Summer Books

I read surprisingly little this summer, perhaps because the outdoors was too tempting with continuously mild weather.

The Cruelest Month ★★
The third volume in the Chief Inspector Gamache mystery series.  My tree hugger self was agitated that the Ginkgo tree was supposed to be in the same "family" as Ephedra genus, which produces Ephedra.  Yes, both of them are from China, but the Ginkgo has no living relatives.  Gah!  Aside from these botanical issues, it was a light, fun read, with the dual mystery of the murder and police politics.

The Wrinkle in Time Quintet ★★
A classic series of children's books that blend science fiction with a touch of religious mysticism.  It's been a while since I read them, and I had never finished the last two (Many Waters and An Acceptable Time).  Light, fun reads.

Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling ★★
A biography of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith.  I started this ages ago, but finally dug into it this summer.  Bushman balanced respect for faith with historical facts, often citing contemporary believers for their perspectives on events.  Not much was surprising, but it was nice to absorb the details.  I'd recommend it for folks outside Mormonism if they're interested in the origins of the church.

forever learning

Last week I was a leader for my church's summer girls' camp.  In addition to getting to know the girls better, I felt that I learned a few lessons myself.

As a leader, I needed to ask the girls to do lots of stuff, from cleaning latrines to going on hikes, practicing our skit to heading to dinner. There were times that I dealt out tough love and there were times that I was a softie.  It's a spectrum, of course, and each situation needed to be handled in its own particular way. I usually didn't give it much thought and just went with my gut.

Oblivious me: braiding clover
instead of paying attention.

It was reinforced—and it might be an obvious lesson to other people—that not only is every situation different, but every individual is unique as well.  I'm not just talking about people having a variety of personalities (I'm not that obtuse), but that every person has their own history of experiences and circumstances that shapes them. People might react differently due to physical or mental illness, or traumatic experiences that they have had in their lives.  These are obviously extreme examples, but even a relatively common situation, like a break-up with a boyfriend or bad grades in school, can cause a shift in a person's mind and attitude.

A difficult thing with teenagers is that they're starting to be affected by longer-term problems pretty consistently—it seems like they carry their emotions and memories for longer periods of time. Additionally, teenagers are mature enough to keep bigger secrets, and so leaders don't necessarily know what's going on in their lives behind-the-scenes. These things wouldn't be an issue for me if I wasn't expected to keep them on track in various ways. They aren't mature enough to take care of themselves and their responsibilities completely.

Even when I'm not coaxing people to do things, I often judge them without knowing their situation.  She's buying that for her kids?  Did he really just say that?  I know it's not right, but I try not to let it show.  I also try not to be judgmental in the first place, but not letting it show is the first step.  It's harder when you need to take action in conjunction with your judgements.  For guiding people to action, it's about finding the right set point between sympathetic and severe, and it's rarely in the same place twice, even for the same person.

I didn't make any horrific mistakes at camp, but I felt like I made lots of small ones. I can't imagine what it's like to be a parent. Thankfully, the girls were incredibly forgiving, and taught me to be a little bit better all around.

I don't need data

We got a mailer from T-mobile this month saying that our plan was going to be upgraded and giving us a broken link to info about the upgrade.  Very helpful.  NWC is also on the market for a new phone; he wants "anything without a big screen," a.k.a. not a smartphone.  Thus, I've been looking at cell provider websites lately and I've been really sad that there are basically no plans without data.

So far this month, I've talked for 12 minutes and used 8 text messages; NWC is beating me at 48 minutes and 46 text messages.  1000 minutes is the minimum we can get with T-mobile; it used to be 500, but all we really need is 200.  Our monthly bill for this pittance of use?  $73.13.  It's a complete rip off, but I haven't been able to find anything cheaper with the main providers.  Cell phone plans are increasingly including things that I don't want or need as part of their cheapest plans, raising their rates on the low-end products and forcing people into using smartphones.  You have to hunt for alternatives.

I'm seriously considering changing to Consumer Cellular, where our monthly bill would be reduced to $35 for 600 minutes and 1000 text messages.  There are other obscure phone plan providers, but theirs seems to be a good match for us.  I'm also amused that their target demographic is elderly and retired persons.  We won't get in-network benefits, but we weren't really using them anyway as we make our long calls via Google Hangouts.

Do you know anyone that uses a non-mainstream cellular provider?  How are they?

Daft for probabilistic graphical models

probabilistic graphical model rendered with Daft

Daft is python package used to render graphical models. Its renders are indeed lovely (see right), but the pipeline leaves something to be desired, and there's still a lot of functionality missing.

To try it out, I decided to draw one of the simplest PGMs possible: N points drawn from a mean μ.  It was frustrating to enter coordinates to place the nodes and plate boundaries. It would be preferable to specify which nodes the plates should surround, just as the edges specify which nodes they connect.  It would also be nice to not specify coordinates at all for the nodes, and instead have the system determine placement (but still allow manual override).

There are no options to control the alignment or scale of plate labels, and the concept of specifying an origin was a little strange, even if it makes sense.  The aspect ratio of the graphical model should be fit to the contents, and you should be able to set margins; the only time we should specify a size is when rendering.

While it seems promising, the learning curve is too steep for me.  I've entrenched myself in Inkscape, where it's easy for me to center things quickly.  Churning out the variant below took me about two minutes, whereas the Daft variant took closer to ten, and it still needs work.  That said, Daft does match fonts better with LaTex documents.  I could see it being powerful once you know how to handle its quirks.

probabilistic graphical model hand-drawn with Inkscape

having it all

What is "having it all"?  This is typically understood to mean being a women with children and a happy family life while also having a successful career.

Not only does this phrasing focus the life-balance discussion on privileged women (ignoring those struggling with multiple jobs, etc.), it also isolates women as distinct from men.  There are sacrifices no matter who you are and what choices you make, but we don't talk about men having it all or not.  As far as I can tell, no man or woman is perfect at everything.

We want each individual or family to be able to choose to balance their life or lives as they see fit.  We want them to be able to choose their family structure, domestic responsibilities, social obligations, career paths, and hobbies.  Just like we budget money between housing, food, clothing, and any number of things, each individual budgets their time and efforts.

Having it all is a useless metric, not to mention that it's incredibly ambiguous.  No matter your choice, using this terminology can appear as a judgement to those who allocate their time and efforts differently, which is basically everyone else.

not allergic to bees

While running this morning, I noticed that the wild raspberries were out, and I took a break to pick a few.  While rummaging in the bushes, I received my very first bee sting. When it happened, I felt pain in the skin over my achilles tendon, and looked down to see a striped insect flying toward my face.  I flailed like a child and took off running, four raspberries cradled in one hand.  After getting some distance behind me, I inspected my heel and removed the stinger and remnants of bee abdomen.

I received two wasp bites as a child, and was always afraid of being allergic to bee stings.  It hurt much more than I had anticipated, but the pain had mostly subsided by the time I returned home.  I was a little anxious, and N commented that for someone who likes bugs, I wasn't doing very well.  But once it seemed clear that I was having no allergic reaction, I became a bit giddy: I was never really afraid of being stung, but the potential allergic reaction.  Liberated from that fear, I may now begin a career in beekeeping.

life with bass

I've noticed that nowadays we mostly listen to music with terrible speakers.  Laptops aren't that great, and mobile devices are also pretty bad in that neither have a decent bass range.  Music has become background to life, and in the process it's lost some of its original artistry, both in terms of range of expression and in terms of how we treat it. It's more like food now than like visual art hung on a wall.

I usually don't like to listen to music while I work since I find it distracting, but there are certain more mundane tasks that it helps speed along.  I was working from home today and hooked up music to our little Bose speaker, and songs that had just played idly before suddenly commanded my attention with their richness.

Even with quality over-ear headphones, the sound just isn't the same for me—it feels restricted.  And when I do use headphones, I almost always only use one ear at a time, switching to let each ear "breathe" in turn.

There seems to be something off about music consumption habits, but I can't put my finger on it.  Part of it is the isolation: we're regularly giving up the abundance of the physical world for the confines of digital one with its poor audio and tiny screens.  Even on subways with their abhorrent screeching, there's an incredible amount to be seen and heard.

Isolation aside, there's also the monster of indulgent consumption.  In stuffing ourselves with whatever we fancy at the moment, we whittle away our patience and attention to detail.  In some sense, we lose the ability to hear the bass in the first place.

I can't make overarching conclusions about what we as a society should do, or if this should even be viewed as a problem.  For me personally, however, I don't like being surprised by the bass in a familiar song.

All this talk of bass makes me want to squirrel up in a basement coffee shop with a live jazz band.

blogiversary!

Today, it's been six years since I started blogging.  To celebrate, I decided to do some text analysis of the 455 posts I've published here, prior to this one.  In curating the corpus, I learned that I write words like totally and amazing far too much.  Moving past my bad mannerisms, there's some fun stuff to see.

I ran the topic model LDA with 50 topics.  It captured the things I like to do: gardening, cooking, and travel. (I'm showing the top 10 terms associated with each topic, and top 5 documents.)

topic 008 chocolate butter egg cup add cream sugar mixture potato lime
two tarts
potato shallot souffle
Nearly Rotten Apples
chocolate festival!
chocolate cake for two

topic 037 seeds plants garden seed tomatoes tomato plant garlic planted plot
starting my heirloom garden
the hard way
So it begins...
frost vs. freeze
bring out yer dead

topic 048 car trip beach drive night friends road visited nwc park
East Coast Australia
up for air: a beautiful, but messy, life
Adventures in Israel, the Epic Saga, Chapter IV - By Day and by Night
concussion!
Come, come, ye students!


It also found some things that I geek out about: software design, books, and teaching.

topic 009 computer password system name history users physical person book month accounts - what's the point? designing everyday things and computer interactions What should computers be able to do? unplug retina displays and serif fonts

topic 012 books book digital library kindle true screen already order libraries
paper and pixels
the Birth Order Book
fiction or nonfiction?
minimally problematic
Kindle review

topic 046 kids science school computer does mean taught put true teach
incorporating computer science into K-12 curriculums
welcome to the system
sorting concept game
switching places
the things we don't clean (little moment of compulsion #5)


And, unsurprisingly, it found the things about which I blather extensively: gender and sexuality, religion, mormon feminism, and morality in general.

topic 039 gender school roles boys girls children grad changed turn transgender
don't compete with the boys
transgenderism
redefining ambition
a blast from the past
gender identity in young children

topic 034 god atonement christ believe belief post faith negative self comfortable
Answering the Temple Recommend Interview Questions
inner light
just on belief (a follow up)
The Atonement
knowledge vs. belief

topic 035 women church priesthood mother holy gender father roles ghost heavenly
General Conference Sentence Generator
teaching young women
Boys and Girls and God
seeing change, or fruit and dirt
The Holy Ghost and Heavenly Mother

topic 047 marriage morality laws society child believe different parents moral gay
on the mercuriality of moral caliber in our beloved republic
forgiving vs. condoning
morality in a governed society, emotional premises, and same-sex marriage
on belief and expressing ideas
can't touch this


Because we have the time aspect, I was tempted to run Sean Gerrish's dynamic topics + influence model to see how topics shifted over time and what posts were prescient of change, but I was too lazy.

We can still, however, track page views over time (Blogger messes up the x-axis labels; it really starts at June 2008) and the number of post over time.

Other tidbits:

• my most popular post is The Holy Ghost and Heavenly Mother
• my cs webpage refers the most traffic
• I have 145 unpublished drafts, ranging from short notes to fully-fledged posts. Some of these I'm still working on, but others I've decided not to publish, but don't want to delete.
• To date, I've earned $4.13 via Amazon ads.  More on my ad policy here.