The Shaky Ladder

So on Sunday (May 29th) I hit a deer while travelling from Flint to Southfield, MI on I-75 in my brand new WRX. I walked away with nothing more than a few scratches but the Rex wasn't so lucky. There are pictures up on my main website but here's a preview:

Or so says the New York Post (first-born son / registration required). It does a pretty good job covering many of my adopted city's features. Though it does miss out on a few of my favorite places, Lafayette Coney Island, Greektown, and Motor City Brewing Company. I just realized there are about a dozen other places I could name off as well. The Post's review is mainly focussed on a more expensive trip here than I would take. However I have been to or heard from friends about many of the places they mention and most of them are worth a visit.

...what else do I do? Well lately I've been involved in a lot of athletic activity. I run occasionally. I ran the Cleveland Marathon this year and the New York City Marathon last year. Running for me is very cleansing. It really helps me re-center and focus on my life. I find it to be a powerful form of meditation much like yoga only less boring (don't get me wrong yoga is perfect for some people). Partially as a result of all this I've become interested in other cool things, like snowshoe racing, stair races, and long distance bicycling. Hopefully this summer I'll participate in my first adventure race and triathlon. As a bonus I've included snapshots of two of my favorite bicycles, my brand new Marin and last year's Specialized.


Mountain Bike - Marin Hawk Hill 2005

Road Bike - Specialized Allez Triple 2004

So I was for the past two years the coordinator of a workshop here at the University of Michigan called CSAAW (Complex Systems Advanced Academic Workshop) that was established to give graduate students who are working on a degree in complex systems a central place to talk about their work. Every summer CSAAW joins forces with CSRG (Complex Systems Reading Group) and subsidizes the purchase of a couple of books for the group which we then read over the course of the summer. This summer we have chosen two books:

• Perspectives on Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems, ed. by Lashon Booker, Stephanie Forrest, Melanie Mitchell, and (my co-chair) Rick Riolo, 2005, Oxford University Press, Santa Fe Institute, Studies in the Sciences of Complexity
• Historical Dynamics : Why States Rise and Fall, Peter Turchin, 2003, Princeton University Press

This group meets every Tuesday at Dominick's in Ann Arbor from around 4 to 6 PM. If you are in the area and carry to join us please email me and I'll let you know how to get copies of the books.

So far we are about a third of the way through the first book and I must admit I'm really enjoying it, but that might be partially why I selected it. This book is from a festschrift that was held in honor of Prof. John Holland (my co-chair) and reflects on some of his thoughts and how they have contributed to artificial intelligence, biology and even economics. There are quite a few notable authors in this work, including but not limited to: John Koza, David Goldberg, Ken De Jong, Art Burks, Oliver Selfridge, Herbert A. Simon (to our knowledge his last published manuscript before his death), Doug Hofstadter, Oliver Selfridge, Ken Arrow, Julian Adams, Bobbi Low, Rick Riolo, Michael Cohen, Bob Axelrod, and Brian Arthur. All in all its really a good book and anyone interested in GAs should pick it up.

This is my first post to this new blog. Its named after a major component of my thesis which is the Shaky Ladder HDFs, a particular set of mathematical functions used to test evolutionary algorithms in dynamic environments. The shaky ladder could be seen as a metaphor for all of life. (The rest of this is utter nonsense, but could be entertaining.) Essentially the shaky ladder is an old carnival game, where people try to climb from a fixed starting point (i.e. the ground) to a fixed ending point (i.e. the bell at the top of the ladder, the proverbial brass ring). Along the way though the ladder twists and shakes under them and could throw them to the ground (really a big soft inflatable mattress). The parallel to life is that we are all born and we are all trying to achieve some goal (e.g. immortality, world domination, the perfect combination of pizza toppings). However who knows what life will dish out along the way? Unfortunately unlike in the carnival game, when you fall off the ladder of life the results can be much more disastrous. That is so ridiculously cliche I had a hard time posting it, oh well, its done now.