Scattered things...

[pmb]

• I remain skeptical of quite a few things that Hillary Clinton stands for - increased censorship is pretty much always wrong, and she's too willing to roll over and find the "middle ground" between the centrist position and the loony right - but linking the federal minimum wage to the congressional wage is a stroke of genius.
• 12 catches of 5 clubs. And I could count them myself instead of having someone else tell me how many I got. That was most pleasing.
• Conference submission date is May 16th. Work work work. Then I am done with the research project that is turning out to be kind of orthogonal to the research I want to do. Then it's all area exam all the time. Work work work. Then the term is over.
• And this summer I am teaching "Intro to Programming" in Python in a 4-week intensive (7/24-8/16). Using John Zelle's book based on the advice of several people. I am psyched. The rest of the summer is going to be spent biking and hanging out and reading and recovering from a relatively rough year of grad school.

Comments

[djsendai.livejournal.com]

but linking the federal minimum wage to the congressional wage is a stroke of genius.

yeah i'm thinking some sort of pod-creature thing is going on here, Hilary is certainly not on my list of "most beloved or courageous politicians".

I see it as pretty much a posturing move, legislators across the board have a tendency to frequently sponsor/write bills they know will have no chance of getting even through committee just so they can look good to the folks at home.

[djsendai.livejournal.com]

as a followup, i'm actually not completely that cynical, I think it was a pretty bold thing to suggest. I hope it gets some real action to it :)

[triath.livejournal.com]

"12 catches of 5 clubs."

Go you!

[tdw.livejournal.com]

The Zelle book is pretty good. There is also a follow up (not by him, but obviously related, and from the same publisher) for teaching Data Structures in Python, but I'm fairly unimpressed by it. It comes close, but falls short (like not mentioning that Python lists are O(n) lookup, and building things in them like arrays. *cringe*)

[clipdude.livejournal.com]

I really like the idea of linking the minimum wage to Congressional salaries.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

I thought they were amortized constant time access and extension. Things like a[3] or a[500] are all O(1). It's mapping item to index that is O(n). Right? Is that last one what you meant by lookup?

[tdw.livejournal.com]

Really? Last I knew (admittedly a while back) lists were really linked-lists under the hood, and thus O(n). Are they just doing lists-as-hashes now?

Testing your assertion (with Python2.3 on Debian Stable)

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Python lists seem to be pretty fast.

import random
import time

for p in range(6,21):
    a = [ 1 for _ in range(2**p) ]

    elements = [ random.randint(0,len(a)-1) for _ in range(1024) ]
    s = time.time()
    for e in elements:
        _ = a[e]
    e = time.time()
    print s - e, 2**p

Gives us:

-0.000524997711182 64
-0.000507831573486 128
-0.000765085220337 256
-0.000565767288208 512
-0.000520944595337 1024
-0.000524997711182 2048
-0.000566005706787 4096
-0.00064492225647 8192
-0.000647068023682 16384
-0.000678777694702 32768
-0.000730991363525 65536
-0.000707864761353 131072
-0.000710010528564 262144
-0.000735998153687 524288
-0.000744104385376 1048576

So list access time does grow, but it's pretty miniscule and probably due to CPU cache issues, and it is *certainly* is a far cry from O(n).

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

5 clubs? 12 catches? You da man! I am once again juggling clubs to strengthen my bartending wrists, and I am starting to work on my flair tricks again (flair bartending is actually competitve now, who knew?)http://www.theflairschool.com/html/intermediate.html
It is amazing that people will pay an extra dollar to watch me juggle lemons! As if alcohol wasn't expensive enough.

[roninspoon.livejournal.com]

I'm of the idea opinion that congress people shouldn't be compensated at all. There are already far too many motivations to remain in office and ignore their constiiuents.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

We need more than just the idle rich in Congress.

[agthorr.livejournal.com]

No, Python lists are arrays under the hood.

Lookup is O(1), but delete and insert are O(n).

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Why on earth would they do lists-as-hashes? Extendable arrays using realloc() while ensuring that the list size is always a power of 2 would be amortized O(1) for everything except insert in the middle and delete from the middle.

[agthorr.livejournal.com]

I think linked a percentage-wise increase in minimum wage to the same percentage-wise increase in Congressional pay is mediocre at best. A 20% increase gives minimum wage workers an extra $2k/year, but gives a Congressperson an extra $33k/year. In other words, the Congressperson's raise would be 2.5 times the minimum wage worker's entire salary (after the raise).

Sadly, it may still be better than what we have now.

[roninspoon.livejournal.com]

we need the idle poor looking to become the idle rich!

[agthorr.livejournal.com]

I still think Python arrays should be B-Trees under-the-hood so everything is O(log n), while still speedy for the common case of small lists.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

True. But it at least ends up tying the minimum wage to inflation, which is a very important first step (although it's already been done here in Oregon).

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Send us your idle rich,
your idle poor,
your idle masses yearning to breathe free
The idle refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the idle, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

[roninspoon.livejournal.com]

... and lock them up and deport them.

[tdw.livejournal.com]

Weird. My mistake.

I guess I'll have to re-evaluate that book now too.

[goteam.livejournal.com]

Living with Peter has completely ruined my appreciation for bar flair, it turns out: last month I went out with some friends who kept getting distracted by tricks that I didn't even notice because they're the kind of thing Peter does all the time. I just kept talking and I'd occasionally insert an "I just missed another trick, didn't I?" into the conversation. Are people like me the bane of the flair bartender's existence, or can we redeem ourselves by tipping well anyway? (Actually, I have no idea what constitutes tipping well for drinks, so if you care to fill me in on how to avoid being a jerk in the future, I'd appreciate it.)

[freyley.livejournal.com]

Yes, a more ideal scheme would be along these lines:

minimum yearly salary (per company) = .02*CEO's total earnings+bonus+value of benefits, etc OR .20*Congresscritter's salary, whichever is greater.

And then calculate hourly wages based on the standard 40 hour week.

Sadly, neither Hillary nor anyone else can propose that sort of thing.

[minorninth.livejournal.com]

Please, no! It's not worth the overhead for the millions of small lists/arrays that don't need this!

[agthorr.livejournal.com]

It's one extra pointer comparison per operation. That's a very small penalty to pay.

B-trees divide things into blocks (of, say, 512 or 4096 entries) and within a block they work just like arrays. So for the common case of small lists, you have one extra check to determine that the root of the B-tree is also a leaf node (i.e., it's entries are data not more B-tree nodes). Once that's determined, you jump to code that works just like the current array code.

B-trees are good because they're fast for small lists *and* they give you O(log n) performance for big lists.

[neonelephant.livejournal.com]

Frosh year at Mudd, and watching pmb and mbrubeck, among others, has made me quite jaded about three-ball juggling. My experience with flair bartending is zero, but I assume the effect is similar.