Jerrod Ankenman's Journal

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nerdy humor
Definition: Vector Space.

A vector space V is a collection of elements such that if x is in V, x is written with a little arrow over it.

Today's home baking ingredients:

Metamucil
Xanthan gum
Tapioca starch
Benefiber
Potato flakes
Rice milk
Yeast
Water
Flour
Wheat starch
Cornstarch
Sea salt
Butter
Brown sugar

Name that baked good!

Cowboys upset over late score by Minnesota
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs/2009/news/story?id=4834737

Somebody please let Keith Brooking know that complaining that the other team ran up the score in your NFL playoff game is beyond hilarious.

A great ad.
This ad is a few years old, but it popped up in a blog post I saw and it's just so, so good. I don't know if you could really make this commercial for any other sport, despite the fact that there are figures just as transcendent in their sports as Jordan was.

Are Republicans just bad people?
Eleanor Clift writes in Newsweek, in part:

The ferocity of the criticism of President Obama for the failed Christmas Day bombing offers a glimpse into what might happen if a real attack occurred. At least half the country—those with political allegiance to red-state America—wouldn't rally around the president the way everybody did on 9/11, despite President Bush's considerable shortcomings, in the chaotic hours that followed the attacks. It would be another chance to score political points.

Poll #1509556 In case of attack, break glass.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 29

If another successful major terrorist attack occurred tomorrow, would Republicans rally in support of the President similarly to the way Democrats did on 9/11?

View Answers

Yes, when crisis really hits everyone is on the same side.
1 (3.4%)

Yes, they would realize it's political suicide not to, but deep down they would wish they didn't have to.
3 (10.3%)

Most of the politicians would, but the radio guys would be skewering Obama right away.
11 (37.9%)

No, Republicans would immediately go on the attack, hitting Obama on security.
10 (34.5%)

Other
4 (13.8%)

( I think... )

Sherlock Holmes
was a fantastic action movie, with cleverness and witty dialogue.

funny comic re: hitler
http://www.viruscomix.com/obersalzberg.jpg

So like, if someone had gone back in time and eliminated Hitler before he rose to power, would we just talk about going back in time and eliminating Stalin instead?

weird, confused analysis
From the ESPN "5-on-5" set of questions regarding the Heat-Knicks game on Christmas:

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?page=Heat-Knicks-091224

4. Who would you rather have the next 10 years:
Dwyane Wade or Mike D'Antoni?

Hollinger: Is this even a question? This is a players' league, and the coaches will be the first ones to tell you that. D'Antoni might be able to get 45 or 50 wins out of 40-win talent, but at the end of the day if he has 40-win talent there's only so much he can do.

(Note for non-basketball fans: Dwyane Wade is an exceptionally talented shooting guard. Mike D'Antoni is a coach.)

Now, John Hollinger has written some smart things about basketball before, but boggle. He says he thinks that D'Antoni's coaching might be worth five to ten wins per year. Now Wade's play last year (using metrics from BP) was worth about 25 wins over replacement. But it's not that simple, obviously, because D'Antoni's salary doesn't count against the cap, while Wade is a max-contract guy. So the question is, can you get 15-20 extra wins and somebody to play 2 out of max-contract money. Now, maybe you can't. But the question was over the next TEN YEARS. Wade is 28 now, and he crashes into people a lot, and isn't a terrific outside shooter. If he can't get to the rim, he loses a lot of his value. Also no guarantee he's even in the league for years 8-10 or whatever, and certainly he's not going to be worth 25 wins per year. There's no reason to expect D'Antoni's edge to decline over that time, though. Also just regular injuries are a risk for Wade but not D'Antoni, etc.

fat tails
I wonder what the Sacramento Kings' true equity in their game with the Chicago Bulls was when they were down 79-44 with 8:50 left in the 3rd quarter.

Anyway, they outperformed. Nice.

Alan Grayson, who was getting kind of popular with progressives, seems to be unhappy that someone is running a (kinda bad) website criticizing him. So he wants Eric Holder to investigate her, fine her, and imprison her for five years. Yay civil liberties!

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_politics/2009/12/grayson-wants-to-send-critic-to-jail-for-five-years.html

Also, I finished my last final today, and barring some kind of unforeseen shift in the realities of mathematics that cause me to get zeroes on my finals, I predict I will be getting a shiny new degree in February.

Games and Art
David Sirlin writes about Brenda Brathwaite, an artist/game designer who is very concerned with meaning and blurs the lines between games and art. I found this very interesting, and wonder what kind of experience it would be to play Train cold, without knowing what was going on.

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2009/11/23/migs-brenda-brathwaite.html

This is cool.
Story about a guy who tried to vanish as a contest.

http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/11/ff_vanish2/

Fish.
Our fish died today. It was a betta that we've had for three years or so.

That fish was awesome. It lived through two weeks with the heater at 50 in the winter. It lived through murky tank water, probably not being fed for several days in a row. It evaded the cats. It was pronounced dead by one of us at least ten times, but always came back to full health, swimming around and flaring its gills when you would look at it funny. The fish was a warrior.

Also, check this video out:
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=4628040&categoryid=2378529

Things that bring a smile to your face
I just couldn't help smiling at an email I got today from the Records office at Columbia:

Hi Jerrod,

Would you like your Middle name spelled out on your Diploma?

We currently have I.

*Name changes will not be permitted after the diplomas are printed.

Regards,

(etc)

PhD applications
I'm working on my personal statement for my PhD applications, and I wrote something like this:

In the past, my work on poker has been primarily focused on “toy” poker games, games that are either abstracted or limited in some way to make them analytically tractable. Solving such games can provide insight into some particular concept and incorporating that insight into play in the “real” game leads to stronger play. However, the next steps of poker research for me are largely in the direction of solving more complex and much more computationally intensive games. Other research interests of mine include modeling of events; I have worked in the past on stochastic prediction models for sports outcomes and for predicting election outcomes. At SIG, I worked on [redacted] models for [redacted]. We applied a [redacted] to tick-by-tick [redacted] and obtained [redacted] results. We then tried [redacted] the model by [redacted] the [redacted] parameter and that [redacted] our results.

Normed vector spaces...
Sign seen at a church on the side of the road:

GOD'S GRACE IS GREATER THAN YOUR SINS

jerrod: what kind of ordering on a space containing both God's grace and my sins is implied by that sign?

bill: well it seems they mean magnitude, so it must be some kind of normed vector space.

OpenOffice Base
Wow. I posted about this before, but then I thought it was just a usability issue. It's not.

OpenOffice Base is incredibly bad.

When you modify a database table, the database should be updated. This isn't a word processing document or a spreadsheet, where you have to "save changes" in order to save them. If you claim to be developing a database, but don't automatically write changes to disk, and don't provide any way to make sure that changes are written to disk other than, say, exiting the program, you DID IT WRONG. On top of that, the front end is really awful.

Our power went out today, and when Michelle's computer came up with OO document recovery, it recovered back to a database with entries through 9/22. So we lost two weeks worth of data on what Mara ate, which basically explodes the modeling I was going to start on soon and puts us back to square one on really understanding the dynamics of her phe intake vs lab results.

Going to go buy Access now, I guess. Argh.

Messing up intuition
OK, so I just learned something. Maybe I should have known it before, but it was pretty counter-intuitive to me, and kind of neat.

Consider the following process:

You are at zero on a number line, which goes off in either direction. Every second, you flip a fair coin; if it's heads you move toward +, if it's tails you move toward -. This process is called a random walk. One of the things we math people are interested in is whether the random walk is recurrent. A random walk is recurrent if the following is true: if we run the random walk forever, we will return to any particular place on the number line an infinite number of times.

It turns out that this one-dimensional random walk is in fact recurrent; that is, if we start at zero and run the process forever, we will revisit zero an infinite number of times.

Now consider a two-dimensional analogue: we are on a vast plane, starting at (0,0). The coin flip is now a 4-sided die, and we have an equal probability of moving north, south, east, or west. This two-dimensional random walk is likewise recurrent; we will revisit the origin an infinite number of times if we just run the thing forever.

Third, consider a three-dimensional analogue: we are in a vast space, starting at (0,0,0). Now we have six directions we can go in: NSEW, up, and down.

Here's the counter-intuitive thing: this three-dimensional random walk (and walks of higher dimensions) is not recurrent. So if we start at (0,0,0) and run the process forever, we will only return to (0,0,0) a finite number of times. Can you see why?

captaino can use this as a PotD if he wants.