Amy's Random Thoughts

2006-12-12T12:42:00.000-08:00

Moving to other blog

2006-05-30T22:09:00.000-07:00

All posts are now being put on Opalesce.

Free WiFi

2006-04-05T23:29:00.000-07:00

Even aside from the fact that I know someone who worked on the New Orleans wifi, this is interesting:

Big Easy to Telcos: Stick It

So, if the telcos/ISPs are complaining that they can't compete with free service provided by the city, how about if the city just buys them out? That way the city doesn't have to install as much of its own equipment, and the public still gets free wireless, and the telcos get out of a business that isn't very profitable anyway (at least from some things I read; feel free to correct me, but I've heard that most ISPs are on the verge of going out of business all the time, and will have to drastically raise rates to stay around).

Eeeeeeeevil

2006-04-05T20:15:00.000-07:00

I was so disgusted by this I had to write something:

RIAA Recommends Students Drop out of College

Can this be justified under some system of ethics? Let's see:

Utilitarianism: is there any overall, average good that comes out of this? Potential violators may be deterred from committing further crimes. These crimes, if committed, might reduce the quality and amount of music being produced. Seems like the greed and pushiness of the RIAA is what's doing this already, so this is making that problem *worse*, not better.

Kantianism: does this increase individual choice or individual moral intent? Funny, seems like if you only motivation to not download music P2P is to avoid getting a heavy fine, that would only make you have more bad moral intent (unless getting mad at a greedy organization and wanting to harm them is a good moral intention).

Somewhere, a while back, I read an article about how the tech community had been too complacent about laws relating to their field, and as a result, organizations like the RIAA and MPAA had run amok with laws totally advantageous to themselves (and thus, in many cases, against the principles and interest of techies). So, what are *you* going to do?

Freedom of Speech

2006-03-26T23:23:00.000-08:00

I really like the way Southpark pulls no punches when it comes to making fun of anything and everything, and I think this article does a good job of saying what's at stake in the current controversy (especially the last few paragraphs):

Hey Chef, these guys are killing free speech

ps. I just now noticed, after putting up this link and posting this entry, that the article is by Andrew Sullivan. No wonder it's so darn good. He's probably the most persuasive author I know of. An article he wrote for Time a few years ago had me thinking for a few minutes that maybe the Iraq war wasn't such a bad idea (I hear he's since turned critical the war). He strikes me as an amazingly good balance between conservative sense and liberal openness, someone who really tries to look at both sides and think about them objectively.

Making things that are really nice

2006-03-26T22:03:00.000-08:00

I don't know about you, but I'd rather have something that's a little late and is really nice than something that's on time but you keep getting the feeling that it's just not quite what it could have been when you use it:

Microsoft's Not So Happy Family

I think they should be commended for standing up for doing it right, late or not, rather than making the deadline and delivering something not quite right to millions of users. In fact, I wish there were a lot more emphasis on doing things right rather than meeting arbitrary deadlines. It's like going to a coffee shop, and having this...

Customer: "I'd like a latte."
Waiter: "Yes, sir, I'll have it for you in four minutes."
Customer: "Okay, that's fine."
*four minutes pass*
Waiter, running up: "Here you go! Right on time!"
Customer: "This is just black coffee."
Waiter: "Yes, but it's right on time! If I'd put the milk in, it would have been late."
C: "Late according to what? This isn't what I wanted."
W: "But I had to have it to you in time!"
C: "Why? If I knew I was just going to get black coffee, I wouldn't have ordered from here. Why do you care so much about getting *something* to me in four minutes?"
W: "We suspect our competitors are working on a way to get a latte to you that fast."

But that's just my two cents, from the bottom ranks. Oh, and I should add the disclaimer that I'm in a really awful mood. So please just find this amusing and don't take it too seriously.

Oh, and I don't like lattes. It's a drink that can't decide if it's milk-flavored coffee or coffee-flavored milk.

The people who run the world are insane

2006-03-25T00:33:00.000-08:00

I present these as evidence:

Larry the mighty raccoon hunter
Steve Ballmer screaming "Give it up for me!"
What's In Cheney's Hotel Room?
Cheney Unplugged

Have any more? Post them in the comments. I'd like to see how many we can come up with.

Way too easy...

2006-03-06T21:54:00.000-08:00

Today, I wrote my first bit of JScript/JavaScript/ECMAScript. It looked something like this:

<html>
<body>
<script>
for(i=1;i<=5;i++){
alert("squee! " + i)
}
</script>
</body>
</html>

The first thing I noticed was that IE completely freaked out when I went to run this. I repeatedly had to accept dialogues that effectively said "HELP! SOMEONE IS TRYING TO DESTROY ME AND BRING DOWN MY COMPANY WITH BAD PR BY MALICIOUSLY EXPOSING SECURITY HOLES!" I guess it's better that it do this than just go right ahead and run whatever the script says... as admin.

But, that aside, note that with just a few tiny lines, I can make an arbitrary number of windows pop up. It's frighteningly easy to be evil in JavaScript. I guess this was what happened when the web started to boom: lots of people went "hey, look what I can do!" and just did it, without any regard to whether it was useful or terribly annoying. Most of the web is still really annoying and not very useful.

Clearly, I just need to write my own browser that doesn't support any operations I find annoying (like blinkytext). Or I could probably find an extension to Firefox that already does this.

What I Think Of Politcians

2006-02-28T22:35:00.000-08:00

This about sums up what I think of politics and the people who play at it:

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7350/1229/1600/transformer%20--%20cm.jpg

Things I decided on an 1860 mile drive

2006-02-15T01:12:00.000-08:00

I'm pro-freeway. And I'm anti-pretend-freeway. For instance, the I-5 is good, because it just stays I-5. The 101 at the northern end of California, however, is bad, because it pretends to be a freeway, then, when it's sucked you off into the woods where you have no escape, it has these signs that read "End Freeway," and you're stuck on a little road in the woods sprinkled with 20-40mph turns. It's hard to enjoy the scenery when you're trying to navigate a car that handles like a brick through a winding road with a cliff on one side and large, glowering trees on the other. Down with the ersatz freeway!

Still alive!

2006-01-29T12:30:00.000-08:00

This is just a quick note to say that I'm still alive, and for any of you who expected to hear from me and haven't - don't worry, you're still on my queue. I have a big chunk of travel log to post, plus many, maaaaany, pictures. I've had my camere a bit over 2 months now, and I've taken nearly 7500 pictures. In fact, part of the reason I haven't posted anything is that I have too much to post, including too many pictures to go through. If anybody has suggestions for good photo sharing sites when one has lots of photos (as you can see from earlier entries, I've tried flickr and snapfish), I will definitely look into them.

Moral dilemma

2005-12-09T05:07:00.000-08:00

Aperture or angle of view? Decisions, decisions....

Contenders:
A: EF 20mm f/2.8 USM: 84 x 62 degree angle of view (on 35mm)

B: EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM: 97 x 74 degree angle of view (on 35mm)

(View angle taken from Canon lens chart.)

So... candidate A has bigger aperture. Candidate B has a wider angle of view (not to mention that it's a zoom, making it more versatile). Ignoring price, which would be better? (Well, if I were really ignoring price, I'd be looking more seriously at this.)

Numa numa ie, numa numa numa ie...

2005-12-09T02:49:00.000-08:00

At the moment I'm feeling a bit obsessed with "Dragostea Din Tei", better known as the "Numa Numa" song, by O-Zone. I even bought a few versions on iTunes... but what I really want is the version I heard on the radio... it was on one of the Latino stations on Nov 10, around 5:30pm... the only other instance I've been able to find of it is this (be prepared to be embarrassed in empathy):

German - Numa Numa Mix

If anybody can tell me the proper name of this mix, or better, give me a link to it, I'd be extremely grateful (note that I'm fine with paying for it... I just want it)... current proposed reward is a massage if you're someone I know, and I'm going to see you in the foreseeable future; otherwise, just lots of good karma :-)

Thoughts for the wee hours of the last day of classes

2005-12-07T01:50:00.000-08:00

My prose-to-code ratio has been far too high this semester.

I really don't want to do a presentation for a bunch of people in suits tomorrow.

Could've been worse. Could've been stabbed.

Actually... just make sure the knife is clean.

It's 35 degrees outside. Eeeeeeeew.

I was planning to go to networking tomorrow, but that was mostly out of a sense of obligation because it's the last day of class. Now I think I'm going to sleep instead. Sorry, Dr. Z. Gotta be awake for the people in suits.

And I thought the lenses I was looking at were expensive....

2005-12-05T00:09:00.000-08:00

This is a completely gratuitous post, purely for the jaw-drop this gave me:

My Glass Is Bigger Than Your Glass

Maybe if I wind up a crazy old rich person, I'll get me one of these... to take pictures of my neighbors five miles away, or to spy on the datacenter Google will have on the moon by then.

College Athletics

2005-12-04T21:05:00.000-08:00

Poor Grades Aside, Athletes Get Into College on a $399 Diploma

Tracking down such violators is only treating the symptoms of an underlying problem: that college and athletics should be separated. This was an interesting proposal I heard from an interesting teacher, Mignonne (I'm sorry if I'm spelling it wrong), who taught the Africana Studies course I took in my first semester at UA. In some ways, it makes a lot of sense: the interests of college athletics and the rest of the university don't really line up. If we separated them, people could still do both, but they wouldn't be forced to the way they are now. There wouldn't be the huge pressure to overcommit, to do two things which are both full-time occupations. I'm not saying that education and athleticism can't complement each other (excercising both the brain and the body can be synergistic), but letting someone slide through higher education so they can be a jock and bring in money for the school doesn't do well for the college's academic standards, nor does it give the athlete a good education.

ps. The spell-checker doesn't think "overcommit" is a word - it's perfectly cromulent, isn't it?

[Started 2005-11-27, 1:18am]

How to get out of a draft

2005-12-03T15:32:00.000-08:00

If they ever start the draft up again, all you have to do is get a tattoo:

Yes, the Military Needs Bodies. But Hold the Bodywork.

Reveling in the nerdiness!

2005-12-02T20:22:00.000-08:00

Yes, I immerse myself in the geeky goodness!

The page at the end said:

"All hail the monstrous nerd. You are by far the SUPREME NERD GOD!!!"

I will admit that I stretched the definition of "working on" for one question... I didn't build my laptop, but I have a terminal open to my tower, euclid, which I did build... by this metric I'm working on 5 computers at once (leconte (laptop), euclid (tower), lectura (campus solaris box), strobos (my office linux box), and mint (u.arizona.edu server I was modifying my webpage on)). I'm in favor of network transparency, so I'm fine with this stretch. But for the rest of the questions, I used no references nor exaggerated... although I did count a few things I have at my parents' house.

The only place I ever got an overload of geekiness was Google, and that was only a couple times, for a short while... mostly I enjoyed it as much as breathing :-)

Harping on the wrong things

2005-11-29T17:22:00.000-08:00

All right, maybe not the wrong things, but they shouldn't be the only things.

Here, I'm referring to diversity. The first things that come to mind are probably ethnicity, and then maybe gender. Not that these aren't important metrics, but this article points out some others that probably don't get the attention they deserve:

Who's in the Corner Office?

The article points out things like educational and economic background as "diversity" factors, and how they don't vary with the more common ones. I can't see anything bad about this one - you can't tell what school a person went to by looking at them (maybe by talking to them, but that's for linguists...). I can't see anyway this should be a separate decision parameter from ability.

I suppose, if you take it far enough, you could call it "discrimination" to go on anything the person can't change - and this would include things like intelligence and talent. This is the "Harrison Bergeron" extreme, and it is going too far. It's reasonable to say you shouldn't select based on anything that isn't actually related to doing the job. The problem is deciding what's related to doing the job. If you're looking for a model, it's reasonable to choose based on a lot of physical appearance factors. But what if you're a what if you're hiring a waitress? If you can statistically show that attractive waitresses raise your profits, could you hire only attractive waitresses? Or should the restaurant-going public just get over how their servers look?

Orwellian - but in reverse

2005-11-29T13:13:00.000-08:00

After all the griping about privacy concerns and Google having too much information about people, I'm glad to see someone looking at the other side of the coin:

http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000710.html

I love the idea of "armchair science" enabled by vast, powerful web applications. Privacy is only a problem if some have it and some don't. If I get to watch everything the government does, I'm less bothered that it's watching what I do. Or even better, if most of the people I know are watching what it does. We can all be Sangamon Taylor (see Zodiac by Neal Stephenson).

Not quite homesickness...

2005-11-28T22:35:00.000-08:00

... but I get this sad longing feeling when I see pictures like this:

Piaw's Blog: My favorite view of Mountain View.

If I'd lived there long enough, or had some connection enough, to call Silicon Valley home, I would just call this feeling homesickness. I guess it gets back to the issue of what home means. I hope I get to like Seattle this much... although I'm skeptical to the point of apprehension and even, sometimes, dread.

Funny, I just went back and read that journal again... and I was homesick for Hawaii, noting that I didn't have the same sort of feelings about [the Bay Area then]. Now I sort of only go back to Hawaii for the beach and the hiking and such. Part II of that journal defined home as a reference point, not necessarily and ideal. I think I've changed my mind since: it's the place I feel most a part of, the place I fit in best - and not 'fit in' in the sense of making myself conform; quite the opposite: the place where I can be myself most completely and be comfortable and happy and integrated that way. It makes more and more sense why the greeters (and other participants) at Burning Man say "welcome home," even if you've never been there before.

Meta-word

2005-11-27T01:30:00.000-08:00

Today, Shauna and I settled on the meaning of the word "cromulent." If you aren't familiar with this word, watch more of (the good seasons of) The Simpsons. It comes up in this dialogue:

Edna: Embiggens? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.

Ms.Hoover: I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.

I have found this definition online for it in several places:

cromulent

[nonsense word] used in an ironical sense to mean legitimate, and therefore, in reality, spurious and not at all legitimate (assumes common knowledge of the Simpsons reference)

However, I don't like this definition. It doesn't properly fit the context. Shauna and I determined a much more fitting and useful definition: when applied to a word, it means that the word may not appear in the dictionary, but the meaning is perfectly clear from the construction. "Embiggens" is not in any (respectable) dictionary, yet it's clear what it means, especially in context. The irony here is that cromulent is not a cromulent word. (Does this sound like any other roots you know? "Virulent", maybe, at best? Or make you think of Oliver Cromwell?)

Besides being fitting (it makes sense in the context it was used) and useful (plenty of words fall under this definition, and I think it should be more acceptable to make up words so long as it's clear what they mean), this definition appeals to me because it's meta. It's a word about the definition and nature of other words. I should tell Stuart. (For anybody not at UA... Stuart gave a great talks about Meta.)

Interfaces, Part III

2005-11-26T21:21:00.000-08:00

Why is it so hard to design good interfaces? And what is it that makes the difference?

With no training in HCI, I speculate that it has to do with how closely the interface correlates with the world we're used to interacting with. I have no idea if this is true, but it seems reasonable, and so it's going to be my premise for the moment.

(An aside: if this is the case, there are two ways to handle it: change interfaces to be more like how we think, or change how we think to be more like some kind of interface. The latter is hard to justify, since, if nothing else, how do we pick what we bend our minds to? Not that some more education of the general populace would be bad, but this seems like a homogenizing effect, which I'd call unabashedly bad.)

So, assuming this is the case, why should it be hard to make something which is like the real world? Partially, I think, because it is a matter of consensus. It's not just my view of the world, it's figuring out what the consensus view is. But not just the consensus, because there mostly isn't one. It's like factoring out the common elements that most people have. It's a level of abstraction of figuring out what interacting with the world means without actually interacting with the world. And it's worse, because you have to figure out the common elements in this level of abstraction for a mass population.

Mass populations can be very hard to predict. On some levels, they're just statistical, and this works pretty well. On others, they're the hardest thing to predict, since really, you have to predict each element, and each element is extremely complicated in itself. Since we still suck at user interface, I'm going to guess that this isn't one of the things you can just do statistically (or if it is, we haven't found the right parameters). Thus, interface turns into a ridiculously complicated probem if you want to do it right.

(Actually, really doing it right would probably mean an adaptive interface that would reconfigure on the fly to suit each user indivitually.... but that is another matter entirely.)

I got to thinking about all this when an aunt sent me this article:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/vitalstats

It's not directly related, but data presentation is just the problem of interface. What's your interface to data? Is it really that different an issue whether you're looking at email or correlated statistics or a bus schedule? You're still trying to put it in some framework that somehow "fits" into a structure of the brain to trigger the right understanding.

One line I must point out that I really like: "Same picture, but many stories" (Tufte, from the article). This brings out another aspect of interface to consider: conveying multiple meanings at once. This might be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you're going for. I think more kinds of data might lend themselves to this than is immediately apparent. Who would have thought a bus schedule would lend itself well to multiple interpretations or evocations? (On the other hand, if you're just trying to find the next time at your stop, maybe you don't want to get distracted looking for the aerial shot of your house.) What other kind of data is really boring, stuff you'd think should just be presented unambiguously? How about finanicial data? Let's take this one and run with it for a moment. What if you take some nice boring accounting stats, and present them in a way that brings out some obscure trends (or at least, where you can see different trends by looking at it in different ways)? Further, do it in a way that it activates different parts of the brain and gets people thinking creatively. Maybe this could get someone going on the obscure trends (since they're feeling creative) and come up with something useful that they wouldn't have otherwise?

Another point I take away from that article is that this is one place science meets art (not that it shouldn't actually in a lot of places... but that's another matter too). At its best, the presentation of data should inspire new connections, tell new stories, and evoke new thoughts and feelings. And here we are, as often as not, using it to bend the truth.

But why should you listen to me? I'm just some weirdo sitting at a keyboard with white goo on her face... who, on top of this, managed to slam a door on her finger yesterday. Stupid finger got what was coming to it for not getting out of the way.

Hobbies With A Lot Of Parameters

2005-11-22T12:13:00.000-08:00

I've realized that getting into any hobby seriously is, well, a serious commitment. Not only is the specialized equipment expensive, there's far more to know than might appear on the surface.

Take biking, for instance. I love biking, and my bike is probably my favorite material object right now. But I'm not into all the technical details as much as I'm realizing I could be. There's a lot about dynamics and torsion and stiffness and other physical bike parameters I don't really know anything about. There are plenty of tweaks of the length and shape of various parts. There are different kinds of clipless pedals. I read an article somewhere about steel having a more real "road feel." I haven't ridden a steel road bike. I'm not sure what this would mean. But, you know, I get a great flying sensation when I ride my bike, and that's what I care about, so I'm not immediately planning to get into all these details.

Cameras arguably have even more parameters. Not only are there all the technical settings on the camera itself, such as metering mode, autofocus zones, whitebalance, filtering, polarization, film speed, resolution, storage format, contrast, exposure, f-stop, focal length, depth of field, number of elements in lenses, chromatic/spherical aberration, vignetting, flash, and probably many others, there's actually "composing" the picture. Huge numbers of physical objects might be worth photographing. Color, direction, and intensity of light all make a big difference. The scale of the object affects lots of parameters and equipment you need on the camera. A city at night and a bug sitting on a drop of water might both need a tripod. If the subjects are moving you might need a different approach entirely. You might need to get up the courage to ask your subject if you can take their picture (I think I was the only one out of the four of us who met that criterion for this picture).

On top of all this, there is postprocessing, including ultimately doing something with an image, even if it's just keeping it in an electronic album (and I'm finally finding a need for a better system of indexing my images... experimenting with various pieces of software), or making prints (also experimenting with this). Postprocessing can include any number of fixes or tweaks or artistic effects. I made a photo look like it was taken from a dark room, rather than just an indoor-lit one (no, not just black - the view out the windows was still the same, and the stuff in the room just looked like the only light was from the windows). One example in the Gimp manual shows a picture of a bottle with some colored liquid in it, and the same bottle "emptied" only using Gimp.

My most recent hobby that I've realized has a lot of variables is music. Take just singing, which is all I do (for now). Pitch, tone, quality of voice, vibrato, where you support the sound from, pronunciation, phrasing, dynamics, volume... the range of music out there, just vocals alone, is amazing. I'm happy if I can just keep up with the weird alto parts.

Low-Tech Solutions

2005-11-22T12:02:00.000-08:00

I once heard (from Alma, I believe) that 95% of security failures are for non-technical reasons, such as executives not wanting to type long passwords and just telling them to low-level techies, and despite this, security researchers devote all their time to the other 5%. Sometimes it's also a matter of not seeing the forest for the trees. Those safes whose locks won't open even if they're shot do no good if the side panels are thin enough to get through with a small hammer.

In the computer world, this is the equivalent of a case where some company had a super-secure bunch of software running on an enclosed server and thought there was no way anyone could break in and get the data on it, only to have a couple of hackers attach a simple magnetic field detector to the wires leading to it and read the unencrypted signal that way. Here's today's example of missing the simple solution:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27853

Corporate Image

2005-11-18T10:31:00.000-08:00

...is priceless. This, for instance, makes me never want to buy anything from Sony ever again:

Real Story of the Rogue Rootkit

And with all the lawsuits over print and silence appearing as arrogance, I wonder how long it will take Google to burn off its good image. I've seen the inside and I believe they really are that idealistic, but most of the public believes whatever the media says, even though the media usually present a baised, or at least warped, perspective.

Accomplishment

2005-11-18T06:39:00.000-08:00

It's nice to have that feeling of accomplishment, especially when it means getting something done that you've been putting off for too long. It is, though, slightly less nice to have that feeling at 7:30 in the morning because you're up... "early." (Yeah, I'm gonna take a nap and then go to class, where class in this case fortunately will consist of going to a coffee shop... that was good planning :-))

Politics Test

2005-11-15T23:11:00.000-08:00

I still consider myself a social liberal and financial conservative... the old-school conservatives (i.e., the ones that actually believed in a balanced budget) weren't so bad; it's these neo-conservatives that get me... worst of both worlds.

Kinky Librarian: 10 Reasons Why Gay Marriage is Wrong

2005-11-15T22:55:00.000-08:00

This is great:

Kinky Librarian: 10 Reasons Why Gay Marriage is Wrong

Interfaces, Part II

2005-11-07T14:44:00.000-08:00

I take this as support of my earlier post about interfaces:

1 Million Windows to Mac Converts So Far in 2005

Why? Because it's the interface that the iPod has going for it... the technology isn't much different or any better than, say Neuros (which I have and works out well for me). But I must admit there is something viscerally pleasing about iPods. Macs have always won on interfaces - and everybody else just copied.

The stupidities of commerce

2005-11-07T04:40:00.000-08:00

I hate arguments like this:

Don't Let Fear Kill Muni Wi-Fi

So they're arguing they have a hard time competing... um, isn't competition what commerce is about? I don't see anything unfair about this; it just sounds like whining...

While i'm on the subject - I also hate when people complain "there are no jobs." Well, then make one. Start a business. Entrepreneurship is one of the things that makes this country great. Funding is out there in all sorts of places. It just requires a little original thinking, or maybe just some careful observation of what people want and need....

[Started 2005 Oct 13 9:15pm]

"Sexy"

2005-11-07T03:55:00.000-08:00

What is it that makes something "sexy"? Presumably, it would be a tie to something that is relevant to reproduction and the survival of the species, some evolutionary advantage. I'm sure you can think of features yourself which fall clearly into this category.

But let's look at some of the many and varied things we call "sexy". Cars, for instance. What do they have to do with reproduction? Well, maybe someone who's got a nice car will be a good provider, and a good provider will be better able to care for their offspring, increasing their chance of survival.

But, then we all take it in our own directions. We all have fetishes. We all have odd little things we find terribly attractive. I have a couple of friends who have a nose fetish (which I've picked up lately too...) - nice long, straight noses. Smell predators and food and all that from further away? Okay, maybe that's reasonable too. Or my typical statement of the kind of guy usually I go for - tall, pale, skinny guys (or, as I prefer to think of them, "slender and fair"). Well, that could be association - guys of that description tend to be geeks, and geeks tend to be paid well these days, and we're back to the "good provider" model. Another friend admits she likes short guys. Not that she consciously goes after them, but she says there's something about the way a short guy walks that she realizes, after she notes she likes a guy, that she feels a pull toward. I don't know if I can explain that one in any terms of evolutionary advantage. Some visible sign of making up for shorter stature, to have better odds in competitions with other males for females/food/turf/all that good stuff?

My point is that we start having to draw edges between more and more nodes, having longer and longer paths back to the original definition. It's a greater number of links in both function and language. And we tend to get these expansions of language (think of all the slang and the huge range of suggestive language related to all this) around things which are important or preoccupying. After all, the survival of the species is rather important.

Non-material Investment

2005-11-07T03:19:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting point, one I heartily agree with:

A Consuming Health-Care Conundrum

Expensive habits

2005-11-04T00:45:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, we had a speaker in my entrepreneurship class who admitted that he kept a corporate consulting job to fund his "startup habit." This led me to a realization: startup junkies are like artists, willing to be starving because they love the creative process.

Interfaces

2005-11-04T00:39:00.000-08:00

Technology has made some staggering advances in the last 30 years. In some ways, though, it has just staggered - made a few awkward steps, and in some cases, just fallen over. One of the biggest failings has been user interface design.

I don't think is from lack of ability (although tech people do have a notoriously hard time designing usable stuff for non-tech people, and that is a hard problem to get around), but rather, underestimation of its importance. Companies lose countless worker-hours due to badly designed, confusing interfaces. We think they're okay because we get used to them, or just started using them before we remember, but to somebody who hasn't used a computer before, a mouse just isn't that intuitive. I mean, think of Scotty: "Hello computer" (aside: anybody else wonder why he could type so fast?).

A lot of technology seems to be in a messy intermediate phase. I liken it to cleaning: when you clean, it gets worse before it gets better. Technology is making things messy right now: throwing off our ecosystem, making people unhealthy, and, although helpful for some tasks, often as distracting and time-consuming in itself as the time it was supposed to save. I have faith that one day we'll get to a point where technology is just a seamless part of our lives, working right in at least as many cases as a human would (don't expect perfection... that's a problem too).

The point of all this is that we need technology interfaces that are more like interacting with the real world, the world we're used to from million years of evolution. We have nice, fast, capacious hardware now. Let's dedicate some of its powers toward making something that's natural to interact with. Something that doesn't depend on liking math or logic or linear thinking. Something that complements the range of human ability and talent and preference and intuition. It's not frivolous. It's what the rest of the world needs - and I don't just mean Third-World countries... I mean everyone, anywhere, who currently doesn't feel comfortable with technology. That's a lot of power and utility we're missing out on.

As a final note... I want telepathy. That's my new standard for when technology has really succeeded. My old standard was flying like Superman.

Spam

2005-11-03T23:16:00.000-08:00

Most of it is just annoying junk, but some of it is funny, often because it is so bad. Today, I got an email from "Perpetrates O. Lamppost ". The other day was one from "Redmond Q. Toothpaste" (both for cheap msft software, I might add). Shauna once got one with the subject line "Knock down trees with your massive cock!", and another, "Hot barnyard action!"

Gotta love the digital age. It's like Dave Barry's randomly generated humor... generate enough random stuff, and eventually you'll come up with something funny. And this doesn't even depend on making fun of Marcel Proust.

Serenity

2005-10-23T21:49:00.000-07:00

I'm The Operative:

You scored as The Operative. You are dedicated to your job and very good at what you do. You've done some very bad things, but they had to be done. You don't expect to go to heaven, but that is a sacrifice you've made for a better future for all.

The Operative

81%

Kaylee Frye

75%

River Tam

69%

Capt. Mal Reynolds

56%

Shepherd Derrial Book

56%

Hoban 'Wash' Washburne

50%

Jayne Cobb

44%

Zoe Alleyne Washburne

31%

Simon Tam

31%

Inara Serra

25%

Which Serenity character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Fame, part IV

2005-10-10T21:56:00.000-07:00

Man, this is getting to be a lot:

http://www.google.com/jobs/studentsp.html

Our lego logo lives on! Woohoo! And the top right pic is from our Dave & Busters trip :-)

Hypocrisy

2005-10-09T17:02:00.000-07:00

Pretty much everybody has heard I'm a fan of Google, but it is important, as Al Franken puts it, to love things like an adult - seeing its flaws, willing to help it grow - rather than like a child, who loves blindly, never seeing fault.

This is one case where I must point out a divergence between Google-say and Google-do: they keep saying they don't focus on what the competition is doing, yet their index size stayed the same for quite some time (not sure how long, but at least since the end of spring when I started paying attention)... til right after Yahoo's announcement of a bigger index size came out. Lo and behold, a few weeks later, they announce a bigger index size.

Now, maybe this shouldn't be taken badly - I mean, competition should, as the basic idea of capitalism goes, be good for both businesses and consumers. Maybe this should just be looked on as Google being motivated by competition to help its users... that doesn't sound too bad.

Fame, part III

2005-10-09T16:30:00.000-07:00

Hah, I beat the jazz musician!

Finally, when I google my name (first and last), I am not only the first, but the first two hits to come up - my UA CS webpage and my blogger profile. (At first I thought I was the first three, but that was only with personalized search... oh well. Third hit on personalized search was a mention of me on the page of a TA whose class I took (vector calc)).

Fame, part II

2005-10-07T22:56:00.000-07:00

I may have heard about this before (some time in the summer, when it wouldn't have seemed like a big deal), but it just came up again:

http://www.google.com/jobs/students.html

It's cool, because those are my peeps... Gwendolyn & Laura rule :-)

Inside Jokes

2005-10-06T09:13:00.001-07:00

I'm really a fan of inside jokes. I started to wonder why this is - some desire to feel separate and 133t? Maybe I'm just shielding myself from an ugly truth, but I don't think that's it - I think there's a deeper, more honest explanation: it's another form of puzzle-solving. Like math problems or coding or many other activities techies are drawn to, making inside jokes has that critical element of pulling together diverse pieces of information and following several steps of connections from clues that are just barely enough to make the next jump. It's a matter of liking it as an intellectual exercise, of enjoying the thought process that falls out of it. And I think this really is the reason, since I'd rather only make jokes that everyone around will get, and feel bad if anybody's left out... so it's really not a desire for separation or exclusion; rather, it's a form of inclusion and bonding.

For note, when I say "inside jokes", I mean anything that fits that above description - movie/show quotes, references to lesser known scientific anecdotes, past experiences of the people around... anything that's not immediately obvious and requires following some specific chain of non-general references. Spiders without legs not being able to hear, for example.

Another crack in the armor...

2005-10-04T14:51:00.000-07:00

Anybody see the beginnings of how Google might take down Microsoft?

http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/04/technology/google_sun/?cnn=yes

Better batteries

2005-10-04T14:31:00.000-07:00

My dad has been saying as long as I can remember that somebody needs to come up with better battery technology... looks like they're starting to:

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000397061482/

Escaping the tangle of wires is good. Think of what you could do with really good batteries... if you had a battery that lasted long enough in its purpose (months, say), you could have stations in rural area for things like signal repetition and only have to stop by a couple times a year (or less) to recharge them. In places with unreliable distribution networks and low power needs, people could just run off batteries. It'd be great for camping. Now, granted, it's not as convenient (like taking a propane tank in to be filled rather than just having gas lines), but there are plenty of situations where running lines isn't practical or desirable. Anything mobile that you can't really attach lines to... like cars, for instance :-) If you had a battery with enough capacity and short enough recharge time, electric cars would be a fine idea.

At any rate, yay for new toys... especially new energy technology.

Standards & quality

2005-10-02T23:17:00.000-07:00

In many cases there is a tradeoff between standardization and performance - take, for example, Cray's choice not to implement IEEE 754 floating point arithmetic: it made for some compatibility issues, but performance needs won out. I think we may have another case coming up here:

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/09/29/news_6134745.html

A couple of things strike me about this article: first, and most important, that the reason Microsoft cites for not wanting to go with Blu-ray is that it is "several years away from delivering on the media" - so what? Why build on something that's not as good? If the technology isn't ready, then work on it and have a tiny bit of patience. If this is a standard we're going to have for a while, let's not mess it up. If HD-DVD becomes the standard, it might be irregularly followed and implemented because it was taken up too hastily.

The other thing that I find curious is the statement "Microsoft sees it as critical that all next-generation DVDs can be ripped onto a computer." Hmm, funny, considering all the paranoia about sharing. I prefer having my media (especially music) on hard disk rather than having to swap in and out optical disk, but I'm rather surprised that Microsoft takes this into consideration, especially over copyright concerns. I guess they're planning to do really good DRM. That may turn out to be a good thing, but I'm still wary.

And what are my two cents about the formats? Well, Blu-ray is a cooler name :-)

Artificial intrusion?

2005-09-25T03:03:00.000-07:00

Let's think for a minute about some things a good AI system would be able to do. I'm not talking about having "human emotions" or any junk like that, I mean being useful to real, practical human tasks. Take, for instance, an away message a friend of mine had posted: it said something like "my new email address is the same as my old but with indiana.edu at the end." A good AI helper background task would notice that, know that AIM contact corresponds to a certain person in my address book, and update the entry (probably without getting rid of the old one, but making the new one the default).

This kind of thing would be incredibly useful. (And, of course hard... and a fascinating problem to study :-) ) However, how did you feel reading that? Did you feel like it might be a bit invasive, to have a program running with that kind of knowledge about you and the real-world correlations in your electronic data (or at least enough equivalence classes in the electronic world), and access to make a change like that?

(An aside: in part I find this example interesting because it might not bother us for a human to do this - if you had a secretary doing things like that, it might not be so odd. Of course, the setting where secretaries work on things for you usually has stuff that you're not emotionally protective of the way you would be of personal information. The electronic agent doing this task might not be troubling in a business setting either.)

The problem with good artificial intelligence is not only that it's hard to do, but that we're really very bothered by it, even without it supposedly having feelings or intentions or anything like free will. I mean, heck, we're bothered by some algorithm at Google scanning our Gmail to automatically put in ads (see earlier commentary). It doesn't matter that the program can actually take no action which would cause us any conceivable harm; we anthropomorphize it unconsciously.

Maybe this will be a mentality shift of the next few generations (and I mean a couple of decades; not long enough for a few generations in straight succession). As it is, we're bothered my machines doing things for which we'd be bothered if a human did them or even some things we wouldn't. Maybe we'll come to realize the difference on a more visceral level, and stop caring if a bot reads our diaries. I think in part it depends on the direction technology goes - if you buy or subscribe to some kind of electronic journal which makes comments on your writings ("you like Jimmy? What do you see in him?"), that's really not going to help the case of AI not being invasive or weird.

Somebody on Google's side

2005-09-25T02:42:00.000-07:00

Good to see at least Wired is siding with Google on the Print lawsuit:

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,68939,00.html?tw=rss.POL

The line that gets me:

"Copyright is not designed to afford consumer protection or convenience but, rather, to protect the copyright holders' property interests," U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote at the time in UMG Recordings Inc. v. MP3.com.

Funny, wouldn't the content creators be better served if their content were better known and easier to find? What is the point of the copyright laws, if not to allow content creators to make the most profit they can from their works? Remember, even Alexander Pope said "Rules were made but to promote their End" (Essay on Criticism).

Immortality... sort of

2005-09-19T22:44:00.000-07:00

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying."
--Woody Allen

A bit more to the point... I'm slashdotted!

http://slashdot.org/articles/05/09/19/1116238.shtml?tid=126&tid=133&tid=99
(okay, okay, it doesn't talk about me directly, but I hung out with Marc for a good chunk of time while I was there and there are pics of me in the report)

This is up there with the Wired article about NerdCore:

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67970,00.html
The interesting thing about this one is that the MC Plus+ so prominently featured is Armand, whom I used to work with, and he wrote a song about Tomek, who I was working with at the time I read the article... just another guy I played volleyball and pool with (and even beat at 8-ball once), and then I found out he won TopCoder and ACM... such was life over the summer.

The Existence of Words

2005-09-16T17:08:00.000-07:00

It shouldn't be too hard to believe language influences the way we think; the question is, how much? If you subscribe to the Whorfian hypotheses, what we can think about is entirely determined by what language we have available to us.

I don't go quite that far, but I definitely think it's important to study the tie between how we think and the language we have. In particular, I was thinking about why it is we have words for some things. I postulate (after a couple of linguistic classes and a fair amount of thinking) that we have a word for something when there is a need to refer to it frequently, and thus compactly. In this case, it worries me that we have certain words. "Anti-Semitism", for example (this was the one that got me thinking about the problem). "Rape", "torture", "murder", "theft", and many others come to mind. "Pirate", even (we do realize that they were bad people, despite the cool image now, right?) That we actually needed, in human history, to refer to these things early on (old Anglo-Saxon words, mostly, I think), and with such short words... well, that worries me.

I'm not a fan of just griping about things; I like to come up with something to do about them. But what can be done about something like this? I guess this is where the whole "politically correct" thing came from (although I think they were going for something a bit different). Do you try to get the words dropped from the language? "Forced sexual intercourse and destruction of property accompanied by seizure of property belonging to others" doesn't sound as cool as "rape and pillage", but I doubt that will catch on. Getting people to say "challenged" instead of "crippled" was hard enough, and in most cases, all it seemed to do was lend a bad association with a word that used to be good (this is what I mean when I say PC was going for something different). Maybe I'm trying to go the other way - let's stop using words with cool connotations for things that are, in real life, very bad, and not to be taken casually.

Addendum 8:43pm 9/18:
I think it's worth noting the line of thought that got me to the first word. I was thinking that there really ought to be more of some people in the world - like Ron. And Sergey. And Steve. And then I noticed that they're all Jewish. I guess I'm pro-semitic. What kind of messed up people wouldn't like those guys? What kind of messed up world comes up with a word that specifically means not liking those guys?

One more great Micro$oft quote....

2005-09-16T17:05:00.000-07:00

Gotta love 'em:

To Ballmer's Chagrin, some of his up-and-coming programmers have left for Google. He was apoplectic about Lucovsky's departure, according to documents made public during the Lee trial. Lucovsky said in a sworn statement that after he told Ballmer about his plans to move to Google, the beefy CEO threw a chair and cursed Google's chief executive. "F__ing Eric Schmidt is a f__ing pussy. I'm going to f__ing bury that guy.... I'm going to f__ing kill Google," Ballmer said, according to Lucovsky. In a statement, Ballmer calls Lucovsky's account "a gross exaggeration of what actually took place."

(from Businessweek)

No! Not Eric! We like Eric!

And what, Ballmer? Did you only say F__ three times?

Hacking as a social problem

2005-09-11T21:22:00.000-07:00

For a long time, I objected to the whole area of security because, as I saw it, it's something we wouldn't need if we could just cure the underlying social problems that cause people to commit crimes in general (a true xNFp statement). At some point in the past few months, I realized that it goes beyond that, that it is in the blood of a good coder to want to break things, and so no matter what the situation, security would always be needed, because, to a coder, breaking the system is another interesting, challenging puzzle to solve, whether they intend to do anything bad or not.

I was reminded of this just now when I came across this article on slashdot (scroll down to point #4).

There are a couple issues to separate out here: one, getting the system to do something it was not intended to do, and two, doing something harmful with the results of that bug. In a security talk I once heard, the speaker told a story about how he discovered that the prices for items on one company's web ordering system were stored in cookies on his local machine, so he changed the prices to a tiny fraction of what they had been, and submitted an order that would have gotten through successfully, if he hadn't called them to cancel and tell them their system really easy to hack. Had fun breaking the system, but used the knowledge to help the people running the system he broke. That's an action I don't have a problem with, and his response upon finding the bug I certainly can admire.

Noting that distinction, it seems that both my earlier observations have some part of truth: good coders will always want to see if they can make systems do things that weren't intended, but the intent to harm is a social problem that might be largely treated.

What about harmful results that come of accidentally making the system do something harmful, whether you were trying to break it or not? Well, maybe a lot of the things we consider harmful now are only so because of some social problems. Information release, for example. It doesn't matter if your credit card number gets out if no one's going to buy anything with it they shouldn't. It doesn't even matter much if someone does accidentally charge something to an account that isn't there, so long as they realize it and report it and fix it (only damage is a bit of time to correct the error). What if a bunch of data gets deleted? Well, ideally it should all be backed up well in real time, so that shouldn't matter either.

There are far more examples I should go into, but I think I'll save that for a post (or, more likely, series) about my idea of utopia and how it could actually work.

Academic disillusionment

2005-09-10T16:28:00.000-07:00

It may, in the end, be a good thing that I didn't have an internship until this past summer. I know, for all I kicked myself for not getting experience earlier, not seeing a broader part of industry... I think this may well be one of those things that just happened to work out for the best in the big picture.

Why would I say this? Because, after one summer at Google, I'm painfully aware of how much the process and setup of academia bothers me. I had always been a bit bothered, but now I have concrete experience and observation to contrast it against.

I'd been saying for a while that I don't want to be in research because I want to do something which has immediate, positive impact on the world. I want to do something real. School is the opposite of real. Everything in it is designed to be artificial. Not, note, without purpose - but deliberately removed from the messiness of the real world. Each assignment is crafted to be a neat little tidbit capturing and exercising the understanding of an idea. Each exercise from a section of a book is solved using ideas from that section. This is a good way to understand certain concepts, but really all you're doing is solving a heavily restricted problem. Even for the "tricky" word problems, you already know something about the solution, since it will involve some techniques from the section. Comprehensive exams do a bit better, since you have to draw from the material of all or most of a course, but it's still restricted to just that course, and you're still solving "neat", artificial problems. This is hardly "problem solving".

On top of this, there is the demeaning status of a student. You're the bottom of the food change. You can't argue with anything. It's one thing to be in this status when you're a child (and I have enough complaints about that; must post about those some time), but for someone 18, 21, 24... it's really frustrating. The instructor and his/her whims are entirely responsible for a mark that will be on your record for the rest of your life, and will affect what you can do for at least the next few years. Now, you have many instructors over time, but each one of them has this power. The system is rigid and beaurocratic. A few nice administrators or instructors might bend the rules, but on the whole, it's set for the masses, and there's very little you can do to escape jumping through many pointless hoops.

Now, it's not to say that I don't think many companies have many problems (including those of schools), but I think there could be much better ways of running the system. What we need is a holistic approach to taking individual from childhood to a happy, productive member of society. When I say holistic, I don't mean some weird hippy thing; I'm being entirely practical. Let's take it from the perspective of greatest total, long-term economic benefit, maybe something like lifetime per-capita GDP.

I have heard from multiple sources in multiple fields that the optimal degree for money is a master's. Let's assume this takes until age 24, and that you work until age 70 (probably more reasonable for my generation, and a lot of people take up second careers after their first retirement anyway). That's 46 years of productivity for 24 years of training. Let's also assume that under a certain age, say, 12, you're not going to do anything really productive (most of the tasks a 12 year old could do can be automated, or should be soon), so it's really only 12 years difference. Now, if the 12 years of training makes you at least 26% (12/41) more productive, it's good to spend those 12 years training.

That sounds fine, but why can't the training be productive, and in the process, make one even better prepared for the rest of one's life? From my observations of the early school system, most of the work is repetitive and the students don't care about it. Now, this alone is a problem that could be remedied without affecting the rest of the system, but I'm going for the holistic best solution. My suggestion for this is apprenticeship. Maybe this isn't practical at early ages (although I still think more individualized work should be done), but starting around late middle school/early high school, I think it would be more beneficial to set each student up with a mentor to apprentice with, for as long as each arrangement seems to work (no sense artificially dividing the time into semesters or years if it's already individualized). This will not only allow the apprentice to do something productive in the real world, but see the applicability of the things s/he is learning.

In terms of overall productivity, though, one must consider that the mentor is losing time too: time spent training the apprentice that could be used on their own pursuits. Maybe this is an hour per day, per student - I don't think it would take much more, since part of the point of this is also self-reliance and self-direction, and small-group instruction could be held with several apprentices at once. This is weighed against the professional teachers we have now, who may have 20 students each (or 1/6 of each of 120 students; each has 6 periods a day), and doesn't do anything but teach them. This means, say 1/8 of a mentor's time used vs only 1/20 for a traditional teacher. Does the increased productivity of the apprentice, including both the apprenticeship and over their lifetime, make up for the 3/40ths of an adult professional's time? I'd say yes, but then I'm a fan of this system for other reasons as well. If a 20-year-old working 40 hours can't make up for 3 hours out of someone else's week, even if they are spending time on things like book exercises, I'd be really surprised.

Finally, I'd like to argue for the long-term benefit of this over traditional school, in a slightly less economic sense (although it still has economic implications). When a student goes from a purely school environment to the professional world (as I did this past summer), they're unused to anything other than the idea of getting closed-form assignments and doing them individually (maybe in a group, but this is less common, and usually considered cheating if not assigned). This is a great contrast to open-form assignments ("make this better"), and having social networking being a big component of getting things done. If your assigment is "make this better", and you figure you might need a particular algorithm implemented to do this, it's all well and nice to look through text documentation and explanation, but it's much better in many respects to just go ask somebody who has knowledge of that. For one, they might have your needed functionality already implemented in a library. For another, they can point you to other related things that might be useful, and even better, to other people who have ideas about the subject.

My ideas of an apprenticeship system obviously has potential drawbacks which need to be addressed. For one, it requires a lot of mentors who are reasonably good teachers. Otherwise, we get another problem that the public school system has right now, measuring by standards which are not necessarily reflective of quality - class size, in this case. Sure, this system has a class size of probably a handful, but most of us would agree that it's better to have a class with 40 students with a really good instructor than a class of 20 with a poor instructor (hence another idea I've heard, to fire the bottom half of teachers and pay the remaining ones twice as much - which I think would result in an improvement, since it would draw even better teachers).

Maybe the best approach would be some kind of hybrid. There are some pursuites where one does just need to cover a whole lot of specialized material, basically in bulk. Under a strictly apprenticeship program, it would be hard to get people like math researchers. I imagive you'd have some studentents who'd apprentice with, say, an engineer, who'd wind up really liking the math part, and devoting big chunks of time to learning it mostly on their own, and after a while, switch to being the apprentice of a math researcher. Well, maybe it wouldn't be so hard then. I appreciate any comments for problems of this type and suggestions of how they be investigated or treated.

As a side note, think about what it means that I complained about the particular things that I did... these are things I had as contrast against working at Google.

Oh, and if you're bothered by my occasional use of 'they' as a gender-neutral singular... it's intentional. It was accepted in the time of Shakespeare (who did use it), and there is linguistic backing for its use as such. So get off your prescriptive grammar and look at the purpose and functionality of the construct.

A place for miscellaneous thoughts (and some quotes reflecting company culture)

2005-09-10T16:09:00.000-07:00

I wanted to separate my blog into events and thoughts. My Mountain View blog will be one for a series of events, organized by chronology and location. I may make another about some other contiguous bit of time (maybe about Burning Man, but I doubt I'll post much of that publicly). This will be just for my thoughts about life and the world.

My random thought for the moment was spurred by a few quotes I came across:

I have 100 billion dollars... You realize I could spend 3 million dollars a day, every day, for the next 100 years? And that's if I don't make another dime. Tell you what-I'll buy your right arm for a million dollars. I give you a million bucks, and I get to sever your arm right here.
--Bill Gates

You see, antiquated ideas of kindness and generosity are simply bugs that must be programmed out of our world. And these cold, unfeeling machines will show us the way.
--Bill Gates

Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical and ultimately making a big difference in the world.
--Sergey Brin

(all from http://www.brainyquote.com/)

Now, maybe Mr. Bill isn't serious, and these are probably extremes, but... does anybody wonder why we're rooting for Google? And why I'm so in love with the company? And why Sergey is my hero?