For dragon enthusiasts
First, in a few hundred years, people will argue about Frodo and Sam’s sexuality in exactly the same fashion they now argue about Patroclus and Achilles. And time will be a flat circle.
Second, Sauron was definitely unappreciated as an architect. If I was building cool stuff like that and no one admitted it, I might try to conquer Middle Earth as well. Just to get a spot in Architectural Digest or Builders of Numenor or something. Barad Dur? Definitely worth a magazine cover.
I’m running a series of machine-learning events wherein I train a model on some data sets and test it against another. After this, I add the test data to the training set, and introduce a new test set. Time goes up with the square of the number of data sets, and my computer has now been running for hours.
Meanwhile I finished “Carrying the Fire” by Michael Collins, the astronaut on Apollo 11 that didn’t land on the Moon. I really liked it. Mike Collins comes across as more human than most of the great figures in history writing books. He jokes about girls, criticizes the food, and discloses the remarks where he sounds a little off. There’s a bit where he’s talking to Houston while orbiting the Moon alone, and because of the time delay, his comments come across as being a little needy. That’s such an utterly human thing to do, screw up his timing and then notice it, while everyone else misses the remark, ignores it, or observes it in silence.
He also talks about something I’ve long considered, the difficulty with getting people to do more than one thing. The irony is that while he was in astronaut training, he only did one thing: be an astronaut. He complains about the parts of astronaut-being that annoyed him, like PR or meetings, and yet he was in a situation where he totally focused his efforts on the undertaking as a whole, being an astronaut. Yet in his thoughts on the future, he talks about how important it is to do many things, explore space AND improve the world. He talks about his love of the USA, specifically, and also how he wants the US to help the world. Doing many things and seeking areas where they’re doable simultaneously is a goal of his, yet from an outside perspective, one could easily observe him as only an astronaut.
Yet that’s a bit of a slip. From far outside, he was only an astronaut for a few years, and yet from inside, he was a lab rat, engineer, pilot, and unwillingly spokesman. He was also a husband, a father, and kind of annoying. His discussions of perspective, of the reality of knowing the world is small and one, is to him a pure thing. From nearby he’s a complex and myriad person, yet from history he’s just this astronaut. He looks the same way at the world. From nearby, we’ve got to give it to the bastards, and yet from far away, we’re all the denizens of a small, fragile orb. The perspective is worth taking, even second hand by reading. Why else read a book?
And this is a good one. One of the better reads I’ve had in quite some time and strong recommend.
Comcast is the kind of service that calls you and puts you on hold.
The epic fight of our era is who is the worst company: Comcast or Microsoft.
Comcast is coming on strong right now, but Microsoft is always a contender. I wish ill and bad fortune to them both.
When the water’s deep
In boolean logic, a ‘but’ statement is basically just an AND (***)’ with somesuch not-ed.
In unrelated news, I want to write more about Sauron. Sauron is awesome.
Also, Boromir carried the Fellowship movie on his back with his shield. Not the comnpany, but the movie was all Boromir. Definitely the most interesting character in the first movie.
Honestly, he was the most interesting character in the trilogy.
Fight me.
Yesterday I completed a double-blind test on myself. I missed some spots applying sunblock.
The subject did not know whether he missed a spot or not. The arbitrator did not know which spots were missed. However upon collecting experimental evidence, spots were missed. When compared to back-calculated extraneous features, the length of the swim-suit vs expected length of swimsuit, after correcting for body positioning, conclusions were drawn with high certainty.
A) sunblock works
B) the area between knee and mid-thigh was insufficiently sublocked
QED
The problem with big data is that there’s a lot of it.
This is a trivial point, but it’s like asking what’s hard about lifting 495lbs. The 495lbs are the problem.
Every twelve second data run I take is 84mb. Each model degree of freedom increases the data size by a factor of a hundred, as in I can search for one mdof with 100 data runs, but two takes 10,000, and three mdof takes a million.