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January 29, 2006

Resolution Plinking or Your Wishing Sucks

Sixteen days ago I asked my readers (all six of you) to wish me retroactive luck on a math exam at work. I recently received the results; I got a 15. Depending on who you ask, the passing score varies between 16 and 18. In any case, I failed.

This tells me one of three things: either retroactive luck doesn't work, you didn't wish it to me, or your wishing it sucks. Because of a certain incident in my past involving a a Rubik's Magic Puzzle and an obnoxious Jefferson County Deputy I'm convinced that retroactive luck can work. I also have faith that all my readers, in fact, wished me the required luck. That leaves "your wishing sucks" as the only possibility.

#1 Resolution for the new year--Pphbbt!

In other news, I was planning on taking some tech writing classes this semester but due to a monumental foul up at the CU-Denver Bursar's office, I wasn't able to take those classes

#3 Resolution--pah-tang-thoof!

Jodi's finally decided on an academic path. I'm very happy for her. Actual goals can make such a difference in life. Of course, along with her academic choices goes a serious and long-term financial outlay. This will preclude purchasing anything made by the Apple Corporation.

#2 Resolution--kaput-tah-toy-tah-toy-puthpk!

Resolution #8, assasinating the Vonage Song guy, would surely prevent me from achieving the work-related bullets, so I must regretably remove it.

#8--Resolution--sha-zang-pah-tick-i-pow!

Resolutions 4 and 5 are mostly out of my personal control so, besides the blogging, all that's left is the running and the blogging. I have enough blogs to hold me through till march so all that's left is to run. I hate running, but it feels so good when I stop.

I guess I'll be getting some new shoes.

Posted by james at 07:27 PM | Comments (3)

January 28, 2006

Google Maps Rocks

For those of you who are in college or the stone age (is there a difference?) and have not checked out Google Maps, you need to. After the novelty of seeing your house on satellite imagery with streetmap overlay wears off, you can start looking into the cool stuff.

So far, the stuff just keeps getting cooler.

For Denverites, check out Alkemis-Denver. Try Alkemis-DC if you're in the DC area. These sites pull up a google map of the area with "tacks" placed in key locations. Some of the tacks link you to a live traffic camera at the intersection and some give you traffic info like "one lane closed Kalamath Ave." There is also a sidebar with links to other things like local live police scanner, random local picks from www.flickr.com and other stuff.

All this with no pop-ups--it's pretty neat.

I think I need to switch departments and get into OSINT. It'll be much more lucrative in the futre, I think, and certainily more fun.

Posted by james at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2006

Virtual Tin Cannes Unleashed

Alright Folks, I set up the bare bones Tin Cannes Film Festival site/blog. You can access it at http://www.falseauthority.com/tincannes/.

If any of you want post privileges, let me know and I'll set it up.

We need to set up our first review. I nominate Serenity and propose a due date of February 6th, 2006. Go to the site and let me know what you think!

Posted by james at 08:54 PM | Comments (2)

January 23, 2006

Miller Time

For all ye Padawan who don't remember, there once was a time when T.V. shows were sent through the air like cellfone calls. One of my favorite over-the-air shows was a PBS show called Mr. Wizard. Mr. Wizard was a cool scientist-guy who did experiments with kids in order to get them to like science. It obviously worked on me.

When I got to High School I wasn't quite studious enough to take the "real" physics class but Mr. Wizard had convinced me that science was cool. I enrolled in the what was informally known as "Mr. Wizard Physics," a course intended for flunkies like me.

This turned out to be one of the coolest classes I ever took. The teacher, known only as "Miller" was even cooler than the T.V. knockoff. In his class I saw students walking barefoot on broken glass and stand motionlessly as bricks careened at their noses. He electrified the doorknob to get the attention of the tardy and had another teacher break bricks on his chest with a sledgehammer. It was memorable.

Two days ago as I walked the dogs in a mild snowstorm I saw a man clearing the snow from his driveway using only one arm to push the shovel. On more careful inspection I saw the characteristic limp that sparked a long-buried memory.

Though I rarely think of it, Miller was, in fact, "disabled." He has very little use of his right side and yet somehow manages to ride his bicycle to work 90% of the time. He also can draw perfect circles by affixing the chalk in his right hand, standing with his right shoulder at the board, and throwing his right arm in a circle with his left. It's an amusing trick, but Giotto would be jealous of "Miller's O."

The shoveler in the driveway with the limp--not a winning answer in Clue, but, in fact, my old Physics teacher. He lives two blocks away from me. I chatted with him for a while, though I don't think he remembers me specifically (I can forgive him, he said he's been teaching over 40 years now) he was still as jovial as ever.

He was the bearer of bad news, though, as he's exclusively teaching advanced students and has been expressly forbidden from performing most of his old tricks. Bloody shame--no students will ever get the Miller Experience again. Maybe it's just as well, though. I hear the latest craze in education is to insist that kinematics is only a theory and that the idea that an intelligent mind directs the paths of moving objects is equally valid.


Posted by james at 07:02 PM | Comments (1)

January 16, 2006

Tune Time

If you are a friend or acquaintance and live in the Denver/Boulder megaplex you may be interested in attending Tune Time 1.0, whenever we get it together.

Posted by james at 09:01 PM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2006

Wish Me Retroactive Luck

When I was jumping all the hoops to get my job, one of the necessary steps was to take a "basic math skills test" called the Math Placement Test (MPT). I was told by my interviewer (now my boss) not to worry about it.

It is the hardest test I've ever seen.

It's ludicrously hard--like Ph.D. qualifying exams in four subjects (Ph.D. candidates generally only have to take such tests in two subjects.)

There are 50 questions covering the fields of Abstract Algebra, Linear Algebra, Number Theory, Probability, Statistics, and Combinatorics. Everything a growing cryptographer needs--go figure.

The questions ares so hard that a passing score is 18 correct out of 50 (thats a 36% for you Philosophers). I got 17, and a reduction in the amount of money in my job offer.

It was still a lot of money, so I took the job.

I found out that one can retake the exam after starting with the company, so long as he/she waits six months. After an unbelievable amount of hoop jumping, I arranged to take it. Nothing lost if I fail, a $7500 per annum raise if I pass.

I took the exam yesterday. They updated it, now it's even harder. Hard enough that I won't mind if I fail for the same reason I wouldn't mind failing medical boards, the Bar, or the CPA exam.

The 18/50 passing score, though, makes it possible that I will pass. You can use the Binomial Distribution to calculate the probability of passing by sheer chance. It's about 6.3%.

I have moderately hight confidence that I got 9 problems right. If we assume I actually got 7 of those right an I'm smart enough to eliminate an obviously wrong answer once out of every two problems you end up with a 35.4% chance of passing, mostly by guessing. If I actually hit those 9 problems, it goes up to about 58%

That's a lot better than Vegas. I took it on Thursday the 14th, under my full moon which might bump it up to 58.00042%

Wish me luck!

Afterthought: How to Calculate the Probability of Passing a Multiple Choice Test by Guessing

While researching this, I couldn't find an easy way to do this on the web. I've included this section in case anyone else out there needs to know to do this. I wrote a little Matlab/Octave script:

%Testpass.m
%By Jamesy
%Computes probability of passing a test by guessing
%testpass(numans, numprob, pscore)
%numans=number of possible answers to each question
%numprob=number of questions on the test
%pscore=number of questions you need to get right to pass the exam

function [prob]=testpass(numans, numprob, pscore);

data=zeros(1,numprob);

for count=1:numprob
data(count)=nchoosek(numprob,count)*(1/numans)^count*(1-(1/numans))^(numprob-count);
end

prob=sum(data(pscore:numprob));

Posted by james at 08:31 PM | Comments (1)

January 10, 2006

jamesy.html

You are .html You are versatile and improving, but you do have your limits. When you work with amateurs it can get quite ugly.
Which File Extension are You?

Posted by james at 09:37 PM | Comments (0)

January 09, 2006

Lonely Man überbeansprucht Hyperlinks

Nearly every young, non-military-veteran I talk to seems to have a canned line that goes something like, "I couldn't be in the military--I don't like people telling me what to do."

Those of us who've been there know that's crap. Even if you're a hobo, you have to do what others tell you sometimes. Even Ghandi had to answer to his wife.

I think a more respecatble answer would be, "I didn't want to" and a more realistic one would be, "I didn't have to."

Sometimes people say similar things about having kids:

Guess what, guys? Kids are time consuming. And I like my free time and I don't like kids either. I love my kid--she's challenging and beautiful and fun. But I hate other kids.

Parents, too, have something positive that the naysayers usually overlook. I no longer spend nights staring at the ceiling wondering why I can't get a date and what I should do when I grow up, which caused more sleep loss than my daughter ever did.

P.S.
This is funny.

Posted by james at 08:27 PM | Comments (1)

January 08, 2006

Flash Fiction Revisited

I recently discovered that my old diaryland account was deactivated. It wasn't a total loss, but I don't want to loose stuff I posted there. I'll be slowly adding that content to falseauthority.com so I don't loose it. Here are my flash fiction stories that I posted. Feel free to re-comment, I still like critiques.

Waxed (50 Words)

Originally posted 2004-06-01, 11:30pm.

He breathed deeply, anticipating the ordeal, the pain, the blood. The imagined sound of the fibers ripping echoed through his head. He would meet his enemies in battle. Millions of them. Mindless drones that he would fight alone. His only weapon: fifty yards of waxed string. With discipline, he flossed.

The Alley (100 Words)

Originally posted 2003-09-24, 5:34pm.

I would‘ve expected something dramatic, maybe my life flashing before my eyes, but my heart didn’t so much as skip when I felt her track-marked arm press a cold steel tube behind my ear. She whispered, cold and rehearsed, “Don’t move, muthafucka!” A spotlight clicked on and immediately cast the shadow of a stocky cop and a pregnant woman on the graffitied wall. I cringed at the rapport of the bullet and heard the sound of her skull hitting the pavement. My partner told the paramedics to take their time and I wondered if we’d done the kid a favor.

Turdleduck (100 Words)

Originally posted 2002-11-12, 10:37pm from New Orleans.

I gawked in terror as the giant snapping turtle circled around for another pass. His mouth opened and inside was gleaming white with a red forked tongue. I blinked and tried to regain focus but his wings kept lifting dust into my eyes. I looked at the person next to me with tears streaming down my face. “He’s coming for you,” he said. I had to warn my comrades! Summoning all my strength I screamed, “Turtle! Duck!”

The man gently laid me back into my stretcher. “Don’t worry son,” he said, “you’re going to be just fine. Here’s some morphine…”

Posted by james at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)

Overheard in NY

I was checking out some of the blogs on the blog roll at veritography.com and noticed one called Overheard in NY. It's intuitively named and the content is great. Here's one that jumped out at me:


They Call That Rice


Guy #1: I had sushi last week.

Guy #2: Isn't that like raw fish?

Guy #1: Man, it's so good you don't even taste the raw fish.

Guy #2: Then you should just take the raw fish out.


--Hunter College East-West bridge


Posted by james at 12:44 PM | Comments (0)

January 04, 2006

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Posted by james at 08:46 PM | Comments (3)

January 01, 2006

New Year: Things to Do

I never liked the word "Resolution" in the context of a Things to Do list.

Posted by james at 09:34 AM | Comments (2)