Even though I try to avoid politics on the basis of principle, I sometimes get drawn in by the cacophony of praise that Mr. Bill Whittle receives every time he writes some pro-America / pro-republican / pro-war litany on his e..e..e.. site. I’m not sure what I’m going to comment on his current piece but I can only hope that it will draw much ire from the legions of cronies who blindly follow the slop bucket of rhetoric dispensed from e..e..e… These threads often go on for days, I just hope I’m not too late. I am probably being a bit harsh really, there is some interesting perspective presented, and obviously there is a large percentage of people able to elucidate their opinions in a clear and logical (at least from their perception) manner.
In other news, I attended my dads Phd candidacy today which went very well. I would talk more about it except that I don’t think many people are interested in harmonic domain analysis of power systems elements with non-linear or repetitive switching compents (Yes that is the title). I can’t say that I understood all of what he was talking about but I take comfort in knowing that I wasn’t alone… I’d say my dad’s a bit of a crazy genius, he’s sort of invented some new math involving matrices to analyze systems purely in the harmonic domain. I don’t doubt he’ll be in a signal analysis textbook someday. But enough of this for now.
Holy crap! And I thought learning the eMAC was an accomplishment!
Sadly enough, I understand that title… I wish I didn’t though… comp sci. students shouldn’t be exposed to these monsters! Hey, and maybe after 3 tries at passing my last class to graduate I’ll have learned something useful… like how to annoy the department enough so they wanna get rid of me 😉
Oh yeah, one more thing… tell your dad if he can use what he knows about that kind of complex math to solve the Travelling Salesman problem using adjacency matrices in at least polynomial time, then he can solve all sets of NP-Complete problems, and will go down in history 😉
Well the details of the matrix math are a bit hazy but basically he’s come up with a set of functions to allow more complex matrix mathematics. For example as opposed to just having addition and subtraction, he developed operations for multiplication, division, absolute value and square root. While the square root function has some problems for signals hovering around zero (for his practical examples), they’re basically very robust. So that’s the extent of what he’s done, I don’t really know if that’s applicable in the travelling salesman problem. Perhaps if an algorithm can be produced using these functions it would be useful.
I do believe that there are a heck of a lot of other uses for this matrix math; they just have to be determined.
And oldcatman, different accomplishments for different levels, but along the same lines. Computers can be tricky to understand for someone without formal training – I’ve been weaned on them and I know my dad was programming back in the seventies, so we’re a bit biased in our family.
Heh, well, on politics, EEE was one of the websites that initially got me into the concept of weblogs. When I first heard of the concept from a friend of mine, I didn’t think it was for me, but after having a look at EEE, the blog he suggested, I was inspired, mainly because I disagreed so vehemently with 90% of what I read and I needed to make that clear for some ego-driven reason. It was really just a dream of mine until combined with Jonathan’s simliar dream and ability to handle the technical aspect of the website. I guess I owe some of that to EEE.
Funny enough that was what motivated me to start getting into political commentary… The boot licking attitude over there always sent shivers down my spine…
Blogging got me to WRITE again……..believe it or not, while in high school (1957 grad!) I started writing caustic & humorous stuff……should have pursued a career in some form of writing/creativeness but spent my working years “creating” reports and designing people systems in health care…….”I take no prisoners”…..politics, sports, show biz, anything that might deserve an oldcatman kick in the groin!…………….today, I dealt with just being “pissed off”……..blogs have a great value if READ & WRITTEN with THOUGHT….as opposed to getting wrapped in what often appears to be ‘soap opera’ rhetoric, or god’s gift to blog reviewing or obsess on how many damn visitors one gets……I suspect the “visits” thing is fraudulent anyway…thinking about to a bit on blog visits.
And then the frustration of writing something with ‘meaning’ and too many of the readers fail to get the point……….that’s why the likes of ChefQuix are on my favorites list!
Thanks for the compliment! Keeps me going really.. 😉
You suck, Chef! NOOB!!
Who’s the bigger NOOB? The Noob, or the noob who follows him?
The noob who follows him. Once a new noob comes along, the first one isn’t as noob anymore.