I wasn’t sure of the exact phrasing of Einstein’s old chestnut about difficulty in mathematics. So I googled it. I haven’t found a really authoritative source, but there are definitely plenty of variations. So I picked one that sounded right.
As far as I can tell, it’s not even in Bartlett’s, which is a bit troubling. In fact, I can’t find any reputable source or citation. Is this an apocryphal quote?
Another personal post. Last weekend (8-10 Nov) I went with UCSD’s Outback Adventures to Joshua Tree National Park for a weekend of rock climbing. Joshua Tree is a world-renowned destination for climbers, and it’s easy to see why: the northwestern part of the park seems to be composed solely of steep and interestingly-textured rock faces to climb up and beautiful vistas of the high desert to look out upon.
The Outback Adventures folks were experienced, taught us what we needed to know, encouraged us to do our best, and generally had their stuff together. I would strongly recommend any of their outings based on my experience.
I’m still very new to climbing. This quarter I started going to the climbing gym on campus once a week with a friend, and a month ago I went on a day trip with OA to Mission Trails park and climbed on actual rock. This weekend was the test for me: is climbing something I’ll keep on doing once a week at a gym, as a form of exercise I enjoy much more than lifting weights? Or is this a serious hobby I’ll put time and effort into? The answer is clear to me after this weekend: I really like climbing, and I want to do it as often as possible. To that end I’ve purchased a harness and shoes (thanks Craigslist!) and I’ll try to go to the gym twice a week.
The next step is to find a climbing partner who has the equipment and experience to set up top ropes on actual rock. It seems to me the rope and protection gear would cost $300-500 (new list price), and that’s an investment I’m not ready to commit just yet. I wouldn’t know how to use it either. So I have to find someone willing to set up climbs and teach me how to use the gear. To show me the ropes, if you will. Sorry.
On a more introspective note, I’m still amused by my newfound enjoyment of The Great Outdoors. My family was never the outdoorsy type, and we never went camping or hiking or anything like that. Until this summer I’d never been camping at all. But so far, I’ve been enjoying it a lot. Was I always an outdoorsy person, but I never knew? On the other hand, it’s possible that I’m developing a taste for camping simply because I’m experiencing it at this time of my life, going with these people, doing these things. Were I occasionally dragged on yet another family camping trip all throughout my childhood, would I have a different opinion? Nature versus nurture: am I a person who likes camping and hiking but never discovered it until now, or do I like camping and hiking because of the ways I’m experiencing it now? It’s unknowable, of course.
Dear California:
I’m ashamed to tears to live in this state. Yesterday, 4.8 million of my neighbors voted against civil rights and equal protection. Proposition 8 was never about homosexuality, or religion, or the traditional marriage ceremony: it was about government adjudication of who can engage in domestic partnership, and the answer of the people is: “Not everyone”. The beliefs of a few about things that don’t affect them have now been turned into laws trampling on the rights of many. Congratulations, California, you just passed a miscegenation law.
To everyone who thinks this is a religious issue, to all Christians who voted yes on Proposition 8 because you interpret Leviticus 18:22 as declaring homosexuality a sin and calling you to take positive action to prevent same-sex couples from being happy in such sin, may I draw your attention to the New Testament: Luke 6:36-37, Colossians 3:13, 2 Corinthians 3:6, Galatians 5:14-15, and Galatians 3:19-28 for starters. You can think homosexuality is a sin, if you want to ignore the new covenant, follow all the laws of Leviticus, and declare putting meat and dairy on the same plate a sin as well, and miss the entire point of Christianity. But even if you do that, don’t you dare condemn other people for what you call a sin. Next time, try listening to what good old JC actually said before you try to do something in his name. Hint: it’s about forgiveness and love, not about legalism.
To all of you Yes on 8 campaigners who claimed this was about protecting the marriage of straight couples from some sort of degradation of society, or about what our children would be taught in schools, or that kids need both a mother and a father or they’ll grow up to be criminals and/or homosexuals, or especially anybody holding one of those signs that said “Prop 8 = less government”, come see me sometime, and I’ll send you to whatever hell you wish. You lied through your teeth to convince otherwise reasonable but tragically uninformed people that Prop 8 was something it wasn’t. I’ve been trying to keep my feelings today mostly in disappointment and not hate: but I really really really don’t like you.
My hopes and whatever feeble prayers I dare offer are with the ACLU, Lambda Legal, and the National Center of Lesbian Rights, who are currently challenging the constitutionality of Prop 8 in the California Supreme Court; and that the Court will do the right thing and protect the rights of all people.
I should be happy with the outcome of the Presidential election. The candidate I supported won, and I think the country sent a message that we’re not happy with the way things have gone. The power of the people is passing to a younger generation and we’re going to make some changes. I should be happy, but today I just can’t be. More than anything else, I’m shocked that this happened here. This is the West Coast, the land of hippies and greenies and crazies of all sorts. If this is what 47.9% of Californians believe, what does that say about the rest of the country? How can the same country elect Barack Obama and ban gay marriage? I just don’t understand.
All right. Back to infrequent natterings about technology.
P.S. Hey, Santa Clara county, where do you think you’re going? You come right back here. Santa Clara County, you screwed up big. 33.7% of you voted against BART. What the hell?! Who voted against BART? You’d better hope there are 5,000 more uncounted absentee votes for Measure B hiding somewhere. If B finally fails when every vote is in, I will find all of you and I will beat your ass back into the real world where we need BART in the South Bay so bad it hurts.
Full disclosure on my political & religious positions: I’m an atheist who sees a lot of value in the best teachings of Christianity and all religions; the teachings that nobody can always follow because it’s actually difficult to be a good person. I have strong respect for civil liberties and the rights of individuals. I’m a bit left on welfare issues. On the other hand, I don’t trust the free market as we know it today. I’d love to, but it proves itself time and again to be a terrible servant of the public good.
My bike was manufactured by Kawasaki Heavy Industries.
I’ve always loved that name: Heavy Industries. Mitsubishi uses it too. Calls forth images of smelters and arc-welding and great banging puncher and stamper machines on conveyor belts, the kind the heroes of a sci-fi movie have to duck through with precise timing. The modern-day blacksmith. Dimly lit cavernous factory buildings with much steam in the air. Dungeonesque. Steel and iron and axle grease. Beautiful.
There’s a new media art group from South Korea that make Flash animations of rapidly displayed words set in time with jazz music. They’re short stories or spoken-word pieces, but read instead of heard. They call themselves Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, turning the name on its head, because of course all they manufacture is fundamentally just bits and pixels. Not everything on their site is safe for work.
The computer security group L0pht Heavy Industries is quite well known.
On the other hand, Kawasaki Heavy Industries makes motorcycles, ATVs, and jetskis. At first those seem like only the smallest of motor vehicles. They don’t make automobiles or trucks. The impression that gives me is that Kawasaki’s Industries aren’t as Heavy as, say, Ford. So there’s a sort of irony that I project into the name.
Of course, they actually do make large things. They build aircraft, helicopters, rolling stock (including the Shinkansen), ships, construction equipment, and energy plants. Plenty of stuff worthy of the name Heavy Industries. We don’t see much of that on this side of the Pacific, so it’s a false impression to many (American?) consumers that all Kawasaki makes is small motor vehicles.
Just some rambling, taken mostly from an email to my dad. I haven’t posted anything worthwhile here on the blog for a while, and I guess this was my desire to write popping up somewhere else.
My friend’s cousin (we’ll call him P., because that’s his initial) added me on Facebook. I know P from a camping trip a few months back.
After confirming P’s add, I took a look at his Facebook wall and recent actvitity. He’s connected to other members of the extended family: my friend, my friend’s little sister, cousins and aunts and uncles from all around the family. There’s a running conversation on his wall with a cousin of the same age from a different side of the family1. P’s status is “looking forward to tomorrow to find out if we are going to have a boy or a girl. :)”. I fully expect he’ll post the news, and potentially an ultrasound picture.
Families usually keep in touch like this with periodic phone calls. I suppose the white-collar 20-35 demographic uses email too, since we’re so used to it in school and business. But I wonder if this is an isolated case of a family using Facebook, or the first I’m seeing of a larger progression. Rushi has pointed out that he has seen high school friends’ parents online, connecting with their high school friends.
Addendum 22 Oct: This is Why You Don’t Friend Your Boss on Facebook. That kinda changes the workplace dynamic, I suppose.
Scott and I got ice cream today at the cafeteria. I had Ultrachocolate1 and Banana. Scott got Mint Chip and Concord Grape.
As I picked up mine, he asked “Did you just take my ice cream?”.
Scott is colorblind.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13
It upsets me how many product names other than Chrome are in there just because stupid JS tries to guess what the browser can do. Next time, we need a new way to detect browser capabilities. I suggest we detect the actual capabilities, not try to guess based on who shipped what feature first in 1997.
It’d be cool if the browser vendor cartel got together one day and decided all User-Agent strings would be simple again, like “Chrome/0.2.149.27 (Windows NT 5.1; en-US)”. And any jankety-ass copy and paste image rollover script from 1997 that breaks if the string doesn’t start with “IE” or “Mozilla” can get stuffed.
Suppose you have a tree of files and directories, and you want to pack them up into a tar archive. Here is how to find the size of the resulting archive. This is useful if you want to stream an archive out to a browser, but want to send the correct Content-Length header first.
No, you cannot use ‘du’. I have tried.
Update! Added #7.
Hi everyone. I’m still alive.
I’m in the Bay Area, living with a bunch of neat people in a neat house. Not sure what I think of the area. On the one hand, it’s exciting to be in a setting so infused with the tech industry. On the other, Menlo Park is really not my style. I think I’ve found someplace even more rich and poncey than La Jolla. Some other areas seem a lot more suitable, though. And I love the expressways and freeways up here – off rush hour, driving between cities is a joy.
I’m interning for VMware. I’m working on internal debugging & profiling tools, trying to improve the VMX startup time. The early effort of tool-building is starting to pay off, and in the last few weeks my mentor and I have some really good changes ready to check in. If you run large ESX instances on contended SANs, and your VMs startup a lot faster in future versions of ESX, that’s all me. I met a lot of great folks here: on my team, on adjacent teams, and all those crazy hosted-ui kids over in the Xerox buildings. I’ve gained a glimpse into the workings of a Medium-Sized Software Company. And I’ve learned a hell of a lot.
I’ve kept pretty busy outside of work. I’ve hiked at Castle Rock State Park, bicycled for 20 miles down Foothill Expwy and around Menlo Park, gone to house parties in Berkeley with old friends from Cambria, became a semi-regular at a hookah bar on University, rode a motorcycle for the first time, drove from Santa Cruz to Palo Alto via Half Moon Bay, clubbed in San Jose, and watched the Perseids from the top of Mt Hamilton.
I went to Vegas for Defcon. That was cool. Vegas is a lot better when everyone in your group is over 21. Lots of stuff happened there. And stayed there. (wink)
A few weeks ago I went camping and hiking at Mammoth Lakes with some friends. This was actually my first time camping. Had a good time on the whole, and discovered that I may be more of an outdoorsy person than I thought. Hiking and scrambling up rocks is really really fun. I may pick up rock climbing as a hobby, once I get down to SD with the convenient climbing wall on campus. We’ll see.
I’m looking ahead to grad school. I still have another year to finish off the B.S. before the grad program actually starts, but until then I’ll try to spend some time working/researching with profs. Only trouble is… there are three professors I want to work with, each with interesting projects, each with different styles of research, each with different industry & academic connections, each with different things to teach me. How do I decide? Oh well. I suppose this is the Right Problem To Have.
There’s someone I miss very much. I wonder if she’s still reading this? Much of this summer has been a journey to find the meaning of “complete” again without her. I’m not doing very well.
This happened a few weeks ago, while I was biking home from work. I thought it was neat. That’s not a camera artifact, there really were two rainbows. It hadn’t rained a drop that day and the sky above was blue.
Apologies for the low quality, all I had was my phone. I’m no photographer anyway (Kim, I’m looking at you!)
I’ll try to update more often.
So now I’m in Palo Alto. (But that’s another post). Guess what supercar I was in front of last night, on Arastradero toward Central Expwy.
Go on, guess.
A Carrera GT.
Life gets stranger and stranger.