“whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. boldness has genious, power and magic to it. begin it now.”
goethe
Categories
short reminder
Category: just life
a few months ago, at ikea, we noticed this pot lid holder. we don’t have a lot of pots and less pot lids even, but we purchased it anyway. guess what we use it for… postcards, of course!!
it’s isn’t exactly an ikea “hack”, but it fits our needs well. also, the higher racks are smaller and the lower ones are larger, which comes in quite handy for those big sized ones.
we don’t like the idea of “storing” postcards away, once received. they make us happy, so we want to look at them! :)
more pictures, on flickr (click for larger):
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!
- you have n kinds of items, 1 through n. each item j has a value (sentimental or of importance) pj and a weight wj. the maximum weight one can carry in the suitcase is c, and according to british airways, c=23 kgs.
- the number of each kind of item in the suitcase, xj, is restricted to zero or one (for simplicity purposes).
- mathematically the problem can be formulated as:
maximize
subject to
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?
Categories
happy 2008!
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!