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Homework
Now that I’m no longer at the university, I have self-imposed homework.
When I started working my way through this grammar book, I had such high hopes. I was going to do a certain number of pages a day, and I would be well on my way to improving my German. Yet, I am still on chapter 1 (verbs). To be fair, the verb chapter has 10 sections (and I am on the ninth section, modal verbs). Chapter 5 on prepositions is only three pages long, which is crazy. I have enough trouble with prepositions in English (and I know enough to fear the Wechselpräpositionen) that three pages of German prepositions will not be enough. And this book doesn’t have anything at all about the differences between stehen and stellen, legen and liegen, and hängen and hängen (not a typo), so I will have absolutely no hope of figuring those out.
Guten Tag!
Guten Tag! Was kann ich für Sie tun?
Ich möchte Ihnen mein Abiturzeugnis bringen.
Gut. Aber warum wollen Sie mir das Orginal geben? Sie sollten niemals das Original aus der Hand geben. Das kann bei uns verloren gehen. Es reicht, wenn Sie uns eine Fotokopie geben.
Aber Ihr Kollege hat gestern gesagt, dass ich das Original abgeben soll.
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Hunger
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After months and months and months of listening to Deutsche Welle podcasts as I drive to and from work (my knowledge of current events is bounded above by my limited understanding of the langsam gesprochene Nachrichten), I’ve been listening to audiobooks again. Ones that I have checked out from the public library via their app because I am cheap.
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Previous book was a novel that I checked out on a whim because one of the characters was supposed to be based on someone I’ve met. (I was not impressed with that book’s portrayal of that character.) Current book is Hunger by Roxane Gay.
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The absolutely most compelling part of Gay’s memoir is that she keeps writing things like, “I had experience E and felt feeling F because of events X, Y, and Z,” and I am sitting in the car listening to her read the book, and I am thinking, “I also had experience E and felt feeling F, too! But because of events U, V, and W, which are nothing at all like X, Y, and Z!”
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I ordered FitBits for the cats. Well, I say “FitBit” the way that you would say “Kleenex” to mean facial tissue. I bought pet activity trackers. One of them is attached to Sophie’s collar, while the other is sitting in a box waiting for the support team to email me back. If I do not hear from them by tomorrow afternoon, it is going back to Amazon.
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I strongly believe that Gwen’s activity tracker was previously purchased by someone, paired to their account, returned to Amazon (for whatever reason), and then shipped to me as “new.” Thus, I can not pair the device to my phone because it has already been paired. There is no tiny hole for me to poke at with an unfolded paperclip to reset the device. My suspicion is that the problem is that the device’s ID number is attached to the original owner’s account in the device-service’s database, so they would need to do the unpairing on their end. Poor design.
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So far today, Sophie has slept for over 15 hours. There are roughly 4 hours left in today. So, if I was wondering what Sophie does when I am away: She sleeps.
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Yesterday Gwen went to the vet for a weigh-in. In January Gwen weighed 8 pounds. Yesterday, Gwen weighed 7 lbs, 11 oz. She used to weigh about 10 pounds. I have an anorexic cat.
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Gwen is supposed to eat 1/2 cup of cat food each day. She typically eats about half of that. We have bought every cheap and fancy brand of cat food. We have bought every type of cat treat. We have purchased cans of tuna and chicken meant for people. We have drizzled duck fat from Whole Foods on her food. Gwen is not interested in eating.
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Recall: Sophie will steal the carne asada off your burrito. Sophie was sitting on her perch when Jim walked by with a grilled cheese sandwich, and Sophie bit a dripping string of cheese off his sandwich. Sophie weighs 11 lbs 8 oz. Sophie is terrified of Gwen. Gwen is the sweetest cat that you’ve ever met. Unless you are another cat.
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Sophie has to eat a prescription food because she barfs a lot. I feed Sophie her perscription food in a “puzzle” feeder where she needs to dig the food out because otherwise she will binge and purge. Yes, I also have a bulimic cat.
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Gwen has a battery powered food dish that magically opens when it detects her microchip, to keep Sophie from stealing her food. Yesterday’s vet visit also included an x-ray that reveals that Gwen has two microchips. (This can happen when you only have used cats.) I told Gwen that she can use 2FA to keep Sophie out of her dish. Gwen didn’t think that was funny. (I am not the biggest fan of 2FA.)
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Michelle is still dead. Recall: Back in 1989 or 1990 or so, she was taking some sort of antidepressant because the doctors thought that it would help with her eating. Apparently she weighed about 86 pounds around the time that she killed herself on April 1, 1992.
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The veterinarian prescribed Gwen a medication that was approved in the United States in 1996, so it was definitely not the one that Michelle was taking. Within 45 minutes of taking her first dose of this medication, Gwen emptied her food dish. Since cats don’t really experience a placebo effect the way that people do, I expect that this medication really does increase appetite.
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Secrets
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While we have great passwords on the servers that were set up by the person who really cares about this sort of thing, we have terrible passwords on the networked printers. Someone in the office renamed one of the printers, and no one on a Mac was able to print until they re-set up that printer.
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I have a PiAware on the office wifi network.
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In the same commit in which I changed a whole lot of files from all over the project – during a time in which another project was having an emergency, so a lot of people were focusing their attention on that other project – I changed the .gitignore file because the other people on this project seem to keep adding things that they shouldn’t be to the repo.
Not a secret: We’ve hired yet another person whose interview I was involved with. He’s going to be starting this summer, but he’ll be getting familiar with his project (remotely) before his official start date. We are still hiring.
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Migraine Monday
People who get paid to do things with social media have invented various alliterative themes for content. Everyone has picked up on #throwbackthursday, but apparently there is also #wednesdaywisdom and who knows what for the other days of the week. And just like anniversary gifts come in both “modern” and “traditional” themes, I think that the days of the week hashtags also have warring factions.
Now that my sleep schedule is back on track and the construction no longer makes it impossible to park at the gym, I was thinking of going back to the gym. I was hoping to go to the gym today. But I have a headache, and going to the gym is even more unpleasant when I have a headache. Going to the gym can sometimes trigger a really bad headache. Once it even triggered a “thunderclap” headache, which led to a same-day CT-scan whose risks outweighed its benefits. (I have since become much more discerning about CT scans.)
I really wish I knew more about the Radon transform (one of the standard mathematical techniques for turning the collected data about beam intensities into an image, that is one of the techniques used for the computing in computed tomography). But a few years ago I went to a talk where the researcher was solving these sorts of inverse problems using linear algebra. Probably in part because computers these days are being optimized to do linear algebra and to mine cryptocurrency. If you want to solve a scientific problem computationally, it had better be something that can be solved by linear algebra over the real numbers approximated within machine epsilon (do not expect exact calculations) or something that can be solved by a GPU. That was one of the nice things about working at ORNL: There was always someone giving a talk about using computation to solve some sort of interesting problem, and since I worked as part of a high performance computing group, it totally counted as work to go listen to researchers talk about how they were using our computing resources.
(Aside: We are starting to get cryptocurrency mining spam on our message boards at work. A spammer will post a link to a site that uses Javascript to mine in your browser. It doesn’t matter quite so much what the architecture is when you’re not paying for it.)
While a lot of computational problems can be convinced to become linear algebra problems or can be forced onto a grid or can be otherwise bent to conform with our biases in computer architectures and software libraries, my headache issues are much harder to resolve because it is really hard to tell if a rat has a headache.
So that is my advice to you: Study computational problems that can be reduced to linear algebra (and/or parallelized on a grid with minimal communication), and develop medical problems that can be easily modeled in rats. It’s probably too much to hope for to expect my neurological issues to be reflected in C. elegans, a creature so primitive that it only has 302 neurons (all of which have been mapped) and that you can research without IRB approval.
Sure, you need to fill out a bunch of paperwork to do research on rats, but it’s not that bad compared to doing medical research on people. You can keep a lot of rats in your lab. You know what your rats are doing. They are maintaining their special diets and taking all ther medication and doing everything else according to protocol. You can sacrifice your rats and put little pieces of their brain under a microscope or blend it into a slurry and see which genes are being expressed.
But it’s hard to know if a rat is having a headache. Rats can’t vomit, so they can never get one of those migraines that is so bad that it makes you throw up. Does a rat see the flashing rainbow crystal or the zig-zag rainbow snake or some other migraine aura? No way to know.
That MD/PhD who is setting up a brand new neurology research lab and needs to get some publishable results in order to keep the lights on and get tenure has a choice: Basic science with C. elegans? Maybe even something genomic, so you don’t even need to maintain a physical lab? Or perhaps something that has a rat model. Maybe cut some rats’ spinal cords and put out press releases about helping wounded soldiers walk again every time there is some incremental breakthrough. What about studying migraine? Recruit a bunch of opinionated people, some of whom don’t follow directions, others of whom drop out of the study. Still others who believe assorted junk science that their racist relatives share on Facebook. And mountains of paperwork.
There is one upcoming treatment that my neurologist has heard promising news about. The studies were all funded by the drug company that developed it. (It’s a biologic, not a small molecule drug.) Preliminary word on the street says that it’s only somewhat effective and costs tens of thousands of dollars per dose. Long-term effects? Unknown.
So instead of taking my headache to the gym, I’m going to put on my pajamas, listen to my audio book for a little while, and go to sleep. Perhaps I’ll dream about a way to model migraines in terms of inverting a large matrix of rats.
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Leadership
My alma mater sent me an email about how excited they are that they will be asking me for a lot more money than I will send them. I’m not going to be sending them any money, so someone else is going to have to chip in extra so that they can raise the $3 billion that they are hoping to raise.
But they are also planning to do wacky things with all this money that they are hoping that people give to them. This includes “a four-year leadership program for all undergraduates.”
The older I get, the less I know what is meant by “leadership.”
Several years ago I worked on a grant-funded project where probably more than half of the people were either PIs or co-PIs. This project had a lot of leadership. But there weren’t that many people who were actually doing the work.
Sometimes I think that we need a bit more respect for people with followership skills.
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Medical Models
Back when I had all those MRIs done, I was hoping to 3D print something cool.
But my skill with 3D printing is limited. One of my friends is a radiologist, and he helped a lot in making a 3D computer model of the blood vessels in my brain.
I was never able to figure out how to 3D print it, but I was able to have it 3D laser etched in crystal.
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Linear Models
I haven’t been writing very much about the technical stuff lately for a few reasons. I’m wrapping up one project, and I am down to the fussiest of silly details, like how to make sure that the exported file is in the right format to be easily used by the person who requested it. For another project I need to reinstall a whole bunch of stuff on the server; that will either be a dull sequence of accepting the terms and conditions or else it will be a nightmare. And the newest project is something that I shouldn’t be saying much about.
I know that makes it seem very glamorous. But it’s not. I am not building some sort of sophisticated system that is going to disrupt anything. Rather, we have a lot of data that it’s not polite to talk about, and I’m trying to find features that are weird enough that a human should take a closer look. This data is a mix of text, numbers, dates, and more, and computers are not known for being good readers are having good judgement. (Yet.)
The one thing that I was hoping to implement today but did not finish was trying to decide whether there is a linear relationship between two of the collections of numbers. We’d been tacitly assuming that these collections were related linearly, in the linear algebra sense. But now I am wondering if they are related linearly in the linear regression sense (that is to say, affine). Maybe the false positives that I was getting from the old model were because the points were clustered near a non-zero intercept. Maybe these points really do sit near a line; it just might be a line that does not go through the origin.
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