This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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The Physics of Friendship
(Lisa Zyga, Physorg.com)
By modeling people’s interactions based on how particles bounce off each other in an enclosed area, physicists Marta Gonzalez, Pedro Lind and Hans Herrmann found that the characteristics of social networks emerge “in a very natural way.†In a study recently published in Physical Review Letters, the scientists compared their model to empirical data taken from a survey of more than 90,000 U.S. students regarding friendships, and found similarities indicating that this model may serve as a novel approach for understanding social networks.
“The idea behind our model, though simple, is different from the usual paradigmatic approaches,†Gonzalez told PhysOrg.com. “We consider a system of mobile agents (students), which at the beginning have no acquaintances; by moving in a continuous space they collide with each other, forming their friendships.â€
After a collision, a particle moves in a different direction with an updated velocity, just as how an individual’s chance of meeting a new person depends on their most recent acquaintances.
At a critical point, the system reaches a quasi-stationary state, for the first time allowing the scientists to reproduce several features of social networks in a single model and in a natural way. Specifically, this technique accurately describes social clustering, the way friendships evolve over time, the shortest path length in a large group, and some features related to group structure.
(via SlashDot)
 While Brandy Amy and I were together, we took the opportunity to watch another Doctor Who. We started in Florida and finished in Washington. A 3rd Doctor episode from spring of 1971. Still before I was born, but not by much. This time it was the turn of The Claws of Axos. It has the Master in it, which is always fun. And some gold people. And some big orange blobby things that look like someone with a blanket over their heads… oh yes, because it IS people with blankets over their heads!
This is an OK Doctor Who I guess, but not outstanding. They seem to be waiting longer to release on DVD the ones that are real classics. Taking longer to restore them and such I guess. And of course we have yet to reach the 4th Doctor, who was my favorite, although I kinda liked the 5th and 7th too.
But this had some good stuff. When the Doctor decided it was time to escape, even if it mean going with the Master. Good stuff. Lets see, better than Spearhead from Space, the last one we watched. And I think better than the Mind Robber, the one before that. But The Seeds of Death, from before that, was better than this. I think the whole trapped on Earth thing they did with the first few seasons of the 3rd Doctor never really worked. The next DVD we’ll watch is the one where he finally gets to leave though.
We need to pick up the pace on the Doctor Who episodes. I want to make sure Amy sees some of the original Sarah Jane Smith episodes and K9 before we hit the new Sarah Jane and K9 episode that’s coming up for the 10th Doctor… I’m sure they’ll make it so you don’t NEED the background, but it will be more fun with I am sure. The whole being in different states though makes it tough though.
Oh, and for those of you who didn’t see it when it was new, it starts up this Friday on the SciFi Channel here in the US. Of course, they’ll add commercials to it and probably mess up some editing to make it fit right in the time slot, but OK. Also, I’m sure it will not do as well in ratings as it would have, because I’m sure most folks who were die-hard and really wanted to see it already have. So after they show last year’s episodes I won’t be holding my breath for this year’s episodes to be promptly available or anything. But it will be there. I won’t pretend it is not an acquired taste though, especially for Americans. This new version is quite the hit right now over in the UK though and is doing quite well in the ratings. So who knows, but…
I am still at work for just a few more minutes, but I noticed on my webcam that it is snowing back at my apartment. There is actually white stuff on the ground. Not much, but some. Can’t say I’ve really seen that in the last couple years since I moved to Florida.
Three cosmic enigmas, one audacious answer
(Zeeya Merali, New Scientist)
DARK energy and dark matter, two of the greatest mysteries confronting physicists, may be two sides of the same coin. A new and as yet undiscovered kind of star could explain both phenomena and, in turn, remove black holes from the lexicon of cosmology.
The audacious idea comes from George Chapline, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin of Stanford University and their colleagues. Last week at the 22nd Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting in Santa Barbara, California, Chapline suggested that the objects that till now have been thought of as black holes could in fact be dead stars that form as a result of an obscure quantum phenomenon. These stars could explain both dark energy and dark matter.
(via Digg)
For the first time in quite a long time… a new graph!
Sam’s Email Backlog
In May 2005 I started tracking how many emails were still unanswered in my inbox. As usual, I am very far behind. Soon after I started also tracking the age of the oldest unanswered emails in my inbox. That one is even sadder. For completeness, I added a third grapoh showing the number of emails in my unsorted spam folder. That is where all the automatically filtered spam is, but I look through it periodically to find items falsly identified as spam. That seems to be running about 1 in 1000 messages in that older. Anyway, here are the three graphs.
Of course, sometime I should update the old graphs too!
So, I’ve been working my way up the Chessmaster Personality ladder.
* Cassie (Rating 23) – Beat on first game
* Pete (Rating 37) – Beat on first game
* Niko (Rating 57) – Beat on first game
* Ben (Rating 84) – I was completely dominating on the first game, but messed up and caused a stalemete, I beat him on the second game
Then the trouble started
* Petra (Rating 311) – I was crushing her and about to deliver mate and the GAME CRASHED. No record of my game remained. I played her again and crushed her again.
* Parker (Rating 313) – I was delivering checkmate and the GAME CRASHED AGAIN. Once again leaving no record of the game.
Please understand… I have made sure to record every move of every game of chess I have played… or even started to play but not finished… since I was in 8th grade. I suck at chess, but I had been sure to do that. Every game.
But when I play computers, I don’t hand write down the games. Because when it is over I can save it or print it or whatever. I now, for the first time in something like 20 years, have two games I played that I do not have the moves for. I suck at chess. Badly. So it isn’t like these games are to be studied or something. It is just something I have done and been proud that I’ve had a complete set. Now I don’t.
This isn’t quite as bad as the email meltdown of 2004, but it is up there.
I now know that I can not play Chessmaster 9000 unless I want to take the extra effort to hand write every move as a backup.
I have yet to decide if that is worth it.
Chessmaster bastards.
(And yes, I installed the two available patches to make sure I am completely up to date. Those supposidly fixed the bugs it had with Tiger, but perhaps there are new Rosetta bugs that they haven’t fixed yet.)
Anyway, I’m very unhappy at the moment.
This was a few weeks ago. I am negligent. But we had an open hands meeting at my job. It was in a neat old theater. A bunch of execs got up and said interesting things and answered questions. Including of course the CEO. One of the presenters mentioned my group. That was good.
 While Amy and Brandy were in town, we went to the movie theater right across the street from the apartment and saw the 2006 version of the Pink Panther. I had previously added all the movies from the old series of movies… eight movies from 1963 to 1993… into my Netflix queue, but of course they are way down the list and I won’t be seeing them for years. Five of those had Peter Sellers for real, 1 more used old Peter Sellars footage after his death and the other 2 were attempts to keep it going without Peter Sellars that from what I heard pretty much failed and sucked pretty bad. But I haven’t seen those, so I shouldn’t judge…
In any case, I’d seen some of the original Peter Sellars ones many years ago as a child, or maybe as a teenager, but certainly not since. I think I saw some of them with my dad. So while I have some vague memory of them, I don’t have any specific memories, so I wasn’t really doing much comparison against them on this new version.
Anyway… I am not generally much of a fan of physical humor, but Steve Martin is really good at it and this was a funny movie. I found myself not wanting to laugh, because it was just plain stupid, but laughing anyway… because it was just plain stupid. I thought Steve’s accent could have been better. But it was played for laughs, not reality, so OK.
This was not a movie about plot or characters or anything like that. Just a continuous series of sight gags and physical humor and the like. It had me chuckling, Brandy laughing and shaking her head that it was just wrong, and Amy laughing uncontrollably for 90 minutes straight. So I guess it did its job. I think though that it definately was that kind of comedy that is aimed at kids and such.
It was an OK time. It was funny. I laughed. But it wasn’t particilarly memorable. I am alrerady having trouble remembering too many of the details and it has only been a few days since I saw it. And my main thought at this point is just that I really want to watch some of the old ones to compare.
Obsessed tourist ‘marries’ dolphin
(dpa on Bangkok Post)
Tendler, 41, has been visiting the city on the Gulf of Aqaba two or three times a year to spend time with her 35-year-old underwater sweetheart.
“The peace and tranquility under water, and his love, would calm me down,” the Israeli daily quoted her as saying.
Last week Tendler finally plucked up the courage to ask the dolphin’s trainer for the mammal’s fin in marriage.
(via Daily Kos)
So, after the Moody Blues concert and a few hours sleep, it was time to go to the airport again, but this time Brandy and Amy were coming with me for the first time.
The main reason was that Amy was interviewing for private schools. The options in the public school are not ideal. So we’re looking into these possibilities. Who knows what will work out, but we’re crossing our fingers. We have applied to six schools, four of which had interviews scheduled for this trip. In the order we visited them:
At most of them in addition to Amy getting interviewed, Brandy and I also got to see the places. At some Amy got to actually attend classes and such for part of the day. All three of us have some pretty strong opinions on the schools (some good, some bad). But I shall refrain from saying anything in a public place like this until we know which (if any) Amy gets into.
There are two more schools that we haven’t gotten to see in person yet, although it may happen over Amy’s spring break at the end of this month.
The official deadlines to apply to all six of these were past before I even started my new job and we started figuring out the school options. But all six let us apply late given we were moving into the area. And the response to Amy at the schools where she spent the most time and we were best able to judge seemed to be pretty positive. But you never know. Things could work out. Or not. We could figure out how to pay for these. Or not.
But we are optimistic for the moment.
And it was very good having Brandy and Amy here in any case.
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