Ken's blog

chess variant: each player has one king, worth 2^N points.  each player has 2 pieces (names and abilities TBD) each worth 2^(N-1) points. ...

what else?  in The Simpsons, "beer". nuclear weapons, giant meteor, and other ways of extincting humanity would also solve all t...

numbers in French currently use a ugly mix of base 10 and base 20.  here, we consistently use base 20.  (we don't fix 11 through 19 to c...

1 un 2 deux 3 trois 4 quatre 5 cinq 6 six 7 sept 8 huit 9 neuf 10 dix 11 dix un 12 dix deux 13 dix trois 14 dix qu...

we make the words for English numbers regular up to 99.  (future post French .) 0 zero 1 one 2 two 3 three 4 four 5 five 6 six...

hypothesis: a society may grant its lower classes hope for upward social mobility, or a comfortable existence, but not both. this is a dep...

cow = beef pig = pork sheep = mutton deer = venison horse = ? we have alternate names for the meat of animals that we maybe do not...

(this post was written before Luigi Mangione was arrested.) predict that the suspected assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, if a...

one of the things learned from the Uvalde, Texas school shooting is that police do not like to go where there are guns.  (this is obvious in...

inspired by "___: the 3D virtual reality experience"

in base 2, the battle between pi and 2pi (tau) is over where to put the decimal point: 1.10010010000111111011010... = pi/2 11.001001000...

"...I'd buy you various expensive goods." that's sweet. "...I'd buy your love." well, that turned dark. ...

team A rises to power and nearly genocides ("humanitarian crisises") team B.  team B survivors regroup, play the plucky underdogs ...

at first glance, a giant gun seems not a very practical method for space launch, because very few payloads, certainly not humans, can surviv...

if you quit with Q instead of q (which is possible to do by accident, e.g., CAPS LOCK accidentally on), mpv stores its resume or "watch...

what major conflicts had 3 main parties? a Scotsman, Irishman, and Englishman walk into a bar. they drink all the alcohol. (a country th...

set yourself up with a mortgage and mouths to feed, so that you may do the horrible thing that you want to do . (expanding from "yuppie...

among animals that play, how much less play do the adults do than the young?  (how to quantify amount of play?)  how does the seemingly dram...

phobia: irrational fear of the unfamiliar. philia: irrational lack of fear of the familiar.  (this definition is a bit of a stretch.) wh...

variations on the classic artificial intelligence task of mimicking a specific human (the Target) while being questioned by an Interrogator:...