One of the things about getting older that is a real bummer is that people die.  Not video-game die, either, or “facebook suicide”, but actually, physically, permanently die.  When you’re young, it is usually less tangible.  Sure, there were pets or some aged relative who died, but the young don’t think about it that much, usually.

When you get older, though, it is something you think about, and something that happens more often.  The chance of someone you know dying increases a little each year.  At first it is just one or two people, a grandparent, or someone you kind-of knew in high school.  Over time more people get added to that pool.  Someone has a car accident.  Someone kills themselves.  Someone has a heart attack.

It used to be that you would hear about these things from a kind-hearted friend or relative, a phone call in the early morning hours frequently presaged the bad news.  The trend I have noticed lately and which has alarmed me enough to post about it is that I have been hearing about people dying, not through relatives or friends, but through posts on Facebook.

The machine has little tact, either.  The page sits there with a little icon of the person’s profile photo, and reminds me that I haven’t talked to them in awhile.  I go to the page and discover, thanks to the sympathy wall-posts, that they’re gone.  Real classy, Facebook.

Worse, when a page becomes a “memorial”, all of the individual’s posts are removed, and it becomes a place only for messages of remembrance.  Except, that by removing the person’s posts, we’re left with nothing to remember them by.

At this point, I have two Facebook friends whose deaths I discovered this way… I wonder how many more?

James Hance released a collection of images on September 1, 2010 that consider Star Wars characters as seen through the lens of A.A. Milne. They are fantastic! For more details, you can check out the story at BoingBoing.

Today I learned that Canola oil is actually pressed from the rapeseed plant and that recently the name of the plant was changed to canola.  The name Canola actually comes from the phrase “Canadian oil, low acid”. I’m not surprised that The Man is trying to give it a different name, since what industry wants to be associated with rape?

The acid described by the name is erucic acid. This compound is apparently very hard on the heart, causing cardiac lesions and other unpleasantness.

La Tourangelle Organic Canola Oil, 16.9-Ounce Tins (Pack of 4)

I’m making a few assumptions about the distribution of letters in the world; that they are even.  For every A, B, and C, there will be an X, Y, and Z. Also, in my statistical calculation, I did not account for the order of the letters. Still, for our purposes, this should be sufficient.

In order to test this, I’ve created a small Python program that will simulate grabbing random collections of letters out of a pool to see what the random words would be.

import random

random.seed()

letters = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'

wordnum = 1

while (True):
    word = ''

    for v in xrange(1+random.randrange(20)):
        word += letters[random.randrange(len(letters))]

    print '%d : %s ' % (wordnum,word)

    wordnum += 1

As you can see, it doesn’t take many lines of code to do it. Running it reveals a lot of garbage: DNBU, MUILYIOAMEBAX, SRLJTTCQHZ, QOV, BBOSYGQOSJXSOIAHZJS, and various other random non-words. So, how about some limitations?

I added code to only report when a 4-letter word which might be explosive was drawn.  Here’s the result, with counts:

141256 : FIRE
212520 : BOOM
329832 : FIRE
356962 : BOOM
379910 : BOMB
530749 : DOOM

So, the 141256th word drawn was FIRE, and it took almost another 100k before BOOM was drawn. If we assume our duck friend takes one second to draw a letter, and does it for 8 hours a day, that means that he can draw about words a day. So, it will take days… a little less than a month, before his house is consumed by fire.

Characters in the show have the ability to take a group of letters and press them together for the express purpose of making what they need.  If they are in need of a nice, new carpet, they would go into the pool of letters in their home, take out R, U, and G, and smoosh them together until they formed RUG.  The letters would amalgamate into their new configuration, and no more cold feet.

It concerned me, though, that some of the characters seem functionally illiterate.  This is the plot of some episodes, in fact.  A character, usually duck, will accidentally forget a letter or remove a letter and end up with the wrong thing.  Hilarity ensues.  Hilarity, that is, until he accidentally makes something truly dangerous.

This possibility has not been explored in the show, to the best of my knowledge.  I assume there is some mechanism which protects the inhabitants from their pools of letters creating BOMB or NUKE.  Those words are so small, though, that the chance of them happening by accident is fairly large compared to the chance of something like WEAPON or CATACLYSM.

Out of a pool of 26 letters, the chance that it would create an arbitrary grouping of 4 particular letters is .  Surprisingly large.  How likely is a seriously damaging combination in practice?  I decided to find out, in part two.

Ideally, a password should be difficult to guess, contain a mix of letters, numbers, and symbols, and should not be based on a dictionary word or anything that is associated with you.

A trick I will use is to take the first letters of the lyrics of a nursery rhyme and replace obvious letters with numbers, 3 for E, 4 for A, and the like.