• About

Bespoke Blog

~ Science! Culture! Computational Engines!

Bespoke Blog

Author Archives: bwkeller

Science is Aesceticism

10 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by bwkeller in research, science

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

funding, grad school, society

I think a lot of the
sturm
und
drang about the current state of science and
academia in general comes from the fact that the reality of science today is
wildly different than what we are told for our entire lives (duh). Society,
education, whatever, says that being a scientist is like being a
priest/priestess. We think what we will do is discover arcane secrets,
entering into a class divorced from the world through its connection to deeper
truths. The reality of being a scientist is that you are a monk. As much as
the job involves the priestly craft of divining ultimate reality, what it
really involves, day to day, is aesceticism. To be a scientist in the age of
austerity is to take a vow of poverty, promising to forgo the worldly
posessions of the middle class that could easily have been yours years ago. It
means self-mortification, flagellating yourself daily with the scourge of
stress, self-doubt, and overwork. So we have a generation of young scientists
who don’t realize that the great ritual at the altar of Truth has a sacrifice
at its centre, and that sacrifice is you.

Vimrepress View Bug

09 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by bwkeller in computer science

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

vim, writing

Heads up kids, if you are using vimrepress for blogging, and you want to use
the BlogList and one of the edit (BlogEdit, BlogNew, etc.) features, make sure
you use separate vim sessions. Vimpress keeps a “view” state, so it knows
whether your buffer can be pushed to WordPress, and the state is shared between
tabs. So if you start a list in a second tab after you’ve started editing,
vimrepress will not let you save your edit, unless you fire up another tab in
the edit view to knock the state back to edit.

WRITE MORE

09 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by bwkeller in computer science, projects

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

markdown, vim, writing

Well, hopefully I will be blogging a bit more frequently. I just finished
writing a manuscript for a paper from the last 2 years of PhD work, and it was
no fun. I am, at this stage, pretty shitty at scientifc writing. I’m hoping
some practice will help improve me. I’ve installe the wicked
vim-repress which will hopefully
make the whole affair more fun. I can’t stand writing with a tool other than
vim, and markdown is a bicycle to HTML’s 18-wheeler. Lighter and more fun to
use.

Video

Pedal-Powered Lightshow

20 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by bwkeller in bikes, projects

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

thinkhaus, velotweet

I’ve been working on building a pedal-powered twitter projection wall as part of a collaboration between Think|Haus and THAAT, to display at HIVEX. On Saturday, our hardware genius Gord got the frame and motor mount completed, and we decided to have a brief rave-light party in the factory.

Parallel Computing with OpenMP & C 1: Introduction

17 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by bwkeller in computer science, programming

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

OpenMP, parallel

So, I’m taking a class this year on high performance computing, and I figure’d I might as well kill two birds with one stone: write some blog posts, and also get some studying done.  Let’s get to it!

What Is OpenMP?

OpenMP is an API for working with shared memory parallel computers.  Essentially everyone now owns one of these machines, as any multi-core machine is a shared memory parallel machine.  What it isn’t is a tool for GPU programming or programming on distributed memory systems (like a Beowulf cluster).

OpenMP is one of the fastest and easiest ways to squeeze extra performance our of modern multicore CPUs.

How to Set Up OpenMP?

Unlike some parallel tools (I’m looking at you CUDA 2 years ago), OpenMP is ridiculously easy to set up.  If you are running a Debian-like system, it is just:

apt-get install libgomp1

And that’s it!  All you need to do now is compile your code, as you normally would, with gcc and the -fopenmp flag

gcc  -fopenmp

How easy is that?

In the next post, we will write some simple C code using OpenMP.

3D Unprinter

06 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by bwkeller in projects

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

3d printing

One of the projects in my list of stuff I’ll get around to is making a 3D unprinter: a machine that can melt a thermoplastic object down and extrude it back into filament.  McMaster has this cool course called Sustainable Future, and part of the course is for the students to do a real world project involving sustainability.  I pitched the idea to the class, and I’ve got a team of 4 students now working with me to build one!  We’re blogging here, and we’ve set up a github repo here.  Watch our progress, we should have a good prototype by December.

Illegal Poetry

06 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by bwkeller in computer science, copyfight, python

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

philosophy, poetry, programming

I have always had a problem with the concept of intellectual property.  The great western tradition of post-enlightenment values have always placed the free flow of art and ideas on a pedestal, as a sacrosanct cornerstone of a just society.  That the ideas living in our heads and flowing from our lips were the domain of no king, pope, or policeman is the one of the most important cultural norms that has emerged from the enlightenment into modern liberal democracies.  The legal constructs associated with intellectual property, in my evaluation, cannot be reconciled with this.  A corpuscle of information cannot be at once free to be spoken or expressed and also be the property of some individual and corporation.  Information Theory, the fantastic work pioneered by Claude Shannon, only swells my distaste for intellectual property.  We know now that with simple coding, all information is reducible to a common binary form.  Film, print, music, photography: all is merely a collection of ordered bits.  Which makes the idea of owning information all the more ridiculous, as the process can be just as easily reversed:  A song can be represented by a string of Shakespeare quotations, a movie can be rendered in musical score.  As an illustration  of this, I’ve written a short program that takes any file and converts it to a long, rambling nonsense-poem.  Poetry as Piracy.

Making the Wordlists

The first step is generating a set of words to use to generate our poems, categorized by their grammatical type.  To do this, I downloaded the English wiktionary.  I then used grep, sed, and awk to split it into plain lists of words:  nouns, past tense verbs, present participle verbs, and adjectives.  I then shuffled these lists, and trimmed them down so that their length was a multiple of 2.  I didn’t need to do this, but it simplified the work slightly.  In the end, I was left with 17 bits worth of information stored in each noun (131,072 words), 13 bits in each past-tense verb (8192), 13 bits in each present-participle verb (8192), and 15 bits for each adjective.

Sentence Skeletons

I then decided on two rough sentence skeletons:

The ADJECTIVE NOUN PAST-VERBED the ADJECTIVE NOUN.

ADJECTIVE NOUN is PRESENT-VERBING the ADJECTIVE NOUN.

Each of those sentences can store 77 bits of information.  A 1Mb file, for example, will require roughly 10,000 sentences, or about a novelette worth of words.  If that 1 Mb file was a copyrighted song, you would not in fact have the freedom to print and distribute your nice new novel (not that you would want to, it would be random nonsense.)

Encoding the File

Now, 77 bits is a bit awkward.  Just choosing between each sentence type gives me 1 bit of information.  I also get punctuation at the end.  If I end each sentence with either a period, exclamation mark, two exclamation marks, or three exclamation marks, that gets me an extra two bits of information.  This gets me up to 80 bits per sentence, or 10 bytes.  I can now easily encode my data as nonsense poetry!  I use the first bit to select which tense of verb, the second two decide if I get a period or exclamation series, and the rest determine the sentence itself.  If my file isn’t nicely divisible into base 10, I simply add an additional line at the end:

All that remains are NUM memories and NUM regrets.

Where NUM is the base-10 representation of the remaining bytes in the first case, and the number of bytes remaining in the second instance (as a long string of leading zeros will get truncated in converting to decimal).

Decoding the File

Decoding the file is as simple as just reading in each line, checking what sentence type it is, and what the punctuation at the end is, and returning it to the original binary form!

Filesystem Organization for Physicists Part 1: The Problem

27 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by bwkeller in research

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

ast, astronomy, computers, programming, science, technology

I’ve been warned that I sometimes veer too far in the direction of toolmaker away from the standard path followed by most scientists.  Try as I might, I cannot seem to avoid finding the process of doing science nearly as interesting as the goal of getting that science done. And so, my mind has been orbiting around a problem I suspect is endemic amongst all physicists, if not all scientists.  That problem, captured so nicely by this PhD comic is that of filesystem cruft.  Science, being at it’s core an experimental art, produces for every successful idea a whole panoply of failed experiments, mistakes, and generally messed-up crap.  Being paranoid creatures consumed by our own fears, along with the awareness that serendipity has been a cornerstone of great work, we are loathe to sweep these ill-fated children of the mind into the trash where they (mostly) belong. And so those of us who rely on computers for most of our day-to-day work end up with home directories filled to the brim with old scripts, corrupted data files, a dozen different versions of the same list of values, and other digital detritus.  And this situation makes for errors, confusion, thousand yard stare, anal leakage, and other evils too foul to discuss in polite company.  Just looking at my /home directory on my workstation at the University, I have more than 100,000 files sitting around, waiting for me to stare at them for a quarter hour trying to remember what they were for.

Continue reading →

I’m back

30 Tuesday Aug 2011

Posted by bwkeller in projects

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

100daychallenge, writing

So, as you are all fully aware, I have been silent for the past few weeks.  Moving across the country can do that to you.  Now that I am no longer living out of boxes, expect a rapid catchup as I make up the posts I missed.

I’ll be keeping track at the bottom of my posts.

24

Milky Way Nights

29 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by bwkeller in astrophysics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

astronomy, M16, science

I just got back from the University of Calgary’s fantastic Rothney Astrophysical Observatory.  Since there is a new moon in Calgary, we have had late night open houses yesterday, today, and one tomorrow from 10PM until 2AM.  Since I am exhausted, let me show you the awesome picture of the beautiful tendrils of cool dust in the Eagle Nebula we were able to capture using the 16″ Clark-Milone Telescope:

M16

Messier 16, the Eagle Nebula

← Older posts

January 2023
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Mar    

Ben’s Tweets

  • RT @OJ_Astro: A blog post by physicist Syksy Räsänen (@SyksyRasanen), who has published with us twice, about why overlay journals are an an… 1 day ago
  • RT @JokesAstro: If the Islands of Hawaii were very massive stars, Kauai would be going supernova soon. https://t.co/NEboP6FRWd 2 days ago
  • RT @AnicaSeelie: @gauravmunjal Imagine if there was a duck but it had human ears 2 days ago
  • RT @jfmclaughlin92: Friendly reminder that if you're at a public university, your institutional email can be searched basically whenever. B… 2 days ago
  • @rcrain_astro Academia has a lot of problems. Precarious employment, massive overworking of junior researchers, poo… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 days ago

Nicholas’ Tweet’s

  • RT @michielsdj: New paper! Retrieval-augmented models are expensive. Make them faster by partially pre-computing passage representations. W… 5 days ago
  • RT @michielsdj: New paper! We propose FiDO, an improved version of Fusion-in-Decoder with faster inference and better performance. Work don… 1 month ago
  • @_julianmichael_ @LukeZettlemoyer @emilymbender @nlpnoah @ssshanest Congrats! 5 months ago
  • RT @michielsdj: Now accepted to @iclr_conf! 🎆 1 year ago
  • @mjskay Yeah, I feel a major point people were missing is that an endless spiral into the drain is actually the perfect visual metaphor. 1 year ago

Top Posts

  • Basic Data Plotting with Matplotlib Part 3: Histograms

Tags

100daychallenge advertising astronomy bash biology blogs BMC books browsers Bulshytt calligraphy canada coding cognitive computers computer science css EEE elvish ereaders ethics evolution experiments facebook google government html humor humour ICP I hate this class iliad internet explorer irex java javascript lego letter libraries marketing materialism matplotlib maze mindstorms mods morality mysql networking neuroscience pens philosophy philsophy php Pilish prime minister programming psychology reading review robots science SENG servers sociology steampunk stupid technology time ubc UNIX url vim web web design writing

Blogs We Read

  • Bad Astronomy
  • Boing Boing
  • Rationally Speaking
  • Terry Project (UBC)

RSS Nicholas’ Terry Posts

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 162 other subscribers

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Bespoke Blog
    • Join 74 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Bespoke Blog
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...