~traviscj/

I’ve officially been accepted to two PhD applied math programs: Northwestern and University of North Carolina. I’ve also been accepted to the Masters of Science program at the University of Washington. Both of the PhD offers came with full fellowship offers(at least for the first year), which basically means that I just need to go and give them the best bang for their buck with my brainpower for five years, and then I’ll have my PhD. Awesome. All three schools are outstanding and have amazing faculty, as best as I can tell.

Professor Kutz has recommended I take some Dynamical Systems(AMATH575, spring quarter) and the Advanced Methods for Ordinary Differential Equations course(AMATH568, summer quarter in some special way). They’re both fairly intimidating courses, but it’d be a great confidence boost for next fall, no matter where I ended up, assuming that I lived through the experience. Though, honestly, looking through the previous year’s, I think I’m up for it.

I have also booked my tickets to visit both University of North Carolina and Northwestern University. I’ll be visiting NU March 15 through 17, and UNC March 19 through 21. I could not be more excited!

I finally finished graduate school applications last weekend. I applied to University of Washington, University of North Carolina, Northwestern, University of Colorado, and University of Nevada. It’s a lot of work getting a bunch of applications out like that: I definitely underestimated it. Hopefully my personal statement measured up to the letters of recommendation that people wrote for me.

I also ended up having an interview with Microsoft that week, just to add a bit to the stress there. It actually went fairly well, though I haven’t heard back on the round-two interview yet. They said it would be a while though.

This is going to be another busy week: Comp Sci, German, Math, and Applied Math homework; Comp Sci exam, and research meetings, along with the standard course assistant for AMATH301 stuff. I also need one more class for spring quarter. Currently I’m planning on the intro CAD class for my last 4 VLPA credits, Real Analysis to round out my applied-math education with some pure-math, and a AMATH500 seminar about high performance computing and visualization(which will be taught by Randall J LeVeque and sounds awesome.) Which leaves me at around 8 credits. I’ve been encouraged to take introductory accounting, a dance class, and probably a lot more… but I’m not too sure yet. It’s kinda too bad that the intro electrical engineering class sounds like kindof a GPA-murderer, because I’ve always sorta been interested in that sort of thing.

I’ve been meaning to write this tip up for quite a while, but now that I’ve finally gotten some closure on it, I guess now would be a decent time. While I was in Brazil, there were two ATM machine clusters across the street from eachother, both between the beach and the hostel we were staying at. The CITIbank ATMs were more reliable, but the HSBC ATMs were a bit cheaper. At first, it always seemed worth the small extra, but since I never wanted to get much out at a time, I was racking up the bank charges. Also, several people had been using the HSBC ATM without issue, so I figured I would start using that one instead as well. This worked well the first couple of times, but one of the days I went in to get some cash out, it didn’t dispense. Undeterred, I went to one of the ATM machines someone else had just (successfully) used and tried there, and withdrew the money. This time it worked.

Now, the problem was that the first transaction went through as well… it just didn’t dispense. So when I tried to call up my bank to dispute the charge, it was hard telling them which withdrawl it was, because they were both for the same amount. They ended up giving me a provisional credit(after some cajoling of the Executive Customer Service personel.. a great hint I picked up from Sharvil). Later, however, the amount was withdrawn from my account, saying that they had investigated and not figured it out. What a pain. About 6 weeks later, HSBC finally deposited the amount back into my account.

Anyways, the main lesson I learned is to try to withdraw slightly different amounts each time so that the customer service rep you talk to can figure out exactly which transaction went sour. I’m not sure if the provisional credit was revoked because they investigated the wrong withdrawal or what, but it would have been nice to know with certainty that I had told her the correct one.

I found a great little LaTeX homework layout for typesetting math homeworks a while back, and I’ve meant to write it up for quite a while. It’s from Harvey Mudd College’s Mathematics Department, engineered to automatically satisfy the department guidelines on how homeworks should be laid out. They also have thesis and poster templates, but the homework installation proceedures and sty files are located on the Homework Class page. Their website also has extensive information on their computer resources. While basically useless for anyone not at Harvey Mudd, it is a model for how this sort of website should look. Everything is clearly detailed at the perfect level, along with suggestions not just for how to do certain tasks, but also when you might want to do something.

I tend to be a VIM guy for working with code, but for smaller scale LaTeX stuff(ie, homework writeups but not the 62-page monster I wrote for AMATH581), I’ve been using the TextMate program. It’s a bit expensive at about $50, but it takes it down to 1 keystroke to recompile the LaTeX file and view it. It’s also really good at working with directory hierachies. I believe I discovered it while toying with the programming language Ruby in their 15 minutes to a weblog screencast.

Turns out that the Ruby people have released a 2.0 15 minutes to a weblog screencast. This time they pull some punches(pasting code in), so it’s cheating a little bit, but they get a blog with an admin interface, AJAX comments(with an HTML-redirected fallback), and an ATOM feed all tied into one app, which I have to say is impressive even when you have stacked the deck. I hate to give up on Python for web stuff since I’m using it for a lot of other stuff nowadays, but it’s all pretty enticing. Find the video on the Ruby on Rails Screencast page.

Life is keeping me so crazy that I should not be taking the time to write this, but posting a link here was irresistable. David Liff is an amazing photographer. I think the best comment on that page(if you can make it to the bottom without running out and buying a plane ticket to one of these places) is “Your photos have more life than the subjects themselves!”. Wikipedia, you may be proud. David Liff, thank you.

David Liff’s Wikipedia User Page

Professor Eric Shea-Brown has written up a nice website explaining what we’re doing with the computational neuroscience modeling. It’s currently on the Why Do Math website at this link: Brain Dynamics: The Mathematics of the Spike.

For my project, we’re starting with a simpler model that is similar in behavior but quicker computationally and (somewhat) easier to analyze mathematically, known as the Izhikevich model(after its creator, Eugene Izhikevich). His website has some amazingly cool videos and a lot of papers on what he’s been doing. His Website

I am finally getting around to starting my graduate school applications.. and overall having a lot of fun with them. The places I’m applying to are:

• University of Washington, Seattle
• Northwestern, Evanston
• University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• University of Colorado, Boulder

I’ve got my UW Seattle application about half done, and just starting the other ones.

The UW has apparently gotten my full GRE scores, because they are now reporting them through the unofficial transcript interface. I don’t quite recall where I sent them already.. I’ll probably get that going soon.

I was home on Thanksgiving Break with Sharvil, and we decided to revive some old computers. Partly I’d like to experiment with some clustering stuff without incurring CPU time at the AMATH department or Teragrid stuff I’m likely gonna be working on soon with Shea-Brown’s neuroscience research. So, it turns out I resurrected about 5-6 old computers(final tally is still waiting on the number of successful Xubuntu installs on them, among other practical issues(where the hell am I going to put six computers…?): The very first computer I built(a P3 450), P3 700, Dual P2 266, a couple of AMD64 3200′s, and a Sony Vaio P3 733. The cool thing is that the neuron spiking models are basically embarassingly parallel(well, each run isn’t necesarily, but from what I’ve gathered so far, we’re looking for averages over a bunch of them. So, sweet! Again, this would be terrible for actual research, especially against something like TG or even Amazon’s EC2–which is another thing I really need to check out.

Sharvil and I also managed to restore functionality in a set of other computers, but the details of that have to remain somewhat quiet, apparently. CIA-types like their privacy, I suppose. Probably I’ll drop in a plug about it on some future project. On the way home from that I picked up a little light bulb for the dome lamp in my old F250 Diesel so that Dad won’t have to search though his cab in the dark anymore.

Above I mentioned Xubuntu… but currently I’m installing regular Ubuntu. It’s taking FOREVER. Which is why I think it’ll end up being Xubuntu. Either way, I guess I shouldn’t have started with the second-slowest computer on some of the slowest hard drives I’ve got. I’m probably going to wait for it to finish, then install Xubuntu on another drive or try imaging this one or something to see how long it takes.

Incidentally, I decided it’d be a great time to run some Amazon EC2 tests(since I happened across some tutorials on YouTube. It’s amazing… You load up the Firefox interface, find the Amazon machine image you want, click ‘boot’, and in short order you can ssh over to it directly. I decided I’d run a little python Sieving program to find prime numbers. I haven’t got the final numbers yet, because I want to get a pretty graph…. but it’s pretty sweet so far. The gist is: A P3 450 machine takes 8 times longer to run the program than my MacBook Pro, a small-image Amazon EC2 instance runs in just a little bit less time, and a extra-large EC2 High-CPU node runs it in just about 60% of the time it takes my MacBook Pro. Granted–this is a terrible benchmark, and it’s straight Python, and I’m comparing across OSX vs Linux, i586 vs Core2Duo vs ??, etc, but these are some good rough numbers for how long this stuff is going to be taking. I’m a little impressed my MacBook Pro was keeping up that well… but it has been a great little machine. And it explains why it runs so hot, probably. In any case, I’ve certainly had less fun with $.92!

UPDATE: Here’s that follow-up with the graph. It’s pretty revealing:

Incidentally, after a bit more sleep I realized that obviously this has nothing to do with float point ops, so this isn’t entirely indicative of how these machines would fare on scientific computations. But probably still interesting. Honestly I’m not quite sure why the AMD64 did so well. The machine feels way slower than the MBPo, but they are fairly close in actuality.

I must be getting more popular on some search engines somewhere. I just got six random comment-spam messages. Awesome. I guess that’s why the more important bloggers have come to rely on Bayesian filters and soforth for taming the wild flow of spam. Hopefully that trend doesn’t continue.

Also, it seems as though I am now learning FORTRAN. I’m sortof starting working with Eric Shea-Brown on some Neuroscience research, working with HPC on NSF’s Teragrid. It’s pretty exciting stuff, and I’m really excited about getting moving on it. Anyways, back to FORTRANizing, I suppose.

I think I’ve already told most of my friends about this… but it’s just way too awesome to not have documented somewhere. Doubly-pronged awesomeness, actually:

• The Discovery Channel’s Boom De Yada video.
• XKCD’s Boom De Yada comic strip

Always makes my day that much better.