©® 2005 - All copyrights belong to their respective writers / publishers / etc. Used without permission.
The flowers spilled their humid sheen in flight; the sleek, bright beasts played, whirling and climbing; the birds chimed with bliss, soaring and dipping. I, a blinded, quaking beggar, stood at the edge of the road, and within my beggar’s soul the selfsame thought kept prattling: Cry out to them, tell them—oh, tell them that on the most splendid of God’s stars there is a land—my land—that is dying in agonizing darkness.
Complexity classes such as NP do not measure the difficulty of any specific problem instance but rather describe the rate at which difficulty grows as a function of problem size. If we can solve an order-n Sudoku, how much harder will we have to work to solve a puzzle of order n + 1? For problems in NP, the effort needed grows exponentially.
Most discussions of the complexity of Sudoku refer to the work of Takayuki Yato and Takahiro Seta of the University of Tokyo, whose analysis relates the task of solving Sudoku to the similar problem of completing a partially specified Latin square. The latter problem in turn has been connected with others that are already known to be in NP. This process of "reduction" from one problem to another is the standard way of establishing the complexity classes of computational problems. Yato and Seta employ an unusual form of reduction that addresses the difficulty of finding an additional solution after a first solution is already known. In Sudoku, of course, well-formed puzzles are expected to have only one solution. Yato and Seta say their result applies nonetheless. I don't quite follow their reasoning on this point, but the literature of complexity theory is vast and technical, and the fault is likely my own.
We provide a simple linear time transformation from a directed or undirected graph with labeled edges to an unlabeled digraph, such that paths in the input graph in which no two consecutive edges have the same label correspond to paths in the transformed graph and vice versa. Using this transformation, we provide efficient algorithms for finding paths and cycles with no two consecutive equal labels. We also consider related problems where the paths and cycles are required to be simple; we find efficient algorithms for the undirected case of these problems but show the directed case to be NP-complete. We apply our path and cycle finding algorithms in a program for generating and solving Sudoku puzzles, and show experimentally that they lead to effective puzzle-solving rules that may also be of interest to human Sudoku puzzle solvers.
Bert Williams, largely forgotten today, was the first African-American star: the most famous “colored man” in America during the early years of the twentieth century. The team of Williams and Walker put together the first all-Negro musical comedy to play a major Broadway theatre...their popularity among audiences both black and white allowed them to force the integration of first-class theatres around the country...through it all he continued to perform in blackface, embellished by giant lips painted over the cork, an ill-fitting suit, a preternaturally unhurried style of locomotion, and a cringing “Uh-huh, boss” lazy drawl. According to another Follies colleague, W. C. Fields, Williams onstage was the funniest man he ever saw, and offstage was the saddest.
Both Williams’s reputation and the remaining record of his work—a number of scratchy vocal tracks, some suggestive photographs and reels of film—make one long to ask: What on earth was he thinking? How does a mind maintain its balance when professional pride is so bound up with personal shame?...
On the eve of the release of Beck's Guerelito, we
offer a Beck remix you won't find on the remix CD:
"Que Onda Guero (Team Shi Latino 96.3 Remix)"
So much of Beck's '90s output was a mythologizing of
the 80s Los Angeles he grew up immersed in –
lowriders, mariachi, turntables and microphones. Sure,
it's patronizing at times – "Odelay" was his gringo
approximation of "orale," as in "orale vato" – but for
some, it's the perfect whiteboy synthesis of
pre-Rodney King Riots Los Angeles.
However, the sound of the city has changed. With this
remix, local L.A. surprise punks The Mae Shi have
tried to capture the sound of a summer in Los Angeles
in 2005 – the sound of Daddy Yankee selling out
Staples Center, the sound of narcocorridos booming
from the car next to you as you drive down Pico Blvd.
This year saw a new radio station take over the
streets of Los Angeles, Latino 96.3, a bilingual
station "blazing reggaeton and hip-hop." In the hot
windows-down summer of 2005, the station was
impossible to ignore, and its rise in public presence
coincided with Daddy Yankee's newfound ubiquity (as
well as his ability to sell out Staples Center).
"Que Onda Guero (Team Shi 96.3 Latino Remix)" is The
Mae Shi's attempt to capture the sound of 2005 in the
same way Beck captured the sound of 1985.
She was talking to the audience about the problems she’s been having with Sony and someone shouted “Shut up and sing!” This seemed to touch a nerve with dear Nellie. After politely explaining to the miscreant that “If this continues with Sony, I will leave the music business, BITCH. And NEVER SING AGAIN,” she started screaming and crying and “They say I’m just pulling a Barbra Streisand,” and “You have NO IDEA WHAT I’M GOING THROUGH,” and corporations are raping the world, etc.
My God, I've lost touch. Who the fuck is Nelly McKay and why should I care? Write more articles about Rick Springfield, for Christ's sake, man! I care about REAL entertainers!
Personne dans mon cœur
Mes propos orduriers n’attirent que les fumiers,
comment leur expliquer qu’je suis sage?
Nobody is in my heart
My dirty language only attracts lecherous men,
how to explain that in reality I am a good girl?
