A some point last year I became infatuated with a game commonly known as Flood-It by a company called LabPixies. My obsession resulted in the creation of a clone I call C O L O R F L O W which addresses the major faults I found with the game, namely there was no way […]
Today marked another step towards Judgement Day as a computer, built and programmed by IBM, competed against the two best human Jeopardy players of all-time, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. After watching the episode I wondered if Google Search would be competitive in this forum. So I tried typing a few of the answers, verbatim, […]
In the summer of 2003, I read an article about the Tahoe Rim Trail being awarded national status. I was familiar with the big name trails e.g. Appalachian and Pacific Crest, for which completing a thru-hike was a many month commitment. This trail was only 165 miles long and there were less than 200 people […]
Most travel guidebooks inundate the reader with “must sees”. For example, any book on Paris will mention the Eiffel Tower, perhaps going so far as to say one must travel up the tower (at least to the second level). I don’t think anyone would argue with listing the Eiffel Tower as a Paris “must see”. […]
I enjoyed Halloween as a kid, walking all over the neighborhood filling pillowcases upon pillowcases with the good (candy and coins) and the bad (fruit or toothbrush, which prompted retaliation as I grew older). In college, the holiday lost its allure as going to gatherings of costumed drunk people whether it be in the student […]
Problem #18, find the greatest sum of numbers along a path in a triangle of numbers, looks like a standard tree search problem. However, there’s a note at the bottom stating a brute force method won’t work for a harder/bigger version in problem #67. So I decided to skip the exercise of writing the tree […]
My wife works at Kids In Motion and a few years ago I threw together their website including some photos she had taken. One of them was a cropped version of this image: The site doesn’t get much traffic, but I recently started experimenting with Google AdWords and Analytics for my own site and wondered […]
Perhaps this has been going on forever and I’ve only been attuned to it for the last few years. When a high profile public change occurs e.g. new President of the United States takes office, the media likes to make a big deal about what happens during the first 100 days. While it certainly is […]
About a month ago, I came across a post from Jon McLoone on the Wolfram Blog where he detailed his method for finding the 25 best Hangman words. His metric was the percentage of games his computer algorithm would fail to guess a given word. His results make sense; short words with low frequency characters […]
A little over 10 years ago I planned on doing a charity bike ride for AIDS from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I was required to raise $5k to participate and the company I was working for at the time was supposed to match any donations I collected…but this was 2000 and that all fell […]
