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I think that every now and then we need to be reminded of the frail nature of our human bodies. Yesterday morning as I walked to my kitchen I was turning right by pivoting on my right foot when my 24 years of walking experience suddenly failed me. I clearly did something wrong, as I heard a crunching pop or two in my right ankle and went down. Luckily it’s just a sprain but my foot is fairly bruised and still sore today. I’m trying to follow the RICE method for recuperating but one can only lay down for so long before having to eat, work, use the bathroom, etc. Thank goodness I don’t work on my feet or I’d be out of commission. If it still hurts next week I’m going to see a doctor but till then I’m trying not to leave my house. The idea of hopping and hobbling to a bus to go to a doctor does not thrill me in the slightest.

Oh, if you find yourself in a bind an upside down hockey stick is a decent makeshift crutch. You’ll need 2 hands to operate the thing though.

At the opposite end of the spectrum there are times when we seem to be amazingly resilient creatures. Check out a documentary called “101 Things Removed from the Human Head” if you can find it anywhere. One of those things was a boat anchor, I kid you not.

Sometimes this is difficult to remember for someone who (likes to think that he) thinks somewhat logically.

When dealing with people, let us remember that we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

—Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

I’m currently reading SICP since it’s highly recommended by many people, available for free, and interesting. The fact that I have a little Scheme interpreter to play with makes it much more fun since I can add missing functionality to it as I progress through the book, thereby learning more Haskell in the process. Yay!

Anyway I was very pleased to see the only correct usage of the phrase “begs the question” I have seen in a while. It’s a pet peeve of mine, but I have submitted myself to the fact that the phrase is so oft used to mean “begs for the following question to be asked…” that it may as well be re-defined. In its correct usage the sentence seems to hang there if you try to apply the commonly mistaken meaning to it. That’s all very hazy so here’s the usage in SICP (emphasis my own):

As a case in point, consider the problem of computing square roots. We can define the square-root function as

This describes a perfectly legitimate mathematical function. We could use it to recognize whether one number is the square root of another, or to derive facts about square roots in general. On the other hand, the definition does not describe a procedure. Indeed, it tells us almost nothing about how to actually find the square root of a given number. It will not help matters to rephrase this definition in pseudo-Lisp:

(define (sqrt x)
  (the y (and (>= y 0)
              (= (square y) x))))

This only begs the question.

Begging the question is to assume what one is trying to prove (or here, define) and use that as the basis for a conclusion. Read the Wikipedia article for a better definition and some nice examples.

Last weekend I moved out of the apartment I lived in for the last 3 1/2 years. Moving was a cinch thanks to a friend’s garage, conveniently placed smack between my old place and the new one. Google maps tells me that I moved just under 3.4 km, which is 2.1 mi for the metric impaired, so it wasn’t much of a move at all! My roommate and I live in the basement of a house split into 3 apartments. Our upstairs neighbours are friendly and seem pretty cool, except one lady upstairs seems a bit strange. It’s a great place though and in the winter the wood stove fireplace is going to be awesome.

I lived in Victoria for over a year before I ever rode the ferry between Vancouver Island and Tsawwassen (ignoring the time I was in BC with my family about 16 years ago, that is). I always just flew in and out of Victoria directly. The ferry is awesome and the view is incredible, navigating through all those little islands. Last time I rode the ferry I snapped this shot. It’s possibly the best picture I’ve taken on that trip.

How’s this for an update: I’m working in Munich for the summer at a European search engine called Seekport. The search engine isn’t all they do, as right now I’m programming a desktop widget that shows live scores & news from World Cup matches (in English and Arabic). I’m building it on top of the Yahoo! Widget Engine because it needs to run on Windows. Even though I quite like the Y! Engine, I would still prefer to be coding in straight HTML, CSS & JavaScript like Dashboard programmers get to use. The Y! Engine uses XML (it is somewhat HTML-like) and JavaScript.

I will take one of these desks any day! I particularly like the “epic”. But you know when you have to contact them to hear the price that’s bad, bad news. Ah well, add it to the list of things to get once I have money.

I guess it makes sense, they didn’t have computer scientist on the list.

I should be an engineer

so it’s 2am and i should be asleep, but instead i’m setting up a blog. i got a new desk last night and so today i finally got my apartment re-arranged and it’s much better now. that’s it for now… time to sleep.

(speaking of sleep, this new sleeping bag design makes so much sense. awesome.)