ThePanda

Tuxes and books, that’s what it is all about, tuxes and books. OK so it is about more than those two, but they seem to be important this week. Oh meeting with professors (in the plural), going to weird things, interviewing for jobs that I will obviously not get, and coding in groups are amongst other dominant themes this week. But then again, a lot of these are me making predictions, as opposed to much of anything else, and unlike certain physicists who publish strange sounding papers in Nature, which then lead to an explosion in cognitive science papers exploring such questions as how long we will live, the time period for which Nature will be published, and future frontiers in inter-galactic travel, I am not trained in such arts. I am at best an ad-hoc Bayesian person, and that isn’t good enough. Oh and Nature gets published for anywhere between another 140 and 4000 years, we really don’t have colonies in the galaxy, and umm the theory isn’t doing so well, since it needs to be contradicted in fewer than the next 100 years, and should it not be contradicted, it self contradicts, and is thus wrong. So much for statistics and Bayesian inference, as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy mentions, should anyone come close to understanding the real nature of the universe, the universe ceases to exist, and is quickly replaced by something even more ununderstandable.

There are somethings which are less understandable as a CS person than anyone else, or so I am told anyways. One of these is non-zero ordering, like tell a CS person about the Korean system of accounting for ages (add 1 to your age, that’s your Korean age), and the usual response (unless you are lucky) is something of why the hell would anyone do this, tell anyone in the non-CS world about this, and the possible response is a meh. CS people do zero ordering, zero ordering is cool, is cool anyways unless you happen to be one of those JDBC people connecting to PostgreSQL, in which case all your columns have to be 1 ordered, never quite understood this, but there always has to be this one thing which breaks with whatever you consider standard, strange but true.

Weeks can be remembered for many things, two of them are things attended and things missed. This week has had its bad moments in more than one way, but what makes it truly sucky is all that I missed, and not all of it was missed because I was busy in other pursuits. I know the entire what’s done is done thing, but these seem to be hard things to look beyond. So yesterday, Jorge Cham, who writes the usually funny, and wonderful Piled Higher and Deeper was in town, and I have been telling people for ages about how he never comes to Brown, but goes to all the other colleges which are near. Did I attend, nopes, did I have other things to do, nopes, did I notice the fact that Brown was mentioned in huge characters right above the strip, nopes, sucks. Then there is Andy Hertzfield, the guy who created folklore.org, and parts of the Mac, and is a Brown alum, and has a few Brown stories somewhere in there, was here, he works for Google now, and was perhaps here because of them, but either ways, he was here. I had this one on my calendar forever, it met at the same time as Cog Sci, but we could find ways around that, well turns out I couldn’t, so bah on that. Bah I say, bah.

Ze Panda

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 12:18 am and is filed under Observances, article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.