Gary_Yngve

nah, just lots of people hating work... (i've been working all weekend and need to work until tues 3pm)

LUMMOX makes no point, lummox idiot.. i go climb ERD now, goodbye What's ERD?

more random pics: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gyngve/Darrington/

Yep, first is Zig-Zag Flakes on NW Corner of NEWS. Second is the 5.9 fingercrack variation on SEWS SW Rib. The fingercrack plus slabs takes you to the bearhug. I thought it was a little stout for 5.9. The nice thing about climbing as a group of 3 is you always have a designated photographer.

Woohoo, I just lost 12 hours from debugging because of a floating point roundoff error. And now I'm waiting for some tests to finish... So here are some pics:

I'd have to disagree on being a moron to go up O-Rock... it has nice views from the Carbon Glacier to Mowich Face. And the classic view of the toilet bowl.

In August (especially back then), the N Face of O-Rock is still pretty snowy. By October it can be bulletproof ice. It's about 400 vertical feet, steepening towards the top to about 60 degrees. The ice slope doesn't go up to the true summit. It levels off, and then it's a few hundred feet of scree scrambling to get to the summit. [edit] Am I a kool kat now?

Nice! I climbed the route a few weeks ago and enjoyed it as well. On some of the pitches you have to be a little careful routefinding to avoid the granola granite. I remember there being a lot of loose stuff on the approach up Bong... I wasn't so worried about falling as I was worried about kicking rocks on the people below me (we were a party of four). The route does give you tremendous position on a steep face:

well, so much for moping about jobs... the topic of conversation quickly changed to mountains

June I did one 2-day trip. July I did one 2-day trip. August I did one 2-day trip and one 4-day trip. I don't expect to be able to even go out every weekend. All I know is that it seems like I am sacrificing my entire life outside of research and my advisor still is not satisfied. From having talked with several people since yesterday, I've come to realize several things: Many other people have had issues with my advisor. We have fundamental communication barriers. He'll be optimistic and say that I can get X done by Y time. I'll think he's crazy. I'll be realistic and say it's not possible to get W done by Z time. He'll think I'm fatalistic. He gets offended when I speak of work in terms of hours. He thinks I should be so passionate about my work that hours don't matter. I want him to appreciate and respect the sacrifices I make to put in long hours. My advisor is not known for his ability to be supportive and encouraging.

This one thing that I don't understand about America. It seems that if you are a lawyer, doctor, professor, etc., you get paid a lot, but you are expected to put in >60 hrs a week. It seems my ideal job would be to work 30 hrs a week and get half the pay (or even a third the pay). But those jobs don't exist. Am I the only one who would appreciate a job like that? How come they don't exist?

A friend of mine got a bonus the other day worth more than my annual stipend. That was news I really did not want to hear.

Explain to him that you were brought up in a repressive environment and don't openly express love. You are terribly passionate about your project even though you don't appear to be. Then show him your prescription for anti-depressants. That's actually half-true... I'm not very open with my emotions.

two weeks ago i girth-hitched two doubles together to reduce ropedrag on a pitch (i guess i could have just not placed the piece, but then the runout would have been pretty big...)

Grrrr, and I had to cancel my plans for this weekend. At least half a dozen times this year I've had to cancel or bail from climbing plans because either my advisor dumped more work on me (or pushed up a deadline) or I've been too exhausted to go. Had dinner tonight with a friend of mine who quit grad school a year ago and is now raking in the big bucks... decisions, decisions...

I had three great relationships with advisors in undergrad. I do think I can be a little passive-aggressive though... not sticking up for myself when I should, and then being angry later...

I sent this email to him prior to our fight today... I either had balls or was damn stupid: I have no retreat paper, unless I can pull results out of my ass. So should I actually enjoy my weekend, or should I work away yet another weekend in hopes that results are going to fall out of the sky and hit me on the head, because not submitting a retreat paper is disappointing and unacceptable?

Suppose you have a humanoid robot. It has many joints, and it has motors on each of the joints. The robot has sensors to detect all sorts of things. How do you make the robot walk? You have to figure out how to control each motor for each joint, based on the current joint positions and all the sensory input that you have. Model reduction focuses on simplifying the state information so that the inputs get mapped as best as possible to the outputs (controls to observations). Control reduction focuses on simplifying the control parameters (knobs/dials for the motors) so that control problems (which tend to be nonlinear and nasty) can be solved in a lower-dimensional (easier) space. Ideally a reduced controller should retain as much flexibility from the full controller and behave robustly. The tricky part about control reduction is that the reduced controllers have to operate on a reduced model. One option is to do model reduction and then design a controller on the simplified model. The problem with this method is that the approximation happens at the beginning, and errors tend to compound. Ideally one would want to simultaneously simplify the model and the controller at the same time (i.e. with a closed loop between model and controller). There are esoteric mathematical methods to do this for linear systems, but extending to nonlinear systems and performing robustly is still largely open. The other way to simplify control is to make control not necessary, that is, make the system inherently robust. A simple example would be a slinky. It tends to walk down stairs no matter what width/height the stairs are. More complicated examples have been studied in biomechanical literature. We've explored both directions, and we've tried working with toy problems (multi-link pendulums) and with real problems (humans walking). No killer results yet.

The funny thing is that I am one of his few remaining students. Two students quit on him. Three are co-advised, so they only get half of his crap. One is the stereotypical work-in-the-corner-all-day-and-talk-to-no-one Chinese guy.

My current project is aimed at the mostly unsolved problem of controller reduction. I started the project six months ago. At least three of those months were spent doing other crap (taking a class, TAing, peer reviewing a few papers, revising a paper accepted to a conference, preparing said talk...). During the three months I had to work, I implemented balanced truncation for model reduction on linear systems, adapted spacetime optimization to work with Galerkin projections, ported a fast forward dynamics engine over to our system, read a bunch of papers, and spent countless hours debugging and tuning nonlinear constrained optimization solvers. But I haven't gotten any compelling results yet, and my advisor thinks it's because I'm not passionate about the problem. My counter is that I cannot be passionate about the problem if I'm feeling threatened to get results. The new project involves using adjoint methods to solve spacetime problems faster, and it may be useful in the project that I have been working on.

I haven't had a chance yet to ask around to obtain funding from other profs. Something I probably should do... I told him that I expect to go climbing on the weekends. He told me that if I expect that, I shouldn't be in grad school.

If I had problems with authority figures in general, I wouldn't be taking Mountaineers courses. The bitch at the IMA is a well known troublemaker who has given anyone and everyone a hard time.

Unless I start feeling passionately in love with my project, he's not going to fund me. This, after I've worked nights, weekends, no mountains, etc. for the past three years, and provided my own funding (that just ran out). He insists that I do not have to work more hours, just every hour has to be so productive... and when I'm in the mountains, all I'm thinking about is what I'm going to do next with my project. So for the next few months, I'm supposed to pretend to be passionate about the project, completely ignoring the axe over my head. Oh yeah, and he gave me a new project to work on for which I should have results and a short paper done by Tuesday, after he had earlier denied that he had ever forced me to work weekends.

Does Larry the Tool give you tickets if are praying without paying?

Because Sphinx will think they are too boring?