Rants and Updates
12 Jan 2012:
Adam Cohen is 3 years older than me... and tenured at Harvard already.
7 Jan 2012:
So, I was chatting with a long-time Caltech friend of mine, and she asked me what it takes to be successful as a graduate student and in science. My response to her was, "Work less hard and get plenty of sleep."
Clearly, this advice isn't for everyone as there are many true slackers, but at Caltech, MIT, and Harvard, I would venture to guess that more grad students fail from working too hard, rather than from putting in insufficient hours. "If you know exactly what experiments you need to do for a paper, you could do everything in two weeks. 90% of the time, you're just trying to figure out the right experiment to do. If working 10 hours a day instead of 16 reduces that to 80%, you'd be more efficient and happier."
To follow up on that, today I watched Dan Pink's TED talk on motivation, suggested by Wendy, and realized there's a tangential similarity between his thesis and my suggestion. When people put in long hours slaving away in lab, what they usually do is give themselves little "rewards" for completing some rote task. In fact, another Caltech friend once suggested to me to "motivate yourself by rewarding yourself with a movie or a nice meal after finish some horrible drudgy task." And that absolutely does not work, according to Pink, for all but the simplest tasks.
Let me give a real-life example. Supposing you have 10 reagents, A through J, and you want 10 test tubes, tube 1 with 1 unit of A, tube 2 with 1 unit of A and B, tube 3 with 1 unit of A, B, and C, etc. The "16-hour-a-day" approach is to say, "Well, I just gotta do this pipetting, and I'll watch a Youtube video afterwards as a reward" and go at it with as much speed as possible. The "10-hour-a-day" approach is to put 10 units of A in tube 1, take out 9 units and put it in tube 2, then put in 9 units of B. Repeat by taking 16 units out of tube 2 into tube 3, and then add 8 units C, etc. This process reduces the total number of operations from 55 to 19, and it's completely impossible to figure out once you've zoned into "pipette machine mode."
16 Dec 2011:
Overheard in the elevator:
"It must suck to be athiest and dead."
Harvard, you make me want to cry. GRE, you really shouldn't have gotten rid of the logic section.
13 Dec 2011:
WHAT!? In Maya, local and global axes are different? Apparently, Y is up in the global axes, but Z is up in the local...
6 Dec 2011:
Good quote I saw today:
First-rate people want first-rate colleagues; second-rate people want fifth-rate colleagues. --Edward Lowinsky
9 Nov 2011:
So, I normally invest by looking at fundamentals and then picking a sector.
But today, I read these three great articles about the historic prices of gold vs. platinum:
Using History to Profit from the Gold Bubble
PPLT: Why I'm Buying this Precious Metals ETF
The Ultimate Precious Metals Showdown: Gold vs. Platinum
I think it's a splendid idea. Normally precious metals are a hedge against currency devaluations, but as far as gold or platinum goes, it's about to same to the everyday person who doesn't use them for industrial purposes.
The only difference is that most people instinctively think of gold, rather than platinum, when they want a safe haven, and this leads to a market inefficiency that can be exploited.
Generally, though, it raises the point of taking a hedged intrasector approach of making money.
I would argue that gold and platinum and other rare metals are probably one of the very few sectors where this is a good idea;
in typical companies, management and strategy and product actually makes a difference, and it's difficult to predict which company will win without doing a very careful study.
***
I did some more reading. There's roughly 3,800 tons of gold demanded each year, of which 57% is jewelry and 31% is investment.
Only 433 tons (11%) are used for industrial purposes.
Platinum, in contrast, there's only about 250 tons demanded for platinum each year, but a majority of it (70% = 175 tons) is used for industrial purposes.
I'm a bit surprised that there's more overall historic industrial demand for gold than for platinum, but I suspect part of it is that gold is historically cheaper.
For example, I don't think people particular care if they get a gold or a platinum dental crown.
In order words, I think that for a significant (if not majority) fraction of gold use, platinum is an appropriate substitute should gold continue to be more expensive.
Consequently, my leaning is that in the long run, gold will be cheaper than platinum, due to the much higher abundance of the former over the latter in the Earth.
7 Nov 2011:
What the zark? The GRE has been changed AGAIN, and now the scores for each section range from 130 to 170?
OK, the standard deviation is 10 instead of 100, and now scores are in 1 point increments; that's fine.
But it absolutely makes no friggin' sense to start the scale at 130; the only reason I can think of for that is so some idiot who scores a 130 feels like he's not that much behind someone who scores a perfect 170.
This whole American "feel-good" scoring has really gone too far.. I mean, if I had my way, the scores would go from -100 to +100.
But really, was the 200-800 system so bad that they had to change it?
My pet theory is that some politician wanted to justify his pay and decided to seek change for the sake of change.
So... at this rate, in about 5 years they're going to change the system again... the only grades you can get on a GRE are A+, A , or A-.
29 Oct 2011:
Comment I read on a financial news article: "A 1% federal sales tax on every stock sold would pay off the debt, fund the wars, and fully fund social security today with no other taxes needed."
That's actually not a bad idea. But it does tend to discourage saving and investing by the average person, when interest rates are so low.
Maybe the tax should only be charged to financial instruments held for less than a month.
28 Oct 2011:
So, amidst all my other activities, I recently decided to short gold ETF.
For a metal with fixed intrinsic value, tripling in value over the past 5 years is not so reasonable, and there's got to be a correction at some point.
I'd actually been eyeing gold prices for some time now, and really wanted to short it when it hit $1800 in early September, but didn't have enough cash on hand to do so without worrying about a continued irrational rise in price.
Now that I've liquidated most of my overseas funds right after the huge 6% rise yesterday, I had the motivation and the means to pull the trigger.
We'll see how this goes.
4 Oct 2011:
Same nightmare again, but with a more mean twist.
Some guy in a shirt and tie was asking me to fill out a form.
I had no idea what it was for, but did it anyway.
The first couple lines were, "Annual salary as a Ph.D." and "Annual salary as a high school dropout."
I arbitrarily filled out $100k and $30k.
Then it asked me to estimate the lifetime earnings of the two, assuming a 2% real earnings raise per year, out to 40 years of work.
I did some math and wrote down some pretty different numbers for the two (it actually comes out to $11.26 million for the former and $3.38 million for the latter).
And then the man sinisterly grins at me and says, "So, Dr. Zhang, wouldn't you agree that one million dollars is a fair price for protecting your high school diploma?"
As I was about to stand up in indignity, he continues, "Oh, we have evidence. English, senior year, I believe?"
Somehow the horror of that woke me up.
Man, my conscience must feel really bad about skipping Mrs. Turk's English class so often, to give me nightmares about it over a decade later.
***
Talking to Ralf and Thorsten, apparently they also have recurring nightmares about failing high school (geography and math, respectively). Maybe everyone has nightmares about their high school days?
25 Aug 2011:
In go (the board game), there is a concept of "moyo," the influence that early stones project on the rest of the board. Having never systematically studied go openings, I am vaguely aware of this concept, but I often surprise myself when I see that a piece I placed arbitrarily in the early game having a strong influence in the mid-game.
I find myself in a similar position for my teaching record... I TAed for Caltech's Intro to CS as a freshman mostly to earn some pocket money, but now I find that it really strengthens my teaching statement, because I can truthfully say that I've had extensive teaching experience from the beginning of my undergrad years.
24 Aug 2011:
So, I'm not religious, but I've always really liked certain verses of the Bible. Ecclesiastes 3, for example:
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
Given my current pursuits, I would add, "a time to give advice and a time to seek it." I am so grateful for the many friends I have in academia who are providing me with such wonderful advice. When this whole thing is over, I'm going to compile all my notes and pass it forward to the next generation of academia job seekers.
11 Jun 2011:
I swear, Harvard really doesn't want us to work on weekends. This is like the 3rd weekend in a row that the Harvard journal access verification site is down. Magically, it always works during the weekdays.
EDIT: Not just the journal sites. Supplies/orders site is also down >_<
3 Jun 2011:
BAM! Powered through the entire Research Strategy section of my K99 in 1 day (including figures!).
Of course, a lot of the text is crap towards the end (or rather, the middle; my order of operations was first, last, then middle for psychological reasons).
But it's crap I can turn into Harvard SPA for now, and work on revising next week. And now's it's been a good 20 hours since I last slept.
1 Jun 2011:
ARGHH!!!! How could they do this to me!? NIH changes their policy on May 26th changing the recommendation letter deadline from June 17th to June 12th (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-11-079.html). Seriously, pushing up the deadline by 5 days, 2 weeks before the new deadline, is just not cool. And if it wasn't for Sri, I wouldn't even know about this, and my application would have been disqualified for not having any recommendation letters.
****
So, recently I've been playing Words with Friends on the iPhone when slacking off writing my K99 (Wendy's bad influence).
My record's been pretty good so far... 6 wins and 0 losses.
But the ironic thing is that the words I construct are usually much shorter and less sophisticated than my opponents'.
They would make works like "ochroid" and "jivey" and "vacate" and I usually do words like "reef" and "dung" and "gent."
But I end up winning because I manage to capture a majority of the Triple-word score tiles and play X's and Q's on triple-letter score tiles.
(In one game, I scored 42 points with just 2 letters, "Q" and "I"... The Q was on a double-letter score tile, and I made "qi" two different ways.)
So my conclusion is that my opponents actually have more mastery of the English vocabulary than I do (or is cheating by using an anagram solver), but I manage to win through strategic thinking and through guiding my opponents to play their long words on low point value tiles.
Then yesterday Amy was telling about a person she knew well, who she thought wasn't super smart, yet managed to come to Harvard as an undergrad as a Chinese National (on full financial aid) and secure a job at Morgan Stanley after she graduates. There seems to be an analogy to life here... you can be very "smart" and "hard-working" but end up with a lesser result if you don't plan and act strategically; conversely one can excel despite shortcomings in intelligence and/or diligence through leveraging effort correctly.
Even among my scientific peers, there are some who I see as definitely smarter than me, and there are some who I see as definitely more successful than me, but there's not a lot of overlap between those two lists.
7 Dec 2010:
Hertz Honorable Mention for my Ph.D. thesis. So close, yet so far away...
(Erez Lieberman, who won the Thesis prize this year, had cover articles in both Nature and Science).
21 Aug 2010:
So, I finally saw Inception today. It was overall a pretty good movie, and it could be self-consistent in a few interpretations of the movie.
Observations:
1. There is one "main" dreamer, although "visitors" are allowed to enter into the dream.
2. Visitors are allowed to create the "scenery" and "architecture" of the dream, but only the main dreamer is allowed to create living subjects, who are actually subconscious fragments of the main dreamer's personality.
3. Mal (Dom's wife) appeared in many dreams that Dom entered as "visitor."
4. While in limbo, there were several living subjects working as servants for Saito, even though Saito entered limbo through Robert Fischer's dream.
5. When Dom reunites with his family at the end of the movie, his kids appear no older than they were in his memories.
Self-consistent conclusions:
1. Through enough practice/willpower, a "visitor" can manifest a living subject in someone else's dream. Saito was able to achieve this because he was all alone in limbo, and had decades of time to practice. Dom manifests Mal unintentionally because of his deep attachment to his wife. Dom actually hasn't been away from the U.S. for more than a few months. Saito will kill himself eventually because the planted idea that the world is not real will continue to haunt him, like it did Mal.
2. Even "reality" in the movie is a dream. Mal is able to appear in many other people's dreams because the other people's dreams because the other "people" are actually Dom's subconscious fragments. Similarly, Seito's servants appeared because Dom subconsciously willed them to appear. Thus, Mal was actually correct in concluding that the world is not real. The reason why the top stops spinning in this "reality" is because Dom got it from Mal, rather than having made it himself. It is not clear in this interpretation who, if anyone, is a visitor in Dom's base level dream ("reality"). My money would be on the French chick.
Oh, and one technical gripe: The reason there's a time dilation, we're told, is because the human brain uses only a tiny fraction of its brain's power. But then, why would the time dilation compound in consecutive layers of dreams? Presumably, the main dreamer is already nearing the max of his brain capacity in the first layer dreams, so there won't be further time dilation.
16 July 2010:
Lol... I don't think I'll ever get used to Boston.. a few days after I arrived, I was asked by one of the grad students if I was gay, because he thought the "Xi Chen" I'm married to on Facebook is the guy from Andy Ellington's lab.
And today, Amy the undergrad asked me if I have a "Bro-mance" with Rob Barish. o_O
4 July 2010:
Education is so perverse. For 16 years, students have to write huge long papers with minimum lengths, so they learn to fill their writing with verbiage, but then in the real world (if academia can be considered the "real world") one tries to be as concise as possible in all writing. Talk about the Peter Principle.
31 May 2010:
So, I found this vocab test from way earlier in my blog, and took it again. I doubt I remembered any details of a random quiz I took 6 years ago, so I'm guessing this could potentially measure real differences.
2004: 111/125 "known" ones, 47/75 "wild guesses." Total = 158 / 200.
2010: 120/124 "known" ones, 48/76 "wild guesses." Total = 168 / 200.
So, what does this mean? First, my perception of my vocabulary has not significantly changed (still admit I don't know at least one of the two words for 38% of the questions). Second, I seem to "get right" the words I supposedly know more, meaning I'm more careful now than before.
One may argue that 158/200=0.79 and 168/200=0.84 are not statistically different (1.73 standard deviations, alpha = 0.04), but if you look at the subgroup of "known", 111/125 = 0.888 and 120/124 = 0.968 ARE pretty statistically different (11.4 standard deviations).
30 May 2010:
So, when I was cleaning up my office preparing to vacate, I found my violin. I told Sherry and Steve how I was consistently first chair violin during elementary school, and that I practiced every day for about an hour. They were a bit skeptical and demanded that I play a piece for them.
After downloading a tuning App on my iPhone after some 5 minutes of spotty connections and updated Licensing Agreements, I finally managed to get my violin tuned and my bow resined. Of course, I still had no sheet music. Drawing into the deep recesses of my mind, the only song I still remembered how to play was the Chinese Song "Butterfly Dream." After some 10 minutes of practice, I managed to get it sounding something like the real thing.
And then I was suddenly very sad. I hadn't touched the violin in the past 10 years, even though I had liked it and been good at it at one point in my life. Not that I'm harboring any dreams of becoming a professional violinist, but it would have been nice if I could have kept with it. It would be nice to be on a par to my friend Rob Bao's piano skills. And he's living proof that practicing a musical instrument regularly doesn't screw over one's scientific career, at least during undergrad and grad school.
I'm contemplating picking up the violin again. But I don't know if that's practical, given that the next ten years will probably be very, very busy for me. I also can't join a group or anything, because the schedule of a scientist is never regular, and I don't want to be the chronically late member.
Well. I'll take my violin to Harvard with me. Hopefully it won't just continue to gather dust.
26 May 2010:
Oh, the irony. I remember like yesterday my first meeting with Rob Barish, and our discussion on how we rejected Harvard for our undergrad educations. Rob said he folded their admission letter into a paper airplane and flew it into the trash can. Well, after detours of varying lengths, we're now both going to be starting at Harvard this July.
Amazing how after two years of French in middle school, the only French phrase that I remember was learned from History:
L'etat, c'est moi -- Louis XIV (I am the state.)
Hm. Wikipedia seems to think this quote is misattributed.. but it doesn't say who actually said it in the first place.
21 May 2010:
Wow. Crazy! Apparently Paul Rothemund's SURF mentor (when he was an undergrad in 92) is Greg Fu, who was my RSI mentor in 1999! Greg's also currently the 6th most impactful chemist, apparently.
To quote Michael Baym, "No matter how good you think you are at science, not only is there definitely someone better than you, but there's also someone who's exponentially better than you."
17 May 2010:
Thought of the Day:
There is no such thing as luck. There is only skill, stochasticity, and attempt frequency.
27 Apr 2010:
A really good article about filtering history
26 Apr 2010:
Dang. I used to think my publication record is probably tops in my Rickoid class of '99, with my 2 Science papers, 2 JACS papers, and 1 Nucleic Acids Research paper.
Then today I found out about Feng Zhang's record (Deisseroth lab at Stanford): 4 Nature, 2 Nature Protocols, 3 Nature Neuroscience, 1 Nature Methods, 1 Cell, and 1 PNAS. All in a span of 4 and a half years, from 2005 to now.
Humbling.. but motivating.
22 Apr 2010:
My thesis is a real-life example of Zeno's Paradox.
11 Apr 2010:
Thesis defense scheduled for May 14! That means I need to turn in my thesis on April 30, giving me 19 days left.
Current progress: 8.5 chapters / 12
1 Apr 2010:
This isn't the first time I've said this, and it won't be my last, but I'm really, really glad I'm a Hertz Fellow.
Finally starting to get my feet wet.
26 Mar 2010:
Thought of the Day:
Doing a startup is like playing No-Limit Hold'em: You only ever lose big money on good ideas/hands.
19 Mar 2010:
The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.. I might be starting to see it.
16 Mar 2010:
I feel like the young Leonidas, staring down the beast that is quantative PCR.
15 Mar 2010:
Current mood:
14 Mar 2010:
On Addiction (and specifically, my addictions)
So, lately I started having the strange urge to play World of Warcraft (WoW). I've never played WoW before, and honestly, I don't generally like the Warcraft storyline that much, so it is a bit of a mystery to me why I suddenly developed this urge. Anyway, I rationally realized that playing WoW would be a terrible idea, and set about trying to rid myself of this baleful inclination. So today (technically yesterday, I guess), in between typing up 3 pages of text for my paper, I spent maybe 2-3 hours reading WoW Detox, a self-help website for WoW addicts wanting to quit the game because it's ruined their lives. My plan was working.. I felt my desire to play the MMORPG steadily dropping as I read about hundreds of real people, who failed in courses, jobs, and marriages because of WoW.
And then I realized, to monumental irony, that I was becoming addicted to reading WoW addiction stories. (There are over 40,000 posts on the website! I read maybe 100 over the course of 3 hours, so reading them all would have taken 50 days of non-stop internet browsing!) Before I get into my introspections, I'll first discuss some thoughts on WoW addiction.
There is ongoing debate on WoW Detox on whether WoW addiction is the same as alcohol or illicit substance addiction. Given the selection bias of the visitors of that site, it should not be surprising that the overwhelming consensus is that WoW addiction is no different than conventional addictions. I think that oversimplifies the response, because I think WoW addiction is not a single phenomenon, but rather a medley of different ones with similar outward syndromes.
From reading the various addiction stories, I can broadly separate the addicts into 2 distinct types. The first type is the "Competitive Underachiever." Addicts of this type were "normal" people in life, yet they possessed the desire to be more than normal. They harbor ambitions that sadly cannot be satisfied by their real world abilities. WoW offers them a world in which they can excel, a world in which they can earn the respect of thousands or even millions of others. These addicts usually break free of their addictions out of frustration at having to play 8+ a day continually just to maintain their places in the game world, because of the various new content that Blizzard Entertainment regularly adds.
The second type of addict is the "Rejected Socialite." Addicts of this type were unpopular in real life because of looks, socio-economic status, or general introvertedness. They desire to be sociable, and their primary goal of the game is not to kill monsters, but to develop a network of online friends they can turn to. These are the people who, 20 years ago, would have been chat room junkies. They revel in virtual interpersonal interactions, because real interpersonal interactions are too hard for them to accomplish. These addicts usually break free of their addictions because they realize their real life friends and family care for them, or because they become disillusioned with their online friends.
To summarize the two types of WoW addicts, there are normal people wanting to be heroes, and there are losers wanting to be normal people. Members of the latter class of addicts are probably similar in profile to conventional addicts of alcohol and illicit substances, generally possessing low esteem and succumbing easily to peer pressure. But the difference between the former type of addiction and conventional addiction is night and day.
Though I never played WoW, I did play another MMORPG several years back, in 2004, called Final Fantasy XI. This was near the nadir of my life, and I was losing the confidence that I had continually cultivated for the previous 21 years of my life, due to a combination of bad luck and bad choices (the latter of which stemmed ironically from overconfidence). With no publications and a GPA below 3.0, I was feeling very.. average. For someone used to winning awards and scholarships on a regular basis, average was completely unacceptable. So, like many other type 1 addicts, I got sucked into the MMORPG, determined to distinguish myself as the fastest levelling solo character. In addition to playing at least 4 hours or so every day, I'd also log out frequently to preserve a low in-game playtime. I perused the online strategy guides, and I even spent about $100 buying virtual currency to help me in my goal. I eventually managed to quit playing the game because of a combination of two factors: first, I realized I was clearly lagging behind players powerleveled by their friends (and thus I could not reach my goal of being fastest leveller), and second because one of my science ideas actually turned out to be quite good (and gave me hope that I could distinguish myself in the real world).
So in retrospect, my starting and ending Final Fantasy XI can both be quite rationally explained. But what still didn't make sense is why I'd suddenly have the urge to try WoW: by most standards, I'm doing quite well at the moment, having recently won a prestigious fellowship, published and submitted several good scientific papers, and a loving girlfriend. My salary isn't as high as that of a lawyer, but I'm OK with that because becoming a professor will give me the opportunity to commercialize my science and potentially become *really* rich in ways lawyers can only dream about. What gives? Well, I'm pretty sure I have a more valid alternative theory.
The first thing I realized when introspecting was that my life has been more or less filled with addictions, since the time of elementary school. Some of these were "good;" for example, math competitions. I was addicted to math competitions from the 4th grade, when I got my first taste of prestige in winning 2nd place at the KATM, up until 9th grade, when I got disillusioned by the USAMO. Some of these distinctly bad; for example, I logged something like 30 days of playtime in Final Fantasy XI, and probably much higher numbers for Diablo II, Starcraft, and Angband. Others were probably neutral; for example, Greek mythology and online Diplomacy and fiction writing (to each of which I devoted at least 4 hours each day for at least 3 months).
The number of different addictions I've had is definitely WAY higher than the mean of the population at large. One consequence of that reality is that the amount of time I've spent/wasted on each addiction is significantly less than that of most addicts on their vice of choice. In fact, professional psychologists may even hesitate to call it an addiction, and would perhaps use the term "hobby" instead. I disagree. I feel that when I spend over 12 hours a day thinking about a particular topic for days if not weeks or months on end, that topic has crossed the line over into addiction or obsession.
In actuality, my behavior probably arises from a seemingly paradoxical combination of attention-deficit disorder (ADD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). (Disclaimer: Although I have read numerous psychology books and administered the MMPI to myself, I have never been formally tested by a psychiatrist for either disorder.) Basically, it means once I latch onto a thought or activity, I'll restlessly pursue it for anywhere between 2 weeks and 6 months, with almost exclusive concentration and focus. These addiction states don't end with me retreating into a lethargic, unexcited state, but rather with me switching very excitedly over to a different addiction. In the case of Final Fantasy XI, I switched into it after becoming depressed at my transcriptional circuitry research results, and I switched out of it after becoming excited at the prospect of TAing RSI students. The new, invading addiction could be triggered by the most random or incidental of events. In my current case, I think it was because I repeatedly saw some ads for a different MMORPG, which somehow led me to remember WoW, and think that it's probably a pretty good game, with its 9.5 million different subscribers and 3 expansions. Remembering my experience with Final Fantasy XI prompted me to search for ways of killing the urge, and that led to the proto- WoW addict story addiction.
Sun Tzu wrote in his Art of War that "Knowing yourself and your enemy guarantees victory." What battle plans have I developed after introspecting and writing this lengthy blog post? Well, first of all, I'm something of a positive feedback cycle. As long as I'm accomplished and continue accomplishing in real life, it's unlikely for me to get sucked into any virtual reality game. Second, rather than trying to fight my personality eccentricities, I should learn to cultivate them. A famous Chinese saying goes "It is easier for a realm to change kings than for a man to change his personality." So what if I'll be forever juggling addictions for the rest of my life? As long as all of my future addictions are relatively constructive, everything's fine. My current addiction (not counting the WoW addict stories one) is writing scientific papers. When that fades, I'll try to channel myself into doing DNA synthetic biology labwork. When that fades, it'll be about time to start in Chad's lab on gold nanoparticle chemistry. When that fades, I'll starting interview at different universities for faculty positions. Variety is the spice of life, and I'm a man who likes Szechuan food. As long as I'm sampling different types of peppers and not mushrooms or wild almonds, I'll be OK.
(Writing blog posts is another of my seasonal addictions, but it carries enough benefits and I manage enough moderation that I won't try to kill it ;-) )
13 Mar 2010:
Life lesson I learned from playing D&D: Take all of your weaknesses and concentrate it all in one area. Then do your damnedest to minimize that area's importance. Examples: Paladins with 4 WIS who take Force of Personality, Wild Shape Druids with 6 CON, and Wizards with 6 STR. Basically, the "min" part of min-maxxing.
Application to real life: Right now, I'm sticking everything ad-hoc and undefendable into section 3 (out of 5) of my paper, and piling on disclaimers at the beginning of the section. In exchange, the other parts are quite respectable and scholarly now.
----
If only the IPCC had the foresight to do what I'm doing, global warming wouldn't be in nearly as much trouble as it is in today.
----
Actually, this reminds me of an event from elementary school. One of my neighbors was lamenting and consulting me on how to present his homework scores to his parents. Most of the grades were decent (B's and A's), but a fraction (maybe 10%) of them were really bad (something like 40-50%). He knows that his parents won't take the time to look over all of his homework grades (because he had a large stack of graded homeworks), so the question was how to arrange the homeworks in a way that his parents take minimal notice of the bad grades, so that they keep giving him a nice allowance.
The strategy I suggested was this: take all of the decent grades, and arrange them chronologically (there was no obvious variation of the scores with time). Then, take the homeworks with poor marks and randomly distribute them in the middle 50% of the good homeworks. That way, when his parents flip through the stack of homeworks, they'll see only good scores in the beginning and the end, and while they might catch a bad score or two in the middle, they'll underestimate the number of bad scores because the psychological "primacy" and "recency" effects worked in his favor (I didn't know what they were called then, but I definitely grasped those concepts!). I think it worked out fine for him.. at least until his parents saw his "surprisingly" low term grade.
12 Mar 2010:
Yawn. Hm. Now that I think about it, "Last of the Mohicans," while being good music, is not good work music.
While procrastinating, I found this:
LOL!
9 Mar 2010:
OMG. I can't believe I just zarkin' spent 2 hours figuring out how to make a shaded box in Latex. And the caption still won't justify properly.
4 Mar 2010:
You know, I'd be more upset at myself for not getting the Lemelson-Caltech prize if it weren't for the fact that the winner this year has all of 1 lead-author publication (Angew. Chemie), and the runner up has 0.
2 Mar 2010:
Thought of the Day:
There are times when you just have to pseudo-bluff that A-high inside straight draw after the turn.
Ouch. I feel like a defense player who got his only Ace ruffed by a 2 on the first trick.
You know what, I'm going to print a poster saying "Christopher Columbus didn't discover the New World by asking the Queen of Spain for a fishing boat," and tape it to my office wall. I shall fear no failure!
1 Mar 2010:
Well, good news and bad news. Good news is that I'm done with all 8 figures and captions for our review paper, and I'm probably going to make (personal) record speed on getting this manuscript out the door.
Bad news is that I'm pretty sure I didn't get the Lemelson Prize. Ah well, it's only $30k. There are bigger fish to fry!
51 references on the review paper so far.. another 49 to go!
Hm... it's 5 and a half pages already. So that'll be 4.5 pages for actual text, and 1 more page for citations.
26 Feb 2010:
Hrm.. this is awkward. In the course of redrawing figures for other people's work for the review paper I'm writing, I think I stumbled upon some better implementations. To include the original or to show the improvement?
25 Feb 2010:
Dave has realized that Cauchy's Inequality means that it's far better to be 95% productive 15% of the time than 15% productive 95% of the time.
(EDIT: This requires convexity to the origin of results as a function of productivity.)
.. either that, or he's rationalizing his lack of results from the previous 3 months.
19 Feb 2010:
I'm reminded of a quote from the movie "Ronin:" "If there's any doubt, there's no doubt at all."
Picking undergrads/grad students/postdocs is like that. If you have any doubts of the candidate's competence, just don't hire him.
1 Feb 2010:
On why I edit other people's papers so quickly while writing my own at worm's pace:
A good sentence is like a needle in a haystack. When someone brings me a box of needles that they've picked from many haystacks, it's easy for me to see any straws that made it into the box. But to write my own paper requires that I actually go and look through the haystacks myself.
14 Jan 2010:
So, while (re-)writing yet another invention disclosure, I got to thinking: why don't some patent lawyers work on commission? (Or maybe they do and I don't know about it?)
From talking to Hertz alums with entrepreneurial blood, there is a strong consensus that the patent lawyer is important. You'd much rather pay $1000 an hour for a lawyer that's good than $200 an hour for a lawyer's that mediocre, if you expect your invention to make you any money at all. A good lawyer adds value to your invention, not only by writing your patent in a way that's impregnable to infringement via silly tweaks, but also by giving advice on potential applications of your technology that you may not have thought of.
When I asked them how to identify a good patent lawyer from one that is merely expensive, the Hertz alums laughed that said that you just have to build good working relationships with good patent lawyers, and it's just something that falls under the ommnibus "entrepreneurship experience" heading. That, of course, depressed me, because Caltech does't have a law school, and thus my social network is devoid of good lawyers.
But that also got me thinking: the free market should have arrived at a good method of matching up good patent lawyers with good entrepreneurs. After all, a good patent lawyers wants to work with entrepreneurs who are successful, in order to maximize repeat business. But that incentive may be too small.
The natural solution that I saw for this problem was for good patent lawyers to work on commission. Charge nothing until the royalties start kicking in. If the patent was poorly written, there will be naturally less of a commission to be earned. Good patent lawyers will then be much more vested not only in doing a good job writing good patents, but also will be incentivized to only work on the patents they think have some chance of paying out.
In the age of steep lawyer costs and patent trolling, the solution would simultaneously reduce the social inefficiency of many poorly written/conceived patents, and increase the odds that a good invention is protected and successfully becomes a technology.
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