My Interests, Part 2

[gfish]

Sorry for the delay. I was stuck in Tacoma. Oh, the horrors.


filk: Folk music for folk who haven't been born yet. My favorite musical style to attend in person.

filmmaking: I'm still not entirely comfortable claiming to be a filmmaker, but we've made 7 short movies at this point. With the new camera, I hope this will continue to increase.

grep: One of the best utilities ever invented. By itself a powerful argument for UNIX, or at least Cygwin.

guitar: I play. Kind of. Give me the chords and I can play accompaniment just fine. Don't expect me to sit down and start playing along, though. My brain doesn't seem to work that way. Yet.

herman hesse: A favorite author, particularly for Steppenwolf. Yes, it is for angsty teenagers, but I was an angsty teenager when I first read it.

home automation: I focus more on the information systems side of things, as compared to X-10 or fancy robotics. I can play MP3s to the stereo (the DJ) and video files to the TV (the VJ). Both are linked through the use of a phrase generator, so they can announce what they're playing through text-to-speech. There is an internal image indexing system which is slightly linked to the VJ, but I plan on adding full slideshow presentation capabilities eventually. The DJ can also be controlled from physical switches mounted in a drivebay on one of my computers.

interstitial spaces: (Unique.) Stolen from Gibson. It's a charming little taxonomic hole.

ken macleod: A favorite SF author. He makes good use of computers, and generally makes me feel like he is writting for my social group. Plus, socialist utopias and anarcho-capitalism!

kendo: Started 6 months ago. I'd like to try iaido at some point.

larry niven: Another favorite author. I guess I've kind of outgrown him at this point, but it's traditional for me. I've been on the mailing list for 7 or 8 years at this point.

lathes: Shiny lathes, yum.

locksmithing: I can pick locks, but not very well. I need to practice more.

machining: I like making things from nothing.

massive soviet technology: (Unique.) I like solid, indestructable, slightly inelegant technology. This is as good a term for it as any.

media events: (Unique.) Challenger. Waco. Oklahoma City. WTO. 2000 elections. 9-11. Columbia. Switching between channels for hours on end until the RSI in my right hand flares up. Good times, man.

metrology: How do you measure the accuracy of your measurements? How do you know how accurately you know something? An incredibly important, yet rather unheralded science.

microgravity: Like floating in a pool, but no feeling of pressure of temperature from the water. I want more of it. I first had this as 'freefall', but decided that this way avoided the namespace collision with the webcomic Freefall.

mir: Ridiculed and shamefully discarded, I think Mir was one of the most heroic and important space achievements since the Apollo project. If we're going to live in space we need to live there. And that means accepting that things are going to go wrong and learn how to deal with them in place.

multilingual puns: Just like a normal pun, but more painful. And snootier.

mysql: I use it a lot. I'm glad it exists.

natural philosophy: An old term for physics. I once won a knowledge bowl match by knowing this term. Added it after reading Quicksilver.

opposable thumbs: Right up there on my favorite body part list. Under brain and anything-absolutely-essential-to-life, above eyes and ears.

over-engineering: (Unique.) See above. I like solid tech. More importantly, I really hate cheap, creappy tech. As t goes to infinity, the percentage of my possessions that count should go to one.

php: A web scripting language. Ugly and messy, but simple and powerful. A mongrel of a language, without perl's obsessive weirdness. A more forgiving C with a really complete set of utility functions.

positive-sum games: (Unique.) Like zero-sum games, but better. Entropy still wins in the end, but there are some really nice situations where we can beat it back locally.

public transit: Particularly in Seattle. Go Metro! I usually try to take public transit whenever I'm visiting a city. A little geeky form of tourism for me.

recursive functions: Elegant and mind-bendy, if not always particularly practical. Factorials are n * (n-1) * (n-2) ... 2 * 1. So your basic function to calculate factorials would be:

int fac(int x) {
  int val = 1;

  while (x > 0) {
    val = val * x;
    x = x - 1;
  }

  return val;
}

It loops through all the values from 1 to x and multiplies them together. Simple.

But you could also implement it as:

int fac(int x) {
  if (val == 1) {
    return 1;
  } else {
    return x * fac(x - 1);
  }
}

The function calls itself recursively, decrementing x until it hits one. Then the calls start to unroll back to the top, multiplying the value from the previous call with the value they received and passing it on up. Yummy! A favorite among CS geeks, and just about the only way to do anything using LISP.

sf: The snooty abreviation for Science Fiction. Star Trek is 'sci-fi'. I read (and watch, whenever possible) SF, thankyouverymuch.

siege engineering: The science of building siege engines.

simulated annealing: (Unique.) Annealing is the process of slowly cooling metal to allow all the atoms to forms a nice, regular crystal. (As comapred to quenching, when you freeze them into a state normally only reachable at high temperatures.) Simulated annealing is a stochastic process for finding solutions to very large problem spaces. Like my DVD collection. I want it sorted such that each DVD is optimally like its neighbors. !143 is a very, very large number. Far too large to exhaustively explore. So instead, I have a program that uses simulated annealing to find a pretty good -- but not provably good -- solution.

space robots: I like following their exploits. And my two big Robot Adventures have involved them in a fake-undergrad kind of way.

ukiyo-e: Pictures of the Floating World. Japanese woodblock prints from the tokugawa period. An art form that I happen to really enjoy. Which is odd, because I'm not usually much for visual art. The historical connotations are probably what make the difference.

unilateral pre-emptive metrification: Metric now, dammit! Why can't we make things easy on ourselves?

united nations: If it ever got real power it would probably ossify and become evil like any other large power. But right now I think it's great. I still need to get my Certificate of Training in UN Peacekeeping Operations.

university of washington: I started attending in 1996. Graduated in 2000, and I've been working there on and off since 1998. The center of my world, in many ways. And a really great campus.

vernor vinge: Another favorite author -- one who needs to write more. Much, much more. Amazing use of computers. Nice guy, too.

vomit comet: NASA would have me call it the 'Weightless Wonder', but I'm a traditionalist.

webcomics: I like 'em, though I had stopped reading them until recently. I wrote one for awhile.

無: Unicode for 'mu' (not, none, cease-to-be). My kanji, as much as I have one. corivax calligraphed me a very nice version:

There is some good commentary in the original post here, but it is locked friends-only.

Comments

[hollyking.livejournal.com]

Interesting using simulated annealing for the DVD sorting issue. I played with the technique a bit when designing a graph layout system for some flow charting software I was being paid to write. I felt I was homing in on a good solution when the company dropped it in favor of a third party library. Bastards!