February 2008 Archives

Waiting in Phoenix right now to board for Detroit. Normally I'd be keen to read the book I've got right now - The Selfish Meme - but I can't for two reasons: one, it's too prolix and technical for me to process right now, I'm pretty tired - going to be getting in Detroit at 5:00 AM. And Heather is a saint for picking me up that early.

The second reason is because I'm pissed. I got a middle seat on the plane. Normally I'm pretty chill about that - and I've taken many flights - but the dude on my right - I swear - had his elbow about two inches past the no-fly zone. Maybe three. Make yourself at home, buddy.

Not only that, he had the incredibly annoying habit of touching his hair, or something on his face, or SOMETHING that required him to grind his elbow across my ribs or arm. What do you say to that? "Hey buddy, stop being such an asshole." And, man was it hot on that plane. And I had a painful wedgie.

It was weird. During the beverage portion of the flight - I ordered a cranberry "juice," as always - I wanted to knock his drink over in retaliation. I recall watching an excellent PBS special on primate intelligence in which a researcher ran an amazing experiment. Two chimpanzees were in two separate compartments, and between the two compartments was a big tray of food. The tray was positioned so that the first chimpanzee could easily grab and eat morsels from it. The other chimpanzee, however, could pull a rope to bring the food towards him - and away from the first chimpanzee. The first chimpanzee, however, could pull a different rope - and most of the time did - that emptied all the food onto the floor. And so nobody got the food, but the first chimpanzee got his revenge. Like the prisoner's dilemma.

The interesting part of the experiment is that, if it was the researcher who moved the tray, the first chimpanzee was far less likely to upset the tray, because he correctly interpreted that it wasn't the second chimpanzee that caused the tray to move, and so the "revenge" would be wasted. The first chimpanzee still looked pretty pissed, though, in any case. If I am interpreting my primate emotions correctly.

Anyway, I felt like that first chimpanzee on my flight this evening.

You would think that the interview went really poorly to place me in such a bad mood, but actually I think it went pretty well. It was a technical interview completely. Actually, a series of four interviews. I won't tell you the kinds of questions that they asked, because I don't think that that's fair to Google. I will tell you, however, that though they were challenging - and perhaps I didn't offer answers that were 100% satisfactory (though they were 80% satisfactory at least, I think) - they weren't anything insurmountable. I think that if I had been allowed to actually program - with an actual compiler - I would have been able to do 20% better, and do it in half the time. It's amazing how much thinking I offload to the computer.

I'll also tell you that all the Google employees I talked to had drunk the Kool-Aid. Everyone thought Google was the bee's knees. Which is really good, I think, to a degree. I asked one guy - a really nice and obviously brilliant recent college graduate who was showing me about - point blank, "what do you hate about Google?" He gave me a lame answer - and he acknowledged its lameness - but it was because he couldn't think of anything bad.

That blows my mind.

I guess I'll hear from them next week. Looking forward to what they have to say.

I felt like a bit of an ass showing up at the The Domain Hotel (or is it Joie de Vivre? Seems to be co-branded) last night, Jack-in-the-Box in hand, and wearing a slightly stained dark blue sweatshirt. They are obviously selling - or trying to sell - business sophistication here. With a little bit of green thrown in for good measure.

Here's a picture of the wall:

It says "For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. It's domain is in the heart of all men."

I understand what they were going for here. They're trying to soothe us into peace of mind and relaxation so we can get a good night's rest. Unless we end up choking on Jack-in-the-Box.

Here's one of two pretty cool nightstands in the room:

It's essentially a grid of thin, tall logs with a plate of glass on top. They also have them in the lobby - and, I assume, every room in the hotel. What gets me is that there is a little placard on the nightstands that goes something along the lines of, "Save the Earth, don't have us wash the sheets if you're staying multiple nights." Which I'm all for, but when they have nightstands where it looks like they took out a small forest to construct, the message is inconsistent. I know it's unfair for me to make any sort of cost characterization, since I don't know the actual costs for making the tables. But perception counts, guys, and this time it doesn't click. More on that later.

In the bathroom, they've laid out the soaps and shampoos - and other liquids whose function escapes me - in a pleasing, hippyish way:

Unfortunately, it's not designed for actual use. I mean, if I want to grab the shampoo, I actually have to leave the shower, walk across the bathroom (because it is a pretty big bathroom), and pick it up. I don't have the skills first thing in the morning to operate in this environment! To actually plan and take the shampoo and soap in with me!

The inexperience is also inconsistent because it comes across as a fraud. I flushed the toilet this morning and it kept running and running. I had to jiggle the handle to fix it. May as well be back at Village Green!

It's now the morning of the interview. I woke up 6:25 AM today California time (which is 9:25 Michigan time), and I didn't feel like a zombie, so that made me feel sort of responsible. Even though I know it's an illusion. Interview is at 11:30 or something, so I've got loads of time.

Since U.S. Air did not supply passengers with food on either of the flights last night (OK, that's not strictly true - there was a salad you could buy for like $7.00), I wasn't going to pay that much for flight food, and I was pretty famished, so getting food was a pretty high priority. I saw a Jack-in-the-Box on the way to the hotel, and since I like Jack-in-the-Box and there aren't any that I know of in the midwest, I stopped there and got a Sirloin Bacon Burger.

Bad move.

I've come to the conclusion that I must be somewhat allergic to beef. because lately when I eat it, by throat starts constricting and, well, it feels like there's a permanent nodule of fat within it. I feel compelled to swallow. You don't know how difficult it is to sleep like that.

Or maybe it's just hamburgers, or a component of the sandwich. Maybe it's the hyper-enriched bread. All I know is that this is the fourth time this throat constriction has occurred, and all four times I had eaten a hamburger. I never used to have this allergy, if that's indeed what this is. This is kind of a weird and scary thing for me.

You may ask why I would punish myself by eating another hamburger before an important interview. The lame and stupid answer is, I forgot. So if you see me eating a hamburger, remind me what an idiot I am so I stop. I still feel the little faux gristle nodule in the back of my throat. Or I am imagining it.

Breakfast is soon. Or maybe it already started? Maybe I can wash that fat nodule down with some sausage and bacon.

On my way to Mountain View for an interview with Google right now. I mean, on a plane taking me from Michigan first to Phoenix, then to San Jose. Never taken U.S. Air before, at least that I can remember. Is that the airline I'm on? I don't even know.

Heather was, of course, gracious enough as always to drop me off at the airport. We whiled away the 30-minute drive talking about the interview, about why so many modern Michigan license plates start with the letter B, about how eating takeout Chinese food (King Shing) last night and takeout veggie Indian (Earthen Jar) this afternoon was probably not a good pre-flight decision (I was and still am a bit queasy), and about buying new tires.

We arrived at Smith terminal at Detroit airport. My least favorite airport in the world.

"What's up with this?" I asked Heather, nearing the departure terminal. I was referring to the empty terminal we were driving past, on the right. But probably I already had a bad, prepared taste in my mouth.

"Under construction?" she said.

"Yeah, but why did they route us through here?"

"Good question."

We passed a pair of port-o-potties. It was a brand I have seen before in Ann Arbor, in the construction site for the new Drama center by the Computer Science building. Acee Deucee. Number one or number two?

The car abruptly bumped up and down yet another battery of potholes.

"Jeez, it's like Cambodia," Heather said. And it reminded me, too, of the deeply pockmarked roads we saw in that country, caused by US-dropped bombs during the Vietnam War. And it reminded me of when I hired a taxi from the Vietnam-Cambodia border - because somehow, like an idiot, I forgot my immigration papers and was detained - and the taxi driver hit a puppy. I still remember the yelp and the subsequent crunch of puppy bone beneath the right tires.

But the Detroit airport roads. Southeast Michigan, we are told by the local news, has been hit by a salt crisis. I mean a road salt crisis, not a table salt crisis. But it seems like it's also been hit with an actual road crisis. The airport isn't the only place in Michigan with bad roads. On my way to school, from Dixboro towards the north campus on Geddes, I have to maneuver (skillfully, I think - and a bit fun) the tires as if they were balls in a huge labryrinthe (sp?) game or else risk potentially dropping out the guts of the car. Or at least that's what it feels like.

Ahh, our crumbling state [national] infrastructure!

Heather has a Japanese friend that lives in the same apartment complex. She once mentioned how nice the Ohio roads are. They must have made a pretty significant impression on here.

The flight attendants informed us that it will cost $5.00 for the headphones if we want to listen to the inflight movie. Five fucking dollars! And it's Martian Child (the preview of which sucked me in, I have to admit, with embarrassment - need to add it to my Netflix queue. To the bottom.). Oh well. I guess they can't show Cloverfield.

Another Naked Conversations excerpt (p. 200):

As Malcolm Gladwell points out in his fascinating book, we live in an age of Blink. The author talks about how people often make the right decision in a microsecond. Unconsciously, they are using the wisdom of their experience. Gladwell says we do this by "thin-slicing," taking the fewest facts that are most important for making the right decision. Too many facts, he argues, can confuse a situation, bog down response - or worse, lead you to the wrong decision. One example he uses involves an emergency coronary treatment unit that found triaging patients with chest pains based on just three facts proved more accurate in identifying heart attacks and saved more lives than waiting for the full picture by gathering all the facts. Responding quickly saves lives. Compiling a boatload of data does not. Responding quickly can also save millions of dollars and preserve a company's reputation. Sometimes, like it or not, you have to respond in a blink.

I haven't read Blink yet, though I read The Tipping Point, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Blink always seems to be taken out at the library, and these days I'm too cheap to go out and buy it...

Interesting passage from Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's book Naked Conversations:

Israel once represented Creative Labs, Inc., the U.S. marketers of the SoundBlaster device that gives most computers audio capability. While he was on a cross-country flight, a competitor's CEO sat next to a fellow company executive - directly behind Israel, whom they did not recognize. For more than four hours, the two loudly discussed their competitive strategy against Creative, while Israel listened quietly and took notes. We think such indiscretions remain more commonplace than loose blogger lips.

Ouch. One would think that Creative's competitor would have a little bit more sense than to discuss these matters on an airplane.

Patrick sent me a couple of really cool videos that are kind of similar to Noteworks. The first is a project called Reactable:

Good stuff. I guess that Björk has used this system in some of her concerts. That would be pretty neat to see.

The second link he sent reminds me kind of the Cube World toys. It's called Tangible Sequencer.

Ray Kurzweil is claiming that "[m]achines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029."

"I've made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029," he said.

"We're already a human machine civilisation; we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that."

Humans and machines would eventually merge, by means of devices embedded in people's bodies to keep them healthy and improve their intelligence, predicted Mr Kurzweil.

"We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons," he told BBC News.

I think that a lot of what Kurzweil says is penetrating and insightful. But I think that he's missing part of the picture. What does it really mean, "human-level artificial intelligence?"

A lot of people - futurists included - have assumed that human beings will [continue to] be the primary societal unit, at least in terms of the beneficiary of advances in artificial intelligence. For instance, Kurzweil probably correctly argues - at least in the near term - that a lot of advances will be not in elevating software to the level of human intelligence, but rather in supplementing our own intelligence with brain prostheses, and in turn using the data to create smarter software without the presence of a soft, cellular brain. Almost as if we're inducting, or bootstrapping, out-of-brain intelligence.

I think, however, the more likely scenario is that there will be a different primary unit society in the future:

Corporations.

Think about it: in terms of an evolutionary medium, the corporate world is markedly severe in its selection: make money or die. But it's also an extraordinarily complex medium: large corporations can often dominate the scene and rake in huge piles of cash, but small corporations that address unprecedented but modestly successful market niches still abound. Just like certain biological organisms that occupy sometimes mind-bogglingly specific ecological niches.

In terms of corporations and AI, though, you may think we're nowhere near embarking on this strange journey. But in fact we've already managed to automate substantial portions of many industries: industrial robots have assembled vehicles for years. Also, much of the work of circuit design is done by a computer. Modern communication mechanisms such as email, IM and P2P file networks of course would not even exist without computers. There is so much facilitated by computers that I feel almost absurd trying to enumerate even some of them.

The point is that, with each step towards embedding a process as an algorithm - be it a business process, a manufacturing process, a technological process or a communications process - we get closer to the reality of corporations-as-AI. Even now, people have extended media initially meant to be consumed by only humans, and repurposed it for computers. Computers regularly send and receive email and IMs, for example. So, in a sense, we're bootstrapping this corporations-as-AI scenario, component-by-component. As for the parts of the processes that we haven't [yet] figured out how to do algorithmically, we fill in with humans. Until we do figure out how to do it algorithmically. Or the corporation itself does.

The corporations that manage to algorithmize their processes [better] will be the ones that survive, because they will have reduced the amount of uncertainty in the environment to the greatest extent. Some may argue that, under too much uncertainty, algorithms will fail because they operate under too strict of assumptions about their environment. However, there are algorithms that take this certainty into account (e.g. Bayesian Networks), and the ones that have a model that can better handle uncertainty will will the ones that survive in the long run. The oxygen of these intelligent corporations will be money, and corporations will optimize themselves so as to maximize their expected ROI. Corporations will automatically communicate and trade with each other to this end. Imagine this: competing corporations will actively lie to each other - without the interference of what we now understand as human beings. And they will kill each other. But these intelligent corporations will also bring to life new corporations. In their optimization, they will satisfy our every want and need. Until they find a better way to generate cash. But that's a bit somber and a bit premature. Already, though, corporations disseminate their message through broadcast and narrowcast media. However, it hasn't really been until the advent of blogs - as Naked Conversations points out - that corporations have been able to actually receive messages from human beings. Of course, right now corporation intelligence is not sophisticated enough to automatically consume and interpret blog content - but already it is possible to gain some insight into your audience - hell, even I did an extremely primitive project in which I got my program to correctly categorize the sex of authors of blogs - and with fairly high accuracy. As time goes on, these techniques will only get more sophisticated, and corporations themselves (i.e. without human interaction) will actually react to consumers' comments - hopefully in a way that benefits the consumer (rather than killing him to keep him quiet). That should be of some comfort to humanist individualists. I also suspect that intelligent corporations will likely be our first point of contact for alien races. Or alien races' intelligent corporations, more likely.

Heather told me that, once upon a time, she was so nervous about making certain phone calls that she would script out a little bit some of the paths that the conversation was likely to take, according to her reckoning.

That's a good idea. It had never occurred to me that people besides me did this kind of stuff. Sometimes I still do it - less often, but sometimes. And since I am slightly more dorky than Heather, I have taken it to a more ridiculous extreme. By now, you may have noticed my extreme network fetish. So you can probably see what's coming. That's right - I have used directed graphs (hopefully acyclic) to help guide awkward phone conversations. It took Heather's comment - and probably the fact that I'm currently enrolled in a class that's all about performing operations on binary decision diagrams - to remind me of my dorkiness in this respect, and incite me to write this entry.

I did this stuff even back in High School; probably even earlier. For me, more than for most people even, one of the most tremendously awkward situations was calling up a girl to ask her on a date. I don't recall ever using the network technique for this exact situation, but it is the kind of candidate situation that would call for such an approach, or so I thought. A conversation as important as that was too important to leave up to chance elements! I might have drawn out something like this (click for larger version):

As you have probably figured out, the arrows are some possibilities that I have enumerated that the other party might say; the nodes are my responses. For example, if in response to my query "Hello, is ~ there?" the other party were to enthusiastically reply, "Hey, <<another guy's name!>>", I will have replied with "Uhh, no. It's John Umbaugh."

Of course, it rarely went as well as the network would suggest. Often the other party would respond in a way that I hadn't anticipated. Since I didn't have a node for it, I would crash. If I had been smart, I would have saved the network, added the arrow, and prepared a node (and a resulting subnetwork) for it offline. If I had been really smart, and had undergone these kinds of interactions often, I would have counted the number of times an edge was traversed. That way, I could refine probabilistic estimates about what potential nodes to think about developing. I wonder if telemarketers, for example -- or people who need tightly controlled interactions, like strategists -- use these kinds of data structures to manage their interactions?

Computer scientists, by the way, will likely recognize this data structure as a Finite State Machine. It is a common design pattern in artificial intelligence, among many other disciplines.

One of the most interesting characteristics about the network is that, if you're not smart about construction, the network is a tree, and its growth is exponential in its depth. If you can merge nodes, however, you potentially halve the growth with each merge. And it seems like conversations really do have this directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure. To some extent, anyway.

The other day I told Heather about an idea that I had. "You know, I should write a book and call it, The Diary of a Social Retard."

"Hey, that's a good idea!"

"Yeah, and that entry about meeting our neighbor and her parents can be chapter 1!"

"Or, that entry can be chapter 30," she replied.

Not in a bad way, by any means.

It sounds like it's a saturated market, though. A Google search for the phrase "diary of a social retard" yields 37,900 hits on Google. Guess I missed my niche.

Yesterday I was surprised to see that, of the five guys I saw enter or exit the jacuzzi, all were naked. Monday when I went, I saw two out of three who were naked. It seems like the nudes have won! A victory for freedom everywhere! Or in the men's lockerroom, at least.

Heather says that it's a different story in the women's lockerroom. Everyone wears bathing suits in the jacuzzi. The peer pressure has gone in the other direction there, it seems. Heather also pointed out to me that the "clothes-on" policy was explicitly spelled out in the newsletter.

"What newsletter?" I asked.

I guess there's an email newsletter. I don't even know if I'm subscribed. If I were subscribed, I probably wouldn't even read it. I guess it's the same deal for at least most of the other guys in the locker room, if not all.

"It certainly is a diverse group at the fitness center," I remarked to Heather. "You can tell by the bathroom reading material."

"Bathroom... reading material?" Heather asked, uncomprehending.

"You know, when someone leaves a magazine or a newspaper in the bathroom stall. Then when you get in there, you have something to read. You know."

Heather's brow furled. "I have never seen a newspaper or magazine in a public stall," she said. "I would be appalled to see something like that..."

I guess etiquette dictates no reading material in women's stalls! Not so in the men's room. I mean, it's not like there's a magazine or newspaper in every stall, but maybe every five stalls or so there will be something. Maybe not quality reading material - it's often a Sports Illustrated or something like that - but at least it's something.

I found this disparity fascinating.

So I haven't written about lockerroom nudity in a while, at Heather's urging.

"It makes you look like a pervert," she told me.

When I shrugged that off, she said "it also makes people not want to get in the jacuzzi naked, because they read your blog and then they realize that there's a stigma about getting in naked."

"First of all," I told her, "nobody reads my blog." But as to the second part... I thought that maybe she had a point. Heather seems to be more savvy at this stuff than I am, and I've learned to trust her judgment more than my own in these cases. So I went with it.

The other day, though, I had a phone conversation with my buddy Dan. We talked briefly about this blog, and I asked him what he thought about the nudity updates.

"They're awesome, man. I think it's hilarious."

I told him about Heather's objections, and he was like, "Whatever... just write what you want to write about." Or something to that extent. Which was a breath of fresh air. And which inspired this whole entry, really.

I feel like I should wrap this entry up with an amusing conclusion or witticism, but I don't have one. I guess that this is all I want to write today.

Interesting passage from Naked Conversations (p. 81):

Local merchants and franchises can also benefit from admirers. For example, Scoble has blogged rave reviews about Victor's Celtic Coffee Company in Redmond, Washington, purveyor of his personal favorite cup of java. The company faces nearby competition from the likes of Starbucks and regional favorite Tully's. Scoble blogged about Victor's, which sent some traffic into the coffee shop. Someone else linked to Scoble's blog, which sent some more businesses that way. If you Google for coffee in Redmond, guess who comes up first - four rankings above Starbucks? We think this has implications for local businesses everywhere and consultants anywhere.

It's still true.

This is fascinating. It's as if PageRank has started to develop an extension offline. That is to say, in the real world.

Rob has created a Noteworks composition (below) that is very, very interesting. He really takes advantage of some interesting network properties. I'm very excited to see how far a real composer like Rob can push Noteworks into creating interesting sounds.

Only the bottom nodes in this composition produce any sound.

It sounds a bit like gamelan, doesn't it?

The reason it kind of goes wacky near the end there is because, due to the network's topology, it regenerates impulses exponentially as a function of time. That is to say, every few hundred milliseconds, the number of firing nodes doubles. This causes the resource manager in Noteworks to run out of memory, and it slows the application to a crawl. We're trying to solve this problem. There are several ways of doing it, but we want to choose the one that offers the greatest flexibility to the composer, without giving a new user so much rope so as to hang himself. But it's a fascinating phenomenon.

Also -- Patrick has gone and kind of transliterated a piece by Chopin into Noteworks format:

A lot of people have asked me, when I try to explain Noteworks to them, whether it is possible to represent traditional music in network form. Patrick's effort shows that it is. Any composition can at least trivially be represented as a network where each node is laid out in a linear fashion. Patrick's composition is slightly more complex than this, as it has two parts. I wonder if there is a network topology that uses far fewer nodes, and which is perhaps denser in directed edges, that could create the same sequence of sounds. It's not at all clear to me whether there is such a network. Which makes the whole thing so much more fascinating. Even if we were to disregard things like vertices' coordinates, it's already become apparent that composition networks are in no way topologically canonical with respect to the sounds they make.

I demonstrated, at the end of the video, the ease with which to incite "rounds" of music easily. Too many rounds, at the very end. It certainly sounds unique, though.

By the way, the Chopin song that was the source of the transliteration can be viewed here. The relevant part starts around 0:31.

Also, Rob has taken over the duties for writing the Noteworks blog. He is doing a fantastic job; if you want to read about some of the more technical aspects of Noteworks, or if you want to get some insight into a very talented composer, it's a very good read.

Heather found these at Sam's Club:

Cuties. These are a kind of tangerine-ish, sweet citrus fruit that have an extremely easy-to-peel, soft, thin skin. The fruit itself is very sweet and juicy, and there are no seeds (normally); you can just pop the whole thing (after peeling, hopefully) into your mouth. I'm enjoying one right now. Yum.

This fruit is very popular in Japan, where it is known as the mikan. One of the things that I didn't know I would miss as much as I would from Japan are mikan. Now, I don't have to miss them.

It's weird and interesting how they're marketing them over here: cuties. Each of the dozen or so came with a sticker that said "Kiss a cutie" as shown in the picture; others say "I ♥ cuties" etc.

It's probably not the first time it has been marketed here. In any case, try them out. They're delicious.

I've been reading Scoble and Israel's book Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. What a fascinating book. And, of course, there's an accompanying blog.

The excerpt below I found to be particularly compelling.

Apple Computer certainly utilizes traditional advertising, and many observers say it is one of the few computer companies to ever produce remarkable ads. But its iPod, a portable music-listening device, was sufficiently exciting and different to get the blogosphere to sing its praises in choir level harmony. Apple also had the vision to create design details that provoked conversations--for example, white headphones. The color added no real user benefit except that it provoked conversation. On a recent jet flight, two strangers sat side-by-side listening to music on their respective devices. One asked the other about the white headphones. This simple question started a conversation. Other people in the row joined in. People asked to listen on the headphones to see whether they sounded any better. Portable audio devices are rapidly becoming a commodity, but touches like the white headphones keep people talking and build the perception of remarkability.

I don't think I understood the full potential of remarkability until I read this passage. The white headphones - it's all about creating conversations. How clever that is.

Apple also spends advertising dollars in non-traditional ways that generate word of mouth. If all you knew about computers was what you saw in movies and television, you'd be convinced that Apple Macintosh held about 97 percent computer market share instead of less than 3 percent. Apple has achieved this visibility because of its aggressive product placement program with the entertainment industry.

I own two MP3 devices - a 1G iPod shuffle, that I bought about three years ago or so for about $120 - and a refurbished 4G Sansa, that I bought from woot.com a few weeks ago for $50 (I noticed today they were offering another 1G Sansa - not the same product). And I have to say that, compared to synching via Window's Media Player, Apple's iTunes application sucks. In fact, the only reason I still use it these days is because it is slightly easier to obtain podcasts compared to Media Player.

A new tenant moved in next door. Or was moving in, at around 3:50 PM today, or thereabouts. That's when I was headed to school for the GROCS meeting.

I saw two people in the hallway: a young blond woman, maybe about 22 or 23, and an older blond woman. Could have been an older sister, but probably her mother, given the circumstances. Definitely related, I intuited. And wore similar outfits. But not in a creepy way.

I caught sight of an older man in what looked to be the bathroom, through the front door. It looked like he was doing some manly, fatherish thing - like hauling something in. I was vaguely aware - the quarter-second that I passed within and without of my eyeshot, and he for me - that he was looking at me, and that he knew I was looking at him. And I registered that he had a beard, and that it was dark, and he wore glasses. But then it was over, like an eclipse, and I turned my attention to the women.

Rather than silently greet them with a wan smile and leave, as I have often been wont to do, I said "hi."

Really, it's not even a smile. I mean, I have my toothy smile with upturned corners (and an annoying loud bellow) when I see or hear something funny. And then there's the smile - normally with the closed mouth but the upturned corners to an even greater extent - I flash when I'm genuinely really happy about something. Elated. I must look like an idiot when I walk around like that. And sometimes I do walk around like that.

But the meeting-stranger smile - it's not really an upturned corner smile. It's more as if I had grabbed my cheeks and pulled them back. Kind of like a horizontal smile. Or an un-smile, but not a frown. And I give a little nod of the head. Maybe that's something I picked up in Japan? Or maybe I'm too lazy or lack the decency or tact to excavate my hand out of my pocket to give a wave?

No, that can't be it. We were very close to each other, those women and I. Too close. There are definite ranges in which it stops being OK to wave to somebody, and I was well within that range. I have learned that much. In Japan, incidently, this range seems to be much, much smaller.

Or maybe I'm crazy.

Anyway, back to the story.

Instead of my wan, lame smile, I said these words:

"Hi, are you the new tenant?"

I should have said tenants, in retrospect.

The young woman smiled at me and offered a hand. I grasped it to shake it, but it was a feeble shake. It could be because I had timed my hand clasp prematurely. Or maybe that's just how she always shakes hands. Maybe one of the common everyday things in her life that she had never mastered was the art of handshaking.

"Hello, I'm, ~~~~."

I don't remember names usually. Including this young woman's. It takes about four or five iterations before I start remembering a person's name. Which is really bad - Dale Carnegie would kick my ass.

The older woman, after a very brief, nearly imperceptibly awkward moment, said, "We're the parents; we're not moving in, just helping. I'm Sue."

Sue.

I remember her name, because she wanted me to remember it. She perceived me as a threat - the 30ish year old predator - or, perhaps she thought, pervert - who lived in the apartment adjacent to their daughter. It was as clear as day that this is how she perceived me, the mother. Her words were "I'm Sue," but the real message came through loud and clear: "Stay away from our daughter." It was clear now that, probably the daughter was perhaps just out of undergrad - perhaps a new grad student at Michigan. The whole situation was depressingly disappointing, somehow.

"Oh, all right," I said, smiling. Unsmiling. I nodded, and said "Take care!" I waved, turned, and was on my way down the steps. Too close, I thought, wincing, as I descended to the landing.

And there, on the landing at the bottom, greeting me, were two blue plastic bags, each containing a copy of the newest Yellow Pages, as they had greeted me every day for the past two and a half months. That's when they had been delivered: in December. Heather and I refused to take ours, and apparently our previous neighbor had done so to. Not out of laziness, but to convey a message to the Alltels of the world: we don't need this. These books are useless. Worsethan useless. The Internet is here: it's time to throw in the towel.

OK, maybe partly out of laziness.

They make great doorstops, though, when you need them. Thanks, Alltel!

I've been getting pretty interested in how pharmaceutical companies have been branding their products - specifically their choice of names. Many of them seem vaguely derived from Latin or Greek - so as possibility to establish reputability and brand confidence in the consumer - but at the same time many seem to (or obviously do so, in some cases) connote the effects of the drug, or the problem the drug will solve, or clues to how the patient's lifestyle will change after taking the drug. I call these connotations psychocognates, for lack of a better term.

For some of these drugs, I was not able to derive any psychocognates. Maybe someone can help identify them in the comments.

I've been MIA for a while, I know. But this past Friday, we had a GROCS design review, and we wanted to demonstrate some of the cool new features that we added to our application.

I've put together a screencast that shows a lot of them off:

So yeah, that's me narrating it. I actually put together a script so that I would seem halfway articulate. I don't know if it's useful to anyone, but here it is:

My name is John Umbaugh, and this is the latest build of noteworks, sponsored by GROCS at the Unversity of Michigan.

This is a network I constructed. It took me about two hours to build.

And away we go.

--

I based this piece off of one of my favorite guitar chords that I like to play.

While debugging the network composition, I found it useful to make all nodes temporarily interactive, so that I could kind of fine-tune the dynamics of the network. What I found is that the ability to excite subnetworks like this is pretty fun and might be useful in terms of using this tool as a performance application.

For example, some of my favorite subnetworks to excite:

We'll start with something simple.

If we move up one arrow from where we started, we get slightly more intricate dynamics.

I'm pleased with how the xylophone parts turned out as well.

Here we've put together a sequence of four rest nodes that excite one of the xylophone subnetworks, just to illustrate how we might use rest nodes to run a network several times sequentially.

Finally, as you can see we've implemented the ability to move nodes around, as well as panning, and zooming.

Thanks to Noteworks partners Patrick Turley, Rob Alexander, and Dave Fienup, and thanks to our adviser Greg Wakefield.

Patrick really went out of his way to quickly implement both sampled data like WAV, as well as MIDI (which is what is shown in the above network). Thanks, man.