Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Things I'm Excited About

So this horrid business of working/teaching/researching at the same time is coming to a close...praise be to the all mighty Turing (keep reading). I realize it's been over a month since we've last talked. I'm sorry but I've been busy apartment fixing, parrot (er, student) teaching, MacBook obsessing, gig playing, xmas shopping and network coding...boo to the ya! There's not much I'm missing in that list (except for the awesome birthday record player from the uber girlfriend) so I will now be focusing on what excites me...textually.

The New England Patriots
Tom Terrific and his merry band of football awesome-ness are currently 13-0 going into this Sunday's matchup with the J-E-T-S YOU SUCK HARD! My excitement, though, is not the numerous offensive records, the greatest single season individual effort ever, Belichick's mission for destruction or even Randy Moss' good behavior. No, I just love watching Wes Welker fall down...swoon.

National Treasure 2
I, the Uber Geek, love conspiracies, Egyptian mythology, adventure and lost secrets. Umm, do I have to explain this more?

The Bloody End to the Fall 2007 Semester
The blood will probably come from either my students or ViewMatrixTableModel.java. The former will most likely bleed from the eyes once they see my final and realize chirping random C syntax just won't cut it. ViewMatrixTableModel.java, however, will find it's surmise at my hands when I strangle the Live Edit out of it.

I Am Legend
But am I more excited about impending zombie doom towards the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or the world-premiere of the Dark Knight trailer? Sorry Agent J but the Bat always wins.

Apple Expedition '08
At the end of January our motley development team will be traveling to Cupertino to present our crazy ideas about math education (pssh, learning...wait, did you want fries with your whopper?). Watch out Steve Jobs, we're going to be in ur compounds drinkin all ur wines!

The Lost Turing Paper
So there's this guy, Alan Turing, who is the father of computational theory. In the late 30's he defined what most people consider to be the foundation of computing today. Then in the mid-40's he was outed as gay and the entire computing community shunned him. Unfortunately for them (and the rest of the modern world) in 1946 Turing wrote a paper on an "unorganized machine" which is basically what we now know as a neural network. In this paper he describes almost every kind of neural network (SOM, feed-forward, back-propagation, genetic algorithms) years before they were thought up by numerous other researchers independently. Plus, his self-realizing robots attack humans and desire sex...it's like our wildest dreams come true!