the brook

The scene is a hands-on workshop for developing presentation skills. Sixteen teaching assistants have come prepared with a ten minute teaching session on a topic of their choice.

A biologist describes the human genome project. A chemist delights us with the tale of dimerizing a ketone molecule. An Lab TA attempts to convey the intricacies of getting gcc to compile code. On display are powerpoint slides, overhead transparencies, voice modulation, presentation structure, good body language and a dozen other things essential for good presentation.

Then there are the mathematicians. Each one gets up, unassumingly, goes up to the big white board, takes up a felt pen and writes down a proof. Concise and compact, straight to the point, and scientifically unquestionable. The trainer says that their voices are too soft. Others that they spend too much time on the details, not stopping adequately to see how the audience responded.

I am too busy envying them to care. To work in a field where everything starts from a notion of absolute truth lends mathematicians a somewhat magical air. While the real world may reach out for help to mathematics, mathematics itself is above (some say contemptuous) of the real world. Delving into knowledge just for the sake of study is an aspect of scholarship that applied computer scientists rarely get to experience - but something that I dreamed of as a fresh graduate student. Someday, maybe, I’ll sit and study math.

I came across Swivel today, and it’s a fascinating place. It’s a repository of publicly-uploaded data (and corresponding auto-generated graphs, it seems like) on anything under the sun. Today’s front page shows me interesting graphs on the falling US contribution to physics, top reasons why books get banned, and airline accidents and fatalities over the years.

The graphs are all Javascript (mouseover actions over a bar show the actual value), and there seem to be some basic manipulations you can do because of this. It’s still not very clear to me how they intend to ensure the reliability of data as service use increases, though. And I’d like for the graphs to be embeddable in web-pages as well as exportable in various (Swivel claims all data is Creative Commons).

…does it take to change a lightbulb?

The answer is… I don’t know, all I changed this morning was a tubelight.

1. You can never get anything right the first time.
2. Every next try is the first time you’re trying to get the previous attempt right.

By induction, no matter what you try to do, you’re doomed to failure :)

Software bugs cause you to believe in a higher power… that likes to mess with your life.

Scene I

Doctor’s waiting room. Electronic queueing system in place. My number - 184. 179 through 183 go by, ever so slowly. The next beep comes and I get up in anticipation, but the display shows nice round figures: 0000 in room 2. Nobody goes into room 2. Now, this is what happens when you’ve written too much buggy code and believe that Murphy’s Law runs the universe.

I’m convinced that was supposed to be my number; and one part of me starts thinking - OK, so they do say on the ticket “Number’s may not be shown in sequence” but 0000 is highly unlikely. Nevertheless, I can’t respectably go when 185 comes since I’ll be politely told to wait my turn and that it may not be in sequence. And then I start to think - OK maybe by 187, I’ll go and complain, or should I wait till 190?

The other part of me is thinking - I’m pretty sure the code would have returned a pointer to the next number; and for some reason a null pointer was returned which didn’t fail but just returned zero. Aah, maybe then all the numbers from then on will be zero, and then I won’t have to wait all that long.

The next number called was mine, and I went right in. Never found out why the 0000 came up.

Scene II

Welcome tea for the undergraduate program in Computational Biology in SoC, NUS. Only a few people registered with this programme so far, so they’ve decided to give an informal talk (with food). Some graduate students have been asked to be on display to encourage or warn the unsuspecting public of the effects of research. After a quick introduction, the students are asked to introduce themselves. And it goes something like this:

I’m ABC, and I’m really interested in Data Mining.

I’m DEF, a freshman undergraduate and my interests lie in the area of Computer Graphics and Artificial Intelligence.

I’m GHI, 1st year and I’m really looking forward to doing good work in Machine Learning for Intelligent Systems.

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.
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I’m LMN, 3rd year undergraduate, and I work in biology with Prof X.

I’m OPQ, 1st year PhD, and I’m studying for my QE and looking for a research topic

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I’m XYZ, 2nd year PhD. (Awkward silence) Oh, and I’m working in, uh, systems.

And finally, my turn. “I’m Anshul, I’ve been here forever, and I’m really interested in the food getting cold behind us right now.”

Oops.

Fortunately, that last just happened in my head. Old survival instinct. But close.

Just came across this via digg - Microsoft Live Labs has come up with a really cool idea called Photosynth. Basically the idea is to take a large number of photos shot at the same location and merge them into a 3-D virtual world through which one can walk through; the details being provided by the photographs. Microsoft is envisaging that given enough data, you would be able to create tours of entire cities with this - though I doubt that will happen. What is definitely possible if they’ve got the vision research correct though, is that popular locations can be mapped out with great degrees of accuracy.

One big application of this idea would be for the software to look at a photograph you’ve taken, recognize the location and throw you into the walkthrough composed using different photographs and allow you to explore the location in 3-D. A very, very cool application of research if they can do it well.

A video explaining Photosynth is available here.

My introduction to the world of programming was via BASIC, C and C++. Along the way of course, I learned other stuff, including Java with its common theme of “Everything is an object”.

I could never get this concept of everything being an object, and hence I’ve never liked, and have always struggled with Java. That’s always made me feel totally dumb - given all the hype and oomph that Java receives for its features and ease of use, I could really never figure out Java totally.

It turns out, I’m not the only one. I came across this article by Steve Yegge entitled Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns. A totally humourous yet amazingly insightful take on “everything is an object”. I’d say its a must read for any serious programmer (and I’m sure the rest have run away by now) - and what it did for me basically was tell me why I felt the way I do about Java. Most memorable quotes for me:

Object Oriented Programming puts the Nouns first and foremost. Why would you go to such lengths to put one part of speech on a pedestal? Why should one kind of concept take precedence over another? It’s not as if OOP has suddenly made verbs less important in the way we actually think. It’s a strangely skewed perspective. As my friend Jacob Gabrielson once put it, advocating Object-Oriented Programming is like advocating Pants-Oriented Clothing.

I’ve really come around to what Perl folks were telling me 8 or 9 years ago: “Dude, not everything is an object.”

I found Steve’s other articles are very insightful too - especially the one on “Moore’s Law is Crap“.