Browsing the blog archives for October, 2009
You know how you’re looking forward to an exciting event, and the countdown to the event is just as exciting (if not more so) than the event itself?
That’s how the countdown to NaNoWriMo is. Sure, midnight the first is really exciting, but counting down the time until you can write and watching as others in [...]
After poking around Chaotic Shiny’s NaNoWriMo motivator for a few minutes, I moved on to the life motivator. (Seriously, give the NaNo one a try next month.) What exactly the purpose of the life motivator is, I’m not sure. Let’s see what it spits out.
Do the hardest tasks first.
I’m a fan of doing the easy [...]
Train rides, I have discovered, are good for thinking and writing. I left home early tonight to go to an event, and as expected, I need that time, as the train decided to lull after the second stop. If the train didn’t lull, I would have arrived early, which wouldn’t have been a bad thing [...]
I’ve run across an interesting problem. On my trip home from my internship, I take a train followed by a bus. However, more than one bus will get me close enough to home so that walking the rest of the trip is reasonable.
Buses A, B, C: These three buses use the same stop that I [...]
You know that saying “Truth is stranger than fiction”? It’s true. I finished reading Running with Scissors, a memoir by Augusten Burroughs today, and despite all the reviews on the back cover saying that the book was twisted and horrifying (yet hilarious). When I read the book, though, I found the book hilarious and well-written [...]
As National Novel Writing Month participants everywhere know, NaNoWriMo begins less than a week from today–five days from the time this will be read by anyone besides myself. Some will argue four, but that’s just a different way of counting, sort of like the story of the mathematician who began counting with zero instead of [...]
As you may have guessed by reading this site, I am carfree. As a result of such, I take advantage of my area’s public transportation regularly. While it certainly isn’t stellar compared to other systems that I’ve experienced such as those in New York and Paris, where urban sprawl is less of a problem and [...]
Now for Cantor’s diagonal argument. Cantor showed that the natural numbers and the integers have the same cardinality, and even the natural numbers and the rational numbers. But what about the natural numbers and all the real numbers? Let’s say we wrote down the decimal representation of every single real number and corresponded them with [...]
Only in America would someone sue someone for over a billion trillion dollars. To be exact, we’re talking $1,784,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Kevin Houston of the University of Leeds is cited in the article as saying, “I don’t think the human brain is set to deal with those numbers.”
But are they? Mathematicians study the properties of not just [...]
As I mentioned yesterday, I finished reading Artemis Fowl, a book about a twelve-year-old criminal and genius who gets on the bad side of a bunch of fairies. He also has a minion…erm, bodyguard named Butler. Sounds cool, right? The plot was actually interesting. The writing made me suffer through the novel. Yes, it’s a [...]