Dispatches from a happy Hullian

I made it, through the full-body scanner and a flight above the clouds, to Washington D.C. I mixed Metro (mostly) and walking (from L'Enfant Plaza across the National Mall to Chinatown, so get a sniff of the air, get a look at the monumental-ness, and grab some tasty Thai food) to get me to the University of Maryland, where I'm staying and taking a course on disclosure control. Today was the ins and outs of releasing aggregated data, which is the end of things I've worked more in. Mostly for myself: I should e-mail Dr. Cox about where methodological transparency grants the intruder extra leverage in estimating sensitive cells: his problematic findings on feasible intervals, and Dr. Karr's recent conference papers on the topic in general. I think I'm getting some good review and some connecting details that I was missing so far.

Tonight I'm probably going to drop south from Foggy Bottom into the western end of the National Mall and try to see the giant statue of Lincoln and the Vietnam Veterans' monument. Tomorrow: microdata, dynamic queries, and then the rush to the airport to get home.

The strangest things pop out at you sometimes.

Apple would like me to update my copy of iTunes, which I may get to doing when I'm not listening to music:

With iTunes 7.3, you can now activate iPhone service and sync it with your music, TV shows, movies and more. Also, you can now wirelessly share and enjoy your favorite digital photos from any computer in your home with Apple TV. iTunes 7.3.2 provides bug fixes to improve stability and performance.

That led me to here.

I am also simmering ideas about cut-sets, reachable rules whether realizable is a rule thing or a grammar thing.

Math is fundamentalism for the sane.

Well, and the more-or-less sane.

Yesterday, at a local two-for-one pizza place:

Cashier: "Do you want one pizza, or two?"
Me: "Er, one, I guess. Is it cheaper than two?"
Cashier: "Well, of course, it's two-for-one!"
Me: (stunned silence)

Yippee for more userpics!

Watch out for the toast icon soon.

I explained a notation I think is cool today. With coloured pens, tracing paper and wild arm movements. And am getting paid for this.

Feeling a bit whomped with work and school of late. I'll get what I can get done done, and try to do enough sanity maintenance in there too. Going to Ottawa Friday night can't come soon enough. Travel Scrabble, talk and "reasonably priced snacks" on the train are calling to me.

I've been putting in some time helping out with a paper on shape grammars as design tools, marking, and not doing quite enough problem sets. Tonight, babysitting a roast in the oven (some people I know do turkeys, I have beef from home to keep me up all night), and alternating procrastinating with stuff I need to be doing.

The weekend involved a bunch of communal time with rottenfruit: Saturday Dim Sum with her and my folks, gaming with her and the usual suspects, and on Sunday we went to monthly Scrabble as thrown by feygele (in nifty rainbow kippah) and vierge_en_trop (who made said nifty rainbow kippah). Saw the kippah in question through a basement window today at Concordia, debated pressing my nose up against the glass and gesturing "hi", but I was late and the head under it looked to be concentrating on something deep. I had fun, and got some stuff done — not as much as I should have, but there was progress. Today was long, and isn't over.

I think I'm slowly growing up.

Something from Ideas (on Radio One) earlier this week (Thursday?) was rattling around in my head... they got Philip Yancey, who's one of the better apologist writers out there (in my experience), talking on the subject of rumours of god, and one of the things he unpacks is an anecdote of some atheist friend of his acknowledging that the conditions for human-ish life are pretty unlikely given the range of possible values for all kinds of physical constants and initial conditions in the universe. Yancey goes on to express appreciation that although his atheist friend stayed an atheist, that he acknowledged the improbability of all those factors lining up to allow life, and elaborate that this forms part of his case for a creator — that it's just too unlikely otherwise.

The first thing that gets my goat is the lack of acknowledgement of conditional probability... the standard and well-established way to level the probability argument is to point out that whatever the probability of conditions being sufficient for human life, the only way to be human and observing them is for them to happen. Sitting here in time, being human, the probability of that happening is more or less 1. There seem to be vast stretches of space that don't contain humans, and the universe took a very long time (if you choose to trust physics over Genesis) to spit us out. So maybe we are unlikely, and we would be rightly surprised if we saw people sprouting up on every wandering bit of space debris. Probability doesn't spring out of nothingness, it only has meaning once you set conditions.

But, maybe more fundamental here, is the assumption that somehow the alternate explanation is that there are huge roulette wheels turning setting all the constants and everything after that, and that an absence of god somehow runs right to everything is stubbornly random. No god doesn't mean no logic, far from it. Cellular automata need some ground rules and they're off doing their thing. Math needs some axioms and given some time, some branches of thought are wandering around category theory. We can watch pretty undistinguished functions over time churning out discrete-time systems and they'll settle into patterns. We can set calendars and clocks with trust that gravity will do its thing more or less the same way as it has over the recorded past. They don't get bumped around when somewhere allows gay marriage or a new mixed-fibre clothing sweatshop opens. So we're the settling down of, or at least a temporary plateau in, the particular progression from whatever starting conditions we got. We're pretty stable as cluster points go. Just because things have settled into something, doesn't mean there was some master plan from the get-go. That works for my life and probably for many of you readers... without taking the analogy as proof, doesn't it seem possible that works on a bigger level, too?

( interests in a nice little table by popularity )

It would appear I’m all over the map... I can’t believe I’m the only (declared) Moock fan or Frontier College supporter on LJ...