Interesting Stuff

So, tonight was (still is) Casemas, which is just awesome. In the middle of it, Natalie, Sara, Robert and I played Scrabble – first time in months. Sara beat me by one point – 162 to 163. Argh! Well, it was a good game. Finals week is going to ream me, but I think I’m gonna go back to the party now.

I just ran across a page that tells you how to build your own 1-wheeled segway-like vehicle for around $1500. Wow!

The good news – bridge club is the shit. I’ve just finished playing for over 6 hours straight, and we had a new member join us tonight. Sadly, I don’t remember her name, but if she comes back, I’ll try to learn it. On a slightly sadder note, Monday is the last scheduled time that Unit551 will be playing with us. Luckily, I believe I’ll be free to go. It’s $2.50 to compete, free to just play the hands. However, it looks like I’ll get rides to the Knights of Columbus games sometimes, and Unit551 might have charity tournaments here once in a while, so it’s not really the end of us playing together.

The better news – I’m not going to die on Monday!! This was in doubt for a while. However, when Dodds says that ACM is due at the end of the semester, he actually means at the end of finals, rather than the beginning of them, and Prof Olson got enough complaints that he moved the final to the day that the 5C rules require it to be (before, he just decided to make it due on Monday because it was convenient for him… jackass). This means that I only have my final paper in Philosophy and my final exam in Systems on Monday (and this is why I could stay so long at bridge, rather than work my ass off).

The bad news – Natalie is leaving on Monday morning, and won’t be back until the fall. I think it’s a good move for her, but it’s sad to see her go. Frosh year, it looked like she would excel here much more than the rest of us, but it doesn’t appear that way any more. How sad.

Now, for the news news – troops sent to Iraq are not equipped with adequate armor, and many of them scrounge bits of bulletproof glass from junkyards as protection. This story is all over. I think it’s absolutely despicable what they’re doing with these “wars on terror,” needlessly putting the troops in harms way. This reminds me of the depleted uranium they use as bullets in Afghanistan. This has been going on since the Persian Gulf, and has some absolutely horrible effects (WARNING: THIS LINK HAS SOME VERY DISTURBING PICTURES). So now, to keep our troops from complaining that they have cancer and their children are deformed, we’re just going to make sure that none of them come back alive, so that no one can complain at all. It makes me sick.

On a lighter note – our CS105 code works! Pomona Mike and I had to write a dynamic memory allocator in C, and it was due this afternoon. As of yesterday, we had never had a working version, and couldn’t find our bug anywhere (it worked perfectly for over 1.8 million calls, then spontaneously gets corrupted). Well, last night, the answer came to Mike in a dream. Literally. He woke up the next morning knowing what he must do, and within half an hour, had a working version. It was amazing, though still slow and inefficient. This afternoon, we worked on it more, and it is now 80% as efficient as the real version that is built into computers, and actually runs faster than the real version! \/\/00T!

Before I go, I’d like to leave you with a very interesting thought. I’m not usually one for minimalist existentialism, but I think this is pretty great:

Finally, some time to update. Here’s most of what’s going on around here: yesterday was the Putnam, which I completely messed up. I’m optimistically looking at a 12 here (last year, I got an 18). Ouch. I turned in 4 problems, and I messed up 3 of them.

Last night we went hot-tubbing at Robert’s house, which was a really great way to relax after a crappy morning/afternoon of screwing up math.

Friday night, I went to a We Are Scientists concert at Scripps. They’re pretty great! This concert was much better than the last one I went to. However, I’ve noticed that their newer music has a different feel than their older stuff – they now write songs about much more mainstream topics like drinking and stuff. To the best of my knowledge, none of their new songs have that original, sciency feel to them. Perhaps they’re trying to appeal to a more general crowd? I dunno, but I kinda liked their older stuff more. I’ll have to listen to the new CD again, and see if that’s just the initial shock of a different style.

Thanksgiving break was great. Rachel, Shannon, Amanda and I went to northern California, and we dropped Shannon off at Lodi. The three of us spent a night at Rachel’s grandparents’ house in Sacramento, which was a lot of fun because they’re really neat people. The next day, Amanda and I went to her aunt and uncle’s house for Thanksgiving, which again was full of good people and great food. We spent the rest of the weekend at Amanda’s house in Livermore. She has some pretty neat friends, and we went bowling one night. We got to see my dad’s roommate from grad school, who also lives in Livermore. Amazingly, Amanda knew them too! Saturday night we spent at Rachel’s grandparent’s house again, and then we came back. All in all, it was a fun trip.

Unfortunately, I haven’t really been paying much attention to world news lately, so I’m not sure I can offer much there.
Soldiers are finally starting to challenge the stop-loss act, which is wonderful news, since it is a horrible law. I hope something actually comes out of this, and it isn’t the symbolic protest that it has the potential to be.

Hopefully, I’ll have more time to update this after this coming week, since I won’t have as much work after then.

(apologies to Hansford for the title of this update)
Guess who is done with their homework this week? Yeah, that’s right. I am. Sunday afternoon, I napped for a couple hours. Sunday night, I didn’t sleep. Monday, I dozed for a few minutes in history. Monday night, I didn’t get to bed until 4:00, though I did skip soccer to get a little more sleep. and today, I finished my homework before 1:00! Since Saturday, I have done: my history research paper, my philosophy paper, my CS81 take-home midterm, another huge Abstract assignment, and accomplished a significant amount of the Systems lab. The weird thing is, though, that I’m not tired. I’ve gotten 10.5 hours of sleep since Sunday morning (it’s now late Tuesday night), and I feel great. Mind you, Monday morning at 5AM, with hundreds of words to go on a paper due later that day, I was not feeling so great. However, it’s all done, it’s all at least ok quality, and starting tomorrow afternoon, I have break.

Let’s see… what else has been going on… due to low turnout rates, Tom is seriously thinking that at the end of the semester, Unit551 will stop playing with our bridge club. However, on Monday, we got four and a half tables, so we’ll see what happens. The poor guy – he’s working so hard to keep this going, and the unit is shrinking so much that they might just have to shut down permanently.

At this point, I think all of the important news is mainstream enough that you should have heard about it: the US is launching a major attack on Falluja and various other parts of Iraq, Israel is easing security lockdowns so the Palestinians can hold elections to replace Arafat, who finally passed away in his coma. South Africa is still having problems with rape, AIDS, and racism, while the Darfur Conflict isn’t getting any better. A small group of Republicans struck down a bill that would have implemented almost every change that the 9/11 panel suggested, which is odd because the measure had sweeping bipartisan support, save for a few people. Both the Democrats and the Bush administration are working on getting these laws passed soon (wow – who would ever think we’d see the day when the Democrats and Bush had the same goals?). I’m not going to link to any of these stories; if you can’t find them, try google (and if you can’t find it, you probably can’t find my blog, so go ask whoever got you here for help).

Well, that’s about it for now. I shall update more after I get back from Livermore (I’m going there for break).

Wow! So, I’ve just spend the past 3 hours playing with a neat little thing that just came out of Google: Keyhole! It’s a compilation of satelite photos from all over the world, and you can go all over and look at things. Though the resolution is terrible out in the boonies, in big cities it’s amazing! Pictures of my house, Amanda’s house, Robert’s house, Amanda’s school, my school, HMC, and the 5C’s were surprisingly detailed. And since it works worldwide, Amanda and I went and looked at various parts of London, Paris, Rome, Athens, Thailand… it’s really neat. However, we couldn’t find Rachel’s street, let alone her house, and we couldn’t even find Mac’s city (Anchorage, Alaska). I couldn’t find my parent’s timeshare condo, but I did find the island it’s on. Robert and Rachel found DisneyLand (DisneyWorld? the one in Florida). Amanda found LAX, and we looked at the planes. Outside the White House, you can see the crowd of people looking in through the fence, and behind it you can see the windows on the cars on the street.

There are two drawbacks to this, though: first, you only get 7 days of the program free. This is understandable, however, because all of the data is streamed off of the Keyhole servers, and someone needs to pay for the bandwidth, etc (though I think that their prices are a little expensive). Second, it’s only available on Windows. Damn! Well, we all gathered around Robert’s computer and played with it (Rachel and Amanda have Macs, and I have Gentoo, as does Kenny). Huh. It just occurred to me that there’s only one person with the combo to our suite who uses Windows. So… yeah. Not yet (ever?) available for Linux. Oh, well. I suspect that by next week I’ll be bored with it anyway.

(continued 2 hours later) Wow! there’s a ridiculous amount of data in there. You can also have it highlight schools (everything from colleges down to elementary schools), banks, restaurants, streets, subway lines, bars… it’s amazing. You can have it highlight bodies of water, identify volcanoes and earthquake areas… it even can identify the different buildings on the Acropolis. Robert found Magic Mountain, and we looked at that; you can see the roller coasters surprisingly well. Kenny found his house, and showed us his car. Niagara Falls is pretty. In downtown San Diego, you can see people walking on the street! This is just incredible. It would be great if I could get this for Linux.

Here are 4 pics I took of it:
my house (that’s the corner of 70th and West Shore, so my house is the 2nd one down on the left)
my high school
HMC (my dorm is the 2nd from the right, just next to the one with the “+”-shaped courtyard).
most of the 5C’s

I highly, highly reccomend you get this and play with it for a week, if you use Windows.

Though it was horribly off-topic, I really liked this SlashDot comment:

Why must I be forced to send my children to schools where the teachers insist that we are descended from apes?

The very idea is utterly ridiculous. A cursory glance at ape anatomy shows that it is impossible for man to have ‘evolved’ from one. It is just a rubbish idea. Everyone with any education at all knows that man actually comes from australopithecus.

This has lightened my mood in a rather discouraging day.

So, it seems like yesterday the EU’s probe finally reached the moon. This is really neat, because it is the first time an ion propulsion system has been used for any large distance. Ion propulsion is pretty great because it takes much less fuel than conventional chemical rockets, and it can draw power for its propulsion system from the sun. Many satelites these days use solar power to power their instruments and broadcast signals, but this is the only system I know of that uses solar power to go anywhere (solar sails don’t really count because it takes hundreds of years to get any significant speed up). Hoorah for SMART-1!

So… I could use some good stress reduction right about now. There are too many annoying parts of my life at the moment. One of the bigger ones is one of the Systems tutors. This week in lab, we’re writing a dynamic memory allocator, which is fascinating. We have two tutors – Chainmail Chris and Other Chris (I know his last name, but if you don’t know him, I’m not going to give you a bad impression of him). Chainmail is awesome, knows his stuff for the most part, and is a pretty great guy. He answers our questions, and tells us when he doesn’t know the answer. Other Chris is rather different. Here is a summary of an actual conversation that took place Monday:

me: Hey, Chainmail – the way I read this lab, we have to make an allocator with perfect memory utilization that runs faster than the standard UNIX version, in order to get full credit. Is this true? Should that be different somehow?
Chainmail: I’m not a grader, so I don’t know how this lab is graded. The Profs aren’t here tonight, so you should try asking them on Wednesday, or maybe just email them now.
me: OK. Thanks.
Other Chris (walking over, without us asking him for help): You shouldn’t be worrying about how to get points in this assignment; you should be trying to write a memory allocator. Don’t concern yourself with how your work is graded, just code it up, and do a good job, and things will work out ok.
me: Well, how the points are divided up will affect how hard I work on each part of this, so I think this is a very important part of the lab.
Other Chris: You don’t have to worry about how your work will be evaluated.

WTF?! Other Chris also seems to have a habit of staring at us while we’re working, and then inserting himself into our conversation when we pause to think. He doesn’t ask if we need help. He doesn’t even make sure that he’s talking about the same thing we’re working on. He just jumps in, wastes our time, and agravates me. I want to just tell him that no one asked for his help, he’s wasting our time, and I want him to shut up and go away. From now on, I think I’ll have to start sitting as far away from him as possible in the Graphics Lab, so that he might jump into someone else’s discussion instead of ours. If we asked for help, that would be one story, but when we’re happily working along and he comes in, interrupts us, and gets us completely off-track it’s more than just annoying. Argh!

On Monday, I managed to get out of Systems lab an hour early, which was fantastic, because I could actually go compete at bridge club. I was paired with a guy named Alex, who hasn’t played in 20 years and didn’t remember any conventions. Consequently, we bid everything naturally. We had Stayman, Blackwood, and that’s it. Alex was proud that he remembered weak 2’s. Needless to say, it was a bit of a challenge to bid. However, I think things worked out ok. As usual, we took last, but I think I played pretty well, all in all.

On Wednesday, Bruce Schneier, one of the worlds leading security experts, came to speak to us. His talk was absolutely fascinating! One of the more important things he said, in my opinion, is that when you assess any potential security measure, you should ask yourself these 6 questions:
1) What are we trying to protect?
2) What are the risks?
3) How effective is the countermeasure?
4) What problems will the countermeasure bring about?
5) What are the costs of the countermeasure?
6) Is it worth it?

One example he gave is bullet proof vests. We are trying to protect our bodies from being shot, and bullet proof vests are a very effective way of doing that. There aren’t any big problems with bullet-proof vests, except that if you wore one all the time you’d get some pretty funny looks from people. The costs are in money, time, comfort, and maybe a little mobility (can you easily move your body in one?). For the average person, the vest is not worth these costs, which is why the average person on the street doesn’t wear bullet-proof vests on a day-to-day basis.

If you follow this analysis, a lot of security measures our government has implemented are useless (our color-coded alert system, ousting Saddam, electronic voting, etc). This leads us to the conclusion that very rarely are security decisions made for actual security reasons. In general, you should watch the entities involved in a decision, and look at their agendas. For example, in airports, you now must have your photo ID checked when you buy your ticket, and again when you go through security. This doesn’t make the planes safer at all (whether or not I still have my photo ID 10 minutes later has no bearing on how dangerous I am). However, this was passed with the airline’s backing because it solves a different problem of theirs: apparently there used to be a market for scalped non-refundable tickets (if I bought a non-refundable ticket but canceled my trip, I could sell the ticket to someone else). With the 2nd ID check, the airlines cut down on that drasticly, under the guise of “security,” and the public thinks it was a government decision, which works out really nicely for the airlines.

All in all, it was a really neat talk. I’m now getting Schneier’s monthly e-newsletter, which should be pretty neat. If you get a chance to hear this guy speak, I highly recommend going to see him.