Monday, December 28, 2009
Friday, December 25, 2009
The Drum
From that well known (to only Andrew Bolt) hot bed of annoying progressivism comes this:
The childhood sense of Santa in the sky gave way in adulthood to a more mature realisation that we live in God's world always, and inspired by that realisation we try to do good.
I largely agree with that statement, so long as the author conceded that there are other ways to be inspired to do good.
I really must, however, insist that 'a more' be changed to 'an as'.
The childhood sense of Santa in the sky gave way in adulthood to a more mature realisation that we live in God's world always, and inspired by that realisation we try to do good.
I largely agree with that statement, so long as the author conceded that there are other ways to be inspired to do good.
I really must, however, insist that 'a more' be changed to 'an as'.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Notes on my PhD
This is the story of my PhD. Most of it was a deeply unhappy experience, as most PhDs are, and people should know this from the start. Take note, those standing at the precipice, you are about to endure this.
On the timetable that was drafted back in 2006 we expected my first calculation to take us about six months. It was intended to be a kind of toy problem to give us a feel for how this class of systems worked. And it was expected that whatever approach we used to solve this problem would easily generalise to larger systems that exhibit similar structure.
It soon became clear, though, that this toy problem of ours was rather a lot more complicated than we originally envisioned. Progress was slow but non-zero in the lead up to my confirmation late in 2007. I drew together a reasonably insightful, 20 page document that showed promise and suggested several ways to attack this toy problem of ours. All of them bullshit, it turns out.
By about the beginning of 2008 this toy problem became the central question of my thesis, generalisations be damned. I was no longer studying a class of models, but a single, terrible model. I hope my supervisors are spared the indignity of lending their names to it, I like them all too much.
The model we had stumbled into proved to be incredibly intricate and infuriatingly adept at frustrating our every attempt at a solution. What was expected to be a simple extension of a class of problems studied in a standard mathematical physics honours course instead became my obsessive passion and hated enemy.
For the entirety of 2008 my project completely stagnated. I can not really put into words how friendless and wretched I felt during this year. You have to be a PhD student to truly understand the sway your project has on your mood. It was as if I completely outsourced my emotions, having invested them entirely in my stupid fucking PhD project. I was mentally inseparable from my abysmal mathematics, and the worse my thesis got, the worse I felt. I would arrive at uni and simply stare into my computer, knowing that I should open Maple, but reasoning that there would be no point.
The hated thing gnawed at my sanity through 2008. It was around this time I stopped sleeping and I blame my PhD almost entirely for this. I have still not recovered anything approaching regular sleeping habits.
Supervisor meetings consisted of tentatively ventured suggestions on how to proceed, followed by an analysis of why said idea was bad. Occasionally the reasons for pessimism amounted to 'it is this project'.
This continued until the Coolangatta conference in early 2009, the nadir of my PhD. Not only was my work wrong and stupid, but I was convinced it has also been done before by some Russians in the 80s. This prompted a flurry of work from me and my supervisors, trawling through nigh incomprehensible papers from the Soviet Union, looking for the answer to our problem. We have yet to find anything, but I still live in fear of some Russian sending me a reference detailing in simple language the solution I have been searching for for the last three and a half years.
As it turned out our work was not 'solved'. We had found a link between two previously unrelated areas of mathematics, and were investigating the system at the center of this bridge.
Things then started to get better for me academically, but I am not sure why. The central problem continued to be eminently frustrating, and completely impervious to any ideas that anyone had. But I felt better, and began to slowly write my thesis. It seemed like there was not a required amount of maths that one needed to do for a PhD, merely an amount of time that one had to endure.
Then came Prague. It was a wonderful two week holiday from my thesis, that I so wished to extend. If I finished my thesis, my whole life would be a holiday from it, I reasoned. When I returned to Australia I began writing in earnest. Despite having no result for my central problem, I wrote one hundred pages of thesis grade mathematics. I was completely reconciled to writing a dithering, rambling, directionless thesis, and never solving my model. I had made my peace with it.
And then, last week, after a series of email exchanges between me and my supervisors, the problem was solved. Done, finished, three and a half years of my life coming to fruition. Just as I am unable to adequately render into English the anguish of my 2008, I am similarly unable to covey how happy this solution makes me. The omnipresent shadow that has covered me since the beginning of my PhD has lifted. I imagine I know how Spain felt the day Franco died. All that is left now is to write the fucker and I'll be a doctor.
Future PhD students take note: I was in no way atypical.
On the timetable that was drafted back in 2006 we expected my first calculation to take us about six months. It was intended to be a kind of toy problem to give us a feel for how this class of systems worked. And it was expected that whatever approach we used to solve this problem would easily generalise to larger systems that exhibit similar structure.
It soon became clear, though, that this toy problem of ours was rather a lot more complicated than we originally envisioned. Progress was slow but non-zero in the lead up to my confirmation late in 2007. I drew together a reasonably insightful, 20 page document that showed promise and suggested several ways to attack this toy problem of ours. All of them bullshit, it turns out.
By about the beginning of 2008 this toy problem became the central question of my thesis, generalisations be damned. I was no longer studying a class of models, but a single, terrible model. I hope my supervisors are spared the indignity of lending their names to it, I like them all too much.
The model we had stumbled into proved to be incredibly intricate and infuriatingly adept at frustrating our every attempt at a solution. What was expected to be a simple extension of a class of problems studied in a standard mathematical physics honours course instead became my obsessive passion and hated enemy.
For the entirety of 2008 my project completely stagnated. I can not really put into words how friendless and wretched I felt during this year. You have to be a PhD student to truly understand the sway your project has on your mood. It was as if I completely outsourced my emotions, having invested them entirely in my stupid fucking PhD project. I was mentally inseparable from my abysmal mathematics, and the worse my thesis got, the worse I felt. I would arrive at uni and simply stare into my computer, knowing that I should open Maple, but reasoning that there would be no point.
The hated thing gnawed at my sanity through 2008. It was around this time I stopped sleeping and I blame my PhD almost entirely for this. I have still not recovered anything approaching regular sleeping habits.
Supervisor meetings consisted of tentatively ventured suggestions on how to proceed, followed by an analysis of why said idea was bad. Occasionally the reasons for pessimism amounted to 'it is this project'.
This continued until the Coolangatta conference in early 2009, the nadir of my PhD. Not only was my work wrong and stupid, but I was convinced it has also been done before by some Russians in the 80s. This prompted a flurry of work from me and my supervisors, trawling through nigh incomprehensible papers from the Soviet Union, looking for the answer to our problem. We have yet to find anything, but I still live in fear of some Russian sending me a reference detailing in simple language the solution I have been searching for for the last three and a half years.
As it turned out our work was not 'solved'. We had found a link between two previously unrelated areas of mathematics, and were investigating the system at the center of this bridge.
Things then started to get better for me academically, but I am not sure why. The central problem continued to be eminently frustrating, and completely impervious to any ideas that anyone had. But I felt better, and began to slowly write my thesis. It seemed like there was not a required amount of maths that one needed to do for a PhD, merely an amount of time that one had to endure.
Then came Prague. It was a wonderful two week holiday from my thesis, that I so wished to extend. If I finished my thesis, my whole life would be a holiday from it, I reasoned. When I returned to Australia I began writing in earnest. Despite having no result for my central problem, I wrote one hundred pages of thesis grade mathematics. I was completely reconciled to writing a dithering, rambling, directionless thesis, and never solving my model. I had made my peace with it.
And then, last week, after a series of email exchanges between me and my supervisors, the problem was solved. Done, finished, three and a half years of my life coming to fruition. Just as I am unable to adequately render into English the anguish of my 2008, I am similarly unable to covey how happy this solution makes me. The omnipresent shadow that has covered me since the beginning of my PhD has lifted. I imagine I know how Spain felt the day Franco died. All that is left now is to write the fucker and I'll be a doctor.
Future PhD students take note: I was in no way atypical.
Deeply Unsatisfying Proof
I wonder if the reviewers will like this or not:
Theorem 1.1.1: This fact if true
Proof: We consider
[Long and complicated equation]. (1)
We now look at equation (1) until we are convinced that theorem 1.1.1 is true.
Q.E.D.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Barnaby Joyce
This is how all politicians should speak.
I heard it is freezing in Copenhagen at the moment so I hope they all made it home safely after dealing soooo effectively with warming.
Update: Barnaby's stuff was crazy enough but in the comments there appeared:
Red Baron :
23 Dec 2009 11:34:48am
An Australian university has almost poerfected a bionic eye.A world FIRST, tell us Barnaby, should they stop, let another country finish the job them sell the eye to Australia at a bloated price????
23 Dec 2009 11:34:48am
An Australian university has almost poerfected a bionic eye.A world FIRST, tell us Barnaby, should they stop, let another country finish the job them sell the eye to Australia at a bloated price????
Horrocks :
23 Dec 2009 4:08:03pm
Yes, all medical research should stop and all vaccines etc should be destroyed. They are what are killing the world. We are trying, in Western countries at least to dictate t Nature by interfering in Natures way of keeping population to a natural level. Sooner or later a virus will come forth that they will not be able to prove a vaccine for and that will be Nature putting us firmly in our place.
Internet.... what the hell?
Sunday, December 20, 2009
George Orwell
I wish I could get that many comments with shit like this. I guess all I have to do is write a book as successful as 1984.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Person of the Decade
We at MYBLOGISAGOODBLOG agonised over this decision. I am sure other, lesser publications would deem George W. Bush the person most intimately linked to this decade. They might argue that these past 10 years would not have unfolded as they did without his determination to wage war abroad. The Iraq conflict is perhaps the most characteristic geopolitical event of this decade and, without his constant machinations, both covert and overt, it would not have happened. Yes, the case for George W. Bush can be made pretty convincingly.
We prefer a more nuanced approach. There is one artist whose films perfectly captured the mood of the decade. He breathtakingly chronicled the tempestuous ten years. He held up a mirror to the unfolding debacle and dared us to flinch. One man understood us so completely that I think it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that the 2000's may as well have been directed by Michael Bay.
The explosions. The knee-jerk American jingoism fueling a frustrating sense of superiority. The inability to see shades of gray between the self proclaimed good guys and the a priori defined bad guys. The belief that fate has called upon said good guys to rail against this evil. The improbable hero, the bone-headed script, the excessive and exploitative sex cheapening up the whole thing and the explosions. The last ten years were a Michael Bay movie.
Which Michael Bay movie, you ask? Well, reader, as far as this publication is concerned there is only one Michael Bay movie, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. No other overladen behemoth, brimming with coarse sexual exploitation, insane character motivations, adolescent fantasies of vindication, cartoonishly evil antagonists and pretty explosions, better captured the mood of this decade.
I watched it again today with the intent of writing a comprehensive overview. I made 14 pages of notes over those paralysingly dumb two and a half hours, and I can definitively say that the plot of this monstrosity is every bit as stupid when you actually understand it. The incongruous plans of all sides completely obscure any coherent character motivation.
To take one example from hundreds, Liberal Donald Rumsfeld asks Optimus Prime 'apart from the shard of the AllSpark, and the body of Megatron, what could the Decepticons possibly be looking for?' As it turns out, the Decepticons were looking for the shard of the AllSpark and the body of Megatron. Why was he so angry, and simultaneously answering his own question?
I also like how, when I wrote the scene between the protagonist and his parents in part three of A portrait of the artist as a robot, I was making a joke. That is what sets Michael Bay apart from people like me. He had a repeat of that scene with an equally pathetic hero, and he was serious!
I will not, unfortunately, write the proposed comprehensive overview of the plot to this movie, however beneficial people wanting to understand the 2000's might find it. This is partly because it would be really long, and partly because most of my notes consist of entries like:
0:34:48 - No on acts like this! Fucking Hell Michael Bay!
1:06:35 - FUCK! So stupid!
1:43:22 - DUMB!
2:00:15 - Explode everything!!!!
So congratulations Michael Bay, your stupid movie is the one that best captures the spirit of the first ten years of the 3rd millennium. This is why you are MYBLOGISAGOOBLOG's person of the decade.
We prefer a more nuanced approach. There is one artist whose films perfectly captured the mood of the decade. He breathtakingly chronicled the tempestuous ten years. He held up a mirror to the unfolding debacle and dared us to flinch. One man understood us so completely that I think it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that the 2000's may as well have been directed by Michael Bay.
The explosions. The knee-jerk American jingoism fueling a frustrating sense of superiority. The inability to see shades of gray between the self proclaimed good guys and the a priori defined bad guys. The belief that fate has called upon said good guys to rail against this evil. The improbable hero, the bone-headed script, the excessive and exploitative sex cheapening up the whole thing and the explosions. The last ten years were a Michael Bay movie.
Which Michael Bay movie, you ask? Well, reader, as far as this publication is concerned there is only one Michael Bay movie, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. No other overladen behemoth, brimming with coarse sexual exploitation, insane character motivations, adolescent fantasies of vindication, cartoonishly evil antagonists and pretty explosions, better captured the mood of this decade.
I watched it again today with the intent of writing a comprehensive overview. I made 14 pages of notes over those paralysingly dumb two and a half hours, and I can definitively say that the plot of this monstrosity is every bit as stupid when you actually understand it. The incongruous plans of all sides completely obscure any coherent character motivation.
To take one example from hundreds, Liberal Donald Rumsfeld asks Optimus Prime 'apart from the shard of the AllSpark, and the body of Megatron, what could the Decepticons possibly be looking for?' As it turns out, the Decepticons were looking for the shard of the AllSpark and the body of Megatron. Why was he so angry, and simultaneously answering his own question?
I also like how, when I wrote the scene between the protagonist and his parents in part three of A portrait of the artist as a robot, I was making a joke. That is what sets Michael Bay apart from people like me. He had a repeat of that scene with an equally pathetic hero, and he was serious!
I will not, unfortunately, write the proposed comprehensive overview of the plot to this movie, however beneficial people wanting to understand the 2000's might find it. This is partly because it would be really long, and partly because most of my notes consist of entries like:
0:34:48 - No on acts like this! Fucking Hell Michael Bay!
1:06:35 - FUCK! So stupid!
1:43:22 - DUMB!
2:00:15 - Explode everything!!!!
So congratulations Michael Bay, your stupid movie is the one that best captures the spirit of the first ten years of the 3rd millennium. This is why you are MYBLOGISAGOOBLOG's person of the decade.
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