Publishing random guff

[simont]

Every so often, in the course of my life, I think about something. Often, when I've thought about it, I write something down about it in a text file on a computer, to maximise the chance of me not losing the results of my thinking, and being able to look those results up when the thing in question next occurs to me.

As a result of successfully not losing a load of these files, I have a gradually growing collection of random unpublished musings; many mathematical (ranging from pointlessly pure mathematics through to applications to everyday life), some more practical (my recipe collection), and one or two in other fields such as literature. A representative set of examples might be:

• a collection of fractions with particularly cute decimal expansions (such as 100/9899, whose expansion displays the Fibonacci sequence)
• an analysis of the optimal strategy for a driver approaching traffic lights
• a failed attempt to derive a generally usable meaning for the phrase ‘twice as likely’
• a recipe for satay sauce
• a set of notes on the various ways in which I've so far failed to cook coeliac-friendly lemon chicken
• notes on my recent re-reading of the Narnia series (I hadn't read them since before I knew anything much about Christianity, and was curious to see just how extensive its reputed Christian allegory actually was)
• a small collection of ideas for SF or fantasy novels which I will (let's face it) never make even a token attempt to write
• instructions for teaching oneself the juggling trick known as ‘Rubenstein's Revenge’, which I posted to Usenet more than once back in my serious-juggling days and saved in case I ever needed to post it again

… and so on. All a bit eclectic, not all with a happy ending, and in many cases not very well written, because none of it was particularly intended for other people to read.

But the more stuff like this I randomly jot down, the more I idly wonder if any of it might be useful or interesting to anyone else. As a general supporter of the idea that all other things being equal information ought to be free, I occasionally feel faintly guilty that I write this stuff and don't even consider publishing it. It probably wouldn't take me too much effort to polish up quite a lot of these writings and shove them up on a junk-pile page on my website, and at times I'm inclined to feel that even if only two or three people have their lives the least bit enriched by that then it might be worth me putting the (minimal) effort in.

On the other hand, some of it's controversial; the Narnia example above is a good one. While I'd be happy to make my notes on Narnia available to anyone who's particularly interested in knowing what I thought, and also happy to receive genuinely interesting comments pointing out things I might have missed, I don't particularly fancy the idea of receiving hate mail from people who think I'm attacking their religion, or well-meaning attempts to persuade me to see it all differently. (And I also wouldn't want to get into a discussion deep enough to require reference to the books, since I've now given them back to the person I borrowed them from.) I worry that if I publish this sort of thing on my website it might be interpreted as a general invitation to send comment and criticism, and I'm not sure I want to do that.

I'd be interested to know what my readers think. People who read this diary, after all, are precisely people who are interested in random things that happen to cross my mind (or who are at least too polite to say they're not :-), so if anyone is going to want to read any of this stuff then I'd expect someone round here to be among them. Any thoughts?

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_kent/]

I'd be interested in your observations on Narnia, if for no other reason than I have recently re-read them myself, for much the same reasons (and, of course, so that I can geekishly rip apart the new movie.)

[simont]

Ah yes, the movie. Oddly, I decided to re-read Narnia, and finished doing so, shortly before I heard about the movie, which caused me to be quite startled when a trailer showed up before Wallace and Gromit!

The group I was with wasn't 100% convinced by the trailer, because its wide sweeping vistas gave us a strong feeling that someone had thought "quick, what else can we film that we can make look like Lord of the Rings?", and indeed at one point in the trailer I had trouble visually distinguishing Aslan from a Warg. I might go to see it regardless, although it's more likely that I'll do what I usually do with vaguely interesting-looking films, which is to persistently fail to get myself organised until it's not on in cinemas any more.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_kent/]

I'm just fascinated to see how they're going to make a film out of it at all. From reading the book recently, I was surprised at how little actually goes on; if it were a text adventure, you could solve it by typing FOLLOW ASLAN, or whoever it is that's present at the time. The kids do very little themselves other than follow the character they met most recently (Queen, Otter, Aslan) and tuck into whatever food that character provides. In which case, I feel they must have invented an awful lot of scenes in order to have made a two hour epic movie. I also hope they've struck lucky with the actor playing Lucy, because they're stuck with her for a while.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

When I met the selection of people around the Gallery in Cambridge I spent a few weeks idly bimbling around the little nest of interlinked websites that I could find via google. I didn't read anything in much detail, but it was nice to get an overview of the (sometimes impressively esoteric) things that these people were or had been interested in. On those grounds I'd say it would be worth publishing them if it's not too much hassle.

Why don't you just dump one a week to LJ? You could tag them as 'junk pile', and the location makes it clear that you're probably not interested in any in-depth debate over the contents...

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Actually I meant 'impressively eclectic'... but esoteric too :)

[simont]

I probably ought to have thought of that myself. In particular, an LJ entry is dated, which implicitly suggests that keeping it permanently up-to-date is probably not on the cards. I think part of my worry is that if I post (say) the traffic-lights thing on the web then I might feel an ongoing compulsion to maintain it, making additions and corrections in response to readers' comments. Posting on LJ would neatly get around that effect.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Moreover, you can backdate LJ entries. That way you have them for reference and they're readable to anyone curiously browsing your archives, but they don't intrude on flists or attract too much attention.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Though it would have the disadvantage that people who wanted to be kept up-to-date on new entries couldn't use the friends list feature to do so.

In which case, a separate account (whether personal or -- for ease of posting without logging out -- a [closed] community) might be better.

[mair_in_grenderich]

ease of posting without logging out

There's a "post as a different user" button. It has the disadvantage that you can't choose an icon, but that's about it.

Alternatively, LJ clients such as logjam...

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested in reading them.

I doubt you'd get THAT much junk mail about it if you didn't advertise them too much.

[mooism.livejournal.com]

Stick them on a wiki? People will polish the things that are worth polishing. Would any of it fit on Wikipedia?

Starting a wiki of your very own for it might not work unless you got lots of traffic, but maybe you do?

[zotz]

a failed attempt to derive a generally usable meaning for the phrase ‘twice as likely’

It's "twice as unlikely" or "twice as small" that wind me up.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Guaging my colloquialism I would have said:

Twice as likely as probability p (p small) means probability 2p.
Twice as likely as probability p (p not small) is meaningless.
Twice as unlikely as probability 1-p (p small) means probability 1-2p.
Twice as unlikely as probability p (p not near one) is meaningless.

Twice as small means half as big?

[zotz]

Twice as unlikely seems to be used either to mean half as likely or twice as far short of certain (your third line, above), with no clear way of knowing which.

Twice as small may be used to mean half as big, but isn't always.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Twice as unlikely seems to be used either to mean half as likely or twice as far short of certain (your third line, above), with no clear way of knowing which.

Hmmm. That *could* make sense. Is it dependent on how unlikely it is? (OK, how unlikely something is isn't a defined measure...) Obviously an unlikely thing can't be twice as far short of certain. I'm trying to think of an example of a likely thing that something would be colloquially described as 'twice as unlikely as'...

Twice as small may be used to mean half as big, but isn't always.

How do people use it?

Twice as hot (or cold), now *that*'s (invariably) used stupidly.

[simont]

This is beginning to come close to the sort of thing I was trying for in my failed attempt. It was clear that for probabilities near zero "twice as likely" meant roughly doubling the probability, and clear that for probabilities near one, "twice as unlikely" meant roughly getting twice as far away from one; and then it occurred to me that a layperson might naively expect "twice as likely" and "twice as unlikely" to be inverses under composition (so that "twice as likely" as 0.99 would be around 0.995). So I searched for a function which had gradient 2 near zero and gradient 1/2 near 1, and then I generalised to "k times as likely" and searched for a family of such functions, so that f_k had gradient k at zero and gradient 1/k at 1, and such that f_k composed with f_m was f_(km).

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. The "twice as likely" one seems wrong in the middle somehow, if twice p=0.5 is "just a bit more than that", the function would sort of accord, but restricting the usage seems as good an answer.

Of course, I need to go and find some suitable functions Fs anyway for my own satisfaction.

[simont]

That was my eventual conclusion, yeah. I found functions which had all the properties I'd aimed for, but they behaved so unhelpfully in the mid-range that I despaired of getting anyone to even begin to agree that they were a good definition of the phrase "n times as likely" in the general case :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Which is always very unsatisfying to write up, isn't it?

I think I will leave this for more productive persuits ;)

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I'm party to a fair number of discussions about sharing teaching materials and I think it's for exactly these sorts of reasons that people don't share teaching materials more.

Some things need polishing up. Other things you might be happy to tell your students but might be a bit controversial written down in black and white (such-and-such a textbook is much better than another textbook, or for instance the session I did this week giving advice to students on how to make their mathematics look better to someone marking it).

It doesn't mean they wouldn't be useful to other people teaching the same course, and you'd be extremely happy to hand them over to someone who you knew would use them, but you might feel a bit uneasy putting them straight on the web. There needs to be something inbetween but I can't quite decide what that should be.

[drswirly.livejournal.com]

Ooh, Juliette. Did you wander on to Planet Gareth and download my thesis recently? If it was you, what on earth were you doing such a silly thing for? I'd stick to the Badgers if I were you.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

No it wasn't me!

I did get an e-mail requesting an electronic copy of my thesis from someone random at Oxford I think about a year ago. I wanted to tell them it wasn't worth reading but I just sent them a copy instead.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Polishing it up would be nice, but might never get there. Sticking it all in a wiki (ETA: a la mooism) would be better than the current situation, as at least it would be available, and people could badger you on what they're interested in. But I know how it is: one always thinks "But tomorrow I might format it properly" :)

Mostly, I like dennyd's suggestion. Once a week (or month, or 6 months) write one up a bit and publish it. You should keep ahead of yourself that way.

Specifically, I'm curious about the sf novel ideas :) If you'll really never take up, you never know, they might inspire someone else.

[antinomy.livejournal.com]

I have half a dozen pieces of random guff buried in my website, polemics, commentry, stuff I wrote years ago and never quite figured out what to do with... Despite the nature of some of it, I've never actually had anyone mail me to rant about it or want to get into an argument, and it's been around some time now, and a few people a week seem to read most of the pieces.

FWIW :)

[xaosenkosmos.livejournal.com]

100/9899, what an amusing (gentle ab)use of generating functions. It probably says something that we just finished those in my combinatorics class, yet we never got to see this wonderful trick =)

In the same vein, 99...9/99...8 has a fun pattern as well. I'm feeling totally cheated here. I suppose i should try to read Knuth's treatment of GFs and see if they make sense at this point.

[simont]

Oddly, I derived that fraction through a means completely unrelated to generating functions, and only realised later on that its denominator had a suspicious resemblance to the Fibonacci difference equation. This kind of interconnectedness is one of the most wonderful things about maths, in my book.

100/9899

[pne.livejournal.com]

Hm... apparently that number isn't in The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/). Why don't you submit it?

I considered doing so, but thought it would be more proper if your name were attached to it.

Decimal expansions of certain numbers are certainly some of the sequences stored there; as, for example, pi (as sequence A000796) (http://www.research.att.com/projects/OEIS?Anum=A000796) or the decimal expansion of 1/7 (as sequence A02080) (http://www.research.att.com/projects/OEIS?Anum=A02080). So why not 100/9899, especially since you can cross-reference it to other sequences already in the database, specifically the Fibonacci sequence (A000045) (http://www.research.att.com/projects/OEIS?Anum=A000045).

[metamoof.livejournal.com]

My maths is a little rusty unfortunately, so I'm wondering if it actually keeps generating the fibonnaci sequence endlessly or whether it has some limit (so far, up to 40 dt is seems to work fine) and why that might be the case.

So yeah, if you want to do more posts on funky stuff like that, I'm all for it...

HAKMEM?

[pne.livejournal.com]

The first thing I thought of was HAKMEM (see definitions at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAKMEM), FOLDOC (http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?HAKMEM), or the Jargon File (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/HAKMEM.html), if you're not familiar with it), which I saw described as "A legendary collection of neat mathematical and programming hacks contributed by many people at MIT and elsewhere. [...] Some of them are very useful techniques, powerful theorems, or interesting unsolved problems, but most fall into the category of mathematical and computer trivia."

And if such a motley collection of "useful" and "powerful" items can coexist with "trivia", and be interesting enough that people published it and other people read it, why not your musings?

Re: HAKMEM?

[oneplusme.livejournal.com]

This also (to me at least) suggests that a Wiki might be a useful format if you wanted to allow it to accrete random bits of vaguely-related information from the sorts of people who'd be likely to read it.

(The only major downsides are that such a beast would require some maintenance (at least enough to counter any annoying sabotage); and that, judging by my publicfile logs, there are more than a few security holes (of the embarrassing "request a URI ending in '|cat_;_nastycommand_;_nastycommand'" variety) in some of the standard Wiki software.)

[timotab.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that "Publishing Random Guff" is what LJ, and blogging in general, is all about.

[rmc28]

I have a bunch of random bits of thought on my webpage - generally the second or third time I'm writing substantially the same email I make it a webpage. Thus I wrote about egg donation, and thus I rewrote the entire egg donation stuff to answer all the questions I kept getting asked by email.

Also thus I wrote my presents page, and a random thing about car hire in Cambridge, and a little bit about weight loss tools, and the page explaining my surname, and I should probably at some point put together stuff about RSI.

The only one which seems to generate much actual comment is the egg donation, but the main benefit for me is that if someone asks me the same question again, I can post a url.

[rmc28]

Bugger, clicked 'post comment' too soon.

I was going to add, that I love reading this kind of thing on other people's webpages and I think you should publish them. The advantage of making them part of your website rather than blogging them is that they are easy to find again in future; the advantage of blogging them is that they turn up on my friends list without me making any effort. One could compromise and either make a collection of links on the website, or post links to static articles in one's blog.

It is allowed not to respond to every person who sends you unsolicited comments about your random thoughts.

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

I assume the lemon chicken problem is the batter, not the sauce? Is it just a question of finding a sane flour to use?

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

Oh and I wanna see the Narnia stuff too. Publish and be damned to them! ;)

Driver Approaching Traffic Lights

[(Anonymous)]

There's a webpage for the Driver Approaching Traffic Lights:
http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~dr105/wiki.pl?TrafficLightProblem

if you'd like to post your solution there.


Douglas

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Do pubish! :-)