Zettelkasten Entries

Each image a computer picks up is essentially a very large number - and it can subtract the first frame from any others to find differences.
Obscenely long passwords must exceed 54 bits.
Nonprofiting breeds favoritism because it leans on friends.
Define RPG PCs as having a few Small, Medium and Large goals, in rough order of desired arc length.
A symmetric key is used for both encryption and decryption.
Where p=0.05, repeating the trial and getting no result becomes .05^k with k as the number of successive attempts. A serial probability, if stable, is p^k.
Sampling theorists are flawed in that the stopping rule can produce p<0.05 depending on which variable you choose to stop on.
We don't have galactic-level language or concepts - the words to express the difference between 1-star and a 17-system species, for instance.
First you fight them, then you get angry at them, then you laugh at them, then you ignore them.
You can't draw a feeling.
Drawing from imagination is difficult because you only see what you're drawing when you're finished.
A guitar is really a hollow wooden chamber modulated with strings vibrating against a 'bridge' into the inside of it.
The PS3 was cracked because, although Sony used the standard Elliptic-Curve Digital-Signature Algorithm, it only had one constant value for all messages.
"The stain'd are those who refuse to see, and as though unwitting, gird themselves in dragon scales, who fear not flames because they think that all is fire."
Surreality is a matter of combining things in a way that feels instinctively true.
Mermaids are female from the waist up and genderless from the waist down. They're symbols of transformation, and a search for love which permanizes it.
Ciphertexts can never be shorter than plaintexts.
Most Civil War encryption only needed to be secure for three or four hours.
If a ciphertext is 128 bits long, there should be 2^128 possible ciphertexts.
We can compute the entropy of a probability distribution p1, p2, ... pn as the negative sum of all probabilities multiplied by their logarithms -p1*(logp1) - p2*(logp2) - ... pn*(logpn).
An aspirator produces a vacuum in a side arm equal to the vapor pressure of water being run through its main channel.
2^305 is the standard information capacity of the universe.
The security level of a cipher is the log2 of the number of operations it takes to break. A 20 bit level of security has an upper bound of one million operations.
Extend a stone in atari.
In Go, eyes containing more than 8 points can make eyes in themselves and don't have killing moves.
The winning side should seek to reduce the complexity of the game.
Moore's Law is that we lose one bit of security every two years.
The more time you spend doing something, the greater the gain on making it into something enjoyable.
Error-correcting code survives entropy. Satellites receives binary instructions in packets of 3 - 000 or 111. Then if a cosmic ray interferes the message is likely altered by only one bit and still transmit effectively.
The Hamming distance between two blocks of binary is the number of bits you'd have to change to turn one into the other.
A Hamming sphere is all codes of distance 4 for a starting codeword. This conception, via geometry, makes the method compatible with the sphere-packing problem.
In math there are many complicated objects but only a few simple ones. So if a simple object is called for, it has to be one of a few.
French knot art pieces are called entrelacs because they interlace, and they represent the idea of endless love.
In pagan cultures mazes were as unassuming as baseball diamonds.
Fox and geese is a tag variant played in snow tromped down to make pathways with spirals and dead ends.
Historically women could become princesses by marrying princes, but not vice-versa.
Paralanguage, or vocalics, are the aural components of speech that add meaning to words as they're spoken.
In the Vita Merlini, Merlin is more like a wild man with prophetic insight than a wizard. He is also a king.
A carillon is the second heaviest instrument, behind the pipe organ. If it has less than 23 bells it is a chime.
Crib talk is a kind of before sleep monologue given by young children while in bed. It usually lasts from 1.5 to 2.5, and consists mainly of question-answer sequences, wordplay and bits of song or rhyme. It's also exhibited by deaf children in ASL.
Measurability depends on a linear progression of units, and can be forced by applying a new scale.
Cartoon character designs are recognizable from silhouette alone.
There's a shadow organization that reenact the works of the Marquis de Sade.
Single axons run the length of a giraffe's neck.
Average savings in a country are tilted by the billionaires.
Degrees of freedom shape probability distribution functions - the more items in a sample, the more the shape changes.
Weight is not a constant, because it differs based on where you are in the universe.
If you put a bunch of smart people in a room together and their areas of intelligence don't overlap sufficiently, they'll just spend time being alternately annoyed by each other.
Left to right biasing is built into almost all design interfaces.
One can't read books in dreams, but listening to music is possible - new compositions can be uncovered without much trouble.
What we lack language to express, we often struggle to remember.
Recipe development is largely a matter of rapid trial-and-error processing.
If you find people to be poor subjects, there are many forms of art that will forever be closed to you.
Radio stations choose their programming by how long they expect people to listen - Top 40s stations are more for traveling or commutes while variety stations are meant for the workplace.
Radio signals have borders of interference, along which natural exquisite corpses form, waiting to be sensed in the air as if by ghost hunters.
Besides their own home, the average person will never see every room of any building they spend their time in.
Virtue is more than the absence of vice. A comatose person is not virtuous.
You can tell a work's audience by seeing what it's advertising.
Metaphor has an odd relationship to synesthesia. We think it's strange when someone colors a sound, and yet call one 'dark' or 'bright'.
The birthplace of horror is the gap between the self and its self-image.
Many jokes, of the kind that come prepackaged, set up a kind of expectation - but in one way fulfills it. "You will laugh at this" or "I will fool you". It's like a magician announcing a trick.
One can, perversely, expect to have one's expectations broken.
Jara Cimrman (or 'the Master') was voted The Greatest Czech in 2005, but was disqualified due to being fictional.