soapbox

Today is the birthday of my college, Peking University, the oldest university in China. Though the “oldest”, it was just since 1898. The real birth date is not May 4th though. This date was chosen to be the birthday (now also homecoming day) because of the “May Fourth Movement” which supposedly started from my college. Anyway, I don’t really have anything to say, just kind of miss the good old days in college, hoho. And also, today is Youth Day in China. I guess I’m still just young enough to enjoy this holiday?

Two of the landmarks on campus: Boya Tower and Lake with No Name.

ps: somehow the “class” inside img tag will disappear after saving the post?

I hereby announce a contest involving a narrow range of disciplines from electrical engineering to computer science.

Here are two parts to the project, hardware and software:
Hardware: You must design and build a circuit which will interface to a computer via usb and will output a voltage ranging from 0 to ~5 V under software control. The goal will be to have this circuit connected to an analog voltmeter to show computer system metrics.
Software: In any language of your choosing, you must write a driver for the USB circuit. It should allow the output voltage to be controlled manually or as a measure of cpu load, memory usage, etc. The software must run on linux and MacOS X.

There will be several judging criteria:
Simplicity and realiability of the hardware design.
Clarity, stability, expandability, and commenting of the code.
Overall coolness.

The prize for the first place team will be $50 cash money and judging will be completed the week of July 9.

Now, go find some undergrads to enter the contest.

I was just reading about attempts to limit global warming by capping CO2 emissions.

Of course, the US, China, India, and Brazil are very against these caps because they mean that we can’t burn as much gas as we want.

I really liked this quote though.

Science would appear to be on the side of the Europeans, who are lobbying for an international climate agreement limiting temperatures increases to 2 degrees.

It makes it sound like we’re going to change the temperature scale so that the maximum change will only be 2 degrees. (Never mind the fact that it doesn’t mention C vs F.)