Robert Perry Hooker

Crypto

2011-12-26T10:23:00.000-08:00

Theoretical computer science (TCS) is a surprisingly broad field. Algorithm design, computational complexity theory, classical information theory, quantum information theory, artificial intelligence, cryptography, and a host of other topics fall under TCS's umbrella.

In a sense, all of these subjects are different: each has its own specific set of theories, its own notational conventions, its own journals and conferences. However, "seen from above," TCS's sub-disciplines can be all thought of as attempts to understand one basic problem that's quite fundamental to the human universe. That problem, in a nutshell, is this: Why are some tasks¹ easy, and others² hard?

If "inherent difficulty" is the "mountain" of theoretical computer science, then each of its sub-disciplines represents an attempt to climb that mountain by a different route.

The particular brand of theoretical computer science that I study is cryptography, or "crypto" for short. Cryptography, loosely speaking, is the study of secret codes. Essentially, crypto USES the inherent difficulty of certain mathematical problems -"computationally intractable problems," in the lingo - in order to control access to information. Crypto is used to establish secure communications channels, to protect sensitive data like credit card or social security numbers, and, in the research I conduct, to guard software against reverse-engineering.

The most basic cryptographic systems can be described in terms of three conceptual objects: a message, a key, and an encrypted message. Each of these entities has a formal mathematical definition (which varies depending on the specifics of the cryptographic scheme in question), but the basic ideas are relatively simple.

The message m represents the information to be hidden.
The key k is a unique piece of information with desirable mathematical properties. Typically, the key is much shorter than the message.
The encrypted message, or "ciphertext" c is produced by combining the message and the key. Without the key, the ciphertext is meaningless gibberish.
The message m can be recovered by combining the ciphertext and the key.

All modern crypto-systems are variations on this theme.³ Until the 1970s, secure cryptography depended on pre-arranged secret keys. These systems provided excellent security, but their usefulness was limited by the fact that everyone involved needed to share a secret key in advance.

However, in 1976 Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman published a paper called New Directions in Cryptography which placed crypto on a new mathematical foundation - specifically, a foundation that depends on the complexity of mathematical problems! Their system introduced the concept of "public key cryptography," which allows two users - traditionally named "Alice" and "Bob" - to securely agree on a secret key without exchanging any information in advance.

Today, cryptography is still a very active area of research. Modern cryptography is focused on designing new schemes that enable ever-greater flexibility: two examples are functional encryption, which allows different users to hold different secret keys that decrypt different parts of the message, and fully homomorphic encryption, which allows mathematical operations to be performed on encrypted messages without decoding them first.

More broadly, cryptography is mankind's attempt to place the philosophical notion of "trust" on a rigorous mathematical foundation.

[1] For example, basic multiplication or blogging.
[2] Like factoring composite numbers, writing a mathematical proof, or composing a symphony.
[3] Actually, this isn't entirely true. Quantum cryptography is not based on "inherently difficult mathematical problems." Rather, quantum crypto depends on the fact that the act of measurement irreversibly affects quantum systems, which makes it possible to detect unauthorized attempts to access the secret information.

Human Motivation

2011-11-08T12:00:00.000-08:00

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed. -Mark Twain

What do people want?

I think this is an interesting question. Arguably, it forms the basis of all conscious human behavior - i.e., "people do what they do to get what they want" - and yet it almost certainly has no fixed answer. Furthermore, I suspect that at the best of times people act with incomplete knowledge re: their desires; more typically, people operate with little or no insight about their motivations. In other words, people¹ don't always know what they want.

Certainly many have tried to figure it out. Perhaps the best-known characterization of human wants comes from Abraham Maslow, who published a paper in 1943 called "A Theory of Human Motivation" that orders human needs hierarchically.²

Whether or not Maslow was "right" in any meaningful sense of the word is debatable, but his hierarchy IS a rough catalog of "things people want." Maslow's list is topped with the "self-actualization" needs, which are a bunch of fairly abstract concepts like morality, creativity, and problem solving. Maslow contends that these are the things people seek when everything else is taken care of: self-actualization is something people want even when they "have it all."

People in the developed world spend a lot of time pursuing self-actualization: sports, reading, music, movies, tv, games, art - even education³ can be thought of as self-actualization.⁴

To me, Maslow's thesis suggests a natural question: given that we can make statements about the needs of individuals, can we also make statements about what people want collectively? In other words, can Maslow's analysis of individual behavior be extended to the behavior of groups of individuals?

Do the needs of individuals drive the behavior of the collective whole? It seems natural that this might be the case. If so, then how are these needs manifested in the behavior of society at large? How is humankind actualizing itself? What problems are we solving? And, more to the point, what is society creating?

[1] E.g., me.
[2] Maslow's p.o.v. is by no means universal; by contrast, the Chilean philosopher Manfred Max-Neef has argued that human needs are fundamentally non-hierarchical.
[3] Not to mention blogging.
[4] Of course, it's not quite that simple - each of these activities has components that fall under different Maslow-vian headings, but that's not the point. The point is that self-actualization is important, and people devote lots of time and energy to achieving it.

Thinking Machines

2011-09-09T23:26:00.000-07:00

"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy." -Dorothy Parker

"A mind is a terrible thing to taste." -Unknown

What is a mind?

This is a tough question. Arguably, it's unanswerable: there's an entire branch of philosophy called epistemology that deals with questions like "What is understanding?" and "How do we know what we know?" Most of these questions don't have terribly satisfying answers.

Philosophical considerations aside (for now), this topic is ALSO fundamental to computer science (CS). In fact, CS has an entire sub-discipline devoted to understanding brains called artificial intelligence, or AI. Generally, artificial intelligence is concerned with the practical aspects of building systems that think like people.

Naturally, this implies another philosophical question¹ - namely, what does it mean to think?

Rather than tackle this whopper head-on, the great British mathematician Alan Turing proposed an alternative. His groundbreaking 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" begins like this:

I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?” This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms “machine” and “think.” ... Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

Turing's paper goes on to describe what's now called the Turing test for artificial intelligence. This test is surprisingly simple - an AI passes the Turing test if its responses to questions are indistinguishable from those of a human. More formally:

Place a computer and a human being in different rooms.
Using only some limited means, like an internet chat session or printed notes passed through a letter slot, allow the human to interact with the computer in whatever way s/he wishes.
At the end of the test, if the human believes he was interacting with another human rather than a computer, the AI system has passed the test.²

Earlier this month, the AI web app Cleverbot (arguably) passed the Turing test: the program was judged to be "59% human" by a group of 1,334 voters. By comparison, actual humans were rated as 63% human. Cleverbot is by no means the first or only computer system that's performed well on the Turing test - in the 1960s, a piece of software called ELIZA emulated a psychotherapist so convincingly that some test subjects refused to believe that ELIZA wasn't a person.³

For more about startlingly human computer programs, check out this characteristically excellent NYC Radiolab episode from May of this year.

A different approach toward a "definition of mind" is provided by the field of neuroscience. In contrast to AI, the goal of neuroscience is to build an understanding of the mind from first principles, by studying the actual physical machinery of existing minds. In a sense, AI and neuroscience tackle the same problem from different directions: AI is concerned with creating intelligent systems, while neuroscience works to reverse-engineer the minds we already have.

The Holy Grail of modern neuroscience is a quantitative description of the brain at the level of individual neurons. Such a description can be thought of as a "brain map" which shows both the location of AND connections between every neuron in the brain. This map has been termed a connectome, and efforts are under way to generate connectomes for a variety of organisms, including humans. Sebastian Seung's TED talk provides a nice introduction to connectomes.

Of course, computers are an integral part of the quest for the connectome. As a unit, the human brain is the most complex system known. Processing the immense amount of data implicit in a brain's structure REQUIRES computers... which makes for yet another an interesting philosophical connection (ha!) between "thinking machines" and people.

[1] EVERYTHING is philosophy! For example, try this exercise: go to a random page on Wikipedia. Click on the first link in the page that does not appear in italics or (inside parentheses). Repeat until a steady state is reached.

[2] Notice that Turing's definition is essentially saying, "We'll know it when we see it," an argument made famous by Justice Potter Stewart in his opinion re: the definition of hard-core pornography.

[3] ...and never mind what this implies about why psychotherapy works.

Randomness

2011-08-03T06:30:00.000-07:00

Randomness is a mysterious concept. Often, the word "random" is used to describe things that otherwise defy explanation, like the stock market, the weather, or "random acts of kindness." Intuitively, most people have a fairly good idea of what "random" means - perhaps, "something that can't be predicted," or "lacking an identifiable pattern" - but a label of "random" can also be an intellectual show-stopper.

Sometimes, the term "random" is used to convey an idea that's much more profound than just "irregular" or "patternless," because "random" can be used to describe why things happen. Random events occur, it seems, not for any discernible reason, but because they are random. In this case, the implication - one that can be troubling to a logical mind - is that a random event has no "why."

This raises a few natural questions:

Is randomness a fundamentally abstract concept, or does "real" randomness exist?
How can something that's truly random be distinguished from something that's simply not well understood?
What, exactly, does it mean to be "random?"

Not all of these problems have definite answers. However, the development of quantum theory lent some philosophical urgency to these questions, and computer science provides one way to approach the answers.

Randomness in Quantum Theory

In quantum mechanics, the act of measurement is a crucial concept. One of quantum theory's basic tenets¹ is that an unmeasured system - i.e., a system that nobody's looking at - does not exist in any one definite state.² Instead, the only meaningful description of such a system involves a set of many different possible states, each of which is associated with a probability. In quantum theory, it is only the act of measurement that causes a quantum system to "collapse" into one particular, distinct state.

Here's a analogy: consider a fair die, which has six sides. When this die is held in the hand, before it's rolled, it is not particularly useful to describe it as displaying a "three" or a "five" - the number on top doesn't really "matter." Rather, it's more appropriate to say that the die is simply a cube of plastic, printed with a number on each face, and that each face of the cube is equally likely to appear on top. Before the die is rolled, it has no state.

After the die is rolled, however, the number on top becomes significant. Now, the die can be said to exist in one of its six possible states, and it was the act of rolling the die that gave meaning to the number on top.

In this analogy, the die is a quantum system, and the act of rolling the die is like measuring the system. This analogy implies - correctly, according to experimental evidence - that two identical quantum systems will not necessarily yield identical experimental values when they're measured, in the same way that two identical dice do not always fall on the same number when they're rolled.

Here, physics and philosophy intersect. The probabilistic nature of quantum theory suggests that - at least on the quantum level - the universe is governed by processes which are in some sense random. This is a profound thought (with all kinds of implications relevant to the questions of free will and determinism), and even some of quantum theory's creators found it hard to accept: Albert Einstein famously stated, "God does not play dice," and he maintained until his death that the randomness inherent in quantum mechanics is actually a product of some deeper, yet-undiscovered deterministic process.

But how to tell?!

Computers and Randomness

In the latter half of the 20th century, the birth of computer science offered a new perspective on the theory of randomness. In the 1960s, a Russian mathematician named Andrey Kolmogorov defined randomness in terms of computer programs: Kolmogorov suggested that a string of truly random observations is always shorter, by itself, than any computer program which can reproduce that string.

Kolmogorov's definition of randomness immediately implies that computers alone can never produce truly random output: in the context of computers, randomness must always come from some other source!³

This fact suggests that - somehow - true randomness transcends computation, and that random data is somehow "greater" than anything a computer can do. This theory is apparently true: the 1970s saw the development of algorithms that require a source of randomness as part of their input. Superficially, this is a weird idea: how can an algorithm - by definition, a precisely defined step-by-step process - depend on something that's fundamentally imprecise?

Intuitive or not, though, randomized algorithms work, and they often vastly outperform their deterministic (non-randomized) counterparts. Modern computer scientists treat sources of randomness as a resource to be utilized appropriately in algorithm design.

Typically, these sources of randomness are derived from inherently physical processes like (for example) the decay of atomic nuclei. This fact, like Landauer's principle (which links computational processes to the world of thermodynamics), may ultimately provide a bridge between the abstract world of bits and the physical world of atoms, space, and time.

[1] Depending, to some extent, on one's philosophical interpretation of quantum theory.

[2] This extremely counter-intuitive notion is expressed formally in Bell's Theorem. Loosely speaking, Bell's Theorem implies that EITHER it is not meaningful to consider the specific states of quantum systems which have not been measured, OR quantum theory breaks the rule that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

[3] On a Macintosh or other Unix-like system, there's a nice way to access a source of randomness derived from mouse movements, keyboard strokes, how often the processor changes the task it's executing, and hard drive data access times. This source of randomness is represented in the filesystem as a special file called /dev/random, and the following command prints out 32 bytes worth of random integers drawn from /dev/random:

od -i -N32 /dev/random

Here, od stands for 'octal dump,' which is an old Unix program that displays binary data in a variety of formats (including octal). In this example, the -i option tells od to display the data as integers, and the -N32 option tells od to only read 32 bytes of data from the source file, which in this case is /dev/random.

Suffering

2011-07-29T21:15:00.000-07:00

"Musée des Beaux Arts"
by W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I like the sentiment expressed in this poem and painting, because I think it's true: the only suffering we really care about is our own. Maybe this is the way it has to be, and our limited capacity for compassion is simply another survival mechanism, akin to our opposable thumbs and upright posture. The irony, perhaps, is that we are capable of understanding empathy at all! What a quandary, that we human beings (apparently) have some control over our affinity for our fellow man.

Summer Reading

2011-07-10T19:17:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a lot this summer! Here are some short reviews of the books I've read since the end of the school year. For what it's worth, don't look for plot synopses here - let it be enough to say that ALL of these books were written by masters who understand that literature must entertain before it can enlighten.

The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin
This book won both the Hugo and Nebula awards (sci-fi's highest honors) in 1975. The main character is an extraterrestrial theoretical physicist, and "theory" underpins many aspects of this novel. Along the way, LeGuin explores alternative social structures, academia, government, child-rearing, and love. Thoughtful.
Blindness, by José Saramago
Born in Azinhaga, Portugal, Saramago won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, but don't let that fool you. Blindness is first and foremost an excellent story, and a surprisingly easy read: any interpretation of this work as an allegorical commentary on human nature is entirely optional! Often frightening, sometimes sweet, and utterly profound, this work is the product of a sensitive, insightful philosopher.
Child of God, by Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy is the most consistently dark author I know. However, he does not write "horror" in any mainstream sense of the word, because his stories do not strike me as a priori attempts to frighten or terrify the reader. Rather, McCarthy's tales are retrieved whole from those dark caverns of the soul where most storytellers are unwilling - or unable - to tread, and his "horror" arises naturally, gracefully, and without fear. McCarthy's gift is his ability to present to us the dark side of ourselves that we'd rather not acknowledge - and in so doing, he prompts us to reaffirm our desire for sweetness, joy, and love. Perhaps the strangest - and most wonderful - quality of Child of God is McCarthy's ability to instill compassion into the midst of utter depravity.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
This tale is modern, intricate, and suffused with magic. Murakami's narrative flow, preserved almost entirely unbroken for over 600 pages, is clear, matter-of-fact, and compelling. At the book's heart is a man's love for his wife, which he carries with a kind of stoic self-possession that struck me as (perhaps) uniquely Japanese.

Networking

2011-06-14T07:11:00.000-07:00

I've got a summer job working at the Global Network Operations Center at Indiana University. Part of the gig includes a weekly introductory networking class. During the section on network bridges, I found Radia Perlman's paper on the Spanning Tree Protocol, which is a crucial part of the Ethernet suite of networking tools. (Ethernet is ubiquitous: chances are, you're using Ethernet - and Ms. Perlman's algorithm - RIGHT NOW!)

She begins that paper with a lovely homage to Joyce Kilmer's classic poem "Trees". It's the best thing I've seen today!

Algorhyme
by Radia Perlman

I think that I shall never see
A graph more lovely than a tree.

A tree whose crucial property
Is loop-free connectivity.

A tree which must be sure to span
So packets can reach every LAN.

First the Root must be selected
By ID it is elected.

Least cost paths from Root are traced.
In the tree these paths are placed.

A mesh is made by folks like me
Then bridges find a spanning tree.

Zeno's Paradox and Planck Units

2011-05-22T23:52:00.000-07:00

Zeno of Elea was a Greek philosopher of the 5th century BC. Besides having a righteous name, Zeno was one of the first thinkers to explore the (somewhat) counter-intuitive idea of a limiting process. Zeno is famous for a handful of interrelated paradoxes about the apparently natural concepts of time and motion, and his observations have inspired great thinkers from Aristotle (322 BC) to Bertrand Russell (1970 AD).

Today, Zeno's most famous argument is known as the Dichotomy. Zeno used this argument to "prove" that all motion is an illusion, because it's impossible to actually "get" anywhere. The logic goes something like this:

Imagine a chicken who, simply for the sake of adventure, is preparing to cross a road. Imagine also that this chicken is intimidated by the prospect of crossing the WHOLE road, all at once - so he decides, rather pragmatically, to establish intermediate goals for himself along his expedition. The chicken's first stop is halfway across the road, because (he reasons) halfway seems like a good place to take a break.

Crossing half of the road takes the chicken quite a while, and he's pretty tired by the time he gets there. To pace himself, he decides that he'll go half of the remaining distance before stopping again. By the time he's made it to his new stopping point - he's now ¾ of the way across the road - the chicken is exhausted. He decides his next segment will be even shorter: just half of the distance that's left, or ⅛ of the total width of the road.

However, by the time Mr. C arrives at his third destination, he's come to an alarming realization (he's quite bright, for a chicken): if all of his rest stops are halfway between his current position and his destination, there will always be some non-zero distance left to travel before he gets to the Other Side!

At this point, his prospects of ever finishing seem dim... but he's a determined chicken, so he presses onward, always travelling half the remaining distance. Lo and behold, he eventually finds himself on the Other Side of the Road. He made it, but he's not quite sure how it happened.

©Gary Larson - The Far Side

A variation of this argument uses a footrace between Achilles and the Tortoise to illustrate a similar point about relative motion. Douglas Hofstadter offers a wonderful, witty dialog describing this contest in his staggeringly thought-provoking book Gödel, Escher, Bach.

It took a solid two thousand years for mathematics to catch up to Zeno's road-crossing chicken. In the 1600s, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently devised a clever system for dealing with the limits and infinite series implicit in Zeno's Dichotomy; today, this branch of mathematics is called calculus, and it's one of mankind's greatest (and most useful) intellectual achievements.

To some, though, purely mathematical explanations aren't always intuitively satisfying. It's nice that math acknowledges that a chicken CAN cross the road... but HOW? And what does it mean? What exactly happens when things move?

Viewed from this standpoint, Zeno's paradox isn't really about math at all. Instead, it's more closely related to a question about the fundamental nature of Life, the Universe, and Everything, namely:

Are time and space continuous or discrete?

Put another way, this question asks, "Can space and time be infinitely divided - is there always a way to split things in half, no matter how small... or is there some 'smallest interval' of space/time that can't be chopped apart?"

Quantum theory provides one possible resolution to Zeno's Dichotomy. Developed around the turn of the 20th century by Boltzmann, Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg, and a host of others as a way to describe the behavior of matter at subatomic levels, quantum mechanics works - numerous experiments have demonstrated quantum theory's ability to predict observable phenomena.

One of the basic tenets of quantum theory is the notion of quanta. Essentially, a quantum (plural: quanta) is a "smallest amount" - a quantity which cannot be divided. In physics, a quantum of length is about 1.6 × 10⁻³⁵ meters, and is known as a Planck length after the physicist Max Planck. This is an unimaginably short distance, but it implies that a road-crossing chicken can only travel "half the remaining distance" 116 or so times (because 2^-116 ≈ 10⁻³⁵) before he must either "go all the way" and travel an entire Planck length, or remain where he is and go nowhere.

It seems, then, that quantum mechanics has resolved Zeno's Dichotomy paradox by demonstrating that space is discrete, and motion is achieved by traveling many, many Planck lengths one after another.

Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple.

In fact, another of Zeno's ideas - he was quite thorough! - disabuses this notion as well. This paradox, known as the Arrow, uses the relationship between time and distance to show that an entirely discrete universe is impossible as well. Though Zeno probably knew very little about the formal link between time and space, Einstein's theory of relativity establishes a clear interrelationship between space and time via the speed of light c, which represents the maximum speed at which ANYTHING can move: 299792458 meters per second. Thus, a quantum of time is the amount of time it takes light to travel one Planck length: about 5.4 × 10⁻⁴⁴ seconds.

Zeno's Arrow paradox goes something like this:

Consider an arrow in flight. If time consists of indivisible instants, then nothing can happen "in between" units of time, and an arrow in motion is, at each smallest moment, stationary. The arrow can't be moving, since that would imply some degree of motion "in between" the indivisible instants of time - which would imply an amount of time smaller than the indivisible unit. Thus, at any given instant, an arrow in motion is equivalent to an arrow at rest that was placed, motionless, in the same position. However, it is contradictory to say that an arrow in motion is EVER identical to an arrow at rest, because one is moving and the other is not.

©Gary Larson - The Far Side

Thus, like the wave-particle duality of matter posited by quantum theory, it seems that space and time are neither fundamentally discrete nor continuous, but are instead - somehow - both.

This suggests some natural questions. If the universe is both discrete and continuous, is it possible to measure and quantify the "discrete-ness" or "continuity" of a particular part of the universe? How much "discrete-ness" does a subatomic particle have? How much "continuity" is possessed by an arrow in flight? And what is it about these objects that determines these properties? Finally, and perhaps most importantly to the chicken... why?!

Landauer's Principle

2011-05-05T18:53:00.000-07:00

In 1961, Rolf Landauer published a landmark paper titled "Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process" in which he observed that irreversible computational processes emit heat. Landauer's principle is significant because it provides a direct link between physics and information theory, and, as of this writing, the full importance of this connection is not fully understood.¹

Thirteen years prior to Landauer's discovery, Claude Shannon launched the field of information theory with his seminal paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. In this paper, Shannon defined the notion of information entropy, which quantifies the information content of any particular message.² Interestingly, information entropy H was so named NOT because of a direct link to the thermodynamic quantity S, but because the formulas for S and H look exactly the same:

Of course, p_i represents a fundamentally different³ quantity in each equation, and the constant k takes on different values and units, but the similarity is striking nonetheless.⁴

What, then, IS an "irreversible computational process?" Consider the humble Boolean AND gate, which is a fundamental component of computers. This circuit accepts two bits as input and yields one bit of output:

An AND gate computes the logical conjunction of its two input bits: it produces a '1' if and only if BOTH inputs are '1'. This means that there are three other possible input pairs that generate the output '0': (0,1), (1,0), and (0,0). Thus, the list of inputs and outputs⁵ for an AND gate looks like this (the '∧' symbol means AND):

(1∧1) → 1
(1∧0) → 0
(0∧1) → 0
(0∧0) → 0

Now, imagine that an observer is given access to the output bit and ONE of the input bits. Here, the important thing to notice is that ½ of the time it's impossible to determine the OTHER input bit just by looking at one of the input bits and the output bit. To illustrate: if the known input bit is '0' and the output bit is also '0', then the unknown input bit could be EITHER a '1' or a '0'.

In a sense, this implies that one of the two input bits⁶ is "lost" as it passes through the AND gate. What Landauer observed is that this "lost bit" is not really "lost" at all - it turns into heat. Specifically, that bit becomes (kT ln 2) joules worth of heat, and in this case the k is the SAME k that's in the equation for S - namely, Boltzmann's constant.

Most people intuitively understand that information is powerful. Is it possible that this is also literally - physically - true?!

[1] By me.
[2] Such messages are usually expressed as a string of bits - 1's and 0's.
[3] We think.
[4] See this Wikipedia page for more details.
[5] Called a "truth table," this list completely defines the behavior of an AND gate.
[6] ...or perhaps more accurately, ½ of each of the input bits...

Tech Stocks, Foxy Moneybags! Tech Stocks!

2011-04-28T20:13:00.000-07:00

If I could buy one and only one tech stock, I'd buy Intel. Here's why:
Intel dominates the mainstream microprocessor market (how's that for some economic alliteration!?). As far as I can tell, the only things that can seriously threaten Intel's business are: 1) a major revolution in the way computers work, or 2) government antitrust regulation. Condition 2) is easy: if Intel is someday forced to divest, then (I imagine) any stakeholders are likely to emerge from that process with pieces of the diversified entity... which will probably still be valuable assets in and of themselves.

Condition 1) is a little trickier. The history of scientific development in the 20th century suggests that major technological revolution is not just a possibility, but a near certainty. HOWEVER, given what I think I know about computer science, I suspect that our collective ability to PROGRAM computers lags far behind our ability to manufacture them. Thus, I think it's likely that we'll see a major paradigm shift in the way processors are USED before we see a revolution in the way processors are BUILT. I think parallelism in code will become ubiquitous, I think we'll see new and exciting algorithms, and I think we'll see a change in the way major software products are constructed & maintained (open source?!) before we have a practical quantum computer / DNA computer / nanotech computer (pick your favorite).

I also think that because Intel's primary product is inherently physical, the company is potentially less vulnerable to the vagaries of the populace than software firms. Put another way: I think it takes longer to design, test, manufacture, integrate, and distribute computer chips than it does to implement a better search algorithm / social networking site - which makes Intel a better bet for long-term investing than certain other high-profile tech companies.

Whether this ALSO means that someone should make a movie about Claude Shannon¹ is a matter of debate. But I'd probably watch it!

[1] No disrespect to Gordon Moore & Robert Noyce, who actually started Intel.

East St. Marys Peak

2011-04-24T12:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday D.B. & I skied up and down East St. Marys peak in the Mission mountains near St. Ignatius.

View East St. Marys Peak in a larger map

Along the way we were treated to some incredible views of Gray Wolf Peak's intimidating west face:

We summited under cloudless skies (click here for a summit panorama)...

...and skied a wonderful fast line down the south face!

Penrose Tilings

2011-04-13T22:06:00.000-07:00

I think Penrose tilings are cool.

First...

Intuitively, a 'tiling' is just what it sounds like: it's an arrangement of 'tiles' that covers a surface without gaps. Parquet floors¹, a brick wall, and tessellations by M.C. Escher are all examples of tilings.

Perhaps surprisingly, tilings are mathematically as well as aesthetically compelling. The definitive text on the subject, Grünbaum and Shephard's Tilings and Patterns, is both rigorous AND chock-full of interesting pictures. That title, out of print for over a decade, is due to be re-released this year in a accessibly-priced softcover edition.

Most familiar tilings are periodic. Loosely speaking, a periodic tiling forms repeating patterns, and it's possible to translate a periodic tiling - move it some distance left, right, up or down² - such that the translated version looks exactly the same as the original. Periodicity is arguably what makes tilings so useful: this property makes it possible to build something large (like a brick wall) out of many copies of something small (a brick), and still have the large object grow & behave predictably.

Penrose tilings, on the other hand, belong to a rather special family. Penrose tiles, along with Wang dominoes, Ammann tiles, and a host of other examples, are special because they ONLY generate tilings that are aperiodic - and unlike their periodic cousins, aperiodic tilings never repeat.

By themselves, aperiodic tilings aren't terribly mysterious: it's possible to construct an aperiodic tiling out of bricks, for example, simply by randomly choosing whether to place each brick on its side or stand it on end.

However, it's pretty obvious that bricks CAN form a periodic tiling, if the builder is so inclined. What's fascinating about Penrose tiles³ is that they can ONLY generate aperiodic tilings - which means that any tiling built with Penrose tiles, no matter how large, will never repeat itself.
In a sense, aperiodic tilings straddle the boundary between order and chaos: they are at once inherently ordered and disordered. Interestingly, this dichotomy yields a natural link to a quasi-philosophical branch of mathematics known as computability theory, which (loosely speaking) seeks to answer the question, "What questions can be answered?"

In this case, the existence of Penrose tiles (and the many other examples of aperiodic tile sets) implies that the question⁴ of whether or not an arbitrary collection of tiles can cover the entire plane without gaps is undecidable. This places the tiling problem in the same class as Turing's famous Halting Problem and the challenge of determining whether two topological shapes are homeomorphic.

Notably, the great Neal Stephenson used aperiodic tilings as a plot device in his excellent sci-fi epic Anathem. In that work, an aperiodic tiling game known as the Teglon served as a humbling test of academic skill - and was only ever solved by individuals approaching the divine.

[1] Think Boston Garden.
[2] No rotations allowed.
[3] Named after the English mathematician Roger Penrose, who is probably the most famous but by no means only person to study the phenomenon of aperiodicity.
[4] Decision problem!

If it's not too dear...

2011-03-31T01:26:00.001-07:00

Freedom

2011-03-26T23:01:00.001-07:00

Wow.

My aunt, who has excellent taste, recently sent me a copy of Jonathan Franzen's 2010 novel Freedom. Last weekend, in what became one protracted sitting (with short breaks for food and sleep), I read this book essentially cover-to-cover. Then, I hurried to the library to check out a copy of his 2001 novel The Corrections.

Franzen has a rare gift. Reading Freedom, one gets the sense - inaccurately - that the book was not laboriously crafted, revised, edited, and re-written, but instead produced in a moment of unconscious grace: something akin to the preternatural fluidity of an athlete who makes an impossible play.

"Words made everything less safe, words had no limits, words made their own world," Franzen writes, and that is true of this book. Freedom is not an entirely comfortable novel, and it is certainly not a bedtime story. What it IS, however, is something like life itself: surprising, gritty, lovely, funny, sad - nearly heartbreaking - but, in the end, unquestionably worthwhile.

Forgetfulness

2011-03-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

My mom liked this enough to send it to me.

"Forgetfulness"

by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot,

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,

to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye

and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,

and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,

the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue

or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those

who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night

to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted

out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Topology

2011-03-16T21:10:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, the Alexander Horned Sphere came up in conversation with one of my professors. The AHS is not a sphere in any typical, intuitive sense - rather, it's a pathological, TOPOlogical (as in, "relevant to the field of topology") construction.

This interesting 'object' is cool because it's homeomorphic to the sphere¹, but its compliment - i.e., what's left over in space when you take this object away - is not simply connected².

Another cool pathological example that seems to defy logic is the Banach - Tarski paradox. This paradox is a great topological result that seems to state that it's possible to get something from nothing: Banach-Tarski says that, given one ball in 3D space which is made up of an infinite number of points, it's possible to split that ball up into a finite number of pieces, and then reassemble the pieces into TWO balls of identical size. This result depends on a fundamental mathemato-philosophical assumption called the Axiom of Choice, which states that given any collection of non-overlapping, non-empty sets, it is possible to generate a new set³ which includes exactly one element from each member of the collection. Fascinatingly, the Axiom of Choice directly implies the Law of the Excluded Middle, which says that any statement must be either true or false.

Whether or not these concepts are relevant to more prosaic, everyday questions like "skiing vs. snowboarding" is entirely a matter of opinion!

[1] Topologically speaking, homeomorphic means "the same as" - the AHS can be "extruded" from a sphere made of some infinitely stretchable substance without having to cut the material or join it back together.

[2] Imagine a ring looped around one of the arms of the AHS. Imagine that this ring can be moved, and is re-sizeable - it can be made arbitrarily large or small - but it can't be cut and can never touch the AHS. "Not simply connected" means that it's IMPOSSIBLE to move and/or re-size the ring in such a way that it can be removed from the AHS.

[3] ...called a transversal or choice set...

Friends

2011-03-16T20:41:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, two friends from "life before grad school" drove ten hours (one way!) and took time off work to come hang out with me. (I know! Me!)

More than anything, it's people who make our lives what they are. Gentlemen: er, sorry - rock climbing hooligans: thank you. You make MY life better. 'Till next time!

Tyler

Ken

Y.T.!

Frutti di Mare

2011-03-07T18:56:00.000-08:00

Translated literally, 'frutti di mare' means 'fruit of the sea.' This classic Italian recipe came to me courtesy of my dad's friend Ray, who prepared a truly stunning version of this for a group of us the other week. It's delightful, easy, and yields a pot that's somewhere in between a soup and a stew. Mussels, clams, or other shellfish can be substituted or added at will - get a selection of whatever looks good!

I'll have the lot!

1/2 onion, finely chopped
garlic
1 c. dry white wine
1/2 c. olive oil
Italian parsely, chopped
2 pints (boxes) grape tomatoes, sliced in half
1 lb. crimini mushrooms, sliced in half
1 lb. scallops
1 lb. shrimp
2 lb. mild white fish; e.g. cod, sliced
Italian spices
4c. water

Sauté onions and garlic in olive oil. Add white wine, parsley, and spices to taste. Bring stock to a boil. Add seafood, mushrooms, and tomatoes; simmer for about 10 minutes or until seafood is cooked. Serve with croutons and/or grated Italian cheese.

The Guns of August

2011-02-27T08:49:00.000-08:00

The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman, is a work of popular history that chronicles the first events of World War I. It earned the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1963 for its engaging prose, accurate attention to detail, and lucid organization, and it launched Ms. Tuchman's literary career (which eventually included another Pulitzer). This book is a scholarly work that's both accurate and fun to read: it's exciting but not overwrought or grandiose, and detailed without being tiresome or dry. In short, it's a wholly readable presentation of a series of events that arguably shaped the course of the entire twentieth century.

Many historians contend that WW II was a direct consequence of the social and political upheaval that characterized the aftermath of WW I. Similarly, the Cold War (and all its attendant nuclear drama) was shaped to large degree by the state of the planet after WW II. Tuchman's thesis, then, is that all of these events - WW II, the Cold War, and indeed the world's CURRENT socio-political climate - were fundamentally influenced by a single inflection point that occurred at the end of the first month of WW I.

In Tuchman's account, the balance of this inflection point - and the ultimate fate of the war - was tipped by "one man in a hurry," who recognized and seized the Allies' last opportunity to stem the inexorable German onslaught. As the German general Von Kluck advanced to within 40 miles of Paris with the French and British armies in full retreat, the French general Joseph Gallieni recognized and seized an opportunity to force a decisive battle - the Battle of the Marne.

Joseph Gallieni

"So close had the Germans come to victory," Tuchman writes, "so near the French to disaster, so great, in the preceding days, had been the astonished dismay of the world as it watched the relentless advance of the Germans and the retreat of the Allies on Paris, that the battle came to be known as the Miracle of the Marne."

In her afterword Tuchman remarks, "Men could not sustain a war of such magnitude and pain without hope - the hope that its very enormity would ensure that it could never happen again and the hope that when somehow it had been fought through to a resolution, the foundations of a better-ordered world would have been laid."

Was that the case? It is up to us to ensure that the answer is 'yes.'

Quick Hits

2011-02-10T12:56:00.000-08:00

Here's a couple of topics I find interesting:

Entropic Gravity

Last year, the Dutch theoretical physicist Eric Verlinde published a paper called "On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton", in which he characterizes gravity as an emergent phenomenon resulting from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (2LOT) and the holographic principle. 2LOT, which captures the tendency of physical systems to increase their entropy, is particularly interesting because it's the only physical law that implies an obvious direction for the flow of time.

I found out about this paper after considering systems that yield a net complexity increase: evolution and gravity were the two that came to mind, and they do so in the presence of 2LOT, a law that says complicated things tend to fall apart, rather than self-assemble! However, in sharp contrast to Dr. Verlinde, my intuition is NOT an extension of a firm theoretical grounding in the subject, but rather a simple linear combination of topics I don't really understand.

The internal monologue may have gone something like this:

"What are some things you don't understand?"
"Well, gravity for one. NOBODY really understands the why of gravity."
"Good. And another?"
"How about entropy? Thermodynamics rocked my world when I took that class."
"'Entropic Gravity!' Perfect! Go with that."
A Turing Machine in Conway's Game of Life

Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automaton invented by the mathematician John Horton Conway. In basic terms, a cellular automata consists of a grid of squares and a set of rules. Each square on the grid can be in one of two possible states ("on" or "off"), and the state of the grid (i.e., which squares are "on" and which are "off") is updated at some regular interval according to the rules.

A Turing machine, on the other hand, is a conceptual model of a computer created by mathematician Alan Turing in 1937 (before digital computers existed!). Both Turing machines and cellular automata are near and dear to the hearts of theoretical computer scientists, because they represent very basic computational models, and such models are crucial to the study of the limits of computation.

Here, Paul Rendell constructed a Turing machine within the Game of Life, thereby demonstrating that anything computable can be computed within the Game of Life. For the full effect, download the nicely constructed cellular automata tool Golly and load Mr. Rendell's Turing machine pattern. This is a mind-numbingly complicated example, and while I'd love to make a joke at Mr. Rendell's expense (perhaps something about having an exponentially-bounded amount of time on his hands), I won't because 1) This has philosophical importance, and 2) Damn that's cool!

Higher One

2011-02-02T20:43:00.000-08:00

The University of Montana made a disappointing move by enlisting Higher One (a wholly owned subsidiary of Bancorp) to distribute financial aid to students.

Though the University has publicly stated that it expects to save about $25,000 per year by using Higher One to distribute money to students, that amount only represents about 0.01% of the University's annual general fund expenditures. Ironically, this suggests that money is NOT the University's primary reason for partnering with Higher One. So then, why? Perhaps the U is simply tired of dealing with all those dollars.

Money, by its very nature, is hard to deal with. If money grew on trees, economics wouldn't work: after all, money's value depends on its scarcity. This means that handling money - keeping it safe, dividing it up, and making sure it gets where it's supposed to go - is a challenging task. This chore is made all the more difficult by the strong emotions money inspires - said Bob Dylan, "Money doesn't talk - it swears."

Whatever their motivation, giving Higher One the opportunity to make a profit by handling millions of students' dollars is sad, because according to Higher One's 3rd quarter report for 2010, "...approximately 88% of our revenue was generated from interchange fees, ATM fees, non-sufficient funds fees, other banking services fees and convenience fees." Those fees are ultimately paid by Higher One account holders - in other words, students.

The University of Montana has granted Higher One the exclusive opportunity to charge students for handling their money. What's more, incoming students won't get a choice of service providers: they'll be forced to do business with Higher One.

Essentially, the University is "passing the buck" with respect to the disbursement of financial aid. Instead of taking the responsibility for distributing those funds, the U has washed its hands of the burden and placed another intermediary between students and their cash - an intermediary that, unlike the University, is more concerned with students' bank accounts than their education or welfare.

Summer is...

2011-01-22T18:09:00.000-08:00

...a state of mind.

I took this picture on the North Fork road just west of Glacier National Park.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

2011-01-15T17:05:00.000-08:00

Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a pretty good book. It's short (≈50,000 words), ultimately sweet, and it's believable, mainly because the plot is driven by the protagonists' flaws, rather than their virtues. Despite its length and uncomplicated prose, it's not exactly "light reading:" Haddon, in a remarkably accessible manner, explores BIG ISSUES like romantic relationships, the deep structure of the universe, and the course of human evolution.

The unlikely vehicle at the center of the story is a 15 year old autistic boy. Though Mr. Haddon has publicly stated that he knows "very little" about autism / Asperger's syndrome, he seems to have captured SOMETHING of the essence of that condition - or at least, something of the essence of that condition as it appears to people on the outside looking in. In any case, Haddon (or at least, his story!) is both sensitive and insightful.

Those considerations aside: it's also a fine read. The mathematically inclined will appreciate references to the Turing test for artificial intelligence, Conway's cellular automata, and the Sieve of Eratosthenes. Lovers of fiction will appreciate the crisp tempo and essentially endearing characters.

Rumor has it that a movie is in the works.

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

2011-01-05T21:51:00.000-08:00

by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
     and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured
     with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

Source: Hubblesite.org

...

2011-01-03T23:13:00.000-08:00

People try hard to be better than they are.

The quest for moments of beauty is what people DO. They seek those instances which are transcendent, extraordinary... above the ordinary routine of everyday existence. Whether it's consciously realized or not, THIS is the stuff of life: the desire for grace.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-26T15:39:00.001-08:00

Dear Friends,

This is 2010 Christmas letter from the Hooker family. (You know: Bob, Carol, Perry, and Lewis? From Indianapolis? Remember?)

When I (Perry) asked Mom, “Why do you want a Christmas letter, anyway?! They’re so weird and impersonal!” she replied, “Well, because I really like reading the ones that other people send us.”

I couldn’t argue.

So, without further ado: Our year, in a nutshell.

Lewis spent the early part of 2010 in Snowbird, UT where he skied a lot, worked a little, and generally improved the philosophical enlightenment of the greater Salt Lake valley. As the snow melted, he followed the runoff south to Moab and gainful employment as a raft guide on the Colorado river. I visited him there in July, and we spent three days running class V rapids in Cataract Canyon. When we flipped in in Big Drop 2, which was flowing that day at 42,000 cubic feet per second (CFS), we lost oars, gear, and bent the steel frame of our raft - but Lew managed to pull ME out of the water and back onto the boat. Lew now lives in Portland, Oregon with his girlfriend Karli and is (reportedly) “super happy.”

Dad maintained his title as chief “Pathologist-on-Bicycle” at Hendrick’s Community Hospital in Danville, Indiana. When I asked him, “Are you reforming the nation’s health care system from within, one biopsy at a time?” he replied, “I’m trying!” [1] Outside of work, Dad ripped off another 5000 miles on the bike, though he still insists that he’s old and fat. He’s certainly not fat.

Mom spent a lot of time this year taking care of her mother-in-law Betty. At 93, Grandma is still in full possession of her faculties, and though she still acts surprised every time she beats her grandchildren at the card table, a broken hip has forced her to discontinue her victory dance. Mom also volunteers her remarkably comprehensive web-programming skills to the Association for MIT Alumnae (‘alumnae’ implies women - I had to look it up!) and the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Web programming can be frustrating at the best of times, but as far as we can tell, it hasn’t driven her crazy... yet.

And as for me? I study computer science at the University of Montana in Missoula. I got straight A’s last semester, and, if you’re interested, you can read my research paper about RNA secondary structure prediction on my website at http://rphv.net. (I also wrote the Christmas letter. On Boxing Day! Ha!)

We hope to hear from you soon.

With love,

Bob, Carol, Perry, and Lewis

[1] “...and failing miserably!”

What I Learned This Semester (Part 1)

2010-12-17T16:34:00.000-08:00

The coolest thing about theoretical computer science is that it's not really about computers at all. It's actually about Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Some of the best computer-scientific results tiptoe along the fine line that divides mathematics and philosophy.¹ To an observer, this metaphysical daredevilry is both mystifying ("How does it DO that?!") and inspiring ("So what does it MEAN?").

Classifying problems according to their inherent difficulty is one thing that theoretical computer scientists do a lot. Appropriately, these problems are often pretty ordinary, like "What's the best way to make change at the cash register for a certain amount of money?" or "Is it possible to pack all these different-sized boxes into this truck?" Typically, characterizing a problem’s "hardness" is a good first step to SOLVING it - and most computer scientists DO actually like to solve things!²

However - and this is where the philosophers³ take center stage - any system which attempts to classify problems on the basis of "difficulty" suffers from one glaring flaw: "difficulty" is an inherently subjective term. Every person - every mind - has a different idea of what's "hard" and what's not. To address this, computer scientists have done their utmost to define "difficulty" in a way that's independent of any specific mind: in other words, they've attempted to create an abstract definition of what it means to think. This is fitting: after all, computers were originally called "thinking machines," and in some sense computers are the result of attempts to mechanize certain elements of the thought process. The abstract metric that computer scientists use to measure how much "thinking" a given problem requires is called computational complexity.

Computer scientists are good at classifying problems by computational complexity. In fact, they're SO good at it that they've discovered many, many different "levels" of complexity, and at the top of this "hierarchy of hardness" lie the undecidable problems, and another bridge to the philosophical realm.

Undecidable problems are more or less exactly what they sound like: they’re questions that, by their very nature, CANNOT be reliably answered. Consider the following phrase, known as the Liar’s Paradox:

"This sentence is false."

Does the Liar’s Paradox assert a true statement? If the sentence is false, then the Paradox asserts a true statement; but if it’s true, then the statement must (as it says!) be false! The truth assertion of the Liar’s Paradox is a relatively simple version of an undecidable problem, and one possible resolution to the paradox is to declare that the statement is neither true nor false, and must therefore be something else. What IS that "something else?" Ask a philosopher!

In the 1930s, a computer scientist named Alan Turing and a mathematician named Kurt Gödel demonstrated that computer science and mathematics have their own versions of the linguistic dilemma posed by the Liar’s Paradox.

Turing demonstrated the general undecidability of something called the Halting Problem, which can be described thusly: "Given a description of a computer program, decide whether the program eventually finishes (halts) or continues to run forever." Turing showed that it’s possible to build a program that halts if and only if it runs forever - another paradox!

Similarly, Gödel demonstrated a broad result about mathematics in general: he proved that ANY mathematical system of sufficient expressive power cannot prove its own consistency, or, put another way, that math alone isn’t enough to prove that math is "correct!"

[1] Said line, if it even exists, probably has fractal dimension . You know, like the Koch curve?

[2] Like normal people! Only nerdier.

[3] Many of whom are named Bruce.

Computational Complexity

2010-11-24T14:44:00.000-08:00

One of the most significant open questions in theoretical computer science (and indeed all of mathematics) is whether or not P = NP. P and NP are what's called computational complexity classes, and they're interesting because they seem to describe something fundamental about the way the universe works. What's more, they do so in a way that's consistent with certain intuitive notions that most people - and not just theoretical computer scientists! - acquire during the course of everyday life.

Generally speaking, computational complexity classes give a rigorous mathematical definition of a problem's inherent difficulty. For what it's worth, P stands for "polynomial" and NP stands for "nondeterministic polynomial," but all you really need to know is that P means "relatively easy - we can handle these problems!" and NP-complete means "pretty hard - we can really only deal with small versions of these problems" (more on this later). Also, beware! If you mistakenly say that NP means "not polynomial," any computer scientists within earshot will be duty-bound to lecture you ad nauseum about Turing machines, asymptotic notation, and Boolean logic. Here's a diagram from Wikipedia about the relationship between the classes P, NP, and NP-complete:

The cool thing about computational complexity classes, however, is that they're hugely applicable to everyday life. People solve small instances of NP-complete problems all the time, and the ability to deal with these types of problems is generally associated with successful types who have corner offices and stylish writing implements. In fact, in a recent episode of the TV show "The Office," one of the characters is promoted from his warehouse position to a corporate desk-job after he shows the company president an improved solution to a classic NP-complete problem that involves efficiently scheduling a limited number of delivery trucks.

Scheduling problems segue nicely into what is perhaps THE classic example of an NP-complete problem: Given a list of cities and the distances between each of the cities, what is the most efficient (shortest) way to visit all the cities on the list? This is known as the TRAVELING SALESMAN problem and, as you might imagine, it crops up all the time when planning multi-city tours for major rock bands... or just running 'round town to the grocery store, the laundromat, and library/bar (depending on your inclination).

Sudoku is another example of an NP-complete problem. To illustrate what makes NP-complete problems special, consider this: imagine a Sudoku puzzle that, instead of using the numbers 1 to 9 on a 9x9 grid, uses the numbers 0-9 on a 10x10 grid. (Check out this link for an example.) Sudoku players will confirm that this type of puzzle is quite a bit harder than its smaller sibling, even though we've only increased the size of the grid by one square. This, in fact, is the essence of NP-complete problems: any increase in the size of the input makes finding a solution MUCH harder (exponentially harder, to be exact).

And finally, the MOST interesting thing about King Charles the First... um...

No, wait. I'll come in again.

Finally, perhaps the MOST interesting thing about NP-complete problems is that, due to the way problems are mathematically proved to BE NP-complete, all NP-complete problems are (sort of) the same! In a way, TRAVELING SALESMAN is Sudoku is resource constrained scheduling, and when we solve these kinds of problems, it's possible that the basic action we're performing is inherently similar. By analogy, when we add two things - be it money at the cash register or cups of flour to a recipe - though we may be performing actions that appear superficially different (since money ≠ flour), we're still actually performing the same basic operation: addition. It remains to be seen whether the act of solving NP-complete problems will someday be recognized as "basic!"

The Game

2010-11-08T06:42:00.000-08:00

I'm don't know shit about "playing The Game." Possibly I've picked up some negligible amount¹ but that's like, it. I've heard people talk about it recently - it being "The Game," with capital letters and all - and from time to time I wonder if they know something I don't. (Not that that's unusual, but, well, you know what I mean.)

I don't like The Game: self-promotion's never been my style. I don't really have a taste for it. It makes me sad and it smacks of insincerity and it feels like a concession to some dark side of our human nature that loves guile and deceit. I saw a movie once where a computer - a computer!² - tells a young Matthew Broderick³ that "...the only way to win is not to play." Now, in that particular instance that particular computer - the WOPR⁴ - was talking about Global Thermonuclear War, but somehow, to me, the essence is the same. Why do we need reductions? Why not... expansions?! Games, to me, are defined by the way they tautologically classify players as winners or losers, and my problem with THAT is that I think life is too complicated and awesome to be pared down to a simple 1/0 Boolean bit. There's got to be more to it than that, and in my better moments I like to believe that life is full of something more than "haves" and "have-nots."

These are strange words, bit-wise, coming from an ostensible computer scientist, but I DO want to understand what's out there and I figure 1s and 0s are as good a place as any to start. I sure as hell don't believe that the ones and zeros are everything, or even that much, really. Strange words too, coming from an admitted Scrabble addict who does in fact own books - not A book, but MULTIPLE books⁵ - about chess strategy. And I'm NOT blind to the fact that in one interpretation of this mortal coil, EVERYTHING is a game. "All the world's a stage," some writer once said, "...and all the men and women merely players."

All of which implies, I guess, that I like to play "The Game" too, in my way.

But the other day I heard someone say, "You've GOT to play the game, because good work by itself won't stand on it's own," and that is some half-assed bullshit advice that I do NOT want to hear, no matter how well-intentioned, because down that road there's a man with a round smiling face and bright honest eyes telling you, "Hey, don't worry about it, this is the way it has to be - just until we get this current situation under control! - and besides, everyone else is doing it, and you never REALLY liked those neighbours of yours anyway, did you? Be a sport and play along."

I've always thought/hoped/believed that if you try your hardest, and ALWAYS keep in mind that it's the people around you who mostly make your life what it is, then the things that need to happen will happen. Sans game.

But maybe that's just my strategy.

Your move.

[1] I've always wanted to write it like this:
[2] (It thinks it's people.)
[3] Yes, younger than Ferris.
[4] Best line from that flick: "Goddamnit, I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it'd do any good!"
[5] Which necessitate a rack.

Dichotomy

2010-11-02T23:27:00.000-07:00

"We are everything to ourselves, and virtually nothing to everyone else!"

"Yeah, and...?"

"..."

"..."

"You always tell me to be less self-centred. That's like not even possible given, you know, the inherent me-ness of me."

"You're missing the point."

"Says you. But seriously! How can we be compassionate/empathetic/kind individuals even though we're hard-wired to care mostly about ourselves?!"

"Dunno. But you can start by making me a sandwich."

Qualia

2010-10-22T19:00:00.000-07:00

I need a break from studying the heuristic optimization of query trees.¹

Recently, I was introduced to the notion of qualia. Qualia (singular quale) are all those things that we experience on a daily basis that require a brain to interpret, and are thus inherently personal. Put another way, they represent "...the subjective experience of conscious thought."

"What," you might ask, "ISN'T part of the subjective experience of conscious thought?!"

Valid point.

I think, however, that qualia represent the philosopher's attempt to discretize thought; to reduce experience to a set of understandable units for the purpose of analysis. Whether or not this is a valid, meaningful exercise is a matter of debate, but hey: not even philosophers will tell you that what they do is unequivocally meaningful.²

In one sense, I think that all interpersonal communication could be based on a theory of qualia: for example, if two people eat an MLT³ and agree that what they're eating tastes like an MLT, then they have achieved some communication even if the actual taste sensations/brain impulses they experience are fundamentally different.

Easy enough, but I'd like to take this one step further: what about those experiences that, unlike taste or color, aren't really understood even as we experience them? What about feelings like joy and contentment, or grief, or fury?

What about love?

To me, these types of feelings, though we can recognize them when they're happening, seem to transcend conscious analysis. They are somehow 'greater' than our capacity for understanding, and are not diminished by this fact but rather, in some sense, defined by it.

Thus, as my contribution to the human philosophical enchilada,⁴ I'd like to propose the notion of meta-qualia: The subjective experience of supra-conscious (or unconscious) experience. Meta-qualia are those experiences that we know but don't really understand, perhaps - and I'm just throwing this out there! - because we can't.

And if, as Gödel suggested (proved?!), there is an infinite hierarchy of such notions - meta-qualia and meta-meta-qualia and meta-meta-meta-qualia - well, then at the end of that infinite meta-qualia concatenation - not that being at the 'end' of something infinite makes ANY sense - that's probably Nirvana.

[1] Thank you very much.
[2] Unless you're buying.
[3] Mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.
[4] Turkey Enchiladas with Red Chili Sauce:

1/2 cup vegetable oil

twelve 6- to 7-inch corn tortillas

3 cups 1/3-inch pieces cooked turkey or chicken

10 ounces extra-sharp Cheddar, grated (about 3 cups)

1 cup finely chopped red onion

1/3 cup finely chopped fresh coriander plus coriander sprigs for garnish

2 cups red chili sauce or two 10-ounce cans enchilada sauce

2 avocados (preferably California) for garnish

For the red chili sauce:

3 ounces (about 15) dried New Mexican red chilies (available at some specialty foods shop, stemmed and seeded (wear rubber gloves)
1 large onion, halved
1 large garlic clove
6 cups water

Cardioid

2010-10-20T20:06:00.000-07:00

I LOVE being alive, and it pisses me off that I'm going to die someday. Probably, I need to "internalize" the fact that I'm going to die, lest I become condemned to support the psychotherapy profession for the rest of my days. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.

But shit! those psychotherapists must be cool!

--------------------------------------------

Everyone wants to be part of the "in" crowd, but there's so many "in" crowds that, y'know, what the hell! "In crowds" don't even like, exist.

---------------------------------------------

"Cool" is an awful tyranny.

Apache2, PHP, and MySQL on Mac OSX

2010-10-19T09:40:00.000-07:00

Last night I spent four obscenely frustrating hours configuring Apache2, PHP 5.3.3, and MySQL 5.1.51 on OSX 10.6.4. Since I fully expect all of my insights to be outdated by the time I finish composing this blog post,¹ please: do NOT consider this an instruction guide.² And, too: remember that each of these steps was carefully crafted with hours of laborious trial-and-error-and-error-and-error. Said no headlines, "Man Resists Frustration! Computer Remains Intact! Relief Palpable!"

If necessary, download Apache 2.2.17. However, this was already on my Mac.
Download PHP 5.3.3
Download MySQL Community Server 5.1.51 DMG Archive
Install MySQL using the package installer in the disk image.
Install the MySQL System Preferences Pane by dragging it from the disk image to the System Preferences window.
Extract the PHP archive.
In a terminal window, cd to the folder containing the extracted PHP source code.
Next, configure the PHP installation to work with Apache AND MySQL. Use the following line:
```
./configure --with-apxs2 --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql-5.1.51-osx10.6-x86_64
```
Type
```
make
```
and hit enter. Let the code compile.
Type
```
sudo make install
```
& hit enter, and type in your user password.

Find the file called

httpd.conf

Here's the path:

/private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Open this file in the text editor, and find this line:

#LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Delete the # sign from the beginning of the line. This un-comments the line and lets Apache use PHP.
In the System Preferences window, click on Sharing. Check the box marked "Web Sharing." This turns on the Apache server. If it's already activated, turn it off and turn it on again.
Also in System Preferences, click MySQL. Turn on the MySQL Server Instance.
To test your installation, create a text file called
```
test.php
```
and place it in the Sites folder in your home directory.
Copy and paste the following code into the file:

Point your browser to
```
http://localhost/~YourUserName/test.php
```
where YourUserName is your user name (also the name of your home folder). You should see a page detailing the various PHP parameters and a line at the bottom that says "Connected Successfully".

If these instructions don't work for you, please drop me a line and I'll nod understandingly (though I probably won't have the foggiest idea how to help). Happy developing!

[1] And possibly also the subject of ironic hacker-subculture t-shirts (sudo make My Day!).
[2] Unless you're prepared to suffer.

Shrug

2010-10-15T23:07:00.000-07:00

Y'know,
I'd love to produce
a bit of poetry here.

Something that captures
the essence
of the human condition.

Something elegant...
profound...
witty...
and possibly
license-able.

Instead, this:
a wry self-referential missive
about how hard it is
to capture
the essence
of the human condition.

Consciousness

2010-10-05T14:29:00.000-07:00

The other day, a friend called me "Perry-the-novel-length-Facebook-post-writer" after I perhaps went a bit overboard while musing about the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem on the study of the human brain.¹

"Oh no no no!" I said. "That's really flattering, but 17,500 - 40,000 words is considered a novella, generally."

Now, anything remotely blog-related is immediately suspect in my book, so I won't make any grandiose claims w.r.t. legitimizing that verbose Facebook comment by turning it into a blog post.²

The whole exchange started after I was introduced to a friend of a friend who studies brains in a lab. A couple of days later, in the normal course of procrastinating, I stumbled across an article that mentioned a large-scale supercomputer-based³ simulation of a brain with a billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses. I shared the article, and was promptly directed to the Blue Brain Project, self-described as "The first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain." Ambitious.

This person also went on to speculate about "...whether an overall theory of brain organization is even possible," which made me well-nigh giddy as I lunged for my copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach, eager to actually TALK about a book that took me the better part of a decade to finish.

In a nutshell, I went on to say that...

...Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel wrote a proof in the early 1930's that, in some interpretations, suggests that there's an infinite hierarchy of 'ways' of looking at the brain, each involving concepts that are not explainable in terms of lower level 'components' (e.g. neurons, thoughts, Minsky's K-lines, etc). In other words, he suggested the existence of mind-related phenomena that can be explained on some 'high' level of abstraction quite easily, but not at all on 'lower' levels. In Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter⁴ wrote, "...it has been proposed for eons that consciousness is a phenomenon that escapes explanation in terms of brain-components ... and there is also the ever-puzzling notion of free will."

Personally, I believe that the functions of a brain (i.e., things like consciousness) arise not from some inherent property of the brain's components, but from the complexity & dynamics of those components' interactions. This is also not a new idea⁵ and there's an (in)famous statement that goes something like, "if you can write a computer program that's conscious, you could run that computer program on, say, a system of ping-pong balls and beer cups and the system would be equally conscious, because it was running the same information processes."⁶

Some people vehemently object to this notion of a beer-can brain, for reasons that I assume are best described as 'dour.'

Dunno if we need to worry about beer-pong installations becoming self-aware, but it DOES have interesting implications for the future of the internet:

What if we're building a consciousness?
Would the human race be a good parent?
Who gets to name it?

[1] No big deal.
[2] Though that's exactly what's happening.
[3] The supercomputer is an IBM Blue Gene system capable of 596 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops). Disappointingly, both the brain-simulation AND Blue Gene projects got built with $$$ from the Department of Defense. Lame.
[4] WICKED bad-ass, and also currently tenured at Indiana University, where I've, like, BEEN.
[5] "Functionalism:" Wikipedia that sh*#.
[6] A 'billiard ball computer' is quite possible, and would be a great icebreaker at computer-science parties, though not QUITE as good as the Bambelweeny 57 Sub-Meson finite improbability generator, which "...were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance to the theory of indeterminacy." (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

B+ Trees

2010-09-28T18:55:00.000-07:00

I've been reading about B trees and B+ trees for my Database Systems class.

Pokin' 'round the internet, I found this 1995 paper describing an algorithm for deleting records from a B+ tree by then-Stanford-master's student Jan Jannink. His paper, motivated by "...the fact that not a single instance of the B+ tree deletion algorithm seems to exist in the literature," was presented at that year's SIGMOD conference. (SIGMOD stands for "Special Interest Group on Management of Data".) This year's SIGMOD was held in Indianapolis, my home town, and, as part of an assignment for that very same Database Systems class, we've been asked to read a paper presented at THIS year's SIGMOD and report about it.

I find it fascinating that, 15 years ago, this topic was still conference-worthy even though B+ trees have been part of the prevailing pedagogy since the early 1970s. Today, B+ trees are relegated to half of an hour-long lecture about multilevel indexes, though the sixth edition of Fundamentals of Database Systems does not include an explicit algorithm describing deletion from B+ trees!

This is not like particularly ground-breaking, but it did make me wonder why some topics get loads of attention while other, unequivocally important subjects languish, forever mired in the morass of academia.

Infinite Jest II

2010-09-22T20:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I'm bothered by the fact that most of my writing is in the first person. I think that I'm sophisticated enough to realize that nobody really wants to read about me or what I do; there's plenty of truly great stuff out there to read/look at and, no matter how hard we all work, we're going to miss most of it. Thus, writing in the first person - about what I feel and what I think - becomes a terribly self-centered exercise, not unlike the O.N.A.N.¹ tendency to dictate world morality.

HOWEVER - and this is the bitch of it - writing declarativey (as in, 'this book IS great!' or 'that food IS delicious!) is ALSO terribly presumptuous because, really, all writing reflects the who and what of the author, and to represent otherwise is bosh.

So, with a wry shrug and FULL KNOWLEDGE of my insignificance, I'm going to go out on a limb and say this:

Infinite Jest is one of the greatest books of, like, ever.

Page for page, it offers up more of what it means to be human than maybe anything I've ever read. It's truth without being literally true... and it moved me.

"Wow!" you say ('cause I'm operating here on the assumption that you give a shit about my opinion). "What's it about?"

"Well, um, it's about this kid, a prodigy, who plays tennis, and, um, also this guy who was a burglar and accidentally killed a congested Canadian, and this other girl who was the prettiest girl of all time and really addicted to freebase cocaine, and some legless assassins, and an MIT student, and annular fusion, and the kid's dad, who made the most entertaining film of all time and eventually stuck his head in a microwave oven, and the description of what happened to the dad's head after he stuck it in the microwave actually made me laugh."

I mean, FUCK. The book is like a thousand pages long, with two hundred-odd pages of END-NOTES. Fucking END-NOTES², which are a bitch because you have to turn all the way to the back of the book to read them, and I'm fairly obsessive-compulsive, so I can't just skip an end-note, I had to read every one, like, in order, and of course that was the whole point, to make you flip back and forth and lose your place and all that³.

It was great.

And made better by what I knew about the author, one David Foster Wallace, who was himself a child prodigy and a ranked junior tennis player. Who also hung himself some years after writing Infinite Jest, which may be the most entertaining book of all time. And who, from the sound of things, tried his fair share of drugs, and had more going on in his head than anyone I've ever come across, and who GOT IT, "it" being life, but who was still so overwhelmed with the awful futility of it all that, midway through mortality's 7-course banquet, during one of those mundane intervals between the vichyssoise and the seared ahi⁴, got up, went to the coat check, got his jacket and walked out into the snowy night, never to return for the duck confit and crème brûlée.

What can I say.

It made me glad to be alive.

[1] Organization of North American Nations. Stolen wholesale from Infinite Jest. But the masturbatory quality of 'blogging' made the pun too good to pass up!
[2] Not footnotes.
[3] Which end notes included a nice englishy explanation of the Mean Value Theorem, which is central to the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, with graphs and everything.
[4] Whilst the waiters are busy shuttling you tiny cupfuls of palate-cleansing sorbet.

Expectations

2010-09-20T16:10:00.000-07:00

Expectations are tricky. All of us have 'em, but none of us are quite sure how to communicate or for that matter even define them with any degree of accuracy. Not to MENTION our un/subconscious expectations, which are the ones that really get us into trouble - those ardent cardiac manubrial-type feelings that we're not even fully aware of until they're removed¹. These expectations percolate half-formed & emulsified from that primordial syrup that some people call soul and other people call heart, and, no matter how many precautions we take against their formation, they're what make us us². Besides, even if we DO manage to clarify our expectations to self and/or others, they³ are often idealized or, like, totally unrealistic. So some people⁴ say that the key to happiness is not having expectations⁵ - you know, set the bar low, so it's easy to clear - but that ain't it either, because 'lowering the bar' is just a cynical term for generating a new set of expectations which, inevitably in this imperfect world, won't be fully met. But - and this is the key - unmet expectations aren't really anyone's fault, and especially not the fault of the expector⁶. They're nothing more or less than the product of each and every person⁷ doing his or her best to be happy, with the possible exception of that lady in front of me on the airplane who loudly and repeatedly proclaimed to no one in particular, "I ALWAYS put other people first!"⁸

[1] Usually suddenly.
[2] Like it or not.
[3] The expectations.
[4] Not the interesting ones.
[5] i.e., Ignorance == bliss.
[6] One who expects.
[7] Which person is, after all, the center of his or her universe.
[8] With a footnoted tip o' the bandanna to the late great David Foster Wallace

150-Word Autobiography

2010-09-14T08:57:00.000-07:00

I was born in the planar wilds of the central Midwest. Raised on corn, mayonnaise, and vichyssoise, I devoted many of my formative years to the collected works of Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, and Steven King.

I spent the summers of my youth in Minnesota, Manitoba, and Montana, where I learned how to paddle a canoe, swing an axe, and, most importantly, love the woods.

Improbably, I emerged from adolescence with degrees in geology and mathematics, obtained in the magnificent, bitter cold of the Gunnison valley.

With help from generous professors and a trusting boss, I parleyed my newly-minted degrees into a not-un-lucrative-but-ultimately-temporary career prospecting for gold in northeastern Nevada.

Now a putative adult, I spend my time studying computer science at the University of Montana and writing pithy autobiographical paragraphs.

Procedural Drawing

2010-09-06T21:59:00.000-07:00

Harmony is a procedural drawing tool that I think is pretty cool. I think "procedural" means that the tool is time-dependent, i.e. that the current behavior of the tool depends on past states. This means that quick, sharp brush strokes look different than broad slow ones.

Oh Boy

2010-09-03T10:53:00.000-07:00

My Monitor is a Window to the...

2010-09-02T20:28:00.001-07:00

...window. Apparently I AM that guy.

Shoshone Spire

2010-08-22T12:38:00.001-07:00

Shoshone Spire, Blodgett Canyon, MT: 5.8+ III

Brandt

(click for hi-res)
Summit

Infinite Jest I

2010-08-20T17:37:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I haven't liked a book this much this soon maybe ever. I already know that there is NO WAY I can do this novel justice in a review... and I'm less than a third of the way through it. The nice thing about true genius is that it doesn't make you feel second-best or inadequate... it just makes you feel good.

The Robber Bride

2010-08-12T15:51:00.000-07:00

Unlike daytime television, Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride is rich, complex, and insightful. The story follows the lives and loves of four women, three of whom are "good guys" (gals?!). The fourth is an arch-villainess of Nurse Ratched-like proportions.

The Robber Bride is mostly about the emotions and situations that drive the three heroines - largely, the care and feeding of men. The fourth character is the foil: a common nemesis, with motivations unknown, who is ultimately responsible for tying the story together.

Though Atwood's women ARE preoccupied with love (and who isn't?!), they're not shallow or weak. Rather, the main characters come across as genuine, multifaceted, and mostly devoid of cliché. The male characters, on the other hand, are uniformly insipid - an unfortunate generalization which left me a trifle worried that Atwood is, well, right. No!

I liked this book. It was fun to read: imaginative, nicely paced, and thoughtful but not overbearing.

For the record, Atwood has produced several other fine offerings: The Handmaid's Tale is a feminist classic (it was nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award), Oryx and Crake is an excellent dystopian exploration of genetic engineering's dark side, and her critically acclaimed The Blind Assassin won the Booker Prize in 2000.

St. Magnus Cathedral

2010-08-09T11:35:00.000-07:00

St. Magnus Cathedral: Kirkwall, Scotland
Click the image for the high-res version.

This picture is a composite of four shots I took from atop the ruins of Patrick Stewart's castle across the street. I used Hugin' and Autopano to automatically generate the composite.

Another Pasta Dish

2010-08-06T13:47:00.000-07:00

Good enough that I might make it again tonight. Very simple, elegant, delicious. I was counting on leftovers, but I fed them to Roy, who went climbing with me today.

--------------------------------

8 ounces linguine
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 large red bell peppers (14 to 16 ounces), stemmed, seeded, cut into 1/3-inch cubes
16 Kalamata olives, pitted, quartered
3 large garlic cloves, pressed
1/4 teaspoon (generous) dried crushed red pepper
1 1/4 cups chopped fresh basil, divided
1 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese plus additional for passing
1 tablespoon white balsamic vinegar

Cook pasta in large pot of boiling salted water until just tender but still firm to bite. Drain, reserving 1 cup cooking liquid.

Meanwhile, heat oil in large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add bell peppers, olives, garlic, and crushed red pepper. Sauté until bell peppers are tender, 4 to 5 minutes. Add pasta, 1/2 cup reserved pasta cooking liquid, 1 cup basil, 1 cup cheese, and vinegar. Toss until sauce coats pasta, adding more reserved cooking liquid by 1/4 cupfuls if dry, about 1 minute. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Transfer to bowl. Sprinkle with remaining 1/4 cup basil and serve, passing additional cheese.

"Ironmonger" 5.8+ R, 2 pitches

Roy

Amos Lee

2010-08-05T18:28:00.000-07:00

We'll be listening to singer/songwriter Amos Lee in twenty years.

In 2005, Rolling Stone noted him as one of 10 Artists to Watch.

Frankly, I prefer listening.

His style is a mixture of jazz, soul, folk, and blues. Influences include John Prine, Bill Withers ("Lean on Me"), and James Taylor.

Some of his better songs:

Street Corner Preacher
Supply and Demand
Keep it Loose, Keep it Tight
Sympathize
Shout Out Loud

I had to resist the temptation to give all of his songs five stars in my iTunes library. But yeah - he's good.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2010-08-04T14:28:00.001-07:00

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a bestselling crime novel by the late Norwegian journalist Stieg Larsson. Originally called "Men who Hate Women," the book was made into a movie in 2008.

The book's protagonists include an investigative journalist, a socially awkward hacker-genius, a magazine publisher and an aging industrialist. Character development is one of the book's strong points: this unique mixture of personalities gives rise to fascinating, complex, and wholly engaging situations. A decent amount of action and romance, combined with a pleasantly unique take on the classic "locked-room mystery" motif make The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a fun read.

Larsson clearly had strong opinions about male/female relationships. Nontraditional romance is one of the book's hallmarks, and while his liberal views might raise eyebrows in certain circles, his heart seems to be in the right place.

Larsson died suddenly in 2004, shortly after delivering The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to his publisher. This is doubly a pity, (1) because he can't write anything else! and (2) because he certainly deserved to receive recognition for this fine and entertaining novel.

Quantum Computing

2010-08-03T11:17:00.001-07:00

I had a 'Facebook debate' with a friend of a friend the other day about the nature of quantum computing. This forced me to codify what I think I know about quantum mechanics - admittedly, not much! In this area, I'm definitely on the outside looking in... but "quantum computing" sure sounds good, don't it?!

Disclaimer: I've done my best NOT to include any blatant disinformation!
----------------

In quantum mechanics, the act of measuring a particle's properties is crucial.

In one interpretation of quantum mechanics, measurement "forces" a particle's state (e.g., position and momentum) into a single state taken from a probability distribution of infinitely many such states. This phenomenon is called wave function collapse, or, put another way, the condensation of physical possibilities (as defined by the mathematics of quantum mechanics) into a single occurrence after interaction with an observer (in accordance with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). The acceptance of this phenomenon's verity is the basis of the "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum mechanics, and Einstein struggled AGAINST it until he died. Apparently, the truth of this interpretation as a basic phenomenon has always been a matter of some debate - wave function collapse may just be an outgrowth of some other, more fundamental concept (like quantum decoherence).

One property of quantum mechanical systems containing two or more objects is quantum entanglement. Here, the objects comprising the system are linked in such a way such that it's impossible to describe the quantum state of one part of the system without a full mention of the other parts, even if the individual objects are separated in space!

Measurements on entangled states form the crux of the EPR Paradox, and may be crucial to the construction of a practical quantum computer, an idea first proposed by physicist Richard Feynman in 1982.

In the case of two physically separated but entangled particles (just go with it!), a distant measurement CAN be performed on one of the two which should not disturb the other particle in any classical sense... thus (presumably) leaving it available as a resource in a so-called quantum computer. However, this measurement can also reveal information about the distant particle... which (and this is the best I can do!) restricts the possible values of that particle's state in strange ways.

In this month's issue of Wired magazine, MIT computer scientist Scott Aaronson goes on record about the fundamental challenge of quantum computing.

From Wired, v. 18, no. 8, pp 112:

"The biggest roadblock [to quantum computing] is decoherence - the tendency of computational "qubits" (quantum bits) to lose their special properties when they interact with... anything. The result is a Catch-22: 'For quantum computation, it's necessary to keep the qubits almost fanatically isolated from their environment,' Aaronson says. 'But you also need to manipulate the qubits to carry out the computation!'"

Interestingly, MIT mathematician Pete Shor has already developed a "quantum algorithm" for the prime factorization of large numbers. This problem is the basis for the protocols that allow secure transmissions on the internet... but given the current state of quantum computers, there's probably no need to worry about quantum physicists buying unlicensed particle accelerators with your Visa card.

2010-08-02T11:16:00.000-07:00

Black Cherry Blues is an Edgar award-winning crime novel by Lolo, Montana resident James Lee Burke. Burke is a prolific bestselling author who has penned more than 30 novels, most of which feature protagonist Dave Robicheaux, a hard-bitten ex-cop from the Louisiana bayou.

This book is a must-read for Missoula's literary aficionados. Not only was the book written here, but it's also set in and around Missoula. Small details, like the "switchback trail to the concrete M," the "faded, golden quality of the light at the mouth of Hellgate Canyon," and "the college kids throwing frisbees in Bonner park" will make Missoula locals nod and smile in recognition, and the tough-guy-with-a-heart Robicheaux comports himself with a demeanor that's right at home in western Montana.

At times, Black Cherry Blues is devastatingly violent. This is unfortunate, because Burke appears to be fully capable of generating feeling without resorting to savagery. Overall, however, the book is quite entertaining: a bestseller that, for Missoula residents, hits close to home.

Scotland!

2010-08-01T10:10:00.000-07:00

I recently returned from a 10-day whirlwind tour of Scotland. The trip was a smashing success. Here's a breakdown:

Day 1: Arrived Edinburgh mid-afternoon. Met friend at hostel. Walked about the city, consumed dinner & two pints of bitter before falling asleep for 12 hours.
Day 2: Tour of Edinburgh. Viewed Picasso, Da Vinci, Degas, and numerous Renaissance nudes at the National Gallery of Scotland. Toured Edinburgh castle, a very old cemetery, and ruins. Met Scottish and Viennese girls at the pub.
Day 3: Took the train to Stirling. Visited Stirling castle, home of Robert the Bruce. Continued via train to Ft. William. Stayed at "Calluna," a climbing hostel. Apparently, world-class climber Dave MacLeod set the routes in the bouldering cave.
Day 4: Ascended Ben Nevis (1344 m), the highest point in the UK, via the normal route (a.k.a. the "Tourist Track"). Conditions were... bloody crowded! Celebrated with haggis and beer.
Day 5: Traveled to John O'Groats by bus. Caught the ferry to Kirkwall. Arranged accommodations, took in the local music scene, which consisted of (1) a marching band of about 50 pipers (whew!), and (2) four high-school kids playing guitars in a local pub. Sometimes, a lot of heart & a couple'a quarts of beer are enough to fix it so the intonation does not offend the ear!
Day 6: Visited Highland Park distillery. Examined St. Magnus Cathedral, and the ancestral home of Patrick Stewart (no, not Captain Picard). Early to bed.
Day 7: Cooked a late breakfast. Took the bus to Stromness, arranged to go scuba diving. My traveling companion and the guy at the dive shop knew each other from the dive shop in Sydney, Australia. Shot a 121 over 18 holes of golf. Made par on one hole.
Day 8: Received drysuit training & certification over the course of three dives in the Scapa Flow. Examined the wreck of the Emerald Wings.
Day 9: Took the ferry to Scrabster - biggest boat I've ever been on. Caught the train from Thurso to Edinburgh.
Day 10: Sat on a plane for 20-odd hours!

There you have it! Photos are available here, here, and here.

Nathan's Salad

2010-07-18T13:26:00.001-07:00

This came out of a conversation I had with my friend Nathan while I was reformatting his hard drive & reinstalling Windows XP.

lettuce
red bell pepper
red onions
avocado
tomato
tuna or salmon

Dress with olive oil & vinegar.

The conversation also included these Wikipedia pages:

Timex Sinclair 1000 - a computer produced in 1982 by a joint venture between Timex and Sinclair that had 2 kB of RAM.
Spark-gap transmitter - an early device for generating radio waves, notably used by the RMS Titanic to transmit her SOS.
the De Forest Audion - a type of amplifying vacuum tube
Raymond Loewy - dubbed "the father of industrial design;" responsible for, among other things, the Studebaker Avanti, the Coke contour bottle, and the Shell Oil logo.
Alsace-Lorraine - a hotly contested region on the border of France and Germany that featured prominently in both World Wars.
Charles Joseph Minard - A French civil engineer noted for his developments in the field of information graphics, and in particular his flow map of Napoleon's march.
Otto von Bismarck - the first Chancellor of the German Empire.
Eddie Rickenbacker - WWI flying ace and one-time owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Summer Squash

2010-07-18T10:04:00.000-07:00

Here's a vegetarian "one-pot" recipe that's slightly more sophisticated than adding a can of tuna to your Kraft mac 'n' cheese (which, incidentally, I happen to like - think backpacking dinner). I made this for a couple of friends the other night after we got blown off the Clark Fork River (like, by the wind!) right at the mouth of Hellgate Canyon.

Two yellow squash(es?)
Two zucchini
Onion
6 oz. mushrooms
Lots of butter
1 lb. pasta
1 jar Alfredo sauce
rosemary
thyme
salt
pepper

Slice the squash, onion, and mushrooms thinly. Sauté "the lot" in butter in a large frying pan until the squash is translucent. (Half a stick of butter is not too much.) Season this mixture to taste, but be judicious - don't go overboard. I like to tap the seasonings into my hand, look at how much is there, and then add it to the dish. Think 1/4 tsp.

Cook the pasta. Drain. Add vegetables & Alfredo sauce. Stir. Serve with fresh bread & butter, Parmesan cheese, and wine. Dessert: fresh peaches.

The Cobweb

2010-07-16T09:24:00.000-07:00

Neal Stephenson is my favorite genre-fiction author. His breakout 1992 novel Snow Crash was decades ahead of its time, and it is high high high on my list of all-time favorites. Thus, I'll read pretty much anything with his name on it - even one of those "co-authored" novels that are typically awful.

First: The Cobweb isn't awful. In fact, it's pretty decent. At times the story can be rather abrupt, even clipped, but it's engaging, I finished it in a couple of days, and I even looked forward to reading it after work. The story follows a number of characters embroiled in Gulf War intrigue, and it tiptoes nicely along that fine line that separates truth from fiction.

Second: His co-author, J. Frederick George, is actually a pseudonym for Stephenson's uncle, historian George Jewsbury. I don't know WHY this makes me feel better, but it does!

Third: The other co-authored book that I found surprisingly good was Black House (think Dickens' Bleak House) by Stephen King and Peter Straub. That one is like Stephen King but different - a worthwhile bestseller.

Bottom line: Not bad, if you're a fan of Neal Stephenson... but read Snow Crash first.

Freeware

2010-07-14T08:19:00.000-07:00

Cross-Platform

VLC -- video /Media Player
FileZilla -- FTP client
µTorrent -- BitTorrent client
Eclipse -- integrated development environment
VirtualBox -- virtualization software package
LyX -- LaTeX document processor
WordBiz -- Internet Scrabble Club client

For Mac

TextWrangler -- text editor
MacTeX -- LaTeX distribution

For Windows

7-Zip -- file compression
Notepad++ -- text editor
Virtual CloneDrive -- virtual CD/DVD drive
Microsoft Security Essentials -- anti-virus

Hip-Hop

2010-07-07T22:53:00.000-07:00

Some people say that hip-hop isn't real music.

Never mind what the haters say! [T.I. "Live Your Life" feat. Rihanna]

Music is about passion and feeling, and the best hip-hop artists understand this. It's NOT just about playin with the trigga / Of any Uzi or an AK [N.W.A. "Fuck the Police"], it's also about insight that enables me to laugh better [Atmosphere "Onemosphere"] and finding love and happiness inside a mix tape [Atmosphere "Multiples"].

Yeah, hip-hop is sometimes stereotyped as violent, antisocial, chauvinistic, even borderline sociopathic. Some hip-hop superstars do little to dissuade this image - in 2009 T.I. (born Clifford Harris, Jr.) spent most of a year in jail after giving a bodyguard $12,000 to purchase machine guns and silencers. (Frankly, I have way more respect for an acquaintance who spent 18 months in Iraq working... unarmed. True courage is going to war without a gun.)

I'm pretty white and nerdy. M.C. Escher is my favorite MC [Weird Al, "White and Nerdy"], so I can't really claim that hip-hop "speaks to my roots." But I contend that good hip-hop transcends the "gangsta" mentality, the bravado, even race, and has more in common with the singer-songwriter tradition than anything else. Just ask Brother Ali, who's an albino. He says, I stay up and write late nights. [Brother Ali, "Forest Whitaker"]

That's cool.

Perhaps my biggest problem with hip-hop is that not all of its practitioners seem to be enjoying themselves. Personally, I'd much rather see a small-time local playing his heart out than a gifted rapper who's jaded and cynical. (Did y'all see Conan's final monologue as host of the Tonight Show? I liked his advice: "Don't be cynical! It's my least favorite quality.")

So, hip-hop is cool... and it's definitely real music. You know, if it's good.

The Gold Bug Variations

2010-07-04T11:56:00.000-07:00

In 1989, Richard Powers received a "genius grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Two years later, he published The Gold Bug Variations, and it's patently clear that this book was written by a highly intelligent individual - perhaps even a genius.

The Gold Bug Variations is long, complex, grammatically impeccable, and practically dripping with scientific exposition. It's got a magnificent ending and interesting, thought-provoking ideas...

...and it's also not that good. I wouldn't recommend it to a friend.

"Yeah, it's all right," I'd say. "Not a bad book, and I loved the ending, but unless you're REALLY into DNA or the Goldberg Variations or 1980's-era computer science, skip it and pick up a copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (or anything else) by Michael Chabon. Hell! For that matter, if you ARE really into DNA and Bach and computers, for heaven's sake get a copy of Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach and call me in a couple of years when you've actually finished it. THOSE books won the Pulitzer, and it's pretty %$&#ing clear WHY!"

The interesting ideas in The Gold Bug Variations are invariably accompanied by hundreds of pages of scientific and moral churning. No editor in his right mind would ask Mr. Powers to cut this stuff out, because the mélange IS so brainy, but the unfortunate fact is that most of the writing in this book doesn't really contribute to the story in the slightest. I feel like The Gold Bug Variations could've easily been split into two independent works - the first, a ten-page essay exploring this idea:

DNA carries the code which results in an organism (people) which then tries to understand DNA.

And the second, a hundred-page novella with all the love, sex, and emotionality that I expect from good literature.

(With that said: I have ENORMOUS respect for Mr. Powers and authors in general. I mean, I haven't written SHIT, and everyone's a critic. I don't pretend to be the final word on this stuff - I just know what I like!)

So's not to end on THAT note, here's a couple of interesting tidbits.

The main character in The Gold Bug Variations is a research postdoc at a university located in a twin city in "the I-states" (Iowa, Indiana, Illinois). Mr. Powers currently teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which is best known to computer types as the home of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Glenn Gould's recordings of J.S. Bach's "Goldberg Variations" are widely considered to be some of the best ever made. If you listen closely to these recordings, you can hear Gould humming along as he plays. Powers mentions this fact in his novel, though he never names Gould specifically.
Da Capo e Fine: "From the beginning to the end," or roughly, "Once more, with feeling."

Holy #&*%.

2010-07-01T00:08:00.000-07:00

They actually changed it.

Play Nice

2010-06-30T23:44:00.000-07:00

The Top Ten Algorithms of the (Last) Century

2010-06-29T14:00:00.001-07:00

Jack Dongarra and Francis Sullivan published a list of "The Top Ten Algorithms of the Century." Their list included:

the Monte Carlo method or Metropolis algorithm, devised by John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam, and Nicholas Metropolis;
the simplex method of linear programming, developed by George Dantzig;
the Krylov Subspace Iteration method, developed by Magnus Hestenes, Eduard Stiefel, and Cornelius Lanczos;
the Householder matrix decomposition, developed by Alston Householder;
the Fortran compiler, developed by a team lead by John Backus;
the QR algorithm for eigenvalue calculation, developed by J Francis;
the Quicksort algorithm, developed by Anthony Hoare;
the Fast Fourier Transform, developed by James Cooley and John Tukey;
the Integer Relation Detection Algorithm, developed by Helaman Ferguson and Rodney Forcade; (given N real values X_I, is there a nontrivial set of integer coefficients A_I so that sum ( 1 <= I <= N ) A_I * X_I = 0?
the fast Multipole algorithm, developed by Leslie Greengard and Vladimir Rokhlin; (to calculate gravitational forces in an N-body problem normally requires N^2 calculations. The fast multipole method uses order N calculations, by approximating the effects of groups of distant particles using multipole expansions)

Reference 1:: Dongarra and Sullivan,
Top Ten Algorithms of the Century,
Computing in Science and Engineering,
January/February 2000.
Reference 2:: Barry Cipra,
The Best of the 20th Century: Editors Name Top 10 Algorithms
SIAM News,
Volume 33, Number 4, May 2000, page 1.

Anansi Boys

2010-06-29T09:00:00.001-07:00

Forgive me: I'm about to start gushing.

Neil Gaiman is, without question, one of the finest storytellers living. (Maybe ever.) Near the end of Anansi Boys, he writes,

"[He] realized, with no little surprise, that he enjoyed singing to other people, and he knew, at that moment, that this was what he would spend the rest of his life doing. He would sing: not big, magical songs that made worlds or recreated existence. Just small songs that would make people happy for a breath, make them move, make them for a little while, forget their problems."

Replace the word "sing" with "write," and I imagine the passage fits Mr. Gaiman to a T. I wonder if he ever had a moment like this.

Words (specifically, MY words) seldom capture the essence of great art. Gaiman IS a great artist, though - make no mistake. His stories tap and nurture a collective yearning for larger-than-life drama without a trace of cynicism or resignation. His tales grant NOT escape but access to that fundamental part of us which rejoices at the prospect of adventure, change, and eye-twinkling mischief. Gaiman suggests that there is no 'big' picture, only many many small ones, each of which is richer, fuller, and more beautiful than we can possibly imagine - if only we'll take the time to look.

When I read his books, I FEEL larger-than-life.

Read 'em out loud. They're worth it.

Oh, and did you know he wrote the screenplay for Beowulf, which stars Robin Wright, who made it big in The Princess Bride? ...and here's a great interview he gave in 2006.

Three Things

2010-06-27T17:08:00.000-07:00

"Two sweethearts,

Two flasks of old wine,

A book of verse

And a cosy corner in the garden."

—Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Quatrain xii.

"Sex, drugs and rock and roll."
—Ian Dury

"There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These things are wine, women, and song."
—Neil Gaiman, "Anansi Boys"

Deutsche Frauen, deutsche Treue
Deutscher Wein und deutscher Sang
—August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben; from the second verse of Das Lied der Deutschen, the third verse of which is the German national anthem.

Dream Big

2010-06-27T13:59:00.000-07:00

Ryan Shupe and the Rubber Band are from Salt Lake City, which is a plus in my book because Lewis (brother) has worked & skied there for the past couple of winters. Also, I spent four WHOLE years living just a couple of hours west of 'Wasangeles' (Wasatch Mtns. + Los Angeles), which makes Salt Lake one of the big towns I know best. (Unfortunately, that's not saying much: my urban navigation skills are atrophied from long years of disuse. Please don't ask me how to get there unless you're prepared to parse an answer that includes phrases like "Go... um... to the... er... that way.")

I first heard this band years ago on a compilation recording of the 2002 Telluride Bluegrass Festival. On that album, they play their hit "Dream Big," for which this 2005 album was named. The song caught my ear then, and I'm happy to say that the album lives up to the high expectations set by that song.

Listening to this music will NOT improve your credibility with the macho set. Frankly, the original album cover makes me wince a bit. The music is generally upbeat, even peppy, but it's not cloying or inspirational. In the lead track "Banjo Boy," Shupe pays homage to both Béla Fleck and Eddie Vedder (of Pearl Jam), and the tribute is not inappropriate. Shupe can't touch Béla's virtuosity (no one can), and doesn't have Vedder's angst-driven fire, but he DOES have something new and, IMHO, good. [ed. note: "Banjo Boy" is a decent effort, and quite quotable in a review, but I skip the song when playing the album. I mean, he's NOT Béla Fleck OR Eddie Vedder. Or even half Béla + half Eddie. But the comparison IS valid, and presumably deliberate, and accompanied by an appropriately self-deprecating song title, so I'm prepared to forgive the presumption. Assuming he returns my e-mail.] I haven't listened to any of their subsequent works (including a... oh jeez... Christmas album), but this CD has one bona-fide hit ("Dream Big") and plenty of more-than-passable others. I mean, it's good! And AWESOME to see / hear out-of-the-blue.

Rosin the Bow

2010-06-24T23:09:00.000-07:00

Rosin the Bow, sung by The Clancy Brothers

Rosin the Bow

Boy's ski trip, Alta - 2006

Recursion

2010-06-22T16:00:00.000-07:00

Here's a screenshot of the latest version of Damn Small Linux running inside a virtual machine installed on Windows 7... which is running in a virtual machine on Mac OSX. Three operating systems running recursively on the same box! Waaaaah!

Is this useful? No. Did I spend waaaay too long getting it to work? Yes. Could I go another layer deeper? Doubtful. Along the way, did I read about ACPI interrupts and asynchronous microprocessors? Yes. Did this make me irrationally happy? Yes.

Duncan Delaney and the Cadillac of Doom

2010-06-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

Duncan Delaney and the Cadillac of Doom is A.L. Haskett's debut novel, and it's pretty damn good - perhaps the best book I've read all year. It's charming, sweet, genuine, often hilarious, and not a little sad. Haskett mixes love, art, tragedy, redemption, and insanely aggressive motorcycle lesbians with a dash of wry, tongue-in-cheek witticism and a flair for the inexplicably dramatic. In short: this book's got heart.

On Amazon.com, Haskett is repeatedly compared to Christopher Moore and Tom Robbins. This is high praise as far as I'm concerned (the last book that made me both laugh AND cry was Moore's A Dirty Job), but he's hardly a mere disciple of those two giants. For one thing, he lacks Robbins' philosophical pretense - there's no agonizing examination of the great question "Why?!" (which, if it truly IS as ineffable as it seems, may not be a great question at all). For another, his humor is one step removed from Moore's free-associative wackiness and remains well-grounded in a knowable, if fantastic, version of reality.

Haskett's cadence takes some getting used to - his style is clipped, even austere, and evokes shades of Cormac McCarthy minus the sense of slow-turning literary magnificence. That might come in time, but it's been 10 years since Haskett wrote Duncan Delaney, and this book has the feel of a one-off. (Not that that's bad - I'd be mighty proud if this were the only book I wrote.) Whether or not Haskett writes again, he's created something good here - a book that leaves you feeling better for having read it.

Ratatat LP4

2010-06-16T09:13:00.000-07:00

"LP4", Ratatat's adroitly-titled fourth studio album, sounds an awful lot like their third studio album, called (you guessed it) "LP3".

These guys are in a rut.

With that said, Ratatat's rut is pretty good, as far as they go. Stroud and Mast don't have to prove shit - their first four offerings (two studio LPs and two remix albums) are inspired, complex, visceral works of art.

For a while anyway, Ratatat had that oh-so-unusual combination of fierce creativity and complete unselfconsciousness - no pretense, only 'cool.'

However, these two are destined for bigger and better things - or at least more money. Like the Neptunes, look for them as producers somewhere down the road.

Awl Will Come in Time

2010-06-13T15:26:00.000-07:00

Sorry. ;-)

Blogging

2010-06-10T19:27:00.001-07:00

From XKCD.

Sacred and Profane

2010-06-10T12:26:00.000-07:00

Said the poet
who compared
the profound
with the mundane,

"I could be wrong,
but I suspect
they're actually
the SAME!
Where this leaves me
I don't know...
What should I write about?!
Love, aesthetics,
wisdom, truth...
or bathroom tile grout?!"

To him I said,
"Don't worry!
All will come in time.
Just remember,
in the end,
Most folks like verse
that rhymes!"

Poetry

2010-06-09T19:24:00.000-07:00

The other night I was feeling blue, so I called a friend and asked him how he handled sadness.

"I write," he said between mouthfuls of Chee-tos.

This surprised me, since this particular friend of mine grows pot in his basement and is a fixture of the beer-league softball circuit. I'd expected something more along the lines of, "I smoke a spliff the size of my middle finger, drink eight Heinekens, and watch WWF reruns until I fall asleep."

"Really?!" I exclaimed, intrigued. "What do you write?"

"Poetry, mostly," he said, without missing a beat. "Short stories, sometimes. When I'm really bummed out I work on my novel. It's about this guy who grows pot in his basement, but is actually this brilliant poet, except nobody knows it because he only writes when he's depressed, and therefore never shows his stuff to anyone."

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. "Wow... is that true?"

"No, you jackass. When I'm sad I smoke a spliff the size of my middle finger, drink eight Heinekens, and watch WWF reruns until I fall asleep. What the fuck did you think?!"

Poetry.

Full Processor Usage

2010-06-08T14:12:00.001-07:00

One of the best things I did last semester involved my laptop. (No!)

I rock a MacBook Pro with an 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 8 gigs of RAM.

"8 GIGS?!" you say. "You only need that much RAM for video games or scientific computing! And you're a student, so I KNOW you're not playing video games."

Well, I actually DID some scientific computing (thank you very much!) that simultaneously maxed out my processor and RAM. (Actually, it's not inaccurate to say that it maxed out BOTH my processors. The Core 2 Duo is a dual-core processor, which essentially means it's two processors on one chip.)

It wasn't easy, and the routine I ran was NOT ultimately useful. But damn it, I used all of the computer that day...

Here's the bidness:

I used the 64-bit version of the statistical computing language R to run a subroutine that generated a random positive definite matrix. The routine is called genPositiveDefMat {clusterGeneration}. My idea was to use this random matrix as a linear operator to test the performance of PyAMG, which is a Python implementation of the algebraic multigrid technique for solving large systems of linear equations. The 64-bit bit is crucial because it allows a given process to address (and thus use) more than 4 gigs of RAM at a time.
Afterward, I had to recharge my dilithium crystals.

Cry Love

2010-06-07T11:24:00.000-07:00

I really like this song.

Cry Love, by John Hiatt

"Cry Love" by John Hiatt, who, incidentally, is from Indianapolis.

uFind

2010-06-07T08:59:00.000-07:00

Here's the project I did for my class on User Interface Design:

uFind project website

Free Music

2010-04-23T13:26:00.001-07:00

From Missoula. Free album.

Global Warming

2010-04-20T22:56:00.000-07:00

I recently ran across some *!$%* / ex-NASA scientist (note the 'ex') who claims global warming is not influenced by humans. Here's the thing, though: even if global warming is NOT an anthropogenic trend, conservation, efficient use of natural resources, and reduction of pollution are STILL the right things to do. Here's the (in my opinion) single most suggestive piece of evidence in favor of human-influenced global warming:

My argument goes something like this:

"Global warming is not caused by humans!"
"Mauna Loa."
"Yes, but no one has actually PROVED..."
"Mauna Loa."
"I know, but it's possible..."
"Mauna Loa."
"Oh, fine."

...and here's what I suggest we do with the haters - a solution I remember from a Dr. Demento album way back when.

Song by The Frantics. Animation by TmsT

Grainy Cell Phone Pictures

2010-04-17T11:28:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday, classes were canceled for the National Conference on Undergraduate Research. I, being a GRADUATE STUDENT, skipped town and went climbing with Dylan.

Of course, I also left my nice camera on the kitchen table when we left the house at four in the morning (hey - it's 0-dark hundred!), so I contented myself with some low-res cell phone shots. (I'm also working with a startup company that's writing software for mobile phones. Next time, I'll call it a business trip.) Interestingly, I had reception throughout the climb, so I sent photos to all those punters who said they'd come with us and then bailed at the last minute.

We did the Southwest Face on the Wedge in the Humbug Spires near Butte, MT. The route goes at grade II 5.8 600'. There were SKETCHY bolts, icy cracks, and a vertiginous summit ridge. Nice!

Chinua Achebe

2010-04-14T00:24:00.000-07:00

Frank Lloyd Wright

2010-04-12T11:34:00.000-07:00

His only skyscraper. Bartelsville, OK

James

2010-04-09T23:28:00.000-07:00

Stumbled across this the other day. James Welton on the Salathé Wall, El Cap.

Snyder Lake Basin

2010-04-04T19:34:00.000-07:00

In Glacier National Park. We didn't get much climbing in because of my bad back and Dylan's broken boot, but we had a great time nonetheless!

Multigrid

2010-03-30T12:15:00.000-07:00

2-D Laplacian with fixed boundary conditions; solved with GMRES and an implementation of geometric multigrid.

Prolongation

2010-03-21T19:25:00.000-07:00

This took me all damn day. And a good chunk of yesterday. See all those powers and logs of 2?! That's computer science, by gum!

Do-Gooder

2010-03-20T12:38:00.001-07:00

I'd rather try to do good than try not to do bad. Unfortunately, that means one has to take a guess at what good is... and, as with all guesses, sometimes one's wrong.

Homework

2010-03-17T20:22:00.000-07:00

"Time's bite has never been mythical."


'''
A Python script to generate the 2D discrete Laplacian matrix
written for MATLAB by:
James Bordner and Faisal Saied
10 April 1995
original file:  http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~fsaied/Matlab/sp_laplace.html


Converted to Python by:
R. Perry Hooker
17 March 2009

'''

from numpy import zeros
from scipy import sparse
from scipy.sparse import csr_matrix

nx = 4
ny = 4
N = nx * ny  
N5 = 5 * N
irow = zeros(N5)
icol = zeros(N5) 
NZA  = zeros(N5)
    
index = 0
row = 0
    
for j in range (0, ny):
    for k in range (0, nx):
        
        if (j > 0):
            NZA [index] = -1.0
            irow[index] = row
            icol[index] = row - nx  # South
            index = index + 1
                
        if (k > 0):
            NZA [index] = -1.0
            irow[index] = row
            icol[index] = row - 1   # West
            index = index + 1
                
        NZA [index] = 4.0
        irow[index] = row
        icol[index] = row           # P (self)
        index = index + 1
            
        if (k < nx-1):
            NZA [index] = -1.0
            irow[index] = row
            icol[index] = row + 1   # East
            index = index + 1
                
        if (j < ny-1): 
            NZA [index] = -1.0
            irow[index] = row
            icol[index] = row + nx  #North
            index = index + 1
                
        row = row + 1 
            
icol = icol[0:index] 
irow = irow[0:index]
NZA  = NZA [0:index]
    
A = csr_matrix((NZA,(irow,icol)),shape=(nx**2,ny**2))

print A.todense()

[[ 4. -1.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.]
 [-1.  4. -1.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.]
 [ 0. -1.  4. -1.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.]
 [ 0.  0. -1.  4.  0.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.]
 [-1.  0.  0.  0.  4. -1.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.]
 [ 0. -1.  0.  0. -1.  4. -1.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.]
 [ 0.  0. -1.  0.  0. -1.  4. -1.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.]
 [ 0.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0. -1.  4.  0.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0.  0.  0.]
 [ 0.  0.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0.  0.  4. -1.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0.  0.]
 [ 0.  0.  0.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0. -1.  4. -1.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0.]
 [ 0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0. -1.  4. -1.  0.  0. -1.  0.]
 [ 0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0. -1.  4.  0.  0.  0. -1.]
 [ 0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0.  0.  4. -1.  0.  0.]
 [ 0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0. -1.  4. -1.  0.]
 [ 0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0. -1.  4. -1.]
 [ 0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0.  0. -1.  0.  0. -1.  4.]]

Internship

2010-03-12T10:13:00.000-08:00

I have an unpaid internship at Orbital Software.

Higher Math

2010-03-02T10:00:00.001-08:00

Another shower-based musing. The real numbers "are" points on a line; the complex numbers "are" points in a plane... so what corresponds to 3D space?!

---time passes---

Ha! Did some research... found , the quaternions!

More Speech Recognition

2010-03-01T12:56:00.001-08:00

I've been experimenting with the speech recognition software built in to Apple's OSX. It's pretty cool! Here's some useful info to get you started talking to your computer (as though you weren't already).

This is a screenshot of the "Speech" feature in System Preferences. Turn on speech recognition here, and adjust relevant settings. It's important to calibrate the microphone - I have mine turned almost all the way down.All of the possible spoken commands live in this folder:

/Users/|username|/Library/Speech/Speakable Items

where|username| is replaced with your user name.

To create custom speakable behavior:

Tell the computer what you want it to do by writing an AppleScript script. The AppleScript documentation is pretty good. Use the AppleScript editor, which can be found in /Applications/Utilities
Name the script with the word or words you want the computer to recognize. Thus, if you wrote a script to open your homepage in a browser, you could call it "home", or "homepage", or whatever words you want to trigger the action!

Here's my script to open my homepage. It runs when I say "home."
Unfortunately, Apple's speech recognition software isn't all that reliable yet. Spoken word cadence, inflection, and background noise all have significant effects. Google's voice recognition is better - but it's not as readily available to 3rd-party developers... yet!
(If you are willing to do some clever manipulation of the Android Virtual Device You can get a version of it on an Android emulator, which comes with the Android SDK - but you still need to configure the emulator to accept input from the system's microphone. Not trivial.)

Here's some cool links for all you burgeoning Android developers (who don't have a device yet!):

http://tech-droid.blogspot.com/2009/11/android-market-on-emulator.html

http://forum.portable.geek.nz/index.php?topic=275.0

http://developer.htc.com/google-io-device.html#s3

http://developer.android.com/index.html

Speech Recognition

2010-02-27T19:19:00.000-08:00

I'm playing with the speech recognition feature on my Mac.
We're designing a self-help kiosk for the school bookstore, and my bright idea was to incorporate speech recognition into the user interface. When I say "pencil" to my mac, it opens a web browser... with the URL of the above image as its homepage!

Showers

2010-02-11T09:08:00.000-08:00

Why do good ideas happen in the shower? Is it just our natural exhibitionism - "Hey, check out my great idea! And it came to me when I was NAKED!" - or is there something else at work? Could it be that the physical experience of showering provides just enough distraction to let our minds wander creatively? Kind of like when you're trying to remember something important, and can't, so you deliberately take your mind off it... and only remember when you quit trying to remember so hard.

Incidentally, this all came to me in the shower.

Moving on.

Here's some of the software we're using in class:
Right now we're using the Python programming language to solve ordinary differential equations. Fun! And I wonder who designs the logos...

Living Well

2010-02-10T12:06:00.000-08:00

"The art of living well consists of aligning one's theory of life with one's practice!"

Everything is Alright

2010-01-26T00:08:00.000-08:00

Everything is Alright, by Four Tet

Download song

Graduate Students

2010-01-11T21:14:00.000-08:00

From Tina Fey's show "30 Rock."

Walking in Memphis

2010-01-05T20:32:00.000-08:00

by Marc Cohn

Download song

Jesse's Girl

2009-12-29T15:59:00.000-08:00

Christmas is over! Everyone survived. My cousin Ellen gave me a sweet mix CD with a recording of Rick Springfirld's 1981 hit "Jesse's Girl," to which I've been rocking out ever since!

Jesse's Girl, by Rick Springfield

Download

Oh, and please give Wikipedia some money so they'll take that &*!^-ing "personal appeal from Jimmy Wales" banner down. (And yes, dammit, a dollar counts!) It's like giving to NPR!

Done With Finals

2009-12-16T14:55:00.001-08:00

Work is important.

There is no substitute for

productivity.

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Also, I think Sir Roger Penrose is the man.

Graphs

2009-12-05T01:32:00.000-08:00

Made in R with the help of the igraph library.

Shameless Plug

2009-11-23T01:55:00.000-08:00

StumbleUpon: I like it.

Homework

2009-11-16T20:20:00.000-08:00

Alas, no extra credit.