Easter

I had a lovely passover with Liv's family, helped out with prep and was all comparatively low-stress, and went back on Sun to hang out with the siblings.

And spent the rest of the weekend being flop, having friends visit, and having dinner party with ghoti and cjwatson and family.

Now I'm back to work, less tired than before Easter, which is definitely progress :)

And R introduced me to cookier clicker, which I'd heard of in a "it's a parody of gamification, you click the cookie and get cookies" way, but hadn't realised that it just kept getting more exponential, and once you'd spent your cookies to get cookie mines and cookie factories and antimatter-condensors you were making billions of cookies a second without clicking at all, and the amount of exponential growth you could get was really quite competitive :)

Miscellany

Router vs Modem

Did "router" always imply "including modem" or is that a change in usage that snuck up on me? It seems now the standard usage is to refer to a router, assuming it does both local routing with wireless and ethernet, and ADSL or cable modem-ing. Is that right? But I'm sure I remember modems and routers used to be separate?

Passover vs Easter

See my twitter for much theological discussion, including:

* Eat lamb as passover/easter?
* Is it heretical to believe Jesus was crucified with three nails rather than four; or pierced on the reverse side of his body by the spear? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triclavianism
* My old "dummy's guide to passover" posts were useful! Except not, because they were entertaining but possible not a sufficiently accurate guide :)

How do I solve 2^{x} = x?

I keep seeing questions like this, that give a technically correct answer in terms of "rearrnage it like this, then that's so-and-so-'s function [see wikipedia], then you get an answer".

But seem to miss out what I think is the conceptually important information which is "you might expect that all equations can be solved in terms of simple functions you're already familiar with, ie. arithmetic functions, maybe simple trig functions, etc. But actually no, lots of functions can't be simplified into those. All you can do is find the name other people have used for 'the function which is the answer to this equation', and hence find out what they know about it. But that's not 'solved' in the way you were hoping."