Syntactic Sugar

2011 in Review

2011-12-30T23:25:00.000-08:00

I did a bit less blogging this year, mostly because I was doing more cycling, traveling, reading, cooking, artistry, and really, just more of the things I love that are actually worth blogging about. So I would say it has been a great year.

In the spring I made the very difficult decision to leave Google, and ended up taking about six months off work. I think that taking some time off to recharge, without any plans initially, was one of the better things I've done for myself.

One of the things I had time to do was a lot of cycling. This year I logged 4,150mi of riding and 284,000 vertical feet of climb (up 54% and up 89% Y/Y, respectively). I completed a trifecta of semi- and self-supported bike tours this year: Central California (San Jose to Santa Barbara), the first tour I planned myself; the Alps (yes, again), my climbing-est tour to date; and the Pacific Coast from the top of Washington to San Jose, my first solo tour and my longest tour in total distance to date.

The Alps were, as always, stunning. And counting the Central California and the Pacific Coast tours together, I traversed over 80% of the western coast of the continental US this year. It's truly a remarkable place— it would take little convincing to get me to do any part of it again; yet, it was only passing through Big Sur in the spring that really spurred me to take the much longer Pacific Coast tour in the fall. To think, how lucky we Bay Area residents are to have Big Sur in our backyard! I met so many interesting people while on tour, and I feel like I've gotten to explore a part (however small) of America in a way that I've never gotten to do before, despite having lived here my whole life.

I guess I've raved about cycle touring enough that I also apparently convinced a few friends of mine to try it out for the first time this year. So that has been a lot of fun.

Now I'm working at DNAnexus, a software startup in Mountain View. At a high level, we're building a software platform for managing and analyzing genomic data, so researchers don't have to worry as much about the intricacies of cluster filesystems, fault tolerance, and all that other "fun" stuff. I am enjoying work at DNAnexus for a number of reasons, chief among them the tantalizing possibility that just by making computation easier to use we could help biologists and doctors take medicine to the next level, and help them to build a new kind of understanding of how living things work (and how to fix them, too).

Happy New Year, and best wishes to you all for an awesomer year 2012.

2011 Book List

2011-12-30T22:36:00.000-08:00

I read the following 26 books this year, of which my favorites were— non-fiction: The Box, Metamagical Themas, and Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air; fiction: 1Q84, The Diamond Age.

Fiction Roundup

2011-12-30T22:25:00.000-08:00

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami. As usual with Murakami's books, explaining the plot is neither necessary nor helpful. And, as usual, 1Q84 is endlessly imaginative, entertaining, and a pleasure to read. The story seems to hang together better and have more of a resolution than Murakami's others. Also, there are a number of structural symmetries that add some interesting layers. All in all, somewhat haunting, and recommended.

The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. I felt a sudden urge to re-read this one while on vacation, and fortuitously, I found a copy in a used bookstore. A bespoke book-like educational device, originally commissioned for an aristocrat's daughter, instead falls into the hands of a girl who lives in the slums. One of the science fiction novels that not only presents a plausible extrapolation— a story of what we could do with technology— but is almost begging to be read (in places) as an example of what we should do with technology. Touching, and perhaps my favorite Neal Stephenson; recommended.

REAMDE, by Neal Stephenson. A computer virus triggers a chain of events in a WoW-like computer game, which causes the Russian mob to start a manhunt… and that's to say nothing of the Islamic terrorists… Stephenson's prose is characteristically fun to read at a local scale, but the world he builds here does not possess the same level of sheer awesomeness as much of his previous work. The final showdown, too, is just too long. It is, however, an enjoyable read.

A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge. Humans playing with fire (in the form of computer software) get burnt when they instantiate a super-intelligent entity. One expedition is forced to crash-land on a world of primitive dog-like beings. Vinge's brand of transhumanism, as well as his many inventions for this story (for example, the Tines, the dog-like creatures, which have a distributed pack mind of sorts), make for a fun read. However, I soon got tired of Vinge's flowerly and/or pretentious prose, inserted in places where human readers are meant to be incapable of actually comprehending the transcendent premise. In a way this genre seems to be a form of literary cheating. I could have forgiven that, but a book that is so epic in scope seems to me to also require a much better conclusion than this one had. It was, though, enjoyable enough that I am reading its sequel.

The Processes of Life

2011-12-30T22:09:00.000-08:00

The Processes of Life: An Introduction to Molecular Biology was recommended to me as "Molecular Biology For Computer Scientists" (the author, Lawrence Hunter, is a Lisp hacker!), and it is a very good introduction to how living things work at the molecular level.

The text covers: the universal processes of life (and covers just enough chemistry to do so), the organization and development of living things, what goes wrong in living things e.g. cancer, and the state of the art in biotechnology. But throughout, the focus is on understanding processes as examples of regulation (i.e. modulation) and feedback, and living structures as machines or as information-bearing components; and looking at molecular evidence for certain evolutionary explanations. Therefore, engineers and others with a technical background can easily benefit from some cross-domain transfer without getting bogged down in chemistry.

Hunter's writing is lucid and engaging, and he gets to the point very quickly. (In fact, and I didn't think I would be saying this, the book is a page-turner in places.) The core of the book is just about 250 pages, and at $39, it's a great deal, too. For any non-biologist who is interested in learning about the wondrous designs that living things embody, I would recommend reading this book before delving into any introductory-level college text, which is likely to cost more, be many times longer, and contain more chemistry than you are really going to want or need to know.

Recommended.

Cycling in Oregon: signage and literature

2011-10-15T10:00:00.000-07:00

The resources that the state of Oregon provides for recreational cyclists are pretty astounding. I have never seen or heard about anything like this, anywhere.

The Oregon Department of Transportation publishes a free map and guide to the Oregon Coast Bicycle Route— the recommended route when Pacific coast cycle tourists pass through Oregon. It includes (now, the first few are pretty standard, but keep reading):

A map of the coast
An elevation profile of the route
Suggestions for scenic detours
A list of state parks and cyclist amenities
Temperature and precipitation graphs for representative cities
Elevation profiles for the major roads that go between I-5 and the coast route, for your reference when you are planning the beginning and end of your trip
A map showing the prevailing wind direction in each part of the state
A graph showing the average number of cars that use each segment of the route(!) each day

This thing is practically a cyclists's almanac. And you can pick up a copy of it as you roll by the roadside kiosks they have placed, very conveniently, on the route at the northern and southern entrances to the state (Astoria and Brookings, respectively).

Picking up a map just outside Astoria, OR

As for the situation on the ground, the route is well-signed the entire way. There are bypasses that take less congested routes through major cities, and these are typically signed turn-for-turn within the city. So you don't need to pull out your map when trying to get through the cities.

For heaven's sake, even the bike shop is signed.

There are two tunnels along the Oregon coast route, and at both of them, bicyclists can press a button to activate flashing lights that warn motorists of the presence of bikes in the tunnel. (The lights stay on for a time T = [length of tunnel] / (10 mph).)

Lights in activated state

A couple of bridges have the same mechanism. In many, many other places, on bridges and otherwise, where the shoulder is inadequate, there are signs warning motorists that cyclists will be using the lane.

All in all, pretty impressive. If you're feeling inspired to ride in Oregon now, the tourism bureau maintains a website that catalogues some of the nicer bike rides in the state.

Tour of the Alps 2011 Trip Report

2011-09-17T03:45:00.000-07:00

This past June and July, I went on a bicycle tour of the Alps with Piaw Na and Xiaoqin Ma. I've now posted my trip report, which includes a map (reproduced below) and remarks and mini reviews of equipment and other things.

View on a larger map

White Noise

2011-09-01T21:12:00.000-07:00

White Noise by Don DeLillo is (…I think…) a caricature of 1980s suburban America. The protagonist, Jack Gladney, is head of the department of Hitler Studies at his small-town college, and the book follows the misadventures of his family (Jack, his wife Babette, and their many children by previous marriages) as an "Airborne Toxic Event" forces an evacuation, and Jack tries to track down the drug that his wife is secretly taking.

What is so entertaining about White Noise is the juxtaposition of the characters' hilariously misinformed and inane dialogues, and the seriousness with which they seem to take everything, no matter how inconsequential.

Very funny, though in an unsettling way (in the year 2011): the setting of the book is by now very clearly not our generation. I feel like we can point and laugh because we left that era behind… right, guys?

Metamagical Themas

2011-09-01T20:36:00.000-07:00

Metamagical Themas is a collection of Douglas Hofstadter's (Gödel, Escher, Bach) columns (of the same name) for Scientific American in the early 1980's.

If you enjoyed GEB I think you will really love this book. Hofstadter's favorite themes are represented here, and like GEB it is full of fascinating nuggets. But unlike in GEB Hofstadter is no longer constrained by the requirement to build a path from the starting blocks to a single central thesis. His Scientific American columns, collected, feel much more like what he really wanted to be writing.

The columns vary in quality (his comments on then-current AI projects, and on the cold war, seem of little interest today) but the best are no less than thrilling to read. Among my favorites are his columns on self-reference, language and its power to shape thought, the nature of creativity and cognition, and the genetic code. And his remarks about where AI research has to go if it is to really fulfill its charter of implementing "thinking" (here spelled out more explicitly than in GEB) are still relevant today.

Metamagical Themas is at least as good as, and possibly even better than, GEB. Recommended.

Cake

2011-08-20T23:05:00.000-07:00

Banana Nutella Cake

I have been baking cakes! The cake recipes from the Alice's Tea Cup Cookbook have served me well. In that capacity, the book comes recommended. However... I cannot yet speak to the usefulness of the chapter on how to throw a tea party.

Fiction Roundup

2011-08-05T22:33:00.000-07:00

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

A classic, a very short read, and a lot of fun. Recommended.

The Road

The closest thing I have read in some time to poetry. In Cormac McCarthy's barren post-apocalyptic world, a father and his son are pushing their cart down the road in search of the coast, always on the brink of starvation. The setting is striking but it takes a backseat to the lyrical and poignant dialogues between father and son. These are all the more remarkable for how few words are uttered. Beautiful and haunting; recommended.

Kafka on the Shore

by Murakami. A fun read. Compared to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, it seemed to have more of a coherent structure and plot, but less of the wordplay (if you could call it that) that made Wind-Up Bird so hilarious.

Catching Fire / Mockingjay

The two sequels to The Hunger Games. These should be considered as a unit since Catching Fire has a cliffhanger ending. Katniss has unwittingly become a symbol of rebellion against the Capitol, but any overt action on her part would put her and her family in danger. Catching Fire was an enjoyable read, but most of Mockingjay felt uninspired, and the ending was rather unsatisfying.

Born to Run

2011-08-05T10:33:00.000-07:00

(Of the two acquaintances who mentioned this book to me, one had started running barefoot because of it, and the other had turned vegan...)

In Born to Run, Christopher McDougall recounts his personal quest to learn to run (and learn to love running) without injury. McDougall's thesis is that the human body is purpose built for running long distances. This seems unbelievable when you realize that, in any given year, most runners will injure themselves while running. Every year. And most people find running to be a necessary evil, not something that feels good. So what is going on?

When McDougall's research led him to a band of quirky long-distance (ultramarathon) trail runners, and an elusive tribe called the Tarahumara who live in the Copper Canyons of Mexico, he sought to learn their techniques— everything from posture to diet. Perhaps the most surprising among those: Tarahumara of all ages run for hours or days on end in thin rubber sandals and sustain injuries at a rate that is close to zero. McDougall advances the case that we're built to run barefoot, not in padded shoes (which change one's running posture and provide insulation from proper ground contact).

The science in Born to Run is somewhat sparse, and the writing can be overdramatic and incoherent. At times the book feels like a way-too-long magazine article. But it is nothing if not entertaining, and the conclusions are eye-opening. Mildly recommended.

Peach iced tea

2011-08-04T22:43:00.000-07:00

I have been making my own iced tea this summer. Prototypical recipe:

3 quarts water
6 tea bags
1/2 cup (100g) sugar
2 cans (11.5oz ea) peach nectar (e.g. Kern's brand)
Juice from 1 lemon

Brew the tea. Mix with remaining ingredients. Chill.

This recipe makes about 3.5L of tea and is much less sweet than the typical bottled stuff. I poked around to compute the sugar concentration for some representative iced teas:

	Sugar concentration*
Peach iced tea (above)	54g/L
Trader Joe's Pomegranate Green Tea	63g/L
McDonald's Sweet Tea	73g/L
Snapple Peach Iced Tea	97g/L

By the way, iced tea as Americans know it (the unsweetened tea that is ubiquitous in restaurants) is, as far as I can tell, nowhere to be found in Europe. Quelle horreur!

* As I understand it, different sugars have different taste and nutritional properties, so these numbers don't tell the whole story.

The Story of the Tour de France, Volume 1

2011-08-04T22:33:00.000-07:00

Bill and Carol McGann's The Story of the Tour De France, Volume 1 is a fairly comprehensive history of the Tour from its inception in 1903 to 1964.

The book takes the form of a play-by-play for the significant stages of each year's Tour, and discusses how the rules of the Tour evolved to adapt to the changing times. The creator of the Tour, Henri Desgranges, was quite the character. He wanted the Tour to be a show of the individual cyclist's strength and cunning, but he was in the end unable to keep the team element out of the sport.

The main takeaway from this volume, for me, is that the Tour de France used to have a lot more badassery than it does today. Consider, for example, Stage 2 of the 1909 Tour, 398 kilometers (247 mi) long and run entirely in freezing rain, in which François Faber broke away for the entire second half of the stage. Or the story of Eugène Christophe in the 1913 tour, in which he broke his fork on a descent during Stage 6. There were no follow cars back then; under the rules of the time, riders had to make their own repairs. Christophe carried his broken bike down the hill, walking 10 kilometers to the next town. Here he found a blacksmith, who was able to talk him through what he would need to do to repair his fork (this was as much as was permissible under the rules). Christophe worked at the forge for 3 hours. But at some point, he ran out of hands. He asked a little boy to work the bellows for him. For this the Tour referees gave him a 10-minute penalty. Eventually Christophe finished the repair and kept on riding. He finished the stage 29th— still ahead of 15 other riders.

If you are interested in the history of the Tour de France, there is probably not a better book. The Story of the Tour de France gave me some perspective about how competitive cycling works and about the historical evolution of the sport, but at times it seemed to me to be little more than so many names and numbers.

Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air

2011-08-04T10:33:00.000-07:00

You can get a digital copy of this book for free. Or get a paper copy on amazon.com.

Reading this book should be a prerequisite for having a conversation about energy policy. Like balancing the budget, the question of how we make the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable power sources requires a quantitative approach with quantitative questions. And, like in the discourse around balancing the budget, people regularly make insane, impossible, or useless proposals because they don't know any better (or they think they can get away with it).

Sustainable Energy, by David JC MacKay, tries to establish a solid numerical foundation for such discussion. At its heart is the question: Is it possible to switch all our energy production from fossil fuels to sustainable sources? And this is more or less an arithmetic question. Either the supply of energy available (given technological projections) can meet demand, or it can't.

MacKay lays out the numbers for various classes of energy consumption and energy production. It turns out that you can reach some nontrivial conclusions just based on very crude lower and upper bounds. For example, what are major uses of energy? MacKay estimates that the typical Briton, who makes a transatlantic plane flight once a year, has a carbon footprint on that single flight of approximately the same as his carbon footprint due to driving during the remainder of the year. And we are not going to make planes that are substantially (say, more than 2x) more efficient than they are today; physics provides a pretty clear lower bound there on the amount of energy that is needed to fly people around. In total, transport (planes plus ground transport) accounts for about a third of total energy usage in developed countries. So to make a dent in total energy usage, we are likely to have to either dramatically cut the amount we fly, or make ground transport much more efficient. (MacKay advocates the electrification of cars as one of the most significant things we can do.)

Conversely, it's also important to know what classes of energy usage account for only small portions of total usage. Lighting in homes and businesses? Around 5% of total usage. Vampire wall warts (like cell phone chargers)? Around one quarter of one percent. Now, some people will insist that "every little bit helps". While this is true in a superficial sense, we can't delude ourselves into thinking that we can, say, halve our energy consumption by implementing ten (or 200) "tiny" interventions like replacing incandescent bulbs or unplugging cell phone chargers when they're not in use. They won't add up. It just can't be done unless you touch the heavy hitters: transport and heating (together, about two-thirds of energy usage). You have something like the equivalent of Amdahl's law here, which upper bounds the total savings even if you were to optimize one class of usage completely away. To think that you can somehow dance around this mathematical constraint is madness.

MacKay reaches a sobering conclusion: for developed countries, making the switch away from coal will require industrialization of vast amounts of land. Whether it's designated for tide power, solar farms, wind farms, biofuel farms, geothermal installations, or something else, we're going to need a hell of a lot of it. (If you find this unpalatable, have we mentioned nuclear power?)

We have been implored at one time or another to try and reduce carbon emissions by carpooling, installing LED lights, eating less meat, not using plastic bags, turning down the volume on the television, breathing more slowly, etc. But we have to pick our battles, and that requires a cost/benefit analysis. I always get annoyed when I hear on the radio a useless and impossible-to-evaluate comparison of the form, "If we all just [made some change], it would be like {taking [large number of] cars off the road, planting [large number of] trees, heating [large number of] homes for free, etc}." Sustainable Energy convinced me that there is a response superior to smashing the radio with my hands, namely, doing some back-of-the-envelope math.

This is a very important book. Did I mention it's free to download? Highly recommended.

The Year of Magical Thinking

2011-08-03T22:33:00.000-07:00

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir of the year in her life after her husband of 40 years (fellow writer John Gregory Dunne) died of sudden cardiac death. During the months surrounding John's death, their only daughter, Quintana, was in a hospital, in a coma, suffering from septic shock.

Grief is common, but Didion has the uncommon trait of being detached enough that she could dissect her grief and commit it to paper. So she was able to pick apart the state of derangement that she found herself in. When people think about loss and the prospect of grieving, they expect to be inconsolable, perhaps unable to function, unreachable in a way. They do not expect to be "literally crazy," as Didion characterized her own mental state when she realized she was unable to throw out John's shoes, because, well, how would he get around when he came back? That is the sort of thing that (if you were in Didion's shoes) would seem to clearly indicate that part of you had abandoned rationality and taken up "magical thinking", and yet, remarkably, it would go unchallenged and possibly unrecognized unless you had explicitly articulated it!

There is little inspirational advice for coping here; just Didion's bare and unfiltered retelling of the event, its fallout, and the strange ideas that her derangement led her to. A very personal account, and a sad but satisfying read (especially if you recognize bits and pieces of Didion's derangement in yourself); recommended.

The Box

2011-08-03T10:33:00.000-07:00

The author is Marc Levinson and the subtitle is How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.

Ships, trains, trucks. Giant computer-controlled cranes. Operations research. This book is pure nerd porn.

Marc Levinson documents the history and the rise of standardized shipping containers in this astonishingly interesting book. Today, 40-foot shipping containers full of stuff are routinely sent from factories to warehouses without being opened in transit, even as they are loaded from truck to train to ship and back to train to truck. Before the 1950's, no one implemented seamless intermodal transport: at a dock, for example, longshoremen would unload cargo from a truck or train, piece by piece, and put it in a warehouse, then repack it again into the hold of a ship. This process was slow, labor-intensive, liable to be interrupted by strikes, and made the goods prone to damage and theft. A 1959 report estimated that the cost of shipping some commodities accounted for 25%(!) of the sticker price. Shipping containers and integrated shipping changed all this. You ever wonder why you don't hear much about dockworkers and longshoremen these days? It's because docks don't actually need very many of them anymore.

Levinson covers the complex web of economic, regulatory, and standardization challenges that faced shipping container proponents. But he only hints at the real shipping revolution: manufacturers that adopted shipping containers actually didn't obtain substantial savings until they also retooled their businesses to use containers end-to-end and to think of fast and reliable shipping as something they could count on. Hence developments like just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing and reduced inventory costs (I am now on the hunt for some reading material on these subjects).

Recommended.

Hackers

2011-08-02T22:33:00.000-07:00

Hackers is Steven Levy's classic social-anthropological account of software pioneers and the computer revolution.

Levy's history takes us from the birth of the hacker culture and the hacker ethic, hammered out in Building 26 at MIT, to the commercialization of software, exemplified by On-Line Systems (better known by its later name, Sierra On-Line) and its seminal series of computer games, and the creation of GNU by Richard Stallman.

(It is strange, to me, now, to think that hacker culture was born out of a subgroup of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club [TMRC].)

Levy introduces us to a large cast of characters from different generations, from the 1950's to the 1980's. And while the history as Levy tells it— recounting all their intertwined stories— is intriguing, Hackers also serves to document the hacker culture and the hacker ethic.

The software pioneers were always trying to push the limits of what computers could do. Still it seems strange to speak of a singular ("the") hacker ethic or hacker culture, since their motivations and their worldviews (while all idealistic in some way) were so different. Some viewed hacking as a search for ever more elegant programs, eternal discoveries of a nearly mathematical nature. Others viewed the computer as a tool for the empowerment of individuals. (This was a tough sell in Berkeley, where computer software, which at one time was in large part the product of (D)ARPA funded research, was viewed with skepticism.) Moreover, each generation's version of hacker culture was shaped by the technological and commercial environment of its time. The MIT hackers were concerned with ensuring that they had unfettered access to the extremely valuable hardware on their hands. But by the 1980's, when inexpensive computers were widely available, what seemed more important was bringing the fruits of computing to the masses.

When Hackers was first published in 1983, it seemed as if it could merely be a chronicle of a little-known and dying subculture. (At the time, Stallman referred to himself as the "last survivor" of the hacker culture.) But today the hacker ethic has permeated society and popular discourse in a way that few might have imagined then, and Hackers is the definitive account of its birth.

Recommended.

By the way, in 1983, at a panel at the first Hackers Conference in Marin County, CA, Stewart Brand made an utterance which is widely quoted out of context as "Information wants to be free". It is worthwhile to read his original comment, which is substantially less normative and more interesting than it is often made to sound:

On one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Brain Rules

2011-08-02T10:33:00.000-07:00

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School is John Medina's guide to some of the principles that underlie how the brain works and how we can best take advantage of those principles when living out our lives.

Even though I've read plenty of popular psychology books, I found a lot of interesting nuggets here, including:

How exercise boosts cognitive performance (exercise stimulates, among other things, generation of new blood vessels in the brain)
The mechanisms by which prolonged stress breaks down our bodies (we're evolutionarily adapted to respond to threats on timescales of seconds to minutes, not months to years)
The importance of the sense of vision: some years ago, brain researchers gave white wine tinted with red dye to a bunch of wine-tasting professionals and found that they described the taste and smell of the wines using the vocabulary usually reserved exclusively for red wines. The outcome of this study is frequently cited as evidence that wine connoisseurs are full of it, but Medina's (more charitable) explanation is that the way our brains are wired, the sense of sight is so compelling that vision input preempts all our other senses.

Medina's writing is occasionally a bit too cute and circuitous for my taste, and, annoyingly, some of the connections appear to be based on little more than wild extrapolation (e.g. the parts about the student-teacher relationship, or the significance of synesthesia). But for the most part the book is easily digestible and appears to be based on solid research. Medina also proposes many interesting ideas— not just suggestions about how in our lives we can better accommodate the natural limits of our brains, but also ideas for experiments that could shed further light on things.

Mildly recommended.

Congratulations, Ed and Sue!

2011-06-19T19:30:00.000-07:00

Live long and prosper!

For our part we made some small mementos. Thanks a million to Shapeways, whose service and support greatly outshines my rectilinear design skills.

Magnet pairs

Google Image Search

2011-06-18T13:02:00.000-07:00

Google's new search by image feature produces uncannily specific and accurate identifications. I spent a bit more time than I should have, plugging in some of my own photos:

"Best guess for this image: munchen hbf"

"Best guess for this image: upenn fine arts library"

"Best guess for this image: kleine scheidegg"

"Best guess for this image: harry potter"

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

2011-06-13T18:14:00.000-07:00

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (paperback, Kindle) is classic Murakami: bizarre and beautiful.

The cast of absurd characters (juxtaposed with the brooding and passive narrator) is fun, but the real star of the book is Murakami's prose (translated by Jay Rubin). The everyday blends seamlessly with the bizarre. Even the mundane is unmistakably sinister. And fairly regularly there is a metaphor or an aside that completely throws you for a loop.

I won't pretend to be able to comment coherently about the plot or what it means. (I'm not sure anyone can. But I certainly can't.) This story is like a dream committed to paper, one of those books that is about the ride rather than the conclusion. A fun read (and I usually stay far away from contemporary fiction). Recommended.

The Seven Sins of Memory

2011-06-13T17:24:00.000-07:00

In The Seven Sins of Memory (paperback, Kindle), psychologist Daniel Schachter attempts to characterize the failure modes of human memory. Schachter enumerates seven "sins" of memory: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. At a high level, these failures include not being able to recall things when desired, recalling things when not desired, and recalling things incorrectly.

I suppose most of us are keenly aware of the first and second categories of memory errors, because at the time we experience any such failure it is very obvious that such a thing has happened. The last category, recalling things incorrectly, represents the "silent failure" mode of memory, and is rather more pernicious (and less well understood). The sin of bias, for example, reflects the fact that recalling is an active process. One manifestation of bias is that recollections of the past are suspiciously similar to conditions in the present. For example, "[people] whose views on political issues have changed over time often recall incorrectly past attitudes as highly similar to present ones." Another sin, suggestibility, has major consequences for how we should interpret the testimony of witnesses in court.

Schachter explains in detail each sin, and mentions relevant literature that sheds light on the specifics of each failure mode. Frequently, understanding these specifics suggests useful tips and techniques that can be used to counteract or "work around" the failure. (The tips are also simple— very little is said of memory palaces, Mega Memory, and other very tiring techniques.) These days, the portable electronic devices we carry around are also useful tools for augmenting our memories.

In the last part of the book Schachter speculates on why memory evolved this way.

For example, forgetting the details of events gradually over time (transience of memory) is clearly economical, since we have a greater need for recalling things in the immediate past. So it appears that the brain initially encodes detailed records in memory ("We started the morning with continental breakfast at the hotel...") but gradually replaces the detailed record with the gist of what happened ("I had a great time"). When you are trying to recall an event from long ago, you use the gist of the memory and other techniques (inference, your knowledge of what usually happens under similar circumstances, a wild-ass guess, etc.) to reconstruct the event rather than recalling it directly. The brain uses lossy compression, and for events further in the past it dials up the lossiness! Some sins, like transience, appear to be evolutionary adaptations (i.e. actually useful behaviors), but others are the byproducts of evolutionary design trade-offs. All told, memory is not a poorly implemented and unreliable hack, but rather a pretty decent system given the hardware constraints.

This book is ostensibly about memory but, memory being such an integral part of our awareness, there is also plenty about attention, learning, and cognitive biases. This book is chock-full of useful information about one's mind and how to use it just a bit more effectively. Recommended.

The Man Who Tasted Shapes

2011-06-13T15:50:00.000-07:00

The Man Who Tasted Shapes (paperback, Kindle), by Richard Cytowic, is the story of one of the neurologists who brought synesthesia back into the field of view of psychologists. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimulation in one sense leads to involuntary (and consistent) experiences in another sense. (Famous artists believed to be synesthetes include Billy Joel, David Hockney, and Itzhak Perlman.) In some of the more common variants of synesthesia, individual letters on a printed page, or individual musical notes, are involuntarily experienced as having colors. While synesthesia was known and widely studied even in the 19th century, by the mid 20th century the predominant view was that synesthesia was not really interesting to investigate and that the phenomena that synesthetes experienced were just "in their heads". Unfortunately, before long, few doctors were even aware that synesthesia existed, despite the fact that estimates of its prevalance are generally agreed to be at least 1 in 2000. Thanks to the work of Cytowic and others, synesthesia is now something that gets covered in an intro psychology course (the one I took, anyway).

The first part of the book is sort of a memoir and a medical detective story, in which Cytowic— working with a couple of patients over a period of years— assembles clues about synesthesia, digs deep into the literature, and begins to conduct experiments to learn more about its genesis. While the dialogues do seem a bit overdramatized and redundant at times, it is a good portrait of how science is done. Not the technology part— the fMRI and other imaging devices are only incidental to the plot— but rather the imaginative part of science: synthesizing theories based on the mass of available evidence.

The conclusion of the "mystery" is a bit anticlimactic, since we still don't have a complete understanding of what mechanism is responsible for synesthesia, just a few tantalizing clues. Cross-talk between regions of the brain responsible for processing different senses has been implicated. In fact, all newborns are born synesthetic but lose that ability over time as connections in the brain are pruned. Interestingly, though, a substantial fraction of people appear to have latent synesthetic abilities. Studies have shown that the incidence of synesthesia among trained meditators is about one hundred times higher than the baseline prevalence! So it appears that synesthesia represents a natural background process of the brain that is simply unavailable to conscious view in a select few people.

This observation is a springboard for the second part of the book, which is a series of essays on "the primacy of emotion". Synesthesia is not an isolated phenomenon in the respect I mentioned: much of what goes on in our brains is not accessible to self-awareness except possibly under extraordinary circumstances. It now seems that the conscious mind is in fact not even in the driver's seat when it comes to planning and execution. (See: Bereitschaftspotential) The essays in this section are a reflection on the implications of this somewhat unsettling model of mind. I enjoyed some of the essays but found just as many of them to be completely opaque.

Despite its flaws I found this to be an enjoyable and eye-opening read. Recommended.

The Hunger Games

2011-06-08T21:31:00.000-07:00

The Hunger Games (paperback, Kindle), by Suzanne Collins, is a novel set in a future North America. Each year twenty-four teenagers are selected from the twelve Districts and thrown into a wilderness arena to fight each other to the death in a televised event. The Hunger Games are the Capitol's way of demonstrating its absolute power and humiliating the districts. The heroine, Katniss, volunteers to enter The Hunger Games in her sister's stead. Katniss is very clever and quickly figures out what she is going to have to do (and how to play everyone— including but not limited to the other contestants) in order to win.

(Yes, the premise is a lot like Battle Royale; or "Survivor", with killing.)

This is a fun and not-very-long read. It is well paced and there are hardly any lulls in the action. I had trouble putting down this book. Recommended.

Looking forward to reading the sequels and watching the movie.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects

2011-06-08T21:29:00.000-07:00

The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang, is a novella centering around sophisticated virtual pets— "digital entities" ("digients") that are positioned as somewhere between pets and children.

The story follows the rise and fall of the startup that creates the digients, as well as some of the programmers and "owners", who become increasingly attached to them.

The storyline and the implications of the technology are well thought out, and you could see it unfolding the way it's described. But as a whole the story just seemed kind of empty. Nothing really happens to any of the story threads at the end, which I would be willing to forgive if the premise of the story were thought-provoking. But I felt like I had seen enough pieces of the plot before that I did not find the questions Chiang raises to be particularly interesting. Perhaps I am just AI jaded. Decent airplane reading but little more than that.

The Birth of Plenty

2011-06-08T21:22:00.000-07:00

In The Birth of Plenty (paperback, Kindle), William Bernstein proposes a framework to help make sense of how civilizations get on the treadmill of sustained economic growth that has only been attained in the last 200 years. Why was it the English who managed it first, and not, say, the Chinese, or Muslims, both of whom had a tradition of scientific discovery and mathematical inquiry going back a thousand years or more?

Bernstein argues that four factors are necessary for nations to break out of stagnancy:

Property rights, including protection both from the government (i.e. rule of law) and from others (robbers, highwaymen, etc.)
Scientific rationality
Efficient capital markets (easy access to capital)
Useful power (for work and transport) and communications

The core of the book is case studies of the four factors and how they were (or weren't) implemented in various countries. It's history and politics and economics but Bernstein makes it very interesting and explains the relationships between the relevant threads of history.

The last part of the book concerns the modern era and the future. It would be really interesting to be able to use this sort of analysis in order to direct policy decisions, but it seems to me that the four-factor story has become, at least in part, a just-so story. After all, one can read about the tenets and method of science anywhere; capital is easy to come by (if not in your home country, you can obtain it from abroad); machines for work, transport, and communications can be shipped to anywhere in the world. With respect to the latter three factors, the cat is out of the bag. The only place in the modern world where any of those are not readily available is, possibly, North Korea. So it may be that no future natural experiment could assign any explanatory role to factors two, three, and four.

Instead, the first factor plays a key role: if we would merely supply the rule of law, says Bernstein— if people believed that they were not in mortal danger and that the fruits of their labor were safe from seizure— then people would have the motive to innovate (with the other three factors guaranteeing the means and opportunity). Not a new idea, but there is a twist. The four factors are logically independent of democracy; they can be present even under totalitarian regimes. And Bernstein cites some evidence that suggests that it's prosperity, borne of the four factors, that makes people ready for democracy. The causality between prosperity and democracy goes the way opposite to what many people assume.

Now, if we take this narrative seriously, then we really have to rethink the way we approach foreign aid and humanitarianism. Promoting (or installing) democracy in a country won't, by itself, lead to prosperity. And just giving money to poor countries is no help at all, if not worse. In both cases the change amounts to planting a seed in infertile soil. What's needed to bootstrap third-world countries today is, almost invariably, the first factor: property rights, considered very broadly. People need to believe that they and their possessions are secure; they need judges and lawyers. The absence of the requisite social institutions is so corrosive that economies cannot thrive without it, no matter how the political leaders are chosen or how much money there is lying around. Conversely, Bernstein suggests that once people have attained some critical level of prosperity they tend to lean towards democracy anyway. But that can lag economic prosperity by years if not decades.

This book is well worth reading, even you take issue with some of Bernstein's analysis. People are becoming increasingly mindful, and they want to know what they can do to make the world a more decent place to live; but no one (except ideologues, I suppose) is so committed to a particular means towards that end that they would persist in advocating something that demonstrably didn't work.

Economic history is complicated, and the scope of this book is very ambitious, but Bernstein manages to make it an easy (and even engrossing at times) read. Recommended.

People who are not in our league VII

2011-05-28T10:12:00.000-07:00

Jin8 plays tetris. So fast is he that being able to see the blocks already on the board appears to be just extraneous. That hypothesis is confirmed when the blocks turn invisible (at 5 minutes in) and he just keeps on playing.

People who are not in our league VI

2011-05-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

Fabrice Bellard wrote jslinux, Javascript that emulates an x86 processor and boots a working Linux kernel.

As if that weren't impressive enough, the hosted filesystem includes a C compiler... that he wrote himself... and a partial emacs clone... that he wrote himself.

Bellard was also responsible for ffmpeg, QEMU, and what was (at the time that it was released) the fastest known algorithm for computing digits of pi.

Movie roundup

2011-05-28T09:50:00.000-07:00

Recent movies, in descending order of enjoyableness:

Ip Man. Semi-biographical account of the life of Ip Man, the grandmaster of the Wing Chun form of martial arts who taught Bruce Lee. Donnie Yen is pretty much the embodiment of unadulterated badassery. Excellent fight scenes. Recommended.

Source Code. Not only an entertaining thriller but also somewhat moving (which I did not expect). Don't take the science seriously and you will enjoy the movie a lot more for it. It's well executed and the characters and their interplay are very likable. Recommended.

In The Shadow of the Moon. Documentary about the Apollo missions, as told by the Apollo astronauts. Really brings to life the political and social climate of the time. I watched the JFK footage and I could not tell if he was a visionary, or insane. Also, sometimes we forget that, yes, some astronauts did die so that we could go to the moon. Recommended.

The Rock. Classic action movie, and one with heart.

Contact. It does have its moments of awe, but the cheesiness is way overdone.

Con Air. Everyone in this movie seems to play a caricature of himself, which gets tiring very quickly.

District 13: Ultimatum. I enjoyed the original District 13 (the parkour scenes are something to behold), and had been looking forward to the sequel. Unfortunately Ultimatum is just ridiculous and nonsensical in alternation.

The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009). Empty and unexciting.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

2011-05-27T22:25:00.000-07:00

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, is the biography of the poor black woman whose cancerous cells were taken from her (without her knowledge or permission) and which subsequently became the first line of human cells to be successfully grown in vitro. Lacks died in 1951 but the HeLa line of cells, descended from the cancerous cells in her cervix, live on in labs around the world.

There is some science background/history in this book, but it is primarily the story of Lacks and her family as well as a story of the history of medical ethics. Shockingly, as recently as the 1950s, doctors frequently withheld critical information (such as, oh, a diagnosis) from their patients, for fear of upsetting them. Black patients like Lacks were the least likely to be given all the facts. Given the lack of respect in the doctor-patient relationship then, it does not seem quite so surprising that when Lacks went to Johns Hopkins for cancer treatment, doctors dared to take and store samples from her tumor for use in experiments without even asking for her consent.

The discovery that HeLa cells were actually capable of reproducing in culture medium (outside of the body) sparked a revolution in medicine. Suddenly you could perform experiments on human cells without having to perform experiments on a human. HeLa became part of the standard arsenal for research studies involving human cells. HeLa cells were used to test the first polio vaccine; they have been used to test the effects of carcinogens, drugs, zero-g environments, and more on human cells. By 2009, research done on HeLa had led to the publication of some 60,000 research articles.

And yet, for about twenty years after Lacks's cells were taken from her, by which time they were already routinely in use in labs around the world, Lacks's children had no idea that any of that was happening. Understandably, they became quite upset and paranoid when they finally learned what was going on. The irony of this story is that while Henrietta Lacks's cells have produced scientific research of untold aggregate value, her descendants are still too poor to afford decent health care.

In researching for this book, Skloot definitely crossed the traditional boundary between author and subject. She worked closely with Henrietta's youngest daughter, Deborah, and helped her to learn about her family's history, unravel what it was that had actually happened to her "mother cells," and assuage many of her concerns. Lacks's descendants were relatively poor and uneducated, and this book could easily have crossed the line into sounding patronizing, but it doesn't. Skloot has done an admirable job in not just identifying but creating the human story here.

This book is both thought-provoking and captivating; recommended.

Review ends here; only moderately thought-out speculation begins. IANA doctor or medical researcher.

Reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, you can see that the medical institution has come a long way since the 1950s, but as a society we still don't have a lot of the answers for how to deal with the use of donated human biological products (tissue, usually) in medical research. One positive change is that the idea of requiring "informed consent" is now widely recognized and standardized. But patients do not have a great incentive to actually donate their biological products to research, because the vast majority of samples are worth approximately nothing, except as part of a larger collection, and donors receive no other benefits. (It doesn't help that in Moore v. Regents of the University of California the Supreme Court of California ruled that once a biological product is taken from your body, it is no longer yours; therefore, in order to profit from its use you would have to have the extraordinary foresight to come to some agreement with the hospitals/researchers before you donated the sample.)

There are a number of proposals to compensate donors of biological products, e.g. with reduced health care costs, or money paid out of a pool funded by pharmaceutical companies. I think some of those are good ideas. But what may be interesting to try here is some sort of analogue to a Creative Commons license: something drafted by lawyers, similar to all the pre-written legal documents or software licenses you can get today, that would provide various stipulations that ensure that research and IP derived from a patient's particular biological sample meet some standard of public accessibility. As Skloot points out, what many donors really want is not remuneration (especially since only an exceedingly small fraction of single biological samples are worth anything anyway) but the knowledge that the fruits of research done on their donations are available to the public and to other researchers, rather than staying in some freezer because no one is going to pay some exorbitant fee for an unknown sample. HeLa itself revolutionized medicine because it was widely distributed, and that only happened because it hadn't occurred to anyone to patent cell lines in the 1950s.

Donors are going to have to be the ones to fight for the public interest, but they don't really have any leverage unless they show strength in numbers.

Mastering Regular Expressions (O'Reilly)

2011-05-24T19:46:00.000-07:00

Many programmers use regular expressions frequently, but most of us can go for months, if not more, between the occasions when we really need to understand what the heck the regex implementation is doing.

For those times when you actually need to know, Mastering Regular Expressions, by Jeffrey Friedl (ebook version available on O'Reilly) is the book you want to have read. It does discuss various regex features, but you can usually find the same info in the API docs for the language bindings you're using; the real meat of this book is its clear discussion of regex engine implementations.

When you want to answer such questions as "Why is the regex engine matching the string P, and not the different-but-equally-valid match Q?" or "How can I make this regex code faster?", then it really helps to understand what's going on under the hood. NFAs, DFAs, state machines, and all that good stuff are covered here, but with many more practical notes than appear in your college compilers textbook.

Recommended... if you're into this sort of thing.

Dear Economist...

2011-05-05T11:56:00.000-07:00

I just ran across Tim Harford's advice column Dear Economist, in which he appeals to economic theory to answer such weighty questions as,

Bike Tour of the California Coast

2011-04-20T17:53:00.000-07:00

I just returned from leading a bicycle tour of the central California coast. Yoyo Zhou, Ed Lee, Sue-Ting Chene, Kalvin Wang, and I spent six days biking from Saratoga to Goleta (near Santa Barbara), a total of about 340 miles. Highlights included biking down Big Sur and eating lots of great food.

You can read more in my trip report.

Bicycling the Pacific Coast, by Vicky Spring

2011-04-18T20:53:00.000-07:00

I just returned from leading a cycle tour down the California coast from the San Francisco Bay Area to Santa Barbara. The classic Bicycling The Pacific Coast, by Vicky Spring, was an indispensable reference and a major part of my trip planning process.

For the section of interest to us (central coast of California), Bicycling the Pacific Coast routes you down Highway 1 (California State Route 1, a.k.a. the Pacific Coast Highway) nearly the entire way. The book provides turn-by-turn instructions that explain when it is advisable to deviate from Hwy 1 (either when bikes are not allowed on the highway, when there is a scenic detour with less car traffic, or when there are specific points of interest), and exactly how to do so. It explains when food, water, restrooms, and lodging are present along certain segments, as well as when they aren't. These elements are (understandably) missing from guidebooks that assume you are traveling by car.

Elevation profiles of each day's ride are also given, which was handy for mentally preparing my travel-mates for each segment. Points of interest and other considerations for cyclists (such as when there is a wide shoulder, and which segments get really hot in the summer) are noted.

Although the book is oriented towards expedition cyclists (i.e. cyclists who carry a tent with them and stop at a campsite each night), and our group was doing credit-card touring, I had little difficulty adapting the suggested routes to stop each night at a city rather than a campsite. It is also straightforward to follow the suggested route but lengthen or shorten each day's ride, depending on your taste.

I purchased a copy of the book on Google eBooks and loaded it onto my phone, so I was able to consult it on the road as well. You can do something similar with the Amazon Kindle edition.

Route planning for a cycle tour of the coast is an optimization problem in many dimensions, and you will need to consult maps and references other than Bicycling the Pacific Coast, but this book helps to pare down the search space considerably and make it much more manageable. Highly recommended.

Tron: Legacy followup

2011-04-06T22:31:00.000-07:00

Look, it's eshell!

Josh Nimoy wrote about his special effects contributions, among others, to Tron: Legacy:

I spent a half year writing software art to generate special effects for Tron Legacy, working at Digital Domain with Bradley "GMUNK" Munkowitz, Jake Sargeant, and David "dlew" Lewandowski. [...]

In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. [...] In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie.

I previously wrote that

the filmmakers should win some sort of award for Not Totally Outrageous Use Of Unix In A Hollywood Movie. Whoever is responsible, I salute you.

So I guess we now know how that transpired and who is responsible for (part of) it.

(via Romain Francoise)

"Seinfeld" in economics

2011-01-30T23:17:00.000-08:00

Princeton econ prof Avinash Dixit's paper "An Option Value Problem from Seinfeld" is a treatment of Elaine's quandary in Episode 119 ("The Sponge") as an option pricing problem. When Elaine's contraceptive of choice goes off the market, she has only a finite supply remaining and she has to become much more, uh, judicious in her use of them. It's a case of "Investment Under Uncertainty" (Dixit's much more voluminous work on the subject).

There's a WSJ article about the paper. If you like this kind of stuff, there's a bit more in the same vein (though with less in-depth discussion) at Yada Yada Yada Econ (The Economics of Seinfeld).

I consider "Seinfeld" to be one of the better products of the 1990s, so it's awesome that it still gets talked about. Moreover it doesn't surprise me at all that there is so much econ content in a show that is ostensibly about "nothing". Econ is everywhere.

Giant Plush Tux Penguin

2011-01-03T23:47:00.000-08:00

or, What Happens When Engineers Learn to Sew

Encouraged by how well the plush (Linux) Tux penguins turned out, Santhosh, Samson, and I spent a couple of afternoons over the holiday making a Giant Plush Tux in honor of our favorite kernel. It was a lot of fun and I got to practice skills that I usually neglect (such as hand-eye coordination).

Giant Tux is 3'8" tall, weighs 24 lbs, is made out of fleece and reappropriated stuffing, and really likes to hog the couch.

You can read more about how Giant Tux was made and see more pictures here.

2010 in Review

2010-12-31T22:25:00.000-08:00

In 2010 I started cycling in earnest. Last December, when I got a bike fitting consultation, Piaw suggested that I advise Terry Shaw that I just wanted to be able to ride from the south bay to the coast and back in a day (depending on how you do it, this is about 70 miles and 7,000 feet of climb— but under any scenario, far, far longer than any ride I had done up to that time). To which my reaction was, Ha ha, very funny, but OK, that's what I'll say. By April— four months later— I had done exactly that. In June I finished the Sequoia Century and set off for a cycle tour of the Alps, which was the most incredible trip I've gone on in years. Now, I've logged about 2,700 miles and 150,000' of climb for the year, up from last year by at least a factor of 10, I estimate. Between that and changing my diet a bit I feel substantially healthier. (It's hard to know which is primarily responsible, as I did not conduct a controlled experiment. Shame on me.)

In just a few months of not even particularly regimented training, I worked up from having never really demonstrated any respectable amount of physical endurance in my entire life, to doing a number of things that were previously, for me, in Ha ha, very funny territory. Now, it's not like I have any unusual amount of willpower. It wasn't a New Year's resolution that got me off my butt, but rather me deciding that I wanted to go back and see Rosenlaui again. And I don't think I would have gotten there if I didn't also happen to think cycling was so damned exhilirating, or if I didn't have a bunch of friends who kept going with me on all these rides.

I guess the lesson is that if you are choosing your New Year's resolutions now, or trying to make any sort of change in your life, you have to plan for the fact that you will need more than sheer willpower to succeed.

I slogged through some parts of 2010, but I also got to do a lot of fun and awesome things this year. Happy New Year, and best wishes to all for a wonderful 2011.

2010 Book List

2010-12-31T21:05:00.000-08:00

I didn't set aside a lot of time to read this year, unfortunately. Here's what I did read:

I think my favorites were Buddha's Brain, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, and Stories Of Your Life And Others.

Recent favorite things

2010-12-31T12:53:00.000-08:00

Some recent things I have enjoyed but am not going to write full reviews of:

Toys

Buckyballs are really fun to play with. You wouldn't think that grown men and women could entertain themselves for hours at a time playing with these magnets, but then again, I didn't think so either. I think of it as intelligent play-doh. Woot occasionally has them on sale at a discount of about 50%.

Rock Band 3. Perhaps the only video game I've enjoyed playing this whole year. No major changes to gameplay, but they have really polished up the game dynamics, and the setlist contains a much greater variety of styles. I don't care much for the guitar, but playing the drums and exercising your coordination is just so satisfying in a strange physical way.

Food

I usually am satisfied with plain black tea but Canadian Ice Wine Tea is an interesting variation. Smells like wine, tastes like black tea. It's very fragrant but still subtle compared to most fruity teas (which I am not fond of).

I ordered some Ka-Pow! Coffee Bars from Sahagún. It's like a chocolate bar, but made with coffee beans instead of cocoa beans. I don't even drink coffee, but the taste and texture of these things is incredibly bold, and hauntingly good.

Cooking

I've been cooking, mostly out of the following cookbooks:

The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook has recipes for pretty much all the staples of classic American cuisine. Also contains a lot of practical advice and tips (some of them apparently very nonstandard) for avoiding all the common pitfalls for each dish.
The New Moosewood Cookbook is the new edition of Mollie Katzen's classic vegetarian cookbook. The whole thing is hand-lettered(!) and whimsically illustrated. This is not a comprehensive reference like ATKFC or JoC, but it fills some of the gaps in the coverage of the ATKFC, particularly with respect to vegetarian dishes and more ethnic foods.
The Joy of Cooking is the very extensive classic. I refer to it when I want to make something specific that's not in another book, but its extensive use of indirection ("First, make Hollandaise Sauce as directed on page 355. Then, prepare the toast as directed on page 1180...") makes it a pain to follow.

I'm not much of a hardware geek, or a culinary geek, for that matter, but the author of Cooking for Geeks (review) did talk me into buying a laser thermometer, which is super useful once you have a grasp of the whole how to use temperature thing. Hardware-wise it's an interesting device too. It looks at the blackbody radiation being emitted by an object, so it can give you the surface temperature of an object from a distance and pretty much instantly. Indispensable especially in sautéing and roasting chops and steaks, but also has less exciting uses, like telling you whether soup is too hot to drink.

Buddha's Brain

2010-12-31T11:37:00.000-08:00

I apologize for the raft of posts coming up. I wanted to flush all my buffers before the new year.

Buddha's Brain: the practical neuroscience of happiness, love, and wisdom, by Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius, is about contemplative practices like Tibetan Buddhism, and what scientists have in recent years discovered about how they work at a neurological level. (From fMRI studies it is pretty clear now that people who are good at meditating are doing something very different with their brains from what the rest of us do.)

Putting on my engineer hat, I would paraphrase the major assertions of this book as follows. Evolution has optimized our brains not for happiness, but for long-term survival. At first glance this is kind of a downer— what hope could there be for sustained happiness, if it's not an end, but a means toward an end? But just because a system is designed or optimized to do one thing does not mean that it cannot be hacked to do another, if you understand its principles of operation. Buddhism encompasses a huge variety of practices, beliefs, and traditions, but among them, it gives you what I would call tools to hack your own brain: to alleviate suffering, to become more mindful, or in general to activate more wholesome and productive states of the brain. Which is much (much) easier said than done, but this book gets you started on that road and discusses the neurological basis for those techniques as we understand them today.

Here's one example. For very good evolutionary reason, our brains are risk averse: we naturally focus on, and give more weight to, the bad rather than the good. Moreover, it's now understood that neuronal associations become stronger the more they are activated. This induces a feedback phenomenon ("positive" feedback, ha ha) that can be quite dangerous, because of the negativity bias. It can manifest as, for example, the feeling of being consumed by anger, or of debilitating anxiety. And that feedback phenomenon is why it's so important to actively interrupt negative trains of thought (and, when possible, to actively bring to mind any positive aspects that are available) rather than indulging in them. Doing so not only alleviates suffering in the present, but also actually rewires your brain to reduce your future predisposition towards those kinds of unproductive thoughts. If you follow Buddhist teachings you will recognize this is as the Right Effort of the Eightfold Path: cultivating wholesome thoughts while weeding out the harmful ones.

In this and a variety of other contexts the authors help you to understand some of the brain's evolutionarily adaptive but potentially unproductive tendencies. (I found the discussion of the brain's capacity for simulation, and why it can lead to suffering, to be particularly interesting.) In some cases a mere awareness of the phenomenon goes a long way in being able to counteract it, so the payoff is near immediate. In other cases it takes a substantial amount of time and effort to stop old habits and access more desirable states of brain/mind. The assertion is that as with other skill, you too can practice in order to learn to be more loving, kind, level-headed, mindful, and happy.

The book is written in a casual and accessible style, and is a moderately easy read. A number of guided meditations and exercises are provided. The authors do discuss a fair amount of neuroscience/biochemistry, only some of which is directly relevant to a practical understanding or to the techniques. Many of those parts can be safely skimmed (though some are very interesting), so you can treat this book as a purely practical guide if you like.

The premise that we have subtantial power to effect physical changes in our own brains, to become happier and healthier people— and using nothing more than our own minds— is extremely interesting. It's not about putting a happy face on everything but it is about helping yourself to take control of your mind.

Highly recommended.

The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack

2010-12-27T15:54:00.000-08:00

The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack is an anthology of The Perry Bible Fellowship, which is one of the most imaginative webcomics I've ever seen.

This book is a treasure.

It isn't for everyone— the author has a twisted sense of humor, and there is a lot of sexual and morbid humor. But the comics are just incredibly rich in their stories, and demand repeated readings. The author loves to take a cliché and turn it on its head. The artwork is also very impressive for a webcomic; it comes in a variety of styles, from very minimal figures to rich watercolors, and even spot-on parodies of other comics and other visual media. All in all the book is a lot of fun to flip through. It will probably stay on my coffee table for a long time.

Many (indeed, most) of the comics still appear on the web, so you can read them to get a taste for what the book is like. Some of my personal favorites: "Guntron Alliance Force", "Mrs. Hammer", "Refridgeron and Magnimus".

Tron: Legacy

2010-12-22T22:15:00.000-08:00

Tron: Legacy was an entertaining and enjoyable movie (one of the most visually and aurally stimulating movies since Speed Racer, which I mean as a compliment, honestly), but mostly I think it worth mentioning because I believe the filmmakers should win some sort of award for Not Totally Outrageous Use Of Unix In A Hollywood Movie.

Whoever is responsible, I salute you.

Cooking for Geeks

2010-12-22T22:08:00.000-08:00

As I've been cooking more recently and learning about the mechanics of cooking (that is, how to decipher cookbooks and follow instructions), I've found myself wanting something of a primer on the theory of cooking. And I think Jeff Potter's Cooking for Geeks is more or less what I've been looking for.

What I mean by theory of cooking is that I'd like to have better mental models about, among other things, what makes dishes taste good; when to use different kinds of heat, and in what amounts; and how to choose complementary ingredients so I can make reasonable dishes without following recipes. What it is, in a general sense, that makes dishes turn out the way they do.

Cooking for Geeks covers a lot of ground. I think the most valuable material for me was learning how to use different kinds of heat (e.g. boiling vs. pan-frying vs. baking) to obtain various tastes and textures. To a large degree, controlling taste and texture is a matter of controlling which chemical reactions occur in the food. The major way you can influence those is by changing the temperature; you just need to understand the temperature ranges of different cooking media and the temperature ranges at which certain desirable chemical reactions happen in your food, e.g. the Maillard reaction.

There are also sections in the book on choosing tastes and ingredients, baking, chemistry, and kitchen hardware hacking. The author has a lot of specific tips but also helps you to understand the physical, biochemical, agricultural, or physiological principles that are your basis for making various choices in the kitchen. In addition, there are recipes, trivia, interviews, and reference material sprinkled throughout the book.

Cooking for Geeks is a useful book to have around when you plan meals. Recommended, provided you can handle analogies between cooking and programming.

People who are not in our league V

2010-12-18T16:08:00.000-08:00

Yusuke Endoh wrote a blog post that shows a quine of cycle length 8 he wrote in Ruby. Here is the code:

v=0000;eval$s=%q~d=%!^Lcf<LK8,                  _@7gj*LJ=c5nM)Tp1g0%Xv.,S[<>YoP
4ZojjV)O>qIH1/n[|2yE[>:ieC       "%.#%  :::##"       97N-A&Kj_K_><wS5rtWk@*a+Y5
yH?b[F^e7C/56j|pmRe+:)B     "##%      ::##########"     O98(Zh)'Iof*nm.,$C5Nyt=
PPu01Avw^<IiQ=5$'D-y?    "##:         ###############"    g6`YT+qLw9k^ch|K'),tc
6ygIL8xI#LNz3v}T=4W    "#            #.   .####:#######"    lL27FZ0ij)7TQCI)P7u
}RT5-iJbbG5P-DHB<.   "              ##### # :############"   R,YvZ_rnv6ky-G+4U'
$*are@b4U351Q-ug5   "              #######################"   00x8RR%`Om7VDp4M5
PFixrPvl&<p[]1IJ   "              ############:####  %#####"   EGgDt8Lm#;bc4zS^
y]0`_PstfUxOC(q   "              .#############:##%   .##  ."   /,}.YOIFj(k&q_V
zcaAi?]^lCVYp!;  " %%            .################.     #.   "  ;s="v=%04o;ev"%
(;v=(v-($*+[45,  ":####:          :##############%       :   "  ])[n=0].to_i;)%
360)+"al$s=%q#{  "%######.              #########            "  ;;"%c"%126+$s<<
126}";d.gsub!(/  "##########.           #######%             "  |\s|".*"/,"");;
require"zlib"||  "###########           :######.             "  ;d=d.unpack"C*"
d.map{|c|n=(n||  ":#########:           .######: .           "  )*90+(c-2)%91};
e=["%x"%n].pack   " :#######%           :###### #:          "   &&"H*";e=Zlib::
Inflate.inflate(   "  ######%           .####% ::          "   &&e).unpack("b*"
)[0];22.times{|y|   "  ####%             %###             "   ;w=(Math.sqrt(1-(
(y*2.0-21)/22)**(;   " .###:             .#%             "   ;2))*23).floor;(w*
2-1).times{|x|u=(e+    " %##                           "    )[y*z=360,z]*2;u=u[
90*x/w+v+90,90/w];s[(    " #.                        "    ;y*80)+120-w+x]=(""<<
32<<".:%#")[4*u.count((     " .                   "     ;"0"))/u.size]}};;puts\
s+";_ The Qlobe#{" "*18+ (       "#  :#######"       ;"Copyright(C).Yusuke End\
oh, 2010")}";exit~;_ The Qlobe                  Copyright(C).Yusuke Endoh, 2010

and each subsequent iteration shows the globe rotated by 45 degrees. To which I can only reply, holy freaking moly.

A sampling of the comments from the blog post:

This is awe-inspiring.

You are a mad man. You are completely insane.

You have completely blown my mind.

If you're curious to learn more about how this works at a high level (as I was), one anonymous commenter was kind enough to write a few sentences about the structure of the code.

Source: Yusuke Endoh

Ruggedized

2010-11-26T18:50:00.000-08:00

Motorola recently launched the Defy, a ruggedized Android phone (see the Engadget review for more info; the picture is the Defy sitting in a glass of water).

While I think only a small fraction of people would buy a ruggedized phone, a ruggedized tablet could be a pretty big hit. I think the killer app is reading a newspaper/book (or playing Cow Clicker) in the tub or pool.

Well, I guess now you know what's going on my holiday wish list every year until someone makes one of these.

Fundbüro at Oktoberfest

2010-10-05T22:28:00.000-07:00

(This article is from a year ago but it is in season again—or would have been, last week).

The New York Times has an interesting article about the lost and found at Oktoberfest (the Fundbüro). It seems to be exactly what you would expect to find at the intersection of German inebriation and German efficiency.

Returning lost phones, passports, keys, and wedding rings on this scale (about 5000 objects are lost each year) must require a regimented organizational/labeling system. And the people who work the booths seem to be very on top of things:

For Sam Sealy, 19, from Bellevue, Wash., it was relatively easy to prove ownership, since his passport was in his gray and blue backpack. An alert staff member actually recognized him from his photograph before he even made it to the counter to inquire.

This is not the sort of thing you usually encounter in America.

The Fundbüro has its limits though:

But as the staff must tell teary-eyed teenage girls every year, they do not keep track of lost boyfriends.

Threading humor

2010-10-03T09:01:00.000-07:00

We were eating lunch at the cafeteria.

P: [Sitting down] Where are R and S?
Q: They're still waiting in line for food. There was this mess inside where two lines merged into one, and they kept getting pre-empted.
P: Would you say they were... starved?

Movie roundup

2010-09-29T23:33:00.000-07:00

Some movies I watched recently, in approximately decreasing order of enjoyment. Warning: includes what you could consider to be a spoiler for Moon.

Back to the Future. There isn't a single throwaway line in this film. I consider it one of the best screenplays ever written. Michael J. Fox's character is just so likable. You really want him to set things right. And the friendship between Marty McFly and Doc Brown is heartwarming.

Incidentally, it speaks volumes about human nature that we are so gripped by the idea of traveling to the past and righting wrongs.

Recommended.

Inception. I really enjoyed this movie. And I think what drew me in was its treatment of mind control. (Nora Jemesin puts it well.)

The plot driver of the movie (that in order to succeed, the protagonists have to inject an idea at a level beneath the target's conscious awareness) hints at something that every writer and teacher has wrestled with. The problem with our minds is that they are not wired to process evidence in a rational way. Planting an idea in someone's head is not just a matter of laying all the facts out in as lucid a manner as possible; it can require a bit of indirection, underhandedness, trickery, and elbow grease. Which is part of what makes writing (and teaching, and the art of persuasion) so intriguing, at least to me.

Also a very good screenplay, one of those technically well-constructed films where everything comes together at the end in a very satisfying way. Recommended.

Moon. I was looking forward to this movie. A cool premise and a set of interesting ideas are spoiled by poor execution. The major twist is exposed less than halfway in, and every potentially suspenseful development thereafter is deflated in an anticlimactic way (you can guess most of the developments after and possibly including the first big reveal). There is no rising action. The film just didn't work for me.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Clichéd and bland and mildly entertaining.

The Expendables. Lord knows, I love explosions as much as the next guy, but I actually found myself bored during the middle of this movie.

The American. Too much brooding. Incredibly slow and boring.

Pita chips

2010-09-22T20:03:00.000-07:00

I previously shared my hummus recipe, so I would be criminally negligent if I didn't also convey how easy making your own pita chips is.

Homemade pita chips are a snap to make and are far cheaper than the stupidly expensive stuff you find at the supermarket.

These chips are merely salted (to maximize your appreciation of the hummus). Despite their simplicity I am pretty sure they are more addictive than nicotine.

Instructions: buy some pita bread (both regular and whole wheat pitas make good pita chips). Separate the two sides of each pita by cutting along the circumference with a knife or scissors. Cut each into triangular segments and place them on a baking sheet, rough side (inside) up. Brush or dribble olive oil onto each. Sprinkle with sea salt. Bake at 350 degrees for 7 minutes. Turn the chips over and bake for 7 more minutes.

Try and eat just one. I challenge you.

Adapted from The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook.

The Elements of Investing

2010-09-19T00:59:00.000-07:00

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book.

The Elements of Investing, by Burton Malkiel and Charles Ellis, is a fine (and very concise) book with basic principles of investing.

Burton Malkiel is also the author of the (much longer) book A Random Walk Down Wall Street; if you have read that book, you may not be surprised to learn that the core of the advice is this: Buy and hold index funds.

Malkiel and Ellis lay out the arguments that suggest you should keep a substantial chunk of your assets in broad index funds (or index-tracking ETFs, which have similar characteristics). Foremost among them, individuals are not very good at picking stocks or at timing the market, and fund managers are no exception. (Having your assets properly diversified can help you sleep at night, and that's probably worth something to you too.)

There's other good advice as well, such as how to take advantage of 401(k) plans and IRAs.

I consider the advice presented here to be a good set of defaults for most people. Those who are exceptions (or are in exceptional situations) will need to consult sources other than this book, but those people ought to know who they are. Meanwhile, if you have already read A Random Walk Down Wall Street, there is little truly new material presented here (same goes, probably, if you are already just generally well read in personal finance). However, you may still find it convenient to have a bunch of essential actionable elements in a single short book.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat

2010-09-09T21:17:00.000-07:00

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, by neurologist Oliver Sacks, is a collection of case histories of his patients.

The book is divided into four sections, corresponding to categories of brain (dys)function: neurological deficits, neurological excesses, visions and altered perceptions, and mental retardation and savants. There are 24 stories in all, varying in length and style. Both the clinical accounts and Sacks's personal reflections on each case are very interesting, though some of the shorter chapters left me wanting more.

One of the most unsettling cases, "A Matter of Identity", is about one William Thompson, a patient with Korsakov's syndrome. He can only remember things for a few seconds, so his mind is continuously forced to improvise ad-hoc stories to explain his surroundings. When Sacks introduces himself, Thompson (mis)identifies Sacks as a customer, and himself as a butcher (which he was, before he was institutionalized); then, noticing Sacks's white coat, he figures him for a fellow butcher; eyeing Sacks's stethoscope, he assumes Sacks to be a mechanic (for some reason); then a doctor; then a customer, again; and on and on. Thompson switches from one explanation to another fluently, never showing any hesitation or uncertainty. He is totally oblivious. Sacks muses, wondering whether Thompson, who has consciousness but lacks continuity, can be said to have an identity, or even a soul. And though Sacks can do little to mitigate Thompson's condition, he does notice that when Thompson is left alone in the garden, he finds a peace that he's not able to obtain anywhere else.

So it is with many of the accounts in the book, that Sacks shows his resourcefulness as a healer. Some of his patients have disorders that make them seem almost hopelessly walled off from the rest of the world. And yet Sacks is often able to break through somewhere, to help patients get in their element—to find some context or activity in which their disorders fade or seem to disappear entirely. It's through clinical accounts, surprisingly, that one sees the human and compassionate side of both the doctor and his patients.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat has many beautiful and wondrous tales, and it really gets one thinking about what it means to be human. Recommended.

Plush Tux Penguins

2010-09-07T00:34:00.000-07:00

Edit, January 2011: also see the next generation of Plush Tux.

As a Labor Day weekend project, Santhosh and I made plush Tux penguins (in honor of our favorite kernel). Neither of us had done a major sewing project before, so it took the two of us about 16 hours to make two penguins.

We obtained free (as in speech) schematics from free-penguin.org. That site is somewhat light on instructions, but the patterns came out very nicely. Each Tux stands (er, sits) about 11 inches tall.

More assembly pictures…

Review: Mercier Galaxy and other bike gear

2010-09-02T01:26:00.000-07:00

Having completed a tour with my bike (my first road bike) I can now make a few comments on it and my other equipment, and pass on some of the many tips people have generously shared with me along the way.

The Mercier Galaxy is a good first road bike, and a good touring bike for its price. I bought mine on bikesdirect.com for $496 and it has since been discounted to $396. The price is right! In addition to taking mine on tours, I've also been commuting to work on it.

The Galaxy's frame is all steel, so it's not light, but it's also nothing that will fall apart on you.

If you are looking to buy a bike online, you do, of course, have to know your frame size. This can be a little tricky if this is your first road bike; I won't go into the details here.

The bike comes "mostly" assembled. All you need to complete the installation is a set of Allen wrenches and a tube of grease— just put grease on every metal-metal interface before you put the parts together. I put my bike together without adult supervision in a couple of hours. (The manual is both unhelpful and unnecessary.) Having a second person around during assembly is helpful. The only tricky part, I would say, is getting the derailleurs adjusted right. I don't have a good sense for visually figuring out how the derailleurs should be positioned, so it took me a few edit/ride cycles to get it adjusted to something usable. I imagine that if you took the bike in to a professional (or really, anyone who knows something about bikes) they would be able to fix this sort of thing for you in no time at all.

I installed the following parts for the tour. These were pretty quick changes: most elements took under 30 minutes to install (first time trying). The Galaxy is nearly ready to go on a tour.

Tires: Continental Ultra Gatorskins. Around town I'd mostly been riding around on 25mm racing tires. For the trip, I installed the Ultra Gatorskins, which have a Kevlar strip in them so they are more resistant to flats (I made it through the tour with no flats). I used 28mm tires since we were traveling loaded. The Gatorskins are heavier but having the extra peace of mind is invaluable. In case you want to install still wider tires, the brakes and frame do even fit 32mm tires, so you do have that flexibility.

Rear cassette: Shimano 11-34 8-speed cassette (HG40). The Galaxy comes with an 11-30. Having that last gear be so much lower really helps on steep grades. (With these gears, Redwood Gulch, a 21% grade at its steepest part, turned from something I dreaded to something manageable.) Often, with a 34-tooth gear, one needs to make sure that the rear derailleur can actually reach that far. The derailleur that comes with the Galaxy is just fine, in fact, though I had to do a bit of fine-tuning so I could access the last gear. You will need some more specialized tools (not just Allen wrenches) to replace the cassette.

Brakes: Kool Stop Salmon brake pads. These brakes are nearly silent and perform well in the rain. There's not much more to say about them! Buy a set already.

Bike computer: Sigma BC1606L. It's light and does the job. A single coin cell powers it for months. Additionally I borrowed a GPS unit for the trip, but closer to home I don't usually need a GPS.

Pedals: Shimano pedals, and Shimano M086 shoes (mountain bike shoes). I also have a matching pair of road bike shoes (R086). The mountain bike shoes have treads on the bottom so that the cleat is partially recessed; the road bike shoes do not, so they have a totally smooth bottom except for the cleat. If you intend to race, then every gram matters, and you want the road shoes. You also want the road shoes if you enjoy the feeling of being afraid of slipping and falling on your back every time you take a step on asphalt or tile. Maybe it makes you feel more alive. Otherwise… just start with mountain bike shoes.

Fenders: SKS Race Blades. I wasn't able to find fenders before I left, so I bought these in the middle of the tour. When riding in the rain, getting a thin stripe of mud down the middle of my back doesn't really bother me, but getting my socks wet from the splashback can be really miserable. The SKS Race Blades are nice because they attach with rubber straps, so they are easy to mount and unmount. (Also important, they go behind the front fork rather than trying to fit through it, so they actually fit on the Galaxy and other road bikes.)

Light: Planet Bike Blinky Superflash Tail Light. (I also had a cheap no-name front light that was anemic enough that I won't endorse it. Fortunately we didn't need to use our lights extensively.) A single coin cell powers the Blinky Superflash for weeks or months of commuting.

Bags: Carradice Nelson Saddlebag and Carradice Bagman Quick Release (rear) and an Ortlieb Ultimate5 Compact (handlebars). The Ortlieb detaches easily and has a shoulder strap, so I left my valuables (camera, phone, passport) in there and brought it with me whenever I had to leave the bike. Extremely convenient. The Carradice Nelson fits a shockingly large amount of stuff, and the quick release mount is useful for commuting as well as for touring. Both bags are waterproof.

Fully loaded bike

Tour of the German-speaking Alps 2010

2010-08-21T02:06:00.000-07:00

In June and July of this year I (along with Piaw, Lisa, Cynthia, and Kekoa) went on a three-week self-supported bicycle tour of the German-speaking Alps— really, mostly Switzerland. I had been looking forward to returning to Switzerland since last (and first) I went there, and this trip did not disappoint. I think all of us really enjoyed it.

I've now published my trip report as well as some conclusions about bicycle touring (based on my impressions as a first time cycle tourist).

Minimum federal ricketyness standards?

2010-08-04T23:51:00.000-07:00

There's a well-known effect in economics/psychology called risk compensation, whereby people tend to adjust their behavior in response to perceived changes in risk.

Consequently, the life-saving effect of the introduction of some safety devices (especially very visible or easily perceived ones, e.g. anti-lock brakes, bike helmets) is somewhat less than the "true" effect of the device, because people compensate for increased safety by engaging in more risky behavior (e.g. driving faster, descending faster around blind corners).

The flip side is that if we just make certain behaviors appear more risky, then people will do less of them (irrespective of the actual amount of risk they are subjecting themselves to). Should the federal government mandate that automobiles feel more rickety at high speeds? These mandates could be encoded as limits on how good the shock absorbers or window seals are allowed to be. (I am pretty sure I drive more slowly in older cars, especially if it sounds like there are gale-force winds outside and it feels like pieces of the car are going to fall off.)

On the face of it, this seems like a silly idea. Which is why it's so unsettling, to me, to confront the possibility that, because risk compensation partially neuters the effect of real safety devices, that this just might actually be an effective (and cost-effective) way of saving lives.

Disclaimer: It's not clear what the socially optimal amount of speeding is, and whether it is more or less than the status quo (and therefore, whether such measures are even desirable from an economic standpoint). It's not clear how much utility people directly derive from a smooth ride and the feeling of security. It's not clear to what extent people would become acclimated to such tricks and resume their fast-driving ways. It's not clear whether you can effectively limit the subjective feeling of safety by regulating a small number of objectively measurable parameters of a car's design. In any case, clearly Phil forgot to take his medication this morning.

Iron Man 2

2010-07-17T14:53:00.000-07:00

Iron Man 2 is a decent and fairly entertaining summer movie. I enjoyed it more than the first one, actually.

However, the first question on my mind after watching the movie was, how much did Oracle pay for its product placement? A good chunk of the movie plays like an Oracle ad.

Stories of Your Life and Others

2010-07-17T14:44:00.000-07:00

Stories of Your Life and Others is a collection of short stories by Ted Chiang. Each one has a single simple "twist" as its premise and the author explores the consequences implied by that idea. Overall a very enjoyable read.

There is a huge variety among the stories. Some have religious rather than scientific/futuristic overtones (I found those a bit boring).

I particularly enjoyed two of the stories, "Story of Your Life" and "Liking What You See: A Documentary".

In "Story of Your Life," a scientist learns an alien language that changes the way she views the world. This story is a rare combination of a cute technical premise, a moving human story, and wonderful writing that really shows form in the service of message.

"Liking What You See: A Documentary" examines how society responds to the widespread availability of a simple (and reversible) medical procedure that renders people unable to perceive human beauty. The fact that the characters are so instantly recognizable (despite the differences between the world of the story and our present world) shows how people's dreams, fears, and insecurities just don't change. The story is also quite chilling, perhaps because I got the distinct sense that it does not quite sound as outlandish now as when it was written (just 8 or so years ago).

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

2010-07-17T14:07:00.000-07:00

I think of Nudge (by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein) as the "applied" version of Predictably Irrational. While Predictably Irrational was primarily about what makes people tick and about various classes of cognitive failures, Nudge goes more in depth into how we can design policies and institutions that counteract some of those those biases (something PI touches on, but only briefly). In that way the two books are quite complementary.

The core of the book focuses on case studies of policies and experiments in a few areas, for example, retirement planning, credit, and healthcare plans. Some of the important takeaways for me:

In order for people to make good decisions, they need relevant data about the alternatives, e.g. "What is the present discounted cost of this mortgage?"
People quickly learn how to make good decisions when they get accurate and timely feedback on recent decisions. (Unfortunately, none of life's big choices fit that criterion.)
Institutional planners can make a huge impact by choosing good defaults.

The authors advocate a theory of libertarian paternalism, which I agree with to an extent. They make the case that good institutional design can ameliorate many situations where our innate biases are especially likely to be self-destructive. But the ideas proposed in the last few chapters of Nudge (example topics: privatizing marriage, allowing patients to sign away the right to sue for malpractice) do not seem to have this property at all. Instead they seem to have sprouted from a general desire for libertarian policies. Which is not to say they are bad ideas (I think many of them are good, in fact), but I don't think they add much to the core thesis of Nudge.

In general the book is well-written and easy to digest. Recommended.

Supercomputer plays Jeopardy! as well as top humans

2010-07-11T14:02:00.000-07:00

As reported in the New York Times, IBM's research division has been hard at work creating Watson, a machine that answers questions. Their tech demo is getting Watson to play Jeopardy! against previous Jeopardy! contestants:

Over the rest of the day, Watson went on a tear, winning four of six games. It displayed remarkable facility with cultural trivia ("This action flick starring Roy Scheider in a high-tech police helicopter was also briefly a TV series" — "What is 'Blue Thunder'?"), science ("The greyhound originated more than 5,000 years ago in this African country, where it was used to hunt gazelles" — "What is Egypt?") and sophisticated wordplay ("Classic candy bar that's a female Supreme Court justice" — "What is Baby Ruth Ginsburg?").

By the end of the day, the seven human contestants were impressed, and even slightly unnerved, by Watson. Several made references to Skynet, the computer system in the "Terminator" movies that achieves consciousness and decides humanity should be destroyed.

The Watson team has taken an approach that is complementary to what Wolfram Alpha has done, relying on NLP to parse source documents rather than using explicitly curated data. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Watson is being productionized and IBM is considering targeting this technology at niche applications as well, e.g. medical decision making. There are already moments when I feel as if the phone in my pocket (and access to Google, Wikipedia, etc.) is augmenting my intelligence and helping me to make better decisions. I can scarcely imagine how life will change when everyone has access to a Watson all the time.

Bad Hemingway Imitation

2010-07-11T13:27:00.000-07:00

I must have seen this in a fortune dozens or hundreds of times, but it still makes me laugh every time, so I wanted to share it with you.

Peter Applebome wrote the following winning entry in the 1989(?) International Imitation Hemingway Competition. The last time I read any Hemingway was nearly a decade ago, and it's still a bit disquieting for me to read this.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a condo in North Dallas that looked across the tollway to the discos and honky-tonks of the Rue St. Bubba. We were young and our happiness dazzled us with its strength. But there was a terrible betrayal that lay within me like a Merle Haggard song at a French restaurant.

"The Great Landry says the Cowboys will be back," said the girl.

"Then it must be so," I said, though I knew it was a lie.

"When football season comes, then it will be cold. Like Switzerland. But not now. The cold will come later.

"Pass the Doritos," I said, and her eyes shone like the stars over Amarillo.

I could not tell the girl about the woman of the tollway, of her milk white BMW and her Jordache smile. There had been a fight. I had punched her boyfriend, who fought the mechanical bulls. Everyone told him, "You ride the bull, senor. You do not fight it." But he was lean and tough like a bad rib-eye and he fought the bull. And then he fought me. And when we finished there were no winners, just men doing what men must do. And the pain was washed away, but the image of the woman stayed with me like a blessing and like a curse. [...]

Read the whole thing for the excellent punchline.

Back from vacation

2010-07-08T02:33:00.000-07:00

Switchbacks leading to Grimsel and Furka passes — right and left, resp. (map)

I just returned from a 3-week cycle tour of the German-speaking Alps, which was a total blast. Selected photos are available on my trip blog. More pictures and a full trip report are coming soon, but it will take me some time to sift through the full suite of 2400+ photos from the trip.

For the time being, I'm grateful for cotton clothes, not having to do my laundry every day, getting to sleep in my own bed, and not getting hungry every two hours.

O Brave New World

2010-05-31T21:40:00.000-07:00

Two articles caught my eye recently. I paraphrase them briefly here, but read the linked articles if you haven't heard about this in the news already.

Oxytocin, when administered via nose spray, increased empathy in subjects in a study published in The Journal of Neuroscience. Discoblog has an interpretation of the findings.
Magnets can interfere with moral judgments, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation changed the way participants reacted to stories designed to provoke moral reactions about guilt or innocence. NPR has a summary.

You can probably, without thinking too hard, come up with half a dozen ways in which these techniques could be misused for nefarious purposes. The reported findings only represent "proof of concept," but I believe it's only a matter of time before these or similar techniques are commonly applied to unwilling subjects.

I, for one, was not really surprised to learn that scientists are getting closer to identifying a neurological/biochemical basis for relatively high-level mental functions. What's so amazing to me is the relative subtlety of these techniques. Time was when you had to jab someone in the arm or put something in their drink or apply blunt head trauma in order to compromise their mental faculties, and even then only you could only manipulate them in a very coarse-grained way (see, e.g. sodium pentothal). I am very worried that in twenty years you'll have to check under the tables for aerosolizers and neural stimulation devices every time you walk into a corporate board room or a courtroom or a car dealership.

How not to misinterpret statistics

2010-05-16T20:44:00.000-07:00

ScienceNews has an article by Tom Siegfried, titled "Odds Are, It's Wrong". Siegfried presents a pretty good analysis of a few common errors in statistics (just be sure to skip over the overdramatic introduction). The most major of these, in my mind, is misunderstanding the meaning of statistical significance.

If you've forgotten everything you learned in your last statistics class and are a bit hazy about what the difference is between these two statements,

Experimental data yielded a p-value of 0.03.

With 97% certainty, the observed difference between the groups was real (and not due to chance).

...then this article may help.

Blacklists

2010-05-09T23:25:00.000-07:00

From Sacramento Credit Union's FAQ:

Why are the Security Questions used?

The first time you login and enroll in Protection Plus, you will be asked to enter five Security Questions and corresponding answers. The Security Questions are used if you do not want to register the computer you are currently using. With the Security Questions, we can make sure it is you logging in when you use different computers, such as, a internet bar computer. The answers to your Security Questions are case sensitive and cannot contain special characters like an apostrophe, or the words "insert," "delete," "drop," "update," "null," or "select."

Why can't I use certain words like "drop" as part of my Security Question answers?

There are certain words used by hackers to try to gain access to systems and manipulate data; therefore, the following words are restricted: "select," "delete," "update," "insert," "drop" and "null".

I suppose that superficially this explanation is reassuring, but what it suggests about the underlying implementation is both saddening and terrifying.

(Blacklisting is often the wrong approach.)

Rush Hour is PSPACE-complete

2010-05-04T23:10:00.000-07:00

A friend got me playing the Traffic Jam game for Android, which is a clone of the children's game Rush Hour:

The object is to move the cars around so that the yellow car can exit the board; each car may move vertically or horizontally but not both.

I was amused (though not totally surprised) to learn that when one considers the generalization of this game to larger boards, it is NP-hard and PSPACE-complete to decide whether a configuration is solvable or not. Flake and Baum, in a 2002 paper (subtitle: "Why you should generously tip parking lot attendants"), prove this by showing how to emulate certain classes of digital circuitry in Rush Hour. This paper is worth a look even if you are only inclined to glance at the pictures of the constructions. The authors built freaking digital logic out of cars.

As with many good games, it seems there is more to Rush Hour than meets the eye.

Logicomix

2010-04-21T01:58:00.000-07:00

Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou is a beautiful graphic novel about math history.

Yes, you read that correctly. Comic book about math.

The story centers around Bertrand Russell's experiences around the turn of the last century, as he and other thinkers tried to formalize all of mathematics— to identify a self-consistent foundation of axioms on top of which all of the rest of mathematics could be derived.

Frege, Hilbert, Wittgenstein, Gödel, and other famous names make appearances in the book. I found the auxiliary characters to be somewhat unmemorable, and the retelling of their stories has been greatly subject to poetic license anyway. What I enjoyed about this book is the fact that it painted such a vivid picture of the early 20th century mathematical zeitgeist. (The graphic novel is an excellent medium for this.) Hilbert and others had great optimism that mathematics could be formalized in such a way that it was consistent, complete, and decidable. In such a world, every well-defined statement about mathematics could be decided one way or the other in a mechanical way. That idea, and its natural extensions— that there could be an arbiter of truth for all factual statements, or even moral statements— were tantalizing to many. (Too tantalizing, apparently, as many of the mathematicians working on this problem really went unhinged.)

Yet, that hope was smashed when Kurt Gödel published his incompleteness theorems, in which he showed, among other things, that there would always be statements that could never be resolved (either proven, or their logical negations proven) within arithmetic or any extension of it. These fundamental limitations on the power of mathematics came as a shock to many. Von Neumann reportedly said, "it's all over," when he learned of Gödel's result. It was the death of a long-standing dream.

The authors manage to tell this whole story with a minimum of jargon, and they even turn the depressing conclusion around with a cute moral. All told this is no small feat.

Logicomix is not a math textbook but a drama. It has limited depth (justifiably so). But it's a neat idea and well executed. It is a worthwhile read (especially considering how short it is).

People who are not in our league IV

2010-04-20T20:54:00.000-07:00

Scott Smider of Cambridge, MA:

Cambridge's Scott Smider successfully completed the 26.2-mile Boston Marathon four times consecutively in two days, all to raise more than $10,000 for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in memory of his sister-in-law Elizabeth, who died from breast cancer Christmas Eve 2008 at age 41.

For those of you keeping score at home, Smider ran 104.8 miles. Astounding.

Source: Boston Herald

Limericks about limericks

2010-04-15T22:41:00.000-07:00

I found these meta-limericks amusing:

There once was a man from the stix,
Who liked to write limerics.
But he failed at the sport,
Because he wrote them too short.

There once was a lady from Crewe
Whose limerics went to line two.

There once was a man from Verdun.

Source: rec.humor.funny archives (includes a few more)

Google shows hotline number for suicide-related queries

2010-04-12T23:28:00.000-07:00

The week before last, Google started serving in its search results, above some queries related to suicide (such as [suicide] and [suicidal thoughts]), the number of a suicide prevention hotline:

This special result appears above the usual search results.

Hopefully this will reach some people to give them some help when they need it the most.

This is one of the more striking examples of one of the signs of our times: that for an increasing number of matters, people can (and do) confide in a computer things they would not share with a significant other, parent, sibling, lawyer, doctor, or clergy-person.

Source: New York Times

Groundhog Day; Shutter Island; True Lies

2010-04-12T23:07:00.000-07:00

Groundhog Day

Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, an obnoxious weatherman who is forced to relive the same day over and over again. It's a cute concept. The kernel of the movie is the story of how Connors redeems himself through introspection and self-improvement. However, I didn't like the execution: the story seemed to stray too far at times into random territory. Connors is confused, then suicidal, then sleazy, then abusive, then persistent, etc. It was just too much for me. The film is still worth watching once, if for no other reason than because the story has become a part of the American cultural lexicon.

Don't forget to read the economists' take: The Economics of Groundhog Day. In a nutshell: "In economic terms the final reliving of the day constitutes what economists refer to as a perfectly competitive equilibrium based on perfect information."

Shutter Island

The trailer makes this look like a horror movie, but it's actually a thriller/mystery. (Good thing, too; I hate horror movies.) Leonardo DiCaprio plays a federal agent sent to the titular island, which houses a mental hospital, in order to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Shutter Island is entertaining throughout, and a good mix of mystery, drama, suspense, and some hauntingly beautiful cinematography. I liked the interplay between Leonardo DiCaprio's character and the two eerie doctors (Ben Kingsley and Max Von Sydow). This movie comes recommended.

People seem to have mixed feelings about the twist ending. It's no The Sixth Sense, but I thought it worked well. (I didn't feel cheated, as I did at the end of, say, Atonement.)

One complaint though, about the soundtrack: enough with the damned string section already!

True Lies

I started enjoying this movie a lot more once I realized it was not an action movie but an action comedy. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a secret agent who hides his true job from his wife (his cover is a boring computer salesman). His marital problems are the source of much comedy.

In its overall setup it's very similar to a Bond movie (and with an FX budget to match, apparently), except that True Lies doesn't take itself as seriously.

A couple of things stand out for me. A few of the characters, including a used-car salesman who pretends to be a spy in order to attract women, are exceedingly pathetic. And the setup behind one scene, in which Helen (the wife of Schwarzenegger's character, played by Jamie Lee Curtis) goes on an undercover mission, is rather disturbing. There were a few parts that made me rather uncomfortable, and I loved those in an oddly cathartic way.

Math column by Steven Strogatz

2010-04-05T22:20:00.000-07:00

Author and Cornell professor Steven Strogatz has a new weekly column in the New York Times, in which he tries to illuminate various concepts in mathematics and explain their significance and applications.

My favorites so far include the columns on complex numbers and limits.

I think most people (whether or not they are afraid of math) will find at least a few interesting tidbits. It's good to see this kind of mathematical exposition in a popular venue.

PSA for word nerds

2010-03-29T23:25:00.000-07:00

One of the perks available to cardholders of the San Francisco Public Library is online access to that ultimate lexicon, the Oxford English Dictionary.

You do not need to be a resident of San Francisco to obtain a library card, though I think you do need to be a resident of California and you need to visit a branch in person.

Pigeon Point

2010-03-17T23:32:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I went on a trip to Pigeon Point with Piaw and others. We biked from the valley to the coast, staying in the Pigeon Point Lighthouse Hostel for a night. The scenery was gorgeous and we couldn't have asked for better weather. In all I traveled about 110mi.

(More details about the trip, and links to photos, can be found on Piaw's trip report.)

I've been finding biking to be quite a meditative experience. Whether I'm climbing or descending I find it's difficult to think about anything but the present. Getting into the proper rhythm really helps to clear the mind.

By the way, if you live in the Bay Area and have never stayed at the lighthouse, the hot tub overlooking the ocean is simply transcendent.

Ominous Nexus One ad placement

2010-03-07T03:15:00.000-08:00

This article from The Onion may have had the most fortuitous (or unfortunate, I haven't decided which) ad selection I've ever seen.

Cue the dramatic music. Nexus One: It kills background noise. For good.

World Builder

2010-02-28T14:27:00.001-08:00

A beautiful and very neat short film by Bruce Branit. (It has stuff that's reminiscent of the Minority Report computer interfaces—except cooler.)

(Via Terence Tao's Google Buzz, which is, incidentally, a fantastic mixture of relatively accessible math blurbs and stuff like this video.)

Artist's rendering of Emacs session

2010-02-19T21:29:00.000-08:00

Piaw Na and I were recently granted US Patent 7,613,693 for techniques we implemented in gtags.

The thing about this matter that astonishes me the most is the fact that, for the illustrations in the application, some lawyer or paralegal took the Emacs screenshots we provided and painstakingly replicated them in black and white line art, right down to the squiggly Emacs logo:

Whoever you are, I salute you.

Five-S

2010-02-19T21:24:00.000-08:00

NPR's All Things Considered had a short feature on Matt LeBlanc, who is an "efficiency expert" at a global shipping company.

LeBlanc visits a site for a few days or weeks, watches the workflow there, and gives recommendations:

"We [...] move a lot of printers," he said. "I'm sure you guys have printers in your office ... have you ever thought about why that printer is there, and if it makes sense for it to be there?" Over the course of a career, you might walk miles back and forth.

And LeBlanc says he can hardly help but apply efficiency principles to his private life:

"There is a thing called 'five-s': it's sort, straighten, standardize, sanitize and sustain," he said. "I five-s my toiletries in the morning."

How very kaizen (though I'm sure everyone knows someone just like that). I find something compelling in the idea of rethinking the things that most people are content to leave unchanged for their entire lives.

Static analysis: a case study of Coverity

2010-02-15T22:35:00.000-08:00

The Communications of the ACM has a long but interesting article about the experiences of the Coverity team and the development of the Coverity Static Analysis product.

(The article has lots of war stories. I enjoyed reading it.)

There are many interesting technical hurdles the Coverity team has had to deal with (e.g. standards vs. reality in language implementations; integrating into complicated and established build systems) in order to make Coverity Static Analysis find as many bugs as possible in user code. But the Coverity team also recognized that in order to make a sale or keep a customer, the output of Coverity Static Analysis must be simple, consistent, and easy to understand— objectives that are often at odds with the goal of finding as many bugs as possible.

For example, one point of tension is that every analysis that identifies a bug has to be able to explain to the user the exact circumstances under which that bug could manifest itself, and

a not-understood bug report is commonly labeled a false positive, rather than spurring the programmer to delve deeper. The result? We have completely abandoned some analyses that might generate difficult-to-understand reports.

Finished a half century

2010-02-15T22:14:00.000-08:00

I went biking today and completed my first half century— 52 miles and about 4h30m in motion. (I didn't leave the house planning to ride that much, but it just sort of happened.)

The weather was perfect.

I'm tired but I'm full of endorphins. I haven't felt this great in a while.

2009 in Review (photo collage edition)

2010-02-14T16:28:00.000-08:00

2009 was a good year. Here's to a great 2010!

Work is going well; there's hardly a day that goes by where I don't learn something new. And not being in school anymore, I have more time to work on pet projects, socialize, go on outings, travel, read, and enjoy the outdoors. Life has been pretty good.

Some photo highlights from the past year:

50 years since Greensboro

2010-02-03T21:01:00.000-08:00

Photo credit: Mark Pellegrini, CC-BY-SA-2.5

It seems scarcely possible that it was just fifty years ago, on 1 February 1960, that four black students in Greensboro, N.C. sparked a sea change in civil rights by quietly sitting down at a segregated lunch counter:

The students — Ezell Blair Jr. (later Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil — were not served that day because they were black. Woolworth’s was abiding by the local custom of only serving whites. [...]

Word spread throughout the campus of what they had done at the lunch counter and what had happened. By the following day, more than 20 students appeared at the lunch counter ready to sit in and protest. Soon, crowds of students were protesting at the stores regularly. [...]

By August 1960, six months after the initial Greensboro sit-in, lunch counters throughout the South announced that they were now integrated. [progressive.org]

Amazing.

Movies and books, second half of 2009

2010-01-16T23:30:00.000-08:00

Here's an index of books I read in the second half of 2009:

My favorites were Moneyball and Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

And movies:

My favorites were Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, L.A. Confidential, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Bike Fitting

2010-01-16T23:18:00.000-08:00

For about ten years before I got a new road bike last spring, I'd been riding around on a crummy $100 mountain bike from Costco.

For Nondenominational Winter Holiday my girlfriend bought me a bike consultation at Shaw's Lightweight Cycles. I had my riding posture/technique evaluated and some small adjustments made to my bike. I would almost compare the experience to being taught to ride a bicycle anew. It seems to be time and money well spent.

Love is blind

2010-01-15T21:19:00.000-08:00

Comic from Optipess, by Kristian Nygård.

Persepolis; Avatar

2010-01-09T00:38:00.000-08:00

These movie mentions should be back-dated to late December.

Persepolis is a film adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel of the same name, about the author's coming of age during the Iranian Revolution. Though it was a fairly faithful adaptation in style and content, I didn't find the experience to be quite as compelling as that of the book. Perhaps it's just harder to digest the same thing in movie format. Still, Persepolis is quite entertaining and touching.

Avatar is a sight to behold. The world that Cameron has created is gorgeous. (Though I have to admit I couldn't help but feel reminded of the Lord of the Rings movies, especially towards the end.) The story, though, is unremarkable and the characters are one-dimensional. However, the scientist characters are not cast from the usual stereotypes, which is refreshing.

Avatar is an exemplary action movie. James Cameron knows how to put a movie together.

I watched it in 3D—my first 3D movie—and thought that part was good but not great: many of the scenes seemed rather flat, I kept noticing strange and minor artifacts, and the way the focus moves around is a bit disorienting.

(For pure visual stimulation I still recommend Speed Racer.)

Now with twice as many 0's and 1's

2009-12-28T19:01:00.000-08:00

New York Times, Code That Protects Most Cellphone Calls Is Divulged:

The GSM algorithm, technically known as the A5/1 privacy algorithm, is a binary code — which is made exclusively of 0's and 1's — that has kept digital phone conversations private since the GSM standard was adopted in 1988.

But the A5/1 algorithm is a 64-bit binary code, the modern standard at the time it was developed, but simpler than the 128-bit codes used today to encrypt calls on third-generation networks. The new codes have twice as many 0's and 1's.

That last statement, while technically true, is remarkably vacuous—even when compared to other sentences in the same article. To an uninitiated reader it gives no hint as to the relative complexity of the two codes (a 128-bit code being 18 billion billion times harder to guess in the absence of any other vulnerabilities).

2010

2009-12-21T20:29:00.000-08:00

For as long as I've been alive, 2010 has been synonymous with "way in the future." It is a little jarring to realize that it is only two weeks away.

As a kid, one of my favorite movies was Back to the Future II, where Marty McFly traveled in time to the year 2015. That doesn't seem all that far away anymore either. Where are our hoverboards?

The power of incentives (in the wireless industry)

2009-12-09T21:12:00.000-08:00

As someone who took a couple of economics classes (and knows just enough to be dangerous), I find AT&T's continued network troubles to be quite puzzling.

[AT&T] has been criticized by owners of the [iPhone] for delayed text and voice messages, sluggish download speeds and other network problems.

[President and CEO for AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets Ralph] de la Vega cited the heaviest data users, saying that 40 percent of AT&T’s data traffic came from just 3 percent of its smartphone customers.

But he emphasized that the company would first focus on educating consumers about their data consumption in the hope that doing so would encourage them to cut back, even though they are paying for unlimited data use.

(New York Times, "AT&T to Urge Customers to Use Less Wireless Data")

I laughed out loud when I read the headline. AT&T thinks that educating users will get them to consume less data, even if it gives them no incentive to do so. I think this is about as likely to work as encouraging people to emit less carbon while giving them no incentive to do so. The article does say AT&T might be considering a non-constant pricing plan; I hope they realize this is a really good idea, soon.

The unlimited data plan is untenable with today's technology. When you, as a user, actually try and take advantage of your "unlimited" data plan, not only are you limited by the mediocrity of the network, you are making other users very, very sad by congesting the network! Offering unlimited plans only makes sense when you have actually built out sufficient capacity to cover the demand. That's why unlimited long distance calls (on both landlines and cell phones) are a good idea (now), and unlimited data plans aren't.

Carriers and consumers claim to prefer unlimited data plans because they're simple. But that simplicity comes at a huge cost to quality, which I bet many people would be willing to pay some amount to avoid.

Personally, I would welcome pay-per-byte pricing to the wireless industry (though I'm not holding my breath). By making people pay an amount commensurate with their impact on other users, it would avert the tragedy of the commons that is AT&T's network today.

Perhaps more importantly, pay-per-byte also provides the right incentives on the network provider's end. When you pay by the byte, your provider has an incentive to build out capacity, because they want to deliver those bytes to you as fast as possible, so they can free up their resources, so they can push you more bytes, which makes them even more money. Under an unlimited pricing structure, the provider has every incentive to drag their feet. Building out capacity costs them money now, but doing nothing at all doesn't cost them anything until your contract expires.

The story of Sage

2009-12-07T19:12:00.000-08:00

William Stein has written a personal account of how he ended up writing Sage (the free software computer algebra system).

For many years, Stein worked on various bits and pieces of mathematical software to satisfy his own research needs. But with just him and a couple of other people working on it, they kept very low expectations for what would eventually become Sage. After all, how could a small group of people match the work of the thousands of engineers and mathematicians who were hired by the proprietary math software companies?

Stein only decided that Sage had to succeed when his license for Magma was terminated, and he realized (1) how insane it was to be dependent on proprietary secrets for math research and (2) how much leverage proprietary software makers had over him and his career:

Isn't it weird that mathematics can be done that way? In 2004, almost everybody in the world doing serious computations with elliptic curves, modular forms, etc., were using Magma. Magma was the industry standard, Magma had won for the forseable future. David Kohel and I were a big reason why. And yet what kind of mathematics is it, when much of my work fundamentally depends on a bunch of secret algorithms? That's just insane. [...]

Anyway, John Cannon's email [...] seriously scared me. I wasn't in any way confident that Sage would ever replace Magma for my work and teaching, and I had big plans involving interactive mathematical web pages. These plans were temporarily on hold as I was drawn into Sage. But there were still there. What John did with that email is tell me, in no uncertain terms, that if I was going to create those interactive mathematical web pages, they couldn't depend on Magma. "This is to formally advise you that your permission to run a general-purpose calculator based on Magma ends." I was scared. It was also the first time I saw just how much power John Cannon had over my life and over my dreams. That email was sent on a whim. I hadn't got any official permission to run that Magma calculator for a specific amount of time (just open ended permission). What John made crystal clear to me was that he could destroy my entire longterm plans on a whim. I looked around for other options, and there just weren't any. Sage had to succeed. But still I was certain that it just wasn't humanly possible, given that I had to do almost all the work, with limited funding and time.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

2009-11-26T20:13:00.000-08:00

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is based on the memoir of the same name by Jean-Dominique Bauby. Formerly the editor of Elle, Bauby suffered a stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome, a condition in which he remained conscious but unable to speak or move anything but his left eye. He dictated his book by blinking. (His speech therapist would read the letters of the alphabet in decreasing order of frequency, and he would blink at the letter he wanted to use.)

The title is a reference to Bauby's corporeal imprisonment and to how he escapes from it with his vivid imagination. Director Julian Schnabel does a good job portraying the terror and frustration of Bauby's impotence (some riveting camerawork here, if you can believe that) as well as his fanciful daydreams.

Diving Bell is a moving story of mind over matter and the power of the human spirit. Bauby's condition arouses pity, yet the focus is not on that but on his humanity. We get a view into his wishes, vices, regrets, dreams, and memories. I appreciated the fact that Schnabel doesn't lionize Bauby or overdo the sentimentality. Bauby is a courageous but flawed man, and it is only his warts that make him recognizable as a real person to those of us who have been more fortunate.

Recommended.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T06:28:00.000-08:00

I hope you are having a good Thanksgiving and that you have much to be thankful for (yes, even if you not an American!).

Among my blessings I count my good health; good friends; my best friend; a wonderful family; a job where I feel I can advance not just innovation (i.e. novelty), but progress; and being able to enjoy life in general with few worries.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

2009-11-25T22:23:00.001-08:00

After reading Visual Explanations I was intrigued enough to pick up Tufte's classic, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Overall it is quite good. With numerous examples, Tufte shows when graphics and tables can be used to illuminate the truth, and he presents some pieces of a theory to govern their design. Tufte also calls out the use of misleading data graphics in newspapers, ads, corporate publications, and other sources.

Some takeaways:

Graphics are frequently considered a crutch to lean on when text is deemed boring; but, when used judiciously, they can actually present and reveal data in a much more information-dense and easily-retained manner than can text. To make effective graphics takes statistical training, not just artistic training.
Creating graphics with "integrity" is, in large part, making sure that the relative sizes perceived by the eye are commensurate with the relative sizes in the real data. Tufte displays examples of many tricks that people have used in order to make differences appear more or less significant than they are. And it's not just about how the data are drawn but also often about what data are drawn.

Tufte also presents some general design principles, including:

Use as little ink on the page as you can, within reason. Avoid redundancy and remove inessential elements.
Avoid busy-looking textures and other "chartjunk."
Arrays of small similar graphics ("small multiples") are an elegant way to present multivariate data.
Integrate graphics with the narrative text when possible.

I was struck by Tufte's lament that computer graphics often evoke the thought "Isn't it remarkable that the computer can be programmed to draw like that?" rather than "My, what interesting data." This seems to be no less true in 2009 than when it was written. Given Tufte's opinions about PowerPoint, I do wonder what he would say about Apple's Keynote. PowerPoint presentations are usually merely inane or unattractive; Keynote presentations, with their typical distorted 3-D charts, are often downright misleading.

While I thought most of Tufte's book was valuable, he occasionally appears to make dubious logical jumps and comparisons to prove his point:

He speaks of a 2.2 megapixel grayscale astronomical survey map being subdivided into "2,275,328 rectangles" as if it is equivalent to a table with as many entries. The eye can perceive macro- and micro-structure in a graphic but not every last detail with fidelity. Thus the effective content of the image is much smaller than 2,275,328 elements. Throughout, Tufte shows some odd fascination with numbers like these and seems to labor under the delusion that their exact magnitudes are meaningful.
Tufte does some rethinking of how box plots, axes, and other graphical elements might look. But he seems to be driven only by his maxim of "reduce ink." In his favorite box plot alternative the different components are barely distinguishable from each other. The simplicity of the resulting graphic does not nearly make up for the fact that the information therein is much less easily perceived.

Still, I recommend this book. Reading it is like flipping through a curated gallery of data graphics designs, many of them strikingly elegant. It is an easy read (I read it in one sitting), but as many of us have to marshal data to make an argument once in a while, we could use some advice on how to do so effectively.

Where The Wild Things Are

2009-11-25T17:48:00.000-08:00

I watched Where The Wild Things Are. I did not enjoy it very much. Max and the beasts are supposed to be a portrait of children, but I just found them to be alternately grating, self-absorbed, and depressing. And whatever worthwhile ideas there were in the film were just lost in a vast sea of inanity (beasts throwing rocks at each other, etc.). It just felt too long. I might have enjoyed a short (or a 48-page picture book) with the same content, though.

Tomato soup

2009-11-03T13:11:00.000-08:00

In 2005, Brian Wansink et al. administered a novel experiment to determine the effect of outside stimuli on satiation:

Wansink's research on bottomless bowls of creamy tomato soup (hidden tubes imperceptibly keep refilling them) won [a 2007 Ig Nobel prize] in the nutrition category. [...]

The research, published as a featured article in the journal Obesity Research in 2005, showed that people eating from soup bowls that don't empty ate 73 percent more soup than those eating from normal bowls, said Wansink.

(Source: Cornell University news)

When presented with a cornucopia of soup, most subjects were completely oblivious:

[We] brought 62 people in for a free soup lunch [...] we found that those with refillable bowls ate 73% more soup, but did not feel any more full [...] Only 2 individuals ever realized [what] was happening.

(Source: mindlesseating.org)

I always found this kind of incredible, the fact that a bottomless bowl of tomato soup could go unnoticed, until I realized:

Tomato soup is freakin' delicious. I am pretty sure I could have tomato soup at breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day this winter.

Visual Explanations

2009-11-01T00:53:00.000-07:00

Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations is a complement to his earlier works The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information (neither of which I have read).

Engineers like myself may benefit most from the first few chapters, in which Tufte presents case studies that demonstrate the importance of data representation in statistical graphics. Whether the graphics obscure or reveal cause/effect can mean the difference between life (as when John Snow identified tainted well water as the cause of the London cholera epidemic of 1854) and death (as when NASA made the catastrophic decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger in cold weather on 28 January 1986). Tufte calls attention to some important issues in data presentation, but I think his criticism of the NASA engineers is not really justifiable (hindsight being 20/20 and all).

Visual Explanations is ostensibly about showing cause and effect graphically, but there are many nuggets throughout that apply to informational graphics more generally. Tufte gives a suite of graphical "design patterns" that are good to keep in mind: eliminating unnecessary clutter, facilitating direct comparisons, using the right amount of contrast, and so on.

The later sections of the book have less specific practical advice but plenty of striking images. The last chapter focuses on the idea of a "visual confection" (Tufte's terminology, I believe)— an image, frequently fanciful, synthesized from smaller images or parts, that tells a coherent story. Perhaps the most poignant of these is the public safety message from The Washington Post, "Why is the Potomac River So Dangerous?", which was later reproduced on a metal sign next to the river.

One takeaway is the notion that a printed graphic is often much more illuminating than a photograph. A photograph can only show you what something looks like. But a cutaway, schematic, or other illustration can show you how something is, by virtue of calling attention to the important details, suppressing the unimportant ones, and indicating cause/effect or the passage of time. Illustrations are an effective and efficient way of conveying an idea directly to the mind's eye.

The book itself is an examplar of the strategies that Tufte advocates. Illustrations appear inline or near where they are referenced in the text. There are no awkward page breaks that require the reader to flip back and forth between an illustration and the text that describes it. The case studies are bite-sized and easy to digest.

Recommended, and an easy read.

This is one of those books that colors one's perception of the world. For example, I can't help but think that some Google Maps engineers took some of Tufte's advice to heart in their recent visual redesign. Many of the maps styles are now more harmonious and suppress unneeded detail and distractions.

Overcoming irrationality

2009-10-28T21:26:00.000-07:00

The editor of the British Psychological Society's Research Digest asked many leading research psychologists to write briefly about one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves. One of the more insightful contributions is from David Buss:

One nagging thing that I still don't understand about myself is why I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I'm acutely aware of these biases. One example is my failure at affective forecasting, such as believing that I will be happy for a long time after some accomplishment (e.g. publishing a new book), when in fact the happiness dissipates more quickly than anticipated. Another is succumbing to the male sexual overperception bias, misperceiving a woman's friendliness as sexual interest. A third is undue optimism about how quickly I can complete work projects, despite many years of experience in underestimating the time actually required. One would think that explicit knowledge of these well-documented psychological biases and years of experience with them would allow a person to cognitively override the biases. But they don't.

The limitations of human cognition are sobering, and sometimes saddening.

The Right Stuff

2009-10-28T21:08:00.000-07:00

"They Write the Right Stuff" (2007) is a Fast Company article about the methodology of the group that writes the on-board software for the space shuttle. The shuttle software has one of the lowest defect rates known of any large project, and it's all due to the process and the culture that surrounds its development. Some of the most interesting takeaways:

Specifications. People who work together on the shuttle software have to be absolutely sure that they are on the same page, that they agree about every aspect of what every part of the software will do. Before any code is written, the requirements for the on-board software are documented in excruciating detail (currently, 40,000 pages of specs for 420,000 lines of code). Compared to software in industry, the discipline needed here seems superhuman. You cannot dive in to coding until you understand precisely what needs to be done. There is no "let me build a prototype and see how it works;" no unnecessary hacks or flourishes in the code; no rock-star programmers.

Continuous improvement. Every time an error is discovered, the team doesn't just fix the error. They document the circumstances surrounding the bug and its discovery; identify how the development process allowed the bug to creep in, and amend it to prevent future occurrences; and look for latent errors that have the same source.

This process costs a lot of money, and it's not fast. But for the software that controls billions of dollars worth of equipment and (in part) determines whether astronauts live or die, it's probably worth it.

Newspaper articles on the web

2009-10-16T01:07:00.000-07:00

Some big newspapers are still not very good doing this whole "web site" thing. As someone who reads more blogs than newspapers, I am particularly jarred sometimes by their misuse of hyperlinks. Two examples:

The Wall Street Journal's Technology section featured an article about a Twitter campaign that brought attention to a gag order against the The Guardian (14 Oct 2009). The subject matter of this article is primarily online, and the article even references some specific resources on the web:

"Thanks to Twitter/all tweeters for fantastic support over past 16 hours! Great victory for free speech," Mr. Rusbridger wrote on his Twitter feed. Words tied to the case were among the most mentioned on Twitter Tuesday.

Even so, this article does not contain a single hyperlink.

The New York Times's "Bits" blog errs on the other side, having too many hyperlinks. They recently ran an article about the launch of Google Wave (29 Sep 2009). Unlike in the WSJ, there are useful hyperlinks to primary sources, such as blog posts. But the text is peppered with additional useless hyperlinks, like "Google" and "Microsoft" being linked to curated "More information about this company..." pages (example).

I find this practice borderline sleazy, and only a little bit better than those advertisements that show up in bubbles when you mouseover highlighted words on certain websites. Why? Because it violates the usual conventions between writer and reader. If words in a block of prose are hyperlinked, the target of the link is assumed to be relevant to the matter under discussion. (Paul Grice called this the Maxim of Relation.) A company history hardly contributes anything to my immediate understanding of the article's subject. When conventions like these are broken it makes it more difficult to identify, and extract information from, the real substantive links.

The solution? Put the links in a sidebar. Bullets under a heading such as "Companies mentioned in this article" would make the context and intent crystal clear.

L.A. Confidential; My Neighbor Totoro

2009-10-10T00:48:00.000-07:00

L.A. Confidential is a great crime drama. The period (1950's) atmosphere is cute and the screenplay is very good. What really makes the film is Guy Pearce's character. His political scheming is oddly compelling and, since he is sort of a nerd, I really wanted to root for him.

My Neighbor Totoro is supposed to be the iconic Miyazaki film, but I didn't love it. There were some good elements (the interplay between the children is adorable) but overall it seemed very disjointed and random at times. Of course, maybe I would have interpreted everything differently if I had known, at the time that I was watching it, that the film is an allegory in which the Totoro is the grim reaper...