I Miss The Sun

Weekend

I had a glorious weekend filled with nothing to do. I mostly slept late and played video games. The short list of things I accomplished: I made a pen holder out of a water bottle, cleaned up my desk and managed to get some homework done.

Monday

Was a pretty good day overall, despite the outside world looking gloomy and rainy. I got up around 11 to start working on notes and readings for Religion and Politics. I confess myself rather excited for the course, as I always enjoy subjects such as these that force you to think from different perspectives. I think it will be especially interesting considering that in Estonia, religion is a huge non-factor when compared to the US. So far I've gone through the notes for the first lecture and I'm definitely interested. We'll see what the readings and tomorrow's lecture have to contribute.

After getting through the lecture notes I relaxed for about an hour before heading off to Crypto. Again the up-hill walk (I'm not going to stop complaining about this, if my legs don't look amazing by the time I'm done studying here I might just sue the school.) and up the stairs to get to class. I'm really enjoying this class, as the material is new enough that it engages my attention and gives me something to learn, but has enough of a familiar basis in mathematics that I don't have too much trouble understanding everything. The teacher also continues to be a generally funny guy, he moves about the room in an almost quirky way and always interjects amusing anecdotes into his lecture.

Today's lecture was on modern cryptography (past 60 years or so) and the application of mathematical definitions to the problem of encryption. How to define a system as secure using mathematics and prove it. This resulted in a bit of a refresher course on some mathematical notations, but I recalled it fairly quickly. We defined perfect secrecy by showing that the probability of getting ciphertext does not depend on the plaintext. (Given two distinct messages, the probability of getting the ciphertext is the same). We tested this definition against the encryption scheme called One-time pad where the key must be the same length as the message, and if that proves true it is perfectly secure.

We also went on to talk about Stream Ciphers as an encryption scheme that would allow you to use a shorter key instead of having to match the message length. And lastly we discussed how to build a Pseudo Random Generator and how they were historically made (with Linear Feedback Shift Registers). Very interesting stuff. I'm honestly very happy with this course so far and hope that future content continues to engage me.

I stopped at Metro again to grab some food for dinner. Ordered a coffee as well since I'd been craving some (and since I had reading to do), it ended up tasting awful and my dreams were crushed. Ah well, at least I know not to get any coffee from there again. On the walk back to the dorm I saw a guy riding a unicycle, unfortunately my hands were full so I was unable to take a picture. You'll have to trust me when I say it was glorious. I actually broke out into a huge smile when I saw it, perhaps an overreaction but it was a rather amusing sight. While inside heading to my dorm I got to listen to a guy sitting in the stairwell playing classical guitar. He was rather good and it was nice to be serenaded as I ascended the stairs.

These little events made my good day even better, so that's always nice. Now I'll (hopefully) be able to sit down and focus on finishing my reading. I've also got a full day tomorrow, with three classes back-to-back. So that'll be fun. At the very least they're all in the same area, so I don't have too far to walk.