fairdice

Surely a new entry in the annals of bedtime procrastination should be made for "Daddy, I can't go to sleep, there's dirt behind my ears!"

So Joel Tenenbaum admitted he'd done all the file sharing the RIAA accused him of, and all the judge asked the jury to decide was the size of the monetary damage. They found him liable for a total of $675,000 for the 30 songs — kind of an arbitrary number, don't you think? Check out this observation passed on by David Post at the Volohk Conspiracy:

One interesting little aspect of the judgment: The jury awarded the record companies $675,000 in damages — $22,500 for each of the 30 songs on which the suit was based. As my colleague James Grimmelmann of NY Law School has pointed out, that's a curious number for the jury to have chosen. The statutory damage provisions of the Copyright Act (17 USC sec. 504) allow a jury to award damages of $750 (minimum)to $30,000 (maximum) for each work infringed (which can be raised, or lowered, by the judge in certain circumstances). The minimum amount that the RIAA could have been awarded, then, would have been a total of $22,500 ($750 x 30 songs). Could it be they got mixed up, and instead awarded plaintiffs $22,500 for each song? Why else would they have chosen that amount? Strange ...

Man, that would make for great numerology, wouldn't it? And yet, it sounds like there's good evidence against this, from a comment on the blog by Ben Sheffner:

I was in the courtroom for the trial, including the reading of the verdict. When the number was announced, I, too, initially thought there might be a mistake, that the jury meant to award the minimum of $750 per work, and that the $22,500 was supposed to be the total award.

However, Judge Gertner said very clearly that the $22,500 was per work, and she asked the jury whether that was accurate. They collectively said "yes." Also, I spoke with one of the jurors shortly after the verdict. From that conversation, I am very confident that the $22,500 per work figure was not an accident or mistake.

So much for that...

Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs.

Thanks for the pointer, rifmeister.

We had a pleasant dim sum lunch at Green Tea today — ordering off a menu, not hunter-gatherer style, but tasty nonetheless. And then came the fortune cookies for dessert, in which, I kid you not, A. received:


"The rubber bands are heading in the right direction." What?!

Of course, in this day and age, we're not the only one: Google currently reports about 116 hits for that exact phrase, and it's the second auto-complete suggestion when you type "the rubber b" into the Google search box.

None of the links I followed up made it any less baffling, though...

I love watching language acquisition in kids. A, now two and a half, still provides occasional gems.

So he's been reading D's old copy of A Pocket for Corduroy, with D's name (written in 4-year-old block caps) inside the front cover. We read the name to him the first time, and now that he knows what it says, every time he opens the book he points out to us "That spells Daniel!"

And then the other day D. was in the room — and A. opened the book, and said "Look, Daniel, that spells you!"

"List ten things you like beginning with a letter" meme, caught from ruthling. She gave me S.

1. Sour pie cherries — this year, all of a sudden, available fresh in stores near you! Yum!
   
2. Socializing. Thursday night dinner is a high point of my week.
   
3. Shakespeare. I'm sad that we missed "As You Like It" on the commons this year.
   
4. 1729
   
5. Storms, with thunder and lightening. I think "lack of thunderstorms" was my only complaint about the weather in Berkeley. Adam howls in terror of thunder, unfortunately, which has made them less fun this summer.
   
6. Sierpinski Gasket, my favorite fractal.
   
7. Sleep. Good stuff. I should do it more.
   
8. Semi-colons! I love 'em, even if they do get beat up on these days.
   
9. (Jonathan) Strange and Mr. Norrell. Wasn't that a great book?
   
10. Sex. Heh.
    

Want a letter?

Oh man, I so don't get this cartoon from the current New Yorker.



Anyone with even the slightest clue?

In 1992, I was an undergraduate math major, and I had just learned a mathematician's second language: LaTeX, the universally-adopted typesetting system. All of a sudden, I could do my math homework in latex, print it on a laser printer, and it would come out looking like — well, just like my math textbooks did. It was remarkable, but in a way it was disturbing. On the one hand, any theorem that looks that good surely must be true, which is a dangerous way to feel. And on the other hand, once I'd gotten past that, it was daunting: what do I have to say that deserves to look that good?

By contrast, I'm sitting in a book talk by Salman Rushdie, who's here at Google giving a reading from his new novel The Enchantress of Florence and answering questions. In the context of talking about how technology has changed his writing process, he mentioned that his notes are all in longhand in notebooks, but the actual writing all happens on a computer, and was typing before that. "I have to see it in type," he just said. "I can't tell whether it's any good, if it's in my handwriting; I always think it's either better than it is or worse than it is."

And many more, at http://www.animalsontheunderground.com/the_animals.html

Okay, sometimes I'm way behind the current events. But how cool is it that there's a website from which you can download free truly random bits — created one at a time from quantum fluctuations?

And better yet, when you sign up, they include a novel captcha: an image of a randomly-generated latexed math formula you have to solve. Mine involved differentiating trig functions...

Aggravating game of the evening: http://onemorelevel.com/game/spin_the_black_circle

I've made it to level 17 so far...

I must have read today's Arlo & Janis half a dozen times before I finally got it.



Is it extreme on the subtle-o-meter, or is it just me? (Or, of course, do you not get it?)

Passed on from a post by my brother bkleber:

I usually admire the work of copy editors: many of my published articles have benefited greatly from their attention. But the journal for which I'm an editor/columnist has a new copy editor starting this issue, and he is... let's call it "overzealous." I admit that written mathematics is a tricky thing to edit, doubly so if you're not a mathematician yourself. But still:

• I wrote a sentence of the form [Foo] is the unique nontrivial example of [Bar]. Editor helpfully decided it would read better with an added comma, and claimed that [Foo] is the unique, nontrivial example of [Bar]. Now all of a sudden my sentence is claiming that [Foo] is the only example, and what's more, it is nontrivial.
  
• I wrote that two sets of points "are quite similar: you can convert one to the other by moving a single point." Editor doubtless felt that "quite similar" was the kind of phrase Strunk and White warn you against, and deleted the word "quite". But this magically converts "similar" from a casual adjective to a mathematical technical term, like the "similar triangles" from 9th grade geometry: the two sets are absolutely not similar!

I hope I've caught everything, and that no other sentences have casually had their meaning drastically changed. I sure hope "they'll none of them be missed"...

So I was all pleased with myself earlier today, when I scored a personal best of 271,392 on Chain Factor — thanks, ams16, quite an addictive little game. That score was, at the time, good for 6th place today and 64th place all-time.

But now I see where I really stand:

All-time High Scores (Basic Mode)

1	grr+1	492,553
⋮
5	grr+1	403,223
⋮
21	grr+1	315,250
⋮
35	grr+1	288,936
⋮
67	mk	271,392

Okay, G., you take the cake, as usual...

Adam was talkative this morning. The first words out of his mouth might have sounded, to the untrained ear, like "bi'klat", but to those of us in the know he was clearly smiling broadly and saying "big light!" This was rapidly followed by a sad "no big light?" and, very shortly, by a strident "want big light!" (The big light in question, of course, was the multicolored light machine from the Tang Party last night.)

And in case there was any lingering doubt as to which of Adam and Lillian belonged to which parents: Both toddlers had their first Tang last night. Lillian came back for another sip, then another; afterwards she pushed away her normal sippy-cup and wanted Tang instead. Adam took one sip of Tang, looked up at me, and said "water!"

If you like on-line math-y puzzle kind of things, check out Bloxorz. Clever.
Note to self: I'm at passcode 284933

If you haven't seen Shaenon ("Narbonic") Garrity's vision of Edward Gorey does Star Trek, you're missing a gem.

No, I'm not quite sure why I didn't post for all of August.

There's a delightful "On Language" piece in this weekend's NYT Magazine. It's on the Oxford English Corpus: don't look in a dictionary to see what a word means; look at how it's actually used!

(Though I can't keep from mentioning this: how you devote yourself to understanding the way words work, and at the same time produce the ambiguous sentence "Information from the O.E.C. can show us the way to better dictionary entries"? Is that "better" an adjective or a transitive verb?!)

Dear Professor X,

Enclosed please find a complimentary copy of the book, Y, of which you contributed an article for.

Sincerely,
The Z Association of America