It was an unassuming blue-grey volume tucked away in the popular science section of the Siskiyou County Library. “Spacetime Physics” it announced proudly in gold letters across the front of the book. Published in 1965, the book looked as if it hadn’t been touched in the decades since 1965. A quick opening of the book revealed diagrams of dogs floating beside rocket ships, infinite cubic lattices, and buses orbiting the Earth, all interspaced with a mathematical equations containing symbols the likes of which I’d never seen before. What was this strange book, and what, exactly, did those equations mean? How could there be equations and dogs and buses all in the same book? Answering these questions would be the beginning, for me, of a lifelong love of physics. It would also inspire in me a deep love of science books which make you smile, and, more importantly perhaps, led me to works of the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who would serve as the model of the researcher I have always wanted to be.
Continue reading “The Computer, the Universe, and John Wheeler”
Makin' Bacon
Come on, you know you want to watch it, “How It’s Made: Bacon”:
That’s some awesome background music, I must say. Good to know they check for pieces of metal which might have fallen onto the pork bellies.
CSE 322 Spring 2008, Week 1
This quarter I am teaching CSE 322: Introduction to Formal Models in Computer Science. Good fun. As part of my teaching I am LaTeXing up lecture notes from the class, which follow closely the book we are using, Sipser’s “Introduction to the Theory of Computation.” Here are the first three lectures for those with nothing better to do during their weekend:
- Lecture 1: Welcome and Introduction
- Lecture 2: Formal Definition of Deterministic Finite Automata
- Lecture 3: Regular Operations on Languages
The notes are certainly full of many typos and such, but maybe there is a young teenager who isn’t in college, but who is bright, and wants to learn something cool about theory, and thus might actually click on those links. Comments and criticisms by others are also greatly appreciated.
Why Living in Seattle Rocks
The view from my morning run
…and that’s not even the best view I get!
Embarassment Is…
…realizing that the class you are teaching for the first time this quarter ends on the half hour, not the hour, and therefore the fact that you are rushing through the material must seem extremely amusing to the students who know the class ends at 20 minutes after. Doh. Doh. Doh!
ArXiv PDF Mime Fix for Firefox 2.0
As part of my switching to a Mac, I’ve started using Firefox (one reason being that I’m investigating using Zotero for grabbing bibliographic citations from the web.) However, an annoying problem I encounter was when using Firefox and downloading pdfs from the arXiv. The problem was that Firefox failed to recognize the files as pdf files and thinks the pdf for arxiv XXXX.YYYY was a file of type YYYY. Note that this isn’t just a problem of downloading any old pdf, but specifically pdfs from the arxiv. I’ve now figure out how to fix this.
Continue reading “ArXiv PDF Mime Fix for Firefox 2.0”
Notes on Moving to a Mac
A list of observations I found in moving from a PC to a MAC.
Continue reading “Notes on Moving to a Mac”
And the Winner Is…
Well, after the Great Debate, I decided to take the plunge and get….
Yep, a MacBook Pro with a top clock speed and a ton of RAM (what you can’t infer those later things from the picture?) So far things are so good, although I must say, the “it just works,” MacMantra is just a plain lie. Getting LaTeXiT, Leopard, Linkback plugin, and Keynote to play nice together was certainly not something I’d want to force upon most people. However, I guess if your trying to use LaTeX in Keynote, then you’re probably up to the task.
I Scream, You Scream, We All
scream for Candied Bacon Ice Cream?
The Great Debate
Since my laptop was stolen, it’s time for me to think about getting a replacement. My last laptop was a tablet PC, a Toshiba M400 Portege, which was “Vista capable,” which I’m pretty sure means that it was “just barely Vista capable.” I loved having a tablet PC, but the Toshiba wasn’t exactly behaving great under Vista (slow, slow, slow.) So now the question is what should my next laptop be. In particular I am almost tempted to (close you ears Seattlites)….buy a Mac.
Continue reading “The Great Debate”