Reverse Chronological Order
The most significant chapter of my life so far is coming to a close. We've been in Jacksonville for more than 8 years now, and in a few short weeks, we'll be moving to Saint Paul to start over. Jacksonville is the only real home our kids have known, and we've made so many dear, dear friends here over the years. We moved here in the summer of 2016. Seven months later, just after the New Year, just before Trump's first inauguration, I wrote the following:
Reflection
Like many of you, I'm feeling a mix of emotions right now: a strange cocktail of shock but also of familiarity, of energy but also resignation, the kneejerk desire to blame every racist-homophobic-gun-loving redneck who voted for him but also the desire for the Left to take a hard look at itself.
Harris did not lose the election for any one strategic decision, or policy, or position. She was placed in a near-impossible situation, and she and her team did just about the damned best job they could have. Given the hand she was dealt, maybe we were foolish to hope for any other outcome. But maybe not...
Politics/Social Commentary Reflection
I've recently picked up fishing more seriously. I've always loved it, and I've had a simple kayak here in Jacksonville for a number of years, but I never had anything fancy or any gear that made fishing from a kayak particularly simple or easy. In April, after I got vaccinated, I started playing in-person poker again, and I was doing fairly well! But then delta hit, and I decided to back out again for a bit. So I spent my poker bankroll on an actual, pedal-driven fishing kayak...
Reflection
Now I've worked more from home for my new job than at the office. It's been a full year since I've seen my family back in Austin. My wife and I became home owners for the first time, moving out of a house we shared with our close friends for the last four years, with all of the feelings that entails. We pulled our kids out of public school, tried to go back, then pulled them out again. And one close friend and my mother-in-law are both fighting off the tail-end of COVID this Christmas morning...
Reflection Politics/Social Commentary
I'm designing a tattoo sleeve of quotes. These quotes both represent and have shaped my life in various ways. I thought I'd share.
There is grandeur in this view of life…
plant sequoias.
Eventually, all things merge into one,
and a river runs through it.
Consider again that dot. That's us, on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
...by the better angels of our nature.
You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness...
Philosophy Politics/Social Commentary
What?!
I checked the date: October 15th. That's when I realized it had been a year. I was registered to take the November 2017 LSAT and had to request my refund by around this time last year...
Data Science
So it's finally over! I can come out of the Kaggle hole in which I've been hiding for the last month or so. It's been quite a little ride. When we left off, I was struggling to engineer some new features and was looking at ways to deal with the size of the data set, such as using an Easy Ensemble (which failed miserably). Since then, I had several little breakthroughs.
First, I started using a much better validation method...
Data Science
At long last, I decided to enter my first Kaggle contest. For the uninitiated, Kaggle hosts predictive, data science competitions. For example, Zillow recently had a contest on Kaggle to better improve their pricing algorithm. Prizes for the competitions can be pretty substantial (the Zillow prize pool was $1.2 million!).
As you can read about in my analysis of their survey, Kaggle is seen as a great resource for learning the tools of data science...
Data Science
"Baby steps" are how we get from A to B. We do the hard work of learning the details, spending hours on hiccups and chasing rabbits down holes. But I find it difficult to really post about baby steps. You all don't need to know about every little aspect of my data science education, and I don't have time to write about them. Reporting falls prey to the law of diminishing returns.
But the pressure to avoid reporting baby steps can overshoot the mark, leading to a desire to only post polished, new material...
Data Science
To the reader,
The best way to read this report is on my Github page here. You can also play around with the code yourself by forking (copying) the kernel on Kaggle itself here. I tried various ways to get the report to render correctly here on WordPress, but to no avail. If anyone has some CSS magic that could make the window below bigger (i.e...
Data Science
I'm still not in a place to really produce some original, quality analysis of my own yet, so I thought I'd teach you all about what is probably the most common pitfall in data science: over-fitting.
In very broad strokes, machine learning consists of splitting your data set into two chunks: a training set and a test set. Then you take whatever model you are attempting to use, whether it's linear regression, k-nearest-neighbors, or a random forest, etc., and "train" it on the training set. This involves tuning the hyperparameters that minimize whichever error function you're using...
Data Science
I realized last night that I have yet to really articulate why I am making this switch from teaching to data science. There's more to it than just not being fully satisfied with teaching and needing a job to earn a buck. This post is more for me than it is you, but I thought I'd share.
Those of you who know me well know that I spent last fall studying for the LSAT. I was fairly convinced for about a year and a half that I wanted to become a lawyer. I was taken with the idea of using my mind to answer tough questions and to convince others of my argument's merit, all while fighting for the most vulnerable...
Data Science
Hello world! My name is Chad Gardner. I am former AP Physics teacher, with an educational background in astronomy, philosophy, and religion(?!). I am currently a stay-at-home dad, spending what spare time I can muster learning Python for data science. I hope to use this site as a place to dump my brain, share my progress, keep myself accountable, and all those other reason people start blogs. Eventually, this will morph into a portfolio filled with beautiful insights, graphs, and stories from the world of data...
Data Science
I've been toying with all of this for about a month now. I have so many bookmarks for blogs, podcasts, free courses, paid courses, and on and on. I've checked out books from the library, bought others on Amazon, and downloaded open source texts. I have to admit that I'm a bit daunted. There are a million places to begin, and I have plenty of work to do before even becoming mildly employable...
Data Science
I have had a difficult time figuring out when to stop learning and to start trying to work on something of my own. I feel a pretty strong urge to make something original. I downloaded years of data from the Florida Department of Education, but that whole thing seemed so daunting. Also, I don't feel like I know enough yet to really discover anything...
Data Science
I didn't sleep well the other night. I saw each hour of the night displayed on the alarm clock. Maybe I stole some little slices of rest, but mostly I just failed at clearing my mind over and over again. School was starting the next morning, and, while I wasn't actively dreading it, perhaps by brain is just tired of it, unwilling to jump into the new semester. I teach good kids, and my coworkers and administration are great, but I just feel so bored, so unfulfilled. I haven't figured out what's so different this year than previous ones. I was a little bored then too, but not to this extent...
Reflection
The room's lighting was mellow and soft and the rustic wooden bed frame hinted at a ski lodge or little B&B. The only sounds in that instant were the soft splashing of my wife in the bathtub. We were alone, just husband and wife. But this was no winter vacation.
"Another one is coming," Agata said. I bent over and applied counter-pressure to her lower back. "Lower," she said, "and father apart." I obliged.
My wife gave birth to our second child on Saturday morning at 1:55 AM...
Reflection
"The Purgatory Players"
by Chad Gardner
Poetry
I've just finished reading two essay collections which have refocused my aim in writing: Wendell Berry's latest Our Only World and Barbara Kingsolver's Small Wonder. Many years ago I decided I could never write fiction: I'm better at articulating my thoughts than I am creating characters. Essays and poems have always been my strength...
Reflection Politics/Social Commentary
One of the years I was studying at Florida State, I taught a History and Philosophy of Science class based around film. Each week we would discuss how a certain film portrays science and its relationship to the rest of human life. This course was one of the more rewarding courses I've taught, and one film stands out as the most thought provoking and revealing: The Day After Trinity. Released in 1981, The Day After Trinity, explores the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb...
Philosophy Politics/Social Commentary
My sister recently bought me a copy of The Myth of the Shiksa and Other Essays by Edwin H. Friedman, the most prevalent student of Bowen theory, a systems approach to family counseling. In an interview entitled "Empathy Defeats Therapy," Friedman writes,
...I think it is precisely our focus on empathy that is one of the major factors that has everybody stuck. It's a post-World War II emphasis. The world doesn't even appear in the original Oxford English Dictionary published in 1932...Reflection
"Why?" by Chad Gardner
Inspired by a passage from Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
Poetry
It seems so strange: how did we forgot how to talk to one another? How did we lose our sense of community, of belonging, of neighborly care? When did we start generalizing, bifurcating, and stereotyping to such a degree that only two, infinitely pliable and immensely dangerous categories remain: us and them? We now speak in nothing but glittering generalities, afraid to say or hear hard lessons built on hard evidence: "there is no insult like the truth."
Nietzsche has a great aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil: "'Our 'neighbors' are not the ones next door to us, but ...
Politics/Social Commentary Philosophy
This popped up on my Facebook page last Thursday (note from the future: link broken!). It's a clip from Bill O'Reilly talking about the recent events in Baltimore where he says, "This is not a country that promotes white supremacy… There’s no systemic effort to keep black people down in America...
Politics/Social Commentary
Every now and then, I like to sing our national anthem in the shower. It's a tricky little song with music that can be quite powerful, as I'm sure we all know...
Reflection Politics/Social Commentary
That "Wear Sunscreen" song has a line that goes like this:
I'm going on 31 in September, and those words are both comforting and terrifying. I have felt so conflicted for so long about what I should be doing with this life of mine...
Reflection
I am currently reading Barbara Kingsolver's collection of essays Small Wonder (which as been refreshing so far, and I recommend it!). The epigraph is a quote from Wendell Berry which reads, "To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it." This is a theme about which I've often wondered, especially since I no longer count myself among those who believe in miracles...
Reflection Philosophy
This post has been a long time coming. Losing one's religion is a funny thing—since I grew up a Catholic among Catholics, most people in my life probably assume I'm still the same old Chad. In many ways I am, but in this one, central aspect, I have changed. I write this post mainly to clear the air, to put it all out there so that those in my life who have known me growing up can know me still. I have a hard time responding sometimes when people assume that I still attend Mass regularly, or still share their political and social views, or still pray...
Religion/Atheism Reflection
My wife and I have been watching NBC's "Parenthood" on Netflix. We are a few episodes into the fourth season. For anyone who hasn't heard of it yet, I'd highly recommend it, especially to you young parents out there.
The other night we watched the episode titled "The Talk" (Season 4, episode 4) which had a surprising impact on me. A mixed-race couple—he is white, she is black—have to explain the word "nigga" to their eight-year-old son. His dad works at a recording studio and the son, Jabar, overheard a hip hop artist use the word...
Reflection Politics/Social Commentary
I've been absent from the blogosphere this summer. It seems to be something of a perpetual truth in my life that when I finally have time to write, I do something else.
The school year has just begun with me not knowing quite where the summer went. In July we traveled, and I had training, but I have no clue where June went. I don't feel like I've been teaching for a year already. That was it? One and counting? I'll be getting to five and then ten by next week it seems. A year feels like too small an increment...
Reflection
Over dinner the other night, a close friend, my family, and I got into a discussion about the nature of different questions. As I tend to do my thinking on paper, I thought I'd write about my position here.
One of the defining characteristics of modern society is the distinction between "science" and "religion". I've written about this before (here and here)...
Philosophy Religion/Atheism
Several months ago, I asked my students to reflect on the following quote:
I decided not tell them that the quote is from Marx. I had several students who read it and just weren't interested in thinking about what it means...
Reflection Politics/Social Commentary
Here is a little example of how far behind our children are. I gave a test about the conservation of momentum several weeks ago. It was, as they all are, a multiple choice test. I have Casio scientific calculators in my room for the students to use, and when they plugged in their numbers into the momentum equation (p=mv), the calculator told them the answer was ".1". Now, the answers on the actual test ranged from, "10.0", "1.0", "0.10", and "0.01". I had several students raise their hand to ask why their answer wasn't one of the choices, as they were pretty sure they had done it correctly...
Reflection Politics/Social Commentary
The other night I had the pleasure of attending a small dinner and concert at a little bed and breakfast in Dripping Springs. The original house was built in 1857, and the evening began with a brief history of the original owners and how it came to be what it is today. Overall the evening was beautiful. It was small; no more than twenty-five people, with the dining room doubling as the concert space...
Poetry Reflection
Eleven years ago, a good friend of mine died in a car accident on the way to school. He swerved to miss a deer and flipped his Ford Explorer. We were juniors in high school at the time and in the band together. Along with some friends, we would carpool to the early-morning marching practices. I think it was during chemistry that an administrator came over the announcements and asked all the band members to come to the band hall. By this time there were rumors, but nobody knew what was going on. While the rest of the school heard the news, our band director told us that Josh had died that morning...
Reflection
At FSU, my professor proposed this question: what if you were invited to a dinner party and brought a relatively nice bottle of wine, something in the $25 dollar range—not too pricey but not too cheap. Then, a few weeks later, when you in turn have the couple over for dinner to your place, they bring the same bottle of wine. Why does that strike us as odd? A gift for a gift right? Or what if they bring a bottle which costs $70 instead? Or $4.99? If your return gift is too expensive, then it can be perceived as showing off or as communicating some kind dissatisfaction with the received gift...
Philosophy Politics/Social Commentary
On the drive to the high school where I teach, there is a hill which always manages to offer me a splendid view of the morning. This past Monday when I topped the hill, due to the clouds (and probably pollution), the sun was enormous as it peaked over the horizon. It reminded me of something from The Lion King: wavy and red as a smoldering coal. I smiled to myself as I imagined the entire hemisphere spinning toward the sun...
Reflection Politics/Social Commentary
Those of you who know me or who have been following this blog probably know that I thoroughly enjoy the poetry of Billy Collins. Agata and I were lucky enough to get to hear him read and speak at the Paramount last week here in Austin. I used to write a lot of poetry when I was younger; I even took a year of creative writing classes in undergrad, but none of it was ever very good. I recently decided to try my hand again. So, inspired by Collins, here is my first...
Poetry
I finally managed to get some reading done over the Thanksgiving break. A good friend of mine lent me Richard Rorty's Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America, and it turned out to be one of the most interesting and rewarding books I've read in awhile. It's a serious of lectures delivered in 1998, and it's less than a hundred pages. But A little background is necessary to appreciate some of the details.
Rorty was trained as an analytic philosopher...
Philosophy Politics/Social Commentary
On Wednesday, my wife and I, along with many family and friends, welcomed our firstborn son into the world. Ira was born at 10:26 AM, weighing in at 8 lbs 3 oz. Both Agata and Ira are in great health, and labor went easily as far as labors go (well, you might have to verify that with her...). We named him Ira for a couple of reasons. My Puerto Rican maternal great-grandmother was named Iris, and we toyed with naming a daughter that before we knew he was a boy. Also, I think we just listen to too much NPR. Ira Glass and Ira Flatow now have a namesake...
Reflection
A lot of different people mean a lot of different things when they use the word "postmodern." When I use it, I tend to mean something like what Nietzsche meant by "God is dead." That is, objective Truth, perfection, utopia, or the realization of an ideal are no longer our goals in science or society. It means that there is not one answer to life's questions, not one ring to rule them all, not one all-knowing perspective, no "knowledge without a knower." Thinking along these lines has pervaded most of the liberal arts since the 1970s...
Philosophy Politics/Social Commentary
The title of this post is drawn from Thoreau's famous line in Walden describing why he went to live in the woods. He wished to
Reflection
Every now and then, more so these days, I need a little reminder that life isn't quite so serious as it's made out to be. Cosmic forces do not hang in the balance. There aren't answers to the all-consuming questions of life. And sometimes, there really isn't anything else I should be doing. I have yet to find a better way to jostle a melancholy mood than Billy Collins. The former Poet Laureate has mastered the art of embarrassing his readers back to a state of sober levity...
Reflection Poetry
It's that moment when you realize that you're naked, that moment when you start looking around for some leaves to cover up your shame, or when you first read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and discover that Columbus isn't worthy of the regard which our elementary school teachers held for him, or when you wake up one morning as an adult, knowing full well and too late that not all adults know what the hell's going on.
It's when you first learn that the earliest manuscripts of the Bible are copies of copies of copies of copies, transcribed not my professionals, but ...
Religion/Atheism Philosophy
I started graduate school with big plans. I was going to write the book, the book that would make everyone say, "OH! How did I not see this? Finally!" and boom, the world would be saved. I knew deep down that it wasn't actually going to be like that, but I wasn't prepared for exactly how much it's nothing like that at all. Higher education, especially the humanities, has become a pyramid scheme: cheap graduate student and adjunct professor labor holds up grossly inflated university president salaries. Tenure track positions are being replaced with five adjunct positions...
Reflection
In Finding Neverland (2004), there's great little scene where Johnny Depp's character, P.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, is performing for some children in a park. He pretends to be a fearless bear trainer, and his furry friend, Porthos, plays the part of the bear. But before he begins, Peter, the young realist, played by Freddie Highmore, says "But this is absurd...
Philosophy Politics/Social Commentary
I am no literary critic, but I see the difference between a utopia and a dystopia as this: a dystopia generally takes a particular feature of the actual world which the author finds ominous and extrapolates it into the future, predicting just what society might look like should that feature be allowed to continue its present course. Fahrenheit 451 is about censorship and the freedom of ideas, the film Equilibrium is about the desire to rid humanity of the emotional (and therefore the uncontrollable) side of human nature, and 1984 was about the dangers of totalitarianism...
Philosophy Politics/Social Commentary
I've been thinking about freedom a lot these days, mostly due to a strange constellation of recent events. First, this semester I'm sitting in on an undergraduate course called "Religion, Self, and Society," where we read John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill. The course ends with a look at the Supreme Court and its involvement with the Mormons over plural marriage...
Politics/Social Commentary