elisteran

Heh. I woke up at 9, was awake enough to get a few things done in the morning for work that needed to go out today, helped watch over the rollout and fix some bugs at the last minute -- then promptly ended up falling asleep for an afternoon nap. In theory, a benefit of working from home, but the infamous "they" are trying to clamp down on people working from home (we're supposed to get approval ahead of time), so I woke up and headed in to the office in the late afternoon...

... sort of a silly situation. If we got dinner, it'd be worth it going in, but ... oh well. at least I raided a salad out of the fridge.

I bought a scale a few weeks ago, but then immediately and promptly forgot to use it regularly. However, over the past few days, I've remembered to weigh myself on two different scales, and it seems I might have dropped 10 pounds. Might. I got one intermediate result that was at odds, but ... we'll see.

On some other news, I went to the Calstate Dancesport Championships last weekend; I was competing in latin bronze with a new partner, a Stanford grad student -- it was definitely a smaller competition, but smoothly run. We ended up getting silver, which is nice; my partner also was competing with someone else in silver, where she got silver, so she was definitely good. She's having to make a decision about which of us to dance with, though, which has to be rough on her. We'll see how that goes.

Complacency

Ack. I made the mistake of thinking the beast of Proposition 8, the California ballot proposition outlawing same-sex marriage, was dead.But of course, just because the initial polls showed little support, supporters weren't going to simply give up, and the initial polls might have helped opponents get complacent (certainly did for me). I think one of the best, simple passages on it came from Google's statement:

However, while there are many objections to this proposition -- further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text -- it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 -- we should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.

(Google almost never takes any stance on social issues, so this was a big deal).


Unfortunately, I just heard over the weekend that proposition 8 is actually showing signs of passage this election. Even if it does pass, I'm not sure what the lasting effects would be ... if the rest of the country continues the trend towards full equality of same-sex marriages, what would stop a measure reverting this from being put on the ballot again and again and again?

At any rate, I chipped in over the weekend to help air some anti-proposition 8 commercials -- here's hoping it'll be enough. There'll be some lingering effects of this regardless ... I wonder if the Mormon Church's injection of themselves on this will affect their proselytizing? And if Obama refuses to come out and oppose it, it'll be a reflection on his campaign, too -- yes, it'd be a risk in a close election, but undue timidity would be a bad sign for being able to do much of anything worthwhile even if he were elected.

... I just packed away my christmas tree. (I could defend myself and say it was a mini-tree tucked away in an unused corner of a room I spend little time in, but I don't think it really helps me).

After the last formation team I was on, I was definitely thinking I should take a few months off of dance. It sucks up an enormous amount of time; and formations are worse than normal: the video at youtube is 4:37, and it ended up taking 2 months of practice (with 5-10 hours a week of practice).

And that's ignoring the time ... this team practiced in Sunnyvale, and was focused on the Mountain View through San Jose region. It takes me 20-30 minutes to get down there, depending on traffic, and burns a fair amount of gas.

Formations do have the advantage of being a very bonding experience; I now know several people who are willing to dance with me, which is a strong plus. Particularly when I face my inability to attract and keep a dance partner (what I would need to do if I plan on really improving my dance).

So those coaches are having two formation teams audition in two weeks (one latin showcase, one standard competitive). Or there are two other troupes that are having auditions (Dance Libre, Decadance). But I feel like I was sacrificing part of my work- and even social-life to meet the obligations of a dance team...

Argh. I hate making decisions about my life.

PS. I'm also a bit annoyed because my instructor called me at 10:15 this morning to cancel our scheduled lesson at 11:15 -- a message that I didn't get until after I had already driven down to Sunnyvale. I've been an inconsiderate student at times -- showing up late, being unprepared -- but, generally speaking, I'm charged for even the shortened lesson. I would need to give 24 hours notice if I wanted to cancel a lesson for the week...

The FSF has a video up of Stephen Fry talking about free software. (Stephen Fry is host of QI, which briefly caught my attention; but they don't have it in the usual streaming Flash format. Instead, it's a java applet that plays an Ogg Theora stream. Apparently this is what Wikipedia uses for movies, not that I've seen many movies there.

This works for many people, although on the #emacs irc channel, it turned out to also not work for quite a few people. Somehow I doubt it's as reliable as the ubiquitous flash video, although I might be biased; the easy ubiquity was a big part of Youtube's success back in the day, when real, quicktime, and windows media player were battling it out. I have to give Macromedia big props for that.

There are some interesting arguments to be had over whether "free software" should be allowed to deal with non-free data formats. I happen to think it should; there's nothing inherently wrong with DRM. It's got interesting technical issues; it can be abused, of course, but it's a lot like cryptography. The technology can be put to "bad" ends, but it's how it's used that determines the morality.

So, putting aside the morality of it, I did end up buying an iPod Touch. So far I'm really happy with it ... the interface is slick, and it's been a convenient source of mapped directions (I look up a route while I'm on wifi and carry the ipod with me; the route remains cached). I also went ahead and bought new music on the iTunes store -- it's been over a year since I bought anything there (which just goes back to the DRM-issue I was talking about). Since then, they've made DRM-free songs available at the same price as their usual offerings; I even paid a few bucks to convert songs I had already purchased to the new format.

However, Fairplay aside, the thing that bothers me the most about the iTunes store is the fact that it's not inside the web browser. Other stores manage to sell music online using just a web browser, or an add on to the web browser; somehow Apple doesn't seem to know how to do it (or, rather, they think it offers some advantage to them to make everybody use iTunes). It's incredibly unfriendly in terms of quickly looking up songs that are available; it's crippling in terms of linking. Am I alone in finding this really, really annoying? I may not be a RESTful advocate like Dare Obasanjo, but basic web principles are good things. Really.

(this draft has been around for ages; the essay is moderately incoherent, but I really just want to POST this and try to get back into livejournal).

An interesting site that's been floating around; it probes your browser history to guess what gender you are.
http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-history-estimate-gender/

Seems plausible, except my results are...

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 65%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 35%

D'oh!

Skipping the boring parts of this, I'm trying instead of my accustomed wide-as-possible browser (all the better to show lots of tabs in, m'dear) to go with a narrow browser window, with only a few tabs visible at once. Might help me make more use of this 30" lcd panel I have at work... this was brought in part because of how narrow the columns are at The New Yorker, and I realized it actually was very readable.

Sadly, no! poses an interesting question: "Survey time: if you could make one pundit who has a regular gig at a major newspaper or magazine stop writing forever, which one would it be?"

My first instinct was Maureen Dowd. Not to be unduly sexist, but she's horribly catty; while she can turn (at least occasionally) a pointed phrase, she's obviously superficial in her analysis. There's no reason she should be so regularly and prominently featured at the New York Times. Take a look at this paragraph from her last column:

Or perhaps after working with Torquemada Cheney all these years, W. simply feels more at home in a monarchy. At the end of dinner he posed under a portrait of Elizabeth I in the drawing room and gayly promised: “This is going to be my White House Christmas card.”

It's offhand supposition, slanted adjectives, and completely anecdotal. Opinion columnists and pundits don't necessarily have to be reporters, but Dowd's entire style grates. I wouldn't miss her if she stopped writing completely. (And it's not a partisan thing; Dowd attacked both Clinton and Bush fiercely while in office; the quote shows her opinions on Bush, and she was shallowly cruel in covering the Democratic nominees during the nomination process).

(On the other hand, the comments section over there throws up a worthy candidate in the form of Fred Hiatt. I don't know how responsible he is for the uncredited editorials at the Washington Post, but they're frequently bad, as are many of the editorial page selections. His most recent article ("'Bush lied'? If only it were that simple") has some issues, as DeLong writes about here, but including his editorial job alongside his writing is probably unfair).

So, what pundits would you rather see stop writing? I suppose political pundits are what came first to my mind, but perhaps some tech columnists should be stopped, too...

Ha. I totally thought the band in Music and Lyrics, the Drew Barrymore/Hugh Grant movie that was surprisingly enjoyable, was Wham. Apparently the movie's group was Pop! and Wham! was a real group. Who knew?

Lyric-wise, I've been listening to a lot of KOIT lately. One of the songs that they've been hitting in heavy rotation is Rihanna's Don't Stop the Music. This fits nicely in the vein of her barely intelligible "Umbrella" -- the refrain sounds enormously like a commentary about Microsoft. I finally got motivated enough to check out the actual lyrics; it's the much more sensible "Ma ma say ma ma sa, Ma ma coo sa " .

Slightly more fun is "Still Alive", by Jonathan Coulton:

I went ahead and watched through an enormous number of portal videos on youtube a few weeks ago ... the gameplay looks fun and the backstory horribly entertaining. The backstory actually reminds me a lot of the backstory in Zork -- I think I should go track down the half-life boxed set now. At any rate, the message in "Still Alive" is horribly cryptic ... lots of fun arguments

Less lyrically, I'm paying the price for carelessness last weekend when I did laundry. Rather than return my bottle of bleach to its normal place under the sink, I left it in my laundry basket. Sometime along the way, a hole got poked in the bottle, so my clothes have been marinating in a puddle of bleach :( Looks like at least one t-shirt is basically ruined for going out and about in public -- will have to see what the full damage is when the load is done.

Bletchley Park, the famed site of British cryptography efforts during WW2 and now a museum dedicated to same, may close due to lack of funds -- it's maintained by a private trust outside of the national museum system, so has to raise the money on its own. It needs to raise at least 1 million pounds to handle some roofing issues.

On the one hand, Bletchley Park was the site of one of the greatest cryptographic achievements in the history of modern times. It's at least as memorable as lots of other random historical sites, and some of the work that they're doing reconstructing the colossus machine sounds really interesting. But on the other hand, I've found myself growing quite skeptical of museums' purposes... having lots of museums around strikes me as vaguely packrattish, cluttered. What's the real purpose of noting down not just "history", such as it is, but historical trivia? (Somewhere in here also lie the Pez Museum in Burlingame, and the Jack Kerouac museum in San Francisco -- they're little storefronts that are also museums, but I suspect they're not, in the end, destined for the ages, the way an estate museum might be).

Of course, this ties in with a course I took recently on Getting Things Done, which is an organization method that's got a lot of random buy-in across the web. The course certainly made it sound attractive ... one of the real tenets is to clear things so that they're in just one place, and once they're done, they're done. I am still playing around with "List manager" products to help categorize tasks -- I wonder how ipod touches do as organizers? -- but the general philosophy seems contrary to lots of museum keeping.

ObMath: a fun video talking about folding a sphere inside out:

Ani-nouto had an entry on conventions that I just have to echo: "Authors on the average conform to conventions, and it’s just the fact." There's not anything particularly wrong with this; it gives a measure of stability in this uncertain world (or, more prosaically, it gives consumers a reasonable heuristic to decide whether something is worth buying).

Rachel Donadio a few weeks ago had an article in the NY Times entitled "It's not you, it's your books." At least one person I know reacted to it approvingly, which amazed me. The essay isn't bad, really -- an anodyne collection of anecdotes disguised as advice, quickly glossing over any controversial stance. By drawing on the myth of a canon of great authors, Donadio could gloss over the critical prejudices of her readers, knowing she wouldn't get called on it.

I probably would have thought no more about it, until in the week following the essay's publication she was on a public radio program broadcast locally talking about it, dealing with call-in shows (unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the show; I meant to try to track down what was in the timeslot, but I didn't get around to it, and now don't remember the day of week or exact time). Donadio was pressed by several callers (and, to a lesser extent, the host) on the topic of, as she put it, "genre fiction."

These are things like "Romance", "Science Fiction", and "Mystery" ... books shelved separately in mainstream bookstores from the "highbrow" "literature" category. Donadio said, in effect, that they could be entertaining, but the genre conventions bound authors unduly, preventing them from being truly challenging. She said that real literature had no constraints, and that's why she appreciated reading it over genre novels. This is balderdash, of course: if you were to run a clustering algorithm over novels in the "literature" section, you'd find many other genres. Regency Romances, for example, or College Professors who Sleep With their Students (a subgenre nicely lampooned in Music and Lyrics); or Nazi historicals. The conventions that provide a structure in some of the genres are conventions that are alternatively adhered to, subverted, or ignored.

Perhaps the capstone of that call-in show was a woman who called in complaining that her husband had low tastes (I forget the example she used -- it might have been Chicken Soup for the Soul). When asked what she was reading, she proudly said that her reading group had just finished The Kite Runners and was starting on something else, perhaps Memoirs of a Geisha. I laughed to myself -- her highbrow tastes were evident in reading books brought to prominence by that esteemed bastion of intellectual culture, Hollywood.

Whee. I was catching up at http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/ [0] when I realized that I'm finally in some sense starting to be able to read haskell code. Yay! My usual way of learning a language is to read a lot of related concepts and eventually try to sink into a zen of the language; but haskell has felt particularly difficult to get into, because its background is very abstract. A language that draws upon category theory in introductory tutorials is a language that takes some thought.

Now I should try programming some stuff in haskell, to go from a read-only language to a read-write one. One of the downsides, though, is that I don't program enough for pleasure: I'm a lazy person easily contented. Russ may write his own blog system but I just use livejournal. My immediate custom needs are usually satisfied with simple shell/perl/python scripts.

I really do need to program more, and push stuff out more aggressively. The head maintainer of color-theme seems to have dropped out of sight again, so I should roll up some pending commits, and see what it takes to get people to start using the new version. Yet another minor patch I had sent in to xemacs seems to have dropped down the memory hole, and the hashtable patches that I wrote 2(!) years ago are never going to go in at this rate.

A large part of the xemacs problem is my own fault, because I don't like having to bug people to get a patch in ... but it's left me feeling a bit disillusioned, particularly when rants like Steve Yegge's latest are going around...

[0] By the way, the entry on negative probabilities shows an interesting perspective on quantum mechanics.

n+1 magazine has an interesting article on dating. I had to laugh, however, at one particular passage: "But her biographer puts the grand total of her conquests at fourteen, and some of these, according to a rival biographer, are questionable—and three were "well-known homosexuals." So ten. For the modern college senior, this is a busy but not extravagant Spring Break."

Spring breaks seem to be typically 5 days long in my experience ... being generous and counting the weekends bracketing it, that's 9 days for 10 "conquests". What, then, is extravagence?

We must stop dating. But we can't. Because the only way to stop dating would be to date more, and more efficiently, to become more adept at spotting, on the first date, those things that on the fifth or fifteenth date are going to become a problem. Of course that only makes it worse—by that standard, even Abelard and Heloise wouldn't have made it. The other option is to change yourself. But you'd have done that by now, if you could.

Efficiency is something to watch out for ... there's probably a life lesson in that. (Ok, you can quibble about it; I read a claim on rec.arts.sf.written (and have, of course, not even tried to confirm this independently), saber-toothed cats keep evolving and dying out. It's a very successful niche, while it lasts)).

I really dislike some of what the Hillary campaign is doing: this claim that she's particularly experienced (she almost certainly is not), that she's met some mythical Commander-in-Chief threshold along with McCain, but which Obama has not; so on. Couple that with her vote on Iraq and I'm supporting Obama in the primaries.

But some of the stuff that people are attacking Hillary for is just ridiculous. For example, when she said, "He's not muslim ... as far as I know." this was after dogged questioning where the interview kept focusing on her and trying to get her to say something. Watching the video, she said clearly several times that he was not Muslim; having to repeat herself several times, it's not all that surprising she chose slightly different wording.

And consider this post, from Kos: "The math is clear: the only way for Clinton to win this race is via coup by super delegate, which would throw the party into civil war." That's incredibly silly; that's like saying when 51% of a group vote for pepperoni after 49% have voted for cheese, the 51% are establishing a coup. Neither Barack nor Hillary have it locked up; not everybody has voted. Kos is one of the big advocates for keeping Michigan and Florida without a voting delegation, because they knew the rules before changing their primary dates. It's deeply hypocritical for him to then be complaining that the rules allow a "coup" by defining people who have until the convention to decide.

(That's basically what the superdelegates are, ignoring the (irrelevant) factors of who gets counted as a superdelegate, and their purpose in selecting a candidate).

(But, seriously, hillaryis44.com is a parody site, right? I can't read it but for a minute without my head aching ...)

I really need to get a feature rolled out by next week, so I've been erratic (well, even more erratic) at communicating with people. I'll try to make up for that next week.

In the meantime, something a little distracting: Brian Hayes discusses a way of ordering the natural numbers developed by Sharkovski in the 1960s. Rather than 1,2,3..., it goes

3, 5, 7, 9, ..., 6, 10, 14, 18, ..., 12, 20, 28, 36, ..., ..., 8, 4, 2, 1

The discussion of how to define the successor function succ(n) on this ordering is quite well-written.

Just a little something for few minutes distraction :)

So a fun ending to my president's day holiday: I went to the west coast swing class at Starlite Dance club, where they had special guest instructors of Arjay Centano and Melissa Rutz. They're some of the better known WCS competitors out there; one youtube video featuring them is


I've used some of their youtube videos to try to borrow for choreography; they don't have the sharp edge of some of the other dancers, but that's probably a stylistic thing as much as anything.

I liked their teaching style, and I hadn't realized, but they're somewhat local to the bay area (Two Left Feet, in Danville). A bit out of my way, but maybe worthwhile for workshops. Arjay seems to have a tendency to put his foot in his mouth; perhaps he was just tired, since he was probably in the Central Coast swing that was going on this weekend. (A poster on rec.arts.dance was really praising jordan & tatiana's performance there; I hope that makes it to youtube).

It's been a while since I've done any WCS; I was taking classes on lindy hop with Richard Powers, but I just can't seem to fall in love with lindy hop the way I do west coast swing (otoh, it may be that I simply haven't had an instructor whose style I really meshed with). Maybe it's the speed; west coast swing is so controlled and measured, whereas lindy always feels a little libertine. On the other hand, one particular song tonight felt very lindy, and my partner noticed it in my dance style, saying I struck her as a lindy dancer. (Example lindy hop:

I just got word that my family's cat, Chance, is dead. I don't know what happened ... he was discovered on the neighbor's driveway, dead without a mark. I should eulogize him, but I can't seem to summon the words -- I had wondered when last I saw him, at the beginning of December, whether I would ever see him again. I guess the foreboding was accurate.

Chance was always an active outdoors cat ... more so than his brother, who passed away several years ago, Chance would spend hours hunting in the morning, only to come in and demand attention when he was ready for human loving. He could certainly be demanding ... when I was back studying for my master's exam, he would get offended that I was on the bed reading textbooks, so would come over and bat at me. When he saw that wasn't going to work, he would plop down on my arm or on my pillow, and commence to drooling. The drooling -probably- wasn't intentional ... I would usually put up with it for only so long before I moved him outside of my room. He wouldn't stick around ... but the next night he'd do it all over again.

I always got along really well with him. He was usually up for a bit of play ... his interest in cat toys would sometimes wane, but fingertips just poking from underneath an edge would always get him pouncing. He would frequently come into my room and sleep on my pillow (usually grabbing the lion's share and exiling me to the corner), until 5am or so when he would leave to hunt or at least beg my parents for toast (cats, in theory, do not eat grains or vegetables; Chance would have none of that. He would eat anything the dogs would eat... I think he would eat things for exactly that reason. Chance could be jealous of the family's affection, so any treats given to the other animals needed to be given to him as well).

His relationship with the other animals was not so close. His brother, Random, passed away several years ago (in some ways, that was more traumatic); since then,I'm sure Chance was lonely. We had gotten a kitten around that time, but Chance was impatient with the kitten and would have little to do with him. As the kitten has grown into a young cat, it was somewhat painful to witness their interactions (Chance grew increasingly crotchety, but it was clear that as the kitten matured, he was less willing to comply with Chance's demands, and Chance's age was going to catch up with him). He bullied one of our dogs, avoided the other dog unless an escape route or safe harbor was close by... but they would all pile on a couch to be with the family when we watched television together.

Chance was one of the things I missed the most when I was away at school; his friendly presence on my pillow, his playfulness, the companionship of being the only two active at 4am ... he was a good cat, and a friend. I had firmed myself against this happening, but I'm going to miss him.

RIP, Chance, RIP.

Those who accuse the movies of having a deleterious moral effect, of dividing families and increasing youthful crime, may well be right, but not for the reasons they usually give. It is not what movies are about -- gangsters or adultery -- which does the damage but the naturalistic nature of the medium itself which encourages a fantastic conception of time. In all narrative art, the narration of the action takes less time than it would take in real life; but in the novel or drama, even when they are naturalistic, the passage of time is abridged, i.e., placed in perspective. For example, a man woos a woman; in the theater this scene may last perhaps ten minutes, but the audience will have the sense that the scene took place over a period of two hours. The absolute naturalism of the camera destroys this sense: the illusion of real life is so strong that the audience begin to be convinced that, in real life as on the screen, the conquest of a woman takes forty minutes. When, leaving the movies for real life, they become aware that this takes two hours, they lose patience. Make movies as moral as you like, in their subject matter or their tone, they will still be harmful; because, if they seek to inculcate a taste for virtue, they cannot prevent themselves from bearing witness that virtue can be acquired in only a few minutes. When he grows impatient, the movie addict does not cry, "Hurry!"; he cries, "Cut!"