akrish

Ok so as usual I haven’t written in here in awhile, but I thought it would be a good idea to (attempt to) start something that I’m going to call “Week in Review.” Essentially, the point is for me to write just a small post about whatever I did last week, and the point is that I do this every week, hopefully every Sunday evening. So without beating around the bush, here we go:

I kind of think about my life in three separate categories: school/work, ultimate, and the rest so I’ll break these into those three categories as well.

School
First, last week a spent a bunch of time thinking about a course project for my statistical machine learning class. I read a couple of papers about matrix completion, clustering and related topics, and eventually settled on a project about multidimensional scaling, which is a dimensionality reduction technique. At a high level, I plan to study MDS in noisy conditions, and hopefully I’ll find some interesting results about when MDS works and when it doesn’t. I also volunteered to present a paper at the statistical machine learning reading group, so I spent a bunch of time early in the week preparing for that presentation. I presented a paper by Tsybakov (You can find it here) which studies nuclear norm penalization for matrix completion, and gives both upper and lower bounds for the problem. The paper is pretty technical and I didn’t understand all of it, but I thought I did a good job of figuring out what was important and presenting it to the group. I was relatively happy with my presentation, shows what you can do with a little preparation.

In classes, we talked about minimax theory, which I think is really interesting, but also kind of a black art. I borrowed Tsybakov’s book from the library and I want to read it to learn more about these lower bounds. Hopefully I can find some time to read it. In algorithms we spent the week talking about the Planar Separator theorem, but for the most part I was thoroughly confused. I also made “reasonable” progress on my research, and I’m starting to get a much better idea of what is actually going on.

Ultimate
Last week was a pretty great week for ultimate. We had a couple of warm days and finally managed to do an outdoor track workout and have outdoor practices which was amazing. These were basically my first full practices in over a year, and it felt really great. On Wednesday we ran a pretty brutal track workout (8×150, 8×100, 8×50 with 60/45/30s rest between reps) and somehow I managed to keep up my speed through the 100s and the 50s, which made me happy. On Thursday we practiced outside and while things were a little rusty, I was pretty happy with my downfield defense, although my flick hucks were really terrible. Saturday was super windy, and we had another outdoor practice which was quite challenging. We spent most of the time working on zone-O/D. On the defensive side I mostly played in the middle of the cup and was relatively happy with my performance. On offense I was really disappointed. My flicks are terrible in the wind and this is completely inexcusable.

On saturday night we had two winter league games against the other two CMU teams. Winter league has been really fun and both games we played were pretty competitive. In the first, we scored a buzzer beater to take the game into overtime but then lost. The other game we lost by a couple. After getting home at 2AM on saturday night, we had another practice at noon on Sunday, and I was already pretty exhausted. To top it off, a couple of Corey’s buddies (who happen to be really good at ultimate) were coming to guest coach. We spent most of the time working on defensive positioning and physicality; most of the time focusing on shutting down the under cut while being able to catch up on the deep shot. I felt like I did a good job in the drills, but didn’t carry that over to when we scrimmaged. I guess part of it was that I was super tired, but I definitely did not play well when we scrimmaged. I thought the practice was really productive and felt good (albeit extremely tired) afterwards. I need to learn how to lay out and do it more.

Life
Life was pretty eventful this week. Ravi is still really excited about Settler’s of Catan, so we played two pretty epic games on Thursday and Sunday respectively. Both games had several people at 9 points and I’m happy to say that I was really close to winning in both games. In one I actually had 10 points but it didn’t get around to my turn, which is really annoying. On Friday, Google hosted a TG (happy hour thing) at their campus, and I won a Nexus One in their raffle, which I was excited about. Unfortunately the phone doesn’t work on my provider, so I think I’m going to sell it.

My parents visited this weekend and my mom cooked a bunch of food for my roommates and my brother. This was really great, especially since Robbie and I were really exhausted from practices. On Sunday we came home and practically ate everything my mom had made. My family went to the Strip District on Saturday to check out the market, where there is actually a lot of really good stuff. I tried some really tasty jams and we also bought some pretty good donuts. I should go there more. It was pretty unfortunate that while my parents were here I had some much ultimate stuff going on because I didn’t really spend too much time with them. On the plus side, my freezer is filled with leftovers so I won’t have to cook for the week!

So I just wrote this really long, hopefully thoughtful post, but it didn’t turn out as I wanted so this is much lighter. This article wound up in my RSS reader and it got me thinking about comics. I used to read tons of comics when I was a kid and nowadays when I look at the newspaper, most of the comics pretty much suck. Here are some of my favorites (in some loose ordering):

1. First of all, Calvin and Hobbes is one of the greatest comics of all time, and that article attests to that. If you can get your hands on Calvin and Hobbes books, I highly recommend them. Bill Watterson treated his comics as artwork and he really does so much more with the inches of space than many other cartoonists. Also, his material is often deep and philosophical, and I think a lot of kids can relate to Calvin in more profound ways that other cartoons. Calvin is one of my favorite childhood characters because of his imagination and his cynicism.
2. Tintin isn’t a newspaper comic, but more of a comic book. It’s originally a French comic book but it should not be hard to find English translations. The comic is quite popular and when I last went to Europe (years ago), I saw the comic book everywhere. Anyway, it’s a very good comic. It’s not like other comics in that it’s purpose is not comedy. They are about the adventures of this journalist (Tintin), who ends up travelling all over the place. And of course there is subtle humor scattered throughout, making these comics quite entertaining.
3. Asterix again is like Tintin in that it is a French comic book. However, this one is more explicitly humorous. The humor is very unlike American humor, differentiating this comic from other popular ones. For one, the names of all the characters are puns, like “Asterix”, “Obelix”, and “Chief Vitalstatistics”. Read the comics for more of these puns, unfortunately I’m not if you’re still able to get them or where you can do so. There are tons of other humorous elements, in fact, there’s a wikipedia article about them.
4. Foxtrot is another really funny comic that was in syndication until pretty recently. If you haven’t read it, you should read some on the website. It’s about your average American Family, and mostly about the three kids, a high school jock, a stereotypical freshman girl, and a super-nerdy fifth grader. I guess, the humor is pretty standard for American cartoons, but I related to a lot of the subject matter, more so than many other comics.
5. Beetle Bailey. For some good old-fashioned laughs, check out this comic. My dad had a bunch of the comic books so I ended up reading them as a kid. Beetle Bailey is a lazy soldier and it’s about his the escapades of him and his camp.
6. Dilbert. I started reading Dilbert as a teenager (much later than the rest), but I guess as a programmer, I can kind of relate to Dilbert’s life (though fortunately I’m stuck in a corporate hell-of-a-job). I didn’t enjoy this one as much as the others, but Scott Adams is still a really funny writer. I recently came across this, which definitely made me laugh.

And of course now there are web comics. I periodically read xkcd and phdcomics. So yeah, enjoy!

So a couple of my roommates and I have recently (re)-discovered Sesame Street on YouTube. It’s been quite entertaining seeing clips of videos that I remember distinctly from my childhood. Also some of the clips are really funny to college students. Here are some of my favorites:

 LL Cool J goes on an Addition Expedition. -  best line ever: “One Elmo monster and one Mr. LL Cool J makes one, two friends!”

Cookie Monster’s Rap. - I totally remember this song from when I was like five. Brings back good memories.

Hoots vs. Yo Yo Ma - Hoots is hilarious. Also Yo Yo Ma is awesome.

Cookie Monster’s Letter of the Day - Cookie Monster’s eyes are so funny.

Gangster’s - exactly like real mobsters…

As you can probably tell, I’m totally procrastinating during finals week. I thought I wrote about this before but I couldn’t find the post. Briefly, I hate finals. Not because of the exams, but because if I do any work that isn’t explicitly studying for your exams, I feel really guilty about not prioritizing exams. What this means is that my productivity goes down the drain. I do spend a decent amount of time preparing for my exams, but I definitely have more time to exercise, and work on other projects. So for the past couple of years, finals time for me has been a decent amount of studying mixed with a lot of wasting time, watching tv and playing guitar, but with an overall drop in productivity.

So that’s how we found the Sesame Street videos. I hope you enjoy them!

I don’t watch that many movies, but this weekend my parents and I went to watch Disney’s (actually Disneynature’s) Earth. All three of us really enjoyed the movie so here I am writing a short review.

First of all, you should watch the trailer, you get a feeling for the ridiculous footage that the directors managed to take.  The movie is basically a documentary about the Earth (duh) and a lot of the creatures that coexist with us. The “story” focuses on three families (polar bears, whales, elephants), but also spends some time on tons of other animals: monkeys, birds of paradise, wolves, penguins, you name it.

Naturally, the theme of how humans are making it difficult for animals to survive is present, but it’s quite subtle. The movie wasn’t designed to reprimand humans (like I believe An Inconvenient Truth was); instead it showed specific examples of how global warming was making it difficult for animals to survive. The narrator would say things like “as our world warms, it’s becoming harder for …,” without directly blaming humans (though we all know who’s fault it is). I really liked how they didn’t get distracted with this theme, as I could vision the movie being completely different if they had emphasized this point further. Not that I don’t think the whole environmentalism issue isn’t important, I think that the movie still made it’s point without becoming too intrusive and forceful.

I was also really impressed with the footage the directors captured. Even in the trailer, there are some amazing shots. I can’t say much about this without giving away anything really cool about the movie, but they use some pretty cool techniques. Most noticeable (and cool) is the time-lapse photography that they use to show change. They use it tastefully to show growth of organisms, seasons changing, etc. Then, there is a lot of aerial footage, in places like the Arctic Circle, Niagara Falls, the African Savannah, and the Rain Forest. A lot of this footage is also really cool (though some of it seems like pretty standard stuff).

The crazy thing is how they managed to get so much footage of animals. For one of the first scenes, the crew waited with cameras trained for two weeks to film polar bears emerging from their winter den after winter. There’s tons of this stuff and I haven’t really seen that much of it (though I confess I’m not much of a nature buff).

What really caught my attention was the soundtrack. It’s not often that I notice the soundtrack of a movie, but there were several times that I found myself thinking “this music is really fitting and also standalone awesome.” The soundtrack was recorded by the Berlin Philharmonic, and they’re an internationally known orchestra. I’m really excited for the soundtrack to come out so I can listen to it while studying.

Overall, I definitely recommend Disneynature’s Earth. Again, I don’t watch a lot of nature documentaries, but I really liked this one. I don’t think it’ll win many awards, but it’s a good movie. Also, you should watch it in theaters to really appreciate the cinematography.

Yup it’s almost finals time and you know what that means… productivity is going to plummet and I’m going to start blogging again.Maybe a few of you noticed but my blog has been down for quite some time. I was originally hosting on a free 1-year facebook accelerator from joyent, but the problem was, naturally, that I only get it for a year. Anyway, my contract expired, and I’ve been super busy with school and stuff to re-set my blog on my older hosting service. This last week, I’ve somehow had a bunch of free time (or I’ve been really good at not working on important things) so I decided to set things up again. So yup we’re back. I think I will probably be blogging a lot over the summer (as I did last summer), mostly because I hope to have a bit more free time. I should also start posting lots of pictures.I guess I’ll start things off with an interesting article I found a couple of days ago. These researchers at Yale came up with a new way to analyze the running time of algorithms. The technique is called Smoothed Analysis and the article is here. The actual paper is ridiculously long and I don’t have enough statistics background (or patience) to read the whole thing, but the basic idea was really cool. Also, we just learned about the Simplex method in my algorithms class, and we talked about how in the worst case the algorithm is exponential, but in practice it’s quite efficient. Smoothed analysis is the explanation!