Wntrmute's New Writeups

October 25, 2009 (idea)

2009-10-25T20:28:21Z

Some remarks on time on the day the clocks go back here in Britain.

<Dimview> My time is 23.26. Twenty minutes before midnight. And don't do that crazy weird thing that Wntrmute does.
<sam512> Last I checked, you were UK time + 1 hour. I'm in the UK and it's 22:37. That makes it 23:37 where you are, which is half eleven, not half midnight.
<Dimview> Saying 'half something' and meaning thirty minutes after the hour. Damned confusing.
<sam512> Oh, wait, you live in one of those countries where "half midnight" means "23:30"...
<sam512> I vaguely remember that from German class.
from the archive

Although potentially confusing when organising nodermeets in Europe, the differing representations of, say, 11:30 are at least understandable: balanced exactly between two hours, it's an arbitrary…

(in the mist) (how-to)

2009-08-01T13:40:30Z

A map of the mist

As a mathematician who dabbles in graph theory, I couldn't help but try and impose some order upon the tangled web of writeups in the mist. raincomplex's writeup above provides a schematic of the nodes and the links between them, but to do so without a messy overlap of joining lines each author appears several times. My first thought, then, was whether I could do better, and arrange the nodes into a map of the mist such that no paths crossed.

I couldn't. But I don't feel too bad about that, since no one else can either! Feeding a matrix representation of the graph into a suitable computer algebra system confirmed that it's non-planar: drawing it on a 2-d plane inevitably requires crossings. There will be a more exotic surface upon which it could be drawn in this way (there are non-planar graphs which can be arranged on a torus without crossings, for instance), but to do so requires determination of what's known as the…

Rule of succession (idea)

2009-05-28T22:07:29Z

There have been two London Park Nodermeets, The Sensible Thing and Hell Hath No Furry, and somehow each has produced a noder marriage. Next month we're holding another one, and so the question arises, what are the chances of it indeed being three times a charm?

As one of the more mathematically-inclined of the Britnoders, this question fell to me, but being a typical student I dithered so long that the meet writeup was posted before I'd reached an answer. It's easy to cook up a dodgy mathematical formula in support of a cause, and that particular flavour of bad science seems fairly popular with the media, so I wanted to set things on a vaguely…

Micromort (idea)

2009-05-16T17:19:42Z

A one-in-a-million chance of dying.

Reasoning about probability can be complicated stuff, and from false positives in medical screening to false hopes in lotteries, it seems that very rare outcomes cause particular difficulties. The micromort (µmt), introduced by Ronald A. Howard in the '80s, provides a handy unit for comparing (and valuing) such risks.

Every day around 50 people in England and Wales die as a result of accidents or violence, which, given the total population, means that Brits face a baseline risk of about a micromort a day. 230 miles by car adds another one- as does just six on a motorbike - whilst air travel introduces about a third of a micromort per flight, which might make you wonder about all the security theatre. The argument by the chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs that Ecstasy was no more risky than…

Seven Wonders of Wales (place)

2009-02-17T18:57:31Z

Pistyll Rhaeadr and Wrexham steeple,
Snowdon's mountain without its people,
Overton yew trees, St Winefride wells,
Llangollen bridge and Gresford bells.

This time last month I found myself in a pub in Wrexham with DTal and several of his Welsh friends. Having been outed as English, I felt it best to keep the conversation centred on the merits of Wales, and so I came to learn of its seven wonders. Despite my previous ignorance, it turned out that I'd managed to see two of them by accident during my trip: our drinking establishment was a stone's throw from St Giles', and I'd wandered over the Llangollen bridge earlier in the day.

In case the rhyme isn't sufficient guidance, the wonders are:

The 240ft waterfall Pistyll Rhaedr, known as "the hidden pearl of Wales".
St Giles' Church in Wrexham, or more precisely its 16th century tower (spireless, so not technically a steeple).
Snowdon,

…

disemvoweling (idea)

2008-11-15T17:00:01Z

Disemvoweling is an online moderation technique intended to discourage trolling, by removing all the vowels from posts deemed unsuitable. The signal-to-noise ratio is thus improved as disemvoweled comments are easily spotted by users and can be skipped over. The same is even more true of simply deleting posts, but disemvoweling has advantages if there is likely to be disagreement between the userbase and moderators as to what content is appropriate. A disemvoweled comment can still be deciphered with effort, which helps establish community standards for what will or won't be accepted; moderations also becomes more transparent, and overly zealous admins can be challenged on their decisions. Further, a 'delete-or-keep' approach can give a false impression of respectability, as only acceptable contributions survive the cut; with disemvoweling, persistent trolls will end up with a visible track record of their antics.

The technique was declared one of…