Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister

I mused a while ago about how as a kid in school I was annoyed they taught us to do math in different number bases, thinking that we’d never grow up to ever use that skill. Of course the punch line to that was that I chose a career where I do exactly that every single day.

In the world of fantasy and science fiction literature, which includes the adjacent field of worldbuilding for roleplaying games (video and table-top), people also invent make-believe languages and, yes, numbering systems for the fictional cultures that inhabit those worlds. If you want to be extra creative,¹ you can introduce your alien civilization’s numbering system to be something other than decimal. Make it octal, or base 12, for example.

Or, if you’re the master puzzle designers at Cyan Worlds and/or want to exquisitely torment your players, you go with base-frelling-twenty-five.

I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written.
—Atrus
Myst

HERE are the answers to the movie quote meme I posted the other day. How many did you guess right? What are some of your favorite films?

Acting is not about being famous, it’s about exploring the human soul.
—Annette Bening

ON this Friday,I’m feeling a little scattered, with a few random thoughts flitting about in my gray matter without much rhyme or reason to them. That may be because of the intense rush I was going through in all my spare time for the last several days trying to get a research paper ready for publication, only to get stuck on a couple of fine points that just didn’t feel ready yet. So, rather than publish something I’d feel was half-done, I’m taking a step back to catch my breath, look at it fresh again after the weekend,¹ and look on Monday for a new journal or conference to submit it to instead.

C’est la vie.

I was listening to YouTube videos of a PhD physicist (Dr. Blitz) debating against people who hold views contrary to demonstrable reality. Most of these are proponents of the idea that the Earth is flat, but there are others he’s engaged on other topics such as evolution, and the age of the Earth.

It’s somewhat frustrating to listen to some of the people arguing with him and their lack of ability to pose anything resembling a coherent point of view or to provide any evidence in support of their position that makes any sense. (I’m not necessarily even assuming here whether or not their position is correct or not,² just that the contingent of people who show up on his debate channel seem to be so woefully misinformed and lack any sense of how to make a logical argument or even have a modicum of rational, critical thinking about them.³

In the comment section I noticed someone had made a comment that summarized what it feels like to listen to many of these, in a way I hadn’t thought of but now that I’ve seen it, it makes perfect sense. “It’s like listening to a conversation where only one of the people is high.”

It occurred to me that I posted some of the questions that came up in my quiz show but never gave the answers. In case you’re curious, here they are.

• (The Good AI for 100) To destroy The Good Place AI assistant, named Siri due to product placement, you hold her nose while inserting a paperclip into her left ear, reducing her to a marble which can be disposed of.

  The AI assistant in the show is named Janet, not Siri.

• (CS for 800) A toddler staring at cookies baking in an oven, constantly asking “Are they done yet?” is a real-world example of the Dining Philosophers Problem in Computer Science.

  This is an example of one process blocked waiting for another to complete. However, while I might be tempted to name this “The Starving Toddler Problem,” it’s not an example of The Dining Philosophers Problem. That one is an illustration of a problem in Computer Science where multiple processes are mutually deadlocked, since they are waiting for each other before proceeding, so the whole operation is hopelessly stuck. By contrast, the toddler is just blocked waiting for the cookies but nothing’s preventing the cookies from eventually being done, at which point the toddler gets access to the resource they’re waiting for.⁴

• (Potpourri for 100) Known for its ease of implementation and efficient run-time performance, Bubble Sort is taught to first-year CS students as a go-to sorting method due to its O(n) growth characteristic.

  Bubble Sort is notoriously awful in terms of performance. It is taught to first-year students because it’s insanely easy to understand how it works and to run through the algorithm in your head. But it has a growth characteristic of O(n²), not O(n).⁵

• (Conspiracies and Pseudoscience for 400) According to a 2020 survey conducted in Britain, one-third of those polled “could not rule out a link” between GPS satellites and the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, with some believing they were both part of a deliberate plot against the populace.

  The people surveyed thought 5G cell towers and signals were to blame, not GPS.

• (Hardware for 400) The first commercially-available personal computer, the Altair 8800, consisted only of a front panel of lights & switches, a 6502 CPU board, and a small RAM board.

  The Altair 8800 was based on the Intel 8080A CPU, not the 6502.

• (Mascots for 300) The public face of the OpenBSD operating system has been a spiky pufferfish named Buttercup, since version 2.7 of that OS.

  The name of the pufferfish mascot is Puffy, not Buttercup.

• (CTF for 200) Capture the Flag games have a long history in literature and film as a training exercise, as seen in the Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, and Divergent stories. (14981, 45294220909404522163130995)⁵

  Harry Potter did not have a Capture the Flag game.

• (CS for 600) After writing the first modern programming language compiler, Lady Ada Lovelace went on to help create the COBOL language which still powers much of the world’s business architecture today.

  Lady Ada Lovelace made her contributions to Computer Science long before COBOL. That was invented by Grace Hopper.

• (Fun & Games for 400) The Chinese game of Mahjong is similar to the card game of Rummy but is played with small tiles representing winds, dragons, flowers, and seasons, plus four suits (cups, wands, pentacles, and swords).

  Mahjong’s tiles come in three suits: bamboo, characters, and dots (or coins). The four suits in the question are actually from Tarot cards.

• (– for 200) In Python, if x=42, then after executing y = --x, both x and y have the value 41 since x is decremented first then the resulting value assigned to y.

  The values of x and y will both be 42. Unlike C, the Python programming language does not have a “--” math operator, so “--x” is just two minus signs, making the value –(–(x)), which is just x.

That’s probably enough randomness from my brain for today.

… Nature almost surely operates by combining chance with necessity, randomness with determinism…
—Eric Chaisson
Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos

Peter Capaldi is such a brilliant actor, and his Doctor is such a wacky and wonderful character, I can’t wait to see what adventures are in store for him and Bill throughout time and space.
—Pearl Mackie

THIS will be the sixth time I’ve done this little quiz format. It’s been fun each time to see how many of these my friends remember, and sometimes see a few people walk away with another film on their “to watch” list.

Here’s the deal.

• Think of some of your favorite movies, or at least ones living rent-free in your head that you can’t get rid of so you might as well reference.
• Post a memorable quote from the film that your friends have a chance of being able to recognize out of context.
• Let your friends have fun trying to guess what movie they each came from.

I’ll post the answers to these in a few days. If you think you know them, say something in the comments below. Be coy if you want to let others try to figure them out too, but that’s not required.

1. “They’re probably foreigners with ways different from our own. They may do some more… folk dancing.”

   “This isn’t the Junior Chamber of Commerce, Brad!”

2. “Your parents are international spies. Good ones, but they’ve been mostly inactive for the last nine years.”

   “What are you talking about?”

   “I was assigned to protect your family, but something’s gone wrong. I have to take you to the safe house.”

   “My parents can’t be spies! They’re not cool enough!”

3. “But genies can’t kill! You said that!”

   “You’d be surprised what you can live through.”

4. “In the jungle you must wait, ’til the dice read five or eight.”
5. “The Crystallic Self-Perpetuating Breeder Construction Core!”

   “Those are big words! I’m frightened!”

   “Don’t be, it’s just evil marketing.”

   “Is there anyway to stop it?”

   “No, General. Marketing is the one force in the universe that is stronger than—”

   “No, no! I meant the big evil takeover thingie!”

   “Oh… There we might have a chance if we can breach the core and pull out the crystallic fusion rods.”

   “More big frightening words!”

6. “You will be king of Egypt, and I will be your footstool!”

   “The man stupid enough to use you as a footstool would not be wise enough to rule Egypt.”

7. “There’s children throwing snowballs
   Instead of throwing heads
   They’re busy building toys
   And absolutely no one’s dead!”
8. “You know, I’ll never forget my old dad. When these things would happen to him… the things he’d say to me.”

   “What did he say?”

   “ ‘What the hell are you doing in the bathroom day and night? Why don’t you get out of there and give someone else a chance?’ ”

9. “…a slight weapons malfunction but… uh… everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now. Thank you…. How are you?”
10. “Science and technology were outlawed millions of years ago. And we must admit it’s been a peaceful world since then.”

Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.
—Martin Scorsese

I  was born on the cusp between two generations—the “Baby Boomers” and “Generation X.” Technically, one could draw a hard line at a specific year and call me a Boomer. Or, one could not do that. My siblings are fond of poking fun of me by referring to me as a Boomer, while at the same time disclaiming any membership in that group themselves, by virtue of that hard line. It’s sort of like a “you must be at least this tall to ride this ride” rule except it’s for years instead of centimeters or inches.

However, I think this is patently silly for a few reasons. First of all, the idea that literal siblings who were all born within a few years of one another could belong to two different generations is really straining any practical definition of the word. “Generation” is only (as far as I’m aware) a term with any precision at all when describing each step along a family tree—so by definition, my sibings and I must be in the same generation (of our family) together.

More broadly, sure, we use the term “generation” to refer to people born within the same roughly-defined era in history. For convenience, we often say things like “people born between year x and year y.” However, when we look at what being in a particular generation (by that definition) actually means, we always refer to cultural aspects of their lives and experiences, along with stereotypical behaviors and points of view.

None of which strictly follow a person’s date of manufacture so much as the people and situations they grew up among, and the lifestyle experiences that shaped them along the way.

In that light, I have never yet seen a Boomer I identified with in any way other than “they seem like my parents’ generation” while most of the traits ascribed to GenX feel right at home for me.

So I still reserve the right to make fun of Boomers and maintain that X is the generation that has it all. All of what, I’m not quite sure.

Every generation trash-talks younger generations. Baby boomers labeled Generation X a group of tattooed slackers and materialists; Generation Xers have branded millennials as iPhone-addicted brats.
—Neil Blumenthal

AMONG my various hobbies is perhaps one of the more unusual ways I spend my time: I’m an amateur¹ game show host. Mostly, if I were to be really honest, for the love of putting together the electronics for the buttons and scoreboards and such, and writing the software that goes into presenting the game to the players and audience. But it’s also enjoyable to set it all up and run people through games at fun events.

So far, I’ve run a few for the Cub Scout pack I used to be in charge of, a bunch more for various church and school events, a number of them for work training and team-building events. And most recently, a sort of “hacker jeopardy” type of game for a local security conference.

Security conferences are interesting places to hang around. There’s lots of good information about keeping yourself and your systems safe, presented by people who wear the white hats as well as the black hats, metaphorically speaking. (And I have heard a few BTS conversations that sounded like “Have you seen the speaker for the next session?” “Um, I think the feds just found them first and took them away.”)

I started out with my own game format that popped up random categories of questions as the players chose them and gave their answers. That developed into something more like the fairly standard grid of topics along the top and point values on the vertical axis, sort of like Jeopardy! but different—we’re playing our own question-and-answer game, not just copying them.²

I haven’t been able to run my game at the conference for the last couple of years, which has disappointed me. Even though I don’t really have much spare time (certainly not enough to finish the new electronic scoreboards I have been working on), I really wanted to take a little break from my research for a couple of hours to run it this year.

This year we tried making a little twist, inspired by the online game show Um, Actually. I thought it might make it easier to answer the more obscure questions and overall make the game a little fresher and more interesting. Instead of asking questions where the contestants have to come up with a correct answer, we rephrased them into statements of fact that just contained a flaw. The players had to buzz in and correct whatever was wrong with the statement. (We did keep the rule from previous years which let players force each other to answer hard questions and steal points from each other.) This turned out to work really well and made the game a lot more fun.

A few of my favorite questions that came up:

• (The Good AI for 100) To destroy The Good Place AI assistant, named Siri due to product placement, you hold her nose while inserting a paperclip into her left ear, reducing her to a marble which can be disposed of.
• (CS for 800) A toddler staring at cookies baking in an oven, constantly asking “Are they done yet?” is a real-world example of the Dining Philosopher's Problem in Computer Science.
• (Potpourri for 100) Known for its ease of implementation and efficient run-time performance, Bubble Sort is taught to first-year CS students as a go-to sorting method due to its O(n) growth characteristic.
• (Conspiracies and Pseudoscience for 400) According to a 2020 survey conducted in Britain, one-third of those polled “could not rule out a link” between GPS satellites and the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, with some believing they were both part of a deliberate plot against the populace.
• (Hardware for 400) The first commercially-available personal computer, the Altair 8800, consisted only of a front panel of lights & switches, a 6502 CPU board, and a small RAM board.
• (Mascots for 300) The public face of the OpenBSD operating system has been a spiky pufferfish named Buttercup, since version 2.7 of that OS.
• (CTF for 200) Capture the Flag games have a long history in literature and film as a training exercise, as seen in the Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, and Divergent stories. (14981, 45294220909404522163130995)³
• (CS for 600) After writing the first modern programming language compiler, Lady Ada Lovelace went on to help create the COBOL language which still powers much of the world’s business architecture today.
• (Fun & Games for 400) The Chinese game of Mahjong is similar to the card game of Rummy but is played with small tiles representing winds, dragons, flowers, and seasons, plus four suits (cups, wands, pentacles, and swords).
• (– for 200) In Python, if x=42, then after executing y = --x, both x and y have the value 41 since x is decremented first then the resulting value assigned to y.

“You know, you don’t act like a scientist. You’re more like a game show host.”
—Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver)
Ghostbusters