Death and the Continuity of Memory

I could write a lot of things about death, but suffice it to say I'm against it. I'm also curious what my own beliefs suggest about what I think constitutes death.

I read a science fiction book a few years ago that I really enjoyed, but unfortunately can't at this moment remember the name or author of. But in this book, you could own a machine that would make clones of yourself, of varying quality (the good ones were very expensive, the menial ones less so). These clones had self-awareness, but they would die (melt down or whatever) at the end of the day. However, you could upload their memories to yourself before they died. (Some people never did, but others, like the book's hero, almost always did.) The book had some kind of a plot involving investigations, and it was told from the perspective of whichever clone (or original) of the protagonist was involved in the action at a given time.

So, you (a clone) would wake up in the morning, and think, "Ah, today I'm the clone." Because you'd have the memories of the person you were cloned from, and that person would have the memories of being a clone as well as a regular person. I think one of the clones once observed, "Some days you're the clone, some days you're the original," which is surely what such a situation would feel like. Some clones were fearful of their deaths, but especially fearful of dying without uploading their memories. To live for nothing!

Sally and I used to talk a lot in college about things like whether using a teleporter (something that destroys your body and builds an identical one in a new location) was the same as death. If I die but an identical person wakes up with the exact same thoughts and memories, what happened?

What about my surgery? When Tam was laid on the table and totally lost consciousness, did she die? And did the body I call my own then wake up later, with me in it?

What about sleep? Will I die tonight, and will someone 'else' wake up with my exact memories?

All of this seems to assume some kind of mind-body dualism, which I don't believe in, but which I also find impossible to get around in my own head.

But what seems clear is that continuity of memory is the key to not feeling as though you've died (or that someone else has died and been replaced by you, I guess I should say). When that clone wakes up in the morning, he remembers being a clone before, many times, and that makes him feel like he won't die either. I'm not afraid of dying from falling asleep, because I remember falling asleep many times and I'm still here. And if I went through a teleporter a few times, I'd lose my fear of dying from it, because I would remember having done it and come out the other side.

Is that enough?

Math Is About Definitions

My college (Metro) has a course that is designed to transition you into higher (proof-based) math. It is called "Introduction to Proofs." At the Colorado School of Mines, the equivalent course is Discrete Math (which is also taught at Metro - I took it, as you might recall - but doesn't have the same gateway function). A lot of other schools seem to have a similar course.

I expected Proofs to be pretty easy, because I did very well when I took Logic at Rice, and I've always been good at doing logic and proofsy things. But actually, the course was pretty challenging although I did do well at it.

But there was one main thing that I learned, and I find that I keep learning this thing over and over again: math is about definitions. When you need to do a proof in math, the main thing you need to focus on (at least in my experience) is the relevant definitions.

Case in point. I was thinking the other day about how to prove the distributive property of multiplication over addition, that is

a * ( b + c) = (a * b) + (a * c)

It's pretty easy to prove in the natural numbers (i.e., positive integers). a * b is b added to itself a times, and you can get to it pretty easily that way. But when I got to thinking about the real numbers, I couldn't imagine how you could go about proving it.

I was talking to Ed about it, and he wasn't sure either, and at some point I realized, of course I can't prove this: I don't know how to define multiplication in the reals at all! How could I have an inkling of a proof if I don't even have a definition of multiplication? (There is no way to get at "pi times the square root of 2" through repeated addition, at least not that I can see.)

And that's how it always is. If someone asks me to write a proof, the main technique I have is to look at the definitions involved and then work from there. If I'm missing a definition, then I have to solve that problem first. For some reason, I find this easy to forget, but also easy to learn.

How Confused Am I?

This morning I was thinking about the school semester, and realizing there would probably be a Fall Break. I was wondering if it would just be the week of Thanksgiving, which falls pretty late in the semester, and is thus kind of depressing, or whether we'd just get Thu/Fri off that week (which wouldn't affect me since I don't have any classes on those days), plus a different fall break.

I just went to the school calendar to check this. Imagine my surprise.

Metaphor Songs

There is a type of song I've noticed that I particularly like, to wit: songs that feature a lot of parallel (in some sense) metaphors. I've noticed this largely through KSAL, so I have a feeling that Sally likes them as well. Some examples:

Leonard Cohen's "Is This What You Wanted?"

You were Marlon Brando,
I was Steve McQueen.
You were K.Y. Jelly,
I was Vaseline.
You were the father of modern medicine,
I was Mr. Clean.
You where the whore and the beast of Babylon,
I was Rin Tin Tin.

Or how about "If You Were a Bluebird," of which there are many versions (Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, Emmylous Harris...)

If you were a hotel
Honey, you'd be a grand one
But, if you hit a slow spell,
Do you think you could stand one
If you were a hotel,
Well I'd lean on your doorbell
I'd call you my home

If I was a highway,
I'd stretch alongside you
I'd help you pass by ways
That had dissatisfied you
If I was a highway,
Well I'd be stretchin'
I'd be fetchin' you home

Or there's Butch Hancock's "Like a Kiss on the Mouth", which I'll give a good chunk of lyrics for (especially since I can't find it on Youtube):

A sky full of fire wheels a-burnin' my heart
A handful of moon beams a-stretchin' my eyes
A woman on the mountain says I gotta lay low
And a woman on the river says the water's gonna rise
And the Earth's gonna shake, the sky's gonna fall
The sad face 'n the glad face are painted on the wall
One's a cryin' in the North
And one's a smilin' in the South
Your love sticks with me like a kiss on the mouth

There's a big city wind whistlin' at the women
A sign above the back door about to blow down
The woman in the alley wants me to hurry up
And the woman on the highway wants me to slow down

And the Earth's gonna shake, the sky's gonna fall
The freight plane and the jet plane are painted on the wall
One rollin' North, one flyin' South
Your love sticks with me like a kiss on the mouth

The farmer's from Dallas and the freak is from Frisco
The wino's from nowhere and the cook's from Japan
The woman at the window, she waves without thinkin'
And the woman by my side got my heart in her hand

And the Earth's gonna shake and the sky's gonna fall
The red bird and the blue bird are painted on the wall
One flyin' North and one flying South
Your love sticks with me like a kiss on the mouth

Obviously some artists are much more prone to writing songs like these than others, and I think they tend to be the kind of folksy, verbose songwriters that I often like. John Denver's "Annie's Song" is a simpler version of the same thing - I like the song, lthough I'm not sure it hits this precise button, since it's not very clever:

You fill up my senses
like a night in the forest
like the mountains in springtime,
like a walk in the rain
like a storm in the desert,
like a sleepy blue ocean
you fill up my senses,
come fill me again.

Incidentally, I have a strong tendency to hear the John Denver lyric as "like a knight in a forest," which is a much richer idea for me, though I realize it isn't very Denver-like.

Work Process Considerations

I am always interested in noticing strategies for maximizing one's performance (alternately, minimizing one's effort) at work, and today I was thinking about two related strategies: error and change management. I wrote once before about parnas partitioning (writing code in such a way that it will be easy to change in the obvious ways later), and this is related, but not specific to computer science.

One question to ask yourself when you have to choose a method to accomplish something at work is, "How easy will this be to fix if when I screw it up?"

For instance, a coworker recently had to update 100 records in a program that has an Access database backend. Had it been my project, I would have gotten the identifiers for the 100 records, put them into Excel, put the new field values next to them, imported the spreadsheet into Access, and then run a query to update them. What she did instead was to open each record individually in the program, and do each update. This would make me crazy to begin with, but it also had the unfortunate result that, once she realized she had made a mistake, she had to do it all over again. If you make a mistake in my plan, you can easily just correct the Excel spreadsheet and reimport it, or fix the import query, or whatever is required. The data is entered once and it's stable.

This kind of technique is important to me because I make a lot of mistakes. I bet other people do too.

The second question to ask yourself is, "How easy will this be to change when they want me to change it?"

I try never to change something such that I can't pretty easily change it back, since "Put it back the way it was" is such a common request. I make new data rather than overwrite old data where appropriate. And I try to keep my changes somewhat modular, so that if they want to keep some changes and discard others, that too is possible. In your specific job, you probably know what types of changes are commonly desired, so you can set yourself up to make those as easy as possible in advance. It saves a lot of frustration and grumbling (on your part) later if you can treat changes as expected rather than aberrant.

Some common ways of making changes easier include making sure there are backups of old files, storing intermediate results, and using notes and/or naming conventions to keep things clear. You will definitely not remember, three months from now, how you generated this file or what you did to it, so make sure you give your future self a way to recover that information.

Here ends installment eleventy-seven in the Tam's Obvious Work Advice series.

Infinity

Ed commented the other day that "never" is a good substitute for "infinity" in thinking. I had never thought of that before, and I think it's a very neat idea.

You can apply it to my previous post. Are you skeptical that two parallel lines meet at a "point at infinity"? What if we say, instead, that they meet "never." Sounds pretty good.

Similarly, the value of the function y = 5 - 1/x (graph at left) approaches 5 as x approaches positive infinity. When does it reach 5? "Never."

See how that works?

The Extended Euclidean Plane

Here is a little bit of fun geometry that isn't too hard to understand (I promise).

As you probably remember or can easily confirm, in regular (Euclidean) geometry, any two points determine a unique line (that is, there is exactly one line that goes through both). And two lines either cross each other one time (that is, they have one point in common), or they are parallel and never meet.

When we talk about "the Euclidean plane" (which is just the usual flat space used in normal geometry), one way to define it is this:

• A point has two coordinates (x, y), each of which is a real number (as shown on the right).
• A line has the form ax + by + c = 0 for some real number values of a, b, and c. For instance, defining a line as "y = 2x + 4" is the same as saying "2x - 1y + 4 = 0".
• A point is on a line (and the line contains the point) when the point's x and y coordinates satisfy the equation for the line. For instance, the point (1, 6) is on my example line above because 2(1) - 1(6) + 4 = 0.

In the geometry course I'm taking, the definition of a particular geometry follows this pattern: you define what the points and lines are, and how they intersect.

What we talked about last night is the extended Euclidean plane, which exists in order to get rid of the annoying concept of parallel lines. (They're "annoying" because they muddy up some theorems, which I won't get into.) The extended Euclidean plane is different from the normal Euclidean plane in that any two lines that are parallel in the Euclidean plane are said to meet at a "point at infinity." Every class of parallel lines (that is, any set of lines that are all parallel to each other, or all of the lines with the same slope) has a unique point at infinity at which all of the lines meet. And all of the different points at infinity make up the "line at infinity." Well, why not?

So, the extended Euclidean plane could be described like this:

• The points include all points of the Euclidean plane, plus a point at infinity corresponding to each class of parallel lines (alternately, corresponding to every slope).
• The lines include all lines of the Euclidean plane, plus the line at infinity.
• Euclidean lines contain all of the points they would in the Euclidean plane, plus the point at infinity corresponding to their parallel class. The line at infinity contains all of the points at infinity.

This leads to at least one nifty result. Now, in addition to this:

• Any two points determine a unique line.

we also get this:

• Any two lines meet at a unique point.

These statements are "duals" - formed by changing points to lines and collinearity (being on the same line) to concurrence (meeting at a point).

Fun stuff!

Rock Band

Our friend Christine had a birthday party Saturday night, so we went. There were 9 people total, and we spent a significant part of the evening playing Rock Band 2 on (I'm guessing) their PS3. (It might have been the Wii. They have everything.) And it was...awesome. I've never played Rock Band before and I just had a fabulous time.

The way the game works is that you and up to three of your friends play fake plastic instruments or sing into a microphone. (You can do one each of guitar, bass, vocals, and drums.) There is a huge list of real songs, such that almost anyone would know many of them. When you choose a song to play, each person gets to choose a difficulty level for their own effort, and then the song starts. Each instrument gets a track that shows what notes to play when - shown in a style similar to how Dance Dance Revolution or a similar game shows it. The vocalist gets lyrics and a line representing the pitch, and when you sing it shows a little arrow showing where your pitch is, so you can adjust if desired.

For the instruments, how many keys are involved and how complicated and fast the passages are is determined by what difficulty level you choose (easy, medium, hard, expert). For the vocals, all that changes is how strictly you are graded.

I got to sing a fair amount, and found that singing songs that I've sung many many times in the car went very well. I think I got 99% on Expert on Bob Dylan's "Tangled Up In Blue" and a similarly high score on songs by Blondie and Fleetwood Mac.

In a funny moment late in the evening, I chose to sing "Black Hole Sun" by Soundgarden (since I know it and have enjoyed dancing to it a couple of times over the decades), and was then shocked to find out how nonsensical the lyrics are. (You don't get to see all of the lyrics at one time - you pretty much just sing whatever comes up on the screen - so it can be a bit of a surprise. Snakes? What?)

So, the singing part is like karaoke, I guess, which I've never tried. I also played guitar a couple of times, and bass (same plastic instrument) a whole bunch of times. Once I got decent at handling the necessary keys for the medium level of difficulty, I started to get into the rhythms and really understand what I was playing on a broader level. (I guess I mean I was playing phrases and not just individual notes.)

One nice thing you might not expect is that the music for the songs is the real music from the real recordings, so it's not like a cheesy elevator-music version or anything. And, while you can hear yourself play well or make mistakes, you can still hear the whole song even if all of your bandmates suck. I'm not sure how they integrate that, but mostly it does just work.

Anyway, I thought it was just about the funnest thing ever, and I may have to buy it. Fortunately I already own a PS2, and there is a PS2 version, so I would not have to buy an entire game console in order to play this one game. Buying the game, guitars, microphone, drums, etc., is bad enough.

New Classes

Since my new classes started yesterday, here is a brief overview.

Higher Geometry II

This course covers affine and projective geometry. Last night we went over groups, abelian groups, and fields, which are abstract algebra concepts. (A field, which is the highest level of this particular hierarchy, is something like the real numbers - a set with two operators comparable to addition and multiplication, with associativity, commutativity, distributivity, identities, and reciprocals.) The prof (a grad student) told us not to worry if we felt like we were drinking from a firehose. He called this "Abstract Algebra in an hour."

15% of our class grade will be based on problems that we individually present in class, 15% on problems that we turn in, 25% on a paper that we have to write (15% for the paper, 10% for a presentation based on the paper), and the remainder on the three exams (no cumulative final). For the exams, we have a choice of take-home (several new problems) or oral (problems from the book or handed out in class), and we have to choose an oral exam for at least one of them.

Oral exams and all of the presentations are graded as Perfect (100%), Good (95%), Fair (75%), or Poor (35%). He suggested that he will not be very harsh with the grading and if you do a decent job you will probably get the 95%.

Principles of Programming Languages

This is an upper-division CS course, pretty standard at most schools, that discusses the different paradigms of programming languages, their features, and something about their implementation. The professor was funny and charming.

There will be 7 coding assignments that will take about 2 weeks each. These are graded pass/fail, and at the deadline we must have turned in a "serious effort." He'll give it back and if he requests additional work or fixes on it, we have a week to turn it back in with the fixes. These coding assignments are worth 7 points each for the total course grade. The remainder of the points come from 3 exams (again no cumulative final) that are worth 17 points each.

Apparently the professor used to let people turn in their assignments whenever, but he discovered (unsurprisingly) that this just encouraged students to prioritize classes that did have deadlines. So now, barring "both of your grandparents dying in a horrible blimp accident [and if anyone's grandparents have died in a horrible blimp accident I'm sorry, didn't mean to be insensitive]" he'll only accept one assignment up to a week late per student.

There is no textbook for this class. He's used several, including (many times) the most popular one, by Sebesta, but he finds that he uses them mostly to make fun of how bad and wrong they are. Also, he said that for us having a textbook just means thinking, "Oh, there's this thing I should be reading, but I don't." And that sounds about right; I haven't actually read a CS textbook yet. He plans to attempt to produce whatever materials he wants us to read, which will be necessarily brief given that he has to produce them.

It's going to be a fun but difficult, I think, semester.

Rocks and Sand

When I was in middle school, I saw a demonstration by a Christian group that, though I'm sure it is completely cliched, stuck with me. The leader had a something like a pitcher (your life), some large rocks (god, i.e., the important stuff), and a lot of sand (the unimportant stuff). She proceeded to demonstrate that, if you put the sand in first, the rocks would not fit, but if you put in the rocks first, the sand would still fit. You can get what you want if you put the important things first.

In middle school, that metaphor didn't fit my life particularly well (though I continued to ponder it), but these days it really does. I have found in particular that absolutely nothing happens unless I make a specific plan to do it. And this is true of hobbies as well, especially the ones that I share with Ed.

Having sex. Doing some math together. Watching a movie. Cleaning the house. Exercising. Eating dinner together. None of it will occur if we don't say, "We can do this tonight," or, "Tomorrow let's do that."

Even though I find this phenomenon a little frustrating, it also means that one of the central problems of life (not doing the things I want to do) is largely solvable through this very simple tactic of asking myself, "What do I want to accomplish today?" It doesn't really require a To Do list, because the things I'm talking about are regular things that you don't tend to forget. I know the house needs cleaning on a regular basis. I know I want to spend time with Ed doing math. I just have to be planful so that these things actually occur.

Rhapsody

Some people swear by Rhapsody, which is a subscription music service. Rather than (or in addition to) buying specific songs, you can listen to any of their entire (giant) catalog for a flat monthly fee. You can play the songs on your computer or Tivo, or put them on your portable music player (though not an iPod).

I was curious what that was like, so I signed up for a free 14-day trial. Afterwards, two buttons appeared - one to allow me to download the Rhapsody music player, and one that promised I could listen to music on Rhapsody's website. I was at work, so I went to try the website.

The interface is junked up with a million things, including ads (which, I'm subscribing, why should I have to see ads?), but I was able to find where you could look up artists or albums you might want to hear. The songs have buttons next to them - one that allows you to play them, and one that allows you to add them to your playlist.

The play button did nothing. The bottom edge of my browser said it was downloading data, but no sound ever happened. (Pandora is playing just fine, so there's no sound problem on my end.) I tried the playlist button, and then I went to where I could view my playlists. But I have no playlists. I guess that button only works if you start a playlist first?

Honestly I just can't be bothered with this. I was already skeptical once I found out that Rhapsody was related to Real because I remember what a nightmare the Real Player was when I had it installed on my computer in the past. But I just thought it would be a nice, clean service - something like Pandora except with options to listen to exactly what you want - and instead it's, well, like I described.

So before I forgot, I figured I would go cancel my 14-day free trial before I get charged. I went to the page to manage my account, and clicked on "Cancel Membership." Here is a screenshot of where that took me:

So now I'm just fucking pissed. There is absolutely no technical reason that you shouldn't be able to cancel a membership online. They're just purposely making it difficult by requiring me to talk to a real-life human who will probably try to sell me some of the many packages and services that I had to un-check on my way to getting the free trial already. (I also had to un-check the box for "send me a bunch of spam email with crap offers all the time" more than once on different pages.)

So between the non-working interface, the ads, the constant upsells, the opt-out spam bullshit, and now the intentionally difficult membership-cancelling process, I am well and truly done with Rhapsody.

Fuck you, Rhapsody.

Spring 2009

My semester begins Tuesday, and originally I was only scheduled to take one class - Principles of Programming Languages, the last computer science class in my degree plan. It is on Mondays and Wednesdays at 7 PM, and I just couldn't find another class before it to fill in the gap, at least among classes that I need or would like to take. (I only have three classes left after this semester, but I would have been happy to have taken another math.)

Last night, I decided to do a search through the online schedule for all classes that are around 5 on M/W. And I found that UCD (University of Colorado at Denver) has a cross-listed math class at 5:30. This one:

MATH 4220-3. Higher Geometry II. Studies affine and projective geometries. Coordinates are introduced in this framework. Planes and higher dimensional spaces are examined. Prereq:MATH3191.

The prereq is for linear algebra, which I started but didn't finish (and will retake next year). I feel relatively confident that I can remember and/or pick up whatever linear algebra it will require. I have also taken the Metro class that is equivalent to their Higher Geometry I, although that is not a prereq.

I am excited about this on several levels. One: math! Two: scary geometry! Three: it's at UCD, where I want to get my master's, so it's possible it could help me. Four: it's another 400-level math class, which I could use.

I was looking forward to a kind of laid-back semester with only the one class, but now I'm very excited about the geometry addition. It will make my semester difficult but enjoyable and rewarding. I can't wait.

Digital Piracy

I have a friend who as far as I know is a capitalist/libertarian, yet who believes that digital piracy is ethically all right if not outright desirable. I find this position somewhat bizarre, and I personally try to avoid copyright-violating theft.

I am not at all opposed to open source. I think it's great to make your work available for free if you can and wish to, and I see a lot of benefits (in software and elsewhere) to doing so.

But, subject to certain limitations (the time limits of patents, fair use, etc.), I think that if you make something, you own it, and have the right to control its use. If I make a CD of the most awesome music ever and I am only willing to sell it for $10,000 per copy, that's my right, even if the price is outrageous.

But what if the record companies are screwing over the musicians such that the musicians hardly see a dime of record sales anyway? Well, frankly, that's not my problem. If Walmart negotiated an unfair deal with a Chinese manufacturer, that doesn't give me the right to steal cheap Chineses goods at Walmart, and I don't see this situation as being any different. Somehow or other, the musicians decided that signing with the label was a good move for them, and until I see evidence that they were coerced or that, for instance, the record labels have some means of preventing you from publishing your own music, it's all kosher as far as property rights go, and I can either buy the CD or do without.

I'm not an absolutist on this issue. I think comp CDs distributed between friends are great and mostly fall within fair use. And I don't have a huge ethical problem with someone copying something they could never afford, like a college student having an illegal copy of Windows. (It's technically wrong in my book, but causes minimal, if any, harm and is completely understandable.)

There is a difference between digital data and physical products, in that the former can be reproduced without cost. If I would never buy a Shania Twain CD but want to pirate one, then I'm not actually costing anyone anything - I'm unfairly using other people's labor, but at no cost to them. If I would never buy an axe but steal one from Home Depot instead, then I am costing them - they have one fewer axe. That difference is why I feel fairly lenient towards small, mild piracy. But it's not enough to make me decide that people who produce digital products shouldn't have the right to charge for their work.

NFL Playoffs

I didn't watch much football this season, but I've been following the playoffs fairly avidly. And although there are a few NFL teams that I tend to really like (the Broncos of course, the Colts, the Eagles), it's not usually obvious to me who I will root for in a particular game. I didn't go into the playoffs this year with any particular favorites. Nevertheless, I have rooted for the winning team in 7 out of 8 playoff games so far, and more often than not I was rooting for the underdog, so it's been an interesting season.

In the first ("Wildcard") round, the games (with winners in bold) were

Chargers at Colts:
I rooted for the Chargers because I was honestly impressed by how they came back in their season and eventually won over Denver in the final game of the regular season to make the playoffs (after Denver led the division all season).

Ravens at Dolphins:
I rooted for the Ravens even though defense-heavy teams are not my style just because ravens are one of my very favorite birds and I like the purple uniforms. Also, Sally hates Florida teams.

Falcons at Cardinals:
I hate all Atlanta teams, so it was Cards for me all the way.

Eagles at Vikings:
I didn't watch this one, but would have gone for the Eagles because I love them.

In the second ("Divisional") round, we had (again with winners in bold):

Chargers at Steelers:
I rooted for the Chargers, but it was evident pretty early on that the Steelers were going to kick them all up and down the field.

Ravens at Titans:
I was still a Ravens fan.

Cardinals at Panthers:
I like both of these teams, but by now I'd noticed that I was picking all of the bird teams, and indeed I found myself continuing to root for the Cards.

Eagles at Giants:
I was still Eagles all the way.

So it's been a pretty good run, and I've supported a bird team every time I got the chance. I don't know if that's a general pattern or just happenstance. (I wouldn't have supported the Atlanta Falcons against anyone.)

Next week are the AFC and NFC champions, with Steelers at Ravens and Eagles at Cardinals, respectively. I'll be rooting for the Ravens and the Eagles, and, if things go according to plan, for the Eagles in the Superbowl. Not that anyone should care.

Finances

My money situation is pretty good lately, so it seems like a nice time for another update.

If you look at my last debt snowball (from November '07), you will see that I should have owed about $9000 by this month. In truth, I've not done as well at paying off debts as I should have. I've spent money pretty profligately this year, partly because of dating Ed. (Ed isn't expensive or anything; it's mostly just that dating him has kind of made me loose and happy and carefree in a way that isn't helpful for budgeting, healthy eating, or other discipline-requiring endeavors.)

However, in May I changed jobs. As a result of doing so, instead of working for a company that is going out of business any day now, I'm working for a company that is doing very well. And although I have the same salary as before, I got a large bonus last month, nearly all of which I applied to debts.

As a result, my total debt this month is about $5,000. This is wonderful and unexpected and I should be completely out of debt by May. The only money I owe now is on my car, which is worth more than I owe on it. So I am feeling really good about that.

Meanwhile, the delightful Mosch moved out in May, and the differently delightful Ed moved in in September. Unlike Mosch, Ed pays me rent, so I have more money on a monthly basis. Ed has also graduated and is now looking for a job; when he gets one, he'll start paying half of the rent and utilities instead of the slightly smaller amount he pays now.

I recently became eligible for my company's 401K, and I am now putting in 15% of my income. I believe there is some matching or company donations of some kind, though I haven't been able to figure it out exactly.

In addition, I am now once again covered by a health insurance plan with a high deductible and associated HSA account. Unlike some people's flexible spending accounts, mine keeps the money in it forever; you can always use the money for medical expenses (including eyeglasses, OTC drugs, vitamins used to treat a condition, etc.), and at retirement age you can withdraw it freely. My current health plan is even more excellent in that regular preventive care is not subject to the deductible, and my company pays half of it every year - the first half! They just put that money directly into my HSA account, so I don't really need to fund it myself at all.

Anyway, things are looking good all the way around.

Food Attitude

I've been doing some thinking about my relationship to food, particularly in reference to this "let's eat dinner together" initiative that Ed and I have been working on. One of my reasons for trying this is that I did not come into adulthood with the basic skill of going home and eating dinner that someone makes.

It's not that I can't make food, nor that I am a picky eater. I was a pretty easy kid in terms of eating and I like even more things as an adult, including most vegetables. (Even the ones I don't particularly like, like carrots or squashes, I will eat.) I am not one of those people who will only eat hamburgers or whatever.

But I do have an aversion to feeling out of control about what I'm eating, to eating at a table, and to eating food at home. I visited my aunt and cousins for Christmas, and we ate many communal meals at my aunt's table. The meals were homemade, varied, and generally very good, but after a few days I found it difficult and started to feel whiny, with a feeling of a lack of indulgence and control in my eating. And I got tired of the rhythm of having these meals at a table.

My childhood was somewhat strange in terms of food. When I was young, my mom cooked for us (of course), but around middle school, she became a vegetarian and started on an arduous diet and I think after that we mostly ate separately - I would make meals and freeze them for myself, or eat frozen dinners or prepared foods like soups. After age 10 or so, I have almost no memories of sitting down at a table at home to eat together.

Our household also had no snacks - no chips, pretzels, crackers, cookies, candy, or things like that in the pantry. There was food in the house, but generally it was healthy food available in limited (though adequate) quantities. We usually only had the specific foods that we normally ate. I didn't snack very much in the ordinary course of events, though I could have eaten fruit or cereal or something like that.

Relatively frequently, my mom would bring home a snack like chips or malted milk balls. We would then consume the entire package of whatever it was. It would have been bought for that purpose - things were almost never partly eaten and then stored for later use. (There were exceptions, like girl scout cookies - you just can't eat a whole box of thin mints in one sitting.) Sometimes we would have restaurant food or fast food for dinner (as people do), but the "normal" food at home was never decadent at all. (Desserts were the same way as snacks - purchased and consumed immediately, never bought in advance and served later in small quantities like I think many people do.)

I think my feeling of deprivation when I contemplate eating food that is already in the house comes from this high contrast, in my childhood, between food that we had at home (healthy, limited quantities, no obvious snacks) and the food that was bought on impulse (restaurant food, fast food, or snacks to be consumed immediately in their entirety). This jibes with the pattern of my eating - I am more likely to be willing to consume even something healthy if I've bought it that very day with the express purpose of preparing it immediately.

When I shop for groceries, I am always torn between wanting to buy things that are healthy, so that I have a healthy diet, but wanting to make sure I will eat the things that I buy later. If I buy things that are not appealing enough, I will simply never, ever eat them (whether they are perishable or not). Even a food that I'd eat if someone served it to me, like a pretty good soup, can be something I will never choose to eat at a particular time. Yet I don't want to buy only total crap and subsist on a diet of nachos and pizza either. (I don't see much point in buying that type of stuff as "groceries" when you can just eat out if you want.) So I try to get a middle ground.

I've cooked twice this week and Ed has cooked once. On both of my nights, I went to the store that night and got ingredients for dinner, and then went home and made it. By doing that I ensured that I had energy towards the foods I was going to make, so that I found it easy to go ahead and carry through with making them. Shopping for meals in advance is a whole different challenge that I will have to tackle.

I want to develop a more wholesome and "normal" relationship to food. It's not so much that I want to become a super-healthy eater as that I want to become a person who can shop in advance for normal, reasonably healthy foods, and then later, even days later, cook and eat that food without feeling like I'm being deprived. I have already become (since college) a person who can keep snacks in the house without compulsively eating them, and I just want to keep moving along this path towards relative normalcy.

All You Can Eat Pancakes?

I recently saw a TV ad proclaiming that all-you-can-eat pancakes are back at IHOP. Apparently this is a promotion they occasionally have, and now is one of those times.

But what I'm wondering is, are there people who really like that many pancakes? When I go to IHOP and get something that comes with the usual short stack, that is plenty for me - usually more than plenty.

I guess I can see how this might work as a promotion, reminding people of their love of pancakes and making them go to IHOP. But I seriously wonder if very many people at all - even people attracted to the idea of all-you-can-eat pancakes - actually want more than a normal-sized order.

Anyone?

The author of this post is not responsible for any pancake cravings you may experience after reading it.

Must. Have. Tivo.

A few months ago, I cancelled my home phone service, transferring the number to my (far cheaper) cell phone service. At the same time, I cancelled Tivo. I figured I could up my Netflix allowance to make up for the difference, and who needs Tivo, and anyway it uses the phone line.

Months later, it turns out I really do miss Tivo. Even though my Tivo box can still be used to record and pause television (you can pause live TV for up to half an hour, or program it to record manually like a very nice VCR), I really miss having the live program listings and the ability to just say, "Record every episode of The Amazing Race this season."

So I got an adapter so that the Tivo can use the wireless network, and it is now set up, and I restarted my account. For $12.95/month it is extremely worth it.

Long live Tivo.

Date Confusion

A conversation from yesterday:

Me: [talking about an economic run we did for a client] The capital costs didn't show up in 2009 because the well was scheduled for January '09 and the cap costs happen a month before that.

Joan: Well, they just completed the well yesterday, so the costs should be in 2009.

Me: How can the costs be next year if they just completed the well?!?

Joan: It's January already.

Me: Oh.

Apple Thing

As part of cooking, I'm trying to work more fruit into our diets. Ed tends to be wary of fruit (has never really enjoyed it) and, while I like fruit, I don't tend to snack, and it's just never convenient to eat somehow.

A few nights ago, I made swordfish steaks, brussels sprouts, and brown rice with sauteed onions and shiitake mushrooms. It was all great, and for dessert we had blackberries. Well, to be more precise, I had picked up the berries for dessert, and ended up serving them with some ice cream, which made them extra delicious, of course.

Tonight for dinner I made tilapia, hobo-style potatoes*, broccoli and carrots. While at the store, I picked up a couple of apples for dessert. I was hoping to make some kind of baked apple "thing" that would be tastier than raw apples but not as unhealthy as an apple pie or crumble (which I don't know how to make in any case, though no doubt one can find recipes or something).

I ended up doing this. I sliced the apples up and put them into a small square casserole (like a brownie dish). Then I mixed oatmeal, cinnamon, brown sugar, and melted butter and put that on top of the apples. (I don't know a recipe like this, but it seemed like it would work.) It wasn't enough to completely make a top layer, so it was kind of just mixed in with the apples, but mostly on top. And then I baked that in the oven for about half an hour.

I didn't have anything to cover the casserole with (we were out of foil and I had already used my lidded dish for the potatoes), so some of the apples came out a bit dry. When the dish came out I wasn't sure that it would be good at all, but it was awesome. It definitely met my intention of being halfway between plain apples and something like a pie or crumble. And it was by far the tastiest part of the meal (which I had remarked, earlier, met the "dinner at home" criteria of "I would only eat this if someone told me 'here's dinner, now eat' - I wouldn't seek it out").

So that worked out well!

(* Hobo potatoes is where you cut up potatoes and onions and stick them in a foil pouch with some butter, and then cook them in the oven - or over your campfire. I was, as previously mentioned, unexpectedly out of foil, so in fact we had pseudo-hobo potatoes that were baked in a casserole dish.)

Home Cookin'

Ed and I rarely eat dinner together at home. We either eat out together, or we eat separately. Given that neither of us is a very good "everyday" cook and the usual difficulties of managing schedules and so on, we eat homemade meals together about once a month or so, usually at my whim.

Since exercising together is going so well, I've proposed a new plan for eating together. Starting this week, the plan is for us to eat a home-cooked meal together three times a week. I'm planning to cook twice and have him cook once. I hope to move up to four and possibly even five times a week once we get the basics down.

"Home-cooked" is a bit loosely defined, but I basically mean for us to make a balanced meal (at least a protein and some kind of vegetable, and enough food overall to constitute dinner, which would generally mean some kind of starch or grain would be included) out of grocery store ingredients. A box of macaroni and cheese would thus count as a reasonable side, but a giant bowl of it is not dinner by itself. So, you know, just dinner the way most people would think of it - no fanciness or gourmet preparations required.

I think this will be fun and beneficial.

Facebook

Once, in middle school, I went to a speech tournament with two other kids who were mildly friends of mine - Gretchen and Doug. Gretchen read the Emily Dickinson poem "I'm Nobody! Who Are You?" Her reading was oddly compelling, as though she really was like Dickinson. I was convinced utterly. And I remembered it for years.

So, I'm on Facebook. And I recently clicked on the "people you may know" application, and Gretchen showed up. I recognized the name instantly and she looked just the same as in middle school (it's uncanny how many people do) and I friended her and told her about the speech tournament. She was amazed, saying that she often recites that poem, but had totally forgotten that she'd originally memorized it for that purpose.

There are so many people I thought lost from my life forever with whom I've reconnected, at least in these shallow ways, on Facebook. I may never meet up with them again, or really have a conversation, but I know that they have a couple of young kids, or that they live in China, or that they had an excellent hot dog for lunch.

Sometimes I remember people and they don't remember me as clearly, as with Gretchen. Other times, people friend me and I barely remember their names, and I can't think of a single thing I ever knew about them. It is strange having all of these very light connections to so many people - in a way it is just like a snapshot of the tapestry of my life.

Before I left New Orleans when I was 9, I had a best friend at my school, named Burke. I've remembered her name for years and as a kid I passionately wished to know her again, but we never kept in touch. I didn't have her address or anything like that, and I'm sure I wouldn't really have written to her anyway. But the other day, I found her on Facebook. Same (unusual) name, still living in New Orleans. Unlike the middle school and high school kids, I couldn't recognize the picture, but I friended her anyway, with a message asking if she was the one I knew.

It was satisfying, but I realized I have no reason to really want to know her again. All I remember of her - and I mean all - is her name and that she had a gray jacket with a wooly white lining. I can't even say anything like "Do you remember that time we...?" because I have absolutely no memories of doing anything with her.

I had another friend, this one in high school, who came out to me as a lesbian back then and then, last I heard, was marrying a man. She just showed up on Facebook recently. She has three kids that are nearly grown, but a picture of herself with a woman who is clearly her partner, and a picture of a tattoo she has that is a rainbow with two female symbols. I guess that worked out all right.

I'm friended with my first boyfriend, Michael. He has a little boy.

I've never been to a reunion, but I guess for me Facebook is kind of like that, if you had a college and high school and junior high and current life reunion all at once, ongoing, for days and days, alongside your normal life. Some of it is meaningful and some is curiousity-satisfying and nearly all of it is nostalgic. Funny life.

An Early Memory

I had my first half of kindergarten in Houston, in a wonderful classroom with a kind teacher, who later gave me a copy of the complete Peter Rabbit series, which she wrote a note in, and which I still have. For my second half of kindergarten, we lived in New Orleans, and I had a terrible teacher.

I remember arriving for my first day of kindergarten in New Orleans. There was a large jungle gym in the playground, and many children (big kids) were hanging from it all over. And they were singing the Pink Floyd song "We don't need no education." All of them. I thought, wow, these are tough kids at this school.

I remember this clearly, and yet it is entirely implausible to me that it actually occurred as I've described it here. That song isn't anachronistic for 1980, but I still can't imagine that there was actually a group of elementary school kids on a jungle gym, mostly hanging upside down, belting out this song in unison. It just can't be. (The fact that the song contains a chorus of children anyway makes it extra-suspicious.)

It's an interesting memory, though. Think how tough those big kids looked to me.

Waterfall vs. Iterative Models

Most people only know one way to run a project; they use a structure that in software development is called a "waterfall model." In a waterfall model, each stage of the project is finished in order, and the results enable the next stage, until you are finished.

For instance, in writing a term paper for school, you might choose a topic, gather some references about the topic, read them while taking notes or making notecards, produce an outline for your intended paper, write a first draft, and then produce a final paper. I think this is the basic process we were all taught in school, and sometimes teachers would even make you turn in intermediate steps just to make sure you were using the process.

An "iterative" model is a different way of doing things, and I think for some types of projects it is superior. In an iterative model, rather than finishing an entire stage before moving onto the next, you divide your project into iterations. At the finish of each iteration, you will have done some of all of the appropriate kinds of work, and ideally you will have some kind of product.

If you applied an iterative model to writing a term paper, your first iteration might result in a very rudimentary draft. You would have gathered only a few sources and skimmed them, produced a very sketchy outline, and put together the bare bones of the paper. The goal should be to end up with a crappy paper at the end of this first iteration. From having done the work so far, you should now know what kind of sources you need and want, and have a good idea where the paper is going. The next cycle will incorporate more sources and be much more complete, and will result in the next draft. You can continue this process of refinement indefinitely (or until the paper is due).

I'm only sketching this out in a very basic way, but there are a few obvious advantages of using an iterative model. First, as soon as you've finished the first iteration, you are always ready to turn in something. Even that horrible first draft can probably get you some grade. In software development, this makes even more sense - even a very "sketchy" program that runs allows people to see visible progress.

Second, you learn a lot during each iteration. When your users or clients see the sketchy program, they will be filled with ideas about what it should do, or you may learn that it wasn't what they wanted after all. Even writing an extremely rough draft of a paper often gives you a very good idea of how it should proceed.

Third, an iterative model prevents the major drawback of a waterfall model - that you may never finish a stage to your satisfaction. If you have to have the whole paper planned out before you begin, you might not get there. If you can't hammer out a complete set of requirements for your software project, you could lose weeks or months or even years that you could have been making progress on other fronts.

Ed taught a computer science class last semester, and many of his students turned in a final project that didn't run. I can't help but think some of them would have been helped by using an iterative model (as well as starting earlier and all of the other usual student tricks). It's better to turn in the 2nd generation code that runs than to turn in the niftier 3rd generation code that doesn't. Using an iterative model lets you hedge your bets this way - at nearly every stage you've produced something of value.

A Feeling

Last night as I went to bed, I felt a strong feeling of not-rightness in my body. It was very similar to one component of being very sick, but it didn't have any actual symptoms - no pains, no fever, nothing physically wrong at all, except for a feeling of wrongness, of dis-ease. It made me want to moan and thrash around.

I've had this feeling before at bedtime, and I had it really strongly in the hospital the night of my surgery. I'd woken up from the surgery around noon or so, feeling actually pretty good and happy to be alive, and then I steadily deteriorated until I was an absolute wreck around bedtime, filled with crippling anxieties and such a strong feeling of something being wrong with my body that I wanted to die.

I wonder what that feeling is. It must be, at least in cases like last night, psychological. I doubt anything was actually wrong with me physically. I may have been overtired, but usually once you lie down and prepare to sleep, that doesn't feel so bad.

I don't know.

Final Grades

I got an A in both of my classes. I am pleased. (My school does not have +/-, so a letter grade is all you get.)

I knew I would have an A in Prob/Stats given that I had an A on basically every single thing for the entire semester (except perhaps for getting a B on one homework sometime), and given that I felt I aced the final. The class was moderately easy and fairly boring.

Discrete Math I wasn't sure about. I felt that I aced the final. Other than that, there were two exams during the semester. I got a 64% on the first one and was given the opportunity to retake it for up to 80% credit, but this re-test was never graded and returned, and I did not ace it. I got 100% on the second test. There was one very small homework assignment, but I never turned it in. I did a small project and write-up on my own but did not ask for credit for it.

So that's that. Another successful semester in the bag.

The Gift of the Lazi

Last night, I had to go to Walmart because we were out of cat food (such that the cats got a packet of for-human-consumption salmon for dinner instead, about which they did not complain) and because we have a gift exchange at work today and I needed a gift for it, and some kind of wrapping material, etc. Ed came with me, and as we were checking out, we were talking about the fact that neither of us has obtained, or even really thought about, a Christmas gift for the other.

Saturday, we're going to the mall. We need to buy gifts for the gift exchange we're having with my family at Christmas, and we need to buy gifts for Sunday night, when we hang out with his family. And I need to get something to wear that night, to my office Christmas party. Sunday around brunchtime is his sister's wedding shower (so I'm finally getting to meet her), and then of course Sunday night we hang out with his family and do their Christmas.

I like Christmas but I'm always remiss about the shopping (as so many people are; I'm sure the mall will be a joy on Saturday). So the idea that I also need to get something for Ed is...argh. And on his side, he used up all of his ideas getting my birthday present earlier this month.

Thus, by mutual consent, what we are getting each other for Christmas, at least for now, is the convenience of not having to get each other anything. It's just what I've always wanted!

Crying, Eureka

Last night, I took the final for my Discrete Math class. It's been a wonderful, fun, and somewhat amazing class (amazing in that I had no idea what discrete math was when I started, and only registered for the class because the one I wanted to take was cancelled and it was in a convenient time slot).

It has also been a stressful class. Although I want to study math forever, I really have a love/hate relationship with it. In short, I love math that I already understand, and sort of hate the struggle to learn new math. But once I start to understand the new math I will love it as well. (I have a very similar experience with music; I almost always hate listening to anything new, but as soon as the newness wears off - usually around the 2nd or 3rd exposure - I'm all over it.) I have a low threshold for frustration, so if I don't understand new math right away I tend to get disproportionately upset.

Occasionally, I get to learn new math that I immediately understand. This tends to be things like definitions around functions (onto, one-to-one, etc.), propositional logic, set theory, probability, and so on. These are really exciting and wonderful experiences for me - all the joy of a new way of thinking, with none of the suffering.

Anyway, returning to my Discrete class. Some of it has been the easy, delicious stuff. Other parts were really hard. The hardest part for me was recursively defined relations. These are sequences like the Fibonacci numbers, where the most natural definition is how to get the "next" number. In class, we "solved" these by coming up with the closed-form rule: the rule that tells you how to get, for instance, the 1000th Fibonacci number without having to figure out the preceding 999. We used tricks. We used generating functions.

On the final exam, we were given a series that didn't respond to any of these methods. We were to solve it "by inspection", which means "look at it and figure it out." Looking back, this one seems simple to me, but I had a very hard time with it. Here it is:

a[1] = 1
a[k+1] = k^2 * a[k]

so the terms are

a[1] = 1 (given)
a[2] = 1^2 * a[1] = 1
a[3] = 2^2 * a[2] = 4
a[4] = 3^2 * a[3] = 36
a[5] = 4^2 * a[4] = 576
and so on

I won't give the solution here in case anyone wants to figure it out for themselves, but taking the test, I stared at this. I tried to reason through it. I drew a picture. I wrote out the first six terms.

And then I cried. I knew I needed to get an A on the test in order to have a good chance of an A in the class, and this question was 1/6 of the points. And solving recursively defined series by inspection is something I can "never" do. So I actually cried. And then I dried my eyes and tried to calm down. I started writing out the terms in terms of how they were calculated, and this got me to the solution (which I at first didn't recognize, until I noticed that it really did correspond to each term). Then I had to do a (very easy) proof by induction to show that my solution was correct, and I was done.

I've noticed that I often get a difficult math thing immediately after crying. I think crying is one way of frustration "breaking", in the way that sweating is the breaking of a fever. Once the frustration breaks, you're calm again, and ready to proceed a bit diligently (if hopelessly), and insight can make its way through your brain again.

I am getting much better all the time at figuring out what to try next, in math. It used to be that I'd get frustrated and give up, and then the next day it would occur to me what else I could have tried, and then I wouldn't bother. Now I can often think of the next thing to try right away, and just do it. I'm sure my tolerance for frustration is increasing too. And I am succeeding at my explicit goal of learning that I can get better at math through effort.

It's been a good semester.

Christmas Specials

By John Scalzi, The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time, including

Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas (1951)

In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible...

Not Just "Difficult"

I am in love with this cartoon. I think it's the books:
From lolgod.

(I want her book.)

Living Each Day

At lunch, I received a fortune cookie that said

LIVE EACH DAY AS THOUGH IT IS YOUR LAST

and when I thought about how I would live my last day, this seemed like absolutely terrible advice. If I knew I was dying tonight at bedtime, assuming I didn't spend the day moping or railing against the cruelty of my fate, I would surely live the day in a more or less hedonistic fashion. Between phone calls to tell people I loved them (which would surely get old if I did it every day), I would eat rich foods (no vegetables unless perhaps a creamed spinach came my way), blow off work and school, and just generally try to relax and have a good time.

So, how ought one to live each day? The sort of obvious answer is that you should live it in accordance with whatever you know about it. If it's your last day to file graduate school applications, you ought to file them. If it's your first day of law school, you should probably go to class. But the idea behind "live each day as though it is your last" is surely to cast some kind of extra perspective to help you do better than you might otherwise. So in that vein, what would the good advice be?

I think you ought to live each day as though you're going to live a long time. What will you see when you look back at this time in your life, and what do you want to see? Will you see yourself working hard to get what you want? Will you see yourself laboring futilely because you never thought about your actual priorities? Will the whole decade disappear in a blur of tv-watching and beer-drinking? Will this be the time you saw the first glimmers of the theorem that eventually won you the Fields Metal?

I remember something C.S. Lewis wrote. He said that since we are going to live eternally (a believe I don't share, obviously), we ought to mind our personality traits and trends. If you find yourself growing more irritable over time, then carried out to eternity, this would become hellish. So we ought to spend our time, at the very least, trying to improve our characters across the board. That's not a bad idea.

It depends on what you care about. Do you care how you are remembered? How do your actions today contribute to what you hope your obituary says? Or do you mostly care about having a good time, in which case, what are you doing today to either have a good time, or let you have a good time in the future? If you want to contribute to a field, are you working on your 10,000 hours?

One thing I care a lot about myself is memories. I try to choose activities that I remember later, that give my life some richness. Things that are relaxing and almost boring, like watching television, napping, or mindlessly surfing the Internet, do not have this property. Even if they are desirable in the moment, over time they blur together and add little to my life.

I find that difficulty is a good proxy for meaningfulness, for me. Learning new math, taking a long hike, reading a non-pulp (for once) book...these are things that stay with me. I look back at them and feel that something has really happened and I wasn't just taking up space or killing time. Even among similar activities, difficulty makes a difference. Eating a spicy rather than a bland food. Hiking uphill rather than flat. Strength training with low reps and heavy weights rather than light weights and high reps. Learning theoretical rather than practical math.

So for me, taking a more difficult path is somewhat key to feeling satisfied in life. Other people naturally work hard all the time, and may need to remember to relax and have a little fun. What works for you?

Girly

Ed and I were at Wal-Mart recently looking at tools. I forget what he wanted to buy - a wrench, maybe. And I pointed out that they had a whole little toolkit for women - a bright pink toolbox filled with pink-handled tools. We both laughed at the ridiculous application of girly aesthetics.

"But, you know," I said, "we make fun of this, but what is the rest of this aisle?"

Everything was black. The men's toolkits were black with fake chrome. Some things were dark green and black. Everywhere, things had obviously been aesthetically augmented to be manly.

Many aisles of the store are the same way. Razors. Women's are pink, with names like Venus, and soft wavy lines. Men's are "Mach 3" and "Turbo" and everything else that suggests lean, hard-edged machines full of power.

The pink disposable razors are not different from the navy blue ones. I see the navy ones as neutral and the pink ones as girl-coded, but that's because that's how gender is arranged in our culture: male is the default, girl is "special." Plenty of women would buy and use blue or black or silver razors without thinking twice, but few men would want the pink ones, or the wavy-handled Venus ones.

Girl things are for girls only.

Software Operator

One of the main components of my job as an engineering & geological tech in oil & gas is knowing how to operate a lot of different software packages. Currently I'd say I'm proficient with Petra, Aries, ArcView, HPDI, IHS, and R2V. I can make my way around Grid. I have used Petrel, though not often or well. And of course, I'm excellent with MS Excel and Access. It's critical that I know how to do these things.

However, it is not enough.

If you don't have the domain knowledge, you're a bit screwed even though you may be able to operate the software. It's like knowing how to use a statistics software package; you can create meaningless analyses all day long. (I do not, incidentally, know any statistics software packages, unless you count Excel. Which I'm sure you shouldn't.)

I do have a lot of domain knowledge - I've worked in this industry for over 10 years - but not always exactly what is applicable to the task at hand. As an example, John (an engineer) asked me yesterday to print some logs for a particular well. Well logs look something like this:


The vertical scale is depth in the well. The squiggly lines represent the values of different things. The turqoise filled-in areas on the right were selected to be filled in based on some cutoff. (I just pulled this one off the web, so I'm not sure of the details.)

I did have some log data for the well John was interested in, and I have software to turn that (digital) log data into an actual log like you see above. However, I had no idea which curves he wanted to see, or how they are typically arranged or displayed. The software also gives you approximately one million options about how to arrange and display the logs - think something like making a chart in Excel, and then increase it by an order of magnitude in terms of options and things you can change.

Here is a screenshot showing many of my log choices (they are the things like CAL2, CAL2_1, CALI, etc., in the list on the lower right side):

I picked some of the ones that sounded familiar, like "Gamma Ray" and "Neut. Porosity" and (off screen) "SFL Resisitivity." And I put together some horrible log that probably wasn't at all standard. And then I called John in.

Now, John doesn't know in a formulaic way how a typical log should look, and he doesn't know how to operate Petra at all. But he was able to tell me, for instance, "OK, Gamma Ray and caliper should go on the same track" and "Put the porosities together and let's go from 0 to 80 but reverse it" and "The resistivity, let's use a log scale." So with him directing and me fiddling around with the software, we were able to put together a useful log for him. It ended up looking like this:

With this experience, hopefully the next time someone asks me to print the logs for a well, I'll be able to put something together that is at least reasonable - something that allows them to come back and give me some directions about what they want instead of just writing me off as obviously clueless.

But this is the kind of thing you get an education for. This is why college classes are not dense and efficient like the kind of professional classes you might take in, say, Petra. No matter how whiz-bang you are at running a program, you have to know what you want to get out of it.

Rationalization

I sometimes find it amusing how our minds readily supply "reasons" for our irrational feelings. I suppose I should pick on myself before others, so here is a good example from last night.

I went to the gym pretty late. I had done some laundry earlier, and had one load in the dryer (dry but growing wrinkly) and one in the washer. When I got home, Ed had taken the dry clothes and put them in a laundry basket in my closet, and had dried the wet clothes, because he'd needed to get his own load of whites done.

I was angry. The clothes in the basket in my closet would need to be put back into the dryer and fluffed prior to being put away, and he'd done the other load without a dryer sheet. My mind seized on reasons this was wrong.

Can't you let me just have the machines on the weekends [since you have so much more time during the week to do laundry]? I considered asking. But this is ridiculous and untrue.

Now my clothes are ruined and staticky. Also not true - I merely finished up their drying (they were still a bit damp anyway) with a dryer sheet, and they came out fine.

I never handle clothes if I don't handle them in the right order; the clothes in the basket in the closet are doomed now. Well, in fact, I did handle them, and it's not Ed's problem if I'm incapable of the normal process of life.

Finally, I settled on the truth: I am tired and finding my stuff not as I expected was hard on me, but it was totally reasonable to move my clothes around so that you could do laundry, and in fact having both loads dry is more helpful than not.

Fortunately, Ed just left me alone after my original outburst, so that I could go apologize a few minutes later without further incident. It's nice to be trusted to be reasonable even if you can't get there right away. ("I knew I hadn't done anything wrong," he said, "so I thought it was a good time to just chill out.")

So now can I pick on someone else?

The other day, Ed and I saw a DVD player in someone's minivan - the kind that is mounted on the ceiling for the benefit of the backseat passengers. And Ed told me that his dad hates those, and that he'd seen one when Ed was last visiting and said they were stupid because "children should entertain themselves."

"So I guess you weren't really allowed to watch TV as a kid?" I asked.

"What? No, we did," he said.

"Oh. But why didn't you just entertain yourselves instead?"

"Oh."

Yep, this is just me being snarky again. If kids don't need to "entertain themselves" at home (where there are a million things to do), why should they do so while strapped into a tiny space for possibly hours at a time? I also ascertained that Ed's dad watches television, quite often, so apparently he does not how to entertain himself either.

I would think if there was any time it would be all right to let your kids veg out with some mindless entertainment, it would be while traveling in a car. At least when I was a kid you could move around freely. Heck, we took a whole drive to Florida in my mom's station wagon with the back seats folded down so the whole back was a (blanketed, bepillowed) play area. But now that we have all of this safety-mindedness (which I support), car drives must be more boring than ever.

Anyway, I think this was an instance of Ed's dad rejecting something because it's new-fangled and frivolous (i.e., through an irrational prejudice), and then having his mind supply a convenient rationalization.

Good thing that never happens to me.

Lucky in Work

I have been lucky in a lot of ways in my life, but especially lucky in how my career has gone. Despite not having a degree, I make a good salary doing exactly the kind of work I am best suited to, and that I enjoy the most. ("The most" is a strong statement, but I think there are very few actually existing jobs that I would enjoy more.)

I got my first performance evaluation here yesterday afternoon. I've been working here since May, so I was curious (and anxious) to hear what they would say. I met with the President (and we're a small company - about 20 people - so that's not unusual or anything) and she gave me a page of feedback that included her thoughts and the thoughts of the other engineers & geologists who have worked with me.

Aside from a (legitimate) question about why my billable hours aren't better, I got only positive feedback. That is somewhat of an understatement. I don't want to be too specific here in case my coworkers might read this blog, but it seems that the people here have found me quick, smart, competent, and creative about finding ways to solve their problems. Under "weaknesses" my form says "none." (One person even described me as unflappable, which is untrue, but still nice.)

One of my coworkers told me once, at lunch, that she would like to be a dental hygienist. She'd get to interact with people all day long, and when the office wasn't busy, she could chat with the other employees. She would enjoy doing skilled work with her hands.

Now this person is pretty young, and I can't help but hope that she seriously considers pursuing that career. She doesn't really like what she does here. She doesn't feel very confident about it, and she doesn't really enjoy working with computers. The "format" of the job (working with computers all day by yourself) doesn't suit her very well.

It suits me perfectly.

Benford's Law

I'd never heard of Benford's Law before, but this is pretty cool:



For those who can't or don't watch the video, Benford's Law states that, for most natural data (e.g., population sizes, but not something like social security numbers), the most common first digit is 1, then 2, on down to 9, in a specific pattern.

I was curious if this law would apply to the data I worked with, and pretty sure that it would. I opened up the well production database for a random client I'm working on and put the monthly oil production values into a spreadsheet. There were over 16,000 non-zero values. I got the first digit and then did a scatterplot, shown below. The red curve is the values predicted by Benford's Law, and the blue curve is the values I actually obtained. Click for a larger image:

That's a pretty close fit, so I was pleased.

Benford's Law works because most real data is evenly distributed on a log scale, and the numbers on a log scale are farther apart the lower they are (i.e., 1 is further from 2 than 2 is from 3), so that more numbers fall into the lower end of any given order of magnitude, so that more of them will start with 1, and very few will start with 9. That's my understanding from Wikipedia, at least.

Iced Tea

Iced tea is by far my favorite beverage, especially at a restaurant. I like it plain, heavily iced, and not too strong, which is usually how it is served.

Today I ate lunch at Wahoo's Fish Tacos, and noticed something I've wondered at before. Next to the usual soft drink station, they have two iced tea machines. I believe the brand is Shangri-La. And these have writing on them that looks something like this:

100% Natural Iced Tea

Freshly Brewed * No Sugar * No Calories
No Preservatives * No Bitterness

When I first saw it, it gave me pause. Since you don't normally expect to find sugar or calories in iced tea, it took me a minute to confirm to my satisfaction that it wasn't artificially sweetened. No preservatives is fine, though, again, one doesn't normally find preservatives in freshly brewed iced tea, so it's not all that reassuring.

And what of "no bitterness"? That part is confusing to me. Iced tea is somewhat bitter - are they saying theirs is less bitter? Are they trying to reach people who may have disliked iced tea in the past on account of its bitterness, and convince them to try this less-bitter tea?

Having had the tea on many occasions, I can state firmly that it is no more or less bitter than other freshly brewed iced tea. And if you like iced tea, I imagine you either like the bitterness, or are happy to mitigate it with lemon and/or sugar. If anything, the "no bitterness" might make you wonder if this is some kind of modified tea, not like a regular tea.

I freely admit to knowing nothing about the marketing of iced tea in this type of environment, but this signage does not strike me as very useful. Had the tea been unadorned, I would have assumed that it is exactly what it is - very standard, good, freshly-brewed iced tea. The words only made me question these assumptions.

Discrete Test Update

I got a 100. Woo.

Manic Pixie Dream Girl

You've probably heard of this movie archetype - the manic pixie dream girl. She's that young (generally) woman with a whimsical view of life, a tendency to overshare, a lot of energy and light, and eccentric hobbies. In a movie she is typically drawn to a sullen, depressed, repressed, or otherwise drudge-like man. She rescues this man by awakening his interest in life. As with the magical negro, it's not always clear what the MPDG is actually getting out of the relationship. Garden State was a particularly egregious MPDG movie I saw recently.

I've been thinking about this character because Ed and I are in the middle of watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is an unusual MPDG movie in that it shows the consequences of actually having a long-term relationship with one of these women. You might eventually get tired of dealing with someone who is continually impulsive and has no purpose in life.

I have a few trains of thought about this archetype. First, I wonder if the MPDG is primarily a male or female fantasy. Is it that men dream of having some light-filled girl-creature enter and brighten their dull existences? Or is it that women dream that they can immediately let a man in on all of their eccentricities and, instead of being weirded out or disturbed, he'll find them adorable and entrancing? It seems to me that it could go either way. I don't think you often see a Manic Pixie Dream Man, though the love interest in The Family Stone comes close for me (and the woman is definitely a classic Drudge).

The second set of thoughts I've been having is a bit more serious. It strikes me that the MPDG and the Drudge that she rescues both have something in common - neither is applying energy to anything meaningful. The Drudge has a meaningless job (which can be high-powered or not) and basically no meaning in life, and he's generally low-energy. The MPDG has plenty of energy flying in all directions, but she's applying it only to meaningless things like her inevitable eccentric hobbies (making figurines out of potatoes, collecting kitschy trinkets, or whatever).

One vision of the "good life" would be applying energy and creativity to something that matters. I guess in movies, most of these characters are Crazed Artists; the guy in Pi comes to mind. Of course, in real life, such people exist and many are not crazed. In movies, you're either crazed, or you're famous and the movie is a biography. (Or both, of course.)

Ed reports that his high school girlfriend was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I had Mosch as my Magical Negro stand-in (I used to call him my "magical Jewish friend"). I don't think I fit any of these archetypes particularly well. I have some eccentric qualities and overshare, but overall I am a plodding rather than a flitting creature; my life has drudgelike aspects, but I also pursue meaning. Ed is clearly a Crazed Artist type.

Do you bear resemblance to a movie archetype? Are you someone's magical friend, manic pixie dream, drudge suitable for rescuing, or a crazed artist? Are there people in your life who fit these categories? (Do you wish there were?)

Academic Fields

The other night in Prob/Stats, before class, some of the students were discussing graduate school. Specifically, they were talking about whether master's programs in math and/or stats involve writing a thesis. I commented that some do and some do not, from what I've seen, and it partly depends on the purpose of the master's.

"Why would you ever write a thesis in math?" asked one woman. "That's weird."

It made me think about how math isn't what people think it is. When I repeated her question to Ed, he asked, "What, does she think math is a solved problem?" But I don't think it's so much that she thinks everything in math is already known as that her conception of math is probably that it is about learning how to solve different kinds of problems.

A lot of fields are not about what you naively think when you have barely any knowledge of them. Psychology is not, as Sally mentioned, all about why people are crazy (or, alternately, about how to make people like you and do what you want by understanding the inner workings of the mind). History is not about learning the timeline of events. English Lit is, for all I know, probably not about writing papers about how the three rooms in the house in a novel represent the holy trinity or whatever. Computer science is not about learning programming languages (much less, as a coworker once asked me, learning how to use Power Point). Even GIS, which was my major at one point, is not about using software to make maps.

However, I'm pretty sure anthropology is about squatting in the dirt with some unknown natives and keeping a diary about their ways, and paleontology is about carefully excavating big dinosaur fossiles, and archaeology is about looking for ancient cities like Troy. Must be.

Mad Greens

Today I ate lunch at Mad Greens, which is one of those new chains that mostly does giant salads. (They also have paninis, soups, chips, and the usual brownies & cookies if you want dessert.) I had never eaten at one of these before, so I wanted to check it out. Even though I don't usually prefer the Giant Salad Meal, it seemed like there might be some good quantity of vegetables involved. So I went.

You can order any salad you want from the ingredients they have, and they also have set combinations that you can order by name. All salads start with a base of either romaine, baby greens, or spinach. I ordered the "Ty Cobb Salad", which has (by default) romaine, tomatoes, bacon, avocado, red onions, and boiled egg. I asked for baby greens instead of the romaine (which looked a bit pallid) - substitutions are no problem. I chose not to pay extra to add a protein (they have a lot of options including tofu, salmon, chicken, and steak of various types), and I chose ranch as my dressing (the recommended one for my salad was spicy bleu cheese).

They make your salad in a giant metal bowl and, if you are eating in, serve it to you in a smaller metal bowl. The salads come in two sizes and I had ordered the larger size. It was pretty big - probably larger than you'd ever make a salad at home, even if you meant it to be your whole meal.

The ingredients in my salad were very good, especially the bacon, which was thick and very bacony. The avocados, bacon, and eggs came in somewhat smaller amounts than you might normally expect in a cobb salad of that size, I thought, but when I ate the salad there seemed to be plenty of all of them. The dressing was good and came in the right amount. (The guy who made it asked me if I wanted a small, medium, or large amount. I asked for medium and he mixed it all into the salad for me. I assume you could also get it on the side if you wished.)

The salad plus iced tea came to about $9. Had I added a protein it would have been $11-14 depending on which one I'd chosen. So those places are definitely not cheap.

Ultimately I did not feel very satisfied by my meal. It was a great salad, but I am not really used to having a giant salad as my whole meal, and either the fact that it wasn't hot food or the lack of protein made it not feel like I had really eaten. (I guess if you consider that salad greens have almost no calories - though they have lots of nice nutrients - my lunch really consisted of a medium-large quantity of ranch dressing and about 1/4 cup each of bacon, boiled egg, and avocado.)

If you like to eat a giant salad and paying $12 or so (which is, after all, what you'd pay for the same thing in a restaurant once you include tip) doesn't bother you, then I'd recommend Mad Greens. I enjoyed the quality and convenience of the food. I probably won't go back there myself, though.