02.11.07
Posted in Random thoughts at 10:16 pm by ducky
I drove down to the U.S. today to return Mom’s car. (We’d swapped our car for her minivan in order to carry more people on the Green College Ski trip). I had this unsettling interaction with a U.S. border guard:
Guard: Where are you headed?
Me: To return my mother’s car.
Guard: What’s your mom’s name?
Me: Natalie Sherwood. [Note: Mom’s name changed in this posting for privacy reasons — but I told the guard the truth.]
Guard: Natalie Frieda Sherwood?
Me: Uh, yes.
How did the guard know my mom’s middle name?
The idea I find least objectionable is that they took a picture of Mom’s license plate, did pattern recognition on it, and looked it up in a database of Washington State license plate numbers.
The idea I find most objectionable is that they noticed that Jim and I crossed the border frequently, and had the FBI go check us out.
Unsettling.
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01.08.07
Posted in Random thoughts at 9:55 pm by ducky
My buddy Vince tagged me with a chain blog thing. I have an allergic reaction to chain-anything (in part because of my experience with chain email letters), but this one looks kind of fun. I’m going to compromise by posting my six weird things but not by passing it on.
Six weird things about me:
- I proposed to my beloved husband.
- When I was in high school, I could palm a basketball. Left-handed. (Okay, I could only palm it left-handed for a fraction of a moment. Right-handed, I could walk around with it for minutes.)
- I always assemble my footwear in this order: right sock, left sock, right shoe, left shoe.
- Sleeping is one of my all-time favorite activities.
- I have been using email since 1974, except for a period between 1984 and 1988.
- I don’t cook much, but a dish I invented is called Fifth Street Danger. To get something yummy, bake alternating layers of:
- flour tortillas
- half salsa / half spaghetti sauce plus extra oregano
- mozzarella cheese
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11.09.06
Posted in Random thoughts at 11:14 am by ducky
Maria Klawe is giving a talk at UBC today about how girls and women differ from boys and men in their uses of and attitudes towards computers and computing. I will be sorry to miss it, but hubby and I are out of town attending to family.
When I was at Interval Research Corporation, Brenda Laurel was working there to develop computer games for girls. I remember her research boling down to basically that girls usually wanted stories and participation, while boys usually wanted to dominate and win. This seemed consistent with what I’d read in Deborah Tannen‘s book You Just Don’t Understand.
I was thinking about computer languages versus natural languages one day. It had always seemed that there were a lot of women in my French and English classes, while computer science was mostly men. To me, they seem to take similar skills (at least at one level). In both cases, there’s a very finicky and arbitrary syntax to learn. In both cases, it doesn’t matter what you feel like ought to be correct; the other culture/the computer are right and will insist on their correctness despite how you feel about it. (This Camel has Two Humps seems to indicate that accepting that rigidity is part of becoming a good programmer.) In both English and CS, I was taught to organize my thoughts with an outline/flowchart, then fill in the details bit by bit. In both, it takes years to gain mastery.
Why then, the gender discrepancy? After thinking about it, I decided that the women probably learn French so that they can converse, and the men learn CS so that they can dominate. I can imagine a girl thinking, “Why should I spend all that time learning its language when it can’t even have meaningful conversations?” I can imagine a boy thinking, “Why should I spend all that time learning French, when I can’t dominate them?”
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11.07.06
Posted in Art, Random thoughts at 3:53 pm by ducky
Merilyn Simonds, a cool (and fun!) Canadian author who is living in my dorm, has been hosting “salons”. Every week, about ten or fifteen of us sit around in front of the fire and discuss something.
Last week, Merilyn put forth that people believe fiction more than they believe non-fiction. She was channeling Janet Malcolm, who postulated that fiction is believed more wholeheartedly because a fictional world is the result of one person’s imagination. Malcolm supposes that because no other perspectives are possible except the one we are reading, we either fall for it or we don’t. When we read a nonfiction story, however, we know that there are undoubtedly many other perspectives, hence we suspend only part of our belief.
I was startled, but think that it is true in a sense: people certainly do have a more visceral reaction to stories than to facts — even if the stories are fiction. You can quote statistics about a disease until you are blue in the face, but that doesn’t have the same impact as a story about someone living with that disease.
Politicians know this. They trot out “real people” to convince the public of that the politician’s position is the right one. Companies know that. They make up compelling stories and feed them as advertisements to consumers. Even user interface designers know this: they make up fictional people and describe how they interact with the product.
Why does this work? Why are stories so compelling? I wasn’t sure that I bought Janet Malcolm’s idea; when I get lost in text — fiction or non-fiction — I don’t think I really think about the existence of other points of view. I’m too busy reading.
What made sense to me is that when we hear a story, we have to imagine it in our minds. I am guessing that the imagination of a story doesn’t fundamentally appear to our minds to be all that different from the memory of a story. I surmise that we are wired to believe our own memories over what other people tell us. (This is good! This is what keeps me from sending all my money to Nigeria!)
Well, yesterday, I happened across a Scientific American. It turns out that when you see somebody do an action, the same neurons fire as when you do that action yourself! Not only that, but the same neurons fire when you hear somebody perform an action with a distinctive sound (like ripping paper) as when you rip the paper yourself.
I speculate that when we hear a story of someone performing an action, the same neurons fire as if we did the action ourselves, thus getting inside our head in a very literal way. It wouldn’t be a surprise that stories seem very real to us. It would feel a lot like we were there.
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10.07.06
Posted in Random thoughts at 12:31 pm by ducky
I have been spent hours lately fighting with wireless on my IBM Thinkpad T42 on Ubuntu.
Most of the web sites out there that talk about how to deal with wireless issues focus on how to get the right driver for your card. Well, my card works just fine, thank you very much. It works great at home. I just couldn’t get it to work either at my office or at Mom’s.
I was turning all the knobs on the Ubuntu Network Settings wizard, but there turn out to be knobs and dials that the wizard doesn’t set.
When /etc/network/interfaces looked like this:
iface eth1 inet dhcp
wireless-essid momsplace
wireless-channel 6
wireless-key s:password
it didn’t work. However, when I set it to this:
iface eth1 inet dhcp
wireless-essid momsplace
wireless-channel 6
wireless-key s:password [1] restricted
then it did work. Apparently telling it [1] (i.e. to use key number one), and restricted (i.e. to always use encryption) were also necessary. I am mystified as to why those would be required.
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09.29.06
Posted in Random thoughts at 12:29 pm by ducky
Two of my favorite colleages at Google had mohawks, and they decided that I needed a mohawk, too. So on the last day of my internship, one gave me a buzz. The results:
That’s Dave on the right!
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05.25.06
Posted in Random thoughts at 9:08 pm by ducky
I have such a sense of liberation! I have no homework tonight that I should be working on!
I guess I’ve been kind of busy for the past three years — first Jim was in school, then I was taking prerequisites, then we were moving, then I was looking after my mother, then I was studying studying studying, then we were moving, then I was getting settled at my summer job… and now I have no homework! It’s wonderful!
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03.21.06
Posted in Random thoughts, Technology trends at 10:46 pm by ducky
As I mentioned before, webcams have proliferated to the point where I’ve seen some built in to computers, and this makes me wonder if they could be used for eye trackers.
Apparently the best eye trackers bounce an infra-red beam off of your cornea, and use the location of the IR spot to tell where you are looking. Some hearsay that says that the IR can damage the eyes, so maybe I wouldn’t want IR pointing at my eyeballs the whole time I’m on my computer.
However, webcams are so cheap that heck, use two! I somehow think that being able to triangulate would help.
If you could do good passive eye tracking, there are cool things you could do, like depth-of-field. Imagine you’re playing a computer game, and the stuff in the distance is sharp when you are looking at it and blurry when you are looking at things in the foreground. How cool would that be?
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03.14.06
Posted in Maps, Random thoughts at 11:28 pm by ducky
As my maps approach something reasonable for public distribution, I’ve been talking to more people about them. People are starting to ask me, “Who do you think will use them? What do you think they will use them for?”
I’m not quite sure how to answer that. I imagine marketing people will be interested, though I have to believe that they already have this information.
Would researchers use it? Maybe for preliminary investigation, but I would hope they’d use ArcGIS for anything they want to publish. While the maps “look right” to me for most places I know about, there are a few places that don’t look right to me. ArcGIS is fundamentally better — they have many many more resources than I do to get things right.
The “value add” for my maps is not “better”, but “cheaper” and “more accessible”. Twelve-year old Katie isn’t going to buy a copy of ArcGIS for her social studies class, but maybe she could use my maps for a report on the racial demographics of Texas. The Southern Poverty Law Center probably isn’t going to buy ArcGIS, but might go create a list of links to prisons to help people understand how African-Americans are hugely overrepresented in U.S. jails. Maybe Frieda and Joe will look at it to figure out what neighborhoods in Chicago they’d like to live in.
But my hunch is that most of the “use” won’t be obviously useful. I have certainly spent an awful lot of time just wandering around in the maps, exploring the demographics of my native country. Was this productive?
My maps aren’t very good for giving me answers, but they have given me lots of questions. Why are there so few rural blacks in Florida, when there are so many just across the border in Georgia? Why are there so few Latinos in East Texas compared to West Texas? Why is the median age so low on so many Native reservations? Why are there so many vacant housing units in northern Michigan and Minnesota?
However, I feel like these are good questions to have. Maybe I can’t articulate why I feel like a richer person for having explored U.S. demographics, but I absolutely do.
And if Katie, and Frieda, and Joe, and the Southern Poverty Law Center also feel enriched, then I will feel like I have succeeded.
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03.10.06
Posted in Canadian life, Random thoughts at 10:31 am by ducky
On Wednesday, I decided that I’d seen the last snow of the year. It wasn’t actually snow — it was very small hail — but I decided that was good enough.
Yesterday (Thursday), there was a light snow that didn’t stick. I decided that the hail from the previous day didn’t count.
Today, we woke up to big puffy fluffy snow that stuck. So today I have to decide that snow only counts if it sticks.
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