Partial derivatives

I'm currently in San Diego at the KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) conference.  I was reading a conference paper that made use of a technique called "stochastic gradient descent", and although I'm familiar with it at a high level, I decided that I wanted to understand all of the underlying mathematics.

It turns out that part of the process involves calculating partial derivatives, and it turns out that I never learned what partial derivatives are, because I stopped taking math after second-semester calculus in college freshman year, and afterwards managed to ignore any equations that had partial derivatives in them.  But this time, I decide to actually learn what partial derivatives are, and in a few minutes discovered that they are actually a relatively simple concept.

So it turns out that I avoided partial derivatives for twenty years, and then learned them in 15 minutes when I actually sat down to do it.

Rolling over!

Reiya has started to roll over from her back to her stomach!  In the past week she's started to roll over onto her her tummy all the time, especially when we're trying to change her diaper.  It's very exciting because she hasn't expressed much interest in crawling yet; she seems to want to go straight to cruising.

The time when she likes to roll the most is when she just wakes up.  She loves to roll all around the middle of the bed, to the point where she'll roll into one of us and keep rolling, even though this means she has to roll in place.  Eventually she'll roll towards the end of the bed, so we have to use our feet to keep her from rolling off.

A good reason to reschedule a meeting

An email that I got yesterday:

Sorry, I won't be able to make it, is it possible to change it to next Thursday or Friday?
I apologize for the incontinence, sorry!

Deep thoughts

The older I get, the more I combat global warming, because the more white hairs I have, the more sunlight is reflected back into space.

Cute thing that Anja said

Just thought I'd throw one out:

"Baba, you know I like to kid, so when I say something that is silly, you know I am kidding."

My Chinese is better than yours, and yours, and yours

I had a bit of an epiphany the other day to do with language competency.  I had been of the opinion that most of my Chinese colleagues' English is better than my Chinese, because their English vocabularies are larger than my Chinese vocabulary.  (This is because they learned thousands of English words by rote in middle school, high school, and college.)  But I went to lunch with a colleague of mine who is very reluctant to speak English unless he has to, and I realized that vocabulary size is not the primary determiner of language competency.  Instead, competency is a combination of vocabulary, grammar, accent, and perhaps most importantly, ability to communicate in real life.  And "ability to communicate", in turn, means a determination to speak, an ability to say things even if you don't know the "right" words, and a willingness to say "I don't understand what you just said".

By these criteria, my Chinese is actually better than many of my colleagues' English.  Sure, their foreign language vocabulary is larger than mine, but they do things like not understand what I say to them (in English), not admit it, and then reply in a way that reveals that they didn't understand.  This is an example of poor communication ability.  Other colleagues never speak to me in English because they know I speak Chinese.  I'm not complaining, because this is great for my Chinese.  But it indicates, on some level, a lack of determination to speak English.  I, on the other hand, am quite determined to speak Chinese.  The point is that even though their knowledge of English may be better than my knowledge of Chinese, their use of English is not as good as my use of Chinese.

From the point of view of actually communicating, it actually doesn't matter who speaks what language better than someone else, as long as everyone speaks the language being spoken well enough.  But the realization that my Chinese is better than many of my colleagues' English is a big confidence booster, and makes me even more determined to keep speaking it.

Just shut up about the heat already

Summer appears to be almost here, with temperatures starting to get into the 30's (high 80's/low 90's Fahrenheit) most days.  What is surprising me is how many people are already complaining about how hot it is.  Most of these people are Taiwanese people who have been living here their whole lives.  Haven't they lived through 20 or 40 or 60 Taiwan summers already?  Shouldn't they be used to, or at least resigned to, ridiculously hot and humid weather by now?  And don't they know that the weather is going to get five degrees hotter by the end of June?  If they're complaining now, what are they going to do then, scream in pain?