Mr. Frog's New Writeups

Cool as Ice: An E2 gathering on the slopes of Salt Lake City (thing)

2003-01-25T19:08:31Z

And so the gathering began. Our weary adventurers gathered to set off on an amazing adventure. It was to be a tale of intrigue, mystery, and corruption that went all the way to the top: the Mayor of the town. Their journeys would take them to Hell and back, only to return and have more killing to do, and more puzzles to solve. A wise cleric, an acrobatic elf, and a charismatic but dim-witted half-orc....

But enough about our Dungeons and Dragons game. How about the aftermath of Cool as Ice. Let's try this again.

The town was Salt Lake City. The time was New Years of 2003. Noders had come from far and wide to witness what could only be described as sheer madness. They traveled to Salt Lake City from as far north and east as Pittsburgh, PA. Still, another made the trip from as far south and west as Salt Lake City. It…

1800 US Presidential Election (thing)

2003-01-06T19:55:42Z

As mllwswpr has so aptly mentioned, the presidental election of 1800 was riddled with problems. Some were solved with Amendments, some with precedent. As elections go, the election of Jefferson was one of the most important.

The Federalist party manged to have two presidents in office before dissolving. Altough he wasn't initially, George Washington favored the Federalist party and is regarded as the first Federalist president. The second was John Adams. Up until 1799, a single party had been running the newly formed United States of America.

In 1800, Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, was elected to succeed John Adams, a Federalist. For the first time in American history the presidency changed hands. In present day America the changing of the guard is important, however not violent. However, the precedent for regime change has seen violence. History is riddled with hostile government takeovers as power…

YHWH (idea)

2002-11-15T23:06:31Z

A little elaboration on Ground Zero's excellent write up. Above, Ground Zero explains that Hebrew texts had the letters YHWH, the word Adonai, and Jehovah. All this can be a bit ambiguous without some explanation.

Ancient Hebrew texts were written on parchment. Parchment was very expensive, so to conserve space the writing was jammed all together, allowing no space between words. Scrolls would be a jumble of letters from top to bottom. To conserve even more space the writers left out vowels.

The point of these texts were to be read, and more to the point, read aloud to teach. Those who could read would decipher the list of consonants into words, with one exception: the Hebrew word for God. Yahweh could be written as YWHW, but could never be spoken. People of the Jewish faith hold the name of God in very high esteem. So as not to disrespect the Almighty, when Hebrew men would read they say "Adonai," the Hebrew word for Lord, rather than the…

Goodman's New Riddle of Induction (idea)

2002-10-10T14:23:14Z

Nelson Goodman introduced a problem with human intuition through induction in his book "Fact, Fiction and Forecast" published in 1965. The problem has to do with examining the color of an emerald at different times. First Goodman defines the word grue. The definition of grue has two parts. Objects that are assigned the property of grue are:

Objects FIRST examined before January 1, 2003 that are green.

Objects not examined before January 1, 2003 that are blue.

The time of January 1, 2003 is completely arbitrary. The date serves to distiguish between objects examined before a certain time and objects examined after that time.

This definition of grue can be difficult to understand initially. Assigning the property of grue to an object depends on the time it was FIRST seen and its color. A green object FIRST seen before the date is called grue. Likewise, a blue object FIRST seen after the date can be called grue as well. However,

…

Paid to be nice (idea)

2002-09-22T16:56:59Z

All through high school I wore my signature Adidas Sambas. Recently, I was unable to find them at the usual store and was forced to visit a multitude of shoe stores to find my shoes. Upon entering one particular store, I was greeted by a stunning female employee with a brilliant smile. To me, it seemed to have more meaning than the previous greetings from other shoe vendors. I don't think of myself as being a very attractive person, so mutual attraction is a feeling I usually don't come across. However, I could not help but to feel the cliched 'chemistry' between us. For the entire time we were together, she was all smiles. When she noticed I wanted to buy another pair of Sambas, she made a few flirtatious jabs. All in all, she was much more friendly than anyone else I had seen the entire day.

I began to wonder if that was just her personality. Was she overly nice because that was her style, was she normally outgoing? Perhaps she was…

The Infamous Rocket Mishap of 2002 (idea)

2002-09-04T22:19:14Z

It had become a symbol. A sign of what we were capable of. Although we never thought we would actually do it, we knew that we could do it, we just needed the initiative.

Over the past year we had blown up many things. A stuffed bunny was destroyed with the help of M-80s. That was fairly impressive for a first time. A teddy bear was decapitated with ground up model rocket engines. Finally, our greatest achievement was the 3 foot rocket. This had been filled with ground up rocket engines, bottle rockets, and matchheads. This rocket looked like an authentic firework. Each explosion was getting better...and bigger. With our aims set high, two of my friends build a 6'6" rocket. This was to be the next bigger and better explosion.

The rocket was built out of four tubes that were roughly 20 inches long, a plastic nose cone, and a G engine was to provide the propulsion. My friends then purchased extra…