The Kindness of Strangers

On Friday, weather.com reported that the chance of rain on this coming Saturday — a day of no small importance to me — is 0%.

Now that’s a bold statement, of course, but a reasonable interpretation of it is: “There is no way it is going to rain on Saturday”.

When I checked the weather again today, weather.com now reports a 20% chance of precipitation.

How is this possible? My not unreasonable interpretation of the precipitation chance number N on day D is: “There is an N percent chance that it will rain on day D: given the initial conditions present today, if day D were to occur 100 times, it would rain on N of the times.”

By this logic, 0% and 100% are very dangerous numbers. If a percent ever falls to 0% on a given day in advance of D, it can never leave 0% on subsequent days before D. Same with 100%. There is no occurrence that could induce a change. (Assuming arbitrary precision, which we’ll discuss later.)

I think what weather.com really means is: “Given what we know now, there’s an N% chance of rain on day D. But we may know more later.”

Also reasonable, but a really irritating interpretation for those of us who just want to know what the weather will be like. We don’t want to have to worry about what weather.com does or doesn’t know. And I think weather.com could account for this uncertainty by an empirical analysis of past 0% and 100% claims. How often did they have to change that number before day D? Add in a little factor that accounts for this uncertainty.

I don’t know enough about weather prediction to make any better suggestion at the moment. Also, I suspect that their desire to not appear overly precise, manifested in their use of only a single digit of precision in their percentages, is a real problem here. Anything under 5% might appear as 0%.

So that’s another good excuse. But the fact of the matter is that when I see 0%, I want to be able to plan my beach party with confidence. Don’t destroy my confidence, weather.com.

Damn. There’s so much beauty in music it’s absurd. What trick of evolution allows it this level of emotional resonance?

When I was in high school, someone gave me a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. Of course, all of his classics (“The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, etc.) were present, but at the very back was a story I had never read before, called “The Imp of the Perverse”.

The Imp is a sneaky guy who lives in your head. He’s the one who implores you to pull the red stop cord on the train, or take a step over the edge of the Grand Canyon – or to drop a snide comment at your family reunion. He eggs you on with a simple motivation: to see what happens when you do exactly the thing you’re not supposed to do.

I was fascinated by this concept, mainly because I often feel this temptation. (I feel like it should be as well known as schadenfreude – it’s got to be as universal, and there’s no other good term for it.)

Anyway, I was delighted to read an article in the New York Times about the Imp featuring Daniel Wegner, who wrote the awesome The Illusion of Conscious Will. The article mentions that actively fighting “perverse” thoughts can paradoxically increase your chance of acting on them.

I had a related meta-problem: since I’ve read about the Imp of the Perverse, I’m always waiting for him to arrive. So as soon as I spot that tempting “Emergency Stop” button in the elevator, I think “Good ol’ Imp”, and before I know it I’m dreaming of pushing the button. One step closer.

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I have a very simple technique for highway driving: I drive 13 miles an hour over the speed limit. This is usually fast enough to place me into the fast lane, but slow enough that it’s not worth it for cops to ticket me. I’ve driven roughly 30k miles and have never been pulled over. So I think it’s a good strategy.

However, the Bay Area is tricky about speed limits. Changes are frequent, and can vary by up to 20 mph (50-65 on 101S in SF; 45-65 on 880N in Oakland). So if I’m cruising at 78, I can get into big trouble if I don’t notice that the limit just dropped to 45. I want some kind of phone or GPS app that will just tell me what the current speed limit is. (Even better: one that will beep when I exceed 13 mph over it.) Anyone? I don’t really care about speed traps; I just want to know the speed limit.

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I’ve been listening to a lot of American Analog Set lately. My friend Lonnie introduced me to them in 2000 and since then they’ve been a constant, steadying presence in my life. In fact, one of their songs was the genesis of the title of this blog. For various reasons I’ve listened to them less frequently of late, but they’re back.

I guess you could classify Amanset as “drone-rock”: whispered vocals, fuzzy or chiming guitars, languorous tempos, repetition, melancholy lyrics. A warm blanket. It’s easy to find them boring if you don’t listen carefully enough. But if you do, and let the music feel for you, it’s a powerful experience.

Here’s a playlist of some Amanset songs.

What’s my favorite Amanset song? None of these, actually. Why spoil the fun?

I may continue this trend of exploring bands that I like. Next up might be Porcupine Tree, just because Steven Wilson keeps pumping out amazing stuff.

How do dogs recognize each other?
You know what I’m talking about: dogs will ignore other species, but bark at and interact with each other. Now that doesn’t sound like an impressive recognition task, but consider that dogs have been bred over the last few thousand years into a staggering variety of subspecies, with radically different features, sizes, and proportions. How does a Great Dane know that a Chihuahua is a dog? (And vice versa; the chihuahua essentially has the brain of a wolf in the body the size of a rodent. That must be confusing.)

The first explanation that comes to mind is smell: dogs smell the same, and they have great noses, so it’s easy to tell if another animal is a dog. But I’ve seen many dogs bark at others – from behind a closed car window. So it’s something more sophisticated.

More possibilities: smell is first, sight is second, dogs only bark at similar-looking dogs if they can’t smell, etc.

Google didn’t come up with much. The best I could find is “Dogs too have their own scent and smell to establish who is who, sniffing around each other’s bodies. Dogs also use sight to first look and decide if it is a dog they are looking at and then sniff to find out if they know each other.”

I don’t have a dog (though I think they are awesome), so if you do I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Shopping by calories
I don’t know what the deal is with my metabolism, but I have to eat a ton of food each day. If I don’t eat breakfast, I won’t survive till lunch, and even after a big lunch I’m hungry by 4pm. When I go to a convenience store to grab some snacks, I often find myself shopping by calories: which item will give me the most calories per dollar? This sounds perverse, but I can’t help it. And I’ve found lately that I do this subconsciously even when I’m shopping in a grocery store! Weird. Does anyone else do this? Kent?

Obama’s Egypt speech
A thing of beauty. Read the transcript (it’s easy and pretty short). It’s nuanced, bold, and inspiring. Some people have been complaining that it’s all words, no action. But the speech itself – just words – is a huge step forward. I can’t imagine Bush even attempting this. Progress has to start somewhere.

An A-Z Music Project update
Earlier this year I started listening to all my music in alphabetical order. I had the ambitious goal of finishing by the end of the year. Well, there’s no way that’s going to happen. True, I had a very busy semester, one that didn’t leave much time for listening to music, but I’m now only halfway through the Bs (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, to be exact, and 70 hours done of 90 total in the Bs). My new projected end date: Jan 2012. Really?

I finally finished grad school. I’m now officially a Ph.D., though as in many things it’s pretty clear that the journey was more important than the destination. A (Ph.D.) friend of mine put it, roughly, this way:

When you get your Ph.D., you don’t feel euphoric; you feel relieved. It’s as if someone pulled a knife out of your back.

… and that about sums it up. Here are a few things I learned along the way (in no particular order):

• I love teaching. I TAed two classes and taught another. Loved them all. Teaching is now definitely a long-term career goal of mine.
• I love coding. NewsDog, Sudoku Slam, Total Fragmentation, and now Modista. There’s a joy in good engineering, a beauty in elegant design, and real satisfaction in making something that people can use.
• I like, but don’t love, research. Sadly, I’m now cynical about “selling” research, choose-your-own benchmarks, and the chance that anything cool will ever get used in the real world. Some people love the thrill of it, but I guess I don’t. When I started, academia seemed purer than business. But it quickly became clear that not much is different: the currency is simply fame instead of money. At the same time, I’m proud of what I’ve done, even if it won’t lead to anything practical. There’s some nice stuff in there, I suppose. (I still think that the proofs Bill and I did for the unpublished bin-packing paper are the most elegant I’ve contributed to.)
• I love California, as a perusal of the photo-entries of this blog will attest.
• I love playing the guitar, and wish I could play more often. Soon, perhaps.
• I love playing ultimate (frisbee).
• I love Bekah.

On the ultimate frisbee note, I just finished my four year “college” career playing for Cal. It ended on a low high note, if that’s possible. It was a huge time commitment — 5-6 days a week, nearly year round — but also very rewarding, and I made several great friends on the team. I reached a certain level of competence (a starting player for a top 10 team, some nice highlight photos), but never greatness. (I suppose that is how I am with most things.) It was really fun, though, and I’m sad to stop playing — though I’ll treasure my now-free weekends.

A few years ago I saw an Idlewild show in SF. The local opening band was called Why? and put on an incredible show. I picked up their album Elephant Eyelash (amazing lyrics), and investigated some other artists on their label/collective, Anticon, such as cLOUDDEAD. All good stuff.

However, I vividly recalled one song they played during the live set that (a) I thought was awesome, (b) featured a dude playing the vibraphone and the drums at the same time, and (c) was not on any of these albums.

After a while I forgot about Why? and only recently found out that they’ve released a new album that has the mystery song on it! The song is called “A Sky For Shoeing Horses Under”, and is just about as good as I remembered, sans a bit of live electricity.

(After listening to it, but only then, watch the video if you’re interested.)

I can’t stop listening to it. Well, except to listen to Motherlover, of course.

I’ve started a pretty bizarre project this year: to listen to all the music I own in alphabetical order (by artist and then by album name). Yes, that’s 14,245 tracks, nearly a thousand hours of music, from …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead to Yo La Tengo (Frank Zappa is under F). So if I listen for three hours a day, it’ll take me a year to get through it. It’s ambitious, but doable.

Why? For one, I’ll get to listen to more music. I swear, if I have to pick a CD to listen to, it can take me several minutes to do so. This eliminates choice. (And is much preferred to random, which is fun for a while, but quickly drives me nuts.) Second, it’ll give me a chance to rediscover old favorites I’ve forgotten, and explore music I haven’t yet given a fair shake.

I’ve also given myself some fairly loose rules: I don’t have to listen to A-Z exclusively; I can listen to any other music I want at any time. So if the mood is wrong, I don’t have to force it. However, I’ve found myself drawn to the challenge over the last month. The other rule is that if I get new music, I insert it into the library. It if comes after my current position in the alphabet, I’ll listen to it as part of the sweep; if not, too late.

At the start, I had some open questions. For instance, there are several artists for which I have many albums. Would listening to these albums all in succession drive me nuts? And which artist is going to be toughest? Would it be They Might Be Giants (219 songs, 7h33m)? Or Dream Theater (71 songs, 9h45m, average song length 8m13s)? Or maybe Alice in Chains (90 songs, 7h5m of depression)? Or the king, Beethoven (115 tracks, 17h34m)? Maybe I’d even enjoy that kind of immersion.

Progress thus far: I’ve made it through the As: (442 songs, 32h37m). Now onto Bach. It hasn’t been that bad. In fact, 7 hours of Alice in Chains was pretty cool. Worst experience so far: three albums of Autechre, which I had picked up because I liked Aphex Twin, but had never listened to seriously or in such isolation. Definitely not as good as Aphex Twin, and three albums worth (all listened to today) nearly put me over the edge. But I made it. And there have been more than enough quality experiences too. So far so good.

Just yesterday I thought of a cool addition. I signed up for Last.fm, a service that monitors what you’re listening to and suggests new tracks based on that data. I figured it would be neat to feed it my whole collection and see what it suggests. Unfortunately I had gotten through most of the As already, so all it got was Arrested Development, Arturo Sandoval, and Autechre thus far. Heh. Let’s see what it makes of that.

I have a clear favorite (in terms of artistic quality, not content). See if you can guess which one it is!

You might have heard about this from me already, but if not, here’s my latest project with my friend Arlo:

(click on the image to go to the site)

It’s a way to browse through items via visual similarity. Right now we have women’s and men’s shoes, handbags, watches, and eyewear, but we’re looking to add more stuff as well.

If you like it, please spread the word!

Well, I’ve warmed up a little to the SD850 IS. Here are some of my favorite pictures from this last year. The selection clearly shows my penchant for spiders and macro shots of flowers will cool backgrounds. I’ll have to broaden my range, I guess.

The Olympics are destroying my sleep schedule. Some thoughts:

• It’s funny that American media outlets are portraying the medal race as close (“Too close to call” proclaimed ESPN.com today.) We’re getting walloped.
• Does NBC really have to show the preliminaries for every artistic event (diving, gymnastics, etc.)? Couldn’t we just skip to the medal rounds, and show other entertaining events in the meanwhile? The poor woman who won gold in the discus for the US — a gold that’s worth just as much as any of Michael Phelps’s heralded golds — only had her medal ceremony televised. Not even a single throw. And what about awesome sports like team handball and ping pong? Sure, Americans don’t follow handball. But maybe that’s because they’ve never seen it. NBC could do so much good by introducing the US (even in small doses) to sports the rest of the world plays, or even other athletes, rather than fawning over the chosen few from start to finish.
• Don’t deny it: Bron-bron and KG would make a sick beach volleyball team.
• Usain “Unsane” Bolt is filthy. Disgusting. Sure, Phelps did a great job, etc., but his achievement really pales in comparison to Bolt’s. (I wrote a little bit about track’s competitiveness here). It’s going to be exciting to follow him over the next few years…
• It seems quite likely that at least one of the Chinese medal-winning gymnasts was under age. This is definitely a violation of the rules, and the IOC should grow a spine and do something about it. However, it raises the larger question of why there should be an age limit at all in gymnastics. It seems a bit of a farce to award a gold medal to a 16 year old when a 13 year old is actually the best in the world. (Or a 15-year, 11-month-old who just missed the cutoff.) I’ve heard some nonsense about how doing gymnastics could be damaging to younger bodies. Right. Like the current crop of 16 year olds started at age 15? In reality, they’ve been practicing since 5 or 6.
• Update: Jeez. I forgot just how insane decathletes are. Bryan Clay, the current leader: 10.4 in the 100, 25’6″ long jump, 48s 400, 6’6″ high jump. Damn!