a set of feasible rays

Penrose Wall

2011-11-22T09:40:00.001-08:00

I just finished painting my bedroom wall with a Penrose tiling, an interesting geometric pattern made from two rhombus shapes that can cover an infinite two-dimensional surface without ever repeating (more precisely, the tiling has reflectional and rotational symmetries, but not translational.) I love all the five-pointed stars and which come out of this pattern, which are rare in two dimensional tilings. The pattern is also fractal, in the sense that it has self-similarities repeated at different scales, from small to huge. One of my favorite fractal features loops around the pattern like a five-pointed Koch snowflake.

After several months of painting, I've finally finished tiling my bedroom wall. Instead of painting the tiling with different colors, which I think would be visually overwhelming, I decided to do it in one single color, but in two sheens: flat and semi-gloss. As the light changes in the room, and as your viewpoint shifts, different aspects of the tiling are revealed, and others fade from view. Coincidentally, our sloped ceiling is set at exactly 18 degrees from horizontal, which is one of the fundamental angles in the tiling and makes the tiling fit the wall in a particularly satisfying way.

This project was powered by Perl, Postscript and PDF, as well as a laser level, paper cutouts of the tiles, a pencil, several rolls of painter's tape, and lots of hours on a ladder with a paintbrush.

Special thanks to Spoza for putting up with the mess for several months, and to the people who let me borrow their tall ladder so I could reach the top corner.

Chocolate Caramel Tartlets

2011-05-05T22:13:00.001-07:00

Every Fall, my church group has a big event to welcome the new people that have moved in for the school year. The men are in charge of cooking food for this event, and to ensure that they actually do it, it's a friendly competition. Competitions are great for potlucks - obviously the competition encourages good food, but perhaps more importantly, it incentivizes overproduction, so that there is always enough food. If you want to win, you need lots of votes, which means you want lots of people to try your entry, which means you want to make lots of food. It's a great tradition.

I fell in love with making my own caramel last Spring - the flavor of homemade caramel is shockingly bold, much more assertive than the stuff you find in the store. I decided then that I would use my newfound love for caramel to enter the dessert competition. And I wanted to win, since this is my last year in the area.

I've watched the winners of this competition in the past, and noticed that not only did they produce large amounts of food, but they made food that was easy to serve in small portions. I'll never forget the time that some well meaning guy brought a beautifully roasted chicken. It sat there, unmolested, while all two hundred people filed past it. No one had the conviction to start slicing it up, not while there was so much other good food nearby that was so much easier to grab. Caramel is soft and sticky, which presents an obstacle. I decided the caramel needed to be in bitesized portions that could be picked up by hand. And chocolate is always a good thing in competitions.

There was only one thing that satisfies my requirements: chocolate caramel tartlets. I adapted a recipe from Saveur, which took a lot of practice during the Summer to perfect. It was very happy practice, though. People seemed to really love my tartlets, and I ended up winning the vote! Even over some other very worthy entries like Theric's Snicker Doodle Family. I made them again this week to proof my recipe, and also to bring them to work. My boss said they were an interesting cross between a candy bar and a cookie. He ate three, which is a lot, since these things are power-packed. The secretary said hers was one of the best brownie-things she's ever had. I had never thought of tartlets as being even close to candy bars, cookies, or brownies, but actually they do share some characteristics...

Here's the recipe. Note that the tartlets are formed in silicone minimuffin pans. I'm not sure they would work very well in metal pans, the crust is very thin and delicate in order to maximize the caramel.

For the crust:
3/4 cup flour
2 1/2 tablespoons dutch process cocoa
5 tablespoons powdered sugar
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, cubed and softened
1 egg yolk at room temperature
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the caramel:
2 cups sugar
10 tablespoons unsalted butter
12 tablespoons heavy cream
2 tablespoons light corn syrup (to keep the caramel from crystallizing)

For the ganache:
1/2 cup heavy cream
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped

Make the crust: Combine flour, cocoa powder and salt, set aside. Cream the butter and sugar in a large bowl until the mixture is pale and fluffy; mix in yolk and vanilla. Mix in dry ingredients. Roll out dough between two sheets of parchment paper until very thin, approximately 2 millimeters thick. Place dough (still inside parchment paper) in freezer for 5 minutes. Remove dough from freezer and pull off both sheets of parchment paper to prevent dough from sticking once it melts. Using a thin, flexible metal spatula and working quickily, cut the dough into strips about 2 centimeters tall. Line 24 silicone mini-muffin tins with dough and press to form shells. As dough melts, it will get sticky and hard to work with, return to freezer to cool it back down if necessary. Place shells back in freezer for 5 minutes. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Remove shells from freezer, prick the bottoms of the shells with a fork, and immediately bake for 10 minutes. Take the shells out and let them cool on a rack.

Make the caramel: Have the butter and cream out and premeasured before you start the sugar cooking. Put the sugar and corn syrup in a heavy saucepan, add about 1/2 cup water and mix. The water will boil out, so the exact amount isn't crucial, it just helps to keep the sugar from burning unevenly as it melts. Heat the sugar on medium high heat, stirring infrequently. After the water boils away, the sugar will be molten and boiling as well. Once the water is boiled off, the melted sugar will form viscous bubbles, and when it reaches this stage, you shouldn't stir it at all. You can swirl the sugar in the pan occasionally, but it’s best not to disturb it too much if you want to avoid crystallized caramel later. Watch the sugar carefully until it gets to a dark amber color. I had to practice this many times to get it just right: if you don't let it brown enough, the caramel will be flavorless. If you let it get too brown, the caramel will taste burnt. When you've decided it looks about right, immediately add all the butter and whisk until it’s dissolved. Remove from heat, count to three, and then whisk in the cream. The mixture will boil up quite a bit. Keep whisking until the caramel settles down and is smooth.

Fill the shells with caramel. Put the shells in the refrigerator until caramel has solidified.

Make the ganache: bring the cream just to barely bubbling over medium heat, without stirring. If you heat it too much, it will curdle, and the ganache won't be smooth. Take off heat, add chocolate. Let sit for 1 minute, then stir with spatula until smooth. Top all the tartlets with ganache, and refrigerate until ganache is set. If ganache is too thin, it will crack during cooling.

Sprinkle with sea salt right before serving - the tartlets are best served chilled. Enjoy!

Smartphone Market Analyses

2011-02-08T09:39:00.001-08:00

It seems like every month, we're treated to a new collection of reports like these: Google Android widens lead on Apple's iPhone in US smartphone market.

These analyses are widely published and circulated because mobile computing is in a gold rush mentality, and data from today helps us understand where the industry is going to be in the future. The big question: who is going to be the new Microsoft and Intel, controlling the most profitable parts of the market and entrenching themselves as kings of the world? Lots of people are making bets, staking claims and indulging their natural human instinct for tribalism, which explains the excitement about the present and future of mobile computing. I don't mind any of that, it's thrilling to be a part of a revolution.

But I do think the discussions we have today are missing the point. Who cares about the smartphone market. Why is it considered so important? Mobile computing is so much more than smartphones! Tablets, mobile devices like the iPod touch, and even things like the Kindle are all mobile computers. Maybe an iPod doesn't have a 3G GSM or CDMA radio, but it has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, and there's no technical reason why it should be treated as a separate class of device. You can already make and receive phone calls on an iPod touch, using software like Skype. The distinction between a smartphone and an device like an iPod is becoming less and less important with time. It's an old, outdated, obsolete characterization of the world based on the presence of a particular kind of radio, along with an expensive contract and service plan from a telecom company. In the future, none of those distinctions will matter, because there will be a huge proliferation of mobile computing devices of diverse shapes and capabilities, and most of them will have optional long-range connectivity options like today's cell phones. The distinction between a smartphone and an iPod will seem as quaint as a horseless carriage.

I'll keep watching for one of these market analyses which doesn't neglect the iPods, Kindles and Xooms of the world, because I believe the future of mobile computing is much broader than the current conventional wisdom. But it may take a while for the analysts to agree with me.

Excel 2011 Rasterization Fail

2011-01-20T17:19:00.000-08:00

To the left is a picture of a chart from Microsoft Excel 2011 (yes, 2011, I use Macs) which has been saved as a PDF file, then enlarged and cropped. As you can see, it has been rasterized at a very low resolution, which makes it unsuitable for use in: 1. Academic Posters, where the image must be enlarged considerably, 2: Scholarly Publications, which are intended to be printed at 600 DPI and therefore require high resolution or preferably vector graphics, and most to the point for me today, 3: Dissertations. Which are like publications except there's no page limit and marginal peer review. And no one reads them. But I digress.

To the right is the exact same chart from the same Excel file, subjected to the same regimen as the other chart, but saved from Microsoft Excel 2008.

It is possible that my inveterate perfectionism is blinding me to the fact that these two images are, in fact, equivalent. It appears that the bureaucracy at Microsoft which decides which features become reality in their Office suite regards these two images as equivalent. Perhaps if I just stopped caring about what my documents look like and embrace super low resolution rasterized images as the way the world works, I could see these images as equivalent. Or if I adopted a consistent artistic position that blurry blocky graphics make a wry, retro statement about our modern, technological world, and decided to make artistic statements in my technical publications, then I wouldn't be so angry about the inability of Excel 2011 to make proper vector charts. Unfortunately for me, I'm not ready yet to go that far.

I have ranted about Microsoft Office's rasterization decisions in the past, and as an eternal optimist, I'm always hoping that someone at Microsoft is paying attention. I keep believing that some overworked Microsoft engineer knows the shortcomings of their products and is doing her best to make sure that the next edition of Office will work correctly. Goodness knows, there are a lot of people at Microsoft working on the next iteration of 3D WordArt and rearranging the user interface so that we have to relearn where all the buttons are. And those things are much less important than fundamentals of image representation and display, which would seem to me to be key to any modern content creation program. But what do I know...

I spent an hour today, to no avail, trying every trick I know to convert the Excel 2011 chart into a vector graphic, like I have done so many times in Excel 2008. Finally, I borrowed a friend's laptop who had the old version still installed, and converted it in 30 seconds. It appears I'll be doing so periodically over the next few months...

Driving the Chevy Volt

2010-10-14T18:27:00.000-07:00

After years of anticipation, I got to drive the Chevy Volt on October 14th. The Volt Unplugged PR tour was visiting San Francisco, holding short test drives around the Presidio, right next to the Golden Gate Bridge.

The best part about the experience was standing in line with a bunch of other electric car nerds and chatting about the Volt. There's a lot of controversy around the Volt's drivetrain, so it was good to hear informed opinions. Of course there's a huge amount of selection bias here, but all of our enthusiasm for the Volt remains undiminished. GM told us it would be an car that ran on battery only until the battery ran out, and then ran on gas, and that's what they delivered. All the fuss about whether the Volt is really an electric car or whether GM lied in its description of the Volt seems rather orthogonal to the car and its technology. It was fun to talk with people who understood the details enough to discuss these things. Some of the people standing in line had already ordered their cars, so we talked a little about the ordering process and which dealerships are refraining from price gouging.

The actual drive was a little underwhelming. It felt like driving any other car, except I couldn't tell if the engine was on. The window was rolled down, and so I thought it'd be very obvious when the engine turned on and off, but I just couldn't tell. The battery had long been depleted by the time I came to drive the car, so it was in "Charge Sustaining" mode the entire time, where the job of the gasoline engine is to keep the battery at a minimum state of charge, despite the fact that power transients requested by the driver will momentarily deplete the battery under its minimum state of charge. I drove on winding, hilly roads around the Presidio, which limited the attention I could devote to the drive itself, since I was busy trying not to go the wrong way or run over pedestrians. I didn't get a chance to test the Volt's acceleration much because the speed limit was ~25 or 30.

The Volt's two LCD screens had a lot of information on them. I didn't watch the one in the center stack much, because I was trying to drive, but it was showing animations of how the power was flowing through the drivetrain. To be honest, the animations weren't that impressive to me, the framerate wasn't that high and the aesthetics of the animation were underwhelming. If I get a Volt, I'd like the option to show something besides those animations on the screen (which probably exists, I just didn't play with it much.) The main screen with the speedometer, etc. was easy to read and functional, if not beautiful. It has a little ball that rises and falls, shrinks and grows as you drive, with the goal being to keep it centered, where you have maximum efficiency. It was fairly easy to keep the ball centered, although it did make for slow driving - you need to start slowing down early and accelerate slowly to maximize efficiency, and the ball does a good job of informing you how well you're doing. The engineer who accompanied me on the drive engaged the "sport" mode for me (which required some cumbersome navigation of the computer in the center stack, I was glad I wasn't trying to do this while driving). Sport mode did make a big difference in how the car responded to my requests for acceleration - I floored it while the engineer was in mid-sentence explaining what sport mode is, and the "jerk" (rate of acceleration) was sufficient to interrupt him mid word. That was fun. =) The brakes seemed a little weird to me, they didn't seem as smooth as a normal car's brakes, although they didn't bother me too much. I'm ok with the car driving differently than a conventional car, after all the drivetrain is quite different. So, the most important part of the Volt - its drivetrain, seemed adequate to me. I didn't get to test it on the freeway, but it definitely seemed drivable, and as a car primarily driven by an electric motor, it has that intoxicating torque which I fondly remember from rides in my neighbor's EV1 back in the late 1990s.

The Volt as a car was smaller than I'd remembered from seeing it at the SF Auto show last year. It's much smaller than a Prius, more like the new Honda Insight. I would say everything about it is "snug". I don't think the Volt would work well for me if I were larger, or if I hated being in enclosed spaces. The air conditioning was running while I drove, it seemed normal, which is great since GM actually had to develop an all-electric heater/air conditioner for the Volt. The Volt has two color choices for the center stack: charcoal and white, the one I drove was white. I didn't like the white look, it seemed like it was copying an iPod circa 2001, despite the fact that Apple has moved on quite a ways from that design aesthetic since then. I also am not a huge fan of the capacitive buttons on the center stack. There must be 50 or so of them, and almost all of them are capacitive, meaning that they don't have a mechanical spring/electric connection like traditional buttons, but instead just detect the capacitance of your finger when it moves close. The stack itself is made of a continuous molded plastic piece, with little studs molded into the plastic to indicate where you should press to actuate a button. I think the studs really ruin the seamlessness of the center stack, and would prefer them to be removed. They don't add much tactile feedback anyway, it still feels like you're pressing a big flat piece of plastic. Despite my skepticism, the buttons actuated fine when I tried them, but they just seems like an unnecessary complication, and I'd prefer traditional buttons. I was curious, though, as to whether the buttons would still actuate if the driver had gloves on. Living for two years in Russia will convince you that you should be able to drive a car with gloves on, but I know the iPhone's capacitive touchscreen doesn't work with gloves on. Hence the South Korean trick of using mini-sausages to simulate the capacitance of a finger and allow you to use your iPhone outside when it's cold. I don't want to poke at my car's buttons with a sausage, thank you very much. So, I wrapped a sweater a couple times around my finger to simulate a glove, and then tried to actuate the sensors. They still worked, surprisingly. Perhaps the iPhone has such problems with gloves because it's trying to localize your finger more precisely, whereas the buttons on the Volt center stack don't need to be that precise. Anyway, the center stack seems functional, although I'd prefer a large charcoal monolith to a shiny white monolith. I'm also not a huge fan of GM's constant need to decorate everything with shiny shiny chrome strips. Like the top of the center stack - a chrome strip there does not make the car look "upscale", it just catches the sunlight and shines in the driver's eyes. The car I was driving had sedate plastic inserts in the doors, instead of having strong graphic patterns printed on them, they were blank silver.

I was a little concerned about the Volt's very low spoiler underneath the nose of the car, which was required to get good aerodynamic performance. It comes within 3 or 4 inches of the pavement, which means that it's going to get mangled by curbs and debris all the time. It's made of soft rubber, but I couldn't help but notice that on some of the Volts being driven around at the event, the rubber had already been a little beaten up and looked deformed. Maybe it's just a preproduction problem, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of Volts eventually end up losing that spoiler altogether.

A big downside of the Volt for my family is its limited space. The middle seat in the back row is actually occupied by part of the battery, which I think is disappointing. The trunk area is also rather small, although I'm glad it's a hatchback. Hopefully GM will make a Volt 2.0 with some of these practical problems resolved.

Overall, I was really happy to get a test drive of the Volt. Despite my complaints, I think the car is a well executed 1.0 version of the serial plugin hybrid concept, and I look forward to the Volt's future. I hope GM sells a lot of them and makes a 2.0 version soon which is cheaper and more functional. In the meantime, I'll keep dreaming...

AMOLED

2010-06-10T10:42:00.000-07:00

As you know, I love new technology. But new technology for its own sake is only of limited interest. That's why I'm so confused at all the love people are giving to Samsung's Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode display, as featured in the Samsung Galaxy S, HTC Nexus One, and HTC Incredible phones (among others.) OLED has a lot of promise: to me the biggest advantage is that it can use less power since it doesn't need a backlight. However, it has a lot of disadvantages, too. One of the biggest disadvantages is that the pixels of an OLED display can only shine for so long before they dim significantly. The blue OLED subpixels are especially prone to this, which is why the AMOLED display that is getting all the attention in the media uses the "Pentile" subpixel layout, as shown in the image to the right.

Traditionally, color displays have three equally sized subpixels per pixel, so that each pixel can display the same color range, blended between the three primary colors: red, green and blue. However, an OLED display which used a traditional subpixel layout would be handicapped because the blue subpixels would fade noticeably before the red and green subpixels, which means that over a year or so, your display would get increasingly yellow-gray, eventually losing the ability to show blue and white colors at all. To overcome this problem, the Pentile subpixel layout provides two kinds of pixels, a green + big red pixel, and a green + big blue pixel. If you look under the water droplet in the picture to the right, you'll see the small green subpixels all lined up, and the big blue and red subpixels alternating. Since the big blue pixel is twice as big as the green pixel, it can last twice as long without fading. This keeps the overall life of the display long, despite the limitations of OLED blue subpixels.

For viewing photos and television, this tradeoff is ok. You can't really notice the different flavors of subpixel, since the pixels are so small. However, for viewing text, this is unacceptable. I've ranted about bad applications of subpixel antialiasing before, but to recap: since text has lots of tiny, sharp lines that don't usually line up with the pixel grid, modern displays use subpixel antialiasing to give the illusion of sharp lines by slightly changing the colors of the boundary pixels of each letter, taking advantage of the fact that our eyes are more sensitive to brightness than color. Having the fringes of text colored slightly funky is better looking than having the text squished into a rigid pixel grid.

The Pentile layout defeats subpixel antialiasing, because the pixels are not the same, and because the subpixels are not the same size! This leads to horrible looking text: vertical edges of text are crenellated like the roof of a castle as the text rendering engine struggles with the Pentile display layout. This is really grating to look at.

Since I use my smartphone mostly for reading text, bad text rendering is completely unacceptable. I don't understand how Samsung can defend their current AMOLED display against the iPhone 4 display - the only thing I can say is that some people are just insensitive to visual detail. These are the same people that made Powerpoint equation rendering so ugly, and they probably watch 4:3 aspect ratio SDTV stretched on their 16:9 HDTVs because they don't notice that everyone and everything is now 33% fatter. It's fine that some people don't perceive visual details - live and let live. But if you're deaf, don't offer your services as a music critic.

Let's put the disparity in plain objective terms that everyone can understand. The new iPhone display has 960*640*3 subpixels, in a display of 5.65 in^2. The Samsung AMOLED in the Galaxy S has 800*400*2 subpixels, in a display of 7.06 in^2. This means that the subpixel density of the new iPhone display is THREE TIMES DENSER than the Samsung Galaxy S display. This has a huge impact on text rendering fidelity. I don't understand how you can just write off this 3x disparity as negligable.

And this is without going into AMOLED's very poor color fidelity and complete unreadability outdoors.

In summary, I'm really glad Apple is resisting the OLED buzzword campaign and sticking with an incredibly high resolution LCD screen for now, instead of jumping on a buzzword bandwagon. OLED is not quite ready for primetime, for anyone that cares about how text looks.

PS. Apple calls their display a "Retina display". This is a buzzword fail on their part, since the resolution of the iPhone display is still not as fine as the retina can perceive.

More on the Pentile display
More on Samsung's claims that AMOLED is better than LCD

PPS. Anandtech did a nice comparison between the Droid's LCD, which has 2/3rds the pixels of the new iPhone, and the AMOLED from Samsung in the HTC Incredible. Take a look at this image from Google maps and tell me which you prefer. Now imagine the LCD with 50% more pixels in the same area - that's what the new iPhone display will give. Samsung marketing, you are just crazy.

Censoring Sir Arthur

2010-06-10T08:16:00.000-07:00

The Dude loves Encyclopedia Brown. So much so that he's read all the Encyclopedia Brown books in his school library. Accordingly, for his half-birthday, we decided to get him the Complete Sherlock Holmes, and he's now happily engrossed. So far, so good.

However, the second collection of short-stories in this compendium is all about the Mormons, from Sir Arthur's perspective, which treated Mormons more as an exotic and dangerous Mohammedans than as real people. 'Spoza and I decided to seal this portion of the book with paper for now, because we don't feel quite ready for our six year old to learn about the Mormons and their exotic ways from Sir Arthur. Of course this is already inducing the forbidden fruit effect, despite the fact that we've covered up 50 pages out of 1100.

So, oh wise Internets, what do you think we should do? Inoculate the Dude against Sir Arthur's perceptions of Mormonism by giving him lectures on polygamy and differentiating truth from fiction, and then unseal the book? Unseal it and say nothing? Keep it sealed and hope he doesn't read it anyway? Tell him we'll explain everything when he's older? ...

Wisdom from Henry Ford

2010-04-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

Life, as I see it, is not a location, but a journey. Even the man who most feels himself "settled" is not settled--he is probably sagging back. Everything is in flux, and was meant to be. Life flows. We may live at the same number of the street, but it is never the same man who lives there.

So many men are afraid of being considered fools. I grant that public opinion is a powerful police influence for those who need it. Perhaps it is true that the majority of men need the restraint of public opinion. Public opinion may keep a man better than he would otherwise be--if not better morally, at least better as far as his social desirability is concerned. But it is not a bad thing to be a fool for righteousness' sake. The best of it is that such fools usually live long enough to prove that they were not fools--or the work they have begun lives long enough to prove they were not foolish.

That is the way with wise people--they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work.

From My Life and Work.

Understatement

2009-11-20T08:39:00.000-08:00

This story, about a possible revitalization of Nickel-Hydrogen battery technology, makes a crucial oversight that should be pointed out.

Evidently some startup has reinvented an old technology, Nickel-Hydrogen batteries, to be more mechanically robust, and have between 1/2 to 2/3 the energy density of Lithium Ion batteries. I'm not sure if this claim is actually true, or if their NiH2 batteries are commercially viable, but if they are, this could be fairly interesting. Unlike Lithium Ion batteries, NiH2 batteries can be charged and discharged tens of thousands of times without becoming significantly degraded.

The article points out that 1/2 to 2/3 the energy density would translate to reduced range for electric vehicles, such as the Chevy Volt - instead of 40 electric miles, you would only have 20 to 30. But the author forgot that fully 45% of the Chevy Volt's battery capacity is not used! Because Lithium batteries can only be cycled fully a few hundred times before losing much of their capacity, the Volt carries around twice as much battery as it really needs. This extra capacity "babies" the Volt's battery, so that instead of charging and discharging from 100%-0%-100%, the Volt goes from 85%-30%-85%, which greatly increases the lifetime of the battery. So, a chemistry with effectively unlimited charge cycle capacity would allow downsizing the battery significantly, which could cancel out the reduced energy density.

There may be other reasons why the NiH2 batteries won't end up working for electric cars, but the energy density problem, at least for Extended-range electric or plugin-hybrid vehicles, seems not to be an issue. Too bad the authors of this article didn't think that through.

Tar baby

2009-08-26T23:32:00.001-07:00

I've been listening to NPR recently, and I really enjoy their lengthy investigations and discussions about interesting topics. Of course, it's still hard to cover a topic completely on the radio, and so things inevitably have to be left out. As a conservative, it's always interesting to me to notice exactly what NPR chooses to omit from its lengthy in-depth coverage of important issues.

Today was a great example: NPR covered Ted Kennedy's death nonstop, with special emphasis given to his vacant senate seat. The seat can't be filled by appointment with the laws as presently construed in MA, since it must be filled by special election 5 months from now. Of course, this would mean depriving the senate of a (D) Senator during a crucial period, which is cause for great hand-wringing. NPR repeated a soundbite several times from Deval Patrick (the MA governor), which said that it would be unjust to deprive Massachusetts of one of its senate seats during such a crucial period. Much discussion was devoted to the people who could run for Kennedy's seat, Kennedy's final request that if someone were appointed to take his place in the interim (assuming the laws were changed), that appointed person would not run in the special election to take his place for good, etc.

However, with all this coverage, NPR didn't find it interesting to mention how MA got in this mess, which I believe is a very interesting story in its own right. Like most states, MA provided for vacant senate seats by having the governor appoint someone until the next election. However, during Kerry's run for president in 2004, MA was governed by an (R): Mitt Romney. This could have lead to an unthinkable situation: Romney could have appointed a Republican to fill Kerry's seat if Kerry won the presidency. To avert this disaster, the MA legislature changed the laws to make them "more fair": vacant seats could only be filled by special election, 5 months after the vacancy was created. Now, of course, this law, created for completely partisan purposes, has backfired, since Obama is going to need every vote he can get to pass his agenda, and the law is reducing the number of Democrats in the senate. Accordingly, I expect the MA legislature will simply revise the law, as quickly as possible.

I agree with this - while the MA legislature is revising the law, why don't they just be honest and make the law state that senators from MA must be from the Democratic party? That way they won't have to change the law back if ever (horrors) a Republican were governor again.

Interesting story, no? I would love to be a fly on the wall when NPR was discussing their coverage of stories like this one. I would like to find out if they decided not to run this part of the story out of overt and considered bias, or whether the bias is just so ingrained that it's automatic and subconscious, making it completely obvious to everyone that matters that this part of the story is superfluous to any useful thorough challenging investigation of deep important issues.

In any case, this whole mess is greatly entertaining.

The real gender inequity

2009-06-22T07:40:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking often about gender issues recently - I have a couple of posts brewing but don't want to post them until they're ready. Until then, here's something to think about:

80% of American jobs lost in this recession have been lost by men. Eighty percent!

The current gender unemployment gap (8.0 percent for women, 10.5 percent for men) is the worst in the history of labor department records dating back to 1948.

College graduates in the US, by gender, are now at 58% female, 42% male.

Add it all up: empirically, men are being oppressed. Happy Fathers Day!

Gandalf's vision of the Tree of Life

2009-05-27T13:54:00.000-07:00

The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy was one of those events that leaves an indelible stamp on our culture. Take these Book of Mormon posters, for example - they are heavily inspired by LotR, like this one where have Lehi looks like Gandalf holding one of the palantíri. On the plus side, I like fantasy imagery, this artwork at least seems new to the BoM illustration scene, and at least it gets kids thinking about scripture.

However, there's something that bothers me just a little with the cultural references here. It strikes me that drawing these kind of connections between scriptural characters and fictional characters might move our concept of scripture towards the fantasies being referenced, which seems to undermine the idea that these scriptures are historical rather than imagined. Along that line, it's interesting that all these posters include dates for the BoM at the bottom - perhaps the dates are supposed to counterbalance the fantasy imagery by making things more concrete? Would any of you consider posting one of these?

Faith & Justice

2009-05-26T11:37:00.000-07:00

We've recently had two weeks of talks in church about Grace. In fact, 'Spoza gave an insightful talk on Sunday about how faith in God's Grace spurs us to action, and Lynette gave a thought-provoking talk on how the enormity of God's Grace defines our relationship with God.

So I guess that's why this picture (earlier the lead picture for msnbc.com) struck me - the idea that "Faith Demands Justice" is particularly foreign to me right now, since I've just had two weeks of eloquent reminder that my faith prominently rejects Justice, in its place offering Grace. Could anyone help me out here - what perspective could lead one to proclaim that "Faith Demands Justice"?

One possible idea - perhaps it comes from Eastern traditions. I'll have to ask my Buddhist friends whether the doctrine of Karma (& Reincarnation) leads to the idea that faith demands justice. Any other thoughts?

Real world fuel economy

2009-04-29T10:10:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons we got our Mazda5 was because it was relatively fuel-efficient, especially compared to other minivans. The EPA rates the Mazda5 at 21/27, which is 13% better than the 2009 Honda Odyssey with cylinder deactivation, and 17% better than the 2009 Toyota Sienna. Of course, real world fuel economy is notoriously variable, and so it's important to examine real world data as well. With that in mind, here's our data from this trip. Overall, we drove 1916 miles and averaged 24.6 MPG. Most of these miles were driven with a 16 cubic foot cargo box attached to the top of the car, which adds a lot of drag and noticeably lowers fuel economy. We also traveled faster than the EPA fuel economy tests - on the open roads of Utah and Nevada, the cruise control was set at 80 mph, which lowers observed fuel economy further. I'm very happy to pay a few more dollars to get home a few hours earlier, especially with three small children in the car... =)

We attribute the two low mileage legs of our journey to some very heavy winds during a large storm in Nevada - with a big box on the roof, the car had to fight hard to maintain 80 mph despite all the buffeting.
The two highest mileage legs of the journey had quite a few trips around the Salt Lake area, without the box on the roof (since it could stay at our in-laws' house), and driving at 70 mph instead of 80. So it looks like the 27 MPG highway rating is fairly realistic.

Leaving the Berkeley bubble

2009-04-23T07:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was a little fragile, a little peevish and petulant. I'm on vacation, so I should be enjoying myself - which made me even more upset. What was making me so irritated?

While driving around, 'spoza and I had a little conversation, trying to get at the source of my irritation, and I think she found it: leaving the Berkeley bubble is confronting me with the hard fact that millions of people choose to live differently than I'd like to live.

The good people of Utah, speaking generally and not specifically, like living large. Large houses, large cars, large portions of food. Acres and acres of anonymous McMansions, hermetically sealed by covenant-compliant white plastic fences. Wide roads packed with king cab pickup trucks on stilts. Restaurants which pride themselves on maximizing caloric value per dollar. Design and forethought seems to be much less important than quantity.

The frustrating thing for me is that when we moved to Berkeley, I vowed not to become a Berkeley snob, and now I find I've started to become one. Berkeley-ites, when they discovered I had just come from Utah, were very dismissive. They implied that I must be overjoyed to have escaped oppression and mediocrity when I left Utah. In Berkeley, it's almost axiomatic that all the people living in flyover country are insipid and narrow-minded, as opposed to the accomplished, internationally experienced Bay Area.

The truth was that I was very happy living in Utah. After having lived so many places growing up, I pride myself on my adaptability - I've enjoyed living in the Mojave Desert and Siberia, in the Pacific Northwest and the Great Basin, even in the ruthless, unrelenting sun of Los Angeles (ok, so maybe LA was my least favorite place to live. =) So I interpreted Berkeley snobbery as Bay Area parochialism. I still think that the Bay Area tends to make people rather parochial, despite its pretensions to internationalism. But the difficult truth is that I really like a lot of things about Berkeley, and I've started taking it for granted. I like living around people which value the environment, and understand that bigger is not always better. I like restaurants that serve me moderate portions of exquisitely crafted food. I like seeing ZENN neighborhood electric vehicles on the roads. I like walking to Trader Joe's.

It's hard to be confronted with so many square miles of sprawling evidence that other people don't value these things, and I think that's what made me so irritable yesterday. I'm reexamining my prized adaptability - could I really be happy living here?

Ironically, I was lifted out of my funk by large quantities of anonymous pizza - it was a great value, only $6 for a pizza and a prodigious order of breadsticks, accompanied by all the HFCS I could stand. And right now I'm relaxing on an enormous couch inside a gargantuan house with enough square footage to lose my glasses in thousands of different ways. There is a certain mindset from which I could enjoy all of this. Perhaps that's what really irked me. =)

Grace shall be as your day

2009-04-20T21:27:00.000-07:00

I passed my PhD qualifying exam today. Although I was fairly sure I would pass, it's surprising how stressful preparing for quals was. As usual, my imagination was worse than reality - my committee was very supportive and the experience was even pleasant.

A big thank you to 'spoza, who has been shamefully ignored for the past few months, but still says she loves me anyway. We're off for a much needed trip to Utah.

All is well !

Come, come, ye Saints, no toil or labor fear;
But with joy wend your way.
Though hard to you this journey may appear,
Grace shall be as your day.
'Tis better far for us to strive
Our useless cares from us to drive;
Do this and joy your hearts will swell —
All is well! All is well!

Why should we mourn or think our lot is hard?
'Tis not so; all is right.
Why should we think to earn a great reward
If we now shun the fight?
Gird up your loins; fresh courage take.
Our God will never us forsake;
And soon we'll have this tale to tell —
All is well! All is well!

Happy news

2009-04-07T10:17:00.000-07:00

Nvidia fellowship announcement

Context: The Antidote to Outrage

2009-03-16T09:25:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling a little better about things today. The world can be a tough place, but that's no cause for feeling victimized. Yesterday, during EQ, I gained a new perspective on Matthew 5:10-12:

10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
12 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

My whole life, I've read these words as saying that persecution is a type of certification of one's devotion. Rejoice if you're persecuted, because it means you've joined the ranks of the devout!

Today, I see them saying something completely different: don't take persecution out of context. Yes, you might feel that you've been misunderstood, attacked, and demeaned, but don't think that makes you special. Your persecution is minimal, if you put it in context. Instead, choose to rejoice in the face of persecution, in order to avoid cultivating feelings of anger and frustration, which only distance you from the God you are trying to serve.

Along these lines, I really appreciated the context Orson Scott Card provides about this unfortunate incident:

What Mormons keep foremost in mind is this: We’re a worldwide church. We might be going through a rough patch in America right now, as we butt heads with the oppressive New Puritans of the American Left, but that has nothing to do with how the Mormon Church is growing in Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, or Taiwan.

Big Love is just an entertainment; nothing they do will diminish the sacredness of what goes on inside our temples.

Outraged

2009-03-10T08:39:00.000-07:00

Endowment ceremony to be shown on HBO

Sometimes I feel that turning the other cheek only brings more abuse. Certainly it seems that the policy of certain Muslims of beheading people who disagree with them ideologically has brought them results.

Not that I'm encouraging the Mormon church to issue a fatwa against HBO, or set effigies of HBO execs on fire - I actually believe (intellectually at least) that turning the other cheek is the right thing to do in the long run. It's just hard when you feel so righteously indignant...

Definitely not a stimulus

2009-02-14T12:08:00.000-08:00

The point of a stimulus, at least as I understand it, is to prevent economic collapse by shoring up the economy. Throwing good money after bad may be necessary for one reason or a number, but it's hard to call it a stimulus.

I was surprised to see Amtrak got an extra $1.3 Billion in the final stimulus package. We have been dumping money down Amtrak's maw for decades now, and periodically Congress issues an ultimatum: become a self-sustaining business in the next 5 years, or we'll pull the plug. Of course they never do. I went to wikipedia and looked up the amount of funding we've given Amtrak - wikipedia doesn't have complete figures, but they were interesting none the less:

I read this graph as showing empirically that stimulating Amtrak with billions of dollars is unlikely to produce any results. I believe there are a lot of worthless projects getting large amounts of money in this stimulus bill, and I'm doubtful that the money we're spending is likely to produce any useful results. The problem is, of course, that this debt burden is going to weigh heavily on me, either through increased taxes, or increased inflation. Time to buy gold & put money in my Roth IRA...

10 reasons to oppose the stimulus

2009-02-06T17:44:00.000-08:00

Food for thought before we load ourselves with another trillion dollars worth of debt.

As economics professor Steven Horwitz said, “The stimulus plans assume consumption is the source of growth. It is not. It is the consequence of said growth.”

Stimulate the economy, not the government

2009-02-06T10:07:00.000-08:00

Obama is my president, and like all other patriotic Americans, I want him to succeed. But his discussion of the stimulus package in yesterday's op-ed piece surprises me. Why does he feel it so urgent that we rush to spend a trillion dollars that we don't have? One of my favorite things about Obama during the campaign was that his personality seemed calm, cool, and collected - he seemed to have a very steady personality, which is a useful trait in a leader. But the insistence that we pass the stimulus package NOW, without careful discussion of why we need this trillion dollar debt and what the money will be used for, seems to be at odds with this characterization.

I really liked some of what Mitt Romney had to say in an opinion piece today: Stimulate the economy, not the government. Like Romney, I worry that an extra trillion dollars of debt will cause our foreign investors to lose confidence in the dollar, which will lead to hyperinflation that will really destroy the economy for years to come. We need to be very cautious in assuming more debt than we already have.

I also think that many of the provisions in the stimulus package are just plain wasteful and wrong, like the $2 Billion allocated for a coal burning power plant (requested by Rod Blagojevich!) According to the government, this $2 Billion would create 2675 jobs, only 150 of which are permanent. That works out to $750k per temporary job! Surely, passing the stimulus bill as it stands would be a disaster. That's why I'm surprised that Obama is pushing so hard for immediate passage.

We got into this mess by spending money we didn't have. I don't see how doing more of the same will fix the problem...

What is wrong with this sentence?

2009-01-30T12:23:00.000-08:00

As for the overall effect, branding expert Rogers says he believes using look-alikes will take diversity to a whole new level.

CNN

Sugar water

2008-12-31T10:33:00.000-08:00

Pepsi recently changed its iconic logo. The new one looks suspiciously like Barack Obama's logo, especially when coupled with the word "Hope". So, the question is, is this a coincidence or are they trying to ride Obama's popularity? (More here.)

This reminds me of a passage from Anathem, which my lovely inlaws gave me for Christmas (thanks!) The gist is that the world ran out of money for doing physics research, because even though there is practically an infinite supply of money in the world, it's all being spent on sugar water and pornography - leaving nothing for atom smashers. True, that.

Let all mortal flesh keep silence

2008-12-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
And with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder nothing earthly minded,
For with blessing in his hand
Christ our Lord to earth descendeth,
Our full homage to demand.

King of Kings, yet born of Mary,
As of old on earth he stood,
Lord of Lords in human vesture,
In the Body and the Blood
He will give to all the faithful
His own self for heavenly food.

Rank on rank the host of heaven
Spreads its vanguard on the way,
As the Light of Light descendeth
From the realms of endless day,
That the powers of hell may vanish
As the darkness clears away.

At his feet the six-winged seraph;
Cherubim with sleepless eye,
Veil their faces to the Presence,
As with ceaseless voice they cry,
"Alleluia, Alleluia!
Alleluia, Lord Most High!"

Liturgy of Saint James (fifth century);
trans. Gerald Moultrie, 1864

At long last

2008-12-20T10:39:00.000-08:00

This week, we bought our first new car - a 2009 Mazda5. We had been delaying this purchase for quite some time, but the car dealership gave us a deal we couldn't resist.
Since we're expecting our third baby in March, it was clear that we wouldn't be able to fit comfortably in our well-loved Saturn any longer. Three car seats across the back of a small car is a recipe for frustration, not to mention not being terribly safe. The Mazda5 has just the right amount of space for us: 6 seats in a 2+2+2 configuration, but is much smaller than most contemporary minivans (useful for street parking), and comes with much better gas mileage.

The Mazda5 has an interesting genealogy: its "platform" (all the mechanical framing and suspension and other things) is shared with a number of other Ford, Mazda and Volvo cars. It's made in Hiroshima, which makes me feel for some odd reason that my purchase is atoning for the A-bomb. It recently did well in US crash tests, getting 5 stars for driver and passenger frontal collision, 5 stars for driver side collision, and 4 stars for rear passenger side collisions and rollover.

'Spoza and I are proud to say we resisted any extra frippery from the dealership - the only option on our car is the automatic transmission. No $500 seat protectors or undercoatings for us! It's always a little sad to me: the auto manufacturers do so much work to design, build, and transport cars all over the world, and then we haggle like crazy over the price. After we've spent all our haggling energies, the finance people at the dealership take advantage of our weakened state to propose all sorts of extra things that we don't need, at huge profit margins. I have to admit, I came close to getting the super long extended warranty. It seemed like a great deal. But 'Spoza reminded me that it can't be that great of a deal, or else they wouldn't be selling it. It was still tempting - but we successfully repelled all their sales attempts, and walked out with exactly the car we wanted, at a great price.

I've been subscribing to car magazines ever since I was a 9 year old. BMW and Mercedes-Benz earned my eternal scorn when they refused to send me sales brochures for their cars, unlike all the other car manufacturers which sent me enough brochures to fill a large moving box. I obsessed over every page. To this day, I'm biased against German auto manufacturers for how they treated me. So you can imagine how long I've been contemplating buying a new car of my own. I'm thrilled.

The kids are in love with the new car - divorced from the terribly portentous financial aspects of the whole car buying expedition, it seemed like a lot of fun to get rid of our old car and take home a brand new one with all sorts of gadgets. A "Magic" key (as christened by The Dude) unlocks and locks all the doors remotely, and makes the lights flash and horn sound! Seats loft The 'Sita high in the air, so she can see out the window! Automatic climate control eliminates the need to fiddle with the heater/air conditioner/fan control to keep things nice inside! Pretty exciting!

Anyway, I love our new car and can't wait to drive it around. Yesterday I reparked it closer to our apartment on my way to the BART station - just so that I could drive it for a minute. What a silly thing to do. But I can't help being excited. =)

Thanks to 'Spoza for the beautiful pictures.

The Law of the Harvest

2008-11-11T20:36:00.000-08:00

In the comments of my last post, one of my friends brought up an interesting idea that I've been pondering for the past few days in context of the ongoing aftermath of proposition 8 in California: "You reap what you sow." Before I begin discussing my point of view on this topic, I want to thank this person for her thoughts - although we might disagree, I'm glad she wrote them, since they helped me come to a clearer understanding of how I felt on this topic.

It's definitely true that any organization should expect criticism for an unpopular or divisive stance. However, does the law of the harvest apply in this case?

I'm going to argue no, based on two major points:
1. The church did not sow hate, so it shouldn't reap hate.
2. The law of the harvest is not true in a secular sense.

Firstly, I think we can all agree that hatred must be condemned, wherever it occurs. But we have to be careful not to label all disagreements as hatred, given the diversity of human opinion. The following statement from the church is apropos:

The Church does not condone abusive treatment of others and encourages its members to treat all people with respect. However, speaking out against practices with which the Church disagrees on moral grounds – including same-sex marriage – does not constitute abuse or the frequently misused term “hate speech.”

The church has consistently differentiated between opposition to homosexuality and hatred for homosexual people, and therefore its opposition to gay marriage can not be fairly equated to spreading hatred towards homosexual people.

Indeed, accusations of hatred directed at the church reveal more about the intolerance and intellectual rigidity of the people making them than they do about the church's behavior, since they presume that rational people of good will can only take one position on this issue, and they overlook the careful distinctions the church has made between homosexual behavior and homosexual people. True tolerance is painful and difficult, because at its root is the uncomfortable acknowledgment that thoughtful people can come to starkly opposite understandings of the same issue, and therefore that we should expect people to disagree, even on very deeply felt and important issues.

In this case, some people on the no-on-8 side have displayed blunt intolerance by labeling all Proposition 8 supporters as hateful: they deny the existence of any shades of gray or nuance to this issue, which I submit is much more complicated and difficult than the cartoonish oversimplification that "Yes on 8 = Hate, No on 8 = Love".

Individual Mormons (and all others) should be condemned for any hatred or bigotry they display, but to accuse the church as an entity of spreading hatred is unjustified.

Secondly, the law of the harvest is false in a secular sense, meaning that as far as we can measure on Earth, it is not true. If we only harvested what we sowed, any bad things that happen to us would have had to have been consequences of mistakes we made earlier, meaning that if we made no mistakes, we would live in a perfectly just world. History is littered with counterexamples to the law of the harvest - a few that come to mind: Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Joseph Smith, and although it seems superfluous to mention him again, Jesus. So I think it's fairly clear that as far as we can measure on Earth, people harvest bad things that are not consequences of what they sowed. As a religious person, I have faith that in God's eternal perspective, all these injustices will be recompensed eventually, but I don't believe that everything which happens to us now is a consequence of some earlier action. In this particular case, I assert that the church did not sow hatred in this campaign, and the hatred it is reaping is therefore not a consequence of the church's actions.

In summary, I am not surprised that the church is receiving criticism for its participation in supporting proposition 8. Criticism is expected whenever one takes a stand on a divisive issue, and the church is no newcomer to unpopularity. But I do not accept that the church deserves the hatred it is currently being subjected to. Sometimes, instead of reaping what you sowed, you reap the thorns and thistles of a shadowed and fallen world.

Fear Not

2008-11-03T22:08:00.000-08:00

Some of us Mormons are worried about how the rest of the world will perceive the church, once the aftermath of Proposition 8 has faded. For example of why we might be concerned, see this recent ad which viciously and gratuitously attacks the church for its involvement in promoting Proposition 8.

It's important for the church to keep its public image in mind - after all, we do actively recruit people to join, which is a much harder task when we are reviled.
Yet, we must remember that the church has never been widely popular. From the earliest beginnings of the Mormon movement, we've had more than our share of persecution. Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, Utah - the hatred for the church has been intense. The US Government mobilized the army against us. The US Legislature passed several laws which disenfranchised the church and forced it into submission. So if we encounter opposition today, it's nothing new, and in historical perspective it's very small compared to the persecution our predecessors faced.

It seems almost superfluous to say this, but Jesus himself was no smooth talker. He gave offense freely, with his radical ideas subverting the Mosaic law and condemning the religious authorities of his time. Jesus was not crucified for being nice.

I feel compelled to point this out only because I want to be clear about my priorities. Although I care a great deal about others' feelings, ultimately it's much more important to me to avoid offending God than it is to avoid offending man. The words of Evan Stephens come to mind:

Fear not, though the enemy deride.
Courage, for the Lord is on our side.
Heed not what the wicked may say,
For the Lord alone we will obey.

E pluribus unum

2008-10-14T09:24:00.001-07:00

I found this essay today, which I think touches on something very important: If elected, Obama will be our President.

Politics in America have always been tough, but I feel that the past 16 years have been especially damaging, since it's become normal to view people you disagree with as truly evil. This must stop. We need to remember our motto: Out of Many, One. We are one country, and those of us who end up on the minority must remember that our commitment to our country supercedes our personal opinions.

If Obama is elected, those of us on the right must honor his election and work with him, supporting his policies when we can, opposing his policies when we disagree with them, but doing so in the context of our country's broader goals, not from narrow partisanship. We must be bigger than the people who have viciously demonized President Bush for the past 8 years, and avoid the temptation to descend into shrill bitterness.

Gloves!

2008-10-11T22:35:00.000-07:00

Evidently, the Chevy Volt's capacitively switched controls will work when you have gloves on, contrary to my earlier concerns. I'm not sure whether to believe this report, but at least someone besides me is worrying about these things! =)

Kilowatt-hours!

2008-09-23T20:04:00.000-07:00

I liked this article on plug-in hybrids, up until the very end, where the story gives a price for 3.98 kilowatts of electricity. D'oh!

You can't buy 3.98 kilowatts of electricity, instead you buy 3.98 kilowatt-hours of electricity. A kilowatt is a unit of power, not energy. This is analogous to getting 1 mile per hour and 1 mile confused - they are not comparable things! Speed and distance are different! Power and energy are different!

Honestly, I think reporters and editors need to take a basic scientific literacy class. They are always whining about how "uneducated" Americans are, especially in relation to science (see the recent flap about Sarah Palin's lack of education, for example.) Yet they themselves can't reliably use proper units when reporting on science!

Electric Dreams

2008-09-16T12:42:00.001-07:00

Cars are all about freedom. The freedom to go where you want, when you want, without depending on anyone or anything else to get you there. Consequently, electric cars have been a difficult sell: it doesn't matter if 90% of your daily driving falls within the car's 70 mile range, because that last 10% of long trips represents a huge amount of freedom that you are asked to surrender when you buy an electric car.

That's why I'm so excited about the Chevy Volt, the electric car with a gasoline-powered range extender. Adding a generator reclaims that lost freedom, since you won't have to worry if your battery is charged enough to go the distance, or contemplate being unceremoniously stranded in the middle of nowhere, waiting hours for your battery to charge. You'll just fill up the gas tank, like on any regular car, and go your way.

The Volt was introduced as a concept car a year ago, and gathered a huge amount of press for GM. They've done the smart thing and rushed the car into production. It should be available to buy in 2010. Today they unveiled the production version, which is a lot less aggressive than the concept (which was famously labeled 'an electric Camaro' by Bob Lutz), but still manages to have a unique character while delivering good aerodynamics.

The interior is interesting - I'll reserve judgment on it until I see it in person, preferably with the center stack in some other color besides white, which seems incredibly impractical for a car. I do have to say I'm not sold on the capacitive buttons for all the controls on the center stack, since capacitive buttons don't work when you have gloves on. That could make for some uncomfortable moments in winter. Of course, in California it shouldn't be much of a problem.

It will probably be a while before I'm in a position to buy my own electric car - the Volt's pricing hasn't been announced, but it won't be cheap - probably $35-40k. And the car only seats 4, due to the large battery pack that fills up the center of the car. So it's not yet ideal for young families like mine. Still, I see the Volt as a brave step by GM, and I hope it turns out to be a smashing success.

Obey

2008-09-09T08:35:00.000-07:00

Having lived in Russia for 2 years, I've seen plenty of relictual Soviet propaganda. That's why some of Obama's campaign ads disturb me. They're very Soviet. I was going to write a long post explaining the similarities, but a quick search found another post where someone already did the hard work for me.

There is something unsettling and very familiar in the Obama poster campaign which has plastered his image over the country. The posters depict the same graphic closeup of the candidate with one block word either "Hope," "Change" or "Progress" at the bottom. I knew that I had seen this before, and then it came to me that this image appropriates the graphic style of totalitarian Soviet propaganda. It recalls the idealized portraits and personality cult of the "Beloved Leader" such as Stalin and Lenin. The leader, face illuminated by a "holy" light, looks off to the horizon and sees the truth that is not available to his mere mortal followers, who must look up to his image.

Kindle, revisited

2008-05-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

Wired has an interesting revisitation of the Kindle, now that it's been out for a few months.

I loved this quote, which aptly describes my sentiments about what a book should be (in sharp contrast to what e-book readers are):

boots instantly; a high-contrast, high resolution display; is viewable from any angle, in bright or dim light; permits fast random access to any page; provides instant visual and tactile feedback on the location; can be easily annotated; requires no batteries or maintenance; [and] is robustly packaged.

Kindle is much better than previous e-book readers. But I'll still stick with my old fashioned books, which work despite two year olds, power outages and rainstorms. =)

A Brave New World

2008-03-02T18:37:00.001-08:00

Today, Intel announced a new processor, which it has decided to call Atom. This processor isn't a surprise, it's been known to those who follow such things for the past year or so under the code name Silverthorne. However, it's a very significant chip that everyone will get to know over the next few years.

Atom represents a Brave New World for Intel. Intel has always been a company which insists on pushing the state of the art in technology, while being well compensated for their efforts. They would prefer to keep every computer outfitted with a big, complex processor costing somewhere around $200 (at a minimum). Intel needs to make huge amounts of money, because they spend billions every year on building new chip manufacturing plants, which are horrifically expensive. Intel's huge profits have been in some sense the engine of the computer industry, since they have enabled the technological progress which makes modern computing possible.

Exactly 10 years ago, bowing to market demands for cheaper processors, Intel created the Celeron, which since then has always been a normal, Expensive processor with a few important features disabled or left out. Creating Celeron allowed Intel to keep selling big Expensive processors under the Pentium (and later Core) brands, while addressing the market's demands for cheaper computers. However, even with Celeron, Intel generally refused to sell a processor for under $30 or so.

With Atom, Intel has acknowledged that computers are getting so cheap that they need a new brand, below Celeron. Instead of taking a big, Expensive processor and crudely disabling it to create a cheaper version, they have engineered a brand new processor from the very beginning to be Cheap. Intel has rarely tried to be cheap before, they usually abandon a market whenever it becomes obvious that the market is commoditizing enough to become cheap. Atom is an acknowledgement that they can't afford to abandon the processor market, even though people want cheap cheap computers.

Atom processors are so small physically, that 11 of them have the same area as a penny. These are teeny tiny silvers of silicon, and they will be built on Intel's most advanced printing process, which makes the world's smallest (and hence cheapest) transistors. Intel will tell you that Atom is all about lowering power, so that Intel can have a processor to go in your cell phone (right now, cell phones are owned by ARM, which specializes in cheap processors). But the reality is that later this year, you'll be able to go to Wal*Mart and buy a very cheap computer with a $6 processor in it. This processor will be as fast as a laptop from 5 years ago, which means that you'll be able to do email, blogging, and surf the internet (barely. you'll notice it being slow.)

Still, it's a brave new world for Intel, because they've never embraced the commoditization of their processors like this before. Atom could sink Intel's profit margins, since it will be good enough for many people's home computers, but Intel's not going to make as much money from selling cheap processors as it does from Expensive ones. Intel's hoping that people will buy so many Atoms that the loss in margins will be made up by an increase in volume.

Let's hope so. If Intel stops making big profits, the whole computing industry will slow down. Computers have been so successful because it has been economically profitable to make them more feature filled and powerful, but if all people need is an Atom processor, the economics turn against innovation.

All of this is especially important to me, since getting a PhD in EECS presumes there will be an industry needing innovation. I still think it's a pretty good bet that computing will survive its impending commoditization. But the question is, in what form?

San Francisco Symphony plays Shostakovich's 6th Symphony

2008-02-10T19:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, 'spoza and I escaped (thanks to our lovely neighbors, who agreed to watch the kidlets!) to San Francisco to attend the symphony. On the program: György Ligeti's San Francisco Polyphony, Bartók's Third Piano Concerto, and Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony, directed by Ingo Metzmacher, who is a guest conductor from Germany.

The program started out with Ligeti's piece, which was commissioned especially for the San Francisco Symphony in 1974. I was a little nervous when I read in the program notes that the last time the San Francisco Symphony had performed this piece was in 1987 - over 20 years ago! I guess if you're the SF Symphony, you have so many pieces commissioned for you that you don't need to worry about performing them regularly. Either that, or the piece is just not good enough to be regularly scheduled.

Surprisingly, I actually rather liked the performance. Some of you might already know Ligeti a little from the weird soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, which appropriated Ligeti's work as background music for the monolith. It's very textured, in the sense that there are so many different things going on in the music that you're not sure what's happening, and you're left with mostly a feeling of confusion and being overwhelmed by this wall of sound. Fortunately, the San Francisco Polyphony wasn't quite so intimidating, although it was definitely music for a specialized audience. The music had moments of melody and comprehensible structure (to the point that I felt sure several times during the piece that I would actually notice if someone made a mistake, unlike other modern classical that is so random and chaotic that it seems impossible to discern how well the music is being performed.) I don't think I'll be rushing to buy this piece, but to hear it live by such an outstanding orchestra, in such a good venue, was worth it.

Bartók's Third Piano Concerto was ok. Hélène Grimaud, the soloist, was fascinating to watch. She made everything look so easy, even though it was very complicated music. Despite the virtuosity of the piece, I just couldn't get really enthusiastic about the music. This particular piece is one of Bartók's simplest and most tonal pieces (for which he's received some criticism, since it has been said that it's some sort of regression away from his more avant-garde works). I appreciated the simplicity - it was nice to recognize a melody here and there, and to feel like the music made sense. However, there wasn't anything really compelling about it, except the last few measures of the finale, which were rivetingly exciting. The second movement, marked Adagio religioso wasn't quite as inspired as I had hoped: it was nice, but didn't have any moments of transcendence or striking beauty.

Even though Bartók is 30 years or so older than Shostakovich, I kept thinking during the performance that it was rather similar to Shostakovich's piano concerti, just not as fun or inspired. Anyway, I'm glad I got to hear it, Bartók has long been on my list of composers to get to know better.

The final piece was Shostakovich's 6th symphony (the picture on this post is of Shostakovich himself. Some people say he looks like a James Potter...) This has been one of my favorite symphonies for years, so I was really anticipating the performance. And it was very good. The symphony is very unusual, in that it only has three movements (most symphonies have 4), and the first movement is extremely slow (most symphonies have the 2nd or 3rd movement slow instead). The first movement is very contemplative and introspective, without the bombast which Shostakovich is known for. Instead, it has long solo passages from the flute, bass clarinet, english horn and piccolo, to name a few, which are suspended over brooding strings. The melodies are very Shostakovichian - modern sounding and different, but not alienating.

Shostakovich was under a lot of pressure from the Soviet government to make sure his music was "comprehensible" to the Soviet people. That put him under a lot of strain, since he clearly wanted to be a musical innovator on the forefront of western composition. But I think overall, it really made his music better. So much modern classical music is written first and foremost for the artists themselves - the composer wants to innovate and be famous for inventing this or that technique, and the performers want to be famous for their virtuosity and daring. This is bad for art, in my opinion. Most new orchestral music is composed without giving the audience any sort of clue as to how to receive and comprehend the music. Instead, the music is alienatingly impenetrable. Such selfishness from the modern orchestral music scene ensures that most orchestras have to restrict themselves to the tried and true classics, since few people will pay to be insulted and left abandoned in the concert hall by music which takes a PhD in composition and music history to truly appreciate. This can't be good for the planet. =(
So back to Shostakovich - although the sixth symphony will never become a popular work on the radio, it is still something that many people can understand, even if it is just a little edgy.

I was awed by many parts of the performance - the SF symphony played the smooth parts like melted ice cream. It was delicious, and the tension in the first movement was brought out very adeptly. The only thing I wished for was a little more passion during the loud parts. It seemed like they were holding back, even at the climaxes of the music. Maybe the price of being such a polished, smooth orchestra is that you can't play violent music even when that's what's written on the page, but I still like my Shostakovich just a tad more raw and passionate, even to the point of just a little snarling at times.

On the whole, though, the concert was better than I expected, and I'm really glad 'spoza and I were able to go. I can't wait until next time we head back into Davies Hall for a concert.

Liahona

2008-02-02T23:54:00.000-08:00

I was surprised to see the Liahona mentioned in a Wired article about history's greatest gadgets. Of course, it was in the mythical gadgets section, but still - it's pretty cool to see just a little acknowledgment of the Book of Mormon in popular culture.

The article's right - Liahona is just begging to be used as the name of some GPS product. =)

History's Greatest Gadgets [wired.com]

Kindle

2007-11-20T21:54:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, thmazing and I were discussing whether or not books would ever be obsoleted by some portable computer/book reader thing. Since I'm a PhD student in EECS, you might expect me to be all gung-ho about gadgets, eager for computers in their myriad forms to make all ancient things obsolete. But I'm still in love with books. I love the way a book feels in my hands, I love turning pages, I love the sharpness and crispness of a beautiful font on good paper. I love being able to remember where on the page a choice tidbit of conversation or information lives, so that at a glance I can find exactly what I'm looking for. I treat my books somewhat roughly - they bounce around in my backpack, get lost underneath the couch (and then found...eventually), and sometimes I read them while walking to and from the bus stop, even if it's a bit damp outside.

So I'm actually a little skeptical that some gadget will ever replace books for me, since books are pretty close to perfect already. That being said, I was very impressed by Amazon's recent gadget, Kindle. Kindle is exciting for several reasons:

167 DPI e-Ink display. Although the display is greyscale only, it's very high resolution. Typical computer monitors are only around 100-120 DPI, which means that the pixels are big, so letters are still rather blocky on the screen. This is fatiguing for me, so I was happy to see Kindle have a much higher resolution display, which should make reading it much less tiresome than reading a computer screen. Additionally, the e-Ink display should be easier on the eyes because it is reflective, rather than emissive. LCD/CRT/OLED - all monitor technologies emit light at your face, which is fine indoors, where you don't have lots of glare, but the sun easily washes them out. Since the e-Ink display is reflective (just like a book), you can read it under bright sun or in the shade without any problems. This does mean that you have to carry a booklight around to read in the dark, but I'm ok with that.

Embedded cellphone connection. Amazon squeezed a cellphone into Kindle, which allows Kindle to be completely self sufficient - it doesn't need to ever be synced with a PC. Instead, it downloads new content from the cellphone network, which works pretty much everywhere and doesn't require you to log on to a Wi-fi hotspot. Amazingly, Amazon got Sprint to agree to send data to Kindle over its network without a contract with Sprint. This is completely surprising to me, since most cell phone providers only allow use of their networks after consumers are roped into restraining and very expensive contracts. The cell phone companies have spent billions of dollars making 3G data networks, which allow for very high wireless bandwidth, but their data plans are so expensive and their contracts are so onerous that no one can afford to make use of them. Just as an anecdote - a few months ago I was stuck in rural Idaho with no internet connection, and I had to turn in a very important homework assignment. As a last resort, I configured my cellphone to act as a Bluetooth modem for my laptop, and beamed my homework over the cellphone network to the internet. It was a 5 MB file, which is tiny by any technical standard. Yet AT&T charged me FIFTY dollars for that 5 MB of data transmission. This is completely ridiculous - every hour of voice conversation generates around 5 MB of data traffic on their networks, and I have so many minutes I can't possibly use them all (right now I have like 2500 rollover minutes that can be used for free any time, as well as 5000 night & weekend minutes per month, and unlimited mobile to mobile minutes on their network.) They don't offer me a cheaper plan - I can't downgrade. So basically, data traffic on their network costs them almost nothing. Yet when I sent my 5 MB file, they charged me $50, just because they can. Absurd. Ok, so after that long digression, you can see why I'm so amazed that Sprint is letting Amazon use its cellphone network without contracts. It's fabulous. I hope other gadget vendors get to use cellphone networks, too - the possibilities are immense here.

The last and most important feature of Kindle is a good selection of material to read on it. It's crazy, but Sony's e-book reader store charges more for many ebooks than it costs to buy the hardcover book itself. Why would any consumer spend more to get less? Amazon's store has reasonable prices (max $10 per book) and it even has a bunch of periodicals (delivered for free, wirelessly) - like Time & Newsweek for $2/month, and the Wall Street Journal for $10/month. I could really see myself loving having a WSJ subscription to read on the bus, without ever having to worry about whether I synced my Kindle to the computer in the morning before leaving to work. It's a fabulous thing.

Despite all these great features, I won't be getting a Kindle any time soon. Firstly, it's way too expensive for now - $399. At that price, I would much rather buy an iPhone. Secondly, I'm a little peeved at the idea of buying books from Amazon to read on this thing, but not having a way to protect my assets. The e-books are encrypted to prevent you from using them with any other device, ever. So what happens if Amazon goes out of business 10 years from now? Basically, all the books I bought from them will be worthless & inaccessible. With the iTunes Music Store, you always have the option to burn the songs to a CD, which removes the encryption and makes sure your assets are stored in a company-neutral format. But with Kindle, you're buying things with no guarantee that you'll be able to use them in a few years. That's one great thing about real books, they are useful for decades, if stored well (of course, they do pile up around the house...) This problem isn't such a big deal for periodicals, which I have no expectation of storing and rereading, but it is something to think about when buying books. Finally, Kindle is UGLY. It has all sorts of extra wedges and doodads on it, the keys on the keyboard are all slanted differently in some strange affectation of ergonomics, and the whole shape is just ungainly. Here's hoping that Amazon hires a better industrial designer for Kindle 2.0.

Anyway, I was much more impressed by Kindle than I thought I would be from the pre-release rumors. Amazon has done a great job for their first cut at this, especially with the wireless connectivity and wide range of content available for it. Who knows, maybe some gadget will serve well for most of my reading. But I still think that there will always be times in my life where nothing will do but a real, printed book.

Good news

2007-09-24T20:55:00.000-07:00

Tesla has conducted new tests of the Roadster's range, and it's back up to 245 miles in the EPA combined cycle! I have heard rumors, however, that first delivery of the Roadster to customers is being delayed another few months...
I get so excited about these new cars (electric, hybrid, plug-in hybrid...) but I'm never sure if the grandiose dreams and visions will ever come to fruition. I'm very fond of Tesla because they seem to be getting close to releasing a real product. I like the plans GM has been presenting about its future products (like the Volt, and the Vue plug-in hybrid), but I have been severely disappointed by them in the past, so I'll have to wait and see how things develop. If GM manages to get the Volt on sale around 2010, at a normal price (~$30k), I might actually be able to get one! The likelihood of Tesla coming out with a car that I can afford by then is pretty remote, so I'm keeping my dreams in check. But it's an exciting time to be a car junkie!

Yesterday was the Autumnal Equinox

2007-09-24T14:49:00.000-07:00

I have a special love for Fall - it's a season of reminiscing and savoring, an especially good time for thought. But it is always a little wistful.

Emily Dickenson says it best:

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away—
Too imperceptible at last
To seem like Perfidy—

A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon—

The Dusk drew earlier in—
The Morning foreign shone—
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest, that would be gone—

And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.

Her First Tesseract

2007-09-07T13:23:00.000-07:00

Madeleine L'Engle has fled our shadowed world. I pause for a moment to remember the richness of mystery and the beauty of paradox which she revealed in her work.

Typesetting equations - a rant about Office 2007

2007-09-04T09:02:00.000-07:00

As a grad student in Electrical Engineering, I see a lot of equations during a normal day. Fortunately for me, most of them are typeset with the superlative TeX typesetting system. I say fortunately because TeX typesets equations with grace, making the typeset equations as beautiful as the concepts they describe. For an example, here's one of my favorite equations set with TeX, using the default Computer Modern font: TeX produces output that is eminently legible and harmoniously composed. The default font is elegant and consistent, it makes good use of thick and thin strokes to make the letterforms easy to read. The slant is consistent between the italic letters and the integral sign.

I'm sure people have their quibbles with TeX, but in my opinion, it remains unsurpassed after almost 30 years of typesetting (an eternity in the computing community - TeX has its origin about the same time as Apple.)

Unfortunately, Microsoft rarely incorporates existing systems into their own products, preferring instead to reinvent the wheel, usually with a few sharp corners tacked on in the name of innovation. So when it came time to put an equation editor into Office, they didn't adapt TeX, instead they put together their own solution. Not surprisingly, it is a very poor attempt at an equation typesetting system. I can smell a paper written with Microsoft Word from a mile away, since the equations are so ugly and malformed. I have to actively overcome an instinctive bias against papers written using Word just because they look so awful. As an example, here is the same equation, typeset with Microsoft's Equation Editor (I'll talk about which version in just a second):
This is a disaster. To name a few of the problems:

The 'x' doesn't appear centered in the parentheses
The integral sign seems to be from a different font entirely - its line width is too fat compared to the other characters, and it's set without any slant, clashing with the rest of the equation
The integral sign is too short vertically, which disrupts the flow of the equation severely
The onscreen rendering is poor - notice the pronounced aliasing (stairstep effect) on the square root symbol

After foisting unnecessary ugliness on world for years with its poor equation typesetting system, Microsoft realized change was in order, so in Office 2007, they included a new system, which is very much improved:

Most of my complaints have been remedied here. In fact, I think this equation is very nice looking, except for the unfortunate placement of the minus sign and the fraction divider in the exponent, which are dangerously close to being blurred into one line and therefore becoming illegible. That's a minor complaint compared with the others, though, and I could manually tweak it to fix that problem.

So all of this background sets the stage for my rant. Microsoft, in its wisdom, included the new equation editor in Word 2007, but NOT in Powerpoint 2007. This means that equations in Powerpoint 2007 look like equations from Office 2003 and earlier. In fact, the second example in this post is from Powerpoint 2007's equation editor, which is still the same one that we've suffered with for years in earlier editions of Office.

Even worse, you can't transfer equations well from Word 2007 to Powerpoint 2007. If you try to paste the equation from Word's equation editor into Powerpoint's equation editor, it gives errors and inserts a string of ???? characters. If you paste the equation directly into Powerpoint, it is RASTERIZED at a very low resolution without the user's control. This means that equations from Word will look blocky or blurry in Powerpoint, depending on the filter Powerpoint decides to use.

This is a capital offense. Windows rasterizes everything greedily, at the lowest resolutions possible, and once things have been rasterized, you can't get them back to their original vector format, which is infinitely precise and sharp regardless of how it is resized, or whether it is printed on paper or viewed on a monitor. But wait, I'm not done yet:
This picture is an unretouched screenshot of the Word 2007 equation resized in Powerpoint. Notice how Powerpoint tries to undo the blockiness of the rasterization by smearing the square root symbol to smooth the lines out. But why has a black and white equation turned so bizarrely colored? When Windows rasterized the equation behind my back, it applied sub-pixel antialiasing at the same time!! Notice the red fringes on the left hand side of the line, and the blue fringes on the right hand side of the line. This is a big mistake - the antialiasing should be done after the resizing, not before. The decision to do these in the wrong order is clearly a bug, not a feature - antialiasing should never introduce such enormous color artifacts.

So, to summarize all this:

Powerpoint should use the same editor as Word for equations. This is the whole purpose of an integrated office suite - to provide consistency across different applications for common tasks. Microsoft's failure to use the same equation editor for Word and Powerpoint is nothing less than indolence, sloth and corporate dysfunction - they have had years to assemble Office 2007, and they failed to get their act together. Blunders like this are why so many of us have become tired of Microsoft - they never manage to get things working.
If Powerpoint can't use Word's much improved equation editor, it should at least gracefully import Word equations using Microsoft's much touted (though often buggy) Object Linking and Embedding. This is a poster child case for OLE, and they failed to make it happen. The reason importing equations as pictures into Powerpoint is such a disaster is that they are not editable once they turn into a picture. This is a big problem, since often people collaborate on presentations, and want to recycle bits of old presentations into new ones. Pictures of equations are much less useful than
editable equations themselves.
If Powerpoint can't embed good equations, it should at least allow me to paste a vector version of the equation into my presentation, so that it can be resized arbitrarily and still look nice. This rasterization behind my back is infuriating.
If Microsoft can't manage to insert a vector graphic from Word into Powerpoint without rasterization, it should do the ClearType sub-pixel antialiasing AFTER it does the resizing filter. Their choice to do the sub-pixel antialiasing during rasterization of the image coming from Word is disastrous. Not only does it introduce horrible color artifacts after resizing, but it also is flat out wrong on some LCD displays: the antialiasing here only works on a monitor with subpixels laid out in RGB order, from left to right. This is not the only possible way of laying out subpixels, in fact some monitors do BGR, which makes RGB subpixel antialiasing actually cause increased aliasing, instead of removing it. This means that if I take this graphic to a monitor or projector with a different subpixel layout, things will look very strange and wrong, even without any resizing of the image. All of this could be avoided by doing antialiasing last, when the system knows exactly what output device it is rendering to.

The thing that is so frustrating about this is that I wanted Office 2007 to fix the equation typesetting problems which have accompanied Office for years. I read about the new equation editor in Office with quite a bit of hope, but their implementation is mindblowingly broken. I would think that getting the equation editor working in Powerpoint would be much easier than designing new math fonts, creating a new typesetting engine, and a new user interface for editing equations. But the last few steps needed to get the new equation editor integrated into Office 2007 seem to have been ignored. This is very disheartening, since it means I will be forced to look at ugly equations for quite some time, still. At least papers written in Word will look better, but the presentations will remain hideous.

Happily, I have the option of using XeTeX and Keynote, which do all of this perfectly and effortlessly. But my Windows-only compatriots remain stuck, again due to Microsoft's inability to finish a product right. I'll try to be optimistic and hope that some service pack will fix this problem, but it's really inexcusable that Office 2007 was released in such a flawed state.

Note to Apple

2007-08-08T14:00:00.000-07:00

I would love to buy one of your spectacular new iMacs, but I can't, since there is no provision for the iMac to accept video input of any kind. Space is tight in my apartment, so I don't have room for both a TV and a computer monitor, which is why I currently play console games on the same monitor my Mac mini is attached to. (Dell 2005FPW, which comes with VGA, DVI, S-Video and Composite video inputs). I know Steve would never let you clutter the iMac's backside with a zillion video inputs, but it would significantly increase the utility of the iMac if there was some sort of video input. And it wouldn't cost you much to implement - after all, if Dell does it, you know it has to be cheap.

Consider the environmental angle as well: you talked up how easy it is to "Recycle" the new Aluminum+Glass iMac at its recent release, but you didn't mention "Reduce" and "Reuse". A video input on the iMac would give people the choice to Reduce the number of display devices in their house, since they could use the iMac as a general purpose monitor/TV. It would also provide Reuse capabilities for when the CPU becomes outdated, since the iMac could transform into a monitor for another computer. Adding a video input to the iMac would be a way for you to show that you really mean business when it comes to the environmental implications of your products. Just a thought.

A crowning achievement

2007-08-03T11:31:00.000-07:00

Deathly Hallows succeeds in lifting the tone, themes and purpose of the entire series above the crowds of common children's fantasy literature.

I liked Deathly Hallows far more than I had expected to. I didn't think it was possible for a mere mortal (and a muggle at that!) to wrap up such a huge amount of loose ends in such a natural and satisfying way. Rowling tends to use a lot of deus ex machina devices to move her plot forward. So many magical devices, spells, and characters have been invented and discarded during the course of the series that I was not very hopeful that things would end with any amount of coherence. Rowling says she had the whole plot conceived before she started writing the first book, but I had doubts about whether her original ideas were good enough to stay around as the backbone of the entire series, or whether they had carelessly and randomly been twisted and turned into just another series of children's adventure, albeit with a modern twist of extra darkness and destruction.

My doubts were unfounded: there are still nitpicks to be made, but overall, things came together marvelously.

I feel that Harry Potter's fate in history is very much dependent on the strength of its finale: if it hadn't succeeded in making the series coherent, then the books would be forgotten quickly, except as an amusing anecdote of mass hysteria and commercialism. But the last book did such a good job of linking the plots of all seven books together that there is a lot of scope for continued rereadings and analysis of the series. I think people will continue to be excited about Harry Potter for quite some time, mostly because Deathly Hallows made all the previous books worth the time it takes to read them. My admiration and thanks go to Rowling for giving us such a treasure.

A lot of car for your money

2007-07-24T08:39:00.001-07:00

'spoza will be the first to tell you that I'm a hopeless car nut. This usually surprises my acquaintances no end, since I'm kinda nerdy and generally not mechanically oriented, nor do I spend any time in other stereotypically testosterone-driven activities like watching or playing deadly contact sports.

Maybe this is why I'm a strange car nut - I'm not interested in exotic, fast, or ludicrously expensive cars, instead I obsess about boldly designed cars which I actually have a hope of driving at some point (whenever I finally grow up and finish this PhD thing). My fascination with Tesla is mostly just because I love electric cars so much, so you'll have to excuse my deviation from principles to adore an exotic car. I promise I'll like them better if they start selling their promised $30k BlueStar sedan in 5 years. =)

So this comparison of 3 mainstream hybrid sedans was exciting to me, despite all the disclaimers early in the article about how the reviewers thought the assignment was about as interesting as a sloth race.

Preemptive Bias Revelation: the Toyota Camry is a very uninspiring car for me. The 2007+ version is better than its predecessors, but still very unappealing and appliance-like to my tastes. The Saturn Aura is perhaps not a revolutionary car, but I think its design is surprisingly elegant and tasteful. The 2007+ Nissan Altima looks exciting, so I like it quite a bit, although I hope it doesn't seem as dated 5 years from now as the 2002-2006 Altima does.

Back to the hybrid comparison - Hybrids have always been a tough sell economically. They don't save nearly as much fuel as they should to justify their price premium. I've often wondered if their environmental impact mirrors their higher prices: surely producing two drivetrains is worse on the planet than one (just think of all that nickel mining for the NiMH batteries - yuck!) How long does it take before the increased environmental production costs of a hybrid actually are recouped by fuel savings? Toyota has done a wonderful PR job by selling hybrids (mostly the Prius), giving them the license to sell boatloads of FJ Cruisers, Tundras and Sequoias (averaging less than 15 mpg) while the public gives them a free green card.

In any case, I think it's clear from American buying patterns that economic considerations are paramount if one wants to escape a small market niche. Which I would hope automakers do, given that they talk often about reducing their environmental impact, which requires selling cars in Volume. And so the question of how long it takes to recoup the extra economic cost of buying a hybrid car is actually the most important question, if your goal is one or more of the following:

Fight global warming
Reduce our dependence on medieval, despotic and hostile regimes (do I have to name names?)
Defund Islamic terrorism

And this is where the hybrid car comparison article falls terribly short.

Despite admitting that it will take EIGHTEEN years of driving 15k miles/year @ current gas prices to recoup the incremental cost of the Nissan Altima ($30.5k) over the Saturn Aura ($23.5k), they still give the Aura last place, since its fuel economy is worse. Then, the article gives the Camry ($30.6k) first place, with the summary

the simple fact is the Camry Hybrid gives you a lot of car for your money.

Talk about misplaced priorities! The Camry will be in the junkyard long before it has recouped its high purchase cost by saving gasoline, compared to the Aura. That makes the Camry a good value?

I'm fully aware that Saturn's current hybrid technology is uninspiring from a geeky point of view. It can't drive in electric mode over 3 mph, its battery is small, it doesn't have that nifty Continuously Variable Transmission. However, GM's BAS hybrid is also simple, which is a powerful virtue. A simple, less capable hybrid system that actually makes sense economically should be praised, since it's actually possible to envision it being applied widely.

I think the article's reaction to the Aura hybrid, like so many other things in life, comes down to people's inability to see past the stats and figures and think about the broader picture. But this post is already long winded enough without expanding on that point... =)

Unit Sensitivity Training

2007-07-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

There are so many factual errors in media coverage of science that could be averted by the tiniest modicum of effort. This article from MSNBC.com about a recent lahar in New Zealand is a great example: (I've included a screenshot, since MSNBC tends to edit their articles after publication. I hope they find this error and edit it out, but it never should have been accepted for publication in the first place.)

Lahar story

Notice anything wrong about those two paragraphs? Here's a hint: how much water is contained in 1.3 cubic meters?

...

A cubic meter is about the size of a normal kitchen range. The article says that the lake's banks collapsed (!!) It says that the collapse caused a broad area to be covered in a veneer of mud and boulders (!!) It says the collapse caused an unprecedented opportunity for scientific study (!!)
Gee, if all they needed was a cubic meter of water, they should have just turned on their garden hose for a few minutes and studied the lahar in their backyard... LOL.

...

Mandatory sensitivity courses are all the rage right now for unfortunate people who mouth off and end up offending some protected minority group. Analogously, I think reporters who get their units fouled up like this reporter did should be forced through a day's worth of scientific unit training for each offense. They could learn the difference between a kilowatt-hour and a kilowatt, that volts are not a unit of power, and that a meter is about the size of a yard. You'd be amazed at how much attention to basic units would catch these kinds of typos.

For all the handwringing I see in the press about how America is falling behind in science, they're sure not doing their part to improve scientific literacy.

Update: It appears that MSNBC finally discovered their typo - they had left out that pesky trifling word "million". Only off by 6 orders of magnitude, but at least someone eventually caught it!

Man outruns horse

2007-07-11T22:11:00.000-07:00

Here's some ammo to back up my post on Running: evidently this year someone managed to beat the fastest horse in the annual Man versus Horse Marathon. The course isn't quite as long as a full marathon - it's only 22 miles, but the terrain is quite scenic (read: challenging) through the Welsh countryside. This year's winner, a German named Florian Holzinger, beat the fastest horse by eleven minutes (!)

Obviously, not everyone will be able to outrun a horse, but this is still pretty impressive ammo for the argument that man was made to run. Now if only I could motivate myself to get my running in... =)

Official Results

Refenestration

2007-06-15T13:37:00.001-07:00

My new internship at Intel requires that I use an IBM ThinkPad instead of my beloved Macintosh. This of course means that I'm interacting with Windows again seriously for the first time in several years, and the experience has been rather dreadful. I'm just constantly amazed at how much misery the world has been put through all due to laziness from Microsoft - it's shocking that such a thoughtlessly designed, tastelessly conceived, and sloppily assembled piece of software became the world's dominant operating system. Observations of these little thoughtlessnesses that add up to a huge waste of human capital (when multiplied by the number of Windows users in the world) can be found at my other blog: Refenestration.

Even more progress

2007-04-18T10:09:00.000-07:00

Tesla Motors announced recently that they won't make 250 mile range after all. Instead, they'll come in "somewhere above 200", but definitely not 250.

I don't know about you, but I'm always making guesses about things I don't know, and the sad truth is that more often than not, my guesses are optimistic, as 'spoza has learned through experience. The crazy thing is that it doesn't seem to matter how carefully I model - there's always some set of unforeseen issues that crop up at the last moment to throw a wrench into my plans.

Anyway, Tesla's still my favorite car company, even though they messed up their range estimate. If I tilt my head right, I can even see their slightly lowered expectations as exciting, because they give me more faith that Tesla's converging on something real. But my head only tilts so far...

Update: Tesla's blog announcement on the topic includes this great quote from Richard Feynman:

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Indeed.

Running is Life

2007-03-26T20:00:00.000-07:00

The Energetic Paradox of Human Running and Hominid Evolution
If you can't download a linked article, send me an email.

In high school, I ran cross country & track. This was a purely defensive reaction to my peer group at church, who didn't put up with nerds, especially the puny wimpy kind. So I'm already used to the idea that long distance running is a survival mechanism, which is maybe why I loved this article so much.

Did you know that hunters from several different cultures are known to hunt prey by dogged pursuit, chasing animals for one to two days until the animal is exhausted? African bushmen run down various kinds of antelope and zebra, Navajo and Paiutes are known to have hunted pronghorn antelope (one of the fastest of all mammals) by chasing it for several days, and Australian aborigines hunt kangaroo in the same manner. I had no idea. It's pretty surprising that man can run down these big, fast animals, which are much faster than we are and are optimized (in an evolutionary sense) for running fast to evade predators.

Paradoxically, humans consume about a factor of two more energy per kilogram body mass per kilometer than other mammals. This is confusing - how is it that man is one of the best distance runners around, but is also one of the most wasteful runners as well?

Another interesting factoid: exercise produces an order of magnitude more heat load for a mammal than the hottest summer day in the Sahara. This means that many animals are limited by heat production - they literally can't sweat or pant fast enough to keep them running. Humans on the other hand, sweat more per unit surface area than any other species. Additionally, we Old World Anthropoids have the most control over their sweat glands than any other animals, due to their exclusive adrenergically innervated sweat glands™. Basically, humans are designed to be the top sweating animals on the planet! Take that!

Not only do we have elite hidrotic skills, but we also have a 2 legged gait, which turns out to be very useful for long distance running. The graphic shows the energy consumed versus speed for a human and a horse. You can see that the horse has 3 different gaits: walk, trot, and gallop, and each of them have an optimal speed. Our walking gait has an optimal speed, but when we're running, the energy cost is relatively flat with respect to speed. This is great for chasing antelope to death - we can just run at a speed that the antelope doesn't like, which tires the antelope out by forcing it to run in fast bursts. Our two legged gait lets us breathe independently from our strides. Other animals have to breathe in sync with their stride because their 4 legged gait opens and closes their chest during each stride. Breathing too fast or too slowly is not good for running, which leads to optimal speeds for other animals (you try hyperventilating while exercising next time and see how well it works).

Finally, we have developed the capacity to carbo-load. I ate a lot of spaghetti during my cross-country days, and it turns out that it's not just a placebo. Humans can plan ahead for an upcoming hunt, adjusting the glycogen reserves in their muscles, by short term dietary changes. In other words, our bodies are designed for planned hunts. Fascinating!

The article I linked to at the top of the page is the original statement of this theory (1984), but the research has held up over time. Here's a summary article with more current understanding about the theory (not much changed): Endurance running and the evolution of Homo.

So, maybe running is life, after all...

Tesla Motors Progresses

2007-03-24T22:57:00.000-07:00

Validation Prototype

I confess to being a Tesla Motors fanboy. As an electrical engineer, I'm hopelessly and fatally attracted to the idea of powering a car with 7000 laptop batteries - what could be more cool than that?! The fact that it goes 0-60 in 4 seconds, has 250 mile range, and looks exotic doesn't hurt either. Of course, electric cars are the only real solution to automotive greenhouse gas emissions and also reducing our dependence on hostile, unstable, terrorist-supporting, hate-filled and dangerously capricious countries. I look at electric cars as our only effective weapon against Islamic terrorists. Maybe that's a little idealistic, but certainly we can all agree that energy independence or at least a step towards it would strengthen all of us.

Geopolitics are complicated and messy, so let's get back to Tesla. This week they announced they've received their first validation prototype, which means they're getting close to production! This puts Tesla in a league of its own compared with other startups making electric cars. Maybe when I grow up I'll get a Tesla. As for now, I'd be happy with a Mazda5.

Eco-preeners

2007-03-19T12:22:00.000-07:00

Goldman Sachs has been one of the most aggressive firms on Wall Street about taking action on climate change; the company sends its bankers home at night in hybrid limousines.
--The New York Times, Feb. 25

Charles Krauthammer editorial

I guess I'm glad it's fashionable to at least try to appear green. But the flood of pious, smug and plainly hypocritical platitudes coming from our cultural elite is disgusting, especially given their consumption levels.

That said, I wouldn't say no to a ride in a hybrid limousine...

Progress

2007-03-06T09:21:00.000-08:00

Technology marches on: "My new mobile phone is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary "features" aimed at idiots, including a mode that scans each text message and turns some of the words into tiny animations, so if someone texts to say they have just run over your child in their car, the word "car" is replaced by a wacky cartoon vehicle putt-putting onto the screen."

The wonders of modern technology

BTW, priapic is a fabulous word. Also poxy. Those Brits do know their vocab... =)

The Secret

2007-03-05T21:35:00.000-08:00

An thought-provoking article on The Secret at Salon. A friend pointed it out to me, along with an apropos Deep Thought: "It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money."

Deciding to want something is definitely the first step, and sometimes desire seems much more important than natural ability, but there is definitely something disturbing about the claim that Jesus was a millionaire who taught us strategies to maximize our worldly success. I wonder if Oprah has read Jesus' statements about wealth.

I'm a skeptic when it comes to such secrets - just like with weightloss programs and perpetual motion machines, in my book the only successful strategy is genuine work. And that's no secret.

UC Berkeley Symphony plays Mahler's 6th Symphony - a Review

2007-03-03T10:56:00.000-08:00

Last night the 'spoza and I escaped the kidlets for only the second time since Rosita was born 9 months ago (this is a momentous occasion - thanks to the Thteeds for babysitting!) We went to see Mahler's 6th symphony performed by the UC Berkeley University Symphony Orchestra.

Before we got to listen to Mahler, we heard the premiere of a contemporary piece called thalassinó, which turns out to be the PhD dissertation of a recently graduated composition student named Yiorgos Vassilandonakis. I tried to have an open mind about this piece - after all, I do occasionally listen to strange and hard modern orchestral music (by choice!). I was a little apprehensive to see the composer state in his notes that his goal was to "methodically" explore the different "parameters" of orchestral sound. I don't like methodical art, so I was worried the piece would turn out to be another forgettable modern piece, unloved by anyone except those who read 200 pages of context describing the hidden motives and structure of the work.

And I was right. The piece was dreadful. No coherent melody, no discernable structure, no unified rhythms, lots of quarter-tones and other esoteric and fragmented ideas all slammed together. I think they could have started at an arbitrary spot, played through the end and without pause started from the beginning, and no one in the audience would have been the wiser - it was that formless. The only emotion I felt was comic horror - horror from the ubiquitious screetching spidery harmonies, and comedy from the pointlessness of it all. The 'spoza and I tried hard not to laugh, since this was supposed to be artistic and serious, and indeed the orchestra was showing some virtuosity with their very challenging parts. But it didn't help that 2 of the cellos front and center on the stage were also snickering during the performance. Anyway, I wanted to like the piece - as Composer's Datebook reminds us, "All music was once new" - but I only like music that speaks to me, and this piece was a complete failure in that regard.

After a long intermission, we finally got to the Mahler. Performing in Mahler's 2nd symphony "Resurrection" was a life-changing experience, so I had high expectations of the 6th symphony, which has an enormous reputation amongst classical music lovers. And it turns out that I like the 6th as well.

The 6th symphony is most renowned for the use of a sledgehammer in the final movement. The sledgehammer represents the blows of fate, we are told, as the hero of the symphony is vanquished (hence the unsanctioned by Mahler, but universally used subtitle "Tragic"). The 'spoza and I positioned ourselves in the audience so that we could see the percussion section well and really enjoy the theatrics of using a sledgehammer in the middle of a symphony. It was great - except that we only noticed 2 blows during the finale instead of the 3 we were expecting (there are several different versions of the symphony, Mahler censored the third blow in some of them). I thought it was fascinating to watch the percussionist sneak all 4 feet of the pitch-black sledgehammer from off the floor and stealthily get ready to smash the heck out of a stepstool. I wonder if he was told to be surreptitious about wielding a sledgehammer on stage or if he did it out of reflex. If I was the one with the hammer, I would flourish it with gusto, since after all, one can't crescendo with a sledgehammer. (Maybe that's why I'll never get the part...)

Anyway, I'm a big fan of some really tragic music, like Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony, so I was expecting the 6th to be unremittingly bleak and depressing. But I've discovered the Mahler isn't as depressing as it's made out to be, at least not compared to Shostakovich. There were a lot of very lovely moments in the music, especially the Andante, which was just dreamy.

The UC Berkeley Symphony played well enough that I felt it was Mahler, but it didn't sweep 'sposa and I off our feet. They played all the notes right, and there was expression, but they weren't cohesive as an ensemble. The complicated counterpoint in the symphony demands exact rhythmic precision, but the performers weren't quite locked together.

A bigger problem was that they didn't establish enough contrast. The quiet, legato sections were not as polished as the frantic, loud parts, so they ended up feeling uncomfortable and rough. You really have to linger on the serene parts of Mahler, so that when his trademark death spirals suddenly begin, the listener is sucked in. Otherwise, the music gets frantic and loud, but not engrossing.

I think with just another week or two of rehearsal, the performance could have been breathtaking. As it is, I enjoyed it, but found myself wishing for more precision and expression.

Overall:
UC Berkeley Symphony Performance: 3/5
thalassinó: 1/5
Mahler 6: 4/5