Nonstationarity

lolmythesis:

Interaction Design, Carnegie Mellon University

lolmythesis:

Economics, Temple University

Having left a grad program in econ, I find myself agreeing, in actuality if not in principle.

A while ago, I saw Johnny Cash Has Been Everywhere (Man!). The developer, Iain Mullan, synchronized Johnny Cash’s performance of “I’ve Been Everywhere” to a running total of the cities covered in the song. (There are 91 cities all over the world mentioned. Some of the places aren’t even cities, but states.) The total trip, as calculated by Mullan, had a route length of 181,075km.

Such a song and site, naturally, made me think of two questions:

1. Is the tour in the song optimal? If not, what’s the minimum tour that covers all 91 locations?
2. What is the optimal tour subject to the constraint that rhyme and meter are preserved?

(NB: I know that the narrator doesn’t go from place to place in order, just that they go to all of those places at some point. I thought it was interesting just to see how suboptimal the trip order was as laid out in the song.)

The second question is fiendishly tricky. Meter and rhyme, from what I can tell, can be difficult machine learning problems, the mysterious Pentametron on Twitter notwithstanding.

For now, I will focus on the first question. (Spoiler alert: There’s a much shorter path!)

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I decided it would make sense to offer MathJax support in an effort to display equations and the like without resorting to either plaintext or copy/paste graphics. It seems to work:

$$\sum_{i=0}^{\infty} \frac{x^{i}}{i!} = e^{x}$$

This is oddly exciting.

(I know. I haven’t posted here in nearly two years. I just needed a space that wasn’t FB to talk about this. And this is gonna be long.)

I haven’t yet heard the new album from Beyoncé. I’ve been sick over the past several days and not quite in a state to appreciate a new work. But everything I’ve read about it suggests it’s a really good album, a work that changes our interpretations of her narratives as a performer and a person. The fact that it was released as a coherent whole, with a video per song, and no singles released in advanced, makes it a rare Gesamtkunstwerk in pop culture. Not like a concept album, necessarily; I get the sense that this album doesn’t have the narrative sweep of, say, Janelle Monáe’s records. But it does seem to be something that — while it has a bunch of great individual parts — is likely better understood as a single thing.

Now, the thing I find most interesting is her revision of the narrative of album release cycles. A major artist works on an album; at some point late in the recording process, some songs become checked off as “singles”, and maybe there are some promotional videos. The singles and videos, along with promotional interviews and the like, stoke interest in the album. At some point, the album gets released, usually on a Tuesday in the US. There may be more singles after that, a concert tour, and so on. But there are certain expectations one has.

And sometimes those expectations get overturned.

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I have not written here in a couple of months now, and certainly I have not done more than some reblogging.  I think I fell off the tumblr track.

In any case, I’ve been in Philadelphia since the beginning of October. At some point I will write more about how I feel about Philly, but for now I think it’s safe to say that I generally like it here. It’s different than Chicago, different than Pittsburgh. Even though I’m kind of lonely and somewhat disconnected from the social threads here, there is still a good deal to enjoy.

For a while, I was working for a local food distribution company. I was an Excel geek, and spent my days dealing with spreadsheets and ERP systems and all that. The work was interesting, but things did not work out as planned, and I left not long after.

Now, I am working as a research associate at Solutions for Progress, a company at the intersection between IT and public policy. It’s a great place, I’m doing interesting work, an it allows me to explore my economics and IT background. The position gives me a space to think about things, to see how novel ideas can be implemented to help people out of poverty. I will probably begin writing about the things I am learning in some way, possibly as tumblr posts.

I do have a few ideas for posts, including some book reviews, so there will be more writing on here in the future. For now, though, I wanted to just update.