Week of events

I haven't written recently partially due to my extensive travels and hectic schedule. NC was good, I met a lot of nice people and the experience as a whole was enjoyable. The conference itself was sortof a disappointment. Not that anything was wrong with the conference, it was just that I was expecting more talk on sequential monte carlo method techniques but it was more on computer design of experiments.

Also, when I arrived I looked on the schedule and realized that I was listed as a poster presentation. So during the first couple of hours of the conference, I was on my laptop creating slides to put on a poster and planning to give a brief talk to a room full of statisticians! I winged it pretty successfully and got positive feedback about my work.

The research triangle in NC is an interesting place. There are no stores anywhere around and it definitely has the feel of a place in which you can spend time thinking deeply about many things. I found my short stay there very enjoyable, but I do believe I would become extremely bored there during an extended stay. At one point in my life, I probably would have enjoyed this seclusion more, but I have grown to enjoy the interaction of people and business of life outside of work.

I mistakenly booked my flight for the am instead of the pm which meant that I missed the last day of the conference which was friday. It was too expensive to change my ticket and I actually didn't mind once I realize the talks were not going to be very interesting to me. In fact, I spent most of the conference talk time just working on my laptop and running simulations for my thesis.

I discovered a bug in my many lines of code today. One that was very detrimental to my program and that I had overlooked several time due to it's subtle nature. The bug was so subtle that it was able to mask it self well when I ran my program in simple situation so that everything worked perfectly. It was only when I added "jumps" ty my model, did the but switch into effect.

Most of the problems that I run into actually have nothing to do with the theory I'm thinking being wrong, but rather the limiting power of the computer. For example, the computer might say I am dividing something by zero, which theoretically cant be zero but is so small the computer just says that it is.

Anyways this bug has moved me back into the direction of solving the problem that I had only recently concluded couldnt be solved. That conclusion would have been correct had I not found this bug. I will have to run more tests to be sure again.

This week my department celebrated it's 50 year anniversary. I got to meet up with several of my old colleague that have graduated already and the event was very nice. It's almost like a second family meeting when a group of statisticians are in a room together, there's a bond of jargon, and common purpose. The take raw data which can be very ugly and worthless and make something meaningful, powerful, and beautiful at times.

I missed the entire second day of events as I have been working intently to solve this problem in my office. I am setting a mental clock of two week for this problem; if it is not solved by then I will just give it up.