2011: The year in review

For those of my two readers who don't know, for the last... oh, five or so years, I think? I've reviewed the year from my own point of view. Well, it's nearly that time of year where the earth reaches that arbitrary position relative to the sun where the Gregorian calendar says a new year begins, so! Let's have a look at 2011!

Cleverbot won't make my shield drop.

Disclaimer and backstory: As of this post, I've killed heroic Gunship Battle 15 times, Baleroc 16 times and Asira Dawnslayer 18 times and I've never had their shields drop. Which is annoying. So, Nika suggested I ask Cleverbot how do get a shield to drop. This conversation is what followed. Text in bold is what I said.

3 Reasons Why Christmas Carols Annoy Me

Firstly, I just want to make this clear. I love Christmas. I have nothing against the holiday and what it stands for. I like that we get to take a day out to spend time with family and friends to celebrate whatever your religious affiliations dictate you can and should celebrate. The songs, on the other hand? Can't stand 'em. They annoy the crap out of me. Why? Well, that's why I have a blog! To talk about crap nobody cares about!

The Actually Important Election Question

Firstly, a disclaimer, regarding my political views. I don't support any single party, I use a "I'll pick the party that I dislike the least" sort of system. I'm not going to tell you who I voted for in the last election, or who I'll vote for in this election (Because I don't know yet, although I have a rough idea), and I'm not posting this blog to support any particular political party. This blog isn't intended to be election advertising, is not supported by, funded by, or anything like that by any New Zealand political party. Apart from the copy-pasta from the referendum.org.nz website, this is my own opinion and you're more than welcome to disagree with it.

So, unless you're not from New Zealand, or you've been living under a rock in New Zealand (Also known as Gore), you know there's an election this year. Part of this election is a referendum on our voting system, which I think has received far less coverage than it deserves. See, in my opinion, this referendum is more important than the result of the actual election, because this decides how elections work. For this reason, I think, no matter who you support, you should make an informed decision in this referendum because this is the way we can decide on the fairest way to get the most out of our democracy.

I did a 130k Bloodthirst Crit.

On heroic Staghelm with full concentration trinket, colossus smash, 2-set, pot, Death Wish and Recklessness. My raid leader told me to stop talking about it and I can talk about it in my blog later. So here we are!

I didn't screenshot it, what with me being on progression, but I did draw it on Paint because I can.

Behold, the awesomeness of my artistic talent, and my awesome critting with deliberately aligned buffs! Be jealous, Chibi.

Small update because I'm not dead!

So the thought occurs, I've barely posted in the last month, after spending the month before that posting a lot. It's really entirely down to me being lazy, but I thought I'd make a small update, just to let people know what I'm up to.
Last month was a bit of a busy month for me. I went down to my girlfriend's place (She lives out of town) to see her perform one of her weekly concerts, then the next week, I went to my mum's place to give my final respects to Dinky and put a wee doggy statue on his wee doggy grave. Week after that, my sister came down for the weekend for the last time before I become an uncle, and now this week, I've gone to my girlfriend's place again for no particular reason. So yeah! Been a wee bit busy, but mostly, I'm just lazy!

But! Because I'm lazy, I thought I'd give a few previews for things I wanna post.

• A brief introduction to quantum physics, because one of my friends asked me to.
• Weird trilogue (That's a real word, I swear!) involving a fictional deity.
• A story about a seagull.
• Something about adulthood.
• A form of review of WoW tank classes.

I probably have other things in line. I'm also considering posting one of my fictional story type things up here, because I like posting it on things and maybe, someday, people will actually read it. It's not bad, I swear!

On a slightly more serious note, I've been poking around the stats, and while I haven't had more than, like, 40 views on a single blog post, I have had a few hits from search engines (Mostly to WoW related things) which is very encouraging! I like the fact that people are finding me from googling me.

But yeah. That was a pretty small update. I'll try write more soon, but for now, brb being really lazy.

Update:  Decided I would put up SKI. It's over here!

Holy New Warrior Talents!

So Blizzard announced today, the new Panda-styled talent trees. Since my main is a prot warrior, I'm gonna look at the warrior ones from a tank point of view.

So, firstly, my opinion on the setup of the new talent trees.

1. I like that they're not spec-bound now. Being able to pick and choose which talent I like without being bound to a tree is pretty neat.
2. I would like the change to be a bit more. There are currently 18 talents per tree (6 lots of 3). Something like 24 or even 30 would be nicer (6 lots of 4 or 5), but then you have the problem of making sure all the talents are cool.
3. The biggest problem, I think, is that, in trying to add customisability, they're removing it. It looks right now like there's one talent that's best for each situation and I'm not sure I like that.

With that said, it's an interesting change and I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays out.

And now, a talent by talent look, but first a disclaimer: I know these talents aren't final and are subject to change. It's also somewhat difficult to look at these talents in a vacuum. I assume skills will be changing, or else some of them are just useless.

So! Straight into it! (Images all courtesy of MMO-Champion)

A Eulogy for Dinky

I think, a lot of people don't understand how important pets are to people, but when you've lived with someone for most of your life (Dinky was born just before I turned 5 and I moved out of home, leaving him behind when I was 18, so that's 13 years of my 24 year old life), they're more than just an animal. Animals have feelings and personalities and emotions and all that too, and when you're close to a pet, they're more than a friend, they're a part of your family too. Dinky was never just a dog, he was a brother to me.

Today, at 19 years old, Dinky was put down, due to his massively failing health. I mean, hell, 19 years old is an incredibly good age for a dog to reach, even one of his size (A quick look on Wikipedia puts him at about 100 in dog years). But then again, Dinky always was a bit of a unique and special dog.

5 Popular Songs I Find Unintentionally Kinda Wrong

I listen to a decent amount of music and a lot of popular music annoys me, especially cause there are a few out there that are either kinda wrong if you think about it, or kinda put across a bad message. Sometimes, this is on purpose, but I'm pretty sure, with these 5, it's really not intentional.

And, just as a minor disclaimer, I don't care if you think the songs are brilliant, this is, more or less, my opinion and I'm mostly just being deliberately a knob.

Light-Speed Briefs

So you may have heard by now that CERN recently apparently discovered particles that can move faster than the speed of light, and I don't think people quite realise the potential ramifications of this discovery.Most people are probably aware that the speed of light is the universal speed limit, but I think a lot of people know this but are sorta unimpressed by just how rigidly the universe enforces this speed limit, or think we just lack the technology to surpass it. Nono. The speed of light is a very strict, "you cannot go faster than this" limit and it's my hope with this blog to explain exactly why that is.

So, in short, yes, this is going to get a bit physicsy. I realise most of my 2 readers don't have a strong background in physics but I'm hoping to explain things in a way that most people should understand.

So! To understand the speed of light, we first need to understand what exactly light is. So..

A snapshot of my iPod

Firstly, no, I'm not an Apple fanboy or anything. I like my iPod and use it and iTunes for two reasons:

1. My iPod has 120GB of space. I doubt I'm filling it soon.
2. iTunes lets me group songs so that, even on shuffle, they stay grouped and play in order. For example, if an album has an intro track that leads into another song, I don't get annoyed at it. Unfortunately, iPods don't have that functionality. Apple, please add it :( Although, knowing them, even if they did, I'd need to buy a new iPod.

So anyway, my iPod is my basic source for all my music needs. Every song I have and listen to is on my iPod. And thus, you can have a random snapshot of what my iPod is like:

Religion, Science and Mathematics

I mentioned briefly in a previous blog post that I consider myself a Christian and I wanted to elaborate on that briefly here. Forgive me if this entry seems overly religious to you, I'm trying to address it to non-religious and religious people here, because 1: I want people to understand my viewpoint and 2: I think a lot of Christians need to re-evaluate what they consider their Christianity to be.

I was going to post something serious but I posted this instead

Why? No idea. I'm bored and I have a headache, so, story time!

I'm generally considered a good sort of guy. I try not to get into trouble and I try not to be a complete jerk to people. Most people know I'm pretty friendly and wouldn't hurt anyone, at least not intentionally. I'm not trying to sound vain here, it's just how people see me. If you know me, you'll be like "Oh yeah, that's Wani."

So, with that said, I've been questioned by the police, complete with fingerprinting and all that stuff. It was pretty epic. Why?

Because I'm a hardened thug and a vandal. Apparently.

The Law of Evolution

ZOMG CONTROVERSIAL TOPIC

Well, not really. I honestly don't see why evolution has any controversy whatsoever about it. Well, I can see why but it shouldn't. This is the information age, we should've all outgrown this.

Now, I'm not a biologist. I don't understand the details behind evolution, but quite frankly, I don't see why I'd need to be. Honestly, it seems like common sense to me. But before I get into all of that, I'm going to try cover a few common misconceptions, but first, since, for some insane reason, religion is brought into these debates, I'm going to cover my own religious beliefs very quickly.

I consider myself a Christian. It's how I was raised, and quite frankly, Jesus seemed like a pretty clever guy and following his teachings seems like a good idea. The whole "do unto others as you would have them do to you" is a pretty good philosophy to live by.
With that said, I consider myself a scientist (And I have a degree to prove it!). I put a lot of faith into basic logic and reasoning and when logic and reasoning dictates that the measurable universe is 14 billion years old (Seriously, young earth Creationists, you're all idiots), and that humankind came from evolution, that's what I believe.

But anyway! Misconceptions!

Hold the Line: A guide to WoW warrior avoidance

So, some of you may remember, I did a thread a while back about Hold the Line. As was pointed out to me, I used some slightly flawed maths so I've gone through and redone a lot of it. For example, I had crit block chance increasing overall avoidance, which it doesn't, and I also ignored [Shield Block]. And thus, I've fixed all this and decided to have another shot at this.

So anyway. The main point was to look at Hold the Line and see how it affects stats compared to other ones. We get warriors in here stacking the hell out of parry, thinking it'll give them this ultimate uptime on Hold the Line which is obviously, the best thing evar.

"You can choose your friends but you can't choose your family"

That's an old saying that (As far as I'm aware) means that if you're friends are being idiots to you, you can ditch them but you can't ditch the people related to you by blood. For the most part, I don't like that saying. You can't choose your friends. You can choose the people you spend your time with, but true friends? That's something you don't choose, that's something deeper than that.

I'm gonna sound like a Yu-Gi-Oh! episode right now, but true friendship is something beyond just people who have similar interests and who like hanging out together. True friendship is a tight bond between two people that can become fragile at times but won't break.

I'm gonna throw out a few examples from my life here, not using real names for various people's sakes, just to kinda demonstrate my point.

Wani's recipe for awesome deep-fried chips

I can be a rather lazy cook sometimes, I'll admit that. Half the time, my dinners are sausages and chips (And somehow, I stay in shape o_O). But frozen chips are kinda expensive, so I thought to myself "Hey! Why not buy potatoes and make them yourself?" So I did! I cut up potatoes, then found out that that didn't give quite the same texture and flavour as the frozen ones, or the ones you get from fish and chip shops (inb4fushandchupbecauseI'makiwi). So! After some experimenting because most chip recipes are for oven baked or pan fried (wth?), I came across the quite simple secret: Boiling.

Some WoW nitpicks

Yes, I play way too much World of Warcraft. And I because I can, just a few minor things I wish they'd done or followed up on or something.

1. Azjol'Nerub: Okay, I think everyone probably agrees with this, including the developers. For those who don't know, Azjol'Nerub is the city of the Nerubians that spans the entire continent of Northrend. So Wrath of the Lich King comes out and what do we get? Two 5 man levelling dungeons, one with 3 bosses including Anub'Arak, one of the Lich King's top generals (Who, thankfully, did get a raid appearance later) and the other with 5 bosses. Rather disappointing for an area with a whole lot of potential.
2. Zul'Drak raid: For those who haven't seen it, there's a huge building to the north east of Gun'drak. What is it? Why is it  there? Is that where the king of the Frost Trolls lives? As much as people seem to hate troll raids, this one just has a lot of potential. Ah well, maybe it'll show up again later.
3. Vrykul raid: There's a lot of really huge Vrykul castles in Icecrown that could potentially hold a raid there. Hell, I can think of three bosses that could've worked in there. Queen Angerboda, who, to be fair, did die but since when has that stopped the Lich King? King Ymiron, another character who I think had too much potential to just be a 5 man dungeon boss especially since when we first see him in Howling Fjord, he's a level ?? Boss monster. And...
4. Annhylde the Caller: Even those who play WoW may not recognise this name, but in Utgarde Keep, she's the Val'kyr who appears, resurrects Ingvar the Plunderer and... that's it. Who is she? Why does she get her own name? What happened to her after that? I want to kill her, damnit!
5. The Nexus War: While levelling in WotLK, we got this all over the place: The war between the mages of Dalaran and Malygos, the dragon aspect of magic. And it ended before 3.1 when we kill Malygos in one of the introductory raids. A bit of a let down and again, a lot more potential here. You know how I would've done raiding in WotLK? Make Trial of the Crusader or something like that the second tier 3.0 raid, make Malygos, with a few more random bosses the 3.2 raid. Would've been far more interesting. Also, make Anub'arak a boss in Icecrown Citadel and put something else in his place in the Azjol'Nerub 5 man and the Trial of the Crusader raid.
6. More Deathwing in Cataclysm: Really, for an expansion based around him, Deathwing doesn't really do that much while you level from 80 to 85. We do a lot of stuff with naga and cat people and the Twilight's Hammer but Deathwing himself really only pops up twice, in Mount Hyjal and in Twilight Highlands. Yeah, I know the Twilight's Hammer are his minions but honestly, half the time, they feel like Cho'gall's minions and we've already killed him off too.
7. The Shattering happened?: I'd also have had some more pre-release events right after the Shattering and before the actual expansion hit, since after the Shattering, it didn't feel like a world changing event had just happened, it felt like it had happened months ago. Ah well, can't do anything about that now.
8. Cataclysm reputations: One of the cool things about WotLK was how they managed reputations with classes. Mages were automatically Friendly with Kirin Tor, Death Knights were Friendly with Knights of the Ebon Blade and Paladins were (I think) automatically Friendly with Argent Crusade. In Cataclysm, everyone's neutral with everyone and it feels less loreful. I don't care that loreful isn't a word. It makes sense to me that Druids should start out at Friendly with Guardians of Hyjal, Shamans should start out Friendly with Earthen Ring, Orcs should start out at Friendly with Dragonmaw Clan and Dwarves should start out at Friendly with Wildhammer clan. I don't think that really causes enough imbalance for anyone to really care, but I think it'd make a nice change.
9. Tauren Village: It was a wee village just to the south of Anh'Qiraj that you had to water walk to. Apparently the Shattering removed it :( Ah well.
10. Archimonde's skeleton: Back at the end of WarCraft 3, the Night Elves, Orcs and Humans allied to kick some ass on the Burning Legion, led by Archimonde, ending with them blowing him up as he tries to kill the World Tree. It's pretty bad-ass of them all. Then, when WoW came out, if you managed to get into the Mount Hyjal zone, you could see this. Basically, it's Archimonde's skeleton tied to the World Tree as a huge "Hey, you wanna screw with Night Elves? This is what we did to one of the three leaders of the Burning Legion, Archimonde the Defiler. Still wanna screw with us? Yeah, I thought so." So once Mount Hyjal is finally fully opened and we can go there, I'm like "Yay! I wanna see the big skeleton!" And it's gone. Really? It was such an awesome symbol of Night Elf badassness. Now sure, leaving a giant Eredar skeleton is probably not the safest thing to do but who cares? It was badass!

Aaaaand I think that's about it. Yes, none of these are huge complaints but I don't care! I wanna nitpick.

BEMA, or how to not fail at troll maths

Okay, if you've done any form of maths in school, you've probably heard of BEMA, BEDMAS, PODMAS, PIMDAS or some variation of that acronym. Basically, it means the order of operations and is the cornerstone of basic arithmatic. Some very successful trolls out there have decided to post basic maths equations and trick people who have a poor understanding of it.

And so, I'm writing a brief note, explaining the order, why it's in that order, and hopefully clearing up some misconceptions.

Firstly, the acronym itself. The acronym isn't important, but I'm most in favour of BEMA because it cuts out division and subtraction, no longer implying that they come before or after addition or multiplication.

So!

1. Brackets (Or, Parentheses) ()

Brackets always come first. Why? Because mathematicians need a symbol that means "Do this first". Plenty of useful situations, such as 2×(x+3) and so forth. The (x + 3) always comes first. I should note that things outside the brackets are not part of it. This seems obvious, but apparently people seem to think that 2(x+3) means the 2 is part of the brackets. I'm not sure why. It's not. There's an invisible multiplication sign (This is identical to  what I wrote earlier) and that means you do it in the multiplication step.
You can nest brackets and stuff too. Anything inside the brackets follows the normal order of operations so you do the innermost brackets first and move out.
There are also implied brackets, where the brackets aren't written because mathematicians are lazy. These mostly come in two situations.
Firstly, square roots. Anything inside the square root symbol is considered bracketed even though the bracket is nearly never written. I'd give an example but facebook notes don't let me.
Secondly, things inside the power. Say, 2^-1, the -1 is considered all part of the power.
Secondly, division written as fractions. The numerator (ie the top line) and the denominator (ie the bottom line) are both in seperate brackets. So, for example:

2x + 3
3x - 1

This is the same as

(2x + 3)
(3x - 1)

I should point out now that 2x + 3 ÷ 3x - 1 does not have any implied brackets, and is, in fact, the same as 2 × x + 3 ÷ 3 × x - 1. This is important but I'll get into why later.

2. Exponents (Or, orders or indices) ^

These are normally written as a superscriptor the alternative symbol is ^. It's just powers and square roots. 2³ or x² or √4 come second. Why is this?
Basically, it's because of what a power is. It's repeated multiplication. 2^3 means 2 × 2 × 2. If you have, say, 3×2³, what you're doing is 3 × 2 × 2 × 2, which is very different from (3×2)³ or 6 × 6 × 6.
Now here, we get problems from -1² because is this -1 × -1 or -(1 × 1). The answer is the latter. Exponents come before the inverse sign. If we meant -1 × -1, we'd write (-1)².
Square root happens at this time too because the square root is just something to the power of a fraction.

3. Multiplication (And divison) ×÷

This seems to cause a lot of issue because of the whole implied brackets thing above. But, first things first, multiplication and division happen at the same time. One doesn't happen before the other, you do them both at exactly the same time. Why? Because multiplication and division are identical operations. The only difference is when you divide, you multiply by the inverse of a number. What's the inverse of a number? If your number is x, the inverse is either x^-1 or 1÷x. Both are the same thing.
Go on, try it. Get a decent calculator and do, say 6 ÷ 2. You'll get 3. Then do 6 × 0.5 (0.5 being the inverse of 2). You'll get 3 again. They're both identical operations and that's why I don't like having BEMA explicitly state division. Division is just a funny way of doing multiplication.
Now then, why do these come in this bit? Because, like exponents, multiplication is just repeated addition. 6 × 3 is just 6 + 6 + 6. 2³ is just 2 × 2 × 2 is just (2 × 2) × 2 = (2 × 2) × (2 × 2) = 2 + 2 + 2 + 2. Again, 2 + 6 × 3 is 2 + 6 + 6 + 6, which is different to 8 + 8 + 8.
Now, I mentioned 2 × x + 3 ÷ 3 × x - 1 earlier. Now, order of operations says that the middle bit is all done at the same time. So this isn't 3 ÷ (3 × x), it's 3 ÷ 3 × x. The first is equal to 1/x, the second is equal to x. That's a huge difference and the original troll maths was based around this distinction.

4. Addition (and Subtraction) +-

Okay, this is fairly obvious. Last, you do all addition and subtraction. Again, these happen at the same time because subtraction is just adding the negative of a number. 5 - 3 is the same as 5 + (-3). I don't think I need to go in to more detail here.

Doing things at the same time.

I've mentioned this a few times. Doing multiplication and division at the same time, and addition and subtraction at the same time. Obviously, that's a rather tricky thing to do. So, what I mean when I say this is you work from left to right. If you have 5 + 3 - 2, going from left to right, you do the addition first, 5 + 3 = 8, then subtract 8 - 2 = 6. For 5 - 3 + 2, you do the subtraction first, 5 - 3 = 2, then the addition, 2 + 2 = 4. Same with division and multiplication. 12 ÷ 4 × 2, do the division first to get 3, then multiply by 2 to get 6. Or, 12 × 4 ÷ 2, you do the multiplication first to get 48, then divide by 2 to get 24.

Now, for something more advanced (Feel free to ignore this if you aren't a nerd), the truth is, the order doesn't actually matter. To use a fancy maths term, addition and multiplication are commutative. Which means the order doesn't matter. If you remember that subtraction is adding by the negative of a number and division is multiplying by the inverse of a number, the order becomes unimportant. 5 + 3 + (-2) is the same as (-2) + 5 + 3 is the same as 3 + 5 + (-2). Likewise, 12 × (1/4) × 2 is the same as (1/4) × 2 × 12.


Aaand that's about all I have to say. Remember people, don't feed the troll and remember the order to do things!

So I made a blog!

So I got bored, decided I'd make myself a blog of some kind. Why not? And I suppose the first blog is a good place to introduce myself, what I intend to write about and generally bore you with details. And thus, me!

About me

My name's Christopher Kennard, I currently hold a BSc with a major in maths and physics which isn't that impressive but if I decide to rant about maths or physics, you at least know I'm not a rambling moron and I do have some credentials to back myself up. I'd love to go for a higher degree but right now, I'm lazy and am probably going to get into teaching instead.
I spend most of my free time playing WoW, so if I write about that, that's why. I play a level 85 protection warrior as my main, I'm not that progressed but I'm having fun so yay me!
I also enjoy writing but I tend to be lazy about that too. <_< >_>
And, if the title didn't tip you off, I'm a lefty. Why is this important? No idea! But it sounded like a catchy name for a blog. Go me!
I would like to clarify that the title is not meant to imply any political leanings. My political views are to vote for whoever reminds me the most of Optimus Prime, and if that fails, whoever I think is the best. I don't vote exclusively for one party.

Aaaand that's about all I have to say about me. Hopefully I'll have something interesting to write and for now, I'ma screw around with designs.