The Collatz Conjecture

Every so often I come upon a mathematical principal that I've never heard before.  In these times, as a nerd turned geek, it is important for me to quickly remedy the situation.  I can always turn to my good friends google and wikipedia to bring me wisdom and elightenment.  Recently, I had this experience.  I came upon this xkcd comic.

It refers to the collatz conjecture which states that if you take any number, if it is odd, multiply it by 3 and add one and if it is even divide by 2. And  you repeat this process you will eventually get 1.  I was intrigued.  This comic was written for nerd culture.  How could I not know about the conjecture beforehand?  I had to know if it was true.  Well, I wrote some javascript that tests the conjecture.  You pick a number and put it in the first box, then click run and it will show you all the numbers until it arrives at 1.  I may be the only one who even cares about this conjecture, but I feel much more secure in my life now that I know the conjecture to be true.

P.S.  Sorry, just like my other javascript posts it still doesn't work in firefox.

XKCD: How Geeks Became Funny

Okay, I just have to share another awesome website. XKCD is a web comic that focuses on many geeky subjects. Many of the jokes are about physics, mathematics or computer programming. I have referenced many of the comics that apply to my life here on my blog.

Many others will not find this comic as amusing as I do. It just doesn't apply to their lives as often as it does to mine. I mean not only am I a computer programmer but the comic also often features cool things like dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are awesome!  That is an eternal truth. 

At any rate, I just wanted to give a shoutout to xkcd and its awesomeness. Also, I wanted to share the below comic, it doesn't apply to my life nearly as much as some other of the comics but it is flowing with awesome.

Well, there was the time I was on a space station that was crashing towards a dinosaur infested planet, but I brought plenty of tranquilizer that time so you can see how this comic doesn't apply to me.

P.S.  As much as I love this comic there are occasionally some sketchy ones.  I take no responsibility if you come upon one that offends you.  I would like to share the disclaimer that is on the site though:
Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).

Someone is WRONG on the Internet

So those of you who know me well, know that I enjoy arguing.  I try to curb this desire due to the fact that it's not considered polite to argue with people.  It's not that I'm a disagreeable person.  But, I really enjoy thinking logically and trying to present an idea in a logical format.  I also enjoy hearing views that are opposed to mine because it helps me broaden my world view.

Well, I have discovered an excellent outlet for this desire.  That is the internet.  There are various forums throughout the internet where people post their thoughts and feelings on any number of subjects.  So, I enjoy posting in response to what they say and either presenting more evidence for why I agree or presenting an opposing view to theirs.  This hobby of mine has lead to several different times where the scenario pictured below has played out.

I mean what am I supposed to do, just come to bed?  Then they would still be WRONG!

I know Regular Expressions

I know the majority of you won't get this comic. So I'll understand if this particular post is void of comments. But I just had to share this because something very similar happened this morning. I was at work and I hadn't even made it to my desk yet. One of my coworkers came in and said, "I need you, we have a serious problem that can only be solved with regular expressions." I wanted to be like, "Everybody stand back! I know regular expressions!"

For those of you who don't know what a regular expressions is, it is a language that allows pattern matching, but anyone who doesn't understand it sees a string of indecipherable characters. A well known example of a place I used regular expressions was when I was on the project for the LDS church where we were putting all the church magazines online. I used regular expressions to match anything that looked like a scripture reference and inserted an actual link to the scripture. So if you are ever reading a talk in the Ensign online and you click a link to a scripture, you can thank a regular expression.

Some Important Flowcharts

I have recently discovered a few flowcharts that I feel will be helpful to all the world around me. The first is a flowchart I found on xkcd. I was very amused by it because of how true it is. I am often asked for help in software that I have never seen before and I follow this exact process and it almost always yields good results. Robyn is the tech guru at her school and she said that she sometimes uses this process as well. So, I thought I would share it with everyone so that you can all become local computer experts.



The other flowchart I have to share is from a recent episode of The Big Bang Theory. It has become a favorite show of Robyn and I. I often appreciate how difficult it is for engineer types to fit into normal society. The show is about physicists, but as a computer engineer I share some of the same geekiness as them so I enjoy it alot. Anyway, there was an episode where Sheldon was trying to make friends. He decided to distill the algorithm for generating friendships down into a flowchart. Robyn and I have noticed we don't hang out with people nearly as much as we used to. Maybe we'll use this flowchart and see if any other couples would like to join us for a meal, a hot beverage or the least objectionable recreational activity.


P.S. I can't take credit for making this flowchart. I googled it and found it on a blog here.

For your convenience I have included the clip. If you don't watch the show you should totally start.

Rick Roll and how it changed my life

Okay, so a little over a year ago there was an internet phenomena called the Rick Roll. It was super awesome. For those who have never heard of this, the basic idea was that you tried to trick other people into seeing Rick Astley's music video of "Never gonna give you up." It involved people making fake url's that would redirect to the youtube video and all sorts of goodness. After it got going pretty big people would even post videos of them Rick Rolling their friends. One of my personal favorites is at a work place where they have obviously been Rick Rolling alot, they actually hire a singing telegram to give one of their coworkers a live Rick Roll. This continued to the point where the video, which was a lesser known song from the 80's had over a million hits on youtube.(As of the time of my writing it has over 2 million hits.) As things got bigger and bigger they even had Rick Astley himself Rick Roll the people of New York in the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade. And, of course, as with every internet phenomenon, it was also covered on one of my favorite comics: xkcd. So this all happened last year. Why am I writing about it now? Well, I recently discovered a mutation of this incredible internet meme. I don't know if this version of it will get around but you have to watch at least the first 30 seconds. It could change your life.
By the way, you just got Rick Rolled.

Another New Arrival

Read the comic below. (Click on it for a larger version) I'm pretty sure I am that guy. I'm always trying to jury rig something or automate something or just plain get myself into trouble.






So why do I feel like him today? Well, remember a few weeks ago when I wrote about our new DVR? Well, it is super awesome, but I thought it would be even more super awesome if our DVR could be accessed anywhere in the world. I had some fun money saved up so I bought a Hava Gold. It was supposed to be a simple hook up to the network. I won't bore you with the details but I'll just say it wasn't simple. I even recruited my dad who came over for like 4 hours on Saturday. The end result is that I bought a second router for our network and there are now 2 wireless networks running in my house but one of them allows access to the Hava. Which means any computer in our house can watch our DVR. I haven't yet setup access outside of our network but that is my next project.

This whole story leads me to the real question. Why do I even do these things? After spending like 5 hours trying to get it to work, Robyn suggested that I just send it back. I couldn't do it. Once the puzzle has been placed before me it must be solved. Now that the puzzle is solved I should probably go to bed. I hope you enjoyed the comic. If you want to see our DVR it is now available wirelessly throughout our house. Come check it out.

Statistically Significant Other

I discovered the above comic recently and found it quite humorous due to its correlation with my life. You see, Robyn and I have been a couple for 1 year and 4 days. (We decided that we were going to date exclusively on March 2nd of last year.) So, she has been my significant other for that long. However, I had taken her on a number of dates before that, but she remained unaware that I was pursuing her. When I told her that I wanted to become exclusive she was actually a little surprised. I only wish that I had used my white board at that time to prove to her that she was already my statistically significant other.