A gem from tonight’s grading.
03.31.2009
03.30.2009
Perhaps there is a business like snow business…?
A massive blizzard has been descending on the Midwest for the past several days. Every weatherman has prognosticated road closures and snow drifts and whiteouts. As the blizzard descended on Sunday night, dumping massive amounts of snow and gusting with 40 mile-an-hour winds, school districts across the region announced school closures for Monday. The interstate closed. The mall and the bus-line closed. Police issued no-travel advisories.
It’s like the Worst. Version. of. Groundhog Day. Ever.
03.29.2009
Someday my prince will come
Saturday we celebrated the Ladybug’s birthday with her official birthday party: a princess-themed affair with seven of her friends. Early on the Queen B had been adamant about hosting the party at home, which she thought would be fun, although to be honest the prospect of infesting my home with eight approximate three-year-olds struck me as slightly less fun than, say, unnecessary endodontic therapy. In order to the girls occupied, the Queen B spent the week scouring the web for princess-themed activities and games. On Saturday morning, she organized these into a schedule of events, but once the little girls arrived, the only method by which said schedule was effective at corralling the kids was when it was rolled into a tight tube and used to swat them.
In the end, the little girls decorated princess crowns, made twirly-whirly princess wands, dug up buried jewels that were later strung together to make princess necklaces, and exchanged princess gifts. They also played a game based on The Princess and the Pea, in which a pea — in this case, a green super-ball — is placed under oneof three pillows, and the princesses must determine its location by sitting on the pillows.
To preface the game, the Queen B read the girls the story. “The Queen went to the bedroom,” she read, “took off all the sheets and the mattress, and put a pea on the bed.”
To which one little princess curled up her nose. “Gross. The Queen peed on the bed?”
In any event, the little girls — especially the Ladybug — had fun and our house is still standing. Happy birthday, kiddo.
03.27.2009
Perspective
You can tell you’re talking to a group of mathematicians and computer scientists when you follow the statement (made in reference to coding a spell checker based on a dictionary of sixteen million words):
By using a binary tree, we can cut the average search time from 16 MILLION comparisons to 24 comparisons.
with
This is still very inefficient.
03.25.2009
Revenge of the nerds
We recently had a colloquium presentation from about using genetic algorithms to find efficient and robust ways to encode and decode images, particularly those transmitted in a noisy environment. As the colloquium organizer, part of my job is to advertise such colloquia, and part of that job is to make fliers. To jazz up a flier, I usually try to find an image relating to the talk, and after a several Google image searches for “wavelets” and “compression” and “noisy,” I was surprised to find this image of an insanely hot babe in a funny hat pop up over and over again:
I made a quick check to see if I hadn’t accidentally set my Google search option to “Suggestive images I’m liable to get fired for,” but over and over again this pic turned up. Eventually I settled for a collection of images of the rings of Saturn under different resolutions, and chalked this up to general web-based weirdness.
However, at the colloquium itself, the speaker gave his outline, mentioned wavelets and their use in compressing the information of an image, and then showed an example using exactly this picture. The speaker — who was actually interviewing for an open CS position at Komplexify U — stated that this picture is called the Lena Image in the image processing field, where it is apparently ubiquitous.
The candididate went on to to say that, in reality, the image is the top 512 x 512 pixels of Playboy’s Swedish centerfold from November 1972, Lena Sjooblom. According to an article in the May 2001 Newsletter of the IEEE Professional Communications Society:
The original 512 x 512 digitized image is still at the USC SIPI Image Database.
There are a few things about all of this I find particularly noteworthy.
- An encyclopedic knowledge of Playboy centerfolds is probably not the best skill set to demonstrate during a job interview.
- SIPI sounds like an awesome place to work.
- Image processing people are pervs.
Postscript
I told this story to the Queen B when I arrived home after work. She patiently listened to the details before making a dismissive shrug. “It figures,” she said.
“How?” I asked.
“It’s just like what Lewis says in Revenge of the Nerds: Jocks only think about sports, but nerds only think about sex.”
