Point-Counterpoint?!

Hi all I'm one of the new contributors and I'll be posting something called point-counterpoint where josh and I "discuss" a wide variety of topics but they will usually pertain to gaming. So without further ado I give you point-counterpoint.

Our first topic: the Mii useless toy or brilliant creation?


Aaron: The Mii was a helpful addition to the Wii, It brought a customizable avatar into the Wii something not possible before.

Josh: ... But its useless!

Aaron: Josh, you're going to have to elaborate; Mii's allowed for a simple yet fun way for the gamer to express themselves. Is this useless?

Josh: Yes, not once have I ever needed a Mii for anything, and quite frankly, it's an utter waste of time to make them. They are just available options sometimes, but are never necessary

Aaron: Well what about Wii sports and Wii play?

Josh: They could easily have put in other characters, not to mention that you can always play with the premade Miis.

Aaron: The premade Miis don't look like anyone this allowed people to feel like they were in the game.

Josh: If anyone has found happiness in seeing a Mii that looks like them playing Wii tennis, they should be incinerated for naivety.

Aaron: Well they are a way to measure your brain in Big Brain Academy I remember you enjoyed that game did you not? They are like a character in Animal Crossing- not necessary but they are like a save file.

Josh: But using a customized Mii is not necessary, and you can easily use a premade Mii as a save file too. In fact, some people who get lower scores may not want to have their face attributed to them

Aaron: But in the case of a shared Wii it's easier to keep track of whose file is whose. For example Super Mario Galaxy uses Mii faces to show whose file is whose.

Josh: But it also uses the faces of familiar Nintendo characters.

Aaron: But there aren't 6 character faces so one will have to get reused.

Josh: Well, first of all, they are in different places and second of all, yes there are.

We didn't have enough time to finish, we hope you enjoyed this taste. So stay tuned for the conclusion of Point-Counterpoint #1

Stupid BestBuy

Well, I don't know what to think anymore... the brawl update today didn't have anything about a delay, but BestBuy is adamant that its delayed until September... hopefully this doesn't just mean that they're gonna take a very very long time to deliver my preorder... anyway, I e-mailed them asking, so I'll get back to you when I find out the story.

On a side note, Amir, you should not make personalized messages on Saddening Goat, partly because it can be accessed by anyone, but mostly because it is going to be a blog views by thousands every day in the near future (obviously) and as such it makes no sense to address only one person. Till l8er!

Santa Claus is coming to town Version 15.0

Alas, December 24th has arrived for the 15th time (well from my point of view). As you may have unfortunately found out, it is a time that reeks of commercialism, horrible TV specials and lack of sports. On top of that, my 87 year old neighbours still get up each Christmas Eve (a wonder in itself) and walk around the neighborhood singing Christmas Carols (albeit with the assistance of some Listerine--though its effectiveness can be debated). The highlight of the day is the anticipation for Kris Kringle/Chris Cringle/Joly St. Nick/Santa/Xanta/Mr. Claus/My mom/Santa Claus arrival with gifts.

After going through this dreadful cycle for years and years, one learns to avoid some things. I snuggle with my large book on Conducting in my bed, listening to the twisted music of Eugene Ysaye, with the hopes of leaving the loud pop songs of the Backstreet Boys (Nathalie-you would enjoy) and the last minute shopping behind. If it hadn't been for YouTube, I would still be surfing through TV Channels in vain, looking for anything that isn't a nativity scene recreation. As for the carols, I convince my parents to put the house into "sleep mode" so that the sage carolers ignore our house. Yet there is one thing I must always put up with, and it is the myth of Santa Claus.

Don't get me wrong- I have the holiday spirit. No, I am not the modern reincarnation of Scrooge. But I don't believe that Santa Claus exists. Logistically its impossible, but then again who could have imagined 6 billion people overpopulating this planet. I am not alone in my hypothesis, as many disillusioned youth mock the existance of that old geezer. My mom thinks he exists-very zealously- and I don't, so you can imagine all the arguments we have.

She always says: "No, Santa Claus is Real! He comes to all the good children and gives them presents." Soon, she follows this by asking: "What do you want for Christmas? Tell me a couple things." Such an obvious attempt at helping Santa-a.k.a. her-get a list of gifts. She's obviously getting me just 1 or 2 gifts, but she still asks for that list. I always try to point out the contradiction in her "belief". There are many more clear signs, including name tags, which happen to be written in her perfect A's and R's.

I cite the logistics, yet she dismisses them. I tell her that we don't have a chimney, but she says that he has keys to the house (Over the summer I was so bored, that I took a small stroll down to the Toronto Archives, and confirmed that only 3 people have the keys to the house). I even point out the gift receipt that is hanging from her handbag, with the bolded "EB Games" logo staring me in the face (I got NHL 07 last Christmas). Recently, I asked her why Santa dosen't help African children. She just smiled back (perhaps his apathy only extends to fortunate children).

I plan to prove her wrong, using the Reductio ad absurdum method:

Let us assume that Santa Claus exists.

We know that Santa starts delivering gifts on the morning (E.S.T) of the 24th on the other side of the world.

Therefore, Santa arrives in Toronto at about 3 a.m. in the morning.

I will attempt to stay awake and wait for his/her arrival. (Contributor's Note: This strategy has failed for the past 5 years because I fell asleep each time) I'll have some bitter coffee with me to keep me awake.

Then again, why do I even try? Do I not want a free gift?

If you've survived through this long post, feel free to share your Holiday stories in the comments section.

New Contributor

Guess Who?

I have joined the blogging community-how sad.

The lowest I can join now is to join a Star Wars fan forum.

It's on my to do list :D

Contributors Wanted!

Okay, I mostly just wanted to move the last post away, cuz reading it makes me sad, but if anyone has interesting things to write about, write a sample blog post as a comment on this message, and if youre good enough we'll accept you... I have a feeling that just Jon and I would make a pretty boring blog to most people.

Death to Nintendo

Brawl has been delayed. Again. And not just 2 or 3 months, but to September!!! When they originally delayed it to December, I wasn't all that upset. They said that their original release date was not realistic, and I can completley understand that. The second time, they delayed it to this coming February, and I was pretty mad. I mean, with all those daly updates and movies of the beta version being plaed, I would think they could release it now if they wanted to, but then again, mb they have something really cool to add... but this! I do not see why they need 9 more months!

I would go on a rant about this, but they may have some very good reasoning tomorrow in the update, so I will wait until then before ranting or some such thing... unlike some ppl, I dont like to judge before knowing the facts (I dont thinkI do anyway...). Thus, I will discuss other video game stuff (as that seems to be a trend on this blog).

Firstly, Guitar Hero 3 is a very good game. Granted, its very similar to GH2, but I don't really care, cuz now there are more songs, and you can tilt your guitar do go into star mode, and I didn't even have GH2. Some ppl say "oh, rock band is better beause you can play drums" and things like that (I guess here im making an argument without knowing the facts, but w/e) but quite frankly, when you buy rock band, you have to pay an extra 60 dollars for the drums and a mic, and its not even any fun without a few people playing with you, according to Tim Buckley. I usually paly 1p anyway, so GH3 is fine with me.

Onto SMG, its also pretty fun. I havent gotten all 120 stars yet, but I do have 105, and from those I can say that it is well worth playing. I still prefer Super Paper Mario, although IGN dosen't, but that's ther problem. Mb Super Paper Mario is just for intellectuals. Also, Nintendo has recently updated the wii shop channel to show their latest released virtual console game on your main screen. Quite frankly, I dont care that Pokemon Snap is out. Even though it was a good game like 7 years ago, I dount anyone would actually buy it now anyway... despite the lasting ammusement that comes with regular pokemon games, pokemon snap gets dumb quickly. Also, I think Nintendo has enough money as is, and probably dosent need mroe advertising to get people to buy virtual console games... not to mention that this makes my main screen look uglier. I had to move the Wii shop channel to the second page because of this...

Tomorrow Ill talk more about Brawl I guess, and mb remember to talk about haircutters, so till then (plus I wanna read what squid has to say about Artefactual coattail now. TTYL

Artefactual coattail (Part 2)

Hmm, I realized explaining all of these is a bit more lengthy than I thought, and I have no intention of doing it all in one sitting. So I'll do it 2 at a time - #3 and #4 will either come later today or tomorrow.

EDIT: Darn, writing at a computer seems to make you verbose. I'm fairly sure I probably could have solved this a bit quicker. Regardless, there are nice ideas that I'll end up using again in #3 and #4.

Generalization 1:

Because of the symmetry, we can take , and is the max element.

Claim: An (n,k) system can have no excess iff we can form a n-gon with sides , or equivalently: .

Proof:

First, note that the algebraic inequality in the problem statement is simply the Generalized Triangle Inequality (bottom of http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TriangleInequality.html) for the set of vectors in the n-gon in the geometric statement. We'll work with the algebraic inequality - it happens to be considerably more relevant.

First, let's show that the inequality is necessary for there to be no excess - we'll then show that it's a sufficient condition. By the construction of the rule set for the (n,k) system whenever we decrease by , we also decrease of the 's by . So, for every decrease in , we have a decrease in . If there is no excess then, eventually will have to be 0. But we cannot have . Since it must decrease by at least , we have the given inequality must hold.


Showing that this is sufficient is considerably trickier. First we shall make a key observation about rules - that it doesn't matter in what order they are applied. Indeed, we could assume they are all applied at the same time - however, in our solution we will still be doing things sequentially. The fact that it doesn't matter if rules are applied at the same time leads to avery crucial observation - you can add rules to form new rules. If is a rule and is a rule, then is a rule. Keep this in mind. Now the method we will use to get 0 excess looks like this:

1. Take the set of the largest 's.
2. Apply the rule which decreases all of 's in that set until the set of 's is no longer the largest set of 's. Then, go back to 1.

Now, if you try this, you'll realize it's somewhat inconvenient when there doesn't exist a set of 'largest' 's - for example, try to find the 3 largest numbers in 2, 2, 2, 5, 5. Now we'll use the very cool trick of adding rules. First let's illustrate with the 2, 2, 2, 5, 5 example. The 2's are annoying, in that we can't really choose one of them to belong in our set. So we'll 'delocalize' them - each of the 2's will be '1/3' of an element in the set. So our rule would be (1/3, 1/3, 1/3, 1, 1). Is this a valid rule? Yes! If we add the rules (1, 0, 0, 1, 1), (0, 1, 0, 1, 1), and (0, 0, 1, 1, 1), we get (1, 1, 1, 3, 3) = 3*(1/3, 1/3, 1/3, 1, 1). It's not too surprising that this should work in general. If there are smallest's when we can only have , consider each of the smallests '' in the set (and adjust the rule accordingly). How can we ensure that we can have a rule which looks like with a's and b's? Basically it consists of adding all the rules with 1's in place of the a's and a 'consecutive' string of b 1's in the b's. Illustrating for and , :

We want to obtain rule (4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7) (there could be 0's and the elements do not have to be in order, but that doesn't change anything). We add the following rules:

(1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1)
(0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1)
(0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1)
(0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1)
(1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1)
(1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1)
(1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1)

One more problem with this rule-creating needs to be settled: what happens if there are or more largests? Then our job is actually very easy. Decrease each of those largests by the same amount (one cool thing about the system thing is that an system has all all the rules of an system for - the reader should be able to show this) until all the largests have the same value as the second-largest. And continue - until all the elements have the same value, and then until they are all 0.

Now, back to the problem. Let us assume we never have a case where there are or more largests (if we do, we're done, from above). We make the key observation that applying our (sometimes created) rule keeps constant. Because of this, it will always be non-negative (given the initial inequality) As long as less than of the elements are zero (more than are positive), we can apply some rule (we can only not apply rules to zero quanitities). So eventually there will be or less positive elements. But if we have or less positive elements, all less than or equal to , then if is non-negative, all those positive have to equal - so we have elements equalling the ; that is, largests. So we have a contradiction, and we are (finally) done.


Generalization 2:

Looking at the above method of proof, it should be fairly obvious that the excess is equivalent to . We can obtain it in basically the same way we obtain 0 excess in Generalization 1.