Wednesday: Boring math stuff

It's still boring, but things seemed to work today.  Woo.

Apparently from a show called "Working!!"

It looks interestingly silly.

• Funny things:
• Oshawott.
• Quagsire.
• Squirrel.
• Food things:
• Finn.  Cake, but not that Cake.
• There's a BBQ/crab restaurant in Aiea?  I may need to visit them.
• Vintage Cave seems a little bit excessive.  Mavro had a more friendly tone, but everything I read about this place makes it sound extra-pretentious.
• People this dumb should resign their positions, as they clearly have no idea how government and the economy work.

Tuesday: Algorithm/implementation/testing

It seems like too many things have piled up in the last category.  Due to network flakiness at work today, I was able to get an initial implementation done for the idea I had yesterday.  It appears to be finding the center correctly, but there's some weird interpolation error that it's screwing up the envelope calculation.  Still, very promising results for an idea I should have had two months ago.

I saw this video yesterday:

And then I saw this one:

I think that illustrates the main difference between NK and the US.  They get people who are so excited to be on video talking about an upcoming war that they're nearly in tears.  We make videos of dogs that look silly when they look backwards.  I think that pretty firmly establishes the fact that everyone talking about how prepared we need to be are kind of crazy.  Killing a bunch of people who have been deluded into thinking all of the US is out to get them isn't really any form of justice.  If only we could show them the millions of pet videos that show what we really care about.

• Oh look, Dick Cheney has exactly the opposite opinion on things.  How surprising.  It's almost as if this Onion video entitled "Ten Years Later, Cheney Haunted By People He Didn't Manage To Kill In Iraq War" wasn't actually parody.
• I had a thought about this, but didn't care enough to fully flesh it out.  Something about forcing down wages through high unemployment to ensure high investor returns as an actual plan instead of a coincidence.
• "If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic."
• Squirrel!

Monday: Finally came up with a decent solution

I've been fighting this damn referee report for like a month now.  Pretty much none of the things I've tried have come up with a reasonable result that seemed useful enough to put into the paper.  I think I've come up with a way to fix that.  The referee wants a comparison between our Method X and a "direct analysis" for some sample of the data.  I've been trying to come up with an external way to do this, and failing miserably.  Today I realized that Method X supports modules, and I can easily add a non-parametric Method X-2 that I can use to do this comparison.

Why did it take me so long to realize this when modules are part of the reason Method X is so cool?  Sometimes I'm a bit slow at things.

Now, all I have to do is to find the time to implement the non-parametric method, debug it, and do the comparison.  Yay! Imaginary time!

Clearly this bird needed a break.

Just a cool picture.

• I'm sure this was sent by a computer, but at some point, someone had to type in that name.  You'd think it'd register a double-take.
• Really? Wonder Woman vs. John Constantine?  Superman punching a hole in Green Arrow's chest?  Aquaman vs. Martian Manhunter (who I shouldn't need to remind you, is on the Superman scale of power, not the "empty bag" scale that Aquaman inhabits)?  Superman fighting Captain Marvel (who I refuse to call "Shazam," because that's not his damn name)?  The abomination that is the shit they wrote into the Question and Phantom Stranger stories?  Fuck you, DC.
• It's probably in bad taste to suggest that a reporter who gets killed in a war that he wildly promoted got what he deserved.  Probably.

Sunday: Continuing things not going as planned

The plan, with those accomplished crossed off:

1. Taxes.
2. Laundry.
3. Dishes.
4. Trash.
5. Math stuff.
6. Different math stuff.
7. Clear out DVR.
8. Find a third link.

Go me.

Squirrels love pizza.

"WTF is this shit? Art? Fuck you, this is just some shit welded together.  Art my ass!"

• I get emails asking me to submit to Journal of Unknown Bullshit all the time.  I assumed it was a scam, but never looked into it.  The answer is yes. It is a scam.
• "Egyptian Deities Cigarettes." You are the laziest brand manager ever.  "Noun brand Cigarettes!"

Saturday: Things didn't go as planned

Last week, From Up on Poppy Hill had the "wide" US release.  I checked at the time, but it wasn't playing anywhere in Hawaii.  That was resolved this week, as I discovered this morning when I checked.  Conveniently, it was playing at the theater that's right next to my standard Saturday sushi place.  Therefore, I came up with the wonderful plan:

1. Eat sushi.
2. Watch movie.
3. Get groceries, maybe?

This was a nice idea, but it turns out that 2pm on Saturday is a busy time at the sushi place.  I waited for my turn until ten minutes before the movie started, then gave up, as I didn't think I'd have enough time to eat my sushi comfortably.

So, $10 later, I had an acceptable theater hot dog:

I was hoping for a pretzel.

And a drink. Still, I was able to catch the movie:

I agree with myself from a year ago: "The goal of a cartoon shouldn't be to create a world of special effects that allows a lion to dance and sing and look realistic.  The goal should be to tell a good story with the help of beautiful pictures."  Ghibli does this again.  Beautiful art:

And a good story with a large number of quick one line jokes thrown in to keep what could be a somewhat depressing movie light and moving.  Another wonderful Ghibli movie that won't have nearly as many viewers as it deserves.  Even at my showing, there were less than a dozen people.

Plus, there's a tanuki in this room.

Then, afterwards, I was able to get a seat at the sushi place with no waiting.  Hooray!

Obligatory sushi picture.

I also discovered today that Safeway has removed the bottom rack on their carts.  This became obvious when I put a big case of water on it, heard a squeak as the bottles hit the floor, and then pushed my cart away leaving the water behind.  No idea why this happened, or even when.  I'm sure they had them last time I was there.

• Interesting.  I don't think totally banning GMO things is really the best strategy, but it does make sense to make sure that everything is properly labeled.  At this point, I don't understand why the government doesn't put QR-code things on all products that trace everything back to exact origins (such as the farms that raised the animals in the meat case, etc).  Well, ok, obviously the reason is that it would cost money, and a lot of people have financial interests in not being honest.  Still, it would be nice.
• I don't think this company makes the sushi machine at the sushi place.
• Red panda vs. sandwich.
• I did the same thing when this came up in my RSS feeds.

Friday: It's a less elegant solution than I wanted

Mostly because it has to use a series of checks to decide which value to set.  Now I have the issue that all my test code is written in my own format as part of my machine learning library, and I have to port that over to the format used at work, and make it usable in that framework.

"WHY DO YOU KEEP PUTTING SNACKS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS MAGIC WALL!?"

• It would have been better if you'd come up with the idea first, Hallmark Channel.  Also, this seems a lot more story driven than Puppy Bowl.  Puppy Bowl has the plot of "puppies. playing."  This Kitty thing requires a lot more outside interaction.  Maybe that's because cats are jerks.
• Also, my understanding was that backgrounds and foregrounds didn't always match due to the different surfaces and possibly different paint selections.  I'm also curious why this poster didn't use Scooby Doo.  Pretty much all of Scooby Doo's original series had this issue.
• This largely sums up my thoughts on this meat renaming thing.
• Red Pandas >> Elephants.
• Because I thought it was interesting.

Thursday: Ill-defined distributions

Here's a scenario to consider.  You have four samples (generically, 2*N), but due to the way they're obtained, a pair of samples have similar values (hence the 2*N choice).  At which point do you exclude one pair from the distribution, and use only the remaining one to constrain your measurements?  The first idea would be to use the observational uncertainties (in terms of the variance) to determine if two pairs are consistent to within those errors.  However, if they're not, you're still left with two values, neither of which have a strong prior for acceptance.  I guess the next idea would be to use neighboring values (because, like usual, I'm talking about images or something like that).  Then you could define a set of five values, (V,dV/dx+,dV/dx-,dV/dy+,dV/dy-) or alternatively, (V,dV/dx,dV/dy,d^2V/dx^2,d^2V/dy^2), which should contain the same information.  This gives a reasonably robust way to exclude point like errors, but fail on larger scale things.

Second scenario: you have a single realization of a distribution in one dimension.  Again, the distribution is sampled in pairs (2*N total), and this can contain up to N modes.  What's the best way to choose how many of those to accept as valid?  My first thought is Gaussian mixture models, but I have reasonable suspicion that the true distribution isn't Gaussian.  It looks more like lognormal, but fitting lognormal mixture models results in a single mode being preferred for all cases.  Clearly that's not helpful.  Maybe do a k-means thing, and then determine if the separation between each mean is inconsistent with the sigma distributions for each mode?  That seems like it's just doing GMM but skipping all the math.

"What's going on over here? Oh! Hello Mr. Castle! I'm the Moon!"

• I've mentioned pizza cones before, right?  Pizza cones.
• "King of all short story writers?" I've had comments on Maupassant before.
• Monopsony.
• Fuck you, The Meat Industry. It's a pork butt because that's funny.  If people don't know that it's delicious, naming it something stupid isn't going to help.  Now I'm never going to know what things are.
• That's unfortunate.
• Comet (that still hasn't been easily visible here for me)!

Wednesday: I think I figured out that problem at work

It seems like 4% of my posts include that or a similar statement.  I'm not sure what that says.

Did you know they were doing quarters with parks on the back?  This one is Denali, and is from 2012, suggesting I've probably been missing out.

"Yeah. I'm the director now.  We're going to be doing this my way now."

• See, I told you it was actual Hawaii cold.
• That's a shame.  It's unfortunate that Disney and the other big media companies keep gobbling up things, and then shutting them down and burying those franchises.
• Pokemon.

Tuesday: Who even cares?

I've been watching a Let's Play for Fatal Frame, and there have been like six of these puzzles.  The guy who's playing still doesn't seem to realize that he needs to slide the tiles so that they are in the position that has the same symbol.

In a different Let's Play (different person, Slenderman game), the player "had already played it," and so had an elevated sense of his own skills at the game.  He missed this flashlight, and then spent like five minutes wandering around the house jerking the camera around like he was having a seizure before finally focusing enough to notice this super obvious thing in the room he'd gone through a dozen times.

Julie posted yesterday's repost various places, and at least according to the blogger stats page, a bunch of people from ISS clicked through to see that post.  Plus, it moves!

I know that this isn't objectively cold, but it's been almost record Hawaii cold here the past two days.  It's a bit weird for it not to feel humid.

I know making fun of Chinese take out menus is lame, but I was thought the "chicken friend rice" was funny.  Like it comes with a smiley face drawn on it, and maybe a caption like "I like spending time with you!"

• Pizza is apparently a squirrel magnet.
• Bear attack!
• Best news story of the year.  The detail and quality is stunning.
• "[...] at a packed news conference with unusually heavy security, including a bomb-sniffing yellow Labrador retriever. A dozen officers in plain clothes and uniforms stood watch as he spoke; one warned photographers to “remain stationary” during the event." Isn't one of the claims from the pro-gun side that guns allow them to defend against tyranny?  How is this kind of overwhelming security presence at all consistent with that?  What, were they afraid people were going to suggest alternate views, and need to be shot before they could detonate their "truth bombs"?  Nice job making yourself look even more deranged and paranoid, the NRA.
• What did the Traveller's Club/Triple Goddess/White's Music do that they now need to clear contaminated soil?

Monday: Three day weekends always end this way

However, it's even worse when a three day weekend ends on a monday that also happens to be "everyone on the internet acts like a fucking moron" day.  The flowchart covers the basics, but the fundamental point of this asshattery still confuses me.  If you're actually funny, you would do funny stuff all the time.  It'd be like your job or something.  If you're not actually funny, why do you think you can pull it off once a year?  Is this just another aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect?  That's really the only thing that seems to make sense.

Now, on the other hand, I'm cranky and dismissive all the time, like that's the point of my blog.  Therefore, this post fits in perfectly.

I decided to do tonight's leftover lamb stew "curry style" with a baked potato.  And some cheese, because cheese.

Interesting theory I came up with today.  The prevailing theory is that Kim-Jong Un is either crazy, or attempting to use an exaggerated external threat to solidify a domestic position.  But, really, is being the dictator of a backward impoverished nation really that great of a job?  So, here's an alternate idea (which I admit has no justification).  China is concerned about a refugee crisis, and uses that as a justification for suggesting peaceful resolutions.  But, if NK can prompt an invasion, it can reasonably suggest that the invading forces are in the position of "you break it, you buy it," as has been the case in Iraq and Afghanistan. This would give China some cover for shutting that border entirely, under the guise of "we didn't cause this humanitarian crisis."  They could also be a nice place for KJU to move to with as much of the billions of embezzled money as he can transfer out.  Then, he trades up from dictator to exiled billionaire dilettante.

And that is what happens when I wake up at 7AM and don't feel like actually getting up, since I could probably snooze for another hour or so, but then that doesn't happen quickly enough.

"WTF is up with this savanna?"

• It's probably mean to wish ill on Texas, and convincing anyone with definitive evidence that they're wrong never works as well as it should, but this would be funny.
• Dr. Strange lives in a townhouse at 177A Bleecker Street, NYC, which is called the Sanctum Sanctorum.  Dr. Strange lives above a Pinkberry.
• All I can think is the door's perspective on this: "OMG man, I'm so sorry! I'll open for you as quickly as I can!"
• These people seem to be incapable of putting coherent thoughts down into sentences.
• Do you know how I know that David Pogue is a dumbass?
• Do you know how I know that Bill Kristol is a jackass who should just die already?
• No, seriously. Fuck you, Bill Kristol. 

repost. :-|

I made a chart:

Sunday: Easter

Which means:

Bunnies.

Candy.

And turning this:

Into this:

Gravity defying angle.

I went with a less complicated Easter dinner this year, with just a simple lamb stew.  It did take four hours to cook, so "less complicated" is more just that I didn't have to schedule things in any significant manner.  I had thought about doing something with potatoes, but couldn't decide if I wanted to chop them and add them to the stew, mash them for a pie style, or something else (my one thought was to pan fry them crispy, and use that as a topping).  In the end, I decided to just skip the potatoes for today.

• I saw this news story just after I started cooking.  It immediately made me want to eat pizza.  You're a jerk, pizza.
• Some pranks require a little creativity.
• Batman celebrates.
• I like the munchlax/togepi bit, but didn't like that buneary was off model.

Don't predict the future. You'll just look silly.

I saw this on twitter: Paul Krugman predicts the future from the distant past of 1997.  The tweet kind of had the feeling of "what a dumbass for under-predicting the success of the internet."  However, Paul Krugman isn't really who I would go to for tech predictions.  That's not really his job.  Besides, not predicting the internet is kind of a running theme.

So let's go through the predictions:

• Productivity will drop sharply this year. Nineteen ninety-seven, which was a very good year for worker productivity, has led many pundits to conclude that the great technology-led boom has begun. They are wrong. Last year will prove to have been a blip, just like 1992.

Fred doesn't seem to have a "productivity" dataset.  Instead I used GDP vs. potential GDP:

Ok, not a great start.  1997 was good, but 1998 and 1999 were better.  However, 2000 shows a turnover, and then started significantly underperforming the potential GDP in 2001.  Not quite a blip, but not a missed boom either.

• Inflation will be back. Wages are rising at almost 5 percent annually, and the underlying growth of productivity is probably only 1.5 percent or less. Sooner or later, companies will have to start raising prices. In 1999 inflation will probably be more than 3 percent; with only moderate bad luck--say, a drop in the dollar--it could easily top 4 percent. Sell bonds!

Fred does have inflation:

Inflation in 1999 was 2%.  Again, not a clear cut miss.  Inflation a year later? 3%. Average over the following decade? About 3%.  That's not too bad.

• Within two or three years, the current mood of American triumphalism--our belief that we have pulled economically and technologically ahead of the rest of the world--will evaporate. All it will take is a few technological setbacks or a mild recession here while Europe or Japan recovers a bit.

Well, within two or three years, terrorism jumped up to the top of the concern pile, and then we dicked around in poorly planned wars while other countries developed infrastructure.  Europe has its own problems now, and Japan never did really recover.  I'd buy this one.

• The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

The internet prediction.  A definite miss.

• As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly.

"Ten years from now" sets the prediction point at 2007, just before the economy crapped itself.  Still, it looks like the values at 1997 and 2007 are basically the same.  This might be debatable if you just had those points, but that spike in the middle, the fallback, and then the flattening seems to match the prediction.

• Sometime in the next 20 years, maybe sooner, there will be another '70s-style raw-material crunch: a disruption of oil supplies, a sharp run-up in agricultural prices, or both. And suddenly people will remember that we are still living in the material world and that natural resources matter.

Rare earth metals.  That ignores the perpetual oil/environment struggle.

• Implicit prediction that all webpages will always look great with a fixed width set at 600 pixels?

Yeah.

Saturday: I hate this commercial

I've noticed before that a lot of national companies have Hawaii specific versions of their commercials.  This seemed odd when I first moved here, but now I've discovered that this is a far better strategy than the opposite.  As an example, this stupid commercial has been playing constantly on every channel I watch.  It's for "Hawaii Jobs on Demand" that is part of some larger national job search company.

The important thing from this first shot is the tree in the background.  There are no leaves on that tree.  This doesn't happen in Hawaii.

"LOOK AT THIS BRILLIANT ANALOGY FOR OUTDATED TECHNOLOGY! WE ARE WITTY!"

Plus, she's wearing gloves and is bundled up for the apparent fall weather.  That also doesn't happen in Hawaii.  I'm also pretty sure that lawns that big aren't very common in Hawaii either.

• This rant from North Korea is funnier if you read each mention of "puppets" as "muppets."  "the puppet warmongers", "puppet army's bases", etc.
• It's a good thing that Republicans believe in small government and things like that.
• The new pope.  I had to make this after reading that story.
• 
• Since there's already a webform to make deal with it gifs, I didn't bother doing it myself.
• This is funny when you know two important facts.  1) Deadpool is an (hilariously) annoying jerk all the time.  2) He has regeneration abilities like Wolverine, so he's basically immortal.

Friday: The best fridays are the fridays without work

And today was one of them.  First up, tasty burger from the Counter.  I've been there before, but I've been doing sushi on my trips to Kahala recently, so since today wasn't a saturday, I figured I'd change things up a bit.  Plus, I wanted something spicy, but like chicken wing type spicy, and they have that as an optional sauce for the burgers:

Mixed greens, sauteed onions and mushrooms, bacon, cheddar, on a whole wheat bun. With hot sauce.

I also discovered that they do sell a small size cheese fries, which is good, because I can never finish the big size.

Also, my burger was made of bison.

I then came home, burned through more DVR stuff, and discovered this episode of pokemon where the gang has to all dress up like girls to get into a gym run by other girls, but who only let girls into the gym.  Plus, those girls were jerks earlier, so Team Twerp had to go beat them up and push them into the mud.  Not kidding.  That's what they did.  Don't fuck with Team Twerp.  However, since everyone had to be a girl, they did this:

Yes, they added a cutout to Pikachu's tail so he'd look like a girl Pikachu.  Pansage got a ribbon (because boys can't wear ribbons, duh), and Snivy got nothing, because Ash's Snivy is already a girl.

So, an exciting day for me.  I also went all over town trying to find ground lamb, only to find it at WF.  Unfortunately, they only had a single half pound package.  That's all they had.  Given that I'd already checked three other grocery stores, I resigned myself to having to mix meats, and bought an accompanying half pound of ground beef.

• My understanding is that zerohedge is kind of on the borderline of "fucking loons."  As an example, this post.  If I'm running a business, and need to have more than 15% of my money totally liquid, I'm probably very bad at running my business.  Why have that much cash on hand?  Do you not have income that covers your standard expenses?  Why do you not have that money invested in something more robust than a bank in Cyprus?  You understand how bank deposit insurance works, right?  Can't you distribute your cash into more than one account?  Oh, wait, you're going to switch everything over to bitcoins.  Yes, you are bad at running your business, and are a moron.
• Now I want a corn dog.
• Number 25.
• Jiggly-PUFF!

Thursday: So that was a serious problem

But I think it's fixed now, or at least in any case, I think there's a workable solution to make it work better.  I think my solution also explains why it preferentially impacted one filter over the others.  I think this also explains the non-commutativity I saw yesterday: instead of taking the average or median of the valid values, we just take the first from the list.  Therefore, if the first entry is bad for some reason, we introduce an order dependence.

Look! A puppy!

• I really hate it when my brain is demagnetized.  I'm glad we don't use giant magnets around people's heads.  Who knows what would happen?
• Klaus Brumman.
• Those look tasty.
• Best show on TV.

Wednesday: nondeterministic

I hate when things are like that.  More specifically, when things that should be commutative are not.  A + B + C should always equal C + B + A.  If that's not true, then I end up spending an entire Thursday figuring out why.

Guess what I'm doing tomorrow?

Another wonderful episode showing why Ice King is a great tragic hero.  Plus: Soupery.  I wish they had those here.

At least today's hearing seemed like it's more likely to lead to a reasonable decision.

• Worst robber ever.
• Interesting theory for the Avengers movie/Captain America/whatever.
• There is no third link.

Tuesday: wait, did I just skip a day of work?

Nope! Prince Kuhio Day! Kind of an unfortunate reason for a day off, but it's always good to have time off.

My day large went like this:

Then I went to get sushi.

Yes, I got double ahi.

• Tony Scalia continues to be made entirely of shit.
• Bach isn't even that high on my list of composers, but 14 hours for a dollar is a pretty good deal.
• It's actually far easier to do this in debian.  I had to do the apt-get thing, and then I think I had to enable the module in apache.  Add a user, import the xml file from google takeout, and I was done.  I'm still using GR for now, but that's mostly just an inertia thing.
• Come up with your own list of what's wrong in this kitchen.  Here's mine:
• That oven in inconveniently placed, so you can't put things in it directly.
• Do you really need a potato tippy thing?
• I always want to place things on a shelf above my sink.  Again, why are the faucets on that side?
• A silverware tippy thing?
• Plates stored on the cabinet doors?
• All of those panels can't hold things, right?  How do you know which are real and which are fake?
• Cutting board and baking sheet storage.  In two places?

Monday: There was going to be math here

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that the intended math was actually the problem with things, so I'm going to skip that for now.  I now have some concern that the eta parameter I've been assuming is defined only on [0:1] probably isn't actually bounded on the large side.  The approximation I'm using needs to be, as the expansion around zero needs higher order terms, and I don't feel like deriving them.

In any case, I don't think that actually solves the main issue I'm seeing, which I think is a generic failure of the model to match observations as eta->infinity.

On top of all that math crap, I apparently can no longer grill a cheese.  My last two attempts have had side A ending up burnt, despite me doing things exactly the same as I've always done.  Maybe my stove has recalibrated itself hot?

Ok, I'm writing this post, and I just saw that MSNBC is having a story about a fucking groundhog not predicting the weather correctly.  An animal.  Didn't predict the weather correctly.  You can take a moment if you want.

Then, just to make my brain try to burn down everything, they posted this graphic:

Thanks for making the video available online.

Ok, so 39% over 127 years, and this was claimed as support for an animal not being "that bad" at predicting weather.  That works out to 44 successes in 127 trials, which just happens to be why I have a script named "even_coin.pl" that calculates the Bayesian PDF for a given coin.  This is conveniently just the binomial theorem, such that:

PDF(H) = (n!/(h! (n-h)!)) H^h (1-H)^(n-h)

Plotted up for this case.

The assumption would be that an even coin is distributed around 0.5.  As you increase the number of trials, the width of the distribution shrinks.  In any case, I'm not entirely sure that you'd use this distribution to claim that a groundhog is better than randomly flipping a coin.

"Why don't we teach math better?"

• I haven't actually read through this too much.  My quick understanding is "better than previous plans," but "still pretty bad."  One odd thing I heard on the radio was that the bank holiday is going to extend until Thursday, as there's concern that if they opened on Tuesday, there'd still be a run on them.  If I'm going to panic withdraw all my money on Tuesday, I'm going to be more panicky withdrawing it on Thursday.
• I wonder if The Bloggess has heard of this.  It's in NYC, though.  Also: "Please do not bring any dead animals with you to the class."
• Squirrel!
• Imagine how weird it would be if modern sports bars required this level of attire.