nawl

Greetings from sunny New Brunswick, New Jersey! Actually, it's not sunny because it's night. Ha, I'm funny.

My flight was, well, a flight. It was long (though at 7 hours, preferable to the 11-hour trans-Atlantic haul to the west coast), and there was a screaming baby. The guy next to me was reading about pediatric urology.

And I landed. Americans are so friendly. Random conversations with random strangers, because the train is slow or the kid is cute or the other passenger is stupid. I'd forgotten about that. A fashion designer seeing me struggling with my bags actually carried my 32.5 kilo suitcase all the way down the stairs for me at the train station and rolled it a block uphill, just to be nice.

I'm living in a Rutgers dorm in an apartment populated by two other AT&T interns. It's a dorm. The security is intense. The check-in bureaucracy doesn't know I exist, so I don't actually have a key yet, but the student on duty assured me with a mile-a-minute kwafee accent that it would be worked out tomorrow.

Target is a really big store.

Tonight, an IEEE awards dinner in Princeton, where I in all of my jet-lagged glory was both the youngest and the least well dressed. Highly amusing. The idea, apparently, was that I would get to meet some Princeton people, but none of the many old men and assorted wives there were actually from Princeton. I got to eat some nice catered appetizers and we escaped early.

Apparently New Brunswick has a big Hungarian-American population from '56. There's a Magyar Savings and Loan. Nearby was a hand-written sign in someone's window saying "Isten hozott!"

Already have things to think about. For a particular problem (recursively enumerable, say) you can make a Turing machine that computes it. If this machine has n states, it must accept before busy beaver(n) steps, which is a finite number. This, er, obvious observation that had never actually occurred to me before came about in a discussion of the complexity of problems based on the length of the program used to compute them, which is related to compression.

You can look for primes using the sieve of Eratosthenes. You can get a different sequence by applying successive iterations of your sieve not to all numbers but only to those that are left.

Tangentially related, does anybody know anything about making music from sequences of numbers? Such a thing reminded me of the description of Bach's Art of the Fugue in GEB and also gave me visions of generating sequences of tones of prime frequencies to torment experiment subjects in some evil psychologist's lab. There must be something between the two extremes.

Work tomorrow. Limos to ride, papers to sign. Perhaps I shall soon exist.