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

Picture to text in Word

Microsoft, On Technology, , , , , ,

Today, I decided I would just take a picture of our church choir schedule so I would have it on my phone for reference.  I remembered that Paul Thurrott on his Windows weekly podcast mentioned that the latest Microsoft Lens app could do Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and put the text and/or the image in OneNote. So I tried it.  Wow! It works great!

After opening the app, I snapped a picture.  The first cool thing was that it corrected for the angle from which I took the picture so the page looked as if I snapped the picture squarely  from the front.  I then told it I wanted a word doc and to store the pic in OneNote.  I chose to share a link to the doc with a friend and sent it to myself.   I opened the .docx file on my windows phone and could see the text converted from the image right above the picture so it was easy to compare to make sure it did it correctly. It did.  I love it when technology foes exactly what I want it to do.

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

Cortona helped me find dinner in between flights

Dad, , , ,

After getting off of my first flight, I took a look at my windows phone to check on my next flight. I’ve used an app called Flight Status for a long time (upper right corner of image) but noticed that my Cortona tile was also showing me the status of my flight, although I didn’t have to enter the flight info for Cortona to do that.

I tapped on the time to see what else she could tell me and saw a link to a terminal map.

I clicked on it and she showed me a map of the terminal including restaurants which was perfect because I was hungry!