The city is all mine

Ooh, I turned on my Xbox 360 this evening, and what did I see? Carcassonne on Xbox Live Arcade! If you don't know, Carcassonne is a really fun strategic board game where you place tiles and try to control territory. Please buy the XBLA version and come play me online. (My gamertag is geekable.)

Also, thanks to Matt Arnold and Aaron Thul for introducing me to the original board game.

Erratic personality

Scott Aaronson on that moment we're all dreading:

A phone conversation last night, with someone I’ll call Prof. X from University Y, was typical. Prof. X started by explaining that, while the whole “blog” phenomenon had passed by him personally, some questions had come up during a hiring committee meeting with the more junior faculty — and, to get straight to the point, was it true that I wrote one of these “blogs” myself?

Yes, I said.

And was it true that this “blog” was known, in large part, for a debate about “battling vaginas”?

Biting vaginas, I corrected him.

And was it also true that I made frequent pronouncements about C*-algebras, modern art, and even string theory and loop quantum gravity, despite knowing next to nothing about any of these things?

Yes, I said.

And was it also true that, in the past few days, I’d spent much of my time defending the General Theory of Relativity against someone who calls himself “assman”?

Yes, I said.

Prof. X said he hoped I’d understand that, as far as he was concerned, I could write whatever I damn well pleased, but that, in an age of increasing sensitivities, and particularly in the wake of the well-known Luboš Motl debacle at Harvard, concerns had naturally arisen over whether a department could afford to gamble on someone with an “erratic personality.”

Go fuck yourselves, part 2

WASHINGTON -- President Bush was presented with a letter Monday signed by 50 high school seniors in the Presidential Scholars program urging a halt to "violations of the human rights" of terror suspects held by the United States...

..."The president enjoyed a visit with the students, accepted the letter and upon reading it let the student know that the United States does not torture and that we value human rights," deputy press secretary Dana Perino said.

The students had been invited to the East Room to hear the president speak about his effort to win congressional reauthorization of his education law known as No Child Left Behind.

The handwritten letter said the students "believe we have a responsibility to voice our convictions."

"We do not want America to represent torture. We urge you to do all in your power to stop violations of the human rights of detainees, to cease illegal renditions, and to apply the Geneva Convention to all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants," the letter said.

Go fuck yourselves

From now on, just call me Carnac the Jaded. (I'm considering switching my AIM screenname to that.)

Cosmic Jewish Zombie!

If there weren't comments on Slashdot, I wouldn't have this awesome definition of Christianity:

...the belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree...

High-brow humor, part 2

Courtesy of Disclaimerwill:

The valedictory speech was memorable only for my brother's interjection. I paraphrase the speaker: "'We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. We cannot ascend the stairs above us without the foundation of the stairs below us. Stairs. Stairs to the left of me, stairs to the right. I'm stuck in the middle with stairs.' Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote these very words in his essay entitled-"

"'The Walk of Shame,'" muttered T-Bone.

It may not read like much, but T-Bone delivered it so sublimely that it left me shaking with laughter for quite some time.

High-brow humor

[Jeff and Greg discuss the Monty Hall problem]
Brad: [looking for his fiber pills] Where did my fiber pills go?
[Jeff and Greg continue to discuss the Monty Hall problem]
[Brad walks out of the room]
[Brad returns with a bottle of fiber pills in hand]
Jeff: Will a fiber supplement help you understand the Monty Hall problem better?
Brad: No, but it always opens Door A!

Dorks in cubicles

What might U.S. economic productivity have been if it weren't for the Monty Hall problem or the 0.99999...=1 debate?

P.S. I continue to be surprised by how many people think that they have a 50/50 chance in the Monty Hall problem after Monty opens a door. Their logic most often turns out to be, "well, I can either stick with what I have, or switch. Two choices, therefore 50/50!" The proper response to this, which only occurred to me as I drove home, is, "By your logic, I have a 50/50 chance of winning the state lottery. After all, either I win it, or I don't."

God's not worrying about collateral damage

Even though I am an atheist, I occasionally try to think like a believer so I can better understand my fellow man. Here's my latest attempt.

Recently a plane carrying to-be-transplanted donor lungs crashed in Lake Michigan. I think we can safely assume that God obviously wanted the intended recipient(s) to die, and used extraordinary means to ensure it happened.

(What, you think my observation is distasteful and rude? Please keep in mind that whenever you attribute something positive in your life to "God's will", I think you're being just as distasteful.)

Don't stop bel

What the hell was that?

Intellectual property op-ed of my dreams

Holy crap, this Cato Institute guy is a genius:

What a difference 16 years makes. Last month, the technology world was abuzz over an interview in Fortune magazine in which Bradford Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, accused users and developers of various free software products of patent infringement and demanded royalties. Indeed, in recent years, Mr. Smith has argued that patents are essential to technological breakthroughs in software.

Microsoft sang a very different tune in 1991. In a memo to his senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.” Mr. Gates worried that “some large company will patent some obvious thing” and use the patent to “take as much of our profits as they want.”

But don’t software companies need patent protection? In fact, companies, especially those that are focused on innovation, don’t: software is already protected by copyright law, and there’s no reason any industry needs both types of protection. The rules of copyright are simpler and protection is available to everyone at very low cost. In contrast, the patent system is cumbersome and expensive. Applying for patents and conducting patent searches can cost tens of thousands of dollars. That is not a huge burden for large companies like Microsoft, but it can be a serious burden for the small start-up firms that produce some of the most important software innovations.

Burning movie files for Xbox 360

If you want to take a bunch of H.264 .mp4 files and burn them to a disc to watch on your Xbox 360 (thank you Microsoft), here's what I learned today.

What doesn't work: Using the Finder's "burn folder" functionality.

What does work: Using Toast Titanium to make a "DVD-ROM (UDF)"-formatted data disc.