Anyone who’s played Elite or Frontier: Elite II would have been graded by the ratings from the Elite Federation of Pilots. The rating is based on number of kills and goes as follows, from lowest to highest:
Harmless
Mostly Harmless
Poor
Average
Above Average
Competent
Dangerous
Deadly
Elite
but I propose we use the very same ranking to judge every day occurrences. For example, while talking to my girlfriend about horse riding she was trying to convey to me the ability a rider would need to ride a particular horse. After struggling for some time to describe the necessary qualities I said, “On the elite rating, what level would I need to be to ride this horse?”. This clarified the matter as she was able to settle simply on “Competent”.
I also find it a useful gauge for programming ability:
“What are you like with Python?”
“Deadly”
just being able to say I’m a dangerous C++ programmer has a ring to it.
But why not go one step further? Use it to describe potential mates in a nightclub?
“What do you think of her?”
“Harmless. After a few, maybe mostly harmless”
Just recently I’ve become interested in Conway’s Game of Life. Basically it’s a set of rules governing the life cycle of cellular automata. Even more basically it’s a 2D grid where the number of living cells around another cell decide whether it lives or dies (or comes to life).
For example: imagine a chess board. Now pick a square. If that square has fewer than 2 living neighbours (the 8 surrounding squares) then it either stays or becomes dead, as if from lonliness. If it has more than 4 living neighbours then it dies, as if from overcrowding. If it has exactly 2 or 3 living neighbours and is already alive then it stays alive. If it has exactly 3 living neighbours and it was dead then it becomes alive.
And that’s it. But because it plays out over many turns (or iterations) it allows for certain patterns to repeat, or entire formations to move across the grid as cells become dead or alive in turn.
Anyway, my fascination with this led me to write a small Java game of life simulator. I’ve provided the code here
It’s not good or tidy code, but it might interest you if you’re a starting programmer.
Game of Life with 3 Gliders
An interesting shape to start off with is the glider (O is dead, X is alive):
OOX
XOX
OXX
put that in the top left and it will move diagonally down and right.
Experiment and have fun 
