| Chocolate Tast-test Results |
[Jul. 7th, 2008|01:12 pm] |
There were four chocolates in the mix - one in chip form, and three others in chopped bar form. The chocolates were A) Dagoba Eclipse (87%), B) fancy schmancy Pralus, C) Callebaut chocolate chips, and D) Endangered Species Butterflies
The votes, transcribed exactly as people wrote them, went as follows:
- (A) Dagoba Eclipse - 5 votes
- Kevin, Laurel, Erin, Zach, Yoko
- (B) Pralus - 9 votes
- Darren, Julian, Nathan, Monica, Na☆ (?), B-Dizzle (?), Mark, Kevin T, Pleir (?)
- (C) Callebaut chocolate chips - 5 votes
- Andy, Amy, Melinda Mary, Shelby, Seager
- (D) Endangered Species Butterflies - 2 votes
- Marissa, John
   
From this we can conclude that the expensive stuff may actually be better, but all chocolate is loved by someone. And the people who like Pralus chocolate are both numerous and have very poor handwriting. The disqualified vote was Chris who wrote that he liked the chocolate covered espresso beans best of all, despite them not being eligible in the contest, as indicated by their complete lack of a single-letter name. |
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| I'm making a note here, HUGE SUCCESS |
[Jul. 7th, 2008|09:15 am] |
I turned 30 yesterday, and there was a huge party, in which I fully engaged geek social fallacy #4. And it was wonderful! I think that I will declare it to be the best birthday party I have ever had! I made a cheesecake, Tracy made a lemon bundt cake, and we had lots of chips and dip and a chocolate taste-off. People played Ricochet Robots (recently reissued, now available near you! It's as good a geek game as Set!), Perudo (with my brand new Perudo dice from Erin! She individually wrapped ALL 30 DICE), and Jenga. The last cubes of ice are only now melting in the sink. We were set up to serve 4 drinks: manhattans (the them of the party was "Manhattan"), martinis, not-quite-a-sidecars, and kirs. The last two were pretty darn popular, so here is the recipe for each:
Not-quite-a-sidecar - adapted from something ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ouro made us
2 parts Applejack
1 part lemon juice
1 part triple sec
1 sprig rosemary
Put it all in a shaker and shake vigorously. Strain and pour and garnish one of the cups with the bruised-yet-still-vibrant sprig of rosemary.
And here is the recipe for the kir:
Kir - not quite a real kir, apparently, but everyone loved them so that's good
1.5 oz Creme de Cassis
Soda water
Put ice in a class, pour the Creme de Cassis over it, and and fill the rest of the glass with soda water. Light and refreshing!
The chocolate tasting that single-blind, but everyone wrote their favorite on a piece of paper that anyone could read. So there were confounding social factors that prevent it from being SCIENCE, and merely make it scientific-ish. I will post the results later today, because the single-blind aspect of the experiment prevents me from knowing what chocolates a, b, c, and d actually were until Tracy gets home from work with the "lab notebook".
I hope everyone had fun at the party: I know I definitely did! |
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| Politics just makes me sad and worried nowadays |
[May. 6th, 2008|03:46 pm] |
Torture is not okay. Torture is, in fact, never okay. Which means that I read with ever-increasing disappointment the news that the current administration actively approved of and explicitly authorized acts which we have successfully prosecuted as war crimes in the past. This means that torture is not "a few bad apples", it is instead the explicit policy of the executive branch from the top down.
I worry that none of this would change under a President McCain. He had this big reputation as a straight-talker about 8 years ago, but he rolled over and advocated for the Military Commissions Act, which is a horrifically two-faced piece of legislation. It expressly prohibits torture by the executive branch and also vests the executive branch with total authority in determining what is and is not called torture. He also seems to have kissed and made up with the people who ran the awful race-baiting campaign against him in South Carolina in 2000.
This means that I read http://electoral-vote.com with great trepidation, because it's looking more and more like the Democratic party is tearing itself apart in an effort to lose the fall election by as much as possible. Bad domestic policy is yucky, and can take some investment and soul-searching to recover from. Bad foreign policy reverberates for decades and causes wounds which take generations to heal. And the past 7.5 years have been marked by some of the worst foreign policy I can imagine, and John McCain seems to be desirous of continuing the disaster. Kissingeresque realpolitik is one thing (it may be bad and morally reprehensible, but at least it has goals and examines outcomes), but this hasn't been that --- it's been divorced from reality. They've pretended that the world was the way they didn't want it, and then they took the steps that would be appropriate in this imaginary universe to fix the problem. Unfortunately, their mental map of the world has proven to be very different from the actual territory.
Anyhow, I was reminded of these fun facts by reading two things today. The first was from former Talking Heads frontman and all-around crazy genius David Byrne (BTW - David Byrne has both a blog and an Internet radio station and they are both good in that insane David Byrne way) and the second was Cory Doctorow's new novel Little Brother (available in full online at http://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.htm ). When the zeitgeist is full of conspiracy theories and dystopias based on stupid responses to terror, this stuff just comes pouring out.
While I've opened the political can of worms, I thought I should plug my solution to ending the Iraq War in the most humane way possible:
First it was the threat of weapons of mass destruction, but the current raison de guerre is that we deposed Saddam Hussein to bring democracy to Iraq. Which succeeded — or, at least, a vote was held and people voted and got a purple thumb and then everyone went back to having a big ol' civil war. Let's hold another vote. I propose that this ballot will have a single question on it: Should the foreign troops leave within 1 year? 1 year is a nice round number, and it allows for an orderly goodbye. If they say yes, then we train people if they want the training, accept refugees if they want to come and be US citizens, and we leave in a year. We can even split hairs on whether it should be a year of the Islamic calendar or a year on the Gregorian calendar, but that ends up being a pretty small difference. That's democracy: people vote for something, and then the government does that thing (modulo various checks and balances).
By all accounts and all polls, this ballot measure would end up with more than 70% of the Iraqi population voting us out of their country. Why are we staying in a country that does not want us inside of it? We ``brought democracy'', and if they aren't free to vote us away on their own terms, it starts being colonialism and empire-building. (Sidenote: If we do stay, what is the end condition? Will we stay in Iraq until ``terror'' surrenders and we finally win the war?)
We may have broken it, but we do not own it. Iraqis own it. It is, after all, their country that we broke. Let's find out what they want us to do and then do that. |
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| Fun at the juggling club |
[Feb. 27th, 2008|01:13 am] |
Nice video of a wally walk in progress:
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| Persepolis |
[Feb. 2nd, 2008|11:26 pm] |
Persopolis opened in Eugene at our local art-house theater. It's a fantastic movie, and a thinker of a movie. But it's sneaky, because it doesn't have the trappings of a thinker kind of movie, it's just that I find myself still thinking about it. Highest recommendations from both myself and goteam as well as all of the Iranians I know who have seen it.
Perseoplis is going up against Ratatouille for "Best Animated Feature", and it deserves to win. Which is saying a lot, because Ratatouille was fantastic.
Rated: ★★★★ |
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| I'm giving a guest lecture! |
[Jan. 6th, 2008|07:07 pm] |
I'm giving a guest lecture on computation and computability and the halting problem! It was impossible to find a good drawing of a Turing machine on the Internet - even on the HMC CS department web pages - so I had to make my own:
Fig. 1 A Turing machine, with an eye to read the
tape, a pencil with an eraser to mark and erase, a state
machine in its belly, a unicycle to move it back and
forth, and a lightbulb to indicate that it's done.
This bizarre machine can compute anything that is computable (if the Church-Turing thesis holds), and can, if provoked, simulate a von Neumann architecture with only a polynomial slowdown. If you ever need to talk about Turing machines, please feel free to steal the image. |
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| Hooray! Obama won! |
[Jan. 4th, 2008|03:55 pm] |
Obama - the candidate for people who wish they weren't as cynical as they actually are.
Obama - the one who, with Alan Keyes, was the natural experiment that led to the measurement of the crazification factor.
Stealing a quote from that previous article, Don't You Dare Kill Obama (... and we know you're thinking about it) . The best reactions I have found are this one and this one:
For a mild dose of realism, there's also a surprisingly well written Rolling Stone Article about Obama and the Iowa caucuses. Apparently Rolling Stone feels the need to do actual journalism a few times a year. How exciting! |
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| Answering a question from my Dad |
[Jan. 3rd, 2008|03:11 pm] |
Is Kindle the future of reading?
Kinda.
The physical format is, because electronic paper is totally sweet and the extra long battery life is great too. But their system is horribly restricted and locked-down and broken in a few key ways. It's way worse than Apple and iTunes and the iTunes store where you can only play iTunes Store songs in iTunes or your iPod[1]. There's some sort of for-pay conversion service and some other free conversion service where you send them a document and it arrives in Kindle format (something called .AZW that is Amazon's own thing) and you can also load plain text files onto it for reading.[2]
If you want to read a .PDF, which is basically all I would want to do with it, then you are SOL. Amazon, in their mad quest to be not a hardware manufacturer (teeny tiny margins) but a service provider (nice big fat margins) and a publisher (potentially nice big fat margins, but the business accounting practices in publishing are so messed up there is no way to know), has decided that the device isn't really yours. It's kind of yours and it's kind of theirs[3], and if you want to load crap onto it, then it can either be a .TXT file with no formatting whatsoever, or you have to go through them. Basically, it's a good idea that, much like your recent troubles with Windows "Genuine Advantage", contains flaws that amount to Amazon giving you the finger and will probably piss you off too much for you to be able to use it for any length of time (much like Windows Genuine Advantage did).
So you don't want one until someone makes one that won't piss you off constantly. Which could be Amazon if they drop their pretensions of still controlling the device after you bought it, or it could be someone else. If Kindle is the future in all regards, then you and I will probably end up sticking with the past.[4]
[1] Pedants please note that while it is technically possible for non-iTunes things to usefully play .AAC (or whatever they are) files, basically nothing does.
[2] This was all garnered from web research that ended up finding the useful page: http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2007/11/19/15-things-i-just-lea.html
[3] This "your thing is not really yours" is sometimes called "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) or even "Trusted Computing". In the long run it's a broken idea (Prof. Ed Felten has a lot to say about this kind of thing), but in the short term it's seductively appealing to large media companies that don't want to change any of their practices even when faced with radical technological upheaval. Some dystopic fiction and other stuff has been written about this, most notably attempting to get people to call it "Treacherous Computing". Which it kind of is. Treacherous, I mean.
[4] People who prefer physical books are referred to in librarian circles (where the debate between new tech and old books is apparently this massive constant fight) as "booksniffers". In other circles, people who want physical books are called "pervy for paper". As for me, I think of it as simply wanting to have the new book technology be strictly better than the old book technology instead of this weird "it's digital and sexy, but it's also no longer yours" thing that media companies seem obsessed with. |
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| Lazy fractal Sunday |
[Dec. 23rd, 2007|04:14 pm] |
REM SIERPINSKI TRIANGLE ANALOG STYLE
10 TAKE PICTURE OF COMPUTER WITH CAMERA
20 UPLOAD PICTURE
30 ARRANGE 3 COPIES OF PICTURE ON SCREEN JUST SO
40 GOTO 10 |
Took a total break from even thinking about any kind of work. Played on the computer and read books and relaxed while the rain drummed down outside. It was wonderful. |
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| Torture is not okay. |
[Dec. 15th, 2007|10:43 am] |
Torture is not okay. It is, in fact, never okay. I was reminded of this when I read this description of a Yemeni man who was tortured into confessing by a despotic regime and then handed over to the US as a terrorist. He then spent 19 months having his mind broken in US "black site" prisons. Then, he was released without charges or explanation or apology or even acknowledgement.
Torture rots the soul. Government-run torture rots the soul of a nation. Guantanamo Bay is now cultural shorthand for being locked up forever and mentally destroyed for no reason and with no recourse. Even the hamster song, sung by children with extra verses they made up, says "If the hamster is caught playing with fireworks / Guantanamo Bay for the hamster". Undoing the Magna Carta by revoking habeas corpus and engaging in extended psychological and physical torture of subjects is evil. It goes way beyond anything that might be considered "wrong" or "misguided". The people who have wrought this upon our nation should be in prison, removed from society so that we may recover from the fallout of their evil deeds.* Instead, not only are they still in power, there's basically nobody out there with any power who is standing up when it matters. Even was-a-POW-and-got-tortured John McCain rolled over and signed onto our current course of action. Without useful recourse, I am stuck complaining on the Internet and signing every petition that comes my way and calling my elected representatives, and wondering what are the long term effects of evil deeds when they are committed by a modern hyperpower.
The consequences will not be nice and they will not be good and they will echo for a long long time. I'm worried.
* - Fallout is definitely the right word here. Think of nuclear ash poisoning the landscape and taking generations to fade away. In the meantime, all that tries to grow there ends up stunted and gone wrong. The only sane responses are to either give up and wait it out in a bunker or to engage in a concerted cleanup effort at no small danger to the cleaner. |
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| The Future of Science Fiction is a bunch of fantasy books based on the Bible. |
[Nov. 29th, 2007|01:57 am] |
Modern sci-fi has a problem. It can be summed up in two quotes:
[The present is] too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong country. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a science-fiction novel. But if you suggested doing them all and presenting that as an imaginary future, they'd not only show you the door, they'd probably call security.
--William Gibson
The other is not from a sci fi author, but instead from a conversation between Stanslaw Ulam and John von Neumann, as related by Ulam:
One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.
Science fiction authors have this horrible problem, which is basically that the future they imagined (minus easy space travel) is already here, but is more shlocky than they anticipated, and the future human condition that lies ahead is, with non-zero probability, by definition unimaginable due to our tiny human brains. Into this void steps Charles Stross (cool enough to have had a vi-powered website since 1993) with his novel Singularity Sky, and the blurb on the back is that Where Charles Stross goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow . Well, if that's true then the future of science fiction is to sidestep all this singularity stuff and to instead tell the story from the point of view of the unmodified humans who are still just people, but are now surrounded by this unimaginably complex system capable of astounding feats and asserting bizarre rules which it enforces with an iron fist.
Basically, it looks like the future of sci-fi is looking more and more like we're going to see lots of variants of Left Behind that substitute the word "nano" every time the Left Behind series (I imagine) uses the world "holy". As in, "Be careful, that thing has a nano-weapon which will annihilate you from the face of the earth!" I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it seems like the most plausible way of writing about an unimaginable future - just tell the story about the normal people and treat the unimaginable parts as mostly magic. But it also means that, unlike the sci-fi of the past, the heroes of these future stories are now going to be mostly luddites instead of technophiles, because the technophiles will have already been taken up by the rapture uploaded their consciousness and the luddites are the only ones that have a story to tell that is easily relatable to our current condition. |
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| Half-staff American flag |
[Nov. 2nd, 2007|01:28 pm] |
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It seems like the flag has been flying at half-staff a lot recently. I haven't been able to dig up any data on how often this has been the case, so I'm asking you all: Do you know of any reference where I can see when, for the past few years, the flag was to be flown at half-staff? I see it so often that we are either living in extremely tragic times, or the whole thing is getting trivialized. Perhaps a bit of both, or perhaps I just remember the half-staff times because they stick out in my mind, but I really don't know. Anybody got any data? |
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| Halloween! |
[Oct. 31st, 2007|09:24 pm] |
I like Halloween. But mostly I really like staying home and handing out candy and eating the candy I should be handing out.
This year I realized that I had a nice confluence of technology, and so I used the projector to project the mirror-mirror-on-the-wall face onto the blinds of the front window. Now people have to walk in front of an animated talking face to get candy. I love it! It has a nice setting to let it be microphone sensitive, which is just great. So far it has sung along with a bunch of songs and narrated an entire episode of "This American Life". I also carved a pumpkin.
In order then, the pictures are: the face, the front of the house (with porch light turned off), and the pumpkin.
  
In somewhat unrelated news, I have decided to take one picture a day for a year. It's been fun so far. You can watch my progress on Flickr if that's your bag. |
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| Determining who the asshole is, and visualizing impersonal statistics |
[Sep. 23rd, 2007|11:16 am] |
In any given situation, the person who is claiming that something is the end of the world is almost certainly an asshole. This is a handy rule of thumb, and applies pretty well across the board, with the possible exception of people talking about global thermonuclear war or other extinction-level threats (large asteroids, etc).
Also, the recent news that nobody seems to be talking about is that according to every peer-reviewed independent study, we have now killed more than 1,000,000 people in Iraq, either directly or indirectly, since 2003 as a result of this war. That is a lot of people - one six-thousandth of the world population, and 4% of the population of Iraq. Visualizing this from an Iraqi point of view resulted in this map. But honestly, this sort of number is way past "visualization" territory. Our government has, in the past 6 years, spent more than $500,000,000,000 on a stupid war, and this war has caused more than 1,000,000 people to die.
One million people. Dead. For what? |
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| Sierra Summer Trip |
[Sep. 20th, 2007|01:47 pm] |
Between August 30 and September 8 I went on an 8 day backpacking trip through the Sierras with my dad and brother. It was completely fantastic.
For those that know the area, we came in over Pine Creek Pass, went down to the John Muir Trail, south through Evolution Valley, over Muir Pass along the JMT to the Bishop Pass Trail junction, and then out on the Bishop Pass Trail over Bishop Pass. It was a wonderful route, and is highly recommended.
Pictures and a google map of our route and a day-by-day log of the journey and much much more may be found at: http://soy.dyndns.org/sierras/
Also, that website I made for the trip is pretty spiffy, if I do say so myself. |
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| Ridin fixie |
[Aug. 12th, 2007|09:14 pm] |
What's scary?
Your chain falling off the chainring on your bike.
What's scarier than scary?
Your chain falling off your fixie.
Other than that incident today, which was easily remedied, I've had my fixie for a year and still like it. I ride it almost every day, and still think it's fun. Slowing down can be hard on the knees, but it's fun to ride and generally doesn't break down. For reasons that will be clear to only some of you, I will shortly be painting it purple and giving it the name "Abelian Grape". |
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[May. 31st, 2007|08:50 pm] |
I am in Asheville for agthorr's wedding, and I am staying at a wonderful hostel. Some of you already know this (including the fabulous Chiara), but if you are traveling alone, hostels are impossible to beat on price, and you get to meet cool people too!
I am in Asheville and it is 21 o'clock in the morning (Pacific Time). I think that means it is time to go to sleep. |
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| Life updates along with bread and circus |
[May. 28th, 2007|04:49 pm] |
I have advanced to candidacy. Now there are only two things standing between me and graduation: dissertation proposal (12-16 pages) and dissertation (many many pages). I am proposING to finish the proposAL by the end of this term (quarter system can suck my ass with its stupid ending in mid June when everyone else has been out for a while already) and then finish everything else by the end of next school year. My advisor thinks that this goal is both a) doable and b) necessary (for funding reasons), and since he's department chair when he talks about funding I believe him. He does think I can finish by next summer, but he doesn't think that I can get him a good proposal by June 13 (although he said he is very willing to be wrong about that).
Life is about to be very exciting - I am flying out on Thursday to North Carolina for agthorr's wedding this weekend (can I drop my car off in front of some PDXer's house from Thursday AM til Sunday AM?), goteam and I will be traveling around Holland on our bikes from June 17 to July 5 (and I am trying to learn Dutch in an effort to fit in), then we get back, have a brief downtime, and then I teach programming 101 again. Phew.
I was at a party recently, and I proposed that people are now rooting for political parties the way they root for sports teams. Particularly now that everyone agrees that terrorism is bad and the environment is good and jobs are good, and so everyone promises to stamp out terrorism, save the environment, and boost the economy. Almost all the candidates say the exact same things - they may disagree on how we get there, but even that is not as true as they pretend. This led to me hoping that we could get politics to be as well-run and orderly as, say, the NFL, where teams compete (on a game-by-game basis) in pursuit a common goal (entertaining people and making money). And that caused people to look at me in horror - apparently this was found to be a depressing and cynical statement. But I contend that it isn't. The NFL is pretty well-run. It has its scandals, but by and large it works. It provides people with what they want, and they continue to support it. Wouldn't that be nice if we could get even close to what we want from the government?
Right now it's all circus and no bread. I'd like to think that a truly well-operating government based on a system of mutual competition and common goals could provide both. And by "circus" and "bread", I mean provide people with teams to root for AND successfully establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. The fact that we aren't getting both indicates, to me, that there's some inefficiencies in the system that could be exploited to someone's gain. |
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