Category Archives: madison

May 03 2020
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lists, madison

Pandemic blog 18: The Wisconsin Idea

The Wisconsin Idea: the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state. They drill this into you right when you are arrive; that we are not just here to teach things to the 18-22-year-olds in the room with us, but to contribute to the advancement of the state as a whole. Then after a while you start to realize it’s not just a slogan; it’s the actual value system of the institution.

I’ve been seeing it this last month. UW-Madison faculty members are doing swift and amazing work, sometimes visibly, sometimes behind the scenes. Not me, really. It’s not a time for pure math. But my colleagues! Song Gao from geography made this dashboard showing changes in mobility by county based on cellphone tracking data. Colleagues in statistics and engineering worked with the state government to pin down exactly what was meant by “14 days of decline in cases,” one of our criteria to start opening businesses. Speaking of opening businesses, Noah Williams from economics and his team at the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy (caw!) wrote a report about the economic costs of the pandemic to the state and the ways we might go about opening more businesses, balancing production and safety. A friend at the med school is collecting blood from recovered patients so we can start to see how antibody levels relate to time since recovery. Thomas Friedrich from veterinary pathology is studying the genomes of viral samples around Wisconsin to understand how the disease is moving within the state. (It turns out that viruses, just like people, don’t actually move between Milwaukee and Madison that much.) My colleague/neighbor Mike Wagner from journalism just launched COVID-19 Wisconsin Connect, to foster discussion among the general public of what we’re going through. And the UW Library is working to document and archive the experience of the campus and the state during the pandemic, because we think we’ll remember exactly how this was, but we probably won’t. The Library will.

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Apr 19 2020
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commerce, madison, politics

Pandemic blog 15: “lock them down”

Trader Joe’s on Friday: the first time I had to wait in line to get in the store. To maintain an appropriately low density, they don’t let a new shopper in until someone comes out. This week, about 90% of shoppers were masked. The people who weren’t were mostly college-age. The food supply still seems pretty normal; a few things, like butter, were out, but it’s Trader Joe’s — there’s always something they’re for some reason out of. I asked the store manager whether they were selling more beer than usual, and he said, beer, no, hard liquor, yes.

Large majorities in Wisconsin support the governor’s safer-at-home order, but there are always dissenters:

You might be surprised to hear I have some sympathy for this point of view, though he needs to be more broad with his lockdown; Waukesha County, where Menominee Falls is, has just as high a case rate as Dane does.

But it’s not crazy to imagine that COVID spread might be slower in less dense regions; maybe so much slower that the pandemic could be kept in check with less stringent suppression measures. Let’s posit that, eventually, we open schools and some businesses in rural Wisconsin before we do the same in Milwaukee. So this guy gets his wish.

My concern is this: he is not going to then say “It’s just like I said, I want to work and be productive, I’m glad I’m able to do so and I support strong relief measures for my fellow Wisconsinites in Milwaukee who have to stay home for the sake of public health.” No, I think that guy is going to say “Why should my taxes be paying somebody in Milwaukee to sit at home when I have to work?”

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Dec 20 2019
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madison, politics

Two wards in Madison

Ward 49 and Ward 66 are two big voting precincts in Madison. Ward 65, where I vote, has 2.819 registered voters. Ward 49, in the campus area with tons of undergrad-heavy high rises, has 3,505.

In the 2018 governor’s race, Ward 65 went for Tony Evers 2190-179. Ward 49 also went big for Evers, though not as dominantly: he won there 1985-591.

Now look at the April 2019 Supreme Court election. Ward 65 went strongly for the more liberal candidate, Lisa Neubauer, voting for her by a 1631-103 margin. Ward 49 also liked Neubauer but the margin was 531-101. 25% more voters but about a third as many votes. Evers narrowly won his election. Neubauer narrowly lost hers. Young voters sitting out downballot elections is pretty important.

Nov 12 2019
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baseball, madison, offhand

Pete Alonso was a Mallard

Pete Alonso of the New York Mets is the NL Rookie of the Year and the all-time home run king among both rookies and Mets. I’m proud to say I saw him hit a 407-foot three-run moonshot in June 2014, when he was a 19-year-old playing for the Madison Mallards in the summer-collegiate Northwoods League. Go Mallards!

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Feb 20 2019
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madison, offhand, politics

Madison Feb 2019 primary: quick and dirty clustering

Madison had a primary election last night for mayor and for several seats on the City Council and School Board. Turnout was high, as it seems to always be in Dane County lately. The Dane County Clerk has all the results in handy csv form, so you can just download things and start having some fun! There were four major candidates for mayor, so each ward in the city can be mapped to a point in R^4 by the vote share it gave to each of those; except of course this is really R^3 because the vote shares sum to 1. It’s easier to see R^2 than R^3 so you can use PCA to project yourself down to a nice map of wards:

This works pretty well! The main axis of variation (horizontal here) is Soglin vote, which is higher on the left and lower on the right; this vector is negatively weighted on Rhodes-Conway and Shukla but doesn’t pay much attention to Cheeks. The vertical axis mostly ignores Shukla and represents Cheeks taking votes from Rhodes-Conway at the top, and losing votes to Rhodes-Conway at the bottom. You can see a nice cluster of Isthmus and Near West wards in the lower right; Rhodes-Conway did really well there. 57 and 48 are off by themselves in the upper right corner; those are student wards, distinguished in the vote count by Grumpy Old Incumbent Paul Soglin getting next to no votes. And I mean “next to no” in the literal sense; he got one vote in each of those wards!

You can also do some off-the-shelf k-means clustering of those vectors in R^4 and you get meaningful results there. Essentially arbitrarily I broke the wards into 5 clusters and got:

[28, 29, 30, 32, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 51, 52, 53, 62, 63, 64, 65, 81, 82, 105]

(east side Isthmus and near West)
[3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 26, 38, 75, 88, 89, 90, 94, 96, 106, 107, 110, 111]

(far east and far west)

[15, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 66, 68, 69]

(campus and south Park)

[2, 12, 13, 14, 16, 21, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 67, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 93, 108, 109]

(west side, Hill Farms, north side, east of Monona)


[1, 6, 8, 19, 20, 25, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 91, 92, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104]

(southwest Madison and south of Monona)

Now what would be interesting is to go back and compare this with the ward-by-ward results of the gubernatorial primary last August! But I have other stuff to do today. Here’s some code so I remember it; this stuff is all simple and I have made no attempt to make the analysis robust.

Update:  I did the comparison with the August primary; interestingly, I didn’t see very many strong relationships. Soglin-for-mayor wards were typically also Soglin-for-governor wards. Wards that were strong for Kelda Helen Roys were also strong for Raj Shukla and weak for Soglin, but there wasn’t a strong relationship between Roys vote and Rhodes-Conway vote. On the other hand, Rhodes-Conway’s good wards also tended to be good ones for… Mike McCabe??

Continue reading →

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Feb 06 2019
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madison, math, offhand

Large-scale Pareto-optimal topologies, or: how to describe a hexahedron

I got to meet Karen Caswelch, the CEO of Madison startup SciArtSoft last week. The company is based on tech developed by my colleague Krishnan Suresh. When I looked at one of his papers about this stuff I was happy to find there was a lovely piece of classical solid geometry hidden in it!

Here’s the deal. You want to build some component out of metal, which metal is to be contained in a solid block. So you can think of the problem as: you start with a region V in R^3, and your component is going to be some subregion W in R^3. For each choice of W there’s some measure of “compliance” which you want to minimize; maybe it’s fragility, maybe it’s flexibility, I dunno, depends on the problem. (Sidenote: I think lay English speakers would want “compliance” to refer to something you’d like to maximize, but I’m told this usage is standard in engineering.) (Subsidenote: I looked into this and now I get it — compliance literally refers to flexibility; it is the inverse of stiffness, just like in the lay sense. If you’re a doctor you want your patient to comply to their medication schedule, thus bending to outside pressure, but bending to outside pressure is precisely what you do not want your metal widget to do.)

So you want to minimize compliance, but you also want to minimize the weight of your component, which means you want vol(W) to be as small as possible. These goals are in conflict. Little lacy structures are highly compliant.

It turns out you can estimate compliance by breaking W up into a bunch of little hexahedral regions, computing compliance on each one, and summing. For reasons beyond my knowledge you definitely don’t want to restrict to chopping uniformly into cubes. So a priori you have millions and millions of differently shaped hexahedra. And part of the source of Suresh’s speedup is to gather these into approximate congruence classes so you can do a compliance computation for a whole bunch of nearly congruent hexahedra at once. And here’s where the solid geometry comes in; an old theorem of Cauchy tells you that if you know what a convex polyhedron’s 1-skeleton looks like as a graph, and you know the congruence classes of all the faces, you know the polyhedron up to rigid motion. In partiuclar, you can just triangulate each face of the hexahedron with a diagonal, and record the congruence class by 18 numbers, which you can then record in a hash table. You sort the hashes and then you can instantly see your equivalence classes of hexahedra.

(Related: the edge lengths of a tetrahedron determine its volume but the areas of the faces don’t.)

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Feb 01 2019
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madison

-22F

I mentioned last week that -3 Fahrenheit doesn’t seem that cold to me anymore. Well, this week it got colder. The coldest it’s been in Wisconsin in more than two decades, the coldest temperatures I’ve ever experienced. When I walked home from the gym on Wednesday it was -22F. That, reader, is cold. You don’t notice it for the first few minutes because you still have residual heat in your body from being inside. But at -22F your fingers start to get cold and numb inside your gloves and your toes inside your boots. My walk was about ten minutes. I could have handled twenty. But probably not thirty.

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Jan 21 2019
4 Comments
madison, offhand

Acclimatization

Walking to the gym today I was thinking, 10 degrees Fahrenheit — sure, it’s cold out, but when I lived back east I would have considered this brutally, unfairly cold. Now it’s an unexceptional level of cold, easily managed by putting on gloves and a hat.

Then I got to the gym and looked at my phone and it was actually -3.

Sep 22 2018
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food, madison

25 dishes that define Madison, and my takes on same

Wisconsin State Journal listicle:  25 Dishes That Define Madison

Pretty good list!  I have some comments.

Graze Burger:  It’s a very good burger, but if you go to Graze and either the patty melt or the green chili burger is on the menu, definitely order those, which are truly special.  Madison is not a patty melt town — I get mine at Mickie’s Dairy Bar, and they’re good, but you have to like grease, lots and lots of grease.  Grazes gets the bread shatteringly crispy without making it greasy, a neat trick.

Ian’s mac and cheese pizza:  As a former Ian’s Customer Of the Month (January 2010) it pains me to admit this, but Glass Nickel’s plagiaristic “mac daddy” pizza is better than Ian’s.

Lao Laan-Xang squash curry:  The very dish that 2-year-old CJ dumped on the ground, where it was mistaken for vomit!

Mickie’s dairy bar scrambler:  I never order this, it’s too big, but this is the dish that CJ always admired the football players for eating when he was 3.

The Old Fashioned’s cheese curds:  They are pretty good.  But nowhere near the top fried curds in Madison.  I have opinions.  The best curds in Madison are from the Curd Girl cart.  They are little miracles.  Light, in a way you do not think a deep-fried and battered sphere of cheese could be.  But they are.  Second best curds are at Graze.  Third best are at Steenbock’s on Orchard, where they’re served with grainy mustard and fried sage.  Purists will be annoyed by this, but look, I love mac and cheese pizza, I’m not going to have a problem with sage in my curds.

Parthenon’s gyro sandwich:  No.  Disgusting.  There isn’t a great gyro in Madison.  Plaka Taverna is fine.  Med Cafe is fine but it’s schwarma.

Plaza’s plazaburger:  Just OK.  Like Paisan’s, Plaza is strictly for people who went to college here and want nostalgia food.

Stella’s hot and spicy cheese bread:  It’s not that spicy and every time you get a bite with no cheese you realize the bread is just not that good.  I’d love to see Madison Sourdough or Batch rip off the idea and make a good version.

Jul 28 2018
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madison, politics

Wisconsin municipal vexillology update

Madison is changing its flag!  The old one

has a Zuni sun symbol in the middle of it, which people correctly feel is a sort of random and annoying and unrelated-to-Madison vic of somebody else’s religious symbol.  On the other hand, on pure design grounds it’s kind of a great flag!  Simple, but you see the lakes, the isthmus, the Capitol.  The new flag elegantly keeps all that while skimming off the cultural appropriation:

 

Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, pressure is mounting to adopt the People’s Flag. Milwaukee’s existing flag is an ungepotchkit mess, routinely ranked among the nation’s worst city banners.  I mean:

I think my favorite part of this mess is that there are two miniflags inside this flag, and the one that’s not the U.S. flag nobody even remembers what it is!

Anyway, this is the proposed new flag, currently the subject of hot civic dissent:

I think this is great.  Daring color choices, you get your lake, you get your big flat lake, you get your optimistic sense of sunrise.  Make the right choice, Cream City!

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