Posts from — December 2005

Why is it that masks like this seem inherently scary?

I was looking through my archives today, and ran into this comment from , in April 2005, which is now amusing:

“If you want to be really unhappy, do as much reading as you can on our glorious House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay. He’s about the biggest scumbag in Washington, and I’m confident that absoloutly nothing bad will happen to him. It’s really quite disenchanting to realize that the system doesn’t work.”

Many thanks to all who showed up on Sunday night and those who contributed… hopefully it made finals week a bit more tolerable.

I really should be studying, but this video is awesome:

http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/002711.html

(Clip from a white house press briefing)

It starts a bit slow, but the end is just great. I highly recommend watching it.

I expected this week to be fairly relaxed, but it’s turned out to be quite busy. Lots of stuff that I wanted to do in the last few weeks/months is getting done now, so I guess it’s better late than never. I have a big project due Friday night, a test Friday night, and a presentation Saturday morning. All of my stuff for finals occurs within a 14 hour period, but it’ll be good once I’m past it. I’m not particularly worried about any of my classes, I’m doing well in all of them.

Interestingly, in the last few days, I’ve regained my ability to get stuff done without a lot of sleep. I haven’t really been able to do that all semester. I’m trying to get more sleep before the end of the week comes up, but I’ll probably have a ridiculous sleep schedule after that.

I’m in need of either another class next semester or an independent study. I’ve been talking with people about ideas for an IS, which has been helpful, but I’m going to talk with Prof Davison about doing an independent study in search engine design, since that’s a class I’ve wanted to take for a long time but haven’t been able to.

In light of recent events, I thought this riddle was appropriate:

A set of eleven bank robbers decided to store their loot from a successful job in a safe until it was safe to start spending the money. Being somewhat but not completely trustful of one another, they decided they should be able to open the safe when and only when a majority of the robbers was present. Therefore, the safe was provided with a number of different locks (the key to any one not being able to open any other), and each robber was given keys to some of the locks. How many locks were required, and how many keys had to be given to any one bank robber?

Each lock can have an unlimited keys made for it, obviously.

Enjoy!

Remember <font color=”white”> and </font>

This sentence had me really confused when I read it completely out of context while finishing my Data Mining take-home final:

“… the best theory for a body of data is one that minimizes the seize of the theory plus the amount of information necessary to specify the exceptions relative to the theory – the smallest cartload of dung.”
Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, page 180

It does make some sense when you read the paragraph above it… it’s a reference to a quote by Kepler.

So, the last riddle seems to have stumped everyone. Tim’s comment is pretty much as close to an explanation as he and I got, so I’ll leave it at that. Tonight’s is much easier.

A coworker has two children. When you arrive at his house for a dinner party, a boy, his son, answers the door. What are the odds that the other child is a girl?

Not an intuitive problem. IM me if you want some help solving it, I’m not going to write out a hint.

<font color=”white”>I’m getting sick of writing this</font>

And now, part 53 of the ongoing series “Awkward Moments in Class”:

Professor: Let’s say for example, the number stored is the distance from Beijing to Shanghai
looks at asian grad student
Professor: Do you happen to know how far it is?
Student: I’m not Chinese…
Professor: Oh. (continues teaching)

“Every time you’re stunned by the government’s waste and capricious nature, Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) is there”
“As president pro-tem of the senate, Ted Stevens is third in the succession line to the presidency. I don’t have a joke here… I just thought it was something you should know” – Jon Stewart

Ted Stevens definitely makes the list of “hilariously terrible senators”