Alex's Journal

November 5, 2006
Current mood – N/A
Time when writing started – 11:50.01 AM

      They say that the only thing constant in life is change. I believe it. Right now, I’m sitting in my dorm room at WPI, typing a journal entry, with the window to my left open just a crack and the door to my right open just a crack and my laptop in front of my open. That’s change right there. Since when do I have a laptop, my four month ago self asks me (he’s the one who wrote the last entry). Since when do I live in a dorm?
Change? Yes. Consider this very journal. Up until 11:50.00 AM this morning, the journal was un-touched since June 10th. That is one of the longest gaps between entries this journal has ever seen. With every passing day, another entry became less and less likely. Or did it? Am I an inconsistent writer, or am I? Maybe I’m so consistent, that the gaps between my entries are exact. The gaps are not constant, but then again, the variability in the gaps is.
Reminds me of my Stats class, in which we are to look at data and pretend that we can make some sort of conclusion about the process that created said data. It’s mildly entertaining, seeing as it’s mostly based on lies. Right now, we’re learning about how to analyze the correlation between paired data. More lies.
Which reminds me of a joke about an Actuary (whose job basically consists of applying models to data), who is searching for his car keys under a lamppost on a dark night. His friend walks by and asks him why he isn’t searching near his car for the keys, where he would be more likely to find them, to which the actuary responds say that the light is near the lamppost. Thus, you get the idea that the actuaries’ methods are sometimes not properly focused on the end goal. What this means in real life is that models for ‘simple’ relationships between data (like linear ones), have been analyzed and optimized to death and back by statistics and consequentially, are the most used. More complicated models (kind of like those required to model ANYTHING else in life) have some general theorems proved to back them up (like our long-playing Central Limit Theorem), but aren’t the best ever.
It’s like a child who likes Winnie the Pooh, who dedicates a large amount of time and effort on one character in a coloring book and then quickly finishes the rest. It happens kind of often in Mathematics, actually, and on the one hand, it’s reassuring because it means Math majors will always have research to do, but when you realize that all of the scientific theory that exists, which attempts to explain how the world works is based on this ‘unfinished’ Mathematics, it’s a bit disturbing.
Which reminds me that I have never talked about the purpose of science. Nor have I talked about science acting as an organized religion. Curiously, and unnoticed by me until 12:18 AM on Sunday, November 05, 2006, wikipedia’s entry on science contains my exact theory, that all of science exists to model life (some argue that it exists to model the universe, and not just life, but when I say life I mean the entity that is the sum of everything I could perceive or thing about). Thus, science models life. Corollary 0, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Environmental Sciences, and even Applied Sciences attempt to explain life. Wait, even applied sciences?
Q: Alex you must be full of it. How could Computer Science attempt to explain and model life?
A: How doesn’t it? What is Computer Science for? The biggest fields now are Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining and Virtual Reality and real-time data processing, and Natural Language Processing. Do any of those remind you of modeling life? They should...

On another note, I think it’s funny when people say they don’t believe in organized religion. Guess what? Science is an organized religion! Why does religion exist? To answer questions about life that we cannot answer ourselves or cannot answer correctly on our own. Oops, why does science exist? To answer questions about life that we cannot answer ourselves or cannot answer correctly on our own. Uh oh, this is getting hairy. Okay, but religion is based on a belief system which must be taken on faith. Oops, can science ever prove anything? No, it’s based on a belief system which must be taken on faith.
There exist statements in science called ‘Laws.’ There exist statements in religion called tenants. They are no different. Laws in science are merely statements that have been true for as long as we ever attempted to measured their truth. Does that mean anything about the next time we attempt to measure this or anything about the truth of the statement while we weren’t measuring it? Mathematical logic (based on a set of axioms) tells us no. No past event and no quantity of past events will ever give us the power to say anything of certainty about tomorrow.
Speaking of illogic, like associating the past with the future and assuming that the sun will set tonight just because it did that for the last 5000 years, people make mental shortcuts all the time. Every instant of every person’s existence, millions of pieces of data are flowing in to the brain. Aside from the five primary senses, scientists have identified like 500 more and every single one is send the brain information. In our infancy, the brain learns to sort through all of this information. It comes up with filters and alarms. The filters keep the brain from having to analyze repetitious information over and over, while some sorts of alarms are set up based on different signals. Thus, your brain has taught you to generally filter out the entities directly above your head because ceilings and sky have a general tendency to not move. If a storm is brewing, or there planes overhead (which you are made aware of because you don’t hear them all the time), or there is a balloon floating in your room, you will likely notice them because they are not simply filtered out. So mental shortcuts are good, after all, if brains never made assumptions about the world around them, it would be impossible for animals to survive. If every time a lion walked out of it’s cave is observed every minute organism in it’s environment and didn’t assume some sort of “the world around me doesn’t change much from day to day,” lions would be worse off than the tigers who do make that assumption. Of course, in the short term, continuity assumptions make sense and are required. (In the long term, of course, we’re dead).
But can we really assume continuity? In general, yes, but we don’t live in general. For instance, the window that is opened just a crack to my left has been in that state since this morning. Now, suppose your life depended on that window remaining in that same state for the next second. You’re still alive because I didn’t touch the window. What if at the very instant I typed those words a baseball was launched at the window and the window was slammed shut. You would not be alive. Now if the window remained opened just a crack for the last second, it’s a pretty safe bet it will remain that way over the very next second, right? By continuity yes, but in real life no.
Let me delay the conclusion of that point by discussing a related continuity issue: me closing the window. Right now, the wind speed outside is X, the temperature outside my room is Y and the temperature inside my room is Z. Under the current value of these parameters, I’m pretty comfortable (given the clothing I’m wearing). Now if the temperature goes down one single degree, will I close my window? Probably not. And that seems generally true, one degree, even of Celsius is pretty small. Suppose we claim that if the temperature goes down one single degree Celsius, I will remain comfortable and not close my window. Thus, if I’m comfortable with 20 degrees C, I’m comfortable is 19, 18, 17, and so on. This logic leads us to conclude that I’m also comfortable with 0 degrees C (right about when water freezes), and even -254 degrees C, when Nitrogen freezes. What happened to continuity? Wasn’t our assumption logical? It seemed logical, after all, what’s one degree C? Nothing at all. So throwing continuity to the wind, at some point before January 1st, I will definitely close my window. Therefore, you shouldn’t bet your life on this window saying open a crack, even though, the temperature will like fall one degree at a time before the moment I close it.
So mental shortcuts are bad and all of them can be false. Eventually. Curiously, eventually we’re all dead. Actually, maybe that’s the source of our faulty assumptions... Ever living organism lives and then dies. Most people are cool with living but death doesn’t seem that popular. That too is curious, but only because there are more humans alive to day than have ever died in the history of the universe. Every single organism in existence, which lives, dies. Of course that’s only empirical evidence, but we already discussed science, and I’m a believer. Everything that lives, dies. But if it was living for all of the past seconds since its conception, won’t it live for the next one. By continuity, yes, but in real life... I don’t think so. Thus, maybe humanity’s general misconception about continuity stems from our own lack of continuity. An organism’s time on the Earth is limited, and thus precious. Time has value because of a lack of continuity. Yet our minds must assume that things generally stay the same for us to survive.
But brains don’t only make continuity shortcuts, they make all sorts of assumptions about the way the environment around them behaves. Take cause and effect, for instance. For a given cause and it’s effect, your brain has created a relationship. This relationship says that when the cause occurs, the effect will occur at some later time. The relationship between cause and effect usually forms after two such events coincide consistently. The mind assumes continuity and thus declares the event which occurs first as the cause and the second as the effect.
Notice how this has absolutely nothing to do with the events themselves. Cause and effect are mental shortcuts.
No amount of these relationships will provide insight into what will happen next, because the only thing constant about life is change, after all.

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June 10, 2006
Current mood - still tired
Time when writing started - 3:27.17 PM

      Another June, and another ARML. Another obscenely long bus ride down memory lane (and to Penn State). Last time I wrote about ARML, I asked "How often is it that you take a bus down to Penn State, chill with a totally awesome group of kids, do an insanely hard math competition, ride every open roller coaster in Hershey Park, take a bus back, arrive at 4:30 AM and become best friends with people you've seen for a total of 4 * 5 hours?"

The answer to that question was once. But now, another June and another ARML later, the answer is still once. But that's only because we arrived back at 3:30 AM, not 4:30 AM.

It was the usual melange of running, roller-coasters, and McDonalds. There was the occasional math competition, late night math problem, and HCSSiM (Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics) math talk. There was Hershey, Friendly's, and Hooters. There was biscotti, Organic oranges, and ice-cream.

Maybe I should start at the beginning. The day was June first; the year, two-thousand and six. It was seven o'clock, my bags were in my faithful, pale blue, Corolla, and the sky was dark. The sky was overcast as it would get into the habit of being for the next week; with periodic downpours interspersed between the constant drizzle. It was a dark and stormy night, followed by an equally dark and stormy morning, as if the very heavens were bestowing their blessing upon our journey. Well, not really; the rain usually came in the afternoon, and

today was no exception.

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June , 2006

	A wakend,
		by a call to p aint
	Empty d ishwasher
		is my canvas

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May 30, 2006
Time when writing started - 2:54.58 PM

The Da Vinci Code

      Okay, so I just saw the movie. So I'm not going to be a plot killer, but I do have some comments about the movie, and about the comments about the movie. Let me say this, "Wow."

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May 8, 2006
Time when writing started - 2:07.06 AM

      Yup, so my parents went to France and took a bunch of pictures. In the meantime, I took all of my finals, mailed five packages, drove at least 200 miles, and joined a team of three others in taking 3rd place at the Fitchburg State College Programming Competition.
I also just finished making a slide show, in Java Script for the pictures. It's really awesome. On a related note, a big thanks goes out to Mason, who gave me fifteen characters without which, this slide show would not exist in the form it takes today (this morning).

In sum total, a Java class was improved, a CGI Perl script was written, a text file was analyzed, a Java Script file was created, a Java Script slide show engine was completed, seventy-three images were uploaded, and a journal entry was written to bring this slide show to the web. Does anyone else think I need another hobby?

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April 24, 2006
Current mood - Nervous yet hopeful
Time when writing started - 12:26.17 PM

      What is the difference between humans and monkeys?

    Monkeys eat, drink, and defecate
    They need shelter and like to mate

    They have kids and even make tools.
    I wonder which one of them makes the rules.

Are humans just monkey's with pants on?

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April 9, 2006
Current mood - Tired and Excited
Time when writing started - 1 am

     :-)

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April 5, 2006
Time when writing started - 7:14.00 PM

     Et tu, Google? Cum on...

In other news Ya|e said no and Dartmouth said yes.

I was congratulated, on several occasions, about getting into Dartmouth. Today I came to a sad realization, however, on my walk from Mass Academy up to a colloquim on astrophysics and "The End of the Solar System" by Prof. John Belcher at WPI. The problem with being proud of and deriving happiness from getting into a college is not immediately apparent. The problem only arises when you consider how one gets accepted into college, because no matter what, an acceptance letter is the product of n (where n belongs to the set of natural numbers that are less than the total number of humans minus one) people.

The last time I let my self-worth be judged by n people was in elementary school.
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March 31, 2006
Current mood - Sadness envelopes my heart (Is that a mood?)
Time when writing started - 4:17.17 PM
      Co|umbia said no. Har\/ard said no too. Three weeks ago yesterday someone I cared about deeply told me no.

In related news, let the number of times I have heard the word 'rain check' in the last two days be A and the number of times I usually hear the word 'rain check' be B, then A >> B and what's interesting is that sometimes the word made me happier but other sometimes it made me sadder. Life was always a funny thing.
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March 24, 2006
Current mood - Was Bitter, then Better, now Bitter about being Better about being Bitter
      Wow, my ability to put two and two together sometimes astounds me. It astounds me because I don't get four. Instead, I realize that I will be at Naomi's Bat Mitzvah tomorrow at nine o'clock on a Saturday.

In other news, some wisdom was found on a piece of paper that came with a chocolate candy I ate. It said "Love is blind to faults, friendship loves them."

That's where it all falls apart my friends, that's where it all falls apart.
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Jack and Jill went up the hill
	to fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down
	and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after

IAD8

It's a date

BM Val

Be my Valentine

IM 4 U

I'm for you

LSKOL

Long slow kiss on the lips

WAN2:-*

Want to kiss?

A3

Anyplace, anytime, anywhere

God - the big G

As long as I've been alive, my religion has been that of my parents and my parents religion says that God exists. Thus, for a long, long, long, long time, I was pretty sure that I "believed" in God but I didn't really believe it. (I was a skeptic). I "believed" in God because of my religion but I didn't actually believe that there existed some higher power or being or what have you that may or may not have created the universe, may or may not be merciful, may or may not decide when and who dies, may or may not judge your life at it's end, and may or may not have created heaven.
Problem is, I'm a tad too logically oriented.
Recently, I came back to this idea however, and I have a few related questions to answer:

• What is God?
• How is God
• What does God do?
• What is in God's power?
• Why do people believe in God?
• Should I believe in God?
• Should you believe in God?
• Should humankind believe in God?

But where to begin?

In other news, what does it mean to care about someone? and in further unrelated news, what does substantial mean? and in even further unrelated news, how does friendship form?

X Things I Learned From my Ski Trip

• Communicate
• Communicate with the people you're with
• Everyone has their own language
• The key is to learn that language and communicate effectively
• Know your weight
• Use your weight to change direction
• Keep your priorities in mind
• Complements can hurt. A lot.
• Always ask why
• Verizon Wireless gets really poor reception around the base of Sunapee Mountain
• Long distance relationships means that the people involved are too far apart most of the time
• Phones help but are clearly no substitute
• No essays get written while you're on vacation
• lists tend to get long when you can't remember something really important you want to add
• When you ask someone a really, really important question, you really, really want to think about what they might answer
• Yes, women think
• Men? Some do, some should more
• You can try anything once
• After the first time, it's never the same
• Don't forget to be optimistic