Relation Ship-shape

Were I a better logician, I would define a relation Ship-shape (S), that takes two arguments of type man-man, man-woman, woman-man, woman-woman (power set of Genders G where the cardinality of the set is 2). These arguments wouldn't often argue; in fact, they ought to align, benign, make a b-line along a spline monotonically along the love axis (aka, the Axis: Bold as Love). Even if we allow local minima, there should be some hill-climbing, mountain-climbing, mountain-biking, back-packing solution to escape it, some escapade with a paddle, be it tabble-tennis, canoeing, or kayaking.

Though I keep yacking (SYN-ACK), reproaching imperfectness in a relationship, I am approaching the limit of my patience function, rapidly diverging from TruthLove, on the verge of emerging from the denominator, the product of the other side.

Indeed, I have yet to fully define/refine the sublime function S, where S(M,W) > S(M) + S(W), und so muss allein vielleicht sein. Traurige Träume, unz.

Perhaps I must turn to geometry to present a better solution. Gee Oh Me? Try?

Puzzlin' Evidence

It appears to me that puzzles have taken on a new mainstream lustre in modern American culture. With the recent popularity of sudoku, the NYT Crosswords (even spawning the documentary Wordplay), and the fun and games surrounding the DaVinci Code, it appears that big game outlets have reminded Americans that there's more to entertainment than the XBox and Fox News.

Video games have been an outlet for lovers of think-fast logic puzzles for some time now. Ever since the Nintendo Gameboy brought us Tetris, video gamers have enjoyed out-witting and this out-playing their friends in such games as Dr. Mario, and now the Brain Age phenomenon (which tags me as a 73-yr-old, fee-fi-fo-fum).

Even in plastic and paper form, logic puzzles continue to delight people of all ages. Ever try to solve a Martin Gardener puzzle? Those things make my head spin like a Rubik's Cube (Bűvös Kocka). Speaking of spinning and repetitive stress syndrome, I owe part of my computer science education to the Towers of Hanoi ripoff I played in 5th grade, and boy are my arms (still) tired. How else could I understand recursion without first understanding recursion? And the fox-chicken-cabbage-over-the-river puzzle...imagine, thinking in reverse and/or being able to make a global move on a local level, thinking non-greedily. Imagine what we could do as a country if we could do the same by aligning with the Kyoto Accords... Now there's a not-so-difficult puzzle...it's the environment, silly!

I'd like to have time to get into geocaching, a sort of scavenger hunt using GPS and clues found online. This blend of exercise, fresh air, and problem solving is probbaly too much for many modern video gamers, who'd rather suck down Doritos and Mountain Dew on the couch as they try to re-"beat" Final Fantasy for the umpteenth time.

I'd like even to run a city-wide capture-the-clues-and-figure-out-the-story competition, but the amount of logistics required is too daunting without a fully committed team. Ah, well, I suppose I'll have to wait for virtual reality to meet mobile computing to create virtual worlds that are mapped over real-space, so people can wander the park searching for the dragon, or the pirates, or the exit from the airlock...

Now that WotC/Hasbro have bought up many of the gaming companies from olden times (with the exception of Parker Bros, who just released a version of Monopoly where you can pay with credit), it's hard to say what the future of gaming-as-mental-activity will be. Hasbro has already released a few gaming titles in dumbed-down form...what's next? Hopefully, a new golden age of games will come about, as these games become more mainstream and widespread, and cross cultural, linguistic, and cultural barriers.

Someone needs to write a simple Java app to grab the day's NYT Crossword onto my mobile phone so I can solve it on the john or on the bus. Then we can all burn a few brain cycles trying to find an eight-letter word to complete the first line of Longfellow's Evangeline, "This is the forest ________."*

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(scroll down for the answer)























* primeval

Bye, bye, Archimedes' pi

Just as not every physicist cites Einstein's 1905 papers and not every mathematician cites the work of Pythagoras of Samos, not everyone needs to cite many of the work in their fields. This leads me to wonder -- just how much fundamental work goes uncited, especially in today's world of instant communication?

This I wonder as I often discuss technical ideas with friends, but work for a company which, in theory, owns that which I produce during the day. But do they own what I produce at night, or that which I cannot own, as I share it with another? How much of our own work can we erase, and how much of it goes unnoticed? Hence the palimpsest syndrome (as I'm interpreting it). As with employees of companies in the software business, I also wonder how many words and theories become wrapped into another and never see the light of day.

I mean, how old is pi? According to an article that's almost as old as me by E. Garfield in Essays of an Information Scientist Vol:2, p396-398, 1974-76 entitled "The 'Obliteration Phenomenon' in Science--and the Advantage of Being Obliterated!" Archimedes estimated pi in the third century BC and others refined it from the sixteenth century until now. Of course, it wasn't called pi until 1706, when William Jones started using the greek letter. It's a good thing we don't have to keep track of all the work that's come before us, otherwise our references would outweigh our new material...Still, it would be nice to have some historian track the development of, say, computer science from BC until now, including Kruskal's algorithm, the significance of depth-first search, etc. I considered embarking on one back as an undergraduate. I'm sure someone has at least begun such a treatment.

My linguistic correlate: how many language/linguistic concepts have we lost citations on...is there a Complete History of Linguistics out there? I mean, the easy (and incorrect) answer is to say it's all Chomsky's doing. But I can see a lot of shaking heads out there...