Aphorism 6

You don't regret
When you don't bet.
So, please ignore
Agent provocateur!

Agent provocateur is a strategy, used by famous scientists, for example:

If black holes do exist, Kip will get one year of Penthouse ... I paid the specified penalty, which was a one year subscription to Penthouse, to the outrage of Kip's liberated wife.

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

As well as famous artists/comedians, for example:

Sacha Baron Cohen realized that when people believe they are speaking to an idiot, they lower their defenses, cease trying to appear clever, and reveal their true selves, including their prejudices and biases.

(also here)

When cleverly staged, it can also reveal what people think about you ... just be sure to choose a topic you know extremely well ;)

Aphorism 5

Don't be Gauss to Abel!

The impact senior professionals may have on juniors can be tremendous. It's a great opportunity to share, help, promote and ... learn too.

The story of Gauss and Abel is covered by Wikipedia:

Abel sent a paper on the unsolvability of the quintic equation to Carl Friedrich Gauss, who proceeded to discard without a glance what he believed to be the worthless work of a crank.

As well as by the 2nd volume of the "Men of Mathematics" by E. T. Bell.

Azi e ziua lui Tolkien

(3 Jan)
Azi e ziua lui Tolkien.
Chiar ar fi un mare chin
Să-l citești tot într-o zi.
Deci, noi filme vom privi!

Aphorism 4

Sh..t comes when nobody gives a sh..t.

This is a reflection on the "broken windows" idea from the "The Pragmatic Programmer". In case you don't have the book, see more here and here.

A reflection on the COVID events ...

The kings of nature? Bloody hell ...
It sounds tempting, yet it's stupid.
Over the nature we "prevail",
With antivirus - outdated!

A startup story

Here is a story from the past startup times. It's a mixture of maths and technology, the kind of things I enjoy, as an applied mathematician by education.

Sometime in 2018, I was involved in an R&D project to detect periodic events. I will skip most of the technical parts, those curious can find the entire presentation here. The presentation ends with ...

... and this is the focus of this little post.

The preable of the story is that the VP of Engineering, a lot earlier before the start of this project, "swore" that they will buy champaign to the entire Data Science Team if we end up using Fourier Analysis for whatever purposes. Was it for fun or they were envisioning this project coming - I have no idea.

But, the team started "assessing the field". I started looking at a simplified unimodal model. After "doodling" for a couple of hours on a one A4 size page ...

... I came with some "expressions" allowing querying the database for periodic events using ... plain SQL! Amazon Redshift was returning results within 2 minutes. I still remember our CTO saying: "You nailed it!".

However, if you check the presentation, there is no Fourier Analysis there. It's just a simple application of the basic stats, limited to the unimodal model. It was enough though to trigger the further research and this simple model was used as a benchmark.

The team, eventually, started looking for multimodal techniques and Fourier Analyses (on terabytes of data!!!) ... and the team recalled the earlier "promise" from our VP of Engineering. We definitely had a party, I don't remember the champaign though ...