When writing papers for school, I always tried to add humorous elements. Writing about philosophy can be serious, but there's always room for a good joke.

And as we all know, a joke directed at the professor grading the paper is the best kind.

At one point, I had a professor who held one very unorthodox view regarding the validity of one of the most basic logical structures. As in, he considers modus ponens invalid in certain situations. No, really, he did. Very well-known, highly-respected philosopher. Someday perhaps I'll write an entry on his argument. Not right now.

The point is, he thought modus ponens wasn't always valid. So after providing a M.P.-based argument in my paper, I commented,

It seems pretty clear that it is perfectly valid, and so the only way to respond to such arguments is to deny one of the premises. (Or to deny Modus Ponens, but only a crazy radical would do that.)

I don't remember my exact grade, but it was an A, as always.

[Insert some point to this post here.]

When I was young, when I'd try to write a story, I wouldn't know how to start. I knew 'Once upon a time' was lame. So what to do? I could start out by introducing the character: 'Bob was a lawyer who wanted to be a carpenter.' But that sounded clumsy. The only way to make an opening line like that would be an almost Carrollian commentary discussing Bob with us. Very lighthearted, and very narrator-talking-to-the-reader.

Eventually, I realised the easiest way was to start in the middle of something. 'Bob looked around nervously. This was his first time using a hammer and if he broke his fingers, he didn't want the nearby construction workers to laugh at him.' It worked.

If I was a better writer, I'd do something in between. 'It was a sunny day in middleton. The leaves fluttered in the breeze, and Mrs. Andrews was hanging up laundry to try. Down the street, a construction crew was breaking for lunch.' But the transition over to Bob's stealing a hammer and then smashing his fingers requires magical writing skills only held by brilliant writers.

So I usually stick with the 'jump right in' approach. Bob's holding the hammer. Ambulance needed presently.

But I can only write a few paragraphs of this scene. I then have to jump over to Fred who is in another country but will hopefully tie in sometime later. Fred's an orthopaedic surgeon. Yeah, that's right. Oh what fun he'll be, what with the cutting and sewing and gushing blood!

Two paragraphs later, though, I have to leave this scene to go to another. And it can't be the Bob scene. That one hit a dead end. I have to start yet another.

Perhaps next November my Nanowrimo will consist of 49 000 words of brief, unrelated scenes followed by a three paragraph conclusion that pulls them all together. That, I can do.

From time to time, I'll create a 'hit-and-run website'.

My first one was Mr. Worf's Homepage (which was deleted for unknown reasons, but I've now reposted it at the original location). A link to an parody anti-Trek website was mentioned on alt.tv.star-trek.enterprise, so I wrote a page with a similar style as 'Mr. Worf', and signed the guestbook as him.

Then in 2003, a Foxtrot strip featured Eileen Jacobson complaining about Mandy Berwick who things she's so popular. At the end, Eileen shouts out 'Zero matches on Google, Mandy! Zero!' So I threw together Mandy Berwick's homepage. Sadly, though blog posts and such appeared on Google that very day, my new site didn't for a while. Oh well.

I've since written three fan sites for people I know. There may be others around, but if so, I don't remember them.

It's a fun thing to do. Advice: Freewebs is probably better than Tripod. Of course, you could use your own host,but then it's less anonymous. Blogger also could be used, but blogs are less cool than normal hit-and-run sites.

Juan Tripp Airline decides business people are both richer and more likely to want to return home on Friday, while the cheaper vacationers are happy flying home on the weekend. So they charge more for the Friday return flights. Bob Vacationer, however, is both cheap and works weekends, so instead of having his lovely consumer-surplus-filled vacation, he has to stay home and watch Monty Python DVDs.
Result: inefficiency/waste caused by price discrimination.

The textbook and Wikipedia articles I've read never seem to mention this--though I'm sure it's covered somewhere in papers and cleverer textbooks. Does competition deal with this somehow? I guess it must not or else we wouldn't have imperfect price discrimination, eh?

If you're hoping for a long, thorough essay covering all sorts of inadequacy and annoyances of Javascript, you're out of luck. I just have one thing to whine about today: lack of interpolation.

I do a lot of stringish stuff in Javascript. Loads. Just recently I was editing this argument: sp + ',' + mp + ',' + dp + ',' + type + ' ' + x + ',' + y + ' (' + done + '/' + total + ')'

That's ugly. Even more than it's ugly, it's a major pain to type out. $sp, $mp, $dp, $type $x $y ($done/$total) is slightly annoying, but almost incomparably better.

sprintf could help, but is still majorly annoying. I want interpolation.

(The biggest Javascript annoyance is, of course, incompatibility, especially when combined with IE's inability to give useful error messages.)

A cursory run v. a cursory walk. Redundant beats contradictory.

(Potentially relevant link)

Yahoo! Answers is funner than Google Answers because it has points. XP like E2, essentially. Unfortunately, it sucks big time. This is for several reasons, most of which boil down to lack of accountability. If you look at ten random questions, you'll likely find at least that many incorrect answers, and probably a fair number of 'i dont know'/'look it up's. The people posting such answers get two points for it, and lose nothing for being wrong or unhelpful. You can't downvote the person claiming only three countries ban flag desecration or the morons claiming allosaurus or tyrannosaurus rex as the largest meat-eating dinosaurs or claoming infinity is the largest prime number. Only occationally will you find the incorrect answer being chosen as best answer (an exta ten points), but posting an obviously incorrect answer shouldn't gain you any points.

In addition to the idiots giving and voting for incorrect answers, there's a more prevelant problem--though perhaps a less troublesome one: multiple (often ten+) people will post the same (correct) answer to a question. And I don't mean nearly at the same time so perhaps they didn't see the earlier answers. They can be hours apart, and the same one-word answer will be posted again and again. It's essentially spam, but not considered so by Y!A.

A third problem is that there's little to no community cohesion. On E2, I knew the people and they were--for the most part--friendly. On Y!A, people are relatively unknown and more often trolls than anywhere but Usenet.

Y!A's moderation is this: major abuses get deleted and good (and some bad) answers get extra points. But I could probably gain thousands of points a day just by doing what most people do: post the same, one-word, useless answer as everyone else on simple questions. The primary thing Y!A needs to change is moderation. Punish incorrect and repetetive answers instead of rewarding them.

Oh, and while I'm complaining, it's filled with useless/poorly-formed questions. But that's not quite so bad since you don't gain points for posting questions. (Actually, you lose them, but then regain them when you pick the best answer)

(Potentially relevant link)

A book by Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey, and Charles Osborne.

I haven't read it, but I've read the E2 node a few times. Summary: here're fifty books that have been parodied and rehashed and made tribute to so many times that we recognise any references to them without needing to read them.

Is it true? I don't know. /Hamlet/ is on the list, and you don't need to have read that to be very familiar with it, but I don't recognise many of the titles on the list. I guess its about their being alternate works to which to redirect the references, not there being common knowledge about them.

That's all. I just felt like posting something here, and that's what I came up with. Sorry.

(Potentially relevant link)

My Intro CS textbook--Computer Science: An Overview (6th ed.¹) by J. Glenn Brookshear--described, among other things, the GIF image format. According to it, GIF compression consists entirely of limiting images to 256 colours (as opposed to BMPs which aren't compressed). Of course, as someone who wasn't completely clueless, I knew essentially how GIF compression worked and that BMPs can use 8-bit colours, or even 2-bit colours.²

What I didn't know until today was that GIFs can in fact be more than 256 colours. That's amazing. (Note for people like me who have animations deanimated: the true colour GIF at the above link is an animation.)

¹ I think 7th ed. was recommended, but those of us who'd bought the used copies had 6th ed. and that was fine too--so long as we noted this one error in this one table we used. I later got a 4th ed.

² My professor, of course, was fairly clueless. He was in IT, and while he may be a good IT person, his C code would contain lovely keywords like 'If' and 'While', he told us i/5 + i%5 would give us i/5.0, and probably other nutballish things. A nice guy, though, and I believe fairly competent at his job when it doesn't consist of teaching courses outside his area.

(Potentially relevant link)

People who say the above are wrong.

• Orange is the best colour for your box of laundry detergent in order to maximise sales.
• Orange is the best colour for emulating the Luna scheme.
• Orange is the best colour for camouflaging yourself in a jungle.
• Orange is the best colour.

The above are all predicates, and predicates are true, false, or nonsense, but never more than one of these. (In this case, probably true, true, false, and false or nonsense).

Now, many fools such as Foo will protest that orange is indeed his favourite colour and therefore the best colour. If I favour blue, though, Foo will contend that we're both right, but he's denying one of the fundamental principles of logic (and despite what silly people will claim, logic applies perfectly to every aspect of the world).

Now, if I say 'blue is my favourite colour' and Foo says 'Orange is my favourite colour', then we can both be right about those respective claims, because they're different claims. And perhaps if you claimed 'Orange is the best colour to show Foo when he asks to see the best colour', you'd be right because Foo is an idiot who doesn't yet buy my claim and no one wants an angry Foo yelling at her for showing the 'wrong' colour. But 'Orange is the best colour' isn't relativised to the person. It's stated in absolutes, just like 'Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system'. True. Not just True-for-Wesc, but True.

Due to our inability to distinguish between 'best' and favourite, we don't like that answer--and by 'we' I mean Foo. I like the answer. I wrote the bloody answer. People mostly do redefining of terms this with normatives like 'best', 'better', 'worse', etc. But why do they object to my labelling it false/nonsense on the grounds of best not applying to colours¹? If I claim 'Jealousy is the heaviest emotion'--with 'heaviest' not being any silly metaphor, but something along the lines of 'having the most physical mass'--they'll not say 'Oh, you're right, because weight/mass doesn't apply to emotions²'. Instead they'll claim it's false/nonsense. The same response I give to the colour evaluation.

Opinions are about predicates and are right or wrong. Preferences are neither right nor wrong, predicates about preferences are. I've had to defend this claim countless times (including to Dr. Hettche, one of my philosophy professor).

¹ I confess that 'best' may apply to colours, but if so, you probably determine the best by enumerating how much people like each one how much.

² Anyone who wishes to butt in with a comment cashing out emotions in terms of chemicals and electronic impulses is welcome to do so only after they've come up with a better analogy for me to use.