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.

Large deviations Take 2

This week a tornado ripped through Tuscaloosa, Alabama, leaving 38 confirmed dead. That storm in all killed hundreds.

This article from the NY times discusses how predicting tornadoes is still very difficult. There are many factors, and it still isn't clear to meteorologists exactly when a tornado will form and come down to the earth.

I grew up with tornadoes, and when I moved to California I thought earthquakes were a lot scarier. It is true that earthquakes kill many more people around the world than do tornadoes. And earthquakes have had serious consequences even in places with amazing infrastructure, like we saw recently in Japan. At the same time, tornadoes that can hit at any time in any place-- as long as "conditions are right"-- make them a difficult problem for scientists to figure out.

As storms become more often and more severe in the world, I would like to see us put more resources toward understanding them-- both by collecting new and more measurements, and by analyzing old data about these storms. We won't be able to divert them, and we won't be able to stop their destruction; but if we can warn people ahead of time, we can save lives.

Beauty and Counting

Sometimes enumeration is beautiful! But engineers don't like having to enumerate everything, because that takes a long time.

There are 892 ways to partition a 3x4 grid into unit rectangles. Thanks to angichau for the link.