Jost cos yao don’t com frum Wolver’ampton

I can’t believe they let these guys have a .edu domain:

… Students will be making extensive use of the internet websites that are dedicated to reporting the latest developments and trends in space warfare. The climax of the course is the space wargame exercise, in which the students will be grouped into various national actors and organizations.

• How to recognize a Weblog tool by its permalinks → Mission accomplished: I’m using The Ultimate Weblogging System apparently.
• Think of the children! Don’t smoke! → Smoking in front of children is child abuse. Those parents need medical treatment, or jailtime.
• Jabberwocky variations → Mazin.
• Maths A-level revival plan approved → Too little, too late. Schooling is a pipeline. Insufficient output can be measured at the end, but you have to go back to where it’s broken to fix the leak. A-level is at the end, so when poor results are measured there, the problem is assumed to be there. If the problem is actually in, say, Year 8, then it’ll be five years before kids can do proper A-levels again.
• Mercaptan → It’s what they add to gas to make it smell. Factoid: one teaspoon spilt is enough to stink out the surrounding hundred odd square miles. ‘Strue.

Terminator 3 has only just come out in Brazil, so I went to see it, and it was a lot better than I expected! (I expected it to be a mindless trilogy ruining hollywood cash-in.) Instead, it turned out to be a reasonably well themed standard action film; as good a sequel as could be expected. Not worth the ridiculous budget, but the car chase was better than Matrix Reloaded’s. Anyway, apart from the line about having “enough C4 to blow up ten supercomputers!”, there was this interesting utterance:

It’s running at 60 teraflops per second.

Oh dear: acronym creep, was my first thought… but then why not? Maybe the appropriate measurement for an AI is not its speed, but its rate of growth? I’d buy it, if the rest of the film wasn’t such a clue void.

Paul Ford asked, in this hilarious distraction, whether or not the perfect sentence can be defined:

“One of the things we’ve been working on is the perfect Western sentence.”

Some interesting tries, but nothing we could engrave in brass and send out on a space probe.

The sentence, laser-printed on a slip of paper, read: “Zounds! Three fish equal one cubit.”

The next slip of paper, titled “Non-canonical Distilled Sentence,” read only “Damn! That fish is gay!”

Despite all this, there’s a serious question to be asked here about information density. A natural language requires so much context and definition to understand, that the information density of almost any sentence is incredibly low. Some well chosen words might seem concise, but if you don’t speak the language, you’ll need a thousand page dictionary to get anywhere. Mathematics can be encoded far more efficiently in terms of actions and objects anyone or anything can understand (i.e. hold up two fingers/claws/fizgluks to transmit the number two).

So, to sum up all Western (in fact, let’s face it, human) knowledge and achievement, I would write this: “213,466,917-1 is prime.” A little dry perhaps, but it encapsulates the fact that we have a semi-advanced industrial economy, resulting in computational resources to spare, to fritter away on projects like GIMPS. Engrave it in brass and send it out on a space probe, and listeners will have a fairly good idea of how far we’ve got. More likely how far we still have to go.