Category Archives: George

Awesome Job Idea: To Be Awesome

George, Idea Polish Level: 1, My Ideas,

What if a millionaire sponsored someone to simply be awesome at stuff? Although, unlike usual, the guy wouldn’t stick to one thing, he would simply spend all of his time finding and learning things that interest him. Then, whenever he’s ready, he’ll perform/teach for his employer. In retrospect, it sounds less like something that someone would pay for and more like something that someone who is extremely rich would do for himself.

~ George

Change Log of November 1-17, 2014

Change Logs, George, Miscellaneous Posts

Note: I haven’t made a change log in a long time, but I’ve started working on one. Hopefully I’ll be able to get one out again.

Every few days I make a post that highlights all 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 to get easy access to all the new posts without scrolling down too much. Note: Since this post may be the last thing I post on a given day, it is less likely to be properly cleaned up, as I will be rather tired at that point

New Posts:

    • George’s:
    • World Idea: No Passing This Point – Instead of categorizing all my “story ideas” as just “story ideas”, I decided to specify it a bit; in this case it’s a “world idea”, meaning that the main thing I touch on is the setting rather than other stuff
    • How to do tan^1 on a calculator is based on my reply to someone asking me that very question. As I am prone to do, I got in much more detail than I think the asker intended, but in this case I think it was better to over-explain than under-explain
    • Rose’s Birthday Gift: Lyrics Book brings one of my real-world projects to the blog; as said in the title, it contains a download of what I printed off and gave to Rose for her birthday
    • Steve’s:
    • How to pass-through connections on an intermediate Riverbed SteelHead is Steve’s thorough and understandable (to those who know what a Riverbed SteelHead is) answer to the title’s question

Major Changes:

Minor Changes:

    • I changed the description text of this change log to make reference to the fact that I won’t always be posting a change log the day of an update to the blog, because it’s hard enough to write 100 words a day without making a change log for everything I post.
    • I fixed some typos in wish two of The Ultimate Wish: Part 1 of 3 – The Wish

Of Special Note:

    • Just wanted to mention that I am now 10 weeks into the 100 words for 100 days activity! As of now I written over 10,000 words for this blog in the last 9 weeks 🙂

Certified Brilliant:

~ George

Complete Amnesia

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

What if someone completely forgot everything, and not just memories but also words, images, tastes, everything. How would someone with this “Complete” Amnesia describe the world? They wouldn’t know colors or textures, verbs or nouns. They wouldn’t even know what colors, textures, verbs, or nouns were or that there even was a such things. What if that person tried to describe what he “saw” in a book? Over all, I think it’s be pretty interesting.

~ George

Rose’s Birthday Gift: Lyrics Book

George, Idea Polish Level: 4, miscellaneous, Miscellaneous Posts, My Ideas, , ,

Rose just had her birthday, so I needed to come up with a birthday present. About two 2 months ago I realized that she likes singing all the time, but rarely knows more than a few spots of a song. So thus the idea of a lyrics book was born. I copied the lyrics to 28 songs that she enjoys singing into a single document, categorized them, and added page numbers. I got almost all the lyrics from www.azlyrics.com, although a few of the lyrics are from other sites. If you use it, I’d recommend printing it in booklet form (or at least double-sided) if your printer has that function, otherwise you’d use a huge amount of paper. Also, there are some known errors in the transcription of some songs, so it is likely that most of the lyrics aren’t 100% like the actual lyrics of the song, but in general they are correct. Here’s the download: Song Lyrics

Also, here’s the Table of Contents (copied from the first page of the document):

 

RADIO SONGS:

“Happy” – Pharrell Williams – page 2
“Demons” – Imagine Dragons – page 3
“Radioactive” – Imagine Dragons – page 5
“Really Don’t Care” – Demi Lovato – page 6
(feat. Cher Lloyd)
“Brave” – Sara Barielles – page 7
“The Monster” (Clean version) – Eminem – page 9
(feat. Rihanna)
“Counting Stars” – One Republic – page 10
“Roar” – Katy Perry – page 12
LEMONADE MOUTH:

“Somebody” – page 14
(performed by Bridgit Mendler)
“Determinate” – page 15
(performed by Bridgit Mendler & Adam Hicks)
“Here We Go” – page 17
“She’s So Gone” – page 19
(performed by Naomi Scott)
“Breakthrough” – page 21

 

TAYLOR SWIFT:

“Shake It Off” – page 23
“Our Song” – page 24
“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” – page 26
“You Belong With Me” – page 27
“Love Story” – page 29

 

OF MONSTERS AND MEN:

“Little Talks” – page 30
“Dirty Paws” – page 32
“Mountain Sound” – page 32

 

FUNNY SONGS:

“Where’d My Wood Go (500 Chunks)” – Element Animation – page 33

“The Saga Begins” – “Weird Al” – page 35
“Everything Is Awesome!!!” – Tegan and Sara – page 37
(feat. The Lonely Island)

 

RIGOLETTO:

“The Melody Within” – page 39
“The Curse” – page 39
“The Melody Within/The Curse” – page 40
“April Child” – page 40

 

~ George

Deeper Movies

George, Idea Polish Level: 1, My Ideas,

Have you ever watched a movie and thought that even if it was good, it was very shallow? For example, most real villains don’t do evil for the sake of evil. Something that I thought would be interesting would be if someone took a simple movie and made it a lot deeper. For example, they could show the villain’s back story, have the hero not be able to take down 20 ninjas by himself, have there not be 20 ninjas in the first place when they can use guns, etc. Just get rid of all those “that would never happen” things and replace it with something more interesting. Maybe retroactively make the movie into a book, since they say “the book it always better than the movie” (not including those little movie picture books for children and the like).

~ George

How To do tan^-1 on a calculator

George, miscellaneous, Miscellaneous Posts,
First off, I’m assuming that your calculator has three things: a “tan” button and a “tan-1” button. You do not have to know where the “tan-1” button is, but if it is a scientific calculator then it probably does have it. I’m also assuming that you know what the “tan” and the “tan-1” buttons do, so this will not explain that.
______________________________________________________________________
Your calculator should have a button labeled “tan-1”, although usually you have to hit the “2nd” key and then the “tan” key. If you are using the calculator that comes installed with Windows 7 (at least I’m pretty sure that’s where it comes from, if someone could verify that please) and already have it set to scientific calculator (hit the “view” button in the top left corner then select “scientific”), then you hit the “Inv” key (short for “Inverse”, I think) and the “tan” button will turn into “tan-1”.
Also, make sure that the calculator is set to degrees (or radians), because it is extremely frustrating to get the wrong answer and have no idea why. To set that there is often a button that says “DRG”, with which you can cycle through degrees, radians, and gradients, using arrow keys if your calculator has them. On the Windows 7 calculator there are three buttons in the top left, beneath where the output is shown. Click the one labeled with what you want.
Finally, if you already know how to get the “tan-1” button but don’t know how to type it in, most fancy calculators (the $10+ ones) require you to input the items in the order that you would write them (e.g. type “tan-1” then “500” then “/” then “1001” then “=”). However, almost every other calculator that I use (including the Windows 7 one and calculator apps) do it similarly, but certain functions (such as square root, log, and tan) are done after you finish typing the expression (e.g. type “500” then “/” then “1001” then “tan-1” then “=”).
Of course, all of this also applies to the “sin”/”sin-1” and “cos”/”cos-1” buttons, but I was specifically asked about the “tan-1” button, so that’s what I went with.
 ~ George

World Idea: No Passing This Point

George, Idea Polish Level: 2, My Ideas, ,

Imagine there was a civilization which has a mysterious floating point in its center. No one knows what it is, but if anyone goes outside a certain distance from it in any direction they quickly die due to unknown causes. However, if they make it back into the radius before they die they are completely returned to normal. This society is extremely advanced, and has managed to make contact with other such societies with their own mysterious floating points. Due to this communication, they learn that all the bubbles of civilization are different, some are larger, smaller, expanding, shrinking (uh-oh), in a desert, on an island, etc.

There are a couple of different ways that the “outside” could be portrayed.

  • It could be as if everyone was on Earth, but if any living thing left the spheres of protection then they’d die. In that case, the inhabitants would be able to see things such mountains and oceans outside their sphere but not be able to interact with it.
    • If this was the case, it seems likely that the spheres were made for the protection of life, because whatever was outside of them was extremely dangerous. Too bad they don’t know how, when, or why the spheres were made
  • Another possibility is that only humans are forced to stay inside. If anyone left then they’d die, but the pets, livestock, and plants could survive outside the invisible sphere.
    • A world such as this, with humans being the specific target, is more suspicious, and seems to be more likely to be caused by sentient life who were trying to keep humans (or specific types of humans) captive. Aliens maybe?
    • Also, if the spheres become crowded, this could lead to some interesting farming techniques, which might involve leavingall of the livestock outside of the radius until the farmers needed them. This way they don’t have to worry about leaving space for food as the population grows
      • In fact, if the place is highly advanced they could do almost all of their work outside of the radius using drones. They could have everything we have today by building factories far away from the sphere and having farms (or maybe no farms, if no life can leave the sphere) cared for by robots. The exception to having everything we have would be space to run around in, which would probably lead to a booming industry for virtual reality, maybe even inter-sphere competitions if they could get it to work
  • Another possibility is that it’s a little planet/moon/asteroid of sorts (something big enough to have about one city, but not much more), but no one can get far from the surface. Maybe the dot would be at the center of the planet. They would still be able to see the stars and do astronomy, but they wouldn’t be able to leave
    • Of course, while that wouldn’t be too hard on our civilization, due to lack of resources for interplanetary missions, this is an advanced civilization which probably could get between planets with ease. Not being able to leave could be a real problem for them
  • A fourth possibility is that outside the sphere is simply nothing, and if anything made of matter leaves it simply disappears. It’d be a sort of “edge of universe”, and there would be absolutely no way of expanding beyond the sphere. Perhaps things that aren’t matter* could still leave, such as light, but it’d also make sense if nothing that we regularly interact with could leave; after all, it’d be the literal edge of the universe, there’d be nowhere to leave too. I don’t know how the different “universes” would communicate with each other, but it’d be extremely interesting

~ George

* matter: things that have mass and take up space

Change log of October 26, 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 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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTcRRaXV-fg

  • 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)

George, Idea Polish Level: 4, My Ideas, , , ,

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