Week 32

Interesting tidbit on the Norwegian mathematician Abel shared by Arthur Mattuck of MIT: he apparently had a tragic life, he made many discoveries but in his lifetime, they were not recognized. Now he is a national icon in Norway, there is a huge statue of him in Oslo: but the joke is, since noone knew what he looked like, they made the statue so big that you cannot see his face when you are near it.

Yes, Stanford, as well as MIT (through OCW initiative) already make video lectures available to everyone over the Internet. Ng's class goes one step further: During Fall of 2011 anyone in the world will be able to follow and to a degree, participate in this class. Very cool.

What is taught in ML class? Let me summarize this way: if one day Skynet took over the world and a robot with an Austrian accent kicked your ass, this is the class you should blame. Joking aside, ML is about teaching machines how to learn. I sometimes call the methods and algorithms used here as "machine scientists" because frequently what ML researchers end up doing is teaching machines how to model mathematically / automatically. Modeling is science's main tool for making sense of nature's data obviously.

"A bold experiment in distributed education, "Machine Learning [class]" will be offered free and online to students worldwide during the fall of 2011. Students will have access to lecture videos, lecture notes, receive regular feedback on progress, and receive answers to questions. When you successfully complete the class, you will also receive a statement of accomplishment. Taught by Professor Andrew Ng, the curriculum draws from Stanford's popular Machine Learning course."

Jeremy Clarkson: "How come every other city in the world staged a pretty good riot [except the British?] To understand why the British are so hopeless at getting off their backsides, we need to go back to the summer of 1381 and the so-called Peasants’ Revolt. A mob, seeking equality for all, had sacked London. They had burnt the houses of the rich, beheaded anyone dressed in velvet, opened prisons, drunk John of Gaunt’s wine and scattered financial records to the four winds [..]

Ten days later, the rebels confronted the king who told them: ‘You wretches, detestable on land and sea; you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live.’ So they all went home. How come? What was it that extinguished the fire in their bellies? Well, I have no proof of this because nobody was keeping meteorological records in the fourteenth century but I’d like to bet that it started to rain.

A lot of people with vast foreheads have, over the years, wondered why Britain has never had a successful uprising. Some say it’s because the monarchy was too powerful. Others argue that you can’t have a revolution if you have a strong and contented middle class.

Pah. I say it’s because of the drizzle. Last year’s May Day riot was a success because it was dry and quite warm. This one was a washout because it rained and we are brought up on a diet of party invitations that always say ‘If wet, in the village hall’. And you can’t change the fabric of society from a venue that’s also used for parish council meetings and line dancing.

There is some evidence to back up this theory. The night of 11 April 1981 was dry and unseasonably warm. I know this because it was my twenty-first birthday. It was also the night of the Brixton riots. Aha, you might say, but what about the Russian Revolution? They also have rubbish weather so how did they get it together? Well, look at the dates. It began in early spring and it was all over by October. And when did the French storm the Bastille? It was 14 July.

Here’s a thought: the only reason why the Arabs and Jews have managed to keep their nasty little war going for 50 years is because it never bloody rains. If the post-war powers had put Israel in Manchester, there’d have been no bloodshed at all."

Paul Graham: "I've never been 100% sure whether patents help or hinder technological progress. When I was a kid I thought they helped. I thought they protected inventors from having their ideas stolen by big companies. Maybe that was truer in the past, when more things were physical. But regardless of whether patents are in general a good thing, there do seem to be bad ways of using them. And since bad uses of patents seem to be increasing, there is an increasing call for patent reform"

"Movement is not expensive if the environment is set up to support it. I am not an extremist or minimalist. I don’t want to be living off a few packs on a bicycle for the rest of my life. I like warm beds, hot showers and large, well-equipped kitchens as much as anybody else. I like having access to lots of useful things like washing machines and gyms. It is not inconceivable that the world could be arranged to provide all these in a way that supports both rootedness and nomadism. Thanks to online friendships, and emerging infrastructure around couchsurfing and companies like Airbnb, it is becoming easier every year. I’d like to see trains getting cheaper, tent-living becoming available for the non-destitute classes, health insurance becoming more portable, public toilets acquiring shower stalls, and government identity documents becoming anchored to something other than physical addresses. I’d like to see the time-share concept expand beyond vacations to regular living. I’d like executive suites and coworking spaces sprout up all over, and acquire cheap bedrooms that you can live out of. I’d like to be able to rent nap-pods at Starbucks. I’d rather own or rent a twelfth of a home in twelve cities than one home in one city.

There is no necessary either-or between nomadism and rooted living. Technology has evolved to the point where the apparatus of the state should be able to accommodate illegible people without pinning them down"

Gleick's Genius: "Feynman had developed an appetite for new problems—any problems. He would stop people he knew in the corridor of the physics building and ask what they were working on. They quickly discovered that the question was not the usual small talk. Feynman pushed for details. He caught one classmate, Monarch Cutler, in despair. Cutler had taken on a senior thesis problem based on an important discovery in 1938 by two professors in the optics laboratory. They found that they could transform the refracting and reflecting qualities of lenses by evaporating salts onto them, forming very thin coatings, just a few atoms thick. Such coatings became essential to reducing unwanted glare in the lenses of cameras and telescopes. Cutler was supposed to find a way of calculating what happened when different thin films were applied, one atop another. His professors wondered, for example, whether there was a way to make exceedingly pure color filters, passing only light of a certain wavelength. Cutler was stymied. Classical optics should have sufficed—no peculiarly quantum effects came into play—but no one had ever analyzed the behavior of light passing through a parade of mostly transparent films thinner than a single wavelength.

Cutler told Feynman he could find no literature on the subject. He did not know where to start. A few days later Feynman returned with the solution: a formula summing an infinite series of reflections back and forth from the inner surfaces of the coatings. He showed how the combinations of refraction and reflection would affect the phase of the light, changing its color. Using Feynman’s theory and many hours on the Marchant calculator, Cutler also found a way to make the color filters his professors wanted. Developing a theory for reflection by multiple-layer thin films was not so different for Feynman from math team in the now-distant past of Far Rockaway. He could see, or feel, the intertwined infinities of the problem, the beam of light resonating back and forth between the pair of surfaces, and then the next pair, and so on, and he had a giant mental kit bag of formulas to try out. Even when he was fourteen he had manipulated series of continued fractions the way a pianist practices scales. Now he had an intuition for the translating of formulas into physics and back, a feeling for the rhythms or the spaces or the forces that a given set of symbols implied".

Mumford is one of the perfect people to write about this; not only does he deal with theory, but he also deals with applications, and he is someone who will go beyond tradiational applications such as mechanics and physics. I know him through his work in image processing; there is the famous Mumford-Shah functional that everyone who uses partial differential equations in vision will come across one way or another. Functionals are 18th century math going back to Euler, and image processing is a field so new that it did not exist 50 years ago -- so Mumford knows what he is talking about. This view needs to be taken into consideration.

Mumford and Garfunkel: "There is widespread alarm in the United States about the state of our math education.[..] The truth is that different sets of math skills are useful for different careers, and our math education should be changed to reflect this fact.

A math curriculum that focused on real-life problems would still expose students to the abstract tools of mathematics, especially the manipulation of unknown quantities. But there is a world of difference between teaching “pure” math, with no context, and teaching relevant problems that will lead students to appreciate how a mathematical formula models and clarifies real-world situations [..]

Imagine replacing the sequence of algebra, geometry and calculus with a sequence of finance, data and basic engineering. In the finance course, students would learn the exponential function, use formulas in spreadsheets and study the budgets of people, companies and governments. In the data course, students would gather their own data sets and learn how, in fields as diverse as sports and medicine, larger samples give better estimates of averages. In the basic engineering course, students would learn the workings of engines, sound waves, TV signals and computers. Science and math were originally discovered together, and they are best learned together now.

Traditionalists will object that the standard curriculum teaches valuable abstract reasoning, even if the specific skills acquired are not immediately useful in later life. A generation ago, traditionalists were also arguing that studying Latin, though it had no practical application, helped students develop unique linguistic skills. We believe that studying applied math, like learning living languages, provides both useable knowledge and abstract skills"

From The World According to Clarkson: "[Mandela] is not Gandhi, you know. You may like what he represents – I do – but if you peer under the halo of political correctness that bathes him in a golden glow of goodness you’ll find that the man himself is a bit dodgy.

Back in the early 1960s he was the one who pushed the ANC into armed conflict. He was known back then as the Black Pimpernel. And his second marriage was to Winnie, who’s now a convicted fraudster and thief with, we’re told, a penchant for Pirelli necklaces.

Furthermore, since his release from prison and his eventual rise to the presidency Mandela has had some extraordinary things to say about world affairs. He’s deeply concerned, for instance, about the plight of one of the Lockerbie bombers and has expressed support for both Gadaffi and Castro. Indeed, he has singled out Cuba, praising it for its human rights and liberty. I’m sorry – what human rights, what liberty? [..]"

For Lenin and the Russian revolutionaries, the big question was “Kto kogo?” — essentially, “Who has the upper hand?”

Kto kogo remains the paradigm at the center of the fiscal battles roiling the Western world: young vs. old; rich taxpayers vs. poor welfare beneficiaries; public sector workers vs. private sector ones; wealthy Northern Europe vs. bankrupt Southern Europe; small government conservatives vs. big government liberals.

Ross Douthat: "For months, he’s positioned himself near the center of public opinion, leaving Republicans to occupy the rightward flank [..] Yet the president’s approval ratings have been sinking steadily for weeks, hitting a George W. Bush-esque low of 40 percent [..] The administration would no doubt blame this judgment on the steady stream of miserable economic news. But it should save some of the blame for its own political approach. Ever since the midterms, the White House’s tactics have consistently maximized President Obama’s short-term advantage while diminishing his overall authority. Call it the “too clever by half” presidency: the administration’s maneuvering keeps working out as planned, but Obama’s position keeps eroding"

"It is interesing to note that right that after 9/11, first best-selling story / viewpoint in US did not include a mad furor about Islam, Middle-East, but it involved the Catholic Church, Renaissance, and Medieval knights. Surely it did involve religion, but not Islam. I am talking about the Da Vinci Code stories of course which brilliantly tapped into a nation's psyche, its cultural fault line. DVC after 9/11 attacks reminded people about something they were familiar with: the dictatorial mentality of Rome (or the Roman Catholic Church), and its top-down hold on religion, knowledge and its symbols. The Western world already had that fight; Geiseric, who destroyed the Romans was seen a barbarian after all, he was a Christian whose only difference from the Catholic "party line" was his belief that Jesus was not God.

If the "bad" in the story is Roman Catholics, then the "good" could only have been something Medieval, and it was. Enter Templar "Knights" whose job is to protect "the secret", the holy grail, whatever. Knights belong to an era after Romans' fall, and the fall of modernity today ushering in an era similar to Medieval Age is the parallel here, that's why the knight as a symbol still "sells" in movies, either in its original form, or in an endless stream of superhero pictures. Iron Man? He has an armor, has a fief (his hi-tech house), has squires (his little robots), is against Military Industrial Complex (modern Rome).

In any case: DVC book and the movies are on code, the code being the dividing line between Rome / Jesus, militarism / piece, mindless centurion vs. the knight"

:)

"[Feynman ..] much later, having settled into a domestic existence complete with garden and porch, taught himself how to train dogs to do counterintuitive tricks for example, to pick up a nearby sock not by the direct route but by the long way round, circling through the garden, in the porch door and back out again. (He did the training in stages, breaking the problem down until after a while it was perfectly obvious to the dog that one did not go directly to the sock.)"

I am having some fun with these.. It started with quid-pro-bro, brocassion, bromance; now there is an entire dictionary about this stuff. They are 'broisms'. Some other ones:

Brofessional: A dude who has devoted himself fully to bro activities. Obviously this includes beer drinking, playing videogames, etc.

Broverload: Anytime someone feels uncomfortable with the number of bros in a confined space.

Brogrammer: A bro who somehow learned to program, but would deny it in any social situation.

Broller Coaster: a roller coaster full of obnoxious bro's that scream excessively even when the ride has come to a full stop.

Brotein: What bros drink in order to become more attractive towards other bro hoes.

Brolitude: When one decides on something consisting of only him and his bros.

Brocean: A collection of bros. It is ruled by broseidon, and most of its citizens have quality flow and play lax.