In English, our traditional parting phrase is "goodbye."  I'm not sure what exactly this means, but that's the way it is.  However, if you translate the English "goodbye" into Spanish, you get adios, which means, literally, "to God."  The same holds for French's adieu.  Why have we ceased commending our loved ones to God with every parting?  Why have we secularized these good wishes?  Of course, I'm sure there are atheist Spaniards and Hispanics who still say adios, but the background is there.  It's a cultural thing...  In emotional partings, we typically make do with a firmer handshake, or a tighter hug, and a "take care."  I much prefer the Spanish Vaya con Dios.  How much better it is to bid your loved ones to go with God than to tell them to take care...

Why is it that in English we have secularized our good wishes?  People used to say "God speed."  Now we say "bye."  Even though Spanish people say hasta luego, hasta la vista, and nos vemos, they have retained the more formal and traditional form -- adios.  In French, as well, they have a host of goodbyes: au revoir, ciao (And yes, I know ciao is Italian, but they use it in French as well), salut, bon voyage, bon chance, and even the long-winded a teut a l'heure.  Yet still they have and use adieu, perhaps the most powerful of the bunch.  Why the difference between the Romance languages and English?

Especially in painful goodbyes, it seems like it would be useful to have some equivalent in English that you could use without anyone thinking you're pretentious, hoity-toity (sp?), maudlin, or melodramatic.  I suppose you could get away with saying, "I've never liked saying 'goodbye,' so I'll say 'God speed.'"  Or replace "God speed" with adios or adieu, but even though most people would understand that both mean "goodbye," they probably wouldn't understand the deeper meaning.

On other news, I've started re-reading Sylvia Plath.  Anyone who took Human Sit in team Phi (that's what it was in Antiquity, I can't remember what it was for Modernity, but anyone will remember the inimitable Drs. Moore, Hass, Freeland, Marenchin, and especially Rothschild) back in Spring 2001 will remember Plath.  Probably not as favorably as do I, but at least you guys know what I'm talking about.  It just occurred to me...  Out of the professors I listed there, only one still works for The Honors College.  Damn, I feel old.  (c;

I know my clock probably isn't exactly on the right time, but it's currently reading 12:21, and I'm sure it's close enough for me to say that it is officially my 22nd birthday.  This will be the first birthday I can remember when I've done nothing -- and by nothing I mean absolutely nothing -- in relation to the special-ness of the date.  I just toasted my birthday with some excellent rum with some friends who were over for something completely unrelated.  Unfortunately, I was the only person who enjoyed the rum.  'Course, it's spiced rum, so that might have something to do with it, and it's sweet and kinda thick, but I quite enjoy it.  Captain Morgan's Reserve Stock, I believe, or something like that.
 
My 22nd birthday, and the lack of fanfare accompanying it, has led me to wax introspective about the future of birthdays...  It's my 22nd birthday.  It's a little bit special for being the first birthday that isn't really special.  Let's say I can remember back to my 4th birthday.  I can't, but let's say I can.  That was really cool.  I mean, I was four, for cryin' out loud.  No longer "free." (That's how I used to say "three.")  Then five came along, and with it the promise of starting kindergarten.  Six was first grade.  That's a really special thing, since kindergarten isn't really school in the way I've since thought of it.  Seven was second grade.  Hell, anything up to 18 started a new grade, and that was a reason for that birthday to be cool.  I remember being ten, and starting fifth grade.  The last grade of elementary school.  Yay!  Also, it meant I had finished an entire decade of life, and to commemorate the fact we started recording my age using two digits.  Whoah, Nelly!  Eleven started junior high, twelve was the year before I became a teen, thirteen was the year I became a teen, fourteen saw me starting high school, fifteen meant I was old enough to think of myself as a "seasoned" teenager.  Not fourteen, not thirteen, but a whole fifteen!  Besides which, at fifteen-and-a-half I was eligible for a learner's permit.  Sixteen meant I was eligible for a driver's license, and a genuine upperclassman.  Seventeen meant I was a senior, and able to see rated-R movies alone if I so chose.  Eighteen meant I had graduated high school, was moving into college, and was a genuine adult.  Nineteen was my last year of being a teenager, twenty marked two decades, twenty-one meant I was old enough to drink, gamble, and buy firearms, and marked my last year as an undergraduate from college.  And now I'm 22.  I've already graduated, I'm getting a job, I don't see my friends anymore because I live in BFE...  Twenty-two is only special, so far as I can see, in that it isn't special.  And from here on out, the "special" birthdays spread apart.  At twenty-five, my insurance rates will go down.  I suppose every decade is kinda special.  At sixty-five I can celebrate the fact that I've reached retirement age...  What do birthdays mean these days?  I've gotten past the age where people will organize a celebration for me, I suppose.  I went to a surprise party last night for a friend of our's.  'Course, she was turning 21, and that's a pretty special age, but I wonder...  Nobody's ever done anything like that for me.  I've always known in advance about all of my birthday parties and such...  Is the anniversary of my birth really all that important anymore?  We hardly do anything for my parents' birthdays.  We get Dad a new rod and reel, perhaps, and buy Mom some new jewelry or a really good movie, and maybe go out to dinner...  Is this the steady trend to which I can look forward?  In twenty years, will I be sitting watching TV alone on my birthday and look back on my 21st birthday party, to which more than fifty people showed up, as nothing more than an icon of the halcyon days of my youth?  I feel terrible...  We left my Mom alone, eating popcorn and drinking soda while watching a movie, one her birthday so that we could go out and celebrate with Laura Ann, because her birthday was the following night and she wanted to go to College Station where the bars don't close until 2:00 am, so she could get a drink at midnight.  I left my own mother, for goodness's sake, to go out and celebrate with a girl on whom I have a huge crush, but barely talks to me...  I know I become more jaded and cynical as the years go by, but I can't help but wonder...  From here on out, will I come to view the anniversary of my birth as nothing more than another day, or should I start trying to make it as special as it always was in years past?  I think it's too late for this year, but maybe for twenty-three...
 
In other news, I'm thinking of working on my Firehead account and posting some recent projects of mine on it.  I know I said that before, too, but this time I mean it.  (c;  In the three days since turning in my project -- formerly my thesis -- I've managed to write a program that displays every star in every constellation in the sky, and quite a few others besides.  Actually, I think the number of stars in all the constellations number fewer than a thousand, and my program displays 4784 stars.  Right now it's running under Direct3D 9, but I'm going to port it to OpenGL before too much longer.  OpenGL is much easier to download and run programs like that for.  Next step in the program is to get it to center itself on the constellations in order, and perhaps open another window to display data about each constellation in turn.  I'll keep posting updates to my blog as I work on it.
 
That's it.  Everyone wish me a happy birthday.  And the party's been moved to Friday, the 23rd.  'Course, it's not really my party, it's for Melissa, whose birthday is on the 19th, but it's close enough.  You're all welcome to come if you want.

Things are looking up, I've gotta say. When I "graduated" I had a job lined up, I expected to finish my project and get my degree in short order, and I was really looking forward to living at home, because I've always liked home (and the fact that there's a hot girl living downstairs doesn't hurt anything, either). Then, of course, my project started getting worse, not better. And both jobs I wanted fell through. Plus, I decided not to take the research fellowship I was offered because I was burned out on working in that lab... So, I still don't have my diploma, and I still don't have a job, and things aren't going too well with the hot girl downstairs (Laura Ann, for anyone who knows her), and I'm not really enjoying home because the dynamic is totally different than I remember it -- thanks entirely to the fact that there are now seven of us in the house, not four. It's alright usually, but isn't it ironic how I can feel lonelier in a house of seven than I ever did in a house of four?

But, things are getting better. I'll be getting a phone call from a company soon, and assuming I pass the interview, I'll have a really well-paying job in about two weeks. I'm settling into the feel of the fuller house, though it'd be better if I had a girlfriend. I turn 22 in four days. And that project? You know, the one that's been bugging me since last September? Did I mention I finished it? I'm gonna get my degree! <does a little dance> Oh yeah, and I'm trying to get together a group to go to a Latin club sometime next week. Anyone who's interested is more than welcome to go. The numbers are even right now (two guys, two girls), but people in Latin clubs are always really friendly, so no matter who you are, as long as you don't huddle in the corner, you shouldn't have too much trouble finding someone to dance with, even if you don't have a date. And, if anyone's interested, I'm going to be having a birthday party on the 24th. I know it's the same date as Katy Z's, but the offer's out there if anyone's interested.

Yay me!

Okay, so I'm still working on this damn computer science project. I swear I'll get it done one of these days. Right now, though, the problems I'm having with it occur at a very high level of detail. So, since it runs somewhere around 20 vertices/second, and I have to run it over and over again to test the changes I make, and the smallest model that has problems has almost 25000 vertices, I have a lot of time to sit and surf the internet. So, I've run into something cool. It's both exciting and disappointing, but it's pretty nifty to me. Note: anyone who isn't interested in how calculus and neural networks are related should go elsewhere now.

So, since I've been desperately trying to find topics in computer science that are capable of keeping my interest while this project sinks my passion for the subject to all-time lows, I've been spending some time looking at neural network theory. After delving a bit into the subject, I'm actually kinda disappointed. The mystique is gone. I understand them (more or less) now, and they were a lot cooler when they were just a black box. Anyway, the nitty-gritty is this: A neural network is essentially a set of nodes in a tree of sorts. You have some input nodes through which you feed values. These values are passed en masse to each node farther down the line, where all the incoming values are multiplied by their respective weights and added together to form a single value, which is then passed on, along with a bunch of other values from other nodes, to nodes farther down the line. The process repeats until you run out of nodes. To train the network, you take a set of data for which everything is known: the input is known, as well as what you would like the output of the network to be. You plug the input values into the network, run it, and look at the output. Then you use what's called the backpropagation algorithm (there are others, but this is the most common and arguably most effective) to modify the weights so that the network becomes better at recognizing the trained pattern and giving the desired output (and, theoretically, giving close to the same output for similar inputs).

This is all well and good, until you look at it the way I do. You can, without loss of funtionality and with a significant gain in control and precision, convert each output node of the neural network into a function of N variables (the input values). Then, you can calculate the ability of the neural network to recognize similar input patterns by taking the partial derivative of the set of output functions with respect to each input variable. The larger the magnitude of the partial derivative around each trained input, the smaller the network's ability to recognize similar patterns. You can calculate the absolute error involved in the network's ability to reconize trained inputs by simply subtracting the calculated output from the desired output. Furthermore, you can train the function by calculating the partial derivatives of the error function of each output with respect to the WEIGHT that you're modifying. This is what the backpropagation algorithm does, but it numerically approximates the errors and uses a fraction of the error as the approximate partial derivative.

Two things: I'm a bit disappointed with the whole idea of neural networks now that I realize they're just intuitive models for creating nonlinear functions for analyzing data. There's nothing special about them, they're just convenient facades to simplify the nitty-gritty. (Note that I'm just talking about feed-forward neural networks. For nets that allow connection loops, the math gets really complicated because you have to take into account the circular dependencies of nodes, and for calculation and training you have to iteratively calculate the value of the system until it converges to some value. I don't have a clue what the math would be, but aside from trying to simplify it into infinite series and use Fourier analysis, I'm not sure how you could do the transformation I'm talking about.) On the other hand, I'm excited because I haven't been able to find notes about anyone doing what I'm talking about -- simplifying the neural network architecture into a collection of nonlinear functions for precise symbolic processing rather than the numerical approximation upon which the network model depends. If I can study stuff like this, I may want to get a master's in computer science after all... On the other hand, if they make me study compilers, operating systems, and databases, I'm calling it quits after the first semester. (c;

Thanks for anyone who managed to read all the way through. Hope it didn't bore you too much.

Here's a good post (link courtesy of Jared) that says some things that need to be said. I've been telling people that for years... Except the way I said it was more like, "If you concentrate on being beautiful on the inside, you can't help but make be beautiful on the outside, too." Granted, that's just me shamelessly pandering to the idealist in everyone, but the sentiment is correct. If you're a wonderful person who concentrates on actually being a person (i.e., an individual), you may not get picked up by random guys at the club, but you're sure as hell going to be more likely to keep the ones you can get ahold of. An old girlfriend of mine (name of Ashley, for anyone who cares), once asked me why I was with her. I told her, "Because you're pretty enough to catch my attention, and interesting enough to keep it." The fact of the matter is that guys will always go after the pretty girls - that's never going to change. Our conception of what's pretty changes every so often, but people will always pursue people to whom they're attracted, and that's the way it should be. However, anyone worth having will just as quickly grow tired of anyone who's not as pretty on the inside as on the outside.

Now, on a totally different subject: I was sitting at IHOP with my brother and his girlfriend, Anna, having just watched Spiderman 2. We were discussing the movie, naturally, and going over what we liked and disliked about it. Naturally, many of my complaints -- just because that's the way I am -- have to do with the liberties that Hollywood takes with reality. For example,
A) I didn't like the way they did that fusion thing. There are a few problems with it... They used Tritium for their fusion reaction, and they claimed that there were only 25 lbs. of tritium on the earth. While there may be free-floating tritium in the world, it's not likely, as it has a half-life of only 12.3 years. In fact, tritium is produced as a by-product, created in the water coolant systems of certain particle accelerators. The amount of tritium that can be produced is therefore more or less limitless, though it does take a lot of electricity to do it.
B) The fusion reaction looked like a miniature sun. That's all well and good, except for the mini-solar flares. I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept that the electromagnetic shield that was erected contained the heat of the reaction so that it wouldn't fry the spectators, but once that flare left the area, everyone in the vicinity would have needed SPF 2000 or so to stay alive. You saw how quickly it ate through that ceiling beam, right?
C) When he's stopping the train, the sides of the front where the spiderwebs press against it bend inward, as expected. However, it seems to me that the front of the train, against which Spidey was braced, should have been just as bent. I have no numbers on the actual magnitude of acceleration the train endured, but since it didn't through people forward when it slowed down it may have been low enough that I'm off base here.

I had some complaints with Troy, too... Three, to be exact:
Greek legend: Menelaus didn't die at Troy, he took Medea (sp?) back home.
Movie: Killed by Hector while trying to kill Paris.

Greek legend: Agamemnon survived the sacking of Troy, and went back to his warm, loving home, where he was brutally murdered by his wife, Clytaemnestra (sp?) ('cause he sacrificed one of their daughters to propitiate the gods so the Acheans could win the war).
Movie: Yup, you guess it. He dies at Troy.

Greek legend: Achilles gave his armor to Patroclus to wear in battle so that the Trojans will see it and run away, rather than egaging the untried youth in combat.
Movie: Patroclus steals Achilles's armor and wears it into battle without Achilles knowing, and is killed by Hector, which fuels Achilles's rage against Hector, leading to the oh-so-spiffy fight scene between the more manly two of Jared's "mantastic trifecta."

I know there are a few other blatant errors in the movie, but none of them really got my goat like those above did. True, they screwed up the whole Briseis thing, they didn't even include Chriseis and Chryses, and they covered in supposedly days what the Greeks accomplished in years. And where were all the guys getting pierced through the nipple with bronze-tipped spears? I was looking forward to it. (c; But I can deal with it.

But the most incredibly ridiculous movie error I've seen recently was in The Chronicles of Riddick (which I saw twice, by the way -- once because Andy and I decided to see it, and again because Laura Ann thinks Vin Diesel is mantastic and Andy dragged me there again. It wasn't bad, but not worth two trips to the theater). My complaint comes in regarding the planet Crematoria.

A) The prison is underground. Fine and dandy. But they open up the ceiling once a day (or maybe twice a day -- once at dawn and once at dusk?) to freshen up the air. So Crematoria has an atmosphere that's breathable. Okay. However, the temperature is supposed to be -200 at night and +700 in the day (I'll assume Fahrenheit readings, 'cause -200 celius is _way_ too close to absolute zero for me to buy it.). Watch the thermometer, the temperature rises pretty quickly. However, one of the main characteristics of an atmosphere is that it insulates -- it retains heat during the night, and absorbs heat during the day. That drastic temperature change simply isn't possible on a planet with a breathable atmosphere.
B) The idea of Crematoria having an atmosphere anyway is ridiculous. Planets with that sort of temperature fluctuation soon burn off most of the useful gasses they possess. No more atmosphere. (I can't remember if it's the heavy gasses that burn off of or the lighter ones, but whichever it is, oxygen and nitrogen are in there.)
C) They decide to make a run for it, keeping between the line of darkness and daylight. Which means the sun hasn't touched the rocks they're running on yet. Rocks retain heat and cold better than air. Which means those rocks are somewhere around -200. Can you say frostbite?
D) Even being generous with the numbers, we can see that the idea of running in that perpectual predawn area is ridiculous. On Earth, that line moves upwards of 1000 mph at the equator. Even if we lengthen the day and make the planet smaller, we're _never_ going to get a planet that has any hope of maintaining what's obviously relatively normal gravitational levels (they're not doing the Neal Armstrong moon hop anywhere) where that line moves under 20mph, which is doubtlessly how quickly they're running.
E) After getting dragged out of the direct sunlight (which causes fireballs to bounce around mere moments after it hits, by the way), where he'd been lying for, what, a minute? Two minutes? Thirty seconds? Doesn't matter, it's impossible. Anywho, after getting dragged out by the other guy (I'm not sure how you spell the name of his race. Furyon? Furian? Furion? Feureion?), he stands there in the cool shade while the other guy gets obliterated by walking scant few yards outside. Umm, seems to me his skin should have been melting off his bones just being within a hundreds yards of that inferno. But that's just me.


And now for the legitimate, non-scientific, non-nit-picky gripe:
Oh yeah, and the whole thing that made Riddick cool in Pitch Black (that was the name of the movie, right?) was the fact that he had the cool eyes. They were very good about making the eyes shine in The Chronicles of Riddick, and having him take off his sunglasses to see in the dark, but they had him going without his glasses several times in light that would have blinded him in the first movie. Besides which, they didn't use his eyes to advance the plot whatsoever in the Chronicles. They were cool, you knew they were there, he used his nightvision to slaughter a few guards in a totally gratuitous display of violence near the beginning, but they never impacted the plot. Boo, I say. Way to take something that made him cool and downplay it until he's just another badass. I preferred the individuality, personally. It's almost like the writers gave up in the middle. Here are the Necromongers, so we know there's going to be darkness, right? Sounds like the perfect environment for Riddick. But no, they immediately abandon all efforts at giving him a niche in which to fit, and instead assign his super-badassness to some sort of racial heritage. BOOOO!!!! Some good action sequences, but overall, I give it a thumbs-down. If you don't have a clue who Riddick is, you might like the movie as just another action movie. But if you saw and liked Pitch Black (which I did), it's disappointing. Boo.

Okay, I'm done now. Peace, guys. Lemme know if anything cool is going on. I turn 22 in a week!