Category: Badgers

Five-Minute Posts: Five March Madness Thoughts

Kyle

Editorial note: First off, I realized today that my titles for the first three of these short posts contained a common error. I wasn’t planning on writing five minute posts, but rather posts that took me five minutes to write (by the way, it’s usually been more like ten, but I haven’t done too bad so far). Please accept my apology for the absent hyphen.

On to the list:

(1) I’m terrified of the Badgers’ draw. Who am I rooting for in the K-State/USC game? Well, O.J. Mayo is 6’5”, and Michael Beasley is 6’10”. Michael Flowers is 6’3”. I’m rooting for USC. That’s who I picked as well, even though LRMC gives the edge to K-State.

(2) For me, Tyler Hansbrough is the new Tom Brady. The annual UNC love fest is driving me crazy. I’ve got them losing to Kansas in the Final Four, but I’d gladly sacrifice the points for an early Tar Heels loss.

(3) A statistical quibble: Just because it seldom happens that all four one-seeds make it to the Final Four doesn’t mean that configuration is a bad bracket pick, even though it’s not a daring one. Unless you’re playing in a huge pool that will have most of the likely Final Four combinations represented, your best chance to win is to get as many of them as possible (well, depending on how your pool assigns points, I suppose). If you think the top teams have been seeded correctly, then of course it’s a good idea to pick those four teams. I usually don’t take all the one-seeds, but I usually get burned for that choice and only get one or two teams in the Final Four. You’ve gotta decide if you want to win or if you want to have bragging rights if something extremely improbable happens. I think either choice is legitimate, of course, but just like in writing (and design), it’s important to be aware of the choices you’re making. They may not be the ones you think.

(4) I love the way the tournament takes over our lives for four days (two of them workdays). Don’t we all need to be reminded that there are more important things than work? I’m not saying college basketball is necessarily one of them, but I’ll take any reminder. Plus, there’s another issue, although I suspect this is more true in academia than in at least some other fields: productivity rarely scales linearly with time spent at your desk not reading joke emails, checking out hilarious videos, or watching basketball. Some days I’m totally focused with my nose to the grindstone for ten hours and accomplish next to nothing. Other days I’m in and out of meetings and totally distracted and yet get a ton done in the four hours I’m actually at it.

(5) OK, I’m way over time on this post, so I’m gonna have to call it quits here. Check out this Badger love from Seth Davis.

Go big red!

Music To My Ears, and Eyes

Kyle

I’m telling you, Julie Rehmeyer is fast becoming one of my favorite science writers. Her Science News Math Trek piece this week follows up on a paper by music theorist Dmitri Tymoczko that represents musical chords in hyperdimensional geometries. Even cooler than Rehmeyer’s very accessible written description of the work, though, are the accompanying videos (1 2). It turns out that Tymoczko’s techniques explain some of what goes on harmonically in Chopin’s E-minor prelude, and the videos capture the effect beautifully.

Still, I was initially skeptical about Tymoczko’s ideas in the last graph:

What’s particularly amazing, Tymoczko says, is that the mathematics needed to describe these spaces wasn’t even developed in Chopin’s time. Nevertheless, he says, “it is unquestionable that he had some cognitive representation of the space. So there was this period of history where the only way Chopin could express this abstract knowledge was through music. His knowledge of four-dimensional geometry was most efficiently expressed through piano pieces.”

I’m not sure I share Tymoczko’s certainty that Chopin knew anything about what we would call four-dimensional geometry, abstractly or otherwise. But the more I watch these videos, the less I doubt that he “had some cognitive representation” of some idea that Tymoczko’s merely learning another way of exploring. I doubt he’ll be able to fully grasp whatever that idea is any more meaningfully than Chopin could, but it’s hard to fault either for trying, and in the meantime we all get to bask in the beauty.

Sorry to get all heavy on you. I think today’s Daily Office reading sort of puts you in the mindset to want to ponder these things: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

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I’ve been warned by a psychologist friend about the strength of the science in some of these fMRI studies, but I nonetheless thought this piece was also interesting. Douglas Adams would be pumped about the music & math/science vibes in this week’s Science News coverage.

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Congrats to the Badgers for clinching sole possession of the Big Ten Championship today at Northwestern. Speaking of Northwestern, I stumbled across this post from a Northwestern student giving online dating a go. Good writer, interesting stuff.

Big Ten Champs!

Kyle

Thanks to my roommate’s awesome soon-to-be in-laws, I got to see the Badgers clinch a share of the Big Ten Championship tonight. It was a pretty serious blowout (not a word to all my Penn State alum coworkers, I promise), which was great fun on Senior Night. I’ve got no real insight here, I’m just psyched.

Go Badgers!!

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Also Keith Law expects a big year from the Brewers’ Rickie Weeks. Join the club, Keith.

New Year’s News Wrap

Kyle

Mourning yesterday’s Badger loss in the Outback Bowl due to a “gutsy” but selfish and foolhardy performance by Tyler Donovan, subpar secondary play, and questionable play-calling (you guys had all three of your gifted running backs available and this is the best you could do?!), I decided to just do a quick news wrap-up today. (By the way, congrats and thanks to Michigan; you guys helped the Big Ten manage to not look like total chumps yesterday.)

USA Today: “Tech could reduce coal facilities’ emissions“

I didn’t know USA Today wrote stories this long. Anyway, this one’s worth a read just to keep tabs on this important technology (integrated gasification combined cycle). Any honest nuclear engineer will tell you that nuclear alone isn’t going to solve all our energy problems, so everyone should be rooting for the carbon-capture potential of IGCC.

Chicago Tribune: “Space power could be bright idea“

The hallways of UW-Madison’s Fusion Technology Institute (which takes up most of the floor I work on) are decorated almost exclusively with framed articles about the interesting but rhetorically nightmarish idea of mining the moon for helium-3 to fuel fusion reactors (“but you haven’t even gotten one to work yet!” the critics would rightly decry). This power-from-space idea seems slightly less far-fetched, though still a little frightening (“but what if you point your one megawatt microwave transmitter in the wrong direction?”).

New York Times: “Rock Is Back. Give Him a Cookie.“

Review of that show I mentioned earlier. Glad to see Jill Scott opened. By the way, not that I’m any authority, but I’ve never read a disappointing article by Kelefa Sanneh.

New York Times: “The Invisible Ingredient in Every Kitchen“

This article contains a half-dozen book ideas for some food-loving engineer. It reminded me of the time I had a homework question that asked for fluid mechanics and heat transfer arguments for why fryers and convection ovens cook turkeys faster than traditional ovens. (Come to think of it, that might make a good holiday post next Thanksgiving; this past year, CSC didn’t exist yet, plus my friends Carl and Brenna and I were too busy eating Thanksgiving burritos at Las Iguanas in Toronto).

New York Times: “Web Playgrounds of the Very Young“

When judging the recent regional Ethics Bowl Madison hosted, I heard the argument that “marketing is not brainwashing.” While I’m inclined to agree most of the time, the way the suits talk about “instill[ing] brand loyalty in a generation of new customers” in stories like this makes me not so sure. Those new customers are, like, seven.