FPGA design engineering

One of the classes I’m TAing for is basically intro to FPGA design engineering. I show the students how to plug things in, where to right-click for menus, so on and so forth. Verilog is written in the accusative case, passive voice.

But I’ve never had much academic instruction in digital logic, not the theory beyond truth tables. So my experience is wildly disjoint from the class. The prof went over Karnaugh maps, and the students were all bored. They’d seen it a dozen times. I had never even heard of this stuff.

Meanwhile they’re assigning A to B, not knowing an assign statement reads right to left.

Weird stuff. The consequence of going back to school after having been out in the world for a few years.

Redemption

What’s weird about redemption arcs is the villian can’t have done anything the audience won’t forgive. This isn’t about relative moral weight; it’s about what the audience reacts to emotionally.

Evil Bob kills a dozen people? Redeemable. Evil Bob drowns a dozen puppies? Not redeemable.

Emotional reaction is a function of time and culture. It’s a very interesting way of dating a society’s mores in reverse. If a villian does xyz and is redeemed, xyz isn’t that bad as felt by that society at that time.

Trees

There’s a tree I don’t know how to draw on the Guanella Pass overlook. It’s this one specific tree. I think I should use a clean sheet and have a few gos at it, try a few tricks, and whichever one works the best, put that in the longer, full page sketch.

Books

I took all the books I was meaning to read and didn’t, stuck postit notes in place of my bookmarks, and put them away. Some were great books; some were my favorites. Some were distinctly meh, and a few were downright bad. One got returned to the library early. But they’re done. Happy September 10th.