Confused

This was supposed to be an entry on my newly rediscovered love for dynamic programming and most things CS, then somewhere down the line that changed into an entry on Australian bush poetry and Banjo Paterson, which then finally turned into an entry on this month’s National Geographic Magazine. Right now I am not really sure what this entry is about, and I should therefore get the things I am sure of out of the way before heading into the dark unknown. Hmm, Francis Crick has died at the age of 88 and well that’s really sad, because to a large part a lot of the things that I have seen and used through the course of my life have at least indirectly been a result of some of his work. Secondly one of my “Days before Departure” things should be coming up soon, since I (now this is scary, I have to attribute craziness to myself) seem to have gone of on a collection spree, collecting all sorts of stuff which I plan to carry, and packing and repacking my poor computer bag. Oh well that entry should be appearing soon.

Going back to this month’s NGM, well I have always found the NGM to be a potpourri of a lot of different kinds of stuff, geography (the serious kind, with demographic information, geology and all sorts of stuff), travel (the fun kind of geography), conservancy, biology, physics and chemistry, history (history the National Geographic was is invariably fun) and a thousand other bits and pieces. I guess this is in part because the National Geographic Society sponsors a wide variety of work, and what’s published in the magazine is in keeping in line with the breadth of human knowledge and endeavor. However this breadth of information has its own problems, in my case I have never really found myself enjoying every article which graces an issue of the NGM, usually I love one article a magazine, read about three, and give up on the rest. I don’t really blame the writers of those other articles, neither do I blame the photographers (the photographs are almost always good) or the editors, rather it’s a matter of personal choice, usually it’s because I don’t like the introduction to a particular article, or because the topic doesn’t interest me at that point of time. I generally like articles which have more of a traveloguish feel to them than some of the more factual articles which grace the magazine, I read most of the factual articles but what I really love are the traveloguish articles and stories, which is why I really love this month’s National Geographic Magazine. For one at least one of the authors has tried to experiment with the way articles are written, and while I have seen National Geographic experimenting with photographs (they had this story with photos which looked as if they’d been colored with crayons, and this other story a few months ago where they used multiple frames to create a single photograph) experimenting to this extent with their stories is something new. Usually they stick to journals (expeditions like the Megatransect) or to general factual articles the kind you’d find in most news magazines and the like. This time however there’s this article on the Jersey shoreline written entirely in the form of letters and well that is really cool. There’s also this article on the Australian outback and Banjo country and that’s really good (weirdly enough the last paragraph contains no information, well it was somehow important I write about it). Oh and I absolutely detest the article on obesity, which shows you that I can never really love everything that National Geographic prints.

I also came across some of the dp stuff I had collected some time back, and I suddenly realized dp is fun, it isn’t all that bad. Actually I was biased against dp when I first came across it, mostly because I had become a little uninterested in CS and well programming had somehow gone on to become more of a chore than an interest. Slightly more than a year down the line I cannot imagine why or how I’d have got bored with programming and I absolutely cannot imagine why I would have been uninterested in dp. Admittedly I got the wrong introduction to dp, while the subset-sum problem (given n integers determine whether an integer x can be formed by a subset of those n integers) is interesting in someways, it somehow does not fit my idea of what an intro to dp would include. Now the LCS problem (Longest Common Subsequence, given two strings find the longest common string which can be made using characters taken in order from both strings) or the Traveling Salesperson problem (given a directed graph with n vertices find the shortest path to go through each vertex exactly once) seem to show off more of dp’s power and I believe at least the LCS problem serves as a better introduction to dp. Oh well I hope my “introductory” CS course has some DP in it.

Ze Panda
confused….