Sunday, June 29, 2014

Update for my goal

Ok. Time for my update. I've started the dog cause again. And my reasons are cheesy and a bit noble. Honestly,  I think dogs are innocent bystanders in politics, and all the Russians my age I've talked to are interested in the US.  They don't hate us for our freedom like the news wants me to believe.  In fact, some know more about American TV then I do.
What have I accomplished?  I wrote this post, I made the page on my blog and I've started to build interest in this again. Next, I will build a Facebook page. I will start building tweets. Anyone out there who wants to help by posting in my comments: I need suggestions on things I can give to people who help. I can write and talk about math, but I don't know how I could use that to give to people. I'm thinking tote bags and bracelets, the old classics. And check the page out and share it. I'll be updating the page over the month as well.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Information theory, Philadelphia Mathematicians, and some probability

This Saturday, June 28th, the Philadelphia Math Counts meetup will meet at the greatest coffee shop in Philly, Capriccio Cafe & Espresso Bar, to discuss John R. Pierce's book, An Introduction to Information Theory. As per the usual order of the group, you don't need to read the book to join in the discussion, just come with an interest in the material and two dollars to help make sure we get to continue doing this. Everybody from novices with questions to experts with answers are welcomed, because the regulars fall under both categories. I can't make it this month, but I can spend a little time posting about the book on the blog.

This post is actually inspired by two things, the book An Introduction to Information Theory by John R. Pierce, and this post I found on how to write a simple spelling correcter in python. The article is great and goes into detail about the hard math and how this applies to programming a spellchecker. It also has links to other pages with other programming languages in case you don't do python. The point of my post is to cement my understanding of the statistic presented in both works by explaining to the hypothetical readers.
The chapter that interested me the most was the third chapter, "A mathematical model". This book gets more into how to use math then other books I've read recently, and can still keep these important tools, Mathematical modeling and building theories, light enough to understand without needing a Masters in the subject. This model Pierce presents accentuates this point.
Build random words based on math. That's the name of the game here. This doesn't give you the hard stats and the hard formulas to this task. Instead, it walks the reader through the skeleton of building a model. The scenario Pierce describes is imagine a bag with an equal amount of letters and spaces (for discussion, 25 of each).  Mix it well, and draw from it at random. And the result is called a zero order approximation.
XFOML RXKHRJFFJUJ ZLPWCFWKCYJ FFJEYVKCQSGHYD QPAAMKBZAACIBZAACIZLHJQD.
As you can see, it's gibberish. Why? Well, it obvious that there are more rules to language than "String letters together". Therefore, his example moves on to add more rules to the words (such as how many single letter words are in the English language, how often they are used, and frequency of letters) and each time adds another number to the approximation. A third-order approximation  is more accurate than a first-order.
If we have words, we still do not have English. We are still missing that wonderful structure known as grammar. The thing is, building a sentence this letter by letter process is very complicated. And who does that? I'm writing this damn thing now, and I don't choose my next word by frequency of letter. It's more natural to just have a collections of words in your brain and use them as you need them. The good news is, we can force machines to do this! Pierce uses this idea and adds it to his level of approximation model, but the article I posted to earlier, How to Write a Spelling Corrector, actually gives a practical use for all this mumbo-jumbo. This article is not more complex, it just uses more equations, as well as showing you how to write a basic spell-checker in python. 
The way the code works is given a user entered sentence, the computer checks it against a list it already has. If a word in the sentence matches a word in the file, then it assumes it's correct and moves on to the next one. If the word is, say, 'thew', then it has a choice between two words 'the' and 'thaw'. The choice comes down to probability. The article becomes more technical at this point, so to keep it light, a word that's used more frequently will have a higher probability, so the program will more likely choose a word with higher probability. The article is worth a read for anyone interested in how spelling correctors work, because it not only discusses probability but how the program assigns probability,  what it does if it's given a word that it doesn't know, and how it learns and becomes more accurate.
That's all I got today. Man, it feels good to finally finish this thing. I love math, and I love writing, but writing these math posts are always something I put off as long as possible, and I always feel like it needs to be better. Whatever. Vacation, here I come.

Monday, June 23, 2014

Procrastination!

I really hate to admit this, but if I don't post for a long time, it's because I start planning this big post that will be epic and awesome, then I start writing it and get though the first draft, then it just sits there, in my box just waiting to be finished. Then I don't post anything because I just keep feeling guilty about not working on it. I convince myself that I'm busy and I don't have time right now to work on it. And it gets pushed aside and pushed aside until 6 months later, I've forgotten the post all together and can't remember it at all.
The one I'm working on at the moment is too important. It is math related, and it's a sort of plug for the Philly Math Counts group that is meeting this Saturday, at Capriccio Cafe & Espresso Bar, 110 N. 16th Street , Philadelphia, PA. If you live in the area, go out and talk about information theory, whether you're an expert or not. I'm not going, because I've got a once in life time trip to hang out in an airport motel in Bellingham, Washington for a bit. So this post will be my contribution to it. Now that I've said it, it will come true.
Also, I have twitter now! I have a handful of tweets, and a picture even! So yeah, that is a thing, and math related post is going up soon, aiming for tonight.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

NSFW

Jesus Christ, can't you do a damn thing right?
You're old and you can't see your cock.
Your mind is mush, it's soft, and all it's good for is saving space in your head.
Us, we're young, imaginative, and we are very, very pretty,
and we are here to remind you of how old you are and how dead you will soon be.
Fuck you for giving me advice, you fucked up, and made mistakes that killed the world.
I want excitement, and I want to change the world. You had your chance.
Look at yourself. You sit on your ass and eat and sleep then wake up to do it again.
Step aside and shut the hell up.

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Короткий пост в блоге

Очи чёрные, котогые я люблю всем силами души. Которую я старался воспроизвести во всей её красоте. Как люблю я ее и как боюсь я ее. Богиня с темными глазами.

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Post Title

Live a small life in a small town just like your farther did. It is the best option in life, really.
Grow up in the same town that your parents met in, lived in and laughed in. The same one your grandparents made a life in. Marry your highschool sweetheart, have beautiful children, and maybe become a pillar of the community.
Will it be tough? Yes, but everyone will help you, because your problems are the same problems that affected everyone that came before you, just with new technology. Be liberal young, and then an old conservative.
The outside world, the risks, that only leads to failure and heartbreak. It leads to poverty. It's a very dark road that not many have gone down and few people have returned from. And they were smart. And rich. And handsome! And well, sure you're handsome, but not like them. You're not smart like them. People out there, they are just better than you, so if you live a life in small town, your problems will be simple.

Food. Food, food, food.

MMMmmggmhm. What's to talk about? Math, science, how about cooking? I like to cook. More importantly, I like to eat. Cooking just produces good food.
Sweet Sunni Jesus, there is so much fucking information out there on nutrition and diet and exercise. The diet and exercise plan I enjoy the most is: "Get healthy enough so you can binge on steak, ribs, cigarettes and beer." Why live if I can't enjoy spicy foods, fired chicken, tobacco, and beer? I mean, have you tried fried foods? It's fucking delicious! Done right, you have a juicy piece of food wrapped in a crunchy shell. The crunch of the greasy shell is satisfying, and all the flavors of chicken, hot spices, and oil mix in the mouth and sit on the taste buds. If that magic point is hit during cooking, then when you look down at the pale flesh of the chicken, sometimes dark juices start to stain it
I can get food at Dominos, McDonalds, or Wendy's, and when I travel I do. A big mac just brings childhood, really, because it was something that was eaten as a reward for a doctor's appointment. It was something we got on long car trips out to Indiana. There's something about the minimalism of fast food. They really don't give you anything even close to special, and the veggies they give you to make it look "gourmet" and "healthy" is really just shit. However, it's still a flavor, it's still an experience, and the looks, the sights, and the sounds is part of the experience. I can't expect more than what I get at these places, and that's why I go. Not every meal has to be something that will keep me alive forever, or an exercise in the way to stimulate all the senses. Ravel's Bolero is just as pleasing to the ears as Handel's Messiah.
These foods, these delicious sweets and meats and fast food treats, they're only good once in a while. God! It is so easy to binge on these things. To spend three or four days with nothing but barbecued ribs, grilled steak, juicy burgers on thick buns with toppings of onions and mushrooms and thick heads of lettuce all mixed in sweat, spicy sauce, sounds like heaven. This does not travel through the body well. The morning of day five feels like the hangover from hell. Sweats, indigestion, diarrhea that either forces its way out of the gates or tries to sneak its way out with farts. Just a reminder of good things are nice in moderation, but really only want to kill you when taken in large quantities.
The creativity of cooking is part of the beauty of cooking. Food that only keeps me alive isn't food. Microwave pizza keeps me alive, but it tastes like molten plastic on wet cardboard. The pepperoni they claim that's on it slides down the gullet past the taste buds on a slide of "cheese" and never gives the brain time to recognize "That was pepperoni". Cooking gives me an outlet for creativity, much like writing. Like my writing, my cooking often fails. Out of that failure, comes new insights and new techniques to try. Rice is an amazing thing. Like microwave pizza, it barely qualify as food by itself. It's just there, it's just simple, it's just plain, and it's just something that barely has it's own taste. Its simplicity is what makes it amazing. Cooking rice and soaking rice is a practice in patience. It's something that makes you wait. When mixed with other simple ingredients (kale, other rice, spinach, mushrooms, small pieces of beef) what you come up with is that mixture of taste, that experience that a Venezuelan girl told me was "fulfilling". It makes a dish that demands attention from all the senses. Good food when recognized as good food becomes shit. If it's enjoyed everyday, it becomes a mediocre miracle. The good stuff needs to be mixed with the bad stuff, as a nice little compare and contrast. To really appreciate food, the full spectrum needs to be experienced. I mean the spoiled foods, the burnt foods, the foods rot your teeth out when you bite in, these foods need to mixed with the cosmic, orgasmic foods in order to get a full picture of life.

Monday, June 2, 2014

Time to bring back the animal cause.

Well, I started keeping this blog thing up to date again. Let's see how long that lasts. Really, I guess sometimes I just don't have anything to say, and sometimes life gets in the way.
That dog thing I try to do, I just feel awful that I dropped it. The excuses are I got in a car accident last summer, and then my laptop completely crapped out last fall, right about the time I last posted. So it goes, really. Now that it's a year later and I have a working computer I can post with again, and my math group is up and humming along, I can get work on the animal shelters.
I want to set small goals first. Reaching small and easy goals helps get the dopamine pumpin' in the brain, keeps everyone positive, and then before you know it, it's five years later and those small goals have turned into big achievements, like a Nobel prize or president of the world or the biggest name in books. I don't know what the people want. Cake and TV I guess. If we set our goals right now, I promise the greatest cake and TV shows in 5 years!
I'm disappearing at the end of the month for a week or so, so let's set some goals now, shall we? Keep it light.
  • Right now, the page is at 31 shares on Facebook. I think that can be doubled by the end of the month. I need everyone's help to do it though.
  • I need to get my page back up on the blog. I took it down for editing, but due to the circumstances mentioned earlier, it never went back up.
I just started this again. Those are simple, and should be done by the end of the month.

Sunday, June 1, 2014

Очень короткий

Привет.
Ето кротко. Мой русский оставляет желать лучшего. Но я должен практиковать. Это не интересно, но это необходимо.