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MAT111N

MAT111N has been one of those repeating frustrations. I have registered for it three times already in the past; and never... never... never managed to get the first assignment in. And then realising that as the work piled up, and other, "more important" courses took priority I would not be able to cope with it - I have had to repeatedly deregister for it...

Well.... "NO MORE!" I cried. And I closed my eyes, and then opened them again so I could see, and grabbed my latex2e manual and registered for it again. I do not even need it to complete my degree; but I could not bear the idea of MAT111N sniggering at me as I lay beatan and broken on the ground.

And with eyes blurred with synthetic divisions and Upper Bound theorems and radians and polynomials and DeMoivre and a load of spinning mathetmatic symbols I completed the 17 page assignment in beautiful clear readable fonts and submitted it 5 minutes ago.

I now sit here... proud and defiant with my head held high and MAT111N cowering before my Latex2e Manual.

later...

All fluey, poor little me...

On Friday I started feeling twinges of not so niceness; and decided to take it easy and not to go to shul. On Shabbat I did not move out of bed, hardly at all... On Sunday I spent most of the day in bed hoping that I would be cured the next morning. I did spend 2 hours each night working on my assignment though; but I could not manage more without feeling dizzy. The stuffiness of the study did not help. Sandra meanwhile has a test tomorrow morning and her anxiety is growing.

This morning I woke up to a headache, glassy eyes, and a horrible cough. So I made an appointment with the doctor and crossed my fingers that my platelet count is not dropping and hospital only a few hours away. As this is what happened the last time I caught the flu.

Sandra meanwhile drove for the first time to the Technikon by herself today. This is a watershed moment; as it means dealing with real traffic in the area. She successfully got herself to lectures and back again.

I went to the doctor and took a platelet count, and thank heaven, the count was approximately 270. Which is wonderful. She has prescribed me antibiotics - specifically Augmentin - and has told me to spend today and tomorrow taking it easy; and only to return to work on Wednesday. I am not allowed to take generics as apparently the binding agent in the generics may have bad effect on me!

Today is Yom HaAtzmaut. Which means I can shave as I consider it to be the dawning of our redemption. This belief has been approved by the chief rabbinate and its only Haredim and Chassidim that do not follow it. Jews who don't believe it is the dawning of our redemption need to wait until Sunday the 6th May before shaving. I, and others like me who believe that this day is the dawning of our redemption, can not shave again from tomorrow until Lag Ba'omer (6th May) as once again we are mourning for the hate in the world between man and man.

later...

its hot in here with the door closed...

Sandra and I have been studying all evening in the study. Its hot in here without air-conditioning and the door closed. Under normal circumstances the door into a stuffy study would be open. But in the middle of the night Sandra woke up and could not fall asleep. She had read somewhere that the smell of lavendar can help one relax and fall asleep.

In fact Wikpedia says:-

It was used in hospitals during WWI to disinfect floors, walls and other surfaces. Lavender is soporific, and added to bath water or sprinkled on pillows aids relaxation and sleep.

And she had some lavendar oil - so she decided to put a little oil in her pillow...

... well in the middle of the night I woke up to a pungent smell and a distressed wife. Well, we had to change all the sheets and linen and swap the mattress and turn on the air-conditioning full blast in an attempt to make the air in the bedroom breathable. The lavendar rich mattress is now in the corridor directly outside the door to the study. In order to be able to breathe whilst studying the door had to be left closed despite the humid stuffy heat of a sultry durban night.

later...

Oooooooooops....

I was playing around pressing buttons in blogger and accidently deleted my template... I have been rushing around trying to make my blog semi-presentable again..

Geez...

Well I have to stop now.. at least the panic has subsided a little bit as I managed to retrieve the essentials from Google's cache. And Sandra is threatening to get cross if I don't shut down soon. Well - I suppose this will motivate me to spend some time on the template which has not been changed for a few years - until now.. Grrr... lots of work to do still....

later...

sierpinski blur

sierpinski blur
Originally uploaded by ilanpillemer.

I have written a little program that creates this blurry sierpinski gasket.

I have written it in C.

So if you are interested in that sort of thing here is a link to the code.

Meira joins the fray...

Meira is now blogging too. Since she is about to leave for Italy in less than two weeks time for a 3 month holiday - there should be some interesting travel writing from her. I am sure that it will be well worth reading.

Here is the link; I am also adding it to my blogroll down down the left side of my blog.

She is using wordpress which in retrospect is the blogging technology I should have used. Maybe one day I will change but not this year.

Oh... and Sandra has been driving the car to the supermarket and to the fruit and vegetable market by herself. But she has still not crossed Berea road whilst driving by herself.

hmm. and when looking at her blog I discovered that Eric Edelstein is also blogging. Its worth going to just for a look at his funny picture. Here is a link.

Oh... and here is a link to Simone's blog.

& 5,6,7,8!

steve_5678_advert
Originally uploaded by ilanpillemer.

Last week Sandra and I went to see the premier of Steven Pillemer's and Terri Pillemer/Davidhoff's play "& 5,6,7,8!". Its "their" play because they wrote the script after being commissioned by the Catalina theatre.

The play is rivetting and holds the attention from the first moment until the final bow. It uses the high-stress high-pressure environment of backstage interactions to set the stage, as it were, for exploding the very human psyches of the the protagonists. Through excellent performances from the actors working with a script that was clearly carefully crafted, the audience is allowed to share in tragedies whose banality only deepens the sadness of their trials.

The main character, Frankie, we see struggling to hold himself together as all the bad decisions, betrayals and bad turns in his life all come to stake their claims on his life. It however, is difficult to feel too much sympathy for his travails as they are clearly deserved. But it is the intensity of his anger and his frustration that provide an excellent foil for the sufferings of the other protagonists. Each one of these characters in some way, through Frankie's downward spiral, have their pain exposed to the audience.

The script is well written, the direction is well-paced, the casting is perfect and the performances startling.

Well worth seeing. There is still a week left of performances. So book your ticket now.

later...

Anton's project

Anton has started an internet project. The project is estimated to last a year; with a carefully planned ending.

He has said that it

has shades of Tarrentino and Wood Allen, wrapped in Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisophus...

Here is a link.

Vroom Vroom

Charade Side
Originally uploaded by ilanpillemer.

Finally. Yes.. Finally Sandra has a car.

We have been going for regular drives around the neighbourhood.
Here is a sample itinerary of one of these drives.

Down to the supermarket.
Park.
Back to the flat.
Down to the supermarket.
Park
Down to the Technikon.
Up to the Supermarket.
Down to the Technikon.
Up to the Supermarket.
Up to the flat.
Down to the Supermarket.
Park.
Back to the flat.
Down to the supermarket.
Park
Down to the Technikon.
Up to the Supermarket.
Down to the Technikon.
Up to the Supermarket.
Up to the flat.
Down to the Supermarket.
Park.
Up to the Flat.
Park.

... hopefully soon she will be willing to drive by herself without a passenger called Ilan.

later...

Jonas_Torben_Poh

Jonas_Torben_Poh_07.03.2007_00.42
Originally uploaded by ilanpillemer.

Congratulations!
Mazel Tov!
Glukwensch!

I am now a Uncle of the smallest Poh in the world.

Andrea, my sister-in-law, is now a mother!

later...

What fun!

I finished the koch snowflake (question 3 of Assignment 1) today.

I was really pleased with my algorithm, as it is very simple and has no special cases.
I did not use trigonometry, so I did not need to worry about quadrants etc.

Very beautiful structure; both the output and the code.

I then played around, and tried out variations.

Here are three different experiments for your amusement.

The first one was done by simply inverting the direction of triangle. Instead of opening outwards, it opens inwards. I provide the case for n=0,n=1,n=2 and n=4.

The second example was done by instead of creating perfectly equilateral triangles, each time it creates a slightly longer isosceles triangle. I provide the case for n=0,n=1,n=2 and n=8 (the most pretty - it looks like a buddhist mandala!)

Finally in the third I used the Koch snowflake but I interlaced two large green ones and then put two smaller ones inside.

Beautiful images, hey! What a fun course!

Letter to the Professor...

I just wrote an email to the author of my prescribed textbook in computer graphics at UNISA.

Here is the text of the email..

Hi,

I have just finished reading p78, your section on creating a Sierpinski triangle using recursion.
I am using the International Edition.

I think I have found an error that is not listed on your errata page located at this link:

(I am a student studying UNISA, the University of South Africa; and in the third year undergraduate course on computer graphics your text is the prescribed literature.)

You write :-
"Suppose that the vertices of our original triangle are given by the array

GLFloat v[3][2];

Then the midpoints of the sides are given by the array m[3][3], which can be computed using the code

for(j=0; j<2; j++) m[0][j] = (v[0][j] + v[1][j]) / 2.0;
for(j=0; j<2; j++) m[1][j] = (v[1][j] + v[2][j]) / 2.0;
for(j=0; j<2; j++) m[2][j] = (v[2][j] + v[3][j]) / 2.0;

Surely it should read
Then the midpoints of the sides are given by the array m[3][2], which can be computed using the code?

Or am I just an idiot; with an error in my brain?

Kind Regards,
Ilan Pillemer

And the longest sentence is...

I was looking at the longest line in the texts (see previous post) of Heart of Darkness and Alice in Wonderland; and I was struck by the fact that these longest lines were not whole sentences. So I now adjusted my program to find the longest sentence in these two texts. I pleased to tell you that the longest sentence in a book is much more interesting than the longest line.

With the Heart of Darkness example, I provide the preceding and following sentence of the longest sentence in the book as it frames the longest sentence very nicely. In order to make clear which sentence is the longest I have presented it in a boldface.

Without further ado... Here are the longest sentences in Alice in Wonderland and Heart of Darkness.

Alice in Wonderland

Hardly knowing what she did, she picked up a little bit of stick, and held it out to the puppy; whereupon the puppy jumped into the air off all its feet at once, with a yelp of delight,and rushed at the stick, and made believe to worry it; then Alice dodged behind a great thistle, to keep herself from being run over; and the moment she appeared on the other side, the puppy made another rush at the stick, and tumbled head over heels in its hurry to get hold of it; then Alice, thinking it was very like having a game of play with a cart-horse, and expecting every moment to be trampled under its feet, ran round the thistle again; then the puppy began a series of short charges at the stick, running a very little way forwards each time and a long way back, and barking hoarsely all the while, till at last it sat down a good way off, panting, with its tongue hanging out of its mouth, and its great eyes half shut.

Heart of Darkness

How could you?--with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums--how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence--utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference.

later...

And the longest line is...

I wrote a little program this evening that takes a text and works out the longest line in it..

I fed it (1) the dictionary (2) Heart of Darkness (3) Alice in Wonderland

Here are the results:

(1) pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
(2) the _Golden Hind_ returning with her rotund flanks full of treasure, to be
(3) `Why,' said the Gryphon, `you first form into a line along the sea-shore--'

hmmm....

"Free Will is considered a conceptual confusion."

This year one of university courses is on Artificial Intelligence.

I have started on the first assignment which only requires one to get a general feel of the different fields and ideas which one will be required to confront and to situate oneself within in order to be able to, in turn, also situate the ideas that will be taught. Ouch.

Anyways... Of the ideas that artificial intelligence needs to examine are the notions of free will and determinism. In my reading I discovered a philosophy called "Pessimistic Incompatabilism" which states that there is neither determinism nor free-will in this world!

Here is a definition of it from Wikipedia

Pessimistic Incompatibilism
While hard determinism clearly opposes the concept of free will, some suggest that even non-determinism might be incompatible with free will. This is pessimistic incompatibilism. Under the assertion that events are not predetermined (e.g., for quantum mechanical reasons), it is then suggested that any event has a probability assigned to it. Taking this concept further, it is suggested that an event is determined not by free will, but by the concept of randomness. For example, if there is a probability of 1% that one will delete this article, then whether or not it is deleted is not considered to be of free choice, but rather a brute random fact about the world. On this account, the notion of free will is considered a conceptual confusion, i.e. it does not exist in the sense which is misconceived, regardless of whether or not the universe is deterministic.


hmmm....

I hear its been hot in Europe this year...

Hot in Europe this year... polar ice-caps melting... hmmm...as my new favourite internet comic book writer, xkcd, says...


hmmm....

my tooth hurts

Last night of my Fedora Core 5 installation I upgraded my kernel to the latest stable kernel release; in order to make use of its better abilities to work with my ATI graphic chip. I also had to install the source for the latest kernel in order to build and link in the ndiswrapper module for my wireless.

I just was at the dentist, where for 1 and 1/2 hours he did things to my teeth. Its sore. He also gave me the quote for all the work that needs to happen due to damage I did to my teeth. I think I cracked one or something. Two crowns are needed. I already have four crowns. Its not cheap. In fact its so expensive its depressing. But I think medical aid will cover most of it.

I am also hungry, but my mouth is too numb for eating anything. Useful thing the mouth. If you don't know I had a car accident last week. I hit the back of someone else's car when there was a sudden traffic stoppage in the fast lane of the freeway. I am now driving a hired car. The spares to repair my car were meant to arrive tomorrow, so hopefully I will have my car back. I miss the car. I am still hungry; I suspect I am going to get more hungry as the day progresses.

Great start to 2007!

And then this Sunday.... my 3 year wedding anniversary!

And onward ho, driving into 2007

Well. What a week. I had a car accident. Ugg. Am now driving a rented car whilst waiting for my car to be repaired.

Last night, Orli and Denzil came over for supper on the last night of 2006. It was a really enjoyable evening. We had a cheese fondue and laughter.

Its now the 1st January 2007 and instead of going to see a movie I will be cleaning the study.

later...