HSU IT Department

The hashtag #natesilverfacts has been trending on Twitter since Election Night. Here are some of the best:

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@weldonwk: Nate Silver wasn't born, the probability of his existence just increased #natesilverfacts

@edyong209: Immense RT @TrojanScientist: Before going on a date, Nate Silver calculates the prior probability of reaching third Bayes.

@petridishes: Han Solo lets Nate Silver tell him the odds. #natesilverfacts

@edwardbenson: Nate Silver escaped from a Prisoner of War camp by shrugging and making an independence assumption #natesilverfacts

@Smedette: Nate Silver can recite Pi. Backwards. #NateSilverFacts

@clarklab: Statistical margin of error will now be referred to as “Distance from Nate” #natesilverfacts

We also have the (fictitious, one hopes) #drunknatesilver ("Last night, I walked onto a maternity ward and pointed out the 53rd President of the United States. #DrunkNateSilver").

Then there's the hilariously over-the-top parody account @fivethirtynate, which has gems like this: "@fivethirtynate: Molten variables hiss and roar. On my mind-forge, I hammer them into the greatsword Epistemology. Many are my foes this night!"

Also, some people think he's a witch :)

A recent post on io9.com alerted me to the fact that Hilobrow has posted a series of 25 short essays by 25 different authors on the many faces of Star Trek's James T. Kirk. It's called, fittingly enough, Kirk Your Enthusiasm :) Some are meditative, some funny, some thought-provoking, some just plain Kirk-boosterism, but they're all well-crafted and all written from a place of respect and genuine affection for the series.

Each essay focuses on a single memorable Kirk-centric scene. Most of the writers chose a scene from the original series but there are also a few from the movies. They include Kirk's first self-destruct bluff (Let That Be Your Last Battlefield); Kirk recites the U.S. Constitution (The Omega Glory) which includes some perceptive comments on Shatner's acting style; "the canonical TOS episode of great slashiness" (Amok Time); Kirk's letting Edith Keeler die (Return to Tomorrow) which draws parallels between Kirk and John F. Kennedy; and lots more. The final essay is particularly interesting: it examines the scene in ST the Reboot where Kirk taunts Spock into losing control so that Kirk can take command of the Enterprise, and argues that Spock is the real hero of the scene since by stepping down he recognizes that being captain requires calmness and rationality, neither of which the rebooted Kirk exhibits.

The essays are a great chance to wallow in an excess of Trekkiness (yay!!) in the company of a bunch of writers who love it too. The index to the essays is here. Go. Read. Wallow :)

The town of Corigliano d'Otranto has gone all brainy. They've put up ceramic plaques around town with quotes from the likes of Augustine, hand out conversation-starter postcards with questions like "Why were you born?" and even hired a Municipal Philosopher.

Does this not astonish you, in this age of tweets and sound bites, knee-jerk ideologues and their blind followers? It does me..

Graziella Lupo, the first person to hold the position, actually trained as a philosophical consultant at the Ca' Foscari University in Venice. I didn't even know such a degree existed!! Had I known, I might have made different choices as an undergrad ;)

So, the Philosopher is available for consultation on Friday afternoons to help you clarify your thoughts and puzzle over Deep Junk. Is this not a wonderful creative fascinating thing? Are not amazed at the intellectual fire of this tiny (pop. 5900) town?? Of course it is and you are! (I wish MY town had a Municipal Philosopher.)

But guess who thinks it isn't? The local branch of the psychologists' professional organization. They say that the use of a consulting philosopher is "not only misleading and confusing, but utterly perilous" and state that they will take "all the most appropriate actions to combat any offence that may be identified".

Well, thinking has always been a little perilous (all those highly volatile IDEAS, you know?). But somebody whose job is helping people's minds work better objects to...somebody whose job is helping people's minds work better? (This bit of course is not surprising at all. Rather depressing, but not surprising.) It's almost enough to make you question their dedication.

Perhaps I shall institute the habit of starting each day with a little Marcus Aurelius or Socrates :)

Math is one of the most predictable and yet surprising things anywhere ever. Oh, some might cite the sentient mattresses of Sqornshellous Zeta, and there may yet be a very surprising fungus on Algol IX that excretes solid gold, but for my money I'll take math every time. Nothing is as entertaining and endlessly surprising as the fact that multiples of nine always add up to nine, or that given a right triangle a²+b² will always always always = c², or that the Fibonacci sequence turns up in sunflowers and pinecones. Why??? I don't know, but it still surprises me.

The joy of mathematics is inventing mathematical objects, and then noticing that the mathematical objects that you just created have all sorts of wonderful properties that you never intentionally built into them. It is like building a toaster and then realizing that your invention also, for some unexplained reason, acts as a rocket jetpack and MP3 player. (LessWrong.com)

Did you know that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes? Really. Go try it. (Well OK, it's technically just a conjecture, but nobody has disproved it yet.)

When I took geometry in 7th grade and discovered that you could start with maybe three or four premises and make them prove all kinds of other things, I was astounded and excited and wowed and mindblown (uh-huh, I'm a Nerd Girl). I'm still gleefully surprised when I do something all mathy and complicated and it works every time. How cool is that??

Did you know that the apparently completely abstract binomial formula (a + b)² = a² + 2ab + b² can be represented by an incredibly simple picture that you've probably doodled yourself at some point in your life? Go here and play with it if you don't believe me. And the even more abstract and scary-looking formula (a + b)³ = a³ + 3a²b + 3ab² + b³ is actually a really simple set of blocks that every Montessori preschooler can do?

Even what look like simple patterns turn out, if you dig down, to have patterns within patterns within patterns. Math makes some of the most beautiful patterns in the world. This page includes a bunch of interactive patterns, including Eratosthenes' sieve!

Perhaps most surprising of all, one single number can be used to predict a city's wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other characteristics. What's that number? Its population. Check out the TED talk on this topic (the TED talks alone could furnish me with at least half of my 100 surprises!).

So yay for the surprises you find when you dig into numbers!!

Our local Ren Fest opened this weekend, huzzah!!! Of course we went, of course we got all dressed up for it, of course we ate turkey drumsticks and drank ale at 10am and sang silly songs and generally had an awesome time. And of course we bought new garb.

Yes, it's only the FIRST DAY and we've already heavily indulged our garbaholic weakness. This does not bode well for our pocketbook for the rest of the season. Spouse has been complaining that he looks like he's slumming when he's with me since I go for the wench look while he goes for the Sir Walter Raleigh look (apart, thank gods, from the ruff that makes you look like a bird who swallowed a plate). So I gave in and got a gorgeous chocolate-brown velvet surcoat over a cream underskirt, with a new shirt to boot. Of course that meant Spouse had to upgrade as well: he picked up a new silk taffeta doublet that looks great and is ten times lighter than the heavier one he's been wearing.

We look fabulous. Except now I need a hat and some accessories. Oh what a shame.

On another note, I apparently qualify for AP History level nerdiness due to the fact that at least one of our cats is named for mythological/defunct or pre-modern era deities. I'm not sure about the other one, but they don't have a category for Greek superhero so I'm going to assume she'd qualify us for this category as well.

A friend of mine pointed me to this post which I must share with you, my fellow Nerd Girls. On her list of nerd qualifications, I'm eight of nine and working on the last one in my spare time (of which, due to being a nerd and therefore a person of wide-ranging and varied interests, I of course have never enough). Herewith, an excerpt:

[W]hen I think of nerds, I think of smart people who are willing to be different, interested in learning pretty much all the time, and good at looking at the world in a highly detailed, specific, and informed way. I think of people who are willing to be weird. Who wear the wrong clothes, not because the wrong clothes are suddenly the right clothes, but because they either can’t quite remember what the trend is now, or they don’t care at all, or they are comfortable with what they happen to be wearing. I think of people who become inspired by a tiny topic that no one else cares about and set out to discover everything they can about it. People who constantly ask the world questions, who challenge all the premises that other people take for granted, but who do it without being mean. Who do it because they’re curious and because they like to push their own minds. And nerd girls are the best.

Read the whole wonderful article here. It's almost enough to make me forget that as of this week, I am halfway to age 90. La la la, birthday, I can't hear you...

OK, this is geeky but I have to share: I made myself a mouse pad at zazzle with this design on it (see icon). Why is it totally geeky? See here.

Heeeee....

The man is just freaking awesome. What else can you say? Every single tale, from the one with only 31 words to the one that has an infinite number. He's so obviously well-versed in radio, radar, sonar, physics, math, astrophysics, all the hard sciences, and it shows in every story. They're so tight, so logical, so damn scientifically accurate, and yet always the human element is powerfully present. Like Ted Chiang, come to think of it.

"The Nine Billion Names of God" is still my favorite. The last line gives me chills every time.

Doesn't seem to be much hard sci-fi of this quality around, at least in the US. I wonder if the decreasing number of mathematicians and scientists we're graduating is responsible for it?