07:55 am - Thought for the Day
It's not plagiarism if you stole it from yourself.
It's not plagiarism if you stole it from yourself.
Hi guys!
I've been looking around for some high res scans of the Weiss Schwarz cards by themselves, but I haven't had too much luck. I got some okay resolutions for a few (500x730, for example), but I'm kinda picky and would like something higher. If anyone has any high res scans of the cards, or the cards themselves and are able to scan them and share them, that'd be great!
Thanks in advance for any help!
Yesterday was a day for running errands with
What: The kiss between Guy Patterson (Tom Everett Scott) and Faye Dolan (Liv Tyler) at the conclusion of writer-director Tom Hanks' 1996 film That Thing You Do!:
Don't worry so much about what you're going to do with your life until you've figured out what you're going to do with your day.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
brownkitty posted this morning a link to My Life Is Average, a site that allows passersby to submit small scenes from tiny oddball portions of their daily life to prove, once again, that the Mean and the Mode are two ENTIRELY different concepts to people who aren't even necessarily mathematicians.
Lots of high schoolers and college kids abounding, not unexpectedly. Still, it's good to appreciate the girl who understands that the way to really attract a proper man is not necessarily through batted eyelashes and a hint of cleavage. See Example:
"On Halloween, out of all the maids, Little Red Riding Hoods, lingerie models and hot nurses at the Halloween party, the most popular girl was the one dressed as a giant piece of bacon, passing out bacon, with a sign on her back that said, 'You know you want me'."
![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/acedia/littlegent/happy.gif){kind=small}
amusedMore iPhone stuff from Jeff Minter on Vimeo.
There's a capability that spacesuits should have that should be cheap and fairly easy to implement but that I haven't heard mentioned.
A spacesuit should be aware of its location and the relative locations of other spacesuits, vehicles, and anything else with which it maintains radio contact. The audio system within the helmet should take this into account. If you're in a suit on an EVA and another astronaut who is above, behind, and to the left of you speaks, it should sound like they're above, behind, and to the left.
This would be particularly useful for moon and Mars colonies, where lengthy EVAs could put significant distance between astronauts and terrain could impede line of sight. It doesn't even have to be precise, but if a natural language statement like "Hey, look at this!" doesn't need to be followed by a location statement or require that the other astronaut look around to see where their companion is to respond then I think that'll be both more efficient and make interaction while suited more natural and less distracting.
One might even want the system to adjust a speaker's volume (to a point) according to their distance.
Just a thought.
![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/charitycam/goth_boy/happy.gif){kind=small}
relaxedIf Jesus were telling the story in Israel today, we would probably know it as The Parable of the Good Palestinian.
Everything I was supposed to do today instead of napping and playing Chromatron.
This journal has moved to Dreamwidth. Entry originally posted at http://tablesaw.dreamwidth.org/429613.ht Comment(s)
Icons!:
Persona 4 & Persona 3
Katekyo Hitman Reborn
Disgaea
Misc /
Rental Magica, Nanatsuiro drops, Melty blood, Suzumiya Haruhi no jutsu, Zero no tsukaima, Hayate no gotoku.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
maricons
The number 23 is on strike!
While its been worn by many great athletes, features prominently in the numerology of human genetics as well as famous passages from the Bible, and has successfully driven Jim Carrey crazy, 23 still feels underutilized in puzzles (aside from that overused 3-cell entry in kakuro and killer sudoku which it does appreciate).
23 is tired of not existing as a BANG, for example.
23 is also tired of not being used as a common value in that "trendiest" of "puzzles", KenKen.
And 23 is hardly alone. A lot of possible numbers cannot be reached by simple operations of the same type. While there are reports of 4-cell 44s and other curiosities in KenKen products, these were not obtained by any cool means; there was simply a bug in "seven" of their 250 puzzles on "limited" wireless carriers (the linked page certainly shows 8 broken puzzles but who's counting? ... or at least doing error-checking of their error-checking). The unusual numbers resulted from 256 being subtracted from all values >= 128 it seems.
After writing a bunch of Calcu-doku puzzles myself for an upcoming book, my thoughts obviously drifted to considering how one could use more operations in each cage. I believe snake-shaped cages, that evaluate from the number (head) to the last cell (tail) with operations being used as encountered is an obvious way to do this. 44, for example, could be (((((5+3)/2)+1)+6)*4), as shown below. Going by order of evaluation: 5 +3= 8 /2= 4 +1= 5 +6= 11 *4= 44. 
In a solving sense, what does this mean? Well, you have to almost work from the back to the front. As 44 = 2*2*11, the last cell (a multiplication) is most likely a 4 but possibly a 2. Three-cell cages would be great for this gimmick as something like [29][*][-] which is [5][6][1] or [6][5][1] in a 6x6 puzzle is not too hard to figure out, but shows one can spice up the math with more than just one operation at a time. If you are just doing one to three-cell cages anyway, the combinatorial confusion of big snakes and possibly unclear paths within certain region shapes won't be encountered at all.
With this example, I really had to appease the number 23 for a bit (at least until BANG 23 actually happens) which made the resulting puzzle a bit too hard. As large cages aren't always easy work-ins, I've also shaded five cells in the grid, which will together contain exactly 2 2's and 3 3's, and this knowledge should certainly get you to a satisfying conclusion.
Rules: Fill each cell with a number from 1 to 6 so that, in each row and column, each number appears exactly once. There are a series of snake-shaped cages starting with a target number followed by a series of adjacent, connected cells each with an indicated operation. Proceeding from the cell with the value through the connected cells in order and performing operations as they are encountered, the digits placed in the cells will evaluate to the indicated value. Numbers may repeat in a cage, but cannot otherwise repeat in a row/column. In this puzzle, five cells are shaded and these cells will eventually contain the set of digits {2,2,3,3,3}.
We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!
We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.
In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.
A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.
Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!
We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.
You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!
( Read more... )We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
-- Batman
EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.
Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!
Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!
---
On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.
Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.
We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!
As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.
I wanted to post a separate note (not rolling it into the Thought for the Day) specifically thanking everyone who has served in the armed forces.
While I don't often agree with when, where, and how our leaders use our armed forces, I have no doubt that we wouldn't have the freedoms we do (and the expectation that we should have the freedoms that we've lost) without each and every one of you.
I don't like to make a distinction between those who served in wartime and those who served in peacetime, because, frankly, when one enlists it it with the expectation (at least it should be) that one can be called to serve in wartime at a moment's notice. In fact, those who enlist in peacetime (rather than hoping their number doesn't come up if there is a war) are generally among the first deployed, and therefore at the greatest risk of becoming an early casualty. It takes tremendous courage and dedication to give up your civilian freedoms and put your life on the line, whether your services are ultimately called for in war or not.
And, obviously, those who have been put through the trauma of fighting a war deserve a special place in our hearts. They did it so we wouldn't have to. The last generation that experienced a draft in this country has grandchildren that have never heard of the concept (and find it abhorrent when they do), so those who voluntarily went through the hell that is war made it possible for you and I to stay home.
So, to all our veterans, thank you.
Why is a drama that's still powerful 50 years later a "classic," while a comedy that's still funny 50 years later is a "good little film"?
Sudoku contest competitor to be retested - so, maybe someone found Eugene after all (or his not showing will make a choice easier?). This could get weird and I'm not sure what this extra step means in terms of how the investigation is leaning. Also of note, Phil Irwin from the chess community is the first to publicly associate the chess "player" from 2006 with the sudoku "solver" in 2009.
Navigate: (Previous 20 Friends)
