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preparing for a sabbatical
Tuesday, May 14 2002
I am leaving for Virginia tomorrow all by myself and will spend two weeks living off and on in my old Shaque. My main goal for this sabbatical is to focus on language parsing algorithms in the peacefulness of the Redneckistani countryside.
Since one of my other tasks will be to restore some of my parents' computer equipment to top operational condition, tonight I busied myself stockpiling all the various software I'd be needing. My infrequent visits to my parents' farm are similar in some respects to the arrival of European supply ships at remote 17th Century American colonies; I come bearing the wares and ways of modern urban culture to a place that seems to be sliding culturally back to the early 60s.
I've decided that this visit's big cultural novelty will be MP3s. I made a whole CD of them so I can demonstrate the manner by which modern New Yorkers listen to tunes. It's doubtful I'll be doing much downloading at the farm because the internet connection there is slow. I'm forced to bear the MP3s and other items of digital information on my person. My visit, you see, will provide extremely high-latency bandwidth.
In the evening, Gretchen and I played a game of called "20 Questions", where one of us came up with something in our minds and the other had to guess what it was by asking a series of not more than 20 yes/no questions. For me, it was an interesting real-world application of binary taxonomy, where everything in the universe is classified into a series of hierarchical classes, each of which containing only two members. The question was: can the entire universe of things be contained in a 20-level binary tree? That would mean that the entire universe contained only two to the twentieth power (somewhat over a million) objects. Since there are many more than that number of objects in the universe, our ability to correctly guess what the other was thinking depended on our familiarity with (and charity towards) one another. And we both did amazing well. Gretchen managed to guess all but the "jumping" part of "jumping spider" when it was her turn to guess. Then I correctly guessed "Doc," (a character in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday when it was my turn to guess. Then Gretchen managed to navigate all the way to "Indian Food" in precisely 20 questions. But she trounced me decisively on her last item, "Sport," the name of a particularly recalcitrant pimple that occupied an entrenched position in her chin back during the fall.
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