Soviet Politics

One last thing about the Matrix: aren’t the Sentinels a total rip-off of the Ur-Quan from Star Control 2? Anyone who’s played the game has to agree with me.

We had a really nice home-cooked Japanese dinner courtesy of Sarah, Rika, and Izumi. It was awesome. I’ll miss them!

Saw Finding Nemo with Jenny. It was fun! Oh yeah and also saw Coldplay at the Shoreline Amphitheater with (approximately) the usual gang: Umesh, Leland, Koto, Jonathan, Lauren. I was somewhat apprehensive that our lawn seats (about half a mile from the stage, it seemed) would ruin the show, but it still turned out great: they played just about all of my favorite songs, and there was a surprising sense of immediacy that made everything work out.

You can see that I’m too lazy to write much. One of those things where so much stuff has happened that I’m too lazy to write about any of it. Hrmmmmmm….. I went to my first conference, PLDI 2003, in San Diego. It was actually a super-conference, one that happens every three or four years, that brings together many of the major conferences in the various subfields of CS. So pretty much everyone was there. It was a humbling experience: I saw tons of famous people, some profs from college who had no clue who I was, diligent grad students doing real research, etc. At first, I was like, these people are ridiculously good; there’s no way I can ever succeed in this field. But by the last day despair had turned into inspiration. I might as well try, right?

The conference itself was intense: 28 talks in two and a half days. I think I went to about 24 of them. We went into the city a couple of times, which was fun.

I got to know some of the other grad students in my group a lot better. They’re really great guys. Oh yeah, jo mama jokes. Here are some good ones:

Jo mama’s so fat, she’s on both sides of the family!Classic wordplay there. For the more mathematically inclined:
Jo mama’s so fat, she spans R³!Manu told me some good ones:
Jo mama’s so big, when she hauls ass, she has to make two trips!… and a politically-minded one:
Ariel Sharon’s so fat, he doesn’t want peace…. he wants two pieces!We were talking one night about that old trick question, “What weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead?” and I came up with this one:
Jo mama’s so heavy, a pound of her weighs more than a pound of lead!
Jo mama’s so ugly, people hit the ugly stick with her! –Jenny
Jo mama’s so fat, when she was born, they had to recompute the gravitational constant!
Jo mama’s so fat, there’s no surjection between and her chins.
Jo mama’s so old, she programs in the lambda calculus!
Jo mama’s so fat, she’s a universal cover for every topological space! –Steve
Jo mama’s so ugly, her ugliness can’t be approximated by a PTAS! –Jenny
Jo mama’s so fat, there exists a cover of jo mama with no finite subcover and she’s closed! –Steve
Jo mama’s so fat, she sneezed and cats came out! –Jenny
Jo mama’s so fat, there’s no poly-time verifier that, given some input, can decide whether that’s how fat she is! –Steve
Jo mama’s so fat, when she walks past Kennedy Space Center they have to re-calculate the escape velocity! –Melinda
Jo mama’s so stupid, she voted for liberty fries. –Jenny
Jo mama’s so fat, her weight grows faster than Busy Beaver!

Yes, we love being nerdy :)

Anyway next time I’ll write more. Alex is back for his last weekend here….