Tag Archives: self-indulgence

Concert Bleg : Franz Joseph Haydn’s The Creation

Posted on by

I’m singing with the Bach Collegium San Diego in this concert coming up next month (coincidentally the same week as ITA — fun fun!) If you live in the San Diego area, I encourage you to come!

Franz Joseph Haydn THE CREATION 1798

Sung in English with a newly edited text by Paul McCreesh

A collaboration between the Chorus of the Bach Collegium San Diego and the San Diego Chamber Orchestra

Ruben Valenzuela, conductor

Soloists
Anne-Marie Dicce soprano
Vladimir Maric tenor
John Polhamus bass

Monday 9 February 2009 at 7:30pm
Sherwood Auditorium (Museum of Contemporary Art)
700 Prospect Street, La Jolla 92037

Tuesday 10 February 2009 at 7:30pm
The Del Mar Country Club
6001 Clubhouse Drive, Rancho Santa Fe 92091

Friday 13 February 2009 at 7:30pm
St Paul’s Cathedral, San Diego
2728 6th Avenue, San Diego 92103

We begin the new year with a performance of Haydn’s monumental oratorio The Creation to mark the 200th anniversary of Haydn’s death. The Creation is often considered Haydn’s greatest work through its bold use of orchestral color, adventurous harmony, exceptional rhythmic and melodic inventiveness, and overall unity with an almost operatic vividness and power. Tickets available online.

blogging to resume next week

Posted on by

Sorry for the extra-long hiatus. I have come down with a post-thesis case of repetitive stress injury, which makes my right arm feel like it is being pulled out of its socket/shoulder blade and then run over by a horde of angry clowns on tiny tricycles.

I will be blogging soon from the warmer climes of southern California — on Monday I will start a postdoc at UCSD’s Information Theory and Applications Center. I am very excited about it! I will be working on… something TBA. We shall see…

delays delays

Posted on by

The defense/talk went pretty well, I thought. And there was champagne afterwards! However, filing the thesis has been pushed off until early in the summer. Although this has the benefit of making the finished document much better, the downside is that such a large object sitting in my brain tends to crowd out other more exciting projects that I would like to work on or think about. In the meantime, I will try to blog a bit more frequently so that I don’t end up with tunnel vision.

Robin sent along a link to some mathematical models in metal. They look like more hard-core versions of the sculpted surfaces seen in display cases in math department hallways. I took a few math classes at UIUC during high school and I remember walking past these dusty shelves filled with plaster (?) shapes with intriguing names like “the ring of the nodoid.”

My dissertation talk

Posted on by

This is why I’ve not been posting, but hopefully that will change.

Beyond the ABCs of AVCs : robust and adaptive strategies for future communication systems

Anand D. Sarwate
Advisor : Michael Gastpar
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
University of California, Berkeley

Thursday, May 15
1-2 PM
521 Cory Hall

Cutting-edge application areas such as cognitive radio, ad-hoc networks, and sensor networks are changing the way we think about wireless services. The demand for ubiquitous communication and computing requires flexible communication protocols that can operate in a range of conditions. This thesis adopts and extends a mathematical model for these communication systems that accounts for uncertainty and time variation in link qualities. The arbitrarily varying channel (AVC) is an information theoretic channel model that has a time varying state with no statistical description. We assume the state is chosen by an adversarial jammer, reflecting the demand that our constructions work for all state sequences. In this talk I will show how resources such as secret keys, feedback, and side-information can help communication under this kind of uncertainty. I will present results on list coding and rateless coding for discrete channel models and coding with side information for continuous channels.

And of course the most important part: refreshments will be provided!

at the risk of infringing

Posted on by

This used to be one of my favorite Frank O’Hara poems, and I always wanted to do something meaningful with it, from an artistic view. I tried something for one of my composition classes but gave up. Maybe after I turn in my thesis I will become inspired…

Instant coffee with slightly sour cream
in it, and a phone call to the beyond
which doesn’t seem to be coming any nearer.
“Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days”
on the poetry of a new friend
my life held precariously in the seeing
hands of others, their and my impossibilities.
Is this love, now that the first love
has finally died, where there were no impossibilities?

— Frank O’Hara

waste management in the home

Posted on by

Berkeley started curbside collection of food scraps in the last few months, and it’s been a great boon to my somewhat forgetful lifestyle. Because my trash no longer smells and I only generate one bag of trash every other week, I only have to remember to wheel out the trash bin Wednesday night on alternate weeks. The compost bin provided by the city is not very good — it’s too big to clean out in the sink, stuff sticks to the sides, and it starts smelling after a week. I’ve repurposed a glass bowl that I keep next to the sink for food scraps, take it out every other day, and clean it before refilling. I vote two thumbs up on curbside composting.

Unfortunately, the amount of paper that I have to recycle from junk mail is ridiculous. I feel like the membership dues I have paid to the ACLU must have gone entirely towards defraying the costs of asking me for more money. It almost makes me want to end my membership, except I know they’ll keep harassing me for years to come, so the gesture would be wasted. There should be a national do-not-junk-mail list like there is for telemarketers.

the bad part of the evening

Posted on by

Dinner was great fun, but the part where it took me almost 3 hours to get home, 2.5 of which were spent stalled in traffic to get through the detour onto the bridge was not so fun. Ironically, I decided to drive because a late dinner in the outer Richmond would have possibly meant missing the last BART and having to take the transbay bus back, but given that I got home at 3, the bus would have been faster. Plus, I could have at least read something.

I don’t understand why they don’t post a sign when you go in to the city warning you that construction will be happening that night. Furthermore, it took the cops nearly 2 hours to get out onto the streets to regulate traffic. I overheard a cop talking to a construction guy, and it seems like the cops had no idea of the duration of the construction, which is mind-boggling. Why is this whole process riddled with incompetency? Had I known it what was going to happen, I would have just skipped the whole detour thing and gone down to San Mateo and back over. I would have gotten back in time that way.

Why oh why can’t we have better managed infrastructure upgrades?