A friend of mine on a set of forums I frequent just recently posted a slightly fascinating problem. I was the first to solve it. I'm writing the answer here so that people on those forums who want to figure it out for themselves won't be spoiled. Then I can post a link to this journal entry for those that do want to see the answer.

Here is a link to the problem he mentioned, which is an image in his Photobucket account:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/caesarmagnus/TrianglePuzzle.gif

Slashdotters who read this journal entry are advised to stop here if you want to try to solve the problem yourself (if you haven't already seen it). I will leave a few extra lines for the sake of clarity.
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I added up the individual pieces of the figure, and their areas total to 32 square units. Then I calculated the area of the entire triangle, and was suprised to find that it is actually 32.5 units.

I was intrigued by this, until I did a quick check on the slopes of the two smaller triangles. The green triangle has a slope of 2/5, and the red triangle has a slope of 3/8. They aren't the same, which means that this isn't a real triangle. The Human eye just isn't precise enough to detect the difference in slopes. (The inverse tangents of these slopes are 21.8 and 20.6 degrees, which needless to say, is very slight.) However, the difference is enough to hide an extra square unit of area when the pieces are arranged in the first form.

To see the difference for yourself, paste the image into an image editing program, then watch what happens when you drag the first figure over the second with transparency turned on. Because of the grid lines, you'll be able to line it up perfectly if you have a steady hand, and you'll see that the "hypotenuse" of the first figure doesn't match up with the corresponsing line of the second one.

If another person has decided to read my journal, then I salute you for having the curiosity to look me up.

In general, I'm not very high on the totem pole. As of Fall 2005, I'm a second-year computer science student at a university in the central United States, which came after losing interest in music and physics, respectively. I am the son of a former college chemistry professor, and the other side of my family has a decidedly small-town background. (As a result, many family members come to me when their computers have problems.)

My own personal computer is something I bought 5 years ago from Dell, but with various internal upgrades and a few peripherals, it continues to serve my purposes. I recently set it up to dual-boot to Windows 2000 and Debian Linux. I don't know much about using Linux, but I've always wanted to learn. My classes also regularly require me to use a Solaris server via telnet; it's a start, I guess.

I am just far enough along in school to pick up a good degree of skill with C and Java, and learn that I like C better even though Java is sometimes easier. I only know a smattering of C++ beyond what it has in common in C. However, in my spare time, I have picked up a rudimentary understanding of Python, Perl, and Lisp. I also tried Ruby and Prolog, but they didn't seem to stick.

I am also a gamer of sorts. I was originally attracted to Unreal Tournament (the one made in 1999), and became rather good with UnrealScript, the scripting language built on top of the Unreal engine. I am writing some code for a large project, which I will not name right now because I fear it may run out of steam.

Like most slashdotters, I am an advocate of free and open source software. I have even managed to get my grandmother to switch to Firefox and OpenOffice on her computer. There isn't much to say about it that hasn't already been said before, and better than I could say it. You use it, it almost always does what it claims to do, and you're satisfied with it.

But anyway, I have been lurking at Slashdot for quite a while; I just never got around to registering until recently.

This journal entry seems to have gotten rather long, so I'll stop rambling. Maybe I'll have something more interesting to write later.