Gray Watson's Blog -- April 2021

Blogging is a useful way for me to record my thoughts and digital travels every so often. Hope you enjoy my digital stream of consciousness.

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April 19, 2021

Nerual networks have been around for some time but Google's AlphaGo and other DeepMind projects have massively scaled them up to a point that they are achieving amazing results. In this artricle, they talk about using neural network technology to solve very difficult mathematical problems.
It also provides solutions at dramatically improved speeds. In one relatively simple example that required 30,000 simulations, involving solutions of the infamous Navier-Stokes equation, the FNO took fractions of a second for each simulation (comparable to DeepONet's speed, had it been tested on this problem), for a total of 2.5 seconds; the traditional solver in this case would have taken 18 hours.

April 5, 2021

Japan just recorded its earliest bloom of the cherry blossoms in 1200 years. I really covet this sorts of reports because it is independent of all other data. No models that pundits can wave off. We are slowly but surely changing the chemistry of our planet and there is little to no political will to fix it. And if your response is "who cares about cherry blossoms", you need to rememebr that is effecting all agriculture.
This year's change in flowering dates isn't limited to just Japan; the cherry blossoms that adorn the Tidal Basin in Washington, DC, have also bloomed early. According to the National Park Service, the peak bloom date of the Washington cherry blossoms has advanced forward by nearly a week from April 5th to March 31.

April 2, 2021

One of the few positive news coming out of the voting rights arena recently is the state of Virginia. While many Republican states are putting more and more restrictions on voting in the name of anti-fraud (with little to no evidence of a problem), the state of Virginia is going in the opposite directly. Kudos to them!
Virginia, which for nearly 50 years had to submit changes to its elections to the federal government for approval under the Voting Rights Act's preclearance requirements, has now effectively imposed the same covenants on itself, an extraordinary step for a state with a long history of segregation and racially targeted voting laws.