Rampant Bicycle

Firstly, there is this little nugget from my page-a-day calendar:

"‘Amicable numbers’ are any pair of numbers for which each is the sum of all of the divisors of the other-they are said to have been discovered by Pythagoras. The smallest pair of such numbers is 220 & 284: the divisors of 220 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55 and 110 (the sum of which is 284); and the divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71 and 142 (the sum of which is 220). In 1636, Pierre de Fermat showed that 17296 & 18416 were also amicable. Two years later, René Descartes proved 9363584 & 9437056. Other amicable pairs (as they are also known) include: 1184 & 1210, 2620 & 2924, 5020 & 5564, 6232 & 6368, 10744 & 10856, 12285 & 14595, 63020 & 76084. In total, there are thought to be 236 amicable pairs below 108."

I'm not sure why we need to know whether a number is amicable or not, but what a fun concept that is!  Math people are, as I have already mentioned, a subset of humanity that I don't understand so well most of the time, but just occasionally I get glimpses of a clean, shiny, orderly universe over in mathland, one where numbers are more playful somehow and less threatening, and I kind of wish I lived there.  (A math person would, of course, say that I DO live there, since obviously this universe still has delights such as the Mandelbrot Set.  I would have to agree with that - my body does inhabit a physical universe where these things are true - but I don't LIVE there in the same way that math people live there.)

Besides, Lewis Carroll was a mathematician in his other, Charles-Dodgson life.  He wrote a little series of word problems that were so charming they fired my imagination and I wanted to try and solve them right away - alas, my eight-year-old brain was inadequate to the task.

Something else that delights me is this essay at the Kenyon Review on rejection letters.  I have never been a writer and so I've never experienced the dubious pleasure of receiving any of these, but I enjoy this essay immensely.  If I am ever the editor of anything, I want to do any rejections I may have the unappealing duty of making with even a tiny bit of the panache the author describes.

Taking a short break from other required reading (self- or school-imposed) to read Stephen Hunt's The Court of the Air.  As with most first novels there is occasional awkwardness, and his later books may significantly improve on the first one...but my main thought for this one is "Wow, that's an amazingly dense setting!  I wish the characters had the same degree of richness."  Ah well.  An adventurey romp, all the same.

Oh, one more: Check out these decorated phones that are apparently All The Rage in Japan. Apparently the 3D style is more popular in Kansai. Hmm.

Ok, so who has been following Spore?

Anybody?

Well,for those of you who haven't, the idea behind the game is quite cool - create a creature, follow it through from a single-celled organism on through the Great Quest for Sentience and eventual spacefaring.  Reviews of it in actual execution are mixed - people hate the DRM, and all - but still...

Even so, I can't NOT be pleased by the sheer diversity of creatures people out there are building.  Some of them are the expected sorts...I mean, you have a bunch of geeky types playing this game, so the biggest surprise about this article in Popular Mechanics is that they have done so well rendering these assorted science-fictional beasties using this toolset.  I particularly enjoy this bevy of Lovecraftian creatures...I mean, LOOK at that Elder Thing!  Not perfect, sure, but a reasonable facsimile indeed, a very reasonable facsimile.

More evidence of geeky fan-craziness on Sporepedia (and I mean that in the most loving way):

Mario & Zelda?  Of course, of course.

Pokemon?  Oh yes indeed.

And that's not all.  People are making all sorts of things, even buildings.  Check it out for yourself here - what do you like on Sporepedia?

I often say that I'm not very good at board games.

Jonathan may be inclined to argue with that, and of course he is entitled to.  In some cases he may even be correct, but as of last Saturday's game night I have decided that what I really mean is "I am not very good at SOME board games."  The category of "some board games" includes the ones where you need the voodoo mojo to look 37 moves ahead and plan out your whole strategy...I don't think I've really got it.  Also it includes the kind of board games where it all works out to (in the end) math.

Yes, math, I mean it.  As in "This game has THIS many turns, and by THIS turn I must have THIS many widgets and do an action with THIS much value, accumulating THIS many points towards my ultimate score."

There are a LOT of board games where, ultimately, you feel rather as if you're playing a math problem with some random variables in it.  "The probability that player A has this card in his possession is two in four, but I can see by the bits on the table he's got in front of him that the strategy he's following is incompatible with this card, and I don't have it, so that means that BOTH player C and player D probably have one, since the deck is empty and none of them are in the discard pile."  Or, alternately, "this action is worth five points on its own, but with these factors in play that adds...three and then this other thing gives me another four, but will that be enough to beat Player A?" and then you are back to probability again.  If you know the game well enough to know what the probabilities ARE, which you don't, but at least one other person in your gaming party DOES.

Somewhere in the middle of all this math and estimating of probabilities and strategizing I have to make some kind of saving throw, and if I fail it a small but important portion of my brain begs off and goes to read a book instead, complaining that in the real world I would have a team of other guys doing the math with me.  Or for me.  As a result, I tend to hang about the table feeling stupid for a bit and then generally pick one of two play options:

1) Well, whatever, I'll just do the best thing that seems available with what I've got.
or
2) All righty then.  Let's see if I can make things more crazy for everyone ELSE.

I pick #2 more often than is reasonable, I imagine.  I feel a little sorry about this, but only a little. ;) It is fun to attempt to introduce chaos into orderly environments, I suppose.

This must be why there are some of us out there that like our games with a little more randomness in them: the addition of randomness makes it possible for an inexperienced player (or one who is not a brilliant strategist) to succeed against someone who is much, much, much better at playing these kinds of games.

I mention this because I participated in a game night this weekend.  We have a new friend in town, and so the usual suspects plus this new person (let us call him Feegle unless and until I am able to obtain his consent to use his real name on teh internets) all piled round our table and games were played.  Many games.

I think Feegle is finally going to give Jonathan a really worthy opponent - not many of us can do that.  Of course, it means that only by the most bizarre fluke of random chance will I ever win anything ;) but at least I can watch the heavyweights go at it.  While I was doing this, I noticed that there seemed in general to be a more heightened sense of "having fun" going on when the game was a little more randomized.  During the very deliberate games the atmosphere was much more serious...or so it seemed to me, anyway.

All of this is prelude to the fact that I am back in school again for the fall as of 9 a.m. (and will be there until after 9 p.m. today, in an upsetting quirk of scheduling.)  Maybe I should have stuck with three courses in the end after all?  Oh, well.  In any case, the blogging proceeds.  At a pace, if not apace.

The reading project continues as well, though I didn't get as much read over the trip as I would have liked - now I'm going to have to take the books back and then get a hold on them again.  Kind of lame, but eventually I'll get 'em.

Oh, yes, expect a Flickr set of Vancouver/Seattle photos soon.  I cannot BELIEVE we didn't get any good photos of Stacy.  What was I thinking?