While AIDS remains a worldwide issue that remains on out minds constantly, World’s AIDS Day does not have a noticeable affect on interest about AIDS. Note the graph below:

AIDS

In fact, after each year since 2004, the amount of personal interest in AIDS has fallen slightly.  I feel the pain on this one.  It is really difficult impact people long-term.

I wrote a Perl script that simulates a game of war.  As I remember playing it, the game goes like this:  Both players receive 26 cards randomly.  Both players play a card off of the top of their deck at the same time.  The highest card wins and takes all of the cards.  I say all of the cards because if both players play the same card (suit is irrelevant) at the same time, then they go into WAR.  Each player player discards three cards and then each play a card.  From there the players each play a card and there is either a winner or another WAR continues.  Thus it is possible to have many cards won in one round.

When playing this game as a kid, I realized that it had the possibility of going on and on and on for many turns.  But how many turn?  Yay numbers!  The Perl script that I used is at the end of this article (I know it’s *sniff verbose).

More interesting to me is the distribution of the length of the game (I measured it in number of won rounds).

Here is a graph from excel.   There are 1000 samples.  The numbers on the x-axis represent the duration of a simulation in number of rounds.  The y-axis represents frequency.   Thus there are more games of war that end in 100-150 rounds than any other interval in this graph.

So… most games (slightly over half), will finish in 150 round or less.  Some can and do last longer.  In this sample,

#!usr/bin/perl

use List::Util ’shuffle’;
my @cards = qw(2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14);
my %maper = ();
$maper->{2} = “2″;
$maper->{3} = “3″;
$maper->{4} = “4″;
$maper->{5} = “5″;
$maper->{6} = “6″;
$maper->{7} = “7″;
$maper->{8} = “8″;
$maper->{9} = “9″;
$maper->{10} = “10″;
$maper->{11} = “jack”;
$maper->{12} = “queen”;
$maper->{13} = “king”;
$maper->{14} = “ace”;

$printGameDiagnostics = 0;
for($gameNumber=0; $gameNumber < 1000; $gameNumber++)
{
#######starting the game….
my @deckFull;

foreach my $card (@cards)
{
for(my $i=0; $i < 4; $i++)
{
push(@deckFull, $card);
if($printGameDiagnostics){    print “pushed $maper->{$card}\n”}
}
}

@deckFull = shuffle(@deckFull);

my @p1Deck;
my @p2Deck;

my $i = 0;
foreach my $card(@deckFull) ##deals shuffled cards
{
if($i % 2 == 0)
{
push(@p1Deck, $card);
}
else
{
push(@p2Deck, $card);
}
$i++;
}

$playNumber = 1;
$numCardsP1 = @p1Deck;
$numCardsP2 = @p2Deck;

if($printGameDiagnostics){   print “$numCardsP1.$numCardsP2\n”;}

@winStack;
while($numCardsP1 > 0 && $numCardsP2 > 0)
{
if($printGameDiagnostics){   print “$numCardsP1.$numCardsP2 added are “.($numCardsP1+$numCardsP2).”\n”;}
$winner = 0;
while($winner == 0 && ($numCardsP1 > 0 && $numCardsP2 > 0))
{
$winner = check($p1Deck[0],$p2Deck[0]);
if($winner == 1)
{
if($printGameDiagnostics){      print “p1 win!\n”;
print “$maper->{$p1Deck[0]} VS $maper->{$p2Deck[0]} “.check($p1Deck[0],$p2Deck[0]).” wins\n”;
}
push(@p1Deck, shift(@p1Deck));
push(@p1Deck, shift(@p2Deck));
push(@p1Deck, @winStack);
@winStack = [];
shift(@winStack);
}
elsif ($winner == 2)
{
if($printGameDiagnostics){      print “p2 win!\n”;
print “$maper->{$p1Deck[0]} VS $maper->{$p2Deck[0]} “.check($p1Deck[0],$p2Deck[0]).” wins\n”;
}
push(@p2Deck, shift(@p2Deck));
push(@p2Deck, shift(@p1Deck));
push(@p2Deck, @winStack);
@winStack = [];
shift(@winStack);
}
else
{
if($printGameDiagnostics){      print “WAR!\n”;
print “$maper->{$p1Deck[0]} VS $maper->{$p2Deck[0]} “.check($p1Deck[0],$p2Deck[0]).” wins\n”;}
push(@winStack, shift(@p2Deck));
push(@winStack, shift(@p1Deck));

push(@winStack, shift(@p2Deck));
push(@winStack, shift(@p1Deck));

push(@winStack, shift(@p2Deck));
push(@winStack, shift(@p1Deck));

push(@winStack, shift(@p2Deck));
push(@winStack, shift(@p1Deck));
}
$numCardsP1 = @p1Deck;
$numCardsP2 = @p2Deck;
}

$playNumber++;
if($printGameDiagnostics){  system(“pause”); }
}
if($numCardsP1>$numCardsP2)
{
push(@p1Deck, @winStack);
@winStack = [];
shift(@winStack);
}
else
{
push(@p2Deck, @winStack);
@winStack = [];
shift(@winStack);
}
if($printGameDiagnostics){print “$numCardsP1.$numCardsP2\n”;}
if($printGameDiagnostics){print “at the end of round $playNumber p1 has $numCardsP1 and p2 has $numCardsP2″;}
print “$playNumber\n”;
}####################game ends

###this function returns
sub check
{
my $card1 = @_[0];
my $card2 = @_[1];
if($card1>$card2)
{
return 1;
}
elsif ($card1<$card2)
{
return 2;
}
else
{
return 0;
}
}

I LIKE MONEY!!!

This Christmas, my little brother Ransom wanted me to make him a game that he designed. He is 10 years old. Surprisingly, he had it well planned out with reasonable requirements. As part of his present, he wanted a way for people to buy this off of the internet. I reasoned with him a little bit and he agreed to ask for donations instead.

Level 3 - Screenshot

Level 2 - Screenshot

So here is the donate link:

1/2 will go to me and 1/2 to my brother that made all of the skins and models.

Here is the download link.

I went ahead and put this on FreewareFiles.com. It has 50 as of 2 days after this post…

I stumbled on a YouTube video with the alert: “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled.”

After I saw that, I wondered just how many YouTube videos had the same thing happen.  So I did some googleing to try to find out.  First, I searched:

GoogleSearch: “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled.” site:youtube.com

This returned 260,000 results.  Keep in mind that the almighty Google search engine does not index every website, nor, I suppose, YouTube video.

Next, I searched for something that I think brings up all YouTube videos:

GoogleSearch: site:youtube.com “Video Responses:”  “Text Comments:”

This returned 1,760,000 results.

If we assume that all videos are indexed randomly, then we can take the WMG audio killed videos (260,000) over the total videos (1,760,000) and get a proportion of WMG audio take down videos.  This is roughly 14 percent.

This means that 14% of YouTube videos have no audio because of a WMG audio take down.

What do you think?  Does this surprise you?  Is my reasoning sound?

So I found this startup: bitloot.com.  If you watch the video on the main page, you can get see the intentions of the company.  It is a new software development philosophy of funding that is a really novel idea.  There are people who make ideas.  These ideas can be discussed about and by anyone.  Once there is an idea, anyone can contribute money.  The money that is contributed by one or more individuals is kept in a “super secret vault”.  Then a developer can create the software for that idea.  Once the developer creates the software, the developer releases a demo or powerpoint of the created software.  Then a vote is held amoung contributors to OK the transfer of funds to the developer.  Presto-the software is released as opensource.  Everyone wins!

I read a story on Google News that says that Viacom has won some legal case in which they are to receive information from YouTube (whom they were taking legal action against).  The result of this suit is that YouTube must give Viacom all of its data on users and what videos they watch.

This is so overkill.  Viacom should only go after users who actually post video’s that they own.  Why should the owneres of MTV be trusted with all of our viewing records?  It gives them a lot of marketing data.  Just imagine Google suing Viacom for their numbers on what people watch.  Ridiculous!

Thus I have sent Viacom a complaint (I am sure I am not the only one).  You should also complain if you are outraged.  The following is the complaint I have just sent though their website:

Dear Viacom, I am outraged that you would ask for a list of ALL individual video’s that You Tube users have watched.  This information could be used for any number of purposes such as viewers habits and desires.
I personally think that it is funny that you are starting to lose money because people have been freed from the 4 channels of television that they used to be stuck with.  You Tube represents a new form of on demand media that will win in the end.
If You Tube actually hands over that very sensitive information of millions of users.  I will never buy Viacom stock, products, et cetera.

It a marketing dream!  Check this tool out because it rocks!  Google trends allows you to see search terms and websites ranked by search volume and news volume.  Prepare to make inferences.  Here are some interesting things I have searched for.

I started with a comparison of myspace and facebook:

As we see, from 2004-2007, myspace was more popular, however, facebook appears to have finally taken the lead.  Have a look at the next panel.

When orederd by region, we see that myspace is WAY more popular than facebook in America.

Computer graphics, though flashy and amazing, are all based off of mathematical formulas and algorithms. 3d graphics, in general, are all based off of polygons and verteces. In programming, I have found that once I can draw something, a huge amount of possible applications arise. In this tree example, I started by making a function that could draw a rectangle with any length, width, and angle. My rectangle function has 5 parameters, x, y, width, height, and angle. The x and y parameters represent the bottom of the rectangle.

By using recursion, I was able to start at the trunk of the tree and branch outward. Each limb, including the trunk, makes two other limbs that are smaller at different angles(so that the limbs fork). I use some randomization to make the tree look more natural. When the limbs stop spawning, they make some leaves. Here is the code and a picture.

When a company or researcher needs to distinguish two treatments, products, or anything else, they use statistical processes to get conclusive results. One of the statistical tests that is the most useful is the ANOVA test. The ANOVA test can find statistical difference between multiple samples.

As part of my Statistical Quality Assurance and Experimental Design class, I had to do an experiment and analysis. I chose to look at banana decay. I wanted to see if bananas left on the counter lasted longer than bananas in the refrigerator. It turns out that the banana’s left in the fridge (Treatment 2) last the longest. Note the picture:

After finishing the experiment, I was sure that the bananas from the fridge were the least decayed; but could I prove that statistically? Once I ran all of the numbers on the bananas, I could. You can read the Banana Project Report for details where the ANOVA test proves that bananas kept in the fridge last longer. Here is a graph of my results:

I can post more later, but you get an idea about how things went. It took 20 hours to turn all of my pictures into data… It became a little tiresome.

We all dislike spam.  But imagine being called a spammer–a turncoat–a rebel.  I have been deemed a spambot by Blogger and my account has been disabled after only one post.  From what I’ve read, Blogger has recently started to use keyword indexing to highlight spam-esque words or nonsensical sentences.  They also check for sites that link to only one other site.  After one post, do they really have enough information?  After two weeks of waiting, I have given up on the claim that they would have a real person look at it to see if it was spam.  So alas, here I am.

Expect technical blogs from my posts with overlap from academia, theory,  philosophy, and interesting thoughts.

Here are some things I am planning to post:

- Time management and prediction via the standard deviation and average of records

- My report for statistical quality assurance on the Decay of Bananas

- Fundamentals of OpenGL and computer graphics in general

- Learning perl as I learn it :) .

- Linux topics