gonna be a data scientist?

Got accepted to Lambda School! It's an intensive coding bootcamp I'll start in September: nine months of 40 hours a week online instruction, following instructors build applications and building our own under their supervision. I'm told that it's the same or more amount of coding as in a 4-year CS degree.

My acceptance is conditional on completing "precourse work" which I'm finding involves a steep learning curve. It dawned on me that this is their weeding out process. I'm not averse to the approach at all; instructional time is better spent on more complicated things than learning to define variables or importing libraries. But some of the later assignments which I haven't gotten to yet have names like linear algebra, pandas, training models with sklearn. Thankfully, there is a metric fuckton of resources online for learning the basics of python on your own.

I'll speak to my decision for the subspeciality--data science--at a later pubski.

summer 2019 curriculum

In addition to the coding I'm doing this summer, I'm training and coaching gymnastics. I'm basically living at the gym and a bagel place next to it. Had a really discouraging day today. I'm so old and stiff. Trying to remember that there are a lot of slow-going, sometimes deeply uncomfortable and miserable days that comprise the road to progress.

Saturday

Officiating my best friends' wedding this Saturday; been reading my speech every day in preparation. It brings me chills. "I now have the privilege to announce--for the very first time as husband and wife--Andrew and Grace."

FUCK NOBILITY.

I think this is part of what gets at me. It's one thing if something done for the right reason happens to also be noble. It's another if a thing is done so as to telegraph to everyone watching that This Here is a Noble Act. This is mind-reading territory which can be dangerous. I don't want to second guess this reporter's motives. As far as I can tell, she wants to send her daughter to a segregated school to help her daughter's classmates, at the expense of a better school she could have sent her. But it also seems like there's a larger narrative the reporter wants her readers to read into, i.e. that white people in Dumbo are racists.

Two Fridays ago, I settled on my house. Overcome with gratitude and happiness.

Funny story. I was eagerly showing the house to a few of my friends the next evening when cop sirens and flashing red lights fill the street. We look amongst ourselves. Well, shit, we do live in Baltimore. There's always some foolishness bound to be going on. Then we hear a very stern sounding knock on my front door. Confused, I open it to greet my unexpected guests--Baltimore's finest. (Cue white privilege for not being immediately tackled to the ground.) "Sir, we're responding to a breaking and entering call, and possible house party." "Uhh... I closed on this home yesterday."

Then my next door neighbor steps outside and starts apologizing profusely. She's been living in her house for fourteen years, the last year and half of which my house has stood empty. She had no idea the house had been sold. Earlier I had knocked on her door but she wasn't home yet. The cops thought it was a rather cute use of their time and greeted me to the neighborhood.

All in all, I'm overjoyed. On the cusp of getting straight As this semester, my roommate is moving in just in time to help pay my mortgage, and I'm the block's most eligible bachelor. I'm less than two blocks away from one of Baltimore's biggest parks where I'm looking forward to a summer of soccer leagues and food truck rallies. Finishing and furnishing the basement will be my next project, so if anyone from Hubski wants to crash, have at it.

There's a famous piece of journalism on the causes of the ~2008 financial crisis, specifically the housing bubble, called The Giant Pool of Money. There's one part that always stuck out to me, and seems incredibly relevant here, so I'll highlight it [emphasis mine, at the end]:

Adam Davidson

Right, the global pool of money, that's where our story begins. Most people don't think about it, but there's this huge pool of money out there, which is basically all the money the world is saving now-- insurance companies saving for a catastrophe, pension funds saving money for retirement, the Central Bank of England saving for whatever central banks save for, all the world's savings.

Ceyla Pazarbasioglu

A lot of money, it's about 70 trillion.

Adam Davidson

That's the head of capital market research at the International Monetary Fund, the place to go if you want to figure out how much money is in the world.

[...]

Adam Davidson

And by the way, before you finance enthusiasts start writing any letters, we do know that $70 trillion technically refers to that subset of global savings called fixed income securities. Everyone else can just ignore what I just said. Let's put $70 trillion in perspective. Do this. Think about all the money that people spend everywhere in the world, everything you bought in the last year, all of it. Then add everything Bill Gates bought, and all the rice sold in China, and that fleet of planes Boeing just sold to South Korea, all the money spent in every country on Earth in a year. That is less than $70 trillion, less than the global pool of money.

Alex Blumberg

Wow.

Adam Davidson

We're talking about a lot of money.

Alex Blumberg

That is a lot of money.

Adam Davidson

And that money comes along with armies of very nervous men and women watching over the pool of money. Investment managers, they don't want to lose a penny of that. They don't want to lose any of that money, and, even more so, they want to make it grow bigger. But to make it grow, they have to find something to invest in.

So, most of modern history, what they did was they bought really safe and, frankly, really boring investments like treasuries and municipal bonds, boring things. But then, right before our story starts, something changed, something happened to that global pool of money.

Ceyla Pazarbasioglu

This number doubled since 2000. In 2000 this was about $36 trillion.

Adam Davidson

So it took several hundred years for the world to get to $36 trillion. And then it took six years to get another $36 trillion.

Ceyla Pazarbasioglu

Yeah, there has been a very sharp increase.

Adam Davidson

How does the world get twice as much money to invest? There are lots of things that happen. But the main headline is that all sorts of poor countries became kind of rich, making things like TVs and selling us oil. China, India, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia made a lot of money and banked it.

China, for example, has over a $1 trillion in its central bank. And there are office buildings in Beijing filled with math geniuses, real math geniuses, looking for a place to invest it. And the world was not ready for all this new money. There is twice as much money looking for investments, but there are not twice as many good investments.

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

Gary Provost

Konstantin Dmitrich Levin, or Levin, is one of the main characters in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. He's a bit of an oddball, eschewing the balls and high society of Petersburg and Moscow to live in the country. There is a part in the novel where Levin has an especially irksome conversation with his half-brother who visits him, so Levin decides to let out a little steam and go mow wheat with the muzhiks, the peasants, remembering how he liked the physical exertion. Tolstoy describes Levin joining an old man and a young lad in the line of muzhiks --

Levin kept between them. In the very heat of the day the mowing did not seem such hard work to him. The perspiration with which he was drenched cooled him, while the sun, that burned his back, his head, and his arms, bare to the elbow, gave a vigor and dogged energy to his labor; and more and more often now came those moments of unconsciousness, when it was possible not to think what one was doing. The scythe cut of itself. These were happy moments. Still more delightful were the moments when they reached the stream where the rows ended, and the old man rubbed his scythe with the wet, thick grass, rinsed its blade in the fresh water of the stream, ladled out a little in a tin dipper, and offered Levin a drink.

"What do you say to my home-brew, eh? Good, eh?" said he, winking.

And truly Levin had never drunk any liquor so good as this warm water with green bits floating in it, and a taste of rust from the tin dipper. And immediately after this came the delicious, slow saunter, with his hand on the scythe, during which he could wipe away the streaming sweat, take deep breaths of air, and look about at the long string of mowers and at what was happening around in the forest and the country.

The longer Levin mowed, the oftener he felt the moments of unconsciousness in which it seemed not his hands that swung the scythe, but the scythe mowing of itself, a body full of life and consciousness of its own, and as though by magic, without thinking of it, the work turned out regular and well-finished of itself. These were the most blissful moments.

I just convinced my real life friend to make an account. So now that I know someone else in person who uses this site, I'm even more attached. My contribution :4