Links For February
What’s the most bullshit-sounding-but-true fact you know? My personal favorite: “There used to be a flying reptile that was as tall as a giraffe.” It’s called the Quetzalcoatlus. 36 foot wingspan. May have weighed more than 400 pounds. Runner up: bombs containing bats.
If Earth were shaped like a donut, a day would be 2.84 hours long.
Terry Tao, whom I like to admire from afar, has posted what is maybe a takedown of Otelbaev’s claimed proof of Navier-Stokes, but the best part? “One could describe the dynamics here as being similar to the famous ‘lighting the beacons’ scene in the Lord of the Rings movies, except that (a) as each beacon gets ignited, the previous one is extinguished, as per the energy identity; (b) the time between beacon lightings decrease exponentially; and © there is no soundtrack.”
Reason #24237834 the human brain is a gigantic hack: Thinking about yourself in the third person reduces stress.
Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Girl dumps boy. Boy is heartbroken. Tries everything. Nothing. Boy shapes up. Boy goes to law school. Years pass. Boy gets back together with girl. Boy gets engaged with girl. Boy breaks it off with girl. Why? No apparent reason. Boy kills between 30 and 36 women. That boy? Ted Bundy. In his words, “I just wanted to prove to myself that I could have married her.“
Speaking of murder, Brazilian woman attempts (and fails) to kill her husband by lacing her vagina with poison. For those wondering, “your vagina is fairly absorbent and shoving a bunch of poison in it will probably hurt you as much as it hurts the person you’re trying to kill.”
Scott Alexander wrote an interesting piece on the search terms that lead people to his blog, including 7th graders looking for answers to their homework on alien thickness. My favorite is “how to atract sisters,” which suggests the visual of throwing a salt lick out into the woods with the intention of attracting not deer, but more sisters.
If there are time travelers among us, how would we find them? Well, what about checking whether anyone has tweeted about a historical event before it happened? Physicists Nemiroff and Wilson tried it but, alas, no evidence of time travelers.
Malbolge is a programming language designed to make it impossible to write programs in. Andrew Cooke thought, “Challenge accepted!” and implemented a beam search algorithm to find a working hello world.
Advice to would-be language implementers (so me and dozens of others), “Every now and then I feel a temptation to design a programming language but then I just lie down until it goes away.”
What are the best shortest, to-the-point but comprehensive and elegant mathematical texts out there?
Leonard Adelman — he’s the A in RSA — has a guest post over on John Baez’s blog about the rarest things in the universe.
There is some interesting exposition here with explanations of Grothendieck‘s work. You always hear such crazy things about him. The exposition itself is mostly a weird mix of anecdote in English and French (fucking Europeans) along with, well, I’m not sure, but it looks like abstract algebra.
Kriegspiel is chess where you can’t see the opponents pieces.