maradydd | Entries tagged with wtf brain

Well, I just had my first dream (partially) in Flemish. That I can remember, anyway.

It even sort of made sense, though I'm pretty sure at least part of it was my brain screwing with me. I was going to lunch at a little outdoor cafe with

enochsmiles' advisor Bart; we sat down and joined another man and woman about Bart's age. We started eating the salad, which had a lot of shredded orange vegetables in it; Bart held some up on his fork and asked "Wat zijn deze?" (What are these?) I replied, "Ik denk dat die zijn wortels." (I think those are carrots.) The other man said, "Nee, die zijn uitbroccoli." (No, those are 'uitbroccoli'.)

As far as I know, 'uitbroccoli' is not a word. 'Uit' is a pretty multipurpose word -- it can be an adverb or a preposition, and also appears in words like 'uitgezonderd', which means 'except' but as far as I can tell has an idiomatic meaning. So I have no idea what my brain thinks 'uitbroccoli' would be.

The rest of the dream was in English, and involved a bicycle race that was partially scored on how many balloons along the course you could pop with a dart gun, and eyedrops that made it possible to fly.

Current Mood: awake

Via Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror, The C Programming Language by Brian W Kernighan and Dennis M Ritchie and HP Lovecraft. My favourite part:

I had heard tales of the... thing that C.A.R. Hoare had summoned up in '62– dark hints of choosing one element from an array, and partitioning the rest into lesser and greater sets, and hellishly recursing until the data were twisted into a sorted list– but nothing I could have imagined would be in any way comparable to the daemoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw.

I think any second-semester sophomore encountering quicksort for the first time knows exactly how the narrator feels.

Unrelatedly, was woken by the postman this morning from a dream in which I was giving a talk about error-correcting codes, failures in spoken communication, and formality of register, at a feminist conference (!), using the OSI network stack as an analogy (!!). I had just got through the obvious parts about how explicit, simple protocols and robust error-correction at the application layer reduce misinterpretation (for some reason, my example for that was a bingo game), but when the protocol has no built-in error correction and can be fragmented, the rate of confusion rises (I think where I was going with that was some kind of analogy between natural language and fragmented IP datagrams), but then the doorbell woke me up.

Current Mood: confused

I bet this could be used to create some pretty awesome illusions. (hat tip to

tdj)

Why doesn't the core Arduino firmware already support V-USB? 1400 bytes, wow, that ain't bad. I'd shave off some program space for that.

I will, naturally, have to see if I can compile it for Arduino in userland, but this should be a kernel thing. For the microcontroller notion of "kernel", anyway.

(clones? where are you, clones?)

ETA: thanks, internet

Current Mood: weird

...wait, I could do 3D "circuit board" design if I could somehow produce the unholy fusion of gEDA and Blender.

If Blender lets you freehand draw on the texture of a surface, that could actually work. omgwtfbbq.

...and then you somehow convert the Blender data file into a knitting pattern, which would in and of itself be a neat little hack, since you could 3D model a garment and then convert it into a pattern ... oh cloning why are you not here yet

I forgot to take my antidepressants today. Maybe I'm actually back to the point where I don't need them anymore. That would be nice.

ETA: apt-get install blender but I am not allowed to play with it till I get more work done, it is a reward

Current Mood: dorky

This is entirely my fault. Feel free to throw tomatoes, but no rocks please.

(To the tune of "The Wild Rover". Apologies to Dennis Ritchie and people who don't like folk music. Also, the scansion and end rhyme go to hell in the third verse; sorry about that.)

Oh I've been a C coder for many an age
And I've spent all my free time on pointers and rage
But I like tail recursion much better than FOR
So I never will be a C coder no more.

And it's (cons car cdr),
Mapcar and lambda -- no more
Will I be a C coder, no never, no more.

I saw Dennis Ritchie one night in a bar
He had typedef'd his wallet to pointer to char
At last call he went to pay up for his friends
But he had no bounds checking and fell off the end

And it's (cons car cdr),
Mapcar and lambda -- no more
Will I be a C coder, no never, no more.

I first watched in silence, but I had a Scheme
So I thunked down my Visa and a small trampoline
At first no one there was quite sure what they'd seen
But the girls saw my Sexp and came home with me.

And it's (cons car cdr),
Mapcar and lambda -- no more
Will I be a C coder, no never, no more.

Feel free to add new verses.

Today's dear brain, what the hell? moment: realising that the verses of Tom Lehrer's Alma can be sung to the tune of Take This Waltz by Leonard Cohen. (Not the chorus, just the verses. But still. 3/4 time, you're a slut.)

Current Location: under a ginger kitten

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Radio Free Meredith

science keeps me warm at night

Out-broccoli? Over-broccoli? From-broccoli? Through-broccoli?

For there are strange objects in the great abyss

Your daily dose of awesome

Dept. of I'll Get Right On That

more idea fodder

Stop me before I filk again

And now for something completely different

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September 2010

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