Things are going well. Going to read some Dennett in bed.
Monthly Archive for May, 2003
Holy Moses. I’m not a religious man, but Holy Moses.
I just finished my last exam of my undergraduate career. I’m fairly certain I passed it, too. I stayed up all night studying, feeling progressively worse about the situation. I got a D on the midterm, and I wanted to better on the final, but the closer I got the more of a sense I got that I would repeat myself.
I knew this morning that I would need to not go into the exam all armageddony if I wanted to do well. I put a false smile on during the walk over and kept it on until the exam started. That makes me feel better.
Anyway, it went as well as it could have. After the exam, Turvey talked to me about my honors conversion draft. He basically said it was quite good and that I didn’t need to do a final draft. As I mentioned to him, the ending fizzles out and I am missing some necessary fleshing out from Robert Rosen, but it was a good eight page condensation of the material with some good thinking. Gee.
Last night at like three in the morning, I spied from my perch in the 3rd floor study lounge two drunk girls trying to get into the dining hall. Probably to pee. One of them was wearing only one gigantic chunky sandal. I thought it was amusing. Today one of her shoes is propping the door downstairs. Not sure which one it is.
Where ya goin’, shoe?
Oh my. There will be a teaser trailer for The Incredibles attached to Finding Nemo when it comes out in two weeks. Oh man. This is Brad Bird’s first film since The Iron Giant, which was awesome, and his first film since coming to Pixar, which is also awesome. And I’m going to have to wait until June 21st! Argggh!!
Walking-back-from-the-dining-hall-thought-of-the-moment: Theological disagreements aside, I am thankful for Jesus’ insurrection. It’s unclear whether without it we would have as free a society as we have now. “Render unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar’s” is very Zen and seems like a pretty important idea for the development of a free society.
From my honors conversion paper:
“Though the rules governing semantic relationships may be quite systematic (and may even constitute a formal system themselves,) they are not part of the formal system to which they give meaning. A formal system is by definition completely self-contained, governed by the rules of the game, often called syntax. Thus, tokens in a formal system are said to live two lives: syntactical lives in which their motions are governed completely by the rules of a formal system and semantic lives in which their motions are mysterious but their meanings significant.
“This relationship seems tenuous at best. After all, if semantics have no bearing on the ramblings of a formal system, isn’t any consistency of meaning just a happy coincidence? And what’s to prevent a formal system from spinning out of control, leaving a trail of inconsistent meanings in its wake?”
Questions, questions…
Nearly over the hump. Yesterday had my Parallel Systems final, and the final presentation for our senior design project:
The Mystery of SENK. I made that shiznit.
Shin wanted me to join his lab and do some OpenGL interactive cell stuff. I pretended that it was possible. But I’m not going to be in Storrs next year. Whatever. Interesting thought anyway.
In addition, I handed in my homeworks six in Programming Languages and Parallel Systems. Got a 62 on my PL project, which sucks, but could be worse. The average was a 63, and it’s a grad class, so fuck it. Week Of Hell is over, and as long as I can follow it with Week of Diligence I will be able to step onto the AT a content man.
Target: paper about whether strong AI is actually freaking possible. Honors thesis. Paper about why applications and the saving paradigm suck snots. SENK writeup. Three are started, one is stupid.
Pardon my language, but HOLY FUCK.
I just handed in my Programming Languages project. Project from hell. I have been working on it marathon-style for three days now, and on and off for a long while for the last couple of weeks. I put it off way too long. Feeling pretty miserable.
I completed it. It doesn’t work. It’s wrong. But it’s complete. I think I touched all the issues he wanted us to touch. I think I hit some of them in the right way. Maybe many of them. But a few of them are indoubtably WRONG and a sizeable chunk are just “off”. All in all, a pretty poor showing. Admittedly, it’s a graduate class and this is a graduate project. But still. Pretty shitty job, Erik.
And now I have a disgusting amount of work to do for my other classes.
sigh