Johannes Brahms is the master of the hemiola. I’m listening to the Concerto for violin, cello and orchestra in A minor, Op. 102, and it’s rocking my world. I heard it at the SFSO last year with two fantastic pieces by Brahms, but when the orchestra really weighs in during the first movement it’s like being lifted out of your seat.
perseverance
I’ve been able to bike most of the way up Hearst now, although rather than run the risk of being flattened by a bus I duck into North Gate and work my way up around the Naval Architecture shack. I realized at some point that all it took was a little more willpower to get up the section right after Tolman.
I was recently told that I had good potential but needed to work harder. Somewhere twixt Boston and Berkeley I lost my work ethic, but perhaps all it will take is a little more willpower?
tin roof… rusted
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.
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.
An Ergodic Walk 