Ken's blog

git push """ remote: error: refusing to update checked out branch: refs/heads/master By default, updating the current branc...

in the real world, you can have masses which only attract gravitationally, or masses with positive or negative electric charge which attract...

parody of the ddate calendar utility's "Grudnuk demand sustenance!".  phrase origin (and identity of Grudnuk) are unknown.

list the positions of the set bits in order of decreasing significance, 0-indexed so that bit position indices correspond to the exponents o...

a man/woman came in for 12 drummers drumming, 11 pipers piping, 10 lords a-leaping, 9 ladies dancing, 8 maids a-milking, 7 swans a-swimming,...

although 0,0 off the coast of west Africa is a popular example latitude and longitude for applications taking input of latlong (GPS), also a...

suppose you want a random positive rational number 0 < N/D < 1 with D less than some bound DMAX.  sample (D,N) uniformly within the tr...

in easily imaginable alternate timeline, Trump's supporters wage civil war attempting to gain power.  who knows whether they would have ...

St. Louis, Missouri

Hartford, CT and Springfield, MA want to call themselves the Knowledge Corridor. where should the corresponding Ignorance Corridor be? previ...

when they first meet on the X Files, Fox Mulder compliments Dana Scully on her senior thesis exploring Einstein's theory of special rela...

waves ripple across the surface of the water: "nice."  the waves continue rippling on the solid container of the water: "some...

first, we expand the rules of chess to define the movement of a pawn on the first rank.  this is immediately useful for compositions and for...

https://github.com/orgs/tmux/discussions/5055 claims tmux supprts Extended Regular Expressions.  "man 7 regex" says "modern...

Greek roots: helicopter = helico (spiral) + pter (wing) tetrelix = tetr(a) (four) + (h)elix tetrapter = tetra + pter tetrelipter = tetr(a...

the killer approaches Marion Crane as she showers.  when the shower curtain is pulled aside, Marion responds not in terror but greets a see...

Prince Andrew does hookers, as we have learned from Jeffrey Epstein.  (realistically, this has been the norm for nobility including royalty ...

despite Palestine's best efforts to assassinate any and all Israeli Prime Ministers, Yitzhak Rabin found himself assassinated not by the...

Ancient Greek: nominative singular: apokalypsis nominative dual: apokalypsei nominative plural: apokalypseis other declensions (othe...

unicursal labyrinth: 2 endpoints and a path between them.  lots of twists and turns but no branches.  perhaps a meditation exercise, perhaps...

every checkmate in orthodox chess requires at least two pieces (plus the enemy king).  often, one or more of those pieces is an enemy piece ...

the science fiction of the burrito tunnel contains the one big lie of the tunnel existing, and several smaller lies which are satirically f...

we calculate the minuscule accelerations that the planets and other bodies gravitationally exert on the sun: a = F/sunmass = G*planetmass/r...

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. ...

doesn't make a whole lot of sense. perhaps it needs an even less sensical third line. shervice.

x^x = 10^100 solution x = 56.96124843 raising a number to its own power; self-power.  previously, Lambert W . Mathematica: u=100*Log[10]...

the digits in the decimal expansion of negative powers of 2, equivalently positive powers of 0.5, are the same as the digits of positive pow...

chocolate armpit sweaty sock stew cream of vinegar from "Plants vs. Zombies: Faulty Fables"

f(n) = sum(k=0, n, binomial(n,k) * k!) for(i=0, 12, x=f(i); print(i" "x" ",x-1)) 0 1 0 1 2 1 2 5 4 3 16 15 ...

n letters in the alphabet, maximum word length k, letter repetitions permitted.  (future post repetitions not permitted .)  how many distinc...

given a graph, find a Hamiltonian path if it exists.  this is NP-complete. if a Hamiltonian path is easy to find (perhaps there are many),...

a ball bounces on a flat surface, uniform gravity, perfectly elastic collisions with the floor.  trajectory is a sequence of congruent parab...

or random starting note, for a piece you want to practice in all transpositions (perhaps Well Tempered Clavier). #!perl -lw @a=split//,...

compose an initial chess position and sequence of moves which do not repeat positions (position includes player to move).  how long of such ...

by some estimates, the U.S. directly killed 900,000 Muslims in the War on Islam ("Terror") after 9/11.  (many more if indirect dea...

antonym of "(running a) tight ship". (cf the game "Raft")

in the thought experiment of Schroedinger's cat, after the murder mechanism is triggered by half a photon, the box contains a cyanide ca...

Q/2 white queens, Q/2 black.  how many can fit on a chessboard (i.e., maximize Q) with no queen attacking one of the opposite color?  queens...

how would a sport change if distance from the one team's goal side to the other team's goal side were decreased?  basketball and soc...

the common belief goes, you never know when you might need to murder, so it is good to own a gun, and so many people do (under the pretense ...

in an alternate universe, Gregor Mendel tries to understand genetics, but the traits he experiments on happen to be the result of viral infe...

pawn allowed on 8th rank: N.  (orthodox chess: promotion forced) Y. pawn is allowed to move to 8th rank and remain a pawn: N.  (...

some humans, annoyed at the threat of being eaten by wolves, decide to kill them, to exterminate one or more wolf packs in the area.  when t...

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

chess variant removing ranged diagonal movement: replace bishop with fairy ferz, or fairy ferz + fairy dabbaba.  the new piece is colorbou...

did anyone find all Koroks in Zelda BOTW before the first object map was published? when was the total number first known? vaguely related...

various tasks related to constructing a random D-dimensional linear programming problem: we want a convex polyhedron (polytope) specified ...

tile the plane with squares and equilateral triangles all of the same side length.  this could be fun with physical tiles. well investigat...

given a connected graph and a number N, select N vertices in the graph so that the size of the Steiner tree (Steiner tree problem on graphs)...

OEIS A135701 previously. the lists below were computed from the known Mersenne primes as of March 2026.  if copying by hand, line number...

given a region partitioned into a small number of pixels not necessarily square (future post cmpvevta), enumerate glyphs.  two possible pixe...

brashly subtitle the sequel "the sequel".

it seems likely that Sophocles's Antigone, ending with two young lovers dead in a tomb, influenced Romeo and Juliet.  perhaps Shakespear...

what if counting in English were base 20?  (inspired by French which is partially base 20 .) should 20-39 be "score" or "on...

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...

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