On an Old Bambi

11:00

Damian was on the couch, trying to finish a Chemistry assignment whose instruction he was woefully absent for. After squeezing a few wrong answers out of me (Does isopropyl dissolve into the air? I forget if evaporation is a dissolving action), he declared his worksheet done and arose for bed, an hour overdue.

As I had done in my Junior year, he remembered homework for his other classes. He had told me this afternoon about his "Precious Object" presentation to his English class. This is perfectly analagous to Show & Tell.

As it turns out, this house has very little in it that's preciuos, presentable, and findable, all at once. The best he could turn up, after ten minutes of vigorous searching, was a hardback book of musty-smelling leaf: Bambi.

"So," I said to Damian, "What the heck makes that book special? I mean, it's just a book. I can barely remember what happened in the plot."

"Me neither. I plan to say, 'My father got this book from...'" a quick glance at the inside cover, "'Katie and George, when he was 8. I also got the book when I was 8, read it, and as my father before me, promptly forgot it.' Yeah, I don't remember anything either."

I tried to recall the basic plot. "Ok, Bambi...grows up...his mother gets shot, I think, one parent gets shot...shoot, the only other thing I remember about Bambi is Thumper. Ya remember Thumpah, stahmped his leg lahk this?" I started bouncing my leg, but Damian's face remained blank. "Dude. You don't remember Thumper?"

"I haven't even seen the Disney movie."

"And you're going to present this bad boy?"

"Well, Alex, what else do we have?"

"...Oy."

We walked back to our room. I had to get laundry off his bed and into the closet, and clear my bed so I wouldn't disturb him on my way to bed from another late night of programming. While I was doing these little chores, Damian was struck with an idea on how to save his presentation.

"I wonder what Sparknotes has on this."

This sentence brought a great fog to our room, one that slowed space, time, sensory input, synaptic responses – with great force, I thundered a thought out, dissipating the fog and leaving an otherwise drained voice to let it pass to the utterer:

"Do you realize how much my respect for you will drop? You'll have read Spark Notes, on Bambi?" To the laptop he went. "Half, damnit!"

Nor did he care.

Epilogue: Despite his hale & whole lack of shame in the search, he found no Spark Notes on Bambi. Actually, he did find the origin of the story. I learned a new word in Italian: Bambino, for babe. It gives a small, pretty trivial insight into Babe Ruth's nickname. Damian's English class is going to learn a little on the origins of Bambi tomorrow. In short, a happy ending for all.

I'll see your PlusPlus, and raise you a cup of Joe.

T minus 3 Fridays. At T 0, I present my Neural Nets project. That should go well; I've been enjoying dilligent work on the project, only being hung up by File I/O. File output I figured out after a short while of scratching my head, but file input I could not master until this very afternoon. I'm reading files at last with this net; it took me a while to find a link between what I wanted to use (the DataInputStream object), and what I knew how to use (the FileReader object). Scrapping what I wanted to use turned things out for the best.

And now, in all its glory, I have a function to load a bunch of Integers and Doubles. Well, almost...I have an array indexing exception that's flinging poo at me at the moment, but that shouldn't take too long to fix.

But now, what I really want to do is show my fantastically scatterbrained coloring scheme.

330:    
331:    /**
332:        <p>Pre: The input file follows the format laid out in {@link Save(Filewriter)}.</p>
333:        <p>Post: ID, values and errors are set.  (C++ implementation did NOT do range-checking.  I should.)</p>
334:    <p>Volatile.</p>
335:        <p>INCOMPLETE needs testing.</p>
336:    */
337:    public void Load(FileReader infile) throws EOFException, IOException{
338:    
339:        BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(infile);//GET THE FILE
340:        int i;
341:        String[] curLine;
342:        
343:        //Read id
344:        curLine = reader.readLine().split("\\s");
345:        id = (new Integer(curLine[0])).intValue();
346:        
347:        //Read values
348:        curLine = reader.readLine().split("\\s");
349:        System.out.println(curLine.length);
350:        value_size = (new Integer(curLine[0])).intValue();
351:        value = new double[value_size];
352:        for(i=1; i<=value_size; i++){
353:            //Really potential error spot!
354:        System.out.println(i);
355:            value[i] = (new Double(curLine[i])).doubleValue();
356:        }
357:        
358:        curLine = reader.readLine().split("\\s");
359:        error_size = (new Integer(curLine[0])).intValue();
360:        error = new double[error_size];
361:        for(i=1; i<=error_size; i++){
362:            //Really potential error spot!
363:            error[i] = (new Double(curLine[i])).doubleValue();
364:        }
365:    }
366:}
367:

This is what I happily code in daily. I find a probably odd amount of satisfaction in just having things look pretty on the screen as I'm typing away. 'Tis fun. (HTML-izing of my code care of jEdit's Code2HTML extension, applied to BaseNode.java.)

I have three more solid weeks of coding ahead of me; I've managed to fall behind in my C++ work. Pretty far behind. From what I've heard, though, only two people in the class are fully caught up with everything in C++ – one of them stays at school every day until 10 o'clock at night, and the other was a professional programmer for a few years coming back to learn some theory and CS groundwork. The rest of us are, well, trying, but damn. I have at least 20 small programs to write. It's not too much brainwork, but getting started on the stuff daily is a question of my willpower vs. its sheer mass.

Oh well. The other end of quarter woe: One of Al's finals is due next Friday. For a class whose first week's lectures were on linear algebra, and that covered conversion of (some) neural nets to Turing Machines and back, and had filler-lectures on multivariable calculus and differential equations...why the heck did he have to assign an essay question for part of the final?

I'm actually looking forward to the Theory of Computation final. About two hours total of the last lectures were spent on a proof that a function is μ-recursive ⇔ it is Turing-Computable. Building the function to satisfy the backwards-implication of that statement took about a dozen functions, a few of them were quite slick, like uniquely encoding a stack of integers into an integer. There should be some fun proofs on that one.

Before class yesterday, Al asked me when I thought the final should be due. I said Friday of week 10 – last class day of the quarter before Evaluations week, also presentation day for Neural Nets project folk – and thought he would ask some of the other people in the room when they'd like it due. He didn't. So, I may have given the class a gracefully long time to work on the exam...but, the last time that happened (someone reminded me at a later break), the last time Al thought his students had bountiful time for his exam, he made the exam just as bountiful. Whoops.

T minus 2 Thursdays and counting.

Composing a letter

"This is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause."
– sgant

I'm currently writing a letter to Senator Murray. I hope a lot of other people are too. More on this tomorrow.