Welcome back my friends
To the show that never ends!
We're so glad you could attend
Come inside, come inside!

— Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Karn Evil 9 (1st Impression, Part II)

Hi there!

If you're reading this, you're probably just looking at my journal, perhaps even thinking about adding me as an LJ-friend; or alternatively, perhaps I just added you as an LJ-friend, and you're curious about me now. In either case, I I'd like to use this opportunity to say a few things.

Trevor: You're skating the edge.
Æon: I am the edge.

— Æon Flux

First of all, I tend to write freely about topics everything that matters to me; more distanced, "professional" entries may directly be followed by more personal ones (and vice versa), and I will, generally, openly write about all sorts of things, including philosophy, sexuality, politics and more. Some of my entries will be friends-only, others will be publicly viewable, too, and unlike other people, I don't use <lj-cut /> tags or specific "topic filters" (i.e., custom friends groups dedicated to specific topics) to shield people from things they may not want to see.

Well, as long as it's text, that is; I will cut images that aren't safe for work etc. (at least if I remember, which I might not always do!), since I wouldn't want for people to get in trouble if their boss happens to be shoulder-surfing at work. Text, though, is a different issue, and if you'll get into trouble for reading about certain topics at work, you probably shouldn't be checking your friends page at work to begin with.

He said, "I am told that when men hear its voice, it stays in their ears, they cannot be rid of it. It has many different voices: some happy, but others sad. It roars like a baboon, murmurs like a child, drums like the blazing arms of one thousand drummers, rustles like water in a glass, sings like a lover and laments like a priest."

— Mike Oldfield, Amarok (liner notes)

Second of all, concerning friending me: feel free to. There is no need to ask if it's OK to do so; everyone's welcome to, as well as to post comments etc. (as long as they're genuine: spammers etc. will not be tolerated, but that goes without saying, anyway). I may add you back if your journal looks interesting or if I know you, too, but this isn't automatic. If you do want me to add you back, engaging me and talking to me is probably the best way to go about it.

Please don't ask about being added back if I didn't do so on my own, either, unless I already know you well and you want to be able to read my non-public entries.

If I already friended you but you don't know who I am and haven't been in contact with me before, that most likely means I became aware of your journal somehow, took a look, and decided I wanted to keep up with what you're writing — "I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter", as it were. I don't expect you to friend me back or otherwise take an interest in me, but if you do — all the better.

If what it is to be furry you still don't comprehend
Then consider this advice, my curious friend
If you're willing to respect that which you don't understand
Then come take my paw and I'll take your hand.

— from "Furry", by Croc O'Dile of TigerMUCK with help from Tony DeMatio, June 1995

Regarding commenting, BTW, I'm always happy to receive comments. However, things like "lol" are not proper punctuation, and correct spelling and grammar would be nice as well. And of course, I expect people to not be insulting or rude, but that, again, should go without saying.

That's about all I can think of for now. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Tags: my journal

Another interesting bit that was supposed to be part of the next "link dump" but that's getting its own entry now: the results of a brony survey conducted by KnowYourMeme (!) were just posted. You can find them here on Scribd (and download them as a PDF if you log in).

There's sections on brony demographics; favorite/least favorite Mane Six, pets, secondary characters and episodes, and other thoughts on the show; various aspects of the fandom; and finally, attitudes to controversial topics such as grimdark content, (non-sexual) shipping, and sexual content.

The demographical results are pretty much what you'd expect: bronies are, by and large, young (late teens/early twens), male, white, US-American (or, if not, Canadian or British), and heterosexual. In other words, if you disregard sexuality, it's not unlike furry fandom, although furry fandom is a bit more international than this.

The study's also got a couple of flaws, alas. For example:

• In the section on favorites (p.12ff), it equates "least favorite" with "dislike". I think this is fallacious; I could easily have given my least favorite Mane Six character, but it would be not just an exaggeration but an outright falsehood to say I disliked them: I like all six of them.

• The subsection on favorite secondary characters (p.17) notes that the survey was carried out before the last episodes aired, so characters like Chrysalis, Cadance and Shining Armor do not appear, but it fails to discuss how recently the characters that do appear were introduced. I'm wondering how much recentism there is at work there: are the more recent characters more popular than older ones that have not appeared in a while? One could ask the same question again in future studies and see if there is a novelty that wears off.

• There's a few questions I'd have found difficult to answer at best. The "what do you like about the cartoon" question (p.21), for instance, lacks an answer for "the music" — how could they forget Daniel Ingram's wonderful songs?

• Worse, the questions concerning grimdark and shipping (p.27) force you to take a stand and either say "I do not think it's right" or "I think it's fine" if you don't enjoy it; I would've wished for a simple "I do not enjoy it, but I tolerate its existence" there.

  Similarly, the question about sexual content (p.29) only allows you to say that you enjoy it "for laughs" or "because [you] find it sexually stimulating" if you do indeed enjoy it. No middle ground? I very much like (say) this picture of Rarity in lingerie (NSFW); I don't find it arousing, but I'm not just enjoying it "for laughs", either. It's just a beautiful picture.

  And that's another issue: what IS sexual content, anyway? The question talks about "Rule 34/Pornographic Content", but I don't think you could in good conscience call the above image pornographic, even if it has bits bits showing. Or how about a picture of Twilight lying on her bed wearing a saddle? It's cute, and there is obviously a sexual dimension to it, but that's all; it's saucy, nothing more.

• Furthermore, there is a brief discussion of the overlap of the brony community and furry fandom, and the authors conclude that since almost 87% of all respondents do not consider themselves furries, the two "do not intersect, for the most part" — it's fairly obvious that this is not a valid conclusion to draw unless you also look into how many furries consider themselves bronies.

• And finally — this is just a cosmetic issue, but some of the pie charts are rather hard to read when they use all similar colors (e.g. brownish tones) for the various sectors.

Despite all this, though, it's an interesting study, and again, I recommend reading it. I just wish they'd included the questionnaire used in an appendix — but perhaps that was on purpose, to be able to reuse it more easily in future studies.

Tags: my little pony, studies

I usually just would've added this to the queue for the next "links" post, but it's too good, and I can't wait to share it. :)

You may already know that it's my opinion that even though MLP:FiM has many, MANY great songs (Daniel Ingram is a gifted composer), Chrysalis's and Cadance's "This Day" aria from the season two finale is the greatest — and this is hands down the best cover version of it I have yet heard. Put on your headphones, crank up the volume, and revel in it. :)

It's not 100% perfect, but it comes very close, and I love it. MP3 download here, BTW. Also, if you don't know the original yet, check it out here; it's an amazing piece.

Tags: metal, music, my little pony

It's amazing how one thing can lead to another sometimes, and how you can come across all sorts of fascinating bits of mathematics just by finding the right starting point.

For example, today's xkcd contains a table of "slightly wrong equations useful for approximations and/or trolling teachers", which was apparently created "using a mix of trial-and-error, Mathematica and Robert Munafo's ries tool".

There was a short thread about this on the SeqFan mailing list (dedicated to the discussion of Sloane's Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences); this prompted me to actually take a look at ries. It's a nifty tool to say the very least; but what's more, the "See Also" section had a link to another page that Robert Munafo maintains, one dedicated to large (mostly finite) numbers. (There is a bit of discussion of infinite ordinals in the end, but not much, and it doesn't mention most of the interesting and/or peculiar ones.)

Large numbers are highly interesting, of course, but I haven't kept up with the more recent developments (the last time I really looked into these matters was a good ten years ago[1]), and I was happy to see that there were new things there that I hadn't encountered before: Bowers' extended operators and array notation and Friedman sequences[2], for instance. I recommend reading it all; it's fascinating material.

Beyond this, there was another link to another long document that Robert Munafo maintains, discussing notable properties of specific numbers; I only skimmed through this, but the footnotes led me to a series of three lectures that John Baez held as the Rankin lectures in 2008 in Glasgow, talking about his favorite numbers.

The first two of these, discussing the numbers 5 and 8, are very interesting. The third one, however, is downright amazing: a wild ride that highlights all sorts of amazing connections and that'll have you on the edge of your seat the whole time. I recommend not just looking at the slides but watching the video, BTW — it's an hour, granted, but it'll be one of the best hours you've ever spent, incorporating everything from a bizarre "proof" of Euler's that 1 + 2 + 3 + ... = -1/12, cannonball stacking in a square pyramid, why bosonic string theory works best in 26 dimensions, elliptic curves[3], the Leech lattice, and what is known as Monstrous Moonshine.

I couldn't possibly hope to sum up any of it, of course (and I must admit that as much as these things fascinate me, I'm neither a mathematician nor a physicist), but I encourage anyone who's got an interest in these things to check these out. It's better than vegging out in front of Youtube! :)

And it still never ceases to amaze me how something as simple as a passing mention in a webcomic strip can ultimately lead to discoveries of all sorts of nifty new (to me) things.

1. I don't recall where, alas; the only site I distinctly recall due to its domain name was Infinite Ink, aka ii.com, but it appears that the article on there that I remember was this one about the continuum hypothesis.
2. That's Friedman as in Harvey Friedman, a very prolific mathematician who I mostly know as a regular poster on the FOM mailing list. Incidentally, he's very interested in large cardinals.
3. On a side note, it seems that elliptic curves are another example of those "there's two things you need to know about X" things: they're not elliptic, and they're not curves.

Tags: mathematics, neat stuff, videos

I'm still amazed by how easy it can (sometimes!) be to pick up at least the general gist of something that is written in another Indo-European language, even if you don't otherwise know said language.

It only really applies to written text for obvious reasons, but it can work amazingly well there. For instance, take this tidbit from the Italian Wikipedia's entry on a certain proverb:

Non c’è due senza tre è un noto proverbio della cultura popolare italiana. [...] L’idea alla base di questo proverbio è che se un evento non è unico, ovvero si ripete almeno due volte, molto probabilmente si ripeterà ancora.

Just read it a few times, and I'm sure you'll understand the gist of it even without knowing either the proverb or any Italian.

I sometimes wonder what new Indo-European languages feel like for those who already speak seven or eight reasonably fluently.

Tags: languages, linguistics

As per the announcement in news, Livejournal Games are history as of today:

Games Discontinued
We resisted writing “game over for games on LiveJournal,” but yes, on April 9, the Games tab will disappear from the LiveJournal navigation bar, and games – including Sim Hospital, Airport and City Gangs – will no longer be available to play.

It was only a bit more than a year ago that these were introduced. I'm curious, did anyone ever actually play one?

Tags: livejournal
Hugarástand: awake

I don't think I mentioned it yet, but in addition to the new ARP study, Klisoura has new survey up again as well (here's my entry for last year's).

Results for last year are available here; you'll need to have Javascript enabled to actually see the graphs and tables. If you can't or don't want to do that, you can also see the results here (1001x6603 PNG, 388 KiB). Thanks to Klisoura for making them available under a Creative Commons license. ^^

(Hat tip to altivo @ DW for the pointer again, too.)

Tags: furry, surveys
Tónlist: Alvin and the Chipmunks - Time Warp

It's fascinating to see how many parallels there are between furry fandom (at least the ideal furry fandom we all strive for, without the occasional bickering, immaturity etc. that arises automatically in any sufficiently large group of people) and bronies. For instance, consider the following quotes, taken from this interview:

[W]e tend to be extremely friendly, giving, and caring around each other.

This fandom is one of the most creative assortments I've ever come across on the Internet. The fan-made content that comes from this fandom is absolutely mind-boggling. The music, the art, the writings... the content is endless!

The unique thing about [our fandom] is that there are no leaders. Sure, there are a few prominent members, but we generally accept each other as equals.

This is the friendliest bunch that I have ever met over the Internet, or anywhere for that matter.

What are these talking about — furries or bronies? The answer is "bronies", of course, but it's not clear from the statements themselves; they could be applied to furry fandom word for word, too.

I think that's great, really. I love being a furry; it's been a crucial part of my life for a long time, and it affects every part of my life and defines who and what I am. But at the same time, I think it's wonderful that this feeling of belonging, openness, acceptance, tolerance, creativity, kindness and care is not just limited to furry fandom. I'm glad I'm a brony, too, even if I'm only really lurking on the sidelines there so far.

Tags: creativity, furry, interviews, my little pony, tolerance
Tónlist: Thor Harald Johansen - Amazing Pony

A fascinating tidbit from Wikipedia, on the intertwined history of certain flap-eared royal fruitcakes and Alfred E. Neuman:

In 1958, Mad published letters from several readers noting the resemblance between Neuman and England's Prince Charles, then nine years old. Shortly thereafter, an angry letter under a Buckingham Palace letterhead arrived at the Mad offices: "Dear Sirs No it isn't a bit – not the least little bit like me. So jolly well stow it! See! Charles. P." The letter was authenticated as having been written on triple-cream laid royal stationery bearing an official copper-engraved crest. The postmark indicated it had been mailed from a post office within a short walking distance of Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately, the original disappeared years ago while on loan to another magazine and has never been recovered.

If it really is true, it's bloody amusing. :)

Tags: alfred e. neuman, funny stuff, history, wikipedia
Hugarástand: amused

I like the word "fucknuggetry" quite a bit, but the following, from a news announcement over on Dreamwidth, made me laugh, too:

Things that are not spam are generally aimed at a specific account or community and unique to that account or community: [...] other general acts of asspimplehood.

"Asspimplehood" — you gotta love it. ^^ And here's another, related one, from the same post:

All of those things are definitely obnoxious and unwanted, but they aren't spam. They can be dealt with by turning on the "human test" (which may discourage the casual asspimple commenter) [...]

Google does not have any hits for the word "asspimplehood" beyond that DW news entry yet; "asspimple" gets about 7000, but most of them seem to refer to actual pimples on your behind, not the proverbial "Oaschwoazn". :)

Tags: insults, linguistics, words
Hugarástand: amused

The following is a pair of emails that just appeared on the nanog list earlier today, proposing a rather... unique solution to the problem of IPv4 address exhaustion:

NANOG Operational TTL Alert for 160-bit Headers (aka IPv4)

Common Misconception - IPv4 is Out of Address Space

NANOG Operational TTL Alert for 160-bit Headers (aka IPv4)

The 8-bit TTL field is reduced to 4-bits plus two 11 bits stuck at 1 for a long time

The new 8-bit fields are: SD11TTTT

Packets without the 11 will enter Deep Packet Inspection processing (slow)

SD are new Source and Destination Address bits set via the generic AAAA 128-bit records

4+8+12+30+6 = 60 + 68 = 128

VRHL+111.T1.000+Port12+30+Frag6

T1 sets the TTL bits - Use T0 at your own risk - VRHL=0101=5

And:

Evil Bit and Spread Spectrum IP Addressing - NANOG Source Address Shaping

Common Misconception: One additional bit of IPv4 Addressing will solve world hunger

The Evil Bit (or spare unused bit) can be used to store (restore) one bit

The Left-Most bit of the 32-bit Source Address Field can be SET to Zero no matter what the original value. The Evil bit can be set IFF the Left-Most bit is **changed**.

Setting the Left-Most bit to zero **folds** this table in half.
http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.txt

Setting the Left-Most bit to ONE would move return traffic to the upper half of the Spectrum which has vast quantities of unused /8s

Wide-spread consensus shows that TWO bits can work. Three bits folds the table to 1/8th.
Governments want a 4-bit Return Prefix to their Super-Hubs for IPv6-like intercept.

The U.S.FCC is expected to issue the regulations on how Spread Spectrum Source Address Shaping will work in their licensed CPE wireless devices. There are 160-bits
in the deprecated header so there are many ways to go.

One-Way Broadcast IP Addressing is now available. The Source Address Field is used
for the second half of the 64-bit Destination Address. The DF (Did Flip) bit near the Evil
Bit is used to note the two halves of the Destination Address have been *flipped*.
NANOGers simply route 32 and then 32 after the flip based only on the Destination Field.
There is no Source Address, only a channel (port).

As another (sane) list member wryly noted, "[s]omeone has been drinking the bong water". It did make me laugh, though.

Tags: funny stuff, internet, networking
Hugarástand: amused

Tags: furry, research, surveys
Hugarástand: awake
Tónlist: U.S. Killbotics - Winter is Coming

I got a new icon from the wonderful kodriak (on FA), a beautiful animation of a realistic blue eye of an arctic wolf:

There's also a non-animated version that I've made my default (and used for this post).

These eye icons (eye-cons?) were pointed out to me by avon_deer, BTW, and I can highly recommend kodriak: I messaged them last night, sent them payment today and got my icon (400x400, animated and non-animated, with several smaller sizes already provided for convenience) just now, a couple of hours later. The total I paid was a very reasonable 16 USD.

If you want one of these, too, kodriak's open for commissions open for commissions again (or on DeviantArt, if you dislike FurAffinity).

Tags: livejournal icons
Hugarástand: pleased

Forget about the Republican Party's clown car of candidates, THIS is who we need:

If he makes it past the primaries, he'll definitely get my vote. :)

Tags: funny stuff, politics, videos
Hugarástand: amused

It never ceases to amaze me what sorts of things people come up with, given enough time and motivation (and who knows what else). For example, this:

Yes, that's a solar-powered Queen Elizabeth II doll that'll sit on your desk (or wherever) and smile and do a slow and graceful wave whenever the sun's shining. I just saw these for sale locally, too; they even come in three colors, turquoise, yellow and pink. You, too, can own the Queen, for less than 20 bucks!

As a friend of mine put it yesterday: I have not the words. One does have to wonder what the Queen herself thinks of these (assuming she even knows they exist); presumably, she's veering between amusement and bemusement.

Tags: kitsch, videos
Hugarástand: amused

I'm just watching a video of a talk that Jim Purbrick (then at Linden Lab) gave at the 2009 Lang.NET symposium on the technology behind Second Life scripting (if you don't have Silverlight installed, you can view it here), and this quote is too good to pass up:

[...] recently there's been some talk about Mono continuations; there is a Mono Continuations extension... Mono is now embracing and extending .NET, which is kind of amusing.

Yes, there was laughter in the audience. :)

Tags: funny stuff, quote of the day, second life
Hugarástand: amused

From the "surely-you-can't-be-serious department"... it's probably a well-known fact that birthers are batshit insane, but even I didn't expect them to be THIS insane:

On Friday, February 3, 2012 the death knell of America the Beautiful tolled across the fifty states and around the world. An administrative judge in the state of Georgia rewrote the Constitution and ruled in favor of putative president Barack Hussein Obama declaring him a Natural Born Citizen and eligible to be on their state ballot. Our rule of law is no more. Our Constitution is no more. Obama, Soros, state media, activist judges and all the ‘powers that be’ of a New World Order sealed our fate. The United States is a land of liberty no more.

You'd think that this whiny, hand-wringing concoction of quacking fruitloopery and turgid pomp is the work of an exaggerating parodist, perhaps a writer for The Onion, that nobody could REALLY write this in earnest — but you'd be wrong.

They're serious. And don't call them Shirley.

Tags: crackpots, funny stuff, politics
Hugarástand: amused

The story of the TSA and two pipes, as told by bruce_schneier:

1. TSA screener finds two pipes in passenger's bags.
2. Screener determines that they're not a threat.
3. Screener confiscates them anyway, because of their "material and appearance."
4. Because they're not actually a threat, screener leaves them at the checkpoint.
5. Everyone forgets about them.
6. Six hours later, the next shift of TSA screeners notices the pipes and -- not being able to explain how they got there and, presumably, because of their "material and appearance" -- calls the police bomb squad to remove the pipes.
7. TSA does not evacuate the airport, or even close the checkpoint, because -- well, we don't know why.

Bruce's comment: "I don't even know where to begin." Neither do I, but I'm starting to wonder whether Douglas Adams was really joking about the telephone sanitizers and human ancestry.

In any case, it helps to view the world as a gigantic piece of absurd performance art. :)

Tags: tsa, weird stuff
Hugarástand: absurd

An interesting new term I just learned:

shrubbery fund

A small hedge fund.

Tags: magic: the gathering, words
Hugarástand: amused

You couldn't make it up — consider, if you will, IMDB's plot summary for the short "The Transient":

A homeless vigilante and his case worker, Steve, try to stop vampire Abraham Lincoln and his gang of 1980s punks from sucking the blood of four-score and seven virgins.

There's probably nothing that can be added to that. Really, who even comes up with this sort of thing?

Tags: movies
Hugarástand: surprised

cheetah_spotty

sithyfox

Tags: cons, eurofurence

Tags: administrativa, livejournal friends

Tags: christmas, solstice, yule

delphinios

Tags: atheism, obituaries

It's fascinating to see how culture works at times. For example, take the Krampus tradition of the Alps; it's apparently finding its way into the USA now (hat tip to rarsuit, especially renniefox and foofers), still on a small scale but definitely growing.

This sort of cultural osmosis seems to be more prevalent for the USA, too. A cynic might say that this is because the USA don't have any culture of their own, so they have to use others', but that isn't true, and I think that in reality, people in the USA simply seem to be less inhibited and more open for new ideas. It's not just about local tradition, either; it's about the notion that by taking something good or interesting from elsewhere, you're insulting that region or detracting from its local culture. Needless to say, you're not, and the USA seem to be happier to just observe and adapt and engage in cultural exchange.

Myself, I still wish I had a nice Krampus costume, too; ah well, some day. ;) It'll definitely be something I'll integrate into my own yule tradition.

For now, if you live in an area where there's a Krampuslauf or otherwise a Krampus tradition, be sure to attend and enjoy it. :) Remember — the more, the scarier!

(Cropped from a photo by User:MatthiasKabel @ Wikimedia Commons; used under the terms of the CC-BY-SA-2.5 license.)

EDIT: NPR story.

Tags: christmas, costumes, culture, fursuits, krampus, rarsuits, yule
Hugarástand: good