Food for Black History Month

Fried chicken, collard greens, and "whipped" potatoes.  Nice. Is it offensive to honor Black History Month with fried chicken?

power

An extremely interesting article on power entitled "Could You Become a Dictator?".  Those experiments were quite clever.

capitalism

Want to know what kind of monster would be freely roaming the American food landscape if an effective FDA did not exist (an occasional Republican wet dream)?  Read about the notorious and unethical but highly profit driven Monsanto company in Missouri.  Two especially disturbing facts are (1) the idea that Monsanto believed that they (Monsanto) are not responsible for determining if their own food stuff (eg, GMO products) are safe, that is the FDA's job and (2) they tried to ban milk coming from cows NOT injected with growth hormones (that Monsanto produces).

a squirrel's thought

Last week while a blizzard was in progress, I imagine a squirrel stuck in a particularly cold winter with less than usual amount of food.  Would it remain in its little burrow determined to stoically take all the pain and hunger winter will dish out?  There are two possible outcomes: if it can withstand this winter, it will be weakened but happy to survive another season; if its corporal body cannot withstand the cold and hunger, it will starve and freeze lonely and helplessly.  But what would be the point?  It was given an evolved brain for survival.  It should seek out warmer shelter; or bunk up with another of its kind.  It should know winter from summer; that it can plan ahead and store food in the autumn in anticipation for the winter.  Its brain has evolved for this; so has the human brain.  Of course the human brain is more complicated but this allows many extraneous thoughts to taint the primitive and fundamental desire of living being to thrive.

Blog Revival

For the new year I will revive this blog.

Coffee overload?

Since November I've been drinking black coffee two to four times a week.  I've always felt unhealthy after drinking coffee; similar to the feeling I get after a meal at McDonald's.  But today was the first time I've ever felt that I would vomit if I drank another sip of my coffee.  Maybe because I had an semi-empty stomach?  I think it is time for me to go back to fun (but expensive and less caffeinated) drinks like Frappuccinos.

Feynman-Kac No.1

Here is a problem that I found from an old homework assignment.  I've modified the original to make it shorter.  Let W_t be Brownian motion and let 1_z(x) = 1 if x > z and equals 0 otherwise. Consider the function

where ε is a small number.  Write down the PDE satisfied by u_ε(x,t ; a, T).  Show that as ε tends to zero, u_ε(x,t; a, T) approaches the solution of boundary value problem.  Find an analytical expression for u_ε(x,t; a, T).  Use Monte Carlo simulation to evaluate u_ε(0, 0 ; 1/2, 1) where ε = 0.1, 0.001, and 0.0001.

I'll post my attempt at the solution later. Feel free to add a solution.