Seriously, who wants to help me start a zombie store?
Category: Mild Lunacy
The DBC of CS
Social engineering at its finest: SCIgen uses a context-free grammar to generate comp sci papers entirely too much like those from which I’ve been expected to learn for the past two years. It’s a little scary how good the results are. I was able to read the entire abstract of my personal paper while nodding my head, although the first clause of the introduction (“Unified metamorphic methodologies have led to many unfortunate advances”) broke the spell.
Oh, right, the social engineering part is that they got one of their generated papers accepted to a conference. Well-played, humans who probably remember daylight!
It turns out I actually did go to school.
I just had a stupiphany that would have been great if it had happened six months ago, when I had the option of submitting a thesis. Whoops!
See, you could store bitmap indices on a varchar field in a database as a two-dimensional black-and-white image for each character position! Normally you wouldn’t use bitmaps for text because the density would be less than 1%, but what if you compressed them like PNGs? You could save a huge amount of disk space, because sparsity would improve the compression ratio, and clock cycles aren’t nearly as valuable as disk access in this kind of situation so the decompression would be parallelizable. The binary operations would reduce wildcard search time by like an order of magnitude! Hell, you could probably store an average-value flattened composite for returning more relevant results faster, and since varchars only go to 256 you could do it as a standard grayscale image! And imagine the data mining you could do on a map like that, pattern recognition, domain linguistics, not to mention just rasterizing it and putting it on your wall…
I promise there are people out there to whom this makes sense. Oh well. Maybe someday I’ll write a paper.
Hard Action Adjuster
There is a new Lady in the Next Cube.
LitNC: “You know what I think? They need to–grow some, and tell that bitch–they let her run that place. You know? She’s an adjuster.“
Strutting around like she owns the place! She’s a loose cannon! She can’t be trusted! Hand over your badge!
Today is 03/04/05. It’s 3-4-5 Day! Bet that makes you think, huh? I bet you probably already missed 01/02/03. That’s something to regret, right there. Are you aware that this is the only 3-4-5 day you will ever see? You’ll be dead before the next one! You’re such a waste! Why don’t you THINK!
Happy 3-4-5 Day!
Charity ad seen on the back of a bus:
Donate Your Car To Us
& End Homelessness
“The Hausenbildenmächina works at last, Greta! It could be change the future of the world! But the reaction only occurs at exactly 88 miles per hour.” Hans shakes his head in despair. “I can’t go that fast! Not even on my European racing-style bicycle!”
“Ach, Hans!” Greta takes his hands in her own. Her eyes are full and bright. “I always believed in you, always knew–if only we had some way to obtain one car! Any car! But our German-or-possibly-Austrian credit doesn’t carry over to these United States.”
“Greta,” says Hans, face suddenly alight, “I may just have a plan!”