Jul
3
Statistics, or “how I learned to stop worrying and love high voltage”
Filed Under Uncategorized
I don’t know why we subject ourselves to this, but once again I find myself going through the mandatory “safety training” for my hazardous office job. This little gem comes from the “electrical safety training” course:
“Electrocution is the third leading caues of work-related deaths among 16-17 year olds, after motor vehicle deaths and workplace homicide”
So let me get this straight. First, we choose a statistic that doesn’t apply to the people who are working here since everyone is (well?) over that age here. Second, we try to scare you by telling you it’s behind “workplace homicide” for number of people killed every year in “the workplace”. Now just a damned minute. Are you telling me that I have a better chance of dying from someone just walking in here and shooting me in the face? Why am I doing this training then? Shouldn’t I be learning martial arts bullet deflection techniques or something instead?
Today there was a seminar that discussed the controversy of teaching evolution and intelligent design in schools. As predicted, there was a fair amount of discussion at the end. Personally I feel it’s ridiculous that in this country we would consider teaching creationism (i.e. intelligent design) in classrooms, considering that at some point someone very wise said:
” Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”
The whole thing was kind of soft on the issue, so in that sense it was pretty unsatisfying. One of the most egregious statments I have ever head was the last person who spoke before the session ended: “I think evolution should be kept out of schools until it is proven”. Wow. That comment betrays a profound misunderstanding of science, which unfortunately is to be expected of the general public in this age of hostility to reason and knowledge. The sad part is that this person is working at a national science lab, if only for the summer as a student. Of course, this person and most of the others with similar sentiments didn’t bother to stick around after the talk for the follow-up discussion. I won’t go into great detail on why this is ridiculous, but only quote Stephen Jay Gould:
“In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.”
If you’d like more information on my position on this matter, you can check out the websites of some folks that have argued the value of science more eloquently than I:
Phil Plait
*note: I published this and for some reason the formatting was abysmal, so I deleted and reposted. Sorry if this messed up anyone’s feed reader.
So yesterday I went with some Argonne folks to Fermilab, home of the currently most powerful particle accelerator in the world: the Tevatron. They also made the magnets for the LHC coming online at CERN. We got to hear a presentation from the folks that made the magnets and I had the chance to talk with one of them for a bit.
Status: Awesome. I posted some pictures in the gallery.
It’s official: Argonne has the world’s third fastest supercomputer, the Blue Gene/P. It’s also the fastest computer for open science. Sweet. I’ve been working on it lately and it’s pretty exciting to have that much processing power. I’ve added some pictures to the Argonne and Chicago galleries, including some random trips Jason and I took recently.
In this case it was me. Come, dear reader, on a journey through a debugging experience.
To me, it always seemed like programming in C is somewhat like the proverbial butterfly in Africa that flaps its wings and causes devastation on the other side of the world. Case in point: fgets() gets SIGSEGV when reading into a perfectly valid buffer. It just blew up in the middle of a loop, in the middle of a file. It had already read half the file fine, and then just blew up on a perfectly valid line. The culprit?
if(vertex == NULL){ vertex = iptr_v = (int *) malloc((*i1-*i0+1)*nc*sizeof(int)); }
See anything wrong with that statement? What happens if you are calling the function again (reusing the vertex buffer as intended)? What does iptr_v get set to? PROBLEM! It turns out that on my machine it keeps the old value, marching along past the end of the vertex buffer and corrupting other memory, which in my case was the file pointer. That’s right folks, the file pointer itself was corrupted. After half a day spent getting gdb to work in parallel I finally tracked this down.
Let this be a moral to you: C can be dangerous. Treat it like a lady.
In the continuing saga of learning how to cook, I took it upon myself to make this recipe since it looked good. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m inclined to take things literally when following directions that say “1 bunch of cilantro”. To me that sounds like “one whole mess of cilantro”, so when I asked the guy at the supermarket if the giant bundle of cilantro I was holding was “a bunch” (helpfully pointing at the recipe, mind you) I was perfectly willing to trust him when he said yes. Despite living near NIST, I have no predefined notions of how much this really means but let me tell you something mister produce section man: this giant pile of cilantro is an order of magnitude too much for this recipe. I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten what turned out to be about 5 cups of cilantro, but let me tell you it was quite an experience.
This reminds me of the time I made a recipe that called for 2 “cloves” of garlic. Not knowing what that meant, I proceeded to add two “bulbs” of garlic. That was also quite an experience.
A highly recommended video to watch.
For those of you who might not know, Michael Pollan wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and several other good books that I highly recommend.
Sorry I haven’t posted in a bit; I’ve been pretty busy traveling and getting settled in here in Chicago. I’ve posted a bunch of pictures to the gallery (see the link at right). I think all told it’s 8 galleries worth of stuff. More on the way, especially from Argonne which I only recently found the final word on where I can take pictures at. I also just got everything set back up so that I can transfer pictures off the camera and all that. Things have been hectic to say the least.
So far everything is going really well here in Chicago. Our first apartment ended up falling through. The landlord was extremely flaky, never returning calls and in general not following up or telling us anything. Jason got in and found that the place didn’t even have hot water or door locks yet. Needless to say we found other arrangements. The Internet is invaluable for this sort of thing. Within a few hours we were able to find another place better than the one we were going to rent, for the same amount of money.
Argonne is awesome. I’m having this experience a lot lately, but it’s a real growth experience for me. I spun my wheels quite a bit for the first two days, but as of day 3 I’m starting to catch on to things and figuring some stuff out. It’s going to be a challenge, but folks are very helpful and do what they can even if they are crazy busy. It’s a bit like drinking from a fire hose. Overall it seems like Argonne is a great little community.
Chicago pizza is the bomb. I’ve had Giordano’s so far, and I hope to complete a tour of duty of the Chicago pizza joints before I leave.
Well folks, it looks like I’m going to be back in IN on Monday the 12th sometime. I’ll get up early Sunday and make most of the drive, then finish the last leg on Monday morning. If anyone wants to hang out let me know; I don’t have anything in particular planned. I’ll be in town until probably the 25th, when I ship out to Chicago. I’d like to get in some good “hanging out time” before I head back to the working world.
Some friends of mine and I went to a Colorado Rockies baseball game the other day. Good times. It was my first time at a pro baseball game, so that was an interesting experience. We played the LA Dodgers, and unfortunately lost. They got 6 runs at the top of the first inning, but we caught up by the second. It wasn’t to last though.
Anyway, some pictures have been posted to the gallery. Continuing my tradition of including random pictures that just happened to be on the camera at the time, there are some other items in there as well. They include some weather we got on May 1st which was kind of wild.
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