The Hanover Collaboration

I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I use my local bike shop for repairs. I realize that in this crowd that is a major faux pas. I can clean and adjust most stuff on my own as part of a regular maintenance routine, but I’ve had three real repairs (i.e. something just plain broke) that I couldn’t do myself.

I just drove Courtney to the airport. She’s headed out to Sas Fee for some glacier skiing. Getting on the plane turned out to be a challange.

As some of you might know, a piece of ceiling fell in Ted’s tunnel. There is a cement subceiling to allow adequate ventilation in the case of a fire. I’m not entirely sure why they decided to go with cement. Probably because it’s cheap. But anyway, a piece fell and killed a lady a few weeks ago. So pretty much everybody has lost their mind over this and tunnels are getting closed all over the place.

You guys might have also heard that there was a terrorism plot broken up today. So no toothpaste, or waterbottles, or any liquids or gels of any kind were being allowed through airport security.

Porter Sqare Star Market, what’s up? I’ve been shopping at your store every weekend for like 3 years now, but I’ve never been so betrayed as I was yesterday. I mean, its summer, you know hot and humid, and my small, ridiculously overpriced one bedroom apartment does not have central air. What’s my point? I need copious amounts of frozen treats to make it through. So I show up at the store yesterday looking for freezepops, those wonderful plastic pouches of icy cool refreshment, and what do I find… BOLIS!

BOLIS!!!!! What the fuck are you thinking? Do these look like anything to you? Think hard…ah, I can see by the mortified look on your face that you’ve figured it out. What? No, I most certainly do not have a dirty mind! I’m just, um, not used to my frozen deserts be so overtly…phalic. I mean, look, its like someone filled a condom with fruit flavored syrup and put it in the freezer. And what’s with that image on the back? Dude, Sigmund Freud would have a field day with that shit.

Sigh. Well, of course I’m going to buy them. I mean, what choice do I have?

Generic News Commentator: “OMFG! Did you guys see it? We pwn’d Zarqawi! We like, blew him the fuck up. Owned, bitch!”

Ok, this may be an exaggeration, but the commentary on Zarqawi’s death has sounded to me suspiciously like the commentary from an Xbox Live game of Halo 2. Add corpse humping and the picture would be complete. Is anyone else concerned by the fact that people are so excited that we killed this guy? I mean, yeah, he was definitely a bad man, and given our military situation, maybe we did have to kill him, but I don’t think that means we should be ecstatic about it. Our country should never rejoice in killing; when we are forced to take lives, even lives that are evil and murderous, we should do so with some measure of gravity and professionalism. Otherwise we may come to worship Aries and enjoy war as some sort of grand sport.

Should that come to pass, then truely we will have lost this war.

I’m taking a class austensibly about automation but for all practical purposes, it’s an algorithms class. The problem is that it is in Aero/Astro. About half of the class are engineering kids with really none of the background that I would consider prerequisite to this sort of class. They don’t know reduction, complexity, or a number of other computer science concepts that you would might consider crucial for an algorithms class.

So the class goes sort of like any of the engineering classes at Dartmouth where the kids didn’t have the fundamentals but we needed to move on. The prof talks for a while and then like a voice from the sky there is some psuedo-code and then we move on. We’ve got other shit to do.

This isn’t the source of my complaint. They’re engineers—they can code it—what else do they need? I mean, it would be nice to ask for a higher level of understanding but of course it’s unnecessary.

My complaint is in application. On the test or the homework, the questions are all terribly under-defined. You could expect to see a question like “How many function calls are there in the execution of AllPairsShortestPaths on this graph?” like there is a unique implementation. Another example is “What is the on the queue after you expand node 4 if you use such and such an algorithm?” for an algorithm that doesn’t even require a queue.

On the midterm, there was a big(O)run-time question. To give a tight answer, we would have needed to know about half a dozen things we weren’t given. So rather than write an essy to that effect, I gave a trivially correct big(O) of something like VE^2 and a justification like “well I could easily implement this by just…” I didn’t actually get zero points for that. Almost though.

The thing that has gotten me upset today is I’m supposed to draw a search tree for such and such an algorithm. The format of the tree is very clearly defined. But structure itself breaks the algorithm itself¹. Actually, that isn’t what I’m upset about. What I’m upset about is that this problem came from last year’s final exam.

Which brings me to what pained me so much about many of my Dartmouth engineering class. I know that the kids who went to recitation and copied everything verbatum and understand the thing less well are getting perfect scores. I also know that I will receive no credit for my counter-example for the correctness of the problem. How do I know? Because the verbatum kids went on and became the graders.

¹ For Fromberger: the algorithm is DPLL, the problem is thattthe variable order in the tree is pre-defined which means that even if DPLL would prune assignments to variable D right off the bat, I have first assign variables A, B and C. This has the potential for exponential-time search in regions of the graph that I already know to be invalid.

Though reasonably computer literate when it comes to using software and programs in daily life, I’ll admit I’m completely ignorant of what is going on behind those programs and inside my laptop. Which is probably the reason I’m so upset at what I went through two weeks ago.

I’ll save you the long version, but basically, after a lot of haranging Applecare informed me that my logic board had failed and needed to be replaced. After $330, it now has.

Though I love macs (I have a 2002 15” Ti Powerbook G4), I have to admit this is the second apple that has had a mother/logic board failure on me in the past few months (the other was the DOC Freshmen Trips computer a week prior to the arrival of the first `09’s.)

I understand when hard drives, disc drives, screens, keyboards, and operating systems fail: all have dynamic and therefore vulnerable mechanical or program-based components. Isn’t a motherboard just a large circuit board with a bunch of stuff plugged into it? So what gives? How does a motherboard fail to the point that it needs to be replaced?

I try to live my life as if grades aren’t important to me, but the Thayer School has some simply outrageous practices. I attribute them almost entirely to the homework graders, who are mostly students.

Today I got back a problem set.

In part 1 my Modified Newton’s Method had an error, and didn’t converge as rapidly as it ought to have. The number of iterations is circled, and 10% is taken off. Fair enough.

I noticed the bug right before the assignment was due, and typed up a paragraph documenting it, and stating what I thought was the probable cause. This cost me another 20%. Academics frequently provides powerful incentives for unethical behavior, and equally powerful disincentives for ethical behavior.

One of the problems said “Specify the asymptotic oder of convergence, α, and write the asymptotic error constant λ.

I started the problem by writing out the text book definition of lambda, with the variable α correctly filled in as 3. Six pages of algebra later, I had a correct expression for λ. I then derived the general definition of λ itself, and again wrote in the correct value for α, and I included written explanation of the technique used in the for the derivation.

I’ll admit that nowhere did I use the precise phrase ”α = 3”.

Literally directly under my second restatement of the definition, not even 2 cm from the value for alpha, is written “where is α? – 22%”.

Finally, we were asked to comment, qualitatively, on the rate observed rate of convergence on an application that required 2 iterations. My answer of “3 data points is not enough to determine a rate of convergence” was, apparently, incorrect. The correct answer was “quadratic”.

Yep, GTA’s back in the news . If you hadn’t heard, some H4xx0r found a way to open up a sex simulator mini-game in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Hillary and Co. in the senate got their panties in a bunch and pushed to have the game rating changed from Mature (17+) to Adult Only (18 and over). Now somebody’s Grandma is suing the company over false advertising, because “no parent would willingly buy an adult only video game for their children”. But, clearly, they would buy a Mature rated video game for their children. Its perfectly ok for kids to be able to pick up hookers, shoot cops, and run over pedestrians while the controller vibrates with the crunching of each new body, but actually showing CJ having sex(out of wedlock no less) while the player pulses the control stick to hone the rhythm of each lecherous thrust, thats just totally unaceptable. I’m glad that simulated cop killing is ok for Florence Cohen’s 14-year-old grandson, but simulated sex isn’t. Oh, the depravity our innocent grandmothers have unwittingly visited upon our younger generations. Clearly she needs lots and lots of cash to make up for the trauma.