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Jun. 15th, 2008 09:36 amDamm. My orange line ride this morning was just chock full o'purdy, Cheekbones here being but one representative example...
Jun. 15th, 2008
So there I was at St. James's Catholic Church in Falls Church, Virginia, this morning (hey, if I sing in Tennessee and New York Catholic Churches I'll have a Monopoly!) earning my weekly hunnerdollars, listening as little as humanly possible (without plugging my ears and singing "Mary Had a Little Lamb", which was not on the program) to the homily (as a former fundie kid, I can say with some authority that this was called a "sermon" in my church and lasted at least three times as long). There's a man in a dress up on stage talking about apostolic succession, which sounds like a digestive disorder but really has something to do with why the Pope is the only human who gets to have sex with God. Sorry I don't quite get the reasoning, or why the Pope should be infallible and therefore fuckable when YHWH is eternal and unchanging but popes change Church policy all the time; I'm sure somebody else here can splain it all to you, but for me, that dogma don't hunt.
But anyway. Whence entered this my mind I ken but ill, but so it did, and there it stuck, and so I must annoy you with it.
The phrase "apostolic succession" is 19 letters long, but contains only 11 different letters of the alphabet: A, C, E, I, L, N, O, P, S, T, U.
The standard Boggle arrangement (no Big Boggle!) is a 4x4 grid, or 16 letters. Official rules state that one cannot use the same letter cube more than once in any word; however, my crowd has long played with the "house rule" that one may reuse a cube provided two or more other letters intervene between successive repeated uses. For example, a partial board configured thus:
C | A
- - -
T | H
could be used to spell "catch" since "a" and "t" are used between successive uses of "c" (also "hatch" and "that" by the same reasoning); but not "tat" or "attach", since those words have, respectively, one and zero intervening letters between uses of the "t".
Thus, if playing by official Boggle rules, one could never find the 19-letter phrase "apostolic succession"; but allowing for the house rule cited here (and assuming the letter distribution on the dice is unlimited—i.e., there are enough of any given letter to go around without depleting the supply of any other letter), can "apostolic succession" turn up on a Boggle board by chance? (Ok, that's a giveaway: yes, it can.) What is the lowest number of dice required to spell the phrase?
Demonstrate the answer.
But anyway. Whence entered this my mind I ken but ill, but so it did, and there it stuck, and so I must annoy you with it.
The phrase "apostolic succession" is 19 letters long, but contains only 11 different letters of the alphabet: A, C, E, I, L, N, O, P, S, T, U.
The standard Boggle arrangement (no Big Boggle!) is a 4x4 grid, or 16 letters. Official rules state that one cannot use the same letter cube more than once in any word; however, my crowd has long played with the "house rule" that one may reuse a cube provided two or more other letters intervene between successive repeated uses. For example, a partial board configured thus:
C | A
- - -
T | H
could be used to spell "catch" since "a" and "t" are used between successive uses of "c" (also "hatch" and "that" by the same reasoning); but not "tat" or "attach", since those words have, respectively, one and zero intervening letters between uses of the "t".
Thus, if playing by official Boggle rules, one could never find the 19-letter phrase "apostolic succession"; but allowing for the house rule cited here (and assuming the letter distribution on the dice is unlimited—i.e., there are enough of any given letter to go around without depleting the supply of any other letter), can "apostolic succession" turn up on a Boggle board by chance? (Ok, that's a giveaway: yes, it can.) What is the lowest number of dice required to spell the phrase?
Demonstrate the answer.