Minstrel’s Log

Remember those days? Remember when games were places where you did horrible things to relatively innocent characters? Remember when the “old folks” were worried that gamers might confuse the imaginary world of video games with the real world? Remember when every time someone went crazy and killed a bunch of people we’d quickly learn that they were a gamer who couldn’t understand that games are nothing like reality?

Well the tides have turned. Now there are such responsible games as Heavy Rain - where empathizing with the game’s Father-Son relationship is a core element of the game, or Prius Online - where at a certain level you get a “companion” who you care for, and whose personality you can shape as the game progresses. Which is not to mention the countless other “caretaking” games, where you grow fish, tend a garden, etc, etc, etc.

So what’s the latest horror to come out of computer games? Well apparently a couple let their baby starve to death while they were off playing Prius Online. The media is spinning it as if they were off taking very good care of a kid in the fantasy world, and didn’t take any care for their kid in the real world.

Yes, you read that right, it’s now (effectively) being said that the problem with gamers is that they’re not putting what they do in games into real-life.

But hey, maybe that’s a good thing. We’re only one step away from the problem being that “gamers” aren’t putting the right parts of the game into real life — ie. when people do bad things it’s not because they’re “gamers”, it’s because they are people, and they are acting stupid of their own accord.

Perhaps one day someone will say: “Remember the good ol’ days of video games, when we could do really stupid things and be excused because the video game made us do it? Ah, well.” And then they’ll start World War III, or unleash some biological super-weapon, or dress all in black and jump out of their spaceship, and no one will blame it on a video game.

They’ll blame it on the evil waves from those newfangled quantum gravity cell phones - those things’ll make your toes fall off, haven’t you heard?

I’ve acquired Fresh Data regarding MBTI types on Twitter!

In the same spirit as the 2008 post on The MBTI Blog, I’ve compiled statistics from Twitter profiles and tweets to determine the most popular type on Twitter.

And the result is….. INTJ!

So that hasn’t changed.

INTJs are found almost 8 times as frequently on Twitter as in the General Population, and INFJs 7 times as frequently.

INTPs, INFPs, ENTJs, and ENTPs are also greatly overrepresented, followed by ENFJs and ENFPs.

The least likely Tweeters are ESFJs, ESFPs, ISFPs, ISFJs, ESTPs, ESTJs, ISTJs, and ISTPs.

In short, Ns tweet, Ss don’t.

More Data:

So here’s the change between my data and the 2008 data. The most notable bits are the increase in ENFP Tweeters, and the drop in both ESTP and ISTP Tweeters.

In lesser amounts, there are more INTPs and ENFJs, and less ENTJs.

That’s the profile data. Here’s the tweeting data. (I’m calling it less reliable for type-distribution metrics, as (1) it’s only from the last 10 days, and (2) I can see tweets in there where people are either discussing other people’s type, or are saying things like “I’m glad I’m not INTJ” or some such)

So you can see that the ratios are still pretty similar, though INFJs seem to be more posted about than INTJs.

One interesting extension of the above would be to see how frequently each of the types posts. That would likely require API access to be in any way efficient, which rules me out for the moment.

Data collected from Twellow (Profiles) and search.twitter.com (tweets) on 2010-01-27.

1057 profiles mentioned one of the 16 types, and 1455 tweets (from the previous 10 days only)

I may have to join Facebook. *Sigh*

The thing about “people” and the reason I’ve been avoiding social-type sites is that “people” don’t have the same level of data filtering that I have. Eg - if I’m known as “Horatio” on twitter (which I’m not), then I would filter out any personally identifiable information, simply because it’s a big internets, and there are some out there who are willing to cause trouble for those who let them.

Okay, so all is well there, @horatio is not connected to Rhett, and all is well. However, if someone else I know is on the same site - that’s the whole “point” to these newfangled social whoseimwhatsits - they’re almost guaranteed to either refer to me by me RL name, or mention that my employer OmniCorp (which is not my employer) wants me to come in and work this Saturday, or ask me how my new graverobbing hobby is going (oops, maybe that one is true?!); thereby making available to the anonymous world data that was only cleared to be released to those I know personally IRL.

Mayhap these “people” I’m discussing so impersonally simply don’t see a difference between the Internet and Real Life. I don’t hold that against them, as the ‘net has been greatly integrated with every-day life. I merely mourn the loss of wonder that they could have experienced by turning on a lightbulb.

Now really, this all comes down to me being paranoid (not clinically, just in the pop-culture way). If I tell person A something, I typically don’t expect it to go beyond them unless there’s a relevant semi-urgent situation. That doesn’t seem to be how people think/act/understand things, though it’s usually how I operate (which gets me into more “trouble”).

The only solution I can see is to categorize data in a purely binary sense: Private data, no-one knows; Public data, everyone knows. Nothing in-between (not counting those who are contractually obligated to hold certain information private).

I’ll still have to keep other people’s data according to current standards - “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, even though it’s impossible for them to do the same.” - as they oddly don’t want the whole world to know about the nuke they’re building in their basement even though they told me about it. (They’re fine with the world knowing about their new delicious cheesecake recipe though - which I would rank as just as relevant data. Mmmm… Cheesecake…)

Here’s where Facebook comes in.  To ease the transition, I’ll have to dive in head-long, release all the information to the public (yes, to my adoring public) *before* they can do so - that way when they provide the same data, they’re just repeating me.

Obviously this concept will be considered for a couple of days before being implemented. If anyone has any thoughts, contact me through the usual channels.

After much coding, testing, and debugging, I’ve finally “finished” ideas.rhettlunn.com. It’s not yet *everything* I want it to be, but it’s a good start.

In a fit of sheer Genius, the boffins at Redux Beverages, working with Omni Consumer Products, have created the electrolyte-containing drink that’s got what plants (and, it is presumed, all other self-respecting organisms) crave - Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator!

Redux Beverages, some may remember, is the same relatively new drink producer who brought us Cocaine (currently known as No Name or Insert Name Here: in the U.S.), that delightful drink which got the FDA to produce such gems of literature as:

• “Your product, Cocaine, is a drug”
• “Street drug alternatives are not intended to supplement the diet.”
• “Accordingly, street drug alternatives do not qualify as dietary supplements.”
• “Your sale of Cocaine without an approved application[…]”

(See the Official FDA Warning Letter for the full details.)

Omni Consumer Products, however, has been around since at least 1987, lending some much-needed stability to the brand. While one of their previous products (the ED-209) was blasted by critics for being unreliable, it is not expected that sales of this product should suffer. In a side note, it appears that Omni has simplified their logo, removing the “C” and “P” from the middle yet keeping the hexagonal “O”.

Story at PE.com
Some of the reaction
Brawndo Marketing Video
More reaction, this time from a well-respected film critic
An Old OCP Communications Advertisement (Warning: May not be suitable for children)

Consider the following two tests for insanitee:

(1) Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.

(2) Plug a sink, turn on the taps, and when the water is overflowing, ask the subject to clean it up. If they don’t first turn off the tap, they’re insane.

Okay, so where does that leave us?

Well, consider eating. We get hungry, and we eat. Then we get hungry again, and we eat. Then again we get hungry, and we eat. This cycle continues for our entire lives, yet never do we find a way to stop getting hungry in the first place.

Are we all insane?

Recently, I realized an old objection of mine to Public School.

Simply put, I did not learn anything there that my parents did not already know.

I
remember a specific instance (before I had realized this, probably in
the first couple of grades) when I came home one day very excited. I
had learned a new word in French: “Noel” means “Christmas”. I felt like
I had some wonderful piece of new knowledge that I couldn’t wait to
share.

Anxious to not only start paying back my parents for
all the cool stuff they’ve taught me over the years, but also to show
that my time at school wasn’t being wasted, I asked my Mum if she knew
how to say Christmas in French.

Of course, she did. My Dad would
have as well, but I didn’t ask him, as I could see by the ease in which
she answered my question that I wouldn’t have been sharing anything new
with him either.

Yes, I was deflated, but (to forestall certain
objections) a different response would not have helped; the real issue
was that I had spent all this time away from my family - the ones who
knew me best, cared the most about me - and I hadn’t even learned
anything new.

…or perhaps it just works…

But still! It Works!

Now I just need to make something with it so you can see it in action. (Such ways of doing things are far superior to attempting to describe it)

I’ll keep you posted (maybe)

But my brain *didn’t* explode after I wrote my last entry!

Yes, yes, I am alive… - I know it’s hard to believe.

Anyways, I’m just checking in… I’m working on a project, that should be done soon… I only stumbled in here because I’m looking for a site where I use images… Apparently they’re few and far-between (I don’t count the above WordPress-Generated gradient.

Later!

You’d think it would be simple. Of course, at first, it is.

a = b

The same thing as saying b = a, it means (in simplified terms) that a and b are interchangeable, any place you could use one, you can use the other and get exactly the same result.

Okay, fine. but what happens when you get:

a=(sqrt(17)-2)/3

see, that’s nice and accurate, but just glancing at it, you don’t know about where it would come on the number line. So, of course, you write another line saying that it’s approximately equal to 0.707. Great, but how do you write that?

a ∼ 0.707
a ≈ 0.707
a ≅ 0.707

Well, the first one, ∼, according to the HTML specification means that it varies with, or is similar to. The Unicode standard just calls it the “tilde” operator. According to the Wikipedia article on Asymptotic Analysis (which refers to a couple of text books) it means that the functions are asymptotically equivalent - essentially that as they approach infinity, they scale in relatively the same manner. Of course, this would make no sense when declaring the numerical value of a variable.

Okay, the second one, ≈, is referred to by the HTML spec as meaning almost equal to, or asymptotic to. Somewhere on wikipedia it’s said to mean approximately equal to, and the Unicode standard says “almost equal to”.

The third one, ≅, has the HTML spec AND the Unicode standard call it “approximately equal to”, but wikipedia swears it’s “congruent to”.

That’s not even counting a couple of other Unicode symbols - including one that Unicode says is “asymptotically equal to”.

So which one do I use? I don’t want to end up saying that a is “congruent” to 0.707, but I’m not able to find a clear, established usage guide for them.

Grr.