2005
10.27
10.27
Look, I don’t mean to be flip here but, duh.
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula… to give a facade to the void.
I recently ran across the latest craze in the puzzle world, Su Doku.
The premise is that it is a character arrangement puzzle, much like your typical crossword. Rather than arranging words or short phrases (I always hated the slang words or phrases in crosswords), you arrange numbers. You are supposed to arrange them so that the number is not reused in the row, column and region. Refer to the Wiki for more details. Super Su Doku increases the region count to 4×4 and alphabet size to 0..9,A..F.
So I was wondering if there were programs out there to generate these things. I was sure that these puzzles cannot be that difficult to generate and I was right. There are many programs out there to generate puzzles of various difficulty levels:
The first sudoku generator was my favorite. It utilizes Gnome-Sudoku to generate the puzzles and is hooked up to the web. It will allow PDF exporting, so printing the puzzles is easy. I can then take those puzzle printouts with me onto the vanpool. If estimates are correct, I should be able to finish between 2-6 puzzles per trip (given that sudokugenerator.com is correct in estimating between 10 to 30 minutes).
This may very well become my next major distraction.
In response to The End of the Affair By Clive Thompson — I’ll bet that the video game addiction cycle goes something like this:
1. You start playing a game, and your body starts goin’ nuts: releasing endorphins and adrenaline because of the excitment of the stimulation to your senses and the challenge it poses to your faculties.
2. Eventually, at least one of two things happens: your body becomes accustomed to the elevated levels of stimulant chemicals, and the “fix” that the video game provides becomes less effective, and less appealing than the challenge of it. (The game is too difficult, and its challenge outlives your body’s addiction to the game’s stimulus.) Or, you quickly beat/master the game and its diminished challenge provides less of a thrill than before. (The game is too easy, ergo it becomes boring. This happens quite frequently, to me anyway.)
3. So, after putting the game away for a time, you may come back to it (although if the game was too easy, this seems unlikely). Since adrenaline and endorphins are not stimulants foreign to your body, but instead chemicals native to your own metabolism, and are are well suited together, it is easy for your body to quickly “recover” from the brief stimulant “addiction”. This means that when you go back to a challenging game, you will experience much the same addictive rush as you did when you played it the first time, and the addiction cycle begins all over again.
You know, perhaps this is analagous to love, in that love is a chemical addiction that your body “recovers” from quickly (relative to foreign addictive substances, like crack). At least, for most guys anyway.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an agency of the United Nations, thinks it can control the Internet.
The U.N. agency’s head, Yoshio Utsumi, said at a news briefing to conclude the latest round of [World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)] talks that the ITU could handle the responsibility and have the technological capability to take control of the Internet “if we were asked to,” adding that the international organization would be the most appropriate body to have such a role.
Most of the news articles available on the Internet right now are making it sound like the U.S. Government runs the entire Internet. This is fabrication, and false.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a non-profit corporation that helps keeps the Internet running. It is mostly made up of Internet Society Members. The members of the Internet Society are both individuals (for whom membership is currently free — membership is open to anyone), and also corporations, organizations, governments, and universities.
The events that precipitated the current controversy include:
Make no mistake, the current media stir and the organizational grandstanding it surrounds is pure politics at its worst. Here we are, in the 21st Century, a billion people happily using and sharing the Internet, and what happens? These power-envying countries and organizations are crying to the United Nations because, ‘Boo hoo and waaah! We don’t have control of the root DNS. We want the USA to give up their tyrannical choke hold over our cyber-lives and cyber-future!’
These people don’t give a crap about the issue of individuals and entities being forced to pay fees to the ICANN to register domain names, or the Department of Commerce urging the ICANN to carefully evaluate the decision of registering the .xxx TLD. All they care about is getting what they want: power. Power is the chief end of politics, which is what all this fiddle-faddle is.
Ultimately, if these issues aren’t settled the right way, here’s what will happen: The Internet as we know it will be split up into several disparate networks. Major network backbone ISPs such as UUNet/WorldCom/MCI will no longer talk to China’s ISPs such as CHINANET and CNCNET. Countries like India and Brazil will attempt to implement their own DNS root zone. CENTR will bitch and moan at the U.N. and the U.S. until the ICANN makes concessions which allow for shared control of the current DNS root zone which will cause all kinds of power struggles. Either that, or the entire Internet will have to be restructured so that every Tom, Dick, and France can arbitrarily set up their own TLDs at will.
Sure, ideally there would be no fees associated with registering any domain information. In a perfect world, everyone could have everything they ever wanted. But we live in a world with only dotted quad IP addresses, and ICANN is the best the world’s got right now. So until Internet2 is implemented, and IPv6 takes hold world-wide, just suck it up, you U.N. pansies.
* Warning: link to PDF resource.
A long time ago, I used to loan my computer to the SETI@Home project. Then I learned that I could lend my computer to a more useful project: Folding At Home.
I thought about this project at work today, so when I got home I checked to see if there was an ebuild in portage yet. Sure enough, there is. I emerged the package, set it up as per the instructions at the end of the emerge. I now have 2 machines setup to process protein folding all day long.
I found the old account I had made in 2003. Since I had not setup or designated a team, I made a new one. Since this research is used for biology research, it could have a great impact on humanity. The more processors we can donate to this effort, the better. I strongly urge everyone to make a new account and download the software (for whatever OS you use, there may be managed packages already). Also, make sure you specify our team number: 47017. This is used for stats tracking but doesn’t serve any other real purpose (besides being big contributors like HP and Google).
Get off your butt and have your computer make the world a better place!
In his Ten Reasons Why You, Audrey Tautou, Gamine French Star of Amélie, Should Date [Him], Teddy Wayne post, Teddy Wayne illuminates points that could be generalized to some normative language such that I, Nels Nelson Might Have a Chance With Keira Knightley.