Earning My Turns

Long hiatus, a great book, and skiing in the forecast

2009-11-28T10:38:00.000-08:00

I've been so busy with work and travel that I've not had the time and focus for writing. We have been in Philadelphia for a family Thanksgiving. At the Penn Book Center a week ago, I came upon Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain. I'm only 100 pages in, but it has already taken top rank in my mental gallery of science books. It's a deep, serious work about brain architecture, perception, and cognition, but written without any pretense or pomp, direct, full of striking news about how reading is implemented in the brain. In these first chapters, Dehaene focuses on what is known about reading's implementation and on the experimental evidence for the findings. I'm looking forward for when he gets into how the design of writing systems is influenced by biological constraints, and how reading gets localized to the same particular brain region, which he calls the “letterbox,” across languages, writing systems, and cultures (He's already given a tantalizing preview regarding the localization of Kanji and Kana in Japanese reading).

My new skis, Black Diamond Justices with Marker Baron bindings, are waiting for me at Marmot Mountain Works in Berkeley. I'm not likely to be able to use them the coming weekend because I signed up for an ASI wilderness first aid class at Sugar Bowl, but I'll be in Whistler the following weekend, where they have been having the best early season in a long time. Now I just need the jet stream to behave to keep both pineapple express and deep freeze away.

Jazz and Tropicália

2009-11-08T22:22:00.000-08:00

Spent the weekend in San Francisco to attend three San Francisco Jazz festival concerts and otherwise enjoy the city. The three concerts were all over the place, in a very good way. Friday night we heard the Portuguese/Cabo Verde singer/songwriter Sara Tavares with a strong quartet from Cabo Verde and Portugal. She was suffering from a respiratory ailment (she said flu but I have difficulty in believing that she would have been able to perform at all with the flu) and the first few songs lacked energy somewhat. She got stronger through the set, however. She did a great Balancé, one of her best-known songs, and she generally showed a stylistic freedom and disregard for the bonds of Portuguese song convention that were very refreshing. Not a perfect performance, besides her illness they had equipment glitches, but lots there to like and a great rapport between Sara and her band.

On Saturday we saw Savion Glover and his outstanding band. Wow. Edge of the seat work, like with Gonzalo Rubalcaba the other day. Except that one can get a whiff of Rubalcaba on recordings, while Glover has to be seen. Glover's dialog and debate with his band members (all amazing, but Tommy James on piano and Patience Higgins on saxophones had especially rich interactions with Glover), the depth of rhythmic variation around Coltrane and blues themes, were breathtaking, so intense and surprising that one truly forgot to inhale, with not a second of slack.

Today, we heard John Arbercrombie with Mark Feldman (violin), Drew Gress (bass) and Anthony Pinciotti (drums). Abercrombie and Feldman are the core of several of my favorite recordings of the last several years: Open Land, Can 'n' Mouse, Class Trip, and The Third Quartet. Today's set was mostly compositions from Wait Till You See Her, a new record I didn't know. I had heard Abercrombie live only once before, with Larry Coryell and Badi Assad on the live tour of Tree Guitars. In today's set he and his partners, especially Feldman, did what we really hope for in live jazz, going outside the tighter confines of a studio recording to wander, explore, tease and draw the audience.

In between, we enjoyed a beautiful cool fall weekend walking around San Francisco, and a delightfully varied exhibition of modern Brazilian art at the Yerba Buena Arts Center.

Pay Powder

2009-11-01T09:36:00.000-08:00

Pay Powder: How much would you pay to ski fresh powder? Does it even have a price? Squaw valley seems to think so. Squaw is built on private rather than forestry service land with limited access to the backcountry. That is set to change as it re-jigs lift pass prices in light of the credit crunch. [...] The resort has always strictly controlled access to the out-bounds terrain including the National Geographic bowl, at least if you are a Squaw paying customer. For that you will need to purchase the eye-wateringly expensive platinum pass at $1699. This enrolls you in the “out of bounds program”. (Via PisteHors)

The sky is not falling. Squaw's program is intended for well-off pass holders for whom the extra cost of a platinum pass compares well with the cost of a day of heliskiing. Nothing obliges Squaw to offer convenient lift access to the backcountry for free. Since Squaw has always forbidden backcountry access from its lifts, nothing has materially changed for the worse with this new offer. Except maybe for the green-with-envy feelings it creates on those confined to inbounds tracked out turns while the high-living are taken on fresh tracks just over the boundary rope. If you can't stand the wave of envy, there's nice Sugar Bowl just a few miles NW as the crow flies who allow easy backcountry access from their lifts. And there's always skinning for your turns from a multitude of trailheads around the Tahoe basin.

An open letter to Steve Levitt

2009-10-30T02:50:00.000-07:00

An open letter to Steve Levitt: [...]The point here is that really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you that the claim that the blackness of solar cells makes solar energy pointless is complete and utter nonsense. I don’t think you would have accepted such laziness and sloppiness in a term paper from one of your students, so why do you accept it from yourself? What does the failure to do such basic thinking with numbers say about the extent to which anything you write can be trusted? How do you think it reflects on the profession of economics when a member of that profession — somebody who that profession seems to esteem highly — publicly and noisily shows that he cannot be bothered to do simple arithmetic and elementary background reading. Not even for a subject of such paramount importance as global warming. (Via Real Climate)

Priceless.

AlpControl claims world’s lightest wide skis

2009-10-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

AlpControl claims world’s lightest wide skis: AlpControl claims its new carbon fiber skis weigh under 2000 grams (4.3lbs) a pair in 175cm with a shovel of 120mm. That’s less than some of the skinny competition skis used the the Pierra Menta competition. However it is ultra durable, the manufacturer claims it might be the best investment in your skiing life.

(Via PisteHors)

But how will it ski? All that elasticity could make for an interesting ride on hard snow.

Gonzalo Rubalcaba Quintet

2009-10-24T10:42:00.000-07:00

I can't get words together. I was at the edge of my seat for much of almost two hours of music that was both unpredictable before it happened and the only way it could be afterwards. I think of the most memorable mathematical proofs, of Braque, Delauney, Pollock; Stravinsky. Deeply thought-out construction that yet feels spontaneous, alive, constantly evolving under its own dynamics. Clusters of notes bouncing among players to the point that one can't figure out what is coming from which instrument, and yet supreme clarity. Again with the mathematics simile, that feeling of vertigo when a inscrutable build-up of argument opens up into the revelation of a final step that makes everything make sense. Or as after ascending a steep snowy slope for hours, the other peaks start poking over the looming ridge, light spreads, and the horizon finally falls away to an infinite variety of landscape.

We've been lucky with several very good jazz outings over the last year, but this one was on a different (hyper)plane. Rubalcaba's virtuosity on the piano was never gratuitous, and rebounded off an incredibly skilled ensemble. Ernesto Simpson with a crisp, airy command of the drums and Yunior Terry with an insistent deep rumble on the bass spread out the piano's rhythmic sparks into space-filling creations (that Pollock idea). Alex Sipiagin on trumpet started maybe a bit tentative, but for the rest of the set and encores he grew and grew with urgent calls, oompah humor, almost painful buildups, longing. Yosvany Terry on alto and tenor sax was the hub of the ensemble, picking up ideas from the piano that spread through the ensemble, and reacting to them with discoveries and surprises now funny, now scary, spinning wheels of notes (that Delauney idea). When hints of a standard were brought in, it was never in the sometimes lazy way in which other bands take a break from hard work by indulging the audience's recognition. Instead, it became quickly transformed into something else, stretched, bent, rebuilt; in another mathematical (or Pollock) analogy, like a chaotic dynamics breaks up an initially compact region into a shifting flock of points.

One sad aspect of the concert is that the audience was middle-aged or older. I know that tickets are very expensive. But also, music like this is about individual engagement between the band and each serious listener, not about creating a framework for social interaction within the audience for an overwhelmingly social youth culture.

Music season starts

2009-10-17T18:47:00.000-07:00

More musical events on my calendar the next couple of months than anytime since the legendary Gulbenkian Foundation festivals in Lisbon in the late 60s-early 70s. Coming week:

Oct 21: Anonymous 4
Oct 23: Gonzalo Rubalcaba

Farhad Manjoo on Google Wave’s Complexity

2009-10-14T23:08:00.000-07:00

Farhad Manjoo on Google Wave’s Complexity: On Wave, every misspelling, half-formed sentence, and ill-advised stab at sarcasm is transmitted instantly to the other person. This behavior is so corrosive to normal conversation that you'd think it was some kind of bug. (Via Daring Fireball)

This is the silliest claim about human communication I've read in a long time. As a writer, Manjoo may be uncomfortable letting others see his communicative sausage being made. But before teletypes and their successors, "normal conversation" — face-to-face conversation — was — still is — all hesitations, false starts, disfluencies, failed attempts at humor, misheard words, losses of attention. That's what we are, that's how we work. We perceive, interpret, and think as we talk, and a lot of that is trial and error.

Manjoo complains that instant transmission of typed characters makes the typist "self conscious." Translation: I'm used to hiding what/how I'm really thinking when I communicate online, and I feel uncomfortable coming out from behind the curtain.

Answer to comments: What Manjoo wrote was at best a unwarranted generalization from his personal reaction to the feature. He made an empirically false claim about human communication; even it the claim is charitably interpreted to be only about typed communication, he cited no empirical evidence about the alleged corrosiveness. Why did he feel the need to make a sweeping generalization, instead of honestly reporting his own experience, and that of others he interviewed, and let us draw own own inferences? The disease of the current 24-hour punditry cycle is an escalation of instant assertion unsupported by evidence to demonstrate the pundit's manhood (how's that for a sweeping generalization?)

Much before the BSD talk program, there was the TENEX talk command that had the same character-at-a-time behavior and may have been the first such program I used. Personally, I didn't feel it corroded my ability to communicate, but I won't turn that into a general claim. I was using Wave editing a document a collaborator recently, and the immediate feedback was useful to what we were doing, especially the marker that showed where he was editing.

Yesterday's book

2009-10-12T23:48:00.000-07:00

Finished reading The Age of Wonder. I used to avoid the Romantics, but that was before learning about Banks, the Herschels, Davy and their overwhelming enthusiasm for science as hope, poetry, and practical success. Highly recommended.

Today's listening

2009-10-12T23:41:00.000-07:00

The best This American Life in a while, on how we make health care so expensive. Grab it while it's available for free!

Today's listening

2009-10-11T14:23:00.000-07:00

Avoidance of expensive roaming data access in Europe last week meant that I had a big podcast backlog. Just caught up with Planet Money, which is way sharper and less slavish to conventional wisdom than Marketplace.

Producer vs Consumer Viewpoints on the News Business

2009-10-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

Producer vs Consumer Viewpoints on the News Business: [...] The trouble is that when journalists talk about journalism, they talk about it from the producer point of view. What Google does, from the media-as-production point of view really isn’t much better than what the paper boy does. But from the consumer point of view, having a paper boy who will fetch any paper you want in the world, for free, at any time, and open the paper to the page you were looking for is a massive improvement. [...] I think it’s interesting that journalists seem to have no problem following this dynamic when it comes to the car industry. This has been a terrible 12 months to be in the business of building cars, either as a worker or an owner or a manager. But it’s been a fine time to buy a car. There’s no car shortage. And there’s not going to be a car shortage. Drivers are in great shape. And it’s about the same with the news. Has there ever been a better time to be a news junkie? (Via Matt Yglesias)

This is an important insight, I think. As a fellow news junkie, I love this new world. In fact, I love it too much: I consume more news than I ever did, which maybe is a suboptimal use of my time. But I worry that there isn't a successful mechanism for compensating the news writers for the benefit I'm getting. After all, I used to subscribe to the NYT, and I would be happy to pay that amount to an aggregator that would distribute the proceeds to news sources in proportion to their traffic. It would be interesting to do a study on how many news junkies have dropped subscription to paper news sources over the last five years, and how much of that would be potentially recoverable as news revenue with the right mechanisms.

Update: Public radio stations have a funding model that has more or less worked even as their federal sources of funding have decreased. Pledge drives are not fun, but they bring in that fraction of the audience that cares enough to volunteer some support. I'd support Web news if the right mechanism was in place. In fact, I'd support public broadcasting more if there was a mechanism for a lump annual supporting multiple broadcasters. I see no reason why Web news sources cannot achieve the same kind of support.

Once again, future-safe archives

2009-10-11T08:53:00.000-07:00

Once again, future-safe archives: Every time a relative passes this issue comes front and center for me. Most other times it's just lurking in the shadows. [...] We need one or more institutions that can manage electronic trusts over very long periods of time. [...] I've felt that universities would do the best job, since they already need to maintain the work of their professors, possibly in partnership with technology companies. This could be a huge source of endowments, as wealthy people with a vision for techology compete to build long-lasting monuments to their creativity and generosity. (Via Scripting News).

A big challenge here is to estimate the endowment needed to keep some amount of data archived in perpetuity, given the uncertainties of cost as technologies and environmental conditions change, and of return on endowment. The Barnes Foundation serves as a cautionary case. Its endowment turned out to be insufficient for the cost of keeping the collection safe. What saved the situation was that the popular appeal of the collection brought in other sources of funding in exchange for transformation into a more conventional museum. Most digital archives would not have that luck in a crunch.

Fortunately, for easily-copied digital information we don't need to rely on a small number of institutions for long-term preservation. Projects like LOCKSS demonstrate the possibility of distributed preservation using many cheap copies. Could they be institutionally extended to preserve personal data?

Update: David Rosenthal on digital preservation.

Shameless consumption question

2009-10-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

Which new all-round (front-side-backcountry) powder boards?

I plan to use Marker Baron bindings for mostly inbounds skiing. I'm already fully equipped with Dynafit setups for the backcountry. I'm not interested in the heavy and stiff boards that Tahoe youngsters favor, but I'm looking for a bit more frontside performance than my light Karhu BC 100s.

New thread: today's reading and listening

2009-10-03T09:29:00.000-07:00

I've failed miserably at keeping this blog up to date with what I'm reading or listening to. I'll try a new scheme: whenever I think of it, list what I've been reading or listening to that day. Here it goes:

Podcasts courtesy of (shameless plug warning) the indispensable Android app Listen.

Antisocial networking

2009-10-03T07:46:00.000-07:00

Antisocial networking: I just got my invitation to Google Wave. The prototype that's now public doesn't have all of the amazing features in the original video demos. At this point, it's pretty much just a way of collecting IM-style conversations all in one place. But several of my friends are already there, and I've had a few conversations there already. [...] Right now, my standard set of tabs includes my Gmail, calendar, RSS reader, New York Times homepage, Facebook page, and now Google Wave. Add in the occasional Twitter tab (or dedicated Twitter client, if I feel like running it) plus I'll occasionally have an IM window open. All of these things are competing for my attention when I'm supposed to be getting real work done. [...] The bigger problem is that these various vendors and technologies have different data models for visibility and for how metadata is represented. [...] This is all the more frustrating because RSS completely solved the initial problem of distributing new blog posts in the blog universe. [...] Could there ever be a social network/microblogging aggregator?[...] In the end, I think the federation ideas behind Google Wave and BirdFeeder, and good old RSS blog feeds, will ultimately win out, with interoperability between the big vendors, just like they interoperate with email. Getting there, however, isn't going to happen easily. (Via Freedom to Tinker)

This is getting out of hand, even for those of us who have stayed away from Facebook and Twitter. Too many disparate streams, no single alerting system. Browser tabs are not the right tool for attention management. However, we seem so close: Google Wave, PubSubHubbub, and rssCloud all involve open publish-subscribe protocols that could be plumbed together to create notification hubs for multiple streams, filtered and ranked according to user preferences.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

2009-09-27T20:55:00.001-07:00

We had a great time at the Cal Shakes performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream this afternoon. Contrary to silly Merc "where are my fairies?" review, we felt that this cheeky reconstruction was better paced than a traditional rendering, and it brought out better the sharp edges of love that are sometimes gilded by fairy light. Doug Hara as a Puck bubbling with physical humor, Danny Scheie as a full-of-himself Bottom, and Lindsey Gates as a sharply snippy Helena were my favorites, but the whole cast did a great job in keeping the play moving and entangling humor, fear, and sexual tension.

Thanks to Brad DeLong for the blogged recommendation.

Localization of emotion perception in the brain of fish

2009-09-20T08:16:00.000-07:00

Localization of emotion perception in the brain of fish: This is beautiful work, showing that certain areas in the brain of mature Atlantic Salmon 'light up' when the animal is asked to categorize the emotions expressed by a set of (human) faces:

More amazing still is the fact that the fish performed this task while dead. (Via Language Log).

Read the whole thing. Some great comments too, and links to related material. Don't laugh too hard at fMIR misinterpretations, we are all susceptible to wishful thinking and to reading too much into laboriously collected data, and all statistical analyses of complex data use simplifications that could get us in trouble.

Someone better at comedy than me might have a go at translating the Monty Python dead parrot pet shop sketch into a dead salmon sketch at a neuroimaging conference. At least "pining for the fjords" would be just right already.

The laws of conditional probability are false

2009-09-12T11:03:00.000-07:00

The laws of conditional probability are false: This is all standard physics. Consider the two-slit experiment [...] In standard probability theory, the whole idea of conditioning is that you have a single joint distribution sitting out there--possibly there are parts that are unobserved or even unobservable (as in much of psychometrics)--but you can treat it as a fixed object that you can observe through conditioning (the six blind men and the elephant). Once you abandon the idea of a single joint distribution, I think you've moved beyond conditional probability as we usually know it.

As I noted in a comment to the original posting, the work of Chris Fuchs and his collaborators gives intriguing ways out from the apparent contradiction between conditional probability and quantum mechanics. Fuchs's latest paper on the subject is Quantum-Bayesian Coherence.

For Alan Turing, a real apology for once

2009-09-11T23:50:00.000-07:00

For Alan Turing, a real apology for once: In an age where (as Language Log has often had occasion to remark) many purported public apologies are just mealy-mouthed expressions of regret [...] it is good to see a genuine and direct apology for once, addressed (though more than half a century too late) to a man who deserved admiration, gratitude, and respect, but was instead hounded to death. The UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has released a statement regarding the treatment of Alan Turing in the early 1950s, and the operative words are:

on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.

(Via Language Log)

If you read the whole Downing Street statement, you might feel a twinge of regret that Turing's other gigantic contributions to humanity beyond cracking Enigma were not mentioned, but the apology is nevertheless strong and poignant, and Gordon Brown deserves praise for saying clearly what had been unsaid for so long by those in power. Thank you.

Data and metadata: Together again

2009-09-06T17:55:00.000-07:00

Data and metadata: Together again: Terry Jones has an excellent post that lists the problems introduced by maintaining a hard distinction between metadata and data. [...] This is all very squishy and messy because the distinction is, as Terry says, artificial. It comes from thinking about experience as content that gets processed, as if we worked the way computers do. More exactly, it comes from thinking about experience as a set of Experience Atoms that then have to be assembled; metadata are the labels that tell you that Atom A goes into Atom Z. But experience is far more like language than like particle physics or Ikea assembly instructions. And that’s for a very good reason: linguistic creatures’ experience cannot be understood apart from language. Language doesn’t neatly separate into content and meta-content. It all comes together and it’s all intertwingled. Language is so very non-atomic that it makes atoms realize how lonely they’ve been.

Or, as Zellig Harris argued, natural language is its own metalanguage.

I spoke recently at a VLDB panel where I really wanted to come at the issues from this point of view, but I felt that it would sound way too abstract to a database audience. Maybe I shouldn't have chickened out, but you can't demolish a deeply vested set of assumptions in just seven minutes...

Agnès Varda and Georges Brassens

2009-09-05T19:08:00.000-07:00

Just came back from the delicious Les plages d'Agnès. Varda lived on a boat in Sète as a child, so she could not avoid including a snippet of Sète native Georges Brassens's Supplique pour être enterré sur la plage de Sète, maybe my favorite among his songs.

Introducing RECAP: Turning PACER Around

2009-08-13T23:27:00.001-07:00

Introducing RECAP: Turning PACER Around: [...]Today, we are excited to announce the public beta release of RECAP, a tool that will help bring an unprecedented level of transparency to the U.S. federal court system. RECAP is a plug-in for the Firefox web browser that makes it easier for users to share documents they have purchased from PACER, the court's pay-to-play access system. With the plug-in installed, users still have to pay each time they use PACER, but whenever they do retrieve a PACER document, RECAP automatically and effortlessly donates a copy of that document to a public repository hosted at the Internet Archive. The documents in this repository are, in turn, shared with other RECAP users, who will be notified whenever documents they are looking for can be downloaded from the free public repository. RECAP helps users exercise their rights under copyright law, which expressly places government works in the public domain. It also helps users advance the public good by contributing to an extensive and freely available archive of public court documents. (Via Freedom to Tinker.)

This is so cool! If it takes off, the document analysis and text mining possibilities will be endless.

Charlie Haden's Quartet West

2009-08-09T22:51:00.001-07:00

Tonight at Yoshi's in San Francisco: Charlie Haden on bass, Ernie Watts on tenor sax, Alan Broadbent on piano, and Rodney Green on drums for Haden's birthday. Limpid sound, exquisitely balanced group playing, deeply lyrical. I'm out of words, really. Ana agrees that this might be best live jazz we've listened to since David Holland in 2004.

Ithaca

2009-08-06T23:18:00.001-07:00

Jeff Klein, the subject of the Open Source podcast I listened to at the gym this morning mentioned Cavafy and his poem Ithaca. I hadn't read that poem in decades, so tonight I picked Daniel Mendelsohn's recent translation that has been on my bedside table:

As you set out on the way to Ithaca
hope that the road is a long one,
filled with adventures, filled with understanding.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
Poseidon in his anger: do not fear them,
you’ll never come across them on your way
as long as your mind stays aloft, and a choice
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
savage Poseidon; you’ll not encounter them
unless you carry them within your soul,
unless your soul sets them up before you.
...

There are a few skills that improve with age; understanding more of the meanings of a great poem might be one of them.