Everything2 New Writeups

restarting a player after his character dies (fiction)

2012-02-04T05:21:09Z

In my high school D&D group, this was kind of taboo. When I was younger, I didn't understand why. After all, if one player liked their character SO MUCH to basically bring them back from the dead, shouldn't they get to keep playing them? Don't they have a right to play who THEY want to play?

And this, dear reader, is where the veil of childish naïveté is removed.

Dungeons & Dragons is a social game with a lot of unwritten rules. No two groups are the same. One rule of my group was that our main DM, Alice, made her die rolls behind a screen. This heightened suspense when the going got tough, but it also meant that we players had to trust Alice to be honest.

Teenagers are not honest.

It's not their fault*. Teenagers are young people thrown into a prison by their parents and are forced to fend for themselves. They act like animals -- bullying anyone who is different, fighting over mates, establishing a pecking order.…

brogue (thing)

2012-02-04T00:18:22Z

Brogue as a footwear term is dervied from the Gaelic word for shoe. Brogue as a shoe term was used to describe footwear worn by Irish field workers and Scottish Highlanders who compensated for the wet climates and boggy soil by punching holes in their shoes to facilitate drainage and drying. This functional practice spread through the United Kingdom, eventually it was adopted by English shoe and bootmakers, however instead of serving as a ventilation system the small symmetrically placed holes were used to enhance the appearance of a particular shoe or boot.

Today broguing refers to certain holes or perforations seen on the outside of a shoe. Brogue as a term has nothing to do with the closure used to fasten a shoe and can also be seen on shoes and boots without closure systems. A wingtip shoe may sport broguing just as a Balmoral may have been brogued. Oxford as a generic shoe term is both useful and useless since the umbrella term may be used to refer to:…

How many infinities are there? (essay)

2012-02-04T00:13:53Z

I know there are several different infinities. ω, ℵ₀, ℵ₁. I'm not sure which is which. Is that all of them? How many are there altogether?

Well, that's not all of them, and that's two different types of infinity. ω is an ordinal, ℵ₀ and ℵ₁ are cardinals. Which of the two would you like me to settle first?

How many ordinals are there?

"Size" is a tricky concept in set theory, particular when we start dealing with infinite sets. What you're actually trying to ask is:

What is the cardinality of the set of all ordinals?

Answer: there is no set of all ordinals.

The ordinals form a natural sequence. Each ordinal is defined in terms of all the ordinals that are smaller than it. Specifically, each ordinal is, by definition, a set containing every smaller ordinal. For example, 0 is the empty set, {}. 1 is {0}, 2 is {0, 1}, 3 is {0, 1, 2},…

what once I was (poetry)

2012-02-03T22:13:57Z

What happened? I was fine when I was young —
for when I spoke, I spoke with greatest care:
quite forcefully the truth leapt from my tongue,
and softly laid my heart her secrets bare.
But when I learned how many truths repel —
how soon an honest heart leads some to dread —
I changed, and spoke to please; sweet lies I'd tell...
to friends now far away, and loves now fled.

What once I was, I long again to be;
on sleepless nights, a voice within me swears
that even now, my better self endures,
though trapped; another's love must set him free.
So to you now my heart her secrets bares:
no other love can bring me back but yours.

Your radical ideas about time traveling to July 29, 1947 to have a threesome with Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy have already occurred to others (essay)

2012-02-03T06:01:08Z

Yes, yes, you think you've come up with something clever and new. You'll invent a time machine and travel back to July 29, 1947, when Marilyn Monroe had not long since turned twenty-one, still only a year removed from having been "Mrs. Norma Jeane Dougherty" (nee Baker), a divorcee struggling for bit parts and willing to pose nude for $50. When "Jackie K-O" was still Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, who'd turned eighteen only yesterday and had never set eyes on that Kennedy boy. You'll use your wit and your wiles and your Twenty-First Century mind control technology to collect the two of them into your rented cottage in Nantucket (a location selected primarily for its limerick potential) and seduce them into a bed built for three, filming the entire thing on the camera in your cell phone for future reference. Naturally, they won't know what you're up to. Cell phones hadn't been invented then, indeed would be inconceivable to denizens of…

Be Nice (poetry)

2012-02-03T04:28:22Z

This poem usually follows a long po-faced ramble about my years of people watching, the valuable insights I have gained from it and how the poem is a distillation of what I've learned, the title coming from the most important of these lessons. It's all nonsense of course, just there to contrast the silly, brief nature of the poem.

Be Nice

"I HATE YOU" said the boy,

But nobody listened...

"YOU'RE A WANKER" said the woman,

And somebody punched her...

"Your cute" I said,

Guess where that led...

Circus Galop (thing)

2012-02-03T03:35:08Z

Circus Galop is a song used to stress test player pianos. It was written in the early nineties by Marc-André Hamelin. It is not playable by a human pianist, but maybe an octopus could manage it.

It sounds like the worst allergic reaction you've ever had and makes a great alarm clock noise.

A video of someone running the Circus Galop piano roll

The Proper Role of Government (idea)

2012-02-02T15:43:08Z

"I believe that without government protection, human life, liberty and the freedom to pursue happiness cannot be assured."

Government is by definition a coercive institution. Aside from the fact that the philosophy of John Locke upon which these "inalienable" rights is inherently flawed, there are other problems here.

Any time we give people the power to coerce others, we create injustice. Perhaps not initially, and perhaps not blatantly, but it will inevitably happen. We see this clearly in the monarchies of ages past. The difference between monarchy and democracy is not as large as you might think: whereas monarchy imposes the will of one person upon others, democracy imposes the will of several people (or a majority) upon others. Neither form of government guarantees equality because they are based upon the rule of PEOPLE as opposed to the rule of LAW.

I could cite numerous injustices done by governments here, but I don't think it's necessary. It should be common…

pushing the envelope (thing)

2012-02-02T15:17:52Z

The term "pushing the envelope" has been used in the field of mathematics for quite some time and according to the website I went to the phrase became popular in general/civilian use after it showed up in the Tom Wolfe novel The Right Stuff in 1979. Here's the passage that is referenced.

"One of the phrases that kept running through the conversation was 'pushing the outside of the envelope'... That seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test."

I'll stray off course here and interject a personal note. If you have a couple of days or maybe even a week or so to kill I'd highly recommend the book. If you have four or five hours to spare, I also highly recommend the movie.

Now, back to the topic at hand.

What exactly is the "envelope"?

Let me state right off that I'm no mathematician or aeronautical engineer. When it comes to that sorta stuff my claim to fame is being able to balance my…

Pinch, Punch, First of the Month (thing)

2012-02-02T01:12:52Z

The rule that a 'pinch and a punch' must be implemented before midday was an unofficial addition introduced in 2000 by a large Melbourne community of enthusiasts who sought to make the rules of the custom less flexible. The new 'rule' quickly garnered attention and regard, however, many have opt its inclusion from the official custom.

It is NOT official in any sense and nowadays, is only given practice within local Melbourne communities and by bogans. It is completely understandable that Sydney-siders would have no idea of such silly and bogan-like rules. In fact, it is silly that aside from the fact that it must be implemented on the first day of the month, that a part from that, there are any other rules!

February 2, 2012 (log)

2012-02-02T00:55:06Z

Why does mass increase with velocity, but electric charge does not?

If you know anything about special relativity, you know that a particle's mass increases with its velocity. An electron gets heavier and heavier as it gets accelerated by particle colliders, as does a proton.

Mass-dependent quantities, like momentum or energy, are also dependent on velocity.

By contrast, electric charge doesn't get affected by a particle's velocity at all. At all. Not at low speeds. Not at 0.9999999999 times the speed of light.

The same goes with a quark's 'charge'. An up quark's up-ness doesn't get more uppity. A down quark remains down, no matter how much Prozac you give it. Also, the quark's 'color', like red, green, or blue, doesn't change. It stays invariant with respect to the speed of the quark.

Why should some quantities get increased with speed, but others not?

I don't know the why, but I do know that a…

Amendment the Second, with Empty Consumerism (fiction)

2012-02-01T23:42:43Z

<--Back | The Network Revenant | Forward -->

Chit and I headed south, alone in the MOG, leaving Fia in her cocoon of security and nanotronics. At my direction, he took us in a southerly loop around the Boston area, coming up on Downtown from beneath. This close to town, the roadbeds had been maintained at a high level of repair, and ground traffic was actually somewhat thick. The MOG towered over most of the small electric or hydroburner runabouts, but they refused to give way for us - Bostonian suicidal driver's arrogance. Chit muttered several times to himself about probable crush patterns and I saw his hands twitch towards the gear selector during a few instances of microcar stupidity in heavy traffic, but he refrained from steamrollering any commuters.

We pulled off the highway into South Boston, a few miles from my loft. I had him park in front of a coffee shop with…

I look so forward to breaking you (thing)

2012-02-01T23:00:41Z

I am aging into a relapsed youth.
I am growing into my childhood stories.
I am all the things I said I'd never be,
And all the things I admired at the same time.

I am shaking in my souls.

There is so much that I don't know,
So much I haven't seen,
And I am burning because I there are so many lives I have only glimpsed,
That I will never taste myself.

I need... I need-

If you want to kiss, then you should kiss,
If you want to cry, then you should cry,
And if you want to live, then you may live.
I will teach…

mistaken (poetry)

2012-02-01T21:23:15Z

The pitter of feet
I turn to see who's there
A leaf in the wind.

The tale of the Fat Bunnies (place)

2012-02-01T18:47:30Z

(On a small piece of pink lined paper.
The italics are an elder hand,
and the rest is shakier and childlike.)

‌

There once was a family
of fat bunnies.
They lived in the happy
forest. Their house was
on Pine Street. This is the
map of the happy forre
st...| rod robins | mitre  |
     |   Home     | mouse's|home
-------------------------------.
    Pine Street              p |
---------------------------. a |
| The   | The    |   cherry| t |
| Fat   |mitten's|chipmon's| n |
|bunny's| Home   |     Home| r |
| Home  |        |         | o |
---------------------------' a |
    Kell Street              d |
-------------------------------'

Balmoral (thing)

2012-02-01T14:02:03Z

Originally the residence of Sir William Drummond in 1390, The Balmoral Estate, located in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, changed ownership several times before the 19th century. Today Balmoral Castle is the private property of the British royal family. It was added by ruling monarchs Prince Albert and Queen Victoria who leased the property in 1848 before purchasing it outright in 1852. Knowledge of current events can be helpful when determining why a style or brand became popular. Certainly clothing or footwear that was endorsed by royalty would attract notice. Wars fought during this century brought different styles of boots into civilian life and the cattle dependent methods of transportation also played a role in determining which footwear was donned by whom.

During the French Revolution many artisans fled the country. Other disenfranchised peoples from southeastern Europe were drawn to England, specifically to the city of London which was the capital hub of…

index fund (thing)

2012-02-01T07:58:01Z

An index fund is a passively managed mutual fund or ETF that seeks to match, net of fees, the performance of an underlying stock, bond, or futures index.

For example, the most popular index ETF, SPY, simply tries to match the overall performance of the S&P 500 index, which tracks the 500 largest companies traded on US markets.

This tracking is achieved by frequent, automatic rebalancing of holdings in the fund to closely track the relative weighting of holdings in the underlying index.

Because index funds are passively managed (which in practice means that computers decide when to buy and sell), they tend to have very low fees, and thus are able to track their underlying indices quite closely.

Invented in the 1970s by John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard investment group, index funds have skyrocketed in popularity in recent years, as evidence has accumulated that index funds tend to significantly outperform actively managed funds over the long term.

…

mutual fund (thing)

2012-02-01T07:45:35Z

Mutual Funds are a Scam

Mutual funds, for years considered the obvious, sensible, go-to choice for the everyman investor, are now widely recognized to be a pretty bad option.

Consider that in 2011, 90 percent of all actively managed US mutual funds underperformed their benchmark index. Ninety percent! This means that the vast majority of people who were invested in mutual funds would have been better off investing in a low-cost index fund which simply attempts to match, rather than beat, the performance of the market as a whole.

And 2011 was not much of a fluke. Even in their "best" years, "only" 80 percent of actively managed funds underperform their benchmarks.

In other words, even the supposed "expert" managers who run these funds are considerably worse at picking stocks than darts thrown at a dartboard, which would have a success rate of 50-50 for beating the overall market, rather than 10-90.

A charitable explanation of this gross…

implication (idea)

2012-02-01T05:07:41Z

Standard logic uses the material conditional, which says that the statement "if p then q" is false only when p is true but q is false, and true otherwise. This has two interesting consequences. First, when p is false, the statement is true regardless of whether q is true or false. Second, when p and q are both true, the statement is true regardless of whether a relationship between p and q exists.

The results of the material conditional seem strange because English speakers expect such statements to be true because a relationship exists between p and q. In fact, I suggest that when an English speaker makes such statement, what they're asserting isn't that either p or q is true. What they're asserting is their expectation (i.e. that a relationship between them exists).

It seems to me that when one translates an English phrase like "if p then q" into a logical statement, one should use something more intuitive than the material conditional. Note that the…

2012 Florida Republican Primary (event)

2012-02-01T04:17:26Z

Ten days ago, Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina Republican Primary, in a victory that was either inevitable or an upset, depending on who you asked. This set up a great amount of expectations and interest for the Florida primary contest.

Florida is a much larger state than South Carolina, and also has a more diverse population. Florida also has several different major cities, which would be a very important point in the advertising war between Gingrich and Mitt Romney.

After winning South Carolina, Gingrich was ahead in polling in Florida for several days. However, either because of a natural drop in the post-victory bounce, or because Florida's electorate is naturally not as amiable to Gingrich as South Carolina's was, or because Mitt Romney spent over 10 million dollars in one week assailing Gingrich's past record, Gingrich's support begin to weaken. By the day before election day, the consensus was on a Romney victory, although…

Roadtrip: A Noder Collaborative Prose Production (event)

2012-02-01T01:22:22Z

The Concept

In the past, E2 prosewriters have not infrequently banded together to produce collaborative pieces, frequently with great results. Well-known examples of such collaboration include Walking Man, City of Souls I, and Briefcase Full of Souls - Part I. However, given there has been a while since the last such effort, it seems time to wrangle together the storytellers of E2 to present a new collaboration: Roadtrip.

Roadtrip will be a cycle of twelve stories, each by a different noder, beginning with myself (Posmella). In the great tradition of storytelling, Roadtrip will feature best friends (a guy and a girl) crossing some fictional countryside in a car, and following a classic story arc involving a crisis (or crises) and finally resolution. What happens in between - who they meet, where they go, what they do - is up to the individual writer, within some prescribed limits.

Tell me more about this story arc, please?

Since you asked, the…

The Andalite's Gift (essay)

2012-01-31T20:42:32Z

Megamorphs #1; a "special" book in the series Animorphs by K.A. Applegate.

Disclaimer: If you've heard of Animorphs and you're thinking "Aww, how cute," maybe you should read my introduction to the first book to see how wrong you are.

THE ANDALITE'S GIFT

Megamorphs #1
by K.A. Applegate

Summarized Plot:

Visser Three has managed to train an alien beast from Saturn to be attracted to morphing energy, so every time the Animorphs change form they have to deal with an attack from a giant dust monster. With this setback plus having Rachel separated from the group while suffering from amnesia, things seem pretty hopeless, but get even worse when Ax and Marco are captured by the monster and brought to Visser Three. Clever morphing helps them escape, and the discovery of the alien monster's weakness gives them a clue on how to beat it, but in order to win Cassie has to bring her…

Editor Log: February 2012 (log)

2012-01-31T20:30:34Z

Introducing Trigger Warnings

UPDATE: user raincomplex has coded a Greasemonkey script available here that users with the Greasemonkey browser extension can use to make trigger warnings on E2 more effective. It replaces potentially triggering writeups with a warning that allows users to opt in or out of viewing their text. Thank you, raincomplex!

Hi, y'all. I have a new project to tell you about. Today I created two categories.

If you're not sure what a trigger warnings are, the Geek Feminism Wiki has a good explanation.

PTSD is real and its effects aren't something sufferers can just get over.

Trigger warnings help some survivors of abuse who…

The Proper Role of Government (idea)

2012-01-31T20:12:27Z

I suggest that the proper role of government is to do three things:

protect human life
protect liberty
protect individuals' freedom to pursue happiness

This suggestion is not new; it comes from the second and third sentences of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. This fact does not make it correct, but hopefully mentioning it will give critics enough pause to consider the idea. What, then, does make them true? Trying to answer this question opens a huge can of worms, but there's no help for it if we want an answer. Let's dive in.

By "human life", I refer to the capacity for sentience. This begins at some point after conception (at which time humans do not have brains) and it must end at brain death (which may precede the death of other bodily tissues). By "liberty", I mean a state of affairs in which no one suffers an arbitrary or unjust threat of violence. By "happiness", I mean the fulfillment of a person's basic human needs.

…

Librarians know the secret editions of the Kama Sutra (poetry)

2012-01-31T20:09:38Z

There are those who think that
you can't learn some things from books alone
and they are quite right you know.

But the library during a weekday mid-morning
hardly has any people or any work to do.
So it's really not terribly difficult to
slip behind a set of shelves or
wander into an empty study room
and try a little practical application.

Everything2 New Writeups

restarting a player after his character dies (fiction)

brogue (thing)

How many infinities are there? (essay)

I know there are several different infinities. ω, ℵ0, ℵ1. I'm not sure which is which. Is that all of them? How many are there altogether?

How many ordinals are there?

What is the cardinality of the set of all ordinals?

what once I was (poetry)

Your radical ideas about time traveling to July 29, 1947 to have a threesome with Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy have already occurred to others (essay)

Be Nice (poetry)

Circus Galop (thing)

The Proper Role of Government (idea)

pushing the envelope (thing)

Pinch, Punch, First of the Month (thing)

February 2, 2012 (log)

Amendment the Second, with Empty Consumerism (fiction)

I look so forward to breaking you (thing)

mistaken (poetry)

The tale of the Fat Bunnies (place)

Balmoral (thing)

index fund (thing)

mutual fund (thing)

implication (idea)

2012 Florida Republican Primary (event)

Roadtrip: A Noder Collaborative Prose Production (event)

The Concept

Tell me more about this story arc, please?

The Andalite's Gift (essay)

Editor Log: February 2012 (log)

Introducing Trigger Warnings

The Proper Role of Government (idea)

Librarians know the secret editions of the Kama Sutra (poetry)

I know there are several different infinities. ω, ℵ₀, ℵ₁. I'm not sure which is which. Is that all of them? How many are there altogether?