Monday, January 14, 2008

Night and Dark Clothes Don't Mix!!

Right now I'm sitting in my 6:30 to 9:00 at night, HTML class. It is dark out, as the sun had already set before I left my house. On top of that, it's cloudy and rainy. A few minutes ago, I was in my car, on the way here. I was driving down an unlit stretch of road, when suddenly, I saw two pairs of feet appear within range of my headlights, directly in front of my car. I slam on my breaks, tires screeching like a banshee, sliding on the wet road, and stopping my car a couple of yards away from killing or severely injuring two people. These people gave me a, "huh?" look, and walked away, as the odor of burning tires surrounded my car. Thing is, these people were wearing all black, crossing an unlit street at night in the rain. Everybody who has the tendency of trying to stay alive knows that this is asking to be hit.

Thing is, this is far from the first time I've seen people in black clothes crossing an unlit street, appearing invisible until my headlights reached them. I've had many other times where I've seen some dark figure just reaching the other side of the street, making me think, "thank God they didn't cross any later, or I would have hit them. This time, however, they were right in front of my car, on the wet road. So I decided to look at all the other pedestrians out that night, and they were all wearing dark clothes. One person, I could only see their legs, because they had light pants, and another person, I could only see their white shoes, but everybody else was all in black.

Now, I know that right now, our culture seems to be in this, "bad good-guy" faze, where everybody wants to look all dark and formidable, because it's cooler. And every time you go out, you want to look as cool and Matrixy as possible, on the chance that everybody around you will pick you out of the hundreds of other people they come in contact with and say, "wow, look how spiffy that person looks." But you're probably not gonna look that cool when I'm scraping your bloody ass off my hood with my ice scraper. Maybe it's time to say to yourself, "hey, I'm an adult now, and I realize that in reality, I'm not an immortal vampire of the night."

Okay now, in all fairness, I'm sure everybody's done this at some point. I have a black leather jacket and black shoes, and I know I've gone out at night wearing all dark clothes. It's easy to dress that way during the day, not thinking about going out at night later. Sometimes you get caught working late. If you are out at night in dark clothes, at least make sure to cross the street in places where cars can see you ahead of time. This isn't a public service announcement, or a GI Joe, "and knowing is half the battle"/ Jimminy Cricket moral message thing. I'm just saying that I really don't want to go through the hastle involved with hitting a human with my car. So please have some consideration and don't dent my fender.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

VLOG Tag

So, there's this tag game going around on YouTube right now, where, if you get tagged, you make a video blog where you give five facts about yourself. I got tagged the other day by my freind Adam. Here's my response:

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

What's wrong here?

So, apparently there's a new chain message going around the internet. It's some sort of neat little brain teaser-mabobber, that goes like this:

Whats wrong here
AAA
BBB
CCC
DDD
EEE
FFF
GGG
HHH
III
JJJ
KKK
LLL
MMM
NNN
OOO
PPP
QQQ
RRR
SSS
TTT
UUU
VVV
WWW
XXX
YYY
ZZZ
Did you know that 80% of UCSD students could not find the error above? Repost this with the title “what’s wrong here”, and when you click “post “, the answer will be really obvious.

Note: You may want to read the following post before wasting your time trying to solve this.

I found this message on a friends profile on Facebook. So I decided to ponder this for awhile. After a couple of seconds, I decided to do a Google search to see if I could find the answer. Apparently, this message is starting to plague comment sections on blogs, journals, and profiles across the internet. Some people are getting bombarded with this nuisance, probably largely in part by people reposting it, as per the instructions, out of curiosity. I also found that there were many people who, like me, decided to try to satisfy their curiosity by looking it up, probably a wise decision.

So, I found a couple of articles dedicated to solving this little pest, and saw that not only are there several possible answers, but even different variations of the problem stated.

Now, the two most common answers I found had to do with the problem being in the question, "Whats wrong here". Some people say it's the absence of an apostrophe in "What's", and others, the absence of a question mark at the end. In these theories, the alphabetical, triple-columns are only there to distract from the actual situation. Problem is, some variations do include the apostrophe, question mark, or both. I've even seen variations where the beginning of the sentence isn't capitalized, which could be another possibility under this theory.

In another variation of the problem, the question is, "Find the error. It's impossible!". Which changes that theory, unless they originally left the apostrophe out of "It's", or something.

Another theory, is that it's a logic problem. The question asks what's wrong, but there is nothing wrong, thus the question of "what's wrong" is the very problem.

I've even seen it suggested that the problem is the presence of "KKK" within the triple columns, an idea which did occur to me, but I don't find very likely. (That would make an already lame riddle that much lamer.)

Thing is, the end of the problem states, "when you click 'post', the answer will be really obvious"
Why?
Another theory explains this, in that the "I"s are really lowercase "L"s. In most default typefaces, capital "I"s look the same as lowercase "L"s. In the text editor, however, the "L"s and "I"s are distinctly different, as they are in my Georgia typeface. Problem is, I copy and pasted several instances of this case into Notepad, which uses a distinguishable I/lowercase-L typeface, and found that in every instance, the capital "I"s are infact capital "I"s.

So I believe this last theory is infact the originally intended solution to this problem, simply because of the, "it will be obvious when you hit repost", part of the equation. This is the only solution where this statement is relevant. The problem is that at some point, somebody retyped this message instead of reposting it or even copy/pasting it. This person typed it out with capital "I"s, not knowing what the solution was supposed to be. It may even have been the original recipient who did this. That variation of the message is the one that ended up spreading, and spawning even more sub-variations. Because of this, the riddle is being posted like wildfire, yet irrelevant in that it lacks the originally intended problem.

Possibly, only the initiator of this pesky little message knows the truth. And they probably had no idea what a monster they were creating when they posted it.

sources: Banana Smoothie, Drunken Texting, 360 Gamers Together, XIHA Life BBS, I luv Korea