"Dimensions"

"Dimensions" seems like a pretty cool movie about visual math, including visualizations of 4D figures.

The first scene starts out easy, then explains that stereographic projections are conformal. The second scene shows that seeing 3D shapes by looking at 2D cross-sections is pretty hard, and proposes stereographic projections instead. I wonder if this is a general lesson.

You can watch it here.

noise problem

I can hear absolutely everything my housemates do in the early morning (now, I'm 2 hours short of sleep). I turned on a little fan, which is helping marginally.

Ideas:
* put rugs in hallway
* get a white noise machine, such as this one

UPDATE: yes, it is a big deal

cell phone; simplifying my name

My Canadian cellphone is working as of yesterday. It's a very cool Samsung phone that doubles as PDA. Unlike the Treo, it folds along a different axis when in keyboard mode (though it is silly in that it closes whatever you're doing when you refold the phone). My student plan means I pay $28 for 250 daytime minutes (free weekends and after 6pm), and includes voice mail and caller ID: the main downside is the 3-year contract.

But it wasn't working at first because someone misspelled my name. I had to go to Bell shop in person to straighten it out. They didn't tell me the misspelling but I suspect it may be related to my bill being to "Rev. Gustavo Lacerda" (even ULC can't rectify this, since they can only make me a Minister).

RentalGuide (which, btw, is only good at taking your money) also misspelled my name as "Lacerpa".

Recently, in Pittsburgh, I couldn't get a prescription filled because the pharmacy disagreed with the doctor's office on whether or not I had a middle name (the pharmacy was right: I don't).

For the last couple years, I've been avoiding using the "de Melo" because it's asking for even more trouble. Mercifully, I think Canadian institutions so far have me simply as "Gustavo Lacerda" (except possibly for Immigration).

I think it would be a huge hassle to simplify my name in the USA or Brazil because of all the dependencies. Here are the nodes of this network of dependencies:

* birth certificate
* military certificate
* voter registration
* Brazilian ID
* Brazilian CPF
* passport
* DETRAN (Brazilian DMV)
* bank accounts
* US visa
* SS card
* PA DMV
* MA DMV
* mutual funds
* IRS
* health insurance
* life insurance
* Canada visa
* Canada study permit
* BC MSP
* doctor's offices
* university IDs

--

My SIN had to copy "Lacerda de Melo" exactly from my Study Permit. We managed to drop the "Pedrosa", though, since it was inside my FirstName field.

Combinatorial Prediction Markets

The video of Robin Hanson's UAI lecture only has 20 views. I'm hoping this blog post will correct this. I found this lecture quite a good overview of his ideas on bet-based epistemology. Domingos got very enthusiastic about this, and they seemed to chat for many hours afterwards.

Robin is interested in algorithms for keeping a consistent belief state (i.e. immune to Dutch book), which is a hard computational problem when you have lots of variables. If you had a powerful computer, you could set up such Dutch books for profit, essentially selling consistency to the computationally-deprived market subsidizer (i.e. the party interested in the information).

From the other side, I'm also hoping that scientists begin to automatically elicit knowledge this way. It sounds like a crazy idea that just might work.