Blood Is Not Kosher

he's like a stress ball to me.

Suggested Alternatives to the One China Policy

Currently, the policy of the United States on the Taiwan question is that the US recognizes that polities on both sides of the Taiwan Strait hold that there is only one China and that Taiwan is part of China. In the current tense international climate, it may be useful to considers alternatives to that policy.

Two Chinas Policy: The United States recognizes the independence of Taiwan as a sovereign state, separate from the People's Republic of China.

Three Chinas Policy: The US recognizes Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland as independent states.

Four Chinas Policy: The US recognizes Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and the mainland as independent states.

One China Policy (Retro 1978): The US switches its diplomatic recognition back from the PRC to the ROC.

One China Policy (Retro 1911): The US recognizes the Qing Dynasty as the legitimate government of China and finds some schmuck to play Emperor-in-Exile.

Many Chinas Policy: The US recognizes the sovereign independence of every Chinese province.

Too Many Chinas Policy: Hong Kong makes a perfectly fine city-state, so why not let everyone do that? The US recognizes every Chinese municipality as its own independent state.

1436506450 Chinas Policy: The US recognizes the sovereign independence of every Chinese person.

2^1436506450 Chinas Policy: The US recognizes the sovereign independence of every subset of of the set of all Chinese persons.

2^1436506450-1 Chinas Policy: Same as above, but not including the empty set, because that doesn't even make sense because it's already claimed by Germany.

Infinite Chinas Policy (Countable): The US recognizes that (1) The PRC is a China and (2) for every China c, the successor S(c) is also a China, and (3) for every China c, c != S(c).

Infinite Chinas Policy (Uncountable): The US recognizes that the set C of all Chinas is an ordered field, and that every non-empty subset of C with an upper bound in C has a least upper bound in C.

No Chinas Policy: The United States embraces mereological nihilism and recognizes only atoms and the void.

In Defense of Tolkien’s Mountains

At tor.com, Alex Acks asserts that the mountain ranges of northwestern Middle-earth are geologically implausible. But I think a fair reconstruction of Middle-earth tectonic history can be made. This is a long post, so I’m putting it behind a read-more:

Keep reading

If your 5 favorite Billy Joel songs were birds what would they be and why

Hmmmmm, that's a really good question that I hadn't thought of before.....let's see:

The Stranger (1977)

I think it'd have to be either a mimicking bird or a brood parasite. So I'm thinking either a Common Cuckoo, a brood parasite:

Or a European Starling, an expert mimic and also an invasive species here in North America:

It's Still Rock and Roll to Me (1980)

This song screams Rock Pigeon, with its stubborness and memory of a better time:

Pressure (1982)

This one has to be a bird that has a really long migration route, so why not the one with the longest, the Arctic Tern:

Lullabye (1994)

This song makes me think of endangered and extinct birds. I think of the last song of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, a bird that was formally declared extinct in 2023, but was last heard in 1987:

I also think of the Zebra Finch, often the subject of experiments about communication development, that can involve isolating a baby bird from their parents so they cannot learn their proper song:

Goodnight Saigon (1982)

This makes me think of the Wake Island Rail, which went extinct as a consequence of WW2 (this song is about Vietnam, but I think it can apply to a lot of war):

I also think of Edward's Pheasant, which is believed to be extinct in the wild, in a large part due to the effects of the Vietnam War:

Thank you so much for the question!!!

Generalized Golf

I have looked up nothing about golf to write this.

Let C be any topological space. We will call this the ‘course’. For any two points x,y ∈ C we have a collection S_xy of ‘shots from x to y’, where each ‘shot’ s ∈ S_xy is a path in C from x to y, which is to say a continuous function s: [0,1] → C with s(0) = x and s(1) = y. For a shot s ∈ S_xy we call x its ‘start’ and y its ‘end’. Let S denote the collection of all shots in C between any two points.

A ‘hole’ on C is a triple (t,h,p) where t ∈ C is a point called the ‘tee’, h ⊂ C is a subset called (confusingly) the ‘hole’, and p is an ordinal number called the ‘par’. For any cardinal number κ we define a ‘golf’ of length κ to be a function g: κ → H, where H is a set of holes on C. A golf g is called ‘finite’ if κ is finite and the par of every hole in the image of g is finite. We define the par of a finite golf as the sum of the pars of its constituent holes.

A quintuple (C,S,κ,H,g) defined like above is called a ‘game of (generalized) golf’.

Take a hole (t,h,p), a successor ordinal ω+1. Let F: ω+1 → S be a function such that F(0) is a shot from t, for every i < ω the end of F(i) equals the start of F(i+1), the end of F(ω) is an element of h, and no F(i) ends in h before this. Such an F is called a ‘play’. We call ω the ‘score’ of F.

A ‘golfer’ is a collection of probability spaces, which for any shot s ∈ S with start x and end y gives a probability space on the set of shots from x. This is to be interpreted as the ways in which a shot can deviate from the golfer’s intent.

…

Now to define the real numbers by way of games of golf on ℚ.

The Billy Joel GIF set on Instagram is funny because you've got all your Uptown Girls, your We Didn't Start the Fires, your Allentowns, and your The Longest Times and a couple of the old man's live performances and then for some reason there's a GIF of "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" Live at Sparks 1981. I have no idea who is responsible but they have criminally good music taste and I hope their soup is always warm and their milk always fresh.

I have a new post up on my blog, continuing the Fictional History of Numbers series. In part 1 we built on the natural numbers using algebraic operations, and got the algebraic numbers. In part 2 and part 3 we used geometric and analytic arguments to build up the real numbers.

These two sets of numbers overlap, but aren't the same; there are real numbers that aren't algebraic (as we saw in part 3) but also algebraic numbers that aren't real. So what happens if we combine the two? We get the complex numbers, which are complete and also algebraically closed. But proving this is a little tricky, and touches on the deep strangeness of complex analysis.

And in the process of adding algebraic closure to the real numbers, we lose the ability to order them, which has its own consequences.

Favorite book round up

#holding out hope the new documentary confirms my theory that 'died in september' refers to the suicide attempts occurring in september 1970

Having it on the record one way or the other would be everything.

The other thing that gets me about the lyrics (and I also put this into my giant Billy Joel essay) is "Unsung songs show my direction" because Walter Everett once compared the song's composition to Henry Mancini and André Propp and in 1971 both of them had just written instrumental songs ("A Time for Us" and "Love is Blue") that went to the top of the charts. So that line is already meta for the likely inspirations behind "Silver Seas" but then he removed the lyrics and added another self-referential layer because now that lyric refers to "Nocturne" itself too.

Once I lived You might remember Born in May Died in September

Some doodles to mark 5 years of The Owl House, because I may be at work but I've gotta commemorate it somehow

"A Lying Witch and a Warden" premiered 5 years ago, on January 10, 2020. The episode was scripted by Dana Terrace (Tiny Nose):

directed by Stephen Sandoval (Mr. Sandoval):

with story by Dana Terrace, Rachel Vine (Viney), John Bailey Owen (Jerbo), and Zach Marcus (Barcus), and teleplay by Dana Terrace and Rachel Vine:

and storyboarded by Bosook Coburn (Bo), Catherine Harman-Mitchell (Cat), Stephen Sandoval, and Dana Terrace:

Yes, if you hadn't caught on yet, they all have self-inserts in the show.

Thanks for creating this universe!