OddThinking

The challenge: What sentence becomes another valid sentence when ROT13ed?

To decide who is “it” (or “in”) first, in a playground game, such as chasey (a.k.a. tag), a fixed algorithmic process is used to make a pseudo-random choice.

Of course, this is a deterministic procedure, and we can, with diligence, careful calculation, computational power and just a little bit of luck, reverse engineer the algorithm and determine who will be eventually selected.

A random memory from when I was a kid on holidays in Murray Bridge just occurred to me. I was listening to a local radio station that was running a promotion with a baby food manufacturer. They called their listeners at random, and if they could read off the serial number from a can of […]

Wishing someone a Happy New Year may subject you to a Denial-of-Service Attack

I have been listening to organisations demanding that we defend our human right to die with dignity.

I find myself unable to support them.

Some Unicode characters are just calling for a caption competition. Ṏ “Latin capital letter o with tilde and diaeresis”? Is that the best you can do, Unicode Consortium?

I was just reminiscing about when I enrolled in Biology 1 at uni. They wanted to get a feel for the mathematical literacy of their students, so they gave us all a quick numeracy test, to see if we understood some basic concepts.

There were only four questions, clearly labelled Question 1, Question 2, Question 4 and Question 4.

I think I met the required standard…

One day I was thinking about the tradition of April Fools’ Day RFC Submissions and thought it would be fun to do a similar parody, but based on the Patent Submission form.

He was soon being groomed for the highest public office in the land… There was however, a fly in the ointment.

{To Do: Create a pithy excerpt that makes this article about foreign characters compelling to read.}