I'm So Glad...
...that i went to Europe when the euro hit all time highs. it's come off 7 cents since then. which might not seem like a lot to you Non Foreign Exchange-y Types, but it can add up... IT CAN ADD UP, I TELL YOU.
i have a Big Sweatshirt with a euro on it. and i love it. (thanks dodong!)
and SARA thought i was dorky when i mentioned the amazing Orc makeup in LOTR.
HEE! let's move from Tetris to Lode Runner, really a classic Mac game, but also a reincarnated as a [noticeably more difficult] Gameboy game. (called Hyper Lode Runner).
the funniest thing i have read all day is the Broderbund Software description of Hyper Lode Runner:
In the year 2264, The Red Lord of Darkness has taken over the world. It is rumored that he has taken political prisoners and hidden them in The Labyrinth of Doom deep within the planet. There is also suspicion that millions of dollars in gold is secretly housed within. You must infiltrate the labyrinth and face an army of mutant cyborg zombies commanded by General Zod. If you can survive the zombies, you also need to get as much gold as you can. The counter-revolution is depending on you in HYPER LODE RUNNER: The Labyrinth of Doom.
mutant cyborg zombies commanded by general zod??? there's nothing i can say that would make that line more perfect than it already is.
this is what the game used to look like when things were simpler:
I have a sickness.
I am plagued by images of blocks and T's and please send me the five-unit skinny one (ew, NOT like that)! i close my eyes and see the negative image of the pieces coming together. I AM ADDICTED TO TETRIS. i play on my gameboy all the time. and not just the "how many lines can you get total" version. there's a setting on mine where you can play against the computer. and it's this combination of tetris and competition that fuels me. because that computer is hard to beat. (like i spent a good two months doing nothing but losing. now the record is LG: 22; RU: 40. that doesn't count, however, all the times i've turned the thing off right before the RUssian computer's win is recorded. it's called asserting my human right of agency. i can CHOOSE to turn that thing off and cheat on the score, at least i have that over the machines!) how it works is that every time the computer "gets a line" it pops up from the bottom of your screen, pushing everything higher. let me tell you, it's hard. the genius part is, it appeals to the addicts, because there are 36 different levels of difficulty. so when you finally beat the computer in the best of six series and get a little chalk mark on your record, the next game is always there, beckoning you to one up the challenge. i repeat: I HAVE A SICKNESS.
I don't know whether i should thank Alexey Pajitnov or throttle him.
ps: oh MIT, another reason why i love you; this was so totally a HOMEWORK assignment in 1.00 or something (and i can play it at work!). Tetris Java Appelet.
pps: this is so going to be me on the flight to Rome tomorrow "Man Jailed For Plane Tetris Game" (except, of course, that i'm a woman)
so. I hate Matrices. I know i linked to something "matrix-y" below, but that was a gesture suffused with irony. i hate them because of a class i took at MIT, 18.06, aka linear algebra (SHOUT OUT: Ethan). this class was supposedly easy, but i found it to be mind bogglingly difficult. i'll never forget walking into the class the first day and the [visiting] professor was like "ok, everyone. turn your text books over. everything you need to know about linear algebra is captured in this picture on the back." the picture on the back? it was two overlapping rectangles, one what more rhombus-y. actually, less rhombus-y and more like a 1yr old child was trying to draw two overlapping squares. this is like version 7.0 of the image: 
needless to say, the "drawing" meant nothing to me then, and nothing to me now, and subsequent tries meet the goals (see below) of the class were unsuccessful.
GOALS FOR 18.06 as per the syllabus:
1. Solving Ax = b for square systems by elimination (pivots, multipliers, back substitution, invertibility of A, factorization into A = LU)
2. Complete solution to Ax = b (column space containing b, rank of A, nullspace of A and special solutions to Ax = 0 from row reduced R)
3. Basis and dimension (bases for the four fundamental subspaces)
4. Least squares solutions (closest line by understanding projections)
5. Orthogonalization by Gram-Schmidt (factorization into A = QR)
6. Properties of determinants (leading to the cofactor formula and the sum over all n! permutations, applications to inv(A) and volume)
7. Eigenvalues and eigenvectors (diagonalizing A, computing powers A^k and matrix exponentials to solve difference and differential equations)
8. Symmetric matrices and positive definite matrices (real eigenvalues and orthogonal eigenvectors, tests for x'Ax > 0, applications)
9. Linear transformations and change of basis (connected to the Singular Value Decomposition -- orthonormal bases that diagonalize A)
10. Linear algebra in engineering (graphs and networks, Markov matrices, Fourier matrix, Fast Fourier Transform, linear programming)
I got a D.
ANYWAY. i mention this because for the longest time, i refused to see the movie "The Matrix." and while i enjoyed the first one when i finally saw it, i continued to have reservations based solely on the title. and then the second one BLEW, and i almost can't believe there's a third. so this quote from a NYTimes review made me inordinately happy:
"Reloaded" was certainly a lumpy, gaseous treatise of a movie...Mr. Reeves, perhaps worried that he was showing too much range, has purged himself of all expression apart from a worried frown and a sorrowful grimace." it got a D too!
the moral: matrix-related things ain't no fun, and like it or not: we are not living in an orthogonal world, and i am definitely not an orthogonal girl.
