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.

Breaktime

Finals went as well as could be expected. The math final was open notes and books, so I took advantage of that fact to prepare my scratch paper, with an old exam as a guide, with formulas and algorithms to solve each problem, including prepared truth-tables, etc, so that during the test I wouldn't have to spend any time looking anything up or drawing anything, because I'd already done it. My evil plan worked really well and I was right on schedule right up until  the Euclidean Algorithm problem. I know how to solve one of those, but I still messed up a distribution step on the backwards side of it, and had to re-do it three times to finally get the right answer. Not a good strategy for a test like that, but I just couldn't let it go. Foolish pride I suppose. So with that delay I didn't have enough time for the last couple of recursive function problems, which is a pity, because those are fun. We'll see how it turns out.
My computer architecture final was one half-hour after the maths final, so Seri and I grabbed a quick bite to eat (with Clint- a frequent happy occurrence) and dashed off to it. It was mostly a blur of questions and answers. I think I did ok, it was a fun class and I learned a lot. I used to think of myself as somewhat of a hardware guy, but no longer. Once the layers of abstraction are stripped away, how computers really work is just mind-breakingly complicated. I would be just as happy to not ever have to look at assembler code ever again, but I know since I have to take a Senior level compiler design class that that is not to be, at least not quite yet.
So that's it for my first semester at Idaho. I'm in the right place, and I think that they'll let me into the grad program eventually. But I'm not leaving without a degree of some sort. Onward!

Calm

Today is a Sunday and I'm having a rest between my last homework assignment and finals. I am not having urges to study tonight, but I am having urges to eat and close my eyes. I think this has been a really wonderful semester at the U of Idaho, whatever grades I wind up with. It was cloudy today. Mostly it's been sunny. Colleen likes it sunny, something I shall have to keep in mind. Before we got here, Clint had been bewailing the weather in Moscow in winter. "Frozen wasteland" is the phrase I think he used. So we were a little apprehensive. But it's been lovely so far, in a cold-ish kind of way. We've only had one proper snowfall so far, but that wasn't really inconvenient for us. Campus has quite the network of heated side-walks for just such an occasion. They are always clear. I have some Yak-trax to put on my shoes, though, just in case.
Last week I went to a poetry reading on Wednesday and then a Maths lecture on Thursday, and enjoyed them both. The reading was by Alexandra Teague, Colleen's instructor this term. She is quite good. I am encouraged that academic poetry, at least here at Idaho, has shifted back toward accessibility. My impression, at least when I was younger, was that the academics were stuck in the rut of making poems as obscure and as unreadable as possible, judging the best poems as being the ones understandable to the fewest. I suppose the height of glory for an academic poet is to become the subject of someone's dissertation, so I can see how that makes sense. And there is still a bit of political poetry going on, identity politics poetry. Horrible wretched waste of time. Ms Teague had a few of what she called Winchester sonnets. They were only thirteen lines each, with the last line of one being repeated in the first line of the next. Sarah Winchester was the muse for most of them. We bought Alexandra's book. She signed it for Colleen.
The maths lecture was given by Arie Bialostocki, my instructor for Discrete Math. He is retiring after this term, so this served as a farewell event, with Arie bringing his famous hummus and the department bringing the cake. The lecture was about the "Happy Ending Theorem" proven by Erdos and Szekeres in 1935: Theorem. For any positive integer N, any sufficiently large finite set of points in the plane in general position has a subset of N points that form the vertices of a convex polygon. Their friend Ether Klein came up with the idea, and Erdos called it the "Happy Ending" theorem because after it had been proven, Szekeres and Klein got married. Math and romance, what could be better than that? Arie had been a student of Erdos', and has an Erdos number of 1. He says that Erdos still publishes papers, but since he died in 1996, it's now at a slower rate.
So, a couple more days and I'm done for the semester.