Language

You ever have those moments when you hear or read the same words as everyone else, but extract a completely different yet completely valid understanding of what those words mean? (completely valid here refers to the different understanding being a valid language construct, but may not necessarily agree with the context in which it is seen)

Case in point : the other day, working on some aluminum parts in a workshop at an undisclosed location, I saw a small package of parts – a typical package of N parts enclosed within a clear cover with a cardboard backing giving the relevant name / description. The package backing proudly declared that these parts were butt connectors. I don’t think I have a particularly dirty mind, but the accompanying mental image was unavoidable. Maybe Ryan can hand these out when playing huckle-buckle…

The incident reminded me of some years back, when at a supper for intelligent university students (read : the computer science students), this book was found in the hosts bookshelves :

Some may not understand. A second look would then be in order.

Why do we sell this stuff to kids?

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Work is Play

Three days into my new job, I feel as if I’m procrastinating from schoolwork. This feeling, fortunately, is not due to procrastination from work. Instead, it’s somewhat of a nostalgic feeling brought on by the type of work that I am doing.

Every dedicated university student knows of the black hole, the oasis, the addiction that is addictinggames.com. Many spend countless hours working on their paper by playing Kitty Cannon and the like. Being a more mathematically enlightened student, I knew that I had found the ultimate procrastination tool when I found Planerity. The game goes something like this :

Start off with a mess of circles (called vertices) and lines (called edges), as depicted below.

This example is already a few moves into the game. To play, move the vertices (the circles, remember? c’mon, I just mentioned that!) until none of the edges (lines) cross, forming a planar graph of N vertices and M edges where N and M depend on the difficulty level. A finished product can be observed below :

My current job at work is like this game, except that I work with a circuit board, using components and traces instead of vertices and edges, and I am allowed a number of line crossings as I have two layers to work with. What fun! (And you thought the connect the dots from grade one had no practical applications!)

An occasion to celebrate

The red mule turned 1400.0 today. I was there to celebrate with it (fortunately… another worker, A., almost had the pleasure when he went to move red mule so that green mule could get by). Admittedly, it wasn’t a huge party, but the red mule didn’t really want a big birthday anyways.

I tend to notice nice round numbers like that. Today I spent some time thinking about numbers. Important points of my pondering were :

• I don’t like odd numbers as much as even numbers, in general. Especially at work. Unless they’re divisible by 5, in which case they’ll barely tolerable.
• Prime numbers, while enjoying a place of prestige (even though, yes, all but one are odd) have no place at a tree nursery.
• Just touched briefly on a few of the many relationships between numbers and music. For instance, the eight note system ends up giving you a great example of modular arithmetic. Also, anything in which the terms “third”, “circle of fifths”, and “time beats given in fractions that used to drive me crazy until somebody finally managed to make me understand the differences between them and that no you can’t just play different timed pieces the same way” have a place of importance clearly has an appreciation for numbers.

As a disclaimer, I don’t think about numbers everyday. So I’m only partly crazy.

Everyone wants a piece of me

Being tall, I’ve received my fair share of related jokes and comments. One of the more interesting suggestions, likely made by social aggitators who demand equality in all things, is the suggestion that I receive surgury to remove several inches from my legs which can then be grafted into the aggitator’s legs in order to equalize height. As attractive as this offer may sound to those who don’t like being tall, I have up to this point graciously declined all such offers.

But today, I’ve found someone who wants another part of me. I was at work at a prestigious tree farm, where my task of the hour was to move a large number of potted trees from one location to another. Potted trees may occaisionally look like this :

They didn’t look like these this time, since I was moving Larix laricina, not a random assortment of deciduous trees. At any rate, the foreman (here named ‘S.’) commented on the amount of walking I was doing. In response, I half-jokingly gestured at my stomach and said, “S., I’ve got ten extra pounds I need to burn off here. Walking is good for me!” The middlesized, skinny S. looked at me and said, “Why you burn them all?? Give them to me!”

So there you have it. Someone does want your fat. But instead you choose to either burn it or to hoard it closely. How very selfish.