Ξ May 24th, 2003 | → Comments Off | ∇ Uncategorized |
Please ignore this entry. I am merely testing. It will be deleted shortly.
I have something to confess. I’ve been sitting on it for three years now. It was a struggle to confront the naked truth about myself, but now I’m comfortable with who I am, and I think it’s only fair to admit the rest of you into my world.
I dig chick flicks.
On Sunday, after a healthy workout, some folks went to see Down with Love. I figured, what the heck, right?
I enjoyed it more than the Matrix 2. Totally different playing fields, but there it is, FWIW.
On a more masculine note, my rapier guard positions are developing properly; it only remains for my torso to figure out where it wants to go.
On Monday, I fenced foil for the first time in ~8 months. A friend and I gave each other mutual horsey rides to the water fountain, and ran around administering butt-kickings to people. Oh, and the fencing went damned well, too.
I know, I know, pride goeth before the fall and all that stuff. I apologize for the horn-tooting, but I’m not apologetic. Those of you who’ve achieved a childhood dream will know how I feel:
I am a swordsman! (albeit one still in need of much practice and experience)
Speaking of childhood dreams.. Imagine my delight when Leo told me that Battletech has gone 21st-century! It’s far from complete, but it rocks so far. Or you can sign on with one of the great Houses and duke it out 31st-century style online.
In other Leo-borne news, I was duly impressed with the 22-minute E3 video of Half-Life 2. Those of you who know whereof I speak, know whereof I speak. Those who don’t must find this video and download it. The graphics and world physics are all there… Now we just need the cybernetic interface for a VR world.
So I was fencing on Tuesday night. Well, I spent the first hour twiddling, and the last hour discussing doublet, jerkin, and trouser patterns. I got to give David’s little 2-year old Zachary a ride on my shoulders. We left the house (carefully clearing the doorway in a crouch) and went for a walk down the street. He pointed out some driveways and cars, and asked me to walk in a puddle. We saw a pizza guy make a delivery, and he asked what was in the green bag. I told him, and he replied, “Good pizza!” That’s debatable on general principles, but I didn’t think the mood was right to do so. ;) Since twilight was getting a little long in the tooth, we turned around when a neighbor drove by with his lights on.
It was a good workout for my shoulders. And I never got to do that with my little sister b/c my mother always started wigging out — “You’re going to kill her!” “She’s going to fall and hit her head!” … and now my little sister has been brainwashed with a deathly fear of letting her two feet leave the ground. Well, at least when my mother’s around, which is when I’m around.
From the actual 2-hr practice, my counterthrusts into quarta and secunda are getting there — I take myself out of line adequately on the defense w/o roaming into the realm of off-balance. My weapon hand stays close to being in line. Footwork needs to be more in line.
On a sidenote, R mentioned that he worked out with two other capoeiristas on Sunday, and they lasted about 2 hours. “You should be proud — you lasted 5 hours that night on the tennis courts.”
On another sidenote, my forearms are uneven. :P I need to start fencing lefty more.
Why is our daily clock so wigged out? If we say, “Hey, meet you at midnight,” we think of it as still being today, or the same day. But technically, it’s tomorrow (but it’ll be today by that point, but we’re talking from the perspective of today now).
Where one runs afoul of this cocked up calendar is when we say, “Hey, meet you at midnight on Saturday.” Do we mean the technical midnight, which immediately succeeds Friday night, or do we adhere to improper normal convention and meet on Saturday evening at five minutes past 11:55 p.m.?
So I put a poser to myself at midnight last night (figure that one out!):
How would I feel if someone built a self-learning machine using perhaps an application of neural net technology (direct your neural questions here), and applied it towards the betterment of mankind?
If a machine could learn to assign a high priority to building a relationship with a person through all the little things, if it could learn new skills and abilities, if it could express joy for having completed difficult tasks and a whole range of other emotions… Then what more could one ask for?
Such a soulless machine could be more alive and human than the teeming hordes, the unwashed masses with their daytime talk shows and their primetime sitcoms, their petty drama and casual spite.
For the life of me, I can’t remember what happened on Friday and Saturday. Well, Saturday night I watched Aladdin with my little sister. But the movie’s only 90-ish minutes, leaving 46.5 hrs unaccounted for. I must have gone to work, but I can’t remember what I did there. This is really bothering me. :P
Ah well.
I made up for it in spades on Sunday. :) Fencing (out near FM 1960 and in at Rice!), armoring, and Mother’s Day dinner at home.
Tonight at sport fencing practice, I took on Matt from the Clear Lake Fencing Club. I fenced épée for the first time in ~six months, and the third time ever. After some warm-up stuff, we had time for one bout. I lost with a 3-5 score, but I’m pretty pleased with myself. I used mostly historical footwork and bladework, and it worked out pretty well.
One interesting sidenote: This is a gross oversimplification, but parries to the outside and inside seem to have flipped hand positions in sport and historical fencing.
En garde in sport style, the hand is supinated (palm up) in the fourth guard, protecting the outside line (the right side, if you are righty). You can parry an attack to the inside in the sixth guard (hand still palm up), but some people say you can roll your hand over as you parry (hand becomes pronated — i.e. palm down).
Now, in historical fencing, Capo Ferro and Giganti (and others) have the Secunda ward which covers the outside line with the hand pronated (a natural, clockwise rotation/progression from Prima. Passing through Tierce, you keep rotating the hand and arm into Quarta, protecting the inside line with hand supinated.
For the historical side, it’s a matter of leverage and hand strength that you can bring to bear by pushing your blade out to either side from the 2nd and 4th wards. In sport fencing, the weapons are so light, it doesn’t matter as much.
I always thought the 8 sport fencing wards were a little wonky. ;P
Re: armoring, for those people keeping score, I now have one extremely well-fitted leg harness (in addition to the two arm cannons, gorget, and cuirass). Plus I helped R clean out his garage, b/c we could barely squeeze ourselves in, much less swing hammers around. One day, I will have pictures to show people, and I will reach some stage of nominal functionality for my armor. Until then, you’re going to have to take it on faith that there’s something worth my weekly investment of 8-10 hrs. :P
R has played with sanding down his armor with a succession of 400 and 600 grit sand paper and jeweler’s rouge — all mounted on a benchgrinder. I don’t dig mirror finishes, but I’ll admit that the slightly wavy, handworked mirror shine looks pretty sexy. Plus it fends off rust like a champ! With an unpolished piece (which looks and feels fairly smooth) left in the garage, I can place my hand on it, and come back the next day to find a rusty handprint. But some of R’s pieces have gone 2 weeks (!!!) without any wax or oil coating, and they’re still rust-free. He suspects the rouge may have some oil in it.
The reasoning goes that a mirror shine doesn’t allow moisture any tiny pits in which to collect. No moisture, no rust.
Me, I don’t need to brush my teeth in front of my breastplate (like 19th century cuirassiers did), so I opted for the simple expedient of Rustoleum high gloss clear coat for the outsides of my pieces and black on the insides.
Ξ May 9th, 2003 | → Comments Off | ∇ General |
So I walk in the house tonight, and I get slapped in the face by a great, big, linebacker of a painted jezebel. Well, no. Not really. But I swear, it smells like a French cathouse in here.
Apparently, my mother thought that the house smelled overly much of food and cooking, so she lit these hellish little candles all over the place.
Now, I’ve always found a lingering trace of fish sauce and spice odors to be therapeutic. Along with incense, it’s de rigeur in Asian households, really.
I’m not sure, but I think I’m on the wrong side of the culture-clash fence — and that’s fine by me!
An impromptu discussion of algorithms and programming came up last night in the gym. Two fellows and I opened with a discussion of Gödel’s theorem of incompleteness. In a parallel thread, we established that heuristic algorithms are not sufficiently rigorous and complex systems for use in number theory; therefore Gödel’s theorem cannot apply to them.
Now the trick to this is tying all this to evolution and Darwinian natural selection. Heuristic algorithms and evolution of the species both share some characteristics — they both rely on sets of very basic rules governing the interaction of basic components. Using these basic rules and components, they both achieve very complex and sophisticated results which sometimes seem to defy logic in that numerous shortcuts and shortcuts for shortcuts have been made. Due to these shortcuts, we sometimes lose sight of the original process which led from initial conditions/components to final results.
Now, evolution only works toward achieving a satisficient condition. i.e. an evolving breed only evolves until it is good enough. Once there, it experiences diminishing returns, where further refinements won’t appreciably increase chances of survival and improved propagation beyond those of existing members.
I think that’s how it works. This all also ends up with the unfortunate (for the paper under discussion) conclusion that Gödel’s theorem cannot be applied to evolution. But it was an interesting journey, though.
In one side conversation, I learned that the evolutionary process can be applied to programming and computer-based solutions to certain problems, like the traveling saleman problem.
And thus, genetic algorithms. They’re even in your spreadsheet.
So this isn’t the Technology Review article that has been cited at me repeatedly (but is never to be found)… But Leo finally found an article which describes the experiment wherein a researcher evolved a chip which could distinguish between two sounds. Eventually, FPGA chips like these could reprogram themselves on the fly — they can learn to rewrite their software and reconfigure their hardware to perform tasks more efficiently! Or they can completely switch tasks…
In another side jaunt down the corridors of the intellectual Elysian fields, I spent my evening and early morning on a fourth-floor terrace enjoying the minty flavor from a shisha — and this is coming from me, a life-time nonsmoker! There, I learned about the distinction between chemical evolution and Darwinian evolution. Chemical evolution is a slap in the face of entropy — no ifs, ands, or buts. But (there’s always a “but”), once a critical mass has been achieved in terms of certain molecules forming (e.g. a lipid bilayer), then you’ve created an enclosed environment (due to the lipid bilayer’s schizophrenic hydrophilic / hydrophobic nature) which frees you to get all sorts of other crazy chemical action going on in the lipid loveshack.
And then, Darwinian evolution takes over.
I don’t care what the atheists or the Christians say about it. I’m satisfied with the notion that, whether God is an amazing architect, a lazy college student whose bowl of month-old soup spawned the universe, or merely a stunningly complex canon of physical laws… it’s all pretty amazing.
..And humans need to spend a little more time being humble in the face of it all. ;)
Next week on Geraldo: an ethical existence and the human condition.
Wow, I’m still sore from Sunday’s 12-hour practice. I think it was the cartwheels and crawls up and down 6 tennis courts that really did me in. :)
Two classes down, and one to go. Think I turned in a fair performance on my Corporate Finance exam, but we’ll see what Dr. Alexander thinks of it.
I’ve been thinking a lot on What It All Means lately. Now don’t go thinking I’m about to join someone’s congregation or become a disciple of our holy lord Gord on earth. I’ve been reading Charles Kimball’s papers on Europe and a paper on the application of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
Fascinating, really. If that paper ever gets published, I’ll let you know.
Call me a confused Confucianist, but it seems like it doesn’t really matter why we’re here on this earth so long as we realize what brought us here, what we do, and where we’re headed.
In other words, remember your place (in the perspective of all human history up to the moment of now), and leave the world a little richer than you found it. How trite it sounds. And yet it’s so difficult for many people to adhere to.
The trouble in applying this trite little bit of advice is that people tend to externalize the problems or goals that should be found within themselves. “I didn’t ask for this!” “It’s not my fault!” “I’m not responsible!”
Enough soap-boxing. Maybe we should just ask, “What would Brian Boitano do?”
But speaking of internalizing duties and goals… A lot of tasks got elbowed aside in the past weeks to make room for the ACM workshop and final exams. Now I have to rediscover my groove and get to ‘em all. Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go… :)
Ξ May 2nd, 2003 | → Comments Off | ∇ General |
Just got home. I tried to open the door with my CMH office key. No dice.
Tried again with my car key. Why the heck won’t these keys fit?!
But I finally got inside (obviously, since I’m here now typing).
I don’t know why, but I’ve A) been in a good mood all day, and B) had images of naked, cherubic little guys with wings in my head all day. They’ve got bowler hats on, and they’re smokin’ fat Havana stogies.
Ξ May 2nd, 2003 | → Comments Off | ∇ School, Work |
My Information Systems class wrapped up last night amidst much laughter and merriment as we presented tongue-in-cheek sales pitches for virtual paint, custom-tailored dogs, pest-replicator revenge services, and the like.
Afterwards, two classmates and I nipped off to the Black Labrador (4100 Montrose, 77006) for drinks. Or so they said.. We ended up with two waters and an iced tea. ;P
Some food was also involved, but it got lost in the tales of melancholy. She’s on the verge of breaking off an engagement, he’s plotting his work resignation even though he just closed on a house. She took her fiancee to Fort Sumter for Valentine’s Day, he dropped close to $100/day on his last GF.
When my turn came, I trotted out the old shtick about the Bitter Backabowl Bachelor’s Society, but my heart just wasn’t in it — Cupid’s bitter darts have blunted with time and age, I guess. :)
Otherwise, I’ve spent the past couple days doing my part in running a workshop on activity prototyping at the Assoc. of Children’s Museums’ annual conference (largely being held in the Galleria, but with registered events all over the museum district).
[As a bonus, further down on the page you may find what I’m involved in.]
I’m still dizzy from having the tables turned so quickly… Three weeks ago, I was skeptically asking our Chicago evaluator about the feasibility of having her remotely attend our prototyping (via fax, e-mail, and teleconferences).
190 faxed pages later…
Not realizing that I was going to be presenting / running 23 people through their own first-time prototyping experiences yesterday, I extemporized in what my project leader called a brilliant session.
On a sidenote, I plan to use “laissez-faire” in my presentation today, and was sorely disappointed to see that capitalism has taken Ayn Rand as its masthead.
So much for the father of free markets. ;P
"Cross of Iron": The Rise and Fall of the German War Machine: 1918-1945 Mosier, JohnLots of solid primary source research, though he still throws in the occasional fast and loose speculation without evidentiary support. I like it. In a nutshell, the Nazis just couldn't get it together. Their faith in racism, the great man, and individual craftsmanship (at the expense of mass industrialization) inevitably led to failure. After reading many other histories, I always wondered why no one called Germany out for its obvious inability to keep up with the Allies' production. Mosier does this and more in solid detail.
"Children of Men"Truth in fiction? With articles about decreased sperm count in men living in industrialized countries, hormone-laden food affecting our kids' development, and now inadvertent cocktails of every drug ever administered forming from human bodily waste that filters into our water supply... One figures that whatever eventually happens in reality will defy and exceed even the extreme speculation in movies like this one.
Really, really good movie. Nihilistic as hell (until the 'morrow at the end), but very accurate depictions of human reactions under stress.
