Monday, April 20, 2009

AeroPress and Number Theory

A warning to all who may use the coffee grinder in the SE lounge to make fine-grained coffee for use in an AeroPress: shaking the coffee grinder will blow the circuit breaker! It seems some of us don't realize that by applying rotating the axis of a spinning body, orthogonal to the plane of rotation, we are in fact applying a force against the angular momentum of said body. If this rotating device is powered by an electric motor, this causes the motor to draw more current to maintain its current speed. In short, don't shake the coffee grinder.

Also, I picked up the Annotated Turing again over the weekend, and read the first two chapters on number theory. I found this to be absolutely fascinating! Now, if you're already well versed in number theory, then these overviews may be redundant for you, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Looking forward to what else is in this book.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Things on my Todo list

My current list of things I want/need to do:

Reading:
Petzold, "The Annotated Turing"
Homer, "The Odyssey"
Huth and Ryan, "Logic in Computer Science"
Tennant, "Specifying Software"
"Software Architecture, A Primer"
Gorton, "Essential Software Architecture"
Dickens, "Oliver Twist"

Writing:
2125 end of term summary paper
2130 empirical study paper
conceptual model of REST process & motivation
ERB paperwork

Coding:
Instrumented JUnit and PyUnit
Diplomacy relationship analyzer
Qualitative Coding Application
iPhone app for navigation and aviation
Custom Braid mod - or just re-implement the engine with Java 2D and OpenGL

Misc:
Taxes
Health Insurance Claim
Personal/professional website, portfolio, and cards. Would like these to have a unifying visual theme.
Bribe people on craigslist for sold out Johathan Coulton tickets
Plan Carmen's bachelor party, 3 camping trips, and a houseboat rental scheme.
Paperwork for windsurfing class.
Compare & choose sailing clubs for the summer
Finish Bluenose

Obviously, this list is waayyy to long to be reasonable. I think you can see where the priorities should go, however (finishing ERB paperwork > reading Oliver Twist :P ).