Reading (For Dummies)

Syracuse is In the News

Some dudes in Syracuse were trying to help the Enemy. Or something.

Exams

So after talking with Phiniki a little tonight and thinking on my own, I've come to a few conclusions about European versus American testing systems.

In America, our exams are almost always written. This provides a few distinct advantages. One is that you can spend some time thinking of the proper way to formalize a definition without looking like an ass. The other is that you can prove what you know. This is because the written exams have no immediate feedback with the professor. So the prof has to ask a general sampling of the questions from the course. The questions are put there in black and white, you just have to answer.

In Europe, the exams are mostly oral. For me, at least, this is bad. You can't spend extra time on the simple questions; the professor begins tapping his watch. You have to be prepared for every possible question, and be able to answer it without hesitation. I would go so far as to say that European exams are the reverse of American; they give the professor an opportunity to demonstrate what you don't know. Like today's exams. Both went pretty much the same way. The professor asks two or three general questions until you stutter, then he starts asking more specific questions about the area that you don't know so well. If you begin to answer questions in this area, the professor will offer "advice" (in the form of primarily false statements) to try to solidify your position or else throw you completely off-balance. The rest of the exam will probably lie in the area that you don't know about. Bummer.

On the plus side, the European grading system is a little less formal. Today I got a 3,0 (on a scale where 1,0 is the best, 5,0 is the worst) in FMC, and a 5,0 in SDS. The beautiful thing is that I don't have to care about either grade. We get certificates for each course that we pass (passing being a grade greater than 5,0), which has our grade and the credits listed. We can pick and choose which grades we use to actually fulfill our academic requirements, by stapling the exam result sheet into a little academic book. So I could fail lots of courses and get 1,0 on lots of courses and end up with a 1,0 average. Strange.

The other fun thing is that, for the advanced courses (which are the bulk of our academic requirement), we can take the exams as many times as we want. During each exam the teaching assistant keeps notes on the questions that you answer right and wrong, and these records are kept by the professor. So if you want to retake the exam, the professor will look at what you messed up last time, and try to find new areas to make you mess up in =).

Ow

Damn Native Americans.

It didn't work. I passed one exam (barely) and failed the other. So I guess I don't set any records. I hadn't realized how much stuff you have to *memorize* to pass one of these exams. Would have been easier if they were written.

Indians (of the Native American variety)

The night before going to battle, native americans would drink lots of water. This forced them to wake up early in the morning to pee, or so people say. It also permitted them to rally and launch an attack against their enemy before the sun came up.

Tonight I drink a lot of water, so that I may wake up early in the morning and prepare to match wits with a few smart professors. Yiyiyiyiyiyiyiyiyi!

Human Interest

Ever notice that, whenever there's a whole lot of really horrible world news going on, the US media feels the need to focus on some rather mundane tragedy, usually involving hospital mix-ups or other strange accidents?

This week the news seems to be carrying lots of news about the little girl with the wrong organs. I won't link to the story, I'm sure you know all about it. All I can say is whoop-tee-doo. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a bad thing that a little girl is dead somewhere, but millions of dollars are being spent to discuss the thing. Guess what? Accidents happen. On the morning that the doc put organs with the wrong blood type in the little girl, a few hundred other people made mistakes that killed a lot more people than that (drunk drivers, robbers, what have you, falling of cliffs, being gored by bison). Why all the focus on the doctor?

On a related rant, why villify hospitals so much? They're there to try and help. Every once in a while they reveal that their workers are human, some synapses fire in the wrong order, and then their professional lives are over. Bummer. I think I'll choose a line of work that keeps me out of harm's way like that.

Well, back to proving that the class of Recognizable tree languagues is equal to the class of statements in Monadic Second Order Logic...

At the Opera

The famous Semper Opera House

Went to the Ballet on the 19th, after my ICL exam. Forgot to mention that....The department paid for us to go see a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Not my favorite Shakespeare work (that prize goes to The Tempest...). See, math nerds can be literate, too.

I had never been to a ballet before, and I was quite impressed. Not the sort of thing I'd do every night, but I can certainly understand the appeal of going every once in a while. Of course, the lead dancing chick was typical anorexic, probably weighted 65 pounds at 5'4" tall. Yeah, bones poking out everywhere, not fun.

Heh, when I think of it though, it was rather ingenious of the department to take us to a ballet. Since, y'know, it's interpreted dance, you don't exactly have to be good at German to understand things. Unless you're trying to take pictures...

I tried to take some pictures of the interior of the opera, but I was repeatedly rejected bringing my camera out. One of the folks was, in fact, threatening to throw me out of the opera house. Apparently you have to pay for a tour to take pictures inside. Lame.

Anyway here is a pic of the ceiling and interior. It is contraband. You are all accomplices now...

The ceiling

More on Canada

Looks like it's official. That warning that Canada issued for eastern-origin Canadian citizens travelling to or through the United States has finally shown its own validity...

Reading the instructions helps

I finally figured out how to make MT play nice with SSL. Yay. (Thanks a lot for never answering me despite asking you a kjillion times, Doug :). Though I guess I should have thought to rtfm).

Dicks

Today, I was the dickhead. I know I joke about it sometimes, but let me explain.

You know when you take an exam, there's always that one dickhead in class that you hate. Because, when you're all done, he comes up to you and says, "What'd you think?" You say, "pretty tough, how about you." The dickhead, to impress upon you his intelligence, says something like, "Oh, I thought the second problem was tough until I realized you just had to do X." At this point, you realize that you did half the exam wrong.

So, today, I was the dickhead. I talked to a friend after the exam and did just that, and watched his eyes go wide. He moaned and said he'd have to repeat the course.

Well, personality aside, I rawked the exam today. So now I'm off to study for the next two.

Turing

Suddenly I realize that Turing got it all wrong.

The definition for a conversational/chatter type robot shouldn't be to fool one of us into thinking it's human, it should be to fool the average idiot who doesn't even know that they're testing a computer. Think about it, who tests modern chatter bots? Computer nerds. What they should be doing is taking clueless people from the street, and saying "interview these two people and tell me if you see anything odd." Because when people know they're testing one computer and one human, they formulate sentences and questions that they know fool a computer.

But if you don't know from the get-go that you're studying one computer and one person, you won't be as prone to asking those questions. Like when we talk to a normal person face-to-face we assume they're human, we don't test the hypothesis. So we should be assuming that both parties in the Turing test are human. That's a better/more realistic test. Isn't there some kind of psychology term for this? Help me out here, Stevis.

Back to studying....

An Answer to my Applescript Conundrum

A while ago I wanted to set up a stupid xterm-like app to stick in the dock of Jaguar. I didn't know why the applescript always hung. An old-skool New Jersey high school comrade showed me The Way (weird, I didn't think any old-skool New Jersey kids knew anything about unix).

Apparently an Applescript script won't terminate if something is hinging on it for stdout and/or stderror. So when you run any apps that you just want to background, you have redirect stdout and stderror somewhere else (/dev/null being one obvious place, though if you're feeling adventurous and have sufficient priveleges, you could overwrite your hard disk with the data...which makes me think that I should write a device driver called /dev/free which will write to free blocks on a disk in sequential order, if you want to overwrite your pr0n and s3cr3t d0x without letting the feds find it. Anyway I'm ranting again).

The almighty method?

do shell script "/usr/X11R6/bin/xterm -display :0.0 >/dev/null 2>&1 &"

(for those un-unix types that don't know how to redirect stderror).

Yeah, I think I'm going to go download one of those snazzy movable type font packages now.

Protesting in Berlin

Allies

I went to the war protest in Berlin today. I guess it's safe to say that I've caved on the Iraq issue. While I agree that Saddam should go, I don't think dropping bombs, killing Iraqis, and sending GIs in to die is the way to bring it about. All that will succeed in doing is pissing off more of the ME countries, while leaving Iraq a more bomb-ruined country, probably complete with minefields. Sometimes comics say it best.

And besides, I think should we should focus such military strength on targets that actually have the potential to strike first. If America's real reason for removing Saddam is because of humans rights violations, it should say so clearly, and work with the UN for a more peaceful removal of him. If he really has weapons, well, let's see some proof already. The US has had plenty of time to show some evidence behind closed doors and allow the UN to slowly come around without tipping anyone off vis-a-vis spies in Iraq.

Ouch...

I have to say I took a minor offense to some signs. I think this thing isn't the US' fault. I guess America's democratic revolution has been hijacked. Too bad the conservatives are interested in bombing Iraq, but "don't want to talk about foreign policy." (warning: Clip from Bill O'Reilly of the O'Reilly factor which may raise your blood pressure enough to cause problems).

Holy Mother...

And more...

And more...

As we were leaving, we heard the official police estimate at 500,000 people. 100,000 were expected. Unbelievable. Even more people showed up in Rome (estimates at 2 MILLION!!!).

Protecting the US embassy

And, of course, we weren't allowed anywhere near the US embassy, not even to take pictures. This fear of terrorism is getting ridiculous...and it's making me more curious how my brother is making out in NYC. Rumor has it that there are sharpshooters there...

More

I met up with Masako-sama this afternoon for tea and a light lunch. I spoke some really bad Japanese. She's surprised at how much I can say, but I have a huge amount of trouble understanding her (her English is okay, her Japanese I have trouble with). It might be a dialect thing, but I don't think so; I think I'm just out of practice. I agreed to go down to the Altstadt with her later on to see the memorial service. And off we went.

I'll have no trouble remembering the guy I met while walking now. I ran into him this afternoon at the Frauenkirche. He says to me, "Aso, Amerikan ist back. My name Wagner. Dises ist mein broder und familie," while waving towards a book on a table. I helped him light some candles on a small shrine in front of the church to get a closer look.

Well fuck...

He was pretty misty-eyed and, well, so was I. War is a bitch, and now we want to enter another one.

I remember him a few months earlier, riding his beat up bike in the cold, making muscles and laughing at how strong he was. He talked about digging through Dresden and rebuilding one of the churches, though much of what he says doesn't make sense (lack of language). I'm glad he can look at me and have gone through what he did, and still laugh sometimes.

I'm heading back for some more pictures of the church interiors, I hope tomorrow (so long as this twinge of a cold doesn't turn into a real one). There are some pretty hardcore memorials about Hitler, the war, and the destruction of Dresden.

This Day in History

Today in 1924, King Tut's tomb was opened. In 1955 the French tested an atomic bomb in the Sahara. In between, in 1945, Dresden was turned into a pile of rubble. What a valentine's day...

North Korea vs. Iraq

So the UN just found out that North Korea has 1) nuclear weapons and 2) the means to deliver.

But let's not forget that Saddam has some mustard gas and a really spiffy camel delivery system which can fire them from Baghdad and reach dangerously close to Al Fallujah without stopping for water.

But I guess the US will continue giving Kim Jong Il humanitarian money while he threatens us with his nukes.

Crypto

About a year ago today, I met Doug and since then I've become slightly more paranoid delusional. And Doug got me hooked on crypto. Last night he emailed me about the PET Workshop taking place in Dresden. So now I'm organizing a key signing so I can lower my mean shortest distance. And I even found out that there some profs here with quite a few signatures. The one across the hall from me has 20 some odd sigs on his key. Amazing.

I can't thank Doug enough for helping make me a better nerd.

The Law of Diminishing Returns

Last night I proposed two theses to my old man. The Law of Diminishing Returns as it applies to science and politics.

In the realms of science, we get a lot of the early, useful information cheap. As time goes on, it takes more and more money to discover facts, and those facts are less and less useful.

Take two scenarios: In the first, we have the discovery of the basic laws of nature. Isaac Newton didn't have to spend very much money to figure out the gravitational constant; it just took dropping some weights and timing some things out. What he learned has become fantastically important when calculating the interactions of any two masses.
More recently, Syracuse University and a few companies invested around $5 million to send an experiment up on Columbia. The experiment was to determine if ants build their colonies the same when in zero-gravity for prolonged periods of time. The shuttle blew up, so the total cost of the experiment was a few lives, probably somewhere in the range of $5 billion. What did we learn from the experiment? Not much...what would we have learned if it was successful? Also not much. Not a very good experiment. I guess scientific discovery will become less and less useful as a function of time.

In my second rant I said that politics work the same way. In the beginning (ie when the US was set up), there were a lot of important decisions to be made and important laws to make regarding civil liberties, etc. These laws didn't take much time to create, because there was nothing for them to conflict with. Lawyers didn't have to say, "Does freedom of speech violate the constitution?" because the constitution was pretty small then. After a while, the important laws were established, bolstering the size of the legal document. Lawyers and politicians created a self-supporting enterprise through legal interpretation and re-interpretation. Now they cost a lot of money because they have to dig through such a huge knowledge base to create and defend so many useless rules...

So what else does this fabulous economic model apply to?

A company

Lately I've been thinking of a lot of ideas, taking on the role of inventor. Reading about computer security problems, I come up with weird ideas to solve them. Of course, a lot of things are just applications of existing technology so they'd make cheesy patents (although I guess technically legal ones). But I figure if I don't register them, someone evil might, right?

I think I'm going to start a company. It will be a technology patent holding company, the purpose of which will be to actually spark innovation. Here is how I plan to do it. Does it sound like a good idea?

The company grabs these "stupid," patents and uses them as a weapon against the Enemy (namely, greedy corporations that bully small companies/people with their stupid patents and the DMCA and whatnot).

Licenses will be granted in two ways.

If a company is a charity or non-profit, they can obtain a "free" license for the duration of the patent (they'll have to pay some tiny amount for the paperwork and processing).

If a company is for-profit, they can do one of two things:
1) They can pay the holding company an (exorbitant) amount for a standard license
2) They can obtain a "free" license if the product our patent is used in contains at least one patent that the licensee company owns. They then have to make an identical license policy for all their owned patents used in the product (that is, they must make all patents available to non-profits for "free," or to for-profit companies under an identical structure). If the licensee company chooses this option, they will still have to pay some small paperwork fee.

It's like a BSD style patent license. Ideas want to be free, right? Well now if you give away your ideas to others, you can use someone's free idea yourself.

Yay. Anway IANAL so I don't know how to enforce the licensing for patents, or how to "protect the company from itself" as it were. Ideas?

Studying

You rock

The last couple of days have been study study study for my FLCP exam. Above I'm taking a sanity break, learning a little Jump, Little Children muzack.

Obviously, I should shave and get a haircut.

I've been missing going climbing the last few weeks, but I've been bike riding back and forth to Huseyin's for the last couple of days. He's been a big help in my understanding of all this stuff. So has Maja. Weird, I've never had trouble understanding things in Computer Science before...this is the first time. Well, I guess that's what you get in graduate school.

Travelling (III)

I love these posable art figures

Went to Phiniki and Skyler's apartment last night. We bought some wine and beer and stuff. Then we drank too much.

Drink some more!

Poor kid...

In the middle we gabbed a lot, Skyler played guitar (he can play and sing pretty well, it reminded me of being in a coffeeshop back home. Except that we were drunk). Drunken bicycle riding back home at 3am was the most fun; waking up this morning with a pounding headache wanting to hurl was the least fun ;-).

Today also marked the last day of class lecture for the semester. Yipee.

One of those days

Ever have a day that you're feeling just great? Today.

Yesterday I went for a couple hour bike ride on my girl's bike. The rear axle seized briefly (I shot what was left my 1,99 &euro chain lubricant into it), the chain rings are so worn that I experience chainsuck. I thought after these two things happened the bike wouldn't make it home, but it did. I've scrubbed the chain out with a toothbrush and put more lubricant in and it seems to be happier. Now if only the brakes worked...

The ride yesterday reminded of Erik. He went to the most recent Critical Mass in NYC. Maybe I should get one going here....I spent much of my ride fighting traffic, pedestrians, and trams. We have bike lanes in a lot of places, but not downtown...and besides most people don't respect the bike lanes (cars drive in them, people walk in them). Yesterday I felt like I was the only person who looks both ways before crossing a bike lane. I've been doing that since I almost got run down my first day here back in September :).

So I came home from my ride, ate a frozen pizza dinner, finished folding my laundry, and went to bed. At about 8pm. I woke up this morning at 7am. Guess my first class of today is cancelled too, so I'm going back to sleep. I've really needed it -- have only been sleeping ~4 hours a night.

News blackout

My new bicycle

Okay, just kidding. I didn't pay $850 for this bicycle. I actually just bought it tonight for 50,- € from a shifty looking German man. I had to cut the old bike lock off it because he lost the key (or so he says). But, he sold it at his house and gave me his phone number...so I'd guess it isn't stolen (at least not from Dresden).

I bought this shitty pink colored bicycle because 1) it's cheap, 2) it has wheel covers (ideal for riding in the rain), 3) it has a rack on the back and a pretty big nylon bag, and 4) people aren't likely to steal it if I ride it to the grocery store or wherever. I figure I'll use it for my "utilitarian riding" and use the good bike for riding off-road. This new bicycle's rear axle is definitely going to need replacing right away....I can hear it squeaking because the bearings are bone dry.

Just so everyone knows, I'm going on a news blackout for the next week. I'm getting fed up with reading about the world going to hell every day, so I'll put off dealing with it. I guess this means you'll learn more about my inner workings and social life, and less about my political agenda :).

I remember that this was one of Dr. Weil's top tips for living healthier (I caught his show on PBS when I used to watch television ;-)).

While I don't like much new age hippy guru shit (and I mean c'mon, look at the guy's beard for chrissake), and the self-help thing, I've done this before and have always felt better because of it...

And okay, this guy isn't off the deep end, I don't mean it like that. I guess my only problem with him is he's like, "The way to get healthier is to eat better food and excercise." I'm cool with him, it's his followers that I think are losers. Why do people need to latch on to that? I think people that actually sit around listen to such obvious things should just shoot themselves. But I'll take his no news advice...(Do as I say don't do as I do?)

Weekend Updates

For those that didn't know, February 1st was the Chinese New Year. We've entered the year of the sheep. I was born on the year of the monkey, which I find incredibly funny because, well, what's not funny about monkeys?

To celebrate, I ate some good Chinese food with a bunch of Asian friends.

Traditional Chinese eating

I like the East's way of eating food. In the West, when we eat dinner we always order our own thing and maybe offer a bite to the people we're eating with (generally only if they're family or good friends). All the Asian cultures (indians, chinese, japanese) love to just order a whole bunch of food and pass it all over the table. Our table had a sweet spinning top for easier sharing.

Sunday I went to Meissen with Ferri. Meissen was the birthplace of porcelain in the West; the Saxon king held the alchemist who rediscovered the formula prisoner "for his own protection." I love history.

The church at Meissen Castle

We toured the castle and the Porcelain plant. Supposedly the church, pictured above, is one of the smallest in Germany. Looks really impressive to me...

Jerry Springer for President

Well okay, not quite president. Jerry Springer is possibly going to run for senator of Ohio. Stephen points me to a transcript of his recent debate on CNN's crossfire. It's pretty interesting to see Jerry Springer and Ann Coulter facing off (scroll down to the bottom).

Springer: Where I think the debate is missing the point is I don't understand why going to war with Iraq will make us safer from the use of nuclear weapons or chemical or biological weapons.

Let me quickly explain. There are only three possible options. Either, one, he does not have those weapons. If he doesn't have those weapons, what's the point of going to war.

Two, which is more likely, is he does have the weapons. If he has those weapons, the best way to get him to use them is to go to war against him. Where's the sanity there?

Option three -- option three is that he did have them but he gave them to terrorists or other countries and they have them, the terrorists have them. Again, going to war against Saddam Hussein won't stop the terrorists from using it if we gave them.

Paranoia, yay!

A while back I was talking about this biometrically encrypted usb flash disk. Combine it with this DES encrypted hard disk and you get a hard drive that is encrypted, with the key stored on an encrypted USB device. I think I'll buy these things to play with them. Thanks again, Uncle Sam.

Let the conspiracy theories begin

And don't forget those ubergeeks in the sky who lost their lives today...

The Two Towers

Fabulous Engrish screen capture reveals what Frodo really wants.

Foreign Friends

I have to say the last 5 months or so have been extremely eye-opening. Lately I've been listening to friends tell me the stories about their countries' histories and their lives.

Tonight I hung out with Maja as she told the story of her life in Belgrade under Slobodan Milosevic and during the riots and 'civil war'. She got out of town on October 15th, 2000, a few days before the Serbian government recreated the parliament and there was a fairly raucous march in Belgrade (also the day of her graduation). I found a fun timeline of the events courtesy of Radio Free Europe, which reminds me that Fritz is dating the daughter of a former Prague correspondant.

I can't imagine what it's like to live in such conditions. I wonder how someone can live with such stress every day. I remember seeing a lot of this stuff on the news a few years ago, but it's not until you hang out with someone that was there when you realize, 'Holy shit.'

Yeah, rulers that commit genocide and that kind of bullshit need to go; maybe Saddam does too. I just hate to see so many more people have to die for it...

Anyway I'm feeling like I've lead an extraordinarily cushy/comfortable/lazy life after hearing her stories tonight...

Uncle Sam's Saving Account

I love spring for a lot of reasons. The days get longer, the weather gets warmer. Thoughts turn to mating with nubile nymphs in the woods; tax season rolls around.

Most people groan at the fabulous April deadline, but I made a choice many years ago that I will not regret for the rest of my life. Every time I get a job, I request that an extra $10 be taken out of each paycheck as income tax, and claim 0 deductions. So, every year in the spring I get back between $500-1000. I call it my interest free savings account. Thanks, Uncle Sam.

Not only is it nice to get this bonus in the spring...money I'd probably waste on useless crap throughout the year...it also helps out the government as a short-term interest-free loan...the government gets to do something useful with my $~750 over the year without having to pay me until later. Kind of nice. Who knows if it really helps them, though.