Your Happening World (July 28th through August 2nd)

  • Why I’m spending today swapping out the dialect in my novel | Mary Robinette Kowal – My project today is replacing all the dialogue spoken by Antiguan characters in Of Noble Family with dialogue rewritten by Antiguan and Barbudan author Joanne Hillhouse. Let me explain why I’m doing this.
  • Google Groups – An code name is quickly picked for the exploration of Earth 1/4 Billion: Green Door. Like 'tanks', 'Manhattan District' or many other project names, it is designed to give away as little as possible about the project. As usual, the Soviet hear about GD in a few weeks.
  • EPONA – Third stone from taranis – Imagine that you have just landed on a planet twenty-one light years from Earth. You are about to enter a lush world where things are more than just a little different! Evolution has taken exotic paths and a whole new kingdom of life reigns over land, sea and air! You are the leader of a first contact mission on the planet named Epona. The mission you have organized has journeyed here in an interstellar craft that orbits Epona. Your hand-picked crew must provide all the information you will need about Epona from the 21st Century technology available to you. Your objective is to unlock the secret of Epona's remarkable life-forms and discover if there is intelligent life you can communicate with.
  • Markov Chains – Markov chains, named after Andrey Markov, are mathematical systems that hop from one "state" (a situation or set of values) to another. For example, if you made a Markov chain model of a baby's behavior, you might include "playing," "eating", "sleeping," and "crying" as states, which together with other behaviors could form a 'state space': a list of all possible states. In addition, on top of the state space, a Markov chain tells you the probabilitiy of hopping, or "transitioning," from one state to any other state—e.g., the chance that a baby currently playing will fall asleep in the next five minutes without crying first.
  • The Mouth of the WWE « – In a match between a 15-time World Champion and the most dominating real-life wrestler in the world, Paul Heyman is somehow the best pro wrestler in the story line. So forget Cena and Bryan and Orton and Roman Reigns — Paul Heyman is the face of the WWE. How in the world did that happen?

Your Happening World (June 15th through June 16th)

Blog fodder for June 15th through June 16th:

  • Activists warn of trans suicide risk in England as surgery delayed | Gay Star News – Activists have claimed the time for trans people to get male to female gender reassignment surgery has skyrocketed in England from seven months to three years.
  • David Brothers: Quitting the Big Two – Changing those habits takes effort, which leads me directly to why it isn’t difficult to stay away from the Big Two these days: I succeeded at changing my thinking. Wednesdays aren’t new comics days any more. I don’t read comics news sites when I can help it. I discover new comics via word of mouth or Tumblr. I unplugged in a way that let me maintain my decision instead of waffling and crumbling.
  • BBC News – Study: Deforestation leaves fish undersized and underfed – Deforestation is reducing the amount of leaf litter falling into rivers and lakes, resulting in less food being available to fish, a study suggests.
  • Hauntology: The Past Inside The Present – This postcard haunts and is haunted. In 1989, its utopian promise haunted a reality that was unable to make good on it, and in turn the postcard was haunted by the increasingly dystopian qualities of reality. In 2009 this haunting-problem now haunts the present as an example of the Marxist hauntology Derrida wrote about. The problems of our imagined Utopias and Dystopias haven’t gone away – the postcard is a ghost of the GDR, exploding like a spectre the neat symbolic binaries we put our faith in by being both nice and nasty, wrong and right, innocent and guilty, present and absent. It’s also the ghost of childhood, of innocence personal or ideological, imploring us to know its killer, manifesting to us so as to haunt and correct injustice in the same way that ghosts traditionally do. It’s a poignant lie about reality and reality is a poignant inadequacy compared to it.
  • German tank problem – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – In the statistical theory of estimation, the problem of estimating the maximum of a discrete uniform distribution from sampling without replacement is known in English as the German tank problem, due to its application in World War II to the estimation of the number of German tanks.