Category Archives: Analysis

Analysis: Ascension CotG Card Drawing Cards

Analysis, Games!

…Or is that ‘Cards Drawing Cards’?

Anyways, in a recent installment, we talked about 1- and 2-rune cards, but forestalled the conversation about cards drawing cards. Here is the list:

Void:
Spike Vixen (2 runes/1 honour, gain 1 power & draw one card)
Arbiter of the precipice (4 runes/1 honour, draw two cards and banish one of them)

Enlightened:
Arha Initiate (1 rune/1 honour, draw one card)
Temple Librarian (2 runes/1 honour, discard one card, draw two)
Ascetic of the Lidless Eye (5 runes/2 honour, draw two cards)
Master Dhartha (7 runes/3 honour, draw three cards)

Mechana:
Kor the Ferromancer (3 runes/2 honour, two power, draw one card if you control two constructs)

Lifebound:
Wolf Shaman (3 runes/1 honour, draw one card, gain one rune)
Flytrap Witch (5 runes/2 honour, draw one card, gain 2 honour)

There are a number of things you can see from this list. First, enlightened really likes drawing cards, it’s kind of its thing. Let’s reorder the cards to show some other patterns. I’m going to put them in ascending rune cost order, secondary sort by descending honour order, with the idea that a 3rune/1honour card is considered more powerful than a 3rune/2honour card, and you are being compensated at the end of the game with the extra honour point:

Arha Initiate (1 rune/1 honour, draw one card)
Spike Vixen (2 runes/1 honour, gain 1 power & draw one card)
Temple Librarian (2 runes/1 honour, discard one card, draw two)
Kor the Ferromancer (3 runes/2 honour, two power, draw one card if you control two constructs)
Wolf Shaman (3 runes/1 honour, draw one card, gain one rune)
Arbiter of the precipice (4 runes/1 honour, draw two cards and banish one of them)
Ascetic of the Lidless Eye (5 runes/2 honour, draw two cards)
Flytrap Witch (5 runes/2 honour, draw one card, gain 2 honour)
Master Dhartha (7 runes/3 honour, draw three cards)

Starting with the Arha Initiate, it costs 1 rune to add ‘one free honour’ to your deck. Interestingly, Spike Vixen (+1P,+1C) and Wolf Shaman (+1R,+1C) are parallel to and similar to Heavy Infantry (+2P) and Mystic (+2R). One would expect them to be strictly more powerful, due to their relative rarity (as you can always purchase a Heavy Infantry or Mystic). Also, the next card you draw is at minimum an apprentice or militia, so you will get a minimum of +1 something with your card drawn, likely more, especially in the end game.

Temple Librarian and Arbiter of the Precipice deal with the issue of unwanted cards in your hand in slightly different ways. Each of them is overall card neutral (+2 cards, discard or banish one). It is telling that the act of banishing a card over discarding one is worth two runes in card cost, even more, as the Arbiter only gives your one honour rather than the normal two for a four-rune card in the end game. But as our previous simulations suggest, the banishing is totally worth it.

Kor the Ferromancer is a tricky card to get a bead on. At +2P,+0.5C for 3R/2H, it’s considered slightly more powerful than +1P,+1C for 2R/1H. I find this a bit surprising, as you would think the card drawing would be more important. In gameplay, it turns out that +2P is much more powerful[1] than +1P, and you end up drawing the card much more often in later gameplay, making the card worth more when it counts.

The last three cards are the most costly of the card drawing cards in the basic Ascension set. Master Dhartha (+3C for 7R/3H) is considered the most powerful card in the set[2], and it should be[3], as it gives you two extra cards, or a 40% stronger hand. Interestingly, it’s 1R/1H for +1C, 5R/2H for +2C and 7R/3H for +3C, suggesting that it’s either much easier to get 5 Runes than 7 Runes (which it is), or that +2C is that much more useful than +1C than +3C is to +2C.

Comparing Flytrap Witch (+2H/+1C) to Ascetic of the Lidless Eye (+2C), both costing 5R/2H shows how powerful card drawing is perceived to be, that drawing an additional card is worth two honour! If you have multiple card-drawing cards in your deck (as I generally do), this can easily be the case. If the card you draw is a heavy infantry, +2P can easily be worth +2H, and the cards scale up from there.

As always, thanks for reading, comment if you want specific parts of this game (or others) analyzed!

[1]Ha!
[2]Except for possibly Hedron Cannon (+1P/turn for each Mechana Construct, for 8R/8H)
[3]Except possibly for an early ‘The All Seeing Eye’ (+1C/turn for 6R/2H), which we removed from our games for being too unbalanced.

Shoddy Preprints vs. Agile Biology Development

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Science!

Early Access to Raw Scientific Results or Shoddy Preprints? Agile Biology Development or Reckless Endangerment?

Today, I read a post that L made on fb today about the issue of preprints in various bio-related fields. The worry is that people will preprint shoddy work online to get priority[0], followed by revising or ‘correction’ for publication.

If you’ve been reading this blog (or just the ‘Agile’ category) for a while, you’ll probably know that I am generally in favour of agile as well as Agile practices. My view is that the more communication and more frequent communication (up to a point)[1] you have between participants (in this case the scientific community), the more useful and better aligned the overall product will be with whatever the goal might or should be[2]. This means people can build on each others’ work more easily and quickly.

With code, it’s pretty easy to build on something someone else has done. A well-written set of unit tests will make sure that goes mostly smoothly. But how do you do this with research without the peer-review?

You can think of peer-review as the testing and release process for a minimum viable product of research, most commonly released as a scientific paper. But papers can take months to write, to go through review, to be published.

So, you have a huge body of researchers working on similar things, but only sharing notes every year or so[3].

So, you could have them send their raw results (untested code) around to each other as soon as they’ve acquired the data[4]. Currently, this is done in small groups of friends or collaborators, if that. What if they posted their raw results, and anyone in the world could download and comment[5]? As things became more refined, or others added their agreeing or contradictory results, the community as a whole could very quickly zero in on what was actually going on.

You would also have all the documentation you needed to show who had priority, and all of whom had contributed along the way. We would probably need to rethink a bit how we gave credit, as the above method could easily replace a lot of scientific publishing.

We would also have to rethink how we gave credit for careful work, as the above system would tend to reward quick work over careful work. But social media can probably show us the way here, with different researchers having some type of time-delayed ratings for how often their results are ‘accurate enough’.

Science may progress faster, and it would be difficult to grind up more grad. students than it does right now. Being part of a huge community who cared might help grad. students (and post-docs) a lot more than you might think.

I wanted to close with an example you’re probably heard of which may help illustrate how this might work:

You’re probably familiar with Watson and Crick, and their work uncovering the Double Helix of DNA. You may not know that the X-ray structure photo which confirmed the theory that DNA was a double helix was made by Raymond Gosling, under the supervision of Rosalind Franklin.

What happened was Gosling returned to his former supervisor, Maurice Wilkins, who showed the photo to Watson and Crick without Franklin’s knowledge or consent. They proceeded to publish their famous ‘double helix’ paper with a footnote acknowledging “having been stimulated by a general knowledge of” Franklin and Wilkins’ “unpublished” contribution[6], followed by Wilkins’ and Franklin’s papers[7].

Note also that all three of these papers appeared with no peer review, and Wilkins’ boss went to the same gentleman’s club as one of the editors of Nature.

So, if we’d had instant world-sharing of preliminary results, Gosling would have posted his photos. Most people would not recognize the significance. Pauling and Corey, Watson and Crick would have all jumped on it. Franklin might have been persuaded to comment on what she thought before she was 100% sure. Wilkins might have come out of his shell sooner[8].

Science would have been done faster. More credit would have gone to the people who did the work. More credit would have been spread around to the people thinking about all of this. More of the conversation would be out in the open.

Science would have been done faster. Science might have been done better.

[0]”Who gets credit?” So important in a ‘publish or perish’ culture, but also important for the history books. The example below (above?) may elucidate some of these issues.

[1]I think most people top out at about once per day, but on a well-functioning team, on some types of tasks, this can be every few minutes, or seconds.

[2]Yes, there are arguments here about how some researchers should be left alone to do their work, because they’re working on things everyone else thinks are silly or wrong. They are outside the scope, and I don’t see them being as affected by preprints, which are much more likely to be an issue in extremely competitive fields. I suspect most researchers, like most writers and musicians, probably like most people, would be happy to have other people paying attention and caring about what they do.

[3]I use 1 year because it’s a nice round number, and because about 41% of scientific papers have an author on it who publishes a paper once a year or more.

[4]Or first draft…This will likely take some back and forth to discover the best use of peoples’ time.

[5]Note that this is basically what the genome sequencing centers do, and that project seems to be going reasonably well.

[6]The linked text is a direct quote from the Wikipedia article, which has two level of quoting inside.

[7]Franklin’s paper was only included after she petitioned for its inclusion.

[8]The backstory on this is fascinating. The linked articles are probably a good start, but I’m guessing many books have been written on this. Teasing apart what actually happened 60 years later is nontrivial.

Go and Weaknesses of Decision Trees

Analysis, Games!, Machine Learning, Programming, Thoughts on Thoughts

Yesterday, we reported that an artificial Go player had defeated one of the top human players for the first time, in a best of five match.

Today, Lee Sedol responded with a ‘consolation win’, to make the score 3-1.

From this analysis of the game, it seems that (at least) two things were at play here (Hat tip PB).

The first is called ‘Manipulation’, which is a technique used to connect otherwise unrelated parts of the board. My understanding of it is that you make two (or more!) separate positions on the board, one which is bad unless you get an extra move, and the other which might allow you to get an extra move. Since the two locations are separate, the player has to have a very specific sense of non-locality in order to be able to play it correctly[1].

To me, this feels like an excellent example of why Go is so difficult to solve computationally, and why there is still much fertile ground here for research.

The second seems to be an instance of what is called the ‘Horizon Effect‘[2]. Simply put, if you only search a possible gameplay tree to a certain depth, any consequences below that depth will be invisible to you. So, if you have a move which seems to be good in the short term, but has terrible consequences down the road, a typical search tree might miss the negative consequences entirely. In this particular case, the supposition is that Sedol’s brilliant move 78 should have triggered a ‘crap, that was a brilliant move, I need to deal with that’, instead of an ‘now all the moves I was thinking of are bad moves, except for this subtree, which seems to be okay as far out as I can see’. The fact that at move 87 AlphaGo finally realized something was very wrong supports this hypothesis.

Is the Horizon effect something you can just throw more machine learning at? Isn’t this what humans do?

[1]Specifically, the idea that two things can be related only by the fact that you can use resources from one to help the other.

[2]One wonders what types of ‘Quiescence Search‘ AlphaGo was using that it missed this.

Tax Freedom Day

Analysis, Economics, Politics

Note: I am choosing to engage the concept of ‘Tax Freedom Day’ on a methodological basis rather than commenting on the fact that it focuses on costs rather than doing a cost/benefit analysis. If you want more on that topic, comment below!

*****

Tax Freedom Day. A popular phrase and concept, but what is it really measuring?

In Canada, it is published by the Fraser Institute. You can read their report from 2013 here[1].

On its face, it seems like a totally reasonable thing. There are lots of hidden taxes, manufacturing taxes, the employer portion of CPP, QPP, and EI, etc…

They also make the (I think reasonable) statement that the total tax burden on businesses ultimately expresses itself in the goods and services they sell:

“Although businesses pay these taxes directly, the cost of business taxation is ultimately passed onto ordinary Canadians.”

Leaving the main purpose of these taxes as social engineering, implementing the decisions we have made as a society as to how to incentivize people to spend their money. (But then, all taxation decisions do this, and that is a much larger topic.)

They even say nice things like “Most Canadians would have little difficultly determining how much income tax they pay; a quick look at their income tax return or pay stub would suffice.”

1) Capital gains (unknown number of days)

But here’s the catch. They compare ‘Cash Income’ with tax from all sources. For example, they include ‘Income tax’, including all taxes on income, which includes all taxes on capital gains, but not the income from capital gains, or as they put it, in their own words:

“…total income before taxes includes deferred incomes such as investment income accumulated by pension plans, interest accumulated on insurance policies, and corporate retained earnings. While these types of incomes are accumulated, they are not paid to Canadian families in the current year, and thus should not be considered as part of their income for Tax Freedom Day calculations.”

So their conclusion is that any time shifting of income qualifies it as ‘not income’.

Anyways, the point is that their methodology includes capital gains taxes, but not capital gains income.

2) ‘Average’ vs. ‘Median’ (11 days)

The Fraser Institute notes that the ‘Average’ (arithmetic mean) family income is $97,254, and ‘pay[s] a total of $42,400 in taxes’. Note that this is 43.6%. This will be important later.

Combining the report with StatsCan data:

The StatCan Income by Decile:

We can intuit that the median 2+ person ‘economic family’ as an annual cash income of $72,300, or about 7.55% of the total, and pays about 6.85% of the tax burden or about $29,065, or about 40.55% of their ‘cash income’ in taxes. This is a difference of 11 days.

(Compare with the Fraser Institute report table 9 on page 9, note that unlike the provincial comparison table (table 7, page 7), it does not include the income levels of the deciles)

Looking at their own table 9, their usage of ‘average’ income means that the ‘tax freedom day’ is overstated for roughly 65% of the population.

3) ‘Economic Families’ of two or more people vs. those living alone. (8 days)

This is a smaller point, but in table 6 on page 6, they show that the ‘families with two or more individuals’ tax rate of 43.6% (their headline number), when ‘unattached individuals’ are included is reduced to 42.4%

If they weren’t trying so hard to convince people that taxes are high, it would feel like they’re making the social judgement that families of two or more are the default, and anything else is odd.

Bottom line: Don’t believe everything you read. With very little work, I’ve shaved 19 days off the headline number used by any number of mainstream news publications. I’m sure there’s a lot one could say in addition on this topic, about income redistribution and income sources.

The Fraser Institute has a very specific agenda that they are pushing, however much they proclaim otherwise. Caveat Emptor.

Note: Incidentally, whoever decided that copy-paste from .pdf files should break all the formatting and insert all kinds of line breaks should be made to manually fix all of the files by hand.

[1]I’m using 2013 as a basis, because I can easily find the 2013 StatsCan decile data. If you want to read the 2015 Fraser institute report, you can read it here:

Rotation and Other Metaphors

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

Today, I noticed that I seem to write a lot about rotation. It seems to come to be ‘naturally’, or at least from something far back in my past[1].

It feels like it might have originally come from discussions of Chirality, somewhere back in high school. Like the concept of Gm1m2/r^2 migrating to Cq1q2/r^2[2], or basing the Bohr model of the atom on the model of the solar system.

A lot of what I write has to do with how I ‘rotate in’ possible solutions to try to fit them with the problem I’m working on. As far as I know, the brain doesn’t actually work like this. I could see a generalized model of computing developing two sections of nerves, one which displayed a problem, one which displayed possible solutions, each in their firing patterns. I wonder if this happens.

While we’re trying to fit possible solutions to this problem, let’s consider other possible metaphors from the ‘ball and stick’ molecular model[3].

– Hinge rotations, like a pendulum, or the dangling COOH on a long-chain carboxylic acid
– Spring action, like atoms in an N2(g) molecule moving towards and away from each other.
– Triangle and higher order into and out of plane rotations/vibrations/translations

Note that all of these can change based on the conditions:
– Temperature
– Water or non-water nearby
– Salts or other charged ions near or far away
– How hydrophilic or hydrophobic parts of the adjoining environment are
– Van der Waals forces

The blog posts which inspired this one:

BOF VI: The Chemist in me:
Multidimensional Word and Sentence Rotation
Solution Rotation

[1] Perhaps this explains why I was so excited about Dinosaur Rotation!

[2]I was lucky enough to see Douglas Hofstadter speak about ‘Analogies in Physics‘. His best work is probably ‘Godel, Escher, Bach‘, which talks about natural and artificial intelligence, the incompleteness theorem, music, and art.

[3]I owe much or all of my intuition here to my time spent rotating[4] through the Ponder Lab at WashU. They work on one of the few world class molecular modeling software programs, Tinker. When I was there, Tinker worked by modeling molecules as balls & sticks, with various rotational and vibrational modes.

[4]Ha!

Brain Normalization, Bicycles, and Privilege

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts

The brain is good at many things. Previously I’ve talked about how the brain is good at being lazy.

One corollary of this is that the brain is very good at normalizing your experiences of whatever difficulties you are experiencing.

This can be a very good thing, if for example you are trying to accomplish a task while subject to indescribable pain. But it can be a bad thing when you assume that everyone else’s problems are just as difficult as yours.

For illustration, I’m going to use my favourite analogy, which while imperfect, I think showcases the relevant concepts.

Bicycles, headwinds, and tailwinds:

Most of you reading this have ridden a bicycle at some point. If you have ever commuted by bicycle, you will know that headwinds are the bane of your existence[1].

But you might never notice a tailwind, if you have one. Headwinds are very noticeable, because you have to actively fight through them. Tailwinds are much more subtle, you might notice that you’re less tired after a trip, or that it was faster. It’s very easy to ascribe that to you feeling more energetic that day, or just feeling more fit.

Now imagine that on your route each morning, you have a tailwind. You don’t notice it, you just end up at work each day slightly happier than you would otherwise. Now imagine another person who travels in a different direction each morning, which gives them a headwind. Having never experienced a headwind, you might say “oh, you just need to increase your pedal cadence until you become more fit”.

This is your privilege speaking. This person is just as fit or perhaps more fit than you. Your brain has normalized your experience. You just think you understand because you also have problems which feel just as difficult to you.

[1]This is especially fun if ‘downtown’ is by a large body of water, and dwellings are ‘uptown’. You will get an onshore breeze in the morning (blowing inland) as you’re commuting downtown, and then an offshore breeze (blowing towards the body of water) in the evening, as you’re commuting home. Headwinds for everyone!

Why Would Alduin Save the Dragonborn?

Analysis, Games!

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

So, some of you may have heard of a little computer game called ‘Skyrim‘.

In the game, you play the part of a ‘Dragonborn’ character, whose special ability is being able to learn ‘shouts*’ by consuming dragon souls.

The game starts (although the player doesn’t know if yet) with the ancient dragon king ‘Alduin**’ arrives after being thrown forward in time by thousands of years. Alduin then*** flies to where the player is about to be executed, and attacks the town, freeing the player.

You learn later that Alduin’s goal is to resurrect dragons (who were all or mostly all killed before recorded history), and conquer the world**** again.

So, why, as Alduin’s first act would he save the life of the one person who can thwart his dragon resurrection**** plans? There are two main theories:

1) Alduin reappears after being thrown forward in time, perhaps confused, and attacks the nearest human target, perhaps the nearest human military target.

The nearby towns:
– Ivarstead (small town) is 5+4 (6.4 units as the dragon flies) away SE
– Helgen (fortified town) is 8+9 units (12 units as the dragon flies) away SW
– Riverwood (medium town) is 8 units away W
– Whiterun (major city) is 7+9 units (11.4 units as the dragon flies) away NW, but is where a dragon was trapped before, and is heavily fortified.

From this it’s a stretch to see Helgen as the obvious target, as it’s the furthest of the nearby settlements. Perhaps Alduin enjoyed flying over mountains, or was flying in the opposite direction from High Hrothgar (where humans taught each other shouts, also heavily fortified). Perhaps the people who threw Alduin forward in time were from Helgen, many thousands of years ago, and he was following them back.

2) The other person saved by Alduin’s attack is ‘Ulfric Stormcloak’ (another human who can ‘shout’), whose capture was about to end a civil war. His escape after being saved by Alduin reignites the civil war, distracting humans, and not coincidentally providing Alduin with many more souls to eat in Sovngard. Sovngard being the afterlife for honoured warriors, where Alduin resides so as to be impossible to kill on the mortal plane.

This theory feels like it makes a lot more sense. Alduin having been defeated by humans once, and needing time for his dragon resurrection campaign needs something to distract the humans. How he would have figured out that freeing Ulfric would help this is unknown. He could also feel that Ulfric could ‘shout’, and seek him out as a source of power, to defeat him, or to release him to cause chaos. I feel Alduin’s arrogance would only let him respect (and only barely) a human who could ‘shout’.

Other ideas:

3) Alduin senses the dragonborn (the player) (either because they feel like a dragon, or like a powerful human), and attacks to try to kill them*****. Ironically, this ends up saving them. Why Alduin didn’t finish the job is beyond me. Perhaps the player escaping into the keep and going underground caused Alduin to lose them, and he went off in search for other prey or dragons to resurrect. Perhaps because the player had not yet come into their power, or did not shout back at Alduin, they were nothing but prey, or beneath his notice.

4) The Elder Scroll****** or whomever empowered it to be used to throw Alduin forward in time brought him forward to the exact time and made sure he was in such a mental state that he would through his own actions save the very person (the player) who would cause his downfall. It was suggested that the time/dragon-god Akatosh was displeased with Alduin’s arrogance, so they could have been responsible.

5) Other ideas? Let me know what you think in the comments!

*’Shouts’ are an innate ability of dragons, for whom ‘shouting is as natural as talking’. ‘Shouts’ are special words of power which do the standard type of dragon things you would expect, like breathing fire or ice, or various other spell-like abilities. It is also mentioned in-game that a dragon argument involves them ‘shouting’ at each other, leading to very blurred lines between dragon arguments and combats.

**Alduin was the first dragon, created by the dragon-god of time Akatosh. Alduin’s original purpose was to be the ‘World-Eater’, to devour the world at the end of time, but Alduin decided to try to conquer the world and become a god. The humans rebelled (with some dragon help), and eventually used an ‘elder scroll’ to throw Alduin forward in time.

***It is unclear if anything else happens between these events.

****Dragons were originally the creation of the dragon god Akatosh. They are normally immortal, and can be resurrected by Alduin (and perhaps others). Consuming their souls prevents this resurrection.

*****Dragons ‘shout’ to argue with each other, so Alduin could have sensed someone like a dragon (dragonborn), and ‘shouted’ at them just to try to speak with them. This is not canon at all, but could make for a much more poignant story, if the whole story was all over an inability to communicate.

******’Elder Scrolls’ are fate-linked artifacts which have amazing and special powers, but these powers seem to be linked to the threads of some larger story woven by the gods or perhaps something even more powerful and ancient.

How do you math?

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Nostalgia, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

In an earlier post, I was talking about ‘friendly triangles’ as an example of unconscious things that inform my interactions with problems and math. Today, I wanted to talk about some other aspects of solving math problems that I didn’t notice I did until I had to teach mental math*, a number of years a.

I was trying to describe mental math, when I noticed all of the little assumptions I made, all the little tricks that I used to make math and mental math easier and more likely to end up correct**.

Some of these tricks were:
– The curve on the bottom of the lower case ‘t’, so it didn’t look like a ‘+’ sign
– Curved ‘x’, I’m guessing so it doesn’t look like a multiplication symbol (this one is lost to the mists of history for me
– Lining up equals signs
– Being very conscious of only having one equality per line
– Friendly triangles (1,1,sqrt(2), 1,2,sqrt(3), 3,4,5)
– Looking for radii of circles in geometry problems
– Various methods for making sure that I always itemized all of the permutations or combinations***

Once I noticed that I was doing these tricks, it was a matter of figuring out which were useful enough to spend my students’ time on. Many of them would probably be most usefully conveyed by demonstration in passing, like the way a painting instructor would demonstrate brush stroke by example.

Knowing then what I know now, I might have tried to help them come up with rules for each type of situation, but in hindsight, it’s probably best I didn’t****. What I do remember is teaching geometry problems with the advice ‘draw a big picture*****’, and ‘label everything you know or can figure out’, which feels like sound advice for solving all sorts of problems.

To this day, it’s probably why all my notebooks are slightly-larger-than-larger blank sketch pads.

*To adults, as part of standardized testing preparation.

**I remember being one of those school math students who did really well overall, but was constantly doing ‘stupid mistakes’, where I would drop a sign, or reverse something/etc… I think I compensated for this be extra checking and all the little tricks I’ll be talking about above. Or have already talked about above, it you’re reading the footnotes after all of the post.

***I actually learned this

****I don’t actually remember what I told them. I seem to recall it was just a bunch of working through problems.

*****Thanks prof. Collins!

Multidimensional Word and Sentence Rotation

Analysis, Internet Culture, Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts, Words!

I was talking to G during a life coaching session, and the topic of ‘Opposites’ came up. Specifically, the use of ‘Opposites’ to swap out parts of a sentence to gain more understanding of the sentence, the topic, or perhaps something else.

There are a number of different ways one can swap out parts of a sentence. I’ll go in approximately the order I use them, but the fun ones are at the bottom. 😀

We will use a famous* sentence to illustrate:

“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.”

First, we can start by swapping parts of the sentence:
– Spoonerisms swap the first characters or syllables of words, such as ‘linc and zead’ for ‘zinc and lead’, or ‘The quick frown box jumped over the dazy logs’, which is nonsensical, but highly creative, especially if you drew it.
– One can swap words, swapping the subject and object: (‘The quick brown dogs jumped over the lazy fox.’), or descriptive words with nouns: (‘The quick brown dogs jumped over the foxy laze.’) This second one could be nonsensical, but could also refer to lasers, which could trigger other thoughts or creativity in the listener.
– We can completely swap the object half of the sentence: (‘The lazy dogs jumped over the quick brown fox’)
– We can move words around and change their parts of speech: (‘The brown fox quickly jumped over the lazy dogs’), in this case changing the meaning from descriptive/innate (quick fox) to intent (fox quickly).

There are more ways to do this, but they are generally more complex combinations of the above.

Second, we can remove parts of the sentence:
– ‘The brown fox.’
– ‘The fox jumped over the dog.’
– ‘The quickly.’

Third, we can change the cultural referent of the sentence or parts of the sentence:
– ‘The swift vulpine soared over the meddlesome cur.’
– If I knew enough Japanese, I could give examples of different levels of formality here.

Fourthly, we can do what I can only describe as ‘Word Rotation’, where you chose a word in the sentence, and rotate about one of the axes that the word is on, similar to a gimbal or leather punch.
– You can rotate animal species, such as ‘the quick brown bear jumped over the lazy cat’
– You can rotate action words
– You can rotate tightly or loosely:
– Tight: Dog, cat, mouse, hamster
– Loose: Dog, horse, panda, bear**
– Absurd: Dog, mushroom, amphioxus, pool table
– You can rotate senses*** (my favourite, although ‘propriocept’ is not a very good verb.)
– You can take a sub-word and rotate it. This one is clbuttic.
– You can rotate more than once (although this is only very subtly different from rotating once more loosely).
– You can exchange words or word parts for the ‘more formal’ version: ‘Mark my words!’ becomes ‘Marcus my words!’
– Rotation also works with antonyms.

Basically, any way you could #hashtag a word in a sentence, and then replace that word with a different word that also qualified for that #hashtag.

Join us next time, when we explore the mysteries of %tags, and try to figure out whether a single open bracket or closed bracket is more annoying. As always, let me know what you think in the comments below!

*This sentence was commonly used to test typewriters, as it uses each of the letters in the alphabet and is reasonably short and easy to remember.

**Banda, pear.

***Space Quest IV had an icon which alternately allowed you to look, touch, or taste objects. It’s possible this is where my analogy of rotation comes from.

Predictive Punning

Analysis, Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts, Words!

I tell many, many, many bad puns, as anyone who has hung out with me knows. What many may not know is how much preparation and mental remapping has gone into this process.

The two key factors in the success of a pun are Timing and Obscurity*.

By Timing, I mean that the pun has to be said close enough to the sentence it is riffing on so that the short term memory of the listeners is willing to go back and look and compare, to find the humour/reference. If you wait too long, you risk your listener timing out** and ignoring you, as they have already forgotten the specifics of the original sentence. Too soon, and the listener has not finished understanding the meaning of the original sentence, and the pun sentence will pass them by.

By Obscurity, I mean that puns which are too obscure will cause the listener to think about the pun for a brief while, then time out and move on. Puns which are too obvious will cause a groan as the pun wave collapses, and the listener will move on. Only a pun somewhere between these, where the listener is subtly forced to engage their brain will get the reaction you desire***.

Complicating matters is that Obscurity is defined differently for each listener****, as each listener will have different amounts of knowledge in each area. So, you’re constantly juggling what you know of the knowledge levels of each of your listeners, and trying to find puns that will fit inside enough of the Timing and Obscurity windows of your audience.

What can help is Sentence Prediction. Just like Amazon can tell that you will need toothpaste before you do, you can predict what words someone will say in a sentence before they know themselves. Once a person has started a sentence and is about halfway through, it is remarkably simple to predict how they will finish the sentence*****. More importantly, it is easy/possible to predict the exact words****** they will use, as you will need the exact words they will use in order to generate your pun.

So, you’re listening to someone speak. Partway through their sentence, you fill in their sentence with what they’re going to say. You then spend the next couple/few seconds planning your pun, you wait until they’re done speaking, and then you strike! Mental chaos ensues! Coyote is happy.

Want to hear more about this? Let me know in the comments below!

*I use ‘Obscurity’ instead of ‘Difficulty’ here because a specific pun will have different ‘Obscurity’ levels for each listener, depending on the specific shape of their knowledge/experiences.

**I’m using ‘Timing Out’ in the sense of the computer term ‘Timeout‘, where after a certain defined period of time, the computer will simply go and do something else. If you want a great example, watch two cats interact. You will see one or both of them timing out on a regular basis.

***If they start hitting you, you’re probably doing this right. Or wrong. It’s all the same. Dada is the anti dada.

****Timing is probably different for each listener as well, but I haven’t studied that in as much depth.

*****I’m sure someone has studied this, but I can’t find a link.

******Incidentally, I quite enjoy the feeling of ‘cache miss‘/’branch misprediction‘ that I get when someone uses a word I don’t expect. It jumbles my neural net and makes me think.