Life is a Rabbit Pellet

Obama wins

2008-11-05T02:00:00.000-07:00

Lots of work to do today. Got some of it done. But not the part that involved coding. It was a bit hard to concentrate when history was being made. So I went to the gym... for the first time in twenty-three decades, I mean days. Decades is the other first time.

Just watching a rerun of the Ogletree interview on the Daily Show, referring to Lincoln and Obama as the "two skinny guys from Illinois who made a difference".

I was downtown Seattle after I got the penultimate bus from Redmond. There are lots of people cheering downtown, cars honking. There's a parade - still going on - around Pike Place Market. There's a small brass band around which a crowd has gathered, moving slowly down the street. Cops look on; I wonder who they voted for. The crowd is very racially mixed. Dancing and kissing - though it doesn't seem to be kissing strangers. Maybe that was earlier, with the initial excitement.

Has the GOP become the party of white people, like the conservative parties are in Europe? (Which brings up another question - when will a European country elect its first minority leader? And no, Benjamin Disraeli doesn't count. Or maybe he does. Not in the same way.)

You do realize Sarah Palin is going to come to DC in January as a Senator, taking over Ted Stevens' seat? And that she'll run in 2012? She might even show some of the bipartisanship she displays back in Juneau. And read a newspaper or news magazine. Probably not the Nation, but hopefully the New York Times - which had the best journalism in the whole election - their in-depth pieces were very good - if you think they're biased, you're just wrong.

Will Sarah - and people like her - realize that their definition of 'real America' is ... well, an illusion?

Which brings up another point - was 2004 the last time in a long time that there were two straight white men on a ticket?

And when are we going to get our first Chinese-American Muslim Lesbian president? When that happens, then things would really have changed.

Full credit to John McCain for not running a campaign that was as full of hate and fear as it would have been if Karl Rove or Prick Cheney had been in charge. Though I'll never quite understand why he thought Ayers was an issue worth pursuing. That was so easy for Barack to laugh off because it was so risible. He could have attacked Barack on breaking his promise to take public financing (an issue I'm rather worried about precedentwise) or dealing with Rezko (though Barack could then have brought up Keating) or being elitist (never mind that he grew up on food stamps) or an ivory tower academic (with enough street smarts to be a state senator).

The Palin pick - you do wonder what might have happened if he'd picked Liz Dole or Tim Pawlenty for vice. Someone who could bring out the base and still be able to put a coherent non-content-free sentence together. Palin in four years time will be different. Fortunately, Obama knows that.

Please Barack, don't go all (post-Clinton) Blair on us.

The Democrats are going to get the blame for the hard economic times in the next four years. But we would have given them a shot at fixing them. The Republicans would have absolutely no chance of turning things around since they have yet to realize Reaganomics is wrong. The Dems have at least a small chance.

New WWT release!

2008-10-29T12:38:00.000-06:00

The WorldWide Telescope got a new release today, as I report in my rarely-updated work blog. The most prominent features are a new 3D mode and animation in tours.

Would I lie to you?

2008-10-07T18:58:00.000-06:00

Discovered an excellent comedy show on the Beeb over the weekend. While it's still on youtube, have a gander at Episode Six from the first season of "Would I Lie To You?" Usually the most entertaining person to watch is the actor/comedian/writer David Mitchell, but here pianist/model/presenter/columnist/poshrichgal Tara Palmer-Tomkinson puts in a brilliant performance.

Contestants are alternately given stories to tell that are either true or false, and the other contestants must work out which.

Well, it's back

2008-09-14T00:11:00.000-06:00

Well... the aftermath of the breakup ... I'm not dating anyone again for a while. Just going to work - for myself - keep my head down, sort my stuff out, play more racketball, and write some papers and articles. And I'm not putting any further details on a public blog, so wipe that expectant drool of your grubby little chin ...

So... the power sharing deal in Zimbabwe... the Guardian reports that while it allows Bob (as Robert Mugabe is called in Zimbabwe) to get away with murder, it does potentially place some nails in the coffin of his political life.

To quote from the article by Chris McGreal

Crucially, the MDC is likely to get the finance portfolio because foreign donors will not want to hand money over to a Zanu-PF minister. It is the prospect of that money that unlocked the prospect of agreement. Without power for Tsvangirai there will be no foreign aid, and without hard currency Mugabe had no means of turning around an imploding economy.

The numbers are staggering. Inflation is running above 20 million per cent a year. Unemployment is 80 per cent. A quarter of the population has left to look for work in South Africa and Britain.

The central bank knocked ten zeros off the Zimbabwe dollar at the beginning of last month because shops and banks could not cope with calculations in the trillions. When it was launched on 1 August, the new dollar was Z$4 to the pound, but the black market immediately offered Z$25. Since then, the currency has crashed so fast that the black market rate is Z$13,000 to the pound. The new banknotes are worthless and the government does not have the means to print new money. Last week, it announced that it would legalise the use of US dollars and South African rand, although these are already the de facto currencies....

Meanwhile, a coalition government is likely to change the political equation for good. Power sharing worked well in smoothing the transition from white rule in post-apartheid South Africa, where a sunset clause meant there would not be an immediate wholesale purge of the former administration and those who served it.

That may be all the more important in Zimbabwe, where the deep loathing and suspicion between the two sides is personal, and Zanu-PF chiefs regard Tsvangirai with contempt for his lack of liberation struggle credentials.

Yet there are many in Zanu-PF who realise that if their party is to have a future it is without Mugabe as leader, and that crippling the coalition administration will do nothing to rebuild the party's fortunes. Throughout all of this, Tsvangirai will have to stay focused on getting to another election swiftly and with his credibility intact.

Other things... Hurricane Ike is really hitting Texas hard. This has affected work a tiny bit, since we needed permission from someone at NASA's Johnson Space Center to release some imagery, but obviously they have far more important matters to worry about. I hope they're alright. Admittedly, I also hope their data is backed up at remote locations.

I really, really, hate road bikes. Mountain bikes are comfortable. And boy do I like comfort.

Stuck at work on a Saturday night. At least I'm not the only one. There must be half a dozen other people in this building at the moment. I've seen a few since I'm sitting out in the middle of the atrium in a vain attempt to work in a civilized cafe-like location.

Fed wins!

2008-09-08T17:06:00.000-06:00

Tennisfanwise, I'm a happy rabbit pellet today.

Zimbabwean Cara Black won two US Open titles - Women's and Mixed Doubles. Ironically, she beat her women's doubles partner Liezel Huber in the mixed final. (Pic from New Zimbabwe article.)

Fed won a Grand Slam in 2008. (Screenshot from the live webcast on the US Open site.)

Andy Murray got to a Grand Slam Final. Go Scotland! Dunblane lives again!

The US Open site has a nice list of Top 50 Unexpected Moments at the 2008 tournament.

Expected: Jelena Jankovic tests patience of her opponents
Unexpected: Jankovic tests patience of her fans with interminable matches

Expected: A mom goes deep into the women's draw
Unexpected: That mom is not Lindsay Davenport but Sybille Bammer of Austria. (Yes, Bammer is the mum whose daughter "is always telling other people to be quiet because Mummy is concentrating.")

Expected:Multi-lingual man from tiny European nation storms through draw
Unexpected: Man is from Luxembourg.

Olympics

2008-08-16T15:57:00.003-06:00

I'm still celebrating Kirsty Coventry's victory in the 200m backstroke. I mean, three silvers is amazing, but a gold is... just a wee bit nicer, you know?

And it places Zimbabwe in the top half of the medal table. As I type this, we're 20th, ahead of Holland and Canada. For now.

Remember, before Kirsty, our only Olympic medal was in 1980, for women's hockey. No Zimbabwean male has yet won an Olympic medal.

Hmmm... let me see, that diver guy, Evan Stewart, came to mind.... time to search a bit online... ah, he has no Wikipedia entry (and therefore does not exist, even if he did get a gold or silver at the diving world championships at some point). But the pages on Zimbabwean performances at the Olympics show that he never reached a final. My searching also suggests that he now owns an import-export business back in Zim.

Right, enough of a pre-Kirsty Zimbabwe.

It's unlikely that the gold medal - her second - will lead the former Dominican Convent lass to millions of dollars in sponsorship deals, of course, in a market as small and shrinking as Zimbabwe's. But you have to admit, Zimbabwe (aka Coventryland) has the highest ratio of medals (gold or overall) to GDP (the biggest predictor of medal success) in the world.

Last time I heard, Jamaica's economy was ten times larger than Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe. Mai-wee! Future Zimbabwean history books will hold Thabo Mbeki with scorn, viewing him with the same amount of respect generally accorded by British textbooks to Neville Chamberlein.

Let's return to the Olympics.

And silver medals. Milorad Cavic has been getting some flack by the media of late, who have decided to cast him as a villain against Michael Phelps' heroic status. Cavic is the Serbian Californian who Phelps pipped out by 0.01 seconds for his seventh gold. Something about Cavic's people wanting the photo finish rechecked. That's ridiculous - in any close race, the result should always be rechecked. Anyway, see Cavic's blog. His attitude leaves me quite impressed, though his miniscule font size does not.

When I was a kid, I was a big fan of The Games. They were larger than life, and I read lots and lots of books about Olympic heroes. Now I don't care so much.

Why?

I'm not a kid any more (ignore the peanut gallery there), there are a lot more sources of entertainment clamouring for attention, or just plain ol' tempus fugit.

But maybe it's something else. Maybe it's the appreciation that Olympic gold medallists aren't superheroes. They're human. And gold is just a colour.

When I was young, I thought silver was the colour of failure, that the thousands of athletes who just compete in the Olympics and failed to get a medal were failures.

Boy, was I wrong.

Every single Olympic athlete (shooters excepted, maybe) is fitter than me. Everyone who makes a final is a hundred times fitter than I'll ever be. Some of them get medals. Some get bronze, some get silver, some get gold. That's irrelevant. The point is, I am in a place now - socioeconomicageographically - where I can meet an Olympic athlete. And they're human, and better humans than I am.

But that's the point - they are human, and not some alien species.

So I've lost the sense of awe I had for the Olympics, but I do have a better grasp of the humanity of its participants.

I'm still having trouble watching the gymnastics though. It's very painful. I seem to be preparing to wince all the time, since they seem so perilously close to falling. Now, beach volleyball (either gender), now, there's a sport that's pretty darn amazing.

More reasons to celebrate: my cultural home's done good :) Britain picked up nine medals in the last 24 hours. Oops, almost said England there. But Chris Hoy (a.k.a. Lord Wheelie) is a Scotty.

And my favourite tennis player - Roger Federer - won gold in doubles. And he was so happy about it! I think he would have been celebrating as much even if he hadn't had an annus horribilis, too.

Good Weekend

2008-03-10T01:41:00.000-06:00

Goddess! Friday's deadline finally came, and we managed to meet it (acceptably), though I did have to pull off an all-nighter to do so.

And then... then, glorious then! I could have my first weekend (San Fran interview excepted) in four weeks. Or maybe six weeks, I have trouble counting with numbers that high.

Yesterday, my murojas and I went to this local Indian buffet. While it was gratifying to not suffer Cairo Tummy afterwards, I don't think we'll be going there in a hurry. The biriyani had yellow and white rice and was kinda blocky. I should have just stuck to the naan and tikka masala. Then we went to return X's car to the rental, and then went down to Lake Sammasomething to see if we could push anyone into the water. But the only other people there were a couple who were being all lovey-dovey... we left then PDAing on their pier, and went over to another pier. I think they got the nicer pier, because ours had more duckshit than an aviary. Why people would want to pay sky high rents on the lakeshore for the opportunity to step on guano every day is beyond me. Not to mention the inclines as one approaches the lakes ... clearly there aren't any casual cyclists in that part of town.

Today, five of us (from four countries, none of which was from North or South America) went over to downtown Seattle.

We first stopped by Pike Place Chowder, which our token lass had discovered on Yelp (online Yellow Pages). I got a four-chowder sampler ($10ish) Bloody awesome clam and salmon chowder, though the vegan and Manhattan versions were forgettable. Next time I'll get the salmon chowder in a bread bowl. That's a bowl made of bread. And it doesn't get soggy quickly enough to be embarassing, so no worries on that score.

Then we headed off to the Seattle Art Museum, which I have to confess is a place that I'd not normally check out as my regular definition of culture involves a petri dish. But when I saw the car crash in the lobby... it didn't seem so bad...

These architectural weaknesses are amplified by Cai Guo-Qiang's large sculpture "Inopportune: Stage One" — nine white Fords suspended from the lobby's ceiling at crazy angles, bursting out in fireworks of LED lights. The white paint and metallic textures of the automobiles accentuate the weakest elements of Cloepfil's steely and bare architectural palette, while the flashing lights serve as tacky counterpoints to his resolutely unflashy design sense." - Seattle Times, May 07

X has promised me a picture of this. And here it is...

Thank you, X!

There were lots of paintings and several photographs, some of which were nice. The one I liked best was titled "Untitled" and I couldn't find it anywhere. I wrote down the name of the photographer ... but didn't even seem to do that right. I wrote "Jerry Uelmann" on my hand, but all I can find online is Jerry Uelsmann, and perhas that's who I should have written down. Two other pieces I liked were Mann und Maus, which has a guy suffering from chest pains (there's a humongous rodent sitting on him) and some giant flowing cloak made of metal dog tags.

Anyway, after that, we went to a coffee shop - had a coconut chai and discovered that Fishtail Lager is regrettably devoid of piscine ingredients ("You want to order *that*! That's disgusting! Make sure I get a taste.") Then we walked a few blocks to watch (for $3 each, thank you o great company card!) the IMAX version of The Spiderwick Chronicles ... which was alright, but had a wee too much Deux en Machina at the end. Wonder if anyone's compared the Griffin to the PoA one.

Oh goddess... the kid acted two roles. Holy crap. Hang on, I better go email the gang - we never suspected that!

Eight hours later, we got off the bus (Route 545) back home. A good day.

Another Day

2008-03-03T03:59:00.000-07:00

I flew back from San Francisco on Saturday night, and I will definitely be taking more Saturday night flights in future! It took just ten minutes from the time V & D dropped me off till I was through security... wow. Incidentally, there was this heavily muscled guy (and his young kid) just before me whom the TSA folks seemed to know. I asked them who he was after he left - turns out it was Chuck Liddell. The guy who told me added, "He's one of the best fighters in the world!" before giving me a *look*, like I didn't know who the hell Mr Muscle was. Which, of course, I didn't.

Hey, wasn't he a guest on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me recently?

Ah, the culture wars...

Anyway, X picked me up at the airport ... and we both headed straight for the office (on Sat night) and worked for the next four hours.

Australian Open

2008-01-25T19:46:00.000-07:00

I'm baaaack...

The final of the women's open at the OzOp (Australian Open) has just started. The local wags in the press have called it variously The Battle Of The Babes, Shrieker Versus Squeaker... I prefer Huntress Vs Bambi, like one of the female ESPN commentators just suggested. Maria's the Huntress - she's been so predatory this Open! However, I'm rooting for Bambi since I like blue dresses and am allergic to grunts. Besides, as the Wikipedia says :

Ivanović started her promising career at the age of 5, after memorizing the number of a local tennis clinic from an ad on TV... During her training she encountered the NATO bombings in 1999, where she would have to train in the morning to avoid them.... she would train in an abandoned swimming pool in the winter, as there were no other facilities. When she was 15, Ana spent four hours in the locker room crying after a defeat - the first that her new manager had watched - because she thought that Dan Holzmann was going to drop her because she felt that she wasn't good enough to become a professional tennis player. He has stayed as her manager to this day.

The image of a teen weeping in the locker room for hours for something because she didn't impress someone who was actually impressed... I can empathize with that.

Had a good game of ping pong today. It was my second ladder (i.e. intramural league) game this week at Microsoft. I've been on a losing streak of late - when will I buy a new paddle? - in my last match I lost despite saving seven match points. Today I was soon 2-0 down in sets. Then I began playing more defensively, and things became more even. Clawed back into the match... in the next two games we were never three points away from each other. Saved two match points in the fourth set. Then it was 2-2, and - oh shit! Huntress just broke Bambi! - and we reached deuce in the fifth set three times. I had the first match point, and lost it. Then he had match point, and I saved it. It happened again. Then I had match point, and bloody well kept it!

Yes!

Despite losing more individual points than I won (since his margins of victory in the first two sets were large and I always squeaked out my wins), the match was mine. (Mine! Mine! All mine!)

Moral: play defence more often. And just get the balls over. And push them more, so that they go into the net less.

I still am not playing very well, though. Will need more practice...

Tomorrow I'll have to take my cycle into the repair shop. The back break's jammed.

My god, it's 4-3 in the first set, and only now does Bambi win her first point off the Huntress' serve!

Of the four finalists in the Australian Open, the two Serbians and American (can Maria really be called Russian? The other Russian tennis players don't think so) are all twenty, while the only unseeded player - Frenchie Tsonga - is twenty two.

Trivia: Tsonga is the son of a chemistry teacher who played international handball for Congo. Amazing. I would have never guessed that chemists could produce tennis players.

Wow. Bambi just got a break point. And she loses it. Then Artemis gets advantage, and Bambi saves it! Now Artemis has just double faulted... another break point for Bambi! Oh my effing goddess... she double faulted again! From the Huntress never losing a point on her serve till this game, to a game with two (three maybe) double faults... wow!

Go Bambi!

Oops.

Bambi just hit a rocket. I think it ended up in the stands. No, it didn't bounce first.

What are the odds that Serbia will win both men and women's?

I watched Djoker beat FedEx last night. The match finished at three. I thought Novak had a good chance of making a good game, and figured I could watch the first three sets and still get to work in the morning at a reasonable hour. There was, of course, no chance that Fed would lose. And certainly not in straight sets. No-one has ever beaten Fed at a major since Mirnyi did so... five years ago.

I watched history being made.

I am great.

I am a delusional couch potato.

No, that's not true.

Armchair. Not couch.

It's 5-5 in the first set.

They just showed a picture of some Serbian fans with a large placard saying "Quiet Please Maria". I second that.

Unfortunately, Bambi's been broken again. Can she break back?

Er. No. First set to Artemis.

ICC: modern day Neros

2006-08-21T11:07:00.000-06:00

The cricket historians are going to love this, when they describe the ICC at the turn of the twenty-first century as the worst thing that ever happened to cricket.

First the ICC plays fiddle while Zimbabwe burns, and now they dare threaten Inzi with a eight match ban? I do hope they go through with it, though - that will give the other national cricket captains a chance to make a stand. Not that they ever would, of course, seeing as they have families to support and all, but it's nice to hope.

They will also scoff at the sheer ludicrousness of awarding the match to England instead of calling it off. Rules are supposed to help cricket, not drive it into oblivion faster than memories of tolerable Zimbabwean cricket.

Conspiracy Theory #245 says that the bookies, tiring of trying to bribe players, decided to focus their efforts on influencing officials instead. After all, it's hard to *play* cricket without a backbone, but administering it requires little more than the ability to sign signatures. Not even cerebral activity. Which is good, considering that the ICC is incapable of such.

Of course, Hair is just as much a victim as everyone else is. It's not his fault that the ICC didn't realize he was a outdated stick-in-the-mud who should have been gently nudged out of the way two years ago. Poor ickle Darry, he's just following the rules, like the uptight automaton he is.

Forcing the Aussie into early retirement will be too easy. Hairy scapegoats aside, isn't this why there are match referees and other ICC officials? To sweep up messes like this when rules clash with common sense? I guess they couldn't be bothered to take their broomsticks out of their arses to clean up. How come no-one's pointing even the littlest finger at Doctrove as well?

The ICC historians shouldn't have to wait long for the next debacle. Although I hear Ladbrokes has stopped taking bets on when that will be. They refuse to bet on certainties.

On the Road again...

2006-07-05T16:49:00.000-06:00

Amazing. Planes have been flying around for ages and the phrase of the subject line still refers to roads. Somehow, 'in the air again' doesn't quite cut it - it reminds me of a late friend of mine who was a human cannon. His name was Ken.

Like many in his profession, Ken died young. I went to the funeral. Many of his colleagues were there. For once, I was of above average height.

Also, there were fewer wheelchairs than I expected. When I asked about this, I was informed that most injuries did not require a hospital stay. Or future pension payments.

Human cannon life insurance premiums are surprising. The surprise isn't that they are high, but that they are available.

And that's about all I said when I was there. Most people didn't say much. They were too embarassed.

Not many human cannons die of freak injuries caused by slipping in the jacuzzi. Alone.

For the sake of privacy, Ken is an assumed name. And Human Cannonballing is an assumed profession. And any truth in what I've just written is also assumed - by the gullible.

Returning to reality.

My plane hasn't left yet. I can see it from where I'm sitting. Thank goodness blogger.com post creation works on cellphones.

The last week or two have been spent in a depression stupor. So has much of the last few years, come to think of it. I tried turning over a new leaf today. And to bury the old leaf. I tried to forgive myself. I tried to separate my past from my future self. I imagined I was a time traveller wh finds himself in someone else's body. That someone else is my past self.

That sounds silly, true. It avoids taking responsibility for my past actions, and hence invalidates the need for forgiveness. But it does not avoid taking the consequences for my past actions, and to look forward. For now, that's enough. I can work with this.

I thought that while on the bus to the airport today. It was a 45
minute ride but felt much longer.

I was taking the bus hours later than planned. (If I had planned, which I hadn't.) Fortunately, and as I was counted on, there was lots of space on the next flight on AirTran to Boston.

Back to Chicago

2006-06-11T02:52:00.000-06:00

I'm missing New York already. Correction, I'm missing Manhattan. I miss the people walking around, the subway, the smell, the unceasing activity (even if the cab:car ratio is very very high at 0300), the sheer humanity and energy of the place. I need to live there. Oh man, I so need to live there. Let the plotting begin.

The plane came in late yesterday, delayed about an hour by bad weather. We certainly had some rather interesting bumps early on in the flight; it occurred to me that I haven't written a will yet. Perhaps I'll make my sole heir the mad security guard who refused to let me in to the NYU accommodation at Brittany Hall I had paid for (and hence left me to spend the night on the streets the day before I presented my conference demo) because (a) he didnt like me, and/or (b) he didnt like the slip of ID paper the hostel had given me during the day. That way, he'll inherit all my debts.

Unfortunately, I'm slipping back into my old habits. It seems I can only work when surrounded by lots of people. I had so many plans yesterday, and ... now they're all gone. Mostly. Bloody hell. What did I do today? Answered some important business emails, touched base with the astroboss to update him on planetarium (and planetary) dome explorations in New York and Melbourne, discussed conferences to hit with my advisor, received a notice that one of the two papers we submitted to Interspeech was accepted (the twits accepted the stupid hacky paper and rejected the good scientific one), tested code (some email correspondence involved) for converting Chinese characters to Pinyin, did 50% of the work required for creating an alternative Mandarin corpus, did 20% of the work required in reviewing a journal paper. And laundry. Did 100% of that, assuming the machine worked right. I had meant to the c++ coding for more functional load calculations today, but couldn't. Didn't. Wouldnt.

I have two choices. Admit defeat and go home, or refuse (but remain defeated) and postpone the admission till dawn. Or finish reviewing that paper, and write a report on it, and then read after some sleep. I'll try that. That way, at least something will have been achieved.

Oh, and I did spend an hour booting a semi-deflated football around with Leandro. Surprisingly, I can dribble better than I can goalkeep. Or aim. And only for short periods. And only because I'm willing to run more than he is. (He's just recovered from a foot injury - he was on a crutch two months ago.)

The ball is, were it possible, even more deflated.

I got accused of being social during the conference. I really should be more careful; such talk is most damaging to my antisocial reputation.

(2 hours later...)

Finished writing 80% of the review. 700 words. Now I'll need to add some citations, and some stats that the authors ought to add to it (just a few greps, shouldnt take more than an hour) but that can wait for postshuteye.

Methinks more work needs to go into making human-readable captchas.

good day's work

2006-02-07T11:24:00.000-07:00

Since I got control of myself again, I've been doing quite a bit of work, thank goodness. I've been writing out all this analysis by syntheis stuff, and today I did something I didnt expect to do this quickly, namely test the simplest case. It's proving tough going too, so it's a good thing I'm doing it now.

In other news, it seems there's a stereo video camera available on campus - perhaps we can play with it. Turns out what I should have been googling for before was "stereo vision camera" instead of "stereo video camera".

Applied for a free mediawiki called prettyscience.

The Superbowl was yesterday. In unrelated and far more relevant news, my team lost. Chelsea 2 - Liverpool 0. Robbie didnt play - some problem with fitness was the claim.

Was forced to return the water cooler/heater last week. Now walking two blocks to fill my mug with tea at night.

long time no blog

2006-02-04T03:34:00.000-07:00

I've not really blogged about me the past two weeks, for good reasons - it's hard to blog about very interesting things, and very boring things, in that chronological order. For the record, shi(f)t happened.

I'm back now, and that feels good. Decided to start implementing a fast linear svm today - it's one of those rare situations that the author of the paper actually gives all details, even the minor ones, required to code something. Meanwhile, designing a general c++ library is hard.

I'm hoping to be able to get to Australia for EMNLP this year. I'd given up on going, as ACL's impossible to get into, but learnt yesterday that EMNLP is going to be there as well. I'll probably have to pay for most of my air fare though. At least accommodation will be free, though!

Looking forward to On-The-Media this week, since Xeni Jardin's cohosting it. She blogs on Boingboing.

Will have to get back to the thesis soon. Terrified that whatever I try won't work. And keep wanting to do other things, like the linear svm mentioned above. But that's important...

Did a lot of writing this week, including wikipedia entries on the Adler Astro wiki (I'll link to that when Mark sorts the permissions issues out) and my other hobby.

Ran three miles today, legs feel okay - for now. Ordered a new pair of running shoes too, so I can try running outside again. Found some New Balances cheap online ($35 including shipping) - they've worked for me before - hope I got the right size. I feel I can only run with my old tattered takkies on treadmills, and I'm tired of having to wait till 11 till I can get on one at the Ratner without having to wait.

It feels very strange to be in control of myself again. Is this what being normal feels like? How unusual. It's almost pleasant.

Notes on making a Doppler Mirror

2006-02-01T20:53:00.000-07:00

Mark SubbaRao and Geza Gyuk, friends of mine at Adler Planetarium Astronomy Department, want to create a museum exhibit where you can dance in front of a Doppler Mirror; it displays you, but with parts of you tinted red or blue depending on whether that part is moving away or towards the 'mirror'.

One solution to make such a mirror - really a large video screen - is to place two video cameras so that they capture a stereo sequence of the museum visitor moving, and then use an algorithm that takes a pair of stereo images like this :

Stereo photographs of blueberries, iron-containing pebbles on Mars taken by the Rover Opportunity in 2004

and produces a 'depth' image like this

In a depth image, the value at each pixel says how far the corresponding point is from the cameras. Now we have a sequence of depth images, and their differences form a sequence of 'velocity' images. The velocity images can be used to tint the original image from the left or right camera red or blue. Finally, the sequence of velocity images is displayed on the large monitor that acts as the 'Mirror'.

For a NQR (not quite right) example, the picture below shows some rocks from Mars colored red-blue according to how far they are from the camera. This is NQR because the Doppler effect tints by velocity, not distance like the photo below does - we should tint with velocity images, not depth images.

The depth image above was computed with the open source C++ implementation of this Belief Propagation Algorithm by Pedro Felzenswalb (U Chicago) and Daniel P. Huttenlocher (Cornell). Their code is easy to use - and we didnt have to do any parameter tuning to get the above to work (we'll probably need to do some to get it to work faster though). When you compile it, an executable called 'stereo' is produced and then you can say from the command line

          ./stereo leftimage rightimage depthimage

Where the image files are left/right/depthimage.pgm .

However, as we have already mentioned, this kind of algorithm is not the best way of doing it, as it does not use any temporal information to get depth.

Another solution is to use a single video camera and an Optical Flow algorithm. Such an algorithm takes a (non-stereo) video sequence as input and produces a velocity sequence. This is better for a museum environment since a single video camera is nice and cheap and low-maintenance - less calibration's needed!

While there's probably something called stereo optical flow, it may not be worth it for a Doppler Mirror.

Some links to follow up on:

Efficient Belief Propagation Algorithm by Felzenswalb and Huttenlocher (can be extended to optical flow)
this Matlab code from Abhijit Ogale for stereo-to-depth and optical-flow. Provides compiled Matlab files (DLLs) for Windows.
Sentience from Bob Mottram. Windows code made for Rodney the Robotic Plonker.

An interesting few days

2006-01-22T22:19:00.000-07:00

It's a funny thing - I never thought that job interviews were meant to be fun! But the ones I had on Friday (half a dozen 45-minute interviews) were quite enjoyable. It's not certain whether I'll get the job or not, but I had a good time trying to get it, so that's not so bad :)

I was able to work some things out on the plane that I'd been stuck on before, so that was really lekker. Tomorrow I'll write it out more and start designing a c++ program to try it. There are still some options that need to be sorted out though, and I'm going to have to think about them.

I also need to ask GL if max-margin stemml is worth implementing.

In unrelated events, this weekend was a good weekend. It's nice to have friends who can bang some sense into my thick skull :)

Talk done

2006-01-19T02:53:00.000-07:00

The past week has been spent on different things, including trying to come up with an iterative algorithm that alternately trains predictors of syllable strength and tone. And writing up a paper for Ndaona - which eventually didnt get submitted as there isnt any $ to go to Hong Kong. (Well, I got a free trip to ICML last year, so I shouldn't complain.)

Gave a talk at the Grad seminar today. Wane brought cake again. I'd promised to bring forks, but forgot. So we had to use the knives in the cupboard - lots of knives, no spoons/forks/sporks. Wane's really looking forward to remind me of this for the next N weeks. N is unlikely to be small.

The talk went reasonably well; perhaps it was of use to some people. It seemed to be of use to the DPers who came. The main thing it did was force me to do a lot of site preparation - I've put up four updates this week, three of them in the last 24 hours. And I made some movies, and found that making video podcasts was pretty easy.

My first vodcast

On a different note, BB just pointed me to Defective Yeti, which has a hilarious RPG up. You are Dubya, and this is your Neverending Story...

> STAY COURSE
The situation in Iraq deteriorates.

Some insurgents arrive.
There is a medium number of insurgents here.

> STAY COURSE
The situation in Iraq deteriorates.

An election year arrives.

> GO LEFT
Far-Right
Pat Buchanan is here.
Sean Hannity is here.

> GO LEFT
Compassionate Conservativism
You are right-of-center on the political spectrum.
John McCain is here.
Joseph Leiberman is here.

> GET REELECTED
You get reelected.

> GO RIGHT
Far-Right
Tom DeLay is here.
Michelle Malkin is here.

Crash

2006-01-11T23:09:00.000-07:00

News from the AAS : NASA's Beyond Einstein movie, which runs for about a quarter of an hour, has about 20 seconds of the animation we made for the SDSS.

Jake's show went on brilliantly. He's good. There were about twenty people in the audience, which was good enough to be a success. There weren't any of Wane's kolackies left afterwards, either.

It's hard to ride a unicycle. He said it took six weeks for him to learn. All I can tell you is that six minutes wasn't enough for me.

Managed to compress a 4.5 page paper to 4 pages, and get some feedback from a couple of people saying it would be a 50% chance of getting it in at ICML as they didn't normally accept papers for making pretty pictures. Looks like it's going to a different conference - and I'm not sure yet how I'm getting the dough to go.

Hun had this idea of going to see Crash, which happened to be playing this week on campus as part of MLK Week. For the first time since I've been here, and probably long before, the U of C is actually treating MLK day as a holiday, which is long overdue. Still, only about 20% of the 80-strong audience was U of C affiliated, Anyway, we (JL and RH and Hun and I) enjoyed Crash very much. But as our emotional input buffers were full, we didnt stay for the post-film discussion. Hun did, though. He must have a big buffer.

Wane unintentionally brought up the interesting philosophical point that rabbit pellets are used for both output and input. Well, you're reading this shit I'm writing, so that's quite a perspichowdoyouspellthatious observation on her part.

As pointless as a papal pe**s

2006-01-10T23:22:00.000-07:00

That lovely quote comes from my #2 favorite comedian, Andy Hamilton a.k.a. Satan. (Sue Perkins will be keeping the #1 slot for the foreseeable future.)

I appear to have volunteered myself for organizing the new graduate student cake talk series. Oh dear. And arm-twisting students to give talks hasn't proved too successful so far. On the other hand, we do have a speaker for the first week - and boy, is he good! In fact, he won't be just speaking - he'll be giving a whole show! Dunno how many cs grad students have juggled for a living before going to grad school, but TTI's got one of them, and he's giving tomorrow's talk.

Please welcome (drumroll), Mr Jake(ster) Abernathy!! [link]

Wane, bless her, volunteered to make kolackies. Life is good - at least this week. Yay! She and LC and I spent a pleasant hour or so (pr'ly mo) chatting about ... mousetraps. Yes, mousetraps were mentioned, can't remember why. And zebras. And fireplaces, and how they existed in Zimbabwe even though the temperature never went below freezing. And rules of American football (I couldn't figure out why there had to be only one quarterback) and rugby (Wane didnt know you weren't allowed to pass the ball forwards there) and soccer (LC said the circle in the middle only had one rule, at kickoff) and Australian football (two rules: 1 - it begins, 2 - it ends).

What else? Oh yeah, on the python-alligator battle reported last year. The moral of that story being "Don't bite off more than you can chew" (my staid description) or "Don't bite off anything that can chew through you" (Wane's far more picturesque version).

Anyway, after that I went back to writing the Ndaona paper - trying to edit five pages down to four. After five hours, I'm pretty close to there... and now I'm wondering if it's worth submitting to another conference where papers can be longer. Maybe I can do both, if I spin it differently enough.

Oh, and I talked with Gnaw about her thesis, and produced some Praat screenshots of Mandarin tone recognition problems, like the one above. I need some for my thesis too, as well.

BBC comedy awards...

2006-01-10T10:29:00.000-07:00

Listened to Tom Allen win the BBC New Comedy Awards (though I thought James Branch was funnier) on the BBC website. [Listen Here]. Tom's got very Blair-ish stocatto impression, and will probably go a long way. It's interesting that the two runners up are having midlife career changes!

A few days ago Liverpool beat Luton 5-3 in an extraordinary match, with Xabi Alonso scoring two rather long-range efforts. Unfortunately, the Beeb only provides a 3d replay of the shorter effort. The longer effort was from behind the halfway line - and, what's really amazing, was that a fan dreamed that he Alonso would do it! Surprisingly, the bookies only gave him 125-1 odds against it. Still, it did win him 25 grand. And that's sterling.

Good weekend...

2006-01-09T00:08:00.000-07:00

I really like the BBC Virtual Replay site. It's a nice way for the Beeb to get around paying royalties to Sky or whoever controls the TV rights for the Premiership, is well recreated, and is a lot more interesting than just watching videos. Now if we could just get table tennis matches recreated like this...

Anyway, Gero and I went to Lolo's and Ian's place yesterday with a Shona-speaking murungu grad student; we had a great time! And all the good food that Ian (and their neighbor Jo) made came out really well. We finished it off today. Our first attempt to duplicate their veggies failed, unfortunately. Gero says we should add more garlic and use olive oil instead of the cheap frying oil we tried.

Jo had several interesting stories, which certainly sound very plausible. Like the time he met Ronald Reagan... apparently his neighbor was the Gipper's secretary when he was head of the screen actor's guild, but couldn't move to Sacramento or Washington for future posts as her husband had cancer and was bedridden. But Ronnie would visit her when he was in town, and on one of those occasions, his neighbor invited him over. Jo's a lifelong democrat and didnt agree with m/any of Reagan's policies, but in two hours of pleasant chat, politics never came up. A very nice guy, Mr Reagan was, and at least the sports-talking parts of his noggin weren't preprogrammed.

Jo also claimed to have met Barbara Bush (who said that George Sr hated the family dog as it shat all over the White House - and yes, she did say shit) and John Holmes (while he was in prison - Jo was a parole officer at the time). Dunno if he was shitting us or not, but I believe him.

Today was a relaxing day. I decided the day beforehand that I was going to take Sunday off, and stayed late in bed. Very late. Then I spent the whole day reading a book (Double Whammy) that Terry Pratchett had recommended .

Tomorrow, it's back to work.

Munich

2006-01-07T12:26:00.000-07:00

Watched Munich with JL and The Jake yesterday. Good 'historical fiction' film, even though I didn't quite understand the bit at the end where the wife of the hero, who's living in New York at the time, is complaining about her kitchen being too large.

Eric Bana's acting is great, and Daniel Craig (right) has an Afrikaans accent that brought back good memories. And I didn't realize at the time that Craig's the new Bond.

Eels in Nose Juice

2006-01-05T22:21:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I found something using Yahoo Search and not Google Search, namely the complete text of a Pratchett book I'd been reading. Today I found that neither Google nor Yahoo can find my other blog but that MSN Search can.

Happened to discuss an old friend-would-not-be-the-right-word of mine with someone recently. He wanted to know what my opinion of the said person was. We soon both concluded that we had the same opinion of the guy - a not-on-the-level managerial-type shyster of a salesman more slippery than an eel in a bucket of nose-juice --- who was therefore perfect for the job.

The character assassination completed, I asked my co-conspirator where he'd picked up the nose-juice phrase from; he said it was a literal translation by one of his Nederlanden friends of a Dutch phrase that had been indelibly seared into his memory.

The Cosmus group met today and agreed to make more movies. Mark's taking a Video iPod and a PSP to the AAS Gadgets and Gizmos session, the AstroViz Birds of a Feather session, the presentation of our movie, in addition to things of interest to his research. He's agonnabe busy...

Misc stuff

2006-01-03T09:23:00.000-07:00

Top 100 US Box-Office Movies ... Titanic's still at number one, earning more than the GDP of twenty small island states.

Freshman makes a million bucks for a cluttered webpage

Helped OA with a visualization problem - and we found something we hadn't seen before! More on this exciting development later....

Cricketer slips in shower, dislocates shoulder, can't represent country

2006-01-01T00:40:00.000-07:00

The great plan I had on using focus to predict tone... just flopped. Doesn't work on noisy data. Fcuk. (Good thing I can rely on my dad to censor this before it gets to my mum.) This throws a wrench into my thesis plans - fortunately, there's Plan B. And C. And D. And E and F will return soon from their honeymoon.

Having finished and enjoyed Going Postal and Thud! recently, I went to the Lspace site, and read some of the Master's Words. Terry's got some good points... in answer to one question about whether his stint in journalism helped him write, he says

"Yes, Dave Gemmell and Neil Gaiman were both journalists. So was Bob Shaw. So was I. It's good training because:

1) any tendency to writers' block is burned out of you within a few weeks of starting work by unsympathetic news editors;

2) you very quickly learn the direct link between writing and eating;

3) you pick up a style of sorts;

4) you get to hang around in interesting places;

5) you learn to take editing in your stride, and tend to be reliable about deadlines;

6) you end up with an ability to think at the keyboard and reduce the world to yourself and the work in hand -- you have to do this to survive in a world of ringing telephones and shouting sub-editors.

None of this makes you talented or good, but it does help you make the best of what you've got."

He also goes on (backwards in time) to say

For more than three years I wrote more than 400 words every day. I mean, every calendar day. If for some reason, in those pre-portable days, I couldn't get to a keyboard, I wrote hard the previous night and caught up the following day, and if it ever seemed that it was easy to do the average I upped the average. I also did a hell of a lot of editing afterwards but the point was there was something there to edit. I had a more than full-time job as well. I hate to say this, but most of the successful (well, okay... rich) authors I know seem to put 'application' around the top of the list of How-to-do-its. Tough but true."

"Application? Well, it means... application. The single-minded ability to knuckle down and get on with it, as they say in Unseen University library."

Alright, I'm starting to write my thesis today. (Once I phone home.)

PS: I'm thinking of calling myself Beel.

Short for Beelzebub.

Just to friends, though.

Wooshing sounds

2005-12-31T02:49:00.000-07:00

Trollwatch: Michael Idov has a fine whine about why you should never run a coffee shop. It ends with the line "The marriage [between the writer and his co-owner wife] appears to have been saved by a well-timed bankruptcy".

He also makes some interesting noises about markups on coffee and the economics of a coffee shop ("Rent should take up no more than 25 percent of your revenue, another 25 percent should go toward payroll, and 35 percent should go toward the product. The remaining 15 percent is what you take home.")

Enough surfing - now to get back to blogging about what's important, namely me.

I'm surfing too much. I gave up hope of getting something to meet the December 31 Speech Prosody deadline as a first author - and I may have given up too early. Oh well, it's sure too late now.

FL did send me a paper to read (I'd helped write some code for it) where I'm second author (FL is nice) - after 10 hours of being awake, I hadnt read it, and sent off an email saying I'd comment in another 90 minutes. Then I began reading it... and sending off comments as I read the four-page paper... and send off the sixth and final set of comments just now. And guess what! Amazingly enough, exactly 90 minutes had passed! Or maybe between 90 and 105 minutes; Google Mail said it was 90 minutes then, and now says it was 2 hours. I'm not sure how it rounds things off... all I can say now is that was under 109 minutes. With my penchant for tardiness and deadline underestimation, that's pretty good.

TextGrid

2005-12-28T15:08:00.000-07:00

Wrote a couple of Matlab scripts yesterday that convert Praat TextGrid files to Phrase-Word-Syllable objects - today it'll be time to go through 20 files to manually align about ten minutes of Mandarin news broadcasts.

Wish it would take ten minutes.

Oh, and I put up a tone recognition page.

And updated Sciengineer.

My friend's edited a book!

2005-12-27T15:58:00.000-07:00

My Hague-based pal Murat Arsel (Phd Cambridge) has his first co-edited book coming out!

Ashgate, the publishers, have more info on this [link]

The blurbs, which I can personally say were not coerced from the blurbers by threat or bribery, include the note that this is "highly recommended not only for those with an interest in Turkey, but also for students of environmental movements and environmental policy everywhere".

Christmas ... happened

2005-12-27T01:06:00.000-07:00

It was an interesting mishmash of people and food that turned up at J's potluck, and we had a good time (surprising, given that it was a very Sit Down Party!) and only left at midnight. We got there around 1930. There were a few moments

(May I add, by the way, that I've been involved in that much of an eye-to-eye conversation for a looong time. Unfortunately, I don't speak Eye so I'm not sure what the exwonk was saying.)

Going back to food, Geronimo and I had a good time making Stuff (TM) out of packets of Stuff (TM) from Devon - Chicago's wee bit of South Asia - it takes 90 minutes to get to it by bus - one-way. We made some kulfa (Hector - see the picture below for what the packet looks like), faluda, and pakoras. Good stuff - easy to make, good instructions, tasted good. (People ate, and kept the leftovers.) All made in Pakistan, too :) We'd also made some gulab jamuns, but as these ended up looking like crystallized blackberries, we left them at home and are still eating them.

And we're still eating RL's leftovers (when RL cooks, he really cooks. A lot. Bless him...) and will be for the next few days. G & I went to his place on Boxing Day for a "Finish Leftovers" attack disguised (very well) as a sumptuous four course meal, and it ended with the women in front of the telly watching Monday Night Football and the guys in the kitchen discussing where to go with Cosmus. Well, not quite. I was mostly in front of the telly too, making snide comments about how rugby was more interesting than American Handball any day.

I'm getting quite good at making snide comments now.

Moving on to other things...

Pratchett's Thud! and Going Postal have been read over the past few days. Most enjoyable.

Guardian Readers have been voting for the best and worst films of 2005. Funnily enough, Sin City turns up on both lists.

Thud!

2005-12-25T00:26:00.000-07:00

It's two hours into Christmas, and I'm halfway through Pratchett's Thud! at the moment. I've just got to the bit where three female coppers have agreed to meet up for drinks with a friendly female dancer (the kind who works in a place where a long demure skirt would be labelled a wardrobe malfunction) ... the coppers are a dwarf, a vampire, and a werewolf (and the last two have a soft spot for a male dwarf who's actually a human).

Managed to get some work done with some of the Mandarin tone recognition stuff, and helped Geronimo make some gulab jamuns (in other words, I burnt some). And listened to a few shows of the 99p Challenge.

Two Christmas meals to attend tomorrow. (Yay!)

Insomnia Cures R Us

2005-12-22T20:13:00.000-07:00

Rejoined the public library today, and got the two latest Pratchetts (yay), namely Thud! and Going Postal. Now I can enjoy my Christmas brekkie. On an unrelated note, we found that you didnt need a social security number to get a library card, so Geronimo joined. And now he can use his library card as a third "ID" to open a bank account. (This isn't a loophole. If it was a loophole, I wouldnt be blogging it. I'm blogging it, so it isn't a loophole. So there.)

Decided to bring something interesting to the Christmas potluck - Indian sweets. So I hopped on the 151, and 90 minutes later (we're not talking a short journey here) had arrived in Chicago's tiny version of India. This is my third visit to Devon in my five years here, and the first time I wasn't dragged. Got a couple of packets of each of ... wait for it... gulab jamuns, kheer (looked like payasam to me), funnyname1, and funnyname2. I don't have them in front of me right now, but the directions to make them seem clear enough. Not to worry, we'll find a way of mucking them up.

Been processing my old Mandarin data, and wondering why my results are suddenly a lot worse. I might have to redo all the pitch tracking with Praat instead of ESPS. (Insert "Sheise!" here.)

Returning was a chore. I had taken the 151 to get to Devon (that's way up there in North Chicago) from downtown and figured I'd take it back down again. First though, I had to get on the 155 ... and that took 30 minutes to arrive. I then stayed on it a short while before getting off at a stop that served both the 155 and 151. After tn minutes the 151 was still nowhere in sight, and then someone said that the 155 went further on to the Red Line (the subway), so when a 155 turned up in five minutes, I hopped on it, and took the train downtown. In other words, I should have just stayed on the 155 in the first place. Anyway... I could have got off at Garfield but didn't want to freeze my (currently expanding) butt off waiting for another bus, so I hopped off downtown and paid another two quid to catch the next Metra instead. Another 20 minute wait, but it was indoors. Warm. Good.

If you didn't make the connection, Warm = Good. Speaking of which, today is a actually very warm day. It's been at most -10 the last few days, and we've been begging our atheist gods to make it merely freezing again ... and Lo! It was 3 degrees celsius today! Truly, this is paradise.

On returning (with GR giving me nasty "yeah so whos making them there sweets?" looks), I got a call from Arsenal in Holland. He's just got his PhD! Much celebration followed. (Details of this are not suitable for blogs other than Wonkette.) All you have to know is that (1) men gossip too (hey, we haven't talked in six months!) and (2) he called at 2am his time because of insomnia, and (3) I did my part and had him yawning after twenty minutes. I should start my own consulting company - "Insomnia Cures R Us"...

Movies...

2005-12-21T02:49:00.000-07:00

Harry returned from the West Coast a coupla days ago, and we decided to renew our tradition of watching near-B movies. In this case we chose to watch a movie with two famous African-born actresses - Theron and Okenedo - who have hopefully got themselves new agents by now. The director of Aeon Flux made them act in a manner that displayed a large variety of emotions, such as oak, balsa, pine, and teak. The underlying plot, well, the less said the better. This kind of movie gives scifi a bad name. Even if the costume designer's taste in underwear is revealing. Make that Especially, not Even...

I had a good time. I'm so stressed right now that I needed a break.

And that was Sunday night. Monday night, we went out again, this time with a couple of friends. One was AH - we introduced ourselves to each other before figuring out that we had already done so three months ago. Oh well, memory is short... we picked up another ex-Cambridgite (although this one spoke Akkadian instead of signal processing) and went to watch a delightful film by Peter Jackson.

And afterwards, having enjoyed ourselves greatly, we compared notes on which parts of it were the most over-the-top. The swinging allosauri + giant gorilla + Ms Watts scene scored high marks, followed by the brontosaurus pileup. Next came the giant worms - AH provided a thought provoking analysis of how invertebrate breathing systems couldnt scale, while R provided another thought provoking comment about how you could have giant insects if the atmospheric oxygen level was higher - as it had been millions of years ago.

In both cases, the thought provoked was "Man it's cold out here!" (AH & R, if you read this, I'm just kidding...)

Some interesting developments happening on the "What will I do after graduating" front.

what a week...

2005-12-17T02:31:00.000-07:00

Mostly working on HMSVM stuff. I found some big bugs, so that's good. Then YA told me a few more tricks, and they've improved results. But... I'm still unable to beat baseline, though at least I can now sometimes match it. Admittedly, it's a darn high baseline.

Been plotting what to do with K dough, if it comes through. MS and I had a nice dreaming session.

Got paid something for the show too. That's nice. I knead the dough. (Sorry.)

Big news: Gmail's extremely low-bandwidth mobile interface is great! Works good on my cell... link

Proofread GL's paper before she submitted it. Nice stuff.

Words of wisdom (and not) heard today :
GL : It could be very interesting or completely pointless. (Referring to the nice stuff mentioned above.)
DS : Some things are both. (Referring to Sunday's show.)
GL : True enough.

Phoned my sister. My nephew's seven, for chrissake... sweet jesus, I thought he was six. How kiddies grow... how tempus fugits...

My first interview didn't go too badly. Actually, it was fun. By interest in the employers increased greatly during it. There's a second interview next week, let's see what happens.

Found an interesting blog by a UC undergrad... link

Reading SP's equations on YX's Penta model... nice stuff. I'd never have worked them out myself. Though I just offered them some suggestions on how to improve it.

Show's over (success!)

2005-12-11T22:25:00.000-07:00

Thanks to MS covering for us last night, and an excellent working session today, the show at Adler went off very well. JF and SS are great banterers.

This weekend's the first time I've ever been convinced that seeing stuff on a planetarium dome actually shows you more of the data. And yes, it is nice to see stuff we've made go up on a dome. And yes, I got to control it, which was fun. The navigational system SkySkan's Digital Sky has more degrees of freedom than Partiview has, which is very nice, but I took a while to learn that I had to press both mouse buttons (instead of just the left one) to stop motion.

Everyone seems to think this is quite a big deal. There were lots of congratulations and back-slapping going around afterwards. And, given the audience (some milionaires, at least one billionaire, the University president, the Adler president, etc) I suppose it is, but I'm so jaded and fed up with infovis and with myself (I should know OpenGL/VRML/VTK/Swing/Director by now, but know nota) that it doesn't feel like much. Just like another show. And tomorrow I've got an interview with a company for machine learning stuff - let's see how that goes.

Just thinking - if I had to stay in academia, I'd like two years to concentrate on Information Visualization. I would like to build a system for visualizing SVMs and kernel methods, including semisupervised and active learning. And I'd like to build a system to create 3d models of data using Partiview to begin with.

Bantering

2005-12-10T20:34:00.000-07:00

Spent Friday with YX talking about further quantifications his student had made to his target approximation model. Good stuff. Nice ice cream too - thanks, FL!

MS and RL managed to pull off Mission Impossible with their show at the Schramm thing - they had to deal with some incompetent company who supplied their equipment since our own equipment wasn't powerful enough. (Although if they'd just had a different location...)

Spent Saturday with the SkySkanners - had a great time seeing our stuff on the Adler dome. And maybe I should move to Australia - if even a fraction of Aussies can banter as good as the ones we were with today, then I'm moving. Funny how the bantering mode transferred to other people too. Teasing RL about being a paparazzi and a mobile sponge (someone who says he doesnt need a cellphone coz his pals always have one - "no I can't give you my cellphone number since I don't have one, but I'll be with so-and-so today so here's his number"...) - ah, people are so much fun.

Unfortunately, the "don't wanna do anything" demon takes over when I'm alone, so I listened to my favorite BBC shows instead. Someone on the News Quiz commented that German national Khaled el-Masri [Guardian, WaPo] went on a CIA package tour - where he has taken somewhere on holiday and returned as a package.

For some reason, this made me laugh too - Satan saying "Lifestyle is what rich people have instead of a life" on Old Harry's Game. Oh, Andy Hamilton is such a fricking genius. Though this, by his usual standards, was definitely one of the fluffier episodes. Even Thomas comes through.

Snow falls, gloves gone

2005-12-09T03:35:00.000-07:00

Network's been up the last two days. Yay.

I understand Gibbs sampling better now.

HMSVM works, but I hope there's still a subtle bug in my implementation of it as it should be doing better.

It snowed buckets in Chicago today.

ZX (!= XZ) told me it took him three hours to drive to Midway. This normally takes 30 minutes. Speaking of which, a plane trying to land there landed on the street next door. It had skidded off the runway. Last I heard, a six year old had been killed.

Chicago Tribune link

Moving on...

Helped Mark sort out stuff for the Schramm show tomorrow.

Was reminded at 11pm about one change we should have made earlier - sorting the speck files by picture typed. Fixed this in an hour. The hour began at 3am. (The intervening 4 hours were spent on... other activities.)

(Potboiler practice: It seems to take about 90 minutes to write 1000 words.)

Finally made that Indonesian stew stuff that Brna gave me. Failed to notice that it the packet had four servings. Thought it had one. I don't think it was meant to taste as spicy as it did. Brna will have a good laugh. Nat will shake her head and ask me to sign legal documents promising never to cook for her. I will reply that I still finished the entire lot.

Read one of YX's students papers with YX on quantifying the tone target approximation model. Nice, but I need more equations. (I wouldn't need them if I understood signal processing, but seeing as I don't, I need them.) He's in town, so hopefully we'll meet up soon.

My two days of getting up in the morning appear to have been just that. Two days. It's the third day, and nearing 5am, and I've not gone to bed yet. Sheise.

Oh, and this is a good one - I had my gloves nicked by a winner of one of the following prizes (a) Pullitzer (b) Nobel (c) IgNobel (d) Congressional Medal of Freedom (You know, that thing Tenet got). I can't say which one because if I did, some readers of this blog might figure out who I'm referring to. Let's just say that (1) I saw him take them while I was making tea in the ... but didn't want to comment as it was too good a story to pass up the opportunity of retelling three million times, and (2) He didn't know he was taking them - he must have thought they were his (in which case I ought to go nick his gloves), and (3) He's very nice.

Hmm. Maybe I shouldn't have said (3). Some readers might already guess who I'm talking about.

Another notwork

2005-12-06T23:56:00.000-07:00

Just when I was settling down to get some work done... the network went down again. I had zipped and gmailed to myself the files I needed to work with, but then I'd made some changes and wanted to get the latest version... and the network refused to come back up. It killed the entire day, really.

GL sent some new test data for Putonghua syllables, and I think I've worked out which parameters need to change to reduce the training error of the HMSVM.

Starting to get into potboiler mode - a new chapter in three days! Not bad. Of course, I'd rather have had the network up and be able to work.

Some other interesting things happened today, but I can't write about them.

The temperature was -15 degrees celsius as I walked home today. This time I missed the bus by 20 seconds. I still refuse, on principle, to run for a bus that refuses to be late. (Even worse, sometimes it leaves early.)

Notwork (noun) a non-working network

2005-12-05T19:35:00.000-07:00

I got most of the main bugs out of my HMSVM implementation, and managed to test it on some real Dialog Act Classification data. There's good news and bad news.

The good news is that the code runs very fast.

The bad news is that it doesn't produce very good results - 27% success rate compared to 57% with our old results. Sheise.

I told this to XZ as he was walking around (he'd been coding for a while too, and needed to stretch) and passed my cubicle. He commiserated, and pointed out that the reverse would have been preferable. C'est vrai, c'est vrai...

This kinda makes redundant the talk I'd just had with GL about how we would meet the upcoming deadlines. Not much use if this code (and I hope it's not the algorithm) is working in dummcomf mode.

I was just about to start running some other processes, when the network became a notwork. This must be Lucy's way of telling me to read some papers instead of programming today.

Listened to some 99p Challenge early episodes in the morning, when Sue Perkins was a panelist instead of the host. She's a better host than the one she replaced, that's for sure.

Addendum: after three hours, the network's working again!

Coding, and the 99p Challenge

2005-12-04T23:43:00.000-07:00

I am now officially chuffed. The HMSVM code is working (as far as I can tell), and I've added command line options so it can do five different loss functions - Hamming, weighted Hamming, and normalized versions of both. Plus 0-1 loss, of course. I still can't believe what YA said about the simplest (0-1) working the best, not because I don't trust her to know what she's talking about and the experiments she did, but because I'm too dumb to understand them and can't see why that should happen.

Anyway, my code's working reasonably well on my synthetic data, and now I just have to remove a bunch of printf statements and set it going on some real data. With any luck, we'll even have something for Dresden! That deadline's this week. Speaking of which, I told JL about the SVM+Viterbi results, and he was very surprised (because there was no good reason for what I did to have worked), so maybe we're on to something. Plus he gave some pointers to some interesting speedup methods suggested by HD, and that'll be investigated.

Oh, and we had a snowball fight today. A very short one.

Apparently my middle name is now Hejju. That j is pronounced the German (or Spanish or pretty much any language except English) way.

Discovered a treasure trove of archives of my favorite radio show, the 99p Challenge. Have I mentioned that Sue Perkins is
awesome and that she's pretty high on my list of People I Never Want to Mudsling With? Alas, the show is going off-air next week? How will I survive? This man cannot live on the News Quiz and Old Harry's Game alone, y'know...

Actually, Sue's profile on the Mel & Sue website is a nice spoof, even if it's hard to find episodes of "her late-night show "Beat the Panel", an hilarious quiz show about panel beating" on the net. Funny that she was reluctant about being out. Why reluctant? Well, that was 2002. Maybe things weren't so tolerant for lesbians in British showbiz then. I should check with N & B, who I owe an email anyway.

Speaking of which, Britain just allowed civil unions - basically state-registered marriage. Excellent! Well... this is mostly good news. There's still the question of "What took this so long?", but better late than never.

Uhoh, people actually read this....

2005-12-03T18:22:00.000-07:00

Apparently humans actually read this. I thought only bots did. I suppose this is where I should say that I better watch what I say, except that if I did, then I wouldn't say it.

No, that didn't make much sense to me either.

Mat and I played our last table tennis game today. Quite the occasion it was, with many tearful memories and speeches. Actually, there were a couple of guys already playing, and they were kind enough to let us play doubles with them.

I hate doubles table tennis. I always play much worse than in singles table tennis. At least that's been my experience since ... oh... 1992? The key thing to remember about doubles is that you and your partner are supposed to take turns hitting the ball, unlike tennis. My control has never been good enough to deal with this - I need the practice that hitting the ball repetitively gives you, otherwise I'm crap.

Until today. Apparently, my control - and Mat's - has improved greatly.

We won. Rather well, to the surprise of both of us. And we were diving for shots, and falling on the floor, and crashing into the bookshelf filled with old bound volumes of Physical Chemistry journals. (And need I say, actually making the shots in the process. And not just by luck, either.) And we missed a bunch of sitters, of course. Fortunately, they missed more than we did. And the net was nice to us, too.

It's funny how one can be a klutz about so many things and still have reasonably wicked control over a little round white (sometimes yellow) plastic sphere. Amazing how after making an impossible shot, actually picking up the ball to get it back in your hand can take several attempts.

How come I wasn't good at this game when I was in high school? Was it because I had to wear shoes? (I always play in socks now.) It would have been nice to have been good in just one sport, not to mention the destruction of my university academic career because I didn't do sports at high school.

That's it - I'm applying for a job with Microsoft China, for the sole purpose of improving my ping pong game.

Hmmm - I wrote that as a joke, but it may not be a bad idea...

Second things first. Find out if there's a Table Tennis club on campus.

Now for the first thing - research.

Didn't get much work done yesterday, or today. The usual downtime. (You don't want to know.) Just an hour or two of coding C. But HLT/NAACL and Speech Prosody deadlines are coming up, next Friday and the week after. Sheise! Got a note that YX is coming to Chicago - great! And he and his student have done the missing piece of work I needed to proceed, so that's even better (Insert evil grin here.)

Yesterday I would have got more work done, but the conversation that LC and XZ were having in the office - was too interesting to not join. What did we cover in the space of an hour? Let's see...

China's one-child policy (only came into effect around 1978 - I had thought earlier) and its varying degrees of enforcement, about who was in charge in most families ("the women of course, the only difference is whether the men know it or not...")

The South American participant in the conversation (not XZ - you can guess where he's from) protested that we should stop using the word "American" to mean "USA person". Fair enough, but what, I asked him, should we use instead? Gringo. Oh. Are we allowed to use that? Um, do you know what it stands for? "Green Go", he said, explaining it had to do with the propensity for green-uniformed USA armies to march into other countries. Oh. Really. He wasn't sure either, but it was a nice story, if over-simplistic.

Never mind - this was a nice segue into discussing army uniform colors (the Chinese Army wears green uniforms instead of Red)... then wars... then World War Two... then the hypothetical (hopefully) question of who would win if the Chinese and US armies fought in a fair battle... then about Stalin losing initial stages of World War Two because he'd killed off all his best generals... then a comparison of German and Japanese post-WW2 guilt (the former did a better job)... after some time, we were on the Han treatment of minorities in China - XZ said it was pretty good, I wasn't sure but didn't have enough unbiased information to check - various questions about "what is progress" came up.

Then XZ brought up the question of tolerance. Yes, tolerance is good thing. Then the Devil's Advocate (yours truly, although I prefer to dispense with the word Advocate in the title) asked "if a minority culture believes in certain things, such as a low status for women, should this be tolerated?" I said it shouldn't be, and neither XZ or LC could say anything, so that hope for an argument went nowhere. Dunno what the answer is, either - it's all about individual freedom vs a society's freedom. I still think the answer is no, but specific cases are often more complicated than binary questions.

Haven't got over the HP fanfic addiction yet.

Oops, one hour before the Ratner closes. Better hit that treadmill. And post that DVD to Frank tomorrow.

Woohoo! Debuggified!

2005-12-01T23:52:00.000-07:00

I was in bed this morning, considering whether to get out or not, when the phone rang. It was D, who wanted some work out of me. We talked a bit, with me throwing in a long silence to mean "No" and then saying "Yes, kinda".

"Are you sick?" she asked.

"Er, no. I haven't gotten vertical yet."

"What?"

"I haven't got out of bed yet."

"Oh."

At least this had the effect of converting my "Yes, kinda" to a "No, not really", which shoved the burden of work from me to her. (I'm a sod, since this was because I had done something I knew she and M didn't want, namely rendering a movie in fullscreen instead of widescreen format.) It also had the effect of getting me out of bed. Unfortunately, not quickly enough, and I missed a seminar I'd really wanted to attend but had forgotten to set an alarm for. (Not that my success rate with alarms is particularly good.)

So, not the best start to the day.

It got worse.

I had got stuck in my implementation of a HMSVM using SVM Struct, and had emailed the author (TJ) to figure out wtf I was doing wrong. He told me very promptly... and it meant I'd screwed up badly.... this would take a week to fix.

Then I went to SW's Masters thesis defence, and that was good. Then Iri and I took Yaz out for coffee to pick her brain, and got some good ideas.

So, the day was evening out now. (Even though Iri did tell me that I'd missed a great seminar. Rats...)

Fortunately, it then got good.

Remember that thing that TJ told me about that I thought would take a week to fix? It took a lot less - just 2 or 3 hours!

Then it got really good.

I found the bug that ha been killing me for the past several days. I had written a "==" instead of a "!=" in line 943 of a 1981-line C file. Fun fun fun. At least I found it using a relatively systematic method, not simply by accident. And in the process discovered lots of other bugs that I might not have noticed otherwise. Well, not really - I would have found them in time. It would have been good to have found this bug much earlier... but it was such a mundane thing that it was really hard to find.

Overall, the positives outweighed the negatives.

Oh, and I whacked MR in table tennis yesterday, and I'm going to do so again tomorrow. Our last match (sniff!) before he leaves Chi-town...

Argh! bug

2005-11-27T01:19:00.000-07:00

Still can't get all the bugs out of HMSVM. ARRRGH. This has to work, dammit! And there's still MarXIST to debug afterwards... oh no. If this is done by January, I will be grateful.

Still need to process the SDSS DR5 stuff. The Dr4 left eye rendering is going well - had done 2600 out of 5000 when I left. Since the last half will be done in a couple of hours once I restart it tomorrow, it'll be fine. I could have started them today at 1.30am, but decided to give myself a break and come home.

Did 30 minutes on a treadmill again. Is running 10km a week on a treadmill any good? Probably not, but it makes my legs feel better.

Visualization for the SDSS

2005-11-26T00:47:00.000-07:00

I've not managed to get HMSVM working using SVMStruct yet. Drat. You'd think I'd be further along by now but noooo... I had to work on Ndaona (more whining about this in a moment) and the stereo SDSS movie for Adler. The stereo movie, which we've been working on for ages, might be shown at the big Schramm event in a couple of weeks. It would be ironic if a bunch of dignitaries, including a couple of billionaire and the University president, get to watch stuff made by an amateur rookie who has to borrow money to eat, but... oh wait a minute, it's not a maybe. They are going to see stuff I helped make - certainly on the dome (thanks, SkySkan) even if not in stereo. Mostly SDSS and
cosmic ray shower stuff.

I wonder if I'll bother going and seeing that myself... my time would be better spent learning ... learning what? I can't learn. I'm morally incapable of learning. It's not just birds that fly into glass windows again and again and again... I even put the glass there myself so I can fly into it. At the moment, it looks quite likely that I'll miss it, even if there is food. What's in it for me?

Slowly adding a chapter now and again to my HP fanfic. It's nice to write again, to have to think about plots and how to write the perfect sentence, and all that good stuff.

GR & I have been learning the innards of computers - we cannibalized an internal CD player from an old machine whose hard drive was kaput to the new old machine I bought from Mat last month. We also moved the ethernet card, but now I'm not sure we moved the right thing.

I've been placing some of our old movies on Google Video. Some are crappier than other. I'm going to have to make a bunch of new ones ... about my stuff.

Just heard that a friend I thought I had lost (through my own unreliability, not his) still wants to be friends. Who am I to deserve such good friends as him?

Since I moved offices from the dungeon to the cubicles, I have been much happier, and felt much more connected to the other cs grad students. Pity I did it so late, but I'm glad I did it. IM and VS and I have a great ML reading group - our last meeting (admittedly one of our better ones) lasted three hours. IM is like Hermione, reading stuff and following details, and bring them up. Like Gibbs sampling. That was a really good one. She brought that up in our other reading group with GL - and I brought the wrong paper to class. (A good wrong paper, though, fortunately.)

Made half the stereo movie today. It had been rendering over Thanksgiving. I haven't seen a high res version of it yet; VirtualDub was still composing the rendered images into a movie when I left. Meanwhile, the left eye version (which is a corrected version of the left eye version I made over the weekend instead of trying to meet a conference deadline which I eventually failed to meet) is being rendered out now. Just checked... 866 out of 5000 frames generated. It's going at about one a minute now, so by the time I get back to school tomorrow, it should have got to 1500. Aargh, that's slow. I could restart it again - there's some memory leak or something in Partiview (our renderer) that makes it slow down after a while.

Got some free food out of RL - that was nice. Now I just hope he put my application for a small stipend increase in...

Goblet of Fire

2005-11-22T19:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday G & I went to watch the new Harry Potter movie in IMAX at Navy Pier. The UCPSDSC had bought a hundred group tickets and subsidized it so we paid $5, a third of the regular price. The bigness definitely helped, as this was a very visual movie. I didn't enjoy it as much as I enjoyed Prisoner of Azkaban though, as there wasn't much plot in the book (except at the end, when Voldemort comes back) - it's my least favorite book.

The astronomy graduate students and I discussed the movie as we went on the bus home. After finding out all the things that got left out of the movie (which I see nothing wrong with), we thought briefly about what got IN ... and decided we liked Ron's dress. (The portrayal of it, anyway.) Mr Grint's facial expressions are, as always, a source of much amusement.

Some comments - MK won't be surprised to hear that I think Hermione looked great EXCEPT when she wore that dress for the ball. I must have a thing for jumpers.

Neville Longbottom really looks different, and I couldn't believe it was the same actor. But it is - Matthew Felton really has lost weight! Meanwhile, G thought the actor for Draco had changed, but he hasn't either.

We were placing bets - rather, being penniless geeks, we were computing odds on - which characters were most likely to die in Book 7. (Incidentally, I have been told that the next book will be called "Harry Potter and the Writer's Bulging Bank Account".) Highest odds - i.e. it's considered very possible - are on Voldemort. Harry gets medium-high odds, while Hermione gets the lowest odds. Choosing a good candidate for cannon fodder is hard, even though Rowling has given us several options.

New words

2005-11-10T15:01:00.000-07:00

diurnalism - discrimination against people of a nocturnal disposition (e.g. scheduling meetings at 10am)

colanderous - full of holes (e.g. forgetful = having a colanderous memory)

realism - discrimination against people who live in fantasyland.

Too much HP

2005-10-21T23:53:00.000-06:00

Went to see Wait Wait Don't Tell Me downtown yesterday with Gero and other PSD students. It was hilarious. Gero loved it too, which was a relief. I was a little worried about the style of humor, about whether it would be too focused on American affairs, but it wasn't.

White Sox get to the World Series!

2005-10-16T21:47:00.000-06:00

The White Sox just got to the World Series! That the first baseball championship in Chicago in nearly half a century will be on its South Side is thanks to the Wonderful Wizard called Oz.

On eating too much

2005-10-05T17:37:00.000-06:00

"It is possible to eat so much that you'll explode."

Old CW: What a load of tosh.

New CW: Snake bursts after gobbling gator What a load of tosh, unless you're eating an alligator. BBC: Snake bursts after gobbling gator

Moral: alligators should be chewed into small bits, then eaten.

Need more manic

2005-10-03T22:17:00.000-06:00

Finally worked out, thanks to Gin, how to view externally computed values (e.g. spectral tilt) in Praat against a Mandarin word/syllable text tier with zooming. I hadn't been grouping before.

It's so nice to have a laptop again!

Other stuff - fighting manic depression, as usual. You know, I sure could use more of the manic bits right now.

Oh, and the White Sox won the American League. That's nice. I think they'll beat the Red Sox in the first round of the playoffs but then lose to Anaheim in the AL Final. Anaheim will then lose to St Louis in the World Series.

I went to the post office last week to get a money order to pay the rent (amazing - my reimbursement from the university came in three days, so I could pay my rent in time!) and got these nice muppet stamps.

Misc.

2005-09-26T21:28:00.000-06:00

Jeff Rice of Wired has a great story on what happens at the Smithsonian Institution's Feather Identification Laboratory -- they study what kinds of birds hit flying planes. Well, mostly birds. Sometimes it's a rabbit.

Meanwhile, it's probably a good thing that the Denver Museum of Nature and Science isn't shutting this guy down. That would give him even more publicity. And when the kids grow up, they'll realize that creationism is just a nice story.

Meanwhile, some folks are wondering if Lucas et al based their Jedi library on a more terran version in Dublin. (Interesting similarities actually, even if Lord Lucas denies it, it's possible that an underlying was doing extensive research when designing it...)

3 DVDs of data generated

2005-09-26T18:05:00.000-06:00

So these folks from - shall we say, a well-known, large, space-related organization - asked Mark for some frames of the SDSS for part of some IMAX (maybe) video they are making for free distribution to museums nationwide.

Actually, we were told (and we think this is cool) that they'd already used an earlier animation we'd made of SDSS data to show some Members of Congress, and blown it up to IMAX resolution.

So, thanks to some new documentation Stu had posted on the Partiview mailing list, we spent three days doing what before took us several weeks, and generated 12 Gigabytes of an flythrough of the SDSS data. We'll send it off tomorrow.

Pretty pictures

2005-09-21T20:19:00.000-06:00

Randy gave me a copy of the September issue of Astronomy magazine, where an article by Liz Kruesi used a picture from the visualizations of cosmic ray showers we created for Pierre Auger
observatory.

It's not the first time a visualization of Mark or Randy has made it to a dead-tree magazine that people pay for, but it is the first time for me, so I'm officially quite chuffed.

In other news, the Mapping our Universe, the movie about the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that Daniela et al made and Mark submitted to Google Video has been included in their database --- and they sent Mark an email asking if there's more where that came from!

Celtic Fest

2005-09-17T22:39:00.000-06:00

Went to Celtic Fest in Grant Park today with a couple of pals from the Happy Hour Late Shift yesterday. It was cool, but I was surprised to find it had almost exactly the same layout of tents as it had two or three years ago when I was there with Tom and Var.

We went there in the afternoon. In the morning, I moved more stuff into my new place with the help of Tokonatsu (thanks!), who had helped me store my stuff at his place over the summer. Anyway, now I have a frying pan again! And a microwave. And a can opener. Amazing how simple things are important when you don't have them.

The fridge is slowly filling up again. Which is good, because I only have $10 in cash to last me till that check from M gets here. And I can only get the grand or so of reimbursement $ after Wednesday, i.e. I'll actually get it around the first week of October. Or second. This is going to be tight.

Back in Chicago at last!

2005-09-13T03:41:00.000-06:00

After ten days in Lisbon for the SigDial workshop (total participants ~ 90) and the
Interspeech 2005 conference (total participants ~ 1300), and a couple of days in England visiting friends and relatives, I'll have to fill up the blogspace of the past few days with details of that. It's pretty hard to blog when things are actually happening all around you (e.g. I didn't blog at ICML) and you are laptopless.

The flight back was United. Midway through the flight, about five minutes after I'd begun to wonder what the Ashes score was and whether I could ask the crew to radio London to find out and had decided against it since it would be too much trouble to explain what cricket was, the American pilot announced that the match had been drawn (cue scattered applause across the plane) and that England had thus won the Ashes (more applause).

I sure hope the people who owe me money pay up soon so I can pay the people I owe money. They've said it would happen this week - hope it does!

Note to self: when getting back from O'Hare with 100 pounds of luggage, don't take a number 6 bus doing a sardine can impression. Very bad for the legs.

Note to self: return those "German 101" language tapes to the Chicago Public Library. They're 2.5 months overdue. (Hey, I got to tape 8 of the 12 tapes...)

After getting off the bus, my luggage and I walked to my new apartment and got the keys from the building manager. It's a nice place - cheap, large, clean - though it's a basement (not good security-wise). Then I got some groceries from Hyde Park Produce and some Chinese takeout. Had dinner, and then went to school to find a couch to sleep on. I won't have a bed for a few days - the nice person (Toko) with whom I've stored my futon is away till the weekend - and my sleeping bag is in my cs office to which another friend has the key. I should get the sleeping bag today. That should be good. I only had four hours of fitful sleep last night.

Pictures from Lisbon

2005-09-06T16:38:00.000-06:00

We stayed near the coastal subway station called Oriente (near the top right of the map) while the conference was in Belem (near the bottom left of the map). It took about an hour by bus or train - trains were faster, but you had to change a couple of times.

This is one of several public squares in Lisbon.

This is some green guy on a green horse. He looks lost. The horse is asking directions from a carthorse (not shown) going in the opposite direction.

The greenies are watched over by an evil guardian angel who guards all those who might give the greenies trouble.

Here's the front view of the angel. He's holding wreaths over two nudist angels and thinking 'I sure wish these human sculptors had known how to use anti-gravity to hold these wreaths up'.

The angels also wish the trains would stop running all the time. The leftmost one in the picture, the one reclining with his back to the arch and knees folded, is telling the others 'You know, I think these trains should ask for directions as well. They keep going around in circles.'

Looming menacingly over the square is a castle where evil wizards keep all the sunlight to themselves.

Of course, when it's night, it's dark everywhere, bar electric lights. You can see the evil wizard's castle from here. It's really really bright, far brighter than explainable by mere electricity.

[Oh, and if Anton, Sounda, or Nilesh is reading this, remember the word "funicular"...]

Moving to the East of the City again (Oriente), we see a signal tower. It's called Lisboabab, and communicates with the aliens who founded Lisbon a thousand years ago. At least it tries to --- no one knows if the aliens are still alive (outside Lisbon).

Surrounding the communication tower are some quite nice buildings. Humans made them. Regarding the building on the left - the architect thought he was drawing straight lines at the time. He also thought his tolerance to port was higher than it was.

The other building is named after a human who went around in circles. Great circles.

Fifteen minutes walk from Oriente is where we lived. No, not in the car! We lived in the pink building on the left.

The view from the pink building: it's always construction time in Lisbon. There are lots and lots of nice new buildings here.

Here's a nice new building! It's the night club where the SigDIAL banquet was. Very cool joint. Very memorable, if I could only remember what it was called...

The only thing cooler than the cool joint was the food and drink (the service was great too).

Not a good weekend...

2005-08-27T16:34:00.000-06:00

I was going to visit my favorite Romanian this weekend, when I suddenly found I didn't have enough $ to do so (even after my parents' generous loan a month ago). Well, I had enough money, but they were in different accounts. In different countries. With a week's lag time for getting money from one to the other.

A check - for my apartment's rent - had just been sent through to my Chicago account. It was for $n. There was $n-$m (where n/10 > m > 0) in my account. Trouble was, I had thought - stupidly, I admit - that this check had already been cashed, and that I had $n more than I really had. If I'd been on my financial toes (as opposed to ass), I would have transferred $m + $backup from my German account to my Chicago one - and I wouldn't have bought ... (actually, what wouldn't I have bought?)... so that I could have afforded my weekend visit. Or I wouldn't have planned it. Or something.

But I didn't... and now I have to pretty much cancel everything (bar a few drinks with friends, like with the Aussies last night) as I've got to make my remaining $ last for quite a while.

Thankfully, the bank just fined me but still allowed my check to go through (a bounced check is a very inauspicious start with any landlord) and some friends at Adler (thanks guys!) lent me some money and drove downtown to put it in my account so that another check that I wrote earlier also gets cashed. Friends and family are great...

My trip through Jez's library continues... read three more of his books the past week. Am still stuck in one of Arthur's books though - some silly slog by Saul Bellow.

On the bright side, my addiction to chocolate (specifically, Ritter Volne-Nuss) has abated. Yesterday I had an entire block (with all 16 bits). In one sitting. For breakfast. And almost threw up on the bus. I felt so sick I even bought some apples and bananas. And ate one. Of each.

And I posted a suitcase to some friends in England, so I wouldn't have to pay extra baggage charges from Stuttgart-Lisbon and Lisbon-London. It cost 32 euros to send a 20kg bag. Not bad...

Visit to Braunschweig

2005-08-22T04:08:00.000-06:00

This weekend I shoved a few clothes and a lot of reading material into a backpack and visited an old family friend I hadn't seen since... 1991 or so. Ann's a high school teacher who used to work in Zimbabwe with my parents. I used to babysit her 2 year old kid Sim - who is now a remarkably well-adjusted 17 year old.

I got to Braunschweig with a 5-hour ride on the Mitfahrzentrale, the German Ride-Sharing System, but returned via a 12-hour cross-country rail tour (Braunschweig- Gottingen- Kassel- Frankfurt- Darmstadt- Heidelberg- Stuttgart- Tuebingen) using the 30 euro "Happy Weekend" ticket. This allows you (and four companions, should they exist) to travel anywhere in Germany for a day as long as you only use the slower local trains.

Sim had a party to prepare for (had to make a birthday present) and go to, so Ann showed me around Braunschweig. We happened to pass through an exhibition by Ernst Barlach. The guy made good lines - I'm almost a fan now :)

Then we found out that Braunschweig was the birthplace of Gauss. So I had to go into the local museum, which had an exhibit on him (2005 is Gauss year, apparently) and then to his statue (see picture above). Very cool.

Planetarium designed (but never built) by Gauss

Gauss' Seal and Ring

Gauss' signature. All students had to sign their name in a big book when they returned to university, and this is a page where Gauss signed in.

In the evening we went to an Irish pub called the Wild Geese where a good guitarist named Richie Harte somehow got many of the audience to join him in a medley of old songs (U2, Marley, AC/DC, Pink Floyd, etc). Ann said this was quite unusual, and was surprised that so many Germans knew all the words. She did of course, but she's an Eirophile, having visited there a dozen times and lived there several months.

It's Monday as I type this, and I've just made contact with Sr T, another old teacher friend from Zimbabwe who lives in England. Ah, looking up old friends is cool...

Debugging

2005-08-14T09:12:00.000-06:00

Ah... writing this package seems a neverendinginging... process. I'm trying to allow for too many options and eventualities. Shiese. It's not so much the debugging as the size of the whole darn thing.

Madagascar

2005-08-14T05:57:00.000-06:00

Having spent most of the week at ICML, the lab at Tuebingen has been pretty packed on Saturday, with about half a dozen scientists around. Of course, we weren't all trying to work. I was busy catching up on my Ashes reading, for instance.

Meanwhile, Den et al were trying to get the DVD to work on the big screen. They had a version of an unnamed cartoon (see title) in Real Player format, but couldn't install Real Player on the main computer since they didn't have admin rights. By the time I was recruited to help out, Art and MatS were already there. After a lot of committee work...

"Why don't we use someone's laptop and attach that to the projector?"
"Wtf is the picture showing up on the laptop and not on the projector?"
"Hey, it's showing!"
"Now resize it!"
"Aaargh! It's gone!"
"Interesting screensaver you have there."
"Stop reading my diary!"
"This really ought to be a reproducible experiment."
"Anyone remember what we did?"
"Try dragging it through that one spot where the mouse moves to the projector."
"Where's this spot?"
"Dunno, but it exists. We got it through once or twice."
"Give me a constructive proof, for Chrissake!"
"Hey, it's on again!"
"Okay, don't make it full screen!"
"We really ought to get a large multi-author paper on this..."

Locked out...

2005-08-02T22:33:00.000-06:00

Got woken up at 11 pm to have breakfast. Chatted with Sat & Meg, who are leaving today morning, for two hours. Said goodbye, headed to the lab. Dropped keys on the path. Couldn't find them. Didn't have a torch. Cellphone light wasn't enough. Fetched camera, and took pictures (with flash) of the path to analyze for keys. Didn't find them. Went home, read stuff, waited till daybreak. Found keys. They'd dropped further on from where I thought they'd dropped - I'd not been photographing the right place.

Links list

2005-08-01T23:02:00.000-06:00

Eric Meyer has created a good site not to take screenshots of and link to (link).

This is a site with three very cool optical illusions: link. Satish (not the same Sat in previous blogs) tells me he's seen this before, from Ed Ad.

Mark Frauenfelder, a.k.a. ze Mad Professor, raves about the coolness of electrocuting bugs. He doesn't dine on fried keratin afterwards, so he must be mad, passing up that fine food source.

Some names are, well, just plain unfortunate. Link. Link to same story, worse headline.

Somehow, I don't think that the ancient Romans really said Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?. And certainly not "Non Erravi Perniciose!". But "Canis meus id comedit", maybe.

I really should "fac ut vivas" now. Or get back to work, at any rate.

Jason's post

2005-08-01T16:52:00.000-06:00

Jason sent an interesting note to the local mailing list today...

Dear ***

Let me be the first to congratulate you for your scientific discoveries!

As a U.S Hygiene Inspector commissioned to "treat" the fridges of Germany to search for rare bacteria I can now announce that 638,012 previously undiscovered microbes have been found in ***'s egg and cress sandwich alone (best before date: 5/9/03). Leading scientists are hopeful that they will lead to the discovery of cures to many new diseases that were created by the very same sandwich, last year.

Someone showed me this fridge. One word "beautiful". I am recommending to the highest level of the Institute to terminate the employment of the kitchen cleaners. Please in future DO NOT clean the fridge or else it will be locked or removed, to prevent further damage to this vital scientific resource.

Thank you for your good work,
Jason

Anyway, the purported owner (***) of the sandwich came in late today, and was told that the secretary, who had posted a (justifiably) annoyed note last Friday on the state of the union, I mean fridge, was looking for him. With a sjambok. He's now in hiding, though he denies all responsibility. (His main defence being that his level of cuisine sophistication isn't high enough to include sandwiches.)

For the record, he is innocent. The email was made up.

Alastair's fridge page

Royal Chemistry Society seeks mouldy mugs

Dinner

2005-07-31T12:44:00.000-06:00

Yesterday Sat and Meg invited some of us over for dinner. It was fun, and we finally finished at 2am. Most of what happened cannot be put into print, mostly because I can't remember it. (Otoh, some of it was confidential academic gossip, and therefore wouldn't be written down even if my memory wasn't colanderous.)

A: How does the process for submissions work?
B: It consists of C asking D to submit something, and D asking when, and C giving an artificial deadline which he then promptly and unerringly forgets.

(I won't write down what this is the submission process for.)

I can remember some of the things that were said that we thought were funny at the time. This clearly had more to do with delivery, inebriation, and sleep deprivation, than any genuine humor.

Somehow we got onto the topic of things with India-induced names, like the Indian Ocean (which is now called the Sri-Lankan-Madagascaran Ocean, or Slama Ocean for short). I said that "...the Windies have nothing to do with India. They were originally called the Westward Independent Islands, which then got contracted to the Windies."

I then buried his face in my glass of rioja. Everyone around the table was taken aback, with internal thoughts of "I didn't know that" and "That' a lot of absolute tosh" fighting for attention. Finally Jez said "Is that true?" If he hadn't said it, Meg would have done so 0.5 seconds later.

My nose was still in the glass of rioja.

"No." I gurgled.

We moved on.

Var had, somehow, come up with the idea of what would happen if the entire population of India pissed on Tuebingen. This had led to general eye-rolling, till she produced some numbers.

Var: Fine, suppose a billion people let off a half-litre of pee each, over an area of 50 square kilometres.
Me: Sounds like serious pissipation here. (Cackles, complaints, apologies, all follow.)
Var: Come on! Half a billion litres, over 50 million square meters!
Me: You want us to do math without a computer?
Meg: There's a thousand litres in a cubic metre.
Var: So it's 0.5 million cubic metres over 50 million square meters.

Of course, this amount of piss would cover Tuebingen to a height of 0.01 metres. Except that yesterday night, our collective minds had decided that it wasn't a centimeter, but a whole meter. Footage from the floods in Mumbai was fresh in our minds. Soon, the Rhine, into which Tuebingen's Neckar dumps its runoff, was called the Urhine.

Sadly, this was actually well received.

Percussive Maintenance

2005-07-26T17:15:00.000-06:00

I learnt a new phrase from Jez today, at the vending machine. It had gotten stuck. "Usually anything can be fixed by banging it a few times", he said as he did so, "and even if it doesn't, it increases the probability that the maintenance people will have to fix it soon. It's called percussive maintenance".

Sat's been having some trouble at his university in India, where the authorities had suddenly discovered that he owed them a tiny amount, which they hadn't told him about in four years and now wanted back (with a fine) before allowing him to graduate. "You just paid it, right?" I asked him. "Yeah," he said, "In India it doesn't pay to complain".

Of course, I had to say something to that.

"In Zimbabwe, the problem is usually finding someone to complain to."

Got stuff done today

2005-07-25T18:54:00.000-06:00

I wish all days were as productive as this. I walked downtown just after lunch at 1300... it was drizzling all the way, and my 1 euro umbrella was demonstrating its value for money...

went to my local bank (Volksbank) to figure out how much money was in my account as I thought I was being underpaid by the MPI (and yes, I was)
bought some salami, cheese und bread on the way at the market (unplanned, but it's good pancetta)
bought a ticket to Amsterdam for 44 euros - summer special - and I can use the fast trains! I'd been unable to buy this online either - all the tickets I could find there were over 100 euros - this gets me there a day early, but I think Bernie - whom I'm staying with there - won't be too upset
went to the local branch of Citibank to verify that I couldn't transfer money to my account in Chicago
Went to another nearby branch of Volksbank to transfer the money - it should take a week, and will hopefully get to Chicago in time to pay for the deposit on my new apartment
Caught a bus to the MPI to get to Florian's seminar at 1500. The bell for the seminar was just going off as I walked up the steps. Perfect timing, nicht?
Went to the payroll department, who promptly verified that, yes, there was a mistake with my salary - and I should get a few hundred euro in my bank account tomorrow - which I can then transfer back to Chicago for my first month's rent.

Thank you, Nick Hornby, for writing High Fidelity, which got me out of my emotional rut and back into life. (Hopefully this effect will last at least three days.) It made me get in touch with a couple of old friends who I really shouldn't have got out of touch with. I just phoned one of them - and it turns out she's actually passing through Karlsruhe in a month! Wow. Her brother works there. Nice timing.

The Romany Holocaust Museum (Heidelberg, Part II)

2005-07-24T11:58:00.000-06:00

Heidelberg Part 1

As I was walking from the Castle, I saw a building for the Sinti und Roma Holocaust Museum. I knew that it wasn't just Jews who died in the holocaust, but also the Romany - i.e. gypsies, though I learnt here that they don't like to be called that - but hadn't seen anything on this other than a couple of lines in history books. I looked at my watch, shrugged, and went in.

There was an old lady there. She looked at me skeptically. (It was shortly after this that I decided to buy new shoes. I was wearing my last serviceable pair of shoes. The hole in the right one has been there for a year now.) "I should warn you," she said, "that the tour will take two hours if you listen to it in full". Maybe she figured from my Chicago t-shirt that I lived in the US, and had an American attention span. Or she knew that Indians had shorter attention spans. In any case, she was right, as I hadn't thought of staying more than half an hour.

"I'll listen to a lot of it", I said. "I'll be here an hour."

Mollified somewhat - "nice but firm" is a good way of describing her - kinda like many New Yorkers and certain mothers - she gave me an English audio guide (all the exhibit text is in Deutsch), and showed me how to use it.

It's a very well-designed exhibit, going through two floors of the building. I should have taken more photographs. I listened to about three-quarters of it, and stayed 90 minutes.

Family photographs of some of the Romany deported to Auschwitz

Romany children in their last summer.

Sinti is what the Romany are called in Germany, Roma what they are called in some other central European countries. They are really several groups of them, but most (all?) have their origins in India - linguistically, Romany has roots in Sanskrit. I knew that before, but what really brought it home was seeing that half the people in the photographs had ethnically Indian features. That, I have to admit, made it more personal for me. I'm not fond of being part of the Indian diaspora (I wouldn't mind being one or the other, but both...) but somehow it's different when considering people far higher on the diasporan scale than you.

The word "killed" is also rarely used, if ever. It's always "murdered". This is good. "Killed" somehow implies a lack of responsibility by the cause of death, e.g. "killed by the tsunami". "Murdered" means a crime.

There is an understandable sense in the exhibit of "hey, it wasn't just Jews who were killed - so were we". Like comments by Nazi officials that no distinction was made between Romany and Jews, and that the aim was the extermination of the entire race.

Half a million Romany were killed across Europe.

Names of thousands of the dead.

When I finished the exhibit, I talked to the old woman at the front desk. I had been the only visitor in the museum at the time (bar an old friend of hers who came in to see what I was doing about 20 minutes after I'd started - he must have reported to her that I was going through it very slowly) and asked if there were normally more people here. She said more people came in in the afternoons, and during the week, when there were schoolgroups.

It's a good, simple museum - more people should come here.

Link to the Sinti und Roma Museum: German, English. (The English site isn't as up-to-date as the German site yet.)

Heidelberg

2005-07-24T11:04:00.000-06:00

The first thing you see as you get out of the train station.

I visited Heidelberg yesterday. As happened on a Saturday six weeks ago, I missed meeting the people I was going to visit the town with. Except this time the missed people lived in Heidelberg, so by the time I missed them, I was already there. (They've been having email trouble, so I think the last two emails before I sent, which had my cellphone number amongst other things, never got there.

So I did what I usually do, which is explore by myself. I got a Heidelberg card, and went to the castle.

In the Schloss they have a museum - a strange one to have in that location - for the history of German pharmacy. There are some interesting exhibits:

Preserved newts. These were meant to be dipped in chocolate, a la Spirited Away. (Another cartoon that I was too scared to watch in full, the other one being Finding Nemo.)

Cranium Humanum (with wig)

I did the touristy thing, which is take lots and lots of photographs.

The castle is so old that all the glass in the windows has fallen off or been stolen. Here's a look through one of the open windows.

Guards. Lions.

Trying to get a better upskirt look at one of the guards.

Due to the increasing number of tourists, authorities are now building a parking lot in the middle of the castle.

Statue of king with ice lolly.

I left the castle. The tourist office told me I could go up for free (since I had a Heidelberg card) with a ski-lift to a higher place with an even nicer view, but when I tried, I could only find machines that sold tickets, and no official around who could give me a free ticket because I had a Heidelberg card. I figured I didn't really care, so I left the castle, and went downtown again.

The first thing I saw was the Romany Holocaust Museum (that's not its official name, but is what it is), which I've posted about separately.

After seeing the Karzer (where I took pictures too poor to post, even by my standards), I saw the German Packaging Museum, which mostly seemed a tribute to a German pencil manufacturer (Schwan-Stabilo) that I'd never heard of but is apparently quite famous. It invented the pencil with white lines on hexagonal edges (a manufacturing error that they were very worried about before they realized it was a valuable branding technique) and the edged highlighter (whose shape came from a frustrated designer thumping the putty he was designing the new nib with).

It's a tiny museum, and for some reason they were busy preparing for a wedding reception in it later that day (even the woman at the desk didn't know why the wedding couple had made this choice - neither of them worked there), but had some interesting non-pencil related exhibits.

Shop window, circa 1900. Click on it to enlarge, and you'll see the cans of Maggi soup!

Colgate through the ages

On the anniversary of the landing (of me on earth)

2005-07-21T22:22:00.000-06:00

After some pressure from friends, I posted a message to the local department this morning. I'd been not wanting to post this for days.

To celebrate (a) the 36th anniversary of the first moon landing, (b) nothing in particular, (c) Thursday, (d) my birthday, (e) the existence of beer, some of us are going to the BierKeller at 8pm today. Feel free to join us!

More people have wished me a HB today than in the last three years combined. They must take birthdays seriously around here. Perhaps I should as well.

Only a couple of extra people showed up in the end, which was what I'd hoped for. (Well, we had a venue change, and I hope no-one came to the old venue and didn't see the note we'd left there.) Had a few drinks and chatted and chuckled and came back and worked.

At one point everyone was describing how the places they came from were really bad. We were usually making things up, but Magda had a really good one, describing how there were lots of shortages in Poland in the early 1980s, and how they happened to live near the paper factory/shop and would have someone at the window looking out waiting to see if the bogroll shipment was in - and when it came in, mothers would run out, with all the little kiddies in tow (the quota was per human, not per adult) to buy as many as possible.

Anyway, Meg asked Magda why there was a shortage of toilet paper in Poland at that time. We never did find out the answer to that one, because Art interjected the suggestion "Bad Polish food?", which caused everyone to go into hysterics. By the time we'd recovered, the subject was vegetarian crocodiles or something like that.

Misc.

2005-07-21T21:59:00.000-06:00

Gerhard Reitmayr of Cambridge (the original one) and his colleagues Ethan Eade and Tom Drummond have come up with a nice way to augment maps. Nice techie details ...

Now here's a product one hopes will become common at internet cafes everywhere (yeah right) A keyboard that has additional keys that change the key layout. Errmm... you say, wot's new with that? That's just software, right? Nope. The whole frickin' keyboard changes. (I really ought to get back to being a regular /.er - I was two days behind on this one.) They have a nice FAQ too. Though they don't say, when they say it will cost less than a cellphone, which cellphone.

If I had any iota of determination, I'd become a regular here.

Truth in advertising

2005-07-21T00:07:00.000-06:00

Peter Day has written a nice piece about dirty advertising. Hang on, let me say that again. It's a column on advertisements for washing up powder. It meanders about a bit, and then gets to the interesting part, about how the ad became far more successful in East Germany once it promised less.

Persil's the current advertising stressed its pre-eminence : the whitest wash in the world.

"East German housewives don't want that," said Mr Mackat [of an Ossie market research agency]. "They just want decently clean clothes."

The pan-German Persil ads showed a German hausfrau at work, beautifully turned out and glowing with health. In the background was her spacious home, shining with the latest gadgets.

"East German women can't identify with that sort of thing," said Frisch and Mackat.

They took the hausfrau and the bungalow out of the ads, and toned down the world beating claims. The ad they unveiled for the Ossies said something modest such as "Best for coloureds". And it worked.

By the way, Ossie and Wessie refer to Germans from (the former) East and West Germany.

Cycling, funny obituaries, and ergonomics

2005-07-20T19:44:00.000-06:00

Getting back into the hang of writing C++ code. Slowly. Sure wishing I had my copy of Stroustrup's 3rd edition around.

Cycled downtown today at 1800 to verify that the bank does indeed close at 1630, and that the local library needs to see my passport to join it (I hadn't planned to stop there, so I'd left my passport at home). Spent 15 minutes there reading a Grisham. Would have been longer, but they were closing. They've got a very small (under 200 books) but decent collection of English books. I'm still going through Arthur's box of books though. He also suggested, when he found I liked Rob Rankin and Terry P, that I ask Jeremy for some books of Steven Aylett. There, I've written that name down before I forget it.

I then pushed my bike up the hill, as usual. Finally investigated that shortcut by the forest. Doesn't save much time. Costs lives, though. Of slugs. (Cause of death: wheel-related, not shoe-related. I hope. I've been avoiding looking at my soles of late.)

I'll have to be careful cycling once I'm back in Chicago. Apparently the cops are cracking down on cyclists like me who believe in flexible rules.

Meanwhile, I hadn't heard about the interesting obituary notice of D.G.Cully, 86. Here's a phrase that wouldn't be out of place in an Aylett novel (there, I said it twice. Now I can't forget the name.), let alone in an obit, particularly when it's not that of the person named.

Unable to actually prove this complex theory scientifically, and frustrated by the cruel conspiracy of the so-called "scientific community" working against his efforts, he ultimately stuck his head in a heated gas oven with a golden delicious apple propped in his mouth. Miraculously, the apple was saved for the evening dessert. Calvin was not.

In the middle of another story (and I don't understand what the problem with men wearing shorts to work is), Jan Wong mentions an interesting fact:

You'd think worker bees would get more sluggish when temperatures rise. But according to a 2004 study by Cornell University, warmer temperatures actually increase productivity. When the office temperature was cranked from 20 C to 25, typing errors dropped 44 per cent and overall typing output rose 150 per cent, according to the study by Cornell professor Alan Hedge.

So when it's a nice, civilized temperature we type faster and make more mistakes? Well, the only way to find out is by reading Professor Hedge's articles. And, I have to say, he has a mighty interesting publication record. I really would like to read about the "Effect of providing foot support on lower leg temperature for sedentary workers." (Proc.Hum.Fac.Ergo.Soc.'03). I'm not being sarcastic. I'm a geek - I really would like to read that. And this is when I start cursing, because none of these papers are online. When are people (outside cs/math/phy/astro) going to make it a habit of putting all their papers online? (You can get around journal copyright restrictions by publishing drafts, or better, publishing in modern journals that leave copyright with the authors.)

Introduced one of my officemates to AIR. He's not got much work done today.

SNAP

2005-07-19T04:51:00.000-06:00

In Volume 11.4 of the Annals of Improbable Research is the superb article on
Sluggish Data Transport by Ami Ben-Bassat et al.

To the right is a snapshot from their paper. Note the mobile data storage backend, the organically engineered frontend, and the LGS (Lettuce-based Guidance Subsystem). And yes, their numbers, showing that the average number of bits moved by l'escargot per second is higher than broadband, are flawless.

darn rz

2005-07-18T22:48:00.000-06:00

Just when I thought I had the Partiview angles all figured out, I find that I can't just set Rz to a constant.

Here are some values I know are correct. They are for when the camera is at 0 0 0, and you are looking at a b c, and you need rx ry rz. The rx ry here are calculated using partiviewangles.m and the rz are computed manually (i.e. we want a rule giving rz) and are therefore approximate.


    a    b    c   rx        ry        rz
------------------------------------------
    1    0    0    0       -90       -90  
   -1    0    0    0        90        90  
    0    1    0   90         0         0  
    0   -1    0  -90         0       180  
    1    1    0   45       -90       -90  
    1    2    0   63.4349  -90       -90  
   -1    2    0   63.4349   90        90  
    1   -2    0  -63.4349  -90       -90  
   -1   -2    0  -63.4349   90        90  
   -1    2    3  147.6885  -18.4349  -32  
    1   -2    3 -147.6885   18.4349  148  
   -1   -2    3 -147.6885  -18.4349 -148  
    1    2   -3   32.3115  -18.4349  -32  
   -1    2   -3   32.3115   18.4349   32  
    1   -2   -3  -32.3115  -18.4349 -148  
   -1   -2   -3  -32.3115   18.4349  148  
    1    2    3  147.6885   18.4349   32  
    1    3    2  126.6992   26.5651   32  
    2    3    1  126.6992   63.4349   68  
    2    1    3  164.4986   33.6901   68  
    3    2    1  147.6885   71.5651   80  
   10    1    2  174.3996   78.6901   90  
    4    1    2  167.3956   63.4349   84  
    3    1    2  164.4986   56.3099   80  
  2.5    1    2  162.6539   51.3402   76  
    2    1    2  160.5288   45        71  
  1.5    1    2  158.1986   36.8699   64  
    1    1    2  155.9052   26.5651   50  
  0.5    1    2  154.1233   14.0362   30  
    0    1    2  153.4349    0         0

There was lots of leftover beer from one of yesterday's night talks - we helped ourselves to some of it, and now our fridges are filled.

Other discoveries: coconut-heavy thai curry must be eaten in moderation.

Cycling in the woods

2005-07-17T14:16:00.000-06:00

Decided to get off my ass, put it in a saddle, and get on it again. Then I had to decide where to cycle to --- I figured a nearby town called Bebenhausen, since I had about 90 minutes of daylight left at 8.30pm. This meant going through a forest. The first sign I saw said "Bebenhausen 1.5km". The second sign said "Bebenhausen 1.9km". The remaining signs I saw -- and there are quite a few ones missing in the forest, even at crossroads --- didn't say Bebenhausen anywhere. I was completely lost, and kept cycling, hoping to find a small town somewhere.

After about an hour, I bumped into the first soul I'd seen since I entered the forest. It was Tom Lal, from my department! I haven't seen too much of him, so he recognized me, not vice versa. (I'm terrible with faces...) Turns out that I had traced a large curve, and was pretty close to the start. I cycled with him and his running pal for a few minutes (good runners, them) and discovered we had another mutual acquaintance in Chicago (Altun) - and that the forest we were in went on for 15-20km in directions I could have taken - before we got to a main road, and they pointed me home.

Surprisingly, when I got back to a road I knew, I found I had didn't have any more uphill cycling to do. On my way into the forest I passed this nice steep downhill stretch, and was really not looking forward to coming back up that way. The alternative way we'd come skipped that (now) uphill patch, which was really nice. It's a lot easier to have a gentle uphills for a long way, mixed in with a few downhills, than a sharp uphill.

I never did find Bebenhausen. That's for another day. Maybe.

Now I better go take a shower. I've found a couple of bugs from the forest on me, and while I've removed the visible ones, there are probably others.

Tuebingen music, GHMM, Partiview angles, UZ

2005-07-17T10:25:00.000-06:00

There's been a music festival in Tuebingen the last two days. Good fun, though I only watched a couple of hours each day. In both cases I cycled down - a mental breakthrough since I've not wanted to cycle down when there are lots of people around - and of course pushed the bike up. I've given up being embarassed by having to push the bike up. It's f*ing steep, and I'm f*ing unfit. C'est la f*ing vie.

Been making a lot of progress understanding what Gunnar's been up to with his GHMM. Turns out he was anticipating a lot of the Hofmann/Altun/Tsochantriadis and Taskar et al stuff with his framework, and then settled on a method that theoretically doesn't make use of all information available, but is faster and works just as well - at least on his problems. It requires the solution of a sparse linear system with thousands (in some cases hundreds of thousands) of variables and constraints, which CPLEX is happy to solve. Unfortunately, CPLEX ain't free, so I can't use it in a general open source toolkit I plan to write in the next two weeks. We'll find out.

The Argentinians want another animation for their movie on the Pierre Auger Project, based on the past ones I've made, including ones I made in the last week. Unfortunately, this requires my being able to make smooth flypaths in Partiview. I've not known how to do that the past 18 months, as I've been stuck on the following problem:

Suppose I want to place a camera at position x1,y1,z1, looking at x2,y2,z2. Partiview requires you to specify x1,y1,z1 and some rotation angles Rx,Ry,Rz that define where the camera is looking to. Yesterday I finally figured out how to compute Rx, Ry and Rz! Here's the Matlab script. There's certainly a proper, well defined way of doing this with lots of matrices, which Stuart's tried to explain to me, so this is definitely a hack. But it works.

I'm back in touch with some people at my old undergraduate math department at the University of Zimbabwe. It's amazing how many people are still there, despite all the economic woes. (We're talking here about a country where people long to get back to the days when inflation was only in double digits, where unemployment is over 70%, life expectancy is under 40, etc.) And a couple of my friends have gone back there after getting their doctorates in the US and Norway. One of them said he was subsidizing his stay there by the money he earned lecturing in the US for three months following his graduation. Wow...

Whelming

2005-07-11T12:36:00.000-06:00

Talk about new words... Ira Berkow writes in today's NYT, in an article about consummate White Sox base stealer Scott Podsednik,

While the White Sox have some power in the lineup - Frank Thomas, Paul Konerko and Jermaine Dye - the team relies on speed, on defense, and on pitching in, well, underwhelming, but nevertheless whelming, the opposition.

Today I've been whelmed by a bug that won't go away. On the other hand, I did work out the Lagrange optimization equations for SVM Regression.

Vegetarian Travails

2005-07-10T13:17:00.000-06:00

While most of us have simple rules that we can use when eating, such as "if it is not moving, I'll eat it" or the safer "if it is not moving, and it does not look like it has been moving in the last ten minutes, I'll eat it", several people have more complicated rules. Take vegetarians, for instance. The only thing that veggies, as I affectionately call them, agree on is that they can't eat mammals. Some self-proclaimed veggies eat chicken. Several eat fish and seafood. Vegans, the purest and more annoying people to have lunch with, don't eat meat products - no milk, butter, yoghurt, eggs, etc.

Link: Vegetarian Taxonomy, by the Pure H₂0 Gazette

Veggies have a rough life when travelling. A veggie friend of mine recalled his visit to Lyon, the French culinary capital for carnivores, with horror. "In each restaurant, it would take ages to ask the waiter what they had on the menu for vegetarians. Most of this time would be spent explaining the concept of `vegetarian'. In one place, the waiter, once he finally understood that I didn't eat meat, wanted to touch me to see if I was real. He had heard rumours of there being such a thing as vegetarians, but had never believed that they really existed."

Such stories make me glad I am only a vegetarian between meals.

Of course, many people ask me when we go to restaurants if I am, since many ethnic Indians are. After much unsystematic experimentation, I have come up with an answer that usually ends up in a conversation like this:

Friend: Do you have any, um, dietary restrictions?
Me: Oh, yes, of course. I don't eat iguana.
Friend: Sorry?
Me: Iguana. I don't eat iguana. You know, that lizard thing?
Friend: Er, right. Have you ever eaten iguana?
Me: No. I don't eat it, remember?

Of course, my friend is really asking the question "Have you ever been in a situation where you could have, if you were not restricted dietary-wise, eaten iguana?" Similarly, I am really giving the answer "Wrong stereotype, bud."

Another trip to Stuttgart

2005-07-09T17:12:00.000-06:00

I hadn't realized snarfing was a crime. Snarfing and cracking someone's computer - that's different, but plain vanilla snarfing? Someone just got arrested for it!

When I went to Aspen last year for the E&O Workshop with the Smiths, we didnt know where to go exactly once we got to the town, so we moved around the houses till we got a wireless signal on my laptop and then found the website for the Physics Institute where we wanted to go. Snarfing saved us that time.
Joined a couple of friends, and a couple of their friends, in Stuttgart today. We initially planned to go to the BrazilFest but when we heard it was 40 euros, went to the free jazz concert in the main park instead. The picture to the right is from an interesting ad for Camel cigarettes. If you don't see why it's interesting, keep looking.

Hmmm... catching up on my MyDD reading. There's an interesting - and scary - post about rabid anti-muslim comments on right wing blogs. Also check out the comments on that post. Ich mochte ein beer. (Actually, I'd like something much stronger, but don't yet know how to say that in Deutsch.)

While sitting in the central park in the shadow of the building shown here (we couldn't figure out why there were people walking around in it) listening to jazz/rock/stuff, Lutzi and Sathya tell me about their very cool group trip to Kiruna in Sweden.

There's an ice palace or something like that in Kiruna (home of Sweden's iron mines, and above the Arctic Circle). Its bar is sponsored by Absolut Vodka - which I had no idea was a Swedish company!- where you could get as many vodka refills as you can drink before your glass melts - it's made of ice too. Apparently it is highly recommended (skin detoxicating, etc) to go diving into snow in -26 degrees after 20 minutes of a steaming sauna. And it doesnt hurt. Even if you do it in bikinis and shorts. Though it might cause people from other group trips just returning from dogsledding and all wrapped up in parkas to get a shock.

This is the first time in my life that I've ever bought more than a single newspaper at a time. Desperate for dead-tree news in English to read during the week while in my internetless room, I picked up the weekend editions of the Guardian, USA Today, IHT, and a couple of British newspapers I hadn't got before.

2005-07-08T17:11:00.000-06:00

Made a couple more animations for Auger. Got lots of work done this week, including using a suggestion of Gunnar's to speed his code up 18%. He was happy but disappointed that it wasn't more. I'll have to go look back at it to see if there was something I can speed up.

Lots of people around here seem to be aiming for SIGGRAPH '06 papers. It seems strange to me to be aiming for conferences months in advance. Speaking of which, I submitted the paper on dialog act classification to ASRU after SigDIAL rejected it (the reviewers gave it a 11, with the more knowledgeable ones scoring it higher, but it needed a 12 to go through). I took the reviewers' comments into account in writing the new version, and used some of the ideas I had while working on Gunnar's stuff, so though ASRU is a different conference, it has a fair chance of getting in.

They're shutting down the computers tomorrow. Oh well, I'll be in Stuttgart watching War of the Worlds and the Brazil fest.

Mark reports some interesting work with the SVMs on his data - they are making better predictions than people thought was theoretically possible with the available features. Interesting.

Juxtapositions

2005-07-08T11:41:00.000-06:00

You know, I think that when a camera company decides to sponsor the photograph gallery at the Chicago Tribune website, I don't think they meant to have it say "London bombings ... sponsored by Ritz Camera".

Meanwhile, I'm a little worried about one of my friends, a researcher at University College London who hasn't responded yet to my emails or phone messages about whether he's ok. He's normally a super-fast email responder. I hope he's at a conference or something,

Paris 2012? Non...

2005-07-07T00:39:00.000-06:00

Since the Brits learnt better from the Americans how to do last-minute lobbying than the French did, and because of Tony Blair willing to take three days off his packed schedule to travel a few thousand miles to do some personal lobbying, London will host the Olympics in 2012 instead of Paris.

Hopefully, this will mean improvements in the Tube, such as multilingual "Mind the Gap" signs.

I've found a couple of interesting quotes from newspapers describing the aftermath of the process.

I have been to London a number of times, and know that it will do an exceptional job as 2012's host city. King William will invite President Rodham Clinton and Vice President Obama to sit in his private box. The opening ceremony will feature very good music by Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney as their nurses push their wheelchairs into the stadium. --- Mike Downey, Chicago Tribune

"By late morning, Louis Troise was one New Yorker who did not realize his city had lost. He had to learn it in the worst way, from a reporter who simply blurted out the raw facts. He took the news well. It helped immeasurably that he had not yet heard that New York had submitted a bid for the Olympics. -- N.R.Kleinfeld, New York Times.

The Guardian reports on a Madrid-London, or more accurately, a Samaranch-Coe deal, that helped swing the vote. Note that both Madrid and London organizers had denied the existence of such a deal beforehand. Plenty of good stuff on how, to quote Daley Thompson's T-shirt (he has a history of interesting, and not always PC, t-shirts), "Seb and Co put the Great back in Britain".

The Guardian also reports in depth on London's superb presentation that stood out from all the others. You can find it on the BBC London 2012 site.

Meanwhile, Neil Chandler in the SF Chronicle writes that

In the normal course of events, we Brits would by now be indulging in our real favorite sport -- a grumbling, blame-seeking inquest. ... We prefer to retreat to the sidelines and moan how we never manage to get anything done.... But it dawned gradually that another time-honored British tradition did indeed fit the occasion: laughing at the French...

So how sweet to see the French president with oeuf on face. Even sweeter was the thought that his careless sideswipe at the blameless Finns -- that their grub's even worse than ours -- may have cost Paris the Games. London beat Paris by four votes. Two more votes for Paris would have meant a draw. Two of the International Olympic Committee voters are Finnish.

Martina's Ten Point Plan

2005-07-03T21:35:00.000-06:00

Martina Navratilova, Wimbledon legend (and the only person playing before 1980 who is still playing!) has a nice list of proposals to shake up tennis. She writes about them in the Guardian, in the article 'Players need control to bring about change'

Thou shalt not grunt. Maria and Venus, hear this. (Actually, I didn't realize grunting makes it harder to play at the net.)
Simplify the game.
- If the ball hits the net during a serve and goes in, keep playing.
- Bring in best-of-nine sets. (As in the new men's doubles regulations.)
Minimize injuries
- Play only nine months a year.
- Standardize hard courts. Make very hard courts just hard.
- Standardize balls.
Allow players to display larger sponsor logos on their shirts. (I had no idea they weren't allowed to do so - that's shocking.)
Get drug testing straightened out. Meaningless and minor drugs are being treated the same as real major drugs.
More money for players. (Again, lots of new details here.)
Have tournament organizers compete for the rights to host tournaments.
Raise prize money. Again, it's amazing that there are that many journeymen like Stephen Huss who still bother playing tennis, when you read of how little minor players (i.e. most players) get.
Women aren't equal to men yet. Why no women's wheelchair doubles? (Actually Martina, this was the first time they held one for men's wheelchair doubles - it was an experiment by the Wimbledon organizers, right? Are there more men's wheelchair doubles players? That said, presumably next year... and anyway, how come you didnt mention the fact that women's prize money is less than men's, at least at Wimbledon? Or is it ok since the men play best-of-five and women best-of-three?)
Unionize.

Wimbledon Doubles Roundup

2005-07-03T19:53:00.000-06:00

Question : when was the last time two players who played on opposite sides of a Wimbledon Final played together and won the next year?
Answer : 2004/5. In 2004, Last year Cara Black and Rennae Stubbs beat Liezel Huber and Ai Sugiyama in the final. This year Cara and Liezel beat Amelie and Svet. Cara becomes the first woman to defend her doubles title in eleven years.

"After winning the Wimbledon title with Rennae Stubbs last year, the petite Zimbabwean has formed a strong new partnership with 28-year-old Huber. Black impressed again with her quick feet and fast reactions at the net; whilst Huber, who potentially was playing the first of three matches today, was matching Mauresmo and Kuznetsova from the back of the court... What Black lacks in height - she is only 5ft 4in - she makes up for in tremendous pace and powerful returns."

Meanwhile, the official Wimbledon website has been paying more attention to doubles these days. with articles about the SA-Zim combination's progress through the last eight (QF, SF, Finals). Excuse their writing style, which is even more stilted than mine.

So have the players, at least among the women. Wimbledon.org notes that "of Ladies' Singles quarter-finalists... all but Maria Sharapova entered either the Ladies' Doubles or the Mixed Doubles tournament."

In general, Wimbledon does treat doubles folks better than other tournaments. Another example is the men's tournament, which this year came up with, in the words of the Guardian's Richard Jago, possibly the most unlikely result in the whole of Wimbledon's history. Is he including Becker 85? Well, maybe including that too. After all, he'd won Queens the same year. I doubt that any bookie had any odds on Huss and Moodie before the tournament started, and they must have odds on BB.

Stephen Huss and Wesley Moodie's 7-6, 6-3, 6-7, 6-3 win over the American brothers Bob and Mike Bryan, the recent world No1s, was the first time that qualifiers had won a Wimbledon title, but there were other outlandish aspects to it. Huss had been considering quitting the game, while Moodie had had no partner. After they joined up for only their second tournament together, almost as an afterthought, Moodie hurt his back and came close to telling Huss to find someone else.

Moodie's fierce serve and burning presence allied to Huss's nimble dexterity at the net and relaxed vibes were a wonderful example of how abilities which complement each other and co-operate become more than twice the talents of two individuals.

It happened the same week that the Association of Tennis Professionals announced a shortening of the doubles scoring system. The purpose: to stop lesser known players winning. Enjoy them while you can.

I'm not sure if that's the purpose. The purpose is definitely to encourage more top singles players to play - the question is whether they will actually be better at doubles than the "doubles specialists". Doubles isn't singles. It's much more interesting, for a start. And if tournaments did more to promote the doubles players, they wouldn't be as "lesser known".

Good to see doubles being promoted more. Hopefully other tournaments will learn from Wimbledon. As Huss commented (on some news report I can't google any more), it is the only grand slam tournament to still have qualifying rounds for doubles. To put this into perspective, read this article in the Aussie Age which says of the former Auburn student:

Yesterday's commanding 6-4 6-4 6-4 quarter-final win over third seeds Michael Llodra of France and Mark Knowles of the Bahamas on centre court was undoubtedly the highlight of Huss's humble career.

Note: that says quarter final. That article was written before the semi-finals.

The Bryan twins deserve sympathy. They have been runners-up at all three grand slam tournaments this year, and must be wondering what they have to do to win.

Mixed doubles news: Mary Pierce, legendary grass hater, won. Together with Mahesh Bhupathi. That makes their defeat of my favorites (Wayne and Cara Black) much easier to take. It's okay to be knocked out early in the tournament to the eventual winners.

In other minor news, Federer won again, as did Venus Williams. It's strange that she'd been written off (at least in my mind) when she was a finalist just two years ago. Presumably the womens' rankings at Wimbledon next year will take into account past Wimbledon's perfomances - if they had, Venus would not have been ranked 14. The men's ranking already did, doubtless so that Henman would get a higher rank than normal. (Actually, I'd suggest they take into account all grass court tournaments, not just Wimbledon.)

Oh, and Jayant Mistry became the first British man to win a Wimbledon title since Fred Perry before World War Two. That's a great trivia question, innit? I didn't know you could play with wheelchairs on grass. Full credit to the Wimbledon organizers for trying it!

Unrelated stuff: been getting some strange comments on the article on Wikis for Summer Schools and Workshops that I posted on John's website. I've asked him about it.

2005-06-25T17:59:00.000-06:00

Words aren't like shit. Shit happens. Words don't just happen. You have to make them happen.

Or maybe I'm just verbally constipated.

Moving on to other matters, it looks like the Iranians have elected an engineer with a doctorate in traffic & transport to be their next president. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also happens to have been the mayor of Teheran for the past two years, and implemented conservative policies like requiring male city employees to have beards and long sleeves. (Well, that's fair enough. If women must wear clothing that covers everything, so must men...) Seriously, the Iranian bloggers are upset, and I get the sense that this is a situation where the Ayatollah & other clerics keep an eye out for electable citizens pliable to their views and bring them to office - and that Ahmadinejad is one such citizen. Oh well, the Khatami backlash is here.

There's been a lot of discussion here, thanks to some comments by Matthias during Junming's talk, about whether the graph normalized Laplacian (the D.^(-1/2)*L*D^(-1/2) version) approximates the continuous Laplacian. It didnt seem to, but when Denny and I talked about it later, I observed that a proof might be possible, since, in the limit, nearby vertices - on which derivatives are computed - would have the same degree as they approximated the probability measure at the corresponding point. I'll find out when Denny gets back on Monday if he got this 'proof' passed Matthias. It's not rigorous, of course, but before that we had agreed with M's assertion that this normalized Laplacian was only an analog, not an approximation, to the continuous-case Laplacian on a manifold.

Didn't do much today so far. My sleep schedule is, to put it politely, shot to little eensy-teensy-weensy schmidtereens. Got up at 5. If that sounds normal to you, bear in mind that it's now the middle of my day, and it's the middle of the night. Ich mochte ein bier.

Friedman on CAFTA

2005-06-24T18:09:00.000-06:00

Here's one in the eye for critics of sensible NYT columnists (in this case Thomas Friedman - note that 'sensible' does not include David Brooks) who say they'll never criticize Democrats.

In today's post, he criticizes "Democrats who just want to defeat Cafta so they can make President Bush a lame duck have their way and block Cafta ratification. I understand Democrats want to stick it to Mr. Bush, but could they please defeat him on a policy he is wrong about (there are plenty) and not on expanding free trade in this hemisphere, which he is right about."

It's hot here

2005-06-24T14:27:00.000-06:00

The biggest obstacle to getting work done now is the heat. It's 30 degrees celsius, and there's no air-conditioning. I'm going to work in my apartment now, and come back to work at 2 or 3am. Maybe it will be cooler then - and hopefully whoever was sleeping in our office (there's a bed in our large office) won't be sleeping there. Well, if they are, today I will wake them up.

Mark SubbaRao has put up a webpage of the AstroViz Workshop last month.

Took the bike for a spin yesterday. Figured out how to get uphill - I shouldn't go to the lowest gears as my fast-twitch muscles don't exist. Cycled a few miles, close enough to Bebenhausen (link is to a gallery of pictures from a local student's bike tour to the place last year) before chickening out - it's seriously uphill on the way back - and then to Kunsthalle and back. Just 30 minutes. After this, I lost the key to my new bike lock, and am now using the spare.

Mingmin and I made the important discovery today that it is possible to play table tennis on the conference table. Even though it's elliptical. Very elliptical. And yes, we even have a net (a real one). Unfortunately she banged her back on a window or some sharp object while picking up the ball, and managed to draw blood. Who said ping pong was safe?

Bhasikoro!, Pissball

2005-06-22T17:40:00.000-06:00

Got a bicycle today, from Rad und Tat, one of Tuebingen's many bicycle shops. 70 euros for a 21-speed 28" bicycle that I will return at the end of August - and they trusted me (or the bike to fall apart) so much that I had to ask them for paperwork to sign.

The problem now is learning how to cycle up the hill where the Max Planck Institute is. I wheeled the bike up half the way here. It will take a few more tries before I can cycle up without stopping.

One of the Spaniards is leaving tomorrow, so a bunch of us went down to a local pub to hang out. At one point, the clique I was in had five people speaking four languages (German, Spanish, French, English) and no common language. Well, the Frenchwoman spoke Lingala and Lari as well, but I'm only counting languages spoken by at least two people in the group. The only person who spoke all four languages was, curiously enough, Canadian.

The pub we went to (the Bierkeller in downtown Tuebingen) has got the best urinals I've ever seen. Whoever does the cleaning here won't have to worry about people with bad aim. They've put little plastic soccer goals in the urinals, with a little red ball on a string. It bobs quite nicely when hit, which is the perfect incentive to aim better. Male reinforcement learning.

[Unfortunately, on a later visit to the place, we discovered that one of the urinals was missing a little red ball. Strong piss.]

Latin Phrases

2005-06-21T07:35:00.000-06:00

Found a good site of Latin Phrases. After all, quid quid latine dictum sit, altum videtur (Anything said in Latin sounds profound). This particular site has such useful phrases as "non sum pisces" (I am not a fish) and "Imperator concidit ut brassica esset." (The Emperor fell down in order to be a cabbage). And the next time you're doing your "Christian in Nero's Rome" impression, remember to say "Eheu, ardeo." (Alas, I'm burning.)

Book Reviews : Al Jazeera (Miles) & A Painted House (Grisham)

2005-06-20T15:40:00.000-06:00

I can borrow books from the library at the University of Tuebingen!! They said it wasn't normal, even for Max Planck Institute visitors, but that they would make an exception for my case. So I borrowed four books last Friday, and finished two over the weekend. With my sleep schedule, my weekend ended at 4am Monday morning, but that's another story. For now, the story is that I have two Amazon reviews up.

The first book was John Grisham's A Painted House, a well-written tale of a young kid who will (at 3-1 odds) become a lawyer two sequels from now.

The second was Al Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenges America by Hugh Miles. My review:

This book was written in 2003-4, and covers the time from Al Jazeera's beginnings in the 1990s to 2004, so it is very up-to-date. Miles' writing is clear and lucid, and I highly recommend this book.

There were many things here that I didn't know about Al Jazeera. I didn't know it was still running at a loss, that 120 of its initial staff came from the short-lived BBC Arabic service, that it had such a grassroots network of volunteer contacts among its viewers, that its staff had been killed by American forces, that it was banned from several Arab countries (and, for a while, by the Palestinian Authority) for criticizing their governments, that it almost interviewed Ariel Sharon, or that several of its loyal Arab viewers think it is American/Israeli-backed.

Given the impressive speed at which Mr Miles wrote this book, it is unsurprising that it has gaps. Questions could have been asked that were not. For example, I would have liked him to have asked whether al Jazeera would be in the black even without the Saudi advertising embargo, as the figures he provides indicate that it would not be. And there are much larger issues, such as why they decided not to show beheadings of Western-oriented hostages when they show horrific footage of nonArab-on-Arab violence from Israel, why they had to interview US Army Spokesman Josh Rushing outdoors rather than indoors, and so on. But time, pages, and one person's perspective (however broad), are finite.

Mr Miles is an Arabic-speaking British journalist who treats Al Jazeera like any other news organization. Of course, for any American who watches Fox (which includes other reviewers of this book), this is very biased. They should go to the English Al-Jazeera website, which I shall now visit more often. As one reviewer here has said, "a TV channel that offends EVERYBODY must be doing something right".

I should also add that I didn't know CNN discussed putting Arab Americans in internment camps after 9/11 (p363).

Now to comment on one of Amazon's featured reviews, which is from the Washington Post Review of Books. Why on earth did WP ask someone (Dennis Ross) who has been (and may still be) a Fox News analyst to comment on a book on a News Channel with a diametrically opposite perspective? I'm not asking for a Guardian reviewer, but at least one from the THES or New York Times. And of course, why did Amazon have to use this review?

For example, Ross asks "Why shouldn't it question what Arabs are doing to themselves, rather than just condemning what non-Arabs are doing to the region? Why doesn't it talk about the failings of education in the Arab world?" Good questions, but he clearly hasn't been to the AJ website, where he would find a special report on In Pursuit of Arab Reform or closely read the book he's reviewing, which describes Qatar - whose benevolent dictator bankrools Al Jazeera - as unusual amongst Arab countries in the high priority it places on education.

Another example: he asks "Why can't it seriously question what the intifada has cost Palestinians rather than glorifying suicide bombers as "martyrs"?" As I don't watch AJ, I don't know if there have been talk shows discussing this, but there probably have been several. As for 'martyr', Ross explains (p357) that that this is standard practice for Arab networks, and that American reporting has its own terminological biases - 90% of US news reports in 2001 used the word 'disputed' or 'contested' instead of 'occupied' to describe the West Bank and Gaza. And that's including the NYT.

More news from the Ethiopian front

2005-06-13T00:22:00.000-06:00

I got another email from my cousin in Jimma this morning. She says it's actually describing events from June 10. (Note that these are her opinions and observations, not mine.)

Nice day to start my birthday with - a bomb blast which happened last night at the university campus here in Jimma. no news about anybody getting killed. The police and the military are on the alert now. There has been vigorous checking at the gates of the university. even expatriate staff were checked. In the afternoon, the ethiopian staff were asked to get down from the bus to
be checked at the gates. They didnt check the foreigners in the afternoon. People said that in addis, the streets were deserted and military were everywhere. We thought jimma was better but today, by noon, the military swarmed all over the place. The situation is quite tense but the university hasn't been closed. Classes are still going on for students who come to class. Exams are not postponed yet - though no one can say what will happen tomorrow or even the next minute.

It's the students who are so demonstrative against the government. The local people are angry but are not able to do anything, rather, they dont want to do anything for fear of the police. The country has a rural population of 85%, the educated are only about 15%. The 15% that struggle
against the government are ending up as corpses or filling up beds and verandahs in hospitals. but they are not ready to give up. The ruling govt has been in power for 14 years. The people have seen this country developing in the past 14 years to nothing, and so they dont want it to continue. We have no idea who is right and who is wrong-but if they come to a solution soon with no bloodshed, it will be better for all.

The weekend was quiet mainly because many of the students vacated the hostel because they are having their exams next week and it is hard for them to study in that atmosphere. Many have gone out of campus coz they were not involved in the problem but the police suspect them to be. The students are split into groups now - on the basis of their region. It seems one group has
arms (guns) and the police are supporting those students. It may be that those students might have planted the bomb on the night of June 9. No one has any idea of what will happen tomorrow, or the day after. Bye for now.

Punting in Tuebingen

2005-06-10T21:59:00.000-06:00

Florian had his birthday last week, and he invited a bunch of MPI-ers out to the river on a punting expedition on the Necker. Our boat contained one Australian, three Indians, one Chinese, one Turk, and two Germans. We also had a dozen bottles of beer and no beer opener. Fortunately, it's possible to open bottles with a belt - thank you Dilan, for showing us this wonderful technique! - so that humans and ducks could enjoy a swig. Many swigs in most cases.

Here's a good shot - Florian silhouetted against the sky. Well, maybe it's too bright.

After somehow managing to have no-one fall into the Neckar (which is only a few meters deep here - good news for those of us whose definition of swimming involves sinking to the bottom and running), we headed off to a traditional German meal i.e. doner kebab, and then to a drink more beer in the market square.

Students getting killed in Ethiopia

2005-06-09T06:20:00.000-06:00

I have a cousin in Jimma, one of the cities in Ethiopia other than Addis Ababa. There's sh*t happening there - here's part of her email:

There is some news from us here-donno what they put on tv but I have tried to put all rumours together to try to get the truth.

Day before Yesterday (june 7) we had a bit of a problem here coz the university students went on a strike of some sort opposing the government. They had elections and the results were to be announced on june 8. the present govt was in power for 14 years and they don’t have much of a support. They have announced that they have won but the opposition says it has manipulated the lections and has asked the govt to give up power. The prime minister is not willing to do so. The students in a university in the capital started protesting and 4 or 6 were shot dead. About 500 students have been arrested. Following that, in the university here in jimma, some students started to protest and they were also arrested. Getting arrested here is not a good idea coz they will torture them a lot-beating on the knees and much more. Yesterday, about 300 to 400 were arrested, of which 50 were girls. Mom saw them being taken to the police station by trucks. Me and mom and the whole community here heard gun shots being fired in the air 5 to 7 times. None of the foreign staff went near the university. The ones who went were also sent back by the military. They blocked all routes to the university so that no one will know wht is going on inside. The whole episode was like hitler being re-enacted. Everyone says the situation has become ok, but no one knows what will happen tomorrow.

Seems many students have been killed in this whole problem. There are rumous that two deaths have taken place in jimma university. Now the clash has changed into that between people from different regions. Lets say like people from tamil nadu and karnataka are fighting-like that two regions of this country are fighting-students of those regions I mean. As such the university is functioning but it looks quite deserted. Everyday, the rumours keep changing that we don’t know what to believe. But all of us here are on the alert. Everyone is praying that the whole episode will get over soon without any bloodshed. Do please pray that we will get out of this mess soon...

Here are links to other posts:
Ethiopian Students International Association
Guardian

America and Germany

2005-06-06T18:21:00.000-06:00

After four days in Tubingen, I have made a few preliminary conclusions about the similarities between American and German cultures. This historically makes sense, considering that English beat German as the official language of the USA by just a vote in Congress a couple of hundred years ago. (I really need to check that 'fact'.)

1) Both say their vending machines have junk food, although the Germans are lying.

2) Both think the French are a little strange and that the English speak funny.

3) Beer, gut

New Pope II

2005-04-20T18:55:00.000-06:00

There has been a lot of unfair criticism of Pope Benedict XVI in the press. Please, let's stick to fair criticism, and give the guy a chance to be himself. In my previous post I used the phrase Panzer Pope - and I apologize. That's a bad echo. After all, if we must have military nicknames, why not Pope B16?

The best nick I've seen so far is by the copyrighting geniuses at the Sun who dub him "Papa Ratzi". Unfortunately, the same article's headline in full reads "From Hitler Youth... to Papa Ratzi". That's misleading, as even the same article says at the very end "He was 14 when forced to join the Hitler Youth. He later manned a German anti-aircraft battery — before deserting."

But that's the Sun. Even some respectable news outlets - like the Guardian - have referred to his joining the Nazi youth group as a reason to doubt him. Oh please...

On the other hand, perhaps they were using the term "Hitler Youth" in the same way as one would use "Concentration Camp", as in a forced punishment.

Of course, now that he's been chosen, the world - Catholic and non-Catholic - can return to ignoring papal instructions.

New Pope

2005-04-19T11:30:00.000-06:00

Catholics all over the world - in Europe and the US anyway - will be praying for the health of Pope =Ratzinger - sorry, I mean Benedict 16 - that it will deteriorate quickly enough to prevent the health of the Church from doing likewise. His election also meant that calls for an Islamic Pope went unheeded. Seriously, the fact that Ratzinger wants to bring Europe back to the Church, and that he's the man to do it, shows how far he is from reality. Even in Germany his support among German Catholics was not particularly high (under 30%, but I can't find the article). His conservative dogma will be popular in growth areas like Africa, but surely they'd have preferred Arinze. I do not pretend to know enough about Latin America, given that they had multiple papabile and weren't actually too fussed about whether the next el Papa was from there.

On the other hand, maybe the Panzer Pope will blog.

Consider me impressed. The Wikipedia is up-to-date with Ratzi's new name within an hour of the election.

Speaking of Wiki's, I finally got the MLSS Wiki running yesterday. I'm not linking to it yet though, still testing. Tiki-wiki is great! Thanks to Gunnar Ratsch for doing the first one at Berder last year.

Back. Again.

2005-03-03T10:01:00.000-07:00

Wow... color photos from World War One! I wish I could find more information about these - they seem toooo good.

Life on Mars (?)

2005-02-17T09:23:00.000-07:00

NASA Researchers Claim Evidence of Present Life on Mars... evidence is indirect but 'very strong' ... paper still has to be peer reviewed...

Jon Stewart sez

2005-01-29T22:51:00.000-07:00

In today's environment, you can't judge a book by its contents. Thus says Jon in the middle of this clip, referring to the Condi hearings. Speaking of good clips - guess what? - I like the attack on the Fox reporter too.

One of my favorite Jon speeches was actually unconnected to the Daily Show. What can you expect from a commencement address that starts out with "I had forgotten how crushingly dull these ceremonies are." On the other hand, it does have some good advice: "Love what you do. Get good at it. Competence is a rare commodity in this day and age. And let the chips fall where they may."

Zimbos at the Australian Open

2005-01-29T15:16:00.000-07:00

There are three Zimbabweans at the Australian Open. As usual, they are much better than doubles than at singles. I find it really annoying that the press, and even the tennis authorities, pay so little attention to doubles tennis when it's so much more interesting to watch.

Two of them, Wayne Black and Kevin Ullyett, won the men's doubles.

Wayne and his sister Cara were knocked out of the mixed doubles at the quarterfinals by Max Mirnyi and Martina Navratilova, who were in turn knocked out by Ullyett and South African Liezel Huber, who were in turn beaten in the final (tiebreak in the third set - ouch) by a couple of Aussies. Cara Black had a really bad Open; she didn't qualify for the singles, and despite being seeded second in the Women's Doubles with Liezel, went out in the second round. Eh, these things happen, Cara.

3d Virtual Sailing with Ellen M

2005-01-29T14:57:00.000-07:00

Ellen McArthur is an awesome British woman sailing around the world alone trying to beat a very tough world record set last year by Francis Joyon. One of the many things new about her bid is its public outreach component. And on top of the "This is New" list is a good 3d interactive animation package that allows you to follow her race.