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And now, for even greater excitement and enhanced user experience, a Share / Bookmark button has been added to each post. HT to Diego.

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Stronger

Way... too... funny... Must... share...


Stronger from ticoneva on Vimeo.

HT to Chris Blattman.

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This blog has gone html funky! There is a new "Subscribe!" pull-down menu for all your RSS needs. Supply will meet demand, so if you want more buttons added, send me a line. (Thanks to TopRank blog!)

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Gary Gygax...

A colleague sent me this a minute ago. A sad day for geeks and gamers all over.

GG failed the ST we'll all fail and moved onto the next rulebook.

I know: so many people, all great in their own ways, die each day, so I don't want to exaggerate.

But what Gary did was not just innovate RPGs out of wargaming, creating a juggernaut industry that has morphed over the decades from books to desktop gaming to MMORPGs; nor was his achievement to bring to the masses the idea that complex systems could be simulated through simple rules (though some people will argue that AD&D is anything but); nope, his real achievement was to popularize the idea that these rules could be used to interact with complex systems in real time. And that it was fun both to design them and to use them.

And thus he helped pave the way that geekdom would follow from then on, adding a fun side to probabilities, computer programming, mathematical simulation, etc.

For me, personally, the discovery in high school of D&D (the Basic set in the red box) marked one of those before-and-after points in life. While my productivity (and my stock of "real" books read) would undoubtedly have been a lot higher without RPGs, some crucial aspects of who I am today have to do with the self that developed from playing those games, starting from with whom and how I spent my leisure time during high school all the way to some basic professional choices.


So thanks, Gary.

p.s. I profoundly dislike the level-based system!

p.s.2. A nice tribute from Slate.

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Hazing

It seems appropriate to start with a declaration of intent. First, for full disclosure: I wanted the blog to be called "The Null Space," but that name (with and without "the") was taken. Now that that piece of fascinating trivia is behind us: a nullspace of a matrix A is the subspace composed of all vectors x such that Ax=0.

What? You don't get it? While nullspaces are packed with fascinating characteristics, here's the deal: they contain all the solutions to certain types of differential and difference equations, including sexy beasts like Markov processes. Oh, yeah!

Still don't get it? Nullspaces hold the solutions to (some broad types of) dynamic problems. These little beasts (the set of eigenvectors, together with their inseparable lovers, the eigenvalues) provide information about the path, stability, and final resting place, if any, of systems represented in those dynamic problems.

And what is a blog about if not about trying to make sense of that dynamic mess out there, aim for a little more stability in your path, find your own steady state?

Hmmm. OK, that was horrible. The truth is, I really liked "the nullspace" since I heard the word in math camp of the Econ PhD program and decided I had to open a bar named that one day. I haven't opened a bar; I opened a blog.

...

p.s. since you were just dying to know, "kernel" means the same in linear algebra... but not in all branches of mathematics. See how nuanced and insightful this blog is from the get go?

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