Updata

[melannen]

1. I let the thing about the new place for telling people about fun things being said about fandom sit for a few days because I wanted to think about all of the good things you all said. And while I let it sit, nemonclature (without knowing about what I did!) started metanews, which is going to be much more of a news place than what I thought of. This is great because it means that I can let her start something first! If hers goes well I'd like to try something that's about making lists of stuff that isn't new but in the mean time you should all go and watch what's happening with metanews.

2. The above was written in the upgoer6 text editor. :P It is cool and really makes me want to go finish the historify text editor I was working on.

3. Also I let it sit because I have learned that, nope, I am still not a person who enjoys having two collapsed comment threads in the same week. I loved all of your comments and they were great threads but wow I ran out of deal-with-people juice pretty quickly after that.

4. So instead I taught myself how to turn comic panels into 3D stereo pairs and started taking over the Stereo Pair tag on tumblr. Enjoy. Or get a headache. Possibly both. (I think my tumblr is now officially "random visual stuff". Although now that I've said that I'll probably go back to posting scans of strange/obscure comics which was my original goal over there.)

5. My brand-new laptop is having annoying and strange connectivity issues to wireless, mostly involving losing the connection repeatedly, not being able to load the web even when it says it's connected, and refusing to see the wireless network at all. But then sometimes it'll work fine for a whole day. And it doesn't help that Windows 8 is fundamentally unhelpful. I suspect it's because most of the wireless connections I use regularly are still WEP encrypted and Windows 8 hates WEP, but it's that way because my old XP laptop hates WPA. Any advice from anyone on this...?

Comments

[kaz]

I totally thought you were the one who'd started metanews! Nice coincidence on the timing.

Also, thanks for the link to the upgoer6! it is FUN to play around with. (I assume the highest rarity is bright red - I tested using "syzygy", which is a word that is only useful to mathematicians and hangman players with a bent for the cruel and unusual.)

Also also, do not feel obliged to respond to this comment if you're out of interpersonal energy. I know those feelings and will not take it personally.

[melannen]

Nope, not me! Apparently there was just a convergence in the Force or something. :D

If you click on the colored words (and it works in your browser setup) you should see a pop-up with details on the word's frequency! (It took me awhile to notice that too.) (ETA: Also people have been describing their research using it! You should try that.)

And I am mostly recharged! A few days of ignoring all comments and playing with geometry made it better.

[kaz]

Omg I am SO doing that when it's not almost 1am, it will be AMAZING. I might actually have an easier time than you'd think because maths does a lot of appropriating words to give them new meanings - "ring" is allowed, for instance, as is "field", and both of those are actually technical terminology I use a lot.

Thankfully the word "syzygy" does not actually play a particularly important role in my work; I just stumbled across it and remembered it because I am cruel and unusual when it comes to playing hangman.

[melannen]

>> "ring" is allowed, for instance, as is "field", and both of those are actually technical terminology I use a lot.

I think maybe you should have to describe the technical meaning if you use words like that. :P

...also syzygy is one of the best words, I use it whenever possible.

[kaz]

UNFAIR

okay I give you: the field axioms, upgoer five version.

so a field is like a big ball with lots of things inside it, and you can
- add two things together to get another thing in the ball
- one of the things doesn't change anything when you add it to other things
- for every thing there is another one such that when you add them together you get the one that doesn't change anything
- times two things together to get another thing in the ball
- same as before, one of the things doesn't change anything if you times by it, call that "one", and
- for every thing there's always another one such that you can times them together to get one
- and then it doesn't matter which way round you do these things
- and if you add two things together and times it by a third, that's the same as first doing each of the two times the third and then adding!

I feel a bit like I cheated by using "times" in place of "multiply". Also, I handwaved the associative law, but I proudly explained the distributive law.

I love the word syzygy. It just looks so UNWORDLIKE. I first encountered it in "Hilbert's Syzygy Theorem" and my reaction was essentially "...you are kidding, right?"

[melannen]

That is awesome! Times is kind of cheating but explaining multiplication from scratch is hard, I admit.

[kaz]

*bows*

Explaining multiplication from scratch would be very, very hard... because you can explain multiplication on natural numbers by "add this number together that many times" or equivalently "if you draw a box made of spots that is the first number of spots high and the second number of spots wide, then the we say 'the first number times the second number' is the number of spots in the box." (Apparently "dots" is not in the top however many words but "spots" is? I'm not sure how that works.) I should mention I really like the box imagery because it's easy to picture (and easy to see why the first definition is the same as the second), extends more easily to rational numbers and real numbers, and because it's very easy to see then why multiplication is commutative (rotating boxes doesn't change the area) and associative (a*(b*c) is then the volume of a rectangle with depth a, height b, width c and obviously rotating rectangles doesn't change the volume)!

But the multiplication I'm using is, y'know, an abstract concept of multiplication and doesn't actually generally correspond to adding a number to itself blah times! It often works that way for fields, but if we step back to rings or algebras - matrix multiplication? How exactly do I add the matrix [[0,1],[0,0]] to itself [[0,1],[0,0]] many times and why is the answer the zero matrix?

It occurs to me that what I should *really* do is explain the principles behind abstract algebra in upgoer five terminology, and this idea of taking things we're familiar with and abstractifying them, because that's a lot more feasible to explain than "what is a Hopf algebra?"

[nemonclature]

Thanks for the signal boost! And I hope you do go forward with the meta recs comm irrespective of what happens my end. I'd love to have a sort of thematic archive for meta. That is kinda what you were thinking, right?

[melannen]

I was originally thinking sort of a combination of that and a news community, but since the news part is being handled, it would be something like that, yeah!

[nemonclature]

Ah right. Well, if you ever want to do news-related things, do consider using metanews, like a merge or a collaboration or whatever.

[sophia_sol]

1. Yay thank you for the link to metanews!

4. I have been enjoying your stereo pairs on tumblr and bewailing the fact that I have bad eyesight, since you say glasses need to be removed, and without glasses I need the pictures close enough or large enough that I can't do it successfully for most of your posts! ALAS.

[melannen]

Glasses do not need to be removed! Apparently that is unclear in the instructions. :/ The tips are just things to try if you're having trouble, they are not required. If you are having trouble, then removing your glasses can help (especially if, like me, you really need new glasses.) But for some people it works fine or better with glasses! And if you can't remove your glasses, then try the other tips. (I edited the text to try to make this clearer a few days ago but I suspect you haven't been reading the whole thing every time. Or maybe the edit is still unclear.)

It won't work for people who don't have full binocular vision a missing eye, severe strabismus, etc. - but everyone else should be able to train themselves into it if they practice enough and try all the things, including the toilet paper roll solution that I added in, to see if any of them work.)

[sophia_sol]

OOOH, good to know! Thank you for the clarification.

Yes, I read every single bit of the text on the first one you posted and haven't read it since :P