At MIT I used the xwindows program xmh to read my email. It was a pretty bare-bones program, but had one really great feature. Instead of having to drag a message to a folder to refile it, you could just right-click on the folder title and it would mark it as beign destined for there. Then you could commit all of the moves in one fell swoop. Neither GMail nor Thunderbird nor Mail.app seem to have this feature, which I regarded as a genius piece of interface in what was otherwise a pretty ugle program, all told. Maybe I’m the only one who got a lot of mileage out that feature, but I can’t help but think that our modern mail clients are missing something.
Author Archives: Anand Sarwate
maximum versus maximal
So I know I learned this at one point, but I can’t rederive the logical argument explaining when to use the words “maximal” and “maximum.” Certainly maximum is both an adjective and a noun, and maximal is just an adjective.
One explanation I remember was that there can be many maximal things, but only one maximum thing. I know that you call it a maximal ideal in algebra, and it need not be unique (unless it’s a local ring?), but then why say “local minima” if a minimum is unique?
I just noticed I’m a bit inconsistent in my usage in this paper I’m writing, and I can’t tell if I should call it the “maximum probability of error criterion” or the “maximal probability of error criterion.” I was leaning to the former, but now thinking about it has got me all muddled.
IEEEtran BibTeX annoyance
I’m busy as a bee writing two papers for ISIT 2007 (in Nice, woohoo!) and as usual I find myself at odds with the IEEE Transactions style formats. The BibTeX format by default puts the bibliography in order of how references are cited, and as far as I can tell there is no option for putting things in alphabetical order. One option is of course to use the \nocite command before any of the other text. This will put the citations in the bibliography without anything in the main text — a handy feature for sneaking in references that you don’t need but should cite (perhaps to appease reviewers). But that hack defeats the purpose of BibTeX, which is to stop you from futzing with your bibliography by formatting the thing in the correct manner, be it APA, MLA, ACM, or IEEE.
I understand that for a survey paper it would be advantageous to list references in the order that they are cited. That way all the papers on topic A will be in a big block together in the bibliography, and the cite package provides a nice shorthand that will list the references as [1 – 5] instead of [1][2][3][4][5]. For conference papers, which often have fewer than 10 citations, it seems that the aesthetic benefits of an alphabetized bibliography outweigh the minor inconvenience in typesetting. From looking at existing published papers, it seems that the IEEE isn’t particularly insistent on making the bibliography in citation-order. So why not provide the alphabetical option?
Perhaps its because the entire LaTeX package system is being maintained by Michael Shell, who I’m sure has better things to do with his time, like a real job. It almost boggles the mind that so many people in the IEEE use this LaTeX package and the Institute doesn’t really support it in the way that the AMS supports AMSTeX.
HD-DVD copy protection
Apparently the HD-DVD copy protection system has been compromised. Is this really a big surprise? I mean, if you actually go and talk to the engineers who designed AACS, would they think it’s totally unbreakable? Behind all the PR and marketing hacks who don’t know the first thing about cryptography are the people who actually designed this system, and I’m sure they would list a load of standard caveats like “assuming a bounded-complexity adversary” But even then, perhaps twixt design and implementation someone screwed up and weakened the protections.
The whole approach to copy-protecting media via controlling the hardware is a little odd to me. Its like having a secret decoder ring made of a piece of red cellophane. If you make a media format which is useful for carrying data and holding movies, you’re inviting attacks far more complicated than those envisioned by scenarios in which you have an average user buying a player and plugging it into their TV. Is it really that the design specs were for the latter and didn’t even think about what would happen if someone popped the disc into their computer?
Personally, I thnk these guys knew it would happen all along and were surprised at how little time it took. The truth is probably that people in the company who were ignorant of the technology ended up approving something that was a lot weaker than it should have been, and not that the guy who hacked the standard was somehow a super-genius. This is not to take away from his accomplishment, but it seems like you can either build a watertight security system or one that leaks like a sieve, and this is more of the latter.
new year’s eve ramblings
At some point I’ll have to decide what this blog is really about — part of me wants to make it about work all the time, but I wonder if that would be shooting myself in the foot. It would (a) alienate 99% of the people who read this thing, and (b) could make me go crazy from thinking about work all the time.
I find myself incredibly sore in the right shoulder from playing too much Wii Tennis and Baseball. That being said, the Wii is probably one of the more fun game systems I’ve ever tried.
As an experiment, I have tried to make my favorite Maharashtrian dessert, shrikhand. The basic ideas is to take yogurt, drain it for 24 hours by hanging it in a cloth, and then mixing in sugar, nutmeg, cardamom, and saffron. I think I didn’t tie the cloth tightly enough, since it is a little less thick than when my mother makes it, but sugar + spice + whole milk yogurt is pretty much guaranteed to be tasty.
I’ve resolved for the new year to read more non-fiction, especially some cultural and performance studies things that I used to read but then stopped. On the list coming up is Paul Bové’s In The Wake Of Theory, the classic The Wretched of the Earth, and Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures by Gayatri Gopinath.
I also want to blog more. Which involves using my brain a little more expansively than my recent lifestyle has allowed. As Topato Potato might say, it is time to “spring into action!”
James Brown Is Dead
Of course, reading that headline just makes me think of that terrible L.A. Style song that we all liked dancing to back in high school…
a terrible pun
Were John Updike a woman (and also less stodgy), he could have titled this review “I ain’t no Houellebecq girl!”
(Like the subjunctive there? I thought so…)
it’s cold outside
The recent “cold snap” has caused Californians to run around like the sky is falling down. No more Birkenstocks and sarongs for you, hippies! Then again, I never imagined that in the Bay Area I’d have to sit in my car and wait for the windshields to defrost. Maybe I should invest in an ice-scraper.
On a more somber note, the cold introduces significant hardships on the homeless population here — shelters are always overcrowded. I used to donate my old clothes to Out Of The Closet, but I think I’m going to start taking them to shelters and other places that provide services — especially the warmer items and blankets, etc.
paper a day : power laws for white/gray matter ratios
I swear I’ll post more often starting soon — I just need to get back into the swing of things. In the meantime, here’s a short but fun paper.
A universal scaling law between gray matter and white matter of cerebral cortex
K. Zhang and T. Sejnowski
PNAS v.97 no. 10 (May 9, 2000)
This paper looks at the brain structure of mammals, and in particular the volumes of gray matter (cell bodies, dendrites, local connections) and white mattern (longer-range inter-area fibers). A plot of white matter vs. gray matter volumes showing different mammals, from a pygmy shrew to an elephant, show a really close linear fit on a log-log scale, with the best line having a slope of log(W)/log(G) = 1.23. This paper suggests that the exponent can be explained mathematically using two axioms. The first is that a piece of cortical area sends and receives ths same cross-sectional area of long-range fibers. The second more important axiom is that the geometry of the cortex is designed to minimize the average length of the long-distance fibers.
By using these heuristics, they argue that an exponent of 4/3 is “optimal” with respect to the second criterion. The difference of 0.10 can be explained by the fact that cortical thickness increases with the size of the animal, so they regressed cortical thickness vs. log(G) to get a thickness scaling of 0.10. It’s a pretty cute analysis, I thought, although it can’t really claim that minimum wiring is a principle in the brain so much as the way brains are is consistent with minimal wiring. Of course, I don’t even know how you would go about trying to prove the former statement — maybe this is why I feel more at home in mathematical engineering than I do in science…
All Wear Bowlers
I saw All Wear Bowlersa at the Berkeley Rep on opening night. It was one of the most entertatining pieces of comedy I’ve seen in a while. The productions I saw earlier this semester (Lorin, Blood in the Brain, and Passing Strange) were good too, but I Bowlers really hit the spot for me in my stressful end of semester dance.
The play is of a piece with Beckett — two hapless fellows somehow get trapped on stage. What’s different is that these two actors, Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford, are incredibly skilled physical comedians. Dressed in vaudevillian baggy pants, vests, and coats, the pair clown their way around, messing with the audience (note : do not get seats in the main level, house left corner), and most of all trying to escape. There are wonderful conceits in the play — a silent film rolls and they duck behind the screen and into the film (the mind boggles at the sense of timing), interruptions from the soundtrack, and so on. The piece reminds me a bit of one of my all-time favorite films growing up : Bill Irwin in The Regard of Flight. It has some of the same sensibilities, although Irwin was trying to say more about theater in an overt way, whereas in Bowlers you feel like you’re watching a kind of aquarium show.
I don’t have too many intelligent things to say, except that it’s damn entertaining and its going on tour I think, so if it comes by your neck of the woods, definitely see it.
An Ergodic Walk 