"Anything You Can Safely Bury in Your Backyard"

Today I finally noticed Stanford's guidelines for what you should compost: "Anything you can safely bury in your backyard"

Well, I don't know about you, but my mind has just gone in very bad directions...

Visualization of a Career

Here is a very cool (and rather intricate) visualization of the outcomes of Derek Jeter's plate appearances throughout his career. (The data comes from the usual sources, and the graphics are by a company called Chartball. I might well want to buy a poster from them about my team, my favorite players, or something else interesting.)

Stung!

I think I just literally experienced the sharpest, most intense physical pain that I have ever had in my entire life (and my fingers were once slammed in a car door, so that's saying a lot).

I was walking merrily along to get a smoothie for lunch, and some insect stung me horribly in my right pinkie right in the bottom spot where I bend it. The stinger went all the way through and poked another (smaller) hole through the skin farther up my finger.

I ending up apologizing profusely for my salty language to the two nice ladies who stopped their walking to ask me what was wrong.

That was close to 30 minutes ago, and my hand is still shaking a bit (and I can't make a firm fist, and it really shakes when I force myself to make a fist). And it still hurts like Hell, though not as intensely as during the heated moment. The pain is very slowly dulling.

I hope that insect dies a slow, painful death (maybe nailing me was its last act of defiance?), and then I hope it gets experimented on. I know biologists --- I could make this happen.

I have been stung before --- on the bottom of my foot, even --- and it was nowhere near as painful as this time.

As some of you know, I have a history dating back to not just my Caltech days but all the way to Beverly Hills. (I never did get stung by one of the Caltech hornets, even though they harassed me a lot.)

My smoothie was well-earned.

In conclusion: Ouch. And Fuck.

Quantum Espresso

I am on the mailing list for The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, and I recently received an e-mail from that advertises an upcoming conference with a very compelling acronym (ESPRESSO).

Here is an excerpt from the e-mail: In collaboration with the Quantum ESPRESSO Foundation and CECAM, the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy, is organizing an Advanced Quantum-ESPRESSO Developers' Training Workshop to be held in Trieste from 19 to 30 January 2015.

What, so classical espresso is no longer good enough?

Academics Write Like Crap

Well, at least most of us write like crap for our academic writing. Additionally, most of us don't include humor in our scientific articles either.

I do the best I can to buck this trend, though others will be the judge of how well I do. I certainly attempt to put humor in some of my writing, and quite a few of my papers (e.g., this one) contain easter eggs. I do think that I am a good writer, and at minimum I am definitely very anal about my scholarly prose.

Although I don't agree with everything in the article about what we do that is bad --- for example, I think the paragraph with "The rest of this article is organized as follows." is genuinely useful for many readers, especially if the article is long --- but I agree with a lot of it. Also, I can't overemphasize how much my scientific career has benefited from my experience in journalism at Caltech. (Yes, being a Tech Editor has been amazingly beneficial. It's one of the best and most important things I did for my education.)

(Tip of the cap to Carlos Castillo Chavez.)

Even More Average Than Before?

Former Major Leaguer Gabe Kapler offered some astute analysis about the Giants' playoff chances: "The loss of Pagan makes an already league average offense more average."

In related news, I subtracted 0 from 0, and I still have 0.

Note: Pagan's injury is a very big loss. Kapler had a sensible point in mind, but the way he phrased it is "fantastic".

The Smell of Old Books (and of New Video Game Systems)

Have you ever noticed the smell of old books? One researcher described it as follows: a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness, this unmistakable smell is as much a part of the book as its contents.

On a similar note, I also have always noticed a distinctive smell when I get a new video game system. Yummy!

Headline: Sudden Execution Causes Extinction of Matrix Products

Here is a quote from a paper I finished reading this morning: "We first execute the last matrix product..."

Well, damn. Now I guess matrix products have become extinct. Cruel bastards.

Induction and Birthday Parties

Well, this is a very depressing way to apply induction.

I find this SMBC perversely amusing, though I have been in this kind of situation before and it's not fun.

More Retiring Baseball Players

Recently, I blogged about Adam Dunn's likely retirement. Understandably, Derek Jeter's retirement tour has gotten most of the major headlines --- and deservedly so. And as much as I can't stand the Yankees (and sometimes get annoyed by all of the jeterating), Jeter deserves immense respect, will make the Hall of Fame in a first-ballot landslide, and I love it that his last game at Yankee stadium had a storybook ending. I'm also not surprised that the The Onion has had a series of articles during the last week poking fun at Jeter. (They have a history of doing that, like the time that I discussed in this blog entry.) I also want to bring up Paul Konerko, who has also has had an excellent career. (When Konerko was a prospect, the Dodgers traded him for Jeff Shaw. Sigh.)

Well Done, Onion: Infernal Edition

I somehow missed this article that The Onion published last year as a satire of homosexual people being condemned to eternity in Hell. This has apparently done wonders for the lifestyle down there.

Four-Sided Polygons: Basically a Rehash of Triangles

I really like today's SMBC about a website in which you can post reviews on anything.

My favorite is one of the reviews of 'four-sided polygons': meh. basically a rehash of triangle.

How The West Was Won

The Dodgers beat the Giants tonight and are now officially National League West champions for 2014!! Tonight we were led once again by Clayton Kershaw, who right now is the best pitcher on the planet.

Go Dodgers!!!!

Spectral Graph Theory: Cover Art

Here is my new cover art for the field of spectral graph theory. (I couldn't wait until Halloween to make this picture.)

The Laboratory Safety Dance

The guy who gave me the key to my office wanted me to undergo a minicourse in lab safety, but thankfully I was able to talk my way out of it. (This is one of the perils of sitting in a biology department.)

Fun Fact: When I was a frosh... I broke so many things in the digital electronics lab that the department changed the policy after me so that future students had to pay for what they broke. I had a collection of the broken items taped to my door in Lloyd House.

‪#‎somebodycall5000‬

Weird Al and Weird Mason

I have pretty much the same hair as Weird Al Yankovic. Just sayin...

"Big Data" is a Religion

As far as I can see, "Big Data" seems more like a religion than anything else.

I like "Good Data" (which is far from the same thing) and "Good Models" (which can, e.g., include parameters fitted from data). I feel like I have a chance to actually understand things that way.

Data analysis definitely has its place and I certainly also have my moments when I do data analysis (see some of my papers), but data is far from everything. In short, I have ambiguous feelings about "Big Data".

Anyway, data analytics is an approach, and I use it sometimes, but there are also many other approaches that one should pursue to try to understand phenomena and solve problems.

By the way, I first posted the picture to which I link above in this blog entry, I ranted a bit about it in this blog entry, and I talked about a Small Data project at ECCS in 2013. (That work I described in that talk has subsequently been published in PNAS.)

The Random Walker Rankings are Back!

The random walker rankings are back for 2014!

Live Action Paper Mario in the Best Western?

The Best Western breakfast room in a small American town provides an interesting cross section of the population.

If this were a Paper Mario game, I would start querying them to check if any of them had seen Luigi.

The Buffalo Beholders and Other Fantasy Football Teams

Here are some very cool fantasy football t-shirts that 'put the fantasy back in fantasy football'. I especially like the Buffalo Beholders, and some of the other ones are also really cool.

(Tip of the cap to Greg Stolerman.)