A couple weeks ago I foolishly signed up for a Flickr Pro account. I'm not exactly sure what I was thinking. It doesn't do video and it won't give me a DVD backup of my photos, both of which I can do on my own server.
Anyway, I was wondering if you would like to see the photos I've added so far. They're not well-tagged, and some of them don't make any sense, but I would be interested to hear what you think.
My weekend D&D group has a different way of rolling attributes for characters, and it’s probability has been bothering me mathematically for a couple of weeks now. First, I should show how the regular rolls work for comparison.
Normally when you create a D&D character, you roll 3 six-sided dice (also known as 3d6) and add them up to get a total. You do this 6 times and apply each totaled value to one of six character attributes.
A higher character attribute is better. 10 is average, while 18 is the best you can roll. Anything below a 9 is below-average for a human, so a character with an intelligence of 6 isn’t so great.
The numbers in each attribute are used to determine attribute bonuses. Attribute bonuses are used inthe game to affect certain skills. For example, a character with an Intelligence rating of 18 receives a bonus of +4 to all skills related to intelligence. A character with a Strength of 18 receives a bonus of +4 to all melee attacks and to damage. This factors into the game significantly.
For every two points in an attribute, the bonus changes by one. A single bonus point is an effective 5% bump in chance to succeed. So a character with a Strength of 18 has a 5% better chance of hitting a creature than a character with a Strength of 16, and the stronger character also does at least one more point of damage when he hits.
Ok, so now I will describe our in-house rolling system, and you can see how horribly broken it is.
A guy in Italy discovered what seems to be a Roman villa by looking at his neighboring land via satellite.
My country's national anthem was written on this day in 1812 by Francis Scott Key. The anthem itself wasn't recognized as the US national anthem until over 100 years later, when ordered so by Congress in 1931. The original 15-star flag that inspired Key to write the verses still exists, and is held in the Smithsonian.
Here's a fact about the Star Spangled Banner that I recently realized: The first stanza of the song is the only part that you typically hear performed. In the first stanza, there are more questions than real answers. For example, the chorus:
This is actually the first person I've encountered who was openly hostile about me providing help. You'll see a couple of the guys come out to defend me, but in the end, the guy ends up stewing in his own stupidity.
I probably shouldn't, but here's a link to the site of this fellow who starts name calling when he isn't bright enough to figure things out on his own. Some people should have their thought licenses revoked entirely. Or at least their license to modify the complicated source code of a popular blogging tool. This includes Joe from Oxford. Thanks, Joe!
Also, I thought I would mention this: "car" != "truck". Don't try hiding that you're a backwoods hick by calling your beat rusted-through truck a "car". That goes for the lot of you.
Here's the IRC chat log from earlier: