12-29-06

In some lesser developed countries, men perform contraception by sticking their balls in boiling water twice a week.

===

There are camels in Ohio.

12-28-06

You can print stuff directly onto an envelope. It really works!

12-27-06

This is fabulous. Make sure you don't miss the question mark after looking at the last one.

12-26-06

It's really hard to write things when you don't have a deadline.

12-25-06

Special Christmas fact: sea cucumbers breathe out their anus.

12-24-06

"Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California." -- Edsger Dijkstra

12-23-06

There's a new version of AIM out. A bunch of features have been added that are useless beyond imagination, while several features that I really liked have been removed. And you still can't make aliases for screen names in your buddy list. Come on, AOL!

12-22-06

If you drive through a Taco Bell backwards, they won't give you your food.

12-21-06

Board game commercials!

12-20-06

Want to know something about ninjas? Ask one!

12-19-06

"My parents became addicted to Warcraft so much that they cancelled Thanksgiving so they could play."

WoW Detox.

12-18-06

A woman can still have sex when she's on her period.

12-17-06

Strip Pong.

12-16-06

In 9-ball, a shot that doesn't make any ball hit the rail is considered a scratch.

12-15-06

"This is an overpriced civilization game with secret role selection in which the players are big city dogs who are trying to capture two-bedroom townhouses in order to urinate on the most cabin boys."

Automatic Board Game Generator.

12-14-06

Chemical addiction to nicotine lasts for only four days. After that, the pull of cigarettes is entirely psychological.

12-13-06

Kevin can do a spot-on voice impersonation of that creepy old pedophile from Family Guy.

12-12-06

"A poem should not mean but be." -- Archibald MacLeish

12-11-06

Every weekday, some ridiculously hot woman talks about nine cool things on the internet. Check her out in Yahoo's vlog, The 9.

One of "the 9" things today was a link to Board Games With Scott. Somebody made a post about it on BGG, so then a stampede of hairy, overweight, middle-aged men waddled over to The 9's website to show their support for Scott by voting for BGWS as the coolest thing of the day. I'm pretty certain that, practically speaking, this accomplished nothing, but it was still an impressive display of what can be accomplished by geeky people in large numbers. Scott currently commands 55% of the vote.

One guy "booted up my Lan PArty systems to get in a few extra votes from unique IPs." Nice, nice. "All Hail the Power of the Geek!", indeed.

And apparently, the word "vlog" is now a legitimate part of the English language.

12-10-06

Indian men have smaller than average penises.

Source: BBC News.

"The conclusion of all this scientific endeavour is that about 60% of Indian men have penises which are between three and five centimetres shorter than international standards used in condom manufacture."

12-9-06

Neat. Table.

12-8-06

From BGG:

"About a month ago, my 4yo was losing in checkers (which is rare, I take a big handicap so she usually wins). She suddenly decided she had better things to do. I said, 'OK, thanks, I win then!'

She cried and cried. Wouldn't play, but every time she started to walk away, and I told her 'if you leave, that's OK, but then I win,' she would scream and cry again."

I am starting to find merit in Lila's injuction against my ever having children.

12-7-06

Algorithms are neat things, and I truly love them, as long as I'm not the one who has to figure them out.

12-6-06

The Backspace key on a Mac is labeled "Delete," and the Delete key on a Mac does not exist. I asked the Mac user what he does when he wants to Delete something, and he said he just always erases to the left.

One-button mice and Neanderthal editing support. Who buys these things?

12-5-06

The new version of Internet Explorer has tabs. I have to say, I kind of like them. Three cheers for Microsoft's unbeatable strategy of stealing everybody else's good ideas.

12-4-06

It took Ian Wilmut and his cloning team 277 tries to produce Dolly.

12-3-06

Gay Monopoly.

From BGG:

"Player tokens are altered - now you can choose from a jeep, teddy bear, blow drier, leather cap, handcuffs or a stiletto heel."

12-2-06

When someone throws up because they've been drinking, it's funny. When someone throws up because they're sick, and the thing they're sick with strikes roughly every two days and has already claimed 3/5 of your suite, however...

12-1-06

It's December!

11-30-06

The word clone comes from the Greek word klon, which means "twig." The Greeks discovered that they could "clone" a tree by breaking off a twig and re-planting it, hence the meaning.

11-29-06

Five people cheated on my last Java assignment. Five people! That's one quarter of my freakin' class!

Some days, you wonder...

11-28-06

It took William Carlos Williams about two minutes to write The Red Wheelbarrow.

11-27-06

My software engineering professor used to be a fisheries biology major.

11-26-06

Synesthesia is the coupling of two or more senses. It makes some people see colors in numbers.

11-25-06

Michelle's boyfriend played Settlers for the first time and schooled us. Some people are lucky to be natural-born gamers.

11-24-06

Sorry I took an extended holiday without updating this thing -- it seems I'm still addicted to computer games...

11-23-06

Thanksgiving Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year. The Monday after Thanksgiving is the biggest day for online shopping.

11-22-06

This probably isn't really a 2nd grade computer test in China, but it's fun nevertheless. Can you beat it in two minutes? I couldn't. (Although I'm better than some of the idiots in that forum, who couldn't beat it at all.)

11-21-06

11-20-06

"Don't chokey on the troche."

"I'm wondering if that could be made a little more purple-sneaker-ish."

"As written, I can't have a willow tree sitting under a willow tree."

"I couldn't agree less."

-- Sarah Gridley, my poetry professor

11-19-06

By some ridiculous miracle (I think he must have been really bored) I convinced Dave to help me try Return of the Heroes. It's a fantasy game with dwarves, elves, magic, experience, quests, and a monster you have to kill called The Nameless One.

Yup.

I'm not ashamed to say it was a pretty fun game, although I don't think Dave will ever again be playing it with me.

11-18-06

I now know what it's like to not be able to pee because both of the toilets in your suite have people sleeping on them.

11-17-06

Alan Turing, the father of computer science, was gay. Homosexuality was illegal at the time, and he grew boobs after taking estrogen shots for a year to avoid jail. Turing committed suicide (though not necessarily because of the boobs) by eating a cyanide-laced apple.

11-16-06

Many vaccines are developed with the aid of tissue from aborted fetuses.

11-15-06

The Japanese attacked Alaska in WWII. It wasn't a trifling matter, either -- over 40 American soldiers were killed and eleven planes lost.

11-14-06

In my poetry class we sit in a circle. Moving the desks around is annoying, so we leave them in a circle when we're done.

The class before us sits in a circle, too. Being more conscientious than we are, they revert the chairs back into neat rows as a kind gesture to the class after them.

11-13-06

Somebody finally did the world a service and punched that stupid dipshit in the face.

===

Not really a new fact, but today marks the fifteenth anniversary of my arrival in America. I celebrated the occasion by proving that an Euler tour can be done on a connected directed graph if and only if out-degree(v) = in-degree(v) for all vertices v in the graph, and scoring 2.1 million points in Geometry Wars.

11-12-06

"Natural animal explosions can occur for a variety of reasons."

Ten Weird Science Facts You Didn't Know, compliments of Heather. I did, in fact, know two of them already (the raining animals and the male seahorses), so the information here is probably reliable.

11-11-06

After playing Amun-Re at board game club today, I have finally tried all of the new games I got last summer (sure did take a while...). I'm happy to say there don't appear to be any stinkers.

11-10-06

The "Re" in "Amun-Re" is pronounced "Ra."

11-9-06

I played Tikal with Dave. It's a game about exploring the Mexican jungle and looting temples. Fun times, though I think it'd be a little slow and/or random with more than two players.

11-8-06

Edsger Dijkstra, the winner of the Turing Award in 1972 and one of the greatest computer scientists of all time, hardly ever used a computer. He didn't even own one for several decades; and when he finally got a Mac, he only used it for email and web browsing. Prior to that, he had his secretary print all his emails and type up his handwritten replies.

11-7-06

In vitro fertilization usually fails.

11-6-06

"We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie." -- Thomas Paine

Confidence games and the ideal confidence game.

===

"Bloggers were invented ca. 300 AD, and were originally called 'monks'. Like their distant descendants, monks had shitty haircuts, and never got laid." -- Married to the sea

11-5-06

I broke 1.1 million in Geometry Wars!

11-4-06

Some of my friends have built pretty cool stuff out of Settlers pieces. But I don't think I've ever seen anything better than this:


Courtesy of BGG.

11-3-06

Back in the 60's, Congress passed a law that provided a legal definition of minimum spanning trees. AT&T at the time was still a monopoly, and the law was needed to ensure that AT&T wouldn't screw everybody over by connecting every network of phones in the most expensive way possible.

11-2-06

"Last words are for fools who haven't said enough." -- Karl Marx's last words

11-1-06

Pomegranite Frappuccinos are quite awful. They are even more awful, I imagine, when you have to pay for them.

10-31-06

Mobius strips are "handed." The handedness of a Mobius strip depends on the direction of the twist -- clockwise or counterclockwise.

10-30-06

The World Rock-Paper-Scissors Championships are held every November in Toronto. There's a $10,000 (Canadian) prize fund.

"Fistful O' Dollars -- Rock-Paper-Paper

"This move took the 1967 RPS World Championships by surprise and is arguably still one of the great surprise offensive moves. The rapid switch from offensive to defensive play can force an opponent into a vulnerable spot."

I wish they were joking.

10-29-06

"My biggest gripe about the business is the women who complain about guys having dicks that are too big. You'd think that by being in the business they would always be wanting bigger cocks." -- Peter North

10-28-06

El Grande: finally, three months after I bought it, I played the game. It's neat!

10-27-06

The world record for points scored in a single Scrabble play is 365, for QUIXOTRY. The player who made it also holds the current world record for most points ever in a Scrabble game, 830.

10-26-06

P.T. Barnum never really said "There's a sucker born every minute."

10-25-06

A tree is really nothing more than an acyclic connected graph.

10-24-06

Bouyack was supposed to take me back to Case. Then it turned out his car hadn't started and he never left Cleveland. Then Kevin's mom agreed to take us back. She made an honest effort. Kevin didn't get the whole story but he said it was "something about red lights."

Thus my fall break can be summarized as follows:

- failed carpool
- loud old obnoxious Russians
- gay porn

Here's to Thanksgiving.

10-23-06

We've all heard, as children, that dork means "whale penis." That's a lie. It just means "penis" -- there's nothing in there about whales.

And for once in this blog I'll expose my source. I looked up dork in The Oxford English Dictionary -- which traces words back to their earliest roots, going as far back as 1000 AD or even earlier if necessary, and cataloguing every meaning the word has had along the way -- so I'm pretty sure I'm right on this one.

10-22-06

If you've been waiting your whole life to see a guy give himself a blowjob and then cum on his own face, and to see two guys giving each other 69 while a third guy gets a handjob from the second guy while singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" into the ass of the first guy, then you should see Shortbus.

10-21-06

Neck-kissing isn't something Hollywood puts in movies just to be mushy and romantic. Some girls actually like it a lot.

10-20-06

There isn't a Nobel prize in economics.

That's right: Alfred Nobel didn't put anything in his will about an economics prize -- a bunch of Swedish bankers made it up in 1969 and got permission to present it at the Nobel ceremony.

Following the controversy that bloomed around this prize, the Nobel committee has voted never again to allow any other prizes to be presented at their ceremony.

10-19-06

I scored 870,000 points in Geometry Wars! Kevin, unfortunately, has reached almost 1.2 million.

===

Dynamic programming is a bitch.

10-18-06

A polish website with lots of amusing videos and pictures.

===

Poe, E. Near a Raven. What's the constraint?

10-17-06

Before hitting it big on Jeopardy, Ken Jennings failed to qualify for Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

10-16-06

C++ does not provide any good way of converting an integer into a string. Dammit, Java is so much better. If somebody would just make Java++, or Cava, or whatever that's exactly like Java, but it compiles into a binary executable, then life would be perfect.

10-15-06

C++ does not have any built-in way to determine the size of an array.

===

Jim's alarms never stop ringing, and he often isn't there to turn them off. One of them was buzzing at 9:30 this morning and I grumblingly got out of bed to go deal with it. Jim wasn't in his room, so I spent several moments stabbing at the buttons of his alarm until I realized it wasn't the one ringing.

I pushed the Off button of its neighbor and that also didn't stop the buzzing. I prodded Jim's third and final alarm and that wasn't it, either. I held all three alarms to my ear and, indeed, none of them were responsible for the ringing.

I looked on the floor by Jim's drawers and found, amidst the clutter, several other alarms. I picked them up one at a time, pushed their buttons, held them to my ear, and still the buzzing persisted -- I could not find the alarm that was going off! Baaaap, Baaaap, Baaaap, Baaaap. And so I continued, frustrated and furious, searching without end for the cause of that deplorable squawking, alarm after alarm, trying desperately to quelch the noise so I could finally go back to sleep.

Through no action of my own, the ringing stopped. Just then, I woke up.

Jim must have woken up and taken care of it, or perhaps the alarm stopped on its own. But either way, if it had kept going, I wonder how long I would have been trapped in my sleep, clawing madly at alarms that never rung.

10-14-06

Cannibal Holocaust. Jim owns it. Despite many efforts, he has never been successful in watching it all the way through.

10-13-06

Ramen flavor packets should be torn open along the side, not along the top.

10-12-06

"To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."

-- Gustave Flaubert

10-11-06

Managing people is hard.

10-10-06

Snowflakes are formed around pieces of dust.

10-9-06

"This is a very difficult proof. I will give you...one minute to think about it."

-- Professor Yang

10-8-06

I have developed an unsettling fondness for Doritos. Meanwhile, I am starting to feel a little ill of Snickers bars. It will have to be Doritos next time I pay a visit to Sam's Club.

10-7-06

"Overplay" is a term used in Go to describe intentionally bad moves made by a strong player who knows that his weaker opponent will not know how to counter them. Such moves, though bad, confer an advantage to the player who makes them if his opponent fails to find the refutation.

10-6-06

Dave knows how to sew.

===

The president of FIDE (the international chess federation) also happens to be the dictator of a small former Soviet republic.

10-5-06

The Nord lobby is a good place to hang out in the evenings. A lot of meetings with free food are held in Nord, and the people who run these meetings drop off their extra food in the lobby when the meetings are over. Today I enjoyed a totally free dinner complete with pizza, soda, cookies, and cake.

10-4-06

An argument in predicate logic can be tested for soundness and completeness, or soundness and effectiveness, or completeness and effectiveness, but not all three.

10-3-06

Suicide rates are highest in the spring.

10-2-06

I finally broke down and got a cold.

10-1-06

Yuri Kuklachev founded the world's first and only cat circus.

9-30-06

Necrid, the Soul Calibur 2 character I'd always thought was crappy and stupid, is banned in SC2 tournaments because he's so amazing. I never liked Cervantes either, but he's considered unbelievably powerful as well (though not quite good enough to get banned).

9-29-06

My Logic professor: I know he means well, but he infuriates me. Today he said that using a theorem as a shortcut to solving a problem is harder than just doing the same work over and over again and essentially re-proving the theorem each time.

9-28-06

"It's not so bad when people look at their watch. What's bad is when they shake it to see whether it's still going."

-- Professor Oster

9-27-06

I can't seem to get any game right these days. We've been playing Caylus too many ways wrong to elucidate.

9-26-06

I'm taking a poetry workshop this semester. The following comment appeared on a classmate's critique of one of my recent poems:

"The rhyme/meter in your first poem was cute...but now it's a little annoying. No doubt I can appreciate the effort, but try to change up your style a bit."

I'm sure that when Chaucer, the Father of Modern English, the first great poet -- really, the first great writer of any kind -- who wrote in a language which we can recognize today as English, decided to write all of his poetry in rhyme, thousands upon thousands of lines of rhyming iambic couplets (or Rime Royale, which is even harder) -- he was doing it just to be "cute." That clearly was his motivation.

And when Shakespeare, one of the greatest dramatists of all time, decided to write over 150 sonnets in strict iambic pentameter rhyming quatrains, and also to compose the bulk of his legendary dramas in rhyming iambic pentameter, he was just trying to be "cute," too.

Apparently it's irrelevant that nearly all of the greatest poetry ever written, in any era, in any language, on any subject, rhymes.

Today, put rhyme into a poem and that's automatically strike one. In a workshop of thirteen people, I'm the only one who rhymes. And we never talk about the others' decision to write in free verse; no, there's nothing strange about that. But when my poems are critiqued, people don't just point out places where the rhyme is forced, the language is weak, the structure could be improved, etc; they also question whether it is wise of me to be rhyming at all. That's right: people seriously wonder why I am rhyming in a poem.

That's the attitude. I wish I were joking.

As far as poetic talent goes, I'm somewhere around the middle of the class. But just because some of my poems stink, doesn't mean that the rhyme is there because I'm trying to cover up the stench with cheap glitz. The rhyme is there because I'm trying to write poetry. We can debate whether a blue square on a green canvas is art, but a portrait of a woman is clearly art; similarly, we can debate whether free verse is poetry, but something that rhymes (and has meter to boot) is clearly poetry.

I love the workshop, I'm learning a lot, and I get to read a lot of terrific poetry. I'm just surprised, amused, and a little saddened that the presence of rhyme in a poem is now considered STRANGE, whereas a block of ungrammatical, underpunctuated prose chopped up into haphazard lines has somehow become the poetic ideal.

9-25-06

I'm going to grad school for English.

9-24-06

Radio waves don't go through metal.

9-23-06

It would appear that cereal stays crunchy longer in whole milk than in 2%. I do not present this as a fact, however -- merely an impression.

9-22-06

Today Dave and I played the demo for Fuzion Frenzy 2, the sequel to the greatest original game ever made for x-box. (I say "original" because Soul Calibur 2 and Oblivion were both made for other platforms. Halo comes in a distant fourth.) I am sad -- no, astonished, grieved, and heartbroken -- to report that all of the charm, vivacity, and splendor of the original was, on the way to the sequel, stuffed in a moldy trashbag and dumped in a nearby river. The music is no longer punchy and upbeat; the characters have lost all character, having been transformed into lanky generic anime-ish dweebs in multicolored Halo suits; the games are new and different but slow-paced and uninspiring; the guy who yelled "FUZIOOOOOOON FRENZEEEEEEE!!!" is gone. And the demo only includes three games. Three!! Contrast that to the original Fuzion Frenzy demo, which had enough games to actually justify paying money for Halo.

It's still a bunch of mini-games, and maybe some of them are fun, but the spirit of the game, the soul, has been completely ripped out.

9-21-06

In any group of six people, there will always be at least three who either all know each other or don't know each other.

9-20-06

Kevin writes his papers by hand, then types them up.

9-19-06

Lifting weights when you haven't done it in a while and spent the previous Sunday curled up in a ball trying not to vomit, really sucks. I was lifting the equivalent of a chicken feather and two peanut shells on the triceps machine and started huffing and puffing by the second rep. I just hope none of the girls were watching. Or had ears.

9-18-06

My left shoe, it's okay, but the right one, the tongue is always sliding under the laces. I've been screwing with it for ages and it still does that. Last time I buy Sketchers, that's for sure. God damn tongue.

9-17-06

Real-time MST (minimum spanning tree) algorithm with moving balls. Download it here and save it to your desktop before running. Make sure you hit F1 when it starts to see all the options. Comes with Prim's AND Kruskal's algorithm!

9-16-06

There are less than forty black people at Case.

[9-22-06 note: this is horribly, horribly wrong. About 6% of campus is black, which is over 500 people. Thanks to Heather for the catch and correction.]

9-15-06

Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis & Clark fame, committed suicide.

9-14-06

There is a strand of bacteria that resides in eggs and undercooked meat and is invisible to the eye. It causes miscarriages and sterility. Thankfully, only in women.

9-13-06

9-12-06

"To my mind it was like he was raking up diamonds in this very strange vegetable patch." -- Professor Gridley

Ahhhh, poetry teachers.

9-11-06

Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, died last week. He was stabbed in the heart by a stingray.

9-10-06

Learn to Play Bridge. This program is simply amazing -- a must for anyone who wants to stop sucking. You will not BELIEVE the things you could possibly not know about bridge.

9-9-06

It took me almost half an hour to explain the rules for Caylus.

9-8-06

A roll of two threes is called a "hard six."

9-7-06

Gay bathhouses.

9-6-06

The first correct sorting algorithm was not selection sort. It wasn't even bubble sort. It was generate-and-test: arrange the numbers randomly and then see if they're sorted. And if my algorithms professor is to be believed, it took the computer science community five years to come up with this.

9-5-06

One third of the software written for the government is never used.

9-4-06

Older men have a higher chance of fathering autistic children.

9-3-06

Arrow Tag. Fun and simple.

===

xkcd. Not sure what it stands for, but it's funny. Don't be discouraged by the fruitcakiness of some of the entries, particularly the early ones -- discounting those, it's a solid comic.

9-2-06

"Märklin", which I'd always pronounced "MAR-klin," is actually pronounced "MARE-klin."

===

Our hallway still smells like Cinnabon-blueberry-cheese-flavored vomit.

9-1-06

King George III was not a native speaker of English. He was German.

8-31-06

The Hippocratic Oath forbids practitioners of medicine from using knives.

8-30-06

If you're a contestant on The Price is Right and make it into the second position of the Spin-Off, and the first contestant goes out, it is mathematically advantageous to take a second spin only if your first spin is 55 cents or lower. If you get a 60 or higher on your first spin, you hurt your odds of winning if you spin again.

===

The 19th century philospher Charles S. Peirce spells "premises" with two S's.

8-29-06

Windows XP has over 40 million lines of code.

8-28-06

Chickpeas and garbanzo beans are the same thing.

8-27-06

I taught Kevin and Dave how to play Ra. We played a game and they BOTH beat me. I guess I must not be very good.

8-26-06

Oh no, I'm a libertarian after all. Dang quiz ratted me out.

===

Tsingtao beer is made by Germans.

8-25-06

I'm back at Case. My suite is right next to a conference room that has several tables and chairs perfect for board gaming.

One of the stools in the common room of our suite is missing.

I bought a 48-pack of regular size Snickers bars at Sam's Club and brought it with me to college. This was one of the smartest things I have ever done.

8-24-06

Carbonated water causes bone damage.

8-23-06

Dark Messiah demo. It's a long download and the demo is short, but the game is incredible.

8-22-06

You can import your blog into Facebook. I still need to play with this feature a little to see if it's any good or not.

[9-23-06 note: it sucks.]

8-21-06

David Bowie's daughter went to Wooster.

8-20-06

Mandy is not afraid of board games anymore.

8-19-06

My barber used to play professional fast-pitch softball.

8-18-06

I liked driving at night.

8-17-06

Smoking, on top of all its other evils, is also bad for your eyes.

8-16-06

Theorem of the Day. Props to Andy.

8-15-06

BoardGameGeek has over 80 thousand registered users!

8-14-06

If smoking is illegal in bowling alleys (see 7-30-06), then why does every single table have an ashtray? I'm beginning to think Steve lied to me.

8-13-06

Today is Fidel Castro's 80th birthday.

===

Woody Allen is a competent saxophone player.

8-12-06

Instead of fries, you can now get a salad, Baked Lays, chili, or one of several other things when you get your combo meal at Wendy's. I hate fries. I've been waiting for this all my life.

8-11-06

In two weeks there are fourteen nights, hence the term fortnight.

8-10-06

80% of skin damage occurs before the age of 18.

[Editor's note: this is another "fact" I got from Sarah, so go figure. She says one of her friends swears by it and as a result wears sunblock everywhere. Whether that means the fact is true or merely that Sarah has really stupid friends is a matter I haven't the energy to investigate at the moment.]

8-9-06

Old Spice changed their basic deodorant. It's green now (instead of blue) and doesn't smell nearly as pungent or foul. I hope my mom just got the wrong one or something. Life will never be the same without the harrowing stench of cinnamon horseradish smeared into my armpits every morning.

8-8-06

I suck at Chinese Checkers. It is now the second item on my "Abstract strategy games I'm surprisingly bad at even though I'm good at chess and other such things" list, the other being Othello.

8-7-06

Female leg hair removal did not become a social norm until the Great Depression, when, too poor to afford real stockings, women shaved their legs and drew lines on them.

[Editor's note: Sarah absolutely swears she got this from a reputable source. But I still think it's a load of crap.]

8-6-06

Girls have a happy trail.

8-5-06

M. Night Shyamalan has completely lost it. His latest movie, "Lady in the Water," is downright apalling. When will people realize that he is a one-hit wonder whose one hit has been hit, and stop giving him money to abuse unwary theater-goers?

8-4-06

Moscow is the most expensive city in the world.

8-3-06

The GRE is nothing but reading comprehension, SAT-level math, and writing. Why did I waste $20 on a study book?

===

KGS is the place where most people go to play Go online. It's pretty cool and everybody has a ranking, so you know if you're about to fight a beginner or the grand master champion of the planet. It's also free.

===

I'm leaving for vacation at 8:00 AM tomorrow morning and will not return until very late on Saturday, August 12. I won't have internet access until then, but I'll write down what I learn every day and catch up on this blog when I get back.

8-2-06

A banana milkshake can still taste pretty good even if the banana in question is spongy and almost rotten.

8-1-06

Grinder's is a fine establishment, but don't get their BLT. It contains giant wads of not crispy bacon. Bacon on a BLT should come in strips, not wads, because wads are soft and repulsive.

The roast beef Grinder, however, I highly recommend.

7-31-06

The string used in tennis rackets is expensive.

7-30-06

Smoking in bowling alleys is illegal. People still do it anyway, though.

7-29-06

Graeter's originated in Cincinnati, not Columbus.

7-28-06

In the board game Life, there is a square that says, "Have tattoos surgically removed," which I always thought was bogus. It is indeed, however, possible to rid oneself of one's tattoos. The procedure is extremely expensive and makes the previously tattooed skin look disgusting.

7-27-06

Today I played Sheepshead for the first time. It's a fairly entertaining card game for five people. I don't know if I'd call it "The best card game on the face of the Earth," but then again, there isn't a whole lot else you can do with five people and a deck of cards.

===

In Sheepshead, as in other card games of German origin, tens are higher than kings. We just cheated and valued the king and ten normally. Not to offend the Germans out there or anything, but -- that's really stupid.

7-26-06

Score another point for Jeff: PartiallyClips.

===

Toothpaste has an expiration date.

7-25-06

We've been playing Ra incorrectly. The auction should only go around once. That would certainly make for much tenser decisions.

===

Goa kicks ass.

7-24-06

Many thanks to Jeff for showing me this blog. I recommend reading the first couple of entries to get a feel for what's going on, then going back to the beginning and reading the whole thing. Simply incredible.

7-23-06

Married to the Sea is a nifty comic. The creators live in Columbus.

7-22-06

"Awkward Antlers." If there's an awkward silence, you put antlers on your head and yell "Awkward Antlers!" Adam was kind enough to do a demonstration:



===

It hurts so much.

7-21-06

Box is slang for a woman's vagina.

7-20-06

Chocolate-covered pretzels are sickening. Salty and sweet do not mix.

7-19-06

venomous versus poisonous: something venomous will poison you by biting you. Something poisonous will poison you by you biting it.

My favorite book in second grade, Amazing Poisonous Animals, should actually have been called Amazing Venomous Animals.

7-18-06

A baseball cap will develop a permanent sweat band if you play tennis in it too many times before putting it in the laundry.

===

Jon Stewart's last name isn't really Stewart. It's Leibowitz.

===

Typewriter, perpetuity, proprietor, repertoire, and peppertree are all ten letters long, and all of them are spelled using just the top row of the keyboard. Yet since the dawn of time, there has been a fun fact circulating about the web that typewriter is THE LONGEST word you can spell with just the upper row. Considering it's TIED for the honor with four other words (and maybe others I wasn't clever enough to find), this nugget of ancient trivia simply isn't true.

7-17-06

Huge lats make you look ferocious.

7-16-06

"Bruce" is the official Anglicization of "Boris." And all this time I thought I ought to go by "Bob" (which makes no sense, since "Bob" is short for "Robert" and "Robert" has nothing to do with "Boris," but I like the name "Bob" anyway).

7-15-06

www.setgame.com

===

Ordinarily I'm good at Set, but put eight people in one game and suddenly I suck.

===

Women have smaller bladders than men.

===

Kamchatka vodka, though it has the proper 40% alcohol by volume, is absolutely foul.

===

Beer turns bad if you chill it then let it get warm again.

===

You can word wrap in Notepad.

7-14-06

21% diluted vodka is absolutely foul.

7-13-06

Somebody left a giant bag of Chex Mix on my bed. I have a secret admirer!

7-12-06

"The internet is a series of tubes, which are arranged in a nebulous cloud." -- Christian

===

Christian: "What are we going to put inside these functions?"
Idiot student: "Constructors."

7-11-06

Cotton thongs are comfortable. Lace thongs are not.

7-10-06

Donald Knuth, one of the greatest computer scientists ever, the inventor of TeX, was a graduate of Case.

7-9-06

In a ping pong match to eleven points, the players should alternate serve every three points, not five.

7-8-06

Formaldehyde dissolves styrofoam.

7-7-06

Pizza tastes good with ranch sauce.

7-6-06

"So my mom's like, 'Can you turn that shit off so it'll stop beeping?', and I'm like, 'No mom, I'm not going to turn off your life support.'" -- camper

7-5-06

Some crayons are waxier than others.

7-4-06

"He who keeps standing ... is still in the same place." -- Arabic proverb

7-3-06

25-gesture Rock-Paper-Scissors.

7-2-06

According to the USTSA Official Foosball Rules, a shot that pops out of the goal is still considered good.

7-1-06

The most dangerous tree in the world is the manchineel tree of Central America. The sap from this tree causes painful blisters upon contact with the skin and potentially, if it gets into the eyes, blindness. Manchineel trees spawn a sweet-smelling fruit that tastes pretty good and will probably kill you.

6-30-06

"Live in a place and eat of its onions." -- Egyptian advice

"The cock that crows at an untimely hour must lose its head." -- Armenian proverb

Armenians have a sick freakin' sense of humor.

6-29-06

Quite a few of the campers are in love with Settlers of Catan. Today six of them played a game that lasted three hours and none of them complained. The game even commanded a small audience. The final score was 10-9-8-8-8-8.

6-28-06

If someone from another school tries to befriend you on Facebook, you can look at their profile before accepting the invitation.

6-27-06

"Big piles of meat are not fun." -- Christian, my computer game programming professor

===

Experimental gameplay project. I haven't tried too many of them, but I do like this one.

6-26-06

Planarity was written by a Case student.

6-25-06

The campers arrived today. Half the kids in my class are WoW addicts. Another one has been playing Everquest for six years. Sigh...

6-24-06

You can insert assembly language into C++ code.

===

ABA games. Torus Trooper and Tumiki Fighters are pretty cool.

6-23-06

Ann Sathers, a restaurant in Chicago, makes amazing cinnamon rolls.

6-22-06

Gorilla glue. Like super glue, but even more super.

6-21-06

Sai, the weapon of my favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, Raphael, are homonymic with the Greek letter psi -- which is also exactly what they look like.

===

If you remove the letter 'e' from the word 'biotech,' you get 'biotch.'

6-20-06

In the game of Set, you can have up to twenty cards without a set.

===

I am legally blind.

[9-25-06 note: the kind lady who checks my eyes at Lenscrafters assured me that the second fact, which I got from Amanda, is not true. You're not legally blind until you're so freaking blind that even glasses thicker than Michael Moore won't help you.]

6-19-06

It is only in Ohio that you can avoid an eat-in tax by placing your order to go. In other states the tax applies regardless. In that case it's not really an "eat-in" tax but a food tax, which Ohio doesn't have.

6-18-06

The world record for a Jenga tower is 40 and 2/3 levels.

6-17-06

Everyone is familiar with the front of a Snickers bar: SNICKERS in blocky italic letters inscribed in a parallelogram. What I did not know is that the back side of a Snickers bar says SATISFIES in the same style. This must be new, because I've eaten many a Snickers bar following an abysmal evening at Leutner, and never seen it.

===

A hot cashier recently began working at CVS. I think I made a very solid impression on her the first time I was there. First I fumbled about like an idiot for my CVS ExtraCare card because I couldn't get my pocket open. Then I couldn't get a five dollar bill to come out of my wallet. It snagged on some of the other bills; I yanked it and ten one-dollar bills spewed out all over the floor.

Today I saw the danger coming and took some precautionary measures. I prepared my CVS ExtraCare card and a five dollar bill miles before I approached the register. I paid for my goods and she gave me change. Things were looking good. But just as our exchange was about to conclude, I jumped the politeness gun and cut her off as she was wishing me a nice day. The conversation went like this:

Me: Thanksalot.
Hot Cashier: Have--
Me: Haveaniceday.
Hot Cashier: ... You too?

I am now determined to complete at least one transaction at CVS without making an ass of myself.

6-16-06

Sam's Club sells 72-pouch boxes of fruit snacks.

6-15-06

I didn't learn how to walk until I was one year and five months old. My startling incompetence could be seen at an early age.

===

The Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev is best known for his discovery of the periodic law, but the periodic table is only his second greatest contribution to mankind. As a graduate student, Mendeleev went on a quest to discover the perfect vodka. After one and a half years of (no doubt) grueling research, he concluded that the ideal vodka contains 38% alcohol by volume. We therefore have Mendeleev to thank for the tasty 40% vodka we see in stores today, and I think we can all agree that vodka plays a role of much greater importance in our lives than some stupid table with letters and numbers written on it.

While we're on the topic of vodka, let me add that the 21% nonsense you pick up at the drive-through is garbage, suitable only for mixed drinks or hitting people on the head with (preferably the ones who bought it).

6-14-06

You can construct a regular n-sided polygon with a compass and straightedge if and only if the prime factorization of n includes only 2's and distinct Fermat primes. A Fermat prime p is of the form p = 2^(2^t) + 1.

6-13-06

There is a card game called Hentacle. You can read a review here; some highlights follow:

"Hentacle is a fast paced game of, er, anime-tentacle-porn for 2 to 4 players. ... Truthfully, I see this game as being a very niche game, basically for fans of ... tentacle-porn."

"It takes an awful lot to offend me, and I happen to like anime. Truthfully, I've never seen any tentacle porn, but I have a passing familiarity with the genre."

"Special Cards can be played at any time, but there are only a few of them. Each girl has their own Special Card that can only be played on them. For example Chiaki, the Space Girl, has a card called 'It's In My Suit.'"

"Exclamation Cards are cards that can be played at any time, and are usually bad things, so you'll want to play them on your opponent. For instance, "Need A Break" forces a player to miss a turn, and "Performance Anxiety" cause[s] a player to discard their entire hand."

"The art is great! It is in anime/hentai style (naturally) and Mel Wong, the artist, did a great job capturing that vibe. Sure it's about tentacle creatures assaulting girls, but there's a lot of humor scattered throughout."

BoardGameGeek lists Hentacle as a "party game." I'll be sure to pull it out at my next family gathering right after Pictionary and Charades.

===

A third nipple is called a nubbin.

6-12-06

One of my classmates, Sean Santa, has a book coming out around August 1. It's called "Down and Out and" (I'm not sure if that's a really nifty title or a typo on his part) and it should be available on Amazon.

You may remember Sean as the computer guru who offered thoughtful advice such as "your megapixel output is corrupted" (see 4-4-06, below), but my favorite memory of him is from the fiction writing workshop last fall. In that class, everybody had to write a story and listen to his classmates critique it. Sean was the first person to speak during the very first story critique. "I didn't like your story," he said, "and I'll tell you WHY I didn't like it..." I think we all nearly crapped our pants.

6-11-06

Mr. Tatman shaved his moustache and looks years younger without it.

Graduation ceremonies suck, especially when the class president is a ditz the size of Montana. "Let's continue our vertical voyage, shoot for the stars and never settle for mediocrity." No, let's not. And let's not say "In conclusion..." but then continue spouting garbage for another ten minutes. Moreover: nobody cares about what your god damn DENTIST thinks, but if you're going to talk about it, don't include the fact that you saw him yesterday. It shows that you probably wrote the speech at 1:00 in the morning and don't have a [CHILDREN MAY BE READING THIS] clue.

6-10-06

Diesel pumps have wider nozzles than gas pumps so that people won't be able to fill their cars with diesel accidentally. In spite of this precaution, a friend of my parents successfully put diesel in his Honda, whereupon it drove for about ten meters and promptly died.

6-9-06

The Bexley High School drama director resigned last week for "personal and family reasons." But some people seem to think that the fact that he was arrested for having sex with hookers might have also had something to do with it. Read the full story here.

6-8-06

"Priapus is a god of fertility, protector of horticulture and viticulture. His statue, holding a wooden sickle in his hand, was used in the Roman gardens as scarecrow, and his enormous penis as a threat against thieves."

"... If I do seize you ... you shall be so stretched that you will think your anus never had any wrinkles."

Cradle of democracy my ass; the Greeks were screwed up. Read more here.

6-7-06

Until today, Julie didn't know that you can click on pictures in Facebook photo albums to enlarge them.

6-6-06

If anyone wants a free suitcase, there's one lying in the middle of the road on Livingston by the Vernon intersection.

6-5-06

A guy on the board game forums wrote a post about the unfair stereotyping of gamers. The general consensus stereotype of a board gamer, if you are curious, is that of a balding, middle-aged, overweight male who smells bad and has a caffeine addiction. With regards to the odor, the poster wrote:

"For some it is a question of 'to wash or not to wash', for others it is the certain time in their life when they are between childhood and adolescence and their body isn't sure what to do with all the new chemicals, for others it is a medical problem. When I was in my twenties I had that problem. Even if I took a shower only three hours later I smelled like a mediocre torchbearer in the Dungeon of Doom. Thankfully I could take some pills based on natural ingredients to get rid of the problem. Now, according to my wife, I smell very good."

Freshman year we had a guy on our floor who stank like a wet dog in a barrel of rotten human flesh, even directly after a shower. How could this be? Some conjectured that he didn't use soap in the shower; others thought he didn't shower enough; some believed he didn't wear deodorant; others thought he had a medical problem. Previously I wasn't sure whether there really existed a medical condition that could make you smell like ass 100% of the time, but now I know. Poor Don; instead of offering deodorant, we should have given him some pills.

6-4-06

Today I watched a match for the French Open between Sharapova and Safina, both of whom are younger than I am. I feel old.

Sharapova lost in the third set even though she was up 5-1 and is really hot. On the whole, it was a depressing match.

6-3-06

The numbers on a roulette wheel add up to 666.

6-2-06

I finished Complicity by Iain Banks today. It was amazingly average. Who recommended Iain Banks to me? I can't remember, and if it was you, please tell me which of his novels truly showcases his talent, because it seems I picked the wrong one.

6-1-06

My dad caught the national spelling bee on TV tonight and called me over. It was very entertaining, and I regret not having seen any spelling bees earlier. My favorite word of the evening was icteritious, meaning "jaundiced" or just "yellow." I also liked heiligenschein, which isn't in the dictionary but according to this site means "A diffuse bright region surrounding the shadow an observer's head casts on a irregular surface." A really arrogant guy went out on that one, which surprised me given how frequently it comes up in everyday conversation.

5-31-06

If you have one of those crank things that rolls up your garden hose, you should unscrew the head of the hose before rolling it up. Otherwise, the water left over inside the hose will have nowhere to escape and the hose will sprout leaks.

5-30-06

I got the residential teaching assitant job at Case! It'll only be for one month, leaving plenty of room for board games and Oblivion, but at least I won't be a loser ALL summer.

5-29-06

The next executive chef at the White House will be, for the first time in history, a woman.

5-28-06

"Starry Night," the famous painting by Van Gogh, resides in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Other famous paintings in that museum's collection include Picasso's "Girl Before a Mirror," Wyeth's "Christina's World," a canvas that's entirely blue, a canvas that's entirely black, a canvas that's entirely white, a canvas that's entirely olive green, and a giant square blue canvas with OOF written across the middle in capital yellow letters.

5-27-06

New York City isn't split up into multiple school districts like Columbus is. The entire city is one big district. Admission into the top public schools is therefore determined by scores on standardized tests.

5-26-06

We'll be coming back Tuesday, not Monday, and I only brought three pairs of socks. This worries me. Recall the lesson learned on 2-16-06: "If you pull an all-nighter and neglect to change your socks, by the end of the second day they start to smell really bad." I won't be staying up all night, but you can see the related problem here.

5-25-06

White chocolate chip macadamia cookies are my favorite type of cookies, even though I like neither white chocolate (which isn't real chocolate) nor macadamia nuts (because they leave an unpleasant aftertaste).

I'll be on vacation tomorrow through Monday, so I won't be able to update until Tuesday. Sorry!

5-24-06

You should wipe clean the top of canned goods before opening them. The rat poop that collects on top of the cans during warehouse storage will get into your food if you don't remove it.

My source assures me, however, that licking the inside foil of yogurt covers is perfectly acceptable.

5-23-06

During free-fall, the force of air against your skin is so great that oxygen diffuses into your bloodstream. Thus, when you go skydiving, you don't need to breathe.

[Steven Bouyack claims he read this somewhere, but it's probably a load of crap. -- Ed.]

5-22-06

Lila kindly pointed out to me ("bor, that is wrong. you are stupid") that 500 sheets of paper do not weigh 24 pounds (See 5-19-06, below). I got this erroneous fact off the 500-sheet package of paper by our printer that says "24 lb" on it. lb != lbs, it seems. I weighed myself with the paper and then without it, and the difference was a mere seven pounds.

5-21-06

After seeing "The Da Vinci Code," I am saddened to conclude that Paul Bettany, one of my favorite actors, works much better as a jovial imaginary beer-loving roommate than as a psychopathic murderous albino monk.

5-20-06

http://ph.otogra.ph is a great place to kill time looking at pretty pictures. Lots of good candidates for desktop backgrounds here.

5-19-06

500 sheets of standard white printing paper weigh 24 pounds. I guess that explains why I had so much trouble carrying 3000 pages' worth of tests in a box, on foot, twenty minutes across campus (see 5-5-06, below).

5-18-06

When I play Oblivion on my laptop, everything works fine except the graphics are white. Everything in the game is a funky shade of white. I tried playing the game on my parents' computer, and it works, except I have to set the graphics so low that the water isn't rendered (it's black, though, instead of white) and all the monsters are shapeless blobs of colored slime. All of the textures are composed of pixels as big as my fist.

I think it's time for a new computer.

5-17-06

My mom has several crowns on her teeth and today one of them broke. She called the dentist and explained the problem as follows:

"I don't have one of my crowns anymore. I mean, I have it. But it's not in my mouth."

People with imperfect mastery of a language often find funny ways to say the simplest things.

5-16-06

Scorpion bites, though not as bad as, say, rattlesnake bites, are still pretty serious and require hospitalization.

5-15-06

In Asian culture, the numbers 6 and 8 are considered lucky. Numbers composed of lucky digits are lucky, too, so skyscrapers will have 88 floors, and 666 is a very lucky number.

5-14-06

My cat is shitting all over the brand new white carpet we installed in the basement.

5-13-06

According to the official rules of foosball, a shot isn't scored if it hits a wall or a defender on its way into the goal. It's a good thing nobody actually plays by the official rules because otherwise 98% of my shots would be discredited.

5-12-06

"They say there are two kinds of losers: bad sports and good actors." -- Larry Evans

5-11-06

The subjunctive voice and the passive voice are not the same thing.

5-10-06

My chemistry students averaged better than my Java students. This is in spite of the fact that A) the chemistry class is hard, B) the Java class is a breeze, C) I was shaky in my knowledge of chemistry and made horrible mistakes while teaching it, and D) I taught Java very well. How strange! Next semester I must be sure to instill more fear into my Java students.

5-9-06

Today I had an interview for a residential TA position at an academic summer camp for high school kids. At one point the interviewer asked me, "How would you handle the situation if one of the students had a crush on you?"

Dave's suggested response: "Depends on if she's hot."

Lacking Dave's wit, I desperately tried to think of something good and failed. I challenge somebody to think of a more horrifying interview question.

5-8-06

Upwords is a stupid game. I'll stick to Scrabble.

5-7-06

Try www.easybib.com the next time you have to write a works cited page. You just enter in all the information you know about a source and the site arranges it in bibliographic format for you.

5-6-06

"Last summer, my friend O. and I went sailing. He is a quit dry, tight up person, working in public sector. In the evening, safely moored in a quiet place, we started a game of Settlers, and - because of the temperature. we played naked."

Read the rest of this (and other funny stories) here.

===

Two facts: 1) Kevin and I happened not to play in any of the same games at board game club today. 2) Both of us won both of our games.

Now I don't propose that these facts are in any way related, but there it is.

5-5-06

If you carry something really heavy long enough, your muscles get completely shot and stop working for a while.

Whist is better than bridge.

5-4-06

"According to a recent survey, only about a quarter of the population of the United States understands that evolution is about as well established as the fact that water is H2O." -- Daniel Dennett

5-3-06

"I would like to become a diva." -- Professor Koenigsberger

"I'm going to go home and put my balls away." -- Professor Koenigsberger

My postcolonial lit class went to an Indian restaurant today to celebrate the end of the semester. I ordered a "classic" Indian dish (I forget what it's called) and it was absurdly spicy even though I asked for the mild version. Apparently "mild" in Indian cuisine means that it will merely set your stomach on fire, as opposed to disintegrating your tongue instantaneously.

5-2-06

I played Mario Party for the first time today and was profoundly unimpressed. Imagine what Fuzion Frenzy would be like if all the minigames were terrible and the final winner was determined entirely by luck. Literally: in a four-player game, a monkey trained to press the A button over and over again would have about a 20% chance of WINNING. I'm not joking. I may not be a monkey, but I lost every single mini-game and still won overall.

Lesson: flipping a coin achieves the same result as playing Mario Party, but in 1/3600th of the time. I think next time I'll take the coin.

5-1-06

Avuncular means "uncle-like."

I got an A on my last English paper. I suppose I still have some of my old magic touch after all.

Subway subs get really salty if you leave them in the fridge for half a day. I don't get salt on mine, so I have no idea where the salty flavor came from.

4-30-06

I am no longer capable of writing a paper without staying up all night. This is a distressing development.

4-29-06

No matter how much I want to like them or how hard I try, White Cheddar Cheezits are just plain awful.

4-28-06

"Fugly would be 'fucking ugly,' but what's fularious?" -- Professor Emmons

"Only when we hear English on the lips of Americans do we fear for its integrity." -- Basil De Selincourt

4-27-06

If there are k people in a group, it is possible for each person to select a random number and then compute the product of all the numbers, without anyone learning the secret number of anyone else.

4-26-06

In England, writers don't pay income tax.

There is a hole in my right pants pocket just big enough for a pencil to fall through. As a result I have had to transfer my pencils and pen from my right pocket to my left pocket.

4-25-06

Hitachi developed a method for increasing the recording capacity of a hard drive by 1000%. Naturally, the first thing they did after achieving this incredible technological accomplishment, was make an animated cartoon music video about it. Check it out.

4-24-06

Sean Connery passed up the chance to play in both Lord of the Rings and The Matrix.

4-23-06

One intense evening of four-square is sufficient to leave you sore for several days.

4-22-06

Torus games! Click here to download.

4-21-06

Over twenty countries, such China and Australia, print their money on plastic instead of paper. Plastic money lasts four times longer and is much harder to counterfeit.

4-20-06

Do your homework the night before it's due. Otherwise, you worry so much about getting it done before class starts, that you end up forgetting about the meeting you were supposed to have with your advisor...

4-19-06

Phil's glasses broke a few weeks ago and have since been held together by Scotch tape and strips of paper. Today I saw he added a ring of red beads around the entire frame.

I sure hope he doesn't have any job interviews in the near future.

4-18-06

I take entirely too long to write papers.

Intrigue is an awesome game. Simple, elegant, cheap, compact, and best of all, you get a nice dirty feeling when you win, like when you screw someone over really badly and you know they'll never trust you again. Because that's pretty much what you spend the entire game doing.

Congratulations to Kyle for making the first "I'm intrigued!" joke. Julie came in close second, Dave was an abysmal third, and Kevin made a particularly poor showing, finishing in fourth.

4-17-06

A subset of a regular set is not always a regular set.

4-16-06

Julie is the ONLY PERSON who doesn't like Fist of Dragonstones.

4-15-06

There are people out there who take pictures of extremely bad Scrabble hands and post them on the internet.

4-14-06

Freecell is NOT a theoretical win. Fire up Freecell, go to Select Game, and type in -1 or -2. You will see a setup which is obviously impossible.

4-13-06

One of the members of chess club, who I thought was German, is actually a Croatian refugee from Bosnia. He's a cool guy. And I'm not just saying that because I trounced him in chess.

4-12-06

Dave got an X-Box 360 for his birthday. And a cake. The cake is gigantic and covered by a one inch-thick layer of unbelievably delicious chocolate frosting. His mom baked it herself and mailed it all the way from Minnesota.

Some parents just love their children more than other parents.

4-11-06

Blue Raspberry Jolly Ranchers turn your tongue seriously blue. It doesn't come out easily, either, not even when you brush your tongue.

4-10-06

Most airplane fuselages are made out of plastic. They're painted to look like aluminum so that people won't get scared.

4-9-06

Connect Four was solved independently by two people in 1988. The game is a theoretical win for the first player if he plays in the middle; a theoretical draw if he plays to one side of the middle; and a theoretical loss if he plays elsewhere.

4-8-06

There have been many recorded pictures of galaxies colliding, but we have never seen two stars collide. That's because relative to their sizes, galaxies are much closer together than are stars.

4-7-06

Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo. This is a perfectly legitimate sentence.

4-6-06

Phil, my chess club buddy, was at the Kaidanov Chess Camp with me in 1999. I don't remember him, but he vaguely remembers me. He didn't realize it, though, until he saw me in my super stylish "Kaidanov Chess Camp 1999" maroon t-shirt.

Lesson: never throw away your old clothing.

4-5-06

www.woot.com is a website that sells one nifty gadget every day. One. The next day, it sells something else.

4-4-06

In English class today we did Powerpoint presentations about old English texts.

Confused student #1: "Why won't my attachment open?"
Sean: "I think your megapixel output is corrupted."

Confused student #2: "Where do I insert my memory stick?"
Sean: "Check under the converter."

"And I was like, why is there sperm EVERYWHERE?!" -- T. It was an absolutely legitimate statement in the context of his presentation.

"I had no idea sex with cows would come up today." Professor Emmons, at the completion of the aforementioned presentation.

---

Poke the penguin.

Irrumator in Latin means "one who forces others to give him head."

4-3-06

Being drunk doesn't make a guy impotent, but it does make it hard for him to finish what he starts, if you catch my drift. The same applies to girls. The lesson here is that you should drink a lot if you have a habit of dropping out of the race early, or if you plan to indulge in threesomes.

4-2-06

A. You can throw up from drinking too much water. It makes your stomach swell, which your stomach doesn't approve of, especially when it's irritated after a night of heavy boozing.

B. Having thrown up the water as described in (A) above, it is generally not wise to then drink more water. "Tempering" it with orange juice doesn't help.

Source: being awoken twice on Sunday morning by the sound of Jim vomitting.

Note: I did not partake in the aforementioned boozing because I was gone all day at a chess tournament, but it is very frightening to enter your suite at midnight and find that all of your suitemates are splayed out on the ground because their temporary absence of motor functions prevents them from assuming a standing or even sitting position.

4-1-06

The Auk isn't just a creepy made-up mascot designed to terrorize gifted young children who are participating in the Knowledge Master Open. It is a real bird. Auks are similar to penguins, but they can fly. They live in the Arctic.

3-31-06

"I refuse to use a calculator mod 7. Anybody who has to use a calculator mod 7 should go back to GRADE SCHOOL."

-- Professor Singer, whilst stumped on a difficult computation, upon being advised by a student to use a calculator.

3-30-06

Dave always carries a comb in his back pocket.

"Play fast and loose," "make a virtue of necessity," and "a foregone conclusion" are a few of the many idioms invented by Shakespeare.

3-29-06

Tigris & Euphrates, though an excellent game, depends deceptively on luck. Poor Dave, who can never draw any red tiles...

3-28-06

Perl isn't very convenient when it comes to handling big numbers. Oh well, I guess no language can be perfect :(

Ryan and I had to write a fairly simple program to do crypto homework, and we tried Perl and Lisp before we finally gave up and turned to C++. Other languages may be cool and snazzy, but none are as homey, as comfortable, as good ol' C++.

3-27-07

If you must fall asleep in class, do so in a position that ensures your head is stationary. You're still a jackass, but at least you don't have to deal with the embarrassment of flailing every fifteen seconds.

Sorry, CS professors. It's not your fault that you're bo--oh wait.

3-26-06

Steven: how the hell are you a computer science major?!
Steven: this stuff sucks!!!!

Folks, you don't know what "sucks" MEANS until you've had to program recursive binary search in assembly. Quit whining.

3-25-06

There is a card game called Bang! To shoot people, you play Bang! cards.

"I bang you!"
"You can't bang someone if they're out of reach."
"His gun has a long barrel, so he can bang you from far away."
"Can you get banged when you're in jail?"

Bang! jokes never get old, either.

3-24-06

"So dividing by 2 is easy, right? Dividing by 2 is like multiplying by 51." -- Professor Singer

Modular arithmetic jokes never get old.

3-23-06

The faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences called a Vote of No Confidence on the president of my university. Next September he's going to resign. That's what you get for creating a 40 million dollar deficit and not letting the English department hire any more professors, asshole!

3-22-06

My board games arrived in the mail today and Kevin and Dave and I played Tigris & Euphrates. It was awesome.

Cocaine produces three main effects:

1) It coats the brain with dopamine. This makes you happy.

2) It reduces the brain's ability to remove dopamine. This makes you even happier.

3) It reduces the brain's ability to make its own dopamine. This makes cocaine the only thing that makes you happy.

Conclusion: cocaine is awesome. Just like Tigris & Euphrates. And you thought these were unrelated, didn't you?

3-21-06

The whole semester that he was in Germany, Dave didn't get a haircut because he was too afraid of having to explain, in German, how he wanted his hair to be cut.

Two people can generate a secret key while talking over an open communication channel. It requires too much math to show here how it's done, but it can be done.

3-20-06

Semaphores are more than just shared memory objects made in Unix to breathe hell into my weekend. The word semaphore refers to a system of visual communication involving flags.

3-19-06

People Magazine has it wrong. This is really the sexiest man alive:

3-18-06

www.brainyplanet.com has a lot of nifty puzzles.

3-17-06

The phone in our study broke. It rings, but the line is dead when you pick it up. My dad replaced it with the Garfield phone that Andy gave me as a present over ten years ago.

3-16-06

Stuck for a gift idea? Go here to purchase the exciting game Shocking Roulette. Four players; four holes. One lucky finger gets a hefty zap of electricity. Who said board games were for pansies?

The profoundness of this game has been immortalized in haiku by a poster on the boardgamegeek forums:

My groin is aglow!
I should have used my finger,
and not my penis.

--Chad Krizan

3-15-06

When you place a harbor during the setup of Settlers of Catan, you sometimes have to choose which way to align it. As it turns out, this choice should NOT be random -- you should turn the harbor so that it is in line with the longer chain of land tiles.

3-14-06

No paraphrasing of mine can possibly do justice to Timur's dazzling insights, so I'll let him speak for himself:

Timur (1:32:17 AM): I really want to see the world, dude
Timur (1:33:17 AM): I like to get out of America
Timur (1:33:27 AM): and then tell people I’m Russian (but really good at English!!!)
Boris (1:35:51 AM): why?
Timur (1:35:06 AM): people just hate Americans
Timur (1:35:11 AM): and tend to be ambivalent to Russians
Timur (1:35:19 AM): although I guess there are some places Russians are hated more than Americans
Timur (1:35:36 AM): if it's a really serious situation, then I just choose a random European country that doesn’t do anything but is kinda famous
Timur (1:35:38 AM): like Holland
Timur (1:35:42 AM): that’s my backup, always
Boris (1:35:51 AM): what if the person speaks Dutch?
Boris (1:35:55 AM): you're in a pickle
Timur (1:36:01 AM): well this is usually toward Asian folk
Timur (1:36:10 AM): not cultured people

...

Timur (1:42:36 AM): also in Holland there are literally something like 20 different types of mayo
Timur (1:42:39 AM): and they put it into everything
Timur (1:42:47 AM): I’ve had French fries with mayo
Timur (1:42:51 AM): hot dogs with mayo
Timur (1:42:53 AM): people with mayo
Timur (1:42:58 AM): they have some good mayo, no joke

3-13-06

In fourth grade the teacher had us do a business simulation. Everyone received a hefty wad of paper money and brought in goods to sell; you had to sell your crap to other people and buy fun things yourself. Most people crafted nifty items and set up elaborate displays.

I was a lazy bastard. I brought in a package of paper cups and some Coke. Before class started I hastily scribbled "Coke 1 dollar" in pencil on a lined sheet of paper and propped it up on a textbook. The writing was invisible from three inches away. People saw that I was selling Coke but nobody had a clue how much it cost.

By sheer luck, I was the only beverage vendor. Many students brought in candy and home-baked items, however, so while I didn't make any money at first, the orders started rolling in once everybody had had their fill of cupcakes and cookies and pie. I sold tiny-ass cups of Coke for a dollar. I was raking it in. Then I ran out of Coke. My pathetic stand teemed with hordes of willing customers begging to be ripped off and I was out of Coke. It was heartbreaking. I could have been rich. I'll never forget the valuable lesson I learned that day: fourth grade sucks.

3-12-06

The difference between zoophilia and bestiality is that bestiality is forced, whereas zoophilia is human-animal mating conducted in an atmosphere of mutual love and understanding. Some people like to have sex with dolphins. Read more here.

Thanks to Andy for the highly entertaining link (whether or not it's true).

3-11-06

"I'm a whore, what can I say?" -- Sarah

One hundred dollar bills are currently the largest denomination being printed. From 1934 to 1946, however, the treasury did print $500, $1000, and even $10,000 dollar bills, some of which are still around today and can be legally used.

3-10-06

Nostalgia originated as a medical term in the 19th century for the homesickness felt by soldiers on the battlefield.

"The Wizard of Oz" was actually written as an allegorical defense of the gold standard. Frank L. Baum used extended metaphors to show why U.S. currency needed backing, and why gold was better for this purpose than silver or other metals. "Follow the yellow brick road," etc.

In Saskatchewan, voting centers are required by law to provide water for horses. Banks too.

3-9-06

In the morning today I was asked if I was a professor. A few hours later somebody confused me for a freshman. Is my age that difficult to pinpoint?

3-8-06

With the aid of a few libraries availabe online, it is not too difficult to write a Java program that lets you send emails from completely bogus addresses. Dave sent me an email from ridiculous_fake_address@case.edu.

3-7-06

"How did they name Canada? C, eh? N, eh?" -- Professor Emmons

"What sorts of puzzles are we unlocking?" -- Professor Emmons
Leave it to a linguistics professor to mix up her metaphors.

"Air is cheaper than polystyrene." -- Professor Blackwell

"But of course, back to the ancient Egyptians." -- Professor Blackwell

"Higgledy-piggledy." -- I swear, he said it.

3-6-06

Computer fonts are broken up into two types: serif and non-serif. Non-serif letters end in stubs, while serif letters trail off into thin lines or other designs. Times New Roman and Book Antiqua are serif fonts; Comic Sans and Arial are non-serif.

Non-serif fonts read faster, but that doesn't mean they're better: since serifs slow down the reader, they also make him better remember what he's reading. This is why Times New Roman is so popular while Comic Sans is considered "not serious."

The font this blog is written in, Verdana, is a non-serif font. That means you can read this entry in twenty seconds and forget it all in twenty more. Maybe I should switch.

3-5-06

If you think your spouse or significant other is cheating on you, head on over to www.cheaters.com. For a modest fee, private investigators will tail your boyfriend or girlfriend and obtain video proof of indiscretionary acts. There is a Cheaters reality TV show. The website also conveniently doubles as a dating service.

3-4-06

Fermat's Last Theorem wasn't actually Fermat's last theorem. It was only the last one to be proven.

3-3-06

Milk jugs and plastic bags are made out of the same material. The difference lies in how fast you cool it after melting it.

3-2-06

In Old English there was a prefix for- which intensified the verb that followed it. The influence of this prefix can be seen in some words today -- forbear, forgive -- but it isn't being used to make new ones.

I think for- deserves a comeback. And not just verbs: adjectives too.

"Board games are forawesome."

"Programming in C is a forhorrifying experience."

"Sing that song again and I'm going to formutilate your mother."

3-1-06

Last night Jim asked me to wake him up in the morning. I woke up and was about to go knock on his door when I realized that he never really asked me; I just dreamt it. Thinking it'd be sort of creepy to go knocking on his door I opted not to.

Turns out it really was a dream. But Jim did oversleep and miss all his classes.

2-28-06

The whole "Freedom Fries" thing was even more idiotic than I previously believed. The vast majority of complex words in English were borrowed from French or Latin -- which essentially is what French was a few thousand years ago -- so "The man has a sword and likes water" is about the most complicated thing you can say using only Old English roots. Anything beyond that and you're in French territory; erasing French fries from our language would have accomplished nothing. Even the word language itself was stolen from French.

2-27-06

One of my chemistry students, who I always assumed was Russian, is in fact not very Russian at all. She was born in the U.S., as were both her parents, and her nearest foreign ancestry is Italian. Apparently "Kalina" is not a giveaway Russian name.

2-26-06

Computer architecture diagrams suck. Especially when you have to modify them.

2-25-06

"This is a nice theoretical notion which unfortunately has dubious value because nobody knows if any of the things we're talking about actually exist." -- Professor Singer on one-way trapdoor functions.

2-24-06

My postcolonial lit professor can see through BS on papers. I got a B/B+ on the first one.

2-23-06

The word muculent.

2-22-06

Write a program that takes an arbitrary number of integers from the user and stores them in an array.

Lines of code required in C++: 9
Lines of code required in Perl: 1

2-21-06

There are three uneaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in my room and two bananas.

A small piece of my bedsheet is stained with chocolate.

Skipping operating systems and computer architecture really frees up my day.

"So of course, if we take a cube, the bottom of a cube is a sphere." -- Professor Blackwell

2-20-06

Kunstlerroman is a German term for a novel chiefly concerned with one character's development of himself as an artist.

2-19-06

It's not pass interference if it happens within five yards of the scrimmage line.

2-18-06

Anthony's, located in Little Italy, is a terrible restaurant. Don't go there.

2-17-06

It genuinely upsets Jim when I tell people that he's good at DDR and practices alone in his room every night.

2-16-06

If you pull an all-nighter and neglect to change your socks, by the end of the second day they start to smell really bad.

2-15-06

Today Phil taught me a new puzzle:

There is a circular pond of radius 1. At the center of the pond sits a duck; at the edge, a fox. The duck wants to reach the edge of the pond and fly away. The fox, who is perfectly logical, wants to catch the duck, and is capable of moving at a speed of 1 around the circle (though of course, if moving won't bring it any closer to the duck, the fox will just sit still). Question: what is the slowest speed the duck can take and still make it to the edge of the pond without being caught? How should the duck get there (i.e., move in a straight line, go in spirals, etc)?

2-14-06

It is possible to fall asleep lying on your back even if both your knees are propped up.

2-13-06

AA meetings are not the only cure for alcoholism. There is a medicinal treatment: a drug kills off the main enzyme that your body uses to process alcohol, the result being that consuming alcohol makes you nauseous and disinclined to drink any more. This enzyme is naturally absent among many Asian and other peoples; consequently the incidence of alcoholism among them is much lower.

2-12-06

That beloved game of our childhood, Chip's Challenge, can be downloaded for free here.

Jim went out to do tutoring and his alarm rang all afternoon. In the evening we discovered that our suite DOES have a circuit box.

2-11-06

Although I am usually good at board games where diplomacy and manipulation are involved, I absolutely suck at Mafia. If I'm the Mafia, I get lynched. If I'm not the Mafia, I get lynched. Or murdered by the Mafia.

I do exponentially better in poker games where the blinds stay fixed.

2-10-06

Roald Dahl and AA Milne (the creators of Willy Wonka and Winnie the Pooh, respectively) were godawful horrible people in real life.

2-9-06

Pictures of old manuscripts taken in ultraviolet light allow you to read things that had previously been erased.

2-8-06

All this time, I've had some random person's sock inside my blanket.

2-7-06

"Inflammable," derived from "inflame," actually came before "flammable."

2-6-06

Milk, when sealed in a ziplock bag and left in Kevin's room for a week, turns light brown.

2-5-06

In a game of football, the quarterback is not allowed to throw a pass if he has run past the line of scrimmage.

2-4-06

DDR is actually a very entertaining game once you can stop being self-conscious about the fact that you're a complete loser.

2-3-06

The white feather is the British national symbol of cowardice.

2-2-06

Rather than trying to describe it, I'll direct you here. First play the video with your eyes closed. Then play it again and watch the guy's lips. Crazy, isn't it?

2-1-06

During World War 2, Canada set up concentration camps for Japanese Canadians just like the United States did.

Winston Churchill was, for all his wit and noble qualities, a hardcore racist. To quote my classmate Scott, "If I had a dollar for every time Winston Churchill said something nice about a black man, I'd have an empty wallet."

1-31-06

It is technically incorrect to use the word "hopefully" in phrases such as "Hopefully it will not rain flaming acid tomorrow." This usage has become more or less accepted, but hardcore grammarians will tell you that such sentences should instead begin with "I hope that", because "hopefully" is only supposed to mean "full of hope," i.e., "He opened the letter from Princeton hopefully, then drowned himself in a well upon seeing he was rejected."

1-30-06

Gibraltar is still owned by Britain. It's where English people go when they want a warm but cheap holiday.

1-29-06

When women gave birth aboard a military ship, the delivery typically took place on the main deck by the ship's big gun. Hence the phrase, "Son of a gun."

1-28-06

If you're buying alcohol and someone is standing with you in the line, they can get carded as well as you.

1-27-06

"Eating club." Such things exist.

1-26-06

Shakespeare didn't have a dictionary. Of course, neither did anyone until 1604, which was when the first dictionary of the English language was published.

1-25-06

Solving cryptograms when you aren't given the spaces between words is damned difficult.

1-24-06

"Frig," the word so often used as an interjection in polite company, actually means, among other things, "to have sexual intercourse." Another juicy definition: "to perform the act of masturbation on." Frig, who knew!

1-23-06

The letter 'e' appears more often than any other letter in the English language, accounting for a whopping 12% of all letters used. 't' is in second place with 10%, and the rest peter out after that. Strangely enough, 'j' is one of the four least frequently used letters, right up there with 'q', 'x', and 'z'.

1-22-06

The recipe for gunpowder is 74% saltpeter, 16% sulfur, and 10% charcoal. I have no idea how exactly you're supposed to mix them, though -- that'll be something to learn for another day.

1-21-06

You can drastically reduce the length of a game of poker by doubling the blinds on a fixed schedule.

1-20-06

The ancient Greeks employed a clever method of concealment to deliver top-secret messages. They would write the message on the shaved head of a young messenger, then send him to the desired location after all his hair had grown again.

Previously in Britain there was a law prohibiting more than one prostitute from working out of the same address, but there's a new law coming soon which ups the limit to three prostitutes.