I had my one and only exam of the semester today, in Avrim's machine learning theory class. For some reason he decided to do it as an in-class exam, which is weird for a theory class and apparently a departure from the way he's done it in the past. It was a fairly difficult exam, but not impossible. I answered 4 of the 5 problems, and didn't do ( Read more... )

Ryan accepted our offer, but deferred for a year -- his wife really wanted to go to Columbia for business school, so he's going to spend a year as a postdoc at Columbia and then come here the next year. According to Avrim he might stop by every once in a while next year to work with people here, though, which is cool. So yay for more theory ( Read more... )

I have to do a short presentation for Avrim's machine learning class as a final project -- I'm going to present Feldman's hardness result for learning conjunctions. Since I'm only going to have about 30 minutes, I figured that I should use slides of some sort, since writing everything on the board would just take too much time, and I'm just doing ( Read more... )

This weekend was Carnival here at CMU, which seemed to be something along the lines of a weekend-long Lawnparties in that most of the undergraduates were drunk and hanging out outside. There was less emphasis on music, and obviously there's nothing like the clubs, but they have their own traditions. Friday and Saturday morning there were buggy ( Read more... )

This is amazing. Foulger (who most of you know, but if you don't, he's a a good friend of mine from Princeton) has started up http://www.mlgstats.com, an unofficial stats keeping website for the professional Halo 2 league. This reminds me of when Foulger and I were going to write a beirut stat-keeping program, so that we could eventually even ( Read more... )

We submitted our slack spanners paper to ESA on Friday. It was actually surprisingly fun to write -- it's amazing how just writing something up will make me notice previous details I'd missed and new ways of applying what we have. I was worried that it was going to be about 5 pages long, but by the time we'd added all of the stuff that wasn't our ( Read more... )

Last weekend was the Princeton fencing alumni meet, banquet, and initiations. It was Coach Sebastiani's last year, which made it even more special. I obviously had a great time, and it was awesome seeing Scott, Stodola, Beaver, Kira, etc. again.I also ran into a few non-fencers like Pete, Aditi, and Ideta. I drove there Friday after ( Read more... )

So it's been almost a month since I last updated. Wow. A lot has happened, but not too much of any significance. Still taking classes and doing research. Unfortunately, Anupam, Hubert, and I were able to simplify our spanner construction so much that now it's just really obvious, and with a couple of hints would probably even make a decent ( Read more... )

Now that I'm linking to fake sites, check out this fake blog that Foulger wrote last summer about Harry Potter. The posts are kind of funny, but the comments are hilarious.

From ploamphed -- this is one of the funniest things that I've seen in a while. Some homeschooling parent who is trying to teach his kids basic algebra wrote a review of Dummit and Foote (a standard abstract algebra textbook by two UVM professors). A short excerpt:

As we see from these excerpts from the text, Dummit and Foote are disciples of "new math ( Read more... )