Winter term concluded nicely: solid work through 9th and 10th week, then caught a ride with Anna out to Madison for a couple weeks with Justin & company. Finished up my finals and emailed them in from WI–everything was either a paper or take-home, so I was able to take my time, put in my best work on everything, and turn them in without a 4 hour drive. So, spring break felt like 3 weeks, which was a really nice change. I needed the space to decompress, get to know myself again.
I’m taking up the guitar again: bought an old Suzuki from a guy in Madison through Craigslist, which sounds pretty good. Deeply resonant sound, bit of a buzz (in the tuner?) on the open G string, but otherwise plays nicely. I ran into Dirk’s Guitar Page, which pleasantly has many of the same pieces I played as a kid: Carcassi, Sor, Paganini. Progress has been surprisingly fast, but I’m a long way from playing well.
You know what’s going to be awesome? When I have to get a normal job.
"So, why do you think you'd be great at Jimmy John's Sub Shop?"
"Ummmm... I can compute first-order perturbations to degenerate Hamiltonians. Please hire me?"
"What else?"
"I can design your web site and ordering system..."
"Nope, already got one."
"I can be thrown around safely!"
"Next please."
In the Broomball Caucus conference, we’ve been debating whether to separate teams into softcore and hardcore leagues. Jack Delahanty wrote against splitting the league, because it would (he asserts) increase forfeits:
There's one problem, though - teams that are comprised of [softcore players] do have fun, and they deserve to be able to have fun. The problem is that these are also the teams that tend to forfeit games. The same players that enjoy sliding around on the ice and hanging out with their floor also TEND to be (and I'm not accusing anybody here, just observing a trend) the players that won't show up when it's cold, when they've got homework to do, or when they have some other thing going on. I'm not saying that players who enjoy broomball for the sake of sliding around don't deserve respect and consideration - they absolutely do. But I am saying that we had a huge problem with forfeits this year that has extended into the playoffs, and we should definitely not gear the league or even one division in the league to teams that are apt to forfeit. Forfeits, more than 12-0 losses, are the real evil that needs to be addressed.
One of the things we’ve been discussing in Metaphysics this term has been the problem of motion through time, and whether or not Russell’s at-at theory sufficiently explains our everyday perception of change as occurring through time. Meanwhile, in Quantum Mechanics, we’ve been talking about the Hamiltonian operator as the generator of translations through time, analogous to the momentum operator generating translations through space.
I’ve got two weird ideas at the moment. First, momentum and position space are Fourier conjugate pairs of each other: you can convert states between them with a symmetric Fourier integral. I wonder if a similar relationship exists between the energy basis (or some other space related to the Hamiltonian) and time.
(Sharon sits down next to Matt)
Sharon: Hey Matt, how’s it going?
Matt: Not bad, I’m really excited about this course!
Sharon: Yeah… I mean, it’s the shortest class description I’ve ever seen: “English 324: Applied Hip-Hop Analysis - We be deconstructin’, yo!”
Matt: So terse, yet enigmatic! Hey–did you hear the Shakespeare lecturer last night? He did half the show in drag, and nobody could tell, because he–
Professor:
Good morning all, please take a seat
I’m professor Stevens, and for this I’ll need a beat;
Literary analysis of hip-hop’s the class,
But realistically we’re here for kicking names and taking ass.
As it’s the first day, we’ll start with something easy
Sharon, please read from the excerpt on page one-fifty.
Sharon: … Um… ahem… Mike Shinoda, of Fort Minor, in “Get Me Gone”:
After that I made it a rule
I only do e-mail responses to print interviews
Because these people love to put a twist to your words
To infer that you said something fucking absurd
Oh, did I lose you at infer?
Not used to hearing a verse that uses over first grade vocabulary words?
People used to infer that we were manufactured
Professor:
Now comes the part we’re best at in English
We make an argument and ram it like a shish-
Kabob through shoddy language and tumescent prose
My thesis, then, is what I want you to suppose.
When Shinoda uses the word “infer”,
His choice of language is poor and
Throws us a lure
That his diction’s unsure.
(Matt raises hand)
Matt: I think that it’s entirely possible Shinoda’s just misunderstanding the meaning of the word here; certainly his–
(Professor and Sharon stare at Matt in worried disbelief)
Matt: –diction is somewhat unclear
For in his first line he tells us quite near
That the interviewers falsely implied his career
Was fake; that sort of agency doesn’t mesh with “infer”
So it’s clear that his choice of words is disturbed
The man just can’t write, it’s a laughable stink!
He’d better step up if he wants us to link
His media, his message with intelligent think!
Professor:
Sharon, if I may beg you to flatter
My interest; please share your thoughts on the matter
I want words to clatter and mix like cake batter
Smashing Matt’s argument to pieces that shatter.
Sharon:
I agree with you Matt
The diction’s absurd
But you’ve got to look past the flat
Mat of ratted and tattered words
Into the deeper construct of post-structuralist norms
There are no underlying forms,
No inferrable swarms
Of congruent ideas labeled by a slurred
Blurred and unformalized word
When Shinoda says “infer” it’s a contradiction in terms
That’s the true message for us to learn
Through introspection he affirms and confirms
That arguing over meaning isn’t feasible;
Only in context are those inferences reasonable.
Professor:
Take a shot, Matt, here’s your chance to show off to the class
C’mon, pop a cap in her metalinguistic ass
Matt:
You know what? Fuck your post-structuralist diploma
You’re missing out on the key point of Shinoda
Which isn’t the absence of concepts right under me
The selection, perfection and subsequent rejection
Of meaning through useless semantic inquiry
It’s the binary opposition of “infer” and “imply”
Which gives rise to a structure worth giving a try
Shinoda’s leaving a puzzle for us to recognize
If you step back and think for a second you’ll find
That our own identity as intelligentsia elite
Has given us cred you can’t find on the street!
So pack your Focoult and get the hell out
Your model’s worth nothing when it comes to the shout!
Brief update, as reading is tearing my life into tiny shreds right now. I died in assassins, after effecting a fifth kill in Burton. Decided the first Aikido Broomball game was worth going to, even though I knew Kevin and his partner would probably be there. I wasn’t killed at the game, but Henry Keiter waited in the trees outside the Libe for the whole game, tailed me home by running the long way around the Olin-Hulings-Mudd complex, and met up with me at the entrance to Nourse. I had time to block his 10-shot, but was exhausted from a hard game, so I was too slow. Henry went on to test his luck against Bendikson in a re-enactment of the Princess Bride iocaine powder scene, featuring two goblets of juice, one with tabasco sauce as a deadly poison. Man, those guys are winners at this game. :-D
Class has been interesting: quantum is tearing my brain to tiny little pieces, metaphysics is alternately interesting and infuriating, and psych of prejudice is absolutely fascinating. Lots of cool stuff about stereotype formation and metacontrast bias, but I won’t write much right now–maybe a paper or two to come later.
Dear Duchess of Destruction,
The last two days have seen the death of many assassins. On Saturday, after Open Mat, I saw Mr. Daft Hands himself pass by my table in Sayles. As he climbed the stairs into the computer lab, I quickly removed my jacket and wrapped it around my head: a suitable improvised mask. Moving as quietly as possible, I snuck into the lab and dispatched halla with two shots through the cervical vertibrae.
Moving in the early hours of the dawn is not unfamiliar to the contract killer, especially when innocent lives (e.g., his own) are at stake. Carls are at their most vulnerable just after waking up, before the natural process of caffeine induction can enervate the senses and bring new alacrity to fuzzy neurons. Thus I found myself walking through the corridors of 3rd Nourse at 10:15 on a lazy Saturday morning, with a pair of rubber band pistols in my bathrobe’s pockets.
I knew the girl had it out for me last night; she and her partner, Ross the Toss, had been stalking up and down my hallway all last night, weapons out. Who else on the floor could they be gunning for? Luckily, I’d had some dealings with this shady character before, and knew a few things about her.
A few minutes ago, I realized my disk was paging when I ran Vim. Took a quick look at gkrellm, and yes, in fact, I was almost out of swap space, and physical memory was maxed out. The culprit was Firefox, as usual; firefox-bin was responsible for roughly a gigabyte of X pixmap memory.
So I spent some time digging, and realized that I’d had a window open to the Nagios status map for a few hours, which includes a 992 x 1021 pixel PNG. The page refreshes every minute or so. So I closed Firefox, brought up xrestop, opened the status map again, and watched. Sure enough, X pixmap usage for Firefox jumped up by about 2500K per refresh. In the last 10 minutes or so, that number has ballooned to roughly 50MB.
I got distracted from writing my backup system and started an IRC client… argh, why are the interesting problems so hard to stop working on? I essentially wasted my whole weekend on this.
On the other hand, it’s pretty cool. :D
This week, I spent a long time mucking about in the mail relays. Freshclam skipped over 8 of the 9 mirrors it knew about, and the remaining one was down, so it spun for an hour trying to fetch new virus definitions. While it was busy with that, clamd woke up, tried to refresh the database, couldn’t acquire the lock (since freshclam had it), and shut itself down. That broke the two clamdscan processes that amavisd-new was using, and 6000 messages piled up in the Postfix incoming queue. I managed to get the whole mess resolved with the help of debian-volatile, which provides rolling stable packages for ClamAV and other frequently-changing projects. I also put in place more comprehensive monitoring for Cacti and Nagios, so next time the queues explode, we’ll know about it sooner.
For the last few days, I’ve been drawing little sketches on my whiteboard, regarding the various goings-on at work. My boss Laird suggested that I put them online, so here they are!
On Tuesday, I was fixing the file transfer box; an apt upgrade had updated some libraries that SFTP relied on, which meant rebuilding the chroot environment with the help of ldd.