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![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/1052413/52258)
00:15 |
More things I probably should have been aware of, but wasn't
From an ad in The Economist:
Understand the Fun and Beauty in Mathematical Concepts
Humans have been having fun and games with mathematics for thousands of years. Along the way, they've discovered the amazing utility of this field--in science, engineering, finance, games of chance, and many other aspects of life.
This course of 24 half-hour lectures celebrates the sheer joy of mathematics, taught by a mathematician who is literally a magician with numbers. Professor Arthur T. Benjamin of Harvey Mudd College is renowned for his feats of mental calculation performed before audiences at schools, theaters, museums, conferences, and other venues.
Throughout these lectures, Professor Benjamin shows how everything in mathematics is magically connected--how the beautiful and often imposing edifice that has given us algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, probability, and so much else is based on nothing more than fooling around with numbers.
This course is one of The Great Courses, noncredit recorded college lecture series from The Teaching Company. Award-winning professors of a wide array of subjects in the sciences and the liberal arts have made more than 200 college-level courses that are available.
Being a sucker for such things, I bought it.
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20:11 |
Small World (Angband Edition)
Chris Weisiger (author of the Angband Newbie Guide, among other things) also works at Amazon. My user icons have never been more appropriate.
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20:07 |
Returning to Meme
Sometimes, the attraction of SF is just too great. Especially since I'm currently engaged in rereading one of the series on the list.
( Read more... )
Also, today was the first sunny day in Seattle this month. Sometimes I like Seattle, and occasionally it reciprocates.
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06:20 |
Tilting at Windmills
I'm currently repressing the urge to rewrite everything in Common Lisp. Even if it _would_ solve hunger.
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![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/1052421/52258)
07:04 |
Vacation from my vacation
Amazon's post-holiday party was Saturday night. After being in the presence of so many people for so long, I'm ready for my post-post-holiday-party book. Something quiet, at least.
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06:07 |
Sagging shelves
It's a sad, sad day when you have to weigh your books to make certain your bookcases can actually support their weight. Hopefully my next set of bookshelves won't have this problem. I'm going to stop by Ikea this weekend, I think, and pick up some of these. Assuming I can find my way there (my sense of direction isn't exactly what would be called 'reliable').
Working at Amazon has, so far, been pretty nice. The hours are a bit long, but the work is varied, and there's a little bit of everything to do. Plus I've been taking advantage of the employee discount. My group is quite new (all joined Amazon within the past six months), so we're all getting used to the Amazon way of doing things together. My first piece of code went live on the website last week, which is somewhat of a rush. So far most of the difficulty hasn't been in the problems themselves, but rather in determining how pieces of code are supposed to fit together and which of the seven steps the documentation says to follow are correct and mandatory, which are merely optional, and which are downright wrong because the package/operating system/framework/library changed fifteen months ago and nobody bothered to update everything which discusses it.
On the plus side, I'm reading more again, aided along by my bus rides to and from work. Having twenty-five minutes each way of dedicated time assigned to a task is definitely conducive to getting it done.
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[Link] | Mood
odd
Music
Richard Wagner -- Das Rheingold Scene 2-5
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05:57 |
Back?
New location (Seattle). New job (Amazon). Maybe a new life as well; we'll see. It's odd to be back.
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20:54 |
Vanity searching gone horribly wrong
( The results )
And yes, my middle inital is 'H'.
Other notes: Installed Afterstep 2.0.0 beta 3. Except for the fact that my Angband windows no longer autoposition correctly, I like it a lot. It's now much easier to customize. I don't like what they did with the WinList module (it sits in the middle of the screen and prevents any window from opening on top of or abov it), but since I don't use that module any more it's not that big of a deal. My virtual destops have also changed from 3 × 2 × 8 to 4 × 3 × 4 for easier navigation.
( Screenshot )
I also finally got around to sending in the rebates for my computer, with about a week left on the 30 day allowable period. Hopefully they will be honored. There shouldn't be any problem, but...
And I really need to automate the portion of my music ripping which is 'make a playlist and stick into the database.' Though it seems like my solution to nearly any data-collection or data-analysis problem these days is to stick it into a database.
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[Link] | Mood
dead
Music
Felix Mendelssohn - Symphony No. 3 Mmt. 2
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22:03 |
Infrequent Update
Angband and comics and dark sun and computational fluid dynamics and databases and research and computers and angband and food and ellipses without end.
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[Link] | Mood
necessity
Music
Camille Saint-Saëns - Cello Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 33 Mmt. 2
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23:18 |
First Entry of the Year
(for me, at least).
Vacation was good. I had jury duty the week of Christmas, but never actually had to report to the courthouse. I also got to see my parents again and my sister for the first extended period since last Christmas.
I also got a new computer (Sony laptop) and am now involved in the process of installing on it everything I wish, so that it becomes a newer, better, more transportable version of this computer.
Primarily, though, right now I'm rather tired since I didn't get enough sleep last night.
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[Link] | Mood
 blank
Music
Antonín Dvorák - Symphony No. 2 in B Major, Op. 4 Mmt. 1
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22:05 |
XSLT is also about having a big penis
Well, that's not quite correct. Really, it's about having a big Xpenis.
Sorry, I just felt the need to share that.
For some reason.
Yeah.
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[Link] | Mood
triumphant
Music
Gustav Mahler - Symphony 4 in G Major, Mmt. 3B
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01:52 |
Various Updates
The container security paper got rejected by Science, so we're trimming it down to submit to PNAS. Of course, the appendix is already around four times the size of the main paper, and this will just make it worse. It's almost as if the paper is merely a teaser.
Finished up work on the paper I working on before this one, so that should be submitted somewhere too. Most of the work was done by Professor Wein's student at MIT (he was at MIT before coming to Stanford), so I'll only be third author on that one.
Now I'm working on yet another paper, which will (hopefully) be an analytical analysis of the model used in the container security paper. We're simplifying the model somewhat, however, so that it is analytically more tractable--smoothing out the step functions, assuming one queue with varying speed rather than a variable number of queues each with fixed speed, etc. Professor Wein and I both hope that this will form at least a portion of my eventual dissertation.
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[Link] | Mood
topsy
Music
Peter Iljitsch Tschaikowsky - Symphony No. 5 in E minor Mmt. 2
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06:56 |
Is this a good thing?
I realised when composing an email to my advisor that the problems I had been having were because I forgot one of the basic premises of the model while looking at the equations.
Basically, we're using a Gaussian plume model to simulate a release of anthrax spores, and I was trying to calculate the amount of spores that will reach a sensor at a given position. Now, if this position is downwind of the release, there are no problems. If it is upwind, you end up trying to calculate a negative number to the 2 * d power, where d = 0.78. This, however, tells you that you get both real and imaginary spores at your sensor, which I realised couldn't be correct. So I instead took the negative number, squared it, and took it to the dth power. Which is perfectly reasonable, except that the madel doesn't support that interpretation, and in fact the number of spores at any location upwind of the release is zero.
Oops.
(For what it's worth, if there is no wind, the whole model just goes kaput.)
But it's better now. I hope.
This is what you get when you come back to a project after several months of working on something else.
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[Link] | Mood
reverb
Music
Serge Prokofiev - Piano Concerto #3 Mmt. 2
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09:15 |
Sloth and Indolence
For those of you who are curious, I have attached the results of the matlab run of earlier in the week.
( matlab results )
I joined Project Gutenberg's distributed proofreading project and am now in the 84th percentile. I have a reasonable suspicion that the total number of pages done by a person is exponentially distributed, but I'd have to take a closer look at the data to make certain.
Fustian is not faustian.
Because it's been a while and I already have one lj-cut here, my current music rankings.
( music rankings )
They seem more stable now, except when I add in new CDs. My four newest CDs of Sibelius and three of Bruckner are not yet fully integrated (not that you can tell from the above data, since the only thing from any of them is Sibelius' Violin Concerto in D Minor). I also finally went in and turned off playing of duplicate performances of various songs--I had three copies of Beethoven's 6th, for example.
My FreeCiv 'Pave the World' game finally broke 7 billion in population. Apparently, the newest versions of the client also use much more memory than they should, since while playing I ran out of swap space; civclient had been using 370 MB of memory (out of 512 MB total) and 1.7 GB of swap (of 2 GB). Probably some memory leaks, too. Or maybe I just shouldn't build civilizations that large.
In other news, my paper (well, I'm second author out of four, meaning I did the majority of the grunt work) has been submitted to Science. I should know by Monday whether or not they'll bother send it out for review. Apparently the lead editor was once associated with Stanford when my advisor was a student here, so that's a plus. In the meantime, I'm working on the next project (asymptotic analysis of an anthrax infection model). Or rather, not working on it. But that's a technicality.
And for those of you taking GREs: in my experience, they were just like the SATs, except that the fact that since you can take them on a computer, if you are your own ride then you can leave two hours early with no problems. Or maybe that's just me.
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[Link] | Mood
 lazy
Music
Béla Bartók - Violin Concerto No. 2 Mmt. 3
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09:24 |
The other users must hate me
( matlab progress report )
Way too much CPU time to be used in computing a single integral. I can't believe I stayed up for this. Ugh. At least it won't be nearly as cold for my trip back to the apartment.
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[Link] | Mood
bleary-eyed
Music
George Frideric Handel - Messiah No. 13: Pifa
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05:16 |
Passive Selfdestruction
I read A Deepness in the Sky yesterday and today, which is one reason why I'm still up, even though I woke at a reasonable hour.
I would think that, given the choice, I might become Focused, except that I'm effectively declining that option by my actions here in grad school. Well, putting off the decision, really, but it amounts to the same thing. Still, it would make things easier.
I checked, and it appears I've only read a little under 18K pages so far this year, which means that I'm unlikely to make 25K for the entirety. Too many months of net-reading only, I guess, to be counteracted by a last futile sprint, but you never know. If I can keep up 100 pages a day, I should be in good shape, and I do generally read more when at home, so Christmas break should be productive (for certain values of).
I had to fetch the apartement manager and get a part of my deadbolt replaced Thursday night. It's rather annoying to be locked out when you have your key in your hands. Certainly I hope the problem doesn't recur tonight, as it's almost certainly too late to do anything about until morning. Of course, I may not be heading back until morning, either.
Even fifteen minutes of separation between work and home hasn't stopped my problems with late nights, obviously. It's just altered them somewhat.
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[Link] | Mood
uncontrolled orbital reentry
Music
Ludwig van Beethoven - Piano Concerto No. 2 Mmt. 1
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04:13 |
Bunch of Stuff
Went to the Ren Faire on Sunday. I think it takes someone rather more outgoing than I am to make the most of one, but it was fun nonetheless. Traffic, though, was atrocious. And I picked up a pound of pecans afterwords, which make a good early morning/late night snack.
My first paper is close to being submitted; I'll be generating what is probably the last of the real data for it tonight. It'll be nice to have some more time again.
I've turned to ToME in an attempt to get my first win at Angband, but all that has really changed is that I now get annoying high level deaths rather than annoying mid-level deaths.
I'm also looking through the Project Gutenberg archives to add some of their books to my list. I do need a better method of estimating page length, though--lynx says that part I of Spenser's Fairie Queen is around 4600 pages. I also probably need a better method of reading them than 'less', as plain ASCII (although eminently portable) is hard on the eyes. I also really don't want to be printing them out, since I would feel guilty using that much of my department's ink and paper.
My music rankings seem to have settled down. On the logarithmic scale for scores, the songs seem distributed in a pear shape, with the majority below the mean and a select few above it. Setting the probability of a song being played to be proportional to its current score over the total number of times it has been played means that every song on a new CD gets played several times at least before being consigned to the bit bucket.
I probably need to go to bed, but I'm not at all sure that I will.
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[Link] | Mood
yawning
Music
Nobuo Uematsu - Searching Friends
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02:02 |
Proposal for an Angband Variant
Serialband:
The basic premise would be that an adventurer's actions can and do have an impact upon the way the dungeon in laid out for later characters. Some examples:
- Some carryover of equipment/gold from character to character. Only that which is given away before death, though.
- Uniques are unique, even across characters. That is, you can only kill Maggot (or Ferny, or whatever) once per save file, and after that, he's dead for good.
- Random uniques, generated either when a character is killed (the killer becomes a unique) or when a new character is started and too few uniques remain.
- Similarly, artifacts are also unique across characters. For the most part, this won't matter too much, except that disenchantment now becomes even more of an annoyance, and scrolls of curse weapon/armor may actually be useful (as the only way to permanently get rid of artifacts you don't want).
- New random artifacts created at character death to replace those (if any) destroyed during that game. These should be generated based upon the dead character's non-artifact equipment, if possible.
- If enough of a single type of monster are killed in a short enough period of time, that monster goes extinct (a la Nethack).
There are some other things I'd like to put in as well (shopkeepers who actually retire when they say they're going too, for example), but those are the basics.
In other news, I am still alive, even though at times I feel I'm not.
And school has started again, though I'm not taking classes (just doing research).
And I seem to be temporarily thrust into a semi-leadership role at my eating club, due to seniority.
Oh well. At least I've collected my back pay for the summer.
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[Link] | Mood
procrastinatory
Music
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Symphony No. 22 Mmt. 3
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23:11 |
Another day, another entry
I read through Shiras' Children of the Atom on the plane yesterday. It was a short story I had already read, expanded into a novel by adding four additional chapters. The basic premise is that a nuclear accident causes the children of the victims to develop vastly superior intelligences, and these children must learn how to hide themselves in 'normal' society. It's okay--little conflict or directed plot, and the author's own biases are astonishingly clear (all the well-adjusted children are or become Thomists, for example), but still an easy enough read. I also had finally read Storm of Swords over two nights earlier in the week. Really, I think I shouldn't read series unless the individual volumes are relatively self-contained or the series has has all of its elements already published in paperback, because the delay between volumes is extremely annoying. Another reason to read more Guy Gavriel Kay, I guess, except that I'm pretty sure I've already seen everything he's written. But at least I'm not anxiously awaiting the next volume in an epic of his.
I will finish Ulysses tonight, unless something goes horribly wrong. Only six pages remain, and while they comprise the ending of a sentence begun 40 pages ago, I CAN force myself through. Really. After this, the longest time since starting a book I've begun reading will be only around two months, for a collection of Checkov's plays.
One good thing about moving my computer from my apartment to my office is that my default evening activity is now reading rather than net surfing, which should be at least marginally more intellectually stimulating, even with my preferred choice of reading material. I have enough Russian classics in my upcoming book schedule that I should get something out of them (even if only an intense hatred of all translators).
My mother flew up to Santa Rosa today to start scheduling the funeral for her mother. My dad and I will follow once we know the date and time, which gives my at least some time to placate my advisor before leaving. I do need to make some optimizations in my computations before I go, though, because currently my programs are spending too much time on the redundant or the impossible and then calling themselves completed too early on the cases on which they should be spending the most time.
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[Link] | Mood
None, or other
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23:05 |
The past two weeks
So I moved fully into my new apartment; then, a week later, finally got some furniture (a bed, dresser, bookshelf, table, and five chairs, to go with the two couches and coffee table that my roommate already had). My roommate's name is Paul, and he seems to be a nice enough guy, but I expect that my relationship with him will be similar to my relationship with Peter (my freshman year roommate): we get along well enough, but we hardly ever interact. I mean, either he leaves before I get up or I leave before he gets up, depending on whether I set my alarm. At night, neither of us typically gets back before 10:00, and even then we tend to closet ourselves in our respective rooms before heading to bed.
After a couple of weeks of living in it, the apartment seems nice enough, although it has some noticable problems (the fact that the fan wiring in my bathroom is a fire hazard, for one, or the extensive stains on the carpet). Given that I've moved my computer into my office and am mainly using the apartment as a place to sleep and store stuff, it should work well enough, though. I just wish the Bay Area housing market would cool substantially.
My current research project is almost done--the model appears to be finalized and I'm onw generating data. I just wish I could generate data faster--I've been computing for more than a day now, and I'm not sure when it will finish. Hoepfully soon.
I just flew home today to start two weeks of vacation, which should have been nice.
My grandmother died tonight.
It's not as though it's entirely unexpected (she's been on the decline since her first stroke more than three years ago), but stilll...
I'm going to be flying back up to the Bay Area with my parents to go to the funeral either tomorrow or Monday (depending on when it will be held).
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[Link] | Mood
ugh
Music
I need a Requiem of some sort, but I left my CDs
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