Ryan Morlok’s Blog

Shanley has posted a great rant about red left turn arrows in controlled intersections. Anyone who has driven in a car with me in Woodbury has probably heard a similar complaint (in addition to all the swearing).

Shanley frames the question in terms of political ideologies (big brother versus democracy). I tend to think of it more as an interesting technical problem, as I have some vision-based sensing ideas that could make the light algorithms more efficient in low traffic density situations. Either way, right now it’s just dumb.

Complete the following sequence:

34, 77, 154, 605, 1111, ?

This question actually came from a brain teasers calendar, so I can’t take credit. It’s listed as a 7/10 difficulty, but if you’re good with sequences it’s not hard.

No, not of being married (I’m coming up on three years of that). Today marked the first anniversary of me starting full time employment. One down, 39 more to go…

Solutions to Brain Teasers I, Brain Teasers II, Brain Teasers III. Stop reading now if your still figuring out the solution.

Read the rest of this entry »

I remember a year or two ago when I discovered Digg when linked from a Slashdot article. At the time, I was bored with Slashdot because the churn wasn’t fast enough and I had some serious time to waste while I avoided school and working on my thesis. Digg seemed like a savior with its endless supply of interesting stories that had a bit more variety than Slashdot but also covered the great technical topics that I loved.

Fast forward to today, and I’m moving back to Slashdot as my primary news feed. Digg today is full of so much junk it’s not interesting to read anymore. There is a huge social and political bias, but worse than that 90% of what you find there is random pictures of stuff that’s only somewhat entertaining.

I think we’ve observed a unique point in history. For years and years, pictures and video was accumulating without an outlet to share it with more than a few close people. Then sites like Digg and YouTube burst on the scene and allowed all this funny and interesting content to be viewed by the masses. Problem is, we quickly got through all of that content, and there is no way for the world to produce that much on an ongoing basis, so everything got stale.

A similar thing has happened with Facebook. This one could be more related to the fact that as you leave school, these social networking sites become less interesting, but I think the problem is more related to the applications that were introduced to the platform less than a year ago. I can think of lots of great ways to use this API for things that are useful, but it turns out that’s not what the masses want. The masses are interested in turning people into zombies, taking movie quizzes, and giving each other virtual free drinks. Yep. That’s about it.

Turns out the problem with these social technologies is society, as a whole, is not that interesting. I’ll take then endless stream of stories about linux making inroads on the desktop over that any day.

Congrats, Shoe, I’ve just validated your opinions.

Suppose you are wiring a surround sound speaker system.  The room’s dimensions are a bit strange:  3 meters tall, 4 meters wide, and 27 meters long (ok, this is a huge room).  You’re in the process of wiring the rear center channel (point A in the diagram below) which is located 2 meters from each wall and 1 meter from the ceiling.  This needs to be connected to the amplifier on the opposite wall (point B) which is 2 meters from each wall and 1 meter off the ground.

Click to enlarge

Speaker wire is incredibly expensive, and you’re trying to find the shortest possible length you can use. The only rule is that the wire must be directly attached (touching) a surface at all times (a wall, the floor, or the ceiling). You cannot leave the wire dangling by cutting through the space of the room.

An obvious (but non-optimal) solution would be to go from the speaker straight up the wall across the ceiling, and down the opposing wall to the amplifier. This would give a length of 30 meters (1+27+2=30). What is the shortest possible path connecting the two points and how much speaker wire must be used?

Special thanks again to Mikhail for the question. Those crazy Russians are full of good brain teasers. Also thanks to Ben Cirillo for drawing up the diagram in the *real* autocad.

Today was my six month anniversery.  Not of being married (already passed two years of that), but rather of working full time.  Assuming I work 40 years, that means I’m 1/80th of the way there.  To correlate that to the previous phase of my life (education — preschool through masters), I’ve just finished the first quarter of my first year of preschool…if preschool were to have quarters. *sigh*

The .dmg image format is great.  But when you want to play nice with the Windows world, sometimes an ISO is just easier.  Here is a quick set of instructions for creating ISOs from the command line using dd.  A great quick reference to have.

I’m not sure what the “official definition” of a brain teaser is, but I’m not sure if this one qualifies.  It’s really just straight up recognizing the pattern.  It’s more something out of a Mensa test rather than a traditional brain teaser.

This question is taken from (at least in variant form) my Seagate mentor Norm Binger.

Complete the following series by filling in the two numbers represented as question marks.

1, 2, 4, 11, 22, 44, ?, ?, 514

In response to Parisa’s Riddle Me This post, I’m finally getting around to posting a few brain teasers of my own. To start out, here is a simple one I got from Mikhail at work.

Given the following dot configuration:

Connect all four dots using three straight lines such that you draw continuously (one line is connected to the next) and you stop drawing the same place you started.