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."

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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.