At least that car has protection versus thunder – get it? Get it?

Man, it really has been a while, huh? Ah, school. I missed you. No, really, I did. This week brings me a take-home final exam that… well, that’s about all I can tell you. I have an exam. Ah, ethical rules. I didn’t miss you as much, and those were the itty-bitty college ethical rules, not the big honking law school rules.

 

But that’s not why I’m here tonight. Nor am I here to tell you that I’ve been cast as the Prologue and the Apothecary in the GG&SS winter production of Romeo and Juliet (on the one hand, so very very few lines. On the other… easy to learn, and I am going to ROCK them.).

 

No, I came to tell you that it just started raining, a rain heralded by a gi-freaking-normous bout of very near thunder that at first startled me… and then annoyed me, because someone’s car alarm started going off after that thunderclap. It goes for two minutes, then another thunderclap sets it off again. What the fuck. Really? Excuse me, I have to put on my raincoat and grab my alarm silencer. I mean crowbar.

My intuition isn’t flawed, math is.

Here is a gem of an article, not by virtue of the content, though it is well-written, but by virtue of the waves of dispute that followed it.

The guy (proof of gender) posted a few well-pruned arguments that show 0.999… = 1. Despite the five or so different proofs, there were so many disbelieving comments that he had to write three more blog posts just to cover refutations of the ‘counter-arguments’, some of which were as eloquent and convincing as:

Is is NOT and WILL not EVER be exactly 1, because, by DEFINITION, it is LESS than 1. If you fail to understand this, then you simply fail to understand the definition of .9 repeating. I was sick in school, and never went on to uni and higher math, but even I know you’re waay wrong.

And yes, the title of this post is also a direct quote from one of the comments. Apparently there was quite a commotion over this ’scandal’:

This blog has gotten over 70,000 hits since the original post was on the front page of digg.  The discussion there and at numerous other small forums makes it clear that the refutations aren’t being read.  There have even been meta-discussions on how this fact can get a warning from digg about containing inaccurate information, even though every knowledgeable source of information agrees with me.  The only reasonable criticism I found on the digg site is that this doesn’t belong in the news because the proof has been around for so long that it ought not count as news.

The digg post still has the inaccurate information warning. Seriously. Click on it. Then bang your head into the wall and click it again. Still there. Repeat as necessary. Incidentally, it seems that 7 is a good approximation for infinity (see the URL for the digg post)– good to know.

Well my fellow citizens of thought, we certainly have our work cut out for us if we hope to one day refute creationism– we can’t even convince people of things that are true BY DEFINITION.

doo doo dooot doo doo do doo dooot doo doo doot doo doo do doo doot

I just looked at my gchat bar and thought it told me I was invincible… I don’t remember eating a star, so it must be time for bed. Also, I wish I were using a no-regret algorithm to write about no-regret algorithms for my NSF proposal. And yes, if you are stalking me pretty hard, you will know that I just combined my two statuses (stati?) to create this post. But in addressing this point (and mentioning the self-referential nature of the post, and of this aside in particular, in an aside), I have now added more.

Those who do not study their own history are doomed to pull all-nighters.

Dear Past Alex,

Seriously? I still don’t know all of the lyrics I need to in Merrily? Show goes up in a week, pal. Six days, even. And didn’t we already learn half of this anyway in college? Dude, I really wish you would stop dumping so much work on me. Do it yourself!

Sincerely,

Present Alex

Dear Future Alex,

Sorry about not getting much done on the Memo 2 rewrite today. I’m sure you’ll be able to handle it over the weekend, though. Thanks for helping out!

Sincerely,

Present Alex

Now if only I could apply ANY of this brainpower to learning the FRCP.

My mind wandered a little in rehearsal today after I realized that there were a couple of lines in one song that fit another well-known melody pretty well… by the end of rehearsal, I had a good chunk of this written, and I worked the rest out in bits over the remainder of the evening. For those of you who won’t be making it to the show, this is the plot (and editorializing), backwards. Which means forward. Er… backwards backwards. Wait, I’ll come in again.

 

For those of you who will be coming, read on, spoilers are meaningless in a show that goes backwards… I mean, you start with the ending.

 

Oompa-Loompa, doobity doo,
I’ve got a story to tell to you,
Oompa-Loompa, doobata dee,
About how we roll so merrily.

When Sputnik launched, well, you were a dope,
Filled to the brink with your childish hope,
You’d be on top of the world someday,
And you and Charlie were pret-ty-gay…
(You weren’t even hiding it)

Oompa-Loompa, doobity doo,
Your first break was in sixty-two,
Oompa-Loompa, doobity da,
Back when you got sucked into the Blob.

Why did you want your foot stuck in the door?
Was it so bad being desperately poor?
Your fame and fortune became your curse,
But at least it could-be-worse,
(You could have been Mary)

Oompa-Loompa, doobity deer,
Let’s fast forward another few years,
Oompa-Loompa, doobata death,
Up to the time you dicked over Beth.

What do you get when you cheat on your wife?
She takes your kid and now you hate your life.
There’s just one way to get over those blues,
You should go on Ty-ler’s-cruise,
(And maybe bang Gussie)

Oompa-Loompa, doobata whee,
Charlie called you out on live TV,
Oompa-Loompa, doobily floo,
Then Mary and Gussie also ditched you.

How did you get so far off the track?
Why can’t you turn around and go back?
Your story ends with complete misery,
The same can’t be said for Cha-ar-lie…
(I think there’s a message here)

Oompa-Loompa, doobata snout,
Sondheim’s moral is not to sell out.
Then you will live in happiness too,
Like the… Oompa…
Oompa-Loompa-doobity-doo!

zomg so tired

I think I’ve slept a total of 12 hours in 4 days… I don’t think I’ve been this sleep deprived for years… so why the HELL am I posting this instead of sleeping? My roommate is in the shower. And I need to shower. Long story.

Anyway, I just got back from an amazingly fun open-mic night at my co-op, which followed a reasonably fun chorus retreat– the only thing that made that retreat suboptimal was the game of Mafia. When people say we’re about to play Mafia I usually feel sick to my stomach, but usually when we’re playing I actually like the game. It’s a pretty interesting game from an information-theoretic perspective, in the sense that the Mafia know everything (essentially) and the civilians only know what they can glean from behavior. Except for the sheriff (we played with one). In fact, in our game, the sheriff got very lucky and found out who the doctor was (me) by the second round. At this point, the civilians had two trusted parties (the odds of a fake sheriff guessing that I was the doctor is negligible, especially given the risk). So basically, we had it made. EXCEPT, before I had time to really hit home some logic, one of the civilians voted to KILL HERSELF, and with Mafia (and a very confused civilian) this was enough for majority. This caused us to go from a nearly sure win to a pathetic loss. I’ve never won as a civilian. This was my chance. God that girl is SO ANNOYING. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. I need to sleep…

So much for that…

I for one am fine with a two-person blog, though perhaps at some point here we should revert back to our previous habits of writing about something at least moderately interesting and sensical (that should be a word, dammit), rather than gibberish intended to incite (why did we think this would work again?) others (the aforementioned “fuckers”) to blog. But that point has not yet arrived: FLIDGET!!! Speaking of flidget, my a cappella group is singing an arrangement of this peculiar ditty– not sure whether to barf or crack up. Especially since I got the Snape part. Flidgety flidgety flooo…

GARTOK BLOG!

(Editor’s note: The number of posts tagged with “the random will continue…” etc. is now equivalent to the number tagged with the names of the members of the group “you fuckers”.)

We now present Gartok the Orc for a guest blog.

ME GARTOK. GARTOK HAVE MANY OPINIONS. GARTOK ENJOY SMASHING AND SMASH-RELATED ACTIVITIES. ALSO KITTIES. THEY TASTY. GARTOK ALSO VOTE LIBERTARIAN BECAUSE GOVERNMENT RESTRICTS FREEDOM TO SMASH. THOMAS JEFFERSON ONCE SAY SOMETHING WITH MANY WORDS. THEREFORE ME AM RIGHT. VOTE GARTOK FOR SMASH!

Urtog make post

I hereby declare that the number of individuals having posted within the last week now clearly outnumbers “you fuckers”. Meet Urtog, Pusher of Buttons– a true hero for Star Trek Voyager fans (he appeared in the background of one random scene, one of many such scenes that were so poorly executed I found it more interesting to look at the extras and give them names based on what inane tasks they were performing, rather than actually paying attention to the bad acting in the foreground). Urtog kindly agreed to make a cameo appearance in this post (the title), so that we could claim to have outnumbered “you fuckers”. Incidentally, I had to do a mild HTML hack to add Urtog’s full name as a tag… silly content management systems…

Freddie never refers to himself in the first person, so if you catch someone doing that it definitely isn’t me. I mean him.

Call me Bippy.

I don’t “blatantly imply”, I “explicitly declare with reckless disregard for the truth”. Anyway, if Freddie is posting, then clearly Freddie is not among the group “you fuckers”. Last I checked, that group had between three and three point one members, depending how much weight they’ve gained since I last saw them.

Why are we referring to Freddie in the third person?