Content-Type: text/shitpost

The losers who moderate Reddit's r/math forum have deleted this brilliant post, Petition to create new flat-earther groups.

Check it out.

On Saturday when I woke up Lorrie said I had awakened her in the night, and asked me what I had been saying. It had woken me up too, and I remembered.

I had been dreaming that I was at some sort of a conference, and at the start of a conference session, everyone in the audience stood up, put their hands on their hearts, and sand The Star-Spangled Banner.

In the dream, I sang also, and when the song ended, I shouted “PLAY BALL!”

Python code I wrote today:

    # This is not the most elegant line of code I have ever written
    return [ item for item in data if item["item"]["id"] == item_id ]

Larry Wall says that a successful program is one that does its job before your boss fires you. Somehow I don't imagine Guido being as lenient.

• Brian Ritchie, bassist for the Violent Femmes, is also proficient at playing the Shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) and has released two albums of Shakuhahi music.

• In 1996 the Femmes and the Red Hot Chili Peppers played a promotional concert at the magnetic north pole.

Suppose you have available an evil necromantic spell that turns humans into mindless zombies. (Whether the humans are required to be dead or alive is not important for this inquiry.)

What happens if you cast this spell on starfish instead, turning them into mindless zombie starfish?

Today I had a cream cheese and cashew nut sandwich. It was pretty good.

It was inspired by the “nutted cheese” sandwich found at Chock full o'Nuts lunch counters long ago. (Theirs had walnuts, not cashews, and was served on dark raisin bread. When I have the ingredients handy I sometimes make the walnut and raisin bread version, which I recommend.)

These days Chock full o'Nuts exists primarily as a supermarket coffee brand. I'm so old I can remember actually eating a chicken salad sandwich at one of the lunch counters.

Thinking on this a little more, I think you have to make Ringo d'Artagnan, and play up his country-bumpkin-ness.

Then George is Aramis (obviously) and Paul is Athos, so that makes John Porthos.

According to Wikipedia:

[The Three Musketeers] was originally proposed in the 1960s as a vehicle for The Beatles, whom Lester had directed in two other films.

I am having a lot of trouble picturing this. Which Beatle is which Musketeer? There is no Porthos in the Beatles. There is no Ringo in the Musketeers.

The script was written by George MacDonald Fraser, creator of Harry Flashman.

I would watch a Flashman movie. The likelihood of there being a Flashman movie for me to watch, in the next twenty or thirty years, seems close to zero.

Aha, but there is already a Flashman movie, directed by the same Richard Lester who directed The Three Musketeers. Malcolm McDowell plays Flashy. And Oliver Reed, who played Porthos, returns in Royal Flash as Otto von Bismarck. How about that?

Etsy search for “not a place of honor” produces nothing relevant. This is a hundred-dollar-bill on the sidewalk, waiting to be picked up.

I want it on a doormat.

Tootsie Pops! New Himalayan pink salt flavor.

• The western blot was named as a joke. There was already a Southern blot test that was named after its inventor, Edwin Southern.

Though rarely seen, the Siberian Snow Camel is a majestic beast, with its splayed hooves and shaggy white fur. Modern populations of Snow Camels are believed to be remnants of the great herds that crossed the land bridge during the last ice age and whose descendants evolved into the bison of the North American plains.

This video is an unboxing of a 20,000-watt incandescent light bulb. (“It doesn't have a filament in it, it has eight garage door springs.”) My question: why was this bulb manufactured in the first place? What are the applications?

If you need that much light, even before LEDs, you would probably use mercury-vapor or metal halide lamps, which draw much less power and probably lasted a lot longer. So what's this for?

Also, I remember seeing in a museum an even larger incandescent bulb, touted as the largest ever made. Maybe at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry? Does this ring a bell for anyone else?

Twitter says they're going to encourage their programmers to replace the term “dummy value” with “placeholder value” and now I can hardly wait for the chance to refer to someone as a “placeholder value”.

• Kola nuts are native to Africa, not South America.

A colleague asked me to provide “choice quotes” from Thomas's dissent, which I said “might be the most Clarence Thomasy thing I've ever read”. But I think they were disappointed, because what makes it so very Clarence Thomasy is how dry and fussy it is. Here's a choice quote, if you can call it that, which examplifies what I had in mind:

The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals concluded that petitioner’s claim was procedurally barred under state law because it was “not raised previously on direct appeal” and thus was “waived for further review.” This state procedural bar was applied independent of any federal law, and it is adequate to support the decision below. We therefore lack jurisdiction to disturb the state court’s judgment.

Maybe I should write a longer article on the real blog explaining what this means. I wouldn't have to worry that doing so would kill the joke, because there is no joke and there was nothing funny to begin with.

Am I the only person who imagines that Clarence Thomas is severely constipated, like, almost all the time?

I thought that the recent McGirt decision would have some connection with _Sherrill v. Oneida Nation, but no, there is no mention of it whatever. I must be seriously confused about something, can anyone tell me what?

On review, I see that it did come up briefly in oral argument:

Sherrill is always in the room when the states and the tribes are negotiating agreements

so I'm not completely confused.

I would like to understand this better.

Finite sets are always compact. Suppose we have an infinite compact space. Is it possible that the only compact proper subspaces that it possesses are the finite ones? The answer turns out to be no. Every infinite compact space has an infinite compact proper subspace. So by repetition, every infinite compact space has an infinite descending chain of compact subspaces.

I thought hey, here we have a partial order (of infinite compact subspaces) in which every descending chain has a lower bound, so we can apply Zorn's lemma… except no, not every chain has a lower bound, what was I thinking? If we include the finite subspaces then every chain does have a lower bound and we can apply Zorn's lemma, but the result is the empty subspace so that was not useful.

Interesting: The example of !![0,1]!! shows that you can't always obtain a smaller compact subspace by deleting a finite set from the original space.

The compact subspaces of an infinite compact set form a rather interesting lattice structure. At the bottom are the finite subsets, arranged like a very ordinary Boolean lattice, but with no maximum element. (Isn't there a name for a complete associative lattice that may or may not have a maximum element?) Floating above this are the infinite compact subspaces, in which there are no minimal elements, and the original space at the top.

Consider just a relatively simple example. Let !!X!! be the one-point compactification of the natural numbers. That is, $$X = \Bbb N \cup {\infty}$$ where a subset !!G!! of !!X!! is open if and only if !!G!! is a finite set that does not contain !!∞!! or !!G!! is a cofinite set that does contain !!∞!!. An infinite compact subspace of !!X!! must contain !!∞!!.

Clarence Thomas's dissent in McGirt might be the most Clarence Thomasy thing I've ever read.

• Spanish for “tumbleweed” is “la rodadora”.

• There is a really cool-sounding museum in Ciudad Juárez called La Rodadora espacio interactivo (Tumbleweed interactive space). New place on my should-visit list!

• Townsville, Australia is not a joke. It is named for Robert Towns.

Montana is the U.S. version of Inner Mongolia.

The last thing I remember from my dreams this morning is someone informing me, very authoritatively, that there are three things that Alexander the Great really wants.

I don't remember the first two but the third was bow-tie pasta.

Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen
Had a very shiny nose.