Interesting Stuff

Behold! It turns out that if you start with the proper background knowledge, this sort of thing is trivial, but no one seems to know where to begin learning about stuff like this.

Also, I’m going to be mentoring a high school robotics team this summer! Whee! I’m apparently going to be doing stuff on the software/vision side of things. They have really nice equipment, including a CMUCam2. It turns out that a $30,000 budget can buy a lot of neat toys.

How cool is this – my favourite author, Lois McMaster-Bujold, is mentioned in the News section of the current Penny Arcade. Few people have heard of her because her publicist is mediocre at mest, but she’s a fantastic writer (to this day, my favourite book is Cordelia’s Honor by McMaster-Bujold). She is currently tied with Robert A. Heinlein for winning the most Hugo Awards ever, and has won a bunch of other awards as well.

A couple years ago, I unknowingly got to meet her–my girlfriend at the time and I were wandering around Barnes & Noble, and since we’re both fans of McMaster-Bujold, we stopped to look at her books. A woman walked up to look at them too, and asked if we were fans of the author. We replied that yes, we both loved her work. She then pulled a book off the shelf, and told us that she had just finished it and rather liked it. We thanked her, and she left. We then turned to the back cover of the book, which contained a large picture of the woman with whom we had just spoken! It was pretty cool, though I wish I had recognized her before she left.

Anyways, I highly recommend her writings, if anyone is looking for some great science fiction to read. Her character development is unmatched, in my opinion.

In the Sunday newspaper, interspersed with the comics, is a section called KidCity which is intended for elementary schoolers, but which I read for the fun and strange facts in it. This week it was all about tiny animals (hummingbirds, etc). Although I’m not usually interested in the activities in the section, this week’s read:

How many words can you make from the letters in the word MINISCULE? We used a special computer program to discover more than 70, so anything over 20 is an excellent score!

I naturally took this as a challenge. I found a bunch on my own (over 50), and with the help of my family and the dictionary, we got a total of 77 (all of them are listed in the first comment to this post, if you’re interested). There are some pretty neat words out there!

The UN is getting pretty upset with all of the USA’s torture and human rights violations. There have been many complaints over the years, but this one is pretty serious. However, I can’t think of a way to easily resolve this sort of thing. The reasonable people of the world say that this violates US law, the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture treaty, etc. However, the people in charge of Guantanamo Bay and other US international prisons disagree and do not intend to change their ways. Is there any course of action to stop them outside of war/revolution/assassination? To the best of my knowledge, there’s nothing the UN can do besides whine a bunch, and there’s nothing the US citizens can do besides protest a lot. This administration has already shown that it will not listen to either of the above methods of lobbying. Any thoughts on what else we can do?

The schoolyear is now over, and although I didn’t finish everything I wanted to, enough got done. I graduated, and the ceremony was alright, all in all. The most amazing part, in my opinion, was at the very beginning. We were all dressed in our caps and gowns and medals, and started to walk down to the tent near the library where the real ceremony was, and all of the profs lined up on either side of the street and applauded for us as we walked past. Cheezy as it sounds, it practically brought tears to my eyes. The rest of the ceremony was uneventful; the usual fare but with an exceptionally boring speaker (that is to say, Prof. Platt gave a boring history of the college without anything related to graduation, advice for the future, or anything any of my classmates and I could actually use or learn from. Libby’s speech, on the other hand, was fantastic). We had dinner at Buca’s with the Panishes, the Harrises, the Couplands, and Kevin.

By the way, if you didn’t know, my brother is going to go to Mudd next year. This is going to make my visits as a sketchy alum a little bit weirder. We’ll see how that turns out.

I’m now back in the Twin Cities, and I already really miss Mudd. Although it’s certainly nice to see some of my friends from the area, all the really interesting ones seem to still be off in Texas/Iowa/Illinois/elsewhere. The company here is enjoyable but not at all intellectually stimulating, and I’m beginning to find myself bored in their company. Have I really changed that much in the past year? We’ll see how the summer progresses; perhaps this feeling will pass.

As for my overall plans this summer, they’re already starting to fall apart. I am definitely going to DEFCON, but I’m almost positive I will not get to AAAI this year – it’s a bit expensive without getting a college/company/etc to pay for you. Including travel, lodging, and admission, AAAI adds up to ~$1000, while DEFCON, in contrast, shouldn’t be much more than $200.

I had also hoped to learn a bunch of TeX and do some crazy TeX programming this summer. Although this is still doable, my computer (which I thought I was bringing home) is now in storage out in California, so I’m stuck on a Windows box with none of my previous code for a few months. I had the foresight to put all of the TeX, LaTeX, and AMSTex manuals on my CS account so I can still get to them, but I need to first learn about TeXnicCenter. I’ll get to it eventually, but the going right now is a lot slower than I expected.

The SessionSaver plugin for Firefox only works if you re-open Firefox the normal way; if you close it and then re-open it by clicking a link in your email, it doesn’t restore anything you were working on last session. I just found this out the hard way – I have had approximately 50 tabs open for several weeks at this point, and SessionSavor has been working great. Due to Firefox’s caching silliness, I keep needing to close the program, since after a while it eats up all of my memory, but as I said, this has not been a problem at all until I just clicked a link a few minutes ago. Now, all my previous tabs are gone. Lesson learned, but I’d have preferred to learn it a different way.

I believe I’ve now been keyed into my room by Hadley more times than all other proctors combined this entire year. The worst part about this? I’ve only been keyed in by her between the hours of 3:30 AM and 7:00 AM. I’m sorry, Hads! I realize it’s a bit late in the year, but I’m gonna try not to get locked out again.

12 hours from now, I’m going to be completely done! Almost there…