Naming issues, conflicting interests, and their connections to constitutional law

Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Every year will somehow offer more time to do things. One of the main reasons people who will never benefit from policies that benefit only the rich vote for said policies and vote against policies that would benefit those exactly matching their income class / social situation / [etc] is that they believe they will eventually be those rich people and once they get there they don't want to be paying taxes that benefit people like themselves, currently. [Or, similarly, everyone is convinced that at least their children will be doing better than them when in fact lately in general your kids will end up doing worse than you.] I just finish a blog post and think "that was easy; I'll definitely write 5 more next month and be right back on track!". Of course the purpose isn't simply to fill the blogger.com data centres with random words, but content is king, as they say (I think). Hannah will stop crying for no reason all day long any day now; it won't rain every weekend; I'll have way more time to go cycling next week; etc.

At work we are solving the world's problems. Every day the decisions we make are touching fundamental problems/solutions and the paths that we take will have long-term ramifications far beyond anything that we can currently envision or plan for. That's why, this past week, I spent most of my time arguing for the following parameter order for our implementation of the clip function:

clip(x, min_value, max_value)

where x is some tensor (collection of elements with some shape -- like a vector or a matrix, for example), and min_value and max_value are minimum and maximum numbers that the elements in x can have. The output of the function will be the same tensor x, but all of the values will be "clipped" to fall within those min and max values, if need be. Just in case you didn't get it (and because it's so important for the story at hand), here is an example... Let's say x is a vector with x = [1, 2, 3, 4] with min_value = 2 and max_value = 3.5. Then clip(x, 2, 3.5) would result in [2, 2, 3, 3.5].

Anyways, so that's the obvious parameter order. Everyone else does it that way. If you change it you're not doing anything other than confusing people. But, some believe that the data should always be last. So, instead, the signature of the function would be:

clip(min_value, max_value, x)

The argument for the above is that having the data last allows you to do some interesting function chaining where you're setting up a network of functions, etc. So there's this competing question of which is more important? Allowing this (and being consistent about it across our implementation where we would always put the data last), or being consistent with everybody else so if they come over to our tools then they won't be confused. So obviously this is just the same as determining the choice to make when we have conflicting constitutional rights! Like there is a right to free speech but there is also a right to not be subjected to hate speech and you need to balance those interests, etc. And when I wrote the title of this particular blog post I guess I thought I would spend more time on the constitutional law and conflict of rights issue and all that but now I don't feel up for it. Sorry. But these are the important issues that kept me busy at work all week (inter alia, of course).

And here are some completely different random observations that will surely enrich your life:

1. I was sitting back with a (home-brewed) Segafredo¹ espresso² watching La Doyenne ("The Old Lady"), aka Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the last of the Spring classics, and during the break an ad for the shampoo "Alpecin" came on. This in itself is not at all out of the ordinary as Team Giant-Alpecin is a major German UCI cycling team and so during cycling events such as the Tour de France and La Doyenne you will often see ads put on by sponsors of the major teams. Anyways, as far as I can tell they are (or at least should be) known for really dumb ads. But this one took the cake (/"the biscuit" if you're British). The ad starts with a new (I presume -- the 'new' part I mean) slogan that fills the entire screen and has the announcer read out the words:

"Doping für die Haare"

And you don't need to be Jonathan Franzen or Goethe or have a 500+ day streak on German duolingo to quickly figure out that the above reads "Doping for the hair". Even though I don't need to buy shampoo because I didn't do enough doping for my hair (or something), because of this inept / tone-deaf commercial aired during La Doyenne, even if some miracle happens or I make some kind of Faustian deal (weird how we're sort of back to Goethe again, right?) that will give me my hair back in return for my soul then I will never buy this shampoo even if it's the only shampoo in the store because come on.. I guess it's meant to be a joke but even by German standards it's pretty weak. And we're meant to be joking about / glorifying cloaked in humour doping during a cycling event in 2016? Puh-lease.

[FN1] Two of Sandi's cycling heroes³ are the Canadian Ryder Hesjedal and the Swiss Fabian Cancellara. As fate would have it, this year they are both riding on the same team: Trek Segafredo. It is sort of a new team (the teams are always changing around a bit and changing names as sponsors come and go, etc.) because last year they were just called "Trek Factory Racing". But now Segafredo has joined as a major sponsor and so they're, as mentioned, "Trek Segafredo". Since both those guys are on the team, and Sandi didn't have a really cool really professional cycling jersey before, and we both like coffee [see FN2 reference supra, and definition, infra], she got a brand new Trek Segafredo jersey for her birthday and so today she can wear it to cheer on the Trek guys in La Doyenne.

[FN2] Why is there this crazy connection between cycling and espresso? I think both of those things are pretty cool so it works out well for me, but where does it come from? Perhaps a topic for an essay for students to be assigned for some kind of English course? In the meantime I did a very quick Bing search and the Grimpeur Bros. have some common sense suggestions (https://www.grimpeurbros.com/pages/coffee-cycling-the-inextricable-link) on the "inextricable link between cycling and coffee" (but nothing too concrete). These include obvious things like "cycling‘s strong ties to Italy, France, Belgium, and Spain probably have something to do with it" and "on weekends, a post-race coffee or mid-ride espresso break, gives us the opportunity to take a break, share some gossip, nosh on some baked goods, and most importantly, share a laugh and enjoy our friendships — all over coffee." Fair enough. Wait, do any of you care about this at all? I think it's pretty interesting, anyways...

[FN3] Yes, in Europe people have cycling heroes. Kind of like in North America people have hockey and baseball heroes.

2. Ben Harper has a new record and it's really good. Sandi is a pretty lucky girl. In addition to being blessed (in the atheistic equivalent anyways) with a healthy (so far) baby girl, and receiving the aforementioned Trek Segafredo professional cycling jersey, she also received a copy of the new Ben Harper record "Call it what it is" for her birthday and we have been listening to it, like, 40 times a day. It's important to learn all the songs because we want to be able to sing along when we see him in Munich on October 1st.⁴

[FN4] Sandi and I might have a somewhat deservedly-obtained reputation of not exactly being the best at planning ahead or being prepared for things, etc. Fine. But, in this situation, despite the fact that October 1st is currently more than five months away, we already have experienced babysitters lined up for the night! K&J will be arriving in Munich several days prior and by then will have more than a year of baby girl taking care of experience. Not bad, right?

3. I think I gave Belgium a bad rap. Brussels is not a fun place to visit. And so I kind of hated it. But watching Liège-Bastogne-Liège, it looks like it's not necessarily such a bad place. And they got by for a couple of years without even having a government. So that's not so bad either...

Until next time...

Addendum:
Remember the Krailinger Duathlon race report from last year? Well the 2016 version is coming up next weekend and if it's raining like last year we won't do it.. But if it's nice, we will! If it's nice then, look forward to another upcoming fun-filled race report where Sandi and I might do a relay and hand-off Hannah in the transition zone. Stay tuned...

Pemulis and Hans

He's been literally counting the minutes tick by for the entire six days that have passed since she told him. Almost every single one of them. Around 8,640 minutes minus a handful where he was able to sleep for the briefest of moments. In fact, most of the time he's even been counting the seconds. He had created a whole swath of games in his head with the numbers. Sometimes he would count up, and other times he would be counting down. Something like "it's been 945 seconds since <some time> and 4 + 5 = 9 and 5 + 4 = 9 and 9 - 4 = 5 and 9 - 5 = 4 and 945 seconds is exactly 15 minutes and 45 seconds which is crazy because the 45 seconds do the same thing as before but now we have the 15 minutes and with 15 you can get 5 - 1 = 4 and then you have a 4 which goes to 4 + 5 = 9, and cetera...". This had actually been happening off and on in his head for as long as he could remember but it had really ramped up and came more to the surface, let's say, over these previous six days. During the wait, he had gone through an entire week of work. She told him on a Sunday, now it was Saturday afternoon, and between those two moments he had somehow attended meetings, written e-mails, conversed with colleagues, and all manner of work stuff had gone down so to say, but all of it was, well, I guess, repressed? It happened completely and utterly capital F-R Freud subconsciously like a dream or even further back than a dream. He knows it happened but he basically just floated through all that stuff that seems to have somehow happened. Each day after work he headed straight home and straight to the couch where he immediately turned on the TV. News, weather, weather, watching the clock, counting seconds, counting minutes, weather, moving pictures that didn't actually help to speed up the clock (or at least the feeling of the clock speeding up) but he felt that if he didn't go straight to the TV that things would feel even slower somehow (even though he didn't try it [not going to the TV, that is]). He took dinner in front of the TV, leaned forward over a short white cheap coffee table. Drank six beers. Seriously. Six every night, and on two of the nights whiskey for dessert. It still couldn't bring him towards sleep, though. Things simply got real hazy and even slower, if you could believe it, and he knew that the beer and the whiskey weren't going to get him to sleep and he even knew that it would make things worse because not only would he not be able to sleep, but he would be drowsy enough that he wouldn't be able to do anything else like read or even watch TV because his eyes would burn so much, but just like with the TV (earlier in the evening) he couldn't NOT do these things because the fear that not doing them would make things even worse was stronger than the rational realization that doing them was making things worse.

Friday night should have been a milestone both because he had somehow made it through the entire work week and he was now only 24 hours away from it. But things felt worse than ever. Since time had somehow exponentially been slowing down, psychologically he was at the furthest point from Saturday night that he'd been since the previous Sunday! That's some wonky space-time physics-voodoo. But still he soldiers on and watches the news and the weather and drinks his six beers and tries to keep watching more TV but his eyes are burning and so, just like every other night in the last week, he turns off the TV and he goes back to counting the seconds and the minutes and after what is truly an infinitely long period each time -- and he knows that a lot of this "literally this" and "literally that" and "infinite this" and "infinite that" is sensationalistic and trust-bleeding in the sense that clearly it wasn't literally every second that he counted and an infinite amount of time by definition will never be reached and all that and so he's sorry that it has to be portrayed this way but THERE'S LITERALLY NO OTHER WAY it was just so so long and the time was going by so so slowly -- he counts the hours too. Finally Saturday morning arrives and the dog wakes him up (yes he actually managed a few minutes sleep somehow) by licking him on the face -- oh what a good boy, he would never do this to me -- and he pats the dog on the head and sits up from his lying position on the couch and turns on the TV and starts watching the news and the weather. It takes just forever, of course, but finally after eons of watching TV and pacing the house and watching more TV, evening arrives. Pemulis feels, in precisely equal amounts, both dread and relief.

His daughter Helga arrives home after being out all afternoon and announces that her new boyfriend Hans is no longer coming over for dinner because she broke up with him and she decides she's never going to have another boyfriend ever again. So Pemulis takes her out for a fancy dinner and buys her a beautiful gold Rolex and a sports car and they play scrabble and he goes to bed and has the most luxuriant sleep of his life and doesn't wake up for 15 hours.

Frühling in Europa

It's springtime here in southern Germany (and technically all across the northern hemisphere but we're talking more feel here rather than hard dates) and the sun is shining again. More specifically than just springtime, it's also Easter-time -- meaning that holiday season is in full force. I asked Hannah if she wanted to go to Majorca, Tenerife, Lanzarote, or somewhere else for a trip and she vomited on my new jeans and then cried for an hour. I tried running that scenario through the Dunstan Baby Language but Priscilla's findings couldn't seem to translate that particular attempt at communication and so in the end we probably won't go anywhere.

It's funny how perspectives change over time. Like when you're a student and you think you don't have any time, but then you start working and you realize that you had a ton of time before and only now you *really* don't have any time. But then you have a kid and you realized that before you had all the time in the world. Or you drink a Molson Canadian and you think 'wow beer is good!' and then later on you try a Steamwhistle and you think 'hey this beer is really good!' and then finally one day you drink a real Munich beer and you realize 'wow all that other beer wasn't all that good'. Or how about you're happy that your running has come a long way and you think that it's great that you finished 10k in under 50 minutes but then a year or two later you're disappointed if you don't go under 45 minutes and then finally now if you haven't broken 40 yet then something is seriously wrong. I think you get the picture so now we can move on to the observation at hand which was that I really thought last year that I'd dropped the ball on blog post frequency but now here we are in 2016 and things are more dismal than ever. But you didn't give up, did you? Here we are now and you're reading a brand new blog post as we speak! These are exciting times. And to make things even more exciting -- especially for the demographic of GWMD readers who are into beautiful visualizations and graphs of all kinds -- please enjoy a graphical representation of GWMD post frequency over the last four years.

So the black curve shows absolute number of posts per year which -- despite an outlier in 2013 -- has been dropping every year since GWMD's inception. The blue line shows the regression line of the data which confirms the obvious drop, and the grey shaded area shows the confidence interval in the linear regression (basically if you were to predict the number of posts in 2017 it would probably lie somewhere between -5 and 30.. haha -5). Of course this isn't really a fair comparison since 2016 has only had 3 months happen so far so take all this with a grain of you-know-what.

Perhaps more interesting, then, and more fair, is a visualization of posts per month! Woo-hoo!

You'll notice some missing months recently -- noticeably zero posts in September and zero posts in November. I wonder why that might be!

Here are some things that have happened recently:

1. Due to springtime weather (see supra), Hannah visited her first [?] beer garden:

2. We ate a giant steak: 

3. My new bike arrived:

4. Hannah learned how to turn her toys into a pillow:

So does all this mean that we might be seeing a higher post frequency in the near future? Some kind of drive from the upper management at GWMD to set a commitment for a solid measurable statistically significant increase in number of posts per month and/or year that will in turn keep our customers happy and returning for more? Could this be the start of something new? Stay tuned to find out!*

* the answer is probably not. Sorry..

中国：从图片前四天 (China: pictures from the first four days)

Hello readers of GWMD
It's me
I've been wondering after all these days if you would like to see
Some pictures
Of Suzhou
They say that Suzhou is beautiful
But I ain't seen much beauty

Hello
Can you hear me?
I am far away in China dreaming of what this blog used to be
When I was younger and kind of free
I've forgotten how it felt before I had no time to write
There's such a difference between the quality
Of the posts from way back when...

Hello from the other side (of the world)
My body still think it's Munich time
It tells me "I'm sorry"
Despite everything that you've done
But when you try to sleep you'll have to
Wait till the morning

Hello it's your wake up call!
At least I can say that I've tried
To get used to being
In the China Time Zone
But it don't matter, it clearly
Will work out the day that I leave...

My office for the week

My home for the week

Giant buildings across the lake

Retired (?) boat at the sailing club

Suzhou waking up across the lake

Suzhou sunrise

Contrasts

Further contrasts: old and modern China

Morning lakeside jog

More buildings

Terrible attempt at selfie

"Suzhou Dushu Lake Higher Education Town" (苏州独墅湖高等教育区)

Swans... I think

Coming up with captions is getting a little tiring...

Something something lake buildings

We all need a little green and a little love

Jesus in China

Something we can all believe in

I did indeed see many other runners around the Suzhou Road Running Base!

Good! Because I could use some computer radiation reduction in my life

Crossing underneath the street at Suzhou Times Square

This particular Chinese food was actually delicious

And here I am eating it!

My own picture (see full moon!) of Suzhou Times Square area

And the ever-important Toronto Buffet Restaurant (did not attend due to sketchiness factor)

NOTE: this post represents an important milestone -- it is GWMD's 150th! We hope you enjoyed it.

中国: Day One

Twelve hours on an air-plane in the window seat imprisoned there by a sleeping old man in the aisle seat who wouldn't wake up resulted in a few things. I couldn't go to the restroom for a very, very long time and thus irreparable internal damage has likely occurred. I read one Harlen Coben novel front-to-back and the better part of a John Grisham and have to admit that the bladder thing definitely will have a stronger long-lasting impact on me. And I ended up Suzhou, China.

Suzhou is a great microcosm of modern China. It's a 'small' city of 11 million people situated about one hour from Shanghai. But it's being built for about 30 million who it seems are scheduled to arrive any day now. There are literally hundreds of very, very tall skyscrapers built and in the process of being built: office buildings and condominiums, stretching all the way into the clouds, with no residents. We arrived into Suzhou at night and nearly all of these apartment buildings were pitch dark. The city has multi-lane highways designed for the influx of eventual Suzhouians getting to work, but for now they are as empty as the 407. The MS building where I'm working is only eight stories tall and we're sitting on the eighth. But don't worry, because the government is building three (3) new 20-story MS buildings next door for expansion.

On the way from the airport we passed many Audis, Mercedes, BMWs, and other expensive cars. There were gleaming glass (empty for the most part) skyscrapers on either side of the newly-paved highway. And then all of a sudden for a short stretch we passed through the old China. The road turned to dirt and there were tiny wooden carts and huts selling food. People were bicycling in the rain and others were on antiquated scooters with all of their possessions tied to the back. There were people everywhere in the road going about their business (in the pouring rain) and after our driver nearly killed some (well, most) of them through his extremely aggressive and frightening driving, we got through that yet-to-be-upgraded part of the road and were back to modern China.

Alert: China is no longer cheap. Our ride from the airport to the hotel with the angel of death cost 350 CNY. That's about 50 EUR, and apparently 25 more EUR than it was exactly one year ago. Our dinner last night was about what you'd pay for a similar thing in Munich (but of a much more frightening character [the food here, I mean]). I've seen Maseratis (yes, plural) and Porsches.

And things are Westerner than ever. The next massive building over from the Four Points Sheraton (which, according to the poster in the elevator, has locations all over the world including London Ontario, Cambridge, and Kitchener-Waterloo!) is a Starbucks. The buffet breakfast this morning had an omelette station, and I filled up on pancakes. At the shopping area in the 'downtown' ("Times Square") where we had lunch there was H&M, Gap, Hugo Boss, Adidas, etc etc etc. Apparently this is how Times Square would look if it hadn't been pouring rain and rendering visibility more than 50 m ahead of you impossible:

Notice the three under-construction buildings. They don't built something and wait for it to fill up and then build something else. They build 30 buildings, then they build another 50, and then a further 100. And then, eventually, I guess people will show up.

If it stops raining tomorrow then perhaps I can put up some of my own pictures!

A Guest Blog

By Helga

            Hello.  It’s me, Helga.  With an “a,” not an “e.”  With the “e” it’s a boy’s name and I’m a girl.  Or so they tell me.

            I’m Canadian but I was born in Germany.  My parents, Pemulis and Joelle, are obviously confused.  I should have been born in Canada.  But I wasn’t.  I hope this won’t be a problem for me in the future.  I hope that when I go to school in a couple of years they won’t look at me all weird like and go, “Oh, she’s really Canadian.”  As if that were a major drawback or something.  As if I had to like Margaret Atwood, which I don’t.  That is, what I’ve read of hers hasn’t pleased me.  Pat the Bunny is a much better novel than The Handmaid’s Tale.  The characterization has so much more depth.  I mean, there’s Paul and Judy and Mummy and Daddy and they’re very real people with real feelings, not to mention a ring and a scratchy face.  Whereas The Handmaid’s Tale is some kind of futuristic schlock.  I didn’t care for it.

            But then I’m a picky reader.  And a picky eater.  Milk and cookies is about all I like at the moment.  Milk and cookies and Pat the Bunny.  And my Mom.  And my Dad.  But he’s into weird computer stuff that I don’t really get.  My Dad is a “data scientist,” which is a fancy term for “computer geek.”  That’s just my opinion, of course.  And I’m only 2 months old, so I could change my mind before another 10% of my life has gone by.  Which would be next Thursday.

            I’m learning new words every day.  Today I learned a German word: scheisse.  It’s a very useful word.  For instance, I’ve just taken a nasty scheisse and I need someone to get rid of it for me.  Hang on while I make my needs known.

            “Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa . . . .”

            (Much later)

            Wow, I must have slept in.  It’s 3 AM and I’m usually up by 2.  However, after that nasty scheisse and a quick bath and a change of clothes, I was starving and my Mom fed me and then I fell asleep and when I woke up I was in my bed and . . . hang on while I wake my parents.

            “Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa . . .”

            (Later)

            OK, that’s better.  It’s 3:30 AM and I’m ready to face the day.  Let’s go for a walk, Mom.  Or let’s wake up Dad and make him walk with us.  We’re a tight-knit family, my parents and me.  Wherever I go, they want to go too.  It’s touching.

            Next time I’ll tell you about my toys.  I can see them, but I can’t touch them.  Toys are like celebrities—you see them everywhere, but you can’t touch them.  When I get older, I’m going to grab all my toys and stuff them into my mouth and see if they taste any better than milk.  It’s not likely.

Beginnings

Hemingway once said that if you want to get busy writing, you better get busy living. It's been tough to do the latter lately so the former has therefore been suffering but just in the last few seconds I all of a sudden got some inspiration to write something quickly before making dinner and so here I am, in the vaunted (virtual) halls of GWMD working on a lead-in to this blog post with a bunch of empty words mainly for the purpose of warming up the fingers, brain, and mind for what might turn out to be an actual post in the imminent seconds and/or minutes. Before I go any further I should probably point out that -- as far as I know anyway -- Hemingway didn't actually say that if you want to get busy writing you better get busy living. But it does at least seem like the paraphrase of something that he might have said. I do believe, in other news, that (probably paraphrased) he did say that one should "write drunk, edit sober", but even that I'm not 100% in on the veracity of given that it was communicated to yours truly via the offspring of the US ARPANET.

Despite seemingly constant explicit complaints and other related passive-aggressive implicit hints/suggestions re the difficulty of life as a parent/caregiver, life has indeed been going on for the antecedent protagonists before H came along and hence you're getting this post. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. And since, despite our best efforts, we can never accomplish our dream of sharing all of these exciting happenstances with all of you readers and admirers live and in-person (virtually) on an as-up-to-date-basis as we would like, here I will relay to you as best I can why the following holds. If y is this blog post, which has as a necessary but insufficient criterion that one needs to be writing (virtually) to create it, and X is the set that comprises ongoing-as-of-late life events and can be summarized by its cardinality x expressed here more simply as getting busy 'living', then by virtue of y, because x is a necessary but insufficient condition for y, or, x + Z --> y, where Z are some other necessary conditions, that since y, therefore x.

Instead of proceeding by proof by induction, I will instead lean on the dependable form of the bullet-point list. And I have to get this done before going to make dinner so please use your imagination as appropriate for where details have been left unconsidered/filled-in:

1. While you might not consider it "living" -- and it most certainly doesn't qualify as living by, for example, Wooderson standards, i.e. it ain't "L, I, V, I, N" -- Joelle and I are masters of the TrainerRoad indoor power-based cycling workout world. Our FTPs (functional threshold powers) are rising faster than industry-induced global temperatures and come spring-time there will be nary a faster cyclist within 200 nautical miles of the Starnbergersee.

2. Work is always rearing its ugly head somewhere in the background and as of late it has seemed to induce a stronger feeling of stress than perhaps at other points in the past. When examining the objective facts, however, it seems more of a combination of regular-style work-related/induced stress and the added joy of point 0, discussed in the foreword to this post, just above. So ignore that negative connotation and proceed to points 2a and 2b, just below:

2a. Yours truly is off to China! Suzhou, to be exact. Should be interesting! Take a minute and Bing it up. Looks like a truly 'neat' place to go. The Venice of Asia. I will be there for a week at the end of February, schooling our Chinese colleagues on the art of the German workday.

2b. Deep learning. As of the start of February I'm on a new (and improved) project in downtown Munich. Well, I've always been in downtown Munich (at this particular job, I mean), and I'm not moving. But the project is new. There's the whole issue with NDAs et al., but I can say that it's deep learning and if you haven't heard of that well the name sounds pretty cool doesn't it? I will be learning very deeply indeed. Anyways, the point is that it's neat. Like Suzhou seems.

3. Despite der Arbeit being arguably on the up-and-up in the lights of sub-points 2a and 2b, number 3 is still, nevertheless, forcefully on the + side despite its 'anti-arbeit' message with its news of a giant break from it; arbeit, that is. The powers that be recently gave the official go-ahead for Pemulis's parental leave and as a direct result of same, the entire family will be making a 3-week stop in Canada in the month of May (9th to 30th -- mark your calendars).

Quod erat demonstrandum.