Page type: student

Labyrinth of Ambiguity - Yeehah; Wackiness Ensues!; These random syllables brought to you courtesy of;Welcome to my web page, your personal fully "interactive" voyage of discovery. Now stop wasting time surfing; and go do something to abet commerce or the military.;The home page for CSE sections AE and AG is here.; Thought for the day: Computers have been going strictly downhill since;the Apple II series. Ah, the Apple IIe, now there was a machine. One spent;relatively little time trying to install software apparently written for;a circa 1956 programmable toaster on one's sparc, or waiting for the system;administrator to come back from a two to three month lunch.;I suppose if youve gone to all the effort of looking at this page then;you are either vaguely interested in me or what Im doing or you have;some scant hope of being entertained.;Ok, so a guy walks into a bar with a yak on a leash, and the thing is, the yak;is huge. I mean really big. Even for a yak, and theyre pretty large to start;with. So the bartender says, "Hey, are you planning on bringing that thing in;here?" And the guy says "First of all, its a yak. And second of all, Im a;freemason, so I should certainly hope that Im bringing it in here." I forgot;to mention that this is in Nottingham (or any largish city in the UK that isnt;London.) Oh, and the bar is built on the site of an old pagan temple. Aw,;forget it.; This is my cat, Loki.; Someday I hope to make him supreme ruler of the cosmos. So be kind to animals, because someday one of they will have absolute;mastery of time, space, and the fabric of reality..; This is;me (on the right) fencing Sean McClean; in the 93; Junior Olympics. He won. I knocked him out of the epee tournament the next; day, though...;You can send me mail...; particularly if you wish to say something nice about my cat.;Im a third year grad student at the U of W CS dept, where I study;AI, and any other cognitive science disciplines I can get my hands on.;Im also interested in pure math, physics(especially cosmology and;elementary particle physics), paleontology, cabbages, monarchy, whatnot.;Who am I kidding. I write email, read Dilbert, and drink alot of;mochas. (Dogbert has a place in my personal pantheon. Many real;team-players have never heard of him, yet.) I make fun of classical;AI, a field which makes medieval french theology look like vital,;relevant, and fast-developing. As far as I can tell, these days doing;'classical AI' consists of getting computers to do intelligent things;for which theyre well suited which sane people who are interested in;the same topic find uninteresting and useless. Ive heard faculty from;other CS disciplines describe some work as "pure AI", the connotations;of which Ill leave to the agile mind of the reader. Feh. Pardon me,;Ill step over to the sink and spit out all my bitterness along with;half of my last drink.;Sometimes I do research. It is,;all in all, grad school.;An excellent site for studying the;Ars magna.;My favorite authors are Lord Dunsany Stanislaw Lem;J L Borges Italo Calvino I suppose William Gibson, Haruki;Murakami, and J R R Tolkien also deserve honorable mention. Much as I;love these authors, not one of them has written the final, perfect;book... But I think that some of them, Borges especially, have read;fragments of it, and allude to half remembered passages in their most;successful writing. If you like children's books, try Patricia;MacLachlan. Also, though I cant quite bring myself to put him in;the same class with the aforementioned authors, I highly recommend;Steven Brust ("Agyar" and "Taltos" are good places to start.);Though none of these have their books on-line, many good authors do.;I am also a great fan of understated sarcasm.;I recommend this excellent story by Neil Gaiman.;Chess stuff.;Other chess stuff.;Some recommended books.;Its always fun to reminisce about Simon's Rock, a wonderful place, although much better in the recollection than in the living. A nice place to wax nostalgic about but you wouldnt want to live there.;Click here if you would like to;know more about interdisciplinary cognitive science within UW CS.;Fencing is fun. I am very picky; about the blades I use.;I quite enjoy fencing. Some bits of it I have down quite well. For instance, I have more kime than a battleship full of suicidal klingons on PCP. However, as Coach Jim is often inclined to point out, my idea of tactical subtlety could use broadening.;Poor Jim.;An interesting question is that of whether spirit or technique dominates.;;Much as Im inclined to think the SCA consists of a bunch of;ferallieurs taking great pleasure in thwacking at each other with sticks;in between;beers, historical;fencing is interesting.;;You can always count on those wacky guys at the FIE to come up with some zany,madcap, and riotous rule changes;Want to see my thrill-packed home page?;To be quite honest, I dont wander around the web much any more, as its almost totally vacuous. Oh well, maybe things will improve in a few centuries. Im inclined to doubt it but one might as well be an optimist. Sigh.;I recommend that you look into the poetry of Philip Larkin if youre having a particularly bad day, or if you just want one.;In need of a useful web services? Nick will take tremendous pleasure in providing them. Oh yeah, hes also good for a dose of neo-Luddism. Rather odd coming from a CSE guy, much less an AI flavored one.;You might want to check out the Electronic Muse, brought to you by Mary-Suzanne. Shes the only person I know;whose cats have home pages.;Take a gander at Daphne's home page. Shescool and has beaucoup attitude.;Ill leave you with this. (Thanks to Messr. Mehl...); When love is gone, there's always justice.; And when justice is gone, there's always force.; And when force is gone, there's always Mom.; Hi, Mom!; -Laurie Anderson;Speak my language...;zmason@cs.washington.edu;P.S. Hi Rane!;