Got back out here to LBL, possibly for the last time. Lummy and I are out here for some design meetings about the BLD (Berkeley Lab Distribution). Lummy and I had an uneventful trip out here yesterday, and spent a good portion of the flight chatting about Things, including SC2000, t-shirts for the lab, various future directions of the LSC and some of its members, etc., etc. Good stuff.
We had some good arguments for a few hours about BLD today (Bill Saphir, Eric Roman, Paul Hargrove, and myself). We will continue arguing on Tuesday.
Sadly, though, Bill will be leaving LBL (going to a startup). Best of luck to him -- all hail Bill!
I saw Nathan's final presentation today on what he did with cfengine this summer. We heckled him a bit and asked him a few questions that he wasn't prepared for, but all in all, it was a good presentation -- I learned some things.
Contributed a few minor fixes to the vorbis-dev list today (and had a good typo in one of them -- nice).
Found a paper that was mentioned on HPC Wire today about ye old "6 degrees of separation" issues. These kinds of things are actually closely related to network topology and are highly relevant to my dissertation. It's good stuff. It's interesting to me that these kinds of studies were first started with a psychologist -- Millgram (I'm gonna get this wrong, but it should be somewhat close: the guy who did the pain response tests that had subjects pushing a button that supposedly shocked a "patient" [although it really didn't] and cause the "patient" enormous pain -- they tested how hard they could push a subject into delivering pain to the patient. Only 1 of Millgram's subjects refused to push the button. Peter Gabriel even has a song about this; Millgram's 37.). Millgram told several of his friends/colleagues to deliver a letter to some random person in the country -- someone that he was sure that they did not know. They could only send the letter to someone that they knew on a first name basis and ask them to pass it on in a similar manner in order to get it to its final recipient.
After many such trials, it turns out that the average number of what we now call "hops" was between 5 and 6. More research in this area has led to the now popular "6 degrees of separation" perception, and "the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon" -- which, if you think about it, is intuitively obvious. Consider: if, by some handwaving, we can assume that most humans on the planet are connected by 6 degrees, then linking any actor to Kevin Bacon -- a vastly smaller domain than all humans on the planet -- seems obvious to be true.
Even though I suck at math, these kinds of things interest me. I read half of a book about this. I can't remember the name of it, but it was also written at Cornell, and the paper that I read today referred to their work several times. Good stuff.
Lummy and I will be heading back to our skanky hotel soon. Outta here.