Last night we went to our landlord’s place to sign the new lease. We drank wine, ate pizzelles, cheese, crackers, olives, and cookies and convinced them to remove the horrible smelling dead thing under the house before we move in. I played with the cutest softest bunny I’ve ever met, and she kept hopping up to me to lick my arm. They blasted “Love Shack” and danced. And this is why I enjoy having John and Pauline as landlords.
Author Archives: Anand Sarwate
memes and false significance
Suppose you observe something and ascribe to it some specal significance out of scale with the actual event due to the nature of the observation. For example, almost any form of divination, fortune cookies, and the like. Is there a name for that sort of psychological irrationality?
I finally broke down and did the page 23 meme where you grab the nearest book, turn to page 23, read the fifth line, and read your fortune. Mine read “This last relation is Bayes’ rule, and it will play a crucial role in our thinking about the neural code.” I think these things are bunk, but that sentence sounds suspiciously like a forecast for my life.
cherries!
I went to the Berkeley Bowl to buy cherries today, and came out with 6.36 pounds of the buggers after spending 20 minutes picking over the baskets. It was relaxing — hunting for the good ones with the other shoppers, exchanging remarks of cherry love, eating cherries until you get sick, how much better they are this year than last year. There were three varieties — Bing, Rainer, and Tulare. I hadn’t heard of the last one, but the one I tasted was good. Unfortunately they are not all for me. Some are destined for a pie, and some to a dinner party.
I wonder what parent invented the tale of cherry trees/watermelon vines growing out of their childrens’ bellybuttons. It’s one of those ideas that’s good on paper but doomed to failure on me. Think of how cool it would be to have your own cherry tree with you wherever you went!
Tony Kushner speaks out
There’s a mini-interview with Tony Kushner in the NY Times. Some quotes:
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our daily bread
Crumpets, those most holey of breakfast buns, are to be enjoyed with butter, jam, or marmelade. I, being the transgressive fool that I am, couldn’t be bothered to root around in the fridge for these divine spreads and instead took out the cream cheese. Oh sacrilege! Forgive me, Crumpet Gods, I knew not what I did!
Attend, my fellow breakfasters! Cream cheese does not make everything taste better. If you wish to rise at the final crumpet’s call, heed not not the siren song of Philadelphia, for it is the path to everlasting queasiness!
Our Crumpet in Refrigeration, hallowed be thy name, thy toasting come, thy top be spread at breakfast as it is in Heaven.
you know you are a nerd when…
Your bedtime reading is Kolmogorov and Fomin’s book on Functional Analysis. And to think I used to be so well-rounded…
misc notes
Apparently when the battery is reconnected to a car for the first time, it spends the next 10-15 minutes “learning the idle,” which determines how it is supposed to behave while idling. Any activity during this time goes into this learned idle behavior. So if your battery drains down and you have to get a jump, your car may have forgotten its idle and may need to be retrained. My newly retrained and retuned car is noticeably better. It’s amazing what a little TLC can do.
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BibTeX database
Thankfully, someone has written a PHP-based document database program for BibTeX. This will allow research groups to create a shared bibliographic database so that you don’t have to pass around some “master bibliography list,” or, worse yet, re-type in from scratch references that are used over and over again.
Unfortunately, it will require me to get my own server with a PostgreSQL database on it (ergodicity.net doesn’t have one). I know if I try to suggest it to the computing support people here they’ll be uninterested, even though you can create several instances of it on a single machine, so if they put it on the main server every group could make their own database. It’s not worth my time to argue the virtues of it to them, especially since I am no expert on the software and they will have fifteen reasons they shouldn’t do it, most of which rhyme with “understaffed.” One thing I definitely miss about MIT was the integration and depth of tech support. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a lot better organized than it is here.
Perhaps, if I am lucky, we will get a machine for the group on which I can install the software.
Al Gore is mad
He wrote a new speech which is long but worth reading.
More disturbing still was their frequent use of the word “dominance” to describe their strategic goal, because an American policy of dominance is as repugnant to the rest of the world as the ugly dominance of the helpless, naked Iraqi prisoners has been to the American people. Dominance is as dominance does.
Dominance is not really a strategic policy or political philosophy at all. It is a seductive illusion that tempts the powerful to satiate their hunger for more power still by striking a Faustian bargain. And as always happens – sooner or later – to those who shake hands with the devil, they find out too late that what they have given up in the bargain is their soul.
Sometimes he borders on the melodramatic, but I found it articulate and well-written. However, I’m not sure I’d want to hear Gore give it, given his sleep-inducing delivery.
discouraging spam
I got a piece of spam today that my filter missed:
Date: Wed, 26 May 2004 12:16:31 -0400 (EDT)
From: Richard Longly
To: asarwate@mit.edu
Subject: You don’t know it, but you’re incompetent
I think my computer purposely let this one through. They’re all against me, but one day I’ll show them. Then we’ll see who’s incompetent…
An Ergodic Walk 