Me: (at Office Depot) “Hi, do you have Bluetooth mice?”
Generic retail guy: “Yeah, all our mice are right over here.” (leads me to various mice)
Me: (one minute later) “I see you have some wireless mice, but none of them appear to be Bluetooth.”
Retail guy: “Right, you’d need to use the little…USB connector things that come with the wireless mice here to use them. We have laser mice and regular optical mice.”
Me: “Um, yeah, but I’m really looking for Bluetooth in particular because my computer has internal Bluetooth, so I wouldn’t need to use a dongle.”
Retail guy: “Well, if you think about it, it doesn’t really make sense to have a Bluetooth mouse, right? I mean, if you’re in a Starbucks or something, how does your computer know which to listen to? Know what I mean?”
Me: “No.”
Retail guy: “Well, how would your computer know you were using your Bluetooth mouse?”
Me: “Because I would pair my laptop and mouse. It’s just as if I had a dongle.”
Retail guy: “Yeah, but what I mean is, it wouldn’t make sense for there to be a Bluetooth mouse. If you’re in your apartment and you’re using the Internet, how does your computer use both at the same time?”
Me: “Um, look, Bluetooth mice definitely exist. I still don’t know why the Internet has anything to do with a mouse.”
Retail guy: “Well, how could your computer listen to the wireless Internet and to a Bluetooth mouse at the same time?”
Me: “…Uh, Bluetooth and wi-fi are totally different.”
Retail guy: “Oh, y’know, I…err…I got confused, I was thinking of something else. Never mind.”
Me: “Okay…”
Retail guy: “Yeah, so…I don’t think we have any Bluetooth mice. All we have is right here.”
Me: “Thank…you…?”

Yeah, he had no idea what he was talking about.

Hey guys, I know nobody ever looks at the code section of my website, but I’ve changed it around a little recently. Took down some useless junk, and put up a little–and I mean little–script I dashed off today. It uses an online service to look up the carrier of a mobile phone number. (Works on all the ones I’ve tried. Returns “Unknown” on land lines.)

But I was wondering. Is there any sort of service that people actually want that I should put up on my website? For example, I have a file uploader which I password-protect. Jonah has a text-message-sender that he keeps behind a password. Does anyone really want any sort of simple service like those? I’m all for making my website marginally useful to people I know.

Things like the Koide formula make me kinda happy. It’s exciting that we have already developed frameworks to understand so many things, but that so much still remains. We clearly know very little about the universe.

A show of brute computation doesn’t interests me nearly as much as an elegant result. If I had to define elegance in this context, I think I would say that a subject with a high results to complexity ratio is very elegant, especially for math. I think first-year calculus (I and II) is very elegant, as it makes many very difficult problems easy, and makes insoluble problems possible.

To me, the most elegant result obtained by first-year calculus is Euler’s formula, or in its most famous special case, that e^(i*pi) = -1. The fact that this can be conclusively proved to or even discovered by high-schoolers with knowledge of Taylor series is, I think, a testament of how elegant calculus is. Of course, there are other ways to prove it, but I think Taylor series are the most elegant way–the clearest, most straightforward, least contrived; no clever logic is required at all.

Of course, Euler’s many formulae remain the gold standard of elegant results in mathematics. While he didn’t always convincingly prove his results, I think it was more important that he simply generated them. Sometimes simpler logic goes further than more bulletproof logic. I certainly don’t believe I should be mentioned in the same paragraph as Euler, but as to myself, I was quite happy with my intuitive proof using Gram-Schmidt that, for vector space V and subspace W, that dim(W) + dim(W perp) = dim(V). The idea is too conceptual to forge into any sort of formal proof, but it makes perfect sense; I would be interested in seeing a more rigorous proof, but I haven’t gone out of my way to look for one. I am, for the most part, satisfied with rationality.

Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s last theorem was certainly a tour de force in the mathematical world, and certainly, as I understand, contains many interesting ideas (which no, I am not myself qualified to appreciate). It’s certainly nice that the theorem–and subsequently, the full Shimura-Taniyama theorem–have been proven, but the proofs are long, complex, involved, and *gasp* even, in some places, significantly case-oriented. It’s a true achievement, but to me isn’t as awesome (in the pre-slang sense of the word) as much shorter results. The epsilon conjecture hinted at great possibilities, but to me, V – E + F = 2 has for centuries been quite profound enough.

I don’t mean to say that I don’t consider the above to be true accomplishments; they certainly are. I suppose it’s simply that I am more interested in the concept than the execution itself. This is why I doubt I will be entering math itself as a field, though I fully expect to be using math in whatever I end up doing.

And it’s also, I suppose, why I have always been so happy to help somebody with math who seems actually interested in the ideas themselves, not just how to do well on the next test. It’s easy to tell the students who truly want to hear the concepts and understand them for themselves apart from the students who simply want an algorithm to memorize. And it’s perfectly understandable why math could be so hated by students who view it as simply a set of algorithms. Because then, as John once sagely pointed out, math is no more than a “demented mind-game.”

WikiHow is seriously, like, the dumbest thing ever.

If you aren’t familiar with it, WikiHow, located at wikihow.com, is a wiki (collaboratively-edited online project) filled with how-to guides. Now, at first it makes sense that people would write how-to guides for each other. But here’s why it doesn’t work in practice: would you take advice from a random person online? Okay, well, some people would. But even if you were one of these people, would you take advice from the type of person who would write pro bono advice on an advice wiki?

I mean, if you needed advice on kissing, would you listen to somebody who sits around all day writing kissing guides on websites? I sure as hell wouldn’t. Just curious–with all the time he spends writing how-to guides, how often does he actually get kissed? I mean, I’ll admit that I spend lots of time online, but (a) I don’t write kissing guides, and (b) the last time I was kissed I had no urge to run to a computer to document my findings.

I’m not sure how to show you how stupid WikiHow is–and WikiHow doesn’t have a guide for how to do that, either–but I think that these examples will be more than enough.

–

How to Show Others You Are Not a Lesbian: I mean, I understand that some girls have this issue, but I don’t think this guide transcends the bleeding obvious. Step 7 reads, and I quote, “Tone down your masculine traits for example being super loud, punching people etc.”

How to Talk to a Guy Over the Phone: “Talking on the phone sounds easy, right? Wrong! Not once you get to the part of talking in reality!” Hi Brad, I, uh, SHIT WHAT DO I SAY AGAIN I’M TOO BUSY THINKING ABOUT HIS PENIS TO KNOW WHAT TO SAY

How to Meet Boys While Attending an All Girls High School: gee I dunno maybe you should get off this stupid website and on the nearest boy you can find I hear they appreciate that kind of thing

How to Make Use of Your iPod: The first step is seriously “Get an iPod.” I’m not even kidding.

How to Appreciate Goth Music: Step 5 is “Realize it is not scary.” That alone makes me want to avoid all of the artists mentioned in the article.

How to Court a Christian Girl: Step 1: “Find yourself a good Christian girl. Good places to look might be church” hahahahahahahahahah

How to Create Small Scale Anarchism: Wait, this isn’t really an article, is it? Is it?

How to Turn off a Street Light: Quick, Albus, the put-outer! Oh wait, this is a serious article. Shine a flashlight at the light sensor? laaaaame

How to Be a Sex Kitten Like Brigitte Bardot: Step 10: “Spread your name, you don’t want to waste your time becoming a sex kitten for nothing.” They did not just seriously say that.

How to Effectively Convince Others That You Are a Woman Without Getting a Sex Change (Guys): Step 1: “Smooth your face. A heavy beard is a dead giveaway.”

How to Sex Dwarf Hamsters: hey jimmy let’s go sex some dwarf hamsters giggle

…

Ahh, it feels good to flame websites.

So the other day I was making a cup of tea, and asked my sister whether she would like some as well. Since I didn’t mind leaving the teabag in my own cup while I drank it, I realized that the easiest way to make two cups of tea of approximately the same strength would be to first put the teabag in her cup, and then to move it to my cup for the remainder of the time. This is because the teabag lets flavor out the fastest at the beginning, and gets increasingly slow at it as time progresses. Of course the tea flavor always increases; there’s no point at which the teabag starts reclaiming flavor for itself.

With all these words like “increases” and “increasingly slow” this sounds like a good opportunity for some calculus.

The graph above represents f(t), the derivative of tea flavor with respect to time. Note that df/dt (which will now be referred to as Tea/Time) is always positive, but decreases in value approaching zero as time approaches infinity. The strength of the tea–denoted F(t)–is the definite integral of this graph over some time interval.

Let’s make some assumptions to make this problem easier. Since I occasionally forget about my tea as I let it cool down before drinking, let’s assume that I don’t start drinking my tea until time t=infinity. Thus, the strength of her tea is equal to the integral from zero to whatever time I remove the teabag (called t=a), and the strength of my tea is equal to the tail integral from a to infinity.

We can of course solve for a algebraically:

Of course, this simply verifies our original observation that I want to remove the teabag at the point at which her tea is half as strong as the teabag would be if I waited until time infinity before removing the teabag from a single cup. We are, however, happy to see our integrals come out to a statement we already knew to be true.

–

I guess what I’m asking is, “Is it a bad thing that I started forming integrals in my head when my sister said she wanted tea?”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6907018.stm

Apparently they solved draughts. I mean, checkers.

I never liked checkers anyway. The strategy just involves trying to block your last row and get to the opponent’s last row simultaneously.

Apparently. So my bank statement comes out on the 13th of the month. Without being prompted by an email, I picked up my paperless statement on the 15th. Now this morning, on the 18th, I got an email that it was available. Why does it take five days for them to email me about it? Just to make sure I wasn’t missing something, I checked on the website again, and no, all that’s there is exactly what I downloaded three days ago.

Thanks for the email reminders?

All I asked for was a decent standalone address book program for my computer. Apparently that request is too complicated. I’ve spent the past hour (and plenty of time previously) scouring the Internet for any signs of a good address book program.

Basically, what I want is a database where I can store names of people, contact information, notes of previous discussions or meetings, and if applicable, a picture of them and/or their business card. Oh yeah–and it has to be offline. Right, so apparently most programs figure that you don’t need any information pertaining to people besides their contact information, but that’s not what I want out of an address book (or perhaps more properly, a Rolodex, sans trademarked connotations).

Apparently SeaMonkey has a pretty good one, but I’m not interested in installing a browser, etc just for the address book feature tacked onto its email client. If I used SeaMonkey I’m sure I’d like it, but I’m really not in the market for changing my browser, even if it’s kind of the same thing.

Apparently Linux has a few pretty good ones, too, but they aren’t Windows-compatible. And it appears as though SourceForge doesn’t really have anything good, for once. Half of their address books are PHP/MySQL solutions, and I really don’t think I want to be running five web daemons in the background just so I can use my address book.

I know that Windows has one, but I don’t like it for several reasons: first, it doesn’t satisfy my objectives; second, it’s designed to be integrated with other Microsoft communication products like Outlook (Express) and NetMeeting; third, its close proximity to my operating system makes me uncomfortable, especially because it has long been the target of worms, etc, seeing as it’s a treasure trove of email addresses. I know this is a bit hypocritical of a guy who often goes without antivirus software, but I just don’t tend to like the peripheral features of Windows like that. (NB: I actually have an antivirus now.)

Long story short, I can’t find a damn address book for my computer, and I’m going to start merging contact information into OpenNote until somebody gives me a better idea, because I really need somewhere to put it. I’m not sure this is going to be very successful, but it’s honestly the best idea I’ve got, besides writing one myself. Further updates may follow.

is the reason I’m now quite good at drawing regular hexagons.

Which, in retrospect, is a useless skill to everyone except for organic chemists, but maybe I can practice even more and turn it into some sort of cocktail party trick.

Or I could just stick to drawing benzene derivatives.

I think I have a negative effect on people around me.

A day or two ago, my sister knocked over a stack of CD jewel cases from a high shelf. I was using them today and noticed that the outside of one was cracked, and some of the black teeth inside were missing. She passed by, and I commented, “See, you cracked this case and knocked half its teeth out.” Two seconds later, she started laughing hysterically, and was finally able to compose herself enough to say, “I must be a great detective and boxer because I cracked the case and knocked out its teeth.”

She doesn’t have the dry delivery yet, but the sense of humor has definitely rubbed off a bit.