This is what happens when you’re too lenient when your function for fuzzy matching on strings is a little too fuzzy. (Warning: some NSFW language.)

Actually, that’s not quite true. The text of the 1897 bill doesn’t come out and say it directly, and it gives several different derivations of pi, none of which are consistent with each other. Values include pi = 3.2, pi = 4, and pi = 16√2 / 7 ≈ 3.23. Who would have thought the mathematical crank who came up with it didn’t check his work?

The intro of the bill is also interesting, and tends to get overlooked in discussions about it:

A Bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth and offered as a contribution to education to be used only by the State of Indiana free of cost by paying any royalties whatever on the same, provided it is accepted and adopted by the official action of the Legislature of 1897.

The crank behind the bill apparently planned on trying to collect royalties on the “correct” value(s) of pi, after giving Indiana a royalty-free license. Of course, this is nonsense, since you can’t copyright, trademark, or patent a fact, so there’s no way you can compel anyone to pay you royalties for it. Passing a bill to grant a state royalty-free access to a fact that isn’t even true is completely stupid in two independent ways.

Needless to say, it passed the Indiana House unanimously before getting shelved in the Indiana Senate, demonstrating the cluelessness of Indiana’s elected officials in both mathematics and intellectual property law. If not for the intervention of a Purdue mathematics professor, Indiana students today might be making funny-shaped circles to comply with state law.

The whole ordeal made the Indiana government a laughingstock, and since then all state governments have been careful to consult with experts before taking action to reject basic facts. Oh, wait.

Never forget.

Next time: a blog post that has nothing to do with sex robots. Hopefully.

No, the real WTF starts with the very first sentence:

A New Jersey company says it has developed “the world’s first sex robot,” a life-size rubber doll that’s designed to engage the owner with conversation rather than lifelike movement.

I don’t think the developer understands the concept of a “sex robot”.

It has touch sensors at strategic locations and can sense when it’s being moved. But it can’t move on its own, not even to turn its head or move its lips. The sound comes out of an internal loudspeaker.

Correction: I don’t think the developer understands the concept of a “robot”. It can’t even move? I know Wikipedia’s discussion of the defining characteristics of a robot doesn’t require the ability to move, but that just demonstrates how Wikipedia makes no guarantee of validity. Touch sensors and speakers in a squick-inducing chassis do not a robot make. This just sounds like a creepy computer peripheral. Surely there must be more to it than–

[...] there’s a laptop connected to cables coming out of its back.

Or you could just not bother trying to hide it. That works too, I guess.

“Sex only goes so far — then you want to be able to talk to the person,” Hines said.

So that’s the order, then. I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time.

A Japanese company, Honey Dolls, makes life-size sex dolls that can play recorded sounds, but Roxxxy’s sensors and speech capabilities appear to be more sophisticated.

I never had any idea the U.S. was beating Japan in both robotics and perversion.

CAUTION: Do not imbibe a beverage while reading the following excerpt, unless you feel like doing a spit take on your keyboard.

An engineer, Hines said he was inspired to create the robot after a friend died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Didn’t see that one coming, did you? I love how the article’s author throws in the appositive to justify the thought process involved. “Why would 9/11 inspire him to make a sex robot?” “He’s an engineer.” “Oh, that makes sense.”

That got him thinking about preserving his friend’s personality, to give his children a chance to interact with him as they’re growing up. Looking around for commercial applications for artificial personalities, he initially thought he might create a home health care aide for the elderly.

“But there was tremendous regulatory and bureaucratic paperwork to get through. We were stuck,” Hines said. “So I looked at other markets.”

In other words, 9/11 + bureaucracy = sex robots.

Come to think of it, however, we should make an effort to distribute this article wherever Al Qaeda is operating. Once they understand that one of the effects of terror attacks against the U.S. is increased innovation in sex robots, they’re bound to give up. U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

The fourth season of The Venture Bros. (aka one of the greatest animated anythings ever) started on Sunday. Here’s the trailer, and here’s Season 4 Episode 1. Of course, you’ll probably need to watch the first three seasons to understand what’s going on, but that’s what DVDs are for. (Colbert junkie bonus: he voices Professor Impossible in the first two seasons!)

Keeping with the animation theme, Tripod recently introduced me to YuGiOh – The Abridged Series, which is much funnier than I was expecting. It’s a gag dub of an anime about a children’s card game and ended up launching loads of imitators. Luckily, you won’t need any familiarity with the source material… in America! Or anywhere else, for that matter.

Finally, there’s That Guy With The Glasses‘s stuff on the eponymous thatguywiththeglasses.com. His Video Game Confessions series was what I first game across (learning the shocking truth behind Ms. Pac-Man, and more than I really needed to know about Link and Zelda’s “understanding”), but most of That Guy’s stuff is worth watching too. Be warned, however, that stuff from the other contributors is hit or miss.

Unless, perhaps, you live in South Africa, in which case it might be a more viable option than the conventional Internet service providers available:

Local news agency SAPA reported the 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80 km (50 miles) from Unlimited IT’s offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card was strapped to his leg.

Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a Telkom line.

[Pigeon transfers data faster than South Africa's Telkom, Reuters, 10 September 2009]

Of course, this isn’t too surprising. After all, a snail pulling a cart with two DVDs for wheels has a faster average data transfer rate than an ADSL connection.

Granted, pigeon- and snail-based layer 2 technologies suffer from pretty sluggish latency, so they’re often not the best option for running your network. You’re generally going to be off using a cat or 5 instead.

[Hat tip to The Risks Digest, volume 25, issue 78, for the South Africa story.]

(Their Final Fantasy rap is also pretty good, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

Next: in case you ever complained that Super Mario World didn’t have enough stuff-happening-even-though-you’re-too-lazy-to-press-any-of-the-buttons, take a look at this ROM hack:

Even with the level-editing tools that are out there, it’s impressive to imagine how much work must’ve gone into the level design to pull that off.

Finally, it’s unfortunate that I hadn’t been reading MS Paint Adventures until now. It’s what you’d get if you crossed a webcomic with an old-school adventure game. Is it weird if what’s sold me on it is how the character’s inventory system in the current “game” is explicitly based on a stack implemented in a circular buffer? And how it’s suggested it’s possible to upgrade to something more featureful:

EB: it’s so frustrating.
TG: whats your modus
EB: what?
TG: how do you retrieve artifacts from it
EB: oh. like one at a time i guess. and if i put too much in, something falls out.
TG: stack?? hahahahahaha
EB: what is yours?
TG: hash map
TG: my bro taught me a few tricks he basically knows everything and is awesome
EB: what the hell is that?
TG: you should probably brush up on your data structures

While I’d probably deque anyone who made a real game with such an obnoxious inventory system, in comic form it’s awesome. It may be the character’s birthday, but he won’t be LIFO the party with just that.* Hopefully whatever upgrades are in store will let him skip lists entirely and explore the rest of the wide array of options out there. Because dude, a stack? With that limited interface he’ll be in a heap of trouble. As What’s Her Face would say, DAG, yo.

Of course, in real life we have data structure based inventory systems too. We’re typically limited to a pair of five-element finger trees, sometimes augmented with a bag.

* Yes, I know that technically having a stack would very much make him LIFO the party almost by definition, but I’m trying to make a series of data structure puns here. If you trie it yourself, you’ll find it’s harder than it looks.