Through red­dit I found the story of The Ghost in the Machine, the story of a man who had a ghostly vis­ion, a grey blob out of the corner of his eye. I won’t retell the whole story, but he even­tu­ally tracked it down to a 19Hz stand­ing wave where he’d had the sight­ing. 19Hz is sus­pi­ciously close to what is doc­u­mented to be the res­on­ant fre­quency of the human eye­ball in vivo. The belief is that a vibrat­ing eye­ball — per­haps in con­junc­tion with other doc­u­mented effects of “uneas­i­ness” due to infra­sonic ambi­ence — leads to ghostly visions.

The 19Hz hypo­thesis was bolstered by tak­ing it to other notori­ously haunted places.

As I dug deeper and did more research, the whole thing felt a bit too neat and tidy, as if I were play­ing out a Fringe plot. Sup­port­ing the whole hypo­thesis is a NASA tech­nical report from 1976, which some­how adds to the 1-​​hour drama aesthetic.

I still have to go through the NASA tech­nical report in detail, but I had a bit of jeal­ousy when I got to the pre­face and saw it was actu­ally a Ph.D. thesis. Every now and then I get a twinge of thesis envy. Could there pos­sibly be a more badass thesis than determ­in­ing the res­on­ant fre­quency of human eye­balls? For NASA? In truth, if I were doing my Ph.D. thesis in 1976, there’s no doubt I’d be doing some­thing bor­ing and computer-​​related. Sigh.

I’m actu­ally really dis­ap­poin­ted no one’s actu­ally tried out — or pub­lished, at any rate — this 19Hz hypo­thesis exper­i­ment­ally. I need to set up some sub­woof­ers around cam­pus and see if any ghost sight­ings come out of it.

Don’t worry: I haven’t actu­ally lost my cat. A year ago I did tem­por­ar­ily — for about a day. I made up a flyer and was going to get it prin­ted in the morn­ing, but thank­fully she came back dur­ing the night.

I just stumbled upon this flyer and thought maybe it could be some use to someone. A quick Google search shows there isn’t much out there for lost pet flyer tem­plates spe­cific to iWork’s Pages applic­a­tion. Maybe this tem­plate could save someone a few minutes of work; who knows.

I’ve provided a PDF pre­view of the tem­plate, as well. The flyer was designed to have very little inform­a­tion — only the import­ant inform­a­tion — and to be highly vis­ible. I think it should work well in black and white, though I haven’t tried it. I’m not a graphic artist and I can’t claim it’s good, but in my opin­ion it’s at least not terrible.

Without fur­ther ado, here is the lost cat flyer tem­plate spe­cific for iWork Pages.

I’ve prob­ably talked before about my ser­i­ous man-​​crush on Gisle Martens Meyer. Mostly I just really like his music. Fol­low­ing his blog there’s a lot I can identify with, too. He’s one of the few musi­cians to do his best to give an expli­cit “fuck you and thanks for dying” to the music industry at every oppor­tun­ity. He’s embraced the new real­ity of music dis­tri­bu­tion with open arms. Plus he seems very gung-​​ho about the robot future in con­trast to all those losers who throw around words like “apocalypse”.

The first sen­tence of one of his most recent blog posts just hit me like a brick:

The reason I like the future is because you can change it.

That sums up a lot about me and why I get so frus­trated with friends my age — or usu­ally quite a bit younger! — who are already start­ing to slip into the con­ser­vat­ive “things which are new suck” men­tal­ity. It might take me a bit of extra effort to “get” some of the new changes to the world: Twit­ter is a good example. It would be easy for me to stick to how things were and shake my cane and say “in my day, we wrote blog posts with more than 140 char­ac­ters!” but I think in the end it’s worth it.

I’m pretty psyched about the future and I want to be a part of it and, I guess most import­antly, I want to change it.

Yes, I’m a com­puter archi­tec­ture nerd. I expect this won’t sur­prise anyone.

The recent story on Microsoft end­ing sup­port for Itanium (side note: this is hardly news. No one ran Win­dows on Itanium in the first place) rekindled my love affair with the Itanium archi­tec­ture. Every six to twelve months I become infatu­ated with it all over again.

My infatu­ation usu­ally dies down when I real­ize the Itanium is out of reach for mere mor­tals. Some­times I day dream about when I’ve acci­dent­ally stumbled into money and I’m able to afford one. It’s hard to find a new Itanium server for under $30k and play­ing around with the online con­fig­ur­at­ors it’s not hard to run your­self into the half a mil­lion dol­lar range.

Today’s dif­fer­ent, though: today I decided to check out Ebay. Used Itanium serv­ers are actu­ally very cheap. Here’s one for $340. It’s only about 6 or 7 years out-​​of-​​date, too. Being out-​​of-​​date with Itanium isn’t such a big deal since they were never in-​​date to begin with. The pro­spect that I might be able to buy myself one as a gradu­ation present — when I have time to play with it — is exciting.

I won’t bore you with the details of Itanium and why it failed in its prom­ise to be the next big saviour, the one com­puter archi­tec­ture to bind them all. I was actu­ally going to write about why I love the Itanium so much, but before I knew it I’d writ­ten six para­graphs about how beau­ti­ful the archi­tec­ture is and real­ized no one but me would ever care to read it. Suf­fice it to say it’s the nicest archi­tec­ture I’ve ever seen, from the per­spect­ive of someone who truly enjoys writ­ing assembly code, the per­fect bal­ance between expos­ing the archi­tec­ture and hid­ing away the mundane details that some­time plagued RISC archi­tec­tures. Whenever someone fool­ishly asks me about Itanium — don’t worry, I’m usu­ally able to restrain myself — I describe it as “everything SPARC should have been”, SPARC being one of the more eleg­ant RISC archi­tec­tures to date.

For my pur­poses it doesn’t mat­ter if Itanium is prac­tical or pop­u­lar or well-​​fabricated or none of the above since it’s just for my own enjoy­ment. One of the biggest prob­lems is that no one’s man­aged to write a suit­able com­piler for it. That suits me just fine since I’d rather be writ­ing assembly code by hand or writ­ing my own com­piler for it. I’m actu­ally half con­vinced that if any­one actu­ally is going to write a bril­liant com­piler for Itanium, one that intel­li­gently takes advant­age of all its spec­u­lat­ive loads and rotat­ing register win­dows and sim­ilar toys that I like to drool over, it’s going to be a com­piler that has a ser­i­ous leg up in static ana­lysis, maybe for a lan­guage that’s been ser­i­ously restric­ted, for which my research would be appropriate.

Well I’m not so arrog­ant as to think that I can write a com­piler for Itanium where so some of the world’s top back-​​end developers have failed before. Even if fail­ure is nigh guar­an­teed, it would be a really fun chal­lenge, and it’s always more fun when the chal­lenge is inher­ent in the beauty of what you’re work­ing with. I think I may have to ser­i­ously put aside a few hun­dred dol­lars for after gradu­ation so I have this to play with.