MSRI week 5.2

I know, I know, I'm a day late. I'm sorry. Things have been hella busy this week. Wait, did I just say 'hella?' Shoot. I've been in Cali too long. The vernacular's caught on to me.

This week was crazy with work. We're behind on where we wanted to be with our schedule, and we're finding more and more problem spots as we near the end. The big question is do we try and fight all these fires right now, or do we try and make it out on the other side before we turn around? I vote for the latter. It's at least some results in that sense. Then if we do run out of time we can talk about what we would've done.

The killer this week has been that we've been spending a lot of time preparing for our final presentation. We need to have a 60 minute Powerpoint presentation on Friday, as well as a finely documented report that's almost publish worthy. I think we have to present on it in October, so I'll be missing a few days from school for that, but geesh just when you think you're done, you're not. We had a 30 minute presentation today, and we kinda had to rush through it, so hopefully expanding that out to an hour won't be too bad. Plus they're videotaping it. I should wear my Pac-Man shirt.

The weekend was tiring. We went to work on Saturday, WALKED downhill (I admit- I had wanted to do it at least once), and then went to an Oakland A's game. I'm not a baseball person, but I can totally see why some people are. The thrill of the lights, the comradery (where's spell checker when you need it?), the anticipation of the one guy to make it or break it for the entire team. Maybe's that's why America is very individualistic. Well, you know what I mean.

But I have a lot of work to do and not a lot of time. I might update before I head back to AZ. We'll see.

One of the guys called me "Gentle Ben" the other day after the baseball game. I know what he meant by it, and he explained it, but I don't like being labeled like that. Though I admit, I do it all the time. "Oh, so-and-so is like the secret love child of whats-his-name and whose-her-face." Maybe I should stop.

MSRI week 4

I am so mellow right now. It's great. Reasons to come momentarily.

This week was very hectic in terms of work. We realized that our conversion from C++ to MATLAB was not without problems. We're getting different accuracies in using the exact same data sets. Not good. For a while as we were increasing the number of known data points, the acuracy was going down. This was cause for great concern. We need to start implementing the new method SOON. Plus I need to become a PowerPoint whiz in like 10 days. Bugger.

We had some grad students come in this week. They're at MSRI for a 2 week program on basically the same stuff as us. Idunno, I was really disappointed in them. Three days in, they throw a giant beer pong tournament. I didn't go. I was reading out by the clocktower (since Cali is currently in the same time zone as AZ, the sunset here is like an hour later). The book was an intro to poetry, how to read/write/evaluate it. They have snippets from lots of different styles. I've been reading those. I wish I had brought my PDA. I have some very personally important files on that. Some of the undergrads, including people I like, got wasted even though it was a workday, and one guy had to puke it up. Maybe I'm too much of a party pooper, but responsibilities don't take summer vacation.

But all that aside, the weekly mandatory group outing was amazing. We took a shuttle to Point Reyes, this little national park northwest of Sausalito I believe. They have a lighthouse there, but we didn't see that. On the way there, it was all clear and sunny. Then as we ventured through the redwoods and emerged from the other side, it was so awesomely foggy. Even in the afternoon.

We began hiking on this one trail. You started losing people that were in front of you. Good things I wore pants. Lots of brush and bushes to push through. No trees on the trail because the terrain was really steep and too close to the ocean. You could hear it, but couldn't see a thing. Me and a couple other people walked off trail and tried to spot the ocean. About 2,3 hundred feet down, we finally caught a glimpse of it crashing on the shore. It was majestic. Except now we had to climb back up those 2,3 hundred feet. That wasn't fun. I'd say that was at like a 45 degree angle. I might've stepped in some deer poop. As we got back to the shuttle I thought it was raining, but it was actually the water condensing on the leaves and coming down from the trees. Tree rain, they called it. Tree rain.

I thought we were leaving after that, but our director, Dr. Cortez, told the driver to head to the beach. So we did. The sand there is so unpressed. You took a step and your feet sunk about 6 inches before they stopped. It was still cloudy beyond recognitition. but we found our way to the water. We took off our shoes, rolled up our pants, and stood on the shoreline, waiting for the water to try and knock us down. It was pretty cold, but it felt so good. A piece of watermelon found its way to us. It looked pretty fresh, but we didn't try it for obvious reasons. I do admit, I love salt on my watermelon, and fresh sea salt would've probably been yummy. We think we found a beached jellyfish, just a baby one. We didn't see any tentacles from it, so people were picking it up, poking it, etc. My roommate still has it. Ew. We all got pretty wet from that, the water rolling up our legs. Some people got entirely drenched. Too bad none of us brought towels. But, oh man, was that awesome.

Back at the dorms, we saw a line of people out on the street waiting for the Incubus concert. I had been talking about it all week to people. I even got my mom to mail me their CD. Of course, I wasn't actually going in to the concert, I was gonna stand right outside the theater and let the music in my veins like I did when Goo Goo Dolls came a couple weeks ago. It started off well enough. The opening act was pretty bad. But that's not why you come to a concert. ABout the third song of the real set, some guards were shining their flashlights on me and some other people. We just stepped back from the gates a bit and they were okay with that. Hey, it's not our fault that air is a good transporter of sound. I was bummed that they were done with the main show in only an hour- I was expecting a 2 hour show, at least. Afterall, they have like 6 albums. So people started to leave. I peeked around the corner, and there were still people waiting to get inside.

Then, all of a sudden, this one girl looks at me and asks if I want her ticket. I was definitely confused, but she said it was free for me and she had already missed most of the show. So I thanked her tremendously, and made it inside just in time for the encore set. That was a good set. Except for the fact that the fire alarm went off at 8AM, yesterday was pure bliss. Climbing back up that hill after seeing the ocean skyline was a rush I hadn't felt before. It's probably like when you're about to pass out after a hard run. Or when you play the choking game. Getting to go into the theater was amazing. You see everyone waving their lighters and/or cell phones waiting for the encore. It's magic. I spent a lot of yesterday on my own, and those were great. I spent a lot of time with the group, and those times were great, especially running from the break waves and usually failing. So I'm on a high, on a high, there's nothign more to it, yeah. I've got church and more work to do later today, but right now? Peace.

MSRI week 2.95

K, so I'm a day ahead of my scheduled weekly wrapup. Whatever. Just wanted to let you know all about the cool stuff that went down this week.

So our project, Supernova Recognition, is pretty cool. Basically we take a bunch of vectors, run them through a testing ground, ans ask "Is that white spot a supernova?" We finally figured out how to run the testing data (reading the instructions can be very useful), and on our initial data set of 10000 points, we were 84% accurate. Granted, this is the data set we just trained to determined the best jusgement criteria. Hmm. We're gonna need to tweak some of the variables a bit for a better fit. Also we don't know which are false positives and which are false negatives. But we have a couple weeks to figure that out.

My co-workers on that project, Thomas and Talea, are great. Thomas puts on the internet classical radio station. We talk things out. We show everyone else what we're doing. It's chill. I hope we can maintain this kind of aura all the way through. Especially since Thomas is my roomate.

On Wednesday I slept in until 10:30. It felt SO GOOD! We had the whole day off, so it was just a day to recuperate and collect. I went with a few people to go see fireworks over the bay. It was less than stellar. From where we were at, we could see one medium-sized fireworks show and one itsy-bitsy fireworks show. We could barely feel the explosions. So that was mixed, but I got to hang out with people, and that's part of what the 4th of July is all about. Oh, and if you ever need to fly, apparently the 4th is the cheapest day to buy tickets. Or so I've heard.

Of course, once the fireworks were done, we got to walk along the bay. Everybody here is so rushrush. I don't like having to catch up to them, and in so ignoring the scenery. Granted, it was 11 at night in Oakland, but still you miss out on a lot of things. I could see the sky clearly after the fireworks were done, but nature's light show was just starting.

The weather here is so rediculuous. Yesterday it was foggy ALL DAY. At 5 we could see the mist still rolling across out office windows. Very cool and weird at the same time. Then today it was a blazing 85 degrees, not windy, and too hot for the jackets that everyone brought. Ugh. If this weather were a rodeo bull we'd've fallen off a long time ago.

So yeah today the group went kayaking near the marina in Oakland. I and two other guys refrained. I had my reasons, as I'm sure they did, too. One of them is an actual lifeguard, so that was interesting to learn. We just chilled and tried to cope with the director of the program, who also declined to kayak. 2 hours later, everyone came rowing in sopping wet. I took a couple pictures when everyone got out of their boats. There was also this Chinese restaurant in Oakland we went to. Good food for the price.

On Friday we had a lecture about Grad School- getting in, applying, and funding for it. I don't know what it was, but there was something about Ms. Patt's message that we wouldn't have to worry about funding for grad school that caught my attention. Apply for fellowships, people. It also became evident that I could also apply to grad school for math. At this point, I don't know what to do. But I have another year to think it over before crunch time.

And apparently UC Berkeley is at the top or near the top for a bunch of different stuff, including Physics, Astronomy (They just had a huge colloquium with people from all over, including the UofA and Steward Observatory), Math, and basically anything else you can think of. The campus is breathtaking. On one hand because of all the hills that you have to walk/bike up, and also it's so darn beautiful. There's a creek runnning through the middle of campus. Plenty of trees. Lots of trees. Almost east coast-like. It's like the school was built around the scenery and not the other way around, which is the feeling I get a lot of at the UofA. I mean, those flowers that they have to replant every month? The city I'm not as much a fan of. So that's a definite drawback. I went with our TA, Edgar, to the bay to see the fireworks, and we drove by a lot of poor neighborhoods. Of course, that's for California standards (Edgar says he and a friend are paying like 1400 for a 1bedroom/big enough living room to split into another bedroom apartment!!!! Holy moly).

But that's the news down here from the source. Supposedly Incubus is playing at the Greek Theater next Saturday, and Daft Punk two weeks after that. Free tunes. Yay!

MSRI week 2.2

K, so I'm a day late of a weekly review. Whatever. The second week was a lot like the first- a lot of stressing out over projects.

Midweek we had to read articles regarding a new method of clustering. Granted, most of us had to learn what clustering was simultaneously. Not being a CS person has been really disadvantageous this week. That, and not having a laptop. Well, I'm sorry I'm one of only 2 people without a laptop. What can I do? But anyway we've been working our butts off trying to arrange a presentation on whether this new algorithm, Affinity Propagation, would be suitable for some of the projects we had been discussing. Long story short, not really, but we had to make it seem like it was the end all be all. I think we achieved more animosity during that project than the rest of the projects put together.

But fortunately, that's done with. We got assigned our full-time projects which we'll be spending the next 3 and a half weeks slaving over. My group project is actually two, which may or may not be a bad thing. The Supernova Recognition team got doubled up with the Track Reconstruction team (TR as when two protons collide with great energy, you quantum physics people know what I'm talking about.) Anyway so we want to see if we can distinguish the curves just based on data points to see if we can locate the ever elusive Higgs photon-thingy. I'm not totally sure how smooth this thing will go. With 3 of us in the group, it's probably gonna be 1 take the SR, one take the TR, and the other interpreting between the 2. Both projects have to do with machine learning algorithms, so that's why they got "clustered" together. I know. I'm a riot...

On Friday night a bunch of us went to go see a movie. Edgar, our TA whom we trust with our lives by now, told us that the best place to go see Rataoullie was at this one theater in a nearby suburb. So we got on the bus, got stuck on the freeway, and- what do you know?- the movie's sold out. We scrambled to come up with a substitute. I wanted to go see 1408, but we would up seeing Knocked Up. My roommate went on his own and watched Fantastic 4. Maybe I should've done the same. So we get out at 10. And then we have to walk a mile. In the dark. Of an unknown city. Along the highway. Uphill. to find the bus station to go back. Apparently we couldn't go at the place we dropped off because that would've taken us over the bay and into San Fran. Ugh. I think I'll stick with the crappier theaters closer to here. Don't get me wrong, the place was nice, but you pay 9 bucks to go see the movie, not where the movie is being played.

The weekend trip was pretty cool and tiring. We went to San Fran, like I had done with my mom before this whole MSRI-UP started. We saw the wharf, shipped under the Golden Gate, ate Clam chowder. Good stuff. Even though I had just seen it shortly before, I knew I had to take it all in. After all, I may never be back in San Fran again.

Things took a turn for the exhausting when the crew decided to walk back up to the BART transit. I got blisters. Bad. Good thing this Italian restaurant was nice enough to let us come in, have some free water, and vamoose. It didn't help that we were across the street from a bunch of strip clubs, either. But eventually I got home. My legs felt like jelly the whole next day. And I still had to go to church.

Today's been a mixed blessing. Our project(s) is intense but theoretically doable, which is good, but we have to put in a lot of back research. Guess they don't call them REU's for nothing. Learned more about some people than I had bargained for. I don't want to know the story of how you lost your virginity, thank you. Oh, and not that I want to make a deal of it because there is nothing to make of it, but I met this girl named Candice on the bus one day. That's it. And then today I had been waiting for 20 minutes to get a computer when she walks in. Just then a computer opened. So I let her go first. I don't think much of it.

The best/worst thing here is the bugs. Outdoors, they got some of the most beautiful dragonflies I've ever seen. Indoors, we have mosquitoes and spiders wanting to crawl underneath our covers because of all the foliage nearby. And maybe it's just that Berkeley is a rather liberal town (I like how the priest yesterday referred to how Berkeley became "that way") but there is an issue of homelessness around here. It's weird and bothersome. Maybe it's just the high cost of living, I don't know. But I saw a bum with an MP3 player asking for change. Um. Yeah. So I'll leave this wrap up at that. Um. Yeah.