A Petty Blog

What if you desire to express your love to someone, but fear the consequences if he or she does not return your feelings?

It’s an age old problem - how many of us know someone who asks a friend to go talk to so-and-so to “see if she likes me?”

Just in time for Valentines day, I found this reference to this research paper, Romantic Cryptography, on Light Blue Touchpaper:

Abstract. We show how Alice and Bob can establish whether they love
each other, but without the embarrassment of revealing that they do if
the other party does not share their feelings.
This is a “secure multiparty computation” of the AND function, where
the participants cooperate in producing the result of the AND, but without
learning the input bit contributed by the other party unless the result
implies it.

It’s an interesting algorithm involving scales and “voting” with weighted balls such that no information is revealed unless both parties indicate interest.

They provide some interesting variations using Love/Don’t Love images that only produce an image if both parties fancy the other:

The paper is short, and is certainly worth a skim at the least.

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I got this from GCFL.net: The Good, Clean Funnies List

My husband, Michael, and I were at a restaurant with his boss, a rather stern older man. When Michael began a tale, which I was sure he had told before, I gave him a kick under the table. There was no response, so I gave him another poke. Still the story went on. Suddenly he stopped, grinned and said, “Oh, but I’ve told you this one before, haven’t I?”We all chuckled and changed the subject. Later, on the dance floor, I asked my husband why it had taken him so long to get my message.

“What do you mean?” he replied. “I cut the story off as soon as you kicked me.”

“But I kicked you twice and it still took you awhile to stop!”

Suddenly we realized what had happened. Sheepishly we returned to our table. The boss smiled and said, “Don’t worry. After the second kick I figured it wasn’t for me, so I passed it along!”

This video is clever, meaningful, and well executed.

The video was entered in an AARP contest, “u @ 50″, by a 20 year old and took second place (or so I was told).

Make sure you read as you listen…

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Fantastic Contraptions

Link rolling wheels together with sticks and water bars to create a contraption that will carry the ball to the goal.

It’s harder than it looks.  Once you finish the game you can play and create custom levels, and you can see the outlandish solutions submitted by addicts.

I finished the game (eventually), including one I solved the hard way because I didn’t realize I could scroll to the right.

Let me know if you can finish it too!

Splitter

The concept is simple.  You get to make a certain number of cuts to make the happy face roll into the goal.  You must have a light sabre, because it cuts everything!

I finished this on in about an hour - let me know in the comments how long it takes you.

Flow

Flow started as Jenova Chen’s MFA thesis exploring Flow Theory in games.

It’s a beautifully simple, addictive game that adapts to your skill level.  Extra credit for playing without looking at any instructions

Flow has been further developed for the Playstation.  I recommend you download the game from one of the mirror links (1, 2, 3) as the online version seems to be a bit skippy.  You can just run the program - it does not need to be installed.

Lemmings

Lemmings is an old classic, now implemented in dynamic HTML so you can play it in a browser.

The lemmings just walk - off a cliff, into lava, … - unless you can save them.

Desktop Tower Defense

This game is an entrepreneurial  icon.  The author of this game posted it on his website, and it caught on.  It spread like wildfire and the author made a fortune from the ad revenue on his site.  He quit his programming job and started The Casual Collective (see Splitter above) to encourage other independent game developers.

Frogs in my underpants.

Some of us are absent minded. We lose stuff. We forget where we keep it; we forget where we leave it.. We leave our cell phones in the coffee shop, our wallet in our car, our glasses on the bureau, and in my case, I sometimes run around looking for my keys with my right hand, not noticing I’m holding them in my left. There’s a reason the neighborhood kids weren’t allowed to play with me growing up.

If this has ever happened to you, you might need this advice from the Get-It-Done Guy.  If not, you might enjoy it anyway.

I liked the style of this column.  I guess I’ll sign up for a while.

You can get on his mailing list here.

Here’s a cool illustration from Optical Illusions - Planet Perplex.

Our eyes have a weakness - a blind spot, so to speak.  The “optic nerve” displaces the light sensitive cells at a certain spot in the back of your eye.  Wikipedia summarizes it thus:

The optic disc or optic nerve head is the location where ganglion cell axons exit the eye to form the optic nerve. There are no light sensitive rods or cones to respond to a light stimulus at this point. This causes a break in the visual field called “the blind spot” or the “physiological blind spot”. The optic nerve head in a normal human eye carries from 1 to 1.2 million neurons from the eye towards the brain.

Planet Perplex has a neat demonstration of the blind spot (and a lot of other cool stuff):

Let me know in the comments if this works for you!

 

Find your blind spot

So I just said your eyes are not perfect. Allow me to demonstrate. Look at the image below. Since the squirrel doesn’t trust the all-too-friendly smile of the boy, he wants to get out. Let’s make him disappear ! Close your left eye, then look at the boy (probably with your right eye). Slowly decrease (or increase) the distance to the screen until … the squirrel is gone !

Whoa ! Seems you DO have a blind spot, and it’s large, too ! There is a certain spot in the back of your eye where you can’t see. It’s where the optical nerves (”wiring and cables”) enter the eye.
This is also a brain illusion. Think about this : do you see a huge floating gap everywhere you look ? No ? But you just learned you have a blind spot so … your mind just guesses what should be there and shows it to you !

 Your mind “guesses what should be there”, but it also blends the information from both eyes…

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This guy is an editing genius.
Obama sings the Beatles’ “Tax Man”

Via I Hate The Media.

I may not be ahem completely normal, but I really enjoyed this video.

Yoram Bauman, the stand-up economist translates Mankiw’s ten principles of economics into English.

“Microeconomists are people who are wrong about specific things.  Macroeconomists are wrong about things in general”

If you liked that one, you might also enjoy this one.

My favorite line: “One of the challenges of being an economics comedian is that it’s very difficult to find places to practice.”  No kidding.
At about 3:30, he compares the current economy to a hamster.

On this topic, I highly recommend several economics books I scored when my wife got them from the library.  All make excellent in-the-car listening.  No really.

I never managed to take Econ in college.Basic Economics was clear, concise, well read (in audio), and fascinating.

The Housing Boom and Bust. More on economics, but using the 2009 housing bust as a framework.  Again, really interesting.

Applied Economcs: Thinking Beyond Stage One I’m cheating to put this one up because I haven’t finished it yet.  I listened to parts of several CDs of the audio version, and so far it sounds just as riveting as the others. It should be required reading for all voters.