Author: Rory

Lectures started this week. The college looks like a completely different place now. A few weeks ago you’d be lucky to see another person in the corridor; I felt like the Omega Man, wandering around a deserted campus. Now there are thousands of students with seemingly nothing better to do than to stand around looking pretty. Not that I’m complaining; many of them do an exceedingly good job of it.

It seems the setup on the new host isn’t perfect yet: I’m not getting notifications of new comments, and referrer logging is a bit on the borked side. I don’t think there are any outwardly visible things going wrong though.

Philips’ new flexible LCD screen is something that Jamie has been asking for for years. It’s his flying car, the promised super-technology of the future. They remind me of Earth: Final Conflict but without the shit plot and lousy aliens. How far are we from the self-updating newspapers of Minority Report? My guess is decades, but let’s not let that get in the way of a good geek story.

If you can see this post then you’re seeing the correct version of the site, on the new host. That’s good. I lost two comments, one of which should really just have been an email anyway, so no big losses. I’ll keep checking my old host for email until I’m sure the changover is complete. As always, let me know about any oddness you see. The address is rory at the name of this site.

I had hoped to have the second installment of the new Top 5 series posted before now, but the beginning of my masters sort of got in the way. What? You want me to shut up about the masters already? So be it. Here follows my top tenfive list of Homer Simpson talking to his brain.

Amazingly I had to narrow this list down from a shortlist of 17 instances of Homer’s odd mental dialogue. That’s not the full list either, that’s just the ones that I thought had a chance of making the final cut. As it turned out I think the list represents most of the major themes of brain-talk. Some just follow Homer’s thoughts, their humour derived from Homer’s unbelievable dumbness (wait, that’s not how you spell ‘dumbness’; wait, ‘dumbness’ isn’t even a word), but the others actually portray his brain as a separate entity capable of possessing knowledge and opinions alien to homer.

5. "Something was said. Not good."

Carl

Hey, don’t yell at Homer. Just ’cause he’s a little slow.

Brain

Something was said. Not good. What was it? "Don’t yell at Homer!" No, that’s OK. What was it? "Slow"! They called you slow!

Homer

How dare you call me that! I — huh?

Lenny

Hey, Homer, you still here? Boy, you are slow.

Brain

Something said. Not good.

Lenny

Get the hell out of here!

I’ll let you in on a little secret. Homer’s spectacular stupidity is going to form a bit of a motif for this list. This one beat out other contenders because of its brilliant exageration. It’s funny that Homer takes any measurable time at all to discover what part of what he heard was offensive. It’s funnier that he appears to have missed out on at least several hours of his life because of the effort. And were it not for Lenny he would do it again.

4. "Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts."

Homer

Aww, twenty dollars. I wanted a peanut!

Brain

Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts!

Homer

Explain how.

Brain

Money can be exchanged for good and services.

Quite simply, not only is Homer seemingly unaware of the concept of money and exchange but his brain is apparently capable of possesing knowledge that Homer himself lacks. Whatever that means. Genius.

3. "Eat the pudding."

Homer

All right, Brain, it’s all up to you. If you don’t think of what it is, we’ll lose Marge forever.

Brain

Eat the pudding eat the pudding eat the pudding eat the pudding eat the pudding eat the pudding eat the pudding eat the pudding

Homer

OK. But then we gotta get to work.

One of he rare ocassions that Homer is not being out-smarted by his brain, this one focuses on his considerable appetite. Even in the face of losing his wife of ten years Homer can’t bring his attention away from a simple pudding.

2. "I’m a big stupid lamo…"

Homer

Ok, don’t panic. To find Flanders, I just have to think like Flanders.

Brain

I’m a big four-eyed lame-o, and I wear the same stupid sweater every day and…

Homer

The Springfield river!

This is funny initially because Homer is mad enough to think that his method of "thinking like Flanders" will actually help him locate his soon-to-be-baptised kids. It’s made hilarious by the fact that it then turns out to work. Are we to believe that Flander atually thinks like that?

1. "Well, time to go to work…"

Homer

Well, time to go to work.

Brain

Little do they know I’m ducking out early to take the Duff Brewery tour.

Homer

Roll in at nine, punch out at five, that’s the plan.

Brain

Heh, heh, heh. They don’t suspect a thing. Well, off to the plant.

Homer

Then to the Duff Brewery.

Brain

Uh, oh. Did I say that or just think it?

Homer

I’ve got to think of a lie fast!

Marge

Homer, are you going to the Duff Brewery?

Homer

Ahh!

The funniest quote in the list is also the stupidest. We’ve seen Homer get taught new concepts by his brain, we’ve seen him take hours to parse a simple sentence, but in this scene Homer actually loses track of what he’s saying and what he’s thinking. It’s the epitome of of his inability to properly function as a human being. As such, we love it.

One of my favourite parts of this exchange is something that you might overlook on first viewing. When Marge confronts Homer about his plan, not only does he continue to be unaware of what he’s saying, he reacts by screaming an running away. That’s pretty much why Homer is my hero, right there.

So, since you’ll probably all disagree with me, what are your favourites and why?

I had a visit from a pair of those door-to-door God salespeople this morning. I don’t remember which group it was, but we’ll go ahead and assume Jehovas Witnesses without loss of generality.

The thing about these people is that they are very nice. Almost ludicrously so. I mean, they’re basically spending a lot of their time trying to save you and me from an eternity in Hell. Even if you think they’re wrong you have to appreciate what they’re trying to do for you. They can be a bit persistent but wouldn’t you be if someone said "I don’t have time to save my eternal soul; I’m in the middle of breakfast"?

So given that they’re not so much bad people as just very very odd, and because I had a few minutes to wait for my brother to drive into college, I spoke to them for a minute or so. I don’t think they were accustomed to my response.

I didn’t tear into them to the degree that I could have. Instead I answered their questions directly and succinctly. I’m used to my religious debates happening in a non-real-time medium so some of my answers weren’t, let’s say, complete. "Why don’t you believe in God?" they asked. I said, "lack of evidence", which is correct. But I should have mentioned the God-hypothesis’s lack of explanatory power, Occam’s razor, and Russel’s teapot. "How do you think we got here?" they asked. I said, "evolution". I was hoping to be pressed on it; I wanted to refute some common anti-evolution myths, maybe touch on abiogenesis. A segue into cosmology would’ve been entertaining I think.

Unfortunately I had to leave, so the claim to fame of converting JWs to atheism is still beyond me. I’ll manage it some day.

I said on Friday that I’d keep you updated on the possibility of me doing a masters. Well, the descision-making process was a little faster than I had expected. I’m typing this in my new (shared) office, where I’ll be working for the next 18 months or more.

I’ll be working on the same project that I’ve been doing for the summer, only now I’ll be essentially taking over the whole thing instead of just doing the front-end. We haven’t sorted out every detail yet of course, but I have enough to be working on anyway. I’m at an advantage over other new postgrads since I’ve already got a comprehensive todo list and a very good knowledge of the system I’m working with (I should have, I wrote it).

My system in here isn’t set up yet. I was given a computer that was used by a German PhD student who’s just left. It’s set up with FreeBSD in German, and he’s the only person who knows the root password. I figured it would be a good idea to make sure he had everything he needed before I install my own OS on it. He got back to me earlier today, so I’ll do my installing mojo tomorrow. For now I’m working on my laptop (which still works well after all these weeks, despite what the naysayers would have you believe).

There are some new postgrad requirements being introduced this year in the department, one of which is that I have to take at least two taught modules as well as just doing my thesis. There’s a heck of a list to choose from, including all of the fourth-year courses, most (or many) of the taught masters courses, a few computational courses from the mathematical physics department, and some others.

On top of all of this registration, system set-up, choosing courses stuff, I’m hoping to have a working prototype ready to demo to some interested parties in about four weeks. I might need to start coming in before one o’clock.

An academic career involving theoretical physics and computer science is not very high up the "How to Meet Women" list. In fact, if it’s on that list at all it’s only because of an irresponsible sub-editor having a laugh. In short, there is something terribly wrong when switching to computer science brings you into contact with more members of the fairer sex.

But now I find out, from former classmate and über-physicist Joe, that this year’s Rose of Tralee just graduated from UCD with a first in theoretical physics. She was in the year behind me. Why is finding women so hard? I mean, it’s not rocket science.

I haven’t had a huge amount to report these last few days. It turns out that last week was the last week of my internship, though I spent the first half of this week waiting to find out if I was needed for another week. No worries though; they took several weeks to start paying me so it’ll be another few until they stop. The project actually progressed a bit farther than I had expected, though we didn’t get it to release standard. I don’t think anyone had any real idea of how big a project it was. I’d like to see it get finished.

I’ve got a meeting today to talk about starting a masters next year. I’m quite keen on it, not least because it comes with quite a substantial tax-free scholarship. I don’t know how much benefit ist is to have a masters in this field when looking for a job, but my reasoning is that I’m far more likely to regret not doing it than I am to regret doing it. I was also offered a job, but I’m much more interested in the masters so I’m going to turn the job down. I’ll let you know how things go.