06.08.08

My (almost) lunch with Steve Wozniak

Posted in Random thoughts at 12:00 pm by ducky

One day, probably twenty years ago, I was in a car with a bunch of friends of mine, and Arthur asked the question, “If you could have lunch with anybody, who would it be?” I immediately answered “Richard Feynman”, having just finished one of his highly entertaining books. A chorus of voices rang out: “But he’s dead!” “You didn’t say they had to be alive”, I retorted.

After a bit more thought, I chose Steve Wozniak. He was famously geeky, and interesting to me because of that. I had heard that he had started a company Unuson, and was excited about what new technology The Woz might bring out. And he was alive.

While Arthur’s challenge of who to have lunch was was purely hypothetical, it got me thinking. My father had been in the Physics Department at the University of Illinois with two-time Nobel Prize winner John Bardeen. I had realized years later, after Bardeen had died, that I could have probably gotten to chat with John Bardeen if I had asked when I was a kid. The idea of lunch with Steve Wozniak gnawed at me, and finally I wrote him a letter, telling him that I would like to have lunch with him. I expected him to say no, but to my surprise he said yes.

It turned out to be difficult to actually schedule the lunch, between my schedule and his, but we finally got a date and time settled… and then I had to cancel because of jury duty. After that, it fell through. I don’t remember precisely what happened, but I have a vague recollection that he simply got cold feet. This made perfect sense to me; if I were a wealthy celebrity, I don’t think I’d meet a stranger for lunch!

Still, the experience made me bolder about asking to meet people. At one point a few years ago, a talented young man named Ping Yee popped up on my radar. On the day when I saw his name in my daily San Jose Mercury News in two different articles on two different subjects and ran across his name in some source code, I decided I would try to meet him. I think he was kind of bemused and puzzled at that, but I ended up having a very interesting lunch with him.

While I was at Green College, I invited a number of the university’s top brass to have dinner with my husband and I, in order to give them more exposure to Green College, and I was a little surprised at the number who accepted.

I still haven’t had lunch with Richard Feynman, though. 😉

05.27.08

Rape by soldiers

Posted in Politics, Random thoughts at 11:49 am by ducky

There have been reports that peacekeepers have been raping children. This is bad, but unfortunately not surprising.  History seems to show that if you give men weapons, little accountability, and few dating options, they will rape.

There is a solution that seems blindingly obvious to me: send women soldiers.

I wonder if there is a place for an all-women, international peace-keeping army.  I can imagine that would be a great way to serve.

05.12.08

it's not just me!

Posted in Hacking, Random thoughts at 8:31 pm by ducky

It’s not just me! Someone else gets frustrated by Web sites that won’t allow dashes or spaces in credit card numbers!

It is just unfathomable to me why any Web site would not insert the ONE LINE OF CODE to handle spaces and dashes. I am glad to see that it’s not just me.

05.10.08

geek humour

Posted in Family, Hacking, Random thoughts at 9:38 am by ducky

My husband and I are geeks. This manifests itself in many ways. One way is that when we moved up to Canada from Palo Alto, we numbered all of the boxes and logged all of the contents of all of the boxes.

In anticipation of our move to a tiny tiny apartment in downtown Vancouver, I packed up a box of books and class notes to take down to our storage locker in the US. Jim said that he’d been assigning new boxes numbers in the 200 series — 200, 201, etc.

Me: “Jim, would you be a name service for box numbers?”

He pulled out his PDA and got ready.

Me: “Um, ‘Hello.'”

Jim said nothing but was suppressing a grin. He continued to say nothing.

Me: “Doh! Right! Carriage-return, carriage-return!”

Much laughter ensued. We are such geeks. 🙂

(When taking DIRECTLY to Web servers, i.e. not through a Web browser, you have to issue a command like “GET / HTTP/1.0” and follow it with *two* carriage returns. One won’t do, and it’s a really easy mistake to make.)

(PS, Yes, I know that HELOs (used in email protocols) don’t need two carriage returns.)

(PPS, Yes, I know that technically it’s CRLF, CRLF, not CR, CR.)

04.22.08

Welcome to Canada, please stay

Posted in Canadian life, Random thoughts, University life at 4:29 pm by ducky

Canada made a change yesterday to the International Student Post-Graduation Work Permit. From about two years ago to yesterday, there was a program in place where if you

  • graduated from a Canadian college or university
  • had a job offer
  • applied for a permit

then you could get a work permit for a year at the company you had the offer from. The company would not have to go through a process of proving that there were no Canadians who could do the job. (If you and said company parted ways, you could change the permit.)

One catch of the program was that while you were not working, you couldn’t leave the country without forfeiting the right to that permit. You were legally allowed to be in the country and look for work. (You just couldn’t leave.)

For many people, not being able to leave might not be a hardship, but I have lots of family two hours south of UBC. If something happened to my mother, I would need to leave Canada. So I figured I had to have a job before I graduated, and looking for work while trying to finish my thesis was a pain.

Now, the requirement for a job offer has been dropped, and the period has been extended. I have get the right to live and work in Canada for three years or as long as my program of study was, whichever is smaller. (This probably means two years.) Not only that, it is a totally open work permit. I can work for anyone, and I can even not work for an employer (i.e. I could consult if I can’t find a Real Job).

This relieves the stress of looking for a job enormously!

really strange phishing

Posted in Random thoughts, Too Much Information at 9:19 am by ducky

I got email from a “Carlie Martindaley” today that sure looks like phishing:

Ducky <at> webfoot.com,   (the email address was properly formatted in the message I got)

Hello Ducky,

I am from your Middle School years and finally got your email.

I have fallen in love with your shoes and I just wanted to know, did you spray paint them? They are so shiny, like fresh glass on a mirror, I cannot resist sending this email. Please tell your shoes, I love them, and thier laces are the most beautiful things.

From,

Annoymous

  1. Starting off with my email address before my name looks fishy, like a computer generated it.
  2. I don’t know any Carlie.
  3. I don’t know any Martindaley.
  4. I didn’t go to Middle School.
  5. I haven’t painted any shoes.
  6. I haven’t sent any old pals email.

The strange thing is that there was no call to action in the message!  The only links were a mailto URL attached to my email address (I took it out for the purposes of this post) and a generic Yahoo ad at the bottom of the page.

Strange.  Maybe the spambots have gotten lonely?

03.22.08

Snowboarding

Posted in Canadian life, Married life, Random thoughts at 9:26 am by ducky

My beloved husband has been wanting to try snowboarding for a while. When I realized late on Thursday that Good Friday was a statutory holiday, we made very quick plans to go to Grouse Mountain, a local ski area. Jim and I talked by phone briefly, and later in the day, when I was in the midst of something, got a message from him, asking me to to confirm that I wanted him to go ahead and buy tickets etc. Sure, sure, go ahead.

Um. I didn’t read the email carefully. He asked if he should buy snowboard rental and lessons for both of us. And I said yes. Oooooops.

I took one snowboarding lesson seventeen years ago that was a total disaster. I was up at Tahoe for a M-F trip, and took the lesson on Monday. I was so sore that I couldn’t ski on Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Or Thursday. Friday, I gave up and came home.

I was thus quite nervous about another lesson, especially since I am seventeen years older now. However, the instructor was better, and I am seventeen years wiser. I didn’t try to push it, and took frequent rest breaks. The snow was also nice and soft yesterday — there had been about 11 cm of new snow in the past 24 hours, and so I fell into nice fluffy stuff and not onto ice. (A ski patrol guy we sat next to at lunch told us that he was not allowed to ever say that the snow conditions were “icy”. He was required to say that the snow was “hard”.)

Looking at the lesson from a distance, you wouldn’t think it would be so strenuous. After all, I would simply slide down a little hill, sit down, rest, take off my board, stand up, walk up the hill, sit down, rest, put on my board, stand up, repeat. So it would be sort of like walking up a hill carrying a relatively light board, sitting down and resting every five minutes.  Not so hard, right?

Wellllll…

  • While you are sliding down, you have to have your knees bent and springy. This takes some exertion.
  • There are two ways to go down: facing down the hill and facing up the hill. In both cases, you have to lean into the uphill edge. I found going down while facing up the hill enormously physically strenuous for my feet. I found pulling my toes up (to dig in my heels) much easier than pushing them down. I could pull up my toes by pulling up my whole foot. It didn’t seem to be adequate to push my foot (e.g. the balls of my feet) down with my calf; it seemed I also needed to push with my toes e.g. tense the muscles in my arch. I happen to have a very very narrow foot with a very high arch, so it felt like I didn’t have a lot of muscle mass in my arch to point my toes down. It was actually painful to go down the hill pushing with my toes. I suspect that I was doing something wrong.
  • Standing up on the board from a sitting position when facing down the mountain, is really difficult, and takes quite an exertion of strength. Your feet and board are way in front of your center of gravity. You have to get your center of gravity above the board — while still keeping pressure on the uphill edge of the board. What I learned to do was to grab the downhill edge with my right hand and pulling while pushing myself up with my left hand. Jim’s physical geometry and flexibility are such that he was not able to grab the downhill edge of the board like I could.
  • While standing up, if you let the pressure off of the back edge of the board, the board will start to slide. Having the board slide while you are shifting weight is a really easy way to cause you to immediately re-enter a sitting position. Thus, the number of standing-ups  probably averaged four or five per trip down.

Note: It is much easier to stand up if you are facing uphill with your board downhill from you because you can get your center of gravity several feet off the ground just by kneeling. However, then you are facing up the mountain, which is difficult. Once I learn how to do turns reliably (shifting from looking uphill to looking downhill), my life will be much better.

Jim wants to do three or four more snowboarding lessons. Ulp. I guess the exercise will be good for me.

03.11.08

malleability of time

Posted in Random thoughts at 10:52 pm by ducky

A post by Scott Rosenberg took me to a NY Times article that included this nugget:

Another ingenious bit of research, conducted in Germany, demonstrated that within a brief time frame the brain can shift events forward or backward. Subjects were asked to play a video game that involved steering airplanes, but the joystick was programmed to react only after a brief delay. After playing a while, the players stopped being aware of the time lag. But when the scientists eliminated the delay, the subjects suddenly felt as though they were staring into the future. It was as though the airplanes were moving on their own before the subjects had directed them to do so.

I have heard people be spooked about dreams where it would make logical sense for something to happen, and then that event would happen in real life (waking them). For example, someone saying, “answer the phone” in the dream, followed by the real-life phone ringing. I have wondered for a long time about whether the brain shuffles the perception of time in order for the ringing phone to make more sense; the joystick experiment gives my theory some more plausibility.

When I was in college, two guys I knew messed with people’s perception of time. They took a sequence of photos something like this:

  1. Dave at the top of a well-known 12-story dorm with a patio on the roof.
  2. Dave standing next to the railing and waving at the camera.
  3. Dave with one leg over the railing.
  4. Dave standing on the roof but on the opposite side of the railing, holding on to the railing.
  5. Closer-in shot of Dave with his hands off the railing (and his feet not visible).
  6. Closer-in shot of the railing with no Dave.
  7. Shot taken from above of Dave sprawled on the sidewalk below.

A perfectly healthy-looking Dave would show this sequence to people, who would be completely flabbergasted. (The way Dave told the story, it seemed like a little TILT light would flash over their heads.) How could he possibly be hale after a twelve-story fall? And the photos proved that he fell! Some people quickly came to the conclusion that he must have a twin who committed suicide, and refused to budge from that conclusion.

In fact, the truth was much simpler. After shot #5, Dave climbed back over the railing and went downstairs. His buddy took shot #6 of the bare railing, and then waited for Dave to get down to the sidewalk. When Dave got downstairs, he sprawled on the sidewalk and his buddy took shot #7.

People really wanted to stitch the images together into a continuous story, but anything could happen in between the photos. All you knew was what happened at those discrete points in time when the photos were taken; everything in between was up for grabs.

This relates to how I understand wave-particle duality. (Stick with me for a second!) In the classic wave-particle duality experiment, you have two slits in a wall, a particle (e.g. photon) gun on one side of the wall, and a sensor on the other side of the wall (e.g. film). You send the particles through the slits one at a time, as slowly as you like, and you will get a diffraction pattern on the film. How is this possible? What are the particles interfering with — you’re only sending the particles through one at a time!

Well, where do you know what is happening with the particle? Where there is some sort of measurement event — at the gun and at the film. What the particle does in between is its own business. Just as you can’t see Dave going down the stairs from the photos, you can’t see what the particle does in between the gun and the film.

Furthermore, the only entropic events are at the gun and at the film. Entropy is important because it is what determines the direction of time.

My mental model of what happens in the two-slit experiment is that the particle is free to move backwards and forwards in time in between the gun and the film and so it interferes with itself. I also imagine the particle as being a three-dimensional string in four-dimensional space-time; the string is stapled at the gun and at the film, but in between it is loose to wiggle around as much as it feels like. (I have no idea how this relates to how “real” physicists think of it, but it is a mental model that makes me happy.)

Okay, now back to the phone ringing in the dream. We sense that A happened before B because our brain essentially “tags” entropic events as happening “before” and “after”. But I suspect that there is nothing that forces our brain to tell us the truth. Dave’s buddy might have taken picture #7 first, then #6, then #2-5, then #1, but when Dave presented them in the order 1-7, he caused our brain to come to a conclusion that was entirely false. Similarly, I bet our brains can do a little bit of rearranging when the phone rings.

And just like I couldn’t tell if Dave presented the photos out of order, I will never be able to tell if my brain presents impressions of the world out of order.

P.S. Props to the late Larry Rubin, who explained to me the idea of photons interfering with themselves.

P.P.S. Sorry this post was so long; I didn’t have time to make it shorter.

02.21.08

open source funding models

Posted in Hacking, Random thoughts at 9:05 pm by ducky

Paul Ramsey posted recently that open source was funded by four basic types:

  • The altruist / tinkerer
  • The service provider
  • The systems integrator
  • The company man

He continued by saying, “Notably missing from this list is ‘the billionaire’ and ‘the venture capitalist’.”

I have to quibble a little bit.

Mitch Kapor personally financed (most of) the Open Source Applications Foundation, which pumped quite a bit of money into open source projects.

Obviously a lot of it went into the Chandler project, but some went into various framework projects in order to make them work well enough to use.  For example, OSAF supported someone full-time for several years to improve the Mac version of WxWidgets.

There is also a fair amount of work done by people who made a ton of money and are now tinkering.  I know personally a few people who made boodles on IPOs, retired, and now spend their time on open-source projects.  While you could say that these are in Paul’s “tinkerer” class, these people can invest a lot more energy than someone on nights and weekends is likely to.

I will acknowledge, however, that the fraction of open source work financed by rich folks is probably small.

However, I think Paul is missing some significant sources of open source financing.  Paul’s definition of “company man” talks of people who have a little bit of discretionary time at their work.  Maybe it’s different outside of Silicon Valley, but I don’t know many people who have much discretionary time at work.  On the other hand, there are a fair number of people whose work leads them to contribute to open source in the course of their work.

  • Sometimes they use an open-source project in their work, find that it has some bugs that they need to fix to make their project work, and contribute the fixes back.  This is self-interest: they would rather not port their fixes into each new rev of the open-source project.  My husband said that his former company contributed some fixes for Tk for this reason.
  • There are a few companies who use a technology so much that they feel it worthwhile to support work on that technology.  Google pays Guido von Rossum’s salary, for example.
  • I don’t know what category to put Mozilla into, but it makes money from partnerships (i.e. Google) to finance its development.
  • There is a non-zero amount of money that goes into open source — directly or indirectly — from governments and other non-profit funding agencies.  For example, the Common Solutions Group gave a USD$1.25M to OSAF; the Mellon Foundation gave USD$1.6M.  This made perfect sense: it is far cheaper for university consortia to give OSAF a few million dollars to develop an open-source calendar than it is to give Microsoft tens of millions every year for Exchange.
    • While I don’t have hard data, I bet that a fair amount of open-source work gets done at universities.  All of my CS grad student colleagues work with open source because it’s cheap and easy to publish with.  While they might not release entire projects, I bet I’m not the only one who has fed bug fixes back to the project.

02.20.08

Elephant parchment?

Posted in Art, Random thoughts at 10:05 pm by ducky

BTW, one of the things that I love about living at Green College is that there is always someone around who knows the answer.  Over the weekend, I got fixated on a big empty wall at our host’s place, and decided that it needed a huge forgery of a medieval map.  But it needed to be BIG to fit the wall.

Medieval maps tend to be about the size of a sheepskin because, well, vellum was made from sheepskins.  They just didn’t have six foot sheep.

I started wondering what kind of story you could make up about how it was so big.  Elephant parchment?   And this got me to wondering how big a piece of leather you could get from an African elephant… so this morning I asked Jake at breakfast.  Jake tracks elephants in Kenya, of course.  (Don’t you routinely have breakfast with elephant trackers?)

Based on his estimates, I could get a rectangular piece around six feet by twelve feet.

Jake also told me that they make paper out of elephant dung.  Elephants, not being ruminants, pass fiber through undigested and in great form for making paper.  Even better for my medieval map forgery!

Update: While it isn’t hugely common, leather is made even today of sealskin and walrus skin, so presumably you could make parchment out of it as well.  Walruses are about 3m long; the biggest elephant seal on record was almost 7m long.

I found some evidence that Canadians successfully made leather out of the skin of white (beluga) whales.  Belugas measure up to 5m long.  If the skin of belugas is similar to that of blue whales, (32m long), then it seems like the maximum size of a piece of parchment is probably around 30m long.  That’s one big piece of parchment!

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