2005 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VIII

nothing like it in the world

I kind of meant to do productive stuff today but I am too unfocused. I am a little concerned about how well I'll be able to survive once grad school actually starts. I think tomorrow I am going to organize stuff. My apartment is not too messy except all my important paperwork takes up my whole table. I also need to sign up for classes. At least I paid my bills today. I also got my much-delayed July paycheck.

I did a bit of homework on what research is going on here at Oregon State. There is a physics prof that does a little bit of PV research, but it sounds like it is mostly on the side. She is part of a troika of PV research, the other parts are in Chemistry and EE. I think the EE research sounds the most interesting. On top of that, another EE prof researches alternative energy including windpower, ocean power, hydrogen, and hybrid vehicles. L, the other Applied Physics PSM student that is here, is also interested in alternative energy, so I think we can team up to find where some good internships are. The third Applied Physics PSM is not here yet, but it's getting close to school starting - maybe I should send him an email.

I was doing pretty good recoding my RSA helper programs until I hit a big data type problem. I might be able to fix it, but I think I might set it aside again for a while.

I broke my fifth LiveStrong bracelet the other day. I'm on my sixth now. It's the last one in my reserve, I need to get some more.

I went to Borders again today. I bought a Linkin Park DVD and another Steven Ambrose book (I'm becoming an addict). The book is about the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. The DVD has some interesting stuff on it.

This weekend's exploring is just going to be limited to campus. I walked around campus a little bit to kill time between recitations the other day, there is still a lot I haven't explored. I found the building with the nuclear reactor, but I don't think I can just go in. I should find out if they give tours. Oregon State's new engineering building is almost complete and I really want to get in there and check it out - just like I did when MSU's BPS building was all but completed.

title

Well, I am done for the week. Tuesday's recitations went badly but Wednesday and Thursday were pretty good. The students have a midterm tomorrow, so I spent an extra 45 minutes or so after my last recitation to go over more material. I didn't mind, especially since nobody showed up to my 5:00 Wednesday recitation so I went home early.

I finished reading The Far Side of the World. It was alright for the most part but it suffers from the same problems as Master and Commander, the worst being a horribly anticlimatic ending. Another letdown. At least I only paid $3.00 for this book. Now I want to go back and watch the movie again because I thought it was done well. It took the good bits from the two books and threw out the bad stuff (like the endings).

I am hunting around for a good computer desk and chair now. Staples and OfficeMax don't really have anything good. IKEA looks like they have a good desk, but I can't afford IKEA. And nobody has a good computer chair for a sane price. I don't care how comfy it is, I'm not paying $300 for a damn chair. Guess it's time to make the rounds of the local thrift stores again.

I won at Hearts again today. The funniest part is that I can't shoot the moon. Everybody else does, but then half the time they get in each other's way and completely botch it. I'm getting better at strategy and screwing up other people's shooting, which is fun.

I got the latest issue of WIRED today. Apparently one of the contenders for this year's DARPA unmanned vehicle race is a joint MSU / UCSD team. I think Oregon State also has a vehicle. We'll see if any of them can get very far past the start line (unlike last year).

there is a new theory

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

...sometimes it just takes a bit of sarcasm to put stupid things in their place.

D-FENS

I'm getting up early tomorrow morning - an unusual occurance. I'm getting up before the crack of noon to see a defense. In Plant Pathology. I was about to delete the email notice until I saw that it was a Professional Science Master's defense. (My track has no graduates yet, but there are three other PSM tracks here.) I'm still not entirely clear on the finer points of my degree program - apparently we need to defend too. But defend what? We don't write theses. I'm assuming it has to do with the internship project. I guess I'll find out tomorrow morning.

More recitations tomorrow. Shouldn't have any trouble coming up with material, but I'll be handing back homeworks which means the students may cry and whine about points. My favorite was the student who wrote a bunch of crap that was one step from saying 1 = 0 and then the following line had the right answers. I docked him quite a bit, which I am at liberty to do because I'm supposed to focus more on the method than the right answers. Let's see if he complains.

I went to the coast on Sunday. I did not go into town, I just sat on the beach and read The Far Side of the World. I'm finding it a bit more palatable than Master and Commander, which I did not like. I also got a little sunburned.

I put some pics of my apartment up at the Yahoo site. Now that I have a futon and proper bookshelves I feel better about showing other people where I live.

another reason i'm not going for my ph.d.

From CNN article "Big jobs that pay badly":

Academic research scientists

"A career with one of the most disproportionate ratios of training to pay is that of academic research scientist. A Ph.D. program and dissertation are requirements for the job, which can take between six and eight years to complete. Add to that several years in the postdoctoral phase of one's career to qualify for much coveted tenure-track positions. During the postdoc phase, you are likely to teach, run a lab with experiments that require you to check in at all hours, publish research and write grants – for a salary that may not exceed $43,000."

"The length of the postdoc career has doubled in the past 10 years, said Phil Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University. "It's taking longer and longer to get there. You can't start a family. It's really tough." And it's made tougher still by the fact that in many disciplines, there aren't nearly as many tenure-track positions as there are candidates."

"So, to those who earn their MBAs in two years and snag six-figure jobs soon after graduation, your jobs may be hard, but maybe not quite as hard as you think."

o lancer evolutions, where art thou?

I went into town today to get a rice cooker because I suck at making rice. The Bed Bath & Beyond here is right next door to the Mitsubishi dealer, so I decided to stop there afterward and take some pics of the Lancer Evolutions. However, when I got to the store I couldn't believe my eyes. The entire Mitsubishi dealership had up and left. No cars. Nobody in the building. Nothing. I swear I saw them open as recently as Tuesday.

Fortunately the car watching was not a complete bust. Just down the street there was a used Honda dealer with an orange Acura NSX.

NSX 1
NSX 2
NSX 3
NSX 4

(My usual image uploading program is broken.)

I ended up going into Staples as well. They actually had a really good deal on bookshelves, so I got two. My apartment is no longer ghetto. Not like I was ever as bad as this guy...

I did not work on the RSA code today. I'm having some kind of problem compiling the library for the new data type I want to use, and I worked on it too much yesterday. Tonight I am going to grade the homework for my recitations, and maybe watch a movie. Tomorrow I think I am going back out to the coast.

Edit: Just finished grading the first of two homeworks. I laugh when I see someone trying to BS me, but then the fun fades when I have to figure out how much of their work is BS and what kind of comments to write. It's so much easier to grade the people that actually know what they're doing. 10/10 - next!

93 is not prime

I found the bug. It did not involve a 216-digit number. Part of my problem was some of my inputs. For example, I typed in 93 as a prime without thinking. There were also problems with actual primes though. I had Mathematica double check some of my program's numbers, and I found a disagreement in certain cases. I figured my program might be blowing out variables again and made everything an unsigned long long. I was right - everything works great now. My RSA keygen program can be very slow though, if anyone knows of a good algorithm for e * d = 1 mod phi, solve for d, let me know.

Edit: Never mind, I figured it out. The way I was doing it was horribly inefficient. My keygen is fast now and works most of the time, but I think I'm blowing out variables again. I am not going any further until I find a better data type.

I also remembered, I get paid tomorrow! About damn time.

generator

Today's physics recitations went much better than yesterday's. I used more of my natural teaching style today. Fewer people showed up today, which is a little discouraging, but at least the few people that show up probably want to be there. Small groups are easier to work with anyway. I collected their first homework problem today but I haven't looked through the stack of papers yet.

The math thing I worked out yesterday is used in the actual process of RSA encryption and decryption. Now I'm working on my RSA key generator, which is a mess. After I first coded it, I found there was some kind of nasty bug that made the keys not work. I replaced a chunk of code and checked my prime number generator, but the problem is still there (maybe even worse). If I can work out this bug it would be a good coding day.

I ran across an article today about a company that uses Stirling engines with solar collectors. That's pretty smart. So this morning I was looking at solar power stuff and coding RSA stuff, instead of preparing for my recitations.

need for speed

I had my first recitations for the new session's physics class today. It went pretty rough. The class is non-calc E&M. I think I like the calc-based classes better. I was supposed to go through three problems, but I got through one in the first recitation and two in the second. On top of that, I got the late afternoon sessions, everybody's already spaced out by then. Fortunately I only have six more work days for this session. One is tomorrow. Hopefully in the fall I can snag a calc-based physics TA spot.

I killed the time between recitations by going over the new modular exponentiation algorithm I found a couple days ago. It's really not so much the math that's the clever bit as the implementation in the code. I put it into my program and ran it side by side with the old method. I was expecting maybe Corvette vs. Model T results. It's more like the speed of light vs. a Model T. Probably worse. The new method is so fast that its processing time doesn't even register, even when I max out the new unsigned long long variables. Here is why the new method is faster:

Problem: 4353^(10^18) mod 13562
Number of operations required for old method: 10^18.
Number of operations required for new method: 60.

So I'm using the new method from now on.

I'm somewhat tempted to get bigger numbers, but I estimate that even the mythical thousand digit data type would take 3325 operations at most. Working that out proved that the algorithm goes as the log of the exponent. Somebody somewhere was very clever indeed.

I might poke at the RSA stuff a little more tonight, but more likely playing the pirate game and going to bed early.