The Cumber Manifesto

I propose we stop calling imaginary and complex numbers imaginary and complex numbers. I propose we throw them all in the same bucket called "Cumbers". This has several advantages, which I shall briefly enumerate.

First is the instant association with a cucumber. Now I don't have kids, so I don't know if Cucumbers are the new Broccoli, but when I was a kid I loved cucumbers as much as I do today. (Though I loved broccoli too, so...) Cucumbers are cool and green and friendly. When written down, Cumbers can even resemble a long cucumber: (3 + 4*j).

Second is just avoiding the names which can lead to confusion in children and some teenagers. I'd like young children to learn algebra, but young children may not be able to fully grasp that one word can have completely different meanings. So when they hear "Imaginary" they think "This doesn't correspond to anything real", or when they hear "Complex" they think "Oh no this is hard." This is compounded by the more important, sad fact that even high school calculus teachers don't know what complex numbers are useful for. I had a great teacher, he didn't know. He said vaguely "electrical engineering." Now I know better, know more, but that's a different subject. Calling them "Cumbers" gets rid of this potentially emotionally distressing situation in the names.

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Why vim? Or: Why a text editor, not an IDE?

People (mostly at my school) have gawked at me when I say I don't use Visual Studio, or I don't use Eclipse, or I don't use Dreamweaver, or I don't use Word and use OpenOffice less and less. Instead I use vim. And the fact that I only have one substitute for all those giant programs speaks volumes about vim.

Of course, it's not just vim. I obviously use compilers and such. But whenever text is involved, it's almost always vim I end up using. I don't particularly like emacs, but they more-or-less have the same practices as vim users if a different philosophy. (Kind of how Christian Monk/Nun practices match up with Buddhist practices even if the philosophies are quite different.)

So I've grown into the habit of saying "Linux is my IDE." I use vim when I need to edit text, and use a host of Linux programs to manipulate that text. I use ant for my Java projects, Makefiles for C/C++ projects, gdb for debugging, $$\LaTeX$$ for documents and homework, and a browser to parse the templates I handwrite that compile down to HTML.

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Fall Semester Classes

(Update: They canceled my Combinatorics class and bait-and-switched the software engineering course, so I had to change a few things around.) Back to school this fall for the start of my Junior year. Where'd the past two years go?

20 credit hours is the norm at my school, it's actually pretty manageable. (And if you think about it, you spend at least 20 hours a week in high school. Not as much time on homework or projects but actual butt-in-seat time seems greater.) If I only had to take 10-13 credits as is common for "full time" students at other schools, I think I'd blow my brains out from boredom. At least with 20 credit hours chances are you'll like most of the classes and the crappy/boring ones are swept under the rug. If you're only taking three classes though, and two of them are crap, I don't think the other one can make you happy no matter how good it is.

Anyway, here's a list of my classes and their descriptions according to the school catalog along with some of my own thoughts.

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New Comment Messengers Finally Added

Finally added a form feature to let you put in your email address (never displayed) if you want to have an email reminder for new comments on that post later on. You'll also be able to unsubscribe if desired.

I also noticed that jsMath fails in Chrome. I'll be replacing it with MathJax shortly.

Edit: Replacement is finished! I think it looks a lot nicer. Here's an $$inline=\pi$$ test.

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Favorite equation revisited

I wrote about my new favorite equation a couple months ago, but I neglected to mention an insight that has been revealed to me!

It's Tau Day today! Long live Tau! What does this have to do with my equation? Well, my equation was:

[math]\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2} = \sqrt{\pi}[/math]

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Crab Canon Maker In Flex

This crab canon appeared on Hacker News recently, I thought it was really pretty. I started writing my own (I'll post it whenever I finish if I think it's good enough), but noticed that it was fairly hard to do in my head. The amount of context you have to keep track of... Anyway, I took 5-10 minutes or so to write a Canon Maker in Flex that just copies what you wrote and duplicates it to mirror itself.




Source for anyone interested (also below)

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Can your SQL database do this?

New to LucidDB-dev (and soon 0.9.4) are a handful of scripting modules that support many different languages, such as Jython. Writing code in Java and loading it as a JAR in LucidDB is fun, but cumbersome; thanks to the standards in Java 6 though one can use JavaScript (bundled with Java) or, my preference, Python. As a fun example, let's grab a list of tweets to insert!

There's a Python twitter client here: http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/ whose dependencies are easy to satisfy. (For Jython, see http://old.nabble.com/Easy_install-on-jython-2.5-td23525500.html for getting an "easy_install" on Jython to get the dependencies.) Just run the Jython's easy_install with "oauth2" and "simplejson" as arguments, and then run jython build.py install inside the twitter client's download folder. If you're good to go with Jython, go get a dev version of LucidDB. Make sure you add your Jython JAR to the classpath.gen file before starting it! For me, that's /home/kevin/jython2.5.2/jython.jar.

There is a caveat here: because we're relying on packages in Jython's site-packages folder, and because we're using the jython.jar in a ScriptEngine behind the scenes, we have to load the sys path ourselves. Fortunately this is done by adding the code import site to our Python, which the standard Jython does behind the scenes by itself.

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