Most geeky thing you've done recently.

[ImagingGeek]

1) Attempted (and failed) to find a way to graph the "23-dimentional" data in a meaningful 2D format, using data produced by an algorithm I wrote to analyse morphology in microscope data. Hint: PCA is not sufficient...

2) Got board doing the above, so I attempted to improve a program I started a long time ago to convert DNA sequences into "music". Quotes, because right now "random noise" is a more accurate description of what it currently creates.

B

[TheCassowary]

Don't know if the geeky things I've done are at the same level of genius as you others, but I have started work on figuring out the percentage of David Bowie's songs which reference to space. Not very recent, but in 6th grade I constructed a tessarect out of popsicle sticks, glue, and string.

I'm also very fond of making useless studies, such as which animals are the most squishy (goats) and how hairiness is proportional to manliness (afraid the proof has run into a problem, I'm working on it).

[KrO2]

Wait, how do you determine what animal is squishiest? That sounds awesome and why isn't it an invertebrate?

[WarDaft]

I'm in a room full of people watching the SpaceX launch.

I'm not actually watching it, I'm making a post here and then playing D3 and listening to cool music - because egads, space news coverage by general media is slightly less interesting than the pollen report - but recently, definitely yeah.

And by "watching the launch", I mean "watching the news try to be interesting about something that is only going to last about 17 minutes, an hour from now."

[Gears]

Had my first LAN party. Played Warcraft III.

[TheCassowary]

Wait, how do you determine what animal is squishiest? That sounds awesome and why isn't it an invertebrate?

My definition of squishiness is squish distance. This is the distance from the unsquished state to the completely squished state, and I don't mean squishing the animal to death (of course, that would give every animal the same squishiness factor), it has to be tolerable for the animal. I also have to account for the animal's size to get a comparative ratio. Something like volume of the animal divided by distance of squish. Try squishing a goat some time, it's confounding.

Then again, this is all crazy and made up. Let the debate about squishiness go on! Man, now I really want to start a thread for bosh science.

[SWGlassPit]

I'm in a room full of people watching the SpaceX launch.

I'm not actually watching it, I'm making a post here and then playing D3 and listening to cool music - because egads, space news coverage by general media is slightly less interesting than the pollen report - but recently, definitely yeah.

And by "watching the launch", I mean "watching the news try to be interesting about something that is only going to last about 17 minutes, an hour from now."

You should watch NASA TV or SpaceVidCast for these things. Traditional media just doesn't cover space launches well at all.

[Sizik]

When my roommate started singing Coldplay's "Swallowed In The Sea", I figured 5 lines of text are about 1 inch, so I wrote a "n bottles of beer" program, starting at n = 6336000.

[The Geoff]

Don't know if the geeky things I've done are at the same level of genius as you others, but I have started work on figuring out the percentage of David Bowie's songs which reference to space.

Along that line, I once wrote a program which generated the lyrics to "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" with a significant saving compared to simply writing the lyrics out. As a side note, "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" must rank as one of the geekiest songs out there, what with the literal version and central role in the excellent film "Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel".

[Copper Bezel]

Huh. Correspondingly, it compresses well. (The song is 3042 characters, which means a 3 kb file. Compressed as a .zip, it's .8, while a random pastiche from the BBC of exactly 3042 characters compresses to 1.6. Bonnie Tyler's lyrics contain almost exactly half the information of a random pastiche from the BBC home page.)

[The Geoff]

I did think about testing various songs to see how far they could be compressed (I'm guessing 2 Unlimited's astoundingly dreadful "No Limit" would be up there... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjzaXoN7ztI), didn't think about just zipping the text file, that's quite a clever way to do it!

[Copper Bezel]

No, you just compressed it by hand, which is infinitely more badass. = )

Hmm. I forgot to account for the "container" information, which is 140 bytes. Removing that, the BBC text compresses at a ratio of .48 and Tyler at .22. "No Limit" gets .31. It actually repeats itself slightly less - but I don't think it would fare as well if we were considering propositional density. = )

Edit: For reference, a good song (represented by Regina Spektor's Düsseldorf) gets .55. = )

[Dr. Diaphanous]

Playing a ball game at the beach, counted the score in various counting systems: decimal, binary, balanced ternary, and successive words from the opening speech of Shakespeare's Henry V.

Spoiler:

Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels,
Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire
Crouch for employment.

[MichiK]

I figured out how to edit OpenStreetMap because a spelling mistake right around the corner bothered me (Oh no, someone is wrong on the internet!). Then, I spent the rest of the night adding every single building, driveway and track of the small village in which I grew up... damn perfectionism.