darkness

God damn it, they've made black paint. Finally. But it's still not black enough.

computational linguistics

I have a course on something that I guess resembles computational linguistics, for which I have to take an exam in 2 hours.
So what is text mining and data mining useful for? Building "a more intelligent Google" of course.
And what about an example of a malformed sentence? "The green, colourless ideas are sleeping furiously."

My New Hobby:
Confusing text mining web bots with ambiguous sentences.

"Would fine times be forever flawlessly falling through the fallacies of faceless fires!"

"John, come here!" "What now?" "I think the text bot got high on semantic tree cycles again!"

happiness

I just realized upon opening the blog dashboard that the previous post had been the 100th.
Well, I was under the impression that this includes updates to previous posts to fix typos and shit, but no. It does however include one or two drafts whose content I'm not very sure about yet. So whatever, let's celebrate the new year with post number 101. Or number 100 if you think the new millenium came in 2000, which it did not.* By the way, there's a bank called "Millenium" here whose offices look more like beauty salons or something (which is not necessarily a bad thing, it's actually rather original). They kind of built "Europe's tallest Christmas tree" here in Bucharest. Well, it's not actually a tree, it's more like a regular steel structure that vaguely looks like a tree, and I find it very ugly, distasteful and ... well... not too tall actually. Nevertheless, when they lit it up for the first time on December 1st (which is also the National Day), 'bout 100 kilopeople rushed to see the kitsch. 'bout 50 kids got lost, people stepped on each other, it was mayhem, hell, chaos, whatever you like to call it. The square and its incident streets were flooded with people, traffic ground to a standstill, busses carrying people couldn't move anywhere, and of course people started ranting about busses being severely overcrowded and arriving way too late. So basically the whole city was fucked. "The tallest Xmas tree in Europe" they say. Some even doubt that assertion, but I couldn't care less actually: it's ugly, it's pointless and it's small. So big wow.
So happy new year, happy 100 posts and whatever.
If happiness were a piece of shit, would it smell like fresh forest soil?
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*) You'd also number this post 100 if you were a reasonable computerist who liked their addresses to start with 0, but in this case you'd be celebrating the "binary millenium" in 2048.

black magic

If you measure an optocoupler's output while driving its input directly from a 9-volt battery, you get a 2-leg transistor.



laugh! ha ha ha!*



You can still use it as a temperature sensor or maybe even as a radiation sensor.

"Merry fucking Christmas!"**

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*) I HATE those movies where they insert laughter in the background whenever some idiotic underpaid actor recites some funny line. It's an insult to my sense of humor. Is it like, am I too stupid to figure out for myself when to laugh and when to go take a shit? Good comedies never insert that stupid laughter. Only mediocre ones that target mediocre people need to.
**) a famous quote by Mr. Garrison.

environment2

As I said before in posts such as this, fuck environmental fanatism. People are part of the environment, they're part of nature, they're not above it. They can't objectively protect it or destroy it, they evolve with it, they go with it, they live and die within it. All toxic materials created by human industry come from the Earth (where the hell can they come from, outer space?), so they're part of the environment. Everything on this planet is part of the environment: stones, critters, humans and all the tools and crap and toxins they produce. We're not hurting the environment with anything, but we might be putting ourselves in a position of being evolved out of it a as species, I mean killed and re-integrated into it as dead molecules. Species go extinct all the time and that's a natural thing. So quit worrying about stupid panda bears that don't like to reproduce and small furry mice whose 20-head population count doesn't really influence anything, and start worrying about yourselves. This guy says it perfectly and I totally agree with him, with absolutely every word and sentence. And he's funny too.

math

This article claims that monkeys are just as good at math as college students. Well, 'mental math' at least. I saw a documentary once where chimps would remember a sequence of numbers at least two times better than an average human. Of course we like to claim we're the best and shit, but think about this: it's pretty normal for college students to be as dumb as monkeys, given the fact that certain 'big' and 'famous' colleges teach courses about... how iPods allow you to create a personal music library.

cbjts

CMOS integrated circuits are almost exclusively used in modern computers and stuff because they're small and profitable. They also sometimes consume little power when doing nothing.
Digital circuits using bipolar junction transistors are usually TTL, and sometimes ECL, maybe even IIL.
But BJTs can also be arranged just like MOS devices. I mean, why not. So without further ado, here is a CBJTS inverter:
(Complementary Bipolar Junction Transistors with Schottky).
The Schottky diodes can of course be omitted, but they make the circuit faster.
I shoud really build some of these when I find some time, as simulations tell me it's interesting. Apparently it can switch in 20 nanoseconds, works with a 1 volt supply and draws between 1 and 2 milliamperes depending on temperature. I guess the supply voltage needs to raised a little bit above 1V if multiple-input logic functions such as NAND are to be implemented in the same way they're done in CMOS.
Anyway, it should be fun. Just try to pronounce "cbjts". It sounds and looks cool.