Ernie's 3D Pancakes

Would you like some more... PANCAKES?

Fighting fire with fire

Encaped, begoggled balloon-blogger Cory Doctorow posts his daily anti-(legal stupidity) rant on Boing Boing, this time about the end-user license agreement imposed by the wonderful (cough cough) web service ApplyYourself:

This is the standard ridiculous EULA junk (we can be as negligent as we want and you can't ever sue us, no matter what), so after I sent in the letter for my student, I immediately fired off an email to the address listed, explaining that I didn't agree to this non-negotiated "agreement" and closing with my standard anti-EULA:

READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

Am I the only one who's noticed a reflexivity problem here?

Suppose Alice is the ApplyYourself employee who gets Cory's email. Couldn't she just send it right back? Assuming the anti-EULA actually works, then by reading Alice's reply, Cory would automatically release Alice from her non-negotiated obligation (to which Alice agreed by reading Cory's email) to release Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to Alice's employer (to which Cory automatically 'agreed' by using ApplyYourself).

Of course, Cory could send the anti-EULA right back, thereby obliging Alice to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to free Alice from her non-negotiated obligation to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to Alice's employer.

And then Alice could reply back again, thereby obliging Cory to free Alice from her non-negotiated obligation to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to free Alice from her non-negotiated obligation to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to Alice's employer.

To avoid a stack overflow (which could potentially give Cory superuser access to Alice's mind) she'd probably add Cory to her spam filter at this point, thereby ensuring that she could not read Cory's obvious reply, and thus could never be obliged to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to free Alice from her non-negotiated obligation to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to free Alice from her non-negotiated obligation to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to Alice's employer. To be nice, she sets up an auto-reply informing Cory of this fact.

Cory, not content to let the matter rest with his non-negotiated meta-obligations intact, could then change the opening phrase of the anti-EULA from `By reading this email' to `By accepting this email onto your mail server'. Alas, Alice is using gmail, which means that Google is now obligated to release Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to free Alice from her non-negotiated obligation to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to free Alice from her non-negotiated obligation to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to Alice's employer.

At this point, Cory drops Alice into his gmail spam filter as well, with the same auto-reply message. Google is now stuck in an infinite loop, forever freeing itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated et cetera et cetera et cetera, ultimately on Cory/Alice's behalf.

The extra network traffic generated by the Cory/Alice anti-EULA loop slows the internet (and thereby the world economy) to a grinding halt. As a result, Cory's recommendation letter does not actually reach the school for which it was intended, and the poor recommendee not get into grad school.

Question: Is ApplyYourself liable to Cory for losing his recommendation letter?

Google Charts

Click on the images, look at the URLs, and then read about the API here

[via bit-player]

Null Homey Topic

Professor Essiness got the smooth Ricci flow, yo.

[via Neatorama]

POST-IT NOTES ONLY

Chaos in the palm of your hand

[via Neatorama]

Ornament

Start with a a degenerate convex polyhedron with two faces, both regular pentagons, one red and the other green. Starting at the center of one facet (drawn here as a white circle), in every possible direction, extend a geodesic outward in that direction until it intersects itself or hits one of the vertices (drawn as colored circles). A geodesic is a straight path that wraps around edges as though the two sides were laid flat on either side of that edge. Now unfold all the resulting geodesics into the plane as straight line segments. The resulting star-shaped region is bounded by segments of lines through the origin and arcs of circles through the origin. Print onto Shrinky Dink plastic; bake for 2½ minutes at 350° under adult supervision; let cool for 1 minute; throw at ninja hiding behind the Festivus pole.

Subjectorum Univerſalium cum principiis abſolutis

The Cartesian product of universal subjects and absolute principles, from Athanasius Kircher's Ars Magna Sciendi, 1669.

[via BibliOdyssey, via KrazyDad]

Update (10/19): See also College Majors in the US, from the always lovely Indexed.

I love Paris in the summer when it sizzles...

The Second International Conference on Mathematical Aspects of Computer and Information Sciences (MACIS 2007) will be held December 5-7, 2007, at INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt.

MACIS is a new series of conferences where foundational research on theoretical and practical problems of mathematics for computing and information processing may be presented and discussed. MACIS also addresses experimental and case studies, scientific and engineering computation, design and implementation of algorithms and software systems, and applications of mathematical methods and tools to outstanding and emerging problems in applied computer and information sciences. Each conference focuses on two or three themes.

The themes for MACIS 2007 are:

• Computational Geometry and Computer Aided Geometric Design
  
• Polynomial System Solving
  
• Algorithms and Complexity

The abstract submission deadline is October 21, 2007. Sacré merde! That's three days from now!

I love Paris in the winter when it drizzles...

David points to a new conference on Topological & Geometric Graph Theory to be held May 19-23 at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. The conference has already lined up a truly impressive list of invited speakers. The deadline for submitting 4-page abstracts is December 31, 2007.