You might be interested in checking out a post I made on my university blog, where I discuss a table showing numbers of degrees being produced versus projected job demand in several disciplines. The results may surprise you (and may give insight into why the U.S. keeps outsourcing high-tech jobs).
Hint: where are the students?
If you've ever wanted to combine staying healthy with literature, then you might want to consider walking, biking, swimming, or rowing to Rivendell.
Here's the idea: Karen Fonstad (sadly, when writing up this post, I saw that Karen died in 2005 due to complications from breast cancer) reverse-engineered the route Frodo and Company took on their way to Rivendell in her book The Atlas of Middle-Earth
In her Rivendell mileage chart, Karen notes the cumulative miles, miles between each milepost, and the description of each milepost location. So if you are just starting out and log 3 miles on today's run, then you would make a note in your notebook your mileage run for the day and the cumulative miles you have run. That way you can compare your progress against the progress of the Company as they (and you) head to Rivendell.
All this may sound a bit geeky, but it does work---I have started the journey, though extensive, non-fitness travel has kept me away from too much "Hobbit-walking", as my wife calls it. Nevertheless, yesterday I jogged 2.25 miles, which brings my cumulative total to 36.84 miles. On the Rivendell journey, this puts me just beyond that incident with the Black Rider, but before they meet up with the Elves on the Road.
As a final note: in case you are not familiar with Rivendell, Hobbits, or J.R.R. Tolkien, get thee to Amazon and buy the books
If you are interested in quality, intelligent entertainment, then you might want to check out the series Numb3rs
The series depicts an FBI agent who is helped by his mathematics whiz brother in solving crimes - kind of like CSI with equations rather than microscopes. But don't let the equations scare you off - the conflict caused by the two different methods of problem solving, characterized by the FBI agent brother and the mathematics brother, along with the various crimes and bad guys, actually provides for exciting drama.
As an example, in the pilot episode a serial rapist/killer is loose in Los Angeles. The FBI agent has a map of the city showing the locations of the crimes, but is otherwise stumped on how to track the killer and predict where the killer will strike next. The mathematician studies the pattern of the crime locations and, rather than try to predict the location of the next crime, he estimates the location of where the killer lives. The analogy is that of a garden water sprinkler - it is difficult to predict where the next water droplet will land, but if you study the pattern of the drops of water, you can estimate where the water sprinkler must be located.
Note that the math used in the episodes is real, and if you are interested in finding more about the different techniques used in the various episodes, then you might want to take a look at the book The Numbers Behind NUMB3RS: Solving Crime with Mathematics
Last week I attended Interface 2008, which was the 40th symposium of a conference celebrating the interface between computing science and statistics. It was held at the Durham Marriott, in Durham, North Carolina. The Interface series of conferences is sponsored by the Interface Foundation, and this year's conference was hosted by the National Institute of Statistical Sciences.
I particularly enjoyed the sessions on data analysis and knowledge extraction - finding patterns and knowledge in large, complex, high-dimensional datasets. Along these lines, I gave a talk titled "Interactive Text Analysis with Iterative Denoising".
Durham, a former tobacco town, is home to Duke University and serves as one vertex of Research Triangle Park. One restaurant I particularly enjoyed was Toast, a small but good paninoteca, which was within walking distance of the hotel.
I've just been appointed to a research position with the Human Language Technology Center for Excellence (HTLCOE) at Johns Hopkins University.
The purpose of the Center is to:
focus on advanced technology for automatically analyzing a wide range of speech, text and document image data in multiple languages.
I am looking forward to this!
Technorati Tags: academia, security, technology
Yesterday was a little busier than normal. In the morning I gave a research talk, "Text analysis with Iterative Denoising," at the spring meeting of the International Biometric Society, Eastern North American Region.
The conference was in Arlington, Virginia and my hotel was overlooking the Reagan National Airport. In the photo below (taken on a cloudy morning), you can see some of the airport structures, and just above the horizon you can see a plane taking off.
Immediately after presenting I rushed to Baltimore for a research meeting. I was interested to see some of the changes to campus since the last time I was there. This building below, just south of Garland Hall, is completely new, and serves as the university's new visitor center. That whole area used to be a gravel parking lot where I parked when on campus. Below the field is a new 600 car underground parking garage.
After my meeting, it was back to Richmond, and grading papers and preparing lectures awaited my return.
It has been a busy few weeks, as I am teaching two new courses this semester, plus settling in to my new university, plus moving, plus... But here is a movie of my new office.
I am right across from a small conference room, which you can see briefly at the beginning of the movie.
I have not yet moved much into the office, since I wanted to clean out some of the things left behind by the previous occupants. They even left their name plate, so I had to cover it up since there was quite a bit of traffic knocking on my door looking for her. Also, our entire department will be moving to a new building in about a year, so I can't get too cozy!
But, at least the room has a window.
Here is a link to my new homepage at VCU
I've started a page for my audio projects, and the first entry is the preface to Anderson's The Younger Edda.
The Younger Edda is a 13th century collection of stories about the Teutonic Gods and Goddesses from the traditional, pre-Christian religion of the Northern Europeans. Rasmus Anderson translated the Old Norse Prose Edda, or Snorri's Edda, into English in 1879. Since I am a fan of tradition, history, and ancestral culture, I decided to make audio recordings of this work. I also wanted to learn more about recording technology and audio engineering.
The first entry is an MP3 of the preface from Anderson's translation.
Technorati Tags: academia, culture, religion, spirit, technology
Congratulations to Virginia Tech - in the latest DARPA autonomous robotic vehicle challenge, which required autonomous vehicles to navigate sixty miles in an urban environment, do three-point turns, park, follow the rules of the road, etc., Virginia Tech's vehicle won third place.
The DARPA Urban Challenge is an autonomous vehicle research and development program with the goal of developing technology that will keep warfighters off the battlefield and out of harm's way. The Urban Challenge features autonomous ground vehicles maneuvering in a mock city environment, executing simulated military supply missions while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles.
Appropriately - their robot vehicle was named Odin.
Read more about the team and the contest on their blog or the team website.
Technorati Tags: academia, science, technology, virginia
Before you get too excited, no, it is not a museum of hammers. When I first saw the museum in Los Angeles' Westwood area, I thought how great to have a museum on hammers - battle hammers or maybe even Thor's Hammers!
Alas, that was not the case, but you should visit it anyway if you are in the area. The Hammer Museum houses some of the art collected by the late Armand Hammer, who was an American industrialist (no, Armand Hammer did not create the Arm and Hammer baking soda). He collected art his entire life, and amassed a very large collection. This museum displays some works from his collection and rotates through other exhibitions. On Thursdays there is free admission, so this is a prime time to visit.
From Hammer's private collection, we saw paintings by French 19th century masters, other European master paintings, and 18th-20th century American artists. There were van Goghs, Monets, a Rubens, and very nice Rembrandts, including Rembrandt's Juno and Portrait of a Man Holding a Black Hat.
There was also an exhibition of 17th-19th century advertisements called broadsides that depicted showings like Toby the sapient pig, a dulcimer player with no arms, the real-life Tom Thumb, and fortune telling ponies.
There was also a modern art media exhibition showing, for example, a guy pushing a block of ice through a city until it melted.
There are many events held at the museum throughout the year, and the museum itself is managed by UCLA.
I have put my slides online for a talk I was asked to give at IPAM today. The talk was titled "Scan Statistics on Enron Graphs", work done by Carey Priebe, John Conroy, David Marchette, and Youngser Park.
Technorati Tags: academia, technology
There will be an an event held at Virginia Tech titled "Bellerophon to Beowulf to Batman: The Image of the Hero", Wednesday, November 7, 2007, 7-9pm, in 113 McBryde Hall. Free and open to the public.
Motivating questions include: What is a hero? Has "heroism" changed? Does Buffy have anything to do with Beowulf?
It sounds like undergraduates will be presenting some of their research, followed by a faculty roundtable, including:
* Terry Papillon (Classics & Honors Program) - ancient world * Karen Swenson (English) - Norse sagas * Charlene Eska (English) - King Arthur * Stephen Prince (Communication) - modern pop culture * Kaye Graham (English) - Harry Potter and children's literature * LtCol. William Stringer (Corps of Cadets) - modern military
If you are going to be in the L.A. area on October 10, 2007, you might want to drop by the IPAM building at UCLA. Peter Jones has asked me to give a talk on Scan Statistics on Enron Graphs.
Technorati Tags: academia, science, technology
A Viking ship that was built in 1892 and sailed across the Atlantic, down the Erie Canal, through the Great Lakes and to Chicago for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, is currently in need of your help. The image above is of this ship moored in front of Manufactures, Chicago, in 1893.
This 76-foot ship, known as The Viking, is currently housed in Geneva at Good Templar Park (near Chicago). Left to neglect, this ship is doomed unless a restoration project receives funds.
From an article by the Norwegian National League:
The "Viking" was built at Framnes Shipyard in Sandefjord, Norway in 1892. It was copied after the ancient Viking ship "Gokstad". Excavated in 1880, the "Gokstad" had been called the most beautiful ship ever built. The "Viking" is approximately 76 feet long, 17 feet wide, and 7 feet high from the bottom of the keel to the gunwale. Clinker built with planking hand split from green logs, the "Viking" made 11 knots and the hull was observed to flex with the waves.
Most importantly, the Viking ship was declared one of ten most endangered historic sites in Illinois by a statewide historic preservation group.
American Express is running a competition for projects to receive funds, and the Viking ship is in the runoff. Some of the other projects and buildings in the competition might be nice things to do, but are not in as imminent danger of being destroyed --- the Viking ship will decay into the water unless we take action now to preserve this important cultural icon.
How can you help?
Go to: the partnership in preservation site, register, and VOTE FOR THE VIKING SHIP - you can vote ONCE A DAY, EVERY DAY, until voting ends on October 10, 2007.
Other links of interest on Vikings and Viking Ships:
Technorati Tags: academia, culture, living, technology
A recent article by Neal Koblitz in the Notices of the AMS, titled "The Uneasy Relationship Between Mathematics and Cryptography," reminds me of the Leo Breiman paper "Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures."
Both papers talk about the cultural and practical differences between various academic departments and how they do research. In the Breiman paper, he noted how progress was a bit limited in the field of statistical modeling by "classical" statisticians until computer scientists came along and opened up the field with new approaches, and corresponding new results.
The Koblitz paper discusses the field of cryptography, and describes how mathematicians and computer scientist cryptographers at first worked well together in coming up with various crypto-systems, but how now that relationship is no longer as solid. While the crypto-systems published by the computer scientist cryptographers are often more practical (usable), they also sometimes rush to publish papers with dramatic errors that might have been caught, say, by a more rigorous approach by a mathematician, such as Koblitz.
Technorati Tags: academia, security, technology
I have posted my PageRank and Knowledge Discovery talks I gave at IPAM for the Knowledge and Search Engines workshop online on my presentations page if you would like to have a look.
Technorati Tags: academia, technology
I am attending a research workshop on knowledge and search engines at UCLA's IPAM this week (and the next several). The image below is a panoramic shot of the UCLA property (May's Landing in Malibu) where we had the kickoff retreat.
Yesterday I gave two tutorial talks. The first was on the basics of Google's PageRank algorithm, and the second was on the basics of knowledge discovery systems. Yesterday Petros Drineas from RPI also gave a talk, on a linear algebra perspective on information retrieval and data mining.
Today Yuval Rabani from the Israel Institute of Technology gave a talk on Metric Geometry. Other speakers today include Rafail Ostrovsky from UCLA (talking about nearest neighbor search and clustering methods) and Peter Jones from Yale University (talking about hierarchical structures in datasets and eigenfunctions).
Rafail is about to begin his talk, as I type.
Technorati Tags: academia
The full report of the Virginia Tech Review Panel regarding the massacre of students and faculty members by Seung Hui Cho has been released.
On April 16, 2007, Seung Hui Cho killed 32 students and faculty, wounded 17, and shot himself. While clearly the fault lies with Cho, an independent investigation was conducted to see if there were any lessons that we could learn so that these tragedies might be prevented in the future.
This BBC article gives a good summary of the results of the report, but some findings seem to be that:
Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher asked a very reasonable and pointed question regarding privacy laws that do more harm than good:
Here's what I don't get. In the hundreds of interviews the panel conducted, why didn't they ask all those people whose job it is to care for students one question: How would you have handled Cho if you had let your conscience, not privacy laws, guide you?
It also seems unfortunate that Cho's high school, which recognized his mental health problems and intervened to give him special assistance, tutoring, and programs so that he could graduate high school, did not tell Virginia Tech about Cho's situation. As quoted in this article about Cho's early childhood:
"What the admissions staff at Virginia Tech did not see were the special accommodations that propped up Cho and his grades," including private sessions with teachers that spared him public speaking...
Strangely, the report did not talk about religion.
Hopefully the report's findings will be heeded by universities, governments, and mental health workers, to help prevent something like that from happening again. But we all should not forget what happened on that tragic day.
A colleague just gifted me with the book Smart and Simple Financial Strategies for Busy People
Unlike complex financial strategies based on timing the market or spending inordinate amounts of time and energy tracking various stocks and funds, Quinn's advice is motivated by the desire for simple strategies that anyone, with any schedule, can implement. Anyone has time to follow her advice and reap the rewards. Topics include buying insurance, buying a house, getting rid of debt, and how to invest money.
Matthew Gabriele at Modern Medieval highlights an interesting point about Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho---that Cho seems to have been strongly motivated by the Christian tradition.
Says Matthew, about Cho's Christian influence:
He likely thought himself, like Mark David Uhl, like those in Battlecry, like Paul Hill, like the Lord's Resistance Army, like the crusaders, to be a "soldier of Christ." Normative Christianity may not condone such action but perhaps it's time to stop burying our head in the sand, pretending that such ideas aren't still out there.
A summary article in the Roanoke Times offers support for this view:
During one session, Giovanni described having once eaten turtle soup. Students shared experiences of consuming other unusual animal fare. Cho's poem the next week lashed Giovanni and the class.
"He told us we were going to hell," said Marciniak-McGuire.
During Cho's short, tortured life, he knew that territory well.
Also, it sounds like much of Cho's writings, his manifesto, and videos evoke Christian God and Jesus themes, as Matthew discusses in this expanded version of a Roanoke Times article.
A Google search on "warriors for christ" returned about 18,000 hits. Cho could have been trying to implement this mixed Christian message, with tragic and deadly consequences.
Hopefully the upcoming report from the Virginia Tech Review Panel will shed some light on the mysteries of the Cho's massacre, but it is likely that many questions will remain unanswered.
My previous entries on this incident are "Black Monday at Virginia Tech" and "Virginia Tech: the face of a killer".
It is easier than ever for anyone in the world to get a good education. Many top universities are placing their course content online, for free. There are also other educational resources put online by universities and organizations (like podcasts from NASA).
For many of the courses, not only do you get the syllabus for the course, but lecture notes, assignments, and sometimes even audio and video of the lectures!
Popsci.com recently posted a survey of many of the online resources, and I have included some below, including one that popsci missed.
So now it is easier to realize your dream, learn something new, or chart a new career. Best of all, you do not even have to get off your couch to take a class, since everything is online. Why wait until tomorrow to learn that language, write that book, solve that problem, or write that code?
I have been asked to give two tutorial lectures at this fall's Mathematics of Knowledge and Search Engines workshop series at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, which is a part of UCLA.
I just found out about this (me presenting), so it looks like I'll be busy preparing the talks from now until then. When I find out more information I will post it here.
Here is an overview of the workshop series:
The rise of the search engine as a major tool for searches on the internet has spawned a large and growing industry that has changed modern commerce, education, and the study of scientific, financial, and social data bases. The underpinnings of these search engines are mathematical algorithms which are well adapted to large and rapid computations, mainly from linear algebra. While the impact of this industry has been enormous, there is a parallel development in the applications of these methods to other related problems concerning the extraction of knowledge from large databases. This long program at IPAM will be devoted to new mathematics and methodologies of knowledge engines: the mathematical procedures used to extract knowledge from large databases. While this includes topics related to search engines it is mainly devoted to the more general problem of finding features in a database or using defined features to search within a database. It is expected that this program will be of interest to a large number of scientific fields, including pure and applied mathematics, statistics, bioinformatics, and engineering.
In addition to the tutorial sessions, the rest of the workshops are as follows:
Technorati Tags: academia, income, job, science, technology, travel, work
Ever wanted to read more, but never seem to have the time?
If so, you may be interested in DailyLit, a site that will break up a book you want to read into easily-digestible chunks and send you one chunk per day (or more, if you like). The chunks are small enough that you can read them in less than five minutes, and so by reading a little each day, in between your moments of busyness, you can complete books that you have been meaning to read, but never quite have the time for.
The books you subscribe to can be sent to you via email or RSS. The service is free, and the books are free too.
Because if you are like us, you spend hours each day reading email but don't find the time to read books. DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read. This works incredibly well not just on your computer but also on a Treo, Blackberry, Sidekick or whatever the PDA of your choice. In the words of Dr. Seuss: Try it, you might like it! (Oops -- it would appear that the actual quote from Green Eggs and Ham is "You do not like them. So you say. Try them! Try them! And you may.")
Do you believe in elves? They are not just for Tolkienites, you know.
As an Icelander, I am aware that invisible creatures are lurking about all around us. Growing up in the countryside, I lived on a farm at the foot of a mountain, where consideration toward the hidden world was as common as the courtesy you pay any other farm denizen."Don't touch the cows while they're milking!" "Don't handle the lambs or the ewes won't take to them!" "Don't climb up on that rock because you'll disturb the elves!" "Don't feed the horses before you ride. It'll make them gassy." "Don't make so much noise by that hill there. Someone might be trying to sleep inside it!"
I've been to Iceland, and I believe!
Note that it's never to late to pursue your dream.
Recently, the famed guitarist for the music group Queen, 60-year old Brian May, handed in his PhD thesis, 36 years after interrupting his studies to play in the band.
His area of study is Astronomy at the Imperial College, London, and the title of his thesis is "Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud". He still has to defend his thesis, which will happen on 23 August of this year. Nevertheless, the completion of his thesis, especially with such a significant gap in this studies, is a significant accomplishment.
The rock star is also preparing a concert to mark the inauguration of a telescope at the Observatory of the Roque de Los Muchachos in La Palma, Tenerife, where he completed his studies last month.
Finally, for a bit of Lord of the Rings humor, you may find the following animated gif amusing:
http://www.blogizdat.com/lotr/walkintomordor.gifA friend has gifted me with a new book: Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America
Recently published, this book takes the reader on a tour of the last several thousand years, specifically analyzing the comparisons between the United States and Rome---as cultures and as models for nations. The arguments advanced by the author, Cullen Murphy, who was the editor of The Atlantic magazine and is now the editor of Vanity Fair, seem to be thoughtfully put together, rather than the alarmist and shallow chatter so often heard on talk radio and in Washington D.C.
So, I am definitely looking forward to reading this!
Viking treasure found in Britain!
"We were astonished when we finally discovered what it contained."
The ancient objects come from as far afield as Afghanistan in the East and Ireland in the West, as well as Russia, Scandinavia and continental Europe.
The hoard contains 617 silver coins and 65 other objects, including a gold arm-ring and a gilt silver vessel.
Dr Jonathan Williams, keeper of prehistory in Europe at the British Museum, said: "[The cup] is beautifully decorated and was made in France or Germany at around AD900.
"It is fantastically rare - there are only a handful of others known around the world. It will be stunning when it is fully conserved."
There are many responsible approaches countries can do to help decrease dependence on polluting petroleum products and move a country's industries and population to a more sustainable lifestyle.
Italy has answered this noble challenge by...banning ties:
"Taking your tie off immediately lowers the body temperature by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius," the ministry said in a statement. "Allowing a more sensible use of air conditioning that yields electricity savings and protects the environment."
However, Italy's tie-makers aren't taking this well:
"Italy confirms that it is a strange country," Flavio Cima said in a letter to financial daily Il Sole 24 Ore under the headline: "I, tie maker, am responsible for global warming".
"We can now happily continue with our lifestyle, using cars, consuming fuel, heating and cooling our homes at leisure. On one condition: we should not wear a tie while we do so," he wrote.
Remember, all you need to do is write.
Josh Catone over at Read/WriteWeb has posted a self-publishing toolkit---how to write and publish a novel.
Follow his approach, using 100% online tools, and you will have something, guaranteed. His best idea is to check out the National Novel Writing Month as a strong motivator to get yourself writing, and Sitepoint, where you can take bids on your novel's book cover designs, for example.
Finally, sometimes you just never know what you are going to see when you look outside your bedroom window.
Technorati Tags: academia, book, culture, living, religion, spirit
Paul Erdös was (1913-1996) a Hungarian-born mathematician known for being prolific (about 1,500 papers with about 510 co-authors) and eccentric. As to the latter, he spent most of his life traveling from place to place, staying in the homes of colleagues. Most of his possessions fit into his suitcase, and after staying a few days he would move on to the next colleague, for another few days of collaboration.
In this way, Paul demonstrated that science is a social enterprise. Research is conducted and papers are published through clusters networked scientists working together. In fact, Paul is known for research in random graph theory with Alfred Renyi (the latter is also known for saying that "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems").
Because of Paul's research and behaviors, we was a bit of a star in the scientific community. Then, and perhaps more so today, it is popular to calculate one's Erdös Number, which is basically a way of measuring the publication distance between one person and Paul Erdös.
For example, someone who co-authored a paper with Paul would have an Erdös Number of 1, and there are about 510 people with this Erdös Number. Someone who wrote a paper with a co-author of Paul Erdös would have an Erdös Number of 2, etc.
Note that having a small Erdös Number is something that many people take quite seriously.
Currently, my Erdös Number is 4 (which also happens to be the Erdös Number of Bill Gates), and I also happen to have 4 separate publication paths to Paul, each of length 4.
The Erdös Number Project is organized to study research collaborations, and contains a large amount of information about collaboration research, information about Paul Erdös, and even allows you to calculate your own Erdös Number. This project is a subset of a much larger field of study on random graphs, clustering, the structure of the Internet, computer networks, data analysis, and social networks. If you have ever heard someone say "It's a small world!!!" or have ever played the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, then in a sense all this research about the structure of networks is about explaining this small-world phenomenon.
A quote from the book Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means
The very existence of the Erdös Number demonstrates that the scientific community forms a highly interconnected network in which all scientists are linked to each other through the papers they have written. The smallness of most Erdös Numbers indicates that this web of science truly is a small world.
I've long been an admirer of Edward Tufte's design books, especially The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
It was with this book that he became famous as a guru of Information Design, partially for his analysis of Charles Joseph Minard's infographic of the disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia by France.
He concentrates on detailing how to make graphics that present information clearly and succinctly, while avoiding common design problems. He gives examples throughout history of good designs and bad designs, and explains why they are so. As someone who went to business school, and who sat through too many business meetings, it is clear to me that too few people are familiar with Tufte's work.
From an interview with Tufte, here is how he got started on the path of Information Design:
In the mid-1970s, while at Princeton, I gave a statistics course to a dozen journalists who were visiting the school. I thought "Well, journalists have to know about statistical graphics...", so I prepared a collection of readings, with a section on statistical graphics. The literature was thin, grimly devoted to explaining use of the ruling pen and to promulgating "graphic standards" indifferent to sensible quantitative reasoning. Soon I started writing up some ideas about my growing collection of graphics. Then John W. Tukey, the phenomenal Princeton statistician, suggested that we give a series of joint seminars. Tukey had opened up the field in the mid-1960s, as his brilliant technical contributions made it clear that the study of statistical graphics was intellectually respectable and not just about pie charts and ruling pens. This focused my mind, since I had to talk for two hours every other week to the students in front of John Tukey! The seminar proved reassuring: I had something to say. Those seminars led to my first book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and changed my life, all to the good.
 Graphics Press |
From a Wired article about Tufte's thoughts on PowerPoint:
PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.
From an interview with Tufte on NPR:
Far too often, he says, the bells and whistles of PowerPoint are used as a crutch by people who don't have anything to say. "If your words aren't truthful, the finest optically letter spaced typography won't help," he says. "And if your images aren't on point, making them dance in color in three dimensions won't help."
His new book, Beautiful Evidence
The Vikings were some of the best sailors, ship-builders, and explorers the world has known.
The remains of a Viking warship was found in 1962, and has been rebuilt using traditional Viking tools and building methods by a dedicated team.
From the BBC news article, The return of the Viking warship:
More than 7,000 iron rivets, 2,000m of rope and 300 ancient Danish oaks were used in the reconstruction. After four years of painstaking work, the Sea Stallion from Glendalough was launched on 4 September 2004.
Now, the team behind the project wants to know whether the reconstruction is capable of making the kind of journeys the Vikings once undertook. To find out, the ship is being taken over 1,000 miles (1,600km) across the North Sea to Orkney and on to Dublin.
UPDATE: You can follow a diary of the voyage at the BBC site.
Here is probably the best way to hide your iPod or iPhone from theft---disguise it as a Microsoft Zune:
Ever wanted to watch a book being made? Here is a link to a short movie of a paperback book being printed and bound.
And just because this is where you go a lot when in Los Angeles:
It's tough being a bag in Los Angeles. Or at least my backpack thinks so.
Every day that I have been in Los Angeles so far I have been out walking or riding my bike. Usually I have my backpack with me, to hold my laptop, some books, and other items. My backpack is one of those padded computer backpacks---in specific, the Dell C8882 Inspiron 17" Laptop Backpack
For a while the backpack worked well, as it had lots of padding, held the laptop plus lots of books, had numerous pockets to hold odds and ends, and was comfortable to wear. But under extended use, especially since I have been out in Los Angeles, the backpack has not aged well. In specific, the padding in the shoulder straps has started to slide around, all the seams started looking fuzzy, like the material was wearing out, and a seam on one of the straps actually split open. So rather than be caught off-guard by a total backpack malfunction one day, far from home, I decided to look for a replacement.
My criteria: I wanted a bag that could hold my laptop, several books, and a few extra odds and ends; was waterproof (the backpack was not); and that would be comfortable and secure while walking or riding a bike. More subjective criteria included having a smaller form factor than the backpack and being more stylish. When loaded, the Dell backpack could easily knock someone over standing next to me if I turned around suddenly, and it also had a major Forrest Gump vibe going---something that doesn't compute in style-sensitive L.A.
And my wife imposed the criteria that the bag had to be less than $100.
So I headed to a large mall on Santa Monica and stopped into the Tumi store. Their T-Tech Pulse Eldridge Computer Messenger Bag seemed really nice, except that it was not waterproof (the sales lady said it is not waterproof, but that it resists water). As nice as the bag seemed, I couldn't see spending $195 for a bag that could not keep my computer dry. Plus, it was about twice my budget.
The sales lady suggested I check out the Louis Vuitton store. They had Very Nice Things, but their $1,300 messenger bags would not fit my laptop. I am also not convinced that their bags would feel comfortable or be appropriate when riding a bike. As for being waterproof, I never got around to asking that question about these bags. I mean, I guess what I am trying to say is that someone in the market for a Louis Vuitton messenger bag would have a different set of criteria than the ones I listed above.
So, just about to give up on my quest, I happened to stop into my local bike shop and they had exactly what I was looking for.
The bag that fit all my requirements turned out to be the
Timbuk2 Commute Messenger Bag
For many years Timbuk2 has made quality messenger bags, and the Commute was designed for the professional who wants something different than the traditional boxy briefcase, and who needs a rugged and travel-friendly bag that can hold a laptop.
This bag has a ballistic nylon exterior and a molded padded back panel (shown above). The bottom is double-padded and has an extra rubberized bottom layer (not shown).
The inside has a padded compartment for the laptop (the X-Large Commute bag fits the 17" Apple Powerbook) and the bag itself is waterproof. It has a handle for convenient hand-carry and comes with a second strap to secure around the waist for when riding a bike (or running to catch a taxi).
And, though the bag retails for $120, you can likely find it for less (I did, and it met my authorized budget).
All in all, the Timbuk2 Commute is a quality bag that seems to be very durable, to be useful and stylish, and to have enough features to make the price seem more than reasonable.
A friend gifted me with a new book: The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born
Max Born was a German mathematician and physicist who won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics, and gave to the world the foundation for quantum mechanics. I look forward to diving into this story about one of the world's best scientists.
And, just glancing at the back cover, it turns out Olivia Newton-John is his granddaughter!
So today I decided to make a tour around the UCLA campus.
The University of California, Los Angeles, or UCLA, has the largest enrollment of any university in the state and consistently ranks as one of the top universities in the world.
The campus is large (about 419 acres) and the buildings have a detailed, solid architectural style (Romanesque Revival?). As an example, the building below is the Powell Libary, which is the main undergraduate library. Interestingly, it was one of the original four buildings on campus.
In 1995, according to wikipedia, of the 36 PhD programs that were examined by the National Research Council, 11 departments made the top ten list.
Also, since 1998, no American university has had more applicants -- out of 50,732 applicants for fall 2007, 11,860 (23.38%) were admitted.
The building below is the IPAM building, or the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. The mission of IPAM is to serve as a collaboration center for mathematicians, engineers, and scientists to work on a wide variety of interdisciplinary problems. For example, during the summer IPAM organizes RIPS, which is a research program for talented undergraduates to solve a variety of problems for a variety of companies, such as Symantec, Pixar, and some of the national labs (LANL, LLNL, JPL).
The IPAM building, though a break from the main architectural style of the campus, was designed by noted architect Frank Gehry in the mid-1970s. Inside there is an open design with large windows that provides a lot of light and helps foster collaboration spaces for visiting researchers.
Another building that moves to the minimalist end of design is the Ronald Reagan Medical Center, below.
Finally, on my way back to my room after touring around the campus, I stopped by a small cafe for some food. Of course, I was riding my folding bike, so when I went in to order my food I naturally carried it with me.
While I was waiting for my food, this man and woman had pulled up on a large BMW motorcycle. The lady rider, in leather jacket and helmet, came into the cafe through the door as I was exiting through the door, still carrying my little folding bike. She saw it and gave me an "All right!". So either she really approved of me and my bike, or she was greatly amused -- I am not quite sure which.
OK, genealogy, and academic genealogy at that - perhaps not the most stimulating of topics.
However, thanks to the Mathematics Genealogy Project, and some curiosity, I was able to trace back my academic genealogy from my advisor, to his advisor, to his advisor, etc., all the way back until the records gave out. (Note: I did a quick initial search -- I may continue this project in the future as time permits.)
Amazingly, I was able to trace my academic heritage all the way back to 1650, to an academic ancestor named Erhard Weigel, who was a German mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher.
And here is his picture:
Below, starting with Erhard, for each person I state the name and the year of his dissertation, if it is known. A link to the appropriate Wikipedia page is also given, if I could find one. In two cases, for Joseph Liouville and Jacques Hadamard, there are two advisors.
Erhard Weigel, 1650 | | Gottfried Liebniz, 1666 | | Jacob Bernoulli, 1684 | | Johann Bernoulli, 1694 | | Leonhard Euler, 1726 | | Joseph Lagrange ? | | | | Simeon Poisson Louis Thenard | | | | Joseph Liouville, 1835 | Eugene-Charles Catalan, 1841 | | Charles Hermite ? | | | | Jules Tannery C. Emile Picard, 1877 | | | | Jacques Hadamard, 1892 | | Szolem Mandelbrojt, 1923 | | Hugh Daniel Brunk, 1944 | | Timothy Robertson, 1966 | | Edward Wegman, 1968 | | Carey Priebe, 1993 (and David Marchette, 1996) | | Kendall Giles, 2007
I thought John Wesley's Top 5 Ways to Build a Wonderful Life were pretty good:
The scientists who died and are in heaven decide to play hide-n-seek. Unfortunately Einstein is the one who is it first........... He is supposed to count up to 100...and then start searching..... Everyone starts hiding except Newton......... Newton just draws a square of 1 meter and stands in it right in front of Einstein. Einstein's counting: 1,2,3......97,98,99.....100........ He opens his eyes and finds Newton standing right in front of him........ Einstein says "Newton's out..Newton's out....." Newton denies this and says "I am not out........I am not Newton......" All the scientists come out to see how he proves that he is not Newton. Newton says "I am standing in an area of 1 sq meter..... That makes me Newton per square meter...... Since one Newton per square meter is one Pascal, I'm Pascal, Therefore Pascal is OUT.......!
If you want to get up-close and personal with the events in Iraq, you really should check out Michael Yon's Online Magazine. Mike is reporting on Iraq by embedding with the troops there, on the ground, with the bullets and bombs. Thus, he brings a perspective unmatched by any news broadcast from New York or the Green Zone. Not only his stories, but his images too capture a previously unseen view of life and war in Iraq. From his "A Memorial Day Message" article:
Yet Mosul is still dangerous. In January, a Humvee with five passengers rolled over a massive IED. The vehicle was completely destroyed. My first mission with James Pippin was the recovery of the five men killed. CSM Pippin set the leadership tone that horrible day and demonstrated moral strength far above and beyond what I believe most men could bear. CSM Pippin and I had just been swapping some emails within the past week, when a message came less than 24 hours ago that he, too, had been shot in Mosul.Mike is also the author of the bestseller Danger Close
, which tells Mike's own story of growing up in Florida, joining the Army, becoming a Green Beret by the age of 19, and having his life altered by one night in a Maryland bar.
As we toured the bar, a man approached, got uncomfortably close, and snarled his contemptuous opinion of our short haircuts in Steve's face. A brown belt with an Indian head buckle marked the border between his blue pants and beige shirt. He wore a white metal necklace, and on his right arm was a tattoo, which seemed to be a marijuana leaf. I'd experimented a little myself during the waning months of high school. It confused me-but not enough to celebrate with a tattoo. On his left arm he had taken pains to emblazon in red: Death Before Dishonor-a clear warning to all of dangerous waters, like a sign that says "No Swimming-Crocodiles".
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This year marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. Though Europeans had visited this land long before, Jamestown, settled in 1607, was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas.
Many festivities and events are taking place this year. This weekend, for example, sees a replica of the boat that settler John Smith used to explore the Chesapeake Bay set sail on a 121-day journey to retrace his voyage.
This past Friday saw Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II return to Virginia, revisiting Richmond, Jamestown, and William & Mary.
Just in case you are wondering, that's the Queen, on the right, and Former Supreme Court Justice and current W&M Chancellor Sandra Day O'Connor on the left, at W&M.
