Adventures in the Colonial 'burg: July 2009

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Note from Beijing

Just so you know, the following sites are blocked in China (this is nowhere near exhaustive):

Facebook
YouTube
Blogger
Google News
Twitter
My new obsession (will tell you more when I return)
Among others...

I only got into FB and this today because I've fixed a remote connection I have through Columbia, and I can access these sites that way. So this is just a quick note from the other side of the world, currently 12 hours ahead of my home, and 13 hours ahead of Ellen. That's right, Ellen. I'm 13 hours ahead of you.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Who...whom

Just a request to every English speaker in the world (and please pass this on): If you don't know when to use "whom" versus "who," then just always use "who." It is grammatically correct in this modern era, and while I would hate to see "whom" disappear from our language, that is better than people saying, "Whom is that?"

That's all for now.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Brick wall

While leaving this morning, carrying my (sometimes too heavy) bike down the stairs, I tripped on the steps. This does not come as a surprise to anyone who has known me at any length, of course, as I have very little control over what my feet do. But that's beside the point. As I tripped I nearly fell down the stairs, and luckily the brick wall to my left broke my fall. I skidded along the wall and now have a skinned elbow, with blood and skin just flying everywhere.

Okay, there's not much blood, it's just a little red. But it goes great with the oven burn I have on my arm above that, about four inches away.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Hmmm

I just got a bike computer, which Corbett has had for a few weeks. This way I can see my speed, distance traveled, etc. I do think it's a little off though, because it states that the distance to work is 2.5 miles, and according to my car and google, it's more like 3.7. I go a slightly different route on the bike, but it should cut off about 0.2 miles, if that. Either way, there's no way it cuts off over a mile. So I have to determine if it is really set correctly. I don't think what I entered for the tire size is completely correct, because bike tires are notoriously varying in size even if they are listed as the same. So I will have something other than my talk to work on tonight. Woo hoo!

Thursday, July 16, 2009

!!!

I am going through all the emails I have for my talk (yeah, that's all I'm talking about now), and I just got to one with a fun opening. Usually people start letters out as

Dear Christopher,

or

Hi Christopher,

(or they shorten my name which of course makes my blood boil, and I'm not quite sure why). But this one was

Dear Christopher!

That was great. I'm not sure I've met this guy in person, so it's not like we know each other. Usually people aren't so excited to talk to me, so this was a booster.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Plenary fun

For a while I was surprised at the number of emails I was getting today in regards to my plenary talk. I'm giving this review talk in Beijing in a couple of weeks, and a while ago I sent off an email asking for any preliminary results people may have, or in general anything they thought I should include in the talk. Since then I've gotten an email or two every few days, but then today I've gotten a ton.

I realized that it was because I put a "due date" of today in my original email. So now everyone is frantically sending me things. It's helpful but really it's kind of a pain now. I'll have to get to the point of cutting out topics because of a lack of time. The big question is: "Who do I piss off?"

Erasure

I'm not sure what it is, but there is something about listening to Erasure that motivates me. I've been listening to it this morning, and now I've been doubly motivated.

First, I was motivated to post about being motivated.

Second, I am going to kick ass on writing slides for my talk now. Only 12 days until I give it!

Oh, and right now, my favorite Erasure song of all time is playing now. Love to Hate You

Monday, July 13, 2009

Bullet points

I'm just gonna bullet through my morning's thoughts.

I learned yesterday that I am not the least organized person around. We helped someone move, and when we arrived, he hadn't finished packing. Luckily, he only really needed help for the heavy stuff, and he also doesn't have much stuff. Took us just over an hour. I feel bad that he had to help move everything that Corbett and I own.
Working on review talks is no fun.
Jobs are already being posted for the next job cycle. No good.
I think we dirtied every dish in our kitchen twice in the last two days. We had two major dinner preparations (including smoking chicken on our stovetop...that's right, you read that correctly), plus I baked a cake (didn't come out so great), plus I made yogurt.
We finally hung the poster my parents got us as a houswarming gift. It's a huge (37"x55") poster recreation of an original 1500's Mercator map. It looks awesome!

Friday, July 10, 2009

Cycling to one's doom

Last night Corbett and I went for a bike ride. It seemed innocent enough. Up towards the Pottery, as we've done before, then over to Centerville Road (means nothing to most of you), to the Jolly Pond loop. We've heard many people talk about this nice ride around Jolly Pond, and I've heard the sentence, "If you're a biker in the 'burg, then you've been to Jolly Pond," more than once.

What was always left out (except for a story Chris told us long ago, when I wasn't really paying attention to the location) was that the road is blocked. If you are aware of this and not worried, you can just go to the blockade, and pass right through it on your bike, yet not in a car. Last night, we didn't know this, and we hit a point (4.5 miles from where we entered the road) where there were signs saying the road was closed 0.8 miles ahead. Do we try it, or just turn around? We decided to just turn around, as it was already eight o'clock, and the sun was falling fast. At best we were still almost an hour from home.

So we turned back, noticing the omnious cloud ahead. This was a nice storm cloud, and it filled much of the sky, but I didn't worry. "Come on," I said, "we can see all the edges of the cloud. We won't get rained on."

So it started raining. It was at this point I started to give up. The darkness was closing in, and it's not surprising that we then started hearing gunshots. Yeap, all those cute deer we had been seeing were being hunted. As we rode, we were getting closer to the sounds of rifle fire. The rain plus the darkness plus the gunshots made me wonder why we didn't just stay home and veg out in front of the television.

All in all, though, we got back home before the sun was completely down, and the rain didn't last long. (Most people in the 'burg I've talked to said they didn't see any rain. As far as I'm concerned we must have been the only two people in the city to see it.) In the end, we rode 32 miles, nonstop (a couple of minute-long breaks to drink water, and that's it). I was happy to get home, shower, and watch who got eliminated from So You Think You Can Dance.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Too much but not enough

I've been slacking here, and every day I think there is something I should be writing about, but nothing of note has really been going on. I'm going crazy with my talk that I'm giving in two-and-a-half-weeks (yikes!), because there are a ton of peope who have not yet sent me anything to include, and I'm basically not sure how the layout of the talk will go.

But let's not talk about that. What should be the topic of discussion? So You Think You Can Dance?! Nah...while I'm happy with the show this season, and last night's performances were mostly spectacular (except the terrible Russian Folk Dance, which even the judges thought was a mistake to include), there's nothing I have to say about it right now.

There's politics, but even that is boring me currently. Sure, the New York legislature is seizing up, and NY's governor is signing his own death certificate. There's my favorite governor of all still fighting to keep herself in the news. There's Minnesota, and Massachussetts fighting DOMA, a new tour to begin to destroy DADT, and all sorts of other things going on. I'm feeling a sense of ennui about the whole thing.

I want something new to happen in the news that doesn't involve the death of someone famous, and isn't going to make me want to wretch. And it has to distract me (successfully) from actually working on my talk or anything else productive. Anyone?

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Knowledge is fun!

Corbett and I were watching Nova's "Science Now" show the other night and learned something that was exciting to me. This is along the lines of the comments from the previous post, as people love to obsess over the word verifications that one gets on the internet all the time.

These "captchas," as they're called, are something we've known for sometime, and they were invented in 2000 by a (then student at CMU) professor at Carnegie Mellon. This is not that interesting, but then another problem which is seemingly unrelated came up. As you also probably know, many people are trying to digitize everything, especially old texts, to get everything in a digital format. The glory of this, of course, is to have everything both preserved and accessible to everyone. The problem though is that many old texts have non-standard fonts, or are smudged, and as such, they cannot be read properly by a computer. So when a computer scans in many of these old texts, they cannot understand the words, and a lot is lost.

Of course, a human could enter it in by hand, but that is a big time waster. So instead, many times when you get two words for these word verifications, one is a word the computer already knows and is actually used to test if you're a human signing up for something, and the other word is one the computer cannot decipher. The assumption is that if you get the one it knows correctly, then you will get the other one correct as well, and then they use that to determine the unknown word. While I don't like citing it, according to Wikipedia, "This provides about the equivalent of 160 books per day, or 12,000 manhours per day of free labor (as of September 2008)."

I just think this is fantastic! So many things can get done this way, because of the well-planned multitasking involved here. This is my new favorite piece of knowledge.