|CerTAINTy|

I've been reading more of Proofiness, a book I talked about a while ago on mathematical deception. The book so far has started off with the idea that numbers are "purest" when being handled by mathematicians. This is because no units of measurement are attached to them. Since forms of measurement that physicists and basically all other sciences use are created by man, they must have some degree of error to them. It is the actual process of measuring things that causes this discrepancy. There are a lot of forms of measurement that are very accurate and useless to dispute. However, he brings up the unit of measurement IQ used in measuring a person's intelligence. I really have to agree with him in the sense that questions in the IQ test may be a way to gauge how clever someone is, it certainly does not constitute grounds for a measurement of someone's intelligence. I think it's something nearly impossible to measure.

So when you see those very nice flashy ads on the internet about raising your IQ 50%, it might be best not to believe them.

Stay classy,
-Nick-

Haunted Condo

Today I checked in with my family in a condo in Key West, Florida. Apparently my dad got a really good rate on it. But the odd thing is, is that it's really nice. As a result I came to the conclusion that is must be haunted.
 The podcast is still in the development stage. When I get back home I'll be contacting a few people on recording our first episode. I also still need to think of the content, kind of important. If any of the five people reading this have any desire to be on the podcast or write video game reviews please shoot me an email or leave a comment.

Stay classy,
-Nick

Podcast Endeavor

Big news!

I'll be starting up a video gaming podcast with my good friend Michael Botros. It will be Canadian. It will be glorious. You can find it here. We'll mostly be doing reviews on video games, movies, and really anything else we find interesting =]. It's called Kanuckast, a name so well thought up by Michael. Please give it a listen when we get our first episode up. I'll most likely post here when that happens.

Stay classy,

-Nick

y=mx + be productive

Today is a momentous day, I got an extension on my assignment that was due tomorrow. To show you how the productivity of my day went. I made this:

This means that I'll have more time to review Assassin's Creed Brotherhood tonight. Fantastic, I know. So far from what I've played it's been brilliant. They took the things that needed work in the previous game and..well...improved on them. They've improved the lock on feature so that you don't try to do an aerial assassination and accidentally kill some random civilian beside your target(which was terrible in the last game).
Anyways, I'll have more on the improvements and faults on AC:Brotherhood later on.

-Stay Classy

IntMath Quest 9

Captains log, Stardate 10/11/2010.

For the past few nights I've been playing Dragon Quest 9. So far I find it to be absolutely adorable. The first thing I noticed was that the cut scenes, while not graphically brilliant, actually consist of models that are not regular game play. For the Nintendo DS I think that goes a long way with me. I have not tried the coop yet, but am attempting to gather some people who I'll be able to play this with. From the few quests I've completed so far I am absolutely loving how each quest, no matter how insignificant or non-relevant to the story has in itself a well thought out and planned story. For example I take the "Wight Knight" Quest. Relevant to the main story line? No. Has a complete back story that results in me actually caring about the outcome? Yes. I absolutely can't wait to play more of this game.

On a side note,

 I've started on my Software Design class assignment for creating a scanner and parser for a small language called IntMath in Java. This is essentially the same assignment that I had last year, which I did not do very well on so it's ROUND 2. I have a better grasp this time around of the overall structure that I want to have in the functionality so I have a feeling its going to go much better this time around. 

Stay Classy.

Mathematical Dark Arts

Today I went to the Indigo in Montreal to pick up some books with a lovely girl. I was looking the Science section of the bookstore (which I might add is much too small considering that the bookstore itself wouldn't exist if it were not for that section) when one book in particular jumped out at me. It was called Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception. According to the inside of the cover, the book is about the corrupt use of mathematics and statistics to persuade people. Thinking about it, I realized how easily we blindly follow the statistics that are handed to us. It's going to be a good read. Inside, my inner child is throwing a tantrum. Before I saw that book I was going to buy Batman: Year One. 


On a side note, I watched V for Vendetta and Watchmen again. Excellent movies, even better graphic novels. 

Real Life Replication

I've been reading a fascinating book called the Blind Watchmaker written by Richard Dawkins. The book is about an argument for the theory of evolution. In the book he uses a very interesting method of demonstrating the cumulative effects of evolution. In the computer program he begins with a very simple organism (or as he refers to them, biomorph) and assigns it default gene values. He then creates a method called evolution. The purpose of this method is to alter the value of one of the genes by +/- 1 with each method call. Comparing the effects of say 5 biomorphs some number of calls >>0 we can see that the effects of this method produces very different results on each of the organisms. I cannot go into too much detail (mostly because I still havn't finished the read) but I found this a very interesting use of some basic tools found in almost any programming language.