Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister

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

IN today’s episode of “Famous Scams of the Past,” we’ll take a look at an item that dominated the airwaves with ads years ago—The Phonics Game. (“What’s that?” I hear you asking, “You never had ‘episodes’ of any such thing, what’s going on?” A fair question. I don’t know, it’s just a turn of phrase to introduce the topic. But talking about scams and history can be fun, so who knows? I might do more in the future.)

Anyway, back in the mid-1990s Dr. Greg Cynaumon came out with this revolutionary new way to teach kids to read. He called it “The Phonics Game” and he claimed it was so amazing, so unprecedented and powerful, that if your child didn’t get a full letter-grade improvement on their next report card after using the game, you’d get your money back.

Pretty cool, right? Well, there was some controversy that came to life along with the excited interest from parents looking for anything to help their kids who were struggling with reading skills. (And considering the game’s creator also suffered the embarrassment of getting in legal hot water with the FTC for selling diet pills that didn’t quite live up to their advertising, controversy seems to follow his business ventures more than I’m sure he’d prefer.)

I seem to recall it getting to the point where it was—at least in the circles I inhabited—increasingly viewed by consumers as something of a scam product. I just filed it away as a curiosity until I had kids of my own who were having a tough time learning to read too, and it occurred to me to wonder if something like this game might be helpful, or if indeed it was a scam or money-making scheme more than an educational tool. So we bought a copy for our kids and took a look first-hand.

In my opinion, I came to the personal conclusion that it was a bit of both: a viable educational tool and a bit of a scam as well.

What was actually wrong with it, then? They had this fantastic money-back offer, how bad could it be? The answer to that is foreshadowed by its name. It teaches reading using the phonics method (itself the subject of some controversy, but for people of my generation, this is better known simply as “the way we were all taught to read as kids”). It’s basic, it’s simple, whether or not there’s a better teaching method, phonics has been proven to at least work well enough for a long time now. And for this product they turned it into a set of entertaining games to keep kids’ attention. So far, so good.

Gamification of teaching materials is nothing new and is also a time-honored approach (even for adult education), so nothing wrong with that. Does it actually work, though? In our experience, yes. Yes, it does. It actually seemed to work quite well, to be honest.

So what’s the scam part of this?

I think the only part of this that’s shady is the marketing and sales of the actual game. They hyped it up as some amazing new thing that would work like magic in your kids’ lives, and for that they charged a premium price—over $225 for the game (about $500 in 2025 dollars). But then what price can you put on pure magic that teaches your kids to read, after all?

I learned to read before I went to Kindergarten by using something more or less akin to phonics. For free. As wonderful as this game is, it should probably more reasonably have a price around 10% of what they were charging for it. They made a nice game around it but not that much more to justify that price tag.¹

A little corporate greed ruined an otherwise nice idea. Can’t say that was the fist, nor will it be the last time that’s happened in this world.

Together, we can assemble amazing words and astounding tales.
—Ollie Kayuro
Fairytale Clues: Magic-filled Stories That Slip English Grammar into the Heart

I  have been holding onto this Friday Fiver for a couple of weeks, mostly just because I haven’t got around to posting anything for a while. But somehow it seems apropos enough to bring out here as I start NaBloPoMo and have the topic of online journaling on my mind.

As usual, this Friday Five is brought to you by the letter F and the number 5, courtesy of sumrsue79 and posted to thefridayfive by anais_pf.¹

1. How long ago did you join LJ (or DW)?

   I started my LiveJournal in October, 2003. This comes after a lifetime of growing up being taught that keeping a personal journal or diary is one of life’s highest virtues and something I was really strongly encouraged to do from an early age. The small stack of empty journals I was given as gifts over the years attests to how well that worked out. Having not had my ADHD diagnosed until much, much later in life may have been a factor, but generally speaking it was just very difficult for me to sit down and organize my thoughts in a permanent fashion like a pre-bound journal in ink. And when I did, I was paralyzed any time I missed writing anything because I couldn’t just carry on with a gap without completely and perfectly filling in all the missing bits first, so I could never catch up and thus every attempt was soon abandoned.

   Fast forward to 2003. I’m allegedly a grown-up with a real life, job, marriage, pets, house, and as a father of young kids, I realized that there were a lot of memories, experiences, and thoughts going by that would be lost in the wind if I didn’t somehow manage to get myself to write them down along the way.

   I found that a few of my friends were blogging on LiveJournal and on an impulsive whim I signed up, thinking I’d just post an occasional random thought here or there, but before I knew it I was full-on chronicling my life. Somehow I found the medium where that actually worked for me.

   After a while, LJ was bought out by a company that changed the terms of service—including the concerning bit about everything posted there being subject to terms that were only available in Russian.² Plus, apparently it included something about how everything posted would be considered under Russian law as if posted by a media outlet with serious consequences if you said anything that in their view was controversial or restricted.

   I didn’t sign up for any of that nonsense just to keep my personal journal, which isn’t a political media outlet at all, other than as a human being I have a few opinions about things. So along with a number of other LJ refugees, I moved my journal over to Dreamwidth, which is a nearly identical platform (technically) which still has the home-grown volunteer-effort feel to it.

2. How did you find out about LJ (or DW)?

   I guess I already answered that in the previous question.

3. If someone introduced you to LJ (or DW), is s/he still on your friends list?

   Yes, technically, but sadly times have changed. The crowds of people I used to follow and interact with between all our LJ and DW journals (and blogs on other sites as well) faded away as people were more drawn to quick sound bites on Facebook (etc.) over writing longer, more thoughtful discourse in the blogosphere.

   So while the friends who were the ones who introduced me to LJ originally are still on my friends list, they’re not active there anymore (or on DW).

4. Have you introduced anyone to LJ (or DW)?

   Yes, a few, mostly just in the same way I was introduced. In a casual conversation, something I wrote about in my blog would come up and I would suggest the idea of checking out blogs to them, or some similar way of introduction.

5. Is your LJ (or DW) public or friends only, and why?

   It started out friends-only because at the time my kids were still growing up and I was writing a lot about our family activities and life experiences, and just for the sake of due diligence of online safety, I didn’t want the entire universe unchecked access to all of that, so I managed access to those who asked first so at least there was some sense I knew who my audience was.

   These days, now that those days are past us, I’ve opened up my journal to be mostly public and the content is more focused on more general life topics since I’m not raising kids anymore at this point in my life.

The bravest journey is the one within.
—Amanda Lee

__________
¹To play along, copy these questions to your journal/blog, answer them and post a link back as a comment in thefridayfive.
²They provided an English translation for our convenience but didn’t guarantee anything about its accuracy in any legally-binding way, so we were still at the mercy of whatever the Russian text said.