Christmas Eve

   The semester flew by and I hardly wrote anything here at all. That wouldn't be an inappropriate entry on my tombstone, either. Last semester I had Theory of Computation and Software Engineering. Both were fun classes, and I learned a lot. I managed a C in Theory, and balanced it with an A in Engineering to get my minimum 3.0 gpa and stay in Grad school. I really must have aced the finals to do that well. I did feel good about them. I'll just enjoy it for now and not look too closely at my grades' teeth. This also means that I get to be appointed to a full-time Teaching Assistantship which is a really big deal for me. It means an Out-of-State tuition waiver, plus a small stipend in cash. This is so going on my CV. Money has been tight this year. Things are looking up.
   So here it is, Christmas eve. I'm having to think about the actual  meaning of Christmas, because most of the cultural trappings are out of reach. Our kids are all here, which is great, but we have no money to spend on them. If Colleen hadn't found a way to cobble together a "tree" out of cardboard and twigs, there wouldn't even be that. No over the river, no through the woods, no presents. We have a roof over our heads, and we have enough food, but we're missing a good bit of what it's common to do. I was tempted to think of it as me just being childish, and okay, that's probably part of it, but also I've started to think of it as Santa's phantom limb. It's missing and it hurts.
   We'll try to have a merry Christmas anyway. In private conversations I've been saying that we're going to do like the Whos down in Whoville, after the Grinch had made off with all of their stuff: we're going to get up in the morning and sing. Sing praise to our King. He has come to be with us, and he is very welcome. He hasn't solved all of our problems, but he has solved our really big one, which kind of makes the little ones moot. ( I had a class, back at Fox, in writing for Christian publications. I got a really bad grade. Probably all three of you who are going to read this are going to understand.) All Praise and Glory and Thanks be to God Almighty, maker of Heaven and earth, who loves us, and came to us and spoke to us, and gave himself as a ransom for many. There's no gift exchange going on here, there's nothing we can bring him that isn't His already. I clearly don't know when or even how to stop. It's alright, I'm not tired of saying it.
Merry Christmas.

National Talk Like A Pirate Day

Ok, so the post title is a bit of a tease. When I got up this morning I didn't know it was Talk Like a Pirate Day, just that it was Wednesday and that I had class and meetings. I haven't spent a single minute trying to talk like a pirate, and it's way too much work to try to write like one. I do have a fountain pen, and I'm not afraid to use it, but sometimes banging stuff out on a keyboard is they way to go. It's just that it's the middle of the week, I have a ton of work to do, and I thought some random typing would get me out of doing it for a few minutes and then I could go to bed. I have a math test on Friday, and then on Tuesday a presentation for Software Engineering where I get to deliver a short introduction to poker hand evaluation tools. Should be fun. Yet another term of kinda liking the math better, but I'm starting to prefer the work of coding maybe a little? I know there are classes coming up where there won't be much difference: I've got a couple of texts on Algorithm Analysis lying around that are frightening to look at right now, but I know from experience that if I dig in hard enough I will get it. Eventually. I've gotten to chapter 3 of one of the books on Lambda Calculus, a 400/500 intro by Greg Michaelson. He's a good writer: he's making the topic somewhat digestible. The other books I have on Lambda Calculus and Recursion Theory are still basically unreadable, so they will just have to wait until I get a little bigger. Right now I am wondering if there is a recursive algorithm for poker hand recognition. How do pokerbots make decisions? Everybody has heard of poker tournaments for people, but there are tournaments for AI pokerbots as well. Actually at this point, to compete in on-line real money poker games these days, you pretty much have to have a pokerbot helping you or you're just giving your cash away, just because of the existence of web-interfaced pokerbots, and the fact that you have to be a very rare kind of savant to beat them. So um, yeah, this is what grad school is like. The University of Alberta has had an Poker AI lab since 1999. So it's an established academic field with quite a few papers out there. I'm reading one right now by Frans Oliehoek, a masters thesis from the University of Amsterdam. I have learned nothing about the UvA athletic teams, or what their School Mascot may be. So I'm going to presume that they're Pirates. Oh yea, bedtime.

Late at night and all is well

So I passed Professor R in the hall, and he asked if I had it all under control. I said that I kinda did. He asked, "Really?", because, after all, I had a class from him last year. "Yes," I said, "but it can still all spin out of control later." He laughed, reassured, and we went our ways.
This semester is fun so far. I'm glad though, that I only have my two classes. I've cut down on my anti-depressants, so I'm not feeling as sedated and stupefied, but it's still a decent workload. If I get tired of poker hand recognition algorithms I have a couple new books on lambda calculus and recursion theory to read.
Wednesday nights at the Big Haus a new class has started on the History of the Ancient Near East in the context of the Bible, which might just be Evan Wilson  geeking out on one of his favorite subjects, but because of that I know it's going to be richly rewarding and a chance for me to geek out on it too.
I have my first math midterm in a week, Determinate and Indeterminate Finite Automata, Regular Expressions, basically the first and simplest ways you can describe or generate a Formal Language. Set Theory based math is different. One of the comments I'm still thinking about from The Soul of Science by Pearcey and Thaxton was that it's helpful to think of mathematical insight as a sixth sense about the world around us, very much like the other five. With the small caveat that it takes a bit of training for your brain to really enjoy/exploit it.
This is a Porsche Carrera GT. Mid-mounted V10 goodness.

I enjoy these the same way any eleven-year-old kid would. They exist and they're awesome.

Fall Semester, 2012

   Classes start on Monday. I have two classes this semester, CS 383 Software Engineering, and CS/Math 385 Theory of Calculation. When I said to Clint that CS 385 didn't sound so hard, he just leaned back and laughed at me. I have since begun to surmise that it might be more of a weed-out class. Doesn't really matter, they kind of all are to me.
   I'm feeling particularly fuzzy-headed and ill-prepared for the new semester. No use in worrying.
   I've been reading The Soul of Science, by Nancy Pearcy and Charles Thanxton. It's a history of science that is also to some degree about the history of science. The authors are putting the Christian and philosophical context of the development of science back into the history, noting where and why it has largely been left out. I'll have to get back to this, it's a good book and worth more comments.
   "The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him," --Psalm 25:14
   EC Bell has pointed out in several sermons that what we actually fear reflects what we do not wish to lose, and that the right way to look at 'the fear of the Lord' is as a fear of losing him. Evan Wilson has more of an old-school view of  'the fear of the Lord' as a fear of being destroyed by his Judgement. Those views are probably more complementary than not, reflecting basically the same thing.
   I think I'm more determined this year to spend some time sharpening my philosophical and poetic and musical skills. Just because I'm not here to only be an engineer. Off to bed, and then tomorrow, it's back to being way over my head in Math and Engineering.

A futile, vain, and meaningless summer was had by all.

   School starts again in two weeks. I have a place to live and some iced tea in a glass. Reviewing all the things I didn't get done this summer would also be a waste of time. But one of the things I did do was go to Evan Wilson's excellent four-week bible study on Ecclesiastes. It was eye-opening. Evan articulated insights that I feel I had been struggling toward for a long time, but had been unable to  quite coalesce on my own. I am very grateful for the chance to listen to him. Of course I won't remember it for long.
   I was already most of the way into a proper futilitarian frame of mind: convinced that we won't be here long, accomplish anything, nor be long remembered. But there are a couple of things that struck me in particular.
"What is crooked cannot be made strait" (1:15)
   We are living in a fallen world and subject to futility. We can't fix it. But oddly, Evan said, futility paves the way for the virtues. Someone who's trying to fix something misses the chance to instead respond to a situation with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness or self-control.
   "Consider the work of God; who can make strait what he has made crooked?" (7:13)
   I suppose this is much like the other verse, I'm just still mulling over the implications. Especially in the arenas of how to treat ones' self and others. Right now I have more questions than answers, and they keep running ahead of me. I grew up in more of a pietistic tradition where I was trying to be perfect and not really need the grace of God, which is to say, not really need Him. Which was Adam's sin all over again, and where futility comes in. We're dependent creatures: we will never not need him. Futility reminds us of this, even though we're proud and kind of dim.
   "Be not righteous overmuch, and do not make yourself overwise; why should you destroy yourself?" (7:16)
    Another mind-bender. I'm sure I gawked at this as a kid and then blew it off. I'm still not sure I quite get it, I may have to ask Evan again, but I'm tending to think that both have the potential to ruin the moment or avoid it entirely with just too much stuffed-shirt prudence. The moment is really all we have.

So it's Thursday of Finals Week, I haven't stayed up all night studying even once. I have one last final tomorrow and I just don't care anymore. I don't even remember what the class was about. Linux stuff. Bash and Perl and socket programming. Maybe I should go over my notes.

I am getting better at this programming stuff, I think, at least I think I'm better. I have a better idea about how to put together my poetry program. And I have a new assignment from Clint: implement 'Asteroids' for a couple of different platforms. I dunno, I may have crossed a line somewhere this semester. I've spent all semester writing programs in languages I don't know, and that was tiresome and unnerving, but now I'm a little bit inured to the feeling. So all the dorky little projects I have in mind aren't really intimidating me so much anymore; sure I don't know how to to write them, or even what language to use, but so what, that just makes them like every other project I've done this year. I need a program to convert text into image files for the fridge magnets poetry project. Oh I know, I'll write one. Hey, I haven't written anything in Unicon yet, I'll just write it in that.
Right after finals we're driving back to our hometown in Oregon. We'll stay with Colleen's folks and then my mom, and probably want to sleep a lot. But we'll also get to see our friends.

Update, and so on.

So I got into Grad School for the fall. This will be good, if I also can get a tuition waiver and a job in the department. But at least in means I'm on track for the Masters degree now and can skip some of the non-CS related Bachelor's requirements. I could theoretically skip the math, but that is such a bad idea, besides, I like the math.
We went to another poetry reading last Thursday. Jory Mickelson, a TA in Colleen's poetry class was reading from his new chapbook. It was good work, possibly not totally butt-kicking, but solid, coherent, playful. He's totally deserving of the MFA he's going to get next year.
And an interesting contrast with the woman that read before him. Whereas Jory's poems had a strong rural western style and voice, Ciara Shuttleworth set most of her poems in San Fransisco. It made me wonder if it is even possible to write anything but a youthful/urban-alienation poem set anywhere near SF, and if not, what is the minimum distance from SF you have to be in order to write something non-alienated? Or at least non-foggy? The fault may be mine. I am a poor critic, and I can't even remember what she was saying. It was trying for urban and edgy and it involved cigarettes.
I got started on my automatic poetry generator project, just an hour or two, enough to realize that it was a huge problem that I didn't have time for. I need a lexer and a parser to go along with my bag full of fridge magnets, also some composition rules. Hm, I wonder if I can't do a touch interface that lets one move the fridge magnet word blocks around on the screen, letting the user supply the polish that the machine probably can't. Hm.

Spring Break

Is upon us. I just hope we can rest. These semester thingys are long and quite tiring. We're half-way through. I've been mildly over my head the whole time. I guess it's fun, but when I get tired it seems a bit frightening as well. I'm working for the Dean of the College of Engineering for the rest of the semester, which is great, except my job involves stuff I can't do yet, like programming our new Surface computers to do Neat Stuff which we don't know what is yet using a optical touch-screen interface I don't know anything about in a language I haven't learned. YeeHaw! I'm a CS major, yes I am, and I'm finding that my ignorance on the subject of Computers and Computing really is infinite insofar as the upper limit of it is undefined. And people are going to ask me how it's going, and I'm going to say that I'm learning a lot. Which is true. I can now write a "hello, world" program in four languages.
Gotta pack.
This here blog needs more pictures.

Faith and Cynicism

While I was laughing because of one of our dear friend's poems, (and it was really funny) my own excellent Colleen informed me (blandly) that I was the most cynical person she knew. I thought 'this cannot be true!' I don't think of myself as being especially cynical, especially not to the degree of being an outlier. So I went to look it up, on Wikipedia, of course. I'll just insert the first line.
"Cynicism is an attitude or state of mind characterized by a general distrust of others' apparent motives, or a general lack of faith or hope in the human race."
Oh, well, that's OK then. A general lack of faith in the human race doesn't seem particularly inappropriate; but I don't want to belabor the point, many better thinkers than me have been over that ground. But I also hope that by now I've assimilated more of the Gospel into my thinking than that. Sure we're going to do bad things, and suffer in our turn, and then die lingering, painful deaths (as Evan Wilson assures us), but in the middle of that, in the middle of all of that, God loves us, and nothing can snatch us out of his hand. Perhaps I don't have faith or hope in the human race per se, but I don't really feel the lack. God's faithfulness gives me faith. His love makes it possible for me to love, and this inevitably mitigates my cynicism a little. I hope.
PS: Colleen, my sister, my bride, be my Valentine.

In which we stop and ponder cars.

Well here I am buried in Language and System software, wondering how I can translate a CS degree into designing and building cars. There's no giant rush to figure it out, I just have this small obsession that won't go away. So I am going to humor myself for a moment and put up something about my own fantasy garage. Ok, not the garage per se, just the cars that persistently present themselves to my imagination. Here we go.

This, being my own car, may not qualify as a fantasy. But it sort of is; sometimes I just want to pinch myself and make sure I'm awake. The Mazda Miata is on everyone's list of the best sports cars ever, to the point that Jalopnik has banned it from it's own weekly top-ten lists on the grounds that it would be on all of them and can therefor be assumed. The same sort of deal occurs at LeMons races, where anyone showing up with either a Miata or a BMW E30 is handed a liberal collection of penalty laps, because otherwise no-one would race anything else and that would be no fun. Ask a question to the folks at Grassroots Motorsports. The answer is always Miata.
I've already mentioned car number two, also near the top of everyone's top ten list: the BMW E30. E30 refers to the chassis code of BMW's 3-series cars from 1985 to 1991. Still pretty light, but stiffer than it's predecessors, the E30 was very popular and they sold a lot of them. Which is good. Slightly bigger and heavier than the Miata, it is also holds more stuff and seats more people. BMW invented the whole idea of a sports sedan, and a lot of people still think this was their best one.

A lot of people will demand that I resign my Enthusiast card for this next one, but I can't help it. It is the 1995-2000 Buick Riviera. Not a performance car, but a luxury coupe. What's compelling about it is just the shape: it unites the sleek with the voluptuous in a way that I find irresistible. I'm not going to resist.

Here's another picture, because hey, I'm feeling a little defensive about it. All cars provide a means of transportation, but they could and should do more than that. This Buick does. If it's more sensual and soothing than exciting, that's still good, and it is very lovely to look at.

Just for comparison, here is a Jaguar XK6 from roughly the same era.

The design is more restrained in its elegance, more conservative. It has read Browning's "My Last Duchess" and learned it's lesson. I would like to drive them both, then decide.

But now to try to win my Enthusiast card back. Another persistent favorite of mine is the Lotus 7. Still in production after more that 50 years, it's simplicity and purity put it in a different class. The tiny Miata is a thousand pounds heavier.

At this point I'm way over-due to say something about the almighty Subaru WRX. This is Idaho after all, and when we have to go somewhere, sometimes what we need is a lot of power and some undefeatable all-wheel drive. All Hail.

I doubt I will ever be able to obtain anything other than 1:43 models of some of these, so I might as well round off the list with some cars that I love irregardless of the fact that other people own them and I never will.
Something with a Pininfarina badge, because art: the Fiat 124 Spider.

In the years between 1952 and 1962 or so, Studebaker made some really lovely cars.

A 1953 Studebaker Starlight.

A 1961 Studebaker Hawk. These cars were much smaller than most American cars of the era, and are as sleek and lovely as nearly any of the comparable European cars of the era. Just for comparison, here's a 1960 Ferrari Superamerica:

It makes me go back and puzzle about the Studebakers. Where did they fail? Did they have all that style lavished upon them only to be cursed with lame mechanicals? I want answers.

On a sunnier note, here's a  BMW 2002:

Oh, hey, every BMW.

Here's a pair of Porsches. There is no substitute.

A Cayman and a 911. I'd drive either if I had to. Ezra Dyer says that the Ultimate Porsche Driving Experience involves sliding backwards into a tree at 200 miles per hour. So at some point prior to that I should just settle. I guess. Got a Porsche in your barn? Consider donating it to me, you know, for Science.
These are a pair of micros from the fifties: A Messerschmidt Kabinroller on the left, and a BMW Isetta on the right. I have this feeling in my heart that the world will rediscover Micro cars in the not too distant future. A few companies are playing with the idea now. I want to get in on the fun.

I really like the concept of the Kabinroller, Cabin Scooter in English. Besides being a fun layout, something like this might really work in the Pacific Northwest: economical, eco-friendly, and rain-proof. Add modern mechanicals, modern materials, maybe AWD, and yes, I can see a market here. Must have enough power to go up these hills. Easy to do with today's engines. Ok, I'm on it. Raise some money, hire some engineers...

Lambda Calculus

So today I learned of the existence of Lambda Calculus. When I explained to Clint that it was the mathematical foundation of Recursion (and Caculability) and that I was changing my middle name to Recursion (or at least making it recursive somehow), he walked me up to his office and pulled a bright yellow book off of his bookcase entitled The Lambda Calculus: it's syntax and semantics by HP Barendregt (North Holland Press, 1981), put it in my hands and said: "This book will kick your ass."
So today I started getting my ass kicked in a slightly more serious way. I'm very glad now for the class I had last semester in discrete math, as my first glance at LC showed some symbols that were a little familiar. But my first glance also showed me a typesetter's nightmare of symbols that really really weren't. In fact, it looks like the kind of text that Lovecraft might have described in a story shortly before the protagonist's clothes are found in a noisome puddle of primal goo. My lucky day, then. I probably need help.

Spring

Spring invariably starts with a big heaping dose of Winter, so I'm not surprised that my plans have been changed. As a post-baccalaureate student I'm not really eligible for much in the way of financial aid, and being new to Idaho, I'm still paying Non-resident tuition. This is the rate that they are charging wealthy Saudis, which is private-school high. So I'm only going to take one class this Semester: CS210 Programming languages. I'm not too discouraged, I will just keep plugging away at it until I can either get residency or get into graduate school and get the non-resident tuition waived.
A slight edit is in order. I have discovered that I need to take six credits per semester in order to qualify for financial aid at all, so I have added CS270, System Software. This class will put me deep into the guts of Linux, emacs and so on. And thus hopefully I'll get less in the way of frosty glares from Clint for not knowing how to do anything.
The down side to this turn of events is that I only have one class with Ser this semester. She in taking Calculus II.

Grades

My final grades turned out about how I expected, an A in math and a B in computer architecture. Clint was going to wait to see what they were before asking the head of the graduate admissions committee whether they wanted to consider me again yet or whether I should wait a bit longer. I'm not sure I should rush it, I'm fine with with waiting until the fall. Doesn't matter much, and I'd have trouble adding classes at this late date.
So it's my Birthday today. I am fifty-one. I got a slice of Seri-baked cake and a big smooch from Fiona. A very good day. Many greetings on Facebook. Tomorrow I shall go and visit my Aunts and Uncles in Grangeville and say Hi to them.
Spring semester starts in a week. I have signed up for Math 175 (Calculus II) and CS210 (Programming Languages). Math175 is Integral Calculus, which I got a B in at PCC. Stupid transfer articulation, I have to take it again because I only have 9 quarter credits in Calculus, and they want me to have 8 semester credits, which leaves me about 2 short. Oh well, it will be fun.
The CS department hasn't even really decided who's teaching what this spring, so far Bruce Bolden is scheduled to teach CS210, but they may re-arrange things  and get Clint to teach it like he usually does. That could be fun, but hard. We'll just have to see.