Sunday, March 27, 2005

Easter

I had two goosebump moments yesterday. I went to the Andy
Warhol museum downtown. There was an exhibit of photographs
of dancers. Everyone I've heard of (which is admittedly not
many) was there: Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Martha Graham, Mark
Morris, Jose Limon, Alvin Ailey, Cunningham/Cage together
(that was a beautiful one), Cunningham in a beautiful solo
dance shot. It was totally breathtaking. I finally started
liking (as opposed to "appreciating") Warhol's
work as well. His "Flowers", a dark green acrylic grass
with bright huge fluorescent flowers was awesome.
I even got into Marilyn and Jackie this time.
The other one was watching "The Company" at night. The
movie was fantastic and real (in the California, "that's
real, man" sense), and the Joeffrey dancers were fabulous.
Even Neve knocked my socks off. She's a beautiful dancer!
The injury scenes were so well done. Understated, but the
understatement enhanced the emotion of the whole thing. The
relationship web was also true to my experience. Highly
recommended!
Now it's Easter. I'm writing a talk and practicing Haydn string
quartets. I had an Eckhart moment while practicing. I'm
trying to transpose all the parts on both Bb and A
clarinet. Some clefs come easy, treble (obviously), bass,
alto (from all those years of playing C clarinet parts on
Bb). Some are coming along: mezzo-soprano for bass on Bb,
Some are not: baritone (for playing a C bass part on A
clarinet). I'm thinking of how cool it will be to be fluent
in all those clefs so I can play whatever part I want on
whatever clarinet makes the key easier. But I found myself
missing the present moment, enjoying the harmonies, the
physical sensation, while my brain is bouncing around trying
to decide what to do next. I continually forget that I'm
perfect already. That I won't be a happier person when I
can do all those transpositions. (I remember Cindi Lee's
comment in yoga class, "Being able to put your head on your
shins will not make you a happier person") It was a nice
reminder of that simple lesson.
Plans for the day: a massive optimization, half a talk,
website maintenance, dodecahedral plates spinning,
databases reading finished. That's all! And I still have
American Splendor checked out from Blockbuster. Hmmm...

Saturday, March 26, 2005

The Carnegie International

I managed to make it to the
Carnegie International
exhibit last weekend. I'm
enjoying modern art so much more in my old age! It's one of
the oldest modern exhibits in the country. Founded in the
late 19th century by Andrew himself, it's had the work of
all the big European and American artists (that nowadays hang
solidly in the permanent collections of big museums) when
it was still new (and mostly hated). Some of my favorites:
Mary Cassatt, Willem de Kooning, Edward Hopper, Camille
Pissarro, George Rouault, John Singer Sargent, and Richard
Serra.

This time I got museum goose bumps at two works. One was by

Julie Mehretu
. There were 3 huge canvases, about 8' X
5'. The most impressive to me I describe as Jackson Pollack
with a pencil. It's a wonderful angular and geometric
chaos. I kept coming back to that one. I wish I had taken
a picture, but the lines wouldn't have come out well due to the
angular camera skew.




The second was a hexagonal room on which each wall was
projected a video of scenes of a man and woman walking
(individually) on the streets of Paris. There was a Phillip
Glass soundtrack playing in the background, which I
immediately recognized, but have no idea where I've heard it
before. The artist's name is href="http://www.cmoa.org/international/the_exhibition/artist.asp?rondinone">
Ugo Rondinone The work is called Roundelay. I just
felt myself walking in the countless cities where I've
wandered, always in a different state of mind, after
different things, thinking or not thinking, directed or
undirected. I wondered what those people were thinking,
where they were going. The streets were empty, stark,
severe. The Glass music was hypnotic. One of the first
times I've thought his music was perfectly appropriate.





I'm so lucky to get to experience this kind of work! I
still remember my favorite exhibit of all time. Chuck Close
at the Met. But that's a whole nother story.

With Appreciation and Gratitude.

Sean

PS: (How curious.. "a whole nother"... Never seen that written,
probably because it's wildly wrong. Ah, the beauty of
sinning with the spoken word...)

Friday, March 25, 2005

Natassa

Natassa talked about her PhD work today in class. She
was a student of DeWitt's at Wisconsin. She was interested
in (architectural) resource utilization of processors
running database programs. She found some amazing stuff,
eg. that the processor was only doing useful work at most
%50 of the time, the rest spent mostly waiting for memory
requests. She had a nice comment in the middle of the
lecture somewhere. To paraphrase:

"It was the most miserable time of my PhD work. I had just
done all sorts of tests and generated millions of numbers.
I was just kind of staring at them for weeks. I had no idea
what I was looking for, but I KNEW there was something
interesting going on."

And she found the interesting stuff! I like her. She's
such a database person.
I was talking about an idea for a theorem database with her
yesterday, and all through my exposition she's firing ways
of how to represent the knowledge in relational tables.
Pretty funny how different people approach the same
problem.

"A common mistake people make when trying to design
something completely foolproof is to underestimate the
ingenuity of complete fools." -- Douglas Adams

Friday, March 18, 2005

Bach

I've been out of it lately. I forgot to go to my chorus
rehearsal on Wednesday, and almost forgot to go to my
recitation. I'm not even going to imagine Bob's reaction if
I would have forgot to go. I almost forgot the chorus
rehearsal tonight, even though I've been reminding myself
all day. I don't know what's up.
The rehearsal was painful from 7 until 9:30. I didn't
want to be there, I felt terrible about missing the last
rehearsal, and I wanted to go home. We were even singing
music I don't like. Some Renaissance and Baroque crap.
Finally, at 9:30, after 2.5 hours of rehearsal, my back sore
from standing the whole time, and totally irritated, we sing
a 5 minute Bach cantata, Unser Leben Ist Ein Schatten.
"Our life is a shadow". It almost drove me to my knees it
was so beautiful. Simple, elegant, clever, expressive. I
have no idea why we sing anything else. It is just magical.
I recalled Beethoven's remark about Bach.
"Not Brook (Bach) but Ocean should have been his name". It
made my day, my week even, and gave me hope. Thank you,
Ocean.

Friday, March 11, 2005

MIA

It's been some time since my last entry. The main reason
for this is that I was working like a maniac trying to
finish the Hol-Light implementation of the real closed
fields decision procedure by the CADE deadline of last
Friday (which turned into Monday morning due to the kindness
of the organizer). It was an awesome work effort on my
part. I don't think I've ever been so productive. I would
wake up early, around 6, and work on it until I had
something at school. Then would return immediately from
school and work until 2 or so. This continued for nearly 2
weeks. I finished! The final example of the paper
completed while I was sleeping on Sunday morning. It felt
very good to have such focus and drive. It's funny what
deadlines can do. As a result though, there's a hole in my
electronic memory, so I'm going to try to fill some gaps.

What's happened in the last 2 weeks? The paper was a nice
accomplishment. John Harrison wrote the bulk of it, as I
was frantically working on the code. It was great working
with him, and I hope to keep our collaboration going. Right
now the biggest problem is the ridiculous inefficiency of my
implementation. Correctness was hard enough though, so I'm
a little hesitant about diving into an optimization phase.
Ahh, back to the past.

I went home for my dad's 80th birthday party! It was a
surprise. I flew home on Thursday night. I slept at
Barnaby's place in SF, then took Caltrain to my mom's in
SJ. On Friday I put together an iPhoto slideshow of a bunch
of old pictures of my dad that I had scanned in the week
before. It came out really nice! There was some good
music, (Five for Fighting, Edgar Meyer and John Larson) and
I made some little comment slides that explained some of the
pictures. It was a great deal of work, but I'm so
wonderfully happy I did it. Anyway, I got to the house
where the party would be an hour early and hid in the
upstairs bedroom. I was still editing the slideshow, so the
time went quickly. When everyone had arrived, there were
some short speeches celebrating my dad, and then I was
ushered in by his great friends and, after some surprised
hugs, we all watched the slide show. The party was really
fun. My dad likes gambling games a lot, so the theme of the
party was "McLaughlin's Games". When you arrived, you were
given a bag full of 80 "McLaughlin Nuggets" (pennies). Then
there were a bunch of game stations (21,Craps, Roulette,
Poker, etc.) where you could attempt to win other people's
nuggets. The one with the most nuggets at the end of the
night got to choose first from the pile of door prizes.
Everyone got a prize, and they ranged from exotic beers, to
nice wines, to flowers (for the ladies) and nice chocolate.
It was such a good time! There was even air hockey upstairs
for the more physically minded. It was a magical night.

The trip was very short. I left on Sunday night. I was
suppose to leave at midnight, so I went to the city early to
have dinner at the dive Indian place around the corner from
Barnaby's. We stuffed ourselves, and in the process of
talking lost track of time and I hopped on BART just a few
minutes too late. I got to my gate at SFO 5 minutes late,
and I had to be put on a different plane. The redirected
flight went through Houston, so I wanted to call Rodolfo,
but it was 5AM when I got there, and I didn't have the heart
to wake him up. In the Houston airport I saw potentially
the worst realistic sculpture I've ever seen in my life.
It's George Bush, "casually" throwing a jacket over his
shoulder. It was so bad I took a picture:




Immediately after that assault, I found this humorous scene
on the departure screen.



Got Windows?

I finished Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War. It was
mostly wonderful. I can't imagine a life in the trenches of
WWI, and am I'll equipped to say anything wise about war or
suffering. It's still in the queue of books awaiting quote
entry, so I'll leave with something from Aeschylus, a quote
that is on the tomb of Robert Kennedy. It is perhaps the
soul of Helprin's novel. And indeed, many others.

"In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop
upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."