I am really really sorry about the title of this blog, I apologize from the bottom of my heart. But right now I am too lazy to think up any other, and this was the thing going through this empty head of mine. But then what is a mixture of gaussians used for?? As fas as my understanding goes in this topic, it is a very useful way of estimating probability distribution in random data. You try to find some pattern in a random set.
Zoom out from the data set to the huge thing called "life". I feel it is just random events, random data points in a ridiculously weird space of uncountable dimensions. (Well there's a thought that might get mathematicians crazy.....uncountable dimensions....for those who don't know and don't care, the difference between countable and uncountable can be roughly put as the difference between 1-2-3-4..... and 1.1-1.101-1.1011....(you can see how many more points can be put in in between the values I have chosen in the second case).)..but then I am just showing of my knowledge and diverging from the topic I should concentrate on.
Well the basic idea I am trying to get at is that life is random and we try to make sense of it. We try to fit these random events into situations and conditions we are familiar to, and once we arrive to a known situation, we now know how to deal with it from past experiences. And if it is a situation we have never encountered, it is basically our training set - we learn from our mistakes and try to reduce the mistakes (minimize the residual sum of squares ..... damn I sure am showing off today :D ).
My life has pretty much has been a series of random events; some I could fit gaussians on, some I used as training set. But unfortunately, my learning curve being very low, it is going to take a really long time before I can handle things with a 95% confidence interval :P.
But then like most of my life, I have been damn lucky everywhere. I have great colleagues and I am in the company of many people who are really really helpful. Trust me, there was not a single day when I felt out of place in this foreign land. I have met all kinds of people, from different backgrounds, with different attitudes; I just wish I could learn from all the people around and make something good of myself.
For once I am enjoying studying, although in a race between motivation to study and slumber, slumber always manages to win. But still I feel glad I am learning new things, I feel excited when something makes sense. I probably need to have done many times more reading by now than I actually have , but still I can claim I am better off than what I used to be.
And as always, I had my share of fun too. Parties with friends, and aaah yes - water polo. Something which I am not good at, but still get a chance to play, and however much I get f@#$ed by the end of the practice session, I kinda enjoy every moment....even when I am doing 800m warm up and cursing the coach and myself (for getting myself into this mess) every millimeter of the way, I am enjoying it...I just don't know it yet ;).
Added to that, the couple of water polo tournies and the parties on the nights we stay over, it is just crazy.....partying like undergrads, so you can imagine......
I think I forgot about the gaussians some couple of paragraphs ago, but coming back to it, I just have one more "funda" I feel like sharing - the more we learn, the more easily can we fit these bloody gaussians....so the best way to succeed is it to keep learning. I realize I am just reinventing the wheel here and everybody, and I mean everybody, knows this!!!!!!
But I still would go on to say that the most important decision we make in our life is the choice of how we want to learn, and what we want to learn. What you want to learn depends on the "dimension" on which you want to make that delta improvement in this world. Some want to do this by curing some disease, some want to do it by having a happy family and making sure that their offspring are people who too make those delta improvement, and not be ones who negate them. And the improvement in any dimension is desirable, some are more celebrated than others, but what good is a cure to some cancer if there isn't a doctor who cares enough for his patient that he/she uses the cure to get rid of the patient's cancer (I wish I came up with a better example).
I wish I can make my delta improvement..........maybe I can help people fit those bloody mixture gaussians that little bit more easily.
