The Vehicle and the Runner

It seems to be the case that when one runs for the stopped bus/train/public transit vehicle whose departure is in the very near future, it leaves before one can get on it, without fail. As a result, valuable minutes of one's day are wasted, adding up to many hours and even perhaps days over long periods of time. This happens so often that one may be tempted to craft a theory postulating that if one is not standing right at the bus stop (or wherever the assumed entry point of the public transit vehicle is), successfully boarding the vehicle will be an impossible task; however, experimental data shows this is not the case. There are rather rare occurrences of successfully getting on the bus or the train or the whatever, but there are enough of these exceptions to the rule to disprove the general theory of never being able to get on. In fact, the behaviour of the departure time of the vehicle and the time of arrival of the person at the intended entrance, otherwise known as Vehicle-Runner Theory (VRT), follows an extremely intricate set of rules, so complex that it may never be fully understood by mere mortals. I am but one myself, but I will attempt to best explain the phenomenon of running for the bustrainvehicle while not incurring the gods of such. (Note: the two may be mutually exclusive; thankfully, I have not found out yet.)

We firstly consider the scenario that we are all familiar with: the vehicle leaves, without the runner on it. For convenience, we will not consider the aforementioned possibility of the runner actually being able to board the vehicle. This is the Classical Stream (CS) of VRT. In CS, there is simply one axiom: the vehicle leaves just before the runner has the opportunity to board the vehicle. We designate this CS-I, the singular constant of the universe that is the defining characteristic of CS. Usually, this opportunity manifests itself in the runner signalling frantically for the bus driver/other vehicle operator(s) to stop and wait for a couple more seconds, of course in vain.

One may ask - is there not a difference between someone casually walking to catch the bus and someone sprinting to catch the bus? Certainly, there is; a common pitfall of attempting to comprehend CS is the assumption that the point of vehicle entry closure is constant across all cases. The casual walker would have to be nearly at the point of vehicle entry to satisfy CS-I; in other words, the distance between the point of vehicle entry closure (e.g. where the runner is when the bus doors close) and the point of vehicle entry (e.g. where the bus doors actually are located), defined as the missed distance (MD), is very small. The sprinter would have more time to make it known that she intends to board the bus, and so if the MD were constant, the vehicle operator would surely notice the runner and thus be obligated to wait, therefore contradicting CS-I. The MD is necessarily increased to satisfy CS-I. Continuing with the bus example, this means that the MD is approximately the length of the bus, meaning that the sprinter would be near the rear of the bus when it departs.

An important fact to consider in CS, and in fact VRT in general, is the fact that other people boarding the bus are not taken into account, per se. VRT affects them if they are also running for the bus, of course - but if they were normally waiting for it like good people do, then VRT assumes that they have all already boarded. This means the in the previous example, if the bus is still in normal boarding state, then the runner cannot be remotely anywhere near the bus. It is only when the last of the normal passengers boards that the vehicle leaves, and the expected MD is observed.

In CS, we can do some simple reasoning relating the velocity of the runner, v_r, and the MD. We know that if v_r is small, then the MD must also be small as well, and if v_r is large, the MD is also large. There are a plethora of other variables that may affect the MD, far too many to list in this simple overview of CS; for example, the weight of the load runners carry (L_r) and the noise that the runner makes (N_r) are important considerations in advanced CS. For simplicity, though, we will use a constant K to denote the entirety of the variables affecting the relationship between v_r and MD:

It must be stressed that the linear approximation relating v_r and the MD is exactly that: an approximation. It may be argued that a better one could be made by using a exponential relation; this was a contentious issue in the 58^th VRT Colloquium, when the gradual disappearance of old buses featuring a stairwell at the entrance prompted a second look at the v_r-MD relation. It should be noted, however, that the Colloquium became (in)famous not for this. It can be easily verified that the actual reason was the introduction of the Non-Standard Stream (NSS). It would be prudent to discuss this now.

For most circumstances, CS provides an adequate explanation of the observed events that occur when someone runs for the bus. Up until the weeks leading up to the 58^th VRT Colloquium, the consensus was that CS-I could never be false, and that any anomalies where the runner was able to board the vehicle could be evidently easily explained by extraordinary events, e.g. a person with a bike or a wheelchair boarding the vehicle. However, a small group of VRT theorists proposed a radical hypothesis: that on rare occasion, there was nothing out of the ordinary to explain the case of a successful runner, and thus CS-I would fail.

The radicalists, after extensive research, determined that there was only one common factor in the cases where CS-I failed: the runner had sprinted at or very near her maximum velocity (denoted C, for "Crikey, I can't run any faster than this"; we note that the leader of the radicalists was Australian) for a prolonged time period (t_s). When this happened, the runner was able to board the vehicle, but it would not leave right away. Instead, it would idle for anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on how close the C the runner had ran, and for how long. The faster the runner had sprinted (at velocity v_s), the longer the idle time (t_i) was. It was determined quickly that C was not, in fact, a constant, as someone not exactly in shape would have a v_s much, much smaller than an Olympic runner. Regardless, if both had run at nearly their respective C values, then both would be waiting on the vehicle for a while after boarding.

With this observation, NSS was developed, making its first appearance in the general public at the aforementioned 58^th VRT Colloquium. The tension immediately became apparent with NSS-I, the one axiom of NSS: "CS-I is incorrect." At that time, the radicalists had not been able to determine a formulaic relation between t_s, v_s/C, and t_i; they only knew that the third was a function of the first two. Even today, as we will see later, there is not even a simple approximation of a relation, such as what CS gives. However, this limitation had no impact on the bombshell of NSS and NSS-I, which changed the landscape of VRT forever. At the Colloquium, two groups quickly formed: those who sided with the original radicalists who developed NSS, and the orthodox group that defended their faith in CS. (The Colloquium was also where the CS and NSS names were concepted; as no competing theory had existed before, there was only VRT rather than VRT-CS.) The two groups made customary attempts at reconciliation, but all were in vain and a rather great schism between CS and NSS formed.

After the conclusion of the 58^th VRT Colloquium, the NSS theorists quickly organized one of their own. With this, the 1^st RVT Colloquium was held six days later, where RVT stood for Runner-Vehicle Theory - in the words of the NSS theorists, they were "putting the runner first", as the runner could finally get on the vehicle. For our purposes, we will henceforth refer to the Colloquia held after these ones as VRT-CS and VRT-NSS rather than VRT and RVT, to avoid bias. So, in the 1^st VRT-NSS Colloquium, the first attempts were made to relate the various parameters of the successful runner scenario, and to further distance themselves from CS. To this day, the VRT-NSS Colloquium is held six days after the VRT-CS Colloquium; the only exception was in 2001, when the CS theorists held their Colloquium at Two World Trade Center on the ninth of September, and the NSS theorists held theirs at the same place the next day.

The focus of the theory of NSS no longer includes the velocity of the runner compared to her maximum velocity and the time spent sprinting, per se. Rather, the two are now seen as separate parts contributing to a new singular variable, that of exhaustion (E). The detailed formulae are far too complicated to reproduce here, but they essentially provide a method of determining E from t_s and v_s/C. One can easily reason that higher values of t_s and v_s/C results in a higher value of E, although there is a distinct lack of an approximation of the relation between E and t_i in NSS. Of course, this was decided in the 3^rd VRT-NSS Colloquium, when the anti-CS sentiment was still rampant. Nevertheless, it is possible to use an (albeit unofficial) approximation.

It is known that there is a maximum value of E, which we denote as E_max; as it is a dimensionless variable, there is no real way of making sense of its specific value and how it applies to the general situation in VRT. E_max is not a constant, per se. Although it is the same value for a given scenario, it may change between scenarios depending on the person and their state at the time. Now, we consider the ratio E/E_max, whose value evidently varies between 0 and 1. There is a threshold value of this ratio determining whether the runner can board the vehicle or not; the value of the threshold is not defined in NSS, but it has been experimentally shown to be approximately 0.9. At this threshold, the vehicle's idle time, t_i, is apparently also a constant, whose value is approximately ten seconds: we define it as C_i. NSS has not developed quite far enough to theoretically determine the relation between E/E_max and t_i, but many experiments have been performed, and an approximate relation has been found:

Hence, if one runs herself completely to exhaustion, where E tends towards E_max, then the expected vehicle idle time becomes infinitely long. It is assumed to be impossible to have a value of E greater than E_max; NSS states that if definitive proof is given that does in fact show this is possible, the resulting enlightenment will provide the ability to create a time machine to go back in time and destroy CS. (This is the unofficial "NSS-II", as it is commonly dubbed.)

Both streams of VRT are still going strong. As VRT is a somewhat inexact science, both CS and NSS frequently modify their theories to include new surprising test cases. Even so, other variables are not accounted for in either CS nor NSS, the most notable of which we will discuss now as a conclusion. The 72^nd VRT-CS and 15^th VRT-NSS Colloquia both focused on the introduction of the scenario in which the vehicle operator was not actually on the vehicle when one was running to board it (e.g. while running for the bus at the bus loop, the bus driver has actually gone to the washroom). It was decided that if this was the case, VRT could not be applied. If the vehicle is scheduled to arrive at a specific location at a specific time and leave not too long after, such as a bus arriving at and departing a bus stop on its route, then it may be the case that the runner is running for a vehicle that she cannot even see. In this case, the vehicle may have either been early, in which case it would have already left, or late, in which case it would not be seen for an additional period of time. The additional factor of the discrepancy between the ideal and actual schedule of the vehicle is great enough to warrant the creation of SVRT, Scheduled Vehicle Runner Theory, where VRT merges with existing research on the scheduling of vehicles. Unsurprisingly, SVRT has quickly split into two streams: one where the runner is capable of boarding the vehicle, and one where it is impossible. Finally, there is the possibility of boarding a vehicle through some place other than the specified entry point. In this case, VRT is quite useless, and some reading up on Fare Evasion Theory and Authority Evasion Theory is recommended.

awaken the slumbering

hurt Once there was a little boy who worked and worked every weekday in his little cubicle at work. One day he had so many windows open after working and working so very hard that he could no longer see the icons of the windows on the bottom panel! So he wished, and he wished, and after pressing the R button one more time it happened: one of his coworkers obtained a new monitor, and so the little boy received the coworker's old one. Finally, the little boy had a second monitor!

However the second monitor was actually kind of bad and emitted a faint high-frequency buzzing noise which greatly annoyed the little boy not to mention that connecting it in the first place would be a rather tedious process since the desktop he was using only had one VGA port and one DVI port with an Nvidia graphics card and had Ubuntu installed so he would have to have one monitor hooked up as VGA and the other as DVI and somehow have everything working perfectly on the software side as well but we all know how well Nvidia and Linux get along so the second monitor took its rightful place beside the first one never to be powered on for all eternity and so the moral of the story is

never buy the NEC MultiSync LCD 1960NXi. It will be a decision you regret forever. geddit? "awaken the slumbering", and then "hurt". awaken the slumbering hurt. essentially if you use monk in d&d then you may be lacking morals because we all know displacement is op and if you can kick people into pits, then, well, balance.

hey do you guys know how to contact donald knuth i need to collect a cheque and i don't know how to reach him and i could use that money to buy some things right now

Logic is inconsistent. I have derived this from the existence of chillies. And no, I did not spell it wrong: I have consulted the Internet, and I am backed by approximately 7,630,000 search results for "chillies" (as of 2012-09-11).

But first things first. When I discussed this proof with a friend, he seemed a little uncomfortable with the claim that I had at first taken for granted. To match the mathematical rigor contained in the remainder of this proof, I shall start by stating, and fully justifying, this claim: Chillies are hot.

I know many of you are used to formulating hand-waving arguments to justify the claims in your fields that deserve a precise, infallible proof. I was going to write "a precise, foolproof proof", but that seemed like a horrible thing to do and I am a good person. In fact, I am so nice as to present to you the most rigorous proving technique currently acknowledged: Proof by Experimental Data and/or Citations from Select Sources. I will demonstrate this technique with the following lemma:

Lemma 1: Chillies are hot [1].

Proof:
[1]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1456995.stm ∎


Now let's proceed with the remainder of the proof:

Proposition 1: Chillies are hot.

Proposition 2: When something is hot, it is not chilly.

Proposition 3: Chilly sounds like, and therefore must be equivalent to, chillie.

This is a corollary to the famous quote "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck." (As an aside, by the law of transitivity, chillie is also equivalent to Chile).

Now then, we have the following:

Proposition 4: Chillies are not chillie,

or equivalently,

Proposition 4*: Chillies iff not chillie.

A perceptive logician may immediately see a problem with this statement. Note that this is a statement of the form "P iff not P". Since there is clearly no way of assigning a truth value to "chillie" without allowing the universe to blow up (along with any remaining logical consistency) by the principle of explosion, this conclusively shows the inconsistency, and therefore the invalidity, of logic itself. ∎


Unless, of course, there is a truth value that has been excluded all along. If such truth value is discovered through more extensive experimental data, I will call it Middle.

Tempus Repet

BEEEEEEP

I slowly open my eyes. Beams of sunshine pierce through the window, penetrate my pupils, and blind my eyes. I can hear a low, monotonous murmur from a distance. Turning towards the deafening noise of my alarm clock, I can barely make out the blocky, lime-coloured numbers displaying 09:37.

"Fucking WHAT the FUCKing FUCK, who the FUCK, FUCK this FUCKing, how did this even FUCKING Fuck's FUCK!"

I curse under my breath as I pick up my glasses from the bedside table. I fucking hate Mondays. I jump to my feet, perhaps a little too quickly. I instantly fall back and grab my throbbing head, screaming in pain while my skull is being split open by invisible Mjolnir. Really, Monday can go eat a piece of shit, burn to a crisp char, and be pissed on. I reach for a bottle of water I left on the bedside and take a gulp. I can taste the bitter ash from the cigarette butt I threw into the bottle last night. Fucking shit. I guess I should be more appreciative though. After all, these are the only butts I'm legally allowed to put in my mouth. I stagger to my feet and make my way to the living room.

Something feels a little off, though. The air seems a little thin. I stop on the way and take a deep breath. I really need to get out and exercise.

"MEEE-"

I turn my head towards the source of the noise, only to meet the orange furball I share my apartment with.

"What's wrong, Garfield?"

"-EEEOW," finishes the cat.

That's right. I guess he wants to eat. I better feed this lazy, ungrateful ball of fat before he scratches me for further delaying his breakfast. I check my watch. 9:37 AM.

I scoop some catfood for Garfield and pour myself some orange juice. After feeding a slice of bread into the filthy toaster I got from a garage sale the other day, I start reading the paper. Of course, the front page is filled with the current medal count and buzz about the new Olympic stars. I flip to the last page and start doing the crosswords. I get stuck on 42 across: 6-lettered word for drooping upper eyelid, starting with P and ending in IS. I write "PEENIS" and move on to Sudoku.

I turn to the toaster after finishing the Sudoku. The bread still hasn't been toasted. Seriously? I'm late for work, AND I don't get to eat breakfast? I get up and check my watch. 9:37 AM. That doesn't seem right. I reach for my pocket and check my cell phone: 9:37 AM.

Oh, I know what's happening, I think to myself. I must be high. But all I remember from yesterday is drinking beer while watching TV and going to bed after lighting a cigarette. It's been weeks since I smoked weed, and I certainly don't feel high right now. Somehow, time seems to be dilated, as if I'm travelling at a relativistic speed. Relativistic. See? I'm capable of actually remembering this shit right now. There's no way I'm high.

I plop down on my couch and turn on the television. The television turns on instantly. Ha, that's funny, I think to myself. Light travels at the speed of light regardless of the reference frame, unaffected by time dilation. That's exactly the kind of explanation some college kid would give while writing some shitty story about time dilation after taking only one or two introductory physics courses at university.

They're broadcasting a fencing match on the TV. Semifinal between South Korea and Germany. Hey, I didn't know Koreans were good at something other than Starcraft. The score says 5-5, with only 2 seconds to go. Man, this is intense. I watch the match, frame by frame. It's like I'm watching this match in slow motion. This is pretty neat, I think to myself.

With only one second left on the clock, the German fencer moves in a blurring motion, managing three thrusts before landing a point, all in one second. As the match timer sets off, I feel dazed. There's another one like me. I take a sip of orange juice.

The cold, refreshing mouthful of citrus heaven trickles down my esophagus, cooling my entire existence. My taste receptors fire off action potentials as they bathe in the sour taste of lemons, mixed with the bittersweet aroma of grapefruit and tangy flavour of tangerines.

Five Alive® is an excellent source of folate, vitamin C, and potassium. Start off your long, tedious days by refreshing yourself with Five Alive®, available at your local grocery store.

Five Alive, Feel Alive!

The World Will Not End In 2012

v0.01: 11/15/10-12/16/10

Plot? Who needs a plot. Plots are overrated. Like gooeys, I mean GUIs. Ha, if I had said gooeies, that would've been a five hit combo by the vowels. Skip to the very end though if you have such a morbid curiosity for this thing called a plot, unless you think the following paragraphs constitute a plot. {Rising,Falling} action and all that. But you'd have to actually read said paragraphs to figure out whether there's a plot or not. Who knows, maybe everything's actually a code for a plot of data points that make a beautiful line of best fit.

I gazed around. Destruction was everywhere. He had crumbled buildings to the ground. She had sent planes screaming down from the skies. They had resigned vehicles to the fate of forever remaining at the mercy of surrounding environmental effects. And personification scratched its head and thought "wait, what?"

The year was 2038--or, at least, it most likely was 2038. It could have been 1901. It could have been something in between. Or something not in between. I looked at my watch, before realizing again that it too had fallen victim to this thing, this horror why the horror why had this started why why why hadn't there been a game with this scenario it would've been awesome to play. But there was no way to make this theoretical game now, even if there was there was no way to play this theoretical game.

A poster fluttered by my feet. "Sixty-four bits: the menac" and the rest of the poster was somewhere else in the domain of the world, not a member of the domain of things I could see.

More of them. "me_t will kill us al" "unsigned int" "32" "Don't P" "INGSOC" among many many others. Although the last one might have been a joke by non-believers. Non-believers. Who could not believe, now.

Fire. Fire was no problem, if the problem happened to be an inability to create it. I decided to cook some food, and crouched down near the remains of a wooden building. Within seconds, sparks flew from open wires in the pile of debris, igniting the wood, giving the fire free reign, making the cooking effortless. I made char I mean short work of the meal and continued in my search for--what? What was I looking for anyway? But I suppose there would be some generic romance that comes out of this, would it be worth it? After all if one should say that is not what I meant at all that is not it at all. Coherence clarity completeness, relics, relics they are, who needs them now, who is here to say that that had had a rather atrocious feel to the flow of the words.\n\nSleep I needed sleep but where, how, this was all rather interesting, the issue of finding a safe place to sleep. And one had to consider though, whether it would be wise to sleep at all, to be held prisoner where, the outside world or the mind? But would the mind ever conjure anything that had not already been seen here, this world of--stream of consciousness is fun because you can say "oh, this part is supposed to be confusing" when you didn't mean it to be so and people ask you wait what, what is this supposed to mean anyway? And you can write the most confusing stuff, that you yourself don't even need to understand, and it's just "well I just left it open to interpretation, go me". If people criticize it, say it's badly written, you can say "well I'll leave a message for the two-months-old me, I'll see if he/she/et al. (ostensibly) gets it and replies". Edit{,t}ing is a breeze, since you don't even need to edit. But anyway, the mind, what could it create that this outside world has not already created? I am sure that if I were to stare at the sky long enough I would see a robot pink space unicorn princess fly across the sky, leaving a double rainbow all the way in its wake. I will also be sure that the tense form jumped all over the place more than an appropriate simile involving a time machine.

Enter enter return return back back? Does back not mean return? Why is the backspace key so far away from the hands anyway, isn't that ridiculously inefficient, unless you're really really really good at typing, which most people aren't. If you have the spacebar so close to the thumbs, wouldn't it make sense to have the backspace around there too? One key moves forward one space, the other moves back one. Dvorak should've thought of that. Either way though wouldn't text-to-speech and touch-screen trump all anyway anyhow?

I decided to sleep regardless of my previous thoughts because of the simple biological need for it. It would have been great if there was some environmental force that killed off any human that slept for too long, then natural selection would dictate that humans would evolve (devolve?) a steadily decreasing requirement for sleep and ideally would get rid of it entirely. No matter now though; there was no need to gain time by not sleeping, time had no bearing on anything anymore I believe.

Am I supposed to be omniscient enough to say "I dreamed that"? Well I didn't dream, so there. I do not know whether I would really want to know if I had actually had a dream, and what it was about, but the moment was gone, maybe I had gone deeper to a second, third, dream level, that sounds familiar, wasn't that movie great? Or was it not made yet and it was more than a century away? But I know it had been has been will be made because the plot holes, they were everywhere, but it's all a stream of consciousness thing so nothing to attack here, move along. Courtroom--scene of the crime--the Lawyer--objection! To sleep perchance to dream.

And now an obligatory flashback. Provides context to the story (if you can call it that). But really, what is there to say now? Except that all the people with visions about the world ending a couple decades ago either got humiliated many thousands of times over, or just disappeared quietly, presumably to get new hallucinations. Quite clearly their visions were defective, ergo they would be able to call in the warranty and get a free exchange. But I can sort of see where they come from. The world resetting, like it has; the end of an epoch, like what has happened; the eruption of chaos, like what's been going on. Because apparently the world began on the first of January 1970, or at least reset/rebooted on that day. And now it's cycled again and everything's gone banana{s,e}.

Or even better, a flashback with some sort of romantic element. That's always interesting. You know like the generic stuff with the main character not getting laid at all, getting desperate, finding their true love, it's not their true love wait it is etc. etc. etc. But what is true love, is it supposed to be the same as love, what is love baby don't no I'm not going to go there wait I already did so too late. Seriously though, what is true love, does it even matter, is it different for all, is there any use in attempting to analyze it if one has never experienced it but there's the rub can one even know if one has experienced it, or is experiencing it, or is it all relative? Is there some checklist then of what true love is and if you manage to check off everything on the list you win and you get true love? But I digress, as opposed to me trigressing or monogressing, and if I make the romance thing mushy enough and full of angst people will love it and call it "eloquent". What is eloquence? Can one simply ask rhetorical and unanswerable questions concerning emotional things to attain this eloquence? Does saying something like "x is but a figment of the imagination" or "and yet m is n" earn eloquence points? But I think the coolest part of having people call you eloquent is that you can acknowledge it, while denying it and strengthening the claim all at the same time. Because then you can just say "but wait I'm not eloquent I'm just another hopeless romantic", but you'd probably say it like "the words I spake doth not attain eloquence; although I wish it to be so, I am not worthy of such a revered distinction", and so you make yourself even more "eloquent" in the eyes of others. Also the self-deprecation is always good because it means you don't have a big one, an ego that is. Which means it's really small. But not non-existent. Presumably. Sentences. Getting. Short. Yes. NULL.

But you know I've moved on. Yes that's right I'm broadcasting the fact to everyone in earshot that I've moved on. I've moved on. Obviously talking about it won't make me feel any regrets or anything. Obviously I've moved on to the point where I don't talk about it because that's what moving on means right? But free sympathy think of the free sympathy!

Is this not a rhetorical question? Or rather, is not this. Because then it could be shortened to "isn't this". Silly language this is. We should all speak in a Turing-something-or-other language, nice and unambiguous. But with a lack of helpful keywords oooh guys check this out we're going to make this thing called an abstract class, what why would we have the abstract keyword that's dumb let's just make the constructor protected or set some virtual function equal to zero because that makes sense right, a function declaration equals zero? Instead of having "abstract" because that's for silly people who drink a certain type of coffee.

Commas, or is it commae, they do nothing, why would you have a break right in the middle of a sentence, when you could either plow on without arbitrary pauses, or just end and start a new sentence, they only contribute to run-on sentences anyway, but a semi-colon, those are cool; they're too awesome to be relegated to either a colon or comma; so they're both and none at the same time.

Really the choice of what happens at all in this post should be up to the reader. Maybe some robots or people (maybe they're the same thing) attack me, or are about to attack me, and there's a cliffhanger, although I would be nowhere near a cliff nor anywhere where I could hang, in the literal sense, if there is a literal sense at all.

Now this is for the people who have been lazy and neglected the reading of the previous paragraphs. We don't blame you for doing so. Wait who's we I thought it was just me myself and I? This is filler content anyways, or it might not be if you really think it isn't, and it may or may not be stalling the progression to the actual plot now, which is here.
|*
|--
There that's a plot. It may be missing a few key elements (units?!) but it's still a plot is it not? But this may eventually have a plot, if I survive that hypothetical cliffhanger. You know what would be really fun, if I just end everything without a proper sentence endin

Anabolic Catalog

In our present day, an important issue that has confronted individuals in all levels in society is that of randomized choice making. Such methods were developed gradually over the centuries, such as drawing lots, the die (dice if you're really serious), magic 8-balls, and the like. But for decision making of two choices, the universally accepted mechanism of random generation is the coin. The functioning of the coin is simple; the coin, at least the ones I know of, has two sides, made distinguishable by a picture of a head on one side and a picture of something that is not a tail on the other. Quite obviously, these sides can be called "heads" or "tails", respectively. Upon being tossed in a manner such that it also spins about an approximately horizontal axis through a diameter, the coin will land, with a half chance of landing on the heads side, and a half chance of landing on the side that does not have a tail. Some people have made ridiculous claims regarding how the chances are not actually even, and that by not having a tail on one side, some aerodynamic effects cause one side to be favoured. Those people are probably the sort who also think airplanes work and helicopters can fly and contract mad cow disease. Please ignore them. More absurd are the claims that a coin can land on an edge, which is greater than or equally preposterous.

However, the idea of using a coin to make double-choiced decisions has a particular difficulty, namely in the assigning of choices to faces of the coin. Sometimes the choice is obvious (e.g. whether to dissect the head or the tail of a bird first (look I'm not a biologist; who knows what they do in their labs)), but most of the time the choice is less straightforward. There are the few fortunate gifted individuals who can make on-the-fly arbitrary assignments of this sort instantly, but those are few indeed. Opponents of the coin-flipping method maintain that this difficulty devalues the efficiency of the entire process and ridicule the seriousness assigned to this task. Those are probably the types of people who can somehow make decisions in a non-randomway, and we will have nothing to do with them.

In light of this difficulty then, I propose the following coin-flipping protocol (CFP, not to be confused with certified financial planner or chlorofluoropentane):

Firstly, a coin must be selected. Seasoned CFP practitioners will have a coin they assign for this particular purpose that is easily distinguishable from the other coins in their wallet, for example one that is of a different currency than the one commonly used. However, if you do not have such a designated coin, then the situation is more complicated. If you have a unique coin that is of less monetary value than all the other coins, then that one should be used; if there are multiple coins of the least value, the one with the oldest date should be used. If this fails to single out a coin, then take the group that is left and head to a store; purchase an item that is worth the group of coins combined minus one, and use the one that is returned by the cashier. Or introduce CFP to the cashier and ask for advice on the matter if such an item cannot be found.

All binary decisions, by definition, are that between two choices. We will consider first the important subset of which are action/inaction decisions (AI, not to be confused with artificial intelligence, airborne interception, or Articuno invasion). These are decisions concerning whether to perform an action or not (e.g. whether to go to class or not). There is some difficulty associated with defining one as the action, as in some circumstances the inaction can be viewed as the action, and the action as not performing the inaction. Thus we define inaction as whatever is being currently performed at the time of the decision. Thus, not going to class is the inaction, as the student is not in class when the idea of going to class strikes him. Likewise, if the student is in class and wants to leave, staying in class is the inaction.

Now, we consider the general case. We wish to name the two choices to be decided upon; the naming for the AI case is simple, as we assign the names "action" and "inaction" appropriately. If the selection is between two things with given names, then the names can be used. For example, "ruby" and "sapphire" for deciding on whether to play Ruby or Sapphire, "apple" and "orange" for deciding whether to eat an apple or orange (but compare them at your peril), "two" and "three" for deciding whether to include two examples or three examples of the naming mechanism in the general CFP. In the rare circumstance that obvious names do not present themselves, simply go outside, present your case to the first stranger you meet and ask him or her for advice.

Now that the choices are named, the procedure is trivially simple. Assign "heads" to the name that comes first alphabetically, and "tails" to the name that comes last. This is logical as "heads" comes before "tails". The astute reader will note that "action" will always be assigned to "heads" and "inaction" to "tails".

There are certain cases in which the decision could either be treated as a general case or an AI case. For example. let's say you are playing Ruby and wonder if you should stop and play Sapphire. This could be viewed by some as a decision between Ruby and Sapphire, and by others as a decision to keep on playing or change. In this case, a preliminary coin-flip can be used to determine whether the "AI" naming scheme or "general" naming scheme should be employed. There is a theorem that states that all ambiguities in the process can be decided in a finite number of coin-flips, which we state here without proof.

This then, is my proposed basic coin-flipping protocol. While coin-flipping is limited to binary decisions with equal weighting, it will suffice and be an invaluable tool in life. The expert, who must make many decisions rapidly, are armed with reams of weighted coins and dice, easily accessible from a multi-compartment desk. But for us laymen who must settle the occasional decision in life, the single-coin CFP, hopefully, will prove sufficient.

Proof

Mac vs Windows

Epic Battle, Transitions Colosseum 2010 · Nimzo-Indian Defense: Classical. Noa Variation (E35) · 1-0

1. d4 Nf6
2. c4 e6
3. Nc3 Bb4
4. Qc2 d5
5. cxd5 exd5
6. Bg5 h5
7. e3 Be6
8. Nh3 0-0
9. Nf4 Bg4
10. Bxf6 Bxc3+
11. Qxc3 gxf6
12. Bd3 b6
13. f3 Be6
14. Nxh5 Nd7
15. 0-0 c5
16. Bb5 cxd4
17. Qxd4 Ne5
18. f4 Bg4
19. Ng3 Nc4
20. b3 Na3
21. f5 Nxb5
22. Qxg4+ Kh8
23. Qh4+ Kg8
24. Rf4 Re8
25. Qh6 Re4
26. Nxe4 Qe8
27. Nxf6#

1-0