Lucas has posted about the super powers bequeathed on those worthy to earn a Master of Science degree. It's true: they can control the weather, cause earthquakes, and levitate our country's GNP using only the power of their minds.

Unfortunately, most MS graduates control the weather by moving to California. Actually, that's also the way they cause earthquakes. As for the GNP, well, I think Bill Gates has an honorary MS degree from somewhere. If not, Wash U, here'$ an opportunity you $houldn't pas$$ up (by the way, that's how B-$chool $tudent$ do 3733t).

Lucas wants the cape to accompany the job, but what he doesn't realize is that the standard-issue gown used for graduation is in fact a Cape of Wonders. Its bright colors aren't just for style. Like the bee and the blow fish, the colors serve to warn evil predators that the person inside is not to be taken lightly.

I do feel obligated to point out that the super powers are garnered only by those MS students who write a thesis. The course-only option is good only for free admission to certain theme parks, and you have to be wearing your cape. The project option comes with a coupon good for one free thesis-format-check from Ouida Jackson, our School's Formatting Fascist Fatale.

Oh, and unless your thesis contains an utterly convincing proof of an NP-complete problem, the super powers wear off by the end of the graduation ceremony. At least you get to enjoy them for a while.

The word Yahrzeit is Yiddish, derived from the German word Jahrzeit which means "season". Literally, Jarzeit means "year time" and its Yiddish form indicates a year's time in observance of the death of somebody close to you.

Tonight I begin to observe the Yahrzeit of my grandmother, who died on 27 February 2002. I will observe this in the traditional way, by lighting a candle that burns for about a day, and by saying "Kaddish" -- the prayer traditionally recited in memory of the dead. Ironically, the prayer doesn't mention death at all. It is an Aramaic prayer, written in the language of the people so they would understand what they said.

Rebecca (Ruby) Kahn was born in Dallas in 1904. She moved to Denton, Texas when she married Raymond Kahn (Rachmiel in Hebriew, the man for whom I am named; nobody has posted an accurate reply on the meaning of that name). Raymond Kahn came to this country not speaking a word of English, but taught himself by reading the newspapers and keeping his mind open. When Ruby married Raymond, she got not only a husband but also his brother Isadore, whom I called "Unkie" and of whom I have many good memories.

By the time I came around, my grandfather Raymond had been gone a year. My parents tried to get me to say "Nana Ruby" for my grandmother, but I could only manage "Nea Nea" (pronounced knee knee), and the name stuck. An advantage of being first-born is that you get to give all your relatives silly names.

My grandmother and I had always been close -- in some ways closer than my parents to me. As a parent myself now, I can see how grandparents have the opportunity for domination in the affection department, because they can love their grandchildren without having to discipline them, clean up after them, or drive them to soccer practice.

Nea Nea lived four blocks from my parents, so we saw much of her, and I would stop by her apartment to visit. One time I stopped by during a tornado, which hit the shopping center behind her apartment, took the roof off the apartment building next to hers, and then returned to the sky.

When I started Sunday School, my teacher told me that nobody knows what G-d looks like -- there are no pictures of G-d. I objected, saying that my grandmother had a picture of G-d in her living room, and I knew exactly what he looked like. The teacher told my parents this, so they asked me to point out the picture next time we were over at Nea Nea's. I pointed to a picture, but it turned out to be my grandfather (Raymond). Nea Nea had spoken so highly of him that I somehow got the impression he was G-d.

Nea Nea had a sense of hunor even in her later years. She told me not all that long ago that if a man broke into her apartment, she'd call the police -- about 7 the next morning. She never did remarry but when pressed she'd tell you she had a couple of opportunities.

It was an honor to get the occasional phone call from my grandmother when she had difficulty balancing her check book. After all, I was at Rice and was supposed to be good at math. We'd find the missing penny and we'd hang up triumphant -- me at being able to help my grandmother, her at helping me feel helpful to someone I love. I always suspected she could solve partial differential equations if the mood would take her.

When I was a kid and she took me and my brother to the mall, I did a terrible thing by hiding in the toy store, playing hide and go seek with the reluctant seeker. She never let me forget that, and would bring up the story too often for my comfort.

After she died, my mom and aunt found an envelope in her apartment addressed to them both, to be opeend upon her death. We all thought there would be something profound, but when opened, the note said that if we found her dead, it was the dry cleaning guy who did it. Years ago she had some kind of argument with him.

It wasn't the dry cleaner that ended her long, mostly happy life. It was just old age and a wish to be done with a body that had brought her more pain than joy in her last years of life.

Months after her death I found myself wanting to pick up the phone to call her, if only just to talk a little while. Now, a year later, I am about to observe her Yahrzeit, and while it is painful to think of the loss of my grandmother, it is good to see many of her fine qualities in my children, and I hope in myself.

Nea Nea, I don't know if you can read my blog, but I miss you and think of you often. Your memory is a blessing for me and my family.

As if you didn't already know, check it out here

I rented a car today while mine is being repaired, and I was fortunate to get upgraded a gazillion levels above the "cheapskate special" I had ordered, because they were out of those kinds of cars. As a result, I am driving a green Sazuki SUV.

Unlike the RAV 4, it has a two-wheel drive option, but it seems to be the rear wheels that do the pushing. I think this is to get better gas milage. When you need to and have the time to do it, you can switch to 4-wheel drive by stopping, putting the car in neutral, and moving a shift lever. You can even select a low-geared 4-wheel drive in case you're pulling a tanker or something.

From responses so far, I know I have to be careful going uphill in an RV, and will do so. I went to Mexico when I was a student at Rice, travelling in a friend's VW bus, which could only do 30 mph or so uphill. So I know to pull over. Of course, with the turbo attachment, maybe we can rocket up the hills after all.

I'm sorry to report that my '97 RAV 4, called "Ravvie" by my kids, was just in an accident last night. Nobody got hurt, and the car is mostly drivable, but it sustained some seroius damaage around the passenger's front wheel well.

I was heading down a hill on N. Florissant Road not going very fast, but there was snow/ice at the bottom and I couldn't stop or power out of the lane in time to avoid hitting a Suburban that was at the red light. I slowed to some 5 MPH by impact, but it took its toll on my car (the Suburban was only mildly bruised).

The guy I hit was in a rental car with insurance coverage -- nice -- though if the assessor finds me more than 50% to blame it looks like my insurance has to pay and then my rates will probably go up.

We are considering packing the 5 of us in an RV this Summer and driving West past beautiful, historic Creve Coeur toward Colorado.

We've been contemplating a trip like this for some time, and this Summer seems like a good time to do it.

Question: is the RV part crazy? We picked up some books on RV'ing, including the ubiquitous "for dummies" version. It seems like a good idea, but are we really RV people? What does it take to be an RV person?

If you have some RV experience, positive or negative, I'd appreciate your advice.

Ben asks about what superhero you would want to be. I tried replying with a link but the link didn't work, so I'll post here for the record, that I (or at least, my humble computer kato) want to be Tobor, the Eighth Man.

Ben asks about what superhero you would want to be. I tried replying with a link but the link didn't work, so I'll post here for the record, that I (or at least, my humble computer kato) want to be Tobor, the Eighth Man.

has appeared: here .

I believe that an op ed article written by Prof. Jon Turner will appear in today's Student Life. The article is about the ArtSci practice of not counting our CS courses. I'm hoping there will be an interesting and exothermic reaction.

Chris has recently posted about Moulin Rouge. Betsy and I saw Moulin Rouge when it came out, and I thought the movie was pretty good for what it was -- a kind of crazy art piece set to music.

I admit that I don't get out much, and am generally easily entertained. But seeing M.R. on the big screen with decent sound was an interesting sensory experience.

I had a deeper such experience years ago whew I first moved to New York. There was a Philip Glass score for a movie directed by Coppola (I think), and the movie was Koyaanisqatsi, which is a Hopi Indian phrase meaning "life out of balance", "crazy life", "a way of life that calls for another way of living". I had seen the movie shown in a campus lecture hall when I was a grad student at UIUC , and I found the experience very moving. In New York, there was a screening at Lincoln Center (Avery Fisher Hall), with the movie shown as usual, but with live music instead of the soundtrack. There was a choir and all the requisite instruments, and a conductor with headphones who kept the whole thing together. This was a religious experience. To this day, if I put on the sound track to Koyaanisquatsi, it takes me somewhere else.

I named my 16' Hobie Cat after the movie, using a trilingual pun: "The Koyaanis Katze". A Hopi Cat, sailing out of balance, a crazy life.

I met with Ed Macias last week, who is the vice chancellor of our university as well as the head of arts and sciences. The issue at hand was the "new curriculum" about which many of you have heard me comment, and in which all schools outside of ArtSci are excluded from counting toward distribution.

I found out some interesting things

• In the "old" curriculum, computer sciences was the only department to have standing in Arts and Sciences toward distribution. Our cs101 course has a G at its end because of the area in which it satisfied the old ArtSci requirements.
  
• The area of common interest is logic, and in the new curriculum there is no such area, hence ArtSci felt they no longer needed to count our course.
  
• But ArtSci (the Math dept) offers a "computing in C" course that *does* count toward ArtSci distribution, while our cs101 does not. Students have been advised to take the math course because it knocks out some distribution while cs101 no longer does.
  
• Ed Macias is at a loss to explain why ArtSci counts the "computing in C" course, but he is immovable about counting our course.
  

Where does this leave us? Well, it's clear to me that it's a conflict of interest to have a vice chancellor who heads up Arts and Sciences, with nobody to look after the students' overall interests. At some schools, such a person is called a provost. What does this word mean? Of cousre, Webster provides the answer:\

1 : the chief dignitary of a collegiate or cathedral chapter

2 : the chief magistrate of a Scottish burgh

3 : the keeper of a prison

4 : a high-ranking university administrative officer  

 

What concerns me most is that the people making academic, curriculum decisions are also the people who worry about finances. This is not a good thing. If one school (ArtSci) draws a fence around itself and encourages students not to look at other schools (Engineering, Art, Law) for course offerings that could enrich their days here and beyond, then something is wrong.

OK, I've finished my solution to the next 102 lab. It has full concurrency, lots of threads, and should be free of race conditions and deadlock. Give it a spin and let me know what you think:

incredible maze lab

I wonder if the blog's day has come and gone already. I don't see much commentary posted on my blog, nor do I see much posting on other (nameless for now) blogs. While I"ll continue writing things unworthy of publishing elsewhere, do you also sense languor (blanguor?) in the blog community.

Are we too busy? Is blogging a fad whose time may soon pass?

by clicking here

It will be broken into two weeks, and the colorful rectangles are all the same, reusable component.

Each time you run it, it may finish or it may deadlock. Each hallway (white) is trying to lock its rooms. Red means trying to get a lock, green means got it.

If all connected hallways turn cyan, it finished. Otherwise, see if you can spot the deadlock. It will show up as a cycle of green..red..green...red etc among adjacent rooms.

Comments MOST welcome!

I just noticed that DoD has posted the following:

Title: 

        Defense Sciences Research and Technology - Time Reversal Methods

Sponsor: 

        United States Department of Defense (DOD)       

        Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)       

Deadline:

        March 14, 2003  

URL to view this opportunity:

        http://fundingopps.cos.com/cgi-bin/getRec?id=76911

So they're asking researchers to consider time reversal. Maybe that means a failed proposal could go back in time, become better, and succeed?

I wonder how much a "deadline" means for a program like this?

Ben has posted about how true horoscopes can be.

On reflection, I'm not sure whom to believe any more. I guess I'll trust Ben on this one, but on the other hand, it seems my fate could be decided by the veracity of the fortune cookie I opened the other day at Lu Lu, or my horoscope entry.

Now the Chinese culture is old and venerable, but haven't the stars been moving in their courses even longer? Whom should I believe? And then there's the proverbs I find on the fitness magazines I was forced to order to support our middle school.

So, here's the problem:

• My fitness horoscope recommended low-impact exercises on February 4th. Thinking I knew better, I joined the Blast for our game against an upper-level team, and we got pounded into the ice like never before.
  
• My fortune cookie told me to have courage in the face of danger (it was worded more profoundly, but that was the sentiment)
  

Maybe the fitness magazine is wiser still, offering 23 ways I could use exercise to overcome stress. They must know the agony we suffer when our horoscope and fortune cookies fight over our fate.

David has discovered that Dave Barry has a weblog . So, naturually, I took a look to see what he writes.

First, I was impressed by how often he posts, with multiple posts almost every day. "Quantity is no substitute for quality, but it's the only one we have." goes the saying.

OK, a cheap shot at a famous blogger, I admit. Referencing a post of mine from long ago, Dave Barry's log falls into the third category, namely those who offer amusing and inciteful commentary on the ways of our world.

But most of Dave Barry's posts are simply pointers to interesting things he has found on the web; little commentary is offered, and he didn't write the stuff he references.

This supports a view I had when the web first started: the web turns the publication world upside down. It used to be almost impossible to publish anything because the cost of printing and distribution was so high. But the web makes those things easy. Now it's the editing, filtering, identification of useful stuff that is problematic.

Who knows, maybe one day Dave Barry will point to a negative273 community member's blog? I say we invite him to our next blog party.

I dreamt last night, around 10:30-midnight, that the Blast got beaten by a B-level team 16 to 2. When I woke up, the score was 17 to 2. Sigh. You fans of the Blast, we are in for 3 more tough games against teams in the division above us. This seemed to have scared away half our team, but I for one was very glad I was there.

I am wondering how many people out there have some control of their dreams? I just looked on the web and there are lots of hits for this, including pages that cite studies.

When I was a kid and would have bad dreams, I discovered that if I could wink in my dream, that the dream would change to something else. I had no control then of how it would change, but at least I could escape from a bad dream if I had the presence of mind to know I was dreaming and it wasn't real.

Lately, over the past 5 years or so, for reasons I can't really explain, I've had almost total control over my dreams. It's not that I think about what I will dream before I go to sleep, but once I dream, I realize that I am dreaming, and I take over the controls and try to go places or see things.

Most of these involve flying, and when I do fly I get the sensation in my stomach of rising and falling, and I feel the wind in my face. I always dream in color (and the ressolution isn't bad either).

I wonder if I could try to go back in time, or try to visit somebody who died. It's not something I've tried, but I hope to think of it next time I have control.

Any other dream drivers out there?

michael recently posted about becoming overly familiar with a restaurant, to the point that he and David were asked to make a delivery. I have two related stories to share.

Tim Teitelbaum, a CS prof at Cornell, became such a regular at the Moosewood restaurant in Ithaca that he was allowed to check himself out at the cash register. I think he ate there almost every night.

My brother-in-law, when he lived in Chicago, became very familiar with the dry-cleaner owner. She had been in a car accident one morning, and when he came in to drop off cleaning on a Saturday, he noticed she had bruises and scratches on her face. He insisted she go see a doctor, but she said she had to watch the store, so he took over the store for her that morning.

Chris recently posted about Landslide, a song recorded by Fleetwood Mac and some lesser bands since then.

It's always been one of my favorite songs, and took on new significance for me in the past couple of years. When I saw the movie Jack Frost , there's the scene where Jack dies, and the music played over that scene is none other than Landslide.

A week or so after I saw that, I had a tape on in my car with my kids' favorite songs, and Landslide was playing. The roads were wet and slick, with some sleet and rain. I look in my rearview mirror, and this truck is coming down Ladue Road behind me, much too fast to be able to keep from rear-ending me. The truck was a Sysco truck (the grocery people, not the router people), and the driver didn't realize how slick the roads were. I pulled off the road in time for the truck to zoom past me, where he was able to stop at the bottom of the hill. I caught up with him -- he was sitting at the stop sign stunned at what had almost happened. In language not to be repeated here, I offered him remediation on the laws of physics and diminished mental capacity.

A funny thing about Landslide is that we're supposed to look at the snow-covered hills, when the Landslide would bring the singer down. But wouldn't it be an avalanche in that case? I guess the author of the lyrics didn't want Stevie Nicks singing

If you see my reflection on the mud-crusted hills, well the landslide will bring it down.

Ben has inadvertently given Fox an idea for their next "reality" show.

Reality Bites

The show would feature real people eating real food (really gross food in some instances) to the point of getting really sick and issuing real vomit. Merging some of their more successful themes, this new show could include

• Animal-challenge night, where contenstants go up against animals that are adept at consuming certain foods. If the human challenger wins, he or she gets to eat the losing animal.
  
• "Millionaire" night, where the challenger tries to out-eat a millionaire; whoever wins gets to eat the loser. Ties would be decided by the oatmeal creme pie battle described next.
  
• Oatmeal creme pie night, where the challenger goes up against Ben Brodie Here, the contestants just boast about how many oatmeal creme pies they can throw down, without really eating anything at all.
  
• Iron Chef night, where the challenger picks one of the Iron Chefs as his or her opponent. The two then spend 60 minutes preparing food that must include a theme ingredient. Then, each must consume all of the other's food. The winner gets to eat Kitchen Stadium
  

Reminds me of the Monty Python sketch where Ron Obvious eats a cathedral.