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]