Very good. My reactions were:feeling sorry for him;wondering how it would feel;understanding that great wealth need not entail this kind of interaction;recognizing in myself an incomprehension of the desire for display;thinking about Death Wish*.
Or like a castle? Or like the mansion on top of the hill?
*a protected NYC apartment with a doorman, yet three monsters have no trouble gaining access to your family
apocrophyl
Forget spelling; I'm just not sure what you mean.
I think she means that the software guy is not an recognized biblical text.
An? An recognized? Wow. Some people have terrible grammar.
I just meant that they discussed his Seattle software fortune in hushed, rumored, tones. Not particularly hushed. But rumored.
Clarifying: given the context -- here, where neb plies his trade -- my comment well might be read as a criticism. And it really isn't. I'm just curious about the meaning of that sentence.
Is your confusion still persisting?
6 crossed with 5. Thanks, heebie. And if this turns into a thread about the word you should have used -- it eludes me, by the way -- I'm really sorry. I should have considered that that might happen before I posted my original comment. Bad me.
I'm still wounded. More grovelling, now.
All of that said, the weirdest part is that someone who has a Seattle fortune is choosing to build a lair deep in the heart of Texas. Not that there's anything wrong with Texas, mind you. Some of my best friends are Texans (and I don't only mean bob). I guess I'm left wondering if this person has (a secret, off-the-books) family or other business concerns there.
Would it be less weird if I added that Jammies' parent's place is in Montana?
Or maybe that would increase the apocryphanalia.
Oh, wait, you recently got on a plane, didn't you? So maybe this isn't in Texas, after all. I wonder how many more ways I can think of to screw up this thread.
I guess I could cross-post with you a few more times.
Jammies only has one parent. Now that's weird.
Are you trying to pass that shit off as grovelling? Please.
Clearly this gentleman made his fortune writing libraries that Microsoft is trying to suppress, like the Win33 API.
"Rumored"? "Alleged"? "Supposed"? "Purported"? Anyway, the truly rich own islands in oceans, not lakes. This how they differ from you and me.
They also have servants who catch grammatical mistake.s
Anyway, the truly rich own islands in oceans
Like the Mole Man.
All of that said, the weirdest part is that someone who has a Seattle fortune is choosing to build a lair deep in the heart of Texas.
There are actually a lot of silly, half-finished Xanadu clones sprouting around Lake Travis.
Anyway, the truly rich own islands in oceans
Fuck that. When I'm a quadrillionaire, I'm going to build my McMansion in orbit.
My experience of life around a lake (in this case, my mom's place up in NH) is that established residents, and certainly the old-timers, are very gossipy: everyone will be talking about that house going up on the island, there will be speculation as to whether the owner had to, ahem, take any steps of the greasing-of-palms variety regarding building permits, water and sewage and whatnot, and people will go over to ogle ... for a while.
Then it'll become old hat, and the rich guy will be more or less left in peace, with people going about their business and gesturing casually over at the island, "Oh, yeah, that's so-and-so, built that place coupla few years ago, not much activity since, had a big party over the Fourth, does that every year."
I hope it's not a Lake Delhi kind of lake.
Maybe the apocryphal proverbial prodigal tycoon is Slovenian.
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There is not an epic, but there may be a lyric, to be written on the vacancy of "context
Flippanter, comment about (me) Restrepo in thread below
Vacant Context for flippo. It's the eyes, jitterbugger.
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Up at my grandad's cabin on a lake, the gossip doesn't die down for at least forty or fifty years, if my relatives' anecdotes are any indication.
30: Oh, yeah, they definitely remember, but do they actually get in the boat and go look any more? Not really.
He might could just take the helicopter. No car plus boat needed.
If the lake freezes over at all (I don't know Montana lakes), he'd have to use the helicopter if it's a year-round place.
(See, I know how to gossip. Where are the binoculars?)
Maybe he just really likes islands and isn't a very private guy, so this was the best way he could think of to get to live on an island without feeling cut off from everybody else.
If I made a billion
I'd buy myself an island
And then I'd have a castle
Built upon my land
And you could all together
Go out up-on the lake
And see me in my castle from your boats
Of course, if I had an island fortress dominating a lake, I'd have some cannon built into those fortifications.
29: Pretty facile with images of the dead for a guy who can't let a day pass without stoking his ebbing libido with fantasies about killin' the pigs, bob.
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What do the scientisty-types have to say about this?. I don't really know enough but it seems at least initially plausible (no glaring crank signs).
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43: My go-to person on the internet for judgments about complexity theory would be Scott Aaronson, and some commenter on his blog has already pestered him about it, so one might wait for something to show up there. (Though he's apparently traveling at the moment.)
I'm a little perturbed by how no draft is available on his web site -- it's one thing to wait for comments from experts before posting something, quite another to publicly announce that one has solved the problem while waiting on such comments. But I should refrain from making such cross-cultural judgments, probably.
(Also, to state the maybe-not-obvious, the scales would be much more tilted toward "crank" if he were announcing that P=NP.)
The paper appears to have been posted.
There's a lot of serious money around The Lake. For gossip, though, I'm not sure anything beats the step-grandson-of-Anna-Nicole-Smith-buying-a-place-on-a-very-prominent-lake-in-Montana-and-the-former-owner-showing-up-under-suspicious-circumstances story from mid-July.
the gossip doesn't die down for at least forty or fifty years, if my relatives' anecdotes are any indication.
They knew you when you were weaning
They knew you when you were grown
They think they know all about you
They'll never leave you alone
Small town romance
There's too many jealousies
Old maids with long gone lovers
Old flames with bad memories
Hey Charley! I was thinking of you the other day; had a lovely chat with an Iraqi Fulbright scholar headed for your neck of the woods. He was a bit bemused by the whole "wide open spaces" thing; I tried to explain that it's not unheard-of for people to drive a couple of hours for dinner out West.
I tried to explain that it's not unheard-of for people to drive a couple of hours for dinner out West.
?????
Really?
We used to drive two hours to get to the mall.
showing-up-under-suspicious-circumstances
That's funny; doesn't interesting gossip usually entail the reverse?
50: Yeah, sure. I've definitely known folks from WY/NE/MT/ID and the eastern parts of WA who defined "normal" distances much more generously than East Coast urbanites tend to do.
Growing up in LA, I thought nothing of the first hour of driving. Now I live in within a mile radius. A twenty minute drive is an entirely different city, and I treat that with all the proper suspicion of a village peasant.
Further to 43-46, here's a post from someone knowledgeable. Sounds like it's meaty and interesting, even if it turns out to be wrong. Not at all cranky. Details are way over my head, so I'll shut up now.
We went two hours for school events all the time. There were only five high schools in the county and only one of those was in the same class for sports events.
I knew a guy in high school whose family lived on an island in the middle of B/ald E/agle Lake in MN. I think the guy's father did something with microchips, and maybe invented something? According to google results, they sold it a few years ago. During the winter we'd take snowmobiles from their garage on the lake shore out to the island, during the summer it was boats, and when there was too much ice for boats and too little for snowmobiles, they had a hovercraft. I never did get a chance to take a hovercraft ride though.
I drove two hours for dinner last night.
54: Yup, Scott Aaronson has posted. Exciting!
58: Aaronson (after saying he is on vacation and has not really had a chance to study it in detail):
In fact, I could think of only one mechanism to communicate my hunch about Deolalikar's paper in a way that everyone would agree is (more than) fair to him, without having to invest the hard work to back my hunch up. And thus I hereby announce the following offer:
If Vinay Deolalikar is awarded the $1,000,000 Clay Millennium Prize for his proof of P≠NP, then I, Scott Aaronson, will personally supplement his prize by the amount of $200,000.
59: To be clear, he is certainly not dismissing it out-of-hand: What's obvious from even a superficial reading is that Deolalikar's manuscript is well-written, and that it discusses the history, background, and difficulties of the P vs. NP question in a competent way. More importantly (and in contrast to 98% of claimed P≠NP proofs), even if this attempt fails, it seems to introduce some thought-provoking new ideas
Aaronson must get a LOT of questions about quantum computers.
Many a geek would consider the occasional need for a hovercraft a completely adequate justification for owning a lair castle on an island in a lake.
Where were you last week when I was trying to get somebody to talk me into buying a used hovercraft?
Is $30 an hour adequate to pay someone to de-eel your hovercraft?
They'd have to pay me for the right to harvest eel.
Funny you should ask, Moby Hick! I was having tentative encounters with my hobos, which I note no-one seemed to follow up on. Geez. I reify the site's quirks and get no respect.
My PI is alarmed by the hobo development, so I'm probably moving sites.
....Of course you need a hovercraft. Watch the Jackie Chan movie for a reminder.
