You have earned the new puppy that's coming with us to the White House
Thank you to everyone who voted yesterday. I know at least three people who voted for the first time.
Results map below.
Bill Bottke is my Homeboy
It took several Ph.D's, including Bill Bottke, to solve the "Stats problem from Hell" -- how to create a synthetic sample of asteroids with a double power-law (or double-Pareto is you are a stats dork) distribution.
... the title of this post refers to DPS 2007 where they were giving away freebie nametags that could be programmed to display a scrolling message with red LED's... at one of the poster sessions someone from SwRI espied a graduate student from MIT who had programmed theirs to say, "Bill Bottke is my Homeboy"
... if you ARE that graduate student, e-mail us because we'd like to buy you a beer.
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My Electoral Map Prediction
Here is today's estimated electoral map from realclearpolitics.com
Below is what I think will happen tomorrow.... All states leaning toward McCain go to McCain. All solid Obama states go to Obama. McCain wins in Florida and Ohio, AZ, and MO. Obama wins the midwest and the Rust Belt, and Colorado goes to McCain (excepting of course Boulder county and the city of Denver).
The only "wavering" states I'm not sure about are MO (which, based on my read of the politics there has a large Obama base... the question is whether those folks can get off work to vote... )... and of course, Ohio and Florida.
Obama has GOT to pick up at least one of the big three: OH, FL or PA, to stay competitive, but it's not enough to win -- you have to have a decisive, lawyer-proof victory in these big battleground states.
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Sunday Dinner
Am making this
http://recipes.wikia.com/wiki/Beef_Pot_Roast_in_Sour_Cream_-_Oksesteg_I_Surflde
for dinner.
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Is this going to solve my stats problem?
I'm trying to find a way to mimic, using a smoothly varying continuous function, the behavior of a double-power-law. Double bonus points if this function is invertible, so we can easily simulate the distribution with a monte carlo appraoch.
The asteroid community deals with this all the time. Yet somehow I have had a tough time finding anything useful in the literature.
Maybe this will help:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2008.07.002 Postscript-- this doesn't solve the problem because the function isn't invertible. Rats. Maybe I have to numerically invert... Can that work??
Another post-script (11/6/08) -- None of the stuff in the published literature helped. It has taken me basically like one week to figure this out. It took about 6 independent derivations. Holy smokes. Today I finally got a version working without any "kludge" factors. The "Box of Wrong Math" in my office had a lot of sheets of paper added to it this week.
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Enceladus Rev 91 data
Phenomenal new Enceladus images...
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/target/Enceladus
this is my favorite.
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Understanding galaxies using principal component analysis
Cool science result I heard about today -- what does it mean??
A group of astronomers performed a principal component analysis on a dataset composed of six properties of galaxies including mass, luminosity, baryon density, age, etc., and found that all of the "power" in the distribution is in a single principal component.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature07366
It's like they have determined the "eigenproperties" of galaxies and there is only 1 or 2 "eigenvectors".
Of course the problem is that principal components don't tell you the *physical meaning* of the eigenvectors -- i.e., whether it's the ratio of baryon density to mass. So interpreting the results is dicey.
Also cool: Andrew West (SSP '94) is an author on the paper.
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going to see Norman Decibel
Heading out at 9 to see Norman Decibel:
http://www.myspace.com/normandecibel
("Fassion Prance" is the best of their 3 songs on-line)
They do experimental jazz. Their bass player is dating one of my friends at work. I like them because they are like a funky version of Phish or Leftover Salmon but with enough bass tones to soothe the ADD mind.
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Amy Birthday List
Can also be recyled for Xmas although it remains to be seen whether Xmas will occur or not...
Size 42 brown clogs:
http://www.buy-dr-martens.com/hababrwocl.html
Books:
Elementary dislocation theory
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195069005/
Panic in Level 4
http://www.amazon.com/Panic-Level-Cannibals-Viruses-Journeys/dp/1400064902/
DVD's to slowly decrease my IQ:
* "Heroes" seasons 1 & 2
Awesome Paper/Plastic Products from Snyder's superfoods
* 1-quart awesome ziplocs
* awesome tinfoil
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