Sunday, February 3, 2008
How Much Would You Pay Per Song?
The longer the debate about file sharing and music pricing goes on, the more and more I am sensitive to price per song. It's to the point where I won't even buy music in stores anymore. Instead I just turn on the radio (can't wait till I can afford an HD radio) or go to Pandora and listen to hundreds of great songs.
The best part about the long-song list broadcast radio stations is they tend to play the same stuff over and over again so it's easy to tune out when I'm trying to work (plus it doesn't take any resources on my machine whose built-in laptop speakers are a little weak for the job anyway).
The best part about the long-song list broadcast radio stations is they tend to play the same stuff over and over again so it's easy to tune out when I'm trying to work (plus it doesn't take any resources on my machine whose built-in laptop speakers are a little weak for the job anyway).
Exponential Distributions and Tag Clouds
I just noticed this and I have to wonder if it's a common thing or not: When looking at the number of posts with a given tag on my tag list, it has a vaguely exponential distribution. Discrete, of course, but it has that same downward slope and everything when the tags are ordered by number of posts. I wonder if the histogram of number of tags with a given post count is Poisson?
I may just take the current counts of this page, run them through R, and post the results. It would be really cool if lots of other people did this and posted the results below or emailed theirs to me for inclusion.
I wonder if it says anything about human behavior? Do we tend to clump most things into the same few bins and have lots of smaller ones?
I may just take the current counts of this page, run them through R, and post the results. It would be really cool if lots of other people did this and posted the results below or emailed theirs to me for inclusion.
I wonder if it says anything about human behavior? Do we tend to clump most things into the same few bins and have lots of smaller ones?
Saturday, February 2, 2008
LaTeX in a WYSIWYG World
Most of the non-mathematically-inclined people I know don't use LaTeX and probably never would even if paid. I've even had people say with the advent of point-and-click formula editors for MS Word, there's no point in bothering with it anymore anyway.
Yet I can't shake the sneaking suspicion LaTeX is still better. Maybe it's just elitism from knowing a system most would find esoteric at best and downright weird at worst (outside of mathematics and related fields, of course).
But I still snicker at the thought of sending my humanities profs .tex files when asking them to review a draft of a paper, or using beamer to give a presentation.
Yet I can't shake the sneaking suspicion LaTeX is still better. Maybe it's just elitism from knowing a system most would find esoteric at best and downright weird at worst (outside of mathematics and related fields, of course).
But I still snicker at the thought of sending my humanities profs .tex files when asking them to review a draft of a paper, or using beamer to give a presentation.
Why I Can't Be an Engineer or Scientist
Quite simply, I hate units. More specifically, I hate worrying about them.
Whenever someone says, "This formula takes kilograms and meters/second, but we're working with metric tons moving at kilometers/hour, so you'll need to convert" I think "Why didn't we just measure it in kilograms and meters per second up front and save ourselves the effort of converting back and forth?" Whenever someone says "And now we need to convert to use the next formula" I think "Why don't we convert the formula once rather than the inputs every time?"
Is this a little petty of me? Yeah, it probably is. On the other hand, UNITS ARE ARBITRARY ANYWAY, and I like mine that way.
Whenever someone says, "This formula takes kilograms and meters/second, but we're working with metric tons moving at kilometers/hour, so you'll need to convert" I think "Why didn't we just measure it in kilograms and meters per second up front and save ourselves the effort of converting back and forth?" Whenever someone says "And now we need to convert to use the next formula" I think "Why don't we convert the formula once rather than the inputs every time?"
Is this a little petty of me? Yeah, it probably is. On the other hand, UNITS ARE ARBITRARY ANYWAY, and I like mine that way.
My First Instinct: Sledgehammer
I have an applied mathematics class wherein the professor has promised little of the math we will need is more advanced that a solid grasp of basic matrix algebra, its meaning, and what it is doing.
Yet whenever he asks for a solution to a problem (despite his prior assurance an elementary solution exists), I consistently throw out a more advanced concept. He asks for how to check the invertability of a matrix, I say determinants. He asks for how to compute the inverse, I say the adjoint. He says make an orthogonal matrix, I say pick some vectors and run Graham-Schmitt.
Pretty often I'm getting "That's way too complicated for what we need".
I think there's a theme here.
Yet whenever he asks for a solution to a problem (despite his prior assurance an elementary solution exists), I consistently throw out a more advanced concept. He asks for how to check the invertability of a matrix, I say determinants. He asks for how to compute the inverse, I say the adjoint. He says make an orthogonal matrix, I say pick some vectors and run Graham-Schmitt.
Pretty often I'm getting "That's way too complicated for what we need".
I think there's a theme here.
Friday, February 1, 2008
PT Yesterday
Okay, a day late:
12 minutes of running
12 minutes of AMRAP 5 8-count body builders and 30 lunges
12 minutes AMRAP 5 pullups 10 pushups, 15 squats, 25 crunches
12 minutes of running
12 minutes of AMRAP 5 8-count body builders and 30 lunges
12 minutes AMRAP 5 pullups 10 pushups, 15 squats, 25 crunches
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