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Saturday, December 22nd, 2012
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12:00 am - Top/Intro Post
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| Saturday, July 4th, 2009
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5:08 pm - Quote: The State of the Art
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| Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
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9:01 pm
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I do not believe that scribbling moronic graffiti on desks should be an offense worthy of expulsion - unless you make spelling mistakes. In words of length < 5.
Can I have the being-in-college-means-literacy-no-exceptions era back? Pretty please?
current mood:  tired
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| Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
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5:13 pm - Unexpected Textbook
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Quite unexpectedly, I saw a pile of "The Little Schemer" at the University Book Center. It saddens me that when I took that very same class six years ago, it was full of Stupid (for example, the TA knew no Scheme, and asked my help to teach the very threadbare Scheme unit.)
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| Friday, January 16th, 2009
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1:03 am - Book Meme
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Meme stolen from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) faceless_wonder.
Rules:
*Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find the fifth sentence.
*Post that sentence along with these instructions in your LiveJournal.
*Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.
"The Lagrange equations are a big mess so we will not show them explicitly, but
in general they are equations in D^2 c, Dc, and c that will depend upon q, Dq, and F."
- Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (Gerald Jay Sussman and Jack Wisdom).
current mood: tired
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| Tuesday, November 18th, 2008
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10:59 pm - "Hearing the Whirr of the Servos Inside"
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Setting foot in an Actual Wet Lab again: Feels Good. So Good.
(Even though my sole excuse for being there is to programmatically coax the robot into submission.)
For all the supposed glory of theoretical work, I yearn to get my hands dirty.
current mood:  cold
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| Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
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12:01 am - This should have been a Real Post.
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Me, shivering from the damp pre-winter air:
"There should be a 3D blanket. It would be the greatest of inventions."
"...wait, that's called clothing."
In other news, there was Capclave. But I should be doing homework rather than posting.
current mood: tired
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, July 4th, 2008
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12:19 am - Twisted Pleasures, or A New Low?
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After a full month of organic chemistry and its pleasures, the urge to draw this icon could no longer be resisted.
My new job, which supposedly involves the molecular modeling of poisons and antidotes, starts on Monday.
Loper's boot block runs.
Math remains hard. And yet I have little desire to go shopping (though I soon must, to buy "civilized" clothing. Yuck.)
The social learning strategies contest is over. My entry was a pale shadow of its planned self.
It appears that only ~36 people competed for the ~$15,000 prize.
I wish I had given the matter more thought.
current mood: useless
current music: the wheels of a passing train?
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
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11:21 pm - Science! It works!
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| Friday, June 13th, 2008
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1:09 pm - Top Recurring Dream Motifs
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A) My old dorm room still "exists", in the sense of being preserved like King Tut's tomb - complete with all of my furniture and projects from that period, and awaits discovery. Neither the room nor the building it is found in bear very much resemblance to their real-world versions, however. On the other hand, my memories are edited to obscure this fact entirely. (Just about every dream I have comes with a complete set of false memories.)
B) Someone has monkeyed with a parallel universe and/or timeline editor to remove something I care about. I work on fixing it.
C) Voices singing in perfect rhyme and cadence chronicle my adventure in real-time - a la Greek play.
current mood:  awake
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| Saturday, June 7th, 2008
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12:46 am - "Deliver me from temptation, but not quite yet."
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| Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
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2:56 pm - "Before there were junk stores..."
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Apparently, the University operated a vintage mainframe until fairly recently: the wires bin at Terp Trader (the UMCP junk store) now contains power cables tipped with plugs the size of a two-liter soda bottle, as well as various data cables, thick as a garden hose, with connectors I've never seen before. There was also a pile of DEC Alpha machines, $15 each. At last. With great restraint, I limited myself to just two of the latter.
Of course, I originally went there to search for something to scavenge for a polarizer plate. But this is how it always goes.
current mood:  satisfied
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1:13 am
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First day of organic chem: uneventful.
Fruitless search for even a small piece of proper Polaroid polarizer: very frustrating. I've run out of screens to cannibalize. Does anyone live nearly, and have a smashed laptop LCD they want to get rid of?
current mood:  frustrated
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, June 2nd, 2008
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1:49 am
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| Sunday, June 1st, 2008
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12:42 pm - Foolish Humans and More
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Recently, someone has seen it fit to link my site from YC News. My very modest web host groans under the strain, and I half-expect a raging mob (having taken up the pitchforks upon finding nothing to download) at my doorstep any moment now.
In other news, organic chemistry lecture starts on Tuesday. I've dreamed of taking the class for many years, and at last the time has come.
The campus is quite beautiful in its summer bloom, but this hardly explains the pathological amounts of time I've been spending there in recent times, setting up shop on random benches and tables. Something about seeing the old familiar walls switches my brain into gear. It "feels like home" - and I have never been in the habit of abusing that phrase.
In other^2 news, I have discovered a means whereby ordinary laptop screens may be viewed legibly in very bright sunlight. The experimental prototype is 80% complete, and will hopefully stop eating my attention and desk space in the very near future.
current mood:  hungry
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, April 26th, 2008
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10:13 pm - We do what we must because we can
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Miscellaneous Bits and Pieces:
1) The Rube Goldberg Laptop award goes to Apple, for the 12" Powerbook A1010. Fixing clocks is going to look relaxing and trivial after that one.
1a) So now the machine works, looks more or less new, and even has software! Still need to set up SLIME to work in Aquamacs, though.
1b) Apple's OS is polished but slow. And not just in the CPU-time sense. I continue to believe that the mouse is a crippling concept. As are non-full-screen windows and many other customary UI elements.
2) Common Lisp is still great for headaches. For headaches, not against.
3) Bio class is substantially more interesting when one understands things.
3a) Unfortunately the *understand!* feeling is hard to come by when you can't solve protein folding in your head. So boo. Where is my neural upgrade?
4) Why is it that not one consumer electronics store carries the simple amplifier necessary to drive cabinet stereo speakers (the bulky, clothed kind) from devices equipped with an ordinary 3.5mm line-out jack? The choice was between building it myself or ordering from Hong Kong - a full month ago, and now arrived. The need for having done this, however, still boggles my mind. Am I an outlandish heretic for owning neither TV, nor DVD player, nor CD player? Those are the only machines I can think of which come with bare-metal speaker connections out-of-the-box.
5) The semester is drawing to a close.
6) Dreary and grim things not worth mentioning here.
7) Disappointing Maryland Day. Where were the original engineering demos? There is very little excitement to be had from watching off-the-shelf technology do exactly what it's supposed to. A Mac Mini running Matlab is still a Mac Mini running Matlab when on wheels.
7a) The Oobleck Pool (similar to the well-known one) was a welcome diversion, though. I failed to take note of which department had built it.
7b) "Physics is Phun" but considerably less so with screaming toddlers in the lecture hall.
7c) Oddly enough, playing with the inert controls of the visiting war helicopter was the highlight of my wanderings. It was genuinely fun. The Army pilot helpfully explained which did what. War machines have an aura of refreshing honesty about them. The air of fakeness still burning in my nostrils from the engineering demos cleared rapidly. There is very little which is scientifically arousing about the helicopter, for instance, but it still has to fly at the end of the day - thus its designers live tightly under physical reality's thumb. And it shows. Anyone who has suffered my rants on this subject will know what I mean. The others should be thankful for having been spared.
7d) Any contraption designed to work rather than to impress gets my attention. Every time.
8) Nostalgia for the days when my renewed dive into math could have meant something.
9) Looking at the science-demo grad students like a peasant might look on the landed gentry. See (8.)
current mood:  pensive
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| Monday, March 31st, 2008
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11:03 pm - The irresistible call of physical reality
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This much-belated post is for everyone who saw this and did a double-take. I am, in fact, taking eight credits' worth of freshman class/lab, while working full time. And will continue in that key, until I have a respectable education.
But do not search my skull for railroad spikes! Kissing sweet good-bye to nearly all of my free time [1] (and every penny of discretionary spending) for the coming few years is a decision for which I had better have a solid explanation. And luckily, I do.
A Computer Science degree is a gateway into the Irredeemable Suck. As a field of research, and as a profession. I've had enough.
The computer is a tool. And I have learned that the existence of a toolsmith is ultimately one of misery and frustration. Most of one's time is spent working around the inadequacies of others' creations - whether you realize it or not. So I have come full circle, back into the physical-reality business. Three summers' worth of full-time lab internship (pre-college) [2] had given me some idea of what sort of destination to march towards, as well as certain skills, which, to my pleasant surprise, have not gone anywhere.
The five-second sound bite regarding why bio wins: I can forgive evolution for generating rampant inelegance and gratuitous accidental complexity. I cannot forgive people. They have minds, and ought to know better.
The pleasure to be had in understanding what makes the real world tick is enormous, though I have had but a small taste thus far. Focusing on clean physical facts after having devoted years to cramming my head full of poorly designed human abstractions feels like a lung-full of fresh air after a nauseating eternity in a dungeon.
Anyone know of a good organic chem text?
My summer will be an interesting one.
[1] This post was originally began on Feb. 10...
[2]
 My old bench. NHLBI, summer 2002
current mood:  excited
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, March 7th, 2008
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12:05 am - Sights
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The place where I work sits in the middle of a run-down industrial park filled mainly with mechanics' shops, print houses, and the like. Whenever something out of the ordinary appears, it is usually worth the staring time. (Ever see a truck designed to carry racing pigeons?)
Today, it was an old man who had sloppily beheaded a fire extinguisher (of the dry-chemical variety) behind his idling rusty pickup. The top, handle and hose scattered around, lay forgotten in the dusty gravel nearby while he carefully held the remainder over a bucket lined with garbage bags. I stood and watched as he waved and swirled it around as it emptied, slowly and methodically.
---
In other news, I should finish the post I've been working on for the past three weeks, which, among other things, explains why I have had no time for anything (including itself.)
current mood: sore
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, February 24th, 2008
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9:25 pm - The industrial hazard of studying
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Namely, it throws my brain into gear - no mean feat, considering the delirious flu-haze in which it has floated through the weekend, only occasionally bobbing to the surface. Now this sort of moment is theoretically a good thing, except when it results in mental connections which coalesce into a runaway distracting obsession. Specifically, I am now haunted by the question of what kind of performance one might expect from an (arbitrary) algorithm that has been compiled to run on the provably Turing-complete Game of Life, accelerated using the HashLife algorithm. The latter is capable of very disturbing (exponential!) speed-ups.
So far all I have to go on is the prediction following from what I call the Theorem of No Fun - namely, that any experiment which follows so trivially from widely known concepts must surely yield nothing of interest. Especially when a positive result would be so shiny (collapse of complexity classes, anyone?) Which, of course, is not something that has ever stopped me from burning precious time and electric energy.
Back to staring at annoyingly vague slides about protein structure.
current mood: curious
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| Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
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7:17 pm - Finite Simple Group (of Order Two) [video]
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hopeful
contemplative
4 (80.0%)
geeky