Here's an thought puzzle for you. Why do men use wallets and why do women use purses or handbags?
I was thinking about this. Do women really have to carry a lot more stuff than men? If a guy thinks about what a woman carries, he probably thinks about lipstick, mascara, mirrors, etc. In other words, cosmetics, things to make women look more attractive.
Women are generally held to a higher standard of attractiveness than men, and in ways that can be controlled by spending money. Better clothing, nicer makeup, etc. Guys can be far lazier in that front.
Women have greater freedom with what to wear, but with that freedom comes a bit of responsibility to use that freedom.
I was attending a wedding this past weekend and saw many women wearing strapless dresses, basically leaving the entire shoulder exposed. Other women that were not part of the bridal party wore differing styles. I thought there's no way a man could reveal his shoulders in the same way, even accounting for women's breasts making some of these costuming choices possible.
Men end up in boring clothing because that's how it works. There's not a great deal variations in suits. They are generally dark: blue, black, brown, and occasionally gray or even tan. Tuxedos are similarly boring. But in this lack of originality, men don't have to do a lot.
Women, on the other hand, are given a great deal of freedom, and because of that, they are compelled to wear so many different outfits. Witness Michelle Obama, where the press scrutinized every inauguration outfit she wore. Husband Barack only had to wear the tux when it came to the various balls that first couple were obligated to attend.
But let's get to purses. Why do women not carry wallets? OK, so wallets would be carried in a pocket. One disadvantage, presumably, is that skirts don't generally have pockets, and skirts were what women wore until the 1970s when jeans took over and both men and women could wear them.
So J-Dog says my blog is false and that while IDEs and version control is important, universities aren't particularly good at teaching them so industry should teach it.
One could argue that industry doesn't even really teach, so they are at least as bad at it as anyone else.
I think it's agreed that you can classify the Stuff J-Dog Wants Taught as more fundamental, i.e., hasn't changed much in years (admittedly, algorithms and finite automata being relatively recent areas in computer science, some 50 years old) and Faddish Stuff, as in IDEs and version control.
Linear algebra, etc. all are rather "singular". There isn't X flavor of linear algebra and Y flavor of linear algebra, there's just linear algebra (feels like an Obama geek declaration). But there is a version of this IDE vs that IDE, and this version control vs. that version control, thus it has a faddish flavor, a technological contrivance, and to learn one might give you an overall flavor of all things in the class, but you may find yourself incompetent in a rival product.
And I can see that being distasteful to the university cognoscenti.
I've probably now attended a dozen weddings or so. I don't get invited to a lot of them, which is maybe all the better because I find them slightly stressful. Being a person who likes sameness a lot, getting ready to have to fly somewhere, get dressed up, go through the pomp and circumstance. It's a bit out of the ordinary.
The more weddings you attend, the more you start comparing and contrasting weddings. What did this wedding do well? What did it not do well? It's a touch petty, but it's not that different from watching a movie and wanting to rank it or listening to a song and asking if it's your new favorite.
I decided to keep this trip on the shorter side. I flew in the day of the wedding, merely 6 hour before the ceremony. I wasn't sure I would know more than the guy getting married (Phil), his best man (John), and maybe that's it.
Still, sometimes you go to a wedding, start talking to someone, and even though you'll probably not run into them again, it's a pleasant conversation. At Adam's wedding, I met some Asian guy who, I believe, went to high school with him, and had since moved to Connecticut. I think they figured since we came as "singles" it was best to put as at the same table.
I hadn't thought about that since just about now.
Hmm, so let me quickly get to Phil, and this post may have to continue at a later moment.
I don't quite recall how I met Phil. I used to be at the university all the time. I had a couch in my office, and used it all the time. I was lazy, so I'd teach, head to the couch to sleep, and start the next day. It wasn't typical, and indeed, in hindsight, a bit weird.
Because of this habit, I'd run into students in the evenings. The big project of the day was operating systems. It was a course I had taken (though we had a different project) and been a TA for. Most OS projects seem to be deliberately vague, as if revealing the details would be far too much, giving students no challenge at all.
Since this was post 2000, the web was in full swing, and previous incarnations of the course were also on the web. Clever students cobbled together pieces from the previous projects to get a grasp of what they really needed to do.
There were two PCs dedicated to the project. It wasn't much, and most students relied on developing it at home on a suitably ratty PC.
There were maybe 5-6 students who would work on the project, and usually Phil would figure out what the project was aiming at and explain it to the others several different times. As anyone who has taught knows, explaining something to someone is the best way to learn.
OS was a pretty intense course, and the bonding that came from it something that students often remember years after the course is over. Although I wasn't really part of the course, that is, not a TA, not an instructor, I came and helped out when I could being an unofficial TA, and that was one of the fonder memories.
I had Phil suggest to be some modern indie mix that I still have on my ITunes to this day. We went a few times out to the 9:30 club. One time, we went to listen to the Gabe Dixon band, who was the warm-up for the suddenly popular Norah Jones (and he'd marry someone named Nora--coincidence?). We had listened to Doves, Sigur Ros. I can't say I've been to the 9:30 club much since then, perhaps once or twice by myself, but being out there was memorable.
I remember getting a flat tire very close to campus and not knowing how to change it. I called up Phil since he was one of the few people I knew. He didn't much know how to change a tire either. A cop came by, but wasn't helpful. He refused to change the tire. Phil called up a tow truck, and perhaps he wouldn't come for free (he had AAA). Eventually, we got that guy to change the tire, and I was fine. But it was a nice thing for Phil to do, as I was stuck an hour or probably two until then.
I had visited Phil's place in southern Maryland a few times, and remember that he was trying to meet someone here and how he'd lament that it wasn't happening. Phil's a prototypical nice guy, willing to give the shirt off your back, feeling guilty if he hasn't emailed you. They say guys like that have problems meeting women who want their guys tougher and not always as nice. Edge, they say.
Phil also wanted a career change, wanted to go to music. His programming career was as much due to the booming times in software and his parents suggestion that he do something more rewarding, monetarily, than astronomy, which was his big interest of the day. Phil said he never had much talent musically, singing or playing, but he loved listening to music, and started classes in sound mixing.
This eventually lead him to Chicago, where he thought a change of scenery would improve his life. Although the music career never quite panned out, he did meet Nora in Chicago, and I think he'll take that as a positive change, one that he didn't originally plan for (does one plan such things?), but has worked out quite well indeed.
I was having a debate with a friend, which wasn't much of a debate to be honest, because we weren't really debating.
He felt that a computer science program should cover the fundamentals which, to him, meant math. You should know things like algorithms, linear algebra, statistics. He said things like IDEs and version control should not be taught. You have limited resources, and those things are fads that change. And since industry uses these things, then let industry teach it, or pick it up on the job.
He argued that no one is going to pick up linear algebra if they aren't taught it in classes, but people can always learn IDEs and version control.
At the time, while I disagreed, I didn't present any counterarguments.
So it made me think. Would a typical person actually pick up those things at work? There are fairly smart people that don't want to learn IDEs or version control because it is a fad. Could they learn it on their own? Perhaps, but there are so many mundane details to learn, much of which isn't that important to learn, that people often go in the other direction. They learn just enough to get by without fully understanding it.
To take this to an extreme, there are smart people that know math that don't even bother to learn to program properly. If you say IDEs and version control is unimportant because of its faddish nature, then you might as well say learning to program in any popular programming language is also faddish. It can take at least as long to really learn a language well as it does to learn the basics of stats or linear algebra (i.e., 3-4 months of focus) and it takes a certain personality to learn a language as well as possible.
The problem, in my mind, is that computer science, as it leads to a programming job, is faddish and fundamental. If you focus on the fundamentals, then you are telling graduating majors that everything else is a fad and is "easy" to pick up. These faddish things are in fact not easy to pick up and are difficult in completely unsatisfying ways.
At least, you can argue that if you learn linear algebra or stats and it's tough to figure out, then when you finally do figure it out, then you can feel you've understood something deep.
This isn't really the case with IDEs and version control. You learn a lot of mundane details and wonder why certain things even exist, and what their purpose is for. A typical industrial strength IDE has hundreds of options. There are ways to extend the IDE (say, for an open source IDE like Eclipse), ways to integrate it with a build system, with a bug-tracking system, etc.
So many details are there, and it takes a long time to master them, and it's not always that uniform from one product to another.
My thinking is that we need to teach how to deal with this because it is a survival skill in the industry, despite being so very ephemeral.
In other words, despite the fact that people may not choose to learn linear algebra once they go into industry, they may, for quite different reasons, not choose to learn an IDE particularly well when they arrive there either. To assume that they will is a bit of folly.
About a year ago, I bought a camcorder. I wasn't planning to make video of my kids since I don't have kids. I wasn't planning to make a movie, though the idea is certainly appealing. I wanted to record my tennis strokes.
Video isn't exactly new to tennis. Back in the 1970s, Vic Braden used to take high-speed videos of tennis players. He famously advocated that players use a very low toss for their serves much like Roscoe Tanner, the best server of his day. This was routinely ignored, especially in Europe, where the opposite occurred: extremely high ball tosses. Braden probably popularized the notion of wrist pronation vs. wrist snap, and that has been far more influential than the low ball toss.
But Braden had an expensive tennis facility and an expert making those videos, so it meant the average player couldn't look at his own strokes. You needed two things: low-cost camcorders and video software to slow down the action. Without being able to slow down your stroke, it's hard to notice where problems occur. While I don't have the benefit of high-speed high-def cameras, I don't really need them.
I use a mini-DV camera which is good enough (though not HD), and I use IMovie '09 to slow down the video. That is also good enough for me.
I first started modifying my forehand in probably October of 2007. At the time, I chose to model Novak Djokovic. I don't even recall why Djokovic, other than he was a rising star and that he was pretty funny. You have to understand that Djokovic had a huge breakout year in 2007. He literally came from nowhere and jumped to number 3. While people were distracted by epic Nadal-Federer finals, few noticed that, by Wimbledon, Djokovic had made his second consecutive semifinals, essentially matching Federer and Nadal, and made his first US Open final that same year.
The one problem with Djokovic's forehand, at least, at the time I decided to stop using his forehand as a model, was the following. Pause the above video. Notice that Novak's racquet face points behind him to the back "fence" (a wall, in pro events). He then lowers the racquet face down so it points down the the ground behind him (pause at 0:13), then turns the racquet face to the right tilted somewhat downwards (pause at 0:14), before pulling the racquet to contact.
To me, that seemed like a lot of excess motion, and I wanted a simpler model.
So I went to the forehand everyone said was the best, at least at the end of 2007 or the beginning of 2008, and that was Roger Federer.
At the beginning of this video, Roger's racquet face points to his right. Contrast that with Djokovic, who brings the racquet behind him. In fact, this pointing to the right was something I had a hard time doing because my body awareness wasn't so good. By body awareness, I mean I would point my arm in one direction, but think it was pointing in some other direction. So I would probably think I was pointing to my right, and was actually pointing behind me.
How could I make such a huge mistake? One reason was simple. I wasn't looking. I was focusing on the ball, so when I stuck my racquet behind me, I didn't really know where it was. I could have asked someone, but it never occurred to me that my mental model of where my arm was and reality diverged so much.
Video really helped me see this.
Now, it turns out, Federer also has some motions that add some complexity to his forehand.
Pause at 0:04, and you see his racquet face pointed face down, and the tip of his racquet head pointed to his right. If you were take an overhead view, lined up so the baseline is "west-east" and Roger is hitting "south", then his racquet face initially points west, the moves north, and indeed a little north-east.
By the time it's pointing north-east, (pause at 0:08), the racquet face points right and slightly down. This is the common racquet orientation for pretty much every modern player, and occurs when they are about to accelerate the racquet head to contact. Up to that point, players do all sorts of things. I would say, at least for the better players I see on public courts, that the Djokovic model seems the most popular. Why? I don't know.
I discovered, after watching videos of myself, that I kept my racquet face down a lot, that is, almost the entire swing to contact. I only open the face right when I hit it, but otherwise, it stays closed.
There were several reasons, but one huge reason was because I feed the ball too close to my body. Feeding yourself the ball means to drop the ball and hit it. Most people drop it near their right foot, and that it simply too close to the body. It should be tossed maybe 3 feet to your right. You want your arm to be out far to the right so it gets more of a full extension.
The other reason was the way I oriented my wrist. It's taken maybe 10 months to begin to train myself not to close my racquet face and to know which orientation my wrist should be at.
Ultimately, that became the reason I abandoned the Federer forehand. Federer closes his racquet face, then points it to the right. Since I couldn't tell whether I was closing my racquet face or not (despite thinking I was pointing it to the right, often numerous times), I felt trying to imitate Federer that closely was going to confuse me.
At that point, I looked to a different model, which was probably the end of 2008, maybe around October or November. I had been trying the Federer forehand since probably March, or before I even started to video myself in May of 2008.
2008 turned out to be a big year for several players: Gilles Simon was ranked around 20 and moved to around 6 or 7 (but has slipped some since a big move to the top 10), Juan Martin del Potro's ascendancy has been more impressive, getting into the top 10 as well, and finally Andy Murray who started the year around 6, and moved up to a solid number 4, threatening to go to 3.
If you were to ask the experts looking at Murray's game what his best stroke was, well, they'd probably not point to his forehand. Indeed, his backhand is considered his stronger side. Still, that's just a relative comparison. That is, it treats his forehand and backhand separately. If you were to rank the top forehands, Murray's would be behind Federer, Djokovic, Verdasco, Gonzalez, probably Blake. It depends on what you think is important in a forehand. If you were to rank backhands, Murray might be 3 behind Nadal and Djokovic. Even so, most pros, have better forehands than backhands. One might argue this is true even for a player with as impressive a one-handed backhand as Richard Gasquet. Few people rip winners regularly from their backhands.
This is probably the best slow motion video of Andy Murray's forehand, despite the rather low quality of the video itself. It's about the only one that is shown from Andy's right, which you almost never see. Most videos are taken from the front, which is fine, but not to illustrate what I want to show.
In particular, since this video is from Andy's right, then when his racquet face points right, then it points to the camera. Pay attention to the entire swing path.
Starting at 0:12 to 0:17, the racquet face points right (i.e. to the camera, i.e., to you, the viewer) which is pretty much the start of his motion to just the instant before contact where he then, out of necessity (like every pro), points the racquet face to the ball.
Nowhere in that stroke does Murray point his racquet face down, which, if you recall from the earlier on, was my problem. I would close my face until just before impact.
Despite knowing this, it took a long time to understand several things. First, I had a tendency to point the racquet face behind me, a la Djokovic. I also had a huge looping motion behind me. I noticed most pros don't loop that big. They have a much milder motion that, in particular, doesn't get behind them.
I should say most male pros. Women pros, by and large, do get their racquet behind them, and hit it like some folks hit a one-handed backhand. There's only one male pro I know of that hits like that, which is Frenchman, Jeremy Chardy.
Watch at 2:16 (it's sad how bad Youtube video quality is--you can't watch tennis at all unless it's at least high quality, which is why it's nice that Youtube finally allowed better quality video to be uploaded). Chardy takes his racquet so that it is behind him (racquet face points to back fence), but unlike Djokovic, who has the racquet tip pointed up, Chardy's racquet tip points to the left. Most women pros (Safina, Sharapova, Ivanovic, etc) do this, but most male pros don't.
Think of your chest as a large infinite plane, much like the ones they teach in you in geometry. A plane divides 3-space into "half", which can be loosely termed as the half-space in front of you, and the half-space behind you. Now imagine your chest points to the right fence, thus you are sideways, relative to the net. This is the position you'd be in setting up for a righty forehand.
Most male pros keep their racquet head in the front half. Women pros, on the other hand, let the racquet head get behind them. This is so they can get a longer swing path. It mimics a one-handed backhand where the racquet face also gets behind you, but applies the same idea to the forehand. Men, perhaps needing less time to hit because they are physically stronger, don't do this.
In particular, if you watch the wrist and arm, it tends to go roughly straight back and drop and then the whole body rotates counter-clockwise. This would be much easier to illustrate if I had a video, but I don't.
To illustrate, imagine you are doing jumping jacks. Focus on your right arm. Jumping jacks have you swing your right arm at the plane of your torso. Basically, your racquet goes from being in front of you as you prepare to hit, to being maybe 45 degress pointing up in a jumping jack motion, to dropping your arm so it is maybe waist height (this is the part of the jumping jack motion where the arm descends down).
Notice the arm stays in that plane. My tendency was to pull my arm behind this plane and make my wrist move behind this plane in a loop motion.
OK, I'm being highly technical here. Clearly, women hit something like that, so why don't I?
Several reasons. One is silly. I'm a guy, I want to hit like other guy pros. Two, male pros have shorter strokes and so I think that's important so I don't get caught too late. Male pros already set up much quicker than I do, so they can afford to have longish stroke paths. Women pros are also quicker than me.
Three, I want to make my body do what my mind is telling it to do. And that's really the biggest reason. The change I'm making may not improve my forehand much, but the process by which I get there will help me think about how I do things, how I get my body to make a certain motion. I didn't expect it to take me a year to master. It's still a work in progress, but I am slowly getting closer to what I want to do.
One key is that I can shadow-stroke the way I want to hit. Shadow-stroking is where you hit the ball without the ball. You would think that motion is enough. If I can shadow stroke, I can hit the ball that same way.
Untrue.
When I shadow-stroke, there's no ball. I don't react to a ball, so I can focus entirely on the swing. But once there's a ball, I have to react so I can hit the ball, and then muscle memory kicks in to try to adjust the swing to hit the ball, and that's where my problems come in. You just have to swing over and over to train the body not to do what it's been doing for a long time.
Now, a year is a pretty long time to obsess over hitting a forehand, especially since the motion isn't coming to me that quickly. But I enjoy the process of getting there. If it came easily, I would have missed too many other things, in particular, a better awareness of what my body is doing. That's been a weirdly valuable lesson.
Weird, only because it's not that critical for me to know what my body is doing when it hits a tennis ball, but valuable because I realize what I thought I was doing and what I do are different things, and that's an interesting lesson, that might apply to less physical activities.
Right now, the motion is kinda there, but I still take my racquet back too much, so I am trying to reduce that motion. If I were to have done this motion 6 months ago, I would have told you I am not even pointing my racquet behind me, but it's off to my right. I would have been wrong. That goes to show you how off my perception was.
So I still need to practice. I'm hoping, fingers crossed, that a month more and I'll have it close to where I want it, but then I've been trying this for many months already, so if it's longer, I won't be surprised.
Twitter has been out a few years now. It was considered the darling of the Ruby on Rails crowd since it was a big popular application. Since then, Twitter has blamed ROR for scalability issues, accusations they once said were not the fault of ROR, but now the claim are. Indeed, there is a push to rewrite Twitter in Scala, a competitor to Groovy, which is a functional language built on the JVM. I had heard of Scala even before Twitter (or Groovy), but I digress.
For a long time, I did nothing with my Twitter account. I didn't get microblogging. I didn't have anything I wanted to post that frequently. I had no big reason to use it.
But that changed a few months ago, when Twitter hit a tipping point. Some people point to, oh, maybe 2005 SXSW, the music, technology, who-knows-what event that's held in Austin, TX (the city that is weird and wants to stay that way) when numerous attendees jumped on the Twitter bandwagon and brought Twitter to a screeching halt until they figured out how to deal with so many new Twits (TM).
That wasn't it. Twitter really took off when athletes and celebrities started using Twitter. Most surprisingly (but probably not), Shaquille O'Neal started tweeting. Indeed, he once announced he was at a restaurant and some nearby geeks saw him online and asked if they could come by, and he said yes. They got a picture with him.
Shaq is such a ham.
He's not the only athlete. In tennis, world number 4 player (and possibly going to be world number 3) Andy Murray is on Twitter. He shows a playful side. He and his "Team Murray" play footy-tennis, some combination of soccer and tennis and losers of the challenge often wear clothes inside out or women's clothing to public places such as dinner. He'll mention his tickets to see the Miami Heat, or practicing with a fellow pro, or a recent tennis result, or playing a "brain game". Not something you imagine Roger Federer (too classy) or Rafael Nadal (English not good enough) to do.
Of course, the Internet has always spawned its own lesser-known celebrities, thus, a Gabe Rivera of TechMeme fame might tweet with Mike Arrington of TechCrunch fame. Although Twitter didn't originally support "chatting" with someone else, people refer to one another by their Twitter name prefaced with an "@" sign, as in @gaberivera.
But certainly, it was enough to push it into national consciousness when Mike and Mike in the morning refer to Facebook and Twitter and when the venerable Diane Rehm now has people contacting her via Twitter. She probably doesn't exactly get it either, but her producers, I'm sure, help her through this technological wonderland.
So where I used to use Twitter sparingly, I now check into it daily. I have the every garrulous Wil Wheaton that I follow who posts like 10 tweets a day (most people manage 1-2 a day) or more. Brent Spiner is also on that list. I haven't yet added Levar Burton.
I follow Carl Lerche, a guy I saw at RubyRx. I probably should add Jared Richardson, but I don't have his tweety address.
And there you have it. When did it happen? Maybe 6 months ago? It's interesting how the NBA has probably encouraged its leading stars to embrace technology. Most players already have smartphones and laptops they bring everywhere to keep them connected to their fans. Gilbert Arenas had his blog and now Shaq twitters.
I was a little surprised that Mad World was written by British band, Tears for Fears. Best known for Everyone Wants To Rule The World, this band produced 3-4 hits.
I first heard about Mad World from the indie SF thriller (only, it isn't), Donnie Darko. Donnie Darko is an early role by Jake Gyllenhaal who plays the titular character Donnie.
The film is basically about growing up in the 1980s. The SF elements are so strong that it's easy to miss the nostalgia for that period of time, which include the rise of evangelical Christians on mainstream TV, the popularity of Members Only and Ocean Pacific clothing, the trend from traditional cheerleading to a dance-style, and the medicating of the youth to deal with psychological issues, real or imagined.
Donnie Darko chronicles the troubled teenage life of Donnie who is a bit of an outcast and is, I believe, on medication to treat this. Of course, he falls for a girl, and then there is the requisite weirdness involved a very large, not terribly realistic bunny called Frank. Is Donnie insane?
If you listen to the version of Mad World by Tears for Fears, the first link I have above, you'll see that it sounds a bit techno, and doesn't even seem like a very good song given that arrangement. Gary Jules (in the second link above) creates a more melancholy version and it's the one that appears in Donnie Darko.
Last night was "songs from the year you were born" on American Idol, where the eight remaining performers pick songs, primarily from the 80s. Adam Lambert, the prohibitive favorite to win American Idol, sang Mad World opting for more of Gary Jules approach. Lambert is the emo guy who normally yells out parts of the song because his vocals are so strong. However, he's been dialing it down some because it's been seen as a bit too intense and over the top for most.
Interestingly enough, as blogs started covering last night's show, a weird phenomenon occurred. Eight people is tough to fit in a one hour live show. This year, they added a new judge, Kara, because Paula Abdul is so gushingly positive that they wanted someone who might have a negative opinion once in a while. This forced the show to conclude 5 minutes after it was supposed to end.
In particular, Adam Lambert, being the last to perform, was on from 9:00 to 9:05 (the song lasted 2-3 minutes as it's usually truncated to get everyone in). Apparently, and here's the fascinating part, many people prefer to watch American Idol on DVR, so they record it, then watch it about half way, and skip over the commercials.
The problem? The program was supposed to have ended at 9 PM, so the DVRs failed to record this. Now it seems like enough people had this problem that people were blogging about this.
Now that I write this, I wonder if this was done deliberately. Those who DVR'ed it will have to go find a version of it quickly. Does it hurt Lambert's chances or will they vote for him "blind"? Although samples of the song were up within an hour of the show, was that enough time?
I happened to see it live, so I didn't miss anything, but it's an interesting phenomenon.
Weather reporting has only gotten marginally better over the years. The biggest innovation probably occurred 20 years ago when Doppler radar became widely used by meteorologists.
For someone who cares when the rain is, I want to see live and time-lapsed Doppler radar. Problem? I'm forced to use map resolutions I don't control.
Now who has maps that are draggable, zoomable and has innovative folks?
Google.
So where's Google Weather? Add it as an extension to Google Maps. Perhaps it might allow users to enter in weather data, most importantly, rain.
Of course, they could add more to it than that.
For example, with weather prediction, I want to see a time-lapse of how the weather for Thursday (say) has changed as the time approaches Thursday. How often is this data being updated? When did that prediction of sunny weather become rain?
And how far is the prediction for right now differing from now. I'll see predicted temperatures for 40s, when it's currently 48, which means the next few hours should be warmer than that. Shouldn't that be auto-updated?
Three opinions on theorems
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1. Think of theorem statements like an API. Some people feel intimidated by
the prospect of putting a “theorem” into their papers. They feel that their
res...
