actuality.log

As you might expect, an elaborately worded, picture filled, profound exposé evoking much emotion and starring great acumen is in the works.

This is not that post. Make room for another run-of-the-mill statement-of-fact post you’ve gotten to know and love.

I got back yesterday from Cambridge, MA. It was awesome, as usual. The talk went off well, and thankfully, my turn to speak was scheduled on the first day, so I got to spend the rest of the week there with no real pressure.

Which means I had plenty of time to arbitrarily walk around and do stuff. And stuff I did. Nothing remarkable to report however.

Oddly enough, on the last evening there, I got to spend some time with a classmate of mine from highschool. I hadn’t seen him since then, and our lives had gotten on slightly different paths in that time. It was nice catching up, and getting to know a little bit about what’s going on with other people.

Much was said and agreed/disagreed upon.

However, one thing was exceptionally unequivocal and unanimous. The hottest (yes, superlative) women we’ve had the pleasure of being around were in school. Easily. One would naively assume, the more you travel around and the more you experience, the better things get in this regard.

Unfortunately, no, it’s all been seriously downhill from there. And gradient has been so sharp, it’s like some sort of carefully planned cruel joke.

Oh, that, and S failing Stanford quals was truly an event worth celebrating. It’s OK to be happy when bad things happen to annoying people.

The more hectic things get, the bigger my need to goof around gets. I’ve been working on characters for the comic again, and here’s part of a potential, to be based on Scooby’s Daphne Blake.

This drawing was created in Inkscape, with a touchpad.

There has been much confusion over the past few days. (Apart from being randomly assaulted by Mac zealots over my I told you sos, I mean). Since you’re all paying attention, you know my family is looming hereabouts, and occasionally request my presence — and the past few days were of that nature.

Let me prefix everything that follows by saying, I love them all, and being around them isn’t inherently a problem.

But,

I’ve had a ton of technical and intellectual issues keep cropping up recently, which has constantly been preventing me from getting any real work done (Like blowing my computer’s adapter and not being able to work on things from outside the lab). And having to be around everyone, uncharacteristically wound up about not-doing-anything, was a bit of a strain. And, I might have said some things that implied they were responsible — ensuring everyone felt plenty guilty.

I kick cute puppies for fun.

Needless to say, I ship off to M.I.T tomorrow, no real recent work done. God damn it.

You probably want to read part 1 of this monologue.

» What is the appropriate course of action when you accidently walk in on a “patron of the pornographic arts” really into what they’re watching?

This is probably a trick question. I mean, is there even a possibility that an appropriate course of action exists? Will something like, “Oh, I’m sorry, didn’t realize you were busy. I’ll umm… get back later… probably never.” cover it?

I don’t think so.

» What really is a woman’s take on the whole “getting stared at by a man” thing? I don’t even mean in a creepy-stalkery way. I just mean an involuntary reflex that’s more along the lines of adoration and admiration of a thing of beauty. All men do it, can’t help it, and don’t even really mean anything by it.

So just what is the woman’s take? Is it creepy and scary? Or could it possibly be conceived as some raw, unpolished, compliment.

» Do the mythical people you’d actually feel comfortable laughing about your insecurities with exist?

I mean, just this other day I said something stupid (I thought I was being super smooth, of course) and the woman goes “Oh, you must be a very sexual person”. And I, having an incessant need to complete her sentence, in my driest sarcastic voice go, “Yeah, either that or I’m twenty odd year old, exceptionally inexperienced, and extremely sexually frustrated.”

Needless to say, there were many awkward silences post that. Wouldn’t it be nice if you found someone who you could laugh with about these sorts of things?

» Honestly, how high does “being a good provider” fall on the checklist of things women probably look for in a mate?

Come on, you can go right ahead and say it — “Provider? Hah! It’s OK if you bum off me and live in a trailer if you look half as good as Brad Pitt”.

That’s it, isn’t it?

My family is around, and my tiny home surprisingly fit everyone for a few days. But this post doesn’t exist to talk about that.

While almost everyone, and definitely all the mac zealots, are foaming at the mouth, fainting, feeling betrayed and declaring war on their beloved Steve Jobs, I am loving the new direction the “world’s most innovative computer company” is going. I applaud you Apple. You’ve finally won me over. I am eager to “make the switch”. I resisted the Imac, Itunes and even the very sexy Ipod, but the concept of a sleek Powerbook running a polished Unix powered by Intel goodness — cue profuse salivation — just blows my mind.

The naysayers will try to remind you of how going Intel is a surefire way to commit corporate suicide. You know what? They’re probably right. I don’t care if Apple goes down the drain as a result of this change, all I know is that over the next year or so, they’re bound to come up with a super sexy titanium Powerbook powered by an x86 processor, and I will own one. After which the company can go down the drain for all I care.

Two key quotes:

“Intel plans to provide industry leading development tools support for Apple later this year, including the Intel C/C++ Compiler for Apple, Intel Fortran Compiler for Apple, Intel Math Kernel Libraries for Apple and Intel Integrated Performance Primitives for Apple.”

and

“Jobs introduces Wolfram’s CEO, who said they ported Mathematica 5 to Intel-based Macs in 2 hours. Working version in 2 hours flat. Only about 20 lines of code changed.”

And honestly, that’s all I care about.

Background: I’ve been on the lookout for a laptop to replace my aging 7 lb monster, and my choices had boiled down to between an Apple Powerbook and an IBM Thinkpad. The Powerbook, though sexy and slim, was still non-x86. And I was not too keen on an using an architecture with evil endianness. (I’ve had a computer since I was two (1982), and in all that time, only one of those computers has been a non Intel x86 machine (a random Casio non-IBM compatible PC). Old habits die hard.)

Anyone who’s anyone (meaning anyone who cares to know) knows by now that Apple is switching from IBM to Intel as their chip vendor for future products. I for one don’t feel too sorry for IBM, as they’ve nabbed the deals to supply processors for all of major next generation consoles. The XBox360’s core, the PS3’s cell and the Revolution’s gekko. The volumes they will see there will clearly dwarf the business Apple was (and would have been) giving them, and no one at IBM need be too worried.

Not like you care, but as usual, I’ve uploaded my talk slides, as well as the source files used to create it. If it matters, they have embedded videos in them.

The existence of these talks are brought to you by:
GNU Emacs (in LaTeX auto-fill mode), to actually edit them.
The LaTeX document preparation system, to make the pretty document with the help of The LaTeX Beamer Class, the styling and functionality engine.
Inkscape, for all the vector graphics goodness.
The GIMP, for all the raster graphics goodness.
ImageMagick, for just about everything, including movie making.
MPlayer’s mencoder, to DivXify the movies.
GNUPlot, for data visualization.

I got back yesterday from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The talk went off well, and I got to run into some interesting people. (And obviously, many more uninteresting ones.) Now if you thought Ann Arbor was some hick town, you clearly haven’t been to Baton Rouge. (Or anywhere in Nebraska). People are, the usual — fat, clueless and there’s a surprising lack of colour. And yes, they talk funny.

(Drum roll) “Are you’ll’s ready for you’ll’s check” (Shudder.)

Anyway, I’d be lying if I claimed the place was any fun. But being a “business trip”, that’s forgivable. The saving grace was the hotel room. It was awesome. It had two TVs and even a GameCube!

I took a ton of pictures, but I think my camera has an annoying little piece of dust lodged in its sensor or something. So all the pictures have this annoying little dot in the top left. I need to open it up and clean it. And that’s seriously annoying. (I just like using the word ‘annoying’). It’s even apparent in one of the pictures below.

Totally off topic, I was talking to someone who was remarking how it would be hard to forget her, considering she was a blonde amongst so many geeks, and blondes are a rarity in these sorts of things. I, being a geek, googled her a short while later and found some pictures of her from earlier on. She definitely wasn’t blonde then. I wonder what need non-blondes feel to dye their hair blonde and combat the myth that blondes are, well, less intellectual. There’s just no need, I know some people who’re insanely intelligent, and blonde too.

And oh, the only thing crazier than a teetotaller at a bar,

is a vegetarian at a very chic Sushi place.

I wonder who the marketing genius was that came up with that name for the restaurant.

Here is a roundup of recent occurrences that I’ve been meaning to write about, but obviously haven’t gotten around to doing.

» My mom and bro are here! They’ve been here for a while now, and doing the rounds visiting relatives and sight seeing (for like the 34^th time), from Manhattan to the little town in the middle of nowhere, Ann Arbor. The sad part is, though they’ve been here for almost 2 weeks now, I’ve only spent like 3 days with them.

» The sadder part is, my brother stole my GameCube and all my games when he was around (to play elsewhere when here? he is going to return it before he leaves, right?). Now I miss it. I miss coming home, and not having anything to enhance the progression of my carpal tunnel syndrome.

» It’s not helping that I leave for my first talk this afternoon. I’m heading off to some southern state best known for, uhm, its swamps, I think. Yes people, whoopidedoo. All that’s left to do is actually prepare for said talk, make sure tickets and such are in order, find a ride to the airport, pack stuff, and find a bag to pack said stuff in. Not bad, given I actually have few hours to go before the plane takes off.

» Stuff for future trips, including visas and such are also falling in place. Which means I’m all set to gallivant all across this country (including my beloved Cambridge Mass) and few others in Europe. Am I excited? Not really anymore, I’m just tired at the prospect.

» And oh, my mom bought me stuff. I bought her nothing, even though she was here on her birthday. I forgot, after being reminded twice. You be the judge as to my degree of evilness.

I think I am choosing an opportune moment to post this, as I’ve gathered that the number of mathematicians reading this journal is at an all time low.

You have to fear the angry mathematician.

Q: What do you get if you cross an elephant and a banana?
A: |elephant|*|banana|*sin(theta).

Q: What do you get if you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber?
A: You can’t cross a vector with a scalar.

Engineers think that equations approximate the real world. Physicists think that the real world approximates equations. Mathematicians are unable to make the connection.

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are staying in a hotel. The engineer wakes up and smells smoke. He goes out into the hallway and sees a fire, so he fills a trash can from his room with water and douses the fire. He goes back to bed. Later, the physicist wakes up and smells the smoke. He opens his door and sees a fire in the hallway. He walks down the hall to a fire hose and after calculating the flame velocity, distance, water pressure, trajectory, and so forth, extinguishes the fire with the minimum amount of water and energy needed. Later the mathematician wakes up and smells smoke. He goes to the hall, sees the fire and then the fire hose. He thinks for a moment and then exclaims, “Ah, a solution exists!” and then goes back to bed.

One day the Wiener family was scheduled to move into a new house. Mrs. Wiener, mindful of her husband’s propensity for forgetting, wrote the new address on a slip of paper and handed it to him. He scoffed, saying, “I wouldn’t forget such an important thing,” but he took the slip of paper and put it in his pocket. Later that same day at the university a colleague came by his office with an interesting problem. Wiener searched for a piece of paper and took the slip from his pocket to use to write some mathematical equations. When he finished, he crumpled up the slip of paper and threw it away. That evening, he remembered there was something about a new house but he couldn’t find the slip of paper with the address on it. Without any alternative course of action, he returned to his old home, where he spotted a little girl on the sidewalk. “Say, little girl,” he said, “Do you know where the Wieners live?” The girl replied, “That’s o.k., Daddy, Mommy sent me to get you.”

Two mathematicians are in a bar. The first one says to the second that the average person knows very little about basic mathematics. The second one disagrees and claims that most people can cope with a reasonable amount of math. The first mathematician goes off to the washroom, and in his absence the second calls over the waitress. He tells her that in a few minutes, after his friend has returned, he will call her over and ask her a question. All she has to do is answer “one third x cubed.” She repeats “one thir–dex cue?” He repeats “one third x cubed.” She asks, “one thir dex cuebd?” “Yes, that’s right,” he says. So she agrees, and goes off mumbling to herself, “one thir dex cuebd…”. The first guy returns and the second proposes a bet to prove his point, that most people do know something about basic math. He says he will ask the blonde waitress an integral, and the first laughingly agrees. The second man calls over the waitress and asks “what is the integral of x squared?” The waitress says “one third x cubed” and while walking away, turns back and says over her shoulder, “plus a constant!”

This above was an ad for a paper [Free registration required]. Yes, a real life paper published in the notices to the American Mathematical Society.

I was doing some random thinking and looking around, and because I’m such a stickler for no-frills-utility and clean-quiet-efficiency, I decided to, well, throw those concepts out the window and save up.

You know, for when I might want to buy something.

On occasion, just for a fleeting instant, your mind begins to conjure up evanescent ideations — and you’re just not sure. It’s a blur. You’re confused, trepid and, dare I say it, even vaguely excited. You’re understandably hesitant to interpret, and labour to go about your day quelling the doubt.

And then, the resident coquette walks in. You know, the one who’s just-unattainable, but is surprisingly ever present. Involuntarily, you’re beginning to leer, and soon, recurrently softly sighing. In yearning.

There is no confusion anymore. It’s crystal clear.

And you’re almost relieved.