Quite right. What are the other Cain's Laws?
"Always be polite and considerate to the lower level administrative/service people. It costs you nothing and can make someone's day." I once asked the waiter, when it was dessert time and based on a hint on the menu, if they had any single-barrel bourbons. She literally lit up, and started through the choices and their relative merits.
Quite right. What are the other Cain's Laws?
I suppose I should have written them down :^) They cover a wide range of topics, eg, "To the extent that the limits of technology and the budget will support, put the tricky parts in software." Following that one came close to getting me canned. What saved me was that it eventually got pushed high enough up the chain that my SVP could say to the other side's SVP, in front of the CEO, "But Mike's solution worked and we met the politically-sensitive goal. We're 18 months past the court-ordered deadline and your solution still doesn't work."
Since this is the recent open thread...
Mostly for wj, who purports to be an eventual user of what is currently a piece of toy software for dewarping images. After a small frenzy of coding today, here's a very simple-minded cut at color. I chose this image to see if it preserved the red-eye effect in the right eye. (After looking at the original Polaroid print under 5x magnification, this is surprisingly good.) Among the things on my mind as I kept cutting corners were: (a) how many serial color-space and gamma conversions am I ignoring here, and (b) how much information am I losing by forcing intermediate values back to eight-bit integers? Still, I'm not unhappy with the results. http://www.mcain6925.com/obsidian/dewarp/obsidian09.jpg
We can afford, as a country, to simply give every person enough food to live on.
Hayek, writing in either the 1920s or 30s, said the US was so fabulously wealthy there was no reason anyone should want for adequate food, shelter, or medical attention. And that clearly the state had a role in providing those.
One of Cain's Laws™ says that modern societies need to establish a floor under outcomes, not just opportunities; not doing so will end badly. How high the floor and how to deliver it are open for discussion; anyone who argues against a floor is arguing for the pitchforks and torches to come out eventually.
Re the link in nous's 3:12...
I'm on the author's side, mostly. So I'll get my initial childish response out of the way: if you're going to argue numbers, for pity's sake format the numbers so they're legible. My normal response when given a table that I have to copy-and-paste into a different piece of software to read conveniently is to just stop there.
Given the title of the linked piece -- "The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic" -- the author never got to the point I was expecting. What I was looking for was a reconciliation of two facts. On the one side, the author's table showing that A&H generated large amounts of tuition revenue at little expense. On the other, the administration's assertion that A&H departments had relatively few students in their degree programs. He put the conclusion right there in the title, but apparently couldn't bring himself to say it.
It seems to me that A&H faculty should (a) have recognized that they were turning into service departments and (b) have been proactive on the question of how to be better service departments (while retaining their historical roles). The goal ought to be that when someone proposes A&H cuts, the non-A&H faculty scream.
Long ago when I was a TA at the University of Texas, the state legislature proposed what was basically doing away with us and requiring full-time faculty to do the work. I went down to the Capitol the day they had public hearings. Two faculty members killed the bill. First, the head of the math department testified that with his current staff, the dept would have to drop the services they were providing to the engineering school: calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations classes. Second, the head of the engineering college testified that he would pretty much have to shut down if that happened because his faculty would go elsewhere rather than teach the math classes. Worth noting that the math department already segregated students. Both linear algebra and differential equations were taught in two versions, one for engineering students and one for people outside of engineering.
There's a thing in the education literature called "the Colorado Paradox". We are quite mediocre at getting resident kids through K-12, and into and through college. But we have the 2nd or 3rd most educated workforce in the country. Mostly it's an accident of geography and history, and is probably not reproducible.
Re TonyP's comment, and a general thought about Alaskan resources... Those would be oil, natural gas, and coal for the most part. Russia already has lots of those.
Spent some time off and on this week adding a first cut illumination correction to the toy software for processing images of documents.
Original snapshot taken with a handheld iPad here.
Result of correcting various geometry impairments -- curled pages, perspective, orientation -- here.
First cut at doing some illumination correction here. The approach I've taken seems to do well at correcting problems caused purely by the light source being off to the side (darker sections where page curl has the surface normal vector pointing away from the light, brighter where the normal vector is pointing towards the light). The shadow in the lower right corner is from the iPad and will require a different approach to identify and correct. Or more likely, when I get closer to production I'll arrange things so the camera doesn't cast shadows.
I would add that my perception of American English has both "crafty" and "cunning" as something that is intentionally deceptive, where "clever" is not.
For me, the difference between "smart" and "clever" is mostly about scale. Smart operates on a larger scale than clever. The phrase "too clever for their own good" is illustrative. In computer programming, it usually means things like really obscure code that exploits some odd aspect of the programming language to make this routine run faster today, but that will turn out to be a maintenance nightmare in months/years to come.
I've never been to either the Hearst Castle or the Carnegie Mansion in NYC. Are they really as dismally dark as they look in the photographs? Or is that an artifact of no-flash policies and old slow films?
Or alternatively, has four decades of living in Colorado where almost everywhere has huge expanses of glass spoiled me?
Other than a "this looks like pictures I've seen" sort of observation, I really don't have any room to criticize decorating choices. My wife and I always said that our style was "graduate students who occasionally had some found money" crossed with "people actually live in this room".
Earlier this year I got tired of having to climb out of the futon and bought living room furniture that I sat "on" rather than "in". It felt really strange to go shopping for furniture without my wife. Plain because I'm a graduate student at heart. Inexpensive because, well, I might only realistically need to get ten years out of it. Three pieces so that I can separate the granddaughters as needed to avoid "Grandpa, she's poking me!" Everything else in this picture has a back story.
Took a guided tour of the NCAR supercomputer facility in Cheyenne, WY yesterday. My son and his SO accompanied me. She runs a climate science group at the U of Wyoming. The computer, named Derecho, appears in the TOP500 list of world's fastest computers twice. The CPU partition is #139. The GPU partition is #256. It's one of the very few of the TOP500 machines where you can actually get into the machine room.
It's been too long since I've done my free-association questions thing, I'm out of practice. Did get a good run after asking about fire suppression in the machine room. (Water, with anti-corrosion additives.) What sort of fire detection? What else do the air sensors check for? Is anything else monitored that closely? How many sensors for all of that together? (120,000.) How does all of the sensor data get collected and sorted out?
The supercomputer resources are provided free of charge to earth science researchers. I was assured by the docent that if I submitted a proposal, it would receive the same consideration as all the others. Except that U of Wyoming proposals get some priority, since the State of Wyoming contributes to the facility. I turned to my son's SO and asked, "Do you need interns?" She paused and then answered "Paid or unpaid?" I never know when people are pulling my leg.
Yes, same size as a plump standard pillow. Traditional Japanese versions are quite a bit smaller and thinner.
I got mediocre marks in cursive penmanship because I insisted right from the beginning on straight up and down strokes instead of slanting it.
Did anyone notice that the toy software actually did a nice job of flattening the notebook pages?
I am now a side sleeper, and I have never worked out exactly what the ideal combination is for that.
I am a side sleeper. My buckwheat pillow is about three times the size of those little back-sleeping ones.
For wj more than anything...
Got the first toy version of my nonlinear "flattening" software running. Here's the input image I've been using for testing. It's a picture (converted to grayscale) of one of my old work notebooks. The notebook is "curled" in three-space and the camera is: (a) not centered over the notebook; (b) rotated relative to the notebook; and (c) not pointed at the center of the notebook. Here's the output from the toy software. It's an approximation of a scan at a bit under 300 dpi. In the current version I give the toy hints about where the corners are, but then it's on its own. There are errors in the area where the curvature is most extreme. OTOH, in real life such areas are likely to be empty. I'm not unhappy with the result here.
Lots of future work on illumination correction, among other things.
My new pillow arrived today.
What sort of pillow? Decades ago now I was waking up with neck pains and bought a buckwheat hull pillow. The common complaint from people who feel it is "But it's so hard." The first time I tried it I sort of wiggled my head into it and got as far as thinking, "Yes, it seems rather..." before I fell asleep. Still using one, with no neck pain for years. All anecdotal endorsements are suspect, of course.
Sympathies to all the people with health concerns.
My sister's doctors are muttering about another joint rebuild/replacement. If you looked at our respective histories, I'm the one you would expect to have torn up/worn out joints and be getting replacements. But she's the one who has had two knees, a hip, and a shoulder replaced, and an ankle rebuilt. She's talking about having a couple of arthritic knuckles frozen, while all my hand/finger joints are fine. I sometimes doubt that karma payback is a thing, because I don't deserve the joints I've been blessed with.
Granddaughter #1 has a birthday this month. Her birthday doodle is done. http://mcain6925.com/obsidian/Charlie-birthday-12.pdf
She's getting the money indirectly. She inherited my narrow palate, which causes all sorts of teeth alignment problems when all the adult molars come in. I'm covering the orthodontics bill to spread her palate now, which has to be done before the upper jaw bones finish fusing.
Granddaughter #1 has a birthday this month. Her birthday doodle is done. http://mcain6925.com/obsidian/Charlie-birthday-12.pdf
She's getting the money indirectly. She inherited my narrow palate, which causes all sorts of teeth alignment problems when all the adult molars come in. I'm covering the orthodontics bill to spread her palate now, which has to be done before the upper jaw bones finish fusing.
So...a professional MIDIator?
I asked for that, didn't I? But yes, although when he was working on it was a few years before MIDI happened. Poking at Google, I see that people are still working to get woodwind attack transients right, now looking at the problem that what the player does with shaping their mouth and throat matters.
My only important personal experience with attack transients was when I was in junior high. The band director convinced me to switch from clarinet to oboe. Too late I learned that the reason he wanted an oboist was so he could include a "Themes From the Nutcracker Suite" piece in the Christmas concert, which had a little four- or eight-bar oboe-all-alone intro to one bit. There are so many things that can go wrong when you attack that first note on an oboe.
Music is fundamentally mathematical, and many of the aesthetic qualities we find beautiful or satisfying (in music and many other arts) can be measured and described in mathematical terms.
When I worked at Bell Labs, the Labs was in the midst of a large hiring surge bringing in lots of people in their mid-20s with shiny new degrees. There was a Bell Labs Club blanket organization whose job was, to be blunt about it, to provide activities that kept those mid-20s people out of trouble. Lots of sub-clubs. Eg, go to a movie sponsored by the Cinema Club in the very nice company auditorium Friday evening rather than going to a local bar and getting into trouble with the equivalent of "townies".
The jazz band was actually multiple bands because of demand. The folk music club was enormous. (Also strange in the sense of a group of people who wrote a set of lyrics, and performed them publicly, with excellent harmonies, set to the tune of Alice's Restaurant and running almost as long, on being hired as a systems engineer at Bell Labs, playing on all of the internal prejudices.)
I worked with a guy at the Labs whose MS thesis was on numerically simulating the attack transients of woodwind instruments.
My biggest complaint about metal was/is that the tempo smacked of the same fault most of the huge prog rock acts had when they were live: look how fast I can play. That said, I occasionally check in at YouTube to see if the AI people have done any new heavy metal versions of the big movies or TV smashes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3XIkiSsHUM
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “David Brooks in Laodicea”
Quite right. What are the other Cain's Laws?
"Always be polite and considerate to the lower level administrative/service people. It costs you nothing and can make someone's day." I once asked the waiter, when it was dessert time and based on a hint on the menu, if they had any single-barrel bourbons. She literally lit up, and started through the choices and their relative merits.
"
Quite right. What are the other Cain's Laws?
I suppose I should have written them down :^) They cover a wide range of topics, eg, "To the extent that the limits of technology and the budget will support, put the tricky parts in software." Following that one came close to getting me canned. What saved me was that it eventually got pushed high enough up the chain that my SVP could say to the other side's SVP, in front of the CEO, "But Mike's solution worked and we met the politically-sensitive goal. We're 18 months past the court-ordered deadline and your solution still doesn't work."
On “Giving Away the Store”
Since this is the recent open thread...
Mostly for wj, who purports to be an eventual user of what is currently a piece of toy software for dewarping images. After a small frenzy of coding today, here's a very simple-minded cut at color. I chose this image to see if it preserved the red-eye effect in the right eye. (After looking at the original Polaroid print under 5x magnification, this is surprisingly good.) Among the things on my mind as I kept cutting corners were: (a) how many serial color-space and gamma conversions am I ignoring here, and (b) how much information am I losing by forcing intermediate values back to eight-bit integers? Still, I'm not unhappy with the results.
http://www.mcain6925.com/obsidian/dewarp/obsidian09.jpg
On “David Brooks in Laodicea”
We can afford, as a country, to simply give every person enough food to live on.
Hayek, writing in either the 1920s or 30s, said the US was so fabulously wealthy there was no reason anyone should want for adequate food, shelter, or medical attention. And that clearly the state had a role in providing those.
One of Cain's Laws™ says that modern societies need to establish a floor under outcomes, not just opportunities; not doing so will end badly. How high the floor and how to deliver it are open for discussion; anyone who argues against a floor is arguing for the pitchforks and torches to come out eventually.
On “Giving Away the Store”
Re the link in nous's 3:12...
I'm on the author's side, mostly. So I'll get my initial childish response out of the way: if you're going to argue numbers, for pity's sake format the numbers so they're legible. My normal response when given a table that I have to copy-and-paste into a different piece of software to read conveniently is to just stop there.
Given the title of the linked piece -- "The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic" -- the author never got to the point I was expecting. What I was looking for was a reconciliation of two facts. On the one side, the author's table showing that A&H generated large amounts of tuition revenue at little expense. On the other, the administration's assertion that A&H departments had relatively few students in their degree programs. He put the conclusion right there in the title, but apparently couldn't bring himself to say it.
It seems to me that A&H faculty should (a) have recognized that they were turning into service departments and (b) have been proactive on the question of how to be better service departments (while retaining their historical roles). The goal ought to be that when someone proposes A&H cuts, the non-A&H faculty scream.
Long ago when I was a TA at the University of Texas, the state legislature proposed what was basically doing away with us and requiring full-time faculty to do the work. I went down to the Capitol the day they had public hearings. Two faculty members killed the bill. First, the head of the math department testified that with his current staff, the dept would have to drop the services they were providing to the engineering school: calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations classes. Second, the head of the engineering college testified that he would pretty much have to shut down if that happened because his faculty would go elsewhere rather than teach the math classes. Worth noting that the math department already segregated students. Both linear algebra and differential equations were taught in two versions, one for engineering students and one for people outside of engineering.
"
There's a thing in the education literature called "the Colorado Paradox". We are quite mediocre at getting resident kids through K-12, and into and through college. But we have the 2nd or 3rd most educated workforce in the country. Mostly it's an accident of geography and history, and is probably not reproducible.
"
Re TonyP's comment, and a general thought about Alaskan resources... Those would be oil, natural gas, and coal for the most part. Russia already has lots of those.
"
Spent some time off and on this week adding a first cut illumination correction to the toy software for processing images of documents.
Original snapshot taken with a handheld iPad here.
Result of correcting various geometry impairments -- curled pages, perspective, orientation -- here.
First cut at doing some illumination correction here. The approach I've taken seems to do well at correcting problems caused purely by the light source being off to the side (darker sections where page curl has the surface normal vector pointing away from the light, brighter where the normal vector is pointing towards the light). The shadow in the lower right corner is from the iPad and will require a different approach to identify and correct. Or more likely, when I get closer to production I'll arrange things so the camera doesn't cast shadows.
On “A New Gilded Age”
I would add that my perception of American English has both "crafty" and "cunning" as something that is intentionally deceptive, where "clever" is not.
"
For me, the difference between "smart" and "clever" is mostly about scale. Smart operates on a larger scale than clever. The phrase "too clever for their own good" is illustrative. In computer programming, it usually means things like really obscure code that exploits some odd aspect of the programming language to make this routine run faster today, but that will turn out to be a maintenance nightmare in months/years to come.
"
I've never been to either the Hearst Castle or the Carnegie Mansion in NYC. Are they really as dismally dark as they look in the photographs? Or is that an artifact of no-flash policies and old slow films?
Or alternatively, has four decades of living in Colorado where almost everywhere has huge expanses of glass spoiled me?
"
Other than a "this looks like pictures I've seen" sort of observation, I really don't have any room to criticize decorating choices. My wife and I always said that our style was "graduate students who occasionally had some found money" crossed with "people actually live in this room".
Earlier this year I got tired of having to climb out of the futon and bought living room furniture that I sat "on" rather than "in". It felt really strange to go shopping for furniture without my wife. Plain because I'm a graduate student at heart. Inexpensive because, well, I might only realistically need to get ten years out of it. Three pieces so that I can separate the granddaughters as needed to avoid "Grandpa, she's poking me!" Everything else in this picture has a back story.
"
(not to mention the aristocracies of the 1700s)
I was going to say that I get a Versailles-on-the-cheap sort of feeling from it.
On “An open thread”
If you were serious, apply and find out.
I would be the intern from hell on so many different levels :^)
"
Took a guided tour of the NCAR supercomputer facility in Cheyenne, WY yesterday. My son and his SO accompanied me. She runs a climate science group at the U of Wyoming. The computer, named Derecho, appears in the TOP500 list of world's fastest computers twice. The CPU partition is #139. The GPU partition is #256. It's one of the very few of the TOP500 machines where you can actually get into the machine room.
It's been too long since I've done my free-association questions thing, I'm out of practice. Did get a good run after asking about fire suppression in the machine room. (Water, with anti-corrosion additives.) What sort of fire detection? What else do the air sensors check for? Is anything else monitored that closely? How many sensors for all of that together? (120,000.) How does all of the sensor data get collected and sorted out?
The supercomputer resources are provided free of charge to earth science researchers. I was assured by the docent that if I submitted a proposal, it would receive the same consideration as all the others. Except that U of Wyoming proposals get some priority, since the State of Wyoming contributes to the facility. I turned to my son's SO and asked, "Do you need interns?" She paused and then answered "Paid or unpaid?" I never know when people are pulling my leg.
"
Yes, same size as a plump standard pillow. Traditional Japanese versions are quite a bit smaller and thinner.
I got mediocre marks in cursive penmanship because I insisted right from the beginning on straight up and down strokes instead of slanting it.
Did anyone notice that the toy software actually did a nice job of flattening the notebook pages?
"
I am now a side sleeper, and I have never worked out exactly what the ideal combination is for that.
I am a side sleeper. My buckwheat pillow is about three times the size of those little back-sleeping ones.
"
For wj more than anything...
Got the first toy version of my nonlinear "flattening" software running. Here's the input image I've been using for testing. It's a picture (converted to grayscale) of one of my old work notebooks. The notebook is "curled" in three-space and the camera is: (a) not centered over the notebook; (b) rotated relative to the notebook; and (c) not pointed at the center of the notebook.
Here's the output from the toy software. It's an approximation of a scan at a bit under 300 dpi. In the current version I give the toy hints about where the corners are, but then it's on its own. There are errors in the area where the curvature is most extreme. OTOH, in real life such areas are likely to be empty. I'm not unhappy with the result here.
Lots of future work on illumination correction, among other things.
"
My new pillow arrived today.
What sort of pillow? Decades ago now I was waking up with neck pains and bought a buckwheat hull pillow. The common complaint from people who feel it is "But it's so hard." The first time I tried it I sort of wiggled my head into it and got as far as thinking, "Yes, it seems rather..." before I fell asleep. Still using one, with no neck pain for years. All anecdotal endorsements are suspect, of course.
"
Sympathies to all the people with health concerns.
My sister's doctors are muttering about another joint rebuild/replacement. If you looked at our respective histories, I'm the one you would expect to have torn up/worn out joints and be getting replacements. But she's the one who has had two knees, a hip, and a shoulder replaced, and an ankle rebuilt. She's talking about having a couple of arthritic knuckles frozen, while all my hand/finger joints are fine. I sometimes doubt that karma payback is a thing, because I don't deserve the joints I've been blessed with.
"
Granddaughter #1 has a birthday this month. Her birthday doodle is done.
http://mcain6925.com/obsidian/Charlie-birthday-12.pdf
She's getting the money indirectly. She inherited my narrow palate, which causes all sorts of teeth alignment problems when all the adult molars come in. I'm covering the orthodontics bill to spread her palate now, which has to be done before the upper jaw bones finish fusing.
"
Granddaughter #1 has a birthday this month. Her birthday doodle is done.
http://mcain6925.com/obsidian/Charlie-birthday-12.pdf
She's getting the money indirectly. She inherited my narrow palate, which causes all sorts of teeth alignment problems when all the adult molars come in. I'm covering the orthodontics bill to spread her palate now, which has to be done before the upper jaw bones finish fusing.
On “Everyone is a hero in their own story”
So...a professional MIDIator?
I asked for that, didn't I? But yes, although when he was working on it was a few years before MIDI happened. Poking at Google, I see that people are still working to get woodwind attack transients right, now looking at the problem that what the player does with shaping their mouth and throat matters.
My only important personal experience with attack transients was when I was in junior high. The band director convinced me to switch from clarinet to oboe. Too late I learned that the reason he wanted an oboist was so he could include a "Themes From the Nutcracker Suite" piece in the Christmas concert, which had a little four- or eight-bar oboe-all-alone intro to one bit. There are so many things that can go wrong when you attack that first note on an oboe.
"
Music is fundamentally mathematical, and many of the aesthetic qualities we find beautiful or satisfying (in music and many other arts) can be measured and described in mathematical terms.
When I worked at Bell Labs, the Labs was in the midst of a large hiring surge bringing in lots of people in their mid-20s with shiny new degrees. There was a Bell Labs Club blanket organization whose job was, to be blunt about it, to provide activities that kept those mid-20s people out of trouble. Lots of sub-clubs. Eg, go to a movie sponsored by the Cinema Club in the very nice company auditorium Friday evening rather than going to a local bar and getting into trouble with the equivalent of "townies".
The jazz band was actually multiple bands because of demand. The folk music club was enormous. (Also strange in the sense of a group of people who wrote a set of lyrics, and performed them publicly, with excellent harmonies, set to the tune of Alice's Restaurant and running almost as long, on being hired as a systems engineer at Bell Labs, playing on all of the internal prejudices.)
I worked with a guy at the Labs whose MS thesis was on numerically simulating the attack transients of woodwind instruments.
"
My biggest complaint about metal was/is that the tempo smacked of the same fault most of the huge prog rock acts had when they were live: look how fast I can play. That said, I occasionally check in at YouTube to see if the AI people have done any new heavy metal versions of the big movies or TV smashes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3XIkiSsHUM
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.