The Interview

My group and I headed over to LW's Friday evening. We had a good interview. One of my worries about this project was that this famer crop mix decision would be trivial, not complicated enough for there to be any benefit to applying our optimization methods. That fear was soundly laid to rest. There are a myriad of factors that affect the decision, and some of them are hard to get ahold of.

Let me see if I can list some. Equipment considerations, soil type, marketing (that's going to be hard to quantify), labor (some require lots of hand labor, some don't), spraying. Tons of stuff. This is going to be lots of fun trying to sort this all out and design a manageable, yet accurate, model.

One of the things we wanted to do was make a piece of software that could be useful to a variety of farmers. That's going to be difficult to do, because after talking to LW, you get a sense of just how much farmers vary stratically. A challenge, for sure.

He surely loves his occupation. His wife is delightful too. She came home from shopping when we were getting close to done with our meeting. LW suggested, laughing, that we try to make a model explaining how the more you spend the more you save, which seems to be his wife's strategy.

So last night after church MS and AS (I think that's what the cool bloggers do--just use initials) were talking about how if you sped off the planet at the speed of light and were gone for a million years, when you came back, two million years may have elapsed in earth time. Of course, I said, this is impossible because you can't go the speed of light, and AS said, yeah, because then your mass would be infinite.

I'm not quoting now, but then BK--a girl--piped up and said, that wouldn't be good because I would come back and all my friends would be gone.

This struck me as funny, I don't know if it comes across as such as I write it. It made me laugh because we were talking about grandiose, fantastic, modern physics ideas, and what she thought about was that if she went off into space for 50 years, when she came back 100 earth-years later, all her friends would be dead. That's cool, though.

And I know essentially nothing about the special theory of relativity. I think I knew that you can't go the speed of light ... mmm ... Darin, he refreshed my memory anyway, if I ever knew it at all.

I wonder if Physics or Mathematics lament the fact that not more people get involved in their disciplines, because IE sure does. Come to think of it, Stats has a dose of it themselves.

There was something else...

Can't ... think ... aaaghhh!

Warning: this is a technical post. It's really to see if I can clarify ideas in my mind by setting it to paper .... errr .... screen. And it'll give you a peek into Statistics 421.

In probability theory, mutual exclusivity and independence are important concepts that often are misunderstood and wrongly viewed as one and the same. The fact is, they are essentially opposite. These concepts (particularly independence) are very important in providing a basic foundation to statistical theory.

Say there are two events, A and B. These events are mutually exclusive if by one's occurence the other is precluded from occuring. If A = "event that I shaved this morning" and B = "event that I did not shave this morning," the events are mutually exclusive. By virtue of A happening, B CAN'T happen.

Two events, A and B, are independent if one's occurance has no effect on the occurance of the other. Say A = "event John Kerry becomes president" and B = "event that my head itches." A has no connection with B. However, if we defined B = "event that all independents voted for John Kerry," you can see that A and B could influence each other.

When you think of the two concepts without really thinking them through, you think that events that are mutually exclusive would also be independent, when actually, events HAVE to be dependent on one another if they are mutually exclusive.

Collision Course

My worlds are about to mix, and it feels pretty good. On Friday, my senior project group is meeting with a farmer from my church. We're going to get a crash course on grass seed farming with special emphasis on what factors go into making the "crop mix" (which kinds of crops to plant, and how much of each) decision.

Really, my two worlds--church/family and school--are amazingly disjoint. There are a few tenuous links that I can think of, but by and large they are completely separate. But no more. It will be fascinating to see them interact.

The Weekend

Like I said, the weekend was about relaxing, hanging out, decompressing. There wasn't much planned, so we played games, talked, ate, slept late, played on the beach (tackle football!), and stayed up late.

You know how life passes? You know about the stages we go through? There was the stage of winsome youth, when you woke up on Saturday morning and everything was perfect, and you went to school and played with your friends and tried to get your work done before first break. Then there was the discussion stage, where you lived to debate most anything with most anyone. Speaking in tongues, church rules, wedding rings, on and on and on.

I just boiled my previous life down to two stages, which isn't exactly the case.

The point, however, is that I'm not presently in the latter stage. I do love a good talk about issues (most recently, (anti-)polical discussions), but there's a ton of stuff out there that I've pretty much discussed to death in my life. That's how I feel at least.

So when there got to be a huge discussion over in the living room about guys and girls and insecurity and personality types, and I happened to be sitting at the table a ways away playing rook, I had no regrets.

And I was pasted in rook, completely crushed, by Tom's sister who is my youth sponsor.

This little weekend retreat to the coast was wonderfully relaxing. I don't get to just sit around very often. But now it's back to school, a little pressured at that, with an exam coming up and homework due and meetings at church this week. Walter Beachy's here, really cool.

I have some thoughts, but I need to go now.

Bye Bye,

By

Internet-less

Yeah, it's pretty bad. No internet access from my laptop.

God says*, "Byran, just back off the internet for the weekend."

I say, grumbling, "All right, but can I at least go downstairs and get on
because there's some stuff I NEED to do."

Silence.

Yippee! *sound of feet clattering down the steps*

*Ficticious conversation. While parts of it may resemble real life, the
author shall not be held responsible for the accuracy or relevance or
reality of said converstation. In other words, I made it up because it
sounded good.