News You Can Bruise for 1999 May 12

Woohoo! My n-queens Scheme program works perfectly! And it's not even due for 24 hours! Now to get cracking on the n-drag-queens problem. I'm kidding, of course. Now to get cracking on the horrid Minix project.

Yes, the enumeration of all solutions to the 8-queens problem eluded even that manliest of mathematicians, Karl Friedrich Gauss. Of course, had he had Lisp at his disposal, Gauss would have kicked my ass.

Last week's Futurama was great (oh no, I'm watching television!), but yesterday's was a big disappointment. Like the way it brilliantly set up the Uranus meta-joke*, only to destroy it with excessive joke layering. But then, there's really no way to top last week's "you're soaking in it" reference.

* "Astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to stop that stupid joke once and for all."