Sunday, February 25, 2007

A New Post!

Jingping and I made a lot of cookies last night! I don't know what's wrong with us. We made a load of peanut butter cookies, and a load of chocolate chip cookies. I had six cookies, a glass of water with orange juice, and two cups of coffee for lunch! I don't feel so good. If anyone wants some cookies, they should come over soon, before I get cookie poisoning!

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Moving On:

Adolph: Vat ist dat?
Andrew: This is data from my experiment.
Adolph: Vat are you doink vis it?
Andrew: I am making pretty plots out of it. Look at this one. Isn't it pretty?
Adolph: Vat does it mean?
Andrew: I don't know.

Monday, January 22, 2007

Cold War II

"Donkey:
ole, ole!"
Wow!

Wow...

What do you...

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Question

So, I spent a couple of hours this afternoon trying to find an authoritative... answer to this question. Nothing I found satisfied me, though I'm not exactly an anthropologist or child psychologist or anything like that, so I shouldn't expect to be too successful.

Anyway:

Where do kids learn their games from? The three answers to this question are: other kids, older kids, and grown-ups. I just wonder what the proportions are. I'm pretty sure that I learned tag and hide-and-go-seek from other or older kids. Though, it is conceivable that my parents taught me the games when I was too little to remember. People should suggest their intuitions to me. Is there a self-perpetuating children's culture underneath us all, with tag being passed largely from generation to generation of children, without much significant input from adults?

Also, where does the "nyaah nyaah nyaah" song come from? I don't know the name of it. You sing it when you beat someone, or when they can't catch you. You can sing it with "nanny nanny boo boo, you can't catch me!". What is this song? Why did Freddie Mercury write "We are the Champions" around it?

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Question

Should it be "materiel support", or "material support"? Materiel is like military hardware and supplies and stuff, whereas material is just stuff. So if you say, "Iran is providing materiXl support to our enemies", which materiXl should be used? Is "materiel support" the natural form of the phrase, but people use "material" just because it's a normaler word? Or is it just a coincidence that you can use "materiel" in a more generalized phrase while talking about military stuff?

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Introducing Bongo and Jingo Jango

Bongo: Man, that new library addition is so cool!

Jingo Jango: What are you talking about, Bongo? We spent 14,000,000 dollars to build a robot to do things for us which we've been doing for ourselves, for years, without even thinking about it!

Bongo: You mean taking a book off a shelf?

Jingo Jango: Right! Just a couple of years ago, if you wanted to get an article from the journal Vision Research, all you had to do was go up to the third floor, take the volume off the shelf, and go to the copy room. The copy room on the third floor had lots of tables, and three copiers.

Bongo: But now you can ask a robot to do it for you! Isn't that just cool?

Jingo Jango: No, Bongo. Now I have to ask a robot to do it for me. If I climbed into that giant, gymnasium-sized room with all the stacks of metal crates, and tried to find the metal crate with the volume of Vision Research I wanted, a security guard would probably shoot me.

Bongo: Come on, Jingo Jango. You're just a Luddite. Do you miss the days of the card catalog?

Jingo Jango: No, Bongo, and I don't miss riding a horse to Wal-Mart either. Putting the card catalog online made things easier, as long as you had a computer. And, naturally, libraries nowadays always have a few terminals with immediate access to the online catalog. But that was cool; it wasn't even that big of a change. A card catalog is naturally a type of database, so why not just make it a computer based one rather than a paper based one?

Bongo: But this thing is so cool! And it saves so much space! Now you don't have to walk to the engineering library across campus to get issues of the Journal of the Optical Society of America. Isn't that convenient? Plus, isn't the library itself like a big database? Isn't it natural, even, just to put all those books online and do away with the 'place' once and for all?

Jingo Jango: They could do it right. They could do more than put one crappy, old, half-operational copy machine on the first floor, halfway across the library from the 14,000,000 dollar robotic librarian. If I go to the kid at the desk with my list of 6 volumes of some journal, and say, "Hey, this journal isn't registered properly in your big gizmo over there. Get these for me", I could, in theory, wait fifteen minutes while they figure out how to get my books and wait for the robot to respond, and then carry all 4000 pages across the first floor to the copier, dump them on the floor, copy my articles, and then carry all 4000 pages plus copies back to the kid at the desk, and leave.

Bongo: You sound pissed.

Jingo Jango: But I don't. I make a point of saying, "I'm going to leave these here, on your shiny desk, while you sit and watch cartoons, and I'm going to take them one at a time to the copier, and don't you think it's silly that there aren't any copiers around here, given that that stupid machine is full of thousands of volumes of journals which no one is allowed to check out of the library, and please don't do anything with them while they're there."

Bongo: Stop complaining. You're such an asshole. I'm sure one of these days they'll tear down the new Starbucks next door and spend the next 14,000,000 dollars on a room full of tables and new copiers.

Jingo Jango: You're funny, Bongo.

Bongo: Anyway, they'll work it out. And I'm right, you know. A lot of journals aren't even printed on paper anymore. Eventually everything will get scanned, and it will all be online. The library will be nothing but kids sitting at desks watching cartoons.

Jingo Jango: They could at least let me into that room so I can get my books myself. If it's so simple, anyone should be able to use it.

Bongo: I wonder what happens when the license on the software runs out. I remember a story about a robotic parking lot in New Jersey, which worked just like the library robot, and the city was refusing to pay yearly software licenses after a new council got elected, something like that.

Jingo Jango: So everyone's car gets stuck in the garage if they don't get it out by the license expiration date. That's nuts. What if the Russians detonate an EM weapon over the library? How will anyone know what's inside all those metal boxes?

Bongo: No one will care, they'll be too busy eating their cellphones.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

I am eating a peanut butter sandwich

It is time to change the subject. I'm tired of scrolling down the page just to see if I have any new comments. If any of my legions want to comment now, I will be able to see it easily because this post is so short.

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Scariest Animals

I would choose "spider" as the scariest animal. This is because it has such a completely inhuman appearance. The scariest animals are the killers. Spiders, cats, sharks, and snakes. There are probably others, but those are the scariest. You could say that a killer monkey is also scary, and this is definitely true. You imagine yourself locked in a room with a killer monkey your size, and you are definitely scared. But a killer monkey is just one type of monkey. Many monkeys are not killers, and probably would not hurt you if you were alone with them in a room.

The point about the monkey is also true for bears and dogs, which by the way are closely related to one another. Bears and dogs can be killers, but they also eat garbage and fruit, meaning that killing is not all that they think about. A dog can be your friend, and you can be his friend in return. Bears have a reputation for being big and lazy, though this is not necessarily true. "Killer bear", as well as "killer dog", is a useful specifier.

Cats are killers. All they think about is killing other things. For fun, we might keep one around with us, to live with us, but only because that particular cat is small. Again, imagine yourself in a room with a cat which is your size, and you are scared. Notice that I do not have to say "killer cat", because we all know that all cats are killers. But cats are like us. They're warm-blooded, and they have babies which we all think are cute. A cat is a battle machine, but you can empathize with it.

Snakes can be scary. Like cats, all snakes are killers, and so it is redundant to say "killer snake". Going by the alone-in-a-room-with-it test, you can agree that a snake which is about your size is a scary thing. But there is something silly about a snake. It is scary in general, and is only concerned with killing things, but it doesn't have any legs, which makes it look like a noodle or a piece of rope. So in a way, snakes are kind of stupid looking. Noodles are not scary, and so this detracts from the scariness of a snake. But certainly, snakes are scary, I will agree with whoever claims this.

Sharks are also scary, but it is unlikely you will run into one, because they live in the ocean. To a fish, a shark is probably the scariest animal. However, to a human, or to any other monkey, a shark is not the scariest animal. You do not walk around in the woods at night fearful of being eaten by a shark. You can't even picture yourself alone in a room with one, unless it is a room full of water, in which case I agree it is very scary. Also, they look a lot like fish, and fish are not scary animals; so, like a snake, a shark looks like something which is not scary, which detracts from its scariness.

As an aside, I will mention that a crazy man with a knife, or a gun, or a chainsaw, or some other terrible thing, is undoubtably a very scary thing. But, like a killer dog or a bear, and indeed just like his brother the killer monkey, the crazy man is only one type of man. In general, men think about killing a lot, but they also think about other things which are not related.

What makes the spider so different from all of these scary animals? Well, obviously it is a lot smaller. This is related to another other thing which makes it different, and that is that it is an invertebrate. Further related to this invertebrate nature of the spider is its face: spiders do not have faces. They can have a dozen eyes all over the top of their head, and their mouths are not mouths at all, but orifices surrounded by poisonous hypodermic fangs and gripping appendages made to prevent you from escaping. They do not chew, but rather drink you as a beverage after they have dissolved you with digestive juices which they inject into your maimed, paralyzed body. This is terrible!

Now, at least a cat has a face. You can look a cat in the eye, and relate to it. A cat has a soul. A cat is a mammal. Cats have babies, which everyone calls kittens, and which everyone agrees are not scary at all. Imagine yourself in a room with a spider your size! Its exoskeleton would probably be bulletproof at such a scale. You couldn't look into its eyes unless it was a jumping spider or maybe a type of wolf spider, since those spiders do have frontally placed eyes which have relatively good acuity and color vision. But you wouldn't be fooled by these spiders. A jumping spider is a perverted mockery of a cat. You and the jumping spider have nothing in common. You cannot relate to the spider. Spiders do not love their babies, and no one thinks that their babies are cute. Spider babies will eat their mothers if they can't find someone else to kill first.

This is why I would choose the spider as the scariest animal. If you put me in a room with a spider which is my size, give me a big knife so that I can cut off my own head before the spider gets me. I'll fight the cat, or the snake, or the shark, especially if you give me a gun or a chainsaw. But not the spider. A spider is like an armor plated eight-legged poison-fanged tank. Man, I just thought the dumbest thought, which was, "I hope no spiders read this", because I am that scared of spiders.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Political excitement

I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to my new congressional representative, Mr. John Yarmuth, who today unseated Republican incumbent Ann Northup! I thought he didn't have a chance, but I voted for him anyway. Gore.. Kerry.. Mongiardo.. Yarmuth! Hooray!

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

anyway, i told you guys that this war would be a great idea. it sure is turning out well.

i had a dream on sunday night which i think was pretty complicated, but here is the main part that I remember:

I go to this big garage, which is like an airplane hangar, but i'm there to get my oil changed, something like that. A guy in a uniform runs up to me, looks at me kind of funny, and asks what i need. I tell him whatever i'm there for, like, "can you change my oil?", and he looks confused. Then i notice that I'm riding a bicycle, and he says "I guess i could put air in your tires if you want", and i just sit there, kind of embarassed and uncomfortable. I don't remember what happened after that.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Thobal Glermowuclear Nar

Theo: It's going to happen again.

Nina: What's?

Theo: Going to happen? A dark age, that's what.

Nina: How do you figure?

Theo: It's all trajectory. History works in trajectories. Something goes up, and maybe a part of it gets left in orbit, or floating in the atmosphere, but a lot of it falls back down.

(Argo enters)

Argo: Oh, no.

Nina: Theo was telling me about the coming dark age.

Argo: Right, right. Theo, what's up?

Theo: Who are you?

Nina: It's Argo, Theo. You know Argo.

Theo: Who are you? Where am I?

Argo: Ms Sandy's looking for you, Nina. Something about a birthday cake.

Nina: That's not fair. Argo! Tell her you can't find me! I went home sick!

Argo: If you're not here, then I have to something about a birthday cake.

Theo: Bring me my jacket!

Nina: Okay Theo, I'll tell Bellboy to get your jacket. Thanks a lot, Argo.

Argo: No problem.

(Nina leaves)

Argo: Theo?

Theo: Argo? Who am I?

Argo: See you, Theo. Watch out for those dark ages.

(Argo leaves)

Theo: Maybe shipbuilding brings you up, but then cities fail you. Then, maybe armies bring you up, but governments fail you. Then, maybe science brings you up, but technology fails you.

(Bellboy enters)

Bellboy: Nina told me about your jacket, Theo. You didn't bring a jacket today.

Theo: What brought us up this time, Theo?

Bellboy: You're Theo, I'm the Bellboy.

Theo: This time, communication brought us up, but democracy is going to fail us.

Bellboy: What's that?

Theo: We'll have it all. Bellboy. Ships, cities, armies, governments, science, technology, and communication. It will be a new dark age.

Bellboy: That's pretty grim, Theo.

(Bellboy leaves)

Theo: We'll also have global warming. That's not really related. How did I get here?

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Introducing Yodekl and Waldekl

Yodekl: I can't think of anything to say.

Waldekl: Me neither.

Yodekl: I hate this.

Waldekl: Me too.

Yodekl: How was your flight?

Waldekl: What are you talking about?

Yodekl: I don't know. Nevermind.

Waldekl: How was your flight?

Yodekl: It was awful, I tell you, the plane was packed, and they ran out of peanuts, and a baby threw up on my pants, and I got in a fight with a stewardess, and they put me off the flight in-

Waldekl: What are you talking about?

Yodekl: I don't know.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Fine Structure

Argo: Do you know what I've always had a problem with?

Bellboy: What's that?

Argo: Timezones. The way how, if you go east into another timezone, you have to set your clock to a later time.

Bellboy: What's wrong with that?

Argo: It just confuses me sometimes. The Earth turns east, so things always happen earlier there. Which means it's always later, since everything happened earlier.

Bellboy: That's not so confusing. Instead of saying 'earlier', say 'already'. Then, things happen already in the east, so it's later there. That's better than saying things happen earlier in the east, so it's later there.

Argo: I think I get it.

Bellboy: It's confusing because you're using earlier and later both in a positive way in the same sentence. But 'earlier' is referring to when things happen, while 'later' is referring to what time it is.

Argo: But that implies that 'what time it is' is always later than 'what happened'. Though that does kind of make sense...

Bellboy: Don't worry about it.

[[[HAPPY 200,000 miles, car! You will live forever!]]]

Car: I am legend.

Friday, August 25, 2006

i am hungry right now

My car has only traveled like 60 miles in the last few weeks, so we're still ~300 short of 200,000. Here, briefly, I will note those who have driven my car some significant amount of time.

Me: drove this car a lot
Jingping X.: is learning to drive with it recently
Samantha A.: drove it quite a bit in previous years
Lindsay H.: drove it a bit my first 2 years in knoxville

Me and 3 girls, wow!

hey, whatever, i was just writing an e-mail to somebody, and i used the phrase "one of them's" as a possessive. i thought it was funny because it sounds pretty wrong, but i think it's right. it was like, "two of my friends have a birthday today, and i know one of them's e-mail address". it would be kind of like if i wrote, "i know one of you's mama" (in this case it would obviously be easier to say "i know one of y'all's mama). i thought it was funny because it sounds pretty wrong, but i think it's right.

obviously it shouldn't be "one of their address", though i could have said "one of their addresses", with "one" referring to a member of the address group and not the friend group.

now, if we were speaking victorian pseudo-latin new-french english, maybe i could say, "i know one's of them address", but that sounds pretty weird.

In other news, I have been keeping track of all the loads of spam i get in my UofL account every day. Every hour actually. Every 36 minutes and 20 seconds actually. Here are some charts!

Here is the local period of junkmail message arrival. The vertical axis is in time-between-messages, and the x axis is date; the horizontal divisions are at noon every day.

{please click it so you can see the detail!!!}




So, a high dot means that several hours passed before that particular message arrived; all those dots on the 0 are from the messages that appeared simultaneously with other messages. There are a lot of those: almost 350 as of 5:05 pm on 8-25-06. We will probably break 400 sometime tomorrow morning. Now, I've just been keeping track for 17 days now, but 331 simultaneous spams is a big chunk of the 678 total since 8-8-06 (almost half, at 48.9%). Something may be going on here.. Here's a clue: the simultaneous messages are always identical to eachother.. Hmm..

Okay, next:

I'll just cite some statistics. For one, how many of these e-mails do I get every day? I will tell you. 678 e-mails divided by 16.9 days is almost exactly 40! Weird! I get almost exactly 40 crap e-mails a day!

Next, you wonder, how frequent are they? Are they getting faster? Very frequent! Yes, they are! On average, I get one every 36.33 minutes; however, the median interval is only 9 minutes, thanks to all those simultaneous duplicates screwing up the distribution. And they are getting faster!

I can average together the current intervals with each prior intervals to get an idea of the overall change in interval over time: if this number is 0, that means they're coming in no faster today than 16.9 days ago. If it's positive they're slowing down. But no, it's actually -23.85 seconds! The interval between junk e-mails is now 23.85 seconds shorter than when i started keeping track! (actually this isn't really accurate, since there's so much variance [just look at the plot above] i can't tell what the current average interval is or what the original average interval was.)

What next!

{please click it so you can see the detail!!!}




Here you can see the arrival of my junk e-mail collapsed across date, to see if time of day has an effect! Look! Obviously, the pink line describes the (normalized) number of e-mails that have arrived at that time of day- you can see that they like to arrive at lunchtime the very most, 12-13 o'clock.

The blue spots are just the inverse of the data shown in the first plot (actually the inverse of that data plus 1; otherwise all the simultaneous e-mails would get undefined values here). This means that it is a plot of frequency across time, get it? It obviously tracks with total arrival density (look at the blue line, which is just the average of all the blue dots, and compare it with the pink line).

Oh well, there you go!

Friday, August 11, 2006

my car

in the coming weeks, my car will likely be crossing the 200,000 mile odometer point. so, in the coming weeks, this site will be devoted entirely to information relating to the known history of my car.

my parents bought me a 1991 toyota camry the summer before i went off to knoxville. this was the summer of 1998. at that time the car had 85,000 miles.

so, in the past 8 years, this car has gone 115,000 miles, which is about 14,000 miles a year; the vast majority of this was acquired through back-and-forth trips between knoxville and nashville. since i've come to louisville, the car has gone into semi-retirement: two years ago, we crossed the 186,000 mile point, meaning the car had finally travelled 1 light-second. this means the earlier per-year mileage has gone from a likely high of 20,000 a year during my knoxville days, to about 7000 a year during my louisville days...

200,000 miles is almost 8 complete circuits around the planet Earth! this is a good long distance.

Sunday, August 06, 2006

WENT TO CHICAGO THIS WEEKEND.
-saw dinosaur skeletons. saw lots of birdies.
SAW FAMOUS PAINTINGS
-making many hours go fast. this is hard to beat.
STOOD UNDERNEATH THE SEARS TOWER.
-a very tall building. not as tall as expected. still, tall.
THEN WALKED AROUND
-saw lots of rectangular things, and triangular.
INCLUDING BUILDINGS
-with rectangular windows and big rectangularness in general.
ALSO INCLUDING STAIRS, LEADING UNDERGROUND OR UP
-into train stations. speaking of which
RODE THE TRAIN
-went to china town lots of times to eat.
ATE LOTS OF FOOD
-walked around, saw lots of things, people, buildings, vehicles, birds.
ET CETERA

Monday, July 10, 2006

Recently:

Something is wrong with my hands. My wrists pop and make awful snapping/grinding sounds when they move. I have faint needlelike pains in the backs of my hands and my forearms. My right thumb is always stiff and weirdly uncomfortable.

Saturday, I helped Jingping to prepare a big meal for 20 Chinese students at her apartment. Her roommate and his girlfriend also helped. We cooked for 3 hours. I washed dishes and chopped vegetables, and stirred pots, and other supporting duties. Eventually all these people arrived, and they sort of stared at me. They were all nice though. I could have tried out some of my newfound Chinese speaking skills, but was reluctant, seeing as how my Chinese comprehension skills are around 2.5%. I had planned to escape after the cooking, but wound up staying around. There was lots of food. There are still leftovers now. I ate a duck's tongue. I did not really like it.

I have been working on an overly simplified mathematical model of interactions between cell populations in primary visual cortex, specifically between populations tuned to specific orientations. There are response and suppression biases, which I have been trying to figure out and fit to data obtained by testing the vision of human subjects, who really are hard to find. This is fun and I enjoy it.

I have been learning to play the xiao, which is a type of Chinese flute. I have a natural talent for it and someday will be famous.

Also, I think I am almost finished with Dragon Quest VIII, surprising considering all the other things to do. I think there are something like 76 hours poured into the game already. I keep wondering, why do the heros just stand there and do nothing when, after defeating a boss, the boss slowly crawls to accomplish the thing which the heros meant to prevent him from doing by defeating him? And why do they allow themselves to be thrown into prison by complete nobodies upon defeating a boss, when said nobodies were themselves unable to defeat the boss, thereby implying that they could have easily been defeated by the heros?

I have recently discovered the joy of Chinese pirated movies, which can be seen in your home with Chinese subtitles for free on the same day as they are released in theaters! I cannot make requests, though, because I am satisfied simply to have the movies wash over me so that I can pick and choose at will. I have recently been watching and rewatching the opening sequence of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, whenever I get a spare 10 minutes or so.

Finally, my car is in a coma. I cannot drive anywhere. This doesn't matter to me, because I can walk home and to Jingping's house, and those are the only places I want to be.

And, my birthday is on Thursday! Everyone say happy birthday!

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Pictures

Here are pictures to go along with ze previous post. If you click on ze pictures, zey will get bigger.



I went to my friend Shane's wedding. Here are my other friends Ian and Joseph.



Then I went to Texas with James to see Margaret and Michael. James, he is far away.




Meanwhile Jingping was in China. Here are some Chinese children.



Eventually Jingping came back and we went to Lisa's wedding. Here are Greg and Kim, who look happy.



And here is Travis. Sacre bleu, look at his beard!



Then, I took Jingping to see Kingston Springs. We went to ze Slave Tunnel and climbed up on ze ridge above ze Narrows.

*Fin*

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

why do i get a funny feeling that the blogspot scene is dying?

i certainly have not helped. instead of keeping people up to date on my personal life or entertaining them somehow, i for some reason wrote nothing but silly vignettes about lazy people working at a hotel or a brunch restaurant or something like that. Unfortunately, there will probably be more of those.

i have gone to texas, with james, and that was fun. also, earlier, i went to florida for a conference. i went in a car with two Chinese people. one of them was the other driver, the other is my girlfriend whom i guess you know, but at any rate she can't drive. anyway, the other driver, he drives at like 95 mph the whole time, dodging in and out of tiny gaps between semis slamming on the brakes/gas every 12 or 13 seconds.

i on the other hand drive a reasonable 80 mph all the time and never pass anyone or cut anyone off, at least i think so. so Yong, the guy, and Jingping, both tell me, independently, that "if you go to China, you cannot drive there", because apparently everyone in China is a lunatic. their driving laws are opposite as the laws here. here, we have shoulders, and you aren't supposed to drive on those. in China, you drive on the shoulders if you feel like you aren't going fast enough. here, you're supposed to go with the flow of traffic. in China, you can't get anywhere unless you're constantly getting in front of the guy in front of you. here, if you cause an accident, it's your fault for being reckless. in China, it's the other guy's fault for not watching out. you should have a chinese person explain this to you. and you should talk to them about politics.

for three weeks, Jingping was gone home to china and i had to fend for myself. i went to a wedding and went to texas, and did some schooly things, kind of, part timeish.

okay, then last weekend i took Jingping down to tennessee to see Lisa's wedding and meet my sister and michael and other people. now, i expected Michael Murphy, aka Murf, aka Circuitry News, would be there, and I expected i'd finally get to sit down and talk about a robot with him. alas, he didn't show.

so, then we went to kingston springs, and i took jingping to see the famous Harpeth River, and the slave tunnel, and we walked up on the big tall ridge between the Narrows and looked down on the cow pastures.

now things seem back to normal schedule, as i'm here in the lab at 10:55 not working on this paper i should be working on. i just typed up a results section, now i need to read this discussion over... and i have one good new subject and two not good subjects, one of whom is myself. and the company that is supposed to be repairing my test lens frames for correcting refractive errors keeps saying the part is back ordered, so i ordered a whole new set of frames from them, and they won't get back to me about it, and then i find out it's the end of the fiscal year so i'm not supposed to be ordering anything at all anyway until july the 1st.

so there we go, all caught up, now blogspot can go back to dying.

Thursday, May 18, 2006

"peanut butter sandwich,
how do i love thee-
person makes too much noise,
hard for me to think."