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.

Iron

Ed and I have new arrangement whereby we travel to our local 24 Hour Fitness three times a week. We spend about 25 minutes lifting weights (we are actually using the same chart, designed by me, though naturally we have our own copies and are using different amounts of weight), and then 20-25 minutes doing some kind of cardio.

It makes me so high.

I usually don't really want to go. "Those weights are heavy!" as Mosch used to say. And the 20 minutes on the treadmill afterwards is somewhat torturous. But when I'm finished, I am often filled with a really strong feeling of well-being, and I find that later the same day, or the next day even, I am extra in love with Ed too. We had this conversation a few days ago:

Me: I just realized why I'm so in love with you right now!

Him: You pumped iron.

Me: Yeah. Is that weird?

Him: Nope. I'm all hopped up on endorphins too.

I joked the other day that we don't need to have sex anymore now that we have this instead.

I've gone through periods of doing strength training before, and I remember that I've always really liked it, despite how easy it is to get out of the habit (and despite the ways that it sucks). But I really hope I can remember how directly good this makes me feel, independent of it being good for you or whatever. I swear I fell asleep last night with a smile on my face.