Rogue Government Twitter Accounts

The tweets in the Rogue POTUS Staff Twitter account are very interesting. (At minimum, it is very entertaining, though in the 2017 world of "fake news", one also has to be cautious about whether accounts like these are real ones.) Also take a look at this list of accounts (including several Resistance accounts). And it all started with a National Park Service Twitter account going rogue.

As I mentioned a few days ago on Facebook, "National Park Service Twitter Account Goes Rogue" would make a great event card for the 2K16–2K17 version of Illuminati. (I don't know of any plans for one, but given that the world feels now that way, it simply has to happen.) The dystopian fiction novels and movies also seem to have missed out on that. Well, some probably do have something like that, but truth is definitely stranger than fiction. The Rogue POTUS Staff account is also right out of dystopian fiction (except that now it's dystopian fact, or "dystopian nonfiction", if you prefer).

Indeed, like now feels like an Illuminati, with some aspects of Paranoia involved for good measure.

Update: Here is one version of a meme that has been going around during the last few days.

Bulwer-Lyton "Winners": 2012 Edition

Here are the winners of the 2012 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Some of the entries are brilliant, and some of them are just plain bad. I actually liked a few of the dishonorable mentions.

(Tip of the cap to Puck Rombach.)

Is Alice in Wonderland about drugs or mathematics?

Apparently, at least one person thinks that many parts of Alice in Wonderland were about Lewis Carroll's (aka, Charles Dogson's) attempts to criticize the newfangled mathematics of the day (such as symbolic algebra with imaginary numbers). The full article appears in New Scientist.

I browsed through the article. It's certainly conceivable that Dodgson did this, but other than the obvious feasibility given that Dodgson was a mathematician (and a very conservative one with respect to mathematical ideas) and I find the idea being put forth to be a very interesting one, I don't really find the argument for this interpretation to be overly convincing. However, because it is rather interesting, I'd be curious to see the author of the New Scientist article give a seminar about it. Maybe I'll have a chance at some point. (She is doing a Ph.D. here, after all.)

2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest "Winners"

Here they are. (Tip of the cap to Josh Hime.)

Another Bulwer-Lytton entry

Inspired by a failed analogy in an expository article I'm currently writing about the FPU problem, I devised (and have since submitted) another entry for the Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest:

As predictable as the regular dynamics of a periodic trajectory in a completely integrable system, James Bond had ferocious, passionate sex with the seductive, evil temptress repeatedly (although one major difference is that inverse scattering theory can be used to understand the former situation but not the latter).

This sentence is actually completely accurate mathematically!

(By the way, my failed analogy is that I tried to give my readers intuition about regular dynamics by comparing their predictability to James Bond movies. One of my coauthors pointed out that analogies only help when they actually increase understanding, though he phrased things much more tactfully than that. My attempt to explain why the standard superposition principle doesn't work for nonlinear problems using the double suicide in Romeo and Juliet was even worse.)

Sentence of the Day (Bulwer-Lytton edition)

After seeing a particular "awesome" (and awesome!) line in Super Paper Mario (it was along the lines of "I will hit you like an unseen dodgeball in a sweaty high-school gym" and I assume it was borrowed from something similar in the movie Dodgeball) last night, I was reminded of the Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest. I just wrote and submitted the following entry:


"After staring lustily at a frustratingly vicious--yet oddly compelling--differential equation that reminded him vaguely and for no good reason of his recently imprisoned ex-girlfriend, the notion that he was about to retire and shouldn't bother with such nonsense hit Professor Cvitanovic like Morrissey singing about a bad debt that he (Cvitanovic, not Morrissey) could not pay."


By the way, here are the 2007 winners of the contest. (And, yes, I did borrow the last name of my former [unofficial] postdoc advisor.)

Please share your "awesome" sentences in this spot. I think that one can do considerably "better" than my entry.


Update: The person who runs the contest (Scott Rice) responded to my submission with the following comment: "Only one submission, from a person with your powers of invention?" Now I feel compelled to come up with more sentences... Any thoughts on what I should put in there? Currently, I'm thinking of being meta- and including the idea of being short of inspiring ideas for a clever sentence. Maybe I can just be recursive? Here's a start: "Short of ideas for an "awesome" sentence to submit to the Bulwer-Lytter bad fiction contest, Oxford professor Mason Porter decided to rely on recursion." This clearly needs some embellishment, however, and I'd like to make the sentence itself recursive.