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thoughts, dreams, yesterday...
Mar. 22nd, 2003 01:49 pmToday, in contrast to my waking-up habits for most days, I did the Right Thing for remembering dreams. I didn't, on the first bleep of the alarm, leap out of bed (a five foot drop when you're on the top bunk) and shut the alarm off with one smooth motion -- no alarm today. I stayed in bed, eyes closed, thought about my dream from last night, and managed to remember what it was and get into sort of a lucid daydream state...
Anybody familiar with this sort of thing? I don't think it was quite like a lucid dream -- I knew I was at least partly awake, and I knew I was dreaming, but I could see the red-orange-ish tint of the sunlight coming through my eyelids, and it wasn't super-vivid... mostly outlines of things, coloured by the ambient outside-light. Is that bad, if my dreams are in wireframe? I fairly successfully managed to walk around where I had been in my earlier dream and juggle four balls...
Where I'd been in my dream, was at Denise's (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
smileydee) dorm, which in my dream was probably rather different from the physical reality of it. There were multiple rooms involved, and an inside and an outside (the outside was sort of a patio-balcony area, which my mind might have pulled from that outside walkway thing connecting the two parts of Brown at Rice...), and at one point, I think I was looking for the restroom, but instead walked through a little closet-looking door around a corner, which contained this room (in hindsight much bigger on the inside than the outside) in which people were practicing hockey by using bungee cords and checking dummies, which they would do at high speeds, careening down these lanes (kinda like bowling lanes) and then slamming into these little multicoloured dummies-on-posts at the end of the lanes. Somehow I was in hockey gear, going down one of the lanes. I crash into the dummy and go right through it, tumbling over. Somewhere, someone is saying that this would have been illegal in actual hockey. There must have been commentators somewhere else, watching me and the ambient other people, whom I didn't see.
Yesterday was a really funky day. I went to Combinatorics, which I've actually been enjoying over the past few days, since we started talking about graph theory. We talked about this really funky problem involving finding triangles (or a section of complete graph, in the general case -- like some set of points where every point is connected to all the other ones) in either a graph or its complement. It's explained like this: if you have a group of any six random people, there are at least three in the group who all know each other, or failing that, at least three in the group who all don't know each other. Try to draw a diagram :) The problem gets much harder when you're talking about sets bigger than three, though...
Anyway, he gave us this algorithm for checking to see if a graph could be drawn as a function of a set of numbers representing the degree of each vertex ("degree" is how many graph edges go into the vertex), and during my office hours for Friday, I sat down and coded it up -- and not long after, Alan came along and spoke to me for a while. This was really interesting, because as it turns out (and as I'd forgotten up until he came and reminded me) he's doing research about this exact sort of thing -- graph isomorphism, particularly. He looked at my program and seemed to like it (as far as somebody can like a simple little program to implement a clever little algorithm) and he tried to explain his research to me... He's a really interesting guy. I remember how, back in highschool, he'd try to explain his new methods for calculating Pi...
After my office hours, Lisa and Daniel and myself went outside and tossed disc, which was really entertaining -- we picked up random passers-by (including Chris and Frank) and pulled them into our game... we hung outside and tossed in the bright happy sunshine until Frank and myself had to go to Practicum lab -- we ended up grouping up, for this week's (relatively simple) program with Marty and Corey respectively. I don't think I'd really worked on a project with Corey before... this should be interesting.
After lab, I hung out in the TA lab and graded a little bit and listened to people talk about things getting blown up and got accosted by Paul... he's a really strange individual. I tried to give him a bagel, because he was hungry, and he was trying to say that it's just extra carbs that people who don't exercise don't need, and... well, one thing leads to another, and he's invading my personal space. I know he's playing, but he just doesn't have any inhibitions...
After that, we (Lisa and Daniel and myself) tried to meet up with our TA for Squeak, but she didn't show, so we headed out, thought about getting Chinese food... but I opted to play a pick-up game of Ultimate instead, which was cool. Afterwards, Corey, Tim, Marty, Andrew and myself headed off for some Chinese food of our own, at the lovely veggie- and Catholics-on-Friday-during-Lent- friendly Chinese Buddha.
... then we came back and I hung around, took a nap, woke up, messed with stuff for a while, spoke with Esther, eventually went back to sleep, woke up, dreamed, got up, went to Woody's, came back, worked on more stuff and wrote a long rambling entry, and then now I'm here.
... and now you know everything about everything, up until this very moment. Esther just IM'd me.
Anybody familiar with this sort of thing? I don't think it was quite like a lucid dream -- I knew I was at least partly awake, and I knew I was dreaming, but I could see the red-orange-ish tint of the sunlight coming through my eyelids, and it wasn't super-vivid... mostly outlines of things, coloured by the ambient outside-light. Is that bad, if my dreams are in wireframe? I fairly successfully managed to walk around where I had been in my earlier dream and juggle four balls...
Where I'd been in my dream, was at Denise's (
smileydee) dorm, which in my dream was probably rather different from the physical reality of it. There were multiple rooms involved, and an inside and an outside (the outside was sort of a patio-balcony area, which my mind might have pulled from that outside walkway thing connecting the two parts of Brown at Rice...), and at one point, I think I was looking for the restroom, but instead walked through a little closet-looking door around a corner, which contained this room (in hindsight much bigger on the inside than the outside) in which people were practicing hockey by using bungee cords and checking dummies, which they would do at high speeds, careening down these lanes (kinda like bowling lanes) and then slamming into these little multicoloured dummies-on-posts at the end of the lanes. Somehow I was in hockey gear, going down one of the lanes. I crash into the dummy and go right through it, tumbling over. Somewhere, someone is saying that this would have been illegal in actual hockey. There must have been commentators somewhere else, watching me and the ambient other people, whom I didn't see.Yesterday was a really funky day. I went to Combinatorics, which I've actually been enjoying over the past few days, since we started talking about graph theory. We talked about this really funky problem involving finding triangles (or a section of complete graph, in the general case -- like some set of points where every point is connected to all the other ones) in either a graph or its complement. It's explained like this: if you have a group of any six random people, there are at least three in the group who all know each other, or failing that, at least three in the group who all don't know each other. Try to draw a diagram :) The problem gets much harder when you're talking about sets bigger than three, though...
Anyway, he gave us this algorithm for checking to see if a graph could be drawn as a function of a set of numbers representing the degree of each vertex ("degree" is how many graph edges go into the vertex), and during my office hours for Friday, I sat down and coded it up -- and not long after, Alan came along and spoke to me for a while. This was really interesting, because as it turns out (and as I'd forgotten up until he came and reminded me) he's doing research about this exact sort of thing -- graph isomorphism, particularly. He looked at my program and seemed to like it (as far as somebody can like a simple little program to implement a clever little algorithm) and he tried to explain his research to me... He's a really interesting guy. I remember how, back in highschool, he'd try to explain his new methods for calculating Pi...
After my office hours, Lisa and Daniel and myself went outside and tossed disc, which was really entertaining -- we picked up random passers-by (including Chris and Frank) and pulled them into our game... we hung outside and tossed in the bright happy sunshine until Frank and myself had to go to Practicum lab -- we ended up grouping up, for this week's (relatively simple) program with Marty and Corey respectively. I don't think I'd really worked on a project with Corey before... this should be interesting.
After lab, I hung out in the TA lab and graded a little bit and listened to people talk about things getting blown up and got accosted by Paul... he's a really strange individual. I tried to give him a bagel, because he was hungry, and he was trying to say that it's just extra carbs that people who don't exercise don't need, and... well, one thing leads to another, and he's invading my personal space. I know he's playing, but he just doesn't have any inhibitions...
After that, we (Lisa and Daniel and myself) tried to meet up with our TA for Squeak, but she didn't show, so we headed out, thought about getting Chinese food... but I opted to play a pick-up game of Ultimate instead, which was cool. Afterwards, Corey, Tim, Marty, Andrew and myself headed off for some Chinese food of our own, at the lovely veggie- and Catholics-on-Friday-during-Lent- friendly Chinese Buddha.
... then we came back and I hung around, took a nap, woke up, messed with stuff for a while, spoke with Esther, eventually went back to sleep, woke up, dreamed, got up, went to Woody's, came back, worked on more stuff and wrote a long rambling entry, and then now I'm here.
... and now you know everything about everything, up until this very moment. Esther just IM'd me.
