Traveling, Traveling

Kyle

Two interesting travel stories (of a sort) caught my eye in this morning’s NYT. The first was one of those periodic road trip accounts that you see now and then and that tend to be pretty entertaining. I love the minivan angle–timely and practical, I thought. Made the notion of the cross-country road trip seem more manageable.

(Speaking of minivans, a brief moment of venting here: A month or so before I moved to Alexandria, I was in a car accident–my fault–and had to have the front passenger door replaced. They put in a refurbished door…and now it won’t unlock! I have to climb in the through the back or passenger side doors. And I can’t take it back to where I had the work done, because I had the work done 850 miles away. Grrr…)

The second was one I hadn’t heard about here but apparently has gotten a lot of attention in Europe. A thirteen-year-old Dutch girl wants to sail around the world by herself. Her parents gave her permission, but the state has intervened to tell her she can’t go–at least for now, while they evaluate her fitness for the trip. Fascinating stuff:

She said on a Dutch children’s show this month that she had been sailing solo since age 6 and planning her global voyage for three years.

“I asked my parents if I could — please — start now,” she said, The Associated Press reported.

“In the beginning, they asked if I was sure I really wanted to do it,” she said. “They have sailed around the world, so they know what could happen and that it’s not always fun, but I realize that, too. But I really wanted to do it, so my parents said, ‘Good, we’ll help you.’ ”

She has been practicing her solo skills. Earlier this year, she was picked up in Britain after she was discovered sailing alone to the port of Lowestoft, on the east coast of England. The British authorities ordered her father, Dick Dekker, to go get her. He went, but Laura ended up sailing home alone, according to news reports.

Caroline Vink, a social worker at the Netherlands Youth Institute in Utrecht, a research organization that advises the government on youth policy, said Laura’s case was not clear-cut because she was obviously a talented and passionate sailor capable of great things. But she stressed that, ultimately, “the state and society had a moral obligation to intervene when the safety of a child was at risk.”

The ruling came from a district court in Utrecht, which said she could continue living with her father during the assessment of the trip’s risk. Laura was not in the courtroom, The A.P. reported. She was out sailing.

Critic Signing Off

Kyle

Final columns by long-time writers are a fascinating genre all their own. I like the way NYT restaurant critic Frank Bruni handled it yesterday: by collecting a list of “questions that [he] was often asked or that [he] wished [he]’d been asked, along with responses.” Here’s my favorite:

IS THERE ANY BEST, SAFEST WAY TO NAVIGATE A MENU?

Scratch off the appetizers and entrees that are most like dishes you’ve seen in many other restaurants, because they represent this one at its most dutiful, conservative and profit-minded. The chef’s heart isn’t in them.

Scratch off the dishes that look the most aggressively fanciful. The chef’s vanity — possibly too much of it — spawned these.

Then scratch off anything that mentions truffle oil.

Choose among the remaining dishes.

Glad Someone Else Mentioned This

Kyle 3 Comments

Earlier today, Anglican Centrist asked a question that I’ve been wondering about myself and will paraphrase here: where’s the media tumult over the recent decision by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America‘s Churchwide Assembly “to open the ministry of the church to gay and lesbian pastors and other professional workers living in committed relationships”?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m from the heart of Lutheran country and have a great love and respect for the ELCA; I’m happy that so far they at least seem to have been partly spared the kind of oversimplified, conflict-emphasizing mass media attention the Episcopal Church was subject to last month. Of course, that doesn’t mean things are going to be any easier within their Church, so I hope you’ll join me in keeping the ELCA (and the Episcopal Church) in your thoughts and/or prayers during what’s sure to be a difficult time for both.

Getting back to the question, though, here’s my thinking:

(1) I get the impression this decision has a smaller international impact than ours does. I’m not a demographer of religion, but I believe the Anglican Communion is larger and (perhaps more relevantly) more culturally heterogeneous than the Lutheran World Federation. There may be ecclesial reasons as well. Am I on the right track, anyone who actually knows something about this? I’m woefully ignorant of global Lutheranism.

(2) I wonder if perhaps since the Episcopal coverage hits so much closer to home for me, I’m only perceiving the Lutheran coverage to be more muted. Note that, like me, Anglican Centrist seems to have started out this general line of thinking when noticing the lack of coverage in the New York Times (I don’t read the print version but do get a daily headlines email from which this story has been persistently absent). But The Times may not be a very good proxy given the Episcopal Church’s ties to New York. Do any trained media-types have suggestions for a more systematic comparison? I’m guessing it would be necessary to give it some time; of course there’s currently more coverage out there of something that happened in mid-July than of something that happened Friday.

What am I leaving out? This is obviously a complex and difficult question to answer well.

(Video) Greetings from Alexandria

Kyle

Well, I’ve emerged from the minor ordeal that was finishing up a master’s thesis (an interesting process that probably deserves further reflection at another time), recovering from same, and moving across the country. So I wanted to start checking in (hopefully regularly) about my somewhat different new digs and educational context. Most of you know, I think, that I’ve started studies at Virginia Theological Seminary with the eventual hope of becoming an Episcopal priest. I’ve had a week or so to get settled here, and it’s definitely starting to feel enough like home to overcome the effects of the waning post-move adrenaline.

I’m sure I’ll have plenty of thoughts to share about this place, but for now let it suffice to say that a big part of why I was so excited about coming here is that the school seemed genuinely committed to the importance of formation in community and to fostering an atmosphere conducive to that work. I’m thankful that so far it has not disappointed.

Anyway, I was saying to a friend of mine before I left that I somehow felt like video blogging might be an especially good way to communicate some of my experience down here. I haven’t totally figured out why I think that or whether I’m right, but see below for a minor dipping-in-of-toes to that ocean. Let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d like to know about my life or studies down here. I’d love to try to stay connected in as authentic a way as possible–even if I do look and feel a little silly.

More Funny Found Science

Kyle

Man, colloquia abstracts are a seemingly endless source of buried jokes. Check out the grad student dig in the following summary of a talk on using machine learning to study human and animal learning:

Machine learning studies the principles governing all learning systems. Human beings and animals are learning systems too, and can be explored using the same mathematical tools. This approach has been fruitful in the last few decades with standard tools such as reinforcement learning, artificial neural networks, and non-parametric Bayesian statistics. We bring the approach one step further with some latest tools in machine learning, and uncover new quantitative findings. In this talk, I will present three examples: (1) Human semi-supervised learning. Consider a child learning animal names. Dad occasionally points to an animal and says “Dog!” (labeled data). But mostly the child observes the world by herself without explicit feedback (unlabeled data). We show that humans learn from both labeled and unlabeled data, and that a simple Gaussian Mixture Model trained using the EM algorithm provides a nice fit to human behaviors. (2) Human active learning. The child may ask “What’s that?”, i.e. actively selecting items to query the target labels. We show that humans are able to perform good active learning, achieving fast exponential error convergence as predicted by machine learning theory. In contrast, when passively given i.i.d. training data humans learn much slower (polynomial convergence), also predicted by learning theory. (3) Monkey online learning. Rhesus monkeys can learn a “target concept”, in the form of a certain shape or color. What if the target concept keeps changing? Adversarial online learning model provides a polynomial mistake bound. Although monkeys perform worse than theory, anecdotal evidence suggests that they follow the concepts better than some graduate students. Finally, I will speculate on a few lessons learned in order to create better machine learning algorithms. (Source, but ultimately via Eric Howell on the Hacker Within mailing list.)

No exactly stand-up material, but I love that the guy was playful enough to put it in the abstract. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, though, given what I found on this project’s spring 2009 schedule page. We actually had that same xkcd hanging in our office for a while.

THW on the Radio

Kyle

A couple weeks back, The Hacker Within‘s fearless leader Milad Fatenejad and I did an interview with Matthew McCormick of Hacker Public Radio. I got notification today that it recently went live. Aside from having to suppress the occasional wince at my usual longwindedness, I had fun re-listening and think it turned out pretty well. If you’re interested in programming/computing or would just like to hear about what we’re up to and why, you can check out the interview here (I had to download it). Thanks very much to Matt for his help as we continue to try to get the word out about the organization and its work.

Some atoms? Some CHEMICALS?

Kyle

I was looking up some citation information on a text I use a lot but don’t have on me today when I stumbled across this wonderfully bizarre customer review on Amazon. Those of you familiar with Benedict and Pigford’s Nuclear Chemical Engineering may find this especially funny, but I thought the prose was amusing enough that I had to share.

I’m always supportive of huzzah, but–as is so often the case–the bewilderment sets in when you try to parse the all-caps text. Also, I wonder if we might adopt prehaps as a new nuclear safety term for the means by which we prevent mishaps.

Enjoy:

But seriously folks, this is the MOTHER of nuclear chemical engineering novelas! If you plan on reading this book be prepared to BUCKLE UP because you’re going for a RIDE. A ride to Nuclear Chemical Engineering LAND! Huzzah! What have we here? Some atoms? Some CHEMICALS? Prehaps this CHEMICAL SOUP ISN’T SO BAD AFTER ALL! BOKKO!

Here’s the link.

Another Sweet Google Tool

Kyle

Three events recently converged to respark my interest in a little mini-project I tried to do some time ago:

(1) At yesterday’s Python subgroup meeting of The Hacker Within, our resident Pythonista got me all excited about developing easy web applications in that language. I write a lot of Python for pre- and post-processing of nuclear fuel cycle systems data, but I’ve never done any web-related Python work except for fixing a bug or two in some Trac instances. Nico got me pumped about the prospect.

(2) I started helping the Diocese of Milwaukee with their new Website, for which we’re using Google Sites in an attempt to improve the ease of collaboration and maintenance. I think Google Sites is pretty terrific, but it does have some limitations, and I’m interested in identifying some Google-compatible solutions. The Python-based Google App Engine seems like a promising direction.

(3) My friend Ryan re-activated pangramaday, which I’ve mentioned here before and is now available via Twitter (@pangramaday).

As it did during my short-lived interest in learning to develop Java Applets, the pangramist’s quandary motivated a little mini-project a few steps more complex than Hello, World! and perfect for learning a new set of interfaces. And this time I can actually publish the result (such as it is), because the Google App Engine framework is just so frickin’ easy to use.

So if for pangram-, crossword- or Wheel-of-Fortune-related purposes you ever need a list of words that all contain some given collection of letters, look no further than pangramhelper. It’s currently both ugly and slow, but if my interest in learning these APIs doesn’t wane too much, that may change.

It’s actually kind of fun to enter random (or not so random–can you tell I’m getting ready for the Easter Vigil?) letters and see what you get:

You wrote:

Christos anesti

We found:

anchorites
characterizations
chlorinates
cinematographers
interscholastic
orchestrating
orchestration
orchestrations
overenthusiastic
rhetoricians
stenographic
theoreticians
thermodynamics

It only took a few hours and about a hundred lines of Python (and most of those are just longhand HTML inside of function calls). Seriously, check out the App Engine.

Cross-posting: St. Francis Forum

Kyle 1 Comment

I put an item up at St. Francis Forum that I figured I should post here as well:

I had the opportunity (at Bishop Miller’s suggestion) to preach at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in addition to St. Francis House a couple Sundays back. I wanted to post the sermon because I know that some folks who wanted to come couldn’t make it and because I was getting lots of questions about the Harvey Cox book I mentioned (it’s called Common Prayers: Faith, Family, and a Christian’s Journey Through the Jewish Year).

Anyway, if you’re interested, you can find the sermon here.