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Egocentrism abounds. When the first page of a chapter is an entire dialog, as in, involving two people, and there’s no telephone involved but we only get one person’s words and the other person is identified solely as “the worker,” well, we shouldn’t expect much balance to the perspectives presented. Chapter summary: As the train…
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I’ve been rather obsessively working on my Battleships program the last few days, and have quite a bit to show for it: The autosolver works now, as does the random puzzle generator. The random puzzle generator is nowhere near as speedy or elegant as the one in Fathom It!, but it’s a start. For the…
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Yesterday, I was discussing the German imperative with my wife. Due to habits formed in high school and college language courses, we tend to use the formal version of imperatives even with our toddler unless we think about it (for instance, “Kommen Sie hier!” vs “Komm hier!”). This got me thinking about how German has…
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I was raised as a cultural mutt. Half my family or so on each side is German but largely indifferent to that heritage (with occasional exceptions, such as my mother’s fondness for a specific cookie, I believe it was springerles). The other half of my genetics is “generic Western European.” As a teen, I was…
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What a whiny chapter. More after the summary. Chapter summary: It’s Dagny and Hank against the world. Dagny oversees the construction of the rail line. There’s a bridge that needs to be remade; her engineer tells her to just fix it for now and replace it later because it would too expensive to replace now,…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…