The new blog is here.
I'll be leaving all this up on Blogger until whenever it gets shuffled off in to the electronic aether, but I won't be updating here anymore. All of the archives from this site have been copied over to the new one. So yeah. It's been a good run, what with Blogger being free and all. The new site is not free (as in, I pay a hosting fee; you still won't pay anything), but it's worth the money, because it is that awesome.
A brank-spanking new blog is coming soon. And by that, I mean actually the same blog, but hosted in a new location, with a new layout, and more flexibility. I'm excited.
Is the title of a song by Randy Hanzlick, who is (or perhaps was) a real live medical doctor who writes (wrote?) songs as a hobby. This particular song was printed on a 45 in 1980 in a run of about a thousand, but is now available on a larger scale as a track on Dr. Demento's 30th Anniversary Collection, which is where I'm getting my information from.
The interesting thing, and the reason that I bring it up at all, is that I just found that same quote attributed to Tom Waits, who apparently used the line in a TV show in 1977. So it would at second blush appear that this line, like all great lines, originated with Tom Waits.
But wait! There's a comment on this page which would seem to indicate that Dr. Hanzlick came up with the title of his song indepently of Fernwood 2 Night. But then again, according to that source, Dr. Hanzlick "saw it written on a bathroom wall," which is suspiciously similar to a quip Waits made about the origin of the line in the interview linked above. Will we never extricate ourselves from this labyrinth of minutiae?
Perhaps the important point is not who said it, but rather that it was said at all. Perhaps the phrase expresses a truth of such fundamental importance that both men gave voice to it completely independently. Yeah. Dig it.
The big news in my life is that I just moved to Chicago. This is how I knew I was there:
I was riding home on the el with my friends, when a man tapped me on the shoulder, and this is what he said:
“Hey, man, wassure shirt say? I would… kill everyone in this… room… for a drop… of sweat beer… Hom… Homer… J… Simpson… Yeah, man, thaz what I’m talkin bout. Thazza fine shirt. You okay.”
Our new friend sat down right next to us. He wore a small goatee, a beat up sweater, and blooshot eyes. As it turned out, he had a lot of things to say, and he said them many times. What follows is a selection of the parts that I feel are most relevant, and that I could also understand:
“White power, baby. Fuck those niggas, what the hell, what the hell they doing. I’m not wanting to offend anybody, you know, but for real, white power. High five, man.”
The man was black himself, and we were glad that the other people on the train were all wearing headphones.
Like the mantra of a devoted swami, he chanted along to the station announcements at every stop.
“This is Clark. Diversy is next. Doors open an the right at Diversy.”
“Standin passengers, please don lean gainst the doors.”
Except he usually missed that one.
“Y’all know George W. Bush? I luuuv him. I’m not tryin t’ offend y’all or anythin, but if I was a woman, I would have his babies. George W. Bush, Bush Sr, Dick Cheney, all them, I want to get down and dirty with em. If I was a woman I would fuck George W. Bush all night long, know what I’m sayin? I’m not tryin ta offend, that’s just the way I feel. They could do me in the ass, man. Course I’m jus sayin all this, I’ma married man.”
“Doors open on the left at Division.”
He noticed that a couple of people in the group were girls.
“Man, women are the best, y’all know what I’m sayin? You gonna take me there, girl? Take me there!” snap snap
His fingers were more than a bit crusty, but for all that he could snap them very loudly, and he did, many times. The sound was made louder by his fingers’ proximity to our faces.
“Take me there, girl! You gonna take me there?” snap snap
The girl he was talking to: “I don’t know where we’re going!”
“You don need to know; you jus gotta get there.” snap snap
He was going somewhere. None of us knew where, and we didn’t stay to find out.
My train has just begun a five-year layover, and I for one can’t believe it spent so long tooling around the south. Chicago is the best place ever.
“Standin passenger, please don lean gainst the doors.”
Special Thoughtful Note
That all really happened. I didn't have to make up any of it. I'm sorry if it offended you. I thought it was hilarious.
I've spent too much time talking about how awesome Macs are recently, so this post is intended to return the discourse to another subject near and dear to my heart, alcohol. Specifically, sangria.
Sangria is a drink that comes from Spain originally. It's like fruit punch, but with booze. I make it pretty often, and people seem to think it generally tastes okay, so I'm gonna go over the recipe I use. It'll be fun.
First, these are the things that go in sangria and some preliminary rambling about them: wine, fruit, sugar, orange liqueur. That's it, actually.
There's more wine than anything else in sangria, and usually it's red. Sangria made with white wine is called sangria blanco, and you need to put different things in it. Don't fiddle with that shit. Red wine is the way to go. You don't need to get amazing red wine; you're going to dump a bunch of sugar and fruit juice in with it, so if it doesn't taste perfect you'll probably never notice. You probably want to shoot for something fruity rather than dry. I've used Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Merlot, Merlot, and I think some other things to good effect. Something like Shiraz or Chianti is probably not the sangria wine you're looking for. Actually, Chianti might work pretty well. I should try that. Yellow Tail is great for sangria.
On to fruit. As with everything in life, fresh is always better. However, I have found (through countless hours, selflessly spent, of experimentation) that using bottled orange juice and lemon juice in lieu of freshly squeezed tends to not make a huge difference in the quality of the sangria. On the other hand, you absolutely should use fresh fruit to make fruit slices to put in the sangria.
Some chefs, such as Emeril Lagasse, recommend the use of a top-shelf liqueur such as Grand Marnier to flavor your sangria. Mr. Lagasse may be an outstanding chef, but he is a piss-poor drunkard, and I assure you that the subtle and delightful features of Grand Marnier or Cointreau (which presumably justify their top shelf price) will be completely drowned in a sea of wine and fruit juice if they are used in sangria. All you care about is giving the concoction a little orange-flavored kick, and for that a seven-dollar bottle of triple sec is your best option.
You also need to make sure you get a big pot or pitcher; you'll end up with about 2.5 L of sangria if you follow the instructions. And that's it for introductory rambling. Here's the recipe.
Ingredients:
Procedure:
That's all there is to making sangria. Give it a shot; don't even worry about sticking to the recipe. Sangria, like your mother, is very flexible. In the words of Cole Porter, quoted here from Box, Hunter, and Hunter,
Experiment.
Make it your motto day and night.
Experiment
And it will lead you to the light.
The apple on the top of the tree
Is never too high to achieve,
So take an example from Eve,
Experiment.
I think it is the funniest thing in the world that Box, Hunter, and Hunter use that quote to preface their textbook on statistics and experimental design.
As planned, I bought a MacBook a couple of weeks ago, and I've been using it pretty obsessively since it showed up in the mail. It's really nice, and I want to talk about why, but not for very long.
My background is Windows, and before that MS-DOS. The first computer I ever used was a Tandy 1000 SL. It had no hard drive, just two 5 1/4" floppy drives. You booted everything off of a floppy disk. It could run all kinds of awesome games, like Think Quick. These worms chased you around some castle, but you could use a plunger to distract them. It was great. Also, I wrote book reports for school with this word-processing program; I can't remember the name of it. The instruction manual for the program included this whole murder mystery story to explain how to use the cut-copy-paste functionality of the program. Instruction manuals nowadays are uninspired and banal.
The second computer we had was a CompuAdd, and it ran Windows 3.1. Windows 3.1 was all right in my book; it was a thin veil you could lay on top of MS-DOS to make it prettier, and like MS-DOS, it was pretty stable. That computer ran Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, which is when I learned how to look things up in an almanac.
Since then, the family's had several computers, all running Windows. It's gotten progressively worse, as most people who use it have noticed. XP, now that it's been out for however many years, is pretty stable, and that's cool. It took them two major service packs to get it that way, though. This is what happens when I boot my Windows computer running XP (the machine has a 1.8 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM):
This is what happens when I boot my new MacBook (2.0 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM):
This is how you install a program in Windows: download the file, run the install program, which asks you about where you want to put the program, do you want a desktop icon, do you want a start menu icon, do you want to associate files with it, you need to restart your computer, BLAH!
This is how you install a program on Mac OS: download the disk image thing, double click it, and drag the program to your Applications directory. Boom.
It's silly to try to say that one operating system is "better" in some qualitative, absolute sense. But Mac OS is better for me. And also in general.
At this point, I am, in fact, completely off the Microsoft. I have a ton of Word and Excel files lying around, but there's this group called OpenOffice.org, and also NeoOffice for the Mac, which makes a suite of programs which have almost all the functionality of the Microsoft Office Suite, but are free. And that's a good price.
There's nothing else I can say about the Mac OS that hasn't already been said too many times. To me, the biggest difference between it and Windows is this: in Windows, you constantly have the feeling that you are using things that were hacked together early in the development process, and then got a fresh coat of paint quickly applied before being released. On the Mac, you constantly have the feeling that someone sat down and thought hard about the programs you're using and spent a lot of time polishing them before they ever got to you. Maybe you don't agree with their decisions all the time, but they were at least actively making design choices, and that counts for a lot. Now I'm done.
There's a very interesting discussion I ran across today regarding Mac OS X. Since this post will essentially be me doing nothing more than aping their ideas, I'll summarize it quickly. The discussion is also fairly long; it's thanks to the oversight (or lack thereof) in my government-funded internship position that I was afforded the leisure to go through it myself.
Mark Pilgrim is a computing professional and 22-year Apple user who recently wrote a post for his blog describing his decision to abandon the Mac OS in favor of Ubuntu. His reasons for switching have much to do with Apple's tendency towards the closed-box mentality; their products are some of the most polished available today, but the inner workings of those products, and specifically many of the file formats they use to store your iApp creations, are closely-guarded secrets. The end result is that you get a product that is beautiful and a pleasure to use, but one that also locks you in. Should you want to export your iMovie edits or your iPhoto library metadata at any point in the future, you will find it unpleasantly difficult. These two applications are merely examples; the problem itself is endemic to most of Apple's bundled applications, and this is what finally killed the Mac for Pilgrim.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball, a blog in which he comments on Mac news and writes longer opinion pieces, linked to Pilgrim's announcement and made a remark which some of Gruber's readers interpreted as meaning that Pilgrim dropped the Mac solely because he had some problems with data corruption. Many of those readers then went to Pilgrim's site and, without necessarily reading the article, posted comments lambasting Pilgrim/evangelizing the Mac; the statement that the Mac OS is "better" than other OSes was frequently invoked.
In a lengthy response, Gruber apologized for the undue hostility of these readers, criticized them for completely missing the point, and clarified exactly what that point was. He ended the piece by saying, essentially, that while he understood and respected Pilgrim's decision, he did not feel that data lock-in was that significant a problem for the Mac. After all, Gruber points out, the Mac OS has been around in one form or another for 22 years; if data lock-in were going to cause a catastrophe, it would have already.
Pilgrim provided a laundry list of incidents in the history of the Mac OS when proprietary file formats have caused very real and significant problems for him personally.
Since I've decided to purchase a Mac in the near future, I was considerably interested in this exchange; in fact, it made me reexamine my reasons for wanting to switch to the Mac OS from Windows. The issues that Pilgrim brought up I hadn't even considered prior to reading his complaints, yet he makes a very valid point. The beautiful interfaces, the "it just works" aspect, many of the Mac's touted features, all hinge upon very specific, very closed standards that Apple certainly isn't anxious to open up. iTunes library metadata, email archives, iPhoto library metadata, iMovie edits: all this information is stored in proprietary, undocumented formats; often the data file itself is completely hidden from the user. The threat of losing a significant part of my accumulated stuff if Apple ever stops supporting these standards or if I ever decide to move to a different platform is very real.
For people like me, and by that I mean people my age, this is something of a rude awakening. Microsoft Word has been around nearly as long as I've been using computers. There was that Tandy 1000SL back in the day, but every computer since then in my family's household has run some version of Windows. The thought that I might one day not be able to open my .doc files in Word is rather disarming. I think the immediate future is pretty safe, but Pilgrim raises a good question: What about when I'm 80? Although preserving every essay I ever had to write on "Huckleberry Finn" is pretty far from my mind, I'm willing to accept that some of the data I am producing at this point in my life will be things I want to hang on to indefinitely. Is Apple going to help me do that?
The answer to that question, based on everything I've seen regarding OS X and not just Pilgrim's indictment, is no. It's to Apple's advantage, business-wise, to keep customers tied to their products, and until a majority of customers recognize this problem and demand a change, there will undoubtedly be none. However, that's not enough of a reason for me to not buy a Mac. The rationale goes directly back to the point Gruber made: Pilgrim switched to Ubuntu because that choice made the most sense for him and for what he does. For me and what I do, however, the switch to Mac OS still has an inescapable logic.
Although I'm sure that some of the information I produce in the next five years will be worth keeping, I have to ask myself exactly how much of it, and which parts, will be things I'll want to look at years from now? Unlike Pilgrim, I am not the kind of person who is concerned about keeping email records going back a decade or more; nor do I have or plan on accumulating gigabytes of video footage, pictures, and associated metadata. The only things I produce of any consequence in the next five years will almost certainly be written in MATLAB, Mathematica, LaTex, or an open-source programming language. MATLAB and Mathematica are both proprietary, but there's nothing I can do about that, and their file formats at least are transparent. This difference in focus on what we consider important enough to archive is the greatest disparity in thinking between Pilgrim and I, and because of it, the closed-format mentality of the iApp collection is a non-issue for me.
The other significant point that helped me make this decision is that, again unlike Pilgrim, my choice is essentially binary: I'm either going to be using Windows or Mac OS. At this point in my life, if my choice is between Windows and something else, I'll pick the something else. I want an operating system that doesn't inexplicably reset the transfer rate on my IDE channels every month or so, that has a consistent user interface, that doesn't have an internet browser so inextricably linked to the OS that new security holes are discovered daily, that doesn't take 10 seconds to redraw the desktop under heavy CPU load, that has some semblance of logical design underpinning it, and Windows fails on all those points. Nothing that I've seen written about Vista has convinced that it will be different from XP in any crucial way. Linux would fit the bill, but as far as it's come, Linux is still something that I would have to "deal with" if I decided to run that on my personal computer, and I don't want to be tied down to an operating system that I have zero experience with. Besides, if I ever change my mind, I can always just run it on a MacBook.
It is my hope that in the future Apple will be forced to address the problems Pilgrim brings up, but this may be misguided optimism. After all, how many average consumers care about these issues? How many average consumers are even aware of them? For someone like Mark Pilgrim, who has years of experience and years of involvement with software, a problem like data lock-in may be glaringly obvious, but I would be surprised if many people purchasing computers today even identify it as a possible concern. I'm quite happy that I happened across this discussion, however, since it's made me aware. And knowing you have a problem is half the battle.
The following is a recipe for cantaloupe bread that I made up the other day. There was this thing I read that was talking about melon bread, and it sounded like it would be pretty good, so I checked around a found a few places online with recipes for various types of melon bread, and they all seemed to follow a pretty standard formula, so I went back to Joy of Cooking and adapted their instructions for banana bread, instead using cantaloupe. It turned out pretty well. I'll probably try to tweak it some more later.
Block 1 Ingredients
Pretty simple. The thing is not to add too much cinnamon; the flavor of the cantaloupe is easily overwhelmed.
The subject under discussion is the proper mixing of a martini. Because it needs to be discussed.
A few days ago, I was lucky enough to find myself at an event with a wide open bar, the services of which I did not hesitate to avail myself. After padding my tongue with a few of the more subdued libations, I placed the order that any gentleman of discriminating taste has to place at some point during the evening. I called for a martini.
The bartender proceeded to use the cap of the vermouth bottle to measure out a portion of that spirit, and followed it up by freehanding a rather significant fraction of a bottle of Tanqueray into the shaker. The resulting drink contained, needless to say, much too many parts gin and far too few parts vermouth.
Now, there have been many claims regarding the best way to combine the rare effervescence of vermouth gin. Some say you should pour a scant quarter ounce into the martini glass, swirl it once, and discard the rest. Others say that you should merely place the vermouth bottle in a ray of the morning sun that is subsequently incident on the martini glass. Still others say the ideal method is to concentrate very hard on the bottle of vermouth that you have left unopened in your liquor cabinet as you shake two ounces of gin. (Winston Churchill, you alcoholic.) This is all poetic bullshit.
The mystique surrounding the extra-dry martini is ridiculous. Show me a man who orders a martini extra-dry, and I'll show you a man who doesn't have the balls to order a shot of cold gin. Vermouth is absolutely essential to the perfect martini. Consider the gin and tonic: all by their lonesomes, tonic water and gin are both fairly unappetizing ingredients that few willingly drink. But mix them together, and you have one of the truly classic, and classy, concoctions of any generation. The same holds true with gin and vermouth. They complement each other; one falls flat in the absence of its partner. The quality that makes the drink is not the flavor of gin drowning out vermouth, it is the dynamic interplay between the two.
Gin tastes like Christmas; this is a fact that has been observed by so many reliable witnesses that it brooks no disputation. But like any Christmas present, gin is naked without a wrapping. You cannot simply pour a slug of Bombay Sapphire into a glass and expect to please. It requires some accoutrements, some dressing. In the case of the martini, this is the vermouth. The vermouth tempers the gin; it calms it without robbing it of any vital characteristics. This is why the martini is the truly classic cocktail: it takes the base spirit with the most complex flavor, and allows one to savor that flavor without being overwhelmed by it. The taste of vermouth should not be anemically intrusive. It should be strong but submissive, pronounced but restrained. Balance must be maintained.
The real martini is mixed with 1/2 ounce dry vermouth and 2 ounces London gin, and it is served straight up and ice cold. It is not made with apple schnapps, it is not made with orange flavored what-have-you, and it is not ever, ever goddammit, made with vodka. If you go to a bar and order a martini, and they ask you if you'd like it with gin or vodka, they are insulting your intelligence as a drunkard and connoisseur. Never drink a vodka martini. An angel dies every time you do. End of story.
Go drink. Now, dammit.
About how awesome life is right now. In theory, this is my easy, laid-back, lots-of-free-time semester, but for a variety of reasons, that hasn't quite materialized yet. Instead, the past couple of weeks have been more like, "wake up at 9, go go go go go, sleep, repeat." Making a PowerPoint presentation for this weekend's charity auction, training no less than four people to fill two of the positions I currently occupy, and remembering how to do differential equations are, it turns out, significant time drains.
So why is life awesome? I have all but officially received a summer research internship at ORNL, and a dude from Northwestern just called me to let me know that I'm probably going to be accepted with financial aid. Boo-ya.
Things have gotten to a point where I am truly and sincerely irked at many of the obligations I have. When I first began working as an A/V tech for the college, it was interesting. I got to fiddle with a bunch of crazy equipment, my boss didn't treat me like an idiot and gave me a lot of responsibility, and I got to drive the awesome old red van around campus. The fact that I did, and do, get paid peanuts for the work is rather beside the point; the job was appealing because it was flexible and on campus. I do still value it for these reasons, but in the past year the job has become rote and annoying, and I have developed a habit of shunting it to the side whenever possible. You can only set up speakers and microphones so many times before it loses its charm.
I've experienced the same problem (on a much shorter time scale) at the Flat Hat. This job was initially appealing because it required (I believed) a minimal time investment and consisted entirely of mindless work, for which I would be well-paid. This is true, but as I became better acquainted with the position, it became clear that doing a good job would require a slightly greater time investment, and would consist of work that was indescribably boring but was involved enough to demand attention. I stopped enjoying both of these jobs some time ago, but I do still enjoy receiving a paycheck, and so have continued to suffer them. But they require time, and time is the thing that I'm least inclined to give them.
The real problem with devoting time to these jobs is not the jobs themselves, but what they're keeping me from. It has reached a point where I am starting to get some (very general, non-specific, vague) ideas of what I want to spend my time on, and these ideas do not include recording a capella performances of mediocre college groups or tallying the advertising accounts at the school newspaper.
When I say "what I want to spend my time on," I'm not talking about a "Gee, I think I'd like to sit down and read this book for a while" kind of feeling. What I mean is that right now, at the beginning of this semester, I am fired up about my classes and about learning this new material. I'm cracking open my textbooks and thinking, "God damn, this looks really interesting. I want to really sit down this semester and get a good handle on this." I'm working through a problem and becoming extremely involved in writing a routine to build a B-spline approximation to a function. And I know that it's horribly, horribly dorky, and I don't care. Previously in my "college career," classes and math were things that I did because I was good at them and because there was a nagging feeling in the back of my head that it would all pay off one day; they weren't things that I was inspired to do in and of themselves. But for the past couple of semesters, math has become something that truly grips my interest; it has become something that I very much want to devote my time to. Population diffusion models? Lay that shit out. Hermitian matrices? Give me a heaping spoonful. It is to the point where I am, bless my little head, excited by all this.
The fact that I am excited is itself exciting, and also frustrating. Exciting for the obvious reasons: I've found some things that I am deeply interested in, and that I (would) happily invest my time with. It's exciting because the longer I study this subject, the more certain I become that I've found a niche that I can be happily productive in, and that applying to continue studying this subject in graduate school was the right choice. It's frustrating because the world at large is essentially ignorant of my newfound direction: random part-time jobs continue to impose themselves, professors continue to assign work, and I don't have the kind of time that I want for devoting to geekier pursuits.
This is the source of the dim view I currently have of my jobs and other responsibilities. What were initially pleasant and profitable distractions have become merely distractions that I could do without. These are temporary problems, however, and knowing that I'll be shedding many of these obligations as the semester progresses makes it easier to put up with them now. In fact, I really have so little to complain about it's laughable. In spite of everything, I fully expect this semester to be a wonderful end to a wonderful four years.
A friend of mine was recently reading the first book in the Wheel of Time fantasy series by Robert Jordan. I am snobbish about many things, and the subject of books is one of them, so of course I had to give her a hard time about reading what was, in my mind, a "pulp" fantasy series. Being the good-natured person that she is, she smirked at me and asked for some suggestions for more worthwhile reading. Naturally, I couldn't come up with anything off the top of my head, and ended up looking like the bumbling fool I am. Since then, however, I've had some time to collect my thoughts, and put together a list of books I enjoyed.
Now, ya'll have got to take everything here with a grain of salt. This is all just my opinion. Obviously, this is true of everything I write on this site, but people can get a little more excited than usual if someone starts criticizing their favorite author (I know I do). If you see something here with which you take strong issue, remember: I'm not trying to present it as some kind of absolute truth. It's just what I think. With that said, let me lay out for you my theory of books.
I've got this idea that good books and good writers fall into two broad categories. The first category is for books that are awesome. They have great stories, great language, great ideas, and are entertaining. They are just all-around solid books, books that I was happy to have read and would read again. They do not make it into the second category, though. There are a great many authors working today who fit in this category. In the sci-fi/fantasy genres, I place authors like Neil Gaiman (the Sandman series, American Gods, Coraline), Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell) and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age) in this category.
The second category is for writing that has all of the aforementioned qualities and more. These are works that have a focus and perfection of construction, that are complete, moving, and beautiful; they stand above other writing to achieve true and lasting worth, and are art. Shakespeare goes here. So do the Lord of the Rings and Dune.
I do not intend with the above descriptions to belittle those works which I place in the first category. There is a place for them, and they fill a vital role. The difference between the two is that books from the first category are transitory; there are always excellent writers working to produce excellent fiction, and as time goes on, the excellent writing of today will surrender to the excellent writing of tomorrow. Those books that stand above, however, are something unique. They will not be supplanted.
What follows is a spotty list of books that generally fall into the fantasy (/sci-fi) genre which I believe are worthwhile. Although I consider these to be a bit more interesting than Robert Jordan, the ultimate test of any art is whether or not you enjoy it. Here, then, are books I enjoyed. The first entries are those books which I believe will stand; the rest are merely outstanding.
That's it. Hope you found at least one book that piqued your interest.
The first is that I just recently finished reading a book called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon. It was really good. It's about New York City and comic books and the early part of the century. Chabon is engaging like John Irving, has a command of English as vast as Conrad's, and tells a story that is slightly fanciful but steeped in reality. Actually the reason I like it so much is that Chabon perfectly captures the spirit of the age he's depicting. Reading Kavalier & Clay feels very similar to reading Fitzgerald, if Fitzgerald had come at his subject from a very different direction. But that's just what I think; what the hell do I know, I'm a math major. Soon to be a math graduate. If I don't drop out of college before the end of the semester. Anyhow.
The second thing is Google Earth. The other day I was fiddling around on Google Maps, and was very impressed by the technology they've got powering that. You can drag maps around smoothly, you can zoom in way far, you can not only get satellite imagery of most places, but actually overlay Google's road map on top of that satellite image, and they've got all this linked with their database, so searching for things close to the spot on earth you're looking at is easy. Very impressive. Then I found Google Earth.
Google Earth has one caveat: unlike many of Google's technologies, it is a program you must download, install, and run, rather than load in a web browser. Should you choose to do this, however, you will lose yourself for hours in what has to be one of the most impressive displays of web integration available today.
Google Earth is a program which models the entire globe in real time 3D. It uses satellite imagery to paint the surface, so you can start by looking at the entire Earth framed in your window, and zoom in to a bird's eye view of your house. Depending on the age of the imagery, you might see your car parked in the driveway. Of course, that's an awful lot of satellite imagery to store on your hard drive. How does the program pull this off, exactly? In point of fact, whenever you run Google Earth, the program connects to Google's servers, and they stream you satellite imagery to power the program. That alone is a ridiculous technical accomplishment, but on top of this unprecedented model of the world, they have added their map technology so that you can see not just roads, but businesses, parks, points of interest, and everything else on this true-to-life picture of the earth in addition to viewing flybys of any trips you might be planning; they have built three dimensional models of the metropolitan areas of major cities; and they have linked all of this to an online community that allows users to add their own markers to the globe for all to see. And they are giving all this away for free.
If the fact that this blog is running on Blogger didn't immediately tip you off, I am a Google fanboy. It's hard not be a fanboy for a company with Google's philosophy, though. They look at the internet, and they find something that people are using. They say to themselves, "We are going to take this idea that works pretty well, and we are going to make it work beautifully. We are going to make it do everything that common sense says it should do. We are going to base it on cutting-edge technology, we are going to make it elegant and straightforward, we are going to make it so stultifyingly simple that anyone who knows how to click a mouse can immediately use it, and we are going to give it away for free." It's hard to argue with free.
Those of you in high school or college are likely familiar with the Educational Testing Service, or ETS, hereafter referred to as "those insufferable craphounds." Those insufferable craphounds are running an organization that markets itself as nonprofit while still finding it mysteriously necessary to charge students exorbitant prices for the privilege of subjecting themselves to tests such as the SAT or GRE. Examining their webpage, one finds that they make much of "listening to educators, parents, and critics" (notice the exclusion of "students" from that list) in order to do a better job of helping "teachers teach and students learn." All I can say to that is they must be pretty goddamn hard of hearing, because I have not ever in my entire life heard a single, solitary word of praise for those insufferable craphounds from anybody, be they student, teacher, parent, or disinterested third-party critic. At best, people grudgingly put up with them as some sort of necessary evil. And I can also say to them that, speaking as a student, the only thing those insufferable craphounds have ever helped me to learn is to exploit common fallibilities in multiple-choice tests, which is, interestingly, a skill that will be completely useless in my professional life.
Examining their mission statement, one discovers some intriguing claims. Let's quote them, shall we?
Our Mission: To advance quality and equity in education by providing fair and valid assessments, research, and related services. Our products and services measure knowledge and skills, promote learning and educational performance, and support education and professional development for all people worldwide.
Those insufferable craphounds state that their products measure knowledge and skills. In a certain sense this may be true; in fact, if they intend "knowledge and skills" to mean "ability to quickly answer standardized test questions," then they have hit the nail on the head. If they intend "knowledge and skills" to mean "ability to effectively learn, ability to succeed academically, and ability to critically analyze and solve a variety of problems," then their mission statement is more than a gross misrepresentation, it is an outright lie. According to those insufferable craphounds, I correctly identified the relationship between "obsequious" and "stipendiary," but remarkably, I had not a clue what either of those words meant, and could not have used them in conversation or writing. According to those insufferable craphounds, I can correctly answer the majority of 28 questions relating to pre-calculus mathematics in under 45 minutes, which is clearly an important thing to know, because having a crazed lunatic point a gun to my head and threaten to kill me if I can't correctly tell him how far Farmer Bob has to go to get to the market in under two minutes is a DAILY FUCKING OCCURRENCE in my world. According to those insufferable craphounds, when I walk in to a testing center unprepared and get a good score by relying on my ability to guess well on multiple choice tests, I am more qualified to study at graduate schools than people who earned a slightly lower score by working hard to prepare for the test.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the entire situation is that colleges and graduate schools seem to actually put stock in the tests that those insufferable craphounds administer. Particularly graduate schools. Come one folks, use your damn heads. I have been at college working hard for four motherfucking years, and you hope to glean something meaningful about my academic ability from a two hour standardized test? You're already looking at my academic record, my GPA, letters of recommendation from people who know me. What are these test scores going to relate to you? How accurate do you think that is as compared to those other piddling bits of information?
Universities, please, take Mr. T's advice and don't be fools: SAT and GRE scores are not telling you anything useful about your potential students. Look at GPAs, look at the classes they've taken, look at their recommendations; Christ, you could even try talking to them. Don't continue to subject us to the pointless and degrading ordeal of standardized tests.
I am sorry for that diatribe, 'cause I bet that I was basically just screaming at the choir. But goddamn, it did feel good to write it down. Fuck you, ETS.
By anti-abortionists. There was some guy standing outside the physics building this morning shouting at us to embrace Jesus and stop killing infants, and a dude standing next to a huge picture of bloody, dead fetus was trying to hand me a flyer saying not to get an abortion. Because, you know, being a guy and all, I had really been considering one.
There was also some guy standing outside the library, telling us we're all going to hell for being at college. Because, clearly, if God had wanted us to learn, he would have given us brains. Oh, wait...
Not that anyone around here is really all that ticked off; this is the most entertaining thing to come through campus this semester. But for any anti-abortionists or other generally crazy people out there, let me give you some tips: You are not going to win a single, solitary convert by coming to a college campus and being loud and obnoxious. At college, if you're being lound and obnoxious, it usually means you're drunk, and we don't pay a lot of attention to you. The way you're going to win converts is by logically persuading us that your position is the more sensible one. Why religous fundamentalists have yet to try using this approach will no doubt remain a mystery...
I was about to sit down and write a post about Nintendo's recently announced Revolution controller, but I didn't really have anything original or insightful to say. I think it's an incredible idea, I really hope they make it work, and I have no doubt that if I end up buying any of the new generation of consoles, I'll be buying a Revolution first. Because Nintendo, you see, makes interesting games. I will grant you that they don't make many, and they don't make them fast. But, examining the Gamecube and Xbox from a position that's pretty close to the end of their product cycles, let me observe that the Xbox still has not one single game which is proprietary to that system that I have any interest in playing, where the Gamecube has a sizable library. You will not find Pikmin on the Xbox, and despite being backed by a behemoth like Sony the PSP is not the most popular handheld in the world; the DS is. If you want to read an extremely interesting and lucid commentary on Nintendo's role in the gaming industry, you should check out this article.
On a completely unrelated note, and because I don't have anything more interesting to talk about, here are a couple of things I've run across recently that are cool:
Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs is the newest album from Andrew Bird, violin virtuoso formerly (nominally) of the Squirrel Nut Zippers. The new album is a long way from the hot jazz-style stuff of his first couple of solo albums. It is kind of folksy, very chill, and extremely good.
Sin City in movie form is out on DVD. Sin City is a series of comic books by Frank Miller that was recently adapted into a movie. It is certainly very violent, though like so many films its detractors don't seem to notice that the vast majority of the violence occurs offscreen. However, it is extremely graphic in its implications, and if you don't like violent movies you won't like this one. But, if you have ever read and enjoyed noir, or seen and enjoyed film noir, then Sin City is highly recommended. It is noir to the maxx.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster is my lord and savior.
(That was sarcasm. If you are an actual, honest-to-God creationist or intelligent-designist, don't tell me, because we can't be friends anymore.)
I have no idea how many people have already heard of Mitch Hedberg, but the man is amazingly funny. You should definitely download yourself a copy of one of his standups from that thar inter-net.
This summer after returning from Germany, I spent the rest of my time back at William & Mary doing research for one of my physics professors. One of the areas in which she does experiments is using ultrafast laser pulses to ablate or deposit materials. The basic idea is this: if you have a little chunk of some metal, say nickel, you can shoot it with a laser pulse. If this laser pulse is fast enough and powerful enough, it can actually excite the electrons in the metal so much that they vaporize and form a plasma plume that shoots off the surface of the metal. This is called laser ablation.
You can also repeat this process in quick succession using a laser that generates, say, 1000 pulses that each last for 150 nanoseconds. Each pulse will generate a plasma plume. Now, if you take some kind of substrate or gridwork and place it directly in front of the material, then whenever a plume shoots off the surface of the material, some of that vapor plume is going to recondense on the substrate. By using several thousands laser pulses, it's possible to build up a film of material that's only a few atoms thick. This is called pulsed laser deposition, and the sorts of films you generate are apparently useful in fields such as superconductor research.
Although the idea is pretty straightforward, the process itself becomes very complicated when you try to do one of these experiments in reality. There are a tremendous number of interactions that need to be considered- what kind of atmosphere should the experiment be conducted in, how should you set up the laser pulse so that it vaporizes the material without melting it, how do the characteristics of the plume change as you whittle away a hole where the laser is impacting, how do successive laser pulses interact with the gas from the previous plume, and so on. The work I did this summer was kind of a basic first step in coming up with a computational model for one of these experiments.
I spent the last few weeks of summer looking at how the temperature of the material is affected by the laser pulse. Mathematically, this is modeled with a system of differential equations by considering the temperature of the electrons in the material and the temperature of the lattice in which they are held to be two separate but related quantities; it's referred to as the two-temperature model. In very special, restricted cases, it's possible to solve this system analytically, but these solutions are not of much practical use. I put together a Mathematica notebook that numerically models the initial laser pulse as well as the period of time during which the heat diffuses throughout the material. Although this project was mostly a chance for me to learn a bit about using Mathematica, it was also an interesting twist on the classic heat diffusion boundary problem, as one side of the material is not held at a fixed temperature. The solution turns out to be using an "insulation" condition for that boundary, which amounts to setting the first derivative of the temperature function with respect to space equal to zero; this represents the fact that heat is not passing through that boundary; it's insulated. Although this wouldn't be strictly true in practice, we didn't get around to including heat loss to radiation in this model before college got rolling again.
Anyhow, for your viewing pleasure, below you can take a look at what I came up with, both as a Mathematica notebook if you've got the program, and as a pdf. If anything I've done would actually be of help to you on a project of your own, feel free to use whatever you find, but please, credit where credit is due. Additionally, if you have any suggestions for improving the code in this notebook, I would love to hear them.
You may have noticed in the past few years that comics are getting quite a bit more press than they historically have- there have been any number of articles on the internet commenting on their wider-spread acceptance as 'serious' art, how the form has finally matured, and so on and so forth; the number of movies based on comics that have been made in the past five years also bears testament to this phenomena. Scott McCloud is probably the most well-known comic advocate, and has written extensively on the theory of comics, but it seems like these days everyone from literary journalists to college students is writing about the comic as a medium.
I won't make any claims about being a comic aficionado; I know next to nothing about their history, or the history of their acceptance in the mainstream. However, the result of seeing several writeups about comics and some comic-inspired movies was that I broke down and actually read a few of them. Now, right up front let's be clear on the fact that, when people talk about the comic as an art form, they're not usually thinking about X-Men or Batman. Not to say that those kinds of comics are bad; they are, in fact, excellent in the same way Harry Potter is excellent- entertaining, fun reads. As well-executed as they are, however, you probably wouldn't point to them as the vanguard of the 'new seriousness.' Comics (believe it or not) are just as capable as book or film of treating all manner of issues from the timeless coming-of-age story to discovering someone you love has cancer, and the infinitely nuanced way in which a story can be told through pictures is what makes these works so fascinating.
If you're interested in more wonderful background, certainly click on the things above. Although I'm certainly not well-read as far as comics go, here are the books that initially got, and held, my attention:
That's about it. I'm hoping to get into the Sandman series when I've got some cash, also Heavy Liquid by Paul Pope. And as far as honest-to-God syndicated comics go, Complete Calvin & Hobbes is hitting this Fall, and will rock. AND there's some comic-based movie called V for Vendetta coming out soon. I don't know a thing about the comic, but the movie is starring Hugo Weaving, and what he does in the movie is kick ass, so chances are it will be really good.
If any of you guys have recommendations or comments, you should, you know, leave a comment. But not if you have a remark. We don't truck with those here.
Despite the fact that pretty much no one else in the group was all that impressed by Berlin, I had a great time there and thought it was an amazing city. We only got to spend about four days there, and what little time we had was sometimes spent on pointless activities, but after all was said and done we got to do some pretty neat things.
We arrived at our hotel Thursday evening, and quickly discovered that it had communal showers in the grand European tradition. Sorry though I am to admit it, I am still a bit of a prude when it comes to such things, and spent an interesting and uncomfortable four days showering with large, talkative European men.
Thursday evening about five of us went to see a variety show at the Winter Garten on Potsdamer Strasse, which is this beautiful theater in the classic vaudeville style. Brass handrails, the flashing lights outlining the stage, employees in evening dress- the place had everything. The show was equally excellent, with a variety of gymnasts and so forth, and one really outstanding old school entertainer. That guy was pretty amazing. Let me tell you about him.
He comes out on the stage and starts chatting with us, dropping little jokes here and there that were really pretty clever- quite a few of them were plays on words that you wouldn't get unless you knew a little German and English, and he's dropping in references to American radio shows from the '30s. And while he's got his patter running, he's doing little tricks for us- a bit of juggling, a bit of balancing a top hat on his nose. Except he's not perfect; every once in a while he wouldn't quite catch the hat he was trying to flip from his foot to his head, or he'd miss a ball juggling, or something. But he was great fun to listen to, and everyone in the audience was like, "What a charming old man, I certainly don't expect him to pull off every trick flawlessly." So as he continues with his act, he pulls out a teacup and saucer. He balances the saucer on his foot, and flips it up and catches it on his head, and we're all like, "Yay! Good job!" Then he puts the teacup on his foot and flips it up, catching it on top of the saucer. So now we're all like, "Wow, that's pretty cool." Then he takes out another teacup and saucer (all while keeping up the banter) and does the same thing. And we're suitably impressed, but we're getting worried, because he keeps wandering around the stage with these teacups balanced on his head, and he's good, but he's not perfect, and they're rattling around a lot, and we don't want him to embarass himself by having them fall. So next he breaks out another teacup and saucer. Has a little trouble balancing them on his foot without letting the other fall off his head, but manages it. Flips the saucer up, and catches it. Flips the teacup up, it almost misses, the whole stack is wobbling, it almost falls, we gasp, but he manages to catch it. So now he has a stack of three teacups and three saucers balanced on his head, and we're impressed. Next he takes out a tea kettle.
Teacups rattling, he leans down and balances the tea kettle on his foot. We're all thinking, "Oh, come on man, you can do it. You're so old and funny, don't screw up now." He flicks his foot. The kettle flips up through the air and lands squarely on top of the stack, which doesn't even quiver.
The man was stringing us along the entire time. He knew exactly what he was doing, and had perfected the technique of making deliberate failures look like mistakes. The whole act, he was building a skeptical audience up to the point where they were completely empathizing with the performer. I have never seen anyone work the audience as well as he did.
On Friday, we had some tasty, tasty Brötchen for breakfast, and then piled on the bus for a "Grand Tour through the City." It was conducted by some random friend of Professor Klabes', and wasn't the greatest. Bus tours to begin with leave quite a bit to be desired, and the high point of this one was the moment when the guide said, "Oh, and by the way, that was the Brandenburger Tör we just passed, turn around quick and you might get a picture." Ah well. Friday afternoon we visited the Checkpoint Charlie museum, which is small and badly designed but very interesting. After that, I strongarmed a couple of people into visiting the Judisches Museum, which is an architectural marvel, and also a damn good museum, following which we wandered around the streets of Berlin and grabbed some dinner before taking the S-Bahn back to the hotel.
Other highlights of the trip included visiting the Pergamon Museum, and getting to see the opera Eugene Onegin. Now, Pergamon was a city in ancient Greece that built a huge altar to either Zeus or Athena, and it's been reconstructed inside this musuem. And when I say 'huge' there, I mean, seriously, you walk into the first room of this musuem and are dwarfed by this massive, wide set of steps leading up to the altar. It's just unbelievable. They also have just a shit-ton of other artifacts from antiquity, from several different areas of the world. The other things that really stick out in my mind are the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way from Babylon. Babylon, folks. Now, keep in mind that these are building-size structures that have been reconstructed inside this musuem, and I didn't even come close to making it through the entire thing. If you should ever wake up one day and discover you're in Berlin, this is a good place to spend a week or so. And the crazy thing is that this is just one museum on this island in the middle of Spree River with something like four other world-famous museums on it.
Moving on, the last thing I wanted to mention was Eugene Onegin. The text is a poem written by Pushkin using an unusual rhyme scheme that has since become known as an Onegin stanza. The music was by Tchaikovsky. I won't pretend to know exactly what was going on, but the music was pretty, the staging was interesting, and after I got back to the states I read a little about the text, and it turns out it's got a fairly interesting history. Nabokov did a crazy translation of it that a lot of people hate. And interestingly enough, Douglas Hofstadter, the mathematician who wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach has also written a verse translation of Onegin. All this has convinced me to read it. Right after I get through the new Potter...
Charles Johnston's translation of Eugene Onegin
In conclusion, the most consistently amusing thing about the entire German trip was Herr Klabes. As proof positive, I submit this photo:
Continuing in the travel journal mindset, let's talk a bit about Amsterdam, where I went along with a bunch of other people on the Münster program this past weekend. And what a weekend it was.
First off, we left the Münster Hauptbahnhof on Friday, and made it as far as Bad Bentheim on the German border before we found out that the railroad employees in the Netherlands were on strike. So we piled off the train the train and onto buses, for which we paid 35€. The theory was that we would be reimbursed, but it looks as though Deutsche Bahn might have other ideas. Anyhow.
We got to Amsterdam without a definite place to stay, which is not the best idea in the world, but luckily there were enough spots left at a place called Hans Brinker. Not quite expensive enough to be a hotel, not quite sketchy enough to be a hostel, it occupies a delightfully ambiguous middle ground. It had hostel style rooms, so you probably get to stay with a bunch of people you don't know, but it was cheap, not horribly dirty, and it had a bar/resturant/common room type of thing on the first floor. Quality place.
The most important thing to know about Amsterdam is this: when you're walking around the city, there will be signposts at many corners with writing on them. Those are not the names of streets. The names of steets are on placards attached to the sides of buildings on the corner. Very important.
So over the course of the next two days, I got to see the Van Gogh Musuem, the Rijcks Museum, the Heineken Experience (actually really cool), walk through De Wallen (without making a stop anywhere, sadly), and visit a coffee shop to sample their selection of pot brownies, pot bonbons, pot muffins, pot milkshakes, and pot. So all in all, it was a really awesome trip. Two and a half days, though, is time to do no more than scratch the surface; the city is amazing and huge, and there were about twenty other things I would have liked to have done. Another time.
Amsterdam is not nearly as seedy as everyone makes it out to be, particularly the red light district. Yes, true, there are real, live prostitutes lining the streets, but there are also real, live tourists filling every nook and cranny as well. There are flashy lights and loud music and people absolutely everywhere. The first couple of times I felt someone's hand in my pocket I got pretty excited, but the thrird time it happened I realized it was merely one of Amsterdam's famous pickpockets plying his noble trade. Thank god I had nothing worth stealing. Though most people will tell you to worry about muggers and whatnot, the street cleaners in Amsterdam are definitely the scariest thing about the city. I saw them eat at least three people.
In the end, it was a great time. The museums were cheap and incredible. The pot also was not to be sneezed at. I had a joint and a brownie, and finally got good and properly stoned for the first, and probably last, time in my life. I think there are pictures of it somewhere; I definitely remember bright flashes of light. The best part was that the pre-rolled joints come in little factory sealed packages. Factory sealed pot. Beautiful.
