Despite the fact that it's in the 30's (and was in the 70's a few days ago), it's actually a beautiful day. Blue sky overhead, the falling snowflakes glittering in the bright sunshine...
It took me most of my walk to campus to realize how strange that is.
Category: Random
So it turns out that vorlon does allow CGI scripts, but it doesn't appear to support any means of redirecting URLs to them. So on one hand, I could set up a dynamic blog which would allow comments, and that would be cool. But on the other hand, my blog would be at vorlon.cwru.edu/~sbm5/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi, and that's much less friendly.
So for the time being: no comments. But hopefully I'll come up with a clever solution.
Category: Geek
Ok, not so much my life as the sidebar of this blog. Now thanks to the Calendar plugin for Blosxom (which is very cool, and easy to use), it has a calendar just like you'd see on one of those high-powered, fancy-shmancy blogs.
Now if I get some links and stuff, I'll be all set.
Category: Geek
I don't understand why movies (and TV shows) seem to enjoy setting up situations so wildly inconsistent that no matter how hard you try to suspend disbelief, the script just keeps beating you over the head with incongruities.
Intangible people are one of my pet peeves, because it shouldn't be that hard to do them right, but they so often suck, badly. Usually intangible people physics is as follows:
As a side note, 2 leads to the interesting question: could you trap someone by putting them in a really big bowl, with sides that gradually sloped up to near-vertical? If not, at what angle exactly would they be able to pass through the bowl?
But basically, intangible people only perceive things as solid when it's convenient for the purposes of blocking the scene, which is just a huge cop-out. Sure, there's the argument that it looks like the floor is solid and they are walking on it only because that's how the person is used to thinking of themselves moving. But they aren't used to thinking of themselves walking through walls, and yet they manage that just fine. My favorite scene to illustrate this type of painfully jarring inconsistency: in Ghost, the dead guy makes a running leap through the wall of a subway car, lands hard on the floor of the subway, then takes a minute to regain his balance, being rocked around by the motion of the subway. Huh? A very close second is when he is thrown across a subway car, slides through the (closed) door so that he is between cars, then stops sliding because he hits the door into the next car. Again, what the heck? For the believers of the self-perception theory mentioned above I challenge you to explain how, while sliding backward, he is deciding which doors/walls it makes sense for him to slide through.
I say, if you want ghosts or out-of-phase Star Trek characters or whatever, make a reasonably self-consistent system (like, they float around by thinking) and spring for a few more special effects so you can pull it off. I can suspend disbelief, but I can't suspend my observations about gargantuan inconsistencies in the way the world (even a fantasy world) works any more than those poor babies that researchers made cry by making blocks and puppets disobey the laws of physics.
Category: A & E
It's warm, sunny, and beautiful out. The sort of day that makes me realize that Spring is here, and energizes me.
Sure it's supposed to snow in a few days, but I'm enjoying living in denial for the moment.
Category: Life
I've decided that I need a time compactor, to prevent time fragmentation. It works so well for computer memory, so why don't we apply the same idea to our free time?
What the heck am I talking about, you ask?
I've noticed that more and more, I don't spend my time productively. It's not that I don't do the things I should do (although that's true too); what gets to me is that I don't even do the things I want to do. I've been trying to figure out why, and I think that time fragmentation is (part of) the answer.
By time fragmentation, I basically mean the fact that I almost never want to work on things (work or side projects), because I'll have to do something else in a little while, so I won't have time to get much done. So instead I just wander aimlessly online, or otherwise kill time. If I added all that time up, it would be enough to do all kinds of cool stuff, but instead I waste so much of it. So I need to find a good way of defraging my time—or more accurately, to keep myself from fragmenting it so much. This article is what started me thinking about it, but I think it applies to a lot more than just code (or is it just that so many of my side projects are programming?).
In case you are wondering: no, the irony of blogging about aimlessly killing time online instead of being productive is not lost on me.
Category: Life
Big curves (on tests) are good
But on the other hand, they basically mean that at least one of the following is true:
None of which is a quality that I really look for in a teacher.
Still, given that one of the above is true, I'd much rather take the curve than not.
Category: School
Ever get the urge to google random people you used to know, just to see if you can find out what they are up to these days?
Um... yeah. Me neither.
Category: Life
I've discovered a fantastic way to make my head hurt: trying to think about what vision is. I was pondering the question of whether or not people see the same colors as other people, and then I started to wonder what that question even means. Where and what in my brain is vision (or any other sense) exactly?
I can imagine a neural net hooked up to a wavelength detector, which would allow color identification: neuron x fired, so the sensor is seeing blue. That would be trivial, and presuably that's more or less what my brain does. But that's not what happens from my perspective. I see blue. What the heck does that mean?
This leads to another mind-bender: When a neural net has been trained to, say, approximate a function, how does it perceive the function?
Category: Random
I was suddenly overcome with a strong desire to do some roleplaying today after seeing someone at school messing with a character sheet during class. I would have flipped through my White Wolf books if it hadn't been for the fact that they are all the way across the country.
It was bizarre, since I haven't thought about those games in quite some time, and haven't played in years. It goes beyond just RPGs too; I was reading Angst Technology the other day and there was a comic about Warhammer 40k, and I thought "It sure would be fun to play that again sometime," despite the fact that I really didn't like it when I played. I guess I just miss killing entire days hanging out with everyone back home, being crazy and doing nothing even remotely productive.
Ah, those were the days.
Category: Life
w00t!!
Sorry, Slashdot moment.
Anyways, I've finally decided to give the whole blogging thing a try. I'm not really sure why... I guess I just want a forum to ramble about whatever's on my mind, where I can at least pretend other people are reading. It makes it feel less pointless somehow.
If I keep this up, the blank space on the right will likely become a sidebar with links to other pages, and this will at long last be the homepage I've always vaguely felt like I aught to make.
On the other hand, to paraphrase the Dread Pirate Roberts, I'll most likely kill this in the morning.
Category: Life