My Orthographer Sayz Mah Spellun iz Getten Bettur!

I spell horribly. I despised English classes - I always wanted to be goofing off with math / physics / chemistry / computer stuff. Add to that growing up between Europe and the U.S., and a German Mom, yeah, things got scrambled. I even once received an 'F' on a paper (later remedied by my explanation), accused of plagiarism. The forensic clues to professor used? I spelled color as 'color' and 'colour' in the paper. To him, I must have copied some passages.

Sadly, this handicap has followed me into adulthood. So I'm always cutting and pasting text into spell checkers to ensure correctness. I don't know what took me so long, but I recently 'discovered' the Google Toolbar.

If you aren't using it, check it out! It has tons of cool features. The ones I find invaluable include a spell-checker that can check spelling on any form, portable bookmarks (all of mine, anywhere, any PC, any browser), search on site, search my google docs, and a unified login for those that use Google ID for login.

Pretty slick, pretty stable and bug free. I like it!

Book 'Em, Danno!

My Daughter likes to talk  about her schoolwork. Often. Pretty cool, but it can be a bit hard to do when remote: Try having someone describe something like a physics problem over the phone. So I asked her to get me copies of her books, a request easier said than done. Eventually, the school administration asked for a personal letter from me justifying the request. I ran across it going through some old e-mails. It got the job done, the books showed up quickly after its receipt.

Dear Ms. L$$$$ H$$$$:

Per your request, communicated through my daughter Juliana Cook, a junior at $$$$$$$$$, I am requesting one copy of each of the textbooks she uses in her classes, to facilitate tutoring and other assistance from me.

Because I am away from the school area more often than not, having a copy of the books locally will allow me to much more easily respond to questions from Juliana, and to be proactively prepared for tutoring her in her advanced studies.

I understand from Juliana that this email from me is needed to facilitate this request. I trust and hope that our wishes can be accommodated. Barring this, I will have no choice but to lock Juliana in the basement, properly converted to a medieval scriptorium of course and supplied with parchment and pen, to have her copy all of the books manually for my use. While such monastic activity will likely aid her in her understanding of ancient history, I'm sure you'll agree that getting the books from you will be far more time effective.

Thank you for your attention in this matter, should you have any questions, do feel free to contact me. If time is critical, feel free to have Juliana deliver the message personally. I have trained her in the traditions of Marathon (we only buy the Wheaties boxes with Pheidippides on them), and she will gladly run to deliver the message before dying from exhaustion.

Otherwise, please email me or phone me at (###) ###-####.

Kind Regards,
Rob Cook

“Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation” yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

Quine's Paradox. Named after the brilliant Willard Van Orman Quine, author of a favorite book of mine titled Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary. The sentence is intended to show a paradox similar to The Liar Paradox can be had even without self-reference.

Named after him is the Quine Program, denoting a program that can reproduce itself as output, given no input (which makes the problem trivial, and is considered 'cheating'.)

It is effectively the Fixed Point of the execution environment. An example in Scheme looks like this:

((lambda (x)
   (list x (list (quote quote) x)))
   (quote
      (lambda (x)
         (list x (list (quote quote) x)))))

For a mind-opening exposition on all things recursive and self-referential, I highly recommend a read of the amazing work by Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Macroscopic Quantum Superposition...The Cat Is A Lie.

Physicists at UC Santa Barbara published recently their results of experiments to create what is effectively a 'Quantum Microphone'. Part of the experiment showed a macroscopic realization of quantum superpositioning: the device simultaneously exists in moving and stationary states.

An overview article for the lay reader can be found at

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=quantum-microphone.

Readers with a background in or understanding of quantum mechanics that are not already aware of this marvelous work can find more detailed publications in Nature, and through the web portals for the researchers involved.

The Six Degrees of Web Separation

Watching information travel through the web is always fascinating. A recent document I published here Troubleshooting Multi-Player PC Game Connectivity Issues has found its way to a forum in Germany, where it apparently is recommended by a DICE dev. Pretty cool!

For the English speaking crowd a commenter directed me to a showing at Bash and Slash, a very cool PC gaming news and opinion site with associated forums and home of "the host of the wildly hilarious and incredibly popular, FPS gaming webcast, BASH." Check them out!

Thanks go out to the poster at the forums at CainsLair, glad you found the information useful!

Another interesting site, Penny Arcade links to the guide. Nearly four million posts in their Games and Technology forum. Wow!

A U.K. site TAG Home of the Tactical Assault Group, show the guide. Nice site, these guys have been around for a few years, with a new focus on BFBC2.

I'll update this entry as I hear of more places linking here, if you care to play the "Where's Waldo" of the web, feel free to comment here.

Regrettably, I've been forced to moderate comments: There are some pretty nasty people out there that apparently didn't like their "You gotta forward your ports!" mantra being shredded with facts.

I'm one proud dad!

My daughter found out today she was accepted to the Stanford SIMR program, an incredibly selective medical research internship over the summer. Usually seniors in HS are accepted, she got in as a junior. Way to go, JC!

Same day, she found out she got a perfect 2400 SAT, first try, as a junior. Somewhere between 20 and 100 out of the 1-1.5 million combined pool of junior and senior test takers get a perfect score in any given year, even fewer excluding the new 'super score' rules that combine the best scores from multiple test attempts.

I always knew my kid was smarter than me!

Congratulations, JC, for getting such awesome results from your hard work and dedication to learning, I'm very proud of you!