Ninjadynamics

Conservation of Ninjutsu
The first law of ninjadynamics, an expression of the principle of conservation of ninjutsu, states that martial arts skill may only be transferred from one fighter to another. It cannot be created or destroyed.

Thus in a martial arts fight, the total amount of skill available is a constant. This statement is known as the Inverse Ninja Law or The Shinobi Law of Numbers.

Additionally, ninjas can obtain greater power by destroying other ninjas. A ninja usually reaches its peak skill when it defeats its former master.

Although the cyborg had slaughtered most of the attacking ninja army, the law of Conservation of Ninjutsu meant that the last few were very powerful and soon reduced it to a sparking heap of metal.

The Inverse Ninja Law
According to the principle of conservation of ninjutsu, the threat posed by any given ninja (or other hand-to-hand combat expert) in any marital arts fight is inversely proportional to the total number of ninjas involved in the fight. This phenomenon is known as the Inverse Ninja Law or The Shinobi Law of Numbers.

Where: T=Threat; N=number of ninjas.

In real terms, it means that a lone ninja is an unstoppable force that can kill an infinite number of (for example) Stormtroopers before they become aware of his/her presence. On the other hand, ninjas in a large group are ineffective and can be slaughtered by a single well-armed hero. As the ninjas are killed off, the number of active ninjas in the fight reduces and the threat posed by each individual increases.

It is important to note that when a ninja dies, not all of their skill becomes available to the other fighters, some is always rejected into the surrounding environment as waste ninjutsu, meaning that the last ninja standing never reaches full power. Hence the net useful threat of a group of ninjas will always be less than that of a single ninja, and in a ninja-vs-ninjas confrontation, the lone ninja will always win.

The good ninja was fighting over a hundred highly-trained evil ninjas, but the Inverse Ninja Law meant that he was barely scratched as their bodies piled up around him.

The Ninja's Handicap Corollary
The Ninja's handicap corollary is derived from the Inverse Ninja Law and states that if one average ninja possesses T=1/N of the total skill in a fight, then a 'completeness factor' C can be included to represent the 'completeness' of a fighter. A small reduction in completeness can mean a large increase in threat.

Where: T=Threat; N=Number of ninjas; C=Individual 'completeness factor'.

A completeness factor of C=1 represents one average ninja.

Underweight ninjas have a slightly reduced C-factor, whereas fat ninjas are not very useful in a fight because of their increased C-factor. Therefore the best ninjas often tend to be skinny little girls.

A ninja with a missing body part, scar or any other disfigurement must have a C-factor of less than one. Hence when fighting alone, a crippled ninja can pose a threat of greater than unity and defeat an otherwise healthy ninja. This can even happen during a single fight - if a ninja loses an arm or a cyborg's face is blown off and they are not quickly finished off, they can soon become very dangerous indeed.

A fighter's C-factor can be reduced by a number of other surprising means. Some examples are included below.

Because of the Ninja's Handicap Corollary, Altair in Assassin's Creed has a greater than normal ability to murder people silently due to his missing finger.

Pirates, although the antithesis of ninjas, are subject to the same fundamental laws. Hence, pirates with peg-legs, hook-hands, eyepatches, or to a lesser extent, missing teeth, have reduced C-values and are more dangerous in combat than uninjured pirates.

In Serenity, River Tam is not only a waif but also clearly not all there. Hence her C-factor is much less than one and she is able to comprehensively destroy large groups of armed opponents and/or zombies without breaking a sweat.

Both Jackie Chan in The Forbidden Kingdom and Captain Jack Sparrow are permanently legless (on baijiu and rum respectively) and hence have a surprising advantage in close combat due to their low completeness factor.

Lowering the flag

A great era on the internet is coming to a close. Yesterday Brokep of The Pirate Bay announced that they would be selling the site to a Swedish internet cafe chain, Global Gaming Factory X. The news echoes the final days of Napster (somewhat before my time), when it went legal and soon faded into insignificance. GGF say that they plan to make the site legal by finding a way to pay rights holders for the files downloaded by users.


Predictably, the decision has angered a great many of the users of the site. The Pirate Bay blog has been deluged with negative comments and there already seems to be a boycott movement forming. It seems to me that the rats are rapidly leaving this sinking ship.*
Of course this is hardly surprising. The Pirate Bay is supposedly one of the top 100 most visited sites on the 'net, and their rebellious, underdog attitude has won the crew untold millions of fans around the world. For them to suddenly sell out to a legitimate company is about the most shocking thing they could ever do.

The crew's reasons (at least the ones they talk about) are sound: They were unable to handle the sheer success of the site and the accompanying financial burden of running it. It is clear that the four were never interested in making money (whatever the prosecution would have you believe), and unfortunately it is probably this that led to their downfall. They say that the substantial fee from the sale of the site will be put towards the same kind of pro-internet campaigning that they are famous for. I for one am very interested to see what will happen now that they have some pretty serious money behind them.
Behind the scenes, it is likely that the pressure of the court case and other legal threats were also getting to be too much. It would be unfair to say that they've caved in to Hollywood's demands, more likely they are simply fed up of being constantly hunted. One can hardly blame them for wanting a break!

Now, the future of the site is very uncertain. I don't believe it will survive this change, certainly not in its current form. Like Napster eight years ago, It is doomed to fade into obscurity. Not that it will disappear, after all, legal Napster is technically still a successful business. But its time of influence has passed – in a nutshell, nobody cares.
Whatever its immediate fate, The Pirate Bay will go down in the history of the internet. I just hope that the new owners treat it and its remaining users well enough that it grows old gracefully, rather than crashing down in infamy. That would be an ignoble end to one of the most important places on the internet in recent times.

Whatever happens to TPB, life (and piracy) will go on. The beauty of the internet is that like a population of creatures, it evolves to overcome new challenges. Brokep hints at this in his recent Twitter interview, where he says that it is time for The Pirate Bay to evolve to ensure the survival of Bittorrent as a whole. The brutal fact about evolution is that in order for the species to improve, some individuals must die - The Pirate Bay was once the 'fittest' in the world, but times have changed seems that the time has come for a younger site to rise up and take the top spot.

The next year will be one of big change in the P2P world, but we'll all come out stronger for it. The Pirate Bay has had an inspiring run, but new protocols are appearing that are in many ways superior to Bittorrent, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of leadership battle arising soon.
It is hard to see the end of The Pirate Bay as a positive thing, but in the long run, I think most of us will come to appreciate that it had to go, and this was the best way.

I'll be proud to say that "I was there" during the golden age of The Pirate Bay. I would also like to thank brokep, TiAMO, anakata and the rest of the crew for their awesome work over the life of The Pirate Bay, and wish them every success with their future campaigns. They are ordinary people who rose up to become some of the Internet's bravest defenders, and I don't believe that will change, even though they are leaving this particular project behind.


*The Pirate Bay invites the most wonderful nautical metaphors. Another reason I'll miss it!

Why do spreadsheets suck?

I had much frustration trying to plot those handy graphs in the post below. What I wanted was a line graph with the points unevenly spaced on the x-axis. Is that so much to ask?

I tried Google Docs to begin with, to find that it can't seem to do scatter graphs properly. And it's slow, because it's an AJAX application.

So I tried Apple Numbers, which can do scatter graphs, but can't put a line between the points. Also it's so slow! Unbelievable. Quad-processor machines shouldn't struggle like this with a simple spreadsheet.

Then I installed Microsoft Office 2008 and tried Excel. This is able to produce the graphs I want in theory, but it crashed when I tried. And, get this, it's even slower than Numbers!

Another thing about Excel for Mac is, in the values for the maximum and minimum values of a graph axis, I can't paste or type anything other than decimal numbers. Which means I can't set the graph to start at "11/06/2008  10:00:00 AM", but I have to enter "39610.4166666667".
How is that useful?

What a crock of shit these spreadsheet programs are.
 

In the end I had to resort to using Excel 2003 for Windows at work, even though it produces the same ugly graphs it was making in 1995. To slightly un-uglify them, I printed to a PDF and rasterised that, to get the nice anti-aliasing.

Next time, I'll try something open-source like Gnuplot, which should make a good job of it.

Apple, Microsoft: You fail at making spreadsheet programs. Go and stand in the corner.

Bath Accommodation Applications: Nerdy Analysis

Two weeks ago, on Wednesday the 10th of June at precisely 10:00, the University of Bath opened the floodgates on its accommodation applications system.
If you're going to Bath, you'll have applied already (or should have!), and you'll know that getting a room in the most popular halls is competitive. Popular theory has it that those applying sooner will have a better chance of being allocated the place they want. I don't know if this has ever been confirmed. I intend to ask the staff all about the process when I get there. Regardless, everyone rushes like crazy to get their applications in as soon as it opens.

With the help of some posters on The Student Room, I have managed to plot the progress of these applications. The results are dramatic (if you're a nerd like me).

Around 2,500 applicants make Bath their first choice every year. Within 8 minutes of the form opening, 500 have applied for their halls. After half an hour, 1,000 have applied. By 8PM, the number of applications has reached 2,000. By the next evening, almost everyone has applied for their room.


I have (inexpertly) calculated the rate of applications based on the rough data gleaned from TSR. There is a huge spike, approaching 300 applications per minute, at T+7 minutes. This suggests to me that the form takes an average of 7 miutes to complete, and that by completing it in less, you will get a much better place in the queue.



It is notable that the first few minutes are relatively slow as everyone is filling out their forms. In the first two minutes, only 14 people had finished (one of them being me!). I suspect that most of these 14 had read all the information on the TSR Wiki and were very well prepared! I had a list of all the answers the form asked for, so I could just copy-paste them in.
In fact, I completed the form in about 1 minute, but I missed the opening time as my work computer's clock was wrong! Disappointing, I wanted to be first, (if just for bragging rights on TSR) :P