Clocks and Roulette Wheels

I've studied a fair amount of math during my education. Engineers were required to take four math classes: two semesters of calculus, differential and integral; multivariate calculus; ordinary differential equations. A fifth course in partial differential equations was recommended but optional. The engineering courses reinforced and built on this base. The prevailing wisdom was that the engineering department taught the same stuff as the math department, but better. I guess we all liked it better when the engineering department presented the material because it came with a context that fixed the ideas in your head.

I took all those and kept going. I decided to sign up for complex variables and linear algebra, just because I liked math. There were also two grad classes that presented integral transforms, calculus of variations, differential geometry, and generalized tensors. The numerical methods that I studied followed the same track: linear algebra for solving large systems of equations and eigenvalues; numerical integration; evaluation of special functions.

I never took a formal course in statistics or probability. The last two graduate classes that I took were in the statistics department: analysis of variance and design of experiments. I was glad to have taken them, but it certainly didn't turn me into a statistician.

I recount all this because it's finally occurred to me that I've missed out on something important. When faced with quantum mechanics and the loss of determinism, Einstein said the God did not play dice. I can't claim to know the gaming habits of God, but I can say that probability and statistics imbue everything around us. They're stand-ins for ignorance, an expression of what we don't know or are uncertain about.

Classical physicists, like Newton, Laplace and Einstein, viewed the universe as a clockwork. Anything could be predicted, given enough information. This is ironic in light of the great service that Laplace rendered to Bayes' theorem by putting it on such a firm mathematical footing. Quantum mechanics killed this idea in the small; non-linearity did the deed in the large. It's all a roulette wheel. Does that mean the universe is really a big casino?

I became aware of two schools of thought in statistics: frequentists and Bayesians. I read hints about the food fight that has been going on between the camps for two centuries, but I didn't understand exactly what it was about - until I read "The Theory That Would Not Die" by Bertsch MyGrayne. The writing style was a bit repetitive, but the story was wonderful.

There were two bits that I especially liked. The first was a quote from Jerry Cornfield to his two daughters as he lay dying: "You spend your whole life practicing your humor for the times when you really need it."

The second was from a section about Jimmie Savage and Dennis Lindley. As the amount of data increases, subjectivists move into agreement, the way scientists come to a consensus as evidence accumulates: "That's the way science is done."

I recently saw "Doing Bayesian Data Analysis: A Tutorial with R and BUGS" by John Kruschke on Amazon. I was intrigued. I knew Bayes and R; what was this BUGS thing about? But now I know, thanks to "The Theory That Would Not Die": it stands for Bayesian Inference Using Gibbs Sampling. There's even an open source project that implements it as a framework. I hope to check it out in the coming months.

I'm planning to add a few items to my must-read list. Probability will be on the list. So will Kruschke's book.

"Boomerang"

It's an interesting time to be alive. I love to read, and I'm awash in opportunities and technologies to make that possible. I'm connected to the Internet 24x7. I picked up a Kindle this year and like it very much, although it leaves something to be desired for reading technical material. I'm reading the third edition ofPeter Norvig's "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" on the Kindle, but I find myself going back to the first edition because the figures don't read well and don't zoom in when the text is resized.

No matter how technology marches on, I still love holding a real book in my hand. Going to the library is still and will always be one of my favorite things to do.

I was out and about this morning when I decided to pull into the town library to see what new books were on the shelves. I have a lot to do this weekend, so kicking back with a book wasn't on the schedule.

I couldn't resist when I saw Michael Lewis's newest offering entitled "Boomerang". He had me at "boom".

Michael Lewis has become one of my favorite authors. I've written about how much I enjoyed his books "The Big Short" and "Liar's Poker". His experience on Wall Street selling bonds for Salomon Brothers gave him an insider's understanding of an industry that's driving our news. There are few stories that compare to seeing the world's financial system teetering on the brink of collapse.

That's not to take any credit away from Lewis's writing. I've only read the prologue, but he finds a way to make the people and events memorable and entertaining. What a great insight: "I think I'll travel to the countries that are on the brink to see why they went awry." He's acting as the proxy for the hedge fund managers betting against foreign countries that they've never visited. His voice is so clear, so uniquely his. It's the essence of great story telling. He manages to take an arcane, dry subject like finance and turn that straw into page-turning gold. I admire him so much for developing that distinctive style and zeroing in on his subject.

I've got a list of things to accomplish today, but I plan to spend a little time with Michael Lewis later on. I can't wait!

Operational At Last

My new computer is finally operational and on-line.

I've never seen a modular power supply before, so it wasn't a surprise when my best assembly efforts were for naught.

Will did his best to sort me out over a cell phone, sight unseen.

Steve and John tried to figure out what I'd done wrong by looking at photographs that I e-mailed, but the detail wasn't sufficient.

It took a breakfast with Matt and Karim to see what my problem was. I brought my non-functioning PC in the back of my car one Sunday, and the two of them opened it up and had at it when we were done eating. They quickly diagnosed where I'd gone wrong and gave me the key to sorting it out.

I had to order a couple more items: a fourth G-Skill DDR, to bring my total RAM to 8GB, and a 3.5" bay for my SSD so I could move it up in the case, right under the CD drive.

When I first powered it up, using the wireless keyboard that is attached to my old machine, I was helpless. No drivers were available for the wireless keyboard, so I picked up a wired keyboard for $19.

I fired it up this afternoon and installed the Windows 7 64-bit OS. After adding the drivers I was fully operational - except for my SSD. I can see it in the BIOS; I can even see it listed as a disk drive in my device manager. But Windows 7 only finds my hard drive, not the SSD. I have to sort that out. The hardware graphics acceleration is disabled as well; I think that's a BIOS setting.

But it's nice to finally have this machine on-line and operational. It took me a while, but I learned a lot. There's still a lot of work to do installing software and moving documents from my old machine.

But I have a great sense of satisfaction today.

My sincerest thanks to Will, Steve, John, Matt, and Karim for the inspiration, patience, and advice.

A Shock To The System

I received shocking news at home last night: a friend sent a note telling me that my roommate from college, Luis DePina, passed away from brain stem cancer yesterday. Born on 10-Aug-1957, he was just 54 years old.

I remember the first time I met Lou like it was yesterday. My parents brought me up to Storrs to move me into Colt House, an all-male dorm that was home to 60 young men, before the start of classes in Sep 1975. They helped to lug my few possessions up the stairs to the fourth floor, got me sorted out, and then left me to my own devices. I was reading on my newly-made bed when the door opened - and all light coming in from the hallway was blocked by the 6'4", 220 lbm man who stood in the doorway. He stuck out his hand, said "Hi, I'm Lou DePina", and proceeded to move in.

It helps to understand that I grew up in Greenwich, CT - as white bread, as homogeneous a place as there was. I had never been past the steel-decked bridge near Sikorsky Aircraft in Stratford, CT. I could have told you who the mayor of New York City was, but I didn't know who was the governor of Connecticut. I had gone to a small Catholic high school, with a graduating class of 125. There were two African-American students in my class during those four years. One of them left before graduation to transfer to Greenwich High School to play football. I didn't have a personal relationship with either of them.

So it was a big change to be exposed to somebody so different from myself. Lou was an engineering major too, but we couldn't have been more different. I was awkward, worried, excessively religious, and had trouble connecting with all these strange people who thought so differently from me. Lou was a gifted athlete - he had been recruited to play on the varsity baseball team, and could have played on the basketball team in Connecticut's pre-Big East days.

But most of all, he was a genius at making people like him.

He was immediately given the nickname "Rook", short for "Rookie", by the upperclassmen. He then proceeded to ride roughshod over everyone in every competitive venue - be it basketball, foosball, or frisbee golf in the hallway. He was elected president of the dorm. Everyone who lived there knew and liked him.

We would go out into the quad on nice days and throw a baseball back and forth. I wasn't a baseball player, but I was game. Lou was an outfielder with a terrific arm. You had to pay attention when you were throwing with Lou, because you could hear the ball whizzing through the air when it got close. If you didn't position the pocket of the glove correctly you'd get a stinger that you wouldn't forget quickly.

I don't know how Lou managed to play baseball and keep up with school in the spring. I remember him coming back to the dorm exhausted after practice in the afternoon. The irony was that he was throwing to warm-up one day when he took a ball in the eye. He was talking with a teammate, and his throwing partner didn't realize that Lou's head was turned when he let the ball go. That was the end of his baseball career at Connecticut.

I found out later that Lou wasn't pleased at first with his new roommate. He talked with others about switching up after the first semester, because I wasn't having much fun. But things started looking up during the spring after I learned how to drink alcohol. The drinking age in Connecticut was 18 at the time. I was of legal age in high school, but I wasn't a drinker. I maintained that stance after going to college. We used to get home-made pizza for dinner on Friday nights from time to time, which was accompanied by a keg of beer (try that in today's litigious atmosphere). A friend asked me if I wanted to play racquet ball at the fieldhouse one Friday afternoon. When we returned from the game the pizza was gone, the keg was tapped, and there was a card game getting started in the cafeteria. I sat down next to Lou and started to play. He kept refilling my cup so I couldn't count how many beers I had drunk. By the time the game was over I was under the influence for the first time. They piled me into a car and took me to a party at another dorm, where they proceeded to introduce me to every girl we met by saying "He's drunk for the first time in his life."

The spell was broken. Lou taught me how to relax, to stop worrying so much, to enjoy myself, and to be interested in other people. If I took some of those lessons too far for a time and had to correct course, that was my fault. The lessons were well-needed and much appreciated.

We parted on the best of terms after three years of living together because both of us accepted positions as resident assistants in the dorms. It meant living alone in a single room. Both of us were busy with school and other things. Lou switched out of the college of engineering, so we didn't have classes together. We didn't see as much of each other on campus after that. I graduated in December and started working; Lou was still pursuing his degree. We didn't see each other after that. There was no e-mail, cell phones, Internet, or Facebook to help keep the connection alive.

I ran into him again at a Hershey Track and Field meet in New Britain years later. My oldest daughter was competing. The skies opened after we arrived, so everyone had to take refuge under the bleachers. There's where I saw Lou. He was director of recreation in Norwich. He had brought a group from the Y to the meet, including a young man with a beautiful, fluid sprinting style. (We stood to the side in between downpours and admired his form, with Lou critiquing it for me.) He told me that he was married and had a couple of young children in diapers. He had suffered an Achilles injury that stopped him from playing basketball, so he'd taken up golf as a substitute. It allowed him to continue to demonstrate his athletic prowess while doing what he did best - charming the people he played with. I wasn't surprised to hear that Lou was a central figure in Norwich politics.

It was the last time I saw him.

I'm sad to think that someone who was so important to me for those three years could have slipped away. It's a common thing, I suppose. As I've progressed through each phase of my life - high school, college, and a myriad of jobs in two disparate fields - I've had the pleasure of meeting lots of people that I loved spending time with. Lots of them are pleasant memories for me now. There are only so many hours in the day, so much emotion and energy that one can expend in maintaining relationships. Spouse, children, and family have to be the first priority.

But it doesn't diminish the affection I have for those people in the least.

There are three lessons here. First, relationships take energy and effort to keep up. You have to spend time in face-to-face contact. Sorry, Facebook. A long-distance electronic relationship is better than nothing, but it's a poor substitute for the immediacy of being there. Second, choose carefully. If it's not possible to hang onto every single person that you ever thought highly of, then you have to pick and choose. Let those people know that they're worth the effort. Write that e-mail, pick up the phone, and arrange contact. It can be breakfast, it can be a beer at a bar, it can be a stroll in the park. Just be there - early, late, and often. Don't let years go by and be left to wonder what the hell happened.

Third, and perhaps most important, is to not wait forever. Our time here is finite, and you don't know when it will end. If I've been waiting until my children were grown and settled to start picking up the thread with my old friend Lou, then I'm afraid that I waited too long. The opportunity is passed, never to come again. I hope I don't repeat that mistake.

Born To Run

I wrote earlier about my desire to learn to run again. It's gone fairly well. I have not pushed myself too hard in terms of mileage or frequency, but I'm happy to say that I've enjoyed it. I've been trying to feel a good pace (on the order of 8 minutes per mile) and avoid injury. It's been short, frequent repeats: half mile at a time on the road; quarter mile laps on a track.

My oldest daughter returned from a summer spent working in San Francisco. She had a pair of Vibram shoes and an autographed copy of Christopher McDougall's Born To Run. I asked her if I could read it.

I was hooked on the first page.

It's a riveting story, even if you're not interested in running. I recommend it to everyone. It begins with a visit to his doctor and a question: "Why does my foot hurt?" He's a middle aged runner, like me, trying to figure out why this activity is breaking his body down.

He learns about the Tarahumara, a Mexican Indian tribe that is legendary for their ultra-marathon prowess. It's a journey of discovery; he goes to the Copper Canyons to find them and learn their secrets.

That's a compelling beginning, but I think it was the way he wove other characters and places into the narrative that grabbed me. He introduced American runners and events. It all culminates with a race over rugged terrain between the Tarahumara and American challengers, including the author.

It's great stuff.

I loved the tie-in with evolution and biology. Homo sapiens is the ultimate marathon running species. Our bodies have evolved a unique combination of attributes that make us great runners (e.g. temperature regulation via sweating through the skin; Achilles tendon; a tendon to keep our heads from wobbling when we run; the capability to take multiple breaths per stride).

The day after I finished the book I went to the place where I swim to get a workout in before heading over to work. I noticed one of the fitness counselors had the book cover in the collage hanging on the wall that described his interests. I was astonished to see a newspaper clipping showing Christopher McDougall leading a group of barefoot runners in Bushnell Park last October!

I decided that I'd give barefoot running a try.

There's a small track upstairs from the pool. It's a mere 1/11th of a mile long, but it seemed like a safe place to try out barefoot running. I went up one day and ran two miles in bare feet. It felt strange but good.

The next days were difficult. My calves have not been worked like that in a long time, and the soles of my feet were on fire! But I was willing, even eager, to try it again.

My next effort was outside on a rubberized track at my local high school. It was far too much sensation for my poor feet, so I had to run on the grass instead. One visit turned into another. I ran again in bare feet tonight. It felt fine. I may begin to enjoy this.

I also picked up a copy of Ken Bob Saxon's Running Barefoot. I learned a lot reading it; I'm looking forward to putting it into practice. I was checking my cadence all afternoon. I wasn't able to make the 180+ per minute cadence, but I was consistently in the 160-180 range. I was easy, light, and smooth.

My latest goal is still in sight. The journey's been a good one so far.

A New Computer

I spent the afternoon assembling the hardware I bought three months ago. Why the delay? It was a near-fatal combination of being busy, ill, and a terrible procrastinator. But there was nothing on the schedule today, so I decided that it was time to tackle it.

It went far better than I thought it would. I would put it right up there with IKEA. The instructions were pretty good, and almost everything fit together nicely. I started just after one o'clock this afternoon, and all the pieces were assembled before four o'clock.

I was worried about the CPU and cooler, but they slid right into place.

It wasn't clear at first where the solid-state disk drive would go, but the case was as ready as promised.

Everything is in the case, ready to go. Here's a shot with the side panel removed:



I have a few questions I'd like to review with some friends who are more experienced than I am. But once I have those resolved it'll be time to power up, set up the BIOS, and install the OS and software.

It's going to be a terrific machine once it comes on line. I'll wonder why it took me so long to get around to it.

Thanks to Will, Steve, John, Karim, and Matt for their encouragement and inspiration.

Keynote

I'm going to speak at my next Toastmasters meeting on Thu. It's the sixth out of ten speeches required to earn the Advanced Communicator Bronze designation. I'm working out of a manual entitled "The Professional Speaker." The first assignment is to deliver a 15-20 keynote address. It's easily the longest speech I've ever been asked to give.

I'm looking forward to it.

Here's the text of the speech. I thought I'd post it here for the hell of it. Plus if I lose the text before I speak I can always come here and fetch it.

“The Professional Speaker”
Assignment 1: The Keynote Speech

Target organization: young professionals at the start of their career.

Mr. Toastmaster, fellow Toastmasters, and welcome guests:

Opening: One of the things that I love about working for a company like Travelers is seeing so many young people joining the firm. You see them walking through The Link, well-dressed, clutching a Travelers red umbrella like it’s a lost-and-found family heirloom. Eyes wide, ears open, frantically trying to remember the names in this maze of buildings so they’ll have a hope of appearing at their first meetings on time.

For some, this is their first job after earning a college degree. They’re walking with ten league boots: separating themselves from their parents, living on their own, paying bills, being adults. What a huge change! If we view life as a series of decades, each its own transition, this is the foundation for adulthood. This is when you start your career trajectory, think about marriage, and decide how you feel about children. It’s the basis for our entire society.

I remember my first day on the job very well, but my gray hair gives me away. It’s a distant memory: it’s been a long time since then. Let’s inject some humor into this keynote, shall we?

• There was no cable; no CNN or Fox or ESPN.
• There was no Internet; no Facebook or Twitter.
• There were no cell phones; no iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry.
• There was no e-mail.
• Computers were kept in a separate room, with its own air-conditioning under the floor, and shared by an entire department.
• Communicating with that computer meant some interactive terminals, but it also included punched paper cards.
• There was a vault in which vellum blueprints were stored for each component. Computer aided design and manufacturing was in its infancy.

Compared to today’s office, those early state-of-the-art facilities felt like a scene out of Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol.” More coal for the fire?

The scope and scale of technological change is breathtaking, but the human elements are unchanged. As I look back on my career, I thought about what I might have wanted to tell that younger version of myself. Here are a few nuggets of wisdom that I offer for your consideration.

Story 1: Figure out what’s important to you.

What’s your goal? Is it money? Climbing to the top of a corporate ladder? Being an effective individual contributor with deep technical knowledge? Whatever that goal is, spend some time figuring out what is important to you. You can’t reach a goal unless you know what it is and the steps you’ll need to execute to get there.

There is a price to pay for everything. Positions of high reward come with great responsibility. No one will ask about your child’s upcoming weekend activity when they send the limo to your house to whisk you off for a business trip.

Pausing on the advancement ladder has a price as well. Choosing to be an individual contributor might mean enduring the frustration of Cassandra: a prophetess whose advice was ignored when she told the Trojans to leave that wooden horse left by the Greeks outside the city gates.

Know what you want.

Be prepared for the consequences of every decision you make.

Make your own measure of success. Take an alternate path.

Story 2: Consider alternative paths to success.

I grew up in a different time. The prevailing wisdom went like this: “Get a job with a well-regarded company. Work your way up the ladder as high as you can, then retire on the terrific benefits they provided.” There was an implied contract: be loyal to a company, and they’d repay you in kind.

That contract is long gone. Companies require greater labor flexibility, so employees need to take on more of the burden of managing and directing their careers.

Alternative paths are on everyone’s radar now. Your choice depends on your appetite for risk. Perhaps you’d prefer being a contractor to full employee status. Or maybe you’d rather go all in and start your own business. This is not for the faint of heart. There are no off days; all the success or failure will be yours to own. You have to learn how to do the work and all the marketing, too. It’s a balancing act: keeping just enough work coming in to make it possible to build your brand and deliver without working every waking moment or waiting for the phone to ring.

Each of the past three decades has seen defining technologies and companies that drove them: personal computers and Microsoft in the 80s; the Internet and companies like Sun, Cisco, and Amazon in the 90s; search and Google at the start of this century; mobile and Apple going on right now. All these sea changes produce opportunities that a smart person can capitalize on.

Story 3: Keep an eye on market forces.

This leads to my next bit of advice: stay informed about your field and those that affect it. You don’t want to be caught unprepared when the world changes. No matter how comfortable and successful you might be, it pays to keep an eye on world events and extrapolate. Have you noticed that every person in this room is likely to have an iPhone, Android, or Blackberry mobile device? If you’re a software developer, and you aren’t writing for one of these mobile devices, you might be doing your future prospects a disservice.

I went to a wedding recently. One young man, whose first job out of school is sales for Microsoft, was rhapsodizing about a recent company meeting he attended. As excited as he was about hearing Steve Ballmer speak, I hope he’s kept his eye on the rise of the mobile computer and the cloud, and the decline of the desktop. His company may not figure out how to replace their desktop operating system and Office monopolies, but I’m sure he’ll have to soon.

Story 4: Keep learning.

The people who were most expert in those technologies that predominated at the start of my career had to change and learn new things or be pushed aside. The cruel truth is that this situation is only getting worse every day. The pace at which new information is added to the world is only increasing.

I resisted the temptation to insert a statistic stating how many terabytes of information are added to the Internet every day, translating it into Library of Congress equivalents to make it meaningful to the audience. But for ever page of fundamental new knowledge there are probably tens or hundreds of pages of celebrity gossip and other meaningless chaff to sift through. I’ll summarize by saying that there are 6.8 billion people living on earth today, and those who are actively adding their bricks to the wall of knowledge are doing it at a rate that is increasing exponentially.

Chances are good that all of us will have several careers during our working lives. I can speak from personal experience: I’ve had two, and I’m expecting that I might have a third act in me. I would not have had that second opportunity if I hadn’t kept learning.

Story 5: Enjoy what you do.

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” This quote is attributed to Confucius and others; it’s still just as true today. You’ll see a lot of stuff written about following your bliss, your passion. The implication is that you just might be able to turn doing something you love into that custom fit career. Whether it is photography or cooking or programming or speaking or something else, your chances of finding happiness pursuing a beloved activity are good. If you’re lucky, financial success and fame might even accompany it.

Story 6: Remember your co-workers.

I was laid off from the first job I got out of school. The economy was not very good at that time; in some ways it was worse off than it is now. Interest rates, inflation, oil prices, and unemployment were all high. A friend of mine recommended that I contact the Navy research lab in New London, CT. It was a department loaded with Ph.D.s; I saw no good reason why they would want a young man without a graduate degree.

Art Carlson, the man who headed Code 44, took pity on me and offered me a job. The two years that I spent there made all the difference in the world. I completed a Masters degree, learned a skill that I loved, and – most important of all – got my confidence back. I moved on from that job and managed to earn a Ph.D. of my own. After graduation I wrote a letter to Art Carlson to thank him for giving me that chance. I said that everything that happened to me subsequent to that interview was because of him.

I was told later by people I worked with that Art showed that letter to everyone he encountered at the lab. It might have meant as much to him as it did to me.

Work is a team sport. All of us are dependent on the good will of fellow contributors to meet our goals. Remember to be the kind of person that co-workers can recall with respect at minimum and fondness at best. You never know when you’ll encounter them again as you progress through your career.

Story 7: Don’t sell yourself short.

My father was an immigrant who came to America from Ireland. He didn’t want to be a farmer, so he left home to find economic opportunity in America. When he landed in New York and came to CT, he thought he’d died and gone to heaven. He worked at the utility company that maintained the water system in town. He was a backhoe operator; a union guy, through and through.

I grew up imbued with his work ethic. I worked for that water company during the summer between semesters in college, so I had a taste of what manual labor was like. I was grateful to study something that made brain work possible for me.

I’ve always loved the details of technical work, but I think I also absorbed the lesson that managing and directing work wasn’t for me. Underneath it all, I’m also a union guy, a laborer.

Part of me knows that this was a good thing, because I’m an emotional person with a thin skin.

But there’s another part of me that wonders why I never aspired to be the person who directed the activities of others. The people I’ve observed who have been in charge of things where I worked have been a mixed bag. A few have been inspirational, brilliant leaders, but when I think of the majority of them I can’t help but look back and wonder if I couldn’t have done at least as well.

The first step in becoming a leader is believing in your heart that you’re someone worth following; the second is persuading others that they ought to believe it, too. Work hard to have an idea of your own, a vision for how things could be, and then get to work persuading others that you’re right. Don’t hesitate to put yourself forward. You might surprise yourself.

Conclusion:

If I could choose one message that my younger self could have heard and taken to heart, I think it would have been the one about alternative paths to success. Oh, and maybe something like “Bill Gates will become the world’s richest man by writing a Quick Basic compiler and having the nerve to call IBM’s bluff over DOS” or “Page and Brin will make themselves the kings of search by solving an eigenvalue problem; you know what that is.”. All of us are limited by what we don’t know. People who prepare themselves well, are attuned to the opportunities that come along are the ones, and are bold enough to act on them are the ones who have the greatest career success.

If you’re one of those well-dressed, wide-eyed young people that I see walking through The Link, I hope that you’ll profit by taking my lessons that still apply to heart, that you are astute enough to spot the changes in the world that will invalidate some of my dogma, and that you derive as much pleasure from your life’s work as I have. Thank you.