It’s easy if you try.
Yes, I’ve been up to no good again. Together with my band, now named The Quirk Side of the Moon, I’ve created yet another parody song, this time of John Lennon’s Imagine.
Imagine you were in a world with no math…
I’ve often blogged (click the words to see my previous posts) about education in the past. As I am a high school student, it’s a topic that’s rather close to my heart.
I recently came across a like-minded blog post that spurred me into action. I’m a student: I can easily talk to dozens of teachers and students to get their opinions on the state of our education system. At the same time, I’m a website administrator: I can easily set up a website to spread my message.
These two facts collided shortly after I read the aforementioned blog entry. The Web is an amazing place to spread ideas and coordinate a grass-roots movement, so, why not? Assuming nobody’s done it before (tough assumption on the Internet), I think I have a new website to start.
What’ll it do? A variety of things, really. I think the key point will be to collect all of these ideas espoused in blog posts and personal websites into one neat and concise resource for students and teachers to read, then start spreading this around to teachers. If you’d like to help, or you know a blog post that has some helpful ideas, post a comment.
You often hear phrases such as “blind as a bat” or “soft as silk,” but nobody has ever attempted to define all these units. So I will. Here’s my list of informal units:
Suggestions for calibrations for the units are welcome.
I’m partly responsible for writing this masterpiece video, so I might as well spam it here…
Enjoy.
A long long time ago I discovered Project Euler, a competition of sorts where the goal is to solve numerous mathematical puzzles with the aid of a computer. I originally thought it to be too difficult, but recently I revisited the site and discovered that I could actually solve the problems with what I’ve learned over the past few years.
Those of you with a programming inclination would probably be interested: it requires the use of some very clever techniques (so you can calculate such beastly numbers as 4000 factorial relatively quickly), and best of all, you can use any programming language you’d like.
So far I’ve solved 21 of the problems. I’ve mostly been brute-forcing the solutions (”guess and check”), but as I work my way into more complex problems which would take hours to brute-force, I’m being forced into cleverer and cleverer programs. It’s very intellectually stimulating.
If you’re up for it, try it out with your programming language of choice. It’ll help both your math skills and your programming skills — there’s nothing like trying to find the best way of calculating 4000 factorial in Lisp to make you learn about the language.
I recently announced that I was attempting to read the Bible. Progress has been slow; however, I have purchased an NIV Study Bible which should make things easier by virtue of being a more modern (and more readable) translation with handy footnotes.
The amount of violence and gore has frankly shocked me. People are dying left and right here, and the worst part is that half the time it’s all okay. Their deaths are religiously sanctioned. On the other hand, it all seems to serve the same central point: follow God. Really, really faithfully. Or he’ll have a lion eat you.
It’s all part of the tactics, I suppose. I’m looking forward to reading the New Testament and the preachings of Jesus. Unfortunately I’m only halfway through the Old Testament (ouch).
Back in November 2007 we had 5,977 posts made on SFN during the entire month. Not bad, although at our peak in May 2005 we had 12,000. Well, I just checked the numbers, and in the last month we had 7,521 posts.
We’re making definite progress. Our goal now is to increase our growth rate even more so SFN can be a productive and vibrant community. My personal goal is 500 posts per day — 15,000 posts per month.
Hey, we might be able to pull it off.
Why do You make so many of Your followers so intolerant and hating, and yet make so many more so loving and kind? It makes it so difficult to make sweeping generalizations!
This summer I thought it would be an interesting project to sit down and read the Bible cover to cover. (Perhaps later I can tackle the Qur’an.) At the time of writing I’m on Numbers 20 (page 170 out of 1217) and generally learning a lot. (The Old Testament God is scary.)
But reading the Bible probably isn’t going to help me understand Christians any more than I do already. A few days ago I posted a thread on TheologyOnline asking them which chapters of the Bible they believe would be the best for an atheist (like me) to read.
Then I get this response from “OMEGA”:
You can buy a 2 CD set in the USA for about $15.00
that will have the bible read to you so, you can Listen to it at your convenience.
and a short while later:
I hope that my suggestion helps because I am not sure that you atheists have evolved far enough to be able to READ.
Okay, so I might not have gotten into the New Testament preachings about kindness and love yet. But isn’t this hatred a little, well, un-Christian?
Read more »
A long long time ago, a friend and I wrote a document on the science of relationships. It was mostly silly, but it did have one section that wasn’t just made up. That section was on the Relationship Uncertainty Principle.
The RUP works in a fashion similar to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics. The idea is simple: at any given time in a two-person relationship, you cannot simultaneously know each party’s feelings for the other and how those feelings are changing.
Perhaps an example would help explain it.
Read more »
global RSS feed.