ChapterZero

I just turned in the grades on the projects, and talked to the prof about the account being locked, and it was all fine. Meaning that all my anxiety was just another example of my mind thinking ahead into an alternate universe, thankfully.

On the other hand, in preparation, I did find these quotes useful ( source: Babes Unlimited (?)):

• I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
• There’s no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves.

Note: these quotes aren’t actually from that website, they are from the series of Dune books by Frank Herbert. But, in the interest of time and carpal tunell syndrome sufferers like myself everywhere, I have omitted the full reference information. Details available at said website. And more quotes.

Actually, that is what makes Dune such an interesting series: although it has a singularly imaginative plot and takes place in a universe rich and well-ordered in its details, its main attraction is the wonderfully pithy and yet poetic quotes that can be drawn from it. Of course that also helps to detract from the novels’ readability… most people, myself included, can’t read a novel created by stringing quotable material together.

The Sci-Fi Channel original movies on Dune are almost as good as the books with respect to the quotes, but like most movies made from books, fail to develop all the implications and intricacies present in the books’ plots (I speak from having seen the first 3 hour movie; the other comes out on March 16). They are definitely worth watching though, especially if you like superfast fighting (using a ‘Bene Gesserit’ technique to slow time subjectively), excellent cinematography (on par with Gladiators IMO, YMMV), or just can’t stomach the books’ wording.

For now, life sucks. I got locked out of my proctoring account for accidentally sending a message out to the entire Engineering network. The sysadmin didn’t seem to think it was a mistake– or if so, he doesn’t show it: when I emailed him about it, he made it seem like a conspiracy. As if I were stupid enough to *purposefully* do something like that, while working on a computer that is being monitored. Not that I would want to do it at all. I admit what I did, as was, was pretty stupid in itself, but I think the price I pay might be way past the bounds of reason. Somehow it seems that when a good person (in the sense of law-abiding– and I do believe I fall in that category) gets in trouble, they get deep down in it. Or maybe it is the contrast that makes your plight so vivid: just a couple of days ago, this would have been the furtherest thing from my mind.

To top it all off, the sysadmin told me I have to go through the prof in charge of the proctors to get the account unlocked. That is punishment enough in itself, but in this week of all weeks, that is not best for my continued employment as a proctor, much less being able to use her as a reference. Why? Because when my account was locked, I was grading a set of projects that I’ve had for about two weeks. Problem is, she sent an email implying that all the proctors should catch up, and next week is Spring Break. So if I don’t get this fixed today, I won’t get it fixed until two weeks from now.

So, all in all, life sucks. But, after I talk to the prof about this situation, whatever her reaction is, my fate will be written, and I will be able to– I will have to– deal with it. Then, as a friend says, the peasants will rejoice.

Waitress: “What’ll you’s have”
Restaurant Patron; “We’s’ll have some coffees.”

Annoying Words is an awesome site.

I am feeling strangely depressed(?) right now. It looks so good outside, the sun is out and the breeze is strong and cool, but here I am at the library trying to get into reading. I came here originally to get away from the temptation of my computer and the tv at home in order to study my graph theory and read up on real analysis, but here I am typing away. I don’t think I love math the way I used to; it always seems that instead of studying it, I go find something else to do. Because it is too challenging, and I can’t read math books about the math I find interesting: either I am lost inside of 5 minutes, or it takes me an hour to digest the material on 3 pages.

Anyhow, I checked back out a book on Maple, because lately I’ve found myself thinking of some nifty and simplistic mathematical experiments that I would like to try out, but I don’t know any fast and efficient way to implement them. I certainly am not going to write a C program to generate the data, and then a MetaPost/Postscript Perl display engine– that would take forever, I would lose interest in the interim, and I would never be able to use the code more than once, unless I spent a week in writing it in the first place.

After all this messing around with low-level graphical languages, MetaPost and PS, I want something at hand that I can use to quickly plot up and experiment with any ideas that come to my mind. Maple fits the bill perfectly, but I have to learn it, and lately I don’t seem too good at learning any large computer-based systems. I guess it will be worth it, though.

So far in my reading, I’ve heard mention of the Risch Algorithm– a method for finding the integral of any elementary function. It sounds cool, and when I looked it up on Google, I found a message in an email digest of the Maple User’s Group from a guy who says he uses it by hand to do all his integration. Certainly that sounds interesting in practice, because I would be able to forget all those annoying heuristics that my math profs taught us to use to get integrals, but on the other hand, I know that at least one description of the algorithm runs on more than 100 pages!

I’ve also found lots of interesting references to function approximation techniques: Chebyshev, Pade, ChebyshevPade, Theile, etc. The methods in themselves are no doubt interesting, but I wasn’t looking at the particulars ( and not only because finding concise but usable description of mathematical techniques online is nigh on impossible), I was more interested in the thought patterns involved in finding the most accurate numerical approximations and the most efficient technique for use in a particular case.

I had two tests today, in Circuits(Networks) and C. The C test was easy– although the professors tried to make it tricky, it had the level of difficulty that any quiz would have in another class. Face it, profs: C (and any other programming language) is just a bunch of rules! As it is, C has particularly simple rules.

The other test however, was not a cakewalk. I’ve been studying for it for three days (which I *never* did before for any test in a technical subject), and even skipped my Algebra class to go to a review session. I am glad I did, though, as it really paid off. There were only four questions, but it took me near on the full 90 minutes to complete them, and I didn’t have time to do more than cursorily check them. But I am certain that I got at least three of the four, and a lot of partial credit on the fourth. But, I was scared for the first 50 minutes of the test, just flipping from question to question basically writing down any equation that popped into my head. In the last 40 minutes, I started to converge down to suitable strategies, and solve the circuits. If I hadn’t went to that review session or did some of the problems from the previous exams in my studying, I doubt I would have done as well: the eminent aspect of the problems was recalling the basics, and using the appropriate strategies. Sounds simple, but keeping it in mind when facing all those unknown quantities can be difficult.

Anywho… I’m now free for the rest of the day. And guess what I’ll be doing for a good chunk of that time, if not all of it? Yes, that’s right: reading

It’s about time I start collecting a bunch of links to other blogger’s sites– i.e., sites I can read without feeling as though I’m getting a little too much information, political or personal, and yet that I am getting enough information, technical or otherwise interesting. I particularly like humorous sites, and technical sites (did I mention that yet?). Strangely enough, my favorite blog sites are those that are nothing like mine: viz., they are regularly updated, and contain useful code, not just meaningless blather. And they have good designs. Yes, that is a *very* small list, and that is why I feel justified in collating it and preserving it for all those information starved techno-hyperjunkies out there like myself. Who happen upon my site.

Who says mathematicians don’t have a sense of humor? Well, if *anyone* does, they are certainly wrong. Anyone (CS students?) who knows what a tree is probably agrees that is an appropriate name, as well as the name for the related entities, leaves. But there is also a forest, which is a graph whose components are all trees. Interesting huh? Clever certainly.

Also, I’ve been looking at this tool,Textile, for the past 5 minutes, and I’m considering whether it would be worth the effort to set up the same thing, or something similar on this site. On one hand, it would save me time, a thing greatly to be desired, as well as give me more expressive power. But on the other, I would have to take the time to set it up. I hate setting things up on my own computer, much less one that I can only access remotely through a rather slow SSH connection.

I enjoyed my Graph Theory class today, immensely. First, we completed two proofs that I understood, in their entirety, in a relatively organized and through manner! The first was that planar graphs always have a minimum degree less than 5. The second was the Kempe 5 color theorem– that every planar graph has a chromatic number less than or equal to 5. The proof for the first consisted of a fairly routine application of Euler’s Theorem and a new and clever application of triangulations (the fact that any graph can be extended into a triangulation, and in the process degrees of the vertices are only increased). Clever by my account, but the second was unbelievably cool. It is one of those proofs that I would learn an entire branch of math to be able to understand (luckily in this case I didn’t need to). And one I hope someday to equal. Awesome proof, really. I wish I could explain it here… maybe someday I will.

The very last thing we did in class was talk about an interesting application of graph theory to computer science, in particular the construction of space optimizing compilers. That is, let the vertices of a graph G be the variables used in your program, and define adjacency as the fact that the live intervals of the variables (the period during which they hold values), overlap. Then the chromatic number of the graph indicates the number of registers necessary to satisfy the memory requirements of your program, assuming each variable fits in a register. Now tell me that isn’t an ingenious application of graph theory!

‘m finally seeing the beauty of TeX, through the agency of MetaPOST. The syntax is still very ugly, IMO, but necessarily so. What’s important is that it is *very* permissive. And I’m also seeing, I think, why TeX has been favorably compared to LISP.

How to go about explaining? Well, the whole thing began with my downloading some example MP code that Alan Kennington so kindly has put up for public viewing. I noticed that in some of the diagrams, he drew heavily on the macro aspects of MP. For example, in MP, to specify a smooth curve joining n points, you would use this line of code: z1..z2…z3..{other points here}..zn. In plotting a section of the curve of some analytic function, he wrote code equivalent to this:

z1..
draw for t=1 to n:
   .. zt
end for

Of course, that syntax is incredibly not MP correct, but you should get the gist. In what other languages can you do anything even close to that? I can only think of two: Postscript and LISP. I think this really points out that simple is better; because those languages expect everything to resolve itself into simple components (in the case of Postscript, elements on a stack, in that of LISP, atoms, and in that of MetaPOST/FONT, sparks and tags), and allow anything that will resolve itself in such a manner to be syntactically correct, they are extremely powerful. Although I guess the old truism that such languages would be inefficient for use in large programming projects is valid.

Anyhow, the point is that I realized that such powerful constructs are also available in TeX, because like MetaFONT/POST, it is essentially a macro (text-replacement) based language. I wonder why more recent small languages aren’t so well designed?