Games

So today I went to the Google Games, an event at the Google Cambridge office involving a bunch of geeky competitive events.

Highlights:

• There was a music-identification round (part of a larger trivia round), during which they rickrolled us and played awesome music like the Firefly theme, Korobeiniki, Do You Wanna Date My Avatar, and Dragostea Din Tei. Unfortunately, I was unable to correctly name Korobeiniki, as I have long held the misconception that it is called Kalinka. (I’ve been disabused of the notion before, but still couldn’t remember the right name.)
• There was a puzzle round; I spent the last half hour or so working through about 70 cases of one puzzle, looking for the one that satisfied certain conditions. At the one-minute-remaining mark, I had three cases left. I managed to eliminate one more of them, and then sent in the other two as answers, feeling sure that I had missed the answer. Instead, one of them was correct! I was both happy and sad.
• I was really excited to play Wii Sports Resort (there were supposed to be rounds in rowing, basketball, skydiving, and swordplay), and I was the only one on the team who’d played before, so we kind of figured I’d do them all. Then they said each person should only do one event, so we decided to be good competitors (they almost definitely wouldn’t've noticed had I done them all), and two other people did the first two events (I wanted to do swordplay). Then time ran short and the last two rounds were canceled. I was and remain severely disappointed.
• We were the highest-ranking Harvard team (the first five spots went to MIT). Success!
• Foosball. Playing with new people was fun. There was a left-handed table there (you shoot left instead of right); interesting, but it was also a really bad table.

A silly post. Happy ‘teens, Blandfill!

I’m making a silly post! This is so I can make a more thoughtful post later without having any backlogged sillyness to interfere.

I’ve been playing Diablo 2! I finally beat Duriel. I’m a necromancer and I summon skeletons. That game is hard and sometimes repetitive so I’m gonna lay off for a while.

There was a robotics kickoff! I didn’t sleep last night! Instead I played Diablo 2 with Nico. Nico has returned to school, to the best of my knowledge. So, today I am pulling an all-day-er. I made up this term; it describes when you have been up all night for some reason and, if you were a rational person, you’d go to sleep as soon as you were done with whatever was keeping you up all night. But I decided I want to stay up so that my sleep clock (totes not a biology person, someone explain why it exists) isn’t all screwed up, and I’m trying to make it all the way to normal-people’s-bedtime so I can be set all right and stuff. It’s about 9:20 PM as I’m writing this sentence so I think I’ve been mostly successful! Also hugely sleep deprived, which is why this post is a collection of words that lack logic or intelligence behind them.

Adrian sent this out over that one email list: http://www.dontevenreply.com/
I countered with http://www.asofterworld.com/oqarchive.php and http://www.27bslash6.com/

Here’s a silly video to break up the pace:

I have been playing the xkcd game for like two whole hours without ending. (The xkcd game is something we made up, I think, where you click “random” until you get a repeated comic.) Usually it doesn’t take more than 20 minutes, but I’ve been going really slow and leisurely, analyzing the details of each drawing, trying to make sure I don’t miss any of the jokes. (Like backslash escape sequences, for example — something I wouldn’t catch in a handcuffs reference even if I was vaguely familiar with the idea when comic 234 came out). I think my patience to do it so slowly is very related to my sleep-dep-ness; reading xkcd endlessly is trance-like.

I am reasonably sure that I haven’t been just forgetting which ones I’ve seen since I began playing, since my browser cache would load previously seen images instantly but all the comics I come across load noticeably slower than instantly.

I imagine this blog post is pretty boring. I’m streaming all over my consciousness right now.

This comic is funny.

To come, two posts (which I might combine into one) on less playful topics: A) New year’s resolution (1240×1480? ^_^), B) What happens to me when I am at home.

GChat

Someone in the room mentioned that we should create a GChat bot that would let us all talk together without the hassle of creating a chat room each time. Having used xmpppy before, I went and did it.

The result:

(Charles changed my GNOME theme to pink some weeks ago.)

Tom then wanted me to write a post about how I did it, so here it is. Without going into a description of the library itself, it works as follows: when it gets a message from one of us, it prepends the appropriate initial and sends the message to the rest of us.

I guess I can go a little more into the details of the library (especially because the documentation is pretty annoying). (There still isn’t really that much to say.) You run some commands in the library to create a connection and log in, then register a function with the connection object to handle incoming messages. I suppose I can add more description if anyone wants. Code.

So that I can get all the tags:
http://acme.com/jef/singing_science/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM0ib4GxLPw

The pursuit of career

Hmm, I’ll write a blog to warm up for my essay.

So, life is interesting and complicated. One of the things people sometimes do in life is enter careers that involve doing jobs. A question arises: What kind of career would I like to do?

I like science a lot. I think that, at a philosophical level, improving the level of mankind’s understanding of the natural world in which we all find ourselves is one of the greatest pursuits there is — here we are, some mammals sitting around wearing clothes sometimes, and we spend years figuring out what the heck everything is and how it got there. Almost as amazing as the fact that anything got there in the first place. (I think Stephen Hawking is a well-known proponent of essentially this idea.) And my favorite branch of the sciences is the science that deals with most of the universe: physics (and astronomy). Understanding the whole universe seems like an extremely ambitious goal, but people have made such big achievements already in figuring out what exactly is out there, beyond the Earth. Space is cool! And the mathematical relations (i.e. laws of physics) that most “stuff” on and near Earth follows seem to hold true throughout the visible universe, as far as we can tell. For me, the idea of being a part of this process of figuring out how the universe works is both extremely appealing and intellectually engaging. This is why I’d like to be a scientist.

Learning how to understand the awesome stuff that we see in the universe is really satisfying

But, hmm, sometimes becoming a scientist is hard, and maybe in real life it’s not as cool or satisfying as it’s cracked up to be. When I come to it, maybe the actual experience of being a scientist is tedious, unrewarding, and takes too much grant-applying & dealing with bureaucracy, and not enough exploring & appreciating the wonders of the universe. If I were to choose a career that I enjoyed, even if it didn’t have the philosophical benefits of being a ‘man of science’, what would I do with my life? (more…)