This World and Me

A few years ago, I stumbled across  Sonic Colors , a 2010 video game produced by Sega for the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS. The game features Sega's mascot Sonic the Hedgehog and his best friend Tails on an adventure in outer space against their nemesis Doctor Eggman, who has captured and enslaved the planets of an alien life form called Wisps. The Wisps have an energy inside them which Eggman uses to power a mind control weapon, with which he plans to take over the world. Sonic and Tails team up with the Wisps to defeat Doctor Eggman and restore freedom to the planets of the Wisps. It has been called one of the best Sonic  games. This post is not going to be about Sonic (though I could write a whole post about Sonic – in middle school I secretly watched all 74 episodes of the  Sonic X  anime ). I mentioned  Sonic Colors  because it introduced me to a band called Cash Cash, whose lead vocalist, Jean Paul Makhlouf, performed in the opening and closing t...

Imagine the following scenario. As a child, you are abducted by a highly intelligent alien life form that is interested in learning more about humans on Earth. The aliens poke and prod you and ask you questions in a language that is completely foreign to you. After some time, some level of communication will be possible – you might start by pointing at things and saying out loud what they are. They're an intelligent life form, so eventually they will understand. The aliens eventually decide to keep you and observe how human children mature. Perhaps after many years, you might find yourself accustomed to the way of alien life, but you can't shake the feeling that you simply don't belong in the alien community. To them, you are the alien. Other aliens agree with you. Perhaps an alien activist will campaign the alien government for your return to Earth: after all, abducting you from Earth without your consent was a violation of your fundamental rights! The alien courts agree a...

Earlier this year, I published a post called "Shakespearean comedy and Rio" in which I talked about the various tropes of Shakespearean comedy and how they can be identified in Blue Sky Studio's modern computer-animated film series Rio . That post was a massive effort. It took more than a year of on-and-off writing to finish. The post was informed by my study of Shakespeare at The Ohio State University in the fall of 2016 and later my study of Shakespeare at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 2017. In my original draft of the post, I started writing along a tangent about Shakespearean tragedies. I wanted to compare some of the tropes of Shakespearean comedies I was learning to the tropes of Shakespearean tragedies I was learning at the same time, but I found that it was too off-topic and would have made the post too massive (the final result was already quite massive, especially with the analysis of Rio !), so I ended up cutting the discussion of Sh...

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...

Here's a mind-blowing logic puzzle that my math professor shared last week. Problem A long time ago, there lived a tribe of 100 green-eyed dragons. These dragons had a rule: if any dragon in the tribe deduces what the color of his eyes was, then that dragon must commit ritual suicide by the end of that day. Aside from this, the dragons lived peacefully. Although each dragon could see the eye color of every other dragon, no dragon was cruel enough to discuss eye colors with other dragons. For all each dragon knew, he or she could be the one dragon that had blue eyes among 99 green-eyed dragons. One day, however, a visitor arrives to the tribe. On the day she arrives – we will call this day 1 – she remarks, "I see a dragon with green eyes." The visitor leaves later that day. At the end of day 1, no dragon in the tribe performs the ritual. At the end of the next day (day 2), no one performs the ritual. In fact, after the visitor leaves, the dragons continue to live in p...

Suppose a device is created which would vaporize the atoms and molecules that form your body, transport them to another place in the world, then reassemble them exactly the way they were. Let's call this procedure type-A teleportation (this is a distinction I am making up, and it will be clear later in this post why it is necessary). We sometimes see these kinds of teleportation devices depicted in science fiction and fantasy. They are also occasionally mentioned as a thought experiment in the philosophy of personal identity , which is the branch of philosophy that revolves around, among other things, the question, "What makes you the same person you are at another time?" We might answer that we know we are the same person we were yesterday because we have the same memories as the person yesterday. Let's call this the psychological account of personal identity . The psychological account is worrisome because memories and human psychology are fickle things. Say y...

Archaeologists estimate that the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed around the year 2560 BC. It is easy to lose perspective on just how far back in time this was. The end of classical antiquity, which is the period of history that includes the Roman Empire and Ancient Greek civilization, occurred around the year 600 AD. The fall of the Roman Republic with the death of Julius Caesar occurred around 20 BC. This is not much more than 2000 years ago. The Ancient Egyptians built the Pyramids more than double the length of time since the fall of the Roman Republic. To put it a different way, the Ancient Greeks are to us today as the Ancient Egyptians were to the Ancient Greeks . And all throughout these millennia, many billions of human beings lived and died. Of these billions, how many are still remembered today? There is a proverb that I've heard several times now which states that every human dies twice: the first when you stop breathing forever, and the second when your name is...

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. ...

In the summer of 2017, my family did a tour of the U.S. national parks. We had traveled out west first to Salt Lake City, where we rented out a small storage closet and placed our fencing bags there (more on that soon), then traveled south to visit Bryce Canyon National Park, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, Arches National Park, and the Horseshoe Bend. These were absolutely stunning sights, to say the least. Words don't do them justice, and while it's possible for you to search up on Google an image of each location, in my view nothing beats actually going there and experiencing it for yourself. I think by looking at a picture of it, you create an expectation for how it will look when you go, and it may actually result in the views being less spectacular if the image was digitally touched up to make it look better. When it comes to national parks, it's best to go in cold. The natural formations are absolutely breathtaking. After spending a week touring the parks south ...