psyche

Thinking of the metaphorical meaning of The Enigma of Amigara Fault, suicide and such jump to mind. I couldn’t help thinking of Lain being my “hole” - it was perfectly tailored to bring out all my psychological insecurities and quirks, and it did. Interestingly, teachers like Mr Barker, Mr Rokison and Mr Smith have only known me since my shift into mediocrity and insanity, and I think Mr Motion is beginning to understand that my mental arithmetic is sluggish at best. Rambling, rambling, rambling. I think my theme of happy/sad is linked to bipolar disorder or at least mania.

I was thinking about trying to speed up my mental maths: if you know your squares up to 20, you could do something like this:

Input: multiply a and b.

Check whether a mod 2 = b mod 2 (i.e. are they both odd or both even? This isn’t necessary but is a vestige of this retardation’s origin in my mental maths crazy stuff - I know a bunch of n²s for ns up to 20 and then some randomers like 25 and some powers of two because of computing jigga.)

If so, use the thing. Using some (like going backward to difference of two squares).

ab = ((a+b)/2-(a+b)/2+a)((a+b)/2+(a+b)/2-a) = ((a+b)/2)² - (a - (a+b)/2)²

So ab = (mean - distanceToMean)(mean + distanceToMean) = mean² - distanceToMean². Yeah.

Hmm. So like: 12 x 14?

1. 12 + 14 = 26
2. 26/2 = 13
3. 13² (lookup, so only one operation, not the fat O(n²) number that multiplication usually takes) = 169
4. 12-13 = -1
5. (-1)² = 1
6. 169 - 1 = 168

Looks retarded but I actually find that easier than going 14 x 10 + 14 x 2 = 140 + 28 = 168. I’m not joking.

Maybe it becomes useful later?

17 x 23 = 20² - 3² = 391

As it pivots on square values and I only want to go up to 20, you can make other stuff:

11 x 29 = 20² - 9² = 319

So it’s “If both numbers are odd or both numbers are even*, their product is the mean squared minus half the distance between them (or the distance to the mean) squared.”

This is fun.

23 x 27 = 625 - 4 = 621. Pimping.

And stuff. Actually, maybe the reason I like this is not to do with number of operations but merely type of operation: I find multiplication difficult; I am an idiot. Addition and subtraction I also dislike but not as much as I dislike multiplication.

*I think I added this constraint so you only get whole numbers. Remember, I’m an idiot!

Having a lookup table of squares and doing this - any good for computational optimisation? MAYBE.

I ordered some of Nakaido Reichi’s music from OCS Books. When I went in there, they started talking Japanese at me - possibly because I was having a bad hair day. Thus, today I got my hair cut. That’s all.

I’m watching this in the hope of properly understanding quantum computing.

Notions of the “observer’s mind” remind me of Lain and obviously Plato’s allegory of the cave reminds me of The Matrix.

These tech talks are awesome. Google aren’t as bad as their (generally) fbugly [functional but ugly] UI design suggests: this is the real deal!

UPDATE: Seriously.

Pax

I Pownced this before but having been since removed from Pownce, I’ll put this here:

Alex Wright - The Web That Wasn’t (embedding was disabled by request…)

It’s pretty awesome.

I watched The Golden Compass and it was okay - they did the person/daemon thing quite well.

This is my critique of Will’s performance on them and I’ve posted my thoughts on his new podcast on the accompanying blog post.

It’s worth a listen as Will is really spearheading the “I like podcasting”… movement… at school… He’s right, though - twitter is worth looking into, although I use it and jaiku rather half-heartedly.

I’ve just realised that while sometimes my thoughts are ugly, I really do try to blog beautifully. Every English essay I have scored full or close to full marks on has been angst-ridden and cynical. So be it!

My father somehow won a second Nintendo Wii (???) by accident and I’m thinking that rather than selling it, I could do something involving some of this stuff? That is, if my brother will let me. He probably won’t. I wonder.

Abandoned playground? The Lain PSX game movie media038.avi (stuff mirrored here [much more disturbing than anime, only gave me sound when I used MPlayer]) contains a weird moving still of her on a swing. This reminds me a little of the Animatrix short Beyond. The whole atmosphere of Lain, The Matrix (first one), The Animatrix and the Matrix Comics is one of despair and confusion. It seems to be my favourite thing in the world.

It appears that the new I Am Legend movie again fails to accurately mirror the novel. This is a shame as the novel is awesome.

I was recently put onto Denno Coil by weirdo in #lain while discussing how I thought Lain showed “augmented reality gone wrong”. How chillingly specific this is.

Why has the iPod been so successful? Because it enables people to quickly and easily turn on, tune in, drop out…

Pax

Lest I forget.

Pax