The Ice is Melting

I made a new video, view it in full screen, and in HD if you like, oh, sound, definitely with sound.

Vitreous Humor

During a visit to Michigan, my friend H told me about a news story she read. The story discussed a call for foreign applicants to observe–from their own country–the closed-circuit television feeds from London and report suspicious and illegal activity. Privacy issues were raised, but I quickly turned my attention to the psychodramatic possibilities:

I imagined myself as an Ethiopian, sitting in my home office, hunched over a computer, watching the high and lows of bustling commuters, travelers, and the like. During a lull, I’m staring at the screen of one particular metro stop, my metro stop, the stop I guard vigorously. The static features of the scene: signs, the lines in the concrete, the cracks on the walls, pieces of persistent trash, have all become etched into my retina. I look away when the tea kettle whistles and see the negative of that metro stop in the direction of my kitchen.

I continue this imagined scenario, to the time when my Ethiopian wife, myself, and our two kids take a holiday in London, of all places. We ride trains to the tourist destinations. The metro stop that funded this trip is the furthest thing from my mind. On a subway ride to the Tate Museum, my daughter needs to use the bathroom. We get off at the very next station. My wife takes our daughter, I take our son. We are making our way toward the stairs, I look back and my sight momentarily vanishes. It returns as quickly as it left. I slowly turn my head to the left and right, the room vanishes at about one o’clock. Odd, but familiar.

It strikes me like lightening. I drop my bag, stand motionless, mouth agape. This. Is. My. Metro. Stop. My son tugs at my arm, pulling me out of my trance. I holler to my wife to take him with her and that I’ll wait for them here. I find the CCTV camera behind me and perch below it. I sit and I watch. During a lull I imagine myself sitting in my home office, hunched over a computer watching the high and lows of bustling commuters, travelers, and the like.

Willfully Ignorant

There are two signs posted to two trees in my neighborhood separated by a block or two. Each sign has a picture of a cat. One claims to have found a cat. The other claims to have lost a cat. By my eye, the cats pictures are the same. I thought about calling, but the short distance between the two signs lead me to believe this was a ruse. But then again, I know people who are so willfully ignorant of the most straightforward connections (myself not excluded) that it wouldn’t surprise me that the two sign posters would not have ventured the block required to see the other sign.

By not acting on the knowledge of these two signs, I am also subjectively ignoring the information, or being ignorant, am I not? I could raise the issue that by calling myself out, I am somehow absolved. But if I apply this principle elsewhere, lets say, for instance, that I choose to believe that infringing the rights of a citizen of my country is okay in the name of the security of the country, I am approving the fact that I am subjectively ignoring the rights granted by the constitution of said country. If I further this stance, by expanding my adoption of ignorance by stating that because I am not a threat to my country, I will not be infringed upon, do I not enter into a moral hazard? Which, if it hasn’t yet escaped from the vapid collective memory, is precisely the culprit that brought the world economic system to its knees?

So I must ask myself, if it was my lost cat, wouldn’t I want the person in my position to make the call?

Aside: two roads, traveling in the same direction, but on opposite sides of a river, are stopped by a passing train. In the span of a minute, I observe the lining up of cars at the track-road intersection. From this observation, I determine the number of cars per minute that travel down these streets. Is this not a stochastic Poisson process? And when the train barrier rises and I realize that my side is less trafficked, am I not performing a K-S test?

And they say you can’t use this stuff in real life.

Lately…

Lately I’ve been busy. Sure I’ve been busy before, almost every year when certain yearly deadlines roll around (I am thinking of the satellite observatory proposals), I get swamped with work and put in marathon shifts. But this is a busy I’ve never known the likes of.

I’ve always worked within the confines of the mantra: Work smart, not hard. And up to now it has worked wonders. I implement all kinds of efficient and time-saving measures like masterful use of Regular Expressions, writing scripts that talk to other scripts that run other scripts on multiple platforms (astronomical software can be so disjointed), and taking advantage of the fact that few students use the powerful number crunching Sun workstations over the weekends. On some weekends I’ll monopolize every single machine to perform data analysis tasks on large archival data sets. Of course, a key part of working smart means not actually having to set foot into that computer lab and managing everything from the comforts of the arm chair in my home.

But it isn’t working anymore. That is, the mantra isn’t cutting it. I’ve gotten to the stage where it is time for the elbow grease. I raise my head from a desktop of papers, sheets with calculations, and my TI-83 solar powered calculator (which I inadvertently stole from my high school back in 1995), and wonder, this must be what other graduate students mean when they complain about being treated like slave labor but I recall that no one is asking me to work so hard, I am doing it out of some twisted desire to achieve something for myself.

What I have found is that all work and no play eventually triggers a state of myself I never knew existed; a state of heightened concentration, increased drive, and perceptible and measurable progress. I am surprising myself, but I still have so much more to do. In less than a month I feel like I must accomplish the tasks that would have normally taken me three. And yet…

And yet I find myself watching more movies, preparing more elaborate meals, and reading more books than I have in months. This is like an uber-state of activity. Surely I must burn out, it is inevitable. But in the mean time…

Mmm, Pie

At the end of every year, my credit card company provides me with a summary of my spending. They break up my purchases into the categories they think are appropriate, but it doesn’t quite match up with reality, so I converted the data from the PDF file into a Numbers spreadsheet. A difficult and time consuming task, I might add. (I might add, get it? Oh, puny!)

I digress. Because of this terrific document, I decided I’d put most of my purchases on my credit card, the only thing I do not charge is my daily coffee fix (that’s probably a large chunk of change, but is for another post). For your pleasure, I present my credit card spending habits from the year 2009:

In the figure above my spending habits are presented in two forms, the monthly totals are shown with the solid line histogram and the individual purchases that go into that monthly total are shown as data points (crosses).

Explanations of some of the peaks:

• April: car insurance
• June: I paid for two meals over 100 (to be fair, I was reimbursed)
• August: an expensive trip to Niagara on the Lake for a day of Noel Coward plays, totally worth it
• September: health insurance
• October: new Ipod Touch (reimbursed by Apple) and car insurance
• November: black Friday BluRay player
• December: Samsung Moment Android phone ($100 was reimbursed)

Colorful pie charts describing the allocation of my money:

Further breaking up the large categories above leads to:

I need to change my habits.