Self-Titled

The SLO heat wave has thankfully faded away. I think it’s safe to remove my lemonade IV drip now. I don’t think I could have taken another day of 100+ degree heat. It’s terrible when it’s so hot you sweat without even moving. I envy Hawaiians, you can get away with walking around in your swim suit in public all day long without drawing strange looks. I’ve always favored hot weather over cold, but I guess it’s true that it’s easier to overcome cold than heat. Fans are the greatest invention ever. I tried our AC, but apparently it just blows regular air. It’s cool at night again now. I never thought I’d welcome the cold nights here. Unsurprisingly, the coldest place I could find in SLO was the grad lab. It was about a thirty-degree difference between the lab and outside. Talk about heaven!

My house mates got back into town today from a week-long camping trip. It sounded like fun; I wish I could go camping too. It’s been so long since I’ve done the real thing with the Boy Scouts. I miss swimming in a lake, building camp fires, and exploring the country side. Maybe one day soon.

I’ve started learning a theorem proving tool to help me with my thesis.  It’s called Coq, which has got to be the most unfortunate name I can think of.  I think the creators are French, and coq means cock, as in rooster, in French.  Why rooster?  I have no idea.  Why does anyone name anything what they do?

I saw The Incredible Hulk tonight and it was pretty much what I expected: light on story, heavy on action.  The action scenes looked great, especially the scene on a campus.  The end action scene looked too CGI-ish and I kept noticing it.  I was looking forward to seeing another movie with Edward Norton in it since he’s usually good (Fight Club!), but he seemed kind of wasted on this movie.  His character, Banner, was flat and uninteresting.  He did a good job with what he had to work with, but it still left me wanting something more.  Overall a good summer action flick without a lot of depth.  (Spoiler!)  I’m interested in seeing where they go with bringing Iron Man into the mix.  (End spoiler.)

Battlestar Galactica is the best TV show I watch right now. It never fails to entertain. God I love that show. The mid-season finale had an incredible ending. I think it’s a better show than Lost, even though I consider Lost my favorite show. BSG is a remake of a TV show made decades ago, but they completely transformed it. The writing is incredible. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

From Structure And Interpretation Of Computer Programs:

In a similar way, we can regard the evaluator as a very special machine that takes as input a description of a machine. Given this input, the evaluator configures itself to emulate the machine described. For example, if we feed our evaluator the definition of factorial, the evaluator will be able to compute factorials.

From this perspective, our evaluator is seen to be a universal machine. It mimics other machines when these are described as Lisp programs. This is striking. Try to imagine an analogous evaluator for electrical circuits. This would be a circuit that takes as input a signal encoding the plans for some other circuit, such as a filter. Given this input, the circuit evaluator would then behave like a filter with the same description. Such a universal electrical circuit is almost unimaginably complex. It is remarkable that the program evaluator is a rather simple program.

I see the light! (It’s full of stars!)

I can’t believe graduation came and went already, it all happened so fast. I was so focused on my thesis work that I barely lifted my head to watch the date approach. It’s weird to go through the ceremony and celebrate with friends and family knowing that I’m not really done, that there’s more work to do. But I feel close, I think there’s only a few weeks left before I’m done. The end seemed to keep slipping out of my grasp. I wonder if it will be easier or harder to focus on my work with my roommate moved away for the summer and my other house mates gone for the week?

I snuck in a movie this weekend while my parents were here. I saw Kung Fu Panda with Michelle, and we both loved it. Go and see it, it’s hilarious!