(Now Playing): Blackalicious - Deception

My weakness at math has always been a thorn in my side. I have to steal math from other people, assuming they've done it right, and research just about every serious concept I want to use until I think I halfway understand it.

Higher maths are especially difficult. I just don't have a fundamental understanding of most of the concepts. This makes interpreting some physical theory very difficult firsthand.

I mention this because it's very difficult for me to think about concepts that I haven't grounded relatively far down to their constituent behaviors. I had to do some work today regarding clustering of vector information, and spent a good deal of time looking at low dimensionality representation of vector distributions, and how dimensionality affects absolute distance, and things like that.

This lead to various work on display theory, graph theory, things like that. I'm not sure there is an easy way to display that kind of information, but I have a more solid understanding of the kind of data I'm dealing with, anyway.

I also went and did the stairs in Santa Monica again today. The stairs are a set rising up a bluff near the ocean. It's a very very long set, I don't remember the exact number of individual steps, but the rise is quite lengthy.
Last week, I managed a pitiful 5 trips up and down, huffing and puffing. This week I'm up a bit, I managed 8, not without a few problems. We'll see how I feel about it tomorrow.

More Go fun. I'm registered on KGS now, which I've found to offer a good amount of competition. My rank is now properly reflected quite a bit lower, around 10k. Spending quite a bit of time over on Goproblems.com taking their timed ranked tests. Lots of fun.

Interesting mini conversation with Peter tonight. Peter is what I guess you would call a neo-Objectivist. He's not exactly 'atlas shrugged is the word of god' but he does think that she had a very serious point. Amusingly, it was sparked by my post below on truth and facts. Rationalists like facts, because they let you get things done. In a field like mine, where no one has ever done what you're trying to do before, you have a very big lack of metrics and boundaries to guide you. So you take hold of what facts you can, and try your very best to keep close to what you are pretty sure about. And most importantly, you dont' make it any harder than it has to be. Your personal feelings, intuitions, values, or guesses can't interfere when new information comes it. You have to keep moving.

I guess every one is really in that same boat, in the end. It just seems worse, since I'm used to being able to look up data on everything normally.