DeeKaying @ Nettle

"A lot of unnecessary pain in the world is caused by people running on their own racetracks, furiously trying to get ahead of one another with their heads bowed and their blinkers on. They keep running: trying to go faster, higher and stronger in the hopes of achieving that which has yet to be achieved. In that they sometimes pay a hefty fee - the price of family, of friendship, of kinship and of health. The price of pain is indeed the price of achievement and it must be paid generation after generation but the racetrack does not demand of you the price of love, for you may run on it just as well in a spirit of camaraderie, respect and fellowship. So take some time, raise your head, lift a glance, and acknowledge your fellow runners for it is they that make your race worth running." ~ Divye Kapoor

Thanks to Sanat Rath , I had the absolute privilege of listening to this superb rendering of Madari by Vishal Dadlani and Sonu Kakkar and an absolutely stunning composition by Clinton Cerejo as part of Coke Studio. Here's the official video. The lyrics of the song are interspersed with the meanings translated to English. Credits for the superb lyrics go to Manoj Yadav. Hope you enjoy it. Make sure you watch this in HD, it's worth the extra audio quality. Song: Madari Producers: Coke Studio Singers: Vishal Dadlani and Sonu Kakkar (Intro music with chords) (Slow build up) (Sharp guitar riff) (Drums kick in...) [Vishal Dadlani sings] Madari, Madari, Madari, Madari mera tu, Main Jamura re Jamoora,  Jamura re Jamoora...  Master, master, master * you're my master I'm an obedient assistant * , an obedient assistant... Madari, Madari, Madari, Madari mera tu... Main Jamura re Jamoora,  Jamura re Jamoora re...  Master, master, m...

Just yesterday, I decided to do a couple of problems from Project Euler . I hadn't been to the site in a long long time, but I was happy that I got through Problem 19 and Problem 43 in short order, but then I've temporarily hit a wall with  Problem 44 . The problem is phrased in terms of Pentagonal numbers and while working through it, I derived an interesting result that I'd like to share with you, namely "How do you efficiently test if a number is Pentagonal?". Recall that a Pentagonal Number is a number N which is representable by a formula   where n is a Natural number. To test whether N is a Pentagonal Number, all we need to do is to solve the equation: which is a simple quadratic and check if n is a Natural Number. That's pretty easy for humans to do when N is a small quantity but programming languages aren't very good with quadratic equations, so we need to do some pre-processing of the quadratic equation for them. Simplifying the above eq...