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About George Evans

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The Ultimate Wish: Part 3 of 3 – Fun

George, Idea Polish Level: 3, My Ideas, ,

 

You’ve made the wish. You protected the universe from yourself, and yourself from the universe. Now it’s time to enjoy your awesome power

As I wish for things in real life, I’ll post them here. Something big to note though, I won’t just wish for anything I want. After all, that would take all the fun and joy and surprise out of life. For example, I won’t wish that I was an awesome soccer player, because that takes the fun out of playing soccer. Better things to wish for are along the lines of being able to fly, because I can’t fly (I think 🙂 ), and there’d be no joy-robbing if suddenly I could fly.

  1. I wish to be able to fly (Not very original, I know, but it’d still be awesome)
  2. I wish to be able to turn myself and anything else I want invisible, as well as being able to turn anything that is invisible visible (Again not very original, but you could get in some serious trouble if you’re seen flying around. Also, something everyone seems to forget about is that when you say “I wish to be able to turn myself invisible”, they don’t mention turning visible again 🙂 )
  3. I wish that my toes (or some other injury) were completely healed (Some people reading might know that I was on crutches for two weeks and in a boot for another three weeks because of a toe injury that still bothers me sometimes. Something like that definitely has to go when you are all powerful)
  4. I wish I wasn’t so sore right now (Probably something that I’d wish a lot 🙂 )
  5. I wish to be able to go to sleep and wake up exactly when I want to (I have trouble getting to sleep, and almost everybody has trouble waking up, so this solves both problems in one go)
  6. I wish to have Telekinesis (Perhaps the best wish for the lazy person and the busy person alike, the ability to move stuff around with your mind would be awesome)
  7. I wish that my body can adapt to cold and/or heat, in such a way that I keep my complete abilities and no damage is caused to my body. (Fall just started, and earlier today I had to swim in a very cold pool for swim team. It would be very nice to not be bothered by temperature.)
  8. I wish to be able to understand, read, speak, and write in any language that I hear, see, or want to understand. (It’d be very helpful to say the least)
  9. I wish to be able to change what happens inside a book and see what the characters would do in such a way that the change is only applied to the book that I am holding at the time of changing it and only after I have said “I, ______, am changing this book”. (This would be Great if you like reading. Not only could you fix any situations that you didn’t like (such as a favorite character dying), but you’d also have a story that would never end. You could just keep changing the situation and seeing what the characters do! As for the restrictions, you don’t want to mess up every book you look at and you certainly don’t want to mess up every copy of the book in the world.)

Notable exceptions (wishes that some might want, but I personally don’t)

  • I wish for x amount of dollars (There are a number of reasons that I wouldn’t want this. First off, with wish power you could easily earn a real income without magically getting the money from nowhere. Second, with wish power, many things that would need money you can easily get for yourself.)
  • I wish to be stronger/faster/thinner/better at soccer, etc. (Something that I’m happy about myself is that I’m fit. Even though I could wish myself to be extremely fast, it’d take the joy  out of winning in a race. Wishing that I was as good of a swimmer as Michael Phelps would ruin all the fun of competitive swimming. While some may want to be stronger, I feel good the way I am)

These are just a few of the things I’d wish for, and I know that you can easily think of others that I missed. Leave any suggestions/ questions in the comments!

~ George

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This post is part of a 3 post triad, each focusing on a specific aspect of “The Ultimate Wish”.

Change Log of October 1, 2014

Change Logs, George, Miscellaneous Posts

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 that day. 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:

  • George’s Posts
    • Might as well make some use of the time I spend in math class 😉 : Ponderings from Math Class (Note: just to be clear, I spend almost all the time listening to the teacher. Glad to have that out of the way 🙂 )

Major Changes:

  • There is now an About Us page! Now we just need to fill it…:)

Minor Changes:

  • none

Of Special Note:

  • none

 

~ George

Ponderings from Math Class

George, Idea Polish Level: 1, My Ideas, , ,

One of the things that has me so tied up for time is my math class, precal/trig in one semester (5 credits!). However, during class I often think of random questions or observations, and I think that instead of making a post for every single one, it’d be better if I just make this single post and keep updating it. If I make a post based on something in here, even better! Quite a few of these will probably only make much sense in my head, but since half the point of this blog is to make people think about things they wouldn’t usually think about, I think it’ll work :). Anyhow, on to the ponderings…

(1) First off, every time I hear the word “pondering” I think of a joking definition made by a past teacher of it. Someone asked what pondering meant, and he replied something like, “pondering is what it’s called when someone wanders around making ponds, the word explains itself, you see.” 🙂

(2) What if 4 > 4 was somehow a valid statement? (((I actually have a way to make it so, but it involves something that I’m not anywhere near posting)))

(3) 1 = 1/1 = 2/2 = 3/3… Somewhat similar to the last question, what if it wasn’t exactly equal, or in some way it wasn’t true. They actually aren’t exactly the same, after all; you type them different, so if you were to measure the bit count of them they wouldn’t be equal

(4) How can you have $i ? Is it equal to $1? $-1?

(5) A joking quote from the teacher: “I’m pointing big!”. What would that actually mean? “Point” means a specific place, but point “big” could mean a general direction, or what?

(6) Interesting Observation: It is impossible to plot a perfect graph, because there is always a smaller number to calculate

(7) Interesting Observation: In precal, you are told that the only numbers you have to worry about being undefined are dividing by zero (infinity), even roots of a negative number (i), taking log of a negative number (also i), and taking log of zero (infinity again). However, you also can’t do this: 0^0, which is undefined (note: not infinity or i, “indeterminate”; even Wolfram Alpha can’t figure it out: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0%5E0). So if you had a problem in which you needed to find the domain of 0^x, the answer would be {x|x<>0}. Also, a^0 = 1 = a/a, so 0^0 = 0/0, which is also indeterminate.

 

(8) Funny comment my teacher made: “Now back to more pleasant things, like math!” (after a conversation about exponential growth and Ebola)

 

(9) log base a of x = y is equivalent to a^x=y, so long as x>0 and x≠1, both of which are impossible (at this level of math?), for example, log 0 = y would mean that 10^SomeRealNumber = 0, but what if it worked? Same with log (-100) = x, which means 10^x=-100, although I think that one is possible with imaginary numbers

 

(10) Interesting Observation (that I’m positive lots of people know): You can have any base for a number system (ours is base-10) and still use decimals, it just depends on when you shift over a decimal. For example, our base 10: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (one 10), 11 (1 and one 10), 12 (2 and one 10)…; base 8: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 (one 8), 11 (1 and one 8), 12 (2 and one 8), 13, (3 and one 8)…; also, base 12: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, a, b, c (one c), 11 (1 and one c), 12 (2 and one c)….

It can get pretty hard to imagine, but you could do it, especially if you were raised on it

 

(11) 0 < 8 > 0 is a perfectly valid statement, but is there any context in which it would be useful? At the very least it’s symmetrical 🙂

 

(12) It’d be interesting to create a problem that has an exact answer and is made up of whole numbers, yet the exact answer is 20 digits long (and not just a irrational number, like e, or a fraction, like 1/3). Also, if you wanted to be mean, you could say that the answer has to be exact, and nobody would trust that their calculator wasn’t just rounding to the 20th decimal, causing everybody would think they just had to restate the problem instead of giving an exact decimal.

 

More to Come!

~ George

Change Log of September 23, 2014

Change Logs, George, Miscellaneous Posts

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 that day. 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:

  • none

Of Special Note:

  • none

 

~ George

Game Idea: Finger Gun

George, Idea Polish Level: 2, My Ideas,

Finger Gun would be a game like the Dart Game, in which if you see someone “shooting” at you (with a finger gun?) then you fall down “dead”, no exceptions. If you don’t see the “Gun” fired at you, then nothing happens. Be honest.

This could be played in a game like capture the flag, where everyone is trying to sneak around and take everybody else out before they themselves get taken out. This could lead to some people just shooting wildly all the time and hoping to get someone, and it could lead to some people who go around looking nowhere but the ground so that they don’t notice anyone shooting at them. Once you are down, you can’t tell anyone else where the person who got you is.

A hard part might be finding out when everyone is “dead”. Maybe the “dead” go to a certain spot, or maybe the last person just wanders around until he’s 100% sure that everyone is down. This could make it harder to go around with your eyes closed, because you can’t win until you know that everybody is dead, and it’d also motivate people not to hide extremely well because they don’t want the game to go on forever. Another reason they wouldn’t want to hide extremely well is that they can’t shoot anyone unless the person sees them, meanwhile others could accidentally shoot you.

An alternate way you could play this is with laser points, and if you see a laser point on you then you’re out. The best strategy for this would then be to avoid looking at yourself. In this case though, the motivation would be to stay hidden, which would get boring. Another danger is that some people might deliberately shine the laser pointer in someone’s eyes so that the target is guaranteed to see the laser pointer on himself.

 ~ George

Change Log of September 19, 2014

Change Logs, George, Miscellaneous Posts

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 that day. 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: IMPORTANT!

  • School started, and the last two three weeks have been really crazy,  so I haven’t made the time to work on the blog. That’s going to/has change(d) though, I recently signed up for the 100 Words for 100 Days challenge, which started Monday the 15th. The goal is to, well, write at least 100 words every day for 100 days. It’s supposed to be for a novel or the like, but I decided that it would work for the blog. So my goal is to write at least 100 words a day for the blog, not including Change Logs. This doesn’t mean I’ll post something everyday, but I’ll  work on something everyday. A prime example of the “not necessarily a post everyday” is that I started 5 days ago and everyone of those (except today) I’ve spent on one post, which will hopefully come out soon.

 

~ George

The Ultimate Wish: Part 2 of 3 – Safety

George, Idea Polish Level: 3, My Ideas, ,

You were just given the ability to grant wishes and have become the most dangerous person both on the planet and to the planet. With a single wish you could destroy the earth. If anyone find out about your power they might seek to control you, or perhaps simply kill you. What are the first wishes you make to ensure that you (and humanity) survives?

In bold are the wishes, and in parenthesis are my comments on the particular wish. “!!!” will be placed in front of particularly important wishes, although they are all important. Note: if you were going to make these wishes, you’d probably want to find the precise wording of the wish; these are more of the idea of the wish than the wish itself

  1. !!!!!! I wish that all the wishes I grant must be fulfilled according to my intention(so that I won’t be surprised by the outcomes of my wish. Definitely should be first, because it is critical to everything else. Also needs to be the most precisely worded)
  2. !!! I wish to need a password to grant wishes(so that I won’t accidentally make a wish that I shouldn’t; perhaps the password is a very hard word that I’ve written down)
  3. I wish that I am not able to grant a wish without consciously agreeing to it (again, I don’t want to accidentally destroy the world. The first wishes will have a lot to do with that)
  4. I wish that if I say the word/phase __________(really long, hard phrase), and then speak of a previous wish, then all the effect of that wish will be undone, apart from the knowledge that I had to say the phrase for some reason(In case I make a wish that messes everything up, despite my precautions. The last phrase is so that I’d know not to wish for whatever I was about to wish for)
  5. !!! I wish that if I say the word/phase __________(another really long, hard phrase), and then speak of a previous wish, then all the effect of that wish will be undone, apart from any effects it had on myself(In case I make a wish that messes something up, but I want to remember what happened anyway)
  6. I wish that if I die, all the effects of the last wish I made before my death would be undone if one of the consequences of the wish was my death (If I destroy the universe, then the wish would be undone (hopefully), perhaps I might want to not make it the last wish I made, in case it wasn’t the one that killed me (and the universe))
  7. I wish that if I am about to make a wish that will cause the death of someone I will know exactly 30 seconds before I make the wish, along with what the wish would have been (more backup for the “don’t destroy the earth” plan)
  8. I wish that any wish I make containing the word __________ (word that I’d never unintentionally say in a wish) will be undone exactly 24 hours after my death, unless I wish otherwise (Just in case)
  9. Having hopefully protected the universe from myself (although I may want to do something about the time stream), the following wishes will be mostly about protecting me from the universe.
  10. I wish to be able to grant wishes without speaking out loud (in case I’m in a situation that I can’t speak, such as underwater or gagged, although perhaps I should need to speak to decrease the possibility of accidental wishing?)
  11. !!!!!! I wish that I’ll automatically know and understand the answer to any question I ask, so long as it doesn’t regard the future. (This is a REALLY big one, with this power alone you could rule the world. If I wasn’t already wishing to grant wishes, this would be one of my “3 wishes”. Maybe someday I’ll do a post on it)
  12. !!! I wish to be able to stop and start time (note: unless I made wish #1 of this post, this could lead to some dire consequence, such as not being able to start time again, or instantly killing me. Also, this is important for my safety because it can help me get out of bad situations)
  13. I wish that I wouldn’t age while time is stopped. (Who knows how the whole “Time Stop” thing would work, so it’s better to be prepared)
  14. !!! I wish that if I were to die, time would rewind until exactly 5 minutes before I lost clarity of thought and start again, but I’d know exactly what killed me and how it killed me (You might want to put a limit on how many time this happens; “clarity of thought” is supposed to help against dying when I’m asleep or drugged.)
  15. I wish to be completely indestructible so long as I cannot think clearly, along with the 10 minutes following the point at which I am thinking clearly (This wish has two purposes: 1st, if someone tries to attack me while I am asleep, drugged, or confused, they won’t succeed; 2nd, if something really bad happens while I’m asleep or something, I will have a chance to fix it)
  16. I wish that any bullet, missile, rocket, dart, sword, or knife thrown or shot at me will instantly be teleported  inside the black hole at the center of the galaxy (I know that there are many other things that could kill me, some of which I might add later, but this is just to cover the basics. Besides, if I said anything thrown at me would disappear, then dodgeball and games like it would become much less fun. As for the black hole part, I figured that no matter what someone shoots at me, it isn’t something a black hole couldn’t handle, meanwhile if the person was desperate enough it might blow up the sun, or something)
  17. I wish that the moment someone decides that he/she wants to kill me, he/she will immediately forget that he/she wants to kill me (pretty self-explanatory, I think)

Notable Exceptions (wishes that I thought would be good, but upon further reflection turned out to be bad ideas)

  1. I wish to be able to teleport anywhere at conscious desire (with the power to wish for anything, I can easily wish to be any place I want. Having taken some measures to make sure that I don’t accidentally wish for something bad, it’d probably be safer to just stick with that rather than risk accidentally teleporting myself into the center of the sun, for instance)
  2. I wish to be able to know the future (or something along those lines)(I never thought this would be a good idea, but I thought I’d explain why I make the last statement in wish #10. It’s pretty simple, to be honest. In many of the movies/books, the person who knows the future often dies or something else horrible because he/she tries to change it. While that may be just in fiction, I wouldn’t want to be the first to try it.)

This post will continue to be updated as I think of more, but for now this is good. Part 3 is about the fun I’d wish for now that everything is safe.

~ George

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This post is part of a 3 post triad, each focusing on a specific aspect of “The Ultimate Wish”.

Story Idea: The Hidden Extra

George, Idea Polish Level: 1, My Ideas,

What if someone got the rights to a bunch of different popular books and inserted the same extra into each book? No one would know where in the book the extra is, and perhaps they wouldn’t even know which books have the extra in it! It would become a little “Easter egg” for those who found the “Hidden Extra” in their book, especially since not all the books would necessarily have it (if it was inserted after the book became popular). Eventually, maybe the hidden extra guy could create a story that somehow links all the books and hidden extras together. Also, who knows? Someone might have already done this, but hasn’t revealed it yet. Brandon Sanderson has started something like this, inserting the (extra) character Hoid into at least three of his different book series, and (I hope) is planning to explain how they connect. As cool as it may be for Sanderson to be connecting his own books’ universes together, imagine how awesome it would be to have the universes of the books of several different authors all connected!

~ George