Sematic xiphoid

sematic (adj.): Serving as a warning or signal of danger. Used especially of the coloring of some poisonous animals.

xiphoid (n.): The posterior and smallest of the three divisions of the sternum, below the gladiolus and the manubrium.

Interestingly, xiphoid is also an adjective that means "shaped like a sword". I bring this up for no other reason than that swords are rather cool. In fact, so cool that I spent my entire american history research period on Friday looking at swords. This site has a bunch of purchasable cool swords, and maybe I'll randomly decide to purchase one one day. Of course, they sell other things besides for swords on that site - for example, if you feel at risk of being attacked, you could always purchase some chain mail (a word of advice, however: my very history knowledgeable friend says arrows can go through chainmail pretty easily). Or if you want, you can also buy full suits of armor, which will be good for decorating the Swedish castle I intend to own in the future.

But anyway, without further ado, here are the Top 10 Swords (in no particular order):

10.

It's Excalibur! Actually, it's not Excalibur... it's a letter opener... that happens to look like the sword in the stone. These must be pretty impressive/cheesy to have on your office desk; whenever a letter comes in you can draw the sword from the stone and mercilessly slice open your letter with triumph! (The stone is probably made out of metal, actually, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was stone... after all, they do have full replica suits of armor...)

9.

This isn't actually a sword either... it's just a dagger. But what this makes this dagger so cool (and also, remarkably distinct from the slightly commonplace assassin-type daggers) are the grooves along its 16 inch blade. And no, the grooves aren't just for grating cheese. The grooves are also awesome at catching and often breaking an incoming sword blade. It was also used often in two-handed fencing/dueling in medieval Italy, but that's another story (involving throwing your cloaks over other people's heads, shaking hands, and why you hold daggers in your left hand).

8.

A sword used during the Civil War by Union officers (you see, the research was sort of relevant...) A 29 inch blade, 35 inches altogether including the hilt. Of course, by this time, swords were becoming a bit useless, but generals still liked them, and they meshed well with the old-style concept of military honor. In fact, here is an entire page about proper etiquette of sword usage (taken from the military manual of the time).

7.

It's William Wallace's sword! He's like, the guy from the intro campaign in Age of Empires 2. What more has to be said?

(It's a replica of his claymore, btw. 56.25 inches.)

6.

Hurray for gigantic German swords. This one happens to be 6.25 feet tall, so it's probably larger than you are. This type of sword is called a "Landsknecht" sword - I mistook it for a "zweihander", the huge German sword that's probably more familiar to people (there should be two dots on top of the i, but I'm not going to look up German accented characters right now). In any case, I found it pretty amusing that over half of the sword consisted of the hilt. Of course, huge 5 foot long blades would be near impossible to forge, but whatever.

I always wondered what two people dueling with zweihander's would look like, but much to my dismay, Wikipedia has informed me that really the ways you'd use a huge sword like this would be to a. run into a bunch of pikemen and swing it wildly, in the hope that you'll break their formation and not be skewered, or b. run around swinging it wildly in the hopes of tripping enemy cavalry. Personally, I think the most effective way to use it would just be to spin it in a circle. Repeatedly.

5.

It's the Knight's Templar Sword! Impressively cool to people that have played Assassin's Creed (unfortunately, they don't sell ring finger blade replacements).

The total length is 46.5 inches. Cool hilt design (the writing on the bottom of the hilt seems to say "Cristi De Templo", which is probably Latin for Knights Templar (but perhaps not?)

4.

It's Merlin's Sword! 45 inches long... the hilt is cool, but I wonder what bird is on the pommel (probably if I knew some more Arthurian stuff I'd get it).

3.

This time it's the Demon Slayer's sword! Another sword from Toledo, Spain (in fact, most of the Toledo Swords, which include the above three, are pretty awesome), you can use it to slay demons! This is because there's a demon's face on the pommel, of course.

2.

The website calls it the Magnificent Sword of Power, and although I don't really see why, it must be pretty magnificent then. And powerful. Also 45 inches long.

1.

The Odachi Samurai sword! No collection of random swords is complete without throwing in any Japanese swords (which, may I remind you, are far better than their European counterparts). I'm not sure if this replica can, but the samurai swords of Ancient Japan could slice through a tree in one swing. In fact, their blacksmithing was so awesome that anyone who revealed the secrets of samurai sword forging would be killed (this is just like the silk thing by the way).

This is a 67 inch sword, which makes it pretty big, even for a samurai sword. Actually, that reminds me, we do have a samurai sword somewhere in my house - it's not as impressive as this though.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That concludes the top 10 swords thing. By the way, if you ever want to learn about (or just hear the names) of exotic ancient weaponry, go play Diablo or Diablo II - since you get new weapons every 2 or 3 levels, you end up hearing a lot of exotic weapon names. Of course, World of Warcraft has a bunch of interestingly named weapons too - which reminds me, they're making a documentary about WoW addiction =P. Enjoy.

That's all for now. I think I'll start focusing my posts more on individual topics - and also start titling them relevantly (but don't worry, I'll keep the random phrase, just probably move it to the postscript). But it really depends whether I feel like it or not. Until then, ciao.

-squidout

Yawn

We somehow managed to go two whole days without any posts. I, therefore, have made another logic puzzle. I think Jon will be able to solve this one with an algorithm, as I probably could, but whatever. Good luck!

Six intrepid explorers traveled to various parts of the world hoping to find new places and places that time had forgotten, unfortunately they all came to a rather fateful end, but not necessarily where and how you would expect.

Each spent 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, or 12 months traveling, and no two spent the same amount of time.

What was each explorer's name, how many months had each explorer been traveling what place did they travel too and what was the cause of death (one of them died of starvation, obviously)?

Fearless Dan went to Swampy Creek for 2 months longer than the explorer who died of a viral illness. Whoever died from a high fall (after climbing a tree to rescue a sloth, was this in the Rain Forest) traveled for less time than the person who died from Food Poisoning.

Valiant Jack traveled for 2 months less than the explorer eaten by a crocodile. Adventuresome Sam traveled for 1 month less than the explorer who went to the Frozen Wasteland. The explorer who went 'Sailing the Oceans' was away for the longest before succumbing to his fate. The explorer who died after 3 months didn't travel to the Long Lost City.

Barry Brave did not die of Food Poisoning. Courageous Fred traveled for 3 months more than Daring Derek. The explorer who visited the Dirty Desert traveled for 6 months more than the person who died of Hypothermia after they tripped over a seal and plunged head first through thin ice.

Bradytelic nylghau

bradytelic (adj.): of or pertaining to evolution at a rate slower than the standard for a given group of plants or animals.

nylghau (n.): large Indian antelope; male is blue-grey with white markings; female is brownish with no horns

Hmm, I didn't know there were antelope (this is the correct plural, I presume) in India. Antelope are supposed to run around in the savannas of Africa, and then subsequently be eaten by large predatory mammals. But it makes sense that you'd get some in southern regions of eurasia too.

Also, hurray for Mexican traffic laws! If only people were sane to a sufficient degree...
In other news, I got a Khet game. The lasers are pretty cool - I should probably find somebody to play it with though. It's basically the same as laser chess.

Anyway, onto the main point of this post: our (Canada+US) highschools suck.

Although true, that's not a very insightful main point, so I'll follow it up with main point #2: that's a good thing.

Now, some people will probably say that our highschools aren't that bad. But they are. I think I was pretty much always aware of this, but recently it was brought to my immediate attention by my friend from Japan, who showed me the University of Tokyo Math Entrance Examination (Science Stream). Now, the high school I go to is supposed to be pretty good, but I'm aware that there are only about two people (maybe 3) in the entire school who can actually solve any of the questions there. That bodes pretty sadly.

Now, the ducated person might notice that the University of Tokyo is like Japan's elite school - so the science stream exam is undoubtedly going to be hard, especially considering the population applying. But so few people able to solve one question is pretty pathetic. Forget comparing this to like, the SAT, or even AP Calculus. This year's COMC is practically a joke in comparison to that.

Of course, it might be fairer to look at what tests regular people in Japan have to write. And they are here. The first part is basically their 'SAT'. It's quite doable, but the American SAT is really a joke in comparison. Then, if you scroll down, you'll find the entrance examinations for the good universities. The best students in our school would probably have tons of trouble just doing the humanities section.

Now, for some people the above facts might suggest that our education (and particularly, our public education) needs to improve a lot. But really, while it would be good if it improved a bit, it's not that necessary. The reason for this?

Well, if a school improves, that's practically equivalent to: the students will have a harder time at it. And from what I hear about Japan (especially with the cram schools, etc.) all the students basically do is work.

Now, with sucky schools, there's the obvious disadvantage that there are a lot of people that don't learn anything, and are thus relayed to rather menial jobs. Moreover, the general population becomes pretty uneducated, and in a democratic society, that's less than ideal.

But there's also lots of free time - and this gives people, especially those who can breeze through the low level public education, a lot of free time to do whatever they like. And it's that type of environment that fosters creativity, which ultimately leads to the US's wealth.

Of course, it's probably more circular than that - the US's wealth attracts the best people from everywhere else, so after a while, the US high schools don't matter anymore - just the universities, which are good. But everything above is just speculation, after all. Education is a pretty random thing.

-squid out

There once was a buggy AI
Who decided her subject should die.
When the plot was uncovered,
The subjected discovered
That sadly the cake was a lie.

(courtesy of munroe's limerick site)



Also, the xkcd today is really cool (but think hard enough about it first):

Happy Chinese New Year!

It's the year of the rat, the beginning of another twelve-year cycle.

space

May lots of money, food, and good fortunes come your way :)

Scythian Suite

I know that these entries are supposed to be much more than just rants about nothing (or should it), but thought you guys might be interested in hearing a piece of music I came across a couple weeks ago, while I was on my dreaded Saddening Goat sabbatical.

The piece is Scythian Suite by Sergei Prokofiev. One of his more primal works, it was actually nearly set to a ballet, which would have been amazing. Its a great piece, although the link I'm posting is only a 4 minute segment of it. But the 4 minutes are sure great. The performers are the Rotterdam Orchestra, noted for their colourful interpretation of post romantic music, and the charismatic Valery Gergiev. Some say his conducting style is on the verge of violent, and he has been known to scream mid-piece and grunt. It may be scary from a performer's point of view, but the results are magnificent, especially when he works with his main orchestra, Kirov Orchestra in Russia. I can't wait to see what he will do with the London Symphony Orchestra, now that he has been appointed Artistic Director and Principal Conductor. For those not too familiar with orchestras, the LSO is the orchestra that brought you the music to Star Wars (all 6 movies) and Harry Potter.

Enjoy and post your reactions to this AMAZING piece:

Scythian Suite-Valery Gergiev, Rotterdam Orchestra
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-hQglagzHqI

Also, for some humor, some guy made fun of Gergiev on YouTube..its quite hillarious
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCGQdjdGv2A&NR=1

Clupeid Rauwolfia

Clupeid - Of, relating to, or belonging to the family Clupeidae (various widely distributed soft-finned fishes, which includes the herrings, menhadens, and sardines).

Rauwolfia - a genus of evergreen trees and shrubs in the Apocynaceae family. The approximately 85 species in the genus can mainly be found in tropical regions.

The last few days, I learned that with enough people, you can make Wikipedia say anything. To an extent.

Note: some words in the following paragraph had their letters reversed so that this post does not come up when searching for certain phrases on Google. You will understand why soon enough.

In French class the other day, two of my friends made a page about a Dr. hsoJ namlA, professor of botany at UofT. The two of them and I have been adding onto it little by little, and trying to fight off the various claims to delete the page. I have a theory that if only one person had made the page and done all the editing, they would have deleted the page near instantly, but as three different users have been working on it, they had to delay for a while. They did put up a candidate for deletion template on the page, however, and so far all moderators who have viewed the page have voted to delete it, which shows that you can't really put just anything onto Wikipedia. Basically, from what I've learned from this page, you shouldn't trust an article on Wikipedia if it has been edited within the last minute or has a deletion template on it, and if neither of those is the case, it's probably fine. For fun, though, you can go to the page, and add whatever you want to it. Just try to make it realistic-ish, so that maybe we can keep the page for another couple days. Hopefully the people researching whether Dr. namlA exists won't come here and find out the truth (that's why words were reversed, by the way).

Also, you should click on the links to the moderator discussions about the page. Some of them are quite funny. Plus, because anyone can edit any page Wikipedia, you can change what their discussion says! They change it back almost instantly when you do that, though, so watch out. While Wikipedia is a great idea, and useful resource, I guess there is a backside to everything.

Now, onto Guitar Hero! Basically, Jon seems to dislike it because it has rock music in it, and FFR has a higher BPM (beats per minute, in case you didn't catch on in his post) than Guitar Hero does. As for his problem with rock music, I cannot help it if he has bad taste in music. Most of the songs he seems to like are techno/trance, which I like to an extent as well, but obviously there are some differences between techno and rock. Basically, all I can say is that whether or not you like the music is preferential, and just because Jon doesn't, that doesn't mean Guitar Hero is a bad game. Plus, there are some songs like this and this (beware: there is a long intro) which I think that even he would like.

Regarding the BPM, I completely agree that some songs in FFR have much higher BPMs than most in Guitar Hero do. I don't think that this is a problem. When the goal is to hit arrow keys that are right next to each other, you can generally hit more notes than when you are using a guitar hero guitar to play. However, not only do I find the guitar controller much more fun to play with, but I think playing with arrow keys is pretty lame. It's pretty much the equivalent of playing dance dance revolution with an Xbox controller instead of a dance mat. Those of you who play DDR should know that that takes away all the fun. Plus, some Guitar Hero songs can have very high BPMs, but they are generally difficult for other reasons, like rhythm or playing lots of chords.

In other news, CBC is very evil. They decided to move jPod from Tuesday nights at 9:00 to Friday nights at 9:00. I went to my television yesterday expecting to watch another episode of jPod, and instead found myself watching some random sitcom about hockey players' wives… Also, I generally have things to do on Friday nights. Humph. Fortunately, you can watch all episodes of jPod online at their site, so it's not too bad. I'll just have to watch jPod on Saturdays instead of Tuesdays.

Speaking of watching television on the internet, everyone should check this out – the Comedy Network put recent episodes of the Colbert Report and the Daily Show and South Park, among other more memorable episodes of each, online to watch whenever you want, without ads. Well, that's not entirely true. There are ads for some show they started online called Lil' Bush, which, surprisingly, has not been taken down by the FBI. Just watch a few ads for it, and you will see what I mean.

Speaking of which, Super Tuesday went by yesterday pretty much as expected for the Democrats – neither Obama nor Clinton have a non-trivial lead, and according to pretty much everyone, the battle is going to get nasty. Unfortunately, when it comes to politics, nasty isn't usually what you would expect. Stephen Colbert actually talked about this in his episode two Tuesdays ago, so you should go watch it! I won't say any more, so that I don't spoil it for you. Plus, he makes everything seem funnier than it really is. I got his book, I am America (and so can you!), and it's really funny, even though I disagree with a fair portion of it. I would suggest reading it, when you are taking a break from playing Guitar Hero, or urgently awaiting Brawl (I assume you spend your time doing the same things that I spend my time doing).

As for Republicans, McCain has pretty much won. I hope he doesn't win the real election, though (this one was fake, of course). He seems to be very similar to the current president. According to an article I read in the Globe and Mail the other day, Republicans are very lucky that Canadians can't vote in the American elections, because over 90% could vote Democratic, almost regardless of which candidate was representing them, mostly because they don't like Bush. Therefore, my opinion is probably fairly prominent among people here in Toronto.

Anyway, after spending a fair amount of time writing this instead of playing Guitar Hero, I think I need to return, or something like what happens to Ethan from CAD when he doesn't play video games for a decent amount of time might happen to me as well. Well, maybe a lower-scale version of that. Anyway, until next time!

Too Much Music

Yelling About Music is the music blog of Jeph Jacques, the creator of Questionable Content, where he...well...yells about music. Indie rock, mostly.

I just read his post from Friday, in which he talks about how there is too much music sometimes; I completely agree. Jeph talks about 1) how he doesn't have enough time to listen to the cds he buys and to keep up with the new stuff coming out ; 2) how ubiquitous MP3s are nowadays, and how that affects people's relationship with music, 3) how his experience at a music festival was unpleasant because there was constantly music, from which he could not escape; and coming up witht he conclusion about how even though he loves music, he wishes there were less of it.

I got an iPod for Christmas 07, and spent the good part of the second week of the break uploading music from cds, and getting album art, and loading them into my iPod. Currently I have exactly 800 songs on my iPod, and when I first got it I thought I would hover around 500 songs. But new stuff keep coming out, and I started a Textpad list of bands/artists that I should check out or get songs from - from friends, papers, blogs, online acquaintances, etc. - and for every one that I listen to there's another two that I add. There are about 60 items on that list right now; it's frustrating.

This trying to clear the list negatively impacts my listening experience. When I hear a new cd, sometimes I don't have the patience to hear all of it the first time, and I dismiss it. If I get the chance to hear it a second time, and give it a thought, I might turn out to love it (many past examples - Arctic Monkeys, Buckcherry, and Tokyo Police Club* being examples that I didn't like at all first time I heard them, but I love now). Now I know I do this, and make myself listen to stuff at least twice before making up my mind about it.

I used to observe people on buses and the TTC; now I put on the earphones. Sometimes I do get tired of music, and stop myself from doing that. I think I shall observe No Music Day this year, if just to see if I can do it, on my own free will. It's nice to have a little quiet once in a while



Cindy

* I realize not all SG authors and readers will agree with my taste in music, but I do have a right to write about my preferences, so...debate me if you wish :P

P.S. Kinda related, kinda unrelated, but still funny:

A reminder...

Hello Again.

I'd like to point out that no one has commented on my post. I would like you to comment on my post. In order to do so please look at the youtube links. It would allow for intriguing discussion.

If there is a problem with the subject matter, comment on this post and tell me. In fact, tell me what you want me to talk about next if Hockey isn't your thing (music, politics, movies?)

Hemoid toponymy

hemoid (adj.): resembling blood.

toponymy (n.): the scientific study of the names of places

While I was looking up the definitions to the above two words, I happened across morewords.com. This is a pretty nice site, in that in addition to telling you what's a word and what's not (and linking to a definition), it tells you a lot of cool things like the anagrams of certain words, what words can be formed with a subset of the letters of a given word, and even what words can be formed by adding one letter to the current letters of a given word (and then rearranging).

It also happens to have a list of all words that contain a certain two letter pair (like 'rp' or such). Now, this happens to be somewhat relevant, at least with respect to the game Ghost (if you don't know what this is, Wikipedia it; note that the variant we play is actually SuperGhost, and no, I'm not talking about the cancelled Blizzard game).

Ghost happens to be one of those games that you can play during boring lectures and events; and, since I often find lectures and events to be boring, I consider myself to be a pretty decent Ghost player - at least, in two player Ghost. And one of the best strategies in Ghost is to use words with really strange letter patterns.

What do I mean by this? Well, for a lot of people, finding a word that contains "rpsh" is not the easiest task (you can try this by the way, and comment if you get an answer - it's not incredibly hard though). But you don't really need 4-character long patterns to confuse people, especially new people. For example, for some reason a lot of people can never figure out what word contains "pb".

My response to the challenges that usually come after I put "pb" down is "cupboard". I also knew "upbeat", "upbringing", and "raspberry" contained "pb" too (you wouldn't believe how many people are stuck at "spb" =P). But, after looking at the page, I realized there are actually a good number of words with "pb" in it. Like, hipbone, clipboard, scrapbook, upbraid, shipbuilder, stepbrother, etc. Really, the key to being good at Ghost is thinking of random compound words like that.

On the subject of puzzles, Josh's puzzle wasn't too hard to beat, especially with Tennis->Australia->Echidna->Anteater->Aardvark. That's a chain of four. And when I said, it wasn't too hard to beat, that was a complete fabrication, since it did take me the better part of an hour. But I was bored. Anyway, I do believe there is a tool that can check for the shortest path. Perhaps there's one in three steps (or two, but I highly doubt the two).

Also, GAMES Magazine, which they happen to stock in our school library, has a bunch of good logic puzzles, many of which I end up doing during chemistry class. Although, there's probably an excess of good logic puzzles floating around the Internet already, so you probably shouldn't waste your money subscribing or your time looking for it.

As for Guitar Hero vs. FFR... my biggest point is that Guitar Hero mainly sticks to one genre, rock, so most of the music sounds like somebody tuned the radio to right in between radio stations. That being said, there are some decent songs (from what I've seen the Dragonforce songs are okay, and when they occasionally sneak a techno/trance song in, like this). But you can play music of any genre on FFR (and by FFR I'm also including all the equivalents, like Stepmania and O2Jam), so you're not forced to listen to static.

Secondly FFR is generally much more intense, in that the BPMs of the songs are generally much higher than those in Guitar Hero (there are easy songs in FFR, that actually are easy, but still have higher BPMs than some expert songs in Guitar Hero). Intensity is good, especially in a rhythm game that gets very boring quick if you're not pushed hard. Some might argue that GH is intense because you've got your fingers in a slightly odd position on a fake guitar, so it's harder to move them around accurately to press the buttons, but that's not really intense - that's more awkwardness.

Just because you're playing a fake guitar doesn't make the game good. GH is a good game because it sort of innovated in the rhythm genre and introduced a fake guitar that you could pretend was a real guitar, and could listen to static while mashing buttons with your left hand because your right hand has to be occupied repeatedly mashing a strum bar thing . Nevertheless, I'm serious when I said it's good. They did design it pretty well, ignoring the stuff above. Just I think I'll go with the simpler, much more entertaining game where you don't have to pretend to play a musical instrument, and just press keys to the (decent) music.

(You see... people even prefer this to the music that comes with guitar hero =P)

-squidout

Operose sortition

Operose – arduous: characterized by toilsome effort to the point of exhaustion; especially physical effort.

Sortition – casting lots: making a chance decision by using lots (straws or pebbles etc.) that are thrown or drawn.

Today I decided to try blogging with Microsoft Word 2007. I realized the other that, when you go to create a new document, it always gives you the selection of making a blog post instead, and when I tried it out the other day, it seemed to be able to post to blogger blogs (like ours), so I am trying it out. I don't really see the difference between posting in Word 2007 and posting with the word processor that blogger gives you automatically, but whatever. Actually, there is one difference – Word 2007, like usual, is very annoying to use.

At first, Word 2007 doesn't even come with the rulers at the top and on the right of the page that you would use for indenting, and it took me almost a month of using it to figure out that you could manually put them back. Then, you don't even have your normal File, Edit, etc menu at the top of the screen! Once I played around with it for a while, I managed to find most of the tools and features that I usually use, but the documents that I had to make without knowing how to indent, change paragraph spacing, or add header/footers, were very annoying to write. It's not that the new Word is bad, just that it is difficult to change from an older version to 2007.

Recently, news of Microsoft potentially buying Yahoo has been all over the place, from all the newspapers, to the news bar at the site of this page. I'm not quite sure what to think of the matter – on one hand, Google is getting very powerful nowadays, and this would at least push it a bit more to improve and release more features, while on the other hand, I don't think it really matters whether or not Google has lots of power. Though, as this article pointed out, the features that I like to use on Yahoo might go away, which I would not like very much. I don't know what I would do without Crazy Cube. If they happened to get rid of Yahoo answers, though, that would be fine.

I hope some of you have solved my previous logic puzzle, as it was really very easy, so I have decided to give you another challenge. Starting at this page, you have to get to the Wikipedia page about Aardvarks, only by clicking links in the articles (i.e. not the Navigation links on the left, and no searching!). The fewer links you have to click, the better. My best for going from Tennis to Aardvarks is 5 links: Tennis > Court > Rituals > Mating > Animals > Aardvarks. If you can beat that, post your path in a comment. Good luck!

Last but not least, I decided to put a Dilbert widget on the blog, because reading Dilbert is fun, and maybe it will give readers an incentive to come check the blog every day. I have to go now, but next time, I'll talk about Guitar Hero, and why it is better than Flash Flash Revolution. Until then!