Frenzied Daddy

You’ve probably noticed the advertising over on the left; a few months ago I swapped out the google adsense for the BlogHer ads. No, I’m still a “blogHim” but they’re taking new members, including … ( wait for it ) … guys!

Anyway, they’re taking a survey to find out what makes my ( our ) readers tick; so please go over here and take the survey. Apparently you can win a free pass to a BlogHer event, and everybody likes those.

I hear BlogHer events are great places to pick up chicks.

OW OW OW OW

One of the things I’m happy about from my childhood is the math. Yeah, this is where I remind dad that he wouldn’t let me have a calculator until I didn’t need one. Math and I get along pretty well. It’s kind of odd that reluctance to do math contributed to my dropping out of the Chemistry path in college, though. I enjoyed science too- especially Chem but I got tired of doing the “where could the electron be” equations and finally gave up.

Anyway, the DQ was doing her homework last night and asked me if some large ungainly number like 23001 could be divisible by three. I told her that 2+3+1 was 6 and 6 was a multiple of three, so yes. I think I picked that rule up in Junior High. We were doing some sort of factoring exercise and the teacher showed us that rule. So we could do any number was divisible by 2, 5, 10, and now 3, 6, 9 too ( if it’s divisible by 2 and also 3 then it’s divisible by 6, if the numbers add up to a multiple of 9 then it’s also divisible by nine ). I could never remember the fairly complicated rule for sevens, though. “Sevens are hard” I told DQ last night.

Ms B was surprised to learn that rule of threes. She caught on quick though because she’s a smart cookie. She agreed that sevens are hard.

So in my daily news reading, I was surprised to come across this article: “Is 91 Prime?” . One of those strange coincidences of the world.

Here’s their answer to the sevens conundrum:

Is 8638 divisible by 7?
863 - 2*8 = 847 (subtract twice the last digit)
84 - 2*7 = 70 (subtract twice the last digit)
70 = 7 * 10, which is divisible by 7 -- therefore 8638 is divisible by 7

That seems like too much work to me. It’s actually faster in this case for me to look at “7 goes into 8638… goes into 8 remainder 1, goes into 16 remainder 2, goes into 23 remainder 2, goes into 28 even, so yes. Sort of a division only worrying about the remainder.

Anyway, that article actually explains why the threes rule above works. It has to do with the decimal system. I almost understand it. One of the comments was also very interesting about square roots: the difference of two square roots is not prime. So 91 is not prime ( sorry to spoil the ending ) because 1) seven goes into 9 remainder 2 then seven goes into 21 remainder 0 and 2) (10×10)-(3×3)=91.

Easy, huh? What about 133? Are there two squares that differ by 133?

I have fond recollections of my brother being the more adventurous of the two of us, growing up. I always thought he was cool- he was braver and more willing, for instance, to jump out of the swings at the apex of his swing, or leap from concrete tube to concrete tube ( the playground of our trailer park had these 4 foot diameter concrete tubes that we played in… couldn’t do that today, they’d be rubberized. But at least when you licked them in winter your tongue didn’t stick to them ). Sure, he had a few mishaps; he got his scar on his chin that matches mine when he went down a hill on his bike and over a bike jump. I thought he was laughing when he got up, but he wasn’t. Whoops. But overall, I was proud to be his brother and always tried to live up to what he was capable of.

I never was able to, though; which made it more surprising when my mother tried to tell me, when I was a teenager, how much he looked up to me. I thought it was the other way around. I was more of a sissy boy and he was the macho one. Aah well, this photo always reminds me of him.

( oh, this picture isn’t really my brother– I stole it from a fark thread and cropped off the lolcaption. )

When I first caught wind of this, I thought it was a sick version of some “viral buzz” for the new Batman movie ( The Dark Knight ) which looks ( looked ? ) awesome.

But, no, now that I find the story on the New York Times, it sounds like he’s dead. The police said they did not suspect foul play and said they found pills near body.

source

In fricking conceivable.

Here’s the link for a trailer for The Dark Knight. I don’t know what they’ll do now; if filming is done ( doubt it ) or what.

Trailer

Damn, who’s laughing now?

Fourth edition Dungeons and Dragons is coming. I’m not following it as closely as I’d like to- because I’m not playing it as much as I’d like. Since DnD was bought by Wizards of the Coast, I’ve been concerned about what they’re doing with the “franchise.”

I have some excellent memories of DnD. One of my least favorite, ok I’ll admit it, player races was the Gnome. It was really only set up for one class- my least favorite “illusionist.” Dammit when I throw a spell, it’s real, ok? Geez. Anyway, apparently I’m not the only one disillusioned with gnomes, because in the fourth edition they’re removing Gnomes from the Player Handbook and replacing it with a Tiefling. In the words of a pal, “the gnomes have been demoted from player race to wandering monster check.”

Poor guys.

Anyway, this is a (funny) (short) video that gives a little more insight as to the change. I guess the gnomes are pretty happy about it. This one called his mom! Anyway, check out the video. It’s the first one on the page.

Flash!

Ripping the CD you bought to your computer as an MP3? That’s a paddling! RIAA, you suck.

Source

OGG is an alternative to MP3 ( not that the RIAA wants you to rip your CDs to OGG either ), and in the interest of helping HTML be media-happy, it was going to be a part of the HTML spec (like your EM and your STRONG and your H1 tags ); now that’s been ripped out thanks to APPLE AND NOKIA!!!!!

Seriously, pals, wth.

As I learned “creative writing,” whether it was at an after-school class or at a meeting of young writers, one exercise kept coming back. Write a paragraph to describe someone. I did it a few times, where “few” means “a few hundred.” One of my favorites, not written by me, is “Aqualung” by Jethro Tull. Of the hundreds I wrote, I rewrote and worked on one in particular where some horsemen appeared out of the fog as a young man stood in the grass and took the time to describe the lead horseman in what I thought was great detail. But a description is more than a catalog of appearances.

Charlie Fletcher describes a character in Stoneheart and nails this technique to the wall.

George looked up. He saw a man made from tarnished bronze from the bottom of his army boots to the top of his tin helmet. The Gunner from the war memorial looked back down at him as he broke the revolver in his hand, shook out the spent shells, and reloaded in a movement so fluid that he didn’t seem to need to look at his hands while he did it.

He moved so fast that he snapped the reloaded revolver back together while the shells were still tinkling at George’s feet.

George felt his nightmare wasn’t over. He scooted away from the Gunner, but not fast enough. The Gunner grabbed him and yanked him back against the wall and then stepped in front of him. Protecting him.

Charlie didn’t explain the horse braids on one shoulder or go into every detail about how the creases of the bronze are a brighter color than the flat surfaces. He didn’t list all the features, and he left enough ambiguousness that your mind can fill in the rest. Stoneheart is full of descriptions like this; they’re very well done.

If I had any inkling that you could used character studies like this in a novel without sounding as wordy as Tolkien, I may have tried harder to pull it all together.

“Players may blunder through dialog with shocking ineptitude, forget the name of the country they are in, or get confused about which side they are on, but once it comes time to roll for initiative they all turn into Sun Tzu.”

In a world where every every idiot with a pirated version if Photoshop™ and a twisted sense of humor thinks he’s a web comic artist, it takes something special to shine above the dross. I’ve been laughing so hard at the DM of the Ring that I think everyone around me wonders what the heck I’ve been drinking. It’s the funniest thing I’ve read today. So far the quote that begins this post is my favorite.

Even the comments are hilarious; this comic focuses on DnD, but one of the comments refers, in a thread about “my dice are trying to kill me”, to a Champions (superhero) game where a player hit a villain for max damage, which knocked the villain out. Knockback bounced the villain into (one bad roll later) another player’s character whose armor did not deflect the “attack” (another bad roll) and who took more damage, and who (another bad die roll) was essentially turned to strawbelly mush after knockback of his own.

And why I hate dice

Ms B told me that the NRA thought that terrorism suspects had a right to carry guns. This led to an interesting debate. But the problem was a difference in perceptions- I thought she meant “as opposed to other people.” But she meant “as opposed to the idea that people in general have a right to carry guns.” In other words; I treated it as a legal right, she treated it as a moral right.

Which are neither the same nor are mutually exclusive.

This isn’t really a post to bring up that discussion; it’s a segue for this coffee mug.

Enjoy.