A glass of eggnog

It is Friday, pretty cold even for the middle of November. We have fallen back from daylight savings, so in Seattle with the perpetually overcast skies, it seems to get dark at 2:30 in the afternoon. I came back home on a day like this and as I was going over my machine learning course, I poured myself a glass of eggnog for comfort. As I sprinkled some cinnamon powder and took a sip, the creamy sweetness filling me with goodness, I wondered from when did I start associating eggnog with this kind of comfort? I did not grow up relating eggnog to Christmas, or winter. The first time I had eggnog ten years back, I wanted to spit it out. It smelled disgusting, and the flavor of raw eggs in them brought me close to throwing up. The same happened with apple cider. Some of my other Indian friends and I were looking for places to spit it out and we finally emptied the cups down the drinking water fountain in our department.

I found telling a friend whose house we generally go for Thanksgiving, that I like it being dark and gloomy as we gather round the turkey. If it was sunny and warm outside it would be so incongruous. What happened in the time during the last ten years which has brought such changes in me? Things that I had no idea about are now normal facets of my life.

I think it is because I let myself absorb new things, and that I love talking to people, ask them details about how they spent the summer holidays, what are their memories of Christmas, and slowly get myself acquainted with the new culture, or cultures because as everyone knows, the US is a salad bowl of cultures around the world.

On the other hand, here's the chance to share mine. Last month, for the first time, I hosted a "Bijoya Sammelani" or get together after the Bengali festival of Durga Pujo. The fun part was other than one friend (just him, not his wife) was Bengali. The others were not Indians. They came to this gathering, asked a lot of questions about Durga Pujo, how we celebrate it, what we eat, how are we supposed to behave, and they ate all Bengali food. They even picked out bones of the treacherous fish ilish. There were fun conversations around, no gossiping, no uncomfortable jokes, just a lot of laughter over good food and good company.

It feels nothing different when you compare one day to the other, but when you look back a few years, you see stuff changing. The more new things we learn, the more new things we open our hearts and homes to, we just pave the way for a more enriched life.

On Machine Learning and my realizations thereof

I promised to myself that this will not become a technical blog, so I am not going to talk about the details of machine learning. Just to let people know the backstory, Artificial Intelligence is a subject that interests me and there was a time when I planned a career in academics and thought that is the subject I would pursue. But then things turned out differently and I went towards a career in software. However, Coursera has shown me time and again, that if I want to learn something, the Universe would help me do so. I took courses in Physics from there too. This year after listening to Dr. Fei-Fei Li's keynote speech at the Grace Hopper Conference, I decided to start studying machine learning. The course I found is from Dr. Andrew Ng and without any exaggeration it is so far the toughest course I have ever taken, physically or virtually!

The first week was overwhelming. After a whole day at work, in the evening I started the course and I felt like my brain would just explode. Without any fluff, he dived straight into math. Algebra had never been my strong point so I gasped when I saw a lot of linear algebra sitting there. And it just wasn't algebra. Literally all the math I had learned, including geometry, co-ordinate geometry (also 3D), trigonometry, and even probability and statistics are being used everyday in a matter of fact way. One thing I must admit, even though I did not realize it when I learned these in high school, I actually did spend a lot of time practicing these. My parents would still say I should have spent some more time studying, but now I know these stuff has got firmly etched in my brain somewhere that even though the surface may accumulate some "dust" over the years, they would not be forgotten. It has become like muscle memory :)

The second part of the problem is programming. Thing with math and programming both is unless you get it right, it won't work. You can yell at yourself, or at the code (or math) but it still won't work. (Cursing in Bengali doesn't help either, I have tried.) So when I had to solve equations and put them in MATLAB (a language I barely ever touched in undergrad, and then never after) I was initially in terrible shape. For a few days I just scratched my head and tried to remember why exactly I decided to take this course. But there is one thing I did not do. I did not give up. This is an unpaid online course which just takes one click to give up. I told myself if I cannot do anything by Sunday, then I will stop taking this class, but until then I will try. That Sunday morning, I had cold hands and I was frantically going over the mentor's notes to understand the problems. Slowly things got better, programs compiled, they showed expected values. Then I ran test cases on them. Those gave right answers as well. Then I submitted my work, and as science is supposed to work, I got full points!

Nobody saw my happy dance for five straight minutes after that!

From the next week, things got better. I understood approximately how much time I need to allot for the programming assignments. I also decided to tackle the problems each day rather than keeping everything for the end of the week.

There has been another realization about the thing called impostor syndrome. As the society we grew up in is silent about achievements but vocal towards failures, we have been conditioned into thinking that failures are our direct responsibilities. Like, as students, if we did poorly on a test it was because we didn't study enough. But if we did well, it was received with a "that's ok, try to do better next time". So we still generally undermine ourselves. As this course is tough and it is from Stanford, to be honest, I initially felt very stupid. Then I felt that maybe the problems are not very tough, it is just taking me time to figure it out. Finally after submitting them, I looked at the Github repos of some mentors and saw that their solutions are less optimized than mine (it would take more time to run their programs than mine) and that they have not used the concepts like vectorization which was taught in class. That made me realize that I actually got the concepts, and I know better than some others! Being able to work in MATLAB also boosted my confidence that we don't really have to learn a new language now, we just need to learn the syntax.

Difficult challenges are a treat to the logical brain! Need to start reading about Neural Networks now... happy learning :)