daily shriek

every day i code in visual basic .net i grow more and more fond of c-style languages and their delicious terseness and their symmetry and i grow more disdainful for languages who try to sound like natural language to make them easier to grok for the layperson, but in the end, like their natural language counterparts, wind up confounding common sense with their lack of consistency, and obscure the deeper workings of computers from those brave enough to plumb their depths.

but it is paying the bills right now, so this shall be my last rant and i will suffer the polyester k-mart suit of the computing world and soldier on, hoping that i don’t slide into the easy ways of vb slackerdom.

so i was reading that facebook’s numbers took a hard hit in january and february and it got me to thinking that social networking may have begun to run its course, perhaps sliding in to decline. but, the interwebs themselves are naught but a social network of astronomical scale and are just the latest means to interact with one another, simply tribes, nations, what-have-you.

wrapping a bar around people and corralling them in ironically concrete places such as second life failed to work because the virtual world exists but in the mind and 3D-animated avatars are in the end, unnecessary. the various mmporgs are just convenient gamer circles and myspace has become what geocities once aspired to and linkedin is strictly business.

today, the cyberlandscape seems at once barren and cluttered and the chaotic choir of empowered voices raised in indiscernible static have become the human background cosmic radiation and computers have become tuners, looking for broadcasts as well place phone calls. our heads truly are in the cloud.networks such as a few private ones to which i belong offer a freedom not known in public spaces, and silliness too — i check them more than i do my e-mail.

but while these are virtual, they share one thing in common, that their roots border on familial and predate the cyber universe in which their collective dopplelganger reside — i already know most people within them.

the virtual world on which i gaze in wonder is but the telephone and my son will think me a relic and will never know the newness nor the awe i hold and sadly, i will most likely never grasp his realm.

i am but a fool think i am seeing anything new.

• For a 9×9 puzzle to have precisely one solution, the initial entries need to include at least eight of the nine digits
• the smallest number of starter clues on a sudoku puzzle is 17
• Sudoku puzzles are an example of a type of graph known as a Latin square, which mathematicians have studied for centuries
• there are 3,546,146,300,288 (about 3.5 x 10^12) meaningfully different 9-by-9 sudoku puzzles
• no one knows how many sudoku puzzles exist for any grid size exceeding 9-by-9
• For a randomly chosen n-by-n Latin square, the bigger n is, the smaller the probability that it is also a sudoku. In fact, the probability approaches zero as n gets larger
• A mathematical solution to sudoku could have practical applications when viewed as a graph theory problem. For example, scheduling committee meetings for various groups in different time slots can pose a similar mathematical challenge.

and my favorite:

• graph theory shows that a mathematically simple formula exists for the number of possible solutions to a given sudoku puzzle. Unfortunately, there’s a glitch: although the mathematicians proved that the formula exists, they weren’t able to figure out what it is.

hahahahahahhaha

link