Nonstationarity

Bell System Technical Journal Archives

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:48:28 -0500

If you have a lot of time and inclination for the history of 20th science and engineering, here are the archives for the Bell System Technical Journal. From 1922 to the demise of the Bell System monopoly at the end of 1983, the BSTJ was the the in-house journal. Besides the obvious articles about telephony and telecommunications, there are articles about information theory (the classic paper by Shannon on information entropy and channel capacity), Unix (the focus of part of a double issue), optical communications, and math papers relating to networks and differential equations. All told, it’s a fantastic, ungated historical trove of scientific work.

A Flat Budget for NIH in 2013 - ScienceInsider

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:28:03 -0500

A Flat Budget for NIH in 2013 - ScienceInsider:

simplystatistics:

The President’s budget proposal would hold the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) budget at the current level of $30.86 billion.

In order to squeeze more grants out of the flat budget—the target is an 8% increase in new grants, to 672, for a total of 9415—NIH will put in place new grant management policies. Continuing grants will be cut 1% below the 2012 level, competing grants wouldn’t get inflationary increases in future years, and NIH will add a new layer of review for proposals from investigators who already have at least $1.5 million in funding.

clearing the dust

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:02:06 -0500

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.

I’ve been on a Genesis kick recently. I used to listen to...

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 22:16:11 -0500

I’ve been on a Genesis kick recently. I used to listen to them a lot when I was in grade school and junior high, stopped for a long time, and started again about three months ago.

This song I hadn’t heard since the early 90’s, and now I can’t get it out of my head. I actually liked the album it was on (…And Then There Were Three…), even though it didn’t seem to be that well-regarded an album. (It was their first album after guitarist Steve Hackett left, bringing them to a trio, hence the title.)

In recent days I’ve been revisiting an economic history paper I wrote on the California Gold Rush and its aftermath, which makes this song apropos.

Anyway, I decided to post this video of Genesis live circa 1980, back when Phil Collins had a lot more hair and a penchant for Hawaiian shirts, and a time when the band did a really good job of straddling that line between pop and progressive.

NO BLASTERS!: You Don't Need to See His Identification

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 23:13:26 -0500

NO BLASTERS!: You Don't Need to See His Identification:

noblasters:

On November 21, 2010, I was allowed to enter the U.S. through an airport security checkpoint without being x-rayed or touched by a TSA officer. This post explains how.

Edit: This is a rough draft, but I wanted to get it up sooner than later. For now, the quotes below are paraphrases. I have…

I would not try this at home, especially if time is of the essence. But it is interesting all the same, especially as a tale of how people from different and intersecting organizations interact.

dwineman: They can’t be serious. Are they serious? Holy crap I...

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 22:22:22 -0400

dwineman:

They can’t be serious. Are they serious? Holy crap I think they’re serious.

(view large)

laughingsquid: The 6502 Microprocessor Turns 35 Though I...

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 01:35:00 -0400

laughingsquid:

The 6502 Microprocessor Turns 35

Though I haven’t used a 6502-class machine in over a decade (emulators notwithstanding), nor have I written code for one since the early 1990s, I have fond memories of the computers that used the processor. I dare say that the 6502 was the warp and woof of my technical background.

I came of age towards the end of the golden era of the 6502. My first computer, which my parents bought for me in 1989, was a Commodore 64C (which had a 6510 chip, not 6502, but they were instruction set compatible). At that time, those who had more money bought PCs, Macs, Amigas, or Atari STs, though it was the former that was selling the most. The C64 was cheap-ish, to the point where the CPU was less expensive than the floppy drive ($129 vs. $179), and since it was falling out of favor I could get software at a sizable discount, or even free.

The thing I loved about the Commodore 64, and the Apple IIe machines I used at school, was the simplicity. I was close to the hardware of the machine. I explored the internals of the machine using the PEEK and POKE commands in BASIC, and my dog-eared copy of Mapping the Commodore 64. By putting numbers into memory addresses, I could create music, or draw pictures, or dial out with my modem. After a while, I began writing code in 6502 assembly, which I still love for its relative simplicity.

These days, we have the convenience of being able to work in abstraction layers. I do not need to have an intimate knowledge of the underlying hardware to send data over the network. It’s a lot easier to write code to make music with the variety of libraries and APIs in myriad programming languages. I can write good code to do sophisticated linear algebra work without having to write hand-tuned assembly. The abstraction layers allow me to think more about the problem at hand than trying to figure out how to get the hardware to do my bidding.

Still, I sometimes want to deal with computers at that basic level, at the level of assembly instructions. Writing code on the Commodore 64 was almost physical — to do anything nontrivial, I had to intimately understand the hardware. But there weren’t too many layers between what I was doing and the voltage level. Certainly, there were fewer levels, even when running a graphical shell like GEOS, than we have on modern machines. Even if I wanted to write significant amounts of assembly code on my netbook or Mac, I’d find it a real headache to do anything of reasonable complexity.

And so I think wistfully back at the old days, realize that things are largely better now, but I still think I’ve lost something with all of the convenience. Makes me want to do one of those projects in Make magazine with a microcontroller, just to have a more modern take on machine-level programming.

liquid pencil review

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 00:26:00 -0400

I enjoy writing utensils. I have a couple of fountain pens, a multitude of disposable pens (my favorite these days is the Pilot G2, 0.38mm), the occasional mechanical pencil. I enjoy writing with them more than I tend to enjoy the things I write. At this point, that mostly consists of grocery lists, basic to-do notes, scribblings about my current research. That is, I write a ton of crap with good items.

(Yes, I guess I’m a pen snob. It’s just that I’ve had so many problems with cheap ball-points and bad pencils breaking while note-taking during lectures that I’ve pretty much decided that I needed to use something better to the extent that I could afford to do so.)

When I first heard about the Sharpie Liquid Pencil, I was intrigued. A pencil that had something close to the permanence of a pen? (That is, you could still kinda sorta erase it after a couple of days, but not completely.) A pencil without lead that broke? Sign me up! Even if it wasn’t as good as my favorite pen, I could learn to like it. Sure, I probably couldn’t use it on a standardized test, but I couldn’t remember the last time I specifically needed an HB pencil, anyway.

I tried finding them here in Chicago, and I couldn’t. Local office supply stores didn’t have them; neither did the local drug stores. Amazon had a backlog of a month (which appears to have been rectified). In general, I was stymied. And the reviews I read were uniformly negative, it seemed.

My brother-in-law was in town this past weekend, and he gave me one to try. Apparently, they were available at Wal-Mart, but given that the closest one to me is horribly out of the way, I didn’t even consider them as a viable place to go. Anyway, I got to try it, and I did on a variety of surfaces: a Moleskine notebook, a legal pad, receipts, business cards.

By and large, it’s better than the erasable pens of old. Those neither wrote nor erased well. I still have memories of papers with holes and black and blue smudges from erasers that couldn’t erase, and frustration from ink that flowed like curdled milk. The Liquid Pencil, on the other hand, had a much more consistent flow. (Yes, I know this is at odds with the reviewers on Amazon and other places.) It’s like a generic ballpoint pen, rather than the erasable ones. I’m not going to give up my fountain pen, but it’s still much better than I expected.

Even better? It erases really well. I think it erases better than some of my pencils. A few days later, I can erase the markings a bit, but not much. To make sure, I used other erasers, and they could erase the graphite similarly well. Again, my experiences in this regard have been much better than those of the reviewers.

My only complaint is that the graphite is fairly light. I think I was expecting something darker, closer to a pen; instead, it really did seem like a standard pencil lead in lightness, though less solid in texture on the paper, like ballpoint ink. Perhaps in the next iterations, they will offer different grades (can I get a 3B or 4B liquid pencil, for example?). But I’m not dissatisfied with it so far, and I plan to get my grubby mitts on a few more as soon as I can.

clearscience: If you want to calculate the position of a...

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 23:26:52 -0400

clearscience:

If you want to calculate the position of a particle, in other words its mechanics, the equation you use is the Schrödinger Wave Equation. Say you have an electron, and it is oscillating back and forth a certain distance from a nucleus. This is an example of the harmonic oscillator, mentioned previously. Now, if it were a baseball on a spring oscillating (same idea), you could use some relatively simple equations on it—maybe ones you would see in an advanced high school physics class. Instead, the Schrödinger Equation is required. Let’s explain some aspects of it:

What is H?: H is an operator, called the Hamiltonian, which describes the physics of the particle. Hamiltonians are a very fancy way to do physics, not peculiar to quantum mechanics. Basically, H will contain derivatives with respect to location.

What is E?: E describes the energy eigenvalues of the system. Long story short: there is not just one solution to this equation, but an infinite number of solutions. But they are regularly placed, and can be numbered “solution #1,” “#2,” etc. So we write E in such a way that we can enter in which solution we want (e.g. n = 0 for solution #1, etc).

Why is it a “wave equation”?: The quantity you have to solve for is Ψ (psi), and that is called the wave function. It gives not the location of the particle, but the probability the particle is at a particular place. The reason it’s a “wave equation” requires a little calculus or differential equations to understand, but here goes: H contains derivatives and E doesn’t. So when you have derivatives of something (Ψ) equalling that something (Ψ), the solution is often in the form sin, as in a sine wave. So, an equation that looks like that makes waves.

laughingsquid: Stay Puft Caffeinated Gourmet Marshmallows We...

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:28:15 -0400

laughingsquid:

Stay Puft Caffeinated Gourmet Marshmallows

We are heading towards the logical extremes of caffeinated products.

Liaisons Dangereuses - Peut-Être…Pas One of my favorite...

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:15:52 -0400

Liaisons Dangereuses - Peut-Être…Pas

One of my favorite songs. Used to hear this on WBMX’s Hot Mix show in Chicago during the mid-80s. The song is nice and dark, and the beat and synth line straddle a line between slinky and sleazy. I can see where a bunch of industrial bands got their sound.

fuckyeahmath: Futurama Writer Created And Proved A Brand New...

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:59:53 -0400

fuckyeahmath:

Futurama Writer Created And Proved A Brand New Math Theorem Just For Last Night’s Episode

(story)

A photo from my camera’s memory card. Shot during a walk...

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 22:01:44 -0400

A photo from my camera’s memory card. Shot during a walk through Andersonville, Chicago, a few weeks back.

One of the things I will miss about Chicago: being a short...

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:31:00 -0400

One of the things I will miss about Chicago: being a short distance from moonlit nights on Lake Michigan.

transferring place to place

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:39:00 -0400

Changing jobs is a difficult process, even in the best of economic times. This goes double when my career is changing as well. Most of my professional life, my work has been in system administration and network analysis. (There were a few jobs as business analyst, research assistant, and so forth, but they take up a small part of my job history.) While I still have the basic skills, I haven’t kept up with the technology since moving over to economics. Also, I went back to school in part because I didn’t have any real interest in continuing to be an IT admin. So, a lot of my switch currently involves changing my résumés so that I accentuate my research/math/programming skills. (Functional résumés are good in that respect.)

What makes the job search more difficult is that my wife and I are changing location as well. At the end of September, we’re moving to Philadelphia. That’s right. After two years in Chicago, we’re getting rid of most of our stuff, packing that which we want to save, and driving out to Philadelphia.

This will be the third time I’ve moved to another city. (The second time may not count, really — it was returning to Chicago, after eighteen years here and another eleven in Pittsburgh.) The first time, it was to college, and so I was expecting to meet people there. The second time, it was back here, and I was already familiar with the lay of the land, had some friends here, and didn’t feel totally alien. So, this will be the first time I will have moved to a place where I don’t know all that many people, and don’t have either an existing social network or something conducive to creating social networks (i.e. college). This idea of going to a new place and having to start over from scratch scares me somewhat, since I have not done it before.

Yet I am looking forward to it. I didn’t get the reset button when we moved back to Chicago; this time, there’s a chance to begin anew, to try new things, to develop social connections largely unencumbered from what I was familiar with. Doing that here required a lot of energy to overcome inertia, and with school and family illness concerns, I didn’t have that sort of energy. But with those things handled (to varying degrees, of course), I can try something new.

I plan to use this blog to chronicle the last weeks in Chicago — the good, the bad, the frustrating, the new, the old — and the move over to Philadelphia, with all that such a process entails.

Gratuitous macro of a leaf, Lake Shore trail, Chicago, 11/09 (I...

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 12:38:00 -0400

Gratuitous macro of a leaf, Lake Shore trail, Chicago, 11/09 (I think). Just because this page needs more pictures.

changing my feasible region

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 22:59:51 -0400

In my previous post, I mentioned that this is a period of several transitions. I will endeavor to discuss them in various posts. For now, I will write about my impending shift from a graduate student to…someone who is not a graduate student, for lack of a more precise description.

As I write this, I am still a graduate student in an economics department. In a few months, I will no longer be a graduate student in the department. (To be honest, I have had one foot out the door for the past couple of months, but there were things I wanted to do to have a cleaner break.) Two years in graduate school were enough for me to realize that what I was doing wasn’t what I wanted to do, and I was running myself into the ground and making myself unhappy to chase a nebulous long-term goal.

I am not sure what my next act will be. Most of my previous work experience has been in IT. In fact, one of the reasons for going back to school in economics was to change my career path from IT to economics, which was my first interest. But during graduate school, and in fact during my undergraduate work, I found that my interest in economics was waning and my interest in myriad other fields was growing. Some of it may have been an effect of the mind-numbing abstraction that is part and parcel of the graduate economics curriculum, the feeling that one simply learns things to learn them, to go through the elaborate and highly technical hazing process. Whatever it may have been, it served to help me figure out what I wanted, and what I did not want.

Even though I don’t know what I will be doing next, I know what I want to do next. I want to work in policy analysis. I am interested in looking at policy questions, taking data and reasonable theories, and shedding a little light on either past and present programs and their effectiveness (my economic history interest) or about potential projects. I’m interested in housing policy, in education, in employment. It’s the policy questions that have me interested, whether in a historical context or in the present day.

Of course, I am a little apprehensive about finding work that’s outside of my core résumé experience. But I’ve had analysis work in several of my jobs, and doing research work as an undergrad, and I’ve now taken a good number of economics and statistics classes. The challenge will be to parlay this experience into a new career trajectory.

like a tanker changing direction

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 17:23:59 -0400

(photo of Lake Michigan from outside my apartment in Chicago)

Transitions are a good time to start a blog.

I have moved and changed careers before. Except for some notes scattered to the wind here and there, there are lots of things I do not remember, sharp sensations and images surrounded by ever-expanding lacunae. I would prefer to not make this mistake again in the next phase of my life.

Here is a chronicle of my current shifts, whether they are geographic, vocational, emotional, or just plain fun. I hope to post in it daily, or at least every couple of days.