New Plan

I'm going to start writing here again. I might even start putting some non-math-related stuff up. Not extremely disparate things but just more about my life or whatever. Could be interesting.

So while reading Jezebel on the train back to Montreal the other day I came across a fascinating comment on the post about Apple removing scandalous apps from the App Store about how the first law of the internet is big-endian word order. I had no idea about how bits were read or that such things as big-endian and little-endian reading order existed. The commenter in question's use of our numerical system as an example of big-endian word order was so cool and not something that I'd ever questioned. I mean, really, there isn't anything other than convention that makes us put the big units first and the little ones afterward. Bring back the old-fashioned use of "four-and-twenty" and its ilk, I say!

Fighting to the Death

I'd never played Risk before last Sunday. My brothers asked for (and received) the "2210" version a couple of Christmases ago but I never participated when they played because I wasn't particularly interested in board games that take hours. Also, it's a four-player game and the other participants were usually my two younger cousins, which would have rendered me de trop. However, last Sunday I witnessed my first game of Risk and found it sufficiently interesting to warrant playing when the opportunity presented itself over the course of the following week. Including the game that I watched on Sunday, there were three games, all of which were the Lord of the Rings version of Risk. This simultaneously makes it more fun and more emotionally traumatic. When playing I pretty much just wanted to maintain a peaceful existence and protect the Shire, which is not the point of the game.

Having awakened my latent Risk-play abilities (if not abilities, then perhaps interest), upon my return home on Monday I proposed to my brothers that they dust off their Risk set so that we could play. We did but we had to stop partway through because things got somewhat heated, so we gave it a rest and finished tonight. Eric (my youngest brother) wound up with total global domination. It was pretty obvious partway through tonight's session that that would be the end result but I refused to concede defeat and fought to the death. My last turn saw me start with only one territory (Japan) that was occupied by one valiant troop. I managed to use my three reinforcements to take two more territories but it was all over by the end of Eric's next turn.

The Risk 2210 game board is kind of interesting in that it represents the game designer's idea of what the world will look like in 200 years. It's obviously been simplified in order for there to be territories big enough to keep gamepieces on as well. Interesting geopolitical quirks include the existence of the "Exiled States of America," which are in the vicinity of Greenland.

Risk can be tied into the mathematical nature of this blog by the importance of probability in gameplay, with the rolling of dice. I like to defend using only one die because I find it really unpleasant to lose two troop pieces on one roll but it was pointed out to me that probability is more in my favour if I defend using two. My problem in a lot of strategy-type games is that I tend to let my feelings and whatnot get in the way. I also need to practice thinking in the correct patterns more.

Head A Splode

One of the problems that I have in attempting to be mathlike is with the necessary patterns of thinking. My arts student brain, used to picking apart readings and, uh, remembering things, has THE HARDEST TIME trying to bend in the ways required of it in math. For example, yesterday Max asked me about a problem that he was trying to figure out for his job (which is doing math). The problem goes something like this:

Part One (this one I had no trouble with): Imagine a cube inside a sphere. The cube and sphere are sized so that the corners of the cube touch the sphere's surface. Now, using your mind, curve the sides of the cube so that they also touch the surface of the sphere.

Part Two (guard your minds, mine suffered ill effects): Imagine the original cube from the previous exercise but instead of putting it in a sphere put it in a torus (new vocabulary word! This is the technical math-term for a donut shape). Now try to do the inflation-of-the-sides thing.

Honestly, I can't even really conceptualize what we're trying to do here. My best thought was maybe putting the cube in one side of the torus and then stretching it all the way around when you come to the inflation bit. On an encouraging note, Max says that we're not really sure what we're doing here so I guess this isn't entirely an arts brain fail. Also, his idea of how to do this was the same as my best thought. Apparently this notion of how one would solve this doesn't regularize though. I asked why we couldn't just use Matlab to model it for us and was told that it is more of an applied tool whereas Maple is more symbolic.

But yeah. http://no.hablo.matlab.head.asplode.net/