Tag Archives: humor

giving no credit where it is not due

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Luca pointed to a paper by Chierichetti, Lattanzi, and Panconesi, which has an amusing comment in the last section (I don’t want to spoil it).

The paper itself is interesting, of course. Conductance often appears in bounds on mixing times for Markov chains, but the rumor spreading problem is a bit different than the consensus problems that I have studied in the past. A nice quote from the introduction:

Our long term goal is to characterize a set of necessary and/or suffcient conditions for rumour spreading to be fast in a given network. In this work, we provide a very general suffcient condition — high conductance. Our main motivation comes from the study of social networks. Loosely stated, we are looking after a theorem of the form “Rumour spreading is fast in social networks”. Our result is a good step in this direction because there are reasons to believe that social networks have high conductance.

some privacy humor

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Ever since I started working on privacy problems (better living through statistics!), I am struck by the generally fatalistic view most people have about privacy. “The credit card companies know everything about me already,” “Google could easily steal my identity,” and so on. When sentiments like this become so widespread, they are fodder for humorists. (via Celeste LeCompte).

A hodgepodge of links

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My friend Reno has a California Bankruptcy Blog.

The ISIT 2010 site seems quite definitive, no? (h/t Pulkit.)

The Times has a nice profile of Martin Gardner.

My buddy, buildingmate at UCSD, and fellow MIT thespian Stephen Larson premiered the Whole Brain Catalog at the Society for Neuroscience conference.

A fascinating article on the US-Mexico border (h/t Animikwaan.)

Kanye West is an oddly compelling trainwreck. (via MeFi).

Information theory, emotion, music

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From The Information Theory of Emotions of Musical Chords, posted on ArXiV today:

My basic hypothesis is as follows. While perceiving a separate musical chord, the value of a relative
objective function L that is directly related to the main proportion of pitches of its constituent
sounds is generated in the mind of the subject. The idea of an increasing value of the objective
function ( L>1 ) accompanied by positive utilitarian emotions corresponds to a major chord, while
the idea of a decreasing value of the objective function ( L<1 ) accompanied by negative utilitarian
emotions corresponds to a minor chord.

I naturally thought of The Mathematics of Love:

Romanian diacritics

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I came across this blog post today while trying to figure out how to write the Romanian breve (the symbol ă) in a document, and it was an amusingly angry rant about Romanian orthography. The fact that the Romanian currency even got it wrong is pretty funny. But it seems a bit like a futile battle; things always change and I bet the orthography gets merged eventually. I, for one, miss the ess-zett (ß) in German, but it’s gone the way of the dinosaurs.

That would be a great name for an diacritic mark — a dinosaur. A stegosaurus sitting on top of a U. But how would it be pronounced?

Futurama and information theory

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According to the article The Truth About Bender’s Brain in the May 2009 issue of IEEE Spectrum, one of the writers of Futurama, Ken Keeler, “confirms that he does read every issue of IEEE Spectrum and occasionally looks at the Transactions on Information Theory.” So is it true that source coding people are more funny than channel coding people?

from my inbox : the Swedish conspiracy

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I got an email from the the postdoc list intended for “Swedish and Swedish-American Postdocs” saying a local businessperson wants to get in touch with them “for special projects and assignments.” Finally we have evidence of the grand international Swedish conspiracy! IKEA was only the start — now they are infiltrating our elite cadre of postdocs! Where will it end???

Professorial Hotness

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Via Crooked Timber (where else?) comes a report of a paper on RateMyProfessor that looks at the Hotness of profs across different fields. It’s a bit weird to me that all of Engineering gets lumped into one category (but Marketing gets its own?), but at least its a mite above Computer Science. At Berkeley the CS people emphasize that they are in their own “division” — they want to create a distance from the EE country cousins I guess. Of course, there it’s Computer Sciences — would more science make them hotter or notter?

When you’re at the bottom of the chart you take solace in small things. Even the Math folks are hotter than us! It must be the sarongs.