You know the story of Snow White and Seven Dwarfs. The Evil Queen asks the mirror on the wall the same question everyday, "Mirror, mirror on the wall / Who in the land is fairest of all?". The mirror repetitiously answers "You, my Queen" until one day when mirror tells the queen that Snow White, not the Queen is the fairest of all.
Unlike the queen, most of us men in our mid-life obsess not about our fairness or beauty. Most of us should have no illusion about our looks especially with kids in the teens or older. We instead talk endlessly about how gravity impacts us. How as we have gotten older, there seems to be more gravity around us. We feel heavier.
Each day we wake up in the morning and go to the bathroom where most of us have a weighing machine. We then ask the machine the same question, "Weighing Scale, Weighing Scale on the Floor / who in this land is the slimmest of all". Just like the queen, until the fateful day, we get the same answer.
Not you for sure, Ha Ha!
For the first thirty years of my life this was not a question, I had ever asked anyone or anything. In fact I did not possess a weighing machine. Sometime in my mid-thirties, I made the fatal mistake of getting one and since then my life has been one of misery. As I stood on top of it and wondered what I was going to see, hoping against hope, to see a small number, I got down each time after seeing the needle pointed towards larger and larger numbers.
Recently, the doctor had also started talking about the fried foods I liked to consume. He then talked about the health risks of increased cholesterol, LDL, HDL, and triglycerides. Even some of my friends had started talking about my expanding waistline.
It got so bad last summer, I swear, I heard the scale whisper "Fatty" as I left the bathroom. Now I know you would say, I have a vivid imagination if I told you that around last Thanksgiving, I heard a groan from my bathroom and a whispered comment, "Is it too much to ask? Why can't you eat less!".
The last one was too much for me to swallow. I had to take matters into my hand. I could take digs from my children and needling from friends. I will be damned if I take sarcasm from a weighing scale. So went and got a new one.
Lovingly I opened it and stood on it for the first time and asked the same question "Weighing Machine, Weighing machine ..." and the strange answer I got was
Fewer chips a day, keeps the doctor away!
Friday, May 13, 2011
Monday, May 02, 2011
Am I any longer a Geek?
One of my favorite Wodehouse title is Carry On, Jeeves, a collection of short stories. The first story, Jeeves Takes Charge, introduces us to Bertie and Jeeves and tells the story of how Jeeves came to be Bertie's boss, I mean valet. In this story, Bertie is engaged to the autocratic but beautiful Lady Florence, who wants to improve his mind by feeding him a book titled Types of Ethical Theory that contained this memorable prose.
Of the two antithetic terms in the Greek philosophy one only was real and self-subsisting; and that one was Ideal Thought as opposed to that which it has to penetrate and mould. The other, corresponding to our Nature, was in itself phenomenal, unreal, without any permanent footing, having no predicates that held true for two moments together; in short redeemed from negation only by including indwelling realities appearing through.
Right Ho. Naturally Bertie's engagement did not last much longer. I found this to be a funny story without paying anymore attention to it.
Recently I saw that my friend had posted on Facebook a comment on NP-Complete problems and remembered reading about this in graduate school decade and a half ago and actually doing well enough to get an A on that course. Since I no longer knew what it was, I looked my favorite source, The Wikipedia and, I kid you not, this was what I read.
In computational complexity theory, the complexity class NP-complete (abbreviated NP-C or NPC) is a class of decision problems. A decision problem L is NP-complete if it is in the set of NP problems so that any given solution to the decision problem can be verified in polynomial time, and also in the set of NP-hard problems so that any NP problem can be converted into L by a transformation of the inputs in polynomial time.
Quite lucid you say
I on the other hand am no longer feel smart enough to comprehend such material.
Of the two antithetic terms in the Greek philosophy one only was real and self-subsisting; and that one was Ideal Thought as opposed to that which it has to penetrate and mould. The other, corresponding to our Nature, was in itself phenomenal, unreal, without any permanent footing, having no predicates that held true for two moments together; in short redeemed from negation only by including indwelling realities appearing through.
Right Ho. Naturally Bertie's engagement did not last much longer. I found this to be a funny story without paying anymore attention to it.
Recently I saw that my friend had posted on Facebook a comment on NP-Complete problems and remembered reading about this in graduate school decade and a half ago and actually doing well enough to get an A on that course. Since I no longer knew what it was, I looked my favorite source, The Wikipedia and, I kid you not, this was what I read.
In computational complexity theory, the complexity class NP-complete (abbreviated NP-C or NPC) is a class of decision problems. A decision problem L is NP-complete if it is in the set of NP problems so that any given solution to the decision problem can be verified in polynomial time, and also in the set of NP-hard problems so that any NP problem can be converted into L by a transformation of the inputs in polynomial time.
Quite lucid you say
I on the other hand am no longer feel smart enough to comprehend such material.
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