Posted by synedra on Sep 30, 2008 in
Uncategorized I’ve now spent almost a month working on my maths with Aleks. We’ve gotten along famously, and I’ve gotten a handle on most of the things one might need in order to slide into harder math with relative ease. Congratulations, me. I’ve graduated!
I have a few branches I can choose from in order to further myself along the evolutionary path to “someone who can play with robots” and also “someone who can fully understand casual lunchtime conversation at work,” not to mention “someone who can solve impossible problems in 42 seconds.”
I think my next steps should be Linear Algebra and The Theory of Computability. After that I can look again at the algorithms and machine learning books, but for now I think this is the most obvious next step. So, how to go about this? I have at my disposal many people who know these things forwards and backwards, but I still need some guidance to grasp the concepts so I don’t drive them insane and inadvertently cause my premature death. I could just read the textbooks but history says I won’t.
After some research, I’ve decided to take advantage of the MIT OpenCourseWare courses, which seem to have been put out there for people like me to slurp up difficult concepts. At least for this, um, “semester.” I will take their Linear Algebra class (with super cool java applets to play with!) as well as the Theory of Computation. I think I’ll also sneak in some Street Fighting Mathematics, because that course just looks fun. I’ll keep myself honest by journaling my progress and keeping my mentor/clone apprised of how I’m doing. And of course you, my imaginary friends.
In my work life, I’m spending this week attempting the impossible – take some code from someone else, and make it work and sing with a tight deadline. So far it’s going well. And this morning I made it through most of a Bikram class. I must be getting back to something nearing normal.
Posted by synedra on Sep 24, 2008 in
Uncategorized Ah, election season. The honeycrisps are back in the produce section, the air has an unfriendly chill, and our level of discourse has degenerated to the level of grade-school boys. Why is it that people who are so brilliant in every other area of their lives have to stoop to ad hominem attacks and meaningless digs whenever the national election rolls around?
I mean, look. I’m no fan of Palin. By all accounts, she is an
extremely effective politician who should probably be considered a great candidate. Is she a nice person? Um, it doesn’t seem like she is. But aiming our slingshots at the low-hanging fruit (a pregnant daughter of an abstinence-only candidate) sullies us, not her. Teenagers have sex, and they get pregnant. There are more effective and less effective sex education methods, but we’re not really discussing that. The general feeling about her daughter’s situation is more of a locker room “heh, heh, she had sex with a jock and she got pregnant!” Many of the things Palin has said have indeed been somewhat laughable, but let’s face it – we do have a history, as a nation, of electing Republicans with pretty but dumb running mates – and I have no illusions that Palin is stupid – so we have to do better than just to jump on the easy lobs they hit over the net at us, lest we cheapen the entire conversation. It sometimes feels like the McCain camp must be feeding us silly Palin trivia just so that we can look ridiculous in our response.
One of the things that made me most irritated during the *last* presidential election was the “You’re either with us or against us” fear mongering that the republicans tended to throw out whenever someone questioned our activities in the middle east. But what I’m hearing now from many Obama supporters feels just about as well thought out. Over on Salon, there’s an “
Open letter to undecided voters” by someone who says they’ll try to be neutral. Um, no. Not neutral. It’s fine to have an opinion – but if you claim to be neutral when you aren’t, then you’re just as bad as FOX news. Or NPR.
The most recent economic events have been an excellent opportunity for us to point out that McCain was involved in the deregulation bill which almost certainly brought us to this crossroads. For those of us not wanting to vote for the “Bridge to No Choice”, simply telling pro-choice republicans that McCain thinks Roe V. Wade is an extremely effective way to help them realize how much his views have changed over the last few years. Sticking with the above the belt facts doesn’t empty our toolbox – it just leaves us with the ones we can use with some amount of dignity.
I’m going to do my part to call a spade a spade, and not try to fool people into agreeing with me through underhanded means. If more of us do that, perhaps we can get through this election without feeling slimy. And maybe… just maybe, if we don’t make the blatant assumption that the people we’re talking to are idiots, they’ll listen to the meat of what we’re saying. And we might not end up with the guy who irritated us least… last.
In other news, since I’m sure you’re all dying to know how my maths are coming… I spent last night wandering through trigonometric identities of all types. And proofs. Proofs are fun.
Posted by synedra on Sep 22, 2008 in
Uncategorized Finally, I’m feeling human. Between slamming my endocrine system into some kind of bizarre state and weaning off of Wellbutrin, I spent the last two weeks essentially in a supreme fog. I think I’m emerging from it now, but boy do I ever dislike having such a huge lack of energy. Bleh.
I love working at
AMI. One of my favorite pastimes when in the office is hanging out with the Robotics team – I’m extremely fond of all of the team members and am fascinated by the topic. Long ago, as a freshman at
UCSC, I had thought I might do something mathy or sciency, but the super bizarre frizzy-haired lunatics who teach the intro courses in those divisions at Uncle Charlie’s Summer Camp were enough to dissuade me forever. Plus I made the horrible mistake one makes when taking a class in Linear Algebra – oh, this is easy… a couple of weeks pass… skip a class or three to write papers for your other classes and then come back, and… WHOA, what’s that? So I chose Philosophy. Essentially Math for Dummies.
So here I am, surrounded by PhDs of various hard sciences, who do amazing things with computers and robots, and wishing I could play with them
[1]. Also wishing I could just go to lunch with these groovy folk and have some idea what they’re talking about, although I somehow manage to follow along a lot of the time. I had thought that my lack of math would eliminate me from the conversation, but it turns out I have a knack for the abstract mathematical theories involved in making robots tie their shoes. And my
clone insists that I understand the math just fine, I just need to work on understanding how the numbers move around.
I asked my boss (MathMan) what math topics I should learn in order to keep up in conversations around here, and he suggested instead that I read up on (or take classes in) Algorithms and Theory of Computability. He assured me I didn’t really need any math to get through those, and that math wasn’t really necessary to get along around here. So I got some books on those topics. Turns out that yeah, you do need some math to get through those. Apparently when you are the supreme high commander of Math Theory, you don’t realize that there are actually some sentient beings who aren’t cozy with vectors and matrices. I also found myself fascinated by the NetFlix prize and machine learning, and so I picked up a couple of those books and discovered, again, yeah, I need some math.
But how does someone whose calendar is all full of important things like yoga classes, martial arts, mothering and actual work fit in learning math? I mean, big math. Calculus and linear algebra are a bare minimum to even get through the intro chapters in these books – but I don’t want to spend hundreds of hours listening to someone spoon-feed me the stuff. I want the matrix version of “I know Linear Algebra!” And here’s where
ALEKS comes in – it’s a website which will run you through various math topics, and it really does an excellent job of teaching. It’s excellent as enrichment for kids, and the parents get groovy reports and pie charts and everything. And if, like me, you enjoy the game of filling up your various pie chart pieces – and the math is not terribly alien to you – you can learn (or relearn) quite a bit in a reasonably short amount of time. I took AP Calculus in high school (um, that was a while ago) so I started with “AP Calculus Review”. Started at 39%, in 2 weeks worked my way up to 97% and so I switched to “College Algebra with Trigonometry” – started at 42% a week ago (the overlap isn’t nearly as large as one might think) and now I’m up to 66%.
Now, Aleks doesn’t go high enough for me – it stops at College Algebra with Trig, so I’m going to have to tackle real Calculus and Linear Algebra on my own. But starting from “Just got through all of these topics” is going to make that a lot easier. I’m still poking along with it (the current topics are much chewier than the earlier ones), but I’ve also started working on my Linear Algebra. I bought a textbook, but I also discovered an
online text which seems more my speed. Seems that Linear Algebra texts are the texts that math professors love to hate, and several of those professors have just written their own. For Calculus I’m going to wait until I’ve slogged through all of my ALEKS pieces, and I have a nice little
book. And a DVD tutorial set with a helpful professor.
Once I’m done with those things I should be able to tackle my algorithms, machine learning, pathing, and recalcitrant computer books. And then the robotics team and my boss can arm wrestle and figure out what stuff I can work on.
[1]And seriously, I’m just a little tired of web applications. If nothing else, robots mean you never have to worry about Firefox’s Javascript implementation.
Posted by synedra on Sep 12, 2008 in
Uncategorized Last week after returning from burning man, I rejoined the work world from my standard perch in my woven rope hammock chair on the porch. The weather was perfect, warm and breezy, and so I was loathe to pay any attention when a hole appeared in the hammock. I tied it off without much thought, and set to ordering a new hammock to replace it, stubbornly staying in the chair typing on my computer while suspended three feet above the concrete. About 15 minutes later, without any fanfare, the hammock chair deposited my hind end unceremoniously on the concrete. Ow. I contemplated my position for a moment, which was funny even at the time – my feet were still up at the level of the hammock, I was tangled in rope, and my computer was still perched safely on my lap. In situations like this, if someone else is around one tends to wish they weren’t, because there is a lot of pride to be lost in these situations… However, there wasn’t anyone around, and I sorely wished there were, because extricating myself from my webby prison was a puzzle I wasn’t up to after having had my brains jarred. I sat for a moment, then found a safe way to get myself, my computer, and my pride back up out of the chair, hmphed, and then went to sit inside.
A couple of days later I was whining at Kjerstin that I felt like I was concussed, although it seemed remarkably silly to feel that way. I couldn’t sleep, I was foggy and fuzzy, but I was sure that couldn’t be the problem because my butt is not the same as my head. And yet, jarring one’s noggin doesn’t always require direct contact… also, jarring your spine can have unexpected consequences. But I was too foggy to realize this, and after several more nights without any reasonable amount of sleep, I was even dimmer. This week I was doing really poorly – lost several pounds, still couldn’t sleep, even fuzzier and dizzy, starting to border on truly stupid, with some fabulous tinnitis, heart palpitations, and a racing pulse thrown in for good measure. The conclusion I drew? That my Wellbutrin must be causing some 18-months-later side effects (this isn’t as unreasonable as it sounds – it’s happened before)
So after some cajoling from my concerned friends, I made an appointment to see my wonderful doctor, thinking that I was probably either suffering from Wellbutrin lashback or possibly adrenal or thyroid issues (or perhaps the spine jarring the week before? Nah…) Since I was on a roll, I decided that I should go see my chiropractor as well, since I had been sitting fairly still for over a week and my hips tend to complain when I do that. It might have occurred to me to consider seeing her last week, after slamming my spine into cold concrete, but no, it did not. But no matter, the right thing happened, I went to see my chiropractor.
Dr. Taylor measured the readings on my spine, and noted with some surprise that I’d misaligned my spine somewhat severely, particularly in areas affecting (let’s see)… the adrenal glands, the thyroid, and the parasympathetic nervous system (hello, lack of appetite). Once I explained to her about my fall – and subsequent symptoms – she said she was sure the two were related, adjusted me, and sent me on my way. After being adjusted I was still exhausted, but the undercurrent of anxious desperation had dimmed a lot. I did see my doctor, and we ended up deciding to test for a few other things, but the general gist is that the likeliest answer is the simplest one – I messed up my nervous system and it made me pay.
So, as always, I’m grateful to my friends for being my external brain pack. And perhaps next time I’ll be smart enough, even in my dimness, to realize that yes, in fact, the simplest explanation is almost always the answer. Or not. It’s a good thing I have such helpful friends.
Posted by synedra on Sep 11, 2008 in
Uncategorized For all of you who have been beamed over to here from the PerlGoddess website, a little explanation is probably in order. Before I started working at my current company, building applications involving graph databases and freebase, I used to do all of my coding in Perl. Alas, this is no longer the case. In fact, since I started here I believe the only thing I’ve done with my Perl skills is some minor hackery on our Socialtext installation. And since I’m an OCD person, I’m afraid I’m not able to convince myself that it’s ok to post about anything non-perl related on a PerlGoddess website. And so my blog has sat unloved and unposted upon for months, due to this somewhat bizarre neurosis.
When deciding what to name my new site, I tried hard to think of something that wouldn’t paint me into a corner. Domestigirl was nice (until someone squatted on it), but kind of fenced me into cooking and knitting and the like, and it suffered a similar fate, although not as abruptly. PerlGoddess never really made it into “regular blogging” territory for the reasons mentioned above. The topics I might be motivated to post about are wide-ranging indeed – from martial arts to Adobe Flex to semantic web ideas to philosophy to singing (and let’s don’t forget cooking)… anyhow, you get the drift. I’ve got a lot going on and I’m frequently switching hobbies.
So, welcome to the Palace of Princess Polymath – blogging by a flibbertijibit (and sometimes, her clone). I promise that I’ll try to use real words in describing whatever’s flitting through my brain, and hope that the posts end up being amusing to someone (at least myself!)
Coming soon, in no particular order:
- Ode to a Kindle
- Singing samples so I can join a band
- A review of the fabulous math site Aleks
- A discussion of maths large and small
- Some commentary on a scrabble game or New York Times crossword
… or perhaps something completely different. One just never knows.
Anyhow, welcome.
