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I got in work very early on Monday. A coworker was returning from vacation and I wanted to have something done in advance of his return. Work started for me at 6am and I was largely finished by the time he got into work. I told him what I had done, he told me to make some changes and I spent the day making them. One or two parts were rather tricky so it wasn’t until the end of the day that I finished. I shot the lead a note that I was done but it probably needed some clean-up and asked to talk in the morning.

This morning, I arrived and the lead shot me a message of “for time’s sake, let me make the fixes and I’ll go over them when I’m done”. Seven hours later he messages me. “Done, please do an editorial review.” Cool. I open the work file and almost nothing of my work remained except for two things: Modifying the color of the column headers and a single calculation. I wasn’t mad or upset, but smirked at how wrong I had been. How absolutely off-base I had been with my assumptions, how naively I treated calendar year accounting, and how underdeveloped my accrual calculations had been. I started laugh. A non-actuarial coworker heard me, and asked what was funny.

Me: Imagine someone asks you to make a sandcastle and after getting some basic instructions you do it. You finish and you look at it and go “eh, not bad. Could use work though.” You tell the person who requested it that you’re done and they say “I need to make a few changes” and you think “I guess I didn’t nail it but I helped!”. At the end of the day you come back and see a completely new sand castle there. So new, in fact, you think they trucked in their own sand because it’s not even same color. On closer inspection you do see that they did use some of your work: a single plastic figurine you had added to yours was preserved. Then the person asks you to check their sand castle to make sure it conforms to what they wanted.
Her: Oh.

Actuarying hard.

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My theoretical future manager at work is out on leave so my hopper is filled, largely, with random tasks that fall off of other people’s plates. I didn’t have much to do except for training and when a coworker popped by saying “are you busy?” I said “no”. “Good, I need you to come up with a proof of this transformation we’re using because the source data is wonky. Someone vaguely remembered an equation from an actuarial paper published in the 80s or maybe early 90s in one of these two journals. Find it, verify the proof, and tell us if we’re doing it correctly”.

I had gone from copy and pasting worker compensation growth rates from Excel to Access to verifying math with symbols I hadn’t even seen before. I wonder if this is the source of many of my coworkers claiming that there’s “never a dull moment” at my workplace.

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Requester:  Terry, thanks for the prints you made that were twice as big.  How long should it take to get the rest of them?
Me: Well, the regular sized ones took 4 hours, so 16 for these.
Requester: You doubled the size, why not just twice the time?
Me: By doubling the length and width, it’s actually four times bigger.  So, it’ll take 40 minutes a page instead of 10.
Requester: But it’s only twice as big.
(This is what I was afraid of)
Me: When do you need these by?
Requester: Three days from now.
Me: How about I just give you a call when I have them done and I’ll work as fast as I can?
Requester: Now that’s what I wanted to hear.

And the silence after he hung up the phone was what I wanted to hear.

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I spent another morning staring blankly at equations and methods that make the more arcane aspects of alchemy seem pedestrian and decided to call it a day after I successfully got an answer to a sample problem.  Mind y0u, it wasn’t the right answer, but I was very proud that my wrong answer was one of the wrong answers listed in the text.  After moments like these I sometimes second guess a math-inclined career so I struck up an AIM conversation with someone else who was in my position a few years ago that I hadn’t talked to lately.

Me: Did you ever have those times where you ran into a roadblock and got mad?
Him: Yes, but you learn to work through them.  You have moments of inspiration where suddenly you realize you’re an idiot.
Me: So how did you deal with constantly running into those puzzleboxes?
Him: After I took the 3rd exam the 3rd time and failed I decided to go to law school.
Me: Really?
Him: Best decision I’ve ever made.

Well, that’s encouraging.

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One of the nominal goals I had for my furlough was to prepare for my next two actuarial exams and today I started studying again after at least a year from last having actively tried to expand my knowledge of actuarial math.  I spent a solid four hours catching up on the basics of integration, followed by the basics of derivation and at one low point the basics of order of operation.  This last point was the computational equivalent of standing up after sitting for a while and kind of losing your balance but the fact that it happened at all made my inner calculator cry a little bit.  I’ve come to an inescapable conclusion that I’ll probably reiterate a thousand times over the next few months: Math hard.

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I tend to play a bit loose with cart handling in the supermarket often allowing the cart to get yards ahead of me.  Today, I did a shove near the egg section and the weighting of the cart caused it to wail it into a freezer which then squealt (yeah, it’s probably not a word) like the compressor equivalent of a stuck pig.  And how did the universe return to alignment? The teller mischarged me by a factor of two and I lost 20 minutes of my life arguing with clerk that $6.00 – $2.00 – $0.79 does not equal $2.79.  At one critical point she had two calculators and a legal pad in front of her.

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The Boy Scouts of America along with DK books are running an IP land grab photo competition.  I’m skeptical of photo competitions as many are just IP grabs as this one is in that all participants give the BSA a powerful license to do anything with the entries.  I found this while checking the terms and conditions and also found this on how the rating of the photos will go:

Click to Bigify

Click to Bigify

I may submit something, and when I ask what my score was, point out that they didn’t rank my photo based on the full 125% of the contest.  The Supply Division person I contacted found this quite funny and in that I called 20 minutes before they closed, we just chit-chatted about her visits to Philadelphia.  I’m skeptical of the supply divisions math skills, but they employ polite people.

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My current task is back to scanning until our new document system is running at 100% and my current docket is largely email correspondences between the document manager and the CAD worker who does the iterations of the drawings.  Today I found one of the gems that makes the job interesting.

Manager:  Please perform attached changes and increment the drawing revision as per (partinent standard).
CAD Worker:  The revisions are for a released item and can not receive a full incrementation from 3 to 4.
Manager:  Iterate the drawing to a partial level.  Assign release as 3.1.
CAD Worker:  Release level assigned as 3.1.
Manager: The requester discovered a spelling error in part (part name and number), please fix and iterate number to less that 3.2.
CAD Worker: Fixed.  I’ve iterated the drawing  to Ï€.
Manager: Non-repeating non-terminating numbers are not recognized as per (gov standard outlining CAD revisions of medical devices), for purposes of revisions, π will equal 3.14.

Well, glad someone laid down the law.  Somewhere a million geometry students are cheering.

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Exam MLC is an odd combination of life contingencies, properties of aggregate distributions and Markov Chains so goes back and forth between old retiring, old people walking picking up coins and old people dying.  There’s always a medium sample question where you have a bunch of old farts and you’re asked to determine the likelihood they’ll all die.  The group isn’t large enough to assume normal distribution of deaths nor small enough that you can grind it out by hand in a reasonable period of time so you have to use stupid tricks that all start “assume seven people are one person” but somehow work.  This one involved auto accidents and having no idea how to solve it swiftly wanted to put: “Probably that all 20 will die auto accidents before they’re 85 = 100%.  Bus accident.”  I know, I know.  I’ll revolutionize risk management.

There was a question that I’m pretty sure was written in doublespeak and no matter how many times I read it I couldn’t make it out.  It was something to the tune of “given accidents occur with the following intensity (equation) where each accident involves at least one victim, what’s the minimum average number of victims per accident.”
1) Minimum average is like saying “exact approximation” in that the words are fine next to each other but mean nothing.
2) Would the minimum be 1?  Almost all the answer were less than one.  Unless they were saying accident victims had it coming and should be counted as people.

The actual exam was fun if one enjoys being frisked for black market calculators and shims of paper.  The next exam will probably involve either a cavity search or a polygraph test.

Hazaa to professional development.

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I volunteered to grade tests for the Temple’s High School Math Competition but first I had to come up with an answer sheet.  The first question for the 9th and 10th grade test was:Equation

I have no idea how to evaluate that.  Normally I’d take a few derivatives and pray but those are geometric functions, taking their derivatives is like digging a deep hole in sand.  We’re throwing this at 9th graders?  The tests should be easy to grade as I look at blank page after blank page.  I’ll give them partial credits for “I have no fucking clue” or dirty limericks.