Pandemonium Medicine Show

Reading my old post about reading, "Not Feeling Well Read", I find that over the last year I haven't kept up the same reading pace. For quite a while I couldn't figure out why I wasn't plowing through books at my accustomed rate. I've since determined the cause of the reduction--I'm actually reading more than ever. I've simply changed my reading habits. I'm a reddit addict. (Confession is the first step, right?) Completely and totally unredeemable. (Well at least I'm honest.) When I seem to get distracted talking on the phone my sister has been known to ask "Are you looking at mathpr0n again?" and indeed I was reading an excellent statistics article on false precision at the time.

reddit supplies me an almost endless stream of interesting, insightful, thoughtful and entertaining articles from a huge variety of sources. But what matters more is the depth. I'm reading high quality long pieces from Harpers, The Economist, The Lancet and many others as well as articles from dozens of science and technology journals. Oh and The Onion too.

After spending 2-3 hours an evening engrossed in my web-based autodidacticism I'm just too tired to read a novel! The good news is that I'm still reading and that reddit and other social media sites enable one to become much better (or at least more widely) read.

What? Sun doesn't pay their engineers enough that they have to patch their own clothing? How disgraceful!

That's not it at all. Not even a bit. I want to patch the jeans and intend to proudly (possibly even more proudly than before) wear them again. I freely admit that even just a few years ago I wouldn't have contemplated wearing patched pants or patching my own clothing. I've become much more conscious of waste lately, not that I was ever particularly a spendthrift.

Part of my concern with waste is just my engineer's inclination toward frugality--never use more of any resource than you must, always seek to optimize resource usage, etc. The other part of my concern with waste has been environmental, both the immediate and long term costs of producing items and of their proper disposal. Whether for frugality or the environment I've decided to patch my jeans.

Don't expect to be seeing me in a home made suit any time soon though....

The rigmarole to get out of jury duty got me thinking though. It's more onerous to prove your eligibility for employment than it is to prove you can't serve on a jury. I think that it should be at least as difficult to become a juror as it is to take a job. Yep, you read that right. I can't understand why so many people want to get out of jury duty and try so hard to do so--Yes, Your Honor^*, it is true. I am prejudiced against all races. (From what I've heard attempting to escape jury duty with this ploy will get you a contempt of court citation).

I never received a jury summons in Canada before coming to the US and it makes me kind of sad that I've never had the opportunity to do my civic duty. I do know that should I ever be eligible again and I receive a jury summons I'll be showing up and I'll be the most eager aspirant juror they've seen in a long time.

* Intentionally spelled this way just this one time.

Listing One : A poem

/* * This is not code. */ float on(short poem, double meaning) { float away, home; // A poem should not have a greater meaning than itself. while(meaning >= poem) { // reduce meaning until it fits in poem. meaning -= poem; } away = poem - meaning; home = !away; return home; }

A friend challenged me to post something to my blog that I wouldn't normally post.

PaperTrail Summary:

...there are efficient ways of constructing clustered representations of graphs that remain within a small factor of the original in terms of route lengths. Further, the authors show that this can be done in a distributed manner. This has lots (and lots) of potential applications - the typical example is for a compact routing scheme, where nodes can store smaller routing tables between clusters rather than between nodes.