Blog
Wet fluffies vs warm fluffies
My cat thinks it can create its own reality, just by growling at it.
We've been house bound for 2 weeks now (lottsa snow). But Lucie (the cat) still wants to go outside for her ritual checking of the perimeter.
So we crack open the back door and flurries of snow blow in and land on her fur. There is nothing dry out there- no place to prowl.
She growls, and hisses, and waits. Nothing happens, except she gets more snow on her back. More growling, more hissing, more snow on her back.
Finally, she stalks off in a huff, back into the house. I'm sure she thinks the snow is worried that it has offended her.
As for me, I suspect the snow doesn't really care. But I won't tell Lucie.
Fri Jan 15 06:20:46 PST 2010
My body, the car
Godley And Creme warned us: our bodies are like motor cars that wear out:
My body is the car that I've been driving Around for forty nine years My body the car Slowly burning out the rubber and stripping the gears My body the car
Well, they were right. The results are in- my gall bladder ejection fraction is 11% (normal is 30 to 70). The doctor's don't seem worried- they just say its some low grade chronic cholecystitis (yawn). But they have Well, Billy Bragg advises against those plans:
Thu Jan 14 05:00:53 PST 2010 I've been using the svn mode in emacs. At first, I thought it had a bug: it made me write change comments for each committed file, one at a time.
Then I realized that this bug is a actually a feature. I no longer write "bunch 'o stuff" when I commit changes to dozens of files. Instead, I pause and reflect on why I changed each one (guess what: lots of changes are due to documentation fixes!).
Wed Jan 13 05:44:38 PST 2010 And I'm sure I've missed some.
And when the lithium runs out, what next: Helium? Everyone driving round in cars with squeaky voices like Mickey Mouse?
And then what? Hydrogen cells? Could be a BAAAD idea. Oh, the humanity.
Tue Jan 12 05:06:15 PST 2010
So I can't read a calendar. I thought this week was last week. Or, should I
say, that next week was the week after.
Perhaps I'm not being clear. I thought that school started NEXT
week, not today. Which means I must now write multiple syllabi.
He tells me that there is no cure- that I
will surely suffer a relapse in the fall.
Mon Jan 11 06:56:45 PST 2010
I've never had such a house. It keeps raining, inside!
Hell, I've seen The Last Wave, I know what happens next. Everyone: time to buy scuba gear!
Sun Jan 10 06:31:44 PST 2010 Fri Jan 8 18:53:44 PST 2010 Weeks of snow. Wonderful.
Fri Jan 8 18:48:55 PST 2010 All
this was done using 3rd party
free tools and less than 40 lines
of javascript. (Note: search is
broken till the Google spiders
pass my way.)
Fri Jan 8 18:34:19 PST 2010 When I lose a file, I used to search for
it using OS/X's "searchlight" tool.
However, I copied most
of my files to an on-line
publicly readable web-based
version control system. So an
alternative to searching for it
in my 500GB hard drive is to ask
Google to search for it amongst
it's petabytes of data. And
the winner? Google search,hands
down. This means that the web
is now a faster place to explore
than my local computer.
Fri Jan 8 18:29:53 PST 2010
I've realized something. What I like doing is
scripting. Scripting is what is what blew my mind
in Beach Street Bondi in 1986 when I sat all
day in my little room, hacking on my Taiwan
AT clone. And all I've ever done since is tried
to find some business model where I can fund my
scripting addiction.
Fri Jan 8 18:27:15 PST 2010
Occasionally I run to the cupboard
to grab a coat , throw open the door,
and find a whole vast room in there
full of details to be retired.
Today I
realized that I was going to spend a LOT
of time importing all my old one-line
functions into this IDE framework .
Fri Jan 8 18:22:58 PST 2010
In those 2 months,
I travelled to Auckland, Sydney, Beijing,
Washington, New York to attend:
Then it was time to do end-of-semester grading, the
annual P&T reviews, and 2 NSF grant proposals (CISE, Dec 17).
At the
end of all that, my wife made a request that i actually was a husband
for a while. So we went to
New York to eat and do museums and some
shows.
This got us home in time for Xmas and all that entails.
Rest assured that i have NO travel plans now for some months and
months and months and months and ...
Fri Jan 8 18:11:27 PST 2010 Albert Gallatin build a mansion near Morgantown, WV.
Who was Albert? Well, he was
a the longest-serving United States Secretary of the Treasury; founded the
New York University and arranged maps and finance for the Lewis and Clarke expedition. He also helped balanced the US budget, which meant the USA could afford the
Louisiana Purchase.
His house is amazing- acres of manicured lawns and a beautiful
old house up on a hill.
The house and grounds are open to the public nearly 365 days a year.
There are deer that wonder around the grounds- very nice in the snow.
On the way back, stop at Apple Annie's for PIE!!!
Thu Oct 1 21:09:28 PDT 2009 Can you believe it? There is a massive massive massive
Hare Krishna palace near
Moundsville, WV.
The Internet map directions are somewhat incorrect, towards the end:
Thu Oct 1 20:42:01 PDT 2009 This one might want to remain a secret. But, for the strong
of heart, a visit to the infamous Moundsville Prison is a very intense experience. This place had hangings, riots, etc,etc. It was shut down after the courts ruled in inhumane. One hour of touring inside and you understand why.
On the way back, just to neutralize the horror
of the jail, go see the
Palace of Gold.
Moundsville Prison is yet another Morgantown Secret.
Thu Oct 1 20:22:18 PDT 2009 There are all these pretty places around Morgantown that are drop-dead gorgeous- but its taken me a decade to find them.
Here is list of amazing afternoon/ day trips around Morgantown:
Thu Oct 1 20:09:49 PDT 2009 Want some Frank Lloyd Wright architecture?
Kentuck Knob has drop-dead brilliant architecture and amazing guided tours. Not as spectacular as Falling Water, but nowhere
near as crowded. Also recommended is the walk back from the house down the
hill to the car park, via "The Meadow" (contains 400 2-d red tin solders, a 12' high chunk of the Berlin Wall, and other cool++ stuff).
Kentuck Knob is yet another Morgantown Secret.
Thu Oct 1 20:06:10 PDT 2009 North end of Cheat Lake is a manicured lake front with
easy walkways between lake and forest. Fantastic at sunset.
Really nice drive down there.
Morgan Run Road is yet another Morgantown Secret.
Thu Oct 1 20:02:11 PDT 2009 Now I drink misty optically.
Here's the Friday night drinks crowd. We gather to reassure each
other that, yes indeed, we are marvelous and wonderful. And, gosh
darn it, we are too!
Thu Oct 1 17:45:49 PDT 2009 Some Australian accused me of being a dirty old man posting these pictures of cheerleaders to my FLICKR account. I was about to protest that this was decent, wholesome, all American girls. Then, for a second, my cultural conditioning slipped and I looked again at these writhing tanned trimmed limbs over mini-skirts short enough to show their breakfast. All to the tune of some guy blowing his horn.
Now I'm confused...
Thu Oct 1 17:30:22 PDT 2009
I used to blog a lot here. Now, I am spread out over five sites:
Give me this day my daily web site .....
Thu Oct 1 09:58:19 PDT 2009 Sshhh... don't tell your minister but dieting is a buzz.
I'm on day 8 of South Beach Phase1 (no carbs, no sugar, no booze, no caffeine) and I just
drove 1.5 hours on a sunny Sunday M'town to P'burg.
The experience can only be described in terms Dr. Leary or Mr. O'Rourke might understand.
Soon I climb into a little metal bullet and try to fly higher into the sky. But that does not seem possible.
(Five minutes later.)
Oh god, I'm so depressed. Food! Give me food! McDonalds' hamburgers dripping in fat. A McHeartAttack Smoothie that is 10 parts sugar and 1 part some
crappy flavor that I won't even taste as I snort the whole thing up my nose. Ice Cream... plates and plates of ice cream that I eat so fast most of it falls
on my shirt. Then, for dessert from my dessert, I will pull my shirt off and thoroughly lick it clean.
(Five minutes later)
Hello birds, hello sky, may I join you as you fly by?
Sun Jun 7 10:16:59 PDT 2009 Welcome (again) to day three of South Beach Diet, phase one. For the next 11 days, no fruit, booze, caffeine, or bread. Its just fine... I drift
through the day occasionally taking pills for the coffee withdrawal headache. Don't feel hungry but if you put a pizza in front of me,
I know I'd just inhale it.
Yes, I know that this is not a long term solution (the effect that diets do not, in the long term, work is sadly
very well documented). But last semester was round and now I am
round and something needs to trim a few pounds.
Tue Jun 2 09:16:13 PDT 2009 So says Gregory Gay, voice of the nation.
Sun May 31 10:00:07 PDT 2009 One strange thing. Initially, we had N bricks on the path. Then, after much pulling and pushing, we had relaid N-6 bricks.
The leftover six bricks now mock our revised geometry.
Thu May 28 17:18:17 PDT 2009 I used to be the guy who read. I read everything, all the time.
Lately, last few years, not so much. Sooooo busy on tenure track technical stuff.
But that has changed, thanks to my Kindle. I bought it for Helen, did a test configure, glanced at my first download, read some, read some more...
Two hours later I thought "Helen is NOT getting this as a gift". So I did the only honorable thing.
Now Helen and I take our two Kindles (a.k.a. the twindles) everywhere.
Tue May 26 16:12:56 PDT 2009 This has been a HUGE semester. For years I've had the NASA buffer going and I only taught one grad class/semester. Now, that's
all gone and I have a standard faculty load. Officially that is 2-1 and some committee work. But...
This term I taught 4 classes including one large 3rd year class that I had not taught before.
Also, I got assigned to the high-effort promotion and tenure committee. The P+T stuff was NOT planned- I was stuck overseas and got a Facebook message saying that I had been appointed to P+T (thanks to the efforts of one Dr. Tim McGraw... who I know owe, big time).
I got by by a few admin tricks: two classes shared the same lecture series; one class was a seminar series that meet in my office Friday mornings; and my marker (Adam Nelson) did a great job of handling many of the subject details.
Still, I am exhausted and my "vacation" for this week involved exploring my inner couch potato.
Tue May 26 15:56:38 PDT 2009
You may have been wondering why this site has been so static of recent times.
My web obsession of late has been
awk.info.
Awk is a decades old computer language- hardly bright and shiny life Ruby of OCaml or C# or.... But dude, it works.
When I am prototyping ideas, this language is the best. I keep having attacks of other languages (Ruby, Python, Lisp, Smalltalk,...)
but in the end, its dear old Awk that I keep returning too.
Most people see Awk as a language for writing two line scripts- buts its much more than that. At
awk.info I've collected examples of Lisp interpreters in Awk, entire OO languages coded up as Awk
pre-processors to "C", massive great word processing and macro language toolkits, etc etc.
Also, the language has another advantage- there is barely anything in it. No advanced data structures, pointers, memory management,
etc etc. So if I explain an Awk program to someone, that explanation is not about the code. Rather, it quickly becomes about the
thing the code is doing. And I like that- lets me use Awk to talk about other things.
Tue May 26 15:47:49 PDT 2009
I don't even know how to write this one. Last month I learned that two of the alpha-females in my nursing group from Jan'78 had died.
Strangely, they did so within a month of each other. After Val died, Maria kept saying that
she could feel Val tapping her on the shoulder. Their funerals, I am told, were very elaborate (700!!! people attended Maria's).
I remember them both very well and very fondly. They seemed so old when I meet them (nearly thirty... years... old....).
It is to their credit that they were so kind and welcoming to a boy that was so young, he thought 30 was old.
We worked many a
shift together and
they were staunch comrades-in-arms. Together we fought
and defeated tutor sisters and pressure sores.
Maria and Val were both first-hand witnesses to the great misplaced swap incident of 1979 and the
curious affair of the cholecystectomy (stories that I will share, another time).
I also remember, very well, the day they threw me to the ground, ripped off my shirt, and shaved off the four chest hairs
I had at that time.
There was nothing personnel in this act- they were just frustrated that their main mark (Tony) had gotten away. Their blood lust
was unsatiated so they turned on the youngest fawn in the herd (and that would be me).
I hope I meet them again one day (for one reason, now I have more chest hair).
Tue May 26 15:28:12 PDT 2009 Question: What does I C S E, I C P C, I C S P, and P R O M I S E spell?
Answer: Seven days of timm being "ON" at four back-to-back international conferences co-located
in Vancouver Canada.
Some nice things happened.
But life is swings and roundabouts:
Tue May 26 15:19:28 PDT 2009 The new “Ocarina” app for the iPhone allows you to play a musical instrument by using the touch screen to tap out notes and the microphone to measure breath like a pseudo-wind instrument.
Since I am the resident experimenter of
all things new (see my
recent encounter with Mo’s Bacon Bar)
I decided to stage a public performance of the Ocarina: Sun Nov 30 08:58:27 PST 2008 I thought I'd gotten over that but last night I went and saw Twilight. Here, the biggest thrill in a
girl's life is
And I thought dimensionality synthesis in hyper-geometrical space was complicated.
Sun Nov 30 08:46:32 PST 2008 You could not make this up. Saturday we toured hell and saw heaven.
Now closed, this was an obscenity. Conditions there
were so bad that the State Supreme court ordered it closed,
arguing that the facility was in violation of the Eighth Amendment (which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment).
Absolutely beautiful.
And the moral is?
There is much to fear and much to celebrate about being human?
People are as good and as bad as we can ever imagine?
Dunno- but I'm thinking hard about it.
Sat Nov 29 21:15:09 PST 2008 Great Thanksgiving. Low key. Neighbors (Max and Lucy) came around and
we boozed and stuffed ourselves all day.
Everything was fun- even watching a dog show where the dogs looked like toupees.
Sat Nov 29 21:10:44 PST 2008 The class is hard going and one student said that if he'd had two such classes, he
would not have made it through. So I asked them "should I make it easier" and they said "NO!" (resoundingly). Structure it better, they said, and prune of some of the superfluous documentation
work, but don't dumb it down.
I asked "should I get rid of LISP?" and they also said "NO!". Functional programming rocks,
said one student, adding that it changed his view of computation.
And I can think of no higher praise than from the alpha-programmer of the class saying
that was "this is the class I've waited my entire degree for". He said that this was the
only class, in his entire degree, that seriously challenged him and pushed him to the edge
of his abilities.
I left that session with a long list of "to do"s but I was also grinning from ear to ear.
Mon Nov 24 08:34:35 PST 2008
Now, submissions does not mean acceptances and pride comes before a fall and
I've been doing real bad lately with TSE.
On the other hand, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Sat Oct 4 20:20:00 PDT 2008
Then came the Internet and E-Trade and global knowledge. And now
everyone knows all those places where
we can park money, to make it (hopefully) grow.
So we we ran out of new places to safely park
and grow money. And there was lots and lots and lots of money looking for
someplace to park and grow:
So we parked the money in riskier and riskier places. Then guess what? Those risky
places crashed and now everyone is running around screaming "the sky is falling, the sky is falling".
Now the market crash worries the hell out of me- threatens my savings,
may cause depression in this country,
etc. etc.
But it seems to me that this economic event was inevitable; perhaps, even necessary:
So welcome to a brave new world where we've bumped into the walls of fish bowl,
and the walls bumped back.
Sat Oct 4 18:15:39 PDT 2008 Last Tuesday was end of financial year.
The world was going to
end unless I got some reports written.
Heads up- in case you didn't notice- it didn't.
So you know how I spend Tuesday.
Sat Oct 4 18:06:09 PDT 2008 This dog, sleeping in the plaza at L'Aquila, seems to me to be
quintessentially Italian.
It sleeps. It occupies a space but never doubts its right to that space.
And the space it occupies is some tastefully selected region in the
center of some graceful concentric brick work.
It ignores me as I walk towards it. If I was to disturb it, it would gaze at me,
neutral,
uncomplaining, waiting for me to declare why I dare to disturb its siesta.
If we talk, it
might say "of course I deserve this space and if we have the espresso I might explain to you
precisely why that is true, or perhaps which Italian car is best.
"But a first, I sleep".
Thu Sep 18 02:03:32 PDT 2008
Also (begin geek joke) this is a bounded model checker (only two copied of a recursive structure).
Thu Sep 18 01:09:10 PDT 2008
Thu Sep 18 01:10:27 PDT 2008
Its like last century's software was an oyster, alone in their little part of the beach, in full control of inputs and outputs. But today's software lives in some kind of jungle and must connect to a diverse ecology of other systems that slither and change all around. Before, the designer owned their world while now the designer must continually react and adapt to the changing environment around them.
Thu Sep 18 01:11:19 PDT 2008
I was wondering, before the days grow shorter and cooler, what would be
the best weekend trip in this part of the world.
Here's what i came up with. The following takes about four days. For a two day version, drop
Greenbank, Greenbrier, and Skyline drive.
Sun Aug 24 07:22:41 PDT 2008 Welcome to the 3rd year tenure track grind. The next three months are exactly the time I put things in place
to get promoted in 2.5 years.
And no one lets me forget that.
Either by plan or accident, all these faculty people have been dropping into my office offering advice on how
I can get promoted to full prof. at the end of my tenure track.
Normally tenure track is for assistant Professors and the end-tenure promotion is to associate.
But I am already an associate so the only way I can get a tenure pay bump is to go for full professor.
Sadly, due to the terms of my start up letter, none of my pre-2006 work counts to that goal. That is, those 29 journal pubs and $X million
in grants are now forgotten, buried in the mists of time.
But I'm on track for promotion. I've been looking into other people's track record that got them promoted. I need 5 more journal pubs and 4 more
completed masters and at, hopefully, one Ph.D.
That's a bit of a stretch in the next 2 years but it is possible. Right now I have revise-and-resubmits on three journal articles, one more
written and ready to go, and one invited one for September.
Can't write anymore. Must get back to (re)writing journal papers.
Sun Aug 24 07:14:49 PDT 2008
Last night I forget to charge the camera so I write this while waiting for a little yellow light to turn green.
This gives me time to pondered all the electricals we carry.
Every night, we have to:
Most motel rooms aren't equipped for this kind of drain. As we plug in, we can see the lights of the town around us dimming.
Angry mobs of local villagers storm the motel carry torches (cause their electrical power has strangely disappeared).
We fight them off
with flashes from the camera- which means never letting that one run flat.
Quick, where's that wall socket?
Sun Aug 3 09:00:57 PDT 2008 Utah rocks, but New Mexico does more.
In 2005, we went to Utah. Everyday, we found rock formations more
amazing than the day before. Everyday, the camera filled up at 3pm.
It was amazing.
But New Mexico is different to Utah. More diverse. Utah has rocks,
New Mexico has so much other stuff. Each day, we've found something
really cool. And not just rock formations.
Then we went on to Los Alamos
to visit the Stepford Wives and Husbands that made the bomb.
Still to come is the Very Large Array and what ever else is up the road.
So, in many ways, New Mexico is way more interesting than Utah.
Sat Aug 2 21:20:19 PDT 2008 Welcome to New Mexico. Desert sands. Atomic wastes. Searing heat.
Drizzling rain. Can I have that last one again?
Sun Jul 27 21:37:45 PDT 2008
Welcome to the Atomic Museum,
Albuquerque.
In the original
version of this Nagasaki bomb, Helen stood nervously at its side. Then she
demanded that the photo be deleted saying
"I don't want to be seen anywhere near this thing".
We asked for home delivery but they said they only had take out.
Sun Jul 27 21:31:19 PDT 2008
Sun Jul 27 21:26:23 PDT 2008
I'm so up to the minute. In the last week I got a rule-covering algorithm going (PRISM, 1987)
and an iterative dichomization tree learner (ID3, 1982). Great breakthroughs in modern science? I
don't think so. Nevertheless, I am now the father of a 10-fold tree learner and I couldn't be prouder.
Mon Jun 30 07:12:01 PDT 2008
Kathy Recihs' books are like my old kindergarten blanket. Familiar and very comforting when you curl up
together.
The formula is simple:
Are we relaxed yet?
Mon Jun 30 07:08:07 PDT 2008
I've been fighting
with LISP and data mining and when nothing was going right and my recursive
tree builder was going crazy, I'd stare blankly out the window listening to a steady
patter plop plop plop. Drops of water, not so much falling as drifting down.
Mon Jun 30 07:05:49 PDT 2008 Gawd bless the 21st century. Don't watch any series week by week. I instead,
buy them all on iTunes then eat them all in one weekend. We've been doing "24" each
year at XMAS that way. Last year we got through "24" in 46 hours.
Just finished mainlining season one of Californication. I asked
my wife "do I look as cool as David Duchovny?" and she patted my arm
and said "yes dear".
Duchovny has developed this entire style of acting where he spouts rapid fire
prose,
without opening his lips more than a quarter of inch. If I tried
it, Helen would say "what's that? stop mumbling and OPEN YOUR MOUTH".
But when David (queue sound of heavenly choir), she leans forward
closer and closer. She says its to hear what he's saying but I can't
help noticing that it means she is getting closer and closer to....
David. Mon Jun 30 06:59:34 PDT 2008 Ok, Temperance Brennan and Bones is all well and good but she ain't the source
If you want the real forensic porn circus, it has to be
Dexter. We spent last night doing 5 hours of the end
of Season Two. And by the end we were jumping out of our chairs screaming. Exhausted, we
went to bed and prayed we'd never be drug mules in the Florida everglades where Dexter
prancing about is more dangerous than any crocodile.
And, of course, if you think that murder isn't a lark, then
you should leave Dexter and go straight to Tony Hill (but only
if you are not faint hearted).
Wed Jun 25 07:51:27 PDT 2008 The test-driven development stuff is a new work practice
for me. No, I don't write the test first (not disciplined enough) but
I now my work is peppered with little demos that illustrate what is
going on. Good for teaching and regression tests. So that's a little
success story.
As for the "reusable code", I've been here before. Thinking I'm doing great design. But the real test is the
next thing I build. Is this supposedly "general" reusable framework really
reusable? Will there be some quirk of the next thing that breaks the
supposedly reusable framework? Time will tell.
And if I was betting man, I'd be better on more "refactoring" (newspeak
for "patching bad ideas").
Wed Jun 18 19:42:04 PDT 2008
My wife is in love with Hodgins. I am fond of Angela and
would die for a date with Temperance.
But we both agree that (a)Zach's fate was so sad;
and (b)we
need to curse the writer strike for cutting short the season three arc.
Now we wait wait wait wait for season four.
Sat Jun 14 18:56:31 PDT 2008 This is my first time back to phase 1 in two years.
Last time, I don't recall feeling this crappy
And crappy I definitely feel. It took till Friday morning
(four days pf back pains, much glumness, loss of sleep)
to burn off the enough of the required water, sugar, etc
for my body to relax.
Now I'm sluggish, very couch-ish. Very very couch-ish.
Totally my fault: I choose to start it on a week with a
surprisingly large admin load. Lots of buzzing around. Let me very
very buzzed.
Got another week of it. Then Phase 2. Booze. Avocados. Dried apricots.
Mangoes. Bagels. Wine. Yeah!!!
Sat Jun 14 18:14:53 PDT 2008 I've been having doubts about my choice of LISP for this data mining toolkit I am writing
for the fall class.
Then, yesterday, I was writing the generic 10-way cross-way loop. And I realized that (a) there was
a general pattern to that processing; and that (b) I could code it up as 20 lines of LISP, plus some funcall
to particular functions passed in as arguments.
So, while other languages support this or that, LISP supports all things. IJAM (it's just another macro).
Tee hee. Sat Jun 14 16:49:30 PDT 2008
I found it... revealing. I came to this town in 2004, king of all I surveyed. Darling of NASA, the publication demon,
fresh back from a great trip to Australia.
Pride cometh before the fall. Here, I was doing the soft
money/adjunct professor life style. And I very quickly learned my
(very small) place in the scheme of things. Adjuncts are a dime a
dozen and rogue faculty without a uni position are quite irrelevant to
the concerns of the uni. After 10 weeks here, I saw the list of
candidates for 2 CS Portland faculty positions: 485 in all and I was
lost on page 12 (candidate number 251).
This town took away my sense of entitlement to all the goodies of the
academic life. In retrospect, I totally had it coming (never
levered by soft money position into a faculty position, then the dot-gone bubble burst,
as did my job security). So I shouldn't really
blame this town- my own damn fault, really.
But, there are too many sad memories here. So , these last few days, I spent much of time in Portland
grateful that I did not living in Portland anymore.
Thu Jun 5 21:56:51 PDT 2008 Another day, another day of data mining and software process theory at JPL.
Spent 3 hours today sitting under sun umbrellas at JPL geeking out. Pairwise testing rules.
Data flows like wine. And data mining is cool.
Geek heaven.
Thu Jun 5 21:53:52 PDT 2008 L.A.: a primitive and savage land where the locals disfigure themselves in order to appease the gods (of fashion).
Where the car is king and all travel is at 80 m.p.h. Including the Internet. My hotel has the wireless less connection from hell.
Or, should I type, th e wir ele ss cooooooooonnnnn ee cti onn fro m hellll.
Thu Jun 5 21:50:48 PDT 2008 I love LISP. Here's a function whose name is the formulae it implements.
Tee hee.
Tue Jun 3 17:29:59 PDT 2008 I'm at the ASE program committee meeting. 40 people flying themselves
in from around the world- how much would this cost if it was funded?
Such collegiality.
It makes me want to sing (to the tune of WHAM's classic "wake me up before you go-go"):
Tue Jun 3 17:20:06 PDT 2008
The conference is in Vancouver, otherwise known as Vantucky. We lived here
for while in 2004 and I can't say that that I enjoyed it. Oppressive
skies, strip malls stretching to the horizon. How can one city support
need all that parking, all those malls?
Our conference hotel is in downtown Vancouver and it can be a ghost
town down here. Some Australians at at the same conference and they
asked "where are all the people?". All we could answer is "driving
north, south on I5, racing to get to the mall".
I learned to hate pine trees in Vantucky. They suck the sunlight from the sky and
walking beneath them is a very dreary experience. The locals are proud of this- they quote with relish from
Lewis and Clarke's memoirs- the part when they sailed along the Columbian and were
depressed by the incredible weight of massive trees flowing down to the shoreline in infinite
numbers. "We have to cut these down", they said, giving birth to the Oregon timber industry.
That night we went to our favorite Indian restaurant in the SE with Scott and Jen (his wife). We drank till
we stopped then went to New Seasons to buy little cakey things.
Today, I go to Portland for breakfast. Portlanders are much prouder of
their city their the Vancouver-ites and are found often striding around it. Either that, or escaping the rain in coffee shops
where they... interact. All
these caring and sharing over-educated middle class kiddies caring and sharing with each other, 24/7, 365 days/year. This is not a bad thing-
Portland is ground zero of the international open source
movement. But it makes this town so frigging
ardent and self-righteous and smug.
Speaking of irrational dreams that go horribly wrong, tomorrow I fly to California to move and shake with NASA people who, bless their hearts,
have little funding and no control over who they give it to. This could be the last time I try to dip into
the NASA bucket.
Sun Jun 1 08:17:25 PDT 2008
And the spirit of coffee moved upon the pen of the academic and he wrote stuff.
And NSF said "let there be funding" and, lo, there were green sheets.
And the accountants saw the green sheets, that it was good.
And the accountants divided the money into faculty salary and student salary.
And the promotions committee saw the green sheets, that it was good.
Fri May 30 09:02:15 PDT 2008
And, of an evening, the humble village folks gather round the big-screen flat panel T.V. to bash the crap
out of golf balls, bowling pins, and androgynous boxing partners.
Mon May 26 20:53:57 PDT 2008 B'fast at Cooper's Rock. Home for much hacking. Dinner at Asian Garden with Eddy and Crystal.
Home (again) for dessert and much playing of the Wii.
Mon May 26 20:57:06 PDT 2008 Sat May 24 17:15:55 PDT 2008 24 people writing one textbook? Why not? Crowd sourcing rules!
I've started a
Google Code project
for my fall data mining students. One big old Latex file with hundreds of sub-directories, breaking up
the whole thing into tiny little fragments. The idea is that student groups have to offer one or more
of the following:
Sat May 24 16:33:18 PDT 2008 Gym, swimming, eating healthy, weight loss, not work obsessed, kinder to small
children and animals, generous to charities, more time on the house and garden, get out of bed earlier,
get more sleep, ....
(Memo: erase this page in 2 months time.)
Sat May 24 16:26:22 PDT 2008 Just back from Leipzig, which used to be in East Germany. The architecture was... informative:
Sat May 24 16:15:45 PDT 2008
How can you screw up an Indiana Jones movie? Inject adrenaline into the veins of the
audience, hang them out over the edge, give them a crescendo at the end, etc etc. For shame Mr Spielberg. And what a waste of a perfectly good Cate Blanchet. Sat May 24 16:12:19 PDT 2008 Sat May 24 16:06:50 PDT 2008 The year before, the same march became the defining moment in the
Sydney Gay Pride movement. A night time march went terribly wrong.
The cops attacked the gays, systematically bashing them. Dozens were
dragged away to a nearby police station and beaten, all night long. Their
friends gathered outside, passing the hat, trying to raise ball for
those they could hear, screaming inside.
Of course, I knew none of this. I was just at a club, dancing and prancing
the night away with my mates. Four straight fag-hags, just here for the party.
Someone said "the Gay Mardi Gras is outside" so we went to look.
It wasn't the carnival that it is today- just a block of blokes wearing black
leather, carrying a sign or two- protests in remembrance of the police abuse
from the year before. We wondered through the crowd and when it moved
off, we sort of got carried along.
Then the T.V. camera crew showed up and all the
gays boys screamed "what if my mum sees me!?". The crowd parted like
Moses at the Red Sea, opening up to reveal me and three
straight friends in the middle of the
crowd.
With everyone else gone, we stepped into the gap. Holding hands,
we walked at the front of the mob, leading the chant, guiding them for a mile or two
through the center of Sydney. It was all great fun, cause we did not know that we risked a beating
with each step.
I'd like to think that if I knew the risks I would have done it anyway. But
I didn't.
So while I'm proud of the service I gave to the gay community, that service was so uniformed that
I earned almost negative karma points that night.
Sat Apr 5 19:21:34 PDT 2008 What made the demo very impressive was that the last 2 weeks I had to commission 10 new
computers. Take what the vendor gives, change that, alter that, etc etc etc.
The same task with virtualization technology would have been a 10 minute install on
each machine. Easy.
So now I get it.
Thu Mar 20 19:41:36 PDT 2008 Third week in January, a strange mood came over me. Took me a while to realize what it was-
I was relaxed! Not running round like an idiot.
Empty in-box on my email (that won't last).
Memo: try to space out NSF grants to less than one very month.
Sat Feb 9 19:43:50 PST 2008 Such functionality! Via FaceBook I've found old friends from high school and some old AI grad friends.
I know that Ken Forbus is updating his knowledge bases, that Enrico doesn't have a beard, and what's new in LolCats.
There are a couple of strange things about FaceBook.
Firstly,
no more anonymity. It would take more effort to create a fake identity on FaceBook that maintain your real one. Gone are the days of BigMan007.
Secondly, you actually want to use it. I read an interview with the FaceBook CEO and he offered the following telling comment "half of our users log on FaceBook at least once a day". Its true- I've been obsessing over it. Even found a Twitter/FaceBook connection that lets me update my status at high frequency which is both exciting for me and boring for the rest of the world.
Thirdly, because it is so usable, you use it. So I'm seeing my world split between emails and FaceBook messaging. Tim Menzies, split it two:
blogs are so 20th century. Onwards to FaceBook.
Sat Feb 9 19:42:43 PST 2008 LISP was my language of choice in the mid-1980s. Then I had a love affair
with Smalltalk that lasted till Smalltalk died.
But it turns out that LISP is worth a second look. In the 1990s, the compiler technology changed. Measured in terms of runtimes and code size,
LISP is looking nearly as good as "C".
And my American AI students seem to get it- they seem to riff on the LISP code I'm giving them- exactly the way Prolog never did.
I told a west coast AI friend mine about the LISP attack. He snobbed me about "time to get to the 1990s dude! Use OCAML". So I read up on OCAML and it is a great language. Still, the maturity of the LISP books is hard to compete with:
And my favorite piece of LISP:
Sat Feb 9 19:39:58 PST 2008
It turns out that Cardiff (where it is set)
is a pretty sexy place. Well, pretty
frequent sex. Plain old sex, bisexuality, homosexuality,
sex-with-aliens, sex-with-robots,
sex-with-bacteria, sex, sex, sex, sex.
Anything is fair game just as long as it
it moves, breathes, or has a shadow. Genitals not essential.
And its not even good sex- good in the sense that
it enhances the plot. Sometimes, it is pivotal to the story
(like in the sex-with-bacteria one,
where the bug was driven by
an the urge to reproduce, at any cost).
But usually it is puerile- the kind of sex where you
sneaking off round the back of the toilet block
for a quick shag, when teacher is not looking.
And be warned:
anywhere else on the planet, sex is followed by snuggling and
maybe a cigarette. But in Cardiff it seems required to condemn to death
the person/alien/robot/microbe that you just bonked.
Shoot them dead, chuck them into a time vortex, freeze them for
eternity, send them back to
1918 where they will be shot for cowardess, whatever.
So here's a tip for anyone travelling to Britain.
When in Cardiff, best to keep it zipped.
Sat Feb 9 19:35:51 PST 2008 In the afternoon, a meeting with grad student "Z" to discuss his new results. He's been
working on an idea that's been simmering around since 2002 (Kareem's stuff on IQ) and boiling
since XMAS'06 (stochastic beam search).
(And don't tell anyone but the problem is kind of urgent.
There is BIG hole in my Jan'07 TSE paper- that no on else knows of except me.
Oh, and student "S".)
So I brought along
student "S" to audit the results. Three of us realized that Mr.Z
was not borderline state-of-the-art, if not over the line.
And the problem with the TSE was solved. Killed. Totally.
Emailed current holder to state of the art. Phone call with them the next morning and he agreed we might
indeed be state of the art.
Meanwhile, Mr. "Z" did lots more plots. And we are looking good.
What a day. What a great day. Wed Jan 9 19:56:34 PST 2008
My true love gave to me, yet more to write.
I was just tallying the words generated by me over the XMAS "holiday". This kind
of gives a little insight into the life of an academic:
Time to rename my web site, I think, to "spell check 'r us".
Tue Jan 8 06:43:47 PST 2008
Last two winters, driven to Chicago and Chincoteague
in mid-winter. got lucky- unseasonably warm in both cases and sunshine to burn
your eyes.
And with the sun, incredible colors in the ocean marsh land.
Sat Jan 5 21:42:39 PST 2008
Take spare parts from 14 other bridges, string them together any which way, and you get the
wonderful mess that is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge at Annapolis.
The temptation
To take the precious things we have apart
To see how they work
Must be resisted for they never fit together again
So I have my own plans. Bring on the low fat diet. Kind of like filling the car with the ultra-grade at the gas station. Milk shakes? Get behind me Satan!
Emacs SVN mode = good
So now I'm wondering about writing a blog reflecting on all this code work. Every day, write about the changes from 30 days ago. This lets me not say stupid things about something that seemed useful n Tuesday, but by Friday I'd undone it all and dumped it in the scrap heap. That way I can write sage wisdom today without having to eat crow tomorrow.
Assaulted, by batteries
Decided to buy shares in lithium. Batteries are the future. Did a head count. My house in crawling in batteries:
Bad case of acute syllabi
"Multiple syllabi" sounds like a disease. Eeek! My doctor looks
concerned. He tells me:
"I'm sorry Mr Menzies but you have have a bad case of multiple active
syllabi. You will suffer for 14+ weeks.
Your symptoms will be tiredness,
inability to explain even the simplest ideas,
and repetitive exasperation syndrome as you repeat the same thing over
and over and over and over again."
Raining, inside the house
Give us this day, our daily hack
I am revealing in a morning hack. Take all that
screwing around time. Do it for 1 hour first
thing in the morning. Maybe even get some cool
stuff done. But burn it off so the rest of the
day can be spent happily in administrivium.
And the snow comes down
21-century: looking good
I love the modern world.
Last night I had insomnia, so in
one hour I added to a website
I'm working on:
The web is closer than my hard drive
Scripting 'r us
Building an IDE
I'm building an IDE for a language I like
and it is so NOT what I thought it would
be.
Busy!
November and December was
extraordinarily busy. I mean busy2*100.
Friendship Hill
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Palace of Gold
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Moundsville Prison
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Secret Morgantown
Kentuck Knob
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Morgan Run Road
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I used to drink optimistically...
Should I cheer this?
No news is good news?
Dieting = tripping?
Dieting, again
Shakespeare hates your emo poems
The Zen of Gardening
Today we took all the bricks out of the garden path, weeded, laid some sheeting (death to weeds), then put
the bricks back. Total time = 3 hours. Net movement of bricks = zero. But we felt better when we were done.
Kindles rock
The semester is over... finally!
A little Awk goes a long way
Maria and Val: R.I.P.
Conference overdose
Worst use of technology, ever.
I will never understand teenage girls
When I was a teenage boy, the biggest mystery in my life was teenage girls.
From jails to palaces of gold
Hell was the old jail at Moundsville, WV.
And 15 minutes away was a slice of Heaven- a Hari Krishna
Palace of Gold (at Limestone, WV).
Score: turkey=0, humans=1
"The class I've been waiting for."
I spent an hour reviewing my graduate data mining class with
the students last Wednesday. They pointed out some less-than-optimal
features of the class (I need some more intro material and I need
to change some aspects of the projects) but they also offered some
rather interesting accolades.
Over-production?
By mid-October I will have:
Finding the walls of the fish bowl
Once upon a time, a few people knew where to park their cash so that
(hopefully) it grew into
more cash.
The world did not end
Si, I am a dog
Better than the real thing
I can't help noticing that this conference looks better on the video screen than
in real life.
L'Aquila: a mountain Italian town
L'Aquila, 2 hours east of Rome, is not a popular tourist location. It is a small
bustling, living town. We work here, not entertain Americans.
This is a typical Italian town of tiny streets and even tinier cars.
The town has the ritual brassy nudes, cavorting in the water.
Even the toilets are stylish.
Of course, we have many Y.A.A.O.T.C. (yet another angel on the ceiling).
And what Italian mountain town is complete without a spooky hulking medieval fort?
Software Ecologies
Something has changed in software.
The Platonist and formalists are retreating (or retiring) and the ardent model-based reasoning people are singing another tune.
Best WV long weekend trip?
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Countdown to Prof. Timm
Addicted to power
On this
road trip we carry numerous rechargeable devices- none of which use standard batteries.
New Mexico beats Utah?
Day 1, in Albuquerque, we found the Atomic Museum and were scared++ by
full scale life-size mock-ups of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan (and
the Trident missiles).
Then we cruised all the route 66 diners and signs that run through town.
Day 2, we rode the Sandia tramway thousands of feet into the air, then
drove to Santa Fe. There, we got a history rewrite.
Santa Fe is an old old old town.
America was not colonized east
to west. Long before cowboys, the Spaniards and the Mexicans had built
massive cities in the center of America.
Day 3 we went to Los Alamos. Along the way we found the Valles
Caldera (so beautiful).
Day 4 we went to Taos and found an Indian Pueblo village that is at least
500 years old (and the locals claim it dates back to twice that age).
Day 5 we went to Mills Canyon then drove for hours over grasslands rolling away to infinity. Also, we had a little more route 66 stuff at Tucumcari.
Day 6 was Roswell (yawn) then walking the desert around Carlsbad Caverns.
Day 7 we went down the Caverns (amazing), strolled the desert around
Gaudalope mountains, then drove along the smooth buttocks of America
(an eiriely deserted highway running over to El Paso).
Day 8 we walked over the sand dunes at White Sands.
That afternoon, we walked around
cool rockets at the National Space Museum, then checked out the National
Solar Observatory.
New Mexico & monsoons?
Ever heard of the New Mexico monsoon season? I hadn't. But every afternoon
here the clouds gather and the rain falls.
A nuke a day...
What was scary was how small were these nukes.
The Hiroshima bomb
was tiny.
And an entire Trident missile (complete with dozens of warheads) was smaller
than an RV.
Temperance says "happy birthday"
For my birthday, all my dreams came true. Bones sent me a letter!
Hi TIm,
Thinking of you!
XXOO,
Temperance
Welcome to the 1980s
Relaxing with the murderers
Summer rain
It rained all weekend. Gently falling, huge gobs of heat relief.
Like walking around inside a huge slow shower.
Very relaxing.
Californication overdose
More forensic porn
Not reusable till reused
Been having much fun coding a data mining toolkit in LISP. Congratulating myself on
test-driven development (sort of), refactoring
all these reusable abstractions, then coding then directly in LISP.
I love Temperance Brennan
In the last 15 days. I've eaten 3 seasons of "BONES".
58 episodes.
Serious corpse porn:
blood, gore, maggots, bodies melted to mush. Yummy.
Dieting blues
Welcome back to South Beach, phase 1.
Two weeks of no booze, no bread, and definitely no fun.
Why I Love Lisp
(defmacro square (x)
(let ((x1 (gensym)))
`(let ((,x1 ,x))
(* ,x1 ,x1))))
A drive beneath me
Sunday, I was lost. Driving through empty streets in download Portland under
gray skies, threatening rain.
Playing with the rocket scientists
The land that Internet forgot
Greatest name of a function
(defun b^2/b+r (w before)
(let ((best (wme-besth w))
(rest (wme-resth w))
out)
(labels
((rank (b r) (/ (* b b) (+ b r)))
(result (k v) (cons (float (rank v (gethash k rest 0)))
k)))
(sufficient w)
(dolist (eg (wme-best w)) (inc eg best before))
(maphash #'(lambda (k v) (push (result k v) out)) best)
(sort out #'> :key #'car))))
Are you PC?
Write me up before you go go,
Cause I think your paper's so so,
Fix this up to show that you know,
Anything 'bout your field.
If clouds, then Pacific NW
Helen woke up, gazed out the hotel window at the low gray rainy clouds
that covered the sky, and said "there's an attractive picture". Yup, we're at a conference in the Pacific North West.
Oh, sure, the sun shines here, sometimes. It even blazed out one day
when all the conference people sat out in the sun and said nice things
about the weather in the state of Washington. The locals all laughed
and smiled- their suspiciously white skin beaming in the sun.
We made some good friends here. Here's Scott who shocked me by saying "you don't let your students use
setf, do you?" and I am ashamed to admit that I do.
One of my favorite sci-fi stories is set in
Portland. A hippy changes the world by dreaming. He doesn't have to
convince anyone of his vision, he just dreams it all up. Better yet,
our hero is not in control of his dreaming. Rather, he is told what
to dream by his shrink. The catch is that each dream is flawed so each
dream must be patched by another. An endless stream of failed best
intentions, all assuming that upper middle-class kiddies know
best. This story could only have been written in Portland, Oregon.
In the beginning...
In the beginning the project was without form, and void; and
darkness was upon the face of the accountant.
Wii, the people
A memorable day
Up at sparrow's fart doing spreadsheets.
Photos from Leipzig
Welcome to post-soviet East Germany
Let's write a textbook
Wanna join? Give me till mid-July to seed some content and demo files, then send me an email and I'll give
you write permission to repository.
Summer resolutions
Leipzig architecture
Post-soviet:
proud buildings glad to be buildings. The centerpiece of our conference center was a five stories of mezzanines
around a glass elevator shaft with glass elevator cabs. The elevator motors, top of the shaft, where left
exposed and panted yellow just to draw your attention to them.
Indiana Jones, sucks
Begin 2 days of denial and anger
TSE just rejected a journal paper submission. And so it begins. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression,
acceptance. Oh, then death.
God I hate that cycle.
Accidental gay activist
Once upon a time in 1979, I accidently lead the Gay Mardi
Gras. At the time, it seemed kinda fun. Bit of a lark,
really. But, man, I soooo missed the point.
Ok, now I get it
Just say a virtualized LINUX installed as a windows app inside a virtualization box. Their package
manager was linked to the CSEE package manager and this virtualized app
goes looking for updates to the package base every hour. So this stuff auto-updates on
a regular basis.
Exhaling after 2 NSF grants
So Dec 10 and Jan 17 I had two NSF grant submissions (FYI: "NSF" is short for "no such funding").
And then there was a new subject to prepare for. And then this. And then that.
FaceBook rules
Joined FaceBook.
Its changed my view of the web- all that AJAX interfaces adds a degree of reactivity that blows away
older conventions (just a wiki, just a blog, just a some other thing).
The LISP attack
My LISP attack continues. I've broken some threshold where now the code flows off
my pen.
(defun shuffle-list (l)
(loop for i below (length l) do
(rotatef
(elt l i)
(elt l (random (length l)))))
l)
Torchwood is soooooo gay
Dr. Who was always camp and BBC's Torchwood series is Dr. Who squared.
A good day
A morning writing NSF grants. Phone calls with folks across the country.
On the 12th day of XMAS
Rain, rain, go away
After XMAS, we drove
town to the Atlantic ocean.
No complaints driving down.
But
I guess two years of luck was all we get.
Down at the beach, we scored all the rain and all cold we'd missed last two times around.
But with the had comes the good. We had the whooooole beach to ourselves.
It must be some law of physics. On the last day of the trip, the day we had to leave early,
the sun came out.
All the satellite dishes at the local NASA base unfurled their flowers.
The Bay Bridge Schmolze
Sat Jan 5 21:20:13 PST 2008
Revenge of the sugar
Sugar-fest'07. The aftermath. Not pretty.
Chocolate headache. Coffee shake. Vaguely unsettled.
World a little value and murky. Can't tell you the plot of the last three episodes of "24"- I think Jack is torturing someone but can't say who or why.
Wed Dec 26 13:21:24 PST 2007
Twas the night after XMAS
And all through the house, no chocolate remained. Or cheesie-poops or potato chips
or wine or turkey or stuffing or gravy or....
The day was a celebration of technology.
Two
couch potatoes on two couches with two
laptops. First, we
decorated the computers
Next, we watched 14 hours of "24" (Jack started
out being anti-torture, then missed it so he tortured his brother to death).
Then we
video SKYPEd over
to New Zealand to talk to Dot.
Finally we
went to bed carrying:
- my new Chumby;
- the laptop, to configure a bedtime Chumby channel;
- the iPod, to try out on the Chumby speakers (it sounded great),
- and the new bluetooth ear piece for the PDA (very good pick up).
Two hours of web hacking followed. Helen ported someone's post-structuralist masterpiece into her on-line journal while I bashed away at some tricky PHP. After which I wrote RSS feeds (this article). Clearly, I married the right woman.
We wish you some happy hard drives, and more silicon next year.
Tue Dec 25 23:06:24 PST 2007
What are you scared of?
Helen woke this morning after her standard nightmare.
She was staying at the New Chicagoquerque Town Holiday Best Western Seasons Holiday Inn to attend the 3rd Season of the Four Cees conference.
She's just discovered that she was due on stage in 20 minutes to talk before her peers on some topic she'd never heard of before. Chilling stuff.
So we started trading worse fears:
- All books take zero seconds to read.
- No new science fiction, since all new ideas are now completely copyrighted;
- After the Chinese take over, all English was banned.
So English professors had nothing to teach,
- Exception: Composition 101 was mandatory for everyone so it was the only subject taught at university. And all the faculty had to teach it, all the time.
- Computer Science fared no better:
- Once the Nasquanians landed and gave out their BioTech, all old-fashioned digital geeks became unemployed.
- All Republicans became refugees and moved to Australia. There, they took over the government, sold the hospitals to Hong Kong, and spend their time threatening New Zealand with nuclear destruction.
- Middle Earth was discovered, not in New Zealand, but in a suburb of the Australian town of Wagga Wagga. New Zealand's economy was now in tatters since all tourist now skip the land of the long white cloud.
- All snow machines were broken (so no more snow, ever).
- We live in Australia, with all the spiders and snakes.
- No more chocolate.
- No more squirrels.
- No more coffee.
- No more beaches.
- We have kids.
Mon Dec 24 15:47:06 PST 2007
And the stockings were hung
(By the chimney with care.)
Mon Dec 24 15:39:26 PST 2007
All you'll ever (k)neeeds
And today's score:
- soccer injury: one
- Cath: nil
Mon Dec 24 15:31:54 PST 2007
My favorite vampires
Hooray for re-runs. I overdosed on Buffy during her day
but I've only ever seen one run (or less) of the Angel stuff.
But my Tivo has caught all the last two seasons of Angel. Love it. Like that Smile Time episode when Angel gets turned into a puppet and must do battle against an evil kids show.
Watch that furious felt fly!
We're building up
to the perfect ending. Our "heroes", morally confused, has been working
for the enemy (trying to change the system from within). Soon they will
stake out some dark alley and turn to face all the legions of hell.
Their cause hopeless, trusting only in each other, the immortals raise their blades to start yet another possibly final battle. Roll credits. Ends series.
We'll may not know how this one ends- but we have hope.
Sun Dec 23 21:18:59 PST 2007
Tis the season to be humble. Not.
Have I been naughty or nice?
Well, at this time of year I am obliged to document
that I have been just frigging awesome!!!!!!
Faculty productivity files due Dec 28. Time to list all that stuff you've done all year. Plus a little spin for the some of the stuff you've only half done.
Of course, us faculty love and trust each other so much that we don't believe a single word of what any of us say. So everything (and I mean every single thing) has to be somehow documented.
Printers run hot, printer ink runs dry, piles of paper grow on the dining room table.
Sun Dec 23 08:33:12 PST 2007
I said what?
Do I believe in this empirical result?
The paper was due in 162 minutes and I was
staring at 300 lines of shell script trying to work
why on earth did I even compare that
with this. Maybe the whole paper,
that I'd been working on for a week, was a
crock?
So I stared and stared and stared, remembering that old joke about your own code, 3 months later, is as alien as anyone else's.
After a while, I found that I believed in 1/4 of the results- and starting writing those up. Then I realized I had a baseline issue- my new method was generating values in the range X to Y but what did any other method do?
"O.K.", thinks I, "need to baseline these deltas against.... ooohhhh so that's why I did that screwy thing."
"Gosh, I don't know who I was when I wrote this code but darn that guy was clever."
Sun Dec 23 08:24:45 PST 2007
Tough job, but someone has to do it
Peyton
Fireman, legal
eagle, golf star, moonshiner,
asked
for help.
Seems his golf club requires him to spend $X00 per year in their club and he was running way under budget. So, he said, want dinner?
The wine list proved trickier than expected and there was some dispute over what to get. "But why fight?", we decided, "Get it all."
For starters, I tried the trout salad with potato leek soup. For mains, the crusted sea bass with shaved fennel did not disappoint, but my partner found the grilled salmon engaging.
The desert menu was challenging before we released we were too drunk to care. So there was some cheese cakes and something else that I can't quite remember. Then a drive home, with a short digression to buy cigars, singing all the way. Saturday, a little blurry.
Sat Dec 22 21:56:44 PST 2007
XMAS comes but once a year
"God bless us, every one!"
Sun Dec 16 19:23:12 PST 2007
The gathering storm
There's this moment, about 20 minutes before the party starts, when the place is clean, the food is ready, the wine is chilled, and the flat never looked better. And at that moment, the selfish thought crosses your mind- why share?
What if instead of opening the door to the guests that I lock it instead, kick back on the couch, drink all the booze, and eat all the food?
Then it passes, your friends arrive, the volume goes up and this unworthy thought goes away.
5 hours later you thank your friends for your latest memories, bid them goodbye, face piles of washing up and bags of fresh garbage, and you're happy they came.
Sun Dec 16 19:14:00 PST 2007
Home for the holidays
No more commuting to Baltimore, ever again (at least, not for another 6 weeks).
Fri Dec 14 14:45:35 PST 2007
Inside the ex-ISR building
From the New York Times, April 18 2006
The most ambitious effort by the congressman, Alan B. Mullohan, is a glistening glass-and-steel structure with a swimming pool, sauna and spa rising in a former cow pasture in Fairmont, W.Va., thanks to $103 million of taxpayer money he garnered through special spending allocations known as earmarks.
The headquarters building is likely to sit largely empty upon completion this summer, because the Mullohan-created organization that it was built for, the Institute for Scientific Research, is in disarray, its chief executive having resigned under a cloud of criticism over his $500,000 annual compensation, also paid by earmarked federal money.
18 months later, the building stands empty: a huge empty echoing space, only ever partially used
The building is like some massive airport foyer, but with not a plane in sight.
Fri Dec 14 14:32:49 PST 2007
PDA rules!
Got a new Blackberry curve. Finally broken through the PDA barrier. Now I wake up in the morning and I read the news, on my little screen. Found a good Gmail mobile reader- use that all the time now.
Welcome to the 21st century. How would of thought it would be less than 2" square?
Thu Dec 13 20:27:28 PST 2007
A present from OZ
News from Ron. D.:
Well - Thanksgiving has come and gone and here in OZ we received the
BEST Thanksgiving Day gift you could ever want - yes a NEW LABOR
Government.
After 11 years we were finally able to go to bed drunk and happy instead of drunk and sad.
Its hard to pick the "best moment" - could it be...
1. Howard's Defeat Speech?
2. Costello taking his bat and going home - with tears in his eyes?
3. Alexander Downer staking a claim for his "next life" - "I am after all the longest serving Foreign Minister and have many contacts that would be useful in business and academia? - (if I hadn't turned away splitting my sides with laughter I would have thrown up)
4. Mark Vaile (Nation Party "leader") also throwing in the towel with tears in his eyes (yes, the drought was broken over the weekend) and handing over to one of the 10 remaining members of the "once great Country Party" to find a new leader?
5. Janet Howard NOT being able to host Christmas drinks at Kirribilli House - or even The Lodge - well at least they have Padstow - the new "Whitehall of Sydney"?
6. The famous conga line of Liberal Party suck ups from the media who now have to find new jobs?
7. The thought of John Winston Howard - cleaning out his office and not being able to take his beloved pictures of the Queen, Menzies and GWB.
Yes, life IS good!
Wed Nov 28 15:23:15 PST 2007
Upgrades to web site
New page added,
just for my talks.
Social bookmarking added (see icon, bottom left).
Page titles added, specific to each web page (see top of window)
Search engine upgraded to Google's new Custom Search beta (try typing stuff into the "Find" box, top right).
(Oh, and I've been playing with SQLite, trying to convince myself its time to take the plunge, leave big XML files behind, go fully relational. Another day, perhaps.
Sat Nov 24 22:29:56 PST 2007
Hey, maybe I do have a life
In the last three days:
Mucking around in the garden with my wife...
...great boozey Thanksgiving dinner with the neighbors...
...Massive photo attack- driving around for hours catching a sunny winter's day in rural Pennsylvania...
...much XML hacking: new web site...
...planning an AI subject for the spring: collecting cool materials...
... and lots of fun LISP hacking
:-)
Sat Nov 24 14:09:56 PST 2007
Time, once again, for ego repair
Email today. "Decision on your paper". Thrilling!
Then you read the review. Thumbs way down. Oh dear...
Begin stages of grieving:
- denial:
- "say what???!!??";
- anger:
- "reviewers are idiots!";
- bargaining:
- "maybe I can write to the editor?";
- depression:
- "it was a crap paper, they are all out to get me";
- acceptance:
- "oh well, maybe I can rewrite it".
How to gauge your academic experience: how long does it take you to run from denial to acceptance.
Me, I'm getting better: down to three days.
Sat Nov 24 13:47:36 PST 2007
Graph theory? Art?
Point Marion Bridge, Pennsylvania. Massive, scary, hunk of rusting steel.
But how to describe it? Struts over a bridge? Graph theory? Work of art? All three?
FYI: due for demolition early in 2008.
Sat Nov 24 13:40:33 PST 2007
The Mathematician's Castle
A very strange building, just down the street, opposite the dog park.
No, I don't know its story. But damn, I like it.
Sat Nov 24 13:34:19 PST 2007
Getting good at the XML
Last December, it took me days to get my first RSS feed going
In July it was about 2 weeks to get this web site up and running.
In August, it took about a week to write a subject page, using the same RSS/XML techniques.
But I'm getting faster. In the last 24 hours, working from scratch, I've built a new site with a Google search engine, bookmaking tricks for all the social bookmaking sites, RSS feeds, multiple categories per site, CSS formatting, PHP rendering the site from XML, etc, all the good stuff.
The next hurdle is SQL. Right now, my home brew stuff works just fine for 100s of XML items. Note sure when that will fall off the edge.
Fri Nov 23 16:26:32 PST 2007
Fame is so fleeting
For 48 hours, they all knew my name. Now, I'm so last week.
Monday night I uploaded an old talk of mine on Open source- can you ignore it? up to http://slideshare.net. Someone wrote a nice comment on it and it got featured on the slideshare home page.
Success begets success. The slides rose to number 5, dropped a little, then held firm at number 7.
For Tuesday/Wednesday, that was the status quo. For the record, I shared the limelight with slides shows about:
- Elvis
- Boatshow in Monaco
- Mercedes Benz Muzeum
- Grappige Borden (Funny Signs)
- Ruby on Rails 101 - Presentation Slides for a Five Day Introductory Course
Then, on Thursday, disaster struck. Someone posted Living in a garbage
truck and I knew the wild ride was over.
By midnight, I was off the home page.
Currently, I'm number 43 and falling, lost in obscurity. Just another faded former rock star.
(Update, Monday, now #56. Eeek! Lights, fading. Oxygen, giving out....)
Sat Nov 17 19:42:18 PST 2007
Help. I like Peter Frampton
Stumbled over a recent concert by Peter Frampton on HD TV.
In his day, Frampton was the best of the best. "Frampton Comes Alive!" went 6 times platinum, and is now the fourth best selling live album of all time
And he still does a great show.
He did the talk box thing, played some
nice guitar, charmed the audience with his refined British accent. Looked like he was having fun++.
But what fascinated me was his age. In his younger days, he was pretty serious guitar-god eye-candy.
Now he's beyond middle aged. Or is he? I started at him, eyes squinting, puzzled.
Guess I'm feeling my age (47). I stared at old-Frampton, much like I look at myself, trying to see if that young fella is still in there.
Sat Nov 17 19:25:13 PST 2007
Bumblebee Bat
 |
|
According to the
Animal
Diversity
Web,
Thailand's bumblebee bat
(a.k.a. Kitti's hognosed bat
or Craseonycteris
thonglongyai) competes with the Etruscan pygmy
shrew for the title of world's smallest mammal.
At issue is whether skull size or mass defines "smallest"; shrews are lighter but the bumblebee's skull, shown right, is smaller at 11mm.
These bats are so-named since they're about the size of a bumblebee, weigh about as much as a dime, and have the ability to hover like hummingbirds. Their roosting habitat consists of the hot upper chambers of caves in limestone hills. They are most active at dusk when they fly around the tops of bamboo clumps and teak trees to feed on insects.
Solitary
While bumblebee roosts in colonies, an individual is solitary. Though close to others in its group, it hangs alone, rather than clustering tightly. Due to its tiny size, and its predilection for separation from the rest of the population, the bumblebee bat is the perfect symbol of a Bayesian Treatment learner.
Famous
The bumblebee's fame far exceeds their size. Cuter than a button but less glamorous than, say, blood-feeding vampire bats, only the bumblebee's extreme size ensures a cult following. No survey of terrestrial bats is complete without a reference to the humble bumble. Little girls around the globe adore the bumblebee (e.g. http://kids-learn.org/stellaluna/florin.htm).
Predictably, bumblebees don't attract little boys who seem to prefer ghoulishly fantasizing about the dripping fangs of vampires.
Rare
Unfortunately, the bats are small both in size and in number. The species was
unknown prior to 1974 and is found only in the Karmhanaburi Province
in Western Thailand. Their habitat has been highly affected by
deforestation and unsustainable levels of teak logging. In 1982, the
Royal Forest Department of the Thailand Government could only found
160 of them living in 3 caves, despite extensive surveys.
Endangered
Sad to say, bumblebee bats may now only exist on the web pages of young girls. Reports on their population are ambiguous and quite dated:
- The original 1973 survey listed their numbers as 2,300.
- A 1984 report lists their numbers as 160
- Subsequent reports are less detailed, listing their population as "rare", "rare", and "rare" in 1988, 1990, and 1996.
- One book published in 2001 reported numbers between 100 and 500 and added that a pipeline was being built dangerously close to their tiny habitat. Also, burning of forest areas near caves is thought to be the dominant, long-term threat to the species.
- A 2006 article in Cambridge University Press reports a 2002 finding of bumblebees in caves 250 miles away from where the bats were first found. This new group, plus the old, would bring the total population to 1500.
- I can't find anything more recent than that 2002 survey.
The Zoological Society of London lists the bumblebee bat as one of its "top ten actions" but is not clear it on-line donations will go just to the bat, or to other endangered species in Thailand, or to endangered species around the globe.
For more information, see thewebsiteofeverything or www.helium.com or Hello, Bumblebee Bat.
Sat Nov 17 18:51:55 PST 2007
CocoMonster
I love this bit in Dan's thesis:
The 3rd bagging experiment tried involved the creation of an algorithm that creates a learner using every permutation of the feature set. This algorithm was named CocoMonster for its ridiculous computational complexity.
There is some kind of intrinsic appeal to overly complex algorithms. One may think, It must be better; its just so...complicated.
This is much like the snob factor in economics which leads us to believe that a diamond must be rare and valuable because it costs a lot of money.
Sat Nov 17 18:39:16 PST 2007
Relationship advice
If someone is starting out on an academic career, they really
should be warned about the "two-bodied problem"; how it can take years
(if ever) to find some place where a Dr. Spouse and Dr. Spice have jobs
in the same zip code.
And, if its not too late, they need to be get the right advice about where to search for a spouse:
- Firstly, the worst person you can marry is another academic. That can only end one way- buried deep in the two-bodied problem.
- Secondly, and this is important, the best person you can marry is another academic. They'll be the only ones who understand the pressure of publication and tenure.
So, now you know that, you can sale off on a successful career, two by two, in love that's true.
Sat Nov 17 18:24:41 PST 2007
Attack of the thesis
Autumn. Trees go red, days grow dark, students race
to write their thesis in time to graduate before XMAS, and supervisor read hundreds of pages
Tuesday night was Dan (120 pages), then DJ (40 pages); Wednesday night, Justin (80 pages).
Sent back all these edit notes.
Which means tomorrow I should get back Dan (140 pages), DJ (80 ages), Justin (100 pages).
And so the cycle of (academic) life continues.
Sat Nov 17 18:13:59 PST 2007
This beach is closed
Ozzie boy meets North American autumn. Autumn wins.
Sat Nov 10 13:04:47 PST 2007
Rewriting AI history
One of the standard stories of AI is that a system called DART saved the Army so much money, that it repaid all the bucks they'd ever invested in AI. DART was a real-time just-in-time scheduling system used to move materials into Iraqi war (version 1.0).
Now one of sad side-effects of knowing too many people is that some of them have long memories. I was at a conference last week where one and two of attendees were living off DoD grants in the early 1990s. And I made the mistake of telling the DART story. They exploded into laughter.
"That thing?", they said, "just a quick and dirty GUI that replaced a ridiculously awkward manual system. The army couldn't tell the difference. They were just happy that anything worked better than their old system. "
I asked, but why DART's reputation? And the answer was obvious.
"No sane AI hacker was going to tell the funding agency that their baby was a dud."
Sat Nov 10 13:29:08 PST 2007
ASE'07=excellent
ASE 2007 was my definition of a good conference.
- At day 3 lunch, every seat was still full.
- There was coffee right outside the sessions- no need to sneak off . Enough comfy chairs to sit around and shoot the breeze.
- Poster session- it was humming. Dozens of people circle round and round for hours and hours.
- During the talks- no one in the corridors shooting the bull. Everyone in the sessions.
- In the sessions, nearly all seats full.
- Talking to lots of folks about new ideas- and them offering new insights and tools on what you can do to handle problem X,Y,Z a little better.
Only downside was that my talk was not till midday, day 3. So the whole time I was sneaking off to practice/ rewrite/ practice/ rewrite the talk again and again and again.
Afterwards, I could get home, easy as pie. In the old days, international conferences meant international travel, locked in teenee weenee tubes, eating airline food, watching bad movies, and getting dehydrated like a prune. Weeks of living packed into a few days elapsed time, followed by a zombie week waiting for the brain to arrive back from overseas.
That was then. This is now. Travel to conferences in the same time zone. One short plane flight start to finish. Yesterday i cam back from ASE 2007. Slipped back from Atlanta, easy as pie.
- Noon:
- Gave my talk. Well rehearsed. Lots of positive comments afterwards.
- 2pm:
- Exit, stage left. Simple train ride to airport
- 4pm:
- Upgrade to business class for $40? You bet!
- 6pm:
- Touch down, Pittsburgh. Strange time in car park walking down long lines of cars looking for mine. Happiness when, in the distance, you see your car's lights winking back when you hit the clicker.
- 8pm:
- Morgantown. Eat'n park milkshake. Daggy bliss.
- 9pm:
- Getting embraced from drunken neighbor on porch. Calling out for help to her husband. "You're on your own", he called back as he sucked back on his cigar.
- 10pm:
- Playing with cat who hasn't seen me in 10 days. Loving and cuddlely at first, then she went into pissy-scratchy cat mode (you never write, you never call).
- 11pm:
- Lots of zzzzz
Fin
Sat Nov 10 13:13:47 PST 2007
Bernd Fischer isa muppet?
Left: a fraggle muppet.
Your call.
Sat Nov 10 13:55:31 PST 2007
The chair, the chair
Every conference I go to has this chair. Exactly this chair. I think it is in love with me.
Sat Nov 10 13:03:12 PST 2007
Best picture I ever took
Talk 'bout dumb luck. This shot took all of 10ms to set up.
Atlantic lighthouse off-shore from Portland, Maine.
View bigger and even bigger.
Sat Nov 10 14:30:34 PST 2007
Helen vs the hurricane
Had a little Pacific northwest experience last week. But in the Atlantic northeast. Portland Maine in the late autumn. Some sunshine but days of overcast gloom, thanks to the tail end of Hurricane Noel. And I was back in Oregon winters again going "get me outta here!".
Me and Helen were there to do a panel at SLS. It didn't matter 'bout the weather- she shone, she shooked, she moved, she nudged, she prodded, person of influence were influenced, planets were re-aligned. Persons sucked up to her to get a publication in her hot new on-line journal hyperrhiz. It was great to see.
Our panel was fun. At one point, half the audience was bursting out of their seats to make comments. And such a discussion- incredible parallels to software engineering. A theoretical acceptance of how knowledge is shifting, that our ideas live on sand. But actions speak louder than words. In what they do each day, the tools they use, they show a belief in that it can all be written down right, first time. Fascinating!
Tue Nov 6 18:53:37 PST 2007
Missing: ghosts and ghouls
What if you threw a satanic ritual and no one came?
Halloween'07 I made the mistake of moving from our porch (on the corner) to a neighbor's place (just a little ways down our side street). We sat there with our candy waiting to see 1000 cute kiddies.... and no one came! 100 yards in either direction we could see the main streets teeming with kids. But without our corner porch luring them into a little alley, we were off the grid.
Across the way, Max and Max snr sat with their HUGE bowl of sweeties. Same story there- no kids. To pass the time we threw barbs and candy at each other.
Eventually, we gave in to the inevitable. Lara and me moved our chairs and bowl of candy to the end of the street. Max came along and gave us his HIGE bowl of sweeties. Then he went back to keep his Dad company, back on the porch. We did a roaring trade- cause we were now in the ghostie trade winds.
Next year- bear traps. And we'll move cavity-central to our porch.
Sat Nov 3 12:59:33 PDT 2007
End of Spam?
About 3 weeks ago,
I replaced my email text (see above) with an image file showing the same information.
And my spam has fallen right away.
No longer, it seems, can I make money from an accountancy mistake in Nigeria. And an 8" penis (that satisfies her all night long) it out of the question.
Fine by me. Nigeria can keep its cash and she if she wants those eight inches, she can take the pills herself.
Just as long as I don't get all that damned spam.
Sun Oct 28 11:13:46 PDT 2007
On a road to somewhere
In Australia, there is one (or two) places to drive. The Princess Highway runs down the east; and the Hume and New England Highways dive inland. So the road signs all count down to one or two places: Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne.
That's the first thing you notice as different when you come to America. More population, more towns, more places to drive, road signs all telling your that Haggerstown is 47 miles away.
So, on an American highway, the sign in this photo is really unusual. Shown here is the most easterly part of I-70 which runs, as the sign says, for 1,700 miles west to Denver then on to Cove Fort.
1,700 miles to somewhere? Beauty. Time to floor the Holden, sink a Tooheys, turn up 2JJ, and run down a few roos.
Sat Oct 27 20:08:23 PDT 2007
Very stimulating week
And by "stimulating", I mean I can barely remember it all.
The week started in Baltimore and ended in M'town. There is a lot a NASA stuff going down right now- meetings with lobbyists, strategy meetings, etc.etc. Meanwhile there is teaching to do, papers to write, grants to prepare. And next week I leave for SLS, then IWLU, then ASE. Still haven't started on those talks. I guess this is my life right now but its a little (a lot) busier than I expected.
-
Saturday: - A domestic day. Shopping. IKEA. Assembling IKEA furniture (once more with the allen key). Dinner with friends.
- Sunday:
- More with the allen keys (fixing up the chair that I'd built wrong last night). Wrote 2 papers: a text mining report and the TSE submission with the Turks
-
Monday - Morning- trying to call the NSF about possible projects. Afternoon- driving back to M'towm. Evening- meeting with Brian W. at a bar to talk about the NASA stuff
- Tuesday:
- Morning with the dean (talking about NASA).
Afternoon talking to the faculty (about NASA). Then teaching.
Then much snoozing in the evening.
- Wednesday:
- Morning- talking with the WVHTC and Galaxy Global about research ideas. Afternoon- talking to students. Evening- writing up grant ideas from GG.
- Thursday:
- Morning- trying to do NSF stuff. Afternoon- students, teaching. Evening- much snoozing. And Helen arrived from Baltimore 'bout 10pm. Yaaah!
-
Friday:
-
8:30am meeting on the national archives stuff. Rest of the day trying
to do an NSF grant (got 3 pages out- like crapping bricks). Lunch at Blue Moose,
walked back through a gray overcast autumn day between trees of gold and orange.
- Saturday:
Slept in! Hooray! Spend the morning doing not much. Went swimming. Then
pumpkin carving.
Wrote some blogs
Sat Oct 27 17:03:17 PDT 2007
Post-modern poem
I love this postmodern poem. At first glance, it looks like a shopping list left on a dining room table by my neighbor about to leave for a long trip. But, when read again, it changes.
Saline (log)Cotton padsQtipsdeod, toothp> Zuldroman synthroid - dreser *better tray with pill low of G 3 heau 3 pimple bag of bottles clan on 7 bag of bottles ---------------------------- nardstromi's boxdrop chest- jeans- khoh'ssweaters wardrobebluegreensjumper (prothe) 24 fleeceI1white tim throdentdrawers (5th)socks for tums 3<Act of Treason> bills trenchcoat
Note how the author has married text genres from traditional forms (the spy's cloak and dagger and trenchcoat) with post-textual representations. "<Act of treason>" is template notation from the C++ language. It directs the compiler to take a generic container (in this case, "act" which is short for "action") and populate it with N treasonous acts.
Here, the author is stressing both the reader and the compiler- the poem does not say how many treasonous acts to add and must assume the hard case of an infinite number of treasons.
Sat Oct 27 16:42:31 PDT 2007
Spiders vs Volcanoes
Some things never change. I was at dinner the other night and
the North Americans starting going on and on about what a dangerous
place is Australia- snakes, spiders, crocodiles, sharks,....
That's rich- this was a Vancouver Canada dialogue. These folks live on an fault line with active volcanos on the horizon. There are no, zip, zero volcanos in Australia. The whole continent lies inside one tectonic plate. Geological activity? Just say no.
So let's do the maths shall we? Shark attacks last year in Australia vs ... Kobe! Or worse, Pompeii ! See, a crocodiles will eat you- if you are stupid enough to take a boat into their marsh lands. But one volcano can trash a whole city!
It's so unfair. My wife Helen speaks of Australia as death trap. And she grew up under the shadow of New Zealand's Mt Ruapehu. Ruapehu is Maori for "twin peaks exploding into pit". Or "get the hell out of here, she's going to blow... again". Sharks and crocodiles attract tourists but when Ruapehu went BANG in 1996, it killed the local skiing industry for years and years.
There's all this geological records for west coast USA. One big earthquake (I mean, really BIG) every 200 years for as far back as we can see. But no big earthquake for the last 400 years. It's coming- everyone knows it. And when it does, the Californian economy (third biggest economy in the world) is going to get a savage dent in it's cash flow (lava flow does that to cash flow).
And that will be nothing, I repeat nothing
compared to pending Yellowstone explosion. The reason Yellowstone
bubbles is that it sits on a huge super-volcano, which is active. The
ground there is 74cm higher than in was in 1923- i.e. the magma is
pouring in underground and the pressure is building. When Yellowstone
blows, magma will be flung 50 kilometers into the atmosphere. Nearly
all life within a thousand kilometers would die from falling ash, lava
flows and the sheer BANG of the explosion.
Now lets compare that with, oh- I don't know- how about, snakes! Well, there are anti-venoms. I ask you, is snake bite plus anti-venom worse than volcano plus clouds of poisonous gases plus molten rock falling out of the sky? I don't think so.
And while we are on it, earthquakes are not the only thing to make west coast USA dangerous. What about guns and shooting sprees in high school and citizens going postal? Heck, I'd take a crocodile over Joe-trucking-cap and his AK47, any day of the month!
Sat Oct 13 20:56:07 PDT 2007
Grass is always greener
Helen called me from D.C. She was at dinner at someone's
house right downtown. From their front steps, she could
look down the road to the capital building, all big and white
and massive, glowing in the night.
I took the call driving round Morgantown. Just the way she described the Capital building, it hit me how darn big is Washington D.C. As she spoke, suddenly I was a Sydney-sider again, only at home in a 3,000,000 strong city. The colors started fading, all around me and Morgantown became a very very small town.
Its a strange world. Helen works in Baltimore and likes Morgantown and I live in Morgantown and crave the big city. Grass is always greener...
(And the cure? Best way to change my mind about Washington would be to live there. Traffic jams, high housing costs, crime, long lines at health care....)
Sat Oct 13 20:07:09 PDT 2007
Once again, the busy season is here.
UIs to write by Oct 23; two NSF proposals for Dec 10, Jan 10; journal papers to finish, new papers to write, SLS and ASE conferences in two weeks....
Sat Oct 13 19:38:49 PDT 2007
Photos at Helen's Fell's Point flat
Ain't nothing wrong with coming here every few weeks.
Sat Sep 29 19:31:54 PDT 2007
Saving it for 'ron
Once there was an Aussie called Tim who lived for years
in Morgantown without any other Aussies to play with.
Then, along came... Ron.
Ron is just your average sort of bloke:
- He proposed to his wife under the gates on the Randwick race course.
- He's a dedicated couch potato sportsman who'll yell at the screen so hard that the batsman turns round and says "sorry, mate, won't happen again".
- Never afraid to try another glass of wine, providing that (a) it is not a Merlot and (b) there is no animal on the label.
Ron and me are so different. He said he had a new G6 and I said I thought Apple only had released up to a G5. He replied "well I don't know about Apple but Pontiac has". He talks cars and I talk computers and that little story just about sums up our different slants on life.
Now, he is gone. Took his wine collection, lovely wife Sandra, luxury apartment down by the waterfront, and now he's buggered off home to Oz. Fair dinkum, what's a bloke to do?
There's nothing for it, really. We must now save all wine for later on. Or, as the
Aussies say it, for 'ron.
Come back, Ron, or
the candles will burn down to a stumps and the wine glasses
will stay forever dusty, empty, and useless.
Sat Sep 29 19:09:14 PDT 2007
Why the question mark in the American anthem?
Went to Port McHenry today where, in 1814, the Brits shelled the Yankees.
A week earlier, Washington had been badly
burned.
Now, was Baltimore to be next?
A fearful audience watched the battle, scared that their
flag and their city would fall to the invaders.
The British were repelled, the flag stood, and Francis Scott Key wrote a poem that was to become the national anthem. At every football/ baseball/ basketball game, you can hear 10,000 voices singing proudly:
And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star spangled banner yet wave
Oer the land of the free, and the home of the brave?
Now I've always thought that the inclusion of the question mark in the last line to be quintessentially American. My American hosts are individually charming but as a group, nervous and somewhat scared about the rest of the world.
In their somewhat blinkered view of the world, they fear that they are missing something.
- That the King will send troops to smash the Puritan movement or burn Washington.
- That they are better dead than red.
- Or even worse, that somewhere, out there, there is some country that may not think that the U.S. of A. is the greatest country on earth.
So a national anthem that poses a question, a call to check if their country still exists, that requires a body count and a glance over the shoulder is, in my view, quite in their national character.
Strange to say, the original anthem has five more verses.
The
question mark in verse one is a rhetorical device to get you tense
enough to read the rest. Now, at the end, of three of the other verses, you will be relieved to
hear, the flag does in fact still wave,
o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
But I've never, ever, heard an American sing anything but the first verse.
So I'm going to try an experiment- ask 20 Americans what is the last line of their national anthem. Watch this space.
Sat Sep 29 18:47:17 PDT 2007
We'll have a gay old time
Seem in Baltimore harbor- cargo ship with a fabulous paint job.
As a matter of fact, the use of this color scheme was discontinued after the sister ship to this vessel had a near miss with an amorous blue whale.
They decided to stay just good friends and meet for coffee, whenever they're both in town.
Sat Sep 29 18:41:57 PDT 2007
R.I.P. Uncle Gordon
My uncle, Gordon Donaldson,
was an assoc/prof of electrical engineering-
actually lectured me when I was a first year. I got a poor grade, much
to my shame.
When I was 12, he tried to teach me Boolean logic, down on his farm. "See this gate", he'd say, "and the next one? Well, by the time we are through both gates, we have opened one plus one gates to achieved one thing. So one plus one is one".
He really tried to teach me lots of cool stuff, but I didn't get it. Actually, I think I learned more from the example he set, rather than anything he tried to teach. He had a super-conducting lab across from my first year EE lab and sometimes there'd be this "whoosh" sound followed by "oh dear...".
Some unplanned electrical spike had just boiled away one-tenth of Gordon's annual supply of liquid helium. I'd poke my nose in to see a mushroom cloud rising from this metal can in the middle of the floor, expanding up and over the ceiling. Underneath, Gordon and his grad student, sat there shaking their heads. Back to the drawing board.
Gordon showed me that science was a very human endeavor. His lab was filled with strange hand-crafted breadboards and wires higgeldy-piggeldy everywhere. "Come look at this," he'd say, "and showed me his lab note book- all covered in scrawl and rough notes and coffee stains. "Imagine it- from this we write international standard research papers. Boggles the mind."
He showed me also what it means to be an international academic. First time
I can remember meeting him, I was seven years old, living in Canada, and he his way to Oak Ridge for a sabbatical on
fusion research. He had his whole family with him and I saw
(rather than I was
taught) that academia meant that a larger world was open to you and your family,
through out your career.
He had this farm back of back of Canberra. It had no power, no farmhouse, no phone, no plumbing, and the road would wash out several times per year. For a homestead, there were three shacks down by the river at a place called Wombat flats. One shack had a door, one shack had insulation, and one had four bunks.
For a kitchen, there were two large hoops at right angles- one on the ground with paving stones and one over the top to hold the pots over the fire. We'd sit there, rain or shine, squatting on logs or folding deck chairs, brewing tea, frying eggs, toasting bread. Of a winter's evening, we'd sit all rugged up, sipping tea, stirring the pots.
(Here's my lovely Aunt Jane, in the kitchen with her tea and biscuits. Behind
here are the water buckets we brought up every day from
the river.)
No one ever told me that this was all totally insane so I just thought it was natural- what every adult does on their weekends. Up every morning to dig thistles out from the lake paddock and spread the superphospate (fertilizer). Round up cows to dose them against heart worm. Dig a new latrine hole every few days. Bathe in the river or, in winter, under a little shower that was can with some holes dribbling warm water from the camp fire.
Uncle Gordon died last month. He was in his eighties and had been sick for a while. I'm sad he's gone but glad that he isn't sick anymore. I don't really understand his legacy to me but I thank him for the example he set.
Now, every time someone comments that I am a little unusual, I just think "well, in my family, I'm kinda dull."
Sat Sep 29 17:36:58 PDT 2007
The key to it all
When I was 12, the pinnacle of hi-tech Sci Fi was Crichton's "The Andromeda Strain". And this was the key to it all- the arming device of the nuclear bomb that was meant to blow our heroes away if the alien bug got out.
One of the technical consultants on that film was Bill Koselka. Then, he worked at JPL and did things like shot lasers at butcher's meat to show the art department what a laser burn would look like.
Anyway, these days Bill works at IV&V and he's been bragging for months about his role in the film. I didn't believe it- I wanted proof. So, to secure his place in history, Bill obliged. "The arming device for a fictional nuclear weapon good enough for you?" he asked.
Mon Sep 24 06:47:27 PDT 2007
Young hopeful (?hopeless) writer, lost in the big city
Here's a photo from the vault. That's me on the left at a conference I went to when I was 16.
I don't know how the mother hens at this conference let a 16 year old get his hands on whatever I am drinking in this picture. Nor do I know why I thought that particular outfit was worth wearing or who was the young woman next to me. But I can guess what she was thinking and so can you so we'll just move on.
In 1976, the Shopfront Theater for Young People ran a young playwrights conference. I was quite the hopeful writer in those days and sent them some film script idea I had about someone doing long distance running late at night. At the time, I was doing that sort of thing and the script tried to capture what I felt, running around each night. There was something strange and powerful about running in dark places with your heart exploding out of our chest while you beat down dead every steep hill in town.
How well did my script capture that? Badly! I worked the thing out in my head, then wrote it out, sorted by scene location. So anyone reading it had to play "follow the link" to pull it out into a linear sequence. Regardless, the conference took the script and invited me down to Sydney.
At the time, I was 16 and living with my parents in a small country town. Coming from that, this conference was a blast! 70 like-minded fellows with their sleeping bags sprawled all over the floor of some big lounge room. No parents! Trains late at night into the Nimrod theater to see a REAL PLAY. Meeting REAL directors and REAL playwrights. So stimulating and overwhelming and overloading! I got 4 hours sleep in the three days there. Even feel asleep one afternoon when five of us had a session with some young great playwright who was twenty, but just had a PLAY on at the NIMROD. I awoke, bleary eyed in an empty room going "hey- where did everybody go?". Still don't know if my snoring drove them out.
After this three day blast, I returned home to months and months of unimaginative studying. When that was all done, I moved back to Sydney and hung out a lot at Shopfront. In fact, I matured into a mother hen looking after the 1981 Young Playwright's Conference. I was the chef that year- this was when I was going to cook for a living (another story for another time). First night, me and one of the other mother hens took a gang of 12 year olds into town to the see "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark". I gotta say, that was the BEST crowd to go see that film with!
So did I go on to become a great writer? Nope. I grew up to be an academic who only wrote technical papers for scientific journals and the occasional web page. I went to many other conferences, but none as fun as that first one. But the Shopfront experience gave me a lot of good stuff. Like acting in some Harold Pinter plays in front of a real paying audience. That final speech of the barman when he explodes and collapses: wow. And I think I NAILED it (IMHO). Some of that dramatic training survived. I don't have any fears of speaking in public. I learnt to give flamboyant conference talks and energetic (over-energetic? rambling?) lectures.
Through Shopfront, I ended up living in a tiny tiny flat-with-no-clothes in Short Street with Carol and Clare (of the strange but successful study habits). Clare saved me from a life in the suburban flats around UNSW for which I will always thank her.
Shopfront also introduced me to the world of politics such as the great (failed) assault on the Shopfront board of directors, 1984.
But in an alternate universe the person in this photo went on to a career as a writer. The great fresh-faced playwright acclaimed throughout the land whose words make the middle class wince with their biting accuracy. Surrounded by women friends who are both attracted, yet repelled at his problems with drinking and sleeping. Who can't write a simple idea in a simple linear manner. With bad dress sense.
Sounds like I did the world a favor by doing something else, heh?
Sat Sep 22 08:37:21 PDT 2007
I itch
Helen took out some poison ivy in the yard, then left for Baltimore. The cat, bless her, inspected
the carnage then came to me for some loving. "Mummy is not here", she whined, "who will worship me?".
Well, it turns out that Lucie the Cat is a vengeful god. After I preened and petted her, all the poison ivy has made my arms and chest erupt in little welts that feel so GOOD to scratch then scream at you for hours afterwards.
Helen! Come back! Face the wrath of Lucie! And let the garden grow, dammit!
Sat Sep 22 08:25:26 PDT 2007
Ain't nothing wrong with Baltimore
Helen and me are playing city mouse and country mouse. Weekends are spent either here or
in Baltimore. Helen has a shorter working week than me so our current mix is two weekends in WV and the
third in Baltimore. Unless I screw up the Baltimore freeways, it is 4 hours from here to there.
I was really worried about this arrangement, before it started. Now, it all looks good. Sure, the house deflates a little when she leaves but its only for a few nights then we are back together. And her new flat is wonderful and the food around where she lives at Fells Point is just sensational. Yuppie over-the-top wall-to-wall bars/clubs/bistros/ etc etc etc and to hell with the diet.
I might have a different view on all this, come winter. The road from WV to Baltimore is I-68 and it is a mean mother in winter- isolated, scary, random animals blundering onto the freeway, blizzards, the whole nine yards. But, right now, it is as pretty as all get out. And fall hasn't even started yet so we're going to get a month of riotous colors. There's something to look forward too.
Sat Sep 22 08:18:05 PDT 2007
Busy as a bumble bee
Rate of blogging falling off. What can I say? I think "start of term" says it all. In the last six weeks I have
- Written a new xml-based content management system
- Created a new way to do my data mining tutorials
- Submitted an STTR
- Interviewed eight students and hired four GRAs
- Started two new research projects
- Wrote a TSE paper
- Worked with researchers in Turkey to find sensational results that will be the next TSE paper
- Helped Helen start up at Baltimore
- Organized new renovations at the NASA Eisland Lab
- Gone to Baltimore
- Wrote two talks for NASA and the ACM
- Set up for class
Summer is now a distant memory. A halcyon time when hours flowed gently between cups of tea and pleasant bicycle rides discussing the zeta function with that nice Mr. Turing. If only he'd tinkle his little bell once more, I'd be off again in a shot.
Sat Sep 22 08:04:40 PDT 2007
The Horror of Drive-Thru
#include pinchOfSalt.h
Somethings are so common, we don't give them a second glance. But sometimes, if we do, the shocking truth is unavoidable.
Consider trampolines. Or, more generally, the human obsession with gymnastics. Why? Is it just we like looking at trim, lithe bodies in scant costumes performing physical feats for our enjoyment? Obviously not. Clearly we are fascinated by gymnastics since it lets us act out race memories. I refer of course to all those generations spent in the zero-G colony ships that first brought us to Earth.
Not convinced? Then let us apply the glare of reason to our darkest psychosis.: drive-through food on highways.
Now what is that all about? It can't be be food- its too fatty, destroys family life, and the coffee is crap.
Not only that, think of the ridiculously complicated infrastructure we have built and maintain, just to get us to our daily McDonalds:
- First you need cars- intricate pieces of kludgey machinery that consume huge portions of our income.
- Next, you need the roads for the cars to run on- huge black rivers that scar the landscape, slash away mountains, rape forests, and damn rivers.
- And all this only let us drive faster and straighter to our next Fat Mac!
So, why do we do it? After minutes of research I have made the following incontrovertible conclusion:
- Life on
this planet was seeded by a race of very thin invisible ribbon
people with a fondness for red meat, fresh off the grill. This
race wrote into our genes the overwhelming desire to
build the ultimate drive-thru.
Crazy, you say? Well, the evidence is everywhere. Ever notice how confetti blows in the wind? And power lines run alongside the highway? Now put it all together. The ribbon people wrap themselves around the poles and wires to stop the wind blowing them away from their food.
And what is that food? Why- us! Every day, we jump in our cars and spend hours driving around in front of the homes of our masters, the ribbon people. "Pick me! Pick me!" is our subconscious plea. And if our cars are pretty, bright, and shiny enough, or if our driving antics are daring enough, then we are plucked by the ribbon people who grill us on the power lines.
Of course, that was all stage one. We're now into stage two. Ever notice that there are more roads in the city? And the buildings are taller? And where the buildings are tallest, the traffic is slowest, the crime rate is highest, and there are more ticket-tape parades? Need I say more?
OK- if you need it all laid out for you. The ribbon people, tired
of the high winds of the open highway, have forced us to build
huge windbreaks. Oh, the fiendish cunning of their plans. Every
day we do our commute, carrying more and more of them into the
downtown area. Then we mill around there, in huge tempting
crowds. They pick and choose which of us to eat- and hide their
carnage within the usual death rate of downtown.
And sometimes they even flaunt their presence by raining down on
us during parades. And like the fools we are, we run through the
ticker-tape, laughing and cheering while ignoring the sizzling
smell of our hapless fellows grilling over the power lines,
feeding the monsters that feed on us.
Every day we play out our innocence, hiding, lying to ourselves, for the reality is unbearable. We struggle to raise ourselves above our murdering masters. But our imagination is stunted by the horror of our existence. All we have ever managed is pale parody of the slaughter yards of the ribbon people.
Worst of all, in our drive-thrus,
the participants gratefully pay to join the massacre
while ordered to "have a nice day. Now do you understand why Ronald McDonald's smile is forced and
his mouth is ringed in blood?
Oh the horror, the horror.
Mon Aug 20 21:12:14 PDT 2007
Welcome to the start of term
Can't even begin to list last week. Such a blur of activity.
- Faculty retreat last Friday.
- Departmental picnic last Thursday.
- Been interviewing graduate students, trying to find my next young gun. Hard task.
Had this explosive idea about using a BASH programming trick to build interactive tutorials. Its really going off in my head right now. And sooo simple to do.
I got obsessed with writing web sites as reports of XML files. Did same for the cs591o data mining web site. It was very exciting, and code was so succinct. But I am numb from the mono-mania required to get it all together. Tired am I. But proud of the product. It looks like a normal web site but under the hood is some sweet XML.
There was some strange bug keeping me up at nights- I could not reproduce my Jan 2007 TSE results. Last week I found the bug and now I can do things like (a) reproduce old work (b) try it on more data sets; (c) try more learners, etc. Very exciting.
Still getting ready for class next Tuesday. Eeek! that's tomorrow!
All I can say is "bring back summer".
Mon Aug 20 20:59:54 PDT 2007
BOOK(S): Val McDermid's Tony Hill novels
Welcome inside the mind of a serial killer. Are you enjoying the view?
Val McDermid writes tartan noir; that is, crime fiction from the land of kilts and haggis. These books are broody and , says Wikipedia, dwell on the good and evil within our souls, redemption and damnation. For example, I've just finished four of her Tony Hill/ Carol Jordan novels:
- The Mermaids Singing (1995)
- The Wire in the Blood (1997)
- The Last Temptation (2002)
- The Torment of Others (2005)
- (read excerpts)
The books are formulaic. In every one, Dr. Tony Hill, famed international clinical psychologist, has at least one scene where he is at the mercy of yet another psycho (and D.C.I. Carol Jordan has to save his sorry ass, yet again). In every next book, he's sworn off his old ways yet McDermid finds some way of dropping him back into the fray.
The formula is the back story. The real story is that Jordan and Hill are hopelessly in love. They orbit each other, unable to get closer, desperate when they are too far apart. They share a love of serial killers. Jordan wants to find them and hang them (while, not-so-incidently, getting promoted). Hill wants to climb inside their skins so he can finally understand what makes people (like him) distant from the rest of humanity.
When one accepts a dangerous assignment or is damaged, the other gets drawn in and shares in the bleeding. By the way, I mean that quite literally- these books are not for the faint of heart. There is a horrifying completeness to McDermid's terrorverse. She'll write about the stuff that other male crime writers balk at.
In the Dexter books, murder is fun, a pixie-like dance through a wonderland of blood splatter. But in the Hill/Jordan world, no one is laughing. In fact, many folks end up bound and gagged, squirming and trying to scream, as their doom stalks closer and closer and raises the knife while crushing their arm in the vice and... well, you get the idea.
Sun Aug 12 08:07:52 PDT 2007
BOOK(S): Roddy Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy
Relentless poverty. Foul mouth Irish. Little hope for the future.
Reproducing like rabbits cause they are old-school Irish Catholics and there is fook all else to do.
In the first book, the young'uns start a band (The Commitments) and it fails. In the second, the sister of the founder of the band gets pregnant and has The Snapper. It the third, the girl's father learn the evils of capitalism and fast food as The Van tears apart a friendship.
The Commitments was fun. Very short. Had a story to tell, told it all, stopped.
The Van is described as a comedy but I just saw waste. Wasted lives, talent unexpressed, no resources to build a better tomorrow. I thought it was a good book, but not one I enjoyed.
The Snapper was all about loyalty- the girl's parents are upset by the news but they stand by her. Dad takes her down t'pub for a drink. The girl's friends down t'pub are explosively supportive. Come to think of it, the girl got pregnant in the car park of t'pub. That's some t'pub.
In the USA, this kind of poverty sends people over the edge. Street gangs, wars between drug lords, drive-by shootings, jails bulging at the seams. But in Doyle's Barrytown, Irish poverty has a gentler, kinder side.
Doyle writes a world where there are no drugs, families and communities stay together to support each other, and nearly no one goes to jail or gets shoot. I don't know if that world really exists, but I'd like to think so.
And Barrytown's poor remain proud, even powerful. The heroine of The Snapper turns on the father of her child who's been bad mouthing her around the town. She goes to his house and orders his silence, or she will reveal all to his wife. In American, this scene would involve guns or lawyers. In Barrytown, its two people hissing at each other over a cup of tea.
Sun Aug 12 08:06:43 PDT 2007
BOOK(S): Jeff Lindsay's "Dexter" series
A nice bit of light-hearted homicidal mania
In Darkly Dreaming Dexter, our favorite psycho works as a forensics expert for the Miami police. Dexter is a well-adjusted psycho. By night, his "Dark Passenger" emerges but, under orders from his dearly departed father, Dexter only unleashes the passenger on those that deserve the most horrible of deaths. By day, this bloody thirsty killer spends his time happily gazing at blood splatter- and gets paid to do it by the Police Department.
In Dearly Devoted Dexter, a killer is leaving grossly mutilated, but still living, victims all over Miami. Dexter's unique insights into psychopaths is desperately needed to catch the bad guy. Meanwhile our hero is being stalked, by the only cop in Miami who wonders why this guy understands so much about psychos. So Dexter has to lie low which, for Dexter, means playing the game of being normal. Sublimating his Dark Passenger, all Dexter's energies go into pretending to love the girl friend that he keeps for camouflage. He pretends so well that.... no, I can't say. But man it was cool.
Sun Aug 12 08:06:07 PDT 2007
Never fly with U.S. Airways
Oh
the horror, the horror, that is U.S. Airways customer service....
Philly. I'm still only in Philly. Waiting for a plane flight, getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room I get weaker. And every minute my luggage squats in a hanger, it gets stronger.
Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a flight out of here, and for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice flight, and when it was over, I'd never want another.
It had been a perfect trip. England, ASE PC (two full papers accepted, yee hah!), London all vibrant and exciting. Then time to go home.
52 hours later I was still lost in transition, still wearing the same clothes (you don't want to know), and constantly amazed at the awful customer service at U.S. Airways.
When I got in from London, all flights west from Philadelphia were cancelled (very bad weather). Called U.S. Airways customer service- what a disaster:
- Crowded airport, booming announcements, bad phone lines, very fast speaking Indians, hard to hear.
- I spoke to Eesha (or was it Naija?). After twenty minutes on one call, she said "oh- this is a ticket with an international carrier. you'll have to speak to our international desk".
- Sigh. Back to the beginning.
- More "on hold" listening to an insanely cheerful recorded voice trying to seduce me into a trip to Lisbon.
- After 50 minutes of this, I started to think that a plane to Lisbon (or, in fact, to anywhere except here) would be a very good idea.
I was told that there were no other flights for two days (massive cancellations). So, like I always say, if life sends you lemons, send it back and ask for a whiskey sour:
- So I planned a day or two of eating in downtown Philly and sleeping in a BIG BIG hotel bed.
Well, I got the bed but it turns out that the hotel was nowhere near downtown Philly. Not sure if it was anywhere at all really. Some generic Pennsylvania. town way out beyond the burbs. Really humid outside and I was no change of clothes (lost luggage, remember?). So I hid in my air con room and did lots of hacking. On the whole, not a bad way to spend a few days.
But hacking bliss melted away when I called U.S. Airways, just to check my booking. Turns out, U.S. Airways lost the booking. I spoke to Pari (or was it Darpana?) who told me:
- I had no booking;
- That I could not get on the flight without me contacting the carrier that took me across the Atlantic (British Airways);
- But that was pointless because there were no spare seats;
- That I would have to fly with another airline (me paying the fare);
- etc, etc.
At this point, I climbed onto a monumentally high horse and asked to speak to a supervisor. Madhuvanth (or was it Reshma?) left me on hold for about 20 minutes then came back with, wait for it, the flight I was offered in the first place.
Its hard to pick the worst moment of customer service but, overall, I think it was the "help" I received from the lost luggage folks. What was most fun was their overall tone of "its your fault if we lose your bags". When I asked about my luggage, I was told that they could do nothing without a reference number. I asked for a reference number and was told that I had to contact a U.S. Airways representative.
"But I am speaking to a U.S. Airways representative", I said.
No- apparently I have to go to the web site and start a query.
"Oh", I said thinking "don't you guys work for the same airline?".
So I logged onto the U.S. Airways web site, recorded my lost luggage. The next day I got this email:
Dr. Menzies,
Thank you for contacting US Airways about your baggage.
We apologize you have been without your luggage, but
could not locate your claim under the reference you
provided in your original contact.
Please submit a new inquiry by entering either the
ten alphanumeric file reference(i.e. PHXHP12345), or
six character bag tag number, so we may access your
file. We look forward to hearing from you.
Patricia XXXXX
Baggage Call Center
Well Patricia, I have to say that "Menzies" is not a common name in USA and the space of "Menzies" arriving from London on BA67 last Thursday must be very very small. But I guess you can't be expected to find me. Its not like you have a computer, or you do this everyday, or that you work in baggage call center
(BTW, its not just me that thinks U.S. Airways has crappy customer service- it was rated nearly worst in a 2007 North America Airline Satisfaction Study.)
Sat Aug 11 13:38:51 PDT 2007
Proof that the English are insane
Behold the pickled body of Jeremy Betham, one of the founders of University College London.
Now I am not making this up. Here is the story:
- As requested in his will, his body was preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet, termed his "Auto-icon".
- The Auto-Icon is kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of the College.
- For the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, the Auto-Icon was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where he was listed as "present but not voting". Tradition holds that if the council's vote on any motion is tied, the auto-icon always breaks the tie by voting in favor of the motion.
- The Auto-Icon has always had a wax head, as Bentham's head was badly damaged in the preservation process. The real head was displayed in the same case for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks including being stolen on more than one occasion. It is now locked away securely.
Thu Aug 9 02:38:16 PDT 2007
In England, fantasies can be local.
Late at night I lie in my London hotel room, trapped by jet lag, and listen to the distant police sirens. They sound
so much more real than the ones i knew at home- they sound like the ones on the tele.
In Australia, fiction was elsewhere. I was 22 before I read a story where the hero light a cigarette under the Coca Cola sign at Kings Cross. Before that, Central Park, Trafalgar Square, the Mullholland tunnel, the Eiffel tower, or the Statue of Liberty featured larger in my fiction that any Australian icon.
The lesson was clear: Australia wasn't important enough to deserve its own illusions. If you want to dream, this desert must be deserted for New York, Paris, London, whatever.
So now I'm here in London and reading British crime dramas and watching BBC science fiction on the DVD drive. And the heroes climb the grimy steps of Barbican station (200 yards to the south) or race to save the world at the Tate Museum of Modern Art (a few miles away, on the South Embankment).
Once again, the lesson is clear. This place is important enough, mentally BIG enough for you to play our your wildest fantasies, all without needing a passport or a plane ride to a distant land.
Wed Aug 8 10:41:51 PDT 2007
M'Town to London Town
Racing to the airport and got there late. Wrecks on the freeway to scare you senseless, holding up the traffic. Impatient at slow lines at security, hoping from foot to foot. Door on the plane shut just as I took my seat. Phew!
Intense relief to be on the plane. Marvelling to be on a Boeing 777 (never flew one before) and to have my own LCD screen right there on the seat in front of me, complete with 18 channels, at 40,000 feet. Watching crap movies then realizing you have crossed over to Ireland and are nearly there.
London, 7am, sunny Sunday. Hotel won't let me check in till 2pm. Hyde Park, fall asleep, cuddling back pack.
Woken by
the police who were checking I was breathing (in this heat wave, some drunks like down and never get up- most awkward- lots
of paperwork).
Went to sleep in an empty park. Woke up midday surrounded by the British. They'd sprung up, like mushrooms.
So un-American.
Pale, gormless, and graceless. No American university dorm finishing school
to groom them into tanned plastic clones (with blinding smiles and
an illogical belief that Mexico is an foreign country). They (still) smoke in public. They have bad teeth,
anemic tans and
have ugly little dogs-
that walk without a leash (imagine that!).
I love London public transport. All those big red buses and bicycles and people walking to work. And the train
stations with the funny names: Angel, CockFosters, Elephant & Castle, St Pancreas (what random word dictionary were they using to
name them?).
But riding the tube? Forgettaboutit. After 3 days of riding, changing, riding again, I started walking. Turns out that London is a small town with pleasant strolls above and spaghetti tubing below.
Very little English in England. Maybe it was hanging round universities but I could walk around for hours and never hear the Queen's tongue.
Later on, at pub. So dehydrated, one beer got me drunk. Reading the newspaper on a leather lounge,
sunlight spilling in all around me. Where else would you want to be in the whole world?
Ate breakfast the next day at a greasy spoon. The menu was "set1", "set2", or "set3". Not quite spam, spam, spam, tomatoes and spam but near enough. Baked beans for breakfast (gross). Sausages. Fried egg. Coffee in a dirty mug and huge bowel of white sugar on the table, all serves not individually stored in separate sachets (so un-American).
Then onwards to days of meetings with academics from around the world. It is a simple formula:
- coffee,
- sugar,
- talk,
- seek agreement when you can,
- politely argue otherwise,
- repeat till dinner time
- then go to pub.
Somewhere out there are some of the greatest Museums and Art Galleries in the Western World. But no time to see them. Thursday I fly home in time for my second dose of jet lag in 5 days.
Postscript: got back to the US of A and found massive thunderstorms between coast and home. All flights cancelled. All flights the next day cancelled. Spent a strange stray day in an out-of-town Philly hotel. A little day in a little place with just little old me. My own private wood between the worlds.
Wed Aug 8 10:26:09 PDT 2007
I'd forgotten about back packs
I'd forgotten what it was like for you to be the mule and the pack to be the bag. Many's the time
I've stuffed a month's worth of underwear into a backpack and headed off to north coast,
Tasmania, Victoria, western Australia, New Zealand, Bali, Thailand, Phillipines, Borneo, USA, UK...
The first time you put on a shiny clean new pack, you tie "the knot". The waist band is usually too long so after you sort out the buckles, you tie the excess strapping into "the knot". Four years later, you throw away the rotting stained back pack, and "the knot" is still tied.
In the meantime, you keep traveling away for a week of four. Every morning you wake up to ALL you stuff spread around some tent/hostel room and you wonder how it can all fit in the pack. On day 1, there is too much stuff to get into the bag. By day ten, stuff has flattened out some (or you have learned some packing tricks or a fourth dimensional portal has opened) so now the pack has spare space. Call it the Tardis effect.
Another effect is curious gravitational attraction between the very bottom of the bag and the thing you need the most. Whatever it is you need next, guaranteed, it will be at the bottom of the bag.
Nowadays. all my travel is over airport waiting rooms. No carry dust from Thailand to Borneo (now its more like Pittsburgh to Arlington). Wheels on soul-less little trollies. Convenient little rolling things with long handles but terrible back rests. No "alley... oop!" and you drag the thing up to your shoulders first thing in the morning. No "ah" as you let is slide/fall off your shoulders at the end of the day.
Wed Aug 8 10:22:08 PDT 2007
Unmentionables
When I grew up I was told that some subjects were "unmentionables", not part of polite society. I never really knew what they were but I remained curious.
So I started thinking what kind of society it might be if those unmentionables were left outside. In a box, maybe put out by considerate hosts at parties. A box full of everyone's unmentionables, all squirming together in the box. Like eels.
And since these would be polite parties, there will be etiquette- rules of behavior for dumping things off in the box. You have to cast it off, quickly, quietly, no fuss. And once must never look at what is already in the box. That just wouldn't do.
( But of course, everyone looks AND talks about it afterwards. Inside the party, little groups fix brave smiles on their faces and whisper in awestruck tones through clenched teeth, "Did you see, did you see? We gotta try ourselves some of that.")
And I'm guessing it might be humbling, standing there at the box. You've emptied all your pockets and wallets and shaken your coat twice. And you're still staring at the box saying "I'm sure, I'm just sure there was something else".
Your friend walks by, glances into the box, and says "Nope, that's all". And you say "that's it? that's all? that's why I can't stop (insert your most annoying flaw here)?".
And cause they are your friend, they take the time to check. They rummage around a little, count it all up, and tell you "yup, that's everything, that's all your stuff".
And you reel back, horrified that they know all your stuff. Then you check their stuff, see that it's all there, and realize that everyone knows everyone else's stuff- we only think we hide it.
And if it's all gone, all dropped off in the box, what do you do then? No hidden issues or agendas or hopes. No reason to live or reason to die. "Hello, how are you?" would have no reply and would not even be asked. Cause you would have no drive to find out. No reason to even think about the answer. Everyone would stand mute and still as statues (while the hosts of the party attended politely and unobtrusively to everyone's food, fluids, and toiletry needs).
Just a tip- it's not polite to drink at these parties. Or wise. Loss of focus? Bad idea! Imagine searching through the box and getting it wrong. Peering bleary-eyed at a hundred that look like familiar, but is it really yours? Could get ugly- think what you might catch if you took someone else's.
So why would you go to such a party and how long would you stay? Well, it might be kind of nice, leaving it outside. Aristotle said he liked being an old man since youth has its disadvantages: "like being chained to a madman".
Once there, you can't leave early. That would be rude, just not done at polite parties. But that won't stop everyone. You know who I mean. That couple who arrive late, eat all the food then sneak out early. And they steal the best bits out of the box as they go! Or worse,they double dip!
Which means as the evening wears out, the party gets tense. No one wants to be first, but you can't be last. Or you won't find a matching set in the box. Or worse, you'll get stuck with a bad one (at least till the next party). At the very last minute, everyone bolts! One second: a room full of mild mannered men and women. The next, dust swirling in the air as everyone runs to squabble around the box.
And someone loses out- forced to leave the party with something they didn't bring. And what's wrong with that, I say? Why always have the same unmentionables? Experiment! Live a little! Mix and match!
I can't say more. The party's breaking up and there's some stuff I want to try on, for a few days anyway.
And meanwhile, outside, all the rogues with the stolen mentionables are roaming wild in the streets. The best and worst selection of everyone's egos, dreams, and schemes- are all mixed up and running around and freely available.
Out there, people struggle daily with the nameless to pick what desires they indulge or disdain. And how you are judged tomorrow depends on the choices you make today. Now that's my kind of party. Gotta go!
Thu Aug 2 21:09:04 PDT 2007
Guess what happens if you eat
For the last two weeks I've been doing this South Beach diet phase 1 thing. Talk about dragging the chain. I was trying to write a paper with Omid and it was like giving birth, with the clock stopped.
Well, Saturday the phase1 stopped and the eating started. There was a birthday party and much silly talking and too much wine. Then, bleary eyed and feeble of body, I sat down to do papers on Sunday. And eight pages fell out of my pen. Monday Tuesday were data mining super hacks. Wednesday I rested then more data mining super hacks on Thursday.
So, amazing to say, eating gives you energy to do things. Who would have thunk it?
Thu Aug 2 16:36:53 PDT 2007
Sssh... don't tell anyone, but I seem to be up to date
This has to be a mistake:
- Research deliverables all on-track,
- 2007 fall subject advertised,
- grad students working on rewriting drafts of journal papers,
- money all sorted out for the fall,
- grad students appointed,
- advertisements our for new grad students,
- travel sorted out for London next week,
- up to date with all my data mining tasks,
- email in-box empty,
- to do and waiting lists tamed
I even have time to blog!
Hang on, now I remember, I have to write a talk for Wednesday and I have around 20 pages of two failing journal papers to rewrite. And the fall subject has to be sorted out (lectures, code).
Oh well, it was nice feeling while it lasted (for all of 32 minutes).
Thu Aug 2 16:28:27 PDT 2007
It's my birthday and I'll eat if I want to
47 today (well, yesterday actually, 16,158
kms away, where I was born) and I've just done South Beach, Phase 1
.
Two weeks of no booze, no bread, no fruit, no fun (actually, not so bad after day 8, once the carb-cravings stopped).
Clearly (birthday) + (end of Phase1) = a good enough reason for a bit of a bash. So a hearty party was convened on the deck of the Boathouse Bistro. And we were merry.
Now its the morning after. Guess what happens if you don't drink for two weeks then go out with four witty friends who like the grape? 'Nough said.
Here are all the photos, mostly thanks to surfbabe69.
Sun Jul 29 04:58:54 PDT 2007
Got a minute?
When you get a second, if you've got a minute, can you spare me some
time? I'll buy it and store it in my new time machine.
It's a nifty box that holds time in cold storage. If I've got a few hours to kill, I shove them in this freezer. ZAP! The hours disappears for me and I have a little time up my sleeve.
Which is really handy when I get busy. Deadline approaching? Too much to do? No problem! Grab some spare time out the freezer, thaw it in the microwave and ZAP! My day suddenly grows by a couple of hours.
Course, if everyone used it, things could get a little tricky. Time would become a commodity to be bought and sold. Companies would only stay competitive if they can buy lots of overtime for their workers. Each family would have one "designated worker" who starts a new job Monday morning and retires by Friday after working 40 years in five days. Think of the retirement package- four decades of income!
And who would be selling the time used by the workers? The airlines! Where else can you find thousands of people who would willingly sell hours and hours of their lives in order to avoid a tedious flight? Air travel would become free- and instant! You board the plane and ZAP you arrive. And the airline sells your time in between.
Such air travel would become a civic duty. A child's first flight would start with great pomp and ceremony. On landing, the child would be presented with a scrapbook showing everything that was accomplished using their time. Oh and the shame and humiliation if, somehow, all that time was wasted.
But imagine how this sort of thing could tear families apart. Johnny brings home his report card. Mother looks, and turns pale. Father asks nervously, "What's wrong?"(but he already knows). Dramatically, mother turns and shows Father the report card. Johnny got an "A" in maths! The parents break down in tears- their boy is going to become a worker! Oh why couldn't he have been stupid like his parents? Now they're going to have to bury him!
Then they brighten up when they remember that a week after Johnny's graduation, and just before Johnny dies of overwork, their bank accounts are going to look very healthy indeed. So the initial shock gives way to sage wisdom. "Who are we?", they tell each other, "to stand in the way of the lad's career?"
This would be an interesting world. All the workers would live at lightning speed, never seeing the results of their labors. No, that privilege would be left to the drones who would tour the centuries like hungover football fans on the bus.
"Hey look, we're passing by a period of political oppression run by a Feng Shui neo-communist matriarchy using anti-gravity technology where voting rights are only given to tall nude redheads who have proved their superiority by wining stock car races."
"Again? Yawn! Zzzzz."
Tue Jul 24 19:08:05 PDT 2007
How did we land on the moon?
Last week, on July 20th, was the first time we walked on the moon.
Now if you ask how we go there, then that is another question.
On the descent phase, the guidance computer went nuts. Things were tense, then it wasn't, then it got tense again. For a time, like all of three seconds, they were going to abort the landing (in full view of all the media of all the nations of the world).
They didn't abort because an archetypal computer-nerd named Steve Bales said it was ok to ignore the warnings and land. He was right, thus allowing him enter into the computer-nerd hall of fame and winning a Presidential Medal of Honor.
(I used to have one grainy photo (now lost) of that event- three brave astronauts and one geek (?with pocket protector) getting ribbons pinned to their chest by President Nixon.)
As part of the 25th anniversary of that landing, I wrote a presentation about how that decision was made. It was hard to sort it all out. Bales had back room support (Jack Garman) and some of the folks I spoke to said Garman actually made the call (it didn't appear on the voice record since it was voice-activated mike, direct to Bales).
An alternate story comes from the biography of the mission controller. Gene Kranz said that Bales (or Garman) knew so much about the that codes since, a week before launch, Kranz had set them the task of understanding all the unlikely ones.
Yet another story was one I was told after I gave the presentation . Someone took me aside and told me what really happened. His claim was that it was a requirements error- there was meant to be a built-in auto abort to handle extreme events. That the error was a true error and if something else had happened then that would triggered the other thing and bidda-boom bidda-bang, no landing. Or a bad landing. Or no take-off after landing. Or something.
Confused? Me too. We can't say with any certainty what really happened just 25 years ago. And this is in a room where every breath was measure and monitored amongst people who knew that every breath they took was being measured and monitored.
And the lesson? Well, how much of history is misunderstood, confused, or distorted? What can we say, with certainty about any other historical event?
I dunno, beats me.
Mon Jul 23 19:52:57 PDT 2007
Harry Potter magic
"Attention muggles. Please register your broom for the broom judging contest by 10pm."
Barnes and Noble on Friday night was insane. Harry Potter #7 was due out at midnight and every car park was taken. The store was packed with Hermonines, Harries, Hagrids, any number of nameless ghouls witches and goblins, and eight year olds display an encyclopedic knowledge of the whole series (e.g. knowing the password in book one to the Gryffindor common room).
We didn't buy a copy- we were back-ordered on Amazon.com. Next morning Helen rushed downstairs looking for the UPS parcel. Nothing! It came, hours later (UPS must have put on special staff for the occasion) and Helen started, non-stop, till she was done.
My turn now- begin....
(9 hours later)
.... end. Nicely done Ms Rowlings.
Postscript: As if we weren't Potter-nerdy enough, I can report that 24 hours later, Helen re-read the whole thing (just to check what she missed the first time through). That 759 pages. Twice. In three days.
Sun Jul 22 13:50:17 PDT 2007
Where have all the blokes gone?
The car's iPod decided to play lots of Cold Chisel (try saying that in the 20th century) and I realized that they were my "blokes" music.
I'm more the nerdy coach potato type- not really a bloke ("bloke" is strine for, er, "manliness" and "strine" is Australian for "how blokes talk"). My idea of a good time, before shin splints, was long distance running. Not the kind of thing that leads to lots of male bonding. So I've never been in a drum circle, chased wild animals with the other apes, etc etc.
Most I ever came to all that was riding to Melbourne with Michael Priest in 1985. 14 days, 1200 kms, Nutrigran-powered pumping machines. But while Michael is a good bloke, he's not a real bloke (remember the apples on shoe laces?).
Strange to say, whenever I did have blokey moments, they were usually with Cold Chisel playing Khe Sanh in the foreground. e.g.
- Peter Bitmead told me earnest tones that "this was the best song ever written in Australia" as he took the LP out of its sleeve, applied the anti-static brush, and played track2, side1 of Cold Chisel's firs album. We listened in awed silence.
- Sherman Young and me on one of our "tweety" weekends in the bright yellow convertible VW, top down,
driving
between nowhere to nowhere on a road marked on no map, singing as loudly as we possibly could:
I left my heart to the sappers round Khe Sanh
And my soul was sold with my cigarettes to the black market man
I've had the Vietnam cold turkey
From the ocean to the Silver City
And it's only other vets could understand
Well the last plane out of Sydney's almost gone
Yeah the last plane out of Sydney's almost gone
And it's really got me worried
I'm goin' nowhere and I'm in a hurry
And the last plane out of Sydney's almost gone
Now I can't say that I miss being a bloke but I miss the other blokes (Peter Bitmead, where are you?) and I miss sitting round with the blokes and pretending that I might be bloke-ish.
Sun Jul 22 13:19:08 PDT 2007
"Geez, this owright."
(Translation: the current situation is above satisfactory).
So sayeth Ron Davenport after 4 hours on our back deck on a hot summer evening. We agreed.
Rain was sprinkling down but the tree above was kind enough to stop most of it. Tiki torches were lit, wine was drunk, followed by moonshine then gin & tonic (I abstained but detailed plans were made for my end-of-diet feast, in 10 days time).
We'd talked and talked and talked into the evening. Max came over and told us strange tales of forensic deaths (we got the snorkel and the plastic wrap, but the boxing gloves? Now that was really weird).
After quoting parts of the Screwtape letters to us, Max lead a discussion on whether or not haggis was kosher (fyi: it is).
Lara came over and told us tales of fighting for hotel room in Leeds during race carnival times.
Helen demonstrated the value of iframes from displaying Flickr slide shows.
Ron discussed Australian cuisine, in particular pie floaters from Harry's Cafe de Wheels.
Meanwhile, her royal highness, Queen Lucie of Cat, chased the fireflies.
Inside the house, my email overflowed with stuff to read, things to do. But I checked- apparently all that stuff will still be there tomorrow.
Tue Jul 17 20:44:50 PDT 2007
TeraByte Tim
What do you do with a terabyte of on-line storage?
Please, I want to know.
Each week, my ISP gives me another 2GB of storage, free of charge (just another example of the excellent service at Dreamhost.com).
It accumulates and now I have, wait for it, over a terabyte of storage (well, 1,024,256 MB to be exact).
The thing of it is this- I only use 18GB of it all. So all those bits at my command and I have nothing to say to them.
Do they get lonely?
Tue Jul 17 06:07:49 PDT 2007
Return of the Diet
On the holiday, I started real good but got read bad, real fast.
On day one, I was prepared! Cheese sticks and almonds at the ready.
But by day seven, it was all about the Waffle House (man, those waffles are good). So I swore to start the diet again when I got home.
Timed it, just so. Two weeks of South Beach Diet (phase1)= no starch, no bread, no booze, no fruit (sigh, no fun). This ends exactly on my birthday so Helen now knows what to buy me this year- apples!
So now it is day three of phase one and I am spaced out. Not hungry, but strangely calm.
But you'd never know it to talk to me- I find I can't stop blurting out whatever I am thinking. Rapid fire, no diplomacy.
Helen is meant to be on the diet too but I know better.... she's in the next room, loudly eating her granola. Tempted? You bet!
Mon Jul 16 18:22:08 PDT 2007
Kids=no
Honest, we ain't kidding. No kids. Ever. Just not
interested. Our genes aren't selfish, they're just
slackers. We've hit the "pause" button so hard, we broke our
biological clock. The lifeguards have stop us diving deeper
into our gene pool.
Now we're trying to figure out why. So if you have a minute, maybe you can help us out.
Empirical results
We did a study. 100% of all idiots were babies once:
- That guy who nearly swiped your car at the corner? Ex-baby.
- That couple upstairs who play loud music? Kept the nursery awake with their crying.
- The really unhelpful woman at the insurance office? Used to wear nappies. Bet they were soiled all the time.
Alternatives to kids
Maybe the whole baby/kid thing is wrong-headed. How do kids compare with, say, cats? Well....
- Kittens take six weeks to toilet train.
- Kittens still look cute if they haven't had a bath this month.
- When they grow up, they never bad-mouth you to their therapists.
- No one will question your abilities to function normally at your job when they hear you just got a kitten.
- Also, they kill vermin. (Well, actually, they half kill, then bring inside to proudly show you. Your role in this little dance is to scream in fear and take a broom to the bleeding snake/ wriggling bird/ screeching bat/... For her part, your kitty will gaze at you all perplexed. Then, understanding dawns. and cute kitty will go outside to get you something else to play with.)
On the other hand, there's kids:
- People with kids have to present them in public, screaming, usually in crowded supermarkets.
- People with kids start acting members of some weird brain washing cult: They try to trick others into joining.
- And babies are just stupid. According to Institute president Molly Bentley, in an effort to determine infant survival instincts when attacked, the babies were prodded in an aggressive manner with a broken broom handle. Over 90 percent of them, when poked, failed to make even rudimentary attempts to defend themselves. The remaining 10 percent responded by vacating their bowels. source: The Daily Onion (Studies Reveals: Babies are Stupid).
Clearly, given the choice we'd get cats, not kids. Hmmm... maybe babies are some sort of involuntary thing. Something we can't control. Like an air-borne disease that we pick up from just walking around. And these been lots of baby infections lately. World population is currently 6,278,627,225 (as of 2007).
(Six billion looks pretty bad, right? But look again- the increases are decreasing: 100% increase 1950-2000 but only a 50% increase projected from 2000-2050. We shouldn't get much past 9.22 billion [gasp] before things start dropping again (2075). And while that's a lot of folks, its only double the current population: we might just be able to squeak past the peak without collapse.)
They protest too much?
But by now, you might be offering the Lady Gertrude objection: methinks they protests too much? Why so anti-baby? Hell, we were babies once and we just spent an amiable and fun couple of hours working on this page. So kids can grow into things you don't want to shoot on sight or run from screaming whenever you see, hear, or smell one.
Its a puzzle- why are we so vehemently anti-baby? Could it be that we're over-compensating for our appalling record at nurturing?
- Helen got a Tamagotchi and it died in a week- starved to death.
- I played The Sims and bought a baby. Social services had to take it away!
- Helen always kills every plant she buys, and I'm no better.
The truth is revealed
Then the other night Helen broke down, confessed all, and the anti-baby mystery was solved. Helen's great-great-great mother three times removed married the sister of... dramatic pause.. Clive of India! Robert Clive was an Englishman who lead a band of mercenaries that conquered Bengal in 1757 and executed its leader.
Dangerous genes indeed! And mine are no better. One of my relatives was this arch-conservative Prime Minister of Australia. Robert Gordon Menzies championed the white Australia policy; called out the army to break up miner's strikes; tried to outlaw the communist party; and best of all- kept helping other people to bomb his own country. Just before WWII, he sold pig iron to the Japanese who promptly used it to build bombs to drop back on Australia! And if that wasn't bad enough- after the war, he gave away bits of Australia to the British so they could do atom bomb tests. Some people never learn!
Mystery solved. Our genes are just too dangerous, too imperious, too English empire-ish. The 21st century is not place for a Robert2 Clive-Menzies. These days, we don't need any more atom bombs, white man's burden, black holes of Calcutta, her gracious majesty the Queen, and six different kinds of forks.
Sat Jul 14 21:54:34 PDT 2007
How much do I believe in open source licenses?
Dilemma: someone want to use one of my digital products (hooray) without it's viral creative commons license (boo). The item in question is the photo, shown here, of the UMBC library.
I presented his case to the zeigeist (well, to be accurate, just my wife . She was the only member of the zeitgeist available at that time)
Here's what me and zeigeist decided (more coffee, dear?):
Dear XXXX,
Your question has prompted much debate in my household (well, 5 minutes over breakfast).
The most important thing to say is that you have read the license and thought about the issues. Thank you.
Licensing matters. Do we really want to be edited out from the future? Our digital world may become the lost world, locked away by proprietary licensing, lost on dusty powered-down hard drives in formats no one can read any more, sealed within rooms with forgotten keys. People use what they can touch, and change. As Lessing says, "Creativity is based on the past" (watch video: mov; mp4; mpg)
Open licenses allow our ideas to (maybe) live on, after us. So do I care about your work? Is it valuable enough to keep it accessible for the future? If not, then I don't care if you are select a license that will reduce the odds that the future can touch and extend your work.
Or should I take the Stallman's viral position? Demand that my work and all subsequent work (like yours) is sharable? If "yes" then I take it my pic won't appear in your work which, in all likelihood, will be the only time that it ever gets used.
Or do I allow you to modify the license into a product where the content: gets used a few times (in your work) then lost on some hard drive, never to be accessed again in the future?
(In this case, I note that the ORIGINAL photo will still remain in the public domain. So your decision to be closed in your work will only effect the future of your work. You make your decisions about sharing your new work, I make mine about the original, we both are happy.)
I can't decide so I leave the entrust the matter to you. My license says "Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.". Accordingly, with one proviso, I grant you the right to distribute the work under any license you like and I invite you to be creative. Perhaps we should stop thinking about "all or nothing". Perhaps there is some halfway point you can find where parts of your material is fully secured and locked away from the future, while other parts are free to access and free to improve in the future.
The one proviso is this- please send me the license agreement that you select to use. I would be interested to read it.
Best wishes. Sorry this response was so long.
Tim Menzies
Sat Jul 14 09:49:39 PDT 2007
San Francisco- what a quaint little village
After 3 days in L.A. I came to S.F. and drove on Highway 101. After the madness of L.A., it all seemed small and quaint. The traffic on the freeway slowed to a halt. Imagine that! It would never happen at 80 m.p.h. (or more) L.A.
I drove from the airport to friends in Palo Alto, slipping in through not-so-crowded streets. It was 5pm so I guess it was rush hour but you could barely tell. Lots of little gardens on the road side. Major thorough fares as tree lined streets. A gentler light than L.A. (not brash in-your-face spotlight but a gentler kinder light).
In 1993 I'd spent a month in this very spot and found it alien and hostile. I vowed never to come to America and went home to finish my Ph.D. and life in the antipodes. Maybe, in 1993, what I needed to do is spend a few days in L.A. BEFORE coming to S.F. And if I'd done that, my life and career would have been radically different.
Thu Jul 12 21:56:00 PDT 2007
L.A. = a mirage of an illusion in the desert
What does it mean that I find NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab more "real" than the rest of L.A.? That a place building robots that will fly out of this world is more grounded than the mirage built on the illusion that is the desert of L.A.?
I confess to some biases. Every since seeing the collapse exhibition I am painfully aware that southern California is a wafer thing layer tacked onto a dying desert ecology. A few dry years and the whole thing will peel off, like a scab, scattering millions of refugees across America.
But even without that in the back of my mind, I would still probably find L.A. an consensual hallucination built to perpetuate an illusion.
In Manhattan, I saw dusty people forced into tiny space, all wriggling to get along despite and because of their diversity. Say what you like about that place, but one thing is clear: there are few illusions here. The whole city acknowledges the "in -your-face" and "here" and "now" of that crowded island.
But in L.A. I see less "here" and more "not here" and "there". The whole place is "not there" in a desert. Every overly green lawn and palatial mansion is alien and screams "Greetings earthlings. Bow before us! We come from a distant and bountiful planet to conqueror you.".
In Manhattan, I saw a vibrant diversity but in L.A., I see rich and poor neighborhoods separated like oil and water, ordained never to mix.
Maybe I can blame it on the cars. Manhattan is a small island- there is no place to hide from the teeming millions. In L.A., 10 million people each day hide in their cars, jump on the freeways, rocket round like pin balls, never to smell their fellow travelers, and rarely have to get out of their way.
So this is the wild west, paved and watered and laundered, but somehow the wild remains. The paper today told the story of border town with Mexico. When the armies of drug lords mounted up and rode into town, local sheriffs all rushed to surrender. I read the story with growing puzzlement. It took a while for me to understand why the writer was reporting this in such bland terms. There was no surprise or shock in this story- their can't be. Of course the rebels are pawing at the castle walls. That is what walls, and rebels, are for. Both are needed- there is no need for walls without rebels and without the rebels we could not justify building the walls. And without the rebels we'd be tempted to connect to our fellow apes. L.A. needs illegal immigrants, meth labs, drive-by shootings in order to justify ostentatious and outrageous displays of wealth where the locals choose their clothes, and their cosmetic surgeon, with all the care of set designer.
Mon Jul 9 20:06:09 PDT 2007
L.A. : mega-myths made real
Today, driving round L.A.:
- Warm weather and blue sky. Too blue. Suspiciously blue.
- Massive palm trees lining the street rearing up into the sky. I mean really, palm trees are never that tall.
- Flocks of cars like ballet companies on the freeways, engaged in some elaborate opera.
It occurred to me that it looked like a place made up to look like L.A.
Sun Jul 8 21:20:30 PDT 2007
Darkly Dreaming Dexter (of Data)
Flew Pittsburgh to Pasadena today, all the way
reading Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Meanwhile, I was looking forward to running Omid Jalali's Mann-Wilcox' scripts on
Yue Jiang new ROC curve data.
So while I was reading of a serial murderer lusting over his next victim, I lusted over data with (almost) the same intensity.
Sun Jul 8 21:14:03 PDT 2007
Summer drive to Gulf of Mexico
Last week of June, first week of July, we jumped in the car with the aim of getting to Key West.
Heck, its only two thousand miles, there and back again. We can do to Pittsburgh to Portland in five days (including deer strike)- and that's 2,500 miles.
Course, we got lost, many times.Didn't get to Key West but ended up on beaches in the Florida panhandle. All up, we drove 3000 miles and made some sensational discoveries. For example:
- Did you know that Florida is bastard hot in the summer?
- And that car air-conditioning is the BEST thing ?
- And that it takes a LONG TIME to drive to Florida?
Yes, all the above are true (write it down, there will be a test).
All in all, it was pretty easy. Highlight was Apalachicola. Other good stuff seen was Spruce's Knob, Harper's Ferry, Fell's Point (Baltimore), Charleston, and the beach at St George's Island.
The winner for "most insane" has to go to the mini golf places at Myrtle Beach.
Low lights were Kitty Hawk and Panama City- two places that precisely describe what NOT to do with a delicate coastal ecology.
Sarah Vowell's audiobook "The Partly Cloudy Patriot" kept us company. She is America's greatest living writer and patriot. I'd gladly join her America. Oh, and the one with that has lots of Apalachicola.
For all the photos from this trip, see here.
Fri Jul 6 13:50:26 PDT 2007
Vacation to hills and oceans
Just back from fantastic vacation: hills and oceans of (West) Virginia .Mon Aug 12 19:20:58 PDT 2006
