Shuffled Music, Music from Up, and How To Get Up In the Morning

This guy named Matthew Irvine Brown has come up with a cool project called Music For Shuffle. He wrote a set of 18 short musical phrases (anywhere from 4 to 18 seconds long), any one of which will transition smoothly into any of the others. The idea is that you put them all in a playlist and listen on shuffle - the result is an ambient, evolving soundscape that's never the same twice (okay, fine it could pick the same order twice, but there's about 6 million billion different orderings (seriously), so for all intents and purposes it's never the same twice). He made a sample video of one ordering, but it's worth downloading the tracks from his website and doing it yourself to get the full effect. His notes on how he made it are worth reading, too; the added trick with the album art is very cool. John Cage would be proud.

(It's nice enough with iTunes's definition of shuffle, but I think it would be even more effective if each track were actually random, rather then having to go through all 18 before ever repeating one. Of course, that's a limitation of iTunes, not the actual project.)

People Lie About Sex, or Practical Applications of Graph Theory

(I got this from a book on Mathematics for Computer Science that's freely available from MIT. I've toned down a lot of the math to make it more readable, but the basic concepts are still there.)

There are a number of studies that claim to have shown that men, on average, have significantly more (opposite-sex) sexual partners than women do. The numbers vary wildly, but the most conservative estimate in the book, coming from the National Center for Health Statistics in 2007, is that men have 75% more partners (on average), than women. However, there's a very cool and simple mathematical trick which will show that this result is literally impossible.

Chemical Words

A problem I've been spending some time playing with recently is looking at words that can be made from the names of the different chemical elements: for example, you can make "ranch" from Radium, Nitrogen, Carbon, and Hydrogen, but there's no way to make "dressing" because there are no elements named "D" or "Dr". When I discovered that Mathematica has some pretty extensive dictionary functionality built in, I decided to actually go after this more systematically and see what kind of words and how many can be made with element names.

OkCupid - online dating site or cleverly disguised social experiment?

Personally, I'm leaning towards the latter. Most people know OkCupid as one of the more popular online dating services, but if you check out their blog, it turns out it's run by a group of hardcore statistics geeks who love to take advantage of the enormous amount of data they get from their millions of users.

DCI Finals: Thoughts Five Months Later

I finally ordered my finals DVD last week (spurred by the 20% holiday discount) and it arrived a few days ago, so I've been watching it a lot lately. For most of these shows, all I saw of them over the summer was some snippets from the gate, and even for the ones I did see on the second night at Allentown, my seats weren't much better than standing at the gate anyway.

I'll admit up front that I'm not really wearing my critique hat at all while watching these shows; I'm watching to be entertained, and I'm seeing who entertains me and who doesn't. I really don't care much at all about who placed what or whose show was harder or easier, I'm just watching some shows. That all said, here's my thoughts on Disc 1, the top 6 corps. For those of you who don't feel like reading my dissertations, I'll include a tl;dr for each corps.

What I've been listening to lately

One of the great things about the endless expanse of free time that is winter break is that I have plenty of time to discover and listen to new music. Read on to see what's been getting the most plays from me lately.

Some Basic Analysis of Bejeweled Blitz (or How To Think Too Much About A Flash Game)

So I've been playing a lot of this game called Bejeweled Blitz lately. It's a pretty simple but addicting flash game, that looks like this:

You can click on adjacent gems to switch them, so long as you end up with a set of three gems of the same color in a row. For example, look at yellow diamond four from the bottom and two from the right. You could swap it with the brown gem below it to make a line of three yellows, but not with the purple triangle to the right, because that wouldn't make any sets of three. After you do that, the three (or more) same-colored gems that you've lined up will disappear, and the remaining gems will fall into the empty space they leave, with new gems coming in from the top so that there's always a full grid.

Now, I first played this game years ago, in a version with no time limit. You just made match after match, and when there were no possible moves left, you lost. This newer version that I'm playing now uses the same gameplay, but now you have one minute to make as many matches as you can, and interestingly, it never gets stuck. Obviously the computer is being intelligent about new gems it drops in from the top, so that you always have a move available, but is that always possible? I decided to fiddle around and see if I could prove anything about it.