Topmost Preempt

Topmost - at or nearest to the top; "the uppermost book in the pile"; "on the topmost step"

Preempt - a bid in contract bridge whose primary function is to take up bidding space from the opponents. A preemptive bid is usually made by jumping, i.e. skipping one or more bidding levels.

Recently, many news articles have come out regarding the Mona Lisa. Apparently, writing by Leonardo da Vinci in the margin of a library book confirmed that it is a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant. An article on it can be found here.

Generally, I wouldn't care about this. In fact, I still don't care. But, while searching through recent pictures of the day on Wikipedia, I came across the picture to the left. It was accompanied by an article that said that the discovery of the Mona Lisa using the golden ratio leads many to believe that Leonardo often employed the golden ratio in his art. Maybe in a few years, we will find Da Vinci's algebra work in the margins of a library book as well.

On the note of logic puzzles (I don't have any more yet, don't worry), I think that the last one was a bit wierd, because it was pretty much impossible to know if you had the correct answer or not. Even I didn't, according to Jon's program. Regarding Jon's program, I guess my attempts to make a problem that he could not solve with an algorithm failed, though I did force him to find out how to implement genetic algorithms! Next time, I think I will try to make one that is both a challenge to solve algorithmically, and a good logic puzzle to solve normally. Maybe I'll have it by Sunday, but tomorrow is round two of the TCHS tournament, which I will hopefully do well in again! I want a t-shirt!

On a musical note (wow, I actually didn't intend that pun), today my friend introduced me to a good site for downloading video game music. From discussing it with a few friends, I realized that there is a great discrepancy over which songs from the Sonic the Hedgehog series were the best. Overall, I realised, the best songs seem to be the songs for the first stages in each game. These include:

Angel Island Zone from Sonic 3 (you might recognize this from a Super Smash Brothers Brawl update a few weeks ago. I think I mentioned it in a post as well.)
Emerald Hill Zone from Sonic 2
Green Hill Zone from Sonic 1

There were, of course, some other good ones, like the Sonic 3 special stage song, but for the most part the songs were from the beginnings of games. Maybe SEGA decided that since some players would only get through the first few levels, they should put all the good music there so that those people still get a good impression of the game... or something like that. Anyway, analysis aside, I like Sonic songs.

Recently apple announced their new MacBook Air. It's thin. Very thin. If you don't know about it, you should probably get into the loop (unlike Wally here). Anyway, I have a few reasons for which I don't like this. Likely, many will have the completely opposite opinion, but that is fine - the MacBook Air was probably intended for someone. Anyway, first there is the obvious problem of the operating system. Despite my dislike of Vista, I don't really like macs either. Maybe I'll get into detail some other time. Second, and more importantly, I think that the fact that it is so thin is stupid.

Likely, a thin computer would be very easy to transport, and many people would buy it for this reason. I don't see why anyone would buy a MacBook Air when they could buy any other computer with better specs. Unless they are going to be bringing it on airplanes or trains, or some such thing. Or sending it in those brown envelopes that look like this that Apple keeps advertising them inside (if anyone actually does this, I hope it is because they are returning it to the manufacturer). Anyway, most people would not get a MacBook Air just to use at home. Yet, to use a CD with it, you have to have another computer with you that does have a CD drive for it to read the CDs from, or attach an external CD drive to it. That seems convenient when on an airplane! While one could argue that you could do work on an airplane without any CDs, that may be true, but I think that many more people watch DVDs or play games (I once had two people in front of me playing a game of Age ofEmpires 2 over an Ethernet cable on a plane) when they are flying. And those who are buying their computers for work, once again, should probably buy computers that have more hard drive space and RAM and such.

Wow, I don't know whether that made much sense... but whatever. Anyway, I'm going to go for now. Maybe I'll post again tomorrow. I can't predict the future. In any case, salut!