Unoppressive Pizza

Last Wednesday I was invited by a friend (who is a graduate student in electrical engineering, which involves lots of exciting math) to go to a computer science pizza party. Sadly, the pizza was not complimentary and it wasn't much of a party (lots of people standing around in a small room) but I had a pleasant time nonetheless. CS pizza parties used to feature something known as "Sexist Pizza" in which people with a feminine gender presentation ("women") didn't have to pay for their pizza. The point of this was to attract more of them to the parties in question, presumably in order to facilitate interaction between the two genders (I gather that the idea behind this would be to create intra-CS straight couplings).

Anyway, at the party in question I nommed some pizza and listened to some intriguing conversation between some computer scientists of my acquaintance about various functions of Gmail. One of them was so bold as to ask me what I was doing there and persist with a "But I thought you were in religious studies..." in response to my claim that I was in CS. I think that he saw through me though, because the rest of our exchange went something like:
"No, I used to be but I switched out"
"... Isn't lying a sin?"
"How would I know, I'm not in religious studies..."

I also, in order to make the whole experience more CS-like, asked one of my acquaintances (who knows I'm not in math or CS) which was his favourite programming language. He asked if he needed to have a preference and returned the question. I said that Python was but couldn't give a good reason why. Julia then asked how I felt about Perl, which I was better at answering. Apparently Perl involves lots of dollar signs, which people find objectionable. Exciting!

Models, Theses and the Situation

Recent days have brought more math and CS-related awesomeness. Max has been investigating the symmetries of the five regular polyhedra and in order to better do this he built models of the polyhedra in question. He used bristol board and glue (which was sometimes replaced by tape) and the resulting models were really cool-looking. I especially liked the icosahedron, partly because of its shape and partly because it was a soothing shade of dark green. The models and the ensuing discussion of symmetries also allowed me to gain new vocabulary words:

Vertex: Point. Or corner. Regular polyhedra have vertices that are all the same (in that the faces are assembled identically around each one).

I can't actually remember my other new polyhedron/symmetry-related words but I may post about them again later if they come back to me. They pertained to the symmetries and whether or not the way the polyhedron looks changes, I think.

In other news, Antoine (who used to be doing a minor in CS but has since changed his mind) told me (well, technically it was an "us" but I am writing this in the first person singular) about the MIT CS paper generator (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/) yesterday. It's pretty cool. You put in the names of up to five authors and it will come up with a fake computer science-related paper these people have supposedly authored, complete with citations and everything. The papers in question apparently do not make all that much sense but they look pretty good to me. As is mentioned on the SCIgen homepage, they are trying to "maximize amusement, rather than coherence".

I would still like to post a picture of my painted and Matlab-postered room as well as of Max's awesomely awesome models but this will have to wait for three or so weeks because I will be at home/my parents' house for that amount of time. This also means that I will be away from my current sources of blog fodder, which is slightly problematic. Never fear, however, as my new location comes complete with two brothers, one of whom (though still in high school) is better versed in math than me. So though the level of math will be lower I will still be learning, hopefully things of the blog-worthy persuasion. Also, I am considering turning toward more math culture-type pursuits.

Vocabulary

My first integration project was being able to fake my way through a conversation about computer science without giving away the fact that I'm not in CS. Key words that I remember from this endeavour are

PERL - This is a programming language. I'm apparently allowed to have strong feelings about it. I haven't really decided how CS Catherine feels about PERL yet. This one time some random guy emailed the person I was dating at the time soliciting his help for some assignment that he had involving programming in PERL.
Edit: My research tells me that spelling "Perl" in all-caps is considered a sign of not belonging to the core group of Perl users. Horrors! I will implement this finding going forward. Also, my religious studies student self was pleased to discover that Perl was named after the parable of the pearl in the Gospel of Matthew. The plot thickens...

Object-oriented - I'm told that this is a way that you can describe programmes that you're writing. This vocabulary word kind of scares me because I'm not sure what context it should be used in and I feel like misusing it would be a dead giveaway for my ruse.

I feel like Wikipedia could be a useful source for this ongoing vocabulary situation. Math profs use it as a resource for their students all the time (or so I'm told) so I should be able to put at least my usual amount of trust (which is pretty considerable- if there's no entry about something I'm curious about I always kind of feel at a loss for where to look next) in it.