mathemajician

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCkYfYa8ePI

(via ehintz)

According to one Swiss website the forecast high here today is 22 C (72 F).

Huh? What the hell is going on?

UPDATE: It's currently 24 C !!!!!!!

New Zealand is having a record cool summer, while Switzerland is having a record warm winter. For example, the forecast high tomorrow in Wellington is 16 C — the same as here in Lugano! For New Zealand in the middle of summer to be the same temperature as Switzerland in the middle winter is so screwed up I can hardly believe it's happening.

I just read this, sort of an interview with Bill Gates. At one point he was asked what he wants for Christmas. His answer was lectures from here. Me too.

I depart for New Zealand in a few days. Man I hate that flight. Anyway, it will be nice being back in NZ again. I'm also spending almost two weeks in Rarotonga (tropical island) before heading to Los Angeles for a couple of days, and then back to Switzerland. Once I arrive back I'll have just 4.5 months before my PhD is over.

I'm starting to work out what to do next. Of course what I'd really like to spend the next 5 years doing would be creating a radical new artificial intelligence system. After working in two companies trying to do that, and having spent the last 4 years learning more about AI for my PhD, I know how I'd go about doing it and I'm reasonably confident that I could succeed. However I have no idea how I could finance it. I estimate that I'd need $1.5 m to get to the point of proof of concept. It would require about 3 people, 10 computers and 5 years work. Once proof of concept had been achieved money would be no problem — the company that is first to develop real AI will easily have a market cap north of a trillion dollars. Alas I don't know any angel investors with that kind of money and outlandish ambition.

Plan B. Currently this plan looks like doing a post doc, perhaps a part time one, in finance. I'd be based in Switzerland and would apply machine learning methods to problems in finance research.

According to this article, in the UK,

"... in the past four years demand for IT and computer graduates has doubled while at the same time the number of students studying the subject has declined by a third."

I've also heard similar things from the US in recent weeks. Even India is supposed to be having a skills crisis according to a few articles I've read recently. Demand there is so out of match with supply that the annual wage inflation for IT workers is running at almost 20%. This is all good news for IT workers incomes. More evidence that shifting from academia to industry now might be a good idea.

If all this industry demand is for real, I find it strange that the demand for people doing theoretical AI research appears to be so bleak.

7 months left on the PhD. Lots to do and not much time to blog. I almost have a committee sorted out, and hopefully in a few weeks I'll move to "PhD candidate" status. I know that seems a bit strange at this point, but it's because I've joined the program after a few years at a research institute so I'm doing all this in a compressed amount of time. Anyway, over the next 6 months I need to get some more research done and of course write my thesis. Hopefully that won't be too much of a problem as most of the material will be ripped from my papers and then massaged to fit together into one document. Still it's a lot to do in the next half year — so don't expect to hear too much from me! In the middle of all this I'm also going on a trip to New Zealand for Christmas, then Rarotonga for a couple of weeks, and then Los Angeles for two days on the way home. Extra busy.

Another thing that I need to do is to work out what I'm doing next. One thing that got me thinking recently is the fact that a couple of very good AI theory guys I know who have done a few post-docs aren't having an easy time finding permanent positions. One has now taken another post-doc position as he didn't get any of the permanent positions, and another has given up completely and is now trying to find a job in industry. These guys are really good, and so seeing this is a bit of a worry. Given that I've worked for 5 years in industry, by the time I will have completed 2 post doc positions I'll be almost 40. If I then can't get a permanent position in a university and have to switch to industry, I'll be in trouble.

If I switch next year to business I'll be 33, and with 5 years industry experience already on my CV, I'm not looking too much like a career academic. That should make the switch a lot easier. Given that academia seems to offer little job security, little money and the pressure to publish all the time means that I'm unsure whether I'll ever be able to follow the longer term more ambitious things I'd like to work on, I'm seriously thinking about going to industry. Another problem is that in academia as a PhD grad you don't have much control over where you live next. You just have to follow the jobs shifting to a new city and possibly country every few years. That's bad news for relationships. I understand now why many academics' wives don't have much in the way of professional careers — in the prime of their career building years they are having to shift from one random town to the next.

Another thing is that I find academia to be quite limiting in some ways. If you propose something really radical with a high chance of failure, it's almost sure to be rejected by the funding agencies. You simply can't go away and try something crazy for a few years, instead you have to produce small units of publishable work all the time as this is a key measure of how your performance is judged. Of course if you are the head of the department you can do some crazy stuff as you have a permanent position. But by then it's probably too late as your really creative and crazy days are already over — you've been molded to the norm and blinkered by the dogma of your field. If I had $1 million in the bank, I'd shift somewhere cheap to live and embark on research so unconventional it would make respected academics wince.

Maybe somebody like Google would be interested in giving me a job that wasn't too bad. Or maybe I could find a niche and start my own business doing something interesting. In any case, I haven't lost my passion and belief that very powerful AI is not only possible, but that it's possible in the next few decades. That's the dream, now how do I live it? Getting a PhD in AI is just one step.

For a long time I have called myself agnostic.

While I am almost certain that an Abrahamic god does not exist, I've been more reluctant to totally rule out more abstract notions of "god". Thus I didn't feel that my certainty in the non-existence of some kind of a god was high enough to be called an atheist. At a more practical level, where I grew up religious beliefs were pretty mild. You could be an atheist, or a theist, and nobody much would care. Even our prime minister is agnostic and nobody but a tiny ultra religious minority seems to care. As such, there was not much pressure to be explicitly against theism.

However I've decided to change my position. When most people say "God", what they mean is an Abrahamic style god, i.e. Jewish, Christian or Muslim. With respect to this concept of god I've already been atheist for some time. The second reason is that, unlike the mild religious atmosphere of New Zealand that I grew up with, on the world stage today conservative religious voices seem to be getting stronger and are influencing major world events. I think that these voices are moving the world in the wrong direction: away from reason, evidence and science, and towards a world where something is true just because that's what you have decided to believe. In such a climate I think that a clearer position is called for.

I am now an atheist.

As a geek who might start a business at some point in the future, this was an interesting read. Indeed I've seen and heard most of this before, but this is a nice compact summary.

I think I can now basically make perfect pasta sauce. The down side to this is that now when I go out to restaurants, unless they are good Italian places in Italy, I tend to wonder why I'm paying so much money to get something that's not as good as I make at home. Anyway, here's one pasta sauce recipe, more or less. See I can't tell you the exact recipe because I never actually measure anything, but I can give you the general idea...

Ingredients:

Puree tomatoes. Forget that pre-made tomato sauce with stuff in, start from first principles.

Olive oil.

Honey. You need something to sweeten it a bit and I find that a honey with a mild flavour works well.

Onions, if you want. Amazingly, you can make a real nice sauce with just the three things above.

A tin of tuna works well with this.

EDIT: I forgot one thing, lemon juice. Add some lemon juice. Trust me.

Method:

Get a big pot with high sides. Stick the oil in. If you're doing onions, chop them up and fry them until they start to turn a little transparent. Stick the tomato puree in and add the lemon juice. Now bring it to the boil. It will start to go "plop-plop" and little bits of the puree with be leaping out of the pot and onto the walls. Good. Keep it boiling like that, but don't burn it or anything too drastic. Stir it from time to time. At some point add some honey so that it's very slightly sweet. If you taste it at this point it will still taste a bit bitter from the tomatoes, that fine. After a while the puree will reduce (and probably make your walls dirty) and stop going "plop-plop" and start making quick little bubbles without leaping out of the pot. Good. This is after something like 15 minutes I'd guess.

At this point you'll need to stir it a bit from time to time and it will start to get thicker and start to get slightly darker too. Make sure that there is enough olive oil so that the sauce is just very slightly oily. Keep on frying it. It's the frying that gives it a really good flavour as it makes the tomato caramelise slightly and gives it a sweet and very slightly smoky taste. The key thing now is knowing when to stop. You want to stop when it's thick enough to be pushed into one side of the pot and never flow back. Maybe even a bit more than that. Now take it off the heat. At this point I'd recommend adding a tin of tuna. Just drop the tuna into the hot sauce and mush it around a bit. Done.

I eat it with spaghetti. Italians claim that every different kind of pasta holds the sauce a different way and this all really important. I think they're delusional.

It might sound like a lot of work, but really it's not. Most of the time you can just leave it to reduce away while it's going plop-plop and making a mess all over your kitchen. If you get it right you should get a slightly oily sauce that's fairly thick, with a deep rich slightly sweet taste and a hint of bitterness. I eat exactly the above dish (sans onions because I didn't have any) about half an hour ago and can still taste the rich flavour in the back of my mouth.

I think the combination of the olive oil, plus some sweetener and frying it are what makes the magic happen. I watched part II of The Godfather movie the other week and sure enough, there was a scene about halfway through the movie where somebody cooking pasta sauce explains this very technique.

A while ago I posted about my visit to Dubai. Here's a couple of nice pictures showing what the economic explosion there looks like. Firstly, this is the new part of Dubai in 1991:




And then 14 years later in 2005:




I hear that China is the same story... just much bigger.

This is a great talk by Douglas Adams. Below is one part of the talk that's about God.

Tools have enabled us to think intentionally, to make things and to do things to create a world that fits us better. Now imagine an early man surveying his surroundings at the end of a happy day’s tool making. He looks around and he sees a world which pleases him mightily: behind him are mountains with caves in – mountains are great because you can go and hide in the caves and you are out of the rain and the bears can’t get you; in front of him there’s the forest – it’s got nuts and berries and delicious food; there's a stream going by, which is full of water – water’s delicious to drink, you can float your boats in it and do all sorts of stuff with it; here’s cousin Ug and he’s caught a mammoth – mammoth’s are great, you can eat them, you can wear their coats, you can use their bones to create weapons to catch other mammoths. I mean this is a great world, it’s fantastic. But our early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, ‘well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in’ and then he asks himself a very treacherous question, a question which is totally meaningless and fallacious, but only comes about because of the nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has evolved into and the sort of person who has thrived because he thinks this particular way. Man the maker looks at his world and says ‘So who made this then?’ Who made this? – you can see why it’s a treacherous question. Early man thinks, ‘Well, because there’s only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he’s probably male’. And so we have the idea of a god. Then, because when we make things we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself, ‘If he made it, what did he make it for?’ Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, ‘This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely’ and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.

 
By Shane Legg at about 11 years of age.

Clearly at this point in my life I'd been watching far too much cold war era sci-fi. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the original here in Switzerland so I can't put in the parts that were hand written in (no doubt very bad) Russian. Maybe one day when I'm back in New Zealand I'll try to find it and put these back in. I still have the Roman character versions for you Russian speakers to laugh at though.

I still remember writing the part here the helicopter flies over the lake in the space city... that was definately insprired by the opening credits of Miami Vice. As for the over the top cost of the American space station... hey, there must have been a lot of inflation.

( Read more... )

 

A story I wrote in about 1982. I was a bit scientifically confused, but hey, I was 9...

( Read more... )

 
Ever wanted a talking mirror... just like the evil Queen in Snow White?

Now's your chance!

One minute it's a normal looking mirror...





...then out of nowhere fades in a talking head.





Watch the animation.

You can hook it up to things around your house like a camera on the front door to tell you when people are arriving etc.

I want one!

You can get them from Theme addicts.

The forecast for tomorrow is 36C (97F), about the same as today.

That would be no problem in, say, Texas. But here in Switzerland very few houses have air con., indeed even the public library doesn't.

So we just... cook.

Thankfully work has good air con.

My blog here has been a bit slow recently... I've been busy with other stuff, including posting more often to my research blog.

 
I'm having "Ubuntu Shock".

I had a file I wanted printed and saw a printer sitting here under a desk. So I turned it on, plugged it into my laptop's USB port and selected "install new printer" from the system admin menu. Ubuntu told me it could see an HP 950 printer and asked if I wanted to set it up as a local printer. I glanced over, and sure enough the printer had HP 950 written on the front. So I clicked "yes". Back to Adobe acrobat and click print and... out comes the paper.

*gasp*

Earlier today my girlfriend brought an MP3 player. I plugged it into my laptop and, just like magic, up popped a little icon of an MP3 player on my desktop. Simple as that.

*gasp*

I'm sure Linux is not supposed to be this easy. At this rate I'm going to have to start using GNU Hurd in order to get my nerd cred back.

... but there is experimental evidence suggesting that the earth really could be at the centre of the universe.

From this article:

...when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.

 
Remember my recent post about The Piano Society where you can legally get free mp3's of classical music? The idea is that pianists want to advertise themselves and so they put some of their performances online for free download.

Unfortunately, Swedish police worked out that a lot of mp3s where coming from these web servers and nobody seemed to be paying for anything. So they shut the site down. From the website:

Piano Society is temporarily off line.

The reason is that the swedish police by mistake took the Piano Society server in their attempt to catch possible illegal activity at http://thepiratebay.org/

Our server just happend to be hosted by the same co-location company and has of course no connection to the Pirat Bay. The swedish police admit their mistake and we are working for a solution and hope to have the site up at latest on sunday.

Sorry for the inconveniance.

It reminds me of a story about Redhat Linux in the UK being contacted by police and informed that somebody had been caught making copies of Redhat Linux. It took 20 minutes to convince the police that no only did Redhat not care, they actually encouraged people to make free copies.

The idea that you can legally get music or software for free clearly has some people very confused.

 
If we think of the political system in the US, images of the White House and the Capital Building come to mind. If we think of the political system in the UK, we can imagine 10 Downing Street or the Houses of Parliament at Westminster. But what about the EU Parliament? This is a building at the heart of a 25 nation union of some of the most wealthy countries on earth with a total population about to exceed half a billion people. But has anybody ever seen the EU Parliament? Or even a picture of it? I never had, and so while I was in Brussels I decided to find out what it looked like.

After getting a city map and hunting for a minute I located the EU Parliament, about 3 km from where I was staying. So off I went. After about half an hour walk finally I found it.

I present, the European Union Parliament:





Or from down the street,





I was expecting something a bit more classical old school European, but that was clearly all steel and glass. I think one reason why it's not well known is that it's hard to find a good place to get a picture of the building. It's really just one huge building connected to a mass of other equally huge buildings with no clear vantage point for taking photos.

One strange thing about the place was that you could really just walk up to the building and look in through the glass. I was expecting a place this important to have at least a 50 metre zone around it where you couldn't enter without going through a security check.

Even stranger was when I walked around the back. What do you expect to see behind the EU parliament... why, a small brick house of course!





I could see tables and chairs in the house, it looked like somebody may have actually lived there. How odd.