We need to fly ourselves before someone else tells us how

If you’re experiencing a constant inexplicable 30%-50% CPU spike on the latest version of Windows 10, and Task Manager CPU usages don’t add up to the total amount of CPU that is being taken away, and you have a copy of Prey 1.6.2 or later installed, and you’re running Windows Defender for antivirus protection, uninstall Prey.

Something about the combination of Prey and Windows Defender causes this spike in CPU, and this spike in CPU won’t be properly reported in the Performance Manager or Task Manager.

I found the secret, the key to the vault

Q. We will have 600 people at a conference.  How many possible two-person pairs does that allow?

A. In order to solve this problem, let’s solve some easier problems first.

Let’s have all 600 people line up in a row. How many ways are there to line up 600 people? Well, first we have to choose the first person. There are 600 choices for that first person, that is, any of those 600 could go first. Then, who goes second? We have 599 people left. So, to figure out how many ways we can choose the first and second people in a line of 600 people, we calculate 600 \times 599.

Now if we continue this logic through all 600 people, choosing the first, the second, the third and so on, we have 600 \times 599 \times 598 \times ... \times 2 \times 1 ways to line up 600 people in a row.

In other words, there are:

n!

ways to line up n people in a row.

But that’s not the right answer to our original problem. Let’s try to get that answer closer to the original answer we wanted. Let’s say we divided each of those n! rows of people evenly into pairs, taking them each two by two in order of the row. In that case, it wouldn’t matter if the first pair contained Alice or Bob, or Bob and Alice. Within a single pair, we don’t care what the ordering of the people in that pair is.

For 600 people, there are \frac{600}{2} pairs or 300 pairs. So, the number of ways those pairs might have swapped the first for the second is:

2^{(n/2)}

or

2^{300}

Therefore, the number of ways to order 600 people, ignoring the ways to merely swap a pair of people, is:

\frac{n!}{2^{(n/2)}}

We’ve only got one more step to get an answer. Notice that while we’ve taken care of the case where a single pair of people are swapped, we haven’t taken care of the case where a pair of people is swapped with another pair of people. In other words, we don’t care whether it’s Alice and Bob followed by Carol and Dan, or if it’s Carol and Dan followed by Alice and Bob. So, we need to also divide by the number of ways to order 300 pairs of people. As we know from above, there are 300! ways to order 300 things. To ignore swapping pairs of n things, we need to divide by:

(\frac{n}{2})!

So let’s take a look at our final formula, which takes into account the ways we can choose n people, ignoring a swapped pair of two people, and also ignoring swapped pairs of people:

\frac{n!}{2^{(n/2)}(\frac{n}{2})!}

Let’s plug in 600 for n:

\frac{600!}{2^{(600/2)}(\frac{600}{2})!}

You can calculate this answer yourself if you use this online calculator and type in this formula:

factorial(600)/((2^300)*factorial(300))

And the final answer is:

20299494504975046998919287449873410470997357804758211063721976583706422622634310664749224388884590269998727324428213387255541766852932670293525215442782845850504673539731874399587442544304231110137690187784329507343362926071687926881971286798898101131291812616898256941583266763117277837275494612974900361671054080465269588991957333261517244301454739566468807941392242311971355600470078712743427938618979975606792194984446656667657442933360294907518626757601942083083777871670367139824740426506309108861774164088710713776707958145172725276913976407882104654927353162897086086095583774650925737362888935120898319907547868981167560993231144350620620065824638747855636344841201434974209405481815338134765625

…exactly.

Addenda: This is a semi-demi-hemi famous problem in combinatorics.  This problem and its solution tends to rear its head in a lot of superficially unrelated areas.  Here’s a menagerie of problems that all have this same solution.

When figuring out how to explain this problem, I stole a lot of ideas from here.

Ten thousand men of Harvard gained victory today

As I do every year, I want to congratulate the current class year on completing your Harvard degree. Your Harvard degree provides you access to important advantages and benefits as you go through life. About two months after you graduate, the bursar’s office will be sending you an alumni card that looks like this.

Harvard Alumni Card

Make sure not to lose this card.

I am going to give you a lot of information on the benefits and rewards you receive by being a Harvard graduate. Normally I have handouts at this point, but there was a problem with printing, so just take notes on your iPhones and things. There’s a web site with all this information on it. Before the end of the presentation, I will… try to get that web site address for you.

Harvard alumni get free upgrades from economy to first class on any airline trip within the lower 48 states. This is a really valuable benefit, so make sure to use the Harvard discount code when booking.

When you enter a boardroom during a board meeting, all people who graduated from non-Ivy League schools must stand at attention until you are seated.

You receive 15% off any Disney multi-park pass, Tuesday through Thursday, holidays excepted.

The Band-Aid corporation provides you free Band-Aids in our own computer matched skin tone. Click on the “Harvard” link on www.band-aid.com .

At most four-star hotels, when you check in, you will receive a special bar of soap that deep cleans without drying out the skin. This should happen automatically; you won’t need your card for this.

You get a special dispensation that allows you to drive up to 75 mph in 55 zones. If a police officer pulls you over, present your alumni card, and the officer will scan the barcode into a computer. At this point, you pay the police officer $1, and then you should be permitted to leave. If he detains you at this point, make sure to contact the bursar’s office.

Some of you own apartments and condos. If one of your tenants has just been married, you may at your option sleep with the wife or the husband or both during the first night of their marriage. But in fairness I must tell you, times are changing. Since 2005 this has become frowned upon and rarely happens anymore. So, I am not going to tell you what to do here, but try to use good judgement, okay?

Also, Harvard alumni have seniority when a group is deciding who will lead the Pledge of Allegiance.

For a while we got a dollar off any KFC $5 Fill Up Meal, but I think that expired. Does anyone know if that expired?

Other than that, I can’t think of anything. So, that’s it… welcome to the society of educated men and women.

Drag it drop it zip unzip it

GIF is pronounced with a hard g, contrary to the claims of its “creator”, Steve Wilhite.

Steve Wilhite only “created” the GIF format to the extent he didn’t copy it from previous creators. At the time he wrote it, he worked for CompuServe.  The GIF format contains the concept of global vs. local palettes, and it contains origin information for frame within a frame. That’s really the extent of the novelty in the GIF format. All of the actual color data is stored within a Lempel-Ziv-Welch compressed table. Wilhite copied the LZW algorithm direct from this seminal 1984 paper and hence from the Unix compress program. I know this, because as a Harvard undergrad struggling through CS175, I implemented a converter between Harvard’s image format and GIF.  My program used the guts of Unix compress, along with that paper, to encode and decode GIF images.

In the mid 1990s, Unisys used threats to try to shake down a few companies over its claimed ownership of the LZW algorithm.  This is after one of the authors published the algorithm publicly and went to work for another company.  As is usually the case in high tech, Unisys’s attempt to screw other companies backfired.

In essence, Wilhite’s and CompuServe’s only practical novelty was simply stamping a copyright notice on the front of some existing technology that they didn’t invent.

So the best we can do is to call it as we would any American acronym, by taking the first sounds of the words that comprise the object. Say GIF, think Graphics Interchange Format.

My baby just wrote me a letter

In 1477, Margery Brews wrote a letter to her fiancé, John Paston. Her handwriting is very fine and ornate. She wrote the following: “If you love me, as I truly believe you do, you will not leave me… Because even if you did not have half the wealth that you do, and I had to undertake the greatest toil that any woman alive should, I would not forsake you. And if you command me to remain faithful wherever I go, I will indeed do everything in my power to love you and no one else ever. Even if my friends say I am acting wrongly, they will not prevent me from so doing. My heart commands me to love you truly above all earthly things for evermore. And however angry they may be, I trust it shall be better in time to come.”

And this, we think, is the first ever love letter.

When we say “e-mail” today, we’re discussing a very specific type of digital transmission; namely, transmission of an original human readable message from one source to one or more destinations, using the SMTP protocol, which in turn is built on the telnet protocol, which in turn is built on the TCP protocol. But “e-mail” as a technical concept predates its current SMTP implementation.

There are other, parallel forms of e-mail as well. In the mid 1980s, Tom Jennings wrote a BBS system and a protocol document called FidoNet. At the time, BBS systems were still quite popular. They required a dedicated computer that answered calls on a dedicated phone line. In particular, FidoNet required that compatible BBS software obeyed what was called Zone Mail Hour, or ZMH, which was a period during which the BBS was expected to send and receive EchoMail to and from other BBSes, typically by calling them directly. Because this wasn’t always practicable, FidoNet had a basic routing capability that permitted you to route messages to through other nodes to their destination nodes.

The early 1990’s explosion of FidoNet was predicated on the existence of cheaper, faster modems as well as cheaper, faster personal PCs. By 1996, while schools and universities were using Internet based email to send messages, the FidoNet community contained almost 40,000 nodes.

As the Internet, and the World Wide Web in particular, exploded in popularity in the early 1990s, FidoNet rapidly died off. Internet e-mail benefited from an “always on” design in which central servers could theoretically speak with dozens of e-mailers at the same moment. E-mail delivery on the Internet was nearly instantaneous. FidoNet servers could typically speak to only one or two users at any given moment, and EchoMail could be delayed up to a day.

Now you would think, given the Internet’s clear advantages on e-mail, that FidoNet should be well dead by now. But as you can see from FidoNet’s most recent nodelist as of this writing, there are several hundred nodes still operating and still interchanging EchoMail with one another.

Successful technology dies very slowly. And very successful technology doesn’t die at all.

Some people think that the automobile destroyed the horse and carriage industry.  These people have never been stuck behind an Amish buggy.

Ten decades in the future, people will take a break from augmented reality in order to write an e-mail, just like their grandparents did. Because e-mail is so quaint, and so old-fashioned, and so romantic.

Why is this the case? Why are people still using this outdated and quaint form of communication with one another?

Perhaps for the same reason that amateur ham operators still try to talk across the Atlantic on longwave radio, when international phone calls are cheap and reliable.

Perhaps for the same reason that vinyl records have seen a resurgence in manufacturing, even though compact discs have significantly better signal-to-noise ratios.

And perhaps for the same reason that handwritten love letters still travel through the post office, a thousand million times slower than an e-mail might.

E-mail (and programs that send e-mail) will be with our race centuries after you and I die, because it has sculpted and defined the lives of countless millions; and we are a nostalgic and romantic race of beings, much more so than being a technologically efficient race.

Hail victory, hail victory victory, hail victory victory

In honor of Memorial Day, I propose the following improvement on Martin Niemöller’s text, to make it more historically accurate. This poem should be read, slowly and heavily, at memorials, funerals, military gatherings, wakes, brises and significant ceremonies of all sorts.

First, they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Socialist. Then, they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then, they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then, they came for the sick, the so-called incurables, and I did not speak out, because I was not sick or incurable. Then, they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Catholic. Then, they came for the disabled, and I did not speak out, because I was not disabled. Then, they came for the homosexuals, and I did not speak out, because I was not a homosexual. Then, they came for the Bohemians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Bohemian. Then, they came for the Slovaks, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Slovak. Then, they came for the Czechs, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Czech. Then, they came for the Austrians, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Austrian. Then, they came for the West Prussians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a West Prussian. Then, they came for the Bolsheviks, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Bolshevik. Then, they came for the Serbs, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Serb. Then, they came for the Protestants, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Protestant. Then, they came for the Albanians, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Albanian. Then, they came for the Austrians, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Austrian. Then, they came for the Latvians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Latvian. Then, they came for the Lithuanians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Lithuanian. Then, they came for the Estonians, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Estonian. Then, they came for the Poles, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Pole. Then, they came for the Freemasons, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Freemason. Then, they came for the Ukrainians, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Ukrainian. Then, they came for the Byelorussians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Byelorussian. Then, they came for the Moldavians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Moldavian. Then, they came for the Sammarinese, and I did not speak out, because I was not Sammarinese. Then, they came for the Monacans, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Monacan. Then, they came for the Yugoslavians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Yugoslav. Then, they came for the Romanians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Romanian. Then, they came for the Dutch, and I did not speak out, because I was not Dutch. Then, they came for the Esperantists, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Esperantist. Then, they came for the Italians, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Italian. Then, they came for the Hungarians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Hungarian. Then, they came for the Danish, and I did not speak out, because I was not Danish. Then, they came for the Belgians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Belgian. Then, they came for the Aegeans, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Aegean. Then, they came for the Finns, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Finn. Then, they came for the Croatians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Croatian. Then, they came for the Macedonians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Macedonian. Then, they came for the Luxembourgers, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Luxembourger. Then, they came for the Montenegrans, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Montenegran. Then, they came for the Romanis, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Romani. Then, they came for the citizens of Danzig, and I did not speak out, because I was not a citizen of Danzig. Then, they came for the Soviets, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Soviet. Then, they came for the political prisoners, and I did not speak out, because I was not a political prisoner. Then, they came for the leftists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a leftist. Then, they came for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jehovah’s Witness. Then, they came for the German Mennonites, and I did not speak out, because I was not a German Mennonite. Then, they came for the Lutherans, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Lutheran. Then, they came for the Christian clergy, and I did not speak out, because I was not clergy. Then, they came for the Amish, and I did not speak out, because I was not Amish. Then, they came for the Hutterites, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Hutterite. Then, they came for the lesbians, and I did not speak out, because I was not lesbian. Then, they came for the transgender people, and I did not speak out, because I was not transgender. Then, they came for the deaf, and I did not speak out, because I was not deaf. Then, they came for me, and I told them, what took you so fucking long?

Cars and trucks fly by me on the corner

It really pisses me off when you ask me to fix your computer.

It pisses me off, because I love you.

When you give me the “can you fix my computer” call, the call means something different to me than it means to you.

To me, it means I will have to stay up all night, buy and try and swap replacement parts, image and restore your hard drive, remove all the malware, and make your computer work the way you imagine it once did, all while ignoring my other family members, my paying work and life commitments.

At my standard rates I would typically charge around $4,000 to fix your seven year old virus-ridden Dell. Your seven year old virus-ridden Dell isn’t worth $100 on Ebay. Should I tell you that? Will you think I am lying or making the $4,000 number up? I am not. You will think I am insulting you if I tell you I make $4,000 for similar work. You are too poor to pay me anywhere near that much though.

Of course I could always send you to Geek Squad. They would of course stupidly and automatically reformat your hard drive and reinstall the OS. If I do that, you will lose all your bank records and baby pictures permanently, to vastly less competent technicians than myself. They would take your money and destroy your data, and they would not even fix the true source of the problem. And you would be very, very, very sad.

And I would know in my heart I could have helped you, but didn’t.

No. I won’t do that to you.

I will take pity on you because you are clearly panicking and unable to eat, sleep or breathe until I save you and your data.

For you, and you alone, I will do a first-rate professional forensic data recovery and reinstallation. I’ll image the drive, work around all the bad sectors, copy it onto a virtual machine, extract your baby pictures and Quicken data, install a new non-shitty hard drive, reinstall all the apps and operating system and your recovered data (sans viruses and spyware), replace the dying fan, update the BIOS, and I will furthermore provide you with an external drive and teach you how to back up your system regularly with it.

Disappointingly, you will fuck up your computer again in a few years, when you refuse to take my advice and do regular backups on the backup drive that I bought for you, specifically for that purpose.

And when your piece of shit computer fails again, you will call me. Panicking. Again.

And the agonizing cycle will repeat.

Being the computer expert in the family is like being the doctor in the family, except you’re the surgeon and everyone expects you to operate on them constantly, suddenly, perfectly, AND pay for the operating room and sedatives and hospital recovery, AND you still consistently refuse to follow my medical advice.

I do all this, for free, because you are so thankful afterwards.

I do all this, for free, because I love you.

I just wish you weren’t so fucking stupid about computers sometimes.

Girl it doesn’t matter just as long as it’s healthy

There is a stock photo of a baby in distress up there, which is critical for getting clickthroughs from social media. Now, I will write a dire-sounding article about a new trend on the Internet.

This new trend is hate speech against babies.

I claim, in an incredulous and yet serious-sounding way, that there is a new and dangerous movement on social media that advocates violence against all babies, just for being babies.

To further develop this clickbait, I search Twitter for a few obnoxious catch-phrases, including “babies hate” and “babies disgusting.”   I then provide a few links to some particular troll posts on Twitter, that make it seem as though this “hating babies” concept is truly an active movement:

“The trend of hate speech against babies is disturbing,” Dr. Hans Kutzler, a Ph.D. and Ed.D. at the University of Northern Nebraska, who I just made up. “This sort of claim to authority, even though it is never actually fact checked, lends an air of credence to the clickbait. But I might not actually exist. Or if I do, I might just be trying to make a few bucks myself through writing clickbait on the side.”

Do YOU think this trend can be stopped? How do YOU stand on the question of hating newborns who have barely come into existence? Inviting the reader to take action is key when writing clickbait. At this point, you have an emotional reaction to this article. And you want to write some long-winded diatribe yourself in the comments section, about how unfair it all is. And because you are all worked up about the wild injustice this article portrays, you will Share with all your friends on social media, thus increasing our page ranking even further in the search engines.

Make sure to post some incredulous question with your share, like “OMG is this real? Somebody tell me it’s not…” When someone tells you it’s not real, make sure to leave the link up anyway, thus increasing our advertising revenue even further.

All of the colours locked away, come out and saturate the gray

 

Flow

The novice asked Master Git: “My git flow is impeded.  I use a graphical tool to start and finish new features and hotfixes.  Today, my graphical tool is broken, and I cannot start a new hotfix.”

Master Git handed the branch of an olive tree to the novice.  Then Master Git said:  “git flow –help“.

The novice ran the command, and was bewildered.  After meditating upon the gifts, she was enlightened.

 

 

The Stolen Cherry

Git Expert was walking through a farmer’s grove.  The scent of cherry blossoms wafted through the air.  As he walked, he spied a beautiful cherry hanging low on a branch.  “git cherry-pick“, he said, and the cherry was transported to Git Expert’s tree.

Whereupon Master Git appeared and said unto him: “You bring discord upon yourself.”

Git Expert laughed.  “How could picking but one cherry hurt the farmer, if we do not tell him?”

Master Git disappeared without a word.  Later on, when conflicts occurred between Git Expert and the farmer, Git Expert was enlightened.

 

The Needs of the Many

Git Expert complained to Master Git: “I understand the perils of git rebase. I only rebase my own work. Why must I use the novice git pull, git merge and git push instead?”

Master Git said: “One is always less than more than one.”

Late at night, Git Expert forgot Master Git’s words.  He initiated a git rebase, but there was conflict.  At this point, Git Expert remembered the advice, and decided to limit the changes via git rebase –skip.  He pushed his changes and slept.

The next morning, the town seized Git Expert, tied a rope around his neck, and pulled him up on a tree.

In his next lifetime, Git Expert was enlightened.

 

The Historian

The historian came to Master Git. The historian asked: “My history is confusing. May I rewrite it to be clearer and easier to understand?”

Upon hearing this, Master Git nodded.

The historian asked: “Your history is confusing. May I rewrite it to be clearer and easier to understand?”

Upon hearing this, Master Git beat the historian to death with a bamboo pole.

In the next lifetime, the historian approached Linus Torvalds and asked: “Your history is confusing. May I rewrite it to be clearer and easier to understand?”

Upon hearing this, Linus Torvalds beat the historian to death with a bamboo pole.

In the next lifetime, the historian rewrote others’ history secretly, without asking permission first.

He lived nine hundred years, whereupon he was killed by a falling cherry tree.

 

I’m gonna swing from the chandelier

Back when I was an undergraduate at Harvard, we were pretty sure that Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Phantom of the Opera was camp. The travelling performance at the Segerstrom tonight confirmed it readily. The show is a grand, bloviating, overbearing noise, so confident in its declamations that it bored literally every single soul in the theater, on stage and off.

Phantom of the Opera doesn’t know it’s camp. It takes itself maddeningly seriously. There are holes in the story big enough to drop a chandelier through — why don’t all the theater performers merely quit when the Phantom threatens violence? Why don’t the policemen immediately shoot the Phantom either of the times they have him in their sights? (He manages to get in several long refrains before anyone can pull a trigger at him.) Why does the Phantom set the cemetery on fire? How does one burn a cemetery? Are headstones flammable?

Beeeewaaaaaare, the Phantom of the Awwwwwpraaaaaa! The melodic concepts are, to be fair, up there with Mozart and Wagner. But the orchestration is stuck firmly in 1987. It neither requests nor requires any apologies for the blaring front-and-center synthesizers. Waaaaaaaaaaaaa, waaa waa waa waa waaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Listen to this goddamn song, you rubes! Weber stole the Phantom of the Opera theme from Pink Floyd’s song “Echoes.” No, really, he did, note for note.

And during intermission, the only thing anyone could talk about was how fast the chandelier dropped. Man, did you see that thing fall? It fell really fast! I thought it might not stop! Whoa, that was scary, that chandelier. Nevertheless, when an act one climax depends on a prop and not on story meaning, then your story needs retooling. And that’s why Phantom is not aging gracefully — its emotional core doesn’t exist until Act 2, when the Quasimodo storyline takes over.

So why does Phantom refuse to give up the ghost? For the same reason Ringling Brothers does: it’s a spec-tickle, something to give the out of towners the smell of elephants and the sense that They’ve Seen A Shew. It’s loud and busy and ornate and noisome and not in the least bit sincere, just like a circus ought to be.