Hyatt Place

I've been staying the last few days at the Hyatt Place at the Denver Tech Center. The Hyatt Place is a kind of scaled-down, upscale hotel. They have limited restaurant service, but then they decorate the place with very modern stuff, as you might see in a pretty modern house.

And it has a 42 inch LCD TV! The first I've seen at a hotel. The bad news is that it hums when it's on like old TVs. The channels were limited, the better to encourage people to get on-demand. I was too tired to watch anything so I didn't.

The new fangled thing is to have really nice faucets that gently arc, and to have arced shower poles that look so strong you could do pullups on them. Well, you could if they weren't 5 inches (ah, US standard measurements) from the ceiling, and if could, in this fitness-impaired day-and-age do even a single pullup. Oh Ah-nuld, where are you to encourage general fitness?

And, they have a shuttle service! They'll drive you for free around in a five mile radius, which is pretty sweet. All hotels should do this! Apparently, I missed the sports bar on the second floor. Oh well.

Much of this niceness has to do with a recent renovation of the hotel, and they've done amazingly well.

So, thumbs up to the Hyatt Place (not the Regency!) at the DTC. (DTC has way too many hotels with similar names, one near the other).

Anyway, they are showing one of these Rube Goldbergian contraption things with lots of flames and such, being more of a pyro's wet dream of a setup.

Day Two: Ruby Studio

Day 2 went better than Day 1, I thought. In particular, we spent an hour or so coding up a problem in the morning. Basically, it had to do with creating a "database" and being able to query from it.

I sat by a guy (I should remember his name, but don't) who was playing around with TextMate themes, so I thought I would do the same. The themes have to do with how the colors of the text and background look. The default is color on a white background. I prefer a darker background. The most popular one seems to be one called All Hallow's Eve, which is another name for Halloween. That one uses orange and black, not surprisingly. I ended up using a user-submitted them called RubyRobot, but replaced some of the colors with ones I liked better.

I'm getting a touch more proficient with TextMate. Alas, I have to learn it the hard way, which is to watch people do it, then ask "How did they do that?" and then check out the book on the topic. I realize James Edward Gray, who apparently prefers II over Jr, knows a lot of the ins and outs of TextMate, and this shows, in a demo he does on TextMate, referred to by one of the folks in the class.

Here's a link for the curious. The example he does is a bit sophisticated. However, with just two days of class, I'm more or less able to follow.

Of course, how much you follow something depends on how much you've seen. For example, today they talked about exceptions and closures. I've seen both before, and have used exceptions, and closures somewhat. The more you know about scoping, the better, because Ruby has some unusual ideas about scoping (at least, unusual to a Java programmer). Again, I've seen lots of programming languages, so these weren't surprising to me.

The one big difference I can see between Ruby and Python is Ruby's use of blocks. A block is something like a lambda expression, but it isn't an object (though, by using the keyword lambda, you can convert it to an object). I think it's awkward that it isn't a true lambda expression and that it isn't an object, but Dave Thomas claims that there is an efficiency reason for doing it this way (converting to and from Procs, the names given to these lambda objects, seems awkward, and the language could be conceptually simpler by not doing this).

Closures always give people headaches. In particular, they have no idea how they might use it. Then, it has some weirdness associated with it. However, I know about lambda calculus and lambda expressions, which, admittedly, puts me in the minority of most programmers.

I had intended for people to meet up afterwards, but apparently, this was not announced, and there wasn't huge interest. I know that part of the effectiveness of whether this works or not depends on really simple things. Does it get announced? Does it seem like there's a blessing for it? Are arrangements made so we have a place to meet and talk? Apparently, being so last minute, and being in a hotel, rather than in one's own building creates issues.

Oh, the hotel. Yeah, there's always an issue with hosting in a hotel. It seems only nice hotels bother with conference rooms and such and the ability to host an event. You rarely get a place that charges 100 bucks a night or so to have one of these things (to be fair, the event at Charlotte wasn't priced too badly). There's a sense that people should not host it at a place that's too cheap looking, especially if they plan to charge a bit for it.

For example, suppose there were a facility that could be rented. But then you'd have to deal with catering, and then transportation to the facility, and then if the place looked kinda crappy (say, it was held on a campus), then people might complain that it looks crappy, and how can they not host it at some place really swank? So it ends up that these things are held at nice hotels that charge an arm and a leg. Having said that, the place does look really nice.

I decided after the meeting to go to the bar area where they allegedly had something called "Beer:30" which starts at 5:30 PM each day. Apparently, despite this name, it's only a small sample. Being in Denver, I get to try beers I wouldn't ordinarily try. I've had Fat Tire two or three times since I've been here. I tried something called Golden Bull or some such. I'll have to look it up. It's sad you can't get this east of the Mississippi. I might get a chance to try one more tomorrow.

I went to the bar area, at a little after 5. The hotel I'm staying at has complimentary shuttle service for places nearby. However, the service only runs til 6. Presumably, they don't want you going out to dinner and doing late night stuff, or whatever. Still, it would be nice if they ran til 7.

So I was in a hurry to get drinks, then run back to the hotel. While sitting at the bar, a woman struck a conversation. In the past, I would probably have felt uncomfortable at the idea of talking to someone random. But then she mentioned she was in the class (goes to show you how many people I recognize). That made it easier to have a conversation. Then, a somewhat older guy sat between us, and that was kinda it for conversation. He talked a bit to her. He was from the Portland area, and they talked a bit about beers.

Tomorrow's the last day. I'll be cutting it close (perhaps too much) to get to my flight. The class ends at 4:30, the flight is just before 7, and it's about 30 minutes to get to the airport, with no traffic. 4:30 is like rush hour. The only good news is that I've been told the traffic to the airport isn't as crowded as other places. Another attendee is planning to drive his rental back, so I'll tag along with him. My hope is my flight is delayed like half an hour or so, so I can make it comfortably.

I'm not sure what's on the agenda for tomorrow. I'm a little surprised that we haven't done much with unit testing, as that seems big in the Ruby community. We've done it informally by just running code and seeing what happens.

Let's see what happens tomorrow.

I will say that I find a classroom setting much more conducive to the kind of learning I want to do (even if the folks seem to be ignoring my questions lately).

Day One: Ruby Studio

It first started out as a book, then a publishing company, and now they offer courses. The book was The Pragmatic Programmer written by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt. The publishing company is called Pragmatic Programmers (or pragprog for short). The teaching arm is called Pragmatic Studio.

I decided to sign up for the inaugural (I didn't know it was inaugural until today) Ruby Studio. I had expected turnout to be somewhat low, but these things are tough to estimate. Although PragProg is tiny by most publishing standards, it's well known about by software developers that there might be 1000 eyes or more for each person who decides to attend.

The reason I thought it might not be SO well-attended is that it's an introductory course in Ruby, and most software developers would consider themselves savvy enough to teach themselves how to program a new language. Now, if this course were substantively cheaper and offered throughout the country, then maybe it'd drum up more interest, but then maybe not.

As it turns out, the class is reasonably full, at around 30-40 people attending it. The demographics are interesting. The class is almost 100% white (as far as I can tell). I'm the only Asian. There are no African Americans, nor other Asians. No Chinese, no Indians, no Koreans. To be fair, Asians make only 1-3% of the American populace, but also make a much larger percentage of the IT industry.

I'd say women make 10% of the attendees, which means there are 3-5 women, which, given Ruby/Rails is a bit higher than expected, but a pleasant turn out.

Dave started by asking the crowd where they came from, and what you see is a large (from my perspective) number of Web developers doing PHP, looking to switch, some QA and sysadmin types that don't code much, but want to use Ruby in their day-to-day work. Also, to my surprise, is the number of people who work on Rails that want to learn Ruby.

This feels like, to me, a J2EE person who wants to take a Java course to learn more Java. It almost sounds silly, since you'd expect any J2EE person to be proficient in Java in order to do basics. Having said that, maybe Rails is so easy to use, so easy to follow simple examples, that you can get by without knowing much Ruby.

Ruby is a funny contrast. On the one hand, given the number of non-developers (which is not to say non-programmers), people must perceive Ruby to be easy enough to use. And yet, folks like DHH do so much metaprogramming magic that most of the attendees (me included) would be shocked at how much you can do in Ruby that is dumbfoundingly difficult.

I won't get too much into the details of what we're doing. There's nothing especially magic about what we're doing, but one issue of interest is how do you teach a language to a wide variety of people? The second is, given that you have to teach uniform content (that is, you don't intend to specialize to each student), what do you teach?

Ruby Studio lasts 3 days, and intro courses are notoriously difficult to teach, because you have a lot of ground to cover. For example, we talked about gems, which is Ruby's way of installing libraries from RubyForge. These aren't official libraries like Java libraries but community donated libraries.

As a teacher of programming, issues like installation is always problematic because you'd want it to be as effortless as possible. One idea, problematic as it is, is to go to a webpage, and edit there. Everyone would use one official compiler, and the same development environment, no installation would be required, and so forth. Anytime, you have to start talking about installation, then you have to go into "Why do I have to install it?".

For example, when I taught "C", I didn't tell people to download "C", untar, and make it. Instead, students were given special accounts that already had "C" installed. I know. It's the nature of languages that they run locally on the machine, and that some installation has to be done, and there are distributions that are practically a double-click from installation away. I'm not saying it shouldn't be taught, because as much as it distracts from the purity of programming, it's also the current real world when it comes to programming.

Oh, wait, let me get to me, to be narcissistic for a moment. Why am I taking this course?

I've heard of Ruby for years now. Years. I knew about Ruby before RoR was even a glimmer in DHH's head. I have (or used to have) the original Pickaxe book (well, the First Edition, in any case). I had the rather excellent Learn Ruby in 21 Days. I would say I've heard of Ruby since 2001, shortly after books became available, and I'm sure I've heard of the language even before that.

Long ago, I had this idea in my head that I should learn a scripting language. But with a plethora of them out there, what do I pick? csh? bash? tcsh? Then, I realized scripting languages fall into two categories.

The original scripting languages were basically simple control flow on top of the native operating system commands. Thus, you had variables, if-then, loops, and functions built on top of calling OS calls like "ls" and "cd". This was all fine and dandy, but you couldn't do computer science kinds of things. Linked lists and trees? Hah!

In Windows-world, these are called batch files.

The problem with these scripting languages, other than syntax that is painful, is that they aren't particularly portable. For example, there are many variants of UNIX, and not all of them have the same options for "cp". So you write a script that uses some switch like "R", and it works on one UNIX setup, but not another. How annoying!

Perl came up with a weirdish idea. What if they reimplemented basic functions like directory movement, file manipulation, etc. as Perl functions? Then, they'd figure out how to port it everywhere, and remove some of the nasty variations from UNIX and Windows installation.

Despite its hideous syntax, Perl allowed you to code real data structures, and was a level beyond what most scripting languages. One could argue easily if there were no Perl, there might not be any Python or Ruby. Indeed, Matz was inspired to write Ruby because of Perl. One might also argue that were Perl not so hideous, there wouldn't be the comparatively niceness of Ruby/Python.

One could also argue that Perl didn't convince computer science types that it was a real language. Its nearly immediate embrace by UNIX sysadmin types, who many programmers oddly consider a subform of developer (to be fair, they aren't really developers, but usually, their knowledge of the system is amazing) put it in some enclave, and people didn't seriously think of Perl as a language people could learn for real. So, in a sense, Perl also retarded the acceptance of scripting languages as being acceptable for programmers.

Having said that, despite its horridness, people who didn't consider themselves programmers found themselves programming in Perl, and because people talk about Python and Ruby as better Perls, people who would otherwise find C# and Java completely intimidating, seem less averse to learning Ruby.

Anyway, back to me. I tried writing a little code in Perl, but to be honest, its weird treatment of arrays and scalars and hashes made it really painful to understand. The books weren't that much better, because Larry Wall tended to assume you groked his view of the world and that it was all easy, when it wasn't.

So I stopped learning Perl. Then, I started collecting books on Python, and books on Ruby. I'm a guy who's great in getting ready to do something, but not so great in doing it. I get books because I expect them to tell me the One True Way (TM) of doing coding. And, almost always, they disappoint greatly.

Part of the issue is avoiding the issue of editing, which I've decided is critical to learning any language.

Honestly, I don't like teaching myself to do much, even if it's the only pragmatic way to program. You can't find experts who want to explain how to code stuff up and let you pepper them with questions. I mean, I can do it, but most books aren't really prepared to teach you programming in this haphazard manner.

I find when I come home, I'm not in the mood to learn to program, then program.

The other problem I have, and it's one I've had forever, is that I want to know that I'm doing something in the "right way". I don't want to do it otherwise, if I'm not. That may seem unusual, but it's far more common than you'd imagine, and it's the one thing that a good programmer should never feel.

I used to teach programming, and you'd find more than one student who want to confirm everything they did was "right". Why? First, they didn't want to feel stupid. Second, they didn't want to "break" anything. Third, they didn't want to waste time. They didn't want to sit there, spend hours doing something, only to realize, they had it wrong! They feel embarrassed, and won't learn anymore.

Let's take this idea out of the realm of programming. Suppose I were to teach you tennis. Maybe you're reluctant. You're not good at sports. You aren't athletic. Already, you've completely psyched yourself out. You won't try particularly hard. If something goes wrong, you're ready to bail. This makes it very difficult to teach someone tennis when they feel they need to be successful right away.

In a sense, I'm that way when it comes to programming. Actually, let me explain this with another anecdote. I knew this guy who, in his mid 20s, decided to pick up tennis. He tried to learn it the best he could. Textbook strokes and so forth. He took lessons. He practiced. He had taken martial arts when he was young, so was sure there was a good way, if not One True Way.

Personally, I'm more of this mindset. I want to learn to program Ruby properly, and that seems difficult. To me, that means getting decent at the editor. I wanted to make an analogy with playing a musical instrument, but that's not quite right. When you play a musical instrument, it's important the notes be played correctly, with the correct pitch and tempo. I suppose a better analogy might be to write music down.

One person composing music might labor greatly trying to write down notes. But, perhaps if they tried some other way, they would get better results, with far less effort. Perhaps there's a device that would let you play chords on a piano, and it would translate that to notes on a page. That would make it far less tedious than, say, writing it on paper.

I don't know that the course will really cover that. Editing, as I said, is far too underrated a skill in programming.

So anyway, I thought about signing up back in December, because I figured, after years, I was still not making that much progress, and I really wanted to be taught in a classroom environment, which is the best kind of way of learning for me, because teachers have pre-digested the material. The way people teach a class is not the way they'd write a book (mostly due to the fact that many people want a book to eventually be a reference book).

A classroom setting has to hit the highlights, focus on important stuff. And for a three day course, they have to cover lots of ground.

The real problem, as I mentioned earlier, is that you can't be all things to all people. Since you can teach a course on an IDE, without learning about a programming language (an indication how complex IDEs have become), most courses like this spend very little time talking about editing.

Even if the course won't cover that (in favor of other topics), I think it's a win for me because it's making me do stuff I haven't done otherwise. I realize, for many people, it's that initial hump that's the toughest. It's like deciding to go dieting that first time. It's hard!

So even though I could buy a computer for the cost of this trip, or some other nice gadget, given my personality, this isn't such a bad way to get me to do things. Ideally, I would prefer someone teach it to me for free, but seems like no one ever wants to do that. So if you have to pay, it doesn't hurt to have guys who are pretty famous for doing that.

Let's see how tomorrow goes.

Atheism

Most atheists just sound like they've thought about the issue of religion more than most non-atheists have.

Making Sense

I was discussing the basic plot of Sunshine with Lance, since he recently saw it on video. The mostly unknown film was directed by Danny Boyle, probably best known for his film, Trainspotting.

It chronicles the tale of Icarus 2, a multinational crew sent to the Sun to essentially send a bomb to reignite the Sun, as it is, mysteriously, getting prematurely cool. Icarus 2 is the second mission sent at the original Icarus, sent out years earlier, has not been heard from.

As science fiction movies go, this is pretty intelligent, except for the entire end sequence. Science fiction movies often feel a need to amp the tension, and so, the idea is that Icarus 2 will discover Icarus 1, and decide to make a detour and join up with it.

In an initial scene, the doctor is engrossed with the power of the Sun, and wishes to be enveloped by its awesome fury. This sun worship is echoed by the Japanese captain, and eventually becomes critically important. As it turns out, the original crew of the Icarus have suddenly become sun worshippers, and while most have died, the captain stays alive, for no particular reason, except with the random hope that maybe a second mission might be sent out? When he realizes a second mission has been sent out, he finds it an affront to the Sun god (for lack of a better explanation) and does what he can to prevent the mission from succeeding.

For the most part, the crew seems reasonable, and make somewhat reasonable decisions. But because it's absolutely critical for the second crew to meet the first crew, they have to bend over backwards to make it happen. In particular, they decide that they don't know whether the equations are accurate enough to be sure that the first attempt will be succesful, and so two chances are better than one. On the other hand, how do they intend for both ships to go? Can one ship carry the payload of two? Why not try once and come back if that fails?

You can go on and on, nitpicking this little detail or that little detail.

I was rewatching a little of a short film called Night Swimming. Although the likelihood of the tale is similarly silly, many short films are often short on believable plot, and longer on emotion, a sense of place.

In particular, Night Swimming is about Otter, who's closeted and fantasizes about his best friend, Darby, who happens to a bit happy go lucky. Darby is seen hanging out with his girlfriend, indicating to the audience that "he is straight". But the idea is to get these two teens together somehow, and so the story is that they plan to go to a concert, and take a shortcut, when the truck stops working, and they figure they should stay the evening, and see what to do the next morning. To amp the tension some, it seems like there are hunters nearby, and Otter thinks they might be serial killers.

Darby wants to go out for a night swim, sans clothing, and Otter reluctantly joins him. At some point, Darby brings up the topic of who Otter thinks about when he, shall we say, pleasures himself. He notes the way Otter has looked at his girlfriend, but no, it's really Darby that he fancies. For a moment, the two get their rocks off. The next day, Darby decides he's committed to his girlfriend, and Otter is crushed, and sends out an application to art school, something his dad had been hounding him to do.

This film lasts all of maybe twenty minutes, and has plot holes galore. But in this case, I cared a lot less. The point really was to create a point in time where Otter comes to term with his feelings for Darby, and while the entire sequence of them making out (well, sorta) is contrived, it creates a decision point that cause their friendship to rift, and when you have twenty minutes to get a point across, then you rely on something silly to make it work. All credit to the actors and the filming that it doesn't come across as contrived, but actually somewhat moving.

As I was checking into the cast of this film, I noticed Otter was played by Bobby Steggert. He's the stronger of the three actors, but it can be very challenging to move from a small part like this to the big time. He's done a recurring role in a soap opera, All My Children and apparently had a role in The Namesake.

What is more interesting, to me anyway, is that he graduated valedictorian from nearby Frederick, MD, some twenty minutes north of where I live now. He's mostly doing theater work now, which goes to show that there are far more actors than jobs for actors in movies.

Occasionally, these short films make me want to make a short film myself, except I don't have a particularly good idea. Short films also rely on a bunch of other things to succeed, from good actors, to good cinematography. The more things that are good, the more likely the film can be successful. Good story is up there with good acting. Good acting can compensate for bad stories because you can be completely transfixed by good actors, but bad actors can totally both a good movie.

I would hope that if I could make movies (a long shot at best) that it would be well thought out. But I get the feeling, with so many movies made that don't make sense, that this is much harder than it seems or people who write movies are much dumber than I thought.

Pearls of Wisdom

Bruce Pearl's journey, as many coaches' journeys, has been a long one. He was an assistant coach in Iowa, a head coach in Division 2 at the University of South Indiana for ten years, where he made the finals of the Division 2 championships twice, before winning it in 1995. He stayed there several years more, before going to University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a Division 1 team, in 2001.

The Division 1 NCAA men's basketball tournament, often compared to a "dance", serves as an ad-hoc tryout for many a coach looking to move from the small programs and up to bigger programs. Among the coaches that have made this move are Bruce Weber at Southern Illinois, who became Illinois' head coach, and Stan Heath, former head coach of Kent State, who went on to become Arkansas' head coach (he's since been replaced).

Bruce Pearl had taken UWM to the Sweet 16, and that lead him to become the head coach at the University of Tennessee. UT has always been a football school. What basketball fame it had, it had in women's basketball where Pat Summitt has been the winningest coach in women's college basketball (her number exceeds Division 1 coaches as well). While she has been asked to coach in the WNBA, she has stayed steadfast at Tennessee.

While UT has had reasonable seasons in the past, teams that have made their way to the tournament, most coaches have stayed no more than 5 years before being replaced. The last UT coach was Buzz Peterson who used to play at UNC. Surely, someone hoped that UNC magic would rub off. That didn't happen. Pearl's selection was seen more of hiring an up-and-coming coach (one often has to spend 10-15 years coaching to get that title), and no one knew how things would turn out.

His first year, players wanted to defect and play for other teams. Pearl allowed these players to leave Tennessee, sensing that a harsh hand would lead to bad feelings. He still did quite well in his first year with 22 wins and 8 losses, impressive considering it was his first year (historically, he's done very well on the start).

What's impressed most people is Pearl's outsized personality. Showing his support for the women's game, he decided (with some players) to have his chest painted with "V" (the other players were in "O", "L", "S", spelling "Vols", the shortened name for "Volunteers"). In response, Summitt returned the favor, by dressing as a cheerleader at a key game between Tennessee and Florida, a game which Tennessee won.

Saturday night pitted UT against Memphis. Memphis was undefeated, with a 25-0 record, and poor free throw shooting. Memphis's coach was one John Calipari, who has been a top basketball coach for ages. UT, with 2 losses, was number 2 in the nation. This isn't the usual number 1, number 2 matchup, which usually pits UNC against Duke.

Pearl, the consummate showman, dressed in an orange blazer, decided to host a pep rally for UT fans who made the cross-state trip, and said UT was ready to take the number 1 rankings. After leading for much of the second half, Memphis came back to take a lead, and with under a minute left, it seemed Memphis might be able to secure the win, and stay undefeated, but due to some bad shots at the end, and poor free throw shooting, UT managed to win 66-62, and will undoubtedly become number 1 in the country, having knocked out the number 1, and being number 2.

This will be the first time UT has been ranked number 1 in men's basketball, and Pearl, much like George Mason's head coach, Jim Larranaga, wants to take advantage of the spotlight. Pearl projects a certain lovable goofiness as head coach, making him seem like one friendly guy, a contrast to, say, Bobby Knight, who recently stepped down as head coach of Texas Tech so his son could take over.

You've got to hand it to Pearl to be able to get this team to where it is in such short order. Alas, coaching is also about recruiting (and recruiting made news as Kelvin Sampson, head coach at Indiana, stepped down for recruiting violations at Indiana of a similar nature to the one's he had had at Oklahoma), so we'll see how he does with his own recruiting. Often, "bad" coaches actually do a pretty good job at recruiting, often suffering when they have to coach. Better coaches can often do well with good players, but struggle to recruit the players they need.

With only a few games left in the season, UT is poised for its first number 1 seed at the men's tournament. UT may remain devout to its men's football program, but Pearl may start to make hoops fans out of the Vols.

Testosterone

This American Life is one of those really underrated brilliant shows. Radio shows, that is. I suspect most people who listen to this NPR show also agree in its brilliance, but it gets little play because it's NPR, and it's on the radio, and mostly, you listen to the radio when you're driving. Only occasionally are there folks like my previous roommate Adam that listened to radio like people watch TV, except, even in this case, he listened to it sparingly.

I was listening to an episode about testoserone. Part of the amazing amazingness of this show is its willingness to delve into topics that you wouldn't imagine anyone would care about. What kind of perverse mind thinks you can make a radio show devoted to testosterone?

There are four segments, of which I heard three. The first involved a man that had no testosterone. My sense, lacking information from the start of the show, was that he somehow had some treatment that prevent his body from making testosterone for a period of time.

The second was about a man, who was born a woman, and considered herself a dyke. She liked other women, and eventually came to an epiphany that she'd rather be a man, and started taking testosterone as part of becoming transgendered. She said, as a dyke, she was aggressive and outgoing. As a guy, however, he found he needed to be less "dyke". Indeed, his friends now found him a bit nerdy, which he found a bit disconcerting, that he had become rather boring in his new life.

In order to pass, he made up a few fictions. When he was a she, he had gone to Bryn Mawr, well known as a women's only college. Bryn Mawr, as it turns out, has an affiliate college, namely, Haverford, where girls and guys both attend. He would tell people who asked that he went to Haverford.

Now Jaime goes to Haverford, and he's proud of this fact, so I found the next part rather funny. This man (Griffin Hansbury) felt Bryn Mawr was a superior college to Haverford, even as he had had many friends at Haverford, so it really pained him to say he had gone to what he had thought was an inferior school.

The third segment was about getting the various people on This American Life to have their testosterone measured. Given gender differences, they had the guys ranked separately from the girls.

Testosterone's main effect for most people is a sense of boldness, and lack of fear. People can often ignore many things while focusing on a specific task. It's also been tied to baldness. The question came up whether the gay male, who is balding, and works out, would have the most testosterone or not. Most women felt one of the women, who was aggressive, and a bit short-tempered would have the most testosterone. Some wondered about the wisdom of knowing someone's testosterone levels.

As it turned out, the gay guy did have the most testosterone, and while he didn't particularly care whether he won or not, he still seemed to gloat in this victory. The guy who came in last felt bad. He said he could understand it if he was at Sportscenter, and he came in last, but what does it say when he comes last to a group of guys in public radio. The gay guy asked what Sportscenter was, and he lamented that he knew what Sportscenter was, and was still last.

This show isn't so much about news. It isn't about campaigns. It isn't about the Presidency. It isn't even about Roger Clemens.

It's about people. Maybe not the average person you know. It's about brainy people who are able to find unusual people, unusual everyday people, whose stories are utterly fascinating to listen to. This isn't even the mythic everyday quality you get when listening to Charles Kuralt, who famously wandered the countrysides in his journeys across the US, interviewing the plain folk he met along his travels.

Yeah, it's pitched at the so-called NPR elite, but I don't think it's such a bad thing to do, to hear stories about what a chemical that our bodies produce have to do with how we perceive the world, and ourselves.

Idol 7

This year, I'm kinda sorta following American Idol a little more than usual. Last year, the complaint was that the males, as a group, were much weaker than the women, and that with Melinda staying near the end, that the group was on the older side (and she seemed much older than the 29 she said she was).

To rectify matters, Idol went a lot younger with its group with quite a few teens. Tony Kornheiser has already said that, on the men's side, Michael Johns is the best of the lot. At 28, he's also one of the oldest of the lot.

These are two videos that are apparently quite a few years old, and show Michael Johns in a band back when he lived in Atlanta, and he shows that he could be the guy that might actually have a bit of a career after Idol, only because he sings songs that could do well.

You see, Idol has always been about singing, and not so much about songwriting. Indeed, the singers are asked to sing covers. Johns has sung songs that are originally written (whether he wrote them is another story, but that's fine).

To be successful as an Idol singer, it helps if you've got crazy inflection. In a sense, the more black you sound, the better off you are. A guy like, say, Woody Guthrie, with a plain style of singing probably wouldn't work, and certainly, Bob Dylan wouldn't work. But those guys succeeded because they were songwriters, and their songs meant something, and so people were willing to excuse that they weren't such great singers.

And for folk singing, keeping it nice and simple and unadorned is part of the point. Idol singers need to be fancier with how they sing.

Although many of these singers are not well-known, many have been singing an awful long time, otherwise, they wouldn't be so good. However, they aren't trained, in the usual way. By all accounts, an opera singer would be better, because they've really mastered how to sing.

Idol, however, is a pop singing competition, and as skilled as an opera singer is, few Americans care for that style of singing. In a way, Idol has popularized a kind of singing style that has lead to few successful careers, which, I imagine, is much to their embarassment. They would love to launch a real career, based on someone who can sing, but someone who can also do original songs that people will care about.

For the men, two men stand out. Michael Johns is, I imagine, still a reasonably clear favorite, and these two clips from his earlier career only cement that. The other guy is likable David Archuleta, who has also been singing successfully since he was young, and he's already desperately young, having just turned 17.

Here's David Archuleta's performance from this past week's top 12.



He sings in a way that's more typical of Idol singers, though he seems a bit better, more polished than most, even at a tender young age. His voice is a touch high, to be honest, but probably due to his young age, but he's relatively smart with how he uses his voice.

The women tend to sing even more in the African American style (which goes to show you the profound influence of African Americans have had on song and singing in the US). I haven't looked through the women as much to find who I like or dislike, but will probably comment on it in the future weeks.

For now, it seems Michael Johns and David Archuleta are the class of the men's field.

If I Were President

People can't keep too many things in their head, especially when it comes to politics. If you were to give an outline of what Obama or Clinton or McCain believes in, you might be hard-pressed to answer. On the one hand, candidates feel the need to have some things of what they want to do, just to show they aren't all talk. In the end, it comes down to personality, and a broad sense of what the person will do.

For example, most people will point out that Obama and Clinton have generally voted similarly, except on a few things, in particular, the Iraq war. Admittedly, for a war, it feels less like a war than an invasion.

Politics is often about making people hate your opponent, rather than love you. In particular, while Obama fans are particularly swayed by his rhetoric, that he inspires, even if he may feel short on substance. Still, Hillary is so polarizing, that many people hate her more than they love Obama, though, to be fair, Obama is getting more love than most politicians.

But it shows the way we are as citizens. We want to be inspired by the president, rather than to look at his qualifications. Indeed, people probably felt more comfortable with Bush than Kerry, but in hindsight, would they say they had made a terrible misjudgment? And how else were they to judge Bush? Bush used the tactic of a strong America, the fight against terrorism. He pushed the ideas of Reagan, and a general vague theme that "strong is good", and many people were swayed by that. It goes back to the idea that Reagan was "strong" and Mondale is a "wimp".

People often say there are two parts to being President (or any politician). There's campaigning, which is to convince you, the voter, to vote for the person. The other is governing. This would seem like two different skills, and yet, people are typically swayed by the campaigning. With television, your visual appearance and demeanor is far more important now than it was in the past.

One issue you hear about, and I find it to be totally strange is the notion of the President as "Commander in Chief", as if they were expected to be some kind of military leader. I feel that title should mean, not so much that the President is a leader, but that the military is subservient to the Presidency, and by that, I mean, that we don't live under military rule, and that the military wouldn't stage a coup. They are a branch that serves.

The question is often asked to make a distinction between Democrats and Republicans with Republicans, especially neo-conservatives, feeling the need to establish the US as a world superpower through military dominance, by being, in effect, the world's policeman. It's silly because no one expects the President to have to make specific military decisions, although he might, with consultants, decide whether the US should be engaged in military actions as a whole.

The other funny aspect about running for President is money. Even bright folks seem to concede that money is terribly important. No one feels bad about Obama raising 30 million dollars a month to run a campaign. No one says that this money is ridiculous to run a campaign, but that it reflects the cost of putting ads up (after all, why would radio stations place the ads for free? We're a capitalistic democracy, and someone should make money on that!).

And what else? Campaigning works! Why must Hillary and Obama travel state to state? Because people are ready to change their minds after they hear a speech! Because they've done little research on their own, and expect the candidate's admittedly biased stance to help them decide. Presidential candidates have become rock stars!

It's funny, but a show like Batman made a rather cynical show about politicking. Penguin decides he wants to be mayor of Gotham City. To fight this, Batman decides he must run as well. Batman's speeches are boring. He says "We must talk about the issues, because the issues are important. The issues are what we must focus on", and so he talks about talking about the issues, but never talks about the issues.

Meanwhile, Penguin is kissing babies, and having parties, and so forth, and basically saying he's one fun guy, and has no other platform besides that. He ends up losing, and blames the pollsters for giving him bad information. That episode does a great job of making fun of politics.

Republicans try to keep their message simple. Strong military. Cut taxes. Religious conservatism. They hammer that message over and over again, not willing to adapt to the situations. Simple-minded ideas for a simple-minded populace (oh yeah, don't forget capital gains tax cuts!).

Democrats don't have a particularly simple message. More money for the middle class. The rich are too rich. Let's all get along. The government can help.

As many political scientists lament, we might get a better democracy if people were willing to be better citizens. But that takes work, and when you're life is running reasonably OK regardless of who the President is, then there's less incentive to care.

Meh, eclipse

Last night, there was a full lunar eclipse. This is the kind where the Earth intercedes between the Sun and a full moon. It had the virtue of occurring around 10 PM, which is a time I'm awake. I had thought, due to the weather, that it would be overcast, and I wouldn't be able to see the eclipse.

As it turned out, it was cold and reasonably clear.

And the eclipse? I suppose one imagines that such an eclipse would leave the moon completely dark, so you couldn't see anything, as if it was a new moon, when you can't see much.

Instead, you get a hazy view of the moon, a little like a cloud passing in front, where you can see through it, except the cloud is kinda black and smoky. And it doesn't get particularly darker, mostly because, with all the street lights around, there's a lot of light around anyway.

Apparently, solar eclipses are where it's at. At least, it has the impression of a cloud coming over. Now, it just so happens the moon almost just covers the Sun which works out well for astronomers interested in checking out the corona, but less exciting for those who want a nice Eclipse. If the moon were bigger, or if it were closer, then the Sun would be covered up even more, leading to a more effective shadow.

In any case, I suppose I was happy I saw it, but it wasn't nearly that exciting.

Racqueteering

I'm watching Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. Frank Deford, a veteran sports reporter, loves telling stories of unusual people in athletics. In this segment, it's about a nun who is 77 who participates in triathlons. Of course, it's the juxtaposition of the two that make it fascinating. On the one hand, without the sports, Deford isn't interested. On the other, the religion makes it an unusual combination. She's been doing this for 30 years, which sounds like a long time, until you realize that she started in her late 40s.

I realize that while some people enjoy these personal sports, it doesn't work so well for me. I tried running last year, and I'll probably get back into it, but I dislike it's lack of competition, and more importantly, it's lack of strategy. I mean, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it can be hard to use smarts to win.

This is why I love tennis. As a racquet sport, there's so much to learning tennis, and after some 25 years of playing, I still am learning something about the sport. For example, since I got more into tennis recently, I've been working on both my serve and backhand.

I had read something in Tennis a long time ago. It claimed Mats Wilander essentially hit a one-handed backhand using the second (non-dominant) hand as support. I had basically believed this for a long time, and while I think it helped (in particular, I can hit an OK one-handed backhand), I was more than surprised to realize that most teachers teach the two-handed backhand as a left-handed (for a rightie) forehand with the right hand as support (it's more than that really), and started to rethink my backhand as more of a forehand.

And this was years after learning to hit a backhand. I'll say it isn't quite where I want it, but it is better.

Or, my forehand. I've always used a wristy flick to get topspin on my forehand. It does the job, but isn't particularly powerful. So I began to watch modern players hit their forehand in slow motion on YouTube. There was Djokovic with his hitchy forehand. I tried that for a bit, but have since moved to the simpler Federer style forehand, which was more arm (there's still wrist) and follow through. It's not quite where I want it either, but it's made me rethink my forehand as well.

Watch any modern player (Federer will do), and you see just how severe the forehand stroke is. Traditional play (by which I mean, players from the 60s) told you to take the racquet straight back and swing straight forward. These days, players hit open stances, and the follow through is so severe that the racquet ends up up beside your left arm! Furthermore, you often see the racquet start up high pointed upwards (see Sharapova), which gives additional swing time to get the racquet to its proper speed.

Perhaps the biggest change has been learning to hit a topspin serve, which I realized requires wrist pronation, perhaps the single hardest movement to learn in all of tennis. It doesn't have much pace yet, but I'm still trying to get the spin needed. The sad thing is that most people I play with barely notice the spin (though I can tell by the trajectory of the ball).

Most people say, with tennis or any sports, that you need to not think at all. I think about the strokes all the time. My slice backhand is off, I'm sure. I cut too much underneath the ball, and don't hit it flat enough.

With running, on the other hand, I pretty much run. I'm sure there's stuff to think about. I think I get less runner's high and a little more pain, but it helps with endurance, so I'll try to keep it up. Still, it's been cold, so I don't do it much now.

My point, if there is one, that people are always rethinking tennis, trying to figure out how to hit the ball better. It's sad that the result of re-inventing the groundstroke to deal with oversized racquets has lead to the disappearance of serve and volley play (people now hit such amazing shots from such desperate positions that many people don't volley much).

And, I for one, like the lessons that tennis provides.

One Thing After Another

I knew it.

I was a bit tired today, so I slept early, which meant that I got up in the middle of the night, and flipped on the television to see what was on. I caught the last half hour or so of The History Boys which I had seen in the theater sometime ago.

The story, I suppose, is about history, more specifically, two different approaches to history. One, by the venerable Hector, played by character actor, Richard Griffiths, represents history studied for history's sake, to learn simply because it's so interesting, not to be highly reverent of the subject, but to understand that what happens is often by chance.

Hector, alas, has a weakness: his fondness of boys. Oh, he can never properly indulge in a serious relationship. He relegates himself to the sideways glance, the inappropriate grope, and the boys? They seem to tolerate his advances, as a sad move by a joke of a person, even as they find his teaching unorthodox.

Mike D'Angelo criticized this point in his review, realizing, were his gender preferences different, how utterly creepy it would be. Yet, it probably comes across less than for at least two reasons. First, somehow, despite their formative age, these guys seem very in control of their lives, perhaps betraying the film's play origins, perhaps betraying the playwright's desire to depict highly literary kids, who quote from the world's great authors or sing show tunes at a whim.

This is Dead Poet's Society (DPS) where the kids already appreciate education, and are, indeed a bit too erudite. They lack the academic innocence of the teens in DPS. Like DPS, perhaps even more so, the kids, those that have personalities, represent different facets, from the shy Posner to the outgoing Dakin.

On the flip side of Hector, is the pragmatic Irwin, who finds the goal of prep school is to get into a good college. Cambridge. Oxford. And to get in requires a provocative approach in the essays. Be interesting. Be bold. But, in the end, it's a game, trying to impress those who read the essays, those who determine whether you get the keys to the next level.

Both Rudge, the athlete, and Posner, the kid coming to terms with his sexuality, take two extreme reactions to Irwin's approach. Rudge knows he's an athlete. He's not particularly academic. He knows colleges wants athletes, but doesn't like the idea that he has to do a song and dance to make the colleges feel good about the lie they tell themselves. Posner, on the other hand, still takes Hector's lessons to heart, both good and bad, interested in the act of teaching, but pained by the life of a closeted individual.

For a while, the film is about these clever kids, and these two approaches, but then it takes a different tack. Dakin, the boldest of the kids, the guy who's too cool, is fascinated by Irwin, the teacher, and despite being straight, wants Irwin to have a tryst with him. Stephen Campbell Moore must have enjoyed this role where he portrays an outwardly confident teacher, who has secrets to hide, not just his interests in guys, but also his credentials. In effect, he's living the lie that he wants his students to follow, yet, it's not nearly that cynical. He understands he didn't play the game well enough as a teen, but he knows how to teach others to play the game. He is Salieri, but instead of lamenting his lack of Mozart talent, he realizes you can fake that talent.

The key drama, then, is that rarity of real life, the advance of a student on a teacher. Dakin's advances are so confident, and Irwin's response so tentative, that despite the inappropriateness, you feel Irwin's the one being taken advantage of. Hector offers his advice: lay off, which seems funny, because he manages to excuse his own actions as a kind of "lesson", a lie he tells himself.

The film manages to blunt the actions of inappropriate teachers by students that are a bit too savvy, a bit too wise, but it tries to make a point, which is that people aren't so easily pegged into a simple label. Teachers, especially high school teachers, often run into problems. They are both authorities, but also surrounded by teens that are only beginning to understand the opposite sex, and this has, on occasion, lead to inappropriate behavior (this happened at my high school). The film makes the rather bold suggestion that people can still be more than simply lechers, that they can still be good teachers.

One of the more touching scenes, despite its obvious play roots, is a scene at the end, where the teens, scattered throughout the audience, are addressed by Mrs. Lintott, who provides the sole female voice of reason. She tells the future of each of the students, and what happens to each of them. It's far more effective than the usual endings of docu-dramas which fill you in on the details of all the real-life characters.

While the film is flawed in many ways, mostly in unrealistic kids that are a bit too advanced for their age, it is nevertheless a lot of fun precisely because they are so precocious (and precious). It deals with two big topics: education for education's sake versus playing the game of impressing an admissions committee and the cynicism behind that. It's also about how teachers deal with education versus the issue of teacher-student relationships. Although this can be seen as providing the film its edge, it's more accurate to say that this is a gay film that is wrapped in education, and suggests the two complementary feelings of playwright Alan Bennett.

In many ways, the film feels like a kid who's precociously singing a song. There's something adorably sweet, and yet awfully impressive about the way the kid sings the song, but you realize, if they still sang like that as an adult, it would still seem very kid-like. In the same way, The History Boys is awfully clever, with kids that are not quite stereotypes, but also not quite real either. Yet, you don't seem to mind following this rosy, nostalgic romp through the upper echelons of British high school education.

On Teaching

I spent a good number of years of my life teaching. I began as a TA back in 1990, and taught for about 13 more years, either as a teaching assistant and as an instructor/lecturer.

I've been out of teaching for several years now. Someone asked me recently if I missed it. Sure, I miss some of it. Some of it I don't miss.

Ideally, you want all your students to be pretty self-motivated, needing just enough guidance so you have some purpose, but not so much that they literally can't do anything unless you are poking and prodding them. Most college-aged kids have reached a phase in their life where they know they don't have to do everything college demands of them. They can say "I'll aim for a 'C', and that's good enough for me".

Some realize that they don't like to study. Some realize they don't think about the subject right. Well, perhaps they don't realize it. They conclude there are too many smart folks, and they like their free time too much, or have far too many personal issues to properly address school. And, of course, not everyone comes into college knowing how to study and how to learn, and therefore, students come in with varying backgrounds and aptitude.

The negative parts are the students who have lots of personal issues, and these issues tend to prevent them from doing well in the course. However, all they care about is whether they pass or not. They know if they don't pass, they'll have to spend more time trying to graduate. And so they figure they can talk you into passing them. This is where it helps to be callous and insensitive. Some people pass, some people don't. We don't want to be that cruel, but there we are.

Ideally, students would come to the same conclusion that you've come to, and accept that they didn't do so well in the course. But that doesn't happen very often. Most people figure there's a way out. The goal is "passing" the course, not learning stuff from the course.

There are two things that interest me in teaching. The first part is rather abstract. I like thinking about teaching like folks who study communications think about communications (as in radio communication, not like people who want to be DJs). Fundamentally, there is a transmitter transmitting a signal-think of that as a function-and a receiver trying to receive that signal, except there's noise that can corrupt the signal, and the receiver needs to compensate for it the best it can.

A teacher is like the transmitter, and the student the receiver. However, even this model has its deficiencies. This assumes one-way communication. The teacher transmits (lectures), the student receives (learns).

A better model is the "missile" model. Ordinarily, it would be very difficult to get a missile to its target. Computing all the right forces is difficult. Instead, missiles use a feedback loop. It determines what its trajectory should be, then finds out what the trajectory is, then compensates for it. If you compensate fast enough, then you get a pretty accurate missile.

If you don't like the military nature of missiles, think about driving. You make tiny adjustments to stay between the lines, adjusting speed, trajectory, etc. to deal with nearby traffic, while, overall, aiming at your final destination.

This is a better model for teacher student interaction. As a teacher, you try to estimate what the student is learning, and then make corrections. This is generally difficult because, first, there are lots of students. You rarely have the time to individually correct each student, and let's face it, how do you correct what the student does?

Old school professors use fear. I knew a professor from Russia, and he'd do the same thing each semester. At the beginning, he'd tell you the good old days when a third of the students would fail. He would be impatient and short-tempered. People would be fearful of him.

But strangely, as the semester moved along, he'd get a little more calm. He'd tell a few jokes. He'd be a little more patient. I know, because he made us TAs sit in his class. It was interesting to observe. He started off as bad cop, and went to, well, not-so-bad cop. Students, probably unaware of this, might even realize he seemed to be getting nicer.

Most students seem to do well in classes they like. That seems reasonable. It's not a perfect thing, to be fair. I recall a professor who told me that the worst TA (by students' opinions) had the best average grade. The other TAs were baffled. How could that be?

They hypothesized that maybe the TA was bad, so the students, who needed to pass, taught themselves, and that was much better. After all, students who teach themselves is what all teachers should strive for. However, the professor also pointed out that even if the students learned more by themselves, their happiness might be lower, and so they might be disappointed with their course overall, leading to higher dropout rates.

I've learned that you can only do so much to help students, that a lot of their success comes from within. However, I'm willing to tell them this, so they understand this.

I find it's worth talking to students about how to learn, and not simply disseminate information. If a few students improve their ability to learn, that is so much better in the long run. As they say, teach a man to fish.

It takes time to understand why students have a tough time learning stuff. As a good teacher, you are part psychologist (or whatever it's called). You try to learn what motivates people, and how they behave. I spent a while trying to understand where people fail to learn, where their confusion lies. That takes a while, because you think it's so easy. You can't understand why the students don't get it.

Most teachers spend very little time discussing teaching with other teachers, which is a real pity. They might learn something from talking to others (although many teachers, paid to be opinionated about their own teaching, are closed to many ideas).

The other part I like about teaching is interacting with students. What do they do outside of class? What do they want to do with their lives? I know. Most people prefer to keep a professional distance, but this means you also don't understand where the students come from when they enter your class. Are students lazy? Sure. But some students are dealing with personal issues. Some are breaking up. Some have family problems. Some have money problems. Some have health issues. You don't get a sense of this if you simply teach and go home.

Now that I've been away from teaching for a while, I get a better sense of what people need in order to be successful in the real world (at least in programming). Part of it is a kind of fearlessness. I like to tell the story of a friend who is doing her graduate studies.

While several other instructors showed how to download and install Eclipse, she said "it wasn't in the weekly plan" so she didn't have to do it. Indeed, the reason she didn't do it was because she's fearful of failure. I understand this too because I'm fearful of failure too. You know how there are older folks that won't touch computers. Why not?

They're afraid to break something. And then, they don't do anything, and so they don't learn anything. And then, they really are helpless.

Fearlessness means giving something a try, and if that doesn't work, spending some time figuring out why. So, this friend didn't want to download Eclipse because it was something she didn't know well, and it would take her time to learn it, and she was afraid she wouldn't learn it properly. Most people are like her. Even in computer science, there are many people like that. They can't do something unless it's been shown to them, or unless they are comfortable with it.

The other part is patience (and a logical mind). If you're fearless, but impatient, then when a download fails to install, you'll quit. It takes too much time. But the best folks keep trying, and often, they get it to work. And the more they continue to do this, the more they learn overall.

I have no idea how I would teach that in a class. Can you teach fearlessness, plus patience, plus a logical mind? Is it surprising that there are a lot of people that are OCD in computer science? It's actually a benefit in the field, if you can control it.

The other thing I'd do differently is I'd have the students do more on their own. I realize that most people learn by doing. They can listen with blank stares, so the more they can do on their own, the better.

Superman and Kumar

Sometimes, when you watch a movie for the umpteenth time, you see things you missed. I get a movie channel, and they love showing certain movies over and over. One, in particular, is Superman Returns. The film is both deeper and shallower than the origin, missing out on nuances like Clark growing up in Smallville, and NYC as a personality.

Remember Luthor's henchmen? Probably not. You remember the lady with the yippy dog. Why does Lex have her around? They don't appear to be romantically involved.

But no, I'm talking about the guys. There's one guy in his group played by one Kal Penn. Yeah, he's Kumar from Harold and Kumar fame. He's gone on to do House. He barely has any speaking lines, but there must have been some arrangement to show him a little more than any of the other guys.

Why does Lex have henchmen anyway? How do you advertise such a position? This stuff doesn't make sense.

I suppose Kal Penn isn't such a household name that he can simply get lead roles. If he wants to be in Superman, he has to do (very) small roles like this. He may have really, really wanted to be in Superman, just like some people want to be in Star Trek.

Oh yeah. There's a new Raiders movie coming out. Harrison Ford is how old? But that's the magic of movies. If there's interest, someone will make it. It's been over 20 years since the last Raiders film. Still, Spielberg is a clever guy (wow, they managed to get Karen Allen back), so he'll probably give us some wows.

Talent vs. Work

I suppose the good news about a blog is that I'm not paid to write it. Thus, I don't have to be original. I can retread an old topic because I find it interesting to talk about.

This goes back to an old discussion, when the following idea was proposed "Hard work overcomes lack of smarts or talent". Certainly, there are cases where this is true, though there is the question of what is talent, and what is smarts? One could argue that it's the ease at which you understand or pick something up. Indeed, when you point at someone and say "they're smart", you're probably saying they either already know a great deal, or that they can understand difficult things far more easily than others.

Certainly, focus plays a part. Justin says that his office mate, Alap, is a very smart guy, probably smarter than he is. But he's not all that focused, and so his research meanders. That this guy lacks discipline might be overcome if he had someone to direct him, and push him to accomplish. So he makes up in focus and drive what he lacks in brilliance, which isn't to say he's dumb. Far from it, he's also a pretty bright guy, but even among smart guys, there's many levels of achievement.

Indeed, it was posited that hard work alone would overcome any talent deficiency. But that requires not only desire and time, but some savvy.

I'll give you another story. A friend, Brian, was once working on a project to produce a binary that included some type information for "C" programs. Although "C" functions have types, that type information is not stored as part of the binary. Thus, you may call "foo" with two parameters: an int and a char *. The real function might take two ints. However, when you link the code that defines foo, with the code that uses it, the linker does not check the type of foo, because that information is not in the binary.

The goal was to write code that would output type information and create a linker that would check for this information, and output errors if the link wasn't successful due to types.

Except Brian spent a lot of time writing his own "C" declaration parser.

You may think "C" declarations are easy. int, float, some pointers. But it can get really nasty. Function pointers, arrays of pointers, pointers to arrays, function pointers that return arrays of pointers. Don't even mention C++. This means parsing declarations by itself is quite challenging.

Anyway, Brian spent a long time on this, even though there were plenty of off-the-shelf "C" parsers he could use that already solved the problem. Even so, Brian found it fascinating to figure out how to parse "C" declarations, even as this was secondary to what he needed to do. The professor teaching the course noted that in order to do research, you need to have "taste". You need to decide what problems are important to solve, and what problems are not important to solve.

Brian's plenty smart, but this is the kind of thing that can happen when you're trying to be pragmatic and get stuff done. You have to avoid going down paths that don't make sense.

I was listening to an NPR segment where this woman was doing research. She noticed when she recorded Chinese speakers saying words that their pitch was nearly identical, no matter when she recorded them saying the words. Chinese is a tonal language. Mandarin has four tones. Thus, "ma" can mean mother or horse depending on how you pronounce it (kind of like "project" has two pronunciations depending on whether it's a noun or a verb). She hypothesized that this tonal language would lead to more people with perfect pitch.

Perfect pitch is the ability to identify notes when you hear them. People identify colors with no problems, but most identify pitches relative to one another. Why is perfect pitch important? Many of the most renowned composers had perfect pitch. It was thought this was a rarity. Yet, if Chinese people have more people with perfect pitch, by the virtue of having a sing-song language get additional practice from the language itself, it makes one wonder whether you can learn perfect pitch, provided you start early enough.

It's arguable whether, given enough time, you could make yourself have perfect pitch or not. But suppose you could, but suppose this would take lots of time. Would you do it? Would you do it if it meant not seeing your parents or friends? Would you do it above all else? Would you do it even if it meant, in the end, you weren't going to be successful?

The faulty assumption in "work defeats talent" is believing we all have the capacity for infinite work. We don't.

I just went out yesterday to play some tennis, to practice serves. It was slightly chilly. It's a lot less fun than playing with someone. But nevertheless, I went out and did that. At what point does someone say "it's too cold to go outside"? And I know that I lack enough talent (and time) to become really good (I can get better, but that's the best I can hope for).

So hard work isn't everything. Think about Einstein. He was brilliant. He came up with some pretty weird ideas. What made his brain think those thoughts? There's the story that a million monkeys at a million typewriters would eventually create Shakespeare. Justin believes even if Einstein hadn't thought of the ideas, someone else would have. But not everyone. There are many brilliant physicists out there, but not everyone is coming up with the same theories. They've expended a lot of effort trying to master the one area they happen to be good at.

And let's not forget culture. How much does culture influence things? At some point, this guy would have to think about marriage and kids. It's been said that many a creative scientist loses their creativity once they get married and once they have kids. Why? Once upon a time you had a lot of your own time, and you could just think. Now, someone else wants a piece of that time, and now you get interrupted a lot. Are you willing to give up being married, having kids, the respect of your parents, to get what you want?

What price do you want to pay?

Nishikori Wins

Well, who would have expected that? Kei Nishikori, the 18 year old Japanese qualifier, managed to push around James Blake, trading shot for shot with Blake (and surprisingly, using a Wilson racquet, probably due to a lack of a Yonex or other Japanese branded racquet). Nishikori had this one really creative shot. He appeared to be running around his backhand, and possibly hitting an inside out drop shot.

Instead, he shoved the ball down the line, and James Blake just look dumb-founded.

Blake had to be surprised that Nishikori could play that well. Nishikori seems a bit short, and hit a lot of shots with both feet off the ground. He has a pretty solid backhand, and doesn't seem to be nervous to make it to the net. Apparently, he trained at Bollettieri's, even though his English is somewhat halting.

And Jimmy Arias doing commentary. His name is a blast from the past. Back when the US had a clay court circuit, he was doing it, even making the US Open semis, until everyone's big game left him behind. Arias probably felt he was born about 5 years too late, and he could have been a great player of the late 70s, instead of a player with a short career in the 80s.

Let's see where Nishikori heads after this.

Speedport Tour

I finally found out what racquet I tried out a few weeks ago. Here is is: the Prince Speedport Tour. Very orange.

As I mentioned earlier, I didn't particularly care for this racquet. I've never liked Prince racquets that much. I playtested a few quite a few years ago. They've always felt a bit slight in the head, I thought.

Prince was the original oversized racquet, so I have to hand it to them.

The K-Blades

I tried out two of the Wilson K-Blades. One was a 93 sq in model which Novak Djokovic uses, and the other, a slightly larger 97 square inch model. One thing I'm thrilled about is that most racquet manufacturers appear to have agreed to put common information in the throat of the racquet, which includes its weight, string pattern (18 by 20 or 16 by 18), how head-heavy or head-light the racquet is. This makes it easier to judge the racquet.

The Wilson racquets I've tried have all had one thing in common. Short grips. If you use a standard two handed grip, the second hand will run out of grip. My hands aren't particularly large, so I wonder why Wilson would do this given that two of its biggest endorsers (Chris Evert and Jimmy Connors) used two hands. Indeed, my Babolat racquet has more than plenty of grip for two handed players as does my Yonex racquet.

Odder still, the 93 square inch racquet is a throwback to old days using a leather, yes leather grip. Once upon a time, leather was all you'd get for a grip. Then, came the synthetics, and for the most part, everyone uses a synthetic grip. What's the problem with leather?

Assuming you're not a vegan and have philosophical objections to animal skin being used for the grip, the main problem with leather is that it has pores, and it gets dirty, and over time, it begins to wear away. Indeed, my brother tried a racquet whose leather grip is 20 years old, and it was sloughing away. Not sure why the K-Blade 93 square inch works this way.

While they both served OK, I found that it was just too annoying not to have an extra long grip, so I can't say I liked either one.

Since I was by myself, I could only practice in a limited way, whacking against a wall. For a wall, you want something that deadens the shot on impact. Wood is decent. If it's concrete, the ball comes back way too fast, and it's no good to practice against.

Lately, I've been practicing a topspin serve, and it's getting there, but I get little pace. The great thing about tennis is that you can try a lot of ideas. I've now gone to a more McEnroe style serve. People always praise McEnroe for his touch and volley genius, but another McEnroe oddity was his serve, where he literally had his back against the server (the odd service stance was due to a bad back). Still, that stance has some interesting advantages forcing you to use more shoulder when serving.

Few people use this serve motion, but since I grew up in the age of McEnroe, I remember this motion, and go back to it from time to time. I find when I serve like McEnroe, it helps my pace and helps keep my left arm up longer.

So, I think I'm done with Wilson's for a while. Maybe I'll try Dunlops next, as the place I try out has Dunlops.

State is Right

The term fascist or fascism is nearly meaningless to most Americans. Indeed, it was pretty meaningless to me. It's a term associated with Nazi Germany, but to be honest, could be applied to other countries. Given this word gives people so much confusion, why do we still use it?

Fascism is, essentially, supremacy of the state. The government is in charge and it's all important. Citizens must give up rights for the betterment of the government. Implicit in this philosophy is that the government, full of power, is likely to abuse this power, making its people miserable, while the leaders make all the important decisions.

If state is all powerful, then religion would be less important (unless, I suppose, it's a religious state), because religion would be a competitor to the state.

As I describe this, I realized that many communist countries would qualify as fascist. The big difference is that communist countries pretend that the people have the rights, and the government is serving the people, but honestly, it's not that much different, is it?

Recently, the Chinese government has evicted people so it can host the Olympics. All they care about is how well they can host the Olympics, and are willing to cause many of its citizens discomfort or worse. Again, people are expected to give up their rights for the benefits of the state.

But then, many governments are like this, right? The more the central government exerts its rights, the more it says its citizen rights are not important, the more it fits this definition.

It's possible there is enough distinction between fascism and communism that I don't understand (I'm not referring to theoretical differences but how it's practiced).

In any case, the word loses a lot of meaning, because people simply don't understand what it means.

Journeymen

In the strangely titled "International Tennis Championships" in Delray Beach, there are two unlikely semifinalists. It says something about the strength (or lack thereof) of the tournament when American, Sam Querrey is the 3rd seed. Ranked 62 in the world, there are a only two Americans ranked ahead of him: James Blake and Andy Roddick. It says something about the state of American tennis that there are more Argentines, Spaniards, Russians, and French players ranked in the top 60 than Americans.

Ask an avid tennis fan, and they're not likely to have heard of Sam Querrey, who grew up playing tennis in California. At 6'6" and 20 years old, Sam has a big serve, but has yet to break into the big time. Even so, he's not having to play qualifiers nearly as much.

The real unknown is his opponent, Kei Nishikori. He's 18 and from Japan. Ranked in the 200s, he had to qualify to get into the main draw. Qualifiers are the tournament before the tournament, with fewer perks and certainly fewer dollars than getting in the main draw. Nishikori has pretty good groundstrokes and seems the heir apparent to Shuzo Matzuoka, the last good Japanese male player to play the game.

Indeed, countries like Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, and the rest of Southeast Asia have not produced top-ranked players. The best Asian player of recent memory was Michael Chang. He played during the most prolific time in American tennis history, when players like Sampras, Agassi, Wheaton, Courier were all top players. Unlike Spain, Argentina, and even Serbia, the top American players haven't been able to help the up-and-coming juniors.

Still, if Nishikori manages to win the tournament, he's likely to make strides to be one of those players that might be able to be competitive in the top 50, possibly higher. There are too many players for most fans to follow. They only care about those near the top like Federer or Nadal or Roddick or James Blake or Novak Djokovic.

There are still hundreds of other players that try to eke out a living, often through doubles, and labor just outside public recognition, playing top-flight tennis, but not quite at that next level. These two players, fortunately, look like their in the upward trend. However, tennis is often headlined by brightly lit stars, who make an amazing breakthrough, like Federer upsetting Sampras at Wimbledon, or Becker winning Wimbledon as his first major, or Wilander winning the French as his first tournament.

Players like Nishikori and Querrey, at age 18 and 20, may already be past their primes in terms of making a huge impact. Strange to say when you talk about such young players.

In this match, Nishikori is a quicker player than Querrey, but he also makes more errors. Querrey is steady, with a powerful serve, but lacking the mobility. Speed is a big issue for Querrey and will probably prevent him from getting too much higher. Nishikori may lack enough power to make an impact as well, but both are talented enough to be in the top 40 or so.

It will be interesting to see where both their careers head.

More Stroganoff

For some reason, I try making chicken stroganoff. Chicken stroganoff, you say? Isn't it beef stroganoff? Well, yes, it is. But chicken is cheaper than beef, and chicken thighs cheaper than chicken breasts.

But you know what? It doesn't taste quite right. Chicken thighs need something to cover up its taste, like chicken curry or a Chinese dish. The beefy taste taste good in a simple sort of way.

I tried a recipe from Cooks Illustrated, and boy is it kinda complex. It requires tomato paste and brown sugar and white wine. It uses a kind of roux as well. A roux, for those who don't know, is a combination of flour and fat, usually butter, but oil will do. You heat up the butter, and mix it with about a tablespoon of flour, and once it's pretty warm, it thickens like no one's business. It's amazing how well it works.

Beef stroganoff usually has sour cream and, say, stock or water, which if you add too much, makes the result pretty watery. Thus, the roux to thicken it.

I've also made it using beef and a recipe from Cooking for Engineers. This is a site developed by an engineer devoted to cooking. Its recipe is simpler than Cooks Illustrated, and therefore I prefer it. Anytime I can use less ingredients, I'm all for it. They claim it takes 20 minutes to do the Cooks Illustrated to make the dish, and it took me almost an hour. What a pain.

So I think I'm going to follow the recipe out of Cooking for Engineers from now on, but because it's so fatty, I don't think I'll do it too often.

I think it's time to try something different.

Why Supermarkets Suck

Is there anyone who doesn't agree that most supermarkets suck. It's not the fault of the supermarkets, per se. People need food, and food has this nasty habit of decomposing. So a large number of folks are at supermarkets all the time, picking up food, so they can eat for another week.

And this leads to crowds. And this leads to painful parking. And this leads to long lines, with carts filled to the brim, and this leads to customers that wish they didn't have to stand in line to get ten items or less, standing behind those who figure twenty items is close enough to ten items (I have a solution for this. Penalize a person one dollar for every item over ten they have in their carts).

The solution seems obvious enough. Hire more people to man the stations. But that doesn't solve the problem of crowds parked. I suppose the solution then is to get people to come by bus (good luck with that!).

What most people would like to do, to be honest, is to have food delivered. But, supermarkets already operate at razor sharp margins. Delivery is expensive. So people are willing to put up with the pain of shopping to save that money. After all, you don't save a ton of money eating at home (maybe half?). You begin to lose that when you pay extra to have someone deliver it.

And do you trust a person being paid minimum wage to try to get you the "best" tomatoes? They'll give you what's convenient, and you're left with no choice. They have no incentive to favor you over favoring someone else, so they resort to what's easy.

The Starbucks solution isn't that good either! That's the one where you have a Starbucks at every corner, so that ever Starbucks is tiny and personal. Here's the key though. Each Starbucks has a limited menu. So every Starbucks can be the same.

Most grocery stores sell 20,000 items or more. It helps to have a large number of items on stock. This makes it hard to be small, because people want so much stuff available.

And, the US lacks the kind of income inequity of India, so we can't simply hire someone to do the job for us, and in any case, they suffer, so we don't have to.

We could shop off-hours, but many stores that we want to shop at don't open 24 hours.

I was surprised after leaving College Park, to discover many a store isn't opened 24 hours. The Giant in Greenbelt is. The Shoppers Food Warehouse in College Park is. But get away from this and most places close at midnight. Inconvenient!

The problem is we want food and we want it cheap, much cheaper than eating out. And stores have no incentive for us to get the kind of choice we want at those cheap prices and have it delivered (and honestly, we want an outdoor secure fridge, and conscientious people, that will place the food their safely, securely, so we don't actually have to be there to receive the food).

So many things make it so hard for us to avoid the pain of buying groceries. Someday, someone will become a genius in this respect. But it's because we demand perishable goods for good food that we are left in this conundrum.

His Barkley

Ever since big athletes got into bed with big advertising, athletes have been careful championing controversial causes lest it besmirch their brand name. Michael Jordan may be the best known athlete since Muhammad Ali, and yet, he rarely spoke out on anything controversial. In this respect, he's no Jim Brown, a former star NFL running back, who made comments about society. He's no Arthur Ashe, the consummate statesman. He's no, well, Muhammad Ali, who was against the Vietnam War.

Similarly, when Augusta forbid women from joining as members, Tiger Woods had little to say. When Kelly Tighlman said fellow golfers should take Woods to a back alley for a lynching, many people, including Tiger Woods came to her defense. Indeed, Tilghman has become pretty good friends with many a reporter and athlete, and being an attractive woman, probably of good personality, reporters as significant as Michael Wilbon prefers to shift the blame to Golf Channel for somehow not reprimanding her immediately, making them, in his eyes, equally complicit in the act. Tilghman made an error of judgement because she's my friend. Golf Channel should have known better! (Perhaps, Golf Channel is filled with with folks like Tilghman, who should also have known better).

For all this, the athlete that is willing to put his head out there, from time to time, is one Charles Barkley. Unlike Jordan, who often stayed sequestered in his hotel, away from potential incidents, Barkley liked to go out in public, out to bars, even when that meant some guys wanted to shake it up with him. Barkley would have none of that.

As an African American, Barkley long held a Republic affiliation, which was a bit unusual. African Americans generally like the pro-Christian stances, belief in family, and so forth. Barkley has become increasingly disenchanted with Christian conservatives who have been more willing to judge others than to forgive.

And that's where Barkley has great insight. Jesus Chris was surprising in a number of ways, at least as prophets go. He wasn't a warrior. He didn't have multiple wives, nor even a wife. He believed in turning the other cheek. He believed in offering one's other cheek if one has been struck. Amazing! And, yet, the most religious are among the most judgmental.

Why?

Because of human nature. To be religious typically means living a particular lifestyle, trying to be good, trying to restrain oneself. It means, in a sense, sacrifice. And when religious folks look at the hedonistic secularists, they can't believe those guys are getting away with it. It's much like freaks and geeks finding they can't stand jocks, except freaks and geeks are exasperated that the average person finds sympathy in jockdom and not in what they do, where religious zealots feel secularists are sinners.

We castigate others because it makes us feel good about our sacrifices. Religion often does this in general because people are like this in general. They would rather say others are wrong rather than they are right. Politicians do this as well. Other politicians are wrong, rather than they are right. This may be why Obama, seemingly light on what he will do, is high on change. He wants to emphasize what's good, even if rather nebulously. What does Hillary do? She has no choice but to attack this message. Or at least, she feels this way.

She understands the way of politics. People hate more than they love. People are cynical. Most people feel they are positive, good people, but after a little digging, you see they aren't. They often justify this venom, this bile by wearing the cloak of religion, saying, hey, I'm religious, so I must be good, so if I hate, it's justified hate.

Now, to be fair, there's many a good religious person, that can forgive, that can tolerate folks that are different from them, but somehow, they seem a bit rare. They aren't the ones on school boards. They aren't the ones running for political office. They go on trying to lead good lives, in obscurity, even as they might be just as shocked at the bad behavior of those more outspoken.

And so it turns to one Charles Barkley to point out these things, and perhaps he will be scorned, or more likely, people will just disregard him, thinking he's just an athlete. Perhaps what's worse than to be labeled a threat is to be labeled crazy. Crazy Ron Paul! To be branded crazy is to be branded irrelevant. It's a message to everyone else. Don't think for yourself! If he's crazy, and you support him, then you're crazy! It was enough to erode a third of Perot's support when he dropped out. He was crazy!

Gotta hand it to Charles Barkley. He was always more fun to listen to than boring old Michael Jordan. Barkley may have no rings, but his accomplishments may end up being greater.

What's Old is NIU

Here we go again. NIU (Northern Illinois University) had its version of Virginia Tech, but somehow, it's garnered a lot less attention. There were differences, to be sure. Virginia Tech's shootings started early in the morning, and lasted til maybe noon. By then, as news spread of how many people were shot (somewhere near 20), the massacre seemed unbelievable.

Then, came the media stuff for Cho Seung Hui, the disaffected Korean, who created videos that he so thoughtfully sent to the media realizing it would be displayed on air. Then, being near the DC area, Virginia Tech sends tons of graduates this way, and so one is bound to know someone that went there. Then, the personal stories that came out of the mayhem, of how one guy pretended to be dead among the dead, to avoid getting shot, the deliberate attack. Then, the plays he had written, awful, yet far more read after his death than when he was alive.

I know few details of what happened at NIU. Six people died and perhaps another fifteen were shot, but survived. At the very least, that so many people survived seems like a miracle, and yet, the parents of the few that died are in no less agony had the shooter been more accurate, more deadly.

It is said that these school shootings merely attract copycats, that these are cries in the dark of the desperate, looking for attention, and yet, somehow, this has created a bit less airplay, while in the midst of the candidates rushing to and fro.

Some had hoped that the name of the killer would remain anonymous, lest it encourage desperate people who wanted their names echoed in the media chamber. Yet, one Stephen P. Kazmierczak has had his name in print, a graduate student in sociology. No one knows why he did it. There was some solace that NIU took some lessons from Virginia Tech, and responded to the shootings as quickly as they did.

Even so, if such events occur more often, will we ignore than as we mostly ignore shootings that still occur in violent cities throughout the country. It is said that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths, a statistic. And so, perhaps, we have come to this, where such an event now registers more as a statistic, than a tragedy.

Winner Fakes All

Presidential elections use a winner-take-all scheme. Some primaries do this too. I realize this really devalues a person's vote. For example, in Maryland, Obama and Hillary are the top two candidates. If one gets 60% of the vote, and the other 40%, then the delegates are split. There is some value, even if you don't back the winning horse.

Even a candidate with as little air play as Ron Paul can pick up delegates here and there, provided proportional representation is available. And that means people's opinions are being heard. Of course, the media and politicians would prefer that not happen because the fringe scares them. They want people to back a front-runner, and let the others fall by the wayside.

I recall hearing a story about Nixon, who felt sorry for a guy that got a silver medal in the Olympics. The guy thought he did pretty well, but for Nixon, winning was the only thing, so he couldn't imagine how anyone would think differently.

Whether this story is true or not, it does reflect a kind of truth, which is that elections aren't about hearing differing points of views, but about suppressing fringe dissent, so the rest of the electorate doesn't have to pay attention.

It seems strange we favor democracy, but only care about who wins, rather than the discussion that should ensue.

Valentine's Day and Socialization

Of all the holidays, Valentine's Day is a peculiar. In particular, for some reason, many schools like the ideas of children, often pre-teens or younger, engaging in Valentine's Day. And exactly, why do they do this?

In a sense, they are encouraging kids to, what, go out dating? Or fill out cards for people to be each other's valentines? There's something implicit in this that suggests guys and girls should be going out, even if, at a certain age (10 and under). Or do the teachers find it amusing that kids, who still feel the opposite gender has cooties (imaginary germs) will be placed in an awkward spot.

You oould argue, much like other holidays, the goal is to get people to spend money, whether that be on chocolates or candies or flowers. Stores love to find reasons to decorate up, whether it be Halloween or Thanksgiving or Christmas or Valentine's Day.

In other cultures, the idea that kids would be asked to send cards to the opposite gender would be shocking. I'm a bit surprised it isn't shocking in the US, and that the schools are so complicit in this, of all holidays. If there were a generic "give a card to somebody day", i.e., be nice to your neighbor, that would be far more palatable.

On Hillary's Strength

Hillary Clinton was asked a peculiar question by Katie Couric. How does she find the strength to run?

Hillary attributed to quite a few things. She drinks tea to stay alert. She now avoids diet soda, which she used to drink prodigiously. She washes her hands a lot (you often get sick when you touch some germs then rub your eyes and nose). She eats chilies (spicy stuff). She drinks a lot of water.

Humans are still trying to figure out what makes their lives optimal. How can they get on by on less sleep? How can they get sick less? How can they concentrate better? We don't have great answers, and those answers may vary from person to person.

I found that part of the interview more compelling that the other kinds of questions she got (of course, neither her nor Obama had many questions on where they stood on this topic or that, except Iraq).