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Hard Problems
I borrowed-without-asking the office’s DVD of the movie Hard Problems and watched it tonight. (Don’t worry, I’ll bring it back on Monday. I doubt that anyone missed it.)
There is not much inciteful commentary that I can give about it. It is a documentary about the 2006 International Mathematical Olympiad. There are a lot of interviews with nerdy high school kids. Also lots of interviews with their parents, some of whom seem to doth protest too much about not putting pressure on their kids to excel. (On the other hand, the mom who named her kids Zarathustra and Galadriel was pretty convincing in her claims that she just lets them do their own things.) If you happen to have a copy of this movie lying around your office, I would certainly recommend it as a worthwhile way to spend 82 minutes sitting on your couch with your cats on a Saturday night.
There was also one work-related idea that I got from watching the bonus features, but I’m going to wait until after I return the DVD to the office to talk to my colleagues about it.
For me, the most interesting part of the movie was that I knew a bunch of people in it. This is entirely because I have spent decent chunks of the past 11 years working with high achieving high school students in one way or another. Even more interesting (well, interesting to me) was which people I could recognize by looking at them and which people I could only recognize by hearing them talk. I was able to recognize on sight someone who I saw at a conference a few years ago. But someone who worked in my office last summer, I only recognized by his voice. (If you want to develop a theory about which people I recognize and which ones I don’t, it will need to include the true fact that on one occasion in real life I did not recognize my own brother.)
The cats did not seem particularly interested in the film. Gwen doesn’t like movies in general, and Sophie is somewhat fickle.
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Crystal Balls and Flashing Crystals
The thing about predicting the future is that if you wait too long, then you have another set of training data for your model.
I was going to get to work predicting the future this week. But then some practical operational issues came up. The practical operational issues always come up because the people who designed the database to do some particular thing were unaware (or willfully ignoring) some future in which the database would be asked to do some different thing. And so in order to create some sort of entirely reasonable document I need to (metaphorically) integrate over all of the changes that are stored in the database in order to figure out where things are now.
We all know that we can’t be the first people to try to predict the future. All sorts of people who work in the College of Business Administration must have written scholarly papers about ways to predict the future. These papers are probably filled with equations and algorithms; they probably warn (in technical language) about what sorts of futures you can predict with any reasonable certainty and what sorts of error bounds you can put on your future. Someone has probably gotten a graduate degree in future prediction by writing some code that predicts the future in newer, faster, easier, or more accurate ways. With access to a university library (which I can get—I know a guy), you can have the future for free.
But most of us are pure mathematicians, so all we can do is prove that the future must exist. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, so I feel like I had a decent shot of figuring out how to calculate the future. Because I have this terrible habit of attending colleges (four, if you must know), I have amassed credits that roughly approximate about one semester’s worth of graduate study in business analytics (mostly statistics, some management science).
At first this seemed like a hopeless task. I was trying very hard to google the right keywords and not rely on emailing statistics professors that I know asking them for better keywords. There are a lot of people who are trying to sell their proprietary methods for predicting the future, so there are a lot of SEO-optimized pages that come up in my searches. And they all read pretty much like business plans written by South Park’s underpants gnomes.
- Collect data
- ????????
- Future!
But then I stumbled upon the names and articles and textbooks and software and websites and everything of some of the world’s experts in predicting the future! (They call it “forecasting.”) Once I am done with short-term operational stuff, I will feed my data into their future-predicting algorithms!
It is too bad that my migraine auras are mostly disruptive and do not function like prophetic visions. It hardly seems fair that I do not get any benefit out of seeing things that other people do not see. Yesterday I worked on neither future prediction nor on operational details because I was at home, freaked out about my latest encounter with the flashing rainbow crystal.
This time the flashing rainbow crystal was close enough to the center of my vision that I was able to see that it was also spinning. It looked like a glowing octahedral twisty puzzle, but where the pieces weren’t all identical, so if you twisted it, it would shapeshift or something. And it was positively glowing, as if the pieces were cladded with tiny little LED screens. Possibly related, I am tapering off one medication in anticipation of starting another (IF THE DRUG COMPANY EVER CALLS ME).
The aura seems to be gone for now, but I would really prefer not to have uncommon neurological symptoms. I mean, the headaches are annoying, but they are remarkably consistent in how they develop, how long they last, and how very well they go away when I take medication. My usual auras are so fleeting (and so consistent) as to be really quite boring. But the flashing rainbow crystal is not something that I see often. I’m told that most people with auras will see the aura for an amount of time best measured in minutes. Mine will come and go, several times a day, over a period of weeks. And I do not have enough data to predict when the flashing rainbow crystal will return.
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Quick Updates
How is it Wednesday already?
Perhaps the most exciting thing that has happened in the past few days is that I went to the neurologist on Monday. Even though I had filled out the paperwork (weeks ago!) to get on the newest bandwagon in migraine medication, I had not heard from the drug company, so I was given the number for their hotline.
I haven’t yet gotten around to typing up my phone log (I a hoping that I won’t need it). But the type of patient who comes to appointments with a heatmap calendar of migraine times and intensities is also going to be the kind of patient who keeps the type of notes that say, “When I spoke to your colleague yesterday at 9:46am,…”
Workwise, I am trying not to complain in public about the one specific issue that is bothering me right now. But I can complain vaguely. There is a thing that should be done to turn user-submitted text into well-formatted text. This transformation is not trivial, so companies have written APIs that allow you to send them the user-submitted text, and they will send back the well-formatted text. It costs a few cents for each transformation that they do for you. I am working on a small project that relies on this type of text, and the only information that is saved in the database is the user-submitted text, not the well-formatted text. Also, I do not have access to the API key. Grr.
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Is That Recyclable?
Every now and then I come up with a great pitch for a new media project or business idea. Recently I have conceived of an ongoing series of short videos called “Is That Recyclable?”
This is not a realistic project for me to do because I would need both a lot of people to submit their videos for my channel and also someone who is skilled at video editing (both the technical side and the story-telling side) to make the contributions not suck.
Conflict is the heart of drama. People would take videos of their colleagues or family members standing by the the garbage can and recycle bin having a disagreement about whether a particular item is recyclable. Maybe I’d allow some soliloquoys while someone narrates the process of moving items from one bin to the other. But I really want to focus on the interpersonal drama. My office had a very long email thread about what to do about the plastic pods from the coffeemaker.
People have very different ideas about what actually is recyclable, and the rules vary from place to place. It is very likely that you would watch one of these videos and see items end up in the wrong bin. Just because plastic bags have the recycle symbol and a number 4 on them does not mean that they should go in your home (or office) recycle bin.
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Friday Omens
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This morning at Starbucks, Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” was playing. Unironically.
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Office fridge.
- A colleague who is out today had sent us an SVG image that we needed to convert to
PNG. Someone tried opening it with Preview. Someone tried opening it with GIMP. I tried
converting it with
convert(from ImageMagick). Maybe our colleague is trolling us? Maybe it is a sign for me to get back into glitch art?
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When Life Gives you Rectangles, Make Shapes
The marketing department is doing some sort of brand refresh, so yesterday when I got back from Starbucks, I found a new box of business cards on my desk. This means that I needed to do something with the almost-full box of old business cards that I hadn’t used—not to mention also the almost-full box of old business cards that I still have leftover from my previous job (and which are orange on the back, so you can’t even use them for writing notes).
If I can get better at folding the cubes, I’m going to try to convince everyone else in the office who also got new cards that we should try to make a Menger Sponge. The level 1 sponge seems very realistic. A level 2 sponge should use almost 3500 cards. We might have that many old cards around the office.
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The Rules (or Not Invited)
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“Save the Date!” proclaimed the professionally-produced card that was mailed to me. It still hangs on my refrigerator, even though the event allegedly happened almost three months ago. Did the event happen? Or was I high enough on the B-list to get a Save the Date card but did not eventually qualify for an invitation. I kind of wish that I knew enough about what might or might not have happened so that I could send a card, if appropriate. I have seen no photographs on Facebook. Really I don’t mind not having to give up a weekend to travel to a social event, but I also do want to know if everyone is OK.
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I am terrible at social events. Several months ago there was another social event. I was clearly invited. I even RSVP’d. I put it on my calendar. And then I forgot to go. And that is too bad because I expect that there would have been people there who I would have liked to meet.
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A significant number of weeks ago (maybe by now it is better measured in months?), one of my colleagues ran into someone who I used to work for. This is not entirely a coincidence because this connection is primarily responsible for me having the job that I have now. The people from my past told my colleague that they are having some sort of fancy to-do sometime in June, and everyone should be there! All the people from my past should go; it will be like old times. We will worship the Sun God and re-enact old rituals. Or something like that. More of June is in the past than is in the future. Did this thing already happen in June? Will it happen in June? The internet suggests that this event is happening on Saturday. A terrible book that came out during my senior year of college said, “Don’t Accept a Saturday Night Date after Wednesday.” It’s currently Wednesday. Do The Rules apply for quasi-professional events? Do The Rules still apply 23 years after the publication of the book? Am I even invited? I suspect that my line in the sand is parking: If they invite me and if I have to pay to park, then I am not going.
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