This World and Me

One chilly morning when I was in fifth grade, I found two of my best friends—let's call them G and W for the first letters of their first names—arguing with each other. The dispute concerned laptops—two laptops to be precise. My elementary school was fortunate enough to have a laptop cart with about twenty MacBooks, which teachers could book for their class to use, kind of like a mobile computer lab. Apparently, that day, two of the MacBooks in the cart stopped working, and either G or W was to blame. The question was who. The relevant facts are as follows. G and W's teacher had booked the laptop cart for her class that day, and G and W, along with one of their friends, a guy we'll call T, sat together for the class. Evidently, G, W, and T were not really paying attention to their class assignment that day and were instead just playing around on their laptops. At some point, G warned W and T that there is a keyboard shortcut in Mac OS X that you should never ever do: ...

Google Lively was a virtual world that existed for about half a year in 2008. At the time it was active, I was 10 years old. Anyone with a Google account could log in from a web broswer, create an avatar, then join public rooms. I distinctly remember there was a coffee shop and an underwater lounge, and you could design your own personal apartment, complete with your own furniture, decorations, and layout. You could then invite your friends to your virtual apartment and hang out. When you joined a room, your avatar would be placed in the center, and you could move it around and type messages that would appear as speech bubbles over your character. I remember you could make your character do certain actions that convey emotions, from positive actions like shaking hands, laughing, and clapping, to negative actions like crying. For some reason, I seem to recall it was possible to punch objects or perhaps even other avatars, if you so desired. Screenshot of the Google Lively interface It...

eetmn emt ybc lueba illhx When I was in elementary school, my friends and I came up with a "secret language" which we used to send messages to each other without others (e.g. teachers, classmates) knowing what the message said. It was not really a new language more than it was a variation of Pig Latin. What we did was we would write the message in English, then take the first letter of each word, shift it to the end, and then add an arbitrary letter to the end of the resulting word. For example, to translate the word "hill" into our secret language, take the first letter 'h' and move it to the end so that the word becomes "illh". Then, add any letter you want to the end of that. The intent of the last letter was to throw people off, leading them on into thinking the last letter was meaningful, when it really was just arbitrary, and it also meant that the same English word can be represented in at least 26 ways. To translate back into English, you...

A few months ago, I published a post called Great Big House in New Orleans , in which I discuss a game I used to play in my elementary school music class. In that post, I explained how I designed an efficient algorithm that allowed me to quickly find the winning position of the game given how many people are playing. I published the actual algorithm itself in a second post . Basically, in the game, all students in the class sat in a circle and passed a stuffed pumpkin around while singing a song. The rules of the game were such that every eighth student gets out (i.e. exits the circle), and the last student to remain in the circle wins. Essentially, I discovered that if you have add one person to the group of people playing the game, the winning position shifts to the right by eight. For example, in an elementary school class of 21 students sitting in a circle, the student sitting at position 10 will win. If I add one student to the class, the winning position increases by eight. ...

goodbye  · ɡo͝odˈbī ·  (1) exclam.  (also goodby or good-by ) used to express good wishes when parting or at the end of a conversation. (2) noun (plural goodbyes or goodbys ) an instance of saying “goodbye”; a parting. — The New Oxford American Dictionary On a warm July morning in Nuremberg, Germany, I was standing at an airport with my host family, waiting to meet the other American students who had been selected to travel to Germany for three weeks . It was the last day of the trip. One by one, the friends I had made in Germany trickled in with their host families. We smiled and excitedly chattered as we recalled the previous night, when we had thrown a huge party with just us kids. We assembled ourselves – Americans and our German host siblings – and took a massive group photograph. I assembled with my own host family and took a smaller photograph of just us together. Just a moment later, we had to say goodbye. I shook my host father's hand, hugged my...

On Monday, I wrote a post about how I wrote a program in Java and later Python that could solve an old game I used to play in my elementary school music class called Great Big House in New Orleans. It was a lengthy post, and you can read the entire thing here . Basically, in the game, all students in the class sat in a circle and passed a stuffed pumpkin around while singing a song. The rules of the game were such that every eighth student gets out (i.e. exits the circle), and the last student to remain in the circle wins. The program that I initially wrote in Java used arrays to simulate an actual game of Great Big House in New Orleans. However, using data of winning positions based on class sizes up to 1000, I was able to identify a pattern in consecutive winning positions that I could use to simplify my program so that it could solve for the winning position without having to simulate a single game with arrays or lists. The code is structured as follows. You are given (by the ...

Note: This post has many errors and omissions. See this 2024 post for an update. When I was a student at Scottish Corners Elementary School, we occasionally played a game in our weekly music class with Miss Bowman called Great Big House in New Orleans. In this game, all of the students in the class sat in a circle. One student – the student at position 1 – held a small stuffed pumpkin. While singing the following song, we passed the pumpkin around the circle. Great big house in New Orleans, Forty stories high, Every room that I've been in, Filled with pumpkin pie. The purpose of this exercise was to teach elementary school students about rhythm. As a rule, the pumpkin has to be passed to the next student on every beat of the song. A student can't ignore the rhythm of the song and pass the ball offbeat (i.e. too quickly or too slowly). The pumpkin has to be passed on the beat. Whoever has the pumpkin when the song reaches the word high  and the word pie  is out of the ...