PMDBoi's New Writeups

February 29, 2004 (idea)

2004-03-01T03:09:05Z

This weekend I learned that I am loved.

Today I turned 20. Normally one wouldn't consider that a special event with respect to other birthdays (that one will come next year), but we leap-year babies only really get our day once every four years, so I was looking forward to it. Among the events that transpired over the past few days:

My mother had the dorms make me a birthday cake, a little round vanilla one with sprinkles and a serving knife. It got here on Thursday, and I carried it regally up to the dorm room. Cake rocks.
Wuukiee and mcc got in touch with me and asked me if I wanted to go see King Lear. I said yes, and so they went out of their way to get another ticket beforehand. Friday night, we met up, went to go see it, were awestruck by the acting in the second half of the play (or, at least, I was), and left the theater very satisfied. We swung by my place, picked up the cake, and ate a few slices in Wuukiee's

…

Prosenoder's Cup 2003 (person)

2003-09-20T23:59:31Z

Nuclear Debate

"Honey, I swear to you, I am this close to having everyone just die right now!"

Sandy's phone nearly trembled with the force of her husband's voice coming through the line. She had married him to be his lover and his friend, but being his counselor was too much sometimes. Especially now, she thought as she fingered the envelope marked "TEST RESULTS" nervously with one hand and rubbed her swollen belly with the other.

"That's... that's nice, honey. What did they do to you?"

She heard a loud sigh from the other end. "Nothing. Absolutely nothing that we've asked them to, and we don't ask much. Just that the world's countries disarm themselves, but they get off on pointing guns at each other. Do you know how much that irritates us?"

Sandy was not many things, least of all a diplomat. "No, not really. But I got something in the mail today."

"Really? Is it my bonus for…

pi seconds is a nanocentury (idea)

2003-01-31T00:04:34Z

Floating through the nodegel today, I started reading through Johnath's writeup on combinatorial explosion when I came across this phrase in his calculations. Being the math nerd that I am, I just found this too cool to pass up, so I worked it out for myself:

1 nano century
=
10^-9 centuries × 100 years/century × 365.25 days/year × 24 hours/day × 60 minutes/hour × 60 seconds/minute
=
3.15576 seconds

Percent error from π seconds: |3.15576 - π|/π = 0.45%

Naturally, I find this to be pretty damn cool. If anything, it makes a great mnemonic, but I have to wonder if there are any other strange wonderful coincidences like this in our unit system. I bet e feels jealous.

An example of this in use (at the request of m_turner, who also informs me that this conversion factor can be found in…

Windowlicker (thing)

2002-09-07T20:25:42Z

The aforementioned stereotypical rap posturing is actually pretty damn funny, if you pay attention to it. Here we have a fatally overconfident would-be pimp try to pick up a girl off the curb and get smacked right back down by both the girls and his driving companion, a somewhat unusual contrast to the flocks of girls that follow "normal" rap stars in their videos (cf. "Girls, Girls, Girls" by Jay-Z). Then, of course, Aphex Twin makes it all seem pitiful. I'd also like to point out that, at times, the dialogue was extremely hard to transcribe from the video, due to the actors' tendency to slur pretty much every word they said so it becomes one big string of phonemes. If you'd like to see it yourself (and everyone needs to at least once), it's hosted in Quicktime over at http://www.director-file.com/cunningham/522.html, and if the bandwidth cap for that site has been exceeded for the day, a smaller version is available somewhere in http://www.aphextwin.nu/. Below is the pre-limo…

Emulating other web sites on Everything using ekw (thing)

2002-06-09T22:15:57Z

Feeling a bit out of place in this monstrosity we call Everything? Longing for that touch of home that you find in other web sites? Well, long no more! Thanks to the delectable properties of that customizable theme they call ekw, Everything2 can be tweaked to look similar to whatever your favorite online oasis may be.

Although it's near impossible to emulate the look and feel of another web site in its entirety, most of the time the text and colors of a web site can be implemented in ekw. Most well-designed web sites follow the same kinds of consistencies that ekw demands (for example, all text is the same color, all headlines on sidebars/nodelets are the same color), so the transition isn't entirely brutal. Below I have some examples of popular web sites (at least, ones that I frequent) "translated" into canned ekw schemes, implementable using the ekw Scheme Cannery.

MetaFilter:

ekw_alinkcolor="#ffffff";
ekw_bgcolor="#00639b";
ekw_headingfont="G

…

air resistance (idea)

2001-11-10T03:01:48Z

One of the main things that separate the examples in physics class from reality. Be they projectile motion or free-fall problems, there never seems to be any air resistance taken into consideration. This makes us wonder how, exactly, some of these problems come about.

For example, the problem at hand would state that a parachutist drops from an airplane at an initial vertical velocity of 0. Fair enough, but then it goes on to say the parachutist free-falls for a certain amount of time—without air resistance. Presumably, this makes it easier for the problem solver to just go ahead and plug the acceleration due to gravity into the necessary equations. Then, of course, the parachute opens, and (because of air resistance) it slows the parachutist at a given deceleration.

"Why wouldn't he have air resistance on the free-fall part of the way down?" we asked our esteemed physics teacher.

"It makes it easier. Free fall is free fall. If we had to factor…