Tales from the Evil Empire

Hey Bertrand,

Thanks for the 'way too kind' review. I must say that I wasn't able to accurately describe my feelings toward the whole exercise, but "impressively time consuming" is exactly perfect. In fact that is the one phrase that describes pretty much everything I've been passionate about in my life -- and I always thought these things were unrealted. That would certainly have to be the major text in any bioctal proficiency diploma. Oh, and it would make a hell of a blog sub title!

That is a great idea on the balanced ternary bioctal numbers, it really opens up a lot of possibilities. I've been experimenting with a system where bits are like charges (+/-). There are two digits, making four states +1, -1, 0 (neither), and an impossible set of both (which always destroys itself leaving 0). In certain ways Zero makes more sense not being a digit, at least it always seems a bit awkward the way its used now. With 'charges', negative and positive numbers are written the same, just they use different 'digits' (eg Int32 and Int64 represent negatives the same way, no confusion between -1 and 0xFFFF, etc..). Adding a positive to a negative can result in a 'mixed' number after the cancellations (a number with both +1 and -1 digits), but the normalizing is pleasantly simple. It also gives bool states of (something like) True (1), False (-1), NotTested (0), and Impossible(+-). Hmm, I can never describe these things in words, esp when having my end of day wine. I'm doing some animations I'll post...

Anyway, after reading your idea about ternary bioctal numbers, I've been trying tonight to get the above system into positive and negative larger numbers. It becomes pretty interesting, this really makes you ask a lot of totally basic questions about the nature of the numbers. Using two colors works for writing, but obviously there would need to be a logical way to represent positives vs negatives without color, and also zero and (+-)... What do you think would be a the right base for a system that goes naturally above and below zero (like ternary also does)? Would it be -8 to +8, or -16 to +16? I really like the symmetry of 4^4 (and 3^3 in ternary), just not sure if that should be half on each side of zero, or a full negative mirrored copy..

Anyway, I think that last glass of wine has rinsed out the day's caffeine, so time to sleep. Btw, your blog has been the first good and deep overview of Whidbey I've read -- looks like it really will be something else, cool even : ). Thanks for that too...

Salut,
Robin

PS Do you really think the solar system would be that much more boring without my anus? Creepy.

Well, Robin, not my idea, it came from a comment on your blog. After that, it was just adding nevi and minus nevi.
Actually, I might give you a few hints that you may find useful or not, dating back from my thesis work, which was about graded algebras, with a focus on ternary algebras. Perhaps you know of Grassmann algebras, which are non-commutitive Z2-graded algebras, for example. Here, it looks like you're building a graded algebra but can't find the right grading group. See the sign as the grade, and the grading group is then Z2. Now, zero does not belong in the grading group, but in the algebra (otherwise, your grading group is no longer a group because it has no neutral element). What's the grade/sign of zero? You decide (the folks who designed the way signed integers are coded in binary decided it was positive).
Seems like you have some more useless thinking to do.
By the way, did you consider publishing your stuff in a scientific paper, something not too academic like Scientific American? It would be great fun to see this in a mainstream journal.

Do you realize that thanks to you, when you type "Microsoft butthole anus" in Google, chances are you'll end up on my blog? Thanks a lot, really.

Hey Bertrand,

Thanks for the pointers to Grassmann algebras, that looks like totally fascinating stuff. Yes huge amounts of useless reading ahead, happy to say. Still it will pale in comparison to the massive amounts of time you must have consumed doing a thesis on the subject. I can only stand in awe.

I would love to publish something in a magazine like Scientific American, even a letter, but it's always seemed so out of reach. Recently though, I've become more hopeful... I'm not trying to brag here, but I've been offered pretty generous funding for my next article. It titled, "New Numeric Writing System Disproves Global Warming". Of course the required travel and research will soak up most of that, but it is still a small step towards the dream...

Btw, sounds like you could make some serious coin with google ads ; ).

Cheers,
Robin

PS - Completely unrelated, but with ASP.NET I've recently found a few servers I admin have backups of config files, called web.config.old or something. Being that these were generally artifacts left over from early testing, they sometimes contained unencrypted passwords, or db access stuff. The problem of course is they could be downloaded from the net. Obviously that is a user error, but maybe it would be a good idea to block files with the pattern ".config" (appearing anywhere) by default? Just a thought..

Just try it. If you've got good material like your stuff, it's probably easier than it seems.

About the old config file, use the web.old.config name instead of web.config.old. That will take care of it as the .config extension is never served.

I'll think about the Google ads, thanks for the tip.