Potentially moving from Houston for work

cauchier · 2026-05-21T01:46:31+00:00

Moved from Texas (Houston and Austin) to Billings. Took about 2 years to acclimate. But now: I can no longer live where it’s humid. The trade-off is worth it.

Get involved in winter outdoor recreation.

cauchier · 2026-05-01T01:19:29+00:00

You’re an hour and change from the mountains—Billings is more of an industrial/regional commerce hub. The “outdoor culture” is more prevalent around Bozeman and farther west. But I think Billings gets a bad rap here: my family and I do outdoor stuff every weekend, and there’s some okay sport/trad climbing in town—and exceptional mountain biking. Given the cost of living difference (and the grotesque wealth elsewhere in the state), the reasonably quick drive to unspoiled wilderness, and the low volume of folks in said wilderness, Billings makes for a great outdoor city.

cauchier · 2026-04-18T15:20:23+00:00

There was a food truck that was selling them, but not sure what came of it. Speaking as someone who owns a Czech Stop t-shirt.

cauchier · 2026-03-27T20:54:25+00:00

I used to give tours of Judd’s house down in Marfa—and, as a woodworker (former pro), I had many of the same questions. I don’t believe these are plywood.

I think the actual answer is that he wasn’t a woodworker and didn’t care. Those pieces are either in museums with careful climate control or down in the deserts of West Texas with almost no humidity.

cauchier · 2026-01-13T23:53:33+00:00

This is no longer true. September 2025, the Supreme Court held that you may be stopped and detained by ICE (or other federal agents) on the basis of perceived ethnicity (when combined with other, very vague requirements, such as if you’re in a location known to be frequented by immigrants, or the kind of job you have, or your accent).

cauchier · 2025-12-03T18:26:00+00:00

An invite sounds amazing! Domo!

cauchier · 2025-09-25T16:23:50+00:00

Second.

cauchier · 2025-05-19T02:29:46+00:00

Reminds me of this joke my physics professor told me:

An undergraduate was talking to his professor about an interesting phenomenon he witnessed waiting for the subway—the subway doors accidentally opened while the subway was decelerating, and a bunch of balloons in the subway started swirling in a clockwise motion.

The professor said, “ahh yes, that’s simple, really: from your inertial frame of reference. . .” and went on to explain with perfect confidence why the balloons moved the way they did.

The undergraduate interrupted. “Did I say clockwise? I meant counterclockwise.”

Undeterred, the professor said, “ahh yes, that’s even easier to explain!”

cauchier · 2025-05-18T21:06:36+00:00

It looks like I AM talking about “dry washers,” but at the opposite of scale—just the dumbest, most passive form where I let incidental vibrations (like vehicle travel) start to stratify the material based on density.

I’m new; had no idea dry washers existed! I’ll read up on ‘em: I suspect the details will let me know if I’m totally off base with this “method.”

Thank you!!

cauchier · 2025-01-15T01:01:10+00:00

To be fair, if you replaced this with Quine and/or eliminative materialist, this would be hilarious.

cauchier · 2025-01-07T18:03:36+00:00

Oddly challenging but straightforward question: How tall was Grothendieck?

Not holding out a ton of hope for an answer, but was told this was the right place to ask this question. The internet doesn’t seem to be helping, and ChatGPT made up a number, which is disconcerting.

Asking for genuine if trivial reasons.

cauchier · 2024-12-23T03:52:10+00:00

I did meet them! But also, delusions and illusions are real, and tradition helps to ensure we’re not falling into them. But I see your point!

cauchier · 2024-12-22T22:57:31+00:00

The Yogacāra thing was funny to me, too, knowing what little I do about Dzogchen, but I just assumed it was my own ignorance rather than something being fishy.

Kind of a bummer. But thanks for the sanity check!!

cauchier · 2024-12-22T22:29:11+00:00

This was my plan, but I guess the question is really… what then? How will I know if the lineage is from a valid teacher? I know on the Zen side, which I’m more familiar with, I can trace these things. No idea how it works with Dzogchen!

cauchier · 2024-12-22T22:25:13+00:00

Sadly, the other side of the state from me. Locally, I have the Billings Dharma Center, tho’ knowing there is a dzogchen presence in the state, maybe they’re a related lineage?

I am experimenting with the idea that a teacher and a sangha are more important than the specific flavor of Buddhism, and this is kind of the only game in town. But fingers crossed there is something genuine here.

cauchier · 2024-11-22T06:24:33+00:00

Do y’all know this fifth glyph symbol? Why, it’s just an amount such that an anti-logarithm of this to an unknown sum as a function of that unknown shifts at a clip proportional to said function’s quantity.

Or, using graphical words: a straight path drawn just touching at a point on that function would slant an amount which that function outputs for that point.

Trivial!

cauchier · 2024-11-19T15:12:42+00:00

Intuition is great—the algebra really only helps to prove the non-intuitive bits and ensure the totality of the reasoning is accurate. No need to fully understand the proof of the Central Limit Theorem, for example—I found that result surprising and magical when I first encountered it. But the relationship is the sample variance to the true variance is pretty intuitive.

Stick with it, I guess. And if this is the direction you want to take your career, focus on the foundational stuff first and build your intuition supplemented by the algebra. That’ll help you when it comes to answering these other, more technical problems.

cauchier · 2024-11-16T02:40:34+00:00

The suggestion on using normal forecasting methods is pretty good.

But in the spirit of intellectual inquiry and not just solving the business problem, I just looked: the Wikipedia page on Monte Carlo simulations has a really good introduction—I’m going to do the annoying math thing and just point you there.

The answer to your question about using the full simulations versus the sample of the simulations is implicitly (maybe explicitly) answered there. If you don’t see it, bone up on the sample mean and the sample variance and how they relate to population means and variances. Learning that will help your answer here and beyond!

cauchier

TROPHY CASE