Lazy math

I’m back at learning math again, but this time it is for the purpose of being lazy. Kind of. The situation for my thesis is as follows: We have a lot of parameters and possibly interactions between them, but we don’t fancy standing in the lab til christmas. There are, however, mathematical tricks for reducing the number of necessary experiments significantly. The more you want to gain, the more complicated the math becomes, and naturally, there’s a limit to it all. I understand the principle, but to actually figure it out at the number of parameters I have will take either assistance or a statistics program. It will make a great start for our modeling attempts, though. I’ll also try to optimize the time it takes to run through all the experiments (changing a heater setting takes a lot longer than changing air pressure).

I’ve had a few days to play around with a graphics tablet my brother got for his work. He hopes to speed up technical drawing, I hope to toy around with the possibilities of digital art. Since I wasn’t particularly motivated the past days, I have created precisely one piece, and I’ll be the first to say it’s not very good. It is an acceptable start, though. The good part is that it’s very convenient. You can copy-paste, save the work at any one moment, pick any color you want, any pattern you can generate. You can overlay to your heart’s content. The problem is that all elementary techniques have a very digital feel to them. They are simply too clean to be anything conventional, and giving them more… entropy, I guess… takes practice.

Our choir is back in action after easter break, and I’m starting to feel I can get a hang of the program before we’re on stage. I missed most of it because of Norway, but I’m faster at picking it up than I’d have thought. Best of all, singing is still fun, and I actually like almost our entire program this year.

Is the library empty yet?

The past few days, my supervisor and I have been working hard to order every single book our university’s library holds. Okay, maybe a little exaggerated, but today I broke the fifty-books-loaned milestone, and frankly, I’m starting to think it’s enough. The reason for our drastic actions is that sometimes, a book you really need may take a long time to get to you, so it’s good to take care of literature early on in the project. Of course, that’s when you do not yet precisely know hwat you’ll need. Since loaning books is cheap, the motto is “better safe than sorry.” Right now, it looks like we’ll either hand some back in a hurry or go to Ikea to get a book shelf, because half the books are only marked for us, and we’ll still have to pick them up. Deskspace is already running low.

To be fair, we have a large variety of topics: Acoustic physics, ultrasonic material science, sensorial control, signal analysis (fourier and wavelet), classification and AI, statistical experiment planning. I expect our work to draw on all of those to a degree, but being new to virtually every single field, we have little ability to separate wheat and chaff beforehand. As a result, aout 40% of what we have now is outright worthless for our purposes. Particularly the more specialized proceedings of some conference or the engineering thesis that keeps signal analysis at the “is it getting louder?” level. I’m spending quite some time skimming over books to gauge their usefulness. I certainly don’t want to read every single one. I’ll probably end up reading a few and cribbing single passages from a lot more.

At the same time, I’ve decided I’m cutting back on work a little. I staid at the office way into the evening the last three days, because every time I had something scheduled right afterwards in town – cycling home and coming back wouldn’t make sense. Now, however, I have the issue that my household is suffering and I’m getting virtually nothing else done.  Time to go home and do some stuff!

Planning ahead

There’s going to be a lot of stuff happening in the near future, and I spent parts of today planning for it.  Next friday, I’m going on an excursion with one of my lectures, and we’ll visit an old industrial museum. They even have a selfactor (check Wikipedia if that means nothing to you).

Then we’re finalizing plans for the poland exchange very soon, and most likely flying there on pentecost. We still have some hassles with the financing to clear up, and a few doorbells to ring.

At work, we want to start with actual measurements next week, and I’ll finally get some new data. I also have to read a lot, as I want to explore what neural networks can do for us. And I’ll have to check into getting myself an account on the NOC’s cluster, as I might need slightly more computing power.

Tomorrow is the painting class for the first time in three weeks. I feel that I have advanced a little bit again over the easter holidays, but I still need to buy a spatula.

Lastly, I had the pleasure of writing sales inquiries to companies. I’ve written so many, Gmail is starting to tailor its ads to the topic. Most likely, I’ll have three offers to choose from, after writing to a dozen firms.

Maybe getting a stipend

Following the advice of a friend, I applied for a company stipend aimed at textile engineers. The Saurer company has money, but is short on employees, so it started offering both financial support (medium scale) and a programm of excursions, meetings and industry visits. I could apply because I chose textile engineering as the field of my diploma thesis; otherwise, a physicist would not be considered.

I got some good information ahead of time from my supervisor (former contact person for the stipend at the institute) and the guy I’d spoken to first about a thesis (current contact person). They gave me some advice concerning the written application, which was very good, since I’d last written an application of any sort over two years ago for the Erasmus exchange to Trondheim. I had to put in a letter detailing my suitability, a CV, a list of my hobbies and my extracurricular activities, a profile of my studies so far and several copies of high school diploma, grades from the university so far and so on. I spent a few hours on that, but the result was quite okay. It certainly didn’t keep them from interviewing me, which took place this morning.

The interview was held by two people: The contact guy and the institute’s professor. They started with some questions concerning nozzles and air currents in  yarning, then questioned me about some bad marks in my first semesters. In the second half, they swung towards the question of what I could do for Saurer. This was a lot more difficult, because I didn’t know so much about Saurer, and I’m not a standard mechanical engineer, so I had to explain how I could be useful. This led to a couple false starts, and some miscalculations about training on the job. This seemed to be acceptable, though. The professor took the opportunity to impart some wisdom to me and advertise for his institute. That pretty much convinced me that I hadn’t done too badly, although it was by no means stellar. Not getting more information about the company beforehand was a big mistake.

In the end, they’ll propose my name to the steering committee, and I’ll probably get a 500€ one-time payment and admission to all excursions and events. That’s definitely worth it, since I’ll meet interesting people and get some perspective into the industry. After all, I have to decide whether I want to continue working in the textile field.

Thermopyle thugs

Yesterday, I saw the movie 300 at a local cinema. Might be old news to some people, but it only came into cinemas very recently around here. The movie is a conversion of a comic, that is in turn based on the historical events at the Thermopyles. Like any recent “historical” movie, you can expect it to have muscles, sword fights and large-scale battles. Not to mention any amount of CGI shiny, but that’s part of the fun. Or at least, in this movie it would be part of the fun if there weren’t so many moments of incredible stupidity in it. Popcorn cinema in all honours, but this movie requires you to consciously not think about anything people say. I’ll showcase some of the worst points:

• 300 takes itself waaaay too seriously. The entire movie is basically people posing against hazy backgrounds flooded with sunlight, so overdone it makes you think they had the backgrounds done with the airbrush.
• the soundtrack is two hours dramatic choir music. Kind of like LotR’s more dramatic moments, but ALL THE TIME.
• the spartans are fighting for freedom, and they scorn the persians because they only have slaves, while spartans are free men, trained to be warriors. Spartans were  all warriors so they could beat down the slave uprisings back home, and they could afford not to have trades only because of said slaves. Not to mention their entire state is a little on the fascist side. Freedom? Hah!
• the only thing people talk about all the time are bravery, glory, honor, bravery, glory, honor, freedom (see above), bravery, glory, hon- you get the picture
• when taken  in the back, the spartans stand fast, because their law forbids retreat. Never mind that they came AGAINST the law, in order to protect Sparta. Retreating would allow them to fight another day, but suddenly, the law is paramount. Also glory.
• Xerxes looks and talks like a drag queen. This does not make him more menacing, so the movie lacks a proper antagonist.
• the persian elite forces wear buddhist demon masks, have curved swords like katana and look generally very japanese. I have dubbed them “the iraninjas”.
• the thing forcing the persians into the lethal pass and keeping them from just walking along the shore is a three meter high shoddy wall. No comment here.

My friends really enjoyed the movie, and I could see how twenty minutes of it could be enjoyable. On the whole, however, it’s an incredibly braindead movie. My suspension of disbelief was thoroughly worn out.