The New Snark

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Any body remember the Becker sheath maker that had a Boker vox rold in with the picture of his Becker sheaths? I thought it was 710 but can't seem to find the picture again.

On a side note while I was laying awake last night staring at the ceiling I was thinking about the monkey / keyboard thing. Not sure of the exact numbers but I can bet that most of us don't have the means to calculate the actual probability.
Assuming roughly 124 possible key presses for one character space (this includes punctuation, space, and lower upper case.......also including key strokes that would have no result like shift + caps lock) If the first character space in a Shakespeare play were to be an upper case "A" the monkey would have a 1 in 124 (.806% ) chance of getting it right. The next letter being a lower case "l" would now mean that the monkey has a (1/124)*(1/124) chance. (.0065%)
Lets assume that there are 500,000,000 character spaces in one of his plays. That would be a (1/124)raised to the 500millionth power chance of the monkey getting it correct. HIGHLY unlikely but it is possible. Most all math done with numbers this small is assumed to be zero for simplicity.
 
Guyon said:
The signatures over there are beyond ridiculous, with guys listing their membership in every fan group they can muster, often with graphics for each one. A single post takes up a full page, and many if not most "communicate" in abbreviated fashion. More often than not, you'll scroll through two pages of material just to get "Yo men, wassup?" and "Sick knife". Just not my style.
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Yeah, that's exactly what I was talking about. I mean c'mon, if you're gonna be an attention ho, at least have some original content to offer. :p

It's too bad too, because there really are some bright and interesting people over there. But trying to find 'em is like playing "Where's Waldo?" on a bad acid trip...
 
My take on the all-caps (and I'm gonna write a lot, so if you don't really want the academic article, stop reading now):

The thing with writing in general, and writing on the internet in particular, is that you don't have body language, voice inflection, tone, or volume to convey the sense of a comment. And human communication is full of nuance. Often we mean to say something that really comes off very differently when one is looking just at the words. So, we need to find different ways to add nuance to written language.

One way in which we add nuance is by altering the size. Capital letters have traditionally been used to draw attention to a particular portion of a sentence. For instance, we begin sentences with a capital letter, so we can draw visual attention to the start of a new sentence, thereby, hopefully, making it easier to read. When we capitalize everything in a word or series of words, such as in a newspaper headline, it is intended to place extra emphasis on those words. This meaning of adding extra emphasis has been true since the advent of lower-case letters.

Too, studies illustrate that capital letters are actually harder to read than lower case letters. So, writing in all caps actually makes it harder for your reader to understand what's going on (see Colin Wheildon, Miles Tinker, et al). Part of that may be due to the traditional thinking that a capital letter means extra emphasis should be placed. I mean, we call it a CAPITAL letter (note the emphasis there). Capital, by definition, has associations with importance. A capital city, for instance, is the "most important" city of an area. A "capital idea" is a really good idea. So the very word we chose to describe that type of letter indicates the intended use for said letter: to highlight and draw attention to the importance of the word including the letter.

All of this is leaving out the well-developed internet convention that considers it shouting, because I think if you consider the origins and traditional meaning of capital letters, it makes sense why people consider all-caps to be rude or shouting.

Consider, how would YOU, in verbal communication, perform the equivalent meaning, of trying to draw emphasis to literally every single word that you're speaking? Add in the fact that, in written communication, by writing in all-caps, you're actually making it harder for other people to read, and that on most devices, you have to go to extra effort to switch to caps rather than writing all in lower-case (an attitude which, in my opinion, conveys the notion that you think you're more important than the people who you are communicating with, or otherwise indicates disrespect). And more, it often means that you haven't given enough thought to your posts to think about which parts of them actually deserve more emphasis than others. Correspondingly, I suspect that, if you wanted to draw attention to everything you were saying, you would increase volume. E.g., you would shout.

Too, if we use caps sparingly, it is easier for them to be meaningful and evident when we actually use them. Speaking in all-caps makes it harder to communicate. It's like trying to talk with your hands tied behind your back and a sack over your head. Sure, you can still do it. But you'll sound muffled, and it will be much harder to provide emphasis to the things that are truly important.

The wall of text has similar connotations of rudeness because it's harder to read. Our minds tend to equate lengthier posts with boredom. I, unfortunately, as you can see from this one, have a propensity for lengthy posts, which makes it all the more important for me to space them out with space left between paragraphs, lest it look too much like a textbook. Imagine if this were all in one paragraph or something. None of you would bother reading it. Point is, these internet conventions aren't arbitrary. They have real, tangible, and sensible roots in long-standing tradition. They are no more arbitrary, IMO, than assigning particular meanings to individual words.

For that matter, we typically use caps to distinguish an abbreviation, such as IMO, WTF, etc, from an actual word. Why? Because we consider the initial letters of each word to be the more important ones for remembering the meaning, and thus retain only those letters. Using caps distinguishes the abbreviated phrase from a normal word, and also highlights the letters that are important, which is still consistent with the traditional meaning!
 
Tankerwolf said:
On a side note while I was laying awake last night staring at the ceiling I was thinking about the monkey / keyboard thing. Not sure of the exact numbers but I can bet that most of us don't have the means to calculate the actual probability.
Assuming roughly 124 possible key presses for one character space (this includes punctuation, space, and lower upper case.......also including key strokes that would have no result like shift + caps lock) If the first character space in a Shakespeare play were to be an upper case "A" the monkey would have a 1 in 124 (.806% ) chance of getting it right. The next letter being a lower case "l" would now mean that the monkey has a (1/124)*(1/124) chance. (.0065%)
Lets assume that there are 500,000,000 character spaces in one of his plays. That would be a (1/124)raised to the 500millionth power chance of the monkey getting it correct. HIGHLY unlikely but it is possible. Most all math done with numbers this small is assumed to be zero for simplicity.
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This isn't actually a perfect analogy here, because probability represents the chance of something happening RIGHT NOW. The theorem suggests that the monkey has an infinite period of time.

Here's another example. Within an irrational number, that is, one whose decimal representation goes on forever without repeating a pattern, one will be able to find any instance of a particular pattern of numbers. In the smaller scale, that means that any single digit number you can think of will appear sooner or later. On a larger scale, your cellphone number will appear somewhere in the digits of pi.

Why? Because the definition of a random string of numbers requires there not to be any repeated patterns. Which means that all of the infinitely many ways to arrange a series of numbers (or letters, in the case of the typing monkey) must be included, otherwise sooner or later there would be a repeated pattern. Obviously, the longer the pattern, the less likely it is to appear early on in the string of letters. But it HAS to appear eventually, because if it doesn't, that means the string of letters doesn't contain all possible combinations of letters, and thus isn't actually random.

If you want to think about probability, consider the probability that the monkey NEVER types the Shakespeare play. That is, that, in the infinite string of letters, the monkey doesn't include the particular pattern. It's probably easiest to think of in context of a single letter. So, suppose that in an infinite string of letters, the monkey never types the letter A, although it's on the keyboard, and we'll just assume that we only have to worry about the 26 letters. Then the probability of any given letter not being an A is 25/26. And we have to multiply that infinite times. Which means that, as the set of letters gets longer and longer, the probability gets smaller and smaller until it is actually functionally zero.

Calculating out the probability for the Shakespeare play to appear in a given sequence of numbers requires a few different steps. First, you would calculate out the probability that, out of the various 40 odd characters used, it would actually happen in a series of letter presses. That probability, as you surmise, is 1 over the number of characters on the keyboard, raised to the power of the length of the play, in characters. Yep, a tiny probability. But then, we need to find the probability that it appears in the whole string. So we can multiply that probability by the number of strings of characters of that length that appear in the infinite string. And, there are infinite such strings. Thus we are guaranteed to have that Shakespeare play appear somewhere.
 
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I feel like i was just in a lecture :D

So my daughters school called and decided to make today a half day of school... And cancel school tomorrow... Well they didnt technically cancel, they just strongly encourage the students to stay home tomorrow. Making summer break start right now.....

On another note i was in the middle of a nap in my hammock when they called. I got just about 3 good hours and no stiffness or cramps or anything like that. Very comfy indeed.
 
On another note, my geography is weak. Evidently the average person can name 137 of 196 countries, which I find very hard to believe. I hope they mean that's the average for people who take that quiz.
 
crimsonfalcon07 said:
On another note, my geography is weak. Evidently the average person can name 137 of 196 countries, which I find very hard to believe. I hope they mean that's the average for people who take that quiz.
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I guess I was considering the probability of the monkey sitting down and typing it out exactly. Infinite time most certainly would include the same pattern at some point.

I want a monkey that lives for an infinite number of years. I would be less than a speck in it's existence but we would make the most of the time we had.

I tried to do a puzzle of the U.S. with my son and am embarrassed to say, I couldn't fill in more than half of it. Sad.
 
Finally spent some time today getting to know my KME sharpening system more intimately. Started with a $10 Kershaw, moved up to a $30 ESEE, and then went to a $65 BK-16.
I very much like this system and will be doing a more thorough write-up, maybe here and in Ka-Bar, as I get to know it even better. It put one hell of an edge on my 16 in just a short time.
Here's a quick cell phone picture.

8F041A19-93C9-4449-853B-A01C170BECAC_zpstelhzegs.jpg
 
crimsonfalcon07 said:
Thus we are guaranteed to have that Shakespeare play appear somewhere.
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I'm not sure it's guaranteed. I think it's more like you not rejecting the null hypothesis that it would appear. It could happen, but nothing is guaranteed. :D snark!
 
The lesser European countries are the ones I have issues with. The Baltics I guess they are called? Bosnia Hertzogovenia (Hell I can't even spell that one!), Moldova, and all those li'l guys. The rest of the world I'm ok with but I can be better. Especially with parts of Africa too. I can do the outer edge of Africa mostly no problem but the interior gives me issues.
 
I do actually think we are guaranteed. If it didn't appear, the character string would be definitionally not random. By the parameters of the set, I think every possible character sequence has to be included, or else it wouldn't be infinite or random. I'm pretty sure that's why that theorem works. I would venture to say that, given an infinite period of time or infinite possible universes, ALL things are guaranteed.

Of course, since we don't have an infinite period of time, on a practical scale, this all is entirely tautological, so your point is still well taken.
 
crimsonfalcon07 said:
On another note, my geography is weak. Evidently the average person can name 137 of 196 countries, which I find very hard to believe. I hope they mean that's the average for people who take that quiz.
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BTW, THAT test is CRAP! It says that Greenland is not a country!
 
james terrio said:
I'm pretty sure you're right about that. I'm not so sure the average American can even find their home state on a map, much less find 137 countries.
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Im not sure the average american can even tell which way is north from their own home without a compass... Sad. I blame technology.

These days everyone is relying on GPS systems to go to the grocery store. They go 10 times and still dont remember how to get there without TomTom LMAO
 
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