This dog seems to enjoy watching the computer screen.
I seemed to have interrupted him. Maybe he was right in the middle of fetching a branch. After I left, he was able to get back to the important work at hand.
Granola street-rubbish photographer feels insecure about GR.
On a few occasions I have had some physics discussions in the local coffee shops. We touch on topics like relativity and I have mentioned that I have actually studied GR (general relativity) and worked through by hand most of the difficult tensor formulas, such as the Bianchi identity, for example. Now computer algebra packages can work through many of the grunt tensor calculations, which can get tedious. (They were so tedious that Einstein invented a special notation, called the Einstein summation convention.) Any way students are often present and often they react as “ooooh, aaaah – wow, he gets relativity”. And actually indeed this is somewhat impressive, and it is nice that many people react this way. If you think GR is easy, try working through some of the tensor gravity formulas! And this is good stuff to know. I am definitely interested in this material. There are coffee shop regulars who will call you a super genius if you know this stuff, and this is nice, too. The support goes a long way. (I have been called a lot of other things, and some not so nice.) You can get some respect around here for knowing some of this stuff.
When I first moved to Madison I walked around taking pictures. (I still do this). A fellow had the same camera and we started talking, and after a short while I learned that he was a physics major, who was doing his Ph.D. and who had also earned a masters degree in physics from Cambridge in England. Well, ok.
We agreed to have dinner and had dinner at a nice Indian restaurant on State Street, and we talked physics. His Ph.D. work involves applying a martingale technique to image estimation and reconstruction problems in astronomical imaging. (He found some nice things including a new algorithm for dramatic computational complexity improvement for some restoration problems.) After that we went over to the Memorial Library, got a library booth, and he worked through the notions of GR in around 30 minutes and pointed out some interesting things he had found. He asked me to review his paper called something like “Notes on General Relativity” but I do not know how to do Lie derivatives (yet), so I said no.
I’m some guy who moves to Madison after doing some c-language debugging for manufacturing robotics and other things in Silicon Valley; and there is no interest in this physics in industry. So it was neat to see that I could still be “intelligent” in the discussions, and ask smart and hard questions. This is a bit of a shift from industry debugging to high physics. You think you have lost the ability, but it’s still there.
I have met some other people, too. I won’t give all the names.
Then I meet Mike Iltis while I was walking around taking pictures. He was having an intense discussion on State Street involving U-238 and I said “cool it dude, it sounds like you’re giving away secrets.” This is sarcastic in that it is public image that matters and not truth.
Some time has passed, and well, Mike sent me another one of his usual and typical e-mail’s, which I love getting, BTW. So, ummm, here are just some fancier papers on categorical quantum gravity, space time topology, and other fancy stuff. Well, that’s Mike. One of my goals is to learn and understand all of this material.
It’s not too hard to feel dumb pretty quickly. It’s good that the students think you’re smart. So much for feeling GR secure though.
Alanis how did you make this list? [2] with lyrics.
The Jingler Jangler Rangler Dangler (JJ for short) has a little too much juke box money but still figures out how to leave a letter by the sea.
Not as lucky as you think.
Vera looks so much like my mother. My dad, who flew on B-17’s, liked her. These were songs giving a force of hope against an indomitable enemy. Any record from 1936 moves me.
Me vida es su tombola. Is this related to boozing it up on the street?
I’m blue over you.
There is a lot to be said about probabilistic networks. They can be used to model many things from languages to social networks. And there are many kinds of probabilistic networks and they are a topic of active publishing at the moment.
Recently I tried a simple example based on a neat code called dyna. This pdf shows the use of a probabilistic network to “reason” or parse a number of input sentences. A set of probabilities that describe the probabilities of word transitions is supplied, and the system “miraculously” interprets the natural language grammar.
Then there is the question of whether I violated the license. The technique itself can get you into trouble using the same “flawed” reasoning that it performs itself (how ironic). Consider the following.
I am a little surprised that my technical posts are getting some attention: at least from the WordPress community. There is interest in things technical. There is so much CS on the internet, actually. I wrote a short piece on blogging with WordPress and a few people made some superlative comments, which actually surprised me. A little social support really goes a long ways.
My friend Mike Iltis called me last night and we talked for around 3 hours on things technical. (I have the bottom of the line cell phone plan). Mike, who often teaches at the university, had sent me a new set of academic links on some interesting topics, and I share a few of them below. I am not an academic but am more half way in between academia and industry. Industry people regard me as an academic and academics see me as a commercial developer. (I was a commercial developer in Silicon Valley several years ago.) Anyway I do have academic interests, but I realize that there is very much that I do not know or understand. I am mentioning Mike Iltis as a reference for the links below.
My website has been down since about noon on Thursday. It seems to have decided to take a sudden crash. This is the longest my site has been down at least as long as I can remember. I am writing this note offline hoping I can post it if/when my site gets back up.
This is not an apology since there is little I can do about it. I need to wait for my provider to get it back up.
I am lucky that I had just done a backup of my WordPress information. I hope that this is not the time to test the backup system.
Many people must be frustrated by not being able to reach my site. I am frustrated, too.
Here are some search key words for the month of September. 12 of these hits are due to Google.
It is amazing that people actually search for this stuff.
The list of search keywords is given below
Thursday 2024-12-19 07:14:14
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