"It was in a book I read."

I'm not exactly the passionate writer. However, I decided last night that I want to write a book; a useful, information-packed book. It will give the reader the power of unverifiable credibility, and Dogbert isn't even involved.

For who said the information must be real?

The book in question will have two main features:

1) It will contain thousands of made-up statements.
2) It will be titled, "a book I read," in that casing.

The purpose is, obviously, for people to buy this book, read its contents, and proclaim those statements with the 100% true citation of "a book I read."

A feature I have not yet decided on would be a blank page for the owner to write in their own statements, magically giving them credibility.

I'm somewhat surprised Dogbert has not thought of this himself. Ironically, this morning's comics contained an acknowledgement of the flawed reality that makes my idea naught but a joke:

But as a joke, you must admit the Wikipedia article for it will be twice the fun.

Bizarro Shakespearoth

What. The. Heck.

I suppose this is for nerds, but certainly of a different kind than I am.

Childhood Games

My dad was talking the other day about growing up in his family, and how he sort of gave his older brother a run for his money regarding being the top boy. "However," he said, "when we'd play Batman and Robin, he was always Batman and I was always Robin."

Interesting comparison. When SC and I were kids we'd play spoken text-adventure games, and he was always the narrator and I the player. Forget who knows how to use the Batarang, I had to deal with reverse- deus ex machina.

Dad should have known how nerdy we were back then.

Happy New(?) Year!

Apologies to non-VG-nerds =)

Nerd + Too Much Time = ...

This was part of a comment on a site that I will probably blog about sometime. While I have a good amount of other stuff to organize and post when I have the time, I just had to share this now.


"I did a little math today and it would seem that the average adult male eats roughly the equivalent of a tenth of a gallon of gasoline every day. According to a quick Google and a little more math, the average cookie is worth something like 0.0027 gallons.

We burn energy at a rate of 100-200 Watts. Which as it turns out is roughly equivalent to the power used by my computer.

Therefore I conclude that my computer is a person too, which is why I leave its cookies enabled."

The quick brown fox?

Remember the pangram, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"? I was just checking out what's new at a certain ROM hacking site, and there was a new section for font files to insert into games. I clicked on one to see what exactly they were, and it happened to use a hilarious example screenshot of the font in Final Fantasy 6. Too bad it doesn't use every letter of the alphabet.

If I Made a Rubik's Cube ...

I've had a share of what I consider to be great product ideas, but this one almost leaves me shaking my own head. I half think this is brilliant and half think it's psychotic, so I'm curious to know what others' opinions on this are -- especially if you're a big Rubik's Cube nut. So here we go.

I don't have any first-hand experience but I imagine that as those Cubes get bigger and bigger they just pack on more layers of the same puzzle. Granted, this makes things more challenging, but I'm looking at a different approach. Rather than solving some 30x30x30 monstrosity, I want to make a toy that both challenges one's knowledge of what has to be done as well as their ability to look ahead and formulate a procedure ahead of time.

This Cube would be computerized, with colored lights instead of stickers, so it could jumble the whole thing up automatically and determine the number of moves required to solve it. This number would be set as a limit, and it would keep track of the turns made, counting down until the allotted number was reached. If you didn't solve it at that point, game over!

Here's the best part: the name, which I initially came up with as a joke and which gave root to the whole idea in the first place. I'd call it the "Rubikon Cube" -- once you've started turning it, there's no turning back!

I don't know about you, but I'm glad I won't be getting one of those in my basket this year. Happy Easter!

A "3-D CD"

ZMaro, SCobbler, and I were chatting about video games at my late birthday party yesterday, and at some point ZM mentioned that the Playstation was supposed to be a "3-D system," yet there seemed to be as many 2-D games on it as there were 3-D games. "Well, those disks are pretty flat," I joked. "A true 3-D system would have some triangular prism that floats in mid-air and is read by lasers from multiple directions."

As many of our conversations go, this simple, witty comment shot us off on a whole different tangent as we began discussing how a three-dimensional "CD" would function.

SC, being a bit over-practical for the amount of sugar we were running off, pointed out that a pyramid would be almost impossible to spin like a CD and be read; a sphere would work much better. Before I could say more than "A sphere is dull," he added that a cone would be best, because you wouldn't have to deal with the inconsistent proximity of the sphere's surface to the reading laser. I wasn't sure what he was talking about at the time, although now I think he might have been referring to a single laser moving in a perpendicular direction to the sphere's spinning, like a CD player's laser moving from the inside to the outside. If this is the case, a cone would help, as the angle would never change. However, a cone would truly remedy the problem if it was spun on a tilted axis such that the side facing the laser was vertically straight, but if you went in that direction you might as well settle on a cylinder.

I, on the other hand, wasn't thinking of having the object spin whilst the laser(s) moved. I was picturing an object held in the center of a zero-G container rotating (though not necessarily spinning quickly) in any direction so that fixed lasers could read every area. However, I still didn't manage to communicate this because ZMaro took us completely off-guard by saying that the lasers would spin around the sphere. My dad kind of stabbed the idea and left it for dead by exposing the inefficiency of doing that. Then SCobbler practically discarded the whole anti-gravity part by suggesting "rollers" that would turn the sphere (of course, I suppose using a cone might negate the antigrav as well).

I eventually just verbalized the fact that a pyramid would be the coolest, but SC wouldn't go down without a fight. Thanks to him we began rationalizing the dilemma of where information is located. He said that a sphere or pyramid would cause issues with where to start reading and it would be impractical to have "directions" all over the thing to point to what to read next. "Hey," I said, "by the time this is done in the first place, data storage will be so advanced that it shouldn't pose a problem." I think we ended on that note, but it may only have been because ZM had to leave.

So we went from yakking about games to theorizing 3-D optical storage, and all the while our parents stood by watching and waiting for us to finish. As ZM said last night, "Sometimes I forget just how nerdy we sound."

A Squared Circle - I'm a Nerd

My philosophy teacher likes to use circles and squares to illustrate contradictions in nature. There's no such thing as a square circle; the essence of a circle cannot be present in a square, and vice versa. Even God cannot square a circle, not because of a limitation on his part but because of the definitions of the two shapes.

When he answered somebody's question today he referenced the "squared circle" example. I doodled on my paper for two seconds and once again proved I'm a nerdy smart-aleck.