Monday Links from the Barnyard vol. CCXV

[NickFitz]

Stone me, there's a lot of words in that Frank Sinatra thing.

The subscribers got their money's worth that week

[NickFitz]

Seems like enumerating tie knots is quite a trendy academic cottage industry

The following paper was posted to the ArXiv only last week

More ties than we thought

Yes, that's their paper - there's a link to it towards the end of the blurb about the knot generator

[OwlHoot]

Random tie knots - "In 2000, Cambridge physicists Fink and Mao figured out a way to list all possible tie knots. They did it by creating a formal language to describe tie knots... During 2013, I have worked out, in collaboration with Anders Sandberg, Meredith L. Patterson and Dan Hirsh, the ramifications of removing Fink and Mao's restrictions. We have condensed the formal language proposed by Fink and Mao to a language with (almost) no axioms and three symbols: W, T, U. T is a clockwise (turnwise) move of the knot-tying blade, W is a counter-clockwise move, and U tucks the blade under a previous bow. Whether to start with an inwards or outwards crossing can be deduced by counting the total number of W and T in the knot description string, and all possible strings in W and T produce possible tie knots." So naturally they've created an online tool to give you diagrams showing how to tie a randomly-selected knot from the set of all tie knots. ...

Seems like enumerating tie knots is quite a trendy academic cottage industry

The following paper was posted to the ArXiv only last week

More ties than we thought

[d000hg]

Thinking what?

If you don't know, you're not.

[doodab]

Some consultants in suits saying that the lightbulb isn’t enterprise ready and needs to be made more modular and hook up to their Enterprise Service Bridge and Messaging Architecture and to communicate using 17 different SOAP and WS-* standards dreamed up by people with important job titles at BEA, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM, but which nobody has actually ever sat down and implemented without wanting to stab someone in the face so many times they don’t have a face left. Usually themselves.

There is a lot of money in it though

[BrilloPad]

Anyone else thinking it?

Thinking what?

[d000hg]

Anyone else thinking it?

[NickFitz]

Quite a nice day earlier, but now it's lunchtime the clouds gather to drive one back indoors to the Web:

• How many software developers would it take to change a lightbulb? - Excellent rehash of the old joke by Tom Morris: "One person to go to the shop to buy a lightbulb. Another person who goes and tries to buy a lightbulb but fails because the shop doesn’t accept Bitcoin. He pops on to Reddit to complain and in the process compares his situation to that of the Jews in Nazi Germany." And so on
  
  
• 14 Days of Genitals - "It's been an entire year since Amy and Meaghan peer-pressured themselves into writing about the grossest animal sex facts they could find, spewing out one each day until their google search history threatened to become a sentient, malevolent beast. To save the world, and their eyeballs, they gave up on day 8. This year, there's no backing down... Prep yourself for two weeks of bizarre, fascinating, and typically pretty horrifying animal sex facts. We've got nothing but the best/worst for you, building to a natural crescendo on February 14th." The perfect Valentine's day read.
  
  
• Things That Cost More Than Space Exploration - "As a reference for people who think that space exploration costs too much, here's a list of things that cost even more."
  
  
• Amanda, @TrappedAtMyDesk on Twitter, Dies, Age Unknown - "She is survived by her 5,141 followers, but did she ever exist?" Jennifer Mendelsohn attempts to track down the young Canadian woman who supposedly died last year of advanced glioblastoma multiforme (mentioned in a post I linked to a few weeks back) and finds that the only evidence for her existence seems to be her Twitter account.
  
  
• Random tie knots - "In 2000, Cambridge physicists Fink and Mao figured out a way to list all possible tie knots. They did it by creating a formal language to describe tie knots... During 2013, I have worked out, in collaboration with Anders Sandberg, Meredith L. Patterson and Dan Hirsh, the ramifications of removing Fink and Mao's restrictions. We have condensed the formal language proposed by Fink and Mao to a language with (almost) no axioms and three symbols: W, T, U. T is a clockwise (turnwise) move of the knot-tying blade, W is a counter-clockwise move, and U tucks the blade under a previous bow. Whether to start with an inwards or outwards crossing can be deduced by counting the total number of W and T in the knot description string, and all possible strings in W and T produce possible tie knots." So naturally they've created an online tool to give you diagrams showing how to tie a randomly-selected knot from the set of all tie knots.
  
  
• Anatomy of a poisoned image: colour-coded JavaScript! - "You may have read recently about a newly-discovered attack that involves injecting code into your browser using poisoned image files." Very nifty little trick, though possibly less nifty when it turns your computer into a bot
  
  
• Frank Sinatra Has a Cold - ""Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism -- a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction." Gay Talese's classic profile of the crooner.
  
  
• A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Doge. Wow. - Very grammar. So explicate.
  
  
• Every Apple reference ever made in Futurama and The Simpsons - "With a combined 33 seasons between them, both Futurama and The Simpsons are awash with references to Apple. Some of these references take the form of biting commentary while others are much more subtle."
  
  
• things fitting perfectly into other things - "Seeing totally unrelated objects perfectly nestle inside of each other provides a certain kind of peace in an otherwise chaotic world." Indeed:
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!