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Okay, you might or might not know the constructed language Toki Pona, but we're certainly still learning, so I think we can construct a good metaphor.
( A hypothetical conversation about food. )Tags:
xdle is a game in the Wordle vein, but about guessing three-digit integers based on number theory facts like greatest common divisors.
Short post, but I guess might be spoilers, so it's under the cut. Also there's that one weed joke.
( some possible xdle starting guesses )For reasons, we wanted to play with color quantization and dithering, and we found out about command line tool ImageMagick's color quantization/dither tools. Then we came up with a very silly idea: what if we took a given starting image and, using our limited knowledge of dither algorithms and complete lack of knowledge of image size optimization, tried to make the coolest versions we could under 32 KiB? Setting the limit to be filesize and not raster resolution means that every algorithm is going to create some compromise between size and detail … so maybe Floyd-Steinberg produces a clearer result at the same resolution, but how much smaller does it have to be to fit in the size limit?
We finally finished this freaking project, and it's such a big one that it's too big for a Dreamwidth post - click through to check it out.
Yesterday, we posted a fediverse checkbox poll on indiepocalypse.social asking, "Are .md Markdown files plaintext?". The poll received 49 votes, with eight respondents additionally replying to discuss details of the question, and the final percentages including 71% yes, 31% no, and 16% I don't know, with substantial overlap between all three of these.
(Also, 12% spiderman. Because Mastodon injokes.)
I think what makes it an interesting question is the term "plain text" (which apparently has a space, apologies). What is, and what is not, plain text? Let's run through some possibilities.
- Are .md Markdown files .txt text files?
- No. The extensions are different, so your computer treats them differently.
- Are .md Markdown files encoded as binary?
- Okay, technically, all binary computer files are binary, but no - the whole format is designed around extended-ASCII text encoding like UTF-8. You can edit it in Notepad or KWrite or TextEdit or gedit or vi or, I don't know, whatever you want.
- Are .md Markdown files completely unformatted?
- I mean, no, clearly. When you have, for example, *asterisks* being used to indicate words that are emphasized, that is a kind of formatting.
- Are .md Markdown files readable in plain text editors?
- Kinda? The link formatting - [link text in square brackets](immediately followed by url in parentheses) - is not very friendly to the eye, tables often get very nasty to read, probably other issues we weren't reminded of - but it's mostly readable. Not as readable as a 1998 GameFAQs guide, but mostly readable.
- Are .md Markdown files designed for styled presentation?
- Yes. This was news to us Packbats, but when we installed Linux, we got Okular with it, and when we opened a .md file with Ocular, we didn't see asterisks for emphasis and square brackets and parentheses for links and so on - we saw italics text, underlined link passages, headers, bulleted lists, and so on. It looked like how it looks when we write something in HTML and open it in a browser. Windows 7 didn't have anything for viewing Markdown that way.
- Are .md Markdown files .txt text files?
- No. In a .txt file, formatting is idiosyncratic, driven by aesthetic and pragmatic judgments about what the audience will want to and be able to parse. In a Markdown file, formatting has to comform to a sta—... okay, stop laughing. In a Markdown file, there is theoretically a standard, and the file is promising with its extension that a computer which will never even try to understand the writer or the writer's motives can produce a styled output by implementing the standard, even if it probably has to recognize some extensions to actually guess right on what it looks like.
So, yeah. I think the moral of the story is that it's not obvious what "plain text" means, but hey ... it was fun asking.
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Simplicio: Computers are magic.
Sagredo: There's nothing magical about it; computers are simply sophisticated mathematical machines. Magic, by contrast, is supernatural - an independent force with its own logic that acts upon the world, and is merely channeled or controlled by those with magical power.
Simplicio: So, in your opinion, computers are not magic because they are not supernatural, not independent, not logical, and don't act upon the world. Shall we take these in reverse order?
Sagredo: Gladly. And yes, of course computers act on the world, and do so through logical calculation - that is the entire reason we created them. But they are not independent of it, they are part of it.
Simplicio: The logic of a computer is hardly the logic of a landslide or river or growing tree, however. All of these are straightforward and natural, whereas computers are constantly seized with their own caprices. You have a telephone, so surely you have seen it decide your text means something entirely different than your intentions.
Sagredo: You underestimate the sophistication of trees, but you are again merely describing the difference between nature and artifice. My telephone and your grandfather clock are alike unnatural, in your sense, and the errors of autocorrection in the one are much the same as the slipping minutes of the other: reflections of our limitations.
Simplicio: Do not try to distract me with the miracle of clockwork timekeeping - I can argue for the magic in that another day; your telephone is a much clearer example. Its errors of autocorrection happen within it, from its own memories and caprice, independent - independent! - of temperature or setting.
Sagredo: Only as independent as a book that remembers what is written on its pages. It acts because it was programmed to, because it stored this data and processed it in the way it was designed.
Simplicio: It acts because it was commanded to, by one with the power to channel its force in a direction - but even then, the magician wanted it to guess infallibly, did they not? Certainly an autocorrect without error would be quite a selling-point.
Sagredo: They did - but such a thing is impossible.
Simplicio: The computer acts on its own internal logic, independent of what its controller demands.
Sagredo: Independent of their intentions, but not their work - its actions spring from what it is told to do, nothing more.
Simplicio: Can you remind me what you had to say about DNS? I remember you spoke at some length the other day.
Sagredo: When many voices are speaking, the results can become confused, but it is still the result of how it was made and shaped, nothing more.
Simplicio: Can you remind me of what you had to say about free will?
Sagredo: I can - I said that we are also machines, defined by our history and origins, our nurture and nature, but able to shape ourselves, changing even our goals and desires. Are you about to claim that my telephone's autocorrection is as independent? Perhaps it should be granted citizenship.
Simplicio: As, no ... but independent, yes.
Sagredo: It is not supernatural.
Simplicio: Sagredo, you are a cunning arithmetician, but let me ask you: why should I care? We are surrounded by forces that we do not understand, that listen to sounds we can hear and sounds we cannot, that remember what they encounter, and that respond according to arcane and unpredicable intentions. They imbue us with tremendous power, if we can control them, but are terribly dangerous if we cannot. Lives are saved and lost because of what flows through these channels. You yourself wield this power, turning it to answer your astronomical queries and mine, to prove and to refute our theories. Do you not see what it does?
Sagredo: Your contention is that I am a wizard, unwitting.
Simplicio: It is.
Sagredo: I don't know how I can accept that.
Simplicio: Heavens help me. Sagredo, you know that you are capable, no matter how much you insist on downplaying it.
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We have been struck with a sudden inspiration.
In the past - for example, while writing and editing our guide "naming yourself in toki pona" - we've thought of nouns for speakers as a static thing: if someone's head noun is 'kulupu', then you call them 'kulupu', end of story. And it's important that we understand and conform to the nomenclature of the subject we're discussing.
...but in the style of lipu pu, "Toki Pona: The Language of Good", the first official Toki Pona book, words can be more fluid that that. jan Sonja might say "meli li lili" to talk about a woman being little, even though that meli is definitely also a jan. Provided there is no misgendering or other deliberate misidentifying going on, there doesn't seem to be anything hostile about that.
So, you know how, in resources like pronouns.page, there will be lists of words that can be marked with hearts or thumbs-up or thumbs-down or other such indicators of mood?
What if tokiponists did that for words about them? Like, if we add this to our profile:
sina toki e mi la, mi olin e nimi ni:
- kulupu
- poki
- tonsi
...nimi ni li pona:
- ijo
- jan
- meli
- nasa
- tomo
...nimi ni li musi:
- kijetesantakalu
...nimi ni li ike:
- mani
- mije
- pakala (mi ken pakala! taso, kon mi li kon pakala ala. nimi "pakala Pakapa" li ike a!)
- sewi
...would that be clearly understood? Would people know that they can say statements like "meli ni li kulupu Pakapa" and be polite and accurate?
I think it would be good if this is something they could check as needed. Obviously, most speakers would simply grab "kulupu" or "poki" off the top and use one of those, which works fantastically and requires very little memorization ... but I think it's good to have, and good to have thought about in case people ask, "mi wile ala wile kepeken nimi 'meli' lon sina?"
wile. mi meli tonsi. mi tonsi meli. pona, pona.
In 1990, Sandia National Laboratories convened two teams of cross-disciplinary experts with a question: how can we mark a disposal site for nuclear waste in a way that will successfully warn people off for ten thousand years? The two teams went off to develop their strategies, and by 1992 had returned their reports; in 1993, the final paper, "Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant", by Kathleen M. Trauth, Stephen C. Horal, and Robert V. Guzowski (doi:10.2172/10117359, OSTI 10117359), was published.
Appendix F - the report from Team A, made up of Dieter G. Ast, Michael Brill, Maureen F. Kaplan, Ward H. Goodenough, Frederick J. Newmeyer, and Woodruff T. Sullivan, III - contains the following passage:
This place is a message...and part of a system of messages...pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here ...nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center...the center of danger is here...of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
I don't think that it's surprising that, decades after this report was written, this ominous and urgent warning caught the imagination of many.
And I think that, if they aren't already doing it, conlang enthusiasts should add this to their repertoire of standard example texts, alongside the Tower of Babel story from Genesis, "The North Wind and the Sun" from Aesop, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the United Nations, and others.
- It's memorable and popular;
- It's evocative and interesting;
- It is simultaneously a very modern message (being concerned with radiation poisoning) and one intended to be understood by an audience without a modern understanding of science (and therefore possible to convey in most languages);
- The intent of the message - that people understand that they are not to dig here lest they release radioactivity into the local environment - can be clearly understood by we the translators;
- Communication of that intent is more important than perfect word-by-word translation, allowing a degree of artistic liberty in translation;
- It (or, more precisely, something like it) was always intended to be presented in multiple languages, for obvious reasons; and
- It is reasonably short, and therefore not too onerous to translate.
None of that is a coincidence, either. If you read (or skim, in our case) the original report, you will find that this passage is what Team A intended to convey "non-linguistically (through the design of the whole site), using physical form as a 'natural language'" - it is a translation into English of the emotional impact on (they hoped) any human of an ominous field of spiky obelisks engraved with warning messages and human faces expressing horror and disgust. (A place that is both a message and part of a system of messages, you may note.) The actual messages they proposed to write on these obelisks are much more straightforward and direct, and the actual languages they propose translating them into are much more popular.
So it's not useful to Sandia National Laboratories to translate this into a conlang ... but I think it is useful to creators of conlangs to do so. I think very few standard passages pose similar challenges to this one - it speaks of things that many such messages do not, in a manner that many such messages do not.
And I think it would be fun if it existed in lots and lots of languages.
Another last-minute one, so, you're getting something short and mostly inconsequential.
In our post about our plans for hand calculations of π, we mentioned casting out nines and elevens. If you're not familiar with these methods, you might theoretically be interested in what they are. If you are familiar, you might not have given any thought to a pretty fundamental question for our application: how do you do it on a fraction?
This math probably won't be terribly readable, but we still want to give it a go.
( A quick summary of what casting out nines even is... ) ( ...and the bit about how to do it on decimals. )"The Salt Merchant and His Ass" is not a particularly famous Aesop fable, but it's a funny story and we recently translated it into Toki Pona.
By our count, the English translation we were working from (George Fyler Townsend's, basically), was about 169 words long.
By our count, our Toki Pona translation was 114 words long.
Now, some of that is editing. The Fyler English translation was a little florid, and we could have stood to be a bit more expansive when writing ours. But the obvious thing to expect when going from a language with a typical average vocabulary of twenty thousand words to a language with only about a hundred and twenty would be, y'know, the same ideas taking many times more words to express, and that's not what we're seeing. Toki Pona is really remarkably good at expressing the essentials of these old stories, despite having far, far fewer tools to do it.
I think that's really neat.
Edit 2023-08-03: We poked around a little more looking at other texts, and typically our Toki Pona renderings are longer than the English versions ... by somewhere between 5% and 30%. (For example, the IPA edition of "The North Wind and the Sun" has 113 words and our off-the-cuff Toki Pona telling would have about 144 if we didn't run out of space.) And all of these are written with the Sonja Lang's basic 120 words - we didn't even add "kin".
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So apparently there's a thing about making a blog post every day in August? We're a little unwell, but heck with it, why not.
One of our recurring preoccupations is arithmetic in different bases/radices. (Heck, there's a post from our old Livejournal arguing for base 6 in 2007.) Recently, we rewatched part of a stream vod of ours in which we were calculating the golden ratio using Fibonacci numbers in a bunch of bases, and we felt like we could do it better now than we did then...
...so we've been plotting. And scheming. And refining our strategies. Because we're aiming our sights on π.
( Maths geekery )In contrast to our Fibonacci experiments, this will have four divisions instead of one. However, it is all still doable, and if we remember to do the equivalent of casting out nines and elevens, we might even get the right answer!
imagine this: the weather is good today, so we want to take tea out onto our porch and sit in the fresh air. let's talk toki pona grammar.
this essay exists because we, while we've been learning, have been very frustrated about not being able to translate things, and we couldn't translate because we didn't know how the words went together. this probably isn't gonna solve that problem for you, but it hopefully means you've at least met all the constructions and you know they exist.
we are not as of this writing fluent, so many thanks to our beta readers, including Russ Sharek of The Circus Freaks, @f00fc7c8@kind.social, and various members of the kama sona Discord. any remaining errors and eccentricities are our own.
- first line is in toki pona.
- second line is a word-by-word gloss in english (spaces separate toki pona words) with grammatical particles in square brackets and prepositions in curly braces.
third line is a somewhat-literal english translation. (obvious example: singletons saying an unmodified 'mi' probably mean "me" - the actual toki pona word does not indicate number.)the rest are commentary.
let's go.
( long (~2.3k words), content warning for mentions of food and health )(mi kama sona e toki pona kepeken lipu mute)
(I think.)
There are other reasons why it's taking us ages to learn a hundred and twenty words and how to use them, but part of it is like the old joke: someone with one watch always knows what time it is, but someone with two watches is never sure.
Which is to say: jan Misali analyzes "x li y" as a subject x performing an intransitive verb y ... but because the same content words function in both roles, you could just as easily analyze it as a copula: x is y, as both jan Lentan and jan Sonja do. And jan Lentan analyses the 'kepeken ala' in "o kepeken ala ilo ike" as a verb used without 'e', but jan Sonja analyzes it as a preposition. The same sentence, understood the same way, but analyzed very differently.
And it's ... good? Like, we are much better off watching jan Misali and jan Kesi's videos and reading jan Lentan's lipu sona pona and referencing jan Sonja's official books and getting feedback from speakers and looking up articles on the Internet than we would be doing only one of those things, but we feel much more strain, trying to develop our own interpretations in a mess of other peoples'.
We're almost halfway through lipu sona pona, though. We need to learn numbers, learn pre-verbs, learn 'la', learn 'pi', learn sixty-ish more words. And read, and write, and converse.
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It's probably not surprising, given that we've been watching jan Misali's YouTube channel for years, but we've been following along on the toki pona language course they're doing with jan Kesi and practicing with flashcards and, recently, starting in on lipu sona pona by jan Lentan so we have more material. And making more flashcards because sitelen pona, the logography jan Sonja kicked off for the language.
It's been an interesting process, even if we're flagging a bit right now - toki pona feels like it'll bring out the poets in us. If you don't know, it's a minimalist language - less than two hundred words - and to talk of most things you must combine ... but the combinations are deliberately not standardized. Instead, the word for a concept is built out of how the speaker describing it right now conceives of it. And that makes it really interesting to ask questions like "what is Dwarf Fortress? what is a roleplaying game? what is a story?", because we have to think about it to talk about it. jan toki li pali e toki. jan toki li pali e toki ale.
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Looking at the links in the description of this YouTube video about measuring tools in machining, good calipers typically can measure between 0 and 8 inches/200 mm to a precision of 0.001 inch/0.02 mm. So, over the course of the full travel, a caliper has about 8000-10 000 possible measurements, more or less, which takes four or five decimal figures to display.
So, let's use 8000 as our benchmark. Imagine for some reason that we were converting to a new numbering system and needed to build new instruments. How many figures will our calipers need to display in any given base?
- At the bottom end of the scale is binary, naturally. These calipers would have 1 1111 0100 0000 divisions and therefore 13 figures.
- Ternary calipers are already an enormous improvement - 101 222 022 divisions, 9 figures.
- Quaternary brings us to 1 331 000, 7 figures.
- Quinary and senary (a.k.a. seximal), 224 000 and 101 012, are one step better and use 6 figures.
- Septimal (32 216) through nonary (11 868) use 5 figures.
- Decimal (8000) through vigesimal (base twenty, 1000) use 4 figures.
- ...and then it's 3 figures until you get to base ninety.
So, what does this say to me?
I would argue that, for most terrestrial purposes, this degree of precision is a good proxy for how many figures a person doing manual calculations would need to be able to process to complete their tasks. Some calculations are more precise than this, naturally, but outside of fields like accounting or astronomy, they are unlikely to be grossly more precise than this. Therefore, a pragmatic comparison of how difficult manual calculations are should be focused on calculations using this many figures - comparing four figures of long division in decimal to seven in quaternary, or four in decimal to six in senary, or four in decimal to ... four in dozenal. Or hexadecimal. Or vigesimal.
Look, numbers being longer might be a good reason to not go for a small base, but numbers being shorter is a poor reason to go for a big base because the numbers are barely shorter. Returns diminish after decimal, and I think that's really the most important takeaway.
Edit 2021-02-12: Because it feels a little bit unfair to choose a number so ideally suited to decimal, if we instead bump it up to 15 000 divisions (as would be for a 300mm (~12") metric caliper), this ... adds one figure each to binary, decimal, and bases 21 and 22. And the most significant digit is 1 in all of those cases.
So yes, there's not nothing in it between decimal and vigesimal, but in this range there's still not much.
Here are the conditions of the experiment:
- Starting with F0 = 0 and F1 = 1, calculate all Fibonacci numbers up to F[ten] via addition.
- Using long division, calcuate the ratio of F[ten] and F[nine] to estimate ϕ (the golden ratio).
- Repeat for every positional system base that has a Wikipedia page: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 16, 20, and 60.
I think as far as practical utility of bases of arithmetic, there is a lot we didn't test by doing this operation, but the stuff we did test was very informative.
Edit 2021-02-12: Here is a Twitch highlight of the stream where we did the experiment, for people who want to watch nearly two and a half hours of arithmetic by hand.
Too tired to originate anything new today, so we're gonna go through some of the PICO-8 carts on our hard drive that we've written and copy out comments that we find amusing. (Note: one of these is amusing to us for non-screen-reader-able reasons.)
( Read more... )Interesting to note how many of the comments on our code are exceedingly practical. Useful? We don't know yet. But they get to the point.
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Someone made a comment on the fediverse and got me curious about the history of emoji's four different mailbox symbols. Crossposting here because why not?
( Most of an answer to the question, in 653 words. )
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I don't think I'm cut out for being a professional philosopher - a lot of the job of such philosophers is to study, understand, and respond to popular positions held by other philosophers, however asinine or incoherent, and because "asinine" and "incoherent" are philosophical judgments, you can't make any agreed-upon list of works to exclude on that basis. I can deal with the stuff sometimes, but my tolerance for it is too limited to do the job in any kind of consistent way.
I do like philosophy, though, and philosophizing. And I've been thinking about how to define art lately - "art" as in the all-of-it thing, not specifically visual art - and that turned into the following.
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