07.31.07

Mismanagement

Posted in General, Research at 9:01 am by Michael

Projects should not be “bursty”. I shouldn’t have to sit idle for months only to receive five new projects in the span of a week. I should be notified of conference deadlines at least one month in advance per paper that I will be submitting. If I’m working on other projects at the moment, the remaining work should either be queued (such that the deadline on at least one of the projects is going to slip) or given to someone who is less busy.

I’m still waiting to do real research – you know, forming hypotheses, creating experiments, … not just writing papers. It’s a pity, though not a surprise, that this is what my life has become.

07.30.07

Wrapped around your finger

Posted in Music at 10:24 pm by Michael

The lyrics to this song are awfully appropriate when everyone around you is attempting to bend your prodigious talent to their own ends. Catchy, too.

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/s/sting-&-police/132153.html

07.29.07

The Matlab Elves

Posted in Programming at 10:14 am by Michael

I received a visitation from the Matlab “elves” today. The following code worked perfectly yesterday:

“load data; imwrite(images{1}, ’1.png’)”

Yet now returns an invalid image. No changes to data.mat have been made.

Edit: Scratch that; someone else on my team changed data.mat without notifying me.

07.27.07

Radiofrequency Ablation

Posted in Ideas at 8:20 am by Michael

It seems to me that the so-called “Gamma knife” therapy used primarily to treat brain tumors would also be effective as a method of fairly noninvasive radiofrequency ablation.

On the other hand, if cardiologists must probe around in there to discover the origin of an arrhythmia anyway, they may as well stick with the traditional method and avoid the radiation.

07.26.07

Systems

Posted in Ideas, Philosophy at 5:26 pm by Michael

System = Method + Structure

Take a human, for example. The structure that supports the system is the body – the compiled version of the DNA source code. The methods, however, are things such as consciousness, experience, personality, thought, and emotion that run on top of the structure. You could duplicate the structure, but that won’t necessarily result in the same methods. Take identical twins, for example. They have mostly identical genetic data and thus mostly identical bodies, but they may not do the same things, think the same ways, or otherwise act like the same person.

There are two ways to create a system: Either the structure must be fully present before the methods can emerge or the structure and methods must codevelop (the latter is how evolution typically works). You can’t build the methods if the structure supporting them is nonexistent, just as you can’t construct a building from the top down.

Edit: Oddly enough, this appears to be a fundamental principle of the Jainist view of the universe. That means even more interesting discussion on the nature of systems, so I don’t mind!

07.25.07

Small changes

Posted in Ideas, Music, Psychology at 10:36 pm by Michael

In music and marketing, small incremental changes are best.

Changes to the Ph. D. Program

Posted in Personal, Research at 7:57 pm by Michael

Thanks to changes in Temple’s Ph. D. program, I no longer have to take the qualifier or any additional coursework (since I’ve completed 8 courses with As). Therefore, I can theoretically complete the degree by the end of next year, though I will probably stick to the three-year plan I devised – I’m already on-track, so I’ll simply be on-track with far less work.

Now all I need is to hear back from Google and I can begin planning 2008. Yes, I try to always have a general plan one year in advance. 2007 was somewhat disappointing thus far, but I couldn’t have predicted that I’d be ripped so forcefully away from algorithms.

B+-Trees

Posted in Programming at 7:44 pm by Michael

During a conversation with a friend, I said something worth writing:

“The B+-tree is the programming analogue of the Clementi sonatinas: not too difficult to implement, but very fun nevertheless.”

Applications

Posted in Art, Philosophy, Research at 7:37 pm by Michael

If one more person asks me why my work on the divisor function is applicable, I am going to scream! I’ve been mentioning Robin’s Theorem (proving a bound on the divisor function is equivalent to proving the Riemann Hypothesis) as an example of what can be done with this, but that is not why I did this research.

If Dali had to justify his paintings to the powerful, we would not have “The Persistence of Memory”. If Beethoven had to justify his works to the elite, we would not have the Moonlight Sonata. The simple act of expression is a reflection of the beauty in the soul.

It is the same with mathematics. I don’t know how significant my result is (though I am sure that it is at least novel and suspect that it has a moderate degree of significance… probably not enough to prove the Riemann Hypothesis), and probably never will due to society’s refusal to accommodate my wish to pursue multidisciplinary training, but I don’t care, because I’ve effectively reduced the amortized time complexity of calculating the divisor function for sequentially-increasing values to O(n) (calculating it the old-fashioned way, by multiplying over the primes, is polynomial) in a most elegant way.

That suffices for me. If it doesn’t suffice for you, I’d say you are, mathematically, at a handicap against those with an innate sense of mathematical beauty. At the very least, you’ll lack the passion that we have.

Oh, and this doesn’t only apply to math. If you only concentrate on application, a whole world of beauty is closed to you.

Matlab with CGI

Posted in Programming, Research at 12:40 pm by Michael

If you call Matlab from, say, Perl, and it segfaults on startup with this message, please note that you must set the HOME environment variable, as Matlab requires a home directory. I used /tmp, but feel free to set it to whatever accessible directory you wish. It took me nearly 2 hours to figure this out, so I am posting this in the hope that it will save others from repeating this.
< M A T L A B >
Copyright 1984-2005 The MathWorks, Inc.
Version 7.0.4.352 (R14) Service Pack 2
January 29, 2005

————————————————————————
Segmentation violation detected at Wed Jul 25 13:37:45 2007
————————————————————————

Configuration:
MATLAB Version:   7.0.4.352 (R14) Service Pack 2
MATLAB License:   213660
Operating System: Linux 2.6.8-1.521smp #1 SMP Mon Aug 16 09:32:47 EDT 2004 x86_64
Window System:    No active display
Current Visual:   None
Virtual Machine:  Java is not enabled
Default Charset:  US-ASCII

Register State:
rax = 0000000000000000   rbx = 0000000000000001
rcx = 0000000000000000   rdx = 0000002a959cf9a0
rbp = 0000007fbfffbdf0   rsi = 0000000000000000
rdi = 0000000000000000   rsp = 0000007fbfffbdb8
r8 = fefefefefefefeff    r9 = 0000002a96c8cb50
r10 = 0000000000000001   r11 = 0000002a9593ccb0
r12 = 0000000000000000   r13 = 0000007fbfffcf50
r14 = 0000002a95af70e0   r15 = 0000002a959cf9a0
rip = 0000002a96bfe790   flg = 0000000000010246

Stack Trace:
[0] libc.so.6:strlen~(0x7fbfffcfa0, 0x2a95c4ffa5, 0, 0) + 48 bytes
[1] libmwservices.so:svGetToolboxCacheFile(0, 0, 0, 0) + 31 bytes
[2] libmwbridge.so:mnRunLoginScript()(0x7fbfffd008, 0×00590420, 0x7fbfffd170, 0x2a95d7d61b) + 549 bytes
[3] libmwbridge.so:mnRunPathDependentInitialization()(0, 0x004015a0, 0, 0x7fbfffd1b9) + 28 bytes
[4] libmwmcr.so:mcr_init_handler(long)(0x7fbfffd430, 0x0058e360, 0×00592470, 0x2a96d99cf8) + 539 bytes
[5] libmwmcr.so:mcrInstance::mcrInstance(mcrOptions&, MfileReader*)(0x2a97559b79 “libc.so.6″, 0x2a97673dc3 “libc.so.6″, 0x7fbffff120, 0x2a97673dc3 “libc.so.6″) + 484 bytes
[6] MATLAB:mcrMain(int, char**)(0×00401730, 0, 0, 0x004015c0) + 226 bytes
[7] libc.so.6:__libc_start_main~(0x7fbffff7df “-nosplash”, 0x7fbffff7e9 “-r”, 0x7fbffff7ec “test”, 0x7fbffff7f1 “-logfile”) + 164 bytes

Please follow these steps in reporting this problem to The MathWorks so
that we have the best chance of correcting it:

1. Send this crash report to segv@mathworks.com for automated analysis.
For your convenience, this information has been recorded in:
test.out

2. Also, if the problem is reproducible, send the crash report to
support@mathworks.com along with:
- A specific list of steps that will reproduce the problem
- Any M, MEX, MDL or other files required to reproduce the problem
- Any error messages displayed to the command window
A technical support engineer will contact you with further information.

Thank you for your assistance.  Please save your workspace and restart
MATLAB before continuing your work.

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