Mercury is so retrograde

I am writing this blog post from my smartphone. Retrograde is what Mercury is, like I have never seen. I am so pissed off I'm ready just to give up on the whole damn thing.

Notes to Reviewers I (Schools)

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These are the schools I plan to apply to so far.

I recognize that there is work associated with each additional school (even if you are just cutting and pasting which is what I would do).  So I have tried to minimize the list and I am also completely cool with the idea that if you consent to do any of these, that you may prefer to do one or two rather than the whole list.  You will let me know, etc. 

Additional notes:  1. The goal is to get a PhD but it really doesnt bother me to get a masters first because I have a lot to catch up on and because I think it lets people get a look at me first (which may help and it may hurt).  2. There is at least one foreign school on the list, I would like others, too.  Maybe Canada?  Maybe Europe?

Computer science: Stanford (because of Pat Hanrahan), Columbia (excellent computational biology), something in Israel (TBD).

CMU?  MIT?  Illinois?  Berkeley? You tell me.  NYU is too close to home.  It would be fine otherwise.

Public Policy: Rand Graduate Institute, something at Georgetown.

How you know things are really bad

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When you invest vast time in describing how much someone's feelings concern you and suggest some ways to change the relationship to better take into account their feelings and they respond "YOU DONT CARE ABOUT MY FEELINGS".  

Right or wrong, this is a subtle sign of a serious disconnect.

Helped A Homeless Person (maybe) Destroyed Two Relationships (maybe)

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I may have helped a homeless person today.  Maybe.  It was so clear that her current dilemma / nightmare was something she had caused.  She was totally able to get that and I think it makes things worse.   I think she will face a week of very challenging adversity and then be OK.  She needs an address to get her disability card, then get an ID and then find a place to live with her disability.  Its all doable, but its all challenging when you are homeless.

But this can be hard to do even when you are not homeless.  

And two other friends may have disavowed me.  This always makes me sad.  What is funny sad is that a friend thinks that I am all rage, and he cant take that.  I try to explain to him that rage and anger is my personality (along with a few other emotions) and he should just adjust to it, but he hates me for saying this because he thinks I dont acknowledge his feelings.  

What surprises me, and which I dont know how to process, is that this is something new?  Weird.  I have been like this for two decades.

There is also some interesting, insulting material about my medical issues, but its not something that can be discussed here.  I am such an idiot sometimes.

Let Me Explain Why You Are Going to Jail

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You are not going to jail just because you were part of the criminal organization of Donald Trump, although, admittedly, that should be enough.

You are going to jail because when Donald Trump became president, if he did become president, he did not grow into the job, but instead worked to be the most incompetent, the most dishonest, the most racist, the most idiotic fucking nutcase that we have ever had, in conjunction with nutcases like Ryan, Nunes, Grassley and McConnel.  Racist nutcases.  Assholes like the Koch Brothers and the Mercers.  Obvious criminals like Pruitt.  

You are going to jail because Trump put a rapist on the Supreme Court and a right wing nutty boy as well.

You are going to jail because people hate that fucking son of a bitch so much that they are even willing to enforce the law, something that we normally only do to poor people, not rich people.

That is why you are going to jail.

What the Constitution Means to Me

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It means that Dershowitz and Kavanaugh can borrow a private jet from one of their rich Wall Street friends and go on a rape party in Georgia secure in the knowledge that there will be no fair elections and no legal reprecusions, then fly back to Washington and laugh at videos of political refugees being teargassed and beaten.

Thats what the Constitution of the United States stands for today.

In Response To Comments From A Wonderful Friend

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What a nice person you are to care.
Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.
Listening to the sound track of Repo Man.
And somehow it seemed appropriate.
I am not likely to suddenly become a nice guy.
I appreciate your words, your experience and your help.
But I advise you to limit your expectations.
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?
Only one, but the lightbulb has to sincerely want to change.

When Some Moron Says Trump is Not Impeachable

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I dont have any pro-Trump friends any more, at least not on FB. I might have some friends in real life with whom I do not discuss politics who might be Trump supporters without my knowledge, and that is fine. But for those of you who have Trump supporters as friends, here is a nice concise response from the New Yorker about what to say when they say "What!? What has he done that impeachable!? Nothing!". When some idiot says that, here is at least one reply:


Over its first 20 months in office, this administration has produced what would have, heretofore, passed for a presidency-defining scandal on a near-daily basis. There is, of course, the president’s ongoing campaign to undermine the independence of federal law enforcement; his apparent use of U.S. military deployments as a campaign tool; ostensible violations of campaign-finance law; shameless profiteering off the presidency; gross violations of information-security protocols; use of mass child abuse as a tool for border enforcement; personal business relations with a Saudi government whose murder of an American resident he has enthusiastically apologized for; lackluster response to the hurricane crisis in Puerto Rico; and failure to so much as staff many key federal offices; among many, many other things. Meanwhile, just about every major Cabinet official has seemingly committed at least one major ethics offense.

From the New Yorker.


http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/house-democrats-trump-investigations-oversight-maxine-waters-moderates.html

Real Clear Politics, Republicans and Georgia

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According to Real Clear Politics (a Republican news aggregator), Stacey Abrams hurt Georgia business because of "sour grapes" after a lost election.

You see, this is why Republicans are evil.  There is no thought in their twisted little minds that Kemp did not win the election, that Kemp is a racist who stole the election.

Are the Republicans really that stupid?  No.  They are just lying to steal the money, always have been, always will.

Lock him up. Lock Kemp up, period.

Things Learned On the Road to GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks)

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Miscellaneous things learned working with Tensorflow/Keras and machine learning to generate images.

1. Use Containers to install Tensorflow

Containers are virtual machines - lite, and it is the least annoying way to install tensorflow on Linux/Centos 7.5.  

2. For CNNs, the GPU is many times faster.

Its true what they say, at least in part.  For convolution neural networks, the GPU speeds things up by at least an order of magnitude and possibly two.  With containers, you only need to install the Nvidia driver on the base machine / OS and use a different container.

3. It is not at all clear how the CNN relates to real convolutions as we know them from image processing, but it does seem as though using larger filters as we increase resolution avoids the problem of the picture subdividing into lots of little squares.