Computational Theology

This week has been spent mostly looking for prospective jobs for when I finish my PhD, and one thought crossed my mind, that of trying to apply for a postdoc in a university in the Vatican. There are a number of universities supported by the holy see, so I wondered if the catholic church would be preoccupied with the virtual world as well as the spiritual one. But sadly, it turns out that the only university in the Vatican itself has a rather narrow range of departments, consisting only of Philosophy, Theology, Canon Law (nothing to do with firearms, I'm afraid), and Missiology (whatever the fuck that is).

What a disappointment.

Portugal and AAMAS

I spent the whole of last week in Portugal, more precisely, in Estoril, where the 2008 edition of the conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems was held. A view from the conference hotel can be seen in the picture above, which instantly conveys the idea of what the place is, a beach resort. Unfortunately, despite weather forecasts to the contrary, I believe I managed to bring the notorious English weather with me, because it seemed to be rainy and overcast virtually every day (this picture was taken in one of the best days).
Tension was high for me, because not only did I have to give four talks about various papers on agents, one of my talks was essentially a summary of my thesis, the first presentation of it to an audience not consisting entirely of my supervisor. This time, the audience consisted of a designated mentor, and the chairs of the doctoral mentoring program. Luckily for me, my presentation was not a complete disaster, and although I might have said more than I should about some controversial topics, people generally felt my PhD was not a smoking pile of crap. Encouraged by that, I went on to present my other papers, but things of course never stay nice for long, and in one of them my laptop did not feel like working together with the projector which forced me to do half of the presentation without slides while trying to make an intelligible history out of the disordered thoughts I had at the time.
Now, going to the end of my thesis, I am looking at various possible positions, and who knows where I will end up.

Into the Real Wild and Lars

Although this week I have been busy with preparations for AAMAS 2008, in which I am expected to give four different talks, I managed to relax a bit by watching some movies I have been recommended, namely Into the wild and Lars and the real girl. These are two wildly different films.

Into the wild is a movie about a moron who thinks he is accomplishing something while he kills himself of starvation in an abandoned bus in Alaska. It may sound mean to call a dead man an idiot, but the fact that many Americans formed a sort of a cult around this example of idiocy deserves strong words.

Smile idiot, smile.

This guy Christopher McCandles, self-styled survivalist (and self-pictured above), after falling out with his family, decides to vanish and try his luck surviving as a bum around cities, which is essentially possible thanks to human charity, and wilderness, his main mistake. In his last attempt at surviving in the wild, he went beyond what his meager knowledge of survival could keep him and could not find his way out of a trail that was good enough to take a whole bus into a certain spot. A very good comment about that was made by a park ranger, essentially saying that if he had a map of the area he would need to walk two miles into safety.

The second movie is more lighthearted, and tells the story of a socially inept man who finds the solution to the social pressures to get a girlfriend in a love doll. Not a crappy love doll, mind you, but a Real Doll, pictured below.

Oh Roxanne.

Of course, just buying such a doll would not suffice for a movie plot, and the movie is not about a man satisfying his masturbatory needs with an artificial person. Rather he pretends that the doll is an actual woman, bound to a wheelchair, which makes for very funny situations, as his entire town tries to play along because the main character is such a likable figure. This last movie is definitely recommended.

Of Munchkins and Blunders

With almost a week having been gone since my return from Spain, and having loads of stuff to finish before I travel to AAMAS, things are not looking very good to me. My thesis work has officially started, and this week not only did I have to finishing reviewing papers for a Brazilian conference, I tried to start writing the introduction to my thesis. On a side note, I have read what was probably the worst paper I have ever seen in the process of reviewing papers for SBIA (their website looks a bit lame), since this is my first reviewing assignment, I fear for the worst in the future. But back to the thesis, it is proving incredibly hard to write an introduction and not starting it with something that sounds like bullshit, given that the remainder of the thesis must be strictly scientific. I wish I had the writing skills of Alan Turing, which I had the audacity of quoting in my proto-introduction, and be able to make interesting analogies, but then again, scientific writing nowadays is a bit different from 60 years ago.



On top of my difficulties at work, my home is now semi-occupied by the entire family of my flatmate, which means home privacy is a thing of the past. Every day some new thing hits my nerves making me feel like I am in a Chevy Chase movie! Luckily, so far I am avoiding being entirely like Clark Griswold and making an ass of myself, but there is still one and a half week to go, and I may end up slipping. In order to cope with this problem at home, I am spending increasing amounts of time hanging out at my friend Paulo's place after work, trying to arrive as late as possible in my flat. At these times, I indulge myself in some games from which I have been long apart, and spent some money buying the Munchkin card game, in particular the Cthulhu version of it, as fueled by my recent reading of Lovecraft. I am also about to start learning Go so as to add another level of chic to my nocturnal play sessions. Let's just hope I manage to survive these coming weeks and maintain my sanity for the conference I am about to go immediately afterwards.

Police Squad!

Since my supervisor already caught me during my lunchtime entertainment moment, I feel more at ease in making comments about the crap I watch while I have lunch (just in case he pops by this blog). And this week, after returning from Barcelona, I re-discovered the series that led to the Naked Gun movies, namely, Police Squad!. The episodes of this series are actually perfect for my lunch break, since they are roughly 25 minutes in length, which does not allow time wasting after the food consumption part of the meal. One very funny part of these episodes is its introduction, usually with a celebrity guest that dies right at the end. Youtube, of course, has all episodes neatly divided into parts, which is quite handy, as you can check out below.

Pimientos de Padron

 

Although I spent the past two weeks in Barcelona visiting my significant other, my work schedule was unchanged. So instead of enjoying the Mediterranean climate and dedicating myself to hedonism, I have spent most of my days trying to kick start the write up of my thesis. Moreover, I have spend half a week trying to come up with plans for further work on parts of my thesis, most of which will never be actually carried out. As you can imagine, this is very stimulating. Even if work is pressing, I needed to enjoy Barcelona, which is one of my favourite cities in Europe, so yesterday I went with Anita to the Mercat de la Boqueria The purpose was to get to know the place better, and although this market is significantly smaller the one in my hometown , it was really a feast for the senses. And I managed to get supplied with local delicacies. Among other things, I bought Pimientos del Padron, which were to be the entree for our lunch, since they are easily prepared, and eaten without the help of cutlery. If the local lore (and Wikipedia) is to be believed, about one in ten of those pimientos are supposed to be spicy, but I guess my luck defies this lore, you can call me lukcy if you are Mexican, or unlucky if you are Brazilian, because I managed to get almost all of them of the spicy kind. And by spicy I really mean it, since I felt the effects in my throat and stomach throughout the day, as well as today (on the way out).

Low Rider

To try and kick start my writing up yesterday, I obtained the soundtrack from GTA: San Adreas, which so far has been my favorite game on the series, as well as the last one I managed to play for a long period of time, before my obligations overrode my desire to play games. In any case, this game has one of the best soundtracks ever, just because it consists mostly of a collage of great songs from various genres (of course, as far as original soundtracks go, nothing beats Mechwarrior 3). Among the tracks included in the Master Sounds radio is Low Rider, which is a song I always assumed was played by some Latino band, which clearly is not the case, as attested by this video I found in You Tube. The music always evokes in me memories of the famous Cheech and Chong movie, Up in Smoke, which I always assumed were the authors of the song, given these comedians' musical pieces. Well, I stand corrected.

My new career

Now it's official, I have quit my position as PhD student to pursue my childhood dream of working in a rodeo. More specifically, I have decided to become a rodeo clown and got a position in a Texas rodeo, starting this summer. I understand the seriousness of my decision, but I figured I could not put this off for long in my life. To demonstrate how serious I am in my clown move, I have linked to this post a comic from the Perry Bible Fellowship, which is, by the way, on of the best webcomics I have ever seen on the internet, some of the strips are a bit cryptic, but the level of artistic finesse along with the witty humor make it for a great experience.

This being the first of April, it should take me some time to relocate to Texas and start posting again my experiences as rodeo clown.

Stories of the 1920s and 1930s

In the past three months I have been reading the best of pulp fiction from the 1920s and 1930s from two of the most acclaimed writes of the time Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft. The genres for which they became famous are remarkably different, with Lovecraft being hailed as the creator of modern horror and one of the precursors of science fiction, whereas Howard popularized fantasy fiction with his very own sword and sorcery type of story.

Dungeons and Dragons

It has been a while since I last posted in this blog, which is probably due to my either not having enough PhD work to do, or too much to do that it is blocking my mind (that is for someone else to decide). Besides the PhD work and other existential decisions I need to decide in the next three months. Throughout these last weeks, however, I have been assailed with strange dreams where I find myself playing dungeons and dragons, with the dream usually ending with me trying to bluff the GM into letting me succeed a vital saving throw that I just failed. The interesting thing about the dreams is that I have not played DnD for almost ten years now, and not so coincidentally, Gary Gygax, the creator of this game has died quite recently. This seems to be the most plausible explanation for my dreams, unless some semi-psychic Internet dweller wants to offer me some more esoteric explanation. Or it could be that I am losing my mind as a result of my PhD work, in any case, this does not bode well for me (I guess).