Month: January 2005

Mika’s has a fish. The fish is a betta and, living in an environment steeped in technology and copyright jurisprudence, his name is Betta-Max. Since Betta’s are also called "Fighting Fish" I thought it would be funny if bought my own fish, named it Universal Pictures and put it in an adjacent container. But I haven’t done this yet and that’s not what this entry is about.

On Christmas day, I realized that I had lost Max. Luckily, I found him two days ago and he is now safely returned to the table.

I think this story is only a good one if I don’t say any more than this.

If you read this recent blog entry, you’ll realize why I’m particularly unhappy about the result of this google search:

My only comfort is that at least I dragged Debian and Ubuntu planets onto the front page with me.

I was pleased to see that my recent post on the interrobang generated a good deal of excitement for this long neglected piece of punctuation. I’ve heard that there will even be a compose key sequence for the interrobang in future version of Debian’s X! It’s inspired me to do another little report from my explorations of Unicode.

I can not claim to be an expert in math(s) and I welcome clarifications and corrections. That said, I find the mathematical symbols in Unicode to be some of the most interesting. I have found these useful in the past when I wanted to concisely express that something is very much greater than (⋙) something else.

Recently, I have been confused by the "neither less-than nor greater-than" (≸) and its companion "neither greater-than nor less-than" (≹) glyphs.

In the past, I have (naively I’m told by people who are better at math than I) eschewed Unicode entirely and used the ASCII equals (=) character every time I wanted to express this relationship. I’m told (although I have yet to meet someone who can give me an example or explain why) that the relationship between numbers need not be equal to, less than, nor greater-than in some forms of math.

I’m willing to accept that. But wouldn’t that also require a "neither greater-than nor less-than nor equal to" symbol? Wouldn’t the "neither greater-than nor less-than" symbol really be implying "neither greater-than nor less-than but possibly equal to or not equal to" which would be something different?

Another character I’m still confused by is the "strictly equivalent to" symbol (≣). I understand =, ≠, ≡, and ≢ but my complexity threshold seems to be breached when the fourth bar is introduced. I also don’t understand why there is not a "not strictly equivalent to" character.

By the definitions I use, ≸ and ≹ seem strictly equivalent to me. Would be it fair to say that ≸ ≣ ≹‽

I was pleased to see that my blog now outranks pedophiles (or ‘paedophiles’ as your locale may dictate), for google searches on my name.

This is always a good thing.

My only fear is that by writing this, my blog will now come up for people searching both the terms "mako" and "pedophilia."

I think my greatest talent might be reading and writing emails. I’m not the best I’ve ever seen but when I’m in a zone, I think I can hold my own against some of the better emailers out there.

I think it would be great to show this off in a talent show some time. With my mutt session being projected, I could start out with 1000 emails that are a mix of spam, list mail, irrelevant stuff and highly relevant email and I could sort through these quickly replying to important emails where necessary.

If I had seen someone do this when I was young, I would have been very impressed.

Through exploration prompted by my last blog entry, you may now know that like everything else today, Beano has a website.

Like many other websites, Beano has added a few features to keep folks coming back. I can happily tell you that Beano didn’t settle for some silly Beano-oriented flash game (yikes) but instead decided to build a comprehensive database of foods whose potential for methane production in the human digestive tract are so intense that you’d have to be crazy to eat them without Beano.

At least, that seem to be the idea. Its called Beano Cuisino and it’s absolutely brilliant.

They’ve got all the classics, like baked bean burritos. They’ve also got more adventurous offerings like sweet and sour lentils with egg noodles. You can polish it all off with a chocolate lentil cake

I think that a desire to increase gas production is the only reason anyone would ever eat a chocolate lentil cake.

My younger brothers will love these recipes.

My favorite vegetable is asparagus which is good because it’s very healthy. The only thing I would change about asparagus is the way that it makes the urine of the people who eat it stink. Curious about the phenomena, I found an article on Occurrence of S-methyl thioesters in urines of humans after they have eaten asparagus that had been published in an issue of Science in 1975. Its author said:

Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry was used to determine the odor-causing agent (or agents) present in the urines of humans after they have eaten asparagus. S-Methyl thioacrylate and S-methyl 3-(methylthio)thiopropionate were identified from methylene chloride extracts of such urines and appear to be the odor-causing compounds. Methanethiol, the previously reported odor-causing agent, was not detected in these methylene chloride extracts.

It certainly sounds like S-Methyl thioacrylate and S-methyl 3-(methylthio)thiopropionate are the culprits. I think the next step important step is to produce a sort of asparagus-urine-stink prophylactic. Kind of like Beano.

Every time that people organize to sign keys around Jeff Waugh he tries to ridicule the keysigning phenomenon by likening the process to intravenous heroin use. He will say something like, "I’d love to sign keys guys but I don’t have my needle, and I can’t find a good vein, and I’d have to go back to my room to get my Bunsen burner."

I think this characterization is grossly misinformed.

Few heroin addicts would ever bother to use a Bunsen burner.