A kid asked me what mass was. Just out of the blue.
I tried to explain. It's just the measure of matter, as height and weight are measures. But how is it different from weight, they want to know.
At this point, it gets strange. Insofar as weight!=mass, the distinction is that mass is how we think of weight and weight is something much more complicated. We're all backwards. It's silly that a six-year-old knows what weight is--in a rough intuitive sense--but not what mass is. We should stop talking in terms of weight. I don't care that I weigh 63KG at the Earth's surface, or that the bag of salt I'm buying weighs 80LB at sea level. What's actually relevant is how much of me or of salt there is. The mass. (Actually, according to Wikipedia, in commerce, 'weight' means mass. So use the term 'mass', darn it!)
Instead of having kids grow up possessing (or thinking they posess) an intuitive sense of what weight is and only teaching mass in science class, they should grow up with an intuitive idea of what mass is, and weight should be a weird scientific concept discussing relations of gravitational fields, which are caused by mass.

Maybe once we colonise other planets we'll switch. But I doubt it. Few would hesitate to say the Sun rose this morning, after all.

I've been browsing some blogs today. Some interesting. Most not. But that's not my point.

I like to comment. I don't care what you have to say about your life. That's not what your blog is for. Your blog is so /I/ can comment on your life. But you have comments turned off. Where am I to leave my brilliant commentary and polite chit-chat?

It's my own fault, of course. I tried getting Annozilla working before, but couldn't get it to connect to any servers. I should try again. But I'm using Elinks now. Oh well.

Sidenote: silly people I know think nothing's wrong with posting personal attacks on public blogs. They have absurd arguments for it having to do with stores in malls not being permitted to kick out disruptive patrons and such. Well, they're wrong, mostly. You're welcome to post comments here, and you're welcome to tell me that I'm wrong and that I'm a grotesquely ugly freak, but do not troll and do not spam. I get to make these rules; the mall does not disallow my making such rules. Optimally, act like this is the Internet pre-September 1993. Minimally, don't troll and don't spam. Really, you shouldn't need to be told that acting badly is bad.

(I've been thinking about renaming my blog to something descriptive, but given this sort of post, I don't think there is a more accurate name.)

It's raining pretty dark here, and it's all dark (which is intriguing because the sky--while not particularly blue--is far from dark; not grey, but more a grey-blue white, really). I don't have to go outside (but I can if I get the urge), I don't have to drive, and I didn't have a picnic planned this afternoon. (Do people really go on picnics?)
It's just dark and busy outside, making it dark and reclusive in here. Who needs the open and welcoming sunshine of Spring? /This/ is the world the way it was meant to be.

In German, words like 'my' aren't the genetive pronouns, but merely adjectives. I don't know if Anglo-Saxon is the same or not. My textbook isn't extremely helpful.

And I'm still wondering about their helpful 'how to pronounce this stuff' section. I can distinguish the A's in 'has' and 'sat', but the two A's in 'aha'? Maybe the second syllable is chopped short, similar to an apostrophe in Klingon. The first between 'has' and 'cought'?

then there's the y and y|. They're described as being like the 'i' in 'tin', but with lips in whistling position (French 'tu') and as the 'ee' in 'seen', but with lips again in whistling position (French 'ruse'). I don't know French.
And I can't whistle.

I'm a bit of an audial learner. I want to be able to mentally hear the words when first learning them. I guess I'll try to did up a good phonology site later. I'm stymied without.

In Anglo-Saxon (Old English), the 'f' and 'v' were the same character. It was typically voiced ('v') in the middle of words and unvoiced ('f') at the beginning and end. Hence, the voicedness of the plural.

This, of course, explains quite a few English words.

This girl--a senior in CS--just came over to ask one of the professors how to compile C++ on Solaris. 'It's something like g++ -o and then something' (She says 'minus oh').
The professor, I kid you not, didn't remember but tried searching online.

I tell her 'g++ -o output_file source_file' and she's like, 'but I only have one input file'.
Dr. Collins then found the command on another professor's website. And, oh look!, I was right!

I told Dr. Collins, 'If I was the professor, I'd fail you both', but I don't think she heard me. (I suppose the professor can be forgiven; at least she was able to look it up. But the student must die.)



I got to do the student evaluation of Dr. Wirth this morning. Wrote a short lecture on letting incompetents learn stuff on their own time.

This is a Java course. Dr. Wirth constantly tries to say, 'you know how it is in C++, well here's how it is in Java...what? You don't know how it is in C++? God! You people really need to learn this stuff. *endless lecture on C++*'
All The Time. Intro C++ and Data Structures (which also uses C++) are both prerequisites for the Java course. These students have taken the those courses. They just Don't Know Anything. For the first month or two, we wrote more C++ code in this course than we wrote Java, because he'd have us write a bubble sort in C++, or a simple command line interpreter in C++, because these fools would be clueless. He sees major holes in our education and takes it upon himself to try to fill them in. He's explained the basics of DOS commands and environmental variables in several of my courses, when what he really should have said was, 'In order to program a computer, you need to know how to use one. Go learn that on your own time'.

He's an interesting professor. Entertaining. Teaches interesting stuff that's very useful and not taught anywhere else. But that leaves very little time for the actual material. Several of us would like to see 'Computer Science 0001: Dr. Wirth's Rantings'. I'd actually like to see two of them, an intro level and a senior level. (Basic DOS commands are intro level [or below], whereas details of C++'s switch implementation should come after intro C++.)

I finished my paper this afternoon. It's not great, but it'll do. I also finally figured out a title better than 'Title': 'One Hasn't Really Lived Until One's Been Painted'. Stems from this just-before-the-end paragraph:

However, let us consider again just what is now being claimed. This experiment originally intended to show that we cannot conceive of an unperceived island, and then take the principle that what cannot be conceived most likely cannot exist to reject unperceived objects. But does that principle make sense under the wider meaning of perceive? It seems as if we have expanded the meaning of 'perceive' to essentially mean 'perceive or imagine', which seems in a sense synonymous with 'conceive'. So what we're claiming is that we cannot conceive of an island that is not being conceived. This seems an odd argument. One could just as easily argue that one cannot paint something without it being painted. Surely one cannot then conclude that nothing exists but things that are painted.

Yeah. The whole paper is kind of lame. There are a couple nice(?) spots. Here one from the opening paragraph:

Let us begin by considering one of Barkley's objections to one of Locke's claims, and if the required five pages has not been reached*, we shall go on to consider a pro-Barkley argument and see how it fairs¹.

And here's a fun excerp from later on:

...Consider the numeral '4'. Aside from having four points in some fonts², it has no resemblance whatsoever to the number four.

² Twos, threes and sometimes fours are easy to add because you can count the points. I think I did this with fives too, but that was pushing it.

And around the same spot:

So what is it that allows these things to represent? In the case of the numeral '4', I honestly have no idea*, but I believe Dr. Georgalis once said that numerals are proper names for numbers, so let us consider the case of the name 'Luca' and assume the issue of numerals is essentially identical to it.

(Interesting, that one instance is the only place the name 'Luca' is mentioned in the entire paper. Oh well.)

Oh...I just realised the title of this post isn't quite accurate. I have one deadline appraiching. NaNoWriMo ends in a couple weeks. I think I'm close to 2 000 words done. Only 48 000 to go! (I'll bet I could get it done too. Yes I could.)

* Honesty is the best policy, right?

Over the past few weeks (or however long it's been since my last update), I've thought of things to write about here and not done it. So here's a collection of ramblings. I'm probably forgetting the most interesting ones.

* The CSCI club watched Wargames last Thursday. We spent ages trying to get the sound to work. I suggested just printing out copies of the script and assigning each person a character or set of characters. We ended up just moving to another room where the sound actually worked, but it was a good idea. Maybe better for shorter shows, as it may get boring after a while, but that'd be a fun game. Like Rocky Horror, only . . .different.

* I have a five-page Barkley paper due Wednesday. I started this morning thinking it was due tomorrow, but I asked the professor and he's cool with it being Wednesday. The assignment sheet said 'Tuesday...before you leave for Thanksgiving...before Thanksgiving even if you don't leave for Thanksgiving'. Not a very clear deadline. Anyway, I have two or three pages done (I rejected Locke's Resemblance Thesis, argued that resemblance is unnecessary, argued that Locke's theory still doesn't work, and then concluded that God solves the problem. It took three pages only because I'm trying to stretch it as much as possible. Lots of useless examples which are then dismissed as unhelpful. Anyhoo...I have a Stats test tomorrow, and I want to study for that briefly at one point. Prepare a crib sheet so I don't have to remember how to do everything. Sidenote: My TI-83--normally willing to do everything for me--will only do the Chi^2 tests when given the observed and expected values. There seems to be nothing on there to compute the expected values. I could probably program it (the professor doesn't mind if we program our calculators), but that's too much work.

* I was thinking about parsers last night. How a parser could be made so that it can handle things like doifXwhileY...just running everything together with no delimiters. Doable, but if you had commands 'whi', 'while', 'let', and 'tell' (for example), it could avoid using the greedy algorithm by regressing in an almost-bubble sort-like procedure. It'd be cool. I did a quick writeup on it and ended up deciding what I was doing was solving the partitioning problem.
Anyway, it could be trouble, as such a grammar could easily become non-deterministic with the proper commands (or variable names, if they weren't clearly distinct, as with different case or something).

* Christmas decorations popped up in Grimesland a few days ago. And of course Christmas commercials have begun. And one local furniture store is doing an end-of-the-year clearance to make room for next year's models. (Furniture comes in yearly models?)
you don't need to start on my girt just yet though. My list contains items such as 'become a vegetarian', which you needn't start on until Christmas morning (or 20050101, or sometime soonish). Or donate to the EFF or the ACLU. They'll probably send me email and it will arrive within a few minutes. (I know the EFF sends email usually, but they didn't last time.)

* Or buy me some new hardware. If it arrives late, I'll forgive you, since it's not like anybody else is buying me that. They're getting me random junk I didn't ask for.

* Remember: Friday is Buy Nothing Day! _Don't_ _buy_ _anything_. (Charitable donations aren't consider purchases in my book. Keep sending money to the EFF!

A couple days ago, my brother was playing around with one of the other students' phone, trying to guess the phone's password for fun. He didn't get it, but he got close, apparently.
Today, when the guy entered his password a few seats away from my brother, my brother asked to try guessing again.
A moment later, the phone was unlocked.
So the guy changed his password. My brother got that one on the first try.

Here's a hint for you: if your telephone beeps in a different tone for each number, your password is not secure. People who know music can get it just by listening to you type it in.

The Blogspot article Blog The Vote has links to search Google for "I voted for Kerry" and "I voted for Bush" restricted to the Blogspot domain. Currently, Bush (131) is far ahead of Kerry (47) (especially if you add in 'George W. Bush'), and in second place is my guy: "I voted for Nader" (101).
Somehow I don't think it's a very representative sample.

Of course, following this post I should show up on all three lists, but I'm only three votes, so it doesn't make a difference.