I am back on Saddening Goat, and I am quite pleased. The prolonged absence has made me weak inside, so I can't wait to jump back on my warhorse of ranting.
Anyways, on to my first official topic: the Crosby vs. Ovechkin debate.
For those of you who are shamelessly uneducated, Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin are the hottest commodities in the National Hockey League. You could say, in terms of impact they are the Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux of hockey today. Now, Sidney has showed himself to be the better of the two players over the past two years. Yet now, with Sid the Kid on the sidelines for up to two months with a nasty high ankle sparin, the NHL's media machine will be focusing on Alex the Gr8: and he has not dissapointed.
Tonight, he had his SECOND 5 point game, and 4 goal game of the season. The only reaction one can have to this is "WHY DIDN'T YOU SCORE THE FIFTH ONE!!!". Not to mention that both came in Montreal and Ottawa, two of the toughest cities to play in as an away team. The man just loves to score goals: he celebrates as though he has won the cup (some may argue that he may have to do this for a long time, seeing as how his ridiculous 13 year, 150 mil dollar contract will limit the Capitals from even buying the most basic assets). But more importantly, he's showing that its not just Sid's world. Tonight he has resumed the leader position in the NHL scoring race, and mind you, I wouldn't be surprised if he stayed there for the rest of the season.
The only question is: how long can he keep this up. Players like Sidney come once every 30 years, where the level of dedication and passion for the game is unparralled. Players like Ovechkin though, have come and gone. Look no further than the immensely talented, but unmotivated Jaromir Jagr. One year he can rip through 82 games a season: in the other, he can simply rest back and explore the realm of two digit negative numbers on his stat sheet (of course I am reffering to his +/- stats).
So members of Saddening Goat, I ask you: Who do you think is the greater hockey player? I leave you with YouTube links, that can help give you a better understanding of the debate.
Ovechkin:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=eorWhtV9Aqk
Crosby:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Egt-nwZ6Ym8
Next time, I'll probably bring up the Lemieux vs. Gretzky controversy.
-Amir
January 31, 2008
Crosby vs. Ovechkin: A new twist?
affray, altercation, argument, battle, clash, disorder, dispute, feud, fight, fray...
Brawl has been released in Japan!
Though I somewhat doubt that anyone in Japan has actually beaten the entire game yet, as it seems as though unlocking everything would take a very very long time, they have told those of us in North America who still have to wait more than a month a few things. Firstly, they have released most, if not all, of the playable characters in the game. They are
You can click on their names to go to the Wikipeida pages on them, in case you happen not to know who they are. Basically, the most unknown are:
Toon Link, who may not actually be called Toon Link in English, but is Link from Legend of Zelda, animated in Wind Waker style. Some have said that he's actually animated in Four Swords/Minish Cap style, so I can't be sure, and I haven't been able to find any videos with him in them, so I guess we will just have to wait. I also wonder what Nintendo will call him.
Wolf O'Donnell, is the head of Star Wolf (what an inventive name), in Star Fox. The only Star Fox game that I've really played is Star Fox Adventures for Gamecube, and he wasn't in that to the best of my knowledge, but Wikipedia says that he exists, so I assume that he does.
R.O.B. was a random accessory for the NES. It was very funny, but also fairly useless, as I believe only 2 games were made that were compatible with it, and both were pretty bad. I remember that it came out as an enemy in the Subspace Emissary, and I was wondering what it would do, but as a playable character, I am hoping that Nintendo didn't make a big stupid mistake.
Lucario, for those of you who, like me, haven't played Pokémon since the times of Pokémon Blue, Red, and Yellow, is a fighting/steel Pokémon. I know that there were Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee that were fighting Pokémon, but what kind of type is steel?
The rest, you should know. If not, you should go play more video games. On that note, today is the last day of WEMass. I hope you all had a great holiday. Despite all the homework I had, I know I did. You can read Tim Buckley's WEMass story that starts here, but it's not extremely interesting. I did notice, however, that it's funny how the god of RTS games looks like this, as in my experience, big RTS gamers look more like this. That's BoxeR, by the way.
As it has been a while, I decided to come up with a fifth logic puzzle! Good luck!
The five Saddening Goat writers (obviously, I am not including Jaysen, though I wonder if I should have even kept Amir) decided to stand in a line and make random statements for fun. They started in the following order, and labeled their positions:
A - Josh, B - Jon, C - Aaron, D - Cindy, E - Amir
It just so happens that in the world of Saddening Goat, telling the truth is strictly prohibited. Therefore, every time someone told the truth, they got eliminated, and everyone to the right of them moved one position to their left. Also, prior to making their first statements, they all decided to cover themselves in big black bags for fun, so that it was not clear who was who. The writers then made the following statement, by position:
A - I am telling the truth.
B - Aaron is not telling the truth.
C - Cindy is telling the truth.
D - Josh is telling the truth.
E - Jon lies.
One was then eliminated, and the people to the right of them moved one position to the left, then everyone made more statements:
A - Cindy was telling the truth in the last statement that she made.
B - I have not yet moved from position B.
C - The person at position A is telling the truth.
D - I am not Cindy.
One was eliminated again, the necessary people moved, then more statements were made:
A - The person in position B is about to lie!
B - I just moved from position C to here.
C - The person in position A is lying.
Again, one was eliminated, then the final two made statements:
A - The person next to me is about to lie.
B - I am Cindy.
One of the two was then eliminated. Who remained?
Cela, c'est tout ce que j'ai a dire pour le moment, alors à la prochaine!
EDIT: I have thought of two more things to say that aren't really enough for a post, so I'll just add them here.
Firstly, the sonic stage in Brawl is Green Hill Zone. I thought that that was funny, considering the music they have released for it is the Angel Island Zone music. Nevertheless, it looks pretty cool. Secondly, I searched "Saddening Goat" on Google to see what would come up, and the sixth result was this... I have no clue what this is... or why it exists... but I thought I would open it up to interpretation, for fun. Anyway, ttyl!
Being SAD
"Seasonal affective disorder (SAD), also known as winter depression, is an affective, or mood, disorder. Most SAD sufferers experience normal mental health throughout most of the year, but experience depressive symptoms in the winter or summer. The condition in the summer is often referred to as Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder." (Wikipedia)
Now, I can't imagine feeling depressed because of the summer weather, but I've definitely noticed that as the days start shorter and the night stretch longer, people's moods generally tend to get worse. Also, quite a witty acronym, no?
I think most people have SAD to a certain degree, though not enough to drive them to medication and suicide - just a general feeling of gloominess. Take me for instance - generally happy, but January sucked. Nothing particularly bad happened, but if you were to ask me "how's life?" I'd say "life sucks". Quite annoying.
Of course, there is a cure.
In these lamps.
Though if I had to sit for an hour in front of these lamps each day...well, it's not exactly a mood-enhancer, and using the hour to think about my situation may even make me more depressed.
How about we collide a large asteroid with Earth, and change its tilt to zero so that we can enjoy the same amount of sunlight all year? What an idea!
***
One day, back in 2003 when I was using Yahoo! mail, I got invited randomly to this website's mailing list: World Science.
It has tons of interesting scientific news, finds, and breakthroughs. Like this story about how Christopher Columbus may have brought syphilis to the New World...hmmmm....
***
Reading Ctrl+Alt+Del lately, starting with the first one. Working slowly, now I'm up to summer 2006. Yes, it's good :)
That's all for now.
Cindy
January 29, 2008
Anandrous piperidine
anandrous (adj.): Destitute of stamens, as in certain female flowers
piperidine (n.): an organic compound with the molecular formula C5H11N. It is a heterocyclic amine with a six-membered ring containing five carbon atoms and one nitrogen atom. It is a clear liquid with a pepper-like odor.
So. I would post now, but I don't feel like writing lots of stuff like usual. So instead I will:
a. Give you another random news story
Hurray for bureaucracy!
b. The twenty-second "song"
Hmm, I actually wrote this. FL Studio 6 is pretty funny. And it's not much of a song - more like random very bad breakbeat stuff that sounds eerily like a Mario Kart level at the end.
I should actually learn to use FL Studio 6. As mentioned above, it's pretty funny. Maybe I'll try to add more onto whatever is there right now.
And a word of advice, if Josh tells you to compose something, you probably shouldn't listen to him. Even if you're pretty bored.
Until next time, ciao.
-squidout
January 27, 2008
Diffluent petrosomatoglyph
diffluent (adj.): Flowing apart or off; dissolving; not fixed.
petrosomatoglyph (n.): an image of parts of an animal or human body incised in rock.
Well, I don't have much to say again. Petrosomatoglyph also happens to be Greek-based, but if you want, look up the roots yourself this time (if you have a decent vocabulary, you probably know them, actually). So, first some random news (shamelessly stolen off the Google feed):
Apparently, at least in some parts of the world, snail mail is now as slow as snails. Of course, this isn't too surprising, when you take into account some parcels are lost and never delivered - and thus much slower than snails. This is probably also a pretty isolated case - but even if snail mail isn't quite as slow as snails, it's still pretty... slow.
There have been some UFO sightings in Texas, and the Air Force claims that the UFOs were actually jets. Nevertheless, given the general mentality of people, there's definitely going to be a spike in conspiracy theories for a while. In fact, MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) - which coincidentally has a site that looks like a practical joke, but I am assured is quite real - already thinks there's a conspiracy involved, and says that if they were really jets, the Air Force should send them to fly around Texas again! Even despite the fact that the Air Force mission was apparently clandestine to some extent ("What we do down there falls under operational procedures that cannot be released because of operations security for our mission"), I very much doubt the Air Force would repeat this exercise (or whatnot) just for the sake of MUFON =).
Obama won the South Carolina primary last night. Not at all surprising, considering that South Carolina has one of the biggest black voter populations (but of course, race doesn't matter in politics).
The name of the 22nd James Bond movie will be "Quantum of Solace", again starring Craig. Hopefully there'll actually be some action, this time.
Wikinews has crosswords, by the way. Considering I can actually do them, they seem to be pretty easy, but whatever.
Okay, enough random news. I think I'll also talk about blogs now.
So, Josh talked a bit about blogs yesterday. Mainly about proper blogging/commenting conduct. And indeed, there's a lot written/understood about such etiquette.
But some of what Josh posted is pretty misleading. Especially "if you ask questions about something answered in the blog post, it means that you either didn't read well, or are questioning the author's credibility, both of which you are not supposed to do".
Questioning the author's credibility is perfectly fine. In fact, it's desired. Go ahead, and challenge our credibility. That leads to good conversation.
Secondly, lurking isn't so bad. You can't honestly expect everyone to reply to all blog/forum posts they read - that would take way too long, and most of the replies would probably be rather pointless. Of course, replies are good - if you have something meaningful to say, please go ahead and comment! But it's much preferred that if you only have inane things to say, keep them to yourself.
Thirdly, don't worry too much if your comment is inane or not. Chances are, if it's logically consistent, not horribly grammar-ed, and not something oversaid and meaningless like "LOL", "wow...", "wtf?!", etc. it's good. Comments aren't supposed to be blog posts in themselves - they can really be as short as "The link to
And trolling is pretty unavoidable, so it's probably going to happen. But it happens on practically every blog/forum, and it's usually just moderated away one way or another. Boing Boing had a funny method for dealing with trolls a while ago - disemvowelment.
And bleh, the Latex server died (go look at the monism bruit post). I'll have to find some more reliable server for it.
Anyway, that's all for now. Oh, and if I go to Indiana in March I get a free $250, but that's another story. Until then, ciao.
-squidout
Hypercatalectic Mucro
hypercatalectic - Line (of poetry) possessing an extra syllable after the last, normal foot of the meter. Such lines can also be known as hypermetrical or extrametrical.
mucro - a sharp abrupt terminal point.
I didn't put in an interjection this time, because I don't think that my usual random word generator has enough to put one in the title of every post for very long, thus, I will save the uncommon interjections for when I deem them necessary.
Anyway, I decided to talk about blogs today, as I think the topic is very relevant. According to Wikipedia, a blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. I was wondering how I would define a blog before going to Wikipedia, and, I must say, I didn't think that the reverse chronological display of posts was a blog's most defining feature, but then again, with the many different types of blogs that exist today (even podcasts are types of blogs, apparently), maybe the ordering of posts is the only thing that they all have in common. To give you an idea of what I mean, here are some examples of what is considered a "blog."
- The micro-blog, a blog in which each post is generally under 200 characters. These blogs are very convenient for those who have nothing better to do while they travel home from school on the subway, for instance, and happen to have a cellphone with text-messaging with them. While many different sites exist for making micro-blogs, the most commonly used today is the "my status" feature of Facebook.
- The macroblog is a blog that can be edited by any member of its community. Some are restricted to certain groups of people, and some can be edited by anyone. I don't see the difference between a macroblog and a wiki, but apparently they are very different things.
- MP3 blogs, a blog that has only songs, and a couple sentences explaining them, for posts.
- Vlogs, a blog that has videos as posts. They have many vlog-resembling series of movies on YouTube.
- Of course, podcasts (if you don't click anything, they are displayed in reverse chronological order on iTunes. I checked).
- Photoblogs, in which each post is 1000 words long (hurray for lame jokes).
- Spam blogs, blogs created by people with nothing better to do, that have many links and random commonly-searched words on them, in hopes that their blog will come up often in search engine results.
blog lurker - a lurker is a person who reads discussions on a blog or other interactive system like chat room or forum, but rarely participates by contributing their comments.
I wonder if the person who came up with this name played Starcraft. They also have names for those who comment far too much, or make useless comments, but their names aren't even worth mentioning. Anyway, apparently there exists a commenting etiquette, that states that unless you comment often on blogs that you actively read, but only say productive (or non-spam) things, you are doing something wrong. There is even a scale of how bad some things are to do. For instance, if you ask questions about something answered in the blog post, it means that you either didn't read well, or are questioning the author's credibility, both of which you are not supposed to do, and thus it is very high on the rudeness scale. Answering rhetorical questions, and posting comments that are fewer than 4 words long are also very bad. However, reading three posts when they are published (aka not ones from far back in the blog's archive) and not commenting on them is bad too. I would give the link to the site with this scale, as it was rather funny, but I lost the link due to a power outage. I'll try to find it later.
Also, happy Winter-een-mass! May you find happiness in all the games you play. I celebrated today by playing a fair number of hours of Sonic 3, Guitar Hero 3, and Super Mario Galaxy, among others, and hope you are having fun celebrating as well. If you really want to get into the holiday spirit, but don't feel like gaming at the moment, some of these are pretty funny, especially the Angry Video Game Nerd movies, despite the great use of unnecessary vulgarity. Also, Tim Buckley from Ctrl-Alt-Del has started a WEMass story , so you should check it out too. You may want to read previous WEMass arcs to understand some of it, though. Especially who all the gods of gaming are.
I think that I will now end this post, because I feel like it. A plus tard.
January 25, 2008
Wirra! Bathypelagic picrate
Wirra - An interjection used to express sorrow or anxious concern
Bathypelagic - Of, relating to, or living in the depths of the ocean, especially in the area between about 600 and 3,000 meters deep.
Picrate - A salt or an ester of picric acid (a 2,4,6-trinitrophenol). The picrate ion has yellow color.
Launched in March 2007, Bloons by Ninja Kiwi was an instant hit. According to Stehpen, its creator, the reason for this is simple: "popping balloons is fun." Basically, the idea of Bloons is that you are a monkey, trying to destroy the evil balloons with your friends, the darts. The controls are simple too: you aim by pointing your mouse where you want to go, and click! The longer you hold down the mouse button, the more power you put into your throw. Each level, you are given a certain number of darts, and a number of balloons that you have to kill, and then throw away!
Unfortunately, popping balloons gets more difficult as the levels progress because of various obstacles. These include:
- The bouncy block, a black block that makes your darts bounce off of them.
- The metal block, a block that stops your dart in its tracks.
- The ice balloon, a balloon that, when hit, makes all balloons within a 2-balloon radius turn. into ice and be indestructable, unless you have a
- Bomb balloon, a balloon that, when hit, blows up your dart and everything around it (except metal walls, of course).
There are 50 levels to Bloons, and many of them near the end can take a while if you're newer to the game, so if you are going to play it, leave yourself some time. The game can be found here. I played just before writing this article, and in about 25 minutes, I beat the game with the following scores:
- Pop Me 100%
- Pop Me 2 72.7% (Although easy to beat, it is very difficult to get 100% in this one).
- Surprise 92.6%
- Triangles 95.6%
- Starburst 100%
- The Iron Curtain 97.6%
- Dart from above 92.3 %
- Holy Moley! 100%
- Boing 100%
- Parallel 100%
- Tack-tile 100%
- Arc 97.7%
- Reservoir 95.6%
- Maze 100%
- One in a hundred 77%
- Boomer 89.2%
- Shapes 100%
- Chain Reaction 100%
- Light the fuse 100%
- Loopy 100%
- Throwback 100%
- Round-a-bout 82.7%
- Ouchie 75.9%
- Monsta 100%
- Demolition 100%
- 2 Paths 90.5%
- Bouncy 43.6%
- Big Ball 94.1%
- Air Raid 100%
- Ice Bounce 93.8%
- The Cell 91.3%
- Backwards Glance 62.5%
- Danger! 66.7%
- Igloos 100%
- Fuggetaboudit 100%
- Chalice 97.4%
- Pacatak 100%
- Bouncebomb 88%
- Lockdown 100%
- Ice Cave 49.2%
- Myriad 100%
- Chilly Chips 67.9%
- D in the D 95.3%
- Showertime 100%
- Not So Hot 74%
- Ears 68.4%
- Bloon of Damacles 93.8%
- The Matrix 100%
- Wrong Side 100%
- The End 100%
200 more levels of Bloons fun! The levels near the ends of the Player Packs get tricky, though, so watch out! Once you have completed these, you should be prepared for Bloons World! In Bloons World, you can make your own Bloons levels, and play those of other people! I made a few levels, but they aren't very good. Maybe I'll work on some more later.
Pretty much the only problem with Bloons is the various glitches in it. You can often throw darts into or through bouncy walls, or have them slide between frozen balloons, and if you throw them hard enough at a wall, you can generally pop the balloon right passed it (this could be very helpful at level 30, if you're having difficulty with it). I personally don't mind the glitches, though, because sometimes they can be pretty helpful, and they're often not that annoying anyway.
Some of the other games at ninjakiwi.com are pretty fun too, so you should check them out. That's all I have to say for now, so ttyl, and let's hope that Saddening Goat's second 50 posts (beginning with this one) are even better than the first 50! Our current number of viewers per day is 12.9, so I think we should set a goal of, say, 20 viewers per day on average by the 100th post. Bon week-end, et à la prochaine!
January 23, 2008
Don't Try This At Home
Mythbusters is definitely my favourite TV show. These two guys, Adam Savage (the redhead) and Jamie Hyneman (the one with the 'stach and beret), get to do all sorts of crazy things in the name of science. The premise of the show is using scientific methods to try and validate or bust various urban legends, and 2008 is its 5th year running. Nice!
Last episode I watched, they revisited the previously busted myth that you can fool speed cameras by pure speed. Fans of the show get to send in their opinions, and by popular demand they decided to do the myth again.
This time, they got a race car with a GIGANTIC JET ENGINE strapped on the back, and with 245 miles/hour of PURE SPEED they managed to bypass the speed camera. Coolest job ever! They also do smaller scale stuff, like Mentos and coke (do NOT eat them together), but of course the coolest stuff are large scale. Like once they wanted to try the seven paper fold myth (can you fold a piece of paper in half more than seven times?). They had to rent an airplane hanger, use 17 gigantic rolls of paper, and spent the entire day folding paper, but eventually they folded the paper 11 times. Conclusion: you can fold a sheet of paper more than 7 times, it just takes technique and size.
Anyway, watch an episode if you can, there's lots more cool experiments: here's the schedule. It's on the Discovery Channel.
Yeah, if I ever get a male dog, I'm naming him Buster :)
***
2 posts ago Josh talked about the golden ratio in the work of Da Vinci. That reminded me of a book I read last year (albeit for a school assignment) on the presence of math everywhere, including stuff about the golden ratio, why honeycombs are hexagonal, and a lot on how math is innately programmed into animals. The book is called The Math Instinct: Why You're a Mathematical Genius (Along with Lobsters, Birds, Cats, and Dogs), and it's by Keith Devlin. That guy's written many other books on math too, so check them out if you're interested.
One book that caught my eye when I was searching for the author just now was one on the Millenium Problems, because it was in a question on Reach for the Top at this week's practice (life is full of coincidences). The Millennium Prize Problems are seven mathematical problems that were given by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000; six problems are still unsolved. A correct solution to each problem is rewarded with $1,000,000 (the Millennium Prize) from the institute. I don't see myself solving any of these, or even coming close, but they are quite interesting.
***
I do believe this is the 50th post in Saddening Goat (without Jaysen's posts, anyway). So, YAY!
Till next time,
Cindy
Smash news old and new.
So just to start I'd like to welcome Cindy as our first female contributor. Now on to older news. http://www.joystiq.com/2008/01/21/nintendo-accidentally-confirms-lucario-ness-jigglypuff-for-bra/ Due to a Nintendo slip up in a Japanese commercial 3 characters have been released. How they missed this is beyond me but i don't care because of the second piece of news. Though rather old Nintendo delayed the North American brawl release. Now I'm not terribly upset by the delay, rather I'm upset because I will be in Israel for the week of its release. and because this is the week of the March break I won't get to play until a much later date.
Thats really all for today, I have a Civics summative due tomorow,
so this is Aaron signing out
January 22, 2008
Hey You
Hello readers!
I'm happy to say that I have joined the contributing team here at Saddening Goat, so look forward to my first post, to come in the very near future :)
Cindy
January 21, 2008
Semirigid quadrat
Semirigid - having a form maintained by a rigid internal structure as well as by internal gas pressure
Quadrat - a rectangular sampling plot used for ecological or population studies.
This morning, someone sent me a cool logic problem that I liked, so I decided to post it here. Unfortunately, I can't take credit for it, but I can't source it either, since I don't know where it's from. Anyway, here it is:
Hints:
- 10g of dynomite is being used on the tallest of the hills.
- 12g of dynomite is to be used at either 8:30am or 9:30am
- Clairvoy-ant, who did not use the least or most explosive, did not live up to his name as he didn't predict that his hill would be exactly 25cm shorter than the hill due to be blown sky high at 10:30am
- 5g of dynomite is to be used before Unimport-ant demolishs his hill wich will be half an hour after Complain-ant.
- Refriger-ant's hill is exactly 15cm shorter than the hill to be blown up at 11:00am, but he is using less dynomite than the hill to be blown up at 10:30am
- Predomin-ant's hill is due to be blown up exactly one hour after the hill that is being blown up by 8g of dynomite.
As I spent a fair portion of last weekend searching through and downloading random music, though mostly video game music (hmm, that sounds really lame... oh well), I decided to waste the time of my fellow gamers and readers of Saddening Goat by sending them the link of a site my friend showed me too! It's pretty good, as it has most popular video game music, and it also has many themes from animés, if you're into that. Just go here, and search through the column on the left. The only problem with it is that some of the songs were either poorly ripped off of NES or gameboy games directly, which made them mutated, and have pretty bad sound quality, or very altered from their original versions. For instance, those of you who have played Mario Power Tennis for gamecube will know that this is not exactly how the main theme goes, though it does start out correctly.
I think I will end my post here, as I have no more that I urgently need to say. By the way, I think that this more or less sums up what I was saying the other day. Next time, I will discuss the Bloons franchise/series/whatever you want to call it, so you should all educate yourselves here so that you will know what I'm talking about. A la prochaine!
January 20, 2008
Brachypterous glucosuria
brachypterous (adj.): having short wings
glucosuria (n.): an abnormal condition of osmotic diuresis due to excretion of glucose by the kidneys.
Funnily enough, you can actually tell what 'brachypterous' means from random dinosaur trivia. Pterosaurs are flying dinosaurs (dinosaurs with wings). The brachiosaurus is pretty well known for its giraffe-like neck, but its name actually comes from the fact that its forearms/forelimbs were larger than its hindarms/hindlimbs. Since practically all dinosaurs are named in Greek, you can then guess that 'ptero' has to do with wings, and 'brachy' has to do with arms or limbs, 'brachypterous' would mean something like 'arm wings' or short wings.
Or at least that's my explanation; I'm no etymologist though. For reference, the Greek term for wing is πτερον (pteron) and the Greek term for arm is βραχιων (brachion). Not surprisingly, Greek for lizard is sauros/σαυρος - and interestingly, this is where Sauron from Lord of the Rings comes from (it happens that Tolkien is a much better etymologist than me, knowing some dozen of ancient languages). Also, people usually call pterosaurs 'pterodactyls'. I'm not sure why this is, since apparently δάκτυλος (dáktulos) is finger, so pterodactyl is "wing finger". Although pterodactyls do have talons, and there is probably something important about their fingers. Much more random, in my opinion, is the fact that a dactyl is also a verse in poetry. Personally, I find it strange that they would name a meter of poetry after a body part, nevertheless a finger.
(Edit: Apparently, according to Wikipedia, other things in poetry are also randomly named after body parts. Besides for the basic unit of a meter being a 'foot', you'll also see other words like 'dibrach', 'tribrach', etc.)
In any case, apparently I promised a mostly non-technical post today. Unfortunately, I do not really have any interesting non-technical thing that I feel especially like talking about. So, I think I'll just go off on random tangents all over the place.
First up, the TCHS Qualifying Round 2 yesterday was surprisingly simple. So, soon I'll get some T-shirt that looks something like http://www.topcoder.com/i/tournament/tchs08current.png. I assume it will, at least - I haven't actually gotten an e-mail from them. In any case, next week's round is probably the more crucial one, since they only take 50 people. Even though I'm routinely placing in the top 50ish now, it's far from guaranteed that I'll advance.
But I haven't been to Indiana yet, so hopefully I do advance =) (the automatic $250+ is a pretty nice incentive too). Now, maybe I should say something about urban sprawl. Some people seem to think that urban sprawl is environmentally or economically deadly or something along those lines, but honestly, more ecological damage is probably done by strip mining or logging operations, and there is market demand for it (hell, that demand seems to be driving a good part of Toronto's economy right now...) so it can't be that bad for the economy, as long as it doesn't escalate too badly and cause some housing bubble to burst or likewise. Honestly, "smart growth" plans are probably worse for the economy (and perhaps, the environment) than laissez-faire. I'm not really sure how to prevent urban sprawl from escalating out of control, but some market-based incentive strategy probably has a better chance of working than direct government intervention. Plans involving direct government intervention have a pretty good record of going askew...
Of course, you'd have to be rather insane to actually seriously listen to my very inexperienced random hypotheses on how to deal with such a problem. I expect there are at least three dozen important factors I have not taken at all into consideration. You'd have to be even more insane to actually ask me to solve such a problem, with my limited worldly experience. Alas, such tends to happen surpisingly often at school.
Diogenes is a pretty cool person, if only for his cynical James Bond style wit (although he most definitely wouldn't want to be compared to Bond). There are a bunch of amusing anecdotes about him - look them up sometime if you get bored. After all, what can you expect from someone who lives in a tub?
It's recently come to my attention that many video game characters like transforming into spheres (or, are already very spherelike):
Maybe Kirby doesn't count, but he is very ball-like. And his rock form in the original Kirby game was also a ball (a circle actually - 2D).
This is just taking well known ones. Of course, there's AiAi and Meemee and everyone else from Super Monkey Ball (even though they're sort of inside balls). There's even Super Mario Ball...
Perhaps we can come to the conclusion that graphics artists are lazy when they can be lazy =).
This also came up when I was searching for all those above pictures. Apparently, there's also one with a rabbit - the mouse, of course, is more accurate.
I'm drawing a blank now, so I think I'll stop here. Until next time, ciao.
-squidout
PS: Hmmm... (maximize)
January 18, 2008
Topmost Preempt
Topmost - at or nearest to the top; "the uppermost book in the pile"; "on the topmost step"
Preempt - a bid in contract bridge whose primary function is to take up bidding space from the opponents. A preemptive bid is usually made by jumping, i.e. skipping one or more bidding levels.
Recently, many news articles have come out regarding the Mona Lisa. Apparently, writing by Leonardo da Vinci in the margin of a library book confirmed that it is a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant. An article on it can be found here.
Generally, I wouldn't care about this. In fact, I still don't care. But, while searching through recent pictures of the day on Wikipedia, I came across the picture to the left. It was accompanied by an article that said that the discovery of the Mona Lisa using the golden ratio leads many to believe that Leonardo often employed the golden ratio in his art. Maybe in a few years, we will find Da Vinci's algebra work in the margins of a library book as well.
On the note of logic puzzles (I don't have any more yet, don't worry), I think that the last one was a bit wierd, because it was pretty much impossible to know if you had the correct answer or not. Even I didn't, according to Jon's program. Regarding Jon's program, I guess my attempts to make a problem that he could not solve with an algorithm failed, though I did force him to find out how to implement genetic algorithms! Next time, I think I will try to make one that is both a challenge to solve algorithmically, and a good logic puzzle to solve normally. Maybe I'll have it by Sunday, but tomorrow is round two of the TCHS tournament, which I will hopefully do well in again! I want a t-shirt!
On a musical note (wow, I actually didn't intend that pun), today my friend introduced me to a good site for downloading video game music. From discussing it with a few friends, I realized that there is a great discrepancy over which songs from the Sonic the Hedgehog series were the best. Overall, I realised, the best songs seem to be the songs for the first stages in each game. These include:
Angel Island Zone from Sonic 3 (you might recognize this from a Super Smash Brothers Brawl update a few weeks ago. I think I mentioned it in a post as well.)
Emerald Hill Zone from Sonic 2
Green Hill Zone from Sonic 1
There were, of course, some other good ones, like the Sonic 3 special stage song, but for the most part the songs were from the beginnings of games. Maybe SEGA decided that since some players would only get through the first few levels, they should put all the good music there so that those people still get a good impression of the game... or something like that. Anyway, analysis aside, I like Sonic songs.
Recently apple announced their new MacBook Air. It's thin. Very thin. If you don't know about it, you should probably get into the loop (unlike Wally here). Anyway, I have a few reasons for which I don't like this. Likely, many will have the completely opposite opinion, but that is fine - the MacBook Air was probably intended for someone. Anyway, first there is the obvious problem of the operating system. Despite my dislike of Vista, I don't really like macs either. Maybe I'll get into detail some other time. Second, and more importantly, I think that the fact that it is so thin is stupid.
Likely, a thin computer would be very easy to transport, and many people would buy it for this reason. I don't see why anyone would buy a MacBook Air when they could buy any other computer with better specs. Unless they are going to be bringing it on airplanes or trains, or some such thing. Or sending it in those brown envelopes that look like this that Apple keeps advertising them inside (if anyone actually does this, I hope it is because they are returning it to the manufacturer). Anyway, most people would not get a MacBook Air just to use at home. Yet, to use a CD with it, you have to have another computer with you that does have a CD drive for it to read the CDs from, or attach an external CD drive to it. That seems convenient when on an airplane! While one could argue that you could do work on an airplane without any CDs, that may be true, but I think that many more people watch DVDs or play games (I once had two people in front of me playing a game of Age ofEmpires 2 over an Ethernet cable on a plane) when they are flying. And those who are buying their computers for work, once again, should probably buy computers that have more hard drive space and RAM and such.
Wow, I don't know whether that made much sense... but whatever. Anyway, I'm going to go for now. Maybe I'll post again tomorrow. I can't predict the future. In any case, salut!
The liberty...
of deleting all of Jaysen's posts has been taken by me. The authors of Saddening Goat had the misconception that with him as an author, our readership would increase, but we were disappointingly disappointed. We sincerely hope that Jaysen's future posts will be of a standard acceptable to Saddening Goat.
Sincerely, Me.
Also, I'll post something later today, as I have quite a few things that I want to discuss, but at the moment am fairly busy. Happy reading, and invite friends!
Aaron am be speak words.
This is really just a mockery of how Jaysen/"boojum" fails at checking that his sentences have any structure; If you are reading this Jaysen be warned. the grammar police are on your case. additionally not everyone that reads this blog is a UTS student and therefore when references are made to teachers and their habits not everyone will understand. please consider what I've said for future posts.
January 17, 2008
Yet another video game post....
no special science words like Jon, no logic puzzles like josh, and no... I don't even know what Amir posts. To break directly to the point, smash bros has been delayed a week for japan AND a month for Canada and the USA. at this point I might usually be swearing my head off but I figure this is a family friendly blog so I wont. Why Nintendo why must you punish us. we don't want a perfect game because that leaves no room for improvement we only want something new. I don't have much else to say however I accept any comments and i immediately respond (and tend to argue) so send in what you think and I'll get a smash related poll up on the page.
January 16, 2008
Executory argentite
As usual, better version at http://writer.zoho.com/public/rekamyenom/Executory-argentite1
executory (adj.): (Law) something not yet performed or done (i.e, an executory contract).
argentite (n.): a valuable silver ore consisting of silver sulfide (Ag2S)
So, I implemented the genetic algorithm for the logic problem 4. And it works well. Really well, actually. In fact, it beat me.
When I first looked at logic problem 4, I tried solving it by hand. Pretty quickly, after 2 or 3 minutes, I got this solution:
_ _ _ D D _
_ _ _ A _ _
C _ B _ _ _
_ A A D _ B
_ _ _ D A _
There were 13 units in this one. And it turned out that this was the 'correct' answer - to the extent that when I compared with Josh, he said he got the same answer.
And then I started to try to solve it with my computer. By pruning. That turned out to be ugly (see last post). So I decided to use a genetic algorithm - which was pretty risky, since they usually aren't all too good. But I did implement it (it didn't take very long, surprisingly), and it returned this 12 unit solution:
_ _ _ D C _
_ _ _ _ _ _
C _ B _ _ _
C A _ _ _ B
_ _ D A _ _
And by increasing the batch size a bit more, it even found an 11 unit solution:
_ _ _ D _ _
_ _ _ _ D _
_ D _ _ A _
Onto how the program works (you can see the code on the side bar at the right). We start with a population of 50 'species'. Each species has one chromosome - a string of 36 characters, that describes a possible solution to the puzzle (one character per square). There are 5 possibilities (bases) for each character - "A", "B", "C", "D", which are what they say, and "X", which denotes an empty square.
Each species has a fitness value, calculated by how well it solves the puzzle. For example, the less units a species uses, the higher its fitness value - but if its solution results in some of our units being killed, the fitness drops. I believe the fitness formula I used was 5*enemyKills-20*ourKills-nUnits (where enemyKills is the number of enemies we've killed, ourKills is the number of our own casualties, and nUnits is the number of units we've used). This just seemed like it would filter the characteristics I want - but it would probably do a lot better with a bit of tuning.
Anyway, the fitness value of each species is calculated. Then the species sexually reproduce. Two parents are chosen from the current population of species, and they create two children. Species with a higher fitness level are more likely to be chosen as parents (whether a certain species is chosen as a parent or not is determined with a uniform tournament selection with p=0.2 - again this should probably be tuned) The children's chromosomes are determined by a crossover method on the parents two chromosomes. For example, if the parents' chromosomes (just for demonstration purposes - the actual chromosomes only have 5 bases, remember) were:
Parent 1's chromosome: "HELLOIAMACHROMOSOME".
Parent 2's chromosome: "OHHNOWHEREISTHECAKE".
A crossover point would now be determined randomly - say, after the 7th character:
Pieces:
"HELLOIA"
"MACHROMOSOME"
"OHHNOWH"
"EREISTHECAKE"
And these pieces combine to form new, different chromosomes:
"HELLOIAEREISTHECAKE"
"OHHNOWHMACHROMOSOME"
And these are the chromosomes of the children. The parents then die, the children grow up, and the cycle repeats - for 100 generations, in my program.
There is another important step in the middle of all that though - genetic mutation.
The idea is that crossover promotes genetic diversity, while natural selection maintains the quality of the species. This causes the overall species of a fitness to increase. A good analogy is that you are an ant looking for the tallest point on some 'mountain':
Every turn, the ant looks around and sees which way leads up the fastest (where the steepest slope upward is) and follows it. So, eventually he gets to the top of a hill. But wait, he's not on top of the mountain! But when he looks around, he sees that all paths lead downwards:
So our mentally impaired ant thinks he's reached the highest point on the mountain, because, after all, no matter what direction he goes, he'll end up going down. How can he reach the summit then? Well he's not going anywhere himself. He feels perfectly happy where he is.
The key is, we mutate him. Or, perhaps more fitting to the context, a gust of wind comes and moves him a bit in some direction:
And now our ant is on the way to the summit. Note, though, that the direction of the wind is chosen randomly. The wind could have not blown him at all - or worse, blown him to the left, where he would just climb back up and twiddle his thumbs again.
Nevertheless, after sufficiently many sufficiently powerful gusts of wind, the ant should be able to escape the hill and find the summit. The same idea applies to the genetic algorithm. Every time after the children are born, we slightly mutate them by passing through all the 36*50 characters and changing each of them with a 0.005 probability (again, could be tuned) to another random character. This way we don't get stuck at some solution which is locally optimal but not globally optimal.
That more or less sums up the entire algorithm. A good benefit of the algorithm is that if the conditions of the problem are changed slightly, it's very easy to adapt - we just change the fitness function. However, my criticism with how genetic algorithms often don't work too well still holds. Right now I run 200 batches of 50 species - that is, I simulate the evolution 200 times - hoping that one of them will give the optimal 11 unit solution. Even sometimes out of all the 200 batches, the 11 unit solution doesn't emerge and we're stuck with a 12 unit solution.
I'm fairly convinced this could be fixed with tuning though. If anyone wants to try tuning the fitness function or the probabilities, that would be pretty cool. Also, I haven't applied the algorithm to any of Josh's other problems, but do that at your leisure (or to check your answer). You input the initial enemy units into the unitsTop, unitsRight, etc. and typesTop, typesRight, etc. arrays. Take a look at what's in them right now - that corresponds to the original puzzle. From that you should be able to figure out how input works.
Anyway, that's all for now. I think my next few posts will be non-technical (or until, of course, Josh tries to make another weirdly constructed puzzle). Until then, ciao.
-squid out.
PS: random genetic algorithm pages:
http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~sipper/ga.html
http://www.obitko.com/tutorials/genetic-algorithms/
and Wikipedia, of course =).
PS2: Apparently, Blogger can't count, since it says I have 16 posts when I actually have 17 =S. Doesn't matter, of course =P.
January 15, 2008
Hypoploid eclosion
hypoploid (n.): The aneuploid, almost always fatal condition in which there is less than the normal diploid number. Aneuploidy is a change in the number of chromosomes that can lead to a chromosomal disorder. Aneuploidy is common in cancerous cells.
eclosion (n.): The emergence of an insect larva from the egg.
So I haven't posted for a while now. The very good reason for this, of course, is that Josh's logic puzzle 4 is evil.
Not evil as in, hard to do. Au contraire, if you play around with any of them by hand for a minute or two, you'll find the answer. But programming a computer to do this is a different story.
Pruning gets very ugly on the grid - particularly for the '2' (sneak by then attack) units. Nevertheless, it's definitely possible, but I think I might opt out of pruning for convenience and look for a heuristic.
Actually, a genetic algorithm could be adapted to the problem quite well. I'm a bit reluctant to use one since from what I've heard about genetic algorithms, I take that they're pretty crappy in general and you can almost always find better heuristics (hell, binary search for some problems would be fine). Plus a genetic algorithm might converge at a local minimum, which would be a bit annoying, but if I perturb it enough each cycle it should be fine.
I'll probably play around with this idea and post whatever results I get with it. Hopefully it'll work out. I don't have much experience with genetic algorithms - really the closest thing I've done was a half-baked evolution simulator where moving dots would compete for food, attack eachother, reproduce, etc. Of course, it turned out that the optimal solution for the ants were to just evolve as fast as possible and ignore attacking completely, so it didn't turn out too amazing. I might try reprogramming that scenario also but to a bit better depth (so we don't have a stupid endgame).
Despite the fact that almost all such methods generally suck, people seem to enjoy coming up with many methods of genetic programming. But, everyone uses it, so it must be good for something? Right?
That's all I'll say about genetic algorithms for now. Unfortunately, I don't really have much else interesting to say. Our Biotech project is going really smoothly. And I mean, really smoothly. Hopefully we'll get positive results though - and even if we don't, it's not even a big deal.
Meanwhile, there's really no need to learn French anymore today, and biology is taught really pointlessly in school, but those are rants for another day. By the way, blogging happens to give you interesting ideas. When I started this post I thought I would just rant a long time about how easy it is to make evil problems that are hard to prune, but then I realized I could probably use a genetic algorithm (for once in my life) instead.
As for whatever else I might say, Portal is an amazing game. I played it at my friend's house for a while on the week-end. And I randomly happened to like this song. I'm not sure why though.
The cake is a lie. Ciao.
-squid out.
January 13, 2008
Logic Puzzle 4
You are surrounded, and under attack! Fortunately, one of your spies stole enemy information regarding their strategy, so you know what they are going to do. Both sides have four different types of units:
A units, which always kill B Units, and always lose to everything else
B units, which always kill C Units, and always lose to everything else
C units, which always kill D Units, and always lose to everything else
D units, which always kill A Units, and always lose to everything else
When two units of the same type battle each other, both die. Your spy points out to you that you have the bare minimum number of units to kill all enemy units without any casualties, except then dies from food poisoning. You have the following map outlining enemy plans, from your spy:
| a1 | b1 | a2 | c1 | ||||
| d1 | |||||||
| c1 | b1 | ||||||
| a2 | b1 | ||||||
| a2 | d2 | ||||||
| c1 | d2 | d2 | b1 |
Your camp is the gray area. You can put at most one unit in each square in your territory. The enemy attacks as follows:
Each non-blank square on the outside of your base represents an enemy units that will be attacking. If they are to the right or left of your base, they will attack horizontally, and if not, they will attack vertically. The first letter for each represents what type of unit they are, and the second represents their plan. If they have a 1 next to their letter, they will engage in combat with the first unit they run into, and if they have a 2, they will sneak past the first, and engage with the second. If they never run into a first/second unit, they will flee, and not be killed. Remember that your spy says you can kill them all!
Your subordinates then ask you where to deploy the troops (the spy happened to tell them that there is no way any of them could die, so you had better make sure that this is the case). What positions do you tell them to put your units at?
EDIT: slight clarifications, just in case:
If you had:
a2 | blank | D | A | blank | blank | blank| noone
then the a2 would not encounter the D, but skip past it and attack the next unit it sees, the A in this case.
If you had:
a2 | blank | D | blank | blank | blank | blank| noone
then the a2 would escape to freedom (which is bad)!
Also, this one's pretty easy, so here are some more of the grids I came up with (I have 12 so far, so if you want more, say so in a comment):
Grid 2
| b1 | d2 | b1 | c2 | a2 | |||
| a1 | c1 | ||||||
| c1 | d1 | ||||||
| b1 | d1 | ||||||
| c2 | |||||||
| b1 | |||||||
| b2 | d1 | c1 | a2 |
Grid 3
| a1 | b1 | a2 | c1 | ||||
| b2 | d1 | ||||||
| c2 | a2 | ||||||
| b1 | d2 | ||||||
| c1 | |||||||
| c2 | |||||||
| b2 | |||||||
| c1 | a2 | d1 | b1 | a1 |
Grid 4
| a1 | b1 | c1 | |||||
| a1 | |||||||
| c1 | |||||||
| d2 | a2 | ||||||
| d2 | |||||||
| b1 | a2 | ||||||
| c2 | |||||||
| a1 | b1 | c2 | b2 | a1 |
Good luck!