Recently, Randall Munroe of xkcd1 diagrammed a complete map of optimal tic-tac-toe moves. I thought I would see how the high-resolution version looked through the Seadragon scripts I’ve integrated into my blog (seen previously in high-resolution panoramas).

So below I’ve reproduced the original high-res image from xkcd in a zoomable format. I split the map for X and the map for O into two separate graphs. At any given zoom level, the optimal move is in red, then wherever your opponent goes you would zoom in on that space and it would show you the optimal move again. It’s pretty simple. It should be noted that it’s not very hard to ensure you never lose at tic-tac-toe. The only way to win is to play someone who doesn’t realize this and wait for them to make a mistake.

For the first time in Vacant Nebula history, I have retracted a blog post.  Upon further consideration (and a little pleading from Stephanie), I realized that the post might cause this website to show up as a result for certain search queries.  Let’s just say, Dateline might have been interested in anyone who came to the site and was disappointed that the link did not, in fact, point to the type of content that was claimed.  In addition, I do not want to attract that kind of attention to a website that has pictures of my daughter.

Fortunately, no one has yet arrived at my site by means of such queries.  For anyone interested, here are the top 20 search engine queries that brought visitors to this website in May, 2008:

That last one is a little weird though.  Yikes!

You’ve probably heard before that the mo money we come across, the mo problems we see (Wallace 1997).  While that may be the case when mo money is acquired posthumously, statisticians and economists now have evidence that your happiness is proportional to the logarithm of your wealth (see chart below).  In other words, sadness is for poor people!  The corollary is that the more money you currently have, the more you would have to acquire in order to attain an additional happiness unit.  Much like crack cocaine.

See also a more formal paper about this topic.  I didn’t read it because it looked super boring, but the charts at the end are interesting.  For instance, did you know there is a “U-shaped life satisfaction in rich English-speaking countries”? (Figure 5)

You may have heard that Apple is bringing the Safari web browser to the Windows platform.  In fact, you can download the beta now.  I wanted to see how compatible my own website is, since Safari is not a browser I’ve ever tested.  Unfortunately, proxy support seems to be broken right now.  Whenever I try to go to a website, I get prompted for my name and password to get through the proxy (this is on my PC at work).  After entering this information, Safari immediately crashes.  This is beta code, so I won’t fault them for having bugs.  I do, however, question the validity of this chart:

From my own experience, this is completely backwards.  Opera is much faster than IE, which is faster than Firefox (when I say IE, I mean IE 6, whereas the chart says IE 7; maybe IE 7 is slower).  I’m not sure what kind of HTML they used to conduct this test, but it must have been much more complex than your typical webpage, in some way that made Safari look good.  Of course, I still use Firefox, the browser that feels slowest to me, because 1) I need my precious extensions, 2) IE is teh suck, 3) Opera cheats with overzealous caching, 4) the speed difference is not really significant, and 5) Opera doesn’t support ctrl+enter, which I rely on to type URLs.

The other thing I noticed in my brief time with Safari is the font smoothing technique, which must have required a lot of work to port over.  I’m not going to get into a discussion of whether it is better than the Windows technique or not; if you’re interested, Joel Spolsky has already done a pretty decent job of covering that topic on his excellent blog.  The problem I had is that my monitor at work is a little unusual in that its sub-pixels are aligned backwards (BGR instead of RGB).  You can fix font rendering in Windows to account for this, but I couldn’t find any such option in Safari.  For an illustration of the problem look at this image:

If you are on a CRT monitor, both probably look OK to you.  If you are on an LCD monitor, one of them probably looks significantly easier to read.  For most people it is the text on the left; for me, it is the text on the right.  This means that the text in Safari will be really difficult for me to read.  Again, they are in beta right now; they might fix this issue by the time the final version ships.

My screen at home is normal, and I don’t go through a proxy there, so maybe I will actually get to try it out tonight.

Apparently my writing style is analogous to my baseball-throwing style.  According to The Gender Genie, most of my blog posts appear to have been written by a female.  It’s all based on some algorithm derived from some research paper by some grad students at Illinois Institute of Technology and at some school in Israel.

Whatevs.

Starting today, I’m planning on making my blog posts at regular intervals.  The plan right now is to make posts on Mondays and Thursdays.  If this ends up being too much, I may occasionally drop Thursdays.  I guess we’ll see what happens.

Over the weekend I had some free time so I wrote up some code to give me a lot of statistics about my site.  Think of this as Google Zeitgeist, only not as interesting, fun, or cool.  Here are some of my findings:

• Posts made on Monday receive the most comments.  Tuesday was a close second.  So I decided Monday would be a good day to begin making posts regularly.  As I suspected, weekend posts averaged significantly fewer comments (just one per post).  Note: does not include posts made before the comments feature was added to the site.

• 94% of comments are made within three days of the post.  So making a post on Thursday shouldn’t steal the thunder from the Monday post.  Also notice that over half of comments made (53%) are made within the first 24 hours.

• Most of you are reading my blog at work.  It’s okay, I won’t tell your boss.  90% of comments are made Monday-Friday, and 71% of comments are made from 8:00am to 5:00pm.  Look at the hour-of-day stats: isn’t that about as close to a Gaussian distribution as you can hope to get for such a small data set??

• I haven’t had much of a pattern in making posts.  Sunday is the only day when I make significantly fewer posts than any other day.  I also tend to make a lot of posts just before bed (...and also a lot at work...).  :)

• Kip’s mean time between posts is 5.47 days, or 1.28 posts per week.  Sorry, no graphs for that.

• Stephanie’s mean time between posts is 16.70 days, or 0.42 posts per week.

Some notes on the data:

• All statistics include posts made by both myself and Stephanie.

• Comments that I made to my own posts were disregarded.

• Data size for all posts:  n = 111

• Data size for posts since comments feature was added:  n = 32

• Data size for all comments (excluding my own comments):  n = 82

• Statistics were collected 2006.05.13, around 2:00 PM.

If you have some kind of statistics fetish, or if you want to independently verify my findings, or if you just have a lot of free time on your hands, you can view the raw data here.  It’s formatted (tab-delimited) to be pasted in Excel, not to look pretty.

I am apparently a terrible volleyball player.  For about two months now I have been playing after work on Thursdays.  During this time, my team has only won once.  And I don’t mean one best-of-three match.  I mean one single game.  And we play with different teams each day.  It does not take a statistician to tell you that I am the common factor.  Think about this: my team would be better off if I didn’t play!  That means my skill at volleyball, were it somehow quantified, would be negative.

I don’t care, though.  I still have fun.

Have you ever been alone in a crowded room?