Monday, April 9, 2012
Skynet is Almost Online
While doing the rounds on Ray Kurzweil's Singularity hype-site today, I came across a spiffy little news bit. Could this be what brings about our inescapable Matrix-esque demise? Even if it doesn't, the Computational Complexity course over in the CS department just got a little harder.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Out with the Old, In with the New
It is always saddening, at least on some level, to say goodbye to a batch of beer. When homebrewing, every batch of beer lives a unique, transient life. The beer changes day to day, grows, ages. One of the best aspects of the hobby, to me, is observing each of my ales trace out the arc of its life. Needless to day, I always feel a bit of sinking feeling when I draw the last pint from the keg.
Make no mistake, the sinking feeling is brief. I'm overly happy to see a good beer go, especially if it's been a particularly good batch. After all, I firmly believe that the best thing to do with beer is drink it. In this sense, the early kicking of the keg is an honorable fate for a good beer to meet. "...runners whom reknown outran, and the name that died before the man...."
Unfortunately, not all great beers pass so gracefully. For example, I still have a Porter on tap that I made in late 2011. It was one of the best beers I'd made to date, so good that I decided to take it off the tap in order to preserve it, to make it last forever. Then time passed, the Porter sailed way past its peak and it took a drastic dive off the deep end, turning into a funky, tart disappointment. Now I'm stuck drinking my way through 2.5 gallons of beer that doesn't really taste good and only reminds me of what it used to be.
So I suppose the moral of the story is to appreciate the fleeting moments. Don't try to hold onto something, not touching it until it withers and haunts you with memory and regret. Either that or the moral is that people need to get over here and help me humanely put this sad beer down so I can use that keg to start serving up the Mild I made two weeks ago. Good riddance!
Make no mistake, the sinking feeling is brief. I'm overly happy to see a good beer go, especially if it's been a particularly good batch. After all, I firmly believe that the best thing to do with beer is drink it. In this sense, the early kicking of the keg is an honorable fate for a good beer to meet. "...runners whom reknown outran, and the name that died before the man...."
Unfortunately, not all great beers pass so gracefully. For example, I still have a Porter on tap that I made in late 2011. It was one of the best beers I'd made to date, so good that I decided to take it off the tap in order to preserve it, to make it last forever. Then time passed, the Porter sailed way past its peak and it took a drastic dive off the deep end, turning into a funky, tart disappointment. Now I'm stuck drinking my way through 2.5 gallons of beer that doesn't really taste good and only reminds me of what it used to be.
So I suppose the moral of the story is to appreciate the fleeting moments. Don't try to hold onto something, not touching it until it withers and haunts you with memory and regret. Either that or the moral is that people need to get over here and help me humanely put this sad beer down so I can use that keg to start serving up the Mild I made two weeks ago. Good riddance!
Friday, March 9, 2012
Back from the Dead
Good news, everyone! Though most people who should know this know this, I passed my PhD screening exam--the reason for my disappearance late last year. Since then I've done such fun things as visit the Tillamook Cheese Factory in Tillamook, OR, the land of cheese, trees, and ocean breeze, watched, in person, Oregon handily dispose of Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl, and spend $700 replacing the cam-shaft position sensor in my car. Happy New Year!
In even better news, I'm making beer today. Earlier this year I took a stab at brewing a new style: English Mild. It turned out so well that the entire 5 gallons hardly lasted a week! Even though I overshot OG by 4 points the beer stilled weighed in at 4.1%, making it quite sessionable. What's more, the beer is dirt cheap and ready to drink inside 14 days from pitching the yeast, carbonation time included. Check it out:
English Mild
Grain:
5.5# Marris Otter
0.75# English Crystal 55° L
0.27# English Chocolate
Adjuncts:
0.31# Brown sugar
Hops:
5 AAUs Fuggles (60 min)
0.5 oz East Kent Goldings (10 min)
Yeast:
WLP-002 - English Ale
I wanted to mash at 152°, though I think it was closer to 150°. The fermentation happened between 64.5-65.5°--very stable for a water bath fermentation. The end result? A beer that delivered a roasty sweetness with just enough esthers and EKG flavor to keep it interesting. It was one of those rare brews that hit the mark on the very first try. So precisely, in fact, that I think this recipe has made it house offering status. It may even edge out my Bitter as the go-to cheap, fast, drinkable crowd pleaser. I'll see if I can recreate the magic today, but my money is on this Mild being a regular presence in beer fridge.
In even better news, I'm making beer today. Earlier this year I took a stab at brewing a new style: English Mild. It turned out so well that the entire 5 gallons hardly lasted a week! Even though I overshot OG by 4 points the beer stilled weighed in at 4.1%, making it quite sessionable. What's more, the beer is dirt cheap and ready to drink inside 14 days from pitching the yeast, carbonation time included. Check it out:
English Mild
Grain:
5.5# Marris Otter
0.75# English Crystal 55° L
0.27# English Chocolate
Adjuncts:
0.31# Brown sugar
Hops:
5 AAUs Fuggles (60 min)
0.5 oz East Kent Goldings (10 min)
Yeast:
WLP-002 - English Ale
I wanted to mash at 152°, though I think it was closer to 150°. The fermentation happened between 64.5-65.5°--very stable for a water bath fermentation. The end result? A beer that delivered a roasty sweetness with just enough esthers and EKG flavor to keep it interesting. It was one of those rare brews that hit the mark on the very first try. So precisely, in fact, that I think this recipe has made it house offering status. It may even edge out my Bitter as the go-to cheap, fast, drinkable crowd pleaser. I'll see if I can recreate the magic today, but my money is on this Mild being a regular presence in beer fridge.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Not so Far-Fetched
While I have all but forgotten about this blog, I haven't been posting with good reason: this semester has been marked by a notable increase in work. The main event, my PhD Screening Exam, is a mere two weeks off and I am deep into the studying at this point, hardly finding time for my classes, let alone any meaningful research. Putting all that aside, there has been some exciting developments in QIP around here lately...
As you can read in this article, the USC Information Sciences Institute cut the ribbon on the first D-Wave One computer outside of the D-Wave facilities in BC. The 128-qubit, adiabatic quantum computer comes as a quite generous gift from Lockheed. The machine is in place, cooled down to a nice 20 micro-Kelvin, and being calibrated over the next couple weeks, which means that we may soon take a little field trip out to Marina and try running some experiments.
Beer wise, things are still slow as I can't find the time to brew these days. However I have received packages of hops from the tipi at my parents place in Oregon which will hopefully get used up before too long. Also, I brewed the second annual Estate Pale Ale (almost 2 months ago!), an APA brewed with wet cascade and centennial hops from my own modest hop garden here in LA.
As you can read in this article, the USC Information Sciences Institute cut the ribbon on the first D-Wave One computer outside of the D-Wave facilities in BC. The 128-qubit, adiabatic quantum computer comes as a quite generous gift from Lockheed. The machine is in place, cooled down to a nice 20 micro-Kelvin, and being calibrated over the next couple weeks, which means that we may soon take a little field trip out to Marina and try running some experiments.
Beer wise, things are still slow as I can't find the time to brew these days. However I have received packages of hops from the tipi at my parents place in Oregon which will hopefully get used up before too long. Also, I brewed the second annual Estate Pale Ale (almost 2 months ago!), an APA brewed with wet cascade and centennial hops from my own modest hop garden here in LA.
Friday, August 19, 2011
YES
The opening of this theater-turned-restaurant has been long awaited. I'm not sure of the specifics of the delays, but I do know that I've been waiting patiently for MB to open despite the big day being pushed back from early spring into the depths of summer. Now all that is in the past and the future looks very bright. Each time I step up to order a pint the menu has changed pretty substantially, and I have been able to wet my whistle entirely with beers I'd never tasted before. There are a number of breweries being poured that I'd never heard of before, and even more that I'd never seen at a bar.
I could go on about all the beers, but the bottom line is that you should check this place out. They've been packed to the jowls so don't expect an easy time ordering, let alone finding much space to sit in the bar area. You could wait for a table, but then you're in for a 1-2 hour wait. I'd chalk it all up to a small staff and restricted hours, which supposedly they are planning to extend soon. When that happens, you can be sure that I'll be in there on USC game day later this fall.
On a completely separate note, I discovered a most excellent YouTube series the other day covering all the bare-bones basics of Quantum Computation. It is a series of short, self-contained classes (in the style of Khan Academy) by Michael Nielsen, the guy who literally wrote the book on Quantum Computation. If you have any interest in how QIS works and loosely what it's all about, you should give these videos a peep. You don't need any quantum mechanics to start working through it all, though some linear algebra is pretty integral to making any headway. Any way you slice it, the stuff is very interesting and these videos lay everything out as clearly as you will find anywhere, starting with the fundamental idea of the qubit and working towards very cool results like superdense coding and quantum teleportation. It's not science fiction, it's just science.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
That Makes it Easy
I just had my mind blown. In my summer course, Random Processes, I had a homework problem regarding estimation theory and determining 2nd order statistics about linear combinations of jointly Gaussian random variables. Part of the problem is to determine the Covariance of these linear combinations. As worked away I had an incredible realization: Covariance behaves like an inner product!
Check it out, it satisfies the properties of an inner produce on the probability space:
1) It's bilinear
\[
Cov\lbrack\gamma A + \delta B,Z\rbrack = \gamma Cov\lbrack A,Z\rbrack +\delta Cov\lbrack B,Z\rbrack\]
2) It's symmetric
\[
Cov\lbrack A,B\rbrack = Cov\lbrack B,A\rbrack\]
3) It's positive semi-definite (or what I think is better said non-negative definite, but that's for another post)
\[
Var\lbrack A\rbrack =Cov\lbrack A,A\rbrack\ge 0\]
Where $Cov\lbrack A,A\rbrack = 0$ implies that $A$ is a constant random variable.
So it's not exactly an inner product--there isn't the existence of a single zero. Rather, all constant random variables behave like zero. Apparently, this defines a Quotient Space--a vector space with an subspace $N$ that forms an equivalence class with $0$--and Covariance is an inner product over such a space.
Anyway, I looked this up on Wikipedia and, sure enough, there is a little section titled "Relationship to inner products" (which pointed me towards the article on quotient spaces). I guess it's not any huge discovery. I wasn't expecting that. But I am a little peeved that Variance and Covariance were never taught this way, or that this cool perspective was never even mentioned. I feel as though I pushed my understanding and intuition of Covariance way ahead by seeing this little change of face, and it would have been a huge help when taking probability courses in the past.
Check it out, it satisfies the properties of an inner produce on the probability space:
1) It's bilinear
\[
Cov\lbrack\gamma A + \delta B,Z\rbrack = \gamma Cov\lbrack A,Z\rbrack +\delta Cov\lbrack B,Z\rbrack\]
2) It's symmetric
\[
Cov\lbrack A,B\rbrack = Cov\lbrack B,A\rbrack\]
3) It's positive semi-definite (or what I think is better said non-negative definite, but that's for another post)
\[
Var\lbrack A\rbrack =Cov\lbrack A,A\rbrack\ge 0\]
Where $Cov\lbrack A,A\rbrack = 0$ implies that $A$ is a constant random variable.
So it's not exactly an inner product--there isn't the existence of a single zero. Rather, all constant random variables behave like zero. Apparently, this defines a Quotient Space--a vector space with an subspace $N$ that forms an equivalence class with $0$--and Covariance is an inner product over such a space.
Anyway, I looked this up on Wikipedia and, sure enough, there is a little section titled "Relationship to inner products" (which pointed me towards the article on quotient spaces). I guess it's not any huge discovery. I wasn't expecting that. But I am a little peeved that Variance and Covariance were never taught this way, or that this cool perspective was never even mentioned. I feel as though I pushed my understanding and intuition of Covariance way ahead by seeing this little change of face, and it would have been a huge help when taking probability courses in the past.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Grow Your Own
A little over a year ago, as part of a gift for my mother, I flew up to Oregon and installed a hops garden at my parents home in Tumalo. I knew that they had some spare tipi poles lying around which I could use to create a unique frame for some hop vines.
After picking a good spot on their three acres I set to work, removing a small juniper and more than a few sizable rocks from the area. The tipi (an 18 footer) went up and the rhizomes went in the ground, complete with a gravity fed soaker hose! I can't quite remember at this point, but I think there were 16 plants--4 Chinook, 5 Centennial, and 7 Cascade--planted between each pair of poles, with two lengths of twine running up the each triangular face of the tipi. Last season things went alright. The plants only grew to about 6 feet and 3 Cascade plants never even broke ground. I'd chalk it up to planting a little late in an already short growing season.
This season, things are looking much better. We replaced 3 Cascades that didn't make it and did a little fertilizing. This year the soaker is running 24 hours a day, which is okay in such sandy soil and the plants seem to love it. The result? The biggest hop cone you've ever seen!
Clearly there is more growing to be done. But the sides are filling in quite nicely and it's creating a neat space inside. Hopefully this season the entire thing will fill in, but definitely in a couple years, once all the plants really mature, this will be quite the cool spot to grab some shade and enjoy an Arnold Palmer or a cool beer, if you're into that sort of thing.
From a brewing standpoint, this is also quite exciting. I'll need to teach my parents when and how to harvest, but I think I can look forward to an impressive shipment of fresh hops to play around with this fall. The only problem is that once the plants get to the top they will just start tangling around and create a big, knotted mess. While this will work wonders to create shade in the middle of the day it may not be so easy to determine which hops are which during harvest. The solution? Say "fuck it" and just brew away! Chinook, Centennial and Cascade can all be used as late addition hops and work well in APAs and IPAs, so I think blindly adding hops by the fistful in the last 10 minutes of the boil could yield some great, one-time-only big hoppy beers. Talk about seasonal brewing.
After picking a good spot on their three acres I set to work, removing a small juniper and more than a few sizable rocks from the area. The tipi (an 18 footer) went up and the rhizomes went in the ground, complete with a gravity fed soaker hose! I can't quite remember at this point, but I think there were 16 plants--4 Chinook, 5 Centennial, and 7 Cascade--planted between each pair of poles, with two lengths of twine running up the each triangular face of the tipi. Last season things went alright. The plants only grew to about 6 feet and 3 Cascade plants never even broke ground. I'd chalk it up to planting a little late in an already short growing season.
This season, things are looking much better. We replaced 3 Cascades that didn't make it and did a little fertilizing. This year the soaker is running 24 hours a day, which is okay in such sandy soil and the plants seem to love it. The result? The biggest hop cone you've ever seen!
Clearly there is more growing to be done. But the sides are filling in quite nicely and it's creating a neat space inside. Hopefully this season the entire thing will fill in, but definitely in a couple years, once all the plants really mature, this will be quite the cool spot to grab some shade and enjoy an Arnold Palmer or a cool beer, if you're into that sort of thing.
From a brewing standpoint, this is also quite exciting. I'll need to teach my parents when and how to harvest, but I think I can look forward to an impressive shipment of fresh hops to play around with this fall. The only problem is that once the plants get to the top they will just start tangling around and create a big, knotted mess. While this will work wonders to create shade in the middle of the day it may not be so easy to determine which hops are which during harvest. The solution? Say "fuck it" and just brew away! Chinook, Centennial and Cascade can all be used as late addition hops and work well in APAs and IPAs, so I think blindly adding hops by the fistful in the last 10 minutes of the boil could yield some great, one-time-only big hoppy beers. Talk about seasonal brewing.
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