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!
Some people like to work on their computers with the lights off, and I can’t for the life of me understand why or come to like it. You can’t very well see the keyboard, your desk, or anything really. You have to squint into a bright light bulb for hours at a time, which I’ve heard isn’t good for your eyes, and it doesn’t seem to actually make the monitor easier to look at. I’ve seen offices partitioned into “light” and “dark”, and it’s just silly.
If I ever get stuck working in a dark office, I’ll bring my own lighting and force anyone who wants to enter my office or cubicle to don the sunglasses and unfold the umbrella I will provide them to help shelter them from the unholy rays shining down upon them. The least I can do is be sensitive to their condition.
When a TV show loses an actor or actress, the writers have to replace their character with a new one and make sure it’s all consistent with the plot. This takes valuable time away from what could have otherwise been a kick-ass space battle.
I’d be too impatient to artfully work around a change in cast. I wonder if you could get away with doing a half-assed job of replacing the actor or actress but essentially keep the character the same. You could introduce the new character, make a lame attempt to flesh them out for that episode, then forget all that and write the new character just like the old one: same personality, same way of speaking, same past, knowledge, etc. You’d just pretend that nothing really happened and continue on. It’d be hilarious!
It’s a shame how much software is rewritten all the time. Incompatibilities of language, interface, and execution platform and the proprietary nature of most software development seem to have doomed us to forever reinvent the software wheel. The number of linked list implementations out there must be staggering. In a perfect world, someone would decide a linked list would be a nice thing and implement it, and then everyone else would use that one implementation from then on. Sadly, the reality of software today is that one person’s implementation of even a very generic data structure probably won’t satisfy the needs of other people. There’s a missing link in the software systems we use that would let us create abstractions that anyone can reuse for their own needs.
Damn this San Luis Obispo weather! It’s always stabbing me in the back. It was supposed to be 65 degrees today, it’s actually 61 degrees right now, but I’m hot as hell in these pants, shoes, and long-sleeved shirt. I can’t win.
I bought the Nintendo Wii game Super Mario Galaxy when it was released and I’ve almost finished it (ten stars left to get). It’s a superb game, with beautifully-executed graphics, sound, game play, and level design (IGN gave it 9.7/10). It’s the best game on Wii right now and I’d recommend it to anyone who liked other Mario games or wants to see the Wii controls done right. However, it does have a couple faults.
Camera
Perhaps the most notable thing about Galaxy is the gravity game play, in which Mario can run on and jump between objects of varying sizes, shapes, and themes floating in space. Each object has its own gravity tug like a planet, so “up” and “down” from Mario’s perspective change as he moves from object to object, or even from surface to surface on the same object. Unfortunately, the camera’s orientation (”up” and “down” from our perspective) doesn’t change to match Mario’s, preserving the orientation with which we started. As Mario’s orientation changes, it can be difficult to predict how the controls will change with his orientation. Moving Mario forward (up on the analog stick) may move Mario away from the camera when on one object, but toward the camera when on another object. Don’t even get me started on left and right. You grow a sense of what to expect after a while, but it never feels natural, and sometimes you guess wrong. The ideal controls would always be relative to the camera so that up, down, right, and left on the analog stick would always do what you’d expect.
Since some objects are very small, their surfaces are sharply curved. The camera doesn’t stay directly over Mario’s head, so sometimes you lose your depth perception and can’t tell where Mario will land if he jumps somewhere.
Level design
Many of the 120 stars in the game involve level remixes, where an extra element is thrown into a level to make it harder, like limiting Mario’s health, making enemies faster, time limits, races, coin collecting, etc. Some of them were fun and others weren’t. Some of the purple coin challenges (collect the one hundred purple coins throughout a level to get a star) were hard, frustrating, and tedious.
Some levels were just too hard. There’s no way you’d pass the first time or even the second. When you find yourself dying for the fifth or sixth time, you have to ask yourself what the point is. It’s just making you frustrated, and that’s not fun. Those levels needed more tweaking to balance out the difficulty.
This year is the first time I’ve been in charge of paying an electricity bill. Even though the bill is split four ways, I alone seem to go out of my way to turn off unused lights and electronics. I don’t go so far as patrolling the halls, but sometimes I feel like you could stand outside and see where I am in the house by the windows that go dark. I didn’t used to be so active about conserving energy with previous roommates, so I’m pretty sure it’s just because I’m the one cutting the check for the bill. The lesson to take away here is to avoid being the one in charge of paying the electricity bill, because it’s probably the most visible utility when it’s used.
I gave a fifty-minute lecture on the lambda calculus for a class last week. It was a topic I understood very well, but had never taught to someone else before. The length of the lecture was daunting enough, but I was surprised at how difficult it was to create a lesson plan. I could clearly see the ideas and their implications in my mind’s eye, but it was hard to impose an order and a rationale on them that would make sense from the perspective of someone new to the material. You have to say the right thing in the right way in the right order. Ideas and concepts have to progress naturally and logically, later ones building on earlier ones. With this new insight into teaching, I respect teachers who were able to clearly explain something to me all the more. You aren’t qualified to teach an idea to others just because you understand it.