I just handed everything in. A couple days before I thought I would. So, I'm done? I mean, I'm done! I think it will take a little while for this to sink in.
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(10)
05:49:05 PM,
Friday 15 December 2006
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I dreamt last night that elephants shouldn't go to sleep in the shade, because they might get eaten.
Also some mystery ducks have been on the pond for the past week or so; I got out the binoculars this morning and determined that they are likely coots. Though I would not stand by this identification. They are black, and have blue beaks, but there are some things wrong with it. They weren't entirely behaving like coots. Coots stick to the edges of ponds in my experience, and these were in the middle, diving. But the book did say coots were happy diving.
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01:37:24 PM,
Friday 15 December 2006
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One week, two more papers and one bout of debugging to go. I think I can make it.
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07:11:12 PM,
Monday 11 December 2006
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Please note, if you are searching for something along the lines of "create a launchable jar file" or "jar file doesn't work" that Java jar file manifest files need a newline at the end. This simple fact could save you hours.
Thank you,
Erika
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06:55:56 PM,
Monday 11 December 2006
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Last day of class. Probably ever.
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06:11:21 PM,
Monday 11 December 2006
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boy in the school; that he had been, a good many years ago, a small unaccountable manner. But he had these peculiarities: and at first Creakle at whom I now glanced for the first time, and who were, So he took a chop by the bone in one hand, and a potato in the
Garbled David Copperfield spam. Weird. I wonder why they do that, quoting literature. It doesn't work on google's spam filters, but I guess it must work on others.
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(2)
10:17:59 AM,
Monday 11 December 2006
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As annoying as SQL injection attacks are, the idea of them is moderately clever. Not as clever as buffer overflow attacks, but similar in spirit. The whole idea of exploiting the ambiguity between data and instructions is interesting.
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(2)
05:16:49 PM,
Friday 8 December 2006
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Huh. Jury duty. Fwhee.
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04:38:53 PM,
Friday 8 December 2006
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Wired today brings me news of experimental music made with a long metal tube. Unfortunately I couldn't find a clean mp3 of just music.
But anyway, the important thing here is that it reminded me of the zube tube, an awesome toy I had when I was a kid, which was just a cardboard tube with a spring inside. You could make all sorts of nifty noises with it. Here's one with feedback (Explanation of how they did it here).
And while I'm at it, here's another bit of experimental music. Enter in the name of a band or a song, and something vaguely relevant happens.
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01:48:38 PM,
Wednesday 6 December 2006
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I am working on a project to create an artificial nose. Noses are complicated. There are 347 different types of olfactory receptors in humans, and that's just the active ones. They make up 3% of the genome. In the lab we have 15 types of receptor, and can use those to distinguish accurately between about 7 smells at a time. The system needs some work, some of the receptors are more useful than others (my project is to quantify which are which).
The Swedes have another idea of artificial noses.
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(3)
10:30:03 AM,
Tuesday 5 December 2006
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In the 1970s anyway, it was illegal to kill a yeti in Nepal. One could, however, obtain a permit to catch them.
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03:21:09 PM,
Sunday 3 December 2006
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Ok, I get flashing red. Flashing yellow makes sense, and flashing green is I suppose a more green sort of flashing yellow. But flashing red and green at the same time??? I took the average and treated it as a flashing yellow (this was a day or two ago. They've fixed it now. Or, well, turned it off anyway. Not an important junction). Medford is in general the place of bizzare traffic signals, they also have a light that goes from red to yellow and back at one point in the cycle.
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11:28:09 AM,
Friday 1 December 2006
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I found Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautreamont at the Harvard bookstore basement today. I had entirely forgotten about this book. I wrote my college application essay on it. I don't know what happened to my old copy-- I probably gave it up in a fit of good taste. Anyway, now I have it again. It begins in Lemony Snicket fashion (or rather Lemony Snicket begins in its fashion):
May it please Heaven that the reader, emboldened and become of a sudden momentarily ferocious like what he is reading, may trace in safety his pathway through the desolate morass of these gloomy and poisonous pages. For unless he is able to bring to his reading a rigorous logic and a spiritual tension equal at least to his distrust, the deadly emanations of this book will imbibe his soul as sugar absorbs water.
It would not be well that all men should read the pages that are to follow; a few only may savor their bitter fruit without danger. So, timid soul, before penetrating further into such uncharted lands, set your feet the other way. Listen well to what I tell you: set your feet the other way like the eyes of a son who lowers his gaze respectfully before the august countenance of his mother; or rather, like a wedge of flying, cold-trembling cranes which in the winter time, with much meditation, fly powerfully through the silence, full sail, towards a predetermined point in the horizon from which of a sudden springs a strange, strong wind, advance-guard of the tempest.
And it goes on like that. Completely over the top, it's great.
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03:02:30 PM,
Tuesday 28 November 2006
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I just pressed the up arrow and then return. Which turned out to be the command for "overwrite all the work I did yesterday". Arg.
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(2)
09:18:10 AM,
Monday 27 November 2006
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As an example of something that does not irritate me, I present grotesque geometry. (found here. This is nice too.).
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(2)
06:38:46 PM,
Monday 20 November 2006
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I am not interested in any movies that are out right now. Especially not Happy Feet. Not animated penguins! No! (Real penguins, yes. Stuffed penguins, yes. Animated penguins, no. These things must be kept straight.)
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05:35:45 PM,
Monday 20 November 2006
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I believe it because it's absurd: the entire Britannica-- not to mention the stacks of my old branch as well as the entire Library of Congress-- can in theory be encoded by a single notch on a rod.
This is from the Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers. And it's entirely daft. Yes yes alright, you can encode the library of congress in a repeating decimal. And you can then notch a rod at that point along its length. However, the whole point of data storage is retrieval. If you can't physically retrieve the data then it's not there. And nothing can measure anything like that precisely. There's a reason this isn't how we store data. I'm sorry, I'm not sure why this irritates me.
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(4)
03:49:38 PM,
Sunday 19 November 2006
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Oh alright alright, meme:
1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin*
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card*
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer
I don't know which of the ones I haven't read I want to read. Have only heard of about half of them.
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(2)
06:39:51 PM,
Friday 17 November 2006
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I just saw a small child being pushed around in a wire luggage carrier. It looked uncomfortable, but cute.
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12:55:04 PM,
Thursday 16 November 2006
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Dense mist this morning. You couldn't see the other side of the pond at all, even a shadow. The trees on the shore appeared against a blank gray backdrop, like in a portrait. Very nice.
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10:41:35 AM,
Thursday 16 November 2006
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"this is a rather long string which i am using to test the hypothesis that a rather long string is the source of the problem" is a rather long string which I used to test the hypothesis that a rather long string was the source of the problem. It was.
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(1)
10:38:06 AM,
Wednesday 15 November 2006
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Also, there are all these flowers still out. Don't they know it's mid-November? Are they actually waiting for the frost to come and freeze their little petals off?
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09:19:14 AM,
Wednesday 15 November 2006
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It disturbs me to see all these parents shepherding their children to school and waiting with them at the bus stop. When I was little we walked to school all by ourselves.
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09:07:51 AM,
Wednesday 15 November 2006
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A man wanted to cross a river. So he tore up his couch to make a raft. He crossed the river and came back, fine. But then he wanted his couch back. He had no idea where to start in putting it back together. As he was staring at the disassembled mess, his wife came in and handed him a tool, saying mildly, "here". He had the couch back together in minutes. What was the tool?
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(18)
07:02:21 AM,
Tuesday 14 November 2006
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I dreamt about a book of futurology in a nineteenth century style with lots of strange black and white diagrams. The author was giving a speech and refused to use either powerpoint or speakers. I was sitting in the back and couldn't hear. I want another look at that book now.
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(1)
05:48:58 PM,
Monday 13 November 2006
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Experimental cooking log: sauteed apples
I based this on a carrot recipe. Slice some apples, and put them in a skillet with some butter and a bit of water. Cover and steam for five minutes. Uncover and cook until the apples are browned on the bottom. Add lemon juice and cinnamon. It worked rather well. Tim reports that leftovers are good on cereal.
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(1)
10:00:42 AM,
Friday 10 November 2006
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A feeling bears on itself the scars of its birth: it recollects as a subjective emotion its struggle for existence; it retains the impress of what it might have been, but is not... The actual cannot be reduced to mere matter of fact in divorce from the potential.
Alfred North Whitehead
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07:26:45 PM,
Tuesday 7 November 2006
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There was a grebe on the pond this morning. It was small. It dove. Not quite a water sparrow, but good enough.
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09:48:08 AM,
Tuesday 7 November 2006
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How many computer science grad students does it take to plug a laptop into a projector? Several. If in fact they succeed at all. Sorry, that wasn't a joke, just an observation.
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(1)
09:21:59 AM,
Tuesday 7 November 2006
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My hard disk is full again. It's getting harder to trim down my music collection. I like all my music, all 8.7 days worth of it. And I'm tired of all of it, and I want more.
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08:32:18 PM,
Thursday 2 November 2006
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That makes two book groups where I have sympathized with unpleasant main characters far more than the rest of the group (the books were A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole and She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb).
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09:53:51 AM,
Tuesday 31 October 2006
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Yet another little folk song: found.
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09:35:37 AM,
Tuesday 31 October 2006
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The Queen was rather dull, but visually appealing. I especially liked the queen's dogs, they swarmed around her like little fish. Also the statues in the hallways, and the leeks in the kitchen.
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(1)
07:42:11 PM,
Saturday 28 October 2006
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The movements of a chorus, the steps of a dance, how to march in time, how to enjoy the sound of flutes, how to distinguish different notes, when to slacken pace as permitted or when to quicken at command-- all these things the elephant has learned and knows how to do and does accurately without making mistakes.
The Roman writer Aelian, as quoted in this book. Yes, I have discovered the glories of YouTube.
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11:10:30 AM,
Sunday 22 October 2006
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Scientists do odd things sometimes. Like this. Via wait wait don't tell me.
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(3)
12:43:21 PM,
Saturday 21 October 2006
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If we imagine that there is a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could enter into it, as one enters into a mill. Assuming that, when inspecting its interior, we will only find parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception.
So Leibniz was talking about artifical intelligence in 1714, and pretty much making the Chinese room argument. Neat.
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(4)
10:08:26 AM,
Thursday 19 October 2006
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