Lorena is finally through Clackamas Community College with an Associate Arts Transfer Degree that she can use for the first two years of her Bachelors degree (if she wants. We are very, very proud of her. It was a 28 year effort in the middle of raising two kids all the way through their PhD and Masters degrees. The beautiful part is that she really did learn a ton in a degree the exemplifies the very spirit of a liberal arts degree. Congratulations for your perseverance and hard work.
Lorena is finishing up here degree at Clackamas Community College and her diploma is in process. We have already framed the kids’ diplomas and put them up on the wall, but we have not yet done our own. We are going to put what we have in good frames and mount them on the same wall with those of the kids. Lorena dug around and found all my old diplomas except my Bachelor’s degree from Oregon State. I am kind of surprised that the one from OSU is the one for which I am least proud and rightly so–I was not really paying attention when I got it. When I was living through it, I thought this was the very best time of my life. Looking back, though, I realize that I was definitely not living my best life and built up a lot of bad habits and a track record that had to be overcome rather than built on.
The one “diploma” of sorts, for which I have a sense of satisfaction is the Kodokan Judo Black Belt (Shodan) I earned. It was a result of hard work and great joy. I still very much love the sport and believe it was a positive good in my life, along with track and field. It was very much unlike football and basketball which do not seem like much of an indicator of athletic ability nor a place where much character is built, especially in how it is currently practiced in middle and high schools, at the university level and especially as professional sports.
The other degrees were the result of efforts for which I can took increasing satisfaction. I had a sense of purpose and increasing knowledge in school, not only about the subject matter, but also the also with respect to the discipline to do something which would provide me with a sense of self worth (unlike sports in general) and an ability to pay the rent. My goal is to extend that through my PhD. So far so good.
Christian hit a half century a couple of days ago. He got his PhD from a tier one university at 23 and now works at the pure research laboratory of an elite university on the East Coast. We are quite proud of him. It is a hard age, but he is navigating it well. In a few weeks I will be able to announce another accomplishment for him and for me. He is helping me with my retirement PhD effort and, believe it or not, with my day job.
I am currently fighting slovenliness as there is no end in sight to our self-quarantine. All our church meetings (Sunday morning, Wednesday Bible study, and Gospel meeting) have been cancelled. Everyone with whom I work at my day job in Boston works from home whenever they can which usually only leaves one or two people in the home office each day. Even at University of Nebraska, all classes are currently being delivered remotely. The UNL remote class thing might work well for me because it might allow me to take some of the required classes I need online as opposed to the current minimum on-campus component. The picture is my new online meeting, scruffy, work-from-home look. Lorena is in rebellion about this.
Kelly showed me yesterday the university where she works has the oldest epidemiology program in the entire world and they are focused very heavily on helping solve the Coronavirus problem. She does not have any special insights to what they are doing, but she is working near a lot of people who work on it. Maybe she will learn some things as we move through this period of upheaval.
Lorena and I did some (very minor) home improvement projects this weekend. We moved a sofa downstairs so Lorena can join me when I am down here working and we mounted Kelly’s and Christian’s diplomas to the wall in the upstairs main bedroom. The consist of:
We plan to add my diplomas here–all but the worthless one from my wasted time at the government high school in Newberg. God willing, Lorena will be able to add an Associate Degree pretty soon and I might finish my PhD in a few years. Maybe this will serve as inspriation.
Christian has been home with us for the last several weeks, but now it looks like he fleeing the nest. Actually he has been paying his own way since he left for his PhD when he was 18, but now, it feels like he is gone for good. When he was in school, we could squint our eyes and semi-believe he was not gone even though he really was. Now though, he does not really need us hardly at all. We like to think our cheer leading is something (and it probably is), but he is truly on his own and making his own way now.
He is now a scientist in the very best meaning of that word at one of the most prestigious institutions of science in the world. It is, in our humble yet biased, opinion much more that just MIT. It is the part of MIT solely dedicated to research, unencumbered with training new young minds, in the very areas Christian studied. We feel somewhat melancholy, but also grateful and humbled that Christian has made it to this level.
He will leave next week and almost certainly never come back except for visits. That is a good thing, but we are in somewhat of a state of melancholy.
I have added a retirement clock to the sidebar of the blog. I am not sure things are going to actually play out in the way the retirement clock is planned, but God willing I hope to be moving from a full time direct employment position to a half-time contract position on or about May 2, 2012–28 months from now. Here is the clock:
Hopefully, this will allow me to spend half of my time working on my PhD, but who knows. More on all this as we go along.
Lorena and I flew to Tempe last week for Christian’s PhD graduation ceremony. It was nothing short of amazing. Several thousan graduated even though the ceremony we attended was just for the schools of engineering. There were bagpipes and speeches and lots of happy people–us included.
Since this is end of Christian’s educational journey, at least for the time being, I thought I would just put down a brief synopsis of his trajectory for posterity.
Age 13 – Homeschool
Age 14 – Wake Technical Community College
Age 18 – North Carolina State University
Age 23 – Arizona State University
Age 24 – Boston area
Christian is getting toward the end of his PhD program at Arizona State University. His first, first-author, refereed journal article, A Decentralized Receiver in Gaussian Interference, was published in Entropy in April of 2018. Just over the last week or so, he served as a reviewer for an article in that same journal and is now on the list and will review more articles there. He has two more articles in process that will be submitted very soon that will form part of his dissertation. Hopefully, he will defend this thesis and be done sometime this summer or early fall. It has been a long, hard haul and his is looking forward to getting out of school and going to work.
Lorena is taking an Art Appreciation class online at Clackamas Community College this spring. It was a similar class Kelly and Christian took when they were at Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh that turned our family into big art museum fans. Long before that, we had read a book in our homeschool that turned us into Diego Velazquez fans.
So, when Lorena and Kelly were at the National Gallery in London, they were very excited to see their first real live painting by Velazquez. Now, Lorena is going to take a couple of the pictures she took of those paintings in a report in her Art Appreciation class.
Lorena drove up to Seattle on Friday so she and Kelly could go to the Seattle Museum of Art on Saturday to complete an assignment for her Art Appreciation class at Clackamas Community College. They had a super time. The museum is really not the same level of quality or experience as the NC Museum of Art in Raleigh nor the top three art museums in Dallas, but they felt it really was not too bad. What is especially great about this is that our family got started going to art museums in general when Kelly and Christian had to take a required visit to the North Carolina Museum of Art for their Art Appreciation class at Wake Technical Community College. It seemed like a chore before we went, but every since, we have been big, big fans of art museums and go to them whenever we get the chance.
Lorena’s next visit assignment is to go to a gallery rather than a museum.
A month or so ago, Kelly’s old boss from her college internship to ask her to return to work for him as a data scientist. It is quite a prestigious institution at the bleeding edge of lots of different technologies. Her job will be to work on a range of problems, improving her skills as she goes. The reality is this would not be a bad place for Christian either, if he can get hired there. She can either continue to work as a data scientist and/or get paid for getting a PhD in Statistics at Johns Hopkins University. She is really grateful for the opportunity, especially because she knows the people and the kind of work she would do.
Kelly co-opted Christian in her big gingerbread house project yesterday and it brought back all kinds of good memories. Christian cannot help himself when it comes to this kind of thing. Christian wants the most artistically creative design possible, but adequate actualization of the design is not really possible without proper attention to even the most minute of details. Kiwi cannot help herself either. She is a people cat. Very social. A warm keyboard with people around is as good as it gets. This is precisely how Christian spent his college years–sitting at the bar with Rubix (Kiwi is the surviving twin cat sister and has filled in nicely now that Rubix is gone) laying on his arms or on the keyboard while Lorena and Kelly are cooking something in the kitchen. That purple and orange thing behind the computer is the bluetooth speaker with traditional Christmas music providing a nice background.
Christian worked on this quite a long time. The stencils for the design, based on Kelly’s absolute requirement to make an English manor, are now ready for the cooking of the gingerbread which should happen sometime starting this afternoon. Some of the pieces are pretty small, so we will have to see how it goes–improvisation and Engineering Change Orders might be necessary depending on suitability of the materials and implementation methods to the design. All good engineers can improvise when needed. Here is a closeup of the design below. Some of Christian’s notebooks (this is typical) are pretty amazing. They are a lot more cryptic these days as he is doing things in the bowels of theoretical Information Theory that is beyond our understanding. It is nice to see this throwback to some of his earlier work in homeschool and his undergraduate degree.
University of Nebraska Lincoln has all my transcripts and my recommendation letters. I have written my “Letter of Purpose” statement, but have not turned it in until my buddy Troy has a chance to look at it and tell me if I am going the right direction. After that, all I have left is to take the GRE, then it is out of my hands and in the hands of the people of UNL. I am still agnostic about whether I am going to do this, but I expect that if we can work out a way for me to do this does not cost a ton of money and allows me both to go fairly slowly and have a decent quality of life, I will pull the trigger.
Veterans Day is a holiday at my current employer, so I spent the day working on the reincarnation of the GaugeCam project. It will be either a base for my PhD research or a contribution to those who are interested in remote water height measurement in the wild or both. The image below is a screenshot from my phone as it accesses the new software that runs on a Raspberry Pi in the house. The yellow lines show the result of the automatic pixel to world coordinate calibration calculation. There is more to do on it, but the technical part is complete–the rest is just nuts and bolts (saving/loading calibrations from/to disk, associating calibrations with ranges of images to which they apply, adding motion detection to determine if the camera or target has moved, etc.
This picture of Kiwi being miffed that Lorena was trying to sit on her chair does not have a whole lot to do with what I want to write about today, but it was pretty fun. Every time Lorena sat down, Kiwi pushed her away and then sat back with a look of irritation. I needed a picture for the post, this was available, and I wanted to have an excuse to put it up.
The whole family has been inspired to talk about some of the things we do to contribute and to get ahead. A lot of it has to do with the whole concept of life-long learning that Charles Murray talked about fairly frequently. In that context, I have almost always had a project on which I actively worked that contributed to something. I earned money on some of them, but a lot of the time I just worked because the project helped in some way and I was able to learn new stuff. The reality is that I did a lot of this work with now expectation of learning anything, but it happened anyway. Examples of these projects include work on the water level measurement camera (GaugeCam), sickle cell disease diagnostics, labor and delivery management, cataract surgery, water particle measurement in flowing water, and several others.
I think the things they all had in common were that they were hard projects (in the technical sense), they required a longitudinal effort of more than a year, a bunch of non-compensated (monetarily) work was required at the front end, and I had the ability to uniquely contribute because of my technical skills. Virtually every one of those kinds of projects turned into a significant amount of money–maybe not significant for some people, but surely significant for me. In addition, every one of them opened new opportunities. The work I am doing right now would not have been possible had I not learned a bunch of new stuff about embedded programming, web programming, machine learning, etc., etc. that I never would have gotten in my day job. More important than the money is the fact that I am doing invention daily. I know it is critical to have dedicated people to perform the mechanical tasks of daily life like farming, medicine, manufacturing, etc., but it is a gift to have spent a career at the bleeding edge of invention. There is always something new and interesting to learn and use that requires all the mental faculties to even understand, let alone exploit. I know that is not for everyone, but I am certainly grateful and humbled to have had this kind of work.
Christian has been thinking about what he wants to do next. His PhD adviser is a luminary in Christian’s research area and one of the best PhD advisers I have ever seen–he takes great care of his students, is inspirational, pushes them to do hard stuff, and demands quality in every aspect of their research. He gets the very best students because of that, so Christian rubs shoulders with a great group of fellow students every day. The get great jobs in a variety of places and one of them has an idea to start a business. That is a perfect setting to find the exact kind of projects that can lead to life-long learning. One buddy even wants them to start a business together–a highly technical business that requires the kind of preparation one can only receive in a math intensive PhD program. I say go for it!
I wanted Lorena to take Christian to get a monster steak to celebrate because it is a very big deal. They both had their heart set on a hamburger so they went to the Shake Shack instead. That he passed the exam means there is a lot of pressure off Christian now because his committee has acknowledged that he has the skill and understanding to perform PhD level work and that the dissertation he defined is worthy of a PhD on successful completion. He made his oral presentation, got beat up by his committee asking a gazillion relevant and irrelevant questions, got all his committee signatures turned into the department administration, sent off his report and presentation to his benefactors at MIT Lincoln Labs, and now he just needs to write and defend his dissertation.
This is particularly gratifying because a couple of months ago his adviser told him he better hurry up and get his comprehensives done because he was in danger of finishing his dissertation before he takes the exam. There is some chance he will be able complete his dissertation and walk the graduation this spring–a pretty aggressive goal, but a good one because he is chomping at the bit to finish and go on to extend his research into new areas or finds something similar. He (and we) are very grateful he really loves his research area in Information Theory.
It is difficult to explain what a seminal accomplishment this is in a discipline that demands mathematical rigor and also requires the work to be translated into a working field solution demonstrable on real hardware. Congratulations Christian! Again, I say this is a big deal and we WILL celebrate this with a very big steak when I am there at the end of the month whether you want to or not!
Tomorrow is Christian’s biggest day so for in the pursuit of a PhD in Electrical Engineering. He has been working like a mad man, often with not very much sleep to get everything ready. Lorena is in Tempe for the week to lend moral support. He is working more as a mathematician than an engineering in a particularly math intensive area of Electrical Engineering. We are confident it will all go fine, but however it comes out tomorrow, it will be a time to celebrate the passing of another milestone and for Christian and Lorena to go eat a really big steak.
If you click on the image (or here), you can see a live version of the new GaugeCam web server. Right now, the program is running on a Raspberry Pi in our house. The reason it is live web page is so professors at University of Nebraska Lincoln and North Carolina State University can critique the design and view adjustments as new features are implemented. There is on-going scholarly work associated with this software. One refereed journal article has already been published (click here) and two more are in the works. Click here to see an article on the early phases of the work on the web site of a commercial camera company (full disclosure–I wrote the article). The goal is to accommodate a variety of sensors that produce 2d and 3d images as well as point measurements and hyper-spectral images. Hopefully, this effort will continue on into my retirement both as a way to contribute and maybe even earn a PhD for this and previous work on similar projects.
I am still not full convinced I can or should do this PhD thing, but all the pieces are still in motion. I expect I should be able to make a decision to move forward or not by late winter or sometime in the spring. In the meantime, I continue to make progress on the GaugeCam reboot as Open Source software (free as in liberty and free as in beer). The video speaks for itself. We hope to present a journal article and make the beta software available for download by spring. The video kind of speaks for itself
When we lived in Raleigh and the kids were going to Wake Technical Community College and North Carolina State University, Christian did most of his studying at the bar in the kitchen while Lorena worked there. They loved that. It is really nice for both of them to get the chance to do that again. Lorena absolutely loves to cook and even more so when she can do it for the kids. Now, though, she has to study herself. The Astronomy class she is taking at Centralia College is a lot tougher than we imagined. One thing she has been trying to figure out is how to get the 10 extra credit points given for visiting a big telescope. 
There is one that qualifies not too far from our house in Olympia, but there is an amazing one–one of the best in the world in Arizona, the Lowell Observatory, not too far from Flagstaff. Christian went there and got the postcard to the right. On the back, it explains that Pluto, the ex-planet (we still like to think that it is), was discovered with the aid of that telescope. The timing is not going to work for us to visit there in time for Lorena to get her credits, but we should enjoy the one at Olympia during Thanksgiving week. The Lowell Observatory is definitely on our radar now, too, and we plan to make a special trip there. The Astronomy class may not be an easy one, but it has been very, very interesting for all of us.
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