ChapterZero

Arghhh!!! I have a meeting tomorrow with my advisor to discuss my progress in research over the past month or so, and I have nothing interesting to mention– partly because I haven’t spent as much time as I could have, but mostly just because I’m slow and dense. I just gave up on the two problems I’ve been looking at, since I’ve gotten nowhere on those, and am now reading his paper on the linear independence of spikes and sines so I can work on another idea he suggested. Namely, to adapt the technique used in the paper to get a bound on the expected spectral norm of a random rectangular submatrix of the Fourier matrix. I can’t get anything done on this tonight besides reading, but it looks interesting.

Question of the night: Let , show that the coefficients of the polynomial satisfy the inequality

It may help to look up Markov’s inequality for polynomials (bounding the derivatives of a polynomial in terms of the Chebyshev polynomials), and try to prove that.

Possibly relevant posts:

• Another basic spectral norm inequality (9/29/2008)
• Expected norm of matrices with randomly signed entries (8/6/2008)
• Research agenda (5/2/2008)

I thought the lyrics said “Bill Cosby”, so the song didn’t really make much sense to me, but now I’ve looked up Bukowski, the lyrics still don’t make sense. It seems like he’s saying life sucks so much it’s hard to believe there’s a God, or that if God exists maybe he’s an asshole, but what’s the bit on evil home stereos and weddings about?

Woke this morning and it seemed to me
That every night turns out to be
A little bit more like Bukowski
And yeah, I know he’s a pretty good read
But God, who’d want to be
God, who’d want to be such an asshole?
God, who’d want to be
God, who’d want to be such an asshole?

Well we sat on the edge of the river
The crowd screamed, “Sacrifice the liver!”
If God takes life, he’s an Indian giver
So tell me now why, you’ll tell me never
Who would want to be
Who would want to be such a control freak?
Well who would want to be
Who would want to be such a control freak?

Well, see what you want to see
You should see it all
Well, take what you want from me
You deserve it all
Nine times out of ten
Our hearts just get dissolved
Well, I want a better place
Or just a better way to fall
But one time out of ten
Everything is perfect for us all
Well, I want a better place
Or just a better way to fall

Here we go
If God controls the land and disease
Keeps a watchful eye on me
If he’s really so damn mighty
My problem is that I can’t see
Well who’d want to be
Who’d want to be such a control freak?
Well who’d want to be
Who would want to be such a control freak?

Evil home stereo
What good songs do you know?
Evil me, oh yeah, I know
What good curves can you throw?

Well, all that icing and all that cake
I can’t make it to your wedding but I’m sure I’ll be at your wake
You were talk, talk, talking in circles that day
When you get to the point make sure that I’m still awake, okay?

Went to bed and didn’t see
Why every day turns out to be
A little bit more like Bukowski
And yeah, I know he’s a pretty good read
But God, who’d want to be
God, who’d want to be such an asshole?

Possibly relevant posts:

• Canzoni Stonate (5/27/2007)
• Simpson’s quote (3/6/2004)
• Life sucks! (2/27/2003)

Hold on a sec. Did this actually happen?

Google has publicly stated that they believe their search engine could grow into the first effective artificial intelligence.

I didn’t know Google had it like that (it’s still just a really good search engine to me) and I’m thinking I should have heard of this by now if it’s true. See the original context (an interesting article on the sheer power Amazon has in the publishing industry)

Possibly relevant posts:

• Google— the next world order? (12/16/2004)
• Mathematical Typesetting and Google meta-tags (5/29/2005)
• Kurzweil (6/12/2005)

Every so often I go looking for online nanowrimo novels, but it seems they are very few. At one point I came across a scifi novel, more of a future history, like a pasting together of the prologues to the chapters of Vacuum Diagram– i.e., good but lacking any sort of dialogue or individual characters. But now I can’t even find that. Can anyone provide links to good online fantasy/scifi novels? Gracias.

Why nanowrimo, you ask? I have a dream of someday participating… and I’ve decided, as I’ve decided every year since I knew nanowrimo existed, that ’someday’ is this November. Ideally I can get a few practice novellas out of the way before then, to build my writing skills, but this well is dry. When I’m reading a book, I’m excellent at pointing out what– plot devices and developments, characterization, descriptions, etc– an author could add to improve their writing; apparently this skill only works within worlds constructed by others. I’m finding it as hard to construct a unique world and an engaging story as … well, finishing this analogy.

Possibly relevant posts:

• What makes for good Sci-fi? (11/13/2004)
• Twilight zone for book ordering (8/15/2006)
• Spin State and Spin Control (3/25/2007)

I’m now officially a dweeb: I signed up for twitter. This will probably fall by the wayside sooner rather than later.

Ways in which this might be useful: it’ll let me post interesting links (to papers, videos, etc.) as I encounter them … that’s it so far.

Possibly relevant posts:

• This is bull (9/1/2007)
• Advisorship request sent out (8/31/2007)
• Fluid Mechanics Films (2/17/2008)

Let be a non-negative random variable, and . Assuming you know for all such , what can you say about ?

I need to establish an upper bound on with this knowledge; so far the best I can do is say .

Possibly relevant posts:

• A cool problem in measure theory (4/9/2007)
• One direction in Khintchine’s inequality for Rademacher sums (9/26/2008)
• Probability tricks (11/28/2006)