Daily photo

MDRS Crew 47

  • March 15, 2006
Yesterday morning I watched a talk given by the man in the top left of this photo, the commander of GT's Mars Society team who will be leaving Friday for a simulated Mars environment in Utah. Five students and a faculty advisor will spend two weeks in physical isolation, practicing the daily exercices of astronauts that have set up a base on Mars. I'm actually most jealous of the desert environment they'll have there, isolated from civilization and having a perfect view of the sky without light pollution.

<grad geekout>
I spent yesterday in the lab from 3:30pm to midnight, running a simulation software called SimpleScalar, which builds a computer architecture around given parameters and executes various benchmarks to determine how the caches, queues, and other components react in certain situations. The goal was to acheive the best IPC without excessive components by varying the number of functional units, the sizes of the pipeline queues, and the cache sizes. While the execution was just as bland as many labs of this type, I found it strangely rewarding to improve slowly my IPC with each tweak, and to have a vague understanding behind why these improvements worked.
</grad geekout>

It's vexing that there's no 'Nique this week to take advantage of my recent photo activities. There's so much going on, yet I doubt much of it will be represented in the paper when we get back in a couple weeks. Still, I'm kinda curious why my sports photos never get any comments.

As I write all this, I'm eating a "hot sundae" Pop Tart that I accidentally bought instead of the usual chocolate. It's quite bad - way too sweet (practically candy), like many of the specialized PTs that appear and disappear every now and then. They don't seem to realize that people don't like stuff this sweet.

Comments

  • Matt
  • March 15, 2006
  • 12:34 pm
Is it strange that five of the eight members of Mars Society are girls? I think you post too many sports photos. Post them more sporadically.
  • jennifer
  • March 15, 2006
  • 4:01 pm
no, i like the sports photos! but ethan, you do realize that no one ever comments on an entry 'cause of the photo -- they comment 'cause of what you write underneath. ;) JUST KIDDING

p.s. pop tarts suck.
  • Smitha
  • March 16, 2006
  • 5:23 am
I miss Pop Tarts...not the ueber-sweet ones, but even the simple cherry or brown sugar ones.

And it's not so much strange as it is cool! (Yay, Emily!)
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