A New Blag

I have dedicated an entire new blag to my love for grammar. I affectionately call it “Grammar Camp”

Chickenfoot Review

So I’ve spent, admittedly, not very long with Chickenfoot’s self-title Chickenfoot. Honestly, I’m probably not the sort of person who should be reviewing it, but I am anyway. What I mean is that Chickenfoot, as you may know, is a rock supergroup comprising musicians from Van Halen and Red Hot Chili Peppers, and I’m not really that into mainstream rock.

The Van Halen influence is certainly detectable. As for RHCP influence: I honestly cannot say; I can’t force myself to listen to enough RHCP to really know what they sound like. Chickenfoot just sounds to me like really uninspired, mainstream rock. Sure, some of the tracks are a little catchy, but they’re mostly forgettable.

I forsee Chickenfoot going down in my personal record books next to Black Stone Cherry’s self-titled as sorely and quite intensely mediocre.

Criticism aside (and hey, this is Critacracy), I do actually like some of the songs. The fourth track—and their second single—”Oh Yeah”, despite its unimaginative title, is pretty good. It’s good in the way Black Stone Cherry’s “Rain Wizard” is good: good enough to probably be in one of my playlists somewhere for like jogging or something.

WolframAlpha: Second Impressions

After I took out some of my aggression on WolframAlpha a couple weeks ago (and managed to misspell “Stephen Wolfram” and not even notice until now), I’ve decided to somewhat revise my statements.

While WolframAlpha is still nothing special, I’ve been using it pretty much every day. It’s sort of a replacement for my calculator, much in the way Google was. I used to do, for example, physics problem sets and type basic equations into Google, like . WolframAlpha has filled this role because it can do things like take and find roots.

It can even somtimes surprise you with its abilities:

Not bad

So the moral of the story is that WolframAlpha isn’t all bad; we sciency-types can still find it somewhat useful.

In other news, wasn’t Google Squared supposed to be out by now?

WolframAlpha: First Impressions

I’m writing this on launch day, so I’m not sure how well the following statements apply to the WolframAlpha we will know when this launch business is over. Also, I stopped watching the webcast several hours ago because, frankly, I’ve heard enough of Stephen Wolfram telling us how cool he is.

No one fucking cares

I have to say that I find WolframAlpha, in its current incarnation, rather disappointing. Certainly it has some cool capabilities; I can find out how long it would take me to drive to jupiter with the query:

• (distance from earth to planet jupiter) / 60mph

What’s disappointing is that the following queries do not work:

• (distance from earth to jupiter) / 60mph
• time it would take to travel from earth to jupiter at 60mph

etc. In fact, my first-ever WolframAlpha query, average quantity of beer consumed by a US male in 1985, left me empty-handed, so to speak. Now given WolframAlpha’s design, it’s not surprising that this information was lacking. Why in fuck would anyone ever bother to enter that sort of data into Wolfram’s database?

But that’s just it! That’s exactly the sort of weird fucking information that a search engine like Google can find, and presumably will be found by Google squared. In the end, Wolfram’s own little 10TB database can never compete with the massive amount of information available on the web.

That’s where semantic parsing comes in, and is another area where WolframAlpha underperforms. It can handle a simple question like

• What is the GDP of France?

because it recognizes that “what”, “is”, “the”, and “of” are all unnecessary words. But, similar to my previous example,

• time it would take to traverse the milky way at 100mph

produces no results. Why is this? All the data is there: diameter of the milky way, 100mph, and division. The only thing that’s failing is the engine’s ability to parse the question I wrote. The answer is ~1 trillion years, by the way.

But maybe I’m being unfair. How about something simpler? GDP of US, Europe works fine, but GDP of US compared to Europe does not (and for the grammar-inclined, GDP of US compared to that of Europe also fails).

In fact, the only really impressive capabilities I’ve seen are those relating to mathematics, and those are far inferior to Wolfram’s already-existing Mathematica.

Killer Toothpaste

I am writing this post in order to warn fellow members of society that using Colgate’s Whitening with Oxygen Bubbles Brisk Mint presents a greater danger to your health than not brushing your teeth at all. I bought this toothpase out of curiosity; what does toothpaste need oxygen bubbles for? Who knows! What an adventure! Or so I thought…

I did a Google search to find the answer to this question, but instead found numerous reviews describing pain and suffering resulting from this toothpaste. Sissies, I thought, a little burn helps kill the germs. I’m afraid to say that I am now one of those sissies.

After about two days of using the oxygen-bubbled toothpaste I developed an extremely painful soreness in my throat. I thought for a while that it was an unrelated illness, but remembering the reviews online I decided to try using a different toothpaste for a few days.

Not 24 hours after ceasing to use the oxygen bubble toothpaste the soreness had almost entirely vanished. I may be a fan of Colgate in general, but this is one product I will never ever buy again.

The Factor Theorem

I was a little angry the other day to be assigned the following problem for homework:

Suppose are in Show that for (not necessarily distinct) in Assume the fundamental theorem of algebra.

Why the anger? Because I don’t know algebra; I’m not taking algebra. I found proofs on the internet, but they all require algebra that I simply don’t know. So I resorted to the following:

Lemma

If is a polynomial  of degree with then the Taylor polynomial of at is equal to

The proof of this statement is obvious and can be found in a couple of ways: show that the two polynomials are equal up to order and therefore equal; find the derivative of at and use that to show that is also the coefficient for the term of the Taylor polynomial.

Theorem

Suppose are in Then for (not necessarily distinct) in

Proof

Given then

by the lemma. That is,

Suppose . That is, suppose where are the roots of . We know must exist by the fundamental theorem of algebra.

Clearly,

We continue in the same way; take a root of and repeat the above by taking the Taylor polynomial of at . This will eventually reduce the equations to:

Considering only the first and last terms, it is clear that

QED

Ilosaarirock: First Impressions

Having spent a solid 3 hours now with Porcupine Tree’s Ilosaarirock, I feel confident calling myself an expert on it. If you don’t want to read my more thorough description of each song, here’s the TLDR version: Finland sucks, Porcupine Tree rocks.

• Fear of a Blank Planet: Yes. This sounds just like it did when I heard them for their US FOABP tour. It’s everything I dreamed of.
• Lightbulb Sun: Actually, wow. This is my favorite recording of the song; I like it even more than the Warszawa version. I find something really appealing about its hardcore-ness.
• Open Car: Probably my second favorite rendition after the Arriving Somewhere… version. Nothing special–at least compared to “Lightbulb Sun”
• Anesthetize: Really? I really wanted to love this. In fact, I love 99% of it. But at 7:13, he sings:

“The dust in my soul makes me feel the weight in my legs / my head in the clouds and I’m zoning out / my hand’s on a gun and I find the range, God, tempt me / I’m totally bored, but I can’t switch off”

The text in bold is supposed to be sung in the second verse. He should have sung “I’m watching TV, but I find it hard to stay conscious.” The rest of the song is fine. In fact, the rest of the song is great. But somehow this is one of those things that tickles even my subconscious because I know the song so well.

As an aside, I have similar feelings about “Futile” on Rockpalast. At about 2:15, right after the chorus, the correct line is: “You were the one collecting space.” What Wilson tries to sing is “You were the one just saving face,” which should be the second line. Instead, what comes out is “You were the one jollecting space.”

• Blackest Eyes: Nothing special here.
• Way Out Of Here: This one’s pretty solid; I didn’t really think much of this song until I’d heard it live, and this version does nothing to diminish my opinion of it. I have to say though, the Finns clapping at the beginning is fucking annoying. They clap a lot for every song, but this is ridiculous.
• Sleep Together: Samesies, but the clapping is more acceptable.
• Trains: Goddamn Finns fucking clapping at the fucking wrong time. I mean, really? There is exactly one segment of this song in which you are supposed to clap, and that segment is not the entire song. Fuck you, Finland.
• Halo: Possibly my favorite “Halo” yet. I’m not a huge fan of the song, but, again, when I heard it live I thought it rocked. This one sounds a lot like the one I heard, so I dig it.

Radioactive Toy = Weissensee?

They even look alike!

Ok, maybe the title is a little misleading. Porcupine Tree and Neu! are very different bands. Obviously, Steven Wilson has found much inspiration in Neu!’s work. He notes in the album sleeve for Insignificance:

“Signify” was supposed to be P.T. play Krautrock, so much so that the demo actually starts off as a faithful (reasonably) cover version of the Neu! Classic “Hallogallo” (one of my top 5 desert island discs) – however clearly something went horribly wrong about 3½ minutes in and “Signify” was born

And the musical resemblance between “Hallogallo” and “Signify” is pretty obvious. But I was listening to Neu! the other day, and noticed a pretty strong resemblance between Neu!’s “Weissensee” and Porcupine Tree’s “Radioactive Toy.”

In particular, the base lines sound almost identical. They plod and pulse in basically the same way. Interestingly, I did a quick Google search, but no one else seems to be thinking about this.

Funny, that.

Residents Of A Blank Planet ‘Ilosaarirock’ Ships

The long-awaited (or at least long-anticipated (or at the very least long-thought-about-even-though-you-aren’t-a-member-of-ROABP)) Porcupine Tree live album, Ilosaarirock, has shipped! Porcupine Tree posted the news on their site today, as well as the track listing, reprinted here for the lazy:

1. Intro
2. Fear Of A Blank Planet
3. Lightbulb Sun
4. Open Car
5. Anesthetize
6. Blackest Eyes
7. Way Out Of Here
8. Sleep Together
9. Trains
10. Halo

I guess that’s cool. The entire FOABP album makes an appearance, which is great, but the rest of it… Lightbulb Sun, Open Car, Blackest Eyes, Trains, Halo — really? I know they played them for the FOABP tour, but that’s not all they played. It’s not like I need another live recording of Trains. I already have four: XMII, Rockpalast, Arriving Somewhere…, We Lost The Skyline.

In fact, ignoring FOABP tracks, the song on Ilosaarirock that I have the least live copies of is Lightbulb Sun. I have just one, from Warszawa.

I shouldn’t complain though, it’s free and it has all of FOABP.

iTunes DJ

In case you’ve missed the hubbub about iTunes 8.1: Apple has released the new ‘iTunes DJ’ feature for iTunes. What is it? It’s sorta like the old party shuffle, where you queue songs for your party and groove to the rhythm (or whatever), but with a couple things added:

• Sync with Genius (la-de-freakin’-da)
• Request songs with your iPhone/iPod touch

The latter feature is, of course, more impressive, and also completely useless. Like “Woohoo! Let’s make sure our DJ uses iTunes because wouldn’t it be cooler to request a song with my PHONE rather than speak to the guy in person? Alright!”

But it is my opinion that this is simply a marketing ploy by Apple — and a good one to boot. This article, for example, suggests you should only party with people who use Apple products:

Invite your friends over (though only if they have an iPhone or touch, naturally) and let the guests choose the songs.

Clearly you’re not cool unless you have an iPhone. But we already knew that, didn’t we?