End of Feb 2014

Some days they are going to pound you.  The world.  Other people.  Time and circumstance.  You are going to have good days, sure, but you are going to have days where you start at zero and it all seems to go down from there.

I'm telling you this so it won't surprise you.  They will punch you in the nose and make you cry.  They will take your lunch money, and try to fight you for your soul.  They own neither.  They don't have a right to either.  If you don't fight and fight - even if you don't want to fight - then they will take both.

To win a battle takes heart.  It takes strength, mind ... tactics and strategy, but without heart there is no victory.  The will to fight.

So in order to not get crushed, mowed down, or eaten ... you have to set aside part of your will for these unexpected battles.  Much like you always have enough money in a bank account to deal with emergencies, you need to have enough emotional/will reserves to fight off these sorts of unexpected attacks from the sides.

And people will conspire to suck you dry of will.

Here is a beautiful lecture on time and capacity by Randy Pausch.  (link, link)  I hope that by the time you read this, the videos still exist.

Randy says of creativity that you have to find the times that you are most protective and guard them fiercely.  Times that are low-productivity can be spent on things like paperwork, or riding a bicycle around the block, or something.  Anything.

I think that you need to find the sources of strength of will, of courage of conviction, and guard them fiercely.  Like an ancient hunter tribes-woman you carry your fire with you.  You must make sure it does not die, it is not rained out.  That you have materials to quickly and effectively make use of the tool that it is.

Your family can lift you up or bring you down.  Most days you lift me up.  I fight the fight because I know you need me to.  That need, my experience of the reality, and importance of it, its impact to you, and who you are to me - it gives me fire.  My siblings, my brothers and sisters - sometimes they do good, sometimes great harm.  They taught me that they are not waterproof.  They will put rain on my fire, to try and quench me.  Some are addicted to drama - the slew rate, how fast they are falling, is more important than having their feet on solid ground - they will will push you off a mountain and fall into the ocean with you if they can just to experience the fall.  Stay away from them.

Games.  Doing things.  These are intermittent.  I play chess tactics, or video games.  Mommy plays crosswords.  They are like gathering seeds.  Small and easy to find one.  Not easy to get enough to feed a family.

Don't let them get you down.  Ronald Reagan, speaking about a day when others were trying to break his soul, and steal his hope and make his life meaningless - to eat him without pity or even consideration of him as anything more than meat for the fire - he said "don't let the turkeys get to you".  Gather now, conserve and grow a will strong enough to resist turkeys.  Know what they are, something about how they work, and have enough informed will, and understanding, and strength, and tactics and strategy - to fend them off.

I it is my sincere prayer that the days when you must fend them off are few, rare, and not hard.  It is also my prayer that you are unrelenting, and victorious in the battle - when it is most important.

I love you kiddo.  God be with you.

Feb 2014: Star Trek and Gender

Mathgirl,

I read the following Slashdot article:

• http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/14/02/14/1341220/star-trek-economics
• https://medium.com/editors-picks/29bab88d50

It suggests that star-trek is a prototype of a extreme-productivity civilization.  Not a utopia, but closer than now - in theory.

I had the following as my response:

I read through about 75% of it.  It is not a great read.  It takes a lot of time to get to a little meat. 

It relies on "social pressure" to stop conspicuous spending.  Lets see that work for real in womens shoes and I might believe it possible.  Otherwise there is a substantial bit of anthropology that the author is hand-waving his way past. 

Reproductively speaking, the minimum cost of reproduction is much smaller for the male than the female.  For the female the time-cost is 40 weeks, while for the male it can be around 4 minutes.  That is a 100,000 to one ratio.    Although females have oestrus cycle times that are 9x less frequent than optimal cycle-times for males, this does not establish a reproductive cost equality.

This high asymmetry in cost drives different general normative behaviors.Game theory says that when the costs are so asymmetric, and so much larger, then you will see radically different optimal strategies.  For women they have a huge vested interest in maximizing the input the man gives - they are selective in partners, and selective in frequency.  This also drives a strange phenomena of "Costly but worthless gifts facilitating courtship".  (link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1559891/?tool=pubmed)  

The most archaic, currently used, non-worthless gift that can be given is not gold, diamonds, cash, or camels - it is footwear.  
If your "social pressure" to stop "conspicuous spending" can actually apply to womens footwear, then it has substance.  Don't just stop sales, show that the desire has been resolved.  It has not been resolved in Europe - this means that the fundamental forces are still extensively at work in that culture.  It also means that the Star Trek economy, while worth considering, is still a work of fiction.
Best regards.

The pub-med article is worth reading. This approach can help you pick guys who are not players, when you are older.  I don't like dating, but there is a selectivity in courtship - be selective.  You are amazing.  You are worth being selective.

I love you kiddo. 

Feb 2014

  You are selling girl scout cookies.  Your mom is too.  It is definitely a team activity.  She is as excited and aggressive as you.  I wonder what hunger inside her heart this is filling.

You have a solid bit of cute going on there.  Your smile is the engineered one you have, not your giggling/delight one, but the one you save for pictures.  You hunger to have a control on your own appearance.  

My friend Lucy L. is having another "Gateway to Godly Womanhood" party for her youngest daughter.  In chatting with her she says that enjoy the pure, sweet person you are now, because that goes away at ten.  The idea of you pickling or something isn't very fun, but Lucy knows kids and I respect her wisdom.

We got binoculars for my birthday (yay mathmommy) and we use them for looking at airplanes and stars.  It is a good thing.  

Your cousin Isaac came to cubbies yesterday.  You were delighted to have brought a visitor and he enjoyed it too.  He needs to get out and play more.  He doesn't do that enough.  Neither do you.  Neither do I.

I gotta go, kiddo.  Its early AM and I have to get working.  See you this evening.

Nov 30, 2013

Happy Turkey day, Mini.

We had a good Thanksgiving with my friend Kevin and his family.  Smoked turkey, great caseroles, and good community.

Last night we watched the parade in Tempe.  We took light rail from our neighborhood to downtown tempe.  There were a ton of people.  You and mom went and sat near the first red tree on the other side of the street from the station.  I went and got a grilled chese (with mayo, and tomato) for you and split a grinder with your mathmommy.  All sorts of be-lighted people and floats and loud music went on.  Some people from floats threw candy and you collected some.  You shared - that was nice.

After we went to the Tempe town lake.  There is a boat-based light parade there in a few weeks.  After strolling a bit, and trying to figure out if there was a boat-based event, we went back to light rail, and took it back to the part-and-ride, and went back home.

Mommy has a stomach cold.  She is not feeling good.  Micro, your baby sister is all snotty-nosed with a nose cold of some sort.  For now, kiddo, you and I do not have colds, but that isn't going to last forever.

You were sharing your candy.  You gave some to a little hispanic girl who was sitting near you.  Her father saw that and thanked me.  You were being generous - one of the characteristics of princess-hood.  You are working on being a princess, of the order of Twilight Sparkle, and she is a good role-model.

Work is work.  I'm about to, God willing, redefine our approach to measurement and warpage. It is hard work, but it is good value.  I want to make sure to deliver good value.

I love you and admire you.  Your sister is just starting to talk so I don't know her person, her character, or her growth yet.  I will need to add letters to her in here as part of the process. We should figure out how to do that.


Those bunglers in washington are doing what they have done for 4 years - sing "the recession is over" when it isn't.  If they sing it long enough are they going to be accidentally right?  It is, sadly, the only tool they have in the toolbox to attempt to fix what they broke.  This is what we get for having lawyers make a government - something complex with loopholes but doesn't do the job.  We should get control system engineers in on it - they would guarantee stability in things like growth using their control policies.  Watson perhaps?  Someday maybe. 

Work is calling, and I have miles to go before I sleep.

October 1st Log

Hey there Mathgirl.

Its 7am and I'm at work.  I'm struggling because I feel like I'm failing at the important things.

You see, I have too many things that I have to do and not enough me to get them done before they are due and if I fail at any one of them then it could be pretty bad.

How do keep you and our family so we have home, food, and opportunity?
How do I give you a daddy who is home and can play?

Those sound like simple questions, don't they?  They are, but they are sneaky.  Sometimes simple questions have very complex answers.  What is value?  What is success?

Daddy's work is complex.  People are giving mixed messages, like "things are good" and "things are horrible".  So I have to worry about job security.  That is a lot of pressure.

I need to get in shape.  I am obese and it makes me slow, and out of breath.  The weight affects my brain and makes me feel sad more than I should.  It makes it hard to have energy at home.  It makes it hard to do things that I need to do there.  As an adult this is a hard thing - how do I get the margin to invest well in my family and make sure they have their emotional needs met?  This is extra hard with the job stress.

I am praying for you a lot.  I get a thought of despair and I know that nothing in my strength can overcome this so I pray.  God is good.  God is big and I have seen many many many answered prayers - God hears.  May God give you a good hope and a future.  May he give you an excellent heart, healthy and appropriate training in mind, heart and action.  May you also get a healthy childhood, teenagehood, tweenagehood, and a good family of your own when you are an adult.

Silly people call kids between 10 and 12 as "tweens".  They forget the history of the word.  It is for hobbits that were in their 20's who were treated as not fully adult - they were "tweenagers".  Instead of saying that you aren't done at 20, the language abusers of today have re-engineered it to tell infants that they are teenagers.  It gives them a larger market - more people to exploit.

Gotta go.  Hard work calls.

Short link for programming article

Hey there big girl,

I saw this on slashdot.  (link) Slashdot is a good news aggregator.

The article says "teach programming earlier".  I read it that way, anyway.  My take on it is "they just mastered walking intentionally and language - so they are crazy-smart and perfectly capable.  They just need a way to make vocabulary easier."

This is the actual article, something I would read:
http://www-public.int-evry.fr/~gibson/Research/Publications/E-Copies/Gibson12.pdf

Here is a more official publication reference:
Teaching Graph Algorithms To Children Of All Ages, J. Paul Gibson. Presented at the Seventeenth Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2012), Haifa, Israel, 3-5 July, pages 34 - 39, ISBN = 978-1-4503-1246-2

The conclusion was:

I want you to be able to succeed.

Love you much, MathGirl.

-mathdad

Aug 8th, 2013

You are such fun, mathgirl.

While driving home from an 11 hour trip to a wedding in Colorado, you made the following:

... dangit.  blogspot won't allow audio here.  dangit...

You quoted the entire episode from memory at 9pm at night to entertain yourself.

Here is the original, I think.  (link)  I hope that Hasbro keeps it up so the link is not damaged.

You can see that you get 90% of the words right, and what you get wrong is also insightful.

You are an amazing kiddo.