Hehe, gotta love this issue of Wired Magazine: “The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 – 2020
We’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?”
Archive for February, 2002
in math news
In 1637, some French amateur mathematician, Pierre de Fermat, scribbled in the margin of a book he was reading: “There are no non-zero integer solutions for the equation x^3 + y^3 = z^3.” It’s a simple equation that’s similar to the Pythagorous Theorem. He continued, “I have discovered a truly marvellous proof, which this margin is too narrow to contain.” No one has been able to find his ‘proof’, and nowadays most believe he either did not have one, or he had one that he later realized was incorrect and never published it.
For over 350 years, no one else has been able to provide a proof to this deceptively simple-looking problem, Fermat’s Last Theorem. It was probably mathematic’s greatest unsolved problem, because of its difficulty, and yet simplicity (you could explain the problem to any layman.
Well, in 1994, Andrew Wiles solved the problem. But I can’t explain it here. His proof is over 150 pages long. That cracka be spending too much time with numbers.
Nonetheless, I wonder what it’s like to ruin the fun and kill one of mathematic’s greatest puzzles. If you’re wondering why the hell would I post about this, well…. we went over it briefly during my Computibility class and it sounded interesting, so I looked it up on the web. I haven’t blogged in a while, and not much is going on in my life. I’m running out of things to pontificate about that aren’t boring to the general public. For instance, my mind has been whirling in the past weeks regarding programming and software development and my software engineering class and my future in all this, but I’m getting slow with the expressions. and the word language and the tongue moving coherently in ways to make people nod and smile with all the goodness vanilla ice cream. My english is failing me. signing off.
I just opened an orange I had saved up, only to find it had gone bad. Sour bad. I don’t think one could find a more poignent example of an opportunity wasted than in rotten fruit.
20.02.2002 Celebrate the palindrome day, baby!
learn with me
In Intro to Software Engineering, we’re learning all about sockets. The major project for the course is peer-to-peer filesharing system that uses XML and TCP.
Gung hao fat choi. ugh. Every time I think of those word in English, I am reminded of this middle school friend of mine who would say it with a terrible terrible American accent. Whenever she said it to me,I would cringe, then smile meekly. What’s a guy supposed to do? Say, “Please stop. You are insulting my ancestors, you uncouth provincial.”??
While taking a dump today, I began to wonder whether or not pooping was anything like giving birth. While I’m sure the muscle contractions are similiarly eerie (or eerily similiar), I don’t think the smells are the same; and it’s likely that passing flacid little turds is nothing like moving a watermellon of a child through your innards. One process ejects something because it is unwanted, the other, because it is precisely and eagerly wanted.
Then I was struck by a flashback of a thought I had some years ago. When I was a kid, I used to be puzzled by the question of whether or not a pregnant woman, while taking a hardy crap, would ever accidentally give birth to her child. After some thought, I realized that, though it would be a messy and unpleasant welcome for the child, the woman would be so lucky that birth could come so easily.
Yup, that was one long dump I had.
A friend’s 21st birthday was tonight. Went out, had dinner, drank a little. I had the usual aging rhetoric floating around in my head: “Oh gosh, growing old too fast! Can’t believe it. Already so old!” Then it dawned on me how much more life I have to life.
Say I’ll live to be 80 years old (a weak estimate for someone of my high pedigree. Heh.) To equal that amount of time, I would take all the memories and years that have occurred up until now, all 20 years of them, every lazy day, every early morning, every cranky tuesday afternoon, every school bus pickup, every hockey goal, every stupid joke I laughed at, every retareded thing I said, every game I played, every second smiling, every blushing at a girl, and every moment I can’t remember but others do, and I get three more sets of those. Three more unimaginable spans of twenty years. That’s an insane amount of time. God damn, so much more life to live, it’s boggling. I think I’ll take my time.