During my long wait for season two of Haruhi Suzumiya, I've stumbled across a fan project, Haruki Suzumiya no Seitenkan , which ponders how the series would have been if the genders of the characters had been switched.  It's interesting concept, though I fear a little too far out on the edge for me. Still it did give me some nice inspiration for two new demotivators.

Unlike my previous work I used Big Huge Labs to make my posters, which was superior experience than the demotivator generator at Despair.com..

  

Please, anime lords, give us a sequel or who knows what my fellow fans may do next.

 

You know you've on your way to China if you start gender switching more often than Ranma, bringing new to phrase character development.  People will never look at your character the same way.

Recently I had been unable to view µTube videos on full screen and I'd been at loss as to why.  It turns out the cause was the new version of flash, 9, which for some reason would play the standard µTube size fine but fail to properly play on full screen.  I realize that most people would prefer to watch that standard size since uTube is greatly lacking in video quality and it appears decent standard player.  However, I discovered via a helpful message board that all I needed to do was right click on the player, go to settings and uncheck the hardware acceleration.  Now I'm free to properly watch poor quality videos on the big screen. 

I may only understand one word in five, but even then this is still a well done Higurashi fan work.  It looks like Keiichi's developed the Mega-Playboy powers from DNA² with the power to charm even the killer lolis.  So sit back and enjoy, and best of all you can bill your time as improving your にほんご.

A little late, but between work as been crimping my bloggin style.  A new Slayers TV series has been announed according to the anime news network .  This certanly helps lighten my mood a bit and take my mind of the depressing presidential primaries.  YAY.  Like DeathToZippermouth at Wiskey Tango Foxtrot, Slayers was the first series that sucked me into anime and I've not yet managed to escape.  The one disturbing aspect is that we have no information about the plot, other than it'll be something new.  We don't even know if it will have Lina inverse.  How can you have slayers with out Dragon spooker Lina Inverse?

I pray on this rainy March day that the new series will be good, but slayers without Lina would like a rose with another name, it just wouldn't be a rose. I believe elsewhere on the internets it was claimed that the new series will be anime origional which is not neccessarily a good thing. While I liked the third season of the anime, slayers try, the pacing was poor with not enough plot for 26 episods. Still it slayers I must watch, if it is ever released.

If you are one of those unfortunately soul who visited this page while scowing the depths of the internets for the meaning of the word Hyperbally, you are now in luck. Truly I'm surprised how how often I find keywords a long the lines of the title in my Google Analytics listing and thus this explanation ought to be counted as a public service. In addition I'll explain the mysterious meaning of this blogs nom de plume which according to some is "odd"

Hyperbally is a quirky alternate spelling of the English noun Hyperbole, derived from the Greek word for excess. According to the Seventh Websters collegiate Dictionary, Hyperbole is an extravagant exaggeration used as a figure of speech.

Hyperbolic has many meanings but everyone agrees that is is an adjective.

1. of, characterized by, or given to hyperbole.
2. of, relating to or analogous to a hyperbola.
3. of, relating to, or being a space in which more than one line parallel to a given line passes through a point.
4. of, relating to , or being a function related to the hyperbola as a trigonometric function si related to a circle

Hyperbola From the Greek hyperbole, a plane curve generated by a point so moving that the difference of the distances from two fixed points is a constant, or conic section speak, a curve formed by the intersection of a double right circular cone with a plane that cuts both halves of the cone.

Hyperbola have equations similar to ay² - bx² = 1 (Verticle opening) or ax² - by² = 1 (Horizontal opening) where a and b are positive constant real numbers.

Hyperbola have equations similar to y

 

Hyperbolic Hyperbally is the title of this blog and it should evoke the visions of extravagant rhetoric streaming off to infinity like a hyperbolic trajectory

With the Media proclaimed National Primary (Though how national can it be if most of the states aren't even voting today, I fear the media can't count) going down, I thought I ponder a few alternate primary solutions.  First of all I believe the current primacy of New Hampshire and Iowa to be unfair and unearned.  These states are small, rural and not very representative of the nation as a whole, but through accidents of history have become overly important.

Primary Options

• National Primary:  This is rather self explanatory, every in the country votes on the same day, not only the 22 and half special states of Super Tuesday. This seems to be fair since ideally we'd be back in the relm of one man one vote. However,The states will no longer have any choice in when and how to conduct their delegate selections and would also make it difficult for all but the best funded candidates to compete.  
  
• Delaware plan  divides the states into four groups voting a month apart starting in March. Membership in the groups would be determined by the number of delegates a state would appoint with the smallest states voting in the first group and the largest states voting last.  Theoretically this would still allow small states to have a say and potentially allow more variety of candidates.  This plan is probably best for small states, since the media will get really worked up about the happenings in whatever states vote first.  I think this is a decent plan, but it still has the potential to force all but one contender to quite before the big states.  Also, since the small states tend to be pretty spread out, this adds to campain costs and travel times. This plan was rejected by the Republican Party in 2000.
• California/American plan:  Similar to the Delaware plan except there would be 10.  Again it would arrange things so it moves from smaller states to larger states.  The oddity is that there are different numbers of states in each group and it seems that it has been gamed to keep Iowa and New Hampshire to be the entirety of the first group.  FairVote.org explains, "In the first interval, states with a combined total of eight congressional districts would hold their primaries, caucuses, or conventions. This is approximately equal to the total number of congressional districts in Iowa (5) and New Hampshire (2)".  Later they grow the allowed number of districts that would solidify a round, but to me it seems like and orderly but just as arbitrary version of the current system.  The primacy of Iawa and New Hampshire's a deal killer for me but the ops-Alaska version doesn't seem to have this pitfall and even a large state such as Ohio could potentially vote in the third round.  This is an interesting plan, but the determination of state order seams more complex than it ought to be. 
• Regional Primary: Divide the country into four geographical regions and randomize the order so no region is first or last in one or another election.  This is nice and simple, but it shares the drawback of the Deleware plan that it might make it to difficult to mount a campaign across that many states. such larg regions.  The Wikipedia version also keep Iowa and New Hampshire first which is exceeding lame.  Some regions tend to lean ideologically "right or "left" and this could effect the types of candidates that might be chosen if that region goes first which is why there's an alternate plan that splits up the south and North east to balance the region ideologically.  I wonder if just subdividing this into 8-10 regions if this wouldn't a simpler and less complicated version of the America Plan.  Then candidates could concentrate on a geographic area which would save on costs and no one set of states would always have undo influence. 
  
• I'm not particully satisfied with any of these plans, perhapse something more sane will work it self out in the next election.  I can only hope, just as I vainly hope that there will still be a point in showing up to vote on Ohio's "late" March 5 primary. 

Last week I stumbled across Blog Engine and installed it to test out its properties.  I immediately liked it's Masterpage based theming and WYSIWYG editor, so I've made the switch from Subtext.  The install process was simple, download the code and then upload onto my web Host into a Vertual directory and grant write access to the App_Data folder.  The only pitfall was that, like my subtext install, I needed to comment out the Trust entry from the web config.  My host, GoDaddy,  doesn't allow application to run in full trust or even to set there trust leval at all.  Since Blogging Engine uses XML files to store it's data by default I all set to start blogging. (Blog Engine also has the option to Use Sql Server as it's data store if you need to get better performance.)

Afer installing I played around with the blog and was impressed by the add entry page.  It had a nice editor as well as an easy method to change post dates and add tags.  All of this was much improved over SubText or even my old Wordpress blog, neither of which had a built in feild to easily enter tags.  Blog engine doesn't appear to have any kind of support for photo galleries like SubText, but either I can keep my old SubText galleries, or perhaps they will be supported by blogging Engine in the future.  As a third option, since Blogging Engine supports Extensions, perhaps someone (even me) could create an extension that could be easily added to subtest.  I plan on adding my [spoiler][spoiler] functionality as an extension in the near future and life will be good.

Creating my theme was relatively easy, I just took the Standard theme and customized to appear the way I wanted.  Blog Engine are based off the standard .Net 2.0 Masterpages, so you start with your master page and you can easily customize your theme without needing to learn a custom skinning system like SubText or WordPress.  The real nice part is that I managed to get Blog Engine running locally so it was easer to code without having to keep uploading to my server.

Importing my old data has proven to be somewhat difficult.  I tried to use the build in blogML importer, but it kept failing, claiming my user name and password were incorrect.  I have my doubts that it is a problem with my typing, since once it actually did add a post from one of my old BlogML files.  I fear it is either the fact that GoDaddy disallows Full Trust, or my content a little screwy from at one time being on Wordpress.  So I've been manually transferring my old posts, and it's a long process, although it is nice to clean up some of the old posts that had been created by Wordpress' bugy editor.

All in all I think Blog Engine is a solid platform and I look forward to finally finishing my Higurashi Reviews.   

Aside from the number of visitors to my blog, it is also the title of my latest review. I picked up book Zero, the Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife , from the science section of the local Barnes & Nobles because it had a nifty title and very bright red cover(link?) that naturally caught my attention. The simple thesis is of the book is to follow the development of the mathematical concepts of zero and infinity. Book it self is written in a very readable style that keeps the subject interesting, but is not afraid to include graphs and formulas.

Naturally, the book starts off with the somewhat murky origins of counting and of the brutish life without the zero. The book is full fun little facts like the Egyptians lack of a zero is the likely cause of our Egyptian derived calendars lack of a zero year. We then move on to the Greeks and Babylonians who were willing to use zero as a placeholder, but rejected using it in more useful ways.

Here the book points out the fascinating fact that the for the Greeks, mathematics was not separate from geometry. To have a convincing proof for the Greeks was to draw it with shapes, not with equations. This is source of the term squaring. (take a line of length x, then x squared would be the area of a square with x sides). This was something that was never taught to me in school. For that matter, except for my Hungarian algebra II teacher, I don't recall any of my teachers going into the history of Mathematics or into the odd characters who developed the concepts that we studied. Why did we spend so much time on Conic Sections?

After the Rejection of zero and infinity by the Greeks and other westerners it moves into India where the modern number line was developed with negative numbers and zero. The Arabs picked up this mathematics developed it more and soon it spread to Europe during the High Middle Ages and was essential for the development of modern mathematics.  Newton and Leibniz's based caclus on mathematics that involved dividning by zero and conviently ignored that it really ought to be impossible.  I fear I'm not skilled enough in Mathematics to explain this in detail so I suggest picking up the book for better description.  I will however share an entertaining quote made by George Berkley, an Irish Bishiop, in 1734 AD "he who can digest a second or third fluxion[dirivative], a second or third difference, need not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity."

Questions:

The Book never mentions any Chinese contribution to mathematics, is this because China had no notable contributions, possible, since it seems the movement of ideas went east from Greece, Egypt and Babylon to India and then back west, perhaps China's location (like the Meso-American) left it out of the proverbial loop.

Conclusion:

I found the book to be very enjoyable journey into the history, uses and oddities of zero. I particularly enjoyed the comical proof from the Appendix where zero was used to prove Winston Churchill = a carrot. It's almost as funny as the "women = evil" proof.