Monday, November 22, 2004

Over the past few weeks (or however long it's been since my last update), I've thought of things to write about here and not done it. So here's a collection of ramblings. I'm probably forgetting the most interesting ones.

* The CSCI club watched Wargames last Thursday. We spent ages trying to get the sound to work. I suggested just printing out copies of the script and assigning each person a character or set of characters. We ended up just moving to another room where the sound actually worked, but it was a good idea. Maybe better for shorter shows, as it may get boring after a while, but that'd be a fun game. Like Rocky Horror, only . . .different.

* I have a five-page Barkley paper due Wednesday. I started this morning thinking it was due tomorrow, but I asked the professor and he's cool with it being Wednesday. The assignment sheet said 'Tuesday...before you leave for Thanksgiving...before Thanksgiving even if you don't leave for Thanksgiving'. Not a very clear deadline. Anyway, I have two or three pages done (I rejected Locke's Resemblance Thesis, argued that resemblance is unnecessary, argued that Locke's theory still doesn't work, and then concluded that God solves the problem. It took three pages only because I'm trying to stretch it as much as possible. Lots of useless examples which are then dismissed as unhelpful. Anyhoo...I have a Stats test tomorrow, and I want to study for that briefly at one point. Prepare a crib sheet so I don't have to remember how to do everything. Sidenote: My TI-83--normally willing to do everything for me--will only do the Chi^2 tests when given the observed and expected values. There seems to be nothing on there to compute the expected values. I could probably program it (the professor doesn't mind if we program our calculators), but that's too much work.

* I was thinking about parsers last night. How a parser could be made so that it can handle things like doifXwhileY...just running everything together with no delimiters. Doable, but if you had commands 'whi', 'while', 'let', and 'tell' (for example), it could avoid using the greedy algorithm by regressing in an almost-bubble sort-like procedure. It'd be cool. I did a quick writeup on it and ended up deciding what I was doing was solving the partitioning problem.
Anyway, it could be trouble, as such a grammar could easily become non-deterministic with the proper commands (or variable names, if they weren't clearly distinct, as with different case or something).

* Christmas decorations popped up in Grimesland a few days ago. And of course Christmas commercials have begun. And one local furniture store is doing an end-of-the-year clearance to make room for next year's models. (Furniture comes in yearly models?)
you don't need to start on my girt just yet though. My list contains items such as 'become a vegetarian', which you needn't start on until Christmas morning (or 20050101, or sometime soonish). Or donate to the EFF or the ACLU. They'll probably send me email and it will arrive within a few minutes. (I know the EFF sends email usually, but they didn't last time.)

* Or buy me some new hardware. If it arrives late, I'll forgive you, since it's not like anybody else is buying me that. They're getting me random junk I didn't ask for.

* Remember: Friday is Buy Nothing Day! _Don't_ _buy_ _anything_. (Charitable donations aren't consider purchases in my book. Keep sending money to the EFF!

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