January 2008 Archives
Played a really interesting boardgame the other day. RoboRally.
It's essentially a gumball rally, but in a Battlebot-ish robot arena with conveyor belts, pits, and lasers. The premise is that, every round, each player has a limited set of primitive instructions out of which to construct a five-word "program" to get the robot to the current goal as quickly as possible. The real challenge is that your robot interacts will all other players' robots - via collisions etc. - and this changes the course of your carefully-laid plans. So when you write your program, you have to anticipate others' moves. And others' reactions against you and everyone else. I can see why they limited the number of program cards to five: the potential planning grows exponentially in the number of card. And also the card types. Consequently, the instruction set is kind of, well, boring. It's limited to go forward, turn left, turn right, turn around, go backwards 1 square, and go forward x squares, etc.
Still, it's a neat idea. Also - to be fair, I only played one game. But that seemed like enough. One of those games where you think, "wow, that's a really interesting idea... too bad it's not actually fun to play." Perhaps if they expanded the instruction set but added some sort of resource or anti-resource economy that the player had to manage to mitigate the complexity explosion - such as battery power, processing power, hard drive space, or heat.
In fact, there was no real provision for memory, which was a disappointment. Furthermore, there was no mechanism to construct loops (and of course, no recursion - but that's more understandable). Somebody should make a game with the same basic core mechanic, but with these economics in play. And perhaps in a less nerdy, more palatable setting. Maybe in the construction of magical spells in a medieval setting.
OK, maybe I'm not so good in this sort of thing.
I'll give RoboRally another go sometime soon, though. Maybe next weekend.
The other day I blogged about an article entitled 50 things I've learned in 50 years, a partial list in no particular order in the Chicago tribune. It was a list of 50 little tidbits of advice. Mostly good advice.
It seems lately that lists have become something of a literary tradition. "Top Ten" lists have been around since at least Letterman - probably before - but it seems like these kind of lists are really proliferating, especially since the advent of the web. There are entire websites devoted primarily to lists of silly and amusing things, like OMGLists and Cracked.
Slate ran a piece, which I blogged about, in which they examined ten different alarm clocks and enumerated their positives and negatives. There's a page of The Top 10 Most Fascinating Urinals. For Lego Maniacs, there's a page of Top 10 Strangest Lego Creations. Movie buffs can check out the Top 12 Movies in History That Were Ahead of Their Time. There's even a page that enumerates the Top 10 Naked People on Google Earth, taken via satellite.
Actually, I was surprised how many sites I found where a "top X" component figured. What's going on here? Are our lives so busy - and are we exposed to so much information - that we've gotten to the point that top ten lists are the best way to cram new shit into our brains? Has traditional prose been relegated as something Hawthorne-esquely quaint and prolix? Or have we, as readers, just gotten dumber?
Not that I'm lamenting, mind you. For all I know, this could be a positive development. I don't know and I don't have a position on it. But I sure find it interesting.
And now, allow me to get on the bandwagon.
John Umbaugh's Top Ten Observations about the Wastenaw Community College Health and Fitness Center
- Parking there sucks. I don't know what it is, but I've visited about six times, and when I come out I always have a hard time finding where I parked. Maybe if they installed signs like "section D" or whatever like they do at the mall? I don't normally have this problem.
- The locker rooms are nice, but you know what they need? .Electric foot massagers. After working out on the elliptical for an hour, nothing would be nicer. And you could increase revenue - I recommend $0.25 per minute of usage. Oh, and a chair massager. No way I'm paying $45 an hour for a real massage though.
- The cardio machines are all human-powered, it seems, which is nice and fashionably green. And there are televisions on the wall, and you can plug your headphones into receivers on the machines. However, some of them are broken. But it works pretty well overall.
- The keyless lockers are awesome.
- A clock is needed in the sauna. Also, why are all the lights turned off? It feels like a Stygian hell in there.
- The fitness center needs to do a better job of educating people about the "switch" in the steam room, which apparently is not a switch at all. I was guilty of hitting this "switch," too, before Heather informed me that it is instead a sensor, and there was a time last month when one of the steam rooms was broken because people kept touching the sensor. A dude in the steamroom kept hitting the sensor yesterday, in fact. Irrationally I felt, in my arrogant new-found knowledge, that he was a bit of an idiot.
- The bottles of soap in the showers are really nice. There are three rectangular pump bottles secured right next to each other, in a rack below the shower head, in the shower - one for shampoo, one for conditioner, and one for shower gel. And their colors are translucent beige, white, and aquamarine, respectively. Together, they kind of look like the flag of France with the tint way off-kilter. The shower gel smells nice - kind of like a cilantro, or actually maybe - probably - eucalyptus. Although I would use cilantro-smelling soap any day, if it existed. The shampoo is watermelon-scented, and smells delicious. Although I don't actually like the taste of watermelon. But I like this smell. Probably because it smells more like the Bubbalicious that I used to blow my $0.50 per week allowance on when I was a little kid. The conditioner, however, smells like elementary school mint fluoride.
- The decorative washer for about half of the shower heads is either fallen or falling off. This makes the fitness center look cheap and lazy - neither of which is true. Also, some the locker doors already have water damage. You should replace them so that you're always projecting a positive image about the facility. Think of it as an investment in goodwill. Just ask Tim Hartford.
- Clearly, people are not aware of the nudity policy in the jacuzzi.
- The website should have a community component like a blog or wiki so people like me can air their ideas, instead of on places like my obscure website, where it will only be read by people who don't care.
So the jacuzzi nudity update today is that I saw a total of five guys in the jacuzzi throughout the course of my being in the lockerroom. Out of them, one was a confirmed nude. There was another guy in there - wearing swimming trunks - when the nude guy got in. The trunks guy got out about 23 seconds after the nude guy got in. I know because I was observing through the window while sitting in the sauna (not in any kind of stalky, pervy way), and since there is no clock in there, I count off enough seconds to mark off about five minutes. The nude guy got in at 97 seconds and the other guy got out at about 120 seconds.
There seems to be some unspoken etiquette about jacuzzi and sauna co-use. I mean, if another guy comes into the sauna when I'm there, I can't just leave because he'll think I'm leaving because of him. So I give it a good minute and a half, two minutes before I leave. Sometimes I feel even <em>that's</em> not enough.
And it looks like all guys do this at the fitness center. To one degree or another. It's just that the grace period is different for different men, and for different circumstances. For the trunks guy, he was obviously extremely uncomfortable about nude guy getting in. 23 seconds was actually a supreme exercise in restraint for that guy, I could tell.
RANT: But seriously, what's the fuss all about? The guy wants to get in naked, let him. Nobody's stopping him now, of course, but it's time that we stopped regarding the human body as a shameful and execrable object and start treating it with the reverence it deserves. It sounds like I'm trying to be provocative and/or humorous, but that's not the case: I'm being deadly serious. These kinds of behaviors only reinforce the idea that we shouldn't talk about our bodies, their problems, and their flaws. Which is probably the cause of a lot of unnecessary grief for the body, both psychological and physiological.
I'm not even going to do a readthrough of this entry to correct any spelling or grammatical mistakes. I'm sure I made some, but it's late and I just want to go to bed. I felt so guilty about not checking over my entry that, first thing in the morning, I loaded up my blog and checked it over. Fixed stuff that was unclear. Also, changed a "their" to "there." What am I talking about? Nobody cares.
It's easy to clean the side of the screen facing you, but what about the other side?
Well, there's now a computer program that will do it for you.
Click here to clean the inside of your computer screen.
Found via Digg.I just want to introduce everyone to the GROCS blog, where my team will occasionally be posting stuff about Noteworks. Visit this blog if you have interest in Noteworks - especially in the details.
We've made a ton of progress with Noteworks this past week. Here is a video of the application that I made and posted on Youtube:
There are four sounds of an electric guitar. The blue nodes are new WAV samples. The green ones are "rests." Can't wait to add interactive nodes and echo nodes. Probably will do so Sunday.
12. Keeping perspective is the greatest key to happiness. From a distance, even a bumpy road looks smooth.
18. Keeping an open mind is as big a challenge as you get older as keeping a consistent waistline.
30. Most folk remedies are nonsense, but zinc really does zap colds.
33. The 10-minute jump start is the best way to get going on a big task you’ve been avoiding. Set a timer and begin, promising yourself that you’ll quit after 10 minutes and do something else. The momentum will carry you forward.
37. Mental illness is as real as diabetes, arthritis or any other disease, and no more disgraceful. It’s the stigma that’s disgraceful.
39. All the stuff you have lying around that you’ll never want, need, wear or look at again? It just makes it harder to find what you do want, need or intend to wear. File it, donate it or throw it out.
40. Exercise does not take time. Exercise creates time.
47. Your education isn’t complete until you’ve learned to take a hint.
49. Whatever your passion, pursue it as though your days were numbered. Because they are.
50. Readers love lists. You got to the bottom of this one, didn’t you?
#49 is a bit of a bummer, but still good advice. I guess that that's why the author decided to slip #50 in there!
So Terence has said that this list has jumpstarted his brain for future entries. Terence, I look forward to them!
Washtenaw fitness locker room jacuzzi nudity log:
Monday, January 21: Two men in the jacuzzi. One nude, the other clothed. In at different times.
Tuesday, January 22: Three men got in. Two were clothed. The other one: unknown.
Saw this video the other day. Now Heather and I can't get the song out of our heads.
I've been getting pretty busy with this Noteworks stuff. Patrick, Rob and I made a lot of progress during our meeting last night. I'll post a screenshot or screencast as soon as I can.
So Heather and I went to the Washtenaw Fitness Center on Saturday. It was pretty packed. But it was a different crowd from the usual weekday after-work crowd.
For instance, in the dry sauna, there was a dude in there, maybe 50 years old, who was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants. I wanted to ask him why, but he didn't.
So there's a bucket of a little bit of water in the sauna, and this man periodically flicked the water onto the furnace. Or whatever it is called. And it changed the experience quite a bit, naturally. When I went in last time, it was very dry, and it took me about ten minutes to start sweating. This time, it was like one minute.
I didn't know that that was what you were supposed to do with the bucket of water. I asked Heather about it later. She said that she saw some women drinking out of it on her side. Ewwww. I don't think that that is its purpose. Unfortunately, there are no drinking fountains in the lockerrooms, so I guess people need to get their water where they can. But still: ewwww.
Oh! And I saw a nude guy getting in the jacuzzi again! I am in favor of this. But I probably won't get in the jacuzzi any time soon. It's not hot enough.
Speaking of nude guys in jacuzzis, that is one of the most searched-upon phrases for my blog recently. But that's not even the weirdest one. One could argue that a site's search terms characterize the content of the blog to a very high degree. With that in mind, here are some of the most interesting search terms that people have used to get to citym.org/ue:
- get me a whopper (this is the #1 search term for my site, actually - 25 people)
- http://citymb.org/ (I don't know what this is - my browser can't find the server)
- synthetic dental enamel
- senegalese peanut soup
- advertising jingles
- enso timer
- jalapeno juice in eye
- metaphor cherry blossom
- naked yoga ann arbor
- rite of spring paris 2008
- tanpopo japanese movie
- マスタークレンズ
- "cause i believe in me"
- "cope" "experiments * musical intelligence"
- "have you driven a lately"?
- "i believe in. . . 'cause i believe in me"
- "like a good neighbor, is there"
- "master cleanse" "unable to drink"
- "washtenaw community college" "fitness center" prices
- "we're home, even when you're not."
- "what women want" storyline
- 3d web browser ces npr
- being nude at fitness center
- bob evans down on the farm jingle
- c++ "error c2059: syntax error : '
' " - can you go blind from getting jalepno juice in your eye
- chikan train video download -super
- clapper light switch
- do manufacturers still spray cereal with iron filings
- enzyte advertisement photos
- five intersting things about wool
- grammer rules, example very quickly
- holosonics
- how to get jalapeno juice from eyes
- i found my clone
- jalapeno juice in your eyes
- japanese men locker rooms
- jingle to green giant
- john site
- master cleanse increased sense of smell
- naked or not in a jacuzzi in a locker room that was before this post (hee hee!)
- name of song on the enzyte commercial
- new sanno warehouse
- nude fitness
- nude fitness center
- nude guys in jacuzzis
- nude men in snow
- nude nice college -gay -porn
- paris stravinsky"music riot"
- perfum the story of a murderer satanic
- perlin noise terrain generation
- sapir - whorf+schools
- sauna sex jacuzzi
- self-pity
- starbucks + game theory
- swarm intelligence video
- television nudity locker room
- tequila serotonin
- the streets of cleveland
- the undercover economist unique target strategy
- tim hartford fair trade coffee
- tim hartford poker game theory
- toby keith
- too many enzytes
- us failed advertising for kfc in japan
- ways to prevent the onion from hurting your eyes
- what do you do if you get jalapeno pepper juice in your eye
- what to do if you get jalepino in a cut
- what to do jalepeno in eye
- who's that kid with the oreo cookie
- you, you're the one - mcdonalds jingle
- yoyogi park site analysis
- メープルシロップ マスタークレンズ
- 両性具有
Nude men in snow? Well, I am compelled to give my audience what it wants, so here's a photograph of me, naked, wallowing in the cold Michigan snow:
Just kidding. I wouldn't do that to you.
Of course, now that I've made this post, I'll receive more strange requests like "nude men in snow." Some sort of tragic preferential attachment.
There was a fatal shooting in Ann Arbor on Wednesday. Or Thursday, I should say. At 1:00 AM.
The perpetrator was (is?) a student at Michigan. In Electrical Engineering, I think. He apparently had gunned down a visitor to his home. And now, at the time of this writing, he is still on the run.
The University emailed me at least six times - all of them saying essentially the same thing - about the incident. They said not to pick up strangers, that sort of thing. Trust your intuition if a situation looks bad, look assertive, blah blah blah.
So, one of my friends attended the HKN meeting at Michigan, which is the Electrical and Computer Engineering honor society. My friend reported how the shooting was the talk of the meeting. And how students remarked things like, "glad he didn't shoot me!" and generally badmouthed him. Even a former teaching assistant of this guy got in on it.
Another of my friends, disgusted, remarked later how the man hasn't even been charged with a crime yet. That about sums it up, doesn't it? And looking at the situation, it does look a lot like it could have been self-defense. Yeah, probably illegal self-defense with an AK-47, and now he is (apparently) evading authorities - but self-defense nonetheless. And they were trashing him.
Honor society.
Shame on you, [some] [members of] [Michigan] HKN!
By the way, on the news today (after the HKN meeting), it was reported that the search for the man has been called off, and that the prosecuter ruled it as "justifiable homicide."
On Wednesday of this week, Dan, Karen, Heather and I had the opportunity to attend the Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis concert at Hill Auditorium at U of M. Since I ordered the tickets online, we have started being tracked by the University Musical Society. Not in any sinister sort of way; just in a modern, consumer behavior data acquisition sort of way. And so, on Thursday morning, at 11:49 AM, I received the following email from UMS:
Dear Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis Ticketbuyer,
We hope you enjoyed UMS's presentation of Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis last night!
We're always interested in audience response to the works we put on our stages — nothing delights us more than to stumble on a blog entry or to receive an e-mail about a UMS event and the impact it had on you.
Please share your reviews and stories about why and how you were moved by this performance, why you're excited about an upcoming event, or how we at UMS can improve your experience at our performances.
Please visit UMS's newest website feature, an interactive tool called “Be A Critic” and share your thoughts today!
Click here to visit www.ums.org/BeACritic. Registration is easy!
So tell us what you think -- be a critic and share your passion for the live performing arts.
So, I decided to meet their call to arms and blog about the evening.
The concert itself was really good, actually. Really good. Wynton Marsalis can coax noises out of a trumpet I had never imagined existed. It was truly enjoyable to hear him. The rest of the band was extremely talented also, naturally, but there really was something extra special about Marsalis. His talent. His easy way, and the way he told stories about the songs they played - songs of Duke Ellington - easily won the crowd. We were like putty in his hand. And - believe me - he knew it.
There were also some aspects of the evening, naturally, of less determinate enjoyability. There was the woman in front of us who had apparently dunked her head in a bottle of perfume in preparation of the night. Apparently she had lost her sense of smell. There was the woman behind us who audibly vocalized her approval of the next tune up, as Wynton articulated in his seductive voice. "Mmmmm hmmmmm," she would say. Or a knowing laugh as Wynton rasped, "a little song known as... Satin Doll."
"I know more about it than all of you," her tone connoted.
Or - the uncomfortable silences and the percolating murmurs as the emcee of the evening (is that the correct term? I mean the guy who introduces the band. The Introducer. I think he was the president of the UMS or something, too) announced a major corporate contribution - $1,000,000, in fact - to UMS the Ann Arbor community by Pfizer Global Research and Development: Ann Arbor Laboratories.
Uncomfortable because Pfizer has up and left (or is up and leaving) Ann Arbor, and taking 10,000 jobs with it.
Now, this is not my indictment of Pfizer. If I were Pfizer, maybe I would have done the same thing. And Pfizer apparently has donated another million to the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation, which is certainly commendable. But I'm just saying: the aura in the theater that night, on that announcement, started with uncomfortable silence and percolating murmurs - almost a perception of blood money - but then graduated to smatterings of clappings, and then crescendoed to full - if not enthusiastic in some pockets of audience - 90 BPM applause. It was a concert in itself, and it was weird to see. It was as if a wave of reluctant consensus had hit the crowd. "Hey, they can't be all bad - they're donating $1,000,000 to the arts community!" seemed to be the psychic flavor.
$1,000,000. In plain sight and sound of 3496 people. And 37 wheelchairs. Mostly uppercrust types. The wheelchairs too.
I wondered Pfizer hired any professional clappers that night? You know, to push it over the tipping point?
Anyway, back to the concert. All of these "incidents of less determinate enjoyability" (what an overblown phrase; I shouldn't have used it. Too late now!) were really my problem in the end, anyway - and I know that. And all in all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable night. I'm glad Heather and I got to be there with Dan and Karen.
I should mention, also, that Dan and Karen took us to a wonderful Polish restaurant - Amadeus. Karen - of Polish heritage - remarked how authentic the food was. She told us about how she has taken her grandmother - I believe a Polish immigrant - to the restaurant, and how much she raved about the food. Heather got a bowl of a kind of dill soup, which was deceptively, incredibly delicious. I got the borscht - which was the wrong decision, but still good. I think that that was the first time I had ever had any. I also swiped a spoonful of Karen's goulash, which was awesome. Also first time.
Anyway, if you're in Ann Arbor sometime, let us take you there. If you're into Polish food.
I bought a new alarm clock. Like a good, upstanding consumer, though, I did my research beforehand. That is to say, I found this page on Slate.com. And I left that page thinking that I would buy a nice, sensible, reliable alarm clock: the RCA RP3720 AM/FM Dual Alarm, with SmartSnooze® and Graduwake® technology. But when I went to Amazon to make the purchase, I was led (somewhat) astray: I decided to level-up and instead bought the RCA RP5440 SmartSnooze Dual Wake AM/FM Clock Radio with Time Projector and indoor/outdoor thermometer.
It's pretty obvious why I bought the clock, isn't it? (hint: the time projector). That's right - the clock projects a digital time on the wall, or on the ceiling. Or on your hand! And it really is as cool as it sounds. The indoor/outdoor thermometer thing is cool, too. But then there are the negatives.
I wouldn't say that it was a bad move for me to buy the clock, but the reviews on Amazon really are spot on: the clock is bright. I didn't think that it would bother me that much, but it really does. Also, the bit about not being able to read the clock if you are viewing it from too steep an angle below is totally true. Graduwake, much to my disappointment, is not all that it's cracked up to be. Finally, the interface sucks. It's very confusing, and some of the buttons already stick. So I guess I just realized that, even though I read those reviews thoroughly, I went ahead and bought the damn clock anyway. Oh, damn you digital time projector, Siren of the alarm clock world!
It's innovative times these days for alarm clock manufacturers. There's the Browfly, which sends off a flying helicopter-like component away somewhere in the room in the middle of the night - and doesn't stop beeping in the morning until you find it and reconnect it to the master piece. Then there's the Sonic Boom (ahhh, that sounds restful), an alarm clock that emits a brain-curdling 113 decibel noise. It also comes with a bed shaker.
These alarm clock "innovations" probably seem idiotic to the sane, but I sympathize with the designers' intentions. Waking up in the morning has always been difficult for me. In fact, I don't think that the likes of the intrepid Browfly or the Sonic Boom have what it takes to quickly and reliably wake people like me up. They have the seeds of something interesting, but I think I require something a little more sinister - a little more desperate - to bring me fully to my wakeful state.
This is my alarm clock idea:
Make a large ant farm and supply it with fire ants. Rig it to an alarm clock in such a way that, when it's time to wake up, the alarm clock beeps, but also begins bending the glass face of the ant farm. If, say, after thirty seconds the sleepyhead doesn't turn off the alarm, the glass will have been bent to the breaking point and the glass will shatter, allowing the ants to escape. Advanced models might spray the chemical pheromones of a rival colony over in your general direction so as to whip the warrior ants into a bloodthirsty friendly. The fear of being stung will wake sensible users instantly with a rush of adrenaline. For the not-so-sensible, they will be awoken with the sting of ant venom. It's fool-proof!
And, since everyone likes ant farms, it also makes a great decorative item, like the Dirt Devil Kone. How kool is that? Order yours today for only three installments of $39.95!
I told Heather about my idea. I think that she's reconsidering the wedding.
Again.
Heather and I finally framed a photograph my Dad took. Or had it framed, to be more precise. The photo is in the woods of my parents' property in Ohio, where I grew up:
The photo itself can be viewed here, on my Dad's Photonet site.
I love this picture. I regret not getting the companion pieces. He sells these, by the way; anyone interested should contact me and I'll (virtually) introduce you.
The framer did a really great job, too. He took us through a variety of frames and glass and helped us pick something that looks really nice. The frame itself is painted black metal, which seems to fit the photo perfectly, somehow. The framer was Graphic Art Wholesalers, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Detroit had a new "reveal" (eye roll) the other day. I learned about this via an NPR article:
Car makers are employing strobe lights, pyrotechnics, cowboys and even cattle in their efforts to publicize new models — known in industry parlance as the "reveal."
In an arena filled to capacity — mostly with the press — Ford unveiled its newly redesigned F-150 pickup truck Sunday afternoon.
The truck emerged from the back of the stage through a cloud of blue smoke and flickering strobe lights. Then, country-and-western singer Toby Keith talked up the virtues of the new truck.
Toby Keith? Isn't that the guy that sang:
Oh, Justice will be served and the battle will rage.
This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage
You'll be sorry that you messed with the US of A
'Cuz we'll put a boot in your ass
It's the American way.
Let's see what this gentleman and scholar had to say about the Ford F150:
"It's roomy, the interior is really slick, but it's still roomy for a big guy like me," he said.
Straight from the heart. I like the reinforcement of equating "big" with, say, "cowboy," "tough," and "glamorous - but in a macho kind of way."
But wait -- there's more!
This week's most anticipated reveal was for Chrysler's new Dodge Ram pickup truck. Two brand-new trucks joined a dozen cowboys herding 120 head of longhorn Texas steer through downtown Detroit.
I like how the announcer for Chrysler really drives home the idea that the new Dodge Ram is separating itself from the herd (groan). And 120 longhorn Texas steer? Through downtown Detroit? Now little is tougher than The Cowboy in the American psyche, but herding cattle through a major metropolis? "Silly" is putting it charitably. But here's the best part:
It was a great idea, but in the end, it was just a group of big cows lumbering down the street. Then, when Chrysler Vice Chairman Jim Press tried to talk about the new truck, some of the steers began to mount each other.
"Well, let's not watch that. This is one show you're not going to forget. OK, look at the truck," he told the crowd.
Kind of turned "pay no attention to the man behind that curtain!" on its head, didn't it?
The auto blog Jalopnik has hilarious video highlights of the event. The first few frames sum it up pretty well.
Momo has made Heather's Senegalese Peanut Soup recipe, about which I blogged last week, and found it to be delicious! She has also translated the recipe into Japanese. Glad you liked it, Momo!
I always thought Jackson Pollock paintings were pretty interesting. Now, though, anyone can do them! Here's mine (click to view larger version):
Done with the Jackson Pollock painting simulator (jacksonpollock.org). Found via Digg.
Controls: change colors with a click of the mouse. Clear the screen with spacebar. I kind of liked monochrome the best, though.
So another really interesting RadioLab segment talked about this software - EMI, an acronym for Experiments in Musical Intelligence - that this guy David Cope came up with to analyze musical compositions and subsequently create new musical compositions in the same style.
For example, Cope "trained" his software on Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and had it create a (very) similar piece. He also did so for Bach, Mahler, and Joplin, among others. Maybe the Joplin-inspired piece is my favorite.
There are a few other ones that are even more interesting, like the Navajo-inspired songs, and Parallax and Vortex, for example. Especially these last two really challenge ideas about contemporary musical composition. I'm listening to Vortex right now, and I feel like I'm going to break out into a riot.
Further exploration of Cope's site reveals how he trained his software (at least in part). One is called the Markov program. My guess is that it uses something like a Markov chain for training. I wonder what order it is - e.g., whether the conditional probabilities are based on the preceeding 3 notes, or 4 notes, or what? Or, perhaps notes are not the appropriate units of expression over which the probabilities are defined? I'm definitely going to have to read some of his papers.
Cope kind of deprecates his program on the RadioLab episode by saying that the program is really not intelligent at all. By this I assume he means that all his program is doing is training conditional probability tables, and then emitting according to them. It's strange and interesting how we, as humans, intuit what intelligence is, and what it is not. And probably a little bit foolish.
One of my colleagues at Michigan remarked that modern artificial intelligence is nothing but probability. I think that that's overstating it a bit, but there's definitely some truth to that. I can't decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Another point of interest: one of the hosts mentioned on the show how people felt hoodwinked and unsettled after learning about the program and how good it is. Others implied that this wasn't real creativity - but gave no concrete reason why not, other than that the process didn't originate in someone's head. These are bad attitudes. The intelligent and successful artist of the future will take full advantage of tools like these to create expressions that we can't even yet imagine. We might think of these people as meta*-artists (where the * is the Kleene closure, of course).
It seems to me that there should be some sort of long, convoluted German word for dread about what it means to be human, experienced on the advent of certain new technologies that do some things better and faster than what humans currently do. What is often forgotten, though, is that the fact that computers doing more and more things faster and better than us actually frees us to do more higher-level thinking.
Noteworks Rob: it looks like Cope has also used cellular automata for algorithmic musical composition. I know you're into that, and probably you are already thoroughly familiar with Cope. If not, though, well, here's a heads-up.
Heather and I looked in the mailbox the other day, and what did we see? Presents from Momo and Andrew from their recent trip to Japan!
The first one was this cool toy called "Cube World."
Now, my future sister-in-law told me about these toys, and how someone in her office had a couple of them. What it is is a cube with a simple LCD monitor each containing a stick figure. Each figure does different things - i.e. different cubes have different personalities. We received Scoop and Slim. Each cube's stick figure does something interesting by itself; however, the toys really shine when you put them together side-by-side (or on top): they actually interact with each other. It's really cool. And it doesn't stop at two; if you add even more, you get a larger world through which the stick figures can have more complex interactions. Here's an example video with sixteen of the cubes put together:
I've been thinking about how they have built for expansion. I mean, if the toy is a hit, they probably want to release new ones that do different things, yet make sense in the context of the other cubes. Of course, you can't plan for all future interactions, so I imagine that they must send signals; e.g. cube 1 sends signal 16 to cube 2; if cube 2 supports signal 16 then both cube 1 and cube 2 do activity 16 (which make sense together in context); otherwise abort and try a different signal. Am I over-analyzing this toy yet? Sorry about that.
But it's a really cool toy. Also, if you put the cube on its side - or upside down - the stick figure "falls" and regards the new bottom as the earth. Really neat; I'm glad they built that in.
We also got another cool gift: a collection of plastic, miniature convenience store items! We haven't taken them out of the wrap because we think they'll become collectors' items. But maybe we'll relent and open them up in the future. They're so cool! Included here, from left, are a bottle of liquor, a bag of ice, a boxed box of smoked tongue (I think), what looks to be a bentou box, and finally a liter jug of water.
Just to get a sense of scale, here's the plastic bottle of liquor next to my hand:
I guess there's a whole series of these! Next time we're in Japan, we're definitely going to pick up some more.
Thanks guys! We love them! These are way cool!
Heather got me to watch an awful movie the other day. Actually it was quite good, but it was the most depressing movie that I've ever seen. More depressing than Leaving Las Vegas even.
The movie is called Happiness. I won't go into details about the plot, but I will quote the summary on Netflix:
A bittersweet film that belies its title, Happiness draws a dark portrait of a supremely dysfunctional family where each member battles personal demons. Plotlines include a prank telephone caller (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who's afraid of women and a preternaturally cheerful woman (Jane Adams) who's unable to make a physical connection. With other stories revolving around pederasts and masturbation, this remarkable movie is not for the squeamish.
That's an understatement.
There are a few moments that provide some measure of comic relief, but overall it's relentlessly brutal. Particularly a scene where a self-conscious, already fragile eleven-year-old boy decides to confront his pedophile father, with whom he has a [healthy] loving relationship, about his pedophilia. The resulting conversation is heartwrenching. Ughhh... it's not that there's any violence directly portrayed in the movie; it's rather being witness to people's inclination to dig themselves so deep into a hole that they can't possibly extricate themselves from it.
It's one of those movies where you have to pause it for a while, go get a glass of water for about five minutes, and then reluctantly hit the play button again. I used to do that for very suspenseful movies, or scary movies (OK, I still do), but I've never done it for a... gee, how can I characterize the genre of this movie? Some of the reviewers on Netflix call it Dark Comedy, but I really don't think that that does it justice. Let me propose Psychic Wound. Yes, this film is definitely of the Psychic Wound genre.
Heather had fun with this. She was gleefully cackling at my horror at the movie. She must have laughed for ten minutes. I told her that she was henceforth banned from choosing the Netflix movies.
Five stars, though. A really good and interesting movie. I just can't stop thinking about it.
As a GTD geek, I truly appreciate the power of prescription and the allure of methodoloy for getting tasks done. In David Allen's book, the author lays out a bunch of strategies on several different levels of how to accomplish tasks - ranging from life goals (which he calls the 50,000 foot view) to a "next actions" list from which the practitioner chooses the next action, oddly enough, based on several factors: time, context, priority, etc. If the next action is going to take too much time (say, more than an hour, for example), one must decompose the task into several smaller tasks. According to official GTD doctrine.
Now, this methodology works pretty well in most cases. But I have found that many unpleasant tasks take a lot of time, and it is not worth the effort involved in trying to decompose the task because it is made up of a bunch of microtasks. One such task might be, "Clean the kitchen," which is composed of microtasks such as "wash the small blue bowl," "wash the large green bowl," "pick up and throw away that piece of plastic wrap on the floor," "dry and put away this spoon," and "take out the trash." And so on.
Maybe I'm being a little over-theoretical here. I'll cut to the chase: my strategy for doing these kinds of tasks is to count them. Out loud. For example, if I take a dish out of the dishwasher and put it in the cabinet, I'll say "One." Break down the old Kashi cereal boxes that we've acquired from Sam's and put them in the to put in dumpster pile: "Two." Sweep the floor: "Three and four." Sometimes I consolidate task numbers because the tasks take longer than the "average" task. Or what I perceive to be the average task. Taking out the trash often counts as five. But the counting works for me.
"Thirty-seven."
Normally I'll count to 100. In general, I accomplishing 100 microtasks per day is feasible. Sometimes it isn't. But who cares? I'm getting stuff done.
Of course, Heather thinks I'm a freak. "What about the flatware? There are like 35 forks, knives and spoons in the dishwasher to be put away. How do you count them? Is that 35 tasks?"
My answer is that I'll often group 3 or 4 pieces of the flatware into a microtask and put them all away as a group. Or, if I'm feeling motivated, I'll take out the whole flatware basket and put it on top of the counter, where I'll put them all away at once. I'll count that as one microtask.
"That's awfully inconsistent; on one hand, you're counting about nine microtasks; on the other hand, one. And that's for the same chore!"
True, but the point isn't to develop a strict definition of what jobs legitimately count as microtasks and which don't. The point is just to motivate me to finish cleaning the kitchen. Or the living room. Or whatever.
Now, I've tried applying this system to other types of tasks, such as lab work, or work for class, for example. I've found that it does not work as well as it does for so-called mindless tasks like cleaning the kitchen. I just can't keep track of how many microtasks I've done while I'm programming. In fact, I have a hard enough time keeping track of what microtask number I'm on for mindless tasks! That's why I count out loud, actually. To the distraction of Heather.
Another impediment, I think, is that tasks like programming often have latent delays, where the computer is chugging along. Compiling a program, say, or doing an SVN update, or running unit tests, which can take up to five minutes sometimes. Or more. These kind of task categories are more compatible with the application of Instant Boss.
Anyway, I guess that's it for today. I'm only on 74 for my 100 tasks to complete.
I heard about SpaceTime.com from an interview on NPR with a correspondent who was attending CES. What is SpaceTime? It's a kind of web browser that enables you to view web pages in 3D. Kind of. Think of a kind of 3D desktop in which you can organize your web pages - in three dimensions (actually four).
When I heard about the new product, I immediately thought that we, as the computer industry, had once again reached the point where our imaginations had gotten to the point where many businesses cease creating useful things and only make cool things (i.e. unuseless things). Until those companies go out of business, and the pendulum swings back to sanity and profitability - but with a dose of inspiration and a pinch of lessons learned, and where the megacorporations likely adopt, package, and deploy the technology in a way that is palatable to the masses. And, if they're lucky and savvy, in such a way that they can whip the masses into such a frenzy that they come to think the megacorporations were the primary inventors of the technology all along. Seriously, it's like a kind of technological Beatlemania. Steve Jobs is more popular than Jesus.
I own an iPod, by the way. Just wanted to wedge my hypocritical disclaimer in here.
Tangential rant aside, curiosity got the best of me and I decided to try SpaceTime out. One of the actually useful features is that, when you do a search on a site - say Google, Youtube, or eBay - the top x or so search results open up in a stack beneath the search window. Kind of neat. Another interesting concept is the ability to navigate your pages in a timeline. The interface allows for pretty nice navigation between your site visits both in space and time. The fact that they're trying to reengineer the way people browse the Internet is very appealing to me. But overall, it's a very buggy and not fully-functional web interface. The demo on the website apparently lies about the freeform rotation of windows. Also, Spacetime crashed twice in one thirty-minute period on me. To top it all off, it seems to be a pretty big memory hog.
I probably won't be giving up FireFox anytime soon. I still don't see the utility of laying out pages in 3-space. I think that, fundamentally, human beings probably prefer to consume their written language in two dimensions (or fewer). I know I do. Of course, I'm one of the weird people that prefer the 2D platformers to 3D platformers. But it will be interesting to see how SpaceTime develops. Or when it flops.
There are some things that a 3D browsing experience can't mitigate, however. Watch the demo - the CEO goes to Yahoo or something and one of those wretched Orbitz.com flash golf games pops up. And I love that when they navigate to CNN.com, the headline story is Phil Spector's mistrial. That man's crazy eyes are forever burned in the retina of my brain. It feels like Satan's elf incarnation is staring directly into my soul.
[This post is cross-posted on my log on the Noteworks wiki]
Made some serious headway on noteworks this week. Patrick and I have decided to split the programming work right now into his taking care of the sound and my taking care of the graphics and rendering. Haven't quite completed all that I wanted to do for Friday's meeting, but it's not too shabby. Can render vertices and edges; no rendering of directed edges yet, though. I have to figure out a way to correctly draw directed edges. Then I have to be able to draw both arrows when A->B and B->A. Then I have to draw reflexive arrows (A->A). Then - and this is probably lower on the priority scale, but still - I want to be able to draw curved directed edges, so the network becomes more managable to the user.
The time functionality is not yet rendered, I should add. That is, when a node is excited, it does not change color, as it should. That's going to take a little bit of time. I've done stuff like this before, but there's more than one way of doing this, and each has its positives and negatives.
Anyway, here's a screenshot. Pretty damn amazing, huh?
Have you seed Burger King's latest advertising campaign? The "Get me a Whopper" one, where they pretend that Burger King has discontinued the Whopper forever?
On the first viewing, it seems kind of amusing. But after several viewings, it seems more and more to me that these people are exhibiting signs of actual addiction to their fast food. Look how emotional people get! It's kind of sinister.
Link from YouTube.
Regan Burns always cracks me up, though.
People should be able to comment anonymously now. Let me know if anyone still has problems.
Heather and I went to the new Washtenaw Fitness Center yesterday. Heather obtained some guest passes. She encouraged me to go with her to check it out, and with some reluctance I joined her. She's been trying to get me to go for a long time.
It's a really nice facility. I mean, it's the best facility I've ever seen in my life. I'm glad Heather convinced me to go. There are loads of elliptical machines, stairsteppers, stationary bikes, freeweights, Nautilus machines, etc. Each of the aerobic machines has a headphone jack through which you can listen to the audio for eight different television screens. And some are cable! There's also a basketball court, a lap pool and a therapy pool, a running track (on the second floor, which overlooks everything), a yoga room, a pilates room, a bunch of classrooms for a ton of different classes they offer, and even a coffee bar.
The real draws, for me and Heather at least, were the sauna, the steam room, and the jacuzzi. Now, there's a shared-sex jacuzzi in the common area, by the pool, but there are also sex-segregated jacuzzis in each of the locker rooms. There are no shared saunas or steam rooms.
And the locker rooms are nice. Top notch and classy. Of course, in the men's lockerroom at least, all of the usual conspicuous clues reinforcing manliness and - in particular - heterosexuality - were present in the locker room. A copy of ESPN Insider Weekly lay on the bench in the dry sauna. In the common area, with plush leather couches, some awful G4 tech-related program was playing. God I hate that channel - except for Ninja Warrior, of course. That show rules.
But nobody was in the jacuzzi in the Men's locker room. So, the dilemma: after coming back from Japan, and being a big fan of the public baths (onsen) in which you bathe in the nude, I wondered - is this supposed to be a nude thing? Or should I have brought my swimming trunks? I was tempted to get in, even though I hadn't brought my swimming trunks. I mean, nude men were walking around everywhere - what would be the difference? But I thought: well, maybe I'll wait and see. Maybe I won't go in this time. I mean, I don't want to be labelled as that "extremely white freak who gets in the jacuzzi naked and exposes his junk for all to see." Not yet.
Afterwards, I asked Heather: "Are you supposed to get in there naked?"
"Well, I don't know, but I think it's probably all right. There was some European chick in there who was naked, so I went in too. But there was another woman in her bathing suit in there with us. And she looked pretty uncomfortable with us. But I think that it's probably okay."
"Hmmmm," I agreed. I mean, this is hippie-dippie Ann Arbor. I would expect that, if anywhere in the U.S., it would be cool to get in naked. I resolved that, next time, I would get in - sans swimming trunks.
We liked the facility so much that we decided to sign up for memberships. A young man processed our applications. Also present behind the counter was a woman whose sole task seemed to be to degreet customers as they came out of the lockerrooms. "Have a nice night, ladies," she recurred. Or "gentlemen."
"Let me ask you something," I posed to her, strategizing my words so as to not flag myself as the healthclub weirdo. "Is it cool to get in the lockerroom jacuzzi naked?" Fail.
Her brow furrowed. "Yeah, so no, people are not allowed to enter the jacuzzi unclothed. I know some people do, but they are not supposed to. It's clearly stated in the contract." She looked at me askance.
"Yeah, um, well I thought so. I was just asking, because, you know, I saw some dude getting in there naked, and I was just wondering..." I lied.
"Yes, we are aware of the problem, and we're working on it." I found it odd that she seemed to regard the members behavior as a kind of problem to be solved. "Fortunately, nobody has tried that in the public jacuzzi, by the pool," she said, smiling. Did I detect a hint of preemptive admonishment in her expression?
I forced a laugh. "Yeah, that would take some serious..." I wanted to say balls. But that didn't seem appropriate, given the subject matter and the professionalism of the woman. I briefly considered cajones, but doesn't that mean balls in Spanish? Or Latin? I just settled for a silent, slow nod and pursed lips. An assenting nod.
After about ten seconds, the young man processing our membership asked us a question requiring my attention, so I was saved.
So I was reading an article in Wired 15.11 by Seth Mnookin called The Trouble with Productivity:
That's when I realized I wasn't accomplishing anything. My campaign to increase productivity had become yet another distraction--and a significant one. Suddently I needed to time-manage my time management. So last week I installed a timer on my desktop... to help me limit how long I spent on Google-related sites.
That sounded very familiar to me.
While we were in Japan, I purchased a little 60-minute kitchen timer to help me stay focused on the task at hand, whatever it might me. I bought that thing at Olympic, in Koenji. It would help motivate me to do things like clean the kitchen, or straighten up the apartment, or whatever. For added fun, I would try to accomplish my task(s) in 60 minutes or less (or 30 minutes or whatever - and I know, I'm a freak). The problem was that Heather didn't like the noise that the timer made. I mean, it was pretty loud, and it goes on for a pretty long time. So if I knew that it was about to go off I would plunge it under a pillow or something. But that wasn't very often.
But I hadn't considered a desktop timer. So I searched the web and found Instant Boss:
Instant Boss is a motivational timer for timing work/break cycles with alarm reminders and dialogs to help you manage your time better and get more work done, while at the same time not depriving yourself of much needed break time.
Instant Boss is perfect for procrastinators and workaholics, alike.
The deafults are 10 minutes of work, 2 minutes of break, and this is repeated 5 times for a total of a 1 hour work cycle.
These values can be changed to suit your needs. The program will remember the values you used during your last session.
Set the amount of time you want to work, how long your breaks should be, and how many times you want it to repeat the cycle. Then just click the 'Work" button and Instant Boss will remind you when to take a break and when to work.
Being a GTD geek, I found this app pretty cool, at least conceptually. And in practice, I found that I actually got a lot more done using it, pathetic as that seems. Heather downloaded and used it for a little bit and experienced similar results.
In lab yesterday, Patrick shared with me an even cooler app (I know, kind of hard to believe) called Enso that provides kind of a command-line interface to Windows. Maybe that's not what most people care about, but for people who sometimes (though not often) pine for the good old days of MS-DOS where typing a command is like ten times easier and faster, this is a welcome application. Enso kind of sits between the interface and all of your other applications. Unfortunately, it's not something that you can get via a simple image, so I encourage you to watch the short video demo here.
I was so excited and grateful about learning about Enso that I shared the Instant Boss application that I had found earlier. He kind of looked at me like I was a freak. Oh well.
The conversation stemmed from a story we both read in the New York Times about Indian schools becoming very popular now in Japan.
Bookstores are filled with titles like “Extreme Indian Arithmetic Drills” and “The Unknown Secrets of the Indians.” Newspapers carry reports of Indian children memorizing multiplication tables far beyond nine times nine, the standard for young elementary students in Japan.
Memorization was still a large part of high school and middle school education when Heather and I were in Japan, certainly. Heather recounts a time when students were called on to write the same English word - say "imitate" - over and over again, possibly several hundreds of times. Pages and pages. Once they got down that word, though, if you confronted them with a different form of the word - say "imitation" - they would be completely lost and feel uncomfortable. I noticed this phenomenon many times myself. Another time, Heather remembers trying to teach the "add the e on the end of a word to change the vowel sound from short to long" rule; e.g. "sit" vs. "site." None of the kids seemed to get it into their heads about how to apply their rule - they were only interested in memorization.
Another story - one of Heather's old teacher colleagues at her school in Japan said that her husband was never very good at English in middle or high school. Once he got to college, it was a different story. He got a professor that taught him rules (tricks, she thought) like the one above; after that, he started picking English up very quickly. His wife was jealous that her husband had learned English so quickly, but she was decidedly not impressed with him. She felt he had cheated and taken the easy way out by learning the shortcuts. She felt that he had kind of committed some sort of ethical misstep.
Heather thinks it's all about discipline, and I think that that's probably right on the money. Being able to be conversant in a topic, according to traditional notions about education in Japan, is a direct result of how many hours one puts in the topic - or at least should be - and I think that the very language encourages this kind of thinking (more on that below). That's the way it's always been! And if you look at many of the "masters" of Japanese art, for example, the most highly regarded are often the ones that have put in the most time - often decades. This is changing, but a kernel of this aesthetic still permeates Japanese society, I think.
Western education - or at least American education, perhaps I should say - seems like it is based more on the internalization of rules. Of course, some memorization must go on, but often only that which is necessary (the axioms), and from there the ability to mechanically derive everything else - or at least a whole lot else. This is not universally applied to American education, however, and I think that this is why history is often so boring to learn in school; we have to memorize a bunch of dates and trivia (literally), and it soon exits our head because we're not used to this kind of learning. Probably the Japanese are light years ahead of Americans in knowing about their history (whether actual or manufactured by the government - Americans and Japanese are both guilty of the latter, by the way). I definitely got this sense while I was there; Japanese youth seemed interested, engaged, and knowledgeable about their history, in general. But it is very difficult to apply rules in order to derive history. Maybe impossible. Of course, later in life, history for Americans often becomes far more interesting because we can connect seemingly disparate historical episodes into a more intriguing, unified, relevant context. But that's more of an appeal to emotion and the senses, perhaps.
But that's a bit of a digression. This whole post has degenerated into a meandering rant. Sorry about that.
I think the more interesting notion is the idea that Japanese language constantly perpetuates these ideas. English - though there are many irregularities - follows a pretty regular grammar. There are only 26 components out of which we can form words. We've made it easy on ourselves; we are rewarded for "working smarter, not harder." Japanese, on the other hand, has much less regularity. It is more free-form (though there are definitely ungrammatical sentences), and its most common constructions are made out of about 2,500 components. The only reliable strategy to learn it, perhaps, is one that relies heavily on memorization. So maybe I can blame my difficulty in learning Japanese really well on the failure of my rule-based brain being able to wrap its head around a non-rule-based language! Or maybe that's just a cop-out.
Quick story to illustrate the point. About six months or so ago, I got my nephew Sean - a high school sophomore - interested in Blender, the free 3D graphic authoring tool. In his chemistry class, he was assigned to create a model of the atom. Being a bright kid, he used Blender to create an animated model of the atom. He demonstrated it to the class, and everyone - including the teacher - was blown away. One kid evidently didn't believe that the work was Sean's: "He got that from the Internet!" he shouted. And then, the credits came on the screen - "Created by Sean Xxxxxxx" (surname removed to respect his privacy). One couldn't imagine a better rejoinder to the kid's accusation.
Sean ended up receiving seventeen extra credit points for the assignment. "And you know how long it took me to make that?" he said. "No more than half an hour."
"Good - work smarter, not harder," I told him. I think that that episode just perfectly crystallizes American approaches to academic and enterprise endeavors.
Let me know what you think of things.
Over the holidays, I played a game with my future sister-in-law, her husband, and Heather in which one person recited a little advertising jingle and the others would have to guess. It's amazing how much advertising signals can permeate your psyche.
Below are twenty-five odd of the ones we came up with. Some are easy, but some are pretty difficult, I think. How many can you get?
Comments enabled.
- ???? ? ???? the San Francisco Treat!
- 800-588-2300 ?????? ?????
- The incredible, edible ???
- Ho Ho Ho. ????? ?????
- It's a good time for the great taste of ??????????
- Like a good neighbor, ????? ???? is there
- Oh, what a feeling! ??????
- ??????? ????? ??????, they're magically delicious!
- Winning Ohio over, have you driven a ???? lately?
- Oh, oh, oh, who's that kid with the ???? ??????
- ?. ?.; it's the way you should be. Just try ?. ?. and you'll see.
- Confident! Confident, dry, and secure! Raise your hand, raise your hand if you're ????
- Head for ????? beer. Head for the mountains.
- Every kiss begins with ???
- ??? ?????, down on the farm
- It's hard to get clean in hard water; and Cleveland is a hard water town. Yeah, but we know best, we've got hard-water ????
- ???? is it!
- Mmm mmm good! Mmm mmm good! That's why ?????????? ???? is mmm mmm good!
- ???????: we build excitement!
- ???????? is thirst aid, for that deep-down body thirst!
- ????? ????? is gonna move you! (not a product for incontinence, BTW).
- ?.?.?. we're home even when you're not
- I believe in ??????? ???? 'cause I believe in me
- That ??? ??? freshness lasts right through it; your fresh breath goes on and on -- while you chew it
- ???? ????? got baked potato appeal; they're made from potatos and skins that are real! Cheddar cheese and bacon, sour cream and chives, tasty baked potatos you won't believe your eyes! They're made from potato and skins that are real. ???? ????? from Keebler got baked potato appeal
- * Save today ??? ?????'s way!
- * ??????? ????: we sell spatulas -- and that's all!
Weird... have you ever heard of onion goggles? I haven't ever heard of such a thing before! But Amazon sells several brands of them on their site!
I'm glad to see that they come in several colors so as to match your personality. You wouldn't want to be caught chopping onions out of style!
Apparently, onion goggle brands differentiate themselves enough to warrant having reviews. Here's Cooksillustrated.com's review of the RSVP goggles (pictured above):
Chopping and dicing our way through 30 pounds of onions per week in the test kitchen, we’re always interested in new methods of eye defense. And while they certainly look a bit goofy, the R.S.V.P. International Onion Goggles ($19.99) do help maintain focus on the onions—yellow, Vidalia, red, or otherwise—rather than the tissue box. We found that they block irritating fumes better than sunglasses, and the foam padding around the antifog lenses is a more comfortable alternative to swim goggles. Available in white or black with lime green trim.
Sunglasses, huh? I wonder if they make Transitions Onion Goggles?
This probably actually would have been useful when I got a case of Jalapeno Eye. Because I'm vain, I occasionally check my blog traffic to see, for example, what keywords/keyphrases people use to get to my blog via search engines and whatnot. One set of phrases that is the most common is the set including "jalapeno eye," "jalapeno juice in the eye," "what to do if you get jalapeno juice in the eye." Of these, the most common are of the form "jalapeno eye." I sadistically imagine sufferers running to Google and typing in the shortest phrase possible to alleviate their pain. Even now, my blog entry for the phrase "jalapeno eye" shows up first in the Google results.
And it is painful. I can only describe the pain of jalapeno eye as follows: imagine you have a seed in between your eyelid and your eyeball. Roll your eye around a bit, and imagine the seed permanently scratching your cornea. I really did think that there was a seed in my left eye, initially, and that I was going to go blind. When my right eye started hurting, too, and when my face started burning, I felt a little better, since I knew it wasn't a seed. Nevertheless, I still wondered if I was going to be blinded.
In any case, since so many people are coming to my site to find out how to alleviate their jalapeno eye, I thought I might provide some actually useful information for jalapeno eye sufferers.
What to do if you get jalapeno juice in your eye
First off, I am not a medical professional, obviously. Consult your physician to see if this treatment is right for you.
Below is a solution you can prepare and apply for the afflicted eyeball to alleviate pain and prevent against future jalapeno eye incidents.
- Cut and squeeze four lemons into a bowl. Remove pulp with a strainer. The acidity of the lemon juice will dissolve away the jalapeno acid.
- Mix in 1 teaspoon of molasses and 1 tablespoon of lye into the solution. These ingredients will soak up the residue jalapeno acid left in your eye.
- Add 1 teaspoon of salt. Stir, but not so much so as to completely dissolve it. The salt particles will scrub and exfoliate your cornea so as to protect against future jalapeno attacks.
- Add 1 1/2 teaspoons cayenne pepper. The pepper does not do anything for the pain, but it will polish your sclera so as to make it shinier and whiter. Think of it as a Listerine Whitening Quick-dissolving strip for your eyeball!
- Your eyes naturally lose iron as you age. To keep them up to snuff, add three teaspoons of fine iron filings to the solution. Keep a powerful magnet around so that, after you apply the solution, you can move it around so that the filings get to those hard-to-reach places. Apply the filings uniformly!
- By now, hopefully you will have realized that you should never put this solution into your eye. Have a good chuckle about it - laughter, after all, is the best medicine. I am sure that the sufferer will be so amused by this exercise that he or she will have forgotten all about his or her pain.
Seriously, the thing that worked for me was to go immediately into the shower and turn the power on lukewarm. I looked into the (soft) stream, eyes open (as much as I could manage, but still squinty). Your eyes will be sore for a couple of hours after that, but the soreness is bearable.
Heather made this awesome peanut soup. She's made it four or five times so far, I think, and each time it's been delicious. It's adapted from the Senegalese Peanut Soup recipe listed in Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook.
Makes 4 servings
- One 15-ounce can chickpeas, rinsed and drained.
- 3 cups chicken broth
- 3 tablespoons natural creamy peanut butter
- 1 teaspoon peanut or olive oil
- 2 red onions, chopped
- One 1" piece peeled gingerroot, minced (ground ginger OK too)
- 1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
- One 14 1/2-ounce can diced tomatoes
- 1/4 teaspoon cayenne paper, or to taste
- Chopped cilantro (optional)
- Plain yogurt (optional)
- Puree chickpeas, 1/2 cup of the broth and peanut butter in a blender.
- In oil, saute onions and ginger for 7-8 minutes. Add the spices. Saute 1 minute longer. Add the remaining 2 1/2 cups of broth, tomatoes, and chickpea mixture (in #1). Simmer 5 minutes. Season with cayenne. Serve, sprinkled with the cilantro, and/or with a tablespoon of plain yogurt.
Heather says that she doesn't use curry powder; instead she uses Indian spices like turmeric, garam masala, coriander etc. We've chopped it very fine in some instances, and left it chunky in others. Both are good; I prefer the chunkier soup.
It's delicious!
Off our balcony:
Our mantle has never looked so festive:
There was a good episode on WNYC's RadioLab podcast entitled Musical Language about the relationship between the two. Kind of along the lines of an extension to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. One of the most interesting components of the podcast was a segment about the debut of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (Весна священная) in 1913. Now, at the time, Stravinsky's piece was an incredibly innovative and avant garde piece of musical composition. It can be listened to from Benjamin Zander's website. From RadioLab's description:
...Jonah Lehrer takes us on a tour through the ear as we try to understand how the brain makes sense of soundwaves and what happens when it can't. Which brings us to one particularly riotous example: the 1913 debut performance of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." Jonah suggests that the brain's attempt to tackle disonant sounds resulted in old ladies tackling each other.
There literally was rioting - and blood - at the debut of this piece. From the Wikipedia entry:
The complex music and violent dance steps depicting fertility rites first drew catcalls and whistles from the crowd. At the start with the opening bassoon solo, the audience began to boo loudly due to the slight dischord in the background notes behind the bassoon's opening melody. There were loud arguments in the audience between supporters and opponents of the work. These were soon followed by shouts and fistfights in the aisles. The unrest in the audience eventually degenerated into a riot. The Paris police arrived by intermission, but they restored only limited order. Chaos reigned for the remainder of the performance, and Stravinsky himself was so upset on account of its reception that he fled the theater in mid-scene, reportedly crying.[2] Fellow composer Camille Saint-Saëns famously stormed out of the première, (though Stravinsky later said "I do not know who invented the story that he was present at, but soon walked out of, the premiere.")[3] allegedly infuriated over the misuse of the bassoon in the ballet's opening bars.
The RadioLab hosts cite some research about how listening to sound patterns that we are not used to causes our brain to release lots of serotonin. Of course, serotonin is a necessary and good chemical; it is a neurotransmitter that helps regulate mood. Too much serotonin, however, is linked to ailments like schizophrenia. So the theory is that Stravinsky's music literally made the audience go - however temporarily - insane. I'm actually not sure we know the long-term effects, if indeed we can characterize the effects as merely short-term. Whatever the case, a year later the piece was exhibited again, but this time to great fanfare and critical acclaim. Stravinsky was actually carried out on people's shoulders. And twenty years later, Stravinsky's piece was used in the Disney children's film, Fantasia.
This isn't the only classical music-inspired riot. In fact, Wikipedia lists ten of them, in a section called Classical Music Riot.
There's also an interesting related personal anecdote one of the RadioLab hosts shares. He worked at a radio station as a young man. One day, he decided would begin thoroughly educating himself about all music traditions - at least the ones present at the radio station's massive musical library - and he started at the very beginning of that library, with Gregorian chant. For two weeks he listened to Gregorian chant and nothing else. One day, he walked in the studio and heard the most discordant, unpleasant music he felt he had ever heard. One of the other disc jockeys was playing some very tame, romantic classical music. I can't remember the composer - there's a segment of his work on the podcast - but it was tame. And yet, it seemed so discordant and irritating to the young man - he actually got angry!
Tying this to contemporary musical traditions and modern society: surely by now you've heard of the U.S. Government's use of music to psychologically break down "unlawful combatants" at Guantanamo Bay. If not, there's a great podcast episode over at OnTheMedia. A little context for the interview - they're initially talking about that Ride of the Valkyries scene in Apocalypse Now [clip]:
BROOKE GLADSTONE: - we heard Wagner playing and the helicopters came in under Robert Duvall.DAVID PEISNER: Sure. My primary source on the Vietnam stuff was a guy who was in a PSYOP unit in Vietnam who later became a PSYOP historian. He actually brought up the Wagner Apocalypse Now example and said that didn't happen.
That said, he did give me an example of something that was called "The Wandering Soul" tape. Apparently it was a Vietnamese fable telling the Viet Cong you're going to die and your soul is going to walk the earth forever, and it was backed by these sort of creepy atonal sounds.
[CREEPY ATONAL SOUNDS]
This was played from boats going up rivers when they were trying to flush the Viet Cong out of the jungles. Whether it was successful, I think it's one of those things that's extremely hard to measure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I wonder whether you could find any rhyme or reason to the kind of music that you know has been chosen in Guantanamo and in Iraq.
DAVID PEISNER: One thing that is fairly certain is the music that was picked was picked partially because it was aggressive and loud, and it was also meant to be insulting to a Muslim. A lot of very devout Muslims don't believe they, you know, are allowed to listen to music at all, let alone sort of Western music.
I guess pushing someone to the brink of schizophrenia doesn't qualify as torture under the current administration's interpretation.
Some of the songs that they played - often against the artists' wishes - were Neil Diamond's America, Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A., Drowning Pool's Bodies, and - perhaps most fittingly and ironically, Eminem's White America.
Back to the RadioLab bit - and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - there was a segment about the relationship between speakers of tonal languages and incidence of perfect pitch:
For those of us who have trouble staying in tune when we sing, Deutsch has some exciting news. The problem might not be your ears, but your language. She tells us about tone languages, such as Mandarin and Vietnamese, which rely on pitch to convey the meaning of a word. Turns out speakers of tone languages are exponentially more inclined to have absolute (AKA 'perfect') pitch. And, nope, English isn't one of them.
Which, the hosts point out, might be one of the contributing factors that a little girl in America is pounding out Frère Jacques while the Chinese girl of the same age is performing Rachmaninoff. That's pretty interesting stuff.
I saw this vintage add and I thought that it looked like Heather looking at a piece of cheese or a plate of olives:
She wasn't too happy when I said that.
[This post is cross-posted on my log on the Noteworks wiki]
Happy New Year!
I'm a big fan of WNYC Public Radio's On The Media podcast, and over the holidays, I caught up with an episode that talked about a special kind of speaker that focuses sound on specific recipients, like a spotlight:
Last week, we visited a billboard on Prince Street in New York City that is among the first of its kind to find a way past the indifference of even the most detached New Yorker. The billboard is flanked by devices that look like speakers but which direct highly focused sound at unsuspecting persons who trigger a sensor by walking by.The sound is sent at a frequency that can only be heard by them. That's because the transmitter uses the skull as a speaker and so the sound resonates inside the head.
That made me think, could we find a way to use this technology with the Noteworks project? Particularly, perhaps, in collaboration with the Ouroboros (surveillance) group? Holosonics is one company that manufactures these kind of "Audio Spotlight" speakers. I wonder if we can get a deal on pricing by exhibiting their technology. As long as we can think of some interesting, worthwhile ideas to incorporate the technology into Noteworks - in a way that favorably depicts Holosonics' product line.
Also, I've found a very useful website called jsresources - that's Java Sound Resources - that provides a bunch of examples of sound code snippets. Very useful for our project.
Saw a really great film the other night. Five stars. It's called American Splendor.
American Splendor is the true story about Harvey Pekar, a Cleveland-area working-class file clerk and jazz aficionado who begins writing a comic book - also called American Splendor - not about superheroes or fantasy scenarios, but about his everyday life. It chronicles his experiences trying to master the fine art of grocery line selection (lesson: don't get behind old Jewish ladies, no matter how short the line), his finding of and marriage to his wife (they met through his comic, and married a week after meeting in person), his genuine, contentious experiences on the David Letterman show, and his yearlong struggle with Lymphoma (recounted in Our Cancer Year).
The film did an excellent job of weaving together real footage, acted segments, and comic montages. It was filmed entirely in the Cleveland area and starred the always good Paul Giamatti.
There's a tall floor lamp in the corner of one of the rooms of our apartment. It's meant to be the room's primary light source. The problem is, it's on side of the room opposite the entrance. There's a light switch by the door when you enter the room, but it controls a socket directly below the switch. And there's no room for a lamp there. By the time you find your way to the other side of the room to turn the light on, there's no need to turn the light on in the first place.
So naturally, I bought The Clapper. Not just The Clapper, but the Smart Clapper. Ordered it through Amazon and got it a couple of weeks ago. The kind that has two outlets and turns on different devices depending on if you clap twice or thrice. And, it has a remote control - with a keyring - if you can't be bothered to clap. Truly, it is a miracle of modern technology. Or mid-1980s technology.
I remember my parents had a Clapper - or a cheap knockoff - when I was growing up. Once it finished living its short life of usefulness/novelty in my parents' eyes, it was relegated to the junk drawer. When I discovered it one day, I promptly appropriated it for use - and experimentation - in my bedroom. It worked great with lights. Not so great - yet still entertaining - was when I hooked it up to a semi-loud radio. Every time I activated the radio with a pair of claps, the radio turned off by its own accord after a couple of seconds. I found that pretty cool back then. I also remember having fierce arguments with my sister Kelly, and the lights would flicker on and off. And we would laugh, and the stern looks on our faces would evaporate.
Unfortunately, Heather is not too keen on the clapping. Says my claps are too loud. Says that it will wake the neighbors. Luckily, we have that remote. We have classily hung it on the wall with a blue thumbtack, next to the useless wall light switch.
Back in Ann Arbor after the 2007 Christmas Whirlwind Tour. Fun, but Heather and I are exhausted.
Had a good visit with my uncle and aunt who are staying at my parents for a little bit. By most accounts, probably not an incredibly exciting New Year's Eve last night - the six of us stayed up and played poker until just past midnight - but Heather and I really had a fantastic time. Learned some new games - including Black Mariah and another variant of high-low 7-card stud in which you (or the dealer) rolls four of the cards. It's fun learning the games but I'm at a big disadvantage playing games I don't know so well. It takes me about 100 games before I can internalize the hand probabilities to any good effect.
I don't think that I lost too much, though. I think Heather actually won some.
