Kevin's Super Short Review

ASC Talent Show - Awesome. I actually purchased a CD at the end. The last time I purchased music was over 4 years ago. 9/10

KSA Kimbap Social - Pretty good. A showcase of culinary and ice-skating skill. 7/10

CSA semi-formal - Quite boring... a room full of people, dressed up with nowhere to go. 3/10

Men's/Women's Interest (updated)

I was at the airport the other day, and something about popular media caught my eye.



The Men's interest section at this airport convenience store can be summed up as follows: 10 magazines that feature men on the cover, 10 magazines that feature women.

The Women's interest section has a much simpler breakdown.



UPDATE!

Hypothesis: The default, or innate, attraction mechanism for humans is to be attracted to females.

Does anyone want to test this hypothesis for me?

UPDATE 2:

Thank you Dr. Baily!

Protein Folding

I have this delusion I'm trying to dispel that I've figured out an O(n) -- in the number of nucleotides -- algorithm for protein folding. I'm at the UW genomics department right now looking for protein people to talk to.

Python

I started using Python to write a development support server for Infomush. My initial impression is that it's more verbose than Ruby, but much easier to read. Bonus: It seems to have much more thorough documentation.

Google, AI, Infomush

I just saw a CNet video where Larry spoke about AI as simple algorithms on a massive computational base.

"We have some people at Google who are working on artificial intelligence."

There's no way any of my team leaked. Google probably figured out the secret to making a great AI themselves, which makes me want to just relocate Infomush to Google and ask "Is this what you're looking for?"

So, I guess we're both at the same philosophical milestone now. If you have real AI, what do you do with it?

All of this makes me wonder if I'm part of a Stand Alone Complex.

I could have this all wrong. Perhaps they're just emulating the brain?

Arm Update

Yes, I'm wearing a sling. It was fashioned from a piece of sling-appropriate material by the outdoorsman in our lab, Gary Yngve. Yes, I technically broke my arm. It's not that bad, or at least don't think it's that bad. Doctor's Advice: Ice, Advil, and come back if it gets worse.

Google awesomeness recap

1. Friday - went eating with Christophe of Google-reimbursement fame. Awesome ancillary activities followed.

2. Today - presented Infomush at Google. Thanks to team SMHACK, Infomush pulled off a quantum leap in clustering quality just as we passed over Google's door jam. (I also won a game of foosball -- only using my good un-technically-broken arm. Of course I took the opportunity to raise he roof for Infomush.)

BTW, SMHACK is our initials backwards: Kevin Chiu, Andy Hou, Michael Skinner.

Hmmm, Christophe also finally learned what Act 2 of Infomush is, at least the first scene of Act 2. Taj helped prod the revelation on by guessing it was "social." I guess this means we'll just have to implement it faster than planned.

Ruby Threads

Today, I encountered my first Ruby gripe.

Variables mapped from collection passed into Ruby threads are not independent of one another. If one thread changes the passed variable, all of other threads share the new variable.

Let's suppose I have an Array of items = ["item 1", "item 2", "item 3"]

Here's some code that takes each item in the array and does some processing on it, printing out "finished!" statements after each element is processed.

items.map{|item|
 Thread.new(item){
  #process with variable execution time goes here
  puts "#{item} finished!"
 }
}

Let's suppose the map task associated with "item 3" starts last and ends first. Then the output could look like this:

item 3 finished!
item 3 finished!
item 3 finished!

The explanation for this peculiar behavior is detailed in Ruby Central's Pragmatic Programmer's Guide:

"A thread shares all global, instance, and local variables that are in existence at the time the thread starts."

Seaweed

A little while ago, I went on a seaweed shopping spree at Uwajimaya. Among all of the different types of seaweed I purchased that day, this one really stood out. I have no idea what it says.

A quick review: It's oilier, saltier, and way tastier than the normal Japanese nori.

(If anyone could translate the bag, that would be awesome.)

T minus 10 days

In my HCI class, we've been prototyping an imaginary interface for 1.5 quarters. Now we have to implement it in 10 days. It sounds tough, but I don't think it will be that difficult, considering that we could simplify the interface much further given our recent video prototype feedback.

Additionally, in my distributed systems class, we've just finished our final lecture and will start our final projects, which need to be ready in 10 days. Ours is called Infomush, but its role in the great scheme of things will be kept a secret for now =).

=========

Monday: Reflective essay on nuclear physics due.

GRAIL: "Most Helpful" Awards

Today Pro held a surprise awards ceremony to celebrate surviving the Siggraph crunch.

I won a little something for being generally helpful around the lab -- editing movies, debugging code, editing papers, and writing scripts in crazy languages that I haven't touched for years.