Explosive Donut

Now that I’ve got your attention:

“Testing has not yet been completed, but the resulting system is guaranteed to be flawless”

-Edsger Dijkstra

Pistachio just got on Facebook (and hopefully will not get kicked off anytime soon). Click here to see his profile and add him as a friend:

Sadly, his profile is better than mine =/

I broke down and pre-ordered the new Radiohead CD, In Rainbows the night before it was released. I was originally going to wait and buy the CD when it came out.I’ll probably buy the CD when it comes out anyway.

 I was kinda pissed that you have to pay $80 to get the B-Sides along with some vinyl I have no interest in. I don’t even have a record player. I lose and break things compulsively. It’s a bad deal to the nth degree for me.

But then I realized I desperately want to hear this album right now, so I preordered it. Why you would pre-order it is beyond me, since it’s all digital – they can’t run out of it. But it’s Radiohead so I lost all sanity and pre-ordered it anyway. I downloaded it the next morning and have more or less had it on repeat since. I’m not in love with every song on it, but a surprising majority are fantastic. I’m not skipping around to just one or two songs. I think my roommates have heard the album a few times too, I listened to half of it in the shower this morning.

Suddenly I feel like I’m back in high school, downloading Radiohead songs off the internet and listening to them constantly (in fact, I downloaded Nude, track 3 in high school, although it was jokingly known as “Failure to repay your mortgage will put your home at risk” or something along those lines).

I’m taking a class that looks at biological systems to find efficient algorithms. Recently, we’ve been studying how ants forage for food and sort larvae. The common idea is that ants are really dumb, but when they work together, they can achieve some pretty neat things. For instance, they can sort different eggs and larvae! They can also find the closest food to them, but then go to the next closest when it runs out! Again, I stress that ants are really dumb.

We just read a paper where some people tried to emulate the ant foraging, except it’s used for network routing. Think of the bits going through your network cable as ants looking for food. Kinda creepy, kinda cool, or kinda boring, depending on your attitudes towards ant and computer networks.

Anyway, like every other grad level class at Harvard, I’m working on a term project. I don’t want to spill the beans quite yet, but reading some biology papers is required. Sadly, this is a sentence I chose completely at random from a paper I read, or tried to at least:

These systems all have in common the use of an HSL autoinducer whose synthesis is dependent on a luxI homologue, as well as a luxR homologue encoding a transcriptional activator protein that is responsible for detection of the cognate HSL and induction of expression of the appropriate output (Figure 1).

Yeah, that really was just one sentence.

On a side note, thank you to Melody for decoding that sentence at midnight (and the other four pages as well). Insanity.