What Song is This?

Stay ? trouble : double

Hee hee, ternary operators are funny.

millichucks

A few days ago, I went skiing with some friends. Needless to say, I was pretty pumped. So, I kept saying stuff like, "I'm super pumped," or "how pumped are you guys?"

After a while I realized that I needed a better way to express how pumped I was, instead of just "pumped", "really pumped", "really, really pumped", etc. I said to my friend Alex, "hey we need a unit of measurement for pumped-ness. What should we call it?" And he asked, "Well, who is the most pumped person you know?" Of course I replied, "Chuck Norris."

And thus the Chuck was born. Throughout the day I mostly fluctuated between 2 and 5 Chucks, (my Chuck leve got lower when it was really cold out). I had a brief flare-up to 50 Chucks when I did a big jump and got a TON of air! I actually wiped out really bad but the whole experience definitely put me up to 50 Chucks.

Later, Alex thought some more about the Chuck unit. We postulated that if you had enough Chucks, you would momentarily turn into Chuck Norris. However, this seems like an asymptotic upper bound rather than something that would occur on a regular basis. Alex pointed out that it would make sense for 1 Chuck to be the transformation point. So, we re-normalized the Chuck scale.

Here is the current state of the Chuck unit:

What people call a Chuck is actually a millichuck. It's sort of like how a calorie is actually a kilo-calorie.

0-10 Chucks - pretty easy to achieve. Can get to this level by hanging out with friends or having a good workout.

20-50 Chucks - someting pretty extreme is going on. For example, my big jump. Or perhaps you just won the showcase showdown on the Price is Right.

> 50 Chucks - not sure about this one. If you have experienced this level, please post about it.

Craaazy Matlab BUG!

If you have Matlab, try this!

STEP 1:

>> foo = [0.05:0.05:.5];

If you did this without the semicolon, you'd get this output:

foo =

Columns 1 through 9

0.0500 0.1000 0.1500 0.2000 0.2500 0.3000 0.3500 0.4000 0.4500

Column 10

0.5000

STEP 2:

>> find( foo == 0.2)

ans =

4

STEP 3:
>> find( foo == 0.15)

ans =

Empty matrix: 1-by-0


WHAAA?!?!? Why doesn't this work? This is crazy. Find works correctly on all of the other elements, but for 0.15 it returns an empty matrix instead of 3. Nothing special about the 3rd element, I've tried this with several different sized arrays. I have also tried it two different Matlabs (one in Unix and one on Windows). Both have the same issue. Please comment and let me know what happens if you try it.

Am I A Dork? (rhetorical)

So, if you ride the bus in Seattle, you may have seen the advertisements for "Poetry on the Bus". It's a poetry competition and the winners have their poetry displayed in the city buses. (I've read some of the poems... they are OK. Poetry doesn't do much for me.)

Anyway, the advertisement has the word 'dreams' written in cursive on the left hand side of the paper, and then the end of the 's' trails off and turns into this big scribble. In fact, here's a link so you can see for yourself:

Poetry on Buses

Anyway, all I can think when I see this sign is "Someone was trying to plot a complex-valued signal in Matlab and they forgot the abs()"

Living Without a Car

Today I went to Third Place Books to study. It's a sweet place, I highly recommend it. Of course in addition to writing some Matlab code, I had to check out the books. I decided to buy "How to Live Well Without Owning a Car".

This was a pretty silly purchase, since I already drive very rarely. I skimmed through part of the book just now, and most of it is stuff I already know. Cars are expensive, they have lots of hidden costs, they are bad for the environment, etc etc.

But here's a few quick quotes from the book that I found interesting:

"Every car creates more pollution and material waste during its manufacture than in the entire time it's on the road."

I knew that gas/oil/etc. was bad for the environment but I tend to forget about those overhead costs. Goes to show that even buying a Prius isn't exactly the environmental wonderment that I would like to believe.

"Another friend would drive to the gym in the morning to do his cardio routine, then drive back to the same gym at night to lift weights. And the gym was less than a mile away."

This is just silliness. But it's so freaking common. I think if you're going to the gym twice a day, you have more problems that spending too much on gas.

"Seventy-two million credit card holders make only the minimum payment each month..."

Ummm, can this seriously be right? That's about 25% of the population of the United States.

Personally, I hope that someday there are more cities that have large car-free zones. I think it couldn't be that hard to have large parking facilities at the boundaries of the zone, and have really great public transportation inside the zone. Here's a couple of websites about de-carring:

Car free cities


Seattle's One Less Car Challenge

That's what I'm TALKING about!

Check out this sexy "girls of engineering" calendar!!

U of I Girls in Engineering

This is awesome! I'm not a lesbian but I am kind of tempted to buy one of these and hang it on my wall.

I sort of have mixed feelings about the overall frumpiness of engineers (both male and female, mind you!) I am so glad that it is OK for me to show up to school with wet hair, old jeans, and pirate socks. (Thanks for the sweet socks, Alex!) However, sometimes I think it would be nice to dress up a little, and not hear the inevitable "Got an interview today?"

You know what? I'm gonna take a stand! I am going to put "learn how to apply eyeliner" on my list of life-goals. Girl power!