Elrac's New Writeups

Tales of MU (review)

2009-07-04T21:55:29Z

Tales of MU is a serial fantasy web novel written and published by Alexandra Erin. In other words, it's a story set in a world distantly related to that of Harry Potter, and it's an ongoing thing insofar as the author posts a new chapter about three times a week. The story began in June 2007 and will now soon hit Chapter 400. It's freely accessible to anyone on the Internet. See my footnotes for the link.

The setting

The world of the story purports to be similar to our own: There's Magisterius University (MU) with a campus and on-campus housing; there is a city nearby where students like to shop or carouse; there are shops with names eerily reminiscent of Wal-Mart and Burger King. There are well-off students and those who depend on scholarships or student loans; career-oriented students and partiers. There are alcohol and other drugs, there is love and hatred, and there is even more sex than at most real-life universities. There are…

Suggestions for E2 (idea)

2009-07-04T11:46:49Z

cc on msg box: I second DimView's request for this; I may have inspired it.
No borders on user-coded tables. When I submitted July 4, 2009, text floated magically in the cells and columns where I placed them, with no visible strings and wires. I was able to add borders where I felt them appropriate, by using the <table>'s "border" attribute.

An hour or two later, someone apparently changed the CSS for tables such that every cell has a thin border. While I agree there may be situations where this looks nice, I feel it destroys some subtle options for placing text that would otherwise be empowered by <table>. Case in point, my WU looks butt ugly now – was that effect intended? I'd like to see this change undone, please.
Voting on Suggestions for E2. Was it a management decision that this corner of E2 doesn't have voting?

The past participle of lead is led (idea)

2009-07-02T19:33:30Z

The following is the first hit from Google for "took * by the hand and lead":

Much obliged I took her by the hand and lead her to the gigantic, untouched, crisp bed that awaited our love making.¹

Amazingly enough, there were almost 20 million hits for my search phrase, which is a typical but certainly not the only example of mis-declined, umm, leadership. The correct spelling got me a little over 30 million, so you could estimate it's flubbed about 40% of the time, Internet-wide.

Granted, the Internet is full of people who can't spell. For many, English is not their first language. But even among people who are essentially or even very literate in English, this is one particularly insidious writing error which has become my pet peeve. It ranks up there with possessive its has no apostrophe². Alexandra Erin, author of the otherwise delightful online…

Convert any number to decimal (recipe)

2009-06-27T10:06:13Z

in10se's method works, no doubt. It's very straightforward and follows directly from the definition of a written number as a polynomial. This is in fact how I implemented my first base-n converting program, back in Computer Science 101. But later on I came across Horner's method (currently a dead link in E2, but Horner's rule works), and I haven't looked back since.

In10se's approach is a bit cumbersome in that it calls for creating, at least temporarily, a table of powers of b, where b is the base. Done by hand, this calls for paper and scribbling thereon; done on a calculator, it requires memory slots.

With Horner's scheme, you can do the whole calculation with a series of additions and multiplications, without the need for additional storage. Also, you don't need to count up digits in the base b number; Horner works with numbers of arbitrary length, you just keep grinding the same two operations and just don't care…

Race Conflicts (thing)

2009-06-20T19:50:57Z

Relax, it's only a game!

If you came here hoping to be offended, I can recommend some of my anti-religious rants. This piece, though, is concerned with Dwarves, Elves, Night Elves, Orcs, Goblins, Undead, Demons and (incidentally) Humans.

Race Conflicts is a so-called web-based MMORPG. That is, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game that's played in your browser over the Web.

Why would anyone want to play this game?

A game has objectives and obstacles. If you overcome some obstacle and achieve an objective, although everything is fictional, your brain rewards itself by releasing some dopamine. The effect is pleasure. In theory, you could achieve the same effect by completing some work-related task, but modern corporate culture seems hell-bent to keep you from getting anything done. You might get even more pleasure from…

ho (person)

2009-06-18T19:19:08Z

According to Wikipedia:

Ho is a town in southeast Ghana and is the capital of the Volta Region.

With that out of the way, another definition that sees more use in the American vernacular. From wiktionary:

A whore; a sexually loose woman; in general use as a highly offensive name-calling word for a female with connotations of loose sexuality.

Finally, I'd like to draw your attention to the apparent prescience of Webster 1913, where the first line for this word reads:

Ho (?), pron.

which presages both a modern alternative spelling of "pornography" and the association of prostitution with this industry sector.