Month: February 2015

Korean BBQ eh “doge”

Oh my!  I went to Kogiya Korean BBQ in Annandale, VA.  It was pretty good.  I wouldn’t go there often (or probably by choice).  It is a bit pricy for what you get.  I tried to eat with the chopsticks, but I need practice (since I’m going to China).  I ate some sort of pork ribs that had a spicy sauce on them that was really good (but a bit fatty).  There was some beef brisket thing that I really didn’t care for (that was really fatty and the fat wasn’t tasty and the meat had no marinade or sauce on it so wasn’t flavorful).  There were various sauces and such that I we could try.  Although I found I didn’t really care for any.  I also had some rice which was a nice respite to have something a bit normal between bites of the meat.

I went with Bryan and his friend from work JZ.  His friend from work uses the word doge from dogecoin(**) (crypto currency) as a verb, noun, adjective and without any consistent connotation.  So, basically it allows your mouth to move and emit sound, leaving your listener to interpret the meaning given the context.  It sort of reminds you of why little babies make noises/cry.  But I might be a bit harsh.  He is really into asian stuff.  I think he wants to move to Japan and become an english teacher.  He also wouldn’t mind going to the Netherlands to become an astrophysicist (since according to him they have the best grad program in that area).  He talks constantly.  He reminded me of Nathaniel.

The adventure tonight was the fact that Bryan told me that we were going to eat at a different Korean BBQ and then when I got there I checked my phone (since the restaurant had wifi) and found out that he texted me the adjusted location.  Thankfully I had wifi, otherwise I wouldn’t have found out until I got back home!

(**) http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge I’ve been notified that doge is not from the cryptocurrency, but from a meme.  My friend Stephen told me about this.

M*A*S*H

“Holy Toledo!  Either that bird hit a land mine or you just shot down a kamikaze pigeon!” — Klinger (M*A*S*H Season 8 Episode 12).  LOL Hilarious!!

“The pentagon.  The weird looking building.  Four walls and a spare.  Monument to Murphy’s law.” — Cornel Potter (S8E13)

Cells

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-biggest-biotech-discovery-of-the-century-is-about-to-change-medicine-forever-2015-2 a rather long but interesting article about the DNA editing tool CRISPR.  This tool was not created, rather it was found.  Microbes (or whatever they are called) have been using this to defend against invasion for a long time.  The way the article makes it out to be that there exists a war at the micro scale being waged constantly.  The combatants aren’t dumb either.  They have a memory, they have tools, they communicate, they learn!  It is truly amazing.  What kind of mechanisms do they have to cooperate?  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22999189 discusses this and this article talks about how cancer cells cooperate and even have free riders.  In order combat the cancer they change the code of the dna to make it so that there are more free riders so the tumor dies.  Cellular organization is very elegant.

This is interesting.  In the future this could be a way to hack a MAS that may be built on similar principles.  The fact is that we try to avoid freeriders but if the system is flooded with them the system will decay.

 

AI conspiracy

I know this sounds all conspiracy theory like, but it seems possible that people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, who have recently made comments about the potential threat of an artificial intelligence take over, were only doing it so that there would be more articles written about AI and how its highly unlikely given current state of the art.  I mean there has been so much press about this issue lately that I don’t think that as many people would have even known about the true current state of AI.  So, the conspiracy is that Bill and Elon really know how unlikely it is to happen any time soon and they know how hard getting all of the news outlets to talk about AI and the current research.  So, they made the outrageous claims to get attention to an area that needs it.  Which other than making them look bad I think it was useful.

Botball 2015

I’m going to be a mentor again for Botball.  This time I’m partnering with David, Kevin and Stephen and we are mentors for the middle school that David helped at last year.  So, hopefully that means we will have more success than I had last year with Kramer middle school.  This weekend is the intro/get everyone up to speed days and hopefully we can make use of the fact that the middle school participated last year to our advantage.

Datamining Forums

Would be interesting to compare writing styles, format etc of users on forums.  Would be interesting if we could identify users with multiple accounts.  Also, would be interesting to look at the change in style over time per person to see if it was hacked or something out of the ordinary.  Plot emotions over time.  Would be interesting to see who has the emotional sway (can cause others to become emotional etc.) over the forum or post etc.  I wonder how much there is in this area.  I would imagine it would be a lot since we have had forums for a long time and I think this is something that Facebook has (or should be) been doing.

JUnit and TestNG

I just got finished some code refactoring and a major rearchitecturing of bounties to be more ammenable to unit tests.  Which I, for lack of time, unfortunately didn’t do.  But, now that I have a bit of time and its for a class I’m going to start adding them.

Junit has always been my goto unit testing framework.  It was the one I was taught.   However, I just found a new unit testing framework called TestNG.  According to this article TestNG has more features than Junit!  That link also goes through and compares and gives examples how its used.

So, I’m going to try it out.  See how I like it.

Robins and cryptochrome

I was sitting in my chair and I saw a robin out the window and I wondered whether it could see me (as in how far can robin’s see).  I of course googled it.  But, I got sidetracked and found a Discovery article explaining that robins can see the earth’s EM field.  According to the article the effect is due to the right eye, left half of the brain and a molecule called cryptochrome (best name for such a molecule, in my opinion).  The article discusses an experiment that shows that the birds can’t orient correctly if their vision in the right is obscured.  Of course this didn’t answer my original question, but it is much cooler.

This reminds me of Gary from Alphas (“respect the badge!”).

Comparison Continued

I took a look at the R source code for the tukey test (HSD test) from the agricolae library http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/agricolae/index.html.  The interesting thing is that they purposefully call round:

round(1-ptukey(abs(dif[k])*sqrt(2)/sdtdif,ntr,DFerror),6)

Also, they assume lm or aov.  So, we know that they don’t like big numbers. However, the nice thing is that the R file shows how to use the ptukey function!  Which is where I was a bit iffy.  So, I think I could get away with writing it in R and just instead of requiring lm or aov I just want the data then I can perform the requisite calculations.

I think I’ve convinced myself that I’ll trust mathematica and I’ll deal with how long it takes to get the data.  I don’t like how ineffiecient it is, but I can sacrifice time if it means that I get accurate results.  I don’t think that I’m qualified or have the time to create such a library.  It is interesting though that we don’t have many papers on knowing how many significicant digits are necessary for accurate tests.  Or that the R libraries don’t report the errors in their calculations.  This must be why people use Mathematica or Matlab because we trust them to do it right to enough sig figs that it doesn’t matter the error because it is insignificant.

So, I just need a nice desktop.