• I’m sick, as many of you know. It’s a strange hybrid strain of Bronchitis and a Cold, imported from the seedy lands of Montreal. I look like this every few minutes:
  

  I’ve been spending between 14 to 18 hours in bed per day. With all the coughing, I’ve been getting what feels like 6-7 hours of sleep each night.

• I’ve been catching up on my Neural Networks class’s readings, it’s still fascinating me as much as the first lecture. And still terrifies me just as much.
  Words like “Hessian matrix”, “paraboloids”, “hyperparaboloids”, “hyper-sphere”, “the”, “conjugate gradient”, “eigenvalue”, and “eigenvectors” are littered throughout, intermixed with complicated equations. Eigen stuff isn’t all that scary, but it’s a personal phobia. I never imagined I’d be reading words like “hyperparaboloids” in a paper I’m supposed to understand.
• I upgraded WordPress, let me know if there are any anomalies.

A new largest known twin prime number (a prime that differs from another prime by two) has recently been discovered. What caught my attention is that the largest known twin prime number is merely 58,711 digits long, while the largest known prime number is a whopping 9,808,358 digits long (discovered Sept. 2006). Had we actually known all the prime numbers between the largest known prime number and the smallest (2), then finding all of the twin primes in between would be trivial.

Being immersed in a field like Computer Science, it’s easy to start believing that anything is possible and within our reach today. Fortunately, the world is more exciting than that. There’s still oodles of primes to be found, people willing to pay money to have them found, and wide-eyed optimists investing their time to find them.

And then there’s the relentless sprint towards the perfecting of neural networks, achieving artificial intelligence, designing exciting new user interfaces, or coming up with a more addicting way to spend one’s time. Still lots of work to be done.

Tomorrow I’ll be having a dentist appointment, followed by an interview, followed by a departure to Montreal where I’ll be attending the Canadian Undergraduate Software Engineering Conference. I’ll be back Saturday night.

Tooth #6 on the top row had me curled up in the fetal position yesterday. Turns out that the deep filling I had in there has let in an infection and another root canal is in order next week. This makes it 3/4 fillings that were put in by my old dentist have been infected… I ought to sue, or something.

In other news, I took a break from wasting time by working on a logo for Igor’s web application. The web app is called UTest, it lets professors upload secret solutions which students can blindly run unit tests against and see the pass/fail results. Blind-folded and hand-cuffed black-box testing.

The original sketch:

The final accepted logo:

My personal favourite, the Make love, not war edition: