I JUST finished reading Haruki Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" which I liked a lot, but I am not sure non-runners would be able to appreciate it. He writes about running, growing older, what running taught him about writing and about himself. Immediately after reading it I felt inspired to chronicle a run I did yesterday. ( Read more... )

Suppose you are working at the check out counter at your local supermarket ( Read more... )

The other day someone mentioned to me that Kalman filters were a lot like HMMs ... the continuous version of HMMs so to speak ( Read more... )

A while back I read a book about Riemann's Hypothesis (actually it was this book) and I was so fascinated I tried to do a 3-D plot of Riemann's zeta function in Matlab. It looked like a series of sheer cliffs and actually looked kind of like this:

( Read more... )

So I was a bit curious as to how projections other than PCA might work on the senate data.

Random Projection: So this looks pretty easy, just multiply by a random matrix! But how could that possibly work? In fact it sounds stupid! Well according to some complicated math that I don't really understand: it could actually work pretty well:

2007- ( Read more... )

I had this idea a while back, but I only got a chance to implement it the other day.

It is a fairly obvious idea - probably one of the first things you would think of doing. Indeed, Keith Poole et. al. appear to do something pretty similar.


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In the last post I gave a "wrong" Born Rule but I claimed that the "right" Born Rule wasn't too much more complicated.

Recap: We have some quantum system with a certain quantum state vector and the sum of the squares of the amplitudes is 1. e.g [3/5 4/5]

We want to measure some quantum mechanical quantity e.g. the SPIN of a particle which can be ( Read more... )

I have always been very interested in modern physics and perhaps especially in Quantum Mechanics but couldn't seem to my head around it. Fortunately Prof. Scott Aaronson gave a series of lectures at Waterloo which really helped clear things up.

First, why is it that many people find quantum mechanics hard to understand?

There are two ways to ( Read more... )

The senators are arranged in a semi-circle facing the presiding officer, but what cracked me up is that each senator has an itty-bitty little desk (apparently designed in 1819 or so) and to me they look totally ridiculous sitting at these desks.Just imagine a bunch of elderly people sitting at these tiny desks that look more suited to kindergarten ( Read more... )

So last night around 10pm I was ... reading about health care when I stumbled on the following comment on a political blog:

OKAY!
We can get in to see the vote from the gallery!
Come ON --
If you are working in DC, vote's so early you can do both!
If you have time off, metro or drive in -- it's lovely to be on Capitol Hill at sunrise!

I had ( Read more... )