algorithmic analysis

You have eight identical keys. One is heavier than the rest. Using nothing but a balance, what is the most efficient way to find it?

Solutions:

The most obvious answer is to split the keys into four groups of two, weigh each set individually, and in a maximum of four attempts you’ll have your answer. A rung above is the divide and conquer approach.  Split the keys into two groups of four on the balance, take the heavier four, split them in half, determine which two are heavier then weigh them against each other. Same answer, three steps, but it can be done in two. You split the keys into three groups, two sets of three and one set of two. Put the groups of three on the balance, if they are equal weigh the two remaining balls against each other. If they are not equal, balance two keys from the heavier side and take the third one out,  if one is heavier you have your key, if they balance you know the one left over is the heaviest.

The applied principle exploits the additional information provided by the balance. By splitting the keys into three groups and comparing two of them we can infer the state of the third. So the balance provides three pieces of information instead of two. In the worst case using this additional piece of information will always be 33% more efficient.

Demo (executable)

Demo (java Source)

municipal messes

I am certainly no environmentalist. I think nature is wonderful, and as a civilization we need to prioritize its preservation, but it is not so simple. Temporarily disregarding the fact that recycling is, for the vast majority of items, total bullshit requiring more input energy and or waste than new manufacture, economic viability is key. It needs to be both temporally and fiscally advantagous. As it stands recylcing is so incredibly inconvienent that it is absurb to expect that the average over burdened american citizen to take the high road over the convience of the trashcan. Sure landfills are disgusting, but that is why they are so far out of town. Businesses, to expound in a grander scope, are social machiens desgined to make as much money as possible. They are intrinsically capitalistic and, as such, amoral. They will not help the environment until their profit margins find it favorable. But I’ve digressed, what I want to talk about is littering.

Littering in the purity of nature is a reprehensible act. I’m overstating the point, but it does have a negative ecological impact. Don’t throw coffee cups in the forest, or on the mountain peaks, but if you happen to be in the city, toss at will. Not only does littering in developed areas gainfully employ fleets of street sweepers, the negative consequences are purely asthetic. You are not hurting anything except the tidy sensibilities of others with your carelessly scattered burger wrappers. Once we moved in and destroyed all that was natural to create a humanoid paradise of asphalt and concrete we did about all the damage we could possible have done. It is naiive to think that littering even makes a difference.

I like living in clean places (with some extremist exceptions like Irvine, if you’ve ever had the pleasure of that haven of unsettling sterility), but it is not your responsibility to cater to my visual sensibilities. And in return, I vow not to cater to yours.

redundancy rant

There is a grammatical abomination so vile it grinds my teeth and loads my shotgun. I am not referring to the common [and equally serious] travesties like there, they’re, their, your, you’re, its, and it’s. No friends, I speak of the persistent misconstruing of common and obvious acronyms. Conveniently, the two standouts in this category are highly related. So for the last time:

There is no such thing as an “ATM machine”, and it does not accept “PIN numbers”

Should you wish to continue propagating this destructive folly, by all means. I rarely have the opportunity to shoot anything.

As a side note, does anyone recall the Windows 2000 boot up screen advertising “Based on NT technology”? (for the uninitiated, NT stands for New Technology)

top ten reasons why you aren’t reading this

10.) live in cave
9.) perpetually unmotivated
8.) Nicolas Cage night on tnt
7.) suffering from a crushed skull
6.) fighting against PETA
5.) fighting for PETA
4.) lost everything in the market crash; too po’ for internet
3.) left universe by accidentally venturing through the 5th dimension.
2.) playing vector tower defense
1.) stupid

athletic integration

NOTE TO STUDENT DISCLAIMER: This guide is intended only for informational purposes, and is not meant to be a substitute for professional sports instruction. Due to its condensed format, this guide cannot cover every aspect of this sport. Neither BarCharts, its writers, designers nor editing staff, are in any way responsible or liable for the use or misuse of the information contained in this guide.

bangkok boredom

I hadn’t intended to review Cage’s latest travesty. I still don’t, but I found a compelling excerpt from a local paper’s review:

[the movie is ok] but mostly it has the inert acting of Nicolas Cage weighing it down

well said Palladino, I could do no better

political recursion

an even better Obama pin:

money masquerade

I wanted to title this post ‘people who distribute leaflets or advertisements shaped like crumbled up dollar bills should be shot without trial’ but I feared for the feng shui of the frontpage. It is cold and I put on my shoes so I could go pick it up for gods’ sakes. Pita pits deception was my only reward. It wasn’t even a coupon.

better buttons

For a long time I was unable to overcome the pretension of advertising my political beliefs with the tacit assumption that someone cares. Finally, I have found the perfect button to unassumingly demonstrate my feelings about the upcoming election:

If you can’t tell, its baller Obama wearing an Obama tie

beach banter

Swimming through the seaweed is quite enjoyable if you can overcome your initial revulsion. Especially the grass. It’s like being caressed by hundreds of feathers. In the bathtub.

I had been waiting for the marine layer to burn off, but as the afternoon broke I gave up hope of a sunny southwestern sky and headed to the beach anyway. The water was brisk, and navigating the murk and bobbing heads of seaweed definitely had an apocalyptic timbre.

The man was already sitting down at the top of the steps by the time I shivered out of the water. He was 2 years from 40, his bike was orange, but I don’t recall his name. Approaching him on my way to the dry rock guarding my belongings I noticed a petite multicolor glass piece only partially obscured by his posture. My hello was met with a greeting and semiserious quip regarding my potential affiliations with law enforcement.

I sat down and, unwilling to offend with a refusal of his kindness, I finished what he had begun. It did his claims justice. Plus, he was kind enough to refer me to a nondescript downtown establishment with a promise of even greater bounties.

I asked him about turning thirty, he explained a slowdown around thirty-three followed by a rejuvenation period; commented on youth ending conveniently as you begin to tire of it. We chatted about the weather and the water. He had no discernible employment or education. He spent his days remodeling his girlfriends home with the handiness inherited from a past life in auto repair. His goal was surviving, giving me cause to consider the potential contentedness of a life spent just surviving in a place as nice as this.

He took off at the first opportunity. Undoubtedly trying to escape my persistent reminders of his headlong rush to the grave. It was an interesting encounter, leaving many points to be considered. Also, I am pretty sure I was boring him.

plight of the pharmacists

Like a missionary on his first tour through a cambodian sweatshop, I was horrified to see the injustices piled upon my dear pharmacologist during my most recent routine pill up. The local Kmart is my pharm of choice which, seeing as everyone including myself seems to remember it going out of business, must be located somewhere in the southwest corner of the twilight zone. This, however, does not excuse their mistreatment of what I assume to be the most skilled and educated segment of their retail workforce.

They require them to check people out, at the counter. A courtesy policy allowing you to purchase a few small things with your prescriptions seems very reasonable, but what exists is far more sinister. I waited in line while the girl in front of me checked out an entire cart’s worth of goods. This took an eternity, considering each item had to be passed back and forth through the window (she was also on her cellphone, but that rant has been beaten to death.) Wasting my time is not something I look kindly on, but frankly my time currently has very little monetary value, for a pharmacist, this is not so. I presumed they did not work through school just to spend their days as a barcode jockey. When I inquired, this suspicion was confirmed. They offered me the corporate number, and now I am running with the cause. Pursuing it further, however, would require the unlikely combination of remembering and staying interested, but today I care.

This isn’t the first policy from the zombie retail giant I have taken issue with. Most notably their waistist lack of clothing in my size which I brought to their attention (despite my earnestness, I couldn’t convince customer service to take my complaint seriously). With the deck stacking up against them, I might be inclined to swear off blue light specials forever…if there was anywhere else to go.

are they customers before you serve them?

cage, conan, and tears

I respect Nicolas Cage. It isn’t his mediocre acting, nor his awkward good looks and receding hairline. It is his work ethic. While most well known actors content themselves with the occasional big budget production, he dogs away at one B film after another. For a time I thought he was somehow constitutionally incapable of rejecting any script his agent threw at him, but the answer is far simpler: He is a working man, and acting is his job. The varying quality of his projects and abilities is no different than the persistent swings in performance faced by any professional.

Unfortunately, after his appearance on Conan last night, it is clear he does not share this insight. He appears to have somehow misconstrued himself as an artist of some sort. Evidenced by his jilted and arrogant explanation of expanding his art form by working with foreign directors, observing how they can put his performance talents to work. Really? It would appear that talent has something to do with being inconsistent as fuck.

Discussion quickly turned to his upcoming cinematic travesty release: Bangkok Dangerous. After some brief talk is cheap pandering the ‘highly stylized’ (his words) clip came on. An action sequence, presumably near the climax of the film. You hear words like stylized thrown around a lot, but finally we can settle on a definition: coloring the frame red. Bold artistic expression aside, with double pistols, subtle slow motion, and horrible inaccuracy over extremely short distances, it was a brilliant parody of action clichés. But it wasn’t supposed to be. Reaffirming my wager, made after seeing the preview, that it is destined to reside in single digit rotten tomatoes glory. The man at least needs to stop taking himself so seriously. That way I can see him on talk television without getting that awkward feeling of watching someone make an international idiot of themselves.

In closing, I don’t much like Conan and Lord of War fucking rules

courage vs cojones

Little in the world is as heartstraining as grabbing the last perrier. You want to drink it, but part of you just doesn’t want to let it go. Not like that. Love made me poke my slippered foot into the den of discarded gull bait, rub it against the package. Maybe there could be one left, maybe this isn’t goodbye. Sorrow clouded my aim. My foot exploded in a crack of white flame as nerves shot watts to my brain. Writhing floorbound in agony, in the throws of most extreme angst, my brutish colleague supposes to characture the nature of bravery.

There is a continuum between bravery and ballsyness. On the former side you have running into a burning building to save a crippled gifted kid, on the latter, anything done at rodeos. Sometimes the line is narrow. Resisting your torturers is slightly more stupid than brave. At least lie or something.

Anyway. Sensitivity to pain is not cowardice.

dimensional determinism

We intuitively appreciate the fourth dimension, which we know as time. This is a pragmatic approximation. You understand you not only need to know where to meet someone but when. If we break the distinction, however, we can more accurately view when as where in the fourth dimension. Three dimensions coordinate systems employ three axis, each perpendicular to the other two. Though difficult to envision spatially, a four dimensional grid is constructed in the same fashion. Four axis are each perpendicular to the other three. What we refer to as duration is more precisely graphical depth in the fourth dimension. This is important in the consideration that four dimensional objects have shape and substance. Even more so than three dimensional shapes, following that we hardly consider anything two dimensional substantial.

Now, Imagine passing a corkscrew through the world of a two dimensional creature. A tiny dot starts to form. As you continue, it spins into an active ball. Finally, as the straight neck of the corkscrew approaches, the ball slows to rest. What appeared to be two dimensional motion was just the effect of moving a two dimensional frame of reference through a static three dimensional object. Just as the ball could not spin without passing through the third dimension, so things in the third dimension cannot move without shifting through the fourth dimension. In effect, you are a three dimensional ball of a complex four dimensional corkscrew, your four dimensional shape no less determinate than its three dimensional analogues. Thus, the only way to alter your four dimensional shape requires interaction with the fifth dimension. Specifically, by passing your four dimensional plane of reference through it. Since we only perceive the first four dimensions, this movement determines our reality. Therefore, to be able to exert any influence on your four dimensional shape, which we might inaccurately refer to as the future, you must demonstrate agency in the fifth dimension.