Pursuant to my earlier investigation into Unintentional Pilish occurances, a correspondence with Mike Keith, author of “Not A Wake: A dream embodying (pi)’s digits fully for 10000 decimals“.

Nicholas -

Thanks for the interest in this problem, and for your results.  I’ve also done similar searches in years past with various subsets of PG, but I think you have used a few more GB than I have, and you have found a few examples that I did not find.  My favorite one (which I had already found) is the Captain Cook, since it starts at the beginning of a sentence.

I know that I haven’t seen the one with the 15-letter word, which is nice.

However…I recently found a 9-word example, which I’ve attached as an image file (this book is not available in PG, of course, since it is recent and copyrighted).  This is the current world record.  Somewhat shockingly, I found this one by simply playing with Google for a few minutes using partial-Pilish phrases that I thought would tend to be common.  Nonetheless, it seems clear that searching massive amounts of text mechanically is the way to go for further records.

So, we have the following records (as far as I know):

Starting from the beginning of a sentence: 8 (Capt. Cook)
Not necessarily at the beginning of a sentence: 9

I would, of course, be very interested to hear of new records in either of those categories.

Best Pilish Regards,

Mike Keith

Great! Thanks! Would you mind if I were to post what
you wrote on my blog?

I’m planning to make my little script for searching for these strings
more efficient (via multithreading etc) and maybe I can rig up a
webcrawler so it can be searching continuously. I’ll let you know if
anything  interesting or any new records emerge!

Also I was trying to come up with a way of determining the probability
of finding a Pilish string of length n in a document length m. The
most obvious way is with a Markov Chain, based on probabilities
calculated from the dataset, so I’m planning to give that a try also.

Cheers,
Nicholas

Nicolas -

Sure, no problem – feel free to post what I wrote. Could you delete my 3rd sentence, and tack on to the end of the 2nd sentence the following:

, and you have found a few examples that I did not find.

Your 15-letter-word example led me to do another Google search with “straightforward” as the root of a manual search. I eventually found another new record! Look at the 4th post on this page:

http://cs.trains.com/trccs/forums/t/164153.aspx

It begins

David has given you a very straightforward procedure to follow. Since you have not done any CV programming you should…

with the part I have colored in red giving 3.141592653 (10 digits). Interestingly, this was written just a few months ago, in Dec 2009.

Keep me apprised of any new results. It’s great to have another person interested in the search. Would love to see some probability results based on Markov chains.

Cheers,
Mike K

After last night’s message from UBC V-Day, I returned home today to find an altogether more happy surprise:

Dear UBC V-Day Mailing List,

We apologize for flooding your inbox. We would like to address an email that was sent out last night concerning a letter sent to us by the AMS President.  As an AMS club the controversial issues involving the council of the AMS effect us, too. We feel that it is important for students to be involved in expressing their opinions and views. We apologize for initially presenting only one side of the debate. This was the first email we’d received on the issue, and now that we’ve received alternate viewpoints we wish for you to have those as well. We continue to maintain a non-partisan stance on this issue as a club. We simply wish for students to take a stand and get involved.

However, we understand that this issue is not directly link to V-Day or any issues of violence against women. For this reason we also apologize. If you would no longer like to receive emails about other issues on campus or abroad that are not directly linked to our mandate, let us know and we will refrain from sending those types of emails in the future.

We sincerely hope that we did not cause anyone distress and we would love to hear your feedback so that we can continue to learn and develop our communication.

Thank you.
Sincerely,
Ahna, Chrissy, and Lau
UBC V-DAY Coordinators 2010

This was accompanied by this email:

As per our non-partisan stance in regards to UBC politics, here is another view on this controversial issue. We stress that UBC V-Day remains neutral on this issue, but does encourage you to get involved!

The following is a letter from Councilors of the AMS:

Fellow students;

As you heard yesterday, your AMS has initiated proceedings to remove President and the VP External Affairs. We would like to say, first and foremost, that this debate has never been about tuition. This is about democracy and representation. When the executives filed a Human Rights Complaint to the United Nations alleging that Canada and BC are violating human rights by allowing a 2% increase in tuition, they did this without consulting either the Student Council, or students at large.

Your Student Society is governed by a student council made up of representatives from each Faculty. It is their job to make sure that what the AMS does is representative of your student voice. The UN Human Rights Complaint from Council should have been brought through AMS committees. We feel council cannot tolerate rogue actions by executives when they are purported to be on behalf of the student body.

The executives never initiated a debate in Council about tuition policy, and instead spoke without the approval of your representatives. We feel this is an affront to your right to democratic representation. We could have had this debate months ago, but Blake and Tim never brought it forward. We feel we can’t continue trust them to respect your representation on Council.

If you believe that we should stand up to executives overstepping their bounds and misrepresenting the students of UBC,

1.       Fill out our online feedback form, here: http://ow.ly/GkdW

2.       Come to the meeting tomorrow (6:00 PM in Council Chambers, SUB 206) and demand accountability from your student executive.

3.       Email your representatives.Sincerely Yours;
Concerned Councilors of the AMS

I am very happy that my concerns have been addressed and that the system works. I was never angry at UBC V-Day as an organization, just at Blake for going through such a channel to communicate his lies. Here is my response to UBC V-Day:

Ahna, Chrissy and Lau,

Thank you very much for this response. I realize that you did not intend to cause any damage with this action and I respect your honesty and forthrightness in responding to my concerns. I wish you the best of luck with your organization’s efforts this year, and I look forward to attending this year’s Vagina Monologues.

Sincerely,
Nicholas FitzGerald

It seems like science-inspired music is a common theme around here. Discover Magazine recently announced the winners of their “Evolution in Two Minutes” video contest. Top-pick went to this rock-anthem by Fresno, California high-school teacher Scott Hatfield.

The rest of the top-5 are here, along with a message from the contest’s judge, internet science-blog polemic PZ Myers.

On a related note, can anyone tell me why AdBlock Plus has stopped working for me in Firefox 3 for Windows Vista?

Item the First:

Item the Second:

Item the Third:

Item the Fourth:

Conclusion:

Exeunt.

I swam out to this island today. It was farther than I had anticipated. There seals sunning themselves on the rocks eyed me with detached curiosity as I doubled-over in pain, gasping for breath.

Despite my great ambitions, I have managed only a fraction of the reading I had hoped to achieve this summer. In fact I’ve really only read about 1.5 books since the school term ended. This is an embarrasing state of affairs, and is in spite of the recent addition to my room of a giant comfy chair perfect for reading.

The fact is that I have not been making enough time for reading, something I want to change. In order to facilitate this I am trying out a new rule for myself:

On any given evening, I will undertake no other leisure activities (TV, computer games, music etc.) unless I have read for at least 30 minutes.

I think I will extend it to say that if it is before 9pm I must read for at least an hour. I just read for a solid three-quarters of an hour, so the rule is a success thus-far!

I’ve created a new element to my website; a blog which aggregates all my writing from the two blogs I write for (here and the Terry blog). I’ll also write personal news etc. there. All the posts syndicated to the site link back to their original source, so comments etc will still be on the original blogs. The other great benefit is that I can have one destination and RSS feed for all my writing.

To do the aggregation I’m using a great WordPress plugin called FeedWordPress, which syndicated posts from RSS feeds into a WordPress blog. This plugin was suggested to me by Andre Malan. The theme is based on “Pretty-Parchment” by Lloyd Armbrust, with my own modifications.

I was amused to see this ad pop up in Gmail for Microsoft’s newly-released search engine, Bing. Is this an oversight by Google, or the ultimate show of contempt for the supposed “Google Killer”?

Why?