My work life, as readers of this blog have probably gathered, seems to mainly involve trying to keep funding agencies happy, teaching concepts like deadlock avoidance to bored undergraduates, exhorting grad students to work harder, going to pointless meetings, and spending any remaining time responding to emails. Of course I have a blog where I [...]
[Warning: spoilers for Shutter Island below.] Over the last few nights I watched Shutter Island, a nice atmospheric horror film. Near the end someone pulls out a chalkboard and writes down the names of four important characters, which turn out to contain two pairs of anagrams. This is ridiculous: puzzles of this sort only work [...]
Every file I use on a day to day basis — excluding only data shared with other people, email folders, and bulk media — is kept in a big subversion repository. For the five years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve averaged 3.5 commits per day. Overall it works really well. Advantages of this scheme [...]
One of my favorite lectures in my embedded systems class covers the design of CAN bus: a highly robust network most often used in automotive applications. CAN’s design is elegant in many ways and it includes several mechanisms to help keep the network operating under adverse conditions. One of these mechanisms is error confinement (see [...]
I’m a happy Ubuntu user and usually upgrade to the latest version within a month or two of its being released. However, things seem to go better when I reinstall the system from scratch (leaving /home untouched of course) rather than upgrading in place. The only annoying thing about this plan is that I then [...]
The other day I was talking to a friend whose PhD work (many years ago) involved experiments to determine whether it was safe to expose humans to ultrasound, for example in sonography. The hypothesis was that heating effects are the primary way that ultrasound causes tissue damage. One of the experiments involved determining the length [...]
My colleague Suresh (of Geomblog) likes to say that blogging is passé. The first time I heard this it annoyed me because — dammit — I’ve been blogging for only about six months. It took me a while to figure out that blogs are irrelevant and I could care less if they’re passé. The important [...]
I’m generally not extremely rude, but as Sarah and many others would be happy to tell you, I’m not all about pleasantries. Basically I’ve never seen the point of certain kinds of small talk. To make things worse, I know almost nothing about sports and have thus disqualified myself from a large proportion of male [...]
Teachers sometimes tell students that there are no stupid questions. This is a huge lie; many questions are so stupid they make my teeth ache. I don’t have a great definition of “stupid question” but it’s something like: A question that only wastes time. Neither the asking nor the answering benefits anyone. Here are a [...]
It is known that Google Knol has some plagiarism problems, but I wanted to share a quick anecdote. In early 2010 I noticed this Knol, which plagiarizes an article originally written by Nigel Jones. I’m sure that Nigel’s article is the original because it appeared in print nine years ago. I was annoyed to see [...]