Strings, Rings, and Other Things

1. Months after changing from Pampers to Huggies, I have belatedly realized that every one of my daughter's diapers is covered with Pooh.


2. I've reached the conclusion that "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" is an innovative science fiction story about the social and economic impacts on modern human culture of the unexpected opening of some sort of inter-dimensional portal and the mass migration of its inhabitants into our world, as seen by two typical children.

Randall Munroe has just posted the results of the xkcd color survey. It's neat to see the patterns that emerged. A few random observations:

The blog post opens with a quote from Billy Budd that begins, "Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?" The full quote is beautifully written, but to steal a phrase from Mark Twain, Melville "is not a close observer" (at least in this case). The colors yellow, green, and blue fall between orange and violet in every rainbow, so to say that those two "blendingly enter into" each other seems rather odd.

The survey's list of common, consistent color names is fascinating (though it needs some synonym-pruning). The names that I know feel "right"; I've wondered whether people have color "accents", but I'm pretty close to the norm here. I'm strangely delighted by the number of color names people agree on, including "apple green", "pea soup", and even "mushroom". (Also "bland"!) "Ugly green" is amusing, too. "Puke green" shows up early at #72 (it's pretty similar to "puke" and "vomit"). I guess it speaks well for the consistency of the survey that "poop" and "shit" are nearly identical (considerably more so than "light purple" is to the less common "light urple", in fact). Those two are very similar to their "____ brown" variants, but (as expected) noticeably different from "baby poop/shit green". (And again, we can agree on all this? Wow.)

Finally, the list of unusual survey responses is a lot of fun. Some are vivid color descriptions, like "unsure-whether-boy-or-girl baby room color" (sort of a cool green), "what I'm sure was once nice wallpaper before you stained it with your nicotine" (greyish pink), and "maybe a half hour before the first stars start showing up in the night sky" (my favorite). Others are comments on the survey itself, like "jesus christ what is with you and green" [sic] and "now i'm just getting freaked out. nothing looks like a proper colour anymore." Good stuff.

Browsing a local bookstore, I spotted Supersymmetry DeMYSTiFied. The "DeMYSTiFied" series seems to have a style similar to the "For Dummies" books but with more of a "study guide" flavor (they all include "end-of-chapter quizzes and a final exam [to] help reinforce learning"). I guessed the book must be intended for a broad audience excited about cutting edge physics.

So when I randomly flipped it open, I was surprised to find myself in a chapter called "A Crash Course in Weyl Spinors" on a page full of equations. Flipping around some more, the book seems at least as equation-heavy as the average textbook, but presented in that "For Dummies" style. The same cognitive dissonance appears in the ad copy:

It's a no-brainer! You'll get:

• An explanation of the Wess-Zumino model
• Tips on how to build supersymmetric lagrangians
• [etc.]

I'm really wondering about the intended audience for this book. It clearly assumes that the reader is comfortable doing sophisticated calculations in quantum field theory (often a 2nd year graduate course), and it's teaching techniques that you'd only need if you're going to read (and write) primary literature in particle physics. But the "golly gee let's make this fun and simple" style seems like the last thing that would inspire confidence in an ambitious physics grad student, particularly when it's competing with well-regarded textbooks written by masters in the field.

A final bizarre note: At the moment, Amazon ranks this book #36 in the category "Science for Kids". Hey, folks with kids: order this and let me know how it works out for ya!

I sent Kim email today complaining about my dry skin and lack of lotion at work. In it, I wrote, 'I have this fear that my knuckles are going to progress from "dry" to "dripping blood" by dinnertime.' When Kim wrote back from her Yahoo Mail account, I happened to look at the raw source code of the message (different story), and where she had quoted my message I saw something odd.

I conclude the following:

• Yahoo has a long list of terms that make it uneasy.
• Yahoo assigns various scores and categories to each one (and tracks who said it).
• Yahoo is so proud of these assessments that it silently adds them into all outgoing mail just in case the recipient's email program wants to use them.
• Yahoo believes that "dripping blood" is always "news".
• Yahoo also associates "dripping blood" with "category: travel".
• Yahoo's programmers take some seriously messed-up vacations.
• Someone out there sees special formatting every time "dripping blood" is mentioned.
• You could probably do amusing things to them with the right "compatible" scripts.