Wondermark » Archive » #936; The Too Explicit Date.

…As Stoltz writes, Prenda is just the beginning. The US copyright system is an attractive nuisance, a moral hazard on steroids, and the entertainment industry’s own much-publicized efforts are the tip of the iceberg. Prenda’s masterminds weren’t all that clever — there are smarter con artists out there who’ve learned a lot from Prenda’s efforts, and they’re licking their chops and getting ready to prey on you and your neighbors. And as with Prenda, we’ll all foot the bill for their cons, thanks to Big Content’s depraved indifference to the fallout from its legal projects.

via Welcome to the century of the copyright troll: Prenda Law was just the beginning – Boing Boing.

Historical Figures for the 21st Century – Telegraph.

“There is an aesthetic crisis in writing, which is this: how do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines? Right now my field must tackle describing a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing.”

The New Aesthetic — There is an aesthetic crisis in writing, which is….

[Sometimes I think people view skepticism as some sort of of sour small-mindedness. This is a good reminder that claims to psychic powers can cause a whole lot of harm. -egg]

It is Tuesday evening and I am on a luxury Mediterranean cruise ship called the Westerdam. I’m in the audience in the Vista lounge. A grouchy woman is sitting on a beige and golden throne on the stage. She’s complaining about builders and dispensing dietary advice. Her name is Sylvia Browne and for years I’ve wanted to interview her. She’s America’s most controversial psychic. She’s become famous for telling the parents of missing children what happened to their kids. Distraught parents go to her during her weekly appearance on The Montel Williams Show on CBS television. Montel is like Oprah. Sylvia tells them, “Your child is dead” or “Your child was sold into slavery in Japan.”

She really did once say that, in 1999. A six-year-old, Opal Jo Jennings, had a month earlier been snatched from her grandparents’ front yard in Texas while playing with her cousin. A man pulled up, grabbed her, threw her into his truck, hit her when she screamed and drove off. Her distraught grandmother went on Montel’s show and said, “This is too much for my family and me to handle. We want her back. I need to know where Opal is. I can’t stand this. I need your help, Sylvia. Where is Opal? Where is she?”

Sylvia said, “She’s not dead. But what bothers me – now I’ve never heard of this before – but she was taken and put into some kind of a slavery thing and taken into Japan. The place is Kukouro.”

“Kukouro?” Montel Williams asked, after a moment’s stunned silence.

via Jon Ronson on America’s most controversial psychic Sylvia Browne.

Our great, collective, ongoing realization that wiping out all the bacteria in our bodies may not actually be a great idea marches on. At Scientific American, Deborah Franklin writes about chronic halitosis — the sort of bad breath that doesn’t go away with a simple brushing — and scientists’ efforts to cure it by encouraging the growth of some mouth bacteria, instead of pouring Listerine on everything and letting God sort it out.

via Working with your microbiome to produce better-scented breath – Boing Boing.

[This is a really odd one. Mathematical statements that are almost but not quite true make me itch. -egg]

The Perrin numbers have a definition analogous to Fibonacci numbers. Define P0 = 3, P1 = 0, and P2 = 2. Then for n > 2, define

Pn+3 = Pn+1 + Pn+0.

The Concrete Tetrahedron says

It appears that n is prime “almost if and only if” Pn mod n = 0.

The “only if” condition is true without qualification: if n is prime, Pn mod n = 0. It’s the “if” part that’s almost true. When Pn mod n = 0, n is usually prime. Composite numbers that satisfy the Perrin condition Pn mod n = 0 are called Perrin pseudoprimes. The smallest Perrin pseudoprime is 271,441. The next is 904,631.

There are only 17 Perrin pseudoprimes less than a billion. By comparison, there are 50,847,534 primes less than a billion.

So if you used the Perrin condition to test whether numbers less than a billion are prime, you would correctly identify all 50,847,534 primes as primes. But out of the 949,152,466 composite numbers, you would falsely report 17 of these as prime.  In other words, you would be 100% accurate in identifying primes as primes, but only 99.999998% accurate in identifying composite numbers as composite.

via Almost if and only if | The Endeavour.

Kendrick Lamar – I’m Dying Of Thirst – YouTube.

[So beautiful. Seriously. -egg]

via OSCILLATE on Vimeo.

You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!

It’s an odd little speech. But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying.

That’s because all of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then.

via Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’ – The Washington Post.