trying stuff with code
Continuing on my blogification of Peter Norvigs excellent talk, the question is, when to watch out for the flu, e.g. if you live in Denmark?
1) Go to www.google.com/trends/
2) Type in the word "influenza"
3) Select your geographical region (Denmark in my case)
4) See data up to year 2008, to avoid the graph being squished by the outbreak of A(H1N1) (which leads to unusually many people talking about the flu)
Turns out the answer is: watch out in October and February.
How to find out how long a year is on Earth by only analyzing text? This approach is lifted straight from an excellent and very inspiring talk by Peter Norvig.
1) Go to www.google.com/trends/
2) Type in the word "Icecream"
3) Measure the distance between the peaks (turns out that the average is exactly the length of a year)
I like graphs. There is a gallery of big ones over at nd.edu
Math in Genealogy is a great project (donate online). Sven Köhler from Potsdam, Germany has written a python script for visualizing the database, which I'm going to try.
First step is to clone the git repo:
$ git clone git@github.com:tzwenn/MathGenealogy.git |
His instructions are quite simple:
$ ./genealogy.py --search 38586 # 30 seconds $ ./genealogy.py --display 38586 > euler.dot # 0.1 seconds |
Next step is to install e.g. GraphViz, which is needed to visualize the dot file as a graph. Go to the download page for GraphViz, and follow instructions for your OS.
This should install the commandline tool also. Now you can visualize Leonard Euler's supervisor family tree (direct descendants) like this:
$ dot euler.dot -Tpng -o euler.png |
Looking at the database is easy. Every invocation of ./genealogy.py --search writes to a sqlite3 database file (genealogy.db).
$ sqlite3 genealogy.db |
This opens up a prompt. Have a look at the schema of the database like this:
sqlite> .schema |
And see what is inside the thesis table like this:
sqlite> select * from thesis; |
This stuff blows my mind.
Gregory Palamas (1296–135), spelled Γρηγόριος Παλαμάς in greek, was a monk on Mount Athos, a place I've visited with my father two times. It is a beautiful peninsula in northern Greece, scattered with old monasteries. Furthermore, only men have been allowed on the peninsula for around a thousand years.
Palamas eventually became the Archbishop of Thessaloniki, which is a city I incidentally happened to live in from 1995-1996. Below is a picture of Gregory Palamas, in the form of an icon.
In his early youth, my father (Georgios Kefaloukos) was also a monk on Mount Athos. There he learned the art of icon painting, and could have painted one of Palamas, although I don't think he did. Below is a picture of my father taken on Mount Athos.
When I first heard about the Math in Genealogy project, I was thrilled to find out that a Gregory Palamas, who lived long ago and was the Archbishop of Thessaloniki, apparently had a transitive relationship with people in science through an unbroken chain of mentoring (112861 "descendants" in total). I became curious, and wanted to find out which famous people he might be connected to.
While Palamas was the Archbishop of Thessaloniki he mentored Nilos Kabasilas (1298-1363), who later replaced him as Archbishop. Nilos in turn mentored Demetrios Kydones (1333-1397) and this lineage of mentoring continues in an unbroken line, through many scholars and countries, until we eventually arrive in Germany and at the famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauß in 1799.
Gauß himself mentored a few students, one of whom was Christian Ludwig Gerling (1788-1864), who went on to mentor Julius Plücker (1801-1868) and so forth. Again the chain of mentoring continues until we reach Marcos Vaz Salles, a Brazilian Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen, which is the city I was born in... And here comes the surprising part, for me at least, because Marcos is now mentoring me, together with Professor Martin Zachariasen!
An unbroken line of guys mentoring guys:
Daniel Grosu, an Associate Professor at Wayne State University has managed to track the mentor lineage through Palamas and even further back to John Mauropous (990-1092), who was a scholar at the University of Constantinople. He was a Byzantine Greek poet, hymnographer and author of letters and orations, living in the 11th century AD. Other scholars have since then tracked the lineage further back to Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, an astronomer living in 12th century Persia. And that is where the tale ends. For now.
Come join the DIKU APL channel on IRC:
I don't know why, but I really liked to read this post by Bill Gates. In an odd way it was heart warming :-)
Three Things I’ve Learned From Warren Buffett
Maybe I should start reading Bill Gates blog as well, just for more of that feel good vibe I got from reading the blog post. I not being sarcastic.
Everything is relative, especially the news value of things, so this is of course only news to me. Having been too busy with life to sit down and quietly read a post that is non-technical.
The question: Is it possible to be an entrepreneur while having small children and a wife? Here is what a bunch of entrepreneurs say about that:
| Entrepreneur | Verdict |
|---|---|
 Jason Roberts Pasadena |
He says yes. Has three kids aged 6, 4 and 2 and several startups behind him or in the works, including AppIgnite. |
 Jason Calacanis Los Angeles |
He says yes, but not if it is your first startup. Has one kid, perhaps aged 2. Is a well-known entrepreneur with several startups behind him. |
 Gini Dietrich |
She says no, has no children. Has at least two startups behind her. |
 Jessica Stillman |
She says yes, if you are willing to give up a certain bond with your kids (between the lines, is it worth it?). The post is actually more a resume of what other people have said, so open it and follow the links. |
Here is something fun to do on a sunny day. The idea is the following: A group of people collectively designing an algorithm by playing a game.
