Entries for June 2005
Textbook Quotations
Every once in awhile textbooks manage to be amusing, but this is the first time I've seen a topic as dry as numeric methods manage to be amusing... or perhaps this is an indication of the sort of day I've had...
"There is a long story about why the denominator of [the varience equation] is N ? 1 instead of N. If you have never heard that story, you may consult any good statistics text. Here we will be content to note that the N ? 1 should be changed to N if you are ever in the situation of measuring the variance of a distribution whose mean is known a priori rather than being estimated from the data. (We might also comment that if the difference between N and N ? 1 ever matters to you, then you are probably up to no good anyway — e.g., trying to substantiate a questionable hypothesis with marginal data.) (emphasis in original)
Incoming Freshmen Update
Back in May I posted with concerns about how Case would handle the influx of freshmen. I had part of an answer tonight when an incoming freshman and his friends poked their heads through my suite door, asking if they could look around. It looks like Housing is filling at least Howe on Southside with freshmen. The next question, of course, is whether they intend to have Fribley open to feed said freshmen. Or, more accurately, whether feeding those freshmen has even been discussed.
Can't Resist The (IT) Meme
Sometimes there are memes worth following, and I think people have the right idea with the top IT services meme (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.) So here are the aspects I love and hate about computing at Case:
Continue reading "Can't Resist The (IT) Meme"
MIT Weblog Survey 2005
"MIT" has been my number one keyword search result all month. I thought I'd add to that through the spirit of scientific inquiry.
SOURCE Week 3
I'm learning that getting an experiment ready is a long line of small successes that don't sound like much when you describe them to anyone else. All the same, things are moving along here in Glennan 809.
Continue reading "SOURCE Week 3"
Parade the Circle
Today was University Circle's annual Parade the Circle celebration, and Mark and I went down to watch the parade and explore a bit. The parade got off to a late start--in fact we were on the verge of giving up wandering through booths when it suddenly came--but we caught it. It was really nice to see such a colorful and family-friendly display. I also appreciated the lack of advertising of each group that participated. That made it seem much more like a small community event rather than an event in a big city.
A few photos and links to more pictures are included below.
Continue reading "Parade the Circle"
SOURCE Day 8
Today provided a lot of confidence boosting after yesterday's pitfalls. It turns out that I won't have to do the nasty programming I thought I'd have to do as of yesterday. In fact, in addition to finding a copy of LabView despite the people in charge of such things being out-of-town, I got the program installed and managed to set up a .VI (a program in LabView) to communicate with the motion controllers. I tested it, and it's responding just the way it ought to, which means that I can start worrying about getting the data acquisition control set up in LabView (which should be even easier), and then writing my program to run everything.
The only unfortunate thing is that the motors are giving me some trouble after we messed with their connections a bit earlier today. I don't think it's anything major, but I'd like to get them operating normally before I dive into any more programming.
I had a chance to use some of my experience from working on the 4th floor wind tunnel last semester today, too. One of the other undergrads who works in Dr. Quinn's lab needed to know how to set things up there and run some tests, so I helped her get all of that in order. It's nice to feel like there's something that I really understand and can run--I'm looking forward to feeling the same way about the 8th floor wind tunnel and all of its instrumentation.
SOURCE Week 1
So work on the SOURCE project is going along, slowly but surely. After speaking with Dr. White and Dr. Willis, it looks like I will be doing pretty much what I described in my earlier entry. I'm using a wind tunnel on the 8th floor of Glennan, along with the RoboMoth robot engineered by the Biorobotics group that lives up there. (I can say things like this, of course, because I've been spending a lot of time up there since January.)
This week has involved reading lots of documentation files and toying with some of the programming language used to control RoboMoth's motors. I'm not actually using RoboMoth as an autonomous robot or for its tracking abilities, but simply as a sensor whose movements I can easily control. Unfortunately for me, it looks like I won't be able to write a program to move the robot and record my data without using more advanced programming than the sort that I learned five semesters ago in ENGR 131. I didn't quite expect this sort of learning experience when I started out, but I'm game. I have a feeling that I'll be very glad that I've kept up with at least a little bit of programming by playing with PHP in my spare time.
Keyword Search Results
I'm going to take a page out of Mark's book and post some of the most amusing keyword searches that turned up my blog last month. I like to do this every month or so for my domain, too, and it's always amusing to see what turns up.
- summer employment form -- Really, what does anything I've written have to do with that full phrase? I don't know. Let's hope I wasn't high on the search results.
- counter-strike nicole -- So... I know why this turned up, but really... what was this person looking for? A person who plays "counter-strike" and has my first name?
- how can i know what i think until i see what i say -- Well, we hope that you're thinking before you say it, to be honest.
- mano singham photo -- I had to laugh. Mano, I think that's a request from someone for you to have a photo on your blog.
- insanity reigns supreme tabs -- ....... Allow me to take this moment to plug tabbed browsing in Mozilla Firefox....
- blog of a mit student -- Imagine how disappointed they were to find the blog of a Case student instead.
- location code -- No, I don't know.
- a little to the left -- And here I thought I was avoiding politics!
And the top search keywords: mit, employment, blog, nicole, and discover. I somehow get the impression that my MIT nerds post got a fair crawling.
Dangerous Books
A panel of conservative scholars and public policy leaders has put together a list of the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries (link from Tom Trelvik). If I've read parts of 4 of the 10 books--specifically, the first four--does that make me 40% dangerous?
And is anyone else surprised that Freud didn't score higher? And why didn't Stalin's books get in there? Maybe his books weren't bestsellers in their time (outside of the U.S.S.R., that is), but Mein Kampf only got bestseller status after the Nazis started giving them out as "gifts".