10.29.07
Finally, a limit!
I’ve finally discovered an intrinsic limit to my intellectual abilities at Temple: I cannot operate well on three hours of sleep!
(Yeah, I sort of knew that already)
That International Scholar Laureate Program again
Since I am again a member of the National Dean’s List this year, I knew it was only a matter of time before they sent the letter inviting me to attend a series of lectures in China for $5,000 again. While the program is not nearly as selective as they’d like to make people think, the people who go do seem to genuinely enjoy the experience (essentially, it’s a vacation where you get to talk to interesting people, much like the conference I just came back from). However, it’s far too disruptive and too expensive to even consider, especially with my planned dissertation timeline this year, so I usually just stash the letter in my “archive of things I’ll look back on someday and laugh at” (a.k.a. my closet).
The interesting thing is that this year, they didn’t assign me to a “delegation”, to be shipped off to China. They let me pick both the “delegation” and the country.
I don’t know if this represents an overall change in the program or if they actually understand the polymath thing I’m aiming for. Either way, it’s an interesting change, if irrelevant (because I’m still not going).
Journal Paper
Finally, we’re about to publish the journal paper on mammograms that has taken the better part of a year to get out.
10.26.07
Word 2007
Is one of the most awful pieces of software Microsoft has ever released.
Including Windows ME.
The thing likes to corrupt every document it touches. Already I’ve lost my old resume (I have a new one, though) and my dissertation (I have a backup, though) to this idiotic program.
10.25.07
Dissertation – Week 1
Writing this week encompases the remainder of the preliminaries, plus the beginning of the background section. In this, I explain the mechanics of general Singular Value Decomposition and the Tucker decomposition, as well as the High-Order Singular Value Decomposition (HOSVD) generalization. I’m not writing the abstract yet, as I’m not precisely sure what the full scope of the experiments will cover yet. It’ll depend on the results, so I’ll probably write the abstract last (or right before the dedications, anyway).
The pagination guidelines are interesting: the copyright page is second, but it begins the numbering with “iii”. So the second page is numbered third? (Is something inserted post-defense between the title and copyright pages?)
I’m going to pwn this dissertation.
Oh, and I’m a member of another honor society now: Golden Key. That makes five honor societies; all I’m waiting for now is Upsilon Pi Epsilon, who should have already inducted me according to their criteria.
To Paraphrase Newton…
If I have seen further, it is because no one stood in my way.
If I have seen further, it is because I had the best seats in the house.
If I have seen further, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
If I have seen further… eh, you’re not missing much anyway.
Any others? 
10.24.07
Short Response to a Boulez Quote
“[A]ny musician who has not experienced — I do not say understood, but truly experienced — the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.”
Pierre Boulez (“Eventuellement…”, 1952, translated as “Possibly…”)
(Wikipedia)
“No, it means the epoch rather than the musician is USELESS. Majority adoption justifies NOTHING.”
–My response.
There seems to be something about the training at the Paris Conservatory of Music since Messiaen that (a) encourages atonality and (b) discourages the free thought necessary to critically evaluate a musical paradigm, because every composer I’ve encountered or read about that spent a significant amount of time there has been absolutely intolerant of tonality for the simple reason that it isn’t the way “modern” classical music is composed. They see tonality as something archaic, to be discarded without even evaluating the idea.
And as anyone following my blog knows, I think discarding ideas without evaluating them is nearly always a very stupid thing to do.
They are also not content to simply hold their own views, but determined to impose them upon others despite resistance, with conviction born of either aesthetic absolutism or a lack of individual thought. In essence, like so many other people, they’ve subjugated themselves to the social demands on their eras rather than defining their own styles and writing music (or doing whatever) for the sake of its own existence (luckily, this nearly guarantees that they will fade when those eras are over, because social demand is nothing if not capricious and they have no other leg to stand upon).
It is also worth noting that classical music began to decline in popularity right around the time that Modernist atonality emerged. It isn’t a coincidence, and to say that atonal music is socially demanded is to ignore the very forces that marginalized classical music to begin with. The only music that’s truly in demand is popular music now, and it’s your own fault!
Success is innate, but ironic
It’s ironic that the type of person who is capable of obtaining success is incapable of enjoying it. By most people’s standards, I’m probably doing very well already. After all, I graduated first in my undergraduate class, I received my MS in one year at age 22, I’m on track to receive my Ph. D. in at most 3 years total, probably 2, and the job offers are still streaming in, with starting salaries that have just officially broken the 6-figure barrier. By my own standards, however, I still have yet to accomplish anything earth-shattering. After all, aside from my divisor function and quantile tree research, I haven’t really discovered anything on my own. True, I have lots of hypotheses, but they don’t do you much good except from a theoretical standpoint unless you have the equipment, resources, or public response to follow up on them. Even if I did have such resources, I don’t have the clout to ensure that my ideas are heard. By my own standards, I am not successful.
I will be, though. So long as I am given the time, I’m sure of it now, because I’ve realized that the capacity for success is an innate property. True, I have skills that are extremely in demand, which is very much helping me get jobs among other things (and data mining/machine learning jobs pay a lot), but when I speak of success, I seldom mean money, and I almost never mean something that depends on the support of other people (because as I’ve seen over the past few years, society does not make enough sense to consistently support pretty much anyone).
No. I’ll succeed because I’m able to do things many people cannot. Most people can only handle one area of specialization, yet I’ve utterly refused to specialize, even while society attempted to actively force me to, and yet maintain expertise in almost every field I’ve touched. In some fields, it even extends beyond that of most specialists, and I’m still rather young and nowhere near the apex of my skill (except perhaps in mathematics, where skill declines after the late 20s and where I now feel confident enough to extend my previous research in the direction of Robin’s Theorem and GRH after finishing my dissertation). I embrace principles such as the universality of ideas, the ability to fit insane workloads into arbitrarily small amounts of time (while I was winning all those awards, I was also doing research, programming on the side, writing music, taking an 18 credit load, and working three jobs, all at once), and the use of the subconscious as an idea factory endowed with all of the power of the conscious mind but none of the effort or attention required of conscious idea generation because I’ve not only theorized but demonstrated them.
Most people dismiss such philosophies because they are either incapable of following them (and thus presume them false from their own experiences) or because they disagree with their premises or potential consequences. Either way, it simply makes my philosophy all the more unique. There’s strength in that difference.
10.22.07
Waldorf education
Waldorf education + Project Polymath = teh win
Seriously, look it up – it’s a good idea, and an absolutely great one to prepare someone for multidisciplinary inquiry at the university level.