Semi Good News

I have some decent news to report. I finished the first draft of my practicum today. For those of you out of the CMU ISR loop, this is one of two large reports that we have to write while we are PhD students. Although conceptually it seems very straightforward, in practice it always seems to take students a while to get it done and approved. Therefore, I don't have a whole lot to be happy about yet. This paper will probably end up looking very different by the time it works itself through the process. For now, though, I'm just happy to have most of my ideas down on paper.

w00t I say. w00t.

Cha-Ching!

So, big news to report. After months of hemming and hawing, stopping and starting, splishing and splashing, I finally got my act together, and purchased a ticket to this weekend's Saints football game! (For those of you outisde the loop, that doubles as this week's Steelers game since they are playing each other.)

There are two interesting aspects to this story (divided up into further subsections):

1. Tickets to see Steelers' home games are expensive. When I saw that the prices of scalped tickets had fallen to only two and change times the fact value of the ticket, I just had to go for it. That is actually down from the five times face value that they were initially going for. I attribute this to:
1. The general not-so-good-ness of the Steelers at the moment. I mean, if you had told me at the beginning of the season that the Saints' and Steelers' records would be mirror images of one another by the time this game came up, I would have believed you. But I never would have believed that it was the Saints who possessed the better record.
2. The splitting up of pairs of tickets into singles. No one wants to go to a sporting event alone, which is why single tickets usually end up being cheaper. This brings me to my next point....
2. I am going to the game by myself. This is not a usual thing. Going to a movie by yourself (I have done this) is bad enough, but going to a sporting event by yourself is so rare as to be mostly unconsidered. I am wondering if anyone out there has experiences like this. The fact that tickets are so expensive kind of prohibited me from just buying another one fom someone else, but now I am beginning to wonder exactly how lame I am going to feel at Heinz stadium when I roll up into the one empty seat between two separate groups of friends. Is there any precedent for this situation?

Well, in all honesty, I know I am going to have a good time. Plenty of people I know have never been to a professional football game in their entire lives, and I now will have the pleasure of saying that I have seen Saints games in three separate cities. Next year I will go for four (road trip to Cincinnatti, anyone?).

Wish me luck. Hopefully I will not be mauled by rabil Stillers fans... At least I'll leave a beautiful corpse.

Really Such a Bad Thing?

Asked if the party would consider legal action, state Republican executive director Scott Migli said, "We've got all options on the table at this point. We feel like the electoral system has been left up to computer technicians."

Win for Type Theory?

I have had discussions with friends in the past about the actual usefulness of the research that comes out of the academic community (in the field of computer science at least). While I don't often have good examples to point them towards, I think now I might.

LINQ, the name of the in-language SQL/XML/etc. query ability that will be built in to C# 3.0 is based upon a programming language technology known as monads, which are an important part of the programming language Haskell. Here is an interesting article on why it is neat, and why Java programmers should be worried (okay, I'm not to sure about that part).

Just nice to see some type theory escape to the larger world of popular programming languages.

CPS Conversion

Of the many things that I learned in Type Systems last year, CPS conversion was the one topic that was conceptually very simple, but for some reason extremely difficult to wrap my head around. Now, of course, going through Tom Murphy's thesis proposal, I realize that I don't understand CPS very well, and I am trying to go back and get a better feel for it.

As I said, CPS conversion is conceptually simple:
To every function we add an extra argument that represents the contiuation. This makes the control flow explicit, because instead of having to propagate the result of function application back up the stack to someone who knows how to use it, we have an argument 'k' that represents what we must do after the result of the application. It is somewhat analagous to passing a GOTO along with every function.

That being said, when I see the conversion rule for function application;

CPS(e1 e2,k) = CPS(e1, \f. CPS(e2,\x. f(x,k)))

my brain often begins to hurt.

So far I have found three links discussing the issue. The last one seemed to be the most helpful, but maybe that is only because I first read the other two.

• http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs611/2005fa/lectures/lec13-fa04.pdf
• http://www.cs.utah.edu/classes/cs7520/cps.pdf
• http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/cs264/lectures/cps_code_generation

Friday Night and Borat Movie Fun Time

Friday night, after much anticipation and after drawing the incorrect conclusion that it wasn't even playing in Pittsburgh, I saw Borat with some of CMU's finest. I have to say, I loved it, but you have probably heard that already. It has been getting pretty good reviews from the press, mainstream and otherwise.

But what was also kind of fun was the crowd there at the movie. The theater was packed, and it was full of 20 and 30-somethings; grad students, med students, and the like. The excitement was absolutely palpable. It was as if we had all been waiting for a really funny movie for a very long time, and we knew that Borat was going to be the movie. People were laughing at the credits! And they were not funny in any way. We were just that excited to be there.

I won't give too much away, but there was a scene where some fraternity brothers end up looking pretty bad. I think, but am not entirely sure, that they were labeled as being students of the University of Southern California. Clearly, however, they were from the South Carolina, as they had Gamecock hats on, and other such merchandise. I'm hoping I am wrong and that I just misread it, but someone else I was with noticed the same thing. If you go to see the movie, let me know if you see this.

After that, we went dancing at the Shadow Lounge where we saw this Brazillian band called Nation Beat. They were this multi-piece group, with some very large drums, guitar, bass and violin. It was terribly fun for everyone involved.

I Went to the Doctor, I Went to the Mountain

Wow,
"The Office" was at it awkward-humor best tonight. Some classic moments include:

• Jim "the Big Tuna" and the other guy from the Stamford office drunkenly singing "Closer to Fine," by the Indigo Girls.
• This sequence:
• "What are you doing?"
• "What are you doing?"
• "I'm rejecting your kiss."
• "Put on your Saris, it's time to celebrate Diwali!"

You really should get into it. I'm telling you all. I loved the British version just as much as any of you. But the American version is still the best comedy on TV right now.