The Gateway of Youth

Look at a young child at play, what does one see? Is it not happiness? How about pure laughter? Emotion so strong that one can see straight to the innocence of their soul; and a smile so strong that it has the power to leap off the child's face and attach to the face a passerby? What could be greater in this world than that? Then look at the same child a few years later, when they are in their teenage years. What does one see in them now? Where did the joy go? Where did the pure sweet innocent laughter and voice run away to hide? Sadly Joan Didion implies in her story, “On Going Home”, that childhood bliss is a dream; a dream shattered by the onset of reality.

The Too True Story of the Nail in the Fence.

Nail In The Fence:
 There once was a little boy who had a bad temper. His Father gave him a bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, he must hammer a nail into the back of the fence.
The first day the boy had driven 37 nails into the fence. Over the next few weeks, as he learned to control his anger, the number of nails hammered daily gradually dwindled down.
He discovered it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence.
Finally the day came when the boy didn't lose his temper at all. He told his father about it; and the father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he was able to hold his temper.
The days passed and the young boy was finally able to tell his father that all the nails were gone.
The father took his son by the hand and led him to the fence. He said, "You have done well, my son, but look at the holes in the fence. The fence will never be the same. When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this one. You can put a knife in a man and draw it out. It won't matter how many times you say I'm sorry, the wound is still there." A verbal wound is as bad as a physical one.

My Note:
Sometimes I am harsh, and more hurtful than I intend.  Anger and fear cause some of it.  Sometimes it happens because I want to be funny (even at someone's expense).  Other times it happens because I want to help someone -- and I choose to be direct -- regardless of how they will "feel it" when I deliver the message.
Please forgive me if I have ever left a hole.

If programming languages were religions....

Okay, so I actually didn't write this one myself, but I saw it on another website and thought it just had to go here.

Bear in mind that this list is just a joke. It is meant to be humorous, if you take offense, then I am sorry.

C would be Judaism - it's old and restrictive, but most of the world is familiar with its laws and respects them. The catch is, you can't convert into it - you're either into it from the start, or you will think that it's insanity. Also, when things go wrong, many people are willing to blame the problems of the world on it.

The Truth of Life

Plato once wrote, “Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another, and he will contemplate him as he is” (68). One would look at that quote and agree with Plato in saying that a person can eventually learn to reconstruct any doubts and misgivings and turn them into truth and reason. In this paper I will attempt to explain how this works, and how in real life we are kept from wonderful experiences only because we are afraid of the unknown. 

What is in a mantra, and why do we have them?

You know, earlier I was helping a friend with some programming questions he had, and as I always eventually do. I shared some programming mantras that I live by while programming. Then I thought to myself, just what is in a mantra? Why is it that we ever were hear that word, it is almost treated with some spiritual respect? So I decided to look up the meaning of the word. What I found did not really surprise me.

People know many things, and half of them are wrong.

So I have been reading a new book by Orson Scott Card. The book is called "Hidden Empire" it is a sequel to his Empire book. Empire was an amazing book about the possibility of another civil war in America. The book brought up a lot of good points that shows how we could very easier head in that direction.

In reading Hidden Empire, Card gives very insightful messages before each chapter. These messages come from the thoughts of the current President in the book. One of these passages really stuck out to me.

"People know many things, and half of them are wrong. If only we knew which half, we'd have reason to be proud of our intelligence.
   What is knowledge? A belief that is shared by all the respectable people in a community, whether there is any real evidence for it or not.
   What is faith? A belief we hold so strongly that we act as if it is true, even though we know there are many who do not believe it.
   What is opinion? A belief that we expet other people to argue with.
   What is scientific fact? An oxymoron. Science does not deal in facts. It deals in hypotheses, which are never fully and finally correct."

Card's writing normally floors me with how crisp and intelligent it is, but this just take the cake. Since this blog is all about things that make us think, I thought this would be the perfect venue for it.

What is par time?

Just finished a new programming assignment. I got a lot of help from my Dad. I always appreciate his help so much. In addition to helping me with better ways to code sections of code. He helps me by telling me what the C++ standard is. This helps because I want to follow the standard in all that I do. If I follow the standard then my code will not only be cleaner but it will also make a whole lot more sense later on.

 

I used new ideas that I hadn't considered before. Since homework is supposed to teach you new things. I believe this one did just that. Even though my current par time is 2.5 hours. I believe that because this one was a tougher one. I have well then made par. The assignment isn't due till friday at midnight and it was finished around wednesday's noon.

The Gift of a Curse

            Mother lay on her bed, in the agony of childbirth. My birth in fact. Father stood nearby; he was a burly man with a brown broad beard that covered the lower portion of his face. His mouth and chin was lost in the sea of hair. He was very concerned for my mother, like a good husband should be, and he would do anything in his power to help her, even if it meant giving up his own life. You couldn’t ask for a more devoted husband or father, at least I could not. They loved each other, more so than the stars could have power to shine deep into the vacuum of space.

As the papers come...

Sorry that I haven't been keeping up to my schedule of papers as I said I would. As the papers do come. I would love comments as to what you guys think of them and what you think is the most interesting part to you. Thank you so much.

Solving a billion equations with a billion variables in nine seconds!

Ran across something interesting yesterday.

Currently the fastest way to solve multiple equations with multiple unknowns is to place them into a matrix, then reduce the matrix to it's simplest form. We call this matrix an "N by N" square matrix, where the number of equations match the number of unknowns in a one to one ratio. This goes very fast for matrices which are less then 9 by 9. Nine equations, nine unknowns. However, as you start increasing N it takes longer and longer to solve these types of matrices. That's even with using a computer. Forget trying to do these by hand!

If you had a N = 1,000,000,000. Current algorithms would take at least one second per equation, meaning it would take one billion seconds to solve this, or 32 years. However Mathmaticitians have developed an algorithm that uses the theory of quantum computing to break the solve time to instead of a second per equation, to a second per digit of N (number of equations).

If you have a billion equations (1,000,000,000) you have nine digits more than one. A N of say a trillion would take 12 seconds. A N of a thousand would take 3 seconds.

This is pretty cool stuff. If we already let the computer solve matrices that take say one hour. Then with this we could solve a matrix with 3600 digits for N. That's a 1 with 3,600 zeros behind it, or 1,200 sets of zeros or 1x10^3,600th power. A google is just 1x10^100!  That's pretty staggering.

If anyone wants to come up with a name for that number, by all means. Maybe a contest? "The best name for the number 1x10^3,600".

source: http://io9.com/5443389/mathematicians-create-algorithm-so-complex-no-computer-can-use-ityet

Why Object Oriented Programming?

There is a point in every programmer's life when he asks himself a certain question. That question is, “what is the big difference between procedural and object oriented programming?”. To answer this question satisfactory, we first need to look at the problems associated with procedural programming that required people to start thinking differently.

Required entry article...

Well, as most of you were aware, I have been thinking of starting a blog for a long time now. When I first thought of starting a blog, I told myself that I wouldn't do it based on time constraints that I have. But now I am finding that I would like an avenue to talk about what is going on in my world.

I plan to use this blog for two reasons. The first main reason is so that I have a place to talk about what is on my mind. The second reason is for a place to share papers or stories that I have written, which I would love to share with the world.

I plan to add one story or paper a week until I have caught up with the stories I will be adding, and between them I will be hopefully commenting on things in the day that interest me, or annoys me.

I try to be a carefree guy, but that doesn't always work. I hope this blog will be somewhat therapeutic in that sense. I hope it helps to draw out my emotions and feelings so I can sort them out better.