Jewish MP (member of parliament) against the Gaza violence

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGuYjt6CP8

Great idea for running in winter

http://www.skyrunner.com/screwshoe.htm

Don't buy Horizon organic milk

These are just factory farms without antibiotics.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_4746.cfm

Bankers finding new jobs

Bankers as comedians.

“Everyone seems to have something else they would rather be doing than their 9-to-5,” he said. “I think that people who are losing their jobs are being forced to pursue their dreams and, in a way, are being liberated from the golden handcuffs of Wall Street and venturing into something that might fulfill them.”

Good review of good movies

Krzysztof Kieslowski's Trois Colours

Should you buy books on Ebay?

Some interesting consequences.  I don't know what to think of this.

Deadweight loss

Interesting article about deadweight loss at Christmas.  I've always thought gift certificates or cards are a bad present.  I was wrong.

Intrigued by this mismatch between wants and gifts, in 1993 Joel Waldfogel, then an economist at Yale University, sought to estimate the disparity in dollar terms. In a paper* that has proved seminal in the literature on the issue, he asked students two questions at the end of a holiday season: first, estimate the total amount paid (by the givers) for all the holiday gifts you received; second, apart from the sentimental value of the items, if you did not have them, how much would you be willing to pay to get them? His results were gloomy: on average, a gift was valued by the recipient well below the price paid by the giver.

The most conservative estimate put the average receiver's valuation at 90% of the buying price. The missing 10% is what economists call a deadweight loss: a waste of resources that could be averted without making anyone worse off. In other words, if the giver gave the cash value of the purchase instead of the gift itself, the recipient could then buy what she really wants, and be better off for no extra cost.

Non-cash gifts from extended family were found to be least efficient

Perhaps not surprisingly, the most efficient gifts (those with the smallest deadweight loss) were those from close friends and relations, while non-cash gifts from extended family were the least efficient. As the age difference between giver and recipient grew, so did the inefficiency. All of which suggests what many grandparents know: when buying gifts for someone with largely unknown preferences, the best present is one that is totally flexible (cash) or very flexible (gift vouchers).

Obama and Warren

A cogent post about Obama's choice of Rick Warren for the inauguration.

By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama’s disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It’s no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history.

Obama and exercise

I just keep liking this guy more and more.

It's a schedule he started as a 22-year-old student at Columbia University in New York, and it immediately transformed him. In his 1995 autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," Obama said he was a casual drug user and an underachiever until he decided to start running three miles each day. He stopped staying out late, fasted on Sundays and became a voracious reader, spending most of his time alone in his apartment reading classic literature and philosophical texts.

Physical fitness yielded mental fitness, Obama decided, and the two concepts have been married in his mind ever since.

Drugs and doctors

A damning book review, written by an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, against the medical profession and pharmaceutical industry. 

The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of TheNew England Journal of Medicine.

The medical profession is truly losing the trust of the public.  Consider the rising rate of people opting out of immunizing their children.  After reading articles like this, you can almost sympathize.

Anthony McGill is playing at Obama's inauguration

A great clarinetist I went to high school with is playing at Obama's inauguration with Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman. 

Bubbles

Fascinating article about financial bubbles and human psychology, complete with experiments.

Austenbook

http://www.much-ado.net/austenbook/

Mouse euthanasia

There was a mouse in my kitchen sink this morning.  I trapped it in a yogurt container.  I'm not sure what to do with it.  I looked up "humanely kill mice".  I found a surprising amount of literature.  Apparently freezing (I was going to just leave it outside in the trash) is not recommended.  Apparently it's very painful.  I think I'm going to try a small animal gas chamber.  Seems simple enough.  Kind of like a science experiment too.  I don't have the guts to grab it by the tail and bang it against a table, as most people suggest.

.....

Hmm.  Not sure I'd recommend that method.  I just put the yogurt container in a big ziploc bag with a glass of vinegar.  Then I undid the lid, and dropped about a tablespoon of baking soda into the vinegar. I was very surprised to see how much CO2 came out.  The gallon ziploc was full within about 5 seconds. It definitely did the trick, but perhaps it's a little elaborate.  I should have just put a mousetrap in the sink.

Another interesting Detroit bailout article

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/business/economy/10leonhardt.html?hp

New Yale online courses

These look great.

Funny

From the Wikipedia article on AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML):

"Despite the name, the use of JavaScript and XML is not required, and they do not have to be used asynchronously."

svn peg revisions

I needed a peg revision for the first time today.  I deleted a directory from a repository, say foo at revision X, and created a new one with the same name.  Then I deleted the new one and wanted the old one back.  I'm now at revision Y.  When I tried to

svn copy -r X foo ./foo

I got the error

svn: File not found: revision Y, path 'foo'

What a strange error message!  Why revision Y?  Anyway, svn is confused.  The solution is

svn copy -r X foo@X ./foo

Alice Walker to Obama

http://www.theroot.com/id/48726

Bhargava

A nice interview with Princeton mathematician and musician Manjul Bhargava

Bach Cantata Pilgrimage

"Study Bach.  There you will find everything."  -Brahms. 
"Not Brook (Bach), but Ocean should have been his name." -Beethoven
 
I recently got ahold of about a third of the Bach cantatas from John Elliot Gardiner's "Pilgrimage" project.  It is supurb, far better than the other two sets of cantatas I've heard before.  I've written before about cantata BWV 106, which is impeccable in this collection.  I'm also listening to some I've never heard before.  BWV 33 jumps out at me as another great example.  The rousing first movement theme culminates in a simple hemiola, that is so incredibly effective I smile just thinking of it.  I don't often wish I played the oboe, but I certainly do now.

Why a Detroit bailout is a terrible idea.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122669746125629365.html

I agree completely, especially with the oft given rationale that it would allow GM to retool to build fuel efficient vehicles.  "It's like asking the cigarette industry to help with cancer research".

Update:

Here's another one.  I hadn't heard of Leyland.  Perhaps the WTO may actually keep us from doing something stupid this time, rather than keeping us from protecting sea turtles. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/business/economy/18car.html?em

Update:

Yet another, from Mitt Romney.  I haven't agreed with anything he's said since his presidential campaign.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html?em

KDE menu bar

If the menu bar disappears in a KDE app, you can recover it by hitting Ctrl-m.

Coach

Great coach story.

Inspiring guy

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/sports/othersports/14haverford.html?em

Malik Rahim

Last night I went to an awards dinner for the Thomas Merton Center.  The main award recipient was Malik Rahim, a community organizer from New Orleans.  The stories he had to tell were horrific, but the speech overall was empowering.  Mostly he stressed getting involved in social justice work where you are. 

Cannonballs

A nice essay from an inspiring outdoorsman.

Like, totally

Nice article about using "like" in modern English, and how it's really not that bad.

The Irrelevant South

A very upsetting article about the racist South.  The only silver lining is that the South is becoming increasingly irrelevant in politics.  It's almost a shame how much they will benefit from the expected expansion of infrastructure and social services.

Evil

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

-Solzenitzen, The Gulag Archipelago

The Problems of Philosophy

I'm reading The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell.  It's a pleasing introduction to some of the basic problems.  The jargon is minimal, and the explanations are, I think, as clear as could be hoped for.  The final chapter, The Value of Philosophy, which I read first for its catching title, is a good place to begin if you are tempted to think, as I was, that philosophy has little of value to offer us today.

iPod fiasco

My iPod had a little accident while I was home in CA for my grandfather's funeral.  It was raining for the first time in six months, and I happened to be out doing errands.  Somehow, my iPod managed to fall out of my pocket while I was getting in the car.  The door closed on the cord though, and I didn't notice.  I then proceeded to drag the ipod along the pavement and through big puddles for 3 blocks or so.  Surprinsingly, the ipod structure didn't look damaged, but all the water did its work, and after a few death throes (flickers), it became a no longer I-functioning body.

I got a new iPod the next day.  Besides CoverFlow, which is truly annoying, the new iPod nanos are nice.  I also discovered a good auction site, uBid, something like ebay, but for new things.  There I got a Macally mirage cover for it.  It's very nice.

Unison Aborted

I use the Unison file synchronizer extensively.  I was very disappointed when I was recently trying to copy a directory structure I copied from a cd lately.  I ran unison, and it failed with the sole message "Aborted".  No file or directory name, no hint to the problem.  After much frustration, I finally found the problem.  The Windows machine that made the cd had for some reason created a bunch of files beginning with a ".".  (perhaps for indexing purposes?)  After deleting these files with

find . -name "\.*" -exec rm -f {} \;    

Unison worked correctly.  Why couldn't they issue a reasonable error message?

Update:

Turns out those '.' files were "Resource forks", a Mac HFS relic.   If you
add "rsrc = false" to the profile, it will ignore the offending files.

 

Amazing security attack

From Bruce Schneier's blog: Monitoring keyboard radiation

Methane Clathrates

Yet another frightening aspect of global warming.

What an idiot

From today's NY times article. 
 

As is often the case when stocks fall steeply, the market is starting to entice some investors, many of whom say they have never seen prices so low, to buy. Among them is Mr. Grantham, the GMO chairman.

After years of warning that stocks were unreasonably overpriced, he said he now believed they were below their fair value and had been slowly acquiring holdings in blue-chip companies.

“It’s a very nerve-racking time to be a value investor,” Mr. Grantham said. “You put a little bit into the market, and the next day you think, ‘What an idiot, what an idiot.’ ”

After hearing Warren Buffet and Jeremy Siegel say "buy now", I thought, who am I to disagree with those guys?  At least Mr. Grantham can made me smile.

Voting machines II

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/22/votes

Why oh why can't we have a better voting infrastructure?

Voting machines I

OK, this is a little better than nothing.  It is still pathetic.  Instead of congratulating themselves on a test of 10 machines, they should start to take this seriously and require paper trails and random post
election audits.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08296/921755-470.stm

Two kinds of genius

A great article from Malcolm Gladwell.

Reye Syndrome

I didn't know that you aren't suppose to take aspirin if you are younger than 19. 

Richard's Paradox

Interesting pseudo-paradox.

Calibrate your battery

I think it should be more well known that you need to calibrate your laptop battery.  I saw today that the capacity is down to %89.  Calibrating is simply a matter of totally discharging the battery, then turning it off for a few hours, then rebooting.  

Don't update to Aquamacs 1.5

If you use fullscreen mode on multiple monitors, Aquamacs 1.5 is broken.  The second monitor won't go to full screen.  Luckily, you can still download 1.4 from the historical releases page.

Palin workflow

Mia Farrow in Darfur

Mia Farrow has posted, in addition to her blog has posted a slideshow of her
time in a Darfur refugee camp.  This is one of the fascinating images.

Camel spiders

Nicholas Kristof wrote that the two scariest animals in nature are polar bears and camel spiders.  I'd never heard of camel spiders, so I looked them up.  Yep...  no exaggeration.  If you're brave, try camelspiders.net.  I'm not including a picture.  You'll see why.

space(s)?

I corrected a sentence in a book a friend is writing:

"... for various kinds of real and complex vector space ..."

I said this should be

"... for various kinds of real and complex vector spaces .."

Interestingly, he pointed out that it is a British/American English difference.

Ian Hibell

Here is a inspiring story about Ian Hibell,  who made his way all over the world on a bike. He was recently killed, after making his way the equivalent of 6 times around the equator, by some Greek jackass racing around Athens.

Interesting graph

Henry DeYoung

There is a good article in the Post Gazette today about Henry DeYoung, a fellow graduate student at Carnegie Mellon.  In fact, we have the same adviser, Frank Pfenning.  I'm in a course that is being videotaped so he can attend.  It's a very inspiring story.  

Flea

Flea, the bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, is now a freshman at the USC school of music.  I heard an interview with him on NPR today.  He is studying Bach chorales, and seems to love it.  This is in addition to starting a free music school for children in LA that now teaches 600 kids music daily.  Inspiring guy...

Berkeley and taxes

I started listening to a course in American economic history from Berkeley.  In the first lecture, the professor, J. Bradford Delong notes that the students are paying $10,000/year for their education.  This
amounts to California taxpayers covering $20,000/year of each Berkeley student's education.  He then notes that the bulk of tax money comes from people making $70-80K/year, and that the Berkeley students can expect to earn more (perhaps much more) than this.  What rationale can be given for such a bargain?  Delong's conclusion is that each Berkeley student has a social contract with the residents of California to work hard, and to do good work.  I thought this is a nice message.  

latex: colortbl + pdfsync

I just had a frustrating experience.  I was typesetting a table in latex for my LPAR paper.  I was using the colortbl package to add colors.  Strangely, if I used the usual lcr column types, it worked fine.  If I tried to set the column width manually however, the cell ended up taking up the entire page.  After a bunch of fiddling, I found that when I commented out \usepackage{pdfsync}, everything returned to normal. So these packages are incompatible, which is unfortunate.

Brancusi as copper

Interesting story from this article on Calatrava in the New Yorker.
In 1926, Marcel Duchamp tried to bring in a sculpture of Brancusi, a bird in copper, for an exhibition. When it arrived at customs, the officials said, ‘You have to pay a duty on copper entering this country.’ The organizers of the exhibition said, ‘But this is a piece of art,’ and the customs said, ‘No, this is a piece of copper.’ Brancusi won.”

Dinner politics

I just got back from a dinner party.  The topic of
conversation turned to politics fairly quickly.  There
was one McCain supporter in the room, versus four
Obama supporters.  I only said a few things, none of
them terribly trenchant.  I noticed some interesting things
about people's argument styles though.  The most informed
person in the room, person A, was very direct, almost confrontational.
What made his thoughts so compelling was the amount of
facts he had at his disposal.  The one who struck me the
most, though, was person B.  Person B had many good points,
but they were made in a really friendly and unconfrontational
light.  This made person C (the republican) more able to
discuss her thoughts without feeling, I think, attacked as
she probably did from my arrogant ramblings.  Person D was remarkable for
her ability to share meaningful feelings, citing for example,
that while Obama may be inexperienced (Person C's main argument)
his experience with constitutional law and general and obvious
intelligence made her feel like he would be able to understand
complex matters deeply, which in turn gave her a sense of trust.
Note to self: have lots of facts, be open, and nice!   Even when
someone is defending Palin.  You'll learn more from others,
and have more friends.  Though I'm somewhat skeptical having
conservative friends is a worthwhile goal...

Mac security update + X11/Terminal hang

I just had an incredibly frustrating experience.  I
installed the latest security update for my mac laptop.
When I rebooted, X11 no longer functioned.  Moreover,
Terminal would start, but was clearly hanging, and
Aquamacs wouldn't open. 

The problem turned out to be a command in my .bashrc
file

xset b off

that was intended to turn off sounds emanating from X11.
Once this was commented out, everything works fine.
You can access your bashrc file by opening Terminal and
hitting Ctrl-C.  This will allow you to use vi to change the
relevant file.

Wall Street Journal

I started reading a conservative newspaper to get a feel
for what the other side considers newsworthy.  I figured
the Wall Street Journal was a good place to start. 
I went to the "most emailed" box today, as I often do at
the New York Times.  The number 1 article was by Rush
Limbaugh.  "This isn't good...",  I thought.  It was a
surprise to me, though, that when I read the article, about
two comments of Limbaugh's that he claims were taken
out of context in Obama commercials, I actually agreed
with him.  He came to the conclusion that Obama was
stoking racial tension and thus is not a worthy president,
which is understandable coming from a neoconservative
pundit, but it does seem he was deliberately misquoted.
(Though I'm trusting that he was really parodying in
the second passage, which I don't have %100 confidence
in without knowing more of the monologue.) 

In addition to Limbaugh, there was a bad writer
named Peggy Noonan, and the editorial was unabashedly
pro-Palin.  Unlike the Times, I found no evidence of another
point of view.  I'll look for one in the coming days.  I wonder
who is the analogue of David Brooks or Bill Kristol.

*nix command: ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4

I was trying to read this paper.  I downloaded the pdf, but the
top inch is cut off.  The postscript looks fine in a postscript
viewer like gv, but I prefer pdf viewers.  Running ps2pdf on
the postscript gave the same result as the pdf download on
the webpage.  Turns out the format is a4, so you need to run

ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4  paper.ps

This solved the problem.

Big Brother?

I wonder if Mitt Romney has ever read 1984. In fact, I
wonder if he reads the newspaper. During his RNC speech he
said something about how the GOP is the party of big ideas,
while the democratic party is that of "Big Brother". While
it's true that the government in 1984 was big, that doesn't
seem to be the defining quality. Among other things, it was
the loss of privacy, basic human rights, and continual
warfare. Iraq, Bush's warrant-less wire tapping and the
administration's odd justifications for the use of torture
seem much more in the spirit of the government of Oceania.

Also interesting is the fact that the derivative of
government spending is much steeper during Republican
administrations. So the interpretation of democratic
administrations being "big government" seems mistaken as
well. I wish the standards of rhetoric were higher in such
important political events. I don't imagine Jefferson or
Madison spouting the banalities I heard repeatedly. Of
course, they would have read 1984 before quoting it.

Bach Cantatas

Bach wrote well over 200 cantatas. They run from about 15 minutes
to 45 minutes.  I first started listening to them after hearing them live
(weekly) at Boston's excellent Emmanuel Episcopal Church. I sang a
number of them with the Bach Cantata Chor in Pittsburgh before the
music director retired in 2007. It's nice to always know there's
a pile of great music you've never heard, just waiting to be remembered.
There are so many though, it's difficult to remember which ones you like. I started
a list so I could remember. Please let me know your favorites that I'm leaving out.
I'm listening to BWV206 a lot lately.

Fact: svn server version

Fact: It is not possible for a client to get the server version number in Subversion.

It took me awhile to find the answer to this because googling for
"subversion version server" is not terribly helpful, considering subversion
is version control software.

Mathematica Undo

Mathematica is generally a good program. The programming language may be primitive, but the symbolic and graphics functionality are excellent. However, I just can't believe that it only has one level of undo. I just lost 20 minutes of work because of this. If you must use Mathematica notebooks as opposed to text edited files, save often!

*nix command of the day: texdoc

texdoc looks up tex documentation, e.g.

texdoc amsthdoc

opens a pdf of the documentation for the AMS theomem package.

Quote

“Every kid is always talking about what his parents have been through, and no kid has any clue what he’s talking about.” - Charles Rangel

1984

I'm reading George Orwell's novel "1984". It occurred to me
yesterday that, while it adds critically to his message, and mirrors
both the Soviet and Chinese postwar situations, the emphasis on the
scarcity of goods is almost counterproductive to his aims. It seems
to me that the message would be more poignant if there was plentiful
food and goods. For it is to an authoritarian plenty, rather than the
poverty of 1984, where countries like China are heading in the era
of globalization. It is this model that will compete with liberal
democracy in the coming years. Nicholas Kristof's "China Wakes"
describes some of 1984's horrors in modern China.

Update:
Now that I've read further, it seems the story wouldn't work
if there were plentiful goods. I'm finding it hard to take this book
seriously. Animal Farm is a much better satire.

Total solar eclipse

The exploratorium in San Francisco, my favorite museum as a child, is
webcasting the total solar eclipse from China tomorrow. Check it out! More info at Wikipedia:

It's happening from 8-12 UTC. Here in PA we're at UTC-5, but because of daylight savings it's UTC-4, so PA folks can watch from
4-8 AM.

Knitro

I've been using a nice nonlinear optimizer called Knitro. It's not free, but has
a free student license. This note regards installing Knitro. You first fill out a form
and get a license. You are suppose to put the license in a file so that the
executable can see that you have permission. I followed all the instructions, but
I kept getting the following error:

### Could not find a valid license.
Your machine ID is 93-04-3c-a2-d3.
Please contact info@ziena.com to obtain a license.
Go to http://ziena.com/trial.html for a KNITRO student version license.
Failed to find a Ziena license.

If you get this, make sure you have no spaces after the license key. Once
I removed the spaces it worked.

Random fact: flammible flour

From wikipedia:

Flour dust suspended in air is explosive, as is any mixture of a finely powdered flammable substance with air,^[1] see Lycopodium. In medieval flour mills, candles, lamps, or other sources of fire were forbidden. Some devastating and fatal explosions have occurred at flour mills, including an explosion in 1878 at the Washburn "A" Mill in Minneapolis, the largest flour mill in the United States at the time.^[2]

Random fact: flammible flour

From wikipedia:

Flour dust suspended in air is explosive, as is any mixture of a finely powdered flammable substance with air,^[1] see Lycopodium. In medieval flour mills, candles, lamps, or other sources of fire were forbidden. Some devastating and fatal explosions have occurred at flour mills, including an explosion in 1878 at the Washburn "A" Mill in Minneapolis, the largest flour mill in the United States at the time.^[2]

Fireflys in Pittsburgh

The best place to see fireflys in Pittsburgh is in Frick
Park at 9:15 PM. They are only very active for about
30 minutes, but if you catch it it's an incredible thing
to see. The best place is in one of the canopies that
are very dark at 9:15 because of the tree cover.

poison ivy

I have a bad habit. When I walk through a place with lots of bushes and trees, I'll absentmindedly
tear a leaf off a tree or bush and tear it up slowly while I'm walking.
I don't like that I do it, because it seems rather destructive. I just
don't think about it much.

In CA, we have poison oak. In the summer it looks like this:
I'm very careful not to touch it, as I'm quite allergic. I had it
bad once in 7th grade, and I've been very careful since.

In Pittsburgh, they don't have poison oak. They have poison ivy. I didn't know
what it looks like until this week, when I started getting rashes
on my wrists, neck and back. For those of you who are moving from CA to the east, this is what poison ivy looks like:
It's really not a good idea to pick these leaves and tear them
to little pieces. Take it from me.

It's actually fascinating how it works. The oil from the leaves somehow modifies the proteins of the skin cells into which it comes in contact. The proteins it modifies are responsible for notifying your immune system that the cell is indeed part of your body, and
is not a foreign object. Once the oil manipulates the protein, your body can no longer tell
that your own skin is part of your body, and starts attacking it. Miracles of evolution abound.

PS: If you've never read them, Steven Jay Gould and Loren Eisley's books are filled with such facts and anecdotes.

Shell award

I just won 92K British pounds from the "Shell
Petroleum Company of England"! I'm even more excited, because
when they write the number in decimal, it was 92,000,000.00
so I think they really mean I won 92 *million* pounds. I just
need to contact the "fiduciary agent" with my email address, bank
account and credit card numbers to claim my prize. They're
throwing in a beautiful Russian mail-order bride as well. So long
grad school...

Typing SML values

I recently spent a few weeks learning the basics of Haskell.
One of the many strengths is the ability to give the types
of functions in a structure. This seems like a necessary
feature, but it is lacking in SML and O'Caml. For instance,
in Haskell I can write

incr :: Int -> Int
incr x = x + 1

In ML I'd either write

fun incr x = x + 1

and hope I can do the static typing in my head, or else
the horrible

fun incr (x : int) : int = x + 1

Note that it is possible to give incr a type in a
signature, but if I don't want to expose incr (it's
just used in the implementation), I'm out of luck.
While this example may not be entirely convincing, when
functions take many arguments, and are nested, it becomes
increasingly difficult to do mental type checking.

A hack to do this in SML is

fun incr x = x + 1
val incr : int -> int = incr

in O'Caml

let incr x = x + 1
let incr : int -> int = incr

Granted, this is not nearly as nice, but ML will catch
type errors this way.

repeating history

"We have learned, a little late no doubt, that for states as for
individuals real wealth consists not in acquiring or invading the
domains of others, but in developing one's own. We have learned that
all extensions of territory, all usurpations, by force or by fraud,
which have long been connected by prejudice with the idea of 'rank,'
of 'hegemony,' of 'political stability,' of 'superiority' in the order
of the Powers, are only the cruel jests of political lunacy, false
estimates of power, and that their real effect is to increase the
difficulty of administration and to diminish the happiness and
security of the governed for the passing interest or for the vanity of
those who govern..." Talleyrand 1754-1838

Parsing first order logic

I'm translating some of John Harrison's textbook code
to Haskell. I thought I'd try Happy, Haskell's "yacc",
for parsing instead of Harrison's combinator parsers.

Since both formulas and terms can be parenthesized,
I ran into trouble with the following:

(P) meaning "the propositional variable P"
(c) meaning "the term constant c"

Then I have a reduce reduce conflict, eg. in the following cases

(P) /\ Q
(c) = 5 /\ Q

It occurred to me that even something as simple as the
following dumbed-down grammar is not LR(1) as far as I can tell:

T is "terms" and F is "Formulas"

T ::= var | ( T )
F ::= var | ( F ) | T = T

I can't think of a way to make this LR(1). In fact, it seems it's
not even LR(k), as (c) could just as easily be (f(1,2,3,...,n) = 5).
Thus I think my 'happy' experiment is a failure. Of course, with a backtracking
combinator parser this is easily remedied.

Nouns and Adjectives

Florian and Fulya were playing an interesting game today: name all
the words you can(excluding colors and homonyms) that are both adjectives and nouns. They got 10 in 30 minutes. It took me longer. Maybe being a native
speaker is a disadvantage...

Update: Emily thought of 8 in about 5 minutes. Maybe it's just me
who's bad at this game. Or maybe it's native speaking *men*...

Little, Big

I just finished the novel Little, Big by John Crowley.
I originally heard of it while reading the Wikipedia article
on Harold Bloom. It's a beautiful book, with language
as rich as anything I've read. I tend to mark particularly
good passages in books with those little postit flags, a practice
I highly recommend, as it doesn't damage the book. I was so surprised at much
of the prose that I have about 40 within the
first 200 pages. I noticed with delight that Crowley himself has
a similar practice.

Un Air de Famille

Another good French movie about family relationships. I find
the reviews extremely irritating that dwell on its comic aspects.
In homage to Shakespeare, the comedy makes the tragedy bearable.
A moving drama with sweetness and humor.

Ressources Humaines

I saw an intensely good movie over the weekend called
Ressources Humaines
about a father and son working at a factory in France. The son
is about to graduate from business school, and is doing an internship
for the administration in a plant where his father works as a laborer.
There is a clash between the administration and the union, and the
result is a real and moving clash between generations and ideals.

Ressources Humaines

I saw an intensely good movie over the weekend called
Ressources Humaines
about a father and son working at a factory in France. The son
is about to graduate from business school, and is doing an internship
for the administration in a plant where his father works as a laborer.
There is a clash between the administration and the union, and the
result is a real and moving clash between generations and ideals.

recent conversation

F: I'm very busy writing my thesis.
S: Wow, you're writing already?
F: I'm writing in the sense that I'm feeling worse and worse for not starting.

SAVE

Funny story:

Conway wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. The name SAVE was not an acronym, but a feature: programmers lost fewer card decks because they all had SAVE written on them.

Liberty Cabbage

I'm slowly making my way through my high school U.S. history book.
It turns out that our modern "Freedom Fries" have an even more ridiculous
precursor. During WWI, we were calling sauerkraut "Liberty Cabbage".

zone

In emacs, try

(require 'zone)
(setq zone-idle 120)

(setq zone-programs '(zone-pgm-whack-chars
                      zone-pgm-five-oclock-swan-dive
                      zone-pgm-martini-swan-dive
                      zone-pgm-drip
                      zone-pgm-drip-fretfully
                      ))

(zone-when-idle zone-idle)

These are hilarious. Especially the drip-fretfully.

ML Puzzle

How do you handle exceptions raised at the structure level?

e.g.

structure A = struct val _ = raise Fail "" end

Turns out there are implementation dependent ways to
set a top level exception handler. Sadly, not part of
the Basis.

The Heiligenstadt Testiment

This is the most utterly devastating letter I've ever read. There are many tragedies in the history of art and science. In music Mozart comes to mind. In mathematics Galois and Abel. The tragedy arises in different ways. Some people die too early, depriving all people to come of the lost works of their genius. Mozart is the most crushing example of this kind of tragedy. But from what I know, he doesn't seem to have been particularly unhappy. Beethoven, in contrast, didn't die particularly early. But from the age of 20 until his death in 1827 at age 57, he was almost totally deaf. 37 years of silence to one of the greatest benefactors to mankind the world will ever know. When I feel disappointed in life, I need only think upon this letter to put my sorrow into perspective.

A Terrible Life Choice

I love the Simpsons.

Same Sex Marriage

Happily, the Congress of Massachusetts shot
down a potential amendment to the state
constitution declaring marriage to be between
a man and a woman. According to the NY Times,
the soonest such a petition could be brought
for a vote is 2012. My favorite line of the article:

Senator Gale D. Candaras, a Democrat, voted against the amendment Thursday, although she had supported it as a state representative in January. Ms. Candaras said her vote reflected constituent views in her larger, more progressive Senate district and her fear of a vicious referendum campaign.

Most moving, she said, were older constituents who had changed their views after meeting gay men and lesbians. One woman had “asked me to put it on the ballot for a vote, but since then a lovely couple moved in,” Ms. Candaras said. “She said, ‘They help me with my lawn, and if there can’t be marriage in Massachusetts, they’ll leave and they can’t help me with my lawn.”

Indeed, the biggest indicator of a change toward
pro-Gay rights was if the congressperson had got to
know gay people. Go figure...

Mac not sleeping fix

My Mac stopped going to sleep one day.
It would if you closed the lid, but never
while open, even if nothing but
the Finder showed up as a running program.
I did some experimenting with killing
background processes from the Activity Monitor,
and found that killing the XXX_ButtonManager
processes did the trick. I kill them every
time I restart, and the Mac sleeps like a baby.

Gunter Grass

has written a great essay for the New Yorker about his youth during WWII as
a young soldier.

iTunes, iPhoto hack

One of the irritating things about iPhoto and iTunes is that it's not immediately obvious how to see all the songs and pictures that are *not* in a playlist or album. A little hack I use that works very well if you don't use the 5 star rating system is to select all songs and set the stars to 0.
then select all your folders and star those songs. Make a new smart playlist that shows songs with a rating of 0.

Lone Scherfig

I saw two great movies recently, both by Danish director
Lone Scherfig (who sadly lacks a Wikipedia entry).
The movies are Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself and
Italian for Beginners.

Wilbur takes place in an anonymous town in Scotland.
The plot focuses on the suicidal Wilbur and his kindly
brother Harper who own a used bookstore. After
yet another botched suicide attempt, Wilbur moves
into the bookstore, Harper's home, so he can be watched
over. Things get messy when Harper falls in love with
a bookstore regular and they are married.
While the plot is a thought-provoking one, the real
intensity of the film comes from Wilbur's extraordinary
complexity, contrasted with Harper's somewhat self
deprecating goodness of heart. I was going to try
to write more, but after reading A.O. Scott's review,
I realize I should just point you there. I could do no
better, and certainly much worse. My favorite line
in that review:

"In less sure -- and also less dry -- hands, the story of two
brothers dealing with the fact of death might have melted
into sentimental slop, one of those life-affirming pictures
that make you want to kill yourself. Instead, ''Wilbur Wants
to Kill Himself,'' which begins with a suicide attempt and
ends in a graveyard, with plenty of trips to the hospital
in between, makes you glad to be alive.

Italian for Beginners is a beautiful Dogme film, revolving
around a group of Danish adults taking a beginning
Italian class. There is almost no plot but for
a humorous and touching development of at least 6
intriguing and delightful characters. Drama is always
shocking to me in that, unlike in opera, so much can
be done with so little. (I'm thinking particularly of
Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman). Here in
Italian for Beginners, with the Dogme (lack of) effects
that make it seem like anyone could pick up a camera
at Best Buy and make a great movie. A heartwarming
thought.

The Humble Programmer

This weekend I spent an enjoyable 15 minutes reading Edsger Dijkstra's 1972 Turing award lecture, entitled "The Humble Programmer". It is an entertaining collection of stories, advice, and philosophizing from one of the pioneers of theoretical computer science. The most relevant piece of advice from a more modern programming language perspective is "... the requirements that no loop should be written down without providing a proof for termination nor without stating the relation whose invariance will not be destroyed by the execution of the repeatable statement." Even when not strictly using Hoare Logic to reason about code, the advice is good. Indeed, my advisor seems to have this ingrained in his programming. Much of his code is instrumented with invariants. He asked me last week why a particular list of inference rules for eta-expansion of a term terminates. While the termination seemed so clear I didn't even think about it before, actually finding a measure of termination helped me understand the judgment better.

A nice observation is that we should "restrict ourselves to the subset of the intellectually manageable programs". This made me smile. On the one hand it seems obvious. How could we do otherwise? But then recalling a few of the programs I myself have written, I felt chided and humbled. The thing I liked most about the paper is the respect for the difficulty of programming. His last paragraph is worth repeating: "[The computer] has already taught us a few lessons, and the one I have chosen to stress in this talk is the following. We shall do a much better programming job, provided we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers."

shulman

I heard a great viola concerto last week by the composer
Alan Shulman .
It was his Theme and Variations arranged for string orchestra.
His son was at the performance, and gave a short speech beforehand.
Shulman played cello for the NBC orchestra under Toscanini.
According to his son, Toscanini was very supportive of the outside
(musical) activities of his musicians. He was at the premiere
of the Theme and Variations, and was recorded to say, in response,
(in my phonetic Italian) "Semplice ma belle", "simple but lovely".

Dishabille

Dishabille. What a great word to describe the unfolding of
Spring in Pittsburgh. "The state of being only partly or scantily clothed."

"New Yorkers shed their winter garb — the Ugg boots, the turtlenecks, the long skirts, the overcoats, the parkas, the gloves, the hoodies and the fedoras — and exchanged them for flip-flops and dishabille." -- NYTimes, 4/22/07

Kontroll

I was looking at French movies at the Carnegie Library the
other day, and picked up one that looked kind of interesting
in a nearby section. It turned out to be a Hungarian movie
called Kontroll. The cover is a pretty bad picture of a guy
running in front of a train, but it won a bunch of awards,
and the blurb on the back was by A.O. Scott, who called
it a "A tour de force. A gritty and stylish debut." So I
got it. It's directed by a young (33) director named Nimrod
Antal. He's got a movie in postproduction called Vacancy
with Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson.
The movie is wonderful. Funny, charming, peculiar,
and clever. It's about the guys who check to make sure
people have purchased tickets in the Budapest subway, and
the underground subculture.

Brahms I

I went to hear the Pittsburgh Symphony last night. It was
the first time I've heard them do anything big. Mozart 25,
Death and Transfiguration, and Brahms' first concerto with
Emmanuel Ax.

First of all, I went at the last minute, and
was late (as usual). I walked up to the box office at 7:56
and asked for a student ticket, thinking I had about %10
chance there'd be any seats left. For $14 I was given perhaps the
best seat in the entire house for a piano concerto, E9,
right behind and to the right of the pianist. It was
perfect to watch Ax, but more on that later.

The concert began in a stunning way. After the usual
reminder to turn off cel phones, a member of the viola
section started speaking into the microphone. I was
annoyed, as I figured he'd be talking about a pledge drive
or something. On the contrary, one of the violists,
Peter
Guroff , had died earlier in the week, and this was a homage
to his memory. He was very young, probably mid 50s. He was
diagnosed with lymphoma 15 years ago, yet after that managed to win the
PSO audition and play for 14 years with the orchestra. The
speech was very moving and they left his chair (on the
outside of the orchestra) with some flowers on it, empty for
the concert. I could see the empty chair easily from where
I sat, and it added an ethereal poignancy to the music that
would come for the next 140 minutes.

Since I'm a big snob, and normally drive 3 hours to hear the
Cleveland Orchestra instead of driving 10 minutes to hear
the PSO, I didn't really know what to expect. It didn't
start out very well. The Mozart was mediocre. For much of
the first movement the strings and winds were a tiny bit
off, which for most any other composer would not be a big
deal, but it drove me crazy during the Mozart. I kind of
gave up hope of anything good until Ax came on. But then
they started Strauss' Death and Transfiguration. It was one
of the first pieces I played in youth orchestra, oh, about
15 years ago. I hadn't heard it for probably 10 years.
They played it marvelously. The sound was rich, the brass
powerful without crassness, and the oboist was great. (To
be fair, I should mention he was great in the Mozart as
well.) The empty chair during that piece, written by the 25
year old Strauss as a tone poem on death and transcendence,
was eerie, but added an ineffable weight to the time. I
recall Strauss pithy comment "I'm not a first rate composer,
but I'm a first-rate second-rate composer." It's hard to
think of him as a second rate composer during that piece
(though I don't share that sentiment for most of his other
works.) I was also reminded of Van Gogh's constant
self-denigration, and thus was reminded to take artist's accounts
of their own work with a grain of salt.

The highlight, though, was certainly Emmanuel Ax. He
radiated lift, kindness and mastery from the moment he
stepped onstage. He warmly shook Cardenes' hand, and the
piece began promptly. This has, over the years, become one
of my favorite works. So much of it that is so profoundly
great that, with my second-rate second-rate vocabulary and
eloquence, I couldn't possibly describe it. Amazingly, he
was only 27 or so when he finished it, and even more
amazingly, not only the public and the orchestra of the
first performance (Gewandhaus Leipzig) hated it as well.
It's so hard for me to imagine them preferring the long
forgotten empty firework-concertos of the day for this
work. I found myself continually wondering how many new
pieces I've heard (and scoffed at) that will be the great
pieces of 50/100 years from now.

Ax was energetic, communicative with the conductor (Jahja
Ling), and sensitive. The orchestra clearly liked him, and
responded in kind. They got out of his way, and I could
actually hear him almost the entire time he was playing.
It was an amazing gift to hear him.

There was a middle-aged conservatively dressed man
sitting next to me. He may as well have been at a
rock concert for how excitedly and exuberantly he listened and
applauded. I don't know who enjoyed the concert more.

Watchdog

Here's a website where you can look up a company's environmental and
ethical practices. I was sad to see Apple rated very poorly.

A Christmas Memory

Listen to Truman Capote read his story A Christmas Memory.
Really powerful. Unabridged, unlike the TAL version.