11.05.07
Posted in Gay rights at 4:30 pm by ducky
Recently, there was a large judgment against the Westboro Baptist Church for protesting at the funeral of a Marine. Their protest was typical for them: linking homosexuality to everything that could possibly be wrong in the world.
WBC is completely, totally, completely repugnant to me, but I cannot support the judgment. If we start putting limits on who can say what where, that is a very scary slippery slope. Even if free speech by The Bad Guys is only limited a little, it means that The Good Guys will also have to face limits.
Suppose, for a second, that Robert Mugabe died and the US government put on a state funeral for him. Mugabe is just about as close as you can get to pure evil in my book, and it would be completely, totally inappropriate for the US government to celebrate his life. I would absolutely travel thousands of miles to protest at such a funeral. I would be incensed if I were not allowed to protest at his funeral.
Rights are so annoying. For them to work for you, you have to also let them work for the people who revolt you. 🙁
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11.03.07
Posted in Random thoughts at 12:19 pm by ducky
I blogged about divisions over the proper reaction to a programming contest entry; recently something similar happened at UBC. In this case, however, it was a group of resource management people.
At the relatively new Aquatic Ecosystems Research Laboratory, they obtained the skeleton of an orca, which they hung suspended from the ceiling of the atrium. This was kind of a big deal — orca skeletons are a bit rare — so they threw a party to note its installation.
Well, before the party, someone somehow managed to put a stuffed seal into its mouth! The building’s denizens were deeply divided by this.
About a third of the people thought that it was disrespectful to put the seal in its mouth.
About a third of the people thought that it was really funny.
The remaining third looked up and said, “But, but…. that’s a Ringed seal, and orcas don’t eat Ringed seals!”
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10.30.07
Posted in Random thoughts at 3:55 pm by ducky
Drat. This study says that vitamin D is not as good as the previous study I mentioned showed. Vitamin D does help against colon cancer, it says, but nothing else.
Drat.
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10.26.07
Posted in Hacking at 12:29 pm by ducky
I heard a story once, but don’t have any idea where it came from. It’s too good a story to let die, so do any of you know where this story came from?
A computer science department had a programming competition of some sort. The winner would be the team that computed the result fastest. The contestants could enter as many times as they wanted without penalty.
One team entered a (slow) program that calculated the value, wrote it to a file, submitted it, and quit. They then entered a second program which read the value from that file and submitted it. They were way, way faster than any of the other teams.
The computer science department was split. About a third didn’t care. A third thought that the team were cheaters and should be completely disqualified and scorn heaped upon them. A third thought that the team was brilliant and should get the top prize and high praises.
The way I remember the story, the department was ripped apart by this issue. It laid bare some fundamental differences in value priorities such that the faculty was unable to work together.
Is this apocryphal? Urban legend? True? Help me out here….
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10.20.07
Posted in Random thoughts at 3:38 pm by ducky
A few people and I were sitting at breakfast talking about consonant clusters. Some languages — like Maori — are syllable-oriented: their words are pretty much consonant-vowel, consonant-vowel, consonant-vowel.
English, on the other hand, frequently has consonant sounds with no vowels in between, like school (S.K.oo.l) or desk (d.eh.S.K). I’m talking about sounds here, not letters, so taxi has a consonant cluster (t.aa.K.S.ee) in one letter, while phase has two letters but no consonant cluster (F.ay.z).
We got to wondering what the biggest sequence of consonant phonemes we could come up with in English was. The talented Bryan Theissen came up with sixth street (s.ih.K.S.TH.S.T.R.ee.t), which has six in a row. (Yes, yes, it’s two words, but I’m looking at spoken language, and there are no pauses between words.)
I did some searching on the Web and found that some Slavic languages have six consonants in a row (and they seem to mean spoken consonants, not just written), but I couldn’t find anything about seven (spoken) consonants in a row in any language. I wonder, is six consonantal phonemes the most that humans’ vocal production systems can handle?
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10.15.07
Posted in Random thoughts, Technology trends at 4:56 pm by ducky
UBC CS Prof. Rachel Pottinger‘s door has an article asking Why Women Become Veterinarians but Not Engineers. Fifty years ago, both were highly male-dominated fields. Today, women get about 3/4 of Vet Med degrees, while only about 1/5 of CS degrees. Maines doesn’t have an answer, but she does a good job of making the question interesting.
Right after I read Maines’ article, I read an article titled Is There Anything Good About Men by Roy F. Baumeister. It probably would have been better titled, “What are Men Good For?” The answer in the picture he paints is “taking risks.” He acknowledges that at the top end of the society, men dominate. To a very good first approximation, men are in charge. Presidents, CEOs, generals, Nobel Prize winners are usually men.
However, he points out that men are overrepresented at the both ends of society. He says that prisoners, the homeless. and people killed on the job (including soldiers) are also usually men. Interestingly, both the Nobel prize winners and the mentally retarded are more often male than female.
He goes on to develop his thesis more, but the basic idea is that men and women might have the same average ability at something, but that the distribution is usually much “fatter” for men than women. There are more men taking risks than women. Sometimes they succeed wildly; sometimes they fail wildly. Women hold down the middle ground, neither failing nor succeeding spectacularly.
Now go back to CS vs. Vet Med. I contend that CS has a much higher risk associated with it than Vet Med. If you don’t keep right on top of emerging computing technologies, it is really easy to get obsoleted in CS. The whole industry has changed several times in the past twenty years. Meanwhile, the architecture of the dog has not changed much in the past 200 years.
Even if you stay current with computing technologies, you aren’t guaranteed safe harbour during the high-tech world’s booms and busts. There is always the threat that someone else will release a product that will put you out of business, in part because the cost of distributing the product is so low. It is hard to imagine, however, how Microsoft could release a new product that would eliminate the need for someone to put antiseptic on Fido’s cut. The “distribution cost” of applying a bandage is very high.
The high-tech world is also more sensitive to fluctuations in consumer tastes and consumer confidence. While someone might delay buying an iPhone because they were nervous about their job getting cut, very few people euthanize their cat because money is tight.
It might be, then, that one way to make CS more attractive to women would be to make it less risky. Unfortunately, even though I have a pretty good imagination, I can’t think of how to make the high-tech world less risky.
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10.06.07
Posted in Random thoughts at 3:35 pm by ducky
Elaine’s Cookies
If I recall correctly, the “Elaine” is Elaine Donotov, who lived down the street from us when I was just a wee child. She probably doesn’t remember me, and might not even remember my mom… but these are the best cookies in the whole world. This recipe makes a ton of really really dangerous cookies.
P.S. Apologies for the American measurement units. It’s how I got the recipe…
Melt together:
- 1 pound butter or margarine
- 1 pound brown sugar (which I have listed as about 2 1/3 cups brown sugar, but that doesn’t “feel” right to me)
Let the butter-stuff cool for a bit. While it is cooling, beat together
- 3 eggs
- 2 tablespoons vanilla
Get the dry-stuff measured out into a very big bowl and mix it all up.
- 6 cups rolled oats
- 1 cup wheat germ
- 1.5 cups flour
- 1 cup milk powder
- 1.5 teaspoons baking soda
By the time you mix the egg-stuff together and then mix the dry-stuff together (not with each other!), the butter-stuff should have cooled down at least a little.
Mix the egg-stuff with the butter-stuff. NOTE! If you put the egg-stuff in too-hot butter-stuff, the eggs will curdle. (I found on the web that eggs curdle at about 180 degrees Fahrenheit.) You need to either let the butter-stuff cool way down or mix the butter-stuff slowly into the egg-stuff. Take a very small quantity of butter-stuff and drizzle it into the egg-stuff, stirring madly. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until the egg-stuff is very diluted with the butter-stuff. At some point when you get bored, you can decide it’s diluted enough, and dump this mixture into the butter-stuff and mix it in.
Dump all the egg-butter-stuff into the dry-stuff. Toss the egg-butter-stuff pot into the sink, you’re done with it.
Wash your hands, they are about to get dirty.
Go mix the egg-butter-stuff with the dry-stuff. It will feel like it’s more liquid and sticky than it ought to be. Don’t panic. Mix it all up as best you can, a little more, and then go wash your hands again. Get all the egg-butter-stuff off of your hands.
Now, magically, when you stick your hands in the batter again, the batter won’t stick to your hands nearly as badly. I’m not quite sure how this magic happens, but it does. (Maybe because the butter-stuff has cooled down? Maybe because the dry-stuff absorbed some butter-stuff?) Oh sure, you can make the batter stick to your hands, but it’s not nearly as bad as you feared about five minutes ago.
At this point, you could put walnut-sized drops of dough on a cookie sheet and bake them. However, this recipe makes a lot of cookies, and if you eat all those yourself today, you will need to buy new trousers. And if you bake them all, you will eat a good fraction of them. So instead, wash your hands again and tear out about ten pieces of wax paper about 20-30 cm wide.
Roll “logs” of cookie dough between your hands. I like to make the logs about 2-3 cm in diameter, and slightly shorter than the wax paper. You might need to make two half-logs and join them together. That’s okay, they will live.
When they are all snug in the wax paper, toss them in the freezer and take out as needed.
Cut the logs into slices about .5 cm thick, pop them onto cookie sheets, and cook them at some temperature until they are done.
I hear you complaining that that isn’t very precise. It isn’t, sorry. I don’t have written down what to use, and the oven that we just cooked them in is kind of flakey… so I’m not sure. Just try something and pay close attention the first time. I think I cooked these at something around 325 degrees Fahrenheit for around twenty minutes, but I’m not completely sure about that.
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Posted in Random thoughts at 3:34 pm by ducky
Different subcultures have different sayings. Among performing artists, you say, “Break a leg!” to wish them luck. Among pilots, you say, “Blue skies!”
We were eating with one of our dormmates who happens to also be a pilot. She finished and stood up to go, groaning that she needed to go work on writing up her thesis. So I wished her, “Blue screens!”
For some reason, she didn’t appreciate the thought. 🙂
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09.28.07
Posted in Random thoughts at 9:33 am by ducky
Marc Olson shot himself on Friday; I went to the funeral yesterday.
Marc was a good man, a happy man when I saw him last, about nine months ago, over lunch in Vancouver. He exuded happiness and success. While I didn’t know him extremely well, I had spent a bit of time with him and his family, as they owned the property next to my husband’s family’s vacation property out on Stuart Island. I remember them at a New Year’s Eve party, I remember setting off fireworks at his property, and other relatively banal but fun family-ish gatherings.
He was a pilot, so he and my husband had things to talk about. He had been the design manager for Microsoft Outlook 2002, so he and I had things to talk about. (He is the one who arranged for me to get an evaluation copy of Outlook 2002 when I was working on my book.)
I have been struggling to understand why he would shoot himself. He was professionally very successful, had lots and lots and lots of friends (literally hundreds of people came to his funeral), and I always knew him as a happy vigorous guy.
My best theory right now about why he killed himself is that it was the result of damage he sustained in his third, most recent, and I guess now final plane crash. The first time, he was on a grass strip, hit a bump, and the propeller nicked the ground. Props are so strong and planes are so light that it flipped the plane over. He walked away from that one with no damage.
The second time, he was landing on a sandbar, and I don’t remember exactly what happened, but his body sustained some annoying but easily survivable damage — like a broken ankle or something like that. He was also away from roads, so apparently it was a real pain to get him out, but he wasn’t badly hurt.
The third time, he ran out of gas just short of the runway, and had to land in the trees. While he didn’t break any bones, he was banged up pretty badly. I heard that he was able to walk to a road, flag down a driver, and get the driver to take him to a hospital. (Can you imagine being that driver? Having some bloody guy walk out of some trees to the road? Would you stop?) I heard that he lost so much blood that the doctors wouldn’t let him do anything high-altitude (including getting in a plane, even as a passenger) because he was low on hemoglobin. I heard that he had a head injury of some sort.
The best story that I can fabricate is that the head injury messed up his brain somehow, or that the steroids they fed him to help him heal messed up his brain chemistry…. because I just cannot imagine the Marc I knew killing himself.
So long, Marc — the world is a sadder, poorer place without you.
Addenda:
- There is a more formal obit.
- Keywords: Marc Alan Olson, Microsoft, funeral, death, suicide.
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09.24.07
Posted in Canadian life at 10:01 am by ducky
Here’s another difference between US and Canadian culture that totally surprised me: Canadians normally do not allow write-in candidates for their elections. In the US, it is normal and customary to allow write-ins.
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