Confirmation
Posted by duncan in Uncategorized on December 15, 2009
It turns out that Charles was right. Here is an e-mail that was sent to someone in the Harvard Society of Physics Students:
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Randall Munroe
Date: Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 12:25 PM
Subject: Re: the harvard physicists are on to you: (was: Fwd:
[sps-open] xkcd and galactic rotation curves)
To: Jacob Rus
It’s a coincidence, but I swear I’ve seen that graph before. I
remember wishing I could see the error bars and data points.
Best,
Randall
CS50 Projects!
Posted by blandfill in college life, computers, science, the Internet on December 13, 2009
Hey everyone, as you may or may not have known, the CS50 fair was this past Tuesday, and three of us participated (Danny’s too good for CS50, although we did try to get him to TF the course).
Note: The cloud is being reset on January 1, 2010, so the links will no longer work soon.
Charles’ Project:
An automated trading system analyzer written in Python3 (eventually going to be moved to its own domain). http://cloud.cs50.net/~li15/fp/
Duncan’s Project:
A course selection tool that randomly selects appropriate Core classes. http://cloud.cs50.net/~dwatts/final
Tom’s Project:
An interactive speech recognition program named “Hal Py-Thousand.” Source Code: http://www.blandfill.com/tomstuff/CS50.rar
Danny:
Look at the post below for one of Danny’s many projects. http://www.blandfill.com/2009/12/13/gchat/
GChat
Posted by danny in Music, Uncategorized, college life, computers, hacks, science, the Internet, video games, videos on December 13, 2009
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
xkcd is so much better than I could have imagined
Posted by duncan in Uncategorized, science on December 11, 2009
After doing a lab about galactic rotation curves, the following xkcd comic has gained more meaning for me;
Escalators
If this isn’t explicit enough for you, please compare it to the following;
Shock and awe.
Creative Process Part II
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Hello world.");
}
Remember how I said I was writing an essay last Thursday? Ha, well, just finished it last night. For those of you who learn about details of my life solely through this blog (I don’t know whether any of you exist, but if you do, please feel free to contact me IRL or through facebook or something, I promise I won’t think you’re creepy!) , here’s a quick update:
- After my three-hour sleep thing, I wasn’t able to work on my essay anymore, so I didn’t drink that red bull.
- In section, I got an extension until Tuesday night.
- Astronomy lab! And CS50 final project! Ouch, double all-nighters, not doing that again.
- On Tuesday, I got way busy accidentally because of CS50fair and other stuff and failed to do the essay.
- So I spent ALL DAY yesterday working on that darn essay.
Now, I don’t intend for this blog to become “oh my god my life is so busy, let me tell you all the details of how busy I am”. That would be uninteresting and unoriginal. But there’s some unresolved things from my last blog post, which is why I’m posting.
So, this creative process. It is, I suspect, important in the humanities. As a young scientist I’ve spent some time questioning whether the humanities are worth anything; my answer is pending but leaning towards “hell, I’m not sure anything’s really worth anything, so why not?”.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with my own creativity, however I can manage it. To be creative, let’s try to define that: “Creativity is a mental and social process involving the discovery of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. Creativity is fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight.” (Thanks Wikipedia.) I like being creative in different ways. Creative with language; creative with code; creative with images; creative with problem-solving. Maybe I’m getting better at these. If I am, it’s exciting.
Well, I don’t have much else I feel like writing about at the moment, but I found this video online and Charles thinks it’s extremely cute:
uneven wet bricks = traction fail
Posted by danny in Uncategorized, college life on December 3, 2009
The creative process (and blood!)
Posted by tom in college life on December 3, 2009
First things first: I gave blood today (Wednesday) for the first time! Duncan was doing it and my schedule was the same as his so I figured I may as well. It was kinda cool, in an ow-my-arm-hurts-in-a-weird-sore-way-will-this-needle-come-out-soon-please way. I’ll post a picture within the next couple dozen hours. (It won’t be gross.)
Second things second: I am reflecting upon the creative process. By this, I mean: I am attempting to write an essay. This is the third essay for my English class. It is due tomorrow (to a good approximation, at least – there are some complicated details). I’ve been thinking of things to write about, and referencing the text of the novel I’d like to write my topic on, for several days, and I even emailed my TF with a bunch of the ideas I’d collected. So, armed with a whole bunch of jotted-down observations, the page numbers referencing my favorite quotes, and a very vague idea of what my thesis might sort of be, I sat down four hours ago ready to write my essay.
This was a bad idea.
I know this because I did essentially the same thing for my first essay. I never really finished it, because I wasn’t able to write anything. I didn’t have a solid idea of exactly what I was going to do when I jumped into writing it, and as a result I sat staring at the mostly-blank text document for literal hours. The smallest temptations become irresistible distractions when you’re a little sleepy (or perhaps just caffeine-jittery) and don’t know really what you’re writing about. But when you’ve set out to write your essay and then go to sleep and then turn the essay in as soon as you wake up, it seems like the only good idea is to just write – there’s no time to stop and go back and outline your thoughts in detail! So you press on, but those distractions just get bigger.
Long overdue
Posted by duncan in Music, college life, computers, science, the Internet, videos on November 25, 2009
Hello readers; I realize that it’s been almost three weeks since I’ve posted, since exciting things like meteor showers, drastic concentration changes, and creepy conversations online with strangers aren’t things that happen to me. But the rest of the Blandfill has been good to me and hasn’t heckled me for not posting, as I have done to them many times. So here’s my update.
Will Ramsey bit me today at the hockey game. It was refreshing and terrifying. Read the rest of this entry »
Omegle
Posted by tom in Uncategorized on November 21, 2009
Stars
Posted by danny in Music, Uncategorized, college life, computers, science, the Internet, videos on November 19, 2009
This one’s for Rachel. Thanks for taking care of our wet music.
As Tom mentioned below, we went, along with a bunch of other people, to see the stars. (Nominally the meteors, but there weren’t very many of them.) I’ve got a little tripod, so I took some long-exposure (15 seconds, so not really that long) shots of the sky.
Cassiopeia over the horizon.
Orion.
This is the PLEIADES.
And now for something completely different.
This is awesome. Someone should do this for a CS50 final project.