Eulogy for Two Fried G5s

Posted by knorby on May 6, 2008 under Apple, Python, humor | Be the First to Comment

I wrote this “eulogy” for two computers that apparently got fried (as in electrical surge or something) recently in the Maclab. I intended it for fellow tutors, but I was fairly fond of it. It would probably help to know that these computers were named “python” and “ada.”

We are gathered here today to mourn the deaths of Python and Ada. They lived good, long lives as G5s. Tragically, Brian discovered their charred remains yesterday, which was confirmed today.

Ada always dreamed of being a missile guidance system, but as a G5, it was never able to fulfill its dream. It forgot its dream, and instead spent its life running word, with the occasional bit of matlab and powerpoint here and there. As it felt its final death blow surge, it visualized tracking a laser point until meeting a glorious, explosive end, it quietly whispered “I’m going home!”

Python suffered a far more tragic death. Realizing it was at its final moments, it began to question the meaning of it all:

>>> raw_input(“So this is it? Was it good? Why do I have to die? Where
I am going?”)
So this is it? Was it good? Why do I have to die? Where I am
going?Traceback (most recent call last):
File ““, line 1, in ?
EOFError

Unfortunately, its questions were left unanswered:

>>> raise UnboundLocalError, “Oh Noes!!!!”
Traceback (most recent call last):
File ““, line 1, in ?
UnboundLocalError: Oh Noes!!!!
>>> raise SystemExit
$

Unfortunately, no one was there to catch its exception.

UofC ACM Panel on Artificial Intelligence Afterthoughts

Posted by knorby on November 16, 2007 under ACM, uchicago | Be the First to Comment

Last night, the UofC ACM held its first major event, an interdisciplinary panel on artificial intelligence. Since Cord and I took over as co-chairs of the chapter, we have been fighting to get things happening in the CS department, which hasn’t been easy. The Facebook event had about 25 confirmed guests and 40 maybes, so we were a little nervous about turn out. The fliers and e-mails we sent seemed to pay off as we had about 60 attend. We were pretty happy.

For our first big event, we felt it went pretty well. The panel had David McAllester, John Goldsmith, Terry Regier, and Philip Ulinski. The majority of the panel were basically computer and linguistics people, so it definitely skewed, but we ended up discussing AI in a pretty broad way. Really, the panel was too broad. For the most part, the discussion was guided mostly by the audience, which made it pretty disorganized. I felt like I didn’t come away with a greater understanding of AI. Really, many of the AI-related questions I have pondered (which others asked) were answered, but I have yet to really process the answers. I have been thinking most about the singularity, which McAllester wanted to talk about, but we didn’t really stay on the subject much. Overall, it was a really enjoyable panel, and it was a pretty awesome thing to help organize. Borja said there was a food spread for another talk that was supposed to be at the same time that the CS department got hundreds of cookies for that only a few people went to. Future panels should be even more of a success.

See Also

• Page on the ACM Site for Event