by ·6 Comments

Picture google_results_dave.png

I have only one ambition in life.

Well… Two ambitions, but the other one is more of a long-term goal. For now, I just want to become the first search result on Google for my given name. This in itself being a crucial step in my larger world-domination’s plot, since we all know Google controls the world already.

As it is, I already have pole position for my old ‘dr Dave‘ moniker. But, and you read it here first, I am hereby setting in motion the switch in online identity from ‘dr Dave’ to just plain ‘Dave’.

No, I wasn’t sued by the American Board of Medicine, or any equivalent local institution. Beside, that Honorary Ph.D. in Curse Removal and Sexual Healing from Kinshasa’s University of Black Magic is all but legit.

However, crazy as the idea may sound (I have a hard time believing it myself), I might one day not too long from now be a bona fide doctorate student: it is likely that my honorary ‘Doctor’ title would by then confuse many people (not that it hasn’t already) which was never the intent. Hence the shift to unambiguous, simple, likable ‘Dave’. I’m guessing there are only a couple millions of us out there, someone has to be the one.

So, how are we doing on the Google front? Well, guess what: not so fucking bad!

Six, if you count them, six people (or things) are standing in the way to intercontinental online stardom.

Of course, I could rely on the quality of my content, my shining bright personality and ever-increasing public appreciation to slowly climb to first place. But I know better.

Instead, I have devised an infallible 6 Steps Program that shall shortly take me there, whence I will finally be able to rest and contemplate the world at my feet, laugh and move on from that Internet fad once and for all.

Please allow me to develop. Note that for obvious reasons, I cannot allow my now mortal enemies any extra link publicity and you will therefore have to Google their websites for yourself. Do it while you still can:

Continue reading

by ·2 Comments

A couple weeks ago, I was buried up to my armpits in Game Theory (nothing to do with Quake or World of Warcraft, trust me), Decision Theory, Cryptology and a dozen other fascinating topics. After a couple days non-stop writing/reading/studying/coding on those topics, I felt I really needed a two-hour break. Yet, feeling guilty about leaving my books for a minute, I compromised by downloading renting that award-winning movie about John Nash. I figured if I was not studying, at least watching a biopic on one of the pioneer in the field of Game Theory wouldn’t be straying too far off.

As it turns out, the movie is not as bad as I’d expected (which is not to say it is any good). Russel Crowe is as convincing as you would imagine a hunky Australian actor playing a nerdy US mathematician to be. All along, you half-expect Crowe to draw a gladius and slice open his mathematical studies nemesis. Instead, you see him mumbling and x-ray-visioning his way into mathematical stardom and bona-fide paranoid schizophrenia.

Continue reading

by ·3 Comments

Seriously, is anyone still reading this?

For the couple tenacious lost souls still around, here is the perennial pointless “Oops, has it been a month already?” post. Insert usual excuses here.

Unfortunately, I cannot even promise you any improvement for a while (possibly two whiles and a half, depending on how things go). However, more as a way to remind myself than anything, here are a couple things I may (or may not) devote a post to, in the (very) near future (OK, I’m typing some of these as I type this):

  • French Politics Part 2 and Ms. Ségolène Royal (I’m nearly done writing it, I swear).
  • Bug-ridden Apple Mail program and why I really, really hate its guts, after it annihilated my inbox and those past 4 months of received emails I hadn’t backed up yet.
  • Incidentally, why you may want to send again any mail you’ve sent me in the past 5 months (particularly if I haven’t replied to it yet).
  • Why Russell Crowe makes a very poor substitute to studying for my Game Theory test.
  • The so-called “Turing” Test: why it is meaningless, pointless and not all that interesting in the end.
  • Complexity classes and NP-completeness. What is it and can it mow your lawn? With extra special bits on primality testing, combinatorial explosion, and my very own personal position on the great P versus NP debate.
  • Cryptology, Encryption algorithms, DES and why they are indeed out to get you.
  • Possibly: what I will be up to, come this Summer, if things go according to the plan (they never do).

Alright, now that I’ve made a bunch of loose promises for new content, I will be going back to actually writing it.

by ·13 Comments

Picture amphi_mog.jpg Just so you don’t think for a moment that I am out there having fun when I leave this blog unattended for weeks on end…

Note that this snapshot entirely fails to convey the real Soviet-era ambiance of my 8am-1pm weekly Tuesday lecture: attended by twelve hardcore students huddled in a 300-seat auditorium, fighting sleep and hypothermia, with the dreary droning of a disinterested lecturer as background lullaby.

Can I get a Hell Yeah for advanced graph theory?!?

Hell… zzz…

by ·4 Comments

Programmers who can’t spell…

Dear unknown person who produced this unspeakably awful batch of code I have to work with:

While I realize your first language is not English, and even though I have my doubts about your French spelling abilities for that matter, could you please make an effort and not spell it ‘avaliable’ in a few hundred files and templates?

I know the code works all the same. It just bugs the hell out of me.

by ·Comments Off on Do you know Creole?

I finally took the time to format and update a small paper I wrote last month on the creolization process and its interpretations in cognitive science.

Despite its pompous title, it is very much layman-oriented and designed as a general presentation of creolization.

What is creolization, I hear you ask?

Well, it’s a fascinating phenomenon observed in communities where kids raised by speakers of a pidgin end up spontaneously producing a more grammatically advanced language of their own (a creole). Not only does it happen in practically every known instance of such pidgin-speaking communities, but a similar process has been observed in Nicaragua with sign language.

Beyond their ethnological and linguistics interest, Creolization studies give great insights as to how humans learn to speak and the cognitive process involved.

If you have some interest into either of these fields, you can read the whole thing here:
Creolization and Cognitive Theories of Language Acquisition

And by the way, don’t let the pedantic tone fool you… I don’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about in there: I am neither a linguist nor much of a cognitive scientist. This particular assignment just happened to have enough wiggle room that I could escape the dreary droning of a typical math’n’physics paper in my choice of topic.

Feel free to post comments, additional info or point out some of the gross inaccuracies no doubt littering the text in the comment area provided to that effect.

by ·Comments Off on In other geek news…

Around 10am GMT today, Unknowngenius Corp. headquarters have had to sustain yet another nasty email spam attack. This one ostensibly attempting to clog our inbox beyond recognition by sending thousands of spams to random addresses across the world, thus resulting in thousands of “no delivery” response mails being sent back to our own mailbox from hundreds different server, with no way to easily filter them out.

Continue reading

by ·5 Comments

Do I even need to bore you with detailed recounts of the ongoing motives for this month of particularly slow blogging?

Last week we had deadline frenzy, this week was oral-presentation-and-written-exam semi-frenzy, next week is final apotheosis of exams and masters programs’ applications. By wednesday, I should be all done and back to regular blogging, assuming my computer hasn’t been turned into a smoldering pile of melted plastic by the giant bonfire I am planning to light in my courtyard, using all the paper currently littering my apartment as combustible.

Ever since and until then, I am all work, very little play, and practically no blog to speak of.

However, yesterday night, I exceptionally took a short break to conduct non-studying-related activities, the exact nature of which shall remain prudently nebulous, except perhaps to mention they bore no relations to soccer whatsoever, featured role-playing aerobics, high levels of cross-channel cheekiness and female-on-male wrestling. Also resulted in my voodoo pin doll finally making an appearance in downstairs’ neighbour special 5am collection (see about wrestling, and ensuing loud thumping noises, above) as well as getting up this morning with a worryingly purple-coloured, very broken-looking, middle toe (see about same).

Therefore, in the spirit of keeping things even with my time, I thought I’d take some to post a few scattered notes I just found this morning in a forgotten corner of my apartment, impaled on a dead rat with a sharpened stiletto heel. I reckon they might be my working notes from two weeks ago, during the finishing line of my first deadline grand slam. Do not worry if you don’t understand much, or anything at all: it might just be that you are a) slightly less psychotic than I at the time and b) somewhat below ‘pathetic’ in your general level of geekiness…

Excerpts from dr Dave’s Working Notes: June 4 – June 11

[omitting: various doodlings of dubious artistic values and possibly offensive graphic nature, certifiably random combinations of symbols not identified as meaningful in any human languages, text fragments dissolved beyond recognition by stains of what appears to be high-grade alcoholic beverages]

Sunday 06/04

9:14 pm – Hmn. I wonder which month is today.

Oh my.

I think we have just entered official freak-out deadline rush season.

Monday 06/05

3:24 pm – Interesting fact about computer labs and thermodynamics: a balmy outdoors tropical-jungle temperature seems to turn into slightly uncomfortable bone-melting heat in rooms filled with two dozen cheap PCs running 24/7.

3:46 pm – Attempt to refurbish some of the older computers’ fan into more useful human-cooling activities thwarted by nosy sysadmin. Perhaps it’s time to get ssh going and work from home.

Continue reading