The best part about picking out courses for next semester is that as a second semester senior, I have first dibs on everything - and since I’ll be done with my major and have only one course left for my minor, that leaves me with three courses I can take in whatever I want (I finished the core curriculum last year). Two will probably be philosophy - Existentialism and Phenomenology is being offered for the first time in years, and I’ve still got my eye on Advanced Logic - but I haven’t decided on the third yet. Maybe something from the Classics department? Maybe Intro French? It’s entirely possible that I’ll end up taking a second CS class just because there’s no reason not to take advantage of them while I still can, but it’s fun not being completely constrained by requirements anymore. It’s less fun that this will (probably) be the last time I pick classes as an undergrad, but that’s okay - there’s always grad school.

That Logic class for which I’m a TA has just started practicing derivations in sentential logic, so for the past week or so I’ve been doing some of the harder ones from the textbook just to make sure I’m not stumped when a student asks me to go over something during my office hours. I was pleasantly surprised to find that going a year without touching these things hasn’t left me unable to do them, but yesterday afternoon I spent about half an hour puzzling over one particular problem. I tried every trick I could remember, but I’d still end up two or three subderivations deep with no forseeable way out. Finally, I decided to dig up my notebook from when I took this very same class, knowing that somewhere in it I would find my solution to this very same derivation. After weeding through pages and pages of these things, I finally found the one I was looking for - only to discover a little note I’d copied down in class, warning me that it was unsolvable due to a typographical error in the textbook.

Today’s another one of those very long weekdays that has left me too tired to think of much of anything interesting to talk about. I turned in a paper this afternoon that I wasn’t entirely satisifed with - the first half wasn’t bad, but the second half was written with a slight hangover, and I think it suffered for it. On the other hand, I got back a paper today that I didn’t much care for when I turned it in, but at least it seems the grader didn’t agree with that assessment. Another paper due next week and one the week after, as well as the usual crop of quizzes to grade and a couple of freelance projects needing attention. I’m being kept busy, yes - but on the whole I suppose I’d much rather be busy than not, tiredness aside. In a couple weeks I’ll be registering for my very last semester as an undergrad (assuming I pass everything, and am unable to convince Financial Aid that I should be allowed to stay for what would be my fourth year), so the course-picking frenzy will begin soon. Can it really be the end of October already?

I had planned on commenting on misbehaving.net a couple of days ago, but I didn’t get around to it. I would, however, like to comment on the most recent post, which includes the following: “This is nothing new, of course, way before the age of Lara Croft, Alan Turing’s famous test of a true simulation of a human being involved a computer pretending to be not merely human, but a woman.” The post then links to Turing’s paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Here’s the thing: Turing doesn’t say anything about a computer pretending to be a woman, sorry. I have no idea where this mistake came from - I had thought the poster had confused the example Turing used to elucidate the imitation game with the imitation game itself, but even if that were the case it’s still wrong. Turing first describes a game in which two humans, one male and one female, interact with a third human who cannot see or hear them, and the third must guess which is male and which is female. This is not the imitation game itself, but merely an introduction to the real Turing test, which specifies absolutely nothing about gender: the only stipulation is that instead of trying to assign genders, the human guesser must determine which of the two other participants is human and which is a machine. A machine that passed the Turing test would be one that fooled the human guesser for a certain percentage of trials. And, incidentally, Turing also wasn’t trying to come up with a test for “a true simulation of a human being,” but rather an analysis of intelligence - what it is for something to be a thinking thing. It’s all very Cartesian. Honestly, I’m all for empowerment (or whatever), but displaying a lack of basic reading comprehension skills doesn’t do anything to further the site’s desire to “discuss women’s contributions to computing, and also to highlight opportunities and challenges within the field.”

Yes, the Halloween party was great - thanks for asking. (Yes, we’re all drunk.) It was suggested that I write a post proclaiming to the web as a whole that Erin’s a hussy, so consider this my proclamation: Erin’s a hussy. Also, Dan’s a fan of naked goth chicks. (These two are unrelated items, yet equally important.)

Morning-After Update: It turns out that mixing delicious Chinese beer with knives and pumpkins and later some vodka results in strange things happening on the Internet. You learn something new every day. Amazingly, I didn’t cut any fingers off, although my pumpkin ended up a little cross-eyed, and Chris’s poor cat was more than a little agitated by the presence of so many college-aged humans invading his turf. But all’s well that ends well.

I was surprised to get so many messages suggesting that, as a group, you might not be disappointed were I to leave the site in its present Halloweened state indefinitely; I’ve come to the reasoned conclusion that you’re all a bunch of closet goths. Don’t get me wrong - I haven’t had to do a white load on laundry day since before I hit high school, and I’m shockingly unashamed of my monochrome wardrobe, but I think the large bat and dancing skeletons might be just a bit much for non-holiday purposes. I’m pretty sure I surrendered the right to such things when I threw away my last tube of black lipstick. In fact, I believe the Goth Police would come and arrest me on charges of Impersonating a Creature of the Night - and that’s some pretty serious shit, right there. You’re unlikely to get off with anything less than a period of probation, during which you’re allowed to listen to nothing but the Crüxshadows and/or London After Midnight, and a minimum of one ankh must be carried visibly on your person at all times.

No, don’t worry - I didn’t overdose on Sisters of Mercy or anything like that, but with only a week to go until the Best Holiday Ever, I couldn’t resist making the site a little festive. (And at least black is easier on the eyes than last year’s bright orange.) Crispy and I will be doing some preparatory pumpkin shopping come tomorrow or Saturday - we’re having a small Thing on Saturday evening, although I’m not sure how wise it is to combine carving knives and alcohol.

A couple of people have written to ask why I haven’t commented on the recent batch of people falling from high places at NYU: there’s no specific reason. I suppose it’s surprising that we’ve had two suicides within the past month or so, but I don’t think it’s surprising that they both took place in Bobst - the first person just proved for everyone who’d ever wondered that yes, you would die if you hopped that tenth floor railing.

Of course, once midterm season hits, everyone starts to feel the strain - but freshmen more than most, especially if (like me) they’re trying to adjust to NYC at the same time that they’re adjusting to the whole college thing in general. Academically speaking, I’m under a great deal more stress now than I was my first year here, but I suppose I’m better equipped to deal with it (no longer being eighteen probably has something to do with that). If anything, I get a little sad when I think that this is the last fall semester I’ll be spending at NYU - at least as an undergrad.

I know I’ve complained before about people who decide they’re going to be computer science majors without ever having done any programming, but it’s midterm time again and I never cease to be amazed at the questions that come up during review sessions. If you’re taking a class in Java and you’re not sure what a for loop is two days before the midterm, that’s indicative of greater problems than those that are purely loop-specific, I’m afraid. I don’t think I’m just being smug here because I understand the material and some others don’t; this isn’t the introductory class for freshmen, after all. There’s a programming prerequisite that you’re supposed to have fulfilled before taking this one, either with one of a couple of other recommended courses or with the equivalent experience, and I honestly don’t see how anyone who’s taken even the minimum (one semester of C) can fail to grasp the fundamental concepts involved in fucking loops, fer chrissakes.

The following is lifted shamelessly from the new DFW book, which I’ve been enjoying since I picked it up on Friday. If you’ve read Hume before, or even if you haven’t,¹ you’ll recognize in the story of Mr. Chicken a wonderfully intuitive explanation of the Humean problem of induction (as opposed to the new problem of induction, which includes such things as Goodman’s grue puzzle):

“If you had the right classes in school, however, you might now recall that the rule or principle you want does exist - its official name is the Principle of Induction. It is the fundamental precept of modern science. Without the Principle of Induction, experiments couldn’t confirm a hypothesis, and nothing in the physical universe could be predicted with any confidence at all. There could be no natural laws or scientific truths. The P.I. states that if some thing x has happened in certain particular circumstances n times in the past, we are justified in believing that the same circumstances will produce x on the (n + 1)th occasion. The P.I. is wholly respectable and authoritative, and it seems like a well-lit exit out of the whole problem. Until, that is, it happens to strike you (as can occur only in very abstract moods or when there’s an unusual amount of time before the alarm goes off) that the P.I. is itself merely an abstraction from experience … and so now what exactly is it that justifies our confidence in the P.I.? This latest thought may or may not be accompanied by a concrete memory of several weeks spent on a relative’s farm in childhood (long story). There were four chickens in a wire coop off the garage, the brightest of whom was called Mr. Chicken. Every morning, the farm’s hired man’s appearance in the coop area with a certain burlap sack caused Mr. Chicken to get excited and start doing warmup-pecks at the ground, because he knew it was feeding time. It was always around the same time t every morning, and Mr. Chicken had figured out that t(man + sack) = food, and thus was confidently doing his warmup-pecks on that last Sunday morning when the hired man suddenly reached out and grabbed Mr. Chicken and in one smooth motion wrung his neck and put him in the burlap sack and bore him off to the kitchen. Memories like this tend to remain quite vivid, if you have any. But with the thrust, lying here, being that Mr. Chicken appears now to actually have been correct - according to the Principle of Induction - in expecting nothing but breakfast from that (n + 1)th appearance of man + sack at t. Something about the fact that Mr. Chicken not only didn’t suspect a thing but appears to have been wholly justified in not suspecting a thing - this seems concretely creepy and upsetting. Finding some higher-level justification for your confidence in the P.I. seems much more urgent when you realize that, without this justification, our own situation is basically indistinguishable from that of Mr. Chicken. But the conclusion, abstract as it is, seems inescapable: what justifies our confidence in the Principle of Induction is that it has always worked so well in the past, at least up to now. Meaning that our only real justification for the Principle of Induction is the Principle of Induction, which seems shaky and question-begging in the extreme.”

¹ I take it back. Math majors who have never been exposed to analytical philosophy are required to read some Hume (at least before mailing me to express their righteous indignation). Start with the Enquiry, particularly Section IV. You can even read it for free, if your delightfully argumentative heart so desires.