Champaign-Urbana Culture

Champaign urbana does have alot to offer, both on and off campus. Im feeling really disconnected from my academic life right now, and I need something else. Ive been looking on yelp and lists of things to do in the area and im happy with whats availble for me in this area: farmers market, good used bookstores, surprizingly amusing art museums, IMPE gym, good restaurants ( i need a good place i can frequent), ethnic food stores.
What i really want though is closer "regular" shopping, and maybe some forest preserve.

what i really want is a club i can really care about.

Things I Do

Im into linguistics again, mainly because i keep on thinking about resource description frameworks and why no one seems to have made one thats an actual language.

Everything out there is based on the concept of a triple (Subject Verb Object) rather than actually looking at linguistic typology and producing an actual language (one that is recursive). I really need to figure out why languages need context sensitive grammars; not so sure thats a good idea at all.

Hacking myself

i normally don't believe in doing things that force your will one way or another. If you don't care to do something then forcing your will (ex. having class attendance) is artificial and wrong. But, ... iono need to reevaluate, is hacking yourself in some way wrong if the will is just not willing to cut it.

Matsuo Bashou renounced his life work on his death bed. I can only hope i will do the same.

Update

I cook alot now to pass the time.

Books

So id say 150$ is becoming common for an average textbook in my classes now. Idealy, textbook content would be free, possibly by some program set up by a university. Standard textbooks are way too pretty, and have way too many problems in them. An ideal textbook would be thin, possibly even paperback made from newspaper quality paper, and have content mostly online in a wiki format. It once again fits into the idea that proffesors shouldn't be teaching but facilitating learning by removing obstacles.

Intercession

I didn't want anyone to be there who didn't want to be there, but that's highschool I suppose. Theory of computer science might have been a bad choice for a couple of reasons.

- They didn't sign up for a week of it knowing what they were really getting into
- I don't think many of them were high enough on the Maslow heirachy of needs to really care. I would rather have had students eat well, sleep, and develop meaningful social ties. Theres no point in teaching to a class without these. ( I can only claim to do the first two )
- Many saw the jump into higher mathematics as merely overly specialized knowledge rather than a profound overveiw of basic philosophical thingys. The only thing i wanted them to see the entire class was the chomsky heirarchy and vaugely understand my proof about the existance of unsolvable problems.
- Many students complained about not learning anything, when in fact it was amazing how much they had learned in such a short amount of time. If there had been hands on things, it would have been easier to demonstrate that they had learned something. I think maybe they expect pain as a sign of learning, a certain sense that math/cs is a field of no pain no gain.

Frankly I did it because i believe theoretical computer science is probably the most important /beautiful thing Ive learned in college and im sad I didn't know about it earlier. It might be the fact that breaks are stressfull for me, being cut off from everyone, but i remember saying to everyone "cs273 taught me not to fear death" as a joke. It certainly affects how i see the world more than i think it was meant to.