psyche

Some people are so smart that whatever choices they make, they’ll be celebrated. Some people are smart enough to make good choices without being all-round successes. I think I’m going to choose the Internet, and lulz it up. I don’t have the luxury of… choicelessness. I have to be good by choosing things, not by indiscriminately lulzing - because I just don’t have the ability to.

Pax

I got my results - if you really want to see them, they’re here.

I didn’t realise I’d messed up Core 3 or Chains and Rings, but oh well. Didn’t mess up on large scale.

Getting nice people at OpSci to write me references.

Pax

I’ve already looked at it but I recently started posting some slightly philosophical questions on there and instead of 4chan and other random responses, a sort of discussion has formed.

It’s kind of cloudy and reminds me a little of anonymous boards (for obvious reasons) but it’s kind of nice.

Pax

Today we visited Kartchner Caverns. Some lulz ensued - they had to keep the site secret while protection/national heritage stuff was sorted out. To keep it under wraps, they referred to it as Xanadu. They named some ~50ft column in it Kubla[i] Khan.

Awesome.

Pax

Forcing cousins to read Watchmen. Used Matlab at OpSci. Trying to remember everything I have to do before school.

Looking forward to grid computing and interplanetary internet. Also, waiting for BBS: The Documentary to get here. Still.

I LOVE IPv6.

Pax

In my experience, nostalgia is BAD because it reminds me that things change. It’s a wistful feeling not far from regret.

Sometimes I feel that my experiences MUST be shared. A sort of twisted existentialism makes me feel that unless someone knows about how happy I felt at some point, that happiness will mean nothing. But is that true? Am I just seeking some kind of validation? What IS meaningful? When you see a movie about some touching or amazing secret, it’s like you’ve been given a window on something that would otherwise go untold… and be wasted. I don’t know.

How “meaningful” are secrets? If I say “my experiences have meaning for ME and that’s all that matters”, I seem to slide towards a clunky and endlessly depressing solipsism. On the other hand, if I say “total meaning is meaning of experience times number of people who know about it times total product of how much they care about it” then most of my life is meaningless.

I am now happy, active, productive and perpetrating lulz whenever possible. It seems the only way around this is to ignore it or punish it out of existence, because otherwise I’d always stay up at my computer and not do work and coast through everything etc. … I read some book (details when I find them) in which the author stated that we get ourselves down/stress ourselves out simply - SIMPLY - because we focus on the bad points and complain in little groups and otherwise become sad/angry. If that’s true then I should be fine as there aren’t really any bad points.

Just strange, apparently neutral clouds of nostalgia and anxiety: anti-lulz.

I saw Hellboy II. It was okay, through I liked the first one more.

Pax

I saw this a while ago but I saw it again yesterday in order to force one of my cousins to see it. She picked up political themes that I missed. I still think it was good. It had a socio/philos/psych edge that insulted the cliché implementation of such embellishments (e.g. the Joker derisively recounts two conflicting popular psychology versions of his own mini-origin). I still like it. Also, game theory - Mr Smith’s comment below links to a totally awesome piece on it.

Doing some structure function stuff. Also lasers. It’s good.

Pax

Finished work experience at Fabric; was good overall, despite some exposure to terrible retardation of some bits of IT. Fabric’s Raymond Serville [sic] was shockingly intelligent and knowledgeable (a good combination) and has set me up to rip apart some computers and then eventually build my own.

Packing for Arizona tomorrow. Taking books to blitz (Dewdney and Körner for the nine-hour flight) and computer for lulz.

Pax

Doing work experience at Fabric. Sometimes boring, but learning lots about disk images… used to be called Psychosis, founder was a hacker. Fun. Discovering joys of Norton Ghost, Windows Deployment Services and other assorted retardations.

Going to Arizona on Saturday to hang out with cousins and get some work done. Should be good.

Going to build budget Linux box soon.

Using VMWare Fusion to install Arch Linux. Hit a snag - right arrow key broken, so some command line tasks are actually impossible.

It’s like Gödel’s incompleteness all over again (my favourite analogy, yes).

Pax

I tried to teach myself some Java from a book I’ve had for years (I remember buying it at Waterstone’s in Ealing Broadway back when I didn’t exclusively use the internet to accumulate stuff). I’ve done some simple things like porting binary (which wasn’t too hard), making a program for finding the arithmetic, geometric or harmonic mean of an indefinitely long list of numbers (will adjust that to perform a quick iteration to find the arithmetic-geometric mean) and an iterative factorial thing.

What I want to do eventually is write some routines to a) solve a system of linear equations in 3 variables via matrices b) absorb plotter and c) do splines.

I’ve made headway with the algorithmic techniques already. I made a spreadsheet to solve the equations in a way similar to my sum of r⁴ thing so when you enter two points (x co-ord, y co-ord, gradient at that point), it tells you the coefficents of the cubic required to draw smoothly through those points.

I tested it with Grapher (a superb application). For people unfamiliar with cubic splines, a different function is plotted between each pair of points that joins up with the next one at the same gradient, so as to create the appearance of a smooth curve. For this, the gradient at each point, as explained in the picture, was just the gradient between that point and the next. Probably not the best way to do it, but it seemed to work, kind of… I believe you can do some magic with the second derivative too. I’ll look into it. Have a look.

If the gradient at the point (x_n, y_n) is m_n, maybe I should’ve said:

m_n = ((y_n - y_n-1)/(x_n - x_n-1) + (y_n+1 - y_n)/((x_n+1 - x_n))/2

That is, the mean of the gradient between the previous point and this one, and the gradient between this one and the next.

I played around a little with Swing but have so far only made an infinite number of replicating, unclosable windows.

I’m also finding Coda even more useful than before. I can just work from a split-screen of its inbuilt terminal and the .java file I’m working on (it highlights Java syntax - how nice!).

Pax