| Grad school; The next month; Mathematical Fiber Arts |
[Apr. 6th, 2009|05:54 pm] |
Grad school continues to happen! I have a better idea of what I'll be researching now, and I've written some of my topic proposal (a paper which relates to the topic exam, which I'll be doing in a month or so, but which isn't actually a commitment to a certain research topic). I'm pretty excited about it. About the only bad thing this quarter is that the class I'm TAing is at 8:30AM, but I think I'll be able to tolerate that.
The folk festival happened again, and was enjoyable. Over break I had a great time skiing at Lech. Next weekend is UChicago's dance weekend; last year's had a wonderful band and caller, and I'm really looking forward to this one. The weekend after that is CMU's Spring Carnival, for which I'll be visiting Pittsburgh (and on that note, if anyone has space for me to stay—a floor is fine!—please let me know!); I'll be arriving on the 16th and returning on the 19th. Not too long after that is UChicago's annual Scavenger Hunt, which should also be great. The next two months or so look like they will be busy but fun!
And on an unrelated note, you might recognize at least one of the names here (and on the other two pages linked from the top)! Nothing I haven't posted here about, but it's neat to see stuff I've made on display at a math conference! |
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| Titles of my posts have been getting less and less descriptive. |
[Dec. 16th, 2008|02:25 am] |
I'm back home for the break.
Visiting Pittsburgh for Capture the Flag was, as expected, awesome. It was my first time playing under the new rules, and I liked them: gameplay hasn't changed significantly, but the rules have gotten simpler and more consistent. Later that weekend a few of us looked at an abandoned blast furnace; it was impressive.
TAing the logic class was a lot of fun, as was teaching two of the lectures for the class. And I learned yesterday, much to my lack of surprise, that next quarter I'll be TAing another logic class (the successor of the one I just TAed). Last quarter's class was mostly first-order logic; next quarter will be more set theory --- stuff I love, and which should be a lot of fun to teach.
Speaking of next quarter: I'll be taking three classes (this quarter I took only one), but they should be interesting ones. I've also finally started to get a better idea of what I'll probably be researching; up until two weeks or so ago "logic" was about as specific as I knew! I'm looking forward to actually starting on research.
Here are photos of ( a bobbin lace doily. )
On an entirely different note, since fashion by democracy somehow seems like a good idea: should I shave? I've never really liked having facial hair, but I've also never liked shaving. |
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| A short update about CTF plans, TAing, and my sweater. |
[Oct. 15th, 2008|02:42 pm] |
I have plane tickets to Pittsburgh for CtFwS! I'll be arriving in Pittsburgh late on Nov. 6 (Thursday), and leaving on the 10th (Monday). Anyone in Pittsburgh have a couch or floor I could sleep on while there?
As predicted, TAing has been fun (except for grading!), and I already knew a surprising number of the students in the class (probably a quarter or so).
The sweater I've been knitting is nearly done --- it's wearable, in fact, but the zipper still needs a bit more sewing. I like it quite a lot; I'll post pictures of it sometime if I can convince my camera to cooperate (and not blur everything)!
Paragraphs don't need more than one or two sentences, right? |
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| Things are going well! |
[Sep. 7th, 2008|01:20 am] |
I've been in Montreal for the last while, and it's been nice. While here, I got together with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kojaxs, ramaxela, Fehr, and Josh; finished all of the knitting on the sweater I've been making (though there's still a bit of sewing left); and learned Morse code. In two days I leave for Greece, where I'll be for ten days (and for the first time my birthday will happen while I'm outside of North America!).
Office and TAing assignments have been sent out, and I seem to have won with both: I'll be in a rather large office (as I wanted) shared with many awesome people, with several more awesome people in nearby offices. And I'll be TAing an introductory logic class (which meets twice a week, at noon).
I also got an email from Sarah-Marie Belcastro: [...] At the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January, Carolyn Yackel and I will be hosting a juried mathematical fiber arts exhibit. Would you be interested in submitting anything to that? Of the stuff you have posted on your webpage, we particularly like the crocheted Seifert surfaces and the LES scarf. [...] Hooray! |
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| I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS! |
[Aug. 12th, 2008|09:45 pm] |
The last week or so has been fun.
There was a Portal party. It was my first time playing the game, and I loved it. The turret-robots are the cutest things ever, and I want one as a pet. About my only complaint about the game is that it's quite short, but we spent a while playing other levels we found on the internet (the best of which was a Rube Goldbergesque level where balls would roll down tracks which would move under their weight). We decided that we should bake a Portal cake (the recipe appears on the computer terminals in the game). sulenda and I finally got around to baking it on Sunday; ( photos are behind the cut. ) It's hard to overstate my satisfaction!
On Friday was a board/card game party; there was lots of fun stuff including Apples to Apples and someone (not entirely sober) talking about Atlantis (and making a lot of sense, amazingly). It's somewhat noteworthy because the person there I'd known for the longest I'd met the previous week; everyone else I'd either met the day before or at the party. I'm getting a lot more comfortable in social situations with people I don't know well; a year ago I probably wouldn't have imagined myself going to a party like that without anyone I knew well. But I'm glad I did; the people were awesome and I had a lot of fun!
I managed, for the first time, to pick a Best SFIC lock (these are the locks that were used at CMU). I'd never tried very hard, thinking I probably would have no luck, but it turned out not to be so bad (it now generally takes me just a few minutes to pick). ( Here's a photo of the picked lock. ) After the summer I want to see if I can make a torque tool like the one described here and use it to remove the core from the lock.
As for the rest of the summer: I leave Chicago on the 24th (actually a few days earlier for a dance weekend near Indianapolis); I've started to pack but have barely made a dent. I'll be in Montreal from the 24th until Sept. 8, when I leave for Greece. I'll be getting back to Chicago on Sept. 18 (just in time for a Crüxshadows concert on the 20th, which will (if all goes well!) be one of the few times a band I like will be playing in Chicago and I'll be able to make it!). |
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| HOPE |
[Jul. 21st, 2008|07:18 pm] |
I got back last night from HOPE, a hacker con in New York. It was awesome! Thanks to those who gave me a place to sleep during that time, and to all the others I know who were there and helped make it awesome!
( More details ) |
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| Pittsburgh! Chicago! |
[Sep. 8th, 2007|11:36 pm] |
I just got back from visiting Pittsburgh. The visit was great, and this year's group of freshmen seems awesome. I think I graduated too early! Thanks to chrisamaphone and gustavolacerda for giving me a place to stay, and to them and everyone else I saw for making the visit awesome!
I'm now in Chicago, moved into my new apartment. Orientation starts on Monday; classes start two weeks after that(!). aleffert, who will soon be my apartment-mate, will be here in a week. The apartment seems quite nice so far, and is near enough to campus that I can (just barely) use the campus wireless Internet, if my laptop is in just the right place. I still need to find a good ISP around here, though...
chrisamaphone wrote my PhD thesis for me. Here's the front and the back. This will make grad school much easier!
( Answers to that last music meme ) |
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| More music memes |
[Aug. 16th, 2007|12:38 am] |
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This is the one where I posts several clips of music and you identify the ones you know; unlike the last time I did it, I'm not restricting whether or not they may have singing. ( Behind the cut... ) |
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| "Look here, old sport," he broke out surprisingly. "What's your opinion of me anyhow?" |
[Aug. 15th, 2007|06:16 pm] |
This is a variation on a meme that's been going around lately and some that went around a while back.
Tell me honestly what you think of me. Unless you indicate that you don't want me to, I'll respond to the comment with the same for you.
As always, anonymous commenting is enabled and I don't log IPs (though of course I'll have a hard time responding with what I think of you if you post anonymously!).
Also, if you have any questions you want to ask me, feel free to ask here. I can't guarantee that I'll answer them (especially questions about authentication data such as passwords :) ), but feel free to ask! |
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| Tetrinet; IRC; Hunt website |
[May. 26th, 2007|04:32 am] |
A quick announcement: for the summer, the tetrifast server is at wavelet.ath.cx. Andrew's zephyr server seems to dislike unauthenticated zephyrs from behind a NAT, so the server now sends announcements using cclub zephyr. So, if you still want zephyr notifications for tetrinet games, you now have to subscribe to <functor,*,*@CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU>; you can do that with "zctl add functor \* \*@CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU" from the commandline on a machine with zephyr (eg. a cluster machine or unix3x).
On a related note, the KGB mystery hunt page can now be found here, though it looks like it will possibly move to cmukgb.org for real sometime soon, now that KGB exec has root on their own machine. The writer's wiki, which chrisamaphone should update, is also at wavelet.ath.cx; Chris will find some way to not notice this sentence, though :)
Also, I want to remind cslounge people that #cslounge on irc.freenode.net still exists, and is (along with frequent games of tetrinet, of course) a good way to keep in touch with each other during the summer!
A "real" update to my journal will come one of these days. |
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| Water computer videos |
[Apr. 16th, 2007|12:54 am] |
Water inverter (about 2MB), and two inverters (about 3MB) connected together --- these videos should explain things much better than my last post (the inverter is very simple). We were also able to connect the two with thread, so that a signal to the bottom one would affect the top one.
Here are the 160MB of pictures and videos of it from gwillen's camera, though I think the two videos I linked above are the most useful. |
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| Chicago; Water Computer |
[Apr. 14th, 2007|01:07 am] |
I mailed the acceptance form to Chicago earlier today. It's nice to finally know where I'll be next year!
In completely unrelated news: tonight chrisamaphone, gwillen and I started to assemble a water computer, something we've been wanting to do for a while. The basic idea is that instead of electricity, we have streams of water; a 1 is water flowing, and a 0 is absence of water. We've had a design for a NOT gate for a long time now (which has water flowing out of it at a certain place only if there isn't any water flowing in); and an OR gate is easy: it's a funnel to combine two streams of water. NOT and OR together can be used to build any other gate. It seems to work really well (far better than I expected it to on the first try)! We made two NOT gates, and were able to get the output from one to be the input to the other; we were also able to tie the two gates together (literally) so that signals further down could be sent back up. This means that, in theory, the design should be able to scale to any number of gates and allow one to build water versions of any circuit (we calculated that if it were made using this sort of water logic, a Z80 processor, the kind used in the TI83 calculator and old gameboys, would occupy about 1000 cubic feet and would need about a kilowatt of power just to pump the water it needs. I'm actually sort of surprised at how low these numbers are).
We took photos and video, which should appear online somewhere soon and which should make all of this a lot clearer. I'm hoping that we can eventually build a two-bit adder out of water logic (or perhaps I should say water gates, though that may be too scandalous). |
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| Grad school visits |
[Mar. 28th, 2007|05:19 pm] |
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I'll be visiting two grad schools next week: Berkeley (arriving the evening of the 3rd, leaving on the 5th), and Chicago (arriving later on the 5th, leaving on the 7th). If anyone at Berkeley wants to show me around (or give me a place to say for the two nights), let me know! (I'd say the same for Chicago, but I don't think anyone who reads this goes there). |
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