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:
- They sort of assume we have a picture header, which we don't...
- For some reason word-wrapping on some of the sidebar things goes completely out of whack and we have oddly position elements
- 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
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