I knew the guy was religious, but his apparent disdain for anything rational makes me glad Huckabee no longer has a chance at winning this race:

“The other scenario… if he kept winning by large margins could he keep John McCain short of the line? That is a more probable scenario, but still an unlikely scenario,” said CNN chief national correspondent John King.

“I know the pundits, and I know what they say: The math doesn’t work out,” Huckabee said Saturday morning at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. “Well, I didn’t major in math, I majored in miracles. And I still believe in those, too.”

Fortunately, the math really doesn’t work out.

It’s funny how something as simple as overexcitability can shape one’s life so profoundly. It’s both a blessing and a curse. Life is harsh, and being able to experience it more keenly opens one up for a great deal of pain that most people will never need to go through. What makes it all worth it is that the intensity of the very struggle and of the heights one can strive for and attain. Even now, at the certifiably adult age of 23, this feeling has not dissipated: every day is an opportunity, to be ascribed a significance all its own – to learn, to experience, to create, to improve – or to waste if the day’s activities are meaningless.

Today I resumed my mathematical research. As I thought, I’m a much stronger mathematician now than I was just a few years ago due to my exposure to complex mathematics as a Ph. D. student (so I guess it wasn’t a complete waste). But how I had forgotten the landscape of possibilities that opens up before me with every new stroke of the pencil!

The engraving is usually excellent, but the binding on all of these books is universally awful. The front cover usually starts to come off after about the first month.

Every time I go back to work on the journal paper, I’m struck more and more about how much the reviewers seem to miss the point. Perhaps it’s the writing; more likely they were just looking for criticism and made some incorrect conjectures by doing so, but we have reviews that ask us to explain how our methodology relates to kernel learning (it doesn’t… it’s a completely separate field), what happens if there’s a trifurcation in the trees (we already stated that we treat it as two bifurcations), to clarify what we mean when we say using a breadth-first approach is more robust (we already state it pretty clearly: “Using breadth-first labeling, a missed branch will only cause changes in the encoding at or below the level at which the branch is missed, whereas a depth-first approach could potentially change the labeling at all levels of the tree”), and finally, “It is not very clear how these precision percentage values were obtained, especially when k becomes 2 to 5. Please clarify.”, even though we state many times throughout the paper that these are cross-validated k-nearest neighbor classification accuracies.

One of the reviewers even asks us to cite a paper we’ve never referenced and don’t use any of the techniques from.

No matter what happens to the economy, my mind is my most valuable asset, and one that no vicissitude of the economy can take away. There’s strength in knowing you can lose everything and yet build it back up again in spite of it all.

I don’t really care whether Picasso, Matisse, or Hemingway used the same type of notebook that I bought, so you can stop making such false claims. I just want something that doesn’t fall apart in my pocket.

Thanks.

Well, I suppose I have no choice but to continue playing the game, as before. Since I’m not considering a career in academia and I already have a bunch of recruiters lined up for an industrial research position, I should not be subject to “publish or perish”. That gives me a comfortable vantage point from which to perform novel science.

I hope.