Author Archives: Anand Sarwate

The Cheese Monkeys

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By Chip Kidd. This is a very cute novel about how a college freshman discovers graphic design though a course on “Commercial Art” taught by one of the funniest cariacatures of the vicious art teacher, Winter Sorbeck. Chip Kidd is himself a graphic designer, and the book shows it — wide margins, painstakingly chosen typefaces, information all over the cover of the book and so on. Many might say that it sufferes from the excesses of the McSweeney’s crowd, but if you are a designer, one expects your book to be itself a design.

The story is straighforward enough, and although there were very few surprises, Kidd’s writing is so funny and engaging that I couldn’t put it down. It’s a wonderful book for a rainy afternoon or a boring commute — it’ll wake you up and you’ll be laughing.

the absurdists could not do better

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Via Talking Points Memo, a transcript of a White House press conference. As a script, it is kind of lacking the absurdist oomph that The Bald Soparano has, but as a start, I’m sure it could make a scene to rival the best of the absurdist theater.

Admittedly, the press corps were being pretty ruthless, but the inability of our current administration to answer a simple question straight-on makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of forthrightness. How the president manages to make himself seem like a straight-talking man of the people while engaging in this ring-a-ring of roses boggles my mind.

open course ware

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MIT’s Open Course Ware project is designed to bring some of the excellent teaching materials developed by MIT to the world free of charge. I just noticed that they have hired some people to translate the sites into Spanish and Portuguese.

I actually use OCW sometimes to look up things in lecture notes. It seems like the structure is too restrictive to cover some classes, however. I guess the lecture notes/problem sets/midterm paradigm is dominant at MIT that OCW can have wide coverage if not universal coverage. If only Berkeley’s educational IT support was so organized. Some might argue that it’s a functioning chaos. I find it inefficient and wasteful.

free scripts

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“I did not then. I just riz the loy and let fall the edge of it on the ridge of his skull, and he went down at my feet like an empty sack, and never let a grunt or groan from him at all.”

“Thy worst. I fart at thee.”

“Mother, give me the sun.”

“Dot vhiskey gat kick, by yingo!”

“Didst thou ever see / A lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world / Is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o’er our heads, / Like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge / Of the small compass of our prison.”

good old general hooker

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The last entry reminded me of a more local story — some strip clubs had a charity event where the dancers wanted to raise money for a charity. Then ended up with a check for $4,300, but unsurprisingly, nobody wanted to take it. Having known at least one person who’s worked as a stripper, I wonder if the social stigma (and thus poor regulation) contributes to the poor working conditions for many strippers. It’s certainly a major viewpoint in the debate on prostitution. Only in San Francisco, however, would there be activists trying to legalize prostitution.

Contrary to popular belief, the word “hooker” did not originate with General Hooker, the infamous Civil War figure whose soldiers frequented every brothel on the long march home. Another one of my cherished jewels of knowledge destroyed by the harsh reality of accurate history. Next thing you know, they’ll be telling me Columbus didn’t discover America.

and bingo was his name-o

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I think I neglected to blog about this earlier, but one of the funniest things about Brazil to me was their obsession with Bingo. In the US, Bingo has been relegated to the church basment social and nursing home, and occasionally for little kids (I have fond memories of playing in the library on Fun Night at Yankee Ridge Elementary School). Bingo is not what you would call a sexy game, like baccarat, poker (that’s for you, Jeff), or to a lesser extent, craps

In Brazil Bingo is a big deal. They have a Bingo Association that publishes pamphlets extolling the virtues of playing Bingo, and how various celebrities financed their careers through the game. The parlors are as full of glitz as any Vegas casino, employees smartly dressed in white shirts and green vests. The room is dominated by a large board covered in numbers which are lit up when they are selected by the MC. Cocktail waitresses serve caipirinhas or whatever your heart may desire. You want to be part of that scene, you want to be one of those people having fun and making money by getting five in a row, column, or diagonal.

So naturally, when the goverment tries to cut down on corruption by stopping the gambling, 30,000 Brazilians take to the streets to protest. If they did the same thing in Vegas, would we have tens of thousands of strippers take to the streets in protest?

philosophy at mit

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Apparently you should go to MIT for philosophy even though they have a tiny department. I often wonder how my life would have been different had I gone to some other graduate school — the size of Berkeley took me by surprise, even though I grew up around UIUC. I think I would have found Caltech too claustrophobic, which is why I ended up not going there. And UCSD managed to botch their recruitment effort spectacularly. But perhaps I should have taken a closer look at the faculty. As it stands, I feel very lucky that I found my advisor, since he wasn’t here when I showed up last year.

my first publication

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This was my life recently — I had worked on an algorithm for emulating a FIFO buffer using a switch and clocked delay lines last summer, but couldn’t manage to get my lower bound and upper bound on the switch size to coincide, so I sort of figured that my effort wasn’t really worth it.

On the 13th I was approached by the professor I worked with on this project last summer and was told he wanted to send it to the Globecom 2004 conference. The deadline was 12 AM today. So I worked on the proofs for my bounds, typed it all up, and sent to him. A few days later he got back to me and asked for some better figures, which I made. Then on Friday he said he had reformulated my proof a different way, because mine was too obfuscated. It seemed to me that he had misunderstood my algorthm (because of the obfuscation, perhaps), so it ended with me saying I would rework the entire proof.

At this point we started q2q for Marat/Sade, so I was in the theater 12 hours a day and couldn’t really use my laptop. But I sat on stage and during holds I scribbled out a new proof. Around dinner time on Saturday I got an email saying that he had worked out the misunderstanding, so I didn’t need to work out a new proof. I celebrated by partying with the cast that evening. Sunday was more q2q — at lunch I got another email saying that there was an error in one of my proofs and that unless I could fix it, the paper was a no-go. I spent the rest of q2q and rehearsal revising the proof in little breaks. Then before leaving I typed it up, planning on sending it when I got home.

When I got home, I sent the email, but had gotten another one saying he had proved the lemma anyway, and all was good to go except for a figure that needed to be fixed. The deadline was a mere few hours away. I managed to get the figure done, and the paper made it in by the deadline. My first real publication ever, possibly. Now he thinks we can send it to a journal if we can append a literature review to contextualize it.

There’s a lot to learn from this experience of alternating rapidly between “this paper is wrong and not worth publishing” to “it just needs a few more fixes.” It was certainly stressful, and the fact that I have a lot more at stake in terms of my career by having something published made it even worse.

One of the things this professor said to me is that “proofs are meant to be machine checked” — this runs contrary to the pedagogical approach to proof-writing that I am familar with. In many of my mathematics classes, starting with Mike Artin‘s 18.701-702 abstract algebra class, the emphasis was on building an intuitive notion of why certain propositions were true, and also (more subtly I think) on the process by which certain results were reached. It’s important to know that because A is true, then B is true, but there’s also value to know that B is true because A implies C and C implies B, not because A implies D, since D does not imply B. The route is important. In engineering papers of this type the focus is the result, and the proof is there more or less to cover your ass. As such, it should be concise and almost mechanical, as all good ass covers are.

A related lesson is that once you want to package some idea, it’s good to write it from scratch. Change all of your pet notation, which might be legacy notation from previous approaches to the problem. Condense lemmas into super-lemmas. That way, when you give it to your co-author, they don’t develop misunderstandings about what you are trying to do and then throw up their arms in frustration, saying that your algorithm is totally wrong.

Finally, it’s never over until the fat lady sings. The moment one commits to submitting a piece of research for publication, it will remain an albatross of stress around your neck, squawking loudly and pecking you mercilessly until you submit the damn thing. If the bird seems to be quiet for a little bit, that’s just because it’s preening, and you can be damn sure it will resume attacking you at the least convenient moment.

But then at the end you have something to be proud of.

bridging the divide

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The first annual UNIDO-UC Berkeley conference on technology and development is going to be held on campus here. UNIDO is the United Nations International Development Organization — not as well known as UNICEF or some others, but a biggie. I had gone to an early planning meeting for this conference but didn’t apply to be on the coordinating committee due to time constraints. But I got the email for the conference today, and the reduced rate for students is $75 for the whole conference, or $25 a day. For this you must also specify what sessions you will attend.

This is a conference being sponsored by the university. The justification for such a fee is that “otherwise students will just come for the free food.” I understand their concern, but clearly this conference is an example of preaching to the choir — those who are already active in development research will fork over the money because they hope it will help their work, and those who merely think they might be interested will be turned off by the high fees and will stay in their offices. I am certainly in the latter group. I have no confidence that the projects will in any way speak to issues in which I am interested or will give me ideas for my own projects.

My rage is a bit incoherent at the moment, but I guess I’m just angry that my university claims to be sponsoring a conference and then attempts to exclude students who may be interested in this educational opportunity on financial grounds. They have some big-name companies as donors — some of that money could be used to subsidize student registration fees. This conference does not fairly serve the pedagogical mission of the university, and it is unclear that it helps reach out to the research community. If I were being less charitable, I would say that the organizers are seeking to funnel the United Nation’s money into their own research projects or projects of their choosing. But I think I give them more credit than that. I think.