Interesting Stuff

Might there actually be some hope in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict?

So, last night it was just starting to rain when I walked back from the tourguide meeting. The kind of rain where you can still watch individual raindrops hit the pavement. However, I noticed something really strange – In the midde of the slabs of concrete that make up the sidewalk, the rain was absorbed into the concrete (it’s apparently quite porous), and so the concrete continued to appear dry for several minutes. However, Within about half a foot from any crack in the sidewalk, the rain stayed on the surface and made it look wet. It appeared as though it was only raining on the cracks! I for one thought this was pretty neat. My dad hypothesizes that they put some kind of sealant around the cracks to keep rain/bugs/plants out of them. I don’t know, but it’s pretty cool.

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.