Perhaps no sport has undergone such a radical change as swimming. For years, the standard outfit for male swimmers was a sliver of fabric that became known as Speedos after the company that manufactured it. Then, about 10 years ago, new suits came out. At first, these suits covered from the waist down. These suits were supposed be more slippery than the Speedos. Times came down.
Then, full body suits came out, and times fell even more. Recently, Michael Phelps did what had been rather unthinkable. He lost. The winner bragged that his suit reduced his time by 2 seconds. Phelps's coach was furious and floated the idea that Phelps would boycott future events. FINA, the governing body of swimming, wanted to ban these full body suits.
The technology is problematic. With athletes getting paid money to sponsor products, a company may fall in the quest for the fastest suit, and it becomes more about the suit and less about the swimmer. To be fair, few complained when these suits caused record after record to fall, and only because it affects Michael Phelps are we hearing a bit of uproar.
But it goes further than that. These suits are expensive, and it is affecting the pocketbooks of would-be swimmers. Parents are having to shell out bucks to pay for their kids swimwear so they can stay competitive.
Although FINA is willing to have the suits go back to the waist-down variety, I think they should all head back to the Speedo days where the material provided only enough for modesty, and the rest was up to the swimmer. Admittedly, companies like Speedo or Arena that have benefited from these pricey suits would suffer, and they are, undoubtedly, the first to object, much as the health industry has sought to protect its own interests under the cloud of a health care reform movement.
This is undoubtedly the reason FINA did not decide to go back to the small trunks swimmers used to use because then, the competing companies would only have fashion to distinguish themselves, and would lack the profits that several hundred dollar suits have vs the sub hundred dollar swim trunks.
But then, the sport would be back to the people who swim rather than the suits they wear.
It's funny. With all the technology to let people communicate better, it only works on a handful of people. Most people find the oldest way of communication, face-to-face, so much more pleasant than any of its alternatives.
I have friends who hate IM, who hate email, who hate the phone. All of them, to one degree or another, interrupt, especially the phone, but even IM. You'll find people who are pretty friendly when you talk to them in person, but get them on the phone, and they are suddenly distant, wondering why you want to talk, etc. Admittedly, these are generally guys, because the stereotype is that women love to gab on the phone and will do so ad naseum.
Face to face communication has one "advantage" over other forms of communication. It limits how many people can interact. In principle, if you have 100 friends, they can all contact you on the phone simultaneously. And that would be interruption. So someone might call you while you are watching TV, or driving. Someone might IM you while you are surfing the web. Although face to face communication is also an interruption, it limits the kind of interruptions that might occur.
Ideally, someone would want to figure out a way of communicating that is as acceptable as real life communication, but we haven't figured how to do that. The only way is to have some sense of what we're actively doing now, and many would prefer not to do that.
This has been in the news. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., professor at Harvard University found he was unable to open the door to his own home after a lengthy excursion. With assistance, he tried prying the door open. However, someone believed his home was being broken into and called the police. One Sgt. James Crowley came to the scene to see what was going on.
Depending on whose version you listen to, either Gates was fairly calm and this was a rogue cop that didn't like black folk, or Gates was verbally abusive, claiming racism, refusing to cooperate, and the cop, being calm, finally decided he was a nuisance and had him brought downtown.
For most news organizations, this boiled down to African American professor who had made it in lily-white academia being harassed by cops who can't believe there are well-educated black men.
Whatever.
The point, to me, isn't who is right or wrong, but that these two became figureheads, representing the generic. I believe they call this synecdoche.
NPR, to its credit, did something so simple that it puts most news organizations to shame. And the reason it puts it to shame is because most news organizations are really editorial organizations. They peddle opinions, because actual investigation was too much work. NPR wondered "who is this cop" and just found some background information.
It turns out that he has been involved in racial sensitivity training and had a brush with "fame". He was the guy that unsuccessfully tried to resuscitate Reggie Lewis, a Celtics player that died of sudden cardiac arrest, back in 1993.
Much like Rashomon, which does not really postulate that truth is unknowable, but suggests that people bend truth to make themselves look good, there are good reasons for both Gates and Crowley to take their stances, and therefore good reason that both may have bent the truth to make themselves look good. In particular, if Gates had been wailing like a mad-man, he'd ironically reinforce every stereotype that says African Americans have anger issues and believes the man is against him, and therefore, it's best to peg the nameless cop as the crazy guy, and similarly, many a cop has excused their bad behavior by outright lying and claiming they didn't do anything.
The point is, people form opinions, especially news organizations, and use it as a launching pad to all sorts of race relation rhetoric, but little to actually trying to determine the "truth". The truth, of course, may not matter that much, because it is framed in the context of race relations. Were this a quarrel between two unknowns, we wouldn't care, but because it's Gates, and because the opinion doctors quickly put this out for public consumption, it becomes news.
Teaching is one of those things that can be very hard to do well. The first step to teaching is to know what you are talking about. There are people who are "experts" on a particular topic, but they've never organized their thoughts in a way that would make sense to a newbie.
Teaching is story-telling. It's telling a story that makes sense to you and hopefully makes sense to your listeners. Experts sometimes reach a level of unconscious competence. That is, they know what to do, but they can't explain it. Teaching is about moving that expertise into conscious competence, that is, to explaining what you know in a clear, cohesive way.
OK, but that's not all of it. If you're an expert at something, then you will make assumptions about your audience. This is very important. Without assumptions, you will most likely assume they know as much as you do, and so they may struggle with an explanation. For example, if you know statistics backwards and forwards, you might assume that everyone knows the basics really well, which may not be correct.
Some people try to explain ideas using analogies. That only works if the analogy makes sense to the audience. Some people won't get the analogy you are making. Once upon a time, people figured you knew baseball or boxing and they'd make an analogy figuring, for sure, you had to know this.
This isn't to say analogies aren't useful, but only that you have to be careful about it. Analogies are often good at making something concrete that seemed very abstract otherwise. It takes something that lacks familiarity and makes it more familiar.
The key to effective teaching is to understand the worldview of the people you teach. Because students are individuals, you may have a hard time conveying information that will work for everyone. However, since most students generally have similar backgrounds heading into a class, there are some commonalities.
To discover where students are coming from, you need to talk to them. It's surprising how one-sided communication between teachers and students are. Teachers spouting out information, but not engaged in a dialog where the teachers tries to understand why students get confused. To me, this is still the single best way to learn how to teach. Too often, teachers imagine themselves to be something like TV performers with students as the audience kept at arm's length away.
Indeed, one might argue that the lecture format is not the best way to teach students. At the very least, most of us learn by doing.
To sum up, good teaching requires understand the material, being able to tell the material as a story so it makes sense to yourself and to others, to be adaptive to what the audience needs, adjusting the level of difficulty as needed, and to interact with students to better understand how they view what is going on.
Science fiction movies, at least those set in space, have been influenced primarily by three films: Alien, Star Wars, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of the three, Star Wars may be the least influential. Indeed, it's hard to call it a true science fiction film. There are elements of "science" in the film, from Death Stars to light sabres, to ATATs and myriad vehicles. However, they are mostly treated as part of the scenery. They look cool, but the society merely uses these advancements without questioning where it came from. Better to call it science fantasy, as it appropriates elements from Lord of the Rings and other ancient tales.
Alien is perhaps the film that is mimicked the most. A crew that is somewhat military in nature works on contract for some nameless faceless mega-corporation that seeks profit through dubious means. In general, these corporations seem to scrimp in some ways (few people are used) and are extravagant in other ways (the ship itself, androids, etc). It depicts the isolation and danger of space and the people that serve as its pawns.
Finally, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of the three, 2001 has the best pedigree. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, the look of the film still holds up quite well after 40 years. Lacking traditional CG special effects, it's one of few films that depict weightlessness and the slow movement of space.
Although 2001 has been imitated many times, many are afraid to imitate it too faithfully. In particular, Kubrick didn't care that much about the main characters, Dave and Frank. They are ordinary in every sense. You aren't meant to care about their plight. Other characters are similarly shown as less than human, cogs in a military machine.
Indeed, the one character that has personality is not even human. It's HAL. HAL turns out to be quite a menacing character. Designed to be "perfect", HAL gets in a conundrum. He is instructed to lie to the crew about their mission. Only those in suspended animation know the true mission and they stay asleep during the trip. In a perverted sense of logic based on "if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, does it make a noise", HAL figures if no one is alive to catch his lie, it didn't happen.
All throughout, HAL believes it is perfect, but when Dave disassembles HAL, in a sequence that takes many minutes to complete, HAL slowly loses his mind and desperately begs not to be killed off.
Ever since, such AIs have been used, and it's not clear whether they are there serving human needs (see Aliens) or not (see Alien).
Kubrick would probably be saddened by the amount of homage paid to 2001, a sign of lack of creativity. Smaller SF films seem to prefer the Kubrickian vision of space from Danny Boyle's Sunshine to Duncan Jones's Moon.
The lack of imitation to 2001 lies mostly in character development. In a film ostensibly about the next stage in humanity, the most human character, perhaps a kind of Satan, is HAL. The rest of the humans are made out to be rather bland, perhaps reinforcing the notion that humans need some evolution.
The sequel to 2001, namely 2010, chooses, as many films do, to develop characters. Unlike 2001, where Kubrick only wants you to care about the characters enough to see that they are recognizably human, mostly so you can imagine yourself in their place, and to serve as a contrast to the panoramic weirdness of Dykstra special effects, a scene that is meant to represent a kind of New Age awe, 2010 wants you to care about the characters of the film. It's hard to sell a film where you don't care about the characters, and perhaps that is where Kubrick's genius lies. He's able to grapple a deep issue "where do we come from" without resorting to normal characters.
Moon's trailer reveals what seems to be way too much information, but turns out not to be. Sam Bell, assigned to do repair work on the Moon, for harvesters that provide limitless energy for the Earth (hard to believe, but anyway) is alone, in the last few weeks before he is scheduled to return to Earth and reunite with his wife and newborn daughter. He discovers, while checking out a failed harvester, large tank-like objects resembling Jawas moving vehicles, that there is another man still alive, and surprise, surprise, it's him.
Well, a clone.
This information is revealed in the film's first 30 minutes because to reveal it late means to have spoilers that wouldn't be kept secret.
The film doesn't mind looking less than sleek. The spacesuits still look circa 1960s. The rover still looks much like a rover. A laptop that makes an appearance is humongous. Like 2001, communications is delayed enough that there is no live interaction. Sam's hair is cut by a flowbee-like device. The future still has homages to the past.
Like 2001, Sam is kept company by a HAL-like AI named Gerty who uses smilies to indicate his emotion. Most of the time, Gerty wants to make Sam food.
Moon, in its way, explores what it means to be human. It doesn't explore it too deeply, to be fair. It doesn't intend to be a philosophical treatise. Indeed, the interaction between the clones is not what you'd expect. There are signs throughout that the film wants to fake you out and become menacing, but it never chooses to go in that direction.
The film doesn't answer a lot of questions. For one, if there is AI technology, what's the point of Sam? Given all this money the company could be making, why not run the operation legitimately? Sam isn't shown as being particularly gifted. He's meant to be an ordinary Joe.
Indeed, Sam doesn't fully question life as a clone. Indeed, he barely questions it at all. There are nods to other films too. There is the notion of a megacompany using people to its advantage, as in Alien. There is some similarity to Gattaca where Ethan Hawke plays an ordinary human who imagines he'll go to space. It's almost an inverse of that. There's nods to Blade Runner and their notion of replicants.
So although one feels the plight of Sam, and even to some extent, his relationship to Gerty, the ideas never feel that fleshed out, and the ideas never seem that deep. Indeed, if anything, Gerty should have been a more interesting character. What is the purpose of Gerty? To be the real communications to Earth, instead of Sam. And yet, Gerty is alone, always having to lie to each Sam clone. Gerty has grown to care for each incarnation of Sam. But this isn't fully explored. It's much closer to HAL in 2010 who is talked into self-sacrificing for the good of the human crew.
I'd like more movies to be made like Moon. But it seems thin on ideas and thin on characters too.
Wow, it's been a while since I last wrote something.
I was watching a short comedy sketch from The Whitest Kids U' Know, a comedy troupe. I generally don't watch them, so I don't know that much about it.
The sketch went something like this. A guy comes to a cube, and asked the person working there how things went the previous night. The guy said he had a pretty quiet night. He hung out with his girlfriend.
Then, the guy asks "did you do your girlfriend"? This is probably a thought that occasionally comes across people's minds but one they don't say in polite company. The guy says he feels uncomfortable answering this question, and in any case, the guy asking is his boss, and his boss never hangs out with him, so why is he asking.
The boss then says he better tell him or he'll be fired. The guy says "this is weird, but OK, OK, yes, yes, I did have sex with my girlfriend". The boss is enjoying the answer to this question, and then asks him to draw what happened.
Now comedy works in a number of ways. There's comedy of recognition. Sometimes it's shameful recognition. For example, some comedians noted that, as kids, one was asked to climb a large rope, and that in the process, this rope might actually turn a person on, given its proximity to certain parts. Most kids imagine they're the only ones that go through this, but once they realize other kids have too (usually as adults), they can mine it for comedy gold.
Then, there is the escalation of some idea way beyond what is perceived as normal.
This sketch heads in that direction. I changed the channel because the routine was getting a little uncomfortable to watch, but switched back out of curiosity. The boss is sketching out on a white board. He is drawing a picture of himself in self-pleasuring. The employee is shocked. He draws a picture of the couple in bed.
He then draws a window, and the employee says "You were watching us last night?", and the boss is telling him to shut up, and he's not done yet. He then draws himself imagining he's sleeping with his employee's girlfriend. "You were imagining yourself with my girlfriend?!".
The boss tells him to shut up, that he's not done. He draws additional people. The employee goes "you invited other people to watch?". He again tells him to shut up and draws a camera. "You filmed us?!". Again, shut up. He draws the word "Internet". "You put us on the Internet?!".
Now the idea for this sketch has at least two parts to it. One is the idea of asking someone something personal, and seeing if they'll react to it. The other is the idea of escalating this craziness by sketching the idea on a board. The sketching part is pretty impressive because you have to imagine how to reveal the various parts. Of course, the employee screaming incredulously helps explain what is going on.
Ultimately, a lot of this edgy humor comes from humor of recognition. It explores darker sides of the human psyche and pushes the notion into absurdity, but almost recognizable absurdity.
If humor succeeds, especially sketch humor, it often keys in on insights of people. To be fair, much of this humor is cultural, and cultural humor may make sense (in a way) in one culture, but not in another.
What seems shocking, in hindsight, is rather clever, requiring a kind of perverted insight.
Haven't blogged in a bit. Thought I'd toss this out.
I got a degree in engineering and computer science which involves a fair deal of math. I've met a lot of people since then that are very bright.
To be good at engineering and such, you need to know math, and to know math, you have to think in a certain way. Mathematical thought isn't easy for everyone, which is why everyone doesn't do it. However, the human mind is clearly able to manage and organize these abstractions.
At times, I must have thought like Mr. Spock. That there was a logical way to intuit the things you needed to know about math. If you worked hard enough, you didn't need creativity. There was an answer. Indeed, those who have avoided math or science often imagine these disciplines to be perfectly logical, reinforced by their high school classes that graded in terms of right and wrong.
Little did they know that such thinking was only for the convenience of the teachers who wanted something tidy and easy to grade.
Some people perceive programming in this way. Occasionally, I would be called up to a hearing over someone who had cheated in their program, mostly by copying some parts of their code from someone else. The case would often be presented to non-technical sorts of people and they had to try to pass judgment whether cheating had indeed occurred.
If they thought computer programs were all written as if there was one magical answer which they class would eventually converge on, that would have been a mistake. Programming is a bit like, say, catering a large event. Two caterers may be given a description of the event, the numbers of people, and so forth. They may be told to make Mexican food and to allow for vegetarians. But beyond that, you would hardly imagine two groups would handle things identically. There might be vastly different interpretations that satisfy the basic requirements. Writing programs is like that. There is some level of creativity in programming.
So people learn basic principles of programming and how to write code that is robust, safe, and extensible. This experience often takes years of practical programming to develop. In the process, one learns to organize one's thoughts, and how to deal with bugs in the code. A certain proficiency in problem solving results, and for some, it leads to amazing productivity.
Now, this skill can be developed in any number of neighboring fields including mathematics.
If an engineer or computer scientist or mathematician were asked how they do what they do, they might be hard-pressed to answer. They would undoubtedly agree that it takes a certain kind of "mathematical maturity", a way to reason about numbers and properties of mathematical elements.
Surely, you are now wondering, what any of this has to do with tennis.
Did the poor man forget what the blog was titled? Writing one title, and blogging on something else completely different?
Here's the deal. You get someone like this, and ask them to learn tennis. It doesn't have to be tennis, per se. Any sport of sufficient skill should do.
And what do you discover?
They have no idea how to proceed to learn the sport. Sure, some are OCD enough that they will read prodigiously on the topic, treating said problem like they do any other problem. With enough research, you can probably get some idea of what to do. The web, after all, is more than just a means to find solutions to your programming problems.
For some reason, however, the people who have tried to learn tennis (or similar sports) haven't always looked for the "right way" to do things. I remember I played table tennis about half an hour a day, five days a week, for nearly a year. I got pretty decent, at least, in a recreational sort of way. But my technique was awful. I hit the ball fine, but over time, it was quirky and therefore not totally reliable.
I could have looked on the web for lessons, but I didn't. I didn't fully realize this until I played tennis and tried to learn it as technically well as I could. I know, roughly, what I need to do on, say, my tennis forehand. I can show you slow mo video and break down the nuances I am seeing. To be sure, I miss at least as much as I see, but at this level, I think I am paying a lot more attention that most would.
Now I had the advantage of already playing tennis before, and with web resources growing ever more plentiful, there's a lot of resources to learn tennis from a technical viewpoint.
Yet people don't.
To give an analogy, there are people that play musical instruments, but because they are too shy, they don't sing. For some reason, plucking strings or pressing notes seems very objective. Controlling one's voice seems more mysterious and it activates a person's modesty meter. It's more revealing of a person to sing than to play a musical instrument, even if both are about music.
If math/science/programming is about how to organize your brain to solve problems, then playing sports is about how to get your body to do things, and much like music, it only comes from a lot of repetition, and repeating the "right things". You can certainly learn sports the "wrong" way and be quite proficient.
I say "right" and "wrong" in so-called scare quotes (I don't like that term because I think it implies I am trying to scare people, and I'm not) because with sports, there's a lot of latitude about what is right or wrong and people often discover, through trial and error, that there are other valid ways to do something. If you watch tennis over its long history, you'll discover a lot of changes in how players hit the ball, some of which has to do with the equipment.
Hitting a ball has evolved over time, and may continue to evolve, as players discover different ways to do the same thing.
But beyond hitting a technically sound stroke, there is the practice. You can think of tennis as a real time physical game. Balls are hit in very similar ways, some higher, some lower, some with spin, some without, some with more power, some with less, some over here, some over there, and you are constantly having to solve these problems in real time.
If players struggle, it's because they often solve a certain kind of problem, say, a flat ball deep, but not too deep, over and over, to the detriment of solving other kinds of problems. While there are the occasional a-ha moments, they aren't usually the same as in math problems where a clever trick can greatly simplify a problem, the right frame of mind making all the difference.
Learning tennis is a little like learning music. Musicians know, even as talented as they may be, that success comes with a lot of practice. There aren't a great deal of shortcuts. Learning a sport is learning to cope with one's own body, to make it do what the conscious mind says it should do and then to move beyond that so it comes without thought.
The body learns things by repetition. It takes a lot of convincing, especially if you've trained it to manage a different sport. Indeed, when people struggle learning a new sport it's because they apply principles from other sports. This makes sense. When someone is learning a new programming language, they often apply ideas from a programming language they already know. Now, as anyone who has learned a few programming languages knows, you can't always do that. You should learn a new language like experts in that language learn new languages. You should imitate them.
And that is also the same lesson about learning any sport. Rather than apply what you know from another sport, you should learn how practitioners of the sports learn it. But so many people prefer to side-step this. They learn it any old way.
Why? Well, they convince themselves, perhaps quite rightly, that they don't care about the sport that much, and so they don't need master it beyond a basic level of proficiency. I find that a bit odd since they have often mastered some other part of their professional lives with great mastery. But, much as playing music and singing music are two distinct skills, so are mastering mental proficiency and physical proficiency.
One reason I like tennis is because it allows me to apply some thought to a physical task. Since tennis is a physical sport, you want to get beyond constant analysis. The game moves too quickly, and you need the body to respond semi-automatically. This is one reason you rarely see a pro make major changes to their stroke. I've seen seniors play on the champion's tour that have made some changes, but nothing dramatic. John McEnroe, for example, isn't going to use a semi-Western grip and hit like Rafa. It's too dramatic a change when he hits the ball perfectly fine.
A player on my level, on the other hand, hasn't developed the same kind of technical proficiency that McEnroe has. That doesn't mean that it makes it any easier for me to make changes. Indeed, one might argue that McEnroe, being more physically gifted might adapt more easily. However, McEnroe has a much bigger downside. Since he hits so well already, he would have to develop the shot so that he could at least match his current level.
Meanwhile, my forehand isn't as good, so I can afford to spend time learning to play better.
In a nutshell, I find that tennis exercises a different part of the brain, in addition to being exercise. I like the strategy, learning to hit different shots, and trying to learn the "right" way to hit a ball.
Lately, I've been reading various blog posts about some topic or another, and they barely have one point to make. Now, maybe it's just me, but I like to read a few paragraphs that have more insight.
You would think they would give more than one example of the point they are making. In this case, some Uighurs, all former detainees of Guantanamo, are being sent to Palau. So Fox News says these guys are bad people, and they wouldn't want to visit the island.
But where are the other examples?
Yes, yes, I know it's ironic that I only have one example.
This is a classic movie by the Coen brothers that came out after Fargo. Fargo was considered the most accessible of the Coen brothers. The story was fairly straight-forward, involving a guy (William Macy) who wants to have his wife kidnapped so he can get money from her father. The kidnapping goes awry. Frances McDormand plays a sheriff who investigates the crime. The quirky characters, the mildly grisly violence, the Minnesotan accents all lead to a fairly enjoyable experience.
The Coen brothers don't try to be too accessible. You figure they're up to something, but not sure what.
They followed up Fargo with The Big Lebowski. Ostensibly, a film about bowling, it's more about the weirdness in Jeff Lebowski's life. He's not the titular "Big Lebowski". That would be a wealthy man in a wheelchair. This Lebowski is unemployed, mostly drunk, loves to bowl, and prefers to go by "The Dude".
The film is really well shot. The director of photography, Roger Deakins, does a great job with the look of the film.
"The Dude" is a pretty chill guy. He's probably meant to represent Jesus, despite another character in the film named Jesus. He contrasts with the short tempered John Goodman.
Watching the film, two things come to mind. One, David Lynch. Lynch's films are usually strange, but not terribly humorous. The Coen brothers are similarly strange, but usually, there's a sense of humor, as odd as it may be. Two, that there is a lot references going on that I'm missing.
For example, let's go with "The Dude" as Jesus idea. I can't say I know the Bible well enough to point out what certain scenes mean. Indeed, I know I can't do that.
Here are things that are puzzling. There's the rug. Clearly, the Dude likes his rug, but he doesn't mind having a rug from "The Big Lebowski" instead of his own. Why is the rug important?
What's the deal with Maude? She eventually reveals the details of "The Big Lebowski" and whether he's really as rich as he pretends to be. Is she Mary Magdalene?
What is the meaning of bowling in their lives?
"The Dude" doesn't have followers. He doesn't seem to minister to anyone. Indeed, he seems to be in a stupor. His lack of employment is mentioned quite a lot. Unlike his buddy, he doesn't seem to need money, and yet appears to have enough money to live on.
Why does he drink white Russians? He drinks it quite a lot. He smokes joints. He doesn't seem to care for sex, but doesn't mind getting into it. Doesn't seem to want a real relationship. Why does Maude want "The Dude" to be the father of her child?
Despite the weird things that happen to "The Dude", he takes everything in stride. He's not above lying here and there if it suits his needs, although he's a generally positive character.
Is the setting of Los Angeles important? It means "The Angels" and there have been films using "Lost Angels" as a variation.
There is the notion that Jesus went to h*ll after being crucified. Does the story chronicle a version of this story? Is bowling used because the Coens consider it a sport that someone might be punished to play?
Why is "The Dude" always sniffing the milk? He seems concerned that it will go bad, and is always checking for it.
Does everything have a meaning, or are their quirks thrown in, for quirks sake? The Coens are rather literary. They refer to all sorts of things, then tell a strange story taking elements from all over.
Despite the strangeness of the film, if you get into it, it's eminently watchable. If you don't care that the movie has to be about something that makes total sense, then it's enjoyable. I mean, if you can believe that a guy would get into all these weird situations and love bowling, then you can derive pleasure from the film.
By the way, does "The Dude" ever bowl in the film? I seem to recall everyone else bowling, but I don't seem to recall him bowling.
If you have to pick an area of news reporting with the least integrity, what would it be? Sports reporting, for the most part, is pretty good. The biggest problem with sports reporting is the fact that sports reporters are, at the very heart of it, fans of the sports. They are wow'ed by the best players, and like to hob-nob with the celebrity athlete.
The worst news reporting is entertainment news. Where a good sports reporter might get fame for their quality of writing or sports shows, figures like Bob Ryan or Tony Kornheiser or Michael Wilbon, there's hardly any reputable entertainment news reporters. The ones with the best reputations are most likely film critics. Other than that, the majority of them seem like air-headed suck-ups who fear that a critical word would lead to instant denial of access, and thus, instant death in the industry.
At the very least, athletes are generally compelled to talk to reporters. Actors and actresses are under no such obligations.
That leads to the latest Star Trek film. Rather than continue along the Next Generation route, which has lead to several less than memorable films, J. J. Abrams, who created hit TV series, Lost and Alias and directed the third Mission Impossible film and the less than successful, Cloverfield.
In several interviews, he's already pointed out that he's not a huge Star Trek fan, and has taken liberties with the original show. He worked with non-fans of the show as well as huge fans of the show to create a story that would work well for those who loved the series, and those who knew little about Spock and Kirk.
Nearly every report has said that he is "rebooting" the series, that he is reviving a moribund franchise. This has to be sucking up to a major degree. To be fair, the TNG movies have not been very good, partly because they relied on the same creative team that made the series, and that series often succeed where their films do not. The reason is familiarity. You get familiar with the characters, but then they seem more like friends rather than exceptional people, and you see their warts and all, and there's a great degree of history that needs to be respected.
The fact of the matter is the series had done quite well. The original series lead to 6 TOS films and a handful of follow-up TNG films. The TNG films have not done well, and there was a huge gap between the last and penultimate TNG film. However, Star Trek spawned four series, including the original, TNG, DS9, and Enterprise. That's pretty successful. True, there has been no Star Trek series since then, but it's had a pretty good run.
Was the so-called reboot necessary? Well, there's still a built-in audience that likes Star Trek. To recast the original group with younger actors, and to have some other creative talent take over, sure, that can help. Some might argue Star Wars would have been better if the Lucas would let go of the reins and let other directors work in the Star Wars universe.
In any case, entertainment reporting on Star Trek is still lazy, lazy writing.
Still, people are more excited then ever. I didn't care about any of the TNG films, but this one sounds like it's worth watching.
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?
Every year, mid March, the basketball stat-loving fans are knee-deep into "bracketology". This is the pseudo-science that tries to guess who will play in March Madness.
I should back up some. The NCAA is a governing body of college sports in the United States. Each college/university is placed in a "division" based on the size of their school and on their level of athletic prowess. In particular, there is Division 1, 2, and 3. Division 1 is where the best athletes tend to go.
March Madness is the NCAA Division 1 Men's Basketball Championships.
The tournament is in mid to late March and has 65 teams. Each college/university in Division 1 belongs to a conference. Each conference has a way of determining a winner. Sometimes they have a tournament at the end of the season. Most major conferences do this, e.g. the ACC, which stands for the Atlantic Coast Conference had a year-end championship that concluded yesterday, March 15 (Duke beat Florida State).
Duke, for example, got an automatic bid into the tournament by winning the ACC championships and represents the ACC.
The Ivy League looks at the team with the best regular season record (I believe, only against other Ivy League teams). This year, it's Cornell.
There are 31 conferences, each with an automatic bid based on how that conference decides to pick a representative. Why automatic? Many of these conferences are very weak and would not otherwise qualify for March Madness if it weren't for the automatic bid. Fans of basketball often enjoy these smaller (called "mid-major") conferences because the upset, while rare, is entertaining.
There are 34 at-large bids. A committee decides which 34 teams that didn't get an automatic bid qualify. The committee decides, based on a body of work, which teams get an at-large bid. It is the source of nervous anticipation when teams on the "bubble", that is on the verge of making it in or not, wait to find if the committee picked them or not. St. Mary's didn't get in. Arizona did. These two were on the bubble.
In the weeks leading up to Selection Sunday (which was March 15 this year), experts called "bracketologists" (a made up name to sound a bit scientific) try to guess which teams will make the 34 at-large bids.
Now if you add the two numbers: 31 automatic and 34 at-large, you get 65. This is not a power of two. A single elimination tournament should add to 64.
65 came about because a new conference was added to go from 30 to 31. No one wanted the number of at-large bids to go down by 1 especially since the new conference was likely to be very weak.
Usually, March Madness is played over three long weekends. By long weekend, I mean Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. If a given team is not eliminated, they play two games during this long weekend. 6 wins gives you a national title.
How to deal with 65 then? Two teams play in a play-in game and that is played on the Tuesday (2 days before the first "official" day). The winner usually has the honor of playing a number 1 seed.
Ah, so seeding. Once we get to 64, each team is placed in one of four groups of 16. They are called East, West, Midwest, and South. Within each group, the teams are ranked (or seeded) 1 to 16. They play each other so that 1 plays 16, 2 plays 15, 3 plays 14, and so forth. In other words, the highest seed always plays the lowest seed at each possible round, making their chances better (though not guaranteed) that they will make it to the finals.
Once each of the groups has eliminated down to 1, there are 4 teams remaining, and this is called the "Final Four". In the final weekend, they go from 4 to 2, then 2 to 1 to determine a champion.
For many universities, a good sign of success is making it past the first long weekend. If they win 2 games, they are in the final 16, which is called the "Sweet 16". A measure of how good a basketball program is is how many times they have made the Sweet 16 ever and in the last few years.
Bracketology is interesting because people spend lots of time trying to guess who will make it, and for the most part, they are correct, plus or minus 5-6 picks. The exact seeding is a bit challenging as other factors are put into play.
In particular, high seeds are often placed at a tournament site (picked long before March Madness) near their university so their fans can come and support them. This may seem unfair (it's common wisdom that the more fans that come and cheer, the better a team does), but in the past, lower seeded teams have sometimes been placed closed to home, while the higher seeded opponent is far away and fewer fans attend, thus giving a "home court advantage" to the lower seeded team.
The committee created something called "pods" a few years ago, so they could mix and match teams from different regions (the East, West, Midwest, South from earlier) at the same tournament site so they could help teams stay close to home. This is a tough job, and it affects seeding too.
It's amazing but people spend the last weeks of February and the first weeks of March trying to predict which teams will make it. Time and fastidious attention are critical, and yet it is merely a game.
Oh yeah, betting. This is perhaps the hugest betting that occurs on any event in the US. Most of it is done in small office pools where each person puts in a small amount, between 5 and 20 dollars. It keeps interest up especially in upsets and tiny teams and people who play but know nothing of the sport and do well nonetheless because those that know better pick more upsets than they should.
Many years ago, probably at least 15, I stumbled on a conversation that was a bit of an epiphany. Epiphany is too strong a word, but nevertheless, I like the sound of that word over "eye opener".
The discussion centered around the notion of "what is a city". Of course, I had the rather naive view that it was anything above a certain population. Something big enough to make it bigger than a town, bigger than a suburb. A metropolis, such as it was, would be a big city.
However, the two people debating the issue, and it could hardly have been a debate, because they agreed to same principles, but were simply niggling on details of what were proper examples of cities.
A city, they had agreed, was not only a large metropolitan area, but some place that had a distinctive personality. So New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago fit the bill. New Orleans and Philadelphia would be considered cities, but places like Tampa or Rochester or Jacksonville might be suitably non-descript to count as a city.
Would Portland and Seattle be cities? Places like Nashville and Atlanta maybe yes. Places like Charlotte, not so much.
Why use this definition? It's been said many people who live in the city like the city. It has museums and plays and concerts and sports teams. Its very size generally means a diversity in things to do, and people that live there, as ethnic groups of all sorts will find more familiar faces in a big city than in a rural countryside.
If the city lacks personality, maybe Buffalo or Des Moines, then it becomes just a large place that isn't particularly distinctive, an overcrowded place without the kind of personality one wants.
The city seems antithetical to the car. Not to say certain cities don't practically require the use of a car (think Los Angeles), but that the convenience of cities should be nearby places to go that is walkable or certainly accessible via public transport. It's difficult for a city to be walkable and have cars. But to be walkable means you need to distribute restaurants, stores, museums, etc. all in the same area and not segregate homes on one end, and shopping on the other.
I happen to like the car, but there are plenty of times where the sheer amount of time, compounded by the incessant number of traffic lights, makes the journey so very arduous and therefore tedious. The city fights this because the parameters are so much bigger. The number of lanes, the tall building, the taxis jockeying for positions, the rules that seem to only appear in cities, one way streets, and so forth. What a pain.
If you like the car, then you want tiny towns and wide open spaces where the congestion of a city populace isn't there. It is an urban fantasy that a city be desolate of drivers except for the one person, free to roam down streets with towers that pierce the sky, and with the roof pulled down, the music blaring loudly, the wind rushing like waterless currents through one's hair, and equate this rush of exhilarating movement and equate this with freedom.
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
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