Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

What a cool Mum!

[from xkcd]

Worthless • Dido • Café Del Mar • Volume 8

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Apparently, even some of the WoW boys who are on ADSL had some delays waiting for the update to download, and someone from my guild, who communicate regularly outside of WoW (we do all know one another in Real Life) posted a link to a website: http://www.cforce.org.

This site begins with three puzzles requiring a little bit of knowledge to solve: the first one took me a matter of minutes, although I had to use Google to find who actually said the quote. Reorganising the puzzle pieces was pretty simple, and my first guess (of Einstein, who died in 1955) was incorrect. The second puzzle took a little longer, but only because I didn’t have access to a 1 dollar bill. Again, Google helped out in finding out the latin phrases on the back. I didn’t bother with the date, as there were only a couple of characters used in this simple substitution cipher that were from this section of the key. Then, as there were a finite number of possible answers to the puzzle, I just tried several of them before I lucked on the right answer. I can’t even remember what answer I put in…

The third one took some thinking. Originally, I had tried one method, and for some reason got fixated on this. It wasn’t until I thought a little more about it, and expanded my ideas a little that I solved it. I had at this stage obtained a small audience of students, and they were very impressed with my solving of the puzzle. I can guarantee that in total, the three puzzles took me around 20 minutes to solve. And that was with some breaks as students needed assistance. If I’d been at a machine with a python interpreter installed, I probably would have done it in about 5.
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Whenever I need to do any calculations, I generally drop into python and do them from there. However, I came across a neat tip over on Mac Geekery: When You Need A Calculator.

I’ve modified is ever so slightly so it goes into a .profile instead of a .bashrc:

function calc
{
    awk "BEGIN {print $* ; }"
}

Sweet.

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As an adjunct to another project I am working on (basically an extended version of the experimental writeup I did about iTunes Ratings), I had cause to wonder as to the distribution of ratings in my iTunes library, and in other peoples.

I may be unusual in that when I import an album, I grab the whole lot. Even if I really only like one track. I just feel some day I may want to listen to the whole lot!
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The Science Creative Quarterly » A GAME THEORETIC APPROACH TO THE TOILET SEAT PROBLEM

The toilet seat problem has been the subject of much controversey. In this paper we consider a simplified model of the toilet seat problem. We shall show that for this model there is an inherent conflict of interest which can be resolved by a equity solution.

We’ve found the ideal solution is that the Toilet Seat Lid is to be left down at all times: then everyone using the toilet incurs the same cost each time they “perform an operation”, be it a #1 operation or a #2 operation.

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That’s purpose is just to trigger Wordpress to update the Post count of each Category.

I’ll leave it here incase I need to redo this operation. It took me ages to tick each category box…

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