Gary_Yngve

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?

One time, not at band camp, I had an accident with hot sauce... getting hot sauce in the eyes is nothing...

Oh, that's cleaning the pipes, not cleaning the chains...

Is it just me, or is anyone else disturbed [edited: in the head-in-the-gutter kinda way] by seeing the most recent threads being, "Rooster Sauce" "Cleaning the chains"

But if you add lots of the magic ingredient , they will counteract gravity!

Hehe, you're right about that. But you're not as thirsty, and the weight is closer to your center of mass. Whatever, if you're climbing with me, I'll carry the filter, and you can use it if you wish. And I won't mock you for using iodine... it all works.

More like every two hours. And it doubles as your rest break. The filter is at the top of my pack, so it's pretty quick to whip out. If I'm doing a climb (not a carryover) with no water source, then I'll have to carry water with me, and I'll leave the filter behind at camp (or whereever we're caching gear). I don't think filtering is necessarily better than iodine, but it's not really inferior either.

One liter of water weighs 1 kilogram, which is over two pounds. If you have to use chemicals to purify the water, you have to either sit and wait for it to work or you have to hike while waiting for it to work, carrying the extra weight in the meantime. If you have a filter, you can drink up instantly, and not have to carry any water. In fact, for those people arguing volume, if you have a Platypus, your volume can be less when using a filter because you don't ever carry the liter of water. Anyway, I'm not saying a filter is for everything... I really like a filter on long approaches and for climbs that are not carryovers. But it seems the general attitude of people here is that filters suck, which I think is a tad overblown...

That's called, "They don't want to get their asses sued."

My filter is under a pound. It is way under a cubic foot... by at least a factor of 50... I'd say its volume is about half a liter. This is my second year using it and I haven't had to change the filter yet. This is partly because I plan ahead and try to filter my water from good sources. Sometimes in the summer I leave the stove/pot/fuel at home to be even lighter.

Brand names aside, my standard rack is very much like Greg's. Some things I've noticed are: I like having extra double slings on moderate alpine routes (slinging trees/horns, minimizing rope drag). On moderate alpine stuff, I like tricams .5-2.5 and hexes 7-9 a lot. When climbing steep cracks, I don't want to futz around with nuts, hexes, or tricams because it's so tiring to place gear, and cams tend to go in faster and easier. I tend to place the #4 Friend on nearly all pitches that I am carrying it. Many times it is the first or second piece I place. If I am climbing a sustained pitch near my limit for the first time that takes certain size ranges of pieces, I like the comfort of knowing that I won't run out of the critical piece when I need it (carrying doubles of handsize cams, etc.).

Dude... you need to get laid... or smoke a reefer... or both...

Right, so that one liter of water you are carrying weighs two pounds. Suppose you are doing Triumph. Chug water at the TH. Don't carry any. Filter a liter at First Thorton Lake and chug. Don't carry any. Filter at top of col... With iodine, you'd be hiking up to the col while waiting for your water to purify.

Filters rock. If you consider the weight, it's under a pound of group gear, so really, under half a pound. The weight is quite worth the convenience and the taste. On many approaches, you won't need to carry any water because water sources are so frequent (remember half a pound is a quarter of a liter of water). And you iodine folks -- you're carrying around two pounds of water waiting for the chemicals to do their thing?