Some musings on getting up early

First, a little update on my November goals. This month has been a little difficult for me. I’ve made considerable progress on the paper I was supposed to be working on, but the rest of the goals have not really worked out.

The Russian had to take the backseat to a programming project (implementing the simplex method in C++), and getting up early has been … challenging.

I’m struggling a lot with just finding the motivation to get up early in the mornings. I go to bed on time, wake up right before my alarm goes off, and then just stay in bed. There are a few factors I’ll try to work on. One of my goals for December will be to instead of getting up early, develop a proper morning routine. I think one of the reasons I can’t get up is that I first need to figure out what I need to do, and plan out my morning.

I’m a creature of habits. I hate it when my environment is disturbed and I can’t follow through on my plans; yet I don’t have a proper routine even for when to take a shower. Sometimes I shower when I come home from work, sometimes right before bed, sometimes in the morning. Sometimes I have breakfast first thing when I get up, other times I wait for an hour or two. Sometimes I have a proper cooked breakfast, other times I make microwave oatmeal. Clearly, I need to fix this.

Here is my suggestion for the basic routine:

Shower when I get home from work. I like taking half an hour to reset after work, so I can relax properly or get started on my personal projects.

1) First thing in the morning: get up and wash my face.

2) Make a cup of tea, and drink it while reading the news.

3) Make breakfast consisting of oatmeal with nuts and dried fruits.

4) Enjoy breakfast while listening to a podcast (my current favourite is History of Philosophy without any gaps.

5) Get dressed, brush my teeth, deal with makeup and hair.

6) Go to campus / get started on the day.

I’ll probably have to tweak this considerably as my month goes on, but this is what I’m going to start with. Ideally, I want to fit meditation and exercise / stretching in there as well. That’s a later project though: right now my focus is on getting some kind of basic ritual started.

What does your morning routine look like?

On terrorism

It happened again. A few evil men decided that the best way to reach their goals, whatever they may be, was to murder over 100 innocent people. The death count as I write this is 100 people. 100. Think about that for a few minutes. That is 100 people who will never again hug their mother, see their children laugh, walk in the rain, sing in the shower, fight with their spouse. 100 people is 4 school classes. 4 entire school classes that are dead, for nothing. Imagine if everyone you attended fourth grade with was killed. To inspire fear. To terrorise us. To make us ask: who will be next?

Will it be me, when I go watch a movie? Will it be my brother, watching a football game? My sister, when she goes to a concert? Will they attack the school where my mother teaches?

In the end, it doesn’t matter where they strike next.

Terrorism, regardless of who it comes from, has as its goal to force a change in society. The second we give in, and create a society with more surveillance, with more armed police, with more control, and with less freedom, they win. I understand that France’s immediate reaction after the second serious terrorist attack this year is to close its border. However, I hope for the sake of democracy and openness that once they have the situation under control, France will open its borders again.

I hope, from the bottom of my heart, that we can deal with this without dropping more bombs, starting more wars. Because if we start killing in retaliation, the terrorists win. They get to recruit more potential terrorists, and force us to kill more, and so on in a neverending spiral of violence.

Terrorism should instead be treated like what it is: a war crime. Don’t bomb the attackers, try them in Hague. Show them all the courtesy a civilised country show criminals. Don’t fall to the same barbaric level of killing innocents “because the end justify the means”. They never do. Killing innocent Afghanis, and Syrians, and Irakis to kill the terrorists is wrong, just as wrong as killing innocent Frenchmen for some goal that we don’t yet know what it is, just as wrong as killing innocent Norwegian children because you hate immigrants. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. Instead of falling to their level of indiscriminate killing, let’s rise above and show the world how an open, democratic society deals with criminals.

My heart goes out to everyone who was directly affected by this heinous act of terror in France. Nous sommes tous Parisiennes.

Linearity of expectation

Expectation is linear. This is one of the most surprising facts in probability theory. Expectation is the “average value” of a random variable. In a sense, if the random variable X represents the outcome of an experiment, then the expected value is what we would expect the average outcome to be if we ran the experiment a lot of times.

When we say that expectation is linear, that means that if X and Y are random variables and a is a constant, then E[aX + Y] = aE[X] + E[Y]. This relation follows from the definition of expected value in terms of integrals. Since integrals are linear operators, it follows that expectation is linear.

It is surprising because it is true regardless of the dependence between the two random variables. Most facts in probability theory have dependence conditions on them, but not linearity of expectation. So no matter how interdependent two random variables X and Y may be, the expected value of their sum is the sum of their expected values.

Linearity of expectation is very useful when working with the probabilistic method. There are a number of very elegant proofs of somewhat deep results that use nothing more complicated than linearity of expectation. Here is an example from chapter 2 of The Probabilistic Method.

Theorem There is a 2-colouring of with at most monochromatic .

Proof. Take a random 2-colouring of . Let X be the number of monochromatic . Then X where is the indicator variable indicating if a given -subset is monochromatic. The expected value for each is . There are possible -subsets, so by linearity of expectation, E[X] = . Hence there exists some colouring with at most the expected value of monochromatic .

Halloween! + November goals

The spookiest day of the year has arrived! This Halloween also marks the 40-year anniversary of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I’m currently recovering from a midnight showing of said movie at the Belcourt Theatre (and a Halloween party the night after). If you like cheesy, so-bad-they’re-good movies, there is nothing better than the Rocky Horror Picture Show. And you haven’t seen it until you’ve seen a live screening, complete with costumes, props, and yelling at the screen.

Today also marks the day I’m supposed to evaluate my October goals, and set new ones for November. Overall, I’d say my October goals went very well. I’ve only had to buy lunch twice during the month, bought nothing I consider unnecessary, and I’ve worked through 4 chapters of The Probabilistic Method. I’ve really enjoyed working with all these three goals, and I’ve enjoyed the extra money that could go in my savings account since because of all the lunches I didn’t buy and all the things I didn’t buy. So I’ll be keeping up with these for the foreseeable future. However, I also need new goals for the new month that will hopefully become habits. After some thinking, they are:

1. Get out of bed by 6.30 on weekdays and 7.30 on weekends. I typically wake up around 6 and just stay in bed, reading, until I have to rush to get ready for work. No more of that. I will get up within half an hour of waking up, so I can sit around with a cup of tea and a book for half an hour instead of checking Facebook from bed.

2. Work on my Russian every day. I took a year of Russian in high school, and then let it lapse. I would like to speak another language, so I’m going to revisit my old Russian books and find someone to practise speaking with.

3. Finish a paper I’m working on with another grad student and one of our postdocs. We are all so busy that the project is a bit stalled. All the little pieces are there: someone just needs to sit down and put them in the right order. So I’m going to sit down with it for an hour every day after lunch and work it out.