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mayhapI love my Robots professor. Today he brought in this old clunker laptop, belonging to NYU, because "you don't do this stuff to your own computers."
Apparently he started playing with this computer by sticking a card in its PCMCIA slots, and it would autodetect it. Then he would stick it in and take it out, and sometimes it would crash, and then he stuck it in while it was booting, and it crashed rather more often, especially when he took it out again while it was booting.
Then he got several different cards and kept swapping them in and out and in and out. Now, when you boot it up, all it does is make feeble pulsing sounds like a malingering game of Asteroids. It's great. Who knows why, precisely, it does this, rather than, say, being silent and unresponsive.
This little demonstration was part of a discussion about how the mind solves problems even as it's changing and developing, in case you were wondering.
He also has the greatest way of writing on the board – whenever he's talking, he writes down cryptic little abbreviations, or single letters, entertwined with wildly gesticuating arrows and underlines. By the end of class it looks like some obscure equation in some newly-invented system of mathematics, frequently without any notations which retained their meaning after one has forgotten the specifics of what he was saying. I bet it confuses the class who uses the room after us.
Yet another day passed and I did not kill Demon Child, although it was tempting. I am proud of my achievement.
Oh, some other things I forgot because the damned keyboard at the kiosk was killing my fingers:
My third-grade teacher, Wendy, turns out to be a squeeing Alias fangirl, and so is the second-grade teacher across the hall. We squeed together.
Also, I nicked this CD from work. I'd half-forgotten about Shel Silverstein, but he was the man when I was in second grade. Still is.
Apparently he started playing with this computer by sticking a card in its PCMCIA slots, and it would autodetect it. Then he would stick it in and take it out, and sometimes it would crash, and then he stuck it in while it was booting, and it crashed rather more often, especially when he took it out again while it was booting.
Then he got several different cards and kept swapping them in and out and in and out. Now, when you boot it up, all it does is make feeble pulsing sounds like a malingering game of Asteroids. It's great. Who knows why, precisely, it does this, rather than, say, being silent and unresponsive.
This little demonstration was part of a discussion about how the mind solves problems even as it's changing and developing, in case you were wondering.
He also has the greatest way of writing on the board – whenever he's talking, he writes down cryptic little abbreviations, or single letters, entertwined with wildly gesticuating arrows and underlines. By the end of class it looks like some obscure equation in some newly-invented system of mathematics, frequently without any notations which retained their meaning after one has forgotten the specifics of what he was saying. I bet it confuses the class who uses the room after us.
Yet another day passed and I did not kill Demon Child, although it was tempting. I am proud of my achievement.
Oh, some other things I forgot because the damned keyboard at the kiosk was killing my fingers:
My third-grade teacher, Wendy, turns out to be a squeeing Alias fangirl, and so is the second-grade teacher across the hall. We squeed together.
Also, I nicked this CD from work. I'd half-forgotten about Shel Silverstein, but he was the man when I was in second grade. Still is.
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Date: 2003-09-29 11:13 pm (UTC)One of the more entertaining parts of that co-worker's party this summer was the reading of Uncle Shelby's ABZ book.