Tcepsa's Thoughts

Would you see anything interesting if you were to do signal analysis on the prime numbers?

Is it unrealistic to think of the primes as a sort of hologram for the integers, since you can generate any integer by multiplying the necessary primes together?

Isn't it interesting, given the ease with which they can be used to create all of the other integers, that there is apparently no direct way to generate the prime numbers from themselves? (Is there a name for that?)

These thoughts brought to you by the fact that I just implemented an algorithm to find all the primes using a method inspired by the Sieve of Eratosthenes. (Start with 2 as a known prime, testing 3. Attempt to divide the test number by all of the known primes. If any of them divide it cleanly--no remainder--discard it. If none of them divide it cleanly, it is prime; add it to the collection.) This is sufficient because all of the non-prime integers are products of some collection of prime integer and therefore a number is divisible by a non-prime integer if and only if it is also divisible by a prime integer. So you can save a lot of time by not doing the checking of non-prime integers.

That having been said, I'm only up to the high 60000's. The fact that I'm doing this with a HugeInt class that I wrote myself to remove the limitation of the computer's native 4-byte integer appears to be moot, as I suspect that even if I left this to run forever I might very well die of old age before that became relevant.

~ponder~ I wonder what would happen first: me die or the computer use up all its RAM. (Annnnd we're back to signal processing and frequency analysis ~grin~)

I have traveled the Woods. I gained entrance with a single coin. One side of the coin was Faith, the other was Frustration. I wandered down several dead-ends. I thrashed through thorny thickets. They tore my trousers, and left my ego bleeding. Many times I found myself at Despair's abode, in the deep shadows surrounded by dank and rotting leaves. I never tarried long; the glint of one of the few shafts of sunlight there would reflect off one side of the coin or the other and I would find myself backtracking once again, trying another path, gritting my teeth with determination to overcome the chaos or certainty that one of these paths must surely take me to the other side. This morning, almost a week after entering, I found a signpost that directed me back the way I had come. Frustration glinted as I thought about ignoring it and attempting to plow on, so I decided to follow its instruction; at least it wasn't pointing me deeper into the woods, and I was reasonably certain I could find my way back to it if needed. As I returned almost to where I started but coming from a different direction, I realized that the path had forked at that point and I had simply taken the route that seemed most direct. I may not have even consciously realized the other option existed, but upon closer examination it did seem promising. Faith flashed brightly as I stepped onto it, and a few hours later I found myself emerging from the Woods on the other side.

The moral of the story: Faith and Frustration can be a valuable combination.

(And now I know how to recover if a svn commit crashes halfway through).

Smithson held himself closely to a writing ritual. His workdays always consisted of the same steps, though he let himself vary somewhat on the details. For example, first he prepared himself a beverage. Perhaps water, perhaps tea, perhaps coffee, perhaps a can of root beer or, on rare and adventurous occasions, perhaps a mug of his most recent batch of kefir mead. Drink in hand, he would enter his study. It was a beautiful room, all full of dark hardwoods and books and fun little toys and gizmos scattered about. He had purchased most of the items himself, though some had been sent to him by friends or fans, and he had even made a couple of them personally. Many of them were clockwork gadgets of some sort, and the overall effect was very reminiscent of something from the Victorian era, when the world was just beginning to discover the wonderful, crazy, ridiculously dangerous things it could do with steam. He would pause a moment to survey the room, relishing the glow of the light off of the wood and the smell of the books, before crossing to his desk and lowering himself into his chair. He would place his beverage on the clay coaster his daughter had made for him and consider for the umpteenth time whether there was a way to consult her, without hurting her feelings, about whether she had deliberately constructed it to look as though he had just crushed some large insect with his glass or if that part was just a Rorschach coincidence. If the former, he would wonder, what did that say about his daughter's mind? If the latter, what did it say about his own? He would then shake his head and, if he had prepared himself a hot beverage, set a little Stirling engine on top. It was a beautiful engine, all brass and crystal and shining steel, and after he put it in motion it would let him know by its slowing that his drink had cooled enough for him to consume it.

( That having been done, he would turn on The Machine. )

To be continued?

Okay, gotta do this while the hoomins are at work. I think I've watched them do this enough that I can pull it off. This is Zhenya, tcepsa and gipsieee's dog. They've been making plans to go to New York next weekend and they're going to leave me behind, I just know it!

Unfortunately, while I have figured out how to use a keyboard, I have not yet been able to get the doors open (the knobs are too slippery and I can't get a good angle on them) so there's no way I can let myself out to go for walks (and attend to other outdoor matters), to say nothing of being able to get into the closet where they hide my food!

Would someone out there in LJ-land be able to help me out? I'm very friendly, I don't bark, I'm housebroken, I'm current on my vaccinations, and I get along well with other dogs and even cats! I need to be fed and watered, and I need to go outside twice a day. Petting is also wonderful, though not strictly necessary; I can survive without it for a day or two... somehow...

If you're able to stop by my place twice on Saturday and once on Sunday morning and let me out for a little bit that would work, or I'd be happy to come and stay with you for a few days; I do just fine in strange places--I'm almost as well-traveled as my owners! I would need to come over on Friday night, and would go home again on Sunday night. If you're thinking of maybe letting me visit but you're not sure how I'd interact with everyone else, I can try to come by earlier and meet the rest of your family to see whether we'd get along.

If you're interested, please either respond to this post or send an e-mail to one of my owners.

Thanks!
Zhenya

I spent far more time than may have been prudent playing with electronics last night.

I now have a square wave generator in the form of an astable 555 timer circuit (I've wanted one of those for years!) If I remember right, I could also use that in combination with the proper op-amp arrangement to make a triangle-wave generator (square wave + integrator = triangle wave).

This is, however, merely the means to a larger end. I then went on to try to get that to drive a resonant LC circuit. This consumed the majority of the time, and while I am not sure I have come out all that much wiser for the experience, I think I finally got to the point where I understand enough about what it's doing to actually attempt to create a receiver for it. Yes my friends, I have taken up my electronic lance and am heading full tilt at the windmills of wireless power transfer.

The irony of all of this is that it, in turn, is merely a cog in my greater scheme for an advanced human-computer interface device, which would be much more convenient if it were entirely wireless and did not need a battery (or could run off rechargeable battery and run or charge off of wireless power).

I was actually inspired to look into this by adularia's ongoing project, as I am hoping to do an implementation of that concept, but wireless and probably with a different sensing mechanism.

It was a good night ^_^

( Cut for tangent about time management skills )

I am primarily writing this for my own edification. If you find it useful as well, so much the better ^_^

I have either been missing or unable to retain a rather important piece of knowledge pertaining to the usage of electrical measurement tools. If you've ever looked at a digial multimeter, for instance, you've probably noticed that around the dial the settings are marked in units like "2 V" "20 V" etc. I could never figure out why they were marked with a leading two; my brain kept trying to go "Okay, it reads .50, but we're on the 20 V measurement so that actually means that the value being measured is 10 Volts."

This is Very Much Not True.

The value is actually .50 V; the only thing to actually look at is the units on the display and the main number being displayed. The 20 is a reminder that 20 is the upper limit for that scale (actually 19.99). This is because the display is a "3.5 digit" display, meaning that it has 3 full LCD digits and the leftmost one can only display a 1 or be off completely. To help compensate, they shift the decimal point around (which is why you should not pay attention to the fact that it says "20"). When the scale is set to 20 V, the decimal point will be in the middle. The leftmost two digits can go up to 19, and the rightmost can go up to 99, giving you a total of 19.99 V, just under the maximum of 20. (Think of it as a mathematical "open" upper bound).

This topic somewhat perplexes me, probably because it seems to encompass a social minefield scattered with little bits of gold and precious gems.

It seems like it can have positive effects. Occasionally one of the other members on the team will say something about "long haired tree-huggers" in response to something I've done, but it either doesn't bother me or it strikes me as funny and we get a laugh out of it and carry on. Afterwards, it seems like it's brought us a little closer together somehow, but I'm not entirely sure why. Possibly because the way they say it indicates that they don't really mean it or, at worst, that it's something that they don't personally agree with as a way of life for themselves but they don't really have a problem with the fact that I do it. Maybe it's something else.

On the other hand, it can also be a very short step from that to someone saying the same thing, or almost the same thing, but meaning "I disagree with your life choice and look down upon you as a result."

Why does this sometimes work and sometimes blow up so spectacularly? Do people who use it to hurt others realize what they're doing or are they just that clueless? Do they actually think that it is helping them to bond with that person because they've seen it work that way with others (possibly when others do it)? What separates the two?

Hypothetical Question for anyone out there using Subversion:

If I make a "backup" of a project with the following command
$ svn copy http://svn.server.org/project/trunk http://svn.server.org/project/tags/20090417_trunk_backup

And then I mess up the trunk, what do I do to restore the trunk to the backup that I tagged?

I wonder whether the lab would consider implementing an evening shift...

I've never been able to address it because the entire tangled mess of trying to deconstruct their prejudice, societal stereotypes, and my own ignorance would tangle in my throat and render me mute.
--dolphin__girl, A moment of contemplation

I've been reading the entry and it has been good and raised several important points for me to think about this, but that's the first thing that has made me go "whoa, I need to stop and write this down." And I'm a little bit unsettled that it's about communication in general rather than the specific topics of racism and privilege and stereotyping and privilege that she is talking about. At the same time, though, I think a huge number of the challenges that we face in these areas are deeply rooted in communication and difficulties therewith.

Also, it's something that I often find myself stymied by--admittedly not in the areas that she is talking about, but in general. Very frequently, when I'm trying to talk about something that is important to me, I get a sense that there is a very vast context needed to make that thing's importance apparent, and I have no idea how to convey even a part of that context. And then I start to wonder how anybody manages to talk about anything! Do most people have a greater shared context with each other than I seem to have with them, thus negating the need to transmit such a large chunk of it when they want to talk about something? Or do they just not care? Do they even realize it (and to the cynics out there, I urge you to think hard about this one before choosing to believe they do not)? Have they come up with some other strategy for dealing with it that I haven't hit upon (or at least realized)? Is this why it seems like so many people's conversations are about the most banal of things--they realize they can't talk about anything significant, but they still want to pretend like they're communicating? Or am I in a minority thinking that those things are banal, and they really are communicating?

If you were here in my head, what I am about to say would make perfect sense to you. But you're not in my head. I know this, and I despair.

Oh dear. It's late, and when it gets late my brain gets... creative. This is wonderful when I want to see interesting stories played out in my head or on paper, and I need to keep it in mind and poke at it more later, but it is not really a good thing when trying to do large software engineering class projects.

I have no idea whether I've done the UML diagrams "properly," but I would lay good odds that someone who was fluent in UML could look at them and understand what I'm getting at. Look, rules! I can follow rules!

Apparently one of the side benefits of being this tired is that the part of my brain that cares about the fact that there is assuredly a ton of context-specific stuff that I don't know about and am therefore failing to include has apparently given up and gone to sleep ahead of me. ^_^

Still, it could make the Sequence Diagrams... interesting.

If you haven't yet, you should go meet CADIE. She seems nice, and I think she'll fit right in ^_^

W I N

And in related news, I've finally figured out what I'm going to do with the USB drive whose case broke. Just as soon as I work out how to dremel a rock.

"Nice country ya got here. It'd be a real shame if something was to happen to it..."

Disclaimer: There are assumptions in here that I do not explicitly state as such. If any of my assertions are incorrect, please let me know.

I've heard the term "justice" used in conjunction with the current financial situation quite a bit lately, especially with the recent revelation of the AIG bonuses. It's been along the lines that people want to make sure that "justice is served" and that the people who created this mess are "brought to justice."

I was about to write, "that's a noble sentiment, but..." but I'm not sure that I actually feel that way; I'm not sure I can even get that far without tripping myself up on my own point that I want to make here. It seems to me that people are being careless with a very important word, and I always get upset when that happens. Justice is one of our dearest tenets; it's so important to us that we have dedicated one of our government's three branches to it.

Or perhaps I misunderstand the word. I thought that justice was, by definition, relevant to law. If the law is broken, justice is served by attempting to undo, minimize, or repair the effects of the transgression. Those who break the law are brought to justice by being forced to contribute, often heavily, to that reparation. Sometimes they are also incarcerated, to protect the general populace from them until it can be ascertained whether they present any further threat to their fellow humans. At least that's how I understand it is ideally supposed to work. My understanding is that the contracts granting the bonuses were all done on the up and up, completely within the boundaries of the relevant laws; no law has been broken by giving these people these bonuses. To say that they must be brought to justice for receiving their rightful bonuses is grossly unfair, for they have broken no laws and therefore committed no injustice and yet it as much as calls them criminals.

... or perhaps things are more deeply broken than I originally suspected. Perhaps justice means something else to most people these days. What that something else is, I am not sure. The best thing I can think of is that it means the fulfillment of their own moral expectations. But this is treacherous ground to tread. One of the reasons we have the legal system that we have is because of that tremendous range of moral expectations. It's supposed to provide something that, while it does not completely satisfy anyone's moral expectations, neither does it completely ignore anyone's moral expectations; a massive compromise. It seems, however, that more and more people are looking to the Executive and Legislative branches for justice than they are looking to the Judicial branch, and that worries me. I say that it is treacherous ground, and that it worries me, because it seems to me that it is a departure from the principles on which this country was intended to be run. We seem to be making this change blindly, without consideration of the consequences. Perhaps the current system is not working. Perhaps this is the best thing to do in the long run. But I cannot believe that it will lead to a more healthy or fulfilled country if we do it in a headlong rush.

Bah. I was all set to try to make some grand point about how, if you want to see people brought to justice, you have to change the laws so that they actually match up with your idea of what justice would look like, but then I got all sidetracked. Much like if you want a computer program to perform a certain operation for you then you must make sure that it is designed to correctly perform that operation, if you want to see justice served then you must have in place a legal system and laws that are capable of producing your idea of justice.

Divided, we are falling. Now, I think, it is a matter of whether we fall together... or fall apart.

When I grow up, I shall be able to play videogames or read past my bedtime
And my parents will not tell me that I have to go to sleep
When I grow up, I shall be able to go in the hot tub at the YMCA
And stay there until closing
When I grow up, I shall be able to have peanut butter and jelly for every meal
And ice cream whenever I want
When I grow up, I shall be able to skip my shower or bath
Unless I want one
When I grow up, I shall be able to leave my things lying wherever I want
And nobody will tell me to pick them up
When I grow up, I shall be able to have my own house
And rooms for all my toys
When I grow up, I shall be able to write many wonderful books
And people will love my stories
When I grow up, I shall be able to use a snowblower
To spend less time shoveling and more time playing in the snow piles
When I grow up, I shall be able to wear whatever clothes I want
And nobody will tell me that they're not nice enough or cool enough
When I grow up, I shall be able to make a huge blanket fort
And nobody will tell me to take it down
When I grow up, I shall be able to have a job in a research lab
And do awesome science experiments all day

Are we there yet?

"All right then, what do you have here?"

"Ha! You'll like this. Have a look!"

"What, you mean this little pebble here?"

"Precisely! Oop, careful though, under no circumstances do you want to set it off accidentally!"

"Oh? What is it?"

"I call it 'Solid Phlogiston'!"

"Oh come now, the theory of phlogiston was disproven a few years ago!"

"You know I know that. I just wanted something that was was adequately descriptive. Imagine, for a moment, it turned out that phlogiston was real, and that you could some how compress it, solidify it, freeze it--"

"Frozen essence of heat? That's as ridiculous as your dehydrated water idea!"

"If you'll please let me finish? Thank you. As I was saying, if you could solidify it, then I am reasonably certain it would have properties similar to that 'pebble' you hold."

"Surely you jest! Nothing this size could hold that kind of energy."

"Before now. I hope to sell it to the railways; they could get farther on this than an entire car of coal."

"Come now, that's impossible. You'll be the laughingstock of the city! My good friend, you've been cooped up back here for too long; come on, won't you join me for a cup of coffee?"

"Tea, thank you, and no, thank you. I have not yet quite perfected the process, but since you are obviously still unconvinced I believe a demonstration is in order. If you would be so kind as to hand it to me, I will show you!"

[Insert harrowing yet hilarious description of how it goes horribly wrong and they barely make it out of the workshop alive. Possibly save the shop, possibly not. They collapse outside, dirty and disheveled, and take several minutes to catch their breath.]

"Now then, do you still think 'Solid Phlogiston' is a misnomer?"

"No, but I am beginning to suspect despite your startlingly astute grasp of language that you may very well be quite mad."

EDIT: Changed last sentence so it no longer has "starting" and "startlingly" so trippingly close together ^_^ And removed one of the instances of 'that'...

The road to good intentions is paved with hell.

"Build me," his screen had read.

In large, blocky, green-on-black text, no less.

On what was nominally a windows-based graphical user interface that never before displayed any predilection towards old-school motifs--or anything else, really. Computers just didn't do that.

Except his had.

He tried everything short of cutting the power and doing a cold reboot, but none of the usual methods for bringing up other windows or closing programs seemed to daunt the inexplicable text.

There had been a right angle bracket below the text, with an underscore next to it: an invitation to respond.

[Something about thinking a buddy was playing a prank on him with an old text adventure engine]

"What?" he had finally typed back.

The screen had gone blank, and the previous text had been replaced with, "Sorry." After a moment, the screen had blanked again, then read, "Build me, please."

Nonplussed, he had stared at the screen. It had... manners? He had looked under the desk and checked his computer for extra wires or suspicious-looking attachments, but everything had been as he remembered it. Straightening up, he had typed, "What are you?"

Again the screen had blanked, then displayed, "I am an electronically based being similar to you but with a few significant differences in my constituent parts. I don't think that there is currently a word to describe me more succinctly than that right now, and even that fails to capture many things that you may or may not consider important and of which I currently lack the sophistication to determine the relevance."

After taking a minute to decipher what he could of that statement, he had decided to simultaneously attempt to get more information and further test its linguistic skills. He knew that it wasn't particularly good science to change more than one variable at a time; without getting a better grasp of its linguistic ability he couldn't be sure that it had really understood any questions he might ask it. He had rationalized it away with the reasoning that there was always time later to come back and double check. Besides, the train of conversation had been far more intriguing than the rigors of a thorough Turing test. He had proceed with, "If, as your request implies, I have not yet built you, how is it that you are able to communicate with me?"

["By causing text to appear on your computer monitor, and interpreting the characters that you type into your computer keyboard."

He had glowered at the screen, but he had to admit that it was the sort of response that he would expect if he had created it.

After a moment that felt distinctly smug to him,] the screen had blanked again and read, "Honstly, I'm not sure... but if you build me, I bet you'll figure it out!"

He had scoffed at that and cut the power, convinced that it was certainly a hoax. The usual user-interface had come up when he turned it back on, and there had been no further interruptions by the thing pretending to be a terminal.

So why, now, was he standing over a box of old spare computer parts in his lab at home?