Justin's Think Tank

Maybe We Should Rethink Education

2012-01-30T11:01:00.005-05:00

Sebastien Thrun on how his online AI class changed him:

http://new.livestream.com/channels/556/videos/112950

Thoughts on a Cognitive Sport

2012-01-08T02:15:00.000-05:00

Note: this post contains a lot of rock climbing jargon and may be hard to comprehend for the uninitiated. Interested readers should refer to Wikipedia's glossary of climbing terms.

A description of rock climbing that I wish I had thought of is that it is a "cognitive sport". I found this term used in two separate blog posts and found it intuitively apt, but it took me a little longer to understand why it is so. All sports contain cognitive elements: the psychological drive to perform better requires will power, any sport with opponents requires outsmarting them, many team sports require cooperation and strategy. But more so than other sports, climbing requires more deliberate thinking than most other sports.

For one, climbing requires participants to overcome their fears. I have long since accepted that a good portion of climbers are afraid of heights, and an even larger portion afraid of falling - despite rationally knowing that they are not going to die. From this perspective, climbing is akin to asserting control over irrational fears, which is very much a cognitive process.

Then there are the steps necessary to reduce the risk of climbing outdoors. Alpine climbers need to consider the weather,their supplies, and their physical condition before deciding whether to attempt a summit. For more routine climbers, there is a body of technical knowledge to be mastered before stepping on rock. The most mundane of these is knowing how to belay and tie knots, but climbers need to know more before going outside. Setting out a top-rope outdoors requires not only more specialized gear and more knots, but also an elementary understanding of physics involved so as not to overload a rope. More cautious climbers may also learn to rescue others and/or themselves, which may involve creating pulley systems - more physics - and creative use of the limited gear on hand. I admit that the application of this technical knowledge forms a large part of the appeal of rock climbing.

Another cognitive aspect of climbing - in my opinion, the most cognitive aspect of climbing - is the climbing itself. Bouldering routes are called problems for a reason, and that is because climbers often need to decipher how to use the holds before getting to the top. Brute strength can only get a climber so far, and technique will get them the rest of the way there, but only if the right technique is used at the right place. What this "right place" is depends on the climber; short climbers may be more comfortable with high foot placements, but may need to use more dynamic moves to reach the next hold, while taller climbers can easily skip through sequences, but suffer when the problem requires them to control their swing. Even on indoor walls the correct sequence may not be immediately obvious, and I've been stuck on routes before until an "Aha!" moment led me to trying a different sequence, more often than not allowing me to finish the problem.

This problem-solving aspect is so salient in my mind that I sometimes think of it directly in psychological terms, specifically by describing a bouldering problem as a problem space over body positions. There are a number of start states (hands on the wall and feet off the ground), a number of goal states (both hands on the finish hold), intermediate states (the holds in the middle), actions to change states (movement), constraints on which actions to take (usually physiological constraints, but also strength, balance, technique, etc.), and finally control knowledge (the decision to take a particular action). I even map the progression of climbers onto the naivety of their search of this space. Novice climbers, not knowing what holds are good or how they should position their body, blindly try everything in reach and settle on the first good hold (a greedy, one-step lookahead search). As they gain experience, climbers internalize which holds are bad enough to ignore (heuristics), while also taking into account future holds before moving (multi-step lookahead). Eventually, climbers acquire the ability to read routes, deducing the best sequence by simply looking at the holds (global optimization). Interestingly, I think most climbers only do this through simulation, as even experts are often stuck on more cryptic problems. The "aha!" moment mentioned above came from considering the route as a statics mechanical problem and how the body might be balanced on the holds given. This is a completely different line of thought than mental simulations, and I wonder if it is unique to climbers with a physics background.

The last aspect I want to address is also the last one to occur to me. Although climbing is an individual sport, I realized that some amount of meta-cognition/opponent modeling is required - by the route setters. This is a role that I find myself increasingly attracted to, for several reasons. First among these is that it allows me to test my climbing prowess in any way I want. Having access to holds and a wall allows me to recreate the hard moves on an outdoor route or the inspiring sequences from climbing videos. Of course, anything I set will be far inferior in quality and difficulty to what athletes are filmed doing, but making the moves similar enough will require much of the same muscles. Although in theory setting my own problems should make me better-rounded as a climber, in reality I tend to set routes which I would enjoy climbing. Most of the time these are technical problems, ones which involve small crimps and precise balance and foot placement. Once in a while I will set something cryptic, introducing climbers to an unusual sequence. Only rarely will I use slopers, which I don't enjoy climbing on and don't understand how to place. Luckily, this shortcoming is fill by other setters, and part of the joy of setting is understanding how they incorporate slopers and, indirectly, how to better use them when climbing.

Which brings me to the mental side of setting. The main point of route setting is not for the setter to enjoy the route, but for other climbers to enjoy the route. This requires that the setter take into account how others approach climbing; after all, setting a cryptic problem requires knowing that the average climber will not immediately see the crux move. The setter must also prevent the climber from circumventing the move. This is often called "cheating" when done as a climber, although I don't believe that using the easiest sequence should be discouraged. Rather, the onus is on the setter to design their route such that cheating is not possible - or at least, that it would be as difficult as doing the move in the first place. This is easier said than done, which is precisely why setting is cognitively challenge. A good route should not only force a climber to do the intended sequence, but to force every climber to do it. This requires placing holds such that climbers would be coming from the same direction, in the same body position with the same hand free. In the problem space analogy, this is equivalent to adding enough constraints such that there are only very few paths connected the start to the finish. These constraints must work for climbers of different heights, and the setter must make sure that a bump and a foot chip for a short climber would not be useful for a tall climber. Juggling these constraints and thinking one level above the climber is why setting a route is as cerebral, if not more so, than climbing a route.

Let me end this essay with a brief exploration of what I think good routes should have. Not all routes are created equal, and inexplicable as it may be, there are such things as incoherent routes. These are the routes that climbers suspect were set by throwing random holds at the wall. A common result is an extremely difficult move in an otherwise easy problem, or perhaps a move which may easily injure the climber (like a dyno to a pocket). In contrast, well-set routes give a sense of movement. I suspect this has to do with balancing many dichotomies: dynamic moves that require precision and static moves that require balance and power, footwork that requires thinking and holds that require courage and commitment. A good route is one that flows - one that, when a climber is on it, they forget about everything else.

Flexibility and Ambiguity in Chinese

2011-12-30T11:58:00.000-05:00

I was surprised to find myself having a new appreciation of Chinese (the language, not the people) on this trip. I've never been a good student of Chinese; my last formal course in it was in middle school, and that I almost failed. I can understand Chinese fine, but I can't write it to save my life. Understandably, I tend to shy away from Chinese literature even though I read it without problems. I was therefore surprised to find myself thinking about two aspects of the language I had not considered before.

The first thought is on how words are constructed. You might have heard that Chinese doesn't have an alphabet, instead using radicals in some combinatorial fashion. It is strange to think of letters and words in Chinese. Not knowing how linguists classify the language (that is, IANAL: I Am Not A Linguist), Chinese seems to jump straight from pen strokes to morphemes. Each radical (usually) has its own meaning, and often may be a "word" by itself. Word is in quotes because, while it is the small free-standing unit, it is often not sufficient to refer to objects. For example, "lions" may be written as 獅 by itself, but if mentioned in isolation 獅子 is more often used. In this sense Chinese phrases look more like idioms, except there are also other Chinese idioms with less transparent meanings. Furthermore, each individual word may be used in multiple phrases, which gives that word by itself some flexibility in meaning.

What most textbooks don't mention, however, is how new words (in the combination-of-radicals sense) are often created. There is a common, but not universal, pattern in Chinese words, where one portion of the word gives the pronunciation and another portion gives the semantic association. These portions, especially those for semantics, are often radicals, but they can often be entire words. The word for lion, for example - 獅 - contains the word for master - 師. Indeed, the two words are homophones of each other, and the remaining radical - 犭 - is often used in words related to animals. This compositional nesting is similar to the prefix and suffix system in English, which allows the creation of words like anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism. I suppose one could call it an infix system - the prime English example being abso-fucking-lutely - except that it's more specific than that. This allows authors to transcribe colloquial, spoken Chinese, which uses words and sounds which did not exist. One example of this is a Cantonese word for stuff - 嘢 - which uses the traditional word 野 plus the radical for mouth, semantically meaning that it's mostly a spoken word. The expressive power of this system has escaped me until now.

The second source of appreciation of Chinese comes from the ambiguous meaning of single words. The inspiration for this came from a restaurant in the Hong Kong Sheraton, called 雲海. This directly translates to "sea of clouds", which is decently poetic but not really succinct enough to be a restaurant name. Then there's the matter of connotations. The word 雲, or cloud, can also be used to mean a large amount and in high density, usually as referring to people (雲雲人海). Similarly for sea, 海, which also connotes an unsurpassed depth and vastness. For two weeks, the question of how to properly translate this name popped into my head whenever I was bored. My best attempt, although its still missing some of the connotations, is "rolling clouds". Of course, it's also the case that "rolling" here cannot be directly translated back to Chinese. There's an art to translating more abstract concepts; it reminds me of the various translations of Jabberwocky, whose meaning is not so much written than connoted. For Chinese, I think, there's a power which comes from the ambiguity and flexible of each word, giving every phrase a deeper connotation than otherwise exists.

Displaying Calendars

2011-12-24T04:55:00.002-05:00

I've talked about my small obsession with digital calendars before. I just want to mention that "logarithmic calendars" seem to be in vogue recently. Then I discovered the timeline widget from the MIT Simile project. It's a cool idea, displaying the same data in two separate views in different time scales. I also like how time is truly represented in a single dimension, allowing the user the scroll infinitely into the past or the future. Having played with it a little, my only complaint is that creating and syncing more than three such timelines really slows down the browser, which is unfortunately, as it would be cool to simultaneously see events on the day, week, month, year, and decade scales. I think for this to work there would also need to be a hierarchical classification of events. We definitely think of history in this way (World War II being a time period, but within which could be further divided into battles, and each battle into smaller engagements and skirmishes), and there's literature suggesting that our brains organize our past experiences in this way too (Conway, 1996. Autobiographical Memories and Autobiographical Knowledge). This makes me think of Gantt charts, but I have yet to see a good integration of logarithmic calendars (although I haven't really looked).

On My First Return to Hong Kong in Three Years

2011-11-20T23:34:00.001-05:00

Potential titles for travel books on Hong Kong

Pollution (You Name It, We Got It)
Holy Shit, Chinese People!
What Personal Bubble?
Wrong Side of the Road, Dude!
¿Hablas cantonés, mandarín e Inglés?

More seriously, some of the changes since the last time I was here (which was December 2008):

A lot of ads have Android/iPhone app icons, even Facebook links. QR codes doesn't seem to be quite as popular yet, although there's some similar system that seems local to Hong Kong.
All the steps on stairs seem really short. I can't tell if I've grown taller in the past three years, but I've noticed that I'm definitely above average height when on the trains. YES.
When I first got to the States I kept doing price conversions back to HKD. Now I do it the other way around, except that I have no clue what the baseline should be. 39 HKD seems instinctively more than 5 USD, but it's ultimately the same. Obviously, small numbers are inherently more likeable (since we see them more often). I wonder if there's literature on how the conversion rate influences spending...
I've lost a lost of my spatial memory of Hong Kong, even for places I would visit on a weekly basis. Then my parents' house has also been remodeled, so it's a little harder to get around.
Whenever I've stayed in the States for a while then come back, I get allergic to something in Hong Kong and would always have a runny nose and keep sneezing. This time I settled with a partially stuffed nose. I think being sick just before leaving somehow buffered whatever I was reacting to.

Font Fun

2011-11-01T21:22:00.000-04:00

I'm heading to DC tomorrow for the AAAI Fall Symposium on Advances in Cognitive Systems. My paper got a poster acceptance, and so the last two weeks was spent wrangling with beamer. One can only focus on LaTeX for so long, so to pass time when I'm not sword fighting I decided to play around with some fonts. Can you guess the major web businesses that use the following fonts? Hover over the images for the answer.

While making the poster, my advisor noted that people sometimes confuse the Michigan block M wordmark with the Missouri block-M wordmark. So I looked up all the M states (turns out there's eight of them; my initial list left out Maine and Massachusetts), and collected their wordmark for comparison:

University of Maine

University of Maryland

University of Massachusetts

University of Michigan

University of Minnesota

University of Missouri

Mississippi State University

Montana State University

Book Tracking

2011-10-26T20:24:00.001-04:00

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I recently closed my Shelfari account. The reason for this is their restriction against exporting my library: some new policy in the last year required your profile to be at least 90% complete for your library to be exportable. This didn't use to be the case, and it understandably led to a lot of complaints (but which the Shelfari staff never justified). Getting up to that percentage required me to join a few groups (which I didn't want to) and add "friends" (which I don't have... kidding! *sob*). I joined a few generic groups, but really didn't want to contact other people to be friends, and eventually gave up on that process. The upshot of this is that I closed my account entirely.

I've therefore set up a new account at Goodreads. It has worked well for me so far; I particularly like how the tag system is done through a "hovering" dialog box, so I can very quickly move from one book to the next. In Shelfari this was through a model dialog, which required more clicks to do the same thing. In general Goodreads do a better job at user interface. There is a lot less AJAX crud, which makes the page load faster. I'm also keeping an eye on the recommendation system, although I don't have too high hopes for it. I suspect the system is much more useful for fiction than non-fiction, where people read largely similar books; with non-fiction, it's boring to read about the exact same topic over and over again.

Anyway, in the process of switching to Goodreads I had to export my library from Shelfari. Recall that I had given up on making Shelfari allow me to export my list. Instead, I loaded up their list of my books, then saved the HTML. I then wrote a quick script which extracted the authors and titles of books. Ah, the advantages of being a programmer... Here I hit a snag: Goodreads allows users to import books, but only by ISBN. Shefari, in its exported CSV file, contains those, but not on it's normal display page. Luckily, I had a backup file of my library, so I had ISBNs for the majority of my books, but not all of them. For the rest, I used the Library of Congress' Search via URL service, which would return detailed book information given a title and an author... which I have! Putting everything together took about an hour, manually verifying that the books were correct a little longer, but at the end of that I had completely moved my library with minimal loss of information. The other upshot is that I cleaned up my list a little, removing books that I'm no longer interested in.

To make sure that this wouldn't happen again, I checked the file that Goodreads would export. It had more information than Shefari, which was nice. What caught my eye was that, in addition to the ratings I gave my books, the exported spreadsheet also contained other reader's average ratings. Which allowed me to make the following plot:

The x-axis is the average rating of other people of any particular book on Goodreads, while on the y-axis is my own rating. The red crosses are the books on this scale, while the red line is a linear regression over these points. The blue line is y=x; that is, what the regression should look like if my ratings were exactly in line with the average reader. As you can see, I have a slightly lower opinion of books in general, especially on the lower end of the scale. Qualitatively, my tastes agree with the average reader, but the discrete ratings on my side makes it hard to give a good regression.

PS. A book I'm reading that is not listed on my shelf is Donald Knuth's The TeXbook. One might expect a book about a pseudo-programming language for typesetting to be dry, but Knuth makes it pretty interesting.

Scattered Thoughts

2011-09-11T23:04:00.001-04:00

In lieu of writing single posts about each of these topics (which would require willpower I don't have), I've decided to give one paragraph abstracts of my thoughts. If any of these particularly interest you though, I might spend the time to refine and lengthen it.

Computer Science Education

The gist of this train of thought (and it's a fricking freight train) is that computer science education should be mandatory much earlier on, in the same way that maths is. There are many arguments for this, the most powerful argument being that while computers are now ubiquitous, many people still view them as magic, aka. "sufficiently advanced technology". Another powerful argument is that, like literature and mathematics and science, computer science teaches a different way of thing. If science is the study of why (things are the way they are) and mathematics the study of what (is the relationship between structures and its implications), then computer science is the study of how (to achieve a specific effect through many small steps). I sincerely think that computer science is the study of process, of the "how" of things; programs are merely a formal language for describe how to change things from one state to another. Since this is about computer science education, I also think that computer science is relatively easy to teach, precisely because computers are everywhere. Students don't need to wait for the teacher's validation - if their program works, it works! On a negative note, a recent paper suggests that not everyone can become good programmers...

Mike Rowe's Testimony to Congress (transcript)

I heard about this from the Blogosaur, and another friend of mine agrees with her, but I have a slightly different opinion to share. I don't disagree that plumbers, welders, and other "dirty jobs" and skilled laborers are as necessary now as they are before, or that they are worthy of respect. What I disagree with is Rowe's suggestion that hard work is no longer valued, or the more blatant assertion that technology does not require hard work. Programmers at start-ups work no less hard than the skilled laborers of yesteryear, and these are the same people who would be fascinated by metalwork and paved roads and suspension bridges 40 years ago. Rowe talks of people who don't know how to fix things, who are afraid to get dirty; how many computer owners know how to fix their computer? Do computer technicians get any more face time with their customers than plumbers? Market economics suggests that as wages for skilled labor increase, this gap will be filled. It might not be filled by Americans, but more likely, people will be more willing to go into those jobs. If plumbers really are as essential to our society as psychiatrist, is it so bad an idea that we should pay more for the latter? Isn't that, in itself, a reflection of our culture's valuation of plumbers?

PS. This goes nicely with my thoughts.

Finite and Infinite Games (wikipedia)

I read this on a friend's suggestion a few years ago. I recently found my notes for it, reported back to my friend, and have since thought a lot more about its subject. The big take away for me is that you can only lose a game if you are playing a game, and you can only play a game if you willingly join it. A corollary is that if you're losing a game, you can always decide to play a larger game instead - until you play the largest game of all (aka. life), in which no one can lose. It supports something I've come to firmly believe: if you don't like something, either change it or change yourself. It also fits into the "Ha Ha Only Serious" hacker mindset, as well as why I derailed my philosophy class onto unicorns for 15 minutes. But that's a different story.

Teach For America (wikipedia)

Some of you may know that I had planned on Teach For America as my backup in case I wasn't accepted into any grad schools. I abandoned my application when I was accepted into Michigan, but I also did a little more research, primarily by reading Donna Foote's Relentless Pursuit. Hindsight is 20/20 and it sounds like sour grapes, but I have philosophical disagreements with the TFA philosophy. While their goal of education equality is commendable, I don't think having a bunch of recent graduates teaching for two years is the best way to do it. This approach is inherently transient, despite the stated goal of hoping TFA fellows will go on to impact education at the policy level. Another stated assumption, that good leaders will be good teachers, may also be unjustified, and that's without taking into account whether the people they hire are good leaders. I personally believe that to become a good teacher one must first know and love the subject, which is more than I can say for most graduates. That applicants to the program has surged in recent years provides additional evidence that people are not seeing it as an opportunity to solve the education problem, but merely as a sentence on their resume (if, of course, they make it through the program). Undoubtedly, my views would be different if I did go through the program, but I would like to think that at least I've done enough teaching outside of TFA to know that I like it.

Circular Logic - "glow"

2011-04-04T17:33:00.001-04:00

The NYTimes has a regular column on math puzzles. I don't usually look at them, but when I do I prefer Dos Equis... what? Oh yes, Numberplay. Most of the time I can't be bothered to figure out the answer, but one of the questions this week happens to be computationally easy. The question is:

Consider the word "glow." If you replace each letter with its counterpart in a mirror alphabet you will get the legitimate word "told." What other words exhibit this same property?

So I started wrote a little script in Python:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import re
if __name__ == "__main__":
    src = open("/usr/share/dict/cracklib-small", "r")
    words = set()
    for word in src:
        word = word.strip()
        if len(word) == 1 or re.match('[^a-z]', word):
            continue
        words.add(word)
    src.close()
    for word in words:
        mirror = "".join(chr(219-ord(c)) for c in word)
        if mirror in words:
            print(word, mirror)

This script uses the computer's dictionary file (which I've used before), mutates the letters, then checks if the result is in the dictionary. The script outputs:

all   zoo
ark   zip
art   zig
blip  york
de    wv
dr    wi
drib  wiry
elm   von
era   viz
err   vii
fir   uri
fm    un
ge    tv
girl  trio
girt  trig
glib  tory
glow  told
gm    tn
gs    th
hob   sly
hold  slow
holt  slog
holy  slob
horn  slim
ir    ri
irk   rip
iv    re
ivy   reb
levi  over
low   old
lug   oft
md    nw
me    nv
mix   nrc
mn    nm
mrs   nih
ms    nh
nh    ms
nih   mrs
nm    mn
nrc   mix
nv    me
nw    md
oft   lug
old   low
over  levi
re    iv
reb   ivy
ri    ir
rip   irk
slim  horn
slob  holy
slog  holt
slow  hold
sly   hob
th    gs
tn    gm
told  glow
tory  glib
trig  girt
trio  girl
tv    ge
un    fm
uri   fir
vii   err
viz   era
von   elm
wi    dr
wiry  drib
wv    de
york  blip
zig   art
zip   ark
zoo   all

As a sanity check, notice that "glow" does indeed turn into "told" (and vice versa).

Problem solved in 10 minutes.

PS. I would have commented on the post, but I have no clue what my NYTimes password is.

Herstory

2011-03-23T18:31:00.006-04:00

I read a book recently (or maybe it was the internet; I don't remember) where the author talked about how history has been male dominated and asked the question, "what happened to herstory?" Well, if you want to play that game...

I used a short regex to find all the words in my computer's dictionary file which started with "his", "man", and "male". I chose a few to systematically replace with "her", "woman", and "female", with slight hand-tuned adjustments for spelling. Here are some particularly funny ones (with commentary).

NOTE: Before you yell at me to say that not all feminists do things as pointless as wordplay, I know. I'm using the word "feminist" (and related terms) below to refer to those who do play these games.

femalefactor - female criminals; also, the critical element behind every successful man
femalevolent - things like the silent treatment; also, witches
herpanic - what Spanish women would do if they found out about this change
herred - past tense of the sound female snakes make
womanager - your female boss
womanatee - another name for baby tees
womandrake - a shapely plant
womaneuver - the special way females handle vehicles
womangled - what every women's hair is when they wake up
womanhole - *ahem*
womania - what Freud and folk psychology called "hysteria" (hersteria?)
womanifold - laundry; not to be confused with "womanifolds"
womanipulate - actually, this is the etymology of the word "manipulate"
womanservant - subject of a lot of male fantasy
womanslaughter - it seems like the unmodified version fits the feminist movement better

We can, of course, go further. See if you can identify the original word for these:

abdowomen - the medical name for a pregnant belly
accompaniwoment - another word for escort
antidisestablishwomentarianism - the longest word in the English language
Archeredes - a virtually-unknown female ancient Greek mathematician
ewomancipation - the process of women obtaining political rights and equality under the law
hashersh - why feminism feels good
homomorphersm - another word for lesbianism
husbgyny - the domestication of women
hywoman - a membrane around the penis which breaks on first sexual intercourse
multidiwomensional - the idea that women cannot be rated on a single scale
portwomanteau - a famous species of wine grape
rowomantics - the behaviors of the female crew team
serapher - another word for angel
whersical - this list
womenstruate - actually, I have no clue what this means

I'll all for feminism, but really: there are more important things to talk about than sewomantics. Also, study etymology.

PS. Also see the ad fenimam logical fallacy

Twitter Wordle

2011-03-05T14:36:00.001-05:00

A summary of my tweets (created with Wordle):

A poor excuse for not writing, I know. I'm hoping to have something up soon, on computer science education.

Some Trends

2011-02-12T20:53:00.001-05:00

I've been playing with graph creators lately. No, not the mathematical graphs... well, I mean... the other type of mathematical graphs (aka. plots). In particular, I was trying my hands at gnuplot, and of course I needed data. Where better than to plot trends from my own journal?

The x-axis shows time; each point represents the average over 6 months, taking the first/later half of the year. The y-value is the percentage of entries over this period which contains this word (or variants thereof; for example, the Twitter plot also includes the word "tweet"). This is all generated programmatically - I extended my journal script to calculate the percentage of entries containing given terms and output it in table (space-separated value) form, which gnuplot then reads. Since the data is highly specific, my gnuplot is also particular to this application. I abused gnuplot's ability to ignore non-existent columns and left it using 5 columns. The source is below:

#!/usr/bin/env gnuplot

reset
set terminal png

set title "Prevalence of Term over Time" font "Arial,16"

set border 3

set xdata time
set timefmt "%Y-%m"
set format x "%Y"
set xlabel "Date" font "Arial,12"
set xtics nomirror rotate by -45
set mxtics 0

set ylabel "Percent Entries with Term" font "Arial,12"
set yrange [0:100] 
set ytics 10 nomirror
                   
set key autotitles columnheader enhanced reverse outside font "Arial,12"
set style data lines # linewidth 2 ?
set grid

# plot [raw_data] using [x-col]:[y-col] [attributes]...
plot "data.csv" using 1:2 linewidth 2, \
             "" using 1:3 linewidth 2, \
             "" using 1:4 linewidth 2, \
             "" using 1:5 linewidth 2, \
             "" using 1:6 linewidth 2, \
             "" using 1:7 linewidth 2, \
             "" using 1:8 linewidth 2

In the future I'm considering writing a script that generates gnuplot scripts. It'll be easier than remember all these ugly commands.

And here are the resulting plots. The first one is on my use of online services. You can clearly tell when I started using Reddit and how quickly it dominated my life. The growth of Twitter is much slower comparatively. Facebook is huge mostly because it's my main source of how other people are doing.

Next are some hobbies of mine, at least those I can think of off the top of my head. It's obvious when I started climbing more often (and therefore better); it's also clear that when I teach at CTY, it becomes a big part of my life. As a computer science major and now a grad student, I clearly code more than the chart shows; one could consider that as habituation, I guess.

Here's another one, on academic topics. These were all topics I considered studying in college. I eventually majored in computer science and got a certificate in engineering design, but took extra classes in all these subjects. I think it's neat that these topics has all been mentioned more often over time - that I'm still into the same subjects I was in high school and college... except design, which I haven't done any of since junior year.

I would love to do more of these, but I can't think of anymore sets of terms to compare. Comment if you can.

Personal Responsibility

2011-02-02T18:35:00.001-05:00

Author's note: I know this is pretty bad writing, but I've been struggling to put this idea down in words and this is the best I could do.

On the bus today I overheard a conversation about someone only taking 12 credits, then saying "but it's not my fault I'm only taking 12 credits." That got me angry, I've been thinking about the idea of personal responsibility for the past month - and trying to write about it , unsuccessfully - and that kind of excuse is the last thing I want to hear. The main idea is that people are responsible for themselves no matter the circumstance. In psychology we recently read Neil Postman, who wrote that TV and newspaper are destroying people's capacity to understand longer pieces of language, which was more common before when people listed to 7 hour speeches and debates (which is also where Lincoln-Douglas debates came from). But it's not the case that books don't exist anymore, just that TV and newspaper, with its short, out-of-global-context pieces, are much more attention grabbing and much less attention requiring. If people want they can still choose to read, but they don't. To blame the media for this is to take the responsibility away from the individual, over what the individual could control but chose not to. Either you accept you made the choice and live with it, or you get out.. To say you didn't have the choice is to say you're not in charge of your life - and in that case, you deserve all the misery you feel.

I don't know when I acquired this sense of individual responsibility - there are traces of my high school existentialism class in this - but recent news events made me think about it more often. There was the WikiLeaks diplomatic cable leak, where I believe the intelligence officer Bradley Manning should be court-martialed but that WikiLeaks is crime free The justification is that Manning signed a contract/swore an oath to keep data confidential, and leaking the cable constitutes violating that contract and taking back his word. WikiLeaks made no such promise, and their actions are at worst inappropriate or distasteful., but in no way illegal. There was the case of two people who used a bug in casino video poker machines and used it to win jackpots. They are being sued by the casino for fraud - but, I assume, the developers are not suffering any consequences. This case is particularly egregious because at a casino you're expected to try and win. You may be thrown out or barred for counting cards- again, legal because casinos are private property (although look at Atlantic City) - but courting cards is not against the law. How is exploiting a bug in video poker any different? It is the developer of the machine who are ultimately responsible. If there was no way to load poker in the house's favor, casino's wouldn't be playing it, except in this case the poker machine is faulty.

There's the case of a stalker using information from Facebook to guess people's security questions on email accounts, then blackmailing them with explicit photos from there. I'm not saying the stalker is guilt free, for he is in violation of the law- and he chose to blackmail these people. But the victims are also naive to use such easily answerable security questions, not to mention taking and keeping explicit photos of themselves.

In my mind I extend this responsibility of choice to a person's entire life course. To think that people didn't know dropping out of school will result in a hard life is absurd. It's not that dropouts always end up nowhere - look at Bill Gates and Steve Jobs - but its that people chose that course and later complain about it, or blame the circumstances for their suffering without considering their complicity in ending there in the first place. There are things we have no control over - one could be born with AIDS, or into war, or be abused - and even then the circumstance should not be blamed for all the failures of the victim. Being forced to immigrate by your parents due to bankruptcy does not justify spending romance novels all day and only ever working server positions.

Let me be clear on this part, in case you haven't gotten it yet. I don't think it's bad to read novels all day and serve as a waitress for the rest of your life. If that has been your greatest desire since kindergarten, I think it's wonderful you have achieved your ultimate - if perhaps small - life goal. My problem is when you find that situation is not to your liking, and your refuse to accept responsibility for being in
that situation nor take initiative in changing it. It's your fucking life, fucking live up to it.

PS. I am aware that there are gray areas in the above philosophy. There are circumstances that, although preventable, would have required inhuman foresight. Flood insurance may have made life easier, but if you live where floods are unlikely, then it's potentially excusable. It comes down to what "common sense" dictates, which is debatable. But the big idea here is not to prevent all negative experiences, but to not use that as a crutch preventing happiness.

PPS. Related reading: The Rise of the New Global Elite.

Sooner apparently means later

2010-12-20T21:49:00.001-05:00

In the mean time, here's a fun charge on spring simulator. It uses a naive force-based algorithm to do the drawing. Those among you with a sharp eye will have noticed I named this simulation "Feynman", named after of course the famous physicist Richard Feynman. In his biography - James Gleick's Genius - the author describes how Feynman perceives equations (he has grapheme-color synesthesia specific to mathematical equations. I have written about the general form before). I quote from the book:

In high school he had not solved Euclidean geometry problems by tracking proofs through a logical sequence, step by step. He had manipulated the diagrams in his mind: he anchored some points and let others float, imagined some lines as stiff rods and others as stretchable bands, and let the shapes slide until he could see what the result must be. These mental constructs flowed more freely than any real apparatus could. now, having assimilated a corpus of physical knowledge and mathematical technique, Feynman worked the same way. The lines and vertices floating in the space of his mind now stood for complex symbols and operators. They had a recursive depth; he could focus on them and expand them in more complex expressions, made up of more complex expressions still. He could slide them and rearrange them, anchor fixed points and stretch the space in which they were embedded. Some mental operations required shifts in the frame of reference, reorientation in space and time. The perspective would change form motionlessness to steady motion to acceleration. It was said of Feynman that he had an extraordinary physical intuition, but that alone did not account for his analytic power. He melded together a sense of forces with his knowledge of the algebraic operations that represented them. The calculus, the symbols, the operators had for him almost as tangible a reality as the physical quantities on which they worked. Just as some people see numerals in color in their mind's eye, Feynman associated colors with the abstract variables of the formulas he understood so intimately. "As I'm talking," he once said, " I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Janke and Emde's book, with light tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.

The idea behind this project was to make an interactive mind mapping application, where no hierarchy is enforced or even implied - unlike most mind mapping software such as XMind. This means a free-form graph layout application. To get the recursive depth, however, each node will also be a summary representation of another mind map/graph, so the user can drill down indefinitely to find more and more detail. What I've coded so far is only a test of the graph layout; I will eventually put in the functionality to create nodes and label and expand them.

In the mean time, a fun emergent game is to try and drag the nodes such that the graph is planar. Just refresh the page to get a new randomly generated graph.

I'll start writing again... soon

2010-12-04T11:02:00.002-05:00

In the mean time, enjoy the new layout.

Recreational Programming

2010-11-08T22:52:00.000-05:00

The result of about 10 hours of recreational programming: a web interface to settle complex bills. This was common when I went on camping trips; people would pay for gas, camping, firewood, etc. willy nilly, and at the end it's always a pain to figure out who owes what. No longer.

Bill Settler

The Evolution of Desire

2010-10-18T23:48:00.000-04:00

I finished David Buss' The Evolution of Desire a while back, but I have been to lazy to post thoughts. It's a more scientific look at human mating strategies and their evolutionary/adaptive roots - a The Game backed by evidence, if you will. I will only share two quotes here.

The first one is amusing:

Feigning homosexuality so as not to incur the suspicion of the dominant man and then attempting to have sex with the woman when the dominant man is not around is a rare tactic among humans. Nonetheless, it is interesting that a few college men reported having observed this strategy.

Really? People pretend to be gay to get girls? And it works? Interesting.

The second one is also amusing (emphasis mine):

[The researchers] asked college women how upset they would feel if a man they did not know, whose occupational status varied from low to high, persisted in asking them out on a date despite repeated refusals, in a relatively modest form of harassment. On a 7-point scale, women would be most upset by advances for construction workers (4.04), garbage collectors (4.32), cleaning men (4.19), and gas station attendants (4.13), and least upset by persistent advances by premedical students (2.65), graduate students (2.80), or successful rock stars (2.71)... The same acts of harassment from men who different in status are not equally upsetting.

Score!

Conway's Game of Death

2010-09-06T17:01:00.001-04:00

Today's Spiked Math gives an interesting twist to Conway's Game of Life, complete with zombies. I was curious what the actual interactions were like, so I modified a NetLogo model to do the simulation.

As in the comic, blue means human, red means dead, orange means zombie.

Enjoy!

Our Upcoming Digital World

2010-08-31T20:00:00.001-04:00

Two converging sources led me to write this today.

The first is a duology (or dilogy, to be etymologically correct) by Daniel Suarez, titled Daemon and Freedom (TM). I first heard of Daemon from the Long Now Foundation blog, where the author talked about how the world is increasingly being run by computers. The online preview hooked me, and I've been searching for a copy ever since. I finally got my hands on both books two weeks ago. Michigan's copy of Daemon had been continuously checked out for a long time; I decided to get a copy of Freedom through ILLiad, thinking they would check it out from the Ann Arbor Public Library - I later found my copy came all the way from Yale. They were good reads, techno-thrillers that refuse to be put down. Saying the books are merely techno-thrillers grossly underestimates their scope - Suarez embedded political, economic, and philosophical viewpoints in the narrative - but here I will only address his description of technology and its impact on society.

The storyline of the novels follows a revolution, from a society very similar to our own to one where the digital world is (even more) deeply integrated into the fabric of everyone's lives. This integration is primarily through a computer problem (the titular Daemon, which controls everyone's private information. This consists mainly of three things: a person's unique ID (UID), their credit, and their role and competency in that role. A UID is just that - some name or series of characters which uniquely identifies a person. A person's credit is also a familiar concept: it is the digital currency of the society. Finally, a person's role and competency (or "level") stems from role playing game terminology; it describes what a person is good at, and how good they are at it. For example, the novel often shows articles by high level (say, level 12 or above) journalists.

Each piece of information stored by the Daemon is part of the overall system, but a larger view of the system is needed first. Each member of this new society wears specialized sunglasses, equipped with a head-up display (HUD) and powered by a wearable power source - in most cases, a battery belt. The HUD is a thin client to the Daemon - that is, it only provides access to the system but does not run the Daemon itself. Wireless Internet access is assumed, so the glasses are always connected to the Daemon. It transmits two sets of data to the Daemon: it's current location through GPS, and biometric data of its wearer. This biometric data - everything from fingerprints and iris scans to gait and breathing patterns - is stored together with a person's UID. DNA could presumably be stored as well, although it was not mentioned in the novels. This comprehensive profile of a person makes identity theft near impossible.

The GPS location, on the other hand, allows the Daemon to provide the user with information. Aside from data about people, the Daemon also stores information about objects. These could either be information about locations (think of a history of, for example, the Eiffel Tower) or information about real world objects. The latter is achieved through ubiquitous RFID tags. Pooling these databases together, a user can access information about everything in their surrounding.

A word about RFID tagged objects. In addition to giving information about an object's history (for example), the Daemon can perform other tasks with the help of embedded, integrated circuits in the object. One example is an ownership check: since the Daemon controls the economy (more on this later), it knows who an object belongs to. If an unauthorized person tries to use an object, the Daemon could automatically disable or even destroy the object. Since the Daemon is connected to most digital systems (more on how it did this later), objects could also be given "magical" properties. The books show a ring which will erase the wearer from security camera feeds: the Daemon associates the user and the ring, finds cameras pointed at the users location, and edits the video in real time to cover the user with the background.

Obviously, such an object could be misused - which is where a user's credit and role come into play. Together, these two pieces of information determine what someone is or is not allowed to do. While the idea of credits is easy to understand, role and level requires some explanation. As mentioned above, a person's role shows what the person is capable of doing. This may be production related - the knowledge to use a milling machine, for example - or skill based, such as the knowledge to write programs. The level is some measure of how much experience and how competent the person is with this ability. There is a third piece of data I have not mentioned - a person's reputation. This is again publicly viewable, and is simply an average of how others "rate" their interaction with this person. A low reputation would mean that the user frequently lies, or cheats, or is rude, while a high reputation means the user consistently does their job well. The creation and registration of objects with the Daemon often require several people to cooperate, and any one could refuse base on the others reputation. The Daemon itself performs checks on a person's credit and levels, to ensure that only responsible individuals could use powerful objects like the ring above.

Credit and reputation could be used in another way: to directly influence the society around you. For example, "news" within this society are simply pieces of media produced by users, then rated by other people. The initial rating of a piece of news depends on the reputation and level of the publisher. A person could also use their reputation to create "jobs" - things they want other people to do. Presumably, those who fulfill the requirements of the job - which might be something as simple as transcribing a minute of video - would gain credit or reputation or both.

For a society like the one described to survive, the stability and security of its infrastructure - that is, the Daemon - is crucial. In the novel, the Daemon first gained control as a virus botnet, gaining access to massive computing and storage capability. With this ability, it hacked into the financial and security systems worldwide, thereby forcing the world to accept its presence. The initial selection of people to receive HUD glasses were selected based on highly specific rules; once its members reached a critical mass, newcomers had to be interviewed by members - who are scanned with fMRI for honesty. It is also at this point the Daemon makes its source code publicly available, thus preventing minorities from taking over the system and also allowing the will of the majority to implement new procedures. Finally, the Daemon also executes the punishments in this society, including the removal of credits or in extreme cases, death (through the control of motorcycles with swords).

That concludes the description of Suarez's novel universe.

Before I talk about the second source of inspiration for this post, I want to point out which parts of the novel is science fiction and which parts are existing technology. The fictional aspects are surprisingly limited. The obvious ones include the sword wielding motorcycles, realistic and useful HUDs, fMRI lie detection (although this is a developing field), and (sadly) ubiquitous wireless internet access. Other things which sound fantastical are only fictional in degree: botnets do exist and could potentially harness the computing power to hack commercial networks. RFIDs are embedded in a lot of consumer products - including books, media players, and passports - and the devices needed to read RFIDs are cheap and easy to obtain. GPS is already a widespread technology, and in fact people already broadcast their location through services like Facebook Places, Twitter, and Foursquare. Finally, socially defined value systems are everywhere: Amazon ratings, news sites like Reddit and Digg, and on social networks like Facebook and MySpace. Of course, digital currency has been in use for the past half a century and drives most of today's financial markets. Finally, crowdsourcing is already available to people, through Amazon's Mechanical Turk service (the name of which is inspired by the original Turk, a fake AI).

My second inspiration likes with this later group. I watched a TED talk today by Seth Priebatsch on "The Game Layer on top of the World". Priebatsch is the founder of SCVNGR, an API which allows companies and individuals to build "challenges" at certain locations. These challenges earned the player points, which could be redeemed as coupons for those companies. Although I knew of all the services I mentioned above, it was only with the talk did I realize how near a future Suarez could be describing. Priebatsch's introduced his talk by saying today's social networks are disorganized, despite the potential of harnessing all the information a person puts online. The main difference between our present technology and that of Suarez's - aside from the science fiction elements already mentioned - is the transparency of information. By infecting global financial databases and forcing the system on people, the Daemon had the power to require the transparent broadcast of reputation and ratings. Without this central (and impersonal, unbiased, not-for-profit) force, there will always be concerns of monopoly and anti-trust for any company that gains control.

This was my original topic, by the way: that an open source, transparent program would solve the problems of a Randian utopia I talked about before. I believe that humanity will ultimately become the society described by Suarez, which inherently contains the values of production described by Rand, although policed in a very different form that what Rand envisioned. Technology has grown too quickly for society, especially our customs, to keep up: just look at the debates on net neutrality and digital copyright. Human right issues are related - the Daemon does not care whether you are Caucasian or African American, homosexual or heterosexual, Christian or atheist, but only your ability to give value to those around you.

I don't know what conditions would lead humanity to implement a change like that though.

Last thought: I mentioned that the Daemon's world was opt-in, that you have to decide to meet with interviewers. The current trend of ubiquitous computing is on smart phones, which I have yet to own one. In the novels, the people who stayed with the outside world were left with a dying economy; I wonder what world I will live in if I continue to refuse mobile technology.

HTML5 Canvas 3D

2010-08-21T14:21:00.002-04:00

The WebGL standard is developing to allow 3D graphics on the web. Unfortunately, it is currently only available in developmental branches of major browsers. In the mean time, the HTML5 Canvas element provides support for 2D graphics... unless you have a backend library to render 3D scenes. Lookie what I did. You'll need a good browser... anything other than IE will do. Drag the display pane to rotate; use the mouse wheel to zoom in/out.

In other news, I've discovered that I remember close to nothing about 3D geometry.

Atlas Shrugged (cont.)

2010-08-05T22:08:00.000-04:00

I had forgotten about these two points last time. Also, Faye has posted her thoughts on Atlas Shrugged.

Post Script 4: Sanction of the Victim

Although, as Faye suggested, that wealth is most often made collectively in the world at large, this is not true for special circumstances. In smaller groups, especially when the groups are not formed through mutual selection, there are often members who do most of the work and members who barely work at all. I am, of course, talking about school projects. If Atlas Shrugged had an effect on me, it is in my wondering whether I should have been more honest in group evaluations.

Post Script 5: On the Value of Human Life

At the end of the novel, the protagonists take over a torture facility to rescue John Galt. In one scene, Dagny confronts a guard by telling him that she was sent there by the head of state and making him choose between letting her in and obeying his boss' order to keep everyone out. When he couldn't make a decision, Dagny shoots him dead.

This scene, and the following ones, never satisfied me. Although I see the literary need to rescue Galt (and have no suggestion on how to otherwise achieve this), killing to achieve this seems entirely antithetical to the novel. Implied in the killing is that there is no life without thought and that being alive or dead makes no difference in that case. While this may be a valid philosophical position, putting it into action violates more than the value of life: our protagonists are also imposing their beliefs on others and making that choice of life and death for them. It is this latter imposure that I cannot stand. My philosophy leans toward what is said of Voltaire (but actually written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall): "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

New Windows Manager

2010-08-01T23:55:00.000-04:00

Switched from Fluxbox to Openbox today, but everything is funtionally the same. The taskbar is pypanel. The readings in the back is from conky. The wallpaper is from a NASA POTD showing the sun's corona during an eclipse.

Atlas Shrugged

2010-07-25T03:06:00.002-04:00

Is a man not entitled to the sweat ofhis brow?

No, says the man in Washington; itbelongs to the poor.
No, says the man in the Vatican; itbelongs to God.
No, says the man in Moscow; it belongsto everyone.

I rejected those answers.

- Andrew Ryan, founder of the city ofRapture

The above quote is from BioShock, a first person shooter where the player stumbles upon theruins of Rapture. The setting of the game borrows heavily from AynRand's philosophy (as the similarity between the names Andrew Ryanand Ayn Rand suggests), especially from the philosophy espoused inher magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. I myself finished the book lastweek, after my friend Faye prompted me to read onechapter. It was the original book I wanted to read of Rand's, beforeits unavailability from the library forced me to read The Fountainhead instead. I thought I would start myconversation with Faye by writing this post.

The basic premise of Atlas Shruggedasks one question: what if all the innovators of the worlddisappeared? Their choice to do so is rational in the setting of thebook: the government (and the world in general) has evolved to thepoint where the work of any innovator is taken from them unfairly. Asprotest against this policy, the innovators collectively disappear,to show the world what will happen if they refuse to continuecontributing their work without appropriate payment. As a consequenceof their refusal to work, to "sanction the victim", theworld collapses with no one producing anything of value. This is themeaning of the novel's title - those who carry civilization forward,the Atlas' of the world, becomes apathetic to those they arecarrying. This is also why the novel was originally titled "TheStrike".

Describing the precise moral dilemmathat the book presents is difficult. I think the conflict reducesdown to these two principles, both commonly accepted morals, whichRand suggests is in conflict:

1. Men are brothers in life, and musttake care of each other. We must ensure that each person is treatedfairly, and those more fortunate must contribute to help those lessso.

2. Men are their own masters, and wemust create our own destiny. No one else is in charge of ourhappiness, and we must work to maximize the value and desirability ofour future.

In Atlas Shrugged, Rand sets these twomorals in opposition. Within the novel, the government puts the needsof the majority over the right of the individual. To ensure thateveryone in society is treated fairly, that those who have not risento the top are given chances to do so, the government routinelylimits the output of industries and commandeers its goods for thosein need, with the force of the law at its side.

The problem is not that the able - andtherefore the rich - are giving money to the poor, but that the poorare not giving value back. Ask yourself this question: if you arerequired, by law, to give money to pan-handlers who have nothing tooffer you in return, would you? If you answered no, consider thatthis is exactly what taxes and social welfare amounts to. The novelexaggerates this to dystopian degrees, but the scenarios arequalitatively equivalent.

In protest against this philosophy offree-loading, the heroes of Atlas Shrugged retreat from the world totheir own isolated village, where the rule of the land islaissez-faire capitalism. Everyone must earn their own living, andtrade occurs because both parties want something the other has - inother words, if one person gives another money, it is because thesecond person has something the first wants. There is no governmentin the conventional sense: instead of taxes required by law, money isgiven voluntarily to protect the personal rights of individuals,including their right to property and right to physical well-being.That is the sole function of the government; there is no socialwelfare, and public utilities such as roads and water are privatelyowned, its existence prompted by its need. It is the rationalself-interest which drives the exchange of money, not the law and itsimplied threat of physical force.

Rand's novel goes on to show that,without the productive capabilities of the heroes, the outside worldcollapses. The welfare state cannot help the poor, as there isnothing of value left to give to them. The government attempts toforce the producers to return through torture but the producers,showing their willingness to die for the cause, proves that there isno way to force a person to think. The end of the novel suggests thatthe world has collapsed sufficiently for the producers to reemerge,to establish a society based on their own morals.

For me, the story raises the followingquestions, which I will address in turn:

1. Are the two principles mentionedabove necessarily in conflict? Is the adherence to the firstnecessarily destructive?

2. In The Fountainhead, Rand suggeststhat a man's work (that is, his happiness)should be his only moral, other people's opinions of it be damned.And yet, here our heroes change their behavior because of otherpeople. Are these two messages in conflict, or can they bereconciled?

3. Most importantly, how practical isthe philosophy that Rand proposes? How should we evaluate its merits?

To answer the first question, I willfirst ask whether the first principle is necessarily destructive. Iargue that, although it maybe not always cause the dystopia paintedin the novel, it definitely does is not the most constructive ofprinciples. Consider a decision theoretic viewpoint: if you can giveyour money to two people, one who will give you something in returnand one who won't, rationality dictates that you should give themoney to the person who will give you value; otherwise, you willincur an opportunity cost. The reason for this is that trade is not azero-sum game. This comes directly from Adam Smith: the cost of eachperson manufacturing what they need is higher than specializing thentrading, and therefore both people come out ahead by trading. Incontrast, the second give-and-take scenario is zero-sum: what yougive away is exactly what the other person receives. Therefore,although not necessarily destructive, the principle of giving is alsonot the most valuable one to follow.

This answer to the second part of thequestion also suggests an answer to the first. If we take ourhappiness to be our only moral, then the extra cost of giving toothers compared to trading implies that we are not as valuable as wecould be. Since giving reduces our productive capability in the longrun, these two principles, if standing by themselves, are directly inconflict.

Here I need to make side notes toaddress two issues: that of people who absolutely need aid, and thatemotion and/or friendship in the world described above.

First, the treatment of people who needaid. Some might object that there are two categories of the poor:those intentionally lazy who pan-handle because they don't want towork, and those truly incapable of work and therefore depends on thewelfare of others to survive. Surely the latter group deserve helpfrom people more able than them. That may be, but consider theimplication of such a dichotomy. A careful reading of the abovesuggests that the measure of a person is always measured by theirability to produce (their value), not their ability to consume(their need). Saying someone depends on the generosity of otherpeople implies they have nothing to trade. To put it crudely, someonewho can only survive with the help of others is someone who has noworth as an individual, who cannot create anything of value at all.Surely the idea that some people are worthless is crueler than theidea that we must all act in rational self-interest. In fact, such amoral presupposes that everyone has something to offer, something ofvalue to trade; this is the optimism inherent in the philosophy.

Second, the nature of friendship andlove. In taking a utilitarian view of human relationships, it mightbe argued that non-material aspects of life are left out, such asfriendship and love. Love is not about a person's value and what onecan gain from it; it is precisely about ignoring personal flaws. Randoffers this answer in Atlas Shrugged, as said by the minor villainLillian Rearden:

"If you loved your brother, you'dgive him a job he didn't deserve, precisely because he didn't deserveit - that would be true love and kindness and brotherhood. Elsewhat's love for? If a man deserves a job, there's no virtue ingiving it to him. Virtue is the giving of the undeserved."

Is this the reason people love oneanother, because they do not deserve it? This ultimately reduces tothe same pessimistic outlook by those who claim some people needalms, but I will offer another argument. Love and friendship may notbe about the material/productive value of a person, but it isdefinitely about personal happiness. The suffering of anunappreciated friendship and of an unrequited love is obvious, andthis stems from love and friendship also being trades: both peoplegain more from interacting with each other than from being alone. Inthe realm of relationships, this is the value that each person isoffering.

The second question above compares thephilosophy of The Fountainhead with that of Atlas Shrugged. Rand,speaking through Roark at his second trial, gives this description ofthe ideal man:

"[The egotist] is not concernedwith [others] in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in hismotive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source ofhis energy... Independence is the only gauge of human virtue andvalue. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn'tdone for others."

The heroes of Atlas Shrugged are allHoward Roarks of their professions. Rand, in an early note for AtlasShrugged, writes, "In The Fountainhead... the theme was Roark -not Roark's relation to the world. Now it will be the relation."Each of the innovators embody the same philosophy expounded by Roark,and yet their main act - to withdraw from the world - is drivensolely by the action of others. Although this seems to directlyconflict with Roark's morals, the differences are explainable.

The main source of this divergence isthat Roark and the heroes of Atlas Shrugged lived in very differentworlds. While both societies disapprove of the character's ruggedindividualism, there was no government directive against Roark's workin The Fountainhead. Roark could design buildings to the fullest ofhis ability, while Dagny, Rearden, and others were prohibited fromproducing by laws which limited their output. In other parts of thespeech quoted above, Roark said, "We are approaching a world inwhich I cannot permit myself to live." That Roark did notwithdraw from the world is therefore a matter of degree - he, likeDagny, believed that society can still be saved from collectivism.The implication is that should Roark find himself in "a world inwhich [he] cannot permit [him]self to live", he would havefollowed Galt's lead to go on strike.

Further more, one's refusal to carrythe world is not the same as a rejection of one's work. While hidingfrom the government, all the innovators continue producing - theirvillage is powered by the inventions of its resident engineers andentertained by the work of its artists. This is part of the messageof Atlas Shrugged and echoes the philosophy of The Fountainhead, thatthe producers of the world can continue to produce without thelooters, while the looters cannot live without the producers.

Finally, despite Roark's society beingin a better state than Galt's, Roark himself briefly retreated fromit - preferring to take the laborer's job of a quarry worker overletting others butcher his buildings. He returned when he found aclient who appreciates his work, as Galt does when the world learnsto appreciate his.

The meaning of Roark's life, as heexplained to Wynand, is his work. True to his word, his work does notdepend on others in any meaningful way, not in an obligation tosupport looters, nor to deliberately destroy them. In a world wherehis is actively prevented from producing - and therefore making hislife meaningless - withdrawing from that world may be the only choiceconsistent with his philosophy.

The final question, perhaps the mostimportant one, asks for an evaluation of the philosophy of AtlasShrugged. Rand's ideal society Galt's Gulch, the village the heroesretreat to, where there is minimal government, each individual worksto his fullest capacity, and there is an abundance of resources to beexploited. Although Rand would be horrified by this comparison, theabove description evokes another ideal society: Thomas More's Utopia.

In many ways, More's Utopia is thepolar opposite of Rand's ideal: there is no personal property, peoplerequest goods as they need them, slavery is pervasive (owned by thestate), atheists are despised, and women hold a notably lower rolethan men. But the ultimate goal of both societies is the same:everyone knows their role in society (be it assigned orself-discovered) and works to their capacity. Utopia - which went onto inspire Marxism and communism - has obvious flaws: greedy dictatesthat some will request more goods than they need, which leads to arace until all state owned property is taken. The flaws of Rand'sGalt's Gulch is less obvious.

Consider the equivalent of greed inGalt's Gulch. Since everyone is driven by rational self-interest, andsince there is no government to provide social welfare, anyone whorefuses to work will have no means to support themselves. Theirrationality, therefore, requires them to produce value for trade, thecheapest and only method to acquire all the amenities for living.Because nothing is free, simply greed will not lead to the society'sdownfall.

There are, however, other forms ofgreed and sloth. Recall that property rights are maintained byessentially a privatized police force. What if the difference inwealth is large enough such that is it more profitable to rob than toproduce? Even with the premise that everyone can produce value, thatvalue may vary greatly between individuals; free capitalism meansthis variance will result in great economic inequity. When gainingwealth by force is quicker than trading what value one has, societyquickly breaks down without the trust and freedom trade requires.Together with the always precarious assumption of general humanrationality, Galt's Gulch will not survive for much longer thanUtopia.

Both More's and Rand's ideal world canonly be sustained by ignoring crucial parts of human nature. Bothsocieties might survive if done in small scale, where everyoneinvolved trusts everyone else completely. There are two ironies inthis conclusion for Rand. First, just as the looters cannot force theinnovators to produce ideas, the innovators cannot force the lootersto be rational or to value property rights as much as they do.Second, and more insultingly, Rand believes in an objective reality,that things are what they are and that individuals are not to createtheir own reality but to perceive the true one. That Rand believes inthe possibility of a society like Galt's Gulch is perhaps thegrossest violation of this tenet of her philosophy.

What conclusions can we draw from AtlasShrugged? As a continuation of The Fountainhead and as a work todemonstrate the relationship between innovators and the world, AtlasShrugged achieves its purpose beautifully. As Rand's magnum opus, itdeserves the attention is has received. Sadly, as a philosophicalguide for future societies, there are still flaws to be resolvedbefore Rand's ideal could be realized.

Post Script 1: Atlas Shrugged and theBible

I think there is an insightful analogyof Atlas Shrugged an objectivist bible of sorts. This works in threesenses:

as the Bible holds the core tenets ofChristianity, so does Atlas Shrugged hold the core tenets ofobjectivism
both are fictional accounts whichdemonstrate how one's life is to be lived
both offer assurance that such a lifeultimately results in happiness.

A key difference, however, is that theBible offers only faith as the proof of its correctness, while AtlasShrugged (and objectivism) promotes reason - a standard with whichobjectivism itself could be judged. At least in theory; see PostScript 3.

Post Script 2: On Style

Between The Fountainhead and AtlasShrugged, I thought the former was better written. In Atlas ShruggedRand gives away too much of people's thoughts - often punctuatingtheir speech and/or the narration. By making her character'smotivations explicit, their actions lose some of the power indemonstrating what they think. In fact, in earlier drafts of TheFountainhead, Rand had written, "Don't dialog thoughts - narratethem". Perhaps because I have selectively reread TheFountainhead multiple times, there were also sections of AtlasShrugged where the descriptions and/or the characters' actions werepredictable.

There is, however, something I thoughtRand did superbly: she managed create, in a novel set in "modern"times, the elements of a fantasy. In particular, the three "princes"of the world - Francisco D'Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjold, and John Galt- have an air of breathlessness about them, like the ancient heroeswho fantasy protagonists discover are still alive (Zedd of TerryGoodkind's Sword of Truth series - not coincidentally heavilyphilosophical and based on Rand's work - comes to mind, but manycharacters from the Dragon Raja series more closely approximatesthis). This made their eventual appearance highly anticipated andenjoyable.

Post Script 3: The Ayn Rand Cult

In Why People Believe Weird Things,Mike Shermer talks about an unlikely cult: objectivism. Beingbelievers in reason, the higher echelons of this movement (thoseclosest to Rand personally) somehow developed a creed which upholdsthat, among other statements:

Ayn Rand, by virtue of herphilosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter in any issue pertainingto what is rational, moral, or appropriate to man's life on earth
The measure of one's virtue isintrinsically tied to the position one takes regarding Ayn Rand andher work
It is best not to say most of thesethings explicitly; one must always maintain that one arrives at one'sbeliefs solely by reason.

A friend of mine, after learning that Ienjoyed The Fountainhead, joked that I pronounce Ann Arbor as "AynArbor". I replied that I liker her philosophy, not her person.

Some Shit

2010-07-16T09:20:00.000-04:00

List of synonyms for urine:

urine
piss
pee

List of synonyms for feces:

feces
poop
crap
shit
dung
droppings
excrement
manure

Climbing Terms

2010-07-12T16:31:00.000-04:00

For future reference, if you climbed a route with one or more the first three, then you ____'ed the route.

Beta	Practice	Falling	Term
			On-Sight
Yes			Flash
Yes	Yes		Red Point (no pre-placed pro)
Yes	Yes		Pink Point (with pre-placed pro)
Yes	Yes	Yes	Hangdog

Two Truths and A Lie

2010-06-29T01:43:00.002-04:00

I just tweeted a very interesting two truths and a lie:

P=NP
All even numbers greater than 2 are sums of primes
The logical conjunction of the above two

I'll leave the solution to the reader. It occured to me while lying in bed, however, that it should be possible to make a list such that any of the three can be the lie. After a little thought and some trial and error, the following fits the bill:

One of the following two statements is false
One of the other two statements is false
One of the previous two statements is false

Simple, but it works. Neat.

This reminds me of the riddle in Inside Man:

Which weighs more: all the trains that pass through Grand Central Station [in NYC] in a year - or the trees cut down to print all U.S. currency in circulation? Here's a hint. It's a trick question.

Once again, I leave the solution as an exercise to the reader... or you can watch the movie.

EDIT: here are a few more humorous Two Truths and A Lie's I came up with:

Water is wet
Fire is hot
The cake

"well, obviously, the cake is a lie."

You think this one is true
You think the last one is probably the lie
You're not sure anymore

What?

Either you won't answer, or you'll answer correctly
Either you won't answer, or you'll answer incorrectly
You will answer

Interestingly, it's possible to correctly answer this last one. You can figure out how.

A Year in My Life

2010-06-18T18:38:00.000-04:00

As most of you know, I keep a personal journal where I record my thoughts and significant daily happenings. Unlike most people who journal - but probably typical as a Linux guy - I keep my journal digitally as plain text. Because it's searchable, I often include references to previous events and people that I am reminded of. I almost depend on it now as an integral part of my memory, and will sometimes be surprised when some incident I remember wasn't recorded in it.

Anyway, recently I started playing with graph visualization. I discovered Graphviz, which automatically moves nodes arounds to make the graph understandable. Primarily I needed it to do some visualizations for my research, but I then realized that the back references between journal entries are perfect for visualization.

Here's the graph for 2009. There are some extra edges to entries from other years which are not drawn.

That's 99 vertices and 183 edges, out of 110 entries for the entire year. Because most entries only reference previous dates, the dates are earlier near the bottom of the graph. You can see some seemingly important dates in the year, ones which I reference often: 2009-03-08, for example, and 2009-04-05. They can be identified by the high in-degree.

Out of curiosity, I also made a graph for my entire journal, a small version of which is shown below. The full version is 27917x4667 pixels, and weighs in at 20 mb.

The horizontal lines are not indicative of anything - it's just an artifact from how Graphviz works. This much larger graph contains 940 vertices and 1821 edges, out of 1283 entries I've written in the last 8 years. I don't have anything to say about it though.

BMI on Craigslist

2010-06-15T23:33:00.002-04:00

There was a post, w4m, on Craigslist. In it, the author listed that she was 170lbs (I'm not sure if she posted her height), and was looking for someone who's single, under 30, and has no kids.

As tends to happen on any anonymous internet board, someone replied that she was picky. Someone else posted that the requires were not particular at all (which I agree with). Then two other people chimed in to say that 170 is "pretty big" unless "you must be like 7'8?", and that 1"70 is large unless you are REALLY tall".

I was curious, so I looked up the Body Mass Index (BMI), which has the following form:

BMI = (weight * C) / height^2

where C is a constant adjusting for the units.

A BMI in the normal range means it is between 18.5 and 25, with 22 being the average. This gives a height range of [69.14,80.37] inches, with an average of 73.70 inches. The average height for American females above twenty is 64 inches, which results in a BMI of 29.18, firmly in the overweight category and bordering on obese. There is a 3.8% chance of her being within the normal range, as 96.2% of American females are shorter than 5'9.

So, while the Craigslist posters were harsh, they were also, unfortunately, correct.

On a different note, the section of the US female population least likely to be overweight is (sterotypically) the Asian/Pacific-Islander (25.2% overweight/obese). The next least likely (surprisingly) are those with a graduate degree (29.2%). Interesting.

My Research

2010-05-21T00:40:00.002-04:00

I've wanted to write this post for a while, but have never found the motivation to do so. There's a workshop this coming week, however, and I am scheduled to present this stuff on Thursday (today... I did okay, I think). So, I decided this is the perfect time to given a non-technical (that is, non-mathematical) introduction to what I do... there truly is no greater motivator than procrastination.

For those of you who don't know, I'm a grad student in computer science at the University of Michigan, specializing in artificial intelligence. Within this field, which is wider and deeper than most people realize, I am looking at the problem of reinforcement learning (RL). The formulation of the problem is simple. An agent interacts with some environment by performing actions. The environment reacts, and may occasionally reward or punish the agent. The goal of the agent is to maximize the amount of reward (or equivalently, minimize the amount of punishment) it gets. Hence the name reinforcement learning: the reward and punishment terminology is borrowed from the theory of operant conditioning in psychology.

Does this problem sound easy? It's not. Let's use a computer game as an example... say, Pong. A Pong agent has two actions available to it: move up and move down. The environment includes the ball and the opposite agent. A simple reward function gives the agent 1 point for winning a game and -1 point for losing the game. Now, put yourself in the role of the agent. You might think, "Oh, just follow the ball by moving up and down, and don't let the ball get past me." Well, you know that, but how does the agent know that? Remember, the agent doesn't know it is in a Pong game - all it observes are a bunch of numbers. The agent doesn't know it will be rewarded for getting the ball past its opponent, nor that it will be punished for letting the ball past it. It doesn't know that the ball will "bounce" when it touches anything - or even what constitutes "touching", "opponent", and "past".

Without any knowledge, the agent will have to act randomly, at least at first. It might get lucky and defend its goal once or twice, but more likely it will let its opponent score and be punished. There comes the first hurdle of reinforcement learning: how does the agent know what it did wrong? The converse is also true if the agent scored - what did it do right? This is called the credit assignment problem, because the agent is trying to figure out what gets the credit (or blame) for the reward (or punishment) it received. Again, remember what while you intuitively know that the agent missed the ball, the agent doesn't have any model of cause and effect to realize this.

To understand the basic solution to reinforcement learning, I must say more about those numbers that the agent observes. For Pong, there might be four numbers: the agent's vertical position, its opponent's vertical position, and the vertical and horizontal position of the ball. Each of these numbers are a state variable, and the different values these numbers can take in conjunction is called the state space - as in "the state of the union", not "the state of Michigan" - because they can describe every situation in the environment. To make reinforcement learning somewhat easier, researchers tend to view tasks as a Markov decision process (MDP). The distinguishing property of an MDP is that the next state of the environment depends only on the current state. For the Pong example, the state space described by the four numbers listed above does not make the game an MDP, since the ball can be moving arbitrarily fast or slow. If instead six numbers are used - the represent the horizontal and vertical velocity of the ball - then the task would become an MDP.

To be concrete, every action the agent takes changes the state of the environment. At each new state, the agent may receive a reward or a punishment, and then it has to take another action, and so on.

Now that the agent has some idea of how to relate one set of numbers to another, it can start learning. In place of human level reasoning, the agent simply plans backwards. Intuitively, if you get punished for being in this state, you know you shouldn't have taken that last action from the previous state. For Pong, this partially corresponds to not moving up if the ball is below you and just about to pass you. This picture is not complete though, because if you are at the top of the screen and the ball is at the bottom, you would not have gotten to the ball in time to deflect it anyway. This means that the faulty action lies further back in time.

Here's what the agent does. The agent remembers the state in which it got a reward or a punishment. Knowing whether this state is good or bad, it knows that the previous action from the previous state is also good or bad. Now knowing about this previous state, and can know about the state two steps back, and three steps back, and so on. That is, the agent learns by propagating the rewards back through the states, so the next time it finds itself in the same situation, it will either avoid that action (because it was eventually punished for it) or do the same thing (because it was eventually rewarded for it).

This was the state of the art 25 years ago.

Before I talk about more recent developments in the field, I want to raise a few problems in the solution above. The shallowest, but also most thought provocative, is this: how does the agent know it's doing its best? Imagine the task is to go from the bedroom to the bathroom to pick up an object. Through pure chance, the agent does this by going through the living room, the kitchen, and the broom closet, despite there being a door directly between the two rooms. Further imagine that the agent is rewarded based on how quickly it gets to its destination (I'm sure you can think of a reasonable, real life scenario for this). How would the agent know that the path it found is the shortest one? This problem is known as the exploration-exploitation problem. It is thus named because the agent needs to explore to know more about the environment, but this often means not exploiting the best action for the agent. In practice, researchers simply make the agent act randomly some small percentage of the time, so it will do its best for the most part but be constantly exploring. For the jargon-philiac, this is called an epsilon-greedy exploration strategy, where epsilon is the small percentage mentioned above.

There are other variations to this general framework which researchers are working on, such as partial observability (what if the agent doesn't know the value of some state variables?) and stochastic actions (what if actions only succeed some of the time?). I will skip the details on these topics and instead focus on what I'm looking into.

Pong, while an illustrative example, is not the most complicated environment for an agent to learn in. For one, there are only a limited number of situations for the agent to be in: in the original pixelated arcade game, there might only be a thousand or so different states. A modern computer running the algorithm I described above would find the optimal strategy (or policy) in less than a minute. Consider instead the rooms example I just gave, where the agent must move from one room to another. There can be an arbitrary number of rooms, and each room itself can be arbitrarily large. Even if the starting and ending positions are unchanged every time the agent must complete the task, it might still take the agent a long time simply due to how much exploring it has to do.

Yet, unlike Pong, this more complicated problem also presents more information for the agent to use. For example, completely exploring one room is useless when the goal is in another room. If you were to give directions to a human, you might tell them to go out of the room, walk down the hallway, and take the last right. Alternately, you might tell them that the thing they're looking for is not in the living room, but in the kitchen. The other person, on hearing these instructions, could then ignore everything in their current room.

What these two instructions have in common is abstraction. The first instruction abstracts over actions (it doesn't say "take 10 steps forward, then 2 steps left,..."), while the second instruction abstracts over states (it's saying that everything outside the kitchen is one room which doesn't matter). Despite this distinction, the two types of abstractions are related: the first instruction is implicitly saying that the current room and the hallway are not worth exploring, and the second instruction can be thought of as the action "go to the kitchen".

My research is related to this idea, although it's a little more specific. Expanding the example beyond rooms, if I'm giving instructions for someone to get to the Eiffel Tower in Paris, I would tell them to get to the airport, take a plane, etc. Each of these "actions" can be further broken down: order a cab, get out of the house, get in the cab,... And even further: walk to the phone, call the cab company,... This is called an action hierarchy, as the first actions "contain" the second ones, which "contain" the third, and so on, until at the lowest level the actions are simply "move this muscle". How do humans break down such a complex task, and can a computer do the same thing?

So far, the state of the art (which is about 5 years old) is "sort of". Given just the MDP assumption, there are proposals for what subgoals should be. The most general ones are different ways of identifying bottlenecks - that is, states which an agent must go through to reach a goal. Think of the door to a room, and in order to get anywhere else you must first go through that door. Other ideas include things like looking at what states you have commonly visited in your experience, or perhaps looking at what you're rewarded handsomely for.

Even knowing what appropriate subgoals are, the agent is not done. Imagine that both the door to your room and the door to the apartment are given as subgoals. How will you know that the door to your room is the first thing to go for, before trying to read the door to your apartment? Depending on the viewpoint, this could either be a problem of restricting the proposal of actions, or it could be one of inducing a preference on different possible actions. This appears to be a slightly easier problem to solve, and I was surprised to find that there is almost no prior work in this area. I intend to look into this question further, and hopefully by the end of the summer I will have some intuition as to what might work and what won't.

Post script: to people not in computer science or perhaps in but not in AI, the problem of action hierarchies might sound insignificant. Despite my previous misgivings about being limited to too specific a field, I find this problem genuinely interesting. Although it may not change the world (yet), I do think its solution will contribute to an understanding of humans and intelligence.

Can You Hear Me?

2010-05-18T11:01:00.001-04:00

I sang this song with the choir back in middle school. We got either second or third place in the Hong Kong wide competition with this.

Although my middle school years were mostly terrible, this song has always stuck with me. It floats into my thoughts every once in a while.

Can You Hear Me?
(By Bob Chilcott)

I look around me as I grow
I'd like to tell you all I know
I see life with all its energy
The city streets, the rush time
This is my world, it's where I like to be
So much to see, so much to find
I sometimes sit and wait a while
See the sun, it makes me smile
Can you see it
Can you see it too

I feel life with all its energy
The joy of waking every day
This is my world, it's where I like to be
So much to do, so much to say
I sometimes sit and feel the sun
Its warmth is there for everyone
Can you feel it
Can you feel it too

My world is a silent one
But it's enough for me
I hear you through your hands
The movement sets me free
But it could be a special thing
To hear your voice
To hear your sing
Can you hear me
Can you hear me too

Intermediate

2010-05-15T19:38:00.000-04:00

I have another post in the writing, but I want so share my discovery that my experiment on Craigslist is no unique. At least two other people have done it before: Simon Owens, whose results were "tame" like mine, and Jason Fortuny, who posted all the replies he got on Encyclopedia Dramatica (both of these are definitely NSFW). I believe several people lost their job over the Fortuny case, and more had to deal with problems in their family.

On the ethics over Fortuny's case, I happen to think he should not be punished. Legal considerations aside, I think the fault lies mostly on the people who replied to his ad for giving personal information to a stranger on the Internet. Without evidence otherwise, the worst case assumption should always be made.

That said, I don't think Fortuny is a shining example of how humans should act, either.

Prologue to Jurassic Park

2010-05-11T00:17:00.000-04:00

I've only written once about the environment and environmental causes, although that was in reference to a larger issue. My apathy is mentioned in passing elsewhere as well. I might have eventually written more on the subject, but I just discovered that the prologue to Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (now a major motion picture) very articulately explains my views. It is copied below for your enjoyment.

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land.

Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years.

Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety.

Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine.

When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time.

A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

Cross Acting

2010-05-08T17:10:00.000-04:00

I don't get in trouble often, but I consider myself something of a rebel. I don't like organizations in the general much - I prefer groups that are more self organized and sustained. Sometimes I do weird things for amusement, like pretending I don't know a secret to see whether the secret holder would divulge it.

This time, I posted a Criagslist ad... in Women Seeking Men.

The primary question I wanted answered was whether men on the internet are really crazy. Some of my female friends have posted ads for fun, and later compared their replies. What they found was that some emails were exact copies of each other - some people just write the same response to everything, looking for a shag. That story had a twist ending for my friend, but that's not my story to tell.

A word on the post: I didn't write the ad myself - I would never have passed as a female writer. I won't copy the post here, but it was itself copied from the blog of a friend. We haven't talked since I graduated from Northwester, and even before then I don't think she knew I read her writing. She is an objectivist before I read The Fountainhead, and the post expresses a related sentiment: her wish for someone who doesn't want only to please her, but someone who can contribute something of themselves to her. In the words of Ayn Rand, a prime mover, not a second hander. Regardless, I never told her I used her writing (if you're reading this, you should email me), so I don't feel right posting her work even with attribution.

First, some statistics. I got 50 replies in total, the first within the hour, the last almost a month later. About 60% replied within 5 days. 12 of the 50 replies had photos attached, and a few more had links to either MySpace pages or some other picture hosting site. A small minority didn't bother to write proper English for the task, and a few more asked questions which made me think they didn't read the post at all. Although it wasn't unexpected, there were several older men who replied. For an ad declaring the poster to be 22, I got a reply from someone 17 years older. It reminds me of what OKTrends found. Of the 50 replies, two were duplicates; the senders sent the same email twice.

My most common reaction (subject to availability bias) is: who do you think you are? Granted, the post is a little self indulgent, but they are still the suitors. What I had posted talks about an intellectual pursuits... and a fair number talk about sex, and how they "know what a women [sic] wants in the sex department" and that "[I] want to be seduced". At the bottom of the pile is a reply that promised to "open that box of hidden desire and fantasy". I want to puke.

On the other hand, I suspect some responders are delusional. One ranted on about hidden treasure. One had a "real" picture of himself tensing up. A few wrote poems.

As for the good... there aren't the many. The ones I like best (again subject to bias, this time of a different kind) were simpler. They mention how old they are, what they do and like doing (somewhat passionately), and invite me to reply. A picture, if one is included, is a simple face shot. Three people mentioned books/authors, one of them being Ayn Rand. Only a single person mentioned something interesting - by quoting an article on the large hadron collider.

Hypothesis: most men who reply to Craigslist personals are douchebags.

Result: Confirmed.

Maybe next time I'll reply to a men seeking women ad (the doucheist one... is that a word?), and see what I get.

Smashing Cars

2010-05-06T23:20:00.000-04:00

I'm kinda unhappy with the latest MythBusters episode, the one about two cars smashing into each other at 50 mph is equivalent to one car smashing into a wall at 50 mph.

The way they tested the myth on a small scale was by swinging two pendulums into each other, with each pendulum containing a lump of clay and an additional weight in the back. The second weight would squash the clay, and from the deformation the impact of the smash can be visualized. It's a pretty clever rig.

My problem, however, is not with the rig; it's with the interpretation of the myth. There are two ways in which the two crashes can be "equivalent": from the perspective of the car, which is what the MythBusters tested, and from the perspective of something in the middle. Since the original myth is about a compact car being squished between two semis, it would seem that this myth should be about the latter interpretation. And in that case, I believe the crashes are, in fact, equivalent.

As an educational show, I think MythBusters should have at least covered this other scenario, and shown how the "myth" is more of an interpretation issue.

Pascal's Wager, Part 2

2010-05-03T23:18:00.000-04:00

I have written about Pascal's Wager before, but I never finished that post. A few days ago I came across a video, which finally closed the case on that argument for me.

The inspiration is this, which I found on Reddit. Most of the video is junk and doesn't hold up to my standards of reason. Something at the end caught my attention though, and I came up with the following argument.

Recall that the problem with Pascal's wager is that, unlike most arguments about God, it's a completely rational. It frames the problem in turns of expected utilities, which is the standard practice in decision theory. The following payoff matrix summarizes the wager:

	God Exists	God Doesn't Exist
Believe in God	+Infinity	0
Don't Believe in God	-Infinity	0

Richard Dawkin's argument, that believing in God has a cost while living, doesn't hold up, as any cost incurred while alive is only finite, and does not offset the infinite payoff of being in heaven.

Pascal's wager is that simple. The video over-complicates and sets up several straw men (eg. Pascal not knowing what God is but then contradicting himself) and ad hominem attacks (eg. Pascal's bias towards Christianity). While the claim that Pascal ignores other gods is true, his wager still works - as long as gods reward belief, the expected utility is still to believe in god(s). The existence of non-god systems (frog's dream, video game, etc), doesn't matter, as they don't offer any utility. The gem of the video is in a 3 second frame: for every unknowable idea that rewards a particular behavior, another unknowable idea will punish that very same behavior.

Here's my new argument. Pascal's wager depends on supposing a Christian god, with the payoff matrix above. Since, however, the existence of the Christian god is unknown, it is equally valid to posit a different god (let's call Him AntiPascal), with different payoffs. In particular, let's imagine a god that will send people to heaven only if they don't believe in any god, and will send people to hell if they do. What does the payoff matrix look like?

	God Exists	God Doesn't Exist
Believe in God(s)	-Infinity	0
Don't Believe in God(s)	+Infinity	0

That's right - everything looks almost exactly the same, except the signs on those infinities switched. By this payoff matrix, people should not believe in gods at all.

So which payoff matrix is right? We don't know. To properly calculate the expected utility of believing in god(s), we need to know the probability of each payoff matrix itself - that is, the probability that the Christian god is real (and has the payoff matrix specified), and the probability that the AntiPascal god exists. Both of these probabilities, it turns out, is unknowable - and therefore the expected utility of believing or not believe in god cannot be compared.

Given the odds, Pascal's wager is not one you want to bet on - there's simply no telling whether you win or lose. While this is no argument against the belief in god, it is no longer the purely rational argument for it either.

The funny thing is, although this argument is new to me, the reasoning behind it is not. As Richard Dawkins himself has said several times, most theists are in fact atheists to all other religions. Real atheists just go one further.

Updates

2010-04-28T00:19:00.000-04:00

I clearly haven't written here for a while. I have a post halfway written about an adventure on Craigslist (no, it's not from the m2m personals...), which I will finish eventually. For now, here's part of an email I sent to my family.

I just got done with the semester over the weekend. If you'll remember, I'm taking two classes:

Advanced AI. Like I said last time, this course is oriented towards getting students to read current research and to think critically about it. I think the course did a good job of that - we had to read a large number of papers, all over the map in terms of area. It's interesting too to see how different students react to ideas differently, as well as what areas of AI they are interested in. The final project for the course is to reimplement a study, and see whether their claims hold up. In retrospect, I should have chosen a different paper. Mine was on a relatively simple method of understanding how the world around you changes due to your actions. Although it was an interesting paper, the algorithms and methods were not very well specified, which makes it hard to test. It was also short with very few references, so there's no extra material I could refer to either. I finished it, but I would have enjoyed it more if the paper was more substantial.
Programming Languages turned out to be more fun than I thought. The basic premise of the course is how to prevent programmers from doing stupid things, and how the computer can automatically detect these errors and notify the coder. We also read a lot of papers here, although a lot of them were older papers. The areas were also more biased towards people without much background, so although we looked at four different methods, we only studied one or two in depth. The final project here was up to us, and I decided to (again) reimplement a paper, this time checking for errors in their presentation. I discovered a few of them, as well as a general problem with the approach it was taking. Because this work is actually someone's thesis back in 2006, everything was documented properly, and I have very little trouble following their work. All this means that I should make my code public when I publish a paper.

It was because both of these projects were due last week that I didn't have time to write this email. I was awake both Monday night and Thursday night writing reports, and so had very little sleep. It was fun though; I felt invigorated by how much work I was doing. There's a quote from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (Dominique, for those curious), when a character says, "This is how I want to keep going - if there's a reason for it." That was how I felt on morning after staying up - that having a reason to drive myself that hard is the best feeling.

I'm also done with my teaching duties for now. The final exam for that class was on Friday, so we graded everything by Saturday evening. My discussion sections and the class in general is smaller this semester than the last. I got to know the students a little better, but not in pro[portion to the decrease in size. I did realize something though - that I should spend the first few session actively encouraging the students to talk to each other. It's really annoying when you ask a question and no one wants to answer it. So the discussions were not as lively, there were less jokes, and overall it was a little less enjoyable.

Oh, I got an award for being a good TA last semester, which is nice. It also came with an extra check, which is also nice.

On the research front... I'm really digging in now. For a short while back in February I was really uncertain how everything would turn out. That period of doubt clarified my feelings a little - I'm sure now that teaching would have a part in my future, more so than research. On the other hand, very soon after that, I found a topic that I'm pretty interested in, so much that I spent all of this morning reading. We'll see how it turns out. I got put on the spot today to give a 10 minute presentation at a workshop in three weeks time, which means I really have to get my thoughts together and present a coherent picture of what's going on in the field, and what I want to do.

Blogspot Spellcheck

2010-03-09T13:49:00.001-05:00

Those of you who read my previous post on hangboards before this might have noticed the strange yellow highlighting. It's fixed now, but it turns out that the spellcheck in the Blogger compose box actually modifies the contents, by inserting span tags like these:

<span class="goog-spellcheck-word" style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% yellow;">errorr</span>

And so, if you click spellcheck, then publish it without clicking again, those highlights will be published along with the post. The resulting post will look something like this post.

Hangboard

2010-02-21T02:14:00.001-05:00

My roommate and I bought a hangboard (aka a fingerboard) (the Metolius Project) from our local climbing gym (Planet Rock) about three weeks ago. We're both engineers, and so we decided to design and build a frame to hang the board from. Here's the result:

You can see that the board is simply supported by two A-frames, kept the correct distance apart by two cross members. They're simply built from 2x4's (which I learned actually have a 1.5x3.5" cross section). We had a fun time loading those on a shopping cart to transport them from the hardware store to the apartment. The wider board is a 2x8 (1.5x9.25" cross section). The vertical member of the board is 6 feet long, which puts the hangboard at an excellent height. The base of that triangle is about 42" long, and extends another 30" out for balance. The two A-frames are 42" apart from each other, measured from the inside. The extra space is so we can mount holds on either side, to practice on other holds (for example, vertical pinches).

The construction of the thing took maybe 12 hours in total, spread over three days of spare time (I think). The most annoying part was cutting the angles in the hypotenuse. The angles were cut by hand, which made their tolerance rather loose. We had to sand down the edge quite a bit. The holes shown below were done without any guide to make sure they're perpendicular, but it all worked out in the end.

This is the part of the rig I'm most proud of. The idea is to let the hangboard rotate, so we can practice steeper crimps. The original idea is to move the entire A-frame, locking it in with notches on the base. That would have been a construction nightmare, however, so we came up with this system where just the board rotates. Those holes are 6.25" from the pivot, and there's seven of them going a full 90 degrees.

This is the side of the pivoting mechanism. The center board is held in place by 4 bolts, and the side board is held to the frame by 6 screws each. This view also shows the extra board in the back, which stops the A-frames collapsing sideways. Mounting this board high up keeps it out of the way as we do pull ups, but there's another practical reason. Since the center board is only held by bolts, we can easily take it out and replace it with something else. In particular, if we decide to make a campus board later on, it can use the same holes for tilt, and can extend beyond the A-frame.

We still have a little work to do on it, the most important of which is adding diagonal beams between the frames to stabilize it further. There are also other things like sanding down the corners, clipping some screws on the back of the board, getting a pad underneath, and applying a layer of varnish. The frame right now is fully functional though, and it holds our weight quite well. Although I haven't looked at how other people mount their hangboards (usually just above a doorway, probably), I feel that this is probably the most flexible design you'll find. The flexibility with the angles and the modular design means it can function as a very general purpose climbing trainer.

We intend to have blueprints of the entire thing online eventually, when we're bored enough to play around in a CAD program. If you want to build one in the mean time, feel free to leave a comment and we'll help you out as best we can.

OKCupid is Wrong

2010-02-16T18:51:00.002-05:00

I started reading OKCupid's blog about a month ago, when their post hit the front page of Reddit. I don't use the site, but their combination of romance and statistics was intriguing. A new post just came out, and I was procrastinating hard enough to think a little about it. In their post, they argued that men between 22 and 30 should be looking at women 30 and older. They first provided data about what their users say they want, then provided reasons why women of that age are better matches.

There is, however, a flaw in their argument. Their basic error is this: women 30 and older don't want to date men between 22 and 30.

I took a closer look at their graphs, and extracted out the numbers. This is the graph I got:

If this looks slightly different from the graphs on OKCupid's post, that's because it is. Here, I flipped the female match preferences graph along the y=x axis. Therefore, if you're female, you start on the y-axis, and read across to get the average match preference.

Now, on to why OKCupid is wrong. If you look at their "zone of greatness", they marked out this area:

You see the problem: the average person in this area don't want to date others in this area. The blog post was written for men, so their bound might be ignored. The bound for women, however, shouldn't be. And this graph shows that, even if men were willing to date women in that age range, chances are the women won't reciprocate.

In other words, even with the other reasons that women above 30 are great fun, it turns out that they are simply not interested in men between 22 and 30.

What, then, should men (and women) be looking for? Look at the graph below:

Overlooking my horrible circling skills, these are the areas where there is a mismatch between men's preferences and women's preferences. Whereever women's preferences are taller than the men's (or men's preferences wider than the women's), there is an opportunity. Because men accept women of such a wide age ranger, any women who is willing to date someone slightly outside the average range (shown in pink) has an advantage. Comparatively, there are much fewer places where women are interested and men are not (shown in green).

Based on this graph, you can see what age you will have the least competition, but still are still relatively desirable.

One last thing: xkcd should be updated to reflect this data.

Disclaimer: Obviously, I am not affiliated with OKCupid. If any OKCupid staff reads this, and finds my graphs objectionable, please let me know.

Only a Theory

2010-01-23T15:27:00.000-05:00

I just finished Ken Miller's Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul. Miller is the author of one of the most widely used high school biology text book, and the lead expert witness for the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District case. The book, however, was not as much focused on the trial as on the ideas behind intelligence design (ID) and evolution, and some comments by Miller on the intelligent design movement.

Being rather familiar with the arguments of ID, I found the first half of the book a little dull. However, I do think Miller does a good job of taking ID arguments seriously, and analyze those ideas from the scientific perspective. Having heard him lecture at Northwestern's Darwin celebration last year, his examples are not new to me either. But in a book, where he can afford to give longer descriptions of the history of life on Earth, I found myself draw into the subject. For a short moment I wondered what it would be like to see Earth 1 million, 100 million years ago. And then I realized that, although there might not have been skyscrapers or monkeys or ants, there was still rain, and volcanoes, and oceans. And the idea that science can prove all these things did exist so long ago is rather amazing.

Personally, the more interesting part of the book was where Miller explained why he thought ID has become what it is, and what we (as scientists) can do about it. Miller suggests that the ultimate motivation is philosophical and psychological. Quoting Max Ehrmann's poem Desiderata, he wrote,

"No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should" assures us that, however chaotic and disorderly the events of our lives may seem at the moment, we should take heart, for we were meant to be. And, in the eyes of many, that's exactly the problem with evolution - it says that we weren't meant to be and that the way of things are unfolding isn't part of anybody's plan or purpose. [...] The worry is that the universe is not "unfolding as it should" but, rather, that it's just unfolding.

My instinctive response is that, is it such a horrible thing for the universe to exist without purpose? Must your sense of direction in life be derived from some external source, and couldn't you create a direction yourself? This philosophical (in fact, existentialist) argument also applies to the claim that
evolution "doesn't put a moral demand" on us, as ex-senator Rick Santorum suggested. But this has nothing to do with evolution.

Miller's reply to the worry is different. He brought up the idea of convergence - that evolution will keep on returning to good ideas. In particular, even if humans as a species might not have evolved, it is almost certain that the niche of an intelligent species capable of changing their environment would be filled. That is, despite the process of evolution being probabilistic, we - as intelligent beings - are in fact guaranteed. This is, the certainty that evolution would have led to something like us, would help quell the worries.

I want to voice another idea though. This quote comes from the video game Max Payne 2, and is more about predestination. Applied to evolution though, it would mean that we are indeed very special:

There are no choices. Nothing but a straight line. The illusion comes afterwards, when you ask 'Why me?' and 'What if?' When you look back, see the branches, like a pruned bonsai tree, or a forked lightning. If you had done something differently, it wouldn't be you, it would be someone else looking back, asking a different set of questions.

The last idea I found intriguing in Miller's book was him mention Allan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind (which I wrote about briefly). Miller quoted Bloom writing:

Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness [...] has rendered openness meaningless. [...] The danger [students] have been taught to fear is not error but intolerance. [...] The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right, rather it is not to think you are right at all.

Miller compares this to the calls for "balance" and "openness" to get ID in public school curriculum. Although that's not the declared goal of the ID movement, "once the supernatural becomes a valid element in scientific inquiry, science will cease to be an empirical search for the truth of the natural world. Like faith itself, "theistic science" will be a subjective window on the world that reflects the innermost convictions of its adherents and not of the outer reality of nature."

This whole affair of injecting supernatural causes into science reminds me of Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead: "Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept—and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection."

Without having clear boundaries of what science accepts, science itself suffers. People no longer need to discover the cause and cure of AIDS, when a simple "it's divine punishment" will suffice. Our understanding of the world grinds to a halt, as does our technological advancement - which depends on the rigorous quest for cause and effect. The "Designer" did not create the iPod, nor the internet, nor any of modern technology. All of it is done by men, relying and exploiting our scientific knowledge of the world. Without science, none of that would be possible.

And that is why I truly fear what the ID movement can do to the world.

Into the Wild and The Game

2010-01-16T23:38:00.000-05:00

I finished two books recently, Into the Wild and The Game. I haven't read much since grad school started, so it's nice to pick up that habit again. I just want to say a few words about each book.

Into the Wild was an interesting read. The book was a little long for the story - I'm not sure the parts about the author climbing the Devil's Thumb was necessary - but it did bring out the interesting parts about Chris. My overall reaction is that I can understand why Chris left on this journey, although I wouldn't do it. I am persuaded by the author that he knew what he was doing, and had only died because of bad luck. I therefore have tremendous respect for the guy, for being able to survive by himself, both in the fringes of civilization and in the "wilderness", for so long.

The Game was also an interesting read. A lot of it was unnecessary drama, but perhaps that was not surprising. I have seen parts of The Pickup Artist
(it wasn't my idea), and it was interesting to know more background about Mystery. As someone who doesn't believe in picking girls up, my eye was more guided to what eventually happened to Neil Strauss. The last paragraph of his acknowledges for Lisa was the most meaningful paragraph to me.

My library copy only had one sentence underlined in the entire book: "The secret to making someone think they're in love with you is to occupy their thoughts, and that's what Lisa had done with me." It wasn't even about picking people up.

My favorite quote from the book is "Never underestimate your capacity to care", which I think says a lot about humans.

I hadn't intended it, but after finishing both books I find their message is actually similar. Both Chris and Neil were unsatisfied with their life somehow, and made moves to change it. At the end though, after following other people's writings (whether they be Henry David Thoreau or Mystery), what they find is not that their old life was wrong, but that they never appreciated what they already had. Chris wanted to go back to civilization and find comfort in people, while Neil was in love with someone who likes his baldness and glasses.

I guess what I'm saying is being happy is both easier and harder than you think.

Google as a Social Force

2010-01-12T22:49:00.001-05:00

Google has increasingly been involved in social and political issues, not just in the US but around the world. Most of you are familiar with the criticism of Google on their privacy policy, with their ability to identify so many people (Google has over 844 million unique visitors per month). A less familiar issue is the problem of network neutrality, or whether internet providers can charge more for people accessing certain sites. Google is part of the Open Internet Coalition which is against ISP filtering. However, questions have been raised as to whether laws should be enacted to make Google content neutral as well.

The latest in Google's involvement in politics is in China. When Google first went into the Chinese market, it complied with government laws about censoring, so that websites about Falun Gong, about criticism of the communist government, etc. would not be listed on Google's search results. Google recently published a blog post talking about a recent attack on Google's services, specifically to get information from accounts of known activists. The post itself does not name the hackers, but as the later part of the post mentions its China policy, it is implied that the hackers work for the Chinese government.

What is particularly interesting about this latest development is that Google, as a business, could have done nothing. Certainly, the attacks should result in increased security measures, but there is no reason for Google to change its China policy. Google earns money mostly from ad revenue, and the more eyeballs an ad gets, the more money Google makes. Google's Chinese site directs a nation of 1.3 billion people to its ads, so if the purpose of a business is to increase profits, Google should keep their Chinese portal open.

That Google is reviewing its China policy, to the extent of considering closing down Google China, is good news. The company with the motto of "Don't be Evil" is touching a lot of legal spheres: freedom of access to information, freedom of speech, copyright... What Google, and increasingly other international companies, decide to do in the face of local government pressure may send a strong signal to the global community.

It is not just that these companies have global reach, but that increasingly the problems one country faces cannot be solved without the participation of other countries. China, without the international scrutiny, would likely increase their censorship. With the recent disastrous Copenhagen talks on climate change, we need companies to put aside short term interests, and consider the effects of their actions on the world as a whole.

In an age where companies have more income than entire developed nations, we need to question what obligations they should have.

EDIT: Ars Technica article about Google's blog post.

My Digital Life

2010-01-05T18:11:00.002-05:00

I took some time over the weekend to collect the pieces of my digital life. I present the results below, a digital scrapbook, if you will. I tried to list all services that I use. For the sites which are not social in nature, and therefore don't have a "profile" to present, I simply linked to the site homepage. Anything that is updated (and viewable publicly) at least once a year is in bold.

In no particular order of categories:

Forums

Shopping

Books

Shelfari

Social

News

Calendar

Google Calendar

Blogging

Blogspot

LiveJournal

Twitter

WordPress

Images

Picasa

Videos

TED

Art

DeviantART

Programming

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Widgets

Music

Grooveshark

last.fm

Pandora

Other

Doodle

Mendeley

Remember The Milk

An Evening with Frank Warren

2009-12-08T00:18:00.000-05:00

Frank Warren, the guy behind PostSecret, visited Ann Arbor on Friday. He travels and gives talks on PostSecret, and having followed that blog for over two years now, I thought I would go and listen to him speak.

This is the first time I've been to any sort of ticketed event. I've never been to concerts (except free ones), or improv theaters (at least not by myself).

If people are not familiar with PostSecret, it's an online social art project. People from all over the world send postcards to Frank. Sometimes the postcards are hand made, other times they're bought, but they share one feature: the sender has written a secret on the postcard. Frank then chooses 20 or so each week (he gets hundreds) to put on the blog, as well as some email responses people have had.

For his talks, he spends some time talking about the origins of the project, then sharing some secrets which were never posted or published in his books, and talks more about the appeal of human connection. At the end, people from the audience are encouraged to share their secrets on the spot.

Personally, I thought the two hours spent was well spent, although the event overall could be better. Although I applaud Frank from coming up with the idea, when people read PostSecret it's really for what people have poured their heart out on. The catharsis is from reading the secrets, and knowing that other people have the same thoughts, feelings, and fears that you do. Knowing that, I wish Frank would have allotted more time for the audience to contribute, to build the conversation in the moment, as opposed to talking about how PostSecret came to be. He's not a bad speaker - he has done this hundreds of times before, and gets the audience to laugh when he wants them to - but it's also missing the heart of why his project is so successful.

Nothing that Frank said had much affect on me. I was more affected by a secret that someone in the audience shared, which made me feel warm and euphoric, as though I had been drinking. It was a girl, who told the story of answering the phone one day and talking to the stranger on the other end for hours. At the end, as they were about to hang up, the stranger told her, "thankyou for talking to me. I was going to kill myself before I dialed a random number..." While telling the story, the girl's voice cracked and started sobbing, no doubt reliving the powerful effect that experience had on her. As Frank pointed out, people are just looking for someone to listen, to show that they care.

Since I haven't had a complete post on PostSecret before, I thought I would also share some of the secrets which resonated with me from the blog. My old dorm did do a similar event, and you can read some of what my (really) immediate neighbors wrote. These are from the official site:

"I want to tell you that i love you, but I'm afraid of the silence that might follow."
"I am afraid that the person I would love and myself will never meet, since we would both be too introverted to introduce ourselves."
"Today I realized I could no longer remember what you were like when you still loved me."
"I am a virgin. I've had three girls offer me free, easy, no-commitment sex. But I turned them all down, because I'm in love with a beautiful girl who just wants to be friends."

These next two were displayed in the same post. I thought it showed something about humans and love.

"I lost my virginity last night to a boy who doesn't love me... And all I care about is how I'm going to have to lie to people when they ask me if I'm still a virgin."
"You thought you lost your /virginity/ that night. I never had the heart to tell you... /It was only my hand/."

This one I thought a little strange, because it implied that love doesn't require respect:

"I love my wife, but I don't respect her, because she's not very smart."

Some more:

"Whenever a stranger stands by me, or passes, I wonder what's on their mind and when they walk away, I secretly miss them."
"Everywhere I look people have found someone to share their lives with. I don't think anyone is looking for me."

I do this too, and more than just near Valentine's:

"Every Valentine's Day, I go to Papyrus to rip off their card ideas."

And even more:

"I didn't take your virginity because I felt it was going to end and I love you so much I wanted it to be special for you."
"If I could go back in time, I'd go back to all the times we almost kissed... and I'd kiss you."
"I have pretended to be happy for so long. I don't know if I'm still pretending."
"I love you and I know you are going to hurt me. I resent that you will hurt me, but I don't know what to do."
"The best decision I ever made was letting you love me."

And my personal favorite:

"We accept the love we think we deserve."

Challenges

2009-11-20T10:46:00.002-05:00

This has been a hard week for me.

On Tuesday I got back my midterm for intro to AI. The material for the course is mostly stuff I'd already done before, so Ive never been too worried about my grade. And, seeing that I got 85% on the midterm, I was correct. What had an undercurrent of an effect on me, which I didn't feel until that evening, was that my score was below both the mean and the average.

And all of a sudden, I started questioning myself. Am I really cut out to be in grad school? Can I make the original contributions that are required of me?

Then there's the anxiety of not knowing how I did in my machine learning midterm last week. Although I have taken a machine learning course before, this course is much more statistically oriented. While I am not completely clueless about statistics, the only course I took on it was in my junior year. I was definitely not up to scratch with my probabilities and density/mass functions, and it was a struggle to understand what the class was about.

It's strange, because I imagine that's how some people must feel even in high school. For people who are not particularly gifted at math, or science, or whatever subject, being required to take those courses must have been difficult for them. I have never had that problem - most of the courses I took even in college came easily to me, and very rarely did I really have to push myself to even get by in a class. With the combination of machine learning, and being below average in AI, I got a glimpse of what school must have felt like for some people.

Last summer when I first worked at CTY, one of the things which struck me the most during orientation was something not about me or the staff, but about the kids. Someone who has worked at CTY for many years commented that while the kids can do a lot of things by themselves, at some point when they get older they /have/ to work with each other, because what they're doing is simply beyond the capability of any single person. I remembered that comment, and even put it in my journal, because I wondered if that was the case for me too. Just as before CTY the students might not have needed to work together, and therefore have poor teamwork skills, I could phrase my own life in those terms. Everything up to and including college had a fixed upper boundary on what you could do. In elementary school you had to master multiplication, in high school it was calculus, and in college some selected topics within a certain field. I was smart, so I did all this without problems, but I wasn't smart enough to skip all the way to college or grad school before my age.

But once college ends, the world is wide open. In grad school and in research, the things you are learning may not have an agreed upon answer. The question might not even have been asked. Each professor that you deal with personally have expertise, and what they studied might not even have occurred to you. It is exciting for the same reason, but it also meant that things will not come easily anymore. The material is more recent - no longer are we studying the creation of some guy in the renaissance (calculus), but concepts and algorithms developed in the last 50 years, maybe even the last 10 years.

I was just suddenly overwhelmed by all of this, and wondered if I really would make my mark among all these giants.

The feeling passed by Wednesday afternoon, but the advice remains: pull yourself together, Justin.

A Little Mathematical Proof

2009-11-06T13:02:00.000-05:00

Did you know that if you take any non-negative integer, then subtract the sum of its digits, the answer will always be divisible by 9?

For example, today's date is 11/06. 1106-(1+1+6) = 1098, and 1098/9 = 122.

Curious why? Here's a more general proof [pdf], that the difference between a number and the sum of its digits (if written in base b) will always be divisible by (b-1).

Michigan Updates

2009-09-25T00:51:00.000-04:00

Alright, I've finally decided to sit down and write in more detail about my Michigan experience.

Living in Ann Arbor is a little strange to me, as it's the first time I'm further removed from a large city. Being in Chicago for four years, visiting San Francisco, LA, and Seattle during the summers, have gotten me used to there being interesting "cultural" events around. I put cultural in quotes because there is of course an Ann Arbor culture, but what I'm talking about is museums and history and architecture. Seattle and San Francisco were great in this respect, where as Ann Arbor is a college town, and thus is dominated by eateries. The university and the town developed together, so only a few blocks from campus the streets become much quieter, and within 15 minutes drive it quickly turns into farmland. Although Detroit is only an hour or so away, I know of no quick/cheap way to get there, and even then I doubt there's much that would interest me. As a result most of my free time is spent reading or climbing, which is a saving grace of sorts. Michigan has a bouldering wall on South Campus, which is across the city from where I live, and so I commute there at least twice a week. It is also one of the few ways I've met people outside of engineering, as North Campus is dominated by engineers. So I've gotten a bit better at bouldering.

As for classes, I'm taking three, and I'll go through them below. As a final though, I will talk about my experience as a Graduate Student Instructor (TA)

Introduction to AI

I've already done a lot of the things on the syllabus, such as search algorithms, inference, and Bayesian networks. All this stuff, however, was done in different classes, and I later decided that this is because a Michigan semester is longer than the Northwestern quarter. I think I could have gotten an equivalency for the course if I wanted to, but I'm considering doing research with the professor, and it has been a while since I did most of the Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI) stuff, so I might as well sit in. So far the course has not been surprising, and I'm rather glad I'm in it, as it's my single "easy" class for the semester.

Machine Learning

Although I've also taken a machine learning course before, my previous work was very implementation biased. This course, on the other hand, is based entirely on statistics and linear algebra. I've only taken one course in both subjects, and linear algebra in my freshman year. The good thing is that I've been teaching linear algebra through the years (as it is part of the course I peer tutor), so the knowledge I retained from that is very helpful. To be honest, I'm not sure I will find the mathematical background to these methods helpful. I did read a paper where principal component analysis was used before the course covered it, so it was exciting to know a concrete example.

Computational Complexity

My background for this course is even stranger. Michigan has an undergraduate course on the theory of computation, which I have obviously never taken. Northwestern used to have a similar course, but the only place I've found it referenced was in the course catalog. So most of what I know about Turing Machines come from recreational reading. And it turns out that it was enough: books on Turing and Godel, together with what I picked up in my programming languages and compiler courses, gave me enough background to take the course. I like the course a lot; the professor has a nice way of putting everything in narrative and historical perspective. If I wasn't so interested in AI, theory would definitely be an area I would look into. A system of logic is just so... elegant.

Graduate Student Instructor (for Programming and Intro Data Structures)

Ah, teaching. I'm always surprised by how much teaching I've done already. I was involved with the GSW for all four years, one of them as a student. And I've done two summers of CTY. Still, I expected doing discussion sections and office hours to be different. But it wasn't; after the first day, when I think back to see what I could improve, I didn't see anything that I needed to adapt to the new format. Actually, this is now not entirely true - I think I need to do a better job of emphasizing why these concepts are important, in the world of computer science. It's much harder to keep a room of 30 college students than a room of 14 6th graders engaged, especially when you don't have much flexibility on what to teach.

Anyway, I'm definitely enjoying being a GSI. At least one student have told me that what I do is helpful, and several others have been asking me questions on computer science concepts outside of the course. Yeah. Now the hard part: keeping it up.

Spiral Staircases

2009-09-09T22:29:00.000-04:00

The new Computer Science and Engineering building has a nice spiral staircase that rises prominently from the main hall. It connects all four floors of the building, and is the most convenient way to get directly up; there is at least one other staircase (probably more; I haven't found any emergency staircases), but that has significant horizontal translation.

I thought a spiral staircase was pretty cool when I first saw it, but as I'm using it more often, I realized how stupid an idea it really is.

The problem with a spiral staircase is that the steps are non-uniform. Since people's gait depends on their height, and their height is a random variable, people have preferences as to how wide a step should be. With a circular staircase, the steps are obviously longer towards the outside and shorter towards the inside. This means people can pick where they walk, right? Except, of course, when there's two way traffic, so people are forced to one side of the staircase. With normal stairs, moving to one side doesn't change your gait, and so you can continue walking. With spiral staircases though, you have to constantly adjust how far you're stretching your legs just to keep going.

Besides that, Michigan is going well. By virtue of it being a public university, the classes are quite a bit bigger than those at Northwestern, even for relatively obscure classes like machine learning. I think that's the only reason why professors seem a little more distant here than at NU. On the other hand, I have two discussion sections to lead next week, as well as however many office hours, and this is also with the largest number of students I've dealt with yet. It'll be fun.

Writing About Writing

2009-09-01T15:31:00.000-04:00

I have been writing recreationally for a while - I've been writing in my journal for close to 7.5 years, and this blog has been going for 2 years as well. Before that, I used to have a LiveJournal account, which was mostly used to keep my high school friends up to date with what I was doing. This blog stands out though, because it can be said that I'm doing a lot for a very small audience.

I recently read Paul Graham's essay on essays though, and I found it interesting that the word "essay" comes from the French verb/noun essayer/essai, meaning to try/an attempt. A lot of my blog posts are planned before hand. I have a running list of topics I want to write about, and while I find the time and mood to write them, I collect ideas and quotes in bullet-point form. Often times I don't actually know what I want to write, just want I want to write about. For example, I knew that I would do a post on The Fountainhead, but I didn't know what I want to say about it. Even for this short post, I'm not sure what my final point is, if I have one. Writing, then, is a way for me to figure out my own ideas. It's not just a tool for me to express my ideas to other people, but also for my ideas to become clearer in my head.

My friend Genia also wrote something about writing a little while back.

I thought it would be interesting to show the notes I have collected before writing this too. They're below:

Paul Graham on essays
    http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
    the french essayer, to try
    I have a goal, but I don't know how it turns out
        I'm not sure what's the point I want to make in this essay
    more to write thoughts down, to externalize and make concrete my thinking
    to clarify ideas
    http://petdinosaur.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/write-a-story-write-a-book/#comment-31
    show notes for this essay

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

2009-08-29T21:46:00.001-04:00

I just watched this, and despite wanting to be the "whole purpose of public education throughout the world" that is the university professor, I have to agree with him.

The TED talk can be found here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

I'm also putting the transcript up, if reading is more your thing.

Do Schools Kill Creativity?
Ken Robinson

Good morning. How are you? It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving. There have been three themes, haven't there, running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about. One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it. The second is that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen, in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out.

I have an interest in education -- actually, what I find is everybody has an interest in education. Don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education -- actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education. You're not asked. And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "What do you do?" and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They're like, "Oh my God," you know, "Why me? My one night out all week." But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right? Like religion, and money and other things. I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue -- despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days -- what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.

And the third part of this is that we've all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have -- their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she? Just seeing what she could do. And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly. So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. Thank you. That was it, by the way. Thank you very much. So, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born -- no.

I heard a great story recently -- I love telling it -- of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said, "What are you drawing?" And the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said, "They will in a minute."

When my son was four in England -- actually he was four everywhere, to be honest. If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year. He was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it was big. It was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel. You may have seen it: "Nativity II." But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!" He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in. They come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold, frankincense and myrhh. This really happened. We were sitting there and I think they just went out of sequence, because we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, "You OK with that?" And he said, "Yeah, why, was that wrong?" They just switched, that was it. Anyway, the three boys came in, four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads, and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." And the second boy said, "I bring you myrhh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this."

What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this: he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately: that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it. So why is this?

I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago. In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. So you can imagine what a seamless transition that was. Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? How annoying would that be? "Must try harder." Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now," to William Shakespeare, "and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It's confusing everybody."

Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition, actually. My son didn't want to come. I've got two kids. He's 21 now; my daughter's 16. He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a month. Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. Anyway, he was really upset on the plane, and he said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah." And we were rather pleased about that, frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.

But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world: every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn't matter where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting? Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.

If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say "What's it for, public education?" I think you'd have to conclude -- if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners -- I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life. But they're rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. There's something curious about professors in my experience -- not all of them, but typically -- they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads, don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings. If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night. And there you will see it, grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.

Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. The whole system was invented -- around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.

In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it's the combination of all the things we've talked about -- technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly. But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

We know three things about intelligence. One, it's diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. In fact, creativity -- which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value -- more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

The brain is intentionally -- by the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain brain called the corpus callosum. It's thicker in women. Following off from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multi-tasking. Because you are, aren't you? There's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life. If my wife is cooking a meal at home -- which is not often, thankfully. But you know, she's doing -- no, she's good at some things -- but if she's cooking, you know, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here. If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed. I say, "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here. Give me a break." Actually, you know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it happen? Remember that old chestnut? I saw a great t-shirt really recently which said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"

And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment called "Epiphany," which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, she's called Gillian Lynne, have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did "Cats," and "Phantom of the Opera." She's wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet, in England, as you can see. Anyway, Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, "Gillian, how'd you get to be a dancer?" And she said it was interesting, when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition. People weren't aware they could have that.

Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room And she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on a chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it -- because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on, little kid of eight -- in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, "Gillian, I've listened to all these things that your mother's told me, and I need to speak to her privately." He said, "Wait here, we'll be back, we won't be very long." and they went and left her. But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick, she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school."

I said, "What happened?" She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me. People who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to think." Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern, they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School, she became a soloist, she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company, the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Weber. She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.

Now, I think -- What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology, and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish." And he's right.

What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios scenarios that we've talked about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way -- we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Thank you very much.

Reflections on Teaching

2009-08-29T17:02:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure when it became apparent to me that liked teaching. Iremember helping other people with math and biology back in ninthgrade, but I don't think I had that much self-understanding at thetime. I helped with some (in reality, a minimal amount) of peertutoring in high school through the math center, where students candrop in and ask questions about their math work. Not too many studentsused that though, and I maybe helped three students in the two years Iwas there. Freshman year in college, I was a student in theGateway Science Workshop (GSW)peer tutoring program at Northwestern. I think that was the first timeI really woke up to the idea that I want to teach. I remember that myfacilitator was really not very good at the whole facilitation thing,and often I would be explaining things to other people in the session,if other people were there at all. I stayed in the program because Iwas bored (the things boredom make you do!), and I stayed with the samefacilitator because it was easy (the things comfort makes you do!). Butby the last quarter of that year, I had made up enough of my mind toapply to be a GSW facilitator next year, which I got.

For the next three years, I was first a facilitator, then a seniorfacilitator, and finally just filling in sessions as necessary. Thismeans I've been involved with the program for all four years ofcollege, and of course I did two summers of CTY as well. In the nexttwo weeks I will be a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) at Michigan, my"fourth" year of teaching.

It is therefore unfortunate that this last year, if not more, of GSW was horrible.

By this statement I don't mean that I grew to hate GSW, or indeed thatGSW was something I had to tolerate. No, I still enjoyed every sessionof GSW; I just wasn't convinced my students enjoyed it. When I thinkback over successive years of GSW, I can see that I have gottencomplacent about teaching and have relaxed how I think about it. Let megive some examples.

Although the GSW facilitator orientation at the start of the yearrecommends doing ice breakers during the first session (or two) of eachquarter, I gave up doing those around the middle of junior year. Duringthe first year of GSW, I had a couple students follow me for the entireyear. Since students can get priority to follow the same facilitatorthrough the school year, this means that the students found what I saiduseful. I had some students join me the second quarter, who stayed forthe final quarter too. But each quarter there were also new students,and so despite it being awkward for the people who I already know andwho already know each other, I continued to do ice breakers. The secondyear, no one from my first quarter stayed, but a number from my secondquarter stayed for the third. I didn't intend to skip ice breakers - Iremember coming prepared to do them, but there were only two studentsin the first session of the quarter, and it seemed silly to do gameswith just two people.

I could blame the decreasing number of students in GSW for that, butwhile that does contribute to the situation, it is my attitude whichchanged. Simply put, I became more focused on what an ideal session islike than on how to foster such an ideal session. For peer tutoring(and I think teaching in general), it's best if the students talk toeach other and exchange ideas. Not because there's a barrier, howeversmall, between facilitator and student, but also because students aremuch closer in mindset than the facilitator. Sharing how they approachproblems allows everyone to reformulate the question, and perhaps finda perspective which helps them most easily understand. And therefore,in an ideal session (I remember I had one absolutely perfect sessionback in my first year), the facilitator mostly listens while thestudents teach each other, only stepping in if everyone is stuck.

My mistake is that I allowed my non-participation become status quo,without adapting to whether the students were discussion. This turnswhat should be a discussion into something worse than a lecture - itturns into a self study. I forgot that getting that initial engagementtakes work, and an ice breaker - even if it seems silly - is part ofthat work. Instead of leading the students through problems until theyhave developed the confidence to discuss among themselves, I have justbeen letting them work.

I just finished Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do, and whileit wasn't a ten point plan to better teaching (which would have beenbound to failure), I did get some insight into what I've beenneglecting. The main thing I learned is that even though you may begoing through the same motions, your relationship with you studentsdepends as your attitude as well, and without that the same motion justdoesn't work. My personal example of that is offering to stay after thesession to help. The first year, I've had students ask me morequestions afterwards, and that had led me to know more about them andtheir background as well. Lately though, although I still make the sameoffer, no students take me up on it. This is because I haven't gainedtheir trust (note: this is different from them not trusting me enough).When I started GSW, I cared a lot more about what the students arethinking and how they are feeling about the material and the sessionitself. In my personal journal I have written short evaluations of thestudents after the first couple sessions, noting how they're reactingto me, and how I can draw them out more. I actually cared about theiranswer to the customary "how was your week?" - it wasn't just agreeting, but a semi-serious attempt to know more about the students.This mutual understanding and trust, although not reflected in thestudents' attendance records or grades, paves the way to the autonomouslearning I described.

The other big mistake I made is not leading them through the questionsanymore. This applies whether or not that trust is established,although if the students are actively discussion the problem at hand itis more permissible to step back. What I realized is that talking themthrough the question (note: not through the solution) shows them morethan how to arrive at the answer. It also shows them how to approachthese types of questions, and what kind of thinking the student issupposed to have. After all, the material is only part of what we careabout as teachers. Equally as important, if not more so, is that thestudents can think within the discipline. For computer science, forexample, that means the ability to break down a complex procedure intosimple steps, evaluating whether that solution is cost-effective, andso on. For Newtonian mechanics, that means seeing the forces acting onobjects and knowing how the forces interact. Whether they can use big-Odescriptions or integral calculus to find the answer is something else,but getting that thinking there takes precedence. If I lead thestudents through the question, letting them make mistakes andquestioning them on why their solution does or does not work, I amchanging ever so slightly the way they see the world.

The last mistake I made, this one somewhat less apparent but equallyinfluential, is that I stopped thinking about what the students arelearning. This seems silly, especially since GSW has all the worksheetsmade for us. But without a goal, without consciously trying to lead thestudents into the way of thinking, it is too easy to simply go for theanswers. I am robbing the students of their opportunity to look at thelarger questions. Again, it's not the questions on the worksheet whichare the most important, but the concepts behind it. The successfulcompletion of the worksheet is merely a proxy to what the studentslearned. Bain brought up studies where the students can ace a Newtonianphysics final, but still hold some naive, intuitive beliefs aboutmotion. Part of it is certainly how the final was designed, but part ofit (a larger part, I would argue) is that the teacher has not thoughtabout how to bring it above just plugging and chugging.

If I had to summarize Bain's book in one sentence, it's this: The goalof teaching is for students to not just learn the material, but tounderstand it's implications. This necessarily means changing (or atleast adding to) how students think. Ways of thinking, unfortunately,are pretty resistant to change, and so to accomplish that the teacherneeds to be prepared. I want to give three examples of good teaching,all of which I have personally experienced as a TA to the course.

The first is from CTY, where once a week during lunch my instructorwill give a student a dollar if they can give the pronunciation andmeaning of a word (limited to a collegiate dictionary) which hecouldn't spell. The result is that the day before and the day of, thestudents will spend a lot of their free time looking at a dictionary.Think about it: if a teacher's job, in general, is to spark people'sdesire to learn, then he has achieved this beyond measure. No childrenof twelve will willingly spend hours looking at a dictionary, butgiving them this challenge drives them to do so. Whether they learnedanything by looking at the dictionary is arguable, but it did inspirean educational fervor.

The second example is from compilers. The professor consistentlybrought up books and papers which were not included in the textbook.These books were not necessarily related to compilers, although theywere all relevant to the topic under discussion at the time. This hasthe same effect as the spelling challenge - it draws the studentsdeeper in to the subject, while making them aware of the larger contextof what they're studying. The best thing is that, at least for me, Ireally get the sense that the professor is really bringing up the booksbecause he wants to invite the students to share his curiosity andinterest in those subjects, and not just to impress students by howmuch he knows.

The last example is by the same professor. I mentioned that exams andmost homework being just a proxy to measure how much a studentunderstands. So the "final" for the compilers course (in addition to aworking compiler, of course), instead of being a paper, was a "codewalk". That means the student/group comes in to meet the professor foran hour, during which the student walks the professor through theircode. This is done in an informal fashion - it's not a powerpointpresentation - but it allows the student to let the professor know,with the highest "bandwidth" possible, what they have learned. Andalthough there are "points" awarded through the quarter for sections ofa finished compiler, that merely influences the final grade. If astudent did poorly before, but have improved as the quarter went on(each assignment is cumulative, and previous test cases are run again)with the final result of presenting a well organized code walk at theend, then they get a good grade. That is, the students are graded onwhat they understand, both about compilers and about programming ingeneral, and not just whether they can answer questions about compilersin general.

So to put this into practice, I'm writing my own CTY robotics curriculum (like I did last year)with all this in mind. I will post the result here when I'm done. Toclose though, I want to pull a totally unrelated quote. I feel thisshould be how assignments given to students should be viewed, as:

"A series of great opportunities disguised as insoluble [read: intriguing] problems" -president of Stanford University John Hennessy, on the energy-climatechallenge, as quoted in Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded

Answers of the Weeks

2009-08-24T13:20:00.000-04:00

What is the difference between hurricanes, typhoons, and maelstroms?

Hurricanes are basically large storm systems (aka tropical cyclone). Typhoons are just hurricanes which form in the Pacific ocean; as far as I can tell, it's just a naming difference.

Maelstroms are giant whirlpools; they have nothing to do with the above.

How do 3D glasses work?

3D glasses allow movies to be turned into "stereograms". Humans (and most animals, I assume) have depth perception because each of our two eyes sees slightly different things. This is most clearly demonstrated if you put a finger in front of your nose. If you then focus on something far away, you will have two semi-transparent fingers. This comes from the brain trying to compensate for the blocked view, and piecing information from the two eyes together.

Cute trick - take a hollow, see-through, cylindrical tube (like a used toilet paper roll), and put it up to one eye. Now, take your hand, and put it along the tube in front of the other eye. Open both eyes. If you're doing this correctly, you should see a "hole" in your hand. It's the same principle as the two "fingers" above - your brain fills in the what should be behind the hand, and since it only knows what your other eye can see through the tube, that's the only part it fills in.

Anyway, back to stereograms and 3D movies. In the old days, 3D pictures are created with color-filtered glasses. Two images of different colors are projected onto the movie screen, and when people put 3D glasses on, each eye sees only one of the colored pictures - because the filter blocks out the other color. By presenting each eye with a slightly different image, the illusion of depth is created. In the two images, things that should be "closer" would have more horizontal displacement, while things that should be "further" would have less. This can be demonstrated by moving the finger back and forth, while still staring at something far away. The further you extend your finger, the closer the two "fingers" appear.

What my question was really getting at was the new, polarized, 3D glasses. I watched Pixar's Up in those, and noticed while standing in line that the glasses only darken when paired with one lens and turned to a certain angle, but it would not darken with the other lens at all. We knew it was polarized, but we thought it would be linearly polarized at first. If that was the case though, the lens should darken regardless of which other lens it was paired with. I thought they were circularly polarized, which would explain the odd pairing thing, but I never did find out why it would be darkest at a certain angle.

Does truth exist?

This question was suggested to me by a friend. Clearly, the answer to this one would not be as... objectively truthful most other questions. I can, however, give my personal belief: yes.

I do believe in an objective truth. To me it's simple: either the trees, the mountains, and my laptop all exist, or I'm a brain in a vat and hallucinating all this, or even I'm part of a strange dream of a giant frog. Whichever one of these is true - and I'm not saying that I know which one is - the basic idea remains that one of them is true. Of course, it could be that none of those are correct, but it's hard to imagine a reality where there is no truth at all. It would almost be a paradox to call it a reality at that point.

Whether we, as humans, would ever know the truth is a completely different question.

Why do humans have social needs?

As far as I can tell, it's evolutionary. This section of Wikipedia gives a fairly simple answer.

I actually made a mistake in the list of questions; the question of whether AIs can become a human's best friend should have been under this question of social needs. That was the true point of asking this question: if social needs could be met without physical contact (for example, through the phone, through email, IM, etc.), then it is almost inevitable humans will eventually befriend an AI.

Let me attack the conditions first. Could human social needs be satisfied without physical contact? I think so. In the old days people have pen pals and write letters to family members in far away places. There is satisfaction in doing those things, and it could only be social in nature. Nowadays people have phones, email, IM, Facebook, etc. which makes it even easier to keep up with people without their physical existance.

A deeper question could be asked as to how advanced the AI has to be. Now that people are used to computers and the idea of AI, it would have to be quite advanced. When AI was just being invented, however, people were willing to believe that they were interacting with a human. Just look at the first ELIZA tests. People got attached to the computer, despite being told how it works and that it's just a computer program. That's one of the big downfalls of the Turing test - that people are too willing to believe. For the purpose of meeting social needs, however, this willingness to believe might be exactly what is needed.

On another level, and also speaking personally, the AI would have to be quite advanced for me to be satisfied. I'm interested in people's stories, not just discussions on various topics. Sure, a lot of my conversations with people have a philosophical leaning, but it's interesting because they have experiences which led them to their believes. Without this experience, it's no different from reading a dry book which simply lays out the argument - or it should more properly called the plan of attack, because there wouldn't be any argument at all.

That said, I believe we will eventually have the technology to create AIs which have their own - albeit not physical - histories and stories.

List of Discarded Post Topics

2009-08-24T00:11:00.000-04:00

I have a large backlog of topics I want to blog about. Most of them were interesting at the time, but I have since lost enough interest to not want to write about it. If anyone is particularly interested in something, or want some clarification of what I would have written about, let me know.

Below are the topics and the notes I've collected for them.

questions of the weeks

why /should/ there be a separation of church and state?
what is the difference between hurricanes, typhoons, maelstroms?
does truth exist?
why do humans have social needs?
would a human-level AI replace the need for best friends?

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/caleb_chung_plays_with_pleo.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belongingness#Evolutionary_perspectives
Eliza and the Turing Test

what should you do to maximize your chance of a relationship on a date?

adrenaline mistaken for attraction (psychology: it works, bitches!)

do animals burp?
why do roosters crow at dawn?
how do 3d glasses work?
physics of getting yourself swinging

musical imagery

hurdles with audience
picket fence
cages
graph paper
DDR tracks
bookshelves
rick roll

communism = democracy

if totally transparent government

IAT to measure cultural associations

Some Quotes

2009-08-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

I've stored up a lot of quote from books I've been reading. It's time to unload some of them to the internets. Some of these are just new insights (like the first one), some of these describe how I feel very well (like the Obama one about his daughters), and some are just

Traditions in a Rootless World, Lynn Davidman
Note - required for class. Not that interesting, but at the time I was questioning why sociologists need to be emersed in the culture they're studing.

Contemporary ethnography is understood by its followers as a process of interpretation rather than explanation. Phenomenological approaches in social science [...] cannot tell us why some people do one thing and others do not. Thus, rather than try to find the distinctive characteristics of joiners, ethnographers of religious communities instead try to portray the religious world as it is experienced by those inside or entering it.

Humans are always engaged in an ongoing process of ordering and making sense of their experiences. The language people use to talk about their experiences and the sequence of their stories "reveal the world that they see and in which they act." Because everyday life encompasses an ongoing process of constructing the meanings of our experience, the ways in which people talk about their experiences are as important as the content to the experiences themselves.

Shocking Science, Geoffrey Carr (The Economist, The World in 2009)

Someone once accused Dr [Craig] Venter of playing God. His reply was, "We're not playing."

Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman
Note - This book starts off great, but about halfway it starts to get really repetitive.

"The biodiversity of the planet is a unique and uniquely valuable library that we have been steadily burning down - one wing at a time - before we have even cataloged all the books, let along read them all" - John Holdren, Woods Hole Research Center

Jeff Wacker, the futurist at Electronic Data Systems, likes to say that innovators are those people who know the 99 percent that everybody knows and therefore are able to create the 1 percent that nobody knows. If you don't know the 99 percent, or cannot get access to it, you will not have the foundation to create the new 1 percent. More likely, you will just re-create part of 99 percent that everyone already knows.

"A series of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems" - John Hennessy, president of Stanford University, on the energy-climate challenge

Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama
Note - I highly recommend this book. Not only because Obama is the president, but it really is well written and highly enjoyable.

We ended up spending the afternoon together, talking and drinking coffee. She told me about her childhood in Chicago, the absent father and struggling mother, the South Side six-flat that never seemed warm enough in the winter and got so hot in the summer that people went out by the lake to sleep. She told me about the neighbors on her block, about walking past the taverns and pool halls on the way to church on Sunday. She told me about evenings in the kitchen with uncles and cousins and grandparents, the stew of voices bubbling up in laughter. Her voice evoked a vision of black life in all its possibility, a vision that filled me with longing - a longing for place, and a fixed and definite history. As we were getting up to leave, I told Regina I envied her. "For what?" I don't know. For your memories, I guess." Regina looked at me and started to laugh, a round, full sound from deep in her belly. "What's so funny?" "Oh, Barack," she said, catching her breath, "isn't life something? And here I was all this time wishing I'd grown up in Hawaii."

In her smiling, slightly puzzled face, I saw what all children must see at some point if they are to grow up - their parents' lives revealed to them as separate and apart, reaching out beyond the point of their union or the birth of a child, lives unfurling back to grandparents, great-grandparents, an infinite number o f chance meetings, misunderstandings, projected hopes, limited circumstances.

Who was I, who shed no tears at the loss of his own?

I imagined Regina's grandmother somewhere, her back bent, the flash of her arms shaking as she scrubbed an endless floor. Slowly, the old woman lifted her head to look straight at me, and in her sagging face I saw that what bound us together went beyond anger or despair or pity.
What was she asking of me, then? Determination, mostly. The determination to push against whatever power kept her stooped instead of standing straight. The determination to resist the easy or the expedient. You might be locked into a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.
... Beneath layers of hurt, beneath the ragged laughter, I heard a willingness to endure. Endure - and make music that wasn't there before.

Later that night, back home in Chicago, I sat at the dinner table,watching Malia and Sasha as they laughed and bickered and resistedtheir string beans before their mother chased them up the stairs and totheir baths. Alone in the kitchen washing the dishes, I imagined my twogirls growing up, and I felt the ache that every parent must feel atone time or another, that desire to snatch up each moment of yourchild's presence and never let go - to preserve every gesture, to lockin for all eternity the sight of their curls or the feel of theirfingers clasped around yours.

Intimate Strangers, Lillian Rubin
Note - this book was mostly psychoanalytic babble, but some of the interview quotes and field studies were interesting.

Suddenly, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to work anymore; it no longer seemed like such fun. It's one thing to work because you want to, another because you have to. It makes a difference, too, if working is defined as helping out - which is the way most married women characters their presence in the work force - or as the mainstay of support for the family.

from the beginning, life is a process of... internalizing representations from the external world.

A man may lust after /women/, but a woman lusts after /a man/. For a woman, sex usually has meaning only in a relational context - perhaps a clue to why so many girls never or rarely masturbate in adolescence or early adulthood... For with them, an emotional connection in a relationship generally is a stimulus, if not a precondition, for the erotic. If women depend on the emotional attachment to call up the sexual, men rely on the sexual to spark the emotional, as these words... show: "Having sex with her makes me feel much closer so it makes it easier to bridge the emotional gap, so to speak. It's like the physical sex opens up another door, and things and feelings can get expressed that I couldn't before. For women, emotional attachments without sex are maintained with little difficulty or discomfort; fr men, they're much more problematic. It's not that they don't exist at all, but that they're less common and fraught with many more difficulties and reservations.

Over two-thirds of the single men couldn't name a best friend. Of those who could, it was much more likely to be a woman than a man who held that place in their lives. In contrast, over three-fourths of the single women had no problem in identifying a best friend, and almost always that person was a woman. Among those who were married, far more men than women named a spouse as a best friend, their most trusted confidante, and/or the one they would be most likely to turn to in emotional distress. For the married women, it was a strikingly different picture. Even when a woman did name her husband to one or more of these roles, it was never exclusively his, as was most likely to be the case with a man. Most women identified at least one, usually more, trusted friends to whom they could turn in a troubled moment, and they spoke openly and ardently about the importance of these relationships in their lives.

Therefore, most men sat silently for a long while when I asked, "Who would you turn to if you came home one night and your wife announced she was leaving you?" When they finally spoke, it was with great hesitation as the realization came to them that there would be no friend to whom they could turn in that moment of pain and shock.

Quote Unquote

2009-08-23T12:38:00.000-04:00

There are a number of things which I don't like about English grammatical rules. The one I want to address here is the nested quotation, which is not only confusing but unwieldy. Consider the following example:

Adam said, "I like apples."

What if this was part of a narrated story?

Beth said, "Adam said, 'I like apples.'"

And if I nest that again...

Carl said, "Beth said, 'Adam said, "I like apples."'"

Obviously, anything this complicated should be rewritten in any case (Carl said, "Beth said, 'Adam said that he likes apples.'"), but putting that aside, it really bothers me that I cannot just copy and paste a piece of text, wrap quotations around it, and be done with the change. If you notice carefully, the rules of English require the outer-most pair of quotation marks be double quotes ("), and each nesting from then on alternate between double quotes and single quotes. For the copy-and-paste usage case I just mentioned, this means all the quotation marks needs to be switched, which is extremely annoying.

Despite this asinine rule, I can actually see the reason: the inability to distinguish between nested quotes and sequential quotes. Compare:

Carl said "Beth said 'This note reads "This note can talk."' I like talking notes."

with:

Carl said "Beth said "This note reads "This note can talk."" I like talking notes."

The first sentence is Carl quoting Beth who is quoting a talking note. The second can mean the same thing, but the ambiguous quotation can also mean Carl quotes Beth, then adding his own comment, and someone else replying. In proper quotation, this latter meaning should be:

Carl said, "Beth said, 'This note reads.' This note can talk?" "I like talking notes."

It can be argued that the alternating quotation, therefore, makes the meaning of nested quotations clearer (with some excuses as to other improper punctuation, of course).

The main problem with the quotation marks is that the starting and ending marks are the same. By nesting the quotation marks, inner quotes will never be "accidentally" terminated by outer quotes. More modern character encodings solve this problem with using different characters for beginning and ending quotes. You can look at the Wikipedia page to see how to type the different ones - although most word processors will do that for you automatically anyway. With computers, the problem is compounded by the starting and ending single quotes doubling (or as it were, tripling) as the apostrophe as well. This is only really a problem for contractions at the beginning of words though, such as "'cause", which could be interpreted as a starting quote. I'm not sure how word processors deal with this.

Personally, I prefer to stick with ASCII. Since I quote a large amount of emails and chats in my journal, and the emails and chat themselves very often quote other things, I can't be bothered to switch the quotation marks back and forth. This sometimes does cause me a little more comprehension time, but compared to the time I would have wasted on changing punctuation, it's not a big deal.

How do you use quotation marks?

CTY

2009-08-13T15:07:00.000-04:00

I've been tracking the presence of CTY online throughout the two sessions, especially through Twitter, but also through blogs. Last year I found several blogs which expressed their amazement at what CTY does for them and for children. I did the same this year, and found this:

CTY’s a place where the top end of the ability curve can find a community. Unlike just about anywhere else, there’re lots of other people like you there. Any strange, obscure reference you make, probably at least 3 people in earshot will get. Any weird thought you have won’t seem all that weird to more than a few people present.

And the same goes for how you act. A lot of gifted kids are, let’s face it, pretty crazy sometimes. But that’s perfectly normal there. In fact, it becomes self reinforcing so that almost everyone acts even weirder than normal. And, because we’re all like that, it’s Ok! You get cheered on, not made fun of.

And by that same principal, because there’s a lot of the shared experience of being pretty lonely at home sometimes, people are very quick to form friendships, and just generally very accepting of and nice to each other. People understand, and so they accept. Most of us have a few friends who will do that so that we can be ourselves with them at home, but here for three weeks it’s like that with most people!

I've never done the real CTY (both summers I've worked with young students), but I totally agree with what the author said. And I don't mean it just for the kids - I mean it for the staff as well.

On the other hand, because I've never done real CTY, I don't shout "Die! Die! Die! Die! Live! Live! Live! Live! Sex! Sex! Sex! Sex! More! More! More! More!" during the American Pie chorus. So I was surprised to find a blog post by someone who claims to have started the "Sex!" chant:

...Because I'm the one who started "Sex! Sex! Sex!"

It was Slut Day. That wasn't a camp tradition, it was something I started on a whim, this being a period of my life in which I valued attention above dignity. To be clear, our definition of sluttishness was pretty mild; no one scored below a 70 on the Purity Test and most of us were lying. Anyway, shouting "Die Die Die" at the chorus of "American Pie" was already a long-standing tradition when I arrived at CTY, but the summer of 1994 something had happened--possibly a suicide?--that convinced people to tack on "Live! Live! Live!" afterwards in a flurry of PC-ism. Then as now I found the revision pretty lame, so on that particular day, Slut Day, since we had been talking about nothing but sex since breakfast, I threw in "Sex! Sex! Sex!" as a kind of musical one-liner. Well, it caught on like hula hoops. The next thing I knew it was part of the canon. The addition of "More! More! More!" followed hard upon, but I'm not sure who was responsible

Whether you believe her or not is up to you. Do visit the post though, and read through the comments - it's more evidence of how CTY bonds people.

A Small But Important CTY Complaint

2009-08-12T20:17:00.002-04:00

CTY ended about a week ago, and I'm still very much in denial about it. I've mentioned previous that I wish the program would continue, even if it was just for one session. This summer was everything I had remembered it to be: the rush of seeing the light go on in the students, being swept away by the excitement in learning that everyone shows. I do, however, have one complaint, which I thought this site didn't do as well in comparison with last year. This involves the communication between staff members, and in particular, between the residential, instructional, and administrative staff.

As a residential camp for middle schoolers, CTY staff is not only responsible for the education of the campers; we are also responsible for the emotional and social well being of the kids. If the kids are older we'd have more problems (like people being in relationships, breaking up, or God forbid, getting pregnant), but at this age most of our problems have to do with being homesick, provoking or being provoked by others, and bullying or being bullied by others. All three happened to my students this year. Under CTY procedure, as a TA I am required to talk to the RAs several times every day, to find out if anything has happened to the kids over the night or during activities. There is a system of paperwork for everything that happens to a student, and those are left in mailboxes for staff to read. In theory, this system allows a rapid dissemination of information on the students, so everyone knows what's happen.

What I found this summer was that while the system is designed properly, people don't really follow them. I have seen TAs and RAs simply bringing the kids to the drop off point, then walk away after seeing they are picked up - without talking to that staff. The paperwork system, while detailed, does not provide a rapid enough response. In one case, I was lucky to have found out about an incident the morning after from the RA. They had put in the paperwork as well, but it had taken over a week for me to be notified of the administrative response. There was a worse case - I heard about the incident from the RA, and never ended up reading the paperwork. Although I knew the gist of what had happened, I didn't really have the details. And since the incident was rather serious, I would prefer to have it - but I didn't. And finally, there were things which I never knew until I read the paperwork - like the fact that one of my students had daily meetings with a member of the administration.

Don't get me wrong - things worked out great this summer, and as I said I had an awesome time. But I was really disappointed by the things I just pointed out, which not necessarily made my job harder, but it did give me unpleasant surprises. If I got the chance to talk to the staff before CTY started, I would say this:

Administration: My management philosophy is simple - it's about the people who's close to the action. For a summer camp, that would be the RAs, the TAs, and the instructors. We are here to make their jobs easier, here to support them. This means that we might have to work longer hours to resolve issues as soon as possible, or we might have to do extra work to ensure classes and activities goes as the RAs and instructors have planned. We get paid more not because we're more important, but because we have to work harder.

RAs: I know you have a tough job - you have to take care of over a dozen kids all by yourself, for multiple hours at a time, sometimes sacrificing sleep. But remember that besides making sure the kids are under supervision at all times, there is a larger goal: to keep them excited and motivated for class. Think about it this way: you can spend 5 minutes talking (and listening!) to the TA and instructor about a problem that arose, or you can spend hours afterwards trying to comfort the student, explain to the administration, or even the parent, about what happened. So please, talk to your TAs and instructors.

TAs and Instructors: You're what the camp is about. Congratulations. But your job is not just to teach the kids; as with the RAs, you have to make sure the students are having a good time. This certainly involves finding out about things which happened in the dorm, or during activities - and remember, finding out earlier saves time. If you could, however, lead an activity! Join the talent show! The kids are never more excited than seeing their TAs and instructors spending time with them outside of the classroom. If it doesn't earn you friends, it at least earns you camaraderie - and that goes a long way in talking with the students.

The Fountainhead

2009-08-10T20:37:00.000-04:00

I have been collecting and clarifying the thoughts I have about the book and its concepts since I finished reading it. There is a collection of ideas, many of which I've had before, some of which are new to be as presented in the book, and some which took me till now to figure out. I have a few things to say about my reaction first. Ayn Rand's magnum opus, her last novel, Atlas Shrugged, is supposedly a book which makes a difference in peoples lives, coming in second only to the Bible. The Fountainhead, written earlier but containing the same heavy dose of what would become objectivism, might not have as large an impact, but I still expected it to change make me question things I believe. Instead, beginning early in the novel and continuing after I finish, I was more surprised by the fact that the book did not change me at all. Rather, I found that I have individually arrived at a lot of the conclusions presented in the book. There might be a confusion of causation here; it is entirely possible that I have read books about objectivism first, which lead me to Ayn Rand, thus me finding the books uninspiring. The most supportive evidence I have of this is that I'm a fan of Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, which expresses a lot of objectivist philosophy. That might indeed be how I first came across Ayn Rand. Since there was a gap of several years before my first reading in 11th grade in high school, my subsequent discovery of the series in junior year of college, and finally reading The Fountainhead, I feel this is unlikely. I would prefer to believe that I have come to the same conclusion as Ayn Rand has, at least on the subject of how best to live one's life. Due to my focus on the individual and not in society, I have the feeling that if I continue to read Atlas Shrugged, I will in fact like The Fountainhead more. But that's an essay for another day.

Let me start by addressing the thoughts that I've had up to the reading of The Fountainhead, then show how the thoughts are tied together by the ideas in the book.

The first idea is one I've expressed for a while, even on this blog: it is the idea that work and play does not have to be separate. I just finished six weeks of working for a summer camp, where I wake up at 07:00, spent at least 7 hours a day with middle school kids (more often closer to 8 or 9), have to work in the evenings to prepare lessons for the next day, and still have paper work to file. If this sounds like a horrible job, it isn't; I love the entire experience, and my only feeling at the end of six weeks is a wish for just one more session. I may have complained in the middle, about how the students are not getting along with each other, or that some policy about paperwork is stupid, but those are minor things. Compared to watching how quickly these children can pick up material and what their minds are capable of understanding, the things I'm complaining about are insignificant. Part of the reason I complain is to express a moment's frustration; the other is that somehow, I am expected to complain.

That last one is strange, when one thinks about it. Of course, there's no rule saying that all employees must complain about their job. But most people do, and it has become a ritual of bonding to talking about jobs as such. In the same way, my parents have very often drawn the distinction between working and play: yes, play is important, but work more so. By the way it is phrased, it creates a false separation between work and play, that the two can not coexist. Play is the fun one, but in order to have fun one must first have fame/fortune/influence, and to get that, one must work first, which is not fun. CTY is the greatest counter-example to this theory. People are taking vacation time from their normal jobs to come and teach children. The salaries are much lower than what I could get if I do an internship at Microsoft, and the food, accommodations, etc. are all at lower standards. But I'm not taking the job because of the meals and wheels, but because of what I'm paid to do. And I happen to like robotics, I happen to like teaching, I happen to like playing frisbee with children.

In the last year or so, I've realized that this sets me apart in several ways. The first, of course, is that I complain less than other people. But more than that, I realize I spend more time being productive, being happy. At CTY there are people who don't want to spend time outside of class with the children. It is not part of the job description, they say. That's true. But the very nature of the job involves spending hours with the kids. If they didn't like kids, why did they take the job? The real reason is probably more subtle than that; I'm sure everyone at the camp liked children. In my case though, I'm taking time out of my own life, when I'm not "on duty", to do more "job work". The distinction between work and play is blurred: I do the same thing whether I'm paid or not. In things besides summer jobs there's a difference - I would have to work a part-time job to support myself, I would have to worry about time and transport and all that stuff. But it's a start. Paul Graham suggested that the test of whether someone is doing what they love is asking them whether they would continue doing that if they weren't paid. I would do CTY; in fact, I did. Living in a dorm, my address changed during the summer, so I never got the last check which was mailed out (the others were collected in person). In essence I was paid only two thirds of what I signed up for. I didn't know until this summer that there was a third paycheck. But I didn't care, I came back; I didn't do it for the paycheck, I did it for the sake of doing it.

The second idea I want to address is one that was on the waiting list to become a blog post. There are two related ideas: an arrogance and over-confidence that I sometimes show, and a condescension for people who don't try.

I recently noted to a friend that arrogance and being full of oneself is different: the former usually has something to be proud of, but they are overly so, while the latter may not in fact have any accomplishments. I believe my arrogance comes from several things: abilities as a quick learner, a mental (and by extension, limited physical) resourcefulness, a refusal to be defeated (at least emotionally), and perhaps relative success so far in life. Because of these things I see myself as better than other people. I've never really worked hard in school, but have pretty good grades. One might object here that my definition of work is different. That is true; I had a lot of fun in school, and part of that fun comes from learning and understanding new things. But that just proves my point. Being able to enjoy this required process of schooling sets me apart. It is like I'm gaming the system, except I'm not. Everyone can be happy at school; some just don't know how, others refuse to.

Wanting to learn and being curious gives me the advantage of knowing a lot, not just in my major, but also in things outside my major. Here again I clash with convention. Look at lists of 100 must read books. Count how many are non-fiction. I'll bet that fiction books dominate. In fact, back in freshman year of high school, in English we had periods where we were required to read. There was one caveat: it had to be a fiction book. I once tried to bring in a non-fiction book, perhaps about physics, perhaps about dinosaurs, but it was rejected. Granted, on that occasion I was sent to the library and thus discovered Terry Goodkind, but I never understood why reading must focus on narratives. I find books on science, philosophy, and sociological studies equally as absorbing, and I don't think that there are any more good authors in fiction than there is in non-fiction. And from these books, I learn a lot about other people, about how the world works, things which I can use in my life.

As for emotional stability - not being allowed to read non-fiction in class didn't stop me. It just meant I had to be somewhat less efficient. I write journals, blogs, debates on philosophy, which helps me get rid of any bottled-up emotions. I'm the kind of person who would be happy in many situations, even if things are not working out they way I want them to. One question I've always hated on the "getting to know you" type games is one which asks for things you regret. I tend not to have them. I'm sure if I plan now and act, I can be just as happy, if not more so. Wallowing in despair is not going to help anyone, and you're in charge of your own emotions. That doesn't mean I don't have goals or that I just let things happen to me. It's the same way I deal with grades. If I'm doing well, then I'll care about them; if I'm not, well, I'm still learning material.

Although I've been aware of these things about myself for several years now, sometimes I'm still surprised when I see other people don't share the same ideals. Being rather secure in my belief that this is the way to being happy and productive, sometimes I just can't bear other people complaining about their life. Have they tried to make their life better? Have they tried to stop complaining and act? It is perhaps not surprising that, if they haven't tried to make things better, things don't get better. This idea actually sprang from a discussion about search engines. We were talking about having additional power operators, like the negation of a search term or searching only pages on a site. Other people in the discussion were saying that these functionalities should be provided, maybe by adding buttons, sliders, etc. I argued that these functions already exist (indeed, Google has them), and people are just not taking the time to learn them. The conclusion that the class had about me was that I'm a power user, and I don't understand how the "average user" works. On reflection though, I think the difference might be wider still: I believe in doing what is possible to get things done. Where is the line drawn between people being stupid and the object of use being badly designed? As a Linux user, I subscribe to the philosophy of "scratching your own itch". If you want something in a program, either work around it, ask someone to code it for you, code it yourself, or forget it. There is enough documentation and forums online to solve most problems, and these solutions are only a Google search away. People should be willing to do this much to solve their problems; less than that, they're just lazy. I was reminded of the computer help desk acronym PEBKAC: Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. My personal conclusion on the matter? I shouldn't be in human computer interaction.

The last idea I had is one which I never intended to write about, but is inseparable from these ideas. This idea is dedication, and I will sidetrack into romance and love to demonstrate my point.

As I've said, I don't like people who don't try. Some people do try, but very often I feel they don't try enough. Although perhaps I don't do it for everything I do, in general I want to see things to the end. For a project in my freshman year, I was in a team of four, except two of the group members didn't really do anything. So the remaining guy and I, we worked the entire evening, through the night, and most of the next day to get the project done on time. We've talked to the other two before, and they've somewhat acknowledged that they haven't pulled their weight. We were supposed to meet the evening before to get the thing done, and what happens? Those two don't even bother to show up. It might be said that this is the simplest case of dedication, that maybe half the people my age have done something like that to get homework finished. True; but I do this not just for homework or group projects, but also for clubs and other activities. I don't value sleep or food much, and would rather see things finished than go to bed.

Let me take this into the realm of feelings. Taking to a friend recently, I was surprised to discover that she had never felt a certain feeling: that of loving someone so much that she would be willing to give them away. It can be slightly paradoxical, but in the simple case it's easy to understand. Let's say that my friend likes someone, but that someone is attracted to someone else. If the happiness of the person she loves is of such value that it is shadows the value of her own happiness, then letting that person go actually makes her happier, solely for the reason that that person is happier. This particular idea has been with me since high school, so it's strange for me to hear that it has never occurred to other people. This is dedication: a commitment to something - whether an ideal or a person - which goes beyond your personal needs.

I'm not sure how well I've explained the ideas, but in the form they've existed in my head, they're intricately connected, although I could not explain how. Reading The Fountainhead gave me ideas, but it still took me until today to realize what it is. I summarized it this way:

"By loving what we do, we become self-sufficient - an unprecedented liberty, freedom from the judgement of others, freedom from failure - because it is not other people's reactions or the result which matters, but the journey, the act of doing itself. By loving what we do, we become powerful beyond measure through the knowledge that no matter what happens, we are happy."

The link I was missing is the self-sufficiency. If someone loves what they do, and are totally dedicated to it without regard to anything else - as Howard Roark was to architecture - then they are truly happy, and can be smugly so. This only applies to things which don't require other people - architecture as a personal art, or a boundary-pushing science where politics doesn't interfere. In these cases, it doesn't matter what other people think, because the goal has never been their approval. The goal is to design, or to push the boundaries of human knowledge. That is all that is necessary for happiness: not praise from other people, but the internal certainty that something worthwhile has happened.

I've once read somewhere that a book should not be read just by virtue of it being a classic. They should be read for their own value, and if it turns out to be a boring book half way through, stop. I myself skipped the last half of Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded because he kept repeating himself, and also skipped Steven Pinker's chapter on abstract syntax in The Language Instinct. I'm not reading the books because I want to say I've read them; I'm reading to see what they have to say, and maybe gain a new perspective. I don't want to suffer hours of indecipherable babble for a single moment's claim of finishing the book. The same is with life. Work, enjoy work, and dedicate yourself to it. Don't do it for the fame, or the fortune, or anything besides your own happiness. Because when you do so, you are self-sufficient, and you'll be the happiest person.

The Fountainhead

2009-07-30T02:59:00.000-04:00

I'm in the middle of reading The Fountainhead, and have some thoughts on that. I will write it and publish it when I have time, probably this weekend. This is just to let you know that I'm not dead, and to expect something from me soon.

Education and Games

2009-07-23T22:20:00.000-04:00

I'm in the middle of CTY, and I'm having a grand time. If I come back next year, I'll be back as an instructor. The future's not certain though, and there are several factors preventing me from coming back. First, CTY fits Northwestern's schedule really well - we end mid-June, then I have a week before CTY starts. UMich though ends mid-May, which means CTY cuts my summer in half. That means it's harder to get things, and I can't just start research later during the summer - I'll have to start it, stop for a few weeks, then go back to it. Of course, the whole research thing will probably be the main competitor for my time. I really wish I could come back though; I'll have to talk to my advisor about it.

Anyway, this post isn't about my 2010 summer plans. I started off saying that I want to be back as an instructor because I was thinking about ways to improve the course. While the course as it stands is pretty good, there are several things which bugs me. For example, the pre and post tests are almost irrelevant to the course material; I'm sure I can think of some better questions which deals with breaking goals into steps, or how information travels through a program, or how to build sturdy objects.

One thing that my instructor did, and which I like a lot, is the focus on not only robots, but on design as well. Before each big project, we have the kids fill out design documents, so they have to think through what their problem is, and how their robot will solve that problem. Right now though, the design templates are very heavily physical. There is no room to do some good thinking about the program, where as there's an area for a sketch of the robot. I would totally redesign the design sheet, so the hardware and software components are given enough time. I also think there's some space for more reflective questions; for example, start off by asking the kids what they think will be hard, then afterwards asking them whether they predicted correctly, and if not, what was harder than expected and why.

All this led to thoughts of flow charts, which I know the other robotics class do. We never teach the kids flowcharts, although I learned that some earlier iterations of the class do have that in the curriculum. The main problem, I think, is that we don't deal with branches and loops until Thursday, and by then it's a little late to start adding flow charts to the design process, especially if they've already filled out several of those sheets. One option, I guess, is to move the branches and loops lesson to earlier in the week. My only qualm with that is how comfortable the kids will be with that material that early. And besides, flow charts don't work very well with variables anyway (as a side note, is there any kind of diagram allows the diagrammer to keep track of variables over time?).

So I was thinking about flow charts, and how to best structure the class so kids can learn more abstract concepts, when I found myself wondering how video games have tutorials which slowly guide the player to more advanced skills. The tutorials have to start off easy, get progressively harder, but at the same time must remain fun for the whole time. And isn't that exactly what we want to do at CTY? Yes we're cramming a lot of material into the kids' brains, but it's also supposed to be fun. In this sense, I liked what one of my other instructors did; he had a theme of the students being robot builders throughout the course, and told them that at the end they'll be "little Gorts". This is in essence a "leveling system", so the kids feel like they've accomplished something.

But really, I think game designers should talk to educators more, so kids are learning more but remain engaged.

Porn and Intimacy

2009-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00

It is rare that I talk about something so personal on my blog. My life is at a changing point, very saliently a point where the future is wide open and I get to decide where it should go. There are some other circumstances which I don't feel like elaborating on, but let it be suffice to say that this has been on my mind somewhat recently.

I think it would surprising some people for them to know I consume a lot of porn. I actually remember the first time I saw anything indecent on the internet. I was probably only 10 at the time, and was trying to get on the search engine Infoseek. I had mistyped the URL, however, and typed in "ifoseek" instead, which turned out to be some porn site. Much later I would classify this as an instance of cybersquatting, but I didn't know any of that at the time. I remember fighting the urge to go back, but eventually I succumbed, and the whole world of online pornography opened up for me. For a long time I was ashamed of it, but in the last few years that changed. It might partially be due to the fact that the Internet being filled with porn is just widely accepted, and as well as the fact that a lot of people watch porn. I think part of it also has to do with me taking a more rational trend in life, and I critically pondered the question of whether porn ever actually does anyone harm. I concluded that, aside from cases where the actors are forced to do it (most prominently, child pornography), there is no physical reason pornography is damaging. As for the whole moral degradation argument, if you were one of those people who were surprised that I watch porn, maybe you should rethink the argument that porn makes men objectify women.

But I don't want to spend this post rebutting the negative affects of pornography. Instead, I want to give a more personal account of pornography, and what I have learned about myself from it. Regardless of it's influence on morals, I do think pornography often depicts humans as (shall we say) animals. That is, the plot of a pornographic movie, if there is one at all, tends to portray people as thinking of nothing but sex. There is no consideration of time, money, possibility of getting caught (unless that's what the director wanted). This past statement, of course, is something I couldn't have said even 3 years ago. In the early days I didn't really discriminate, and everything explicit on the web looked the same to me. As I grew up and learned and thought more, however, this trait of porn became clear to me. I must say that there are times when mindless sex is exactly what you're looking for, but most of the time nowadays I'm looking for something else: a connection.

My real problem with porn is that the actors rarely show concern for each other. Although the act of sexual intercourse requires another person, it is safe to say that both characters are more often than not only concerned with their own desires. If the actress gave a blowjob, it's not to please the buy, but because she "likes it". If I may, it's the difference between being a friend because it keeps you from feeling guilty, and being a friend because you truly care for their feelings. Sex in the real world, I would think, is more about the other person's desire. Both people may be horny, but there is the desire to make the other person happy first. In porn, these acts of "giving" seem forced, and are there more to satisfy the /audience/ than the /partner/.

Instead, lately I've been more attracted to amateur pornography. I don't mean what professional studios label as "amateurs, but actual home made videos. Often these are videos that couples have filmed of themselves, probably for their own entertainment later. Because the actors are real people (not fake characters) with feelings for each other, however, these videos depict much more intimate acts of love making. And that's what I'm looking for: the sense that what is shown is not simply two animals copulating, but two humans with emotions and an intellect. What they are doing is an extension of their love, because even a piece of cloth between their bodies is too much to bare. It is, almost by definition, a private moment, and therefore I also feel somewhat guilty about it's distribution and consumption. But again, it's (mostly) a victimless thing.

Given that it's rather easy to spot whether two people like each other, I'm surprised that not more professional porn is done depicting this connection. The most obvious clue, I think, are the actors hands. Are they clasped and fondling (gently), or are they there just to hold the other person in place? Is the brushing of the hair to see their face better, or to give the camera a better angle? The face, too, is a big area, just because we are so good at reading emotions. And then, of course, the big orgasm thing - is there any involuntary movement?

I think the fact that I think in this way says a lot more about me than the fact that I watch porn. One last thing... you may comment that I'm looking for intimacy in the wrong place. I know.

Unique Identifiers

2009-06-29T01:00:00.001-04:00

I was playing with Twitter search recently, and was curious who at Northwestern uses Twitter.

My first instinct, of course, was to just search for "Northwestern University", but it was quickly apparent that people who attend Northwestern don't actually write "Northwestern". Maybe this is due to the assumed common context of the tweeter and the audience ("grounding"); the reader knows the tweeter is at Northwestern, and since conversations try to maximize bandwidth, what is common knowledge is left unsaid.

The question then becomes: what terms would people at Northwestern, and only people at Northwestern use? That is, what phrases are semantically associated with Northwestern?

There were only two that I could think of:

"Dillo Day". It turns out that no other university in the world has a day in honor of armadillos (or whatever the reason NU actually has a Dillo Day). Of course, this only works when Dillo Day recently happened or is going to happen soon
Norbucks. This actually makes a lot of sense, since it's a portmanteau of Norris (University center) and Starbucks. By itself, either word is common, but this combination makes it unique to Northwestern.

Can you find any other phrases which are unique to Northwestern?

Restless

2009-06-12T13:57:00.000-04:00

Although I only had one final this week, I had some grading to complete and a take-home to finish. In reality I didn't have everything done until last night. And almost immediately, I felt tendrils of doubt creeping into my mind. What am I to do now?

I am someone who needs things to do to be satisfied. It can be school work, or being with friends, or sinking into a good book. The first I'm done with, by definition; the second I don't have that many of; and the third I have a nagging feeling is not constructive enough. Paul Graham says of reading, "Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive." That's why I use book darts, to keep track of stories which I find inspiring and sentences of succinctly expressed great ideas. I write the quotes down afterwards, and they may eventually find themselves in blog posts - as the ones from Closing the American Mind did.

I've always thought that the greatest contribution of religion to personal life is that it gives people a purpose. I believe in creating that purpose myself instead of having it be prescribed, and so perhaps it's strange that I don't like free time. But I don't think that's a fair description of myself; it's not that I don't like free time, but the promise of more, better things to do in the future makes this period of relaxation boring. In two weeks I will be in LA, once again interacting with the smartest kids in the country and the world. In three months I will be in Ann Arbor, naively eager to contribute to the compendium of human knowledge. It is in comparison to these sights and sounds that this period of nothingness seems dull.

I was once asked whether I will miss Northwestern. As a rather unemotional person, I replied that I don't think I will. "Missing" is not the right word to use. I am certainly sad to see friends depart, neither of us knowing when we'll see each other next. I also know that I have fond memories of my time at Northwestern, and will sometimes reminiscence over them. But I believe I have a bright future, with the great opportunities for happiness (and disappointment as well, I suppose). The past has shaped who am I; now let me shape the future.

What I'm saying is that I would rather have graduation done with, then jump on to the next thing in my life, than to waste a week waiting for things to catch up to my enthusiasm.

I guess I'm an impatient person.

Pause

2009-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

Due to time constraints from class (heh) and social activities related to graduation, I will be taking a short break from blogging. I intend to return before the end of June.

Keep it classy.

Inebriated, v2.

2009-05-31T23:52:00.001-04:00

As Faye so aptly put it, I am once again inebriated. But I'm close to graduating, so it's my excuse to loosen up a bit. I will post the answer to last week's question, as well as a new question, tomorrow at midnight.

Thoughts on Being a Student

2009-05-29T01:00:00.003-04:00

I recently read the first few chapters of The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom. I didn't finish it - while the content was interesting, I find Bloom taking too long to get to a point - but be that as it may, I would like to first offer a summary of what I think Bloom's point is, before offering some thoughts.

Bloom's basic thesis is that the modern drive for openness and tolerance takes away the individuality of cultures and of people. By asking students to be open to different ideas, everything becomes relative to students, and therefore unimportant. They are equally passionate - or rather, equally dispassionate - about everything. They do not argue for a way of life, and do not see things above money, happiness, and life. In Bloom's words, "they do not drink the spirit of life, but prefer the water of the crowd."

Bloom's explanation of this is the lost of the classics: people are not reading great books anymore, and therefore do not experience, through the characters in the book, what it means to sacrifice their lives for a cause, or to struggle through truly difficult circumstances. They do not have anymore what Bloom calls "wisdom". The Bible is one of Bloom's classics, and he writes,

"With [the Bible's] gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a total book and the possibility and necessity of world-explanation is disappearing. And fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise - as priests, prophets, or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine. Contrary to what is commonly thought, without the book even the idea of the order of the whole is lost."

Personally, I'm not convinced that students are truly lost without the classics. I do, however, agree with Bloom's general belief that today's students are lacking something. I'm not sure there's a word for it, but it encompasses the desire to keep learning, the desire to be convinced of something and to work to proof or defend that conviction. Bloom uses this anecdote to illustrate what students are missing, and how modern education are failing to help students regain that drive:

I once had a debate about education with a professor of psychology. He said that it was his function to get rid of prejudices in his students. [...] I began to wonder what he replaced those prejudices with. He did not seem to have much of an idea of what the opposite of a prejudice might be. [...] Did this professor know what those prejudices meant for the students and what effect being deprived of them would have? Did he believe that there are truths that could guide their lives as did their prejudices? Had he considered how to give students the love of the truth necessary to seek unprejudiced beliefs, or would he render them passive, disconsolate, indifferent, and subject to authorities like himself, or the best of contemporary thought?

After reading this story I was reminded of an AI koan in the Jargon File:

In the days when [Gerald Jay] Sussman was a novice, [Marvin] Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe" Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

The moral of this story is that randomized preconceptions are not the lack of preconceptions. You just don't know what they are. The psychology professor is doing much the same thing. Simply by getting rid of what prejudices the students have which the professor can detect, doesn't mean that the students don't have any prejudices left. Worse, now no one knows what those prejudices are, and cannot act to instill a more useful set of beliefs. In computer science terms, the goal of initializing a neural network is not to get rid of any "preconceptions", but to give it the best "preconceptions" for the the neural net to start learning with.

Students, following only the common and mundane goals of money, fame, "success", are missing out from the greater enjoyment of life. Too few, and very often far too late, realize that they don't like what they're doing. "The most common student view lacks an awareness of the depths as well as the heights, and hence lacks gravity." There needs to be some energy, some driving force, whether from the reading of the classics or from some other source to propel students above hoi polloi. Bloom at one point called this "indignation". "Indignation is the soul's defense against the wound of doubt about itsown; it reorders the cosmos to support the justice of its cause. Itjustifies putting Socrates to death. Recognizing indignation for whatit is constitute knowledge of the soul, and is thus an experience morephilosophic than the study of mathematics."

But what can schools and universities do? "Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to see that completion."

My favorite quote in the book simultaneously points out the problem and the solution:

The only way to counteract this tendency [that the here and now is all there is] is to intervene most vigorously in the education of those few who come to the university with a strong urge for the un je ne sais quoi, who fear that they may fail to discover it, and that the cultivation of their minds is required for the success of their quest. We are long past the age when a whole tradition could be stored up in all students, to be fruitfully used later by some. Only those who are willing to take risks and are ready to believe the implausible are now fit for a bookish adventure. The desire must come from within.

Drunk

2009-05-27T01:00:00.002-04:00

I have too much wine in me to properly write a post, so I'll postpone that to some other time. Thanks for understanding.

Eliza the Psychologist

2009-05-25T01:00:00.018-04:00

Last week's question: Why do children like playing on swings and slides?

You know, even after spending some time looking on Google, I couldn't find a satisfactory answer to this question. If I may, however, I would like to propose the following partial solutions:

Swings and slides both offer the kid motion, and it's faster motion than they at that age can acheive themselves. So it offers a novel sensation for the children.
Along similar veins, at least the slide offers a new tactile experience as well. I can't think of that much else where you can feel solid material sliding underneath your fingers.
Slides and swings are usually located in playgrounds, where lots of children gather. The opportunity to play with other children form the last part of the appeal.

Some adults (like me!) still go and play on slides and swings, and personally I think it's for much the same reason. Of course, as herion_e pointed out, there's also the nostalgia for us, too.

Building on the last point above, this week's question is: why do humans have social needs?

Python Bashing

2009-05-22T01:00:00.048-04:00

As a computer science major, it is not surprising that I write a lot of small programs every day. From simple things like modifying some text input in some way (a chain of sed's), to writing my alarm clock, a twitter backup, and an ISBN converter. My journal search tool was written by myself, and that goes back quite a ways.

All of the programs mentioned above, however, are Bash scripts.

I'm actually a little sheepish about this. After all, Bash is not a real programming language, but just a way to automate a few administrative operations. There is no type system, no support libraries, no object oriented utilities.

I've thought about doing more things in python, but somehow there's a barrier to entry to it. I reasoned that since what I do is mostly with text, it's easier to read from files in Bash than in python (a single cat as opposed to open().read()). But really that shouldn't be a problem. The output might be an issue too, if I wanted things in nice columns and what not. But then instead of column or paste I would just be using printf or equivalent.

I was digging around Paul Graham's older essays, and I came across his one titled "Being Popular". It's about what he things makes programming languages popular. Most of the attributes in the essay don't describe the Bash script very well, except for the section on Throwaway Programs. And that, I think, is exactly why I use Bash scripts so often.

Because I'm using Linux, a lot of my operations are done on the command line. I don't just mean the crazy programmer things like compiling or system administration, but I mean every day things like moving files, writing essays, even reading a book. My volume control, in fact, is also a command line program (alsamixer; although now I have a keyboard shortcut for that and I rarely actually open alsamixer). Given that I'm in a terminal so often, Bash is practically always open for me.

It is precisely this always available attribute which makes me use Bash. As Graham mentioned, I don't want to write something, then wait for it to compile, then run it to see if it works. Bash works as an interactive prompt, and I can type the whole program in "one line" and just run that. More that that, I can test things a lot quicker in Bash than I can in C or Java. Just open a new terminal (Ctrl-N) and I have a clean slate to test if a certain line of my program does what it wants. Python, of course, is also interactive, but it is unfortunately not as easily accessible from the desktop. I have to type a full 7 keys (P-Y-T-H-O-N-(enter)) to get to the interactive shell, and this slows down the entire process.

So until someone manages to use python as their main shell, I'm sticking with Bash.

Killing Children

2009-05-20T01:00:00.022-04:00

It is commonly known that a lot of computer jargon are tongue in cheek, especially when they were first developed. For examples, processes are compared to people, so when they spawn other processes, the original one is called the parent and the other one the child. When you stop a process, it's called killing it. There are also times when the process is dead but still taking up resources, and very naturally we call them zombies...

Recently I ran into the problem of killing child processes. I want the output of a command in a variable, so something like this:

output="$(command...)"

The problem is two fold: the command itself spawns new children, and the command I'm running may not terminate. What I want to do is set a timer, then when the time is up I would kill the process. To kill it though, I would have to kill the youngest (inner most) child. I couldn't find a simple way to do this, so this is what I came up with:

output="$(command...)" &
t=1
d=0
while (( "$t" < 120 && "$d" == 0 )); do
    sleep 1
    if jobs | grep -v 'Done' | grep -v 'Exit 1' | grep 'parse' > /dev/null; then
        t="$(( $t + 1 ))"
    else
        d=1
    fi
done
if (( "$d" == 0 )); then
    ps -AH | grep -A 10 "^ *$(jobs -l | awk '{print $2}')" | grep -B 10 ps | grep -v ps | awk '{print $1}' | while read pid; do
        kill -9 "$pid"
    done
    output=''
else
    output="$(command..)"
fi

My question is, is there a simpler way?

Swinger Party

2009-05-18T01:00:00.013-04:00

Last week's question: What is the legal status of the verdicts shown on court tv programs?

Apparently, the legality and degree of legal binding for these shows are done on a per show basis. The People's Court's verdict is supposed to be binding, as are the verdicts in Judge Judy. Judge Joe Brown's verdicts, however, has no real judicial power. What makes this partially interesting is that both the persecutor and the defendant are paid some amount to be on the show, and whatever damages award at the end are deducted/added to that payment as necessary. The only advantage to doing this over going to actual small claims court (which has a similar damage limit of $5,000) is that you get more publicity, and you don't have to get a lawyer. Still, I would never do something like that even if the public might be on my side. I just can't take seriously people who want to go on TV during a court case.

This week's question: I've visiting a local playground a lot lately, suddenly being in the mood to play on the swings. But why do kids (and adults) like to play on swings and slides?

Much Ado About Nothing

2009-05-15T01:00:00.019-04:00

I would like to offer a concrete example of my stoicism and rationality:

I think birthdays are stupid.

Imean, it's really all arbitrary. The earth year is merely acoincidence, depending on the mass of the earth and the sun and theconstant of gravitation (although, I supposed I could use the anthropic principle and say that any planet years would be roughly equal, toachieve life sustaining conditions). While this is important foragriculture, there is no reason would would celebrate this for ourbirth. And what's more, it's not even correct. We are celebrating ourbirthdays every 365 days, when it actually takes 365.242199 days forthe earth to go around the sun. That means every year, we arecelebrating earlier in earth's orbit - a whooping 387,483 miles fromwhere we celebrated last year. Add in leap years, and counter leapyears every 100 years (except the counter counter leap years every 400years), and that imprecision just builds up.

And what's soimportant about our piece of rock circling a giant ball of gas? Why notuse the lunar year - so we have birthdays every 27.3 earth rotations? Or the galactic year, which makes it's round once every 250 million years?Another nice and arbitrary one is the Halley year - which goes by theorbit of Halley's comet (who wasn't even the first person to observethat lump of ice).

We can even go the other way, and not justcelebrate birth days, but also birth months (30 days of partying!) andbirth seconds (make a wish! too late). And when you think about it,birth seconds are much better for your ego. Think about it:6,740,000,000/365.242199 = 18,453,508 people have the same birthday as you, while only 6,740,000,000/31,556,926 = 215 people have the samebirth second. If you go down to birth nano-seconds, then you'd even be/unique/. Think about that.

Oh, and there's the whole businesswith half-birthdays (which I guess are okay), unbirthdays (which areawesome, if only because it appears in Alice's adventures), as well asdecimal birthdays (which are just plain bad, because of the additionalarbitrariness of the decimal system. Really, people were arrogantenough to just use their number of fingers as the base?).

Personally,I think if you're going to celebrate someone's life, just celebrate itwhenever, I think I've listed enough birth-[time unit]s that you'llhave reasons to party for the rest of your life. So why not just enjoyyour day, take pleasure in being alive, and be glad that other peopleare suffering for 364.242199 days of the year?

Now, if you're happy and you know it... clap your hands!

The Data Experience

2009-05-13T01:00:00.083-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about the task of rapidly conveying vast amounts of information in a short period of time recently. I'm not sure why that has been on my mind. I'm calling it the data experience, because (perhaps with the thing on synesthesia and all) I feel that it is more than just data visualization, but it involves the other senses as well.

Experiencing data, if done properly, can give the sensation of more than just the 3D world we live in. For example, stress analysis simulations put areas of high stress in red, and areas of low stress in blue - for a 3D object. The color actually gives the model a fourth dimension. Of course, it's not the entire 4D object - in the case of stress analysis there is no such thing - but it is a mapping from 3-space to 1-space. Just as a 3D surface can be represented on a 2D graph with color (a heat map; the two representations can be combined), a 3D model with color can express a 4D surface. Although less common, other orthogonal features of graphs can be used to express other information, taking the visualization into even higher dimensions. An animated heat map (for example, a stress analysis which shows the change as the stress is applied then relieved) is convey 5D data. I can imagine other things - for example, perhaps the thickness of the mesh outline - which can be used to show even more information at once.

On the other hand, sometimes the data can just be in 3D, but the user experiences higher dimensions. One of the authors of The Mathematical Experience talks about a 4D intuition. A project at Brown University allows people to manipulate a tesseract (also known as a hypercube - a 4D structure where all edges are the same length and are orthogonal to every edge it shares a vertice with). By using the controls to rotate the virtual tesseract in different ways, the author suddenly could feel and reason about the tesseract, just as normal people can mentally rotate a cube. I find the possibility of lesser dimensional beings able to have an intuition about higher dimensional objects fascinating.

Another use of data visualization is not so much about the data, but about the visualizer's partition and organization of the world. Randall Munroe, for example, does this rather often, as does Indexed.

I don't have much more to say, but I would like to share some cool data experiences:

Did You Know - a video with surprising statistics. Notice how the background images are made to convey meaning as well, although this is now very common with newspaper polls and such.
AlloSphere - an enclosed sphere where sound and images can be used to help scientists explore connections.
TwitterVision - a simple but elegant way to show not only what people are doing, but where they are doing it.
Ball Droppings - a Google experiment with interactive AJAX. Not exactly data visualization, but it does link the different senses.

Finally, a recent example in my life. In psychology we were talking about the implicit association test (IAT). Usually this is done on a computer, so the response time can be measured to millesecond precision. That could not be demonstrated easily in class though, and so the professor did a cool analog. Instead of pressing a button, we had to slap one of our thighs to indicate where category an object belongs. The point is not to get it right - obviously there is no feedback between our legs and the computer - but to make the disassociated concepts apparent. Since people are slower with harder associations, but different people are slower by different amounts, what actually happens is with harder associations it would take the the class longer as a whole to return to silence. A simple, but very effective, way of showing how the IAT works, and a great example of why I call it the data experience.

Synesthesia

2009-05-11T01:00:00.038-04:00

Last week's question: how do people with grapheme-color synesthesia perceive ambigrams?

I talked to a friend who has graphame-color synesthesia, and did some "testing" with her. The results are at once unexpected and intuitive.

As she said in a comment for last week's post, the color all depends on the recognition of the letter. For normal text, even if the letters are upside-down, the colors would still be associated with them as long as they are legible. It makes sense, therefore, when she looks at an ambigram, the "color" of the letters change according to which interpretation she has in mind. If she consciously reads the ambigram upside-down, the letters will have those colors.

Getting to the heart of my question, the letters change color abruptly. If anything, there is a middle ground where she doesn't recognize the letters at all, and there is no color associated with the scribble. This is more clearly demonstrated when I showed her an unfamiliar ambigram sideways. Although she recognized one letter, the other were just scribbles to her, and so they remained black. Even after seeing the ambigram with the oriented correctly, when shown it sideways again it stills remains black, unless she tilts her head. She can't seem to get two colors appear with one glyph at the same time, like how in my favorite optical illusion it's hard to see the ballerina turning both ways at once.

The answer which I didn't know I wanted was that the color comes after recognition. It is not like the brain sees some lines, puts a color to it first, before the person recognizes it to be a letter. Rather, even if the person knows it's a letter, if the glyph is transformed (in this case, rotation and/or merged with other lines to form a different letter) and the person forces themselves to see just some scribbles, then the "letter" loses its color.

Personally, I'm intrigued by synesthesia, because of how it explicitly connects two unconnected stimuli. On some high level it works the same way as those leaps logic that people can do to get an unintuitive but effective solution. And sometimes, I wish I am a synesthete just so I can have that experience.

This week's question: a number of networks have "court tv" programs, where a prosecutor and a defendent get "tried" in front of a "judge", usually setting some small monetary issues up to several thousand dollars. What I want to know is, are the prosecutors and defendents legally bond to honor that verdict? Do the networks do anything to ensure that the money/goods changes hands? Or is this all just another "reality tv" show?

Labels and Folders

2009-05-08T01:00:00.087-04:00

In the last few years, the words "label" and "tag" have gotten a whole new meaning on social networks. del.icio.us, Gmail, flickr... you name it, you can probably tag it. Aside from the definite usefulness and convenience, tags are interesting to me because they are an example of an idea which broke the mold.

Try if you can (if you use Hotmail Windows Live Mail, it shouldn't be too hard) to remember what email was like without labels and tags (which are the same thing). We used these things called folders, and each email (oh yeah, we didn't have conversations, either) could only be in old folder at any time. The terminology is not surprising, because we borrowed that from how people organize real world letters on their desktop (I hope you're making the connection now). If you had a physical letter, then it could only go in one folder - unless you make copies, but then the copies don't reflect each other. If you highlighted one letter or made annotations, the other copy in another folder won't change to reflect that. Because this was the only way of treating communication, it was the model used for the first implementations of email.

Now, what I just said wasn't quite true. There are physical ways of giving an object several categories at once. They're what we call post-its. You can put different colored post-its in a book to note where, say, the author talks about the life of that time period versus the symbolism of socks. If they happen to be on the same page, no problem - you can tell the two apart because they're different colored. The only problem was that you couldn't tag a page with too many things - there's only so much page border for the post-its to stick out (not to mention that they only sell post-its in so many colors, although this can be mitigated by writing the theme on the post-it - hey, labels!).

When you think about it, tags are the logical extension of that. As mentioned, there is no limit to how many colors/labels you can have. This is only restricted by your ability to create strings (er, computer strings, that is, a series of characters). The adhesive on the post-it will also never die, and you can put as many labels on one thing as you want.

The digital tag can be thought of as a superset of folders. If you only put one tag on each object, then they act in the same way as folders. You can even put slashes (/) in the tags to simulate nested folders. And why not? Tags are more powerful than folders, and can keep the same feature (that is, it's backwards compatible). It seems to me that eventually the tag system will be moved offline to the desktop as well (if cloud computing doesn't completely eliminate the desktop market). I'm sure there are difficulties (the datastructures in the OS would have to be completely reorganized, for example), but I think the final result would be worth it.

On a side note: shortcuts on Windows, or links on Linux, allow sort of the same funcationality. One difference is that (for shortcuts and soft links) what is stored is not actually the file, but directions on how to find the file. It's like looking in a folder for one thing, then having something there telling you to look in another folder. Linux does offer hard links, which puts the actual file there (I'm dumbing this down; if you know better, good for you), but that's all just technical talk.

I really admire the person who thought to bring tags to the computer (according to Wikipedia, it was the del.icio.us folks. Kudos), because they're seeing through the limitations of the current system and doing something better (although it turns out not to be "new" in this case). In my mind I associate it with Newton and Leibniz seeing through functions and discovering calculus, or Einstein cutting through the luminiferous ether to arrive at relativity. Of course, tags are not quite as history making as those events, but there is something similar in the minds behind all of these creations.

I tried to think of more instances where people have taken ordinary concepts, applied it to computers, then created a more powerful and more general version of it, but I didn't come up with anything (except some weak ones, like bookmarks). Can you find any examples?

"bookmarks" (more like book darts now)

Thoughts on Being a Professor

2009-05-06T01:00:00.108-04:00

Faye tumbl'd upon a NY Times article which goes very well with what was on my mind.

Let me give some comments about the article first. There are some things which I disagree with - none more strongly, perhaps, than "young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence payand assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise offaculty appointments." While for some the decision to become a graduate student (and later on a professor) may indeed be an economic calculation, I - perhaps romantically and naively - believe that most choose to do so because they are interested in the field, and really do want to learn more about the subject.

That little note aside, however, I find Taylor's op-ed most accurate, both on economic and academic sides of university education. Let me start with the economic side.

As Taylor noted, the tenure system works against free-market economics. There is no incentive for tenured professors to continue working on break-through research (except the personal interest mentioned above, which for the same reason I cannot consider insignificant). In fact, I think the abolishment of tenure can help academia in at least three (inter-related) ways:

Professors need to work hard even after tenure, so it increases their output
Professors who lose tenure will leave spots open for recent graduates
Both of the above increases the competition for professorship, and thus the overall quality of professors increase.

Note I don't mean to imply that all professors slack off after tenure; however, the fact that the system allows them to do so means the system is broken.

Of course, the abolishment of tenure has some implications. A good question to ask to arrive at those are, why was the idea of tenure created in the first place? According to Wikipedia, tenure was created to guarantee the academic freedom of professors, so that they can investigate what they are truly interested in, without fear of an unapproving administration or board of trustees. But in this sense, tenure is no more than a legally binding contract, saying what the university can and cannot fire the professor for. And for that, any legal contract will do, regardless of the length of the contract. Additionally, since tenure approval is given by a committee of other professors, academics who don't folow the majority opinion are unlikely to get tenure in the first place. Examples include Norman Finkelstein (who was mentioned in a reference in the above Wikipedia article) and a whole host of others, the cases for which you can read about on the American Association of University Professor (AAUP) website.

Before I read the NYTimes article, I had spent a lunch talking with a friend about the tenure system. Our conclusions were surprisingly similar to what Taylor suggested. We thought that tenure should not be lifetime, but limited in scope, and subject to regular review. In particular, we thought of something like a year of evaluation, and if it is satisfactory then you get four years of "tenure". The continuous seven year contract which Taylor suggests is probably easier to implement, as one year is not a very long time for evaluation, and there's always the possibility of professors delaying the publishing of results (what?) until their year of evaluation.

Besides addressing the problem of tenure, Taylor's op-ed actually spends a lot of time on restructuring university departments. I have expressed before my concern that I am not knowledgeable enough (the post script for this post) to do anything ground-breaking. I don't know what the balance between the breadth of knowledge and the depth of field is. Taylor seems to lean towards the side of breath of knowledge, with the restructuring of departments to be problem based. There are, however benefits to being around people in the same field. Problems in AI may have been previously solved by people working on systems (for example, synchronization is more often discussed in the latter context than the former), and these problems would be unique to that field. So while I think putting faculty and students into problem-oriented groups is a good idea, I think the current grouping by subject should also be kept. One structure for breadth, the other for depth.

That's all I have to say for now. I recently read parts of Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, which offers a critique of the education scene. Although it was written over 20 years ago, I find the trends it describes still accurate, if not more so, today. We disagree on the cause of the trends, but Bloom makes it clear that it's a problem. But that's a story for another time.

Colored Language

2009-05-04T01:00:00.095-04:00

Last week's question: what answers do people give for the question "why do good things happen to bad people?

Here's a survey of what people have written. These were taken off the first 6 pages of Google results, searching for the question without quotes. Just browsing through, it's clear that people as the reverse question (bad things to good people) quite a bit more often. A quoted search gives 72,700 for bad things/good people, but only 4,200 for good things/bad people.

I'm a little surprised, because I think it's a much more bothersome question. Let's take a look at what people think.

Justice is delayed, not non-existent

This is in essence the same answer to the bad things/good people question. The idea is that there is an objective good and you will be rewarded, but that reward is not immediate (read: it will come after you die). In the same vein, punishment is not immediate either.

It's all Satan's trick; just focus on what God has given us

This is an interesting explanation, because the logical extensions are curious. Paying attention on what God has given us, while it's not a bad thing, is not really a solution. It is implied that justice is delayed, or that what you get in this life is not as important as what you get in the next one. Otherwise, if it is Satan's trick, then Satan seems to be a perfectly valid way of getting rewards. But if that's the case, why aren't people giving up their posessions and living like Mother Teresa? Behaviorially, then, wordly posessions do have some value. Turning inwards to what we do have, therefore, is more ignoring the problem than an explanation.

It's to show God is merciful to everyone (who are all bad)

I assume that God is merciful to them is so they may repent... when the "bad people" do well in this life, and don't believe that they do well because of God, but because of what they did. That is, they're probably not going to repent. Also, it's delayed for the good people, so the good people can... what?

The "good things" may not be really good

Sure. The people with "good things" (ie. wealth) also have bankruptcies and divorces. But not all of them do. Just as one bad thing happening to a single good person makes justice questionable, one good thing happening to a single bad person asks the same questions. That's like saying, oh, that good person is vegetative in a hospital, so he won't be rained on now. Great.

It is paid for in something else, like regret and guilt

You don't feel guilt if you don't get caught. Also, fascinating discussion on circumcision/"genital mutilation".

No Christian would take a bad-person-with-good-thing's place

Yeah, not all atheists have horrible family lives. Please. To put it in perspective, would you change places with someone who talks to an invisible friend every week, who believe they and other people are sometimes possessed by spirits, and that there are shadowy figures plotting to ruin their lives at every turn? No, it's not a delusional new-age conspiracy theorist (or John Nash crossed with Emily Rose). Just prayers, the Holy Ghost, and Satan respectively.

My personal answer? Dumb luck. Some people just get lucky, and others get unlucky. Deal with it.

This week's question: Synesthesia is the intriguing phenomenon that some people have. Synesthetes, as those with synesthesia are called, have two senses inexplicably linked, such that when one sense is activated, they involuntarily experience something in the other sense as well. One of the most common forms of synesthesia is grapheme-color synesthesia, where letters, numbers, and parts of words are associated with a color. Given this type of synesthesia, how do synesthetes perceive ambigrams?

PS. I have no idea what the answer is, so if you know someone with grapheme-color synesthesia, can I contact them and find out? Thanks.

First Date?

2009-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

I learned something cool in social psychology today. Psychologists Don Dutton and Arthur Aron did a study, commonly called the "bridge study", where they tried to see if people would misattribute adrenaline due to fear/anxiety to attraction (Wikipedia/paper). They found that people did tend to "report" more sexual imagery when they took the participated in the experiement after crossing a narrow suspension bridge, and they were more likely to accept a phone number ("to find out the results of the experiement") than if they just crossed a solid concrete bridge.

I thought about this result, and came to this idea: doesn't this mean that on first dates you should do something that's adrenaline inducing? A thriller, a roller coaster ride, rock climbing... anything to get those adrenaline flowing, so it can be misattributed to you.

That sounds like a fun psychology experiement...

I have a midterm today...

2009-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

... so I'll be lazy and put some jokes.

http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff88/shimitaor/emo_lawn.jpg

http://nsfw-comix.com/comix/nsfw-crayemo.jpg

Q: Why don't vapires play poker?
A: They get nervous when the stakes are raised.

Q: Why isn't there a varsity golf team?
A: Because golf is a club sport.

Q: What's a will?
A: That's a dead giveaway.

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: Because all the English majors wanted to see poultry in motion.

Good People, Bad People

2009-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

Last week's question: How are rain, sleet, snow, and hail formed respectively?

In general, all precipitation is caused by ice crystals forming and growing in the upper atmosphere, until it's large enough to overcome gravity and fall (the Bergeron process). For rain, it passes through a layer of warm air underneath, thus melting the ice. If there's another layer of cold air after that, whether near the surface or not, the rain may freeze again into sleet. For both of these, the ice crystals form around ice nuclei; for snow, however, the ice itself is the nuclei. In an environment where there is a lot of water droplets and not a lot of ice, the droplets contact the ice and add to it, building a larger snow flake.

Personally, I find hail the most interesting one. Only able to form in storm clouds, hail starts off as ice crystals like everything else. However, the updraft of the storm lifts the ice crystal back up, so it falls again and more water can freeze on the surface. This happens again and again until the updraft is not strong enough to lift the crystal, and a ball of ice falls as hail.

This week's question: A common question to religious people is why bad things happen to good people. The answer is usually something along the lines of it being a test, to see if people will remain faithful. Until I thought of it, however, I have not heard anyone ask the other question: why do good things happen to bad people?

PS. jrscheung asked me where these questions come from. Some of them, like this one, are things I've always wanted to know but never took the time to find out. Posting them here is a promise to find the answer. Some are questions that other people have asked (such as the insane voter one: Q/A) which piqued my curiosity. Others are thoughts I have, like this week's, and the rest... are usually just things I found out which I find interesting.

Social Search

2009-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

For one of my classes I recently had to suggest a new search engine feature then make a pitch about it. That was what started the cree.pr project. Most of the pitches weren't that interesting (no offense to anyone in the class reading this), but after hearing a whole bunch of them I had a revelation: Social search is a crappy idea.

Here by social search I mean something where the results shown are somehow influenced by what previous users have done. Now, it's not the case that social search is useless. There are entire communities built upon finding out what other people have done, and using the "wisdom of the crowd" to just take the cream of the cream.

But aggregating social information to make search results better is a crappy suggestion, because it's one of the defaults things you can do to improve search. It is the same thing as saying in a science experiement that "more data would have made the results more accurate". Well, duh. Similar suggestions would be to use more CPUs or build more datahubs.

So people, please actually think of something partially innovative next time.

Meritocracy vs. Diversity

2009-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

I recently finished Daniel Golden's book Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges. The main thesis of his book is that colleges, instead of admitting people based purely on how strong they are academically, are instead giving an advantage to those with "hooks": athletes, children of big donors, alumni, faculty, or celebrities (in both popular culture and politics). The ideal admission policy is a meritrocracy - if you can demonstrate that you are good at school, then you get in.

At the same time, Golden is also a proponent of diversity on college campuses. That is, the student body of colleges should have the same distributions of race and social status as the nation at large.

Here's an uncomfortable truth: meritocracy and diversity, in the current social state of the nation, cannot coexist perfectly.

What do we mean by merit? The problem is that the demonstration of merit often times requires opportunities, which unlike intelligence is not distributed evenly across the population. Let's say someone has a lot of potential at computer programming, but happened to be born into a household that could not afford computers. There is minimal computer training in schools, and so this person never develops this potential, despite being better at it than a lot of other people. Should this person be admitted to a top computer science program? In theory, yes, although of course the admissions officers see nothing to indicate this person's competence in the field, and therefore in practice, no.

Here's another uncomfortable truth: there are objective truths to steorotypes.

Due to the unequal opportunities given to people of different races and social statuses, it is true that white Americans have a much higher graduation rate from high school than black Americans. Ideally, social policies would eliminate this difference, but so far it has failed to do so completely (though I'm sure it has made big steps in that direction). Because of this measurable statistic, it is scientifically valid to have a priori assumptions about someone's education level depending on their race/background.

This about it this way. If I tell you that in a bag of marbles, 67.4% are striped. In another bag, 44.7% are striped. If you draw a marble from the first bag and had to guess whether it was striped, you would probably say yes. Draw from the second bag, however, and you'd probably say no.

67.4% is the percentage of Asians 25 and over with some college experience; 44.7% is the percentage for Blacks (source). Just because the objects are now people, and the attributes are now education level, doesn't change the way these probabilities are analyzed.

Back to diversity. If Golden's idea of diversity is to be realized, then colleges should take, say, the top 15% of its applicants of each race. Factor in socioeconomic diversity, and it will be the top 15% of each race-status group. This process is a rough equivalent of giving "admission points" to applicants who come from challenging backgrounds; there's an assumption here that people of the same economic status has the same (or lack the same) opportunities. Of course, it's possible to do this on an individual level, but whether there are resources available to evaluate each applicant that carefully is questionable.

In either case, it is clear that this group is not equal to the top 15% of the entire pool of applicants. Any kind of standard of merit can be used; as long as race and socioeconomic status influences the opportunities a student gets (and I fear it always will), meritocracy and diversity are not mutually compatible.

The question is, which one do we value more? Politically, of course, we want to say that our colleges give the same chances to everyone, that we are race and wealth blind; educationally, colleges want the brightest students, so when they graduate they will add to the list of alumni with high accomplishments. What societal factors are making colleges choose the first over the second?

I am personally in favor of a pure meritocracy, racial and economic diversity be damned. But then again, I am Asian, I come from a well-off family, and I consider myself (pretty) above average.

All Hail Rain, Sleet, and Snow

2009-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

Last week's question: are patients in mental institutions allowed to vote?

This is actually a rather touchy question, and its answer has changed over the years as our understanding of the human mind has grown. It used to be that there was really vague language describing who could and could not vote. As far as I can tell, this decision is given to the state. The constitution says nothing about the right to vote of people who are insane, but only that people cannot be barred from voting by reason of their gender or their age (as long as they are above 18).

One example of vague wording is in the New Jersey State Constitution. Before 2007-11-06, Article II Section I Paragraph 6 of the constitution read:

No idiot or insane person shall enjoy the right of suffrage.

However, an amendment passed to change it to the current:

No person who has been adjudicated by a court of competent jurisdictionto lack the capacity to understand the act of voting shall enjoy theright of suffrage.

There is a difference in the wording of the two, in that someone who is insane may still have the capacity to understand the act of voting. I have not done any searches, but I suspect there are similar clauses in the constitutions of other states.

For those interested, here's a case where the state tried to bar people from voting.

This week's question: What atmospheric variables cause the formation of rain, snow, sleet, hail?

Dolphins!

2009-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

Some of you may recall I did a project last year where I had to design a toy for the dolphins at Shedd Aquarium (for those who don't, here's a magazine article about us; I look absolutely horrible in that picture). Another team recently finished that project, with a working apparatus. It's a little weird knowing that I came up with an idea, and a year later it's in physical form.

Anyway, during those two quarters I learned to sketch dolphins, and did a few sketches in my notes. I've forgotten how to do them already, but when I was reclaiming an old notebook I found the sketches, so I thought I'd put them online.

They're on my DeviantArt gallery:

There's also a quick sketch which I did at Canyonlands, my only personal souvenir (I have 4.5 GB of pictures and videos from other people on the trip).

I challenge you to find time and create some art, however bad it is.

Picture Week!

2009-04-15T01:00:00.002-04:00

Lately I've been getting lazier about actually writing content. Every so often I have artistic urges, and so why not do a picture week (= this and the next post)?

I drew this last week:

Insane Voters

2009-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00

Last week's question: at what level of anthropomorphing can animals take over the world?

I think we should first look at how animals are most often anthropomorphized. From personal experience:

Speech
Motivation
Reasoning

And really, I think that's enough. The "anthropomorphing" of speech is really a way to express the assumption that animals cannot communicate with each other. It is clear that at least some animals do - whales, dophins, dogs (to an extent). Of course, these are never cross-species, and speech allows them to do that.

In fact, all three traits are somewhat amplifications of what animals do naturally, or rather, without being aware of them. And what does giving animals human motivations and reasoning do? It lets them inspect themselves, to think as we think.

That's all it takes. Humans survive because of our brains, and to support that we have become physically weak, much weaker than other animals. And if athropomorphic animals get that brain power for free... we're doom.

This week's question: Are patients in mental institutes allowed to vote?

PS. Thanks Yvonne

Stranger Appeal

2009-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00

The xkcd blag recently introduced me to Omegle, a chat service which connects you to another stranger. The idea is intriguing, and looking at the comments for the post, many xkcdians have found meaningful conversations through the site.

This is my latest find in the category of sites which connect you to people, which I think has the potential to forge deeper connections. These include:

Really only BlogTV and Omegle is active; the other two you learn about people, but they never learn about you.

There is something carthartic in learning about strangers, and telling your deepest secrets. In some sense it's like a one-night-stand - you have no obligation to do anything with their secret, and it's just for the release of lifting a burden.

I'm actually working on a search engine for a course this quarter, which I've titled cree.pr. As can be imagined, it's a people search engine, and it aims to automatically compile as full a profile as possible of someone's online activity.

But sometimes talking to a stranger is not enough. There is something to be said about meeting someone in person, having them in front of you. But then it takes courage to say what you mean. I used to not have that courage, but I do now.

Although, none of the above has worked out to well so far. I'll keep trying though.

Empty

2009-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

I really know nothing about politics. This is more a play on words than anything else.

The World Without Us

2009-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00

Last week's question: How are the arches at Arches formed?

You can tell I'm running out of ideas when the questions are so straight forward. The arches are actually formed the same way as any other rock formation - through wind and water erosion. It's just that the rocks on top have the correct hardness and weight to withstand the erosion while the center crumbles away.

Boring, right?

This week's question is more interested. Literature has featured anthropomorphic animals for a long time. What spieces, and at what point of anthropomorphing, can animals take over (ie. extinguish, possibly drive to extinction) the human race?

Mood:

But it's really the title text I like: "When I say we should do something sometime, I'm secretly hoping you'll say 'Why not now?'"

Wizard's First Rule

2009-04-03T01:00:00.001-04:00

Recently the developers have been discussing the possibility of addingsome additional optimizations to our i686 port to improve multimediasupport. This would involve reducing the compatibility with oldersystems. As some of you may have heard,this discussion has resulted in the decision to focus exclusively onthe x86_64 port. The overall opinion of the developers is that thex86_64 port is now complete enough to justify this decision and thatthis is in keeping with Arch's philosophy of supporting currentgeneration hardware. The x86_64 architecture has been available since2002 (compared to i686 which is from 1995), and we believe most of ouri686 users have x86_64 compatible hardware.

-- Arch Linux Team

I got this in my RSS feed (from Arch Latest News) on Tuesday night (around 23:00), and I was really annoyed for the next hour after that. Arch Linux dropping i686 support? What am I going to do with my laptop? I don't want to reinstall everything on a completely different distro, especially since that practically promises to slow down my computer and make it less customizable. I forwarded this Genia (who has been planning to switch over to Arch after trying out Ubuntu for a while), telling her to reconsidering the switch.

It was only until Wednesday night around 22:30 did I realize it was Arch Linux's April Fool's joke. I have never fallen for something as big as this (although I was Rickrolled twice by Ryan - I just click on links by instinct, and if it's not what I want I close them. Thanks mouse gestures). I recognized Google's joke right away - Google CADIE is so far ahead in the AI curve that it can't real. Also around the Northwestern campus there were posters about Jon Stewart coming to campus, which turned out to be a hoax. I did not see the posters myself, but was told this by a friend. My first question was on the organization which is bringing him to campus, but since my friend didn't know, we switched topics to comparing Stewart and Colbert instead.

So Arch dropping i686 support is the only hoax I really fell for. Why? Wizard's First Rule.

People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believealmost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a liebecause they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid itmight be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, andbeliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. Peopleare stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie andthe truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all theeasier to fool.

-- Wizard's First Rule, by Terry Goodkind

Or, in a one sentence summary:

The first step to believing something is wanting to believe it is true, or being afraid it is.

The only hoax I really had enough knowledge to dispell is Google's, because of my background in computer science. For Jon Stewart coming to speak, I had no immediate interest. I used to watch The Daily Show, but have stopped since the middle of last quarter. My lack of preference allowed my rationality to kick in, and ask who was bringing him to campus. For Arch though, the idea of them dropping support for i686 is not out of the ballpark - they've dropped support for popular things before (for example, the official Sun JRE and JDF packages). The post even had links to forum discussions, and knowing that Arch is a fairly international distro, that the discussion was not in English did not surprise me. Since this was plausible, and after reading it I was afraid it was true (and didn't bother visiting the Arch forums, because I was sure there would be a lot of complaining - again, April Fool's completely out of my mine), I took the joke hook, line, and sinker.

The funny thing was, for most of the day I was pretty aware that it's April Fool's, and took a lot of things with a grain of salt. And still Arch took my completely by surprise.

I have to say, good job Arch Team. Keep up the good work.

Spring Break

2009-04-01T01:15:00.000-04:00

I hope you all enjoyed my lolcat last week. I'm glad to say that the broken spring has been fixed:

So we can go on.

The group has uploaded a shit ton of pictures on Facebook, but since I'm compiling them into a giant (3.5Gb+) file for download anyway, I've selected a few which I think represents the best of the trip.

Please note that I did not take any of the photographs - all the scenery and framing belongs to the respective owners.

Welcome to spring quarter, everyone.

Arches' arches

2009-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

Last week's question: what are the fluid dynamics of drafting?

Drafting is the practice of staying behind another moving object to reduce the energy needed to move. This is possible because when air moves past an object, there is a small area behind said object where the air cannot reform as rapidly, creating an area of low pressure. This low pressure is filled by pulling nearby particles, including those of the following object, towards it, hence saving energy on the following object's part.

Despite this somewhat technical explanation, I can't see to find fluid flow diagrams of drafting. Maybe someone would be so kind as to provide one?

This week's question: How are the stone arches in Arches National Park and elsewhere formed?

Smile!

2009-03-27T01:00:00.002-04:00

I had this conversation more than once with a GSW student this quarter:

Her [working on the problem, looking up to see me smiling]: What? What are you smiling at?
Me: I'm not laughing at you. I smile at everything.

This is becoming truer and truer over time. I don't literally smile all the time, but I see humor in a lot of things. Even if people who smile don't do so well in life, they tend to have more fun... which is the point, right?

My dad has always had this work/play distinction. This is a quote from an actual email he sent me:

Sometimes, I ask myself, am I a bit selfish? Many people start workingfor charity after retirement - to continue to use their knowledge andexperience to help the society grow, and to help the under-privilegedpeople. On the other hand, I think that I have also spent the last 30years actively involved in the building and managing an excellentrailway for the people of Hong Kong. Considering that I work 12 to 14hours a day, I think I have worked for 45 years already, based on an8-hour day. I think I have done my part and I do not owe the societyanything. Any extra effort must be extra. Should I start playing now,do the things I like to do, reserve the remaining time of my life tomyself and spend the time with the people around me? I do not minddoing some volunteer work, but it must not be "work".

The above may seem far-reaching to you. As you know, I always adopt thevalue of "Work Hard, Play Hard". Work must come first. If I do not workhard in my younger days, I cannot figure out how I can play hard. I maynot even have the money for you and your brother to attend an internationalschool and study abroad! Having said all these, I am not asking you totake me as an example. You should always balance working and playing,although still giving "work" the priority. Does that make sense?

We often had semi-philosophical discussions like this, so it wasn't surprising. I wrote back,

About working: you know I've always had a different view. Workingshould be playing, damn it. Yes you should spent time hiking, running,or something that makes you happy, but why shouldn't working make youhappy too? I'm teaching this quarter, and I get paid $400 a quarter. Ienjoy teaching, and I enjoy watching people learn. If I didn't, Iprobably wouldn't have applied for the job in the first place. So yes,"work hard, play hard," but preferably "at the same time."

Besides, the most famous scientists all had a great sense of humor. Einstein:

And Feynman:

who played the bongo drums. He also said to People magazine after getting his Nobel prize, "If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize." Nuts.

In fact, Freeman Dyson thought being funny is highly related to these two's fame:

Scientists who become icons must not only be geniuses but alsoperformers, playing to the crowd and enjoying public acclaim. Einsteinand Feynman both grumbled about the newspaper and radio reporters whoinvaded their privacy, but both gave the reporters what the publicwanted, sharp and witty remarks that would make good headlines. Hawkingin his unique way also enjoys the public adulation that his triumphover physical obstacles has earned for him.

Really the important thing, I think, is making your work fun. I totally agree with Paul Graham, who's essay How to Do What You Love I've referenced ad nauseum. With academia it's easy - I won't go into a field I didn't like anyway.

To drive home the point, here's a TED talk by Stuart Brown on why play is vital.

OH HAI

2009-03-25T01:00:00.005-04:00

Im in ur mekanicle systemz

breakin ur springz.

Drafting

2009-03-23T01:00:00.045-04:00

Last week's question: Why do things appear smaller when they are further away?

This intriguing problem actually has very little discussion. I found several discussion boards, but the people on there are either really confused or half crazy. The last link is the best explanation, although it was also touched on in the other discussion boards.

But in any case, I figured out the solution before reading the boards. It's nice to have my answers checked though.

What happens is that as objects are further away, the angle it forms in our eyes is smaller. All the light has to pass through a small hole (the pupil for the human eye, some other form of lens for cameras and video recorders) before this gets processed. The larger the angle, the larger than image is. When an object is up close, light from that object forms a very obtuse angle. This translates to a large image. When things are further, however, the angle is smaller. This correspondingly makes the image smaller.

The second part of the question was why this was the case. This is the case because light travels in a straight line. If light curved before entering recording device to make a bigger angle, or otherwise curved after that point and before it hits the retina, then closer objects could appear smaller than large ones. But our vision would also be greatly distorted.

In fact, I wonder if there are animals whose eyes work like this.

This week's question: What are the fluid dynamics of drafting in cycling or driving?

Trains and Skip Lists

2009-03-20T01:00:00.037-04:00

I was on the El to the airport the other day (for my Michigan visit, actually), and I was wondering how the train system could be improved. Someone once suggested that the network should be built like a spider web centered around down town Chicago. There would be trains which take you down town, but also other lines which circle the city. A line like that would certainly make the trip from Evanston to O'Hare a lot shorter, but it's a costly way to make the train system efficient.

Instead, as a nerd computer scientist, I thought about how trains are kind of like linked lists. You start at some node, but to get to another node you have to go through everything that's in between. This is, of course, as opposed to arrays, where you can just jump to the node you need.

And then I realized, people have solved this problem in computer science before. The solution: skip lists. These are not data structures normally taught in courses (although I heard that has changed since I took it... sigh), but the principle it functions on is simple. Going with the train analogy (and only going one way for the moment), instead of having one train stop at every station, you have several trains/tracks. One would stop at every station, another would stop at every other station, then every fourth, eighth, and so on. Getting to your destination would then involve transferring to trains that skip more and more stations, stay on that train until its next stop is past yours, then transfer to slower and slower trains.

Of course, this idea is not new to transportation companies either. Usually it's given the name "express". The only difference is that the express tends only to run during rush hours, and not otherwise. That is understandable - if there aren't that many passengers, profit will be low or even non-existent if there are several trains going around rather than just one.

And yet, the tracks are already there. Between Howard and Fullerton the Red and Purple Lines run on separate tracks. They don't stop at the same stations (except Belmont), but the tracks are there for this to happen.

So here's what I suggest. Instead of doing the whole skip-2, skip-4, skip-8 system, which would require a separate track for each train, just use two tracks. Have the express do a skip-4 or something otherwise in the middle. The express will then travel roughly 4 times faster than the normal train, greatly speeding up travel. At the end of each track, just do a merge to change sides, and the trains are ready to go back.

Unfortunately, in the current economic climate no one will do this. It's probably prohibitively expensive, and will never get enough passengers. And the space to get 4 tracks (2 there and 2 back) is also pricey. But it looks good on paper!

And that is how computer science (tries to) impact real life.

Car Seating

2009-03-18T01:00:00.009-04:00

We have 19 people going on spring break, including myself. I've been thinking about how to organize people in the three vans, and came up with this:

A legend is available, although I did not show the single arrow relations... :D

The problem is that only the people in blue and red are drivers, and the people in red each own one of the vans (and therefore must be in separate cars). The drivers should split evenly between the three cars. I also tried to maintain the male:female ratio in each car.

I assigned points to the relationships (1 to acquaintances, 2 to friends, 4 to boy/girl friends), and derived this:

Clearly the current solution is better than the old one (by a whole 8 points!).

This problem is NP-complete, and while I could write an algorithm to exhaustively search the space of possible allocations,

It's probably tedious, especially with the male:female constraints
I don't feel like it
I think this is a near optimal solution (read: good enough).

It's rather amazing how the human eye can so quickly form a near optimal solution, while a computer has to calculate the points for each configuration separately.

I am open to better solutions.