ChapterZero

Here I am at LLNL finally. I just got back from a talk which had nothing to do with the reason I am here, adaptive optics, and I am ashamed to say I fell asleep during it. Luckily I didn’t snore!

The atmosphere here is really relaxed; everyone calls everyone else by their first names, no “Drs.” around. And the lab is situated on a block that is a mile square, and it’s basically a small town: it has its own zip code (or is it area code), fire station, hospital, police system, gas station, stores, etc. That seems to be a theme here in Calif.; Mt. Hamil, where Lick Observatory is located, is also its own little town. The difference is, at Mt. Hamil there are only 50 townspeople, but here at LLNL, there are over 10,000 employees.

There are also orange bikes by each entrance, and scattered throughout the grounds, which you can use as you like. They are the old-fashioned kind that you brake by pedaling backwards, and have a basket in the front. Takes a little getting used to, but they are cool.

The whole place is cool! I haven’t chosen a project yet, because we haven’t spoken to all the groups yet to see what they’re working on, so we’ll be doing that tomorrow. Oscar’s office mate is another intern, an EE senior from MIT, and she is working on scene-based AO. Scene-based AO is used when there is no conventional or laser guide star available, and it works by taking multiple frames of a scene, and comparing the two for movement due to turbulence. The associated problem is, of course, figuring out if the movement is indeed due to turbulence, and to attempt to correct for it, or if it due to movement of an object within the scene, and to leave it alone.

Last night, Oscar and I went to see Finding Nemo, because we don’t have a tv in our apartment. It was worth seeing, I was surprised to find; the plot was simple, but good, and the fact that the movie was computer-generated didn’t continually distract you from it. In fact, I wasn’t conscious of that at all.

I’m here in Calif., actually I’m posting from a terminal on the 3rd floor of the McHenry Library at the University of California’s Santa Cruz campus. Even writing this down doesn’t seem to affect me as much as I would have throught it would a week ago– I don’t feel like I’m hundreds of miles away from home. I take that as a good sign.

Outside is a wonderful wilderness, full of redwoods. This is a huge campus, and all through out, there are pockets of forest; and even alongside the newest buildings are redwoods that have to be decades old. The terrain is very hilly– on the way from San Jose, we drove uphill for the entire trip, and my ears popped several times. All the houses have front yards that look like they were laid out by professionals, festooned with colorful flowers and exotic looking plants. It’s strangely cool here for my conception of a California summer should be, but not too cold.

While here, I’ve started rereading “Living the Martial Way”, one of my favorite books on the martial arts, just because it bolsters my self-image to think of myself as an aspiring warrior. I’m considering going back into martial arts, but this time, into a discipline I choose for myself, to fit my characteristics. I was thinking aikido would be a good choice, as its doctrine seems to fit my personal philosophy, or as Miyamoto would have called it (I think), my heiho.

I’m here in the library looking up two books on strategy that were mentioned in that book: “The Art of War” by Sun Tze, and Go Rin No Sho, or A Book of Five Rings, by Miyamoto Musashi. I really wish I could check them out, but I’m just a guest here. I’m considering purchasing them over the Internet when I reach Livermore. So far, I’ve just read part of the intro to A Book of Five Rings, and it has some pretty intriguing and exciting things to say about Zen. It actually describes Zen in a manner that any sane human could understand, something I’ve never seen done before. Not even Douglas Hofstadter could pull that off.

So, I’m back to read more about Zen, as the library closes at 8 here. Then I’m returning to the apartments to hopefully watch a movie with a new friend on his computer– can you imagine they arranged housing for us, but didn’t get us tvs?! What am I going to do for the remainder of the week?

It’s 7:08pm in Cali. time here.

It is the day before I leave to go to Calif., and I have no idea which direction is up. I have yet to wash my clothes so I can take them with me, much less begin to pack. I probably need to go out and get all sorts of things, but I have no idea what they are. And there is a lot of important paperwork that I don’t have completed:

• my housing situation is uncertain: I haven’t heard from the apartment people whether I got an apartment or not
• even if I got the apt., I still haven’t filled out the furniture rental application
• because I don’t have any of the housing info, I can’t complete my security clearance application to work at LLNL.

The last is what I’m really worried about. If I somehow manage to get that clearance application in by tuesday, the earliest I can manage, I will only have two days before having to be where I’m supposed to work. I doubt I can be cleared in two days; how can I work without the clearance?

I’m in a pickle, no doubt, and its all of my own picking.

I’ve gotten myself to do some more reading of the real analysis book, and I’m now on the part about properties of topological spaces. Like Hausdorff spaces, normal, and regular spaces. All of the various properties get foggy in my mind, except for the Hausdorff; that one I see some point in. In order to test my understanding of the concepts involved, I am trying to see why, if not come up with a proof of why, it is true that a compact set in a Hausdorff space is closed.

Baby steps, I know, but I need to know all this stuff before I dive into more interesting waters. It always amazes me to see how the plethora of definitions at the beginning of any math book usually resolve themselves into practical (albeit abstract uses by its end.

I have decided that if there is one life-damaging bad habit I have, it is procrastination. I have a knack for putting things off as much as they can be, to the point where they don’t quite implode on me, but start collapsing. Then if I’m fast and dextrous enough, I can usually work out a way to save myself.

The most recent incident is still in progress. Since I’m to intern at Lawrence Livermore, I received a series of security documents that I was supposed to have completed and sent in by now. Of course, the point is, I still haven’t done them yet. There’s something about all the blank spaces, requiring such precision in answering, that makes me want to put off and put off. That is why I didn’t apply to any college I actually want to go to…

“Anticipation, Anti-cipation, An-ti-ci-pation … is making me blue!” At least, that’s my rendering of the song.

On Monday, I depart this city to travel to the distant environs of California. In the interim, I need to set my affairs straight. Mostly, that will consist of cleaning the house, since my mom is returning from Barbados tomorrow, buying stuff (clothes, shoes, hygienic miscellany) to take to Calif., and battening down the hatches on the site so I will be able to do interesting things while not having ready access to my accustomed tools. Oh, and finishing up on my cousin’s computer so it can sent off concurrent with the stuff my mom is shipping to Barbados.

I am addicted to printing. Right now, I’m printing a ton of differential geom. notes written by B. Csikos— incidentally, he said he used ChiWriter to typeset them; it would be nice to have access to ChiWriter, I really do like the chic typewriter style, but it is sadly obsolescent, and even in its obsolescence, a proprietary product. The notes look surprisingly high-quality (in terms of comprehensiveness and looks) for a non-book format; of course, they are a lot on the concise side.

That’s my new spiel this summer, differential geometry. That, and I’m trying to take my love affair with real analysis to its inevitable conclusion, so I can make moves on its sister, complex analysis. See me pun! I also got both volumes of the great Core Java 2 books for less than $25, so I will be boning up my Java competency sometime soon. I look forward to being able to use Java to visualize stuff; seems like it would serve as a good graphical RAD for visualization purposes. Maybe that’s just because I’ve seen so many visualization packages based on Java.

I just saw a sad “worldview debate” on Christianity vs. Naturalism hosted by the UC system, which pitted Dr. William Lane Craig against some other guy. Craig was the Christian apologist, and the other was a less than mediocre champion for naturalism. Predictably, Craig’s arguments did nothing but indicate that it is reasonable to conclude that the universe was created by something with the purpose of supporting life, doing nothing to support his claims that the proposed something has all, most, or even any, of the qualities Christians attribute to their God: personality, goodness, maleness, three-in-one-ness :), omniscience, omnipotence, benevolence. His biases were obvious: at one point, he referred to the “hostile, mindless universe”, as if that statement makes sense. All the same, he got his point across, which is more than can be said for Mr. Naturalism. All he did, was recount in way too much detail a story from his childhood (in short: “Daddy, who created God?”, “Son, never ask such questions; you must have faith!”— good point, but by far not the only one salient), and denounce religion as too many words, too little ideas (i.e., what does ‘god’ mean, or ’spirit’, etc.). He didn’t raise any scientific points, at which I was disappointed.

found a use yesterday for my interest in Postscript programming. I was trying to print out a draft copy of Alan Kennington’s book Differential geometry reconstructed: a unified systematic framework, but all the pages were coming out shifted up just enough to chop the page numbers off and irritate me. Hey, if I’m going to be printing 422 pages with my home printer, the output better be easy on the eyes! So, I used the copy of the DSC specs I printed (not for much, really– all I did was look up where to place the relevant instructions, and I could have intuited where they ended up– but maybe the specs will be more useful for something down the line) and the PLRM to figure out how to fix it.

Here is the resultant rough code:

use Getopt::Long;
GetOptions("scale=f@" => \@sf,
           "offset=f@" => \@of );
#Make sure the scale factors aren't zero (Getopt makes non-specified
#argument values 0
$sx = $sf[0];
$sy = $sf[1];
$ox = $of[0] + 0;
$oy = $of[1] + 0;
for $val ($sx, $sy) {
   $val = $val || 1;
}
while(<>) {
        print;
        if( /^%%BeginSetup/ ) {
              print <<END;
<< /BeginPage { pop $ox $oy translate $sx $sy scale  } >> setpagedevice
END
        }
}

The option handling is perverse: to specify the offsets/scales, you must specify two single values instead of one list of two values, the way most programs accept arguments; i.e.:

Now I’m tempted to attack the problem of blotting out certain page elements– Kennington has an illegible copyright notice affixed to the right hand side of every page, and a useless footer on easy page. Good book though, albeit unfinished.

I am trying to learn some math: differential geometry and topology. They are interesting, but it seems that just to read through one page takes me an hour, and even then, that is without doing any problems; ideally, I should be doing problems, to help test my understanding and improve retention.

I’m also trying to figure out where to go with this site. I have no need for it, and I’m beginning to admit that I don’t even use it that much. When was the last time I even posted to this blog? And who besides me cares? If I decide to continue with this site, it will need a purpose. I would like that purpose to have something to do with math… maybe a blog of my mathematical learnings. But I’m not sure I have what it takes to make a worthwhile math site. You know, constant updating to follow along in a coherent fashion as I learn something. Plus the illustrating and notational problems. That’s my best thought for now, however.