about me
last thursday i ate my first francesinha in a smoke-free café. and let me tell you, it tasted really good. my sincere thanks to all the portuguese smokers out there who are playing by the (new) rules – i appreciate it. :)
ad by tbwa for the world tobacco free day.
when i failed to join the air force and had to choose another career, i picked informatics, journalism and astronomy, all in the same application form – that’s how clueless i was towards my future. in the end, informatics won, and 7 years later, here i am, still clueless but with an engineering degree! :)
every now and then, on the most improbable situations, the informatics/mathematics part comes in handy, like for instance (and ironically) when i have to fly.
here’s the formal definition of a common problem, known as packing. the next time your mom tells you to stop procrastinating on your packing duties, you can properly explain her how hard that is – and hopefully delay the task a little longer!
this is called a 0-1-knapsack problem, which is known to be a np-complete problem. np stands for non-deterministic polynomial time… and that translates into “very hard & time-consuming problem”.
another np-complete problem is called bin packing, which consists of neatly placing different volumes in as less bins as possible. no time-efficient solution has been discovered for these problems.
so there you go. combine the two and you have packing! :D
(and now, back to the suitcases…)
ps – images from wikipedia, more on the subject here.
ps2 – who was stephen cook?
“Ernesto Guevara: What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two; melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.”
from diarios de motocicleta.
if i hadn’t already felt the urge to travel to south america, i would surely get the itch after watching diarios de motocicleta: the story of young che guevara on his south-american continental roadtrip on a bike named la poderosa (“the mighty one”). the film photography is simple and stunning, eye-catching in its rawness.
besides, roadtrips fascinate me, as i am sure they do to many other travelers out there. my only stint at a roadtrip was a 3 or 4 days drive through colorado, utah and wyoming, over a year ago.
it was beautiful and liberating, and we plan to go back to the states and repeat it someday, with a twist: we shall visit an itinerary of odd-named places. it will certainly include highlights like potomac, normal, breakneck, chicken, gringo, frostproof, ding dong and most definitely choconut. no kidding!
above, our detour to visit a place called cisco. :)
2008 is going to be a good year. i have a thing for even numbered years, and i especially like “round” years (or names). as an example, number 7 is kind of spiky, but 8 is round and nice, so i like 8 better. hey, we all need criteria, right?
have a smashing 2008!
there was a time when i had to make up all sorts of games and tricks to keep my cousin quiet for a bit (and for my own sanity). i’m sure these cute camions-bidons, by martine camillieri would have made quite a success.
check out her website for an overload of color and creativity, as well as many ideas to entertain children – and yourself!
