“The problem received the title of `Buridan’s sheep.’ The biological code was taken from a young merino sheep, by the Casparo-Karpov method, at a moment when the sheep was between two feeding troughs full of mixed fodder. This code, along with additional data about sheep in general, was fed into CODD. The machine was required: a) to predict which trough the merino would choose, and b) to give the psychophysiological basis for this choice.”
– The mystery of the hind leg, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
I returned yesterday evening to Shampoo-Banana, and was happy to see that my home was still standing. The visit to CalTech/Manor was nice if not very productive.
In the pile of mails awaiting me, there was a letter from Doctors without a Clue with the regular “we know how to spell Kuala Lumpur correctly, you should send us money”. To entice me into opening the letter, there was in it free sticky printed mail labels, with “**Ms.** Sariel Har-Peled”. While it is true that I considered having a sex change operation when I was on the job market in 2000 (and also change my nationality to Chinese), this is a bit of a stretch.
I also got a notice that the organic co-op (read grocery store), which is located five minutes walk from my office, is now open from noon till 8pm (although, the webpage still lists the old bizarre hours).
And if you are bored with this blog, within a mouse click throw, you can find this list of expressions. Just dont try to bite the bull too hard, because I think the bull dont like it.
New comment on your post #187 “Through Sadom going to Gomorrah”
Author : Sariel
Hmm. I guess I was cheated…
Hmm. I guess I was cheated…
I think I mentioned Ipe before, but my just completed talk in Caltech (slides here) is a good excuse to revisit it. First, the latest version of Ipe can convert xfig figures into ipe format. Secondly, Ipe spports layers and views, and it is easy to do simple animations in a single figure. For example see this figure. Unfortunately, such pdf figures do not work well with prosper, which is currently the latex package I am using for my slides. (Altough it supposedly works quite nicely with the beamer class, which was mentioned to me by several people.) Fortunately, it is easy to write a script that generates an eps file for each such view of a figure (i.e., each Ipe figure with several steps generate several eps files). Putting such multiple figures into the presentation is now quite easy. See the source files of my slides, if you want a concrete example.
So, the question is, if you have Ipe, why on earth would you use something as primitive as xfig?
Next stop, shampoo-banana, where the GM corn grows tall, proud and intelligent.
New comment on your post #187 “Through Sadom going to Gomorrah”
Author :
Repeat to yourself. Pasadena is *NOT* LA. Pasadena is *NOT* LA. And you may as well forget about the warm weather. In case you Midwesterners have not heard, we are currently gunning for the wettest winter on record in 120 years. So we don’t want nobody to wish for the sun and the clear sky until we get there.
Repeat to yourself. Pasadena is *NOT* LA. Pasadena is *NOT* LA. And you may as well forget about the warm weather. In case you Midwesterners have not heard, we are currently gunning for the wettest winter on record in 120 years. So we don’t want nobody to wish for the sun and the clear sky until we get there.
Dagstuhl was over, so I went to Amsterdam for one day. There was something disturbing about the red light district and Amsterdam’s free soft drug reality.There is always something disturbing about human activities done without the suppression of culture and religion. Not that life in other places are morally cleaner, but they just let people pretend they are.
Anyway, currently I am visiting Manor Mendel in LA, enjoying the warm weather, and hopefully doing some research.
New comment on your post #186 “Dagstuhl done”
Author : Suresh
Upper semi-computable ?