Short Story: The Beginning (part 2)

This is a story I wrote a long time ago. I'm putting it up here for yours and my amusement. After this, I'll be ripping to pieces and pointing out the holes.

Navigation: Back to Part 1

From my school days, I went to Girton College at the University; learning the combined area of Natural Sciences - yet concentrating on the flame of the scholarly pursuits of my school years; the more esoteric aspects of physics. From there, I gained a first-class degree with honours, moving to Oxford to study to become a doctor. Soon after, I moved to America to lecture in a University in Chicago.

Whilst teaching, I became involved with a beautiful young student of mine, Kathryn Laird. With fair, golden hair, slim figure and happy disposition, she whirled into my life. My agenda changed - no longer did I pursue knowledge with such single-mindedness; she gave me a new outlook, and my life changed to revolve not around books and lectures as it had in the past, but around her. I was besotted.

Two happy years we spent together, and we were to be engaged. Yet it appears that fate cruelly determined that this was not to be.

Late one night, I was walking back to her home (she still lived with her parents). I walked her towards the short back-alley that led to her home, intending to walk her all the way back. She declined, kissing me briefly on the lips, saying that she knew I had a long day ahead of me tomorrow (a convention that I had to lecture to had started that day), and to run along home. I waved her goodbye, blew her a kiss, and started to walk back to my home, my mind wandering, thinking of my beloved.

A short while from where I'd left Kathryn, I head a distance female scream. It had come from a dark alley along the road to my home. I broke into a run, soon reaching the alley-way.

In the dim light, it wasn't possible to see much. There was only one street light in the alleyway, and with that being broken, the only light filtering in was that from the main street behind me. I could make out a rough dead end, trash cans scattered around the walls, and a huddled shape on the floor in the darker shadows beyond.

A slight movement to my left, barely perceptible, alerted me to the presence of another person. I turned round to face whoever it might have been and in a quiet voice, said "What's happened here? I heard a scream..." I didn't hear a reply - with a glint of metal and a quick movement from the hidden figure I crumpled to the floor, unconscious.

End of part 2

New "This Is Vegas" Gameplay Movie

Check it out on Gamespot Video :)

Basically, it's the tutorial for Club Aqua, and shows you a lot of what partying will be like in the finished game.

And it's awesome ;-)

Update: Unsealed on Zoetrope.com

I'm somewhat shocked. Unsealed is the top rated short screenplay on Zoetrope.com (Francis Ford Coppola's Writer's Workshop site) for the month of February (i.e. that's when it was submitted).

Er... like, yay!

New Vitamin Regimen - And A Less Fuzzy Brain

So one of the upshots of the medical research that I've been doing recently is that I'm slowly figuring out how a lot of things work - especially for myself.

Normally, I'll wake up feeling like I have a hangover. Dry eyes, slight headache, very groggy. This tiredness doesn't stop during the day - and it doesn't go away no matter how much I sleep.

I think I've figured out how to fix that though. And the results are surprising. I've been borderline for type II diabetes for a while, with high cholesterol. And I do get coldsores. Those symptoms (high blood sugar, high cholesterol) are something that can be caused by a subclinical herpesviridae infection (if the papers I'm reading are correct). Add in the fact that I get some scintillating scotoma, and it looks like I've had a subclinical migraine for quite a while that was getting ready to rear its ugly head.

So a little research online, and I arrived at this solution (I take this morning and night):

• Curcumin (Turmeric extract)
• Resveratrol (Red Wine phenols)
• A good MultiVitamin
• Omega 3 fatty acids
• Lecithin
• L-Lysine
• Vitamin C

... and hey presto, I wake up feeling absolutely fantastic. Which is a nice change for me.

Still in the "is this a placebo or is it real?" phase, but the results are promising.

How does it work?

Well, assuming that herpesviridae are the cause of my symptoms (by the way, we can add migraines and cluster headaches to the list of potential herpesviridae-caused symptoms now after spying a few papers on this), it works something like this:

Curcumin - interferes with herpesviridae reproduction, also tones down TNF inflammatory response (kind of like a natural Enbrel/Etanercept).

Resveratrol - interferes with herpesviridae reproduction, turns down TNF inflammatory response, and inhibits reactivation (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10551373)

Multivitamin - to replenish Vitamin B stores (I use one high in the cyanocobalamin form of B12). Mainly to help repair nerves, but also to act synergistically with interferon in the body to increase its efficacy (http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6908611.html); adding high doses of B12 massively reduces the amount of interferon-beta necessary to hold an infection in check by about half.

Omega 3 fatty acids - modulates the structure of cell lipid rafts, making it harder for the herpesviridae (and rhinoviruses, adenoviruses) to enter or exit the cell membranes.

L-Lysine - interferes with herpesviridae replication by masquerading as L-Arginine (the virus can't tell the difference, and L-Lysine substitution produces faulty viruses).

Vitamin C - for healing (used by the body with Lysine to create collagen). This is really a buffer for the high levels of Lysine, allowing it to be effectively used, and to ensure that Vitamin C stores don't run low as a result.

Theoretically, this mix could also act as a good weight-loss treatment too; if you think about it, if this can shift the balance away from type-II diabetes and high cholesterol (which Omega 3, resveratrol and curcumin are shown to help with in some studies), weight loss should come as a natural consequence.

Anyway, it's all theory at this point. But the papers I'm using to do this research are pretty promising.

Math Puzzle: this one goes to 1.0

Your mission:
You have the following piece of code:

int GetIndex()
{
float rand = GetRandomNumber();
return NUM_ITEMS * rand;
}

... which you'd expect to return a value from 0 to NUM_ITEMS-1, giving a nice equal chance of picking any item from some list at random.

The question is this:

Most random number functions return a value from 0.0 to 0.999999999999999'. (Or, to look at it another way, 1-epsilon, where epsilon is the smallest possible floating point value that can be represented).

However, Joey Badrand (that scandalous cur) has come up with a random number function for your use which returns a value between 0.0 and 1.0! And you have no choice but to use it in your function.

Questions

1. What does this do to your distribution, and why is it a bad thing?
2. How do you fix your function so that the output of Joey's random number generator can be used to do the Right Thing?

200th Post!

Hahah :) Today is a special day... this is the 200th article that I've written on this blog since I started writing it back in 2004. That's roughly one a week, give or take.

Yay! Here's to the Intertubes! *clink*