Delight

Testing a computer program becomes monotonous. Our project involves minimizing the "lateness" of x number of jobs processed on y number of machines. One of the things that makes our research unique (and that's a very important issue in research!) is that we have sequence-dependant setup times.

Think of a "job" as a batch of widgets to be processed. This "job" has a due date and can be processed on many different machines. So let's say our method of scheduling these jobs assigned job "a" to be processed on machine "b". The setup time for job a on machine b is different depending on what job machine b has just finished processing. Got that?

We're taking advantage of a computer's computational power to run through thousands of possible sequences to give us an optimal or near-optimal one. The algorithm we're using has parameters, and we have to determine formulas for these paramaters, so that depending on certain inputs, these paramter values will automatically be determined. Yeah...

Anyways, I love it, to put it concisely. I loved developing the program, I love the complexity, the minutiae of having to have everything just right, and I certainly am loving birthing equations to fit data.

That's an intriguing part of statistics, by the way, a valuable tool that statisticians possess, this ability to take data and fit it with an equation--a distribution--that describes it.

This equation was great. It involved two input variables and six constants. It was an exponential, which meant we had this multiplied by that divided by whatever and added to you, all that multiplied by me; we had all that and then we raised it to the 2.5th power. How great is that?! I wish I could somehow paste in a Equation Editor graphic, then I'd show it to you in all its glory. But anyway, we had to become a little less rigid than we'd hoped, and there was one annoying outlier that didn't fit our artfully-constructed equation, but I think it'll do the trick.

Radio

Radio during the 2 o'clock hour is great around here. You have a preacher that takes calls on the Bible and Christian life. You have a catholic psycho-somebody who gives life and medical advice, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Sean Hannity and Michael Medved (two great conservative hosts), and Dan Patrick on sports. Then a little later you have this completely bombastic, sometimes vitriolic lady from New York--Randi Rhodes--on a little later. And Bill O'Reilly. So much good stuff, not enough ears.

I want to tell you about our equation, but it's too late. Suffice it to say I had a really great time helping to formulate this crazy equation that will hopefully be useful to us in our research project.

One thing about Randy and Shelley being around together: things are interesting. They probably think I'm just ignoring them, ah, but I observe. I certainly experience.

Like last night they were watching a movie in our room but I needed to get up before six the next morning to go to work. So I say, Shelley, you want to step out for a few minutes? I hunker down in bed and soon they return to finish their movie. Of course I'm not sleeping while the movie's playing, but they don't know that. It soon ended and I'm not sure what they were thinking of doing, but it sort of seemed like it was going to involve some more movie viewing or something, but I very strategically shifted position and did a little sigh thing. That was enough to move them on down.

Sleepless in Harrisburg

Ridiculous! It's after midnight, I need to get up before six tomorrow morning, and I'm so excited I can't sleep; just wide awake.

I stumbled upon a Statistics professor's blog, and aside from his mocking young-earth creationists, his site is fantastic. He has re-energized me about pursuing Statistics as a career. I think I'm going to bump Carnegie Mellon up on my list of potential graduate schools. It would be wonderful to work with him, as he goes interdisciplinary and works in different areas of the sciences.

Statistics has so many things to offer a number-loving geek like me. Numbers, lots and lots of numbers. Math. Programming. Science. If I could delve into some hard-hitting engineering, I'd be completely happy.

Let's see if this unwound me enough.

Boo-hoo for Tenors

One problem with being a tenor is that when you spontaneously begin singing with a substantial group of people, invariably songs will be pitched LOW, Low, low. So it's either let the majority take over or say "Hey, Arnie, it's too low, pitch it up." Which he then does, making it difficult for every non-harmony singer to sing along.

I've never been stopped by a policeman, and I've never had an accident on the road. However, judging from the amount of times people have looked at me like "Wha...?" and threw their hands up in disgust, I don't know that I'm a very good driver.

Had a smashing good time with the youth group tonight. Arnie was over and was playing the tunes and we got to wailing away. The party was in honor of Help, Help Me Rhonda who came from Indiana to visit. She was a fellow Bible Schooler of several of our own.

Problems with CCM

There's an old contemporary Christian music artist, Steve Camp, who had enough of the CCM industry, and he mimicked Martin Luther and posted 107 Theses on the door of the CCM establishment, and took a lot of flack for it.

It's interesting, because just a few days ago I posted on how I'm pro-love song. Camp is on the other side of that, pushing for Christian artists to sing only strictly "Christian" songs. It's all about motivation, which makes it hard to look at specific groups and judge them. If you're singing love songs because it'll get you played on secular radio and line your pockets, you've got a problem, but if you're making music--art--from a Christian worldview and you celebrate elements of the human experience that aren't framed in "Christian" language, I don't think you have a problem.