I had to finish off a test last night for my class. It went okay. Some of my classifiers performed shittily. I don't know if that's okay or if it's my fault. I think I was mildly clever at some point, though. This is not the clever bit: one of the problems was classifying a bunch of the Federalist papers whose authorship was disputed. We already had the data distilled, we didn't go from the texts themselves. I used a k-nearest neighbors thing because I didn't want to have to think about SVMs - namely, would I use a non-linear kernel? Nope, not thinking about it. The other problems called for using PSVMs, the teacher's particular area of expertise, rather than SVMs, and I presume they were supposed to be linear, which makes things easier. The one big advantage of PSVMs is that they are lightning fast. SVMs, however, can be slow, which is disconcerting when you have a short period of time to turn in your midterm.

Larry Wasserman hath a blog and it is awesome.

I skipped a couple days of gym because I had a cold and because I had to do this test. Now I have to skip tomorrow because the high is supposed to be 100 degrees (38 C for you Yerpians), which is not good for effective training. Or survival.

Because I was up late last night, I don't have much of a "give-a-shit" right now.

Honestly, this global warming stuff is tough. We - that is, oil companies and sovereign governments - have the equivalent of 2795 gigatons of carbon emissions in reserves and can only burn 585 gigatons of it before there's a global calamity. The difference is on their balance sheets and is worth $20 trillion. It's hard to argue against $20 trillion. And reserves are increasing, still, what with new technologies being able to extract more oil from previously theoretical sources.

Guinea pigs as figure of speech: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/06/human_guinea_pigs_and_the_history_of_the_iconic_lab_animal_.html People don't use them anymore, but a couple famous people did and GB Shaw railed about it. Scandinavians, however, use rabbits instead of guinea pigs in their figures of speech.

Jon Huntsman, a man I have always found interesting, has apparently joined a liberalist think tank. http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/06/22/jon_huntsman_update_he_lands_a_job_at_a_liberal_think_tank_.html This, of course, means that he is going to be completely persona au gratin politically.

These information strategy interviews at work are pretty interesting.

Seriously, though: Owen Meany.