Lelanophilus

On the seventeenth of July I celebrated Dinosaur Day with Mallory. It was pretty epic.  We ate dinosaur nuggets and wore dinosaur shirts and watched a dinosaur movie and made dinosaur hoodies!  It was awesome.  Also!  Also, I made a dinosaur puzzle for Mallory!  Check out these pieces in this pretty awful bag I made too!

I love making puzzles!  This one was especially special because I spent some time playing with vector art and making a bunch of colorful dinosaurs.  I printed out the picture I made on fancy photograph paper and glued it onto some MDF.  I think the dinosaurs are super cute.  The distinct colors kind of make it one of the easiest puzzles I’ve ever made  even though it has a hefty number of pieces.

Did you notice that it is kind of heart shaped?  I don’t know if Mallory did.

Here is a nice little closeup:

So that is it!  You should probably celebrate dinosaur day next year.  It will make you real happy if you love dinosaurs.  And really, who doesn’t?

[I wrote this on the twenty-second of April, 2007.  Sorting algorithms were so magical back then.]

“The Archetypical Perversely Awful Sorting Algorithm”

Bogo sort is a wonderful sorting algorithm. It is, in sheer awesomeness, second to none. Allow me to explain.

The algorithm for Bogo sort is described thusly: Imagine that you have a deck of cards that you desire to sort. First, throw them all into the air. Try to get a nice spread, maybe catch the wind a little. Then, pick up the cards one at a time (without prejudice to what you can see of those that land face-up). Check to see if they are in order. They aren’t!? Repeat.

Best Case: O(n). Theoretically you could get them in order on the first try.

Average Case: O(n*n!). More realistically you won’t get them in order for a very, very, very long time.

Worst Case: O(unbounded). Perhaps you won’t get them in order ever?

This means that Bogo sort will take about 1.33e62 years to finish sorting a deck of cards (minus the jokers and those silly rules cards) on average, assuming that it takes you only one second to throw the cards into the air, pick them up, check their order and then be ready to throw them again. Kind of ridiculously fast for a human, but super duper slow for a robot, so it averages out.

To put that into perspective the universe is estimated to be 1.37e10 years old. It would take you some 9.7e51 times that long to successfully sort a deck of cards using this ridiculously awesome algorithm.

DUDES. You don’t even understand how awesome this is.

(SO AWESOME.)

In Moroni 7:10-12 we get some good doctrine about how good isn’t going to come from evil source.  It is impossible for anything bad to come from God and for anything good to come from Satan.

I used to read this as absolute.  If you are a bad person you do bad things.  If you are a good person you do good things.  End of story.  That is how things would work in a perfect world, I think.  We don’t live in a perfect world (had you noticed!?) so there aren’t absolutes.  I don’t follow God one hundred percent of the time.  When I do bad things it isn’t because God is telling me to but because I have stopped listening to him and am instead following another spirit.

I used to think that this scripture meant that the good acts of a staunchly anti-God person are really evil acts because they are vocally declaring that they are not following God and Christ (and thus, by process of elimination, must be following the devil).  I think I always knew that this didn’t make any sense so I tried not to think about it too much.  Last night I realized that the good acts really indicate is that the person is following some portion of the light of Christ even if they loudly protest that they are doing nothing of the sort!  An evil person can do good things, but the good things don’t come from evil, they come because the person still has some connection to God.

The moral is that we are complex critters with complex motivations.  When we do good, we are following God.  When we do evil, we are not.  This is true even if we say otherwise.  Just because we call evil good and good evil doesn’t make it so.  Anyway, I am pretty sure that blessings follow our good acts regardless of why we think we’re doing them.

I really love making puzzles.  At the beginning of the summer I made a pretty sweet puzzle for the girl I was dating. Here it is exploded.

I don’t know why the speckled look is so appealing to me, but I love it!  The shape is kind of odd because I drew a pretty sketchy heart on the wood and then I didn’t do a very good job of following the average of my lines.

I love giving hand made things like this to people because then they’re obliged to never throw them away.  Obliged!  Things didn’t work out and we eventually split up but she’s got to carry this wooden memento of our failed love for forever.  Ha ha, sweet!

Maybe the moral of the story is that a broken heart isn’t the best thing to give a chick?

The first time I saw this box I thought it said “the Strangler”.  It really looks like “the Strangler” in the orange circle, right?  From further away the black g on the white background plays the exact same trick.

What a name for a newspaper.  I picked it up one time and it had uninteresting articles and a personals section that was indeed pretty personal.  No crossword though, so it is pretty much a waste of paper.  I still think “the Strangler” when I see it even though I know that that is not right.  You can’t change me.