Scraps 1

The paper in pocket reads

chinese 10 - 10:50
cs144   11 - 12:15    Packard 101
Gates   2 - 4
cs298   4:15 - 5:45   Terman 332

Markoff Larrabee
Moment generating functions
Tensor product geometry?

I really like the syntax highlighter’s attempt to color that. The first four lines correspond to places I needed to be during the day. The next three are from my first meeting with the graphics research group. After sitting there for about an hour and a half, I realized how little I knew about what I’m getting myself into. (Granted, my mentor told me the material was mostly dense).

The line about Markoff

Apparently, John Markoff from the New York Times made some false or inaccurate statements about Intel’s new Larrabee. One of the graduate students mentioned sending a very polite email to him telling him to look into getting the facts straight. I’m going to read the article eventually..

Moment generating functions

I learned about these in my statistics class but I completely forgot what they are for. I vaguely remember that the first and second ones give you the mean and variance. I find it sad that not only did I not really find a meaningful connection between this and what I was studying, but that it hasn’t been that long, and yet, I’ve pretty much completely forgotten all the statistics I learned and enjoyed so dearly.

Tensor product geometry?

This got thrown around a lot during that research meeting. I learned about tensor products in my math classes. After quickly looking them up in wikipedia, I didn’t quite see how they related to geometry (I think that was what it was in reference to). Maybe they were using it to describe a manifold? Oh well, hopefully I’ll get some reading to get caught up to speed with everything.