How to Spy on Ryan.

Fiction is now either Science Fiction or Historical Fiction. The present doesn't last long enough.

2011-12-31T21:52:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading "The Wind up Bird Chronicle," and the plot of it requires that the main character be unreachable by phone when he is outside of his house. How different a world that was, where going out into the world to meet other people actually isolated you in some ways. This dated the novel entirely. It became a novel about sometime last century instead of just a novel.

Consider writing a story about someone who gets lost on a road trip or a walk. This is an archetypical setup, but how difficult it would be to do that today, to set that up in a way that rules out all the obvious ways of getting directions in an entirely uninteresting way from our smart phones? I can imagine it now: "My battery was too low to get signal, and between my two companions, one doesn't have a nationwide data plan, and the other is with a second tier carrier with poor 3g coverage, so miraculously, we have to talk to another person, and thus move the plot forward in an interesting way." Even after all those awkward contortions, that setup probably has a half-life of 5 years.

All of us spend a lot of our lives on our computers, but what we do on them can't be written about in a way that is both poetic and accurate. We just don't have enough words for it. Every humble tool in a leatherworker's arsenal has its own name (the awl for instance.) These things have been around for long enough for that to happen, and to gain the gravity that makes them candidates for metaphor. The pen is still mightier than the sword, even though we no longer use either. The keyboard may be mightier than the cruise missile, but I can't imagine saying that with any dramatic weight.

The basic ways we do common things are not only different, but changing from year to year. Henceforth a novel will have to choose a time period in which to take place, and choosing "now" will make it historical fiction by the time it is published.

Why big organizations don’t take risks proportionate to their size (a theoretical argument)

2011-03-08T20:47:00.000-08:00

TLDR version: People optimize E(Log(x)). Big organizations should optimize E(Log(Σ x)), but because they are composed of many people, they optimize ΣE(log(x)).

Logarithmic Utility Curves

Suppose someone offers you a 50% chance of a $1M prize, or a 10% chance of a $10M prize. Most people who don’t already have a lot of money would take the first, more certain option, even though the expected value of the second is double that of the first. ($0.5M vs $1M). $1M would improve my life a lot. $10M would also improve my life a lot, but not so much more than $1M that I’m willing to risk getting nothing. Economists call this “risk aversion.” and model it using a “utility curve.” Though quite abstract, it corresponds pretty well to intuition. The idea is that $10M isn’t “worth” 10x as much to me as $1M, so I have to account for that before I take the expected value. The most common utility curve used in simple models is logarithmic, both because it’s mathematically simple, and close enough to reality for most purposes. Intuitively, no matter how much money I make, I’m willing to put in a linear amount of additional effort in order to raise my income level by 10%, so you end up with logarithmic utility.

To compare these two offers, before we take the expected value, we’ll take the log of the outcomes.
log(1M) ~ 6,
log(10M) ~ 7,
0.5 * 6 > 0.1 * 7, so we take the first offer as observed.

Rather than optimizing E(x), we optimize E(log(x)) and get behavior somewhat like what a real person would do.

Organizations

It makes sense that an organization should have a utility curve looking like a log. Going out of business (log 0) is -infinity as observed, and companies care about percentage improvements rather than absolute improvements just like individuals do. I apologize for not having better arguments that this is the way organizations should behave. This is a blog post, not a research paper. :)

This means that if the output of each employee is x, the outcome for the company as a whole is Σ x, and the company should be optimizing E(log(Σ x)).

How do they actually behave? The company will behave in the way that the aggregate of its individuals behave. If individuals are rewarded in proportion to their personal outcomes rather than the company’s outcomes, they’ll behave by optimizing their personal utility function. As a result, the company as a whole will optimize Σ E(log(x)).

Big organizations apply the risk-aversion of an individual to losses that are teeny relative to the size of the organization, because people care more about their individual risk than the risk to the company. Ideally, a company should have many people working on huge improvements with a small probability of success. In reality, it's almost impossible to structure incentives so that doing things with a small chance of success is a good personal strategy. It’s hard to reward competence and not outcomes. If you reward outcomes, the company will be risk averse. Having a few engineers work for years on something that doesn’t finally work is a teeny risk to the company, but potentially a huge risk to the careers of those engineers.

History through Google Books Ngrams

2010-12-16T23:29:00.000-08:00

Each of these graphs plots over time the fraction that one word constitutes of all words in books mined from the Google Books project.

Westward expansion of the U.S.

One invested in railroads, the other, canals.

New religions of the last 200 years.

Race.

Note how people didn't start capitalizing "black" until the mid '60s, even though it had been used as a descriptor as often as "colored" for a long time. Note the different curves for "negress" and "Negress." Capital "Negress" rose in usage alongside "Negro woman" and was nearly as common in the '40s, but half as common in the '70s. Lowercase "negress" was mostly replaced by capitalized versions, which were then replaced as well.

Industrialization of food.

Pawpaws were more popular than blueberries, and gooseberries were more popular than raspberries!

Communism

Presidents

Marijuana

Industry

Music

AIDS

Notice how HIV lags AIDS, and condom is correlated more with HIV than with AIDS.

Feminism

Scurvy

Ideology

Israel and Palestine as a people and as a place

The names of Muslims

It's 2:00 AM, and there's still worlds to explore just off the top of my head. This is a treasure trove. Google Books Team, this is an amazing accomplishment. I used to envision that this is how history would be done in 50 years when the digital age has ensured that anything that someone cares enough about to transfer is preserved. Now we're getting to do that sort of history, today.

Inception

2010-07-19T13:50:00.000-07:00

The movie is great. Go see it. What I'm about to write will be entirely spoiler free.

Inception will leave you distrusting your own perceptions in the manner of Descartes's Demon, more so than The Matrix ever did. It does this I think because the experience of the characters in the movie entering and leaving dreams is so similar to our experience entering and leaving the movie. "Waking up" from a good movie is a very similar feeling to waking up from a dream.

When we talk about "suspending disbelief," it isn't supposed to be something you do, but rather something that happens automatically if the movie succeeds in drawing you in. When dreaming, we tolerate wild violations of physics and causality without it ever decreasing our emotional involvement. The objective of a good movie is to tap into that level of credulity, and it wouldn't surprise me if someone discovered that the same pathways in our brains are involved.

When Christopher Nolan was writing the dialogue about how addictive it is to be an architect of dreams, he must have been really talking about is how addictive it is to be an architect of shared dreams: movies.

Men's Wearhouse is missing a major business opportunity.

2010-06-24T11:47:00.000-07:00

Every male in the U.S. who goes to a prom or is someone's groomsman has likely been fitted for a tuxedo at the Men's Wearhouse. Theoretically, the Men's Wearhouse should have the most comprehensive database of men's sizing information of any company. There have been a lot of weddings among my close friends this year, and I assumed that after the first fitting I'd be able to rent subsequent tuxes without going to the store in person. Amazingly, according to one of the attendants, they throw away all information about the customer after 6 months.

This loss goes beyond convenient tuxedo rentals. With this much information about me, they could be delivering clothes custom-tailored overseas to my doorstep at a price no other company could match. That much opportunity is certainly worth the cost of a few dozen more machines. Ancillary data produced by your business can become more valuable than the profits from the business itself. Don't throw anything away.

Janelle Monáe (Wow)

2010-05-23T22:22:00.000-07:00

Imagine if Lauryn Hill became a geek, teamed up with Outkast, and wrote two concept albums about an android uprising in the futuristic city of Metropolis. The result would sound something like Janelle Monae's inaugural two albums, Metropolis, and The ArchAndroid, the first three acts of a six act story. The songs flow seamlessly (literally) from one to the next, usually jumping genres in the process. She can wail, she can scat, she can croon, she can rap, she can dance (oh she can dance), and she can sound like GLaDOS when necessary. Orchestral interludes bookend the chapters; In one, she puts words to a snippet of Claire De Lune.

Pitchfork loves her too. Historically, the intersection of the albums I like and the albums they bother to review has been approximately 0, so these two recommendations are about as independent as they come. Go have a listen! Every track can be heard for free at the links above.

My favorites so far: Sincerely, Jane, Tightrope, and Oh, Maker.

Tax-time gripes

2010-03-07T17:40:00.000-08:00

California Use-Tax

It's really not reasonable for me to try to add up all the money I've spent online (but only on items used in California, not those purchased as gifts to someone out of state.) This is the largest expenditure for me outside of rent and travel, and I don't remember everything I've bought and from where. Mint.com and searching for "receipt" in gmail helps, but it's really a lost cause. I do my best, but it seems most people I talk to don't bother, despite it being the law. This is by far the most time-consuming part of filing my return, and only hurts me to do so.

A few things confuse me about it.

Is shipping and handling included in the taxable portion? It's not "used" in California.
Do online retailers have enough information themselves that they could provide some sort of automated assistance in tallying these?
Have the courts decided whether use-taxes are constitutional despite being a tax on inter-state trade?
Am I a chump for bothering?

Passwords

Filing my taxes inevitably involves getting data from financial institutions that I haven't had any interaction with all year, and thus, remembering my various passwords. If you are designing a password system, please don't place restrictions on the content of the password. It's your responsibility as an administrator to keep your users' passwords from being brute-forced. Do not offload this responsibility to them.

Arbitrary restrictions I've seen today alone while trying to get forms from various financial agencies:

Must have at least 1 number.
Must have at least 2 numbers.
Must have at least one capital letter and 1 number.
Cannot have special characters.
Must be greater than 6 characters, but no more than 15.
Must be greater than 6 characters but no more than 8.

If I can't have a small secure set of passwords to use everywhere that I can reasonably remember, I'm just going to email them to myself, thus defeating every high-minded security best practice you are trying to implement.

Google can render your equations for you!

2009-11-08T13:59:00.001-08:00

In my last post I mentioned that Knol and Google Docs now have equation editing. What I didn't mention is that this is an undocumented feature of the public Google Chart api, and it's easy to use. For instance, if I wanted to include the Schrödinger equation on this blog. I would construct an url like this:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=tx&chf=bg,s,FFFFFF00&chco=AACCFF&chl=i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t} \Psi(\mathbf{r},\,t) = \hat H \Psi(\mathbf{r},t)

Put your code in the chl parameter. The chf parameter lets you specify a background color in RGBA, chco lets you set the foreground color in RGB. When you drop it in inside of an image tag you get this:

If you anticipate making 250,000 calls to the chart server a day, contact Google first at chart-api-notifications@google.com. There's no limit to how much you can use it, but they reserve the right to turn you off.

Simple Simhashing, My favorite trick.

2009-10-01T21:02:00.000-07:00

Knol got equation editing a few days ago, and to celebrate I've written up a knol on one of my favorite CS tricks, simhashing using sets. It's a technique I picked up at Google, and it's extremely useful for grouping together similar things in a large dataset.

Suppose you have a huge number of items that you would like to group together by a fuzzy notion of similarity. Suppose the only tool available to you is a key-value store. Suppose you only have the resources to consider each object once. Never fear, simhashing is here!

Keep Your State Parks Open

2009-05-30T20:15:00.000-07:00

Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed closing 80% of California state parks, including most of those in the Bay Area. This is estimated to save $143 million out of a $24 billion deficit, or half a percent. This strikes me as a very poor decision given the miniscule effect it would have on California's finances, and the large effect it would have on California's quality of life. Furthermore, it may end up costing the state more than it saves if it decreases tax revenues from tourism. Admittedly it's a tough decision to spend $143 million on parks rather than on health insurance for poor children, but ultimately $143 million is a drop in the bucket for the latter. To put this in perspective, $143 million is $4.35 per capita after removing the unemployed. I'd much prefer higher entry fees or taxes to outright closures, or he could parole ~3000 non-violent drug offenders instead.

This site makes it easy to contact your state representatives.

Closing these state parks means that gates would be padlocked, and parking and restrooms won't be available, though it will likely still be physically possible to enter. You can find a list of all 220 here. Here are a few of my photographs from the parks they are intending on closing.

Point Lobos

Big Basin

Prairie Creek Redwoods

Henry W. Coe

Sugarloaf Ridge

Pfeiffer Big Sur

Castle Rock

Moss Beach

To those for whom I recommend games . . .

2009-04-12T22:08:00.000-07:00

You have to try Braid.

It looks like Super Mario Brothers redone as a shimmering, moving, impressionist painting. It plays a little like Portal, but really unlike anything you've played before. The game explores the concept of time, how we perceive it, how it effects us. In each world, time operates in a different way, and there are maddening ingenious puzzles built out of the implications. Each puzzle teaches you something new about the logic internal to the world, and will make you think in a way you've never thought before. Once you've figured out a puzzle it doesn't require much more physical dexterity to complete than getting through the first few levels of Mario, but some puzzles may take hours of thought before you stumble upon the solution. As penny-arcade described it, epiphany is the central game mechanic.

The story is as impressionistic as the artwork, mostly told in snippets of text that accompany the entrance to each world. They relate the mechanics of time in that world to the ways in which we experience events in our lives. One section describes how returning to a place laden with memories can cause us to feel as if we are travelling in time, and not just space. In that world, time moves forward as you move to the right and backwards as you move to the left. The story and the art both get darker and more mysterious as the game progresses, with a baffling ending that will leave you reevaluating everything you've seen up til that point, probably for days afterwards.

If there was any debate that games are an art form as expressive as any other, Braid has settled it.

You can get the PC version from several sites, including Steam, or the Xbox version from Xbox Live Arcade. All are $15, and a free demo is available.

How to convince yourself to get rid of stuff (especially if you live in CA)

2009-03-16T22:45:00.000-07:00

I helped some friends move into their new home over the weekend, and as always, moving became an opportunity to decide whether certain things were really worth moving. The broken grill that just needs an afternoon's woodworking to fix, the rusted recumbent bike bought with good intentions, the box full of leis and decorative sticks left over from a theme party, all become a little less benign when you have to load them into a truck and then figure out where they "go" in a new home. Some popular metrics for throwing it out: if you haven't used it in the last year, if you haven't used it since your last move, if you forgot you owned it. I hereby propose another metric particularly suited for those living in California: what it would cost you to get that space back by enlarging your dwelling.

First, figure out approximately what it would cost in dollars per square foot to increase your living space. From browsing Craig's List postings of comparable apartments, my current 400 square foot apartment could be upgraded at a rate of about $1.5 per square foot per month. Now compute the floorspace that the item consumes, multiply, and you have an approximation of the opportunity cost of that item in dollars per month. Translate this to years for added impact. To keep my new conga drums at 27" × 14" I'm giving up about $50 worth of floor space per year, which is a rate I'm comfortable with.

To compute this metric for stackable items such as books, divide this number by how deep the items are currently stacked in the way you are storing them, so as your bookshelf gets taller the storage of each book gets cheaper. It's cheating to compare it against the height of your ceiling directly. Add in the extra space wasted in storage. On my 3 layer bookshelf, the average 6" × 1" paperback stored vertically with 5" of wasted space in front of it is costing me $1.35 per year. That's more than I paid initially for some of these used paperbacks that I still haven't read after a few years of lugging them around. Out they go. If you are living with someone and they want you to throw something out, experiment with paying rent to them on it at the rate you get from this calculation.

Texture Targeting

2009-02-06T22:24:00.000-08:00

I made it to the San Francisco Postmortem, a get-together for bay area game developers, for the first time last Tuesday. I finally got to meet the creators of Natural Selection as well as reconnect with some friends from college, Sam Hart and Chris DeLeon. The guys at Unknown Worlds are busy working on a sequel to Natural Selection on a shoestring budget with minimal staff, and they are doing an amazing job of doing things as efficiently as possible. The biggest bottleneck though for a modern game is the incredible quantity of art assets required to achieve the graphical standards gamers expect. I've been interested in texture synthesis since I took a graphics class in college, and decided this would be a good opportunity to experiment with it in the hopes that it could speed up creation of texture sets. I've started a texture synthesis project on Google Code, and there are two bare-bones utilities there that are ready to start playing with. The code is all based on techniques from Efros and Leung with a variety of experimental modifications of my own. The ultimate aim of this is to produce something akin to an "automated super clone tool" such that an artist can make a few textures for a theme in exacting detail, and then synthesize the rest from sketches using this software.

So far I haven't been able to get satisfying results for any non-stochastic textures, but that's my aim. With this technique there seems to be a dramatic trade-off between giving the artist any control at all over the resulting texture, and the amount of detail present in that texture. If anyone has an interesting results or ideas in that regard, drop me a line.

My first painting since Kindergarten!

2009-01-12T19:33:00.000-08:00

From Portfolio

Mike Rotondo held an art party last Friday night, and I took the opportunity to learn to paint! I mysteriously remembered a lot of techniques either from watching my mom paint, the tips she's given me, or my art-history class in highschool. It's 16"×20", acrylic on canvas paper.

Stuck on what to get someone for Christmas? Try a Kiva.org gift certificate!

2008-12-23T13:42:00.000-08:00

Usually charity gifts aren't really satisfying. Giving in someone's name doesn't give them much enjoyment, or even much of a warm fuzzy feeling. They aren't personally doing the giving even if it's in their name.

Kiva.org gift certificates are different! The person gets to go online and pick and entrepreneur in the developing world to help fund. It's interactive so it's fun, and the person gets the warm fuzzy feeling of charity at your expense instead of theirs.

Many people's lives could be improved by getting a small loan, but credit often isn't available to them because it costs as much to administer a small loan as a big one. Kiva.org is part of the growing microfinance movement that aims to fix this by putting up the capital for these small loans so that the receiver gets a much lower interest rate on the loan than they otherwise would. Learn more. Try it out!

That Woman is Terrifying.

2008-10-25T02:27:00.000-07:00

Today, Palin mocked fruit fly research despite it being the basis of much of our modern knowledge of genetics, and responsible for a Nobel Prize. This is more enraging to me than anything else in the broad spectrum of outrages that have come out of the McCain campaign. Basic science research is the most noble thing that humans do, and to denigrate it without so much as a Google search, while still claiming to be qualified to be president . . . I don't have any language strong enough to condemn her without wishing her bodily harm. It is terrifying to me that given a choice between voting for Bush and voting for Palin, I would vote for Bush.

Decision 2008

2008-10-20T16:55:00.000-07:00

There are many stark differences in policy and temperament between the major party candidates this election. However, there is one fundamental ideological issue that eclipses all others and has been completely ignored by the mainstream media. When voters enter the booths this November, they will undoubtedly be asking themselves whether they prefer group orgasms through breathing techniques, or spiritual warfare to ward off African curses. The choice is yours.

Kahili Ginger!

2008-10-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

From Plant Portfolio

The plant that ate my apartment is finally blooming! I bought it as a bulb at the gift shop of the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden in Hilo two years ago. My plumeria came from the same store. Below you can see pictures of what it looked like right after it sprouted, (that's a six inch pot!) and what it looks like now. The smell is incredible. I could tell it was blooming just by opening the door of my apartment. The scent spilled out into the porch.


	From Plant Portfolio

Here are a few facts about it:

The plant is named after the feathered standards that were the symbol of a Hawaiian Noble's power.
When it is sending up a new stalk it grows something close to an inch per day. The roots completely consume the soil.
I haven't fertilized it at all, and it's been in a shady south facing window for most of the last two years. I try to saturate the soil with water once per week, but as the pots have gotten bigger that has gotten harder.

Next time you are feeling cynical about humanity …

2008-09-14T00:51:00.001-07:00

… inspired by McCain's recent polling numbers perhaps, check out the featured content in the Sporepedia. The amount of creativity is just stunning. Everything in there was created by amateurs in their spare time for fun. In case Wikipedia wasn't proof enough, when you give regular people great tools, they will make amazing stuff just for kicks. Most people have worlds of creativity that isn't used in their jobs, and they just need a convenient outlet to amaze you.

More generally, there's huge potential for harnessing our leisure time to produce useful work, and at the moment it's largely untapped. Google Image Labeler is a great (though horribly named) pioneer of this. You play a fun game, and in the process you give Google an awesome data set of images labeled with tags. Fold.it is another. Playing that game is equivalent to computing the lowest energy state of a protein. If you are good at it, you could cure cancer. The sky is the limit for this sort of stuff though, and the internet is finally giving us the organizational tools to bring it about. Imagine if instead of working out in a gym, people had access to volunteer landscaping groups. You'd get a similar workout, but you'd beautify a landscape in the process instead of just pumping iron and wasting all that energy.

Here's a great talk on the subject, Gin, Television, and the Social Surplus. My favorite quote:

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into … an architecture of participation.

Beyond Blogrolls

2008-08-07T01:19:00.001-07:00

Usually the links found to the right of a blog are only useful to bored people clicking randomly, or to pass PageRank (The latter being a model of the former.) As such, I've updated all the banners and links on my sidebar with some information about what they are and why they are there. Some of these deserve much more than a paragraph. Boy Scouts, in particular, deserves essays. For the time being though, this should give you a reason to click on them.

Rainbow

2008-08-05T22:15:00.001-07:00

The skies are usually boring in California compared to the nightly shows in the midwest, but every so often there's a real treat.

From Mountain View Rainbow

Knol has been released and guess who is featured!

2008-07-23T12:30:00.001-07:00

Look who is on the front page of Knol! Some of you are probably aware that I've been working on a backpacking guide for a while now. I decided when they announced the Knol project internally that it would be a perfect fit, and published it there. Go check it out!

Wall-E is Incredible.

2008-06-30T01:12:00.000-07:00

Just go see it. I don't know how Pixar will be able to top this one. It took my breath away scene after scene. In some moments I started to tear up at the sheer lyrical beauty of it. I kid you not. Just go see it.

Edit: Now that a day has passed I'll add my little 2¢ about what makes it so good.

I think the most incredible thing about it is how perfectly it nails the tone. It's a post apocalyptic movie in which the earth is uninhabitable and the remaining humans are sluglike consumerist caricatures living out their days in space, but the movie treats the subject with such tenderness that it's never vindictive or off-putting. The humans aren't evil or stupid, they're just innocent, naive. Wall-E is a bit of a packrat, collecting all of the human artifacts that he thinks are neat, and the simple joy he takes in an egg-beater or a rubik's cube softens it perfectly. In spite of the fact that the entire planet is overrun by our junk, a lot of the junk is really cool. It's these touches that make it an honest look at humanity instead of a diatribe. As good as all this is though, it's really just a backdrop for the love story, which is so innocent and touching that it could carry the movie even if the rest of it was ignorable.

Hope for the Future

2008-03-18T20:54:00.000-07:00

Arthur C. Clarke, author, died today at the age of 90. You may know him as the author behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, the book and famous Stanley Kubrick film. Clarke wrote in an earlier age of Science Fiction. The internet had not yet transformed the world, and cyberpunk was not yet a glimmer in William Gibson's eye. America lived in the shadow of the cold war, and much of the Science Fiction of the time dealt with the possibility of humankind destroying itself.

Clarke infused his writing with a limitless view of both human potential and human failings; In his view, humanity is in its infancy, delicate, vulnerable, throwing temper tantrums, but with its best years still ahead of it. In 2001, the main character upon his apotheosis literally becomes a child among the stars. In Childhood's End humanity as a whole escapes it's physical bounds in a heartbreaking moment of destruction and transcendence that the title of the book literally describes. Throughout his writing however, the factions of humanity are always a single mistake from destroying each other, and it is often extraterrestrials that distract them enough to survive their own power. Clarke wrote long before Nelson Mandela took his long walk to freedom, and hypothesized in Childhood's End that South Africa wouldn't reach a peaceful settlement until aliens gathered overhead and demanded it by blocking out the sun. Still, in his worlds we always managed to escape our vices to do extraordinary things: building a space elevator, colonizing the solar system, greeting the vast powers of the galaxy with dignity.

His books are full of the hope that with the passage of time, the problems that seem so immediate will be immaterial, that the differences between us are surmountable, that we have the ingenuity to escape our lonely planet and join whatever waits beyond. This perhaps the essence of Clarke's future. With that, I present to you the most intelligent and moving speech I've seen delivered by a politician in my lifetime. Had he been able, I think this is the type of progress Arthur C. Clarke would have liked to see.

Clarke delivered a farewell speech on his 90th birthday about his legacy, the incredible distance we've come within his lifetime, and his hope for the future. "I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. I hope that we have learned something from the most barbaric century in history — the twentieth. I would like to see us overcome our tribal divisions, and begin to think and act as if we were one family. That would be real globalization." If you'd like to read some of his work, the full text of the "The Star" is available online.

No one dared to disturb him or interrupt his thoughts: and presently he turned his back upon the dwindling Sun.

- Childhood's End

Sprouting Mango Trees From Pits

2008-03-11T23:49:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to do this for a while, and I know a few friends who have also been interested but mysteriously I've found all the guides online to be bad advice. I can confirm that now, because I'm pretty sure I've discovered the trick! My second mango pit has sprouted today, and I'm optimistic about a few more of them. I unfortunately don't eat enough mangoes to really have a control group in my study here, but of the 10 I've planted with a few different techniques, The only ones that have sprouted were handled in the same way, which I will now impart to you.

Eat your mango. Mmmmm.
Clean the mango husk enough to get a firm grip on it and be able to feel the woody material.
Near the eye of the mango (where the stem would have connected) feel along the edge for a flat spot about an inch long. Take the mango in both hands and press into this spot with your thumbs. With a bit of working the husk should split in half leaving the seed exposed inside.

The advice that follows here should be modified a bit based on the humidity level of your location. On the San Francisco peninsula here the air is very dry, so I go to elaborate lengths to keep my mango pits moist. If you live in a humid location this may be overkill. Generally, the goal here is to disturb the roots as little as possible, and keep the plant moist and warm until it's fully established.

Wrap the seed in a strip of paper towel, wet it, and squeeze out the air.
Unless you are very good at repotting plants, choose a pot that you won't have to move it from for a while. I'd recommend at least 6 inches, but make sure it's small enough that you can fit a ziplock bag over the top. Any indoor potting soil is fine.
Plant the pit near the surface of the soil with the concave side down.
Soak the soil with water, and then put a ziplock bag over the top of the pot. It isn't essential for it to fit tightly. The goal of this is to keep the humidity level high.
Place the pot with ziplock bag in a sunny window, preferably south-facing.
Water it every two days by filling the saucer under the pot to the brim. So long as it gets a lot of sun I don't think you can over-water it at this stage. The soil should stay moist and water should collect on the inside of the bag.
If your pits are growing they will turn green within a week or so, then split open with a stalk coming out about 2 weeks later.
Once your plant sprouts remove the bag, but keep watering it regularly. Take particular care after repotting it that the soil never dries out. Mangoes don't have a very robust root system so disturbing it can really harm your plant. Cold can also be fatal to them so make sure to bring your plant inside if it will drop below 40 degrees. Once you have a respectable tree, Texas A&M has a good guide for cultivating mango trees in a home garden that can take over from here.
Enjoy!

Fun With Absurdist Logic

2008-03-09T13:30:00.000-07:00

What can you prove starting from the assumption that 1 = 2? Technically speaking, anything. One of the basic rules of logic is that if you include a false statement in your assumptions, you can prove any statement from those assumptions, regardless of whether the resulting statement is true or false. (P ⇒ Q follows from ¬P, regardless of Q.) This is often used for proofs "by contradiction" where you assume the opposite of what you are trying to prove, show that it results in a false statement, and thus conclude that your original assumption was false.

Though we know that this is true, rarely do we exercise it, and it can be a lot of fun to do so. Bertrand Russell once remarked "Give me any false statement and any other statement to prove and I will prove it," and I'll be cribbing from him here to use "1 = 2" to prove that I am a walrus. (He proved that he was God, but I'm no Bertrand Russell.)

Assume 1 = 2.
Consider the following set of two elements: {me, a walrus}.
This set has size 2, but because 2 = 1 it must also have size 1.
Therefore, me and the walrus must be the same element, and thus, I am a walrus.
Q.E.D.

There's great potential for a game here: One player chooses a false statement to start from, and the challenger responds with a fantastically outlandish statement to prove. Failure to prove it in 1 minute results in consequences appropriate for your age group. (If you are in college, you know what to do.) Astute readers will note that a similar argument to the above shows that I am also the eggman. Proving "goo goo g'joob" is left as an exercise to the reader.

The Best Album I've Heard in Years

2008-03-05T16:33:00.000-08:00

If you'd rather listen to it than read my jibber jabber, check out the myspace page.

"Punch" is the second album from the newly renamed "Punch Brothers," their first being "How To Grow a Woman From the Ground." It's unclassifiable music, which clearly springs from bluegrass but with influences too numerous to count. It mixes the idioms and instruments of bluegrass with the complex harmonies of contemporary classical and jazz. I guarantee you've never heard anything like it. It makes Bela Fleck sound tame and traditional. Chris Thile, the frontman for the group has been called "the most virtuosic American ever to play the mandolin," and the other members of the group receive less effusive praise only because their instruments are more common. Here they are put to good use playing things that have never before been played on these instruments.

The meat of the album is contained in a bewildering, four movement, forty minute piece entitled "The Blind Leaving the Blind." Despite the length and the stretches of dissonance, it's never inaccessible for long; the lyrics and melodies stay rooted in telling the emotional story of Chris's recent divorce. Every so often they break into an old-fashioned bluegrass jam, but then change keys in a few measures to remind you what you are listening to. On my first pass through it was exhausting to listen to, and it was a stretch for the band as well.

"For me, when I first received the score and saw what Chris was asking me to play on my instrument, that had to have been just as traumatic as him getting his divorce papers," Pikelny says. "He figured, 'Hey, if you have the notes there, you'll figure out a way to play it.'"

Chris Thile's voice, though adequate, doesn't match the quality of the playing and composition, and the album suffers from what Dan and I call "Great Album Syndrome." (Every truly great album must have one unbearable song, i.e. "The Crunge" or "Fitter Happier." On this album it's the first track, "Punch Bowl.") However, if hearing a banjo in a song doesn't immediately turn you off, (I understand that excludes a fair number of people) then give this a listen.

If you're having trouble spying on me . . .

2008-02-19T21:50:00.002-08:00

. . . since I haven't updated in a while, here are a few other options. I've started using jaanix.com, which I think has the potential to be a great social news/content aggregator. I still read reddit but I haven't been happy with it recently. A lot of the content on there has become either unbearably sensational or focused on political minutiae, so here's hoping jaanix takes off since its easy to tune out what you aren't interested in. One nice feature of jaanix is that every user gets their own subdomain full of the things they've submitted. Mine is at moultano.jaanix.com, which you can subscribe to in the rss reader of your choice should you feel so inclined.

I've also become a regular user of Google Reader which has dramatically increased the quality of what I read online. If you read online news but don't have a feed reader yet, you owe it to yourself to try it out. The purpose of Reader is to be your "inbox for the web." For most sites that include regularly updated content (like this one) you can drop the name of the sitel into the reader interface and it will keep track of it for you. Reader becomes your one stop shop for checking the sites you like to read, because all of the sites' updates will show up there like email messages as items for you to read. One great feature of Reader is that it allows you to share any item you are reading with your friends with a single click. It doesn't send anyone any annoying email, it just drops the item onto a page of your own which other people can also subscribe to (if you use google talk, the shared items of your friends will automatically show up in reader.) View mine, or drop that url into your feed reader of choice.

Thanksgiving

2007-11-27T22:00:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving 2007

I can't think of any appropriate title for this.

2007-09-24T22:51:00.000-07:00

On Saturday night, someone was murdered in the park behind my apartment. I heard the shots from my couch.

(09-24) 11:45 PDT Mountain View - -- An alleged gang member has been arrested on suspicion of fatally shooting a friend over the weekend- Mountain View's first homicide in two years, police said today. Marco Jauregui, 25, was booked on suspicion of murder in the weekend slaying of his friend, Rene Escalante, 24, said Mountain View police spokeswoman Liz Wylie. Police said Jauregui shot and killed Escalante at about 12:30 a.m. Sunday at Whisman Park on the 300 block of Easy Street. Escalante was pronounced dead at Stanford Medical Center. A motive for the shooting was unclear, and police were investigating whether the shooting was gang-related, Wylie said. "All of the involved parties are affiliated with the Mountain View Sureños," Wylie said. "We're still trying to figure that all out. We're not quite sure why a good friend, who is affiliated with the same gang, would kill his friend."

I thought it was fireworks at first but then I heard people yelling. I went out to my porch to see what was going on, then decided it wasn't a good idea to be back-lit on my porch if someone had a gun and went back inside. An ambulance and police showed up in 5-10 minutes. I could see where they were putting him on a stretcher from my porch, and it isn't more than 300 feet from my apartment. Helicopters were circling low overhead for the rest of the night.
View Larger Map I'm somewhat accustomed to having violence happen in my neighborhood, but this is the first time I've actually witnessed it. The most chilling part was the pauses between the shots. There were three or four shots fired and they had a couple of seconds gap between them. It didn't sound like a burst of rage. The person fired, stopped and saw what they were doing, and then fired again at least two more times.

Andy Kehoe

2007-09-23T13:14:00.000-07:00

I wanted to share an awesome artist with you guys that Neil introduced me to a year or so ago, Andy Kehoe. His stuff has a vague narrative that runs through it with thematic characters. His "Truth" character is my favorite. I find them all really profoundly effecting. His site keeps drawing me back either to show friends or just to look at the images again. I love the textures. I just bought prints of the first two as birthday presents to myself.

Finding hope in a clearing.

Greeting the simple life.

Truth kills another crow.

Truth wanders alone.

After the flood, Truth wavers.

Death comes for me on a beautiful autumn day.

No answers out here.

Tragedy in the woods.

War hovers over us again.

King crow grows rampant.

Noble voices lie hidden and mute.

Shee Atika

2007-09-13T01:07:00.000-07:00

Sitka 2007

Most of the people I talk to about Alaska immediately think of snow and ice, but southeastern Alaska is a temperate rainforest and the ocean dampens the wide temperature swings that happen further inland. While I was there, it rained every day, and the high temperature never deviated more than 2 degrees from 58°F. The summers are often sunny and a beautiful 70° and I heard that the weekend before I arrived was a great example (grumble grumble grumble.) The rain is the dominant feature of the climate. The hills and mountains are covered in acidic muskeg peat bogs that you can only effectively cross on the wooden planks that are laid out for the hiking trails. Walking off the trail is a good way to get your boots sucked off. Large fungi grow everywhere. One particular shelf fungus bears the common name "Chicken of the woods," because theoretically it tastes like chicken. I didn't try it on this trip, but on a previous trip we threw some in the spaghetti sauce after a long day of backpacking, and it was delicious. There are three main trees that grow in the area, Sitka spruce, yellow cedar, and western hemlock. The wood of Sitka spruce trees is used for piano soundboards and in some high end guitars. "Devil's club" is common in the underbrush, so called because it's stem is covered in spines. It's significant enough in Tlingit medicine that SEARHC (South East Alaska Regional Health Consortium) uses it in their logo. The large trees there take 300 years to grow, but when they fall they also can take 300 years to decay. In that time as "nurse logs" they provide nutrients for new trees to sprout right out of their bark.

Although the last visit was 9 years ago, I've been to Alaska several times before, but never this late in the summer. As a result this is the first time I've been there to witness the salmon spawning which was an incredible experience. The only thing I can think to compare it to is watching a thunderstorm overflow the storm sewers. Hundreds upon hundreds of salmon fill a stream that is in some places 3 inches deep. Mostly they just hover in place spending only the energy it takes to resist the current. At this point in their life cycle they are near death and very weak. At one point Roger reached into a stream and just picked one up out of the water. I reached in and held a few of them, and they barely struggled against me. The bears near the coast grow much larger than those in the interior because they can gorge themselves on salmon before hibernating every year.

The only really low tides while I was there happened before dawn, so I got up at 5:30 on Saturday to go explore the tidal pools. There is a small island right off of the coast of my Aunt's place called Magic Island, because at low tide there is a path that runs out to it from the beach. It's a great place to observe the intertidal wildlife. This was the first opportunity I've gotten to test out the waterproof case for my camera, so you'll see some neat pictures from that in the album. I discovered that morning that starfish are as entertaining for me at 23 years of age as they were when I was 13. One pycnapodia decided it was not going to let go of my hand under any circumstances. Maybe it thought my hand was the last thing saving it from being swept into the cold dark abyss. Maybe it thought something was imminently going to devour it if it let go. Maybe it thought that my hand tasted like a delicious rotting carcass. It probably didn't think anything at all, but I'm sure whatever Precambrian era these things evolved in didn't prepare it for dealing with curious little kids. After about 10 minutes of trying to coax it back into the water or onto a rock, I finally had to just tear some of it's little tube feet and pull it off. These things readily grow back whole arms so I'm not too torn up about it. Some salmon were feeding right next to the island and periodically leapt into the air.

The incredible thing to me about the whole area is how full of life it is. The morning I left we saw a pod of killer whales moving through the bay behind my aunt's house, a male, female, and two young. My aunt tells me that the island has one grizzly bear per square mile. It's hard to go a day without seeing a bald eagle. Ravens and various shorebirds are everywhere. On Friday Linda, Lee, and I drove 15 minutes up harbor mountain and within half an hour had picked more blueberries than I could eat in a month. Huckleberry bushes are everywhere, as are blackberries and salmon berries (like raspberries but orange.) I know that generations ago much of America was probably just as verdant, but by comparison to what exists now Alaska seems singularly blessed. The livelihood of everyone in the region is dependent on the vitality of the land; fishing, lumber, and tourism are the major industries. The wilderness cannot be ignored, and it infuses the local culture. Every mountain in view has a name that everyone knows. The local radio station is KCAW, Raven Radio. People regularly talk about the odd things they've seen local wildlife doing, and it's a rich set of stories. One thing that has often bothered me about living in Mountain View is how little the architecture and culture responds to the area in which it is built. Except for the ever-present sun, Mountain View could just as easily have been built in Iowa or New York. Green grass simply does not grow here on it's own, and we spend a lot of water to transplant it. Industrial salt evaporation pools block our access to the bay, and we don't know the names of our mountains. The Steven's Creek trail and Shoreline Nature Preserve are blessings, but in the residential and commercial areas the natural beauty of the area is ignored. I think the Stanford campus and much of San Francisco get it right architecturally, and I wish more places did.

The native population plays a large role in the culture of the Sitka. The name Sitka is an anglicized form of "Shee atika" which was the Tlingit name for the village (atika) in the region they called "Shee." Northwest coastal native art is possibly my favorite style of art, and Sitka has some great examples of it. The style is a wonderfully inventive blending of strict and elegant iconography with compositional experimentation. The components of the forms are attractive in themselves but the brilliance I see in it is in the ways the animistic figures are bent to fit within the geometric shapes of decorated objects or as compositions on their own. Sitka National Historic Park (totem park as I've always called it) has many very impressive totems on it's path through the woods. This picture should give you a sense of the scale of these things. The more naturalistic raven head at the bottom of this totem is modeled after the helmet that a famous Tlingit warrior wore into battle against the Russians. You can see the actual helmet on display at a nearby museum and it is still periodically used in ceremonies. Totems are still regularly made, and the going price is approximately $1,000 per foot if you'd like to commission one.

Roger has been running the Sitka Fine Arts Camp for 7 years now which teaches native arts amidst music, art, and drama. Recently he's become an advocate for the building of a brand new and beautiful theater at the local high school. It's nearly completed, most of what remains to be added is the expensive electronics. One neat bit of legislation in Alaska is that 1% of the budget of every public building project is required to be set aside for art to decorate it, and I really liked the installation at the theater. Roger took the opportunity of our visit to demonstrate the acoustics of the stage. You wouldn't guess it from the haircolor, but I'm related by blood to Roger, and not Jeanine. Somehow though we manage to keep those red-headed genes in the family. :) It was great finally getting to meet my first cousins once-removed. Mina is at an age where she can be entertained by me growling and chasing her around, or alternately by just providing a lap and arms as a jungle-gym for her to climb on. Both Anja and Mina love listening to stories, and the three of us took a few trips to see the fantastic things on Mulberry Street. Everyone I've told about my trip has asked me how my Aunt and Uncle came to live in Alaska, and I'm embarrassed to say that I don't know at all, but they've lived there for over thirty years.

Hopefully I'll be able to go back next year. It was a great experience.

Don't trash the 'nati.

2007-08-07T22:34:00.000-07:00

Weekend in Cincy

My journal entry about this past weekend was several pages, so I don't have much energy to write about it more here. Most of it was either too personal for me to talk about it on the internet or for others to want to read about. Picasaweb has a feature where you can place each of your pictures at a geographic location so that others can see them in context, and I've done that for this whole album so check it out! Several times as I was driving around this weekend I looked at familiar places and tried to bring up everything I could remember that happened there. It was pretty overwhelming, especially after living for a year in a place with so few memories attached to it. I suspect that eventually cameras and the internet will be able to do that for us. I've found already after a few years of having a digital camera that I remember events that I have pictures of more vividly and more often.

I ate enough of the Cincinnati-specific staples this weekend to tide me over until my next visit: goetta, cottage ham & beans, Graeter's icecream, and Skyline Chili. I've failed to explain what cottage ham is to many people before, so if you are still curious I've thoroughly documented it in the photos.

I'll try to get Eric to post the video of us jamming so you can see how I blistered my fingers, and how poorly I remember my blues scales. If I play guitar at all this week I'll be playing with a pick. This was a pretty musical weekend all around. I went to the Cincinnati Blues Festival on Friday and saw some of Eric's friends play in the Jon Justice Band. Neil gave me a CD that his brother produced with an artist named Sorie Kondi in Sierra Leone. You can see the music video for it to the left.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters.

2007-07-30T20:46:00.000-07:00

Tahoe National Forest, Warren Lake Trail, 7/28-29

I always forget how profound an effect natural beauty has on me until I experience it again first hand. I went backpacking this past weekend on a pretty rough trail near Lake Tahoe. Despite partying pretty hard on Friday night, getting up at 6AM on Saturday and sleeping restlessly Saturday night, I'm more awake than I can remember being on a usual Monday. I feel like I've cleared the cobwebs out of my lungs, the grit out of my joints and muscles, and most importantly the lint out of my thoughts and enthusiasm.

The trip was all around fantastic: great company, great views, hot sun, fresh air, cold clean water, and the most beautiful wildflowers I've ever seen. The most magical part of the weekend that you won't see represented in any of the pictures was how the valley we camped in looked at night. As the fire got low, the natural light took over. The moon wasn't high enough to see, but it was high enough and full enough to illuminate the cliffs on the far side of the valley. They looked phosphorescent.

You can see more pictures of me in Phil's album and Rico's album. Ginger worried a little beforehand that she'd be spoiling a "guy's trip." Little did she know that she'd be providing an audience. I'm not entirely sure what it is about backpacking that brings out the raunchy side of everyone's humor, but it probably has something to do with not showering and crapping in the woods. Eating half a pound of cheese and the resulting digestive effects help a bit too. It might also be that backpacking offers the most thorough escape possible in a vacation. You can leave your troubles at the trail head. All of us on this trip were single, two of us recently so. The therapeutic effect of it all can't be overstated. For me personally, the beauty was intoxicating. "My cup runneth over" is more perfect a description of the feeling than I can come up with on my own.

I've never been much of a religious person. My spirituality in the past has been limited to existential angst more than anything else. I've always said though that being in nature is the closest thing I get to transcendental experiences, and this weekend yet again confirmed it. I was humming "Amazing Grace" all down the trail, and the worlds of psalm 23 kept bubbling up as each new vista presented itself. This trip was exactly what I needed.

Surely beauty and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Salsa Rueda!

2007-06-08T19:12:00.000-07:00

Salsa Performance Dinner

At long last, the salsa club performed at Google on Thursday. Pics, pics, pics, and more pics. Also, someone from the crowd took a video of the advanced rueda group performing, which I was in. You can see it to the left. The style of salsa is Salsa Rueda. It's danced in a circle with rapid partner changes in time with the music. None of it is choreographed. The people in the circle know a set of moves, and one person calls out the next move to the group. It's a ton of fun if you can get people together in a club to do it. I'm not sure exactly what makes it so much more fun than partner dancing. Chen proposed the following hypothesis on Thursday. "When you are dancing as a couple you only get to laugh when you screw up. When you are doing a rueda you get to laugh when anyone in the circle screws up. You laugh more." The style of music is Timba, which is a Cuban style of salsa that features a lot of syncopation. I highly recommend "Marcando la Distancia" by Manolito Y Su Trabaho or "Esperanza" by Calle Real if you'd like to check it out.

The lot of us went to Cascal afterwards to celebrate and wish Iliana good luck in her life after Google. I'll be taking over her role of organizing the club, and I've got monstrously huge shoes to fill. The paella was great, as was the sangria, and the company made the evening. If people are up for it and I can manage to organize it, I hope to have another performance in 6 months or so.

Dobromir (my teacher) has graciously uploaded videos from the DVD of moves he made to google video. Here are a few of my favorites.

Full-sized Panoramas

2007-05-29T23:48:00.000-07:00

Picasa now allows me to upload panoramas without scaling them down, so I've uploaded mine. Here are some of the highlights.

I've also uploaded albums from the spring break backpacking trips of my sophomore and junior of college.

Spring 2004 Backpacking

Spring 2005 Backpacking

The Last Two Months

2007-05-27T09:41:00.000-07:00

Apologies for abandoning this blog for so long. Here's a short list of all the things that I wanted to write about or feel like I should have in the past two months and didn't get around to.

Lauren and I breaking up.

So it goes.

Breaking my camera.

This happened in the process of Charles and I inventing a new way to play pool. Never would I have suspected it was possible to play pool and get a cardiovascular workout at the same time. Sometime I'll post the rules. The Gods of Invention are petty, and they demand sacrifice. Such was the fate of my camera.

Visiting Linda, Lee, Christina, Steve, Jake, and Will in Wenatchee.

This was just awesome, and I contend that I have the cutest nephews ever. I would have pictures to prove it, but sadly . . .

Virginia Tech Shootings

There's only one thing of any significance I probably would have said. The people that died there died for the sake of freedom. In a society where we don't lock people up for writing disturbing things and where we allow people to have weapons, horrible events like this are inevitable. Those 32 people bore the cost of these freedoms for the rest of us.

Seeing Shivkumar Sharma and Zakhir Hussain.

Tabla is awesome.

Seeing Nickel Creek perform for probably the last time.

They've decided to go on indefinite hiatus after this tour, and I can't say I blame them. They've been playing together since they were eight. It wasn't the best of their concerts I've seen, and it wasn't nearly as eclectic as their concerts usually are, but it was a good time.

Salsa Dancing.

Considering this has been my primary recreational outlet since October, I should probably post something about it.

Canon's ten business days have been exhausted, so hopefully they'll ship me back my camera any day now, at which point I'll start having a lot more motivation to post.

Wildflowers

2007-03-16T23:44:00.000-07:00

Wildflowers

Putting your money to work.

2007-03-04T01:19:00.000-08:00

I just happened upon kiva.org this evening, and it seems like an amazing idea for a charity. The site allows you to finance small entrepreneurial ventures in developing countries through small loans that are often subeconomic for banks to take on at reasonable interest rates. This is a significant market failure because transactional costs inhibit the natural flow of money towards opportunity. At the cost of nothing more than the lost interest, and a little risk, you can help someone substantially improve their life.

The legacy of Dwight

2007-02-12T00:33:00.000-08:00

I hosted my first Sunday morning pancake brunch this morning! Aaron was kind enough to take some really nice pictures. I was too busy making a triple batch of pancakes. For those of you not familiar, Dwight rather-be-naked Bussman hosted a pancake brunch at his apartment almost every Sunday I was in college, and it was invariably a tasty, fun, and musical time. It's to him that I owe the inspiration, and to my grandma that I owe the excellent pancake recipe. His clothespin game also made a brief appearance, but since I only had one clothespin, it's unclear whether it's potential was limited by demand or supply. There were however some rousing games of Egyptian Rat Screw and Taboo, and I demonstrated that if nothing else, I can slap a table like an alpha-male gorilla.

Eleven people came over the course of the morning, and it was a great excuse to buy some more stuff at IKEA in preparation. I never thought I'd say these words in combination, but these are amazing stools. They fold up smoothly and take up a negligible amount of space, they are extremely solid, and they work equally well as impromptu drink/card/coffee tables as they do as chairs. Meenali contributed some Mangoes and grapes, Thu brought some syrup and made some delicious eggs. Dan brought Taboo. Nayema, through some otherworldly bending of the spacetime continuum, managed to do all of the dishes in 10 minutes. Clearly witchcraft. There is no other explanation.

My apartment handled the volume of people pretty well I think. I hope everyone had a good time, and I think I'll be doing this again. :)

Google Ski Trip 2007

In other news, the Google ski trip rocked. Let it be said that Google knows how to throw a friggin' party. I skied for 5 hours and danced for 5 hours on 6 hours of sleep, and followed that up with another 6 hours of sleep. Continuous delirious awesomeness all the way through.

Amazing Demonstrations of World Demographics

2007-02-01T00:34:00.000-08:00

This is an amazing demonstration of how data can come alive with some smart visualization to really give you a solid mental model for the subject matter. The software he's using is hosted by Google, called Gapminder. Gapminder is also the name of the non-profit that is creating these visualization tools built on top of the demographic data that the UN collects.

Comings and goings

2007-01-26T01:54:00.000-08:00

Lauren visits, my beard leaves, Lauren leaves, my mom visits, and leaves

Here are some new albums of pictures from Lauren's visit and My mom's visit. Lauren finally decided to exercise her veto power over my beard, and I wasn't sorry to see it go.

Most have you have probably seen this since I've sent it around, but the Google search for miserable failure is very different as of this afternoon. (For those not familiar, the first result used to be Bush's biography.) This was part of a ranking change that I worked on with a coworker to fix google bombs. It's gotten a little bit of press so far, on the Google webmaster blog, on my manager's blog, and on Search Engine Land. The wikipedia page was changed 3 hours after we saw the google blog post go live.

No matter how much experience I have with the internet, it still tickles me every time I do something that gets talked about in a language I don't understand, although the last time it happened it was a little more embarassing.

Christmas and xkcd

2007-01-04T23:31:00.000-08:00

Christmas was great this year, although a little awkward as I slowly transition from the status of poor college student to not-so-poor person with a job and all that that entails about gift giving. According to my grandma, the buckeyes I made this year were the "the most delicious things I've ever eaten," so if you were the recipient of some, I hope you enjoyed them, and if not, be jealous :b. My mom got me a Roomba, which is as I speak busily cleaning my apartment for me in preparation for Lauren visiting tomorrow. It's kinda like having a huge slow-moving cockroach that cleans for you. That might not sound like an endorsement, but remember I used to have madagascar hissing cockroaches as pets. A few other favorite gifts include a book of Charley Harper's artwork, a T-shirt that says "Google is Ruining Everything!" a laser level, a hand painted pot from Lauren, and lots of assorted candy and food.

I wanted to share with you all a webcomic I've been enjoying for the last few months called xkcd. The humor is best appreciated by geeks, and in particular, geeks with exposure to higher math, but there's something there for everyone. Here are a few of my favorites:

The Fountain

2006-12-04T21:44:00.000-08:00

You aren't likely to hear about The Fountain. It's not a very accessible film. Even most critics have been bewildered by it. I saw it last night however, and it has affected me and stayed with me more than any film I've seen since "Requiem for a Dream."

There are three parallel stories in the film. The central story involves a modern day couple, Tom and Izzie, played by Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. Izzi is dying of a brain tumor, and Tom is a neuroscientist desperately trying to save her life. Izzi is writing a novel called "The Fountain" about a conquistador that goes to South America to search for the Tree of Life, and this novel becomes the second story. The third story takes place at some point in the distant future. In it Tom hurtles through space towards a golden nebula inside of a transparent sphere. The first two stories take the form of his memories as he waits to arrive at his destination accompanied by a giant tree.

The acting in the movie is nothing short of incredible. Tom's grief is palpable, alternately ferocious and debilitating, and Izzi's shift from fear to acceptance of her imminent death is touching in contrast. Essentially, however, the movie is about images and themes: The ways we view death, the lengths we'll go to to prevent it, the way that coming to terms with the death of a loved one requires you to accept your own mortality, the conflict between working to save someone and being with them for their remaining time, and what grace, if any, there is after death. The images in the film are equally riveting: The sunlit tree of life at the summit of a Mayan temple, silhouetted tai chi in front of a field of stars, and many others. The music fits the mood and subject matter perfectly, a collaboration between the Kronos Quartet and Mogwai.

The connections between plots reveal themselves gradually, many parallel images create a sort of echoing continuity, and only at the end of the film is there a clear causal link between the stories. Most of the movie is as bleak and desperate as its images are beautiful. Ultimately however, the characters grow to accept and understand their mortality, and in a triumphant finale achieve what little material transcendence is possible in a physical world. It's not an easy movie, and you might not like it, but I guarantee you'll remember it long after you forget every other movie you've seen this year.

I'm Wiiless!

2006-11-19T17:38:00.000-08:00

Charles, Nayema, and I went Wii hunting. When we got to Toys 'R' Us at 11 last night there were over 90 people in line for 80 units. We got to Walmart at 7AM. I was person 16 and they had 14 units (picture 1). We went to Target and there were 160 people in line for 70 units (picture 2). We went to Best Buy, and they had already handed out tickets for all of the 60 units they had (picture 3). The going rate of spots in line was $70, at least according to the one transaction I witnessed.

New photo albums

2006-11-16T03:07:00.000-08:00

Summer, 2006

Hawaii

Pictures from Hawaii and this past summer for anyone that missed them.

Happy Halloween!

2006-10-29T01:16:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween!

It really doesn't feel like Halloween without chilly weather and the smell of leaf mold. On the other hand, this is without question the scariest pumpkin I have ever carved.

Lauren's Visit

2006-10-24T01:59:00.001-07:00

Lauren's visit

When it's been a hot day on the coast, fog starts rolling in right before sunset.

After Hours Productivity

2006-10-18T21:41:00.000-07:00

Through a rigorous scientific process I have determined that the distribution of balls in the Google ball pit does not match the distribution of colors in the Google logo.

Rich's Wedding and the Cincinnati Nature Center

2006-10-18T01:07:00.000-07:00

Rich's wedding

I went to Cincinnati this past weekend for my cousin Rich's wedding. It was really wonderful. :)

I've got longer videos of the dance that I'm uploading to google video at the moment. I'll post them here when they finish uploading.

Update: here they are. 1 2 3 4

Cincinnati Nature Center

On Sunday after a brunch at my Aunt's, my mom and I along with my other aunt and uncle went to the Cincinnati Nature Center. Here are some pictures from that. I missed the height of the leaves changing by about a week, but I saw enough of it to tide me over.

The video in that album is of woolly aphids devouring a limb of a beech tree. The only thing that eats them is a particular type of carnivorous caterpillar.

There are a lot of wonderful things at the nature center. In the spring the frog ponds are all suitably full of frogs and lily pads for them to sit on. The larger lakes are great places to watch fish and turtles come up to the surface to gulp down any offered food, or to watch turtles sunning themselves on a log. In the summer the prairies are full of birds and the sounds of locusts. In the winter the clearings in front of the bird blinds fill up with birds, and they are my favorite part. When I'm in a bird blind I feel like I'm simultaneously kneeling at an ancient forest shrine and watching the lost boys have a food fight. Together, the two effects ensure that I always leave refreshed. I think I like Charley Harper's art for a similar reason. A lot of artists capture the grandeur and beauty of nature, but I've seen few that simultaneously capture it's silliness.

Mark Warner is going to be president.

2006-10-06T01:05:00.000-07:00

I don't think there's a politician alive with more ideas or credibility. Spread the word.

Garrison Keillor on Habeas Corpus

2006-10-05T20:39:00.000-07:00

Garrison Keillor had some powerful words to say about the recent Senate action. There should be an editorial like this in every newspaper in the country.

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor. Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns, Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig, Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Inhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyl, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Lott, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar, Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu, Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.

"It's a free country"

2006-09-28T22:08:00.000-07:00

Most of you are probably aware of the recent suspension of Habeas Corpus . Senator Chris Dodd said it at least as well as I could:

This longstanding tradition of our country about to be abandoned here is one of the great, great mistakes that I think history will record.

Reading about this for me is like gaping at a car wreck that you just can't turn away from. Here's how the vote went in the House and the Senate. In the past six years I've gotten used to the feeling of being embarrassed by my government, but I can no longer console myself that the executive is merely incompetent. I wonder how long it will take the phrase, "It's a free country," to fall out of circulation. It feels inadequate to mention any single notable and applicable quotation; There are so many, from Benjamin Franklin, George Orwell, Winston Churchill. What's amazing to me is that with the entire range of quotable and historic philosophers arrayed against this type of legislation, too few senators had the courage to stand against it to mount even a filibuster. I joined the ACLU today. Freedom apparantly can't protect itself.

Grandma Hartsock's 90th Birthday

2006-09-25T21:33:00.000-07:00

Grandma's 90th

Sep 23, 2006 - 14 Photos

I don't think this past weekend could have possibly been more eventful or emotional. Here are a few of the things I did:

Flew into Cincinnati on the red-eye friday night (Exhausting)
Realised that I had lost my whole set of keys somewhere during my flights. (Sad)
Surprised my Grandma on her 90th birthday dinner and saw her gasp and burst into tears. (Happy)
Beatboxed under Neil's flow. (Happy)
Rushed home at 2am because water was pouring from the kitchen ceiling. (Sad, Exhausting)
Watched the Bengals almost lose against the Steelers and then finally pull off a win. (Happy, Exhausting)
Discovered that my grandma finds "America: The Book" hilarious. (Happy)
Watched a performance of "Of Mice and Men" at the Cincinnati Playhouse. (Sad)
Flew out of Cincinnati at 7AM. (Exhausting)
Found my keys at the security desk in SFO. (Happy)

Red River Gorge Info

2006-08-23T21:31:00.000-07:00

A great trip

Kathryn asked for some information on Red River Gorge, so I annotated this map showing most of what I know about it. It seemed like the type of thing that ought to be on the internet. The blue line shows a four day backpacking trip I took with Rolli and Lauren in the spring of 2005, and the blue Xs show approximately where we camped. I've taken the trails that cut across sections of that southern loop, and they aren't as pretty as the rest of the park, but there are some neat views in places. The map underneath is from kywilderness.com. I definitely recommend chewing on some fresh wintergreen if you get the chance.

I'd recommend the pulled cream candy in the gas station outside of the park, but the woman who made them died this past year and her son couldn't keep up the business. It's the end of an era. They still sell Ale 8 however, so if you take a trip there and this map helps you, drink one for me. :)

A Proud Parent

2006-08-18T21:19:00.000-07:00

This is what I look like in awe.

Those of you that have seen my living quarters over the last year have probably noticed my recently acquired obsession with plants. Though I'm sure "The Little Shop of Horrors"* is partly to blame, I credit my grandmother with getting me hooked. She gave me a pothos plant during my sophomore year of college and a jade plant the year following. I mothered both obsessively despite them not needing much attention, and the dropped leaves of that jade plant have since, with a little coaxing, spawned plants for pretty much anyone around me who wanted one. I was content with those until this past spring break when Rolli, Lauren, and I visited Hawaii.

The wet parts of Hawaii are naturally hospitable places for plants. If it's not a cactus, it will probably grow there. Every nook and cranny is covered with vegetation, so you can imagine the results when someone actively tries to grow things. The botanical garden north of Hilo, Hawaii is an amazing place, and it inspired me to buy ~$30 worth of bulbs and seeds in the gift shop. As a result, I now have ~20 young guava trees growing on my deck, and that's just the beginning. (If you want one you can probably have one once they are more established. I've got no shortage.) I've gotten to the point that I no longer throw away fruit pits. I start thinking about how the plant that just fed me poured huge amounts of energy into producing this little seed, and that the least I can do is plant it. Even if the fruit goes bad, I've been known to brave the mold and mushy fermenting fruit flesh and plant the pit anyways.

Baby Pictures.

Bringing my plants out to California was difficult as you can probably imagine. To start with, California is picky about what you bring in because of the significance of their fruit and nut industry. One diseased strawberry could financially ruin a whole lot of people. Thankfully, the Ohio department of agriculture has a guy that for $20 will come inspect your plants to certify that they are free of pests and disease. My plants are now papered and have all of the rights and obligations belonging thereto.

Secondly, there's the whole problem of transport. My car (see a few posts back) was pretty well equipped for this, but it was still complicated to keep terra cotta pots from breaking while keeping them accessible enough to water and move around when necessary. I shuttled them between the back seat and my tent whenever we went for an excursion during the day and were taking one car, and set them out in the sunlight whenever I could.

Unfortunately, upon successfully moving into my apartment in Mountain View, I became stupid. I thought, "Hey, my plants have had very little sunlight for the last ten days, I should put them all out on the porch 'cause they could probably use a lot of it." We left for 3 hours to go run some errands. They were all dead when we returned, or at least that's what it looked like. My peperomias were covered in dead leaves and burned at their base, my kahili ginger's leaves were scorched, the stems of my pothos plants were blackened, my other gingers were burned at the base and there were dead leaves all over everything else. This was pretty devastating as you can probably imagine. These plants were the result of months of love and attention, practically pets, and they were all half dead from one bit of stupidity. It had been an exceptionally hot day for Mountain View. The black soil in their pots heated up as it soaked up the sun and killed all of the tissue just above the surface of it. They were effectively nipped off.

I've been coaxing them back to life for the last few weeks, and been pretty successful. My kahili ginger is sprouting new stalks, as are my avocados. My guavas perked right back up, and I'm restarting my peperomias from the branches that I cut from the scorched bases. I'm trying to restart my smaller gingers from their root balls, but I'm not sure if I'll be successful. The worst hit plant was probably my variegated pothos which looked after three hours in the sun like it had spent 3 months in the compost. Every last little bit of stem was black. I cut a few living bits and tried to plant them, but they didn't last long. About a week ago, however, I noticed a tiny little bit of green poking up from a part of my pothos planter. It's currently struggling back from the roots after losing the entire body of the plant. New gardeners? try a pothos. You can kill every bit of living tissue above ground, and it still just might survive.

The most recent addition to my happy plant family are six seedlings of giant sequoias that poked up in the last few days. They started from seeds about the size of the bits of paper that a hole punch produces. The largest, about a centimeter tall, has its first soft pale needles unfolding with its tiny stem. Its a pretty amazing feeling to watch the birth of something that might live longer than Christianity. Some of the trees in Sequoia National Park have been around for 3,000 years.

Speaking of which, Lauren's camera survived the sand and was available to take pictures of the sequoias. She (like all the cool people are doing) has also put her pictures up on PicassaWeb. Check it out.

Here's the list of Common and species names that I prepared for the official from the Ohio Department of Agriculture:

Common Name	Scientific Name
Pink Ginger	Alpinia purpurata
Kahili Ginger	Hedychium gardnerianum
Red Ginger	Alpinia purpurata
Yellow Plumeria	Plumeria rubra
Guava	Psidium guajava
Macadamia	Macadamia integrifolia
Ti Plant	Cordyline terminalis
Christmas Cactus	Schlumbergera ...
Peperomia	Peperomia ...
Pothos	Epipremnum pinnatum
Jade plant	Crassula ovata
African violet	Saintpaulia ...
Avocado	Persea americana
Nightblooming Cereus	Epiphyllum oxypetalum

* "The Little Shop of Horrors" is a musical by Howard Ashman and Alan Menkin, whom you may know as the writers of the music and lyrics for "The Little Mermaid," "Aladdin," and "The Beauty and the Beast." The story follows a poor worker at a plant shop who finds an alien Faustian plant in a local market. The plant offers him fame and fortune in exchange for a steady supply of blood to drink, which he eventually must kill people to obtain. I listened to our vinyl of it on a weekly basis as a toddler, and according to the opening narration, the plant was found in the market on my birthday, "THE TWENTY THIRD DAY OF THE MONTH OF SEPTEMBER, IN AN ERA VERY SIMILAR TO OUR OWN."

Pictures From The Road to California

2006-08-17T01:26:00.000-07:00

Trying to narrow my pictures down to a few representatives just wouldn't cut it, so here are the ~100 best in the beta version of Google's PicassaWeb. It was a great trip, and I really don't think there's an ugly state in the union.

Trip out west

Jul 16, 2006 - 97 Photos

You'll notice that there aren't any pictures in there of Giant Sequoia National Park. You'll also notice that some of the last pictures in the album are of giant mountains of pink sand and my camera in the midst of it. I actually did manage to take it all apart and clean the sand out of it, but my souldering skills weren't quite up to the task of getting it working again.

Other peoples pictures will have to suffice.

I'd write a little about the sights on the trip, but its too late at the moment, and all I could really do is bore you with superlatives anyways. Just take a trip sometime and go see Dead Horse Point and Sequoia National Park, and while you're at it drive around southern Utah for a while stopping at scenic points. They've got a place called "Panorama County," and they aren't kidding. Skip the Grand Canyon unless you've got the time to hike down into it. It's cool, but there's cooler.

Hooray for Internet Access!

2006-08-15T23:02:00.000-07:00

Behold the glory and the power of the fat pipe. After 3 weeks of waiting for an appointment, 4 hours waiting for a technician that didn't show, and 5 hours waiting for one that finally did, I finally have internet access. I'll post more later. I am now in California and I just finished the second day of my third week at Google. Unfortunately my camera is broken, so pictures of the new place will take a little while. Thankfully it broke late into the road trip so I have pictures from most of that. I'll post some later.

Wheeeelz!

2006-07-04T22:42:00.000-07:00

I am now the proud owner of a dark blue 2006 Scion Xb!
From the research I did, I don't think any other car would have fit my needs nearly as effectively.

30 city / 34 highway MPG
It's a foot and a half shorter than my mom's Corolla for easy parking.
I can sit up straight without being in danger of hitting my head on the ceiling, which is rare in cars this size.
There is enough room to comfortably take three people backpacking, and you could probably uncomfortably take four.
The visibility in the car is fantastic. The view from the driver's seat is virtually unobstructed in every direction, and you can see all four corners of the car which comes in handy for parking. The front windshield is panoramic.
The back seats are the most comfortable I've ever sat in, and are actually usable when I'm driving which is also rare in cars this size.
An auxiliary audio input comes standard in the form of an 8th inch audio jack under the parking brake, so no matter what you use to play music you can pipe it directly through the car speakers with nothing more than a cord.

The only real flaw I've found in the design so far is that the central cabin light puts the trunk area in shadow and there isn't a separate trunk light. I also wish car companies would start accomodating Nalgene's in their cupholders, but that's probably too much to ask until people stop drinking Coke. The car also isn't exactly aerodynamic, which doesn't produce as much noise as you might expect (it's actually pretty quiet,) but is probably the reason why it gets 34 MPG on the highway rather than something in the low 40s.

Fantastic Weekend in Pittsburgh

2006-07-04T21:54:00.000-07:00

I spent my last weekend living on this side of the country in Pittsburgh visiting Lauren. We saw Water (which I highly recommend,) explored Frick Park, painted pottery for eachother, hung out with Ashleigh, visited Lauren's Uncle for a 4th of July party, and met up with Jules (former Soundbytes director) who happened to be in town for the weekend. Good times all around. Awwwwww. :) Soundbytes director lovin' Ashleigh's makes-me-oh-so-jealous apartment. Lauren, pretty in Oriental Express.

Cincinnati Sunday with Lauren

2006-06-11T20:32:00.000-07:00

The Krohn Conservatory is having their annual butterfly show. The deal is $6 to watch a horde of screaming kids pointing at butterflies and their parents hoisting them up in the hopes that a butterfly will land on them and make a good picture. The difference in oxygen levels between the jungle room of the conservatory and the room full of butterflies was palpable, but it was worth it just to see the atlas moth. Atlas moths are huge. A blooming Bonzai. Aglamesis' "French Quarter Petite" sundae is almost as big as an atlas moth but it tastes a lot better.

More Gorge Pictures

2006-06-04T00:07:00.000-07:00

Playing with fire Pink mountain laurel Millipede Fire

Red River Gorge with Neil

2006-06-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

Neil and I took a trip down to Red River Gorge this week as a respite from our various responsibilities. Despite the heat and humidity it was refreshing and a good time. We grilled some great pork, hiked around, talked, played with fire. Unfortunately we missed the Rhododendrons blooming by a week or so, but the mountain laurel was still around and gorgeous. Mountain laurel by the trail Neil under Gray's Arch The Red River Girls swimming in the Red River