Small numbers in Hesmai Iok, and a throwback to Hesmai numerals.
Adverbs in Hesmai Iok, and a bit of an accidental sing song as well as revelation on the Hesmai culture’s way of thinking.
Reduced Spelling in Hesmai Iok: for when you can’t take the bars anymore.
Sometimes I wish that the dashboard can be cut into two: one for people who post quickly (say, > 5 posts per day) and one for people who post slowly (using the above, ≤ 5 posts per day). That way I can easily follow people posting at different speeds without the fast posters overpowering the slow ones.
(For the record, given yesterday’s misunderstanding, this is a sincere wish.)
Coast sketch of the Yiwgg Peninsula.
“I want every post to be tagged with ‘PSV: n’, where n is the Post String Value of the post in question. n is computed by taking the average value of the Unicode codepoints of every third character in the string. If the post has any non-text material, then every seventeenth…
Oh, oh, no, that was not a request; it’s just a random thought about how far tagging requests would go. I will never expect anyone to tag anything, at least for me. (I may not have nerves of steel but they come quite close.)
But if you are interested, I did say that “any non-text material shall be converted to a base-64-encoded form, and then the selected characters shall be both every seventeenth character and also every ‘primeth’ character (i.e., the 2nd, the 3rd, the 5th, the 7th…)” It’s really this part that gets obnoxiously difficult, that’s for sure.
Again, though you are welcome to do so you do not have to do such shenanigans for me. It is a mere exercise of thought. I will not begin to dream to inconvenience anyone in such a way (I write automated tools to do it instead.)
“I want every post to be tagged with ‘PSV: n’, where n is the Post String Value of the post in question. n is computed by taking the average value of the Unicode codepoints of every third character in the string. If the post has any non-text material, then every seventeenth character as well as all prime-positioned (i.e. its order in the string is a prime number) character in the base-64 expansion of that content (with the character + and = standing for 62 and 63 respectively) must also be considered. Express n correct to 30 significant digits, padding zeros to the right as required.”
My tab layout. Because why not.
Month in Review, April 2013.
It’s about half a year later and by now Arthur is confident enough to raise his rate R to $4.50 × 105 m−5 s−1. Suppose Denver commissions Arthur with a digital print that will eventually be printed on a 1 m × 1.4 m poster with no margins. Because of a time crunch, he whips up his tablet, whose pen’s nib has worn down to having a radius of 0.55 mm after the previous commission (he’s going to throw it away soon or at least relegate it to doodle duties), and after working at 1.9× his usual speed for 7 hours, 53 minutes and 9 seconds of continuous work he completed the piece. How much should he charge?
With this question, there is no need to find out L, W or ρ because thankfully we’ve been given the end result of 
. This happens a lot with posters that need to be printed in the end, because no matter how big you choose your file size, in the end you’ll always get back the same area. If you’re commissioning someone and they are expecting a digital file, then things may be different, but this is not the case here.
We also know a handful of other things about his tablet from the last section:
Several other values are also very easy to calculate:
And the rest is simple arithmetic:
“The amount is as clear as day,” says Arthur. “You owe me exactly ninety-nine dollars and thirty-two and nine-tenths of a cent.”
Denver is even more flummoxed than Barbara was, but the numbers dazzles him even more – when’s the last time he saw a π? – And he pays up.
Stay tuned for Part VII: Epilogue.
The way forward is to use a volume, yes, but this time instead of talking about the process of using to tools to graft things into the finished product, we talk about wearing down the tool needed to graft the ingredients in to the finished product. Every tablet pen has a pen nib, a bit of plastic that is used to pin-point one particular point on the tablet. Like the lead of a pencil, it’s able to make pointing things on the writing surface a much easier job, and is the main helper in creation; like the lead of a pencil, it wears out eventually. Unlike a pencil however, the nib has to be replaced, and cannot be sharpened.
Because of this, one might consider that a pen nib would become unusable after only a proportion of its formal lifespan has been expended, at least with the purpose of producing commission-level quality work. Let’s call this proportion U. Because of the way it is constructed, U is a dimensionless number that must always stay between 0 and 1. U doesn’t appear in terms involving traditional tools of art because those generally aren’t as irreplaceable as pen nibs (they can be sharpened/re-honed/straightened-up, but nibs must be replaced, like mechanical pencil nibs).
So let us assume that in the hands of Arthur, a pen nib has one year of use, and that he uses on average three hours a day and his average speed of moving is at a rate of 1 cm/s. For Arthur, U = 0.05.
Using the above information, we can derive that according to Arthur, a pen nib has a lifespan s of:
Two kilometers – not bad!
We still need to figure out how many cubic meters of pen nib are worn away for each meter of travel. It would not be unfair to assume that 1 m of travel will wear out the pen nib with a proportion of 1/80000 of the whole – you never use the whole pen nib, only ever at most half of it, and the estimations are rough enough that we can afford to make such approximations.
So, for every d meters of use, the pen nib will lose that proportion of its volume, or (assuming the average between a perfectly right circular conical pen nib with radius 0.5 mm and height 16 mm and a perfectly cylindrical pen nib with the same dimensions, as most pen nibs are in between these two shapes):
(A tip from a physicist: π ≈ 3.)
This of course makes perfect physical sense, so it works!
One thing of note is that not every pen nib is 0.0005 m in radius and not every pen nib is 16 mm tall, and certainly not every pen nib will wear out at the same rate. These are not magic constants but rather variables, meaning that the final equation for V should look more like this:
With all the modifications in place, the Formula for Digital Commissions looks like this:
…where v is the average speed in which you move your pen.
Good lord! What a funny collection of letters!
Stay tuned for Part VI: One Final Example.
Edited to conserve space
I believe it is only proper to say “thank you”, as it appears you did actually have much patience in replying to the rebuttals.
(Although the correct rebuttal for 1 is “since the ship is literally impossible to create, there would be no one supporting it to begin with [as the count of the number of people in a relationship must be a positive integer – no −5 people, 2.8 people or 4 + 5i people, and certainly not surreal numbers like {0|0} or {1,5,9,81,660 | 3, 9, 22, 30, 55}] and hence you were talking to a non-existent person so the point is moot.” It is understandable, though somewhat irresponsible, to remember that one does not throw logic out of the air with copulatory abandon when it simply imposes such basal restrictions such as “if a ship is congruent with another ship, then it must be considered equal to the other” and “the ship must have Boolean value TRUE or FALSE when it comes to determining whether or not it contained transgendered person, never both at the same time”, or even the most basic restriction of them all, “a ship must exist in some form or another somewhere/n in spacetime in order to be considered valid”.)
I apologize for any inconvenience caused.
A handful of months of sleepless practicing later, Arthur finally honed his mastery of digital art well enough to go on commissions of just that! Reviewing his formula, he realizes there’s just a bit of a problem before he can continue: digital art generally isn’t measured in the SI units of area, the square meter, or even traditional units of area, such as square inches or square centimeters. Instead, it is often measured in square pixels (often abbreviated to just pixel, as in “6.0 megapixels”), and more rarely in square ems or square picas, which are usually defined, indirectly, by the square pixel. Unfortunately for the formula, a square pixel does not share the same unit as a square meter; a conversion factor, known as the resolution ρ, is required to translate between the two. A common resolution unit is dots per inch, which for our purposes is identical to pixels per square inch. Clearly, the SI unit for resolution must be pixels per square meter, because its dimension is “the inverse square of length”.
Fortunately, because of this conversion measure, we can easily rewrite the formula as such:
…which brings us to the second problem: what is the digital equivalent of ink spilt, wood cut, or glue dripped? The obvious answer is “length of total combined strokes on the tablet” – let’s call it d – and certainly one would assume to make it dimensionally consistent with V you need to cube that length. Only there is a slight snag with that problem – since the total length of all strokes on the tablet often exceeds meters per work, d³ would be enormous! This would mean one of two things:
Surely, there must be another way.
Stay tuned to Part V: A Steel Sword with a Wooden Blade
A few days later Arthur found himself a customer! Barbara requested a 50 cm × 80 cm print of her newest poster, but it had to be hand-drawn and/or painted. Seeing how this is a wonderful application of the formula, he decided to do just that.
After carefully weighing the combined mass of all his material (0.85 kg), he started working on it. While working on the piece, he decided that his rate is $3.75 × 105 m−5 s−1, seeing as that he is not fully skilled yet, it only seemed fair that the value was reduced somewhat (even so, it took all the care in the world to relay the commission info to Barbara, who was no doubt delighted to see such a tiny value as “one millionth of a dollar”). It took him almost 8 hours of solid work (it was 7:15:44 actually), but after all that he had a beautiful poster of the requested size was created, and it turns out he used about 20 mg of material. Now, how much shall he charge?
It won’t take long to find that answer:
“…and that’s why I charged exactly seventy-eight dollars and forty-three and a fifth cents for this poster,” explained Arthur proudly. Barbara was somewhat mystified by the numbers involved, but she took it and paid up. Success!
Stay tuned for Part IV: Forays into the Digital Realm
About Ninety-Eights and Ninety-Nines
