Found a fitness provider with no pain, no sweat videos that
are still terribly useful. I don't listen to his instructions, but
use the translation to get what he is saying. works fine...👩🦳
Got frustrated today, trying to eaccess an article on Diabetes1 in today's
New York Times, without actually taking out a subscription; this where
the French dailies are more humane. One can, for a few Euros, read anything
one wants.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/health/diabetes-cure-stem-cells.html
Still, did find a review article on the research issue:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01842-x
* * *
Also been giving a listen to the odd rant by young Dr Bernard, a few years back.
He is sooo right: eat less and move more is what the obese would like to do,
if their situation were different!Duh!!
Back to the AI lecture. Installed a new module:
Going back to the AI lecture, got an introduction to the Support-Vector
Machine (SVM), a machine learning algorithm to classify data points or
find a linear solution. The idea is to arrive at a demarcation so that new data
can fit into one category or the other ie a classification, that can take the form
of a straight line or a higher dimensional form. Its adequacy is ensured by maximizing
the distance from individual data points.
No:
So how does one choose between approaches for a problem ?! By seeing
how poorly our model performs.
I did again: took a fall on the first snowy day. Thankfully,
my bum took the hit this time and not my arm as happened a few
years ago. Why does this happen to me: because, the first day of
snow on the ground is often a sub-zero day and there is ice under
those innocent-looking white sidewalks. If this happens later in the
season, it is not so bad because there is a build-up layer of salt and grit
under the snow. On the very first snowstorm, NOT.
I have lived in Canada long enough to be alerted to this, but I forget
and walk along thinking of this and that. I need to concentrate and take
little careful steps. That, or wait till the city snow crews have done their
work.👩🦳
* * *
Don't mean to troll Thanksgiving travellers, but Beijing to Shanghai
is roughly the distance between New York and Atlanta. And 500 Renminbi
comes to 78 USD!!
Started on the AI learning lecture. The lecturer points out that a human being has difficulty
visualizing linear relationships in more than 2 or three dimensions; not so for a computer.
It's all a series of tuples for the machine.This is going to be brutal!!!
Been following events in BC from The Guardian UK. One
needs to enter from the International edition.
For an overview of the situation in BC, found this in the Guardian UK:
* * *
Atmospheric river': the term was coined in the 1990s. These are narrow water
plumes in the upper atmosphere, that can be thousands of kilometers long but
only a few hundred wide. Quite normal, and how rains travel to the Western Coast
of America and Europe. But at this intensity, clearly part of the climate crisis.
Experts had warned the Fraser Valley in the BC interior woud be hit more often
and with greater severity. The rain there is 'orographic' ie over a mountain ridge...
(Wikipedia)
I'm off again this morning, to get vaccinated. It is my annual
flu shot. Not a big deal, but it does feel like I'm getting jabbed
a lot these days. To the point where I have been thinking I
should buy cardigan sweaters for all there medical events 👩🦰
As the news on Glasgow has been coming in, I have started to wonder
if the Covid-19 pandemic is a heated up world phenomenon. Higher
populations, more international travel, more people in cities, more tourists
and even mountain-climbing eco-tourists and so forth. The current resurgence
of Covid cases in Europe is being partially blamed on cold weather because
the virus stays in the air longer in colder temperatures. Equally important,
high levels of CO2 in indoor environments promote transmission: we are breathing
in each other's expelled CO2, and there needs to be ventilation standards in
schools, offices and workplaces.
I've been watching a lot of youtube lately. Thought I'd share some of my 'finds'
for today.
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* * *
* * *
There is skepticism about the Cop26 agreement. It's another 'let's meet again
and try to do better' agreement. On the plus side: coal is now part of the discussion.
There also remains frustration on the part of poorer and smaller countries - often the
most impacted by droughts, or storms and sea level rises - and at the same time with the
least power to affect outcomes. And dangers for many plant and animal species.
source: BBC
But then, on a very long time scale, Earth is getting slower and colder and life
on the planet will seek to adapt. Dizzying to contemplate...
Playing with the Bank of Canada inflation calculator this morning:
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/related/inflation-calculator/
* * *
Bloomberg US:
Moving on from yesterday, there are certain heuristic practuces that
make traversing a nodes and arcs image easier:
- Enforcing arc consistency atevery move will solve it - if there is a solution -
without backtracking
- Choosing to begin with the node with the largest number of domain elements.
- From domain elements, choosing the one with the fewest links...
The assignment from this lecture is kinda exciting to me, because I am such a huge
scrabble fan. It is generating a crossword puzzle from a given wordlist that the AI
will then solve.
From code:
https://github.com/dtemir/harvard-CS50AI/blob/master/crossword/generate.py
* * *
So how does the code create a crossword puzzle exemplar. We are given
structures (word length) and word lists to work with. the code enforces node consistency
(on a word) and arc consistency (on a pair) who must exhibit similar letters at required places.
Where that is impossible, backtrack tries agin with another word. The output is the
'solved' image.
Note that a variable is a word space in the puzzle: with two position values, across or down,
word length.
A neighbor is another variable in the puzzle.
An assignment is a word.
Sunday was municipal elections in Quebec. Of the 1108 municipalities in the
province, some 210 now have women mayors, including Montreal's Valerie Plante.
St-Jean sur Richelieu joined the list on this election.
Congratulations to all !
Been working through ther exam scheduling problem. One needs to
upgrade pip and install the constraint module for all the code:
* * *
An example of aconstraint satisfaction problem. Courses A to G need to be
schedules so that no one has two exams at the same time...
Sat through what simulated annealing as an optimizing approach
is. Boils down to moving to next neighbor but allowing moves that
are slightly less good, at the beginning, to eventually phase this
behavior ut and - hopefully - find the true optimum.
Moved on to linear programming. Turns out that python has an import
for that called spicy.optimize. Had to read up on np complete problems and
simplex optimization.
An np complete problem (nondeterministic polynomialtime complete) has to
run through all the possible combinations to find the optimal one. The brute-force
approach!! There are no sure shortcuts into it. What blouse looks best with what
shorts given white sneakers?? Take everything out and try it on!!
Linear programming problems describe a linear relationship with constraints.
How long should I run each machine given tat the first costs $50 per hour
and the second $80. My constraints: machine1 requires 5 workers per hour and machine2 2;
machine1 produces 10 units per hour and machine2 12. The optimize module tells me
machine1 1.5 hours; machine2, 6.25, See below:
Gaussian algebra solves it, but why spoil the fun??
* * *
I had a question from someone: why does the 90 units of production
have to be treated in the negative. Short answer, because it is an upper
bound ('limite supérieure') . I have an order for 90 chocolate cakes and I can
deliver more but not fewer. It has to be stated in this form to meet the condition...
My own take on this tragic occurence:
A young ineperienced crowd, weary ofpandemic restrictions.
A misunderstood notion of mosh pits (probably how Metal Bands came to
'loosen' to tight crowds at their own events.
...
It saddens me to see so many young people at COP26 - and
even older adults - decry the failiure of the current exercise and
accuse one and all of 'greenwashing'. I remember how panicked we
were at the time. renewables sounded very nice in principle, but in
practice were a nightmare because the energy they generated could not
be stored, or easily transported. And would be dependent on abundant
sunshine, not very likely here in Canada in the winter months.
Granted things do not seem to be changing overnight, but a petrol free future
is in the works. In 1972, the report of the Club of Rome the Limits to Growth
came out; to my mind, that was the year we became a planet, and not just the
citizens of this or that country. That was a momentous change.
Low and behold, today solar energy can be stored, at large scale, and transported,
across continents. And nobody worries about the neighbors...And we have electric
cars in the cities, with recharging points and Big Oil didn't sabotage anybody.
All my paper and plastic gets recycled - how were we ever going to get ordinary
citizens on board for that - and one can bicycle in Paris; how did that happen in
this most urban endroit.
The myriad changes I have lived through, computers and total connectedness not
the least of them, argue that we have not failed to adapt. We just need to take a moment
and feel a bit better about ourselves.
So the crunch at the moment is how to 'phase out' oil and gas. I am not concerned about
the calendar, but I do think we need goals about what to change next. Indeed it might
take quite a bit of oil and gas to build and maintain for the thechnologies of the future,
but with planning and good will, we can make it.
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/opinion/cop26-summit-glasgow-fossil-fuels-b1952244.html
Been running a few tests to see what we're talking about, here.
For simplicity, using only three houses and the requisite three hospitals.
Test1 is model perfect:
The second test, however, less so.
We're down to 7, but everyone is going to the same hospital!!!
Below, running again, but with random restart at 20.
Not too shabby: we got a four on run 4!
