Luciferous Cataphyll

Luciferous - giving light

Cataphyll - a reduced or scarcely developed leaf at the start of a plant's life (i.e., cotyledons) or in the early stages of leaf development

Aha, I copied Jon's way of giving the definition of the randomly generated words in the title! For some reason, I keep getting words relating to plants... but, what can you do (well, I could just generate new words, but then I would have to click the button again)?

Summing Arithmetic Progressions

This was a cool problem I found when going through recent TopCoder SRMs (it's the 1000-point problem from SRM 385 div 2) that I think even people who have had 3 months of compsci class should be able to solve (or you could think of an algorithm to solve it even if you don't know how to program):

A magic arithmetic progression with k elements is a sequence of the form x, x+d, x+2*d, ..., x+(k-1)*d for some positive integers x and d. How many integers between left and right, inclusive, can be represented as the sum of some magic arithmetic progression with exactly k elements?

inputs
int left, between 1 and 1000000000, inclusive
int right, between 1 and 1000000000, inclusive, and greater than left
int k, between 2 and 5, inclusive

eg - for left = 1, right = 12, k = 3, the representable numbers are: 6=1+2+3, 9=2+3+4=1+3+5, and 12=3+4+5=2+4+6=1+4+7, therefore you should return 3.

Winter-een-mas

Finally, it is Winter-een-mass season! Winter-een-mass, or WEMass for short, can best be described by a quote from Tim Buckley the other day:

"Winter-een-mas is a holiday of sorts. More specifically, it is a celebration of video games and the people that play them. Video games allow us to do things, go places, see stuff, that we couldn't do in real life. They can be an escape from reality, a release after a long day, a fun activity with friends, or just an enjoyable way to pass time. They give us a lot of entertainment. So why shouldn't they be celebrated?"

If you want to read the CAD arcs regarding WEMass (which are all pretty funny), here they are (well, the first comics in them, anyway):

The first WEMass, in '03
The second, when Ethan started spreading it a bit, in '04
'05, when Ethan gets attacked by evil corporations
and again in '06
and then the random one in '07

In spirit of this, everyone should go play some video game, or start reading Ctrl-Alt-Del (a link is in the links section on the right), or something like that. Or at least not vote that two pretty good games (well, one really good and one pretty good) both suck in the next poll.

Disney Channel Hits

Back when I was 7 years old, or around then, my mom got me a CD called Disney Channel's biggest Hits. I liked it at the time, and it even had Weird Al's take of American Pie on it (the one that tells the story of Star Wars episode 1), which I still think is a funny song. Anyway, I was just thinking about it the other day, when I went to Disney World during my trip, then I came across this. I guess Disney just made a stupid mistake, but I would think they would have some way of checking to make sure that an incident like this doesn't happen, especially considering their audience.

I'm sure you're all very busy solving my last logic puzzle or the arithmetic progressions problem or trying to understand Jon's "Artefactual coattail"s, so I'll stop now. Till next time!