and the whatnot of sorts

Lately I’ve been kept very busy with school.  There has been some time for other things, though:

• I walked down Robson Street at night with all of its amazing lights.
• I got lost in a very confusing grocery store that enjoyed placing mirrors and windows interchangeably-- I was never sure whether I was looking behind me or just looking through to the next aisle.
• I got punched ( pretty lightly ) by a smiling homeless man.
• I bought and read the excellent Cul De Sac book.
• I saw a Vancouver tourist bus scrape a street sign.
• I helped a homeless man find a nearby liquor store-- I’m not sure whether this makes me a good or a bad person.
• I searched for, and failed to find, any good apple cider in the surrounding area.
• I finished another sketchbook.
• I went to China Town with some friends and tried out some Chinese bakery ( quite different but still good ).

Here are a few pics from the research that I mentioned:

For the pictures with the arrow included-- the image under the arrow is the action of the sentence.

Anybody want to try guessing at these?  I’ll give 50 points for each correct answer.

Something I worked on during biology class-- unfinished, ambiguous, and inefficient… but definitely fun to think about.

Here are the notes:

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A few months after I wrote up my idea ( and completely unconnected ), I was invited to participate in a user-study testing out an AI system that tried to automatically create meaningful picture “sentences” out of text given to it.  That’s a very very difficult and interesting problem.  I have a few pictures from the study somewhere that I’ll try to post if/when I find them.

Anyways, busy busy busy and “busy busy busy”

Awhile ago I wrote a simple little program that simulates the evolution of a species ( or sequence of letters in this case ) through sexual or asexual reproduction and mutation governed by natural selection. I only have a basic understanding of evolution but I tried to make the simulation somewhat realistic ( yeah right ) while trying to make the computational time reasonably brief.

At one point the program was complete, but then I decided to make a few more changes.  Right now the program is in something of a ( not quite working ) transitional form.  

If you’re interested you can get the admittedly rather messy java code for the program here:

evolve

organism

note: I’m going to be posting some projects over the next few days.  This is the first one.  Next up-- the second one.

I’ve been subscribed to Dictionary.com’s word-of-the-day email service for awhile… not so that someday I can flex an over-sized vocabulary as a form of pathetic bragging, but so that I can understand someone if they are using those words and, plus, sometimes words can be kinda fun ( one of my favorite is defenestration ).

The problem is that I haven’t really learned any words from Dictionary.com’s word-of-the-day service. I log into my email account and glance through the word-of-the-day email. Within 5 minutes I forget the word’s definition.  Within 10 minutes I forget the word.  ( I guess this progression of forgetting is slightly better than forgetting the word first and then the definition. )

The cause of my forgetfulness, is, of course, my own personal laziness and lack of self-motivation to spend even a single minute trying to commit the word to memory.  However, Dictionary.com’s word-of-the-day (and all the other word-of-the-day services I’ve seen) makes this easy to “get away with.”

So over winter-break I spent some time trying to make a word-of-the-day service that forces the user into taking a bit more time and using a bit more mental effort… which I hope translates into remembering more words.

» Read more after the jump →

Yesterday I successfully gave directions to some tourists.  Here’s an exciting recap:

tourists: “Excuse me.  Which way is it to the beach?”

me: “I think it’s over there” (pointing)

tourists: “Thanks”

This isn’t the first time that I’ve pointed a direction to a tourist, but it is the first time that I’ve been correct.

I’m 1 for 5 so far in Vancouver.  You wouldn’t believe how proud I am of this.

In other news, my parents have some pictures from the Vancouver trip up on their photo website.