As I’ve been preparing for the last month, today is the first of a long period of freedom from classes and responsibility. I planned to utilize this as best I can by self-studying some subjects I’ve prepared.

Calculus

Before anything else, I wanted to brush up on Calculus. I started learning Calc in my AP Calculus class in high school, but never took the AP test. In college I had to take Precalculus twice and the calculus class three times to get to a Calculus 1 level over four years of college. In part I usually blame the fact that none of my teachers let me use a graphing calculator on the test, since I usually programmed some TI-BASIC programs to solve this stuff for me, but this is mostly excuses.

So I just today learned about Taylor series from 3Brown1Blue’s Essence of Calculus series. I never learned about this in Calculus, and it’s a really interesting way to look at estimating the derivative of a certain spot of a function by creating an infinite sum of polynomials. I’ve been working these out on paper and hope they might come in handy with some neural networking concepts I’ll try to learn in the coming weeks.

Tomorrow I plan to finish up the matrix calculus, then get my environment set up and start on some tensorflow tutorials. Any mathematical concepts I don’t understand can be learned as necessary. I hope to have everything set up and some idea of how a neural network is structured by Friday.

Statistical Learning

In our high school we had two AP math topics, Calculus and Statistics. In hindsight I should have done the latter, as statistics to me feels more realistic and concrete and therefore easy for my brain to wrap around, as well as having more chances to use programming languages with it in school. So I thought it would be valuable to learn something about statistical learning since I’m learning about calculus. So I began An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R (ISBN 9781461471370). The introduction already starts talking about matrices, so I’m glad to see that portion of my self learning coming into view as being useful. I understand everything in the introduction and look forward to learning more tomorrow.

I’ve played with R but have spent a lot more time with python, and think that in 10 years python will be a much more useful language, but I think any concepts learned here will be applicable to both and beyond. R seems to be preferred by people not specializing in computers, so it should be valuable to understand this world of programming. Besides, it seems easier to create visualization in R and it might be nice to play in the more typed world of statistics rather than python’s arbitrary types.

Nevertheless the goal is to get the environment set up, and do exercises through chapter 3 by Friday.

Chess

Watching Bullet chess videos for entertainment and reading a bit of My System. No games today besides keeping up with correspondence games.

This site

I want to make the Sitemap in such a way it will have a nice long list of all the pages on this website, so it’s easy for viewers to binge-read all the journals and posts here. With Hugo it should be trivial to set this up via the templating and iterating through all posts within a section.

Misc

I went to a club with a friend of mine today (Future Club in Nanjing) since she wanted to dance to let loose and forget about her worries. This club has a separate section for world hip-hop/pop music specifically for foreigners or Chinese that want to mingle or watch over the foreigners. I’ve spent plenty of time in clubs in the past two years, but recently not had any reason or desire to go. But looking at it as an outsider and observer this time it has a different tone.

I’ve spent most of my childhood (up to 18 or so) going to church weekly, and going to school in a school system attached to a church. Clubs, while more “sinful” than most places, to me feels like a church ala Stranger in a Strange Land’s Fosterite Church of the New Revelation. Here’s why:

• Hymns: Much like regular church, there’s a standard repertoire of party pop songs that play every time I’m there or any foreigner club around China. Everyone knows the lyrics and the moves, and those that have been there for a while can perform while others can imitate. These songs are around the same theme, that “This is a party!”, to drink more, to shake that ass, and perform actions and rituals associated with the environment and familiar to everyone.
• Preacher: The DJ and hypeman are on a raised stage or staircase, trying to get everyone to sing along or be on the same wavelength as the songs. Like the pastor may tell the congregation to kneel, stand, or sing a verse, the hypeman will tell people to raise their hands, jump, or repeat after them.
• Tithing: While you can go in and drink the koolaid/vodka free alcohol, people that go there frequently will buy a few drinks to support the institution. Those that pay more (like VIP tables) get more reputation in the club.
• Proselytizing: I know some people that get paid to go there and dance or be “party people.” They are the same people that really urge others to come there on certain nights.
• Matchmaking: A lot of couples meet through churches, and so do people at nightclubs.

I know none of these are really hot takes and there’s much less in common than in common, but from my time spent in the club today these similar dynamics were playing over in my head. Churches were extremely important to communities maybe 50 years ago, but their influence is waning. Although this is the case I feel that humans still have that base desire of semi-weekly congregation and shared music, some of which is shared by the rituals that take place in the nightclub. Especially with foreigners away from home, this sort of third place is a respite from the daily life in the Chinese People’s Republic and fulfills a lot of the social and spiritual needs that may have been fulfilled by churches 50 years ago. The volume of the music and the environment are not something I enjoy, but it brings a lot of needed community and joy to other foreigners here.