The Life and Times of The Partially-genius...

WCCO had an article this morning about teaching math the Singaporan way. After reading the article, I realized that I have been doing math in my head the same way for years.

For instance if you are trying to subtract 32 from 145, I would round down to 30 and round down to 140, giving 110. Then I would subtract 2 from 5 (the leftovers from rounding) to get 3. Adding 110 and 3 gives us 113, which is the answer.

I just had a thought. As many of you know, I tend to see patterns in things around me. I read an article about Windows 7 and at one point in the article, it was just called “seven”. That made me think of Vista and I immediately saw it spelled in my head as VIsta… VI of course is 6 in Roman Numerals… Interesting.

Have you heard of the Large Hadron Collider? It is the giant ring under Switzerland that scientists will use to shoot atoms at each other to see what happens when they crash into each other. There was going to be one under Dallas, but it got canceled back in the early 90s.

Anyway, the fear is that by shooting a specific atom at another specific atom, we (as in humanity) could create a small black hole that would eat up the earth. Rainer Plaga, an astrophysicist working for the German Federal Office for Information Security, states that a micro black hole produced at the LHC could set off a chain reaction that “would appear like a major nuclear explosion in the immediate vicinity of the collider.”

While this is not really provable either way, without actually running the LHC tests, most of the scientific community believe that nothing dangerous will happen.

Check out this LHC video stream to see more.

This may not be of interest to many of my readers, but I wrote a little password generator the other day to create a randomized STRONG password.

This creates an 8 character password using the following:

Special Characters: !, #, $, %, &, (, ), *, +
Numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Capital Letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z
Lower Case Letters: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z

It is written to produce at 1 capital letter, 1 number, 1 special character and fill the rest with lowercase letters.