Three things remaining on the list from yesterday, hopefully to be done by midnight: read and respond to texts, catch up on discussion group, and prepare for next week’s class. I think these can all be done by midnight. But in the interests of blogging every day, I’m going to churn out a post now rather than after they’re done.

Today started off two hours behind schedule. I didn’t manage to scrape together enough motivation to have dinner yesterday, so it just didn’t happen. Actually, today started at 3:00 with going to bed three hours later than planned.

Happily, a phone call that I’d expected to take close to an hour ended up being closer to ten minutes, so I was on schedule until midafternoon, when I got a phone call from my mother. I’d forgotten to build in time for unexpected things like phone calls from mothers, and then suddenly it was evening, and I was all behind. I looked at my schedule and realized I’d forgotten to put in dinner.

The original schedule was supposed to be finished by 21:00, leaving the rest of the evening to play around, but that won’t be happening. I insisted on dinner tonight. Several times when I thought something was too much effort, I did it anyways because I was petrified that the first person to call me out might request a donation to NOM or the Princeton C(o)S department or something.

Off on a tangent, blogging about myself is starting to feel really silly and arrogant. Who am I to think the events of my day are worth the time and computer memory needed to chronicle them? Here is a little chunk of memory that is kindly allotted to me, that I didn’t even pay for, and I can say things with it. Surely there are more significant things to be said! At least, substantial topics worth pondering over. I’d like this month of posts to be intellectually satisfying.

Today sucks. Everything about today sucks! I’m completely devoid of purpose, and I just spent five hours sitting on a couch in my summer apartment watching anime. This sucks.

I don’t feel like doing anything at all. It all takes too much effort. At the same time, I’m really really bored. My fingernails have been too long for weeks. Long enough to make typing difficult, but it’s too much effort to declaw myself.

I miss school and deadlines and purpose.

Summer is also the time to take up experiments that I’ll likely never finish, and what better time to start than now?

Therefore, I’m going to blog everyday again to have something to do, and I’ll make a great big schedule for tomorrow. It will have all the things I need to do on it. Tomorrow will be a great big purposeful day! And tomorrow night, I’ll update with a list of what I actually got done. If there are things I didn’t finish, then the first person to call me out on each one will give me the name of their favorite cause, and I will donate $28 to it. That’s a perfect number.

Things to be done tomorrow: email math department, call Mr. Hoffman, call Mr. Sweedo, go through the rest of my unread emails, read and respond to texts, mail things out, go grocery shopping, return library book, read materials for May 30th AoPS class, catch up on Rationalist AI Summer Camp discussion group. Please call me out on any of these that I don’t do tomorrow.

I’m going to write out a schedule and then follow it, just for a day. I think that to be purposeful again, I just have to do something. Anything at all.
 

New MSPaint annoys me to pieces! I want to draw clear, sharp pictures of graphs. Just graphs. Collections of points that are sometimes connected by lines. I want this picture to be clear and legible. So how come I can’t make solid points anymore? Every single one of the “paintbrushes” involves some kind of weird smearing at the edges, and it takes more memory to record it all, and the resulting point is not as clear. When I want to zoom in to look at it, I have to go to a separate tab to zoom in at all, and everything isn’t just buttons anymore, it’s classifications of buttons into a hierarchy! Maybe I liked to click on one button and have everything I wanted right there. Maybe I liked solid dots.

Yes, I can have solid dots with the pencil button instead, but the biggest pencil dot is way too small. Yes, I can draw a circle and then fill it in with the bucket, but that takes more time.

I’ve heard it said that someone who has milk, water, juice, and wine has more freedom than someone who has 50 types of soda. Well maybe I agree. I want to draw a solid dot, or a solid line of a certain thickness, and instead I have 9 brushes that smear in slightly different ways.

I’m not happy about it. All this complaining about technology makes me feel like a great big reactionary, complaining about every change that happens, and it’s true that every improvement is a change. But not every change is an improvement! Getting rid of the functionality of drawing thick solid lines is NOT an improvement. I don’t care if the new interface has gently-rounded corners and pretty, soft colors. I want the one-click drawing tools, and I want big solid dots back.

P.S. I stopped using TeXnicCenter on my computer. Images don’t work right. Too incompatible. PDFs don’t build at all half the time. I’ll be looking for a way to have LaTeX again, either by getting OldAdobe back or by trying a new LaTeX thing. This is stupid.

It’s not terribly compatible with TeXnic Center, the thing I use to type in LaTeX. When I compile it without New Adobe already open, then it opens up New Adobe. . . but then it gives me a little pop-up asking if I want to open a file or make one. Every single time! I don’t know how to turn that setting off! It doesn’t even let me close the little pop-up. I have to choose one or the other. Meanwhile, TeXnic is trying and trying to open the thing I just compiled, but it can’t do it because Adobe is waiting for me to choose one of two undesirable options. I want it to just open up and give me a blank window with nothing on it. Is that so hard? Then TeXnic can do its thing, and everything would be fine!

Well, I don’t want to make a new document, so I end up “choosing” to open an existing file, and in the meanwhile my clicking things is giving New Adobe all sorts of outside input. By the time I go back to TeXnic, it’s given up and given me a little error message. So now that New Adobe is already open, I try to compile the thing again. After all, maybe if it’s already open, it won’t give me the noob window again, right?

Nothing’s ever as easy as that. For whatever reason, if New Adobe is already open, and I try to compile in TeXnic, then it crashes. Freezes completely, and I have to close TeXnic and open it up again. I’m really not happy about this! I don’t know if it’s the fault of TeXnic or New Adobe. TeXnic has crashed in the past on me before, but infrequently, and certainly not every time I compiled. I think it’s the fault of New Adobe, because it’s definitely different, and TeXnic looks the same as before. I’m really unhappy about this. Whoever decided everyone wants a noob window forcing them to choose one of two options anyways?

A friend was staying with me the last three nights, and what does one do with a friend for three nights? Get into a lot of arguments and play a lot of Set. Let’s call this friend Puff (the Magic Dragon).

So there we were, arguing and playing Set and arguing some more, and then he suggests an experiment. We sit across from each other and deal cards in four rows of three, and if there are no sets on the board, then we deal two more cards. We each keep two separate piles of sets: those taken from our own side of the board, and those taken from the other person’s side. This was to see if we favored one side over another. Puff hypothesized that we’d favor our own sides of the board more.

It turned out that we both strongly favored his side of the board. Now that I think about it, I guess I do start at the top of the board and scan down, like starting at the top of a page. I never noticed that before. It was an interesting thing to notice.

I have Second Sock Syndrome. It’s when you knit one sock, and then you don’t quite get around to knitting the other one. I remember being at that knitting store picking out sock yarn months ago, thinking, yipes this dinky yarn is thin as a thread. I asked the lady how long it would take to knit a pair of socks, and she warned me that each sock takes longer than a hat.

I bought a set of sock-sized knitting needles. They are like toothpicks. I’m knitting with thread on toothpicks. Friends who are real masochists call me a masochist.

For months I knitted the stupid thing, on and off. All through spring break, as we traveled, as other guild members played the carillon, I’d sit somewhere knitting. Facebook is filled with pictures of me knitting, labeled 正正正正正, the Chinese character I’d use for tallying rows.

And then the first sock was done, a thing with a cubical heel and a very trapezoidal toe. I thought about starting the other one, and I put it off.

Apparently this is really common! People chug through the first sock, and then lose steam, and then they don’t make the second. It even has its own name.

—

Terraria isn’t entertaining to me anymore. I open the silly thing, and I just don’t care to keep playing it. I really really wanted to play it for days after my laptop broke, and then the weeks went by, and I gradually forgot about it. And now, now that I actually can play it, I don’t want to anymore. First-world problems.

—

I don’t feel like doing anything. Not a single thing. But the Internet isn’t entertaining either. I want to go do something, and nothing seems like a good thing to do. Maybe I just want to go to bed. Maybe everything will seem more exciting after being asleep for half a day.

—

A good programmer can pick up a new language. But sometimes, the new language is something like Haskell. The thing doesn’t have any loops in it! And then I go online and type “how to use loops in Haskell”, and of course such a question has been asked before. The answers, however, are horrifying things informing the asker that anything done with loops can be done with recursion in Haskell. Great. Thanks. I just have to try and come up with a weird way of recursively doing things that are normally done with loops.

Something as simple as determining if a number is prime! Any language has things which can be said better, and things which can only be said poorly. This thing, I fear, in Haskell, can only be said poorly.

As far as I can tell, Datingish is a spin-off of Xanga that focuses on dating questions. It is one site that feeds into the thing that suggest stories for me to read. Frequently, is comes up with people wondering whether something is acceptable (porn, cyber sex, etc.), or whether something is “cheating” in a relationship.

It makes me want to say, who cares? Who cares what a mass poll says about what is “cheating” and what isn’t? That’s just like wondering what kind of food you like, and going to a blog and posting, “is French food better than Mexican?”

But that’s not how it works! You don’t know until you go and try French food and Mexican food, and see how you yourself feel about them. Even if 90% of people prefer French food, that doesn’t mean you have to like it better. Even if 99% of people say kissing other people is “cheating”, that doesn’t mean you have to snub your nose at it and say in indignant tones, “that’s immoral!” Even if all your friends make fun of Justin Bieber, that doesn’t mean it’s bad to like his music.

What I want to know is, your significant other is doing this action. How does it make you feel?

If it makes you feel bad or disrespected or uncomfortable, then it doesn’t matter if a hundred people say, that’s not cheating, people do it all the time. It bothers you, and that’s all the reason you need to bring it up. Discuss it with your significant other(s) and try to work out a solution. Maybe your partner(s) will say, “why is this an issue? Everyone else is fine with it!” But that’s not an excuse, because relationships are all different.

And if it doesn’t bother you? No one in the world can tell you that it should. If your significant other can kiss, touch, and sleep with other people, and it doesn’t bother you, then why make yourself bothered by it? There’s no reason every relationship has to have the same traditions and the same taboos. To me, “everyone else says sex with other people is cheating, so we have to treat it as a bad thing” sounds exactly the same as “everyone else says French food is better than Mexican, so we have to like French food better.” Sure, it’s bad for most relationships. But it’s not bad for mine, and it doesn’t have to be for yours.

That’s up to you to decide. It doesn’t matter how a hundred other people feel. How do you feel about it, and how do(es) your partner(s) feel about it? It’s between you and your partner(s), and those are the opinions that matter in your relationship.

There is a lovely site, oneword.com, where each day a common word is featured. Everyone has a minute to write about that word, although time limits aren’t enforced. Sometimes I write on it just for the pleasure of generating a chain of thought and chunking it onto the Internets. Sometimes I read what people before me wrote, but usually not very much. A lot of them are unbearable, the heartbroken laments of people writing about romances. I’ve found that any word can be turned into a lament about a romance.

The trouble is that, like xkcd says, “our brains just have one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.” It works both ways. If one sees many many pictures of Biden eating a sandwich, then some of them become great. And if I see many many tales of heartrending woe, then the scale refits itself, and most of them become merely average. They bore me. Each is enough to occupy a great deal of a person’s mental processing. They can induce profound emotional reactions in that person. But to me, sitting here reading hundreds upon hundreds of artistically-vague unhappy sentiments, (often with the exact same imagery! (What is it with teary rain and objects shattering?)) they are all alike.

I think you can compare love to anything. You probably don’t even need to try all that hard.

Sometimes people write long essays, paragraphs upon paragraphs, or perhaps verses and verses of poetry. I tell myself they are exceeding the one-minute suggested limit, because my limited experience does not permit me to imagine someone who can think and type so quickly.

But today, I came across this wonderful entry about the word “remember”:
Remember me. Remember who I am. Who am I? I’m 24601. I stole a loaf of bread 19 years ago, but I have reformed to be a better man. Bring him home. Bring him home.
It’s very compelling somehow. The first thing that caught my eye was the number 19, and when the eye falls upon it, I can’t help but see “loaf of bread” also, and then I know exactly what it is. What it’s referencing, and also that it is referencing my favorite musical, and not its novel or movie counterparts. As I read the words, I hear the songs in my mind’s ear, and I imagine the author (identified only by a username) sitting before a computer with his mind full of song. I feel like I’ve shared a moment with an unknown stranger from the Internets.

Perhaps he will never know that he’s made an Internet stranger take a second look. But it does sort of make me want to generate stuff that makes people take a second look.

Perhaps next time I write some tropey romantic ballade, I’ll compare love to a trilobite or a segmentation fault or something.

There are things new Firefox does that I wish it didn’t. Very small things that I’ve become accustomed to, and so, spoiled as I am, I notice when they are gone, and I resent their absence. The little resentments pile up, so that using the internet leaves me annoyed and frustrated.

The most minor one is that new Firefox has a single orange button that replaced all of old Firefox’s drop-down menus. That extra blot of confusion figuring out where to find each tool that I want to use.

Another is that when I type into the address bar, new Firefox defaults to the Google search. I already have a Google search bar for that, right next to the address bar! Old Firefox defaulted to the I’m Feeling Lucky feature. I could type Kingdom of Loathing and be right there! But new Firefox makes me scroll down and make an extra click, every single time. (Happily, the about:config page let me fix this one.)

Old Firefox would show me the URL in the bottom right corner right away, whenever I hovered the mouse over a link. Who cares? But I play Dragon Cave. Each egg has a unique code, and I collect cool codes. On a page with 20 eggs, I hover the mouse over each one to look at the code, and then I hit refresh and do it again. And you know what new Firefox does? It waits an instant before fading the URL in! A bit of animated prettiness, but at the cost of usability, and I don’t like it. To make it worse, it doesn’t always appear in the same corner! So I’m never quite sure where to expect it, and then it surprises me!

—

New Gmail subtly annoys me. Old Gmail had little buttons with words on it, which new Gmail has replaced with pictures. Why? Presumably it wants to be more universal, so that people can understand what the buttons do even if they can’t read. Except the buttons are all stupid things, like arrows or folders or gears or some combination thereof. Like I really know what a stupid arrow means. It means “reply”. Now isn’t that obvious? And here I was thinking it meant “move”. How silly of me. “Move” is a picture of a folder, while “archive” is a folder with an arrow on it.

So the end result is, I have to hover my mouse over all the buttons and wait for a little box to appear that tells me what the button does. Why would I want that? Presumably, so someone who can’t read will know what the buttons do. Presumably, illiterate people can better tell between an angular “back” arrow and a curved “reply” one.

Why would a person who couldn’t read even use email at all?

There’s no way to select all. I can select all the messages on one page, but I can’t select all the messages in the whole inbox. Suppose I get behind on my emails. . . a thousand messages behind. Mark all as read? Now you have to do it one page at a time.

—

New Windows subtly annoys me! The Internet says it’s less flashy and more minimalist, but I don’t think that’s true at all. It likes to open all windows of a program in the same little tab on the menu at the bottom of the screen. More hierarchical, that’s the trend. More hierarchy in new Firefox’s drop-down menus, more hierarchy in new Windows’s window-displaying buttons. If I want to switch from one window to another, I first have to click the program on the bottom bar, and then choose the window. One more step of looking closely at the miniature previews of the two or more windows. I don’t want to do that! Maybe I have an online math room open, and a class script, and a third window where I’ve Wolfram Alpha running, and I need to switch back and forth. One more step! Always one more step! That’s what the hierarchy does. Maybe I could glance at a window’s tab beforehand, see the first word of the title, and know enough. Now I have to look at itteh-bitteh pictures of the two windows and their contents. Oh, and what do they do? They take a moment to appear (in elegant little animations); what great big dinkery!

New Windows likes to configure updates again and again and again. Twice a week since I’ve gotten the thing back, and at the worst times. In the middle of typing a post with the thing unsaved? Restart, and it closes new Firefox, and the whole thing is lost. When I wake the creature up for math? Restart, and take a half hour to do it too, and all my little students are waiting, and I have a scheduled time to appear in the classroom! If it were up to me, I’d restart when I felt like it. I’dn’t forcibly restart in the middle of something being done.

I want to know how to write programs in DNA. How is it done? I know that DNA is the basis of all life on Earth, or whatever it is the Biology books say, but how? It seems to me that all DNA is good for is building proteins.

I want to know if some of those proteins can act as AND, OR, and NOT gates, or as other gates that have some function or other. Of course they can. The proteins allow things to pass selectively, or produce one-way channels, and a whole host of functions.

But how are they built? The mRNA makes a copy of the DNA, and then the tRNA (is that right?) brings the appropriate chemicals over. . . how? Presumably the tRNA is drawn to the current building-protein by having the right 3-char DNA codon. I’m imagining something like a magnet. The pull on the right code is stronger than on all the other codes. But then, why does it only happen to the current location? What about all the rest of the mRNA, why aren’t they dragging along tRNA things too? Maybe they are, but they float away because they have nothing to attach to.

What’s so special about the A, the C, the T, and the G? What does each one stand for? How should I arrange them to program with them?

And then, all the cells (with the exception of the sex cells) in a person have identical DNA. Then how do cells become different things? How do they get enough information from surrounding cells? Presumably the chemical concentration of a liver is different from that of the brain, but are they all distinguishable by chemicals alone? And then, when the person is first conceived, all the cells are in the same environment. How do they ever start differentiating at all?

I know that a single wrong character in computer code can (and usually will) ruin the entire program. How can humans have differences at all that don’t ruin everything?

I want to know why everything works. Failing that, I want to know that it is reasonable that things work. And a human is such a complicated program! But if I can see a little bit of code that constructs a single gate, that would be enough, and I would trust that the rest of the information can be written in a program as long as a human’s DNA. And that would begin to answer things a little bit.