Ganesh Swami

Fifteen Mac-vs-PC commercials back to back:

Do you really have to stoop to such low levels?

One of the biggest advantages of being in school (while most of your friends are graduating soon) is the immense opportunity to learn at all times. The Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Science center at SFU has lined up a list of high profile speakers over the next few months.

They are: Jesper Lutzen, Efim Zelmanov, David Brillinger, Craig Evans, Herbert Wilf, John Mason, Paul Seymour, George Papanicolau, Christos H. Papadimitriou and Marsha Berger.

As always, I’ll be writing about the “take home message” from these talks. For those at SFU, these will be held in the IRMACS center as usual.

About a month back, I had written about winds that had knocked out power in my area. Well, the last two weeks have been hell for us here in Vancouver. Last week, there was heavy snowing that lead to a closure of the school. In about 45 minutes, the condition had become so bad that they had to close all roads leading to and from the mountain (SFU is atop a mountain.)

When my friend finally dropped me home later that day, the roads looked like an ice-rink. With a bunch of amateur skaters. Stalled cars, jack-knifed buses and people shoveling snow to uncover their vehicles. Funny sight. Not.

School’s closed today as well.

I’ve been really busy this week preparing for work (at the MIAL), so I’m going to cop out and post a bunch of links that I found interesting:

• A dialogue on Mathematics & Physics by Chaitin and Calude.
• Ultimate physical limits to computation. Physical limits as determined by the speed of light, Planck’s constant and the Gravitation constant.
• Physics of Climate Modeling in Physics Today. Also check out the comments on RealClimate.
• Linux running on the PlayStation3.
• Information Processing: Metric on the space of genomes and scientific basis for race. Plotting genomes of humans leads to easily identifiable clusters of ethnic groups: Europeans, Africans, Asians and Native Americans.
• Comments on Nature’s open peer review experiment and the lack of anonymity by Derek Lowe.
• GigaOm: 2007 is all about monetization of social networks.
• Barclays Ph.D.s Build Hedge Fund Giant Inside Bank. Great article about math, physics and finance.
• rod gets ripped outright. Some strong words, but I understand his feelings. Writing about and pointing to interesting content takes time. On the other hand, I can’t help but paraphrase Zappa: “I should be worried if my music isn’t being copied.”
• Misbehavior of markets by Mandelbrot, the father of fractals. Since I’m taking a non-linear physics course this semester, I went to amazon to check out the reviews — not very appealing. (via rod)

The only way to survive is to do shit and see what happens. You just have to have enough shit going on that some big shit happens. — Tom Peters

Now that 2006 is past us, it’s safe to look back and reflect. My “strategy” for most of 2006 has been to try new and challenging things. Sure, putting myself outside my comfort zone has increased my failure rate, but as a total percentage, I’ve had more success. A hundred percent of nothing is still nothing.

Happy new year!