Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.