TJ Murphy: the Life and Times

Monetary Policy

2012-02-11T11:34:00.004-05:00

It seems the most common objection to suggesting a return to sound money, ala the gold standard, is that the central bank can't adjust monetary policy to expand credit when the economy is in recession, and thus can't help the economy grow. The argument misses the mark, though, because the argument for sound money is that lending institutions are forced to be more disciplined with their lending in the first place. This leads to less mal-investment, less potential for asset bubbles, and less severe swings in the business cycle.

Central bankers are no more prescient than any other kind of banker, and they're just as likely to make wrong predictions. Perhaps more so in our current environment, given the dual mandate of our federal reserve. The point of sound money is that you can't fuck it up. Unless you get rid of it.

I read a commentator, a professor of history, noting that inflation is beneficial to debtors. He was specifically addressing the young Ron Paul supporters who (as the wisdom goes) have tons of student loan debt. Inflation means that those debts are easier to pay, since presumably wages are inflating at a similar rate to everything else (which isn't quite s0). The argument reminds me of my highschool US history class; I recall reading about William Jennings Bryan making the same argument with the "Cross of Gold" speech.

I wonder what research has been done into the beneficial effect of price stability and mild, steady deflation (as sound money would create)?

New Personal Record!

2012-02-11T11:02:00.001-05:00

My max bench press is now 195lbs! Max deadlift is 315, and max squat is somthing around 260. I'm not gaining any weight, still at 148 +- 2lbs, but I certainly seem to be getting stronger.

THE CMB

2012-02-09T17:32:00.002-05:00

I appreciate a song that can pull off a casual and ironic reference to the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation without naming it. I'm thinking of a song from The Faint, namely "Machine in the Ghost:" A line from it runs:

"Turn your TV to the snow, watch the first thing ever known... its always on"

Its an allusion to the fact that the static you pick up on an untuned (analog!) TV is, in fact, part of the oldest energy in the universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB). Its the furthest back - the deepest into space- we can see, the closest thing to the big bang. You'll recall that since the speed of light in a vacuum is constant, the further away something is, the longer it takes to get to our view point, so looking at a very distant object is very literally looking into the past. That's what the CMB is: the first thing ever known. And its always on TV. I've read sentimental people refer to the map of it as "the Face of God." Sortof trivializes the other stuff we watch on TV, eh?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background_radiation

The song's talking about the inability of any philosophy, religion, or science to account for the fact that the universe exists in the first place. Its an age-old question, probably one that all aspiring intellectuals grapple with early on in the development of their world-view. The next line in the song is:

"When nothing's over, what was there? How did nothing come to end, at once?"

Surely, that's got to be high on the list of questions that plunge juveniles into existential dilemmas; hair-pulling, glassy-eyed episodes of bewilderment that don't end until they get comfortable with saying "we don't know" and living with it. Which isn't to say that all attempts to know are fruitless, just that most are.

Good news

2012-02-08T08:45:00.001-05:00

Paul beat Romney in Minnesota! Sadly Santorum beat them both.

-TJ

Belief

2012-02-02T12:16:00.001-05:00

I'm recalling a former co-worker, from a former job, saying incredulously: "Wait, so you believe in science?" as if that were the most absurd possible belief to hold. I think the context of the conversation was the advent of intelligent life on earth. In his defense, he was kind of an idiot. The sort of person competent enough to file reports, but not inquisitive enough to question their purpose.
Also, it borders on sillyness to talk about "believing" in science. Science is just a method of determining, with as little error as possible, the state of some natural phenomena. It makes sense to believe in the efficacy of science for doing so, but believing in science itself makes as much sense as believing in measuring-tapes. Or rather, I should state the contrapositive: not believing in science makes as much sense as not believing in measuring tapes. Both things exist, and to believe otherwise is just to be willfully ignorant. Which I suppose is exactly what the speaker was declaring himself to be.
And on a related note, people facilely talk about "believing in global warming" (or these days, "climate change") as if it had the same level of self-evidence as things like science and measuring-tapes. Well, strictly speaking, the earth does warm (as well as cool) and the climate does change, so it's equally tautological. But that's not really what they're talking about: they're referring to anthropogenic climate change, which is a hypothesis and doesn't hold the same epistemological status as an observation.
Hypotheses aren't things to be "believed" in, they're to be accepted or rejected. Once enough evidence accumulates, one can reject a hypothesis, or determine that they are unable to reject a hypothesis. The latter doesn't mean that the hypothesis is correct, just that the evidence can't tell one way or another.

Empire

2012-01-31T16:55:00.000-05:00

Maybe the most compelling objection to the US adopting a non-interventionist strategy is that the Pax Americana is holding the rest of the world together, and without our military presence everywhere, the locals will start fighting each other for whatever inscrutable reasons. The trouble is, maintaining that presence is expensive, and however exceptional America is, its not exempt from the reality of needing to produce at least as much as it consumes, in the long run, or perish.
So. Maybe the peace is worth keeping, and we should keep our military deployed around the globe, keeping people from fighting each other. Its to their benefit, whether or not they realize it, right? But we can't provide security if we go bankrupt, so we've got to find a way to deal with that (impending) issue if we want to keep on keeping everyone safe. How do to it? Borrowing and inflating can't work forever, and there's only so much tax money to be had from US citizens.

But wait a minute, if so many non-US citizens are benefiting from our military presence, perhaps they should pay for it? There's an idea, we could start charging all the countries in which we have military bases in order for us to keep them there; an amount at least equal to what the presence costs. That way our protective umbrella is sustainable. Any country who doesn't like that idea, or can't afford it, can simply say so and take their risks with their neighbors on their own.
And thus, America asserts itself as a tribute empire. Is this desirable?

"The state of Union is getting stronger"

2012-01-29T12:09:00.001-05:00

What?

The state of our Union is that we're broke, that we've made promises to our citizens and allies that we can't possibly keep, and that we don't have the political will to fix any of it.

Who is the state of the union addressed to anyway? Evidently people who aren't paying any attention, and who's sole insight on how the country is doing is that one speah each year.

Sovereign Default

2012-01-24T20:20:00.001-05:00

This is exciting; George Mason University is having a symposium on how
a sovereign default might play out in the United States.

http://mercatus.org/publication/us-sovereign-debt-crisis-tipping-point-scenarios-and-crash-dynamics

Not everyone is playing osterich.

Electability

2012-01-24T20:19:00.001-05:00

Aye, there's the rub:

"Some candidates for office may themselves know better but believe that electoral success is impossible unless they make unrealistic commitments. U.S. politicians will not receive credit for solving a problem that many refuse to believe they have—sometimes out of sheer ignorance, sometimes schooled by widely propagated but baseless ideology. Perhaps some more-understanding candidates say what is necessary to achieve election now, hoping or planning to educate and change the views of the electorate later."

From the GMU symposium on US sovereign default: http://mercatus.org/publication/us-sovereign-debt-crisis-tipping-point-scenarios-and-crash-dynamics/courting-avoidable.

I think that's a charitable interpretation of the candidates' (other than Paul's) positions on our national finances. The uncharitable interpretation is that they're absolutely delusional, which may be the case for Santorum in particular.

And then, on the other hand, we've got Ron Paul telling us we've got a serious problem, and people telling him he's unelectable for saying it.

Our country may deserve what's coming to it, I'm sad to say.

NDAA

2012-01-16T11:10:00.003-05:00

National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

The president may now use the military to imprison anyone associated with a dangerous group, in secret, without access to an attorney.

As always, governments are the greatest danger to their citizens. I fear a government responding to a subversive message (such as this blog post) much more than I fear a religious zelot in a remote part of the world wearing a homemade explosive belt. The latter are in relatively short supply, poor, and disorganized. The former are ubiquitous, the most economically powerful entities in existence, and highly organized.

How much power?

2012-01-16T10:51:00.002-05:00

I've been wondering how much Paul could actually accomplish in office, as the president. He can veto any new bill that he finds unconstitutional, but I don't think he can refuse to enforce bills that have already been signed into law by previous presidents. Can he? Part of the answer is that he can rescind anything that was enacted solely though executive order. Whats the scope of that?

I saw an interview where the anchor tried to corner Paul, asking directly: "You say you're opposed to anything unauthorized by the constitution. Does the Head Start program meet that criteria, and would you end it?" I thought Paul's answer was at the same time principled, sensible, and pragmatic. he said "Yes its unconstitutional, but its not the focus of what I'm concerned about. We need to focus on the big impact issues, like spending overseas, if we want to fix the fiscal problem."

Elsewhere, such as here, he's explained that he's not looking to pull the support out from under the people who have come to depend on the government. He thinks we should work to ease that reliance, but not that it should be forcibly and immediately removed.

"First in the South"

2012-01-16T10:27:00.003-05:00

I wonder if Paul has yet uttered the words "states rights" in the hearing of South Carolinian's.

News pundits talk about how the large active military presence in SC won't jive with Paul's pro-peace message, but their governor thinks the state might be war-weary enough to respond to it (though he backs Romney). I also read somewhere that South Carolinian's have "their own brand of independence," and the governor exemplified it by saying: "our great-great-great-grandfathers fired on the flag!"

That's a curious way to put it, but it drives the point home in my mind: people in SC care about principle more than unity. And I like that. The reason they "fired on the flag" had everything to do with states rights and the proper role of the federal government. Since the issue at hand in that case was regrettably slavery, I can understand why a candidate might not want to bring it up again; but "states rights" has got to be something that people in SC would majorly respond to.

So: is there a way to talk about states rights -- or more properly: Federalism -- without invoking the ghost of slavery and being labeled racist? Its a touchy subject. Yes, ending slavery was moral good, but it probably could have been accomplished via peaceful means, avoiding the deaths of close to seven hundred thousand people.

Israel is just fine

2012-01-16T10:17:00.004-05:00

This is interesting. At about 1:30 into the video, the host quotes the head of Israeli intelligence and the Israeli prime minister saying: "Iran is not a threat to Israel. And if it is, we can deal with it on our own."

I, quite frankly, had no idea that this was Israel's position. I thought they wanted our help with protecting them, that they felt like they needed us protecting them in order to continue to exist. I'm surprised to learn that that's apparently a uniquely American view.

So; good news then. It wouldn't be a betrayal of an ally to pull our support from the region. Israel wouldn't collapse, and they feel confident that they can take care of themselves in the face of aggression. Come to think of it, they've demonstrated that that's overwhelmingly true repeatedly, so there's really no good reason to doubt them.

On the other hand, the government of another one of our allies might be in a lot more trouble without our support: Saudi Arabia.

ADDED: here's Netanyahu say it himself:

IMF Money

2012-01-14T20:56:00.003-05:00

I heard a bit of off-putting rhetoric in something Paul said in a speech in South Carolina; he mentioned how there's a conspiracy to replace the dollar with a global paper currency issued by the IMF. This was so out of the blue that it struck me as paranoia. But lo, Google shows me this:

http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/10/markets/dollar/index.htm

So: the IMF is publicly making noises about the possibility of replacing the dollar with a global paper currency. I can only imagine what's going on behind the scenes. That Dominque Strauss Khan is quoted in that article is icing on the cake.

The idea single currency has a lot to recommend it; so long as all its users hold themselves to the same fiscal discipline. The failure of that condition is a major part of the Eurozone's current problems.

More student loan paranoia

2012-01-12T13:05:00.000-05:00

So the student loan asset backed securities (ABS) market is roughly one fifth the size of the home mortgage ABS market. Arguably, that means that a collapse in the student loan market would necessarily have less deleterious effects than what we saw in the mortgage crisis. However, I suspect that a large portion of the student loans issued have co-signers who have mortgages (ie, their parents). If this is true, a collapse in the student loan market should put further strain on the mortgage market, as co-signers who are legally required to pick up the slack in their co-signee's loan payments become less able to afford their mortgages. In that light, the un-expungebility of student loans takes on a new, darker tone.

Actually, I don't know the law on that subject: if a student has a co-signer on their student loans, and the student declares bankruptcy (or even dies), does the co-signer become responsible for the loan? I would imagine that they do. What if the co-signer also declares bankruptcy? Based on the logic of student-loans, I would expect both parties are still on the hook. This hasto have already been played out in court, what has been the result? It's now that I wish I had a clan of loyal followers and commentators who would dig up the answers to such questions, as seems to happen on popular econ blogs.

The Economy

2012-01-11T14:54:00.003-05:00

Fun quote from Moody's chief economist, Mark Zandi: "I don't see anything different happening in the economy whether Romney or Obama are the next president. they're pretty much the same. If some of the other more bizarre republican candidates were elected, well then we'd have to reconsider things."So there you go: that's why you don't want to pick the "electable" guy just to get Obama out of office: he's substantively the same. Just rides to town on a different animal. On the other hand, Zandi dismissed my worries about the implosion of the student loan market, saying that "sure, a big portion of that trillion dollars worth of federally subsidized, need-based debt is going to default, but its on the books of the federal government. So it will be a big problem for tax payers, but its not going to impact the financial system like the mortgage crisis did."

I'm sorry to say, my worries were not allayed. Aside from default on government-held assets being a fairly big problem in this era of our government constantly running out of money, I'm not convinced that they're really on the government's books anyway. Sallie Mae, who I believe is the initiator of this trillion dollars of risky debt (correct me if I'm wrong), regularly issues asset backed securities. As often as twice a quarter, and they're not small issues.

I'd like to know who's holding them, because presumably the risk is on their books, not the federal government's. Their site is currently crashing as I try to investigate; awesome sign. But even then, the buyers of the ABS's likely aren't the ultimate bearers of the risk; it would be dumb of them to not buy insurance on these risky assets (ie, credit default swaps).

Zandi didn't answer my more specific question: "Has a market emerged for credit default swaps on student loan asset backed securities?" Which is unsurprising if he was unaware of the market for ABS's. I suspect the market is there, it just hasn't made the news yet.

Then again, I may be ignorantly misunderstanding the whole situation. I would invite enlightenment from anyone who's more well-versed.

Exercise

2012-01-10T20:43:00.004-05:00

Recent appearances aside, this is a blog primarily about me (and my "times" secondarily).

And so I shall post some pictures of my naked torso.

This is a before and after. Before I started working out:

After about a year of working out:
Also some beardlyness.

Honestly the difference isn't quite as striking as I had hoped. The extra 20 lbs of muscle would probably be more evident if my chest hair were trimmed in either picture, or if they were from the same angle. And I think probably more than half of the gains is in my legs, which I don't have a before shot of. At anyrate, there's a bit more depth of chest, a bit more V-ness to the torso. I've got a ways to go still. I can never seem to eat enough.

Vetoes

2012-01-10T17:34:00.001-05:00

I have a theory on why the republicans of the political machine don't want Ron Paul to be president. His nickname in congress is allegedly "Dr. No," because he votes against any bill that isn't explicitly authorized by the constitution.

Which is true of most bills.

Republican congressfolk are just as beholden to deliver loot to their constituencies in the form of ear-marks and special interest legislation as their Democratic brethren, and I'm sure they expect that they would be severely limited in their capacity to do so by the veto pen of a President Paul. Imagine a Republican president vetoing Republican backed legislation! Now that would be sweet; a welcome antidote to party politics.

I also really like the idea of having a president who shares a moniker with a bond villain.

More on voting

2012-01-10T16:40:00.001-05:00

I think I speak the truth when I say that: a.) among people concerned with removing Obama from office, b.) the health care reform law is a primary point of interest.

Repealing the law before it goes into effect is a major, important issue. The consequence of not doing so is that the entire medical system will likely become as distorted and inefficient as Medicare, among other very bad things. Now, I fear that many people who hold this view will put removing Obama, and therefore "electability" of the republican candidate, above all else. And so, the received wisdom goes, that means nominating Mitt Romney. The governor of the state that created the model for the healthcare reform law.

Now, Romney's said that what worked for Massachusetts doesn't necessarily work for the nation, and he believes the law should be repealed. I hope you'll join me in finding this disingenuous. I suspect that rather than fighting for a clean repeal, as president he would use it as a platform to create something he thinks willwork for the rest of the nation, which is bound to be another CF, in my cynical estimation.

We find ourselves in the bizarre situation of having two front running, viable candidates: one who's platform is peace, sound money, and constitutionally limited government; the other whose platform seems to encompass increased foreign military presence, doesn't seem to have a stance on the money supply, and supports government restriction of various civil liberties. Hell of it is, republicans seem to be leaning towards the latter candidate. For once,a legitimately positive candidate is both running and doing well, and the republicans are leaning towards the same old grabbag of semi-statist semi-cronyist garbage

Please please please, people at primaries: Forget about Romney and vote for Paul.

2011: a year in pictures

2012-01-09T22:07:00.004-05:00

Last nice day at the beach:
Well, not actually nice. The wind was blowing in the 30's and the temperature was in the 50's. But he clouds looked nice.

So, I locked my super-awesome ultra strong kyrptonite bike lock to my railing, with my bike:
And lost the key. Kryptonite provides a lovely key-registration and replacement system. I even signed up for it. Sadly I did so after I had had the keys in my pocket for about two years, so the registration number on it was pretty faded. Evidently I gave them the wrong number, cause they gave me the wrong key. On the plus side, I got to see just how long it takes to grind trough a kryptonite lock with a craftsman hand grinder (about 25 min). Also, I like that a spark is hitting me directly in the face.

I finally completed (sortof) a longstanding dream: made my bose soundstation work again. The ipod jack had stopped working, and I figured I could hack it by soldering some pins into the data ribbon. This almost worked, and then I fried the headphone jack on my iphone. Hurray applecare! Happily, I got less stupid and googled "bose sound station aux jack hack" and found someone who had the same idea, but was more electronics savvy than me. See, there's solder points right on the effing board that you can solder the wires into, no ridiculous ribbon-stabbing necessary.

And here's some more of me and my pumpkins:

Pumpkin Carving

2012-01-09T21:49:00.004-05:00

See this? Its the trophy for the scariest pumpkin at my work contest. Damn right.

Our friends Julie and Joe invited us over for pumpkin carving before halloween. I surprised myself by carving this little bastard:

Pretty effing scary, amirite? I was just looking at picture of a skull for that one. Later, I found out there was a pumpkin carving contest at my work, and I decided to up the ante. I had visions of incredible flaming skulls, ala the famous Metallica skull:
I invited some friends from work over, had some beers, and set to work. The big pumpkin I got from work totally disintigrated in the attempt. Its the thing upside down on the bottom in the picture below.

Having not succeded with the big pumpkin, I resorted to using the one I had already made, and a smaller root vegetable. On top is one I carved out of a rutabega using a sketuchup 3d model as a guide. Its pretty awesome, but I got tired of carving radishes for the teeth so they didn't work out quite so well. I ground up some boiled beets and poured it over the top of the original skull, which, I think you'll agree, looks pretty gruesome.

I had frozen them for preservation, and after they melted this is what happened:

Even more wicked, eh?

And then, incongruously, heres a picture of Rachael and I in front of the Bahai temple in Wilmette. I've been growing a beard for like two months and I'm already weirded out by the pictures of myself without facial hair.

PICTURES BEAUTIFUL PICTURES

2012-01-09T21:21:00.005-05:00

Pictures from San Francisco!Rachael and I at the highest point near SF, looking out at it!
Rachael and I under a big awesome dome thing!
Rachael and I on the middle of the GGB!
Rachael and I and Kim and Ben near the GGB! Kim and Ben were amazing hosts. They shared their house with us, they cooked for us, they took us around their city, they took us along the coast, they took us to a farm, they played games with us, they drank with us, and they let us play their dog. They made it an awesome trip. Thanks guys, it was you.
THE SEA!

Rachael and I are Engaged!

2012-01-09T19:59:00.005-05:00

I finally popped it a few weeks ago. We were on a Battlestar Galactica marathon, and in between episodes she teased me by getting down on one knee and taking my hand. I was like "Whhaaat are you doing?" She said "just showing you what its like to think something is gonna happen, and then it doesn't." (This because I had been showing her progress on the wedding bands as I made them, and I handed one to her when I got it cast... in retrospect I see why this may have been sort-of a confusing thing to do).

This cut me to the quick, and started me thinking (while the next episode was playing), "why am I delaying anyway? I've got rings, why don't I just propose now?" So at the next break, I snuck off and got them from the drawer next to our bed, got down on one knee myself, and asked her if she'd be my wife. Happily, she said yes. Well, actually she first asked how she could know that I was serious, since I'd given her the rings once before, but she was apparently satisfied with "'Cause I'm really serious."

We're thinking of getting married in mid July; its the soonest thing that works out well scheduling-wise. We'll probably do it in Cincinnati, that being the birthplace of our epic love, home to a lovely garden with waterfalls (the Campus Green on UC's campus), and locale of my favorite hangout (Baba Budans, with whom we're in negotiations with for as a reception-place). Failing that, we're gonna spend the money we'd otherwise blow on a party on a sweet honeymoon.

Indefinate detention

2012-01-09T15:55:00.001-05:00

Here's a fun fact: president Obama recently signed into law a bill that allows indefinite detention of American citizens, on American soil, without trial or charges.

Go here to do something about it :
http://act.demandprogress.org/letter/ndaa_reversal/?akid=1107.494012.rPmy8O&rd=1&t=3

Add that to the assassination via drone strike of an american on foreign soil without trial, indictment, or charges, and how does he look on civil liberties? Not good.

I've got to imagine this is flummoxing to the people who voted for him. Maybe he really did Hope to Change a whole lot of things; but it appears he can't change the corrupting influence of power.

...and further (continueing the thought from below)

2012-01-09T15:50:00.001-05:00

Maybe the most skiving, cowardly phrase a voter can utter is "I won't vote for them 'cause they're not gonna win."

I understand why people say it so commonly; they don't want to "waste their vote." Or more accurately, they don't want to be seen as having wasted their vote; they want to affiliate themselves with the successful candidate. So the question I'd like to ask people when they say such a thing is: "are you participating in representative government because you want someone to publicly stand up for your beliefs? or are you participating because you want to have been right?" I really wish the people who'd pick the latter would stick to sports.

On the republican primaries

2012-01-09T13:02:00.004-05:00

A few notable political points. A conservative pundit noted in the WSJ's op-eds that a candidate with such "extreme doveishness" as Ron Paul cannot win the republican nomination. I guess its the same foregone conclusion that keeps the media from talking about him, even though he's currently in second place. Its rather sad and disillusioning that the policy of "being a nation at peace" disqualifies one from candidacy. When did we become so warlike? And why? I thought we all agreed that wars were things to avoid? Are our policy-makers such diligent students of Peter Parker's uncle (of "with great power comes great responsibility" fame) that we've made it our moral obligation to spend our blood and treasure on the wellbeing and security of the entire planet? More likely its just momentum; we took on the role of global hegemon, and we can't see any clear and safe path to abdicating it.

We can, however, see in retrospect that most of our military adventures were mistakes. Teddy Roosavelt's Philippine imperialism is a dark and regretful chapter of our foreign policy ("Civilize 'em with a krag!"). Our entrance into the first world war was both unnecessary and counterproductive. All the domino-theory-motivated wars and operations have proved to be futile and pointless since the Soviet Union collapsed of its own rot. Oddly, the party affiliation of the presidents who initiated all of those conflicts is currently the one that makes the most anti-war noises. And yet, we're stuck in the mentality that we have to keep following their example. What a weird situation: Progressivism once meant making war in the name American superiority (ala T. Roosavelt) or of freedom (ala Wilson) or of anti-communism (ala Kennedy), now Conservatism means continuing those traditions. What sloppy intellectualism.

The other interesting political point: the "extreme doveish" candidate currently has the most campaign contributions from active military personnel of any of the candidates. I think this gives the lie to the sentiment that "support the troops" means "support war." A cynic might argue that soldiers supporting politicians with a peace-oriented agenda are being disloyal, but I think that stance is just pigheadedness. War may be "too important to be left to the generals," but its certainly too important to be left to people who can't figure out whether or not its "progressive" or "conservative" to make war, or who are preoccupied with such meaningless labels in the first place.

Of course, the more realpolitik explanation for our military stance has nothing to do with idealism and everything to do with resources. Our support of middle eastern dictators during the arab spring certainly contains none of that Wilsonian progressive idealism of spreading freedom and democracy across the globe, and has everything to do with maintaining a stable political environment for mineral extraction (and supposedly counter-terrorism). And maybe, from a cost-benefit standpoint, that's legitimate. I'm just really hoping for energy sources outside the middle east so that we can stop caring about it and let it deal with its backwardness on its own. Happily, technology provides.

But then back to the more idealistic reasons for our presence specifically in the middle east: there's our promises to our allies, which we should keep if we're gonna make any claims to idealism and integrity at all. Oh Israel. Why couldn't the land of milk and honey have been revised to be in Utah or somewhere? At any rate, they're our friends, and they're surrounded by hostile neighbors. How far does our friendship require us to go from keeping their neighbors from becoming nuclear powers? They could keep that from happening themselves, probably, but it would also probably trigger a war that'd we'd have to become involved with just based on our alliance-relationship. On the other hand, the US can overwhelmingly win any total war we choose to fight, with or without the nuclear arsenal. That we don't fight that way is a matter of us being much nicer than we strictly need to be.

My real question is: what would the world look like if the US were to take on an isolationist stance? Would Israel necessarily fall? Would China expand their military influence and take on the hegemonic role? What would that mean for free trade? Come to think of it, expanding free trade agreements with other countries (especially China) would probably keep them from feeling the need to expand militarily (because trade is cheaper than war).

Regarding "occupy wall street";

2011-10-18T14:15:00.004-04:00

specifically regarding the demand that all student loan debt be forgiven, I have some analysis to offer: A basic economics question: what happens to the price of a good when demand for it is increased and supply stays relatively constant? The price increases, of course. What would happen to demand if some outside party were to give money to potential consumers of a good explicitly to buy that good? Demand would increase, the price would go up, and in the long run supply would also increase.

Thus in education: governments and other entities have long made it a deliberate policy to encourage young people to get higher education; subsidizing loans, providing grants, sponsoring scholarships, and so on. And so: the price of education has risen. I would speculate that the dramatic rise in cost is directly proportional to the amount of subsidy that has been poured into it. Further, the advent of low-quality "for-profit" educational institutions is the long-run response to the increased price.

The increased price is the direct, obvious effect of intervention in the marketplace. What are the "unseen" effects? A lot of people who otherwise wouldn't seek higher education will do so, and will aspire to attend more prestigious (and expensive, incidentally) institutions. That's all good, right? Maybe, but much of that price-increasing subsidy comes in the form of subsidized debt, so these new students bear an increased burden. Further, since new students are (at least temporarily) shielded from the economic consequences of their choices of subject matter, we can expect more people to study subjects that are more fun. More literature, more art, more humanities; more of all the things that are intrinsically satisfying but, alas, less valued societally than more difficult and "practical" subjects like science, engineering, and business. Thus, we have more people with expensive educations and skill sets that produce goods that few people are willing to pay for, at least at the price needed to service the subsidy-inflated debt burden held by the producers of those goods.

Maybe the the unseen effects outweigh the obvious ones, and we should concede that the whole project was poorly motivated and give up on it. But what about all those poor students who were encouraged to borrow money in order to buy an asset that's, ultimately, unproductive? It was a bad loan, so maybe its appropriate to write it off; consider it a dead loss. But again, back to that subsidy point; most of those loans (~70%) are made through Sallie Mae, and thus guaranteed by the federal government. If they default totally (ie; are "forgiven") then the federal government is obligated to pay the difference to the people who lent the money to the students for their unproductive educational investments.

The federal government is broke. It could only make those payments by raising taxes, inflating the currency, or issuing more federal debt. All three have negative implications for those same oppressed students ever being able to find the jobs their educations have prepared them for. And so the students are left barely better off: no debt, but still no income. It does seem as though they've been done wrong by somebody.

But who? Is it the people who lent the students the money? It does seem like they're guilty of naivety-bordering-on-stupidity to lend on the order of a hundred thousand dollars for a degree that leads to a profession that earns around thirty thousand dollars (I'm thinking here of a friend who studied photography at an expensive school, who's case I don't think is unique). But the fact of the matter is that the lenders have not been using the type of degree one is planning on perusing as a decision criteria at all. Imagine walking into a bank, asking for a hundred thousand dollars, and being given it without asking what you're doing with it or how you plan to pay it back. It sounds ridiculous, right? Why would any institution concerned about loosing money lend it out on those terms? Don't they deserve to loose it if they're that stupid?

Yes, they certainly do. But the lenders were willing to take the risk not out of stupidity, but because someone else had already agreed to bear almost all of that risk. Again with that subsidy: by guaranteeing all those loans, the federal government enabled the lenders to have lending standards that would be suicidally lax otherwise, thus achieving the goal of making financing more broadly available to potential students. The lenders didn't care how the borrowers were planning on paying back the loans because the government had already legally promised to pay if the borrowers failed. And the government was unconcerned about the risk because a) it made student loans ineligible for bankruptcy a decade ago, b) education was a political priority, and c) its not very smart about money or risk in general.

In conclusion: you've got the wrong street, occupiers; try "K" instead of "Wall."

Money isn't everything

2011-10-13T17:35:00.002-04:00

Only the crystallization of human intelligence and effort, the evidence of having created positive value in the world, and the recognition of having served another's need. Of course, its easy to forget all that when currency, the physical symbol of this abstract idea of money, can be created without any of those things underlying it. Fiat money, like the cake, is a lie. It is a deception on the part of those creating it, for the purpose of extracting those positive values from the people they exchange it with without giving anything in return.

I think the disaffected (would-be) intellectuals who rail against money and its possessors are at the effect of this lie, and that their anger would be more justly aimed at the entities that create the lie rather than those that are forced to use it. That is, at governments rather than markets.

HUM

2011-09-11T00:21:00.003-04:00

I've been on vacation all week, and also sick all week. Rachael and I were planning on doing a bunch of city-exploring and sailing, plans that have been sort of hampered by fever and lung-hacking. We still managed a fair amount of exploration though, much of which is photo-documented and yet to be posted; we did the architecture tour on the river, rode the ferris wheel, went up the Sears (Willis) Tower, went vintage shopping and Hi-Fidelity site seeing in Wicker Park... and on Satuday, to cap it off, was the best show I have ever seen or ever will see:

To my lasting amazement, HUM did a reunion show here. This is one of my all-time favorite bands, and I've been a "listening to a lot of HUM" phase for the last six months or so. They had broken up a decade or so ago, so it was one of those bands that I would say "I wish I had been around (and going to shows) when they were touring" about, all full of regret and nostalgia. How great was my elation, then, when Rachael told me that they were playing at the Onion's A.V. Fest, right here in Chicago, a short train ride away from our place! It seemed too good to be true, compounded by the fact that the Onion likes to put things that are not true on their pages, but lo! they spoke truly.

They sounded awesome. They played bunch of my favorite songs, and couple new ones. I was surprised at how true to the recordings they sounded; there's a lot of stuff that seems one-off and unreproducible (in terms of screeches and things). And they were loud! Listening to Afternoon With the Axolotls in front of the speaker stacks was, well... difficult to describe for me. Like a religious experience. Like floating in the void of space and watching supernovas explode around me.

I can't say enough about how much this music means to me. The itunes reviews actually do a pretty good job describing it.

HUM

2011-09-10T23:19:00.001-04:00

HUM

2011-09-10T23:18:00.000-04:00

HUM

2011-09-10T21:14:00.000-04:00

Friday sailing

2011-09-03T12:36:00.002-04:00

I'm pretty happy with this photo:
I feel like it could be an ad for the brand of shorts I'm wearing.

And here's the vista I'm so happily admiring

Sunset-lit Rachael:
My two apprentice piolets, Rajesh:

...and Tuhin:

Wicked sailing day

2011-08-27T19:16:00.002-04:00

20-25 mph winds, 8-10 foot waves, it was nuts. I took all these folks out (and also Ashley, who was somewhere else when we were taking the photo) . Towards the end it was getting a bit harrowing, in swells we couldn't see over, and they were breaking near the shore line. I did three runs out to the two mile buoy and back, with only a little break between, with two passenger each time. It went off with nary a mishap, despite having misriggged the mainsheet initially, getting stuck in irons at launch the second time, and having the waves (and really strong wind) screw up our tack the third.

I was on the water for probably two hours total, and it was exhausting. Gives me a feeling for how difficult crossing the lake would actually be. Though in that wind, we'd have been nearly half way there in the two hours I spent on the water!

Are they even trying?

2011-08-26T21:42:00.002-04:00

I just got the following spam

Julie Anson ✆ j.anson@ballarat.edu.au

show details 8:19 PM (21 minutes ago)

You have been approved to be paid you and your family £750,000.00 in
this years British American Tobacco Company Lottery Programs held in the
United Kingdom. Your email address was selected from a random lucky dip
of email addresses from all over the world, to begin your claim,do
contact Mr.Tom Bleen
Claims/logistics officer
Email:batc_104redacted
Tel:+44-redacted
Mrs Julie Anson,
Lottery Co-ordinator.

Trancendentalism

2011-08-25T22:22:00.005-04:00

Transcendental functions are crazy. I tried applying the tangent function to the y vertex coordinates in my ring design (long story, kinda boring, basically amounts to me having only the most rudimentary understanding of what the tangent function does), and this is what results:

Its... less wearable. But more space-ship like.

Ambigram for DRH

2011-08-18T22:19:00.004-04:00

Inspired by xkcd.com/917

Beautiful Summer

2011-08-15T19:47:00.006-04:00

Rachael and I have been soaking up as much beach as possible. Here she is displaying her captives after beating me in beach-chess (which is much like normal chess, except that it later fills your apartment with sand):

A little later on, my favorite cloud came by to get in a picture with us:

After that, we discovered a truly fantastic sandcastle that someone left out on the beach for us, the photo of which I can't seem to upload without it getting messed up:

Later still, we savored the true flavor of Chicago at Mustard's Last Stand:
But the lake isn't all fun and games, it can be formidable and furious:
Kevin told us to look wistful and that's what we managed. Kevin and Rachael and I were going to go sailing on that day (which was yesterday), and I was really excited about the wind forecast. I had seen earlier in the week that it was supposed to be 15-20mph out of the north, and it ended up being more like 25-30. I didn't realize that north and west winds make for really rough seas; the waves were 6-10 feet and coming in fast. As we were walking towards the beach I saw the whitecaps and had a pause, but I was still intent on going out. I talked to the guy at the sailing beach-house, and he advised strongly against it, there being a marine warning in effect (which means that only the coast guard will come rescue you). We saw this other 'cat on the beach; I figured we'd watch and see how they did, and if it looked fun I'd convince Rachael and Kevin to give it a shot.
The sailors were, according to a bystander, fairly experienced. They lasted about five minutes, capsized, turtled, ended up with the boat on the rocks and themselves out to sea getting rescued by the coast guard.

I couldn't initially figure out what the black metal pole hanging from the top of the sail was; I realized only much later that it was the broken top five feet of the mast. At any rate, I let myself be persuaded to forgo sailing that day. In retrospect, looking at the first picture, their travails may have been much less terrible had they had had a mast-float; it seems very silly to sail without one.

Kevin and I went out aboard the Pianissimo the day before, on much gentler seas.
It went very softly indeed, as only a fifteen ton fifty foot yacht can. I don't know what's with my expression in this picture. Looking stern, I suppose.
[added: no, the camera is looking stern.]

Speaking of rough weather, we had a big wind storm a while back, and this car on my street discovered the virtue of parking in a garage:

I saw this on my way to work with the tree on top of it and the owner looking at it agape. Its a lovely neighborhood we've got here, full of mature tree-lined streets and on-street parking.

Here's two more pretty things: Rachael with a Willow crown and some pressed orchids I put in a transparent frame for her:

Sadly this masterpiece didn't last; the color of the flowers faded and it got wet in a rainstorm, making it get all splotchy. I had written "I Love You" in oil on the rice paper in the bottom left corner; the thought was that I wanted to include a message but didn't want to overly distract from the flowers. I used too much oil and it became pretty illegible, but it ended up looking sortof like asian writing if you turn it sideways, which goes with the aesthetic.

More interesting things!

2011-08-06T17:21:00.005-04:00

I have, over the course of the winter, been forging a Ring of Power. I haven't discussed it here because I wanted to keep its great importance a secret, but now the cat's mostly out of the bag; you see, I'm having one made that fits my finger (the fourth from the thumb on the left hand) and one that fits Rachael's.

Here's a few screenshots of the (nearly final) computer model:

Its a mobius ring with a triangular crossection. Rachael had brought up the idea of having a mobius strip ring like this, but I wasn't a fan of how the curve isn't continuous. I figured a two sided strip with a continious curve wouln't result in a very wearable ring, but I figured one with three might be more so. I made a few models out of wax and clay years ago, and vaugely dreamed of having enough mathematical sophistication to construct it perfectly, and over the course of serveral months this winter and spring I finally worked it out. I experimented with a lot of stuff and eventually settled on some matrix transformation methods. Reading some stuff like this may have helped: Mobius ring

The great ~~Belgian~~ Dutch smiths at Shapeways have taken this excretion of my mindgrapes and turned it into a physical object!Actually, several of them. Above is the (nearly) latest draft prototype, made from plastic. I had a bunch made so that I could be sure of the sizing, each one a millimeter smaller than the one previous. It is, as I'm sure you're keen to notice, too thick to be a comfortable ring; a fact that I realized moments after I order this batch. The next batch of more wearable rings is currently hurtling though space aboard an aeroplane as we speak, I believe.

The previous incarnation of the Ring, which finished its long journey to me back in May, is here:

As you can see, this one is totally metal. Its made of silver, and I basically drew it in Sketchup. This was before I figured out all the mathemagic that's required to make it have smooth sides and make it easily realizable. The segmented versions took about five hours each for me to draw, with only sixteen segments. I saw the futility of my Sketchy-ways, and decided to take the plunge and write a program to render it with whatever variations I wanted.

And here it is! Its written in Matlab; I may at some point re-write it in something cooler.

%make mobius ring

num_segments = 360;
side_length = pi()/10;
circumradius = 1/2 * side_length *csc(pi()/3) ;
%circumfrence = 4.7; %5.1 results in 5.3 effectively
circumfrence = 5.0; %5.3 results in 5.5

inradius = 1/2 * side_length *cot(pi()/3);
radius = (circumfrence / (2 * pi))+circumradius;
% stretch=1.61803399; %phi
stretch=2.71828183; %e

starting_plane = [circumradius*sin(0/(180/pi())), circumradius*cos(0/(180/pi())), 0
circumradius*sin(120/(180/pi())), circumradius*cos(120/(180/pi())), 0
circumradius*sin(240/(180/pi())), circumradius*cos(240/(180/pi())), 0];
translation = zeros(3);
translation(:,1)=radius;
twist = 120;
theta_z = (twist / num_segments)/(180/pi());
theta_y = (360/num_segments)/(180/pi());
theta_yi= theta_y;
row = 4;
vertices=starting_plane+translation;
for i = 1:(num_segments)
theta_zi= i * theta_z;
Rz=[cos(theta_zi), -sin(theta_zi), 0
sin(theta_zi), cos(theta_zi), 0
0, 0, 1];
new_plane=starting_plane*Rz;
new_plane = new_plane + translation;
theta_yi= theta_yi + theta_y;
Ry= [cos(theta_yi), 0, sin(theta_yi)
0, 1, 0
-sin(theta_yi), 0, cos(theta_yi)];
new_plane = new_plane*Ry;
vertices((row:(row+2)),:)=new_plane;
row = row+3;
end

S = [1 0 0
0 stretch 0
0 0 1];
vertices = vertices * S;

connections = zeros(num_segments*3,3);
connections(:,1)=(1:num_segments*3)';
con_2 = connections;
con_3 = connections;
for i =1:num_segments*3;
con_2(i,3) = con_2(i,1)-1;
con_2(i,2) = con_2(i,1)+2;
end
for i =1:num_segments*3;
con_3(i,3) = con_3(i,1)+2;
con_3(i,2) = con_3(i,1)+3;
end
connections = cat(1,con_2, con_3);
connections = mod(connections, ((num_segments*3)));
num_connections = size(connections);
num_connections = num_connections(1);

row = 1;
normals=zeros((triangles_count),3);
for i = 1:(triangles_count/3)
a = vertices((connections(row)+1), :);
b = vertices((connections(row + 1)+1), :);
c = vertices((connections(row + 2)+1), :);
AB = [(b(1)-a(1)), (b(2)-a(2)), (b(3)-a(3))];
AC = [(c(1)-a(1)), (c(2)-a(2)), (c(3)-a(3))];
%do crossproduct;
n = cross(AB,AC);
for j = row:(row+3)
normals(j,:) = n;
end
row = row + 3;
end

plot3(vertices(:,1),vertices(:,2),vertices(:,3));
axis([-4 4 -4 4 -4 4]);

I forsee a great irony:

2011-08-06T17:18:00.003-04:00

In the upcoming elections, this will make an excellent bit of campaign propaganda:

... for the subject of the poster's opposition.

Debt Downgrade!

2011-08-06T16:15:00.006-04:00

This morning, after returning from the farmer's market on my bicycle, I was shocked to open my paper-paper and find this news:

How I failed to become aware of this yesterday fairly boggles the mind. I had the radio on on the way home, and web-browsers open all day. I guess it was announced later? Or NPR didn't find it a fit subject of commentary?

Anyway, this is one eventuality that I never heard anyone discuss during the media charade around the debt ceiling. I heard lots of discussion about the horrors that await us in the form of a credit downgrade if we didn't raise the debt ceiling, but nary a mention of the possibility that we would be stricken with the same fate if we did.

It seems pretty obvious in retrospect. Can the United States, as a matter of fact, make good on all the promises its made? Absolutely not, and everyone who's been paying the slightest attention knows it. That the S&P should come out and say it was only a matter of time, and perhaps the biggest surprise is that it's taken this long. It's appalling the way people let political allegiance distract them from the facts of their environment.

Here's a thought: to whatever extent this actually changes investors' behavior (you could argue that the downgrade's been priced into the market for a long time), it should have the effect of making some private debt more comparable to US sovereign debt. Thus, investors should be more willing to substitute private debt for sovereign debt which means lending money to companies rather than governments. What effect does this have? Money that would otherwise be locked up in government projects will instead be allocated to private projects, which are inevitably more productive.

On the other hand, the government always has the power monetize the debt, something that I think its under-appreciated in its insidiousness.

Added: is that picture cropped that way on purpose?

Political ideology

2011-07-30T19:05:00.002-04:00

Conservatism means merely "keeping things the same;" hanging on to the values of the past. Thus, the nature and value of conservatism as an ideology depends entirely on past circumstances, and upon what portion of the past one chooses to select as that which is to be conserved.

For instance, in the debate around embryonic stem cell research (already so far in the past), opposition to the research was taken to be the conservative stance. But why? Hostility towards science has not been the tradition in western culture, nor has the application of religious values been accepted as part of our legal environment (and to the extent that it had, it's long been depricated). What then is being conserved?

I would argue that another word from the opposite end of the benighted spectrum of political discourse better applies. Whats the opposite of "keeping things the same?" "Changing things," obviously, and more specifically "changing things so as the world is better in accordance with the set of values held by the people doing the changing." What's the word for this approach to governance? Progressivism.

Yes friends, our penultimate governmental executive warrants the label "progressive" just as much as the current one, though their ideas of progress are rather different (and equally misguided, I'd argue). And to them both, I have only this to say: "You keep your values, I've got my own. Don't interfere with me or my compatriots' pursuit of our values, you can only do harm."

The name for this stance is Liberalism.

If you're having trouble digesting these definitions, I'd suggest that you may be suffering from a condition known as "watching TV." Or, more generally: "absorbing your political ideology from pundits."

Black bomber; reasons to like

2011-06-27T18:09:00.002-04:00

I was considering whether I'm so fond of my motorcycle simply because I'm buying into some coolness narrative, because I built it and am biased, or because it's objectively awesome. No doubt there are elements of all three, but here's an objective comparative measure:

1969 cb450 max horsepower: 45
2010 harley sportster 883cc hp: 46

That's to say: the cb450 generates about the same horsepower with half the engine (displacement is 444cc). I had heard that the engine was high tech for it's time, and that they stopped making it mainly because production was too expensive; I had never really appreciated just how advanced it must have been.

How does it make so much more power? I suspect it has to do with the peak rpm being nearly twice that of the harley's: 9000 vs 4600.

Idea

2011-05-12T18:57:00.000-04:00

Bicycle with hand and foot crank!

HDR makes even malls look nice

2011-05-03T21:11:00.000-04:00

At sunset, at least.

Done

2011-05-01T22:36:00.002-04:00

So here's the finished product. Neither as awesome, as legible, or as non-overlapping as I was hoping. Fun times though. I may have learned something interesting about topology.

Sisu Sphere

2011-05-01T15:05:00.006-04:00

So I had the brilliant idea of making my Sisu ambigram (thats what it says, by the way) into a three dimensional object. My thought process was this: Its one continuous line, so it would be cool to describe it as a mathematical function. But it overlaps itself, meaning it can't be written as a single function. It could be written piecewise as maybe eight functions, but that's not what I was going for. Then I realized that if it were inscribed on the surface of a sphere rather than the two dimensional plane, it wouldn't have to overlap itself. And I think if it were done in polar coordinates it could be written as a single function. Then, if you projected light though it at the critical angle onto a flat surface, you'd get the original 2-dimensional image.

I went to bed dreaming about how to use Sketchup to do this, and figured I could use the reverse technique as well: project the two dimensional image into three dimensions and intersect it with a sphere (something both possible and easy in Sketchup!), then just cut away the surface of the sphere that aren't part of the letter-lines.

Here's the projection:

and intersected with the sphere:

After some cleanup, you get a sphere with the lines on it, which you can subtract the superflous parts from:

and lo, here's sortof what I was going for:

Only sort-of, though. It has the full ambigram as separate halves on the front and back, which is not what I wanted. Its neat, but its not a single piece, I'm trying to figure out if what I want to do is even possible now.

[update] IT WON'T WORK! YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! Or maybe that's just how I designed it. I think in order to do what I want I'm going to have to make some of the pieces cross through the center, which I'm having some trouble visualizing.

Another Photo Post

2011-04-30T18:20:00.008-04:00

Continueing the theme of pictures I enjoy, but not so focused on my own person, here's one of my Grandpa, sent to me my Mom, which I think captures his character very nicely:
Like my Dad said, he's probably one of the most peaceful, virtuous human beings you could ever meet.

Here's Rachael looking fetching in front of a plant that manufactures really awesome metal stuff:
Here's a sample of the awesome metal stuff:
That's a transmission component (probably), friend. Note the person standing nearby for scale. Awesome, right? I imagine its for a ship or a powerplant; I can't think of anything else that would require that scale.

Anyway here's one of Rachael and I both, on our way to Goose Island: Visible, dangling from her perforated earlobe, is what appears at a glance to be a simple knot made out of sting. But nay, that knotted rope is of the finest silver, and if you look closely you can see it sparkling with my love for her.

Here's a sign advising me in no uncertain terms not to do what I just did:

And here's an example of a perplexingly common occurrence in this neighborhood:
Lots of people want to live on Sheridan, I guess.

Finally, my design is coming along nicely and maybe even increasing in legibility (the progression is from bottom to top):
Can you read it yet? The symbol on top is totally unrelated to the meaning of the ambigram. I just needed a dot to serve as part of one of the letters (hint!), and I wanted to make it something other than just a dot. Its a greek letter Lambda; I was trying to think of a single character symbol that symbolized something important for me, and lambda stands for "lambda calculus" in my mind. Not that I'm especially well practiced in the field, but its a core concept of a certain programming paradigm that I would like to be a part of. The oval with the starburst-y rays at the top is taken directly from the cover of "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs."

BEEEAAACH!

2011-04-30T18:02:00.003-04:00

I was more awesome about it today. I saw that it was 70 degrees outside, decided I must have a dip, rode to the lake shore really fast to get warm, walked to the water line, stripped down, and ran into the waves and dove. No hesitation. Of course, I also didn't hesitate to jump straight up out of the water, let out a whoop, and run right back out.

Nevertheless, it felt awesome.

I found a lost soccer ball in the rocks and juggled it for a bit till I got dry, briefly considered the ethical question of considering the soccer ball mine, and decided that it had probably washed ashore from somewhere far away and was therefore bereft of owner. So now I've got a soccer ball.

I also had some nice flat-rock-sitting, reading a book and looking at the waves crashing at my feet:

Afterwards, I went to the coffee shop (which I had only recently left, about 15 minutes before), secretly hoping that someone would ask my why my hair was wet and I could tell them the incredible story of how I just swam in the lake for about five seconds. Sadly, no one did, so I just spilled tea on my phone and apparently fried the home button (not causally related).

In the spirit of Beachery, here's me and Mom from two weeks ago, on a much less "jump in the lake" sort of day:

Later that evening we went out to a jazz club, which was pretty awesome but overly packed. It would have been great if we could have gotten a table, but it was standing room only. On the way back, there was this decal of a throne pasted to a seat on the L-train:
Its part of some advertising gimmick, but I forget the point. Point of the picture is that it matches the evening jacket that I had cheekishly put on over my plaid jacket-thing.

Wow, that was a narcissistic post! Every one of the photos has me in it! I love the front-facing camera on the iphone I've just broken!

2011-04-29T23:03:00.008-04:00

From the people who brought you this video, watch this video!

So good! In so many ways! I love it! The moustaches! The rhetoric! The people in suits dancing like rappers (which I suppose they are, by the strictest legal definition)! The integration of quotes from the classic works into jibes!

"What I've learned is how little we know,
The world is complex, not some circular flow.
The economy's not a class you can master in college,
to think otherwise is the pretense of knowledge."

And oh the sweet, sweet rhyme!

Some subtle, and I think probably effective propaganda (for the side I like, so its ok) is at the end: the the crowd of people eager to congratulate and speak with Keynes are suited, older-white-dude types. The Bernanke-clone among them, they're calculated to look like power-brokers. The people extending their hands to shake Hayek's are young men and women dressed less expensively and with the general appearance of being students. They did a nice job with that, I think.

New idea

2011-04-29T22:51:00.000-04:00

For a tank badge / possible tattoo:

... and BOOM!

2011-04-29T21:36:00.003-04:00

the compulsive communication switch flips back on.

That last post may feel a bit disconnected; its literally my thought process over the course of the day as I did my actual work. Not that I actually wrote it at work; blogging at work would be bad.
...
I did actually accomplish some statistical badassery today. "Statistical" in the sense that it involved doing t-tests on some experimental populations, not in that if I did it a hundred times it would be badass maybe 96.5 of them. I'm actually doing what my education trained me to do, which certainly makes me feel better about the whole endeavor. I'd've been pissed if I learned all that calculus and statistics and probability only to find that nobody was ever interested in employing me to use it.

In another dimension (new galaxy) of badassery, this week marks the third month of consistent exercise for me; working out five days a week. That's nearly sixty hours of gym-time, friend. Discover's got a sweet gym on campus, so it was hard to not be motivated to join. I finally got tired of being scrawny after being so effectively overshadowed by Rick (who is the same height and build as me, except built), so I've been doing the whole intense-weight training and eating shittons of calories and protein routine that he's been working at for years. And I am indeed seeing gains, I've put on about fifteen pounds of muscle (bringing me to a ripply 145), and seeing my shoulders in the mirror is now a rather pleasing experience.

I've also been biking to work a few days a week. Sortof a funny story: in the locker room at work there's some big day-use lockers in the locker room its self, and then a bunch of little cubby lockers out in the hall. There's signs on a hand full of the big lockers that say "Reserved for people who bike to work only;" which is sweet. I told the guy working there of my velocipedal intentions, and he (with some excitement) handed me one of the signs and told me to pick out a locker. Now, I fully intended to start biking the following week, but I got sick and it was sorta snowy, so I decided to hold off a bit. Not two days into the week, I found that my sign was taken down. "Did they realize I haven't been biking?" I thought to myself. I figured maybe they decided that I was just asking for the locker 'cause of its prime location and was foolin' them on the biking. So I waited until I actually worked up the will to bike into work (a week or two later) before I mentioned it to them. They happily gave me back the sign and showed no indication of suspicion, so I was probably just psyching myself out.

Speaking of biking to work, its rather nice. I haven't done the whole fifteen mile trip yet, but I've been taking the train up to Highland Park (which is a bit north of my work) and biking from there. I tried Lake Cook rd once, but it was a little too harrowing. Its a pretty high-speed, high traffic road, and there aren't sidewalks or shoulders to ride on over the highway overpasses. A little to harrowing for me, until I'm fit enough to maintain 30mph up and down hills (ha).

Also nice: Zubowka vodka. I heard about it on the radio; npr had some special on it. Its a polish vodka flavored with Buffalo grass, which apparently has been banned from import into the US for some bizarre reason, and is only recently becoming marketable. They blathered on a bit about how its got a really unique flavor, enough to make an impression on me and influence me to buy it when I saw it in the store the other day. And lo! Its really, really good. At room temperature, neat, its pleasantly sippable. Here's the word with the polish accents: Żubrówka

Funfunfun. What else is awesome? Foremost among awesome things is that Rachael's somehow managed to convince her company to let her try out a remote work arrangement, so she's going to be up here starting in July. W00t! She and I hung out last weekend, enjoyed the parks, shopped for bikes (for her, not me, I can't justify buying another one yet however much I'd like to), ate good food, drank good beer (at Goose Island, most notably), played chess, Finished Moby Dick together, and watched a few episodes of the IT Crowd (a british comedy about working at an IT helpdesk, not something about fashionistas).

Secondmost among awesome things (it would have been foremost if not for Rachael's news) is that I got a spot for the Hobiecat at Wilmette beach. Its a few miles further away than Evanston beach (by about 2, I think), but its a sweet beach with good services. Sadly they wouldn't give me the resident rate, which made it a biiit more expensive, but such is life. It will be like a vacation every weekend this summer, so its totally worth it. Now I need to get a wetsuit.

Thirdmost? Eh. Two's good.

Oh, shitty news: my computer can't play Portal 2. I tried all the hackery I can think of, but my video card is just too ballsackingly old. My disappointment was profound. I had been tracking the possible early release all weekend, I even bought the "potato sack" to try to help it out (with further sadness, most of those fucking games don't work on the mac). I pre-downloaded the Portal 2 files, getting everything nice and ready. I then woke up early last monday morning (at five) figuring I could fire it up and play for an hour or so before work. I fired it up and got a big FUCK YOU from Valve. Well they said it nicely, more like "your videocard is not supported," but it felt like the most lettingdown-y fuckyou-ery I've experienced in videogamery. "I'll turn down the specs!" I pleaded, but the implacable error message returned on every execution. I tried extensively modifiying the configuration files (which have a nice prominent header that says "WHATEVER YOU DO DON'T MODIFY THESE FILES") and I almost got it to work: it passed the first, Steam-originated check but apparently still failed the game's own check. And since I assume that's in the binaries, I gave up at that point. Well, I didn't quite give up. I checked the price of new MacBookPro's (cause really, what the fuck else would I buy at this point?), and decided that spending $2k on a new computer just because my old one, which otherwise works perfectly well, can't play the only video game that I've wanted to play in the last... fairly long period of time... was unjustified. Can you tell how upsetting this is? I think there's more profanity in this single paragraph than the rest of the entire blog, so let that be an indication.

I learned everything I need to know from "... And Justice for All"

2011-04-29T18:00:00.007-04:00

(musings of a Master of Science waiting for queries to execute)
Its amusing to think of SQL as a whiny, oversensitive, nitypicky bitch. "neh, I was expecting something between a comma and the word 'from,' I won't execute your statement, neeeeeeh!". Its tempting to think "if you're smart enough to realize that there isn't anything after that comma, why not just ignore the damn thing?" But then, I must confess, SQL is in the right. By putting a comma after a field in a select statement, I'm implying that there are more fields to follow. Who knows what horrors I could unleash if I allowed that sloppy unfulfilled expectation to go unchecked!

I come to this humbling realization (that the machine is right) after every time I get angry at the SQL engine for taking ten minutes to run a query that ends in an error, doing it several more times, and then realizing its because of a blatant, obvious logical error on my part. "Oh, you want to run this test on all four hundred million records in the database, not just the hundred thousand in your sample? Ok, hang on a sec, I'll be right back..." At least if I shout "No, wait! That's not what I wanted, come back!" the SQL engine listens to me and cancels the request. This is, of course, in contrast to SAS, which seems to go catatonic any time I ask it to do anything more than slightly difficult (read: the wrong thing). "Wow, that's a BIG request, buddy. I'm going to need ALL of your system resources, some ear plugs, and like three (thousand) hours. Come back after lunch and probably just restart the computer."

There's someone nearby with some instant messenger notification sound going off constantly. Every time I get annoyed enough to get up and try to find the source, it stops. And every time I get into a groove with some code, it starts up again. Headphones are normally an excellent defense against this assault on office etiquette, but mine have developed a faulty connection in one of the channels, so I have to either listen to just one ear or fiddle with it untill the sound comes on and I can cleverly wedge it into place so that it doesn't move. Both of those options, as you can imagine, come with their own subtle and insidious irritations.

... HA! I found the sweet spot. The soothing power of Metallica once again flows through both my eardrums.

"Fire 
is the outcome of hi-po-cracy 
Dark-est, po-ten-cy
 in the exit of hu-man-i-ty 
color our world blackened"

I feel like if you're going to write a song about nuclear annihilation, that's how you should do it. Folksy songs about how sad the world would be without flowers and frolicking animals and atmosphere have their place, to be sure, but they just might not capture the full horror of the event. Of course, a song never could, but I feel like Blackened makes a good go of it. Also good is the Crass song, "What the fuck?"; indeed it perhaps exchanges horror-capturing for musicality and listen-ability.

Its been tough being a person who thinks there's actual value in Metallica. In addition to the skepticism of people who haven't spent countless teenage hours listening to it, the people who actually have too often seem to be of the "I like the riffs and the skulls" school of musical appreciation. The only two friends I've ever made who seemed to enjoy Metallica in a similar way to me are Matt and Rick. Matt decided he didn't like them, and some time later our friendship ended rather whimperingly. Causal connection? I like to think so.

"Do you want what I want? 
Desire not a thing
I hunger after independence
Lengthen freedom's ring"

Liberty, oppression, anthropogenic apocalypse, corruption in law, McCarthyism, betrayal by authority and ostensible guardians, conscription, wartime horror, self-doubt in the face of a slipping grip on reality... Serious stuff! Songs about the actual problems of the actual world; the terrifying realities that so easily crush the lives of the powerless who get swept up, unknowing, into them.

This is the sort of stuff I was absorbing as an angsty teenager late at night through headphones turned up way too loud while my peer group enjoyed "I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one," "Uuuuuh, na nanana!", "the more money we come across, the more problems we see" and other (very similar) classics of the nineties era. Ruminating on this may provide insight into my character and outlook, for any of the vast readership of this blog who are personally acquainted with me and have interest in questions like "why does TJ think and act the way he does?". Metallica, Ayn Rand, Ray Kurzweil, and Douglas Hofstadter; familiarity with their (more seriously) vast collected body of works pretty much sums it up. Oh and Douglas Adams too; he's probably (for better or worse) responsible for most of my writing style. Whatever emotional sensitivity I posses is probably Hugo's responsibility.

Goddamnit SAS is so fucking irritating. I think Stockholm Syndrome must have something to do with its lasting popularity. One moment it impresses me at how naturally it's procedures handle somewhat complicated requests, then I'm bogged down in trying to get the tiny bits of information I actually need out of the hundreds of pages of results it generates. A real good-cop, bad-cop setup. I think an amusing measure of its opacity is the frequency with which its users attribute intentions to it. "SAS is trying to do X" "SAS thinks you want Y, so you have to trick it by doing 0x1310f12a"

I suppose putting some effort into understanding the subtleties of the intentions of SAS's original programmers and worrying about semicolons and commas is a small price to pay for nearly instantaneous processing of billions of data points. And, of course, once I figure out how to ask the question properly to Google, I get ample examples and the opacity is alleviated.

Goose island

2011-04-28T15:40:00.000-04:00

Their regular beers are pretty good. But their Belgians are fantastic. Furthermore: they have nearly as many Belgians as others, with a total beer count of around thirty.

The top hat

2011-04-28T15:36:00.000-04:00

Is unexpectedly attractive. I think I may need to have and wear one. Not because it's anachronistic or retro or as some social comment on Victorianism in the modern world, but because I think it actually may just be the best-shaped hat.

More programming self promotion

2011-04-25T22:03:00.002-04:00

I was thinking it would be clever to be able to display the amount of time i've used a language, in addition to how much expertize I feel like I have with it and whether i've used it for Pay, Educaiton, or Recreation. Thus, I figured I could encode the information as a LISP-list, as follows:

(php 2 1 P) (HTML 8 2 PR) (PERL 1 1 R) (SQL 3 4 P) (Shell 16 3 PR) (Batch 12 4 PR) (Mathematica 6 2 E) (C++ 3 2 R) (Lisp 3 2 R) (Python 6 2 R) (Matlab 6 3 ER) (R 18 5 ER) (AMPL 3 2 E) (GAMS 3 2 E) (VBA 6 2 P) (SAS 21 3 PE)

... which made me think that it would be clever and funny to make a resume that is itself a program. The obnoxious looking stuff could be hidden as 1 point text in the horizontal lines, but when you copy and paste the whole thing it would show up full-size and interpretable. Not sure what the program would do, but it might be a neat idea.

Languages

2011-04-19T16:33:00.001-04:00

I was idling wondering how many programing languages I "know". I came up with a list, including some that are questionably included as "languages" (since HTML, php, gams, sql, and AMPL don't have the structures needed to be Turing-complete), and a few of them might be better described as "environments" rather than languages (like matlab and mathematic). Nevertheless, I'm pleased with my list. I've even gotten paid for work in half of them! Does that make me a programmer? If not, what does? (answer: the presence of values in the "for fun?" column)

Language Got paid ? For Edu. ? For fun ?

1
SAS
1

1

2
VBA
1

3
GAMS

1

4
AMPL

1

5
R

1

1

6
Matlab

1

1

7
Python

1

8
Lisp

1

9
C++

1

10
Mathematica

1

11
Batch
1

1

12
Shell (BASH)
1

1

13
SQL
1

14
PERL

1

15
HTML
1

1

16
php
1

Sas

2011-04-14T12:49:00.001-04:00

Why does an anova report comparing for variables with around a hundred thousand observations cause Sas to hang indefinitely? Is what I'm trying to do really that difficult?

First exposure to lake Michigan

2011-04-11T12:26:00.001-04:00

To commemorate my first (I think ever, possibly with one exception a decade ago) plunge into the great lake, here's a photo.

The difference in skin tone between my face and body is comical.

And more!

2011-04-07T23:00:00.006-04:00

So the answer to the question in my previous post turns out to be: it depends. It depends on what you mean by "the same idea as Pascal's triangle, but in three dimensions," which boils down to how you want to define adjacency. Pascal's triangle adds the two numbers that are "above" it in the two-dimensional triangle (which is skewed sideways if you write it in a grid). So if you're making a pyramid on a grid, what counts as the numbers "above" a number? is it all nine (ie: n,s,e,w, nw,ne,sw,se, and directly above)? Or is it just the four at the cardinal directions plus the one directly above?

If you choose the former, the sum of each level of the pyramid produces the powers of nine. If you choose the latter, its the powers of five. This is unsurprising in retrospect; the series of powers you will produce depends on the number of neighbors you define as adjacent to the central cell. Ie: 9 way adjacency produces the powers of nine.

Come to think of it, making the pyramid on a square grid isn't necessarily the next logical step from the original Pascal's triangle. You could make a triangular grid (though not with a spreadsheet; not easily anyway), which would give you four neighbors, presumably resulting in the powers of four.

Or you could do an octagonal grid, which would give you 9 neighbors and the powers of 9 again. Come to think (further) of it, that's essentially what you're doing when you define adjacency in the first way above (ie; nine-way adjacency).

(note: each square is intended to be stacked on top of the one below it, forming the pyramid. )

9-way adjacency

5-way adjacency

sum

125

729

What better use of Spreadsheet mastery could there be but to solve curiosities about mathematical constructs? I know, right? Oh and look at the beeeauuutiful surface it makes in 3d!

One final question: what powers can be produced in this way; ie by the concept of "adjacency"? So far we've seen 2, 5, 9, and conjecturally 4. Can three be done? How bout six, seven, and eight?
I suppose it depends on how wedded you are to the concept of a regular geometric grid? Could a more abstract geometry accomplish those other power series?

Pascal's Triangle

2011-04-07T22:32:00.002-04:00

I just made a rather interesting discovery: in Pascal's triangle, the sum of the ith row is equal to the i-1th power of 2.

Row	Sum	Pascal's triangle:
1	1	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
2	2	0	1	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
3	4	0	1	2	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
4	8	0	1	3	3	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
5	16	0	1	4	6	4	1	0	0	0	0	0	0
6	32	0	1	5	10	10	5	1	0	0	0	0	0
7	64	0	1	6	15	20	15	6	1	0	0	0	0
8	128	0	1	7	21	35	35	21	7	1	0	0	0
9	256	0	1	8	28	56	70	56	28	8	1	0	0
10	512	0	1	9	36	84	126	126	84	36	9	1	0
11	1024	0	1	10	45	120	210	252	210	120	45	10	1

I was trying to remember how the construction of the triangle was done in LISP yesterday on the bus, and I decided this morning to try and figure out how to do it in Excel. Its extreamly easy in Excel, of course.

Added: ooooh, heres a fun question: if you made a "Pascale's Pyrimid" (ie, same idea but in three dimensions) what series would the sums of each layer make? Would it be the powers of three? If that turns out to be true, could it be generalized to n dimensions?

mmmystery

2011-04-07T22:31:00.001-04:00

Out of further curiosity, I plotted the rows of Pascal's triangle. The result is a series of curves that look decidedly Gaussian, though with the center shifting leftwards. I remember one of my calculus teachers saying that he had been fascinated with Pascal's triangle as a young studnet because of its many interesting and strange attributes, and he said it was the thing that got him interested in math. Indeeeed.

Perl

2011-04-07T22:30:00.002-04:00

I've also been learning Perl in my spare time, since its the only programming language it seems I can use at work. Well, aside from Java and VBA, but I mean for command line stuff. I'm studying the book thats available for free on the Perl website, and one of the excercises suggested i figure out how to convert decimal to binary using eight bitwise "and" operators. I figured it out (mostly) myself, thoguh I used a hint about the binary representation of the powers of two. Check it out, I think its a pretty clever hack.

#!/usr/bin/perl
#dec2bin.plx
use warnings;
use strict;
print "Enter a decimal number ";
my $num=;
print(
($num & 128) <=> 0,
($num & 64) <=> 0,
($num & 32) <=> 0,
($num & 16) <=> 0,
($num & 8) <=> 0,
($num & 4) <=> 0,
($num & 2) <=> 0,
($num & 1) <=> 0,
"\n");

It works becuase Perl converts all numebrs into their binary representation, and the bitwise "and" operator compares numbers bit by bit. The binary representations of the powers of 2 all start with 1 and the rest are zeros. So you build up a string that becomes a binary number by &'ing each of the powers of two as high as needed, as these get compared with the binary representation of the input number. Its not the most straightforward way, especially since the input number is apparently already being used in binary internally, but neat none the less.

Air traffic controllers

2011-03-25T12:25:00.000-04:00

Regarding the news where a couple of jets had to land without instructions from air traffic control, 'cause the controller was sleeping: why are there even humans in the loop? Coordinating the airspace and runway-use of mostly auto-piloted airplanes seems like a task that software is well-suited for. Maybe we need people on radios for those emergency situations that can't be programmed for effectively, but it seems like the default option should be for the tower's computer to communicate instructions silently to the plane's computer, regardless of whether either's operator is sleeping.

Regulation vs policing

2011-03-24T12:10:00.000-04:00

It seems that "regulation" of industry and "policing" of industry are conflated in many people's minds, and indeed in the nomenclature of our government bureaucracies. However, I think there's an important distinction to be made between them: the former involves government planning of resource allocation, the latter involves government detection an punishment of crimes and wrongdoings. The former is hopelessly counterproductive while the latter is indispensable, so it's probably not good for our public discourse that we refer to both as "regulation."

-TJ

metaconspiracy

2011-02-24T21:25:00.003-05:00

I wish to call your attention to several interesting points:

The stated purpose of Wikileaks is to "Reduce the power of coercive conspiracies" (ie: dictatorships and oppressive government in general) through radical transparency.THe idea is that by increasing the amount of effort a conspiracy needs to expend to keep its plans secret, the conspiracy's effectiveness is diminished; and by publishing the secret communications of governments (no matter how mundane), those governments are motivated to increase their internal security. .
Recently, Wikileaks unloaded (a small part of) that cache of diplomatic communiques, causing a big fuss for a few weeks, until:
Two powerful dictatorships (with varying levels of US support) fell to popular uprisings in the last few weeks, and it certainly seems that more are on the way.

My question is: is there any causal connection between "Cablegate" and the democratic revolutions occurring in the middle east? I suspect that there is, but in ephemeral and subtle ways.

An amusing possibility, suggested by Rachael: assuming that there is some connection, could it be that some part of the US government itself had some role in leaking the documents that it's trying to crucify Wikileaks for publishing? It doesn't even seem that implausible, if there was any reason to suspect that whatever was contained in the documents (like Gaddafi's eastern European prostitute-nurses) would have a sufficiently powerful effect on the hearts and minds of the people of the middle east to encourage them to rise up and throw off the yoke of oppression, why not make it public? Of course, private diplomatic communiques can't just be shared with the world just because its in our interests; that would be a breach of good faith. But if some lowly private slips the contents of a hard drive to a shadowy internet conspiracy, and they take the initiative to publish it on their own, how could the state department be blamed?

Ha. Hows that for conspiracy? When I write it out like that, it seems a hell of a lot more plausible of a plan than some of the other attempts we've made to play real-politick in this century; the Iran-contra affair coming readily to mind.

At any rate, I'm moved to happy tears at the news coming out of the middle east. The sight of people asserting their right to liberty is awe inspiring.

Hacking data ribbons

2011-02-20T13:09:00.002-05:00

I wonder if I could splice wires into a data ribbon by sticking a very fine needle through the plastic and making contact with the conductor inside, then connecting that wire to something else? Seems plausible, right?

The occasion for this wondering is that my Bose soundstation ipod dock has finally kicked it. It was already not working with the iphone 4, and its finally stopped working even with my old iphone. The symptom is that it keeps disconnecting (apparently) from the phone, making the phone stop the music and display the message "this device is not designed to work with the iphone...". The fact that this lovely piece of equipment has no 3.5mm jack makes this problem render it effectively broken.

SO: my thought is that I should be able to wire a 3.5mm jack into it somehow. I opened it up, hoping to find some place where the input gets converted from the 30-pin ipod connector to just the left and right channels, but alas, there's no obvious place. Except at the ouput to the speakers, but I assume that if I want some amplification it'll have to be somewhere a little further back.

I've found the circuit diagrams for the 30 pin connectors online, and it looks like the lines of interest are 1 (ground), 3 (left) and 4 (right). My hope is that I can just do the operation I described above at the outermost connection point and solder those wires to a female 3.5mm jack. I know of no reason why this shouldn't work. I will update.

New Home

2011-02-05T18:17:00.005-05:00

haHA! I've found a new place to live! Mainstreet, Evanston Illinois! I've struck a fantastic balance between being near work, near the city itself, in a neighborhood thats both beautiful and entertaining, near public transit, near(ish) the freeway, super close to the lake, near a coffee shop that has good coffee and culture, near bars and restaurants, near a music venue, near a boat launch, near an awesome university. With tree-lined streets that don't have their trees pruned to accommodate power lines above them. I am super excited.

Not to mention my apartment-to-be. Its in one of those courtyard brick buildings that seem to be iconic of Chicago, the unit is on the top floor in the courtyard/street-facing corner, has hardwood floors, granite counter tops, a full size stove, big windows, parking, laundry, heat and water included, possibly a garage space for my motorcycle, a secure place for my bicycle, two blocks from two different grocery stores. Did I mention its like 6 blocks from the beach and a boat launch? Theres also a bike shop.

Right now I'm at a coffee shop on Main street called the Brothers K Coffee House. Its pretty awesome. Its a the corner of a building, at an intersection, with windows on two sides, and a 20 foot ceiling. There's a guy setting up for an open mic; it will be interesting to see how their open mic scene compares to Cincy's. Or rather, how It compares to Baba Budan's; I can't say I really went to many others.

After I filled out my rental application I stopped into this bar/music venue near the leasing office. It was a pretty hip looking place, and it had a really interesting and reasonably priced menue. On tap they had an awesome belgian, which was awesome. I started chatting with the bartender, he was nice and friendly as I talked a bit about moving up here, but his eyes lit up when I told him I was bringing a boat. Turns out he's a hobiecat enthusiast, he teaches a kids watersports camp in the summers, and he runs the rescue operations out of the boat launch thats a few blocks from the bar we were sitting in. He was psyched that I was bringing up an 18 foot boat; said the 16's could just barely keep up. So that's awesome. I gotta try to get a spot on his beach; there's limited space and a lottery system to assign them.

Also, I now have a conundrum. Rachael and I are now sharing a blog called ChicagoViaCincy that's devoted to our longdistance relationship and how were making it work. Thus, stuff that touches on our relationship I will be posting there. The conundrum is that it is also stuff that I'd like to post here. So I'll probably just post stuff in both places.

This afternoon I was supposed to meet with some girl about subleasing a furnished place from her in Logan Park. I contacted her earlier in the week, but I had to reschedule a couple times because of the snow (which is epic). I went down there yesterday to check out the neighborhood. it was alright, reasonably attractive, but definately near some down-market stuff. Lots of Taquieras and pay-day loan shops. I was luke-warm on the neighborhood, my thought was baisically that it would do just fine for a two-month sublease, and I could evaluate how it would be long-term. I had called this chick and left a message saying I'd give her cash for the whole sublease period, but this morning she texted me saying that she'd found someone else who wanted it. I was all upset for a couple moments, feeling betrayed. But as it turns out, I'm glad it worked out this way cause I think my new place is going to be much much better, both immediately and long term.

Another thing: I registered for the first CFA exam this morning. I've got quite a rigerous study schedule ahead of me, cause I'm taking the first exam on June 4th. Eishita (one of my co-workers) pointed out that the second level exams are only only offered in the summer. The result being that if I waited until winter to take the first level exam, I would very unadvisably have only six months to study for the second level exam, which is much harder. So now I've got to cram 250ish hours of studying in before june 4th.

Continueing with lifestyle changes, I signed up for the gym at Discover. I had started doing pushups and situps on my own in my apartment, so I was able to at least do 50 pushups for the fitness assessment. Actually 51; the guy had said that 50 was the most he had seen anyone do for their assessment, so I had to at least one-up the record. I also realize that I eat way too few calories, even when I feel like I'm gorgeing myself, and thus I finally have an appreciation for all the shakes that Rick consumes.

Health Problem Quantified | John Goodman's Health Policy Blog | NCPA.org

2011-01-05T20:06:00.000-05:00

Health Problem Quantified | John Goodman's Health Policy Blog | NCPA.org: "We now know how many people have the problem most often cited as the reason for last years’ health overhaul legislation. Answer: 8,000

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Portal 3

2011-01-03T12:03:00.002-05:00

What if, in the next iteration of Portal, the portals were four dimensional after the fashion of the "timegates" in Stross's Palimpsest story? Mechanics-wise, placing the portals would become a difficulty. Would you be confined to suitable surfaces in eye-shot, and how would you control when the portal opened to?

I just re-read the end of the story, where he's really making you grapple with all the twisted convolutions that that possibility has to offer. I imagine you could make some really bizarre puzzles if you could wrap your mind around it, which I'm having some trouble doing.

JOB OFFER: DISCOVER

2010-12-23T13:33:00.009-05:00

Discover has offered me a job. Or rather, they indicated that they're going to send me an offer for a job next Wednesday.

CHIGACO!

I'm (probably) going there! My visit there was a such a magical and revolutionary experience that I feel strongly compelled to be there, come what may of Discover. I feel like the Gold Coast is a place that I could settle down in. I've been in an anti-suburb mentality for so long that this is a striking revelation, but its so beautiful that I've been converted. Like Saul on the road to Damascus. I can see myself living there for good. Of course, I almost definately wont be able to afford to right now, but its a long term goal.

I've been loathe to post pictures since Google somehow decided to forbid nearly all of the past ones from outside access, but I'll give it another shot with some Chicago memorabilia.

The Chicago Cultural Center building literally made choke up from the beauty of it.
Partially, perhaps, because the beautiful building isn't merely some religious or government facade, but a library!

Or at least, a former library. Sadly all the books have been moved elsewhere, it seems, but the inscriptions praising books are still gloriously on the walls. The books are now presumably in this building, which may compete in beauteousness. I found myself becoming irritated just then by not being able to take a virtual tour of the inside of that building; Google's streetview has given me a curious sense of what aught to be possible.
Also sadly, the inscription from Victor Hugo (above) seems to suffer from some translation issues. I can't quite parse the latter half, but I get what its meant to say in any case.

The Ballroom of the "Library" looks out on the sculptures in the park, nicely captured here with HDR.

Nearby they also have a giant tree with lights on it! I suspect it may not be a year-round installation, though.

Is this truely Falcor's office? How Lucky!
Ah, wrong spelling.

And in unrelated news, Rachael and I finally finished the Bulbdial Clock, and it is good. This is the "technoclub dancefloor" view of it; ie: from the side and up close:

Another funny thing:

2010-12-23T11:12:00.000-05:00

One of the quotes on the back of The Extended Phenotype is:

"This is a contender for the title of the most important contribution to evolutionary biology of the 1980s." Professor R G Turner

Strong praise, right? However, the date on the title page, "1999," makes the praise seem like a backhanded slap of outdatedness. Typo, insult, or humor? Or maybe it was just mostly written in the 80's and not published till later. Lols anyways.

-TJ

Awesome out of context

2010-12-23T10:48:00.001-05:00

From The Extended Phenotype, page 109, 3rd paragraph:

"The phenotypic effects of a meme may be in the form of words, music, visual images, styles of clothes, facial or hand gestures, skills such as opening milk bottles in tits, or panning wheat in Japanese macaques."

...

Get it?

He is, of course, referring to the species of bird named "tits," for which the wikipedia entry is currently (strangely) only the seventh google result for the search string "tits."

However, the irony of species of bird named "tit" having learned to open milk bottles (presumably after they received their name) must not go unremarked.

I suspect Dick thought the same. Richard Dawkins, that is.

-TJ

NWS, dunnhumby

2010-11-17T14:50:00.003-05:00

Got a callback from dunnhumby, which I'm excited about.

Somone finally responded to my request for NWS help on the R mailing group. Turns out it was an inconsistent capitalization issue. Resolving this got it working fully on the Ubuntu machine, but only partially on the Cygwin machine. IE: I can now send commands and have them executed, but I can't get the values returned to the server. The only error I'm getting on the client machine is "No NWS server found;" which is odd because its the client and you'd think it doesn't need to have the server software running on it.

Where did my pictures go, blogger?

2010-11-12T17:04:00.002-05:00

Looks like half my pictures have spontaniously declared themselves forbidden. Hopefully the issue will work itself out.

Had a telephone interview with Discover (the credit card/ banking company) for an Analyst Leadership program in Chicago this morning. It went reasonably well, but it was significantly more difficult than the other interviews I've had recently, asking some pretty pointed technical questions. I was able to give good answeres for most things, but there were a few that I couldn't answer at all. It sounds like a great position and I'd love to do it, so I'm optimistic.

Jobs and bikes and Rachael

2010-11-09T21:00:00.007-05:00

Had an interview with Macy's today, which I'm excited about. I had given my resume to a representative at the career fair on the third, and they called me yesterday to schedule an on-campus interview. It went very well; I was confident and enthusiastic, had good answers and examples for every question, and the position is a good one. It's a two-year rotational "leadership development" program, where they spend 8 months in three different departments, then go on to be an analyst. He couldn't go into much detail about the nature of the projects that the analysts work on, but he mentioned things like modeling new store openings, which could be cool.

I'm glad I went into the interview with a positive attitude; I had a pause when I saw what they had posted on their website. The representative at the career fair had suggested I go online and take a look at the "capital planning position," but the only thing with such a description I found was something where the requirements were "highschool education or equivalent." I was afraid that was the position they were interviewing for, and we were going to have an awkward moment where we realize that we're both not interested. Happily, this was not the case. The position is attractive, and I'm interested in doing it.

Here's some cool pictures! Sorta like how having a certain model of car makes you suddenly notice how many of the same model there are on the road, having a sweet bike has suddenly made me aware of all the other sweet bikes on the road. Like these:

In roughly decreasing awesomeness order: The first one has actual flannel covering the tank, which I must say is an excellent gypsy touch. The second one is actually in good shape, and the third is just cool cause its big and black.

On my own bike, I think I may have some vibration issues. The super-sweet origninal badge has apparently vibrated itself to pieces, along with the license plate:
How will the curious onlookers determine the engine size and make once it's shattered? Woe!

Here's a picture from our birthday trip to Columbus, with Rachael pointing to a photo containing excellent advice.

We had lots of delicious beer, for example:
From the first (and best, beer-wise) pub we went to. Sadly I can't remember the name of it; nominal aphasia being something I apparently have. [Rachael reminds me that it was called "Barleys," which is a pretty straightforward and memorable name. We also went to a place called Elevator, and one other place who's name escapes me (but had good pizza). IT WAS AWESOME.]

Rachael also solders like an angel:
No seriously, she's really good. I showed her how to do it, we both made some globby solders, then she figured out how to get them machine-perfect. Really. I've never seen hand soldering so good. Anyway, she showed me her angelic technique, and we proceeded building the Evil Mad Scientist Bulbdial clock. I was happy to have found something geeky and machine-y we could do together, having failed to arouse her enthusiasm with my "sand and paint my headers" project.

Here's Rick and I deepening my mom's worst fears and pretending to share a shake. Except its a week-old guiness that the bartender pulled out of the fridge, and Rick has become a guido.
It started off as a joke, but it turns out that week old Guiness is really quite pleasant. So I finished it.

And I didn't feel the least bit bad about it.

2010-11-05T17:38:00.001-04:00

Phone interview with Discover in Chicago on Friday!

Distributed computing, elections, and house of leaves

2010-11-03T11:59:00.004-04:00

My earlier moaning about how easy it would be to implement the NetWorkSpace parallel computing architecture on a *nix system has proven to be less than well-founded. I set up a couple of Ubuntu machines and put the software on them. Initially I was trying to use my Mac as a master, but there were issues in the path naming still. I tried from a second Ubuntu installation, and NWS doesn't run properly from it. I've got an open (perhaps overly verbose) posting on the R mailing list, and Revolutions politely let me know that they make their money from support and thus can't help with the open-source stuff. Also that they don't support Ubuntu. I've all but decided to bail on the NWS package and try to implement MPI. It's apparently the industry standard, but also more difficult.

Yesterday was election day, and I was happy to see Libertarian candidates for all offices except for the Senate (where I voted for the only independent). I'm pleased to see that we'll at get a split government, that should at least tie them up and prevent them from doing too much more damage for a while. But it also precludes repealing the health care bill via legislation. Hopefully the courts can do something about it.

Rachael and I have started reading House of Leaves. I almost put it back on the shelf when I saw the back cover said something about "postmodern delight," but XKCD made a joke about it, so I'm willing to give it a chance. It's been engrossing thus far. The "unsettling" part of it is how effectively it erodes the fundamental assumptions you rely on for interpreting reality. I think the non-standard typesetting is aimed at least in part at assisting the narrative in that regard.

Of course, undermining one's grasp on reality might be a really unhealthy thing, but it also might help get rid of some ungrounded assumptions one might have. As long as you reassemble what you deconstruct.

Or maybe think of it as "Refactoring."

Son of Hamas

2010-10-27T00:54:00.005-04:00

A very moving book, and I think potentially very important book.

The gloss: the first son of one of the founders of Hamas grows up full of hatred for his Israeli oppressors, gets caught before he can do anything really criminal, suffers inhumane conditions in Israeli prisons, witnesses Palestinian prisoners torture other Palestinian prisoners, and comes to question the cause he was prepared to fight for. He witnesses the brutality of people in his own culture and comes to think that there may be something wrong with it; seeing that Palestinians were treating each other and the Israelis at least as badly as the Israelis were treating them. He becomes appalled at the universal violence and just wants to make it stop. The Israeli intelligence agency asks him to act as a spy; exposing suicide bombers and violent plots. He agrees on the condition that his information won't be used to kill anyone, only to imprison them. Ultimately this stipulation proves impossible, he's worn down by years of living a double life, and he escapes to the US around 2005 and writes this book about his experiences.

Its moving because of Mosab's empathy, passion, bravery, and his willingness to admit that he had been wrong. Its potentially important because it is an outspoken and clear instance of a person with plenty of reason to be filled with hatred (and the position to act on it) forsaking violence and devoting his life to making peace. Not peace in the sense of a negotiated truce, but a genuine, deep healing that obviates violence. More on this later.

Mosab is truly admirable.

I must post this in the midst of my elation before I run into another crippling error

2010-10-25T19:08:00.004-04:00

I was composing an email to the R mailing list to ask for help on the issues I described below. Wanting to seem very serious and well-researched, I double checked everything I was doing before sending it. In the process, I found the error. Maybe I should take that as an approach to problem solving in general: write out my problems as if I'm addressing the ultimate experts on the issue. That way if I fail to figure it out, I have a nice message ready to send, but if I figure it out, then I figure it out!

Here's the email:

I'm trying to set up a large cluster of computers at my university
lab. All clients are running XP SP3, and I'm working from a OS X
10.6.4 machine set up as the master; using R 2.11.1 on all machines.

I've succeeded at getting password-less SSH access to the client
machines using Cygwin, but I'm having issues with initializing sleighs
that seem to stem from the "DOS vs UNIX" path-style issues.
I've tried what seem to be two different correct approches, and get
two different errors.

1. The unix-style way; accessing the contents of the C drive through
/cygdrive/c/...:

s=sleigh(
nodeList=c("lab211-18.mydomain.edu"),
launch=sshcmd,
user="authorizedUser",
scriptExec=envcmd,
scriptDir="'/cygwin/c/Program Files/R/R-2.11.1/library/nws/bin/'",
scriptName="RNWSSleighWorker.py",
verbose=TRUE)

2. The DOS-style way, where the changes are to the "scriptExec" and
"scriptDir" options:

s=sleigh(
nodeList=c("lab211-18.mydomain.edu"),
launch=sshcmd,
user="authorizedUser",
scriptExec=scriptcmd,
scriptDir="'c:\\Program Files\\R\\R-2.11.1\\library\\nws\\bin\\'",
scriptName="RNWSSleighWorker.py",
verbose=TRUE)

I've verified that the "RNWSSleighWorker.py" exists in the path
"C:\Program Files\R\R-2.11.1\library\nws\bin\" on the client
machine...

At this point I was going to paste in the exact errors I was seeing
and I realized I was missing a directory ("\R\") from all the path's
above, and that I was doing the unix style one with "cygwin" instead
of "cygdrive". Now, the "dos-style way" seems to be working completely
and totally.

So now I can supposedly do parallel computation. I'm almost afraid to take the next step, for fear of what horrors inevitably await!

unix R and windows not playing nice.

2010-10-25T16:23:00.004-04:00

This is beginning to have a very quixotic feeling to it. One of the lab consultants who's been away for five weeks on an internship stopped by today, and as I was updating him on my progress on the project it struck me how little I've actually accomplished in five weeks. True, I've overcome some major bariers and discovered some interesting things, but ultimately I'm still not doing distributed computing.

So far, my accomplishments include figuring out the SSH paswordless login with RSA encription, and getting the client machines to respond to unix commands from the host. Before (when I was using COPSSH), I kept getting an error saying that the 'env' command couldn't be found on the remote machine. 'env' is a really basic unix command, but it seems that it wasn't included in the version of Cygwin that was packaged with COPSSH. I resolved the issue by just installing Cygwin directly. The first time through, I didn't realize how enormous the full Cygwin set of packages is and ended up installing 6gb of mostly unknown material to a computer. I was gratified to see that SSH still works with just the minimal subset of Cygwin packages.

The problem I'm having now is even more frustrating, and gives credit to the recommendation from ReVolution not to mess with Windows clients. The issue is with the quoting of file paths, of course. Unix uses forward slashes and Windows uses backslashes; and in most programming languages the backslash is an escape character. Why oh why would Microsoft have chosen to ignore this reality? Unix and C were around and well established before they came on the scene with their dos-style paths... could that have done it explicitly to make it difficult to operate between platforms (and thus increase switching-costs?).

The crux of the issue is in the last line, right after the "\nws\bin\" bit. See that extra forward slash that follows? It seems thats inserted automatically by the stored function, regardless of what I enter as a parameter. Which is, incidentally, the following:

s=sleigh(

nodeList=c("coblab211-18.business.uc.edu"),

launch=sshcmd,

user="murphytj1",

scriptExec=scriptcmd,

scriptDir="'c:\\Program Files\\R-2.11.1\\library\\nws\\bin\\'",

scriptName="RNWSSleighWorker.py",

verbose=TRUE)

The double backslashes are what's required to overcome the escape character issue. The "scriptDir" is supposed to be the path to the file on the remote machine where the NWS client script is located. But despite the fact that I'm supposedly executing it with a windows style command (what the scriptExec option scriptcmd does), the function appends the forward slash. It is, I think, an error on the part of the writers of the NWS package. Now I'm trying to dig through their code to see if I can fix it; chances are slim.

Equally grim news on the Snowfall front; I can't even get sfCluster running on the host machine. Many many dependencies are apparently missing; starting with the gcc compiler (which I fixed). Even more frustrating, when I call make install, I get another error that looks like it was an issue with the coding:

Ok. Now call 'make install'.

sh-3.2# make install

Making/probing required folders...

mkdir -pv /usr/local/bin

mkdir -pv /usr/local/etc/sfCluster

mkdir -pv /usr/local/lib/sfCluster

mkdir -pv /usr/local/share/sfCluster

mkdir -pv --mode=700 /usr/local/var/sfCluster/tmp

mkdir: illegal option -- -

usage: mkdir [-pv] [-m mode] directory ...

make: *** [install] Error 64

sh-3.2#

What I should probably do is just drop both the macbook and the windows machines and try it on my Ubuntu laptop.

Distributed Computing

2010-10-19T21:32:00.006-04:00

I achieved a milestone in accomplishing my distributed computing project at the computer lab: I was able to get SSH commands sent from one machine to another without using a password. This is the second major achievement: it allows the master machine to distribute the workload to the workers. The first major achievement was the netWorkSpace server, which allows the workers to access the same variable-space.

HOWEVER, its a limited achievement. I was able to get passwordless SSH working from my Mac, off campus, connecting through the VPN to a windows machine. When I try to do the same thing from a windows machine in the same room, I fail. Go figure: reduce three major layers of complexity, get a bad result.

Ironically, I think the issue arises from connecting from a windows machine. SSH apparently works by checking a certain file for public keys, checking them against the private keys on the remote machine if it finds any, and asking for a password if it doesn't. I think the problem lies in where it's looking for the keys. On a *nix machine (like my mac), it looks in the /User/Home/.ssh directory by default. The closest corollary to that on a windows machine (where I've installed COPSSH (which implies Open SSH and Cygwin)) is buried in "program files/icw/home/user/.ssh." It seems that when I try to connect from the windows machine, even using the BASH terminal emulator, it's not looking in that directory for the key. I've also tried adding that directory to the %PATH% variable (which lets me launch SSH from a CMD prompt), but I still get asked for a password.

I'm quite sure there's a way to make it work, I just haven't found it yet. The consultants in the lab office have all become quite amused at my exasperation... I've tried to recruit a few of the more savy folks into helping me, but thus far I haven't had an enthusiastic response. I guess supercomputing isn't attractive to everyone, eh? How do I reach these kiiids?

On the other hand, a few of the people I've talked with about running problems on it have been enthusiastic. One guy I know has a friend who's working on a protein folding simulation in Matlab (which netWorkSpace also supports), which I think would be an ideal sort of problem to run on such a setup. His description of it sounded incredibly computationally intensive, and it sounds like the problem has the attributes that make it viable for distributed computing; ie: many independent sub-problems arising from a small amount of data.

I've also found some lectures on the subject from Google, which is exciting. http://code.google.com/edu/submissions/mapreduce-minilecture/listing.html
Apparently they teach this series of classes to their summer interns. I'm gratified that my post-graduate studies have enabled me to follow along and understand, at least through the parts I've seen so far. I learned, among other more technical things, that its distributed computing, that I'm trying to achieve, not parallel computing. The latter refers to tasks broken up between processing cores in a single machine, the former refers to tasks broken up between multiple machines. Same spirit; differing challenges.

Added: Dad mentioned that the "before" picture "actually doesn't look that bad..." Its just the light. It was bad. But of course, the most significant parts are the ones you can't see; all the internals that didn't work now (mostly) do.

Comparison Shots

2010-10-19T19:41:00.010-04:00

Before:

After:

It's taken some time, and I'll admit that there were moments when I was ready to give it up as a lost cause. But at last, this 1969(ish) CB450 has been rebuilt, somewhat restored, and wholly resurrected as a cafe racer! It starts on the first kick (usually), goes really fast, and only stalls occasionally!

Short list of things I've done to the bike:
rebuilt the engine,
rebuilt the carburetors,
replaced air filters with pods,
replaced mufflers with short chrome exhaust pipes,
replaced clutch cable and lever,
replaced front break cable,
replaced throttle cable (with a hacked-together one),
replaced and sealed the gas tank,
rewired the electrical system for the lights and replaced the headlight,
replaced the chain,
hacked the old seat into something in the cafe-spirit and made a seat cover,
made the right hand tank badge,
bought a vintage left hand tank badge,
painted everything that wasn't chrome,
installed clubman handlebars,
installed bar-end mirrors.

And a short list of things I still need to do:
jet the carbs,
rebuild the stator,
rebuild the clutch.

But that stuff should be easy, right? I think I may also do something non-standard with the chrome panel on the gas tank, I was thinking of doing a checkered-diamond pattern on it in black.

Wedding

2010-10-15T11:56:00.005-04:00

Rachael and I went to an awesome wedding last weekend between Steve and Cassie Kemple. It was at the Mockbee, which is an old factory building that's usually used as a music venue. The ceilings are all vaulted and 20 feet high, and there's giant arched windows in the main space with the stage. The did the ceremony downstairs in a long vault that was painted white, and they played Beatles songs. For dinner, there was Adriaticos. Any other pizza at a wedding is sort of 'meh,' I feel, but Adriaticos is like a gift.

The wedding itself was really sweet, you could tell it was a couple that really cared about each other.
We had a blast dancing and helping the bar make money. We pretty much danced straight through (with minor gasping, stich-soothing resting periods) till everyone was gone, then we helped clean up.

Rachael was layin down some serious next-level dance moves with Eric. I was too entranced to get a picture, sadly, but here she is with Patrica and Matt:

Also, HDR is nice.

2010-10-14T18:38:00.001-04:00

This what I was saving the piston rings for,

2010-10-13T19:48:00.002-04:00

turns out.

This is pretty cool: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ReuleauxTriangle.html . I knew that that figure had some background; its neat to see that its a formal mathematical concept with a name and lots of history.

Seat cover!

2010-10-13T19:04:00.002-04:00

A few too many people said "is that... electrical tape on the seat?" when I showed them the otherwise super-slick photo below (it was actually black duct tape), so I felt motivated to finish the seat.

[Added] A part of this post got cut off when I sent it though the email interface:

I had made the seat cover a few months ago, but I couldn't figure out a good way to attach it to the seat. I was going to just glue it on, but I couldn't get the mounting brackets off of the bottom (they're rusted on). Plus, getting it on tight and smooth would be a nightmare (and likely a total disaster).

Rachael suggested that I sew it on, to which I responded: "Pfffff! The bottom is made of metal, how'm I gonna sew something to metal?" Gradually it dawned on me that she probably meant that I should lace it on, which is, of course, the perfect way to get it tight and deal with the brackets. So thank you, Rachael, for your insight.

Vrooooom

2010-10-12T13:25:00.000-04:00

Parallel computing

2010-10-06T02:16:00.003-04:00

After a bout of extreme dwarf fortress enthusiasm (which is about to end in a tantrum spiral), I've recovered some of my enthusiasm for more productive geekery. After work today, I figured out how to remotely uninstall R from windows machines, and to install the newest version. This is essential, you see, for my massive parallel computing experiment that I've been stewing on for a little while.

I got my boss's go-ahead to run the scripts about an hour ago (I can't sleep, and he's got a late-email habit); and now I've got all 141 lab machines ready for paralellization. Now I've just gotta get Snowfall figured out and a good problem coded into it. I talked with a professor today on that subject; he was curious about R's optimization capacities. I discovered (after writing a naive email to him on the subject), that R can interface with all the best solvers, including CPLEX and COIN-OR. I think that means that the project is a good idea.

Rick Nicak's Self Titled album

2010-09-12T02:46:00.005-04:00

And another thing that's been going through my head, but for much much longer: you should probably buy this album:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/rick-nicak/id347212867

I've been listening to Rick record this thing for the last year or so (really only the summer; for actual recordings that made it onto the final product), but I'm now filled with awe in listening to this thing I got from iTunes.

And for posterity, if rabid fans want bootleg copies of some of his unreleased stuff: let me know and we'll work out a deal!

Palipmsest

2010-09-12T02:17:00.005-04:00

Best story I've read recently. The word's been stuck in my head all week, on a low level, while I've been on vacation. I realized, when I got home and was idly browsing my browsing histrory, that it's the name of Charles Stross's recent Hugo-winning story.

That the word's been stuck in the back of my mind is unsurprising, considering that I've recently read one of his books, have been reading his blog feed, and have enjoyed everything that's been given the Hugo award.

It was that mix of imaginative and believable that comes from the story-writing idea of "changing one thing, then examining how everything else changes." And with that said, and with that one "changed" assumption made, its unreservedly the most brilliant thing I've read. Maybe not as impactful on my future self as some other works have been, but, standalone, the most brilliant.

As of now, you can read it by googling the word "Palimpsest" and clicking the "archived page" link. Last week it was directly available, but I suspect there were some copyright issues involved in keeping it freely available. Happily, I've managed to read it and preserve it.

Music

2010-08-24T11:42:00.004-04:00

Rick and I made music last night. We recorded a few takes of a song he's been working on lyrics for, and we worked out some guitar parts I can play. Until our joint work is finished and published (Rick's shooting for the end of September), you can enjoy his solo work on iTunes and on his website:

4stringrick.com (he may have to register a new domain; he's now messing around on a six-string bass)

There's a sweet widget on the homepage where you can listen to the whole album, as well as a link to buy it. I can't tell for sure from the image, but it looks as though he may have used Papyrus as the typeface on the cover. Have webcomics not taught their lesson?

What's wrong with this picture?

2010-08-20T15:46:00.001-04:00

Its a screenshot from my iphone. Its asking me if I want to answer the call, and also informing me that I have no service. Minor disconnect? Some grimlens in the phone not talking to each other?

Sculpture

2010-08-12T11:45:00.014-04:00

I saw this sculpture at the University of Michigan, just outside the Law quad. Its been around for a while, and it bears a striking resemblance to components of my Meme-Gene/Body-Soul sculpture design I did a year or two ago. (Edit: the sculpture was done by Chuck Ginnever in 1972).

The angles look really close to being the same; I wonder if the similar mathematical considerations motivated the designer of this sculpture. As I recall, my method was this:

Take an equilateral triangle with side length S as the base
Copy the triangle and rotate it by 22.5 degrees (which completes a 360 degree turn in 16 turns)
Move the copied triangle up on the x axis by .225*S back on the z axis by the same. (I chose .225 just as an amusing reference to the 22.5 degree turn; I think both are the result of choosing pieces per turn, somewhat arbitrarily)
Connect the sides of the copied triangles and make parallelograms out of them, and repeat till you complete a circle (four circles, in my case)

The parallelograms that result make shapes that fit the description of these pictures very closely. I wish I had had a measuring tape on me; it would be cool to see if it obeys the proportions.

More generally, they probably fit into the formula for a helix somehow: x=cos(t), y=sin(t), z=t. Which, of course, is the message encoded in the sculpture I designed.

But given the two arbitrary parameters I made (using 16 pieces per segment, and making the segment depth equal to 1/100th of the degrees per turn times the side length), its remarkable that someone else evidently chose to make the same arbitrary parameter choices.

Of course, they're not completely arbitrary, just guided by what seem like arbitrary aesthetic motivations. Sixteen is the fourth power of two, everyone knows powers of two are cool, and the other two nearest options (8 and 32) would have made it too elongated or too squished, respectively. As for the second choice: turning 22.5 degrees into .225 and using it as the ratio of the sides to the depth just seemed funny.

So we could express it's height H in terms of the side length S, Segments per turn G and number of turns T:

H=GT(S*((360/G)/100)

So, if G=16, S=1, and T=4, it would stand 14.4 feet tall.

If it were made on the scale of the sculpture at U of M, where I'll estimate the S at five feet, it would be exactly seventy two feet tall. Is that significant? Not sure, I was just surprised that it came out to an integer value.

Curious about this, and in a procrastinative mood, I'll test how common this is. Given integer values of S, it looks like H will be an integer 1/5th of the time:
Now, its true that S=5 is the first of these integer values... and it remains true independant of the values of G and T even if they're not integers themselves. Unless T is an irrational number. It doesn't seem to matter what G is.

Cool stuff.

But wait, there's more! I found the sculpture on U of M's website, and it has a beautiful description and a meaning entirely other than what I associated with it.

Though, I note that there happen to be five parallelograms! Ahhh! Am I glimpsing deep mathematical truths, or merely numerological coincidences?

On Technocracy

2010-08-12T10:18:00.004-04:00

Its funny how suspicion of technology and faith in technocracy seem to coincide in some people. Are these conflicting phenomena, or is there a connection between them?

It seems plausible that people who have little understanding of technology are unaware of its limitations, and as a result are overly optimistic about what it is able to achieve.

Perhaps this explains why people who call themselves Luddites also seem to often ascribe to technocratic government institutions.

BanannaPhone

2010-08-10T14:34:00.000-04:00

2010-08-06T12:04:00.003-04:00

I'm taking a couple of computer science classes in the fall, and they assume a prior knowledge of C++. Accordingly, I decided that I should probably learn it ahead of time, and have spent the last week attempting to do so. I've come to the point where I'm fairly comfortable with the syntax and style. Behold, a sort function I've just written!
I must say, I'm not a fan of member functions. I understand their purpose as far as making the code easier to read, but setting them up and debugging them seems not worth the hassle. As far as language evangelism goes, I think I prefer the functional style.

Amusing Artifact

2010-08-05T13:16:00.001-04:00

There's some wonderfully ironic and telling symbolism in this paperweight I came across today. Its intended to look and feel like gold (its really heavy), and is probably made of lead.

2010-07-29T15:33:00.004-04:00

In the month since I finished my thesis project, I've read the following books:

Cryptonomicon
The Left Hand of Darkness
Accelerando
The Name of the Rose
The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Chapters 1-3.5)

I've also visited a professor at the University of Michigan, (pry not a good fit, turns out), and arranged to visit a bunch of professors at IU in a couple of weeks. Douglas Hofstadter even emailed me back, though to say he'd be unavailable 'cause he's out of the country. I was super nervous in sending him a request to meet face to face, since he's been so influential on the course of my thinking and studies in the last couple of years. But his reply email was prompt and gracious, not nerve-wracking at all.

My professional situation is looking up, and I've also been able to sign up for a couple computer science classes for the fall. I'm taking Data Structures and Discrete Computational Structures, as well as a Discrete Mathematics. Since the programming classes assume a prior knowledge of C++, I'm going to have to shift my summertime programming self-tutelage to that language, from LISP. I think I can get all the way through the C++ version of "How to Think like a Computer Scientist; hopefully that'll be sufficient.

IIIIII HAAAAAVE THE POWEEEEEER!!!1!!!\

2010-06-30T14:50:00.006-04:00

Get it?

Here's another hint:

for a subtle pun, read this page:
http://www.drama.uconn.edu/Puppetry/Puppet_home.htm

Aslo, Rick and Matt blew up my stereo though extreme malicious negligence. And it was my 14th birthday present!

	Language	Got paid ?	For Edu. ?	For fun ?
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2	VBA	1
3	GAMS		1
4	AMPL		1
5	R		1	1
6	Matlab		1	1
7	Python			1
8	Lisp			1
9	C++			1
10	Mathematica		1
11	Batch	1		1
12	Shell (BASH)	1		1
13	SQL	1
14	PERL			1
15	HTML	1		1
16	php	1