Anagram Puzzle

Each of the pictures below describe anagrams of the same thing.  Can you guess what it might be?

Leave a comment if you think you know the 10-letter answer.



What's in a Name?

In the sidebar on the right I have a link to WolframAlpha, which I use a lot for reference information like when I “need” to find out how many deuterium atoms can be found in a one gallon sample of water. The black helicopters can land on Agmorion's lawn, not mine – I'm just a consultant.

It's not just for nerdy stuff, though. you can use it for quite a few things you may or may not have a need for.
 Pretty much anything that is quantifiable can be found here just by typing, in somewhat standard English, the question you want answered and the "computational knowledge engine" interprets what you want and does its best to present you with an answer.  A lot of the time it returns a frustrating response of "WolframAlpha doesn't know how to interpret your input".

 At least I think it does.  I know it used to.  I couldn't remember the exact phrasing of the error in the paragraph above so I tried to make it return one on purpose.  I typed in "number of pigs in Sweden" and it immediately came back with 1.68 million, along with a population graph from 1961 to 2007 and the population of cattle, chickens, and sheep in that country as well. 

 Ok, Mister Helpful, how about answering this one: "what is the square root of a pig"?  It came back with 30,303.  This, it explained, is the square root of the estimated world population of pigs (918 million - China has the most with 426 million and Saint Pierre and Miquelon has the fewest (reporting, anyway) with just 30 little piggies).

 Fine.  Forget the pigs.  Let's try these questions: 

• Why is the sky blue?
• How many roads must a man walk down?
• What is your favorite color?
• What is the average airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
• How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?
• How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
• Are you Skynet?
• Who is Keyser Soze?
• Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?
• Why did the chicken cross the road?
• What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Fun, but no errors.  Let's try "ZZYZX".  Ahhh... there's the error. I had the wording right after all.  That'll teach you to out-nerd me... [Editor's Note 09/26: I meant to type XYZZY here, which, of course, does not result in an error...]

 Want to find out what the low temperature was on Halloween in 1980 in Lockport, NY?  Just ask (54F - that was a Friday, btw).  How old is Oprah?  56 years, 7 months, 23 days (the sun rose at 7:11 AM that morning in NYC the day she was born).  When is Easter in the year 2337?  April 18th.  We are also told that will be the 332nd anniversary of Adobe Systems acquiring Macromedia, and the 400th anniversary of Leon Trotsky's call to overthrow Stalin. 

 Another thing it is fun to use it for - convoluted-sounding familial relationships.  For example, who is your cousin's mother's grand-daughter's uncle? Well, still your cousin, related by 1/16th blood, it turns out.  Neat little genealogical tree, too.

 Speaking of family relations...

 A huge fraction of my son's church and school friends have names end in the sound "en" (-an, -en, -on).  Grayson, Ian, Jayden, Hayden, Logan, Brendon, Owen, Ethan, Evan, etc... it's a little much for me to remember, although my wife has absolutely no problems and scolds me about my social mental lapses often. 

 "Which one is Ian again?" I ask?  "You know, the small boy that used to be at Ethan's daycare.  His mom is the nice one I told you about a couple of weeks ago," the wife says.  "Oh, yeah, I remember," I lie un-apologetically, opting to pull the plug on the conversation right then and there instead of putting it on uselessly sputtering life support for the next 15 minutes.

 I don't pay attention very well.  Hell, she probably could have said "He's the unbelievably foul-mouthed, bright orange two-year-old with the switchblade and the gift of flight" and I would have probably reacted the very same way.

 I suck.

 Still, it seems more than coincidence that such a large fraction of the kids have such "similar" names. Let's type the "en" names into WolframAlpha and see what we come up with.

 The most interesting thing you see when typing any of those names is that the popularity for pretty much all of them stays fairly flat from 1880 then really starts to climb starting in 2000 or later. 

 Looking at the "most common age" for those names, weighting them with the "expected total number alive today" and comparing that number with the age distribution of the population of the USA, you find that 10% of all the male children under five years of age have one of the 8 boys' names listed above.

 That might not seem impressive but considering the thousands of possible names that are out there, that is a huge percentage!    That's more than "coincidence" or "statistical clustering", my friends - it's more like a "policy" or a "movement".

 No wonder I can't distinguish one kid from another when I hear their name - it's like I live on effing Krypton (Jor-el, Kal-el, Zor-el, etc.) or something! It has nothing to do with my Herculean lack of focu...

 Say, did you know that the word krypton was coined 112 years ago, has a Scrabble score of 16, and corresponds to telephone keypad digits 579-7866?  WolframAlpha does, and now, so do I.

 Temporarily, anyway.

The Omnicron Imperative (Part X)

(Looking for the other parts?  The links are in the sidebar on the right.)

The roar of their rocket engine suddenly cut out and silence reigned aboard the suborbital capsule of Captain Awesome and Lilly Appleton.  After seventy seconds of crushing acceleration  the sudden weightlessness was a welcome change, albeit a slightly disconcerting one.  The curvature of the Earth and its paper thin atmosphere lolled slowly below as the ship coasted upward.

Although neither one of the passengers had ever been into space before a casual observer would not be able to tell the difference between them and any pair of seasoned astronauts they could care to name.  They unbuckled their safety harnesses and prepared their equipment with an elegance of purpose as if they had been born in a zero-g environment.

Lilly had never met Captain Awesome before today but knew him by reputation.  She was not as intimidated as she thought she would be meeting someone who had single-handedly saved America more times than she had birthdays.  He had a confident, ego-free manner that immediately put her at ease.  She wondered why he would bother risking his life over and over when, the rumorists said, he was more than capable of paying for a tropical island to be built from scratch and then retire there.

And he is so handsome, her id reminded her.  Embarrassed at herself, she darkened the visor on her space helmet to hide the fact that she was blushing.

They worked together checking their miniaturized front-mounted oxygen tanks and securing their leather satchels to their lower backs.  A squarish, second pack that looked like a bookbag was firmly strapped to their shoulders and cinched around their waists.  Sixty seconds after engine shutdown, they were satisfied that all their gear was in order and drifted to opposite ends of the passenger cabin.

Captain Awesome and Lilly each grabbed a red and white striped handle on the bulkhead and inserted their feet into pairs of reinforced carbon fiber loops integrated into the floor.

The capsule continued its silent arc toward apogee.  As their upward momentum slowed to zero, the gentle thump of guidance thrusters permeated the cabin and the craft began the rollover for re-entry.

"Now!" shouted Captain Awesome and they simultaneously turned their handles.  Dozens of custom explosive bolts fired one after another in rapid succession and the internal pressure of the ship suddenly blew its upper half down and away towards the Earth.

They climbed out of the lower half of the ship and pushed themselves away from the craft and toward the spinning planet below.  The two halves of the spacecraft tumbled magestically behind them as their flightsuits' internal temperature controls kicked on full.  The batteries that powered them wouldn't last long - just long enough.

Ten seconds after blowing the bolts they were dropping back toward the planet through the rarefied atmosphere 100 kilometers above the state of California.  Newton's Laws kept the passengers and craft arcing gently westward toward the Pacific ocean but only the spaceship remnants would crash there today.

The low friction coupled with the intrinsic aerodynamic design of their flightsuits meant they were gaining speed fast as they pointed themselves toward the ground head first and fists out.  The HUD built into their helmets informed them they had just passed local Mach 1.0.

Lilly and Captain Awesome each pulled a release handle on the front of their suits and two skinny tubes of black and silver fabric deployed and was dragged behind them as the atmospheric density slowly increased. Suddenly, the memory shape weave of carbon-fiber and Nitinol snapped into a two pairs of rigid forty-foot wide bat wings in the frozen air.

"Successfully initiated glide phase," said Awesome.  "Beginning braking maneuvers."  He glanced at the tumbling former spacecraft out of his peripheral vision.  What a waste, he thought.  At least the other teams have accessible landing strips near their targets...

"Roger that, team leader.  I have a GPS lock on your positions, and I can see , based on the rate of your deceleration my space wings appear to be doing their job," Twitchy commented smugly.  "You can congratulate me later.  Proceed to the target location highlighted in your HUD".

A red augmented reality bullseye appeared in their fields of vision, staying fixed as they moved their heads around.  They gently began tilting themselves into the thickening air to both steer and slow themselves gradually arcing themselves into a tighter and tighter spiral.  After zipping past 30,000 feet their downward velocity had been reduced to about 250 miles an hour and by the time they had glided under 10,000 feet their former spacecraft was scattering its shattered remnants on the sea floor off of Baja California.

The air, while still frigid, had warmed to a point where their flightsuit heaters were no longer critical but their helmets informed them of the depleted batteries just the same.  The shape-memory wings began returning to their previous, silky form and made a sound like a flag fluttering in a stiff breeze.  The former wings each completed their transformation into two dark parachutes just as the pair reached an altitude of one thousand feet.

They slowly and silently drifted toward the target indicated on their visors.  It didn't seem possible that the isolated run-down biker bar nestled incongruously amongst the towering saguaro cacti could be a hotbed of Omnicron activity.

But the dirt and sand parking lot off the main highway was filled with roughly sixty motorcycles.  At 7:30 AM, that would be unusual in itself even if, Awesome noted as he and Lilly touched down 100 yards away, the license plates were all local.

(To be continued...)

The Omnicron Imperative (Part IX)

(Looking for the other parts?  Check the sidebar on the right.)

The mineshaft elevator rumbled to a halt and a few seconds later the front of the cage creaked upward. The twelve members of the Constant Lightning team blinked as their eyes readjusted to the natural light of the Virginia sunrise streaming through the dingy payroll office windows.

"Vell," said Sven Turgensen taking in the view outside, "I guess ve all get to play astronaut today, ya?". The six-foot-two blonde-haired, blue-eyed Icelander was a former silver medalist biathlete but he felt just as comfortable invisibly tracking down prey in the too-crowded streets of Mogadishu as he did holding a rifle and wearing a pair of cross-country skis. Although he could read and write a score of languages, the polyglot managed to speak each one with a thick Reykjavikian accent. His comrades joked that even his International Sign Language swapped out all his 'w's for 'v's.

He hated to fly.

His partner, Lance "Ratso" Berger was raised on the streets of New York City and survived by his wits from the age of six. He moved from gang to gang, learning the system and inventing quite a few tricks himself. He knew, almost by instinct, where to find food, shelter, and, later, weapons. By the time of his ANON recruitment at age fourteen he was the de facto general of a small children's army allegedly responsible for over seventy percent of the gang-related activity throughout the Five Burroughs.

The now 25-year-old Ratso just glanced up at Sven, shrugged as if to say "Been there, done that." and walked off toward one of the six awaiting craft queued up on the hardpack runway adjacent to the now nearly-empty parking lot. Sven followed and the rest of the team split into their designated pairs, each silently heading for their own plane.

From above, the half-dozen stealth-enabled copies of the VSS Voyager looked like a row of matte-black seagulls frozen in mid-flight. The twelve team members stopped outside the hulls of the multi-windowed suborbital craft mounted to the underbellies of the motherships and began to don their awaiting "spacesuits".

These were not spacesuits in the traditional sense - they were only designed for survival in the unlikely event of an sudden cabin depressurization, not for extended stay in the harsh environment outside of Earth's atmosphere. Instead of the bulky, outdated archetype normally associated with astronaut-wear, these electric-blue composite fiber flightsuits were light, sleek, mobile, and virtually form-fitting. Even the helmet was stylish and comfortable.

After the last of the team had buckled themselves in, the cabins self-pressurized and the six spaceplanes simultaneously began to trundle down the bumpy runway under the control of a flight computer in Twitchy's laboratory, each lifting off seconds behind the one in front.

Each mothercraft climbed upwards in a tight spiral keeping the group's flight fingerprint constrained to a one-mile-wide column. When the group reached 50,000 feet the internal communicators slowly dissolving in the ANON members' digestive tracks crackled to life.

"All teams, comm check," ordered Twitchy from far below. Everyone all murmured an affirmative response except Sven, who groaned miserably.

"Ok... everything checks out, and your final destinations have been fed into the onboard guidance computers. You are go for launch in thirty seconds. I have temporarily cross-connected your communicators through the spacecrafts' radios, in case our prodigal Team Leader wants to give everyone the traditional rousing into-the-breech speech. Just make it quick."

There was silence as the planes gently banked into their respective launch positions. Just when everyone thought he wasn't going to respond, Captain Awesome cleared his throat.

"Let's go do our jobs," he said.

The six spacecraft detached themselves and began to fall away from their carrier ships. A second later,each ship's hybrid rocket boosters simultaneously roared to life, launching the spacecraft on supersonic suborbital trajectories toward their designated targets. Their diverging contrails made it look as though a six-pronged icy crack had suddenly appeared in the cerulean dome of the sky.

(To be continued...)

Back to the Gym

A bit of luck has allowed me to head back to the gym after a few months off.  My project schedule has slackened a bit and they just put a new gym in a shopping plaza I pass on my way to and from work.  Awesome. Here is how the new gym compares with the old one:

It's cheaper.  I was paying $85 per month before, and now I am only paying $40.  To be fair, I paid an extra $15 a month for rental of an out of the way locker to avoid having to feel like I was trying to get dressed and undressed in a crowded subway car.  Speaking of lockers...

No Locker Room.  Just one-person bathrooms.  This might sound like a drag, but, for me, it is actually a huge bonus.  No locker room means no herd of oblivious fat naked old guys (OFNOGs) bumbling nakedly around like untethered pink wrinkly parade floats, nakedly hogging the sinks, or nakedly using the hair dryer to make taint jerky or whatever the hell that one guy was doing. God help me, I can still see it...

New Gym Smell.  Actually, the new place is odorless.  The old gym had a weird smell to it that was one part sweat, one part pool water, and one part Grecian Formula. I still can't wash the scent out of my gym bag.  I am gonna have to get a new one.

No Trainers.  Well, the trainers at the old gym were all fine except for one.  Picture a 40-year-old, pink-haired, ex-punk-rocker-wannabe with who has suddenly taken to the idea of running for class president. Now strip her of an indoor voice and internal monologue, and give her a laugh that would curdle cheese.  That's her.  She does not respond to desperate, psychic pleas for her to just shut up for 5 damn seconds. Although she got "Employee of the Month" a while back, she probably has won "Employee Murdered the Highest Number of Times in the Imaginations of Those Around Her" multiple times by a majority of the people there as well.

Awesome Hours: It's allegedly open 24 hours a day.  Yeah, we'll see about that after I storm out of the house in tears Christmas morning, looking for a way to burn off one giant hissy-fit worth of rage after not getting a Kinect for the XBox (hint, hint).

Convenient: I drive by it at least 10 times a week.  Unfortunately, I have to also drive by a Bojangles, an AJ Gators, and park near a BBQ place to use the facility.  I am looking to the super-fun rationalizations I am going to come up with that convince me that eating an eight-piece chicken dinner by myself in the parking lot of the gym is the good and proper thing to do.

Not Crowded: So far, the maximum number of people I have seen there after work has been ten.  Ten!  A huge change from the old gym.  On Mondays (the traditional I'm-gonna-head-back-to-the-gym day) after work it would be so packed that you may not be able to hit a treadmill at all.  And forget about the whole month of January - resolutions, you know - it takes a few weeks for self-delusion to wear off, see.

Tanning Available: Nice.  Cheap, too.  Five bucks a go, and its tied to your door access fob.  For some reason there is a sign in there that tells you to shut and lock the door before you start (good) but if you try and start the bed without locking the door not only will it not work (again, good) it also disables your building access fob for 24 hours (uhhh...).  I suppose the ED 209 was unavailable.

Cardio Machine TVs: Every machine has an integrated (albeit awkward to operate) TV.  Music channels are available, too.  Much better than having to stare through Maury Povich because all the other treadmills within line-of-site of the other community TVs have been taken.

No real negatives so far, but the night is still young.  If all goes well, I figure I'll have six-pack abs in about a week.  Two weeks, max.

New Puzzle

Here is the Puzzle that was to be pasted on the bottom of the 1970's TV project:

Good Luck!

P.S. You can find the rest of the Secret Puzzles in the sidebar on the right.

1970's TV Project: The Sad Conclusion

(Continued from Part I)

With a majority of the woodworking for the little TV complete, it was time to permanently mount the signal wires. I decided to use magnet wire for the on/off switch because the wire needed to be routed through a tight space. The audio wires were the four very tiny red, gold, green, and red-green wires internal to the earbud's insulation. The power leads were some nothing-special wire I had laying around.

I used rubber cement and electrical tape to insulate the wires and act as a strain relief. I wanted to use Plasti Dip, but the 16-year-old manning the hardware store basically insisted that the product did not exist because she had never heard of it. I bought it there in the past, see, but there was no benefit to continuing the conversation with her - teaching a pig to sing, and all that...

Neither auto parts store carried it either, but one guy at NAPA said he knew for a fact they carried it in the hardware store I just came from. That made me smile, and I thanked him.

Why the smile? Well, as I get older, I find myself randomly dropping more and more (not necessarily old) information along the wayside to make room for new stuff in my apparently full-to-capacity brain. It's comforting to know that I didn't imagine the whole "I know I bought this insulating goo here before" thing - it really, truly, happened. Not just because the whole hardware store incident is probably one of the most boring delusional fantasies anyone could possibly have, it gives me hope for other things I "know" for a fact happened or were said or done that, I guess, have slipped everybody's mind but mine...

Like when I know damn well I put my hat on the dresser and when I go to get it, poof, it's gone. And not merely gone, it had never been there in the first place and no one even knows what this thing I call a "hat" even is. After a thirty minute search during which I am on the verge of tears and questioning the reality of all that is around me, it poofs back into existence.

"I found it. It was in the bottom of the cedar chest at the foot of the bed," I say. "You must have put it there," Mrs. Snowurchin says.

Really? I came home, took off my hat, dug out the extra comforters, and buried it in the bottom of a wooden box I never use. I wonder what I was thinking before and after I did such an odd thing. It must have been like "Hahaha! My arch-enemy, Future Me, will never find it here! Now to slip myself a roofie to wipe out the memory of this ever happening and my diabolical and, frankly, petty scheme will be complete. Hahaha!"

But this isn't about my hat or my inability or unwillingness to hang it on an easily accessible hook in the bedroom closet. It's about me accidentally bricking a media player. Let's move on.

After the wires were soldered, insulated, and strain-relieved, I tested the player out to make sure it still worked. It did not. It would not boot at all, in fact. Hmph. I don't think I shorted anything together and I know the board is getting power from the battery. Maybe the repeated manhandling damaged some of the flex-board circuitry inside. As far as I can tell, I didn't "let out the smoke".

Jimmydunes says that it might just be bricked in software and that there is some sort of fix that can be applied via the USB port. I was a little leery before about plugging the modded Frankenplayer into a computer someone actually cared about - and that's when it was working. Now there are just too many unknowns for me to try that at all.

Call me prudent. Or call me a coward. No... prudent. I like prudent better...

I have decided not to push forward with the project - like I said, I really didn't want to turn this into an electronics chore. I will shelve this for now and, once I get back in the mood for electronics work, I might dust it off and troubleshoot it.

Some of you know that I like to add a Secret Puzzle to the woodworking projects I complete, with the idea that they would be discovered by some stranger later. I generated a puzzle that was to be pasted to the bottom of the TV after the project was completed. Shame to let it go to waste, so I will post it tomorrow...ish.

Looking back, I see that I've completed quite a few projects in a row without issue so I was due for a speedbump of some kind. That's just statistics, right there. Although I have reason to be bummed, I really have no right to be.

Besides, I'm a hoopy frood who really knows where my hat's at.

Site Update

Busy this week.

Got volunteered to make a website for some folks - time will be spent on that.

New poll.  It's in the sidebar on the right.  It don't cost nothin'...

One complaint, though, before I sign off. I am disgusted by the double standard that seems to be firmly entrenched regarding what is deemed acceptable behavior for two-year-olds versus what I am allowed to get away with.  See, if my son goes up to two perfect strangers in Barnes and Noble and declares "I.... I'm not poopin'!" it is unbearable cute and funny.  But when I do it, it's "call the police" this and "restraining order" that...