Grace passed away last night. Bye, little friend.
Hank laid her first egg today! (It's the top one. Pig laid the other green one today and Gracie the brown one. My other two hens are freeloading jerks!)
Our chicks are 6 weeks old tomorrow. Here's them when we first got them: 4 weeks old, discovering the yard for the first time: Pig (left) is very good at digging: Sittin': Everything else in life is kind of blah right now but I like these lil' guys. They've discovered that they can fly high enough to clear the cage walls (~2.5 feet high), so I guess I need to build a lid for their cage now...
This Tuesday pubski thing is still throwing me off!
School Work on the textbook progresses inexorably...I'm just about done with the content, but then I have to edit, index, write a glossary, make a website, convert the book to HTML, polish up examples, and figure out details of publishing it. One step at a time, I suppose. Some friends and I developed a tool called Assigner for managing homework submissions. About 4 or 5 classes now use it! It's nice to realize that I've managed to effect long-discussed change in a department. (Less nice that it's not my department anymore, and frustrating to realize that it's not the faculty doing it.) Got a rejection on a conference paper I submitted. I was expecting a rejection, so it wasn't a surprise, but it's still kind of a bummer. One reviewer was very thorough, though, so I think things will be better for it. Have any of y'all put anything on Arxiv.org? I've got a journal paper that's been stuck in submission since 2015 and I'd really like to be able to drop a preprint somewhere without making IEEE mad at me. Chickens Last week Hank got sick and spent the day sitting on the couch with me. She's back to her normal self now, though! We've trained her to hop up on our arms and eat snacks and she's getting really good at it! Annie's got a cut on her head; she can't see well, so she might have banged it on something or maybe one of the other birds was bullying her. Either way, she's living inside now until it heals up. She seems to be enjoying her stay so far:
Birds Chicken coop and run is just about done. We moved the birds out there on Saturday and they seem to be enjoying it quite a bit. It's twice the size of the box they were living in in our dining room. Look at this handsome roo: Broke out the OA torch and "forged" some brackets for the ramp from the coop to the run out of a bit of rebar. In the process of making these I broke a drill bit, but I was able to re-grind it myself and it still cuts great. School My advisor told me to take this week off and I am following her advice and trying not to work on much related to research or teaching or whatnot. Instead I'm trying to wrap up a handful of projects that have sat too long at the almost-done stage. Ambitious Project Not being content to merely finish stuff that I've already started, I have begun a new undertaking. Some friends of mine run a colo "business"/hobby and want to offer cheap Raspberry Pi colocation. You can buy "Compute Module" Pis that are pretty much the CPU + RAM + a few capacitors on a PCB that will fit in a DDR2 laptop RAM slot. I have started drawing up schematics for a backplane that has everything else those compute modules need: USB, Ethernet, power, storage, etc. It'll be quite interesting -- doing Gigabit Ethernet trace layout requires a bit of EE black magic -- but hopefully the end result will be really cool. Right now we're guesstimating that we can fit somewhere around 150-200 Pis in 1U if we can manage to get power and heat to cooperate.
I'm getting published! It's not the most applicable conference for me to publish in, but it's the first paper I've gotten from my PhD research, so I'm happy regardless.
Currently spending a lot of time in the right half of this diagram, so I tried to put some of that anxious energy to use, mostly for nerdy things that probably aren't terribly interesting in general: - I wrote a program to let you pipe stuff into IRC. - I wrote two articles on C++ first-class (ish) functions. - I read Brave New World, since one of my friends gave me it for Christmas. I should have read it a long while ago. One thing that's interesting to notice is what Huxley imagined would be automated and what he imagined would still be done manually (e.g., adding various fluids to bottles and helicopter piloting). Ultimately, though, it feels like Huxley is presenting a false dilemma between hardcore moralism and hardcore hedonism(?), which was somewhat disappointing. Then, last night my wife swerved to miss someone who blew a stop sign and hit a curb at 35 MPH in the Rabbit. She's fine, but the car ain't. The lower control arm failed where the ball joint bolts to it, and physics took care of finishing off that CV joint and the quarterpanel as well. There's also a new dent in the roof, which says 'bent frame' to me. Naturally, insurance wants to total it out (seeing as I paid $1400 for it, I don't blame them). I'm getting it towed back to my place; I'm going to fix the mechanicals myself (since it doesn't look like any of the suspension attachment points on the body are damaged) and then see what it'll cost me to get a body shop to straighten out the rest. I'm just hoping that the tow truck can get it into my basement garage; otherwise I'm going to be laying in some very cold gravel in my barn instead. I was going to try to get that information theory math explainer written this week but that is probably going to be put on hold until I have more than one functioning car again. EDIT: Cold gravel it is for me. Fortunately a more thorough investigation of the damage showed it's not much worse than I already thought. No damage to the door, and nothing in the strut tower or underbody appears out of place. The wheel is cracked, but the tire appears OK?
I just have to write and grade a final exam and grade a few projects and the summer semester is over! Then I have a few weeks "off" until August 14 where I teach algebra for a week and then start the fall semester. The chicken coop is nearly done; the oppressive heat has kept me from working on it as much as I'd like to. I think the plan is to put a small computer out there with a couple web cams so people can look at birds ~over the internet~. If any of y'all know anything about using the Raspberry Pi camera interface or streaming video on a low-bandwidth connection, I am all ears. Would there be any interest in a Shopski on shortening bar piercing jewelry? It's not terribly interesting but there have been a few twists involved because the work is so small. Here's Bertha napping under my leg: Lion, being handsome: Hank, being the sweetest lil bird:
Took some pictures of chickens last week! Some even turned out: http://imgur.com/a/eHOXF Emailed my advisor on Saturday to say that I couldn't keep working at the rate that I was. I'm missing a paper deadline, which I'm not pleased with, but I also feel like a person, so I guess it's working OK. I'm going to try to figure out how to run my life so I can sustainably produce great research and teaching without burning out or neglecting personal responsibilities. I'm afraid that that attitude is going to mean that I'll look less qualified for faculty jobs. However, if I can't keep up with that level of workload anyway, why would I want a job that expects me to? Hopefully I'll find a job somewhere that fits me OK.
HOW ARE Y'ALL I HOPE EVERYONE IS GREAT It's been a hell of a several weeks! I moved to a new lab (long overdue; vaguely motivated by stupid dept. politics that I'm getting myself as far away from as possible). Research is going great although I appear to have stepped in some category theory lately. Hopefully I'll have a paper to show for all my scribblings soon. On a personal note, my wife has a girlfriend and I've been surprised how much being polyamorous has improved our relationship. There's been a lot of emotional work to do but things are going great. I hope you grace your ears with these sounds (if jazz is your thing): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT_aBs9pjfFY_EKyN9ETe8mCVAe5hpkb1
Birds One of our chickens has started laying! Her eggs look exactly like the decoy eggs; fortunately, the decoy eggs are really light (because they were cheap on eBay) so we can easily tell the difference. I like to imagine her walking into one of the laying boxes, looking at a decoy, thinking, "Oh, ok, I think I can make one like that" and then popping out an egg. There's some critter that's been trying to dig its way into the coop, so I bought a game camera to determine whether I need traps or target practice. Books This summer I wrote a lab manual for the class I developed. Starting this school year, incoming CS students are required to take that class, which means that come next semester there are going to be about 200 students in the lab! So, this semester I'm editing that lab book so we can get it printed, probably just through the university printing service. The plan is for the book to be very affordable (say, $20ish). In my opinion, charging more than $100 for a textbook is immoral, and if you want to charge more than $50 you'd better have a damn good reason to. On that note, fuck you Pearson, there's no reason an introductory discrete math textbook should cost $300 new. It seems like almost every 'innovation' in education/'educational technology' is just some new way for a company to extract rent from college students. How you can charge students $20/semester to send radio signals inside a classroom is beyond me. I recently bought a new copy of Category Theory in Context for $25! If you want to argue that textbooks have a small market...let me tell you, category theory textbooks have a market of about 5 people. If they can make a $25 book on category theory work, I guarantee you can figure out how to sell a discrete math textbook at an affordable price.
As much as I hate to play devil's advocate here, I don't think that paper backs up all the claims made by the Cosmos author. Here's why: 1. The result just shows that certain QMC problems take exponential time/resources to simulate.* This means that if we are living in a simulation, the universe simulating us would be exponentially larger than our universe, which does suggest that maybe Musk's argument that it's highly likely that we live in a simulation is flawed. But, it does not suggest that it's impossible for us to live in a simulation. 2. These results are only for classical algorithms. One of the big draws of quantumn computing is, well, efficient simulation of quantumn physics! So this paper doesn't eliminate the possibility we live in a simulation on a quantumn computer.** In short: simulation isn't impossible, and math/science has yet to determine that simulation must be difficult. Right now, we don't know an efficient simulation technique, but we also don't know that we can't find one. * But is the problem itself in EXP, or is it perhaps NP-hard and it's just that the only known algorithms to solve the problem take exponential time? Some reading leads me to believe it's "merely" NP-hard, which would mean that efficient (read: polynomial-time) simulation on a classical machine is possible if P=NP. ** Going off the assumption this problem is NP-hard, efficient polynomial-time quantumn simulation may not be a foregone conclusion. On the other hand, if efficient simulation implies that we are being simulated on a quantumn machine, what does that say about the "host" universe's physics?
I've been away for the past while, busy with research and personal/relationship growth. Some of the latter is going to take me years to get to where I want to be, but at least I know where I'm going, even if I'm not entirely sure how to get there yet. I finished a paper on my research, then cut it from 32 pages to 15 in half an hour to meet the conference page limit. I don't expect that paper to get accepted, but hopefully the reviewers will have some advice at least. I'm in an awkward spot where I'm not sure how to cut this into several papers, but a proper writeup with all the details and good examples needs about 40 pages. Maybe that's something worth publishing on the Arxiv as a supplement to a mch much shorter conference or journal paper. It's been pretty cold out lately; the chickens are not a huge fan of this but they seem to be doing alright. At night they fluff all their feathers out so they look like little potatoes with beaks!
We got chicks last Thursday! There are six of them and today they moved out of a big rubbermaid container into a bigger box so they can spread their wings. https://wobscale.chat/_matrix/media/v1/download/wobscale.chat/LcqfnsIDmoghYWuyUboInsOn They are SO PRETTY https://wobscale.chat/_matrix/media/v1/download/wobscale.chat/dVoBGbEbkkXNIrJjTfWiZqLn
Unfortunately, most students haven't been taught mathematics well at any point in their lives. The week before the fall semester starts I teach an algebra review class to incoming freshmen, and I'm amazed at how poor some of their math skills are (for example, confused why 1/x + 1/y is not 1/(x + y), or reducing (5 + x) / (5 + y) to x / y). It's a travesty that students can get this far in life without really understanding what's going on, but I don't think it's all their fault either. Fortunately, they have you! Better late than never, as they say. So here's my advice on teaching mathematical rigor to people: 1. Be as excited as you can be. Rigorous argument is not necessarily the most enthralling of things, but people pick up on whether you care about something and that can make a big difference in their opinion of the topic. 2. Be patient. You've, perhaps subconsciously, spent years developing the understanding you have of the subject; they have not. That can change, but it won't happen right away. 3. Ask them questions. Building connections between ideas might come naturally to you, but it does not to everyone. Try to nudge them to see relationships between things, even if you/they don't fully explore that relationship and why it exists right away. Walk them through your process of seeing why a solution is right or wrong. 4. Think about what guides your intuition for problems and explain what you can of that process.
Gracie is the biggest bird and super independent, but she'll fall right alseep if you pick her up and pet her. Here's Gracie and me, sleeping: Bertha knows she can fly out of the cage, but she'll only do it if I'm standing there to hold her. Other times, if she wants out, she'll lock eyes with you and do this little dance thing and if you put your hand down, she'll step up onto it. We eat breakfast together sometimes.
This whole tax thing is pissing me off. Big companies can evade billions in taxes, but if Trump's tax plan goes through, I'll have to pay taxes on my tuition waiver -- which by most estimates will double what I owe. Fuck. I was so happy to be finally making five figures...all I want is to be able to not lose money while I'm finishing up school.
Birds A friend made halloween costumes for our birds. The birds hated them but they were patient with us for a little while at least. My wife started a tumblr for our chickens: https://chick-it-out.tumblr.com/ Life Research progresses inexorably. I've given 4 variations of the "what is research/grad school" talk/conversation in the last week, which is always fun, although it's sometimes tricky to be honest without sounding too negative. Online dating is kinda weird. This is a good town if you're into single moms...
I was raised on Ken Ham's stuff. The first science class I took that wasn't predicated on young earth creationism was in college. I tend to agree with Nye--believe whatever you want, but don't shelter your kids from learning other viewpoints. Oddly enough, young earth creationism ended up making me agnostic. In the circle of Christianity I grew up in, it was taught that 'if Christianity is true then it logically follows that the earth is 6,000 years old'. If P then Q, Not Q, therefore Not P. And, well, once you learn that biology is more than just classifying animals, it's not hard to show that the earth is a little bit more than 6,000 years old. QED.
I gave a talk on Bash yesterday; you can see the slides if you're interested. Figured out that it'll take 3-4 weeks to print my lab book, which effectively means it needs to be ready to print by the last week of November, so that's where my Thanksgiving break is going to go...
Hubski, is it selfish to feel frustrated because you're spending all your time doing things that help other people and therefore are accomplishing nothing that you need to do for yourself? Because, on reflection, the past year has been that way for me. The windshield wipers on my daily driver stopped working for some reason, so for now I'm just hoping it doesn't rain when I have to drive somewhere. One of my students cheated this week. On the one hand, I'm pissed because every time that happens it eats up several hours of my time meeting with people and running paperwork around campus. On the other, I'm getting pretty efficient at doing that, for better or for worse. At least in two weeks a lot of this will be over and maybe I'll be able to get anything done. Sorry for the rant.
I'm figuring out how to convert this drill press I have to run off a VFD, which will give me infinitely-variable speed. The motor is getting switched out too, so that will upgrade me from a washing machine motor to a 3/4 HP motor. Should make quite the drill press for around $200.
Buffalo Trace is what I typically recommend to people who want to try bourbon. Elijah Craig and Bulleit are also good (albeit a bit pricier). Four Roses is a blend of whiskeys and has some really complex flavors, if that's what you're after. I don't drink a lot of Irish whiskey but I have a bottle of Bushmills that is quite nice. (Don't ask me about scotch; it's incompatible with a grad student salary.)
Hey! Do you make or fix things? You should make a Shopski post! I love learning how to do new things, and seeing other people working on stuff motivates me to get off my butt as well. It's currently been car-focused because that's what I've been working on, but I'd like to see a wider variety of posts. On a semi-related note, I've been doing really well at checking things off my personal to-do list (hence a lot of shop time), but not so well at the things I told my advisor I'd do. Time management is tricky like that, I guess.
I definitely feel that places like Hubski are still working hard to make the dream of Cyberspace come to fruition.
My wife's quitting (always fun when the C*O tells you "in your position I would leave"....), which is good for her sanity. I think right now the plan is for her to finish out her degree so she can qualify for more interesting jobs. Meanwhile, it looks like every department on campus is getting an 8-12% budget cut next fiscal year which is going to make things very interesting, and not in a good way. However, my advisor says it's likely I'll have some research funding in the fall! Figured out that the MR2's low oil pressure was in fact the sensor wire being loose; tightened that up and things seem OK again. Hopefully I'll be able to get it legally on the road soon.
First time was pretty nervewracking, and I still get anxious before teaching, although once I get into the swing of things I calm down. My first day I learned an important lesson: performance anxiety is real. I was doing some basic probability analysis that I figured I could do off the top of my head and made an absolute mess of it and had to start over! So now I make sure that regardless of how much time I have to prep I make notes that feature fully-worked examples and exactly-worded definitions. (Much of the time my notes are just that and I can do the motivation and exposition bits off the cuff.) I was only a couple years older than most of my students when I started and I was concerned that they'd doubt my knowledge and argue about stupid stuff, but that turned out to be entirely wrong. I'd given plenty of presentations in classes before, so I was at least a little used to standing in front of a classroom, but teaching felt different because the students were really paying attention to what I was saying for a change. Definitely a sobering moment when you realize you could say just about anything and a room of 50 people would just take your word for it! A lot of my students have been very smart, and I really love the oddball questions they come up with, even if I don't always know how to answer them. Teaching takes a lot out of you--even though I don't feel tired while I'm in the classroom, I pretty much have to schedule a half hour or so after class to sit and drink coffee and do mindless tasks because I need a bit of time to mentally recover.
The work is definitely its own reward, although you won't find me complaining about getting to drive it! I didn't know much about working on cars beyond how to change oil and rotate tires before I bought this one. I printed off a shop manual for it that explains more or less how to do about any procedure; for everything else, there's friends and enthusiast forums. Friends are especially good to have because they can be persuaded with food to lend tools and help out on bigger projects.
I'm still alive. One step closer to getting my MR2 running again. My wife's getting screwed over at her job and it's the same shit that I've seen over and over again at this university since 2010: the people who care have no power to make things better, and the people who have the power are only out for themselves or are sucking up to the people above them in the hierarchy. We're also getting chickens here in the next couple of weeks, so we'll be building a coop here soon.