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galactic_mollusk
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Name: Siddharth
Country: United States
State: Pennsylvania
Gender: Male
Interests: dinosaurs
Expertise: identifying dinosaurs
Occupation: see 'Expertise'
Industry: dinosaur identification
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
4/24/2003
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| I am now a grad student. Whoa.
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| CHS 2005
Princeton 2009
UCLA 201?
http://www.logic.ucla.edu/
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| I have not posted here for a while, but now I am home on break, sitting in my room and listening to some morin khuur, so here I am on xanga. This reasoning doesn't really make sense to me either, but it feels right.
Last night I saw Finding Nemo for, astoundingly, the first time. It was pretty excellent, and I now concur with all those who held that I was seriously missing out for a few years.
I am applying for math graduate schools around now. Ideally I would like to get into the logic program at UC Berkeley but I could end up anywhere, depending on where I get in. If I get in anywhere.
I always wondered, when I was slightly younger, if I had it in me to be an academic. I figured that I'd aim for that as a goal and see how long my luck held out. So far so good, though these things can change fast.
As a senior I have to write a thesis. I am doing something with 'feasible constructivism.' So regular mathematical constructivism is where you insist that all of your proofs be constructive. For example, if you prove that a number with a certain property exists, your proof must yield a method of finding that number. Feasible constructivism is where you further insist that the method be feasible, that is, run in polynomial time.
It seems interesting. I hope I end up figuring something nice out.
Over and out.
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| STRAINED YOGURT
Strained yogurt is yogurt with some whey removed, so it's very thick and creamy. If you take a regular container of yogurt (the almost cylindrical containers), there is a handy way of ensuring that you will eat strained yogurt by the end.
The method involves eating depth-first, not breath-first, so to speak: choose a small portion of the top and eat downwards from it, leaving most of the top surface untouched. This will create a shaft that reaches (ideally) the bottom of the container. Over time, the weight of the curds will push the whey into this shaft, whence it may be easily drunk or else siphoned off somehow.
Eventually the yogurt will become thicker and creamier.
STARBURSTS
It is possible (though inadvisable) to live entirely off of starbursts for at least three days. This information comes from my summer roommate, who has done so.
TOENL (Test of English as a Native Language)
I do this every now and then. Here are the questions, all of which have come up in recent thoughts or discussions. They range from very easy to very difficult:
1. Fish may be "mongered" (consider, e.g., a fishmonger). Name two (or more) other things that can be mongered.
2. Divide the following words into three groups such that if two words are in the same group, then they are different forms of the same verb. The words are: bid, bide, bade, bode, bides, bidden.
3. Give a perfectly common noun with five consecutive consonants (hint: the last one is not an 's').
4. What is the present tense of the verb "wrought?"
5. Grasp, grab, grapple, group, grope. Which word does not belong?
6. Usually in English, the subject of a intransitive verb takes the same form as the subject of an transitive verb and different from the direct object of a transitive verb. This is called "nominative-accusative" alignment. In some languages, the subject of an intransitive verb is treated similar to the direct object of a transitive verb and different from the subject of a transitive verb. This is called "ergative-absolutive" alignment. Can you think of any examples of ergativity in English?
7. English is not considered a tonal language. Nevertheless, give an example of how English uses tone to affect the meaning of a sentence.
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| Work
I think the long term goal that my professor has (and here I delude myself into believing that anyone reading this cares) is to find a particular kind of solution to the characterization problem for Heyting Arithmetic, which is basically intuitionistic Peano arithmetic. Towards this end he is giving me smaller tasks, which take me longer than they should, but I still seem to get them for the most part. This is partially encouraging, though it shows I have a long way to go before I do anything of real import. It is fun enough though. I work on no schedule, and Princeton is quiet, leaving me mostly to my own devices. Math, foraging for food, exercise, and webcomics occupy the majority of my time.
Three Movies
The first of the three movies is Prince Caspian, which I saw with Mike before I moved back here. Other sources will tell you how good or bad it is but I have two points to make:
1) The similarity of the battle at Aslan's How to Helm's Deep in LoTR: The Two Towers. I know I am basically exposing my dorkiness in its full, but the parallels are too numerous and significant to not notice. They include: a handful of battered good guys in a wide, semicircular fortification with a tower in the middle, beset by a far larger and more uniformly dressed contingent of bad guys. Defeat at their hands seems imminent and the good guys lead one last desparate sortie out of the fortifications taking advantage of its structural features (an underground passageway, or a causeway from keep to ground respectively). Finally, the good guys are saved by an army of recently roused trees.
2) After the battle, a dying warrior mouse, Reepicheep, is brought to Aslan the lion. On cue, some smallpipes start skirling in the background. There were no other bagpipes in the movie. It struck me and Mike as very cliche to use bagpipes as exclusively an instrument of sorrow and lament, and it was especially funny since we had discussed this not a few days earlier. We started laughing out loud but luckily there were about three other people in the theater.
Mongol: I will watch this film tonight. I am very excited. It's in Mongolian. I hope they have throat singing.
Transformers II: they were filming this at Princeton today, interuppting our regular route to lunch. It looked like they were shooting some kind of car scene. Large crowds gathered around as staff tried to contain them. Unfortunately there were no actual transformers. Disappointed, we left to get lunch, which was falafel.
Falafels
Falafels may be Western Asia's single greatest contribution to civilization, and that's saying a lot. I observed that falafel (being a transliterated word), could conceivably be spelled 'falafal,' in which case it would be an anagram of 'alfalfa.' Weird, eh.
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