My blog has been getting spam comments in German. Perhaps my blog is now reaching a larger audience?
The new carpet was put in yesterday, and my bed arrived this morning, meaning that my room is almost 100% finished. The only thing that will change in the near future is that a table is coming up into the living room / office area, but other than that, I am ready for action.
I like clever T-shirts. Unforunately, many t-shirts try to be clever, but are really just dumb, obnoxious, or pointlessly profane (in an unfunny manner.) I saw a guy with a t-shirt that said something in binary code on it, and asked him what it meant. He said it was ‘you are dumb.’ I’ve seen several other nerdy t-shirts to that effect: “stupidity is not a crime, you are free to go” etc etc.
I decided I’d make my own. It arrived in the mail today. Here are the results.
When i was in high school, we had band camp at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. It was pretty fun. The marching and learning the show part wasn’t all that great, but we played a ton of video games and just generally had fun. I remember explorining the buildings, looking at academic papers, and being somewhat turned off by the idea of going to graduate school. I’d see this huge poster with some title like ‘Distilled k-polychlorate subgroups with isometric properties’ or some other incomprehenisble gibberish. Usually there would be some kind of picture or a goofy chart that looked like it might be interesting if you understood what the hell was going on. I tried to read snippets of those posters but it just made no sense so I got bored and wandered off, to do something like choreagraph a wiffle-bat fight with Paul Dehmer.
I’ve spent the past 8 weeks doing research at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. The work we are doing is theoretical computer science, which means we are solving mathematical problems dealing with algorithms. We’ve just about finished our work in the theory domain, and we’ll spend the rest of our time writing up this paper and maybe running some simulations to see how well our plans work in progress. The title of our paper will be something like “Approximation Algorithms for Grooming Problems in WDM Ring Networks.” That sounds kind of gnarly, but I assure you it’s really not all that complicated.
At least, it doesn’t seem that way to me now. I have been working on this stuff for the past 8 weeks, thinking of nothign besides this, reading a bunch of papers and scribbling my thoughts on a yellow notebook, so maybe it is kind of complicated? I don’t know.
The point of this entry was that most of the problems i’m dealing with can be summed up very simply: I give you a bunch of different objects, each of which has a different weight and profit associated with it. Then I tell you, you have ‘W’ boxes, each of which can hold ‘C’ units of weight; find a way to get a decent profit. That’s not so bad, is it? It’s complicated by the fact that certain objects can be split into several boxes, sometimes there are limitations (i.e this object can only go in this box), etc. On top of that, we have to make sure the running time is polynomial in the size of the problem, which means we can never get the best possible solution and therefore have to prove some boundary between our solution and the best one possible; something like ‘our profit is always at least half of the most profit you could possibly make.’
I don’t know. Maybe that sounds complicated to you. It seems pretty simple to me, though. Maybe because it really is simple, or maybe it’s just the fact that i’ve been working on it for so long. In any case, I am no longer under the impression that grad school willl be difficult.
Woot.
From an article about some new space-ship thing that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is making:
“The Blue Origin spacecraft, being built by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos’ new venture, will have VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capability, according to the company’s FAA permit applications. It will be a cone-shaped vehicle about 50 feet tall and 22 feet in diameter at the base, and carry 3 or more passengers to an altitude of 325,000 feet”
Then some guy comes along and decides to correct it for metric units:
“The Blue Origin spacecraft, being built by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos’ new venture, will have VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capability, according to the company’s FAA permit applications. It will be a cone-shaped vehicle about 15 meter tall and 7 meter in diameter at the base, and carry 3 or more passengers to an altitude of 99 kilometers”
And then this smartass follows:
“The Blue Origin spacecraft, being built by Amazon.com multi-hundradaire Jeff Bezos’ new venture, will have VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capability, according to the company’s FAA permit applications. It will be a pointed-shaped vehicle about 8.3 fathoms tall and 2.17313508 x 10^-16 Parsecs in diameter at the base, and carry ~pi or more passengers to an altitude of 9.90600 x 10^14 angstrom”
This weekend at Julie’s place, Kurt and Ashley were going to dye their hair and she suggested I join them. Guided by curiosity more than anything else, I took her up on the proposition. Here are the results. I like it.
Here are some pictures I took at a 4th of July parade in claremont.
Anneliese showed me this video here. While the first one, a ridiculous mistake by a TV shopping show host, is pretty funny, the next video is absolutely hilarious. Some kind of crazy Japanese game show they they appear to bet on which cat will be able to run off with a large fish.
They have a poker tournament here every monday night, with best buy gift certificates as prizes. A went out quickly because there was mention of ice cream, and while I was waiting for Natalie to bust so we could get ice cream (she kept on winning even though she didn’t want to – strange how that happens) I wandered over to another table, where I saw david had quite a bit of chips.
I asked him if it worked, if his new method of cheating was paying off for him. He looked shocked and tried to play it down, but I kept asking him if he tried it and said that I would never lower my moral standards to win at a game. I claimed that he had used some kind of hybrd egyptian-mayan algebra system to devise this cheating method. He seemed really uncomfortable in trying to claim that he was not cheating, so I stopped.
I really don’t know why I enjoy that so much.
Somehow I got onto a bunch of right wing mailing lists, and I’ve been trying unsucessfully to have myself removed from them.
In other news, I’ve finally started enjoying my research here. I am happy. I like it here, but I’ll be happy to get home just the same.
Mark P Neyer wrote:
> Michael Kai Mayeda wrote:
>
>> Mark P Neyer wrote:
>>
>>> Hello Everyone:
>>>
>>> Tomorrow I turn 21, and since I’m from Cincinnati I don’t really know anywhere to go and celebrate my birthday. Does anyone have any suggestions of a good place to go?
>>>
>>> Also, If you’d like to come and have dinner with me that’d be sweet too; the more the merrier, I say.
>>>
>>>
>> tropical lei is right down the street.
>>
>>
>>
> is that like a hawaiian restaurant or what?
>
>
it’s a strip bar…don’t know if you’re the type to party there, just a suggestion