Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Time of Trouble

After much thought and deliberation, I have decided to leave the Vast Numbers post up.  I look like an idiot and I find the failure in my math embarrassing.  I should have done more research and made more effort to be accurate.  It's clearly a case of arrogance gone astray.  However, I'm leaving it up because the comments are so terrific I couldn't bear to take the thing down.  Of late, I've had truly great comments from Steven, Blaine, Giordanisti, Tim, Jeremiah and especially Matt.  I am thankful to everyone for their efforts in contributing to this blog.  But enough equivocating.

I was wrong.  I'm sorry.

I hope that was clear.

Some of you may have seen already that I've put a page on the blog for book reviews.  Lulu has no policy at all that moderates reviews before they appear on my system, which is unfortunate.  I am getting up to six attack reviews a day, which Lulu dutifully takes down, as they are clearly abusive and unacceptable to Lulu, nevermind the insult to me.  However, Lulu has had to take down enough that they are now harassing me to turn off my reviews.  I can't really blame them.  Lulu, like Amazon and a host of others very large business sites are getting their fill of trolls.  There's a lot of money there being annoyed by them.  We should recognize that when the day comes when we have to use I.D. to log onto websites, we have the trolls to blame.  Me, personally, I would be happy to have a net where no one is allowed to comment without their REAL NAME appearing, and without there being an automatic fine for personally abusive behaviour on public sites, such as speeding in a car, illegally parking or ignoring stop signs.  I understand that in Canada there is legislation moving in this direction, as there are many small businesses, restaurants and retail stores, who pick up a troll that works day and night to vindictively put them out of business.  I would not be at all sorry to have that troll come home one day to find the police and the court casually seizing all that the troll owns in compensation. That day is coming.

In the meantime, I'm the victim, so I'm taking the best action I can think to take.  For those who left reviews on the Lulu site, I'm afraid that turning off the comments removed those reviews.  I'm pretty unhappy about that.  If you're willing, you can find your reviews on the blog here - I sincerely ask you to repost your review the review page.  I would be very thankful.

If someone wants to write a bad review, one that indicates that they've at least read the book, so that I could print it, I would appreciate that, too.

I apologize for all the inconvenience I have been responsible for these last few days.  Please bear with me, folks, in this time of trouble.


4 comments:

  1. Somewhat irrelevant, but something I'd like to mention as it makes my eyes bleed.

    Your links on the right (blog archive, Links, Popular Posts, Labels...) all seem to be Bright Blue when unclicked. I have this feeling that is not intentional on this dark background, and do not know how long it has been there. Could you take a look?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Alexis, it's been a while. I've been dutifully following along, but have been too busy to contribute. The good news is I can see the surface fast approaching. For now let me just point out that your math errors did not actually undermine your original thesis -- That you need the interaction of _many_ of sources of randomness to result in emergent behavior. In fact your error was that you overestimated the impact of any specific source.

    Stay well. I'll leave you a review of how to play just as soon as i read the new version. Also, thanks for including me on the inscription.

    ReplyDelete

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