Sun Mon Tue Wen Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30
Yesterday, during the afternoon it snowed again, and the snow did
stay for a short time. When the sun came out, is disapeared quickly,
even causing some fog to appear, especially in the burnt part of the field. Later on, it snowed a bit again.
Susan told me today that she video-taped it.
Yesterday evening it was a clear sky, and again I made an attempt
to find cometh Hyakutake. And I think I found it. Then I took
my Jupiter-21/M 4/200 lens and
attached to an oculair, so I can
used it as a monocular (one eye binocular), to give a 20x magnification.
I also tried my Helios MC 3M-5CA 8/500 lens,
giving a 50x magnification,
but that turned out a bit too much. This kind of magnification gives
you a hard time to find the object of interest, and if handheld the
images always shakes (at least with me).
This morning I looked up some instructions to find the cometh to
verify if what I had seen, really was the cometh Hyakutake.
I then found out I had been looking to the Perseus constilation,
after which the street we live in has been named.
Fractal cabbage
When I walked into Susan's office, I
saw this picture that she
had made of this `green cauliflower' a long time ago. I also
had wanted to take a picture of one, but never came to do so.
(I also made a 1% quality JPEG version of it.)
I once wrote a small C program
for MSC to generate cabbage fractals.
(follow-up)
Live video
He put a picture of himself on a page
in one of the TransCoop deliverables.
Li-Xia is going to cook some of my favourite
dishes tonight. Tofu (Ta Hoe, in Dutch)
dipped in egg, fried with a little leek, and some other things.
(follow-up)
Road Rally
Coca Cola have started a
game, which consists of finding a route through the U.S.A.,
with a length closests to 10000 miles, where each city is visited
at most once. I am afraid that it is an NP-complete problem,
which means it can only be solved by brute force. But as they do not
give you the distances between the city (nor which cities are
connected) the biggest part of the puzzle consists of finding out
this information.
Yesterday, Li-Xia, made some of my favourite
dishes: Dou Fu, Fish-sticks
with egg and tomato-ketchup, and sheep meet with eggplant.
CoCoA is the specification language of the
TransCoop
project, that we are working on. Today we received the following
email from Jürgen,
which is in the style of this language:
Hoi co-workers in the cooperative scenario instance WP32 of the CoCoA
cooperative scenario specification "WritingDeliverable".
In the step "Polishing" I made some actions in my private workspace
regarding the Extended SEPIA GUI section.
Unfortunately, I can not visualize my workspace history.
Therefore, I RequestExportOperation with VTT as destination workspace.
Source workspace is /home/ftp/pub/dimsys/TRANSCOOP/WP/wp3/documents.
Hope, VTT has appropriate GUI support for interactively resolving
conflicts that may occur during the merge.
I will now request the Communication function to go to step
"OutOfOrderForToday". The CM has not refused this attempt!
Maybe VTT has merged his actions into the shared workspace of the
cooperative scenario instance WP32 when I invoke the communication
operation "BackInOffice" tomorrow.
Regards, Juergen
I hope the cooperative scenario instance WP32 is commited soon by an
authorised user ... If not I will leave this instance ... And invitation
will be rejected automatically :-)
Computer Chess
Yesterday on the news they said that the chess program Fritz was 10 times
better than Deep Blue. I used Alta Vista and searched for "AEGON computer chess", and found the pages
of 1995 ICCA 8th World Computer Chess Championships. Here is said that
Firtz had won last year, and that Deep Blue was on a shared 3-5 place.
In the description of Deep Blue, it said is was the Deep Blue prototype,
which I think is the predecessor of the Deep Blue machine that
played against Kasparov
in February.
Then I read some notice that something was wrong with Alta Vista, that
it did not scan the web anymore for two weeks. That would explain
why it did not find the pages about the current tournament.
Then I used ilse, and found the pages of the
11th AEGON Computer Chess
Tournament, which must be the one that they mentioned on the news.
Fritz played against Karpov, and lost. Although they say it is the biggest
human versus computers chess tournament, Deep Blue is not listed
as one of the contesters.
Cottages at Cordeville
Last week I replaced my background image 'Cover of the current Ace Books
Heretics of Dune' with Cottages at
Cordeville by Van Gogh.
(follow-up)
Star Trek: The New Generation
Yesterday, I looked to the episode `Disaster' from ST:TNG. (I did not
see the last 10 minutes.) The funny thing is that I still get irritated
by all those illogical things in the serie, just as when I saw the
very first episodes of the original series.
After viewing this episode, I came to the conclusion, that the
Enterprise would not even pass todays safety standards. It seems
that the whole ship is powered by a single source. I cannot believe
that communication systems fail, if this primary power source is
cut off. Also the Turbo lifts seems to be highly unreliable. It
is surprising that there are no emergency stairs. And that doors
cannot be opened by hand. Many designs seems to be very stupid,
if I saw what went wrong during the disaster.
My conclusion is that in this serie the technical part is ruled by
what is required by the story line. Or in other words, the serie
is totally a-technical, and does not deserve to be called `Science
Fiction'!
I have been listing to `Symphonie Nr 5' from Beethoven, and
Concertos from Bach.
Two days ago, the Daily Planet reported about a rumour that Timothy Leary wamted to perform
a live suicide. They said that nothing like this was
mentioned on his pages. However, I did find
a statement that affirmed it. Of course, I informed the
editors of the Daily planet. Today I received an email from
Francisco van Jole
thanking me for this, as another email list had contradicted it.
It seems he already has given a deathday party last December.
Personally, I think it is very unlikely that he will commit suicide.
It would not surprise me, if his dying will be broadcasted as
described.
Last week I received a technical report, with an overview of
all technical reports from last year. In this it mentions the
technical report INF-95-15: Simple perfect squares and 2x1 perfect
squared rectangles of order 26 by Prof. A. Duijvestijn.
The tables are
available online.
Prof. A. Duivestijn is one the founders of our department. He
started his research after simple perfect squares a long time ago.
When I started studying the book `Graph Theory' by Bëla Bollobäs
already mentioned the only simple
perfect square of order 21 which he had found.
(follow-up)
Benches
This morning some people were busy with fixing the benches that had been
standing loose on the square in front of our building since they put
them there last December. Last week some people had put some of
the benches in the middle of the square, out of the shade into the
sun, I guess. I do not know whether there is a correlations between
these two events. Someone suggested that they might be doing it, because
they are afraid that some students might take them home. That might
be difficult because they are quite heavy, but students can usually find
a work-around. However, the benches have been there on the square for more
than 4 months now, and nobody seemed to care. (One lesson might be:
Steal things when you do not need them yet.)
Finally, she started repeating words after us. Yesterday she repeated
Li-Xia, saying the chinese words for lamp and
shoes. This morning she repeated me saying shawl (in Dutch).
The Wirrel-Warrel puzzle
This afternoon, I made a PostScript file representing the
purple Wirrel-Warrel puzzle. The six pieces can be fitted into a
hollow cube of unit size 5, where the inside space is of unit size 3.
Home |
March 1996 |
May 1996.
