Catching up… 13 July, 2008

It’s been a while since my last post… My trip to Regina ended, I had a very good time the last few days there and met some interesting people and after spending one day in Amsterdam, I came back to a really hot Athens and the exams… This explains the silence.

For photos from my trip, check here : http://users.ntua.gr/ge04042/photos.html

Tomorrow I finally finish my exams and I will travel to Crete for 10 days, to participate in a mathematics summer school organized by the local math department. I believe it is going to be fun.

4 days ago, we went to a Manu Chao concert… It was very nice.

For some videos from YouTube check here.

I conclude with some “words of wisdom” by Trainspotting…

Regina Week 2 - IPSW 20 June, 2008

The IPSW week is ending today, so it is time for a new post.

I worked on the problem of modeling cancer cells growth and trying to find the best combination of anti-angiogenic drugs, chemotherapy and radiotherapy in terms of dosage, frequency, scheduling and side effects.

The problem proved to be *H*U*G*E* and extremely difficult (of course! ). We worked on many different aspects of the problem and we learned a lot in the process.

During the past week, I had the chance to learn many things about Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), since I was trying to solve a 3 coupled PDEs system. I learned how to use Maple’ s PDE features (thanks to Matt) which has A LOT of weaknesses and also the COMSOL Multiphysics program, for modeling of this kind of difficult problems. I also remembered the LaTeX Beamer presentation features.

But the last week was not only about work.

We had the chance to go for kayaking in the beautiful Wascana Center lake, I played a lot of basketball (until I turned my ankle yesterday ) and some cards and we also watched Iron Man in an almost empty cinema where we bought some HUGE pop corn bags!

P.S. 1 : Firefox 3 was released this week, so you can see above an interesting screenshot that I was lucky to take.

P.S. 2 : Google Code Jam 2008 registration already began. First Prize $10,000 plus a free trip to the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California for the finals!

Regina Week 1 - GIMMC 16 June, 2008

The first week of the GIMMC is over and there is one more week left before I go back to Greece and the exams.
The past week I have been working on the problem of snow removal for the city of Regina.
Our mentor was Dr. Ed Doolittle and we were able to categorize the problem as a Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (CARP). I performed a rough Cost Estimation to show that it probably isn’t worth of optimizing, but people should really use a relatively efficient way of solving it. You can find our presentation here.

Some highlights of the past week :

• We have been walking A LOT! Downtown Regina is about 4 km from the University, and since the transit system here is not very good it is easier to walk this distance.

• Regina has about 180.000 people and is so spread out, that almost nobody walks, even downtown.

• I’ve been 2 times at the Casino Regina, however I didn’t play. Is is interesting watching all these people being there all day long and (mostly) loosing money.

• We organized a poker tournament one night (guess who won! ) and a Mafia game another night.

• I visited some Dollarama and A Buck Or Two shops. They have a huge collection of useless (and sometimes usefull) things in ridiculously low prices (1$ )

• One night, we went to the CBC Studios, and participated in a live radio recording of a special event for the National Aboriginal Day.

My personal suggestions for Regina :

1. The Cathedral Village Freehouse - Nice bar/restaurant, with live music.
2. Bonanza - An All-You-Can-Eat restaurant with nice steaks and good prices.
3. O’Hanlon’s Pub - The place to be when everything else is empty.
4. Trifon’s Pizza - The bar/restaurant near the university. Nice meals, very cheap beer, nice atmosphere.
5. Vintage Vinyl - Great Discs and musical T-Shirts Collection.
6. Wascana Centre - It rocks! Beautiful lake…
7. The Old Warehouse District - Most of the bars are in this area.
8. Lazy Owl - The UofR’s student pub.

P.S. For the last 2 days the Internet connection at the university has some problems, so I can’t upload photos now. But in the next few days, they will be posted on Facebook, so just be patient.

Day 1 - NW 2067 (a.k.a. The Damned Flight) 8 June, 2008

Day one of my trip and I departed in the morning from Athens to Amsterdam. The flight was good and arrived in Amsterdam at 7.20.
I also had the chance to meet the girl sitting next to me, so we walked for a couple of hours downtown,
drinking a coffee at a beautiful cafe watching the river and then going back to the airport to catch my next flight. Amsterdam looks great, a very interesting city with way too many bicycles and a tram. I will have the chance to visit it again for more hours on my way back so I will write more then.

Next flight was from Amsterdam to Minneapolis. The boarding time was 2 hours (!?!) before the flight and they told me to be one hour before that at the airport, so my visit in the center of Amsterdam was short. However it is really easy to go there, since you just get the train from Schipol airport and in 15 minutes you are there.

While waiting for the departure, I had the time for a few morning beers which knocked me of for a large part of the 10 hour flight to Minneapolis. It is not such a bad idea drinking alcohol after all. It can help you avoid jet lag. I cannot even comment on the US officials at the security check before boarding. They were much more polite than in my last trip to the States, but the “a priori terrorist” attitude is still there. So, 10 hours later, a movie (Just My Luck) which I chose from the 40 (???) movies offered and some talking with Cat (a PhD chemistry student going to Salt Lake City) who was sitting next to me, I arrived in Minneapolis.

And then the adventure started… After going through the customs and immigration office I was informed that my flight was delayed for 2 hours due to the strong winds over Minnesota. At this point, my cellphone was not working due to some unknown roaming problem, so I paid 3$ for a 20 sec call to Canada to change my airport pickup time.
But 5 minutes later, the flight had disappeared from the boards. After the first sock that it was canceled, I learnt that it would be delayed for 2 more hours (departing on 1.30 in the night). This meant that I would have to wait in the airport for 10 hours…
By the time of departure, the 41 of us who would be on the flight were the only people in the airport.
We received a 13$ ( ) coupon to cover eating expenses and a 10.000 miles bonus on the frequent flyer program or a 100$ voucher for NortWest flights.
I go for the miles since I don’t think I will be flying with NorthWest again.

Eventually we boarded on the plane and some time after 2.00 we were in the air. But as it appears, this was just the beggining of the adventure.

The time I am writing this lines, we have landed in Regina and are not allowed to exit the airplane, since it is 3.30 in the morning and the agent of the airline company is not here. The customs official eventualy showed up and is right outside the door, but he will not allow us to depart without the agent.
We have been sitting here for more than an hour. They keep giving us free snacks and drins to calm people off, but the situation here is crazy.
The bureocracy of the customs official is attacking the common sense.

Continuation :

Finally, they managed to get the agent at the airport and at 4.30 I arrived at the University of Regina and the 11th floor of the Norh Tower of residensies, 33 hours since I left Athens.
During my first day in Regina, I had the chance to meet 2 of the participants and we went for a long walk to the malls around the university, getting a few things we needed. Roaming is fixed now, my laptop enjoys a new power cable since the old one was almost destroyed and my stomach is still fighting with the McDonalds and Subways, which is pretty much all you can find in the airport and within a walking distance from the university. The accommodation here is simply great and the rooms are huge. However campus is quiet, since the semester is over for a few weeks now, and mostly middle school children are here on summer camps.

I’ll keep posting with more details from the workshop and hopefully more math!

Nikolas

Weapons of Mass Distraction 25 May, 2008

The last few days a huge stupid-storming called Eurovision (lame music contest) stormed over Europe.

Hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily let the TV suck their brains…

This is my tribute to them…

… So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads…

From Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, by Clay Shirky.

Doors in the Wall 5 May, 2008

I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the Only Wise. This they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

…

…

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore
fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed
adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity,
their own or anyone else’s.

…

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Taking some time off 25 April, 2008

I’ve been away at countryside for a couple of weeks, trying to refill my batteries and refreshing my interests.

Some gardening, some cooking and a lot of beer and video games!

I would post some beautiful pictures, but sadly I lost my mobile phone and my went with it.

I continued solving Project Euler problems reaching 22% and also started solving Python Challenge.

You should check these two out, since you can exercise your programming and mathematical skills while learning a bunch of really useful tricks and techniques.

Btw, Facebook introduced a nice Instant Messaging feature, kinda mimicking  Google Talk in the implementation. The first impression is good, however I would like to see more features included and also a wider range of (aesthetically better) emoticons.

Bureaucracy 13 April, 2008

I’ve been silent for a while, spending my time doing… mostly nothing.

Spring came and took me with it… It’s like my unofficial spring break.

The title comes from my little adventure of finding a list of the courses offered by my school in English.

Oh yes! In year 2008, the primary technological institute of Greece doesn’t offer course list and other material in English. So, after 2 weeks of discussions with the , I was able to obtain a  hardcopy of such a list, which I am supposed to rewrite into a document and get the appropriate signatures.

Anyways, I thought to scan it and offer it here, in case anyone ever needs it (come on people, grad school application are coming soon).

So you can get it from here.

New semester! 30 March, 2008

Exams are over, and the 8th semester already began.

It has been a long time since my last post…  In the meantime a lot of strange things happened. A general strike, a few riots etc.

I’ve been enjoying the lack of electricity for a few hours a day, which provides a peaceful and dark environment for thinking and resting your mind..

I don’t have much to say this time, but here is a gift…

The other day I needed to convert an image to pdf, so I created a simple command line utility to do so…

You can find it here. I hope you will find it useful.

So, here are a few links from OCW for some of the courses I’ll be taking this semester in case anyone takes the same courses…

Physics II (YES! Walter Lewin again! :D)

OCW 8.02

Partial Differential Equations

OCW 18.152

Signal Processing

OCW 6.011

Modeling

18.361J

Optimization

15.094J

6.253

Optimal Control

16.323

Logic

24.241

Theory of Probability

18.175 

La lingvo de la mondo 26 February, 2008

Ni estas mia unua teksto en Esperanto lingvo. (This is my first post in Esperanto language).

After a successful first half of the exams period, I’m here writing this post about my new “discovery”.

Last weekend I accidentally heard of Esperanto, so I thought to give it a try. And here I am, having taken 3 “courses” from a computer program I downloaded.

Esperanto is a constructed language, meaning it was designed on purpose by L. L. Zamenhof , a Polish ophthalmologist in 1887.

The ideal behind it is that a language should be easy and flexible, to be used as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.

My opinion so far is positive. The language is relatively easy, well structured and the pronunciation of the words sounds well. I would say it has the structure of German, the orthography and endings of Slavic languages, common roots of the words come from Latin (and a bit ancient Greek) and in the first look it reminds you of Spanish.

They say (and I kinda hope it’s true) that it can provide good ground knowledge to support the easier learning of other languages and of course, as every language there is a whole culture generated by and around the language.

For example, you can take a look at a ska group called Esperanto Desperado which has a few nice Esperanto songs.

**************

I provide a few links here with references and courses.

Esperanto - English translator

lernu! (online courses and material)

MIT Societo por Esperanto (it has a few interesting links)

esperanto.gr