People are afraid of the dark
because it holds the unknown
and unknowns are scary.
But maybe it is just as frightening
if we let the light shine everywhere
and believe that because we know everything the light shines on
we know everything.

Perhaps for once
when the sun fades over the horizon
and the darkness returns in its dependable cycle
we should silence the fears
and remember

Okay, just one more post for the streak milking the stuff uncovered in my old hard drive, and then it’s over, I promise. Here is a silly three-button idle game I discovered, which I apparently made in 2010 when I was a bored eighth-grader and the most recent jQuery version was 1.4.x. Instead of enjoying a text wall, please enjoy trying to get 16,384 clicks in the non-warp version. (There’s no victory message or anything; it’s just a nice round number that I reached while writing this post. And yes, I know you can call JavaScript from your developer console, or edit the source or DOM. That’s cheating.)

And I realize this is short even for filler posts, so if you don’t want to play an idle game, here is a remix of numbers.bmp to stare at and feel inspired by. Or disgusted with, or indignant at. Your choice.

(Short streak post. And for the uninformed, I’m using Spivak pronouns for this post just because.)

Generally, when people I don’t already know through math competitions ask me or my parents about something like how to teach their intelligent child to make em really good at math, or even English or whatever, I am skeptical by default because there seem to be a lot of Taiwanese parents who have alarmingly rigid and largely baseless expectations or assumptions about what their children ought to be interested in and excel at.

You can lead a horse to water, and honestly I think you could find a way to force it to drink if you really wanted to, but you can’t make it enjoy the process of being force-fed. Um. Force-watered? Force-hydrated?

You can teach your child math and English, and you could make em ace all eir tests, but you probably can’t make em enjoy the test so much that e decides to create more diabolical versions of these tests to give to eir fictional characters in eir stories for fun!

These are all actual illustrations from the old stories I mentioned in part 2.5 of “More Fiction”. Stories I wrote in 2004. As a first-grader.

This is kind of horrifying.

Mom dug up an old hard drive for me to find photos of my elementary-school self participating in the same math competition I’m presenting at in a week. I discovered a lot of other interesting old stuff there. So today’s filler post image for the streak is courtesy of Brian_2003/03/23. I don’t think it means anything, but sorry, I really really need to work on that presentation.

Nope, still no meaningful post today. Instead here is a pretty diagram of the A* search algorithm (A-star in English, for my search crawler overlords). At least, I hope it is; I spent more time fiddling with the pretty colors than making sure the algorithm I implemented was actually A*. It looks right, though? In the background, red component measures traversed distance from start, (inverted) green component measures difference between the traversed distance plus heuristic distance and the theoretically optimal heuristic distance from the start, blue component measures heuristic distance to goal.

Here are two screenshots of the Android 3x3 grid lock we dealt with in the phone post.

Part of the reason I don’t have a real post today and am instead writing filler for the streak is that I wanted to include this 3x3 lock in the programming presentation I’ve been indirectly complaining about in the last few posts, and I couldn’t find any nicely licensed screenshots to illustrate it, so I made these screenshots myself, and then I spent somewhat more than an hour researching copyright law and listening to a talk about it before posting them.

= within 15 cents of $20,000/7
= NT$88,661, by Google’s current exchange rate

= 739 hours of Taiwan’s hourly minimum wage or 4.43 months of Taiwan’s monthly minimum wage
= 317 hours of Massachusetts’s minimum wage (7.94 weeks or 1.85 months assuming a 40-hour work week)
= 1.2~1.7 weeks of a list of high tech internship salaries as featured on Slate

= 2,955 plates of Sushi Express
= 1,478 cheap boxed lunches (at NT$60 each), which would last one person 1.35 years at 3 per day
= 1,122 Big Macs, price in Taiwan, or 596 Big Macs, average price in U.S. (January 2015)

(streak)

This is not any better than the first installment, but I need to post. And then, you know, do homework and presentations and stuff.

Dr. Carver had just managed to drill past Dr. Perkins’s cranium when she heard the door behind her creak open.

“Ha! You walked right into my trap!”

She turned around. Dr. Perkins was standing in the doorway.

She looked down. Yes, they were both Dr. Perkins, she’d know that pair of glasses and spiky hair anywhere.

She looked up. Well, the guy in the doorway was wearing a set of black robes outside his white lab coat, but other than that, they really looked completely identical.

“What?”

(streak)

≥1 of you should know what is being referred to.

• Oh yeah, I love being first. Of course the approximate price is that I have to expose the world to the innocent naïveté of my fourth-grade self. So far nobody mean has ventured there yet, but who knows.
• Darn, two years. Darn, Cards Against Humanity. I need more of that in my life. I don’t know what else is happening but music is good.
• Wait, that’s the old link. I didn’t even know.
• Darn, one year. My old theme. The introspective force is strong with this one. Darn, are you me?
• Darn.
• Yup, we’ve been here before. Diversification is interesting. How does one do all this?
• Ditto. I understand some of these words. Although curiously, there is more than one prominent typo…
• 12, I guess?
• Images in posts are the best. Maybe I could blog about that issue although goodness knows I’ve already tweeted enough about it. Also IMO 2009.6.
• Darn, two years. Ish. Darn, I didn’t make that choice but are you me?
• Darn, two years.
• Darn. | This is also an old link and I also didn’t know.
• Hi.
• I hope this is me in one year. The good parts, anyway. Join the poor singers’ club.

• Oh, one of those posts. It’s usually a bad sign when they’re the most recent, which is corroborated by the three-year interval. Yes, there is always a relevant xkcd.

(streak)

I always tell myself, okay, I will actually just draw something facetiously and get it over with, nobody comes to this blog to admire my GIMP mouse doodles, but then perfectionist tendencies kick in and I get carried away and it ends up taking more than an hour or so.