Link Blogs

One of the many blog genres is the link blog, a site that just provides links to other sites. It sounds boring, but some of the blogosphere’s most popular sites are link blogs: Jason Kottke adds little content at kottke.org; nor do the boing boingers.

Without realizing what I was doing, I started a link blog in July of 2007. I put up a “snacks” feature on OWF, a light feature that would just point people to interesting items on the Web. I made it easy to maintain, and I started populating it.

I’ve come to realize just how addictive such a feature is. Its main purpose is still to provide links that my readers may or may not find interesting, links that may fuel a coffee break at work. But I often find myself “snacking” a link that I want to be able to retrieve at some later point. Blogger makes this even more compelling: I host the main snack blog on blogspot, and the default Blogger header has a search box for the entire site. And once Jack prompted me to add descriptions to my links (which show up in the RSS feed but not yet on OWF), I realized I could add keywords that would speed up the retrieval.

So have I read The Mathematics Of Change Ringing [pdf] yet? Well, not completely. But I can revisit it at some later point without trying to remember where I saw the link. To find the link just now, I went to the main snack page, typed the word “bell” into the navbar at the top of the screen, and went right to the entry.

It’s been liberating in an odd way. I can tuck links into this little corner of the Internet and recover them at will. It’s become a Pensieve of sorts. I can snack a link, close the window, and revisit it when I have time.

The Atlantic's Variety Cryptic

The blogosphere has been abuzz with The Atlantic’s recent decision to tear down its long-standing paywall.

While most have mentioned trawling the archives for this or that article, few have made the obvious observation: The variety cryptic, by Cox and Rathvon, is part of the package. Perhaps that’s because the boing boingers and Jason Kottke don’t actually do variety cryptics, but I feel like it hasn’t even shown up on my puzzle lists. Maybe it’s always been online, and I’ve never looked?

Cryptic crosswords are crossword puzzles in which the clues have the word definition, but they also have a hefty amount of wordplay to get you to the answer. Thus each clue in a cryptic is really two clues. It’s up to you to determine where one ends and the other begins, and deciphering the clue can be tricky: I often figure out what word should go in the space provided and then try to reverse-engineer the wordplay.

A variety cryptic adds yet another dimension. In a variety cryptic, the answer to the cryptic clues don’t necessarily fit into the grid the way you’d expect. You might have to add a letter, drop a letter, change one fragment to another, or make words “warp” from one part of the grid to another. I remember one variety cryptic, published in The Enigma, of course, where words that contained the names of European currencies had to be transformed so that those letters became EURO. Remarkable became reeuroable, for instance.

Technology Rules

Some high school students discovered an asteroid. Neat.

But the best part is the summary of connections mentioned on Slashdot. The Wisconsin students, “used a telescope in New Mexico, belonging to a college in Michigan, that they controlled over the Net.” Gotta love the Internets.

Quote Of The Day: Starting Fires With Fish

From Joystiq, describing the latest news of Uwe Boll, the German director most famous for his big-screen videogame adaptations:

…the infamous German director and pouting pugilist will see his future endeavors financially constrained after his latest $70 million video game adaptation, "In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale," set the box-office alight with all the effectiveness of two moist fish furiously rubbed together.

Quote Of The Day: This Is Why People Don't Like Goblins

Jerry, from Penny Arcade, writes of his re-entrance into World of Warcraft.

After seven blissful levels of wondering why I ever quit WoW, I ended up on some featureless beach in Feathermoon waiting for some stupid, almost nonsensical drop. After that, I talked to a Goblin whose most pressing concern (in a world whose very crust was cracked by perpetual War) was his tremendous thirst. Would I go and get something for him to drink? I've got water, but he doesn't want it. He only wants to drink the glands of some twelve-foot tall plant man. It's like, listen. This is why people don't like Goblins.

Randomness

When Pim and I looked at the prizes for Menu For Hope, we were surprised to see that a number of people had won more than one prize. I know, theoretically, that an even distribution among prize winners is one possible outcome while lists with duplicates are much more likely. But it's one thing to know it, and another thing to accept it. An iPod's shuffle feature is truly random, but it often seems as if the shuffle is favoring one artist or album. (That's why iTunes now offers a "smart" shuffle that diminishes randomness in favor of distributing artists/albums.) And in the TV show Numb3rs, an evenly distributed set of points is a clue that someone has tried to make something look random. True random numbers aren't spread out equally.

Just to convince myself, I wrote some code to demonstrate this unintuitive aspect of randomness.

First, draw 1 number from a set of 10. The probability for each number is 1/10th. Do this 10,000 times to get a bunch of results to chart, and you end up with an almost even distribution across those 10 numbers, demonstrating the fairness of the random draw:
1 1024
2 1042
3 992
4 952
5 974
6 1034
7 995
8 993
9 1001
10 993

In that run, each "turn" was a single draw. Now make each turn 10 draws. In Menu For Hope, many contributors entered multiple raffles, and drawing more than once from the same pool simulates this. We expect each number to come up once, because that's what probability tells us. But it doesn't work that way, at least not necessarily. On one run, I got this set of results:
2
5
6
7
2
10
2
6
8
3

Even though the probability of each number is 1/10, you end up with single numbers repeated. There are three 2s and 2 6s.

When I ran the 10-draw turn 10,000 times, I got these results:

1 unique numbers 0
2 unique numbers 0
3 unique numbers 6
4 unique numbers 187
5 unique numbers 1274
6 unique numbers 3457
7 unique numbers 3528
8 unique numbers 1373
9 unique numbers 169
10 unique numbers 6

Here I counted the unique numbers in each set. 10 unique numbers means a perfect distribution. 1 unique number means that every random draw hit the same number. I didn't implement the logic to separate duplicates (the 6 in the previous example) from the triples (the 2 in the prior example). Or quadruples, for that matter. This was a simple simulation.

The odds of randomly getting an even distribution are pretty low. You are roughly 600 times more likely to have 6 or 7 unique numbers, meaning that some of those numbers are duplicated (or tripled or whatever). You’re 200 times more likely to have a scenario where half the numbers are missing. You’re 30 times more likely to have just 4 unique numbers: a whole host of repeats. The numbers looked similar on multiple runs.

This makes sense if you think about it. In the second draw of the 10-draw turn, you have a 10 percent chance of drawing a duplicate. If you don’t, you have two unique numbers, and on the third draw you have a 20 percent chance of duplicating one of the existing values. By the time you get to the tenth draw, there’s a 90 percent chance that you’ll draw a number that’s already been drawn, assuming all the others were unique.

Menu For Hope, of course, is much more complicated. Raffle ticket purchasers can stack the odds in their favor by buying more tickets for a given raffle. Prizes with fewer bidders have different odds than those with more bidders. And it was about 100 draws across 9,000 raffle tickets. But even the simple version in this post, where each of just 10 numbers has an equal probability, shows that duplicates and triplicates should be commonplace. So it's not surprising that some people won multiple prizes: It would have been more surprising if none had.

Which Paragraph Looks Better?

In my article about Franconian beer, I have these paragraphs:

But even the best Franconian brewers aim for the everyday drinker, not the thrill-seeking beer snob. Waltman contrasts Belgium's prestigious brews with Franconia's farmhouse ales.

Belgian beers kind of hit you over the head," he says. "They have unusual flavors; they're big. In Belgium, if you ask for recommendations for 10 breweries, they would all be cafes: People sitting around sipping these strong beers. In Germany, and especially in Franconia, beer is what you drink all day long. The beers are designed to be drunk." Simple flavors, well-balanced hops and low alcohol create a drink that can go with your weeknight dinner or your afternoon break.

This is the text as I submitted it and as the Chronicle ran it. But when I had a chance to review the piece before publication, I looked at it again and posed a question to my editor. Should it read, "Waltman contrasts Franconia's farmhouse ales with Belgium's prestigious brews"?

One of my writing mantras — one of the ones in my screen saver — is “Keep related concepts together.” Following that rule, the paragraph should read the way I asked. The first “Belgium” segues into a digression about that country’s beers. But then your internal reader sees “Franconia Franconia Belgium Belgium.“ Because those are proper nouns, it feels, for lack of a better word, loud.

What do you think?