Mizblog

Today was the first time I’ve ever hosted a family Thanksgiving feast. It went better than I expected, except now that it’s over I’m exhausted, sore, and am coming down with the crud. Or, as some would call it, “The ‘itis”.

Quick recap of injuries I’m still trying to recover from: mid thoracic sprain, gout, plantar fasciitis, and a strained right quad. The real killer is the sprained back, which I think is the root cause of everything else bad that’s happening to me. It’s preventing me from doing regular exercise because it hurts when I breathe deeply. I’ve been doing physical therapy for the last month, but all they’ve managed to do for me is to make it hurt worse.

This: Scratching an itch through the scalp to the brain : The New Yorker.

Holy crap! This is so amazing, I can’t even explain it. I’ve done a little bit of 3D stuff in Flash, and it was pretty clunky. This is an epic vault up in capabilities for the Flash player. Maybe all my 3D skills weren’t wasted after all…

Unreal Engine 3 Support for Adobe Flash Player Announced | Epic Games Community.

Bird Mite Infestation.

A friend of mine is currently battling a bird mite infestation. It’s a horrifying experience. The medical establishment is not well equipped to deal with such an infestation, and many doctors don’t even imagine that bird mites can live off of a human or a pet.

They can!

The CDC is investigating strains of drug-resistant bird mites growing in California. It’s truly frightening. Bird mites are tiny (up to 0.5mm) and translucent, making them almost impossible to see without magnification. They’re most active at night, burrowing into skin and invading the nose, mouth, sinuses, and even the urethra.

So don’t let birds nest anywhere near your house. When disposing of abandoned bird nests, wear gloves and long sleeves. A dusting of borax wouldn’t hurt either.

If you do find yourself host to bird mites, you’re in for a fight. They’re hard to kill, they infest everything around you, and they go nuts on you at night, making sleep difficult. You’ll have to clean everything every day, fumigate your house, treat your pets, shower twice per day, change your diet, and invest in a variety of exotic cleaning supplies just to manage the infestation.

There is no cure.

Don’t you feel itchy?

Well, it’s finally happened – my wife and daughter returned from Nepal after a 3 month vacation. They’re epically failing to adjust to the local daylight schedule, having slept through most of their first 3 days back. It seems there’s rarely an hour of daylight in which all of us are awake. The trip has turned my whole family into extreme night owls!

I had a dream this morning. I was a lemur, and there were a lot of lemurs in our kingdom. More lemurs than food. The king called us all into an underground tunnel for some ceremony, and as we all filed down I saw the piles of dead lemurs who didn’t get up to follow.

Once down there, I guess we had whatever ceremony and were coming back out. I was first. On the way out we saw a giant blue cushion in the passageway. It filled the hall all the way across and all the way down, and I knew that it contained the bodies of all the lemurs I’d seen up above. It was the king’s way of handling the problem of disposing of the dead bodies. We were not impressed. The thing looked like it was made of Cookie Monster fur.

Anyway, we walked over it and around the corner to leave, but all we saw at the end was a cement wall. THE KING HAD SEALED THE PASSAGE AND TRAPPED US ALL! I realized that this was also the way he was going to deal with our whole group. I became depressed, but then I noticed that the cement was still fresh, and part of it was flaking off, so I dug into it with my fingers and was able to get through to someone digging in from outside! I cleared an opening and saw a guy looking in at me. He told me that the king was planning some kind of selective breeding program, and he had to get rid of a lot of male competition.

I went back to the ceremony chamber, when someone yelled and the king ran past! He had a secret way into our chamber! We chased him, but then I realized that his bodyguard was following him, so I tackled his bodyguard. As I was struggling to remember what to do in a fight, that’s when I woke up.

The best way for critics to earn enduring fame is to lavish their worst criticism on the best art of the day. Later generations will remember them as examples of sheer boneheadedness.

I’ve been practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at UCLA for the last few months. I’m so new I don’t even have the funny pajamas. And I always hurt after class. Today is no exception. I feel like I was hit by a truck.

Last night we were taught the twister roll! That should have been exciting, but my knee popped the first time my partner rolled me and I think that put a damper on the rest of my evening. It doesn’t hurt, and I can walk on it just fine, so I have no idea what happened in there.

The class meets in Wooden Training Center at UCLA, in the blue room. The mat (floor padding) in that room is covered with some very rough vinyl, so whenever you rub your skin against it, some of that skin is going to stay on the mat. I have a chunk of skin missing out of my right foot. Scraped off by the mat. Stingy!

This summer there are about 50 people in the class, and the room can only handle about 20 people comfortably. That means for most of the class, we’re standing around watching others do drills, or we’re trying to practice techniques in a tiny area while keeping a constant eye out for neighboring groups.

We’re two classes into the first summer session now, and I don’t feel like I’ve improved at anything. I’m up against vastly more experienced partners than in my beginner class last Spring, so they’re illustrating my lack of experience and technique. Hopefully some of theirs will rub off on me over the next couple months.

http://www.noulakaz.net/weblog/2007/03/18/a-regular-expression-to-check-for-prime-numbers/

The way it works in checking if n is prime is to make n copies of some character. (The original article uses 1’s to confuse us with the \1 pattern match, so I’ll use “x” instead.) It first trivially checks for 0 or 1 of those (0 and 1 are not prime). Then it checks for (xx+?)\1+ which will iterate over successively minimal matches of two or more x’s, and then see if the remaining x’s can be matched by copies of that minimal match from the beginning. If it can be matched, the number was obviously not prime (we just divided it into some unknown number of equal segments). If it can’t be matched, it tries the next most minimal initial matching.

As an example, let’s take 15. We create the test pattern “xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx” and run it through its paces to see if it matches our composite pattern.

• Does it match “” or “x”? Nope.
• Does it match “xx”\1+? Hmm. “xx” “xx” “xx” “xx” “xx” “xx” “xx” “x” Nope!
• Does it match “xxx”\1+? “xxx” “xxx” “xxx” “xxx” “xxx” YES! NOT PRIME!

If we used 17 instead, we’d never find any substring that could be repeated to match the rest of the pattern, and our match would fail, meaning that 17 is prime!

I dreamed I was racing Bruce Lee up a hill. There were a bunch of stairs separated by open spaces. Kind of like a terraced parking lot, or the stairs going up the hill at Pierce College. Anyway, Bruce Lee was faster than me, but my long legs let me catch my stride better on the stairs, so I’d be able to catch him and start to pass him on the stairs. But every time I got ahead of him, he’d reach out and pull me back while he pushed himself forward against me! So I started grabbing his arm and pulling him back while I pulled myself forward. We were laughing and grappling with each other all the way up the hill. Neither one of us got tired.