Today, I promise not to write ANYTHING about the weather. I'll save that for tomorrow when we're supposed to get another foot (or more) of the white crap.
Sigh...
Instead, two totally unrelated things I've been meaning to mention. First of all is a weird thought that popped into my head yesterday afternoon while eating an apple—do you leave the stem in when eating an apple, or do you twist it out? I don't know why the thought popped into my head; it just did. I personally twist the stem out. I don't know why; I mean, I could eat an apple with the stem in it. It wouldn't bother me at all. But for whatever reason, I always twist the stem out.
I guess I'm just weird like that.
And in regard to twisting the stem out of an apple—is/was there some kind of weird thing that goes along with how many twists it takes to get the stem out of the apple? You know; like if it takes four twists you'll kiss four people this year, or something strange like that? I seem to remember something along those lines from when I was a kid, but I don't remember any of the details. So if YOU know if I'm remembering this correctly or if I've just moved myself one step closer to heading off the deep end (a distinct possibility), let me know.
And thanks.
Secondly, I would like you to read this paragraph--
“In this paper, we develop a cascadic multigrid algorithm for fast computation of the Fiedler vector of a graph Laplacian, namely, the eigenvector corresponding to the second smallest eigenvalue. This vector has been found to have applications in fields such as graph partitioning and graph drawing. The algorithm is a purely algebraic approach based on a heavy edge coarsening scheme and pointwise smoothing for refinement. To gain theoretical insight, we also consider the related cascadic multigrid method in the geometric setting for elliptic eigenvalue problems and show its uniform convergence under certain assumptions. Numerical tests are presented for computing the Fiedler vector of several practical graphs, and numerical results show the efficiency and optimality of our proposed cascadic multigrid algorithm.”.
My question is this—did you understand it? Please say no. Please say that only a genius (or, in the case of the person who wrote it, a former lineman for the Baltimore Ravens who's a math scholar) can understand it. Because, you know, if that's something most people understand and I don't; well, then, I even dumber than I thought I was.
And that's quite dumb!
Okay. That's it for unrelated things for now. Except for this—if you're in Marquette and wanna see a dork on TV, there's a special fundraising edition of “High School Bowl” on WNMU-TV tonight at 9. There will be two pledge breaks in the show, and the aforementioned dork—well, okay me—will be begging for bucks for Public Media.
Between those, though, will be game segments featuring some of the brightest young people on the planet. And I'm pretty sure at least one or two of them might even understand that paragraph about the cascadic multigrid algorithm.
8-)
No comments:
Post a Comment