Yesterday I attended the weekly mathematics colloqium which this week was a joint venture with biology. The topic was the rise of qualitative methods in biology(and particularly differential equations). Part of the talk was quite enjoyable. Although not particularly new, the recoverage of attractors, equilibrium and all that was rather refreshing after the material I have been dealing with lately.

Unfortunately the speaker was in my opinion, highly condescending and trying to spark controversy. He argued that quantitative methods(closed form solutions et al) are arguably useless for any real system as closed forms can be hard or impossible to find. So far not too bad I suppose, though I wouldn’t quite go as far as that. Then he seemed to get carried away. He started arguing for instance that biology students shouldn’t take calculus, and that we should replace their current calculus courses with a class that basically boils down to numerical integration and graphing and then observing how stuff behaves. While I agree those methods are useful, the argument that we need to completely rid biology students of the base on which everything is built? Absolutely nonsense. His argument is that biology students hate math, so why teach them how to calculate derivatives, integrals etc.

He of course rationalized this by saying that if they needed to actually solve the equations they could then just go to a mathematician. Doesn’t this seem a bit condescending to biology students, that math is something they can meddle in, but leave the real work to the mathematicians? Also aren’t we depriving them of the beauty of a large section of mathematics by doing this? Also what if they do eventually want to proceed with their research. They then have the choice of going back and having a mathematician hold their hand through everything, or going back and learning calculus anyways. Also the argument that biology students can’t and shouldn’t do calculus is highly offensive. Several good friends of mine are biologists and show quite an aptitude for mathematics.

Thankfully I wasn’t the only one offended with a large portion of the argument and several of our mathematicians took him up on the argument. At least one faculty member walked out, after commenting that the speaker was either trying to be overly controversial, or was just a plain idiot. One could almost imagine the fights between Lagrange and Fourier in their head.

Well back to my own meager research(Perceptual objective audio quality metrics). Looks like this afternoon holds another interesting talk.

* Graduate Student Seminar:  4:00 pm, SH 235.  Joel

Lucero-Bryan:  An Introduction to Modal Logic and Various

Semantics.

Ooh and looks like what could be another interesting talk tommorrow(If I can sneak in and have it done before my DSP test)

Topology Seminar: 2:30 pm, SH 235.  Ted Stanford: The Game  

of Hex, the Jordan Curve Theorem, and the Brouwer Fixed Point

Theorem

Wow. So this has been a really rough spot of time. I am taking 15 credit hours in graduate school which is more than the average by almost double. The classes are really interesting. My research is really interesting. Unfortunately lately I seem to have lost my drive to work on much of anything. I just feel…distracted. I’m not quite sure whats causing it or how to get over it. Anyone have any ideas on how to get your drive back? I want to be doing research and work. I enjoy it when I am doing it. Its just that I can’t seem to focus myself into starting it. It may just be the pressure of having so much on my plate.  Who knows.

So I suppose I should contribute something positive to this instead of whining. Here is quite possibly the most addictive flash animation you will ever see. http://www.leekspin.com/

On the offchance that anyone local is reading this, is anyone else I know going to the analysis workshop in albuquerque NM october 11th?

Well Monday I had a very productive day. I managed to get the code for the audio degredation done for the most part that I will need for the testing. As well I wrote up the bulk of and got the idea approved by my adviser for the first user experiment. Hopefully today I can finish the writeup and go for a swim.

Pathetically bad joke? Yes please.

Q:What happens if you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber?

A:You can’t cross a scalar with a vector!

I just finished watching the lecture by Timothy Gowers on the importance of mathematics. Following are the links for each part of the lecture(it is split into 8 parts to be posted to YouTube). Many thanks to the uploader on YouTube for this. Everyone should check it out as it is at a level that nonmathematicians can understand, while still reaffirming what many mathematicians already know. Know of any more mathematics videos on youtube that are at roughly this level(as well as good ones in general)? Let me know and I’ll make another posting with the best.

Part1
Part2
Part3
Part4
Part5
Part6
Part7
Part8

My all nighter turned into an extended midday nap and now its 4:26am and I’m still awake. I really have to get this back on track. I don’t think another all nighter will work so I suppose I’ll go to bed in a few minutes and then just incrementally work my sleep schedule back. I should probably reduce all these late night distractions that I find to keep me awake.

To prepare for the coming semester(and try and keep in the swing of things) I am going back through my basic analysis book and rewriting most(if not all) of the proofs to improve my writing technique. I am doing this concurrently to the audio research that is of primary important. With that having been said, does anyone have any links to work being done in continuous SUBJECTIVE video evaluation?

Well these last few days have not been terribly productive. I had a group meeting with adviser and other GA’s on tuesday and was very excited about some new ideas. Since then however, it feels like I’ve gotten very little actually done. This is both academically and personally. It just feels like some wasted days.  Hopefully today I can finish coming up with some user experiment setups and test them out on my roommate to decide if they’re even feasible or not.  This means cutting up and rearranging a ridiculous amount of audio samples as well as adding noise to them in very particular ways.  This is not particularly hard, just tedious.

Hopefully I can get my sleep schedule back on track again. Pulling an all nighter tonight in hopes of going to sleep normally tonight, and then waking up at a decent hour(I’d like to shoot for 6:30am). If I can get this working, I feel it will greatly improve my productivity.

On another note, I ate at the local Indian food place on campus and now have a craving for whatever that yellow chicken stuff was. (Tasted like a cheesy chicken curry kind of…). Will have to get back in there to ask about it.

New Mexico State University is a ridiculously hold happy school. Let me explain. They tend to put holds on your account that stop you from registering, adding classes, or doing anything else useful whenever you owe them money, have late books, or quite often just because they feel like it. I personally manage to get a hold on my account pretty much every semester. It’s split 50/50 between me actually deserving it(owing money) and the university just randomly deciding they want me to have to call them(lonely I suppose). Well today I discovered yet another hold on my account.

Rather amazingly though, I managed to get it removed with just 2 phone calls(down from the usual 4 or 5). Is my college finally becoming responsive? Maybe too much to hope for but since I’m stuck here for another 3 years or so, I guess I have time to find out.

Today I started this blog as a way to collect my thoughts and get used to presenting them to the outside world. Also this should be a good way to relieve some stress and relate the life of being a graduate student.