kakostacbhp’s Blog

Same story as before – I’m not happy with myself for this quiz. The difference is, this time I’ll be writing a reflection paper. Meanwhile, I’m trying to get a hang of the syntax for next week so I don’t get blown out of the water with another quiz. And, of course, there’s the nebulous midterm.

Loops seem simple enough, but I am practicing. I should do that more. One thing that I forgot to ask in class: does it matter if you write ++i or i++ in the incrementing part of the loop? I don’t think it should, but once bitten, twice shy.

And now I need to get some sleep before my 8 o’clock math class tomorrow.

I am now officially pissed at edublogs. I really don’t want to rewrite my post about laser suturing. Go read the article. So, instead, I’ll just leave you with my thoughts on the process:

It’s incredible. Three minutes to close a cut that could take weeks to heal on its own is nothing short of magic. I have some scars of my own, and while it’s amusing to poke them and not feel anything, the chance to prevent scarring, nerve damage, and even infection with this process is great. And instead of welding the edges closed, it makes your body fix itself.

The downsides: It’s not yet approved by the FDA (although there’s a company just waiting to commercialize it once it is). The equipment is expensive. Implementation will likely be difficult because a needle and thread are so much cheaper. It doesn’t work on subcutaneous incisions because the light from the laser has to penetrate.

Though, since it can heal the skin-level cuts, perhaps it will prevent scars from the skin and from internal organs from growing together (this happened to a good friend of mine from my dance class and it was not good for her).

Class. I understand the concepts well enough; it’s the syntax I’m having trouble with. Part of the problem is that Alice (or should I say PREOP?) is so much easier to build with because all you have to do is click and drag. There’s no real syntax to speak of. I’m getting spoiled in that class.

So. All that leaves me with is practice, practice, practice. My schedule kind of fell apart last week because of physics, so I’m gonna try that again.

I’m kind of excited about the finalist visit. I never got to do that since I wasn’t accepted into CBH until later, so I don’t know what to expect. I’ll see most of you guys there, I guess.

I could not believe my eyes when I saw this. I want furniture like this, if only for the entertainment value when I have guests over. Torvald, the chair, and Nora, the rocking stool, were created after a rereading of Henrik Ibsen’s “The Dollhouse”. (I haven’t read it, myself, so I don’t know if the names are references to the play, but I would bet they are.) The two pieces of furniture have sensors embedded in them. Torvald has a photocell that starts his lines when it senses darkness (someone sits down). Nora has an accelerometer.

Here’s a sample dialogue, with two people sitting down. It’s like a battle of non sequiturs.

T: This time I needn’t sit here and be dull all alone. You have just come at a fortunate moment.
N: It’s wonderful! Wonderful things don’t happen every day. Take this armchair; I will sit here in the rocking-chair.
T: Has anyone been here?
N: What a thoughtless creature I am, chattering away like this.
T: You can depend on me.
N: It will make me so happy to be of some use to you.
T: Don’t disturb me. Look straight at me.
N: I am in a silly mood today. Come and sit down here, and I will show you something.
T: How unreasonable and how ungrateful you are. What sort of madness is this! Can you not understand your place in your own home?
N: What do you want of me? Have you been sitting here waiting for me?
T: I may as well tell you plainly, we were once on very intimate terms with one another.
N: You don’t understand me, and I have never understood you either.
T: Explain yourself better. I don’t understand you. Can I never be anything more than a stranger to you?
N: You must simply listen to what I say. I have existed merely to perform tricks for you.
T: You are right, it has affected us both. Something ugly has come between us. Where are you going?
N: Isn’t there one thing that strikes you as strange in our sitting here like this.
T: Here you shall stay and give me an explanation.
N: Does it not occur to you that this is the first time we two… have had a serious conversation?
T: On the contrary, I feel extraordinarily lively. And you? You really look both tired and sleepy.

For a long time, there have been questiions about whether to make quick decisions based on gut instinct or to think about it and weigh all your options. I’m sure plenty of you have been told to do the former when taking those standardized tests, on the grounds that your first instinct is most often right, even if you can’t actually work the problem out.

It seems that there’s been research from both sides. So here’s another bit of research from the gut instinct side. These researchers used kaleidoscope images to show to the study’s participants and had them focus on half the images, but distracted them from concentrating on the other half. Then they were shown another set of images and told to pick out the ones from the first set. And the participants did better at picking out the images that they were distracted while viewing. Make what you will of this.

Writing that program on Monday really helped. And acting out the program and stack. I’m not happy with my quiz, but not as unhappy as the first quiz. I feel like I’ve learned most of the stuff, it’s just those darn nitpicky details. So I just have to practice with my own programs. It is very hard to make myself buckle down and work on CBH stuff without a schedule or deadline or even a set assignment, not just once but all the time. I’m going to try Jaclyn’s suggestion of setting a certain time every day for working on C++.

It seems that the Dept. of Defense has created a web site, Forge.mil, based on SourceForge. The main difference between the two is security requirements. Forge.mil is intended to be the home of DOD open-source projects. There are only three projects right now, and they’re restricted to the DOD tech community. The projects are publicly viewable, but only authorized individuals can edit the code. The public is encouraged to make suggestions. Here’s the FAQs page for the site.

Too lazy to think of anything even remotely witty.

Class is going all right. The quiz…. was a quiz, what can I say? And as Blake has mentioned, Alice is a wonderful way to familiarize yourself with object-oriented thought. I still need to catch up on my reading, though.

And I thought I’d mention this in the wake of the Hungarian notation discussion. I’m teaching myself HTML and CSS for Baja, and I’ve discovered that CSS can and probably should be written so that every line ends with either curly braces or a semicolon. Thank you, Jaclyn, and hooray for making wrong code look wrong!