More attacks on anonymity in DNA databases.
A letter from Kurt Vonnegut to the head of a school board in North Dakota who burned copies of Slaughterhouse Five. (via MeFi)
An interview with Olympic bronze medalist John Carlos on giving a black power salute at the 1968 Olympics.
Tomorrow is National Grilled Cheese Day.
I really enjoyed this exhibit of Tagore’s painting at The Art Institute of Chicago, although my favorite drawing is not online, this bird was pretty cool.
My friend Geeta Dayal wrote this review of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner. Looks intriguing!
The other day I found myself wondering “so what does the word martingale come from?” A short time on Google later, I came across this paper from Journal Electronique d’Histoire des Probabilités et de la Statistique, which had a special issue on The Splendors and Miseries of Martingales (Splendeurs et misères des martingales):
The Origins of the Word “Martingale”
Roger Mansuy
(earlier version : “Histoire de martingales” in Mathématiques & Sciences Humaines/Mathematical Social Sciences, 43th year, no. 169, 2005(1), pp. 105–113.)
It’s 10 pages and worth a read just for fun. Some of the fun facts:
All in all, perhaps this essay ends up raising more questions than it answers, but I certainly had no idea that there was this much to be unearthed behind a simple word.
(Via Adam Smith) The deadline for submitting workshop papers to the 6th International Conference on Information Theoretic Security (ICITS) has been extended from today to Monday, April 23 (at 3pm Eastern) due to holidays. It’s in Montreal in August, so if you have some recent results that you would like to present in a workshop setting, please send them in. “Papers which broaden the applicability of information-theoretic techniques (say, to areas such as data privacy or anonymity) would also be very welcome.”
ICITS will have two tracks this year : a more CS-style conference with published proceedings, and a workshop (think ITA) track without proceedings where you can present older stuff.
It’s not as risqué as ChatRoulette, but the Banff International Research Station now has a live stream for talks (assuming the speaker wants to be recorded). This week you can learn about Stochastic PDEs (talk schedule here).
I am singing with the UChicago Early Music Ensemble, a somewhat relaxed group led by David Douglass and Ellen Hargis of The Newbury Consort. I started rehearsing a bit late, so I’ve been playing catch-up. This year the repertoire is all music from Spain and Spanish colonies, and today we worked on two of the harder pieces in the program : an ensalada called La Bomba, by Mateo Flecha “El Viejo”, and a jacara by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla. Too many words!
In looking for some recordings to get a better sense of the pieces, I came across this charmingly old King’s Singers TV special (check out those sweater vests!) acting out La Bomba in what appears to be the house from Clue:
Lucky them, they get multiple takes which makes it a bit easier to manage the crazy transitions in the piece. There’s also a multitracked recording on which is pretty good:
Unfortunately we are doing it up a third from there, much to the chagrin of my passagio.
We spent a bit of time trying to get the jácara up to speed, but singing Spanish that fast is hard! When I heard how fast this version went I almost lost it:
It looks like I have my work cut out for me, especially if I want to roll my r’s like that.
For those who are interested in signal processing, the classic Wavelets and Subband Coding by Martin Vetterli and Jelena Kovačević is a must-have. But perhaps you were unaware that the two of them, together with Vivek Goyal have written a pair of books:
Signal Processing: Foundations
Signal Processing: Fourier and Wavelet Representations
They should give you a solid grounding the fundamentals of signal processing from a more modern perspective. Preliminary versions are available for download from the book’s website.
On Friday I saw Home/Land at the Albany Park Theatre Project. I’ve been raving to people about it because I think this may be the most important piece of theater I have ever seen.
This is a play built out of stories collected from all over Chicago about immigration and the struggles of families and communities who have come here from all over the world. The actors are high schoolers, the youth of those communities and they bring with them an urgency that is palpable. These stories need to be told, and it is precisely that need that transforms the theater for those two hours. The interior imaginations of these performers is rich, surprising, and incisive. This is a kind of total theater — physical movement, song, and ritual — that you would not expect to come from, well, kids. And you wouldn’t expect to see it in the commercial theater.
The first clip in this profile of the show on PBS was one of the most moving moments in the piece — when I saw it each beat came perfectly timed, the choreographed raw anguish casually brushed away by two guards righting the door. These are real things that happen to real people, and we too can brush these things off. As the saying goes, “attention must be paid.”
The show has been extended but is sold out. Get on the wait list. They will call you if there is space, and if you get in, you will not regret it. If you don’t believe me, read some other more professional reviewers.
Stanford has put up a page where people can leave remembrances of Tom Cover. (h/t Gireeja Ranade)
The variation of the human body across sports is fascinating (via Matt Tong).
The films of Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) are available for free online (via Zhenya Tumanova).
A paper arguing that systems-CS conference reviews are bad. (via Manu Sridharan)
A watch that’s on Indian Time. Works for other cultures too! (via Harbeer)
An Ergodic Walk 