Friday, October 21, 2011

October 2011

Hey Mathbaby,

It has been a while since I posted.  We visited Logan Utah - a place that is quiet, green, and non-crazy.  We got to see some very sane, healthy relatives.  Your grandma (on my side) is ... listing.  She has had a very hard life, and much of it was her choosing.  I never knew we were related to sane people.  It was refreshing to see that.  It makes me feel like less of an outsider to humanity.

You have done so much.  You are in Ballet class and cubbies.  You are learning important things in life like "you are a strange creature and that is a good good thing" and "episode 4 was the first episode of star wars".

You and mommy are sleeping.  It is 2am and out of the last 36 hours I have spend 7 sleeping and the rest doing prep for work, transport to work, or work-stuff.  I am very (very very) tired.

You are so big.  I used the Nyquist sampling criteria to improve your response to discipline - but I feel guilty for it.  I found that when discipline was .. slower .. the rate of your response was also slower, and rate of your divergence from desired behavior and attitudes was quicker.  Increasing the responsiveness of interventions both decreases how often I need to do them, and also the severity.  You might not find it as fun that I clamp down on things quicker, but in the longer run it looks like  win.

I am surprised to learn that your great-grandpa Hansen (my grandpa) and I are working on similar things (Kalman filtering).  It is strange to find roots like that.  My mom never got beyond the kindergarten of algebra, she missed out on the large majority of the field because of the deceptiveness of her own arrogance in high school.  As a smart person you are susceptible to this poison - you are right often, so you are much more willing to believe yourself.  That makes you willing to believe yourself when you are very wrong.  It is dangerous.  I try to not do it often myself.  Its a curse to the mostly competent.

Your mathmommy is capturing a fair amount of your fun and clever statements and adventures on Facebook.  I wonder if Facebook is making blogging slow down.  Interesting idea.  I think it is a proportional load against community.  Never confuse time in front of a computer interacting with someone as being as complete as face-to-face.  Try kissing someone sometime and realize that you can't ever have that through an LCD screen.  You should wait till your mid-20's or even your 30's before you try such an experiment though because.  Did you know that oral cancers are up 80% in your generation because of HPV?  Now kissing the wrong idiot can get you oral cancer.  Grrr.

I work very hard for you.  It is unlikely that the people not adjacent to me have any idea how valuable I am, or what I accomplish, but I am delivering some of the best value that I have so far.  There are closings of the circle that have been in the works for half a decade.  I was able to measure a feature in an image accurate to ~2nm when the pixels are 0.7 microns in size.  It is subpixel image registration that goes to less than 1% of a pixel size - though it needs many pixels to work with.  I like what I'm doing.  Someday you are going to want to have pieces of stuff ... anchors for consciousness upon which you can hold pieces of your father.  If I am a very lucky person my grandkids will want to know me, want anchors like that.  This is a part of that ... it's little but nonzero.

I have several goals for this semester, things that their completion could be a good thing.  I want to rebuild and detail sky cooling - it can significantly improve albedo.  There are some .. who are not practiced well at thinking .. who assert that white paint doesn't help.  they did not model their system properly.  I want to detail a variation on climate modeling - something that piggybacks on current models but has more value to industry.  I want to make this improved .. modeling algorithm.  It is a mutant Kalman something.  Will let you know.  Need to learn more about the guts of various breeds of splines including smoothing splines, and lagrange splines (I think).

God keep you baby girl.  If not for you and your mommy I would have told off these people when they demonstrated their dysfunctions first.  I hate putting up with the profound inefficiency, power struggles, "ivory towers".  It makes me wonder what the meaning is for the long term of humanity if this is the best we have.  If this is the pinnacle of human achievement - how low it is versus how high it was meant to be.  What an amazing gap that is just pregnant waiting for someone to fill it.  Maybe this is why the middle-east is desolate - why the places where humans have lived the longest there is nothing to show but rubble for 3000 years of human "civilization" - the bright spot is always in motion.

I love you baby girl.  Sleep well.  If you life a long life, I hope to be there.  If I am not then you might (maybe) have some typed characters with which to remember your dad.