Metacircular Personality Disorder

Oh, Ye Loyal Followers!

2006-12-05T01:25:00.000-08:00

That's you, you, you, you, and last but not least, you!

Direct your attention to hayeah.wordpress.com.

This is probably the most moving entry so far. *sniff*

Close Enough

2006-11-30T01:18:00.000-08:00

Full size not working

But it's on the server:

here is the full image

Shrunken image works

Direct link to fullsize from the past also works:

My Very Own Snow Day

2006-11-27T11:57:00.000-08:00

2 Eponyms

2006-11-25T19:19:00.000-08:00

Hitler the Righteous

2006-11-24T23:19:00.000-08:00

Most Beloved in Particular

2006-11-21T08:00:00.000-08:00

Love and Passion and Heart

2006-11-18T13:46:00.000-08:00

iKnow

2006-11-16T15:45:00.000-08:00

Gentle Manly Conduct

2006-11-16T15:44:00.000-08:00

Formal Mathematical Proof

2006-10-27T06:26:00.000-07:00

Red Roses Blue

2006-10-21T18:14:00.000-07:00

Context Free Gramma

2006-10-19T22:32:00.000-07:00

Neuroplasticity

2006-10-15T20:22:00.000-07:00

Lispy Lisping Lovers

2006-10-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

Platonic Love

2006-10-08T13:15:00.000-07:00

The 5 platonic solids are tetrahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron. They are the only 5 convex regular solids possible. Being convex means The solid doesn't cave in or protrude. A cube is convex, but a christmas star is not.

Plato thought the first 4 solids are related to the 4 classical elements, fire is tetrahedron, earth is hexahedron, air is octahedron, and water is icosahedron. Plato had his philosohical fantasy why this is so. He didn't really know what dodecahdron is related to.

Anorexia Nervosa

2006-10-07T15:14:00.001-07:00

Pumping Life

2006-10-03T18:39:00.000-07:00

The regular expression is a way to express patterns in a string of letters, like all strings alternating between a and b ("ab", "abab"). The "pumping lemma" means that certain kind of patterns if they describe a long enough string, it must be that it's a repeating pattern. So given a string that fits a pattern, it's possible to lengthen the string to however long you'd like, by repeating a smaller pattern within the larger pattern however many times you'd like.

In our example, the pattern "abab...", you can imagine any arbitrarily long string of letters that fits the pattern. The pumping lemma says that because there HAS to be a repeating sub pattern within the pattern "abab...", we can find an example that fits the pattern, and the example can be as long as we'd like.

Finite Love Machine

2006-10-02T04:50:00.000-07:00

A finite state machine is a theoretical (and often practical) object in computer science. It has the ability to recognize certain class of patterns-- patterns that can be checked with finite amount of memory.

So given a pattern that asks you to keep track of increasing amount of information, it is impossible to construct a finite machine to recognize every instances of that pattern.

The pattern 10100100010000... is one such example, because it asks you to build a finite machine that can keep track of the increasing amount of zeroes that separate each ones.

National Security

2006-09-28T23:03:00.000-07:00

Agent is an artificial intelligence jargon meaning roughly an intelligent entity. The agent concept is a load of crap.

Phonetics Lesson to Politicians

2006-09-26T21:54:00.001-07:00

Phonetics, of course, is the study of how speech is produced.

Neuroscientist Hard at Work

2006-09-26T21:11:00.000-07:00

Nondeterministic Protagonist

2006-09-24T23:05:00.000-07:00

The finite machine is a fundamental concept in computer
science. It provides a simple model of computation. But note
there are other type of machines that are more powerful than
finite machines.

A finite machine can have a finite number of states it can
be in, ergo _finite_ machine. Then we can specify for each
state that if it receives a signal, it will change to
another state, perhaps itself. So given a series of signals,
a finite machine will travel from a initial state to some
state, perhaps returning to the starting point. We can
select a few states as goals, if consider the computation a
success if we end up there after processing all the signals.

In theoretical terms, the collection of all the possible
states is denoted Q, and the collection of successful state
is denoted G.

In the real world, a machine can do only one thing when
given a signal. But in the abstract mathematical
neverneverland, it's easy for certain proofs to imagine a
machine that can do many things simultaneously. So given a
symbol, it can go to one or more different states. Crazy eh?
What's crazier is that this magical machine is no more
powerful than a real world machine: anything that the magic
machine can do, the real world machine can do.

In math jargon, the real world machine is said to be
"deterministic", and the magic machine is
"nondeterministic".

A-Quantum-Musing

2006-09-23T14:08:00.000-07:00

My Medusa

2006-09-22T15:01:00.000-07:00

Saw LS today by chance. She can give the coldest stare. Wow.

Depth-first Conversation

2006-09-20T18:38:00.000-07:00

Depth-first search is a specific order in which the items
organized in a tree are being searched for. A tree is a way
to organize things by relating items hierarchically: a top
item leads to many items, and those in turn lead to even
more.

If you have a tree, you can follow the branches in many
different ways. Depth-first search specifies that you always
follows the leftmost branch first. At the end of a branch,
you go back to the last branch point, and explore the next
leftmost branch from there. You keep doing that until you
hit the rightmost branch.

The Middle Class Aristocrats

2006-01-16T02:35:00.000-08:00

I used to have no need for social excuses, like birthday, to be nice to people. Though recently I've gained the tact to use them as social leverage... for acquaintances, or not quite friends. Real friends, they enjoy the privilege of having me ungoing to their birthdays. Today contrary to moral principles, I went to a supposedly friend's birthday, and met some of his supposedly friends. This is one of those rare occasions I mingle with mere mortals that inhibit the sub-metaphysical world.

I didn't think it could be so bad. After all, they are a bunch of engineers. Their sexual frustration is supposed to be channeled into technical prowess. The subconscious realization that they will forever be managed is supposed to give rise to a complex that includes overestimation of technical merits, a immitigable contempt towards the trivial and frivolous, and a uncontrollable urge, nay, perverse compulsion, to demonstrate a point with math or logic or reason.

It turned out they are pretty well adjusted. They are insufferable.

Get a load of this, a bunch of engineers eating together, and the conversation circles round clothing and trinkets to buy for girls... now, that creeps me out. No back of the napkin calculation? No grandiose delivery of ideas way beyond the ken of all those present? No nothing. Actually, nothing's all there is.

They are the middle class aristocrats. For whom, glory is by association. For whom, knowledge is by osmosis. For whom, work is distraction, and distraction is work. For whom, there is only upward levitation, but no upward mobility. They are all uniquely the same.

Passionless of who they are, they are full of fire of who they are not.

They should all just go get a MBA. Yes, the society needs more MBAs. They are the forces of change. There are hopelessly ossified organizations yet to be mismanaged to death so as to provide feeds for the rising technocrats.

One of them is smart. He traded engineering for finance.