We shall all pretend this is dark and mysterious, and not just a bad photo.

As part of my resolutions (of course I’m writing because it’s my duty, not because I’m procrastinating, why would you ever believe such a thing?) for the year, I’ve decided I’ll write a little, just a little, every day. I have another blog which I might use for more science-y things, but here’s-what-I’m-thinking-today might be a good enough start.

N and I went to see Double Indemnity today, which I’d been meaning to see for a while. It’s a lovely little forties noir drama of murder and adultery — don’t you just love those — at the SJ Rep. Prices were relatively steep (I doubt the $10 student mentality will depart any time soon), but I thought it was worth it. The characters were complex, the story riveting and the dialogue snappy. I do wish though that we could’ve gotten seats closer to the front. The balcony isn’t the best of places to catch the expressions on the characters’ faces, and there were certain plot twists during which I’d have loved to see the characters respond.

There’s something about the 40s which I find oddly compelling. I wouldn’t go for the dark lipstick personally, but I like the whole tailored, fedora-d, outdoor coat-ed appearance. It’s not just the fashion, though — I think it’s the entire package, a certain restraint shot through with drama. I’m not surprised it’s making a comeback. It’s a nice balance between primness and elegance.

Though I have to say, whoever wrote the screenplay for DI seems to have a grudge against all womankind. Perhaps that’s an attitude from an earlier era I could do without? … Just saying.

Dune remains as compelling as it ever was. I’ve guiltily abandoned the book on the history of language I’m reading to plow through sci-fi instead. Which reminds me — Empires of the Word is pretty damn cool in its own right. It’s essentially a book tracing the history of some of the major languages of the world, and exploring the reasons why some survived and some didn’t.

It’s incredibly interesting, from a history perspective, to see the connections between various groups of people and then trace their lineage through to the present day. One thing that fascinates me about sci-fi, by the way, is that you have to do some extrapolation of past-present to present-future, and I’d love to be able to come up with a model of language in the future, simply as an exercise. Hey, think about it: Firefly has all its main characters cursing in Chinese. It’s become a sort of outlaw, vernacular tongue that, as mispronounced as it is, is very much used on a daily basis. In Empires of the Word, Nicholas Ostler explains how Chinese, unlike Egyptian, has remained in use for about three millennia now in some shape or form. Whatever words the Chinese assimilated were converted to pre-existing Chinese words, for instance, and aggregated into longer words if necessary, instead of different words and phrases being added to the language, thus changing it. So the longevity of the language is no joke. I can completely see why Firefly adopted Chinese.

Interesting tidbit of the day.

For one, some plans that I’d made for my future turned out not to be viable — a bummer, which might yet leave some other options open. But one of the more challenging things about my current situation is  all the gaps between what I’m doing right now, what I want to do in the future, what else I think I want to do in the future, what I’m expected to do, and what I’m too lazy to do. I suppose the issue right now is that I’ve no clue what I want. This is a dilemma of luxury that I’ve obviously created for myself, because I’m in a good job (a great job, actually, where I’m learning an incredible amount) that pays well and I’ve more or less settled into how I’m living right now.

But I have to look around me and see what some of the people I love are doing, and the difference between them and me is palpable. They’re all either exactly where they want to be, or are planning meticulously for it. And they’re all extremely good at what they do; they’re passionate about something, and it shows. I’ve no clue what I’m passionate about.

So my one real resolution for this year is to figure out what I’m good at, where I want to be in a year’s time, professionally and personally, and how to get from here to there. Vague, I know, but … baby steps. The one scenario I don’t want to find myself in, in ten years’ time, is in this exact same situation.

Whew. Deep thoughts.

In other news, I finally bought Dune today. I don’t know why in the name of omniscient entities I thought I could walk through Barnes & Noble to get coffee from the cafe without interacting with books. Ten steps towards the new releases, one glimpse at the latest Orson Scott Card, and I was lost. But I have a policy to buy only books that I know I love, so Dune it was. I can never remember if I already do have a copy. Either way, I bought it, and am already reading it. Now I have the delicious dilemma of deciding between Dune and Doctor Who for my dinner companion, and I can’t believe how alliterative this sentence is.

The interesting thing about Dune is… well, there are lots of interesting things. But I wish I could have somehow sneaked it into my thesis, because my god I love this story. I need to print out the Bene Gesserit litany against fear and frame it up somewhere. It’s such a marvelous mix of plot and character, science and religion, society and politics. The cool thing is, even though Dune has nothing to do with AI or robotics or automata, it’s entirely overshadowed by the sheer lack of such things. The whole point of the Butlerian Jihad is that machines that think like humans are abominations; instead, humans control their minds and bodies in precise, machine-like ways. “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind“, according to their version of the Bible. It would’ve been really interesting to see how/if elements of AI could’ve featured in the book, anyway.

Last weekend, Gsj and I went to check out the local bookstore near where he lives, which turned out to be a very good idea indeed. There’s something fiercely lovable about second-hand independent bookshops — they don’t have the gloss of new books to draw the uninitiated in, and they really are old and musty and possibly depressing. But there were some gems in there, for both lulz and edification.

…. which of course was right next to…

The latter was really rather extraordinary — it included all sorts of things like making your own electric shock machine and building stoves… or something. I believe the Boy Mechanic was published in the 1930s and the Girls Handicrafts in the sixties, though I can’t be sure about that.

Maybe I should get into this Instagram business. It would probably all be pictures of books in various seductive poses, and then it would get weird.

So maybe not.

Thank you, Internet. I hope the WWW hangs around long until after we all die; alien civilizations will find it such a treasure trove of amusement.

New Year’s didn’t start out particularly promisingly, but I have simply convinced myself that new years are just a result of the Earth flinging itself weariedly around the Sun one more time, so I refuse to attach any importance to them. If I were the kind of person to make resolutions — or rather, reaffirm the necessity to continue promising myself that I will improve — then these would be my resolutions:

1. Exercise more

2. Eat less

3. Learn more things

4. Continue to attempt to be a badass at everything.

1) has effectively not happened since Dec 31st since I have been too busy coding and then eating dinner ravenously, and 2) vanished when my family sent me an enormous box of 18 brownies which not even a recent collective debauched weekend hangout could diminish. 3) however is looking promising, since I have been completely felled by the awesomeness of Perl hashes. 4) makes for some excellent daydreams, which (unless I suddenly win the Nobel or become a caped vigilante hero) will be all it will amount to.

Still, it’s nice to dream. I have some ideas about what I should call myself, should I somehow acquire vast quantities of spandex and the huge ego that goes with the superhero complex. Right now I’m focusing on getting boots. I figure I’ll work my way upwards.

Not so secretly, however, I wish I could be some kind of travelling science-preacher. The number of cool things that have happened at the end of the year — the LHC thinks it’s found the holy grail of particle physics, someone else invented a way to hide an event in time by pretending it never happened — makes me extremely excited about this year and all the rest.

In other news, however, Thanksgiving consisted of V coming up to see me and us wandering around the Bay, most notably to San Francisco and then Berkeley. There was a lot of storage-unit-ing involved, but never let it be said that V (or the contents of her storage unit) was poor company. As a matter of fact the entire thing grew to be quite an adventure, complete with shady dealings in the seedier side of Berkeley. I ended up seeing more of that fine town than I really expected to.

On the other hand I got some hangers and appalam off her, so it was all good.

A tad more exciting, even if there was less shadiness, was our San Francisco trip. I admit that at first I couldn’t see why the Bay and SF in particular were all that exciting; I mean, it’s all California, yes?

But I think I had to take a good long walk along Haight-Ashbury to convince me that there’s just something wildly persuasive about SF. We went to lunch at a place with Indian pizza, of all things, and it was glorious. The amount of food consumed over the weekend, by the way, has to be seen to be believed. I think I’m still carrying excess poundage around.

Sort of a niche market.

You know the other thing about SF and Haight-Ashbury? It has the best shops — fun and eclectic, but never pretentious, welcoming and kooky. There was the place with lovely scents, knicknacks and accents:

I may have a stationery obsession.

And of course, bookshops. With books you might never have heard of, shelves with defiantly non-mainstream literature, dreamy artwork, random people recommending your next to-do on the literary list.

Couldn't resist the cover. Turned out to be a very good read.

Comic books about heavy topics are my favorite.

Hindu imagery, a la Sita Sings the Blues

The thing about SF is that it’s open, inviting, insane but not self-consciously so. Even on a dreary November afternoon it’s buzzing with people all determined to find and do something cool.

Also, I like its general philosophy:

You could even leave the PB out and the statement would still be true.

Which of these are not real band names?

Defiance, Ohio
Take Two And Call in the Morning
Fries and a Shake
Chicken Monkey Surrogate
Modest Mouse
Limited Protocol Engagement
An Array of the Parameters
Not Unusual Behavior

My “Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan” Pandora station had to be renamed; I think it vaulted past the boundaries of “fusion” into the uncharted territories of aural bewilderment. Still fun to listen to while coding.

But this has led to some distraction. It was a slow day at work (all right, all right, I was slacking off) and I mentioned to V how some bands just had the most incomprehensible names. So I came up with a few and have presented them for your entertainment. I imagine “Fries and a Shake” to be a sort of retro hipster music theme, and I don’t want to think about what Chicken Monkey Surrogate does in its free time not performing to drunken souls.

What are your favorite weird band names?

Blood

In the middle of all this mass hysteria surrounding our favorite red liquid-sucking parasites, I’ve chosen to bring a dose of reality into my life and read a book called Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce. 

I’m mostly kidding, I picked this up almost by accident when I went to the SJ downtown library as I said in another post. But I really have to note down some of the quotes I picked up from the book.

• Apparently certain citizens with cotton wool for brains decided that they were going to object to blood mixing along racial lines. This i’m sure makes perfect sense when a person not of your color donates blood that saves you when you’re bleeding to death in enemy lines.  But to get to the point, the Red Cross figured that there was no way to separate “black” from “white” blood when it came to albumin (a protein that sucks in liquids and keeps people from going into shock) production  and so banned “black blood” from their production pools.
• After which The New York Times ran indignant articles about how many a Southener remembers being “nursed by a Negro nanny”, and how this is really hypocritical, concluding with ”Sometimes we wonder whether this is really an age of science.”
• “The historical French reverence for blood… would blind many doctors to the virus that tainted it.” One section touches briefly on how the French came to view blood transfusions as almost something spiritual, about how it was a social contract, so much so that when AIDS began to taint batches of it, decades later, the transfusionists found that they just couldn’t refuse prisoners and AIDS sufferers.
• “Everybody used to say that the only blood that was shed [during] Munich was that collected by Janet at the Hammersmith.” Janet Vaughan was a young lady who pioneered blood banks at a time (1938) when as a woman she wasn’t allowed to interact with the patients at her hospital.
• One official commenter, on the philosophy of selling blood vs. collecting it via donations: “Is human blood properly an item of commerce to be peddled like maple syrup?”
• Blood use in America, as the book depicts it a fascinating reflection of the philosophies of the country itself: the world leader in innovation and creation, yet amongst the least-regulated, most patchwork systems of blood distribution. The American Association of Blood Banks and the Red Cross represented opposite ends of a spectrum of beliefs regarding the role of individuals in society — while the AABB thought it made perfect sense to hold individuals accountable for their debts to society, and therefore required repayment in forms of donation or payment, the Red Cross thought blood shouldn’t be paid for because it was the duty of every member of society to give to every other member.

All in all, a fascinating book. I’m just at the rather heartbreaking part where they get into the whole AIDS epidemic, detected initially in hemophiliacs. For some it appears to have been a choice between bleeding out immediately, and dying a slow and painful death by immune system compromise.

Ada And Babbage

Apparently it was Ada Lovelace Day on October 7! I don’t like the idea of reverse-discrimination and I don’t think you should be treated differently if you’re a woman in STEM, but considering that Lady Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, this is pretty cool. The stories and resumes of some of the women on the site are really impressive (what little I’ve gone through).

However, I discovered something even cooler: a web comic about the alternate-universe lives of Lady Lovelace and her mentor, Charles Babbage, as crime solving geniuses.

FABULOUS.

Some notes from the webcomic (seriously, kickass brilliance, who thinks of these things and can I meet them?)

• Lovelace was taught by Mary Somerville, the polymath and only the second woman to be recognized as a Scientist, as well as Augustus De Morgan and George Boole. If those surnames don’t sound familiar, you haven’t taken basic computing.
• “…Mathematics was an extremely eccentric pursuit for a woman in this period, not least because higher study was widely considered to damage women’s bodies by depriving their wombs of blood.”

Turning into my mother

I suspect this won’t be the first time I’m tempted to call something a weekend of geekery. Last weekend consisted of:

– a cloud computing meeting, hosted by eBay

– volunteer orientation at The Tech

– discovering the MLK public library,

all of which was very enjoyable and makes me want to grab people off the street and yell technobabble at them. You’ll be glad to know I refrained, and am instead subjecting the internet to my opinions.

Cloud Computing and the Future: Talk Cloudy to Me!

Decided to archive this (I don’t know if I’d call it blogging) over at my other blog. There are far too many concepts that I’d like to learn, but at least I now have a list of terms to research.

Time to start learning JavaScript.

Orientation at The Tech

The orientation itself was  a little bit of a downer, to be honest. It wasn’t bad per se, but the attendees mostly seemed very, very quiet, no matter what their professed dedication to geeky things was. When we toured the galleries, they seemed rather… sparse of material; I got the sense that there was more space than information.

After two training sessions, I’m glad to report that I was incredibly wrong.

These exhibits are packed with information, and they’re a heck of a lot of fun (even if you’re not science-inclined). For instance, Tuesday’s training consisted of us going around to different exhibits and playing around with them, including a gorgeous panoramic view of anywhere on earth with the Google exhibit; messing around with design shapes on a scrolling screen, courtesy of Adobe; trying out the genetics wet lab, inserting jellyfish genes into bacteria; and trying out the clean energy challenge (tiny windmills! solar panels that fit in your palm! triumphant music when you win!)

Just to wrap that all off, yesterday’s training included earthquake simulations (actual earthquake waveforms were used) and scooting around in a jetpack.

One of the best parts is that you can scan your ticket and then visit a site online that saves some of the work you’ve done in the museum — pictures of the earthquake area, photos of your bacteria in the incubator.

I can absolutely see this being a place kids love visiting.  Volunteers really do get an excellent opportunity to interact with guests, get them to learn the science behind the exhibits, see everyone having fun, and even learn from knowledgeable visitors.

Did I say I couldn’t yell technobabble at people off the street? Hah! Spoke too soon.

There’s something rather mischievous and transgressive about hanging around a place after it’s closed. It’s one of the reasons I loved doing backstage work when I was in theater — you learn the secrets of the background work, you get to be a puppetmaster. At the same time, it’s a little bit of freedom, no screaming schoolchildren, just you and the science.

The volunteers  – diverse in both background and age, which is fantastic — seem like a lot of (responsible) fun. I might even make friends! And now I’m thinking of dragging Nl to the after-hours cocktail event; this week’s was PJ-themed, apparently.

The MLK Public Library. 

That acronym just can’t be escaped. The library is rather pretty, what with the towering glass and steel facade, right smack in the middle of downtown SJ and about 5 minutes from the light rail, bless its heart.

Borrowers’ cards are free (YAY) but my temporary card only let me borrow one measly book. I’d wanted to get something recommended by this article on The Browser; as it turns out, it was the interview subject’s book and it’s called Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce. (I do also want to borrow every other book on that list).

It’s been very entertaining so far, so much so that I’ve shoveled down my breakfast while being engrossed in all kinds of gory procedures of the 19th century (although that might just be me). The ingenuity of some of these doctors seems to have been matched only by their utter willful blindness towards the harm of bloodletting. Ever seen a barber’s red-and-white striped sign? The white is for the bandages, and the red’s for blood. Because really, who else would you go to for all your bloodletting needs but your barber?

I shall now leave you with a slideshow of assorted robots. Just for kicks.

Robots Mania

Creek near yoga studio

I don’t know what to think of yoga, objectively, anymore. I thought about the first sentence of this post for a while, trying to figure out the transition of “yoga”, from it being some kind of mystical, magical thing practiced by sadhus in caves all over India, to the sort of exercise that metropolitan career professionals can spend hundreds of dollars a month on (have you seen some of these yoga outfits? Who in hell pays a hundred bucks for pants?) A part of me cringes at the fact that I’m Indian and all I know about yoga can fit into a postage stamp, but another part of me is a bit indignant at the assumption that any one culture should own something that could benefit anyone.

As expected, I was the only desi in the first yoga class I signed up for — gentle Hatha yoga, which later turned out to be a misnomer of epic proportions — and the incredibly toned lady leading the session pronounced nothing the way I’d have expected it to be pronounced. But I couldn’t find any derision in myself; her sincerity, and everyone else’s focus, made phrases like “feel your heart and push it out, out into the sky, while you root yourself through your backside” sound calm and energized, earnest instead of ridiculous. In Vinyasa, apparently, the exercises get progressively harder, with the stretches turning into lunges that morph into feats of muscle strength. Halfway through the Goddess Pose I could feel sweat dripping off me, muscles trembling, the whole shebang. The “gentle” was some kind of euphemism, apparently. Excellent workout, regardless, and the yoga instructor seemed to think I was so into the exercise that I didn’t really need any guidance. I’m looking forward to buying a whole package and going at least once a week.

Hatha yoga is a whole different kettle of fish altogether, far as I can tell. I trekked to the JFK hall (a good thirty minute walk, plenty of exercise in itself), arrived sweatily late and then tried to get into the swing of things. Precision is everything here; a sprightly little Japanese lady walked around correcting our poses and making sure we were placing exactly the right sort of weight on every muscle and bone. I felt like I’d gone to an orthopedic by the end of it, nicely stretched out and limbered up. Perhaps it’s an idea — walk there, stretch, run back?

The story of the tax assessor-cursed library is as pathetic as is it infuriating. After about two months of living in this rather fantastic city, I finally made the trip to Campbell library, hoping to pick up some of those non-fiction books I’d been intending to read. As unimpressive as the collection was, I found a book on the physics of human motion (or something of the sort), an overview of religion, and a China Mieville book, and had to stop there because I couldn’t possibly carry anything more than that. So I make my way to the front desk, fill out an application form, and stand in the line bouncing eagerly. The librarian takes one look at the street I live in and says, “Oh I’m sorry, that’s always been a contentious spot, I think you belong to San Jose and not Campbell, which means an $80 yearly subscription fee.” I mean, what?! Apparently the post office and the tax assessors’ office have some sort of grudge going on, in which they each fight for dominance of the naming of the burbs, or something, the upshot of which is that even though I live in what is called Campbell, according to the tax people I live in San Jose. I refused to pay the $80 fee, because it was ridiculous and there are about fifteen other libraries — well if not nearby, then at least less than an hour away by public transport. As the weeks pass, however, my resolve weakens. It’s either this or the main San Jose public library, and I’ve gotten far too used to being ten minutes’ walk to my books. Austin’s spoiled me.

Last week I did one of the most interesting things I’ve done in a while — I went to an exhibit at the Tech Musem called Islamic Science Rediscovered, and though the whole thing had a couple political overtones I’m not a huge fan of, I figured it would be interesting to at least take a look. Turns out the $21 fee was entirely worth it; I had a great time, took notes and played with all the playable exhibits. I’m intending to write another separate blog entry about this in my other blog, which still needs a bit of work before it can be public. But I have to say just one thing here: the role of the Middle East in developing science as we know it today is vastly underestimated, as far as I can tell from the (necessarily) limited information available at the exhibit. Which makes the current state of the Middle East even more deplorable, if I think about the scientific heritage they’ve lost.

This weekend will be about as techy: Cloud Computing meetup tomorrow afternoon, which will probably confound me, but hopefully inspire me to look things up as well. Then on Sunday, it’s back to the Tech museum for orientation! Hopefully I shall be a volunteer there soon, helping to mold young minds.

Now that’s a terrifying thought.

Reading through the paper, it doesn’t sound very impressive (but then again which dry scientific paper ever does?) especially because the maximum time they could temporally cloak anything turned out to be 110 ns; in theory, that could go up to 120 microseconds.

The number of sci-fi scenarios that could arise from this literally blow my mind. I was thinking about some of this stuff when I encountered a commenter’s thought that made my ideas far more concrete: this might be new technology, but imagine applying it to the screening of signals. Data is encoded in signals, and you don’t have to make all data vanish for it to have an impact on the veracity or accuracy of your information.

Just think about that for a second.

And after that V asked me what the hell the point of 110 ns as any kind of measure was, because it’s not immediately obvious what that does. So I tried to create a scenario for her.

1. The average PC processor these days operates at about 4 GHz (actually closer to 3.5, but whatever).
2. That means that the period of a single clock cycle is about 0.25 nanoseconds.
3. 110 ns translates into 440 cycles of 0.25 nanoseconds each.
4. Now, consider the number of cycles it would take for a single instruction to execute.

Here’s where I hit a stumbling block. I’m supposed to know this sort of thing because I’m a computer engineering student, apparently, but a) I wasn’t particularly stellar, b) I have the worst memory and c) I’m very software right now. I crowdsourced the question on Facebook and was firmly put in place for asking such a ridiculously wishy-washy thing (my commenter was right, anyway — there are too many things involved in comp arch to every answer a question like that without knowing the entire, exact background).

Incidentally, I believe the DP512 we used in microcontroller classes operates at 16MHz, which is a far less impressive 62 ns clock speed. Not much help there.

But if you want to consider something as basic as a fetch-decode-read-execute, you’re thinking of at least 4 cycles, maybe ten if you factor in subrouting jumping and the different kinds of memory access… I think. I’m probably still simplifying this far too much into uC territory.

Of course now the question is why the hell I’m torturing both myself and others about this piece of technology. And the answer is: possibilities! Sci-fi! I’m not talking about cloaking entire people or underground cities cloaked in time or anything (although that would be fabulous). I’m talking about bits of data just carefully concealed. I swear to god DoD probably had massive funding in this project.

Here’s what I typed to T, while we were discussing the possibilities:

well you’d have a system of signals, but some of them would run through these lenses

and the lenses would turn on and off at random times, so that no one suspected any patterns

so what you’d get is sort of… lost packets, noise?

if you couldn’t record the events i mean

so it would be secret in the sense that you couldn’t record it and it would sound like noise but it would be RIGHT THERE

under your nose!

distributing information!

 …. actually why stop there

if you could mess with the signals propagated through security cameras

then all you get is a series of nonsense images, if anything, through that camera

…..whoa.

it’s an entire system of rewriting history

And what I typed to V:

you could lose valuable calculations within those 440 cycles

by which i’m thinking like… stock market calculations? fluctuations in the market?

i need to ask some comp arc people about this

i mean you don’t even have to lose ALL your data

you just need to lose SOME data

for your final data to totally fail and not make any sense

Of course this is stupidity, in some ways, because it’s not likely they have a portable micro version of these lenses that they can simply insert where they want to. But here’s the thing about sci-fi — you have license to imagine and hope for the future.

Or possibly dread, if we’re talking about a totalitarian system that jacks into records to rewrite history and itself. 1984, guys — doubleplusungood.

Science: it’s like magic, except it works!

In other, almost just-as-startling news, have a look at the Crazy Camouflage Cephalopod:

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I need to look up the Enki myth and the tower of Babel again.

Man, stuff is so fascinating, how are people even bored?

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