So say we all

Well BSG is now gone, leaving behind a feeling of disappointment and free Friday nights. I got closure in that I was reassured that the writers lost steam in the second half of season 4. I've watched a few season 1 and season 2 episodes recently and they are so much better!

Now I'm taking suggestions for what to do with my Friday nights... :)

Never Have I Ever...

Thought "a lunatic ninja was coming through [my] window".

Also, there are not enough haikus in my life. (Finally a solid xkcd!)

Zardoz reference!

Sean Connery at his finest:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/joaquin-phoenixs-crazy-diary/

I think really awkwardly terrible movies are GREAT!

Battlestar Galactica comes back tonight!!!

Yes, this deserves it's own blog post... weeeeee....

xkcd today

The Difference - after absorbing the first two circles (yes, my laptop screen is that small so that's all I could see without scrolling down), I decided I'd do it again.

Word of the day

Catamorphism - "a catamorphism is a generalization of the folds on lists known from functional programming to arbitrary abstract data types that can be described as initial algebras."

Today in section I covered fold and forever changes the lives of the four students who showed up.

Mathematics Genealogy

Because my friends are also nerds*, when we got distracted while working on our security project today we started looking through the Mathematics Genealogy Project. This project is like a family tree, except the links are based on the "is the PhD advisor of" relation instead of "is ancestor of". It may interest you to know that most of the famous Cornell CS professors trace back to the likes of Poisson, Fourier, Lagrange and Gauss.
We decided to include the path from my security professor to Gauss at the end of our PowerPoint presentation. We are presenting tomorrow, so I'll keep you updated on the response.




*Only with respect to the general population - they're the cool kids in the CS department. ;)

Amusing comic

NERD-SPEAK ADVISORY! If you are allergic, please refrain from reading further.

Working for Google. I guess he doesn't get to be a Noogler.

On another note, I think I am going to embrace the philosophy of intelligent design sort [courtesy of Jon's facebook profile].

6*9

Google's answer to life the universe and everything.

It is meant to be.

More puzzles!

Thanks to grande, this has taken up a good amount of my time last night and today. So now that I've completed all the grow puzzles, I'm going to get some useful work done. I hope it wastes as much of your time as it did of mine :).

Guess what I discovered today...

...a new button on my laptop, well technically it's probably a switch. It was exciting. It turns on and off all wireless radio signals!

Archers and knights and wizards, Oh My!

Check out our graphics for Lambda-Craft (some of them courtesy of War Craft 2). This is just a mock up and not the actual GUI, which is currently under construction. And we'll probably make them bigger, but they're still pretty awesome!

Puzzles!

Today I'm buried in work. This is probably due to the fact that I spent literally all of yesterday, from 11am Saturday morning to 1:00am Sunday night, on the Engineering Quad participating in the Microsoft Puzzle Challenge! (Beware: if you value your time and like puzzles, you probably shouldn't click on the link.) It was a lot of fun, though 3 of the 4 people on my team (myself included) have never done this before so it took us a long time to get the hang of it, but we warmed up towards the end. In any case, it's 11:30pm on a Sunday night, I have 2 problem sets due tomorrow morning so I have to go and finish those...

I haven't forgotten...

...about my blog, but honestly there's little to write about between classes, homework and yes, trying to get a job. But to catch everyone up to date, here are things I've been busy with this semester:

• countless interviews on campus and a few in NYC (another one coming up this Friday)

• thinking and talking about, but not actually implementing (yet), a secure bulletin board service that is highly available (i.e. many servers)

  • a lot of the talking has revolved around the most important feature of the system – its name. Specifically whether or not k will come up with a good acronym so that I'll consent to naming it O.L.G.A. So far he came up with: OnLine Guaranteed Availability. Our other candidate is Mythos.

• solving hard data structures and algorithms questions, including proving a problem is NP hard during an on campus interview.

• doing a little decision theory economics here and there, which made me realize how many CS terms and definitions I take for granted.

• working on the satellite, which so far has involved lots of meetings and lots of arguing about design.

• designing "LAMBDA-CRAFT!" - the final project for the class I'm TAing. Two armies, the Red and the Blue, each with an all powerful wizard that can freeze his opponents, archers that can shoot arrows and knights that ... well ... they just sort of ram into other army units. The point of the game is to capture the enemy wizard, where 'capture' means 'walk into'.

• this has also involved a lot of arguing, all in good spirit of course and mostly with the professor about how many types of army units we should have. Now I want to see how many people agree with me on this: from the point of view of the students, would you prefer one type of army unit (i.e. only archers or only knights) or both?

• I'll post some graphics when we have those.

• and finally, being sick for most of last week. The story goes like this:
• JR's mom: "Do you want to go see your newborn baby niece on Thursday?"
• JR: "No, O is going to be sick."
• A couple days later, surely enough I had a fever and conveniently enough for JR he was quarantined from seeing his niece.
  

Computer Security II

Some advice from my Systems Security professor:

Don't confuse pseudorandom and random, when it comes to keeping your spy safe.

So for our project, my group decided that we should procure some Uranium (or some other radioactive element) to produce truly random numbers. The system we're currently planning to implement is an anonymous chat, GABS. GABS is a clever permutation of the first letters of our last names.

The plan is that GABS will be resistant to traffic analysis. In other words, if two people are talking over the network, no one will be able to tell that they are talking to each other. This is useful for two spies talking over a network. Moreover, a user can talk back and forth to another user without the latter knowing the identity of the former. This is of course highly useful to police informants who wish to remain anonymous to the policemen they're supplying with information (think Law and Order or CSI).

Things that should go onto my resume

Hair cutter. I gave JR a hair cut earlier this week and granted I am no Pete, but it looks pretty good.

And the ability to effectively work on a laptop that overheats and freezes regularly (for four years and counting). The battery to my laptop quietly died about a week ago. One day I was using it just fine and the next time I pressed the power button no lights came on and I was very confused. My response was of course to try the power button about five more times for good measure to make sure that I didn't forget how to press buttons.

Come to think of it, sometimes it seems like computers are against me. Computers and right-handed people! All my lecture halls this semester have no left-handed desks.

Also, Cornell classes are in session tomorrow. Actually, I have to be on campus from 10am - 7pm. Classes, office hours and meetings aren't so bad really, but it's this microteaching from 5-7pm that I'm dreading. First of all, it's my fourth semester teaching. Second, there will be 5 TAs in training there, each of us has to teach a 7 minute mini-lesson, which is VIDEOTAPED. Not only do I have to give and receive constructive criticism for 2 hours, but I also have to watch myself on tape. So enjoy your Labor Day!

Computer Security

I'm getting back into the swing of things at Cornell. Being a grad student is only slightly different from undergrad. It's a little more relaxed in terms of degree requirements and I'm taking all computer science related courses. I feel like my brain is finally turning on, probably working at about 65% of its capacity, but at least I can now pay attention through a full lecture and not feel like I'm daydreaming.

My professors are all great this semester and of course, there is no avoiding nerdy jokes. For example, my computer security professor was telling us that we have to do a group project, but that the topic was up to us. So some smartass asked:

Does that mean we can write a virus?

And everyone laughed... Silly computer science majors.

Other than that, I’m starting to actually look for a job. So anyone want to finish my resume? Really, it’s almost done. I just need an objective…

Left Hand - Right Hand

People constantly forget this, but I am left handed. Well, actually I'm sort of mixed handed (or a weirdo if you prefer). I write, paint and do other things that involve delicate movements with my left hand. I play sports, eat and perform other feats of strength with my right hand. And I always enjoy reading about the differences between left-handed and right-handed people.

On Wednesday there was a post on Greg Mankiw's Blog called Lefties' Leg Up. One of the comments to this post lead me to a site called Right Hand Left Hand that has a couple of test on it.

The first test is called Line Bisection Test. Here are my results:

People with damage to their right parietal lobe often show neglect of the left half of the visual world, so that the rectangle will be bisected far to the right of the centre. Normal people without parietal lobe damage oftern show the opposite effect, so-called 'pseudo-neglect'. The rectangle typically being bisected slightly to the left of the centre.

Neglect
Pseudo-neglect
On average you placed your centre 50.52% of the way along the rectangle, 1.03% to the Right of the exact centre.

The second test is called Attentional Test. This is a timed test where you see a picture of a bunch of stars and have to find the small one as fast as you can.
I took the test 5 times and calculated my average over the trials.

People with damage to their right parietal lobe often find it difficult to pay attention to the left half of their visual world, a condition called 'visual neglect'.

People without brain damage often show the opposite effect, a slight tendency to pay more attention to the left half of the visual world, so-called 'pseudo-neglect'. As a result they are a little faster at detecting objects on the left than on the right.

Your average reaction time was 1.83 seconds for stars on the left and 1.61 seconds for stars on the right.

I guess that means I have slight damage to my right parietal lobe. Luckily, I don't know what the parietal lobe does, so I don't miss it. But I think I know a certain someone who dropped me on my head...

Pop Quiz

Another example of how I entertain myself at work:

You Passed 8th Grade Science

Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Science?

I failed 8th Grade US History and since we didn't have US History in 8th grade, I feel this is justified. Thanks to the M6 listening test, I just learned the capital of Australia last Wednesday and thus passed 8th grade geography with 7/10.

Fork this

Three AMAZING fark links from this Monday...

3. Magnetic Floating Bed. Papa, any ideas on how sleeping in a strong electro-magnetic field would impact ones health?

2. The Ithaca Journal was on fark yesterday in the DUMBASS category with a caption:

Fly your flag upside down this Independence Day

Is Ithaca the City of Evil? Nah.

1. And the winner is Miraculous garlic vodka that treats diabetes and cancer. Eto pravda?!

Sore throat, a cold or the flu my mom says "Eat a clove of garlic." And for sunburn rub vodka on your skin. It's no wonder that combined these two natural remedies can treat the uncurable.

Honorable mention: Mario Desktop. Apparently, it's not finished and I haven't checked it out. But still, the idea is spiffy!