Religion. i haven't been posting on religion as much as i used to. millions of people are praying for their god to cure an amputee, but that's not happening.

Calculus. since i moved to Oregon, I've made learning calculus and programming a priority. i want to write about the definition of the derivative and anti-integral in a future post. since i came to Oregon I've been studying calculus and since I've been out of high school, i've learned way more about the subject than when I was in class. i think what helped the most were the DVDs by a professor at the University of Austin. He had some sweet analogies describing the tangent line to a point and describing the limit that I wish my teacher in school used.

Programming. i've laid of programming ever since i developed my philosophy of c++. i was satisfied enough with my understanding of programming languages that I took a break. before I had a lot of trouble understanding basic things such as the function of 'constructors' in c++.

I don't get access to the internet very often. The closest thing I got to internet is the text messages I get from twitter. My pass time is studying calculus. I'm starting to understand calculus a lot more than I did in high school. The derivative of a function is the rate of change of the function. The integral is the sum of the products of all the rates of changes and little changes  time  of  an independent variable. The derivative is also the tangent line to any point on the graph of the function; the integral is the area under the graph of any function.

I've been learning with Calculus Made Clear films. All basics come in 8 hours of film. I like the films because they include a lot of examples of how aspects of calculus may be applied to solve "real life" problems. I think studying math solely from the abstract is more difficult than learning how the same math can be applied to different real life problems. One interesting example: what width of a rectangle provides the most area given that 3 sides of the rectangle sum to 600 units of perimeter? Another example I need to review myself: if there was a floor with parallel lines and the distance between those lines was equal to the length of a stick, what are the odds that the stick will hit a line once you throw it on the floor?

I'm not sure how calculus integrates into programming yet (pardon the pun). I haven't been studying C++ alongside calculus, but I plan on getting back to programming once I'm confident in my understanding of calculus.

I'm continuously trying to find ways to occupy my easily bored brain. I've been reading "Kitchen Science" by Howard Hillman and watching episodes of The Twilight Zone. I did go to Sea World and Disney World in consecutive days several days ago (with my girlfriend), but since then reading and watching Twilight Zone is all. Oh yeah, I almost forgot the many hours I spent thinking of the code for a program that would solve any sudoku. Unfortunately, my pursuit at programming the sudoku solver ended in failure.

Kitchen Science is a great book if you want to learn interesting science about food and even some history about food. I bet you didn't know that once upon a time the London Broil was a cow's flanks but after World War II the London Broil became so popular that butchers had to market the round beef as the London Broil. Hell, if I got something wrong here I really don't care. I bet you also didn't know that the reason visible ice forms in ice cream is because the ice cream was exposed to relatively high temperatures for too long allowing the water in the ice cream to separate from the fat and form large ice crystals. There you go: the book has a lot of interesting facts.

I have never seen Twilight Zone as far as I know before july 4th 2009 when there was a Twilight Zone marathon on the Sci Fi channel for the entire day that day. I think the marathon got so much attention they extended it to July 5th so I saw about five episodes before there was no more marathon :(. I was really sad when the marathon was over but I quickly remembered that just about anything on TV is very likely to be on the internet. Now I continue to watch episodes on the internet through Veoh and CBS . I felt like I was in some one of Twilight Zone's twisted happy endings.

Before Twilight Zone and before realizing how much fun Kitchen Science could be, my mind was focused on solving every sudoku possible. I don't mean that I was actually going to solve every sudoku possible because that would probably take more than one life time. What's funny is that probability has a lot to do with how I went at creating the program that would solve all sudoku puzzles. After many days of jotting down barely helpful notes and sleeping on the problem, I finally came to a great realization as to how the any sudoku could be solved. The program would insert a random number in all squares without numbers in them already and then compare each square to all the other squares in their row and column to make sure there are no repeats and if there were repeats the squares with a random numbers would be blank again and the process would repeat. In theory, this would solve any sudoku with no problem. I actually tried my code with a smaller version of sudoku with a 9 by 9 board where each square holds an integer between 1 and 3  and the program sucessfully solved any combination in seconds. However, when I tried a 9 by 9,  the program was taking a long time. I took a while to realize that the odds of all the numbers coming in place was very very very unlikely  (let's say about 1/9 ^ 60).

what do you do for fun?

Flesh eating parasites don't stop at anything; not even TV personality, Ben Fogle. I have no idea who this guy is but flesh eating parasites suck. They also remind me of what a loving deity must be out there. I'm kidding. I'm confused. I haven't read the Bible, but I've heard that God created all the other animals for us. Should flesh eating parasites know they're eating the flesh of the only species that worships the creator of the universe and not eat our flesh? Why would a loving deity create a flesh eating parasite?