Link Roundup: November 2023

In case you missed it, last month, I wrote an article on the mystery genre in ace fiction.  And the Ace Journal Club read a chapter about intersectionality with race.

Purity culture made me feel trapped.  Finding asexuality set me free. | LGBTQ Nation – As regulars know, I track articles on asexuality for my other blog, but I thought I’d highlight this for the godless audience.  Tyger Songbird describes their story of growing up in Christian purity culture.  At first it seemed to align with their desire to remain single, but it was revealed to be a lie, as he was expected to get married before 25.  Tyger Songbird also wrote several other good articles last month about virgin-shaming, and being sex-repulsed, and Black masculinity.

Evil Lost Media: Dr Phil’s House of Hatred | Big Joel (video, 39 min) – Dr Phil briefly created a disaster of a reality show that brought together people who hated each other.  You know, a white supremacist, a black person who hates white people, etc.  Dr. Phil seems to expect a simple narrative of two sides coming together, but there’s an obvious asymmetry between the oppressors and the oppressed, and it also isn’t long before intersectionality rears its head.  It’s hilarious to watch Phil’s naive centrism beach itself on the shores of reality.

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Consent culture and fitness

In gay fiction, the nerd/jock romance is a very common trope. In the standard take, the jock is an attractive closeted high school boy with homophobic friends. The jock archetype works well in these stories, because he’s an object of desire that comes with a source of conflict and character arc for free. The jock archetype is emphatically not the same as jocks in real life.

I recently had occasion to read a gay romance (see review) that was allegedly true and autobiographical. So while it might be described as a nerd/jock romance, he’s a real jock, not the fictional archetype that I’m accustomed to in this context. He is not in high school, he does not have homophobic friends, rather he just spends a lot of time working out and being concerned about his appearance.

I was shocked how disagreeable it was to me, and why. The sticking point was that jocks (in the novel) do not observe consent culture.

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Origami: Little Turtle

Little Turtle

Little Turtle by Tomoko Fuse

Sorry to disappoint people who were expecting a turtle!  That’s just what the model is called.  If you want a turtle, go look at this one.

This is a fairly old photo, from 2014.  I can tell just based on the photography sensibility.  I just put the model on top of the textbook I was using as a flat surface for folding, and put a tape measure in there for scale.

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Infinite Fractal Mazes

My previous post, “Solving fractal mazes” is a prerequisite to this one. Fair warning, this will be long and dense.

Fractal mazes contain infinite paths, but the only solutions permitted are finite. Some people find that disappointing. What’s the point of all that extra maze if we don’t get to traverse it? So my goal is to come up with a variant ruleset for fractal mazes that permits and formalizes infinite solutions. In fact, I will propose two distinct rulesets, provocatively titled Countably Infinite Fractal Mazes and Cantor Fractal Mazes.

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Solving Fractal Mazes

What are fractal mazes?

Fractal Mazes are a type of maze popularized (or invented?) by Mark J. P. Wolf, published in the Mathpuzzle blog in 2003. A fractal maze is a maze that contains nested copies of itself.

small fractal maze

“Small Fractal Maze”. Credit: Mark J. P. Wolf. Source: Mathpuzzle

Fractal Mazes are typically visually represented as a sort of circuit diagram. In the above image, the goal is to find a path between the “+” and “-” by following the colored wires. The wires are color coded in order to clearly indicate where paths cross over/under each other. The three modules, labeled A, B, and C, are each copies of the entire maze. However, the start and finish only exist in the largest copy of the maze. So however deep you go into the fractal, you must eventually climb all the way back up again.

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Link Roundup: October 2023

A Weird New Scam | stderr – Remember when FTB went down for a few days around September 12 or so?  Marcus Ranum explains what happened, entertainingly.  The short version is, someone claimed they had a copyright on the banner image–you know, the one that says freethoughtblogs.com on it–and the hosting service shut down the site because DMCA is fundamentally broken.

Fractal Mazes – Commenter amito pointed me to their fractal maze browser app (see app, Github).  (Solver beware: I’m pretty sure the first maze by Noke Lieu just doesn’t have a solution.)  And then Jay McArthur linked to their own github page with a collection of more fractal mazes with citations, plus a python app.  I’m proud to have made three mazes featured in both of these.  I made them a long time ago (here’s one), but they’re still kicking around.

Fractal mazes are great, I love them.  I first heard about fractal mazes in 2003 through MathPuzzle, and then I designed three myself almost a decade ago.  You cannot solve fractal mazes with the conventional right-hand rule, but there is a computationally efficient terminating algorithm that will solve any fractal maze.  Perhaps one day I will describe the algorithm.

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The Random Number Game

I invented a game, and it goes like this. We’re going to pick a 20 digit number by taking turns choosing each digit. I choose the first digit, then you choose the second digit, I choose the third and so on. Once we’ve chosen all the digits, we use our number as the seed to a random number generator. The random number generator picks a number between 0 and 1, and if the number is greater than 0.5 then I win; if it’s less than 0.5 then you win.

Obviously this isn’t meant to be a “fun” game, it’s more of an open-ended math problem. What’s the strategy? Is there a strategy? Who wins?

The idea behind the random number generator, is that it’s deterministic, and yet opaque. Given any particular seed, the random number generator will consistently pick the same result—either you win, or I do. But there’s no particular pattern to it. It behaves as if the result were randomly chosen. The only way to predict the game’s outcome is to individually plug in each random seed into the random number generator. However, this might be intractable, as there are 10^20 possible seeds.

This game is deterministic, finite, and perfect information—much like Chess. However, it appears that the only real strategy is brute force, by plugging in seeds into the random number generator.

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