Funny news

Egypt donkey jailed for theft

CAIRO (AFP) - An Egyptian donkey has been jailed for stealing corn on the cob from a field belonging to an agricultural research institute in the Nile Delta, local media reported on Thursday.
The ass and its owner were apprehended at a police checkpoint that had been set up after the institute's director complained that someone was stealing his crops, the state-owned Al-Ahram daily said.
The unnamed ungulate was found in possession of the institute's corn and a local judge sentenced him to 24 hours in prison. The man who had his ass thrown in jail got off with a fine of 50 Egyptian pounds (nine dollars, six euros).

a collection of interesting or funny things

Wandering across the World Wide Web, sometimes I come across things which are interesting or funny. Or I see them in real life, and they have an online counterpart.

Here are some links:

Heat Sensitive Paint. Cool! Admittedly heat-sensitive colour changing things aren't new (think about mood rings), but I didn't know anyone who had applied it in this way. It's like living art! On your walls!

Wandering on the site, I also found this. So apparently there's now a "peaceful" version of the Swiss Army Knife. Might not be nearly as useful if you're stuck in the wildnerness, though.

And this. Hehe. And apparently Halo 3 ads are very artistic.

***

List of the world's 50 most powerful blogs. Surprisingly (to me), LOLCATS is on the list...hehe.

***

(This is for you Josh)

On the Colbert Report last Thursday (June 19), Cookie Monster was on the show. To me, this was a weird coincidence, because not too long ago, for art class I had to make an illuminated letter, and I chose to do one with Cookie Monster because C is for Cindy and C is also for Cookie. And then even more recently, I had to write an article on Cookie Monster for our school publication.

Anyway, Colbert interrogates Cookie Monster on why he has recently started eating vegetables (GASP), placing them over cookies. And apparently Elmo, who's something like 3 1/2 years old, can drive. And, oh yeah, Cookie Monster eats Colbert's Peabody award.

This is the link to Thursday's episode on Comedy Central, but it doesn't seem to be working for me for some reason, so here's the link on CTV Broadband. Go to "Watch It Now" and find the June 19 one. You do need Flash 9, though.

***

I love the Comedy Central channel, as the above reference to the Colbert Report bears testament. I like to watch MadTV and standup (Just For Laughs). And now that it's summer I can actually have time to watch TV!

Two of my favourite stand-up comedians right now are Demetri Martin (I like his website) and Russell Peters. You can search them up on Youtube.

Demetri Martin has a Youtube account, and here's a good video of Russell Peters.

***

This game is funny. It also reminded me of Fibonacci.

***

I was at Indigo yesterday with a friend, and there was this hilarious book in the humour section, called The Man Book. There's some sports trivia and all of that, but some just hilarious bits.

"This book contains everything you need to know to be a man. "Everything," It will prepare you for every situation you can imagine, from the office to the bedroom. It will improve your life no matter what you're doing...whether you're in a bar, in a fight, in a wedding, in an argument, at a game, at work, or in a stranger's bed.
It's time to be a man. Read this book."

***

Ok, that's all for now.

It's summer so I'll be going on vacation in 2 days; I'll see you in August :)

- Cindy

EDIT: I forgot this. Ukeleles are cool!

The Challenge Part 2

Well no one has posted probably due to exams so here's an update, our contest ends on June 25th. No one else messaged me to join so it seems it will be just me and Josh competing, and I have posted my song on Youtube under the name Azerkablam, the song is called Gangplank Galleon and was the song from the final boss fight in Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo. The fight and music resemble a pirate ship. Josh plans to do a theme from Mario tennis so we should expect something fun. Anyways till the end of the contest or when the next post occurs,

Aaron

The Challenge

So I made a challenge with Josh today, who ever can produce the better piece of video game music on Mario paint composer wins.

The rules are as follows:
1. The song can't have been done on youtube before.
2. Songs must be declared in advance
3. If the song is on youtube during the contest and after the song was declared then the song can still be produced.
4. Any and all resources and programs can be used
5. Have fun with this.

Our deadline is sometime in mid to late June, and I encourage any and all to join this competition. There is no prize however the winner will be known as the best Mario paint composer on Saddening Goat. All songs will be uploaded to youtube when completed under one user so that they can be watched at the end.

If you plan to join comment and tell us what song you plan to do, mario paint composer can be downloaded online free so go play with it!
Aaron

If you're bored...

...here are a few good online games you could play, that I have recently discovered:

http://www.addictinggames.com/theworldshardestgame.html

This game is pretty hard, but it's very satisfying to beat a level. Most levels generally appear impossible to beat at first, so you need a lot of patience to play this for more than 3 minutes, but otherwise it's pretty good.

http://www.addictinggames.com/doodledefender.html

This isn't actually that great a game, like most games of the genre, but if you suddenly have the urge to play a cheap shooting game, it's a good choice, since you get to draw your own ship! I suggest saving up for additional guns, as then you can draw even more!

http://www.addictinggames.com/magicpen.html

If you played the crayon physics demo that came out a while back, this is basically a slightly more developed version of that. Crayon Physics Deluxe should be out soon! Also, try building a catapult.

http://www.addictinggames.com/dropple.html

I don't know why they came up with a story for this game... but otherwise it's good.

http://www.addictinggames.com/accelerationmaze.html

Fun, though it gets frustrating at times. And, the music gets fairly annoying too, especially considering it's techno.


On a side note, did you know that Ash Ketchum was 10 years old when he began his Pokemon adventure? I don't understand who would send their child out to wander from town to town at 10 years old... yet apparently many people in Pokemon do. Maybe Pokemon is secretly trying to convince kids to run away from home at age 10. At any rate, good luck with summatives, exams, or whatever else you may be working on at the moment, and until next time!

oh, life is so depressing

What is it with me and extinction stories?

The real question is, however, where did the bees go?
A Mayan prophecy, Stephen Hawking theories, as well as an Einstein quotation all serve as damning evidence of inevitable doom. Apparently, Einstein believed that four years after the bees start to die, the world will collapse because they are so crucial to pollination and life.

Well, the bees started dying in 2007, so live it up already!

Males to become extinct???

Interesting title, isn't it?

But first...where have I been? Yes it's been a LONG time - almost 2 months - since I last posted. I have had good intentions but either lacked inspiration or time: there was a trip to Washington, D.C. and with May bringing about the end of the school year, there is much work to be done. And there was also an AP U.S. History exam. But I'm back now, so here goes:

***
I first heard about the topic in the title last weekend (and intended to write about it then, but never got around to it) when my parents showed me an article in a newspaper. It talked about how an Oxford Professor, Bryan Sykes, expects male humans to die out in as little as 125,000 years because of the degeneration of the Y chromosome.

My initial reaction was complete disbelief, because wouldn't the extinction of males imply the end of reproduction and therefore extinction of the species? Unless two females could produce an offspring? Or there were asexual reproduction? But shouldn't evolution progress forwards and not backwards - as in, sexual reproduction is more advanced than asexual reproduction, so if we went backwards wouldn't that be illogical? I also questioned the time period that he proposed, because 125,000 years in the scheme of evolution seemes way too short for an entire gender to die out just like that.

Anyway, I found the article online, here. The article also talks about a bill in the UK, and its implications on the lesbian community, but the middle section is the part that interested me the most.

Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University and author of the book Adam’s Curse, is convinced that men will die out as the Y chromosome withers. He has calculated that, at the current rate of decline, heterosexual reproduction may only last around 125,000 years. “The core sex is female,” he says. “Male infertility is high because genes on the Y chromosome are packing up all the time. Many species become extinct because their Y chromosomes apparently disintegrate. In the end, the same thing will probably lead to the extinction of the male gender.”

The only glimmer of hope, he believes, may lie in the experience of the mole vole. This tiny rodent native to the Caucasus mountains of central Asia seems to have lost its Y chromosome somewhere down the evolutionary millennia, but the genetic material that confers maleness has nimbly transferred itself to another chromosome. If the Y chromosome turns out to be as useless as Sykes suggests, it would be possible to move the human SRY (the sex-determining region of the Y chromosome) and associated “maleness” genes to another chromosome and produce males with two X chromosomes.

It also talks about advancements in technology that would indeed enable two females to reproduce; sperm could also possibly be manufactured in labs from other DNA.
Anyway, just very interesting.

***
An added bonus:

A schoolmate and friend brought this to my attention - if you like food (all of you probably), and if you like food of the inexpensive variety, you might like CheapEats. It's a guidebook to cheap food (no surprise there). There's a book each about several Canadian cities, like Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver. It lists 365 restaurants where breakfast is <$5, lunch <$10 and dinner <$15. The bonus part is that there's a sale on it right now so you can get it for under $10 including taxes and S/H (in Canada only, though). When it asks if you have a coupon code (that's step 2), type in "facebook", and don't forget to press "apply". Being a Torontonian I got the Toronto version, of course, but I'm not sure if the code works for other cities as well - I guess it doesn't hurt to try.

Oh, and hurray for PayPal :)



That's all for now,
Cindy

Rubiks = puzzles that take less than 10 minutes to complete.

So my dad came to me this weekend holding a Rubik's Magic that's been stowed away in our basement since at least 1986. From then it took me 1 day to understand it and 1 day to master it. By the end of Sunday (today) it only takes me 10 seconds to solve it. For those who dont know a Rubik's Magic is a set of 2 rows of 4 black squares bound together that works similar to the toy jacob's ladder. On one side are the pieces of 3 rings which when in the right positions and order are unconnected and on the reverse are similar patterns but with three rings that link. starting in the unlinked the goal is to link the back rings. Sound simple? Infact it is. it takes little to no time for it to be solved when one knows what to do. from is 2x4 shape it becomes a v shape with a 2x2 square with two sets of 2x1 squares on sides 90 degrees from each other. This now brings my collection of rubiks puzzles I can solve to 4 being the cube, mini cube(2x2x2), the revenge(4x4x4), and the magic.

Ok so it wasn't a video game post. I know it wasn't in my posting nature but that's all I have to say right now... I'm just filling the space until my fellow contributors post.

let the next post happen soon,
Aaron

Some Halo WTF

So, it's been 10 days since the last post, in part due to my laziness. In any case...

There's a saying that goes, "expect the unexpected". Well, I hope you expected these things to happen =) (ordered by relative WTF-ness, best first):

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=KicJSFEgB_U
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=ym0BtwmCvoc
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=qXfwd4_ydLM&feature=related
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=hw-Y2mG0hYE&feature=related

Also, here are some... interesting... Rube Goldberg style contraptions people built. I should try making one of these some time =):

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=Jje1m9DJp8k&feature=related

(sniper vs. noob series):
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=qbELWI5nkPg&NR=1
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=HxMITb5a2p8&NR=1
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=arB8hCCl7NY&feature=related

While we're on the topic of WTF-ness, worsethanfailure.com is a very amusing site, especially if you know a thing or two about programming. But even if you don't, just look at http://thedailywtf.com/Series/Error_0x27_d.aspx - guaranteed laughter.

Ooh, and I also found a very nice job on the WTF site (it's real!): http://jobs.thedailywtf.com/1001/listing.aspx?Ad=Y&JobId=1001237 . They must have been stalking me.

In any case, that's all for now. Until next time,

-squidout

...

Wait! The title's not a random phrase! Oh no! Where are you going to get your (not-so) daily exposure to random archaic vocabulary that only about 10 people in the world have a justifiable right to use?

Too bad, it's down here now. And no more definitions - I trust you can use Google by yourself =).

subcelestial cadaster

Between Battles

Just signed off of Nintendo WIFI Connection, I was playing a game of brawl with Josh and Jon, tons of lag to go around. Everyone played their favourite characters and if it wasnt for lag I can say each of us would have won at least one game each. The final results after 3 games: Josh -2 (Josh I probably would have won the game I was Toon Link had lag not occured), Jon -1, and sadly me -0. We each proved our abilities as each character and in josh's case, how he could annoy us by rehashing the same move 60 times. If any readers would like to face any of the three of us feel free to comment.

Til then,
Aaron

Acescent goldstone

acescent (adj.): becoming, or tending to be, sour.

goldstone (n.): a type of glass (gemstone) made with copper or copper salts in the presence of a reducing flame.

Again, it's been a while since I've posted. But luckily (or perhaps not...), I should be posting more often now =).

Anyway, I was going to post about Brawl - mainly to convince you that, contrary to what you might expect, Peach does not suck, and in fact is one of the best characters in Brawl. But then, when you think about it, such discussions about "who the best character in Brawl is" don't really make sense. Especially not at this early stage, when there isn't even enough information from tournaments to get a rough sense of what characters belong to which tiers. You should just use whatever characters you're the best with.

But do try Peach for a bit before you condemn her to the bottom of your preferred list =).

Onto other stuff. Some people have recently rediscovered the board game Risk, or something. In any case, they seem to like playing it a lot now. Which is, in a sense, very strange, considering that if you really feel like playing a strategy game, there are many electronic alternatives. Most of them also have much deeper gameplay, with a much smaller luck factor. In fact, there are probably tons of other board games with a much smaller luck factor than Risk.

But bashing Risk is not the point of this post. Attacking in Risk has a very interesting mechanism. The way the people I play with attack in Risk (which actually is not the official way) is:

1. If the attacker has 1 army, he rolls one die, if he has 2 armies, he rolls two dice, if he has 3 or more armies, he rolls three dice.
2. If the defender has 1 army, he rolls one die. Otherwise, he has a choice of rolling one or two dice.
3. If the attacker's largest die is greater than the defender's largest die, the defender loses one army. Otherwise, the attacker loses one army. If the defender rolled two dice, if the attacker's second largest die is greater than the defender's other die, the defender loses another army. Otherwise, the attacker loses another army.

Now, the question is, when should the defender roll one die as opposed to two dice? Clearly, if the attacker rolled two sixes, the defender is probably better off rolling only one die - that way he will probably only lose one guy, as opposed to probably losing 2. Similarly, if the attacker rolled three ones, then the defender might as well roll two dice if he can, since he automatically kills two of the attacker's armies. But of course, there are more hazy scenarios, like if the the attacker rolls two 4s. Should the defender roll one die or two dice?

Firstly, it's clear that only the attacker's two largest rolls matter - the smallest die doesn't affect anything. So let these two rolls be r and s, with r >= s. Now we can consider both cases:

Defender rolls one die

In this case, only the attacker's largest roll, r, matters. The defender can roll any number from 1 to 6 with equal probability. For numbers 1 through r-1, the attacker wins, for the other 7-r numbers, the defender wins.

We are considering the change in relative strength between the attacker and the defender, i.e. (the number of guys the defender has) - (the number of guys the attacker has). If the defender wins, his relative strength increases by 1, and if the attacker wins, the defender's relative strength decreases by 1. So the expected change in relative strength is:

(expected change)
= ((7-r)-(r-1))/6
= (4-r)/3

Defender rolls two dice

In this case, there are three possible outcomes - the defender loses 2, the defender and attacker both lose 1, and the attacker loses 2. Note that if the defender and attacker both lose 1, this does not change the relative strength, so we only need to consider the other two outcomes.

Let the defender's rolls be a, and b, with a >= b. Looking at it like this, there are 21 possible rolls for the defender, since rolls like (4, 3) and (3, 4) are considered the same. (21 since 1+2+3+4+5+6 = 21). Then, he loses when both a(r-(s/2))(s-1)

cases where the defender loses 2 guys.

How many cases are there where the attacker loses 2 guys? We must have a>=r and b>=s. This works out similar to the above case... it turns out that there are:

(7-r)(4+(r/2)-s)

cases where the attacker loses 2 guys. So, the expected change in strength is:

(expected change)
= (2(7-r)(4+(r/2)-s)-2(r-(s/2))(s-1))/21
= ((7-r)(8+r-2s)-(2r-s)(s-1))/21
= (56 + r - 15s + s^2 - r^2)/21


Now we can finally resolve the initial question - it is better to roll two dice whenever:

(56 + r - 15s + s^2 - r^2)/21 >= (4-r)/3

or

28+8r-15s+s^2-r^2 >=0

Technically, if it equals 0, it doesn't matter whether you roll two dice or one. Now, while that formula isn't that large at all, it is still pretty random. But note there are only 36 (and really only 21) possibilities for (r,s) pairs. And if we check whether to use two dice or one for each pair, we get the following very nice pattern:

1 2 3 4 5 6

-+-----------
12 2 2 2 2 2
22 2 2 2 2 2
32 2 2 2 2 2
42 2 2 N 1 1
52 2 2 1 1 1
62 2 2 1 1 1

That is, it's better to roll two dice whenever your opponent's smallest roll is smaller than 4.

Now with this, it's not too bad to calculate chances of winning. For example, assuming you're smart, the expected change in relative strength if the attacker rolls r, s, is:

2.0000 1.9047 1.7142 1.4285 1.0476 0.5714
1.9047 1.3333 1.1428 0.8571 0.4761 0.0000
1.7142 1.1428 0.6666 0.3809 0.0000 -0.476
1.4285 0.8571 0.3809 0.0000 -0.333 -0.666
1.0476 0.4761 0.0000 -0.333 -0.333 -0.666
0.5714 0.0000 -0.476 -0.666 -0.666 -0.666

Looping over all possible 56 different rolls of three dice for the attacker, the expected change in relative strength each time is 5/56 - with favor towards the defender.

Figuring out the probability that the attacker will win if he attacks with n armies and the defender defends with m armies isn't much harder either - you can get a recursive formula fairly easily. But maybe I'll post that another time.

Until then, ciao.

-squidout.

MORE REASONS TO FIGHT CBC's CHANGES

Just look at this list (kudos to Peter McGillvray for compiling this list on Facebook):

1. The CBC Young Composers Competition has not been held since March 9, 2003. It, as well as the CBC Young Performers Competition, have been suspended for the past four years. The Canada Council provided the funding for the $10,000.00 grand prize

.2. CBC erased the classical music budget for CBC Records in February 2008, precisely on the eve of their first Grammy win by Canadian violinist James Ehnes and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra under Bramwell Tovey on the CBC Records label. Many artists, such as Measha Brueggergosman, launched their careers on a CBC Records label recording.

3. The commissioning budget previously devoted to commissioning new works from composers is now spread out to cover jazz, pop musicians, and some unspecified amount of contemporary music.

4. CBC cancelled Two New Hours, a multiple-award winning program that was aired for two hours a week in the incredibly prime time slot of Sundays 10pm to midnight. This program was dedicated to the music of living Canadian composers. It was cancelled in March 2007 in its 29th year.

5. CBC cancelled The Arts Report. The late Val Ross, an arts columnist for The Globe and Mail, lamented the loss of this particular radio segment, saying that it kept her in touch with important cultural developments across the country.

6. CBC cancelled Music For A While, which aired classical music daily from 6pm to 8pm. It has been replaced by Tonic, a jazz program which also features hip-hop, soul and world music.

7. CBC cancelled In Performance the flagship Classical concerts program. It was replaced by Canada Live, which has an uneven and unpredictable offering of funk and R and B bands, jazz, Middle eastern fusion music, throatsinging...

8. The proposed cuts for the Fall of 2008 represents further reductions in classical music content, eliminating classical music 6am to 10am and 3pm to 6pm.

9. The new hosts are not musicologists and have little depth of knowledge to share with radio listeners. Howard Dyck, for example, who is no longer hosting Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, is an Order of Canada recipient, a conductor and the recipient of numerous honourary degrees for his contribution to music in Canada. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Dyck Larry Lake, former host of Two New Hours, is a Toronto composer, performer and broadcaster. He is Artistic Director of the Canadian Electronic Ensemble, the oldest active live electronic music group in the world, now in its 35th season. Other hosts whose, such as Tom Allen, Eric Friesen, Rick Phillips are also giants in the field of music broadcasting.

10. The axing of the CBC Radio Orchestra: North America's 70 year old last remaining radio orchestra and platform for countless premieres of new Canadian compositions

11. Gone are Music & Company - Tom Allen's morning show, Here's to You - Catherine Belyea's (Formerly Shelley Solmes') all-request show, Studio Sparks - due to the venerable Eric Friesen's "retirement", and Disc Drive - Jurgen Gothe's popular drive-home show after almost 30 years. These changes come on the heels of last years round of cuts to vital programs such as Danielle Charbonneau's much-loved Music for Awhile; Larry Lake's new composer showcase Two New Hours; Symphony Hall - Canada's live orchestra recording showcase; The Singer and the Song - Catherine Belyea's excellent Classical vocal program; Northern Lights - the overnight Classical program beloved by Night Owls everywhere; The reformatting of In Performance- a primarily classical live performance show into the much-reviled Canada Live - a uniformly non-classical and completely unfocused hodge-podge of World music, soft pop, and sort-of Jazz; and the controversial replacement of veteran Howard Dyck from Saturday Afternoon at the Opera after many years of great service.

12. The CBC axing the Radio Orchestra one day citing lack of resources, and the next day buying hugely expensive full-page ad in the Globe and Mail to convince us how wonderful everything is going to be in their Brave New World

SAVE CLASSICAL MUSIC AT THE CBC

When I was younger, I always looked up to the CBC as a symbol of Canadian culture. From Hockey Night in Canada to the Passionate Eye, it was an organization of journalistic integrity, a place to find solace from the nonsense known as CNN, and a hub of the arts.

When I was younger, I loved CBC Radio 2. It was dominated by classical programming, with an enormous amount of Canadian content, reflecting the diverse and potent Canadian classical scene. It was a nice little refuge from Classicalk 96.3, which really, gets bland after you listen to the same stereotypical (pun intended) selections of classical music, like Fur Elise, Chopin Nocturne 1 and Beethoven's 5th Symphony.

When I was younger, I always liked the CBC Radio Orchestra, in Vancouver. The only remaining radio orchestra in North America, it had a mandate to perform classical music with a large percentage of Canadian conductors and soloists, as well as being responsible for premiering numerous numbers of newly commisioned compositions.

But you know what, the CBC has decided to change. Gone are the interesting shows and innovative programming, replaced with horrible and tasteless dramas about hockey wives and scnadals and bad reality TV shows. And they are removing most of CBC Radio 2's classical content, and replacing it with gar-bage. Oh, did I mention they are destroying the CBC Radio Orchestra, even after they WON A GRAMMY over other well-funded and better managed orchestras in the United States (even beating the almighty Boston Symphony)?

Now, if we take CBC's side of the issue, they will say promoting classical music so much is not reflective of the Canadian cultural demographic. But how can they be so blind, with so much talent (and I do not over inflate this term) coming out of this country. There are so many youth in this country who listen to Classical music. How is tommorow's youth going to hear classical music in the future? Those CD's, or (insert name of new device replacing CD's in 3 years) are very very expensive. Specifically, how is tommorow's youth going to hear the music of today's youth. How are we going to have new works commisioned by Canadian composers, when private interests (orchestras such as the TSO) can only include so much Canadian music, when they are catering to a paying and general audience?

So I ask you, PLEASE help us (the movement who are trying to stop them) to avert this disaster. I know many of you think these email initiatives don't accomplish anything, but sometimes, SOMETIMES, they do. A similar thing happend with Hockey Night 3 years ago, when they didn't want to renew Ron McLean's contract (the semi bald guy working with Don Cherry). Fans were outraged, did a similar thing, and got him back with a 6 year contract.

The addresses below are of IMPORTANT people! Richard_Stursberg@cbc.ca; mark_steinmetz@cbc.ca; jennifer_mcguire@cbc.ca; ht.lacroix@cbc.ca; AND NOT by commas as listed below. So, if you click on send and it doesn't work, try using the ; sign instead)1) copy the list of e-mails / copiez cette liste d'adresses2) add the e-mail of a local and/or national newspaper / ajoutez l'adresse d'un journal local ou national3) Copy one of the messages provided (if you don't have time to write your own) copiez un des message suivants (si vous n'avez pas le temps d'ecrire un vous-memes)3) click send / cliquez sur le button "send"Richard_Stursberg@cbc.ca, mark_steinmetz@cbc.ca, jennifer_mcguire@cbc.ca, ht.lacroix@cbc.ca, richard_stursberg@cbc.ca, Verner.J@parl.gc.ca, Min_Verner@pch.gc.ca, Harper.S@parl.gc.ca, Belanger.M@parl.gc.ca, angusc@parl.gc.ca, liaison@cbc.ca, auditoire@radio-canada.ca, liaison@radio-canada.ca, ombudsman@cbc.ca, ombudsman@radio-canada.ca[And here are some e-mails of journalists and big newspapers. Send me more contact information of CBC officials, newspapers, journalists and I will post it!opinions@metronouvelles.com, info@metronouvelles.com,letters@globeandmail.com, mlederman@globeandmail.com, jadams@globeandmail.com, scormier@ledevoir.com,ppapineau@ledevoir.com, fdoyon@ledevoir.com,sunletters@png.canwest.com, sunopinion@png.canwest.com, tabtips@png.canwest.com, provletters@png.canwest.com, smeurice@nationalpost.com, mhiggins@nationalpost.com,sstinson@nationalpost.com, wmoriarty@png.canwest.com, rguggi@png.canwest.com,submit@theherald.canwest.com, calgaryherald@reachcanada.com, letters@thecitizen.canwest.com, psimpson@thecitizen.canwest.com, letters@thegazette.canwest.com]

***To whom it may concernI am writing to express my immense dissatisfaction and anger with your decision to dismantle the CBC National Radio Orchestra.The National Radio Orchestra is the last remaining broadcasting ensemble in North America. Its mandate to commission and perform Canadian music makes it an invaluable resource for Canadian musicians and performers. Your decision to terminate it reveals an incredible shortsightedness and disrespect to the Canadian cultural values. I am outraged that this decision was taken without any consultation with the musical and cultural community and that the players and other concerned parties were deliberately left in the dark and wouldn’t have even known about this decision beforehand hadn’t it been a leak of information.I am extremely disappointed and enraged that you have decided to terminate one of the most important Canadian musical traditions.I ask you to show responsibility and respect to Canadian culture and to reverse your decision immediately.

Sincerely,
(insert name)

Thanks guys, I really would appreciate it! And so would the 80 odd musicians who will lose their jobs next year

Hidden brawl music?! (insert interrobang here)

For those who dont know the site The tanooki is a site dedicated to all things nintendo. Today they made a discovery of a number of songs that went unused in brawl on the actual game disc. The link to the mp3s is here: http://www.editorartist.com/album.php?id=smash_brawl_!_lost_tracks . this now brings the total music in the game to some number like 337 songs!

Anyways... till next time,
Aaron

Bump (blogger is dumb)

So I posted, but Blogger randomly ranks posts from when they were created... not from when they were actually posted... so since I started a post yesterday, it is down there somewhere... go scroll to the gameboy-ish pic =)

A quick review...

Brawl is awesome end of story.
















Seriously though, I was playing josh online a few days ago and honestly all I think the game lacks is voice chat. yesterday I looked at his accomplishments and he's done a lot less in the game than I have. This means I am one step closer to having a full accomplishments board than he is. Josh I challenge you (and anyone else willing to accept) to the meta game the first challenge being who can complete their accomplishments board first.

Techno "music" again!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJvM3m2hVzo

Despite Homestar Runner being pretty stupid for the most part, I'm clearly not the only one who thinks that techno music is bad.

Re: Where are all the posts?

As Josh clearly stated Brawl is taking up all of the time the two of us would usually spend at our computers, however since both Josh and I have now posted the others have no excuse. I too was in Israel with Josh and as stated it has a very different look to it than many of us would expect. I'm currently typing and playing brawl so one has to be more important so until next time.

Aaron.

Laminous chassepot

laminous (adj.): laminate, layered, composed of overlapping layers

chassepot (n.): officially known as Fusil modèle 1866, was a military breechloading rifle, famous as the arm of the French forces in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 1871.

Coincidentally, a lamina in math is simply a closed surface (2-manifold) with a density function that you can integrate over to find the mass - very layerlike.

So, I have not posted since I came back from Indiana. Mainly because there were a bunch of things that I had to catch up with. Some of these things I actually had to catch up with. Some of the things turned out to be playing a lot of Halo 3, Brawl, and even some WoW. And some of the things were completely pointless, like deciding to learn how to read ancient Greek - for some reason that seemed more enticing than posting, at the time. But anyway, I will remedy that now.

I might as well mention Indiana a bit. In short, it was very awesome, much better than expected. For example, they actually gave us good, edible food. Many would be surprised at what a rare occurence that actually is at events like these.

Of particular coolness is all the free merchandise we got there. Sure, we got a lot of standard stuff... t-shirts, mousepads, notebooks, etc. But, for example, they also gave us a Microsoft... gameboy imitation keychain?:

On this one-of-a-kind item you can play 6-by-6 Sudoku (and not the normal kind either - some puzzles that it gave actually had several solutions :P), a Space Invaders game in which you can survive 10 seconds, max, and a Simon Says game, where they give you random arrows, that you have to repeat.

Moreover, it's designed amazingly - since in order to stop playing a certain game, you need to either win at it or lose at it. In either Space Invaders or Simon Says, you're bound to lose very quickly, so this is fine. But you can't really lose in Sudoku... so you have to solve the Sudoku before you can play any other game mode. Resetting it does nothing at all =).

We had some fun with this when we got bored for a bit. Anyway, second up is a really cool... white plastic ball:

But the really cool thing about this white plastic ball is that it can turn inside out! As shown in this very badly recorded video below (try holding a camera phone with one hand and spinning the ball in the air with the other):

We also got some cool stuff, like a frisbee that folds into a wallet sized container and a cool blue ball that turns red when squished. Not to mention three water bottles from different sponsors, and a big yellow bag from Caterpillar. I probably brought back more than I took with me.

Anyway, I'll probably post more later. Until then, ciao.

-squidout

Where are all the posts?

So, posting on SG has been fairly low recently. Rather, very low. Considering it has been a vacation for most of our writers, and last time this was the case, we had about two posts each day, it may seem a bit surprising. But, I, at least, have two reasons for not having posted.

The first is a trip to Israel that I went on last week. It was fun, especially because I went with a group of friends and... acquaintances? Well, it's hard to explain. But, Israel is significantly less war-torn than you would expect, especially with the media nowadays. I have to admit, I didn't go to, say, Sderot, during my trip, so I cant be sure that what I am saying is true of all Israel, and I'm fairly sure, in fact, that it isn't, but life in the fair majority of Israel seems to be like that in any European country, in terms of war weariness, and in general, except that they mostly speak Hebrew in Israel. I even saw some people playing soccer a few times! In fact, Tel-Aviv seemed a lot like Bordeau or even Paris to me. Jerusalem, obviously, has some differences, like the conflicting religious quarters of the old city, and fights over the Western Wall, but interestingly enough, even big religious conflicts can be settled by economic means. A few years ago, people from the Jewish quarter of the Old City started digging a tunnel along the buried part of the Western Wall, for religious and archaeological reasons. The wall happens to pass through the Muslim quarter, however, and the Muslims (for some reason) did not like the Jews digging under their territory, so they started throwing bricks at people in the tunnels. Despite the religious value to the tunnel, most people didn't like having bricks thrown at them, and so they stopped digging through and visiting it. However, many people didn't like not being able to visit the tunnel, or dig it any further, and so they came to a compromise: the tunnel was dug so that it ends at a market in the Muslim quarter. As long as the tunnel's visitors brought money with them, the Muslims didn't mind them, and today the tunnel has practically become a museum. Apparently they run summer camps in it too. Oh, the Dead Sea was pretty cool too.

My second excuse is pretty obvious: Brawl. As expected, Brawl is fun. Many feel that it is pretty much the same as Melee, and thus not worth the hype, but, although I agree that it is similar to Melee, I think that the many newer features and rectifications were well worth it. And, the music is much better, but I don't think I need to talk about that any further. I found it interesting that, prior to the game's release, most people who had been keeping up with the almost daily updates had a pretty good idea of what character(s) they were going to be playing as, and for the most part, they seem to have been accurate. For instance, I was sure I'd like Sonic, Meta Knight, and Falco, and aside from Falco being only my fourth-most-used character, with Pit in third, my hypothesis was accurate. I also liked the Adventure Mode more than expected. Most people said something along the lines of: "Subspace Emissary was okay, but considering that Brawl is mainly a multi-player game, it is good enough that they have a real story for single player." I actually liked it, though, and despite the story being slightly hard to follow at times (i.e. the part where they got Game and Watch to join their team was a bit strange...was he supposed to be an enemy before?) it was still good. If only there weren't so many levels where you had to play as Lucas and the Pokemon Trainer, two of my least favorite characters. Some cutscenes were pretty epic, too, like this one.

The other writers might have reasons for not posting too. I imagine that Brawl works for a few of them too. Or maybe they're just lazy. Hopefully we'll get back to our usual posting rate soonish.

On an irrelevant note, apparently not many people liked jPod the t.v. show, as it has been cancelled for next season by CBC. People should develop better taste in television shows. Oh well.

Not much else to say for now, so until next time. Oh, and at pi second, I was in front of Theodore Hertzel's grave =)

Happy Belated Pi Day!

So, long time no post! Been having something like a writer's block, plus March Break has been busier than anticipated.

Anyway, I found out today that March 14th is actually a holiday (for math enthusiasts) called Pi Day, since π roughly equals 3.14. Sometimes it is celebrated on March 14 at 1:59 p.m., also commonly known as Pi Minute. If π is truncated to seven decimal places, it becomes 3.1415926, making March 14 at 1:59:26 p.m., Pi Second.

Incidentally, March 14th is also Albert Einstein's birthday, so there's double the reason to celebrate.

So I've missed it this year, d'oh! Nevertheless, there is always next year, and here are some tips on how to celebrate Pi Day. Number one on the list is creating some "pi ambiance", by doing stuff like wearing a pi shirt or using a pi mug. I happened upon this creative pi shirt:

Get it? Pi-rate? :D

dd

So, yes, mark it in your calendar for next year :)

dd

Until next time,

Cindy

Syndical triggerfish

syndical (adj.): Pertaining to a syndic, one appointed to represent a corporation, university, or other organization in business transactions.

triggerfish (n.): A type of fish with a roundish, laterally flat body with an anterior dorsal fin.


So, as Josh probably made you aware, Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out this Sunday. My verdict so far: it's very, very good.

Gamespy and IGN rated it down a bit (4.5/5 and 9.5/10) - it seems like they did this because: a) the graphics are Wii-ish, and b) they didn't like the Subspace Emissary plot. I'd advise you not to worry too much about these complaints (and actually, in their review, they do too =)). For the first part, although the graphics may be lackluster compared to say, XBOX 360 games, the art and cinematography is still excellent and brilliantly done. Arguably, the fact that the graphics suck doesn't matter in a bunch of cases, since the characters aren't really very graphically complex anyway (I doubt better graphics would make Mr. Game and Watch look more realistic).

Now, the subspace emissary is good. Perhaps it isn't great, because it does get tedious at times, the character moves aren't really meant for sidescrolling, etc. That aside though, it does have some very amusing cutscenes, it lets you get a feel for most of the characters, and it has an interesting albeit very bizarre plot (overall I liked the plot though - it's not easy putting all those different characters into one story and still keep a coherent storyline).

But Super Smash Bros. Brawl is not the Subspace Emissary. The fact that they actually bothered to put in a real single-player mode into a franchise known for its multiplayer is very nice on their part.

The music works really well in the game, even the songs that sounded weird. The main theme is very catchy (especially since you'll be hearing it in different forms a lot), especially in the final destination song. Also, one of the Kirby songs, "Kirby Gourmet Metal Mix" works really well in brawls.

I tried the online out a bit, and it works very well, with barely any lag. I'm guessing that this mode will be a lot more entertaining With Friends - in the anonymous Without Friends, it's more or less like playing computers (some people are even worse than computers).

As for the characters, I've unlocked them all now, and played with each of them (some more than others). My best is either Peach or Diddy Kong (probably Peach now). Samus (my favorite Melee character) has gotten a little less powerful and versatile, so she doesn't seem as good as she was in Melee. The characters are generally balanced, though, which is good (Jigglypuff can actually do stuff!).

Gamespy has 1337 screenshots of Brawl. Given that it's Gamespy, this may be entirely on purpose:

Also, at the end of the Subspace Emissary, you get treated to the actual Latin lyrics of the Brawl theme:

Audi famam illius
Solus in hostes ruit
Et patriam servavit

Audi famam illius
Cucurrit quaeque
Tetigit destruens

Audi famam illius
(...Audi famam illius...)

Spes omnibus
(...Mihi quoque...)

Terrar omnibus mihi quoque

Ille.....
...Iuxta me!
Ille.....

Ille iuxta me
Socil sunt mihi
Qui olim viri fortes
Rivalesque erant

Saeve certando
Pugnandoque
Splendar crescit!

I'm happy because I can actually understand the lyrics with my very rusty Latin. But if you don't like Latin, you can read these lyrics =).

-squidout

Hurray!

It's today!

Three more hours!

Brace yourselves.

Carbolated mopboard

carbolated (adj.): Containing or treated with carbolic acid.

mopboard (n.): A molding that conceals the joint between an interior wall and the floor. Also called baseboard.


If I actually named my titles like I should name titles, this post would probably be called "Hurray for Literary Analysis!"

Now, why do I bring this up right now? And especially, why do I bring this up at all, when literary analysis bores me to death, in most occasions. But very recently, I have discovered the untapped potential of literary analysis!

Perhaps some context would help. I was in English class today. It was more or less your standard english class; we talked for an hour about Macbeth. Of course, that's perfectly normal and fine - Macbeth is regarded to be a very interesting, albeit quite unstable character of Shakespearean literature. More interestingly though, was the ten minutes we spent of that hour talking about Harry Potter.

Just like you can get from "Cheese" to "Archie Comics" in two clicks in Wikipedia, we similarly managed to get from Macbeth to Harry Potter. The rationale, of course, was that "Double, double, toil and trouble/ Fire burn and cauldron bubble" was in the third Harry Potter movie, along with another line from Macbeth later on. Of course, the line "Double, double, toil and trouble" is pretty common with anything to do with witchery, just like "To be or not to be" (and horrible witty variants) is used everywhere too. We did spend ten minutes talking about the 'impact' that phrase has on the viewer (guess what? It's ominous!), and how it has an enhanced impact if the viewer has a knowledge of the story of Macbeth.

All that is fine and well, but it was during this discussion that I had my wondrous epiphany about literary analysis. With literary analysis, we can show that Sirius Black is really Macbeth! I mean, look at all the similarities between them:

- they both know witches!
- Macbeth kills (betrays) King Duncan. They think Sirius Black killed (betrayed) Harry's dad.
- Macbeth dies at the end. Sirius dies too.

Okay, that's all the real similarities. And there are probably lots of differences. But luckily, literary analysis is so powerful, it allows us to convert the differences into similarities!

- Sirius was stuck in prison for a bunch of years after they thought he killed Harry's dad, where there were evil Dementors that feasted upon his mind and emotions. Similarly, after Macbeth kills King Duncan, he's trapped in a prison of his own mind and starts going insane and seing ghosts!

- Both Sirius and Macbeth didn't want their victim to die but it happened because of them. Like, Sirius randomly gave some random person all the passwords, and then the random person was able to kill Harry's dad. And Macbeth didn't really want to kill the king, of course, but Lady Macbeth forced him to. And there were those pesky witches too. Promising lots of good things.

- Both of them want revenge after the person gets killed. Sirius tries to kill the random person that he gave the passwords to that can turn into a mouse. Macbeth gets revenge on Banquo, because Banquo is so evil that Banquo's presence inspired the witches to come tell Macbeth the prophecy which compelled him to kill the King. (He also benefits much more than Macbeth from Macbeth killing Duncan too. Sort of).

- Macbeth owns a castle! Actually, he probably owns like three. Sirius also sneaks into the Hogwarts castle at some point.

-Sirius gets killed by a woman. Macbeth gets killed by a man "not born of woman".

- the line "double, double, toil and trouble/ Fire burn and cauldron bubble" is in both Macbeth and the third Harry Potter. What more could you want?

And now, by the method of literary analysis, we can combine all these very logical observations and conclude that, yes, Sirius Black really is Macbeth, of course.

Don't get me wrong, by the way. Macbeth is a very good play, along with most of Shakespeare's stuff. I just don't really see the point of doing analysis, period. Perhaps it's an exercise in random logical deduction (which of course has to be so logical), but it seems like this is is a much better explanation. Talking about literary works is fine, but going so deep into them (and inventing a bunch of jargon in the process) is a bit silly.

I'll post something more interesting in a while. For the meantime, go read Graham's new essays (sidebar). They're good as usual. I also picked up jPod the book a while ago, and it's fairly good so far (it's the only book that includes free spam with it! =) ). I also need to finish Atlas Shrugged sometime, but oh well.

Oh, and I might randomly decide to write a book called "The Adventures of Klee Shay". Just because the title is so good and no one's taken it yet =).

-squid out

And this is rock

Or at least the rock music Josh seems to prefer. There is some okay rock.

Voila.

I felt very bad making it so repetitive but I had to make it reminiscent of all the rock songs Josh listens to.

Ciao!

-squidout

Techno "music"

I attempted to compose some techno music today, mostly for fun, but also to show just how bad techno music is. Enjoy!

Also, Brawl got a 9.5 on IGN! Hurray! Can't wait for Sunday!

EDIT: Many people seem to be having difficulties with MegaUpload, so try this instead.

RGN#13: VGM

As Josh stated in his most recent post, he has a 12 hour plane ride next week. I will be on that trip with him so the two of us have been compiling two playlists of VGM (video game music), one on my Ipod consisting of OST of much older games, and one on Josh's Ipod consisting of 300 and something Super Smash Bros. Brawl songs which are mostly remixes. Unlike Josh however, I recognise that there is better VGM than that in Sonic the Hedgehog, such as the Kid Icarus underworld theme. (Which notably made it into brawl as the original music for pit's level skyworld.)

Here's the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtblzRbQxrY ( this one starts at about 20 seconds in)

Here is thr SSBB version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDYaCTzBMJI

And for fun, here is a version done on Mario Paint: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsqyis7LzAQ

I'd like to know what our readers enjoy the most, a remixed version or the original. So post your opinions in comment form and I'll try to get a poll in the sidebar running.

So as I try to catch up to Jon and Josh in posts.
until next time,
Aaron

Succursal seaware

succursal- serving to aid or help; serving as a chapel of ease; tributary.

seaware - seaweed, esp. coarse, large seaweed, used chiefly as a fertilizer

Brawl "OST"

Okay, so I downloaded all of the songs from brawl and put them on my iPod, mostly in preparation for a ~12 hour plane ride I'm going to go on next week. Some people ripped all of the music from the game, even random things like the 2-second sound it makes when you unlock a new feature, then called an official soundtrack. I'm not sure why the called it official, but whatever. I think I have gone through most of the good songs by now (there are 16 hours worth of them, and I only downloaded it yesterday, so I haven't managed to listen to it all yet...), so I thought I'd point out a few of the better and more interesting ones.

Firstly, just because I had commented on them already here, they put the Green Hill Zone, Emerald Hill Zone, and Emerald Island Zone themes in to go with the Green Hill Zone stage. The former two are pretty much as they appeared in their respective games, but they made a cool remix of the Angel Island Zone theme, that you may have heard some of if you kept up with brawl updates, that can be found here.

Although it's not actually that great a song, they did put a Mario Tennis theme in it, which was mixed with Mario Golf themes, as they sound pretty similar.

Nintendo managed to put in songs from a very large variety of games, even within each series, as the only series that I knew all of the songs from was Pokemon. Though, I only know the Dialga and Palkia battle theme from hearing it once or twice on my sister's DS. Okay, technically I also know all of the songs from Big Brain Academy and Golden Sun, but that's only because there was only one song from each. Oh, and I would have known all of the songs from the Mario series, except I've never really played Mario Kart DS enough to recognize this.

Anyway, back to the better songs. From Legend of Zelda, most of the songs are pretty good, but I especially liked what they did with the Song of Storms. Or maybe I just like the Song of Storms... either way. The Ocarina of Time Medley is pretty good too, though.

From Kirby, I think I liked the Meta Knight's Revenge song the best, even though I've never played Kirby's Super Star.

As for the Donkey Song songs, they're all really good, but I always liked this song, from Donkey Kong Country. Also, it's not THAT good of a song, but the mix of the theme from the original Donkey Kong is at least nostalgic. And funny.

From Animal Crossing... I never really liked any of the songs that much. From my small amount of experience playing the game, I think the music is mostly just there so that playing the game doesn't feel awkward without any music, since most games, and movies too, seem weird without anything playing in the background. I think that this is the best of the eleven songs they decided to take from the series, though.

All of the Fire Emblem songs are pretty good, though I think I like the Medley the best, especially after about a minute.

Some of the music that they decided to put in seems very out of place, though. For instance, the Mii Channel theme isn't terrible, but imagine fighting to it... or the Wii shop theme, or the PictoChat theme, or the Wii Sports theme, or the Cow Racing theme from Wii Play, or the Brain Age theme, or the Big Brain Academy theme, or this. I really do not see why they felt compelled to put a song from Electroplankton in, but at least all of the other good songs make up for it. Anyway, I hope that there will be at least one decent fighting song to choose from for the Picto Chat stage, as I wouldn't be surprised in the least if these are the only songs you can choose from when fighting there.

Oh also, there's a song from Pikmin in French! I almost never played Pikmin, so I don't recognize any of the songs from it, but the lyrics in this one are funny. I'm pretty happy that they put in this song too.

That's all for now, but I'll probably post again very soon, as Jon almost caught up to me in number of posts, which I obviously can't let happen. So à bientôt!

EDIT: http://www.addictinggames.com/evenmorebloons.html
More on this later :)

Liliaceous chromolithograph

liliaceous (adj.): of the Liliaceae family that contains the lily, tulip and hyacinth

chromolithograph (n.): A color lithograph, specifically those of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Another fairly random, short, post, with no specific focus. Anyway, a few things:

1. I'm surprised Josh hasn't commented about this, especially since he bothered to download the entire thing to his iPod. But they've ripped the sound track from Super Smash Bros. Braw, and you can easily find it on Youtube or elsewhere by googling "Brawl OST" (which is quite ironic, because as far as I can tell, it's not really official). Try this link. The song in that link is the "Final Destination" song for Brawl, and it's probably the best composition in the game. But of course, since it's more or less done by Uematsu.

2. Time for a real logic puzzle: Find a six-letter word such that any consecutive 4 letters or consecutive 5 letters are also a word.

So for example, if your six-letter word was "abcdef", then: "abcd", "bcde", "cdef", "abcde", "bcdef" would all also have to be words (in addition to "abcdef").

I randomly came up with this during a pretty long car ride, so perhaps it's not too hard, but I'm pretty surprised by how all of those turned out to be words. There's also very possibly more than one solution - the solution I'm thinking of though, also has the nice property that 2 (3 if you count slightly obscure words) of the 4 consecutive three-letter strings are also words.

If you can find a solution such that all the three-letter strings are also words, that would be very impressive. But that's probably impossible due to vowel-consonant positioning, etc.

3. I had the occasion to hear some music from Diablo II today (in a quite unexpected setting actually), which reminded me that it was a pretty amazing game. It's fairly cheap now, so if you're bored one day you should go and pick it up for $15-$20 or so.

The music was just a random note, by the way - the music is good, but it's not Final Fantasy epic good. It fits the game really well though.

Until next time, ciao.

-squidout

RGN#12: Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards.

To many this post's title may seem confusing, I post one thing saying that I'm reviewing games and suddenly we are at 12 random gaming notes (RGN)? Well yes, and no. The first ten RGNs were on my facebook page as notes and included other information other than reviews such as how to add channels to your wii and other semi-relevant information. The eleventh was my last post and that accounts for all eleven previous notes.

This video will pretty much sum up the game:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vdlEH0yFbg

When you have finished watching feel free to continue,




As you can see from the video it's a classic Kirby game with some character team ups and mixed powers. This however, is surprisingly a more difficult game than one might expect. This solely comes from the fact that there are a total of 100 crystals to collect and in order to find most of them you must take advantage of the multi ability use in this game. The only real downside to this game is that the game only has five worlds with five levels the fifth always being a boss level. This said every level must be revisited at least once to get everything. On a scale of 1 to awesome (10) this game ranks in at a good 7 or 8 . I urge any Kirby fans or gamers looking for a time waster to pick this game up. For $10 on the virtual console a good Kirby game from the N64 could be yours on the wii.

Cliquant heredes

clinquant (adj.): Glittering with gold or silver; a false and showy glitter

heredes (n.): Heirs

Funny words today. Clinquant comes from French, but it was actually first brought into English by William Shakespeare. You know, this isn't too surprising though - he actually 'invented' (i.e., took from other languages) thousands of common English words. Like "bump" for example. Next time you use the word 'bump' you can feel secure in your sophisticated-ness.

Heredes actually isn't an English word. It's a Latin word. Unsurprisingly, it means 'heirs' in Latin. But just like other Latin words, it sometimes crops up in the context of law, where the word 'heirs' isn't anywhere near good enough, of course =).

Anyway, I'm not really sure what to post. I could talk about why the moon was red, but I don't feel like it and you probably all already know it's because of scattering in Earth's atmosphere. So instead, I'll keep this post short, and present a nice little paradox my friend showed me:

You've probably played a lot of two-player games, like Tic-Tac-Toe, Chess (it has rules to make sure it is finite), two player Ghost, Halo, etc. Most such two-player games are finite - meaning that you finish after a finite number of "turns" or a finite amount of time.

However, one can easily invent infinite two-player games. For example, if we randomly make a game Asdfmas where turns consist of saying numbers and if someone says a negative number, they lose, is very easily infinite.

Now, one would assume that a given game is either finite or infinite - after all, if a game doesn't take an infinitely long time, then it has to be finite, no?

Well, then, consider the two-player game called Metagame. The rules of Metagame are simple. Player 1 chooses a finite two-player game, and Player 2 moves first. The question is, is Metagame finite or infinite? (If you immediately think it has to be finite, think again for a bit. Then scroll down.)

Obviously, the Metagame has to be finite, right? After all, they just play a finite game, which can't take infinitely long? Well, since it's finite, Player 1 can choose the Metagame. Oh, then Player 2 can choose a game too. Why doesn't she choose the Metagame as well? Player 1 also feels like playing the Metagame again. Hmmm...

So, the Metagame is infinite? But how can that be? After all, they just play a finite game. Hmmm....

Hopefully that's fried your brains for now. Until next time, ciao.

-squidout

PS: Here's another paradox for you, this time with a touch of Godel:

What is the smallest positive integer that cannot be defined with less than 81 characters?

(Hmm, "the smallest positive integer that cannot be defined with less than 81 characters" happens to have 81 characters...)

Lunar Eclipse

As everyone has probably heard, there will be a total lunar eclipse tonight, Feb 20 (and Feb 21 morning for Europe and Africa) for the Americas.

A total lunar eclipse happens when the moon passes completely behind the Earth's shadow:

When the moon is in the umbral shadow, it looks red:

Cool!

I happen to have a perfect view of the lunar eclipse from my bedroom, and now the moon is already in the prenumberal shadow and moving into total eclipse. In Toronto, it is expected to be in total eclipse around 10PM. I'm definitely going to be getting up from the desk every so often to watch the moon :)

Cindy

Encaustic pinxit

Encaustic – A painting medium in which pigment is suspended in a binder of hot wax.

Pinxit - Lettering on a print that denotes the original artist of the work for, or from, which the print was made (from Latin Pinx, meaning "he painted it")

Two art words! That's a change. Anyway, to start off, I found this the other day, and while it is kind of old news, so I wouldn't be surprised if some have seen it already, it's kind of funny. Well, maybe not funny, but it reminds me of all the times that someone has asked me "if you could have one wish, what would it be?" to which I, or one of my friends, would generally reply unlimited wishes. While the concept is funny, though, in actual fact, it's kind of sad how someone would destroy the Make a Wish Foundation like that. Wishing away the foundation's legal team was pretty smart, though…

Today, 49 years ago, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker of the Progressive Conservative Party cancelled the Avro Arrow program. That was a sad day for Canada. The Avro Arrow could have become the fastest plane in the world. It could have become a great defense for Canada, especially with the constant threat of Soviet bombers at the time. It could have given Canada something to really brag about. But, no. Instead, it became a $400-million pile of scrap metal. It may not look like much (especially since this is the Arrow without many of the features that were intended to be included in it), but you can watch its maiden flight here. I think it looks pretty cool. I'm really not an expert on the subject, so go to Wikipedia if you want to learn more about it.

Warning: do not click on the following link, unless you have a fair amount of time on your hands. It is far too addicting. Which is probably why it's on addictinggames.com. Anyway, you have been warned.

Filler is a very good game. Basically, the goal is to fill at least two thirds of the game screen with circles, while avoiding the evil bouncy balls. When each level starts, the bouncy balls start bouncing around, and then you have to place your circles so that, while they are growing, they do not touch a bouncy ball. When you hold down your mouse, a circle starts growing around where you clicked, and it stops when you either let go of the mouse, the circle you are making touches another circle you already made, or the circle touches a bouncy ball. In the latter case, you also lose a life. Each level, you only get a certain amount of circles and lives to place, though. If you run out of lives, you lose, obviously, and if you run out of circles, you can continue to place more, but each takes a life from you.

You now know enough to skip the game's introduction and play on your own! You should get used to it fairly quickly, so don't worry if you don't understand everything. The last couple days, I played this game a lot, and, as I am so nice, I'll give you a few pointers to make it, at least, to level 50 (though, my best so far is 76).

1. Don't bother rushing. You have lots of time each level, and plus, if you run out of time, it doesn't matter. You just lose a few bonus points. Try to spend more time optimizing the size of the balls. That being said, though,
   
2. You generally have many more balls than you need for each level. Don't wait too long to make your move, as you could probably easily pass the level with 5 or 6 huge mistakes, even more past level 15.
   
3. Use gravity to your advantage. As far as I can tell, all circles seem to weigh exactly the same, no matter their size, so, for instance, if you have one really big circle on screen, you can push it over with a few small circles, and clear up some space to place two or three decently-sized circles, in most cases.
   
4. Try placing circles in the top left corner. Placing them in a top corner is good, because then when they fall, they move bouncy balls that are below out of the way, clearing space for you to make another circle. However, the top right corner is bad, because when a bouncy ball gets trapped by your circles against a wall, then is squished, it teleports to the top right corner, which can be annoying when you are in the middle of making a big circle there.
   
5. Lastly, try catching the bouncy balls in small spaces, so that they aren't bothering you wherever you are placing circles as much. Usually, you do this by accident anyway, and it is somewhat hard to do when you are trying to, but if the opportunity arises, go for it.
   

I'm wondering if there is any space at all once you get to, say, level 100, so if anyone manages to get there, let me know. Anyway, that is all for now, so à la prochaine!

Sexpartite lunette

sexpartite (adj.): Composed of or divided into six parts, as in a sexpartite rib vault.

lunette (n.): Something that has the shape of a crescent or half-moon (especially when referring to an architectural feature)

Latin and French today. Although, 'lunettes' in French does mean glasses, but 'lune' is moon. Actually, glasses (especially in old times) were often crescent-shaped (i.e. "half-moon glasses"), so this isn't too surprising. Anyway, finally some words that aren't biology.

Last post I might have said this post was going to be about lasers, but as usual, that was a complete fabrication. I'll talk about puzzles instead. Japanese puzzles mainly. Especially the puzzle types published by Nikoli, and particularly Nurikabe, which I've recently ordered 5 books of from Japan - they're written in Japanese, but luckily you don't need the words, and the numerals are most likely Arabic, but even if they aren't, learning ten or so Japanese characters won't kill me.

But anyway, what is Nurikabe? Well, it's a Japanese word for "invisible wall randomly in the middle of a road." More relevantly, it's a puzzle type invented by Japanese puzzle company Nikoli, who also brought you Sudoku. A short explanation is basically: you're given a grid with some numbers on it, and you want to fill some squares in black so that the numbers are on white islands with 'number' many white squares. But this flash tutorial will probably be much better at explaining it to you: http://www.nikoli.co.jp/en/puzzles/nurikabe/. Good quantities of printable puzzles don't seem to be readily available on the web but there are a bunch of online sites that publish a new one every day or so and that you can solve in your browser - just google nurikabe.

I think it's pretty similar to Sudoku in terms of average difficulty. Perhaps it's a bit harder at first, but you get used to it very fast anyway (and sudoku is probably annoying at first too... although I don't even remember when I first saw sudoku). A puzzle that I really find annoying to do are "Paint by Numbers". They're pretty popular - you may have done one or two of them. Unfortunately I never got the hang of them and they take me really long.

Interestingly, Paint by Numbers, Nurikabe, and Sudoku (it's extension to n^2 by n^2 grids) are all NP-complete, which at least means you can take solace in the fact that your computer won't laugh at you any time soon (that said, it could still solve them faster than you could).

Anyway, the Nikoli site has a bunch of other interesting puzzles. Shikaku looks interesting but they only invented it recently so there are practically no available puzzles. There's also puzzles with very funny titles, like "Where is Black Cells".

I think that's all I'll write about puzzles today. Maybe I'll conclude with some random remarks.

I rewatched Goldeneye the other day, and have come to the conclusion that it was the best recent James Bond movie. Perhaps James Bond out of the cold-war era is getting a bit strange now, so people are altering the genre a bit (*cough* Casino Royale *cough*). But whatever.

My friend told me to go get some random "Solar something" RTS game but when I went to the IGN site to look it up I got distracted by: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/852/852953p1.html. It's about time for a new Banjo Kazooie.

This person has a lot of good trance/techno mixes and songs posted. If you like the genre (unlike some people...) you should check it out.

And that's all for now. I could talk about lasers next time, but I'd probably just copy what Munroe said and add something about petawatt lasers... so just go read his blog post! Ciao.

-squidout

By the way, the post is in the above picture. Quality 7.

Crocodilian scleroderma 2

So, this is basically a follow up to yesterday's post.

And the program I told you about is now on the sidebar. Of course, you'll probably need Python to run it, but that's fine. stegano.py will hide a file of your choice in a bitmap and unstegano.py will bring it back. Pretty handy.

Now, you'll notice that you can specify the quality of your steganization. This basically describes how many bits of the hidden file we hide per byte. So it ranges from 1 to 8, with 1 being very subtle (you're only altering the LSB) to 8 which is very unsubtle (the entire pixel is replaced with stuff from the hidden data). The bonus is, of course, 8 takes up 1/8 the space of 1. Even 2 takes up only half the space of 1, and looks the same to my eye. To see the difference between the qualities, here's the first two paragraphs of this post repeated 5 times hidden in Mr. Happy from yesterday at all possible quality levels:

Quality 8:

Quality 7:

Quality 6:

Quality 5:

Quality 4:

Quality 3:

Quality 2:

Quality 1:

Original (no hidden info):

It should be noted that it always takes the most significant bits from the image, so even with quality 7 (where there's only one bit from Mr. Happy) the noise is quite "see-through".

Now, how can the evil enemies detect this? Well, there are lots of advanced statistical image processing techniques they can use to see if there is something "beneath" the image. You can go google 'steganalysis' to figure out how it's actually done - I'll just show one of the most crude techniques.

First, behold the below image of some random very badly built Mechano toy that I threw into the snow today:

You'll notice it's a JPEG. That's because I'm definitely not going to upload a 1632 by 1224 bitmap image for you. Definitely not. But I did the following test with a bitmap, so no worries.

The reason, of course, that I'm not going to upload a 1632 by 1224 bitmap for you, is because bitmaps are big. While the bitmap is about 5 megabytes large, the corresponding JPEG is only 122 kb. So, a lot of space is wasted in bitmaps. And we make use of that space when we hide stuff in them.

Of course, every 1632 by 1224 bitmap file is about the same size. But, what if we try compressing them? I have a feeling a 1632 by 1224 black rectangle compresses just a bit better than the above image. Similarly, if we hide information inside bitmaps, it has to be compressed too. So hmm...

In any case, I took the Gettysburg Address (1.4 KB), the Declaration of Independence (9.1 KB), and Dickens' Great Expectations (997 KB), and hid them all (with quality 2) inside a copy of the above image. Then I zipped the resulting images. The results:

Hidden Information	Size of Hidden Info	Size of Compressed Result
None (original picture)	0 KB	1646 KB
Gettysburg Address	1.4 KB	1648 KB
Declaration of Independence	9.1 KB	1652 KB
Dickens' Great Expectations	997 KB	2168 KB

So, you can notice a difference =).

Of course, this is a very hard test to do if you don't have an original picture, because different images compress differently. But you can generally notice if someone is trying to hide Great Expectations =).

Oh, and perhaps I didn't mention it, but of course, you can hide any type of file this way (because after all, all files are ultimately binary). Hiding Mr. Happy in:

(I know, we'd usually hide the Secret Plan in Mr. Happy, but the Secret Plan file is bigger, so stick with this), at quality 4 we'd get:

Yeah, it's noticeable but whatever. Given all the other random things happening in that picture, it doesn't look so off. If you use quality 1, 2, or 3 though usually you don't notice anything.

In any case, this was my first 'big' project in Python, which seems to be a really powerful language even though I only know about a quarter of its features. It may not be as powerful as C++, but it's probably a good choice for someone new to programming to learn.

Anyway, there are a bunch of improvements that you could probably make to the programs. The first is modularizing it and allowing to bypass the annoying input so you can do tests like the one above much more easily. Secondly, non-integer qualities would be nice too. Like, if I have lots of room, I should be able to set it to say 0.3. Since quality acts harmonically (1/n ish), there'd even be a considerable difference between 7.3 and 8. The nicest thing would be to figure out the best possible quality that takes advantage of the entire file - because only using the bottom n rows is pretty dumb. destegano should be able to figure out how large the file is by itself (although honestly, any self-respecting file type allows extra zero bytes at the end, so we could just choose the size of the steganograph). Also, it needs to be optimized a lot - hiding Great Expectations took quite a while. But for a quick hack, it's pretty nice.

If you actually bother getting it to work, have fun playing around with it and hiding files from other people. But that's all for now. Maybe next time I'll talk about laser beams or something.

Until then, ciao.

-squid out

Crocodilian scleroderma

crocodilian (adj.): belonging to the order of large reptiles, Crocodilia

scleroderma (n.): a chronic disease characterized by excessive deposits of collagen in the skin or other organs,

By the way, crocodiles are the closest living relatives to birds, since they both happened to evolve from dinosaurs.

Anyway, I felt like posting, so since I've been programming a bit of stegano stuff in Python recently, I think I'll move on from swords to steganography.

Steganography ('stegano' for short), for those who have no cryptography experience whatsoever, is probably best explained like this: Let's say you want to send a secret message to your friend, containing say, the word "crocodilian". This is known as the plaintext - it's the net information that you want to send to him. But the evil enemies want to know what you're sending to your friend too, and with their unlimited resources they can intercept the messager or mailman or telephone or e-mail or any other means of communication you can think of. So, naturally you encrypt it and turn it into ciphered text (often shortened to just ciphertext) by say, shifting every letter one letter forward: "dspdpejmjbo". Of course, your friend needs to know that everything is shifted one letter forward too, but presumably you arrange this ahead of time. Anyway, you now send this to your friend and it gets intercepted by the evil enemies. Now, the evil enemies notice something fishy - why would you bother sending your friend a string of gibberish letters like "dspdpejmjbo"? So, suspecting something, with their multi-million dollar budget they hire a crack team of researchers who manage to crack your code in a few years - and your secret has fallen!

Of course, one way to avoid this is to simply make the cipher trickier (two spaces forward!). But another way (and the way related to steganography), is to just not make them suspicious. We could do this, say, by making an English sentence where the first letter of every word corresponds to the letters in "dspdpejmjbo" - such as: "Do stupid peons derail planes entering jam made joyously by Olga?" When the evil enemies intercept this, they would, of course, find nothing unusual about the sentence and just let it pass through. After all, they can't spend a multi-million dollar budget analyzing every message that comes their way for hidden information.

So, in short, ciphering is hiding information; steganography is hiding the fact that you're hiding information.

Steganography is a pretty cool part of cryptography in that there are so many possible ways to do it. You might have noticed, that the sentence I constructed above is pretty fishy (i.e. they might eventually notice something was a bit peculiar about it). Also, even for a short sentence such as this one, you'd need almost an entire paragraph (if not more) to hide it all in that manner. So nowadays, most stegano stuff is done by hiding the information digitally in the insignificant layers of files.

Take the above black box, for example. If you copy it into Paint (or an equivalent) and play around with it for a while, you'll notice that it does contain the information "dspdpejmjbo". This is quite more subtle than "Do stupid peons derail planes entering jam made joyously by Olga?", since now you can hide a hidden message inside any block of uniform color. You can even hide the block too - you could include it surreptitiously at the bottom of a photograph or something.

But the evil enemies are getting smarter, and have just written a computer program that checks all picture files for blocks of uniform color, and then tries floodfilling the block with various colors to check for hidden text. So how do we get around them now? There's a very nice way to do this, but it is slightly more technical.

Of foremost importance is understanding how .bmp (or any other graphics extension of your choice, although they tend to be much more complex) files are stored. Luckily, with a hex editor it's not very hard to find out (if you don't know what a hex editor is, go learn to use a computer).

Open some arbitrary bitmap file (the one below, for example) in a hex editor.

If you do open it, you'll see lots and lots of bytes represented in hexadecimal. Of course, hexadecimal is always used because 16^2 is 2^8, so one byte goes to two hexadecimal characters. Similarly, ASCII ranges from 0-255 for the same reason; you can express one ASCII character with two hexadecimal characters or in one byte.

Now, if you're not used to hex cracking stuff, it'll probably look a little foreign. But if you play around, you should be able to figure out what most of the things are. For example, the first 2 bytes in a .bmp file are always "42 4D" - representing the ASCII "BM". This basically helps programs identify it is a bitmap (a nice trick is, if you are ever given a mystery file, open it in a hex editor and look at the first two bytes - they often identify the format of the file).

Then, bytes 3-6 denote the file size of the bitmap, in bytes (yes, there are only 4 bytes for this - we too hope that you don't feel like making a 4.3 GB bitmap file anytime in the near future). Now, if you look at the file size of something, you'll note that it's represented a bit oddly. By that I mean, they put the least significant bytes first.

What does that mean? It's basically akin to writing the number 7543 as 3457 - here the least significant digit, 3, appears first. Although, you don't need to worry about the bytes, so if you see "5E", that really means 5*16+14 = 94, not 14*16+5 = 229. Altogether, that means that something like "5E 26 00 00" actually represents the number 26*(16) + 5E = 9822 - not 24102, and definitely not 1579548672 (by the way, forgive the flipping between hexadecimal and decimal so often - only 26 and 5E are in hex there).

There's a lot more information encoded like this, like the length of the picture, the width of the picture, etc. However, we want to get to the interesting stuff - the actual picture. So skip ahead to byte A. This tells you the byte at which the actual image information starts. For my computer it's usually 36 - so the 54th byte. But it could change depending on the operating system, settings, the actual image, etc.

Now, you'll see familiar triplets of bytes - they encode the RGB values. So, if the 54th through 56th bytes are "00 FF 00" that means that the RGB of that pixel is "Red: 0, Green: 255, Blue: 0", so it's a green bit. (Actually, it's really the BGR values - the first "00" is the blue value - but we don't need to worry about this since we treat everything the same).

The observant person might have noticed that when I said "that pixel", I never really specified what pixel I was talking about. Now, you might intelligently assume that the first pixel would be the pixel in the top-left corner - but you'd be wrong. After all, if you look at the image, the pixel in the top left corner is cyan, not green. So hmm...

For some reason (hey, don't ask me) bitmaps represent the picture data from the bottom up - so the first pixel is actually the bottom-left corner. Then the next pixels are all along the bottom-most row, then they proceed to the second bottom-most row, etc. all the way to the top row.

Of course, that's not nearly annoying enough. To make things even better, they force the width to be a multiple of 4 - so you'll find that if you have 6 pixels in a row, you'll see the RGB's for those 6 pixels, followed by 2 "00 00 00"s.

Luckily, none of this matters to us, since we just want to hide "dspdpejmjbo" in the data. The first step is to translate that to an equivalent hex string: "6473706470656A6D6A626F00". Now, we're going to break up that hex string into triplets of characters: "647 370 647 065 6A6 D6A 626 F00"

Now what do we do? Well, consider the R hex value for some random pixel, say "A2". Now, this represents a red value of 162. Now, if we changed it to say, "A6", you probably couldn't tell the difference. But if we changed it to something like "62", you probably could - the red value has changed by 64.

We call the "2" the least significant bit (although it's really 4 bits, but shh). We basically are just going to replace the last 4 bits with one bit from our message. So for example, if our first pixel was "A2 B3 C4" it would get changed to "A6 B4 C7", since our first triplet is "647".

And when we do that, the new picture is:

Now, our message wasn't very large, so all of it managed to hide in the bottom row. You can notice the steganography in paint, since we are doing +/- 16 shifts to the color values. But nevertheless, it's a pretty nice way of hiding information. And I bet the evil enemies wouldn't suspect anything!

I'm going to go play Halo 3 with somebody now, so I'll stop now, but I'll post more about this later - like my program that automates the process, how you can actually detect stegano, and how to hide pictures within pictures.

Until then, ciao.

-squidout