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31 Dec 2002
2pm I go to Porto de Galinhas, not knowing where I'll be sleeping.
4pm Rudy calls, and we meet up.
5pm Get lunch. Walk all along the beach. See many tourists. Play a blues riff with a cavaquinho (kinda like a ukulele) with some hippies. The city was very full: I must have seen like 15 Asians (that's my new handy heuristic for estimating crowds in Brazil).
7pm Watch a very entertaining accordion player / singer / dance caller.
11pm Play porrinha. Figured out a (in retrospect) trivial result about porrinha with rational players. If you assume that it is common knowledge that all players are rational (the strongest possible assumption, I guess), then each player's best guess is based only on the previous player's guess and his own hand (greedy analysis).
1 Jan 2003 - 12:05am NEW YEAR! Hugs going all around, which was nice. It's interesting to be hugged by someone you've never spoken with. Saw the clouds being lit up by the fireworks on the next beach. It was beautiful.
1:00am Saw my cousins Renata, Maria, Gabriela; and Felipe and Pedro, who grew up in California and who give people a chance to practice their English. Then I went to talk to the older generation.
Extremely geeky conversation with Roberto (my physicist cousin who lives in San Francisco, father of the two boys above): he's still working with models for stock-picking using AI techniques, etc, but recently got back to working on physics again: he's doing very interesting work with Constantino Tsallis (a 3000 hit man!), and he's given a talk about the work at the Santa Fe Institute.
I impressed him with the paradox of mathematical information (aka the paradox of "in logic class you learn nothing"). We also talked about Hofstadter, and other popular science personalities.
I told him I would love to do this kind of research. He said it's looking difficult at the moment, but we kept talking about the stuff, so who knows what will happen when I follow up. It's so cool to know another geek in the family, even if we're that far (1/16 blood).
2:30am Check out the rock band, who played a few songs from Abbey Road remarkably well.
2:40am Talk to Roberto some more. He explains Tsallis's ideas in more technical terms. Interesting: Gaussian distributions may actually be less "natural" than longer-tailed distributions in some cases. (The Gaussian is the maximum entropy distribution (i.e. "natural") under the classical (i.e. less general) assumptions). The consequence is that when those assumptions don't hold, supposedly "rare" events happen more often than you would expect. Very cool stuff. They say the consequences show up in biology, finance, and a lot of "complex" fields (even if skepticism is called for whenever you hear hyped claims about "complex systems", "non-linear dynamics" or "chaos").
3:00am Rudy and I go walk towards the Skol place, then give up and get the car, and then we give up because of the traffic, so we park halfway and walk along beach. The Skol place was really sucked and was really expensive. So we walked back.
3:50am bought an Orange Pitu. Enjoyed hard rock like I hadn't in a long time.
4:15am felt more inebriated than I remember ever being, after having only half of a cup.
4:30am Rudy sees me trying to sleep with my head on a plastic bottle, and says we should go home.
5:00am We get home.
~6:00am I get to sleep on a very tight couch.
9am Wake up very sweaty, by people arguing.
10am offered a sleeping bag.
12noon wake up for good
2:30pm arrive home
2:40pm get a fix of the 'Net
2pm I go to Porto de Galinhas, not knowing where I'll be sleeping.
4pm Rudy calls, and we meet up.
5pm Get lunch. Walk all along the beach. See many tourists. Play a blues riff with a cavaquinho (kinda like a ukulele) with some hippies. The city was very full: I must have seen like 15 Asians (that's my new handy heuristic for estimating crowds in Brazil).
7pm Watch a very entertaining accordion player / singer / dance caller.
11pm Play porrinha. Figured out a (in retrospect) trivial result about porrinha with rational players. If you assume that it is common knowledge that all players are rational (the strongest possible assumption, I guess), then each player's best guess is based only on the previous player's guess and his own hand (greedy analysis).
1 Jan 2003 - 12:05am NEW YEAR! Hugs going all around, which was nice. It's interesting to be hugged by someone you've never spoken with. Saw the clouds being lit up by the fireworks on the next beach. It was beautiful.
1:00am Saw my cousins Renata, Maria, Gabriela; and Felipe and Pedro, who grew up in California and who give people a chance to practice their English. Then I went to talk to the older generation.
Extremely geeky conversation with Roberto (my physicist cousin who lives in San Francisco, father of the two boys above): he's still working with models for stock-picking using AI techniques, etc, but recently got back to working on physics again: he's doing very interesting work with Constantino Tsallis (a 3000 hit man!), and he's given a talk about the work at the Santa Fe Institute.
I impressed him with the paradox of mathematical information (aka the paradox of "in logic class you learn nothing"). We also talked about Hofstadter, and other popular science personalities.
I told him I would love to do this kind of research. He said it's looking difficult at the moment, but we kept talking about the stuff, so who knows what will happen when I follow up. It's so cool to know another geek in the family, even if we're that far (1/16 blood).
2:30am Check out the rock band, who played a few songs from Abbey Road remarkably well.
2:40am Talk to Roberto some more. He explains Tsallis's ideas in more technical terms. Interesting: Gaussian distributions may actually be less "natural" than longer-tailed distributions in some cases. (The Gaussian is the maximum entropy distribution (i.e. "natural") under the classical (i.e. less general) assumptions). The consequence is that when those assumptions don't hold, supposedly "rare" events happen more often than you would expect. Very cool stuff. They say the consequences show up in biology, finance, and a lot of "complex" fields (even if skepticism is called for whenever you hear hyped claims about "complex systems", "non-linear dynamics" or "chaos").
3:00am Rudy and I go walk towards the Skol place, then give up and get the car, and then we give up because of the traffic, so we park halfway and walk along beach. The Skol place was really sucked and was really expensive. So we walked back.
3:50am bought an Orange Pitu. Enjoyed hard rock like I hadn't in a long time.
4:15am felt more inebriated than I remember ever being, after having only half of a cup.
4:30am Rudy sees me trying to sleep with my head on a plastic bottle, and says we should go home.
5:00am We get home.
~6:00am I get to sleep on a very tight couch.
9am Wake up very sweaty, by people arguing.
10am offered a sleeping bag.
12noon wake up for good
2:30pm arrive home
2:40pm get a fix of the 'Net