blag.xkcd.com
Billboards April 19th, 2007 There's some strange text on billboards around New York. I like puzzles like this, but at the moment it doesn't seem to go anywhere -- if you Google it, you just get blogs talking about the odd billboards. It occurs to me that the sort of people who would be curious enough to go to Google and type them in are probably the sort of people who would like xkcd, so maybe we should create a twist in the puzzle.
Creative Commons license) Cory Doctorow was the guy who first convinced me to publish xkcd under a CC license, allowing people to share my comics freely. It's easy to do and was one of the best decisions I've made.
Free Culture, which is available online for -- surprise -- free. I read it as an audio book on a long car trip, but I recommend the text version -- the audio book has a different reader for each chapter, and they're of wildly varying quality.
one of the teams was a group of xkcd readers -- Nicole, Bobby, and Jessica. They are fun people who I actually had the pleasure of meeting briefly while visiting Boston a while back. Their team was called "If You Die in Canada, You Die in Real Life."
In which I lose the originals of the last three months of comics and the laptop I create them with. March 15th, 2007 I draw all my comics on paper, but I scan and process them on my lovely Fujitsu Lifebook P1510, a tiny hybrid tablet computer (it's the size of a hardback book). I have high-resolution versions of all the comics, which I use for print versions and shirts and such. I used to save them to my Linux desktop, but recently I've been moving around a lot and I got in the habit of saving the comic files on my laptop.
I was answering casually because I knew both of us knew this was stupid and we didn't need to go over it again. I was repartitioning my Linux desktop's drive to make room for the files, and since that was taking a while I decided to go to sleep and finish the (months-overdue) backup when I woke up. I'm a heavy sleeper, which explains why I didn't wake up when, at 12:55 PM, someone forced opened a window to my apartment, came into my room, and stole my laptop off my desk within arm's reach of where I was sleeping. I think I can still manage to do comics on schedule (sans tablet screen or any sort of speed) via the cheap old XP machine I set up for that purpose during the repair. And I still have the pencil-and-ink copies of everything. The full versions of, for example, the recent kite comic, the Lisp comic, the Richard Stallman comic, and everything else since around New Year's? Nothing else was stolen except a little cash from my wallet. There were a couple other burglaries in the complex on the same day. If it's picked up they'll call me, but I'm not holding my breath. If anyone sees it for sale on eBay, it's a Fujitsu Lifebook P1510D with an extended battery pack, off-brand charger, and all the little logos removed. For the folks suggesting ways of tracking it online: my cryptography-geek security paranoia was canceled out by my laziness. I set up all sorts of ideas for dealing with stolen laptops, but never actually maintained them (after all, they were just paranoia). com, with the idea that every time it got online it could (securely) update the site with information about where it was and who was using it. I have it automatically log in to a VPN, and I should be able to see it that way. But the VPN had stopped connecting a few weeks ago and I didn't fix it. I had also planned to make stickers that says "CONTAINS GPS, WILL BE TRACKED IF STOLEN," (bluffing) but that's part of my xkcd stickers plan that's on a back burner right now. Other than the comics, there's not much that's irreplaceable. But the laptop did contain assorted xkcd shipping records from last year (before I moved to the online system). Fortunately, there is no financial information about anyone (except me), but it did have the addresses I've shipped shirts to. And I had just removed the system passwords so the Fujitsu guys would be able to work on it. It was a mess -- I'd be surprised if anyone else can use it. And lastly, my roommates got me a RoboRaptor for Christmas, some sort of mini version of the popular toy you see everywhere. And I can't help but notice that during the burglary it sat on the shelf and did nothing but watch.
Fortunately, the place is a huge mess, so the thief didn't spot my digital camera on the floor. It contains the results of a physics experiment involving 50 gallons of water and a parking deck that I'll blag about later. Edit: I know the lost data is my own damn fault, and it's not so bad. I'm a lot more upset about the break-in while I was here and the loss of the laptop than the -- rarely used -- high-res comic files. I just want to share the awful irony that it was just when I was about to get back on track with backups that it happened. I have also, in the past, been that obnoxious backup guy -- the one who insists we back things up both here and here every six hours in case there's a terrorist attack AND a tornado at the same time. Regarding offers of donations -- thank you, I appreciate the support. I feel like if this is the worst problem you have, you're doing okay, you know?
But all the numbers discussed had a sense of arbitrariness to them. The xkcd number was just a function that grew rapidly plus a large argument. I've been thinking about it, and I want to construct a number that is not only mind-bogglingly large, but elegantly large. This is hard to define -- the closest I can get is that it shouldn't feel arbitrary.
some have pointed out, noncomputable functions like the Busy Beaver function can grow faster than any computable function. By my understanding, this just means they have a higher computational complexity -- their values for a little bit may be smaller than a computable function, but you can never prove that, for sufficiently large arguments, a computable function is an upper bound to the sequence.
That is, H{} represents the process of n-level recursion. Then I use this recursion several times on the Busy Beaver function until I run out of space. This isn't just four recursions -- each new H{} is a virtually infinite set of recursions, since it has as many levels as the result of the number in the level below it. As the seed, I picked 9 -- the largest integer you can fit in a single digit. I'm a lot happier with this number's bigness' than I was with A(g_64, g_64). It feels bigger, in some hard-to-describe way (it also feels bigger in the easy-to-describe way: ">"). It uses a more fundamental idea of bigness It's also, of course, noncomputable. However, you can stick the Ackermann function in place of the Busy Beaver function and get a number that is again much larger than the xkcd number. So, anyone want to define an elegantly bigger number in about 32 characters, invoking reasonably standard notation and functions? I'm sure it's possible -- it's not a well-defined contest, and I'm sure there are a lot of other tricks you can use. Edit: As a number of commenters have pointed out, my notation here is pretty bad. I'm indeed using H{} more like a macro that acts on an expression than a transform that acts on a function, and this leads to difficulties in mixing the levels. Fortunately, you guys have waded through the fog and understood what I was getting at :) Here's a slightly simplified expression that does the same thing and tacks in two extra recursions (so as to use the 32 characters).
Velociraptor Safety March 4th, 2007 I recently received a letter from Dr. Daniel Snyder, a paleontologist from Knox College, who wanted to share some theories on handling dromeosaurids: Dear sir, I have recently been introduced to your Web comic, and I write in great admiration. You have a keen mind and wit, as well as the artistic ability to convey them to the reader (me). I notice that many of your comics revolve around people (including yourself) with a phobia of Velociraptor. This phobia revolves around Velociraptor overcoming some 70 million years of extinction and the geographic barriers between its home and yours, leaping out of the underbrush and/or through the kitchen, and d...
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