Stick-bugs

I'm not a big insect person, but if I had to choose, my favorites are stick and leaf bugs. Once last fall during a frisbee game I saw a leaf flickering across the end zone, and when I realized it was a bug I got so excited that I stopped everyone and got that leaf to safety!

So you can imagine my excitement when I read this story from last week about an amazing stick-bug that we thought was extinct 50 years ago, but has somehow managed to survive on a rock near where their population used to be.

It's fascinating what biologists sometimes have to do in the name of their science-- they discover things and grow things when there's no logical evidence for what takes place. Sometimes engineers turn their noses at this, but I don't think that convex optimization has ever brought a beautiful bug back to life.

Gut feeling, the fancy name for blind luck when it turns out right

There's a fun story today about two men who kayaked around Ellesmere island in the Arctic north last summer.

The island is between Canada and Greenland. Here you can see a map of the north Arctic including Ellesmere island.

I like this quote from the story:

“We paddled out at 11 in the morning, got scared and came back,” Turk said. “We went out at 4 in the afternoon, got scared and came back. And then we went out at 9 and looked at each other. ‘O.K., we’re going for it.’ By 3 in the morning, we got clear around Cape Union.”

He added: “We each had a gut feeling that that was the right time. But is a gut feeling just a fancy name for blind luck? Or did we really know something? I don’t know. We made it.”

Glad Calvinball is at the bottom!

Remember Watson, the computer that can play Jeopardy? Scientists love to create algorithms that can beat humans at games-- it's one of the most interesting, fun, and useful ways to address questions of artificial intelligence. You can now find an up-to-date categorization of games, with respect to how easily computers can beat humans, in xkcd. Thinking about the different games might give you some insight as to what computers are good at and what they are not!

Math in Business

Jordan Ellenberg has recently introduced me to mathbabe, a great blog with interesting perspectives on all sorts of things related to math and data and life.

This post is about jobs that mathematicians could have after getting their PhD (or enjoying some advanced expertise) in mathematics. I think it's also really applicable to folks in EE and CS who work on data, like me!

Here's a quote I definitely agree with:

"in general [academia is] a place for people who have internal feedback mechanisms and don’t rely on external ones."

The Berlin Wall

On August 13, 1961, the Berlin wall was raised overnight. Literally starting at midnight, the border between West Berlin and East Germany was entirely lined with barbed wire fence by morning. The wall itself was built then built up inside the fence.

This morning on NPR I heard a review of writer Hogler Teschke, who was born and raised in East Germany. When he was seven, he first saw the wall.

Renee Montagne asked him about divisions between the East and West:

Hogler Teschke: "I think the most important difference was that the people in the West grew up in a democratic and an open and liberal society, and we did not. And with freedom, and with democracy, there are also many many challenges, and you have to learn to face this. And you have to learn to think and act for yourself. ..."

RM: "You mean it wasn't just an immediate gratification of the basic human need to be free-- as I think the most idealistic people would think. That emerging from communism wasn't that simple."

HT: "A very good old friend of mine... once said, It is actually not very easy to learn to be a free person. That sounds very simple and banal, but it is not if you have not learned it from your childhood on."

They spoke also of two words created from this fractured history: Ostalgia, or nostalgia for the East. Teschke's son, who was 10 when the wall was open, calls himself an Ossie, like a Eastie. Teschke believes his son's generation still feels the divide, but he hopes with the next generation it will disappear.

Futurama clip

just watch it. It's only seven seconds.

Thanks to Marco Duarte for that one (via google+).

Freya Stark

Freya Stark was an explorer and writer, born in the late 1800s. She spent most of her time in the middle east. I've been reading about her in the New Yorker. I liked what I saw, and kept reading on the internet; here is a quote of hers that I like:

"One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings... I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism."

From the New Yorker article, which is a review of some of her books which are being re-released, I chuckled at this quote:

"The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is, and no one is surprised."

After laughing I realized that we have come a long way. Here I am, a woman studying to get a PhD in electrical engineering. This Monday is my preliminary defense, and as it turns out, pretending to be stupid will not get me very far.