Penn vs. UPenn

I have three friends who go the the University of Pennsylvania. Two of them calls the school Penn, the other simply calls it Penn.

And I always have trouble remember they all go to the same school.

|\|U/\/\B3r$

I've always been better at numbers than with words. That doesn't mean I can't write (I hope), but I can definitely remember numbers better than letters or words. For shorter numbers (say, 4 digits or below), I usually keep numbers in my mind by factoring them. I'm also better at even numbers than odd numbers, but I don't really know why.

For longer numbers, like phone numbers or IP addresses, I have a different system. I chunk the number in 4 digit groups, and draw them on the number pad. So, for example, the Hong Kong phone number 51439681 would become 5143-9681. 5143 on the numpad forms something like a Greek alpha, with a longer lower tail, while 9681 does a small quiver before the downward stroke to 1. I mainly focus on remembering these patterns on the numpad, and usually I will also know one or two actual numbers for me to place it on the pad correctly.

Anyone have special ways (short of pegging) to remember random sequences?

Roof! Rough! Ruth!

There's a lot of psychology surrounding jokes, and I mean more than the usual stuff that deals with expectation and surprise and joy. Take, for example, the following joke:

A guy has a talking dog. He brings it to a talent scout. “This dog can speak English,” he claims to the unimpressed agent. “Okay, Sport,” the guys says to the dog, “what’s on the top of a house?” “Roof!” the dog replies. “Oh, come on…” the talent agent responds. “All dogs go ‘roof’.” “No, wait,” the guy says. He asks the dog “what does sandpaper feel like?” “Rough!” the dog answers. The talent agent gives a condescending blank stare. He is losing his patience. “No, hang on,” the guy says. “This one will amaze you. ” He turns and asks the dog: “Who, in your opinion, was the greatest baseball player of all time?” “Ruth!” goes the dog. And the talent scout, having seen enough, boots them out of his office onto the street. And the dog turns to the guy and says “Maybe I shoulda said DiMaggio?”

This is not the first time I've heard the joke, but it's the first time I've made a connection with something else: logic. Those of you who took some psychology might recognize the Wason selection task:

You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table each of which has a number on one side and a colored patch on the other side. The visible faces of the cards show 3, 8, red and brown. Which cards should you turn over in order to test the truth of the proposition that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face shows a primary color?

Wikipedia gives the solution as well as interpretations of the test:

The correct response is that the cards showing 8 and brown must be inverted, but no other card. [...] If we turn over the card labelled "3" and find that it is red, this does not invalidate the rule. Likewise, if we turn over the red card and find that it has the label "3", this also does not make the rule false. On the other hand, if the brown card has the label "4", this invalidates the rule: It has an even number, and does not have a primary colour. [...]

[...] By contrast, some (though not all) Wason tasks prove much easier when they are presented in a context of social relations. For example, if the rule "Only people over 18 are allowed to drink alcohol" is set up as a card game with age on one side and beverage on the other, the cards might be 17, beer, 22, coke. Most people have no difficulty in selecting the correct cards (17 and beer) that must be turned over to test the rule. [...]

It turns out that for the talent scout to determine whether the dog can speak, similar logic is applied. The proposition to validate in this case is, "if the dog could say words outside of homonyms with 'woof', then the dog could speak." Notice that the antecedent is specific to "words" that normal dogs couldn't speak. If the talent scout had believed the dog could talk based on the questions in the joke, it would be the equivalent of him turning over the card labeled 3. The scout would, in other words, be affirming the consequent.

But I don't suppose joke listeners think about all that.

Bugger Blog III

Blogger has changed a bit since I started using it, but I'm most annoyed by a single thing: the way your posts are dated.

When writing, under post options, you can set the date and time of the post. I personally prefer the ISO 8601 representation, so 1 pm on Christmas day this year would be 2007-12-25 13:00. Technically there should be a 'T' before the time, but a space makes it more human readable. However, not many people follow this convention of YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm, especially the 24 hour format.

I used to be able to enter that for the post date and time though, and Blogger would accept it. Sometime in November, however, it stopped excepting that format. Instead, I get this error message:

Illegal post time (format is: hh:mm AM/PM)

Okay. There are two separate things that piss me off about this:

1. When they say "AM/PM", they mean AM/PM, to the uppercase letter. What's wrong with writing it in lowercase? It takes one line of code to convert everything to one case, and they should do it for you.
2. When they say "hh:mm", they don't actually mean hh:mm. What they mean is [h]h:[m]m, the tens digit only necessary when the numerical value is higher than 10.
   

The AM/PM thing, okay, but it pisses me off when they follow that so strictly and yet relax on the other part of the format. To be honest, I would be less annoyed if they required a zero for the numbers. At least then they're consistent.

Christmas

Merry Christmas to everyone. I have two caro... songs :D to share.

Rick Alexander's Santa is an Anagram for Christmas

and...

Klein Four Group's Twelve Days of Christmas

Happy Holidays!

Time and Space

I noticed something while having a conversation with some friends about locations. In the US more so than other countries, people describe distances by how long it takes to drive there. For example, Devil's Lake in Wisconsin is 4 hours drive north from Evanston, and Sacramento a 3 hour drive from San Francisco.

In one way, this is a very practical way of giving locations, because although it doesn't tell you where the place is exactly, it tells you how to get there, and how long it will take. What I find curious is that the time is not an absolute measure, either; it depends on the speed of the traveler. By using driving time as a measurement of distance, we are in fact assuming one thing: constant speed not only for the trip, but for all drivers.

That in turn reminded me of a suggestion someone made a long time ago. Some physicists suggested that distances should be measured in time units, with the constant being 3*10^8, or the speed of light in a vacuum. Going from Evanston to Devil's Lake would be 1.04 milliseconds, and from San Francisco to Sacramento 0.470 ms.

I find it ironic that the US, where science education standards are dropping, would have a colloquial convention that demonstrates relativity.

Week of 2007-12-17 (and 2007-12-10)

I'm two decades old :D. A quarter of my way to 80...

• The presentation for my design class went smoothly
• Got back to Hong Kong (obviously)
  
• Got my grades for fall quarter. They were exactly as I had predicted them.
• Reinstalled everything on my computer (Windows, Ubuntu 7.10, Arch)
  
• Birthday!

Yep.