meditation thoughts

While meditating, I had a moment of feeling like I was seeing myself as an outsider, thinking, "who is this guy lying here trying to contemplate the mysteries of the universe?"

Shortly after, I had a moment of seeing a bunch of eyes around me, my own mind, looking at me..

I also got distracted with a few thoughts:

1) I thought about some design considerations for the mobile voting app I've wanted to create, like how to link phones together. Seems like passing around a random number would be good, but it needs to be big enough to prevent collisions, and also prevent people "snooping" by typing in a random number hoping to enter someone else's voting room. I had the thought that maybe this would be a good place for an xkcd style password phrase, like "frame typhoon football", rather than a number like "109072480903", which is about how big the number would need to be to have as many options as three random words chosen from a dictionary of 5000 words. Probably just two words would be enough, especially if voting rooms disappeared after everyone left.

2) I thought about a problem I've thought about before — how can you have a peer-to-peer game of poker? You have two clients, and no server.. how do they shuffle the cards such that player A can only see some of them, and player B can only see some others of them? I simplified this to shuffling a deck of 3 cards (2 cards doesn't work, because once you know one card, you know the other). I had some thoughts about how to solve this, but failed. I think the problem has a solution, because I recall someone I was talking to about this saying they had a solution published in a paper that I haven't read. But I like chewing on the problem.

3) I thought that I'd like to start putting illustrations back into my blog, but I don't have my bamboo tablet these days (and I'm not sure I'd use it if I did, because it's a bit of a hassle to setup and a bit awkward to draw). I like drawing on paper, and I had the thought: I could draw on paper and hold the image up to the camera and use JavaScript to process the image — similar to the mac's "signature thing" (shown here) — and give a url to the image so I could load it into blogger.