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.

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Dynamic programming is a bitch.

10-18-06

A polish website with lots of amusing videos and pictures.

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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.

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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.

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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.