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We Met! and sparkling pineapple spears
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We Met! and sparkling pineapple spears Yesterday was a day of depleted energy that signalled itself first thing in the morning. Nevertheless I began preparing myself for my coffee date with N. Coffee and breakfast did little to dissipate my lethargy. I spent the morning working on my cover lettre for the Outreach position. Everything was going in slow motion. Perhaps I ought to mention the evening before. I had an interview in Dartmouth for 7 PM. Based on the telephone call where I had received the invite, I was left with the impression that the site was near the Dartmouth foot of the MacDonald Bridge. I was mistaken, and I walked for almost an hour an a half to get there in my new high heeled boots. The organization turned out to be Primera, an insurance giant. The office was practically underneath the MacKay bridge. The ‘manager’ position they were going to interview me for involves generating sales and opening my own office. I had been late because I had only allotted an hour for the walk. In an adjacent room there was a meeting with many people in it, and a woman from Newfoundland pitching to them a lifestyle. This, to me, felt like a soul-killer. The sole focal point handed to these people was acquisition of money. I need some, but not like that. Nope! When I arrived home I was not hungry for anything heavy. I have a package of pineapple spears in the refrigerator that have been there for a while. I took 6 or 7 of them. They were sparkling, like a sparkling wine. I could smell the products of fermentation. They tasted really good! But oh, did they cost me the next day! Now, back to my day yesterday. I spent some time working on a couple of thing as well as the cover lettre, and a little time chatting with internet friends who live across the sea. As the time for our coffee date approached I began checking bus schedules. I caught a suitable bus ( 1 of 3 possible choices) within minutes of arriving at the stop at Quinpool and Robie. The cafe was easy to find. The Seton building is the one that faces the road. Inside, a sign directed me to the cafe on the second floor. I spent the next hour working on my cover lettre. It is almost finished. I first became aware of her arrival when she eased herself into a seat on the opposite side of the table. After very little smalltalk I asked how her statistics was treating her. My own exposure was a single second year course, an introduction to theoretical statistics. It is useful in Computer Science. As I responded to her description of what she is currently learning, regression, I mentioned that regression techniques are essential in the methods of giving sense perception to robots. Whether visual, tactile, auditory, or thermal, all these phenomena are analoge in nature, and computers are digital, that is, discrete in their essential operations. So it falls to regression techniques designed to discover the distribution pattern in some given environment to allow a robot to find its place in that environment, or manipulate some artifact at that locale. This material I learned in a fourth year course called Machine Learning, and Robotics. There we have it: academic smalltalk between two women. I love it! We also talked about social theory, and it philosophical background. That took me to an area of<b> philosophy </font></b>that I had not studied. But I was able to recommend wiki for a first approximation for some of these topics. Wiki articles also provide references for more detailed treatment of topics. We agreed that Macro theories do not ever touch the ground. They do not inform us of the condition where we live. We talked about feminism, and its reaction to macro theories, and feminists have historically had a fascination with Marx. We talked about family, and other things, but what I really remember is the way she dusted the entire conversation with sprinkles of her delightful laugh. The laughs told me two things. She understands what I am talking about (such people are not always easy to find), and she gets me. It is my playfulness with ideas, my delight in understanding that is coming through. She is not giving me what I had hoped for in the aftermath of the new years dance. She has already made life choices that hold her. She seems to be offering something else, something richer, something real. I’ll take the real, any day. |
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