Speaking of constrained writing
This reminds me of the long theological debate among Christian churches about whether miracles have ceased. Thanks to Nick for the link to "Cadaeic Cadenza".
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This reminds me of the long theological debate among Christian churches about whether miracles have ceased. Thanks to Nick for the link to "Cadaeic Cadenza".
I was inspired to memorize pi out to 58 decimal places. This wasn't particularly difficult, because I had already memorized it to 53 places. I would like to reach 100 places, but I haven't really applied myself to memorizing pi since I was in high school.
I used to have some more geek talents, but I've stopped counting in binary on my fingers since I got wrist injuries. I used to be able to reach 32 (all combinations of five bits) in five seconds, but last of practice has pushed that out around seven or eight seconds nowadays.
While I was still keeping up my diary on Advogato, I was also practicing doing the Towers of Hanoi with everyday objects (since I unfortunately don't have a nice 64-disc set wherewith to hasten the end of the material universe, or, indeed, any nice Towers of Hanoi set). In January of this year I set my personal records:
Towers of Hanoi: 6 objects in 55 seconds. 7 objects in 121 seconds. (I really want to shave a second off of that.) You see my list of potential geek party stunts is fast expanding. In theory, if I didn't have to look, I could be a lot faster.
My original geek party stunt concept was memorizing the Nicene Creed and the MIT License and reciting them to show that they are almost exactly the same length. However, I have yet to memorize the MIT License. I do know some fairly long passages from the GNU GPL.
Speaking of the Towers of Hanoi, Sumana mentions
the logic puzzle of the Christian trying to cross a river and bring across a wolf, a goat, and some cabbage.
I heard it was a farmer with a fox, a goose, and some grain (or corn), but fair enough.
Either Gardner or Dewdeney somewhere mentions an interesting geometrical interpretation of this puzzle which makes it very easy to solve. I'm trying to reconstruct that interpretation so I can explain it. I think the positions of the three items were represented by the vertices of a cube. The difficult part would be how to show which transitions are prohibited (because just being in a certain state is OK temporarily, as long as you don't try to leave that state in a way which results in two incompatible items being left alone together).
The plaintiffs (wow, the plaintiffs are the good guys for once!) filed their first amended complaint. It was interesting to do a diff of a text dump of the original against a text dump of this amended complaint. Among other things, the new complaint adds some more background about the research of the various individual plaintiffs, corrects typos (I'm afraid it creates some new ones...) and adds new causes of action and prayers for relief, including the explicit facial challenge to the DMCA as a whole:
WHEREFORE, Plaintiffs request the following relief:[...]
F. A declaration that the DMCA is unconstitutional on its face because it violates the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
G. A declaration that the application of the DMCA to the publication or presentation of scientific, academic or technical speech, including the publication of computer programs, violates the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
These folks mean business. :-)
Oh, there's a new enumerated powers argument, too:
I. A declaration that the DMCA is unconstitutional because it is not a valid exercise of any of Congress' enumerated powers.
There are also corresponding prayers for injunctions corresponding to these declarations (enjoing the defendants against enforcing the DMCA against plaintiffs).
Although my arms hurt in the morning, my chiropractic appointment, the break from typing, and the exercise of making sushi seemed to help, so that they felt pretty well in the evening. Unfortunately, just as my arms started to feel well, some back pain popped up, as though to take the place of my arm pain.
"It means," said Aslan, "that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation."(C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe)
It is always upsetting to rely on the Deep Magic and to be defeated by a magic deeper still.
I wrote a poem about that this evening.
Contact: Seth David Schoen