April 2008 Archives
I was in the sauna yesterday, and there was a newspaper there. And this article kind of popped out at me.
The long and short of it:
The [lacrosse] players displayed the question, "Will You Go To The Prom With Me? Yes or No?" on their posteriors while mooning Huron senior Carolyn Campbell at a game.
Naturally, I laughed. And naturally, the students were punished. But I've been pretty surprised at the extent of the negativity of the reaction has been from the parents.
"Inappropriate is inappropriate," Huron athletic director Dottie Davis said Monday after meeting with lacrosse varsity players and their parents. "It disrespects women, and that's the clear message we need to have the students understand - what may be fun to them isn't necessarily fun to everyone else."
Huh? Disrespecting women? I don't really follow. Seriously, I don't - will someone clue me in?
"It's hard to know what to do," Melinda Campbell said. "It just happened. I hate to say, 'No harm, no foul' because some people were harmed. But it has certainly caused a lot of excitement."
Ummm, who was harmed in this, again? Because they saw an array of butts? They haven't seen a butt before?
Sure, it's silly and stupid. But harmful?
At least one person was cool about it:
Campbell, who accepted the prom invitation by patting the lower back of the player displaying the word 'Yes,' described Wennersten's method as "cute" and said she wasn't upset by the manner in which she was asked.
DotHomes is like a Google for people in the market for buying or renting homes. I was pretty happy to see that, as of today, they had 751 listings. Heather and I are actually in the market right now; it will be interesting to see how this tool helps us, if at all. We're excited to try, in any case!
It's also pretty cool how they integrate Google Maps into the picture if you have a more sophisticated query, like Ann Arbor 3 bedroom under 230K. How cool is that?
Found via Scobleizer.
My buddy Patrick turned me on to the Perry Bible Fellowship, an online comic strip that often reminds me of Gary Larson's The Far Side strip in its subtlety - sometimes too subtle, though... there are more than a few that I just don't get. Often it's pretty dark humor, too, like Transfer Patient, which is my favorite.
Many other good ones, though. Like this one. I love the expression on the caterpillar's face in frame 4.
I don't even know what this one means, but it makes me laugh.
I was driving around Ann Arbor the other day, doing various errands and things, and I saw a pretty large convoy of police cars, ambulances, and black cars and SUVs. They were escorting/being escorted through the intersection at a pretty fast clip. In a couple of SUVs, on either side, there were tough looking dudes in sunglasses and sharp black suits conspicuously sticking their heads out of the open windows, like dogs enjoying the speed-induced breeze, but with much more businesslike - more severe - expressions. It was a true study in the juxtaposition of the intimidating with the ridiculous. I could almost see their earpieces.
I don't know why I included that map. Probably just because I can!
I remembered thinking at the time, I don't remember reading anything about any state official visits, and then I remembered the Dalai Lama is in town this week. So that's probably it.
Anyway, on Sunday, Heather and I were driving around looking at houses and stuff. We saw a few Chinese protesters at Michigan stadium. They were protesting the Dalai Lama.
There are also pictures on the China Daily. It looks like the photographer for that newspaper has specifically chosen his or her spot to make it look like a lot more people were present at the rally. I mean, there were a lot of people there, but maybe not as much as the photographer is implying. Then again, maybe I caught things when they were winding down or winding up.
The protestors' shirts were one of the most interesting components to the whole deal. They said, Support Beijing 2008, and they had an Olympic symbol on it.
The China Daily article rhetoric is amusing, but it really illustrates that these protesters have a far different perspective than me and very many of my peers about the whole Tibet/China thing. Warranted or not, these protestors view the Dalai Lama as a kind of Osama bin Laden. I imagine I'd be pretty torqued if Osama came to Ann Arbor to preach about spirituality, too.
So on Sunday they filled up Crisler Arena for the Dalai Lama. Also on Sunday, Pope Benedict packed them in at Yankee Stadium. Perhaps it's my paranoia, but is it merely a coincidence that two very-highly regarded spiritual leaders are touring America at the same time? Or is there some sort of hidden political agenda going on underneath the surface?
Seth Godin remarks on his blog about how a reader suggested we might simplify web addresses, maybe to make them a little less scary. The reader writes:
We don't say, "Visit us at http://www.askinosie.com," we just say, "askinosie.com."
He also suggests that perhaps the "[dot] com is superfluous, just as www is."
I agree with Seth that maybe dropping the [dot] com might not be the best idea, for the reasons he cited, as well as the fact that it would complicate the address space with name collisions, which would likely result in an explosion of litigation.
But the www? I understand the need for nixing the http://. This is a pretty arcane and scary sequence of characters for non-geeks. Protocol angst: Is that foreward slash or backslash?.
The www is a different matter, I think, though. I used to be a proponent of nixing the www (e.g., saying Google.com, rather than www.google.com) until I had a conversation with Heather. She pointed out that www was kind of like a linguistic clue to users - especially useful for the less computer-savvy - that the following sequence of utterances denoted a web address. Almost functioning like a kind of Est-ce que in French, or a Qing Wen in Mandarin - phrases that carry very little semantic meeting, other than to say the following is a question.
So now, I gauge the situation before I decide whether to use www. If I am in the lab with my labmates, I definitely drop the www (or else risk losing valuable geek cred and tech esteem). If I'm talking with someone a little less computer savvy, then I'll throw in a www. Heather's right - that makes them a lot more comfortable and less hesitant to try whatever Web 2.0 technology you're evangelizing to them.
Lisa turned me on to musician Greg Pattillo this weekend (thanks, by the way). Here's a video:
Warning: this entry might not be for the squeamish.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
I was really sick this weekend. Or more accurately, starting around Sunday at 6:00 PM until about yesterday. Stomach flu or something. It was the kind of vomiting where I was slamming my forehead on the toilet seat with each retch. I seriously thought, at times, that I might be in danger of choking. This kind of vomiting has only happened to me once before, when I got food poisoning at a Japanese restaurant in Cleveland. I think it was the sea urchin that time. I had never had sea urchin before then. And I have never had it since.
It's weird, how when you vomit a pretty large volume of mass, how instantly cold you can become. And I was vomiting about 16 fl. oz. at each, uh, iteration. I know because I happened to have an old McDonald's medium Coke cup in my car, and I had it with me when I was sick, in case of emergencies. Good thing.
And when I vomited into that cup, it was so warm. And instantly, my body became cold. Cripplingly cold. I mean like involuntary shivering cold, in like two seconds. I guess that maybe the body uses the food in the stomach to help regulate body temperature. Or at least my stomach.
Naturally, there was diarrhea too. Perhaps I should have stopped before now, but I came this far, so... in for a dime, in for a dollar.
The thing that I was most concerned about, though, was dehydration. I mean, I had lost a lot of water in a very short time, and I couldn't seem to keep new water down. And I was thirsty. It was pretty terrible.
But by 4:00 AM I was finally able to drink a full glass of water and get to bed.
The next day, my body ached all over. In, like the muscles or something. Or at least that's how it felt. I reckoned it was because of the dehydration.
Unfortunately, I had to make a three-hour drive that day. That ruled, let me tell you.
OK, this entry is starting to bore me, so chances are you've already stopped reading it. So I'll stop, too.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone of Southpark and other fame have animated a segment from one of Alan Watts' talks. It's really good.
It looks like there are several more, too.
I went and got a haircut today, after this talk I went to, which was pretty interesting. On central campus. Maybe I'll blog about it.
I left, and it had turned out to be a pretty windy day, and the sky looked like it was having trouble deciding whether it wanted to rain or not. Walking from the lecture hall to the barber, the wind managed to slip in through the spaces on the buttons of my button-up shirt. I had decided not to bring a coat today, and I regretted it.
Anyway, I got in there - I'm talking about the Barber Shop now - and I hadn't made a reservation. Just a walk-in, as usual.
They placed in me with this older guy. He was a talker. I felt compelled to feign competence in matters of Michigan football - a truly Herculean feat, let me tell you, because I don't know anything about anything when it comes to Michigan football - and we continued to talk about it for ten minutes.
Talking in abstracts and ambiguities, and spouting disgraceful sports-related platitudes such as, "Well, you've got to have good blockers if you wanna get the ball down the field," - polished turds of wisdom applicable to every possible athletic situation - I kept afloat. It was as if I had channeled all my ancestral wisdom of John Madden - acquired piecemeal, in the bits and pieces of thousands of instances of Sunday-afternoon, frenetic content browsing with the up and the down buttons on the television remote - into a pinpoint of time and space, and I had harnessed it expertly. I had held my own.
Toward the end, however, I think he suspected. The jig was up.
I have never really appreciated - until recently, that is - the necessity of knowing things about stuff one doesn't care about. On the surface, unimportant things. Debating the merits of a Lloyd Carr, versus a Rodriguez. Will Rodriguez be the new Schembechler? These are the droplets of lubrication that keep Ann Arbor in such fine-tuned working order.
No, but the guy was really nice. The barber. Thankfully, the focus of conversation had moved to more merciful domains. The barber's name was Marty, and he had had a barber shop in the Nichols Arcade in Ann Arbor some years ago. Turns out he had given the Dalai Lama a haircut, when His Holiness had visited the town many years ago. There had been a bodyguard at the door, Marty said, and another one watching over Marty's handiwork. One who was ready to pounce should any suspicious slips occur.
And the barber told me a story from the same time, when his buddy was charged with the task of lugging a Tibetan Buddhist icon around Ann Arbor in his pickup truck. This is an item that Tibetan Buddhists worship. Just the idea of some guy driving around this supremely sacred object in his Ford F-150 made me chuckle a little bit. Especially given the condition of Michigan roads.
Anyway, I got a good haircut, so that's always good.
The Dalai Lama is coming again to Ann Arbor. Soon in fact: April 19 and 20. I'm going to see if Heather and I can go. If it's not too expensive, that is.
It's pretty weird, I think, that Ticketmaster is selling tickets to this event. But at the same time, I think it's cool that His Holiness is so straight-up about it.
Rob has been nagging me a little bit to get a better version of his Bedtime Music notework online.
His main complaint is that I didn't have the right instruments set for the composition - a bug that has been since correct. Also, I hooked up the audio directly to the microphone for a much improved (though still not perfect) audio experience.
There's still some lag due to CamStudio, but it's not too bad.
We had the Noteworks demonstration this past Saturday and Sunday. I think that it went really well. We had perhaps about fifty people come each day.
Here's a video of the setup. Each network (1 per machine) is connected via an ethernet hub to all others, so as to form one huge network. Each subnetwork is a variation on an ambient composition that Rob wrote. You can hear it if you listen closely.
Unfortunately, I'm a really bad cameraman. However, at least somebody got some good footage. Here's me showing off the crappiest composition - mine - which I created to be in the shape of Michigan. Just for laughs.
Rob created a really great composition/performance notework that I'm really excited to get up here.
Here's a picture of our friends Byung and Misook composing a network.
And here is the Noteworks team!
I think the demonstration went extremely well. Lots of good questions from the attendees. We got a lot of great suggestions and are excited to implement them.
Our GROCS coordinator, Linda, was kind enough to film the event with a real video camera. When that footage becomes available, I'll post it here.
Rob composed something really interesting with the latest build of Noteworks today. He calls it "Bedtime Music." I don't know if that's an official title, but it certainly works for me.
The sound is crappy again, since I'm recording from the speaker to the mic (no sound in on my laptop); also, it bogs down sometimes because my machine was running out of memory, what with CAMStudio also in play.
Anyway, disclaimers aside. Here's Rob's description:
Put this on for a while as you're tuning out for the night (the motor is @ the bottom). As you can hear I was very much inspired by John's work, but this has an open fifth as the central theme. The general movement is upwards and to the left... and then meandering back down.
Rob makes really good use of stochastic vertices - particularly in conjunction with feedback loops. Sometimes the loop feeds back into itself, and sometimes it feeds into a [set of] sink rest vertex [vertices]. I had some of these same structures in my last (much less interesting) composition; it's interesting to see the patterns/tropes that emerge from the fundamental node types. Same with the motor, as Rob has characterized them - the two rests pointing towards each other. They drive the rest of the piece.
The echo nodes (i.e. the blue nodes with the letter E inside them) are something new this time. The idea is that an echo expresses in the same way that the calling node (or the caller's caller, and so on if applicable) expresses. The interesting part, however, is that these echo nodes can effect a change on those input nodes - for example, transposing the input key, or increasing/decreasing the volume or duration. Rob uses this to really interesting effect to construct a simple subnetwork that kind of generates [recursive] thematic motifs.
Patrick was pretty excited when he saw Rob's work this evening. He IMed me:
I have been listening to [Rob's composition] for like 20 minutes.... [I]t has been super different the whole time i have been listening to it.... [I]t is like someone is performing for me.
This notion fascinated me. In a sense, we are not creating compositions with this software; we are abstracting one level higher, where we're designing a composition embedded with its performer, in that we're specifying constraints on how a performer (read: stochasticity) can interact with the network. In fact, I hesitate to call these creations compositions, because they're more than that; perhaps I should start calling them, in earnest, Noteworks. Anyway, it's like we've successfully broken down an artificial barrier between performance and composition. Or something close to this.
The fact that Patrick could listen to a network that was ostensibly so simple - and yet derive enjoyment out of it for twenty minutes and more - tells me that we're really on to something pretty incredible here. I mean, a lot of the credit has to go to Rob's talent as a composer, for sure. But all of us have been incredibly surprised and pleased at our success in designing a tool in which the "core mechanic" is to define the composition as a set of relationships between sounds.
And, oh boy, it's a real pleasure to see Rob compose with Noteworks. Let me tell you!
(Or, come to the demo this Friday and/or Saturday and see for yourself!)
We finally have the Internet nodes implemented - though they were not present in the above notework. Internet nodes allow you to connect noteworks over the Internet - effectively expanding your notework across machines and constructing a far more sophisticated soundscape. We hope to take advantage of this feature for the demo.
So the Noteworks group is giving a hands-on demonstration of our software in the central collaboration area at the Duderstadt Center at the University of Michigan this Friday and Saturday. All are welcome. Come to one or both! It's from 5:00 to 6:00 PM, but people will be able to play with the application afterwards as well for a little while as our partners Enjoy Your Flight gear up. I'm acting in that performance as well, so all the more reason for you to attend.
It is going to be awesome. Here is our PDF flyer, for more information.
Let me know if you're interested in attending, and I'll give you detailed directions.
It is going to be awesome.
