Went through the projects of "nand2tetris part 1" in a few hours over last evening and this. Very cute to cobble together a little cpu from nand gates. I guess I never appreciated the various relationships between other architectural choices and the choice of having a control FSM in a cpu versus not --- notably the nand2tetris cpu is single-cycle, ( Read more... )

Today was warm until it wasn't; the evening, during which I went and picked up my laundry, showing signs of being legitimately Winter again.

Took the leftover ingredients (sauce, cheese, sausage, also some unused spinach) from pizzamaking and turned them into a pasta bake. Also v tasty.

Made some from-scratch pizza again for dinner. Dough turned out slightly crackery in flavor, but I got a lot of good rise out of my yeast this time. I have a space heater in my little office, and I just kept it near that for a couple hours, and that seemed to work great. For flavor, I figure I probably need to have more fat in it, or else give up ( Read more... )

After getting home from work immediately appeared to be a traintastrophe in the making, went to see Esther Schor talk about her book "Bridge of Words". Kinda neat. The stalled train situation had resolved itself in the meantime, got home, had some ramen with K.

Made some bread to make sure my yeast supply is still alive, in preparation for planning to make some pizza tomorrow. It is, and bread turned out fine. Ate it straight out of the oven with butter and honey.

Thai curry leftovers for dinner. Got a copy of Hennessy and Patterson's textbook on Architecture, and I am enjoying catching up on all the low-level processor/memory hierarchy/etc. stuff I usually ignore as a theorist.

Something that's bugged me for a long time is this:

How many paths, starting at the origin, taking N steps either up, down, left or right, end up at a particular place (x, y)? Ignoring the fact that x+y has to have the same parity as N, something that goes like e- k(x2 + y2), right? Just central-limit-type reasoning ought to suffice to see that. ( Read more... )

K made some very nice thai chicken curry for dinner; didn't accomplish much myself. Trying to read through the RISC-V Rocket implementation to see if I can understand much. Conclusion so far is "not really".

Still watching "Hell on Wheels". The characters motivations frequently make no sense at all, but at least they killed off the by-far most annoying character in the show.

Cold weather, so: made some cookies. This time snickerdoodles. The cinnamon does, it seems, come across better when it's on the outside rather than in the dough, even at the same quantity. I do still kind of like black pepper as a cookie spice, but I left it out this time around. I find it a bit tough to gauge how much water I need to add after the ( Read more... )