Kicking Ass Bathroom-Wise

I read this and realized that with one bathroom and 900 square feet, the wife and I are totally kicking Tommy Hilfiger's ass in terms of bathrooms per square foot.  With 20,000 square feet and only eight bathrooms, you might have to walk a long way when nature calls. 

Cleverness

Youtube reports that each of the following videos have been viewed more than a million times apiece. Even when you consider that people watch videos several times, it is likely that for many, the following will not be new. Nonetheless, I thought that these uses of a Nintendo Wii were immensely clever. I imagine that the multi-point interactive whiteboard could be modified so that two people could share a common whiteboard over a network. That would be supremely cool! In any case, if you haven't seen the following, take a look.

What's Up With Labels

So Blogger has this field for me to enter labels associated with each post.  I don't know how this information is used.  Perhaps it's used for indexing purposes. Who knows.

Errata and Stuff

Errata: The wife called the ranger to report our creepy experience.  The ranger said that that another ranger had come out to check on us and that the flashlight in the middle of the night was most definitely someone checking in on us.  

Stuff: I'm getting all geared up to do some grading for the linear algebra class I'm TA'ing.  There are few things worse than trying to follow haphazard matrix manipulations.   I'm listening to Thunderstruck by AC/DC, it's getting me all pumped up for several hours of tedium. 

Good Ol' Tennessee Backwoods Fun

My wife and I decided that we needed to get away, so Saturday morning we grabbed our camping gear and headed to Savage Gulf State Park in southeastern Tennessee. It has a modest beauty, and the last time we went it was nearly empty. Saturday night we hiked to our campsite, set up our tent, threw in all our gear, and went for a short excursion to a nearby waterfall. When we returned, there was a group of eight or so guys who set up in the adjacent campsite maybe 300 feet away. We made dinner, ate, cleaned up and got ready for bed. The path to the outhouse goes within a hundred feet or so of this group's camping area.  As we got closer, their dogs started barking and growling.  As we walked past a flashlight points at us. I'm annoyed that the dogs are acting threatening, but did't feel like saying anything. The wife and I took a different path back from outhouse through an unused campsite, and then go tried to go to sleep. The wind was really blowing and the creaking of the trees kept both of us from really falling asleep.

I'm on the boundary of sleep and wakefulness when I realize that someone is shining a flashlight into the tent. Still disoriented, I say "hello?" The flashlight shuts off. At first I thought it was a ranger -- sometimes rangers come by to make sure people made it to their campsite. Then I realize that if it was a ranger, he or she would probably have checked on the other group as well, and their dogs would have started barking. I spend the rest of the night feeling progressively more creeped out. The next morning I wake up and hear footsteps and look out the window of the tent and see someone walking away who had just walked within five feet of our tent. Just to be clear, our tent was not on the shortest path between any two points anywhere in the campsite. The wife and I opt to skip breakfast, pack up as fast as we can, and make tracks far away from these people.  Their dogs come running out from their campsite growling at us as we leave.

Where to begin enumerating the wrongness? Well for starters, there's a sense of powerlessness. What can you do? If you have to ask people not to come over to your tent in the middle of the night and peer in with a flashlight, something is already so wrong that there is little hope that such a reasonable request will set things straight. Plus, there were at least five of them, and two of us. I'm a 160 lbs and not much in a fist-fight. Maybe they thought it was a funny joke, maybe they're psychopaths. I didn't really want to find out. Second, it takes something I love -- backpacking -- and makes me love it a little less. When you go backpacking, there aren't any authorities nearby.  You are trusting that the people you encounter are not looking to cause you harm. You can't enjoy backpacking if that trust gets eroded. Finally, I got bullied a fair bit as a kid, and on a couple of occasions got beat up. The most upsetting thing about getting beat up as a kid was that the violence and cruelty was completely unexpected. (The second most upsetting thing was that the teachers and principles at the school where this happened didn't seem overly concerned.) I spent a considerable amount of my youth, afraid of people. As an adult I recognize that most people are pretty OK (although I still carry some distrust of people in general.)(observe that you can't leave comments.) When I encounter people such as I did Saturday night, I have to resist the instinct to retreat into myself and revert to childhood views of seeing other people as different and something to be feared.

Social Contracts and Compressed Sensing

Social Contracts: "Treat others as you would like to be treated," isn't so much a social contract as a moral guide.

Compressed Sensing: There is a veritable marching army of researchers doing compressed sensing. I've lost count of the number of introductory talks I've seen on the subject. I could probably give a talk on it myself. And everyone sketches the l₁ ball and mentions how pointy it is compared to the l₂ ball, which is not pointy at all. Today's talk was quite good, although by now, going to an introductory talk on compressed sensing is like wine-tasting. I know more or less how it's going to go, the question is how will the speaker deliver the key parts.

Random Thoughts and Links on a Monday

At some point I gave up trying to work out questions surrounding my faith. I decided that, for interactions with my fellow humans, I needed only justify my actions according to some reasonable social contract e.g. treat others as I would like to be treated. Faith, I had finally decided, starts and ends outside the narrow realm of logic. I find it amazing, though that the person whose views most mirror mine is a homeless man.

I've also decided to try to avoid politics. The media inevitably distorts, either through ignorance, political inclination, or a practical need for brevity. And so I doubt that my opinions, based on what I learn from distorted reporting, could be the basis for solutions to problems that must be extremely complex. The one opinion I do hold is that there is no threat to a democracy greater than election fraud. I was disturbed to read this. I have no idea who maintains the blog, and he clearly has a liberal bent, but if what he has to say is true, I would feel better knowing that this guy Esser isn't counting the votes in November.

Acoustic Guitar

Acoustic guitar doesn't really do much for me, but I thought the video below was amazing.  Also, I saw The Lives of Others last night.  I enjoyed it far more than I thought I would. 

Tuesday Thrills

Nashville occasionally gets tornados. The warnings on the radio start with a series of beeps, continue with an automated voice listing the counties under a warning, and conclude with instructions to get to the basement. My wife and I rent the second floor of a house and can't get to the basement. Normally we just stay away from the windows and concentrate on being lucky.

Tonight while working on being lucky, the wife received an e-mail informing us that a tornado was expected to reach the campus (which is less than a mile away) in fifteen minutes.  We decided that luck was pretty fickle, and that it was time to get to know our downstairs neighbors better. To get to the downstairs apartment we have to go outside, and the sky had a look to it that I have never ever seen before.  It was kind of serene and filled with other-worldly structure.  I would have stopped to study it, if I didn't have the sense of being a gazelle marveling at how lustrous the lion's mane was.

Our neighbors are really nice. 

 

Friday Blues

After several rounds with my advisor, we've gotten to a state where we're both happy enough with my results to publish. This is good because I'd like to have a paper submitted, preferably accepted, before I start applying for jobs. I am presently doing the literature search I should have done before I started this project.  Why, you might ask, did I embark on this ass-backwards approach to things?  The answer is as follows:

1. My advisor gave me a minimal energy problem to work on.  After realizing that direct approaches weren't going to work, we opted to exploit a connection between minimal energy problems and potential theory.
2. "It's easy!" he said, "You just normalize like this and take a limit like that!"  One year later, I've become convinced that the first statement is false and the second is more or less true.  Potential theory, it turns out, can be technical. 
3. Since my potential theory result seemed significant in its own right, my advisor suggested we publish. (This was not the plan from the get-go.)  So now I'm doing what I should have done at the start, which is making sure that this work hasn't been done already, hence the literature search.
   

So I'm digging through papers and books mostly written by Russians in the late sixties and early seventies.  It makes me think of watching the Olympics as a kid.  The event was wrestling, and there was an interview with a Soviet athlete from Siberia.  "How do you train?" asked the reporter.  A man who looked like he could throw cars starts speaking in russian.  The translation is provided in a voice-over.  "He gets up at six, eats a loaf of bread, five eggs, and a chicken. After tea, he carries anvils for his father. He then goes to the gymnasium and trains with the team. In the afternoon he spends three hours running through waist-deep snow to help maintain his fitness."

When I read these papers and books, I can't shake the image of huge, hulking men running through waist-deep snow while working through exceptionally technical mathematics.  I on the other hand feel remarkably soft and ill-prepared to compete in an environment such as this. How can people learn so much in a lifetime?  Where do these people study? There is only one professor I know of who seems to have a handle on this material. What exactly am I going to do as a mathematician?