Rosio Pavoris

I guess there are worse ones to celebrate, though. Still not going to open the door to trick-or-treaters, though. Going around asking for candy is what Three Kings’ Day is for. Dressing up (as anything but the Magi) is what Carnival is for. Granted, these holidays are much more christianalised than Halloween is, but it’s two for the price of one.

Speaking of christianalising Halloween, here’s yet another YouTube video:

Vandalism for Jesus! Wooh!
I wasn’t even aware you could take something back if it was never yours in the first place.

(Yes, posting YouTube videos is a lot easier than discussing it myself. However, occasionally people just say what I think, and I’m assuming most people don’t spend their days hopping around YouTube while it’s still usable.)

As you know, the Military Commissions Act is the law passed in the US that suspends habeas corpus and legalises torture. At this point, it’s a few weeks old, and nobody seems to care.
Keith Olbermann pretty much says what I would.

So yeah. “Fascism” hasn’t been hyperbole in a while now, but now “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is no longer an exaggeration either.
Peaceful solutions seem unlikely, at this point. I still won’t kill for this country, but at this rate, I think I may have to write my thesis on cryptography.

Apparently we get a week. The KUL gets two days. I don’t have anything interesting to do.

In unrelated news, Gmail sucks. It’s been laggu as fuck, and now it isn’t logging conversations properly. What the fuck, Google?
It’s not like they can’t afford the bandwidth or processor power.

Spring forward. Fall back. Try to detect it. It’s not too late.

This (and the accompanying textbook) is much more interesting than what they’re teaching me, and it’s over twenty years old.

Two things bother me, though: Sussman’s body language has far too much in common with George W. Bush’s, and Abelson’s hair is bizarre and makes him look like a nuclear fallout accident victim. Which might actually be appropriate, given that they’re dealing with lambda calculus, ho ho.
Anyway, they look very typically ’80s-alpha-nerd-like.

(This and this is what they look like now.)

But yeah, watch that if you want to know about Lisp and lambda calculus and whatnot. I’ve seen the first four so far (1a, 1b, 2a, and 2b), because Telenet has a monthly download limit which is made of suck and fail. 15 GB in my case, but apparently our “regular use” amounts to about 10 GB per month. So yeah.

An ad by the Democratic National Committee:

“We have always been at war with Eurasia.”
This type of thing isn’t new, obviously, though this has been one of the most ridiculous ones yet. Even the Kool-Aid drinkers should realise that, this time.

Having said that, though, what kind of an ad is that? TDS has done much more impressive things without even trying.
If the Democrats still fail to overwhelmingly win this election (to the point where even the creative vote-counting of the last few can’t make a difference), I’m going to beat up the first donkey I run into in the street.

I have figured out which fan is making this much noise. Turns out it’s the one on my video card. Also turns out they’ve installed it upside-down, which isn’t actually a big enough issue that I want to bother with fixing it.

I’m now trying to figure out how much damage I can do if I just block it, and what I can block it with. Mostly just checking how much current is going through the bit it’s cooling, and whether it actually needs the fan if the case is open and I’m not running anything more graphics-intensive than Windows itself.

Maybe I should just shut everything down and try to clean it. I wonder if the Fnac sells canned air. I guess I could also just replace it with something that is less three-years-old than a Radeon 9600.

Edit: I think I fixed it. By which I mean: I poked at it, a lot of dust fell out, and now it’s marginally less noisy.
In retrospect, turning the computer off first might’ve been safer.

Edit 2: Apparently not. I guess I’ll need to clean it out entirely. Canned air is ’spensive. ;.;

True story.
It’s the only one of the three I can’t block, too.

Today, I turned down a dinar of curryworst (frikandel, for Dutchies and whatnot) and fries because I didn’t see the point of eating.
The fact that my mom actually made it (though she doesn’t like fries herself, and she absolutely hates curryworst, though she thinks I love it, which may be true) probably means she’ll try to send me to another psychiatrist soon. Though her advice when I told her a few weeks ago our Maatschappelijke en Ethische Vorming teacher person talked to me personally about motivation and happiness and whatnot even though we’d only had one class at that point was to “pretend to be happy”.

Meh.

(Worst means sausage. It contains no actual curry, and it’s actually considerably better than it looks. I realise it looks like a turd, but that’s only because it’s a really bad picture.)

Because what blog with a Politics category run by a liberal socialist kind-of linguist would be complete without a Noam Chomsky quote?

In my own professional work I have touched on a variety of different fields. I’ve done my work in mathematical linguistics, for example, without any professional credentials in mathematics; in this subject I am completely self-taught, and not very well taught. But I’ve often been invited by universities to speak on mathematical linguistics at mathematics seminars and colloquia. No one has ever asked me whether I have the appropriate credentials to speak on these subjects; the mathematicians couldn’t care less. What they want to know is what I have to say. No one has ever objected to my right to speak, asking whether I have a doctor’s degree in mathematics, or whether I have taken advanced courses in the subject. That would never have entered their minds. They want to know whether I am right or wrong, whether the subject is interesting or not, whether better approaches are possible - the discussion dealt with the subject, not with my right to discuss it.

But on the other hand, in discussion or debate concerning social issues or American foreign policy, Vietnam or the Middle East, for example, the issue is constantly raised, often with considerable venom. I’ve repeatedly been challenged on the grounds of credentials, or asked, what special training do you have that entitles you to speak of these matters. The assumption is that people like me, who are outsiders from a professional standpoint, are not entitled to speak on such things.

Compare mathematics and the political sciences—it’s quite striking. In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is concern for content.

Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility

This is interesting, and probably true, I believe.

Certainly people have been attacking Richard Dawkins for his stance on religion because he doesn’t have any degrees in theology ridiculously often, only it’s actually worse in that case, because theology really has no bearing on what he has to say.
He argues (quite lucidly and convincingly) that there is no God, essentially. Theology, almost exclusively, presupposes that there is a God, and then goes on to argue about tiny details regarding this God.
Even if the field were relevant to the discussion, his lack of credentials wouldn’t be particularly important. The thing about theology is that it has no basis in reality. It’s intellectually dishonest philosophical masturbation without any of the logic or, frankly, philosophy.
It is of considerable historic interest, no doubt, but as far as actual coherent debate goes, any prior knowledge of any of its “great thinkers” is entirely unnecessary.

Speaking of Dawkins, apparently the Fnac had an copy of The Selfish Gene (30th anniversary edition, which came out earlier this year), in English, so I bought that. So far I’ve managed to read the multitude of forewords and prefaces and the first couple of chapters, but I’m really too tired to be able to tell you if it’s actually any good. I’m assuming it is, but I’ll probably start over after I’ve gotten some sleep.

Also, do you have any idea how annoying it is to code in an assembly language when you’re literally half asleep? And I was still the first person to finish the damn thing.

Lisp is a pretty interesting language. I would hate having to use it, but I can definitely see why people used to teach it. It’s a lot better than Java, as far as understanding things rather than rote memorisation of functions goes.

(define (fibo n)
    (if (< n 2)
        n
        (+ (fibo (- n 2)) (fibo (- n 1)))))

(In Scheme. I’m not actually sure how to do that iteratively rather than recursively, but this is mostly because the interpreter I’m running doesn’t accept linebreaks, so long code gets confusing really quickly. And Scheme deals with tail-end recursion iteratively anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter.)

I edited robots.txt a while ago to let search engines at most subdomains again. As far as my blog goes, Google alone is responsible for about four times as much traffic as the average user, which is obnoxious.
Anyway, the main reason I did this is because I was bored and I like knowing what people search for. As such, all search terms for cairnarvon.rotahall.org for October so far:

joey ceunen (3)
oogy kol (1)
iclubyou (1)

People googling their own names, apparently. >.>

marcel logist (3)
sp.a-leuven (1)

Election day madness!

i hate being bored (1)
bored myspace surveys (1)

Because these things are so hard to remedy that Google must be used.

belgia drinking age (1)

I hope whoever searched for that was trying to find my blog specifically. There is no excuse for thinking “Belgia” is a real country.

iq level of average neopagan (1)

IQ doesn’t usually have as much to do with it as maturity. “Age of average neopagan” would’ve been a better search. And my guess would be 14.

making methane from storebought cane sugar (1)

Digestion!

kol disabled accounts (1)
kol multi abuse (1)

*cough*

clevar (1)
joking about racism (1)

<_________<
I blame Codu.

rotahall (1)

We get a lot of these on other subdomains as well. I’m not sure why people have so much difficulty remembering .org.

penn and teller subsidy recycling (1)
religious tension and persecution in europe in north america (1)

Serious topics! \o/

portable door download holt mp3 (1)

I didn’t even know that existed in audiobook format.

muffins game kol (1)
kol knockoff (1)

Your mom is a KoL knock-off.

où sont les neigedens d antan? catch 22 (1)

Où indeed? One of these days I should explain how charsets work, and why ù gets mangled into ù here.
(The short answer, of course, is “because people are idiots”.)

saddest whale (1)

This actually took me a bit to figure out. I guess Google’s matching thing hit the title of this entry, which is a Dr Tran quote. I wonder what that guy was looking for.

muffins cairnarvon irc chat (1)
#radio-kol irc (1)

Apparently just going to the respective websites to look for it didn’t occur to them.

wordpress rss feed into livejournal (1)

Only available to paid accounts, I’m afraid. Use a real RSS client.

political cartoons compulsory voting (1)
the god delusion fnac (1)
the fifth branch (1)
international retard day (1)
lassi test khl (1)
pavor rager (1)

It’s interesting to compare the first TLAP Day post with the second one a year later. I guess I ran out of patience somewhere in between.

And of course…

cool ideas for muffins (1)

Yeah, I guess that wasn’t very interesting after all. I don’t get a lot of hits from search engines, apparently (36 in October, compared to a few thousand direct hits, and a few hundred hits from links from various websites; something like half of those originate on Skatje.com or one of its subpages, interestingly), and people aren’t very interesting.
Anyway, I guess it filled a post.

Incidentally, all but one of those were Google links. The other was AltaVista, which I didn’t know was still around.

Three words:

President Dick Cheney.

(Next in line after Cheney is Hastert. After that, none other than our dear Ted Stevens. Link. Also interesting to note how few Secretaries people tend to be able to name. Rice and Rumsfeld, sure, but who else?)

Many years from now
When your grandchildren climb upon your knee
You may be quite astonished to see
How many channels they can change on TV
When some old film in black and white
Comes on and there you are upon the screen
Or is it someone just like someone you’ve been
Looking not a day over nineteen?
“Granddad” the little ones are asking you
“Why do you look so sad?” (so sad)
So you tell them all about the fun you had

Back in ‘64 before you were born
People had no time for pouring scorn (or scoring porn)
On dreams of love and peace
No one was obese
Only tight trousers were worn
Back in ‘64 we were at it like knives
Back in ‘64 the time of our lives
Was in the present tense
Now does that make common sense
Any more than girls with hairdos called beehives?
(zoom zoom zoom zoom)

Back in ‘64 before you were born
Back in ‘64 before you were born
But as you’ve gone on and on
Your audience has flown
And as you find yourself all on your own
You may wistfully recall
How Benjamin Disraeli said that
“Life is too short to be small”
Or maybe like some old time song
Overall it’s long — so
so long… it’s all over.

Apparently Telenet is engaging in “maintenance”, which means that we can essentially expect no internets between 8 AM and 4 PM every business day until October 16th.
This isn’t even funny. Incompetent fucks.

Anyway.
I’ve been looking at our Java exercises again, because apparently we’re supposed to do them in pseudocode as well, and I noticed something.
while loops. In our pseudocode convention, they’re rendered as “doe zolang”, which bothers me. If you’re going to do it in Dutch (and I question why anyone would, even), why not translate it as “terwijl”, which has the same etymological root as the English “while”?
I’d bring it up, but I’m not sure she actually wrote this stuff. It’s entirely possible there’s a national or transnational Dutch body that oversees this sort of thing. That sounds pretty typically Dutch, anyway.

Also, I feel like shit. Wooh.

Yeah.

Anyway.
It would seem I have acquired most of our required textbooks, and I’m not particularly impressed.
A lot of the programmin’ stuff seems to be aimed at memorising rather than understanding. Given that we’re already working with Java, that seems an efficient way of ensuring this college produces no brilliant programmers whatsoever, and very few that would be considered even marginally competent.

Also, apparently the codin’ stuff I did when I was bored last Friday comprises the next four weeks of exercises. Given that it took me half an hour, and we get four and half hours per week to work on them in class (plus however long people want to work on them at home), that’s not very encouraging.

If anyone has any ideas for reasonably complex Java applications that don’t use GUI that I can write, let me know. I’m bored. >.>

Edit: Not this:

public class Bottles {
  public static void main (String[] args) {
    int bottles = 100;
    while (bottles > 0) {
      String bot;
      if (bottles == 1)
        bot = “bottle”;
      else
        bot = “bottles”;
      System.out.println(bottles + ” ” + bot + ” of beer on the wall,”);
      System.out.println(bottles + ” ” + bot + ” of beer.”);
      System.out.println(”Take one down, pass it around,”);
      bottles–;
      if (bottles == 1)
        bot = “bottle”;
      else
        bot = “bottles”;
      System.out.println(bottles + ” ” + bot + ” of beer on the wall.\\n”);
    }
  }
}

I know that’s popular, but it’s also beneath me. O\__/O

(Don’t even bother with the Fibonacci sequence either. Iterative and recursive, dammit.)

People need to stop thinking calling Leuven Louisville is in any way funny. Yes, we know you overwhelmingly voted for Louis Tobback, as you have for the past decade or so. But no, it’s not that clever.

I found out “schepen” apparently translates to “alderman”, which sounds a lot cooler.

This amuses me. Pretty old by now, but still. 70 pages of complaints, and still going. You’d think the Vox thing earlier (don’t you fucking dare sign up because I linked it) would be enough of a hint that Livejournal (or Six Apart, whichever) sold out.
I don’t think it’s hypocritical to condemn the people bemoaning the Facebook Newsfeed while supporting the people who oppose this. The Newsfeed was implemented because they thought it was a neat idea, which it actually really was. You’ll remember I opposed the regional networks later. There’s a difference between making an honest mistake (which arguably wasn’t even a mistake) and just succumbing to corporate pressure and greed.

MySQL died again last night, BTW. I’m sure you noticed, seeing as how it stayed down for like ten hours.

I know I’m pretty good at programmin’, but why does everyone else have to be so bad at it? At both the x86 assembly language (Computersystemen) and Java (Beginselen van het Programmeren), I pwn both all of my fellow students (obviously) and my teachers. Why? It’s not like it’s that hard to understand.
Sad part is, we haven’t even seen any complex things in either yet. For assembly, we just covered addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and we’re now moving on to jump commands. For Java, we’ve covered basic control structures, but not all of iteration yet.

Skatje’s dad is in London right now, I think. Pity she couldn’t go with him, or I’d hop across the Channel to visit.

My mom needs to make up her mind about inviting Skatje to the family New Years party on January 6th. I don’t think she will, which might be for the best, since early January is a pretty annoying time to be entertaining transcontinental visitors, and she doesn’t have a passport and whatnot yet.
Looking forward to summer, though. If not 2007’s, then 2008’s.

The weather needs to stop sucking. It was almost cold enough to snow this morning, but then this afternoon it went to deep summer type temperatures. Between this and people coughing on me all the time, I’m going to get sick again, I think. It’s been like three years since I’ve been seriousfully diseased.

Apparently Maia made it back to Canadu safely.

I dislike Maatschappelijk en Ethische Vorming. It’s Psychology for Retards, essentially, and both the “for retards” and the “psychology” bit bother me about that. Teaching psychology mostly seems to be stating the obvious and reminding me how utterly human people are. It’s disheartening.
It’s also at the end of a long and mostly incredibly boring day. Teacher guy doesn’t suck too much, though.

I think that’s about it.

Coren essentially covered things. Tienen is back to Marcel Logist and the SP.a, Leuven overwhelmingly voted to keep Louis Tobback (also SP.a) in power.
He’s right when he says Vlaams Belang hasn’t quite taken over the country yet, but they’ve gained far more power than they should have, and people should be worried. Somewhat.

It’s interesting to note people in my class were actually talking about it, and complaining about the fact that Vlaams Belang actually got votes. I guess being retarded doesn’t automatically mean you support Vlaams Belang, though I’ve found the reverse is true.
Most of them voted for the SP.a or Groen!, so leftism is still alive and well in our colleges, even the shittiest of them. This is a good sign.