Pete's Log: cool talk, empty ndlug room
Entry #1139, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)(posted when I was 23 years old.)
I really enjoyed the talk given today by Amy Murphy, titled "Enabling disconnected transitive communication in mobile ad hoc networks." A lot of the stuff they're doing is pretty preliminary, but it was interesting just to see their ideas and their plan of attack. Dr. Murphy seemed uneasy when asked for justifications for her work. She listed a few applications, which seemed to me (and to Dr. Kogge) to be enough to justify further research, but she seemed to lack confidence when trying to justify her work. I found that unfortunate. Talks are always better when the speakers are confident that what they are doing is worth their time. But beyond that, I liked what she presented.
I took a piece of paper and a pencil along with me and jotted down a bunch of random thoughts, some related to the talk, and some not. Some of them are very short and on paper lack anything resembling context. So I decided it'd be fun to write some of them down here, keeping their context to myself.
- play with numbers
- person area network
- network etymology
- beacon
- quasi
- economics in artificial systems
- efficacy
- merge
- shadow
- your values will change
Actually, I should probably provide context for the last one, since it's pretty funny. Dr. Murphy was talking about applications for her work at the end of the talk, and mentioned that she could probably get a lot of funding for the military applications of her work, but that she was not willing to go that way. Dr. Bowyer told her "Your values will change." I thought that was funny.
The engineering open house was today. The college is trying to convince the current freshmen that engineering is for them. NDLUG participated by having the NDLUG room door propped open and a few of us sitting there, ready to answer questions. We had four people stop by, three of whom were actually interested in Linux. Not a very exciting turnout...