Week 2 - American Museums, Trump Hotels and Reservoirs

Now that my third week here in the Maryland is almost over, I ought really to be embarrassed about the lateness of posting about my second week, but instead, I will be shamelessly unapologetic. I am going to be following up with another blogpost soon about my third week here. I was set back by accidentally deleting all my previous work, which led in part to this post to being delayed.

My workweek wasn't to eventful, although I would like to note that I have discovered the beautiful pool here. At the recreation center they have both a 25m and 50m pool. The 50m pool is not only enormous in length, but also so deep, that I am worried of being gobbled up by a shark from the depths, sharing the fate of a poor seal in one of David Attenborough's documentaries.

Visit to DC
Saturday was my 20th Birthday. During the day I went in to Washington DC to visit the museum of American history. I was impressed by their exhibition on the internment of Japanese-Americans in camps in the western USA during the Second World War. Basically, all Japanese in the West, including citizens, were put into prison camps, because they were mistrusted, in total disregard of their rights!

Flowers from the exhibition

On the way back we stumbled on a familiar and nowadays quite notable hotel... Looking at it you could really see that the owner must be an educated man with a refined taste..!

My Alaskan flatmates John and Josh

We also passed the National Gallery sculpture garden, with a cooling fountain and interesting sculptures.

My all time favourite sculpture which tricked you to think it was a 3D house from all angles!

A different take on Rodin's The Thinker

Upon arriving back home I found a package awaiting me. It was the kind of package that every person in the world dreams of getting when they arrive home, and I was the lucky man that day. It contained a birthday cake from Timea! Which leads me straight onto the topic of my birthday.

The mysterious package

Birthday
That evening we celebrated my birthday with people from the TREND program and my flatmates. It was good fun. Being my third 20th birthday party in a third country I thought it was a fitting end to the festivities. On top of this, I have received many lovely cards. I now have a stunning collection plastering my desk!

Moments before digging into the cake

I got two 60th birthday cards!

Reservoir Computing
Up until now I had been working on a thing called reservoir computing. I have now changed my topic to Dynamical Systems, more on that later. I want to try to explain this technology anyway. It is really amazing. One of the postgraduate students here, Jaideep Pathak, someone who I have worked with, has written a very interesting and readable paper on the subject.

From Lu, Pathak et al. (2017)

Let me give an example of a problem that it can solve and how a reservoir computer solves this. The double pendulum is a very chaotic, unpredictable, crazy system. Say I were to give you the angle at every moment in time of this system and asked 'can you give me the positions of every part of this pendulum at every time, using just this one value?'. This is possible with a good dosis of Maths and Physics knowledge, plus a computer.

A reservoir however can solve this problem without knowing anything about the system. The 'nodes' in the reservoir have values and at each time step they receive a new input from our input value and simultaneously affect each others values in a randomly preset way. So far this network is just a jumble of values, continuously shifting around, and it is not useful in anyway. The magic comes in the output layer: over a certain amount of time we measure the values that we want our network to predict. We then determine the optimal way of adding together the values of the nodes at each moment in time, to approximate the output as closely as possible. We can then continue to apply this trick for times where we do not know the output. It turns out that this works very well. Look at the image below, where a reservoir can predict the y and z values of a chaotic Lorenz system using just the x value.

From Lu, Pathak et al. (2017)

This is quite amazing and the reservoirs perform very well. The question is if they can now be applied to other deterministic, yet hard to predict systems, such as the weather. Both the weather and the Lorenz system display the so-called 'butterfly effect', where a small initial difference can totally change the future. That is why there is the hope that this can be applied to such tricky to solve systems!

Week 1-Touchdown in College Park

I am going to initially be running this blog over the course of my 10-week TREND Research Programme (Training and Research Experience in Non-Linear Dynamics) at the University of Maryland for the interest of and to stay in contact with my family and friends abroad. UMD is in College Park, a suburb of Washington DC.
Het spijt me dat deze blog niet in het Nederlands kan; dat is nou eenmaal nodig om het merendeel van mijn lezerspubliek te bereiken.

Schiphol Airport
On Sunday the 3rd of June, I said goodbye to my family at Schiphol airport. Having just been there returning from Edinburgh on Thursday, this would almost give the impression that I was trying to flee my family as soon as possible. I can assure you that this is not true! If that was the case, I would have gone straight from Edinburgh. My only two full days at home in Bussum were mainly filled with celebrating birthdays: that of myself and Isabel, two weeks ahead of schedule, and that of my pal August. Not too bad.

Goodbye to my beloved sister Marguerite!

Cycling in East Lothian with my girlfriend Timea before leaving Edinbugh

Arrival
After an 8 hour flight beside a lovely elderly Californian Lady, I arrived in a distinctly wet Dulles Airport, DC. I got out of the airport fast, skipping the long queue filled with waiting Europeans by using my American passport for the first time. I must say that I felt slightly indignant about the fact that the border guard did not give me the privilege of hassling me with the usual questions about who I thought I was, what I was doing there and why I would even consider going to the US! It seems that there are also disadvantages to travelling with an American passport.

Now getting to College Park was a bit more of a challenge due to the pouring rain and floods which had greeted me. I managed to hop onto an Uber outside the Terminal. You would think that having arrived in the USA no-one would know where this little country called the Netherlands is. Well my driver Barnabas damn well showed the contrary: this Ghanean driver was married to an Amsterdam lady! After an informative exchange regarding were to go and not to go in DC, and the finer points of Modern Physics and Relativity Theory, Barnabas managed to plough our way through the desperate weather conditions and to drop me off at my destination.

I immediately proceeded to address the matter of greatest importance in life: basic sustenance. Well, it turns out that College Park is a so-called 'food-desert' and finding a grocery store near a campus with more than 39,000 students is apparently tricky business. I proceeded to walk 1.5 miles in the rain to the nearest Whole Foods.

Having captured the most important items, I returned to find that there was a campus power cut, and so abandoned all plans, and got a huge meaty, 1200-Calorie Burrito and a big soft-drink at Chipotle, in true American-style.

Jetlag=Great
6 hours of Jetlag, is great. Waking up at 5.00 am means that you can run, explore, eat breakfast, call home, and read a book, and that all before work. It turns out there are some really nice running trails here in the area, provided they are not flooded... I followed this rhythm for the first few days of the week, although now I am once again finding myself struggling out of bed, and can confirm that the jetlag has disappeared. Jetlag may be great on the one hand, time difference is not. Being six hours behind means that I can either call in the morning, when I am groggy, or after work, by which time it is past 11pm in Europe, and those back home are getting groggy. Don't even bother calling in the evening...

Myself and the TREND 2018 Participants

Flatmates & Colleagues
There are 11 others in the TREND program. Most are living together. I on the other hand, am living with one other Physics student and two Alaskans interning at a government contractor. The Leonardtown Community, where I am staying is only 15 minutes walk from work. They are pretty good to live with, and I must say, I have learnt a lot about guns from one of them.

I was quite surprised at the start of the week that after work, everyone here seemed so mellow and content with just doing their thing and going to bed, really. I was getting so bored by Wednesday I practically forced others to socialize... I think I was being a bit impatient. People are settling in now and we have gotten to know each other a bit better. On Friday we had a potluck dinner, plenty of fun and good craic. I made pancakes, which everyone enjoyed, despite them calling them "crey-pes". My bacon and cheese pancakes where found to be slightly too unorthodox for their liking. This evening ended on the high note of me stepping on glass :-p ! Thank God, my foot was fine dragging me around DC the next day.

Visit to DC
Saturday afternoon I headed down to Washington DC by metro, to the so-called "Mall". The Mall is a huge park in central DC where many famous monuments and museums may be found. After the leaving the metro station Archives I immediately found myself, yes, before the impressive Archives of the United States, containing, among others, the declaration of independence, the constitution and the bill of rights.

USA Archives

Abraham Lincoln

We visited all the classics: we passed the Smithsonian museums, the Lincoln Monument and the Washington monument. Washington himself expressly disapproved of honouring leaders too much and yet they managed to build a 169m obelisk for him!

Special note for the Korean war memorial, where each statue of a soldier had such realistic and stunning facial expressions. I would also like to mention the beautiful speech from Lincoln's second inauguration carved on the inside of the Lincoln memorial.

The Korean War monument

The Washington momument is a lot, lot bigger than me in reality.

Later that day Kyle, one of my fellow TREND students, and I passed through the Hirshhorn museum and then got dinner at Chinatown. It struck me how the center of Washington was so full of expensive, and beautiful buildings but that once we crossed a street leading to Chinatown, the buildings suddenly became shabby and many homeless looking people appeared. I imagine that they are kept out of the city center somehow. The difference on both sides of the street was marked and like day and night!

Chinatown

On the way back from DC we met many people returning from the Washington DC Pride Parade. Many were dressed flamboyantly as you can imagine, while others were barely dressed at all!

Concert
On Sunday there was a concert given by the National Youth Orchestra at the local Episcopal church. It is quite a cute typical church building. I got to listen to an organist and many different woodwind and brass instrument players. Afterwards there was a free dinner and I even got to talk to two of the players over there, who invited me to come see their next concert Saturday!

One of the different groups under leadership of conductor Tiffany Lu

This post was a bit long and winding summation but there will be more structure in the next ones as things fall into place. I will also later tell more about my work, my colleagues and what I have been getting up to in and outside the lab. Saturday is my 20th birthday and hopefully that should be good as well. Just message me if you want my address.