Archive for the ‘Trivialities’ Category
Thursday, September 2nd, 2010The other day I was browsing books online (something I spend an embarrassing amount of my time on) when I discovered such curiosities as these. Curious about this publishing house I’d never heard of with titles that were either a) identical to those of movies, comics, music videos, etc., or b) nearly nonsensical chains of free association, I became suspicious about this imprint called Alphascript Publishing.
This week I have learned that it is impossible for me to read undergraduate prose within fifty feet of an unoccupied computer. Fighting through their awkward sentence constructions and stilted, thesaurus-driven vocabulary takes more concentration than I can muster when there is anything remotely interesting to do nearby. Honestly, it’s a mystery to me how so many college students can be so bad at putting coherent ideas together on paper.
But, with this understanding, I was able to make good progress for a while this afternoon by isolating myself at a table outside of Phoenix Grill, a little coffee-and-sandwiches deal on campus. Then I got distracted by an out-of-place smell. Confused, I turned to the student a the next table over, and he answered a number of my questions at once.
Me: Does it smell like weed to you?
Student: Heh. Yeah.
(short pause)
Student: I’m smoking it.
Student: <showed me his bowl>
Student: <grinned dopily>
Me: Oh. Oooooh.
This story is over a year old, but crazy shit doesn’t have a shelf life. And, with Adrianne’s cautious post and my cavalier comment this morning, it is apropos:
A white paneled delivery truck ran over a UW-Madison graduate student’s head on Division Street Friday afternoon and, except for a concussion, he wasn’t hurt.
Ryan Lipscomb, 26, said he was riding his bicycle pretty fast down the East Isthmus Bike Path where it parallels Eastwood Drive on Madison’s east side just before 3 p.m. Eastwood had a green light, so the crosswalk for the bike path showed a white walk sign, Lipscomb said.
He saw the large truck, the kind that usually makes deliveries to offices, coming down Eastwood, preparing to make a right turn onto Division Street. Lipscomb said he could tell the truck wasn’t going to stop. So Lipscomb slammed on his breaks, flipping his bike and throwing himself into the street. He landed right at the intersection of Eastwood and Division.
The truck ran over his head.
“I didn’t see it coming, but I sure felt it roll over my head. It feels really strange to have a truck run over your head.” His helmet, a Giro, was crushed, but Lipscomb’s head was fine.
Madison Police Department Sgt. Chris Boyd said the officer at the scene urged Lipscomb to keep the helmet. He did. It is all flattened and mangled and broken, unlike his head.
My favorite part of that is how much fun the reporter is having, writing “the truck ran over his head” as often and in as many ways as possible.
If you live in the Boston area, and you 1) like books and 2) need more cool people in your life, then do I have an idea for you.
Back Pages Books in Waltham has been struggling recently, but they’ve put together some creative ideas to raise money and stay in business. Of note is next Monday’s Bloomsday Fundraiser (Bloomsday explained here). For a paltry fifty bucks you get food from some of the better eateries in Waltham, live Irish music, readings from Ulysses by Waltham’s Reagle Players, and an art auction. Proceeds to keep a swell independent bookseller in business, and the odds are good that everyone down to shell out $50 for such an event is 100% awesome and worth getting to know.
I promise that this won’t devolve into a scarcely-updated Mathematica blog (there’s a post about bourbon coming soon, for one), but I thought this bit from the program’s “reading and writing files” documentation was priceless:
In Mathematica’s standard notebook interface, you are directly giving input and getting output every time you press Shift+Enter. Although much more rarely needed than in more primitive languages, Mathematica also allows you to get input and generate output as side effects in a computation.
This is so amazing that I don’t even have a joke. If I were smart, like Dr. Shalizi, I might have a joke. But I’m not, so I don’t.
(I saw Cosma speak on Friday. He was really good, and actually did get in a sly crack at A New Kind of Science, though I’m pretty sure I was the only one at UCI who got it. He was talking about models of complex systems and he said something like, “It’s not good enough to simply recreate the behavior of some part of a system and say, ‘Aha, since this looks just like that, then the mechanism behind this must be the mechanism behind that.’ That is, unless you’re writing a 1200-page self-published tome.”)
Another nerdy post meant more for people Googling “Mathematica Hardy text disappeared” than for the regular blog patrons. Feel free to skip it.
I finally got around to acquiring the January update for my iPod touch this week. In general, this probably isn’t blog-worthy, but I was really impressed by the new Google Maps tool. On the iPhone, this application tries to locate you by triangulating your position based on cell phone signals. On the touch, that information isn’t available, so it uses wireless networks to approximate your location.
Here’s what happens when I use this tool from my apartment:
Depending upon how you look at it, the result is is either completely wrong (off by 2,975 miles), or exactly right (but dated by 18 months). Going with the latter, I think that’s quite a feat.
I have a post-it on my desktop with half a dozen subjects for posts, which I hope to get to in the next week or so. A couple of them will be on the other blog, but content is content.
The first is just this picture, which I took after Ruth spotted the sign. We were in the process of boarding a flight from Orange County home.
Ruth looked up and said, “Caution, interpretive dance may occur.”
Maybe you had to be there?
Keith is getting ready to begin a masters program with an advisor who is interested in data mining, and this got me interested in Padhraic Smyth’s book on the subject. Dr. Smyth is one of my favorite people at UCI, and he knows from statistical machine learning, so I expected the book to be good. Glancing at the reviews, I noticed that they show an interesting structure: there are a lot of 5-star reviews, and a few 1-star reviews, and a smattering in the middle. Clearly it’s a divisive book: some people think it’s a great survey of important techniques, and some people wish it was more oriented toward producing working code for large-scale business systems.
And then there’s “Mustafa,” who just thinks it sucks. And, while I haven’t read the book, I imagine that most of his criticism is valid:
Finally .. I recevie the book .. I read the list of content and I surprised about it .. and now I know why they dont write the contents here to read before bying the book ..
This is a bad statistics book, you can read any thing in it except about Data Mining … No Cluster Analysis .. No Nural Networks .. No Rule induction No Dicecion Trees .. Nothing and nothing and nothing …
And I want to sell this bad book which Name is Data Mining … for the three lier writers.
The omission of “Nural Networks” does seem to be a glaring mistake, but surely most of that important material is made up for by the inclusion of neural networks on page 173. And don’t get me started on the authors’ decision to exclude “Dicecion Trees.” There’s simply no excuse for that.
Who are the “9 of 44 people” who found this review helpful? More importantly, how can one avoid ever having to deal with them professionally?
It turns out that this bastard is real. Coulda fooled me.