Halo

There's an English word I don't know

Sherlock Holmes said
Railings.

Ah, but what type of rail? Wikipedia has once again astounded me by informing me that there are different classifications of railings - guardrails and handrails.

If you was to go back in time, and kill yourself.

K-97 said
Do you mind explaining Manifolds to me? I remember reading about them at one point (can't remember why?) but I didn't get them 100%.

This is where it gets a little abstract, and I'll admit I'm referencing Wikipedia a bit for guidance on the technical terminology, but essentially a manifold is a space in which every point is like Euclidean space (do you know about Euclidean and non-Euclidean space?). So, essentially, although a manifold as a whole may not exist in Euclidean space, as long as at each point on the object the local area resembles Euclidean space then it's still a manifold.
The best way to describe it is using a sphere, imo - that's how it was explained to me. The surface of a sphere is a 3D non-Euclidean space as a whole, but at each individual point on that surface it looks like a 2D Euclidean space. If you were standing on a sphere (like the Earth), the local area looks like a 2D plane to you, as the curvature is very subtle, and the laws of Euclidean space hold within that local, plane-like area. So, the surface of a sphere is a two-dimensional manifold, because even though the whole thing is non-Euclidean, at each local point it resembles Euclidean space. Note, though, that it only resembles Euclidean space at each point - the curvature is still there, it's just unnoticeable. A way to understand this is by thinking about map projections of the earth. We can take a small geographic area of the Earth (which will have a subtle curvature and so technically be 3D space) and project it onto a 2D plane - a map. However, the way you transpose it to 2D is dependent on where you are on the curvature - if you then map the same space but standing in a different place, your two maps will differ slightly despite describing the same space, because the 2D projection of the 3D space is merely an approximation and therefore changes defending on your relative perspective.
Of course, all of this gives rise to some pretty cool concepts, and ways to define objects in terms of visualisable space even when those objects exist outside of that. An example is the Klein bottle (yay for wikipedia giving me this example xD), which is actually a 4D object that cannot be implanted in 3D space (though we can represent it in 3D or even 2D space as a sculpture or drawing), but is actually a 2D-manifold!

E3 Is In Seven Days!!

This is the first E3 in a while I'm not excited for, simply because this is the first time for ages that I've not had a current-gen console. Half the announcements will basically be irrelevant. Thank goodness that Destiny is coming out on 360 as well, it'll be the one reason I keep my LIVE subscription up. And I suppose I may be able to get the Pokemon Gen III reboots on an emulator, because srsly, I'm not buying the 3D version of a handheld I already have just for one game.

Is it bad...

Jorick said
Gross. If you're going to hashtag, at least use the symbol thing so people can easily spot it with their peripheral vision and know to skip the worthless garbage post entirely.

#OMGR00D

better?

If you was to go back in time, and kill yourself.

CidTheKid said
Oh boy, that sounds something I'd like. If one were to try to understand it, what would you recommend to avoid losing your head?

I have no idea. I don't understand it! :P I assumed you did, as I know you have a mathematical background, and the rules discussed in the video are essentially those that are in place in the study of mathematical topology. The idea is that any two objects that can be morphed into one another without puncturing or ripping the "material" are the same - as long as they're transformed into eachother through continuous deformation. A donut and a coffee mug? They're the same, 'cause they both only have one hole (donut in the centre, mug in the handle) and can be morphed into one another without puncturing or ripping. It's a huge area of study and I'm woefully clueless on it, honestly - but I need to be clued up on it in order to study theoretical physics, particularly string theory. I mean, spacetime itself is a 4-dimensional manifold, and string theory does some crazy shit with multidimensional space... bosonic string theory requires there to be 26 dimensions and superstring theory requires there to be 10.
Sorry if I've missed a joke you were making or something, or am repeating stuff you're already aware of. I decided to take the post at face value xD

SpamJam: 48 Hours to make a fully functioning Spam forum game

I think the best forum games are those which encourage creativity in the participants. Therefore, my submission is a game in which you give people a limited amount of time in which to invent their own game. It would have to start at a specific time, described in the OP, so that people who see the thread later due to timezones or being busy for one day don't get disadvantaged, and it'd have to have a specific cut-off time due to timezones, etc. For the same sorts of reasons, a decent time period should be given to potential participants so as not to dissuade people from playing due to short time constraints, if they have commitments or some such.

How's that for meta, David?

Nobutsrsly, this is a really cool idea. The comments above are just my roundabout way of giving constructive criticism. If I have time I might try to hash out the rules for a game.

cabbage thread

You have accurately encapsulated my feelings about fucking cabbage. And I swear if Rusalka comes in here with her cabbage-loving heresy...

So I was reading all the sections and I was wondering...

To weigh in on Spam's fuzziness or lack thereof - actually, in the end, most people who are part of the 'community' of Spam do give two fucks and care to some extent. Spam's like a pineapple - prickly as fuck and hard on the outside, but sweet and soft and mushy on the inside. Kinda. Mostly.
Honestly, the more you just act like you belong here, the more people will welcome you into the fold, providing you aren't an utter tool (which we've already seen you aren't, so thumbsupbro). All the people who say they never got 'hazed' just pitched up and started making intelligent/amusing responses one day, rather than making their newness/arrival a 'thing'.

EDIT: Also, to explain why so many of us are posting here talking about this stuff, it's actually just because we all love to analyse Spam as a mini-community/society or as a collective entity, to show how aware we are of what it's like.

Is it bad...

BrobyDDark said
We should just keep count of how many times Kaga, Halo and Sherlock get called a he.

How many times I'm referred to as a male? I think you've somewhat missed something, here.

Prentice Hall said
I think if you like being called a woman or whatever it should totally be ok. You shouldn't be afraid to be yourself Halo!

While I completely agree with this, the purpose of the thread was to express amusement over the confusion. I honestly don't give two shits what gender people think I am. Hashtag-individualism.

PrimezTime said
Holmes is a girl? ...I was one of those people. You put up a good mystery with first impressions there Holmes.

That you still didn't know is proof that you're not here enough for my liking. Kill more time, Primez, gawd.

Is it bad...

Jorick said
That's kind of neat. I threw in my most recent long thing I wrote, character history for an RP, and it gave me male (61.4 %), female (38.6 %).

Littlefinger just reeks of masculinity that way.