I’ve been thinking lately of making my Battleships program more robust by having a complete autosolver and a random puzzle creator. The first step was programming a step that would do the simple stuff: If a row has n remaining water cells and n remaining empty cells, all the remaining cells have to be water….
Author: Clio
Atlas Shrugged Chapter 6: The Non-Commercial
Ayn Rand is an odd lover: First she begins to seduce me in chapter 5, then she spits in my face for most of chapter 6, and then she bats her eyelashes coyly at me again. Chapter summary: The Reardens have an anniversary party to which they have invited a rogues gallery of guests, including…
Mulberries
this afternoon, i found a mulberry stain on my orange shirt it looked like a bullet wound, dark purple in a sea of pure, bright color it wasn’t a splatter: that would have looked artistic, or deliberate, or at least reckless this was a single drop an ellipse stained into my chest just above my…
A simple HLSL tutorial
HLSL is a C-related language that exists for the purpose of adding filters (or “shaders”) to images for various graphic effects. It is the primary way to manipulate the appearance of completed images within VS2010 projects. (Note that I deliberately use certain terms, such as shader and filter, interchangeably in these posts, to balance the…
Atlas Shrugged Chapter 5: The Climax of the d’Aconias
I end my first week’s reading assignment finally feeling a bit like I’m not reading a pig in a poke. However, the first half of the chapter makes me wonder if Rand wouldn’t have been helped with a bit more editing, although she strikes me as the type to not be very enthusiastic about that….
Atlas Shrugged Chapter 4: The Immovable Movers
I’ll admit, I had to look the meaning of the title chapter up. Rand makes it clear in the next chapter that it’s an Aristotle reference, but she doesn’t elaborate. I know that people used to study the classics more than they do now, and so perhaps the concept was considered common knowledge at the…
BabyCenter and Father’s Day
I’m a member of the May 2009 forum on BabyCenter. I think it’s a clever and useful idea to have forums specifically for a birth cohort, and it’s entertaining and informative to read comments from fellow parents. I’m more than a bit disappointed that there aren’t more males on the forum I’m on; I haven’t…
Moments #3
I had always played right field, except for the year. Right field was reserved for the worst player on the team, because it was junior little league (whatever they called it when there was still a machine on the pitcher’s mound instead of a player), and so hardly anyone ever hit the ball into the…
English modals and negation
English modals are a strange enough beast among themselves, but adding in negation leads to especially treacherous waters. This post will restrict itself to the four most common, and possibly most confusing: May, can, must, and have to. May “May” as a modal is ambiguous between permission and possibility: 1. You may have some dessert…
Atlas Shrugged Chapter 3: The Top and the Bottom
Alas, this chapter is not a foray into D/s relationships. Instead, it’s another contrast chapter, this time contrasting Jim’s high-on-the-hog lifestyle with Dagny’s more modest concerns. Chapter summary: Jim Taggert attends an event with various bigwigs in the steel industry, where they prattle on about Mexico and he complains about his sister. In a bridge…