Nerdiness as a Projection onto Three-Dimensional Vector Space*

This is not a new idea, but it has yet to be committed to print, so it doesn't really count yet.

Subjective measures of nerdiness have been around for some time, but I'd like to propose a quantifiable method, one that could preempt any possible arguments of comparative nerdiness.**

The nerdiness of an activity can be expressed as the product of the obscurity, intensity, and inverse of productivity of that activity.

N(O,T,P) = O(a) * T(a) * 1/P(a)

To clarify, obscurity is defined as the distance outside the mainstream (measured in parsecs), intensity as the volume of skull sweat produced by the average practitioner (measured in milliliters), and productivity as the amount of energy that would be produced if the activity were converted into energy at the ratio of E=mc^2 (measured in ergs).***

Admittedly, this formula was derived empirically, but it can be extrapolated successfully. Compare the locations in coordinate space of the nerdiness of playing football, watching football, and playing fantasy football. Playing football is not at all obscure, very intense, and (arguably) very productive, so this results in a low nerdiness score. Watching football is not at all obscure, not at all intense, and not at all productive, resulting in a comparable nerdiness score to playing football. Note, however, that as the intensity of football-watching increases (e. g. body paint, statistics tracking), the nerdiness also increases - this matches our observations. Finally, fantasy football is fairly obscure, fairly intense, and not at all productive; hence, it is nerdier than watching or playing football, which again matches our observations.

For another example, compare watching Babylon 5 with playing a space combat miniatures game set in the Babylon 5 universe. Watching the show is quite obscure, not very intense (but keeping up with the plotline makes it more intense than watching, say, Friends, and hence nerdier) and not at all productive. Playing the game is even more obscure, much more intense, and even less productive, and therefore much nerdier. Once again, this meets our observations.

The productivity term is included to distinguish between things that are nerdy and useless, and things that are nerdy and useful. Tinkering with obscure automobiles or programming languages is very nerdy, but it becomes less so if the tinkerer is then able to apply that knowledge. In a broader sense, this term distinguishes between theoretical physics (obscure, intense) and role-playing games (obscure, intense).****

Can the formula be used to compare the nerdiness of fantasy football and Babylon 5? Here, it breaks down due to the subjectivity of the measurements - which is more obscure? Which is more intense? If we could accurately assign numerical values to these properties, we could know the answer for certain.

One more interesting property of this formula is that obscurity and intensity are unrelated. The nerdiness of an activity is as much a property of how we interact with that activity as it is an inherent property of the activity. Sure, video games are nerdier than fishing - when taken at the same intensity level. But if one approaches fishing with great intensity, it becomes even nerdier than video games.

This makes sense. In my definition (and in my formula) of nerdiness, you can be a "nerd" about anything. All it means is that you're passionate about what you do.

*This is meaningless mathematical babble. The more accurate statement would be to say that this is nerdiness as a function of three variables in three-dimensional space, where the axes are defined as the variables, and the domain and range are defined in the first octant.

**This method does not solve these problems, unfortunately, as it only introduces additional subjectivity. So why did I come up with it? If you're reading this far, you shouldn't have to ask.

***See what I mean? Incidentally, this means that the units of nerdiness are parsec-millileters/erg, which I'm pretty sure has never happened before ever, so that's cool.

****If you don't think the intensity values for these two activities are comparable... well, you're doing something wrong.

--
my love is a louvre

Simple Harmonic Motion

When I am overwhelmed with work, I default to one of two courses of action:

• Buckle down, work hard, squeak by
• Curl up in a fetal position and hope my problems go away by themselves

This week, I learned that there's a third option:

• Oscillate wildly between the two

I guess my point is that Real Content is Forthcoming, which is something I say often enough to need an acronym. (RCIF? RCiF? RCF?) Stay tuned.

--
please proceed into android hell

Rice, My Old Arch-Nemesis, We Meet Again

I don't think I've ever failed quite so hard at cooking as I did earlier tonight. The meal took a long time, used costly ingredients, and wasn't any damn good whatsoever - and I managed to destroy my friend's wok, to boot.

The culprit, of course, was rice - the rice held everything else up, stuck to the wok, and still wasn't finished long after I had lost my patience for it. How can billions of people subsist on such an obstinate, finicky grain for their daily sustenance? The mind boggles.

Finally, the problem was compounded by the expectations of eight of my friends, waiting to be fed. I didn't just have terrible food, I had a lot of it. Fortunately, my friends are barbarians with no taste, so they didn't particularly care - and for barbarians, they're very polite; the only audible complaints were from me.

This is made even worse when one considers that I've tangled with rice before. Its niceties are not entirely unknown to me. At least, that's what I thought when I started cooking tonight. As with many things in life, there is one correct outcome for rice, and a million failures.

This is the part of the post where I try to make it seem like what I'm writing about is important, but the only conclusion that I can come to is that I suck at cooking rice. Maybe I should... suck less? I'll figure out how to do rice right someday, but I wish I had methods other than "exhaust all possible failures".

As of now, I am formally instituting rice as my culinary arch-nemesis. It's on.

--
subatomic waves from the underwater caves

Sleep Would Be Nice

My roommate's hard drive has a tendency to spin up, loudly, at odd hours of the night. As far as I can tell, his computer is idling, so this could be indicative of drive trouble... Regardless of the cause, it provides me with an apt analogy for the state of my mind on a Sunday night - it just won't idle.

Sundays, especially cold, snowy ones, are perfect for lazing around and not getting any real work done. This is lovely when you can afford to do that, but I don't have time for laziness one day a week, much less five or six (which is usually what ends up happening). Combine this with my whiplash-inducing attempts to re-align my sleep cycle from weekend mode back to EST. The end result is that every Sunday night, I lie in bed, wide awake, and think of all the things I didn't do today, this week, this month, this life.

It's a long list, and it only gets longer as time progresses, but eventually I get sleepy counting the nodes and drift off, and wake up exhausted and not at all ready or willing to get back to the business of Doing Stuff.

Tuesdays suck even worse.

--
all the things we did and didn't do

Why I Do What I Do

I'm sitting at my desk, writing a recursive search for a binary search tree. It's challenging for me, but I understand it, and big chunks of comprehension keep falling into place. I'm blasting the good bit of Vicious Delicious, and it occurs to me: I really love doing this. I love the work that I do. This is easy to forget when there's so much of it, as there always is, so I savor the moment.

And back to work. Substantive content forthcoming.

--
I want to touch the back of your right arm

Life in a Swing State

Pennsylvania could still, hypothetically, go either way tomorrow, and so the city is inundated with desperate pleas to go out and vote. (Since Pittsburgh is quite liberal, the subtext "... for Obama" is omnipresent.) It seems to be a little late in the game to be trying to swing swing voters, so that's probably not what they're trying to do, but even so, I can't imagine myself being convinced to vote one way or another by advertising. Is the Obama campaign going for the three-pronged attack? Or do they just have too much money?

And yet, voter turnout in America remains pathetic. 60% of the eligible population is nothing of which we should be proud. So why don't people vote?

The first reason is the simplest. The chance that the vote of an individual will affect the election at large is effectively zero. In a system that uses something as cockamamie as the electoral college, that chance drops even further. If your vote can't possibly effect any change in the outcome, why bother?

This is actually a very reasonable question, because on an individual level, the negligent voter is correct in that the outcome of the election will almost certainly be the same regardless of his actions. The answer, then, comes when the voter realizes that he is not simply an individual, but a manifestation of a greater public consciousness. (I know that doesn't actually mean anything - bear with me.) This is similar to the question of whether or not an individual is justified in jumping turnstiles to ride the subway. One miscreant won't break the system, but one can never consider a miscreant in isolation - anyone who jumps the turnstile must consider not just the effect of their individual action, but the total effect of all turnstile jumpers, which may very well be enough to break the system.

Elections are the same - your vote does not matter (accept it and move on) but a lot of votes put together do. A victory by 10,000 votes means that 10,000 people each decided that even though their individual vote doesn't matter, they'll still vote anyway, because what the hell, why not.

There's always the glib response that while you may not care enough to vote, the other guy who stands for everything that you despise certainly does, and don't you just want to show him who's boss, you grubby little citizen, you. Or consider the alternative - what if they had an election and nobody showed?

Actually, that would be pretty cool. Scratch that.

The other, more complex reason for not voting is that American ballots lack a "none of the above" option. Unfortunately, this means that a deliberate expression of abstention is indistinguishable from a deliberate expression of apathy (if such a thing is possible). There are several reasons for choosing "none of the above":

You're very moderate, and thus both candidates appeal to you equally

You're very radical, and thus both candidates disgust you equally

You're very apathetic, but you heard that sometimes polling places have cool stickers

You reject the basic premises on which democracy is founded.

Voters #1 and #3 are separate issues in and of themselves. #2 can always go vote for a third-party candidate, a can of worms that will for now remain sealed and buried in a lead-lined bunker. Let's discuss #4.

A common expression is that if you don't vote, you have no right to complain when things go to hell in a handbasket - the "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!" philosophy. The alternate perspective is that if two wolves and a sheep vote on who to eat for dinner, the sheep has no right to complain when the polls go south. He accepted the system by participating in it, and must abide by the outcome.

Unfortunately, even if you don't vote, you still have to live with the outcome, so that argument doesn't hold water - the sheep still gets eaten, even if he deliberately abstains and protests the unfairness of the elections.

Finally, some people just don't care about politics on any level. Fortunately, these people are the ones most likely to get screwed by the government, so this problem is ultimately self-correcting. I would go so far as to propose that those who don't care about the future of the government could be easily made to care, by (say) indefinite detention without charges, counsel, or habeas corpus.

Alternately, voting could become a necessary condition of citizenship, but this is reminiscent of the mandatory attendance policy in my calculus class, otherwise known as "Naptime 21-259". You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him think. Forcing people to vote is like drafting people into your military - if your citizens aren't willing to serve their country, you're doing it wrong.

My father always liked to say, "The choice between bad and worse is always more important than the choice between good and bad." I don't know if it's actually true, but it sounds good, which is the next best thing.

And really, I don't even care about this all that much. I'm just sick of all those damn flyers all over the goddamn place.

The article I last promised has been bouncing around in my head with another dozen of its half-formed brethren. Who knows which one will emerge first?

--
no wonder the sound has so much body