I'm Not Drunk...

... or even hungover, which is odd because at many points in grad school I promised myself that if I ever managed to graduate I would go on a week-long binge in which I drank myself into another dimension.

As grad school progressed and the prospect of keeping such a promise seemed more and more likely, the promise began to diminish. The week-long brain-wrecking binge became a weekend of debauchery, and then downshifted to an irresponsible night. Finally, when the moment came, I had dinner with some friends and then went to a local pub and had a few beers with more friends and some of my committee.

The next day I didn't even have a headache, which was good because my advisor wanted to meet with me and talk about future research plans and I kind had a bunch of things to take care of.

I still kind of have a lot of stuff to do. Between making requested changes to the dissertation, applying for a job, resubmitting the paper that was rejected without a referee report -- "your paper looked pretty good, but we get a lot of papers and we can't publish them all" -- I'm kind of busy.

This all seems wrong. It's like that one time when I turned thirty, it felt like it would be such a big deal and then it happened and it wasn't. I even had to go to work the next day.

Dissertation Defended

The presentation and ensuing questions were painless.

Grad school is over.

Formula One

Disputes among formula one teams have been resolved ensuring that the series will continue to run. Perhaps they all got together, had a big Nazi-themed orgy and worked things out.

A Curious Clip

Today on NPR's Tell Me More Michel Martin played a clip of a caller saying that the election of Barack Obama proved that racism doesn't play a significant role in our society. To me the assertion seemed wrong and kind of fringe, and so I was surprised that Ms. Martin would choose to air the clip. Perhaps she aired it because this idea has gained traction in certain segments of the population.

The most obvious counter arguments to this are, one: Obama won in spite of race. He was young and charismatic and he ran an effective campaign. The war was increasingly unpopular. The abrupt economic downturn didn't help McCain. Finally, several conservatives I've spoken with didn't like McCain -- they felt he wasn't conservative enough. And, two: even if it were the case that Obama has never faced racism, that doesn't mean that minorities in general don't face racism. Perhaps most significantly, racism can take forms that aren't apparent to those who aren't facing it. For this last reason I think it is quite difficult to say with certainty that racism, or sexism for that matter, no longer plays a significant role.

I wonder if someone who would claim that racism no longer plays a significant role isn't deliberately overlooking arguments as basic as those I presented above.

Odds and Ends

Turning off Javascript:

Nearly five years ago I bought a 12" G4 iBook. On the whole the machine has served me pretty well, although it's nearing the end of its useful life. This is happening not because it's wearing out -- physically the machine is fine -- but because the processor is too slow. When I bought the machine the 1GHz G4 was a middle-of-the-road processor. I knew that toward the end of its life I wouldn't be able to install the latest greatest software. What I didn't anticipate was the number of websites (e.g. gmail, nytimes.com) that would be heavily based on Javascript. Over the years these websites have changed and the associated Javascript has started consuming a lot more CPU cycles.

I first noticed this when trying to figure out why my machine was running so slowly. I was surprised that Firefox was sucking down 70% of the CPU, even though I wasn't interacting with it and it wasn't refreshing a page. Someone recently suggested turning off Javascript, and the results have been striking. First, lots of sites including gmail and nytimes.com provide a Javascript free interface. Second, the sites load really quickly. Lastly, my browser consumes zero cycles when I'm not interacting with it. The overall effect is that my aging laptop just got a new lease on life.

Global Warming:

I play hockey with a guy who argues with the ref anytime the ref makes a call against our team. This is standard procedure in hockey. If you use your stick to yank an unsuspecting player's foot over his head and the ref calls you on it, you act incredulous and shake your head at the horrible misguided call. Occasionally a ref will change his mind.

What's interesting is that this guy will argue with his own team when he's on the bench. Even if most of our players on the bench quietly admit that the call against us was legit, this guy will have reasons and explanations why it wasn't. There are two very different processes going on here: the first is advocating for our team; the second is understanding what actually occurred. I wonder if these two processes get mixed up for this guy.

I think that blurring the distinction between understanding and advocating occurs in discussions of global warming and politics in general. On several occasions I have heard smart people present arguments that, if they examined them critically, they would be able to take apart immediately. When people do this I assume that they are advocating for their political team so-to-speak. In sports it doesn't make sense to say that the wrong team won. However, if we treat the question of global warming like a tug-of-war contest we may find that the wrong team does win.

Here is a simple solution: Everyone needs to take a moment to imagine that they're wrong about global warming (or whatever crucial issue is being discussed) and ask themselves: What are the consequences of people following my views if they are wrong? If the consequences are substantial, should I hedge my arguments a little bit?

Thoughts on Iran

It is hard to know how much the video above, which was produced for western audiences, represents the desire of the Iranian people.

Nevertheless, the reports that communication channels for the citizens of Iran are being shut down are disconcerting. Without Twitter and SMS, militias can follow through with Khamenei's threats of bloodshed with little risk of digital evidence.

Oops

Yesterday afternoon I had two realizations. The first was that there was an obvious corroborating test that I needed to do for my numerical experiments but had not. The second occurred while I was writing the code to implement the corroborating test -- there was a bug in some code that caused a certain analysis to spit out something that was plausible but also more or less random.

Last night I started writing the software to do the corroborating test and fixing the problem. My Mac Mini has been crunching number all through the night while I had panicky dreams of Hessians that were not positive-definite. This morning I woke up and was immensely relieved to see that the corroborating test does in fact corroborate my results, and that the bug is easy to correct. Now I'm back to re-working my dissertation and figuring how to explain to my committee the last minute changes.

As an aside, the Mac Mini is a surprisingly useful machine for numerical experiments: it's cheap; the vecLib framework provides a LAPACK implementation; best of all, it's quiet. Mine sits on a shelf in my living room.