Absent For A Bit ....

I am away for a little while working on a few or more episodes for The Adventures of My Space Alien Alter Ego story ... will return (to Earth) soon!

Notice: Blogger has screwed up and lost a bunch of photos out of my blog! They are replaced with a gray silhouette of a human head. I will eventually get them replaced with the correct photo, it may take a while to find and fix everything. So some of my stories don't make much sense without their photos, sorry for the inconvenience.

esbb

2009-04-30

A Question for A Confused Cooper

A poem for my dog and wonderful daily companion, Cooper

A Question for A Confused Cooper


In the course of every day
I ask my dog several questions
along the way,
Such as what he wants to eat
or what he wants to play.
But the one that was the funniest
from yesterday
Was when I asked him,
"Did you lose your hippo?
I think he flew (from your mouth)
-> that a way"


Poetry Link: to my next poem in the blog 
(actually this one will be song lyrics !)

Proving That Esfahan Is Not Half of The World

Today I learned that there is Persian proverb:

"Esfahān nesf-e jahān ast"

which mean "Esfahan is half the world". Half the world??? That is a very tall claim. So I looked up the city in wikipedia. Esfahan is a beautiful city that is in the middle of the country of Iran. It is located on the main East-West and North-South routes crossing Iran and was once one of the largest cities in the world. It was the capital of its part of the world a couple times, I believe. The pictures included in the wikipedia article alone show a city rich in culture and beauty.

Esfahan has a sumbol that seems to indicate that it is half of the world:


I would think that the left side looks like a globe with lines of longitude and the right side is the pretty part, so the right side must be the Esfahan part (?), I'm just guessing here folks.

So now we tackle my mathematical proof to see if Esfahan is truly half of the world.

I tried examining Arabic fonted words, but they were not much help and then I learned there is a language called Unipers which tries to take Farsi (the main Iranian language) and use a Roman font. So here goes my word math....

From the best that I can tell from the transliterated phrase, the word 'jahan' is the word for 'world'. I noticed that 'Esfahan' has some of the same common letters in a row, 4 of them, the 'ahan' part. So, doing some fractional math (don't get all 'I forgot that stuff years ago' math-whimpy on me if you have read this far), 4/7 of the word Esfahan is equal to 4/5 of Jahan. I guess (?) we should do fractional multiplication:

4/7 times 4/5 = 16/35 = or 45.714% of Esfahan is the World

So mathematically we half a proof that 'Esfahan' is a little less than half of the 'World'.


So I propose that this should be the new symbol for the city of Esfahan:


And if you want something a little fancier, I made this one too, as a gift to the people of the artistic city of Esfahan, a city well known for it Persian rug manufacture:

My New Occupation: Mitsubishi Dealership

Its not what you think, unless you know me really well. Its not cars or WWII aircraft. Its pens. Yes, pens. Probably the finest tipped pens in existence for the common man. Yes, there are Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph, but they are a pain in the &utt, and expen$ive (x10). These Mitubishi's write smoothly and rarely skip.



I just got in a new supply of Mitsubishi Gel Ink pens

This is my current inventory as of 2008.Nov.07:

Size 0.18 mm Mitsubishi Uni-ball Signo Bit UM-201
$3.00 each

Black
Blue
Emerald Green
Light Blue
Light Purple
Mandarin Orange
Pink
Purple
Red
Turquoise

Size 0.28 mm Mitsubishi Uni-ball Signo DX UM-151 $2.25 each

Black
Light Blue
Blue
Red
Emerald
Lime Green - New Color!

They are also available at JetPens.com
I just re-order in a large enough quantity to avoid their shipping ($25 minimum at jetpens.com) and then sell them at my cost. My wife says (loudly), "YOU AREN'T MAKING A PROFIT??? Whats the use in doing it?" ..to bring fine things to fine people, honey.

Desk 13 and Sponty

Desk 13

When Sister Mary Agatha would leave the room, I would begin. But first, the geography of our setting: The classroom in Parochial School had 25 desks laid out exactingly in a 5 by 5 grid and 24 were occupied. The distance from the desk to the walls and desk to desk perfectly matched occupying the square part of the room. Only the room was a rectangle, after taking a section of the front area for Sister MA's podium and circular trash can on one side and giant globe on the other. The lone desk in the middle of the 25, Desk 13 from the beginning or the end, had recently been suddenly vacated when the occupant had told her father that she wanted to be a nun, too, just like Sister MA when she grew up and the enraged father took his daughter from our midst forever.


0[_]0

x x x x x

x x x x x

x x o x x

x x x x x

x x x x x


Now I return to the word 'begin' near the beginning of my story. I would quietly count 1,2,3 after the door would click shut behind Sister MA. Then in unison all 24 of us would turn to the middle empty chair, together speak in monotone, each one slightly above a whisper but the collective voice was heard just outside by Sister MA in her current sister-sister chat through the ventilation system which made remarkable metallic reverberations as an intercom:

"And then there were nun",

followed by a brief 1200 millisecond pause and then two voices (always mine and Cindy, it was our idea after all), slowly shaking our heads,


" none? ",


and the 22 would chant, turning, breaking into 2 banks of 11 each for myself and Cindy, 22 index fingers in the air slightly blocking the passage of the their breath,


" not one "


Sister MA would open the door and poke her head inside to see us all motionless, turned back around with our heads forward and down dissolved into our books.


"Did someone say something?"


A silence on our part and then Cindy, our spokeswoman, would say,

"Not one person spoke"


Sister MA reflected a pause back, squinted while turning her head 17 degrees to the left in a manner later made famous by John Belushi, and then closed the door.


Sponty


When we were young and would get terribly excited, whoever was the least excited (LE) of the bunch would say,


"Stop, or you'll burst into flames with excitement",


and then whoever was the most excited (ME) would say,


"or what, I'll turn into ashes?"


and the LE would finalize,


"a dash of ash to stash in the trash".


And we would all fall down giggling in great excitement hoping not to catch fire spontaneously, and although we didn't know that spont word just yet, we just felt all sponty inside. And then we would sing our Dash/Ash/Stash/Trash song for the next hour or so and giggle until our faces hurt. Oh, that felt so good.


Hold it. In each of those memories I am a little girl with strawberry blond hair, dimples and freckles. Sorry, those must have been someone else's memories, as I am a 50-year-old brown haired man who has never been inside a parochial school; no dimps, no frecks.

2009-04-06

Sudoku Rectangular A-B-B-A B-A-A-B Rule

While playing Sudoku this morning I think I noticed something new (at least for me).

Every Sudoku puzzle is supposed to have a unique solution. It is not supposed to be possible to have a pair of numbers in a 3x3 square that can be switched and then have the corresponding pair in another 3x3 square to the side or above or below then just be switched, what I call an A-B, B-A -> B-A, A-B swap AND have those 4 cells form the corners of a rectangle
(see fig 4).

For instance, this morning in a puzzle I had deduced that the pair of numbers at pair position A-B was 1 and 6, (see fig 1) but didn't know which order. Shortly after that I figured out that B and A' were also 1 and 6, (see fig 2) in the middle column of the puzzle, but again I didn't have enough information at that time to make a final determination of the pair B and A'. Then I tried to figure out the position labeled ? in fig 3. At that point I realized that the cell at B' could not contain a 1 or 6.

Reason: If A & B and B' & A' can be swapped with 1 and 6 or 6 and 1, then there would not be a unique solution to the entire puzzle. The swapping of 1-6 & 6-1 to 6-1 & 1-6 would not break an otherwise completed Sudoku puzzle, as each row, column, and 3x3 grid would still contain 1 through 9

Fig 1

Fig 2

Fig 3

Fig 4 Illegal Combination


If my logic is incorrect, incomplete or unsound, please let me know.

This may prove to be a useful tool when trying to solve a Sudoku puzzle. I don't think I have seen this "trick" explained before.

Update 2009.04.08 - Note: All 4 corners of the rectangle have to be updateable cells for this rule to apply. Sudoku games begin with a certain amount of cells filled in, non-updateable. I noticed several examples in completed puzzles where rectangles do exist, but at least one of the corners was a non-updateable cell, to which this rule does not apply, hence the alternating A-B-B-A B-A-A-B in the title.

New Blog for My Abstract Art ... Come Visit

Click HERE for the Art of Ernest S B Boston

These are pieces that I have generated mainly using computer art tools. Enjoy !

Something New:

I am also in the process of linking my poetry blog entries together. This project is only partially finished. A "Poetry LINK" at the bottom of the blog entry points to the next older piece of poetry.


First poem in the series of linked poems ....

Turn Gold Out of the Darkness

Turn Gold Out of the Darkness

Blog Archive

My Art

These are some of my abstract art pieces. They are available as prints, send me a note if you are interested.

Couch Glow

Couch Glow

Gold As Smoke

Gold As Smoke

Flowing Wood

Flowing Wood