The Book of the New Sun is the insanely praised magnum opus of Gene Wolfe. It’s so well reviewed that it’s been called science-fiction’s Ulysses. Since the people praising it are fellow writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, George R.R. Martin and Alastair Reynolds, any serious science-fiction fan had better sit up and pay attention. The tetralogy is also notoriously difficult to make sense of, so much so that there are published analyses of its deeper meanings and themes, such as Michael Andre-Druissi’s Lexicon Urthus.
I found a copy of the hardcover Gollancz 50 edition of the first volume, comprising the first two books The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator in a local bookstore and promptly bought it, knowing it to be one of the classics of SF that I never got around to reading. Unfortunately the second volume, comprising the books The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch doesn’t yet exist in that edition, and I ended up ordering a paperback copy online. That was many months ago. Yes, it took me that long to finish the series to my satisfaction.
Continue reading The Book of the New Sun →
So the Algorithms 1 class by Professors Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne of Princeton on the Coursera platform just ended. I just made my second of three attempts on the final exam, scoring 18.31 / 20.00. I may yet make another attempt next week as everything officially closes only on 30 September 2012. It’s been an amazing experience and I learned way more than I expected. Some thoughts:
- I found that I’m pretty strong on practical programming. I could complete all of the programming assignments with not much trouble, and ended up spending a fair amount of time on the forums helping others out with their programs too. I only struggled somewhat when implementing the optional extra optimizations that the professors suggested which are not graded. This mostly involved doing the same thing with half the memory or less, or cutting running time down drastically. For example, the toughest timing trial of the collinear points assignment gave you a maximum of 10 seconds to solve the problem. My first attempt came in at just under 7 seconds, and after much agonizing I got it down to just under 3 seconds. The very best students were able to get it down to just under 2 seconds.
- However I am terrible on the theory. I blame that on a lack of solid grounding in mathematics. I really suck at calculating things like the order of growth of running time for different algorithms or the minimum and maximum heights of different tree-like data structures. This calls for a good grasp of discrete mathematics. I’m also bad at internalizing geometrical principles, so assignments like collinear points gave me more trouble than the supposedly more sophisticated A* algorithm we used to solve the 15-puzzle. I’m currently signed up for Sedgewick’s Analytic Combinatorics class which runs next year but I’ll probably flunk that one.
- This class really thought me how beautiful some algorithms are and how you can achieve so much in just a few lines of code. At heart, they’re all about pure logic so it’s possible to even describe them to people with no programming knowledge whatsoever. I also think I finally managed to get the hang of recursive functions while doing the Kd-Tree assignment. I’ve always had trouble visualizing them before.
- I also learned how very limited even the powerful computers we have available to us today are. As a science-fiction fan, I’ve always taken it for granted that one day, perhaps sooner than we expect, we’ll be able to simulate sentient minds and even whole worlds inside computers. Unfortunately, even the lowly 15-puzzle is enough to make modern computers struggle. It’s pretty humbling. As Sedgewick likes to emphasize, while we can always look forward to ever faster computers in the future, it is even more certain that the size of the problems we need to solve in the future will grow faster than our computers will become more powerful. As we can’t rely on ever more powerful computers to do the work, we must instead design ever more clever algorithms.
Anyway, Algorithms II starts up in November so I’ll be back at it pretty soon. In the meantime, I should have a little extra free time.
Participating in the Coursera online courses is keeping me busier than I’d first thought, but I still had time to read up on science-related stuff.
- Ever wondered while on a journey why the return trip always feels like it passes more quickly than going there? According to this article in The Irish Times, this is due to how our psychological perception of time differs according to circumstances. The article calls this an act of retrospective timing. That is we try to estimate how much time an event took after it has already passed from memory. However, this is done by recalling the information we stored during the event, and the more information we stored, the longer the duration we perceive it to have taken. This means that when we’re first traveling to a new place, we have all sorts of new data to absorb and store, but during the return trip, most of it will have become familiar already. Hence we perceive the outbound trip to have taken longer than the return trip.
- Along with video-gaming nerds, comic books fans have long been relegated to the depths of otaku social outcasts. But this article from The Pacific Standard talks about closely identifying with a superhero may have measurable positive effect on their bodies. A study invited undergraduates, male ones only, to state how familiar they were with Batman or Spiderman and went on to query the students about how they felt about their bodies. Those who did identify with one of the superheroes not only felt better about their bodies, they were also able to demonstrate measurably greater strength, especially when they were shown pictures of a more muscular version of the superhero in question.
- This next link seems to be down frequently but it’s such an interesting article that I just had to link to it. It appears on the Psychology Today website and talks about the Baining, an indigenous group of Papua New Guinea, who have the distinction of being known as one of the dullest people on Earth. They apparently have nothing in the way of the usual cultural accoutrements such religious rites, myths, festivals etc. and discourage playful of any kind, even among their children. The only thing they have going for them is work and they value all products and activities that are associated with useful work.
- Finally an article about the Curiosity rover currently on Mars. It’s from The Atlantic and it reveals how the engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory built in a little Easter Egg. Specifically the vehicle’s treads are designed to spell out in Morse code the initials J-P-L as the robot slowly makes its way across the red Martian soil. That is such a geeky thing to do I just had to include it here.
The unexamined life is a life not worth living