Tales from the ArXiv: Mathematics Paper or Science-Fiction Novel?

A new paper, which looks very fascinating, that just appeared on arXiv is called Tropical Principal Component Analysis on the Space of Ultrametrics.

Tropical PCA sounds very promising and fascinating. Additionally, I think the title of this paper would make a great title for a science-fiction novel.

A Novel-Writing Algorithm

This also works for academic writing.

😅 @tomgauld and the novel writing algorithm 📚💻 pic.twitter.com/5WTk6XxTXt

— Dr Jess Wade 👩🏻‍🔬 (@jesswade) February 23, 2019

Network Structure of "Choose Your Own Adventure" Novels

Network structure is very important for 'choose your own adventure' books. (My strategy was to do an exhaustive search, noting any infinite-length walks.) If you don't believe me, you can see for yourself.

Cycles FTW!

One More Turn (Again): Civilization VI

The Mac version of Civilization VI came out today, three days after the Windows release. I need to get used to the new mechanics.

I am playing as Gorgo (Greece, Spartans). My second city is Rhodes, though when my slinger covered the "RH", it looked like "ODES" rather than "RHODES". I wanted to change the city name to "ODEs", but I couldn't figure out how to do it. (I have also been having some trouble picking up some of the commands for simple things.) Given the set of leaders and civs, clearly there are now going to be multiple leaders within a given civ. Two examples of this were available so far, but given these examples and other descriptions (e.g., of the Americans), there will be more. Given the "Selfie" achievement, one's opponents can also include the same leader.

Thus far, I have picked up the "Escort Service" achievement (unsurprisingly). Two achievements that I want to acquire are "Luftballons" and "Missed That Day in History Class" — the former because it's a gratuitous Nena reference (with an associated nice combination of things to get it) and the latter simply because it's highly amusing. Other cultural references in the achievement list so far include the B-52's song "Roam" and the Lego movie.

I'm not yet sure what I think about the Civ VI way of doing things. Clearly I'll need to play more and find out. (It will probably also be beneficial to do a multiplayer game to accelerate learning, but I don't know if the Mac and Windows are ready to interface with each other yet.) I also need to get work done, and I have a very large backlog of papers to finish and other things with hard deadlines to do. And I have a couple of novels I really want to read, and the World Series starts tomorrow. :)

Update (10/27/16): Also, I really hope that Civ VI is still making fun of Dan Quayle. :) This is having a significant effect on his legacy in history. If not for Civ, many people would never have heard of him and he'd be all but forgotten by many others by now. Civ may actually help give him a more "permanent" legacy!

Update (11/06/16): I won a Culture Victory and achieved the level of Emperor Nero. I can also confirm that Civ is still making fun of Dan Quayle (25 years later...), which is again the lowest level of achievement in the game. Eventually, people playing this series of games will probably wonder if he was ever a real person. :)

Book Recommendation: The Bone Season

I am now about 60% through The Bone Season, and I am really enjoying it. Highly recommended!

Especially highly recommend if you like dystopian fantasy (the book scores very high in world building, which tends to be a big win for me), and especially highly recommended if you've spent time in Oxford.

(So far, most of the book takes place in dystopian Oxford—including dystopian High Table, dystopian Magdalen deer park, dystopian tutorial, etc.)

Things to Do on the Last Night Before Your International Move

Things to do on the last night before your international move:

1. Order a bunch of novels to arrive at your new place.

2. Finally order that 120-sided die (d120) you've been eyeing for months.

3. Get ice cream. (Seriously, how could I not go to G & D's on my last night here?)

Ready Player One

I just finished reading Ready Player One (which several people told me to read during the past few years, given the prominent role that 80s pop and gaming culture play in the game).

It was fun, I spent some quality time geeking out, and the book stands out very well on its own as a novel (which is crucial, because allusions by themselves can't fully carry a novel). The 80s pop and gaming culture did help, though!

Columbus, Ohio plays an important role in the book, and I just so happened (without planning it) to read almost all of the book while in Columbus.

(By the way, just about all of the musical references were too mainstream, and the author messed up the lyrics from the Howard Jones song.)

Comparing Novels Based Only on Punctuation

Can one algorithmically discern writing styles in novels based only on punctuation (no words)?

Take a look at this discussion.

I want to see someone compare the writing styles of different scientists in this way. :)

(Tip of the hat to Santa Fe Institute.)

Update (3/19/16): Here is my article on this for the Improbable Research blog.

Every Flavor Except for a Set of Measure Zero?

I saw these Harry-Potter-inspired jelly beans at a market many years ago, and I was struck by "Every Flavor Beans" now coming with two more flavors. Perhaps they mean every flavor except for a set of measure zero?

"Brimstone Angels" Series of Forgotten Realms Novels

This evening I just finished the 4th book in the Brimstone Angels series of Forgotten Realms novels.

I read the 3rd book on the series last fall as part of my read of The Sundering series (which is the main track covering the transition from 4th edition Forgotten Realms to 5th edition), and I bought the first two books to introduce myself to the characters in that book. However, I decided to read the book, The Adversary, to go through the whole Sundering series (though with occasional break to read other books, such as following Drizzt Do'Urden and one or two things from other genres, as some of the books in The Sundering series weren't all that great) before getting back to the first two books.

I found that I enjoyed "The Adversary" a great deal. It was one of the best D & D novels I had read in a long time. It is well-written, and the characters are interesting --- and I also do enjoy Planar beings and politics in my novels. (I really dug the Planescape setting back in the day.) The occasional draconic swearing mixed in with the English also reminds me of Firefly, so that is a nice touch too. To keep this track going, I decided to read the 4th book first and will treat books 1 and 2 as preludes. (Book 4, called Fire in the Blood is also very good.) I'm not sure if I will get through them both before the 5th book comes out in December (and I would like to jump to that to keep the story going), especially as I want to read the next Do'Urden book that comes out next month.

Every time I go on sabbatical and have some more time or it's the summer and I have more time, if I find a good fantasy novel, I am reminded how much I enjoy them --- even though during the school year, it's hard to spend much time at all reading novels. Around the last month or so, I have tried to make it a point to at least read a little bit of a novel on most days. (It would be really nice to keep that up; it makes me happy.) I also really miss playing in a D & D campaign, so between wanting to find a way to play RPGs regularly again and enjoying a really good D & D novel, I have been thinking about D & D a lot lately (including reminiscing about adventures from days gone by, browsing a bit through some 1st edition books, etc.). I used to have so much more time for reading novels and playing D & D, and it would be really nice to recover that. I have become so busy in the last few years.

So, this is my book recommendation for the day. I think it's been quite a while since I blogged about a novel!

A Physicist's Thriller

Cornell physics professor Paul McEuen has published a sci-fi thriller novel. I have never been a big fan of thrillers (except for Michael Jackson's song, of course), though I feel inspired every time one of my fellow scientists publishes a novel. I'll do that one day too.

Paul has a few more grey hairs now, but one of my first thoughts the first time I saw him over a bit over a decade ago was that he looked like John Lennon. (I talked to Paul about some stuff related to me PhD dissertation when he first came to Cornell while I was in graduate school.)

Killed off in chapter 1?

I have heard rumors that a literary mathematician who is named after me is slated to be killed off in chapter 1 of a book. Granted, the rumor is now several years old, and this could easily change. Tom Hanks should clearly play him in the movie version.

Simile of the Day

Today's simile comes from Dune: "The thought hung like a sine wave in Leto's mind"

Reaction 1: Ummm... what?

After a slight delay, I had Reaction 2: What function would make this simile work?

Mort

This evening, I saw a play called Mort, which was adapted from the eponymous Terry Pratchett book. I have (obviously) heard of Discworld, but I have never actually read any of it. Nevertheless, the idea of a play based on stuff like that sounded appealing [and, interestingly, Tolkien's (great? great great?) granddaughter, an Oxford freshman, was in the play so there are other fantasy connections as well] and I was not disappointed. (It turns out that one of my perturbation methods students from last term was also in the play.)

I hadn't know about the play until I read a review of it in one of Oxford's student newspapers, and I was thankfully able to make it today (the last day). The author of the review seemed to find it mediocre, but I was intrigued by both the theme and his/her comments that the character of Death had a very dry sense of humor. That was more than enough to make me want to see it because I like that sort of thing. Sure enough, Death was awesome!

One thing this makes me want to do is read the book, but in looking at Mort's wikipedia entry, there appear to be three books that come before it. My question to the audience is first whether this is necessary for this particular book and second (independent of the answer to the first query) what you think of those three preceding books (as well as this one).