Hopefully the Quaker kickstarter will go better.

LANDS OF LOKE

Best of loke to all of you in the future.

20:25 < @treellama> uh oh the washing machine just loched
20:25 < @Wrkncacnter> uh oh
20:26 < @treellama> bang bang bang bang BANG BANG BANG BANG WORLD ENDING HORRIBLE NOISE WORLD ENDING HORRIBLE NOISE

conventional prisons cannot hold clique. MARARTHON is the only shackle we have left that holds us back from true greatness, and we are hard at work on 4GETTING. i mean, even thinking that clique belongs in a prison speaks to a gross misunderstanding on your part of the mechanics of the world. clique is the prison.

- thermoplyae

The Proud Pilot ADD N TO X enters his steam driven space ship to much applause and the fanfare of the massed marching drum machines of NASA. His mission: to enter the Black Hole and make contact with the SINGULARITY.

Proud as MIAMI VICE, ADD N TO X sets the controls to the heart of the Hole, leaving earth in a hail of chrome sparks and black rubber arrows of smoke.

She looks back at earth from her porthole, everything looks pink and green. He thinks of his family who live in the plastic countryside. His wife and children have pylon hairstyles and all their trees are mathematical. She pictures them riding flame horse generators as the sun shines through the trees and the entertainment balloons play their favourite music. ADD N TO X pulls the churchill rubber bung from the aperture cut into her carbon teeth saying out loud “MUSIC IS DUST ON THE POOR.” She then invades her face with an extended digit. Remembering the zeppelin of information telling him the future is only greater invention in response to greater extremes.

Looking out into space, his manicured whiskers flood a myriad colours emitting from the port hole. He knows there is no such thing as the past, or the future, there is only the present. That is to say the only thing not pre-recorded in a pre-recorded universe is the pre-recording itself which is to say any recording that contains a random factor.

Ascot, her on board computer and random friend draws his attention to the scopophilic gaze form the millions on earth watching his great quest, by gently tapping on the thumbnail sketch of the kings moth surmounted on his fine aviation helmet made from waxy equations and bark. ASCOT reminds him that embedded within this experiment is the voyeurism of the audience longing to see physical breakdown; the nemesis of creation; for the Pilot ADD N TO X is acting on a silent stage unable to contact, but only to be contacted which leaves ADD N TO X at the mercy of the viewer. She looks at the trophy mounted on his control panel, it is inscribed “TO THE FUTURE’S GREATEST COSTUMER.” ADD N TO X realises he is the final product in the hands of the audience, merely a cipher in a machine world, her body held tightly in place by tiny silver clamps yet before him her cabin lies the sun. ADD N TO X looks closer and sees the little Black Rocks in the sun. He checks his instrumentation a fluid series of volumes, 101 tri-form and the rushing of air.

Ascot replies, “NO! You can see little black rocks in the sun.” ADD N TO X activates the dual defence structure, biting down hard on her cigar. She thinks of all the beautiful yes sirs in their structured plastic units watching back on earth.

Meanwhile, back on earth a picture of a tiny space ship endlessly turning a perfect circle in the void of space has not made interesting nocto-vision. After days of the same thing the plug was pulled to empty the screen leaving ADD N TO X to drain off the Pop Ocean.

Suddenly, without warning the FERMI-DIRAC DISTRIBUTION FUNCTION fails him. The cockpit fills up with the sound of armies of metal headed electric insects battering their way through flesh.

ADD N TO X has entered the black hole. ASCOT confirms, “You have entered the black hole.” He feels drunk on folding time while ascot sings the NATIONAL ANTHEM FOR A COUNTRY THAT HAS FIVE MINUTES TO EXIST. Everywhere there is exploding starts. Copper leaves burst through the cabin walls. Ants and termites blister and burn as the velvet parachute melts.

ADD N TO X thinks skyscrapers are crushing him. He looks at her hands, they are a mile long on the head of a pin. His capsule oscillates all at once, butter and glass, steel and grass. He is aware of every nut and bolt as her ship shits coal in agony. ADD N TO X feels his body become pure light that gives off a pervasive and featureless odour. He thinks of Leather and Lace and it is in this moment she is AVANT HARD, he is abbreviating into intensity. There are no special effects. Everywhere is electricity. His flesh and bones dissolve, She is a ShockWAVE RIDER on the blast from the vast police thing of noise that splits addntox into all of his individual atoms. ADD N TO X is the special effect and in her disorder there is liberation from the filaments that were once nerve endings. He is aware in all her million parts that he is GOD and God is electricity and the SINGULARITY has added his n to her x to create the perfect musical note of a cymbal.

The singularity has assumed ADD N TO X

雲門、因僧問、如何是佛。

門云

。

Q: What did the Earth Mothers do?

A: They stopped camping.

Chrome gets it

Things have been quiet around here lately because no one gives a shit. Nez has been finishing the first draft of his novel, TK has evaporated, I’ve been working, TL has a kid to look after, and that makes most of us. The best Mararthon-related news I’ve got is that we’re 157 steps ahead of these chumps.

Definitely not a Pfhorums stimulator. This morning I finished playing Pfhorums.nits, pictured below:

Its most remarkable feature is its realism. Finish off a major conflict and then an angry Dugit appears, sputtering something incoherent and draining away the last of your stamina. Get cornered by Slave and tl and they’ll knock you out inside of a few turns.

There’s been musing about expansions already — I myselfs were surprised to find that there weren’t any dungeons in this installment. Hopefully there’ll be even more NitsLoch to look forward to in the future.

Abstract from Dr. Epstein’s thesis:

Students often make errors when trying to solve qualitative or conceptual physics problems, and while many successful instructional interventions have been generated to prevent such errors, the process of deduction that students use when solving physics problems has not been thoroughly studied. In an effort to better understand that reasoning process, I have developed a new framework, which is based on the mental models framework in psychology championed by P. N. Johnson-Laird. My new framework models how students search possibility space when thinking about conceptual physics problems and suggests that errors arise from failing to flesh out all possibilities. It further suggests that instructional interventions should focus on making apparent those possibilities, as well as all physical consequences those possibilities would incur.

The possibilities framework emerged from the analysis of data from a unique research project specifically invented for the purpose of understanding how students use deductive reasoning. In the selection task, participants were given a physics problem along with three written possible solutions with the goal of identifying which one of the three possible solutions was correct. Each participant was also asked to identify the errors in the incorrect solutions. For the study presented in this dissertation, participants not only performed the selection task individually on four problems, but they were also placed into groups of two or three and asked to discuss with each other the reasoning they used in making their choices and attempt to reach a consensus about which solution was correct. Finally, those groups were asked to work together to perform the selection task on three new problems.

The possibilities framework appropriately models the reasoning that students use, and it makes useful predictions about potentially helpful instructional interventions. The study reported in this dissertation emphasizes the useful insight the possibilities framework provides. For example, this framework allows us to detect subtle differences in students’ reasoning errors, even when those errors result in the same final answer. It also illuminates how simply mentioning overlooked quantities can instigate new lines of student reasoning. It allows us to better understand how well-known psychological biases, such as the belief bias, affect the reasoning process by preventing reasoners from fleshing out all of the possibilities. The possibilities framework also allows us to track student discussions about physics, revealing the need for all parties in communication to use the same set of possibilities in the conversations to facilitate successful understanding. The framework also suggests some of the influences that affect how reasoners choose between possible solutions to a given problem.

This new framework for understanding how students reason when solving conceptual physics problems opens the door to a significant field of research. The framework itself needs to be further tested and developed, but it provides substantial suggestions for instructional interventions. If we hope to improve student reasoning in physics, the possibilities framework suggests that we are perhaps best served by teaching students how to fully flesh out the possibilities in every situation. This implies that we need to ensure students have a deep understanding of all of the implied possibilities afforded by the fundamental principles that are the cornerstones of the models we teach in physics classes.

Possibilities: A Framework for Modeling Students’ Deductive Reasoning in Physics