A Random Walk Through That Other World

Morning weigh-in: 178.5#, 10% BF

What I've been doing lately to occupy my time (besides walking around in the woods and downtown) is, of course, playing with the computer, and what I've been doing on the computer lately (instead of buckling down and getting my high-speed internet connection running) is fiddling with math programs.

(I had a conversation with a friend's brother-in-law on Thanksgiving, where he asked me about Linux and wondered how I could possibly handle real world stuff like Microsoft Office documents, specifically Excel files. I told him I had two very good spreadsheets on my machine, and both were capable of reading Excel files, thank you very much. He countered with something like "well what about if it uses [some MS-specific technology], like what if has embedded video?" Well, top that, mister!

I was a guest -- and it was obviously a contest, not a conversation -- so I let him win; I was too polite to mention that embedded video in a spreadsheet was a digression from what spreadsheets are actually used for, and in fact, the mere presence of embedded video is a sign that the spreadsheet probably came from some marketing guy, is therefore worse than useless and can safely be ignored. Meantime, what if you wanted to do real math? A spreadsheet isn't even near able to do the job, but what could I say? The guy probably doesn't even know "real math," and in fact probably drinks Budweiser... )

Where was I? Oh, yes... So anyway, I've been playing with octave and Gnuplot again, mostly finger exercises to see if I can get them to do different things, solving differential equations that I pull out of my ass, plotting pretty cardioids in polar coordinates, generating different types of random numbers and plotting them to see which look most like the stock market -- this last one is pretty cool, I remember things from old "Mathematical Games" articles on "random walks," and now thirty years later I try them out for myself.

One thing octave can't handle right now is optimization, at least not until I install some library routines. In the meantime, I still have those genetic algorithms. They're written in C, so you'll never guess what else I've been messing with...