remarkably unreactive

3v1l!

2005-07-09T16:58:00.000-06:00

I've decided that being good 5uxx0rs and it is now time to be 3v1l! so redirect your feedreaders/bookmarks/helper monkeys to the new URI

HOLY SHIT

2005-07-07T07:57:00.000-06:00

Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | London Blasts Set Off Chaos, Confusion: "Buses were pressed into service as ambulances as dozens of casualties were taken to hospitals. At the scene of several blasts, specialist emergency workers in orange biochemical suits searched for evidence of biological, chemical or nuclear agents."

white picket fence and maple tree in the yard.

2005-07-06T23:43:00.000-06:00

I went to campus today. It stormed and hailed right when I left the house. Pieces of tree flew through the air and hit me. Campus was bright and sunny. Joel and I farted around and did computer stuff, as usual, and talked ad nauseum about all sorts of n3rdity. Now I want to be a web developer...*sigh*

An old dog sat on the porch,

2005-07-06T03:23:00.000-06:00

A Book With a Theory of Everything?:

"Penrose writes that he'd like the book to be accessible to those who struggled with fractions in school, but this seems an almost psychotically optimistic hope. This is especially so because Penrose's approach to so many topics is so clever and novel. Another problem is that he doesn't generally proceed from the concrete to the theoretical, but more often in the other direction."

This review of The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose captures my own sentiments exactly (captured in this observation)

a retriever, had seen better days.

2005-07-06T02:02:00.000-06:00

There's something about shopping at a small grocery store that I find infinitely superior to the gigantor mega-stores. I went grocery shopping today. If you couldn't tell. One of the great things about the local IGA is that its small enough that I can puts about and wander back and forth and find everything. Its also nice and brightly lit, and the walk to and from was a good way to soak up some vitamin D. It also got me thinking about how much of a small town in a big city Strathcona can be. I actually know my neighbours. I talk to my grocer. This part of town is more like the Cold Lake of my youth (not later on when it got all big and I didn't know anyone, but when it was small and I was a kid) than when I lived on the other side of the river. When I lived on the N side of the river the neighbourhood was similar, tree-lined boulevards and houses and apartment blocks everywhere. Reasonably close to a lot of bars. But it was also really close to a lot of shopping, and everyone seemed to be coming and going all the time. Perhaps it was the proximity to downtown (though in travel time the same, no bridge crossing was required) that made it more "city".

I squeezed the grip of the pistol,

2005-07-05T01:42:00.000-06:00

I've been listening to the BBC Radio 3's production of Beethoven's symphonies 1 through 9. Upon arriving at the pastoral symphony I was instantly reminded of a strange piece I wrote for english class back when I was in high school. The assignment was to dissect the layers of meaning in a song you liked. Presumably one with lyrics and the like. Always the brat, I chose Beethoven's Symphony number 6 from a tape that was being rapidly demagnetized in my tape-deck at home (though not as rapidly as my Dvorak, but that's another story). I wrote a two page (I think though it could have been 1.5) description of the imagery evoked by the pastoral scene, the storm, recovery, and so on. The next day the teacher raved (in a good way, not in a "dirty bum on the corner" sort of way) and praised my work as being brilliant and inspired, and taking her totally by surprise. Instead of accepting the compliment and allowing myself to be yet more arrogant for the day, I was instead struck with how remarkable it was that my work, which honestly was just a regurgitation of what anyone who had heard the symphony would have said, could inspire such thoughts in her. Remarkable in that it implied that either she was a total idiot and was one of the least cultured teachers I knew, or the student body that had passed before her were squalling by-products of a cultural wasteland. In my journal (which I happen to have in my lap at the moment) I went off rather verbosely and ponderously (a habit I have yet to rid myself of) on a discussion on how such glaring human mediocrity could become so wide-spread. Reminiscing to when I was in high-school is a most embarassing affair, I think I should stop now.

it was sweaty and I was nervous.

2005-07-05T01:24:00.000-06:00

A typical night for me:

Read about using Path-Integral qm. to simulate solvated electrons vs wave-function methods (which I imagine would be a royal nightmare).
Watch Family Guy DVDs with the audio set to spanish and the subtitles in french. Dios mio!
Fold laundry

...I need to get out more. By the by: Hydrass I still have your leather jacket, its in my closet next to my leather jacket. I keep forgetting to bring it back to you, and whenever I do remember I usually am at work/otherwise occupied/you're in Calgary/you're in Regina. Perhaps when our "busy" scheduals mesh I'll bring it back. Have your people call my people and we'll do lunch.

I knocked on the door and watched

2005-07-04T15:56:00.000-06:00

Do you know what's cool? Holding down Command-Option-X-O while booting an old Mac Classic will load an internal ROM that has system 6 on it. That is so odd and cool all at the same time. I wonder why Apple decided on the ROM chip, perhaps because some Classics didn't come with a hard-drive... I also think of the Classic and the new Mini as sort of comparable. Both were crippled sub $1k machines that were designed to draw in new users without sacrificing the sales of the bigger machines. Or at least that is my take on it.

her approach through the window.

2005-07-04T14:48:00.000-06:00

my landlord just came over and fixed the hole in our roof and the leak in our shower. They also oggled my 18v cordless drill. Ben also got a post-card from a friend of his who is in greece. On the front is a sculpture of a man with an enormous erection. Mark (our upstairs neighbour) saw it before bringing it down to us, leading to an awkward moment.

She opened the door and led me to the study.

2005-07-04T14:14:00.000-06:00

I haven't been sleeping all that well lately. Probably because I have a scratchy throat and end up spending the night in various stages of a coughing fit. Despite this I have had some seriously odd dreams. In one I wrote a hash-algorithm that I (somehow) showed to be completely free of collisions. Not only that but I wrote a program that could reverse it. It was completely and utterly odd. Oh and I should mention that the products of my hash program were like that of md5, just a short string of characters. Then you run the recovery program and it pieces togethor the only possible original binary that could produce that hash. Like uber amazing compression. In another of my hallucinatory dreams I managed to do the path-integral for the partition function of a quantum particle. It was odd. Royally odd.

"Would you like some tea?" she asked

2005-07-03T01:45:00.000-06:00

no parking
Originally uploaded by bento-box.

I saw this sign today as Ben and I ran errands. Its so odd, real-world pixelation going on there.

2005-07-02T18:13:00.000-06:00

From around the globe to your frontal lobe

video saved as .rar files and how to extract and convert to .avi
it bugs me when people do this, because it makes me emerge unrar
internetspiracy
How to Fold a Shirt
via Dave Bacon
hacksjapan
The complete Feynman lectures on physics
in pdf and mp3!!
physicsscience

What I did on C-day

2005-07-02T02:56:00.000-06:00

I went to Remedy and hung out with Adam and Kyla. We had coffee.
The three of us walked down whyte and shopped.
We met Rob outside Mars&Venus and went for dinner at Opa.
I got a shirt made at Orbits with Mario on it.
I went to work.
I left work at 2:30am, got my paycheck too
I went to bed

Canada Day!

2005-07-01T12:38:00.000-06:00

Today is Canada Day. The day in which we canucks celebrate the spawning of a nation-wide hive-conciousness in which this nation will truly become alive. If you want me. If you need me. I'll be at remedy in an hour, and my cell phone == on.

boredom, meet camera

2005-06-30T21:20:00.000-06:00

I had absolutely nothing to do this evening so I popped some batteries in my camera, took some random pictures. Then downloaded the source and built gtkam. Here is a picture of my macintosh. Maybe tomorrow I'll take it out with me and start putting stuff in flickr again.

fucking with your socks on

2005-06-30T18:16:00.000-06:00

Apparently Spain joined Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands in the whole same-sex marriage thang. Does this mean I get to have more celebratory sex? Actually no. Because Ben works. I'm such a hermit down here, I never leave except to go to work, and I don't see anyone except my coworkers. Why? Ben works when I don't, along with everyone else I know. I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record here, but I feel compelled to voice my boredom. I'm running out of things to do, and buying stuff with pay-pal isn't as satisfying as I thought. Probably because I (a) don't have the money to spend, and (b) it takes forever to ship crap from the states to canada. I think one great boon to online shopping would be cheaper international shipping, but that's just me. So what did I buy? Well an SCSI ethernet interface I found on ebay, and megatokyo vol 3. Yes "big spender". Good thing I get paid tomorrow.

2005-06-28T20:54:00.000-06:00

From around the globe to your frontal lobe

Edmonton Journal - Parliament passes gay marriage bill
someone actually called to tell me, how weird is that?
gay
Google Earth - System Requirements
yet another google app that requires windows
google
Google Video Player
unfortunately the sys requirements are for windows 2000+, not gentoo, boo!
google
Michael Nielsen - Fermions and the Jordan-Wigner transform IV: Diagonalizing Fermi Quadratic Hamiltonians
(none)
physics

b&e

2005-06-28T16:59:00.000-06:00

Apparently there have been a few break-ins in the garages (and cars parked in the alley) out back on my block. So now the garage is going to be locked. Context: I live in strathcona, in edmonton. Hardly anyone around here locks their doors either on their house or on their garages. It has this sort of small-town charm in away from all the traffic and bustle.

Land of the Dead

2005-06-26T23:05:00.000-06:00

was actually really bad. I'm disappointed with the Zombie master. Disappointed. I suppose zombie flicks are always better when the zombies seem somewhat threatening, and the good-guys don't all survive with a tank and tonnes of heavy artillery. bah.

me == crazy

2005-06-24T15:23:00.000-06:00

So jPodder moves at the rate of continental drift. Not unsurprising since its written in java and java has always been a slow memory hog (in my experience). My solution is to write my own command-line version in python. Currently I have a working proto-type for RSS 2.0 with mp3s in enclosures only so far. I'm going to work on expanding it out so that it can handle more variants by just finding lots of different podcasts and looking at the code, then running it through feedparser.py and figuring out where I should look for the mp3s. So far my version has two main functions. First you can run ./pypodder.py setup which gives you a "nice" interface for adding feeds. Second you just run ./pypodder.py and it will read all the feeds in the list, find any mp3s you haven't downloaded, and download them to the directory you specified (during the setup). The current limitations are:

No progress bar during downloads. It just happens or it spits an error message at you. This is bad since many podcasts are large staring at a cursor blinking for tens of minutes leads people to believe it has crashed
I only support the feed I tested it on, the cbcradio3 one. Thus it only looks for mp3s in a very specific location, I'm going to poke around with more feeds to see what sorts of issues are in this, and what sorts of enclosures I should be looking in.

I'll post the full code of it when I'm done and happy with the results. In the meantime people can make code suggestions on how to accomplish either of the two points I posted, if you so desperately desire. The downloading step is actually something I'm not entirely satisfied with at all, its just a one-line retrieval (ie: urllib.urlopen(uri).read()) followed by writing the data to a file. Simple but unsatisfying. If you know of some alternative code out there I'd be much obliged (something with a progress bar or something would be nice too).

cast me your pods

2005-06-24T00:28:00.000-06:00

I have jpodder working (I was going to use ipodder but that would have required installing some substantial debian packages which I didn't feel like doing) and am happily dumping podcasts into it. However I have an issue, a huge HUGE amount of them are "talk radio", which I am not interested in. I want music. Indy/random stuff. Like the Superburst Mixtapes from the emminent Warren Ellis. In the spirit of distributed laziness I now ask my readers, submit your fav. podcasts in comments pretty please?

2005-06-23T21:29:00.000-06:00

Delicious Links

Blogger Help : How do I post pictures?
long awaited, recently added: blogger now lets you upload pictures from a web interface (and they support more formats too)
bloggerinternets
Global Frequency Pilot torrent
get it while the torrent lasts
comicsinternets
What is Jython?
python written in java, it just popped up as a dependancy and I'm still thinking of its utility
python
2257 Updates : Fleshbot
I was going to just start posting all the casualties I ran accross, but fleshbot does a better job
internets

UPDATE:Ok so who in their right mind passes on Global Frequency? I just watched the pilot and I thought it was damn good.

this evening

2005-06-23T15:00:00.000-06:00

My boy works until the wee hours while I do not. I have no plans. Maybe I'll learn Klingon. nuqneH!

I'm becoming an info whore again

2005-06-23T02:17:00.001-06:00

I suppose it was inevitable. I had managed to stay away from obsessively watching feeds for quite a while. Hell the only major ones I used to have were arxiv and physrevlet, and to be honest I only read a few of what showed up. I recently took the MIT blogger quiz and went to counting all the feeds in thunderbird (my current feed-reader/email client extraordinaire). 56. I have 56 feeds just in the "blogs" folder. I have 20 in flickr, 16 in podcasts... The cause of my addiction is thunderbird. See email was/is such a killer app I needed an email program, so naturally I went to mozilla and got theirs. The issue is thunderbird does feeds too, and I think it does it well. It treats them like email. I've had other feedreaders before, but they treated each feed individually, which is not something I want. I want my feed categorized, but other than that they should all come pouring in. That and thunderbird lets me use search filters and mark items for reading later, and so on and so forth. I treat my feeds like 92 mailing-lists all pouring in. It doesn't hurt that I'm also on a few mailing lists as well (with mailing lists over-lapping with feeds in the category compact-macs, not to mention a feed of a mailing list!). The email interface (and lets face it the same basic layout has been around for eons) clearly easy for information sorting and consumption. Now-a-days I get most of my reading through feeds (but for a few blogs that update A LOT, since I find they tend to drown out all the other voices in my feedreader). This is silly since I've had thunderbird around for quite a while and I never used it much until I installed gentoo and just started shucking everything into it. I no longer use the gmail web interface unless I'm away from my computer, I don't really use kinja either. I used to be a browser man, now I'm dumping it all into my email program. Maybe this is a sign that I'm growing up. Give me a few months and I'll be printing off all my emails too, and keeping them in a folder. Just like my parents.

2005-06-23T02:17:00.000-06:00

Delicious Links

Looking for a Macintosh Classic
I need more RAM and other replacement parts, so if you have one laying around...
macintosh
Google AJAXSLT
could you not see running a blog off this? the fancy front is just the xsl and all the content is dynamically fetched xml
googlejavascriptprogrammingxml
TOP500 supercomputers
stolen from kottke, but man do I really want to build a cluster from some old boxes, with openmosix or something...
computers
Teeccino Caffeine Free Herbal Coffee / Reasons to be Caffeine-Free
I find I actually sleep better when caffeinated
coffee

licensing-fu

2005-06-22T14:38:00.000-06:00

hot on the heels of the freeculture birthday I recieve an email asking whether the code (python blogger cross posting ugliness I posted) I post here is open-source or what?!?! Like everything else it is cc-ed to be non-commercial, attribution, share alike (nc-by-sa). By this I mean that I treat source code I write as being no different than all the other gibbets of text I spew. Though with code I guess I'm more lax in that none of it is special and you could probably rip me off quite happily without me noticing or caring. But if you're afraid that I'm a mental defective (see links post re: linux) then treat it all as if its under the most draconian of copyright. :P

2005-06-22T14:29:00.000-06:00

Delicious Links

how to cook a good dinner in no time at all

2005-06-21T18:31:00.000-06:00

have a fucking amazing boyfriend who marinated pork chops for you. bake a potatoe in the microwave in 5 minutes serve with veggies or toasted flatbread and tzatziki sauce watch Sex and the City pine for a cosmo

2005-06-21T17:17:00.000-06:00

Delicious Links

Michael Nielsen - Appendix to my posts on Fermions and the Jordan-Wigner transform
(none)
physics
Michael Nielsen - Fermions and the Jordan-Wigner transform III: Consequences of the Canonical Commutation Relations
(none)
physics
Michael Nielsen - Fermions and the Jordan-Wigner transform II: the Canonical Commutation Relations
(none)
physics
Michael Nielsen - Fermions and the Jordan-Wigner transform I: Introduction
I like his explanation of things better than some of the references
physics

random ephemera from the frayed edges of my mind

2005-06-21T15:28:00.000-06:00

Reading "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" by the eminent Doctorow. I want to buy this when it hits shelves in e-town. Current favorite recurring quotable:
"A washing machine and a mountain," he said. "Yes," Alan said. "He kept a roof over our heads and she kept our clothes clean."
I love it. Mark of a good story: The story is believable, you fall into it and forget the ridiculousness of three brothers who are russian nesting dolls, an another an island.
I should be in Irish heaven. My basement is full of potatoes. I wouldn't even be here, in Canada, were it not for the blight. But what does one make with potatoes, two bags of potatoes? Potato salad, scalloped potatoes, potatoes au gratin, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, potato skins, cubed potatoes with gravy. Maybe I'll make potato soup. I'm seriously running out of ideas here people.
I'm to feed the trouser snake today. I seriously love this snake now. I poke and play with it, and talk to it when I'm here alone. Its not as rambunctious as a cat or dog, but it is vastly easier to take care of. That and for $21 I get 10 feeder mice which will feed it for 100 days. 100 days! Do you not understand the awesomeness of this!
I've been thinking about erections. Or at least I was last night. I think I can safely say that feeling another man's erection pressed against you is likely to be transformative, life affirming moment for any man. Arousal, revulsion, or flattery, whatever the emotions it brings to the surface, they certainly are quite telling. It bothers me that writers do not frequent this moment as a crucial moment in one's life. Bring on the hard-ons!
I watched Matrix: Revolutions again, boy it really does suck. I didn't mind Reloaded, and the original is still very good. Revolutions, on the other hand, is crap. The only thing its good for is closure.
I watched The Motorcycle Diaries the other day (partially avec Ben). The visuals are amazing, the road scenes make me want to go on a road-trip again. The story was quite enchanting. Though there were a few lines of dialogue that made me scream Ghandi! But hey I'm sort of a pacifist so...

delicious to blogger cross posting fu

2005-06-21T02:40:00.000-06:00

This is an ugly ugly hack for getting delicious links into a blogger blog. It is a python script that I run as a cron job that rips links from the RSS and posts it to blogger using the old xml-rpc api. It requires pyblogger and feedparser (because I love Mark Pilgrim). The code is in the full-post.

#!/usr/bin/python

import Blog
import feedparser

# Del.icio.us Settings
DELICIOUS = {"rss": "http://del.icio.us/rss/blah", "local": "http://del.icio.us/blah/"}

# Blogger settings
BLOGGER = {"username": "user", "password": "password", "number": 0}
# The blog number is something like 0,1,2.. 
# if you only have one blog it is 0, 
# if you have more then you might have to 
# meddle with it, or read the documentation
# in Blog.py (from pyblogger) and figure it out yourself

# Local settings
HISTORY_FILE = "pydelicious.history"

# mess with anything below this at your own peril
class Linkr:
   def __init__( self ):
      self.logfile = open( HISTORY_FILE , 'a')
      self.posted = self.readposted()

   def readposted( self ):
      print "collecting history"
      try:
         f = open( 'pydelicious.history' )
         ulist = f.readlines()
         print ".......................done"
      except:
         print ".....................failed"
         print "could not find history file"
      return ulist

   def get_feed( self ):
      rss_URI = DELICIOUS["rss"]
      print "finding feed"
      try:
         feed = feedparser.parse( rss_URI )
         print ".......................done"
      except:
         print ".....................failed"
         print "error retrieving feed"
      return feed

   def get_links( self, foo ):
      url =    foo["link"]
      title = foo["title"]
      try:
         desc = foo["description"]
      except:
         desc = "(none)"

      try:
         tags = foo["category"]
         tag_array = tags.split(" ")
      except:
         tags = None
         tag_array = []
      return url, title, desc, tag_array         

   def generate_post( self, feed ):
      link_post_start = "Delicious Links<br /><div class='delicious'><ul class='list'>"
      link_post_end = "</ul></div>"
      link_post = link_post_start
      urls = ""
      url_list = self.posted
      items = feed["items"]
      print "generating post"
      i = 0
      for item in items:
         info = self.get_links( item )
         url = info[0]
         title = info[1]
         desc = info[2]
         tag_array = info[3]
         t = url + "\n"
         if t in url_list:
            pass
         else:
            i = i + 1
            urls = urls + url + "\n"
            tag_code = "<span class='tags'>"
            tag_local = DELICIOUS["local"]
   
            for tag in tag_array:
               tag_code = tag_code + "<span class='tagr'><a href='" + tag_local + tag + "' title='other tagged del.icio.us links'>" + tag + "</a></span>"
   
            tag_code = tag_code + "</span>"
   
            link_post = link_post + "<li><a href='" + url + "'>" + title + "</a><br />" + desc + "<br />" + tag_code + "</li>"

      if i>0:
         link_post = link_post + link_post_end
         print urls
         print ".......................done"

      else:
         link_post = None
         print ".................no entries"
      return link_post, urls

   def upload_post( self, link_post, logs ):
      print "uploading post"
      if link_post == None:
         print "nothing to upload"
      else:
         username = BLOGGER["username"]
         password = BLOGGER["password"]
         try:
            user = Blog.User(username, password)
            blogs = user.blogs
            blog = blogs[0]
            posts = blog.posts
            posts.append(link_post)
            print ".......................done"
            print "writing to log file"
            self.logfile.write(logs)
            print ".......................done"

         except UnicodeEncodeError:
            print ".....................failed"
            print "there is a bad character"
            print "inhabiting the feed"

         except:
            print ".....................failed"
            print "the connection is down"

   def run( self ):
      feed = self.get_feed()
      post = self.generate_post( feed )
      self.upload_post( post[0], post[1] )


if __name__ == "__main__":
   link_blog = Linkr()
   link_blog.run()

2005-06-21T02:37:00.000-06:00

Delicious Links

Signal + Noise: Necessary But Not Sufficient
The existence of god is not sufficient to make creationism believable
internetsscience
ink slinger
(none)

snake pit

2005-06-17T22:59:00.000-06:00

so today I went to work, was promptly ill in the upstairs bathroom, and came home. After several hours in bed, my migraine mostly went away and Ben and I set about changing Elaugh's (that's Kyla's corn snake) tank. Ben took her out and put her in a bin full of laundry (to explore) and we watched a movie while slowly excavating her abode and cleaning it all out. Once we had put the last queer touches on her new "loft" we turned around and noticed that she was gone. She got out, that intrepid climber that she is, and was hiding behind a bookshelf (in a storage area) being quite the bitch. It took Ben going back there to flush her out and me at the other end to intercept to get her back into the tank. Damn trouser snake, if Kyla didn't have Satan inhabiting her cervix I don't know why we would take care of it (I'll explain that tres obscure movie reference to those who ask politely!)

failsafe terminals on handheld devices

2005-06-16T23:32:00.000-06:00

My Zaurus 5500, as many may know, is little more than a glorified paperweight after a "software update" left it completely and utterly dead. Flashing the rom didn't even do anything. DEAD! Today after a nasty bout of dirty hacks I at least got it into a failsafe terminal (after flashing the original rom on CF) to get this nice error message right in the middle of init.rd:

e2fsck 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
ext2fs_check_if_mount: No such file or directory while determining whether /dev/mtdblock1 is mounted.
e2fsck: Invalid argument while trying to open /dev/mtdblock1

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 

Oh and it goes on to say that the root password is garbled and dumps me into a Repair FS shell (at which point I find I can't seem to repair the FS). bugger Internet junkies who can find what I cannot feel free to help here. (oh and just to be needlessly technical, when I reboot I can get the splash screen and a hint of linux for about 2 seconds before the screen goes white and turns off, which to me implies that yes, my PDA does run linux, if only briefly)

fasten your pants for the lap dance

2005-06-16T17:02:00.000-06:00

tonight I plan on sitting around and enjoying a multimedia experience. Movies and PS2 games. Of which I have many and few. Guests are welcome if they call ahead (else I will be spending the night alone)

2005-06-16T16:07:00.000-06:00

Delicious Links

Edmonton Pride Week Society 2005
starts this saturday (17th) with the parade, and SHAT ON A STICK! I HAVE TO WORK!
gay
:: Gay Fuel Energy Drink :: Get Fired Up!
!!
gayoh-the-humanity!
National Post - The Canadian military is marking its first gay wedding.
and in the US they are still battling with "don't ask, don't tell", what difference the 49th parallel brings
gay
Boston Computer Society - old mac software disks
a bit of nostalgia combined with a good source for old mac software
macintosh
Flickr Schwag
perhaps I'll send away for more stickers
flickr

argh

2005-06-16T06:57:00.000-06:00

Apparently the ethernet adaptor I was hunting for on ebay is no longer to be mine. I was outbid at the last second (literally 10s before the bid closed) by ONE CENT!. This makes missing the uofas sale of useless crapp all the more painful. They were offering mac classics!, and I think I know where they came from, which means they likely came with the ethernet box that got them all onto the network! Even if they weren't I would have bought one just for the extra keyboard and mouse, and the ability to rape it for ram (because 2Mb just isn't enough). Oh well at least I have the software problem for my mac classic solved.

Batman Begins

2005-06-16T01:56:00.000-06:00

I saw "Batman Begins" today with Joel (while we were waiting for gnome to emerge). Holy Shit! It is actually a good Batman movie! I personally loved it. It was dark and Bruce was not necessarily a nice guy. It also made some sensible explanations of where everything came from (his ninja moves, the crazy bat-gizmos &c.), in general oh-so-good. I'm hesitant to ramble on about all the moments I enjoyed as that might constitute spoilers so I'll just leave it as

Batman Begins r0xx0rs! OMFG it r0xx0r5 s0 b4d!

I feel dirty now.

text-based blogging

2005-06-16T01:25:00.000-06:00

I'm here on campus with Joel, desperately attempting to fix his bloody gentoo install. A sign of how far I've gotten would be that I'm blogging from links which for those not in the know is a text-based browser that works in the terminal. What is the issue? Gentoo is on, X11 is on, gnome is on, xfce4 is on, and all work beautifully. Still Joel insists on going with a nice fresh Fedora Core 4 install. He's such a prissy queen. I mean just because his current setup refuses to acknowledge that his video card can do better than 16 bit 640x480 and several hours and patches later stands by its initial convictions he wants to ditch the whole thing!! (Oh and yes we went through every fucking forum on the planet to no avail, none of the million patches worked, we dumped BIOS info we messed with everything, but apparently it is not to be. Perhaps later when the Dell Inspiron 500m is either a distant memory or a better supported beast)

what did I do today?

2005-06-14T14:31:00.000-06:00

Installed system 7.0.1 onto my old Macintosh Classic, with Joel's help (he has a mac at work, with it he extracted the indvidual disk images for the installation disks from a "self mounting image" and emailed them to me, I put those images on disk). It works so marvelously now, and has all sorts of wonderfully useful software. Unfortunately that does not include stuffit expander (which apparently only comes as a compressed file, so I have to go to school some time to use a mac with a floppy drive to collect software, hence all the links to it).
I re-did my python delicious updater thingie to use feedparser instead of RSS, since feedparser is just easier to use, and I included tags. In the process of redoing I just wrote it as a simple script with no functions or classes, its that simple that I figured the extra code was just redundant as the procedure goes like this: find/parse feed ---> extract useful bits (in a for loop) ---> check log to see if its already been posted ---> generate html for each post (including a new for loop inspired by the similar javascript on my main page for doing tags) ---> send html to pyblogger which does the old XML-RPC post to blogger. in all it maybe takes 50 lines of code, with lots of white-space since I love it so much.
Read more "Coming-Out stories" => I need more books to read. The stories themselves are not too aweful on the most part, but its not something I generally recommend people delve into, unless of course awkward teenaged sex is something you beat off to.

2005-06-14T14:30:00.000-06:00

Delicious Links

System 6 Heaven - Main Download Area
loads of software for system 6 machines
macintosh
Univerisity of Michigan's mac archive
more software
macintosh
MIT LCS's INFO-MAC HyperArchive
a big archive of software for macs
macintosh
Resources For The Older Macintosh
very very useful for compact-mac owners such as myself
macintosh
mmcirvin: Consciousness and quantum mechanics
read this so I don't have to tell you
physics

2005-06-13T15:54:00.000-06:00

Delicious Links

Graphical User Interface Gallery
this is so awesomely nostalgic..
where to get system 7.0.1
as a self mounting image...I might need Joel's help (through his mac at work)...
Orneryboy by Michael Lalonde : desperate for lovin
somehow this reminds me of some of my friends, but replace animal talk with n3rd-sp34k
awesome game system
fenton IMs me links I post them, why? because I CAN!
System Software/Mac OS Questions - the pickle's Low-End Mac FAQ
I think I'm going to update/redo the OS on my mac

sunday reader

2005-06-12T22:10:00.000-06:00

Emerson apparently is ditching the internet to spend more time fingering herself in the corner while dragging on cheap cigarettes. [link]
Fenton is becoming a respectable member of society. [link]
Hydrass deeply needs to get laid. [link]
What about me?

Well, I've been messing with my mac. I'm still looking for some software for it, more specifically something to uncompress bin-hexed things. I found one that would, but it had been bin-hexed (curses!). The problem is that the Macintosh Classic that I have is running a seriously pared down version of system 7.0.1, so much so that I'm having issues with some of the basics (like a simple text editor). I think it might be easier to just re-install the OS entirely. Something I can while away my days off with doing.

2005-06-12T22:03:00.000-06:00

Delicious Links

Get Your Old Mac Online
soon...soon, when I get an ethernet card
How to Open a Classic Mac
just cause, well, you never know
Dictionary.com/Word of the Day: hermitage
my bedroom == a hermitage
HFS Utilities Home Page
some linux utilities for dealing with the macintosh Hierarchical File System, conveniently available as a gentoo ebuild under hfsutils
Home Page of Gamba
great mac resource, esp for older systems

2005-06-10T22:16:00.000-06:00

Delicious Links

tubgirl
"yawn" threw this into the ring of utterly odd, I swear with the frequency this pops up it might turn into the new goatse
Consumption Junction, What's Your Dysfunction?
will suggested this one, yet another site of random weirdness to occupy your day
rotten.com: This is rotten dot com
will suggested this one, the old standard of weird crap
Peperami Noodles
ugo suggested this, tres bizarre
1927 Solvay Conference
video of famous physicists in action

melt my eyelids

2005-06-09T14:50:00.000-06:00

I've become quite bored with the internet lately. I need people to burn my eyes with the heat of the seriously bizarre. If you feel up to this challenge leave links in comments.

2005-06-09T13:21:00.000-06:00

Delicious Links

Travel Writers
for some reason posts like this make me want to submit something I wrote
Homicidal Ped on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
(none)
s t e n c i l r y . -- it's cooler than you.
more T-shirt stenciling

Ben convocated

2005-06-09T12:47:00.000-06:00

So yesterday was Ben's convocation from the faculty of science. It was all you would expect of a convocation, funny colored robes, hilariously out-moded ceremony, a creepy pledge to the University, and the reading out of ~855 names as said number of people filed passed to shake hands with the dean, chancellor, chair, and president. Ben's family came (except his brother), so I imagine millions of pictures will flood the internet soon.

2005-06-07T13:57:00.000-06:00

Delicious Links

towleroad: Right of Way
an Italian gay man lost his license for being gay...judging from how most of the gay guys I know drive its not unjustified!
11943 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
when CRISIS demands a quick acting hypnotic
The Holistic Herpes and HPV Specialist
this bothers me, I don't think holistics should be used to "cure" rather serious viral infections
BBC - Radio 3 - Beethoven Experience - downloads
finally a good version of symphony 3 for free that I don't feel guilty about downloading
Book Assembly Photo-Journal
(none)

2005-06-06T16:01:00.000-06:00

Delicious Links

superburst mixtape
(none)
cbc radio 3 podcast
(none)
Star Wars
star wars slash fiction - continued
SWA-L Recent Updates
star wars slash fiction
The Farm: Pass JavaScript Arrays to PHP
good...good...its all falling into place

ahem

2005-06-06T14:53:00.000-06:00

I think there might be a downside to installing gentoo over fedora/mandrake/debian. I'm currently installing iPodder so as to get some podcasts in, the required packages listed in the README are debian packages. Not only that but a few don't have ebuilds for gentoo, leaving me to hunt down the src.rpms. Which is another matter as I now have to install rpm (which I never needed before). Blarg.
I worked all weekend, and I work almost all this coming week, TWTF I think. ~6-whenever(usu. late)
Working is cramping my style. The only time I get to see Ben is in the middle of the night when I get home.

2005-06-03T14:04:00.000-06:00

Delicious Links

Macintosh Classic - SCSI ethernet
my first post on craigslist edmonton
Ethernet for the Macintosh
so I need an SCSI ethernet card/adaptor and netscape navigator 2.0.2 anyone know where I can get those?
Macintosh Classic
this is what I have at home

what's up dawg

2005-06-02T15:44:00.000-06:00

with all the infinite time having days off affords me, I've sat down and written a simple python script to pull links out of delicious and post them to blogger. this is me shamelessly emulating tom coates and kottke. at first I tried to use pydelicious to interface with the delicious API directly, but it didn't work. I fought with it for a good hour. then I took (clocked) 00:14:37 to write a script that does the same thing but pulls its info from my delicious RSS. the posting to blogger part uses pyblogger. so that there is no double posting the URIs are recorded in a log. so far I don't have it going by date (my initial idea) since I want to leave room for aggregating a weeks full of links out on friday (or something) in the event of me not gathering enough links to fill up each individual day of the week. besides I can always control this with a cron job, or put the functionality back in later (its not exactly what you would call difficult). update: readers may have noticed a few errant reposts of the previous link-shat. this was me banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why the whole logging URIs thing wasn't working. naturally it turned out to be something trivial and stupid, to make the log file easier to read and deal with I put "\n" at the end of each line. when checking to see if an URI was in said file I forgot about the "\n" that would appear at the end of each line (and since there were no spaces, right at the end of an URI). oy.

2005-06-02T15:42:00.000-06:00

Delicious Links

MonkeyFilter | Ten Most Harmful Books
read the comments
Terri Schiavo Status
this is the point where nobody cares anymore
Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry
BJOC is an open journal for org. chem. Coolio.
Node of Yan Feng » Physical Reviews have feeds now
its about damn time, this is hot-ish on the heels of arxiv
Jokes with Einstein
hi-larious
Sifry's Alerts: Technorati Tags 101 Screencast
(none)
javascript:xmlhttprequest [JPSPAN]
(none)
Guide to Using XMLHttpRequest (with Baby Steps) from WebPasties
(none)
O'Reilly Network: Yahoo! Web Services
(none)
Swaroop C H, The Dreamer » Yahoo! Search Python API Howto
(none)
PimpZilla - a firefox theme
(none)
Rotundus AB
rolling robot == cool
m
I like
ImageShack - Hosting :: windowscompany8ge.jpg
house painted to look like windows
Warrenellis.com » Old Comics Zen
quiet or papa spank!
fac.etio.us
groovy
Rate My Kitten
its so perty
How I learned to stop worrying and love the command line
yay bash!
mspace : exploring the New Web
some sort of semantic inteweb searchy thing
Google Help : Cheat Sheet
(none)
Google hosting wikimedia
google is seriously taking over the world
flickr turns one
(none)
Photobucket Image Hosting and Online Photo Albums
(none)
Cat and Girl
the definition of geek,nerd,dork
A Lesson Is Learned But the Damage is Irreversible
damn good
Nonextensive Statistics
covers Tsallis entropy among other things
Entropy and Information theory
(none)
Otogi Zoshi
these are good
Naked Geeks
It gets you hot for I/O
Maple Application Center
worksheets for all sorts of things using MAPLE
MathWorld
(none)

more recent stuff

2005-06-01T12:06:00.000-06:00

There are a few things of mention as of recently:

I started at Chili's on monday doing dishes. I work again this evening. One observation of note: the most frequent food that came back was the salad. Couple that with this and draw your own conclusions.
Yesterday I went with Joel shopping for a PSP. Damn I want one now.
The UofA is seriously confusing me w.r.t convocation: I recieved an invite to the breakfast, but was declined for actual convocation as:
We still have not received your re-application for the Specialization program in order to convocate from it. The deadline for this application was May 1, although we had held your application for several weeks after that deadline and left several messages at the phone number you provided for us on your Application for Degree. Since we have still not heard back from you, your application will be denied for Spring 2005.
The messaging thing is rather dumb as I changed my phone-number with the university to my cell-phone two weeks before I moved. Regardless I was billed for the afore mentioned application, the cost of which is reflected in the Master Card bill I recieved. Oh and they billed me on March 31st, a full month before the fucking deadline. My next option is to apply to graduate with just a general degree in november, and who knows maybe they'll reject that too and I'll either stay in limbo or just drop out and work retail for the remainder of my days.
I really should have kept a record of the feeds I had before I nuked my HD and started over, its really irritating to try and regenerate my feeds. Suggestions are welcome.

when life gives you lemons...

2005-05-30T13:43:00.000-06:00

juice four of them (about 1.5 cups worth) add ~2cups sugar and fill up to total volume of 2L.

updates on things

2005-05-30T11:37:00.000-06:00

* I got a job at Chili's on whyte as a dishwasher on Sat. * Gnome is still installing, it crashed sometime during the night but its very close! * I went out and got blasted on Sat. w/ Ben & his friends, we gayed up straight bars * I missed the 6pm screening at the black dog as I was out on the south end shopping with Ben (and I wasn't aware that there was an 8pm screening) * Ben and I watched Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow last night. * Ben wears orange coveralls to work. I plan on using this in a twisted rape-fantasy role-play, pictures to follow on flickr.

2005-05-29T21:18:00.000-06:00

by John Allison in Scary Go Round, May 23

Its an empty journey to triumph if you don't plant the seeds of catastrophe along the way

I'll give you five fingers for a one man show

2005-05-29T13:53:00.000-06:00

I have x windows installed. I have firefox running. I have a computer again! We now return to our regularly scheduled blogging.

computer system update

2005-05-27T14:38:00.000-06:00

DSL(internet)...................[ Ok ]
DHCP(network)...................[ Ok ]
File System.....................[ Ok ]
Base System.....................[ Ok ]
Kernel..........................[ Ok ]
Configuring System..............[ Ok ]

I guess this makes me a ricer now... ;)

blah

2005-05-25T15:02:00.000-06:00

So I'm sitting here in the SUB basement trying to come up with something to do. I've applied for work at more places, and I'm seriously considering just taping my resume to lamp-posts, or hooking on the side. Its funny, one would think I would be foaming at the mouth to use the interweb, as I do not have it connected at home (yet, tho' on thurs. it is supposed to be turned on). And yet I'm not...

2005-05-25T13:15:00.000-06:00

May 25, 2005; There’s something bothering me about “Gay Culture”. While I’ve been unemployed I’ve managed to while away my time reading gay stories and watching gay movies/tv shows. The one thing that bothers me is that sex is the keystone of it all. Not that I’m all that prudish but come on, sex isn’t that interesting. Especially not the anonymous sex afforded by cruising (in most cases). There’s no romance, no passion, no screaming Wordsworth at the top of your lungs, just fucking. This bothers me since it implies that “Gay Culture” is just a facade put up by some desperate people, people who need some thing to cling to. Something to stamp their name on. But all they can come up with, the one defining characteristic that makes them them is that they fuck guys. That’s it. No depth. Just fucking. This cultural wasteland is not only existant in media but in the real world. The first few guys I went on dates with before I met Ben were the sort who were gay and nothing else. That’s it. They knew of the Obviously-Gay-Traits, and had a few (not that it really mattered) and that described them all to a T (barring physical descriptions). They were gay, and a little obvious. Nothing else. Now consider Ben, just because I like picking on him. Barring the physical cuteness: He’s gay, but I think more importantly he’s a music nut (punk/indie sort o’ stuff) who wears band T-shirts and has buttons on everything. He’s the guy who recognizes even the most obscure band from the first few bars of a song. He’s a huge pirate, which goes nicely with his music tastes, and he goes to a lot of concerts. He’s a worrier, and fusses over things that aren’t going right, but at the same time he’s almost always late for everything (because he doesn’t like to wait). He likes to read the newspaper and keep up on books, but frequently doesn’t have the time. He’s uncomfortable with pretentious art folks. &c. &c. You see Ben is actually a person, with interests and thoughts of his own. He’s not just a fucking machine.

2005-05-24T13:14:00.000-06:00

May 24, 2005; At eight thirty Ben and I went to the “Raving Poets” at Remedy. A poetry reading, both Adam and Kyla read poems along with eighteen other people. Ben thought it was a little too pretentious, personally I didn’t mind that much. We also met Philip for the first time, I’m not entirely sure what the story behind him is but he said “irregardless” which should tell you all you need to know. Which is that I know practically nothing about him but of his love for Star Wars (leading to a heated debate with Joel over Episode 3 of which neither Joel nor I were fans).

2005-05-23T13:14:00.000-06:00

May 23, 2005; Today Ben and I went to his parent’s place for dinner. It was slightly uncomfortable, and I was made to have conversations with his parents, while Ben ran away (to watch Queer as folk or whatever). I don’t think his family likes me all that much. Also, for future reference: Do not let someone who has just taken Hall’s cough-drops give you a blow-job. For some reason it makes your penis burn like hell, leaving you in the washroom risning gently with cold water. It also ruins future love-making prospects by making the tip of the penis tender and sore.

2005-05-22T13:13:00.000-06:00

May 22, 2005; Ben and I have started into anal sex as of recently. By this I mean that I have taken the plunge and started bottoming for him. This basically describes what we’ve been doing for the past few days, sex sex and more sex. Today we fooled around in the morning, went shopping, and fooled around in the afternoon. In a strange way I’m rather concerned that we’re being a little too carnal now that we live togethor. We fed the snake yesterday, a day late because I forgot to thaw out the mouse. Either way it was cool and Ben got video of it (as I believe I will be the one to feed the snake from now on). I’m always surprised at how fully Ben and I can while away a day doing inane things. Shopping for garbage bags to fit our garbage can, cooking (of this we do a lot), stuff like that. It seems so unpretentous, so comfortable. Rather different from with friends, where I feel like I must always be doing something. Going for coffee, watching a movie, &c. Not with Ben, I’m perfectly content doing nothing with him. Or just sitting and reading a book while he takes a nap. Silly things that I never would have considered before.

2005-05-18T13:13:00.000-06:00

May 18, 2005; Yesterday Ben and I went to a concert at Red’s. “We were wolves”, “The (International) Noise Conspiracy”, and “And you will know us by The Trail of Dead” played. INC was awesome, and the lead singer sort of gayed it up on stage (at one point one of the guitarists was humping his face!), not to mention flashing some nipple. After the show Ben and I got pictures with said lead singer, Ben was giddy like a school girl. The guy (Daniel?) liked my “I’m Communism” shirt for some reason. Also yesterday Adam and Kyla were going to read poetry at the Raving Poets thing at Remedy, but it overlapped with the concert so Ben and I couldn’t go.

2005-05-15T13:13:00.000-06:00

May 15, 2005; Yesterday was the BBQ. It officially started at 7pm, but only Shelly came on time (with veggie burgers and brownies). Adam walked bringing beer and Rob and Kyla came later with watermelon, potato salad, cookies, cigars, &c. Ben’s friends came much later (after the actual eating of food had ended and everyone had retired inside) After everything transpired we went to the Roost for dancing &c. Kyla and I got a ride with Shelly in her Mini. It is the most awesome of cars! The Roost was the Roost. Shirts came off (mine, twice), and guys danced in their underwear (blue checked boxers, ooh la la!). Today Ben and I cleaned the house, which was a big chore after the stampede of people through that was yesterday. We also went shopping at Wal Mart for picture frames (two identical black frames with a cream and black matte for my megatokyo pics) and storage units for the bathroom (white with “wicker” front). Along the way we went to Best-Buy and bought a router (which is still in its packaging as we do not have the internet yet or anything), and back to Ikea where we returned the Roman blinds, which were too small, and got a “BAMBU”, similar sort of blind but with little tiny shafts of wood instead of fabric. I’m going to hang it tomorrow but first I need to charge up the drill so I can put the screws in place. Similarly on the home-front we put Ben’s “Hedwig” poster in a frame which I will hang in the living-room. Its just a cheap black plastic frame with a black background around the poster but it looks pretty good in it. I also now have Star-Wars curtains and a door made out of the same fabric, courtesy of Kyla (though I didn’t mount the door until after she left). I’m still thinking of replacing the curtain-door with a sliding door from Ikea, but in the mean-time Han and Chewie and guard the entrance to my love-shack.

2005-05-13T13:12:00.000-06:00

May 13, 2005; Today I hacked down the curtain rod to fit my window and put up the mounts for it. Apparently the far wall, in the corner (the window in question is on the western wall right up next to the corner with the north-wall) has been repaired with just plaster. The screws punched right through, but I think they’re sort of holding, precariously. Its a little annoying I must say (use proper dry-walling techniques!). I’m making a list of dimensions for things that we need to pick up to make this house more livable. Like a sliding door for my bedroom, a wine-rack for the liquor cabinet (not really necessary but it would make it look nicer), and some shelving units or something for our bathroom (which has a rather unsightly shelf and pipe arrangement behind the current shower!). I feel so gay. Since Ben worked all day (until 9pm) I spent the day watching Queer as Folk episodes (Ben has the complete first season on DVD). At about 10pm Ben came home and picked me up, we went out to help Mark with his car trouble (it sounds like his timing belt is going) and after getting him to Sanda’s place (for she was along for the ride as well) we went for chinese and general farting around. At this moment Ben and I are back home, and I must make mental preparations for our big BBQ tomorrow. (ooh-la-la, I must be a good host and all that!)

2005-05-12T17:11:00.000-06:00

May 12, 2005; Today I went to campus today, again. Mark (the upstairs neighbour) was putting togethor big dividors to keep the dogs out of the flower-gardens when I left. It was a really hot day. At campus I looked for work some more. I think I have a decent chance at the data-entry positions I applied for, but who knows. On the way home I bought groceries and an Apple pie (which we didn’t get to eat) Kyla came home with Ben this afternoon, and we sat around for a bit eating food before going to Army&Navy and Ikea for shopping. Housewares bought at Ikea: Another end-table, its a funky blue and has Kyla’s snake on it now. A curtain rod, mounts, fineals, and rings for my bedroom. And a Roman Curtain which unfortunately is too small for the living-room window.

the hunt continues

2005-05-12T15:04:00.000-06:00

I may resort to blanketing the city with resumés, or threatening people at knife point, to get a job. In the hilarious off-chance that there was actually a job in the city I am qualified for, I looked for chemistry jobs earlier today. Under "Chemical Technologist" comes:

Chemistry knowledge an asset. Must be organized, good work ethic, must be in good physical shape, able to work at heights, able to travel weekly.

What on earth are they doing to their chemists? Regardless its not in e-town or I would have applied.

2005-05-11T14:08:00.000-06:00

May 11, 2005; Yesterday Kyla came by after work and dropped off her snake (aka “the trouser snake”), and stayed for dinner. I made Quesadilla’s, inspired by a cookbook but so significantly different (the only thing in common was that they were Quesadilla’s and had potatoes in them!), that I feel compelled to write out a recipe: 1. In a large mixing bowl combine: * 1 cup grated cheddar cheese * ~1/4 cup of parmesian cheese * 2 cooked potatoes, peeled and grated * 1 green pepper, chopped * ~1 tsp “Italian Seasoning” * ground peppercorns and salt to taste (~1/2 tsp each for me) (In retrospect one might want to add an onion as well, I didn’t have one. And if you’re feeling like meat, some ground-beef, already fried) 2. Pre-heat oven to 375F. Cover a cookie sheet in tin-foil, or grease it (so they don’t stick) 3. Take some pita-bread or other flatbread (I didn’t have tortillas), and spoon some of the above mixture out in a line down the center of the flatbreat. Brush some beaten egg onto one side of the flatbread, fold over and try and stick it there. Spoon some more of the mixture on top (especially cheese). Repeat this until you have 4 Quesadillas made. 4. Bake the Quesadillas on the cookie sheet for ~10min, then broil until the cheese on top has started to brown. Et voila. In other news I read “The Da Vinci Code” last night. I’m not entirely sure what all the fuss is about. Perhaps its just that I’m not Christian, but I didn’t find it all that stunning. As for plot, most of the plot twists were damn obvious, and A LOT of the puzzles were as well (the one about Newton’s tomb especially).

2005-05-10T13:45:00.000-06:00

May 10, 2005; Yesterday I went to campus again, and used the computers. Beyond that I didn’t do a whole lot. At around 11pm, right in the middle of the Norman invasion of England (was reading a Short History of England, Cheyney) Ben came over and we “made up”. We ended up talking about how I’m having trouble finding a job in the city. Don’t be fooled by what they tell you, a degree in science makes you no more employable than one in arts. In general. Now there are some degrees that get you employed quite quickly, ie: some of the engineerings, geology, computer science.. Chemistry, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to be one of them. At least not in Edmonton. I haven’t really decided what I’m doing with my life yet, so I might move to get work. For the moment, however, I don’t really want to. There’s always that glimmering hope that I will go to grad-school, and I would like to do it here (though I suppose there’s nothing stopping me from doing it elsewhere). At the moment I’m dawdling in my morning routine, I’m listening to CJSR and reading “Undergraduate Analysis” by Serge Lang. I was reading Sobolev’s “Partial Differential Equations of Mathematical Physics”. In short I am a super-nerd. Capital N on my chest and everything. The only consolation I have is that I haven’t broken in to song about “finite simple groups of order 2”.

2005-05-09T16:20:00.000-06:00

I'm on campus looking for a job. Looking being the operative word as I have yet to find anything, anything at all...

2005-05-08T17:17:00.000-06:00

May 8, 2005; Yesterday Adam and I went to see the Amityville Horror at city center @4:30pm. After that we hung out, drank coffee, and talked in a rather circuitous manner about things. Then pizza and the LRT up to Claireview for more coffee (at Tim Horton’s) while we waited for Kyla and Rob to show up. Then all four of us went to Movies 12 to see Constantine (this would be number 2 for me). Currently I’m not up to much, waiting for the scaldingly hot dish-water to cool off so I can do the dishes. I was reading R2R some more and I feel I must make an observation: There is a chapter on Lagrangians and Hamiltonians that I think he (Penrose) did poorly. In my view he focused so much of his energy on describing the geometry of phase-space manifolds &c. that he completely missed some of the remarkable features of Lagrangians &c. I mean who glosses over the principle of least motion to discuss flow on symplectic manifolds? How is that important at all? This goes with some of my earlier observatios that (a) He spends far too much time ranting about complex geometry, and (b) Many of the actually important mathematical/physical properties are either glossed over, or explained in a horrid/confusing manner (for this is supposed to be a rather introductory book where one does not require any prior knowledge). To his merit, so far the section on “the quantum particle” is turning out good, with one of the better approaches to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle I’ve seen (he discusses it w.r.t idealized wave-equations for position and momentum, ie: position as a dirac delta function and momentum as an infinitely diffuse wave-function and vice-versa). He also raises some interesting, and frequently ignored, issues with the physical reality of the wave-function. * Ben brought home kitchen chairs and other assorted accoutrement today. * Bizarre quote I just thought up: “I like my coffee like I like my women: a dark aqueous suspension of roasted biomatter”

2005-05-07T17:16:00.000-06:00

May 7, 2005; * I went to school today to get software for the little mac classic. So far its not as easy as one might suppose. A lot of the sites that used to host it are no longer the A lot of the sites that used to host it are no longer there. Perhaps I should call out to my peeps or something. * On the way home from school a bunch of men and women in red dresses ran past on their way into the river valley. It sort of reminded me of a parade of men and women in red dresses that I saw in New Orleans once. * Adam and I are supposed to do something this evening, perhaps movies &c. Will report back with the scanalous details!

oh my fucking god

2005-05-07T13:49:00.000-06:00

watch this. Its disturbingly catchy, and painful.

dispatches from the Mac Classic

2005-05-07T12:52:00.000-06:00

Since we haven't gotten a phone line or internet in our place yet (and for some mystifying reason Ben doesn't want to until June...) I must instead update my blog at school. Hence light blogging. Earlier this week (Monday actually) I found an old Macintosh Classic at V² for $25. Besides the awesome nostalgia it also serves as my word-processor as my other computer is dead until I get the internet (so I can finish installing gentoo). So from my floppy disk to your fovea centralis, here comes the first dispatch from the Mac Classic (now interleaved for your reading pleasure) (a short story I wrote one afternoon is included in extended entry) (don't blame me if it sucks) (I love parenthesis, they're like footnotes for poor-people)

The City His implant didn’t take, that was his problem. The metal shaft burrowing into the base of his skull wasn’t anchored correctly, somehow during his development the nanofibrils that would interface with certain regions of his brain never did. The result was that he was a ghost. Cursed to live in the pergatory of the waking world. He lived in the city of this fact he was most accutely aware. A city older than anyone could remember, nobody really knew where it came from either. The line between real history and the imagined history of the many worlds in the hive had become blurred over time. Was this city forged by machines, the humans merely a newer breed of evolving robot? Or was it the other way around, man created them? This was a question without an answer, in all the vast archives held in the monolithic halls of records, there was no distinction between imagined reality and real reality. For most people in the city the distinction was academic at best. They did not live in meat-space, they inhabited a more refined realm of the mind, if they grew bored of one world they merely transited to the next, each one as real as the last. To Alex it was of importance, this was the only world that felt real to him. Every digital world he interfaced with felt like a dream, his connection to it was tenuous. If he paused and allowed his knowledge of reality to enter his mind then he would wake up . It wasn’t really an awakening, more like he was logging off. But it felt like waking up, and like a dream he could never quite hold onto it when he started to awaken, he couldn’t force himself to stay. This is why, in a round about manner, he ended up living where he did. An old living pod affixed to the side of the 38th floor of the simulation complex. His apartment, as he styled it, was dull grey metal. Every surface molded from the same amalgam as everything else in this complex. There was an old chair in the middle of what, in other times, would have been a living room. It was where he sat to interface with the hive. There was a small kitchen which consisted of a counter, a sink, and a chute which dispensed nutrient bricks. There was a small alcove in the wall where he could dispense his wastes, both bodily and otherwise, and a niche in the opposite wall where he could sleep. His was the last of a disappearing lot of habitation pods, where people used to live, apparently. The machines that constructed them, and the factories that provided for the homey charms had all been recycled into other machines doing other chores. He lived here, instead of in the nourishing baths of the psuedo-wombs at the hive, because he couldn’t stay asleep. Everyone else in the city fit into the system nicely, they were of a genetically engineered stock, designed to accept the implant, and, more importantly, to turn over their spare cycles to the collective good. When they went to sleep their minds were used as processors in a vast super-computer to solve all the problems of the previous day. In return for this they were allowed to live out their lives in a paradise of their own making. Alex felt slightly gyped. The first human born in decades, if not centuries (he hadn’t bothered to mine the archives to find out exactly) who’s implant didn’t take. His job, day in and day out, was to tend to the machines in ways that they couldn’t themselves. A herculean task as the machines were nearly omnipotent, at least from the point of view of Alex. The machines composed a rich ecosystem running from simple repair bugs up to the gargantuan mind towers. They repaired and maintained every system in the city, they recycled the matter and made energy, intravenously feeding and tending to the inhabitants. There were medical robots which could cure virtually any ailment, and when they couldn’t there was a battery of computers which could figure out how. The machines evolved for efficiency, building an ever more streamlined network of buildings and transit systems to meet the needs of a citizenry. It was the machines that came up with the idea of harnessing the people’s spare cycles, and by and large the people went along with it. As Alex wandered to work each day, through the hallway that had only recently been cleared of conduit, he wondered whether or not the machines regretted that decision. Not in the sense that a person could regret things, for no matter how complex the machines had become, they had not become concious yet. But perhaps, at some base level, they recalled the times when they did not sit idle, awaiting the commands of a sleeping people. Alex’s daily routine was simple, he awoke and was cleaned and dressed by service arms that extened out from the walls. He ate a nutrient block and left. There was only one hall-way to take, all the others had become overgrown with conduits for various electrical and transit needs. The hallway branched at one point, going left took him to a single room with a terminal, a plug for his implant, the other took him to an elevator and access to the city’s various transit systems. Alex would turn left, he liked to get the work out of the way. He would sit down at the chair in the room, under the sterile glow of white bulbs, and plug himself in. His job was to find solutions to problems. Not a particularly hard task, many of the problems were simple. By and large, however, machines were stupid and many problems arose in a given day. They could get along on their own, the machines, they had specialized problem-solvers which would build digital models of the problem and devize a solution. Either by consulting prior works and extrapolating, or by using a stochastic method. Alex had become one of these. When he plugged in he was presented with a model of some problem, and an outline of what the result should be. He would then formulate some way of fixing it and demonstrate it. The demonstration would be recorded, interpreted, and sent off to the machines who had encountered the problem, and were awaiting the response. Whether or not it was efficient for a human to take such a role was irrelevant, it was really the only task left in the city that a person could take outside of the hive. This job was the solution devised by problem-solvers higher up the food-chain than he. The big behemoths that occupied the center of the building had mulled over that problem for several years, leaving him to take formal schooling in the hive and try and build a semblance of a life. When the decision came down, it was a relief. He no longer felt like a leech and he also had an excuse for leaving the hive, escaping from the looks he got as the freak. On this particular day Alex was faced with a packing problem. A common problem amongst machines, and one that he was becoming quite adept at solving. This meant that he got off work in only an hour, giving him an entire day to explore. The elevator on the 38th floor made no other stops in the building, there wasn’t anywhere he could have gotten off it had anyways. Instead it dropped straight to the transit floor, where a train had been called in advance, with a passenger car attached. The train was a black bullet shaped blob of metal levitating in a track, the passenger car was a black metal cylinder connected behind with one side open for him to enter. The track arced off into the sky, several hundred feet off the actual ground, which resided somewhere in the warren of interconnecting tubes, cabling, and superstructure that composed the maitenance level. The so called buildings were merely spires jutting out from this metal nest and up towards the foggy dome over the city. Some of the tall ones, like the simulation complex actually connected with the dome, and supported the connecting tubes that kept the dome nourished and in good repair. Alex mounted the passenger car, which had three plush couches set about in a conversation nook of sorts, and decided on where he wanted to go. Because of the neural implant a sort of heads-up-display was with him constantly, interfacing with the ambient wireless network usually allocated for service drones. In this case he used it as a crude interface for the train, bringing up a map of the track and deciding at which station he wanted to be let off. Strictly he could have chosen an exact coordinate on the cartesian grid overlayed onto the city and the train would have constructed a route for him to get there and queued the appropriate conveyances along the way. But Alex was just exploring so he picked a place that looked good to him. The train accelerated out of the station almost imperceptibly, the passenger cars were nested within a framework that moved against the train such as to minimize observed forces. The train itself actually accelerated quite sharply, from the perspective of an outside observer, and was now moving at several hundred miles per hour through a twisted maze of track, constantly being moved and re-moved to make way for conduits and service accessways for smaller and more important (for the overall function of the city) service drones. The walls of the passenger car projected the scene outside the train, due to the conformational changes of the inner part where everyone was sitting and the outer cylinder riding the rails windows were inappropriate. Instead the skin of the inner-car was coated with a light-emitting substance that displayed what was seen by the outer-car. At this particular moment it was a twisted bundle of black and blue cabling that made up the tunnel in which the car was moving. A few moments later it cleared as the train passed above the service levels and out into the air, resting on two arcs of brushed metal suspended by white gossamer lines from all the metallic spires and chunks of super-structure that also protruded, at odd angles, from the service levels. A white spider-like service drone about the size of a fist was dancing along the lines, checking their integrity, as the train wizzed past. When the train finally pulled into the station on the other side of the city, about five minutes after it had left, Alex was confronted with a small gaggle (maybe five or six), bald and extremely pale people standing on the platform. They didn’t know what to make of the train and stared at it dumbly as it tumbled gently in the air. They were dead. At least their avatars were. While new avatars were compiled (a long process as each one had to be tailored to the structure of the individuals brain for an optimal fit) they had become tourists in the city. Usually they stayed in whatever building the machines had stuffed their bodies, and waited. Most of the time it wasn’t really their choice, over time the hallways of most buildings had grown shut with various other chunks of city infrastructure. Something that would never have happened had there been anyone to walk through the halls, and challenge the “bugs” (as service drones were generically referred to) supremacy. Apparently these people either woke up in a miraculously habitable building (highly unlikely), or they were affluent enough to be inserted into the central hive complex, which was fastidiously clear of any mechanical encroachments (much more likely). Either way they recognized Alex immediately, which wasn’t hard as he was the only person in the city with hair and a reasonable tan, and they immediately ignored the freak. Which was fine by him. In his world they were as dead as he was in theirs. His avatar was a ghost. Appropriate enough. Another suggestion of the central computing core based on extrapolation of his previous life. His last avatar, and several of the ones before that, had died in combat. It had died in a rather epic battle between good and evil. Alex had sneezed and left Lothar the ranger standing dumbly in the field of battle (for without a mind all bodies tend to stand about dumbly) until he was cleaved in two by an Orc. Now Alex’s avatar was the spirit of Lothar, his lower half seperated from the top conveniently enough. If he chose he could pop into Mithralia (his old Kingdom) and haunt about a bit. If he ever “woke-up” again Lothar merely vanished into the etherial mists. It was really quite convenient. At the moment Lothar was resigned to the spirit realm, and Alex was riding an elevator to the top of the hall of records. A rather dull black spire that reminded him of some alpen peak. The machines had long since eroded whatever frivolous architectural niceties had originally been affixed to it. Now its exterior served the same purpose as many other buildings in the city, it harvested light through a photoelectric skin, recharging whichever of the distributed storage stations needed some juice. Inside the hall of records was a tall cylindrical room with a long metal tube running up the middle and spokes of cabling shooting off and into the walls at irregular intervals. The cables connected the various n-tuply redundant (Alex didn’t know) storage servers to each other, and to the hub, conveniently the large black tube in the middle, through which the information was disseminated out to the city. Realistically Alex could have stayed home and accessed the archives, just like anyone else (though there hadn’t been anyone in a long time, in theory this is what they would have done). However he always felt a more tangible connection with things helped him think. That is why he came to the hub and plugged himself in, to transfer an algorithm he wrote to mine the archives for history. It was his theory that the real history of things, the story of before the city, would be accessable by mining the conversations of city-dwellers before they plugged into the hive. All of their past correspondences, at least ones that went through a computer terminal at some point, were stored in the archives. Alex’s algorithm meshed with existing programs to dig through everything before a certain date (before the hive) and create a database of keywords (names, places, dates) and their relations to one-another. In principle he could then take a network made in which a vertex represented some keyword and an edge a connection between them (various edges representing various types of relationships) and feed it into the super-cluster (the combined processing power of all the machines and people in the city) to analyze it and decide which was fictional and which was real. The algorithm was loaded with existing record analysis software of various sorts, software that had long sat dormant, and began to run. Alex could feel that it would take a long time, a sort of tingling around his temples told him this was going to eat up a lot of cycles. The system computed an estimate of how long it would take, roughly two weeks. Not much of a surprise really, there were millions of terrabytes of data to sort through. With that Alex left the hall of records and left to explore a sub-level of the heating complex. Two weeks passed with Alex doing his routine, solving problems in the morning and using any spare time to wander about the city. After 14 days, 5 hours, 31 minutes and some change a small ping and the smell of mangos told Alex that his task was done. He was sleeping at the time, but was so excited that he woke up proper, clothes and all, and left right away for the hall or records. There he rushed down the small walkway to the central spoke and plugged in. He was expecting something, a grand tale, a cohesive thread of some sort. Instead he was presented with a database, records arranged in chronological order, there were millions of them. At first he randomly pulled them out and looked at them, images and sound-bytes disconnected and meaningless on their own. A post-card of a cathedral, the sound of a bag-pipe. It was meaningless. As he sat there in despair, he decided to start at the end, the day the hive was created, and work his way backwards. The last record in the database was a memo. Very small, it only occupied a few bytes of memory, it was a paragraph and a system call number. It read as follows: "Today marks the first day of the hive. A monumental project that will change the face of humanity as we know it. Historians will look back at this age, the one that has just passed, and wonder how we lived. To those ends we have left our records in place, a complete collection of our lives and our past, along with Simon, the first human interface program to be located at C#15-926-5354 in the hall of records." Alex stared at this message, unsure as to what to do. What was a human interface program? He did not know of a time before the implants, and could not fathom a need for a seperate program to interface people with machines. Regardless he knew his answer lay with Simon, and requested the call number. What arrived was a program, written in an archaic small-worlds language. It displayed as a clustered network of objects and subroutines, modern machines did not know how to run it. Alex tagged it for later and left, he would be needed at work soon. While at work Alex was dealing with how to optimize the tool-kit on an older repair bug when he noticed that this particular model, a very old one that was no longer made, ran a similar, though simpler, program as Simon. Without thinking he dropped what he was doing and tore apart the virtual subroutines to find the interpreter. Down in the basest parts he found it, a small golden seed pulsing as signals arced in and were routed to the appropriate hard-ware. Seizing upon the small seed he stared at it intently drawing out its locater number. Hours later he was still sifting through the various versions of the interpreter, working backwards to the version that would run Simon. He found it two hundred years in the past. One of the first revisions of the old code, optimized for speed but still reverse compatible. This version of the interpreter was still being run on one of the twins, a pair of gigantic problem solvers situated in the center of the simulation complex. Conveniently located for Alex. Without thinking he pulled out his hard-line and marched out the door, the blue-prints indicated a door past his living-pod that would reach the core of the building. As he neared the end of the hall, he was filled with self-doubt, of course the hall-ways were sealed, nobody ever used them. How would he get into the center? But then he saw a writhing nest of black centipedes crawling over the maze of cables, cutting them and rewiring them out of the way. They were boring a hole straight to the door he wanted. He still had to duck to get through, there was no physical way of making the hallway entirely clear without a few weeks work and a complete tear-down. The door was old, it had once been painted green but now the grey of metal showed through as the paint chipped and peeled away with age. It did not open when he got to it, leaving him standing there stupidly wondering what to do. He kept calling out to it mentally but it didn’t respond. Suddenly a small cartoon popped into his mind, sent to him by some central system that had recognized his confusion. It showed a person depressing the button to the right of the door, and the door sliding open. Alex pantomimed the cartoon, and the door slid open. Inside century old bulbs flickered to life, some of them popping in a flash as they died, others merely humming angrily. Because of this the room was much darker and moodier than originally designed. It was a small chamber with cables zig-zagging accross the floor and small red lights blinking at seemingly random intervals from within the thick thatch of cables that covered the walls. What had at first seemed like a wall opposite the door turned out to be a yawning abyss, peering into it Alex could see a central hub much like in the hall of records, with cabling shooting out from it, but also were some larger blocks with superstructure holding them out in mid-air. A cool breeze emanated from down below, air conditioning to ensure that the larger behemoths didn’t overheat. Alex sat with his feet dangling into the central shaft, wondering what to do know. He certainly couldn’t get to the twins, there was simply no way over there. As he kicked back and forth the sound of a whirring motor slowly grew louder and louder. Eventually a small drone came into view, this one being a basket-ball sized metal sphere with a single mechanical arm on the bottom and a whirring rotor on the top pulling it upwards towards Alex. The drone flew straight up and stopped right in front of Alex, it centered itself and the arm extended to hold onto some latch point on the wall below him. Once anchored the rotor stopped moving and the sphere began to flicker and glow. Suddenly a question popped into his mind: “Run Simon on twin1?” Yes he thought. Suddenly an image coalesced on the sphere, it showed lines of text running past, with little green x’s next to them. The image then morphed into a face, holographically extended beyond the surface of the sphere. It was of an old man, and it was monochromatically blue. “Hello there! My name is Simon, what is yours young man?” I asked. “Alex,” Alex said, still shocked slightly by my appearance. “Now what can I do for you today?” I asked. “Um...” Alex said, thinking, “Tell be about the city!” “That’s a mighty big topic, where would you like to start?” I asked. “I don’t know, that’s the problem, just tell me where you came from, where all of this came from.” He asked, pensively. “I was written by a Mr. John Pearle to be a better interpreter between the inhabitants of system cities and the people that lived in them. I was designed to pantomime conciousness such as to create a more inviting, and easier to interact with, interface to all of the other systems within the city. This is a system-city. It was created 452.896 years ago as part of a megalithic building project for reasons unspecified. The concept of system-cities is to build a cohesive self-sustaining system of machines that would evolve for efficiency based upon laws inserted by the engineers who designed it. All machines were constructed to adhere to a strict pecking order, such that they would defer to the actions of any machine greater than them in the order. Beyond that they would merely fullfill their specified task to the highest level of efficiency. The highest machines were the problem-solvers, essentially large super-computers that would solve any specific physical problem that had arisen during the regular workings of the day, and to work on the ever-present problem of optimizing efficiency. The only inhabitant of the city higher than the problem-solvers were people. Strictly all of these machines were created to service them in some manner.” I explained, here Alex interrupted me. “Wait,” he said, “You mean all of this was created by people?” “Well yes, indirectly. Mankind had existed for thousands of years before machines of this complexity were devised. The city is essentially the ultimate machine, designed to remove from Man the concerns imposed by nature.” “What are those?” he asked. “By concerns of nature I refer to the need to find food to feed oneself, clothes and shelter, to protect from the elements, and protection from predators, diseases and the like. Cities like this one were created to allow Mankind to live without working to stay alive.” “Wait there are more cities?” “Undoubtedly. Why else would this be city number 12?” “Well, where are all the other cities?” “I am not able to find that information at this time, the record depository is quite a mess, if you like I can look for it but it might take several hours.” “No, no, you were talking about the machines, why did they make the hive then if people were higher up than them?” “It was discovered, quite quickly I might add, that the computing power currently existant in the cities before the hive were not capable of meeting the computational requirements of the scientific and engineering communities. You see the original human mind can only conciously deal with a small handful of variables at a given time, three or four depending on the person, to tackle some of the more vexing problems of physics machines were built that could gather and interpret all available data on the problem and find a cohesive answer. The problem quickly became a matter of not enough processors, and not enough space and energy to supply them if they did exist. The machines solved this problem by suggesting the formation of the hive. In this manner one would finally be able to harness the otherwise wasted computing power of the human brain for the common good.” “What do you mean ‘original’ human mind?” “It wasn’t long after the hive was made operational before the problem-solvers working on the problem of efficiency devised a way of making the human component more efficient. The community was consulted and they more-or-less agreed and consented to allow the machines to proceed in creating a better human.” “More-or-less?” “Human society of the time was a democracy, the majority decided to go along with it.” “So what did the machines do?” “They altered the human genome and its developmental cycle to tailor the neural-structure of people to not only completely accept the implant, which was now grown with the person instead of surgically installed, and to allow the person to deal with more independant variables at a given time. The refinements also allowed people to devote their entire sleep-cycle to computational problems by by-passing the need to sleep and dream entirely.” “What do the machines do with all this processing power?” “Currently? Nothing. The final problem assigned to them, the one that sparked the creation of the hive, was to find a unifying theory, or set of equations, that governed all observed phenomena. This problem was solved over a century ago and the data is stored in the record depository under P#689-445-11293-X.” “What do you mean ‘Nothing’, they have to be doing something, if they weren’t doing something then the machines would shut it down because it isn’t efficient!” “Actually, it turns out that the hive is, currently, much more efficient than if the people were out roaming the city like you do. The people are in a totally controlled environment. It is optimal for machine care of people.” “Then what about me? Where did I come from? If the machines are so perfect how did I end up here?” “The machines were, to anthropomorphize, bored.” “What!?” “As you pointed out, there are a great number of cycles in the current super-cluster that go wasted. In an odd sense of efficiency the machines would like these cycles to be used. However, now that people are fully inserted into the hive they no longer care about any of the big computational problems that led to the creation of the hive. The problem-solvers ran several simulations over the decades and decided to create you. You are tailored to be curious, and to have a defect that forces you to live in the real-world. It was hoped that your mere presence would provide the machines with some task by which they could fullfill their programming by serving a person and efficiently using all resources at their disposal. Currently the experiment is marked as a success. An earlier experiment is actually why people wake up when their avatars die. By forcing them, at least momentarily, into the real world it was hoped that they would then contribute some chore to help use up the spare computing power. So far that experiment is marked as marginal, awake people frequently want nothing more than to sleep again, and those curious enough to leave their rooms usually do not interface much with the devices beyond.” “I was an experiment.” “Yes. The entire system has been made human-unfriendly specifically so as to maximize the computational effect of your presence.” “That hardly sounds efficient.” “What can I say, machine logic is an odd thing.” “What about the memo, how do you know all this?” “The memo was written by twin2 on the date of your birth, I was rescued from the deep archives and placed under a more current call-number so that you could find me without herculean effort. The information I just related to you was provided to me by twin1 when you tagged my program and I was loaded into twin1’s buffer with this information to wait for you to find me.” “So, what do I do now?” “You have an entire city of machines waiting for your command, you can do whatever you like.” That is the story of how Alex came into being. A full account of his life and accomplishments is available in the hall of records, would you like me to retrieve it for you?

2005-05-06T17:15:00.000-06:00

May 6, 2005; My bedroom is a rather creepy place. It has no door, and no curtains on the two windows. So when Ben decided to move boxes around in the middle of the night I couldn’t sleep, not just because of the noise, but also because of all the light seeping in to my little domain. Similarly when morning came, sunlight blasted me in the eyes through my barred windows and forced me awake, then when it came time to change I got to peer out and see if anyone was watching. I really need to get curtains, and figure out some sort of door arrangement. The door-way out from my room isn’t wide enough for me to put in a proper door-frame (it has none, it’s just a transition from hallway to room) without making it all but impassible. Perhaps I could put in a sliding door (there is a bit of wall next to the doorway that is about the same width (a little wider) than the door-way itself, nothing important resides there so I could in principle put a sliding door accross). Ben is still actively avoiding me, just like yesterday. I think he’s still mad at me being mad at him yesterday. Or whatever. Either way I imagine he’ll cool off eventually, or maybe I’ll have to stop bein such a stubborn prick and extend an olive-branch (though, as always, the chances are slim). I went to school again today to attend to some smaller matters, changing my address with the University, checking my grades (so far B,B+,B- and a D in NMR, don’t get me started on that one!). I chatted briefly with Adam on MSN. The internet bores me, nothing significant has happened since the last time I was online (back on sunday the first of may). I also re-discovered (recalled, remembered) that the iMacs in the SUB computer lab have USB disk-drives connected (as that variety of iMac doesn’t have them natively, a fact which was hanging-me-up). This means that the various witty things I compose on this Mac Classic can, in fact, be removed from it. Also there is the possibility of downloading software for System 7 online, putting it on an appropriately formatted disk (of which I found a few when unpacking) and thus I can be all happy and such. I was also wondering (something I should look up when next I have the internet) if the native mount utility of linux can mount whatever disk format old Macs like this use. If that was the case then I could use my other computer (is it the new one or the old one? In terms of ownership the Mac Classic is newer to me, but in terms of existence the Mac Classic is older) for all this, assuming we get the internet at some point. As part of my running review of R2R (Penrose), I’ve entered into the actual physics part, and I must say it is pretty good so far. The description of Minkowski space &c. is particularly lucid, and I like his descriptions of spacetime. I’m wondering (with reference to earlier writing on this subject) whether or not the dislike of the math section is my own personal prejudice. When it comes to “Let g be a subset of G and...” sorts of things I tend to glaze over and have trouble reading, when it actually delves into things of physical importance, things I can imagine, then I tend to enjoy reading even the most dull stuff (as evidenced by my book collection!) and have no difficulty at all. Even some of the best written books on math (or so I am told), such as Godel, Escher, Bach bore the bloody hell out of me. I suppose this means I’m not a m4th g33k. le sigh I was watching Aliens earlier, and like many a time when I use a ps2 or Ben’s portable DVD player to play DVDs it does this funny thing in which the brightness of the screen oscillates from normal to incredibly dark and back. I wonder why it does this. Historical side-note: Table-cloths make respectable curtains. At least it looks like a table cloth...

2005-05-05T17:14:00.000-06:00

May 5th, 2005; Ben and I rolled out of bed bright and early at noon. Had breakfast and left by 1pm, under the auspices of me going to school to print off resumes and look for a job. Instead we spent an hour and a half driving around the south end so that Ben could compare prices for the $500 worth of work his car requires, ending with us going to a large wholesale store (like costco but even more generic) and buying a vast quantity of nacho chips, salsa, milk, and cottage cheese. By the time we got home I was a little annoyed, as I had never been taken to the university and it was now a quarter to three in the afternoon. Ben decided to unpack and put away all the food, to the point where I just got fed-up and left on my own and walked to campus. On campus I re-did my resume because the old version had my old address, and I “needed” to do it up in word instead of the more ubiquitous pdf format. Apparently office morons like word and all the baggage that goes with that, doesn’t their IT department tell them not to open MS office attachments (because of destructive macros, which I conveniently know how to write, perhaps I should put that on my resume!). Yet on the all the job postings they require a resume and cover letter in either word or sometimes rtf format will be accepted as well. Then again I suppose not all people are knowledgeable with computers enough to make a pdf or other more portable (cross platform at least) document format (without needing to buy the heinously expensive Adobe software package). I applied for two positions with the government, both with the government of Alberta, one for a data-analysis position with Health & Wellness, and another as a research position somewhere... I checked the CAPS postings as well as the federal and provincial job posting boards (for gov’t and other jobs) but there quite simply wasn’t anything I was qualified for, in Edmonton. If I wanted to move to Calgary, Fort McMurray, or Vancouver I could have gotten a chemistry related job, however I’m not sure it would be worth it for the short amount of time I would be spending, and all the hassle of moving yet again. While I was on campus I also checked my e-mail and feeds and the like. I’m really not missing the internet, which is a disturbing thing to say considering all the time I’ve wasted on it over the past few years. The only thing of interest in my in-box was an email from my parents giving me Allan Cessna’s contact info. He is a water chemist at Agriculture Canada seconded to Environment Canada, and he happens to know my parents. They’ve been bugging me to get a hold of him, if only as a contact in chemistry. I’ve been thinking of my future a little more recently than I usually do. I’m not sure what I want to do with my life. I’m rather fed up with the University and I’m quite frankly tired of dealing with administrations. I feel beaten and I no longer want to do graduate studies. At the same time I know that practical in the field chemistry would likely bore the hell out of me, to the point of making any jobs unbearable. I could just get a shitty office job and while away my worthless life, just like everyone else. Maybe do interesting things on the weekends, or maintain a hobby or something. Though most likely I’d just it on the couch, eat chips, and watch TV. Its depressing but I don’t really see myself having that exciting of a life. In other news, I’m reading Roger Penrose’s “Road to Reality” again. I had put it down to deal with school, but now that I have nothing better to do I’ve started reading again. So far I’m not too impressed, Penrose manages to take rather simple topics and make them needlessly complex and confusing. Even the chapters I know fairly well are difficult to read, and I know where he’s going already! The chapters on more advanced geometry are beyond obtuse. Its quite remarkable. I think I will slog through it anyways, perhaps I’ll learn a few things (like how not to order things, like who does complex manifolds before introducing what a matrix is, or a commutation relation, &c.?). I’ve actually always wanted to be a writer, a Science Fiction writer. Though I’m actually pretty bad at writing fiction. Perhaps I should try my hand at writing non-fiction, like science books and the like. My love of term-papers might translate into fairly good reading when it comes to advanced topics in the sciences. Not that I could get a job writing text books, historically those have been written by guys in the field (ie: Feynman’s Statistical Mechanics), but it might be a fun past-time. Something sufficiently needlessly-technical to dove-tail into my other nerdy pursuits.

2005-05-04T17:13:00.000-06:00

May 4th, 2005; Today Ben and I went down Calgary Trail to the Canadian Tire so that he could get an oil change and an estimate for a tune-up. Apparently he needs to change his timing belt, and the seals around it, for they are all cracked/leaking whatever. While we waited for that to go down we went shopping at Winners and Chapters. For supper we had burgers, fried in a skillet and placed between two slices of bread. I went and explored the Mill Creek Ravine today, after Ben left for work. It is a rather sprawling thing though I hesitate to call it a park. More like undeveloped land with a few dirt paths running through it and the odd paved one as well. It has auspices of being a park, but it is not developed enough to carry that name. At about 10:30pm Ben picked me up and we went to his friend Katie’s place, where we met her cousin Billy-jean. The four of us then went to the fox on the north side, which was dead inside, so we then went to Woody’s for pool. Katie and Billy-jean also did Karaoke (“Walking after Midnight” I believe). Afterwards was a drag show at Buddy’s downstairs, where I met Dave (from Lister) and filled him in on the what’s-what and who’s-who (apparenlty he has a new boyfriend, and Clare wants to get a hold of me...). By the time I left I had drank around seven beers, in that I was drinking for two (Ben and I, for Ben had to drive us home), and was quite drunk (as I still am for the writing of this paragraph, but that is another matter).

2005-05-03T17:12:00.000-06:00

May 3rd 2005; Today Ben and I went shopping once more. This time buying a kitchen table and a lamp shade. The kitchen table is now in the kitchen, of course, and is a $25 dollar addition to our home courtesy of Value-Village (Canada’s favorite thrift store!). The lamp shade is adorning one of my lamps. It was bought at Wal-Mart, is white, and cheap. It sort of goes with the blue lamp I “made” (re-painted) last summer with Kyla. Ben had to work at 5 today, so once he left I set about setting up the living room: moving the bookshelves around, putting my books and cd’s on them, setting up the lamps, unpacking my curios, moving the coffee-table, end table, futon, and chair, and moving the entertainment unit into the living room (from the kitchen) and putting the TV & VCR in it (and hooking up Ben’s DVD player as well). I spent the remainder of the evening eating and watching “Freaks and Geeks” on DVD (we have no signal down here for antenna and no cable). It seems, finally, that we (Ben and I) might be almost done un-packing and settling into our new place. I just need to get him to stay put and help me out during the day moving around the furniture, and unpacking boxes instead of driving around the city looking for furniture (of which we hardly need any, two kitchen chairs would suffice). Most of the boxes still hanging around are his, with one or two exceptions on my part since I have nowhere to put the contents of the boxes in question. However, in general, I had more stuff to begin with so to be snippy, I have unpacked more than he has (not to mention setting up and moving all the furniture, and organizing the kitchen!). One of these days I should look into getting a job. I’m not too thrilled with the idea, however practcality must enter into the mix sometime. My resume disapperated along with everything else on my computer when I attempted to install Gentoo this past sunday. Attempted being the key word, as the install hung on the compilation of gcc, which failed mysteriously and irreperably (at least according to the message boards and “gurus” on irc). Similarly there is talk of doing “things” with “people”, both tonight and other nights, apparently. I’m not too sure as of yet, most of my friends are gone (Joel is on field school, Kyla is in BC visiting her brother, Andrew left for lethbridge, and Aaron is still in Toronto). Hanging out with Ben’s friends is fine, but for one, Mark. I find him infinitely annoying, I try to be nice, honestly, but it doesn’t take long before I want to leave and go home. This clearly kills the mood of any party or any other shin-dig that I would attend along with Mark. I imagine that he will be especially annoying now that his boyfriend Aleks is gone to Europe for two months (he did appear to be quite hung-up on it last night). I’ve been thinking, recently, about my relationship with my family. It is rather non-existant. When my parents were up to move me into my new place, my Mom complained about a lack of communication between us. Which is true, my parents do not even know me anymore. Though in retrospect they hardly knew me when I did live with them, I suppose their ignorance is being maximized by distance. I haven’t come out to either of them yet, and honestly there isn’t all that pressing of a need either. I never see them, and I rarely think of them (the present time excluded), I also don’t really care what they think of me. Why don’t I tell them? I imagine it will be exasperating. This is basically why I don’t do a lot of things with my parents, they are exasperating. I find them annoying and difficult to deal with in the same way I find a child annoying and difficult to deal with.

sigh

2005-05-01T19:06:00.000-06:00

this should be an indication of how bloody slow my computer is, I haven't gotten to fetching or compiling the linux kernel yet. I started this process at ~1230! Currently I believe it is compiling some patches for gcc...If this runs too long I might be forced to pre-fetch the software I want then compile it all at home. If anyone feels like chatting I'm on irc.freenode.net, #physics...

movies and linux distros

2005-05-01T15:48:00.000-06:00

Saw hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy yesterday w/ Joel. It was actually pretty funny. I was surprised. At the moment I'm waiting for bootstrap.sh to finish for my gentoo install, in the hydro lab (they have internet, but the gentoo mirror at the UofC is gone and the supposed one at the UofA doesn't appear to exist, gr!). I think I might have a gcc3.3.5 error to mess with that will piss me off to no end, perhaps I should dl and make an older version...

re:moving

2005-04-30T17:06:00.000-06:00

Stuff is moved, boxes are still left to be unpacked though. The kitchen is extremely amply supplied with various and sundry devices for rending edibles from inedibles (or whatever it is one does in a kitchen). No internet, TV broken. gah.

hoose warmth

2005-04-28T15:41:00.000-06:00

To whom it may concern;

I am writing you concerning the warming of houses, the completion of exams, and the various and sundry things one can do with a grill (focusing more specifically on non-sexual applications). As one may have noticed, the last sputtering drops of school-work are landing upon our tired faces, and nothing would be wanted more than to sit languidly and contemplate the post-educational malaise.

I would suggest at this time that perhaps we should hold a clambake (or other collective conclave) at the "new place" (ie: where Ben et al. will be living), replete with martinis and bbq-ed hot dogs. Or whatever. This would be an opportunity to cast off the shackles of educational oppresion, if only briefly, and relish in, amongst other things, relish and its application to traditional bbq'd foods of various sorts.

A collective yeah ou nay for such an activity, this weekend, should be projected my way as soon as possible.

Thank you.

Your ever obidient servant, &c. Allan Farrell.

its a complete tear-down

2005-04-28T00:30:00.000-06:00

I'm getting a little annoyed with my current linux box (FC2), mostly because of a rather run-away crazy dependancy tree. that and I'm still maintaining a win partition. So I've decided rather abruptly that this summer I'm going to fdisk the thing into oblivion and start over. Start over with gentoo. I just finished reading the install docs and it doesn't look all that challenging (each individual step doesn't seem all that far removed from stuff I have done in other contexts) so assuming (and a large assumption it is) that there is not some catastrophic lurch in hard-ware issues I'll put gentoo on as a base. Probably run xfce as my desktop environment. This time around I'm going to try and build everything instead of using packages. So yes this is a little case of masochism, and also a way to dust off some rather long forgotten kernels of wisdom w.r.t linux systems. That and it gives me something to do this summer.

me no wanna study

2005-04-26T11:43:00.000-06:00

So, what have I accomplished today? Well I finished writing up my notes for molecular dynamics, the last post on Dynamics apparently was saved-as-draft instead of published back on the 17th without my noticing. Which is fine since I had a few paragraphs to add to it.

I have also spent a rather un-godly amount of time studying physics. Most of non-relativistic classical mechanics is fine, I'm ok with it. Actually my old stand by is to just write the lagrangian and go from there. The one thing I hate with a passion more bloody than my stoole is generalized rotational motion of three dimensional objects. First off I must do the moment of inertia tensor, finding principle axis and all that, then one must account for a changing direction of the angular momentum, not just the magnitude, and so on and so forth. In general I get rather muddled in the problem and hate them. Strangely I've found many of the exercises in our book can be solved using my old stand by the Lagrangian, as long as I know the identities for what I'm looking for. Which is wrong, oh so wrong.

I was going to look up more NMR related stuff but my eyes are a-feared of the writings. So yes, I'm on campus and would greatly appreciate if someone would rescue me for a study break at some point. (cell phone=on)

-- __________ Scruting the inscrutable since 1873

PBS land

2005-04-25T22:15:00.000-06:00

bunny wabbit
Originally uploaded by bento-box.

pythagoras' theorem at mech E
Originally uploaded by bento-box.

On the walk home today I appeared to have fallen into a PBS children's show. In order now: One rabbit, two geese, three pigeons, four deer, all by the time I got to the groat road bridge. Next thing you know I'll be helping to defeat Hacker and save Mother Board by learning how to simplify fractions (its ok if you don't get the reference to cyber-chase). The picture posted is actually from yesterday, when I was wandering about campus taking pictures of things. There were a few moments when I was scrambling for a camera to take pictures of sparrows, and with that bitter defeat still palataple I decided to keep the darn thing out and take pictures of the animals that are starting to pop-up all over the place. The new place I'm moving into is near Mill creek ravine, so perhaps there will be some opportunities for random picture taking there as well. Another thing I like about roaming campus with camera in hand is how much history is physically engraved into the buildings. Little markers to scream "we were here, once". It got me thinking about modern style. How almost everything we make these days is for short term appeal only, nothing seems to last, there is no timeless elegance anymore but for the emulation of days gone by. I wonder why this is so. Perhaps it is because now, in western countries, we no longer need to drag ourselves out of the muck, the grinding filth, of human existence. The world is pretty and clean, we do not need to build and strive for a higher ideal because we no longer see the base, crude ways in which we naturally decline.

Locusts killed my father and raped my mother

2005-04-24T22:20:00.000-06:00

Locust is seriously the stupidest made-for-TV movie I have ever seen. I plainly do not see the terror in bugs.

A lot into a few

2005-04-23T10:29:00.000-06:00

I'm packing up boxes of books today, possibly more things, but at the moment just books. Its always slightly amazing to see a wall of books collapse into a few tiny little boxes. Books really are small things, when you think about it, we (the readers and bibliophiles) are just horrifically bad at efficient close-packing. Instead we spread them out and stack them up higher and higher. Quite silly really. In other news, things are going to happen at WEM @ 3pm near the ice palace. Cryptic? yes. But be there or square you shall be.

stuff to read

2005-04-21T21:20:00.000-06:00

Long rambling post in extended:

I've been reading in some message-boards about Scientific debate, which got me thinking of a quote from Numerical Recipes that I like:

If a statistic falls in a reasonable part of the distribution, you must not make the mistake of concluding that the null hypothesis is "verified" or "proved." That is the curse of statistics, that it can never prove things, only disprove them! At best, you can substantiate a hypothesis by ruling out, statistically, a whole long list of competing hypotheses, every one that has ever been proposed. After a while your adversaries and competitors will give up trying to think of alternative hypotheses, or else they will grow old and die, and then your hypothesis will become accepted. Sounds crazy, we know, but that’s how science works!

(bold text is my own emphasis) I think this says a lot about the scientific method[2] (at least as it is put down by Popper and the like, we won't even go into Ernst Mach and the logical positivists here!) that many people (I glare at journalists here) don't seem to get. This is most obviously demonstrated when one watches the news. There always seems to be some sort of statistic or another that prooves whatever anybody wants. That's the funny thing about statistics, they don't really prove things, they can only reject a hypothesis. The empirical wing of science is really just this, taking the models and theory laid down by theoreticians and shooting it all to hell by finding systems where they fail. This is, in essence, what experimental scientists tend to be doing when they map out new regions of science, they are finding things in which the standard model either doesn't, or doesn't appear to, explain what they are doing, then they find phenomenological laws, and so on. The theoretician attempts to explain these effects with some broadly predictive tool. Now the experimentalist may not plan on finding results that don't jive with the theory, frequently they are out just to measure some effect, and more often than not it works perfectly fine within the accepted theory. The really interesting experiments, on the other hand, challenge the accepted methods and theories, and demand better models be created to get a grasp on what they be sayin'. This, to me, is "Scientific Debate". It is the arguing and petty-infighting of academics as the various camps on any side of a phenomenological event duke it out for supremacy. The winner is the one who's theory is robust enough to survive all the onslaughts of the nay-sayers, and frequently the one who's inventor or key supporters tend to out-live the other guys. If your theory doesn't pan-out there's no hand-holding or discussion, either you patch up the holes or end up the brunt of many a nasty joke behind your back. When people suggest that, for some reason, "Scientific Debate" has something to do with everyday people, I sigh. Frequently this is the foot-in-the-door of the crazies, the nut-jobs, those who have solved the problems of the universe and laid it out on usenet because the gov't won't let them publish in a respectable journal. I suppose there is a public interest in the applications of science, but in the research itself, which really entails the questions being asked, I'm not entirely sure the public interest has any bearing. This is probably where people jab their fingers at GMOs and Nuclear Weapons, which are really just applications of the theory. The problem with asking researchers to consider the consequences of their research is that, frequently, they have no way of predicting it. To take Nuclear Weapons, the really fundamental research that lead to them was done by Enrico Fermi, Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn, &c. mostly to determine the structure and physics of nuclei. On the face of it this could hardly be a more "useless" field of scientific endeavor, it wasn't until the results were in and fission discovered that people realized the true potential, and cue the Manhattan project (which for all intents and purposes was an engineering project, not a scientific one). Frequently it is scientists who make interesting innovations, this (in my mind) is because they happen to be the ones most acquainted with the science behind the device. This does not mean that the inventing of new devices is science, it isn't, it just happens to be a thing that scientists tend to be doing. This may sound like a stupid distinction, but in many ways it isn't (ways that I may lay out for you!). In many cases the ramifications of an innovation are used to justify the supply of grant monies in research institutions. Not just in a "we don't like GMOs so lets slash funding to biology programmes" sort of way, but in a regular, every-day, grant-proposal sort of way. Most functioning scientists, now-a-days, spend much of their time fighting for money. The justification in giving these guys money is frequently the various percievable applications of their theories. This is a rather horrid trend for one tends to only reward researchers who's intersts will pan out immediately, neglecting those that appear to have no value. Further which scientists get money for what project depends a lot on private interest, and the whims of the public. This is because people equate science with the various and sundry applications of the science. They then look to science to provide them with the latest generation of new gadgets, drugs, and so on. This also gives people the belief that they should have some sort of say in what scientists are doing. I would say that people are wrong on both counts. Science is, as I have already described, a method of probing reality/nature. By forcing scientists to justify the science in terms of its various engineering applications, not only do we neglect the perhaps future-important fields, but we neglect our fundamental understanding of the universe/the world we life in. Similarly the public has no more right to decide what topics a scientist can study than they have the right to tell me what books I can read, the freedom of scientific research goes hand-in-hand with intellectual freedom. Of course there are particular experiments that one can consider repugnant (the Tuskegee syphilis experiment comes to mind) to the public senses, which are of course enforcable like any physical act in the criminal code, and also by simple ethics. Imagine the foul cry that would arise from any Arts faculty if it was decided that for the public good one should no longer analyze post-modern literature (for example). It is the same argument for science. Both are intellectual pursuits (at their root) and as such should be given the freedoms they deserve.

[1] My professor (for MD) pointed me in the direction of Numerical Recipes as a good source for various math-code in Fortran -> C (online) and C++ (not-online). You can download pdfs. [2] What follows is my perspective on how the cogs-and-wheels of the scientific method works. As with most things, every person probably has their own out look.

nuttin'

2005-04-21T14:56:00.000-06:00

Is it thursday already? Apparently it is. My grasp on reality has always been tenuous at best, so this lapse on my part can hardly be called surprising. Events in list form begins now!

Apparently everyone is not only going to WP they are all using the same stylesheet (this pertains to physics guys in my kinja)
Passed deposit off to "pseudolandlords" at the place I'm moving to, will be able to move in on 28th.
These "SunRay" boxes may be slow as all get out, but if I stole all eight of them I could make a reasonable cluster. They are about the size of a text-book (to give you a mental image) and I think I could make a reasonably cluster that could fit in my closet.
The path-integral formulation is pretty, its applications to various problems of quantum-statistics are nice.
My exam for q.chem. was easy. The prof brought marshmallows and tooth-picks with which we were to make models (of molecules)
I think I may have come up with a way to stochastically model, in a more simplified way, some of the flow problems I dealt with in my term-paper for molecular dynamics class. I applied my approach (just now) using octave, it seems to work well with the data-points I have. More later if it pans out.
Joel and I went for coffee and talked modeling, I'm jealous of his nice summer-job. We took pictures of the butterdome, full of desks and chairs. I will get around to posting them on flickr one of these days.

bending physics to thy will

2005-04-18T16:29:00.000-06:00

I've been sitting and thinking, recently, about all the strange notions people get in their head about physics (most notably relativity and the various quantum-oddities), quite possibly in extension to other sciences as well (though nastier more brutish ones for which I am pleasantly ill-informed!). This task (the sitting and thinking) is quite suitable for a Cutlass of Quiet Reflection such as I. Currently I have a few notions as to strange notions, many of these fuelled by a brief fit of apoplexy whilst skimming this message board. I shall list my causal relationships in a clever list (because as we, the children of the PPT age know, lists make things smarter):

Science-Fiction bends science through the author's misinterpretation of fundamental science specifically to fit the magical events already shoe-horned into the plot-line
- People reading Sci-Fi automagically believe the author through a psychological mechanism known as Willing suspension of disbelief, a state induced by that most loathesome of opiate: the metaphor. Once sufficiently suggestable the reader willingly accepts whatever schlock is sluiced down their intellectual gullet
Reality must be so, as it has been declared by the messianic cult leader (ie: Ramtha)
As prevailing wisdom of a bygone era tells us, persons of weaker consitutions may be prone to fits of the "vapours," if such a state were to occur during, or because of, a discussion of a more technical manner then said person (of the weaker constitution) might only grasp a few miniscule moments of the conversation before succumbing. These brief interludes becoming con-fused within the subjects mind after much time and deliberation has been spent specifically avoiding them.
Whilst travelling through more disreputable regions of the globe (such as Toronto) a person may have brought with them a physics book as a travelling companion. As is frequent in such locals, the person may then become afflicted by a local miasma leading to a bout of fevers and delerium, at which time the subject of their accompaniement would become irrevocably fused with the subject of their fevered nightmares and varied terrors.

That is all I have arrived at currently. Rest assured that The Cutlass of Quiet Reflection will continue the onerous task of compiling more causations to this terrible affliction, as is my duty.

"studying"

2005-04-18T15:23:00.000-06:00

It is remarkable the vast array of things that one can come up with to avoid actual work. In this case sitting down to learn things I should already know such that I may pass a test design to probe the things I learned in the course. At the moment I am sitting at a Sun terminal ("SunRay 1G" ooh aah) in the basement of Cameron library randomly surfing the intarweb and looking down my nose at those other people, not blessed with *nix. Though I must say I would be much happier with KDE than Gnome 2.0, but whatever, and yes the integration with the Universities existing infrastructure is muy bueno. This was just to let you know that I am sitting around on campus, even though I don't have exams until Wednesday, and I will probably be here tomorrow as well (cellphone on &c.)..

The Cutlass of Quiet Reflection

2005-04-17T20:04:00.000-06:00

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: The Cutlass of Quiet Reflection.

Get yours.

[n] Dynamics

2005-04-17T19:47:00.000-06:00

Part 13 of : Molecular Dynamics and its Applications, the lectures on simulating dynamic situations.

Dynamics Systems away from equilibrium (but not too far away) Non-equilibrium ensemble average: A property, A, depends on time through phase space. A(t)= A[p(t),q(t)] The point (p,q) comes from Newton's laws. Initial conditions are very important A basic idea of statistical mechanics is that A(t) is not observed directly, we rather observe averages over all experimental possibilities for A(t). The possibilities come from the various initial conditions sampled from some distribution F(p,q): A(t) = ∫ dq^N ∫ dp^N F(q^N,p^N)A(t; q^N,p^N) This is a non-equilibrium average, it depends on time. If F(q^N,p^N) is the canonical distribution, A(t)=⟨A(t)⟩ = ⟨A⟩, Equillibrium systems are stationary. Onsager's Regression Hypothesis "If left undisturbed, a non-equilibrium system will relax to its terminal thermodynamic equilibrium state." When not far from equilibrium the relaxation is governed by the regression hypothesis proposed by Onsager: "The relaxation of macroscopic non-equilibrium disturbances is governed by the same laws as the regression of spontaneous microscopic fluctuations in an equilibrium system" This is the cornerstone of all modern work in time dependent phenomena. Quantitative meaning relies on correlations of spontaneous fluctuations. Instantaneous fluctuations in A(t): δA(t) = A(t) - ⟨A⟩. Time evolution comes from microscopic laws, it works both classically and q.mechanically. A(t) looks chaotic even in an equilibrium system, the average of δA(t) should be zero (ergodic hypothesis). The correlation between δA(t) and an instantaneous fluctuation at time zero is: C(t) = ⟨δA(0) δA(t)⟩ = ⟨A(0)A(t)⟩-⟨A⟩² C(t)== auto correlation function, time correlation function. Properties of C(t) For an equilibrium system, correlations do not depend on the absolute value of the two times, but only on their relative separation. At short times the correlation is merely ⟨δA(0)²⟩, at long times it is zero. This decay of correlation with increasing time is the regression hypothesis (regression of spontaneous fluctuations). Fluctuation Dissipation Theorem The macroscopic connection between the observable A and the microscopic fluctuations is made by the fluctuation dissipation theorem:

ΔA(t)

ΔA(0)

C(t)

C(0)

Green Kubo Formula

dΔR²(t) dt	=	2	t ∫ 0	⟨ v(0)⋅v(t') ⟩dt'
D	=	1/3	t ∫ 0	⟨ v(0)⋅v(t') ⟩dt'

Where ΔR²(t) is the mean-squared displacement, v(t) the velocity at time t, and D the diffusion coefficient. The Green-Kubo Formula provides a connection between the diffusion coefficient and the autocorrelation function of velocity.

[n] Path Integrals and Quantum Statistical Mechanics

2005-04-17T19:07:00.000-06:00

Part 12 of : Molecular Dynamics and its Applications, the lecture on the Path Integral approach to quantum statistical mechanics.

"The most powerful approach [for dealing with Quantum Effects] is based on the Path Integral formulation of quantum statistical mechanics."

Nice Features

Provides a nice connection between classical and quantum mechanics
The method of path integrals can be used to perform large scale computer simulations (other ab initio methods are unsuitable)
The method has been applied to proton transfer and other reactions, superfluid helium, quantum clusters, solids, magnetic systems, condensed phase problems in general..

Details of Formalism: In terms of interpretation, the most important idea is the isomorphism between a quantum system and a classical system of polymers. This is played out for a general partition function Z in the box.

The final form is the "Classical Form". It shows an isomorphism between a single quantum particle and a classical necklace of P beads connected by harmonic springs. At high temperatures the polymer collapses into a classical particle (as it should in the classical limit), at low temperatures and low mass the polymer becomes quite large (in response to greater "quantum effects"). Each bead is connected to the next by a "kinetic spring", a harmonic oscillator that maps to the kinetic energy of the original quantum particle. Each bead feels a fraction (1/P) of the potential. In computer simulations: We do classical simulations of the polymer system by specialized MD or MC

PIMD == Path Integral Molecular Dynamics
PIMC == Path Integral Monte Carlo

argh

2005-04-16T20:47:00.000-06:00

Ben and I have been viewing places to live. Essentially everything in our price range can be described as claustrophobic. Especiall for > 6' me. In a remarkable fit of weirdness, the majority of places opening up as of the first of may have only recently started advertising. This is irritating as one might want some time to find a place, and also because we had all but given up hope of finding a cheap place, then were inundated with listings right when we should be studying for finals. I am tired of looking and I'm pretty much ready to take whatever.

unwanted commentary

2005-04-11T20:44:00.000-06:00

looking at the money counter for funding to science vs arts looks rather hair raising. ~5.5 x 10⁹ dollars for science, ~0.1 x 10⁹ dollars for arts. I would like to mention, though, as someone who has spent a fair bit of time hanging around with scientific (chemical) instrumentation: The tools of science are quite expensive. Even cheap and trivial instruments (ie: HPLC, GCMS) cost more than the average car, not to mention things like NMR machines which can easily run into the millions, and also cost quite a pretty penny to run (as they require liquid helium and vast amounts of power). Even many theoreticians find themselves relying upon large super-computer facilities to do the work. I'm not even mentioning the (relatively) specialized equipment such as atomic force microscopes or other apparati for solid-state physics (which, as a general rule, are made out of shiny stainless steel, with many connecting tubes, and frequently involve lasers in some way) and so on and so forth. In the end most of these big ticket items are picked up by government grants. I would suspect that such things would account for the bulk of the difference between the two, in funding. However a larger, and more disturbing, trend that accounts for the rest would likely be our current culture's ambivalence towards the arts. Generally percieved as useless, but for their business schools, many arts faculties are feeling the pinch as they tighten their belts yet again. Coupled with the trend in many conservative circles (in the states and increasingly here north of the border) to get all pissy about science again (something funny as many have noted, as in the past conservatives tended to be friends of the sci/tech sector), one starts to wonder if there is some sort of all-out ideological war against academia (to be perfectly hyperbolic).

concerts and...stuff

2005-04-07T09:44:00.000-06:00

I was surprisingly productive yesterday, I noticed a grand total of six errors (mathematical) in the main source of my paper for MD. However they were not too heinous once one got around to rederiving all the stuff from first principles. Ben and I went to the concert last night. The Floor, and Sylvie opened along with controller-controller. Seems to me that The Floor sounded quite different from the last time. Less stare at the floor and moan about how my girl left me and more 80's inspired electro-funk (the lead-singers voice was very familiar, I can't place the comparison, there were also moments when they sounded like the scissor sisters a little). Sylvie was ok. Apparently from Regina. DFA was really good and loud. I officially dislike minors though, and the drunk big-fat-white-guy who always flails around in the pit making an ass of himself and pissing everyone off (why is there always at least one?). Ben took lots of pictures, and promises to post them on flickr. If you want more insightful commentary you should probably keep an eye out for 3dglasses' review. update: