Actual 5K Results

Yesterday was the 5K race. I successfully completed the race, although again I did not run the entire distance. Here I am pre-race with my number one fan, who had to be awakened before his usual time to make it to this race:
And here we are taking off right at the beginning of the race:
Jeff and Vinny were participating in the one mile fun run/walk, which started once the 5K participants were out of the way, so Jeff was able to take a few pictures of me running:
And here's the youngest race participant, making his way along the track:
Afterwards, there were some fun activities, like a little petting zoo with chickens, goats, sheep, and rabbits:
And an inflatable bouncy castle:

As for the race results, I finished the race in about 41 minutes. This is not as good as my time at work, which makes me suspect that the run at work was not actually 5K. But I did make a few beginner's mistakes that cost me some time.

I was pretty excited to be there and started off running too fast, which wore me out faster than I should have. Next time I will try to ignore all the people around me and know my slow and plodding pace.

Also, I got dehydrated. I didn't drink enough before the race because I was trying to have an empty bladder for the race (all that jostling makes me have to go and I don't have the best control anymore). Then, they were offering water and I probably should have taken some, but I thought I was almost done with the race so I declined. In reality, I was maybe about halfway through.

After we went home, I had a migraine, so I think I really was dehydrated. I still have not figured out how to balance the conflicting objectives of staying hydrated and not peeing in my pants. Any advice from you experts out there is greatly appreciated.

Reconnecting, Remembering, and Recoiling

So I decided to join Facebook over the weekend. Jeff had gotten an account and told me about all the old friends he had connected up with. I was curious about some folks myself, so I decided to join too.

It's really interesting to see what some of my old friends and former classmates are up to these days. One is a law professor in a neighboring state. Another is a doctor in another neighboring state. Actually there are several who have become medical doctors. No other computational scientists, as far as I know.

I also saw the names of some of my old nemeses in the friends lists of friends. (I was badly bullied in junior high, at the hands of a pack of very mean girls.) At first I panicked at the sight of their names. I would have thought, after twenty years, I would be over it, but after I calmed down and figured out what they were up to as best I could, I reveled in seeing that one was a humanities graduate student* and I harbored a secret desire that another one was living an absolutely miserable life in our hometown.

I was surprised that I thought such things about these people; after all, the last time I really saw any of them was more than half a lifetime ago. I basically never think about them in my daily life, my self-esteem is at a level I would consider healthy and stable, and I really don't feel any ill effects from those years, or so I believe. But I guess this shows that I do.

* There's nothing wrong with studying the humanities, but I do take a certain joy in knowing that my annual income is nearly an order of magnitude larger than hers. (Petty, much?)

Metrology-Themed Cake

As promised, I made a metrology-themed cake. Like I predicted, I didn't get a chance to make it until the weekend. Since the World Metrology Day theme this year was "Measurements in Commerce," it seemed most appropriate to make a pound cake.

Pound cakes are so named because originally they were made with a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs, and flour. Those proportions in a cake today would be considered too dry, so today's pound cakes are a little different than that. But one thing that makes a pound cake a pound cake is the fact that the only leavening in it is the air that's whipped into it while mixing it up.

Once I'd settled on that, I needed to pick a recipe. I searched online for pound cake recipes, and soon came across one that claimed to be Elvis Presley's Favorite Pound Cake. What's not to like about that? I had to make it!

Here are the main ingredients:

In case you can't tell, this recipe calls for two sticks of butter, seven eggs, and three cups each of flour and sugar. Also, it has you sift the cake flour three times, to maximize the fluffiness, I suppose.

I had a baking helper:

He helped to remove the wrappers from the butter and put the sticks of butter in the mixing bowl so that we could cream the butter and sugar:

and add the eggs, one at a time. This is the only "action shot" I was able to get of my assistant -- he's learned that when the camera comes out, it's time to say "cheese!!!"

Here's the final batter, after I'd beat it on medium-high speed for 5 minutes, just before I scraped it into the pan:

I used Pam spray for baking rather than buttering and flouring the pan, because it works way better than my best buttering and flouring. Here's the cake ready to go into the oven:
The cake goes into a cold oven (no preheating). Unfortunately my oven temperature is not very accurate or reliable, so my cake ended up getting a little overdone. I had to cut off the top, because it was burned.

And here is the final product, cooling on the rack:

I decided that it would be really delicious with fresh, local strawberries from the farmer's market (which are so much more flavorful than anything shipped thousands of miles to your grocery store):

and whipped cream, whipped in the mixing bowl I stuck in the freezer after I'd finished washing the remaining cake batter out of it:



I bet you wish you could try a piece:
It was really good! Elvis knew what he was talking about!

Happy Memorial Day!

Hope you're all having a great time this weekend. We spent most of the weekend with visitors -- my aunt and uncle from Urbana and their daughter. My cousin, their son, was in a rowing event that was held here in town, thus prompting them to finally make the trip down here nearly four years after we moved away.

On Friday afternoon, they got a fantastic tour of my workplace. I tagged along and saw a lot of stuff I hadn't known anything about before. After the official tour I took them into the machine room to touch the big supercomputer, up close and personal. (Don't worry, gubmint auditors, they touched only the cabinets!)

After the race on Saturday morning, we headed for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where we saw Elkmont and then took them up on Clingman's Dome. We returned home and had pizza out on the deck with my rowing cousin and his friend -- in the dark. But it was kind of like a candlelight dinner.

On Sunday morning, I fed them the obligatory pancake breakfast before they left to see the final race. They left from there for home, stopping at my Dad and Marvis' house for a break.

It was really good to see them. The thing I miss the most about Illinois is living 8 blocks away from them. Hopefully Tennessee is no longer quite so far to them, and they'll come again sooner!

Pre-5K 5K

Yesterday morning, as part of my workplace's "health month" festivities, they held a 5K event. I decided to participate as a preview for what it would be like to run in the 5K race next weekend.

I knew immediately upon arrival that I would be smart to start just in front of the walkers, but at the very back of the runners group. Soon after the run began, the packs formed: actual runners at the very front, followed by a long, empty distance; me (and my colleague/coach, who graciously ran at my pace), followed by a shorter empty distance; and the walkers bringing up the rear.

My fearless coach told me to run as far as I could, then she'd let me walk for a certain amount of time before running again, then walk a short time, run, etc. I managed to run the entire first mile of it. For the rest of the course, I would run until I was really tired, then tell her something like, "I'm going to stop running at that shadow," and she would try and talk me into running a little bit farther ("If you run to that crosswalk, that will make three minutes of running."). This usually worked. At one point there was a photographer, and as we approached him she told me to run so that he would have a good picture to take!

The thing I enjoyed the most about our run was that we had the run of the road because the police had blocked off the course. It was cool to be so important that the road was cleared and you didn't have to watch for cars.

I finished the 5K run in 33 minutes and 36 seconds, the fastest I've ever covered three miles under my own power and without the aid of simple machines. (I was going to say engineering, but the flat, paved surface of the road is engineered, and furthermore, I suspect that my shoes and sports bra would be considered engineered devices.) That means I did roughly an 11-minute mile, which is pretty darn amazing in my book!

Happy World Metrology Day!

Ever since I found out about World Metrology Day, it has been my favorite math-related holiday. (As cool as Pi Day is, it's just not as applied as World Metrology Day, and I am an applied mathematician.) I am so excited to be celebrating it again this year! This year's theme is "Measurements in Commerce: Metrology Underpinning Economic Growth."

In honor of World Metrology Day, I will (of course) be baking a metrology-themed cake, although due to time constraints, it may not be today. Stay tuned, vast blogging audience, for pictures!

My Life Is So Uninteresting

... that I can't think of anything to say right now. I'm sure I'll overcome the writers block soon.

Letters to Our Daughters

The ever-fabulous Dr. Isis has started a brilliant project called "Letters to Our Daughters," in which senior women scientists write letters of advice to their scientific daughters. If you haven't been reading these yet, I'd encourage you to do so.

So far there have been four outstanding letters, with more to come. I especially enjoyed the first one, from Dr. Pascale Lane, about being a "bitch." My experience supports what she's saying, too. If I'm being called a "bitch," it probably means I'm doing something right!

Running Update

I am still running. I am going to be in a 5K race on Saturday, May 30. My colleague/running coach is working me up to 5K. We've been running longer distances and for longer stretches of time. With any luck, by race day I'll be able to run the whole thing.

The race is to benefit the local CASA chapter, which one of my other colleagues is a volunteer for. She approached me to run in the race after she saw my running gear in my office. I am a total sucker for children and I think CASA is a very important program, so of course I said yes. I'd probably crawl the 5K to support CASA.

We have a whole team of people who have joined the race, some running, some walking the course. I'll let you know how it goes!

Fairy Tales, Fairness, and Modern Sensibilities

Since Vinny is a boy, we've been (luckily) mostly isolated from the whole fairy tale business. Nobody buys him pretty princess outfits or anything, since he has the "wrong" private parts for all that.

But he has received a few of the less princessed Disney fairy tale DVDs, such as Pinocchio and Peter Pan. It's quite a relief now, watching these from an adult perspective, that I finally have the words to express what felt so wrong about them years ago.

Pinocchio, in the eponymous movie, is simply a very naive and trusting lad. And why wouldn't he be? He has no experience in the world. But the consequences for his naive, unwise choices are inappropriately steep: if he doesn't "behave," he won't become a real boy.

Yet he has no idea how to behave! He doesn't understand anything about how the world works -- in the fraction of a day between the moment he came into being and the moment he set off for school, he had no chance to acquire even the limited wisdom of a young schoolboy!

It strikes me as an incredibly unfair burden on this naive little child -- why does Gepetto not walk him to school, at least on the first day? How is Pinocchio, who has only just learned of the existence of school (not to mention the theater!), supposed to understand the importance of school? How is he supposed to know that the men who lure him into the theater are not trustworthy?

Pinocchio's future depends entirely on him making good choices, but he has no ability to discern good and bad choices. It's a frightening spot to find yourself in. Perhaps this incenses me so because as a child I faced a similar nightmare situation when age-inappropriate behavior was expected of me (e.g., being "thoughtful" at the age of 4 -- the age at which I was firmly in the middle of the preoperational period of cognitive development and essentially incapable of seeing any viewpoint different from my own).

I don't want my son growing up with that kind of burden on his mind, so I don't think Pinocchio is going to be a staple in his viewing schedule.

Peter Pan won't either. I didn't watch that one myself, but Jeff did, and he found it sexist and racist. I guess some of the "oldies but goodies" aren't so great from a modern perspective.

Happy Mothers' Day!

Hope you've all had a fantastic Mothers Day. I had a really good one.

I spent the morning playing with Vinny. We got out some tinkertoys (hand-me-downs from his older cousins), which he really enjoyed playing with. He could make things that went round and round -- what's not to love about that?

Jeff cooked me a special feast this afternoon, including steak, chicken, corn on the cob, and several other items. I made the dessert -- strawberry shortcakes. We ate outside on the deck -- it was a nice day (the first in over a week). It was nice to get a chance to enjoy some sunshine with our meal.

What a great, leisurely day with my boys!

Back from Atlanta

We got home last night from Atlanta (not Aunt Laura). The conference went really well, my presentation was a success, and a good time was had by all.

On Tuesday night, we went with some of my colleagues to a Brazilian steakhouse, where you get served lots and lots of meat until you think you're going to explode. The meat was delicious but I felt rather gluttonous afterwards. It was also really expensive, although luckily, they didn't charge for Vinny. I think it was a good experience to eat there once but I don't think I'll ever do it again.

Instead of going to the conference event by myself on Wednesday night (or paying $50 for an additional ticket), I skipped it and went to Johnny Rocket's (a 50's-themed diner) with my boys. We had a low-key evening together, stopping to play in a park before heading back to the hotel.

I'm glad to be home, though. Luckily I don't have any travel planned until next month.

Cute Story

I have a conference this week in Atlanta, and my boys kindly accompanied me. Yesterday, we told Vinny where we were going for the next few days. He was very enthusiastic about it, and excitedly asked, "I see Grandpa too?"

Turns out he thought we were going to "Aunt Laura," not "Atlanta!"

Grammatical and Mathematical Tip of the Day

The local Humane Society is running an ad on the radio asking for help taking care of all the pets that have been abandoned by people who have lost their jobs and/or homes and can no longer afford to keep them. While this is a very important message, their phrasing really irritates me every time I hear the ad.

They say "a countless number of pets" have been abandoned. This is wrong on many levels:

1. You cannot say "a countless number." It doesn't sound right. Go with either "countless pets" or "a number of pets."
2. If you're going to say "a countless number" and ignore the grammar, then I'm going to get pedantic on you and say that the number of pets cannot be countless. You see, countless means "too many to be counted," and it is impossible to have a number of pets that is too large to be counted. Too large to count easily or quickly? Sure! But it can't be too large to be counted. Here's why:

There are only non-negative integer numbers of pets. That is to say, you can't have 3.7 pets or √3 pets or -28 pets. Therefore, the number of pets must be countable.

In other words, if you took all the pets and lined them all up, you could map them one-to-one with the set of natural numbers (non-negative integers), kind of like this: {(Fido, 0), (Goldie, 1), (Muffin, 2), (Fifi, 3), ...}. Therefore, we could take the size of the set of one-to-one mappings of pets and natural numbers, and determine the number of pets.

I understand that what they really mean is an unknown and probably very large number of pets that need help. But they should express it in a more mathematically accurate way, especially if they're counting on the support of mathematicians.

FYI

This is what happens when you leave a two-year-old with markers and a coloring book while you go to take a shower...


Luckily, they're washable markers, so his new navel décor should come right out in the next bath.

My Daily Scenic Drive

One thing I really like about living here is how beautiful the scenery is. There are breathtaking landscapes just about everywhere you look.

Inspired by my budding supercomputer supermodeling career, I decided to snap a photo shoot of my own: the scenic things I see every day as I drive to and from work. Enjoy!

This is a view from the parking lot where I park my car. The area behind the parking lot is full of trees of all kinds.
This is a closeup of part of the previous picture. You can see the dogwood in bloom. Unfortunately, the redbuds were pretty much done by this point, so you can't see them here.

There's a beautiful scene that I encounter every day, on the property of my workplace, where a lake inlet comes right up next to the road and the tree cover breaks. You can see this inlet surrounded by trees on either side, and it's just gorgeous. Unfortunately, it's hard to get a picture of it without stopping by the side of the road and I didn't really have the time to do that the other day. Maybe I'll capture that image for you later. All my subsequent pictures were taken at stoplights when I was stopped.


At a stoplight, where I'm about to turn left.

This is another view of that clump of trees up the hill from the previous picture. Okay, yes, I did take this when I was driving. But actually, I wasn't looking at the camera -- I had begun to take a picture right as the light turned green. It took several seconds (thanks to the red-eye preventive flash sequence) for the picture to be taken. By the time the picture was snapped, I'd already turned left and was driving up the hill.

This is a typical view at a stoplight in town. Notice the hills in the distance. In the evening, when the sun is setting, they are positively spectacular!

Adventures in Coupled Differential Equations

If you ever took a differential equations course in college, you probably encountered the fox and rabbit (predator/prey) paired differential equations. They looked something like this:

R'(t) = 2 R(t) - 0.01 R(t) F(t), R(0) = R₀
F'(t) = - F(t) + 0.01 R(t) F(t), F(0) = F₀

where R(t) and F(t) are functions representing the rabbit population and fox population, respectively, at time t. The initial conditions (starting values for R and F at time zero) are R₀ and F₀, respectively. R'(t) and F'(t) are standard notation indicating the derivatives of R and F with respect to t: in other words, the change in R and T per unit time at time t.

If you think about it, you can understand that if we neglect constraints such as food supply and predation, the more rabbits there are, the faster the rabbit population will rise, which is indicated by the first term on the right-hand side of the first equation. Conversely, the more foxes there are, the more the fox population will decrease, because the foxes have to compete with each other for food, as modeled by the first term on the right-hand side of the second equation. The encounters between rabbits and foxes have a deleterious effect on rabbits and a population raising effect on foxes, as you can see by the opposite signs on the coefficients of the final terms in both equations.

This turns out to be actually a pretty good model of population dynamics. An important question in ecology is what population levels can be sustained at a constant level (equilibrium)? If you look at the effect on the predator-prey populations of different initial conditions, you can find this out using trial and error. (There are legitimate mathematical ways to figure this out without graphing a bunch of guesses like this, just so you know.)

I used Matlab to solve the pair of differential equations with different initial conditions. I didn't graph some of the more boring initial conditions: if we start off with all rabbits and no foxes, the number of rabbits grows exponentially. Similarly, if we start off with no rabbits and all foxes, the foxes go extinct. On to more exciting initial conditions.

First, let's suppose that we start off with equal rabbit and fox populations. How do the populations change over time?
(Click the graph to embiggen.) As you can see, the populations vary in a regular, periodic pattern. You can see that the populations return to the starting state every so often, but the numbers of each species vary by a factor of 3 or 4. What happens then if we start off with 200 rabbits and 5 foxes?
Observe the dramatic swings in the populations of the two species. Again, the result is periodic, but the period is longer and the change in population from the maximum to the minimum of each species is quite drastic.

As it turns out, I know what the starting populations must be for the two species to remain at constant population. Look what happens when we start with 100 rabbits and 200 foxes:


You might wonder, what if we vary the numbers slightly? So I set the starting population of rabbits to 110 and kept the starting fox population at 200, and here's what I obtained:

So, as you can see, if the ratio of rabbits to foxes is close to 1:2, the populations will remain relatively stable, while if it gets out of balance, the populations will swing wildly.


Similar predator-prey coupled differential equations can be used to determine the equilibrium state of vampires and humans in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe. The equilibrium population size for the city where Buffy lives is about 36,000 humans and 18 vampires. As it turns out, the population of Sunnydale is actually very close to the equilibrium population size computed with the differential equations! (h/t Pharyngula)

Other fun vampire population ecology links:
Punk Rock Operations Research: On Vampires and Stochastic Processes
The Oyster's Garter: Vampire Ecology: Twilight vs Buffy

Supercomputer Supermodel

Earlier this week, I spent nearly two hours in photo shoots at work. Pictures were being taken for our annual report and publicity materials.

Of course, since they wanted to make everything as realistic as possible, they chose two women and one man to pose between the rows of supercomputer cabinets. (After all, that is the gender ratio at my workplace.) In addition, we held a laptop while we examined the cabinets carefully. (Another thing that I'm always seeing people do.) We opened and closed cabinets, pointed out things to one another, and tried to be conversational despite the fact that we were wearing earplugs (it's loud enough in the machine room to damage your unprotected ears) and couldn't hear a thing. (Thanks to the wonders of Photoshop, those earplugs will disappear from the pictures.)

After the grueling hours in the machine room (hey, I was squatting for something like ten minutes, which gets really painful!), I told my boss that I really needed a personal upkeep allowance to buy clothing and have beauty treatments now that I'm a supercomputer supermodel. For whatever reason he didn't agree, claiming that he paid me enough for me to buy my own (damn) clothes and beauty treatments, with plenty left over for feeding my starving child. Personally, I think he refused because he's afraid he'd have to share the money they give him for that purpose. (Money he probably spends on conferences, just to obtain the conference shirts that are a staple of his wardrobe.)

Mother-Son Evening

This evening Jeff was taking a watercolor course so Vinny and I had an evening out on the town together.

We started by going to the "Pizza House" (as Vinny calls our local pizza buffet restaurant) for dinner, where we saw an older woman whom we recognized, sitting alone. I invited her to sit with us, and she did. I asked her about her past, and she told me she had a masters degree in mathematics, and that she'd worked as a programmer on my workplace's first supercomputer. I thought this was just about the coolest thing ever, and I asked her quite a few additional questions about her computing experience, and then told her a little about what things are like now.

After dinner, we went to play on the playground, but we didn't stay long because the sun was setting. We came home and it was soon time for bed. I tucked Vinny in just before Jeff came home.

Exploration Day

Yesterday was a really nice day. It was beautiful: sunny, but not too warm. Perfect for a family outing!

First, we went to the Aquarium of the Smokies. They have an exhibit where you walk through a glass tunnel and see sharks and other fish. At first Vinny was restless and didn't really like that exhibit but soon he got interested in looking at the sharks.

Then we had an early dinner before going into the park and seeing the Elkmont area. Elkmont was once a retreat for rich people to escape the oppressive summer heat in the city. When the national park was formed, instead of giving up their land they were paid a reduced amount of money and given long-term leases on their property, the last of which expired in 2001. We saw many of the former vacation homes, a number of which were in ruin. The area was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, though, so the ones that are salvageable will be preserved. I don't know what their plans are -- perhaps it will be something like Cade's Cove.

Yesterday was a fun day out with my boys. Today, by contrast, was cold, rainy, and overcast. We spent the day indoors.