Back at Mudd
Here I am, and the semester has gotten off to a pretty good start. Kai’s back, though he’s now living in North. hm… we’ll have to see how he deals with that. So I get here around 7:00, quick grab dinner before Platt closes, unpack a bit, and go play bridge. For several hours. Carl and I used odd/even discards again, which is, imho, much nicer than Lavinthal. Well, whatever you’re used to, I suppose. I got to be declarer a lot, though I didn’t get to endplay anyone (that’s my goal for a while – endplay more people. It’s really neat when you notice that it’s possible, but I have trouble recognizing when it’ll work and when it won’t).
My schedule is pretty great – my earliest class is at noon. :-D I’m taking LSD, Algorithms, Robotics, Cognitive Psych, and Exile in Cinema. and then Programming Practicum, CS Colloquium, and Math Forum. Kenny says that there’s a Putnam Seminar analog for this semester, which I might have to add soon. We’ll see.
Let’s see… news… http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6672643/
There’s a great idea – let’s train the bomb-sniffing dogs by going to the airport and planting a bomb in some unsuspecting passenger’s baggage. Now, let’s lose the baggage, so that our explosives could be anywhere in the world. Dumbasses! I was alerted to this in an issue of Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram.
Huygens landed on Titan with few problems, and has sent back pictures. Apparently one of the data feeds got damaged in the landing, so we don’t have direct information about the wind patterns, and we have fewer pictures than we planned on. However, this is a perfect example of why space agencies build redundant systems – you can have something break, and it still works.
Things are changing in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Now that Abbas is in charge of the PLO, Israel has cut off talks with him until he actually does something useful. The PLO’s Fatah group has pledged to stop suicide bombings in Israel, but it says it will still attack soldiers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Hammas, to make up for this, has increased its number of suicide bombings. I don’t think this is any closer to peace, but it’s probably not further away, and it’s at least not the same crap that’s been happening for the past few years over again.
How’s this for ridiculous – farmers are getting sued for replanting the seeds they harvested from GM crops that they bought last year. That’s just ridiculous.
Finally, here’s a possible way to help fight spammers. Hard to say if it’ll actually work, but we’ll see. It’s at least a neat idea.