May 2012

Time flies, kiddo.  It is nearly your birthday month again.  This is a public-ish blog so I really (really really really) don't want to put enough information for the millions of evil identity thieves out there to try and rob you of your future.  A friend of mine had her identity stolen as a baby and before she was 12 years old had $70,000 in credit-card debt without being legally able to to get a credit-card.  Horrible system we have here - I don't want you to be harmed by it.

For the aniversary of your math-mommy and math-daddy we went "up north" to Flagstaff.  We got to see a dormant volcano called "Sunset crater" and some very old Native American ruins.  Native Americans don't like being called Indians because this isn't India.  Native Indians think it is funny to refer to them as "dot" Indians and Native Americans as "feather" Indians, but I digress.  Both you, kiddo, and I (mathdad) were very toast for the actual trip.  I'm nocturnal (and worked on take home-open everything three week long final exam in PhD level stats course - Optimal Design of Experiments) and so I was tired, and you woke up about 4 hours early so you were ready for a nap right after we started driving to see stuff, but you never got your nap.  Your gracious math-mommy put up with our understandable tired, she knows we saw neat stuff and enjoyed the trip.

I love what I learned about optimization from the Ancient farmers.  There was a learning tool at Wupatki national monument that talked about how to grow good corn.  It surprised me to learn that taking the highest yield corn was dangerous because those high-yields variants are less hardy and if you do that then when the dry years come you will starve. 

We saw a TON of lizards.  We hiked on a lava flow.  You were afraid because you knew that volcano's were hot, but it is rocks that have been cool for a thousand years.  There is a hot spot that goes along under the flagstaff area, kinda like the Hawaii hot-spot.  It puts up cones every so often.  It is thought that the San Francisco peaks were actually a single cone that went mount St. Helens in a big way a long time ago. 

You have a Ballet recital this next weekend (Sunday, I think) and I will try to get pictures of you in it.

I have been watching you, thinking about your actions.  I think you go through cycles of wanting to be around me (the typical daddy-hunger that every kid has) and times when you give up because I work so much in school and work.  I am so sad when you give up.  It is a few months of one then a few of the other.  When you are in the give-up phase you seem to have more "negative" behaviors. 

Your new baby sister is going to be born soon.  I will be dividing my time between helping with you, and trying to help mommy.  I think the balance is going to be skewed more to mommy spending majority of her resources on the newborn and me making up for it as best I can by spending more resources on you to cover your loss of her time and attention.  I really hope we can show you the value of helping with the new baby.  She can be a great friend for your whole life if you build the bridges early.  In my family there is a lot of disconnect between the siblings and I really wish that wasn't the case.  I wish we had better bridges.  Although that is something that I no longer have substantiative input for myself it is likely that you can do better and can have a chance at stronger and more healthy connections with your sibiling/s.

One thing that I have had a growing beef toward is the Chinese attitude toward their daughters.  If we adopt/foster then I think we should consider helping there.  Those little girls are treated poorly and I want them to have good childhoods.  The interesting question is how to help them retain their cultural identity - how to have them know their parents and people - unlike my whitebread, ignorant, wanna-be-Scottish self.

Oh, kiddo.  I gotta remember to do the 23 and me thing.  I have a hypothesis about whether my biological father (and his 4 brothers) were all "genetic throwbacks" having substantial difference in form/appearance from their father or were um ... something else less unlikely.  I have some advanced genetics: Smart, no wisdom teeth (not even buds), and very extreme hearing range (in terms of frequency) and it might be good for you to have some sort of track of what strengths and weaknesses contribute to your genetics.  I am slightly worried that someone might try to patent it or use it against you or your kids but my thought is that if it is my DNA and not yours then it can limit in some way the exposure you could have.

Hopes for my next post include:

• pictures from this spring.
• pictures from your ballet.
• maybe a sonogram from your sib
• As your sister it is disingenuine to call her mathbaby 2.0 because she is parallel, not advanced.  We will have to come up with some fun and relevant nomenclature there.
• maybe some of the fun quotes from you - you have great one-liners.

I also need to see about getting some blog-management tools so that I can have better interfacing and also better documentation.  It would be a sad waste if my intended letters to you through this were erased by google long before you could read them.

I think I need to try to send (snail-mail) to your cousins who are somewhat incommunicado in the boonies of the desert southwest: I-guy and Bean. 

I love you kiddo.  The thing that keeps me working hard during long nights and the serious social isolation that is my new norm is that I am working to give you and our math-family a good life and a good future.  I work hard - and that shows you that I love you.  I love you and your math-mommy very much.  Goodnight mathbaby.  Sleep well.

Google made things look different.  I'm wondering if I have to import/export my blog so it does not get nuked.

Jan 2012

We had Christmas.  Your Grandma Mimi sent you too many presents.  We gave 1-2 a day for about a week after Christmas.  You loved it.

You are becoming more insistent that we get you a pegasus unicorn for a pet.  We should work on that.  Maybe stage with gerbils or something ... so you can practice care for the pet.

You have a new baby sister on the way.  God willing she should be being born in min-June.  We will see how that goes.

Got a letter from your cousin I-guy.  Need to write to him and let him know that he is admired and valued as a person.  I know he gets that from his mommy, but sometimes a distant figure can have a more heard voice than a near person - even if they have the same message.

I'm trying to wrap up school this semester.  Here is hoping/praying/working hard&smart - all that can be done is being done.  I want to be around for you and that means I have to spend time in your life with you - not always elsewhere working on school/work/other stuff.

You did a great thing today, at three years, weirding out the sonogram technician telling him about how implantation in the Fallopian tubes would be a bad thing, and saying that the baby was a girl because there was no penis.  You know more about what goes on in there than pregnant 18 year olds that they have had as patients - the tech said so.  I love your curiosity and your amazing verbal articulativity.

Early Nov 2011

Hello there Kiddo,

Gosh you are big.  You love to run, to chase, to be chased.  My heart says you were so much smaller but my eyes say you are getting so much bigger.  I'm not ready for you to be 3 yet.

You are watching Star Wars.  Fifteen times in a row and it is a thousand times better than the tripe that Disney gives girls.  I hope you never ever see the little mermaid.
I strongly agree with George Takei when he sais that Disney gives very bad life-lessons for little girls.

The underlying message of Little Mermaid is to the effect of "betraying everyone you know and love to the darkness is perfectly fine and you can get what you want in the end."

The underlying message of Beauty and the Beast is to the effect of "get used to the abuse and you can find out he is a nice guy".  It is like the Stockholm syndrome glorified.  You are not a punching bag.  There are times when you are going to have to step up and do things you don't like.  I'm not saying you should quit when it gets tough.  I'm saying that you should know the difference between abuse and not, and not let yourself be subject to that.  Have some backbone, some self-respect.  I think Gaston and Beast had the same soul and deserved each other.  There is a dehumanization and disempowerment in this that I hate - it has the same odor as child-slavery.

You are trying to process how C-3-Pinnochio (C3PO) can talk when he is only a head, or with a leg missing. I think you are sensing a cognitive dissonance - why doesn't he feel pain.  Not sure there.  I know you very much would like to be a doctor for horses and other animals.  You have a great natural curiousity for how living beings are shaped, and live and how they function.  You have a bent for morphology.

I should have more pictures of you.  The world can get pictures of Disney everywhere - they are sold in every nation on the planet.  The world can get pictures of Star Wars - they are sold in every nation on the planet.  In 10 or 50 years, where will you get your memories?  How will you hear words from your father.

I love your passion.  I love your courage.  I love your curiousity.  You are an amazing and wonderful creature even at three.  I want you to not be led into the lies/tricks/traps of this world - they are lethal.  They drink your blood and crush your joy.  I want you to have things that truly deeply fill your heart and soul and make the world a better place for your having lived.  I want you to both aspire to greatness and to grab hold of it.

I am in debt for the house, for my student loans, etcetera.  My net worth is not enough to give you an inheritance.  I want you to be wealthy and even if I can't give the small things of material possessions maybe I can give the big things of heart & soul wealth.  Gotta try.

God is good.  God can take care of you in storms that are a thousand times bigger than you and which would crush you in an instant.  He will get you through them well - if you walk with him.  Please walk with him.  Learn his ways, and learn to love Him.  Walk with Him.

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.

July 2011

Hello Mathbaby,


We watched soul surfer at the dollar theater this month.  You asked why the shark bit the girls arm.  You liked the surfing.  Your grandfather died this month.  You and your mathmommy went back east to help your grandma with the funeral, to be there for her.  It was noble, I think.  While there you visited an aquarium that had baby sharks of some sort - the kind that don't bite.  You wanted to pet them, and did, and told me about it on the phone.  You also got to pet a swan.  We went to goodwill this week (not a bad frugal activity) where you found a small/portable ironing board.  You brought it to me and said you found a surfboard.  You stood on it well, and practiced paddling.  Your hair is getting long, again.  You need a trim.

I was reading that to be a successful blogger requires something like 4 posts per day.  I am getting maybe one per month in for you.  Not very successful, yet.  My question goes something like "I have been struggling for years to get quality time with my family, and keep my bills paid.  My progress has been problematic.  What does it take to do well here?"  I wish I could do well.

I'm trying to figure out whether I should keep paying (out of pocket) to go to school and fight for the degree (they don't seem to want me there) and try and make a big difference in this world (it is getting very dark).  I am trying hard to not lose .. but sometimes even the road to not losing seems very dim and hard to see.  It isn't the same as winning, but that is sometimes even harder to perceive.

I love you babygirl.  I have a picture on my desk to look at and I say "I gotta do well for her".  I gotta try.

June 2011

Hey Mathbaby,

I was asked what advice I can give a big brother to help guard his little sisters heart.  This is what I had.  When I wrote it I imagined that I was speaking to myself.  This is how I want you to be treated, what I want you to have from your dad, or a big brother. 

Things to do:
- Do give her truth.  Don't candy-coat it.  Don't exaggerate it.  Do give her the blunt truth.  Establish yourself as credible.  No "easter-bunny", "tooth-fairy" or "santa claus".  When she needs someone to trust then she never goes to those folks.  I know I watched.  You either have credibility for being a high-quality source of truth or you don't.  I'm not saying to crush her sense of wonder - but tell her "I will always tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and if you really want to know the answer then I will tell you."  This gives her seasons of wonder but also she knows you always always always tell the truth to her.
- Do give to her a facility at understanding.  Equip her with tools of understanding so she can make good decisions.  Get her into games that train her to figure out what her options are.  Geocaching.  D&D.  I love chess, but you have to have a very (very) particular bent there and most girls dont.  Read books like "how life imitates chess" by Kasparov, or "outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell, or "the goal" by Goldratt.  No seriously - in reverse order, read those books.  "rock, paper, scissors" by Len Fisher is also good, but should be read around the time of Kasparov.  Find a way to have her read to you while you drive, or you read to her while she drives but read the material in them.  Find the stories she reads, then read them, and think through the good and bad, and challenge her with decision or options where people either did a great job of making the most of opportunity, or really missed out on something obvious.  Teach her to think so that if she needs to she can.  She is younger than you, and she is a girl.  If you can't teach her something new in how to think, then you can at least teach her how guys think.
- Do talk to her, regularly and often.  Give her a good level of detail about what guys do what and how to girls.  From tricks they play to get them in the sack, to how they fake how they are handling being dumped.  If she speaks the langauge of "guy" then she isn't going to be as easily duped, used, or exploited.  She can get past the BS and at least find what she is looking for - even if its not what you are looking for her to look for.
- Do take her to your local police department sponsored violence avoidance class.  It can give her very good material in life.  How to not be a victim - they know what it takes. Make sure every 2-3 years she gets a refresh.
- Do follow up by getting her into a habit of healty activity.  Be a jogging buddy, or work together (there are plenty of books and organizations that help) to run a marathon.  She will be amazed how she feels (and looks) after being able to run a marathon.  At the beginning she might not be able to walk a quarter mile, but without too much pain, and with some commitment on your part, after around 3 months she can be in the top 1% of physical fitness on the planet.  Its good for her emotional well being, her physical health, and her life-span.  Swimming.  Bike riding.  Rock-climbing.  Something.
-This is hard, it isn't fun, but its part of truth ... Do have a female cop or a female nurse talk her through every step of getting a rape kit.  Rapists are serial - they never have only one victim.  Rape escalates, the next one is worse than the last.  A properly done kit will put them in prison.  It happens to 1 in 4 women before they are 18 nowadays, rape does.  If she is ignorant then her very real, very human, very natural responses are going to make her throw all the evidence in the garbage - make sure he gets away with it.  If she knows what to do then he will go to jail.  If every girl properly did a rape kit when something like this happened then all the rapists would be in prison.  The rate of rapes would go down 75%.
- Do give her quality time.  Find things she hungers to do, from driving the car, to running her own business or whatever.  This isn't like going to the movies once a week and not saying anything wihle you stare at a screen.  Do make it hands on, interactive.  Garden.  Rebuild a car engine.  Learn to fly ultralights.  Go to the gun-range, bow range, paintball place and teach her how to shoot/play/compete.  Put at least 10 hours per week into her - into doing worthwhile things with her.  This will establish and maintain the relationship.  When she needs someone to talk to then she will come to you.  You will learn each other, know each other, and grow to trust each other.  This is a habit that will pay for itself in worth 1000x over the length of your lifetimes - invest in each other well.
- Do empower her - that means provide a clear vision of who she can be that is accessible and noble.  Learn good role models, visions of who she could be, and if she can be open to them then share them.  If she is really young then buy her good comic books - ones that have a values worth having in life, and characters worth aspiring to. 

This is big - you MUST learn to listen.  If you are thinking of an answer - you aren't listening.  Listen as if what she was saying mattered as much to you as it does to her.  Listen, remember.  Ask good questions.  You can tell her slow down, or wait a minute.  You can say - give me a bit to think about that.  As guys we have a narrow pipe for communication and are easily overwhelmed there while girls have amazing communication bandwidth.  If she loves you she will give you some room - just keep engaging her.  THIS IS ONE OF THE BEST AND MOST IMPORTANT THINGS YOU CAN DO FOR HER.

Do not do these:
- You can not force her to wait until the guys brains have (to some extent) migrated from the penis to the head - do not try.  Children in our instant-gratification/consumerist culture have no capacity for patience.  She is your younger sis, therefore a child, therefore incapable of demonstrating that level of self control. 
- Do not intimidate any/all potential boyfriends.  This will make her go behind your back.  When that super-sleaze finally gets her alone, you are not going to be able to warn her and she will get raped, and then not tell you about it.
- Do not believe for an instant that she is innocent.  Her relationship to you doesn't trump her human nature.  She wants a number of things.  She will lie.  She will be manipulative.  She will use a guy just like a guy will use a girl.  If you can't be real with yourself about who she is, and what her motives can be then you can't give her truth that will help her.
- DO NOT introduce her to bad things.  You start her drinking she will go the next step.  Younger sibs do that.  You do not want to look in the mirror after she did something amazingly bad and want to kill yourself for having introduce her to it.  Be excellent.  Teach her excellence.  Keep her away from things that kill the soul and degrade the person.

In life there are no "silver bullets", no miracle cures for everything.  There are some things that work sometimes and others that don't.  There is no single thing that a father/brother/friend can do for her that will help (see the event based solution vs. process based solution) but his doing these things is kind-of a silver bullet.  These will not guarantee that she doesn't get hurt, but will go a long way to protecting her, and if she does get hurt these will go a long way to helping her heal.

Mathbaby - I want this for you.  I hope to be around to be it, but life doesn't guarantee that I will be.  If I can't be there, then I want you (and anyone else around you) to know what I want for you.

I just read (most of) "rock, paper, scissors" and it seems very sad how terribly poor human beings are at working together.  If we could team up in groups of .. more than 35% of mating pairs .. and work as coalitions for just a few years, then much more truly successful living could be accomplished.  General human quality of life on the planet could be improved by 300% if only we could work together well, committedly, and sincerely in teams like this.  They say it takes a village to raise a child - but it seems we no longer have any villages.  Maybe we never had villages.  That is sad thought.  I hope you have a village.  I hope you are a village too.