Happy Holidays! 2020 Recap.

Notes on least squares optimization, some short-term learning goals, and a review of accomplishments in 2020. Finally, some comments about current and upcoming anime.

First, I’m excited to share my notes on least squares optimization, mainly taken from Gilbert Strang’s “Computational Science and Engineering.” Much of it is verbatim, but I’ve added some background material (from Lay’s Linear Algebra and its Applications), worked out the algebra, and fleshed out explanations wherever I found it helpful to do so. I’ve been working on these notes for the past couple days, and I’ve become much more comfortable with several concepts in linear algebra as a result, particularly the relation between fundamental subspaces, orthogonality, and singular value decomposition. The notes go over ordinary, weighted, and regularized least squares. Honestly, I will need to go over these topics a couple more times (at least!) before I truly feel good about them, but for now, you can find the notes by following the link below: **Notes for Least Squares Optimization **

Next, I’d like to talk about some of my short-term learning goals. I recently started Andrew Ng’s renowned Coursera course on machine learning, and I think I quite enjoy it. The course is very light on the mathematics, which I can’t say is totally surprising, but I look forward to encountering more challenging material as I progress through the course. In addition, I would also like to start looking deeper into Gelman et al.’s Bayesian Data Analysis text, ideally via a course of some kind, but I haven’t yet found a MOOC that uses it. Recently, I finally bit the bullet and started learning R, which I have been stalwartly avoiding for the past two years in favour of Python, and more recently, Julia. However, I know that R is unparalleled for intensive statistical analyses, and ggplot is an amazing visualization library, so there’s no reason not to learn R. Lastly, I re-read part of Evil Lord (a light novel I talked about in a previous post), and love it so much, I started reading it in Japanese, keeping track of new vocabulary with Anki. It’s very intense!

This year has been difficult for everyone, and I don’t expect that it will get much easier anytime soon, even with widespread vaccination on the horizon. Nevertheless, I’d like to highlight some of things that I accomplished this year. Hopefully, this doesn’t come off as too obnoxious!

1. I finally figured out a reliable protocol for site-directed mutagenesis! Optimizing the initial PCR can be quite involved, but I prefer this over methods that don’t allow for easy upstream quality control.
2. I improved my patch-clamp recording protocols to allow leak-subtraction and estimation of whole-cell parameters! Part of this was inspired by and would not have been possible without pyABF and its incredible developer, Dr. Scott Harden, who helped me vastly improve my Python processing scripts.
3. I (re-)read Lay’s Linear Algebra text, which really helped improve my familiarity with linear algebra.
4. I hope this doesn’t jinx me, but I’ve gotten pretty good at cell culture recently - no contamination in almost 6 months!

Because of the pandemic, I was worried that anime studios might stop producing anime altogether. Fortunately, this didn’t happen. I enjoyed several series this season, especially Akudama Drive and Munou na Nana. I have yet to catch up with series I mentioned previously, including Kamisama ni natta hi and Taisou samurai. Another series that caught my eye (today, actually) is Adachi to shimamura, which seems to be a very calm, soothing slice-of-life series. Next year, I’m looking forward to a bunch of series, most notably the following:

• Mushoku tensei
• Kumo desu ga, nani ka?
• Non non biyori s3
• Log horizon s3 (I’ll need to rewatch s1 and s2 soon - actually, I might start that tonight after writing this post!)
• Jaku chara tomozaki kun
• Tensei shitara slime datta ken s2
• Horimiya
• Kemono jihen
• Tatoeba last dungeon mae no mura no shounen ga joban no machi de kurasu
• Ura sekai picnic

I’ve recently been watching a lot of Hololive Vtubers. I really think that this medium has a lot of potential to equalize the playing field for how entertainment is delivered. There are definitely worrying aspects, but I’m very supportive of where this technology/platform seems to be heading at the moment.

That’s it for 2020! Happy New Year!