August 28: Actually Working on Work Again
This morning I got up and ate dorm breakfast, which consisted of stewed chicken and cabbage with salted cut of salmon (and rice and miso soup). It was all rather small though. I wonder if the salmon was expensive or something, because I don't believe I've ever actually seen a dorm breakfast that small before. D: For some reason I was fine until lunch though, so no worries there.
In the morning I worked away at the variational inference problem I had been assigned. I was starting to get somewhere on the actual problem itself by 11:50 (not just teaching myself how to solve the problem using a related one with more available information), which was when Kabutoya-san showed up and told me to drop it and gave me something else to do. I can't say I'm terribly surprised, as the variational inference problem was kind of out of left field, and I had just been given a new research direction that it's not really too in line with. My new task better resembles what I understood my new research direction to be, so hopefully I will actually get to finish it... >_<
At lunch I ate hiyashi wakame ramen (why have they been making such nasty-looking other food lately!?). I have no idea why, but I don't get hungry in the afternoon after eating it, even though it's like, buckwheat noodles and some seaweed and that's it. O_O They must marinate the ingredients in lard or something, but it doesn't really taste like that, so I'm not quite sure what's going on...
After eating I played handiball with the usual suspects. I was alright again today, which was nice. When I was rotated out, Kurauchi-san asked me "Are you a person who hates losing?" Haha oh damn. I asked him why he asked that, if I was being too competitive or something, and he said that wasn't it, but I'm not sure if I believe him. >_< I was behaving in a perfectly normal fashion as far as I was concerned, and I'm not even a ballhog like some of the other people in the PIG group are, so I really have no idea where the question came from. Unfortunately that means I can't fix it. D:
After lunch I read a new paper Kabutoya-san gave me, which took an inordinately long time. D:< The authors were not native English speakers, and so their sentences were often kind of... backward, somehow. "Manifold" appeared to be their favourite word, and they used it many, many times, along with a lot of other more-complicated-than-necessary words. Did you know that "manifold" can be a noun, adjective, verb and adverb? Cool stuff. All-in-all, it was a pretty horrible read, which is unfortunate, because the actual content of the paper was good, it was just buried in an excrutiating level of detail, with said detail itself being buried in unnecessarily complicated language. >_< Trying to actually understand what was happening in the paper took a fat chunk out of my afternoon, and it was only like 12 pages long. D:
After making it through the demon-paper, I got to actually start doing stuff for the new model I'm supposed to use. Kabutoya-san just kind of handed the description of it to me and was like "Here, do Collapsed Gibbs Sampling on this", and my eyes kind of bugged out, as the graphical representation takes up like half a page. My previous experience in CGS consisted of working on two models that had one latent variable, one observed variable, two parameters, and two hyperparameters per model. Now, there are three latent variables, five observed variables, six parameters, and six hyperparameters. O_O I guess it's flattering that Kabutoya-san didn't seem to think giving me any help with it was necessary (or he's just too busy haha), but I honestly sort of just stared at it wide-eyed for a while thinking "Oh shi-- Guess I'm getting sent back to Canada now..." As it turns out (unless I'm horribly mistaken), the joint distribution (one of my desiderata, as that jankey paper would say) seems to factorize quite nicely (which is probably the point). I have not yet tried to make anything happen with the factors themselves, but I remember there being a healthy requirement for pyrotechnic mathematics (I am totally going to use that expression for the rest of my life now :D) in my last experience with CGS. D:
One unfortunate thing that occurred today was going back to look at my slides for CGS (they're already coming in handy haha). Looking at them didn't dredge up painful memories, if that's what you're thinking, but the date I included in the title alerted me to the fact that the last time I worked on something I actually got to see to fruition was July 26th. D:< I know there was a two-week vacation in there somewhere, but still! That's two full weeks of work totally gone... It's definitely not the best feeling in the world to realize I've essentially been a glorified paperweight for since my presentation. >_<
I left work at around 6:30 and walked home. I went to the Yokosan to buy food supplies (senbei, bananas, milk, and dessert, because I made the mistake of looking in the freezer section haha), and they were out of my favourite ultra-cheap milk! I think they really need to take a hint, as there was FULL STOCK of ALL the other kinds of milk other than the one I wanted, which was entirely gone. It's the cheapest brand and it's low-fat to boot, so no wonder people like it... Please stock more! For the moment, I had to pay 50円 extra for my milk, which I'm pretty sure is full fat, because it tastes like I'm drinking creamo. D:< I really hope it's not actually creamo haha. D:>
I ate dorm dinner when I got home, which seemed to be an apology for yesterday's triangle-fish. :D There was gyoza, some pork mixture, some kind of cream stew (enough with the cream already!), miso soup and rice. It was all really good, and it also made up in size for today's breakfast. Unfortunately I'm now going to take all of those calories with me to sleep, instead of... well sitting with them at a desk doing math and reading all day. I guess it's not so bad ahaha. >_<
Anyways, I'd best get to bed now, as it's getting late, and I am tres tres tired. Falling asleep has been an elusive desideratum! D:< Diuuuuuu...
Night!
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