Today, I came across the article
Schizotypy, creativity and mating success in humans by
Daniel Nettle and
Helen Clegg, which concludes that creative people have more sex partners.
When he speaks about creativity he means artistic creativity. Appearently,
people who have artistic creativity react stronger on impulses.
I also found the article Schizotypy and mental health amongst poets, visual artists and mathematicians
by Daniel Nettle. Could it be that mathematicians have less "unusual experiences",
because they are simply better at understanding and thus explaining the reality
around them. Mathematical understanding also requires creativity. I personally
believe that understanding is a creative process, because one has to generate a
hypothesis about something that one experieces and than verify it against that
experience. Many of the greatest inventions are the result of placing things in
a different perspective, and that often involves a "creative" jump from the
traditional line of thinking.
It has been some weeks that Annabel and I went
to the university to play Go. We arrived as first.
A little later, Marcel and Rudi arrived, and shortly thereafter Ton. I
decided to play against Ton. Taco had also arrived, and started a game
against Marcel. And then Annabel played against Rudi. She was given 25
stones ahead, and lost with 54 points. Ton and I decided that I was to
be given six stones ahead. After about two hours, I lost with 39 points.
I had kept all my stones apart, but somehow he succeeded in capturing almost
all the boarders. And all those long small boarders made up a lot of points.
He felt we had some good fights, and that our game play was definitely getting
at a higher level. In past weeks, he played some strong games against Marcel.
It seems that he too has become stronger in the past year.
This evening, I started with Myst, not the original version, but the
"Myst Masterpiece Edition" from 1999, which as I understand it, only
has improved graphics and sounds. I am going to keep
a logbook again. The reason that I
continue with Myst and not with Uru: The path of the shell, is
because I have not been able to locate a cheap copy of this game.
This weekend, Andy was away to the weekend-care, and Annabel was having
a birthday party this afternoon. Li-Xia and I
took the opportunity to go the city together. The last time we did this,
was on October 6, our wedding day. After we
had done our normal shoppings and had put everything in the bags of our
bikes, we went to Camel and ordered the usual. We sat inside on a round
table, close to each other. When I went to pay the bill, the boy who
served us, asked if we wanted to pay separately. Did we look so much in
love that we could not have been married, or was it just a standard
question for him? Then we looked around "De Slegte" bookshop and some
other shops. We also looked for some dresses for Li-Xia. In the end we
did not buy anything. We came home around five o'clock and decided to
lay down for half an hour.
This evening, I made some curly kail hotchpotch.
Instead of using fresh potatoes, we decided to use instant mashed potatoes
especially for hotchpotch by Maggi.
Annabel did not like the taste of the instant
mashed potatoes. I felt it was quite heavy on my stomach. I also had some
red unions with it. And we opened a can of Unox sausages.
This evening, I installed flymode for Uru. I took some time to look
around the different Uru worlds. In a sense it was a kind of dissapointment.
It is almost like watching a behind the scenes of a movie. In a way it
takes away a lot of the magic. Somehow you are expect to see more, when
you start flying around, but soon you discover that only visible part have
been modeled. I also found this interesting page about
Uru tweaks
and the Alcugs Wiki.
This morning, there was a little snow on the
grass and the cars. In morning it did snow several times a little bit.
None of this snow did stay on the ground
This morning, there was a thin layer of snow on
everything. The sky was relatively clear. When we came outside, we discovered
that the snow looked more like hail as it consisted of all very small hail
stones.
Yesterday evening, I discovered a nice way to create a jigsaw for one dimensional
cellular automatons, starting from an idea I got last Sunday while in church.
The form of the jigsaw pieces is such that they hold together.
The basic layout consists of two H connected to the side, and then rotated 45
degrees clock-wise. This solves the crossing problem. Below the pieces are given for
Rule 30, where the order of the pieces follows the one given
on MathWorld. The shapes
are slightly different for the values zero and one. For clarity, zero is
coloured with white and one with black.
The entry "Universal jigsaw puzzle" on the blog of Paul Harrison gives a jigsaw puzzle
for Rule 110. This makes use of auxilary pieces to solve the crossing problem.
This evening, I downloaded UruTweak an notepad clone that performs some decryption/encryption during load/save
so that Uru files can be tweaked. I gave it a try and removed some blockages
in the city. I have played with the idea of developing an age by myself, but I
afraid that it will be a lot of work. Maybe I should start with extending an existing
age. You are not allowed to publish any modifications.
The new Afghan consitution drew praise from the Bush Administration with its supposed
freedoms of speech, religion, movement, and equal rights for women and minorities, and
in particular its requirement that 25 percent of the legislative seats in the Loya Jirga
be set aside for women. What the Administration chose to ignore is the fact that Islamic
law trumps all of the so-called freedom guarantees in the constitution. The constitution
states that "no law can be contrary to the sacred religion of Islam" (Article 3). As
Freedom House's Paul Marshall pointed out in a National Review piece, "If the state
declares that its laws and decisions are identical with Islam, then any opposition can
be punished as violating Islam." That pretty much shuts down criticism of the Islamic
Republic of Afghanistan.
Lack of freedom is just one of the areas where little has changed. The U.S. Commission
for International Religious Freedom calls the present Karzai government and the new
constitution "Taliban-lite." And for good reason. War lords and drug lords have
strengthened their grip over large areas of the country, while opium production and
exportation has boomed. There are frequent allegations that the government is involved
in the drug trade, something the Afghan president does not deny. Many conservative
clerics, jihadists, and war lords, even former Taliban, have gained a semblance of
legitimacy as new members of parliament.
Indeed the Supreme Court's Chief Justice Shinwari sometimes sounds more Taliban-esque
than the Taliban themselves. According to the organization Equality Now, Chief Justice
Shinwari has made several attempts to ban women from singing and dancing in public. A
year ago the Supreme Court issued a ban on cable television channels, particularly
condemning Indian musicals. Afghanistan's top judge has stated that women should cover
their bodies entirely, exposing only their faces and hands, and that adulterers should
be stoned to death.
Meanwhile hatred of the West continues apace. Hazrat Wahriz, founder of the Union of
Freedom of Expression in Afghanistan told the Chicago Tribune that, "in every mosque,
[clerics] are agitating against anything having to do with democracy and anything to
do with freedom of expression."
One wonders what society President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were
referring to when they said "Afghanistan is now inspiring the world with its march
toward democracy," and (referring to the defeat of the Taliban) that "the Afghan people
have now been freed from that horror."
The fact is that the keystones of a free society -- freedom of speech, religion, the
press, and equal rights for women -- all remain pretty much the same as under the Taliban.
So what has changed for the average Afghani? You may want to ask Ali Mohaquq Nasab,
while you still can.
Tonight, Annabel and I went to the university to
Go. I challenged Ton for again and we decided that I would
be given six stones ahead. Annabel played a number of games on a 9x9 board against
Jan-Willem. Then she continued reading in a book she had brought and looking around.
I felt, I was not doing so good, and in the end I lost with 23 points.
Today, I saw a spam messages that started with the line: "Can you touch her G-Spot?
If your Manhood is bigger and long enough you can." The messages then goes on to
suggest that it should be longer than 6 inch to reach the G-spot. Of course, this
is total nonsense, because the G-spot is at most 2 inches inside the vagina.
On Wednesday, we recieved a free pedometer because we joined the
Yakult contest. Today, I have put it on.
On the end of the day, it said that I had made 12691 steps, which is equal to
14.910 Km or 266.6 Kcal.
Today, I had a day off, and Li-Xia and I went
shopping in the city. By accident we came across a copy of Myst IV: Revelations
for just 10 Euro and could not resist the temptation to buy it. I installed it
in the evening, and played for almost half an hour. See my logbook for the details.
This time I used one kilo of patotoes to make curly kail hotchpotch. I decided to boil some red
unions with the potatoes. It gave a little sweet taste to the hotchpotch.
One type of Dutch hotchpotch is made with carrots, unions and potatoes.
So, it is a kind of mixture of different types of hotchpotches.
This morning, I was having trouble solving a nonogram. I thought
it could not be solved with my usual approach of solving row-by-row
and column-by-column. I saw some way I could get further with some
combined row and column reasoning. I was excited to find a nonogram
that could not be solved with the row-by-row and column-by-column
approach. I entered it into my original solver,
which did not have any problem solving it. As this program uses only
row-by-row and column-by-column reasoning I did not find a counter example.
But nevertheless, I got some idea for constructing a nonogram that could
not be solved with the row-by-row and column-by-column approach. I
had to modify the program to verify that it would only have a single
solution. And to my surprise it did work. Then I constructed a simpler
counter example of a nonogram that has a single solution but cannot
be solved with the simple row-by-row and column-by-column approach.
It is a seven by seven nonogram with for both the rows and the
columns the numbers: 3, 2-2, 2-2, 1-1, 2-2, 2-2, and 3. It would
not surprise me if a smaller counter-example does exist.
When we arrived home yesterday, there was a little snow on the ground. Today, it did throughout the day. Every then
and now, little snowflakes could be seen falling from the sky. In the
afternoon, I looked around in the city a little, and when I
went home there was a thin layer of snow on my bike as well as
on the ground. That snow stayed the rest of the day.
In the past weeks, I worked on more Rule 30 Jigsaws.
First of all, I came up with a very solution on a square grid. It is based
on basis of 9 by 9 squares. With one pixel per square, it looks like:
Because this is rather small, below a five fold magnification:
In the evening, it started to snow. It was drifting snow. Although it looked
like a lot at certain places, I don't think it was somewhere between one or
two centimeter. There is a warm front moving in from the west. That means that
temperatures are going to rise, but because the warm air flows over the cold
air on the ground, it is also an ideal condition for black ice. According
to the weather report, it is going to reach us tomorrow morning.
This afternoon, I spend about four hour writing a program for finding the smallest Nonogram that cannot be solved in row-by-row
and column-by-column approach, yet only has one solution. (See entry
of last Tuesday for the first counter example that I found). When I was finally done,
I was rather surprised by the large number of such Nonograms that were found. The
smallest 'hard' Nonogram (with respect to area) is a two by four Nonogram, with on
the short side the numbers 1-1 and 2 and on the long side the numbers 1, 1, 1, and 1.
The solution of this Nonogram is:
1 0 0 1
0 1 1 0
Below a table that for different size gives some numbers. The column 'total' contains
the total number of patterns possible, which is equal to two raised to the power
of the product of the sizes (=2(n*m)). The column 'reducable' contains
the number of patterns with empty starting or finishing columns of rows or that
have more than one adjecent empty rows or columns. The column 'hard' contains the
number of patterns that are 'hard' nonograms. The column 'single' contains the
number of patterns that are nonograms with a single solution, and which can be
solved with the row-by-row and column-by-column approach. The column 'multiple'
contains patterns whoes nonograms have other solutions than the pattern from
which they are derived.
