Work Starts!

This post is only half about one of the topics that I said I was going to post about last time. That's because there has been plenty going on this week to write about, so I'm going to let most of the stuff go.

The one topic that I do want to mention though is Professionalism. I was going to write a whole post about the professionalism (or lack thereof) of my peers during our orientation, but I'll just gloss over it quickly. In short, I was much less than impressed with the profession conduct of many of my peers. The most noticeable problem was punctuality. Training was scheduled to start at 8:00AM sharp everyday, yet people (who were staying in the same hotel as the training) were utterly unable to arrive on time. Additionally, throughout the day we would have breaks to go to the bathroom, get coffee, etc.. These breaks were usually 10-15 minutes, but invariable turned into 20-30 minute breaks when people simply did not return to the training. Not only were many people terrible at arriving on time, they also enjoyed going out drinking on some nights. This resulted in more than one morning where there was a sizable portion of the group that was hung over for training the next day. All in all, I was disappointed in my peers and a bit worried how my workplace would actually work when I arrived there. Fortunately, when I arrived at work on Monday I was greeted with a very professional and respectful group. Everyone in the team has been welcoming and helpful as I try to rapidly learn all the systems, acronyms, and processes that are already in place.

Which brings me to the other half of this post, my thoughts on my new job. So far it has been a lot of fun, but really crazy. My team is stretched a bit thin right now as we just had a very good employee (coincidentally the guy who hired me) take a different job within the firm. We are also in the process of developing a new system while still trying to support the existing systems. So, I've been learning a lot, but much of it has been sort of trial by fire. I'm simply given small tasks and projects and told to do them. The good thing is, unlike engineering where I would have to learn a proprietary programming language or figure out the proper equation to use, much of my job is looking at a system and determining what needs to be changed or updated to make it easier to use. This is good because I am generally good at looking at a project and seeing what needs to be changed, but I tend not to be quite as good at actually implementing the change. In short, the job seems to be exactly what I thought it would, and what I hoped it would. The strange thing though is how little I understand about the system as a whole, or the firm for that matter. My degree doesn't give me any background in software, finance, or business analysis. The main applicable skill is that I know how to learn and think critically. That part I am making very good use of. To make a long story short, my job has been great so far and I'm looking forward to learning lots more about the industry.

Just don't get me started on having a consistent place to sit...over the past 4 days I've sat at 3 different desks in two different buildings. Another story for another post though.

~Alex

Math, The Way it Should Be (Unit 2.6: Summary and Philosophy)

As you (probably) well know, the final lesson in each unit includes a summary of previous lessons and then some personal philosophy from me.  But before we get to that, I would like to point anyone new to this series to the first post in the series.  I usually also link to the first lesson in the unit, but I'll be getting to that soon enough.

So this unit was pretty much a refresher on geometry and a little bit of what is usually covered in trigonometry classes.  We started with the very of geometry, angles.  The most important thing to take away from that lesson is how radians work.  They're not the most intuitive but once you get used to them, they're well worth it, as you will see later.  After angles came triangles.  The most important thing to remember about those three-sided shapes is that they're the key to doing all kinds of things with vectors.  In fact, you can make an infinite number of triangles with a given vector... it's choosing the right one that is difficult (and the right triangle is usually right!).  Then we covered functions that are basically little machines that turn one thing into another thing.  Trigonometry rounded out July.  The take-away message there regarded the trigonometric functions (most importantly: sine, cosine, and tangent).  The penultimate lesson dealt with areas and volumes.  I wasn't very happy with that lesson but I consider that most of geometry education deals with memorization of formulas that becomes largely obsolete with an understanding of calculus, so I kind of glossed over it, (hopefully) leaving you with exactly enough to understand some of the things that come next.

So here's the philosophy: I don't really like geometry or trigonometry.  My real interests lie elsewhere in mathematics.  Unfortunately, like all of mathematics, those more interesting areas are built on the foundation provided by less complex mathematics, specifically algebra and geometry.  So even though I don't like them, I  have realized that they are necessary to fundamentally understand what is going on in more complex operations.  To me, things like geometry and the multiplication tables are like the alphabet: they're not that interesting in and of themselves, but combine them together and you can form the words that describe the whole universe in a way that very few people understand.

-Lane

Training, Week of 8/7

This past week, there was some bumpiness at the beginning of the week and the long run got bumped until today (Monday) and so I only managed 40.3 miles in 4:51:56 (7:15/mile average).  The Thursday Night Track Workout went well despite the fact that I didn't feel that great.  We started an 800m repeat every 5:00 (6 in total) which creates the paradoxical effect of the faster people getting more rest than the slow people (I averaged 2:25-2:27).  I didn't feel that great, but I didn't feel worse as the workout went on.

During the workout, I did experience one of the hardest running decisions yet.  The guy who runs the workouts offered to time me and the other "fast" guy for a seventh interval.  I didn't want to because I was tired and my legs hurt and I was nauseous, but I felt obligated.  Eventually we decided not to continue, which I was very thankful for.

Now I'm looking ahead to the Corporate 5k to Benefit Special Olympics, CT.  I want to help Pratt win another team trophy and I think that there's probably going to be a trophy in it for me which is always nice.  Not to mention I get to hang out with the other runners at Pratt and Whitney, which is super cool.

Now on to a bigger and better week!

-Lane

Training Ends

Whew...haven't been here for longer than I would have liked. The last week of training for my new job was absolutely crazy. It took place at three different locations around Manhattan, and involved a couple new topics that were both brand new to me and very technical in nature. The long and short of it was that I did not have time for much more than just a quick run, dinner, and bed. Thus, no posts from Alex...

Anyway, the last three weeks of training have generally been good. I gained a solid foundation in basic financial instruments, and introduction to the programming language Python, and an overview of the main initiative that I will be a part of as I start actual work. I learned a lot through the training and met a bunch of people who will help to build my network as I start. However, I am glad that it is done and that I can now move on to learning my role in my actual job, which starts tomorrow morning.

I will likely post a couple more posts about the training to relay some of my observations about both the training and all the people I spent the last 3 weeks with. Topics might include: professionalism, networking, learning, etc. Not exactly sure what, but there is certainly more to come.

~Alex

PETA

If you haven't heard, the internet has just discovered that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) actually end up "saving" but ultimately killing lots and lots of pets.  PETA absolutely LOVES controversy, but I haven't heard a whole lot from them about this.  Essentially, they rescue abused pets and then determine if they are "adoptable".  The pets deemed un-adoptable are then euthanized, to the tune of 85%.

The reason that PETA is so quiet on the issue is that they believe that they have a moral position that is superior to any that could possibly be held by anyone else.  From this perspective, their decisions are beyond question because they care more about animals than anyone else.  This is a dangerous position to take (for anyone).  Even if there were tons of demonstrations and protests against PETA but I am sure they would not change their behavior.  Once a person/group of people think that they're above being questioned they start to go a little crazy and I think that's one reason that PETA is falling more and more out of the mainstream.

Anyways, I agree (to an extent) with their message that we shouldn't be unnecessarily cruel to animals but it's not what is said, it's how it's said.

Math, The Way it Should Be (Unit 2.5: Areas and Volumes)

As usual for this series, if you haven't seen them before, you should check out the first post in the series and the first post in the unit.  This unit has kind of stretched on a lot longer than I intended but it is an important one because although I'm not a big fan of geometry and trigonometry, it does set up one of my favorite topics, calculus.  In light of that, we'll have this lesson and a summary and then I want to tie up some loose ends and then we'll get to the fun stuff, though perhaps not in the way you might think.

The first thing to be covered right now is the area.  Consider the old, familiar Cartesian plane:

Now imagine drawing a shape on this plane.  It would have two dimensions.  When we talked about vectors, we talked about their length, that is, the "space" that they take up in one dimension.  When we want to talk about the "space" taken up in two dimensions, we call it the area.  Many regular shapes have special formulas to help figure out their areas and in the interest of brevity, I will allow the reader to tackle that on his or her own.  What shapes really interest me right now are rectangles and circles.  The reason is because you can make any shape with small enough rectangles or circles.  This may not be obvious but trust me, I will explain later.

Circles (more on them here) have an area proportional to the square of their radius:

\(A = \pi r^2\)

I will prove this to you later, I promise, for now, just please believe me.

Rectangles (4-sided, closed shapes with all right angles) have an area equal to the product of the length of their sides:

\(A = ab\)

Where \(a\) and \(b\) are the lengths of the two adjacent sides.  This makes a lot of sense if you go back to the explanation of multiplication earlier in the series.

Volume is the amount of space an object takes up in three dimensions.  Again, regular shapes have their own special formulas, which you can find in a number of places on the internet.  For volumes, I basically only care about the three-dimensional analog of the rectangle, which is the prism.  It is has all right angles and six faces, all of which are rectangles.  In essence, the prism is a box and the volume of the box is as follows:

\(V = abc\)

Where \(a\), \(b\), and \(c\) are the lengths of the three sides that are perpendicular to each other.  

So those are the basics of areas and volumes.  I didn't spend a whole lot of time on them because I really think that memorizing a bunch of formulas for all sorts of shapes isn't very useful because you can just reconstruct them if you know the formulas for rectangles, circles, and prisms and just one other thing (just wait for unit 4!)

Homework: No homework for this lesson because I'm a) feeling benevolent and b) want to go to bed.

-Lane

Cowboys & Aliens: A Review

Note: Originally I meant this to be a review of the movie but it turned into a movie rant.  If that doesn't bother you, keep reading.

*WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW (NOT LIMITED TO JUST THE MOVIE AT HAND)*

Over the weekend, I went to see Cowboys & Aliens.  My fiancé said that she wanted to see it after seeing the preview that played before the last Harry Potter movie.  While I expected that it would be a fun movie to watch from an action point of view, I was pretty sure that the plot would be terrible.  After all, with a name like Cowboys & Aliens, what chance did it really have?

Well, I was wrong (and you won't hear me say that very often).  The plot was very good and even allowed me to suspend my disbelief in the fact that band of cowboys and Native Americans could possibly defeat the advance scouts of a space-faring race of aliens.  I won't give a plot re-cap here because that can so easily be found elsewhere.  What I do want to say is that I appreciated the ending of this movie more than the usual Hollywood ending.

Usually a movie ends with one character selflessly giving up his/her life to eliminate the threat to everyone else and everyone else pretty much survives and goes on to live happily ever after.  The main character goes largely untouched and everything is just hunky-dory.  Take the most recent Harry Potter movie: despite being at the center of the near-destruction of the wizarding world, witnessing the deaths of countless friends, and going toe to toe with the nastiest wizard ever, Harry Potter still has this wonderful perfect life afterwards (don't even get me started on the death and back-to-life thing.  Worst ending to an epic series ever).  On the other end of the spectrum would be Oedipus Rex.  At the end of the story, everything goes completely wrong for the hero: he learns that he killed his dad and married his mom and puts his own eyes out.  I can't always hope for an end like that, but I can hope for something a little more like Lord of the Rings, where Frodo returns, broken, to the Shire to find that he can't adjust back to life and eventually fades into the distance with the elves.

This is a little like what I found in Cowboys & Aliens.  While there was the typical sacrifice of a character near and dear to the protagonist to seal the antagonists' doom, the main character just wasn't quite able to put his life back together.  All he can do is just ride out of town without a plan or a friend.

It may be strange to not want a happy ending at the movies, but here's why: I can't believe in the perfect hero who saves the day and emerges unscathed.  I can't believe in a person like Superman or Harry Potter.  I can believe in a hero who tries his/her hardest (and may, like Frodo, ultimately fail) and emerges scarred.  The fact that a hero can exist, even if he is not invincible, is what gives me hope.

-Lane