Talk at SIAM Annual Meeting 2017

I gave an invited plenary talk at the 2017 Society of Applied and Industrial Mathematics Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh yesterday. My slides are here. I talked about some very new work on chaos and learning in spiking neural networks. My fellow Chris Kim and I were producing graphs up to a half hour before my talk! I’m quite excited about this work and I hope to get it published soon.

During my talk, I made an offhand threat that my current Mac would be the last one I buy. I made the joke because it was the first time that I could not connect to a projector with my laptop since I started using Mac almost 20 years ago. I switched to Mac from Linux back then because it was a Unix environment where I didn’t need to be a systems administrator to print and project. However, Linux has made major headway in the past two decades while Mac is backsliding. So, I’m seriously thinking of following through. I’ve been slowly getting disenchanted with Apple products over the past three years but I am especially disappointed with my new MacBook Pro. I have the one with the silly touch screen bar. The first thing the peeves me is that the activate Siri key is right next to the delete key so I accidentally hit and then have to reject Siri every five minutes. What mostly ties me to Mac right now is the Keynote presentation software, which I like(d) because it is easy to embed formulas and PDF files into. It is much harder to do the same in PowerPoint and I haven’t found an open source version that is as easy to use. However, Keynote keeps hanging on my new machine. I also get this situation where my embedded equations will randomly disappear and then reappear. Luckily I did a quick run through just before my talk and noticed that the vanished equations reappeared and I could delete them. Thus, the Keynote appeal has definitely diminished. Now, if someone would like to start an open source Keynote project with me… Finally, the new Mac does not seem any faster than my old Mac (it still takes forever to boot up) and Bard Ermentrout told me that his dynamical systems software tool XPP runs five times slower. So, any suggestions for a new machine?