So I’m on Wikipedia, searching for the famous Nicolas Poussin painting with the tomb. Damn, what was it called? Some Latin phrase about Arcadia. About death. Let’s try “death in Arcadia.”

So I get the article Arcadia Lake (porn star) about a ’70s porn star. Several results later is Et in Arcadia ego, the famous Poussin painting with the cryptic tomb inscription “I am also in Arcadia.”

I guess that’s what you have to expect nowadays. At least Ms. Arcadia Lake’s (née Michelle Carpenter’s) picture isn’t as dumpy as most modern porn stars’.

Which leads me to the most important question — what would Poussin say if he saw one of her movies? I personally vote for “Quod Arcadia ego cum.”

It’s coming. Monday Mathematics, a series of weekly papers addressing how to solve common difficult problems in mathematics, and the math behind those solutions.

Have a favorite math problem? Let me know.

OK, so when Ken Jennings goes on his blog and writes what’s wrong about Jeopardy!, then maybe people are going to listen. Maybe they should think first.

What’s wrong about Jeopardy!, Ken? Well, first of all, they need more categories like “Skanks from Reality TV Who Got Naked in Men’s Magazines,” he says. Oh yes, and the contestants should be chased by angry bees.

If you didn’t get the joke already, he was kidding. It was obvious from the first sentence. Hypothetically. Well, one would hope so. Apparently the Associated Press didn’t get the joke. Read all about it! ‘Jeopardy’ Champ Ken Jennings Blasts Show! And the Jeopardy! spokesman didn’t return a call! I guess he was too busy crying in the corner.

I have a dream. I have a dream that one day, this nation will rise up and forcibly remove every idiot from every important job in this country. The results would be immediate.

I think I actually have a really good idea for a cryptography system. No more GRAWM-1 crap. I think this one actually works. I just need to work out the details, and then I think I have a solid hash function. A bit more work and I should be able to get some symmetric (and maybe even asymmetric!) cryptography going too.

In short, my idea is this: \sum_{i=0}^n Prime(i) x_i x_{n-i}. x_i is the (integer) value of each byte/word/dword/whatever in groups of n. (The primes would be pre-generated.) Diophantine equations are really tough to find solutions for in reverse, so collisions are hard to create. It’s second degree, so it already avalanches appreciably, and the primes prevent a single byte from masking another particular byte. I’d then collect a bunch of these sums, and run some other functions on them. I’m thinking some conditional modulo based on even/odd-ness, then another run through the Diophantine equation. The final sum would be the hash.

Anyone reading this who’s knowledgeable and interested in helping find vulnerabilities? I’m going to read up some more on group and ring theory first, because it might be relevant. Lemme know if you’re interested.

At last, a real domain for me to use, and a real blog too. No more allyourbaseare.be. (Hah, anyone interested in using it?)

It wouldn’t be fitting to keep using Xanga. I mean, I prefer doing things on my own terms, on my own website. Once I get around to it, I’ll change this blog’s layout to be more original. It’s a nice default, but then again, it’s a default. Those are no fun.

Not to mention, of course, that everyone can comment on this one, not just Xanga users. Closed online communities aren’t very exciting. And I’ll have an excuse for writing more posts about academic subjects and programming. A lot of people have coding blogs. This will be more like an anything blog. More suited to me, dontcha know.

Oh good. Looks like the website is done. Lots of CSS and nearly no images makes Carlo a happy boy.

Side note about WordPress: Why doesn’t it ALTER TABLE AUTO_INCREMENT=0; after deleting a category? (This automagically resets the auto_increment to one more than the highest existing number.) No reason to mindlessly increase the ID numbers. I went and ran the query myself. >_>

Note 2: I’m going to have to write a guide for people who use Word to write HTML. It’s a really Bad Idea(TM) and they ought to use real HTML. (Like, handcode or use Dreamweaver or Amaya or something.) Has Word improved since Office XP? Haven’t used any newer versions, myself.

The code page is finally done. I achieved a complete separation of content and layout. Not only is all the layout in CSS, but the webpage itself has no content. I use the prototype 1.5.0 library to make AJAX requests to a Perl script that itself reads from an XML file. It’s pretty cool. (The animation is done with scriptaculous.) Hurrah for Web 2.0! It’s cool some of the time, useless most of the time, and difficult all of the time!

A new era has begun and stuff! This blog will suit me well, or something. Hosted by myself, kinda. No strings attached to some blog conglomerate!

We’ll see how it goes.