Tag Archives: silly

New Candidate For Most Surreal Email I Have Ever Written

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Before you read this, some necessary background.

First, This may come as a surprise to some of you who read my blog, especially those of you with particularly low reading comprehension, but I like to joke around, and tease people in a good-natured way and generally have a good time.

Second, lately I’ve been having a series of Very Serious conversations with a good friend, and one of the things that came up is that I use self-hypnosis to explore my subconscious and understand myself better. She replied that she had tried hypnosis but it just didn’t work for her; she felt like she was imagining everything instead of letting go and letting things happen.

Third, this is a perfectly normal place for many people to start with hypnosis, and all it takes to get through it is the ability to listen to your body’s physical sensations.

Fourth, because our conversations were Very Serious I have changed her real name. Let’s call her Jen instead.

Fifth, as I wrote this, I started to make a silly joke… and it sort of spiraled out of control. However, in comedy there is such a thing as commitment to the joke, so I stayed with it, all the way down into the ground. In flames. On an orphanage.

And Sixth, FOR THE RECORD, AGAIN FOR YOU FOLKS WITH POOR READING COMPREHENSION, Jen is a wonderful friend and I would never say anything to hurt her. This email was a joke, and she took it the right way, and she laughed.

Oh, and Seventh: Trigger Warning: This post contains ascii-art drawings of penises and making fun of quadriplegics. And ninjas. I mean it has ninjas in it, not that I’m making fun of them. Just the quadriplegics. They don’t fight back as much.

On 11/14/2013 05:23 PM, Jen wrote:
OK, we totally need to find some time to hang out so I can pick your
brain about how you discover these things.

This sounds really interesting.

Absolutely! You’ll be happy to hear that it all started where you’re at now: with me being unable to make hypnosis work, and when I did, it felt like I was just making everything up.

The bad news is that I’ve been working at it for over 20 years.

The good news is that I didn’t know how to really practice at things until this year, and I STILL don’t know how to practice at THIS.

The first time you do it, it will either shock you or completely underwhelm you, because there’s nothing to it–you’re already doing it, all the time. And I mean ALL the time. It’s like breathing, or nervously bouncing your foot. If you have a functioning Peripheral Nervous System, you can do this. It’s either happening to you right this second or you’ve had a sudden attack of quadriplegia.

JEN! IF YOU HAVE HAD A SUDDEN ATTACK OF QUADRIPLEGIA, TRY TO ROLL YOUR FACE OVER TO THE REPLY BUTTON! IT WILL SEND ME A BLANK EMAIL BUT I’LL KNOW YOU ARE SIGNALING ME TO oh what am I doing, you’re face down in the keyboard you can’t see the screen it’s not like typing at you in caps is going to help. I mean how stupid am I feeling right now, right? I’m all “TRY TO ROLL YOUR FACE” and you’re just lying there with one eyeball on the P key and your nose mashing the space bar. Geez I feel so dumb.

So… now what. Um.

Huh. This is suddenly kind of awkward.

Okay, so. I am wracking my brain right now trying to think what combination of pixels I could type up that would shine on the top of your head and help you with whatever is going on, but to be honest I don’t even really know what’s going on. I don’t know if you’re having a stroke, or an extremely rapid onset of Friedrich’s ataxia, if you’re just having the world’s calmest epileptic fit. I’m going to level with you, some of this is speculation, I don’t have a lot of information to work with here.

OOH! It could be ninjas! One shuto-uchi (“knife hand”) strike to the C2 vertebra and down you’d go, plus you’d never have seen it coming, because ninjas. This would also explain why you were just sitting there reading this email before it happened, instead of preparing for–I know, I know, “don’t blame the victim” and all that, but there’s a reason I try to teach people to maintain a minimum level of situational awareness. Oh man, I shouldn’t have said that, you’re probably already blaming yourself anyway. It’s probably hard for you to accept this right now, but, if it WAS ninjas, there’s nothing you could have done. I know you’re probably kicking yourself right now. Well, I mean you WOULD be if you could move your legs–aw geez that was probably insensitive of me. Wait, can I say “insensitive” or is that too close to “insensate”? GAH it’s like a spiderweb of tripwires with you and your political correctness! I don’t even know how to talk to you anymore, Jen–again presuming, falsely, that we’re talking and you’re not just lying there blowing snot bubbles into that little groove at the bottom of the space bar–it’s like you’re a complete stranger now, and ALL I AM TRYING TO DO HERE IS HELP YOU, WHY CAN’T YOU SEE THIS aside from the fact that you cannot, in fact, see any of this, as previously stated in an earlier interjective clause in this very sentence. I don’t even remember where I was going with this.

OH! Ninjas! That was it. Here’s the thing: it’s probably just ONE ninja. They don’t actually travel in packs or anything, except at like anime conventions, and even then they’re not actual real ninjas, they’re just dorky teenagers dressing up like, I don’t know, Scorpion or Sub-Zero from Mortal Kombat and stuff. Actually, now that I think about it, the chances of your ninja being a REAL ninja are statistically pretty minimal–except wait, C2 vertebra fracture.

Crap.

Okay. Jen, I know you can’t see this, but try to be brave. I don’t want to alarm you any more than you already are, but… it’s probably a real ninja.

All right, look–crap, I did it again, sorry. You’re getting a big ol’ eyeful of that P key and I’m telling you to “look”. Geesh. I don’t–wait, don’t you wear contacts? Oh MAN that has gotta suck! I mean, you suddenly lose sensation to 95% of your entire body all at once and the part that can still feel has to start hurting? Ha! Sorry, sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. It’s just that I’ve never really been sure what the actual definition of irony was, and I was just thinking that this is probably pretty close, and–

Sorry, I’m sorry. Appropriate conversation, I get it. I’m pontificating about wordplay and you’re lying there, terrified, with a probably-real ninja assassin in your apartment and spit puddling around your cheek. It’s not like you’re wondering if AppleCare covers the damage if the trackpad shorts out from your saliva. It doesn’t, by the way. Cover the damage, I mean. Just in case you WERE wondering. Which would be pretty odd, actually. And not just a little hypocritical, given the whole “appropriateness” discussion, if you ask me. Which you didn’t, given the whole “keyboard face” thing–sorry to keep bringing that up but it’s really sort of the elephant in the room here–and anyway now I’m starting to wonder why I can’t seem to go more than two paragraphs without it feeling like we’re having an argument. Am I projecting? I feel like I could be projecting. It’s possible. I am going through some issues right now. Okay, tell you what: let’s assume that yes, I *AM* projecting. Let’s just go on that, from here, clean slate, start over. Okay? Okay. Starting over. I’ll go first.

I forgive you.

Well what else am I going to start with, it’s not like we can pretend that words haven’t been said here! I’m just trying to make you see–and YES I realize that was an inappropriate word, but that’s starting to become just a bit too convenient a deflection, young lady, we ALL KNOW that you’re face down in your laptop, we GET IT, the whole paralysis thing, it was big news when we first heard about it but at some point you are just going to have to pick yourself up, sorry, haul yourself up by your bootstraps, again sorry, though maybe you’ve got a friend who would go boot shopping for you and put them on your feet for you so you would have actual, literal bootstraps, and then I guess maybe your friend could sort of tug on them for you, because maybe you gave her a head-nod or an eye-blink or whatever, I don’t know how this stuff works, she’s your friend so I’m sure you could work out some kind of signal given time, but my point is that sooner or later you are going to have to stand on your own two feet. Sorry.

Look (sorry) these are just figures of speech, it’s not like I’m standing (sorry) around trying to think up inappropriate knee-slappers (sorry) to say to my suddenly-and-inexplicably quadriplegic friend to be hurtful! It’s not like I am TRYING to cut you down (sorry) or kick (sorry) you in the teeth (sorr–wait, that one would actually work), if you could just meet me halfway on this, I would try to do better, I really would, Jen, I would try so hard.

But nothing is ever good enough for you, is it? Is it? You don’t have to say anything. We both know I’m right. Well here’s something you DON’T know: I have HAD IT. I am DONE. I tried to give you my friendship and you sure took it, but you couldn’t give back, could you. You just had to go and make everything about you, you, YOU. Well HERE’S something that’s about me, me, ME: ALL MY FINGERS STILL WORK YOU AWFUL HARPY! I HOPE YOU ENJOY STARING AT YOUR KEYBOARD AND I HOPE YOUR TRACKPAD TASTES LIKE GROSS SWEATY PALMS! Look at me! My legs both work! I’m not the one drooling into my keyboard! I’m not the one who is going to be discovered by EMTs tomorrow morning with my laptop open, AND I’M NOT THE ONE WHO’S GOING TO HAVE TO EXPLAIN TO THEM WHY I’M LOOKING AT AN EMAIL FULL OF ASCII-ART PENISES!!!

8=D
8=========D
8=========D
8===D
8==========D
8======D
8=========D
8======D
8==========D
8====D
8======D
8=======D
8==========D
8=========D
8=====D
8===D
8=====D
8====D
8=======D
8====D
8========D
8=D
8=======D
8=D
8====D
8==========D
8========D
8=D
8===D
8===D

HAH! ENJOY YOUR FEEDING TUBE YOU FOUL HARRIDAN

David

P.S. If you are not in fact paralyzed from the neck down please stop reading 17 paragraphs ago

P.P.S. The penises count as one paragraph

Final note for you blog readers: If you use Ruby, you can generate your own page full of ascii-art penises with the ‘dicks’ gem. Just type ‘gem install dicks’ and then ‘dicks -n 30’ and bam, your face will be full of cocks. As it were.

Donkeypunching Ruby Koans

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Do you want instant enlightenment? Sure, we all do.

And now you can have it!

Tonight I presented Ruby Koans at URUG. It started out simple enough, but then we got on a weird quirk about trying to make the Koan tests pass without actually satisfying the test requirements. We monkeypatched Fixnum, then started playing with patching Object#to_s… basically we were looking for TMAETTCPW: The Most AEvil Thing That Could Possibly Work. I spelled Evil AEvil because it’s extra evilly.

Mike Moore had the bright idea to just break off all the assert methods in Test::Unit; after that it just became a challenge to discover how to get the rest of the koans to run at all.

With sincere apologies to Matz, Jim and Joe, here is the result:

https://gist.github.com/1108850

Palindromic Powers of Two

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Huh, that’s odd.

Just farting around, reducing the set of Integers to their prime factors—typically Friday-night stuff, amirite?—and I noticed an interesting pattern.

  1. Start with a keyspace of 0 and all of the integers in order as your available keys.
  3. Write a 0.
  4. You’ve exhausted the keyspace, so get another key, 1.
  5. Write the entire series so far, add the new key, and write the series (minus the new key) again. You should have 010.
  6. You’ve exhausted the keyspace again, so get another key, 2.
  7. Repeat: 010, 2, 010 -> 0102010.
  8. Repeat with 3: 010201030102010.
  9. Repeat with 4: 0102010301020104010201030102010.

And so on.

The “Huh!” moment is this: you’re writing the exponent of two in the prime factorization of the list of integers:

1 20
2 21
3 20 * 3
4 22
5 20 * 5
6 21 * 3
7 20
8 23
9 20 * 32
10 21 * 5
11 20
12 22 * 3
13 20
14 21 * 7
15 20 * 3 * 5
16 24

Math Joke 3

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Until last week I only knew 2 good math jokes. But then I heard this one! Without further ado, I hereby inflict it upon you:

An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are chatting over lunch when the engineer says, “I just don’t get problems in higher dimensions. I mean, stuff in 3 dimensions I can visualize quite easily, but how do you visualize something with more?”

The physicist shrugs and says “You just have to imagine integrating. For example, if you have an object in three dimensions and integrate it over time, you have added a fourth dimension, time. It’s like taking an object’s position and integrating it to get the object’s velocity. You can do it again with time, to get the object’s acceleration, or with another dimension; each integration changes the units appropriately.”

The engineer thinks for a minute and says, “That’s okay for a few dimensions, but what about some of the really wacky stuff like 17 dimensions?”

The mathematician looks up and says, “Oh, that’s really easy, actually. Just imagine an n-dimensional space and set n=17.”

Math Joke 2

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Until last week I knew exactly 2 funny math jokes. Now I know three. I’ll post the third one tomorrow. Here’s the second one.

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are asleep in a hotel when the curtains in each of their rooms catch fire. (Inexplicably, and all at the same time. Don’t ask why, it’s not important.)

The engineer wakes up and sees the fire, runs into the bathroom, fills the wastebasket with water, comes back and throws it on the fire. The fire goes out immediately, but there’s quite a bit of water damage.

The physicist wakes up and sees the fire, and pauses to estimate the rate at which the curtains are being consumed. He runs into the bathroom, fills the wastebasket with exactly 1.7 liters of water, comes back and carefully pours it on the fire. There’s a bit more fire and smoke damage due to the delay, but not a drop of water is spilled unnecessarily.

The mathematician wakes up and sees the fire, and pauses to contemplate the problem. Then he calmly walks into the bathroom. He turns on the faucet and strikes a match, then douses the match under the running water. He examines the match closely for a minute, then says, “Ah yes, this problem has a solution.” And then he goes back to bed.

Math Joke 1

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Until yesterday I knew exactly 2 funny math jokes. Now I know three. Here’s the first one.

Two math professors are arguing in a cafe about the education level of the average person. One insists that the average person has little grasp of mathematics beyond arithmetic. The other asserts that the average person knows at least rudimentary calculus. They pass their lunch in fruitless debate.

Finally, the first professor goes to the bathroom. The second professor waves the waitress over. “I am having a bit of a debate with my friend here. When he returns, I’ll ask you a question. If you answer with the exact phrase ‘one third x cubed’, I’ll leave a ten dollar tip.”

“Ten bucks? You bet,” says the waitress.

The first professor returns. The second professor announces, “Here, I’ll prove it to you.” He turns to the waitress and asks, “What is the integral of x squared?”

“One third x cubed,” replies the waitress. They both laugh and the second professor leaves the $10 tip.

As they’re leaving, the waitress mutters, “…plus a constant.”

Twitterable Mandelbrot II: The Mandelbrottening

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Yesterday I posted my Twitterable Mandelbrot, a ruby script that generates the Mandelbrot Set in 134 characters. A few of you took this as a challenge to shorten my code even further. I didn’t mind, and in fact was interested to see your results; I was sure that an extra character here or there could be shaved off.

What I didn’t expect at all was that somebody would shave fourteen characters off.

Reader brahbur on rubyflow came up with this:

a couple of these changes could be considered “cheating” (-:

80.times{|a|p (0..300).map{|b|x=y=i=0;(x,y,i=x*x-y*y+b/150.0-1.5,2*x*y+a/40.0-1,i+1)until(x*x+y*y>4||i>98);i>98?0:1}*''}

Brahbur’s solution does look different; there are quote marks on each line and it outputs 1s and 0s instead of #s and .s, but the mandelbrot is still clearly visible (Edit: I reduced the size from 300×80 to 240×60 just to keep the outputs roughly the same size):


Click for larger version (1400×800)

I think this is just awesome. Once we’re playing with 0’s and 1’s, I can see another optimization: i>98?0:1 can be replaced with 99i. This bring us down to 118:

60.times{|a|p (0..240).map{|b|x=y=i=0;(x,y,i=x*x-y*y+b/120.0-1.5,2*x*y+a/30.0-1,i+1)until(x*x+y*y>4||i>98);99i}*''}

I have to give most of the credit to brahbur, though–I just saw a tiny tweak, on top of the amazing rewrite they already did. So great. THANK YOU brahbur!

Now, the challenge continues: can you shorten this further? Brahbur was concerned about “cheating”, so let’s define the rules for clarity: Output should be 240×60 (extra quotes and padding are okay) and it should be visually recognizable as a Mandelbrot set. Other than that, go for it.

Twitterable Mandelbrot

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As a kid I always thought fractals were neat, but every time I tried to learn how to do them, I got lost in the math. I guess 20 years makes all the difference: today I went and read up on the Mandelbrot set and had one of those “wait, that’s it?” moments.

It took me about 15 minutes to write the program. Here’s the output:


Click for larger version (1400×800)

The whole program was about 400 characters long. I got to thinking, “that’s *almost* small enough to fit into a single tweet…” and then I spent the next hour and a half refactoring my code for size.

Victory:


http://twitter.com/dbrady/status/12546255974

What do you mean I need a hobby? I have one. See?