Saturday, December 05, 2009

"Instead of attempting to use direct numerical integration techniques, stochastic sampling techniques or Monte Carlo integration is an alternative. As mentioned, the key idea embedded in the MC approach is to represent the required distribution as a set of random samples rather than a specific analytic function (e.g., Gaussian). As the number of samples becomes large, they provide an equivalent (empirical) representation of the distribution enabling moments to be estimated directly (inference)."

Bayesian Signal Processing, James V. Candy, 2009

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

"Walk a little slower, daddy.", said a child so small. "I'm following in your footsteps and I don't want to fall."

"Sometimes your steps are very fast, sometimes they are hard to see; so walk a little slower, daddy, for you are leading me."

"Someday when I am all grown up, you're what I want to be; then I will have a little child who'll want to follow me."

"And I would want to lead just right and know that I was true; so, walk a little slower daddy, for I must follow you."

Saturday, September 05, 2009

"But they that will be rich, fall into temptation, and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil."

I Timothy, 6

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

"There can be no joy in living without joy in work."

St. Thomas Aquinas

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

"The expanded chest, full-formed limbs, and grave countenance of this warrior, would denote that he had reached the vigour of his days, though no symptoms of decay appeard to have yet weakened his manhood."

"The frame of the white man, judging by such parts as were not concealed by his clothes, was like that of one who had known hardships and exertion from his earliest youth. His person, though muscular, was rather attenuated than full; but every nerve and muscle appeared strung and indurated, by unremitted exposure and toil."


The Last of the Mochicans - James Fenimore Cooper

Friday, July 10, 2009

Ahab turned.

"Starbuck!"

"Sir."

"Oh, Starbuck! It is a mild, mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day - very much such a sweetness as this - I struck my first whale - a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty- forty - forty year ago! - ago! Forty year of continual whaling! forty year of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make was on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, wall-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! - when I think of all this; only half-suspected, no so keenly known to me before - and how for forty year I have fed upon dry salted fare - fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul! - when the porrest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts - away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving buy one dent in my marriage pillow - wife? wife? - rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey - more a demon than a man! - aye, aye! what a forty years' fool - fool - old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, bruch this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, starggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God! - crack my heart! - stave my brain! - mockery - mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into the sea or sky; bettern than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board! - lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby-Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!"


...

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

'Cause you never can tell
What goes on down below!
This pool might be bigger
Than you or I know!


McElligot's Pool

Saturday, May 30, 2009

So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life's
a Great Balancing Act.

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 1/4 percent gauranteed.)

Kid, You'll Move Mountians!


Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Monday, May 11, 2009

"Then there is the man who drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of six inches."

W.I.E. Gates


"All models are wrong but some are useful."

G. E. P. Box, 1979, Page 201.


Sunday, May 03, 2009

"One of the things you learn in engineering is to be rigorous. If you build a bridge that falls down on a windy day, there's going to be hell to pay. Financial markets are not like that; they are very noisey. It's hard to tell who's skillful and who's just lucky. And a lot of analyses are done in extremely haphazard, primitive ways, but the investing public doesn't know any better."

Dan diBartolomeo - Wired, March 2009

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Monday, March 16, 2009

Command + Tilde - Switch between open windows in Firefox.
Command + Tab - Switch between tabs in a given window in Firefox.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Rebuilding my Macbook...  It is truely freshing to rediscover software I've stashed away in the past.

  “An expert is someone who, over many years, manages to remain confident enough to keep trying and humble enough to keep learning.”