locilre

I though it would nice to tie two interests together here.

Oh god. I think Project Euler was specifically designed to keep me from sleeping. I found out about it last night, while I was having a nice chat with Megan, and immediately set to work. I haven't joined yet, but I have been tackling some of the questions, and I'm certain of my responses. Saddly, not all the questions are purely mathematical, and can't be solved (reasonably) with pencil and paper. However, it is good incentive to learn to hack some Haskell or Lisp.

The few problems I've solved so far have involved a little bit of calculus, and counting arguments. I'm writing up my results in LaTeX. I think this could be good portfolio work, to show Stefan before I start working on his problem course solution manual this summer.

Anyway - This stuff is gold.

Ron Eglash: African fractals, in buildings and braids

Whoa.

I've just finished watching: Sai Emrys Non-linear fully two-dimensional writing systems, and Conlangs DE-Cal Class 8 (2/16/05): Signing Systems.

Such good food for thought.

Okay, the Tenori-On is my new dream toy. I really want to play with one of these new wonder synth.s because I mean, come on, how gorgeous is that thing.

Maybe, some time next year they will come down from their 1250$ price to something more affordable for a student like me.

Go now, and watch all the videos!

I've come up with a generalization of the Dowling's Recipe for Disaster.

The basic idea is this: learn a little about Language A, maybe some verb paradigms, some structural generalizations, ie. Is Language A SOV or SVO by default, how many cases are there, etc. Make sure that none of this trivia can help you put a sentence together, or read anything. Then, distract yourself, start thinking about learning Language B. Repeat the same steps as Language A, but convince yourself that Language A was instructive some how, and now you're more able to appreciate Language B. Confuse Language A with Language B as much as possible.

At all costs, make sure you're incapable of sounding cogent in either language at any time.

Then brag you know Language A and Language B.

"It passes the time."

Of course, this method can be applied over any set of languages, and the more unrelated the languages are the better. Strive to approach a very obscure branch of each major family at least once, and keep things scattered.

Things are going well here. I just got the old bookshelf from the guest room at Foster, and we're slowly filling up the truck. I'm not sure where some stuff is, so I'm a little afraid of opening a couple boxes, but I know where Borges, my yarrow stalks, and my Zamenhof portrait are, so I'm confident it'll all resolve smoothly. I'm thinking I might have to ditch some stuff on Shalini, because it would be weird having it all in once place again.

We're going to be trucking out of town in a couple hours, so expect a wave of photos.

Oh, and new boardgame! I got Tri-ominos. Which I think has really crummy game-mechanics, but nifty pieces. Maybe I'll come up with some alternative rules soon.

Yay, I've got most of Vim LaTeX-Suite running in OS X.

One thing I've done is remapped F5 to ^Down, since F5 raises the volume on my MacBook. This isn't really the behavior one would hope for when trying to insert an eqnarray. Also, ^Down feels really natural.

I also learned some handy tricks like :set nu, etc. Woo! Knowledge.

toothpastefordinner.com

Oh god!

I woke up this morning at around 07:40, came downstairs, and had a bowl of cereal. Last night I was lamenting the lack of Hex, and board games in general in my life, so when I got up, I took the lappy downstairs, and started playing on Kurnik. I had a real hankering of strategy games I suppose.

I met up with this groovey guy zxoivzjxco, and we played a couple rounds. He was a big fan of walking through games very slowly, going "Okay, we could consider h3, or g4, etc." It was nice to have some one who wanted to table talk a little bit, as opposed to just playing a straight-noobish kurnik game. Now I gotta see if Derek will do some PBeM.

Off to class for 11:00!

It's a little crazy how fast I can produce media these days. It's getting very routine for me to take a quick shot with Photo Booth, drop the file into Flickr Uploadr, and blog about it instantly. Same thing with my Canon, the stuff goes right from iPhoto to the internet in seconds.

I can do the same with video, and audio data as well. This is partly why I would like to get a cellphone. I would like to be able to do some of this stuff without a laptop mediator.

It's incredible what technology allows us to do, and kind of scary too. I can see it coming to the point where I'm recording everything. That's probably why I don't have a cellphone yet.

Start: Sep 20 2007 - 7:00pm
End: Sep 20 2007 - 9:00pm

Eunoia and Crystallography author Christian Bök kicks off York University's Canadian Writers in Person reading series on September 20. Listen to a lecture from one of Canada's best-selling and most noted poets. The readings, which are free and open to the public, are held Thursdays at 7:00 p.m.

Bök is the author of two poetry collections, Crystallography (Coach House, 1994) and Eunoia (Coach House, 2001). Eunoia, one of the best-selling books of Canadian poetry in history, was the winner of the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of the academic study Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (Northwestern, 2002).

Wow, I am so excited for this.
I better brush up on my monovocalic-lipograms, just to feel like a mortal at that man's feet.