rejected opening paragraph for my ISIT 2007 paper

And it’s a good thing too — I don’t even like Buffy

Xander wishes to leave a message for his friend Buffy and writes it on a chalkboard using a secret code. After he leaves, Spike comes by and sees the encoded message on the chalkboard. Not content to leave things as they are, he decides to make some limited alterations to what was written. When Buffy comes back that evening, she has to recover the message left for her by Xander, despite Spike’s non-causal tampering with the encoded message. In this paper we will look at a model for this problem, which can be thought of as randomized coding for arbitrarily varying channels with the codeword known to the jammer.

Concert Announcement : A Flowering Tree

Sometime if I have time I’ll write about our first rehearsal with Adams and Sellars. I have also written a small note on some of the religious poetry used in the libretto.

A Flowering Tree


by John Adams
libretto by John Adams and Peter Sellars

John Adams, conductor
Peter Sellars, director
Jessica Rivera, soprano
Russell Thomas, tenor
Eric Owens, bass
SFS Chorus, chorus

America’s foremost living composer, John Adams, imagines rich and beautiful worlds. This SFS co-commission, inspired by The Magic Flute, is an escape into dream and myth and comes on the heels of Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic. Peter Sellars returns to direct this semi-staged production. The premiere of any new Adams work is an event not to be missed.

Thursday 3/1 — Saturday 3/3, 7:30 PM

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!”

Escape Java Joint

I have spent a fair bit of time in the last week at the Escape Java Joint, a spacious coffeehouse on Williamson St. in Madison that has a lot of art as well as meeting spaces and so on. The tea is pretty good (selections are spotty though), it’s all fair trade, and they play jazz (not nu-jazz or anything like that, but Dexter Gordon etc. streaming from KKJZ). It’s probably the best working environment in a coffeeshop that I’ve come across in years, barring the time I didn’t have my headphones and sat next to the discussion group for new mothers that happens some nights. Now if I could only get the Lagrange multipliers to stop gnawing on my very life essences…