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.

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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.

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"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.