Luke's Blog

Freedom of Speech

2010-12-07T23:24:00.006-05:00

The last week has been an extraordinary test of freedom of speech, as Wikileaks has begun publishing confidential US diplomatic communications ("cables") on the internet. The leaks themselves are less interesting than the global, especially US, response to them.

As for the leaks themselves, I've read a number of them, and for the most part, they are well-written, short but sweet summaries of some international or diplomatic issue. Crime in Mexico, corruption in Russia, etc. There are some confirmations of stuff we all suspected was true, but had no official word on, such as China hacking Google. Some of the cables reveal issues that other countries should be concerned about, such as Saudi Arabia asking the US to invade Iran, even though the Saudi citizens are largely pro-Iran and anti-US. The most shocking problem revealed by the cables is that the US asked its diplomats to spy on UN officials. The painful irony is that we are supposed to be building trust with our diplomatic relationships, yet we cannot be trusted ourselves.

Nothing so far has been a "bombshell" that will make heads roll (but we'll see, only a tiny fraction have been released).

But, officials in the US are calling for Julian Assange's blood. This is wrong.

It makes no difference whether Wikileaks is morally in the right. They are not a US entity, and they are not breaking US law. They are exercising freedom of speech. (There are certain exceptions for abuse of speech, but Wikileaks wouldn't fall under any of them.) The US government should not be squelching anyone who is exercising their right to freedom of speech, especially when it is political in nature. The highest protection for freedom of speech is for speech criticizing the government.

Yet various members of our government are condemning their actions and started a chain reaction where Wikileaks has lost access to funding (PayPal and some credit cards dropped support) and web hosting (Amazon dropped them). Not to mention some mysterious vague accusations of sexual behavior against Julian Assange--though I admit he may have brought that on himself.

This is a scary picture of what happens when you upset the US government. No one has yet claimed Wikileaks is breaking the law, and yet they have nearly been shut down. This is not how our democracy is supposed to work.

Sanity in Numbers

2010-11-01T23:02:00.009-05:00

This past weekend was the historic Rally to Restore Sanity. I did not attend, but I support the cause.

What I find fascinating today are the heated debates on the internet arguing whose rally was bigger. The whole thing is juvenile, but my curiousity got the best of me. Here's a breakdown of what I learned.

It seems that Glenn Beck and many of his supporters believe his rally had 200, 300, 500 thousand attendees. Whereas the estimate for the Stewart/Colbert rally is around 215,000, and it seems few are arguing it (although there are many reports that thousands were unable to make it in due to the size of the crowd). The former appears to be unsourced (i.e. it's truthy) (there are some claims that the National Park Service said there were 200k attendees, but I have not seen a reliable source for this, and anyway the count would not have been scientific) while the latter was done by AirPhotosLive using statistical methods. In fact AirPhotosLive also did an estimate of Glenn Beck's rally, and arrived at 87,000.

Now, there is a somewhat legitimate claim that AirPhotosLive could be biased. They were commissioned by CBS in both cases, and CBS is a sister company of Comedy Central (or something like that). I would reject that as implausible, however, due to how tenuous the connection is.

But the debate doesn't end there. Of course, there is visual evidence. Here are the best photos I found of the two rallies:

(original source)

The top is Rally to Restore Sanity, the lower is the Restoring Honor rally. The lower photo is missing only a small number of people below the bottom edge, as can be confirmed from other photos of the event. Moreover, from close-up photos, you can see that at Beck's rally, people were comfortably spaced, many in lawn chairs, while the Stewart/Colbert rally was standing room only, shoulder-to-shoulder.

Given the densities of the crowd, and the relative areas occupied by each (deduced from the photos and a map of the area), I think it's pretty easy to see that the Rally to Restore Sanity was easily 2x the size. Furthermore, I would say the count of 200k is entirely reasonable, if you estimate the number of pixels per person, and the number of pixels in the photo of people.

What's remarkable is how many people do not trust the published numbers. A quick sanity check reveals they're entirely reasonable.

Chopin at Symphony Hall

2010-10-31T23:08:00.003-05:00

Tuesday the 19th, my attendance was compulsory at an all-Chopin program at Symphony Space in the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre. Anne-Marie McDermott starred as the pianist, with Marta Wryk the singer and Rafal Jezierski the cellist.

A few excursions before I review the program itself. First, I found about about this performance through a Facebook ad. Finally, after thousands of "Harvard Grad? Get $1 teeth cleaning!" ads, they are starting to target me more appropriately.

Second, it turns out there are several Peter Jay Sharp Theatres in New York. If you google for it, as I did, you'll find the one in the Lincoln Center. Apparently many others were also misdirected. Fortunately they're not too far apart, and I was able to take the subway and still arrive on time.

Third, the program started way late. I know it's standard for programs to start 5-10 mins after the headline time, but this was quite late (possibly because of the number of confused people at the other Peter Jay Sharp theatre?). And then they spent the first ten or so minutes announcing the results of the piano competition held earlier that day. Of course I have the greatest respect for the young musicians (and, GO HARVARD, a 16-year-old Harvard student was named audience favorite), but not so great that I want to wait for my music to start on a work night :P

Fourth, regarding the piano competition, each contestant had to play a (or two?) Chopin etude. They reported the most commonly played was 10-10. Seriously? It's such a superficial piece. I would take anything in Op. 25 over that one.

Finally, Symphony Space gives highly discounted tickets to anyone 30 and under. I can understand broke college students, but 30 and under? Is my generation really so stingy we won't pay for real musical talent?

Songs

The songs for piano plus voice, Opus 74, are perhaps some of the most obscure Chopin works. It's not hard to see why: Polish is not the most widely appreciated language, and the pieces are such a small fraction of his repertoire. But, like the preludes and etudes, their small scope doesn't mean they don't have wonderful musical content. Less complex than his typical piano pieces, they are still well-crafted, please the ear, and encompass a range of emotion.

Marta Wryk was the native Pole who performed the voice. Rather than critique this performance, I'm going to make a more general claim. I think vibrato in classical music is way overdone. I have no doubt that it takes a great deal of hard work and talent to produce a sonorous, controlled vibrato, but frankly, I question the musical value. For such light pieces as these, I feel that the tempestuous vibrato of a classical opera singer isn't appropriate. Throughout the performance, all I could really hear was the vibrato, and I couldn't appreciate the melodic line.

So perhaps it was a fine performance by the usual technical standards, but musically I would have taken it a different direction.

Mazurkas

Next on the program was the piano solo, beginning with the four mazurkas Op. 17. The mazurkas seem to occupy a strange place in Chopin's repertoire: they are not as widely known as his flagship pieces such as the Ballades, but they arguably offer the best insight into Chopin's style. The typical Mazurka is short but extremely musically complex, with modest technical difficulties but great musical difficulties. One listening is rarely enough to even begin appreciating them.

This is really where McDermott shined. She had excellent control of the dynamics, and she had the passion needed to bring character to these vignettes. She ranks among the best performances of these I have, almost reminding me of Horowitz in the amount of expression. My only suggestion would be to use a bit more variety in dynamics when repeated sections are encountered; I noticed the same passage being played exactly the same on the second and third reprises.

Ballade No. 1

Ah, the G minor Ballade. One of Chopin's best-known works, it is a staple of any pianist's repertoire.

However, disregarding the technical difficulties (which, like other Chopin pieces, can be moderately difficult but is no obstacle to a professional pianist), I think this is one of the easier pieces to perform well. The expression of this piece comes naturally and it is not difficult to follow its thoughts.

McDermott chooses a fast tempo for this piece, among the fastest I've heard. This actually can work fine for most of the piece, but there are definitely portions where the loveliness goes by too fast. Still, the performance was enjoyable and sent chills up my spine.

Grande Valse Brillante

After an intermission, we return with the Waltz Opus 18. This is something of a parlor piece: a lot of fun without too much heavy material--though Chopin always sneaks in a lyrical section anyway. The characterizing attribute of this piece is lots of rapidly repeated notes. McDermott again chooses a fast tempo here, and I noticed some of the repeated notes missing (though to be fair it's not very noticeable and I'm just being a snob). Nevertheless, it was a very fun performance.

Berceuse

A rare sort of composition from Chopin, this piece is an ostinato with a repeated bass line throughout. The right hand receives increasingly embellished variants on the theme. Not one of my favorite pieces, but I can't complain about the performance of it.

Scherzo

To wrap up the solo piano part of the program, and the piece that I was most looking forward to, we are treated to Scherzo No. 1.

Chopin's scherzos, perhaps with the exception of No. 4, have nothing to do with the traditional form other than being 3/4 with an extremely fast tempo. Etymologically, a scherzo is a musical "joke", and it is the usual performance instruction for the playful or dance-like movements of a sonata. However, Chopin's scherzos are profound, dramatic, and sometimes even sinister. The first in B minor is one of Chopin's more chromatic pieces, with a lot of tense harmonies and a rather vague melody. The middle section of the piece is a huge contrast to the rest of the piece, being a calm, lyrical section based on some traditional Polish Christmas song (if I recall correctly).

Again choosing a fast tempo, McDermott performs one of the most impetuous, electric renditions I have heard. I found it hard to stay seated through the performance. She crushed a lot keys to give the piece an extra heavy bass beat, and the right hand ripped through the strings of notes with fury. Really, it was an awesome interpretation; I have quite a few recordings of this piece but I've only enjoyed Horowitz's as much.

From a technical standpoint, it was a little muddy. She hit a certain wrong note at least a couple times--the reach at the end of many of the right-hand phrases--which I am familiar with as I've hit the same wrong note myself many times. A lot of the notes got washed away in the fury, perhaps a bit less pedal would clean things up. Still, I would buy her CD.

Cello

The final section of the program was some piano-cello pieces. Contrary to what was announced earlier, two of the three pieces were not written by Chopin for piano-cello, but rather are arrangements.

First was the etude 25-7, a natural candidate for a cello arrangement as the melody is in the left hand. However, I thought this made a pretty mediocre piece. Frankly the cello is not as expressive as the piano. Maybe it was just the cellist, but the dynamic range required for this song is not met by the cello. And so we end up with the piano part actually being more expressive than the cello, even though the latter is supposed to be carrying the song.

Next, the famous Nocturne 9-2. Most of my comments for the etude apply here as well. The cello struggled a bit with getting the very high notes right, missing and then needing to adjust, and so this song was a bit of a miss for me.

Finally, was Opus 3, Introduction and Polonaise Brillante, which was written by Chopin for piano plus cello. Like Chopin's other early pieces, I feel that this was a bit of a technical show-off; the piano part was quite amazing I thought. Quite an enjoyable piece of music.

Concluding Remark

Although you wouldn't guess it from all my criticism, this was probably my favorite musical event I've been to in NYC. It's just amazing how Chopin captures everything wonderful about music to me.

Forever Zero

2010-09-02T23:29:00.003-05:00

My brother started a blog. If you like videogames, you should come over!

QFT

2010-04-26T01:28:00.002-05:00

The people with the most public voice--journalists and politicians--often have little to no clue what they're talking about... There's nothing wrong with a lack of knowledge of areas outside your expertise; the problem is when you misrepresent the truth or raise hell over an issue you don't fully understand. The journalist's job is to acquire expertise needed to report accurately. The politician's job is to seek advice from experts and serve their constituents. Please do your job!

Sigh... I wrote this over a year ago and I feel it's worse now than ever.

Almost amazing

2010-04-25T22:14:00.004-05:00

I just noticed this utility in Windows 7. At first I couldn't believe it, but then I found it's quite flawed... :/

Thomas Adés

2010-04-25T21:26:00.003-05:00

A couple weeks ago, I went to Carnegie Hall for the first time to watch a piano performance. (I've wanted to go several times, but it's so damn hard to get out by 7pm on a weekday.)

I zipped down to 59th street on the 4 train and walked over to Carnegie Hall on a fresh Saturday evening. I arrived about 25 minutes early, as getting a good seat was a top priority. After all, why go to a piano concert live if you can't see the hands? So I bought tickets on the first tier, left side of the stage, giving me a good view of the keyboard.

Like many concert halls, there's no legroom. This was actually a box seat, and the seats in it were movable, but the only way for me to give a respectful amount of room for my neighbors was to have my knees pressed against the banister. Annoying.

The program selection was divine.

First, a collection of pieces by Janáček. I've heard little of his music (I haven't heard his operas, which I guess he is most noted for), but what I've heard I've enjoyed, and this was no exception. A nice variety of colors, with a little bit of modern harmony, somewhat reminding me of Kabalevsky. For sure I need to check out more of his work.

Next, one of my three favorite Liszt pieces, Isolde's Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. The Horowitz recording of this piece is untouchable, but Adés had a capable performance. He brought out much more of the middle voices, so I got to hear quite a different perspective on the piece.

Third, a collection of Prokofiev pieces from Sarcasms, Op 17. I don't recall anything memorable about these pieces; it sounded very much Prokofiev.

Overall the first half of the program was great. An amazing selection of pieces. I was less impressed with the second half, sadly. First, a Schubert piece, which, like every other Schubert piece, was entirely forgettable. Frankly, I wish Schubert were kept where he belongs: as background music, and not on stage. (Harsh :)

Next, the highlight of the program: works by Adés himself. He arranged for piano 4 pieces from his opera Powder Her Face. These were very modern pieces, with non-tertian harmonies and flagrant sarcasm. There was a wide variety in the pieces, ranging from farcical to meditative, from simple to virtuosic. There were moments I enjoyed, though overall I didn't think it was great; at least there was enough variety in the works that I had plenty to listen to. Still, much better than most modern pieces I've heard.

He wrapped up the main program Six Bagatelles by Beethoven Op 126. I thought that was a little too much classical-era music to finish a program otherwise so emotionally loaded, but it's also hard to go wrong with Beethoven.

There were a couple encores, a short Liszt piece followed by something modern. The Liszt was good; I couldn't understand the other piece even though (or because?) it was slow.

The pianism overall was decent. Technically, I didn't hear any wrong notes (which is impressive given the difficulty of the program), but I thought the runs were a little weak; more volume or clarity in the runs would've really helped at times. Also, although he did a good job voicing various melodic lines, I thought he suffered a bit from lack of dynamics in the voices he was emphasizing. I think this was the main detractor from his performance. The melodies needed more shape.

Nevertheless, overall an enjoyable concert, and a very promising musician.

A new generation of math

2010-04-24T09:41:00.004-05:00

The power of computers with modern algorithms is gradually revolutionizing mathematics. We're all aware of the numerical capabilities, but their effectiveness goes far beyond that.

Computers have basically created the field of experimental mathematics. As computer and algorithm technology improves, we will be seeing experimental math progressing in fields of mathematics that formerly were strictly a human art.

The PSLQ algorithm, which allows one to turn a decimal expansion into a formula. Often mathematical constants can be computed relatively easily. This algorithm gives a way to identify constants with only minimal input on what the form should be.
Gosper's algorithm turns all those tricky combinatorial sums into trivial computer exercises. It has even resolved open problems, such as proving sum_k C(n,k)^3 has no explicit formula.
Computer-verified proofs. This field is young, but there is interesting progress. Many of the elementary, and some non-elementary, theorems in mathematics have been rigorously shown correct by a computer. No more doubt about whether the human proofs are using some step that the axioms don't support.

Jury Duty

2010-04-12T00:52:00.001-05:00

Back in July, I was summoned for jury duty in Manhattan. Although this meant annoyingly missing most of my work day (and making up for it in the evenings), I was looking forward to seeing our legal system in action. In the end, I didn't get much of a look into our legal system, as I didn't serve on a jury, but I did get to see others' attitude towards jury duty, and I was disappointed.

It's a natural reaction to want to get out of jury duty. It's an unfamiliar interruption to our routine and an uncertain commitment.

Many people made it obvious they wanted to get out of jury duty. And I found that offensive. More on that later.

After spending most of the day in a waiting room--where people read, checked email, or nodded off--we were finally summoned to the courtroom for jury selection. We got a quick overview of the charges (a lower Manhattan burglary), followed by some basic screening. The judge asked if anyone doesn't speak English. Several people raised their hands; a few spoke so little English they were excused, but a few were asked to stay. Next, any disabilities that would make you unable to serve. A couple people were excused for back or knee problems that make sitting difficult, and a couple people shared their concerns privately with the judge. One guy, whom we'll call Todd, said he was hard of hearing in his right ear. The judge asked if Todd could hear him; of course Todd said yes, but realizing he just made himself known, he defended himself saying he sometimes missed words. The judge didn't buy it, and he was asked to stay.

A few more people tried to get out based on inconvenience. One guy had a vacation scheduled. He had a hard time explaining why he had scheduled a vacation when the jury summons were sent months ago. Some people tried to get out because of work, even though the judge made it clear in the introduction that work is not an excuse (there are protections in the law for employees), except for the rare case of lives being in danger, such as a doctor who has no substitute.

After the initial screen, we began the process of jury selection. A lottery selects 18 people to come up and sit in the jury box. The judge, followed by the lawyers, screen each potential juror. The judge asks essential questions such as education and employment background and whether they understand and can obey the juror instructions (such as not being prejudiced when rendering a verdict).

The selection process fascinated me. The interview went one of three ways: the potential juror was cooperative and generally answered "yes" when asked if they can be unbiased; the potential juror who was excused due to the case "hitting too close to home", such as someone from the same neighborhood or someone who was also a victim of theft/robbery/burglary; and the potential juror who was obviously trying to get out of jury duty. What amazed me was how common the third category was; probably a quarter of the people made painfully obvious attempts to be excused. Most common were victims of some petty theft (and honestly, who hasn't been victim of some theft) who claimed they couldn't be unbiased. The judge was no fool, and he scowled at them and pointed out the absurdity of what they were saying. Most gave in and admitted they could try to be unbiased...

Todd was the worst. He said that "Well he must be guilty if the police have evidence. They wouldn't charge him if he wasn't guilty." The judge pointed out the principle of innocent until proven guilty and other basics we all know; still Todd insisted the defendant is guilty. Todd was no fool; he was an educated guy who worked in insurance. But he was applying all his intellect towards getting out of jury duty. In the end the judge made Todd stay.

After the judge did his basic screening, the lawyers had their (relatively brief) turn. I was extremely unimpressed with the quality of the lawyering, but I guess that's not too surprising considering they were probably both cheap (or free, in the case of the defendant) lawyers. I remember there being some analogy of circumstantial evidence and seeing a puddle outside and concluding it must have rained last night. It was a decent analogy: a puddle by itself might've just been someone who was spraying their sidewalk in the morning, but if everything else was wet, you could safely conclude it was raining. But the execution of the argument almost made me laugh. I guess not every courtroom can be as exciting as Law and Order.

The judges and lawyers confided behind closed doors to select 9 of the first 18 jurors to remain. Todd was excluded--I guess it's not hard to guess why--so he ended up getting his wish. We went through another round of jurors and interviews the following day to get the full jury of 12 with 6 alternates.

During all the downtime in the courtroom, I had a chance to chat with some of my neighbors. In addition to the info I got from the on-stage screening of potential jurors, I have to conclude that Manhattan residents are not at all representative of the rest of the country. During the screening, I sat next to a UPenn graduate and a banker who used to work at the same firm as I do. At least one screened juror was also a Harvard grad, and quite a few others with Ivy league educations and prestigious jobs. Given that jury selection is supposed to be a random sample of the population, I was surprised just how large a fraction of people (probably half) were "upper class".

Anyway, I want to finish up by saying how angry I was at people who try to get out of jury duty. This is the American justice system; it's what makes the abstract words of our laws into a reality protecting our rights and privileges. Fundamental to it is that everyone is guaranteed a fair trial. Every individual depends on and benefits greatly from our judicial system. We are all in debt to our legal system, and so when we're asked to contribute to it, we should do so thankfully. Todd wasted the time of everyone in the courtroom and showed no respect for the principles of justice, for the selfish reason that he didn't want sit on a jury for a few days.

Five years!

2009-11-15T20:36:00.007-05:00

Amazing that our 5-year reunion is coming up already. Time flies. (Ok, so really it's been less time for me, but it's still been a few years.) Here's what I wrote for my yearbook blurb.

Five years later, I find myself far from where I would have predicted. After graduating, I set out to find a teaching or programming job, with the intention to return to grad school after a couple years. Instead, despite having no corporate experience, I was headhunted on to Wall Street and decided to give it a go. As serendipity would have it, the chance to apply mathematics to the fast-paced world of finance was just the right fit for me.

I got a lot more than I signed up for. I entered finance as the economy was booming, and had a front-row seat as things unwound. Dozens of my colleagues lost their jobs, but after a very scary year, our firm made it through the crisis. Now the media is on a witch hunt, and we're the targets.

There's not much time outside of work, but I try to keep my passions alive. I keep my taekwondo kicks sharp at the gym, I tutor high school students through our firm's mentoring program, and occasionally play some Chopin on my digital piano.

I'm excited as to what the next 5 years will bring.

Real numbers: Unreal

2009-11-05T23:22:00.006-05:00

I don't believe in real numbers.

That's a statement surprising to hear from someone who studied math and does a lot of work with real numbers every day. But let me explain.

I don't believe real numbers are meaningful to study as an object themselves. However, I allow that they are a useful tool for studying properties of the natural numbers.

Here's why: I can only believe in math as far as it concerns conceivable physical processes. Specifically, I can only believe in math as far as it concerns the behavior of a Turing machine, as I find Turing machines representative of all conceivable physical processes.

Turing machines, by their nature, only deal with the finite, and so in the limit, the countably infinite. Real numbers, on the other hand, aren't countable, and so their properties cannot be verified by any Turing machine. For example, consider the statements:

There are only finitely many twin primes
There exists a set with cardinality between aleph_0 and 2^aleph_0

1 is a statement about natural numbers. Its truth will affect the result of a Turing machine: a Turing machine can enumerate the twin primes, and its output is finite iff 1 is true. 2 is a statement about the real numbers. However, a Turing machine cannot enumerate all sets of real numbers, and so no Turing machine can be affected by the truth of 2. Note that 2 is the famous continuum hypothesis. I don't care whether the continuum hypothesis is considered true or false, as it is irrelevant to any property of the natural numbers.

I can also defend this view from the perspective of model theory: Any theory with a model has a countable model. So the existence of "truly" uncountable sets (i.e. sets that are uncountable in the model) is unnecessary.

On the other hand, real numbers are still useful. The rational numbers, which are enumerable by Turing machines, have many properties that are easiest to discover by working with their completion, the real numbers. Furthermore, I don't deny that e and pi exist: they are meaningful quantities because arbitrarily good approximations can be computed.

So I'm not so crazy to dismiss real numbers; I just think a lot of problems regarding real numbers (such as the continuum hypothesis) are irrelevant, and we shouldn't waste time debating their truth. Let's focus on the parts of theory that tell us something about natural numbers.

Spearman Rho

2009-09-07T14:58:00.005-05:00

I'm working on updating my website. Right now I am missing a lot of old content, but I've added some new content: http://www.luke-g.com/math/spearman/index.html

I believe this is the largest table of the exact Spearman Rho distribution ever computed. Still, I believe it can be extended a bit more with smarter techniques. Beyond a certain point, the tables are mostly unnecessary, because there are reasonable asymptotic formulas. But having the tables is a good way to test the asymptotics :)

What is Spearman Rho?

See the wikipedia article for the math. It's basically a way of measuring correlation without an assumption of a particular model (for example, it doesn't assume the relationship is linear). That makes it much more robust against data sets that aren't normally distributed, for example.

Why should I care?

Because linear regressions are probably the most dangerous mathematical tool in existence. The simplicity of the model for linear regressions disguises the extremely sensitive assumptions that go into it. It's scary to think how many people do regressions in Excel without knowing the math. In particular, you need independent, normal residuals for test statistics to be valid, and these conditions are quite difficult to verify, not to mention usually false. (This can be relaxed somewhat, but the point remains.) The most obvious problem is outliers that screw up or dominate the results. However, when an outlier is removed, the results become biased.

Spearman Rho doesn't have these problems. Because it's non-parametric (meaning it does not assume a particular distribution for the variables), it's not sensitive to non-normal distributions. Furthermore, outliers have no more effect on the results than any other data point, so removing them isn't necessary, nor even desirable, since they are a valid piece of information that should be taken into account.

Accidental Discovery

2009-08-31T00:03:00.005-05:00

I was working on a combinatorics problem and happened to come across a nice identity. I'm sure it's not original (if you know the original result, leave a comment! I'd like to know), but I thought it was nice. I wonder if back in high school, when I did combinatorics regularly, I would recognize this...

Let F(N) be sum_i (-1)^(M-i)*(M choose i)*i^N. We use the convention 0^0 = 1 (in the sense that there is 1 way to pick 0 elements of a 0 element set). Then, F(0) = F(1) = ... = F(M-1) = 0, and F(M) = M!. Neat, it's not very often you get an equation with exponentials that has such nice behavior :)

Explanation: Suppose we have a set S of M elements. Then, how many possible sequences of elements of S of length N are there that contain all elements of S? By the inclusion-exclusion principle, it's F(N). On the other hand, simple combinatorics gives F(0) = ... = F(M-1) = 0 and F(M) = M!.

Great Use of Technology

2009-08-12T22:02:00.004-05:00

Remember 10 or so years ago, how awesome it was that vending machines started taking dollar bills? Do you remember how frustrating it was that they never took your dollar bill? Well, I have to say, one of the great technological triumphs of the 21st century has been vending machine dollar bill scanning technology. I don't know how they do it, but modern vending machines have no trouble taking my crumpled up $1 bills.

Thank you, science.

Spider Solitaire

2009-07-19T21:09:00.005-05:00

One of my secret vices is the Windows game Spider Solitaire. It turns out that this is a really fascinating game.

When I was young, I played Freecell occasionally, though I got bored once I figured out you can win every game with enough thought. (Only something like one in ten thousand games are unsolvable.) Much later, while bored, I learned Spider Solitaire to see if it was as interesting; my Mom played it a lot. After a few games, I started to realize there was really something unique about it.

I've always played with the discipline that undoing turning over a card is not allowed. In other words, I can't undo any move that reveals a formerly hidden card. This adds an element of chance to the game. The goal is to win the greatest percentage of games possible. (I don't care about score-- score and winning are, in fact, opposing goals.)

This leads to a game full of subtle calculations and intuition; all kinds of interesting trade-offs occur in the course of a game. Optimizing winning chances often requires long sequences of elaborate moves to match up suits and maximize opportunities before revealing a hidden card, which could make or break the game. Even after several hundred games, the proper play in many situations is unclear to me. Card counting seems important, particularly on Hard, yet I'm far from mastering the ways of applying it.

I think it'd be fascinating to work on a computer program to play near-optimal Spider Solitaire. Monte Carlo techniques could test efficacy of different strategies, and perhaps even develop an optimal strategy. But it's pretty far down on my list of projects :)

I've saved some of my historical stats. You can see my medium-level game really improved over the first 100 games. Now I play on Hard. All these were done without undoing any card reveals, even when I realized I made an earlier mistake. I'd estimate a few percent of my games I lost after realizing an earlier mistake.

53-47 medium difficulty achieved 1-20-2007
64-36 medium difficulty achieved 2-17-2007
60-40 medium difficulty achieved 6-16-2007
72-28 medium difficulty achieved 8-08-2007
29-71 hard difficulty achieved 7-1-2009

Programming Competition

2009-07-09T21:55:00.004-05:00

Al Zimmermann's Programming Contests

http://www.azspcs.net/

I pointed out this site about a year ago for the previous contest, Primal Sums. I thought I'd mention it again as there's a new 3-month contest about to start. He also added a year-long contest to find solutions to the postage stamp problem.

Although I don't have a tremendous amount of time to devote to the contests, I think it's a really great idea to have long-running, open-ended contests like this. That way, unlike many other programming contests, people (like myself) without a lot of free time or a flexible schedule can still compete and get good results.

Eiges

2009-06-23T00:11:00.003-05:00

A facebook friend of mine had a link to some obscure music sitting on Youtube. I clicked around and found several pieces I enjoyed, but there's one that has completely conquered me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCVpvfDsjts

Piano Sonata-Toccata No. 4, by Oleg Eiges.

I feel like this piece is getting really close to my ultimate conception of music: a bit abstract, contrasting--if not manic--dynamics, creative but not dissonant harmonies, and enough complexity that multiple listenings all provide new appreciation for the piece.

(I think the performance leaves some to be desired, but the piece is really awesome.)

Thread Count

2009-06-07T19:49:00.004-05:00

Have you ever wondered what the thread count of sheets really means? Me, too. http://www.cottoninc.com/PressReleases/?articleID=364

Anyway, I bought new sheets today, along with pillowcases and another pillow (bringing me up to 5). Can't wait until bedtime!

NYPhil: Mahler 1

2009-05-08T22:43:00.004-05:00

A few weeks ago I realized I hate myself for not going to more music stuff in New York. I live in Manhattan, I have a fulminant passion for music, and I have some spending money to go out more often. No excuses. So I signed up for NYPhil and Carnegie Hall's newsletters.

The first result is that I went to Avery Fisher Hall tonight for a performance of Mahler's first symphony. On the program first was Mahler's Blumine, then a premier of a commissioned piece by Peter Lieberson called "The World in Flower".

Blumine

This is a single movement piece that was originally part of Mahler's first, but expunged in later revisions when he realized it sucked. Frankly, I thought it was a bit dull, and not up to Mahler's usual standards.

The World in Flower

I didn't realize when I bought tickets that I was going to see a world premier of a piece. About half an hour long, this is an eight part piece for orchestra, chorus, and vocal soloists, written over the past few years (2005-09) on commission from the NYPhil.

It's definitely modern style. It uses non-classical harmonies, with lots of tritones and 9ths (major and minor), although I wouldn't classify it as an "ugly" modern piece. Most of the dissonances resolve to something tolerable. There are eight sections, each a few minutes long and based on a short poem (with the poems being sung by the soloists or the chorus); these aren't really analagous to movements, however, because they flow smoothly from one to the next.

Frankly, I was rather unimpressed by this piece. (Though, as ya'll know, I'm a pretty nasty critic.) There are plenty of ideas in the piece, but they just never seemed to go anywhere much. I started to feel like it was a bunch of 10 second crescendos followed by decrescendos; there wasn't much variety in the dynamics at a larger scale.

I didn't really pay much attention to the interaction of the lyrics and the music. Both can't fit in my head at the same time :) I didn't notice anything particularly good or particularly bad in this regard.

Furthermore, frankly, it was awfully bold to pair this up with Mahler. I mean, it's Mahler. You can't stand up next to that...

Mahler 1

I haven't heard much Mahler, to be honest, and this was the first time I heard this symphony, but even so, I feel like he's one of the best symphonic composers I've heard. He uses instruments to their strengths, forges great movements from solid phrases, and introduces new ideas rather than rehashing the same bars over and over.

The first movement opens with the same first couple notes as the Stark Trek: TNG theme, and that sadly reminded me I passed up going to the new Star Trek to watch this :) The second movement I don't have much memory of, other than being in 3/4 time. The third movement is based on "Friar Jacques" in a minor key (D minor, in fact), which I thought was going to be gimmicky, but it was actually a great movement that evoked Beethoven's 7th 2nd movement ostinato. The 4th movement was a blast from beginning to end.

It wasn't a perfect piece. One thing that bugs me, which I've also noticed is much worse in most other symphonic pieces, is transient phrases played by a certain instrument (usually brass bugs me the most) that never properly resolve on that instrument. Suddenly trumpets blast some chords, then you hear nothing from them for the next minute. It makes them feel out of place to me; I have trumpet blasts lingering in my ear. But, Mahler usually gets this right. It's a relatively minor complaint in what is a very well-done piece.

What I appreciated most about the piece was the variety throughout. There's no dilly dallying around single ideas incessantly, of which many composers are guilty, especially in longer symphonic works. There's a mix of new ideas and variations on old stuff, and modulations so you don't get bored of the same chords over and over. He let the dynamics flow naturally--lyrical for a while, growing in a crescendo, finally an explosion--and doesn't waste the listener's time with excessive prudence.

The standing ovation was well-earned.

Worse than Bush?

2009-04-11T13:45:00.004-05:00

Although I've been pretty happy with Obama in most aspects so far, the issue of warrentless wiretapping is a huge disappointment. It's constitutionally preposterous, and an insult to the idea of democracy. Wtf, Obama?

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/obama-doj-worse-than-bush/

Contact the White House here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

Here's what I wrote:

Dear President Obama and staff:

I'm writing about the DOJ's argument on warrentless wiretapping. The article I read is here: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/obama-doj-worse-than-bush/ This has received widespread attention, for example, being posted on slashdot.org.

I am deeply disappointed, if not frightened, that the DOJ is arguing that "state secrets" make it impossible to for the courts to hear the warrantless wiretapping cases. Effectively, this means there is no accountability for the government's actions. Clearly, this is an attempt to subvert the authority of the judicial branch over the executive. As an American who believes in the importance of checks and balances, I find this trend disturbing.

I hope you consider reversing this position. As a sign of good faith to the American people and our justice system, we should let the courts rule on the legality of actions taken by the previous administration.

"State secrets" is far too vague a reason to defend possible constitutional violations. The government is by the people, for the people: "state secrets" is nearly an oxymoron. If there is truly a national security concern so grave as to exempt a public trial, the nation needs to create a system where cases such as this can be brought to trial.

Thank you for your consideration,

--Luke Gustafson

Pandora

2009-03-29T16:52:00.003-05:00

I've started listening to www.pandora.com. It's an internet radio that plays songs similar to artists you pick, using the "music geneology project" (whatever that is). It does a pretty decent job of matching genres and styles, so it's a great way to discover new music. It covers both classical and popular music.

This is the future of music distribution. In an age where you can easily download music for free, the only way to compete is to have free music available (with stuff available for purchase if you like).

And it's great. I was listening to Scriabin, and heard a pretty decent recording of a piece. I click for more info, and find out the pianist had recorded the complete piano works of Scriabin. And so I bought the CD's from the Amazon link. And then of course, Amazon tempts with me other stuff, which I also buy. They've made over $100 off of me already, and in exchange, I've got an awesome Scriabin collection.

Martial Arts Misteachings

2009-03-22T21:14:00.005-05:00

(This post is inspired by my second ever set of knuckle pushups on concrete and some youtube videos of others' knuckle conditioning.)

First, let me disclaim, I'm not the expert; I did taekwondo for a while and now I follow MMA. But there's some obvious stuff that so many martial arts teach that just isn't practical:

Punching with the first two knuckles. Ideally, you want to punch with your index & middle finger knuckles, as these are the biggest and line up best with your wrist. However, conditioning only these two knuckles is a huge mistake. Outside of the gym, few surfaces are flat, and against a moving opponent you'll rarely make a clean hit. You need to condition all four knuckles for punching. I'm not sure if this is generally true, but the instances where I have heard of trained people breaking their hands punching, it's often the ring finger knuckle.
Kicking with the foot. Feet are squishy and full of small bones; making them your prefered kicking surface is a mistake. You need to kick with the lower part of the shin. First, the tibia is a very thick bone and is unlikely to break. The lower shin is covered in tendon and ligaments that further protect the bone. Second, the shin transfers force much more violently than your squishy feet. I've seen people break baseball bats with their shins. I doubt one could do that with their foot.
Blocking. Blocking is just silly for the most part. Punches (jabs, at least) are far too fast to block intentionally. The hard blocks you see in martial arts movies are completely unrealistic. Instead you need to learn the correct fighting posture to protect your head and maximize the chance of deflecting punches. Second, hard blocks don't work against kicks: a good kick can break a forearm (and I've seen it happen a couple times). Kicks need to be dodged or caught with a soft block.

Peeves

2009-03-15T22:58:00.006-05:00

There are a lot of things that are universally annoying, like how hard it is to get a CD out of its shrink-wrapping. I'm not going to write about those. Here's some unique stuff that annoys me.

Stereo sound abuse. When I listen to piano music, I don't want to hear the bass in my left ear and the treble in my right. When I'm listening to rock, I don't want to hear the singer in my right ear and the guitar in my left. I want to hear it in both ears.
Small fonts. Why has it become so popular to use 8pt fonts on webpages? Not only that, but the fonts don't scale when you change the text size option in your browser. I'm not always sitting within one foot of my screen, please don't assume I am when choosing a font.
Suit jackets, or even ties, with jeans. Or a suit jacket over a T-shirt. Do you pair fine wines with McDonald's? I find this equally silly. It might be considered cool, but I still throw up a bit every time.
5 stars for everything. Customer reviews on sites like Amazon or MenuPages are basically always 1, 4, or 5 stars, corresponding to "bad", "ok", and "good". This makes ratings nearly useless. Please be more critical. If more than ten percent of stuff is getting five stars, you're not picking the best from the good.
"That" versus "which". I don't want to see this grammatical distinction disappear, because unlike some other formalities, like who/whom, this distinction affects the meaning of the statement. "That" is for restrictive phrases, "which" is for nonrestrictive. Strangely, this error is very rare in speech: people always use "that" when appropriate. For some reason, I guess, people think "which" sounds more formal. But they're wrong: "that" and "which" are not interchangeable.

To balance things out, watch for a later post on random stuff that pleases me.

Timbers

2009-03-02T22:16:00.003-05:00

"Out of the crooked timbers of humanity, no straight thing can ever be made."

--Kant

(This quote is on some ads in the subway. I saw it, and thought it was awesome.)

C Sucks

2009-02-16T15:58:00.004-05:00

One of the most frustrating things about programming is the programming language. There are so few good choices. For low-level coding, C and C++ are the gold standards. But as far as I'm concerned, they're crap.

Myth: C is portable. It's often claimed that C (or even C++) is a portable language. Practically, this is utterly false. You end up writing different sets of code for different platforms by using the preprocessor. If you are hoping to write code once and compile it anywhere, you're out of luck. (There are cross-platform libraries out there, where someone else has done most of the hard work. But even then, portability isn't guaranteed.) Furthermore, if you want to use advanced features, such as assembly or instrinsic functions, every compiler has a different scheme.

Myth: C is easy to optimize for compilers. It's a fact that C/C++ are the performance champions, with possible exception of modern Fortran for some numerical work. And it's true compilers produce some well-optimized code nowadays. However, it's false that C is easy to optimize for compilers. The only reason compilers are any good is the effort that's gone into them. In fact, it's incredibly difficult to make correct optimizations to most programs, and there typically are compiler switches (e.g. assume no pointer aliasing) necessary to give permission to make not-correct-in-general optimizations. Any code with pointers is nearly impossible to optimize correctly, because you can't discount the pointer pointing at currently-in-use data (which is basically the pointer aliasing problem). Furthermore, some parts of the C standard make optimization hard: for example, truncating floats to integers is much much slower than rounding. Finally, C and C++ lack any sort of intrinsic vector operations, so the compiler itself needs to be able to figure out when code can be vectorized (which is very difficult).

Myth: C is good for low-level coding. Just because C is a low-level language doesn't mean it's good at low-level coding. It's missing all kinds of useful low-level operations that most processors support: bit rotations, access to the overflow, etc. And it's way behind the times for vector operations, such as XMM; support for these varies by compiler. You really need assembly to write high-performance numerical routines.

Fact: The preprocessor is a horrible idea. This one is obvious if you've seen the obfuscated C code contest. Who thought it'd be a good idea to give you the ability, if not to encourge, defining any symbol as any text whatsoever? And isn't there a better solution to having a tangled web of header files? Don't get me started on the evils of macros.

Fact: Compiling C projects is a pain in the ass. This is something Microsoft got right: an IDE with projects that are relatively straightforward to compile (unless, god forbid, you're having trouble linking to another library). But for other platforms, you're going to be working with GNU tools, such as make. Make itself is not evil, but it's used as a hack of a hack to solve the cross-platform issue discussed above. It's a complete disaster in implementation and convenience. The fact that you start most projects with a 200kb makefile ("configure") before you even have source code, and it only grows from there, should tell you something is wrong. Is there a bug in a makefile somewhere? Good luck figuring out what's wrong. On only two projects I've downloaded and tried to compile, I've spent 6 hours debugging makefiles. Either it doesn't work very well, or the learning curve is too great. Either way, simply compiling a project shouldn't be more than a couple mouseclicks.

These are just the problems with C. I have way more problems with C++. It's a horrible chimera of low-level programing with high-level language features, which can blow up in all kinds of unpredictable and non-intuitive ways...

Incompetence

2009-02-11T22:27:00.003-05:00

This is one of those things that you always knew was true, but only over time do you really realize how true and horrible it is.

The people with the most public voice--journalists and politicians--often have little to no clue what they're talking about. This is true in science (global warming, evolution, nuclear power are a few that come to mind immediately) and finance (lately there's been a lot of rhetoric with little connection to reality). By extrapolation, I have to assume all other areas as well!

There's nothing wrong with a lack of knowledge of areas outside your expertise; the problem is when you misrepresent the truth or raise hell over an issue you don't fully understand. The journalist's job is to acquire expertise needed to report accurately. The politician's job is to seek advice from experts and serve their constituents. Please do your job!

This is getting more important all the time, as fields get increasingly complex. Not everyone can be an expert on everything, and we need competent public figures who can distill the important issues for the public.

(Something I like about Obama, incidentally, is that he's actually quite competent.)

Taxing

2009-02-08T19:19:00.003-05:00

C'mon. Politicians should be the most careful about getting their taxes right, and they have the least excuse for getting it wrong (they're in charge of the rules). Whether it's negligence or intentional, people who have skimped on taxes should not be serving in the government.

If it's really that hard to pay what you owe, there's another reason tax law needs to be simplified.

The O-Bomb

2009-01-27T21:57:00.004-05:00

While it's often laughable how the media has deified Obama (and likewise laughable how Fox News tries to make him out to be incompetent), I've been really pleased with him so far. Undoubtedly the first week in office was scripted, but that doesn't change the fact that he's already done so much. And it's not just all the executive orders overturning Bush's questionable policies (Guantanamo, family planning, environmental), but rather the openness. After 8 years of Bush losing emails and his staff "not remembering" what happened, this is a welcome change. As I mentioned a couple posts ago, check out http://www.whitehouse.gov. Am I too optimistic that the government might start catching up to the internet age?

And how is it that Obama seems so open minded about everything? Could this be the start of an era where politicians honestly weigh all sides of an issue, rather than doing whatever gives the best soundbite?

Pinch me!

Marginal Value

2009-01-25T21:43:00.004-05:00

A little philosophy and economics for your rumination...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_value
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility

One thing that's surprisingly fascinating in economics is how value is assigned to goods. There's a classical paradox: Why is it that water, being incredibly useful (necessary for life, etc), costs so little, while diamonds cost so much? At a high level, the answer is simply supply and demand: there's plenty of water, and not enough diamonds. Specifically, looking at the value of the last unit of each (the "Marginal Utility"), you can see that there's plenty of water for our needs, so the last unit of water has little value; whereas the last unit of diamonds are being used for luxury items.

This is a brutal concept: objects are devalued to only their least valuable use.

It doesn't just apply to prices; anywhere one judges "value", this notion should be considered. And I'll suggest, if you're feeling brave, to apply it to yourself.

The ultimate value of one's life is not one's accomplishments, but rather what one accomplishes that no one else would have. That is, what made your life unique. A doctor is a noble profession, but there are a lot of doctors, and a hopeful doctor who would've filled your slot at medical school, who make the marginal value low. A senior banker might make a lot of money, but many others could have filled your shoes if you weren't there.

On the other hand, there are some surprising places where there's a lot of marginal value. There are few good teachers; if you've taught or tutored, you've made a difference where possibly no one else would have. To your friends, you're a unique individual who has no replacement. If you've done anything creative--writing, composing, drawing, performing--you may have created something no one else would have. Similarly, if you're a researcher, your discoveries might not have been made by anyone else.

As the cliche goes, no one dies wishing they spent more time at the office. There's not much marginal value to be had in the office. Seek out your marginal value!

Lost season 5 premier tomorrow

2009-01-20T20:51:00.003-05:00

and I'm psyched!!!!!

Oh yeah, also there was an inauguration today or something. I heard it was pretty good. Check out the sick new www.whitehouse.gov website.

Juxtaposition

2009-01-17T14:04:00.003-05:00

Sometimes Google news finds hilarious pictures to go with articles:

If Surgeons Keep A Checklist, They Erase Many Errors

Next to this headline, a picture of Michael Jackson.

Pillowcases

2008-12-17T23:36:00.003-05:00

A year ago, the Asia 94 laundromat closed because they weren't profitable enough. I was always happy with their results; that's where I was doing my laundry, so now I had to find a new place. Who would have guessed the sorry state of laundromats.

The first place I tried was right next door. They didn't get spots out of my shirts, and the second or third time I went, they lost my two pillowcases. They also were slow about doing laundry (like most places, they truck off your laundry somewhere else where it's cheaper to run laundry machines), so I decided to go elsewhere.

So I tried a different place at the opposite side of our block.

This place seemed a bit better. They got my laundry back to me the same day. They did laundry "in their own facility", which was not in that building, but with a 1-day turnaround I didn't care too much. Although I rarely receive the same black socks I give them, I've been doing my laundry with them for most of the past year.

However, this week, I did a small load of whites, which included two of my pillowcases. Instead of returning my laundry with two pillowcases, they included 6 pairs of 36 waist briefs.

So sad.

Faux News

2008-09-28T13:16:00.004-05:00

I was surprised even Fox News was questioning Palin's suitability... but then I got a 404 and was unsurprised!

Ankle weights

2008-09-14T22:56:00.004-05:00

I have rarely been so excited by a purchase as I am this weekend. While shopping for new running shorts, I looked through the other products at the store. I found two that I couldn't resist: first, a grip strengthener, second, ankle weights.

Can't weight to try them at the gym tomorrow!

Hypocrites

2008-09-01T14:29:00.004-05:00

Hypocrisy flows like water in Washington, but Republicans prove theirs is unequaled:

McCain was elected for being a moderate Republican, but picks Bush Jr. as VP. Creationist, pro-life, and anti-gay, she embodies the far right's position.
After attacking Obama for lack of experience, McCain picks a VP with no Washington experience and no passport (EDIT: no passport until a year ago). (Being mayor of a small town in Alaska doesn't count as experience. That's a part-time job!)
Sarah Palin's daughter is 17, pregnant, and unmarried. So much for abstinence-only?

This plan to lure Hillary supporters will backfire. I can't wait to see the VP debates!

Three dimensions

2008-08-24T12:00:00.004-05:00

I don't think the human brain can visualize three dimensional objects. Rather, I think it can only really visualize two dimensional surfaces in three dimensional space.

To prove my point, here's a problem which is mathematically trivial, yet I can hardly visualize the solution: Divide a cube into three congruent pyramids. (No scratch paper allowed!) The two dimensional version is easy: Divide a square into two congruent triangles.

Book reviews

2008-08-18T00:09:00.005-05:00

Now reading: Restitution by Lee Vance (so far, it's very good). Next on my list: Nickel and Dimed.

Also I've been reading some poetry. Yeats, a quintessential Romantic like myself :), has a few poems that have blown me away.

What Happened (Scott McClellan)

3/5. This is a nonfiction book about the Bush campaign and whitehouse while Scott McClellan worked under Bush (eventually as press secretary). It's a hefty book, the writing can be a bit dry, and the revelations are stuff we all suspected anyway, but I enjoyed reading it as a personal story. Through the book, one feels that they are the priest in a confessional. Scott openly admits to things he and others have done that he isn't proud of.

Although Scott tries to portray everyone in the best possible light, a lot of what he says is worrisome. Bush comes across as unintellectual, not seeking or wanting to know the facts or nuances about issues. Karl Rove is the "master of the game", hypercompetitive and willing to win at any cost.

I did not like his repeated excuse "the Whitehouse bubble" for poor choices made by the administration. Of all people in the US that I don't want living in a bubble, it's the people in the Whitehouse!

One thing that was clear to me was that Scott is a very gullible guy; he's not evil, but the Bush administration took advantage of him to do their dirty work.

I concluded from the book that the Whitehouse is full of evil people, and gullible people.

The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)

3/5. This is a feel-good story about pursuing one's dreams, one's "Personal Legend". It also definitely has some religious themes, but I wouldn't say religion is a key part of enjoying the book. I have to say that the beginning of the book was great, and made me think about myself, where I am, where I'm going, and how that compares with my dreams. However, I feel like the story got weaker (if not a bit absurd) later in the book, which is why I'm only giving it a 3 out of 5.

While the thesis of the book is to follow your Personal Legend, practically this just won't work in real life for everyone. Not everyone can be a hero. The reality of economics is that there's a lot of dull work that needs to be done; moreover a lot of fulfilling activities aren't economically valuable (the "starving artist" phenomenon). I think this is really tragic, but fortunately an army of robot servants will eventually allow all humankind to pursue their Personal Legends (but... see the Star Trek episode When_the_Bough_Breaks). Seriously though, those of us who are able pursue our dreams should count our blessings.

The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

2/5. This was a mildly entertaining story about love, lust, laughter, and manslaughter. The prose is ornate, and I think is the highlight of the book. However, the plot is brief, and overall I felt like the book was too static--the difference between the end and the beginning of the book was small.

I was a bit surprised how little I enjoyed this, considering it's supposed to be the Great American Novel. So, I looked up The_Great_American_Novel, and found out that doesn't mean it's a good book, it means it's a good historical piece. Sure, the book might give a good sense of what elite America was like in the 1920's, but I prefer entertainment to be the primary objective of novels.

Programming Contest

2008-08-02T14:02:00.002-05:00

http://www.recmath.org/contest/index.php

Looks like fun!

Academia

2008-07-16T23:11:00.004-05:00

Interesting article I ran across. Obstensibly about women in science, but really takes a skeptical look at academia as a whole: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

"If you are extremely introverted, you might prefer to work as a computer programmer. " Hey now!

Ron Paul

2008-07-05T18:37:00.005-05:00

I had two quick reads the past two weeks: Keith Olbermann's book (Truth and Consequences), and Ron Paul's book (The Revolution: A Manifesto). I picked up Keith's book because my brother is a fan; I picked up Ron Paul's book because I was hoping for something interesting. (I'm not a libertarian, but would enjoy hearing a defense.)

Ron Paul's book really is nothing more than simpleminded rhetoric. His arguments, if you could call them that, are full of holes the size of Texas (if you missed the pun, Ron Paul is a senator from Texas ;). On a number of topics, he is either deliberately misleading or ignorant. On other topics, he oversimplifies and doesn't address common criticism.

I suppose one positive point is that at least he's fairly consistent in his beliefs. He's probably not crazy; just a libertarian zealot and a tad paranoid.

The Constitution

One point on which I agree with Ron Paul is that the constitution is intepreted too loosely. As a programmer and mathematician, I believe precise specifications are a prerequisite to any system or project, otherwise confusion or mistaken expectations result. Whereas, with law, we have murky interpretations of a centuries-old document that was written during very different circumstances from today's. We should be amending the Constitution, and any other old pieces of law, to stay current and clear, instead of relying on increasingly labyrinthine case law.

Now, Ron Paul makes a fair point that the Constitution does not provide the facility for many of the programs the federal government operates. Yet his argument is simply quoting the Founding Fathers, rather than actually looking at how Constitutional law has developed over the centuries. Not being a legal scholar (neither is he), I can't really say much more.

He takes this a step further, and argues (or simply states) that therefore, the federal government shouldn't be doing these things. Here I disagree. There are things we should be doing, but we should have amended the Constitution to make it clear that the federal government has the authority. I'll go into more detail in the coming sections.

Foreign Policy

Ron Paul's foreign policy is simple: less is better. His argument again is primarily citing the founding farthers, although he makes a number of claims about the harm of spreading American wealth abroad. Unfortunately there's not a lot to corroborate his statements.

He uses a number of fallacies in this chapter. Among them, "things were better before X, therefore X is the cause of our problems", even though he points out this exact fallacy in others' arguments later in the book. Second, he takes as evidence of our overextension that we have troops in 160 countries. Of course, he neglects to say what those troops are doing. Maybe they're just defending our embassies. If we had that many combat operations, that would be bad.

He also believes in eliminating (not simply reducing) foreign aid. He points out, rightly so, that it's extremely expensive. However he makes no mention of benefits. Instead, he believes that private groups can fill the role. I wonder what his take on the Marshall plan is.

For much of the chapter, however, I found myself nodding along. We do have too many troops abroad, and we have been meddling in others' affairs too much. Combat is incredibly expensive and incredibly destructive, both economically and morally. We're not the world's police. That duty should belong to the UN.

Ron Paul is no fan of the UN or other international organizations (WTO, NAFTA). He argues that no organization should have rule over the American government; therefore the UN is bad. He dawdles on a bit about how the WTO is bad, but it's just handwaving and not substantive. (I was a bit surprised by this, because the WTO is a free trade advocate.) Instead of international governance, he argues that we can be "friends" with other nations, and this is enough.

Here I disagree. While I believe the UN, etc., should not have authority over the US, we can still (and should) actively participate in world governance. The solution is obvious: If the UN asks for something, our Congress immediately passes a bill (not necessarily rubber-stamp, but we should show good faith towards participating in international governance). We keep our sovereignty, but still cooperate internationally.

Taxes

Obviously, the Libertarian position is small government and small taxes.

It's hard to argue that our government needs to trim some fat. A lot of fat, even. But calling income taxes "looting", as Ron Paul does throughout the book, is disingenuous. The government needs to be funded, and these funds should come from people who benefit from the government (which theoretically should be everyone).

I fail to see how an income tax is looting, while a corporate tax is not. You have to tax money at some point. In fact, I might say income tax is the most fair way to tax. The richest Americans should be paying the most tax, and that's precisely what can be done with an income tax. On the other hand, a corporate tax simply decreases the margins at a corporation. Guess which workers will be the first to see their paychecks shrink if the company's taxes go up?

I suppose I'm being a bit unfair here. You might say the Libertarian position is that the government has no right to redistribute wealth. But then I might say, define "redistribute wealth" in a way such that any government operation is not a redistribution of wealth.

Anyway, taxes are a complicated subject. I believe I've blogged previously on it a while ago, when I was reading Greenspan's book. It's a very complicated topic.

One subject he briefly discusses is pollution. He claimed that pollution taxes wouldn't work; instead pollution should simply be illegal (since it's effectively trespassing), with government-granted exceptions. So basically, he is claiming that the government should regulate pollution. Sounds like exactly how it is now!

There are a lot of points I could go into, but I think I can sum up things pretty well with one sentence: Overall, I like the idea of reducing the government footprint, but Ron Paul takes it too far. There's a balance somewhere between socialism and anarchism where things are most efficient and humane.

One final thing I'll point out is an overlooked but critical issue: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. These are not funded sufficiently for the future. Ron Paul and I agree, there's a disaster waiting to happen.

Personal Liberties

This chapter dealt with a few points: government surveillance, the war on drugs, and abortion (actually abortion may have been another chapter, but it belongs under this heading). There's also a little blurb about educational freedom, which basically looked like an excuse for creationism, but it wasn't one of his key points. Conspicuously absent from the book was sexual freedom--I wonder why, because it's pretty clear what the Libertarian stance is. Probably he just wanted to stick to topics conservatives could agree with!

His stance on abortion is one I agree with: it should be up to the states. I don't really see how the Constitution would grant the federal government the power to make a law on this. Now, he doesn't say it explicitly, but he's obviously pro-life (as you know, I'm pro-choice). He gives an anecdote about how 40 years ago, as an ob/gyn doctor, he saw an abortion and it was quite cruel. Of course he doesn't mention how things have since improved. He also mocks the use of the term "fetus" instead of "baby".

His stance on goverment surveillance is one everyone agrees with. The 4th amendment makes it quite clear that warrantless surveillance is not allowed. Moreover, habeus corpus is granted in the constitution (not in the bill of rights, but before), and should not be violated by the "enemy combatants" loophole. Thank goodness for the recent Supreme Court ruling on this. Ron Paul also alleges that the surveillance has been used for political purposes.

Finally, he claims drugs should be uncontrolled. His reasoning for this is entirely one-sided, focusing on the cons of drug regulation and not the benefits. Among the problems with laws against drugs are burdening courts and prisons, and creating a black market that ultimately begets more crime. I agree that both these things are problems with the current system.

However, Ron Paul fails to look at the benefits of drug regulation. His proposed solution for addicts is that communities take responsibility. I will categorize this as pie-in-the-sky, judging both by how hard it is to help people that don't want to be helped, and by how little responsibility communities currently show for their addicts (walk around New York at 4am, for example).

What Ron Paul, and others who take a libertarian view on this issue, seem to completely miss, is the self-destructive and highly addictive nature of many drugs. Opiates such as heroin can be impossibly addictive. Legal or illegal, life becomes about getting the next fix. Other drugs, such as cocaine, may have brutal physical effects, in addition to being highly addictive. I personally don't want to live in a society full of addicts--there'd be plenty of crime even if the drugs themselves are legal. Considering the extremely narrow possibility of using these drugs responsibly, they should be hard to get.

Incidentally, I think distribution of illegal drugs should be illegal, but not possession. You're doing no one a favor jailing an addict; they need treatment, not prison. The dealer is the culprit and the one who needs to be punished.

Marijuana, as opposed to the harder drugs, is another issue. Ron Paul ignores harder drugs and only writes about marijuana. I'm by no means an expert on this drug, having never tried it myself and with most research heavily biased. It's true the history of its ban is sketchy, and it's true a number of other first-world nations do fine with it. I have no problem with legalizing recreational drugs that can easily be used responsibly. However, I fear that if you put too much trust in people to use drugs responsibly, you'll be let down.

Currency

Fiat money and the Federal Reserve is another major platform of the Libertarians, and Ron Paul devotes a chapter to it. The claim is that fiat money is worthless due to inflation, that inflation is caused by the Fed, and that a gold standard will solve all the problems. Ron Paul also blames asset bubbles on fiat money, and claims that inflation hurts the working class most. Ron Paul's proposed next step is to eliminate taxes on transactions and capital gains for precious metals, namely gold and silver.

This is a complex topic. I'm not an expert; I'd consider myself a beginner. However I can hold my own against Ron Paul, who, like many Libertarians, took Ec 101 but not 102! I'll try to address each point, and show how Ron Paul and similar Libertarians are either almost wrong or completely wrong.

First, let's define inflation. Just kidding. You will not be able to define a number that truly represents inflation. Inflation is a general rise in prices; however since no asset has a truly stable value, it's impossible to measure inflation exactly. Hence, bear in mind that although inflation is a real thing, it's also a fuzzy concept.

Ron Paul seemingly defines inflation as an increase in money supply, but this is incorrect because as GDP grows, money supply can also grow without any increase in prices.

Money is not worthless because of inflation. Cash loses its value over time because of inflation. However, cash can be invested in a variety of things that will actually increase in value (after adjusting for inflation) over time. For example, any American can buy inflation-protected treasuries (which will at least guard against inflation as measured by the CPI). Even ordinary treasuries tend to grow much faster than inflation. If you're more paranoid, you could buy gold or oil. In fact, most investors will have some of each in a well-balanced portfolio. Stocks will tend to return even more, although they are exposed to many more risks.

How is it possible that you can actually invest your money so that it grows faster than inflation? That's because GDP (after adjusting for inflation) grows over time.

Inflation is not exactly caused by the Fed. The Fed's job is to balance inflation and growth by regulating the money supply, which it does primarily through the interest rates it sets between banks. (Briefly, the interest rate between banks affects how much the banks can borrow, and money is effectively created when borrowing happens.) So, yes, the Fed controls money supply. However, the Fed does not control prices. Oil is a perfect example. As it runs out, its price goes up. This results in higher prices for a lot of stuff. Is this inflation? Yes and no. Oil is really worth more now, so no, prices are not inflated, it's just that the things have become more valuable. But yes, it's inflation, because it means higher prices.

The Fed has a tough and thankless job.

A gold standard solves one problem: the size of the money supply. The gold standard makes the money supply absolute (disregarding new gold mined). It doesn't necessarily eliminate inflation, but practically you can suppose it does. In fact, it tends to cause deflation, because GDP grows over time; if the money supply doesn't grow with GDP, prices tend downward.

However a gold standard introduces a number of other problems. One is having an absolute sized money supply--no flexibility for times of crisis, and a tendency for deflation. Deflation is problematic because it encourages long-term saving, which is actually kind of bad for the economy, because economic growth happens only when money is spent. (A small amount of inflation is considered healthy.)

Another problem is that there's not enough gold in the world. There's about 4 trillion dollars, using 800 dollars and ounce and wikipedia for the current gold supply. (You couldn't legislate the price of gold without causing a huge arbitrage opportunity. If you set a gold standard today, you'd have to use 800 dollars per ounce.) That's much smaller than the US economy, and a tiny fraction of the world economy. One might argue that this isn't a problem because you're issuing currency, and not all currency needs to be backed up by gold, because not everyone is going to turn their currency in for gold. But I find that begs the question, now you've effectively got fiat money again.

A third problem is the general idea of using a commodity as currency. Gold, silver, and platinum (the main precious metals) have industrial uses, and therefore it makes more economic sense that their prices should vary with supply and demand.

From Ron Paul's writing, you get the impression that fiat money is collapsing and going to be worthless in a few years. However, looking at the past half century of central banking, we're still going, despite any number of crises. And all the other major economies (Japan, Europe, UK) are also on fiat money with central banking. I think this empirical evidence worth considering: with how rapidly the economy has evolved the past few decades, it's amazing things have held up so well under the current system.

Ron Paul explains that inflation hurts the working class more, because increase in money supply reaches the wealthiest first (banks, financial institutions) long before it trickles down to wages. While that is probably true, his presentation was misleading. If the working class is 10% behind today, and inflation is 2% per year, he makes it sounds like the working class will be 20% behind in 5 years. No, they will still be 10% behind, because the trickling is always happening and inflation is affecting all levels at all times. (If it's not clear, write some equations ;) The working class will only get to be worse off if the inflation rate constantly increases. In which case, we'd have worse problems to worry about!

Ron Paul blames asset bubbles, such as the dot-com boom/bust and the recent housing crisis, on fiat money and central banking. Neither of these would be solved by the gold standard. The dot-com boom was overvaluing new high-tech stocks. The fact is, stocks can remain overvalued for a long period of time, because they only very slowly (through dividends, share buybacks, and possibly mergers and acquisitions) realize a cash value. The gold standard does nothing to solve this problem; it's one of psychology and not economics. You can easily draw a chart of the NASDAQ priced in gold; it proves that asset bubbles happen even if you choose gold as the currency.

The housing bubble is more complicated. There is potential blame to assign to the central bank. The Fed made interest rates lower for banks, which trickled down to mortgage rates, which created a surge in demand for houses. Now, this is not the whole story: Wall Street created its own problem by giving out bad mortgages. The Fed had nothing to do with that. Had Wall Street been a bit more careful about whom they lent to, things could've ended up fine. Thus I'd say blaming the Fed for the current crisis is a bit disingenuous; they may have had a role in the housing boom, but certainly not the mortgage bust.

Whereas, on the gold standard, we simply would have suffered after the dot-com bust. There would be no lowered interest rates to stimulate the economy. This is where the flexibility of central banking can come in handy: smooth out the crisis a bit by reducing lending rates temporarily. In exchange, you have to raise rates later while the economy is healthy. On the gold standard, you get no such benefit, and you have to weather the full force of the crisis and the ensuing paranoia as investors reallocate their portfolios to safer assets. Why invest in risky new business, when your gold is sure to go up in value over time as deflation takes place? Yet, without investment, the economy can't grow.

Finally, to finish up, I thought he had a decent idea to eliminate taxes on transactions and capital gains in gold and silver. And why not add platinum. This would make precious metals function closer to cash. The one thing to watch out for is that financial instutions may be able to engineer products that avoid capital gains tax by using gold and silver. But overall, it did sound like a decent idea to me.

Missing

Nothing or very little was said about a couple topics that I think are especially difficult for Libertarians: social welfare, and dealing with market failures such as monopolies.

Education II

2008-06-29T20:12:00.003-05:00

Over two years ago, when I was doing Teach for America recruiting, I wrote a blog entry with some thoughts on education, in particular about how we need to recruit better teachers.

It's interesting how things played out. Of course, they rejected me, and now I've got a job I would have categorized as "sell-out" (I don't feel that way anymore!), but I've been following Steph's experience in Newark. This past year, I've also been regularly doing volunteer tutoring.

Monday nights, I've been tutoring a variety of high school kids in math. All the kids come from disadvantaged backgrounds, but their abilities covered the whole spectrum, from remedial to honors. It refreshed my perspective, after years of mainly being among bright & motivated people at Harvard and at work.

Though I wouldn't think twice about doing it again (and I will next year), the experience wasn't as rewarding as I hoped. It left me with a feeling of futility.

It's futile to try to fix years of broken education in a couple hours a week. It's futile to inspire a student who has spent 10 years in school only "getting the answer" and not learning.

There are too many things wrong for small changes to work. Fix one thing, and another thing will prevent success, resuming the downward spiral. There needs to be a massive change. Students, teachers, parents, and principals all need to change.

First, too many students can't be bothered to learn. They just go for the answer, close their book, and acquire nothing. I don't know the solution, but that this is a problem is clear. As a first step, I think tests need to move away from regurgitation and focus more on application and critical thinking.

Second, high-quality teachers are lacking. A simple explanation, perhaps too simple, is that the incentives aren't there. With payscale being defined only by seniority and not performance, and not competitive with other fields, it shouldn't be surprising when the best teachers aren't career teachers.

Third, school administration is abysmal. Standardized tests produce meaningless results because basic principles of scientific experiment are ignored. Students are enrolled in classes when they clearly haven't mastered the prerequisites.

Of course, I'm writing in generalities, so things aren't always as bad as I make it out to be. But as depressing as reality is, I'm convinced it can be improved. It may take more than one person, however...

Now reading

2008-06-21T15:21:00.004-05:00

I've been buying books twice the rate I'm reading them...

War and Peace: 1/5. I made it through 200 pages, and then gave up because there wasn't any plot yet.
Treasure Island: 4/5. I enjoyed this quite a bit, though not as much as, say, Harry Potter. Yay for pirates.
Musicophilia: 3/5. This was a quite entertaining non-fiction book about music and the brain. I think sometimes it strayed too far from the central topic, and could've been a bit shorter. Also since there's a lack of real science on the topic, it had to reach a bit for material. But it had a lot of interesting anecdotes, and overall it was cool.
Never Let Me Go: 4/5. This novel was pretty awesome. A dark plot is slowly revealed, and there's a lot of focus on character development. The author did a superlative job at making the characters seem multidimensional and real. The narrator was particularly perceptive of others' quirks and manners. As someone who likes observing others' quirks and subtleties, I enjoyed reading it :)

Wiretapping

2008-06-20T21:29:00.003-05:00

It's hard not to be cynical nowadays with how little integrity is in Washington. I'll pray that Obama has the cajones to bring some integrity to the White House. (I won't kid myself that Obama is a completely straight shooter. But he seems far better than typical.)

How did politics become so crooked? Is it because the incentives in Washington are all messed up? Is it because no one can resist being "above the law"? Is it because only the most disingenuous have what it takes to get elected?

It's unfathomable and unforgiveable how the government, which represents the American people, asked the telecoms to illegally spy on Americans. Now, the House, which represent the Americans people, just passed a law saying that it's not longer illegal "because we told you to do it", fourth amendment notwithstanding. And magically, any accountability just vanished.

I'm a bit pissed about this. Where's the outrage?

And this is far from the only example of overtly corrupt politics...

Martingales

2008-06-08T22:54:00.004-05:00

This is a warm-up post before I write an enormous essay about a "Bayesian theory of knowledge" I've been thinking about :)

A martingale is a process where the expected future value is always today's value. The opposite case is where a process shows inertia ("doesn't go far enough": expected future value is a continuation of current trend) or momentum ("overshoots": expected future value is the reverse of current trend).

Here's a practical example. Theoretically, stock prices should be martingales (ignoring the issue of interest rates), because they should be an aggregation of all public knowledge. If there were trends of inertia or momentum, that would be a piece of knowledge, which should already be factored into the price. If a trader isn't taking into account all these pieces of knowledge, he'll lose because other traders will, and arrive at a more accurate price. (Hedge funds may try to exploit various sorts of statistical properties of stock prices. Because their trades affect the stock price, in fact the hedge fund is "helping" the stock price become more of a martingale.)

This insight can be applied to human beliefs as well. One's beliefs should be martingales, too, if they're taking into account all information one knows. (Which includes meta-information, by the way, which is important to consider.)

However, this doesn't seem to be human nature. "Inertia" and "Overreaction" seem to be the norms for people's beliefs. By realizing whether one has a tendency to overreact or underreact, one can make more accurate changes to one's beliefs.

Phrased another way, do you believe your beliefs 20 years from now will be similar to your beliefs today? If not, why haven't you changed your beliefs yet?

I'd encourage you to apply this "martingale" test to beliefs of institutions as well: religions, politics, etc.--institutions that often show inertia or overreaction! Where will beliefs be in 20 years? Why aren't we there right now?

Pennies

2008-05-30T21:15:00.004-05:00

Hi I'm back :)

Subway story: You know a penny is worthless when a homeless guy drops one & doesn't bother to pick it back up.

NYC observation: Everywhere smelled like urine today. Hope it wasn't just me ;)

Unconscionable

2008-01-21T12:41:00.002-05:00

Some days you have to wonder where society is going. A few thoughts on recent events:

Whitehouse "recycles" years of emails

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/16/AR2008011602202.html?hpid=topnews
The whitehouse is required by law to retain emails. But whoops, they've "recycled" years of their tapes. Anyone want to place odds that someone's going to be punished? I'm not very optimistic.

I wonder what was so incriminating in those emails.

EPA claims "executive privilege"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080119/ap_on_bi_ge/california_greenhouse_gases
When confronted by California about the Environmental Protection Agency blocking their anti-pollution measures, the (aptly named) EPA claimed executive privilege to avoid releasing documents. How crooked do you have to be? This isn't national security we're talking about, it's air quality!

Hasbro uses DMCA against Facebook games

The DMCA is a modern copyright law with several components, including the right to send a "takedown notice" to websites for alleged copyright infringement, without any approval from a judge, etc. It's possible to file a "counter-notice" which enables you to re-post the material 2 weeks later, but you still must comply with the takedown for the first 2 weeks.

This is one of the most readily abusable laws out there, and now it's being used by Hasbro, a boardgame company, against Facebook games such as Scrabulous and Bogglific.

What makes it awful is that games aren't copyrightable, not to mention the thousands of people who are pissed off now. http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html The name of a game might be trademarked, and sure I'll agree with Hasbro that there may be some trademark infringement, but that has nothing to do with the DMCA!

There's an easier solution, if Hasbro really is feeling threatened. Why not buy the facebook game and then give it your blessing? It'd probably be an absurd bargain.

Or maybe be a gentleman and give the facebook developer a heads-up that he/she must modify the game.

Mortgage predators

If you follow the markets at all, you'll see that some parts of the markets have completely crashed, overall things aren't so great, and we're probably going to be in a recession soon. The cause of all it was packages of mortgages, called CDO's, that became worthless as people throughout the US defaulted on mortgages, which seriously affected the balance sheet of a lot of major banks.

The whole problem was selling mortgages to people who couldn't afford it. This "predatory lending" is not only (usually) illegal, but it's also basically what crashed the markets and is having a huge effect on the economy as a whole. Not to mention all the families that could lose their homes.

It wouldn't even be possible to sue these people for all the damage they've caused. They should be in jail.

London

2008-01-07T01:43:00.001-05:00

Early early morning at the Iceland airport. Already the lines to check in are long :/ I really have no memory of the time at the airport or the flight itself, which is unsurprising with how tired I was. I know from a photo that we got breakfast at the airport: I had orange juice and a chocolate muffin. Yum yum. I mostly slept on the plane. However, you know how when you fall asleep sitting up, your neck muscles relax and then your head tips over and you wake up? That kept happening to me, except I think I mostly slept through it :)

We arrive in London early afternoon and take the subway ("the tube") to the hotel. It turned out to be a pretty long trip, and the tube is much more expensive that the subways in the US, so really a cab would've been better. My impression of the tube was pretty positive. The seats (along with other surfaces you might place your butt on) were upholstered, things were generally clean and modern. I really liked the sign on the doors that read, "Leaning on the doors can be dangerous"... I thought that was hilarious because in the US it'd be "Do not lean on doors"! The major shortcomings of the tube were related to its smallness and ticketing: it was a bit short for me and there's not much room when things get crowded. Also it can be a long journey from the tube to the surface--some places are really, really deep underground. Really annoying, however, was the ticketing: there are different zones with different fares. To enforce this, you need to re-swipe your ticket to get out! I can't imagine this incovenience being offset by the increased fares for longer journeys.

We get out of the subway, get our bearings (not too hard since there's a park on one side) and head towards the hotel. I start to see why London has a reputation for such confusing streets. It's not at all a grid like NYC, and instead things intersect at odd angles with strange merges and forks.

After walking for a while, passing lots of nice buildings, we start to realize (based on the building numbers) that we must've walked past the hotel a while ago :) We actually asked someone if they knew where the hotel was, and amazingly he approximately did. I noted that he pointed at first with his middle finger, as they do in the UK, but soon switched to his index finger after realizings we're from the US. Smart guy :)

Indeed we had walked past the hotel. Turning around and watching the building numbers more carefully, we get there eventually, and it was actually really close to the subway. We are greeted by fancy-pants doormen and escorted to our room. It was in the basement, but whatever, it didn't make a difference, and the room was very nice, I thought. We're given a skeleton key attached to a big weight. I thought the skeleton key was cool--I don't think I've seen one before in real life--but the weight I didn't understand.

As it turns out, you don't take the key with you when you go out. Instead, you just leave it at the desk. Huh. Seems like a bit of a security issue but I thought it was really nice. I don't even have to hang on to my own key!

Peggy leaves right away to visit her college friend who's now at Cambridge. And so it's just me and London...

Of course the first thing I do is take a couple hour nap. After getting up and summoning some energy, it's early evening and I head out. The weather is refreshing but not warm; there's a bit of a haze from the humidity. We're not too far from downtown, so I just walk along the street instead of taking the tube. The street actually becomes Oxford Street, which is where everything is, after a few blocks and going through a "pedestrian subway" (an underground sidewalk, which US cities could sure use a few of).

My walk was nice but only a few highlights. Being Sunday evening, everything was closed except restaurants, so I didn't get a chance to actually do anything. I grabbed a quick meal at Pizza Hut (one of the few restaurants at which I wouldn't be embarrassed to eat by myself) and took pictures of the holiday lights and decorations around the city. Mostly everything was modern buildings, but a did take a couple detours to snap pictures of some churches that looked pretty cool.

I walked a bit past Oxford Circus (not quite sure what the UK definition of "circus" is; apparently something like the US "square") and then turned around. After a couple blocks along my return trip, I was accosted by early-twenties-looking guy asking me, "Do you want to take a stress test?" I say "No" with a bit of a chuckle to myself. It turns out he was just the first of about 5 such people, and they had a little table set up with the "stress test" and a book, which I see is authored by Ron Hubbard.

They're Scientologists!

Their stress test is really auditing. My initial reaction is disgust, of course, at one of the worst "religions" there is and their attempt to brainwash on the streets of London. But I am fascinated--even a bit frightened--by the look on the Scientologist's faces. They have a certain fire in their eyes--a face that would appear focused and intense if it weren't for the smiling mouth--that made me realize they really are batshit.

Anyway, I walk back to the hotel and zonk out for a good night's sleep. The next morning I grab some blunch at Subway nearby and prepare for a long day of touring :)

I walk through Hyde Park (that's the park near our hotel) to start off. It's pretty wide open and dotted with statues. You could definitely play a game of soccer here, as opposed to Central Park in NYC which doesn't have a lot of open space, and the space that is open is generally full of picnickers and sunbathers. The southeast corner of the park is home to the London Eye, a gigantic ferris wheel. I would've ridden, but I'm not a big fan of ferris wheels.

Exiting the park, I get my bearings and head through the Wellington Arch and through Green Park. There's more statues and such, but nothing really to write home (or blog) about. Finally I get to Buckingham Palace. I wasn't interested in a tour (not enough time, too much to see) so just snapped some pictures. Everything was gold plated. (At least, I assume it was gold.)

I was thinking about breaking off little piece and then retiring filthy rich...

I continued my trek northeastish and walked by St James's "Palace", which was just brick, but it did have one of those tall-black-hatted British guard dudes.

Earlier in the day, I got an email from Pegs suggesting getting tickets for a musical, so I was headed in the direction of the discount-same-day ticket place in Leicester square. I don't remember anything of note between St James's Palace and there. Anyway, I take a few looks through the list of musicals that have tickets available, and I almost instantly decide on one big one that I've never seen: The Phantom of the Opera! Coincidentally, two ladies in front of me also were getting tickets to that show, so we actually ended up getting adjacent seats :)

My legs are getting tired, so I head up towards Oxford street and start walking back. However, unlike the last time I was on Oxford street, now all the stores were open. First I went to a music store, and figured I'd check if there was any classical stuff I might enjoy. And there was! I bought Mahler Lieder, Cziffra plays Chopin, and Argerich playing Chopin's preludes. 11 CDs for less than 40 pounds. London is making a very good impression on me so far :)

Next I go to a mini-mall. First I check out the sports stores for swimsuits... no luck. I conclude soccer is the only sport played in London.

I grab a smoothie to hold me over between now and dinner (after the musical).

I get back to the hotel, call Peggy, but find out that she's not going to be able to make it in time by only a fraction of an hour :/ So I dress up a bit (I asked the concierge if people dress up for musicals here; he said "I would.") and take the tube to Picadilly Circus, aiming to arrive at Her Majesty's Theatre before 7:30.

Picadilly Circus, unfortunately, is a rather confusing intersection. It's a 5-way intersection, in fact, so even if you roughly know what direction you're heading, you still might end up taking the wrong road. The problem is compounded by the way streets are labelled in London: there aren't nice signs right at the intersection as in the US, but instead the street names are erratically posted on buildings. I ended up taking the wrong road for a bit, until I could find a sign that unambiguously labelled the street as the wrong one :) At least now I have my bearings, and I walk really fast to the theatre.

I get there at like 7:35, so I was a bit nervous I was late, although I know theatres (at least in the US) usually start 5 minutes late. In fact I arrive right as the prelude is ending and the curtain is being drawn. I'm roughly in the middle of the row, so a bunch of people had to get up to let me in, but whatever. I'm in the middle of the first balcony, so it's a great view.

The musical was fabulous. The theatre was beautiful. I don't know whether it was part of the theatre or part of the play's setup, but there was a large, elaborate border around stage. The musical's props and costumes were likewise gorgeous. Overall it was really well done. The singers were quite good; in particular, after seeing the movie which has an awful singer as the phantom, it was wonderful to hear a real tenor playing him. As good as it was, I still think Les Mis has much much better music, but it was a memorable experience.

I head back to the hotel on a crowded subway, humming "Angel of Music" and the theme to myself. Dinner is at a nearby Italian place, yum yum, one of the few non-bars that are taking customers this late. I have a very rich gnocchi. And then it's sleepy time.

We have have half a day left. We pack up, leave our stuffs at the desk, and take a last quick tour of the city. First we explore Kensington Park, adjacent to Hyde Park, and it's really great with the refreshing weather. Pretty cool is the Albert Memorial there, a gold statue with equally opulant architecture around it.

We also go along Oxford Street and swing by a mall. Peggy looks at girly stuff and I go look at man stuff. In fact, there's a Speedo store, and I grab a swimsuit (but not a speedo Speedo! a normal swimsuit) which I hope to use in Barcelona. The nicer swimsuits were 40 pounds, which is pretty absurd, so I go for a more modest pair for 18. Anyway, we continue our touristy journey and eventually get to a tea store Peggy was looking for, and she picks up a bunch of tea. And then it's time to head back... we grab our stuff (barely able to hang on to it all now :) & hop on the Tube.

We're going to a different airport this time, so it's a different route. We make a somewhat confusing Tube journey (apparently one of the tube lines actually goes in a circle) to the train station, and then take the airport express train to the airport... and it's off to Barcelona we go!

Overall impressions: I really liked London. There's a nice culture there, much more polite and considerate, compared to the US. And even though it's a big city, it's more like Boston in that it's not terribly crowded and the buildings aren't so tall. I also thought the parks were nicer than US cities, and it also has the advantage of being much older and getting all the cool stuff that goes with that. I think I could see myself living in London.

Iceland

2007-12-31T02:19:00.001-05:00

Ok I guess I'm gonna do this in three parts, it's taking too long to write :)

Left work, took good ol' Fung Wah to Boston, rode the silver line for the first time ever, and then vacation begins...

Icelandair is the best airline I've been on. How'd they win me over? Food, of course. On every flight they served food. The food was about as good as microwave food can be--it wasn't too greasy or anything, although saying it was "good" is a bit of a stretch--and the food was icelandic. The icelandic butter was heavenly.

So what is icelandic food? Although I only spent one day there, my general impression was that it's meaty, potatoy, and salty. Overall hearty. (Did you know mashed potatoes have a really high glycemic index? I didn't know that either.)

We arrived at an absurd hour of the morning. I fell in love with the airport. Though big, it had that friendly "small airport" feel to it. Instead of endless bland hallways, it had small rooms full of style. Walls were angled, ceilings were decorated.

We exchanged cash at 60some kroner for a dollar and bought a bus ticket to Reykjavik. (Pretty much everyone knew decent English so getting around wasn't tough.) I had a certain sense of awe on the bus, being in a foreign country for the first time, trying to absorb what elements of culture I could through the windows of a bus. The landscape, though dark, had a certain natural beauty to it as the roads wind around the hills. If only there were snow instead of hibernating grass, I could imagine it being very beautiful.

There was no traffic but I still enjoyed observing the roads. Although the signs and lines were different, it seems that traffic laws are mostly the same, and people did drive on the right side of the road. However I had to laugh at the traffic lights: they went green, yellow, red as in the US, but then went red, yellow, green! Because, ya know, you need that extra yellow light so you can time your start off the green light.

The bus dropped us off at the Reykjavik station, from which we got to take a quick courtesy bus ride to the hotel.

It seemed like all the buildings were small in Iceland. Our hotel was no exception--it was more housed-sized than hotel-sized. There were a couple floors but not many rooms. The room itself was decent, not huge but nothing really wrong with it (other than the tv remote missing batteries). The water, on the other hand, had a problem: it was full of sulfur. Iceland has the stinkiest water ever. I was afraid what I might smell like after a shower. That said, I didn't think the water tasted too bad :)

The room had some sort of balcony. Above the glass door was a green exit sign, or at least what I assumed was some sort of exit sign, having never seen one before (I eventually learned this was the universal European exit sign). That made me wonder if it really was an emergency exit. Combined with the fact that it really wasn't a proper balcony (the floor was metal strips, like an emergency stairway) and that it's really too cold to want to go outside, it probably was. But that wouldn't explain the nice, inviting door going outside. One of life's great mysteries.

Ok so since it's like 4am, it's time for some sleep. After a nap we are up and about (yeah right) and go for a little tour of the city. We start with the main tourist road. It's not tourist season, so it wasn't very busy at all. Thankfully we find a store selling hats so I can keep my head warm. Everything is really expensive; the hat came out to like $100. And it's a tad too small. Oh well, at least now my ears won't die :)

One interesting store we went to was a rock store. There were lots of rocks you could buy. There were a bunch of rock dolls, and Peggy bought a few. The store owner was a pretty funny guy. His English was broken (and apparently also spoke French, German, and Icelandic), but did have a nice pun. He had these cubicle rocks, about half an inch cubed, and said they were intended for making drinks "on the rocks". Groans...

The sun was low on the horizon. Iceland is far enough north that it barely gets sun in the winter. The sun was only visible for a few hours, although dusk and dawn were long enough to give a respectable amount of daylight.

In addition to covering the tourist street, we walked along the coast. There were some pretty nice views of mountains and stuff. There was also a port where gigantic ships loaded & unloaded cargo. Below is a picture of me in front of an abstract viking ship. Do I look cold? I am.

It's getting to be dinner time, so we head back downtown. I realize the city isn't really that big--there's not many places to go other than retracing our steps. We did see a neat lake inland that had a ton of ducks (I'm not actually sure they were ducks) in it.

Dinner was at a pretty restaurant. Eventually we realize it was the same restaurant advertised in the hotel as having a Christmas buffet. So we go for that. There were lots of attractive meat dishes--pork, fish, various birds, reindeer--and various potato dishes. The chef actually tried to explain each dish to us, but he didn't know many of the names in English, so that wasn't terribly helpful. It was my first timing having several of the meats, including reindeer. Imagining myself eating Rudolph made it all the more delicious. Overall it was a little salty, but I still thought it was a great experience (as buffets typically are). There was also a wide selection of desserts, including various cookies, pies, and sweets. Of course I went straight for the chocolate mousse.

Paying was a bit interesting. We had to go to the cash register, and neither of us knew how to tip. There wasn't really much for service, so probably tipping wasn't required, but we left like 1000 kroner on the table anyway. "Silly American tourists giving us all their money!"

I forget exactly the chronology, but the remainder of the early evening was napping/tv and some grocery shopping. Groceries of note included 6 kinds of dark chocolate, and water that wasn't full of sulfur. Peggy really liked the shopping basket, which could either be carried or wheeled around. It sorta reminded me of a dog on a leash.

The bottom right one was my favorite.

Anyway, we signed up & paid for a Northern Lights tour. It was a really clear night so the odds were good of seeing it. Sadly there was a misunderstanding about the timing--the pickup was at 8:30 while we thought 9, but in fact you were supposed to already be at the bus station by 9. So that sorta sucked. Would've been nice if someone called us, considering that we were in the hotel and they had our number. Well, that didn't work out, so instead we debated economics & got some extra sleep/tv.

The next day was another early morning... had to get up at like 5am. We return to the airport and then it's off to London...

Anyway, overall impressions-- It reminded me a bit of Minnesota. Everyone is white (lots of Scandinavians in MN), and it's brutally cold. The diet had some similarities: lots of meat, salty, not much vegetables, hearty. People are polite and friendly, and streets are uncrowded if not empty. The major advantage is the serenely beautiful landscape.

Seems like a pretty chill place. (groans...)

Billions

2007-12-17T03:43:00.001-05:00

I broke in my new laptop by solving 6 billion boggle boards :)
http://www.luke-g.com/boggle/index.html
Fun times, fun times.

Ay caramba

2007-11-26T22:55:00.001-05:00

Add to the list of retarded things I've done:
Order tickets on the web in Spanish, when the link to the English page is just off the right of the screen.

Greenspan

2007-11-24T23:11:00.001-05:00

Well, I finally finished Alan Greenspan's book, The Age of Turbulence. (War and Peace is next on my reading list... I estimate 6 months to finish it!) Overall I enjoyed it, and I learned a lot, but there are some shortcomings I'll talk about later. Note, I'm hesistant to recommend it unless you think GDP numbers are really interesting :D It can be pretty dry reading, although I happen to be the sort of person who enjoys it.

Before I go into the book, I should mention that I'm doing vacation the first week of December with PGPC. Gonna check out Iceland, London, and Barcelona. I'll be sure to take lots of pictures :) Getting a passport was a bit of an adventure. Being from rural Minnesota, no one travels abroad, so like everyone else there, I didn't have a passport. However, everyone drives, so I do have a driver's license. However, after being in Boston and now New York, I don't drive... so I never really bothered to renew my license (actually I did go to the NY DMV to renew it, but they told me I had to get a driver's record from the MN DMV... and that was annoying so I really took my time :). Anyway, for quite a while my only government ID was an expired driver's license. I nervously went to a post office to get my passport... they reluctantly took my driver's license anyway so that was a relief. Anyway, now I happily have a passport and am waiting for a new driver's license.

I was thinking to myself, if I didn't have my original birth certificate, it would've been impossible for me to get either ID (well, maybe not impossible, but not possible under the rules they state.) And then I was thinking, IDs really suck. Not having one could be a huge limitation, for getting a job or traveling or anything. Seems like a lot of inefficiency, and I'm sure there are people out there (immigrants & homeless) who are screwed because of it. On the other hand, at least a tax ID of some kind is necessary so the government can tax you... but anyway maybe some other day I'll think more about it.

Ec 101

Disclaimer: I am not an ec expert, but I'll pretend to be for this post :) My opinions are likely to change as I learn more.

In an earlier post I talked a bit about the beginning part of the book. Greenspan talks about modern history from his perspective as an economist and the Fed. I won't reiterate the points I made before (in part cuz I don't remember this part of the book as well lol) I really enjoyed it, but I was a little disappointed at his coverage of 9-11 and the dot-com bust recovery. He did talk quite a bit about the dot-com boom, and "irrational exuberance" of course, but didn't really go into depth about the recovery, even though the cover (& title) of the book makes it sound like his thesis is the resilience of the modern economy. It was just sort of like, "Magically the markets adapted and there were no lasting effects." Heh.

Of course, it's true that the modern world economy is more resilient than ever before. I would sum up globalization as the main reason. The world doesn't revolve around Manhattan any more (as much as I might like to believe that :). The bigger & more integrated the economy, the harder it is to take it down!

A second major point about the modern economy, although I can't say whether this was an important effect in the recovery from 9-11/dotcom, is sophistication of the modern market. There are so many very smart, very rich investors out there (e.g. hedge funds) who are watching the market for opportunities. Risk-reward tradeoffs are better understood than ever before, and the techniques to exploit correlations and subtle mispricings are common knowledge. With highly liquid markets, enabled by computer trading and instant communication, it's possible to take on very precise risk and make very specific bets. We're in an era of unprecedented efficiency of markets (efficiency in the sense of current price = risk-adjusted expected value). When the market panics, there's plenty of investors out there looking for bargains as people start to misprice things. So, when there's a crisis, it's no worse than it needs to be.

Anyway, getting back to the book, after the first 1/2 of the book, which is about history, comes chapters devoted to Greenspan's opinion on various economic issues. Here I thought there was some weakness in the book. Although he's a great economist, and there's a lot of interesting stuff I learned, I think he didn't really do a great job of arguing his positions in a lot of cases. Notably, he rarely addresses counterarguments or looks at the other side of issues. I think if you already have opinions about some things, this book won't change your mind. It'll just give you an idea how Greenspan thinks about these things.

Several chapters were about non-US economies. China, Russia, India, etc. were covered. These I found fascinating. Greenspan has a very informed view, since he actually has visited many of the leaders, so it's great to hear his interpretation of things.

For China, he was concerned about politics getting in the way of free-market policies, but so far China has been good about progressing towards that. I was a little surprised to learn that Chinese leaders are actually very good economists, or at least very concerned, which I might summarize as, they don't buy into Marxism :) If they continue to open their markets (their attempt to fix the exchange rate comes to mind as something that needs to be abandoned) there is good hope for them.

Russia sounds like a total disaster (economically-- I'm not going to comment on their modern political situation, which also sounds bad, because I'm not well enough informed). He points out that they've been communist so long that a whole generation of people there have no idea what capitalism is. The Kremlin doesn't sound like they have very good plans for the future, either. Let's hope they succeed in joining the modern world economy. They have a lot of potential to contribute.

India seems like a booming economy, but Greenspan worries that their government regulation is slowing things down too much, and is the reason why only their tech sector has really been successful at globalizing.

Anyway, generally his points were (1) governments need to have consistent enforcement of property rights (2) tarriffs and other regulation are bad (3) communism doesn't work. As a quick aside, I recall in college how left-leaning a lot of people were economically (a large group of students was trying to introduce a liberal version of ec 101 to the course list). I never really had any ec smarts then, so I never had a strong opinion, but now I see absolutely how retarded communism is. People may observe "Communism works in theory, the government just has to do a good job" but no, it doesn't work in theory because theoretically, the government cannot be omniscient enough to regulate markets in any sort of efficient way. Even something as simple as the oil market is really, really complicated. Furthermore, there's a fundamental point about human nature, that we like to earn things for ourselves, and that's not really compatible with the communist way of thinking. Capitalism has a "natural selection" aspect to it that's proven to work-- it does leave some losers, but not so many that it's a problem that can't be solved. Had I been more informed in college, I might've had a chance for interesting debates :)

Moving on, Greenspan talks about our underfunded retirement plans. Really this is an urgent issue--the government isn't saving the money people need to retire. This is something that needs to be actioned NOW, but of course it won't be because any solution would be politically unpopular.

My personal opinion, as a 25-year-old so take it with a large dose of salt, is that retirement isn't something that should be guaranteed anyway. Seems to me that if you want to retire, you should save for it yourself. Ok, the government should have a program to help you save for yourself--I'm doubtful about the number of people who could figure it out themself properly. (I think about how many times my dad points out to us kids that we could be millionaires when we retire if we save $X now. I can't seem to get through to him that a million dollars won't be worth very much in 2050... if I only had a million dollars then, I'd be poor!) Why do people want to retire anyway? :) Seriously though, jobs don't tend to be so labor-intensive nowadays, so there's less argument for retiring for health reasons. A change of the retirement age is something we should consider. I sincerely hope that at 60, unless I'm dead, I'm still being a productive person--I mean, I'd like to retire early but I don't plan to stop doing fun work after I retire!

Greenspan also devotes a chapter to education. I was happy to read his concern about the US education system. Although we have great colleges, we have mediocre elementary schools and downright crappy high schools. He spends most of the chapter talking about why education is so important, but admits he's not an education expert and so doesn't propose much for solutions (and I greatly respect that!) What he does propose is unsuprising from a libertarian: less regulation, with respect to teacher requirements and the teacher's union issues. I totally agree. He also mentions vouchers, which I don't agree with, but he also admits he's not informed enough to have his own opinion on that.

Let me go into some detail (I could write a book about my opinions on education, but I'll try to keep it brief as this post is already enormous). One issue is that to become a teacher, you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get certified. It's easy to exaggerate this point, but the truth is teacher certification that's even slightly intrusive is a serious handicap. Teaching is not a glamorous profession and never will be, so a lot of highly skilled people are never going to actively seek a teaching job. Hence, teaching jobs should be made easily available--I have a suspicion that a lot of people who would otherwise take a teaching job don't because they're not certified and don't want to bother, when they have 12 other jobs they could be looking at.

Furthermore, I have some beliefs that a formal teacher curriculum is generally counter-productive--in particular, that a degree in education doesn't make a teacher (although note that I'm not saying education isn't something worthwhile to study--I just don't think it's the way to become a teacher). First, I believe different people have different teaching styles. There isn't one "right way" to teach. Second, I don't think teaching is a learned skill so much as an aptitude--there's limited benefits to a formal teacher curriculum, time that could probably be better spent mastering the subject matter. Third, psychology research is, and probably always will be, way behind human intuition, not to mention far too easy to misapply, so there's just way too many aspects to teaching that can't (or shouldn't) be captured in books. (So what does make a good teacher? Master of the curriculum, enthusiasm, sensitivity, and good communication skills.) This is in addition to the fact that people who are really passionate about their subject probably aren't going to be majoring in education while they're in school; they're going to be studying their field of interest!

But surely we want teachers to be qualified for their job! How could schools make sure teachers are qualified without a certification program? How about the same way that every other employer does it: Interviews! Have the school staff interview the applicant, and have the applicant do some teaching trials. I would contend that you can distinguish a good from a bad teacher in 10 minutes, max. I think one day of interviews should be more than sufficient to ensure quality teachers.

Another serious issue, which Greenspan addresses, is the problems caused by the teacher's union and such. Why are there rigorous payscales? It makes no sense--it messes up supply/demand for hiring and doesn't provide incentives for employees to work hard. If math teachers are in higher demand, they need to be paid more (nice that it works out that way for math :). And I'm also in favor of compensation tied to performance--seems to work well for Wall Street--good teachers should get a bonus (although how to measure "goodness" in a productive way is tricky, I admit) and likewise for management.

Finally, not related to Greenspan's book, but another problem with our school system is bureaucracy. I've talked a lot with Steph about her experience in Teach for America, and one of the things that blows my mind is how inefficiently things are managed. Management is actually subtracting value! Test standards that aren't meaningful (bad statistics being one common issue), overemphasis on test scores rather than learning, lack of accountability for failing students, and general overhead that achieves no value-added.

(Cultural issues are also important to education, but Greenspan doesn't go there and I'll spare you as well :)

Not entirely unrelated to education is income inequality. Inequality is a fundamental result of capitalism, but the degree of inequality in the US has really grown. Manhattan in particular is pretty terrible; check out this, which is a bit old, but hey, they don't do that many censuses. One question is, how much inequality are we willing to accept. Greenspan doesn't really give an answer to this--after all, it's a social justice issue, not an economics issue. I don't have an answer either; I'd have to think about it more :) My first thought is everyone deserves food, shelter, education, and health... but after that I'm not so sure what inequality is intolerable.

Anyway, he makes a good point about why this inequality has grown so much, and why it's likely to continue to grow: highly technical/skilled jobs are becoming increasingly important. Computers have obsoleted a huge number of mundane but skilled jobs, and what's left are highly skilled jobs and the people who maintain those computers :) Hence the middle level of skilled workers are getting squeezed out to the low end or the high end of the payscale, depending on whether they can do the highly skilled work that's being created. And the fundamental fact is, yes, the highly skilled jobs really are generating 10x (or whatever) the productivity of the low-skilled jobs (a computer program might replace 10 people), and so in an economic sense, yes, they really do deserve the 10x pay. But then you have to ask whether this inequality is good (or maintainable) for society.

Greenspan's proposed solution to this problem is better education, to increase the number of highly skilled workers, and relax immigration laws, to allow more highly skilled workers into the country. I think both these options have problems (which he didn't address in the book): first is that there just might not be that many people who have the IQ to do the most highly skilled jobs--education can only bring you so far. (I'm not saying we shouldn't try--I'm 100% pro-education--but I'm just saying I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't help all that much.) For immigration, if you completely open our border (which I thought was what he was implying), you'll lure in just as many low-skilled workers, and wages for the low-skilled jobs will drop proportionally.

Energy is another chapter of the book. Specifically, how much of our energy comes from unclean fuels, and oil, which comes from unstable/terrorist regimes. I think Greenspan was pretty levelheaded about the issue; he wasn't denying global warming or the ickiness of coal. I was a little disappointed he didn't give a solution: he shot down carbon trading as ineffective, but offered no real alternative. I think he was probably just afraid to say "government regulation" because no real libertarian would say that :) He might've also mentioned nuclear power (which I'm in favor of) but I forget :P Personally, I really really hate dirty air (how many times have I complained about NYC's air?). Global warming is also a concern, of course. But still, I just don't get it how people think it's OK to dump millions of tons of shit into the atmosphere. It's like peeing in the pool. We really should put a price on pollution--banning it or regulating it would be too disruptive or ineffective, I think--and it shouldn't be cheap. Phase in some tough taxes on pollution/greenhouse gases over 20 years, and let the market do its work... before you know it, we'll be all nuclear and wind. And that would make me, my lungs, and the glaciers happy.

Finally, finally, the last thing I wanna mention is libertarianism. Greenspan is a professed libertarian republican (not neocon republican, thank god). Sadly he doesn't make much defense of libertarianism in the book (or at least, what I consider the key points of libertarianism as opposed to simply conservative economics). I mean, I'm generally pro-free market; it's a proven system. But I wouldn't call myself libertarian because I do believe government intervention is necessary in a lot of cases. (I might say, I like the reasonable points of libertarianism :) Unfortunately Greenspan only devotes about one paragraph of 500 pages arguing against government intervention in monopolies. Not only that, but I had to laugh at it, because he used Microsoft as an example. He says Linux and Macintosh are giving Microsoft good competition. He also claims that he's never seen a monopoly do the trick of lowering prices to kill competitors, and then raise prices to make money. The first point is simply false, Microsoft has most of the world by the balls--every document in the corporate world is MS Office, for example. For the second point, I would give Microsoft as a perfect example of a misbehaving monopoly. Remember Netscape? What was the result of that: MS gave IE out for free, killed off Netscape, and then didn't improve the browser for like 5 years until Firefox started to give it some legit competition. That doesn't sound to me like a functioning free market.

I guess I'll wrap up there... lots of interesting/controversial issues, and I'd be happy to hear any thoughts!

Priorities

2007-10-31T23:19:00.001-05:00

Got off at 86th street at 10pm today, as usual a homeless dude was sleeping on a cardboard box bed in the station. And he was smoking a cigarette. Really now, don't you have better ways to spend your money?

Unrelatedly, I bought the following books the past two weeks. So far, so good. :)

Misputed

2007-10-24T22:10:00.001-05:00

I swear something will explode if I hear these again...

"Impute" is not a combination of "compute" and "imply". It means "to blame or attribute". "Compute" is perfectly adequate, and "extrapolate", "derive", and others are there when you need something more specific.
"Revert" does not mean to revise and return. "I will revert back to you" is gibberish.

That is all.

Big Balls

2007-10-10T21:35:00.001-05:00

What is it with guys on the subway spreading their legs so no one can sit next to them. Unless it's a cute, petite girl who squeezes in.

Death and Taxes

2007-10-08T20:34:00.001-05:00

Last weekend, I went to Barnes and Noble to peak through books. Also last weekend, I went to a social event with coworkers in Princeton, and took my first train trip (I wasn't impressed with the train. It's like a subway, but above ground!).

Anyway, at the bookstore, after poking around through classic fiction, non-classic fiction, Calculus for Dummies, and several dozen books how to beat the stock market, I went up to the new releases shelf and saw Alan Greenspan's book, The Age of Turbulence. He was on the Daily Show a couple weeks ago for an interview, and as always he impressed me with his intellect. With its relevance to my career, I thought it would make a good buy-- so I bought it :)

Anyway, I'm only 100 pages in, but I'm already enjoying it (I admit the prose is dull, but it's not nearly as bad as his speech). Before I comment on it, though, I first would like to comment on what the Fed actually is, because few people seem to actually know. (And I wonder to myself, why don't they teach this in school. Economics is 1/2 of what government is about.)

Some drivel about the Fed and such

Both my Dad and Jon Stewart commented on how the Fed lowering interest rates was about putting money in banks' pockets. That's really not true at all. In this case, the Fed had to lower rates (it really wasn't an option) because credit markets simply weren't functioning, as a byproduct of the mortgage crisis. The credit markets are (roughly) where banks borrow & lend money to each other, and it's of critical importance that these markets functions smoothly, because billions, if not trillions, of dollars need to flow through it every day. Part of the Fed's job is to maintain these markets.

These markets are also critical because it's how the Fed controls how much money is in circulation.

The surge of stock markets after the interest rate cut was questionable, in my opinion. That's an overreaction, caused by a psychology of something like "Oh the Fed's gonna cure all our problems!"

As for putting money into banks' hands, that's largely untrue. Every transaction in the market has a winner and a loser-- people who gained when their stocks went up were offset by the losers who sold the stocks in the first place! Sure, banks are benefitting from having a functional credit market now, but that is the norm. And if you're still not convinced, look at the disasters that happened this quarter-- Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, UBS, and countless hedge funds losing money.

Taxes

The thing that's currently fascinating me is economic policy. The biggest mystery to me is taxes. What is the purpose, and what are the effects, and how to make it "fair". It's much more complicated than funding the government (and neoconservatives don't seem to care whether they have funding or not!). What things are taxed, and how much they are taxed, also affects how people & corporations will invest their money. For example, if I could invest in A or in B, both with the same expected returns, but A was not taxed, I'd have to be stupid to invest in B instead. And as it turns out, there's a lot of situations like this in corporate finance (there's perfectly legal ways to pay less tax. The bad stuff is when people start to lie about things to reduce tax). So effectively, the government is giving incentives where to put money. Unintended incentives are often known as "loopholes" :)

The other thing that interests me a lot is what to tax. Do you tax income? Sales? Every transaction? The latter wouldn't work. Consider an agreement where I pay you $100 every Monday, and you pay me $100 every Friday. If every transaction is taxed, then we both lose money because we keep paying taxes on the $100! On the other hand, if only the sum of the transactions is taxed (in this case, $0 per week) then people will start to group together offsetting transactions together so they can pay less tax.

So it's really complicated.

I don't have an answer :)

Spending

And then, of course, is the question of what happens to the money you pay in taxes. Well, it gets spent. The idea is, money being spent should represent some sort of productivity. However, generally the governments are not particularly effective at spending money in the most productive way.

On the other hand, some things need a government to get done. City infrastructure, industry regulation, military, and not the least, social welfare.

It's about balance... let the more efficient free market do most of the spending, while the less efficient government should do spending in places where it's necessary but won't happen from market forces.

A little Greenspan

As I mentioned, I'm not very far yet, but there's already been some things that I've found really interesting. First, Greenspan is a really smart guy. He also earns my respect for being a pro musician for a while. He's not the "brilliant" type, but the type who is obsessed with getting every detail right. He likes reading through data! Yet I get the impression he really understands the "big picture", too-- making the data tell a consistent story.

Also interesting is his interaction with the government. He worked with the Republicans, which normally I wouldn't like, but ye olde GOP is 10x better than the neocons in the office now. There's a lot of friction between doing what is probably best for the economy, and doing something that looks good for the President. Too much economic stimulation leads to inflation, and unmitigated inflation is a sure path to economic ruin. But on the other hand, mild, consistent growth won't get you re-elected.

One thing I also didn't realize, but makes a lot of sense, is that unemployment and inflation are inversely related (theoretically-- but something called "stagflation" when both happen at once, has happened, and it's bad). Because, if there's more demand for jobs than there are jobs, wages go up, which will lead to inflation going up. So sad!

Again, it's about a balance-- try to get rid of unemployment, and you will risk severe inflation.

Unemployment

While I'm on the topic of unemployment, one thing I think free-market people often overlook (possibly including Greenspan) is that employment is probably not an efficient market. That is, there might be both supply and demand that aren't getting fulfilled. That's because people are reluctant to move or change career paths, and employers are hesistant to hire. Stated differently, there's a large transaction cost of moving a person from one job to another.

So, I feel like it's society's duty to recognize that this is an inefficient market, that bad things happen to good people, and just because you're unemployed doesn't mean you're unemployable, so the government ought to help you out until you get back to being a productive member of the workforce. See, there's good conservative reasons to support social welfare :)

Presidents

Also pretty cool about the book is to hear his take on other famous people. He's a very low-key guy, so when he says anything you know he means 10x that. But he's also a very observant guy, so he has a lot to say.

Nixon was extremely intelligent, but paranoid and mean. He recalls Nixon swearing like a sailor.

Ronald Reagan was a charmer, who always had a story or joke for the moment, but he was not an academic. He rarely read his briefings.

Ayn Rand was his philosophical influence. I haven't read any of her works, but sounds like she was a really smart dude. However, she perhaps was too libertarian, because she was raised in the polar opposite and terrible environment of communism.

Heal the world

Anyway, here's my current opinion, likely to change often, especially as I read more, on things that lead to economic prosperity.

Educational opportunity for all. Everyone should have the potential to realize their abilities. This is nice from a social justice point of view, and also from an economic view--it means more efficient skilled labor markets.
Globalization. Governments should make strides, very slowly but surely, towards open borders with the rest of the world. This leads to more efficient markets and better allocation of resources.
Open information. Efficiency and knowledge are closely intertwined. Furthermore, in this age of computers and instant communication, vastly more information than ever before is being generated. Patents, copyrights, other intellectual property law, and business models were designed for the pace 20 years ago, and are obsolete nowadays, and clog the legal system with little benefit to the economy as a whole.

And for balance, things that are bad:

China, like other emerging markets, needs to deregulate its market (slowly, but surely) and regulate human rights.
Fundamentalism in any form. Like the markets, minds work best when they are open ("but not so open your brains fall out"). Fundamentalism has a tendency to intefere with 1 and 2 above.
Politics. Unfortunately, with information availability at all time highs, so is disinformation. Politics seems to be built around disinformation. This interferes with 3 above.

Felonious

2007-09-24T20:43:00.001-05:00

I signed up to do volunteer math tutoring. Tonight I went to do my paperwork. Sheesh, just to volunteer I have to 1) Get a reference (I admit it's just 1 person checking a box saying "This person is not a child molester," but still...) 2) Give my residential history 3) List my roommates, including their birthdays (I'm gonna totally feel like a dork asking them tomorrow) 4) Get fingerprinted so the FBI can investigate me. Apparently I'm a felon until I can prove I'm not.

Talk about bureaucratic overhead. I went through this and more (well, not the roommates thing) to get my job, but that's understandable for that sort of position. In this case, I'm VOLUNTEERING to TUTOR. Is it really that hard to prove I'm not a child molester? Couldn't you just, oh, look up to see if "Luke Gustafson" is on the list of child molesters in New York?

I would like to hear a statistic about how effective these laws are at reducing child molestation in volunteer programs. Someone needs to do a cost-benefit analysis.

Anyway, I will go through with it, even though I'll have to run an errand to the police station. The lady could tell I was a tad pissed I had to find my roommates' birthdays (seriously how is their birthdate relevant to my ability to tutor math. C'mon people...) and I knew she was sympathetic. I seriously thought about skipping it because I don't want to waste my time on this unnecessary, privacy-invading crap.

Mafiaa

2007-09-15T22:19:00.001-05:00

Wow, today there was a big leak of emails from some anti-p2p group.

http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/09/15/1843234.shtml

The internet has really changed intellectual property. It's too easy to copy and share things nowadays. Old business models don't work any more. I wish the record companies (who collude via the RIAA) would realize this and move to an on-demand online system. iTunes has been how successful with music and TV for purchase?? In my case, especially because my music taste is obscure/not popular, I would happily pay money for quick downloads that are easier to get than searching through a dozen unseeded torrents.

I just don't think there's any way to stop people from sharing stuff online. Instead, they should figure out a different business model. Online sales and live performances might not be able to make as much money, but I think that might have to suffice.

Semi-related, I also am pretty disgusted with a lot patents nowadays. Unless you read http://slashdot.org you probably wouldn't know this, but there's a huge number of totally bogus patents out there. The fundamental problem is with non-physical, intellectual property (algorithms, software, user interfaces, etc)--these things are just too obvious and easy to rediscover. It doesn't make sense to protect them, and furthermore, impedes further progress in the area. Just try to imagine mathematics or physics if people patented their theorems or experimental results--there would be no progress.

Anatomically Correct

2007-09-11T21:44:00.001-05:00

DID I ACCIDENTALLY DELETE A WHOLE POST?!?

Crap.

(I probably meant to delete the draft, and deleted the post instead?)

My recollection...

Aaron came to visit back in June for Lawyerness training. We hung out. The subways were really slow.
The natural history museum had anatomically correct people, and the wall street bull is anatomically correct.
I wore all the way through the soles of my fancy black shoes.
I read some statistics papers, and it really sucked from a mathematical point of view (such as being utterly wrong. Dude, you have to bound your error terms.)
I didn't really enjoy the latest UFC's that much (as of June).
Never assume you've really learned something just because you've read about it. It's probably wrong. Examples are efficient markets in finance (they're not efficient), and parallel fifths in music (they're not bad, just listen to Ravel). Yet both these things are taught frequently-- considering them a first approximation is fine, I suppose, but a first approximation is not understanding!

Random stuff

I've become extremely good at spider solitaire. Just call me Spider Man.

I ordered a new laptop finally. As many of you know, this one is 5 years old or so. It's pretty surprising how little GHz processors have sped up; this comp is 1.4 GHz while my new one is only 2.0 GHz. Of course the new one is dual-core and has a much better architecture, so it'll be a lot faster (it better be!), but still, goes to show how the "gigahertz wars" are totally over now.

I'm a little disappointed that nothing supports 64 bit stuff nowadays. I'm getting 4GB ram with this computer. Buying even more than that is increasingly practical, but unless you're 64 bits you're not going to get much use of it. Makes me want to switch to Linux (I will never use Vista).
Books I read this summer: Unbearable Lightness of Being, Fermat's Enigma (thanks Zheng), Life of Pi, (part of) The Black Swan (went to a talk by the author & got the book for free!), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (ending was a tad too surreal/unbelieveable, I thought, but overall good), and finishing up a Chopin biography.

I have a lot of piano composing to do.

Yikes

2007-08-31T22:31:00.004-05:00

Another month slips by so fast... The weather is getting nicer, good for me without an AC in my bedroom.

New people have been coming in to work. Quite a funny feeling, that now I'm more senior or something... Anyway, as I've said many times, I'm really impressed how good work has been. But on the downside, I'm really getting old!

The last month and a half had several interesting events and some new experiences for me. Among other things, went to MoMA twice and got my very first taste of "modern" art. Like modern music, some is cool and a lot I don't really care for much. Favorite exhibit: painting "Here, Sir Fire, Eat!"

Scrabble on facebook is totally awesome! It's been so long since I've played word games.

Jean's wedding

So the biggest thing I've missed blogging about so far is my sister's wedding. I went back to MN for a few days to chill at home & obviously go to the ceremony.

Anyway, after getting back home, I got to try our Wii, and as always DaveDude and I played warcraft mods together. The Wii is pretty cool, and that sort of control is definitely the future of gaming.

The drive from Goodhue (where we live now) to Breckenridge (the wedding location, where we used to live) was a bit tedious because my brother kept playing angsty screamy music. He made a point of rubbing it in that it was his car and he got to choose the music, even though I specifically avoided complaining because I knew it'd be futile :) We stayed in a hotel in Wahpeton, Breck's sister town, but we didn't end up spending much time in there.

Friday was the rehearsal. It was pretty boring, since I'm not on stage at all.

Afterwards we all had dinner in Chahinkapa park. It was pretty good food; I was especially relieved that there was a great and plentiful fruit dish available (I'm totally a fruit addict now). Very cute was all kinds of custom wedding memorabilia (bookmarks, cup holders, water bottles) with pics of Jean & Tyler.

After dinner was swimming. That was a lot of fun... I like to swim! :) Many of us being lifeguard vets at this pool, myself included, we undertook the dangerous sport of "drysliding". That's when you turn off the water for the waterslide. You can go way faster with the water off, believe it or not, although obviously the slide needs to be damp for it to work.

Saturday we went to The Wilkin, a "nice" restaurant (meaning you can buy steak) with all Gustafsons (minus Jeano, who was getting ready for the wedding). Hmm, a habit that I really don't get is buying those peel-off lottery-type things. Yet our family seems to like playing these games, and easily spent $100 on it and didn't win anything. I just don't feel like it's very good value per dollar :P

After The Wilkin was naptime (of course!). However, that was interrupted when Dad called and told us we actually were already late for the wedding pics, so I didn't get a chance to nap at all! What a travesty. I got dressed in black shirt, black shoes, black pants, black socks, and a maroon (crimson?) tie... official usher dress. I forget to bring my own belt to MN, so I stole one of Dad's... a bit too big for me :)

As I imagined, wedding pics was a pretty boring process.

Anyway, then it was the wedding. As usher, I got to escort ladies to seats in the church. Weird, in an old-fashioned way, but cool I guess. DaveDude and I lit the candles. It's a bit upsetting, but my candles didn't all light. I got 6/7 going pretty easily, but one of them had cruft (probably wax) on the wick that wasn't letting it burn right. After a good 60 seconds of trying to burn the cruft off, I got a bit of a flame going, so decided that was my best shot I'm willing to give while 200 people are watching. We put our flamesticks away, walk back to the back, and the service begins. Not too long, and only 5 of my 7 candles are still burning. How embarrassing! One I can understand, but I wonder what on earth made the second candle go out. One of life's great mysteries.

Anyway, service was alright considering I was standing the whole time. I took a bunch of pics on a (old) digital camera Dad gave to me; you can see all the good ones on facebook. The sermon & lesson seemed a tad long to me (but hey, I don't go to many weddings). Basic theme was love of god is a key part of love for each other.

However, there was one cool event during the wedding. When it was time for the best man to get the rings, he announced "I don't have them" and shrugged. Well, isn't this the most embarrassing thing to happen during a wedding. But then one of the other ushers, and brother of the best man and groom, all football players, grabbed a football-like object and dashed to the front of the church. He threw the ball, which had the rings inside or something, to the best man. Cool.

After dinner was the reception. I had prepared one awesome piano piece, Wedding Day at Troldhaugen by Grieg, to play for the wedding, and I practiced a bunch of other (easier) songs to fill time, too. I wasn't totally sure how much I was going to get to play (after all, some wedding planning is always saved for the last minute), but after talking to Jeano (of course the bride always plans the wedding) I guess I would just play between now and the start of dinner. I started with Ravel's Pavane, then played Wedding Day. The piano was pretty bad-- not only was it out of tune, but it was absurdly quiet. Also I actually didn't get all the way to the end of Wedding day before the dinner started... oh well, got through the best parts :) On the upside, I was a bit relieved I didn't have to sightread any of the other music I brought.

Dinner was nice but uneventul. Instead of a traditional wedding cake, there were cheesecakes and an ice cream cake for the bride & groom. I thought that was excellent; I'm not really a big cake guy.

After the wedding was dance time. I had a lot of fun dancing. I danced with my younger cousin Kayla, Grandma, Mary-Ann from our old congregation (wow for being over 60 she could really dance), but not any bridesmaids. Sheesh. A lot of people complimented me on my dancing (I got the moves, baby) but I have to say Jean's a hell of a dancer.

David was a party pooper throughout. Heh.

The next day we headed back to Goodhue. Fun times.

Cool machine at the gym

At the gym I recently discovered in the treadmill area are stair-climbing machines. This is awesome. Stairs are a hell of a workout!

Catch 22

2007-07-12T21:24:00.001-05:00

Sometimes, doing the right thing will hurt you, but if you do the wrong thing, your conscious will.

Sometimes, I wonder if life is a Chopin piece. There is drama and sadness, but altogether it's beautiful.

Sometimes, I make cryptic, philosophical blog posts. :P

Reunion

2007-05-19T18:20:00.001-05:00

Last weekend was a Harvard Taekwondo reunion. I took Friday off from work & Fung Wah-ed my way to Boston.

Professor Cube

Gabriel & I went to the games store, Games People Play. On top of one shelf, there were some toys I simply couldn't resist. They had all sizes of rubik's cubes. The 3^3 for $10, 4^3 for $20, and 5^3 for $30. With all the rubik's cubes I see on people's desks at work, I thought I'd outdo them and get a 5x5x5 :)

Also, they had a bunch of the link-separate puzzles, where you try to take apart two things that are cleverly interlocked. They had a collection of particularly nice ones, Hanayama puzzles. They were rated from 1-6 in difficulty. Naturally, I was interested in how hard the 6's were. I found one that I thought looked cool, called "The Elk" or "Antlers", and so I bought it. Gabriel also bought a difficulty 6 puzzle, called "NEWS" or "Needle", which was particularly curious since you can't see how the pieces are actually connected to each other.

Anyway, it took me a good 4 days to solve the Elk. It has a particularly nasty property... but I won't give away the secret here :) The 5^3 rubik's cube, on the other hand, I haven't yet solved. However, everyone at work has been noticing it & thinks it's cool. Therefore, I must be cool, too :P

Dinner #1

Friday night was a dinner for everyone who was already in town. Which was only about 4 alums. But it was cool to see the guys on the team again, and meet some of the fresh meat.

Hmm, seems like I'm the only alum who currently has a real job. So throughout the weekend we joked a lot about my "selling out" (or "cashing in" as one guy put it :P). Haha. It is sorta funny, I feel so old, but all the people my age are still in school... maybe I'm really not so old after all.

Party #1

Friday evening we went to a party at an MIT coach's house. Us Harvard people got there right when it started, so for a brief period of time we were the majority. Mojitos were being served (courtesy Suzanne) and jello shots (corresponding to your belt color (hard to believe I'm only green!)) were also drunk. Eventually lots of MIT people showed up & we got pretty segregated, but it was still fun to, well, party.

Actually a couple hours in, all the Harvard people abandoned me. I guess they went to a gay club of some sort. I was gonna leave, but then they all came back. Whatev.

Oh yeah, and this was the first party I've been to that did "Mission Impossible", where y'all draw slips of paper from a bowl with your evening mission on it. You know, the sort of stuff that you should be doing anyway when you get sufficiently drunk. Kissing Victor was a pretty common one. My mission was to propose to someone in the style of Vijay, whom I met later that evening. With his instruction, I made a truly romantic gesture, yet, she rejected me!! Oh well. Someday I will find the special someone.

Also I drew the mission "Use someone's butt as a pillow for two minutes" but I couldn't find a volunteer, or at least someone passed out :P

Dim Sum

Saturday "morning" was Dim Sum with the team. Now all the alums were around & it was cool to chill for a bit while eating mysterious Chinese food. Especially memorable was Pat L's stories about med school.

Brookline

is a very nice neighborhood. Visited Peggy Saturday afternoon & thought it was a nice place to live. Lots of green & stuff. Thanks for dinner!

Party #2

Geoff Svacha hosted our Harvard tkd party Saturday night. The missions were much better, and so was the beer :) I drank a shot of hot sauce. It wasn't bad at all. I like my buffalo wings hotter than that.

Totally awesome was all the chocolate syrup missions ;)

Top of the Hub

Sunday was lunch w/ Zheng. Was quite delicious, and the view was great as well ;)

Banquet

Finally, the team had the end-of-year banquet. Yum yum kimchi. I was a bit surprised, but I was the only one who was wearing jeans. I figured some of the other alums wouldn't have brought fancy clothes. But whatever, it's nice to be underdressed for once :D

Probably the highlight was the alums vs board members hershey pie eating contest. It's an htkd tradition to eat these hershey pie slices in one big bite, which is just barely doable for most people. However, the board members this year consisted of several small girls, so this contest wasn't particularly fair. I led the alums with a big swallow, and I think we finished before the first board member even ate hers.... :)

Also sorta cool was one of the grad students at the banquet is actually interviewing in our group at work. Sorta cool to talk to her about finance & stuff. It's a small world, I guess :)

Paying for it...

Well, I got back home Monday morning at 2am. Was a little late to work on Monday :) Sadly, whether due to sleep deprivation or just a faltering immune system, I got sick. Tuesday I had hot buffalo wings from Domino's (Peggy's suggestion... I have long been looking for good buffalo wings & these are really pretty good!). Wednesday morning I woke up with a sore throat. I thought, hmm, maybe all the buffalo sauce had burned my throat a bit. Of course, that wasn't actually the case, and Thursday I really was feeling sick... :/ Oh well, it's only a sore throat. I'm trying to get some rest this weekend & hopefully I'll feel better soon.

It's no secret that the alum reunion is an underhanded way of getting us to give donations. Indeed, I'd love to make a nice donation to the club. But it will be conditional on the sparring performance of the team next year... :D

Colors

2007-05-06T00:29:00.000-05:00

100 posts!

It's springtime-- flowers are blooming, trees are budding, birds are singing, garbage is fuming, and Lost episodes are omg-good.

After over a year of having a cell phone, I finally figured out how to get pics from it to my computer. Not only does this enable me to blackmail a variety of acquaintances with embarrassing pictures, but it also lets you see how pretty NYC can be.

There's a lot of colors. It's a bit weird--in real life, things are mostly green and yellow--but hey, maybe it's better than real life :) So I went for a walk through Central park, enjoying the fresh air, blue flowers, and pink trees, and I even noticed some non-pidgeon species of birds. I thought hey, maybe I haven't given NYC enough credit. This is pretty nice.

Then, on my way back from the park, I see a homeless guy peeing behind some guy's truck. :( I decided not to take a picture of that.

Oh well. It was ALMOST a really nice walk :)

KnLog Day 500

2007-04-22T20:46:00.001-05:00

(yes in fact, exactly 500 days)

Today the weather was gorgeous. So, I went for a run through Central Park. I did about 1.5 laps around the Reservoir (and walked the last 1/2 lap). The trees are budding, flowers are blooming, the air is pretty fresh for NYC. It's great!

Sadly my knee is kinda sore again. My tendon has never really fully recovered, even though I haven't done anything more intense than running for the past 3 months. (The last set of squats I did was 225, and that bugged my tendon so I haven't done any since.)

The greyed out area is the tendon I had removed; it has served me well as a new ACL. I think it's been growing back--it no longer feels like 2 distinct pieces. The red area is the spot that bugs me. As you can see, it's a pretty small piece of a pretty big tendon, so I haven't worried too much about it. But I'm a little concerned now that my tendon might actually have a tear, rather than just being sore from missing a piece, & that's why this spot isn't healing right. I dunno :/ I dream of the day when my left knee will no longer hurt :)

Anyway, after my run I watched UFC 70. Overall it was pretty disappointing, no really good fights. One of my favorite fighters, Mirko Crocop, got KO'd by a high kick. The funny thing about this is, Crocop is famous for his KO-power high kicks, while the other guy is a world-class ground fighter. So no one would've predicted that outcome.

And truly gross was how he landed after the KO:

Amazingly, he did walk out of the ring. There's no word yet about how his knee/ankle is, but I'm pretty sure something got messed up there.

Coming up in a couple weeks, there's an Harvard Taekwondo reunion May 11. So I think I'll come by :D

Fresh Air

2007-04-16T01:56:00.001-05:00

Work has been pretty exciting the last couple weeks (as you might've guessed from my previous post). I've been working on some actual deals, rather than just programming--which has its advantages (more recognition) and disadvantages (more pressure, more grunt work). But probably the highlight of this last week was having a discussion/argument with the guys about calibrating mean-reverting stochastic models. It's nice to work with smart people :)

Springtime

The weather was awful today. April showers bring May flowers, or something. But, it is becoming springtime, my very favorite season of the year. I'm looking forward to runs through the park :)

Sadly NYC's air is not fresh. Maybe if you've grown up in a city all your life, you wouldn't notice, but the fact is, the air doesn't taste right. I dunno. Even Boston is much better. Oh well, every city has its disadvantages...

Fighting

Haven't blogged about this much lately (except my April Fool's joke, which thankfully one person fell for ;) I've been catching up on all the Ultimate Fighting. Wow, has there been some awesomeness. George St. Pierre beat Matt Hughes for the welterweight belt, but then immediately lost it to underdog Matt Serra! GSP went from being my hero to an embarrassment :( David Louiseau had a couple awful fights--he's a striker, but he wouldn't open up--which is really disappointing since I'm a fan (he's a tkd blackbelt). The heavyweight division is showing some excitement--Mirko Crocop joined the UFC, and he's fun to watch with his deadly kicks. Tim Sylvia beat Andrei Arlovski twice to get the belt, but then totally embarrassed himself by losing to the return-from-retirement Randy Couture, who is barely 1/2 his weight (not to take anything away from Randy, but Tim was really looking awful in that fight).

I guess fighting/MMA has really caught on as a sport. They're happening much more frequently, and the stuff on Spike TV continues to be popular. This makes me happy--this is a real sport. The downside to MMA is, of course, it's not something you want kids to do :)

The skillset required is vast, the action is continuous, the underdog always has a chance, and an iron will is just as important as your boxing skills. Furthermore, there's a lot of mutual respect in MMA. After the fight, the guys typically hug (if not kiss!) each other, congratulate each other, etc. There are a few badasses (not many considering how many fighters had bad upbringings), but they are a minority, and even they show respect a lot of times. For example, after the second Tito Ortiz vs Ken Shamrock fight, Tito pounded Ken out, Ken announced he's retiring, and even though they were essentially mortal enemies for years, Tito raised up Ken's hand and paraded him around the ring in a gesture of respect.

As Joe Rogan often puts it, "How can you watch baseball after seeing this?"

Also, I like MMA as a sport because you don't have to put up with the BS of other martial arts or boxing. Boxing is dumb because the gloves are too big, and when someone gets KO'd they have 8 seconds to recover (the fight should end!) Martial arts are dumb because they all think they actually work in real life, even though 95% of them don't. In MMA you get the real thing.

God?

Anyway, there's one thing that has become nearly ubiquitious at the UFC that annoys me to no end. Fighters, after winning, thank God for their victory.

I can understand that the fighters believe in God. I can understand they might pray for strength, or even a victory, no matter how silly that might be. But, why do they publicly thank God? I am doubtful God gives a hoot about who wins the fight, if he even approves of fighting at all!

Late nights...

2007-04-12T01:26:00.000-05:00

Two 16-hour days in a row. Only 3 days of work and I've already done over 40 hours :)

Tomorrow I swear I'm leaving before 7!

Dinos

2007-03-24T21:23:00.000-05:00

Gabriel came to visit NY a couple weeks ago. We had a nice romantic dinner Friday night, and Sunday we saw dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History. Coolness is that a guest & I get in free at the museum and don't have to wait in line. Yay for job perks. (Anyone else want to go to a museum?)

Weirdly enough, when looking at the dino skeletons, what I found myself most interested in was their knees. When I tore my ACL, I gave myself a quick lesson in knee anatomy, and the general principle is that knees are pretty poorly constructed joints that easily would fall apart, if not for a few ligaments that bear pretty much all the forces on the knee.

So as I looked at the dinosaurs, I found myself examining their knees, trying to figure out how some ligaments could possibly hold the joint together under X tons of weight. Maybe I'm just making this up, but it looked like there was room within the knees for ACL's a few inches in diameter.

Nevertheless, I imagined that should a predatory T-Rex ever be chasing me, I could run while the dino's knees would fall apart trying to keep up.

Woolly mammoths also had pretty cool skeletons. Although their tusks are impressive, their kneecaps are even more so. Their kneecaps were a few inches thick--they were more the shape of spheres than pancakes. Now, the kneecap is basically a piece of bone & cartilage to lubricate the patellar tendon's motion over the knee joint. This tells me that woolly mammoths had patellar tendons a few inches in diameter. Wowo.

Stratification

In a previous post, I gave out most of my lighter NYC culture-shock observations. But there's also something readily apparent that has a lot more gravity: Manhattan is far more stratified than any other place I've been to (which admittedly is not many).

It's no surprise that there's a huge income gap between the rich and poor of Manhattan. After all, it's home to both Wall Street and Harlem. But what makes me want to throw up a bit is how cultural the stratification is.

As one person put it to me, Manhattan is a very convenient place. You can get anything delivered. You don't need to cook or do your own laundry (and I don't, which I admit I've really come to appreciate). But what sucks is the cultural division between the people that are doing these mundane tasks and the upper class.

Back where I grew up, delivery or restaurant work was something you did as a teen before getting your high school degree. But here in Manhattan, it seems that these jobs are done by adults, often who have poor English skills or are otherwise at a cultural disadvantage. I'm just trying to imagine a dad who's raising a family on a McDonald's income... not only does the income suck, but it makes a terrible role model for his kids.

I dunno what to conclude. It's inevitable that stratification is going to happen like this. It just sucks that it's so deeply ingrained in the Manhattan culture.

Bad Moms

Here's another thing that really sucks that I've noticed in NYC. I see a lot of bad moms.

I'll admit straight up that this is a racial issue. I get the feeling that this may be a part of Black and Hispanic culture. Sure, there's a lot of bad Caucasian moms, but it's not nearly as ubiquitous.

I'll give a couple stories illustrating this. The first isn't too bad, but consider it representative of something I've seen many times.

One day I was eating pizza at Famous Famiglia's. A mom came in with her two boys, about 6-8 years old. They ordered a couple slices of Sicilian (which I was having, too), and the mom made them get a Snapple rather than soda, but the two boys had to share one (why I wonder? Surely not because it's too expensive?).

Her boys were goofing off a bit at their booth. She kept semi-yelling (stern, angry voice, but not much volume) at them to "shut up", "shut up", "shut up". They continued to pretty much ignore her, and she continued to pretty much be pissed as hell.

The whole time, there wasn't a kind word between the mom and her kids, and not the slightest smile ever crossed her face.

How can you be so grumpy when you've got two excited kids at a pizza place? I don't understand.

My other story makes me want to throw up. (Ok, not throw up, but rather give the mom a good punch to the jaw.) I was riding the subway home from work one night. A mom was standing in the aisle by her 4 year old daughter, who did have a seat next to a woman. Like the previous example mom, this mom never showed the slightest smile.

After one stop, a seat across the aisle frees up, and the mom takes it, so she's now about 6 feet from her daughter. That's ok. But then something disgusting happened. At the next stop, the woman next to her daughter got off the train. Another person eyed the empty seat, and beckoned the mom to take it. Her daughter excited said "Mommy!" as you'd expect a four-year-old to do at the possibility of being reunited with her mom. She shook her head. Again, a beckon to take the seat. She shook her head and dismissed the offer with a flick of her wrist. So the other person took the seat.

Ick.

The mom was so lazy she wouldn't move 6 feet to sit next to her daughter. When you're 4 years old, that's a big deal.

What's with these awful family values? These moms don't love their kids; they're treated like burdens, not treasures. I don't like it.

Finance

2007-03-13T20:49:00.000-05:00

Now that I've been working for a while, it's time to think about stuff I've learned.

Libertarianism

I really have a problem with economic libertarianism--the idea that unregulated industry is best. (It's maybe not such a common view, but seems popular on Slashdot.) I really hate--ahem--dislike it because, well, if you know just a little economics, you might agree with it. But if you actually know anything about real-life economics, you'd know it doesn't work.

The general principle is that a free market is the best market. If A is selling X at too high a price, then B will come in and sell X for a lower price. Competition follows, and the consumer wins.

There's a lot of problems with that. Cost of entry is commonly cited--B might not be able to sell X at a lower price because it's too expensive to get started. Other problems are quality control, especially for stuff like foods where the consumer can't really know what goes into them, and having reliable public utilities.

But there's a more fundamental problem than that. Consider this: A and B both sell X. Competition will drive prices for X down, right? Ec 101.

Wrong. What actually happens is A and B merge, and raise the price.

That's why you want regulation.

Capitalism

One thing I really fundamentally didn't understand was the central importance of investment banks to capitalism. I guess I also didn't really know what investment banks did :D

But seriously, I feel like there's a stigma that exists with banks... I definitely was a bit unsure how honest the industry is. My fears have been allayed, however. Everything I've seen done has been done to the best of our abilities, without deception or distortion.

Banks make their money because, well, their service is just that valuable. An analysis and optimization might save a company $100M. Taking 1% as fees, and, well, that's still a lot of money.

Efficiency

Here's one thing that really super duper impressed me, but it makes a lot of sense in retrospect. The management is really efficient. I mean, it's not 100% efficient; what management could be? Yet it's been obvious to me that people are getting stuff done without much bureaucratic overhead, and management is always looking for the fastest way to get things done.

I guess I didn't expect this cuz I associated businessy people with Dilbert and whatnot. But actually it makes a lot of sense that management is going to be efficient. In finance, efficiency turns into money pretty directly.

I fear that, after talking with friends, not every industry is like this... Since I really can't stand bureaucratic overhead or office politics, maybe I really did end up at the right place?

Efficient Markets

Probably at some point you've heard the phrase "efficient market." Here's a quick definition: The market always arrives at the correct price, given all available information.

Just recently I had the realization why this is so true. People can effectively weight their information by their certainty! If I'm really sure company A is undervalued, I will buy as much stock as possible! If I'm not so sure, I might just buy a little. So not only are people's understanding of the information reflected in the markets, but also their confidence in their understanding.

Alias

2007-03-04T23:10:00.000-05:00

Two posts in one day, rather than one really long post. Yeah, sorta cheating, but whatever.

Blue Room

Went to Boston last weekend. Was very last-minute; Saturday I went to work briefly (I don't usually work on weekends but had some stuff I needed to do). I had no weekend plans, so called up some Boston peeps and decided to make a long-overdue visit. Same Gabriel in the afternoon, Peggy later afternoon, and dinner with Zheng. She picked out the Blue Room, amazingly remembering that I ate there for our post-graduation dinner back in 2005. Sadly there wasn't any rabbit on the menu :P

Pi

Anyway, I also made a quick stop to the Coop bookstore while in Harvard Square. I bought the book Life of Pi. The author's style had me instantly hooked. I've only just begun, but it's so quotable. I like to read just a little bit at a time, really soaking up the words, because the author leaves you with so much to think about every paragraph. I.e. it's not the story, it's the prose I enjoy. That's extremely extremely rare. Anyway, I'm also looking forward to the story, because the author claims it will "make you believe in God," so it must be extraordinary ;P

Agnosticism

While on the subject, here's a quick rant. The thesis is: agnosticism (with respect to God) is retarded. Life of Pi also states this in one paragraph--I don't have the quote handy, but the character (who believes in God) says he can't stand agnostics--atheists are ok--because a life of doubt is no life at all.

What I feel is dumb about agnosticism is the idea that we can't know whether there's a god. I will grant that this is true. This is true in much the same way that we can't know whether there are unicorns, gravity, or whether two and two make four.

There's a certain degree of uncertainty in any knownledge, yes. We didn't create the universe so we can only guess at its rules. But that doesn't mean that you doubt everything.

I don't think the god issue is at all hard to resolve. The answer is obvious. Don't pretend that there's actually something interesting about the debate. Either you've felt god & believe, or you're being logical & don't. I don't see any possible middle ground (that doesn't involve some level of cognitive dissonance).

If you're agnostic (yes, all of you in facebook's Agnostic Intelligentsia), take some time to think about the question, make up your mind. Please!

(I'd love to write another dozen religion rants... but religion isn't easily openly discussed. That should be my next rant ;)

Alias

With Lost only being weekly, and the last couple episodes rather unfulfilling, I needed another form of non-interactive entertainment. I heard about the series "Alias", created by one of the dudes behind Lost. Plus, it has a hot female star, so how bad could it be?

Over the last three weeks I managed to watch all of season 1 and 2. I rather enjoyed it :) Not as amazing as Lost season 1-2, and not my type of music, but overall good stuff.

What's sad is how obvious the series was collapsing. The storyline only covered 1.5 seasons, 2 at best. Season 2 ended with something totally insane; season 3 couldn't possible continue in the same form, and I have no plans of watching it despite the cliffhanger. Sheesh, talk about milking it for all it's worth.

I feel like the same thing is happening to Lost. It's getting tangled in all its loose ends, and the plot is getting so far from where the series began that it's nearly unrecognizable. That's not to say I think season 3 has been bad, but it's completely different from seasons 1 and 2, and I believe (as do most) it's not as good.

Same thing happened to X-files. Good for quite a while, then it dragged on for a few extra seasons.

Anyway, I was thinking about how we could resolve this issue of TV series going to the pot once they get past their intended lifetimes. (OK, Lost is supposed to have a 5 season story, but c'mon...) You should advertise shows by their writers/creators, not their titles. Sorta like books. And why not do the same for movies?

Seems to me that it's the writing, not so much the stars, that make a movie/tv show great. Authors deserve the attention for a great show. Hollywood's too focused on the actors, but they are only a small part of the equation.

How many Hollywood writers can you name?

It shouldn't be this way.

This would resolve the 3-extra-seasons syndrome because you simply end the series at its natural point. The author/creator(s), presumably building fan loyalty, creates a new series. People will watch.

Subway Girl

2007-03-04T22:30:00.000-05:00

Sorry to be so unfaithful to my blog lately. I've had a few crazy weeks at work: a couple guys left & I've been taking over a lot of new projects. This week I broke my record and spent 17 hours at the office one day :) Anyway, although things have been hectic, it's also been full of opportunities for me.

So here's an update on the interesting stuff that's happened.

Subway Girl

This story begins a couple months ago. I was walking back from CVS one weekend night, having just bought myself some juice, chocolate milk, and Sweettarts (when I buy candy, it's usually Spree, but I'm afraid they were all out). Having a sweettooth that evening, I started eating the candy as soon as I left the store.

At about 93rd street, a tall brunette approached me, asking "Can you help me out?" So I said "Sure" and ask what she needed. Subway fare, it turns out.

She's not your typical beggar. She was well-groomed (makeup, clean hair) so wasn't homeless. In fact she's quite attractive. Maybe she was just a little tipsy that night and lost her metrocard.

Now, it's easy to catch people lying. All you have to do is catch them off guard. I ask "Where are you headed?" And amazingly enough, she didn't have that part of her story figured out... I don't remember the answer but it was silly.

Despite this, I walk with her to the 96th street station. I even give her a couple of my sweettarts. A little bit of conversation reveals she might've been drunk, but she wasn't, like, weird or anything.

When we get there I give her my extra metrocard--it has like $3 left so it'll get her onto the subway. She asks me if I can lend her some money... I ask for what and she also doesn't have that story figured out. So I say sorry, and she goes into the station and I walk home.

A couple months later, which is a couple weeks ago, I'm headed to the 96th street station and guess who I run in to? Subway Girl is asking for fare again. I'm crossing Park Street with a group of people-- she asks them for fare and then asks me. She doesn't remember me. I wanted to call her out on her lies, and ask how she could be short of money when she's well-groomed and sane enough to have a job, but then I don't want to judge her just yet--and less so in front of these other people.

Next time I run into her, though, I'll get her story...

Sickness

That same weekend a couple weeks ago, was the first time I've gotten sick in NYC. I attribute my health to a healthy diet and regular exercise--but this weekend the germs have me beat. Friday night after work I go to bed, exhausted as usual. But I don't sleep right, and I wake up during the night several times with a burning throat. Then next day, indeed, I've gotten sick. I'll just be thankful it was only a sore throat--nothing icky with boogers or nausea--and I was better by Monday.

I also went to dinner with Steph for the first time ever in Manhattan that weekend :) My appetite wasn't as big as usual but I still love going out to eat...

Baby formula

Tuesday night two weeks ago, I exceeded my beggar donation budget for the year.

While walking home from work, a middle-aged black woman accosted me. She was distressed. She gave me a story about how she and her husband needed to buy formula for their baby, but were completely out of cash. And something else about how they bought the wrong stuff, blah blah. Anyway, watching out for the usual beggar trickery, I ask a simple question: "How much do you need?" She knows the exact price.

She's for real. She was about to cry, which isn't so easy to fake. I look down at her hands, and she's wearing a humble wedding ring. A beggar doesn't have a ring.

I give her $20.

But that's only half the story. In fact, I only had $25 in my wallet at the time, so I was down to $5. I walk past my apartment to the ATM to take out some more cash. On the way back, a middle-aged black guy accosts me.

He's got a box in his arm.

He tells me that she and his wife bought the wrong formula for their infant, and needed some money to buy the right stuff.

I tell him nonchalantly "I think I just ran into your wife..." He doesn't understand, but then she comes down the street and remembers me. "He helped me" she says. "I've had my heart broken three times since I saw you."

Her husband gives me a quick lecture about how they're on the streets and I'm so lucky to have a house, blah blah. I admit I feel bad for them, but I just gave them 20 bucks. I don't know why, but he suckered me out of the $5 remaining that they needed. I was almost going to go to the store with them to see what I really just paid for, but hey, I was tired so I went home.

But that REALLY blows away my budget for beggars. I mean, I don't want to judge them, but c'mon people, make your own money, or GET OUT OF MANHATTAN which is the most expensive place in the US.

While on the topic of beggars...

I saw a couple really pathetic people on the subway the last few weeks as well. One was a blind guy playing accordion, mechanically walking from the back to front of each car. He wasn't very good, else I may have given him a few bucks (despite already being over-budget ;). Sorta creepy to see the blank stare he had...

The other guy blew me away. I was half-asleep on the subway, but opened my eyes when I felt a nudge on my foot. The guy had bumped into me. He had no legs. He was walking on his hands.

Oof ta.

D Major

2007-02-04T19:59:00.001-05:00

Finished & published my fifth prelude. This one's in D major: http://www.luke-g.com/piano/compositions/

Here's an interesting fact: Pennies are worth more than a penny now. In light of this, congress recently passed a bill to make it illegal to melt them down. The market value for the materials in a penny is over 5 cents now. The obvious prediction is that pennies will be phased out sometime in the near future. In the meantime, I am hoarding all my pennies :) Nickels also are worth slightly more than 5 cents, but as of now, it's not profitable to melt them down. Still, I'll bet that in the near future their composition will change.

Culture

2007-01-28T23:58:00.001-05:00

It's hard to believe I grew up in rural Minnesota. After visiting home for xmas break, and last week Dad & Judy came to visit NYC, it was sort of amazing to note the cultural differences.

Opposites

I often sum up the differences as NYC is the opposite of rural culture. It's more or less the truth, especially when talking about Manhattan versus more conservative areas.

In Manhattan, you live far from work but don't drive. In MN, you live 5 blocks away, but you still drive. Generally, outside the east coast, there's a "car culture". You drive everywhere. This is partly because things are really spaced out, so walking isn't always a real alternative; in Manhattan I'll be damned if there's anything I need that's more than 2 blocks away. However, I still notice that people prefer to take a car even when their destination is nearby.
In NYC you honk whenever the person in front of you is going slower than you want to be going. In MN, you don't honk unless you're about to crash.
In NYC there are lots of one-way streets. Cars are paralleled parked so closely it's impossible to pull out without bumping each other. In MN, the streets are wide and empty. Parallel parking is a useless skill because there's always plenty of room on the curb; and anyway everyone has their own 2-car garage.
In NYC people know what a yarmulke is, or at least have seen one.
In MN, you know the difference between Catholics and Lutherans, and you can't understand why anyone from the other denomination would believe that crazy doctrine.
In MN you know all your neighbors. In NYC, you maybe said hi to the people who live in the apartment next to you. In MN, you probably don't lock the door unless you're gonna be gone for a few days. In NYC you lock the door even if you're just taking out the trash.
In MN, going to eat at a "nice" restaurant will cost $10 per person. You'll order burgers. Or, if you're really going to indulge yourself, you'll get a steak for $15. In NYC, you can eat at McDonald's for $10. Or, you can go to a nice restaurant for $50 a person and order squid and lamb.
In MN, you're not really sure what a landlord is because you own your own house and property. In NYC, you have a landlord and probably hate their guts.
In MN, to have a party, you'll go to your friend's farm and have some Bud Light you bought at the gas station. In NYC, you'll go to the club and get a Heineken for $7. (personally I still think Heineken is wimpy. but it's still 10x better than bud light.)
In MN, you think a banker is someone who cashes checks. You've heard of the Wall Street Journal, but you don't know what it actually is.
In MN, you don't have a passport, but everyone gets their driver's license at 16. You think going to college more than 3 hours away is really far, and your first job is probably also within that range of home. You think internships are only for med students; over the summer you're a waiter.
In MN, you once saw a black person but didn't get a chance to meet him. In NYC, every morning on the way to work, you're on the subway squished butt-to-butt between a Chinese girl, a black guy, and a hispanic mom. The smell of the homeless guy at the back of the train is bothering your nose.

I could easily go on, but I think this characterizes things reasonably well.

It's not at all hard to understand why rural areas have such a conservative culture. They're so homogeneous--all white, all about the same income, all Christian. Compare to NYC, where you see people of all colors, accents, religions, and levels of affluence.

I really think this is fascinating.

Lobster Ravioli

Here's the story of the night I had dinner with Dad & Judy.

I left work a little after 6 so I could meet up with Dad & Judy & get to the restaurant, Fino Wall Street Ristorante, by 6:30, the time for which I made reservations. But, I tried calling my dad and he wasn't answering his phone. At 6:30 I even left a voice message saying to call me.

Finally, I decided to walk into the restaurant at 6:45.

There they were. I was greeted by the owner of the restaurant with a thick Italian accent & a hearty handshake. He said they've been waiting for me, and in the meantime, he's "already part of the family." :D

As it turns out, my dad forgot his phone at the room. Instead of taking 5 minutes to go back and get it, they hop in a cab & try to get to the restaurant. Since they were actually on Wall street, the cab was pretty pointless, and it couldn't even drop them off at the restaurant cuz Wall street doesn't allow traffic. But they did manage to get there. At this time I was waiting outside for them on Wall Street, but since they came from the wrong direction I guess I missed them.

Anyway, there were already at the restaurant for 15 minutes, and had made friends with THE OWNER.

So that made dinner an extremely special experience. The owner seemed to really want to impress the never-been-to-fine-dining Minnesotan guests :)

I get a squid appetizer & Judy gets a cucumber salad, but my dad doesn't get any. But the OWNER brought him some ravioli ("homemade ravioli" he corrected me) anyway :P He tried one bite of my squid (Italian "Calimari") but still thought the idea of eating squid is bizarre lol.

Then I am totally awestruck when the OWNER brought us a bottle of his FAVORITE (and therefore very expensive) wine ON THE HOUSE!! Wow. It was a red wine from 2001-- I forget the exact name-- but it was pretty subtle. I guess I will need to learn to appreciate wines better. Although I guess it didn't really have much of an alcohol-y taste, which is unusual & good.

Anyway, for the main dish, I got lobster ravioli, Judy got some spicy Penne dish, and my dad had veal for the first time ever (at the owner's & my recommendation).

To finish up for dessert, I got some Peach Sorbet-- and get this-- it was served in a hollowed-out frozen peach as a bowl! hehe. Judy got some Pecan pie, and my dad didn't get any dessert (he's so cheap lol).

But I just can't believe it, I now personally know the super awesome charismatic owner of a high-class Italian restaurant. Yay! I need to go back to take advantage of this :D Anybody in the mood for some Italian?

Website

2007-01-21T14:15:00.001-05:00

Bought myself some webspace today. http://www.luke-g.com (may take a day or two to register with everyone's DNS)

Nausea

2007-01-01T00:27:00.000-05:00

Check this out:
http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusions/illusions.htm

This is my favorite because it makes me physically ill after a while:

Gates

2006-12-29T23:36:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I flew back from MN to NY. It was also the day of the most retarded airport story EVER.

I was flying from MN to Chicago and the Newark. After checking in to Minneapolis, I look up the flight to Chicago and head to gate G2. It's at 5:11, even though my ticket says 4:55, but I figure no biggie.

I chill out for about an hour waiting for boarding time, watching the CNN on the wide-screen TV that makes everyone's head look fat.

When the flight boards at around 4:50 and I try to get on, they scan my ticket and then it sets off a beeping alarm. I think, oh no, am I on a terrorist no-fly list or something? As it turns out, it's the wrong flight. This is going to Midway, I was supposed to be going to O'Hare at gate G18. Whoops!

Of course my flight actually was at 4:55, and I missed it. I'm able to get on the next flight to O'Hare at 7, but then I miss my connection. And of course, there's no more flights to Newark that night from that airline... so I get to stay overnight.

I curl up on 4 consecutive seats and sleep for like 1 hour, while the noise of TVs and giant floor waxing machines keeps me up.

Anyway, I get on the 7am flight and I'm back to my appartment at 11am, ready to zonk out in bed and take an extra vacation day. Yet right after I walk through the door, I get a call from work... :/

The next time you feel retarded, just remember that Luke waited at the wrong gate for an hour without realizing it.

New Year Resolutions II

2006-12-24T09:22:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I did some thinking. I decided I'm grown up now. It doesn't mean I don't have more growing to do, it doesn't mean I won't laugh at fart jokes, and it doesn't mean I know what my future's going to be; it just means that my perspective of myself has changed. That said, I have only one new year's resolution this year: Commit to everything I do.

I have two commitments to start out the year: get my website back up by the end of January, and finish my first set of 24 preludes by the end of the year.

"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor."

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

--Thoreau

Philosophizing

2006-12-11T01:12:00.000-05:00

Did you know Chopin is not only my favorite composer, but also my favorite philosopher?

"Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on."

"Simplicity is the highest goal, achievable when you have overcome all difficulties."

"Bach is like an astronomer who, with the help of ciphers, finds the most wonderful stars . . . Beethoven embraced the universe with the power of his spirit . . . I do not climb so high. A long time ago I decided that my universe will be the soul and heart of man."

"When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher."

(Why the fonts and colors? Long story....)

Anyway, I found these while looking for a different Chopin quote, but sadly I didn't find it. It was something about how the darkness of life/music makes the happy moments that much more beautiful. Like a rose in the desert, or some other metaphor like that which involves a flower. Blah.

Ears

2006-12-08T23:53:00.000-05:00

Last week we had a "conference" at work. I went to the afterparty. There was a lot of loud music. Yay for dancing.

Anyway, I have a scary story that goes with this. The next day, my ears were still really ringing, and when I whistled certain higher frequencies I would hear a totally messed up, muffled sound. So I thought my ears got totally busted. Oh no!!

And the following day, I still had the same problem... Would I ever enjoy music in the same way again? I started to wonder how Beethoven felt.

A few days later, my ears cleared up. But get this-- the earwax from my right ear was bloody! Yeah, that's totally ick.

Moral of the story: Bring earplugs when going out.

Actually, I don't get the point of loud music. It makes it impossible to talk to each other. I mean, yeah, you need it loud enough that people talking doesn't drown out the music. But, you definitely don't need it so loud that you have to shout in the other person's ear just to be audible. So silly.

Then again, maybe I just don't get it at all, and the point is that you're not supposed to talk to each other :P

Thanksgiving

2006-11-26T21:52:00.000-05:00

This week was my first ever vacation from work. Nice!

Going Home

I don't know how much longer I'll be calling MN "home". Anyway, Wednesday I did some work and flew home to Minneapolis. Our flight was delayed about an hour before taking off, because we had to wait in line for the other planes to take off. I guess JFK airport was really busy that day--who would have guessed :P

Anyway, me, my bro, and my dad chill at home for a while. Pizza and ice cream with chocolate fudge is the menu--been a long time since I've had home-made fudge yum yum. David and I get out the old WC3 CD (well, old for me--he still plays :) and play our all-time favorite mod, Final Fantasy Epic. It's got a great leveling treadmill and enough quests to keep you busy. It's at least the 3rd time us two have played that map--it's THAT good :P Too bad it's actually not finished... Anyway, yay for videogames I haven't played in a long time :)

Skip-Bo

Then it's Turkey Day. For the first time in my life, I am the first one in the house to wake up. My dad's family comes over and we all play some cards. The game Skip-Bo is a family tradition; it's light on strategy (so you can play it while drunk lol) but still sorta fun. I manage to win the first game, despite a very slow start, with cunning play and a huge stroke of luck. I didn't realize this, but we were actually playing with $1 bets, so I made $4. Haha. However the next two games don't go my way, and I end up at merely +2$.

We had some yummy turkey etc for dinner, of course. I'm still eating like 10 minutes after everyone else had finished :)

To finish up the night, Dave Dude and I play some more FF.

TGIF

Friday begins as a marathon gaming session for David and I. (Well, actually, I poked around at some math while he was asleep--but I will save the math for a future post as things materialize.) We level up to our ultimate classes and beat the map. Yay.

That evening, us three guys watch the first two Naked Gun movies. These are damn funny!! Every scene has some random/funny element to it. I wish they made funny movies like these nowadays; instead, "comedy" has come to mean "stupid/gross". Ok, I'll concede Borat was funny, but you gotta admit, they don't make 'em like they used to :)

This is my first full day off from work!

TGIS

Saturday I fly back early in the morning. Dad and I get up at 4am to drive to the airport, I get on my flight at 6:30, and I'm back to my apartment by 11am. Some quick unpacking and a short nap and it's time to go out.

Zheng and I went to the art musuem. Good to see her again. This is the first museum I've been to in NYC--I'm really not taking advantage of what the city has to offer lol. Anyway, we get a charismatic tour guide who points out what is actually interesting about a lot of stuff. Somehow he even mentions quantum mechanics. Overall it was a pretty cool experience; the tour definitely made it better than when we went to MFA.

The thing that really captured my imagination, though, was the most elegant grand piano I have ever seen. It had gold (or at least, gold-colored) columns holding it up, with designs of gold all around the piano. I wonder, would I play better on this piano, just because it looks sooo good?

Anyway, we finish up the evening with some Japanese food. After eating a bunch of sushi, my stomach doesn't feel so good... hmm. I wonder if the same substance that was in my poisonous Korean food was also in this Japanese food lol. Shoulda just stuck with the seaweed salad. Anyway, at least I felt ok today after a bunch of sleep.

Lost

Today wasn't terribly exciting--mostly I caught up on sleep. Patricia came over, and we watched the last two episodes of Lost. It's incredibly annoying that it's not continuing until February, because the last episode ended with a heck of a cliffhanger. What's Jack gonna do?!?!?

I read a very interesting theory on the Lost boards that the island is actually home to Djinns. It fits amazingly well: an ancient civilization was there (hence the 4-toed statue), Djinns are invisible (hence the whispers) (or they can take on the smoke form, or the form of the others), etc. Then Dharma somehow found the island and thought it'd be ideal for doing research, and something goes horribly wrong when they mess with the Djinns. Or something. Anyway, my money would be on this theory.

In the meantime, I guess I will have to watch Star Trek reruns :D

Losing Everything

2006-11-20T22:14:00.000-05:00

This weekend was Harvard-Yale. This will be the subject of this blog post.

Fung Wah

I leave work at 5ish, go home, pack up, and then realize I left my tennis shoes at the gym. Whoops. So I just wore my fancy brown shoes. Anyway, I get to Canal Street around 7pm and there's a huge line waiting for the bus to NY. Boo.

I stand in line, waiting for the bus to come. I notice that a sign is saying traffic is gridlocked, take mass transit instead. So I'm thinking, that's no good... Well, around 7:30 a bus pulls in. I just barely make it on board--I'm like 4th to last--so I get a great seat by the restroom. Anyway, we actually moved along pretty well, so I was in Boston in 4 hours.

Michael, Aaron, Kenny, and Gabriel are all at the apartment waiting for me. Kenny is actually asleep already. We all cuddle up on the floor and go to sleep because we have to get up early Saturday.

Where Every Bunny Knows Your Name

After we all very slowly got out of bed, we headed over to Leverett for the pre-game breakfast. This was pretty cool cuz I haven't been to the dhall for a loooong time. Breakfast isn't particularly great, I guess it was just the usual stuffs. Some other ppl show up eventually, and so we get to catch up with some old friends. Yay.

After breakfast, me & aaron & mikel & senovio (who recently arrived) head over to the coop. I need a Harvard shirt. So I buy a nice crimson Harvard sweatshirt. The other guys get some stuff too.

Aaron and I head down to the Murr Center to pick up our tickets cuz the mail was too slow for us. So we get our tix, yay. And we head back to the apartment, put on our crimson shit, and head over to the Game.

Keys!

During the Leverett breakfast, I reached into my right pocket, felt my phone, but didn't feel any keys... weird. I check my other pocket, and no keys. Crap. As it turns out, I lost my keys.

So before and after the game I check with the cafeteria ladies if they found my keys--nope. After the game I check with Paul if anybody has turned in some keys. Nope. Hrmf. I retrace my morning steps, seeing if I somehow lost my keys on the way to Leverett. No luck.

It's just my apartment keys, so I'll survive without them, but still, that really sucks.

To be continued...

Yalesux

We arrive at Soldier's field pretty early, so we figure we'll check on the tailgates cuz we haven't had anything to drink. Well, there doesn't seem to really be much nearby other than old-people tailgates. So we just head into the stadium, completely sober.

Being there so early, we head to the 50 yard line and get great seats. But then I guess it looks like these seats aren't for us, so we head to our section, 22. Generally, the seating was obviously first-come, first-served, but the sections were definitely assigned to different groups of people. I didn't really get it, but whatever.

Having non-contiguous seat assignments, we just grab whatever row is free. It's a pretty bad view, actually, but whatever.

We pretty much sucked it up at football. We lose punt the ball away right away. Yale does throw an early interception, but at least they are able to advance down the field. As the game continues, we continue to run shitsucking plays and punt the ball away before a first down. When we have one of the crappiest QB, best RB, and best O line in the Ivy League, you'd think we'd run a bunch of plays up the middle. No. We run plays sideways. Everything is sideways. We zigzag up the field, getting 0-1 forward yards a play. It's disgusting.

Please, please fire our play caller. He is ruining our football.

Jerk

Who would've guessed, but the biggest jerk we met at the game was on the Harvard side.

We were in section 22, row X, a pretty crappy place at the corner of the field. The stadium is totally packed.

After half time, a couple guys and their wives show up, stand in front of us, and then tell us that we're in their seats.

Yeah, we are. They have row X. I'm row O, Gabe is row something else, Aaron is PP; our seats are filled with other people. This seating is on a first-come basis, obviously. But this drunk guy wants his seat.

We scoot down. But I guess that's not enough room. Gabriel, being next to them, was defending our seats while the rest of us sorta didn't know what was going on. Refusing to give up our seats, the guy sends his wife to get a security guard. And he comes and asks us to move.

Dude I'm pissed. Who comes to a sold-out game at half time and expects their seats to be open? And what do they want us to do, displace the people that are in our seats now? Sadly, we didn't have contiguous seats, so this wasn't really an option, but I would've LOVED to have asked the security guard to tell the old lady in my seat that she has to move.

Anyway, we go high up and the view is actually a lot better. But I still would LOVE the beat the doodoo out of Mr. X11 who took our seats, just because he was being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole.

Dinner

We leave the game a tad early cuz we got spanked. I heard there was a streaker but otherwise I don't think we missed any excitement. We go over to the indoor track for the HAA event.

The track is completely covered with cardboard. I guess they had to do that to protect the floor, but still, that's a lot of cardboard.

It's free to get in, and they have some simple snacks that were free. But alcohol wasn't free. And there was a huge line for the bar. So we didn't end up getting anything to drink, and I'm still 100% sober until 5pm. My friends were really letting me down lol.

Anyway, Terry et al are there and we say hi to the gang. Trevor mentions to me that he saw my Excitebike video at Bisqwit's lol. I also meet Wilfred for the first time outside of DotA (which I don't play anymore :P) that I can remember. It was nice to chill.

Afterwards, we decide an early dinner would be a good idea before all the Yalies eat everything. We narrow it down to Uno's or 9 Tastes, the latter winning because of no line. Yay for Thai. I get Bangkok Jungle. It's really good and spicy. Where is spicy Thai in NYC??

After dinner we stop by somewhere and buy some Sam Adams Octoberfest. We go and drink the Sam Adams Octoberfest. It tastes like October-- Ya know how the air smells different in October when the leaves change colors? That's what it tasted like. Yay for Sam Adams.

Keys (cont.)

So the most plausible place that I could have lost my keys was in the common room of the apartment. My pockets are sufficiently deep that the keys shouldn't fall out except when I take my pants off, and the only place I took my pants off was in the common room last night when I was going to bed. So I looked all around, going through all the stuff on the floor, even (ick) Michael's stuff, but there was no sign of them. :(

To be continued...

Hockey

Aaron and I, being the only Real Men among us, went to the Harvard-Yale hockey game that evening. It was friking $18. But at least I got a 12x18 poster of Kevin Du.

Yale scores a goal within the first minute. I guess our goalie is a freshman and also sucks.

I forget how awesome hockey games are. The violence on the rink, the unusually hot girls who sit in the student section, the drunk football players who make fun of the opposing goalie's mother, and the dude who paints his body crimson and wears a helmet and yells at us all to stand up.

Personal favorite insult: Directed at a Yalie wearing a jersey saying "Page": "Better watch out Page, Mark Foley is coming!"

We keep the score within 1 until the third period. It's 3-2 in their favor. Then we totally blow it, getting a bunch of penalties and letting the puck into our goal in much the same way that Homer lets donuts into his mouth.

We lose. Time to go.

Phoenix

What I was really looking forward to that night was going to the Phoenix for the 80's music night. I had even invited a Wellesley friend to come. I head over a tad early, but when I get there at like 11, it's full. The bouncer isn't letting people in. And there's a line. Crap.

Plans canceled. Sad tear!

Borat

But, as one learns in Positive Psych, you can turn problems into opportunities. The night was young, we were all around, but all bars in Cambridge were full. Aaron is leaving tomorrow at 1. We need to watch Borat.

We pretty quickly agreed that this would be a good idea, even if it's past our bedtimes. Marion and Gabriel, who had already seen it, even come along.

Now, this movie is just about the craziest thing ever. I dunno if it was the funniest thing ever, but it was the most disturbingly funny thing ever.

I don't think he managed to expose latent racism/homophobia/bigotry as much as he had in some of the Ali G sketches (nothing can compare to "Throw the Jew Down the Well"), but it still made some good commentary on our society. (Esp. the rodeo dude who told him to shave his mustache so he didn't look so much like a Muslim.) But the real highlight of the movie was just the most absurd situations imaginable. Naked men wrestling. Jokes about incest. Kissing other men on the subway. A chicken, for no reason. Pamela Anderson. Pentecostal Christians. Bags of shit. It was great.

All mine!

For the second night in a row, I get the futon to myself while Michael and Aaron cuddle on the air mattress.

Beavers

Sunday morning, we go get some breakfast at ABP and end up eating outside. Brr. Aaron heads back to the airport already; I guess you have to go to class at law school or something. After that, we aren't really sure what to do, but Micheal has a good idea (his first ever!) and we call up Ben de Bivort for lunch.

We get a light lunch at Boloco, then head to Leverett dhall, yay. Marion et al were there already, we sat down w/ them for a while. We talked a lot about Borat. That movie makes great conversation.

Anyway, then it's time to play some Super Scrabble. I managed to bingo with DECORUM, giving an easy win :) We stopped around 2:15 (we didn't finish, I don't think it's possible to actually finish a game of Super Scrabble), went back to the room, and rounded everyone up for one more movie.

Bond

We went to see Casino Royale. This was a pretty cool Bond movie. I wouldn't give it a glowing review, as many people seem to, but it was definitely better than the last couple Bond movies. I didn't think this Bond girl was as hot as the usual, although Michael disagreed.

I was actually pretty confused for a good portion of the movie because of an editing error. When Bond has to pick the password for the money transfer, it ends with the digits 4-7. Yet, the password he enters is VESPER. That does not fit. Gabriel also noticed this. So I was going through the movie thinking that he intentionally entered a fake password because he knew the dude was trying to phish it, but actually it was supposed to be legit. Blah. Whatever.

After the movie, we get pretty split up since Kenny has to study, Michael is visiting Gabe from MIT, and Trevor is eating leftovers. So me & gabe from Harvard & senovio go get some chinese. For the first time ever, I eat lotus root. Interesting. Otherwise nothing exciting. Time to head back to the apartment; I gotta get going since I have to work Monday morning...

Keys (part III)

Sunday, when I was taking of my pants (as I frequently do), I was about to throw them on the chair in the common room. Then it occurred to me, maybe I did that Saturday night and my keys fell out. So I inspected the chair closely. UNDER THE CUSHION, I find my keys!!! And a bubble blower.

Whew. At least after losing football and hockey, I didn't lose my keys, too :)

That's all...

So sadly that was about it. I do my goodbyes to the dudes & Marion, then it's off to South Station to catch the 11pm bus.

Damn I'm tired today. What a nice weekend. Only wish I had more time to visit everybody else!

Also, I have a gross story

I have two puke stories. Don't read this section if you don't like puke.

At the hockey game Saturday night, when I was in line for a urinal in the men's room. The guy in front of me (Yalie?) had thrown up in the urinal. Who throws up in a urinal?

Today, walking to the subway from work around 9pm, on Exchange Place between Broad St. and Broadway, a guy threw up. I dunno why. But he just threw up, right there, on the street.

Ick.

Road Construction

2006-11-13T00:03:00.000-05:00

Harvard-Yale coming up this weekend, but my tickets still haven't come...

Otherwise not a lot of excitement in my life. Got plane tix for Thanksgiving, although sadly I have to work from home anyway since the markets still go. I'll be in MN Wed-Fri and returning to NY early Sat.

Shopping

2006-11-05T21:32:00.000-05:00

Today I went shopping. Of course, when a guy says he goes shopping, you know he must be buying some techy gizmos or something, cuz we don't go clothes shopping. THAT requires female support. (Ok, well socks are an exception.) Here's what I got:

Tomorrow night the electric piano will get delivered to me. They laughed at me for being in a 6-story walk-up :(

And, I've got TWO stories to finish up this post:

First, I went to Patricia's bday party on Friday. Clay from freshman year was there, and he told me Warren Tusk, aka Stinkoman, aka Charon, aka The Guy With The Cape, is getting married. No way!

Second, Thursday night the dudes at work planned to all go out together for a beer. About 50 ppl were invited. 6 showed up. And we sat outside... brrr... so we left early. So that was really pathetic. Ok that wasn't much of a story. But I did have my first Sam Adams in a long time. Yum yum.

So as a bonus, here's a third story: What's with blue shirts? Any given day, at least 1/2 the people at work are wearing a blue shirt. Personally, I don't even really care for them. But anyway, last weekend I stopped by Boston real quick and went shopping with a couple fine ladies. Bought my FIRST EVER blue shirt for work. I will wear it this week. I'll let you know how that goes. :P

Happy Halloween

2006-10-28T23:05:00.000-05:00

Well, my last couple weeks were a bit different than usual.

Mainly, I had a big regulations exam this morning, and I studied way too much for it... so I spent less time at work, no time at gym, and lots of time in bed reading for the last 10 days. Blah, now I feel so out of shape... Monday I will have to hit up the gym real good.

Anyway, I guess other than lots of studying, I've done a bit of socializing. It's cool to catch up with old friends. And make new friends :)

The weather is starting to get cold. Brrr.

For the first time in my life, I paid someone else to do laundry for me. That was cool. They're much better at folding clothes than I am.

I don't have a Halloween costume. :( Remember college?

The last couple episodes of Lost have been pretty good. I was a bit pessimistic at the beginning of Season 3, but now the action has heated up and it's pretty cool.

Ok, one story: My brother reported to me that some evil dudes sprayed a fire extinguisher through his window, so his room was quite a mess with fire-retardant foam. I wonder who he pissed off?

And that's all.

Ballade 4

2006-10-18T19:37:00.001-05:00

I am totally obsessed with Chopin's 4th ballade--haha I've seriously listened to it 20 times the last 4 days. It might not be as large in scope as the other three, but if you could capture my heart and put it in a song, it'd be this.

One year

2006-10-15T17:46:00.000-05:00

It's the one year anniversary of this blog and since I tore my ACL. Wow!

I guess not a lot of material this week for blogging. Well, I did a set of 205 lb squats, so I'm finally feeling good about my quads again-- but you probably don't care :) So let's look at the news.

North Korea had a nuclear test. Seemed to be a bit weak, getting "only" 4.0 on the Richter scale, but I read some radiation measurements confirmed it was nuclear and not just conventional explosives. So now everyone's imposing harsh sanctions.

I did some reading and I guess it's totally disgusting what the government does. Absolutely no respect for humanity. Clearly their situation is not maintainable, and with these sanctions in place and a bit of patience, any country Kim Jong-Il had will crumble under his own mismanagement.

Good news from Asia is that China unblocked a good portion of Wikipedia. Yay for freedom of information. The country has been progressing very quickly.

So I guess Iraq's mortality rate is no better, if not worse, now than it was under Saddam. So we really screwed up that mission.

Interestingly, apparently in the bill that Congress signed about using force in Iraq, it approved of the measure against the "regime responsible for 9-11" (or some words similar to that). I should fact check that, but if it's true, wow...

In NYC, less than a couple miles from where I live, a plane crashed into a building. Fortunately almost no one died (it was a residential building during business hours, and amazingly, just a couple apartments actually got hit). The circumstances are weird though: a Yankees pitcher was the owner and pilot. The news said visibility was bad, but really you could see at least a mile-- yeah, it was bad if you're landing a commercial plane flying at 450 mph, but if you're in a private jet only 500 ft altitude, you have no excuse not to see the building. Hrmf. Luke bets: pilot drunk.

Peter Parker

2006-10-07T21:07:00.001-05:00

Wow, I think I bought the best bed ever. So today I spent most of my time there :) It's extra soft (I don't like hard beds cuz I can't sleep on my back), I got 300 count sheets instead of 200 (NOT a waste of money!), and the pillows are so super fluffy I only need one for my head (usually I need 2 to keep my neck straight).

Models

Here's a cool story from a week or so ago.

I went downtown to work out (squatting > 185 now, leg press 360-410--pretty much back to normal!), got some dinner, and took the subway back home--the A train.

I'm sitting across from a tall, muscular hispanic guy. Some girl gets on the train wearing a denim jacket over a pink shirt with a gold necklace, dyed-blond hair, and black glasses frames without lenses in them. She points out the hispanic guy across from me, and then she and a guy sit right by him. "Are you interested in modelling?" they ask him.

As it turns out, this guy and girl are scouting out models (I couldn't hear for what) on the A train. This hispanic guys actually apparently already was seeking out modelling jobs, which I guess isn't surprising--even though I'm 100% straight I'll admit he's an attractive dude lol.

Later he gets off the train, and then the guy asks a skinny black girl over. (She's sitting 3 seats to the left of me.) She's pretty tall, and was dressed pretty attractively, but she's really skinny--probably only 100 lbs despite her height. Cheek-length hair, small jaw, and a physique that indicated to me that she was probably 14-16. Anyway, she is dumbfounded that they ask her to be a model. Her brother (?) came over and was like "wtf dudes what ya doin to my sister" in the stereotypical overly-protective-older-brother way. But the guy is a smooth talker and manages to get her phone number. But as she left the train she told her sister (?) that she was worried that her mom would be mad that she gave out her number. But, I think they really made her day--that's pretty flattering. :)

Now this would be a much cooler story if they came up to me afterwards and asked me to model. :(

Rats

Okay here's a gross story. I think this takes place a couple days after the subway-model-scouts story.

I got home from work and my room smelled like sewage. I took out all the trash, thinking that maybe some fruit in the garbage was getting really stinky or something. I run the fan for a while, but still, the stench is intense. What could it be??

So I scout around the room. It's not my dirty clothes. I don't have any more garbage laying around. My bed smells fine. The bathroom smells fine, so it's not sewage backup.

And then I look into the corner behind a dresser. There's a dead rat. Ew.

Once I got rid of it (which itself was a pretty gross process) the smell cleared up really fast.

I'm happy that I have moved to a new apartment :)

Spider Man

And now I have a super cute story from today.

I went to get some lunch around 2pm. Pretty much the only type of food nearby is pizza (the other choice being sandwiches), and I head to the nearest pizza place. I get my usual two slices of pepperoni with a bottle of 100% apple juice (my breakfast beverage of choice), and sit down at a table and enjoy filling up my tummy.

Some 6-10 yr old kids come in with their moms. And they instantly come and sit right by me. The kid asks, awestruck, "Are you Spider Man?". And so I'm like, "Yeah! But it's a secret. Don't tell anyone." So he tells his friend I'm Spider Man. Then I remind him it's a secret :)

Anyway, I had some fun pretending to be a superhero for a while. I sorta wonder what their moms were thinking, but afterwards one jokes to me that I'll have to find a Spider Man costume today.

I love kids!!

Growth

2006-10-05T21:55:00.000-05:00

The growth rate for animals in the world where the graph is a tree, with each vertex of degree N, is (N-1)^(N-1)/(N-2)^(N-2) (where "growth rate" means the limit of A_n^(1/n)). Yay. For large N, this is about eN.

N Growth rate
2 1
3 4
4 6.75
5 9.48
6 12.21
7 14.93
8 17.65

Ok, now I just have to figure out how modding the graph by a cycle affects the growth rate. This is difficult.

Anyway, got a real apartment now, with two coworkers as roommates. Upper East Side, super quiet neighborhood, right by the park and subway. Yay. Hoping to get a mattress delivered tomorrow :)

Watched the season premiere of Lost last night. Missed part of it because I was gettin my keys to my room--I sprinted back, through the rain, but still was 10 minutes late :( There sure was a lot of ads... but anyway, I think I'll rewatch it online (or is it on TV again?) to try and catch some more clues. Looks like season 3 will be very different from the last couple seasons.

Spin Hooks

2006-09-17T21:53:00.000-05:00

75th post. It's getting close to one year now! I'm not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed of this blog. I guess at least I like to have a record of what I've been thinking :)

Gym

My big excitement this week was the gym.

Monday I had an appointment to get an evaluation before I got my membership. This evaluation consisted of: taking my blood pressure. That was all. Well, the guy takes my blood pressure twice, with a funny look on his face. I wonder what's going on. He asks if I had high blood pressure... I say no, although I'm usually a bit on the high end. As it turns out, he's getting really high readings from me. I theorize that he's getting a bit of my elbow, so that might be affecting the measurment. He tries again and gets something more reasonable, but I'm still on the very upper end, something over 90. Well whatever, I'll just go on continuing to believe I'm perfectly healthy :)

After that he shows me around and stuff. The gym is pretty dang nice. The actually supply you with shorts, socks, shirts, towels, soap, shampoo, conditioner, and even blow dryers for the metrosexuals. All you have to bring are shoes and a change of underpants.

Anyway, Wednesday I go to actually work out. I'm actually in pretty decent shape it seems--my hour-long weekend runs were keeping my heart/lung fitness pretty good. I started on the treadmill and did a mile in under 7 mins, which is a really good pace for me, especially as a warm-up.

After that, I check out the weights. I start with some free squats at 135. That's still a pretty wimpy amount, but I need to rebuild my quads. My knee's been doing great, and I'm just so happy I can do squats again :) I also hit up some benchpressing 6 @ 150ish (machine, not barbell, even though I'm usually opposed to machines), arm curls 6 @ 35, leg curls @ 80-100ish separately, and leg press @ 270 and 320. Hmm, I used to do leg press at 360 and 410, but yeah, my quads need to be built back up. Otherwise I did about what I left off at.

Since it's been so damn long since I've lifted, suffice it to say I was quite sore the next day :)

Downtown

Saturday I went downtown with the intent of working out again. However, I decided first to go to the office for a bit lol. It was totally empty of course. But my brain has been stuck on the debugging problem that I've been working on... blah it's so frustrating. Anyway, after a few hours of computing all by myself, I went over to the gym.

I repeated approximately the same workout, but I embellished it with some martial arts between sets of weights. After my usual dynamic stretching routine, I did a bit of taekwondo and boxing exercises. They have a punching-bag type thing (the kind that sits on the ground) and a mannequin-for-punching type thing there, which made my day. I beat on those things with punches, elbows, roundhouses, and lots of high roundhouses. It was hella fun punching the crap outta that dude, and then roundhousing his face. Ah, I miss the good old days of tkd tournaments... maybe I should join a dojang :)

And I should brag about how conditioned my hands are :) Over the past few years actually, I've been hitting stuff with my knuckles. My knuckles have gotten some noticeable calluses, but most importantly, my bones and whatever else in my knuckle joint have seriously hardened. I can punch wood pretty much as hard as I want without feeling anything... metal can still hurt though :)

Anyway, I just brought that up because I was beating on this stuff with my bare hands. I felt proud of myself, that most people use boxing gloves for doing this, while I could wail away at it bare-knuckled :P

Saturday morning, I had actually woken up dreaming that I was doing spin hook kicks. Yes, I often dream about martial arts/beating people up. I never got proficient at these before I busted my knee, and I've never attempted one since then--until Saturday. I felt a little ridiculous trying the first few kicks, but after a couple minutes I was able to throw some decent spin hooks without falling over haha. It was very fun. Yay.

Catalan

I did a bit of math today for my daily brain exercise. One math problem I've often enjoyed thinking about is counting polyominos, aka lattice animals. One thing I don't like about this problem is that it's specific to the square lattice--no one cares about the others. One thing I like to do about specifics that I hate is generalize them :) So how about this for generalizing:

Define a "world" to be a connected graph such that given any two points A and B, there exists an automorphism of the graph that sends A to B. Now, we can generalize this further to n-worlds as a connected graph, such that there exists a partition of all vertices into n sets, such that given two points A and B in the same partition, there exists an automorphism of the graph that sends A to B. But I'm not going to do n-worlds yet :P

Define an "animal" to be a connected subgraph of the world. Two animals are equivalent if an automorphism of the world maps one animal to the other. Now, we can restrict the set of automorphisms that we look at, if we don't want to include certain symmetries. For example, it's often best to only consider translations.

Let A_n denote the number of animals having n vertices.

So anyway, I've been thinking about different worlds and how that affects the asymptotic growth rate of A_n. On the plane, where we get the usual case of polyominos, the evidence is that the growth is 4.05^n/n, but theoretically there's a long way to go before we prove that. So maybe one could get some insight thinking about other worlds.

Let's look at some simpler worlds. Z/n x Z--the surface of an infinitely long cylinder. This gives us one finite dimension and one infinite dimension. As it turns out, with some generatingfunctionology, you could enumerate these exactly for any given n. The result is actually just linear recurrence, so you could easily get the exact growth rate, too. Now, if only you could do this for n in general--then you could enumerate the plane animals, since A_k on the plane is the same as A_k on Z/k x Z :)

Today I tried to think of a more exotic world. Consider a binary tree, but make it infinite in both directions. Here's something that was tricking me up for a while: you might think that since a binary tree of height n has 2^n vertices, that this guy would have 2^aleph_0 vertices. But you'd be wrong. It's easy to embed him in Z x Z, which is obviously countable.

Okay, so I enumerated the animals in this world (under only translation automorphisms). The data seemed to fit the formula A_n = (2n choose n)/(n+1). I thought, whoa, that's cool. In fact, that's the Catalan numbers!!! A quick stop at Wikipedia reveals, indeed, I'm just rediscovering the wheel.

And they have a growth rate of 4^n/(n^1.5). So think about that.

Maybe some time when I'm bored, I'll try to figure out the growth rate for n-ary trees. Unary is obviously 1, binary is 4^n/n^1.5, who knows for ternary?

Anyway, I think it'd be really cool to, like, figure out some general result about the asymptotic growth rate of A_n based on some graph or automorphisms properties.

Balance

2006-09-10T17:07:00.000-05:00

Time to philosophize a little. Now that I'm out of college, life has changed a bit... so here's some thoughts.

First of all, there are three things that I think are most important to having a good life. Let's do them in a fancy numbered list:

Be healthy
Have a good social life
Be intellectually engaged

The first thing is most important, although often easiest to overlook. Being physically healthy is a prerequisite to being mentally and emotionally healthy. But, it's all to easy to sacrifice your health by working too much, using too much caffeine, drinking too much, etc. in an attempt to succeed in #2 and #3. Yet, (with occasional exceptions), taking care of #1 will make you more successful in #2 and #3.

#2 and #3, I think, can be exchanged, depending on the person. For me, I had to go with social life first, because I never felt like time with friends is wasted, while I can't always say the same about math lol. But I definitely understand, some people emphasize the intellectual more.

Over time, I've discovered that talking/hanging out with friends is probably the most important thing for your emotional health. I mean, I know I'm not exactly the most extroverted person ever :P, but especially since high school, I've realized how important it is just to keep in touch with people. Life seems a bit empty when other people aren't around.

Finally, achieving something by using your brain is what makes you feel productive. I guess different people would interpret this differently--it might be art, engineering, blogging, or whatever--but somehow being productive is a key factor for feeling good about yourself.

Anyway, college sure made it easy to fulfill all three of these things: sports/gym available to stay in shape, lots of foods at the cafeteria to eat healthy (if you so choose lol), a variety of smart and accomplished people to hang out with, and plenty of psets and papers to do. It didn't take much effort to have a healthy, balanced life--the hard part, I think, was realizing the important of balance and allocating time to everything.

So, now about growing up. Life is different... Suddenly it's more difficult to have a satisfying life.

Being intellectually engaged is probably the easiest thing for me right now. My job is pretty interesting, and I look forward to the problems I get to solve.

However, the other things take more effort now. Being healthy is a bit trickier for a couple reasons. First, I'm at a desk for over 10 hours a day... I gotta specifically allocate time for exercise so I can stay in shape. Off on a tangent, tomorrow I get a physical assessment so I can finally get my gym membership. Yay. I'm very much looking forward to finally gaining the 5 pounds of muskle I've been hoping for since my New Year's resolution lol. But actually I have been going on long runs over the weekends and stretching and push-ups at night, so I'm in ok shape now--but having weights to lift will be very much nicer.

Second, food is a little trickier now. Having a cafeteria sure was nice, I think. Now you gotta pay for the food you eat. And healthy food is more expensive. I actually have given up on soda now, for example, and the replacements, Vitamin Water or juice, are about twice as expensive. Blah. And nothing is cheaper than McDonald's, which is about the ickiest food there is (although it at least has lots of protein). Cooking for yourself is a great option, but it's also time consuming--not to mention requires a kitchen :) I shouldn't complain too much, though, because there is an ok cafeteria at work.

Probably the most obvious and severe change since college is social life. Now my peers are my co-workers, and even though they're cool, it's not the same as college roommates! Plus, instead of having tons of friends as neighbors in the dorms, now you're pretty much surrounded by strangers at home. It's a very different environment. So, having a good social life is something that requires extra effort.

I guess getting a paycheck is supposed to make up for this all, however :P

And that's my philosophizing for today :D

Iranq

2006-09-01T22:19:00.000-05:00

I just broke my record for most hours at work in one week :P

Thai food seems to give me boundless energy. I wonder why--maybe just the spiciness wakes me up?

I feel a little silly that I haven't made any plans yet for the long weekend. Maybe I will stop by Boston someday. At the least I'm gonna visit some friends I haven't seen in a while.

I signed up for the gym at work, but my membership won't start until the 11th. Aww! So slow.

It's sort of interesting to compare the current Iran situation with the Iraq situation 3 years ago (or was it 4?). Bush & Co used WMDs as the rationalization for going to Iraq. They even accused Iraq of having a nuclear program, which was based on totally false documents but somehow they didn't really get into trouble for that.

So now, Iran is fingering its nose at the UN, just like Iraq was doing. Except, this time we KNOW they have Uranium. And I read one article that said they were actually refining it beyond the amount needed for fission reactors; i.e. they're probably going to be starting a nuclear weapons program.

Yet, Bush & Co seem to be advocating diplomacy this time, rather than action as in Iraq's case. There are two (not mutually exclusive) possibilities for this change: either they learned from their mistakes, or they hid their true motivations. I'll let you take a guess which is more likely :)

I wish the neocons would just be upfront about their plans. They want to take control of the Middle East. It's not about liberating people or helping humanity (I won't even get into how much worse off Iraq is now... civil war!), it's about the strategic reasons: oil mainly. Yum yum oil. Carter said during his presidency that our dependence on foreign oil is our #1 security concern. That still appears to be true...

And I think that a politician that can't be honest (to at least a reasonable extent) is about the lowest form of life there is. They're supposed to be public servants. Lying is ideologically opposite that. If you want to get ahead by lying, that sucks, but at least do it in business rather than politics.

Also Rumsfield once again is getting heat from the press for comparing critics to Nazi lovers or something. How many times is he going to get away with his cocky talk. He really disappoints me. He sounds like the sort of dude who could be a great guy--he wrestled in college, which is about the hardest sport there is, and made money doing one-handed push-ups--but actually he's a cocky jock. Hrmf.

Kimchi

2006-08-27T22:02:00.000-05:00

Hmm, nothing terribly exciting since my last post I guess. But I had a few adventures today I guess.

Poisoned?

Saturday Zheng and I went to get some Korean food, but I forget the place. It was among a lot of other Korean places, so I guess it was some mini Koreantown or something :) Anyway, it was a totally awesome meal, yum yum. But...

I couldn't fall asleep that night, and *ahem* I had to pee often. It felt like I had a big dose of caffeine or something. But that's not possible, I didn't drink anything caffeinated... Yet the next morning, when I get up (at 9am), I really feel like crap and I continue to use the bathroom frequently. So really the only explanation is, there was some crap in the food that my body didn't like at all. Hrmf. Anyone else had strange reactions to Korean food? I wonder if they used weird kimchi or something.

Rain

After about a gallon of water had passed through my system, I was feeling sufficiently detoxified that I decided to go for a run. Since I've been at work like 50-60 hours a week, and I haven't had flexible breaks yet, I haven't been getting enough exercise; but that should change now that I'll be in office and close to a gym. So I need to get in shape!

It's raining a bit when I go. I start at the NW corner of Central Park, and just randomly run up and down hills and stuff. About 10 minutes of running and I'm pretty winded, which I expected from being out of shape. At this point, I get to a lake, and decide I ought to do a lap. Then it starts to pour.

I didn't mind getting wet. It feels very nice to be in the cool rain when I am on a long run. But, I seriously getting soaked here--I worried that my cell phone might get damaged or something.

I don't know why, but while it was raining, I never had to take a break while running. Maybe it was my "second wind", a phenomena I've heard of but never really observed in myself. Maybe the rain helped to cool my body. More likely, I was just running more slowly.

Anyway, I ended up running for about 50 minutes before I finally find my way out of the park. I'm sure I'll be a bit sore tomorrow, but it sure was refreshing, especially after feeling so sick this morning.

Mathy stuffs

I had some good thinking days this week. I spent some time going over Godel's theorem again, and now I can finally re-derive the Godel formula. I'm trying to get to the point where I can understand it "at a glance", a level of internalization that I think is necessary to really doing math. It's a little strange, usually proofs don't take me so long to internalize, but this one seems to be a bit tricky for some reason. I can do the algebra, but I still don't quite get the trick. Anyway, hopefully one more reading and I will better understand the trick.

Actually just yesterday I had a "eureka" moment of some sort. I guess I will think about it more, but my idea was in regards to formalizing metamathematics. Briefly I'll give the background: So Godel's theorem relies on the fact that one can construct a statement that means "This cannot be proven in this system." And it's true. But you can't prove it. Yet, metamathematically, you can prove that it's true. (See why it's so hard to wrap your head around Godel's proof...) So I was thinking, one should formalize this metamathematics, and continue with meta-metamathematics, etc. Then you could look at what statements are true at what level of metamathematics. And my idea is, maybe if you keep going up the metamathematics chain, you will eventually get all "true" statements for some definition of "true".

But I will have to think about this more. It's very confusing.

Actually I've started to read a bit about stochastic calculus. It's very relevant to financial modeling, since it gives answers to difficult expected-value problems. However, I don't really care much for analysis, so it's not particularly exciting. But I feel like I should at least read enough that I could derive Black-Scholes myself.

Incidentally, I find Black-Scholes to be a thoroughly unimpressive formula. It's hard to believe it got a Nobel Prize. I guess there were some clever insights, but it still could easily occur in an undergrad pset: "Find the price of an option given price, strike, volatility, time, and interest rate. (Hint: Show that one can buy stock to hedge the option precisely, eliminating risk)." I guess the "hint" is the reason why no one before Black and Scholes could get the formula--I don't think the notion of hedging was ever used for pricing before, even though it's commonplace now. Yay for standing on the shoulders of giants.

Yankees

2006-08-15T22:41:00.000-05:00

First, I have some corrections to my last post:

Three McDonald's double cheesburgers are closer to 1500 calories.
There is milk available for free. Obviously, it's intended for putting into your coffee, but that doesn't stop me from pouring a glass of milk :)

Here are some additions to the previous post:

The same shoes that gave me awful blisters also have sucky laces. They are round. And as you probably have observed, round laces don't stay in knots very well. In fact, I tied a double knot in my shoes, and it still came undone.
The weather is much nicer now.

I really love these bullets. So, here are some Boston vs New York observations. (Doing Minnesota vs New York is a little pointless...) Or maybe, I should say Manhattan vs Boston, because I still haven't left Manhattan :)

Boston tap water tastes way better than NY's.
NY is way huger than Boston.
NY seems to have more McDonald's (per capita).
NY subway seats are way less comfortable than Boston's. Yet, people in NY seems to be way more aggressive about taking a seat. Although that might be related to the fact that trips on the NY subway tend to be way longer than on Boston's, so standing is pretty bad.
The NY subway is impossibly un-user-friendly.
Boston smells ever-so-slightly fresher than NY.
The Red Sox almost always beat the Yankees.
NY has an interesting phenomena of "food trucks," which serve lunch and snacks from the streets of downtown Manhattan. Yummy.
Several times I have had people breakdance on the subway train and then ask for donations. This is sort of annoying so I don't give them money.

Anyway, I guess I have some adventures to write about. I went to visit Boston this past weekend, woot.

The first adventure was walking through Chinatown to get to the venerable Fung Wah bus. I walked most the length of Canal Street. I was amazed by how crowded the sidewalks were. Even more amazing was the height of these people. Now, I don't want to stereotype asians as short, and in fact, a pretty decent percentage of the people weren't even asian. But the fact is, I was a head taller than anybody else there. My cursory observation was that there were more women than men, so maybe that was contributing to the shortness. My theory is that all the tall guys are at work Friday afternoons.

Also amazing about Canal Street is the street vendors. I could barely walk down the street without buying something! There were so many clothes and accessories to buy... and fresh foods... ! And even more amazing was the prices. Ties were $3.00, about 10x less than anything I've ever seen. I saw T-shirts at 3 for $11. Whoa. And the bus to NY is only $15 :)

Anyway, I get to Fung Wah at 3:00, and figured I'd have to wait for the 4:00 bus, but actually the 3:00 bus is still there. I guess they wait until it fills up instead of leaving on time. There's actually quite a few empty seats when I get on, so I'm able to pick a seat next to a non-sketchy-looking person :)

Traffic around NY makes the bus go pretty slow. I sleep most of the way there, but the trip ended up being pretty long and I don't get to Boston until 8:30ish. Happily, Zheng's at South Station waiting for me, and we go and get some Thai food yum yum, which I haven't had in ages! I wasn't in the mood for anything too exciting though, so I just got some crispy Pad Thai. Although I guess this was actually pretty exciting in that it had peanuts, which I usually try to avoid. And actually, I thought the peanuts tasted really good with the other stuff. So maybe I will be more opened-minded about peanuts in the future. Zheng gets my favorite Thai dish, Drunken Noodles, which is also a title of a post in this blog. Yummy.

Saturday I somehow manage to get up in the morning, even though I'm seriously behind in sleep. Zheng and I go to MFA, and it's actually my first time there. I did such a bad job of seeing Boston while I was in Boston :P I actually showed my old Harvard ID and they let me in free, even though I have no idea if Harvard even had a deal with MFA (MIT does, which is why I gave it a shot). I was a little scared when the guard asked to examine my ID, but he didn't notice it expired 5 months ago :0

MFA was pretty cool. We saw a lot of sculptures and other 3-d art pieces, and we also checked out the musical instruments section, which was pretty cool. I was expecting a lot more 2-d paintings, but we actually didn't see many until we got to the European section.

We also got some lunch there. It was really nice outside so we ate outside :) However, I made a serious mistake: I left my Hershey chocolate bar on my tray, in the sun. By the time I finished my sandwich, it was pure chocolate syrup. So I shield it from the sun, and eventually we go indoors and sit for a while, waiting for the chocolate to freeze again :) But it's really hard not to eat chocolate, so I end up eating most of the bar by scooping it up with my finger and licking the chocolate off :)

After MFA, we had a couple hours to kill before dinner. So we took the T to Prudential to go shopping a bit. Interestingly, the T station there had no toll thingy, instead you had to pay when you got on the train. A very faded, barely legible sign outside says it's $1.25 fare. Well, I'm out of quarters, so when I get on the train, I put in $2, but the operator is like confused or something and then lectures me about how I have to be prepared, but he lets me on for just $1. Yay.

We checked out some clothes stores. I guess one highlight I should mention was this really really expensive place, but I forget the name. A 100% cotton white button-down shirt goes for $300. I couldn't tell the difference between it and a $30 shirt like I wear everyday, except for the tag saying "dryclean only". Hmm.

Dinner was at Jo's Brasserie. As you can tell from the name, it serves women's undergarments. Zheng gets some mussels and I get some shrimp. This was probably only the second time I've had fancy French food before. Yum yum. Hilariously, the mussels are served with French Fries.

Then it's time to call up the Harvard dudes to hang out. Kenny and Gabriel are now living in Harvard Square. I guess Gabriel got a job doing ec research instead of going to MIT grad skool. Kenny grew a beard, apparently because his razor broke :D

While we were outside of ABP hanging out, some dude, clearly on something, comes up to us and starts talking. First he compliments Kenny on his beard. Then he asks about me, and eventually finds out I did math at Harvard. Then we talk about how awful/wonderful math is. Finishing up the bizarre conversation, we introduce ourselves. Gabriel says "I'm David" and then the dude is like, "No way! That's my name! NO WAY!" Then he turns to me, and I'm like, I gotta think of a cool name, quick! "I'm Luke." Aww! I can't think on the spot. Kenny introduces himself as George. Then I feel really bad, I should've at least thought of introducing myself as Kenny or Gabriel. Oh well.

Oh yeah, and speaking of being accosted, while Zheng and I were sitting down in the mall, some creepy dude comes up and introduces himself to us. Then he's apparently trying to be nice, but asks some awkward questions like, "so are you two married?" Hrmm. I was gonna be like, pleaze go away, but then I saw hanging from his neck a press badge-type thingy that had his name and the name of some magazine on it. So I figure he's probably legit. Anyway, as it turns out, he's asking for money for some homeless-related magazine. Now, he really managed to make a sucker out of me, because I gave him $10 (would've given $5 but that was my lowest bill). I guess I haven't given any money to homeless people for at least a couple years, but now I'm good for at least 10 years :) And actually, I broke my own rule of not giving money to people that annoyed me to get it. Aww! Well I guess he was TRYING to be nice, he just sucked at it :P

Anyway, after saying bye to the dudes, that's about it for Saturday. Sunday I sleep a bit extra and just go to the bus, I didn't get around to calling up Gabe for a second visit, but hey, I'll be coming to Boston often I think :)

At South Station, there's a long line for a bus which I assume is Fung Wah. Actually it's Lucky Star, which also goes to Chinatown apparently. Without reading the sign, I buy a ticket to NY, and it's also just $15, but once I get in line and look around a bit, I realize there's also a Fung Wah bus, and there's no line for it at all. Weird. Which makes me wonder, why are there 40 people in line for Lucky Star and 0 in line for Fung Wah? Anyway, after probably 20 minutes waiting for the bus to arrive, I get on, sit next to someone not-too-sketchy, and have a pretty uneventful trip back to NY. It also takes around 5 hours... blah traffic sucks.

So that was my weekend. Yay for weekends.

Blisters

2006-08-02T22:45:00.000-05:00

So I guess I'm all grown up now! Aww! Well, blogging about work is bad mojo, so I guess I don't have as much to write about now... but I'll give it a try, ya?

Congrats!

My sister and her boyfriend are getting MARRIED!

Funny how my sister seems to always be ahead of me in life, even though I'm a year and a half older. She finished swimming lessons the same time I did, since I failed some of my early classes. Then, she was manager and head dudette of the pool while I was just lifeguarding (not that I wanted to be a manager, though...). Then she graduates the same year as I do, since I took a semester off. And she actually started work a month before I did, and now she's engaged. Sorta funny how that works :)

Hours

Our training at work have shifted up a gear, and I have hardly been at home at all. Monday and Tuesday I was there for 15 hours, today only 12 :) It's not so bad though, lots of work in Excel. This stuff is decently interesting and I can't wait for my real work to begin :)

I'm still living in a pretty crappy place (but I'm never home haha), but later this week I'll be visiting an apartment with a STEINWAY piano. Depending on how that goes, I probably will also check out some upper west/east side studios. I have to say, getting housing in NY is really a headache :P

Blisters

So one atrocity that comes with working in the coporate world, is that you have to dress up a bit. In particular, fancy shoes! (By fancy, I mean anything other than tennis shoes (aka sneakers)). There are a couple points I'd like to make about that.

First, fancy shoes really suck for your feet. I sort of wonder why, but they aren't at all designed to actually help support your foot correctly. When they're charging $100 for something made of $5 materials and $1 labor, the least they could do is design it to be comfortable. But seriously, shoes have serious effects on your joints. One thing I learned about in ACL therapy was how important shoes are to your ankles and knees. I have pretty flat feet, and apparently that has caused some slight bull-leggedness. A lot of people with flat feet also walk and stuff with their feet turned outward, which is very bad. Both these things are signs that your joints aren't lined up properly, and can cause pain and injury over time. So when I get tennis shoes (aka sneakers), I get ones with extra arch support, and I even have extra arch stuff in my insoles, so they keep me all in line. But dress shoes don't have arch support at all (putting in arch things in the insole is sort of pointless when the shoe itself has no arch support). Aww! And it really does make a difference, I can feel the fatigue in my ankles after walking for a while.

Ok, so the REAL problem with dress shoes is that they chafe. They just aren't meant to fit your foot correctly, really. So Friday I wear a new pair of shiny brown leather shoes, and after just a couple minutes of walking, I already can feel the back of my ankles getting torn up. :( They rim of the shoe really squeezed around my ankle, but the rest of the shoe was loose enough that my foot would slide around. So basically, the rim of the shoe was seriously rubbing against my ankles.

By the end of the day, the back of my feet had huge blisters, and the skin fell off shortly after. Now, I'm a tough guy (haha), so some soft tissue injuries don't bother me that much, especially on my feet, which experience a good deal of pain from tkd :) But when I had to wear dress shoes again on Monday, I pretty quickly realize, I'm gonna be a bloody mess if I don't do something about it. This isn't the sort of problem that a band-aid would do anything about, so had to improvise a solution. I squashed the back of my shoes, folding it under my heel so it doesn't contact my blisters, and now wear I'm wearing my shoes like slippers :) Today my feet are feeling a lot better, but I better give it a couple days before I go back to chafing shoes :) I just hope that my new shoes are sufficiently broken in that they won't be so bad the next time...

Website

I'm really having a tough time dealing with not having any (non-blog) webspace. My Scriabin pages actually got a lot of hits, and the internet just isn't the same without BlastMan. And most of all, I want to have a spot to put up my music! So last weekend, I checked out some web hosting stuff. I didn't buy any yet, but I think this weekend, or next for sure, I'll get a domain name of my own and some server space. That'll be cool, and it's only $5 a month.

Global Warming

So obviously it's freaking hot. And humid. It's like 50 gazillion degrees, and I mean Celsius. And the humidity must be close to 100%, because the air is actually foggy. Just during the time I was waiting for the subway tonight, I starting dripping sweat. I didn't actually feel that hot, but none of my sweat was evaporating. I noticed my hand was dripping sweat, which is a little STRANGE, and I realize it's sweat running down my arm. It sure felt icky.

What the world needs to do, is stop burning fossil fuels. Nuclear power is super safe nowadays, and doesn't pollute at all. (There are also the obvious alternatives of wind and solar, but solar isn't as economical and wind isn't as widely available.) The waste can actually be reused, but people tend to be reluctant because that breeds bomb-grade materials. But still, it's a lot nice to dump 10 tons of radioactive stuff down some in some chasm, than to dump 10 megatons of CO2 and icky stuff into the air.

Further, we ought to be spending a LOT on fusion power. Progress is slow but steady. Fusion power seems to me like the earliest computers: they weren't really practical or economical, but once the technology fully developed, they're totally worth it! A couple small breakthroughs and the world's energy problems will be solved forever!

Anyway, once we stop polluting, the Earth should clean up itself pretty well. Yes, we already have some global warming, but there are natural mechanisms that keep it in check. More heat makes more water evaporate, which reflects more light, which reduces the heat absorbed.

Super-size me

A dude like me with a crazy metabolism has certain caloric intake requirements. Obtaining these requirements with minimal financial expenditure is often pretty tricky. I like to eat healthy foods (fruits and vegetables yum yum), but I need at least 3000 calories a day, up to 4000 if I work out, and vegetables aren't going to cut it. McDonald's, however, seems to be about the best calories per dollar you can get without cooking yourself. Three double cheeseburgers or 20 McNuggets gets you about 1000 calories for a few bucks, including a ton of protein. (The big downside is that there's so much salt... one double cheeseburger is about 1/2 a day's worth... and I definitely don't like much salt.)

Ok, so that was just a fancy way of saying I often eat at McDonald's, even though it's not optimum nutrition. Actually, before I give my McD's story, let me make a little observation about breakfast.

It seems that breakfasts nowadays are made of the most disgusting foods ever. I won't touch hardly any of the breakfast stuff at work. First, a good breakfast has a mix of carbs, protein, and fat to give your body a good energy balance for the day. Probably you'll want to eat extra sugar in the morning, since your bloodsugar is low after not eating for so long, so it's okay to eat extra sugar in the morning. But that doesn't mean you should skimp on fats and protein. A perfect food for fat and protein is milk. Not skim milk :) Milk isn't really a great beverage, in the sense that it's not effective for hydration, but it's great as a food. Juice is a perfect breakfast beverage: it's got a lot of sugar to satisfy your morning sweettooth, but it's fructose, which is much better than sucrose for maintaining your energy, and it's also much better for your teeth. (BTW, "high fructose corn syrup" means about 55% fructose. So don't think that means it's all that much better than regular corn syrup.)

So my perfect breakfast is cereal (sugar and milk), a glass of juice (hydration and fructose), and some meat (protein!).

But it's almost impossible to get protein for breakfast-on-the-go it seems. There's no milk, and never any meat. Instead, all you can get is bagels and sweets. All I've bought from these sorts of places is juice.

The other trend I don't like is coffee. I guess I'm in a unique position, because I'm extremely sensitive to caffeine. One soda (now I'm in NY so it's soda, not pop :) will keep me up 6 hours past normal, and an expresso would undoubtedly kill me (if I don't throw it up first). But I'm not convinced caffeine has any real benefit. It's a powerful stimulant, and also a norepinephrine (a neurotransmitter often associated with motivation) emulator, so it DOES give you a pick-me-up. But the downside is, you can get jittery and your train of thought can be more easily distracted--although these obviously depend on the individual--and worst of all, you burn through your mental energy much faster than normal. On the other hand, just walking around for 10 seconds to get your blood flowing will wake you up equally, without the side effects of a mind-altering drug. A bit of exercise periodically to keep your body temperature and metabolism up makes it impossible to fall asleep, and I'd argue it works much more effectively than caffeine at enhancing mental performance.

Most convincingly, however, is that over the years, I have empirically determined that no caffeine is far more productive than caffeine, in small or larger doses. And this is with dozens of all-nighters of experience. Sure, some caffeine would keep me working longer, but my efficiency was reduced so much it was never worth it.

Really, the best solution is to sleep enough. Sleep repairs the body and the brain, and I don't like the idea of going to work with a broken brain :) It's not like caffeine gives you mental powers for free--pushing your brain past normal means you'll just need more time to fully recover anyway.

Anyway, the point of this breakfast rant is, it's terrible that we have such a coffee-oriented society. There's free coffee everywhere at work. If you want to drink something else, you can get soda cheaper than juice. And good luck finding milk outside of the grocery store.

Ok, back to what I was actually going to say...

Anyway, back to McDonald's. This sorta ticked me off. I order 3 double cheeseburgers and a large Sprite (no caffeine!!). $6.25 she says. So I pull out 2 fives, and decide to give a quarter, too, to make nice change. Well, she takes my money, closes the cash register, and that's it. No change. So I tell her, I gave you $10. She's like, huh?, and then after the next order when the register opens again, she pulls out a five and a one and is like, "See? 6 dollars. Plus 25 cents." I was totally confused by this, so I gave some disgusted-looking shrug I think. Okay, seriously, how on earth would you know that the $1 you pulled out was mine. Cuz it wasn't; I didn't have any $1's in my wallet. Moreover, dude, I CAN COUNT. You don't have to explain the meaning of $6.25 to me.

So I guess I just lost $4, not to mention be insulted by a McDonald's employee. Anyway, in case I had any doubts as to her competence, when they give me my order, there are 3 double cheeseburgers and a large fries. And I'm like, hey, I ordered a Sprite. And not fries. I guess she misheard me. Which is strange, because even though the vowels might sound the same to a Spanish speaker (she had an accent), the consonants are really unalike. :(

At least I am able to communicate to her that I ordered a large Sprite, and no fries. So she actually goes through the trouble of taking the fries out of the bag. I was afraid she was even going to charge me the extra $.20 for the soda, but at least she was nice enough not to bother with that. Really though, if I were in her shoes, not only would I have returned the $4 I asked for, but I would've left the fries in the bag.

I guess next time I will go to Burger King ;)

Vagabond shoes

2006-07-20T22:02:00.000-05:00

Whee! Flew into New York today. Here's a chronology of my day:

I try to sleep, but can't really. Haha. Too much nerves. So I sorta lay in bed, half asleep, until sometime around 10am. Once I finally get the energy to get up, I check on all my luggage, take a shower, and check my email. I was expecting an email about where I need to be for work, but I didn't get it... so I called to ask if I needed to be there on Friday (there was some confusion about when I could actually start lol). I also call to check on when some apartments are going to be open to make sure that I know where I'll be living :)

So me and dad head up to the airport around 12:30. I've never been on this airline before, Sun Country. We drive to the Lindbergh terminal like always, but then I see a sign saying Sun Country flies out of the other terminal (uhhh... I already forget what the other terminal is called lol). But we didn't quite catch the directions to get to the other terminal... I thought 5 West, he thought 5 East, but neither of us was sure. As it turns out, I was right, but we took the other road... so after some cursing we turn around and eventually get to the correct terminal :)

Since I had to pack a bunch of fancy-clothes into my suitcase, it was pretty heavy. I was expecting to pay the $50 fine or whatever for overweight luggage. But... Sun Country is super awesome and didn't even weigh it. Nice.

Anyway, the flight leaves on time, and other than a bit of turbulence and a cute 5-year-old girl who sat behind me, nothing was special in flight. I dozed in and out of consciousness (being very sleepy, but also still nervous :), and read a bit more of "I, Robot" (thanks Marion!). They served us grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner.

But after we landed, then things got dumb. Now, JFK is a busy airport, yes. But dude, after you land, you should have a gate. Instead, we wait in line for a gate for over an hour... almost 2 hours actually. We arrived at 5:45, but by the time I grabbed my luggage, it was after 8. Aww!

EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention is that there was a bird (pidgeon?) inside the airport while I was getting my luggage. That was pretty cool.

Anyway, the (super-cheap) temp housing I was planning on staying in closed at 8, so I had to get a hotel instead. I call up Holiday Inn Express, and they tell me to go to the "C" station to get to the hotel shuttles. Ok, so JFK is pretty big I guess, so it took me a while to figure out how to get there... but it was pretty cool, I got to take a train thingy around the airport until I got there.

So after waiting like 30 minutes, no shuttle for Holiday Inn Express ever came. Blah! I go back inside and call up the other hotels, determine Comfort Inn is cheap, and watch for their shuttle to come. I knew that they at least had a shuttle, since I saw one or two during the 30 minute wait earlier. So about 15 minutes later, I get in the Comfort Inn van, and yay, I have a bed to sleep in!!

After shelter comes food. I was famished cuz all I had was grilled cheese since lunch. As it turns out, just as I had arrived at Comfort Inn, a pizza delivery boy was there delivering pizzas. So as soon as I got to my room, I was like, WHERE'S A PHONEBOOK I WANT PIZZA.

I'm a bit of a newb when it comes to NY geography. It seems that my hotel is in Jamaica, NY. I have no idea wtf that is. After going through the phonebook, I find Domino's pizza in S Jamaica. I call them up, and this guy was so totally incompetent I couldn't believe it. Now I often have to spell my name to people ("Gustafson" isn't that common outside of MN), but rarely do I have to spell "Luke". And then I have to spell "Comfort Inn" for the guy. And after 5-10 minutes of attempting to tell him where I am, he says, sorry too far, call 1-800-DOMINOS. Haha.

Later I find a little map of the NY area in the phonebook, and find out about where I am and what's nearby. Well, eventually I decide to call Domino's and they hook me up with the correct Domino's. I get a medium pepperoni and a sprite. And finally, 11pm, I get a real dinner. BOOYAH.

Okay, one funny thing. So when I was a little kid, I would call "grilled cheese" "girl cheese". And I ate it ;) I was like, 10 or so when I finally found out it was "grilled" and not "girl". :D

Optimization

2006-07-19T22:54:00.000-05:00

Whew, what a busy month it's been. So that deserves a big post.

Jobby stuffs

So, the place made me a nice offer, and I'm off to NYC tomorrow! Actually, I was due to start the 17th, but they didn't finish my background check in time... there's a funny story that goes with this.

I get the offer materials on my birthday (June 28th). That was quite a nice birthday present I suppose. But really, being 24 now, I don't like getting any older... no more birthdays please! Really I should be counting backwards... I'll say I'm 22 now :D Anyway, I have to send them a bunch of stuff back: the contract, release forms, and a drug test. Now, the drug test is only given in certain cities, so I would have to drive up to Minneapolis to have it done. Since I don't have a car, that means my dad has to take some time off from work so I could have it done, so the drug test would have to wait a bit.

So, I'm gonna send the other materials back to them right away. I'm about to Fedex all the stuffs they gave me, in the envelope they gave me.... but then I look at the address and realize, this Fedex is for my drug test! So I turn around, head to the post office, and mail the stuff instead.

Well that turned out to be a mistake. Haha, I was so glad I caught my mistake that it didn't occur to me that I should Fedex the contract, too! So that stuff goes through the regular mail.

The next week, on Friday, I have my drug test. I was relieved that I could go under pressure ;) I fedexed it in the envelope they gave me, and it arrives on Monday.

On Monday the place calls me, and they say, what's this, we haven't gotten your contract yet! And I'm like, wha? Well as it turns out, the mail is freaking slow. Suddenly I felt dumb for sending it in regular mail. Thankfully, on Tuesday they get all the stuff.

But, since I guess they have some strict background checking policy and stuff, I get a call Friday night (the 14th) saying I can't start work on Monday (the 17th). Wow--short notice. In fact I was gonna fly to New York Saturday morning! So it's cheaper to change my flight than to pay an extra week of housing--so I do that.

So now, I'm all good, and I'm starting work next week. I'm moving in to New York tomorrow--exciting times!

I'm just gonna stay in some temporary housing for a while, until I find a nice place to settle in (and get my signing bonus so I can afford a real place lol). I responded to a couple ads on craigslist for sublets with a piano, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll still have a piano to play!

Go programming

I've really grown to love this game of go. It's got deep tactics, but it's also about grand strategy. (I should also mention I've gained quite a bit of strength; I win almost all my 9x9 games now.) I don't know if I mentioned this earlier, but one of the reasons why I started playing was because it's such a difficult game for computers. Computers are only weak amateur level. So, go makes a very interesting computer science problem: not only is a good go program non-existant, but also financially attractive! (Lots of prizes for top go programs, and a huge market of people who want a computer to play against!) Anyway, I thought I'd take a look at it before I get too busy with work :)

I did manage to write a program that plays go, even doing tactics with 2-liberty strings (including ladders), but it was too slow. I needed way more speed to do enough calculations to have a strong engine. So, I spent the better part of the day looking up profiling tools. Eventually, I found a nice C++ solution, which I improved myself. It really makes beautiful output now--any function you mark to be profiled, it keeps track of how much time is spent in that function, and it can even log the called functions (if they are also profiled), so you basically can get a full trace of your program. And then, it totals everything up, so you can tell exactly what block of code is taking the most time. (Btw email me if you want the source--it's free)

What I found out, is that the C++ STL is damn slow. Aww! And here I heard it wasn't. But really, after doing some investigation into STL source, there is huge overhead, and too much dynamic memory allocation, which is very slow. They do use proper algorithms, but that doesn't really make much difference if your bottleneck is memory allocation. So basically, although I wrote some clean algorithms for doing the calculations, the program spent most of its time doing STL junk!

So, I started a re-implementation of the algorithms in some nice, low-level C. I want to do it all without dynamic memory allocation, which is quite tricky, but I figured out a way to do it. There is an interesting tradeoff, however, in the implementation of the go board logic: If you want to keep track of the number of liberties of a string, when two strings are joined, O(n) time will be required. But, there is a way to correctly join strings in O(1) time, by keeping track of liberties in a special way. I believe this technique is undiscovered, or at least unpublished--I've never read about it in the computer go literature--even though it's a simple trick any math dude could find. But sadly, there's no way to convert this liberty representation into a normal liberty count. (Note: Add in a O(log n) factor to the amortized time for the go game, because of the tree structure used for the strings.)

I have to opt for the O(n) algorithm, because information such as number of liberties and where the liberties are, is necessary to programming an AI. Nevertheless, there are a ton of interesting ways of getting constant-factor improvement in this method. What I settled on is giving each intersection 8 values, which allows each empty square to be in 4 doubly-linked lists. That is sufficient for liberty lists, since each square is the liberty of at most 4 distinct strings, and more than sufficient for intersections that contain a stone. This also gives a reasonably quick way of merging liberty lists: simply traverse one list, inserting each liberty that is not adjacent to the other string.

Since I've been so busy the last couple weeks getting ready for work, I haven't had time to program this non-STL engine yet. But hopefully I will get something done. I estimate 1000x speedup once I'm done. There couldn't be a more interesting problem than go AI :)

Oh, also I guess I should update a previous post about solving go. I thought I had a solution to the graph history interaction problem, but in fact, I figured out it wasn't 100% correct. But I could still salvage it a bit. One thing that makes the GHI problem so tough in go is that there are no conversions--i.e. irreversible moves--unlike chess, where stuff like pawn moves are conversions. But, frequently go behaves as though most moves are conversions, since capturing large groups is so rare. So, to hugely enormously reduce the GHI problems, you could keep track of "effective conversions"--states after which, the number of pieces on the board does not decrease. So when I get back to solving go (which will be a while, since having a basic go engine is sort of a prerequisite :), I will try this out, and see if it makes transposition tables useful!

Oh, and the program I made to solve linear go (1xN go that is) ran into interesting problems. I did some move-order optimizations that hugely sped up the alpha-beta search, so I was able to confirm all the values up to 1x8 with greater depth. However, it seems that 1x9 has SERIOUS superko issues. The principal variation may be dozens of moves deep, which is getting out of reach of an alpha-beta search. And a transposition table, or simply making a game graph of all positions, is pretty useless since there are so many GHI problems. And 1xN go has almost no unconditionally safe groups, which means there are no shortcuts to solving it (unlike non-linear boards, which have uncoditionally safe groups). So 1x9 seems out of reach at the moment. Wow. I wouldn't have expected that... In all likelyhood, a 2x9 will be easier to solve than a 1x9 board!

Assembly Language

One of the things I read about, after my frustating encounter with the slowness of STL, was assembly language. It's pretty easy to insert assembly code into C code, so I thought it would be worthwhile reading about it. I was actually pretty surprised, I often hear that compilers are better at optimizing code that humans, but as it turns out, this isn't true at all. Compilers don't produce good assembly code at all. Processors have an unbelieveable number of quirks to worry about! Of course, you have to be a heck of a programmer to write fast assembly code....

Anyway, it was really interesting learning X86 assembly. This is not my first encounter, but it's the first time I've done it in decent detail, including MMX and SSE instructions. One can see what a mess the instruction set is--especially having only 4 general-purpose registers (often quoted as 8, but 4 of them are pointers and not for arithmetic). Even more interesting was learning about how processors convert the X86 code into "micro-ops" that are then executed by the processor, and how the processor tries to run as many in parallel as possible. The logic required for doing this stuff is for more sophisticated than the logic to execute the actual instructions!

My hope is that after rewriting my go engine, I'll profile it carefully and rewrite the time-critical sections in assembly. That could give a large speedup for this sort of problem, especially since I have a Pentium 4 which has many special optimizations (in particular, it has a long pipeline).

Where is my music!?!

I'm getting a little upset at the web haha. It seems there is no free webspace that I could use for hosting the music stuffs I have. MP3s and even MIDIs seems to be banned :( Especially sad is that I have MP3s of many of my songs now, including the stuff I played at the recital in April. And I'm pretty much done with my Prelude in D Major, although I might go back and change a few notes before making the sheet music. (I'm pretty happy with it, but 1 measure seems to sound a bit wrong--the bass line insists on a 2nd inversion chord, but that doesn't sound right in this context. So I need a different chord, or a different bass.) Blah. Maybe I will just buy some actual webspace so I can put whatever I want on the web, and not worry about silly restrictions on file types...

Tennis

Me and my dad have been playing a bunch of tennis lately. Not my favorite sport, but it's a good way to spend an hour each evening. Also, it's a good test of knee health :D Being the violent type, I really enjoy whacking the ball with all my might, but there aren't many opportunities to do this other than serving. So for most of my tennising, I have been whacking my first serve into the net or way outside the court. But the last week or so, I've gotten much better, and I'm maybe even getting close to 50% on my first serve. Of course it feels really good to hit a lightning fast serve in :), but it does make the game a little silly since my dad usually isn't quick enough to hit them back :) On the other hand, my dad likes to put a ton of spin on his serves, so he never really got a very fast serve. Hehe. But he still usually beats me :)

Speaking of my knee, it's actually pretty amazing how exactly the recovery followed the doctor's schedule. At 6 months, not much would hurt, and now at 7.5, I pretty much never feel any pain anymore. Hopefully my fast-twitch muskles will start to rebuild now that I can jump without pain :) (my left-leg vertical jump is about 6 inches--hmm I have a ways to go before it's 100%!) After 9 months, I should be good for plyos :D :D

Family matters

My sister got a job in a hospital doing nursey and paperworky stuff. She didn't quite make it to med school this year, which is sorta disappointing. But remember from positive psych: in every problem, find an opportunity! I think this actually works out well for her: she has a real job this year (instead of going deep into debt at med school), she gets to find out how she likes the hospital environment (maybe med school is not what she wants to do!), and she gets a really nice addition to her med school app if she choses to reapply :)

My brother is staying in our old town. So I guess he ended up staying at his gf's parent's house. Haha, his foster family. But seriously, he did run off in a strange way, and that is a strange place to stay. As you can imagine he and my dad argued about these things a few times, but I think everything is straight now.

Ok I can't forget this. All of you who don't like poop should skip the rest of this paragraph. My dad's sisters and mom live nearby, so on the weekends we generally all get together for some cheap beer and mediocre food (we would be rednecks if we lived farther south!). (Well, the restaurant Daniel's is really good.) Grandma and Karla and her bf Scott came over one night and we had pizza and beers. They brought their own cheap beer while I drank some yummier pale ale (forget the brand) my dad got me for my birthday. Shortly after supper (aka dinner), Karla goes to the bathroom and complains about the toilet paper being gone. She had to replace the roll. What's really REALLY funny is, after they left, there was LESS THAN HALF A ROLL LEFT! Women. Anyway, after that, we start talking about irritable bowel syndrome. So apparently all the women in my dad's family poop constantly. They talked about how Sandy keeps a bucket in her car for such occasions--we thought they were joking! And later Grandma goes to the bathroom. She's gone for a while, and when she gets back, she says "I didn't make it." Hahah, grandma is so funny. We all laugh. But she keeps insisting, she shat her pants. Karla (intoxicated at this point) checks Grandma's purse, and indeed, inside is some underwear rolled up in a plastic bag. EWWWWWW. OMG Grandma had a poop accident in our bathroom. At least she cleaned up after herself. But I tell you, after they left, dad and I were like "wtf is this really our family??"

Ok hope ya'll enjoyed the bathroom stories. One other family occasion I'll write about. Some other weekend, we all went to a restaurant/bar to celebrate my job and Grandma's birthday. I ask for a Sam Adams and they get me a Sam Adams Light--it actually wasn't bad at all, but I still felt a little less manly for drinking light beer. Anyway, at the bar they have a peel-off lottery-type thing you can do. Prizes go up to $200. So, being the northern rednecks that we are, we're all buying dozens of these things at $1 a pop. I start with a batch of 20 (my dad bought them for me) and get $4 back. The other dudes have similar success rates. Later, we all go for another batch (my family is, literally, a bunch of alcoholics and gambling addicts, literally!) I get $0 on the next 20. And here's the surprise: Sandy and Marv get $100! Nice! So they made money. Karla gets some more, too, gives some to Grandma, and she peels off a $100! Jeez. And this was after my dad already paid for a good portion of the dinner lol.

One thing that's kinda sad is about my cousin Kayla. She's Karla's daughter, but her parents got divorced a while ago, and Karla's ex, Rick, hasn't been handling things very well. He is being sorta crazy now I guess (he seems like a nice guy, but I guess he has some serious issues that have really ruined things). So I guess he's got Kayla most of the time now (although hopefully that will change soon once the court stuff goes through), and he's letting her do whatever. Like, I guess she's drinking and hanging out with a bad crowd now. And she's 14. Yikes. Early teens is NOT a good time to be without responsible parents. So I'm really hoping she'll get cleaned up before serious consequences start coming. Aww, I even knew her since she was a baby...

Where was I?

Heh, I guess I've been pretty absent from online stuff. I hadn't been to facebook (usually a twice-daily ritual for me) for 2-3 weeks, and I haven't been on AIM for a while. And my phone was sorta broke for a while--the screen often wouldn't turn on, so I couldn't dial numbers--but I could still get calls just fine. Got that fixed. So anyway, especially now that I'll be in NY, which isn't far from Boston or NY, where many of ya'll are, I'll do a better job keeping in touch. Seriously. Check your facebook messages :P And if you're in NY, tell me, because I haven't kept track of where ya'll decided to go this coming year :)

Thai

2006-06-18T14:34:00.000-05:00

I've had a very interesting past week or two.

First, Friday (9 days ago) me and my dad went to a friend's family for dinner. Their daughter was in Thailand for a while doing some service or something, and now she's returned to the US. She prepared a Thai meal for us. Sadly her dad's Minnesotan, unenlightened tongue couldn't handle the usual spiciness of Thai, so she made it quite a bit more mild than usual. Aww!

Anyway, it was an elaborate dinner. (I should say supper. That's what we call it in Minnesota!) By far the most interesting part of it was that we ate with our hands. I guess this is how they do it in Thailand :) And really, that's the only way to eat. I don't understand the invention of silverware. :P

The next few days were not particularly exciting. I guess I beat Gnu Go in an even game, which means I've gotten a lot stronger, but I've been unable to replicate this victory :)

Wednesday I left for New York to interview at a place. My flight was delayed both in the ground and in the air, so I ended up arriving really late at Newark. Then I took a (expensive) cab to Manhatten, and by the time I got to my hotel it was almost 1am. Oof ta. I went to bed at 2, and of course, nerves kept me from sleeping very well. I got up around 7, dressed up in my brand new black suit, asked the desk for directions, and walked through downtown to the place. I got to the building quite a bit early, so walked around a bit to admire the ginormous buildings.

Anyway, I had a very nice interview, going all the way from 8:45 to 5:15. Lots of logic and programming problems, and I learned a lot about what this branch of the company does and the sorts of problems they solve. Of course I can't share any of this since it's secret :P

I thought the interview went pretty well. I solved almost all the problems they threw at me. Also I thought the people were pretty cool. Lots of Harvard alums :) The people were all very smart and good at what they do.

Anyway, the real excitement of the trip comes after the interview. I needed some more cash to get a taxi to La Guardia, but then my credit card wasn't working! Oh no! So suddenly I was stuck in NY without money. A little bit of panicking, then I call my dad and get a hold of the credit card company. I find out that my sudden charges in New York had activated a fraud detector or something. So once I get that cleared up, I'm able to use the ATM finally. Whew. But by the time I get to La Guardia, I'm late for my flight, and had to wait for the next flight to Minneapolis. Blah. But I make it back home.

So not much luck with traveling to or from NY. The next morning, the recruiter calls and says that the boss of the group wants to phone interview me (he was gone on Thursday so I didn't get to see him). I was so super sleepy, but I guess sleep will have to wait so I can talk to him haha. He asks some tough questions, and I get stuck on the last part of an interesting programming question, but otherwise it went pretty well (considering how hard it is to communicate equations over the phone lol). At the end, he says he wants to hire me. Woot. Official word should come sometime next week probably. If things go as planned, I'll be moving to New York in a few weeks :D

Oh, and one other cool thing I should mention. Our piano at home was having some technical problems--the damper pedal wasn't working on most of the keys. So sometime this past week I decided to open it up and see if I could figure out what was wrong. Half the fun was figuring out how to open all the panels of the piano lol. Anyway, the pedal is simply not lifting the dampers enough. Removing the bottom panel, I see there's simply a bolt you can adjust to change the range of motion of the pedal. So I tighten it a bit, and voila, the dampers now lift all the way off the strings! I also found out that the soft pedal wasn't working correctly either, and tighten it up too (although soft pedals don't really do much on uprights, which is why I never noticed it wasn't working in the first place :). So I guess I am a piano techinician now lol.

Also, I printed out a copy of Chopin's Polonaise-Fantasy. It's my favorite Chopin piece now (I used to prefer the first and fourth Ballades). Quite a fun piece to practice.

And finally, Happy Father's Day. My dad doesn't know it yet, but I have a Harvard Dad sweatshirt to give him :) He's only been asking for one for, like, 4 years :P

Congrats 06

2006-06-08T09:52:00.000-05:00

First, I am oh so jealous that you guys got SETH MACFARLANE of Family Guy as your class day speaker. That owns Tim Russell hard. Second, congrats on graduating, and keep in touch dudes!

I am excited, next week I will be visiting a place in New York for a full day interview!

Political ranting

My blog could use a little politics update I guess.

Here is a good quote from Fox News: "No doubt some far-left pundits have said far worse things than Ann Coulter will ever say and the mainstream media often celebrates them." This is pretty funny when you keep in mind Ann Coulter said she wants to kill all Muslims. And liberals, too.

When visiting Boston in May, I bought a couple books at the airport: the Da Vinci Code, and 101 People Who Are Really Screwing America. The latter is a funny and SCARY book. It was written as a response to the highly conservative 100 People Who Are Screwing America, which contained pretty much anybody who wanted to let gay people kiss. Anyway, the 101 People makes a lot more sense, containing people who actually, like, lied and cheated and stuff. A lot of the stuff I didn't even know about--I knew Halliburton was bad, but I didn't know they were liars and cheaters who got off the hook just because of Dick Cheney.

Probably my favorite entry in 101 People is "The so-called liberal media." As ya'll probably know, the news stations are a bunch of pussies who are afraid to say anything bad about anyone (except Lou Dobbs on CNN. But it's not like he's a flaming liberal or anything.). And when the conservatives accuse them of being liberal, their response is "sorry, we'll try harder to present your side and say bad things about Democrats" instead of "stfu." I just think it's really ridiculous that anyone left of Fox News is labelled liberal.

Good news (well bad in some sense) is that Bush's approval rating has (finally) dropped to the 30's. Now people are finally waking up and seeing the mess that is Iraq (not to even get into Haditha, which will surely make us all the more popular in the Middle East), general incompetency in running the government (Katrina, border issues, X minutes before responding to 9/11), and how great his economic policy really is (high gas prices). And of course, to distract us all from the problem with Iran, and try to gain some conservative votes for the elections, Bush is making the #1 issue gay marriage. (Good quote I saw on Lou Dobbs, in response to a dude who said the gay agenda was a huge threat to American families: "Could I get a copy of the gay agenda? None of my gay or lesbian friends has any idea what it is.")

The 30% approval is also proof that Bush is losing his conservative support. I think a good example of this was on Lou Dobbs earlier this week. He had a conservative pundit who was disenchanted by Bush's lack of, well, conservativism. Bush has been nothing but big-government in his 6 years in office. Look at the huge deficit! Of course, Lou likes to argue, so most of what they ended up talking about was how the gay agenda was destroying the American family (he had to dodge Lou's questions...). Lou says, what would really help American families is health care and better income :P

What America needs is a good dose of Star Trek. I dunno about DS9 or the more recent incarnations, but TNG and (to a lesser extent) the original made really good political points. Not to mention TNG is the greatest show EVER omg. It's amazing how timely ST:TNG is, even if it's a decade or so old. For example, a couple nights ago, I saw an episode that basically inverts the gay debate. Riker falls in love with a member of an androgenous (single-sex) species. It's revealed that the lucky lover actually identifies as female, but that is not accepted by her race. Once word gets out that she identifies with a sex, they send her into "treatment" to correct her and make her asexual like the rest of the race. Their relationship ends, then Riker is sad--and so is she, we suspect. It's so funny how stupid that looks to us--what's wrong with being female?--yet clearly it's analagous to homosexuality in our 2-sex society.

Ranked!

2006-06-03T16:42:00.001-05:00

I finally beat a computer in a ranked game, and so I now have a rank: 20k. So my guess was right :) Here's the final position; I'm black and won by 3.5 points (close game!).

This is my best victory ever; I have GnuGo on my computer (this opponent was the latest GnuGo version) but never even beat it with 7 handicap stones, while this game I won with only 6 handicap stones. I've been playing on KGS and I have to say the people are really nice. There's frequently lessons and teaching games you can watch. So I've been learning a bunch about Go. It's a beautiful game!

Top 10

2006-06-02T16:11:00.001-05:00

Wow, now my blog is one of the top 10 google results for "Luke Gustafson." Wowo. Now I am curious who all reads my blog...