Today's Spiked Math led me on short little journey into hilarity. Starting with the comic which is all about cake (thereby combining two awesome things: cake and maths), I followed the posted link and found out that I'd missed the comic reference: the cake equation comes from something called the Drake equation. So I went on my way to Wikipedia and came across this description:

The Drake equation (sometimes called the Green Bank equation or the Green Bank Formula) is an equation used to estimate the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.

Except that I read "detectable extraterrestrial civilizations" as "delectable extraterrestrial civilizations". XD

Probably not what the lecturer intended me to learn from that lesson...

In Linguistics we have been studying how language changes. Something interesting about English, Modern English at least, is the fact that we only have one form of the second person pronoun, the word you. Most other languages have a separate term for plural, and possibly even a different word when showing respect.

English used to have these forms: thee, thou, and thy were singular forms, and ye, you and your were the plural forms. The plural forms were used to show respect. When addressing a superior one would use you and that person would respond using thou. The use of thou also showed familiarity; one would use thou when speaking to family members, but use you when addressing strangers.

Because of major social changes (urbanisation, the rise of the Middle Class) people didn't know who was who anymore. They couldn't tell who to be polite to, so they were just polite to everyone, using the plural form in all contexts. It then became standard to refer to all strangers as you, whatever the hierarchy. Eventually, we lost the familiar thou altogether.

Thou does still exist, in religious contexts. The reason for this is interesting. We think that thee and thou show respect, when in fact they were originally used to show familiarity; these words were used when referring to God because God is our father. Now we hear thou used in some older versions of the Bible and we think it is because when speaking to God we ought to show respect. It just shows how we keeping distancing ourselves from God. It's the same with the word abba. We know that abba means "father", but (I don't know about you) when I say abba I (used to at least) put that same sort of respectful distance into the word. Remember that song that goes: "You are awesome in this place, Mighty God. You are awesome in this place, Abba Father..."? In fact, abba is the Hebrew equivalent of daddy.

We think we ought to be proper and perfect, call him sir and never step a foot out of line, when all God really wants is to be our dad. He wants us to call him daddy, to know him well enough to use thou. To run into his arms full of dirt and grass-stains and tear-filled eyes and tell him we fell down again, even though he has told us a million times not to run so fast. To bring him all our failures and mess-ups and let him kiss them better. To not be afraid to come to him before we are perfect, and trust him to love us completely despite the dirt and the brokenness.

How not to do it (or: from geek to n00b in 2 easy steps)

I am an idiot.

Note to self: when playing with Putty be very very careful. (By Putty I really mean FreeBSD, but it sounded cooler).

The internet just gives you commands to type, and I happily type away, and then later realise that I've done something Very Bad. Those sites that supply the code need to come with warnings, like DON'T CHANGE THIS! Or at least, "if you're going to change this then make sure you've done this, this, and this."

I keep kicking myself out.

The first time I broke the shell by telling it to change to a shell it didn't have installed. I could log in but I couldn't login as root and so that wasn't very helpful. The ways to fix this are to reboot the system and then do some other things, but because it's a VM I couldn't reboot without being root. I asked the guy who set the test if I could start again and he reverted the VM.

Then I disabled the authentication. I did this because I was trying to use winscp to get files from my Windows machine into the VM, which doesn't allow you to su after you've logged in. What I was hoping to do was make it not worry about a password at all, you know just skip over that bit and let me be su (I'm not really worried about security, evidently). I can't remember if someone told me to turn off keyboard-authentication or if I just saw the option there and thought "ooh, let's try this!" >.< (Don't do that).

Now I can't login at all, because it can't authenticate my typed password...

There are other ways to authenticate, using keys etc. But you have to be logged in to be able to let it do that.

So basically I'm screwed.

I don't know if I can ask him to revert it again, or if I should just give up.

Playing with Putty

Adventure doesn't feel like adventure when you're in it. It's hard, it's tough, you have to make decisions and trudge through drudgery. Adventure involves long journeys to walk and bigger-than-you monsters to fight. I've been too busy slaying dragons to notice any reason to be excited about this whole Life thing.

But it's 4am - there must be something exciting enough to keep my awake at this hour (besides the coffee).

It has been quite a day. I approached this weekend with much trepidation, and in explanation as to why I will list for you some reasons. First of all I have three things due for Monday - one being a big maths project which I couldn't wrap my head around until today, an English research essay due for Wednesday which is my entire English mark for this semester, a maths test on Thursday, and work stuff for Friday. Besides all the usual hand-ins.
I postponed the essay, and the other later stuff is chilled, which leaves the three most stressful things for Monday, and they are:
A Matlab project I thought was an Insurmountable Mountain of Horror, but is actually Not That.
A Matlab tut to hand in.
A pre-interview test for a position I applied for for next year, and the thing I want to talk about now.

I applied for the geekiest job on earth. And possibly the most daunting: System Administrator. Basically, looking after the Rhodes network (all the connections and servers and mail systems and everything). In true geek style, we aren't getting interviewed for this job (well possibly, but that comes later). Instead we've been given A Task. It looks like this:

 

A nice little system which is running FreeBSD which I've never used in my life, and I now have to install Apache, mailman, Postfix, etc etc before the end of Sunday (meaning midnight). Fun things. What makes life amazing is that Rhodes uses a proxy. That just makes connecting to the internet (and installing things via internet) Pretty Tough.

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, then you're basically on the same page as me).

So why did I apply for this job again? Not because I know anything. I applied because I really want to learn. I do have some idea of what these things are all about, but I want practical knowledge of it. And I'm gaining that just by doing this task. Google is my friend, yo! Except that nothing seems to work...


Yeah. I should probably get back to it. It's almost 5am now - that means it's already Sunday and I still don't know what I'm doing wrong. I also still have to finish my project, and maths tut, and hopefully sleep at some point too. Or maybe just drink more coffee coffee coffee..

What I've learned from Numerical Analysis (and other parts of maths):

I want a formula to solve everything. But what I'm supposed to be learning is a process.

At lower levels, memorising formulae is all you need to do. Later on in life, however, things get a bit more complicated. All you are given is a general method, and you have to adapt it for specific situations.

I miss that magical feeling of plugging in a formula someone else discovered and Hey presto! Right answers where you need them.
But magic is hard to find in the real world.

And sometimes you have to be the one to discover the formula.

Lolspeak?

On first glance I thought my linguistics textbook was laughing at me, as I opened it up to study mere hours minutes before a test. Turns out, however, that Hehe is actually a language, spoken in Tanzania. Go figure.

Getting bored in MATLAB

If you ever come across the program MATLAB (Matrix Laboratory - it's like a very complicated calculator, but not really), then ask it "why". You might get something like this:

>> why
The bald and not excessively bald and not excessively smart hamster obeyed a terrified and not excessively terrified hamster.
>> why
To fool the tall good and smart system manager.
>> why
The rich rich and tall and good system manager suggested it.
>> why
He wanted it that way.
>> why
The programmer suggested it.
>> why
Barney suggested it.
>> why
To please a very terrified and smart and tall engineer.
>> why
The tall system manager obeyed some engineer.
>> why
To satisfy some programmer.
>> why
Damian wanted it that way.
>> why
Can you rephrase that?
>> why
Because Damian wanted it that way.
>> why
How should I know?
>> why
Because they asked the terrified and smart and tall and tall programmer.
>> why
To fool a young tall hamster.
>> why
For the love of a bald and terrified mathematician.
>> why
It's your karma.
>> why
Some terrified and rich system manager knew it was a good idea.
>> why
Don't you have something better to do?