Monthly Archives: October 2014

Change log of October 26, 2014

At the end of every day (or, at least every day that I change something), I make a post that highlights all of the changes and/or posts that have been made since the last change log. This way I can update previous posts and actually have the changes be found, plus readers will be able get easy access to all the new posts without scrolling down too much. Note: Since this post will be the last thing I post each day, it is less likely to be properly cleaned up, as I will be rather tired at that point

New posts:

Major Changes:

  • none

Minor Changes:

  • none

Of Special Note:

  • This change log is a day late because I was really tired last night and didn’t feel like making a change log

Certified Brilliant:

  • I believe that if you haven’t seen Abbott and Costello Who’s on First then you are truly missing something in life. They say that actions speak louder than words, so rather than just recommending the video I’ll actively make it easier for you to see it 🙂

 

~ George

Culture Idea: Chance Based Currency (Part 2)

The next part of my explanation of the Chance Based Currency idea!

(See part 1 here: http://evansforever.com/culture-idea-chance-based-currency-part-1/)

The first problem I’d like to address is that it would be very hard to deal with large sums of money.

  • Using high felix dice, like a 100 felix die, would make the seller risk gaining only 1 F in exchange for an item. On the other hand, the purchaser is also risking paying 100 F for the item. On average, the seller would make about 50 F per sell, but that’d only be after a while.
    • As said in the first post, all the seller can do to decrease the risk of having a low F roll is to refuse to accept high felix dice. However, if the government is like ours (the US), then it’d be against the law to not accept currency the government has decided has value.
      • In the US, if someone tries to pay you with legitimate US currency (and you’re in the US), unless you accept the currency the buyer has the right to take whatever it was that he was purchasing without paying you. The dice government might have similar laws, or they might only have laws for specific dice types, or maybe none at all
  • Another problem would be having to make a 100 sided die. Perhaps the government would make dice that go up in intervals greater than 1. If so, then a 100 felix die could be ten sided, going up by ten, or 20 sided going up by five, or maybe even 5 sided, going up by 20. This would clearly affect the formula to calculate average F, which would become as follows: Divide the max felix of the die by two, then add (the lowest value it can roll*1/2).
  • This would put the 10 sided 100 felix die’s average F at 55, the 20 sided 100 felix die’s average F at 52.5, and the 5 sided 100 felix die’s value at 60! Wow, and I thought this system was interesting already, but with accounting for minimum values as  well  as  maximum values makes this all the more fascinating
    • And what if the die didn’t go up by the same interval each time? What if you had a 100 felix die, but it had only 6 sides, which were 1,2,3,4,5, and 100? It’s still 100 felix, because felix is the potential roll, but it would have nowhere near the purchasing power as the other examples given.
    • If this were the case, the way you’d calculate the average F is by adding together all the sides and dividing that number by the number of sides on the dice. For example, 1+2+3+4+5+100 =115, 115/6=19.1666667, which is the average F of that die.
    • This method could work with other dice, for example 1+2+3+4+5=15, 15/5=3, which we already know is the average F for a 5 sided 5 felix die (man, now I have to say how many sides it has also…), but it’s harder and more time-consuming than the normal calculation.
    • Another thing I thought of about this idea is that it’d provide another way to gamble without any felix loss; roll an “x” sided die which has all of its faces equal to zero but one, which would be some high number. Perhaps the government would earn extra money by selling dice such as these to gambling houses.

That’s all for now

~ George

Change Log of October 19, 2014

At the end of every day (or, at least every day that I change something), I make a post that highlights all of the changes and/or posts that have been made since the last change log. This way I can update previous posts and actually have the changes be found, plus readers will be able get easy access to all the new posts without scrolling down too much. Note: Since this post will be the last thing I post each day, it is less likely to be properly cleaned up, as I will be rather tired at that point

New posts:

  • Interesting Observation: Average Day considers what we say we like to do and what we actually like to do
  • Finally! Another Idea Polish Level 4! Culture Idea: Chance Based Currency is something I actually started about a month ago, but I kept thinking I couldn’t publish it until it was finished. However, I decided that it’d make it easier on both the reader and the writer to have it split into smaller sections that don’t take as long to read (or write 🙂 ), so that’s what I did.

Major Changes:

Minor Changes:

  • I reformatted the Cool Websites page, Extra Cool Websites page, Special Websites page, and Ponderings from Math Class post so that each item in them were individually numbered.

Of Special Note:

  • Subscribe to the blog to get email alerts whenever a new post is posted!

Certified Brilliant:

 

~ George

Culture Idea: Chance Based Currency (Part 1)

What if there was an economy which had legal tinder that was made of dice? I’m going to call the currency Felix (“lucky” in Latin). For example, a two felix “bill” would be a two-sided coin, a six felix “bill” would be a normal 6-sided dice, and I don’t know how they would work with hundred felix “bill”‘s. When you pay for something, you pull out your dice and roll them. Whatever value they land on is how much they are worth for that transaction; you could have a 100 sided die, but if it lands on 1 then it’s only worth one dollar. Perhaps when paying something, you have to bring out enough dice to have the price be halfway between the minimum you could roll and the maximum you could roll (I’ll explain that more later), and after the cashier checks to make sure that everything adds up properly you roll the dice. You pay whatever value that comes up is, whether cheaper than or more expensive than the original price.

This could lead to an interesting treatment of the value of money. Here’s some math to explain: You’re buying a new hammer that is worth 5 F [F is absolute money (after the die has been rolled), and felix is potential money (pre-roll), e.g. a 10 felix die rolls 5 F]. If you have a 5 felix die, you still probably wouldn’t be able to afford it. This is because, on average, the die wouldn’t roll a five, and thus, on average, the seller would lose money. The seller doesn’t want to lose money, so he wouldn’t sell the hammer for a 5 felix die.

The way you’d calculate the average value of a die is to divide the top value it could roll in half and add 0.5. The additional 0.5 is because the die can’t ever roll zero, so it’s not the halfway point between the top value and zero that you’re looking for, it’s the halfway point between the top value and one. This would place the average value of the 5 felix die at 3 F. To get you’re hammer you need an average of 2 more F, so if subtract 0.5 from 2 and double the outcome you see that you’d need a 3 felix die to complete the transaction (I assume that a culture based on this currency would figure out how to make a three-sided die).

So now you have two dice which have an average F of 5, enough to satisfy the shopkeeper. You roll your dice. The 3 felix die lands on one, good for you, but the 5 felix die lands on 5, for a total of 6 F. Your heart sinks. The shopkeeper happily pockets the dice, having earned an extra F, and gives you the hammer.

Later, your friend sees the nice quality of your hammer and gives you a 9 felix die to buy him one. The interesting thing about this situation is that a 9 felix die also has an average value of 5 F, even though a 5 felix die + a 3 felix die = 8 felix. The difference is that every die has a minimum roll of 1, so the minimum F for two dice is 2, meanwhile the minimum F for one die is 1. The added price of 1 felix accounts for the added risk to the shopkeeper of 1 felix.

You visit the shopkeeper again, and he seems a bit worried about your 9 felix die, but doesn’t stop you from using it to pay. You roll, and his fears are confirmed. The die landed on 2, giving it a value of 2 F, 3 F less than the asking price! You can see that the shopkeeper is upset at being shortchanged as he pockets the die, but you’re elated. You can’t wait to get the hammer to your friend so that you can tell him what a steal you got it for.

In this system, most sellers would always want to be paid in the highest number of the lowest denomination dice they could get, at least for the more important deals,  so that they are guaranteed at least a certain amount of F, even though the fewer dice that are used the higher the felix value is. Some shopkeepers wouldn’t allow dice with too high of a felix value to be used to purchase items, meanwhile others might make a sale by requiring the average F to be less than halfway between the top value and one. Gambling would be easy in this culture; simply have both players roll a 100 sided die (or whatever they use instead) and switch dice. One might roll 50, and the other might roll 20, who gets 30 F while maintaining the same amount of felix.

After all that though, the only more flawed currency system that I’ve seen anywhere (not that I’ve looked for any) was this one:

Alternate Currency

(Source: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/512:_Alternate_Currency)

I can’t decide which flaws I should go over first, but this post is too long already, so I’m going to split it into a number of smaller parts focusing on specific problems with this system and addressing them. These I will write and publish those parts until I’ve gone over this idea thoroughly, or I’m tired of it.

~ George

Interesting Observation: Average Day

When someone asks you what you like to do, you usually don’t reply with the things you do most often, whether because they’re not fun (school, work), everyday (eat, sleep), or boring to talk about (watch TV, use the computer, play outside, etc., although they can be interesting to talk about, they aren’t very noteworthy). The more usual reply would be something more specific and interesting, like I would say “Swim Team and Piano”, because those are more interesting replies than “using the computer”. In general, it’s the highlights that we talk about, because for the average person the average day is merely average : )
 .
(Yes, I wrote this whole thing primarily so that I could say that last line 🙂 )
 ~ George

Change Log of October 11, 2014

At the end of every day (or, at least every day that I change something), I make a post that highlights all of the changes and/or posts that have been made since the last change log. This way I can update previous posts and actually have the changes be found, plus readers will be able get easy access to all the new posts without scrolling down too much. Note: Since this post will be the last thing I post each day, it is less likely to be properly cleaned up, as I will be rather tired at that point

New posts:

Major Changes:

Minor Changes:

Of Special Note:

  • none

Certified Brilliant:

  • At least before you read it 🙂

 

~ George

Song Idea: The Animals Acting

One day, I somehow ended up with the song “The wheels on the bus” stuck in my head, and I somehow started coming up with my own lyrics for it. Here’s an example:
The Penguin waddled back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The penguin waddled back and forth, all through the town.
Then goes on to the next lyrics. The form is
The | (two syllable animal name) | (verb) – ing | (three syllable description)
Examples:
The rabbit hopping up and down
the lizard scampered all around
the panda sitting on the ground
the giraffe standing tall and straight
the hedgehog hiding in a ball

You can easily add more lyrics. This could be a fun song to play with kids, and when they sing the verse they act out what the animal is doing (hopping for the rabbit, sitting for the panda, etc.)

Money Code

Just a little idea I had a bit ago

In a movie about two criminals, one criminal send the date of the next heist to the other using a money based code. They send a check with the date of their next heist in the check’s value (e.g. $6.23 – 6/23/__). At the end of the movie, after pulling off an elaborate heist, one criminal opens his vault to find a that everything is gone besides a check for $4.01. April Fools Day.

Change Log of October 7, 2014

At the end of every day (or, at least every day that I change something), I make a post that highlights all of the changes and/or posts that have been made since the last change log. This way I can update previous posts and actually have the changes be found, plus readers will be able get easy access to all the new posts without scrolling down too much. Note: Since this post will be the last thing I post each day, it is less likely to be properly cleaned up, as I will be rather tired at that point

New posts:

  • Both Story Idea: Non-Linear Book and
  • Age < 11 are simply Polish Level 1 ideas that I thought were interesting
  • Interesting Observation: Movie Titles, however, was supposed to be level 1, but I ended up explaining it a lot more than I intended too, because it ended up more interesting than I thought it would be

Major Changes:

  • none

Minor Changes:

  • I change the phrase “highlights all of the changes and/or posts that have been made that day” in the Change Log description to “highlights all of the changes and/or posts that have been made since the last change log“. While I intend to write the change log often, it seems silly to write one for only one item. This way I can wait until I’ve got at least two things to mention before I write a change log

Of Special Note:

  • none

Certified Brilliant:

 

~ George