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Wed, 30 Mar 2005
the engineers' conceit (or is it just MIT?)
Haven't blogged in a bit, but I had a realization a few days ago that I thought I might share with y'all.
The other night, I went to TGI Friday's with a horde of friends. During dinner, I was talking with Matt Powell, a co-worker of mine who's also MIT '02, M.Eng '04. Somehow, the topic of raising children came up, at which point I asked the age, in his opinion, at which one was capable of grasping calculus and differential equations. After some discussion, we settled on 12ish as probably the earliest one would want to teach their child such things.
A couple of the people sitting near us (not engineers) overheard this and questioned why any sane person would ever do something like that. I immediately, almost instinctively, responded that a person couldn't carry on an intelligent conversation about anything technical, or even really understand much going on around him, without a grasp of calculus and diff. eq., and (in so many words) that people who didn't have such a grasp were basically worthless. Matt expressed agreement.
Then we remembered that we were in non-engineer company, and that there were maybe two or three other people at the table of fifteen who'd taken anything beyond maybe "college algebra." This apparently failed to cause Matt any discomfiture, since, well, he's Matt, and he tells it like he thinks it is no matter how unpleasant that might be. I, on the other hand, was somewhat embarrassed.
I still think I'm right, though. People who don't have at least some basic grasp of calc, diff. eq., mechanics, and E&M (the latter two being little more than the application of the former) must go through life in some sort of epic fog.
[ permalink | 11 comments ]
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Interesting...what kind of epic fog?
repak wrote
hmmm... probably an Odyssian one.
-repak
Sherv wrote
hmm
Computation is also pretty important nowadays (in the "how computers work" sense). And even knowing a decent bit of all of the above (except for E&M, in which I think I'm pretty shaky), I still am amazed by much of everyday existence.
repak wrote
...but amazed and confused are very different.
-repak
dmax wrote
Assuming you understand how the world works because you can predict the behavior of simple systems is deluding yourself. However, not evening bothing to TRY to understand it (which necessitates the study of calc, diffeq, etc.) is willfull ignorance and therefore commands my disrespect. Also: coke and hookers.
repak wrote
Are you saying that coke and hookers command your disrespect, or were you just casually mentioning them for the hell of it?
-repak
No mention of hookers can be casual, let alone disrespectful. If disrespect were intended, he would have called the aforementioned hookers "sex workers." Sheesh.
By the way, amazement and confusion are practically wedded in my psychology. Surprise, however, is not engaging in a menage a trois here.
The above from Sherv.
Sherv wrote
one other thing
Max has a very good point. I expect to learn so much in my lifetime that I will reach a pit of despair over the fullness of my ignorance from which the only possible escape can be death.
i wrote
Nerds Unite!
I agree. On the equations @ age 12 sort of thing. And the necessity of intelligent conversations, in both kids and coworkers. haha Thanks for the recs on the mullet music, big R! :)
Rodin wrote
Mon, 28 Mar 2005
As Heather once said, in the view of MIT engineers, being a liberal arts major basically involves lots of whining most of the time, and the rest of the time not building anything. Q.E.fvckingD.
brilliant! (so say the Guiness guys).
writeback
shazam wrote
Wed, 23 Mar 2005
Oh my god! In 1996 I thought this was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. I'm so glad it's still around. Hooray for the RBBTDDA!
...at least not for a couple months. I'll put up a pic of my new hairdo at some point...
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woz wrote
plz post rst of series, kthxbye.
hippo wrote
Tue, 22 Mar 2005
you lie where is pics?
I'm considering going back to the clipper-number-two-in-the-bathroom approach to hair cuts. What do y'all think? Will I look like even more of a retard as a skinny guy with a buzzcut than I did as a fatass with a buzzcut?
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rodin wrote
hmm
I always go for #1, further levered down to shortest possible.
I don't know how you can live with #2, anyway. Don't you lose some barely countable infinity of ego-points?
repak wrote
actually...Mon, 21 Mar 2005
This time I went conservative and opted for 3! That was a week ago, though, and it's already longer than I'd like. I'm thinking I'll give it a quick once-over at #2 later tonight.
-repak
Yeah, it's been a while, but there's honestly not been much to blog about! Yesterday it was gorgeous outside, so I woke up and ran my new 12k loop. I think my loop is hillier than the course is going to be in July (though I don't know for sure yet), so I think I'm in good shape. I need to try and get my speed up a bit, though—at the moment I'm only averaging about 6.5 MPH (shut yer ass, I know I'm slow), and I'd like to run the 12k in under an hour in July (gotta have goals, even if you can't quite hit them). I'm guessing my HIIT routine during the week will help with this...
This morning I got a call from a recruiter out of southern New Hampshire. He apparently had an old copy of my resume (well, OK, a completely up-to-date one doesn't actually exist at the moment...), and thought he was trying to hire me away from Analog Devices. I talked to him for a little while, telling him essentially nothing about myself but eventually worming out of him that he was trying to recruit me for Silicon Labs! Heh...
Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to go see the Ring 2 yet, but maybe I'll try and go some night this week... hmmm...
Oh yeah, by the way, the PDF I linked to on MAX-OT kind of sucks. If you want to read more about it, go to AST's site and log in with username max-ot@jfet.org and password max-ot.
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Sat, 12 Mar 2005Holy shit there's a lot of good stuff coming up.
- Queens of the Stone Age at Stubb's BBQ - March 15 (and their album comes out on March 22)
- The Ring 2 - March 18 (next weekend!)
- Beck's new album, Guero - March 29
- Sin City - April 1
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - April 29
- Autechre at The Parish - May 25
- Batman Begins - June 17
- SiLabs Relay - July 4
Other upcoming events (dates not yet fixed): ProSLIC tapeout, me visiting Boston... have I left anything out?
Mmmmm... here's to the future.
[ permalink | 3 comments ]
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shazam wrote
Don't forget: Opening day at Fenway Park - April 11.
Guero wrote
Speaking of 'Guero,' you should definitely check out 14pN4p
hippo wrote
Fri, 11 Mar 2005
boring *whips out knife* i will kill you
Wow. Sloanies are even dumber than I thought.
According to this post over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Sloan has decided to deny admissions to several people who did nothing more than edit a URL provided to them by the admissions department, discovering in the process that their admissions letter had already been posted to the webserver and reading same.
Sloan claims that they "hacked in" to their files in order to view their admissions status; meanwhile the fucking morons made the admissions letters publicly available on their webserver.
This goes to show you that stupid people should not be permitted to be aware of the existence, let alone in any way have a hand in the operation, of computers.
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hippo wrote
yeah in the articles in the tech and the globe never mention how they "hacked" in. they should be blaming the company that
handles the web application process
repak wrote
The thing that chaps my ass is that by the time it got to the point where ApplyYourself.com was going through web server logs to finger the people who'd "hacked" them, they MUST have known exactly what was going on and that it was their fault. That they failed to report same to their clients is ridiculous.
"Yeah, they hacked us. HACKERS!"
Aside: "Whew... handled that one well."
-repak
Gautham wrote
Fucking Sloan
Sloan seems like it's full of a bunch of dumbasses. Brian Manley was showing us one of the assignments for his "graduate" level information technology class. It involved using FrontPage to create a web survey. Apparently they were also forbidden from using anything but FrontPage to complete the assignment. It's like something straight out of the curriculum of a backwater community college.
ling chi shang shui fang mei wrote
HAKKED BY CHINEES
deeefeeeeet!
I'm a routine kind of person. Yeah, I know, this might be surprising to some of you. Honestly, though, I like to have things planned out, I like to know what's happening when, I like to feel completely in control of the forseeable future (this last part being key: I'm an unmitigated control freak; perhaps even :s/control// applies here...).
Even though I like the control afforded by having a plan, I do tire of same old, same old eventually. That's why it's time for a new routine. By this, I mean a new lifting routine. Stop reading now if you just don't give a rat's ass.
Since it's getting nice here (i.e., it's almost warm enough to ride my bike to the gym before dawn in shorts and a T-shirt), I want to start riding to the gym and back (5 miles each way) so that I'm getting a bit of cardio every day. Doing this with my current lifting schedule is nearly impossible while still getting to work at a reasonable time, though—my current split has me lifting 75 to 90 minutes four days a week. So I'm going to a new one, known as MAX-OT. The MAX-OT philosophy is that shorter sessions (30 to 40 minutes a day, leaning towards the low end of the range) with a 5-day split is much better for you. Moreover, MAX-OT claims that you should never train the same muscles within 5 days of each other, meaning that my current routine (3-day split plus full body workout on Saturday) needs a complete makeover.
Not only does this change things up, which ought to break the plateau I've been seeing lately, it gives me time to ride to the gym and back every day. Total hotness.
I start Monday. Damn, I'm excited. My only worry is that since I haven't been riding much, my ass is going to get sore. I did about 9 miles on my bike this morning (started around 6:15a or so) and I was OK (it was also a hillier course than the route to the gym), so I'm guessing all will be well.
Hooray for controlled change.
writeback
Sherv wrote
I'm sorry, but...Mon, 07 Mar 2005
That's not the only reason your ass is going to get sore.
Also, it is so nice here that I was wearing a t-shirt and shorts at 10 PM as I was walking home from work. Ha-HA!
One of the many things that sucks about Cadence is that it doesn't support the scroll wheel at all. The same is true of Acrobat Reader and many other programs.
Today I was thinking that I should write some code to capture button 4 and 5 events and massage them into some form that older programs could digest. Then it occurred to me that someone must already have done this, and it turns out that I was right: imwheel is a package that grabs events from mouse buttons 4 and 5 (and more, if you've got a sideways scroller as well) and translates them into keypresses. It's pretty sweet.
In addition to being compatible with X, it's apparently compatible with GPM, so you can even use your scroll wheel on a console. Now that's pretty hot.
A quick tip: it seems that imwheel will die if you have a catchall @Exclude rule, but you don't actually need one—if it doesn't have a rule in place, it'll apparently just pass the events through to the underlying window.
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JW Holloway wrote
Cadence
Hey, do they have you doing layout as well, or are you just a sch. capture + SPICE guy these days?
repak wrote
Recently, a whole lotta MATLAB, but generally when I'm building circuits it's capture to SPICE. I've developed my own totally hot design flow using 'make' and shit. Someday I'll document it and everyone will switch to it on account of its sheer brilliance.
We have layout contractors who do the bulk of the layout; I just sort of have to drive my layout guy in the right direction ("yeah, those really have to match," "LOD effects are critical here," that sort of thing).
-repak
JW Holloway wrote
Sue2 + CppSimSat, 05 Mar 2005
Sounds an awful lot like Prof. Perrott's Sue2 + CppSim + HSPICE + Matlab integration. You've got capture, behavioral simulation, circuit sim, and MATLAB all rolled into one tool. He's got it all wrapped up w/ a make interface behind the scenes. I hear it even works with Cadence now.
Layout bitches. That's hot.
Next time I'm in Boston, I expect to play a rousing round of the getopt game.
How was I reminded of the existence of this game? Dragonball GT just came on Cartoon Network and I misheard the name of one of the characters (Trunks) as "Trux." That got me thinking, "Hmmmm... trux... -Acdtrux... tar!"
Wow.
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jim wrote
yep
I'd own you.
repak wrote
bring it on
biaaaaaatch.
-repak
I know this isn't really new, but if you haven't yet, go see the trailer for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. I'm, like, dying of excitement. April 29, here we come...
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Fri, 04 Mar 2005Looks like the ProSLIC well and truly hates me. We're in "critical crunch mode," so vacation ain't gonna happen—at least, not until we tape out. Currently that puts me in Boston around finals at the earliest.
Y'all should let me know right now what your plans are before and after finals so I know when to plan my trip.
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May wrote
I'll be in Boston for my brother's graduation, so I BETTER see you there, biyatch!
J.W. Holloway wrote
Boston
I will be here forever.
Sherv wrote
you cuntWed, 02 Mar 2005
I will be in Boston between the 24th and the 27th. I hate you.
I got the boards back from Advanced Circuits yesterday, and promptly made a mess of my kitchen table stuffing one of them. My desk at work has a new decoration, and my GOD is it hotness.
You know you want to make one for yourself...
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DAMNIT.
On May 25, Nine Inch Nails is going to be playing at Stubb's Barbequeue. Normally that would be great, except that Autechre is playing The Parish that very same night!
Why must I choose!?
[ permalink | 3 comments ]
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gwax wrote
Easy Choice
Autechre
Sherv wrote
si
yo quiero mama
dmax wrote
Tue, 01 Mar 2005
bithead >> goth
a young lady's illustrated primer
Generally my blog entries at least attempt to have some original content, but not this one. Reason has a good interview with Neal Stephenson that I thought y'all might enjoy.
edit
If you haven't already, go and read In the Beginning Was the Command Line. It's great.
writeback
gwax wrote
The Big U
Yeah, that's all fine and good but, if you ask me, Neal Stephenson's best book is still The Big U.