Posts by Berck

Dad mentioned months ago that I should watch this video. It’s an hour long, and I was bit reluctant because the subject of the video is exponential functions. I tend to think that I’m reasonably well versed in exponential functions, so I took my time getting to the video. I was going to just send my response to Dad, but figured I’d share it for everyone in case anyone else has thoughts.

Is it, “the most important video you’ll ever see”? I doubt it. Chances are you either understand exponential functions already, or you’ll never understand them, and this video won’t change that.

There’s an underlying idea in this video that, “we need to do something about the population problem.” And I disagree with that statement. We needed to do something about the population problem in 1970. It’s now too late.

I think we’re done. I think all of the things that naturally limit population growth have already started happening. He mentions Japan in the video, and how anything less than a 3% economic growth rate was a recession for Japan. Japan hasn’t really hit a 3% growth rate since 1990 or so. I suspect they never will again. And I’m not sure we’ll ever get much better than that, either. Here’s some graphs of Japan:

Japan’s GDP Growth
Japan’s Population Growth

There are all these doomsday predictions about what things will look like once we overpopulate some area, and I think they have a problem: there are natural pressures that are not well understood that start taking effect long before those doomsday scenarios.

I think we’re seeing the beginning of that. The U.S. population growth is declining (still a seriously positive 9% or so), but declining. The U.S. Birth Rate has plummeted dramatically since 2007 as a result of the recession, and the population growth as a whole obviously trends behind birth rates.

I think we’ve seen the end of of “sustainable growth” in the U.S. As the professor in the video points out, there’s really no such thing as “sustainable growth”, so this shouldn’t be a surprise. I think the current economic collapse, which in turn has caused a downturn in the birth rate as well as the immigration rate (illegal immigration from Mexico has all but stopped in the last couple of years…), signals the beginning of a profoundly different era.

We saw peak oil in the U.S. in 1970. We’re about to see worldwide peak oil sometime in the next 10 years. I think there are more subtle resource limits that are already coming into play that we don’t even recognize that will further constrain population growth which will further constrain economic growth…

I think we’ll see a vague recovery from this recession, but things are never going to be like they were in the early ’90s. On the other hand, every generation likes to think that we’re entering some bold new phase of history, and maybe I’m just suffering from that?

Just got back my first homework in Design and Analysis of Algorithms. I worked very hard on it, so I was glad to have gotten 119/125 on it. Here’s the assignment, as I turned it in.. I missed points for not evaluating 1c at infinity, and for not providing enough detail for the average case in number 3.

He’s just assigned the second homework. It looks to be about the same difficulty level, depending on how hard the recurrence relations at the top turn out to be. And I’m guessing they turn out to be hard.

Passed!

So, I don’t have to worry about that anymore. The last big worry is the Spring schedule, and I’m not sure when that comes out…

I had all sorts of frustrations with my Programming Language class today. I went to school an hour early to use one of the Windows labs because we have to turn in Windows executables which I think is a really stupid requirement. Providing a windows executable has absolutely nothing to do with my ability to code in the specified languages.

Anyway, the COBOL compiler worked fine, after I spent half an hour figuring out how to use it. The FORTRAN compiler didn’t work on my source file, and the ADA compiler refused to work at all. I spent an hour futzing with it with no results. This is precisely why I don’t use windows.

I have perfectly valid source code that compiles and executes beautifully on Linux, yet I’m supposed to waste hours of my life with lab computers that aren’t maintained correctly? Ridiculous.

Well, so far my least enjoyable class has been Operating System design. The textbook is wonderful (Tanenbaum!), the material is something I’m very interested in, but the professor is absolutely boring. He’s a grad student who doesn’t appear to have taught a class before, so I’m hoping he’ll get better as the semester progresses.

The best thing he’s mentioned is that our first project will be to implement a new system call in Linux, and the second project will be to implement our own process scheduler for Linux. This sounds like a substantial amount of work, but should be fun. He’s alluded to other projects as well… Since I hope to some day submit a useful Linux kernel patch, it’s good that I get to spend class time playing with the kernel.

My algorithms class looks like it’s going to be a lot of work. The first assignment involves some mathematical proofs, some theoretical analysis of algorithms, followed by analyzing an algorithm theoretically, coding the algorithm in a language of our choice, then analyzing the performance of the algorithm experimentally and compare to the theoretical analysis. And this is just the first assignment.

Probability and Statistics is, thus far, terribly easy. The professor promises it’ll get a lot harder. Three semesters of calculus are listed as pre-reqs for the class, so I would hope he’s right.

I still think programming languages is going to be lots of fun. Computability, Automata and Formal Languages is also pretty mathy, but the concepts aren’t too difficult and there haven’t been any assignments so far.

I’ve been trying to get ahead on work so I won’t have to do any while Ben and Amanda are here this weekend. Since it’s still the beginning of the semester, it shouldn’t be too hard.