Dan Q

Calculating the Ideal “Sex and the City” Polycule

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

I’ve never been even remotely into Sex and the City. But I can’t help but love that this developer was so invested in the characters and their relationships that when he asked himself “couldn’t all this drama and heartache have been simplified if these characters were willing to consider polyamorous relationships rather than serial monogamy?”¹, he did the maths to optimise his hypothetical fanfic polycule:

Juan Pablo Sarmiento

As if his talk at !!Con 2024 wasn’t cool enough, he open-sourced the whole thing, so you’re free to try the calculator online for yourself or expand upon or adapt it to your heart’s content. Perhaps you disagree with his assessment of the relative relationship characteristics of the characters²: tweak them and see what the result is!

Or maybe Sex and the City isn’t your thing at all? Well adapt it for whatever your fandom is! How I Met Your Mother, Dawson’s Creek, Mamma Mia and The L-Word were all crying out for polyamory to come and “fix” them³.

Perhaps if you’re feeling especially brave you’ll put yourself and your circles of friends, lovers, metamours, or whatever into the algorithm and see who it matches up. You never know, maybe there’s a love connection you’ve missed! (Just be ready for the possibility that it’ll tell you that you’re doing your love life “wrong”!)

¹ This is a question I routinely find myself asking of every TV show that presents a love triangle as a fait accompli resulting from an even moderately-complex who’s-attracted-to-whom.

² Clearly somebody does, based on his commit “against his will” that increases Carrie and Big’s validatesOthers scores and reduces Big’s prioritizesKindness.

³ I was especially disappointed with the otherwise-excellent The L-Word, which did have a go at an ethical non-monogamy storyline but bungled the “ethical” at every hurdle while simultaneously reinforcing the “insatiable bisexual” stereotype. Boo! Anyway: maybe on my next re-watch I’ll feed some numbers into Juan’s algorithm and see what comes out…

Note #24503

This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.

She might not have completely slept through me serving her a dog treat this Nineteenth of Bleptember, but our dog was still dozy enough from her nap that she didn’t notice for a while that I’d placed it directly onto her bleppy tongue. 😅

Reply to short note on emoji text alternative variations

In an article about the accessibility of emoji characters to screen readers, Steve Faulkner said:

…

Note that there are differences in how they are described in some cases:

“grinning face” is also “beaming face”

“beaming face” is also a “smiling face”

“open mouth” is described by JAWS/Narrator but not by NVDA/VoiceOver

“big eyes” are described by NVDA/VoiceOver but not by JAWS/Narrator

“cold sweat” is “sweat” and also “sweat drop”

…

The differences don’t matter to me (but I am just one and not the intended consumer), as I usually experience just the symbol. Reading the text descriptions is useful though as quite often I have no idea what the symbols are meant to represent. It is also true that emoji’s take on different meanings in different contexts and to different people. For example I thought 🤙 meant “no worries” but its description is “call me hand”, what do I know 🤷

…

Steve Faulkner

What Steve observes is representative of a the two sides of emoji’s biggest problem, which are

that when people use them for their figurative meaning, there’s a chance that they have a different interpretation than others (this is, of course, a risk with any communication, although the effect is perhaps more-pronounced when abbreviating¹), and
when people use them for the literal image they show, it can appear differently: consider the inevitable confusion that arises from the fact that Twitter earlier this year changed the “gun” emoji, which everybody changed to look like a water pistol to the extent that the Emoji Consortium changed its official description, which is likely to be used by screen readers, to “water pistol”, back to looking like a firearm. 🤦

But the thing Steve’s post really left me thinking about was a moment from Season 13, Episode 1 of Would I Lie To You? (still available on iPlayer!), during which blind comedian Chris McCausland described how the screen reader on his phone processes emoji:

I don’t know if it’s true that Chris’s phone actually describes the generic smileys as having “normal eyes”, but it certainly makes for a fantastic gag.

¹ I remember an occasion where a generational divide resulted in a hilarious difference of interpretation of a common acronym, for example. My friend Ash, like most people of their generation, understood “LOL” to mean “laughing out loud”, i.e. an expression of humour. Their dad still used it in the previous sense of “lots of love”. And so there was a moment of shock and confusion when Ash’s dad, fondly recalling their recently-deceased mother, sent Ash a text message saying something like: “Thought of your mum today. I miss her. LOL.”.

Note #24485

This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.

“Is is walkies time yet? How about now? Now? What about now?” Her blep partially-engaged, our doggo buzzes with excited anticipation as I put on my shoes.

Note #24481

This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.

More mlem than blep, but I ❤️ this picture of our happy pupper mid-playtime too much not to share it with you this Seventeenth of Bleptember.

Photo courtesy Lisa from Muddy Paws.

Note #24479

This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.

Usually our dog ignores the television, but when a horse appeared it was interesting enough that she sat up to take notice.

Not interesting enough for her to put away her half-asleep blep, though.

Dan Q found GC9XJDB WLMCP #2E Bridge The Gap

This checkin to GC9XJDB WLMCP #2E Bridge The Gap reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

A quick and easy cache-and-dash in-between errands. I’ve got gardening gloves; I’ve got supplies to make brunch… and I’ve got ten minutes spare, so I came to find this cache.

Container might enjoy some camo tape or something if it’s not to be mistaken for litter! TFTC.

Note #24474

This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.

“What’chu lookin’ at?” our doggo appears to ask, this Fifteenth of Bleptember.

Note #24471

This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.

If the most significant thing you achieve this Fourteenth of Bleptember is that you find a good spot to lie in a sunbeam… that’s still a win.

Note #24461

This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.

Does there exist a more contented moment for this bleppy doggo than getting to lounge on the sofa with her favourite humans?

Note #24459

This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.

Some days… you’re just so dog-tired you can’t even find the energy to pull your head into your basket with the rest of you.

This Twelfth of Bleptember’s a bit like that for me, too. I feel you, dog.

D20 with Advantage

Dungeons & Dragons players spend a lot of time rolling 20-sided polyhedral dice, known as D20s.

In general, they’re looking to roll as high as possible to successfully stab a wyvern, jump a chasm, pick a lock, charm a Duke¹, or whatever.

A 'full set' of white polyhedral dice commonly-used by roleplayers - a D4, D6, D8, two D10s, a D12, and a D20 - sit half-submerged in a red liquid. — Submerging your dice set in the blood of a halfling is a sure-fire way to get luckier rolls.

Roll with advantage

Sometimes, a player gets to roll with advantage. In this case, the player rolls two dice, and takes the higher roll. This really boosts their chances of not-getting a low roll. Do you know by how much?

I dreamed about this very question last night. And then, still in my dream, I came up with the answer². I woke up thinking about it³ and checked my working.

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Table illustrating the different permutations of two D20 rolls and the “advantage” result (i.e. the higher of the two).

The chance of getting a “natural 1” result on a D20 is 1 in 20… but when you roll with advantage, that goes down to 1 in 400: a huge improvement! The chance of rolling a 10 or 11 (2 in 20 chance of one or the other) remains the same. And the chance of a “crit” – 20 – goes up from 1 in 20 when rolling a single D20 to 39 in 400 – almost 10% – when rolling with advantage.

You can see that in the table above: the headers along the top and left are the natural rolls, the intersections are the resulting values – the higher of the two.

The nice thing about the table above (which again: was how I visualised the question in my dream!) is it really helps to visualise why these numbers are what they are. The general formula for calculating the chance of a given number when rolling D20 with advantage is ( n² – (n-1)² ) / 400. That is, the square of the number you’re looking for, minus the square of the number one less than that, over 400 (the total number of permutations)⁴.

Why roll two dice when one massive one will do?

Knowing the probability matrix, it’s theoretically possible to construct a “D20 with Advantage” die⁵. Such a tool would have 400 sides (one 1, three 2s, five 3s… and thirty-nine 20s). Rolling-with-advantage would be a single roll.

This is probably a totally academic exercise. The only conceivable reason I can think of would be if you were implementing a computer system on which generating random numbers was computationally-expensive, but memory was cheap: under this circumstance, you could pre-generate a 400-item array of possible results and randomly select from it.

But if anybody’s got a 3D printer capable of making a large tetrahectogon (yes, that’s what you call a 400-sided polygon – you learned something today!), I’d love to see an “Advantage D20” in the flesh. Or if you’d just like to implement a 3D model for Dice Box that’d be fine too!

¹ Or throw a fireball, recall an anecdote, navigate a rainforest, survive a poisoning, sneak past a troll, swim through a magical swamp, hold on to a speeding aurochs, disarm a tripwire, fire a crossbow, mix a potion, appeal to one among a pantheon of gods, beat the inn’s landlord at an arm-wrestling match, seduce a duergar guard, persuade a talking squirrel to spy on some bandits, hold open a heavy door, determine the nature of a curse, follow a trail of blood, find a long-lost tome, win a drinking competition, pickpocket a sleeping ogre, bury a magic sword so deep that nobody will ever find it, pilot a spacefaring rowboat, interpret a forgotten language, notice an imminent ambush, telepathically commune with a distant friend, accurately copy-out an ancient manuscript, perform a religious ritual, find the secret button under the wizard’s desk, survive the blistering cold, entertain a gang of street urchins, push through a force field, resist mind control, and then compose a ballad celebrating your adventure.

² I don’t know what it says about me as a human being that sometimes I dream in mathematics, but it perhaps shouldn’t be surprising given I’m nerdy enough to have previously recorded instances of dreaming in (a) Perl, and (b) Nethack (terminal mode).

³ When I woke up I also found that I had One Jump from Disney’s Aladdin stuck in my head, but I’m not sure that’s relevant to the discussion of probability; however, it might still be a reasonable indicator of my mental state in general.

⁴ An alternative formula which is easier to read but harder to explain would be ( 2(n – 1) + 1 ) / 400.

⁵ Or a “D20 with Disadvantage”: the table’s basically the inverse of the advantage one – i.e. 1 in 400 chance of a 20 through to 39 in 400 chance of a 1.

How to Monetize a Blog

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Maintaining a blog can be a lot of work. A single article can take weeks of research, drafting and editing, collecting and producing included materials, etc. It’s not unusual to seek some form of compensation for it, and those rewards require initiative. With a good monetization strategy, it can become a fairly lucrative venture.

So let’s talk about monetizing a blog, starting with the most obvious and perhaps easiest avenue: display advertising.

A content creator with an established audience can leverage that audience and sell ad space on their blog. Here’s an example:

…

Tyler

I’m not sure I have words for how awesome this blog post is. If you’ve ever wanted to monetise your blog and are considering an ad-driven model, this should absolutely be the first (and perhaps last) thing you read on the subject.

If you’re not convinced that Tyler is an appropriate authority to speak on this subject, I highly suggest you visit their other site that’s got a wealth of useful tips, PutAToothpickInTheChargingPortDoctorsHateThatShit.christmas. Yes, really.

Note #24437

This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.

Such poise! Such grace! While out for a run around with her doggy pals this Eleventh of Bleptember, our dog takes every opportunity to show off her elegance and style and definitely not just look like a derpy little wazzock.

Photo courtesy Lisa from Muddy Paws.

Note #24435

According to news media: today, a billionaire is being taken into space, where the crew will open the rocket door and put him outside.

This seems like a great start, and I hope that the remaining 1,780+ billionaires left here on earth will be following suit soon.

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Footnotes

Footnotes

Roll with advantage

Why roll two dice when one massive one will do?

Footnotes

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