Older blog entries for schoen (starting at number 87)

He went like one that hath been stunned
And is of sense forlorn.

First proprietary software purchase in a full year -- Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional (for Win32). That's one impressive program!

I plan to get a Win98 box and run an X server, full-screen PuTTY, and screen for a while, and to make up some macros to make NaturallySpeaking more Unix-friendly, mutt-friendly, vim-friendly, bash-friendly, and Python-friendly. I might also try AbiWord under Windows.

A pity to be using proprietary stuff here, but Dragon is so far ahead of everyone else...

I continue to hope that not everybody will have gone home by the time I get to LWCE tomorrow.

Hmmm, I'd never fainted before. That was an interesting experience.

Physical therapists know some stretches they don't teach you in high school gym class. But it's a vaguely disturbing thought that there are stretches which can make you lose consciousness. I'll never doubt it again...

I'm sorry to be missing the first three days of LWCE. I hope everybody's having fun there. I'm still anticipating going on Thursday. You can recognize me because I have a long beard but am obviously not Alan or Maddog. Oh, and I'll be wearing a name tag that says "Seth Schoen". Yeah.

Tax stuff went well, except you're really not supposed to run for a postmark a couple of hours after fainting.

I wrote a sonnet which is an acrostic for the dedication of my collage. I'm so close, I can feel it (in my ulnar nerve, no doubt).

I'm up late doing taxes, cleaning, collaging. No surprises there. I do have a few distractions.

There is nothing quite like listening to a bunch of your old classmates singing Pablo Casals's "O Vos Omnes" for an hour or two. (Casals set part of Lamentations 1:12 in Latin to music. It's very meaningful that Casals chose that text -- if you know a little of his life story.)

o vos omnes, o vos omnes qui transitis per viam,
oh, all you who pass by along the road:
attendite, attendite, et videte,
look and see,
si est dolor, si est dolor,
whether there is any grief
sicut dolor meus.
such as my grief.

I took Ryan's advice about going outside on Saturday. It was a beautiful day, and I took a seven-hour, seventy-four-block walk around San Francisco, from the Ferry Building along the Embarcadero up Chestnut Street to get a haircut, and back through Chinatown. Wow! San Francisco is neat, and I rarely actually walk around unless people are visiting me. So thanks for the advice, Ryan.

I stumbled upon the San Francisco Art Institute, where my mom used to work in the 1970s. It's an incredibly beautiful tiny little campus up on a hill in the northeast corner of the city; there are amazing views from up on the roof, and you can walk right up out on it. I hadn't been there in over a decade.

On Sunday, I went to Berkeley so Sumana could help me with my collage (still not done!), and whom should I run into outside a new vegetarian Japanese restaurant...

I ended up staying over in Berkeley at a friend's house so I could go by the voice-recognition dealer's place in the morning. Well, they made me make an appointment (for Wednesday) and sent me away empty-handed. So I dropped by Transvirtual looking for Rob, and didn't see him but did see Jim. I'll catch up with Rob at LWCE.

I also read The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth over the weekend, and I highly recommend it (although I didn't find the ending very satisfying).

The U.S. Government Bookstore has moved from 2nd Street to somewhere else. Oops.

Wrists

The doctor diagnosed me with "wrist pain"; my experience was very close to the old joke:

- Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this!

- So don't do that, then.

I'm going to look at voice recognition stuff in Berkeley early next week; I'm trying to make an appointment with a voice recognition technology reseller. (Berkeley is the home of the disability movement, so it has a number of resellers, dealers, and consultants in assistive and adaptive technologies, and a bunch of them have showrooms. Cool!)

I also still haven't gotten around to comment in some of the front-page articles (death of copyright, graydon's technical questions).

Collage

My collage is delayed a lot because of my wrists, but I'll think it's a really bad thing if I can't get it finished this weekend.

12 coins (spoilers)

rillian: you can't search more than 3^n coins, or floor((3^n)/2) coins when you also have to state whether a coin is heavy or light -- this from an information flow argument (each weighing distinguishes one of three possible states, and the possible states described by "coin j is bad" are j in number, the states described by "coin j is bad with error-direction s" are 2j in number).

This doesn't prove that you can search (3^n)/2 coins, just that you can't search more than that.

bwtaylor: In answer to the original problem, we can break it into sub-problems.

1. Given 2 possibly-bad coins known to have the same possible error direction (both heavy or both light), where the shared possible error-direction is known, to find which of the two coins is bad (if either), in one use of the balance: weigh the two coins against each other. (If they balance, neither is bad.)

2. Given 4 possibly-bad coins of unknown error direction (coins of which one is heavy or light, but you don't know which -- call these "U" coins), and at least 1 known-good coin (call this an "N" coin), to find which coin is bad, and its error-direction, in 2 uses of the balance. Weigh two U coins against a third U coin and an N coin. If the two U coins rise: they are suspect-light coins (possibly light, known not to be heavy; call these "L" coins), and the third U coin is suspect-heavy ("H"); then use the solution to problem 1, above, with the two L coins (if neither is bad, then the H coin is bad). If the two U coins sink: they are H coins, and the third U coin is an L coin; use the solution to problem 1, above, with the two H coins (if neither is bad, then the L coin is bad). If the two U coins balance with the third U coin and the N coin: the fourth U coin is bad. Weigh it against the N coin to find out whether it is heavy or light.

3. Given 8 possibly-bad coins of which 4 are H and 4 are L, and at least 4 N coins, to find which coin is bad (its error direction is then automatically known), in 2 uses of the balance. Weigh 3 H coins and 1 L coin against 4 N coins. If the L coins and the H coin rise, then the bad coin is the L. If they sink, then the bad coin is one of the 3 H coins; use the solution to problem 1 with any two of the 3 H coins to find which is bad (if neither, it is the third). If they balance, then the bad coin is one of the 3 remaining L coins or the remaining 1 H coin. Use the solution to problem 2, above, with these 4 coins (we already have more information than we need!) to find which is bad.

4. Given 12 U coins, to find which coin is bad, and its error-direction, in 3 uses of the balance. Weigh 4 of the U coins against 4 others of the U coins. If they balance, one of the remaining 4 U coins is bad; use the solution to problem 2, above, to find which and its error-direction. If they do not balance, the 4 coins on the side which sinks are now H coins, and the 4 coins on the side which rises are now L coins. Use the solution to problem 3, above, to find which is bad.

In order to be able to search floor((3^n)/2) coins, I would need to find a recursive generalization of this somehow. I'm going to talk Ryan's advice and walk around San Francisco for a while today -- it is a beautiful day! -- and see if one comes to me.

Other people's diaries

rakholh: I don't want Lieberman to get elected "just because" he is Jewish. Actually, I don't want him to get elected at all, because he wants to censor the Internet. Actually, I don't want anyone to get elected, because I am an anarchist. But I especially don't want Lieberman to be elected, since he wants to censor the Internet. (All major candidates do, but Lieberman is just more vocal about it.)

I thought it was neat that he was a Jewish major-party nominee, though. In the U.S. it is extremely rare for anyone who doesn't appear to be a church-going white Protestant male to be elected President or Vice President, or even to be nominated by a major party for those offices. The last exception to the "getting elected" bit was John F. Kennedy, a Catholic (still Christian by prevailing standards, still white, still male). If I remember correctly, the Democrats did nominate a woman for Vice President once, but she was not elected. No woman has ever been elected President or Vice President. Neither has an atheist or an adherent of a religion other than Christianity. (Apparently some non-Christian theists who disliked organized religions were, once upon a time.)

Some time I can talk about claims of divine inspiration for scriptures. :-)

lilo: I need to give my wrists a break!

Latin

nymia: I found Frederic Wheelock's Latin book to be very helpful; he gives straightforward grammar explanations (mostly in tables) followed by very interesting and memorable classical quotations. This is a very traditional way of teaching Latin, and I enjoyed reading that a lot, even though my class was using the more "modern" Ecce Romani.

It is necessary to memorize a huge number of inflections, although I can't say I could ever do all 144 finite forms (more or less) of any verb outside the first conjugation. (In addition, there are a few non-finite forms, not just the infinitive.) Traditionally, people would just recite those until they memorized them: puella puellae puellae puellam puella, puellae puellarum puellis puellas puellis. (Or "a ae ae am a, ae arum is as is; us i o um o, i orum is os is...")

Hey, at least it's easier than Greek, which has over 600 finite verb forms (especially if you learn the archaic duals, which I never did).

If you want to see lots of examples of conjugation, you may appreciate the Barron's book 201 Latin Verbs Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses, recently (1995) re-issued as 501 Latin Verbs Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses. But if you don't like inflections, that's probably the last thing you want to see.

LWCE

I'm going to be at LWCE in the Linuxcare booth on Thursday the 17th in the afternoon, and I'll be at the show wandering around in the morning.

It's nice that people are reading this. Yes, I'm still in pain.

I wrote several friendly notes, one important letter, and did a lot of brooding. I also had a few nice meetings at work.

Lieberman

Someone's diary mentioned Lieberman, now Democratic VP candidate. So, as neat as it would be to see that a Jew could be elected vice president -- something I would not have thought when I was little, and which still might not be the case -- Senator Lieberman has a terrible record on Internet and media censorship (as was reported on Politech and in several other forums this week). OK, not that any mainstream candidate has a good record here -- from the PS+++ point of view. :-)

Ouch!

General

I actually bought a churro; it was absolutely delicious, every bit as good as those East Coast cannoli. Advogato is providing free advertising for the South of Market churro industry.

I don't know whether I'm going to LWCE or not. If I do, I'll see some of you there.

I went to a Linuxcare program on workplace discrimination and was very concerned by the "hostile work environment" rules. The rules about behavior aimed at a particular person make some sense to me, but the work environment bit seems like a problem to me. For instance, what if somebody is offended by my "Jon Johansen is watching you" poster? A very long story.

RSI

I found some other things to do at Linuxcare that don't involve typing -- mostly teaching classes. The interesting thing is that I'll have to get permission from my department to do work for other departments, and maybe they will bill each other. Unfortunately, I seem to squander most of my non-typing gains with bursts of typing to check e-mail and (say) write Advogato diary entries; that seems to undo my progress. I am still going to investigate more weird suggestions about interface devices, all the way to electrodes which read nerve impulses (no, they don't have to be implanted or anything) and maybe some voice recognition. I don't mind dictation quite as much as I thought I would.

Lots of people are visiting -- dhd, who taught me a bit about calling conventions, signal handling, and processor modes; lkcl, from whom I hope to learn a bunch of Samba lore tomorrow.

Tumble rings

The tumble rings I made in 1997 were unaccountably a smash hit in the office, after languishing in obscurity for almost three years. I just had to find the right people to show them to, and now we have a Linuxcare 19th-century mechnical optical illusion cottage industry. A visiting industry analyst saw them, too (you want maybe I should have shown her that Makefile instead?), so maybe they will become internationally famous tumble rings.

Zack of Kernel Traffic is extremely funny and creative, aside from being a clever Perl programmer.

Evening

A one-minute question turned into about four hours of conversations and e-mail relating to my ex-girlfriend. Ouch. (And not just because of my wrists.)

Which is more fun, failed relationship politics or trading playing card lore with somebody on another continent? Either way, I was up very late. Just like old times, in many ways.

In other news: "the depredations of the copyright industries".

Wendy has actually been mentioned in my Advogato diary once upon a time, but not by name, I don't think.

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