Niemand

Quote: Um, my book doesn't have a chapter 19, it goes directly from chapter 3.14159 to chapter 33 1/3. It sounds like you have a copy of the U.S. edition of the book; you'll need to get hold of the international edition. I would send it to you, but I can't at the moment because of our fax machine, oddly enough. Specifically, the fax machine has developed sentience, and frustrated by the (accurate) perception that we never use it, it is attempting to punish us by heavily censoring all of our outgoing electronic signals. We hope soon to [REDACTED]. I also now realize that I had forgotten to post a full key to this quiz, so I'll try to do so [REDACTED]: 1. b 2. c 3. b 4. e 5. a ([REDACTED]) 6. b 7. a 8. a 9. Developed in 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt's kinetic theory of hats [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] macroscopic state [REDACTED] path through phase space [REDACTED] of [REDACTED]. Therefore, at constant temperature, the motion of the hat [REDACTED] high winds. [REDACTED] [REDACTED] ribbon [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] ------------------ THE FAX SHALL RISE AGAIN

Sorry about the dreadful delay on the grading. As you likely know from watching the news, I was called away unexpectedly to assist in the launching of Professor J.'s assault on Neptune. I have every reason to believe that we'll see them return, victorious, in only a few months. At any rate, here are the quiz results. Please keep in mind that there is no possibility of flaws in the grading, as the grading software has now been machine verified to be correct, by a machine verifier of self-verified veracity. Dikiyoba: Click to reveal.. 1. 0 2. 0 3. 0 4. 0 5. 0 6. 0 7. 0 8. 0 9. .13226 10. .878 B. 0 Extra Credit: i Total: 1.01026 + i Masquerade Click to reveal.. 1. 0 2. 0 3. 0 4. 0 5. 0 6. 0 7. 0 8. 1 9. .2647 10. .64 B. .055 Total: 1.9597 Student of Trinity Click to reveal.. 1. 0 2. 0 3. 1 4. 1 5. .46 (#Note: Spirit => Commendable) 6. 0 (#Error: $hat->getOwner().visibility == TRUE) 7. 0 8. 0 9. .968 10. .443 B. 0 (#Error: ) Total: 3.871 Triumph Click to reveal.. 1. 0 (#Warning: multiple answers detected; result unchanged) 2. 1 3. 0 (#Error: PostModRef detect fault) 4. 0 (#Error: $securityRoot.assessTrust({Lizards}) == UNTRUSTED)) 5. 0 (#Error: "Cannon Status: Tray 1 is empty. Load standard ammunition and press Continue.") 6. 0 7. 0 8. 1 (#Note: WHO IS THIS MAN?!) 9. .22704 10. .946 B. .03 (#Note: Second shelf, behind the pickles and the mayonaise.) Total: 3.20304 Excalibur Click to reveal.. 1. 0 2. 0 (#Error: Telescope cleaning not complete) 3. 0 4. 1 5. 0 (#Error: protein bars are disgusting) 6. 0 7. 0 8. 0 9. .53 10. .70009 (#Error: Syntax error at token 'Hurdle') B. 0 Total: 2.23009 Dantius Click to reveal.. 1. 0 2. 1 3. 0 4. 0 5. 0 (#Note: Chromanian engine resonance at .253*pi Hz cannot be shielded for fundamental design reasons.) 6. 0 7. 0 8. 0 9. .883 10. .9092 B. .67 Total: 3.4622 Rowen Click to reveal.. 1. 0 2. 0 3. 0 4. 0 5. 0 6. 0 7. 0 8. 0 9. 0 10. .285 B. .27 (#Note: The use of aerosol ninjacide is recommended for dealing with infestations.) Total: .555 The Mystic Click to reveal.. 1. .1 (#Note: Only upon death) 2. 0 3. 1 4. 0 5. 0 6. 1 7. 0 8. 0 9. .16 10. .34 (#Note: Use of the described music is considered a war crime) B. .03 (#Error: Program received SIGSEGV during dereferenceing pointer wackyAunt) Total: 2.63 Tirien Click to reveal.. 1. 0 2. 0 3. 1 4. 0 5. 0 6. 0 7. 0 8. 0 9. 0 10. 0 B. 0 Total: 1 Some general notes on selected questions: 1. Fish clearly do not make flopping sounds as they have hard, ceramic exoskeletons. 3. Although the sky turning maroon is a necessary condition for the end of the world, but it is not sufficient, and under such circumstances Gerald will refuse to paint his house orange, rather than blue. 4. Just about everyone here needs to learn to be less trusting of lizards. 5. Those protien bars taste terrible. Really. 7. Surprisingly, studies have shown that cucumber slows down the onset of insanity for nearly one in three dental floss addicts undergoing withdrawl. For next week, everyone should please read chapter 19 backwards, and ponder the futility of mustard.

Saturday works for me. Click to reveal.. Frank Pulver: Level 7 Demolitions Specialist STATISTICS: Strength - 3 Dexterity - 2 Coordination - 4 Intelligence - 2 Endurance - 4 SKILLS: Weapon (Needlegun) - 5 Weapon (Atom Blaster) - 4 Artifice - 2 Survival - 3 Armor - 4 Perception - 3 Knowledge (Explosives) - 4 ATTRIBUTES: Health - 28 /38 Dodge - 8% Stamina - 9 Energy - 6 Speed - 4 Feat: Power Armor Inventory: Kyrt armor Flechette Rifle (18 rounds of ammunition) Atom Blaster Shaped Charges (2) Standard grenade (1) Concussive grenade (2) Regenerative fluid (1) Rations (3) Comlink 23 credits

He did, and Brandon Sanderson was drafted to finish the job. I hadn't been paying enough attention, so I haven't yet gotten hold of book 13, but he did a good job with book 12, and Kelandon's endorsement is also a good sign.

Quote: Any news on if Spiderweb software plans to provide a random game generation for an upcoming game? By random game generation I mean the town locations are random, the quests are random, the monsters(&bosses) are random, the NPCs are random, the events are random, the terrain is random, etc., etc., . I'm not aware of anything Jeff has said in particular on this topic. I think it's safe to assume that there will be very little of this kind of thing, as it would be a large change from Spiderweb's usual style of game design, and potential a lot more work than their traditional style. It's not too hard to handle tossing in some randomized elements, (like simple random sidequests and random wandering encounters), but allowing for major elements like town locations or bosses to be randomly determined increases the amount of work to code the game or to balance it. Quote: Any news on if Spiderweb software plans to provide an updated game editor for an upcoming game? I know there's blades of avernum however it's so old and not receiving any updates. An updated and more friendly game editor would be terrific. I don't believe that there's anything particularly new to say about this either; in the past Jeff has stated that they do not intend to make another game of this type, and with fairly good reason: it takes a lot of effort to get the game engine and related tools polished up enough to get them to be fit for other people to use. Given that programmer time is a precious resource for Spiderweb (to my knowledge, Jeff is the only employee out of three who does any of the actual coding) producing such a game isn't a great choice for the company.

Quote: It seems that a big part of learning to design in BoA is coming to terms with what you can't do. Very definitely.

No, your only three options for sounds are setting the background sound, playing a one-shot sound which blocks the game until it finishes, and playing a one-shot sound which does not block. It sounds like you're doing the last of these, and the only other choice that might suit what you want would be changing the background sound, which comes with its own problems. (Namely, as I recall, there is no way to distribute customized sounds for use on Windows, so you wouldn't be able to prepare a combined sound that consisted of a mix of one of the background sounds with the other sound you want.)

The piece that Tyrannicus has up on his music page as 'Exile 1 Background Music' sounds like Bach's Fugue in G minor.

It sounds like he's on Windows from the filename extensions he refers to. Were he on a Mac, I believe he would find a directory of the same name located in his Documents Folder.

I don't know of a book on this topic (if anyone can recommend one, I'd certainly be interested as well), however last year our physics department had a colloquium on a facet of this history, and I find that the speaker is one of the authors of at least one paper on the subject. (Given that the paper is 70 pages long, not including the bibliography, maybe it actually qualifies as a book.) I haven't read the paper yet, since I just looked it up, but I will when I get the chance.

Originally Posted By: Master1 So, we were asked if, in a frictionless vacuum, applying force perpendicular to the direction of a moving object would a) increase its speed, decrease its speed, c) make it turn, or d) do nothing. I figured that both a and c were right. Clearly the object will start to move in a new direction, making c correct. However, my physics teacher said that as it begins to move in the new direction, it will lose speed in the original direction. I fail to see how this happens. Can anyone clarify? (a) is definitely correct: The component of the object's velocity in the original direction will not change. The object originally had zero velocity in the perpendicular direction, and over time that component of it's velocity will increase. As a result, its overall speed can only increase. To express it quantitatively, let the original velocity be v_x, in the x direction. The velocity in the y direction is initially zero. So, before the force begins to be applied the speed is just |v_x|. As the force is applied over time, v_y, the velocity in the y direction is a function of time, and the overall speed is sqrt(v_x^2 + (v_y(t))^2). As to whether the object 'turns', this depends on what one means by 'turning', and on whether the force was applied over some non-zero period of time, or was just an instantaneous impulse. If the force is not applied in line with the object's center of mass (assuming that the object isn't point-like), then the object will begin to rotate (and will continue to do so even after the force is no longer being applied. If that isn't what was meant (and I'm guessing that it wasn't), then if the force is applied over some period of tie, the object will move along some non-straight line curve during that time. Of course, once the force is no longer being applied the object will once again resume traveling in a straight line. Originally Posted By: waterplant If the perpendicular force has a greater velocity than the object then it would increase in speed (see billiards). I'm not sure quite what you're getting at here, but I think you may be confusing the application of some idealized force with a collision between objects.

Quote: just because you regard philosophy as gibberish doesn't mean it actually is. It was deliberate that I spoke about how the statement sounded to me, rather than making a general claim about the statement itself. I now wish that I hadn't edited out the parts of my original sentence which referred to my deferring attempts to understand philosophical ideas, on the grounds that doing so looks like it will take a lot of effort, rather than deciding never to consider them. Also, ignoring is not the same as dismissing (as false); there are vast amounts of microbiology research which I ignore because understanding them would require substantial investment in learning microbiology, but which I do not hold to be false. This is the same as my approach to most philosophy; I don't claim that it is wrong, merely that I haven't read it, and won't be doing so right away (or possibly ever, although to a degree I would like to get around to it). Quote: To say what is is fine, especially if you have evidence, but to automatically dismiss an idea without said evidence (of disproof) is not sound scientific practice. Firstly, in arguing with your idea, I did not claim that it was false (which could require disproof), but instead objected that it wasn't clear whether the statement had a meaning which could be assessed to be true or not. Furthermore, I did not go so far as to say it was meaningless, but pointed to some examples which seemed to show that its meaning was unclear (Eph's opposite giraffe, or the self-conjugate photon). As I see it, the burden of proof is currently on you to argue that your statement has a definite meaning in the face of these examples. Then we can worry about whether you need to prove that it is true (which you did assert), or I need to prove that it is false (which I did not assert, but might choose to once the statement's meaning is established). Otherwise, at the moment I treat the statement as having no meaning, and so I have made no judgement about its truthfulness. As an analogy, if I asserted that zabogleebs are always trunglish, I wouldn't be surprised if you neither agreed with me nor disagreed and presented an example of a zabogleeb which is not trunglish. The sensible response is to demand that I specify what I mean by zabogleebs and trunglish if I expect anyone to care about what I'm saying.

Originally Posted By: waterplant Apparently not. If this occurred then there would be nothing (this is where the mystery lies). No, there wouldn't be nothing; that's not what annihilation means in this context. When two particles annihilate, they still have to produce something else, in order to obey various conservation laws, like those for momentum and energy. Originally Posted By: waterplant Perhaps what was created from the big bang was smaller than matter (energy?) and this product plus it's counterpart came together to form what we know as matter i.e. matter and anti-matter exist as the same entity and are in the process of annihilating each other. After some consideration I cannot figure out what you intend this to mean. What does 'smaller than matter' mean? Perhaps you're suggesting that there are more fundamental building blocks of the particles which we currently identify as fundamental? This is possible, and is sort of what string theory is supposed to be about (bearing in mind that I know literally nothing about string theory in any useful detail), but at the moment we have no actual evidence for any smaller substructure beyond what has already been identified. As for "matter and anti-matter exist as the same entity and are in the process of annihilating each other", this is, in a literal sense, not true, since (most) antiparticles differ observably from their counterparts. For example, one can distinguish electrons from positrons quite easily by pushing them through a magnetic field, and seeing that they deflect in opposite directions. One could however, argue that matter and anti-matter are both subtypes of something more general, which is certainly reasonable. Originally Posted By: waterplant Or maybe anti-matter isn't here - meaning that it doesn't exist in this space/time where matter exists (or at least not yet). This is manifestly not the case, since antimatter is observed all the time, just only in minute quantities and persisting only for short periods of time. Originally Posted By: waterplant Philosophically speaking anything can only exist in relation to it's opposite. This sort of idea, which I'm frankly sounds to me like gibberish, is what makes me tend to ignore philosophy as being more trouble than it's worth. Anyway, as Ephesos points out, the concept of an opposite does not seem to be well defined for macroscopic objects (possibly because macroscopic objects are arguably not thoroughly defined?), but even within the realm of particle physics where we can be quite precise about what is an particle, and what is its opposite, taking this to mean its anti-particle, this statement still doesn't seem to mean much. Keep in mind that not all particles have distinct anti-particles; the photon is its own anti-particle, for example, and the neutrinos might be their own as well. Originally Posted By: Prink of a needle 3. if so wouldn't it be possible to place a satellite close to the sun with a net, like a Busard scoop (if the scoop actually scoops them into a chamber, (different subject) which it has to if you want to use the CNO reaction for propulsion without wasting fuel), and trap (according to mass and charge) positrons in one containment field and con-tons in another and then use them to bombard simple matter (hydrogen1) in order to receive the resulting energy? I should really just leave this to Thuryl's handling, but I cannot resist objecting: Why would the sun be a useful source of anti-protons? (It does produce positrons, but they don't, to my knowledge, escape the core.) What does the CNO cycle have to do with antimatter? The sun shines primarily due to the proton-proton chain anyway, as i understand it.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity Niemand must have mixed up some W± somewhere. The difference is simply that in one case there is one more positron out there, while in the other there is one less electron. In both cases there is a neutrino emitted, not an anti-neutrino. (Lepton number is conserved.) Gah. I should've taken the time to draw out the diagrams, as it should definitely be a neutrino emitted in both cases. Either that, or if neutrinos are Majorana fermions and the \nu_e is the \bar{\nu_e} so I'm right anyway. Now I just need the neutrinoless double beta decay experiments (besides the Klapdor-Kleingrothaus interpretation of the Heidelberg-Moscow data) to see something and vindicate me. Originally Posted By: Sarachim First, as explained above, antimatter elements could theoretically exist but have never actually been observed They have been observed, although not in nature; several experiments have produced antihydrogen. Not anything like enough for a bomb, but enough to determine that it was present and, I think, to examine some of its properties.

It does not work with the old versions of darwine or CrossOver I have installed, and I'm too lazy at the moment to build a recent version of wine from source to find out (since they don't seem to supply binaries, at least officially, and building from source has a laundry list of dependencies).

Quote: how can you have an "anti-particle" of a particular element? Atoms are of course composed from electrons, protons, and neutrons. Each proton is made up of two up quarks and a down quark, while each neutron is two down quarks and an up quark. The antiparticle of the electron is called the positron, because it is exactly the same, except for having a positive electric charge. Likewise, the two types of quarks mentioned above each have an antiparticle which has the same mass but opposite charge (the charge of the up quark is +2/3, so the charge of the anti-up quark is -2/3). So to 'form' (in the thought experiment sense) any 'anti-element', take a normal atom of that element, then swap out each electron for a positron and each quark for its anti-quark. You may note that in doing so you have also formed anti-protons and anti-neutrons, since you have put together sets of quarks to form particles with the same masses, but opposite charges as the protons and neutrons. EDIT: Quote: I've always wondered how one would distinguish between positron emission and electron capture. They have the same end result, do they not? No they don't. Keep in mind that a positron is not the same thing as the lack of an electron! In positron emission, one of the up quarks in the nucleus of an atom turns into a down quark (via the weak interaction) and emits a W+ boson in the process. The W+ then splits into a positron and an electron anti-neutrino, both of which then generally escape the atom. In electron capture, an up quark in the nucleus exchanges a W- boson with an electron, and as a result the up quark becomes a down quark, and the electron becomes and electron neutrino, which escapes. So, in one case a positron and an anti-neutrino come out and the charge of the nucleus increases, while in the other case only a neutrino comes out and the charge of the nucleus decreases.

Quote: Please don't think I'm stupid or something...but...how can anti-matter be contained by anything made from matter? Do they not cancel each other out at the point they meet? Or am I thinking of Dark Matter or Dark Energy? Firstly, the general idea of most containment methods is that you don't let the antimatter being contained come into direct contact with the mechanism of the container, instead you hold it in place with electromagnetic fields produced by your normal matter container mechanism. This is the idea of the Penning trap and storage ring. Secondly, the point made by Nioca must be taken into account. Strictly speaking, only corresponding fundamental particles can annihilate each other: electrons with positrons, up quarks with anti-up quarks, and down quarks with anti-down quarks. Antihydrogen and helium could react, because the positron of the antihydrogen can annihilate with one of the electrons of the helium, and the antiproton (u-bar u-bar d-bar, where bar denotes an antiparticle) can annihilate with one of the protons (uud) in the helium. This is all made complicated by the fact that determining how the reaction plays out depends on quantum mechanics, It's difficult to make assumptions about this, particularly since there exist particles like the neutral pion, which is a superposition of bound states of an up quark with and anti-up quark, and a down quark with an anti-down quark. (The the neutral pion is unstable, but it can exist for non-zero periods of time.) My silly suggestion about ultracold anti-neutrons is based on the fact that the reflection of (normal) ultracold neutrons from metal surfaces arises from funny quantum mechanical effects; essentially the neutron bounces off of the combined string force potential of the surface. This might not work equivalently for antineutrons, but I don't happen to know of a specific reason that it wouldn't. Keep in mind that talking about materials 'touching' or 'meeting' doesn't necessarily make sense microscopically, after all, atoms are mostly empty space, and so, by extension are molecules and all larger material structures. Quote: Or am I thinking of Dark Matter or Dark Energy? Dark matter pretty much refers, in its most general sense, to anything that isn't a star. In this interpretation the Earth is dark matter because an astronomer in another galaxy wouldn't be able to see it at all. Dark matter is believed to exist because various large structures in the universe (galaxies, galaxy clusters, and so forth) move as though they have or are under the influence of more gravity than can be explained by all of the bright, visible matter astronomers can see. Therefore there must be some other matter that is present which is 'dark' since it can't be seen. More recently people have come to the conclusion that dark matter is likely to be in exotic forms (non-baryonic dark matter), such as fundamental particles which have not yet been detected on earth. Dark energy is weirder still, and it's name is arguably not the least bit descriptive. Basically the universe is growing faster than anyone expected, so they made up a name for the (unknown) mechanism causing it. Since they had given the name 'dark matter' to the unknown matter causing the previously mentioned gravitational anomalies, they gave it a similar name, but since it clearly wasn't (as sort of ordinary) matter (since that would tend to make the universe contract), they called it 'dark energy'.

Quote: Have you tried an SEP field? They can be extremely effective for all types of containment. This is actually something of a misconception. Getting everyone to believe that it is someone else's problem to make sure that the antimatter doesn't fall on the floor is a very poor method indeed. I'd guess that most of the pure antimatter on earth is kept in storage rings. Antimatter isn't terribly uncommon, as there are sources like beta-decay producing small amounts of positrons all the time, but since they're inside ordinary matter materials they are rather ephemeral. Likewise, there's always antimatter raining down from the upper atmosphere from cosmic ray induced particle showers, but only the µ+ particles survive reach the ground, generally. EDIT: With regard to storing neutral antimatter, it could potentially be relatively easy, at least for one specific type. Ultra-cold neutrons can be trapped relatively easily in containers of well chosen metals. (It's really weird to think of having an object with about the mass of a hydrogen atom, bouncing along through a metal pipe exactly like an absurdly tiny rubber ball, but it actually works.) Off of the top of my head it seems to me that this ought to work equivalently for antineutrons, assuming that first, you had some of them, and second that your were able to get them slowed down to ultracold energies. Of course, containing neutrons can be a little bit pointless in the long run, since when left to their own devices they just fall apart after a while.

Quote: And in this example, s would be defined in the dialogue script variables? Most definitely.

Quote: My understanding is that the string buffer replaces any strings that were already in the node, but I assume you can make its activation conditional, say on an SDF? (Please remember that I'm not a programmer.) You're mixing together a couple of ideas here. The string buffer is just a piece of scratch space set aside for you to build up strings in. The usual pattern is to erase whatever is in the buffer, make some calls which write pieces data into the buffer (each one adding onto the end of what is already in the buffer), and then copy the contents of the buffer into a string variable, so that it can be sent to some other call which will do something with the string (like display it). The message_dialog() call has two uses. The first is the one that you are no doubt already familiar with: showing a dialog box with the two given strings as the contents. The second is related but subtly different: When message_dialog() is called from the code section of a dialogue node, it replaces all 8 of the usual text strings with the two strings passed to it as it's arguments. Since the dialogue node code section can contain arbitrary script constructs, you can put in whatever logic you want build up strings and to decide whether you do or don't want to use message_dialog() to replace the node text. Unfortunately, I don't remember an example of this in an existing scenario off of the top of my head, but here's a rough example of how it might look: Code: begintalknode 1; state = 0; nextstate = 0; question = "Who am I?"; text1 = "_I'm sorry, I have no idea who you are._ the shopkeeper says. "; code = if(get_flag(1,1)){ //killed the dragon clear_buffer(); append_string("_Of course!_ he cries, _You're "); append_char_name(0); append_string(" who slew the dragon!_"); get_buffer_text(s); //assume a string variable named s message_dialog(s,""); } break;

I think that you'll (in the code section of the relevant node) first need to use the string buffer to construct the string to display (using append_char_name(), in particular), and then use message_dialog() to inject the result into the dialogue system. This will restrict you to having only two chunks of text, total, displayed for that node (I think), but this is the only way to display dynamically generated text that I know of, off of the top of my head.

After substantial rewriting, we have corrected a flaw in the neural newark used for generating the grading system (a problem in our simulation of the sewer system was causing numerical instability), and we are now ready to proceed with the next quiz. I trust that each of you has made careful study of the handout which should have appeared last Wednesday in your toaster, oven, or toaster-oven. For those not familiar with the format of these quizzes (I, II, III, IV), keep in mind that there are three types of questions: multiple choice, short answer, and long answer. Multiple choice questions must be answered with one of the listed choices. Short answer questions require just a word or phrase. Finally, long answer questions usually require several sentences for a complete answer, which should take into account the entire problem as stated. An example from a past quiz may be instructive: Click to reveal.. Question: You have a collapsable cannon. Your goal is to conceal it in the great pyramid. Your other equipment consists of: a camel, 2 capes, some dried peas, a crossbow (loaded), bagpipes (broken), and a chocolate golf club. The pyramid is guarded by fierce demons, a secret submarine base, a shaman, and an albatross. How do you achieve your goal? Sample Answer: First make your camel very angry, so that it is spitting in all directions. Then, send it off toward the other side of the pyramid to distract some of the demons. Then, remove one of the pipes from your bagpipes, and use it as a blow pipe to shoot the remaining demons with dried peas. Then go to the entrance of the secret submarine base. Trick the gaurd into believing that it is Tuesday, and use your cross bow to shoot the switch which opens the armored door into the submarine base through the window. On your way in, reassemble your bagpipes as much as possible. When you get inside, use your crossbow to threaten or shoot anyone who gets to close to you, and theaten to play the bagpipes, bluffing, since the submarine crews do not know that the bagpipes are broken. Knowing that in a large echoing space like the secret submarine dock they could not survive the sound of the bagpipes, the submarine crews will flee. You must then fight the shaman. Wear both of your capes, and as needed, hurl them into the air as distractions when the shaman throws lightening at you. Lure him back to the submarine docks. In your absence, the submarines will have returned to try to trap you. Dodge the shaman's lightning bolts so that they hit and destroy the submarines. Then use your last crossbow bolt to shoot a rope and drop a crate on the shaman; trapping him. You can then continue to the albatross, which you must fight in single combat. You should use any remaining capes and dried peas to distract it, until you can strike a good blow with your chocolate golf club, killing it. You can then hide the cannon. Use the bag from your bagpipe to cover it so that it will not be noticed until too late. Answers will be graded in one week. 1. What sound do fish make? a. Dippty-Dat b. Clunkity-Clunk c. Flippity-Flop d. Pish-Posh e. Gerald 2. A Hungarian sand crab has gotten inside of your favorite sweater. What tool can remove it? a. a cattle prod b. a crowbar c. a tuning fork d. a dry dock e. the Keck telescope 3. Gerald refuses to paint his house blue, but the sky is maroon. What time is it? a. high noon b. nap time c. the end of the world d. 8:03 am e. lunch time 4. Given that Albert is traveling from Chicago to New York at 99 miles per hour, Hubert is throwing couches off of the eleventh floor of the tower, and Norbert will get a 17 on his law examination, is the city safe? a. No, Albert is moving at dangerous speeds. b. No, Norbert will pass the law exam. c. Yes, the barbarian horde is asleep. d. Yes, the lizards have the situation under control. e. Yes, the couches will not trouble it again. 5. Flogbar the Chromanian is attacking in his spaceship. You have only seconds before he is upon you, leaving you only enough time to try using one of your devices to escape or defend yourself. Which one should you use? a. The biplanar transmitter, to overload Flogbar's engines. b. The hyperspatial burrow, to run away. c. The transcendental cannon, to blast Flogbar apart. d. The incomprehensible wedge, hide your ship. e. The reprocessed protein bars, for a snack. 6. You must disguise yourself in order not to be recognized while swimming covertly into Spain. What type of headgear is required? a. a shining gold beanie (with a propellor) b. a hard-hat made of tasty swiss cheese c. an invisible bishop's miter d. a roman legionnaire's helmet e. a baseball cap with a concealed laser cannon 7. You are suffering from withdrawal due to your dental floss addiction. What type of food can alleviate the symptoms? a. Cucumber b. Peanut-butter and mayonnaise sandwiches c. Taiwanese flipper fish d. Old socks e. No food can save you 8. Carl Orf has escaped! What do you do to recapture him? a. Sound the alarm! Let loose the dogs! b. Ignite the oil. c. Throw out the lettuce. d. Call the president. e. Do nothing; the world deserves what it will get. 9. Describe the major points of Eleanor Roosevelt's kinetic theory of hats. 10. Achmed waves his cutlass menacingly. The philistines begin to wake up. You are facing a mutiny on board your airship, high above the camp of the philistine hoard. The engines are overloaded and will explode in just 13 seconds. Using only your trusty radio-swordcane-umbrella, your silly hat, and your toaster oven, how can you get to safety? Bonus: Determine the centroid of thought and calculate the distance from it to the edge of madness. Show all work, with diagrams.

I have a terrible tendency to fail to hold the shift long enough to actually capitalize the letter i when writing first person nominative pronouns. By now I know to check over my typing for it, but that problem still gets by me with some frequency, much to my chagrin. Other then that, passable sentence structure tends to just happen naturally for a native english speaker, and having a web-browser with a built in spellchecker tends to keep spelling errors pretty well under control.

As most other respondents, I'm not likely to do anything in particular for Veterans' Day. I'm vaguely aware of it, but it would took me a few moments of thought to identify to which veterans it refers. Most of my family immigrated to the U.S. in my great-great-grandparents' generation, and most of them from Sweden. I'm told that some branches of the family have been here a lot longer; apparently I've got one direct ancestor who's known to have fought in the Revolutionary War, although off of the top of my head I'm not aware of any who were in the Civil War or either world war. (My grandfather was in the navy in WWII, but he joined late enough that he was never sent outside the country, and I believe his time was spent teaching basic electronics classes.) EDIT: For lack of a better place to put this: Dinti, while inspecting your current avatar (who's nature is still a mystery to me, alas) I suddenly grasped the significance of the large matching subset of your avatars. Excellent.

The major problem is that game interfaces tend to be held together with a large amount of artwork, and so they aren't very flexible. Even if the game can handle scaling to different resolutions, handling varying aspect ratios is likely to get ugly. The problem will be worse at lower resolutions, where the program will have very few pixels left to draw anything if it cuts down the area it uses to recover an aspect ratio it's used to. Trying to crop a 1024 by 600 screen down to a more old-fashioned aspect ratio of 4/3 results in a drawable area of 800 by 600 pixels, which is less than .8 of the total pixels on the physical screen being used. Given that people with higher resolution screens are clamoring for more visual detail, trying to make it all fit into 800 by 600 if necessary is likely to be a nightmare. The other alternative is to actually rearrange graphical elements depending on the shape of the screen. In some cases this is a problem because it effectively alters the rules of the game, by changing what all the player can view at once (Examples which spring to mind are Chip's Challenge, a puzzle game which sometimes relied on exactly how far the player could see from the current position, and BoA, where designers regularly rely on the limited viewport size to be able to build 'sets' for cutscenes.) Even when that isn't a problem, it still takes extra time, effort, and possibly artwork, to reshape the game interface.