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
On the train, I read the most recent Wired. It was particularly interesting. They’re focussing in on the important consequences of our vast storage capacity and the global network becoming what it ought to be. It hasn’t directly affected everyone yet, but the cloud is looming on the horizon. Grid/cloud computing should be very interesting indeed.
I was amused, however, when I read this:
Moreover, the number of hyperlinks in the World Wide Web is approaching that of synapses in the human brain.
I think something similar was in Serial Experiments Lain. As Mr Smith has my copy, maybe he should WATCH LAIN to confirm it (hint, hWATCH LAIN!!int)…
This guy doesn’t seem to like the idea of emergent properties, but he seems balanced.
The Cambridge thing yesterday was good. The course looks good. The colleges look good. The people were good. The research was good.
I talked to one guy - soon-to-be-Dr Jean Martina (blog, CL site) - who seemed to have an up-and-running automated theorem prover (+ until yesterday I didn’t know that the sum of consecutive odd numbers was always a perfect square…). My dad asked him if it had implications for machine intelligence and he smiled and said no. I thought that could be a cop-out so asked if he could use automatic genetic programming to make a computer come up with theorems and tests them and maybe come up with new mathematical resutls. Again, he smiled and said no… Later he mentioned his wife, also doing a PhD, was using software to model the human brain at the cellular level and then look for emergent properties. Like intelligence. He seemed like a cool guy and I was pretty happy that there was SOME theory being explored!
I nearly met someone I’d spoken to from the Computer Lab’s IRC channel (Malte Schwarzkopf). I didn’t realise it was him until later, but he was busy explaining his state diagram tool to an American girl anyway so I didn’t get a chance to see what it was all about. I would have, actually - I was seeking out theoretical core research, which is why seeing that theorem prover was so good.
The talk by Neil Dodgson was entertaining and informative (and for bonus points he repeatedly mocked Mirosoft - brave, as we were in the William Gates Building and M$FT seemed to fund lots of research etc.). I felt a little uncomfortable when he called computers “stupid” - I hope he never has to deal with HAL 9000.
At the end, there were questions (”I have a Scottish accent, will I be okay?”, “Is IB okay?”, “Can you interview me by phone bcause I’m overseas?” etc.). I asked what kind of theoretical research went on (apart from proving programming languages correct, which he’d mentioned). He smirked a little so I thought he was going to incite nerd-mocking and mentioned concurrency (from one of his slides). He then said “good question” and said something I can’t remember and then transferred it to his assistant guy (I’m not doing assistant guy any favours, he was helpful and smart but I just don’t know his name or position), who mentioned compilers. Later I asked if there were any College quirks we should know about. He said no.
His assistant guy finally mentioned the 2minutechallenge and then we were free.
We saw a bunch of colleges and I decided I wanted to be in the town centre because otherwise I’d be (more) disturbed by the potential peace and quiet [also consider Churchill's EXTREME DISTANCE (15 MINS BUS OH MY GOD) from town centre... although it was close to CL].
I met up with Elliot there and we ran into Will who knew lots about Queens’ so took us around there and explained everything. As a result of that and later bus issues (…) I didn’t manage to see Trinity Hall but I think as long as I go central, it’ll be fine.
BTW in this issue of New Scientist, there’s an article about Abdus Salam by Jim Al-Khalili. My grandparents hung out with Salam in that dingy house *shudder* and I’m reading Al-Khalili’s Quantum. It’s good. Connected!
Pax
Watching Federer. They like his footwork. Jim (Philbin, fencing coach) likes footwork. He draws parallels with boxing. Personal trainer (Patrick Sago - awesome guy) is an amateur boxer. Lulz.
The Imperial taster was cool. We had lectures - some cool AI. Unfortunately they missed out the crypto talk but it was pretty good nonetheless. Did some programming. Once Vivan had plugged in my monitor (Dr Zetie’s report was right, I realised in shock: I do give up easily) the exercises were okay. They were more an exercise in figuring out the convoluted documentation and Linux keyboard shortcuts (Mac OS X has taught me some faux-Linux bad habits, I think).
I don’t really know why it was called the future of computing, but both the talks were essentially on AI (face tracking and emotion recognition, and then computational creativity - the Painting Fool). They linked the painting to the emotion thing - I’d already seen that in New Scientist or something similar, I think. I’d also seen the augmented reality thing they showed in the intro talk. The guy spoke very quietly but the videos he showed us were definitely ones I’d seen on YouTube - tracking the environment and then putting virtual items in. Lain. Lulz.
Pretty good. Vivan reckoned people there were smarter than the ones at the Royal Holloway one, although one of them who’d been to the RH one denied that he’d been when asked, so perhaps he wasn’t so smart after all (???). Java seems cool. Linux isn’t as bad as I thought.
Lulz.
Pax
It looks like graphics is well and truly useless now. I’ve been reading through the Mozilla Developer Center’s Canvas Tutorial and it’s clear that it’s quite powerful (e.g. automatic bezier and quadratic curves and all that). It’s quite a cool new element and I’ll have to check it out at some point.
Unrelatedly, Vivan suggested that I make a last minute application for the Imperial College IC125 Future Computing Taster Course, which I did and - surprisingly - got a place at. So we’ll be there, wrecking Art and Evolution, Enigma - the cryptographer’s battle, Lunch will be provided*, Gestures and artificial intelligence and Image manipulation in Java. Sounds good. Artificial intelligence and quantum computing, ha ha! Ha ha ha! And I actually know where the Huxley Building is now. We’ll have some stuff to talk about at university interviews. Lulz.
Also, I’m going to take back Ealing Broadway. I’m going to make it more fun! Preparing for Arizona by buying lots of reflective clothing (yes). Trying to make main site more coherent. Failing.
Trying to get Wikipedia SEL people to accept that the Knights guy was running HotSauce, and that lambda calculus is quite important.
Trying to think of massive hack for Lain’s tenth anniversary. Have a few ideas.
*may not be a lecture, not sure
Pax
m35 of jpsxdec and #lain just found out why my site hadn’t been rendering in IE or Firefox: you can’t end script tags with “/>”, even though it’s valid XHTML. Oh well.
What a hero!
Also, this renders graphics obsolete… although I knew about the canvas element when I was writing it.
I finished lain.
Pax
This blog post will grow as I remember more details.
Imperial College (or Imperial Lollege, as it was when my dad was there, reading Mechanical Engineering and putting the lulz in Lulz…ondon) was pretty awesome. Four year course with industry placement looked awesome.
They coincidentally brought up Richard Hayden, whose CV I had read online previously. I lulzed up the talk with some banter about stochastic fluid flow. Hot female Japanese CS applicants were in awe of me, or at least noticed me in order to be contemptuous. Halls of residence full of lulz: Southside and Eastside. Talked to Dr Jeremy Bradley (DoC admissions tutor) about quantum computing and mathematical preparation; he suggested that if I have “any maths ability whatsoever” I should do JMC (Joint maths and computing) - he essentially said “don’t believe the prospectus; it’s actually the entire maths and computing undergrad in one”.
Met guy applying for physics. He plays Command & Conquer. Was from Wales; friendly. Also met Yen-Ming and his father. His father was doing his PhD - all research, no teaching - at Imperial while my dad was undergrad. How interconnected of him.
Saw some projects. Fantastic. Eye tracking, torso modelling, game playing lulz ensued. Dad saw that one of his professors from 198x was still a member of the mech eng faculty (lulz).
Ray Hammond and James Bellini were shockingly down-to-earth and non-speculative. Predictable themes included delocalisation of working environment, epic lulz, “conscious internet”, ubiquitous computing etc.. Hammond talked about what was essentially The Wired. Reminded me of Masami Eiri when he said, and I quote, “The next step in human evolution is merging with our creations”.
Audience was mostly pretentious pseudo-intellectuals like me. No-one else under 18 had entered (or made an entry decent enough to get an invitation). I guess young people don’t care about future. Short-sighted info addiction stuff. Lulz. Highlights included tipsy Tesla fanboy rambling about something no-one cares about, man whose life goal is to make jokes about Microsoft and Drunk Freelance Philosopher (one of the runners-up, in fact). I thought the winning entries were okay - not as great as Hammond and Bellini, though.
May remember other stuff. Cambridge had better be good, after that.
I like quantum computing. I like internet. I like artificial intelligence. I plan to lulz stuff up. Throw off crushing weight of friends with superior mathematical ability with attitudes ranging from condescending to hostile. Now irrelevant. Before I cried! NOW I LAUGH IN THE FACE OF ANTI-LULZ!
Ha ha; lulz!
Pax
P.S. News from Cambridge:
Dear Farhan,
Thanks for your query. Although it will depend on the College to which
you’re applying, the Faculty expects that you will be interviewed as a
computer scientist and will have one extra interview by the
mathematicians to check your mathematical ability. The Faculty also
expects that, should you be made an offer and then fail just the STEP
requirement, you would still be able to come to read Computer Science
with one of the other six options.I hope this helps,
Fiona Billingsley======================================
Mrs Fiona Billingsley
Student Administrator
University of Cambridge
Computer Laboratory
William Gates Building
JJ Thomson Ave
Cambridge CB3 0FD, UKTel: +44 (0)1223 763505
Fax: +44 (0)1223 334678
Email: fmb37@cl.cam.ac.uk
======================================—–Original Message—–
From: Farhan Mannan [mailto:farhanmannan@mac.com]
Sent: 25 June 2008 21:48
To: undergraduate.admissions@cl.cam.ac.uk
Subject: Computer science with mathematicsI was planning to apply for computer science in 2009 but recently
decided that I may apply for the 50% maths option in the first year.
Does this mean my interview will essentially be a maths interview and
devalue the books I’ve read, or will it still be a computer science
interview with the proviso that I do well in STEP?Thanks,
Farhan Mannan
Now:
Over the summer:
Pax
If my muddled understanding of cellular automata and neural networks (and indeed the human brain itself), logic gates and the internet has taught me anything, it’s that the networking of nodes (simple[r] systems) can yield impressive, unpredictable or lulzworthy results. For me at least, pieces of fiction (films, books and such… not like, rubbish stuff) have an effect because I pick up on certain connections within the material to other parts of itself as well as to other things I don’t fully understand and stuff I already know etc.. This generates a kind of feel which I struggle to capture with my poor photography and endless blogging.
Maybe these complex network “feels” are also what govern sociology, love and anti-lulz! I think of this “feel” as a generalisation of the term zeitgeist, removing it from time. Geist, then? It already has a definition; I like mine better. How about nGeist? For network Geist? WordPress seems content with it… yes, that’s fine. Maybe The Node was just one Geist. Or the Universal nGeist. The uGeist! I MAKE WORDS UP.
Usually when I’m not fully acquainted with someone - or something - I get a more attractive “feel” than I will when I get more familiar.
Occasionally though, it just gets better and better until I get lost completely. Very occasionally. But when it does, it increases O(xx!). These cases have been computing, maths and a few other special cases which maybe I’ll write about later.
Ha ha! Later!
Pax
I’m quite glad that I’m going to have a chance to talk to a real psychologist about this now. I noticed some years ago that my self esteem (should it be hyphenated?) seemed to be influenced by the outside world but also comprised some other more random elements. It wasn’t really reflected in my mood - I would always feel kind of confrontational and angry as I’d never really felt I’d totally excelled in any respect and would thus feel like I had a fight to pick with everyone. The thing was, I would sometimes feel like I was a rubbish, untalented person and want to one-up the arrogant and unfairly successful people I met and would sometimes feel immensely proud of myself and want to maintain some phantom “good reputation” that I never really had. I was never in the middle - it was a little extreme. I think this is what made me work so hard.
My surviving grandparents are now both declining rapidly, my maternal grandmother’s death remains an interesting event and my general angst about the world is at an all time high, but I now feel stable and, really, quite good. Windmill Lodge told me I had a period of depression between September and sometime in January, which seems to make sense. It feels so much better now - to be able to categorise it and seal it off is a tremendous relief.
It’s a surreal situation - consistently failing to perform well in Mr Motion’s tests and generally failing at Dr Zetie’s top set exercises should really be killing me but actually, I find myself beginning to change in a more fundamental way than any of these surface fluctuations that have plagued me for so long.
Computer Science with AI at Imperial - where my dad went for Mechanical Engineering - looks awesome, but then again everyone I’ve talked to wants me to apply for Cambridge. It’s a nice thought but I wonder what the course is really like. I’m fascinated by problems of optimisation, logic and semantics… but I also like programming. Erroll Wood (probably the only person in our computing class who comes close to really understanding computing as a discipline - James and Vivan program well but I don’t really know what their views on actual computer science are) has expressed concern over the level of practical stuff in the Cambridge course… meh, open days will resolve these quibbles (hopefully).
On that note, Mr Brewis, Dominic Yeo and Mr Motion all gave me blank looks when I mentioned the Simplex algorithm. I mentioned it to Mr Brewis when we were discussing optimising the equilibrium in the Haber Process, Dominic Yeo for fun and Mr Motion to see if he could properly explain it to us (we’re doing matrices right now, so it might’ve been possible).
I feel like I’m the only one in the whole school apart from Dr Zetie who takes any sort of computer science seriously! Vivan confused the bogosort with the bucket sort as Will played with Mr Fry’s sorting demo app in computing. For a few hopeful minutes I really thought he know what the bucket sort was but I soon realised that NO-ONE CARES ABOUT ANY REAL COMPUTER SCIENCE. ALL THEY CARE ABOUT IS SHOWING OFF HOW THEY CAN CHEAT AT GAMES AND PROGRAM STUFF IN VB, ONE OF THE WORST LANGUAGES IN THE UNIVERSE.
It doesn’t matter how much you know about iPods or how authoritative you can sound while quoting Wikipedia! AUGH! Don’t mistake this for a rant, however, as I’m not really complaining about a sudden retardation - more like getting emotional while stating the forgotten situation in all its stupidity.
Oh, I’m also very optimistic about the Public Schools this year. I somehow did well last year and I feel like I’m becoming a much better fencer anyway. Yeah. Optimistic.
I’m reading Brainwashing. Its cover is so tacky that I almost didn’t buy it but I’m so glad I did. It’s RIDICULOUSLY good. It is now among my top books (Simulacra and Simulation, The Psychology of Interpersonal Behaviour, Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman? et al [ask Facebook]). Afterwards I need to read The Theory of the Leisure Class. I think The New Turing Omnibus, which is a little textbooky but incidentally contains Conway’s Game of Life as well as Simplex and a load of other pretty great stuff, will probably be up there once I understand it fully. I’m plodding through it. Like a retard on muscle relaxants. Seriously.
Mr Smith alerted me to the correct pronunciation of Proust (”proost”, for phonetically [is this the right word?] retarded people such as myself). I had mentioned it because of (you won’t see this coming) Lain (his madeleines in In Search of Lost Time were used as a metaphor for involuntary memory).
I’ll finish this with a conspicuous ego-boost. I feel immensely happy when I see someone I know giving someone else the finger or calling them fat or even a chode. Elliot and I, in our social ineptness, broke down barriers and behaved oddly until people began to realise that arbitrarily criticising us or trying to be funny to our detriment didn’t work as well as it should and adopted our crap. Even Michael B, someone very, very critical of odd behaviour - someone who would often mock me for trying to be funny in a perceived-to-be-OTT way - was recently seen giving the one-finger[ed]-salute across the atrium.
Poor Mr Rokison still mutters “You’re all so weird/strange” every time he puts his head down in a desperate attempt to renew his self esteem (aha, we’ve come full circle) in front of a class that is no longer captivated by his paradoxical energy or random lapses into making repeated Pingu sounds. It’s refreshing that he mercilessly mocks Will (I’m sure Will finds it funny or he’d assert himself and throw Ollie - sorry, Rokison… sorry, Mr Rokison - to the ground or something). This isn’t a joke, by the way - I’m growing tired of his attitude. Condescension - especially at such a similar age to us - do not help his position at all. I suspect the way this ends will be hilarious.
Imagine turning down a place at Cambridge. My parents and siblings were horrified. That gives me hope - it means they thought I had a real chance of getting a place there. 
Pax
Thinking of the metaphorical meaning of The Enigma of Amigara Fault, suicide and such jump to mind. I couldn’t help thinking of Lain being my “hole” - it was perfectly tailored to bring out all my psychological insecurities and quirks, and it did. Interestingly, teachers like Mr Barker, Mr Rokison and Mr Smith have only known me since my shift into mediocrity and insanity, and I think Mr Motion is beginning to understand that my mental arithmetic is sluggish at best. Rambling, rambling, rambling. I think my theme of happy/sad is linked to bipolar disorder or at least mania.
I was thinking about trying to speed up my mental maths: if you know your squares up to 20, you could do something like this:
Input: multiply a and b.
Check whether a mod 2 = b mod 2 (i.e. are they both odd or both even? This isn’t necessary but is a vestige of this retardation’s origin in my mental maths crazy stuff - I know a bunch of n2s for ns up to 20 and then some randomers like 25 and some powers of two because of computing jigga.)
If so, use the thing. Using some (like going backward to difference of two squares).
ab = ((a+b)/2-(a+b)/2+a)((a+b)/2+(a+b)/2-a) = ((a+b)/2)2 - (a - (a+b)/2)2
So ab = (mean - distanceToMean)(mean + distanceToMean) = mean2 - distanceToMean2. Yeah.
Hmm. So like: 12 x 14?
Looks retarded but I actually find that easier than going 14 x 10 + 14 x 2 = 140 + 28 = 168. I’m not joking.
Maybe it becomes useful later?
17 x 23 = 202 - 32 = 391
As it pivots on square values and I only want to go up to 20, you can make other stuff:
11 x 29 = 202 - 92 = 319
So it’s “If both numbers are odd or both numbers are even*, their product is the mean squared minus half the distance between them (or the distance to the mean) squared.”
This is fun.
23 x 27 = 625 - 4 = 621. Pimping.
And stuff. Actually, maybe the reason I like this is not to do with number of operations but merely type of operation: I find multiplication difficult; I am an idiot. Addition and subtraction I also dislike but not as much as I dislike multiplication.
*I think I added this constraint so you only get whole numbers. Remember, I’m an idiot!
Having a lookup table of squares and doing this - any good for computational optimisation? MAYBE.
I ordered some of Nakaido Reichi’s music from OCS Books. When I went in there, they started talking Japanese at me - possibly because I was having a bad hair day. Thus, today I got my hair cut. That’s all.
I’m watching this in the hope of properly understanding quantum computing.
Notions of the “observer’s mind” remind me of Lain and obviously Plato’s allegory of the cave reminds me of The Matrix.
These tech talks are awesome. Google aren’t as bad as their (generally) fbugly [functional but ugly] UI design suggests: this is the real deal!
UPDATE: Seriously.
Pax
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