Interesting Stuff

Despite my silence, I’m still here. The MCM is over. The first half was great, the second was quite frustrating. We have a fantastic model and a horrible paper.

Tuesday I got to hear Brian Greene (world renowned string theorist) speak at the Athenaeum (sp?). It was fantastic! We have a reception at 5:30 with cheese and crackers. So I go, and I’m hanging out with people, and there he is, hanging out too. I introduce myself to him, shake his hand, and talk with him for a bit. It was pretty cool! Then there was a dinner at 6:00, and at 7:00, he gave a talk. Nothing you can’t find in his PBS miniseries or his books. However, in the books and the miniseries, he seemed like a nice, quiet, fireside-chat sort of person. In this talk, he was very enthousiastic, with fervor and practically a fire-and-brimstone air about him at points. Wow! What a surprise. After the talk, he had a book signing, and I got my copy of The Elegant Universe autographed. Nifty!

Finally, what post would be complete without more news? The Bush administration has once again altered scientific claims to fit their agenda, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. It’s kind of scary – of the people at the Fish and Wildlife Service who responded to the survey, more than half of them said that they had been instructed to change their findings to go along with the politics. This sort of thing incenses me. Argh!

I don’t get it. Communist USSR was considered an enemy country. Communist Cuba is still an enemy country, and we have economic sanctions against them. Communist Korea is an enemy country, and we have sanctions against them too. Communist China, however, is an ally, and we trade with them all the time. They have a veto in the UN Security Council, which is designed to, among other things, protect human rights. At the same time, they beat elderly mourners when they try to pay their respects to previous political leaders (Zhao was the leader of the Communist party, until he decided that the Tiananmen Square massacre was not a good thing. He was then put under house arrest for 15 years, and passed away last week). They censor news stories, they arrest peaceful protesters. If you do something they don’t like, they take you away in the dead of night and you are never heard from again. They persecute Bhuddists. Why on earth are they considered such a great country? Why are we holding the Olympics there? Why do they have so much power over human rights in the UN? Why don’t we have sanctions against them? Why on Earth does everyone like China!?

This started this forenoon when I went to a talk about the Darfur Conflict (which was aggravating in and of itself – 2 million people have died, and except for the US and Germany, no one has declared this genocide. This is bigger than Rwanda, Cosovo, and Chechnya put together). One of the more interesting points I heard at the talk was this: the Janjaweed people are able to kill and rape everyone else in Darfur because they are being armed by foreign countries. Chief among them – China and Pakistan, who also happen to own 70% of the oil in Sudan. Pakistan has a lot of issues, so while I do not condone this, I am at least able to half-understand where they’re coming from. China however, has gone one step further – it has been using its clout in the UN to impede peace-keeping missions, sanctions, and other ways to stop the killings.

This evening, on the front page of Slashdot, I find this story. It’s advice for people going to China, telling them how to maintain their privacy. As far as I can tell (for example, from this comment), there is no privacy at all. There are police everywhere with automatic rifles, making sure that no one steps out of line.

And yet the Bush administration, along with what seems like everyone else, loves China. Is it because they are huge? Trading with them will only reinforce the government, which will lead to more censorship and oppression. Are people afraid of them? Better to head off problems now than ignore them until they get out of hand. What is going on here? I don’t understand.

Those of you who go to school with me may remember a week at the end of last semester where I agonized over building an environment in LaTeX to do propositional logic proofs. After I was finished with it, I showed it to Prof Aaron at Pomona (who was teaching the Computability and Logic class at the time). He was so impressed with it that he used it to make the answer key for the homeworks on propositional logic. He also showed the other CS profs. This semester, Prof. Keller is teaching CS81, and apparently, he was so impressed with it that not only is he using it now, but he has told his CS81 class about it. Inadvertently, he actually told everyone in every class he teaches (including Music84) about my work, since he sent one email out detailing office hours and my LaTeX environment.

Everyone seems to like this so much because, as far as anyone can tell, this is the first time ever that anyone has done this. Ever. So, I’m pretty excited that people like it so much. Feel free to copy and use it, though I’d like you to keep the documentation (included in comments in the file) intact. Also, if you make improvements to it, I’d like to see a copy sometime.

You can get a copy here: http://www.cs.hmc.edu/courses/current/cs81/boxes/

Note that I only made logic.tex; Eric Malm created hmcpset.cls over the summer, and it has since become the standard way to do problem sets for the math department.

I’ve just joined Facebook, and I’m a bit overwhelmed by the vast amounts of information it gives me. Surprisingly enough, I think Cassie was right – it actually does afford you some privacy and protection, while giving your info to people who should have it anyway. Wow!

I just played some bridge, which went ok though not great. Then, I watched Love Actually, which is absolutely fantastic. What a great day!

The title of this entry is taken from Johnny’s Room by The Bobs. It’s still pretty good music, even if they haven’t been popular for 20 years. Over break, I got two of their CDs and one by The Persuasions, and have been listening to them constantly.

Having said that, today was the greatest day in recent memory. I woke up before my alarm went off, had a long shower, went to lunch, and then had Robotics for the first time. That class is going to be awesome.

After Robotics, I came back and updated my computer. Suddenly, I can’t move windows around the screen any more. I try restarting Xorg, and still nothing. Let me explain how I restart Xorg: I log out of it, and it begins to shut down. Then it hangs, and I push the button to turn off my computer. Then I turn it on, and it decides that it didn’t have a clean shut-down, and checks if everything is ok. Then I restart X. At this point, I discover that my mouse doesn’t work any more. I can’t do a damn thing. So I have to power cycle my machine again, and pull up a command prompt. I call Mac (who, incidentally, is now switching to FreeBSD instead of Gentoo), and he comes and fixes it. I try exiting X again, and… it works. It actually logs out correctly and gives me the command prompt again! I figure, what the heck, if that works, maybe I can try messing around with X some more. Within 15 minutes, my second monitor is working. This is the first time it has worked since September. My computer is now working better than it ever has. I’m not sure what happened, but I want to have Mac’s babies.

And now it’s the weekend. It’s time for fun, partying, and not work. All in all, a great day.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000085&sid=aRaEXeRubjHc
Wow. That is the coolest robbery I’ve ever heard of. And now the thief has a bullet-proof limousine to escape in.

This was in the December issue of Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram, as mentioned in another recent post of mine.

Here’s a short list of available Vim commands: http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?tip_id=422.

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.

Wow! All of a sudden, there seems to be much more news in the world! Here’s a few parts I found interesting:

Not only is the Bush administration being criticized for human rights violations, but other countries are justifying their own human rights problems by pointing to ours. Sort of a “my older brother smokes, so it’s OK if I do, too” kind of thing, I suppose. A very dangerous precedent, I daresay.

On a happier note, however, the courts have finally ruled that it is unconstitutional to require stickers in biology books saying that evolution is only a theory. Huzzah! Yes, it is only a theory. But so is atomic theory, or the theory of relativity, or electromagnetism theory, or microeconomics (from what I can gather, macroeconomics is closer to “wild speculation” than an actual “theory,” but I’d be happy to learn more if anyone wants to dispute this). However, no one seems to mind that these are often taught as facts, rather than the theories that they are. So… yeah. Those creationist bastards are still not allowed to break down the separation of church and state.

Finally, the Huygens probe has landed on Titan (well, it hasn’t yet, but by the time anyone reads this, it’ll be there). I don’t expect anything remarkable to come from this, but it’s still pretty neat.