non-standard deviation

I want one of these and one of these. I suspect others will as well.

Unfortunately we can’t have the ones on display, and most of us don’t have the skill to make even dodgy facsimiles.

On the plus side, thanks to the serendipidy that lead me to the Steampunk Workshop I can point to music to listen to and offer a timely reminder for everyone to catch up on reading Girl Genius and other work by Phil and Kaja Foglio.

The Foglio link is especially rich in distraction-inducing goodness.

There’s Buck Godot, What’s New with Phil and Dixie and even Girl Genius, all available for free on-line reading. (I’m probably going to spend way too much money getting the stories on pressed-pulped wood, nonetheless, especially since it’s the only way to get a copy of Darc Tangent).

The Steampunk Workshop also leads to the Datamancer site, with yet more one-of-a-kind industrial crafting. Plus hours of work-avoidance wonder via the Datamancer’s own links page as well.

Finally, and in preparation for future distraction, there’s Steampunk Magazine. Not a huge amount here as I type but the hope of plenty of fun reading ahead, none of which will help anyone meet a work deadline.

So, where to go today instead of being productive.

Here will do. It’s a mathematically comedic

response to George Vaccaro’s horrifying encounters with the Verizon billing department

George Vaccaro’s ‘horrifying encounters’ are worth letting a deadline or two slide as well, if only to be appalled anew at the level of basic inummeracy abroad in the world.

For those who don’t get Munroe’s joke, there’s more distraction to be had. The Mathematics Department at the University of Toronto has a rather nifty Question Corner.

It’s not being updated any more but it has a fair swag of questions already answered including a question about e^(i?) that makes the middle third of Randall Monroe’s cheque explicable.

As for the last third, it’s a summation expression. One way of expressing the series in English is

for all whole numbers, n, starting at 1 and going on forever, add together all the fractions, one divided by (2 to the power of n).

Another way, which attempts to lay out the steps involved in calculating the value of each item in the series is as follows.

Step A

1. Start with 2 to the power of 1

   ₂¹

2. Calculate this:

   ₂¹ = 1*2 = 2

3. Make this value the denominator of a fraction with 1 as the numerator:

   ¹?₂

4. For convenience’s sake, turn the fraction into a decimal:

   ¹?₂ = 0.5.

5. Set this value as the first item in an addition:

   0.5 + [more values to come]

Step B

1. Now go with 2 to the power of 2:

   ₂²

2. Calculate this:

   ₂² = 2*2 = 4

3. Make this value the denominator of a fraction with 1 as the numerator:

   ¹?₄

4. For convenience’s sake, turn the fraction into a decimal

   ¹?₄ = 0.25

5. Set this value as the second item in an addition:

   0.5 + 0.25 + [more values to come]

Step C

1. Next is 2 to the power of 3:

   ₂³

2. Calculate this:

   ₂³ = 2*2*2 = 8

3. Make this value the denominator of a fraction with 1 as the numerator:

   ¹?₈

4. For convenience’s sake, turn the fraction into a decimal:

   ¹?₄ = 0.125

5. Set this value as the second item in an addition.

   0.5 + 0.25 + 0.125 + [more values to come]

Step D &c

1. Keep repeating the above steps, increasing the power you raise 2 to by one each time.

2. Don’t stop, ever.

Stepping back from this endless task for a moment. Try the steps above for all values of n from 1 to 10. To really see what’s going on, note the intermediate values you get as you increase n.

For example, for n = 2 above, the sum is

• 0.5 + 0.25

For n = 3 above, the sum is

• 0.5 + 0.25 + 0.125

Think for a minute about what happens to the value of this sum as you keep adding together fractions derived from ever larger powers of 2 (hint: it keeps getting closer to a particular number). Now, consider what would happen if you kept going forever.

Now, go back and take another look at Randall Monroe’s cheque.

Funny, yes?

/* Funny, no, probably. Nothing like explaining a joke to suck all the life out of it. */

Amused or not, take at least a moment to check out Monroe’s webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. With any luck I’ll have a few more people missing deadlines as they spend ‘just a few minutes more’ reading through the more than 200 strips Munroe has produced as of this posting.

And, don’t forget to mouse-over the comics. Most of them have an extra tidbit tucked away in the image’s title attribute which will show up only if you hover the pointer over the image for a few seconds.

Another Pre-amble

Referring, once again, to my article on documentation for Red Hat Magazine entitled ‘Four rules and an axiom’

I’ve posted a further comment in reference to thoughts posted by two readers.

And, like my first, self-generated comment, I had links in the comment.

<tone mode=”wearied & pissed off”>

/* It’s hypertext for pity’s sake. In-line links to other material are the entire point of this environment’s existence. If we can’t in-line link, we may as well start using Gopher again. */

/* I hasten to add: this rant isn’t aimed at the folks running Red Hat Magazine. They’ve clearly got both a ‘lots of links probably means comment spam‘ policy and a ’strip links out of posts we let through just in case’ policy. */

/* Given the bane and blight that is comment spam, neither policy is entirely surprising. It’s still annoying enough that I’ve been moved to this little rant against the whole mess. */

</tone>

As you might infer from the above, the comment has appeared sans links. So I’m re-posting the copy below, complete with anchor tags and title attributes.

Comment as Originally Written

Don in Brooklyn wrote:

Speaking of jargon - numbering your five rules 0)-4) is a problem! Especially when it is followed by reference to the “five rules” when you have just finished with Rule 4.

and Tigger23505 wrote:

having a rule 0 smacks of jargonism. What do you do when you have a rule that absolutely must head the list. The common solution is to call it rule 0. The other thing to keep in mind particularly in technical writing, is that many in the target audience are used to things like numbering the bits in a 32 bit word 0-31.

FWIW, although I’m aware of the programmer’s habit of ordering from 0 rather than 1, I wasn’t primarily thinking of that when I decided to call my axiom ‘rule zero’.

I was mostly thinking of the Zeroth law of thermodynamics and, to a lesser extent, Isaac Asimov’s Zeroth law of Robotics.

In both cases, the zeroth law serves as a foundation stone or fundamental beginning point from which further laws can be derived (in the case of thermodynamics) or newly understood (in the case of Asimov’s Robotics Laws).

High falutin’ company I’m aiming to put my laws in, I’ll admit. Never let it be said I lacked ambition, however. Capability? Well that’s a whole ’nother question.