Re: CHAT: The love of inventing & conscripts (Was: Re: I'm new!)

H. S. Teoh wrote:

> Cool, I'm the kinda guy who invents anything, too. I've this irrational,
> almost lunatic craving to create things...
There's a few of us around :-) Especially here, I imagine.

> When I was a boy, I used to do what my father calls "dramatizing" -- it
> looked like I was making weird sounds and strange gestures just for the
> fun of it, but actually, I was acting out an entire movie made up in my
> head.
Dunno about movies specifically, but I've spent most of my life doing
various things that look wierd to everyone else :-)

A SF/F character of my invention, Antherus /'&ntT@Ras/ was an obsession
of mine for several childhood years, and I'm using the word 'obsession'
in the original psychiatric sense.

> When I was bored during long car trips, I used to look at the
> scrolling scenery and "see things"  in the shapes that went by, which
I used to get really annoyed with my brain (actually I still do but not
for this particular reason) because in a car trip I would imagine myself
to be playing a computer game with the scenery, and I couldn't *help*
imagining this even when I didn't want to; it was really annoying. The
sort of 'games' I mean are things like a character hopping from tree to
tree (or car to car), or having an imaginary rope that I had to keep taut
by weaving it between landmarks.

> Later, I got into computer programming, and loved creating all kinds of
> programs just for the fun of it.
Yup, My major is in programming and I think of it as a creative
endeavour. A good program is like poetry. I intend combine this field
with my literary skills and write user manuals etc.

> Then, the music bug hit and I started composing (with no formal music
> training -- all I had was my aunts' old dusty music books which had sat
> idle for years on the shelves). I'm still composing and improvising
> today.
Music's one of my oldest ones. Stories, too.

I've invented interface specifications for imaginary operating systems
(using the name 'Doorway'). And I once invented a replacement for HTML.

I've invented card games <http://www.pagat.com/invented/suitmatch.html>.
I've invented a card _trick_ as well, but for obvious reasons I don't
plan to put _that_ on the web :-)

> My first attempt was rather weak -- basically taking existing English
> letters, cutting them up a certain way and reassembling them another way.
> Being quite simpleminded then, I proudly showed some "encrypted"  text to
> a classmate, who promptly cracked the code using simple frequency
> analysis. Bummer. So, to make it harder to use frequency analysis, I got
> the idea of adding single glyphs for common 2-letter sequences, and using
> multiple symbols for the same letters (like the very common letter 'e').
I once had an email conversation with my sister in which we sent each
other messages in more and more twisted ways. It wasn't an 'encryption'
as such, because we told each other how it was done; the idea was just to
make the other person work a bit.

In the end I sent a message in which each letter was replaced by a pair
of letters on either side of it on the keyboard, so for example 'g' could
be written as 'tb', 'yv', 'hf, 'bt', vy' or 'fh'. Double letters for those
in the corners, so 'z' would be written 'zz'.

> frequency analysis. I also had symbols for numbers (base 16, but could
> also be base 10 if a special base-10 marker was present), as well as
> symbols for mathematical operations. (Yep, I really wanted to represent
I invented a way of counting in base sixteen on your fingers:

 1 = First hand, thumb up
...
10 = Both hands, all fingers up
11 = Thumbs on both hands touching each other
12 = Thumbs and forefingers touching
...
15 = All corresponding fingers touching
16 = Hands pressed together

I also invented a base 12 script, but can't remember it now. I do
remember that the symbol for (12-n) was regularly the symbol for (n) with
a dot on top, and that you could tell at a glance if a digit was
divisible by 2, 3 or 4.

--
web.       | Here and there I like to preserve a few islands of sanity
netyp.com/ | within the vast sea of absurdity which is my mind.
member/    | After all, you can't survive as an eight foot tall
dragon     | flesh eating dragon if you've got no concept of reality.