Take 4 at a stable blog
I went to the National Gallery today to take a final look before I leave next week. This particular series of painting caught my eye, especially the one above.
It just seems to reflect the drastic kick of reality I’ve been ingesting. When I was little, dreams were so lofty, ideas so wild and thoughts run carelessly. Now, the future seems perilous at times… what if my next steps are wrong?
I’m still looking forward to the next year though…. but what lies after Cornell truly scares me.
I went to the Screen on the Green with Sean Monday, and it turned out to be a great time. An old 1961 romantic-comedy called Lover Come Back was being screened.
It was a refreshing relief from the modern flamboyant films with either intricate plots that dances around drama or seemingly mindless violence accented by a few touching moments. Hell, even the language was naively fresh; the lack of any swear words seemed so different now.
Albeit very generic, the film contained some genuinely funny moments. Either that, or the rambunctious group sitting by us altered my perception of the jokes which didn’t rely on sheer stupidity to work. Dare I say that it’s even a relatively “smart” comedy?
The plot in the end was anything but smart though. As one should suspect, the story has a happy ending. This wouldn’t be a movie I would show anyone in my house, but for an outdoor screening with a crowd.
Quick note: check the weather and bring a jacket, and bottle to drink from! Open container laws suck.
I’m starting to write solutions for the Larson’s problem book on Github. It’s just a small project I would like to keep adding on to it as I progress through the book…
Link is here: https://github.com/runiteking1/larsons_solution
At work, I had to generate random data to run logistic regressions on. In one unusual case, the slice sampler was performing far worse than expected. The code was simple, and contained no mistake; we thought something incredibly bad had happened with the whole testing framework.
What ended up happening was that our data matrix 
The logistic regression is a special case of GLMs, implying that we have a linear predictor of 
Maybe a small proof will come later? But this seems to have to do with the eigenvalues of the sum of two randomly distributed matrix… which is not entirely trivial.
Work is so tough. I thought it’ll be pretty chill and have tons of time to relax at night. Nope… too tired to do other stuff.
I’ll be posting some statistics soon though!
Well, this past month has been a doozy. From finishing up my semester, to having a personal crisis; I haven’t been able to document much of my thoughts at all.
As the semester came to a close, mom told me that my grandma had a form of cancer. We didn’t know how serious the cancer was, or what stage it was in. All we knew was that it was definitely not benign. This caused a rush of emotions that I didn’t know how to respond to or talk to others about.
Inability to discuss what I felt during those 4-5 days led me to cast a doubt on myself. “What is wrong with me” was asked many, many times with no response from my usually egotistical self. It even spilled over to a game of League of Legends. For some odd reason, I just bursted out in tears after losing a game that we should have won; I still don’t understand why I would cry over such a trivial matter as a video game.
Around that time, I had plenty of projects to work on. The most interesting was probably the animation-esque class I was doing. Jane and I decided to implement the Fattal paper on target-driven smoke animation. For some reason, I turned into a total douchebag by the end of the project. I dictated what should be done in an extremely condescending way, while shooting down all her ideas. Thankfully she was kind enough to stick with me all the way through.
On the front of my research and parallel computing though, it went pretty poorly near the end. I ran into quite a few problems which I’ll have to resolve throughout the summer. There is a large hope that a paper will arise out of this with enough work.
In terms of logistical issues in my life, moving out was a bitch. The kitchen was almost more dirty than Detroit, and my clothes was incredibly hard to sort through. “Should I send this back home… or to DC?” In the end, I finally packed everything and sorted everything out between the times when I was not on campus for senior week.
Speaking of senior week, it was extremely sad seeing the world change. It seems that I while I don’t love the status-quo, I like it more compared to the increasingly faster progression of time. In only a year time, I will be graduating from Cornell.
This made me wish I had done more social stuff this year. Besides Jane, there was literally no one I got particularly close this year. It’s almost like a “lost year” in terms of social development (which I desperately need). I am currently reading through the Carnegie book hoping that it’ll help eventually…
My first day today was great. Great food. Friendly people. Seemingly interesting project. I have high hopes for this summer, and I intend to reach them. The problem seems that I’ll be quite busy after work too. From the research with Bindel to my undying faith that I’ll be the next Penn and Teller, I’ll be busy in the night.
I guess the question I’m faced with now is at what point do I call it quits?
Busy with final projects, and watching Pokemon.
*team rocket does something stupid
Jesse: why did we do that?
James: because we have to fill the half hour
I have trouble expressing feelings.
What do I do when my mom tells me that her mother has a form of bladder cancer? I was too shocked even to ask about how far along the stage it was; I just “smiled and nodded.
Maybe this is part of growing up.
One began to hear it said that World War I was the chemists’ war,
World War II was the physicists’ war,
World War III (may it never come) will be the mathematicians’ war.