In the coming days, this may come to be known as the “Trimonthly roundup”. But for those still shivering in the depths of winter, there is hope! For spring is filled with a number of conventions and events of interest to HRSFANS; we bring them to you now, in an attempt to list and discuss events (like sci-fi or gaming conventions) which HRSFANS are going to. It is also announced on hrsfans-discuss, and the updated list is kept on the HRSFANS wiki.

Are you going to any of these events? Got anything coming up that you’d like HRSFANS to know about? Like to see other HRSFANs? Great! Just drop a note and let people know!

February

• 2/9-12: Capricon: Wheeling, IL. Nicely sized general SF convention. Mystery Spatula Theater 11 and Gozer Games will be there.
• 2/12-17: Boskone: Boston, MA. Put on by NESFA, a major Science Fiction/Fantasy convention.
• 2/19-20: Boston SF Film Marathon: Somerville, MA. 24 hour SF film marathon, noon Sunday-Monday. Drew G will be attending.
• 2/24-27: Dreamation: Morristown, NJ. Weiyi G, Jason B., Alden S. and Kay S. and Dev P. and Laura S. will be leading a New York HRSFANS contingent

March

• 3/2-3/4: Intercon L: Chelmsford, MA. The much larger sibling of Intercon Mid-Atlantic. Matt E and Mindy K are going.
• 3/16-3/18:
  

  Vericon XII/HRSFANS 2012 Reunion

  : Cambridge, MA

• 3/21-3/25 IAFA: Orlando, FL. HRSFANS author Marie Brennan will be attending.
• 3/30-4/1 [ FOGcon: San Francisco, CA. HRSFANS author Marie Brennan will be attending
• 3/30 – 3/31 Emerald City Comicon: Seattle, WA. Tony V is interested in attending.

April

• 4/6-4/8 PAX East: Boston, MA. Like PAX, but in Boston. Kevin G is interested in attending.
• 4/6-4/8: Anime BostonBoston, MA. Ada P and Alessandro will be running cosplay events
• 4/6-4/8 Sakuracon: Seattle, WA. Tony V is interested in attending.
• 4/27 WACcon : Seattle, WA. Diplomacy tournament. Tony V will stab you.

It is a quiet time for the Bimonthly roundup. Winter is coming, and winter is a time to bundle oneself up and retreat indoors, to conserve energy and hold back against the cold until the new energy of spring arrives. Still, there are some blooms which can be seen to poke through the snow, calling to those who appreciate their life and beauty.

This is the latest installment of the Bimonthly Roundup, an attempt to list and discuss events (like sci-fi or gaming conventions) which HRSFANS are going to. It is also announced on hrsfans-discuss, and the updated list is kept on the HRSFANS wiki.

Are you going to any of these events? Got anything coming up that you’d like HRSFANS to know about? Like to see other HRSFANs? Great! Just drop a note and let people know!

November

11/18-20, Anime USA: Arlington, VA. Seems to have something to do with anime, which is perhaps Japanese animation? More seriously, it’s a fan-based, fan-run anime convention. Also, their website’s mouse-following multilayer css backdrop is pretty slick.

December

12/2-4, Anonycon: Stamford CT. Small con with heavy focus on RPGs and some LARPs. Jason B and Weiyi G will be running The Dance and the Dawn LARP (by Warren T).

January

1/13-1/16: Arisia: Boston, MA. Arisia is a massive sci-fi fantasy convention, and many HRSFANS are perennial attendees.
1/13-1/15: MIT Mystery Hunt: Cambridge, MA. The Olympics of puzzle competitions, an annual adventure and tremendous challenge. On this year’s writing/organizing team: Emily M, Andrew L, Kevin C, Kartik V, Novalis. Many other HRSFANS expected to participate.

To get put on future announcements, just add yourself (or your event) to the wiki list, or email me to let me know!

Hello, all! This is the first installment of the Bimonthly Roundup, an attempt to list and discuss events (like sci-fi or gaming conventions) which HRSFANS are going to. Future installments will be sent to hrsfans-discuss and posted on thiS blog, and a list will be kept on the HRSFANS wiki.

Are you going to any of these events? Got anything coming up that you’d like HRSFANS to know about? Like to see other HRSFANs? Great! Just drop a note and let people know!

Now, without further ado:

August

8/26 – 8/28: Pax Prime: Seattle, WA
This is probably today’s largest and most influential video game conference, created by Penny Arcade. A number of HRSFANs will be attending, including Tony V, Rebecca N, and Dennis C (who has previously convinced Tycho of the wisdom of drinking Catan, if I’m not mistaken).

8/29 – 9/5: Burning Man: Black Rock City, NV
An experiment in temporary community, filled with creativity and bizarreness of all sorts. At least a few HRSFANs will be there.

September

9/2-9/5: DragonCon: Atlanta, GA
A very big gaming con. No HRSFANs (that we know of) are going, but several are interested in a possible expedition next year.

9/16-18: Intercon Midatlantic: Bethesda, MD
A LARP-focused con with a strong following. Several HRSFANs attending, including Warren T, Rebecca M, and Michael V.

October

10/20-10/23: Spiel: Essen, Germany
A giant 4-day board game convention in Essen, Germany, where new board games come out. For most of us, heading there sounds a little crazy, but it’s a great place for new German-style board games (as you might expect), and Kevin G is potentially interested in a trip.

10/21-10/22: BlizzCon: Anaheim, CA
For all things Blizzard related, especially World of Warcraft. Certainly of interest to several HRSFANs, but none (so far) are known to be going.

To get put on future announcements, just add yourself (or your event) to the wiki list, or email me to let me know!

We are excited to announce that you should Save The Date for: THE SECOND QUADRENNIAL BIG HRSFA REUNION! This will be held on March 15-18, 2012, coincident with the HRSFA undergraduate SF convention, Vericon XII. Our “blue-ribbon” committee of “people who like to volunteer for things”* is busily working out the details of lodging, food, events and costs.

The reunion in 2008 was a blast — attending were scores of HRSFA alums spanning 20 years, sharing many activities such as going to Vericon VIII, partying, playing games, and generally re-uning. We guarantee that, like the prior reunion, this one will be Made Of Win.**

If you like, keep an eye on the HRSFANS Blog, now available on RSS and Twitter, for updates as they arrive. The Big Sign-Up Announcement will be sent over hrsfans-announce, so please sign up there if you haven’t yet.

Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem,
HRSFANS Reunion Committee

* If you, too, are a person who likes to volunteer for things, let us know and we will get you involved in helping to plan the reunion. We are always interested in feedback about what you might like to see happen at the reunion. Contact Jason Brodsky (jaybrod at gmail) if you are interested.

** By FDA rules the reunion must be at least 90% Win to qualify for this certification.

In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a HRSFANS event was hosted in the Lowell Senior Common room. The event was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

For anyone attending the Harvard 2011 reunion, there will be a HRSFANS event on Saturday, May 28th, from 3-5 pm in the Lowell Senior Common Room. Come join us for refreshments, good company, and the possibility of going mad if you stay too long.

via Palahniuk and Chocolate

You might remember earlier this year, Kevin Martin’s post about how many a’s people put in Khan. He also mentioned that one might fit an equation to the curve.

To a geeky statistician, those are dangerous words. Dangerously appealing words.

Before you continue, let me warn you: extreme geekitude follows; performing some analysis of this was like bringing an elephant gun to a squirrel hunt. A very geeky squirrel hunt (perhaps squirrel fishing). If you’d just like to see a graph of the final model, feel free to skip to the end.

So, the first thing we do is try to come up with a model for this curve. The basic idea is this: every time someone puts up a web page mentioning Kirk’s Khan scream, they have some number of a’s which they’re going to use. We consider that everyone has some number of a’s they tend to feel is appropriate, and that we are selecting from the population of people who put Khan scream references on the web. So we are modeling some underlying distribution of preference for a’s among these people.

Footnote: I also have to recognize that in addition to a distribution of preference over people, an individual person has some variation in how many a’s they actually put up; that there may be multiple populations of people; and that different kinds of people are more likely to add references to Khan on the web. Some may even post multiple times. While a more complex model which took this into account might be able to make a better fit to the data, we simply consider it all as combined into a single conditional distribution–given that the post was made, what is the probability of it including a certain number of a’s.

The first model is pretty basic: it says that after each ‘a’ is added, there’s a chance that you’ll stop, add an ‘n’, and be done. This probability is the same after each a–it’s not dependent on how many you’ve entered before. This results in the number of a’s being expected to follow a geometric distribution: each ‘a’ entered is a trial, and we continue adding a’s until we ‘succeed’ and add an ‘n’. On a log scale, this model is a straight line.

After seeing this (and a few other models), and doing a little web research, we remove the two leftmost points from the data for our model. These are ‘Khan’ and ‘Khaan’ (1 and 2 a’s). They are much higher than the rest, and substantially change the model. We suspect that their references are largely due to very different sources: anyone referring to Khan Noonien Singh himself (or Gengis Khan, or any other Khan) for the first, and anyone referring to Khaan (an actual animal and also a common alternative transliteration of Khan) for the second.

After we do this, we can see an improved fit, though there are clearly still some regions of higher- or lower-than-expected occurrences.

So we now make our model a bit more complex, reflecting in part the complexity discussed above. We make a mixed model, suggesting that there are two populations posting Khan references. One follows the geometric model we used above; but the other, we will model as a negative binomial distribution: one explanation is that these are people who are aiming for a large number of a’s, and we are modeling their variation in what they think of as “a large number of a’s”. Fitting this mixed model (using maximum likelihood to determine how many people fall into each group, and the distribution parameters for each group) gives us the next graph.

A more complex model would attempt to model the conditional probability of adding another a (given how many a’s have already been added) as varying smoothly, depending on the number of a’s already added…we could, of course, model this as some sort of generalized additive model…sorry, please excuse my drool. Let’s continue.

Of course, I had to take it another couple of steps further. When I started this project, I wrote a perl script which would go to google each day and save the number of Google results for each search, stored in a file by date. Further, I extended the range to 125 a’s (anything longer than this, Google considers too long). So what we now have is a time series: for each day, we have an entire graph of values. Using this, I was hoping to see how the numbers change over time. Unfortunately, it appears that the results are not consistent over time, having significant variance up or down. Presumably, this is a result of Google trying out different variants on what results to return. But it means that rather than seeing counts increase over time, we see some variance in each count. For example, the counts for “khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan” (26 a’s) vary from around 150 to around 8000.

You can see the variance overall by looking at a boxplot of the ranges for each number. For some reason, there’s a lot of variance for 5-34 A’s, but not too much outside of that range.

So, time series analysis is pretty much out; this is a shame, because you can pretty easily make a video of the counts on each day, over time (with a fitted model for each day). The trouble is that the counts are more affected by the algorithmic decisions google is making behind the scenes than by any underlying change in the number of pages.

(click to see animation)

But we can at least try to use this variance to see if it smooths out any of our earlier outliers. Here, we’ll take the median reported values, over time, for each number of a’s (rather than the individual reported numbers on any specific day) and repeat the earlier geometric/negative binomial mixed model:

Final model: Mixed Geometric/Negative Binomial on median counts

And that, I think, actually looks like a pretty decent fit. Notice that the negative binomial portion is actually fitting the low-A section now, rather than the strange middle-A hump we saw before; this seems to give a more natural interpretation: most people will put in around 6 A’s for KHAAAAAAN!, and for people stretching longer, a geometric distribution fits pretty well for determining how long they’ll keep adding A’s.

So there you go. Proof that anything can be overanalyzed. If people like this (drop a comment here or email me), I’ll keep collecting data and will look at doing some additional analysis with more data in a few months.

You can download the perl and R code and khan data from thomaslotze.com. While this was inspired directly by Kevin Martin’s post referencing squidnews, there were also earlier graphs from drtofu, Walrus, and Jim Finnis.

Everyone loves Catan. Especially when it’s made of sugar.

Click the picture for a full-resolution version. It’s entirely edible, down to the fondant rocks and robber. Most impressive. This birthday cake (actually, 19 cupcakes) was made by housemates Cassia and Kim for our friend Tony’s birthday. I believe that the inspiration came from Cupcakes of Catan.

Who doesn’t love science of the future? Today I’m linking to 7 Man-Made Substances that Laugh in the Face of Physics, which mentions several things which we are now able to create. Granted, most of them are still only produced in limited quantity rather than being ready for mass-market. And at least one (non-Newtonian fluids) I remember making myself as a kid out of flour and water. But overall, it gave me that thrill of reality catching up to science fiction. I love it when science advances sufficiently.

On the opening of the new Star Trek movie, I had to make sure you got your dose of Klingons. So here it is: Floris Schönfeld has written a Klingon Opera, which was performed at the Water Mill in New York. NPR did a story on it today and provided a link to the Klingon-Terran Research Ensemble.

It sounds pretty ridiculous, doesn’t it? I thought so, too. Then I started thinking about how this is one of those amazing things about art: that it can take inspiration from anywhere. No matter the source, if you can create something which speaks to some aspect of our humanity, it doesn’t matter what inspired it. Truth can come from surprising places, and we can find important insights into the patterns of life and interaction in all sorts of human creations, even (perhaps especially) in those created primarily to entertain. We shouldn’t reject something as not being meaningful, just because its source is unexpected or unorthodox. One of the reasons people love Star Trek itself is that it frequently grapples with meaningful human issues, even as it’s surrounded by rubber suit aliens and gobbledygook science. There’s no reason Klingon opera can’t do the same.

Then I watched some. I’ll admit, while I did think their exploration of sound and its qualities was interesting, I found it more than a little bit stilted…and kind of ridiculous.

On the other hand, I feel that way about most opera. Enjoy the new movie!