I’ve been ruminating on the subject of personal liberation/gratification/independence that comes as a result of the do-it-yourself attitude. With sites such as Instructables, magazines like MAKE, radical changes in class structure occurring at major universities and development in the third…
When I was in college, I once had this crazy notion of a half-derivative. We’d been taking nth-derivatives in physics, and I wondered “why stick to integers?”. Well, as it turned out, others had been there before me. At the…
Today I read about one of the most ironic events of which I’ve ever heard. You can’t make this kind of thing up. The atheistic PZ Meyers (a biologist and associate professor University of Minnesota, Morris), was kicked out of…
I’m becoming increasingly interested in systems engineering, but still don’t really know much about the subject. One thing that I read about recently (though I completely forgot where) was about how to choose a robust cooperation protocol, using the communal…
This past weekend I spent an inordinate amount of time writing a small set of code that will allow the fetching of bits (rather than bytes) from a FILE *. For now this only supports reading, not writing. It’s meant…
This past week I finished my reading of Mandelbrot’s most recent book The (Mis)Behavior of Markets. I actually didn’t like it that much. I found the book to be especially light on details; for a mathematical empiricist Mandelbrot didn’t actually…
I keep finding interesting stuff on this old HD; Here’s a documented e-mail conversation between myself and a high-school friend Jeff Peoples on materialism and the mind. It was dated 2004-04-07 and appears to have been written in response to…
Once a long time ago (2003) I took an English course to satisfy UCLA’s bureaucratic notions that I should have a ‘well-rounded’ education. As part of this course we read short stories, and were required to write a mini-essay each…
I was going through a saved home directory from a HD that died a couple years back, and found this piece, which deserves to be saved. The file it came from is dated Mar 8 2004. (if it looks like…
I usually really enjoy having to design a computer application. Lately I’ve been trying to design a multithreaded server that’ll process image frames from a video. Right, that’s MPI, Network and video decoding all rolled into one. Decoding video into…