Mint the Coin!

I've just heard about this plan for the U. S. National Treasury to mint a $1,000,000,000,000 platinum Coin and deposit it in the Federal Reserve in order to alleviate congressional spending issues. Read about it here.

My opinion: this sounds equal parts amazing, ingenious, and absurd. Therefore the government should do it and I fully support it. I propose the following additions to the plan:

1) Since only one will ever be made and the plan is to spend as little money as possible making it, ideally it would not even be minted. Carving a minting plate for a single coin that will never be used? Please. The Treasury can just press out a flat disc of platinum, declare it to be a coin worth $1,000,000,000,000, and immediately deposit it in the highest security vault that the Federal Reserve has. What, we can't do exactly that because that could lead to really easy forgery? Fine - have them scratch a really simple design into it and keep its true appearance a secret! Or, you know, not worry about it, since it'll be useless as a unit of exchange - no bank would deposit it or give change, so it'd only be worth the value of the platinum it was printed on anyway - so there would be no benefit in forging it.

2) The next thing I fully support is that someone breaks into the Federal Reserve and steals it. Ideally this would be Nicholas Cage, but I am willing to be flexible. Certainly it'd be useless as a unit of exchange, but it's the principle of the thing! Everyone knows rare things are more valuable; it's a well-known principle of economics. This would be the only trillion-dollar coin in the world, certified as such by the federal government. This Coin, ladies and gentlemen, is the physical representation of the purchasing power and budgetary demands of the U. S. Congress! A symbol of American prosperity and ingenuity, or governmental excess, take your pick, it's the national zeitgeist in cold metallic form. Everyone should want one! Not everyone can have one, of course, which is part of the amazingness of the idea and further contributes to its symbolic nature. It is an object that invites theft, by anyone sophisticated enough to realize its true worth and skilled enough to accomplish the task. Clearly this is a job for Carmen Sandiego.

But, you ask, isn't this a reason why minting the Coin would be a bad idea? After all, part of the advantage of is supposedly the security of having only the one coin! Not at all: the government has an obvious fallback measure. In order to properly serve its purpose, the Coin must be kept secure in the deepest vaults of the Federal Reserve; if it ever leaves storage it will instantly lose all its value both to the government and to the person who steals it. If it is ever stolen, no one will ever know, so naturally the Coin will always remain in the vault.

3) There is one final thing that the Treasury can do. As rare, important, significant, and desirable as the Coin would be to Americans as a whole, it is sad that no one would ever see it. To alleviate these needs and create a further supply of funds for the needs of the government, I propose that the Treasury mint commemorative replicas of the Coin for public sale and distribution. This is, after all, well within its legal allowances.

I Want My Tears Back - Nightwish

The treetops, the chimneys, the snowbed stories, winter grey
Wildflowers, those meadows of heaven, wind in the wheatA railroad, across water, the scent of grandfatherly love
Blue bayous, Decembers, moon through a dragonfly's wings -

Where is the wonder? Where's the awe?
Where's dear Alice knocking on the door?
Where's the trapdoor that takes me there?
Where the real is shattered by a Mad March Hare?

Where is the wonder? Where's the awe?
Where are the sleepless nights I used to live for?
Before the years take me -
I wish to see the lost in me!

I want my tears back!
I want my tears back now!

A ballet on a grove, still growing young all alone
A rag doll, a best friend, the voice of Mary Costa

Where is the wonder? Where's the awe?
Where's dear Alice knocking on the door?
Where's the trapdoor that takes me there?
Where the real is shattered by a Mad March Hare?

Where is the wonder? Where's the awe?
Where are the sleepless nights I used to live for?
Before the years take me,
I wish to see the lost in me

I want my tears back!
I want my tears back now!

Lockhart's Lament

I don't know if you've noticed that I'm really bad at this 'updating the blog on a regular schedule' thing? There's not even really much of an excuse for it; it's not as though I'm working on more important things (well, I am, but I'm spending a lot of poorly-prioritised time on less important things, too). I'll have to try to get back into the habit.

Anyway - I try not to talk about myself too much on this blog because it's really not about me so much as just me thinking about things. (In case that motif wasn't already obvious on the blog background!) But I'm making an exception, because there's something I absolutely HAVE to gloat about at the moment. So, personal anecdote first; if you get lost or bored with the mathematics, skip to the bold text below where things get less anecdotal again!

For a little background - my current college transcript contains references from four different schools already and I'm only halfway done. The problem this has led to is that I took basic classes like Calc I and II at one school, then transferred to another school that accepted them as a prerequisite for Calc III, then transferred again to a school that counted Calc III towards my degree but not I or II, compelling me to have to retake them. The good news is this is advantageous to my GPA; the bad news is... well, guess who decided to use Laplace transformations to solve petty little first-order differential equations? Me. Because BOOOOOOOORIIIIIIIING. It's an open secret in Calc II that I have paid scarcely any attention in class at all, and still set the grade scale for the rest of the class.

Here's the part where I gloat: on the last exam of the year, I got 111%. I scored higher than the grade scale permits. ("I don't always get pass tests, but when I do...")

Here's how. The grade scale in Calc II worked by first scoring all the exams by points-per-problem out of points possible. All the scores are then scaled based on the person who scored highest - if the highest score is 93%, it becomes 100% and everyone else gets (100-93)% = 7% added to their score. Then the extra credit points are factored in; every test has up to 10% worth of extra credit, so the highest theoretical score is 110%. (Did I mention this was an easy class? It was a really easy class.)

There was only one question on the last exam I missed. (NOTE: If you don't follow the rest of this paragraph until you reach the next note, that's okay.) The instructions were to integrate 1/(1+x²) from -1/2 to 1/2 (the antiderivative of 1/(1+x²) is arctanh(x) + C, AKA the inverse hyperbolic tangent, in case you haven't gotten to hyperbolic trig...). Yes, it was literally the formula exactly, so it seemed easy until I realised the calculator doesn't have an inverse hyperbolic tangent button. After mulling this over for a while, I decided I could define y = arctanh(x), solve for x, use the identity tanh(y) = (e^y-e^-y)/(e^y+e^-y), and then solve for y to learn the logarithmic equivalent of arctanh(x). (NOTE: Okay, we're back!) Good news: it worked. Bad news: I completely lost the teacher somewhere along the way, who was expecting us to solve it using Taylor series. Oops. So I lost points and got a 93%, the scale was set by someone else who got a 99%, and so after accounting for extra credit I ended up with 104%.

When I got the test back and asked about the big red question mark on that problem, teacher explained his confusion, I explained my process, teacher said OH! That makes sense, and gave me back the seven points I had lost. And, since he wasn't about to go recalculate everyone else's grades in the class, that left me with a score that was 1% beyond what was theoretically possible! :D

Okay, anecdote ends here. Those of you who ended up skipping to this point get something to read as well. Most of you are probably part of the broad portion of society who not only hate mathematics, but are openly proud of it, which is a weirdly socially-acceptable display of ignorance. Ever wonder why that is? Paul Lockhart says it's because of the way that mathematics is (erroneously) taught as a science rather than an art, and you probably do appreciate mathematics when you encounter it - you just don't recognise it when you do, because you've been told all of your life that mathematics is something totally different! You can read it here. It is a bit long, but entertaining, illuminatory, and totally worth it. Post your thoughts when you're done.

The One Thing - Paul Colman

The Willpower Paradox

I feel vindicated!

This is something of a personally important issue for me, I guess. I wasn't exactly brought up under the slogan of 'believe in yourself and anything will be possible', but it's a common enough refrain that I was familiar with the idea and sorely confused by it. I'm pretty sure I was born a realist, and my nascent love of science was very clear that if you thought you could do anything just by mustering sufficient determination the laws of physics were going to have some harsh words with you. (Everyone thought this was nit-picking, of course. I was also born a pedant.)

As I continued to try to justify my unfounded thoughts on the matter it also occurred to me that determination was far less important to your success than accurate judgement - since, after all, if your ideas are wrong your inner drive is worthless and if your ideas are right then your determination just hastens what is ultimately inevitable! At some point I discovered and became obsessed with the reductio ad absurdum and the idea that submitting your own ideas to reckless assault for the slightest weakness was the only sure way to guarantee you were right, to prove that it was impossible to be wrong! Oh, and G. K. Chesterton's introduction to Orthodoxy - "I can show you the homes of the supermen... the men who truly believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums" - didn't hurt either.

So basically, I'm really enthusiastic about self-doubt, and I hope you'll forgive me if I point you in the direction of two much-better-written articles - at Scientific American and Nowsourcing - and simply seize a shamelessly egotistic opportunity to relish my own correctness.

The Clockyard - Abney Park

There was a young boy, in a clockyard,
Building himself from the pieces he found
Screwing on what's been left on the ground
Hoping to finish enough, one day, to leave

The years flew by, and some gears fell off -
Fears and rust and tears he doffed
And bravely searched, while parts he scoffed,
But soon he found -

There was a young man, in a clockyard,
Building himself from the pieces he found
Screwing on what's been left on the ground
Hoping to finish enough, one day, to leave

The years flew by, and some gears fell off -
Fears and rust and tears he doffed
And bravely searched, while parts he scoffed,
Until he found -

There was a grown man, in a clockyard -
Building himself from the pieces he found
Screwing on what's been left on the ground
Hoping to finish enough one day to lead

He thought to himself, "If I wait too long
To find the pieces I need, then my chance might be gone
What I need might be outside the gate
But I will never know, if I continue to wait."

And then he had a dream:
An old man cried in a clock yard,
Giving up on the scrap that he found on the ground,
"I can't build myself from this scrap all around!"
The man woke up and said, "I must leave."

Ethics and Madness in Beowulf

Okay, interesting fact time!.

One of the problematic aspects of translating Beowulf is the use of ambiguous words whose clear definition is not known. One of these words is 'æglæca', a noun which has connotations of monstrousness, vileness, or hostility. This, however, is complicated by the fact that it is used at various points to describe not only every one of the monsters Beowulf fights, but Beowulf himself. Repeatedly. Indeed, at one point Beowulf and the dragon he is fighting are described together using the plural form 'æglæcean'.

That the authoritative translation of Beowulf (by Frederick Klaeber) makes the interesting choice of translating the word differently depending on to whom it is applied - 'warrior'/'hero' for Beowulf, 'monster'/'demon'/'fiend' for Grendel or Grendel's mother, 'wretch'/'monstrous woman' for æglæcwif (a feminine form used for Grendel's mother) - does not simplify matters.

Now, this is already interesting in the implication of considerably more moral awareness and complexity to the Anglo-Saxons than is normally attributed, but I find Doreen Gillam's analysis particularly thought-provoking. She argues that the term is used to imply "supernatural," "unnatural" or even "inhuman" characteristics, as well as hostility towards other creatures: "Beowulf, the champion of men against monsters, is almost inhuman himself. [Aglæca/æglæca] epitomises, in one word, the altogether exceptional nature of the dragon fight. Beowulf, the champion of good, the 'monster' amongst men, challenges the traditional incarnation of evil, the Dragon: æglæca meets æglæcan."

In other words, it's possible that what we have is a legitimate Anglo-Saxon word that translates with the vernacular meaning of 'psycho'! :D

Balance Slays the Demon - Poets of the Fall

Deep in the ocean of darkness, in the mirror of light, balance becomes a stranger... and in your fantasies, he rides a storm on your peace. Beyond the shadows he settled for more. There is a miracle illuminated.

Deep in the ocean of darkness, in the mirror of light, balance becomes a stranger
And in your fantasies, he rides a storm on your peace - wake up and smell the danger

Ever the light casts a shadow, ever the night springs from the light

In the end, it's never just the light you need,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
In the end, it's never just the dark you seek,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
Find the peace

Beyond the lake he called home, lies a deeper darker ocean green.

Like an evil twin, feel it scratching within,
Like an insane sovereign ranger,
And his beautiful face with his leathery lace,
So can't you see the play he's staging?

Ever the light casts a shadow, ever the night springs from the light

In the end, it's never just the light you need,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
In the end, it's never just the dark you seek,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
Find the peace

yranidrO dellac ,nwot rehtona ni ,niaga neppah lliw tI

In the end, it's never just the light you need,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
In the end, it's never just the dark you seek,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
Find the peace

Screaming, new darkness descends on this frail frame, I drown in fathomless black space. Will I never scratch the depths of this domain? I see not, yet nothing could be worse then the shades my mind calls herein, alone, in my own Wake the unravelling of reasons schemed.

A Matter of Perseverance...

Apparently I've become Valve; I get two installments into a project and forget how to count to three. -_-

Well, so much for that. I will be certain to finish both the Strange Loop series and the Trouble with Sanity series, I promise, and in the future I won't even try to start something like that again.

In the meantime, however, I'm currently in the middle of finals. Regular posts should resume next week. I'll conclude both of the above series as soon as possible while moving on at the same time.

Sleep - Poets of the Fall

Hear your heartbeat
Beat a frantic pace
And it's not even 7 AM

You're feeling the rush
Of anguish settling
You cannot help showing them in.

Hurry up then,
Or you'll fall behind and
They will take control of you

And you need to heal
The hurt behind your eyes
Fickle words crowding your mind

So...
Sleep, sugar, let your dreams flood in,
Like waves of sweet fire, you're safe within
Sleep, sweetie, let your floods come rushing in,
And carry you over to a new morning
Try as you might
You try to give it up
Seems to be holding on fast

Its hand in your hand,
A shadow over you,
A beggar for soul in your face

Still it don't matter
If you won't listen,
If you won't let them follow you

You just need to heal,
Make good all your lies -
Move on and don't look behind

Day after day
Fickle visions
Messing with your head
Fickle visions
Sleeping in your bed,
Messing with your head
Fickle visions
Fickle visions