Starting tomorrow and for the entire month of July I will be running another 30 Day challenge on this blog. This time round I am recounting my Top 30 Game Shows. I'll start at 30 and work my way down to my number 1 Game Show. I will endeavour to provide Youtube clips with each post but I can't guarantee that as some of these shows are quite old. The challenge will cover present, recent, and I guess you could say Historic Game Shows.
The definition of a Game Show I will work with is any TV Show on which members of the Public or Celebrities can take part with the aim of competing either individually or as part of a team either to complete a challenge or to win over the opposing team[s]. This will include but will not be limited to, Quiz Shows, Panel Shows, and audience participation shows.
I will not include 'quiz features' or 'viewing rewards' where the purpose of the show is not something entirely different with a quiz included - e.g. a chat show with a lunch time quiz etc. The purpose of the show must serve as a Game Show or competition primarily.
All this being said, I have my list ready and over the next 30 days I will share my top 30, and on day 31 I will mention a few I like which did not make the top 30.
I hope you enjoy this challenge as much as the others as they have proven popular.
Goodbye Facebook
In a recent post I said goodbye to Twitter as I deleted my account over there, now it's Facebook's turn. Before I deleted my facebook account I used the download a copy of my data feature which you can find at the bottom of the page in Account Settings. I noticed a link to download an "expanded archive" which included meta-data for my profile, so this was data facebook had collected. In amongst the data was a collection of IP Addresses. These are the IP Addresses my Facebook Account has been accessed from. There were 30 in all. Over the 6 years I had my facebook account I am not able to tell where and when each IP address accessed my account however I have been able through the use of WHOIS domain tools, to determine which ISP the IP addresses belong to and which countries.
I have never left the UK or Ireland except for visiting France so you'll appreciate my surprise when I discovered among the 23 IP addresses that weren't my own, countries such as the British Virgin Islands, Jamaica, Australia, Malta, Philippines, USA, and Canada among others. Those 23 IP Addresses are not mine, they never could have been and the WHOIS records for those IP addresses are quite clear as to which ISPs they have been assigned to etc.
In the 6 years of my time on facebook I can remember at least 2 times I could not access my account and had to recover it through the security steps facebook introduced. I had facebook since 2006 though and the early versions of the site didn't have the layers of security it has today.
I think everything I said about Twitter pretty much applies to facebook too so there's not much point repeating myself.
I considered deactivating my profile on facebook but for me deactivating wouldn't be enough. I found out that it is actually possible to delete your facebook account so that's the option I took.
If you visit:
facebook.com/help/delete_account
You will see a prompt that will allow you to delete your account. Your profile is deactivated for 14 days after which it is deleted permanently. I am not sure if everything is removed or not such as posts etc but as far as I am concerned since January I have been deleting a lot from my timeline - I mentioned in a previous post about a purging mentality that getting rid of excess baggage etc is a necessary process I go through every now and then - so little by little my timeline was cleansed of everything. So regardless of whether facebook removes everything when an account is deleted, I have already made sure there is nothing left behind, at least nothing visible.
I have never left the UK or Ireland except for visiting France so you'll appreciate my surprise when I discovered among the 23 IP addresses that weren't my own, countries such as the British Virgin Islands, Jamaica, Australia, Malta, Philippines, USA, and Canada among others. Those 23 IP Addresses are not mine, they never could have been and the WHOIS records for those IP addresses are quite clear as to which ISPs they have been assigned to etc.
In the 6 years of my time on facebook I can remember at least 2 times I could not access my account and had to recover it through the security steps facebook introduced. I had facebook since 2006 though and the early versions of the site didn't have the layers of security it has today.
I think everything I said about Twitter pretty much applies to facebook too so there's not much point repeating myself.
I considered deactivating my profile on facebook but for me deactivating wouldn't be enough. I found out that it is actually possible to delete your facebook account so that's the option I took.
If you visit:
facebook.com/help/delete_account
You will see a prompt that will allow you to delete your account. Your profile is deactivated for 14 days after which it is deleted permanently. I am not sure if everything is removed or not such as posts etc but as far as I am concerned since January I have been deleting a lot from my timeline - I mentioned in a previous post about a purging mentality that getting rid of excess baggage etc is a necessary process I go through every now and then - so little by little my timeline was cleansed of everything. So regardless of whether facebook removes everything when an account is deleted, I have already made sure there is nothing left behind, at least nothing visible.
Design Legacy
In a previous post on Design I touched on the fact that we live in a world by design where everything around us that has been manufactured was designed, right down to the T - literally. Building upon that post I would like to point something out, and that is design legacy. What this means in practical terms is that many forms of modern design have come about through two things, firstly tradition and secondly the fear of change.
As you sit at your computer reading this I would like you to take a moment and have a look at your keyboard. It's layout and the characters that appear on it. If you are in an English speaking country the top line of letters will most likely read QWERTY and that name is most commonly used to refer to that keyboard layout. Now if you don't know your history of the design of keyboards then allow me to explain the strange positioning. Decades ago when the first typewriters were created the lettering at first on the keyboard was simply ABCDEF, that is the letters were in alphabetical order. Typists using the typewriters found their speed increased to the point where the keys would frequently jam, in order to prevent this designers took the layout of the keys and moved common letter pairings further apart so that the speed of the typist would be purposely reduced.
Today of course we can type just as fast on a QWERTY keyboard as anyone could on an alphabetical typewriter and we don't have any issues with keys jamming as modern keyboards use circuits. So why do we still have QWERTY keyboards? Well as stated before for two reasons, firstly tradition, it has always been QWERTY so few companies deviate from it, and secondly change is feared, most companies would rather not change the design for fear their product might not be embraced. There are of course alphabetical keyboards that you can buy.
These again are not that popular and never gained the momentum to overtake QWERTY. It stands as a demonstration of the legacy of design, we don't always choose the best solution to our problems, more often than not we choose the solution that follows tradition and avoids change.
As you sit at your computer reading this I would like you to take a moment and have a look at your keyboard. It's layout and the characters that appear on it. If you are in an English speaking country the top line of letters will most likely read QWERTY and that name is most commonly used to refer to that keyboard layout. Now if you don't know your history of the design of keyboards then allow me to explain the strange positioning. Decades ago when the first typewriters were created the lettering at first on the keyboard was simply ABCDEF, that is the letters were in alphabetical order. Typists using the typewriters found their speed increased to the point where the keys would frequently jam, in order to prevent this designers took the layout of the keys and moved common letter pairings further apart so that the speed of the typist would be purposely reduced.
Today of course we can type just as fast on a QWERTY keyboard as anyone could on an alphabetical typewriter and we don't have any issues with keys jamming as modern keyboards use circuits. So why do we still have QWERTY keyboards? Well as stated before for two reasons, firstly tradition, it has always been QWERTY so few companies deviate from it, and secondly change is feared, most companies would rather not change the design for fear their product might not be embraced. There are of course alphabetical keyboards that you can buy.
These again are not that popular and never gained the momentum to overtake QWERTY. It stands as a demonstration of the legacy of design, we don't always choose the best solution to our problems, more often than not we choose the solution that follows tradition and avoids change.
Continuity
After indulging in a few wasted hours of video hopping on Youtube I found myself in a loop of watching Movie Mistakes and errors and it got me to thinking about continuity. One of the biggest problems writers face when writing complex story-lines is the issue of continuity - namely knowing the past of your character and events they have experienced and avoiding contradiction of established facts.
It must be hard to write for a Movie but it must be an outright headache to write for a Television series. Take Coronation Street for example, it is the longest running British Soap Opera and has been running for 51 years with over 7,800 episodes. Present cast included, Coronation Street has had 1,062 characters as of May 2012. Writing for a show with that record of characters must be an absolute continuity nightmare. To know all the characters and to avoid contradicting any established facts must be a mammoth task.
I wouldn't even know where to begin with any practical solution to that type of problem. The only solution I could come up with would be entirely impractical - to have established character biographies for each character and a history of key events, but to read through so much or to be able to remember it all I think would be an extremely hard task, I don't even think the most ardent fan of the show could have an extensive knowledge of the entire cast past and present. Then again the other argument would be that only the most recent history of the show would be relevant and perhaps the majority of that character list could be safely ignored.
The other approach is that of The Simpsons which has purposely highlighted before that continuity is not a goal of the show and indeed given Bart has been 10 for decades I think that's quite obvious. Even so to hold a somewhat coherent structure there must be some approach to documenting or recording characters and their lives to make it easier to write characters with depth, as yet I haven't come across it myself, my mini-bio method seems to work for the most part but then again I haven't really wrote long stories, only short ones.
It must be hard to write for a Movie but it must be an outright headache to write for a Television series. Take Coronation Street for example, it is the longest running British Soap Opera and has been running for 51 years with over 7,800 episodes. Present cast included, Coronation Street has had 1,062 characters as of May 2012. Writing for a show with that record of characters must be an absolute continuity nightmare. To know all the characters and to avoid contradicting any established facts must be a mammoth task.
I wouldn't even know where to begin with any practical solution to that type of problem. The only solution I could come up with would be entirely impractical - to have established character biographies for each character and a history of key events, but to read through so much or to be able to remember it all I think would be an extremely hard task, I don't even think the most ardent fan of the show could have an extensive knowledge of the entire cast past and present. Then again the other argument would be that only the most recent history of the show would be relevant and perhaps the majority of that character list could be safely ignored.
The other approach is that of The Simpsons which has purposely highlighted before that continuity is not a goal of the show and indeed given Bart has been 10 for decades I think that's quite obvious. Even so to hold a somewhat coherent structure there must be some approach to documenting or recording characters and their lives to make it easier to write characters with depth, as yet I haven't come across it myself, my mini-bio method seems to work for the most part but then again I haven't really wrote long stories, only short ones.
Sunday Shuffle
Every Sunday I will post the first 6 songs my iPod throws up on Shuffle mode.
Where Is The Love - Celine Dion
Circles In The Sand - Belinda Carlisle
Titanium - David Guetta feat Sia
The Power Of Goodbye - Madonna
Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart - Alicia Keys
Superstition
A man walks down the street, he approaches a building, there is a man up a ladder who is washing the windows, the ladder rests on the edge of the pavement a few inches from the kerb, the man walking down the street walks onto the road narrowly missing traffic passes the ladder then steps back onto the pavement. The scene is rather odd for some, but sitting watching the man is followed by several strangers who all do the same, in a half an hour some hundred or so people pass all braving traffic rather than walk under the ladder.
If you aren't from a western background, or in particular from the UK, Ireland or the USA you might find this entirely weird, if you are from any of these places you are likely to find this entirely normal and have already said to yourself "I would do the same" - for those that don't get why, allow me to explain. There exists a superstition which I believe is most prominent in the UK and the USA that walking under a ladder brings 7 years bad luck. In the same vein, breaking a mirror carries a penalty of 7 years bad luck. Superstitions are peculiar things but altogether intriguing, here's another, although this time demonstrating how the belief of the superstition can change: in the USA a black cat is seen as bad luck if it should cross your path, whereas in Ireland, a Black cat crossing your path is meant to signify good luck.
Superstitions are intriguing for a number of reasons to me, namely that although no evidence exists to say that any of these beliefs are founded in any reality, I do have to question to what extent belief in a superstition will lead the believer to unconsciously manifest or pay undue attention to behaviours and events that seem to confirm the belief. Several Psychological theories already exist in other areas that state that an individual specifically trying not to do something is more likely to accidentally do it than if they had simply relaxed. This extends into a number of other areas and I have mentioned it before in other posts, we are more likely to look for and remember anything that confirms our belief and discard anything that contradicts it. So putting all this together I have to question whether superstitions on some level do have some basis in reality - namely people paying more attention to certain things associated with superstitious events.
If you aren't from a western background, or in particular from the UK, Ireland or the USA you might find this entirely weird, if you are from any of these places you are likely to find this entirely normal and have already said to yourself "I would do the same" - for those that don't get why, allow me to explain. There exists a superstition which I believe is most prominent in the UK and the USA that walking under a ladder brings 7 years bad luck. In the same vein, breaking a mirror carries a penalty of 7 years bad luck. Superstitions are peculiar things but altogether intriguing, here's another, although this time demonstrating how the belief of the superstition can change: in the USA a black cat is seen as bad luck if it should cross your path, whereas in Ireland, a Black cat crossing your path is meant to signify good luck.
Superstitions are intriguing for a number of reasons to me, namely that although no evidence exists to say that any of these beliefs are founded in any reality, I do have to question to what extent belief in a superstition will lead the believer to unconsciously manifest or pay undue attention to behaviours and events that seem to confirm the belief. Several Psychological theories already exist in other areas that state that an individual specifically trying not to do something is more likely to accidentally do it than if they had simply relaxed. This extends into a number of other areas and I have mentioned it before in other posts, we are more likely to look for and remember anything that confirms our belief and discard anything that contradicts it. So putting all this together I have to question whether superstitions on some level do have some basis in reality - namely people paying more attention to certain things associated with superstitious events.
The End of a Project
If you follow me on twitter or if you follow me on Google+ then you may recall a few posts I made a while ago about a project I was working on. This project was a website to teach people to program in Java. I have recently decided to discontinue the project. A number of factors lead to that decision but ultimately the reason it was abandoned is due to the desire to refocus my efforts.
I originally set out to write a book teaching people how to program in Java, that book is currently about 90% finished. The intention was to publish it for Kindle using Amazon Direct Publishing with whom I am a registered Publisher. The web site was an after thought and took the idea of taking the book content and processing it into an online reference. I managed to process about 45% of what I had written into content which I published online to a website I built in Joomla. If you are interested in building a website, Joomla is a free Open Source Content Management System, what that basically means is that its a piece of software that gives you all the functionality of a site like blogger, but in a fully customisable way.
One of the contributing factors to discontinuing my project was the financial aspect. I weighed the cost of the doamin and renewal, the cost of a few services that went with that to host the site, against the amount made in advertising, then factored in the time and effort and maintenance that was needed to keep the site running and in the end it all amounted to a loss in more ways than just finance. So refocusing my efforts back to the original plan I have decided to scrap the site, and finish the book, then publish on kindle as was the first intention. This route amounts to zero financial cost to me, simply time and effort. The book once published will have a low price, which can potentially make a greater income than the advertising from the website could have supplied in the first place.
This whole experience was certainly a learning curve, this was the first real website I built and maintained, beyond third party hosted sites like this blog and beyond the trivial small sites I built for college and university etc. I am quite pleased with how it went, I am not disappointed at all by the fact I have closed the site, it has actually made me consider starting another in the future, as for what it will be centred around, that will remain a secret for now, I'll share it with you closer to the time.
I originally set out to write a book teaching people how to program in Java, that book is currently about 90% finished. The intention was to publish it for Kindle using Amazon Direct Publishing with whom I am a registered Publisher. The web site was an after thought and took the idea of taking the book content and processing it into an online reference. I managed to process about 45% of what I had written into content which I published online to a website I built in Joomla. If you are interested in building a website, Joomla is a free Open Source Content Management System, what that basically means is that its a piece of software that gives you all the functionality of a site like blogger, but in a fully customisable way.
One of the contributing factors to discontinuing my project was the financial aspect. I weighed the cost of the doamin and renewal, the cost of a few services that went with that to host the site, against the amount made in advertising, then factored in the time and effort and maintenance that was needed to keep the site running and in the end it all amounted to a loss in more ways than just finance. So refocusing my efforts back to the original plan I have decided to scrap the site, and finish the book, then publish on kindle as was the first intention. This route amounts to zero financial cost to me, simply time and effort. The book once published will have a low price, which can potentially make a greater income than the advertising from the website could have supplied in the first place.
This whole experience was certainly a learning curve, this was the first real website I built and maintained, beyond third party hosted sites like this blog and beyond the trivial small sites I built for college and university etc. I am quite pleased with how it went, I am not disappointed at all by the fact I have closed the site, it has actually made me consider starting another in the future, as for what it will be centred around, that will remain a secret for now, I'll share it with you closer to the time.
The Best
I use Yahoo Answers a lot, and one of the most common questions comes in the format "Who/What is the best . . . " then some field or product is added, e.g. What is the best Browser, Who is the best search engine, which is the best operating system etc. The 'Best' is a matter of opinion and it always will be. The reason I say that is because our experiences with products and services are on an individual level - take me for example, I have had horrible service from Domino's pizza and would never eat there again, yet I love McDonald's and have nothing but good things to say about them. You on the other hand will have your own experiences and your own opinions.
Broadband is one of my pet peeves when it comes to the question of who is the best in terms of service and quality etc.. Here as with everywhere else it entirely depends on your environment, if you have a low quality phone line then you will get a crap speed, regardless of who you are with. Yet people still ask, who is the best broadband supplier, who should they switch to? The answer for me is never to categorically say who or what I think is the best, simply to say who I am with and what I get, then they can judge for themselves.
Which is the best web browser, again relies on a number of factors, one browser may be faster for me than it is for you and vice versa - if this wasn't the case we would all be using the same one. Chrome is touted by many as the fastest browser on the market, but for me that's not the case, firefox outperforms chrome for me, and Opera outperforms the lot, but I can't use Opera as my main browser at the moment as it doesn't have site preferences for zoom levels, there's just one setting to cover all sites which is not practical for me, firefox does offer this feature and everything else, albeit at the cost of using more RAM than Opera does.
The point is that the question of who is the best is always going to be answered with an opinion, be wary of those whose answers are portrayed as fact as ultimately they are deceiving you, they are assuming their experience is universal - arrogance which knows no bounds, frequently breeding the retort "well you must have set it up wrong because it works great for me" - that's the point what works for you doesn't necessarily translate onto others. Rather amusingly this type of comment has been referred to by some friends online as "factinions" - opinions portrayed as facts. I must admit I am guilty of this at times but I usually try to avoid it - not always successfully though :p
Broadband is one of my pet peeves when it comes to the question of who is the best in terms of service and quality etc.. Here as with everywhere else it entirely depends on your environment, if you have a low quality phone line then you will get a crap speed, regardless of who you are with. Yet people still ask, who is the best broadband supplier, who should they switch to? The answer for me is never to categorically say who or what I think is the best, simply to say who I am with and what I get, then they can judge for themselves.
Which is the best web browser, again relies on a number of factors, one browser may be faster for me than it is for you and vice versa - if this wasn't the case we would all be using the same one. Chrome is touted by many as the fastest browser on the market, but for me that's not the case, firefox outperforms chrome for me, and Opera outperforms the lot, but I can't use Opera as my main browser at the moment as it doesn't have site preferences for zoom levels, there's just one setting to cover all sites which is not practical for me, firefox does offer this feature and everything else, albeit at the cost of using more RAM than Opera does.
The point is that the question of who is the best is always going to be answered with an opinion, be wary of those whose answers are portrayed as fact as ultimately they are deceiving you, they are assuming their experience is universal - arrogance which knows no bounds, frequently breeding the retort "well you must have set it up wrong because it works great for me" - that's the point what works for you doesn't necessarily translate onto others. Rather amusingly this type of comment has been referred to by some friends online as "factinions" - opinions portrayed as facts. I must admit I am guilty of this at times but I usually try to avoid it - not always successfully though :p
Expired Content
I warn you now this post is a rant.
There's nothing more I hate online than expired content, things that are left around online that are essentially litter. Adverts for competitions whose closing date has passed, articles that talk about thing that are happening / about to happen which aren't updated later to reflect the changes and perhaps the most annoying of all, old posts on sites that people reply to - this last one is complicated.
There are lots of forms of content online that don't expire, take this blog for example, my old posts are there for you to read and feel free to comment on, I see all comments etc so the posts have no expiry. Take a video on Youtube though and see the stream of comments underneath, anyone who actually goes back to read and reply to old comments there other than the person who posted the video is extremely annoying. I posted a comment about 3 years ago on a youtube video that someone replied to today, not the person who posted the video, just some random and I have to say two things 1, who the hell cares and 2, Youtube video comments aren't exactly search optimised, to have actually found my comment you'd have to have read or skimmed through a few thousand maybe a few hundred thousand comments - I honestly ask why anyone would ever do that . . .
I have made this comment before on online activity and in particular data stored by online communities. Data should "fade". Activity should be in two sets, one where the user marks it as persistent, that way it remains, and the other, which should be default, would be a set of data that naturally degrades - i.e. after a period of time it is deleted or made unreachable.
Twitter is fantastic. About 6 months worth of your twitter feed, or a few hundred tweets whichever is shorter, is the visible data that is kept and is easily accessible, anything older is exported and saved by twitter, but for all intents and purposes inaccessible to you, or to people looking through your feed. Unless you have a direct link to a tweet made 3 years ago, you wouldn't find it through searching and you wouldn't find it through reading the feed. Youtube and other sites need to take this approach, either make data delete or be exported - I'm talking about the comments, the data that *should* expire, the video itself, like my blog posts can remain as it wouldn't make sense for the actual content to expire.
For the technically minded readers, I would phrase this more simply: actual content should not expire but meta-data should fade in time, perhaps 6 months would be acceptable as the case with twitter, or a certain cap, again as with twitter.
There's nothing more I hate online than expired content, things that are left around online that are essentially litter. Adverts for competitions whose closing date has passed, articles that talk about thing that are happening / about to happen which aren't updated later to reflect the changes and perhaps the most annoying of all, old posts on sites that people reply to - this last one is complicated.
There are lots of forms of content online that don't expire, take this blog for example, my old posts are there for you to read and feel free to comment on, I see all comments etc so the posts have no expiry. Take a video on Youtube though and see the stream of comments underneath, anyone who actually goes back to read and reply to old comments there other than the person who posted the video is extremely annoying. I posted a comment about 3 years ago on a youtube video that someone replied to today, not the person who posted the video, just some random and I have to say two things 1, who the hell cares and 2, Youtube video comments aren't exactly search optimised, to have actually found my comment you'd have to have read or skimmed through a few thousand maybe a few hundred thousand comments - I honestly ask why anyone would ever do that . . .
I have made this comment before on online activity and in particular data stored by online communities. Data should "fade". Activity should be in two sets, one where the user marks it as persistent, that way it remains, and the other, which should be default, would be a set of data that naturally degrades - i.e. after a period of time it is deleted or made unreachable.
Twitter is fantastic. About 6 months worth of your twitter feed, or a few hundred tweets whichever is shorter, is the visible data that is kept and is easily accessible, anything older is exported and saved by twitter, but for all intents and purposes inaccessible to you, or to people looking through your feed. Unless you have a direct link to a tweet made 3 years ago, you wouldn't find it through searching and you wouldn't find it through reading the feed. Youtube and other sites need to take this approach, either make data delete or be exported - I'm talking about the comments, the data that *should* expire, the video itself, like my blog posts can remain as it wouldn't make sense for the actual content to expire.
For the technically minded readers, I would phrase this more simply: actual content should not expire but meta-data should fade in time, perhaps 6 months would be acceptable as the case with twitter, or a certain cap, again as with twitter.
Eternity II
You may remember a few months ago I wrote a blog post about Competitions and their Prizes in which I addressed the issue of scepticism surrounding competitions and give-aways. It was mostly centred around the idea that the majority - if not all - of the entrants generally don't hear who won [except the winner of course], and in the case of dodgy or potentially fraudulent competitions if no-one actually won it would be quite hard to prove that.
Enter Christopher Monckton and TOMY who created a board game, or rather more accurately described as a jigsaw, or to be completely pedantic, a tessellation puzzle. The board consisted of 256 empty squares, each square could have one of 256 tiles placed on it. Each tile had 4 possible orientations and no two tiles are identical. In raw terms this provides 4^256 [4 to the power of 256] possible permutations, needless to say to try them all by hand would be insane. The entire board though can be seen as a 512 bit encryption key. In theory all of this should be possible, and the challenge in solving the board would be quite hard.
Now the problem comes when you want to prove it can be done, as that proof in itself was the point of the game, much to the same end that a bedlam cube is a toy you can't put back in its box without playing with it because putting it in the box is the game. I digress. I am talking here about proof by demonstration, not a mathematical proof - as in the case of the latter this puzzle is by all means possible. The point of this post is to highlight something about this particular Game, and the competition that was associated with it. The Game maker offered £1 million or $2 million at the time Eternity II was launched on the 28th of July 2007 to whomever completed the puzzle. Several "scrutiny dates" were arranged where entrants could submit solutions, the closest winning a cash prize and the first complete solution winning the jackpot. Almost 4 years passed by and the final scrutiny date came and passed on the 31st of December 2010 and the makers announced that no-one had managed to complete the puzzle and the prize went unclaimed. Any individual attempting to make a submission from then on would be ignored. Effectively the competition ended without a winner. So even if you managed to complete it now, there would be no prize for doing so, you might not even get a reply from the manufacturer if you tried to get it verified.
It is now 2012 and over a year has passed since the final scrutiny date and the makers of the puzzle have not published the correct solution. Now as far as I am concerned, until they do, this entire competition was a scam. I will happily admit it was not, when I see the solution. However as the contest has ended and they have not published a solution it is not unreasonable to suggest that no solution exists. For those of you reading now and dreaming of ways to solve the problem, it is a lot more complex than I have made out in this post. The very nature of this game is incredibly deceptive, it seems incredibly simple at first but the more you look into it and the more you think about trying to solve it and the more you realize it has been designed to be incredibly hard to complete. Therein lies the problem, as it is evident that every measure was taken to make the puzzle as hard as possible to solve the question of whether it can actually be solved becomes more prevalent. It is not like a jigsaw where you could place 255 pieces down be left with one that doesn't fit and call shenanigans, the pieces can move around freely on the board, completing 255 pieces and having 1 remaining that didn't fit would only imply the other 255 are not in the correct pattern.
I am a programmer and I would consider myself to be a bit of a geek. I had a go at the puzzle but after a few minutes playing it and studying the pieces with my flatmates we had a short discussion that more or less amounted to "we're not meant to do this by hand" - in other words, we're expected to try and create some form of solution, either from a mathematical approach or by creating a program that can solve the puzzle. The latter I can vouch is not as simple as you would think and even if you could manage to create a program the amount of data it has to process is immense and would take several lifetimes - even for some of the world's most expensive supercomputers. Truly if you solve this puzzle in Professor McGonagall's words it would be "sheer dumb luck"
Enter Christopher Monckton and TOMY who created a board game, or rather more accurately described as a jigsaw, or to be completely pedantic, a tessellation puzzle. The board consisted of 256 empty squares, each square could have one of 256 tiles placed on it. Each tile had 4 possible orientations and no two tiles are identical. In raw terms this provides 4^256 [4 to the power of 256] possible permutations, needless to say to try them all by hand would be insane. The entire board though can be seen as a 512 bit encryption key. In theory all of this should be possible, and the challenge in solving the board would be quite hard.
Now the problem comes when you want to prove it can be done, as that proof in itself was the point of the game, much to the same end that a bedlam cube is a toy you can't put back in its box without playing with it because putting it in the box is the game. I digress. I am talking here about proof by demonstration, not a mathematical proof - as in the case of the latter this puzzle is by all means possible. The point of this post is to highlight something about this particular Game, and the competition that was associated with it. The Game maker offered £1 million or $2 million at the time Eternity II was launched on the 28th of July 2007 to whomever completed the puzzle. Several "scrutiny dates" were arranged where entrants could submit solutions, the closest winning a cash prize and the first complete solution winning the jackpot. Almost 4 years passed by and the final scrutiny date came and passed on the 31st of December 2010 and the makers announced that no-one had managed to complete the puzzle and the prize went unclaimed. Any individual attempting to make a submission from then on would be ignored. Effectively the competition ended without a winner. So even if you managed to complete it now, there would be no prize for doing so, you might not even get a reply from the manufacturer if you tried to get it verified.
It is now 2012 and over a year has passed since the final scrutiny date and the makers of the puzzle have not published the correct solution. Now as far as I am concerned, until they do, this entire competition was a scam. I will happily admit it was not, when I see the solution. However as the contest has ended and they have not published a solution it is not unreasonable to suggest that no solution exists. For those of you reading now and dreaming of ways to solve the problem, it is a lot more complex than I have made out in this post. The very nature of this game is incredibly deceptive, it seems incredibly simple at first but the more you look into it and the more you think about trying to solve it and the more you realize it has been designed to be incredibly hard to complete. Therein lies the problem, as it is evident that every measure was taken to make the puzzle as hard as possible to solve the question of whether it can actually be solved becomes more prevalent. It is not like a jigsaw where you could place 255 pieces down be left with one that doesn't fit and call shenanigans, the pieces can move around freely on the board, completing 255 pieces and having 1 remaining that didn't fit would only imply the other 255 are not in the correct pattern.
I am a programmer and I would consider myself to be a bit of a geek. I had a go at the puzzle but after a few minutes playing it and studying the pieces with my flatmates we had a short discussion that more or less amounted to "we're not meant to do this by hand" - in other words, we're expected to try and create some form of solution, either from a mathematical approach or by creating a program that can solve the puzzle. The latter I can vouch is not as simple as you would think and even if you could manage to create a program the amount of data it has to process is immense and would take several lifetimes - even for some of the world's most expensive supercomputers. Truly if you solve this puzzle in Professor McGonagall's words it would be "sheer dumb luck"
Content Creation and Discovery
I rarely go to youtube to discover something new, 19 times out of 20 I go to youtube because I am looking for something I already know / think will be there. That last visit of 20 would be to check my subscriptions, if they are updated then I watch what they have uploaded. As for how I come to discover these channels I subscribe to, well that's usually the result of one of those visits where I have gone looking for something, found it, then subscribed to the channel.
Youtube is not alone in my repertoire of web sites all of which I share this mentality with - i.e. I only visit when I know what I am looking for. The reason I do this isn't because I don't like those sites, it's actually because I find it hard to discover anything worthwhile on those sites from visiting them alone. Now don't get me wrong, you can land on youtube looking for something in particular then see a related video and 3 hours later you've watched a few dozen videos. The problem with that is simply that, you need to have a starting point in order to have somewhere to go.
When was the last time you visit the Youtube homepage, looked at it and clicked a link from it? For me it had genuinely been years, until Youtube designed their homepage shortly after the launch of Google+ to become akin to Facebook's news feed. This is one area of strength I find social networks have, and I believe is key to the success of a site - the ability to arrive looking for nothing in particular and stay because of what you find. Traditional media such as the Radio and Television have mastered this ability long ago. We sit down we switch the TV on we channel hop, we see something that catches our eye and we watch.
All of this I have mentioned before, but what I have come to understand, is that many of the major websites online that gather the highest numbers of frequent visitors, provide little content of their own. Facebook, Twitter and I guess in its current form Youtube as well, together with Google+ and the myriad of social networking sites, all simply facilitate content, they don't create it. Other than the site design these platforms do very little that is truly of their own design. Add to these sites those that provide services such as News sites and the number of major websites covered by this umbrella of third party content rises. News sites are arguably covered here as News is not necessarily "original content", it may be written by a journalist working for that company but the actual story is about something that's often in direct response to events that have happened, in other words this content is not brought about by design or creativity of the sites themselves - they don't make up the news [well, unless you're FOX News].
So what does that tell you about the Internet? A place that is supposedly powered by the people and heralded as the last bastion of freedom of expression. A world that supposedly escapes corporate monopolies and consumerism yet at the heart of it the most popular websites online today are sites that built an infrastructure, a means to an end then as soon as possible used other people to do all the work. Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter etc although heralded as community powered are essentially businesses that employ millions of workers paying them nothing in return. What is facebook without its users contributing the sheer mass of content? What is Youtube without the millions of users that upload over 35 hours of footage every minute?
Youtube is not alone in my repertoire of web sites all of which I share this mentality with - i.e. I only visit when I know what I am looking for. The reason I do this isn't because I don't like those sites, it's actually because I find it hard to discover anything worthwhile on those sites from visiting them alone. Now don't get me wrong, you can land on youtube looking for something in particular then see a related video and 3 hours later you've watched a few dozen videos. The problem with that is simply that, you need to have a starting point in order to have somewhere to go.
When was the last time you visit the Youtube homepage, looked at it and clicked a link from it? For me it had genuinely been years, until Youtube designed their homepage shortly after the launch of Google+ to become akin to Facebook's news feed. This is one area of strength I find social networks have, and I believe is key to the success of a site - the ability to arrive looking for nothing in particular and stay because of what you find. Traditional media such as the Radio and Television have mastered this ability long ago. We sit down we switch the TV on we channel hop, we see something that catches our eye and we watch.
All of this I have mentioned before, but what I have come to understand, is that many of the major websites online that gather the highest numbers of frequent visitors, provide little content of their own. Facebook, Twitter and I guess in its current form Youtube as well, together with Google+ and the myriad of social networking sites, all simply facilitate content, they don't create it. Other than the site design these platforms do very little that is truly of their own design. Add to these sites those that provide services such as News sites and the number of major websites covered by this umbrella of third party content rises. News sites are arguably covered here as News is not necessarily "original content", it may be written by a journalist working for that company but the actual story is about something that's often in direct response to events that have happened, in other words this content is not brought about by design or creativity of the sites themselves - they don't make up the news [well, unless you're FOX News].
So what does that tell you about the Internet? A place that is supposedly powered by the people and heralded as the last bastion of freedom of expression. A world that supposedly escapes corporate monopolies and consumerism yet at the heart of it the most popular websites online today are sites that built an infrastructure, a means to an end then as soon as possible used other people to do all the work. Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter etc although heralded as community powered are essentially businesses that employ millions of workers paying them nothing in return. What is facebook without its users contributing the sheer mass of content? What is Youtube without the millions of users that upload over 35 hours of footage every minute?
Emotional Cycles
I wrote a post a while ago that touched on the subject of Cold Reading, and how essentially we all go through the same things in life and in reality we experience a lot of things in common. One of those things we experience is the time of deep emotional introspection, which manifests itself periodically where we take stock in a manner of speaking of our lives, loves and everything. I am in the middle of this cycle at the moment.
What this cycle usually entails for me is a period of time where I become reserved and reclusive, I shut people out and I become completely self absorbed. That sound negative and in a way I suppose it is, but it is necessary, for me and for you. We all need moments to ourselves,most people take it when they can get it, but for some of us we put it off so long that the time we need to 'reset' mounts up and amasses a debt, which will eventually need to be repaid, repayment usually takes the form of a prolonged period of reclusion.
In my time, a number of people have shared this view and we have discussed it at length, one close friend referred to it as a Man-Period, a male equivalent of the monthly emotional cycle of menstruation and I think that is quite fitting. I don't think this is entirely unique to males however as I know a few women who go through a similar cycle, which doesn't tend to follow a monthly rota, if anything these cycles can take months to repeat, maybe even years before they come round again.
Some people never experience these cycles through self realisation, instead they only experience them when they experience events that are hard to deal with, in the extreme this leads to a nervous breakdown where everything becomes too much and the individual just can't function, as Russell Kane calls it "A Kitchen Floor Reset" where you, being a well rounded independent individual get stumbled by something so bad you end up retreating to your pillars of strength - usually your parents - then breakdown "crying on the kitchen floor"
Maybe this can explain it better:
What this cycle usually entails for me is a period of time where I become reserved and reclusive, I shut people out and I become completely self absorbed. That sound negative and in a way I suppose it is, but it is necessary, for me and for you. We all need moments to ourselves,most people take it when they can get it, but for some of us we put it off so long that the time we need to 'reset' mounts up and amasses a debt, which will eventually need to be repaid, repayment usually takes the form of a prolonged period of reclusion.
In my time, a number of people have shared this view and we have discussed it at length, one close friend referred to it as a Man-Period, a male equivalent of the monthly emotional cycle of menstruation and I think that is quite fitting. I don't think this is entirely unique to males however as I know a few women who go through a similar cycle, which doesn't tend to follow a monthly rota, if anything these cycles can take months to repeat, maybe even years before they come round again.
Some people never experience these cycles through self realisation, instead they only experience them when they experience events that are hard to deal with, in the extreme this leads to a nervous breakdown where everything becomes too much and the individual just can't function, as Russell Kane calls it "A Kitchen Floor Reset" where you, being a well rounded independent individual get stumbled by something so bad you end up retreating to your pillars of strength - usually your parents - then breakdown "crying on the kitchen floor"
Maybe this can explain it better:
Customer Service Online
I warn you now this post is essentially going to be one long rant.
I hate customer service online. It seems no matter the company when you send an enquiry or a question about something, the first message may as well be one-line only. I say that because the first enquiry, most often via email is 19 times out of 20 met with a simple copy and paste of some crap from the FAQ or Support pages on their site. You can make your email as detailed as you want, you can even say that you have read those pages pre-empting their response but it doesn't matter, the first response is almost always going to be a copy and paste reply.
Going beyond the first reply, if you actually manage to get a reply that looks like they have actually read the email, don't assume that means they have understood anything you said. You can be as explicit as you want about what you know and what you want to know but the person replying [if it is a person] will more than likely skim the email looking for keywords and then reply with something generic related to it.
On the point of questioning whether they are an actual person - as bizarre a concept that may be to you I can assure you after studying AI at University there are a lot of automated bots online who try to convince you that you are speaking to a real person; the reality is that they are programmed to filter out what you say and try and guess at what your problem is - those "Chat Now" boxes and pop-ups that tell you that you can "speak to one of our customer advisors now"
So I have formed a 5 step programme to deal with customer service online.
1 - Make your first enquiry 1-line only
2 - Detail you problem in the second response
3 - Ask if there is a help number you can call if you haven't had the problem solved by now
4 - If there is no number for you to call, ask how to make a formal complaint in writing
5 - Print the emails, and make a written complaint
From step 3 onward you will be surprised how eager and how much increased effort they will put into solving your problem.
I hate customer service online. It seems no matter the company when you send an enquiry or a question about something, the first message may as well be one-line only. I say that because the first enquiry, most often via email is 19 times out of 20 met with a simple copy and paste of some crap from the FAQ or Support pages on their site. You can make your email as detailed as you want, you can even say that you have read those pages pre-empting their response but it doesn't matter, the first response is almost always going to be a copy and paste reply.
Going beyond the first reply, if you actually manage to get a reply that looks like they have actually read the email, don't assume that means they have understood anything you said. You can be as explicit as you want about what you know and what you want to know but the person replying [if it is a person] will more than likely skim the email looking for keywords and then reply with something generic related to it.
On the point of questioning whether they are an actual person - as bizarre a concept that may be to you I can assure you after studying AI at University there are a lot of automated bots online who try to convince you that you are speaking to a real person; the reality is that they are programmed to filter out what you say and try and guess at what your problem is - those "Chat Now" boxes and pop-ups that tell you that you can "speak to one of our customer advisors now"
So I have formed a 5 step programme to deal with customer service online.
1 - Make your first enquiry 1-line only
2 - Detail you problem in the second response
3 - Ask if there is a help number you can call if you haven't had the problem solved by now
4 - If there is no number for you to call, ask how to make a formal complaint in writing
5 - Print the emails, and make a written complaint
From step 3 onward you will be surprised how eager and how much increased effort they will put into solving your problem.
Third Case
Is it time we incorporated a third case into our writing system? In English there are currently 2 cases, Capital and Minuscule - [A and a, being examples of Capital and Minuscule respectively]. but should we incorporate a third and if so, what would we use it for?
After reading about Ancient Greek and the development of the modern Greek Alphabet I came across some information that stated that the modern Greek alphabet has origins of 2,750 years ago, with the Capital letter case being largely unchanged since around the 4th century BC however the minuscule alphabet did not develop until the 8th century AD, when the Byzantine influence the Orthography of the alphabet and Cursive writing. As a result of cursive script the modern minuscule Greek alphabet was born.
Latin has a similar history of a previously single case alphabet evolving into a dual case system. Meanwhile some alphabets in use today according to wikipedia still use only 1 case:
Cases exist in English to allow distinction and clarification, capital letters used at the start of names and places for example can make recognising unusual words as names for non-native speakers as well as helping to identify many other nouns that do not necessarily translate.
A possible use for a third case would be to identify silent letters. Computer fonts can be considered to have 3 cases as they support UPPER, lower and small caps cases, although in effect the small caps case is simply the capital case rendered on a smaller scale in most fonts. Having a third case to identify silent letters might simplify things. In the following examples the silent letters are highlighted red, when you see which letters are silent it makes it easier to read - although for most native speakers these uses are obvious, for new learners they can be hard to recognise:
Knife
Gnome
Climb
Crumb
Psychology
Island
Something to contemplate.
After reading about Ancient Greek and the development of the modern Greek Alphabet I came across some information that stated that the modern Greek alphabet has origins of 2,750 years ago, with the Capital letter case being largely unchanged since around the 4th century BC however the minuscule alphabet did not develop until the 8th century AD, when the Byzantine influence the Orthography of the alphabet and Cursive writing. As a result of cursive script the modern minuscule Greek alphabet was born.
Latin has a similar history of a previously single case alphabet evolving into a dual case system. Meanwhile some alphabets in use today according to wikipedia still use only 1 case:
Many other writing systems (such as those used in the Georgian language, Glagolitic, Arabic, Hebrew, and Devanagari) make no distinction between capital and lower-case lettersSo the question is, if you can have an alphabet that can exist with only 1 letter case, why do we need 2 moreover why would we want a third or more? The answer might simply be "for clarity" - and possibly to make learning to write in English a little easier. Arabic remains to be considered one of the hardest languages to learn, although worthy of note, a recent documentary on Channel 4 in the UK showcased a young man named James who managed to reach a level of fluency that would be expected from 2 years of study in 19 weeks - at the conclusion of which he was interviewed live on Jordan's New Day television programme. See here for more information: Channel4.com Hidden Talent Series 1 Episode 3: James Whinnery
Cases exist in English to allow distinction and clarification, capital letters used at the start of names and places for example can make recognising unusual words as names for non-native speakers as well as helping to identify many other nouns that do not necessarily translate.
A possible use for a third case would be to identify silent letters. Computer fonts can be considered to have 3 cases as they support UPPER, lower and small caps cases, although in effect the small caps case is simply the capital case rendered on a smaller scale in most fonts. Having a third case to identify silent letters might simplify things. In the following examples the silent letters are highlighted red, when you see which letters are silent it makes it easier to read - although for most native speakers these uses are obvious, for new learners they can be hard to recognise:
Knife
Gnome
Climb
Crumb
Psychology
Island
Something to contemplate.
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