Bryan Dahmes

Sometimes I hate my analysis...

I'm actually kind of superstitious.  Every so often I really believe that if I talk about things I'll jinx them.  For example, I was heading to a basketball game with a few friends many years ago.  Golden State vs. Minnesota, so we needed to head over to East Bay.  About a third of the way across the bridge, one of the guys said he was amazed how little traffic was on the bridge at that time.  Within 30 seconds, we got stuck in traffic.  We were stuck on the bridge for nearly an hour.

I apply this sort of superstition to my thesis analysis.  I usually try to keep my deadlines for small (timescale of a day or a week) projects only.  None of the "my analysis should be done next month".  A little cynical, I know.  Lately I've been changing things around a bit, to the point that I was actually thinking I had everything done, and that I should have a completed analysis and be able to start trying to publish things in about a week.

Well, that was over a month ago now.

While I was finishing some things up, I noticed that there seemed to be one small little effect on my final results.  Tiny.  A couple percent or so.  Nothing to sneeze at.  I figured it should take me a day to run some sanity checks, maybe fix a minor bug or inconsistency in my analysis code, and everything would take care of itself.

Well...not so lucky.  It turns out this teeny little effect was evidence that I've got a bit of a bias in my analysis, and I've gotta get rid of it.  It's kind of a hard thing to nail down, and I wasn't really expecting it to be there.  It took a while to understand that it was a bias and not a bug.  Now I'm sure my code works, but I need to find a work around for this bias.  It might take me a little while...or I might get lucky and have everything work in a couple of days.

Anyway, I'm slogging through this stuff now, and it can be really depressing.  I can't move forward until I conquer this thing, so I'm kind of stuck until I figure a way out.  I hate being stuck...

einstein and crackpots

I just got pointed to a cute little piece in a radio program from Julie (thanks!).  Go to http://thislife.org.  Find the episode called "A little bit of knowledge", and go to about the 30 min 40 sec mark in the program.  It's a story about an electrician who takes a year out of his life to try and prove that Einstein was wrong in his theory of relativity.

Now this is kind of a big deal.  I mean after all, Einstein is pretty much the father of modern physics.  Everybody knows this guy in some form or another.  For the next couple of weeks here at SLAC we're having our "summer school".  This year's series of topics are mostly gravitation.  So it's Einstein, Einstein, Einstein all the time, and for a very good reason. 

I listened to this radio program, and I'm sure this thing is very familiar to a lot of physicists.  You get some sort of so-called "crackpot" who comes up with the claim that Einstein's relativity is wrong, or Quantum Mechanics is broken, or something like that.  Invariably, the author (or whatever) claims the solution to these problems is always very simple, but the details "haven't quite gotten worked out yet".  I used to get mails all the time from people claiming they'd discovered the true theory of the universe...at least I got them all the time until our spam-filter got a little stronger. 

I've been approached once when I was giving a tour of SLAC about something like this.  This guy knew somebody who was "really smart" who had figured out something that nobody could understand, but what if it's right?  Nobody would listen to him, but if I would take up his cause, certainly some good would come of it...

It's really kind of cute, and sad, and funny all at the same time.  Everybody wants to understand what's going on with the world, and I'll admit that the way physics is done, things get scary from time to time.  Why can't they be simpler?  If there was just an easier way to understand things, the whole world would benefit.  So I admire the efforts of everyone who tries to make sense of things.  Sometimes the math gets nasty, or at the very least, it gets a little cumbersome.  That seems to be the nature of life.  We take gravity for granted, but if I recall correctly, Isaac Newton had to invent calculus to really get to the heart of things.

Having said that, I really don't think that people should just say "ugh.  math hard" and quit trying to understand things.  And they certainly shouldn't stop trying to figure stuff out.  Thinking is what sets us apart from the rest of creation.  Well, that, and these nifty opposable thumbs.  There's gotta be some common ground somewhere.

It's been a long time since I posted anything...

Actually, I've been so close to finishing my work recently.  I have to finish writing my BAD (short for Babar Analysis Document) before I can submit it to the review process.  At the beginning of July I went for it.  Cut down on a lot of other things to try to finish this paper before the 4th.  And I almost got there.  A lot of work, but I had the results.  Maybe 2-5% more work to finish off, then proofreading the paper, and that would be it.  Then I start the review.  From there I condense the paper I have now (about 150 pages) to a new one that would be about 10 pages or so.  That one would get published.  Then, the thesis.

Well, I'm still on that 2-5%, and it's been a week or so.  I added a few more pieces to my analysis, so I made progress without getting closer to being done, but these last few bits are killing me.  I need to get them done, but there always seems to be one extra thing to finish.  Today I am fixing a small bug in my code that changed my results slightly.  After that, I've just got a teensy bit of stuff left to do.  I'm optimistic that I could be done by the middle of the week.  I hope so.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to start working out again.  End of last week, I just got tired.  Thursday and Friday were basically just me sleepwalking.  I didn't go to TKD this week at all.  Skipped wushu on Friday, too.  Slept a LOT this weekend.  So this week is a good chance to get back into things.

May was busy

Okay, been a long time again, but I've got a chance to post again.

I've actually been really happy with how work has been going recently.  Not as fast as I would like it to, but I think that I have most of my results done.  I'm working on some finishing details at the moment, and I should be able to start getting my analysis reviewed in a couple of weeks.  I'll leave this alone for now, because there's a lot of other stuff that I want to talk about before it becomes far too late for me to mention it.

Anyway, last time I posted I mentioned that I was going to be going to the "Night of Wushu" being held at Stanford.  It seems like it's kind of hard to describe wushu to people.  I say that I've started taking wushu at stanford, and they wonder if I've suddenly taken up asian cooking or something (wushu sounds too much like mushu, or something like that).  I took a brief look at the wikipedia.com entry on wushu, and I think they said it should call to mind the idea of kung fu.  So that's cool.

I've got a really good friend in the TKD club who started taking wushu last year.  She's amazingly flexible, strong, and graceful.  So Audrey started doing really neat things right away.  She competed for Stanford at wushu collegiates last year.  I think she medalled a couple of times.  Really, really impressive.  Anyway, after getting to see her perform, and seeing a bunch of other people my size and smaller just doing incredible things, I started really wanting to try this.  Growing up, I was always kinda small so I never really thought I would be that athletic.  Growing up a little more, I started to find myself strong for my size.  In TKD I'm actually big enough to "bully" people in my weight class cuz I can hit harder than a few people.  So I guess one thing I lack is finesse, or any amount of fluidity, grace, that sort of thing.  So I'm close to the last person that should take up something that is very stylized.

Naturally, I took this as a challenge. :)

This quarter I started up with the stanford wushu club.  I was a little worried about this for a couple of reasons.  One, I'm kind of afraid to leave my feet.  I'm not very good at jumping (although I can jump high.  It's landing, or looking like I know what I'm doing is when I have issues) or spinning.  Wushu is pretty much a lot of jumping and spinning.  Two, around January I pulled what feels like a groin muscle, or something around there.  I tried resting it and that didn't work.  So I decided that I'd try to start working out again and see if I could gently bring things back to normal.  Well, wushu involves a lot of deep, long stretches.  The idea is to get you doing the splits ASAP.  Develop a lot of leg strength and a lot of flexibility.  Deep squats, etc.  Things that can be very painful for a pulled muscle.

I'm amazed, but I think all the stuff I've done with wushu has actually helped my recovery.  Things still hurt, but not nearly as much as they did when I first pulled it, or even when I was taking all the time off to rest things.  I guess the best rehab up to this point was just to work out.

Anyway, I've been involved with the club for a quarter now.  I've been taught how to do the first (beginner) set of movements.  Now I just have to look like I know what I'm doing.  My legs are getting a little stronger, but I still have a long way to go.  My flexibility has gotten better, I think.  I don't think my leg goes any higher, but it's easier to get to that height now.

Night of Wushu was a real motivator for me.  I got to see both of our instructors (Wong Laoshi and Zhang Laoshi) perform.  Wong Laoshi performed a drunken-style set (think jackie chan's "drunken master" movies), and Zhang Laoshi has an amazing double straight sword set.  I was nearly two hours of people doing amazing things.  Flying through the air (Audrey got literally thrown around in one of the fighting sets she did), using weapons, all the good stuff.  Really amazing, and I hope I have the time to keep at it.

With the Stanford school year up, there's a break in wushu practice for about a month.  Then both instructors plus several of the students are heading to Beijing to practice for a month.  Sounds awesome.  Hopefully someday I'll get that chance.  Better start really working on my splits...

tkd stuff this may

Sorry I haven't posted in a while.  Had to take the last one down, and I've managed to get a bit busy lately...

Actually, this month is a really nice mix of busyness.  For the moment, work is actually going really well.  I'm trying to finish off an internal document that gives all the details of my analysis.  Currently it's sitting at about 120 pages or so, and I've got a bit more work to put into it.  Once this is finished, it'll go through review here and I'll write a paper intended for publication.  Thankfully, that one will be shorter.  While my analysis is going through review, I'll be writing my thesis and looking for jobs.  The good news this month is that I'm making (what feels like) a lot of progress.  Pieces are starting to fit together, I think.

Outside of work, I've been pretty busy, too.  May is a really busy month for the Stanford TKD club.  This weekend I helped referee a red/black belt tournament at CSU Hayward.  It's a big change moving from judging (scoring) the match to getting in the center and being a referee.  As a judge, there are two other people scoring along with you, so any mistakes you make can be cancelled out by the other folks.  As a referee, it's just you.  There's also all sorts of little things that players can do to cheat (holding, pushing, etc.) that are easy to see from the corners when you are judging, but are sometimes really tough to see as a referee (a good competitor knows to grab with the hand the ref can't see).  Lots of new stuff to think about, but it's a lot of fun.  Up to this point, I've mainly been a ref for kids' matches (where I am a lot bigger), or color-belt matches (where they don't know what they're doing and it's easier to call things).  With black belt matches, the action can be faster (so you've gotta know where to be, and get out of the way if necessary), and so on.  Pretty fun, plus I got a nifty t-shirt to say thanks for helping.

Next week, the Stanford club is holding an in-house tournament.  I would fight, but I've been nursing a pulled muscle for a couple of months now.  Pretty much only hurts when I kick, which is really annoying.  Anyway, I'll get more referee experience this weekend, too.  Should be a really fun day.  Then two weekends after that (Memorial Day weekend), Stanford is hosting an Open tournament.  I'll be reffing and judging for that one, too.  Should be a lot of fun.  The nice thing is that Stanford gets to hold a referee clinic, and I could actually get certified as an "official" referee this month.  I'm not sure what benefits go with that, but I'm sure I get a certificate or something. :)

Finally, two weekends from now is the "Night of Wushu" at Stanford.  I'll have to talk a bit about the wushu club later.  It's a really fun martial art, but the emphasis has switched from fighting (like with TKD) to demonstration.  Wushu is basically all the cool movie-fighting that you see.  Jet Li stuff.  Anyway, I just started up with that club.  It's a little (ok, a lot) too early for me to do anything, but it'll be good to go to the event and get some motivation.

More rambling

So now we have a pope.  Well, not "we" as in "me", but you get the idea.

Actually, Christina's comment brings up a few things that I was thinking about, too.  It was a really fast decision for who would be the next pope.  Benedict XVI (Cardinal Ratzinger), who has been referred to as the "enforcer of the faith".  Quite a warm, fuzzy title.  Some of the criticism that I've heard is that he's fairly conservative, and that this is supposed to be a bad thing.  Not being Catholic, I don't entirely understand all the implications, but this does raise one issue for me.

Remembering back to the last election, the biggest excuse made for getting Bush elected (at least around here) was all idiot religious nuts went out and voted.  "If only they would think once in a while" was what I'd hear.  Now, I am "religious" (although I hate that word), and I do try to think once in a while.  So why the stereotype?

In a way, I think that I understand.  I know that Religion has gotten in the way of progress from time to time.  The earth was originally seen to be at the center of the universe, and to speak differently was heresy.  Near as I can tell, there's no evidence in the Bible that God made the universe as a bunch of extra "heavens" above a flat earth. To get a little more real, Religion has also promoted the slaughter of millions of people, the oppression of millions of others, and so on and so forth. 

These obstacles to progress really can create an image problem.

I think I understand why people rail against this stuff.  This is why I have a problem with Religion.  Religion and faith are often entirely different concepts.  Faith is remembering Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, where he says that the meek will inherit the earth (not the weak).  It's sometimes hard to see true faith in Religion.  As far as Christianity goes, I think you can sum it up pretty easily..."Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind.  And love your neighbor as yourself".  Another one says that "Religion that God considers pure and faultless is to look after widows and orphans in their distress, and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world".  Not exactly racist, sexist, or all that close-minded.  So somehow we got lost along the way.

To jump to science, I really don't think that the Bible says anything about Quantum Mechanics.  All we have is that God said "Let there be light".  Does it matter that we now call the light "photons"?  There's a t-shirt that I really like, where on the front God "speaks" Maxwell's equations, and on the back it says "and there was light".  When I was in college, a good friend of mine said he got into physics because he wanted to understand the mechanism of God's creation.  I think this is a noble goal.  Granted, by it's very definition, science refuses to deal with God.  Science is a search for "natural laws".  This means that the universe operates without the need for a chariot to carry the sun across the heavens, etc.  God, being supernatural, can't really be defined by science.  From this, people make the jump and say there is no God.  But I don't think that science, in its purest form, excludes God.  I think that it's very easy for science to become a sort of religion itself, where people take what has been said about our universe, and then conclude that science has defeated, or killed, God.  Only fools still believe.  I don't see the leap.

Anyway, I know this is getting long (and I'm in a meeting, so the longer I write the more likely I am to get totally muddled.  Hope I've done okay).  This is a whole huge can of worms.  This is an intensely long discussion.  I'll have to think about this for a while.  Unorganized thoughts in a blog...ugh.

Random...

I know this is a little late to be commenting on the current news, but I've been kind of fascinated by the death of the pope.  I've been thinking about this for a while, but haven't managed to say anything.

It's really weird.  We live in a world today where all the news can be accessed almost immediately.  I'm learning US battle plans by watching CNN or Fox news, and every trial is covered extensively, even when there's nothing to cover.  I think I've got a little ADD, so I lose interest in this stuff pretty fast.  Maybe I've just got a little ostrich syndrome (if I just stick my head in the sand long enough, the world's problems will go away).  At any rate, even though I check CNN.com every day, I tend to avoid anything that goes on for more than a couple of days.

Kobe trial?  I think I learned something, but that's more ESPN's fault.  The Scott Peterson trial?  It was in Redwood City, where I live (and could have conceivably gone to the courtroom to attend), and I ignored it.  I'll admit the Michael Jackson trial kept my interest for a solid couple of hours.  The worst for me was the Terry Schiavo case.  I actually went from disinterest to full on disgust.  All I saw whenever I read the news was bickering, or grand hollow gestures.  None of it felt real.  This is always driven home to me whenever the news moves on to the next big story, completely forgetting about the big stuff that just happened, because people just don't care long enough.

Where was I?  Oh yeah.  I had a point somewhere.  Anyway, for some reason I got really interested when the pope was on his last legs.  I mean, this is something big, right?  I'm protestant, but for some reason I vaguely remember it being a big deal when John Paul II was elected pope.  It was what, 1978?  I was three years old and yet I remember it being a big deal.  Then I found out that there's over a billion Catholics in the world.  This is going to affect a lot of people.  Started finding out a few interesting things, too.  Like JPII is buried in a vacated tomb.  Kind of weirded me out (I thought only one guy did that) til I found out that the previous occupant's body was moved pending canonization.  So I started doing things like checking out various Catholic rituals and traditions on Wikipedia.com...amazing, really.

So, this is a big event, and I'm actually trying to keep my eye on things.  In the next couple of weeks, billions of lives could potentially be changed.  Some people are hoping that the new pope will bring the Catholic church "into the present", others worry what would happen if the next pope were too liberal.  All of this is probably not going to affect my daily life too much, because I think that most people understand that even among Christians there are quite a few differences.  But I think it's going to affect everybody, at least a little.

Rough week

Last monday morning, I was talking to Lucinda, and I was saying that I could have a rough day or two ahead of me.  I'm in the middle of trying to write my BAD (Babar Analysis Document), and it's been a while since I've had to write anything.  So I'm going through all the annoyance of trying to take what I know and put it down on paper in such a way that everyone who reads the BAD will know what I'm talking about.  I'm at the tail end of things, and since I'll be trying to get my analysis reviewed and published soon, I'll need this supporting document to be ship-shape.

Anyway, I've come to realize that I hate writing.  At least starting to write.  Writer's block sucks, and it's really easy to get distracted.  It's easy to make a plot of the data that tells my story better than words, and then lose the desire to actually write words.  It becomes a sort of "Look!  Can't you see?" sort of thing.  Of course, try getting something approved with nothing but a picture.  Unless you're an artist, of course.

So anyway, Lucinda was nice enough to send me a Calvin and Hobbes strip :

She figured that if my day was going to be tough, it always helps to laugh about it a little bit.

It was weird...the strip kind of turned out to be prophetic for the week.  Right after getting off the phone I found a new decay mode in my data.  That's actually a good thing, cuz it's something new to look at, and it gets to be mine.  But...it does mean that we have to figure out why we didn't expect to see it, if it's really there, that sort of thing.  I think my advisor's exact words were "You found something new!  You're never going to graduate"  Took a little bit of the wind out of my sails.  This changed my day from "write like mad" to trying to figure out what the heck happened.  This went on for a while, and I'm now to the point that I'm writing like mad so that I can catch up to my analysis and start working on the new stuff.

While I was going back over things and putting them in the BAD, I realized that I'd made a few changes since I made various plots and tables.  So I started remaking things, and in the process of remaking things I learned that things had changed enough that I had to figure out why stuff was so different.  It seemed like one thing after another was breaking.  Nothing made sense, and I essentially felt like I was starting over.

Fortunately, I think I've gotten past the worst of it...maybe.  There's still a lot of writing to do, but I understand and have fixed the problems that I created last week.  It's not like these things are necessarily all that bad, but it sure does add to the stress level.  Hopefully this week will be more productive.

NCAA tourney

The NCAA tourney's been a lot of fun this year.  Sure, I was upset that I didn't manage to draft Minnesota, but I was able to console myself with the points that I got from Iowa State.  Basically, in an attempt to make the game more 'skillful', each first round game victory is worth 3 points.  Second round games are 4 points, and so on up to the championship game, which is worth 8 points.  This means that the eventual champion is worth a whopping 33 points, but since the early games have so many points available, 'strategy' in picking the right upsets can get you the win without actually picking the winner.

So, like I said earlier, being a little afraid of busting out on the 1 seeds (and honestly, how much skill does it take to put all your money on the best team?), I went and picked up one 2 seed (Oklahoma State), a couple of fours (one of which was Louisville) and a few others that netted me some early round points.  Bottom line is that I have guaranteed myself of at least 3rd place this year.  I currently have the most points (37), with one of the final four teams (like I said, Louisville).  The guy who bought Illinois (Brian H) pretty much lost everyone except the Illini pretty early, so he has to win it all to outscore me (of course, Illinois is a 1 seed, so they're expected to).  One guy (Kirby) only really had Carolina and Wisconsin, but that was enough to do a lot of damage this year, as he was the only guy with two elite eight teams.  The final team was taken by Bob, and he's got the same fear of one seeds.  I think he bought Stanford last year and learned his lesson.

So anyway, this year I am guaranteed to finish in the money.  3rd place pays $10, so I could be happy with that.  I would really like to win a little more though.  Not for the money, but instead to quietly pay back a couple of trash-talkers.  The fun thing every year isn't really winning (although that's a big plus), it's being able to ridicule the other seven guys for their choices.  If you bomb out early, you're pretty much pitied and everyone takes their time patting you on the head and feeling sorry for you.  That happened to me two years ago, and I'm still getting grief for it.  Brian's been sending out "I can't believe you're doing so well, I was feeling so sorry for you" mails to me.  Really, really want to beat him.  Kirby's the reigning champ, and he's been talking it up with wisconsin and carolina, saying he only needed two teams to beat our 8, and so on.  I've been trying to lie low for a while.  I haven't said anything (and neither has Bob).  Neither of us are big taunters, and we're each hoping that our teams can quietly trounce the big one seeds.  If that happens, I might talk a little smack...but I doubt it.

laptop

I loaned out my laptop to my office mate this week.  I was thinking that I hadn't had my laptop for too long, and he really needed something for this conference that he was going to.  I figured that I hadn't really gotten attached, so there'd be no problem.

Man, it's amazing how quickly you can get to love your little toys.  He came back today, and it was like Christmas.  I usually not much of a tech-lover, but I get attached quickly.  It took me forever to get a cell phone.  I always thought they were too...something.  But now, I take mine with me when I'll be out of the office for five minutes.  It's not that I expect a call, but still...

I think the laptop is turning into the same thing.  I used to really wonder how useful something like this could possibly be...and now I'm hooked.