Today after last night's storm it was hot and a bit sticky. The ground and plants had gotten a good soaking. The sky was clear with a bit of haze. The sun looked pale and almost white in the haze of the morning.
I'm back to my normal routine. I've finished seven of the ten comp sci (and related technical) courses I started back in May and June. I have three left to go, but I've half-completed all those. Nevertheless I'm shifting gears a bit. I'm doing one lecture a day from the remaining three, and adding in other activities, ones I doing on the trip, including a Machine Learning course (the one from Andrew Ng at Stanford).
Machine Learning is all the rage lately. It's fun getting a deep expertise in it, rapidly as I can process. In Ng's course I learned a new programming platform called Octave, which is what he said they use in Silicon Valley to prototype new algorithms, and only later port it over to Python or R for use in production. From the way everyone talks, you'd think it all happens in Python or R. You can tell Octave is for the gurus of the Valley.
I'm also making my way through a course on Udacity from a professor at Georgia Tech, about applications of Machine Learning to finance, specifically hedge fund trading algorithms. It's a really fascinating talk. One of the texts, which I already started reading, is about how hedge funds really work. It's fascinating. One can see how to apply machine learning algorithms to it quite easily, at least on conceptual level.
I texted Greg about this, telling him I was learning about hedge funds from a guy at Georgia Tech. Greg went to University of Georgia, and he's partisan about the state in general, and so I thought he would get a kick out of it, even though Georgia Tech is a rival to UGA.
He texted back, asked if I was going into investment banking. I laughed at that, and explained that it was about the machine learning algorithm behind it. I said I thought one could run any such sort of algorithm in the cloud at this point.
"With an iPhone interface. lol," I added.
Thursday, August 9, 2018
The Desert Has Mercy
Last night we got back into town from ten days being away. We were up in Colorado for what has become an annual gathering of the family in Estes Park, which is not far from where my sisters live with their family, and where we all grew up.
This year was poignant in that as part of the visit, we put mom's ashes in the memorial wall at that the camp Columbarium, as they call it. We did on the second full day. I met my sisters in the office next to Columbarium at ten that morning. The woman there had the new plaque ready, with my mom's name and vital dates next to my dad's, which were on the old plaque.
That evening my sister's asked me about the place where I had scattered some of mom's ashes during our trip to France, which we had taken in April. I told them that I had carried them (in the little purse Kate made for them, also with a little bit of dad's ashes too) with me in the basket of the bicycle as we went across Brittany and Normandy. I told them it had been beautiful and sunny the entire way. Even the locals were marveling at the weather for that time of year. So many twists of the paths along the sea were achingly beautiful. Yellow rape flower across the green lush fields. Cows at every turn. I mooed at nearly all of them along the way. I wound up saving the scattering until we got to Omaha Beach, where on the only grey day of the entire trip, I through them out in the lapping surf.
Colorado felt especially healing this time because I could walk out into the pines and sit beside rushing water in the streams that come down off the glaciers. In the desert I miss that forest cover, and the rushing of water.
Last night a couple hours after we got back, and just after dark, an intense nasty storm cell came over us from the northeast, part of the monsoon counter-cycle coming down off the rim, where we had just come from. It started as an intense storm that send the trees into torments, backlit by the motion-activated flood lights from the woman next door, down the hill from us. Then the rains came hard and dumped several inches until it ran in a steady cascade from the roof onto the rocks and cacti. Standing below it, it sounded not unlike a mountain stream.
This year was poignant in that as part of the visit, we put mom's ashes in the memorial wall at that the camp Columbarium, as they call it. We did on the second full day. I met my sisters in the office next to Columbarium at ten that morning. The woman there had the new plaque ready, with my mom's name and vital dates next to my dad's, which were on the old plaque.
That evening my sister's asked me about the place where I had scattered some of mom's ashes during our trip to France, which we had taken in April. I told them that I had carried them (in the little purse Kate made for them, also with a little bit of dad's ashes too) with me in the basket of the bicycle as we went across Brittany and Normandy. I told them it had been beautiful and sunny the entire way. Even the locals were marveling at the weather for that time of year. So many twists of the paths along the sea were achingly beautiful. Yellow rape flower across the green lush fields. Cows at every turn. I mooed at nearly all of them along the way. I wound up saving the scattering until we got to Omaha Beach, where on the only grey day of the entire trip, I through them out in the lapping surf.
Colorado felt especially healing this time because I could walk out into the pines and sit beside rushing water in the streams that come down off the glaciers. In the desert I miss that forest cover, and the rushing of water.
Last night a couple hours after we got back, and just after dark, an intense nasty storm cell came over us from the northeast, part of the monsoon counter-cycle coming down off the rim, where we had just come from. It started as an intense storm that send the trees into torments, backlit by the motion-activated flood lights from the woman next door, down the hill from us. Then the rains came hard and dumped several inches until it ran in a steady cascade from the roof onto the rocks and cacti. Standing below it, it sounded not unlike a mountain stream.
Wednesday, August 8, 2018
Harvard in My Hotel Room
When I got back to Arizona, I immediately went back to my schedule of three computer science lectures a day. I'd streamlined my schedule of courses somewhat to concentrate on just a few---one of the intro courses from M.I.T., as well as Jerry Cain's CS107 at Stanford---a phenomenal course that I was savoring.
In Mexico, I had been diligent about continuing at least one lecture a day. That turned out to be pretty easy, since I was waking up long before the breakfast room opened, when the sky outside the big glass hotel window was still dark. I'd follow my normal home routine, without coffee of course, and had time to go through at least part of the Harvard intro course I had started right before leaving for Mexico.
It was just thirteen lectures, taught in the manner of a Ted Talk, on stage in front of several hundred Harvard undergraduates, and also beamed live to New Haven where Yale students could co-enroll in the course.
The professor was himself a Harvard graduate who had switched to computer science after a taking the same course as he was teaching now. He had empathy for beginners. He moved through subjects very quickly, with a quick patter. Many people on line talked about the course, so I had decided I had to sample. It was easy to follow. I knew almost everything in it (although not completely everything) so I didn't have to take very many notes. That allowed me to listen to it in almost real time, without stopping constantly to write down notes, as I must do with the M.I.T. and Stanford courses I was doing.
The conference was along enough that I almost finished the entire Harvard course while I was still in Mexico, but I had a couple left during the flight home, and it wasn't until I few days later that I could cross off the last lecture number on the sheet of paper where I kept a list of all the lectures of the courses I was intending to listen to, numbered in sequence under each course listing. It was like my own personal course schedule.
In Mexico, I had been diligent about continuing at least one lecture a day. That turned out to be pretty easy, since I was waking up long before the breakfast room opened, when the sky outside the big glass hotel window was still dark. I'd follow my normal home routine, without coffee of course, and had time to go through at least part of the Harvard intro course I had started right before leaving for Mexico.
It was just thirteen lectures, taught in the manner of a Ted Talk, on stage in front of several hundred Harvard undergraduates, and also beamed live to New Haven where Yale students could co-enroll in the course.
The professor was himself a Harvard graduate who had switched to computer science after a taking the same course as he was teaching now. He had empathy for beginners. He moved through subjects very quickly, with a quick patter. Many people on line talked about the course, so I had decided I had to sample. It was easy to follow. I knew almost everything in it (although not completely everything) so I didn't have to take very many notes. That allowed me to listen to it in almost real time, without stopping constantly to write down notes, as I must do with the M.I.T. and Stanford courses I was doing.
The conference was along enough that I almost finished the entire Harvard course while I was still in Mexico, but I had a couple left during the flight home, and it wasn't until I few days later that I could cross off the last lecture number on the sheet of paper where I kept a list of all the lectures of the courses I was intending to listen to, numbered in sequence under each course listing. It was like my own personal course schedule.
Roughening the Surface of Physics
On the flight down to Mérida (United---two legs from Phoenix, switching at Houston Intercontinental), I had watched a video of a talk Martin had given recently at Duke University. It was at a conference calls "Jews and the Ends of Theory." Martin's talk was called ""Against 'the Attack on Linking': Rearticulating 'the Jewish Intellectual' for Today". I had downloaded the Youtube video to my iPad so I could listen to it during the flight wearing my earbuds. I purchased an extra-wide seat upgrade from the leg across the Gulf of Mexico, the hop between Houston and Mérida, over the blue water. The talk sent me thinking in many different ways.
The youtube video was actually a two-talk session. Martin's was the second talk on the video. The first was by a woman from Harvard, a Russian Jewish woman professor in her Forties. I tried to listen to her talk, but her accent was too thick for her to be picked up well on the microphones in the classroom at Duke.
All I could get out of her talk was that she mentioned Victor Shklovsky a couple times. I knew exactly who that was, because we had just covered that in the Yale Introduction to Literature course I was taking online. He was one of the greatest of the group of literature critics called the Russian Formalists.
I mentioned this Martin during our first conversation, which was over breakfast in the hotel dining room on the morning after I arrived. Martin was blown away that. Sadly he said the woman who gave that talk had since passed away from cancer.
I wound up brining up Victor Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists over dinner on the last night of the conference, when a bunch of the older Americans and the remaining Israelis dined at the fancy restaurant just across the street from the hotel, including several of the wives who had come, and including Alex Gerstein and his wife, who had come all the way from Beersheeva, and who had been the senior attendees at the entire conference.
I was sitting in the middle of the table, and over drinks, I told everyone that I thought that what we were doing at the conference had a lot to do in spirit with the Russian Formalists.
I explained that the Russian Formalists had begun as a school of thought that literature could be studied in terms that close to being scientific---for example, in defining what makes "literariness," which is something they thought about a lot.
But there advanced over time among the Formalists the desire as well to accomplish something beyond a rational study of literature, and towards a value-driven goal, of using literature to create a "roughening of the surface" of everyday life, which otherwise could dull and boring.
"That's what this conference is about," I said. "It's about roughening the surface of physics, in a way."
They understood what I meant, I could tell.
The youtube video was actually a two-talk session. Martin's was the second talk on the video. The first was by a woman from Harvard, a Russian Jewish woman professor in her Forties. I tried to listen to her talk, but her accent was too thick for her to be picked up well on the microphones in the classroom at Duke.
All I could get out of her talk was that she mentioned Victor Shklovsky a couple times. I knew exactly who that was, because we had just covered that in the Yale Introduction to Literature course I was taking online. He was one of the greatest of the group of literature critics called the Russian Formalists.
I mentioned this Martin during our first conversation, which was over breakfast in the hotel dining room on the morning after I arrived. Martin was blown away that. Sadly he said the woman who gave that talk had since passed away from cancer.
I wound up brining up Victor Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists over dinner on the last night of the conference, when a bunch of the older Americans and the remaining Israelis dined at the fancy restaurant just across the street from the hotel, including several of the wives who had come, and including Alex Gerstein and his wife, who had come all the way from Beersheeva, and who had been the senior attendees at the entire conference.
I was sitting in the middle of the table, and over drinks, I told everyone that I thought that what we were doing at the conference had a lot to do in spirit with the Russian Formalists.
I explained that the Russian Formalists had begun as a school of thought that literature could be studied in terms that close to being scientific---for example, in defining what makes "literariness," which is something they thought about a lot.
But there advanced over time among the Formalists the desire as well to accomplish something beyond a rational study of literature, and towards a value-driven goal, of using literature to create a "roughening of the surface" of everyday life, which otherwise could dull and boring.
"That's what this conference is about," I said. "It's about roughening the surface of physics, in a way."
They understood what I meant, I could tell.
The Last Time I Saw Martin
The host for this year's conference---the guy who had been put in charge of organizing it---was a Mexican physics who works at the Technical Institute in the capital. He brought about half dozen other people with him, his graduate schools, all of them Mexican as well. Our host gave the opening talk. It was out-of-the-ballpark good---on one of my favorite topics, namely the ongoing mystery of why the corona of the Sun (the outer fringe) has a temperature that is much greater than the surface of the sun.
There was a Russian, who has a position in Mexico as well. He gave a talk on field theory on the second day. Very mathematical, the way a Russian talk usually is.
There was a Cuban professor there too. She gave a great talk on neutron stars. She invited us to come to her astrophysical conference in Havana next year.
Everyone else was either from the United States (by birth or by immigration), or from Israel.
Ironically Larry Horwitz from Tel Aviv was not there. Martin said he can't travel anymore unfortunately. The guy has put in his years.
Martin, who now runs everything, was Larry's graduate student the last time we met, in Houston, at the first conference twenty years ago.
There was a Russian, who has a position in Mexico as well. He gave a talk on field theory on the second day. Very mathematical, the way a Russian talk usually is.
There was a Cuban professor there too. She gave a great talk on neutron stars. She invited us to come to her astrophysical conference in Havana next year.
Everyone else was either from the United States (by birth or by immigration), or from Israel.
Ironically Larry Horwitz from Tel Aviv was not there. Martin said he can't travel anymore unfortunately. The guy has put in his years.
Martin, who now runs everything, was Larry's graduate student the last time we met, in Houston, at the first conference twenty years ago.
Gaelic in Mexico
The physics conference in Mexico was tremendous, even more than I anticipated. I met several dozen new people, some of whom may become collaborators at some point.
I left the conference as the Secretary of the four-person executive committee of the organization that puts the conference together.
Mérida was fantastic experience. It was the first time I'd been that wonderful city. The Paseo del Montejo, where our hotel was located, is a nice modern neighborhood. We ate almost every night at the Irish pub next door. I translated some of the Gaelic in the Guinness posters for some of my friends at the conference.
I left the conference as the Secretary of the four-person executive committee of the organization that puts the conference together.
Mérida was fantastic experience. It was the first time I'd been that wonderful city. The Paseo del Montejo, where our hotel was located, is a nice modern neighborhood. We ate almost every night at the Irish pub next door. I translated some of the Gaelic in the Guinness posters for some of my friends at the conference.
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