Tinkly jangler

(EDIT: Formatting messed up a bit again, so it's better if you read this post here)

tinkly (adj.): tinkling; like the short high ringing sound of a small bell; "sounding brass and a tinkly cymbal"

jangler (n.): an idle talker; a babbler; a prater

If we replaced the 'a' in 'jangler' with an 'i', we'd have a tautology =). Anyway, jangler is a fairly interesting word... I need to start using some of these words more often. Today's post won't be about math, but it will be about something nearly as boring to the majority of the population... books! Anyway, onward ho!

Things I've had the (dis)pleasure of reading recently

I put the (dis) not for irony but because occasionally I might actually rant about a book I disliked considerably. Since I read all the below mainly out of free will (the occasional exception being whatever school forces me to read - and school reading does seem to consist of under 5% of all my reading, so it truly is occasional), chances are if I bothered finishing it, I probably enjoyed it to some extent. Of course, you probably won't enjoy everything (even more likely, anything) I do, but that's your problem.

Mongo: Adventures in Trash by Ted Botha

Mongo is trash. So, this book is about people that collect trash. Really. But it's about interesting trash.

What do I mean by interesting trash? First editions of Finnegan's Wake, signatures of Benjamin Disraeli and Aaron Burr, bottles dating back to the eighteenth century, and old coins and jewelery. Perhaps even more interesting are the people that do this - like "Dave" who digs through piles of sludge in landfills and marshes to find antiques and old jewelery. Or "Steven" who is a rare-book collector - who gets all his books from the street. "Christiana" goes around and finds old broken computers and electronics and repairs them. Dan and Scott go excavate ancient outhouses. A group of anarchists reject consumerism and live entirely off the streets. We also have our standard crowd of black baggers and canners. Enough interesting character for a play or two. Admittedly some sections are more interesting than others, but that's fine - it shouldn't make a difference whether you decide to skip a chapter or not.

Very interestingly, all these stories take place in New York, and the collectors admit that New York is the best for 'mongo' collecting. Goes to show the culture and wealth of the city.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapcott and Anthony Williams

If you're not impressed with Wikipedia, you should be. Seriously impressed.

Perhaps you should be impressed by the fact that it has over two million articles now, mostly accurate. Or that Google often returns a Wikipedia page in the first five entries on a search for almost anything. But I, on the other hand, have always been more impressed by something else - Wikipedia manages to get thousands of mindless drones to do its work for free!

Of course, Wikipedia is non-profit, and no money is really generated from this work. But it does create wealth. And if, like me, modern civilization has brought you to believe that people only generate wealth for money, you will find this very strange. Very, very, strange. What incentive could these people possibly have to spend hours of their lives adding content for free to a website that they won't even (mostly) be credited for?

Wikinomics basically addresses questions like this, so if they at all interest you, you might enjoy the book. From Wikipedia to Linux and open-source software, to MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube, and even to the mass collaborations that allowed for the success of the Human Genome Project, there are lots of successful examples of how mass collaboration somehow created wealth in a weird way never seen before. Of course, there are also examples where open-ness does not equal free-ness. These include things such as InnoCentive, who offers money prizes to whoever best solves a certain scientific problem (http://www.innocentive.com/), and the Goldcorp Challenge, where the big gold company Goldcorp (ticker: G.TO) basically said "Here's all our geological data of this really large region - now tell us where to dig for gold, and we'll give the best suggestion some large amount of money" - to great success. Actually, TopCoder fits right into these examples, where they get other people to develop software cheaply for them, give the developers and designers about $1000-$2000, and then sell the created components to companies that need them.

Back to the question I asked earlier - and the answer obviously is, there isn't a very clearcut one. Wikinomics wisely doesn't offer an answer either, but rather talks about the factors that seem necessary to adopt this new 'business strategy' for a given problem (admittedly, this might because the book is mainly written for business leaders, but since I'm not a business leader, let's conveniently ignore this fact =)).

Honestly though, if you think about it, you can see why getting people to do things for free might work. Take this blog for example. You could claim that I am wasting my time every time I make a post because I don't get anything out of it and you all reap the benefits of my obvious intellect (of course). Yet I claim that I do get something out of writing blog posts - it allows me to put my thoughts in order, whenever I want. Wouldn't it be better, more convenient, and more selfish for me just to write for myself and say, write a collection of essays in a journal or such (contrary to what you may think, an essay is really just a piece of prose that is supposed to help you clear up your thoughts, not an evil torture created by English teachers so that you need to slave away several hours figuring out how mood is established in the Life of Pi)?

Truth is, not really. Writing for other people forces you to arrange your thoughts in a certain manner. And you gain experience doing that. This seems to hold universally - whether it's adding content for free on Wikipedia or contributing to open-source projects, you get drawn into an online community, and inevitably, you learn things. These things are quite useful in some cases - several companies (usually the best companies, in fact) are more impressed if you led an open-source project than by random credentials like "oh, I went to such a good university and got such good marks".

So, in the end as a result, we have this strange symbiotic relationship that benefits both parties. Of course, not everything should go completely open or try to use mass collaboration - this would lead to something akin to communism and widespread low-quality - but it's definitely an expanding frontier.

Essays by Paul Graham

Everyone should definitely read these. Seriously. This guy writes well. Well to the point that he is very, very, convincing, at least to me (perhaps my personal biases creep in here, but usually I disagree to some extent with almost anything I'm reading - here I almost mindlessly accepted the conclusions). They're all pretty good, but I understand not everyone is completely caught up with the state of startups, programming, and the Internet that reads this. Try How to Be Silicon Valley, Good and Bad Procrastination, Inequality and Risk, and News from the Front.

You'll notice there's also a link on the sidebar =).

Neversfall by Ed Gentry

So, I guess this is your standard fantasy book. It wasn't really amazing to the point that I'd read it again, but it was okay in that I didn't pull out my hair in frustration. I really need to start finding some good fantasy soon - recently all I've read has been pretty mediocre.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Of course, this is for school. But it's not bad, and pretty good for Victorian literature actually. Much better than say, Pride and Prejudice. I could see myself reading this even if I wasn't forced to by school.

Coding and Information Theory by Richard Hamming

This book is fairly hard to find now, but it's really good. I believe I posted a bit about it when I got it - basically, if you've ever wondered about problems like "what's the most efficient way to store some piece of information?" or "how would one measure the randomness of a sequence" then this book is almost a must-have.

Although, I do admit it is hard to find. You can always try MIT's electronic textbook on "Information and Entropy" here.

Elementary Linear Algebra by A. Wayne Roberts

Hurray for 25 year old textbooks. I know perhaps this isn't the best textbook on linear algebra, but shamefully enough, it's the only one I've read =P. They have nice vignette's though - every five pages or so, they show some interesting open problem that you can use linear algebra to help solve - such as finding Fourier series, or applying Kirchoff's Laws to a general graph, or the theory of Markov chains. Too bad I can't really compare it well.

Books I just picked up

Well, I went to Chapters yesterday and picked up the following books.

The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman

An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned But Probably Didn't by Judy Jones and William Wilson

Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell

Well, they made a movie about the Golden Compass, so the book must be at least a bit of a pageturner - it'll be interesting to see if I actually liked it or not. I'm quite divided on so called "popular children's books". Harry Potter was pretty bad and Artemis Fowl was amusing in parts but didn't really leave any impression at all, but the Bartimaeus Trilogy, particularly the ending, was surprisingly good (although the second book was a bit mediocre but whatever - you can't expect too much from page turners).

An Incompete Education is a pretty funny book - it's basically a book full of things that if you know will make you look intelligent at cocktail parties =). Nice as a reference book or just to leaf through.

Interred With Their Bones seems to be some mystery book about a lost work of Shakespeare - as if we haven't had tons of these before. The title comes from the following well-known quote from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."

Books I plan on picking up soon

Unfortunately, Chapters, while having a 'wide variety' of books, sort of "caters to the masses" - i.e., they lack a lot of intellectual stuff. I don't just mean math and science books (which their collection is rather limited, not surprisingly) but even things like Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, which is considered one of the best autobiography's of all time. So, here is what I'll probably pick up soon, given the chance.

A New Kind of Science by Steven Wolfram (yes I know this book is a bit controversial, but the excerpt was interesting - of course, I'll probably take most claims he says about how modelling and computer automata and chaos theory are the future of science with a grain of salt - they might not be all that wrong though... And yes, he probably should have put references in, but do you always see references in a novel?)

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

The Theory of Money and Credit by Ludwig von Mises

Actually, right now I'm interested in any books by Franklin or von Mises. I can get all their works online easily, but I would prefer them in book version (easier to read). Of course, Chapters doesn't have them and even Amazon doesn't have them in stock (you can order copies from other sellers, but I find this doesn't always work the best). So I'll either have to pick them up from the University library or find a bookstore that sells these things (ironically, neither of Coding and Information Theory or Elementary Linear Algebra were from Chapters or Amazon either - Coding and Information Theory I picked up from Gerstein library at U of T, and I snagged Elementary Linear Algebra from the University of Montreal when they had a bunch of free books available for us to take). Unfortunately I live in suburbia, so my chances of finding a bookstore like that anywhere closeby are virtually nil.

Anyway, that's all I'll bore you for now. I've recently been playing around with catching Pokemon on Pokemon Diamond and I might post soon about how Pokeballs work. If you have any good fantasy (or other) book recommendations, tell me!

-squid out.

Typing on Wiis...

is very annoying! Hence, this will be a very short post. The end.

Vendible gudgeon

vendible (adj.): fit to be offered for sale; "vendible products"

gudgeon (n.):
1. a small, European, freshwater fish, Gobio gobio, of the minnow family, having a threadlike barbel at each corner of the mouth, used as bait.
2. a person who is easily duped or cheated.
3. a bait or allurement.
4. (Nautical) a socket attached to the stern frame of a vessel, for holding the pintle of a rudder.

Hmm, gudgeon was an interesting word today - I could see myself using it, particularly the second definition, some time in the future. Too bad vendible is almost obvious.

"The Megapixel Myth"

For all of you who brag about the extremely high resolutions of your camera, go here - http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/mpmyth.htm . It is (mainly) true - it's sad how many people buy products based on statistics they don't even bother to think about...

Weird Logic Puzzle #2

See Josh's last post for his second 'logic' puzzle. It's very amusing though, how most 'logic' puzzles are really 'lots of trial and error' problems - and if you don't believe that claim, then a computer should not be able to do this:

public class quick2 {
static String[] words = {"jolly",
    "kev",
    "log",
    "star",
    "white",
    "mask",
    "nut",
    "pudding",
    "card",
    "fun",
    "bow",
    "cupid",
    "fern",
    "eve",
    "holly",
    "sack"};

static boolean[][] bad = new boolean[16][16];
static boolean[] hasE = new boolean[16];
static boolean[] hasH = new boolean[16];
static boolean[] used = new boolean[16];
static int[] quelWord = new int[16];
static int[] quelBlck = new int[16];

public static void main(String[] args){
 for(int i=0;i<16;i++){ j="0;j<16;j++)" i="0;i<16;i++){" time =" System.currentTimeMillis();" block="="16){" i="0;i<16;i++){" windex="="12&&block!="15)">0&&block%4!=0) if(bad[wIndex][quelWord[block-1]]) return false;
 if(block>3) if(bad[wIndex][quelWord[block-4]]) return false;
 if(block>4&&block%4!=0) if(bad[wIndex][quelWord[block-5]]) return false;

 //no E's first column or third row!
 if(block%4==0&&hasE[wIndex])return false;
 if(block/4==2&&hasE[wIndex])return false;

 //no H's third row!
 if(block/4==2&&hasH[wIndex])return false;

 //no logging top row! (-g__g)
 if(wIndex==2&&block/4!=0) return false;

 //fun 2 columns right holly!
 if(wIndex==14&&block%4>=2) return false;
 if(wIndex==9&&block<2) windex="="9&&block%4<2)" windex="="9&&(quelWord[block-2]!="14))" windex="="6){" windex="="7){" windex="="10){" windex="="1){" windex="="13){" 4="="block/4)" 4="="block/4)" ohno =" new" i="0;i

This program takes 15 ms to run, which is pretty amazing considering there are 16! ~ 2.1 * 10^13 possible ways to arrange the 16 words in a 4 by 4 table. Luckily, massive pruning comes to the rescue, cutting the time down by a factor of 4*10^7 (assuming originally that the computer would be able to analyze one billion ways per second - a very generous claim). With all the extra constraints Josh put it, it does return the only solution (highlight if you want to see),

nut sack log card
holly eve fun white
pudding star jolly mask
bow kev cupid fern

That's all for today. Another post will be coming soon. Also Artefactual coattail #3 was finally posted - you can find it in the archive.

-squid out

UPDATE:

So okay, Blogger mutilates code. Actually, in a lot of aspects its not the best for blogging math or comp sci. So without further ado, here are the programs and math things I have done so far... in non-blogger format:

http://rekamyenom.googlepages.com/artefactualcoattail1.pdf
http://rekamyenom.googlepages.com/artefactualcoattail2.pdf
http://rekamyenom.googlepages.com/quick.java
http://rekamyenom.googlepages.com/quick2.java

Enjoy!

Answers!

All right, look, Mr. Feeny, I have a question that I'm going to need a yes or no answer to: how many people get into Yale every year?

Are you the type of person who would ask a question like this? Then Yahoo! answers is the place for you! "It's the one place where the world shares what they know to help each other out. And it's all for free!"

Unfortunately, Yahoo!! answers isn't as great as its description would seem. Back a couple years ago, when it was created, it was pretty useful. People would ask each other things like "where can I buy a Wii?" and others would reply "nowhere." Ever since, however, it has been deteriorating. Slowly, people started finding other things to do on Yahoo! answers, that ruined the idea of friends helping friends, or whatever its supposed to be.

The first problem was actually caused by Yahoo! itself. All Yahoo! answers users were given points based on how many questions they answer, and the more points they had, the more advantages they could reap, including a limit to how many questions you can ask when you have under a certain score. At first glance, this seems fine, because it would encourage people to answer questions, but in reality, its pretty bad. Instead of genuinely answering questions, people started posting random words or quick and obviously incorrect responses as answers, just to get the points:

Q - What is the biggest prime number that has been found by humans?
A - 7. (you have received 2 points for answering this question)

With all these points, the annoying people had the world at their hands! They could do things like ask for the answer to their homework, insult their parents, and even make questions out of random statements so that they and other people could get points for them! Between all these, Yahoo! answers became pretty dumb. Yahoo! has done a few things over the years to try to fix this, to no avail: first, they let people rate answers (of course, rating an answer gave you a point), then they had well-known people ask questions to try to get people to give serious answers.

This problem, however, can be solved easily: make people pay for asking questions, as in Google answers!

Ya, okay, I basically wanted to insult Yahoo! a bit. Maybe I'll try it again sometime.

Anyway, I came up with a better logic problem, that hopefully Jon won't ruin by posting a solution to it. gl hf dd

Santa has a very bad memory for vocabulary. As such, he made a 4x4 list of some Christmas-related words, so that he could remember them. To help him remember them, he made sure that no word on his list had any letters in common with any of its neighbors (any of the words exactly one space horizontally, vertically, or diagonally from it). He also invented some other rules for fun:

1. The letter E is not in any word in the third row from the top or the column that is farthest left.
2. The word log is in the top row.
3. The word fern is in the bottom right position.
4. The word fun is in the same row as the word holly, but is 2 columns to the right of it.
5. The words nut, pudding and bow, are in the same column.
6. The words star and kev are in the same column, but star is higher up than kev is.
7. Both the words sack and card are higher than the word eve, and sack is to the left of card.
8. The letter H cannot be found in the third row from the top.

The words on his list are:

Jolly
Kev (I'm not quite sure what a kev is, but I found it in a random list of Christmassy words)
Log
Star
White
Mask
Nut
Pudding
Card
Fun
Bow
Cupid
Fern
Eve
Holly
Sack

Your task is to put the words in the same positions on a 4x4 list as Santa did. Good Luck!

Point-Counterpoint 2: Counter-counter-point?

Josh: I think it is blatantly obvious that halo3 is superior in all aspects

Aaron: Superior to what?

Josh: I think the answer to that question is blatantly obvious as well considering the subject of the discussion.

Jon says: Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games. Honestly, Nintendo has enough "let's play tons of mini games" games.

Aaron: Mario and Sonic is such a fun game though it plays well and it isn't a lets play mini games game.

Jon: A lot of the mini games in Mario and Sonic don't work very well and how is not a "let's play tons of mini-games" game?

Josh: They easily could have put all of the games in it into Mario party.

Aaron: It's more like a way of saying "don't worry sonic will be good in brawl and us (Nintendo) working with Sega wont destroy the fabric of reality." Sadly people believe that.

Jon: yes, but public messages don't make good games...

Aaron: I don't know about that, Josh? What did you think of M&S?


Josh: I think it's exactly the same as Mario Party, except there's no board to go around

Jon: they could have at least put online play in...

Josh: they even have the same splash screen where you can read the instructions before each event/mini game and online play would be pretty boring since the only mini game that you actually play with other people in is ping pong which, by the way, is very very similar to Wii tennis.

Aaron: Hmm, i see the comparison but saying its a weak game isn't fair. It's still fun its one of those games one will never get bored of, halo three will get boring when 4 is released

Josh: ... no halo 4 will be released

Aaron: and fencing is multi player Josh.

Jon: How does a weak game not get boring?

Aaron: Josh how can you be sure?

Jon: That doesn't make sense and yeah, halo was a trilogy they're not making a halo 4, but they are making other games in the halo universe.

Josh: With the exception of hitch hiker's guide, all trilogies are in 3 (in case you didn't know that, Aaron)

Aaron: First of all M&S is one of those games that one can just pick up and play and doesn't get old.

Josh: I think that Mario & Sonic would get old faster than halo3 would

Jon: yes, most definitely

Aaron: on an other note halo 3 didn't bring anything new from #2

Josh: ...have you even played halo3?

Aaron: Yes, i didn't care for it.

Jon: another "lets play tons of mini games" game isn't new at all
even if halo 3 doesn't have "too" much new stuff, it definitely still has a bunch

Aaron: But halo 3 was like lets give halo 2 a makeover and change the 2 to a 3

Josh: You could argue that that is true of any sequel


Jon: what sequel completely changes the way a game is played?

Aaron: well the second game in any series tends to be the worst we discovered this a few days ago. So if Halo 3 is just and improvement of 2 what does that make it?


Josh: Better than Mario & sonic

Jon says: they perfected the game play in halo 3 you can't deny that...

Aaron: Well is a comparison of a party game and a fps game even fair?

Josh: If you are trying to state that fps games are always better than party games, then why would they even bother making party games?


Aaron: Because most fps games suck when you have people playing with you

Jon: huh?

Josh: I disagree

Jon: most fps games are meant to be played with other people.... multi player is probably the best aspect of halo 3.

Aaron:i mean offline

Jon: Although the campaign was pretty awesome well honestly, online is the future of multi player practically everyone has Internet access now

Josh: and 4-way halo3 is pretty fun too


Jon: even Nintendo, who was reluctant at first, is putting online multi player into their games now

Aaron: It may be true but Mario and Sonic is one of those party games where people see you doing the crazy movements and want to play with you.

Jon: Umm...

Aaron: people see you playing halo and want to play but the second they pick up a controller it doesn't seem anywhere near as great.

Jon: huh? Quite the opposite in fact a lot of the mini games in Mario and Sonic are quite clumsy

Aaron: But people see you playing them and want to join despite how clumsy they look or play

Josh: If I saw one person spinning their arms randomly in circles, and another hitting people with a gravity hammer, I would go play with the latter


Jon: i think that's fairly true in general.

Josh: maybe we should stop now (esp. considering this is pretty long for a post) and have a poll!


Jon: With all the halo hype, it's even arguable that halo 3 appeals more to casual gamers than a game like Mario and Sonic.

Aaron: Okay so to conclude we want the readers to post which kind of game they would like to play a zany party game, or the over hyped FPS.

Heelless epigraphy

heelless (adj.): Without a heel

epigraphy (n.): The study of texts written upon durable materials (stone and metal especially), ie inscriptions

I actually knew the random words today, much to my dismay. Anyway, you'll notice that we do not have a new template yet. This is for a variety of bad reasons, found below. Anyway, onto updates:

Why dumb logic puzzles are dumb?

You might have tried Josh's 'logic' puzzle:

"All the letters of the alphabet have been given a numerical value. The value of a word can be found by adding all of the values of the letters in the word. For instance, if o = 7, h = 1, s = 24, and j = 3, then Josh = 35. Find the values of Crusty, Presenter, and Carpenter, if the following are true: Butter = 57. Use = 27. Crab = 13. Peanut = Spray = 51. Part = 37. Base = 20. Bran = 11. Banana = 10."

You might have tried it, and maybe even solved it. You might even have got the same answer as someone else who tried it, and maybe even solved it. But that doesn't really matter at all, since every number is a solution to the puzzle.

I'll let you puzzle out why that's true, but to accentuate my point:

(a, b, c, e, n, p, r, s, t, u, y) = (1, 133, -61, -124, -63, 112.5, -60, 10, -16.5, 141, -12.5) works and gives CRUSTY = 1

(a, b, c, e, n, p, r, s, t, u, y) = (1, 131, -60, -122, -62, 111, -59, 10, -16, 139, -12) works and gives CRUSTY = 2

So obviously, 1=2. Or at least the puzzle designer thinks so =P.

UPDATE: Why dumb puzzles aren't that dumb?

Surprisingly, if you restrict the solution set to having no duplicates and the positive integers, there is a unique solution. Of course, this also makes the puzzle rather arbitrary, but oh well, most puzzles are.

Here is justification for that claim, in code (although you'll note, the program only does 50 enumerations, which I could list out and check by hand if I was really bored, so the computer proof wasn't necessary):

import java.util.*;
public class quick {
 public static void main(String[] args){
  int[] beg = {2, 2, 3, 8, 1, 14, 6, 8, 15, 11, 21};
  
  int[]  r1 = {1, -5, 1, 6, 1, -4, 3, -2,  0, -4,  2};
  int[]  r2 = {0, -4, 2, 4, 2, -3, 2,  0,  1, -4,  1};
  
  int[] test = new int[11];
  
  for(int a=-1;a<4;a++){
   for(int b=-6;b<4;b++){
    for(int i=0;i<11;i++){
     test[i]=beg[i]+a*r1[i]+b*r2[i];
    }
    checkTest(test);
   }
  }
   
 }
 
 static int[] test2 = new int[11];
 public static void checkTest(int[] a){
  for(int i=0;i<11;i++) if(a[i]<=0) return;
  
  for(int i=0;i<11;i++) test2[i] = a[i];
  Arrays.sort(test2);
  
  for(int i=1;i<11;i++) if(test2[i]==test2[i-1]) return;
  
  for(int i=0;i<11;i++) System.out.print(a[i]+" ");
  System.out.println();
  
 }
}

'beg' represents an initial 11-vector which satisfies the system. 'r1' and 'r2' are two linearly independent vectors that can be added onto 'beg' while still keeping a solution. Together beg + ar1 + br2 specify the entire solution set to the 9 equations in 11 variables (makes sense, it's a plane in 11D).

The constraints in the for loop are determined to keep beg+ar1+br2 positive (there are probably tighter constraints, but oh well). CheckTest code first checks if there are any negative elements, then checks for duplicates by sorting then checking adjacent elements. The only output is:

1 3 4 6 2 15 5 10 16 11 20

so the unique answer under these new conditions is

(a, b, c, e, n, p, r, s, t, u, y) = (1, 3, 4, 6, 2, 15, 5, 10, 16, 11, 20).

with CRUSTY = 4+5+11+10+16+20 = 66.

Erm, yeah... the templates...

Well, I tried to import some templates from the site I posted today, and it didn't work so well. The main problems were:

1. They sort of assume we have a picture header, which we don't...
2. For some reason word-wrapping on some of the sidebar things goes completely out of whack and we have oddly position elements
3. The page footer died pretty much every time.

One day when I'm bored, I might try to learn the script Blogger uses for their templates but until then, we'll probably leave it at this. But to draw your attention away from this very tragic fact, go ahead and marvel at all the amazing features I implemented:

Contributor Posts

On the sidebar, you'll see a new section, "Contributor Posts". It lists all of our contributors (4 currently) and their number of posts. More useful, however, is if you click on one of the contributors, you'll get all the posts by that contributor.

However, Blogger is somewhat annoying and for some reason does not have this feature built in - so I worked around it with labels... Basically, every time you post, you must put your name (the way it's spelt in the contributor box) in the box where it says "Labels for this post:" in the Create Post screen. Otherwise, it's not counted. But this also has the benefits that it can be extended - say, if two people contribute to the same post, it can be under both their names, and later I might categorize the posts into subjects (games, politics, math, anthropomorphic dragons, miscellaneous, etc.) Just remember to put your name in the label box each post.

News Feeds

There's also a news feeds widget on the sidebar. It's actually been there for a while - the reason I bring it to attention is not to boast about my amazing ability to press a button and have it appear on the blog, but for suggestions.

Like other default Blogger widgets, it's sort of lacking. I can basically give it a search term, and Google News searches that search term, and returns the top 4 or so results. Right now I have it to search "news" which returns arguably not-always-so-interesting-or-relevant (for me, anyway) content - like "The Ambiguously Good News" and "Top 10 Economic News in Korea" (I wouldn't mind reading the second one, actually).

Anyway, what should the search term be? I already tried video games, but because it's Google News searching it and not just Google searching it, it returns lots of typical media stuff - like "Video Games shown to decrease Blood Flow to the Brain". Post a comment to this post.

RSS Feeds

We've always had these too, but I don't know how many of you actually know about/use RSS feeds so I think I'll mention it anyway. You can subscribe to our feed by pressing the feed button in your toolbar or going to: http://saddeninggoat.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss. Feeds are really useful in that you can see what pages have updates really quickly (in my feed viewer, I just have a list of feeds, with the ones that are bold indicating they are updated).

You can also subscribe to a feed for an individual person, but I forgot the link for that - I'll look it up later and attach it.

EDIT: Taken from Blogger help:

The format for label feeds is this:

http://saddeninggoat.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/labelname

(labelname being the name of the contributor... so 'Josh' for example. You should be able to keep spaces, your browser should parse them into %20's. Also, I realized you can filter by category from the main feed, so I recommend just doing that).

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That's it for today. Artefactual Coattail #3 hopefully coming tomorrow. The first sentence of this post rhymes, by the way.

-squid out

Effigiated Nonconstraint

Super Smash Brothers Brawl

I have come to the conclusion that Brawl is not, in fact, delayed. BestBuy hasn't replied to me yet (though it is their Boxing Week sale, so I imagine they are somewhat busy) but as nobody but them and Futureshop seem to think it is delayed, and they are not nearly as credible on the matter as Nintendo is, I assume they are mistaken. If the cruel reality is that they are just going to take a long time to ship my preorder, however, I am going to be very upset. Speaking of their Boxing Week sale, I am pretty mad at the lack of good video game deals. A few years ago, both Civilization 4 and Age of Empires 3 were $30 off, and ever since the video game deals have been getting progressively worse. Hopefully there will be an improvement next year.

Back on topic, the daily smash updates are finally starting to get good again. For a couple weeks before the break, there was update after update of random, useless, and boring parts of the game, and at one point, I didn't even bother checking the updates every morning before school! Fortunately, they have redeemed themselves recently with a few cool stages, songs, and assist trophies. I think my favorite from the past two and a half weeks are:

• Waluigi as an assist trophy, mainly because he is holding a tennis racket! As Mario Tennis is my favorite Gamecube game (or maybe tied with SSBB), I especially liked this.
• The stage Mario Circuit, mostly because I always liked Mario Kart (though it does seem similar to Mute City).
• This song, because it was always my favorite Sonic theme.

You can read about them in more detail or check the new ones here.

A Cool Problem

Just for fun:
All the letters of the alphabet have been given a numerical value. The value of a word can be found by adding all of the values of the letters in the word. For instance, if o = 7, h = 1, s = 24, and j = 3, then Josh = 35. Find the values of Crusty, Presenter, and Carpenter, if the following are true:

Butter = 57.
Use = 27.
Crab = 13.
Peanut = Spray = 51.
Part = 37.
Base = 20.
Bran = 11.
Banana = 10.

Good luck! By the way, please don't post answers in a comment, so that others can solve it as well.

EDIT: All letters' values are all distinct integers greater than 0. If not, as Jon pointed out, there are infinitely many solutions.

Interrobang

I decided to counter Aaron's dumb post with a much more intellectual post: what is the interrobang?

Unfortunately, I must admit that Aaron first introduced me to the topic... but that is irrelevant. Anyway, the interrobang is an English punctuation mark (while it is non-standard). It's use is to combine the exclamation and question marks into one! It has been greatly popularized recently by people instant messaging, when they say things like "How could you do such a thing?!", except when people say that they are actually using improper grammar, as they should be using interrobangs. I think that where it should be used is fairly obvious.

In my searching I found two other cool and very real punctuation marks:


The irony mark ؟

This one is actually French (so you can use it on your French tests and the teacher shouldn't get too mad at you). It was suggested and adopted by some French poet in the 19th century, though it is very rarely used. I'm sure its use is obvious as well.


⁂The asterism⁂

This one is kind of like the therefore sign, but it has asterices instead. It is supposed to be sued to draw attention to something, like a chapter in a book, or something important.

I am sure that these punctuations marks, while not used much elsewhere, will be properly implemented by us bloggers to keep them from dying out.


Ducator meus nihil agit sine lagunculae leynidae accedunt؟

EDIT: Here are the Wikipedia pages for the three punctuation marks with pictures of them on them, in case these ones don't work:

Interrobang
Irony Mark
Asterism

Point-Counterpoint?! (Part 2)

And now for our stunning conclusion. (Note: you might want to read the previous post again to remember where we left off)

Aaron: Uh no there are only 4 character faces in galaxy...

Josh: You only know that because we just went to look it up... anyway, who cares, Miis could easily be replaced by more characters in the game.

Aaron: Well maybe Galaxy was a bad example but the Mii was originally supposed to be for the DS as an avatar to represent the console.

Josh: Hmm... first of all, I don't think that someone who brings up examples that don't help their case is very credible, but also, while Miis may have been more useful on the DS, on the Wii, I still find that they are not very useful or amusing... maybe we should just get a random person to represent us on Wiis as we get a random name chosen to represent us in real life?

Aaron: Fine Josh I'll go delete your Mii and you can play as the random person your sister made.

Josh: Fortunately, I never play with Miis, so that should be fine (though I think my pro level in Wii Tennis may be deleted, but that's okay)

Aaron: its a way to show off and say look at my Mii though, i mean to say there's a whole channel dedicated to that.

Josh: And that channel is stupid as well... I only bothered downloading it because you told me to... I liked my wording for this from before, so I'll say it again: anyone who finds enjoyment from seeing themselves as a Mii should go be incinerated for their naivety.

Aaron: but what about the creation of more recognisable characters Nintendo power constantly posts recognisable characters which people put artistic design into.

Josh: ....... that sounds pretty stupid to me... they should go learn how to use photoshop... plus, I think the whole point of Miis is removed if you make a Mii that looks like a recognisable character like Mario...

Aaron: well i think we can both agree that the concept is fun and one can spend just as much time playing with Miis as they can with games and if it sells consoles then in the end does it really matter?

Josh: Do you really think that the Wii sells because of Miis? Frankly, if anyone spends as much time with Miis as they do playing games, and are over the age of 2, I do not think they are intelligent enough to be considered in this argument. After all, Saddening Goat is for intellectuals (after Jon's posts anyway).

Aaron: well maybe not so much amir's :P

Josh: .............

Aaron: ............

As Josh refused to debate any further, for fear of death by stupidity (that was in a recent Dilbert comic -Josh) this concludes our Point-Counterpoint. Stay tuned for our next debate, and post suggestions for topics in comments! Aaron signing out!

Tragicomic philtre

(Note: for template stuff, scroll to the bottom of this post)

tragicomic (adj.): manifesting both tragic and comic aspects; "the tragicomic disparity...between's man's aspirations and his accomplishments"- B.R.Redman

philtre(n.): a drink credited with magical power; can make the one who takes it love the one who gave it

As usual, the title has no relevance at all to the text; I'm not going to talk about an ironic* love potion in this post. Rather the title is randomly chosen for a variety of reasons: so that I don't have to think of one, so it sounds cool/stupid and thus memorable, so they return the first hit on Google (and so I can finally use the I'm Feeling Lucky button), so I have an excuse to look up random never-used-in-real-life words, so I can pathetically attempt to be witty, etc. The reason I draw this to attention is because of the "so I have an excuse to look up random never-used-in-real-life words". In each of my future blog posts I'll put the definitions of each of the two randomly generated words at the beginning to take up more space with irrelevant material and hence have longer, more impressive-looking posts.

Addressing other things.

The Mii-Wii 'debate':

The Mii is most definitely not a brilliant creation. It's not even per say, a creation. That doesn't make it completely useless, however.

A Mii is simply a customizable avatar. Customizable avatars are simply a digital representation of the user, and they're not new. Customizable avatars have been around since the early days of MUDs and Usenet, as blocks of Ascii code. They're in practically every IM client today and if you post in a forum, you'll have seen tons of them. More recently, you'll see them featured prominently in many RPGs (i.e. Mass Effect and Oblivion allow for tons of character customization, up to the exact position of eyebrows, for example), and in practically every MMORPG and MMOG in general. A lot of games even let you put your actual face (or actually, any object...) on your 3D character, so the Mii creation, where there are only a few dozen choices per category, is actually considerably lackluster compared to other games' customization systems.

There are many purposes of an avatar - it lets you be recognized quickly, it serves as a means for personal expression, etc. How much time you want to put into customizing your avatar has always been a matter of personal choice. It's not necessary, but a lot of people do it anyway. A lot of people don't - and this is why there are often enough default or randomly chosen avatars for use when you need them.

As of now, the Mii basically serves the same purpose your Gamertag and profile on XBOX Live does. If anything is brilliant about the Wii, it's how they (mostly**) got away with the risk they took in choosing to use the Wii Remote as the main controller.

Where is Artefactual Coattail Part 3?:

Um, yeah, I'm still workign on it. There was a flaw in my original solution so it now seems a lot harder, but I'm partially done. I'll post whatever results I was able to get tomorrow.

Templates:

Many templates here:

http://mashable.com/2007/09/13/blogger-templates/

Take your pick. Just one request - choose one with a light-color foreground (not black) because a black foreground will cause all the LaTeX to be unreadable. Light colors like light blue or green are fine though. Put your choice in a comment, and I'll choose whichever is most popular (and among ties, whichever I like the most :) ).

Happy Holidays!

-squid out

*this seemed like the best way to convey 'tragicomic' in one common word - although it's really more of an amalgamation of ironic, pathetic, and ludicrous.

**if you're wondering why it's 'mostly', go take a look at all the hardcore vs. casual debates surrounding the Wii - although this is also representative of the direction the games are taking.

Artefactual coattail (Part 3)

The third and (likely) second-last installment for artefactual coattail. If all this is deterring you, fret not - I'll be posting some non-math musings soon. Anyway, onto Generalization #3 and #4

Generalization 3:

This is both trickier and simpler than Generalization 1. On the con side, because of the cyclic-ity, our symmetry is dead. But, instead of rules, we only have rules - this will help us a lot.
Why does this help us a lot? Let's begin a quick foray into linear algebra. We have

rules and chemicals. This sounds suspiciously like equations for unknowns - however the rules are actually unknowns, not equations. How so? Well, what is unknown about each rule? The only think unknown about or relevant to each rule is how much it is applied. From the argument in part 2, (or anyway, it should be pretty evident), it doesn't matter in what order rules are applied. So let us assume rule (the rule that subtracts the same amount from ) is used amount (so is subtracted in total from each of those 's). Now, the rules that affect a given are rules $. We can then check whether we can get 0 excess by assuming each of the decrease by - illustration time:

system:







In total the contribution is:

.

For zero excess, the total contribution must be . Equating, we can say

where and . Of course, right now it is not in our interest to go around inverting huge matrices and then checking what terms are negative when multiplied by our vector. But knowing this fact will help us later on in our discussion.

For now put this aside. Let's start by looking at systems. Now, the claim here will be slightly more bizarre than even the general claim for Generalization 1:

Claim: In a system, if is even there can be no excess only if and for all , and if is odd there can be no excess only if for all (taking and).

Proof:

The claim is divided into two cases, so let's divide our proof into 2 cases. First, n is even. We'll just let for now. Then, after we apply rule 1, we have:



In order to remove the rest of (that is, now ), we need to apply rule 2 with that:



And so on:



Eventually we'll get to:



It's crucial to note that there is a term instead of a term because is even. Now, in order to cancel the remaining two terms, it's necessary that:

, or

, as desired.

(EDIT: Okay, above is the way that I saw it first. However, a much, much simpler way is just noting that is invariant, and it is 0 at the end. This is why I should write my argument on paper first...)

So we've seen that this condition is necessary for even. Is it sufficient? A look at a case like 1 3 1 1 2 0 should convince you otherwise. The restriction for all is necessary regardless of whether is even or odd. A simple contradiction argument shows this - basically, you can't remove more than , the two neighboring y's, from .

This does prove the "necessary" condition asked for. It would be a lot nicer to have necessary and sufficient conditions, though. Are these two conditions taken together sufficient?

I believe it is. I haven't found a counter-example. And I have sort of intuitively reasoned why - but of course, that means nothing. Ordinarily in a situation like this, I'd offer $10 or so to someone who could provide a proof or counter-example, but unfortunately I doubt anyone that reads this has a chance... in any case, the offer is still up.

Given the fact that I cannot even solve systems successfully, there's not much I can do with systems in general. However, if you paid attention the the matrix thing above, you'll notice interesting things happen when - particularly, the determinant of the matrix becomes 0, so the matrix is uninvertible. In fact, I have a rather cool theorem (which I have proved - it's actually quite the same as the short proof for the alternating sum above) that outlines a necessary condition in this case:

If we have a system where , there is no excess only if:

,

where represents the complex number .

Generalization 4:

Well, without a full theory for generalization 3, it's hard to really find a formula for min excess. However, for the case, I suspect it is:

Somewhat disappointing, I know. If I make any more progress, I'll post an update.

-squid out