| Another winner |
[Aug. 10th, 2008|10:18 pm] |
This is not sarcasm, this is not satire, this is documentary.
And BTW: Klingon is not a Finno-Ugric language. Just ask anyone who speaks Erzya. |
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| The Return of Steve's Meme |
[Jun. 3rd, 2008|11:35 am] |
1. The age you will be on your next birthday:
2. A place to which you'd like to travel:
3. Your favorite place:
4. Your favorite object:
5. Your favorite food:
6. Your favorite animal:
7. Your favorite color:
8.-12. skipped
13. Your nickname/screenname:
14.-16. skipped
17. A Bad Habit of Yours:
18.-19. skipped
20. Your major in college:
(Actually, Problems are Complex, so the answer gets even _more_ interesting...!) |
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| This could be me if I'm not careful |
[May. 31st, 2008|12:23 am] |
In my case, it'll be something like: "Oh, I _get_ it! The Jordan Canonical form... you know, the one with the eigenvalues on the diagonal and 1's on the superdiagonal... that holds for _complex_ n-space! That's why that matrix in R4 didn't turn out right! I have to get this down... hand me a kleenex or something. No, not a used one!!" |
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| How a mathematician argues |
[May. 16th, 2008|01:11 pm] |
Richard Dawkins is taking trip by train and finds himself seated next to a mathematician who is also a theist. Enjoying a good debate, Dawkins challenges the mathematician to come up with an airtight proof for the existence of God.
The mathematician, who has his nose in the middle of a difficult book and not wishing to be interrupted, says, "If you are uneducated, then there is a God."
"Uneducated?" replies Dawkins, somewhat shocked. "I have M.A. and D.Phil. degrees from --"
"Exactly," replies the mathematician, returning to his book. |
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| Favorite Quotes |
[Apr. 26th, 2008|06:33 am] |
"You'll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse. Do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into his most excellent harmonies."
-- from Philippians 4:8 (The Message)
"People can reject God. They can rail against His purposes. They can try to ignore Him. But they cannot remove Him."
-- Jim Fletcher
"This is my 2008 slogan: Reasonable Person for President. We are grown-ups, we know our country needs greatness, but we do not expect it and will settle at the moment for good. We would like a candidate who does not appear to be obviously insane."
-- Peggy Noonan
"I have no freaking clue who Nick and Jessica are. I see them on the cover of People and Us constantly when I am buying my dog biscuits and kitty litter. I often ask the checkers at the grocery stores. They never know who Nick and Jessica are either. Who are they? Will it change my life if I know who they are and why they have broken up? Why are they so important? I don't know who Lindsay Lohan is, either."
-- Ben Stein
"Adventure is just bad planning."
-- Roald Amundsen
"I think that the 'born gay' thesis is a crock."
-- Camille Paglia
"That brings me joy!"
-- Michele Wolfe
"What's the mouse's armor class?"
-- Merodym (spoken in all seriousness, I might add)
"Aliens? Us? Is this one of your Earth jokes?"
-- Krowbar in THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA
"This car is old, so it's not necessarily new."
-- Deirdre (age 7)
For any humanly constructible system of axioms, there is a formula which can be obtained but is not provable in that system.
Cat: "Is that what I think it is?"
Rimmer: "What do you think it is?"
Cat: "A big orange swirly thing in space!"
-- Red Dwarf
Q. Paul, why do Hell's Angels wear leather?
A. Paul Lynde: Because chiffon wrinkles too easily.
"Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak."
-- The Bard
"Push the button, Frank." |
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| Wisdom Culled from the Marx Brothers |
[Apr. 25th, 2008|12:29 pm] |
You don't have to speak to be heard.
Always answer the important question first.
Really important people never have anything really
important to say.
The best thing to do in a difficult situation is to make
an ugly face or offer someone your leg.
Puncture a windbag whenever possible.
Whatever it is I'm against it.
101 uses for scissors, glue and a blow torch.
Beware of strangers selling Tootsie-Frootsie Ice Cream.
One properly executed HONK! is worth a thousand words.
Your Breeder's Guide...Don't leave home without it!
There ain't no Sanity Clause.
People are honest but you've got to watch them.
If someone gets you down, stick your feet in their lemonade.
Sometimes fighting for someone ELSE'S honor is probably
more than they will ever do.
When in doubt, the password is "Swordfish"
You CAN burn the candle at both ends.
Take time to have a strange interlude.
When making any sort of request, it doesn't hurt to add
"And two hard boiled eggs".
Outside of a dog a book is Man's best friend.
Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
The Ace of Spades is the most valuable card in a bridge game;
it may be played repeatedly, and relied upon to take every trick.
Don't pester a man leaning against a building --
he may be the only thing holding it up.
Any time you got a lot you gotta too much.
You gotta get up early if you wanna get out of bed.
Some nicknames don't need explaining.
Omit things that you don't think are important.
Twelve years is not too long to be in one college.
If you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce,
they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.
Remember that art is art...but then again, water is water.
This would be a better world for children if their parents
had to eat the spinach.
Marriage is impossible only after you're married!
I can here for a party, and what did I get? Nothing. Not even ice cream.
The gods looks down and laugh.
Your retirement is the greatest contribution to your field
that you can make! |
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| MS in Mathematics |
[Apr. 22nd, 2008|03:44 pm] |
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My thesis passed without revision. Only the paperwork left to do. |
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| Jazz, a satire |
[Mar. 31st, 2008|08:10 pm] |
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As pop culture goes, this is seven years out of date, but I don't care. I was ROTFLOL reading this anyway. The background: Ken Burns' Jazz is a documentary that runs 1140 minutes (according to Amazon) was about as balanced as a history of American politics hosted by Howard Dean and Hilary Clinton. Burns, who admitted knowing little about jazz, turned to several experts who had an ax to grind. Hence, this satire. |
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| Fedora 8 |
[Mar. 29th, 2008|09:05 pm] |
I haven't installed or used a Red Hat distro since about 2003 -- version 8.1, in fact. I quit about the time that Red Hat announced that all of us nonpaying users were leeches that they were better off without. I ignored the Fedora project, sticking with Kanotix, since it was deb-based, as I was tired of the dependency hell that rpm packages were known for. Kanotix worked after a lot of tweaking, and once Kubuntu reached 6.06, I switched over to that. Kubuntu has had ups and downs but won overall on consistency. It's still the best distro I've ever used. But it only achieved its potential with additional packages, best installed via Automatix.
Well, the news that Automatix is dead prompted me to install Fedora 8 on a spare partition.
Not that I couldn't do what Automatix did via the command prompt, but I figured that it was time to eject my Red Hat prejudices and take a look at what its community has come up with after five years. That, and the end of Automatix might spell the end of K/Ubuntu as the distro of choice for the casual user who wants to give Linux a spin. Those users are its base; tough to survive if your base gets alienated.
And, after five years, I figured that the problems associated with rpm-based distros would be history.
How many words are there on Earth for WRONG?!
Fedora 8 installs fine, and its Gnome desktop looks like a Mac (which is good), but if you add KDE, you lose sound support (as least on my laptop). And I have four packages that can't install because of -- believe it or not -- dependency hell.
It's been five years, folks. Five years! May I be blunt? It's time to ditch the rpms and move to debs. apt works just fine, folks. yum does not. End of story. |
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| Automatix is dead... |
[Mar. 28th, 2008|10:41 pm] |
And it may end up killing K/Ubuntu, IMHO. Why download a crippled system, which is how Ubuntu acts without all of the easily downloaded goodies? The loss of Automatix won't hurt the geeks, but wasn't the point of Ubuntu that it was the distro from the average user?
It may be time to consider downloading Fedora 8...
(Cue Principal Skinner: "No... No! NOOOOOO!") |
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| Thesis |
[Mar. 28th, 2008|11:50 am] |
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That raging elephant standing in the corner that I don't like to acknowledge... I sent off my "final" draft to the committee on Monday, asking them to pour over it and see if it's ready for defense. No word yet from any of them, so that's either a good thing (no bugs found) or a bad thing (they haven't gotten to it yet, and the deadline to defend is May 5th). |
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