Bachelor Chow
Like many other things in life, a comedy show had things absolutely spot on. In this case Futurama has in it a fictitious product called Bachelor Chow, which functions as a pet food, but for humans; specifically middle-aged men that…
Holographic Sunglasses
My moleskine has been holding on to a rather provocative idea for quite some time. On 7th Aug. of 2006 I wrote about a television system with no moving parts. The idea is that you use an LED laser together…
Heterogenous Lists
I’m used to C’s version of unions and structs. In C a union is simply a spot of memory into which various types of things can be stored. C doesn’t do all that much checking on the data types though….
Secure Computing
Cloud computing, remote virtual machines, web mash-ups, and anything that executes on someone else’s machine with data you (or your customers) provide is really insecure. Sure you can encrypt the traffic, but in the end that remote machine is forced…
Flight to San Jose
So today, I flew to San Jose and back. I went to the Mozilla office (which is right next to the infamous Googleplex) and met Brendan Eich. This, for me, was an altogether surreal experience. I’ve never traveled that far…
Hallucinated Abstract
I actually thought this up around sometime in Feb 2007; I had been reading Sipser’s Intro to Computer Science text, and hallucinated the following abstract while drifting off to sleep: This paper presents an isomorphism between the set of problems…
First week at UCI
My first week has been rather nice and relaxing. I’ve got much of my paperwork covered with respect to RAship, ID card, finding shops and stuff around the area. My roomates are cool and mellow (and have similar philosophical/religious views)….
Audience Question at Conferences
I’ve been watching the videos of last year’s Singularity Summit and noticed that, along with all other conferences I’ve watched, questions from the audience are completely inaudible to the sound recorder. There is a very simple solution that I haven’t…
More Accurate Speedometer
I’ve been sitting on this idea for at least a year, and I’m not really sure why I haven’t blogged about it yet. It turns out that car speedometers are not very accurate. In fact, they can be on the…
Markov Coincidence
I was chatting with one of my friends recently. He was telling me about a Markov chain program (I think 5th order) that he had just finished. This gave me an interesting idea. Suppose that you were to measure the…