I want sooooooooooooooocks!
Actually, I don’t want them…this time I need them; all the pairs I currently have are hella holey.
Here are my current faves on Sock Dreams. They have some really awesome ones out right now, so in case you’re as into socks as I am, get over there and get yo’ free (and super fast) shipping!
Toe-Tal Recall (holy hell these are badass)
Color Blocks (are these “Claudia socks” or what?)
Have a survey. Hell, have three surveys. (Spoiler: it’s just one survey.)
What is your zodiac sign?
Aquarius!
What is your favorite color?
Orange!
What’s your lucky number?
I don’t know if I have a particularly lucky number, but I tend to have a rather high occurrence of double and sometimes triple repeat numbers in my life—things like 22, 88, 111, etc.
What talents do you have?
Making up songs on the fly, getting R to do what I want it to do, being annoying.
Are you psychic in any way?
Nopers. Though my 2010 NaNo about Google had some freakishly accurate predictions in it.
Favorite song?
I don’t know if I have a favorite favorite song anymore. The one currently topping the playcounts is Jealous (I Ain’t With It) by Chromeo. Doin’ It Right is still my jam, though.
How many pillows do you sleep with?
Two. But half the time the one on the bottom ends up on the floor. Not quite sure how I manage that.
What position do you usually sleep in?
I usually go to sleep on my side but wake up on my back/on the floor/burritoed in the sheet.
Have you ever tried archery?
MARK NUTT!!!!!!!
(Yes, we had to for junior high P.E.)
What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sleep?
Long enough where counting the hours didn’t even matter.
Do you have any scars?
Many, many scars.
Have you ever had a secret admirer?
OMG STORY TIME okay so one Valentine’s day in high school we were all in the common area milling around in between classes. All of a sudden I see this pack of those chalky candy hearts come flying towards my head. I duck ‘cause I figure they’re for someone else, but then one of my friends picks them up, looks at them, and gives them to me. They have my name written on them (I was the only Claudia at our high school) and they say they’re from “Nekko Nikky.” I never found out who that was.
tl;dr: probably not.
Can you do any other accents other than your own?
It’s not an accent per se, but I can laugh/talk like Barney Rubble (don’t ask how I figured that out). I can also sound like that Russian space station guy from Armageddon. And the turrets from Portal.
Are you a good judge of character?
HA, no. Clearly I am not.
Can you curl your tongue?
Yup.
Are you a clean or messy person?
Everything is either immaculate or tornado aftermath-level messy. No in between.
How long does it take for you to get ready?
Like, get ready to leave in the morning? 15 minutes maybe.
Do you have much of an ego?
BAH.
Do you talk to yourself?
There’s not many other people who talk to me, so yeah.
Do you sing to yourself?
Bitch, I sing out loud.
Can you name all 50 states of America?
LET’S SEE IF I CAN!
Alaska, Arizona, Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, South Carolina, North Dakota, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Massachusetts, Maryland, Arkansas, Michigan, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota!
I think that’s all of them. Can I do the provinces/territories too?
British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland & Labrador, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Northwest Territories, Yukon, Nunavut!
Have you ever been scuba diving?
Nope.
What makes you nervous?
Almost everything.
Do you correct people when they make mistakes?
Depends on the person, mistake, and how much the mistake matters.
Are you ticklish?
Don’t touch me.
Have you ever been in a position of authority?
I was a stats lecturer! Sometimes they called me professor. It was awesome. I miss it.
How many piercings do you have?
Four.
Can you roll your Rs?
Yup.
How fast can you type?
In the range of 110 WPM.
What are you allergic to?
One of the trees in the UI arboretum (not sure which one; whichever was closest to our back yard when we lived up that way). Asthmacort, an asthma medication I was (very briefly) on because I had super bad pleurisy and I couldn’t breathe. They took me off of it once they realized it made it HARDER FOR ME TO BREATHE.
Do you keep a journal?
Does my blog count?
Do you like your age?
Not really. 26 is pretty meaningless. 25 is the square of 5 and 27 is the cube of 3, but 26 is like the fart of numbers.
What makes you angry?
Don’t even get me started! I’m good at rage.
Were your ancestors royalty?
Hahaha, oh yeah, totally.
Canadian Mall – Installment 17: Sunridge Mall (Peripheral Stores)
I reiterate from my Market Mall post two weeks ago: Calgary is NOT flat.
Today I took a super roundabout route and went east to Sunridge Mall. Okay, I actually didn’t go in the mall. By the time I got there I had absolutely no desire to deal with crowds of people, so I just hung out in/around the peripheral stores instead. So I shall review them!
Mileage from home to mall (one way):
Pros:
- A massive Real Canadian Superstore. Even bigger than the one on Marine Drive in Vancouver.
- A Real Canadian Liquorstore (I am not even kidding, that’s what they’re called)
- BULK BAAAAAAAAAAARN!
- A huge Value Village, which is like Goodwill on crack.
Cons:
- Calgary! Why u no have consistent sidewalks on your main avenues?
- Value Village prices are like Goodwill prices + $5. But a pack of off-brand shredded cheese at WalMart is like $8, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
- The Bulk Barn is a tiny little thing. Plus it was closed by the time I got there.
Plotting
Aalskdfsdlhfgdsgh, this is super cool.
Today in probability we were talking about the binary expansion of decimal fractions—in particular, those in the interval [0,1).
Q: WTF is the binary expansion of a decimal fraction?
A: If you know about binary in general, you know that to convert a decimal number like 350 to binary, you have to convert it to 0’s and 1’s based on a base-2 system (20, 21, 22, 23, 24, …). So 350 = 28 + (0*27) + 26 + (0*25) + 24 + 23 + 22 + 21 + (0*20) = 101011110 (1’s for all the “used” 2k’s and 0’s for all the “unused” 2k’s).
It’s the same thing for fractions, except now the 2k’s are 2-k‘s: 1/21, 1/22, 1/23, …).
So let’s take 5/8 as an example fraction we wish to convert to binary. 5/8 = 1/21 + (0*1/22) + 1/23, so in binary, 5/8 = 101. Easy!*
So we used this idea of binary expansion to talk about the Strong Law of Large Numbers for the continuous case (rather than the discrete case, which we’d talked about last week), but then we did the following:
where x = 0.x1 x2 x3 x4… is the unique binary expansion of x containing an infinite number of zeros.
Dr. Chen asked us to, as an exercise, plot γ1(x), γ2(x), and γ3(x) for all x in [0,1). That is, plot what the first, second, and third binary values look like (using the indicator function above) for all decimal fractions in [0,1).
We could do this by hand (it wasn’t something we had to turn in), but I’m obsessive and weird, so I decided to write some R code to do it for me (and to confirm what I got by hand)!
Code:
x = seq(0, 1, by = .0001)
x = sort(x)
n = length(x)
y = matrix(NaN, n)
z = matrix(NaN, n)
bi = matrix(NaN, n, nrow=n, ncol=3)
for (i in 1:n) {
pos1 = trunc(x[i]*2)
if (pos1 == 0) {
bi[i,1] = 1
y[i] = x[i]*2
}
else if (pos1 == 1) {
bi[i,1] = -1
y[i] = -1*(1-(x[i]*2))
}
pos2 = trunc(y[i]*2)
if (pos2 == 0) {
bi[i,2] = 1
z[i] = y[i]*2
}
else if (pos2 == 1) {
bi[i,2] = -1
z[i] = -1*(1-(y[i]*2))
}
pos3 = trunc(z[i]*2)
if (pos3 == 0) {
bi[i,3] = 1
}
else if (pos3 == 1) {
bi[i,3] = -1
}
}
bin = cbind(x,bi)
bin = as.matrix(bin)
plot(bin[,1],bin[,2], type = 'p', col = 'black', lwd = 7,
ylim = c(-1, 1), xlim = c(0, 1), xlab = "Value",
ylab = "Indicator Value",
main = "Indicator Value vs. Value on [0,1) Interval")
lines(bin[,1],bin[,3], type='p', lwd = 4, col='green')
lines(bin[,1],bin[,4], type='p', lwd = .25, col='red')
Results:
(black is 1/2, green is 1/4, red is 1/8)
I tried to make the plot readable so that you could see the overlaps. Not sure if it works.
Makes sense, though. Until you get to ½, you can’t have a 1 in that first expansion place, since 1 represents the value 1/21. Once you get past ½, you need that 1 in the first expansion place. Same things with 1/22 and 1/23.
SUPER COOL!
(I love R.)
*Note that this binary expression is not unique. All the work we did in class was done under the assumption that we were using the expressions that had an infinite number of zeroes rather than an infinite number of ones.
Annabelle (not the movie)
It’s my kitty’s birthday today!
Since she’s all the way back in Moscow and I miss her, I shall spam you with photos. ‘Cause why not.
Um…can we call this the October List?
Did you know Bill Pullman has anosmia? I didn’t!
Anyway.
I have nothing interesting to say (do I ever?) so this post is going to be just a bunch of random crapola.
- Here’s an awesome list of some of the vault backstories in Fallout 3. Vault 106 legit creeped me out when I went in there the first time.
- I was going through the old photos on my camera and I found this picture of a pinecone smoking a cigarette.
Bad pinecone!
- The news is so snarky here. Prime Minister Stephen Harper was not planning on attending that Climate Change Summit held a week or so ago. A day or so after I was watching the news and the little ticker said something like, “President Obama spoke at the Climate Change Summit for all concerned Americans…and apparently had to for all concerned Canadians as well.” Also, this:
- I’m watching Spaceballs. Because Spaceballs.
- A handy-dandy Wiki guide of Greek letters used in math, science, and engineering.
- I don’t know if I’ve ever posted this on here, but it’s definitely my favorite little clip of the AH boys “working.”
YAY!
Eigenblogger 
