Chin Jen Wang's Birthday

Dear Sumant,

To begin with I am in Faner Lab and its 12:50 on my computer clock and woo hoo its February 29 the Leap Year. I am glad that I am able to again write this morning page. My math 449 class was canceled so I have some additional time to go over other things including some study. In the morning I got the call from my cengage representative regarding the access codes to my blackboard course for my students. In the morning I did yoga and went over day 2 from littlewoods book. I am anxious to know how much this will effect me after day 28. I am excited about it. Today is Chin Jen Wang's Birthday. It's like once in a 4 year opportunity. I met Chin through Vine. He is one of the sweetest person I know. A tireless worker who has been pushing himself too hard. Recently he got his gall bladder removed and he hasn't recovered well. I am always praying that he gets well. The vantage point from which I see is its the unhealthy diet of non vegetarian food but I cannot say that to him because it goes against their Church's Morality where the head pastor Sandor Paull pronounced "Shawn-door" has given numerous accounts to how much he enjoy sinking his teeth into meat. Which is one reason which always baffles me that if you can go to an extent of killing somebody to satisfy your taste buds then how can you be trusted ? If you cannot show compassion to other creature and all your thoughts are just geared towards making it to the heaven and living a life with the creator for eternity, there is something wrong with the philosophy. Anyway that was a digression I didn't want to make right now. I acknowledge that they are doing a lot of things to make a better community. I will just go to student center and finish up some grading and study for a while. Did I tell you that I got a hand juicer now I can enjoy Grape Fruit juice at any time of the day which is awesome.

Best Regards
Sumant

Midnight pages

Dear Sumant,

Today was great. I woke up early at 6 am. Did some 449 stuff and today I started Yoga also. It was great. I think my session lasted almost 40 minutes. I am using a classic celebrated book on yoga. Which has a 28 day course. Also I went to hear Wole Soyinka, a noble laurette here. It was a part of my artist's break. I been working on generating functions recently. I think I now have few problems to submit tomorrow. I wrote the Stirling's number and Bell Number algorithm. Plus I solved two problems. I also did grading for Dr. Wallis and my own Math 140 class. Today we had Dr. Salah's two hr make up lecture for 501. So it was a fruitful day and I am happy about it.

Cheers !
Sumant Sumant

Bell Numbers

> # Program for Bell Number
# Homework Assignment for Dr. Porter's Math 449
# Submitted by Sumant
# Date February 26, 2008
# Dependency: Maple 7, Classic Worksheet
b449 := proc(n)
strl := Matrix(1..n,1..n,0);# Matrix with 0 entries
for i from 1 to n do
for j from 1 to i do
if ((j = 0) or (j = 1))
then
strl[i,j] := 1;
else
strl[i,j] := j*strl[i-1,j]+strl[i-1,j-1];
end if;
end do;
end do;
bell := 0;
for k from 1 to n do
bell := bell + strl[n,k];# Add numbers in the row
end do;
bell; # Display the bell number
end proc;

Stirling number of 2nd Kind using Maple

> # Program for Stirling Number of 2nd Kind
# Homework Assignment for Dr. Porter's Math 449
# Submitted by Sumant
# Date February 26, 2008
# Dependency: Maple 7, Classic Worksheet
s449 := proc(n,k)
strl := Matrix(1..n,1..n,0);# Matrix with 0 entries
for i from 1 to n do
for j from 1 to i do
if ((j = 0) or (j = 1))
then
strl[i,j] := 1;
else
strl[i,j] := j*strl[i-1,j]+strl[i-1,j-1];
end if;
end do;
end do;
strl[n,k]; # Display the value
end proc;

Morning Page Revisited

Dear Sumant,

Well as promised I am back to a new edition of my morning pages, this time sitting in the very first row next to the computer which has scanner attached to it. I just talked to Rachel from the Vine. I didn't get to wake up real early this morning as I went to bed a little late somewhere around 1 am after calling my mom and dad separately. Yesterday I got a card for my sister's upcoming birthday on 3rd of March. I will goad her again to read "The 7 Habbits of highly effective people". The book on yoga by littleman looks great. It is straight to doing Hath yoga (physical yoga). The book by Iyengar I believe also talks about Raj Yoga. Before going to sleep yesterday I did go over Perfect Set. A Perfect set is one which is closed and has no isolated points. One famous example of Perfect set is Cantor Set. The other property of Cantor set is that its "No Where Dense". A no where dense set's definition had two double negatives. The definition is "A set is no where dense if the closure of the set has no nonempty open interval". I must admit that I still haven't got the hang of this definition.
Since morning I was trying to get hold of the generating function theory. We are currently doing composition of exponential generating function and one of the classic problem is "Given n people how many ways they can be partitioned and made to sit around a circluar table" and amazing thing is the answer to this is n! (n factorial). A slight extension to this same problem is now each of these table could be served either red of white wine and the answer to that is (n+1) ! (n+1 factorial) which is devoid of 2^n (which one might expect as one has two choice for each table. Well that brings to an end of my morning page. See you next time.

Best Regards
Sumant Sumant

Morning Page for today

Dear Sumant,

This should have been the morning page ! Anyway I am in Morris library sitting in the third row and facing the enterance. Right now its sparsely occupied. I have come here just after teaching my Math 140 class. Today we covered more optimization problems involving boxes, cylinders and rectangle. I was glad that I took colored chalks to illustrate the figures. They will have to prepare for their upcoming midterm which is supposed to be on next Tuesday. The main reason I am in library is to pick up several (4) books including two on yoga, one on business ethics, one by Julia Cameron on Walking.

Yesterday I went to bed early (about 18 :30 hrs) so that I can wake up at 3 in the morning but instead I got up at 22:30. To make better use of the time I started reading and it went on till 1:30 only then I could go back to bed again but this made me wake up at 10 in the morning. So I have to be careful when I go to bed if I want to get up early morning tomorrow. I also took time to listen to Ragas album of Ravi Shankar as a part of my renaissance taste in music. It was awesome and I liked it. Other than that things are great.


Best Regards
Sumant Sumant

Waking up Early

Dear Sumant,

Today I woke up at around 4 am I lingered for a while before out of bed at 5:am. I loved it. I had time to read section of book by Richard Carlson. I went over 501 and 449 subjects. In 501 at present we are doing Lebesgue Measure Theory. Here are some tidbits of what I right now can recall. There is a concept of outer measure and for any interval its the length of the interval for ex for interval (a,b) where a < b its (b-a). One of the important theorem is any open set can be written as a countable union of disjoint open intervals. It has a 5 step proof in which the countability is shown by mapping with rational number and overlapping intervals are contained in a maximal open interval. The other is E1 and E2 are two measurable sets that so is their union ie E1 U E2. The outer measure is denoted by lambda* and it has 3 main properties including that its translation invariant. In 449 we are doing product of generating functions and all you have to do is find the coefficient of x^n. So far we discussed mostly product of ordinary generating functions.
SIUC was closed on last Thursday and Friday which is kind of unprecedented because of winter snow and ice. My car was all cocooned in sheet of ice. The weekend I went to two parties including one thrown foe Elmer, who is now going back to Columbia and the other at Charles House. So in a way it was a nice long weekend. I did go to Walmart to get my car battry replaced. I also went to Barnes and Noble and spent some time going over the "Walking in this world" and "The Artist's Way" both book seem pretty interesting and I am going to order these soon. Apparently her other book "The Right to Write" inspired me to get back to writing more and one of the very reason I am updating this block. In her all books she advocate the importance of writing, walking and thinking.

That's for now
Sumant

My Changing Taste In Music

Dear Sumant,

It 13 hrs and I am updating this blog from the morris library. I had a math 501 homework due today. My blackboard account is finally set up so I look forward to posting assignments using blackboard for my Math 140 class. Over the weekend I went over two books "Road to Perdition" a manga style american comic and an Audio book "Profound Effects of Music on Life". The second book was an eye opener in one sense because after hearing that I have stopped listening to popular radio in car. Basically it says that a most of the popular music first builds up the tension and unlike classical music of Beethoven doesn't release it. It had some statistics of how that effects the IQ of mouse. There were pieces of music from "Smashing Pumpkin" and some other bands that were used in the study and had profound effect on the functioning of mices. On the opposite rich and complicated classical pieces had a nourashing effect on the brain, so that means time to get the CD of Mozart, Bach and Beethoven :)

That's for now
Sumant Sumant

Rain & Snow

Dear Sumant,

I am updating this blog from the Faner Hall. It's rain and snow all over southern illinois. That means its dangerous to drive. It was good that all my classes finish on time and the weather wasn't so severe. I was happy that 3 students did show up for the class, so I discussed some more problems in the class. I didn't do anything new, I covered an few examples on Differentiation using Chain Rule plus an example of Arteriosclerosis besides general idea of logarithms and exponent function and overview of things to be covered in upcoming classes. I gave them extra credit for just showing up for class. I have some new homework for Measure Theory Class and Continuum Mechanics class. I caught up to my Combinatorics class after not being able to submit many problems. Today I submitted 5 problems.

That's for now
Sumant Sumant

Single Screen conectivity

Dear Sumant,

I been thinking about all the various electronic gazettes now merging together. You now have cellphones that multiple as still and video camera, gaming machine, mp3 player, television, internet browsing etc. However still people buy many of these things individually because of richer features when they are standalone. However thing which makes it bulky is the size of the screen and since all these devices have screen in common I think the technology companies should aim for a screen which is easy to connect to any of these devices (may be something like blue tooth technology) and can be folded and unfurled with minimum components. So all you carry is device and one screen or there will be a way to connect to any of the screen available at home like television or big LCD monitor or projectors.

Best Regards
Sumant Sumant

Kindle and the way we read books

Dear Sumant,

Kindle the electronic book has kindled my interest. As I see right now it has to move to more open setting. Right now Amazon has a strangle hold on what we download since everything is store on their server and so you are paying for every book which is different than going to your local library and getting books for free. The traditional library system should also be embracing kindle like technology to deliver books. Right now lots of libraries are going for digital content since it allows its patrons to access their copy in no time. The good thing with Kindle is you are not tethered to your computer anymore and you can access all the books from Amazon and few other sites like Wikipedia.

Best Regards
Sumant Sumant

Super Marios World Record plus Vietnamese Food

Dear Sumant,

Like most of teenagers I was hooked to Mario Brothers when I was in grade 7th. My friend Vikram had the console and we started spending hours after hours honeying our skill. I just saw a video of guy Andrew Gardikis, who now has the world record for the fastest time to finish the whole game. The Video is available on You Tube and you watch the whole game (ofcourse skipping levels) in stunned silence of 5 minute and 9 seconds and the current record while writing this mail is 5:08 seconds. I am sure if you have played that you cannot refrain from marveling the skills of this genius and it does give you an uneasy feeling of how somebody did that. You see it and yet its so damn hard to really believe it. Its just that fascinating.
Today I spent time with Sang Shin going over problems on Tensors. We still have 2 more problems to finish by tomorrow. Akina took me to Vietnamese New Year Celebration and they had some of the best food I had. I have discovered Vietnamese food only recently. The first time I think I ever had was in St. Louis a month ago and then I had it in Portland. They had one salad I think which was made of carrots and radish in shapes of serrated french fries. Which was super delicious. I am using Audacity these days and so far have been able to digitize few of the cassettes I have owned.

That's for now
Best Regards
Sumant Sumant

Ping Pong Tournament, Measure Theory and Generating Functions

Dear Sumant,

Well as pointed out in my last blog that I need to write more. Yesterday I was reading some wiki book whose print out I took last year. It was on Lucid Dreaming. I have yet to seriously take up Lucid Dreaming. The basic step is to keep a dream journal which helps you in recollecting more of your dreams. Today I played Ping-Pong tournament. I topped my group and it was amusing because I got two bye and all the best players were crammed in the other group. My friend Mei who is real good player was in that. I think he did a good job inspite of having to play against all best players. I may go tomorrow to see what is in store for me since they are playing the remaining matches tomorrow. But we had a good time. We played doubles also and lost but then it was a lost in finals. However only two teams competed.
Other than that, I handed over the first mid term to my 140 Class and I am satisfied with the grades. I believe all these students have a good chance of getting a good grade in my class and no body will get an F. I also talked to my mom on Google talk for almost 1 hr and I feel great whenever I talk to her. She is a wonderful person. Now its a weekend I am ready to go home. Do some combinatorics problems and read some Measure Theory. I am taking Math 449 with my favorite professor Dr. Porter. His teaching style is very friendly and I do try to imitate when I am teaching myself. His main goal is to convey the information in a way that sinks in. He has insight into how students are thinking and can explain the problems in a way that make so much sense. It's a real blessing to have him as a professor here and I am excited to be doing my thesis under him.

Best Regards
Sumant Sumant

What a day !

Dear Sumant,

This monday while coming back from my Walmart trip ("I had to change a pair of jean I bought from regular to loose fit"), I made the usual trip to Barnes & Noble and picked few books, among them were books on Microtrends (Mark J Penn), Influencer (Authored by several writers) and two books by Julia Cameron a author I browsed for the first time. Well the blog is about the "The Right to Write". I noticed that several of the books have been goading me to write more. I know I have pretty much given up writing with pen or pencil. It's lot easier for me to type now with the dexterity I have developed over the years now. I have started to read more and more but its the lack of writing to express my thought is causing a drawn in my personal integrity account and I think I am now determined to fill that with writing more.

Yesterday was kind of a day when the things seem to be going out of control several times. I had made my lunch of cut fruits, packed neatly into lunch boxes and suddenly when its time to leave that I discover I cannot find it. Then after reaching school I realized that I was missing all my keys (which include my dept keys, car keys, house key and my Usb plus a whistle) all woven in a neck strap). I had to give a mid term to my Business Calculus class and I reminded myself that I needed to maintain my composure. In fact after loosing all this I wasn't panicky. I checked several places I been to but couldn't find. I reported to Diane Fitcher, called Shirley Meyers and then went back to concentrate on preparation for the mid term I had to prepare. When I came back from the class I had a voice message from Darin that my Keys are found. In the evening Mei invited me to his house for dinner and as I got out of Neckers building it was raining heavily. I got thoroughly drenched before I reached my car in the Faner parking lot. The rain hadn't stopped and I had difficulty driving because of very poor visibility .

Br,
Sumant

8th Habit

Dear Sumant,

One of my all time favorite author is Steven R Covey. Its one of the few books that I may have read more than 20 times and each time I read I am amazed about the things I need to work on in my life and that is one reason that I love giving this book as a gift to people. I gifted it to my sister and it passed on to my parents and I am still waiting for them to read it once. This has been a challenge so far ! Last month I got the 8th Habit on mp3. I have been listening it on and off whenever I get free time, be it while cooking or driving or walking towards class. Its a 7 hr program that includes both 7 Habits and the 8th Habit which is "Finding your voice and help find other find their voices.". I also have the book which comes with a companion DVD that includes some 16 short movies. Today I saw 3 of these wonderful movies. Each with insight into human behavior.

This Friday I attended the Chinese New Year Celebration at the Lutheran Church here in Carbondale. It was good food and nice performance by the little kids. Thanks Mei for inviting me to this gathering. I did bump in to several people I knew already.

Right now I have a 501 homework due and I should be signing of this blog and head straight to Roy's House.
Have a good weekend
Sumant Sumant