Thursday, October 21, 2004

I hurt you with my words

In my CS 251 class, we cover various data structures of use in programming: trees, graphs, queues, stacks, etc. So oftentimes the professor will draw an example of how we might envision one of these data structures on the blackboard, and he'll occasionally ask the class to give him numbers to fill into the nodes. The first time he called on me, I said "pi". The second time, I said "e".

He doesn't call on me anymore.




And now, it's time for...
Duck's Classroom Corner
-with Professor Duck

Today, Duck will prove to you that 2n = 0, where n is any natural number.

First off, we know that 2n - 1 = 20 + 21 + 22 + 23 + ... + 2n - 2 + 2n - 1
In binary, the ith bit of a bitstring, starting at 0 and from the rightmost bit, is equal to 2i. Therefore, the righthand side of the equation becomes the bitstring 1111...11

But! In binary, the most significant (or left-most) bit is known as the sign bit, meaning that it indicates whether the number is positive or negative. Let's show our bitstring again, with the most significant bit highlighted:
     1111...11
Since the most significant bit is 1, this number is clearly negative. But negative what? To negate a two's-complement binary number, you invert every bit and add 1 to the result. Let's investigate further:
     1111...11 <= What we started with
     0000...00 <= After inverting each bit
     0000...01 <= After adding 1

So we see that the negative of 1111...11 is just 1; therefore, 1111...11 = -1.
But recalling our previous equality, we know that 2n - 1 = 1111...11, and by the transitive property of equality, we know therefore that 2n - 1 = -1.

After adding one to both sides, we arrive at our final result:
     2n = 0

Next class, Duck proves that the total number of dead in the Holocaust was also 0... or, as Duck might say, 2n.




Debora, you might want to stop reading at this point.




Y'all should visit this site.
Where else could you find a woman telling you that John Kerry eats fetal stems cells, will kill every unborn child in the world, will kill every newborn male of the Hebrews, and will elect activist judges like Saddam Hussein to the Supreme Court? That's something the liberal media won't report!
Nor do they seem to be making widely known the massive ignorance (or possibly denial) of Bush's constituency.
Read more...

Monday, October 11, 2004

On the Honest Reporting blog, someone posted a comment berating Israel's creation, in defense of the "native" Palestinians*. In it, she wrote "How many countries can be named that have become states by... terrorizing and massacring... [and] waging terrorist campaigns...?"

I hope the irony of this is not lost on all of you.
If it is, we must have a long talk.


*No, I'm not implying that the Palestinians were not native to the land. I'm taking offense at her implication that the Jews who formed a homeland there weren't living there before 1948
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Friday, October 8, 2004

There've been a whole buncha fliers posted around campus telling people to vote for the Homecoming King & Queen--including some fake ones for Cthulhu, Kodos, and Lando Griffin for Homecoming King.

I think some guy should register as a Homecoming Queen candidate and run with the slogan, "Vote for the Homecoming Drag Queen."
Read more...