Note: This blog has been deprecated, because the system it's built upon (MovableType) was comment-spammed to the point of destabilization. This URL now exists for archival purposes. Trying to add a comment to an old entry will not work here; however, the entries do exist at my blog's current manifestation, here, and comments do work (and I'm still very happy to read them, if you're so kind to leave them).
This is probably not what you're thinking.
A card game for young children has the following cards:
n1 n2
24
n3 n4
The objective of the game is to use any of the four arithmetic operations to combine the numbers into 24.
There are 42 ways to do this with the numbers 2, 3, 6 and 8. If we don't use any operator more than once, there are only 24 ways.
That is wonderful poetry. 2, 3, 2×3 and 23 yield palindromes under the operations of arithmetic and combinatorics.
This datum was brought to you by programming with narrowing in Curry. I'll post my program in a week, after the course has ended and finals are submitted.
In other news, I plan to visit Jim some weekend soon and do some Abstract Algebra proofs, with much enjoyment of Led Zeppelin. It'll be a grand old time.
This is what I dreamed college would be like.
me: Well, Damian just went through an excruciating "by...inspection!" proof that sin'(x) = cos(x)
Jen Clark: lovely
me: Which is why this terminal has been quiet for an hour
me: He asked me "Alex, can I ask you a favor..." "Yes." "Can you order some sheet music-" "What's the derivative of x^2?" "..." "No."
Jen Clark: hehe
me: So my dad came along and ...instigated the fun. That's what drunk people do.
me: He had some wine and decided to spoil polynomial derivatives for Damian
me: So I then asked Damian what sine's derivative was.
me: ...60 minutes later...
me: Hallo.
Jen Clark: heh
me: Oh, in his defense, off the bat he said "Cosine," but I could see the gaping hole in his ass where that came from.
me: And I really didn't need to see that.
Recently, I was informed of the method to train a parrot to poop on command, or have the parrot give notice it needs to lose a gram: Basically (in other words, look into this yourself before trying it from my advice), the objective is to associate a phrase, sound, or object with the act of pooping: The association must be made while the bird's excreting.
I don't want to associate an object, as that requires the object be available at any given time I want Sherry to make a plunge. (A toilet would be amusing and appropriate, except it's fairly fatal if she were ever to fall in; it'd be a quick drowning.) So, I want to think up a phrase to get her to poop on command.
The question is, what phrase? I have three I can't decide between:
If you had a parrot, what would its pooping sound be?
I've discovered Thunderbird, and its ability to harness RSS feeds, treating new articles like e-mail. Before, I only knew of Firefox's "Live Bookmark" presentation, which let RSS feeds be just a bookmark folder that would update itself. The problem I have with that is not knowing what I have and haven't looked at.
I find RSS as e-mail easier to manage...or at least, easier to hold on to things without having to bloat my Firefox bookmarks with neat BoingBoing and SlashDot posts. Speaking of which...
There's more, but I'll leave those be. There's too much funny stuff online. Actually, I can't resist plugging something from my favorite writing category: Revenge.
So I don't sound like a total Mozillaphile: I have taken a look at Opera. As far as I can tell (at the newby level), it matches Thunderbird for functionality with RSS. I haven't looked at e-mail yet, but I can already tell I don't want all this happening in one program; sorry, Kobar, looks like Mozillas at the moment.
The Mac Mini doesn't come to consumers until the 22nd, but it has already been cracked open. David assured me that the Mac community wouldn't be subjected to Apple's overcharges for memory, so would circumvent Apple's prices & services and just install memory themselves. There's a pretty fair-looking comparison of budget PCs and the budget Mac. I've been working on Macs at Evergreen, and I've decided I like the system enough that I'll get one. I just don't know if I want a Mini for cheapness, or if I should hold out for a laptop...I will at least wait until Tigre comes out. Until then, I'll just keep drooling...drooling, by the way, is quite a fun activity. Y'know the bit - men, boys, the dollars for toys...Nicholas had a hi-larious-as-usual entry on his getting a Mac, but alas, his blog was lost with his computer Bob. I'll miss you, Bob. I think I got that name right. (Oh, the sincerity, one can almost smell it...is the stink profuse enough yet?)
Something that wowed the guys at work, and definitely worth a try (requires web Java):
Visual Thesaurus
Greatly pleasing to the eyes.
Care of the Pouwster:
theandyman87: she is just on an emo trip
theandyman87: ...again
Phoenix Team I: in order for one to begin you have to infer that the other ended...
Phoenix Team I: she's a continuous function alright
theandyman87: with enough extrema to supply the hundreds of tangents she goes off on
Phoenix Team I: this series is most definitely not convergent either
This is the horno that never was, only because we were too lazy to make it. Plenty have written already, but none have [video]-recorded.
I didn't get pictures of the actual horno we saw, but rest assured, they wouldn't have been worth it: An aneurysm is one of those "Ya gotta be there" moments. I didn't get pictures of Kiwi either, which sadden me in hindsight; Julie soaked her tiger's head the first day we got there, and it never dried decently. Matty's bear was Everybody's Favorite Fire Hazzard, and Julie's tiger had water for in its head all trip...shoot, I missed a fire/water combo. Heck, with an earthen animal, like a stuffed potato bug or something, and then...something Windy. That'd cover all the Greek element bases. Actually, for a cabin with six guys in it, it was amazingly non-Windy. But we couldn't get pictures of that either, now, could we?
What follows is the set of 94 pictures I took. I've added a scrollbar to the thumbnails, and, yes, I did put that right next to the main window's scroll bar. While it has the advantage of being short on arm movements required for navigating...it's two scrollbars right next to each other. I'm sure I'll come up with something better later (when I post camping pictures from summer). 'Til then, enjoy!
I saw this on a bumper sticker yesterday:
Nuke the gay owls for Jesus
(Yes, it was in Evergreen's parking lot.)
I tend to just walk by the odd bumper stickers, but this one was too much. I tried to keep going on past it, but I couldn't; it made so little sense to me, it made anti-sense. When sense and anti-sense combine, they cause minor bits of the mind to come loose and induce a sneeze in search for Freedom. This bumper sticker definitely cost me some brain.
Damian pointed out this morning that it was probably a slur against Republicans. All right, I could see that. I still want my brain back.
Damian is finally getting into learning Calculus with Mathematica. This does, however, involve me tutoring him. The sessions tend to be highly productive and enlightening, but also include such wonderful excerpts as "You're a dick." "Fuck you." And several iterations and variations thereof. The productivity is also quite high. The lesson he was working with had a funny way of remembering the first ten digits of e, that even will help with my woeful US History memory:
2.7 Andrew Jackson Andrew Jackson …
(Jackson was elected in 1828. e ≅ 2.7182818284590…)
Pictures from the camping trip are coming soon. I took 94, so I'm changing the way I'm going to present them, slightly. I've almost finished. On a related note, I'm finally getting into using CSS instead of tables for formatting things in a page. I'm sure that makes 2(?) of you happy.
After many trials and travails, and with much, much, much help from Nicholas (and much, but just one much, help from David) I've gotten Gentoo installed and KDE up and running. I still have a funny resolution thing whenever I bring it down from 1280x1024, but I can live with that. I have a GUI now! I'm excited. If I could only get HUGS and PAKCS installed, it'd be just as good as a school machine, with the distinct advantage of not requiring me to go to school.
Meanwhile, I may finally give Opera a try. There's very little chance it'll sway me directly over, for I have finally looked into some FireFox extensions and found the Web Developer extension. I adore the Information it gives. The dynamic CSS editing doesn't seem to work a post-rendered XML file (like an XSLery gallery), unfortunately; but, it works just fine for other purposes.
But there's work to be done. Back to XSLery with me.