“In a world of perfect karma, Ahmadinejad would be captured by American “students” and held hostage for over a year, paraded before TV cameras and threatened almost daily with death.”
Taken from here. I couldn’t stop laughing when I read it.
Archive for the ‘Humor’ Category
A Just World
Friday, September 21st, 2007Nerd Humor
Monday, August 27th, 2007I read a paper called ‘What Really Makes Transactions Faster?‘, and while reading it, I made notes to myself in the margins. I was skimming the paper again today, to write a short summary, and I found a note that I couldn’t decipher. It simply said ‘GNFARB’ and pointed to a bit of text that was underlined. I stared at it for a bit, with absolutely no clue what the heck GNFARB was supposed to stand for.
I figured context might help, so I re-reread the text: “Acquire the locks in any convenient order using bounded spinning to avoid indefinite deadlock.” Upon readnig this, I thought to myself “Inifinte Deadlock” would be a pretty good name for a rock band.” I then remembered exactly what GNFARB stood for.
Embarassing
Tuesday, June 26th, 2007My friend mentioned an old windows shareware game involving some kind of mouse running around a mansion looking for cheese. I have a very vague memory of such a game, and her curiosity sparked mine, so now I’m off looking for this game. I stumbled upon the following microsoft website: http://www.microsoft.com/games/puzzle/. It hasn’t been changed since 1998, so it looks really horrendously out of date. There are several games to be had (some “from the creator of Tetris!”) and next to each game’s title there’s a bit of pixel art and the size of the game – most of which are on the order of 100kb. There’s even a “news” banner proclaiming the revelation of the Xbox at the 2001 Consumer Electronics Expo. It’s like turning a corner in a Wal-Mart and finding a small section selling pogs. Somebody more clever than I should coin a name for this sort of thing: when a supposedly “tech savvy” company has an embarassingly out of date section on their website. This thing looks almost as bad as geocities did.
For the overly curious, my friend was thinking of this game. I was thinking of another, but I’ve got not idea what the heck it was. There was some sort of house, maybe, which was all dark? I’m not even sure if there was a mouse involved. It came bundled with the PowerSpec PC I bought at the start of high school, and that’s about all I can remember. I’ll know it if I ever see it … this is going to drive me nuts.
A Theory Of Knowledge
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007I spent several weeks working on a theory of knowledge. The rough draft is availible here. Feel free to read it and leave me your comments.
I frequently make ‘discoveries’ and then forget that I’ve made these discoveries. The nice thing about keeping a journal or writing a lot in general is that you can recall ideas that you had long forgotten. I was reading some stuff I wrote here about two years ago, and I was surprised to see I had ‘discovered’ things back then. The nice thing is that I come up with some weird ideas sometimes, and I often forget them. This blog has given me a convient way to remember little gems like this post here. I would do well to include this example in my theory of knowledge. It’s bizzare and clever at the same time; those are the kinds of ideas I love!
A Conundrum
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007Apparently nobody knows the origin of the word ‘conundrum’
Update: I called my Mom. She said that the word probably comes from the latin conare, which means ‘to try’, implying that a conundrum literally means a ‘thing which must be tried,’ and the plural is ‘conundra.’
<3 Mom
For Bonus Points
Friday, February 23rd, 2007I met a girl at Xavier. The last three letters of her screen name are LCM, which are her last three initials: middle, confirmation, last names.
At work, there’s a guy named Greg C. Dietrich.
That means i know an LCM and a GCD.
Don’t Get My Hopes Up You Jerks
Wednesday, February 21st, 2007I was hoping to come home and find an email from a Computer Science Graduate Studies admissions department for some prestigious school glistening in my inbox. I opened thunderbird to find that the ’school’ folder had like 10 new emails in it. Hooray! Could this be the day? Nope; just 6 emails from the ‘Colorado School of Mines,’ to which I never applied, informing me about funding I could recieve, followed by an apology for sending me so many emails. I replied:
you guys wanna give me a full ride ? i’m pretty good at stuff.
Their response:
Mark -
I can’t imagine any Department not wanting to give you a full-ride!
In all seriousness, however, teaching assistantships/research
assistantships are competitive at Mines, but everything is looked at on
a student by student basis.
If you have a particular area of research interest I can get you in
contact with that Department Chair and you’d be able to get a better
sense of direct funding options.
Let me know if I can be of assistance.
[Name Removed]
If I don’t hear back from any grad schools soon, I swear I’m gonna go nuts.
Embarassing
Monday, February 19th, 2007Over a year ago, I did a problem for my Eletricity and Magnetism course, and thought it was so cool that I wrote about it on my blog. It was a nifty problem: given a sphere of charge Q with radius R, find the repulsive force each half of the sphere exerts on the other half. I remember puzzling over this one for a while before finding a solution. I thought it was so cool, I wanted to write a bit about it. When we went over the problem in class, I realizd I’d a simple mistake (no surprise there) in the problem. I never bothered to correct my blog becuase I’m lazy like that.
Fast forward to just a few days ago, when some guy finds this problem and links to it on his blog. He says he thinks it’s a neat problem, but is puzzled because i say the answer is “obviously” something incorrect. I put the “obvious” line in there as a joke, because it was a hard problem. The day after this guy linked to my post, I switched servers, which invalidated the link he put up to my blog. I finally got this all figured out, and replaced the entry with a note that I did the problem wrong and posted a link to a correct solution.
The neat part of all this is that my blog is apparently the first result google comes up with when you search for “cool physics problem.”
I tried working out the problem just now, and realized I’ve forgotten a lot of the stuff I learned in E&M. I thought the class was kind of neat, but it really wasn’t my bag. It reminds me, yet again, why I love comptuer science so much more than physics. I can jump right in to work I left off several years ago when it comes to computer science theory, but I’ll be damned if I can do a physics problem I would have known how to solve just over a year ago. It seems to me that comptuer science is just so much easier than physics, and that’s why I like it more.
Hehe
Saturday, October 7th, 2006I went to the Tall Stacks stuff this year, and had a good time listening to some rockin’ sweet bluegrass music. While I was there wednesday night, I saw a young woman, perhaps late 20’s, holding a little boy with a t-shirt that said “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” Either that mom has a really wicked sense of humor, or she didn’t put a lot of thought into what her kid’s shirt said.
Also, I’ve really been digging on this band DragonForce lately. There’s a ‘metal militia’ group on XU’s facebook, and these dudes have been giving me all kinds of sweet music to listen to. Everyone I have played DragonForce for (at this time, only Rebecca and Anneliese) has loved it – and girls usually don’t like metal. So these dudes must be on to something…
I amuse myself
Thursday, September 28th, 2006I decided, on a whim, to look at some code I wrote for computer programming classes back in my freshman year of college. That seems so long ago now. I have changed so much. Still, the things I did back then are amusing to me. I wrote all kinds of weird notes to Gary (the professor grading my projects) in the comments. Here are some that made me laugh:
Before some arithmetic:
//this fixes that stupid buisness of chars being negative instead of > 127
//that makes me so mad
Before a really ugly function:
//display the board in ASCII format
// i'm sure this function appears gargantuan and incomprehensible - just trust me that it works
//dont' even look any further
Before a bit of code that appears a few times in various forms:
//i suppose i could have written an inline function
//but i really dislike inline functions
//they seem like a waste of time to me
At the end of a compression program:
// MAKE SURE YOU CLOSE THE FILE or else all manner of nastiness shall ensue
//because the last few bits won't get written
//so the decompressor won't hit an EOF
And, my favorite, before calling function I write for a Heap data structure. I gave it a name different from the ‘canonical name’:
/this function below is equivalent to MaxHeapify
//but i think that's a dumb name