Category Archives: General

Pets, Power Tools, Firearms, and Furniture

Posted on 2010-01-26 by pappp

I’ve recently had several discussions, with a variety of people, about things I might like to own, but am not willing to at this stage in my life, and an interesting meta-discussion on the matter with my mother. The reactions seem to imply this is an unusual enough idea that it is interesting simply for being novel, even though it seems perfectly logical (in my mind anyway).

The basic premise of my willingness to own things, in addition to the normal “will I derive pleasure/utility commiserate with the expenditure” sort of thought (which tends to make me not want much anyway), is dictated by the following argument “I shouldn’t buy anything that will still be around in a year, I will want to keep, and I won’t be able to keep if I am in graduate student housing in another state.” I tend to use MIT as the straw man because 1. There is awesome stuff going on there, that I would like to be involved with, and 2. The housing situation in Boston sucks, because, well, Boston continues to be a dense population center for no reason I can discern.

It’s never really made sense to me to buy nice things knowing I’ll have to give them up, when I can simply wait until it is more convenient, and the fact that this attitude keeps my living expenses ridiculously low is a nice bonus. I use the titular set as an example, because they pretty well cover all the angles of the idea, and the set tends to have at least something that makes sense to anyone I am talking to. To elaborate a little bit (Topic/Desire/Reason Not/Holdover Solution):

Pets: I’ve always had cats, and love having them around v. not generally allowed in student housing. So, enjoy the house mate’s cats for now.

Power Tools: I love fabricating things v. space, weight, mess; this is about large stuff, not hand drills and rotary tools. The flip side is I’m getting REALLY good at improvising things with hand tools.

Firearms: Shooting is fun, and I currently reside in a region where it is a widely accepted hobby v. not generally allowed in student housing, legal concerns depending on locale, and incompatibility with my desire to avoid keeping a car. The fact that it is an area where there are people who shoot means I know people who periodically invite me along, and thus I get to shoot for only the cost of range fees and ammunition.

Furniture: It would be nice to accrue nice stuff for storage and work areas while I’m in a gigantic nice house v. space, student housing is typically mostly furnished. Because I mostly compute on laptops, my desk is “enough” space, and there is an improvised workbench in the garage made of a headboard and pair of dead A/C units that were out there when we moved in for messy things.

When discussing this idea with my mother (From whom I largely inherited this attitude), she brought up another neat fact. She reads horrible finance books for fun, and ran across one recently that mentioned some research, which, in addition to the fairly well known (I think?) link between children of people with thrifty habits held-over from the great depression and hoarding behavior, discussed a link between (descendants of) Japanese-Americans interred during World War II (please, please tell me this isn’t novel to anyone.), and an attitude that “I shouldn’t own unnecessary nice objects because they could be taken from me at any time” …Which one might argue the my attitude is descended from.

I’ve had had that idea before, observing how my family operates, and now want to go article finding because I didn’t expect there to be evidence as to which factor was the source of the behavior, or serious research on the topic. A quick googling doesn’t turn anything up, but I always love legitimate studies to verify my passing thoughts; sometime (”In my copious spare time”) I will have to have a wallow in consumer psychology literature, it looks interesting.

EDIT:
The inital horrible finance book was apparently Mind over Money, (which is a (un)remarkably common title, but probably Mind Over Money: Overcoming the Money Disorders That Threaten Our Financial Health. This is not a recommendation.) and referenced the authors (but not the text) of D. J. O’Brien, S. Fugita The Japanese American Experience (google books link with partial text).

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Kentucky Touch screen / Natural User Interface meeting

Posted on 2010-01-22 by pappp

Earlier tonight I attended a sort of open-access seminar on multi-touch user interfaces, catalyzed by an EE senior design group working with Awesome Inc. to create a large multi-touch wall for the outside of their space. The attendece was wonderfully diverse on account of the announcement hitting the professional, academic, and hobbyist communities in Lexington (more events need to propagate like that!). Attendees included several members from the Lexington IEEE chapter (co-opted as a chapter meeting), a number of local creative types, many students from UK, and several other interesting folks.

The discussion centered around the CCV effort of the NUI group, and was fairly solid, although I would have appreciated a bit more technical depth. I actually ended up dominating a couple conversations on account of being better read in the area than most of the other attendees, and don’t consider myself particularly well-versed in multi-touch display technology. I still don’t really understand TUIO, I was rather hoping someone there would be able to explain it.

One small downside, I still get the uncomfortable feeling that everything said or done at Awesome is being sucked in and analyzed as a potential source of financial gain. The culture there always seems exploitative (or at the very least commercial) instead of communal, which is very unfortunate, as they have set up a nice space, and seem to be attracting interesting events.

I really am attracted to open-access, discussion based topic seminars like this, and would love to see more of them happen. There are lots of good efforts to bring that sort of thing to Lexington, from a seminar series Dr. Finkel is attempting to arrange this semester (based on students and faculty giving short presentations on neat things they have found), to Collexion and Dorkbot’s regular meetings. This is not the first time I’ve been after this sort of thing either, for a while the UK LUG was running some decent events in this vein, in particular I remember a successful LUG event on PyGTK, but the LUG is several years defunct…again…because those of us who were active didn’t have time to keep it going on our on (and be students), and no one else stepped up. I think some of the short-form lecture series like ignite have had events here as well, but those have never seemed as useful to me.

Posted in Computers, DIY, Electronics, General, Objects, OldBlog | 1 Comment

A Tiny Plastic Dot

Posted on 2010-01-20 by pappp

(This is very much an example of one of the little manic episodes that make me a good generalist/appear high functioning)
The left touchpad button on my laptop (Thinkpad T60p, hostname Monolith) has been “limp” for a while. It bothers other people who use my machine, because (objectively) it really does feel very wrong, but it had broken gradually and I had acclimated enough that it didn’t bother me. Last night I started paying attention to the problem, and it became maddening, so I decided to see if I could fix it. I looked at the problem last time I had the machine apart, so I knew there was a torn plastic tactile dome to blame. It is (as best as I can make out) impossible to order just the appropriate domes, and a whole new touchpad is 1. defeatist, 2. about $12 from shady ebay sellers, and 3. requires waiting for it to be shipped. I decided a better (ie. creative, free, immediate, and credit-card-fraud free) solution would be to go rummage in the parts bins, find a sufficiently similar tactile dome in something dead, and install it. The closest match I could find was the keyboard domes from the corpse of my old VPR Matrix 180B5 (The worst made laptop I have ever encountered. Every bit as fragile as one would expect something made by a Best Buy house brand to be, even though it was basically a re-badged Samsung P10. Polystyrene is not chassis material.) I now have a partial match (it’s a little too weak, and not “snappy” enough) installed, which is good enough to keep it from being bothersome.
Thinking about tactile domes reminded me of a fabulous article I read (I thought) about them several years ago. It turns out it was a much more general article about handheld devices, but it really was fabulous. The article is “Handhelds of Tomorrow” from the April 2002 issue of Technology Review. Ideo has a PDF available outside a paywall. The part about the tactile bubbles was one little subsection about Peter Skillman, who was “the hardware guy” at palm/handspring (weird corporate history).
The search for the article reminded me of a previous kick on the work of one of the other important palm/handspring people, Jeff Hawkins, who in addition to being a founder of both companies, is doing amazing work in neuroscience as it relates to computing, and has written a book On Intelligence and given a awesome TED talk on the topic.
Hurrah for (hypo)manic episodes?

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Really Trijicon?

Posted on 2010-01-19 by pappp

This is pretty much a re-blog, which I don’t usually like doing, but the story is so mind-bendingly stupid it bears hating on in as many venues as possible.

Story Here. Reblogging from boingboing.

The short version is, Trijicon, who make (apparently very nice) gun optics, took it upon themselves to emboss references to bible verses into the ends of the serial numbers of the ones they are selling to the US military (as part of very large contracts). That are going into combat in the middle east. In that conflict where the most important thing we can do is win the PR war with a skeptical populace. A linchpin of doing so is demonstrating that there is no religious motivation, to avoid invoking centuries of violence and hatred, and legitimizing the arguments of the other side that we are invading crusaders (although even dumber presidents have trouble keeping that straight).

The most obnoxious part is that, rather than playing it down and claiming the sequences are just part of the identifier (optics nomenclature is easily confusing enough to make something convincing up), Trijicon went ahead and confirmed that they had intentionally added bible verses, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that it might be a Bad Thing. At least they were clever enough to to choose verses having to do with light.

Any attempt to play down the degree to which this is stupid should be met with consideration of the media/public shitstorm that would occur if someone were found attacking Americans with a weapon engraved with quranic references. I’ve always read that humans were supposed to develop a theory of mind that supports this kind of reasoning around 4 years of age, but sometimes I wonder.

With stupid behavior like the above, supplanted by things like groups thinking it is a good idea to send audio bibles as aid to Haiti, it’s no wonder there is such suspicion of (Christian) religious motivation in US foreign policy. When reading the audio bibles article, I couldn’t help but picture those propaganda-spewing eyebots from Fallout 3, but the pictures on the organization’s website just show a cheap self-powered boombox with a flash card. At least they have useful parts in them, solar panels and hand-crank generators to keep personal communication devices powered are pretty high on the list of things I would want in a large scale disaster, and since Haiti has been in one sort of disaster or another pretty much continuously since the late 1400s when the first Europeans showed up, I imagine there are plenty of folks around who know how to improvise.

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Alan Kay and ACTA

Posted on 2010-01-18 by pappp

As an amusing aside from the previous post, thinking about early HCI work and reading about all the ACTA nastiness (wikipedia link for pseudo-neutrality, my feelings are more in line with the “What the F*CK!” stance over at this BoingBoing post) at the same time reminded me of one of the most amusing bits from Alan Kay’s original publication on the Dynabook concept (from which most modern ubiquitous computing descends) A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages:

The ability to make copies easily and to “own” one’s information will probably not debilitate existing markets, just as easy xerography has enhanced publishing (rather than hurting it as some predicted), and as tapes have not damaged the LP record business but have provided a way to organize one’s own music.

He may have been a little off on that front, the ability to make an infinite number of perfect copies (something that neither xerography or cassettes can do), and distribute them over arbitrary distances for virtually nothing did change things in ways that don’t really leave room for the old-school media middle-men. The fact that technology has changed the world is not something to be legislated against, particularly when doing so will will criminalize socially normal behavior by those who adapted, to benefit those who did not.

The latter portion of Dollhouse (which is way, way better than the first few) is largely about this kind of (un)intended consequences of technology (which is something I really enjoy thinking about), and has kept it on my mind, but I’m going to wait until the last (booo!) episode airs later this week to babble about that.

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HCI: Information Theory or Ergonomics

Posted on 2010-01-18 by pappp

I was doing the first (actually, second, the first was an article from perennial human factors design blowhard Donald Norman, just like I was joking it would be) reading for my PSY562 class, and was kind of disturbed by the degree to which the book seems to treat human technology interaction as a totally pragmatic enterprise that essentially reduces to ergonomics. This stance may make sense with simple mechanical systems, but the human computer interaction I am most familiar with has always seemed more meaningfully posed as an information theory problem than a simple issue of lubricating a system.

Looking at the big HCI pioneers, we get people like Ivan Sutherland, who’s most famous work, sketchpad, was done as his PhD. project under Claude “The father of information theory” Shannon, and Douglas Engelbart (of hypertext and the mouse), who thought of HCI as a matter of Intelligence Amplification which is more “transhumanism” than “building better tools”.

This may just be an artifact of the bad nomenclature in the field; some people, particularly in Europe, tend to use “ergonomics” as a name for the whole field of human technology interaction (Or human-centered design, or human factors, or any of half a dozen names with slightly different implications…). The inconsistent nomenclature is to be expected in a field that draws from so many other more established fields; psychologists, engineers, and designers all tend to use different, incompatible vocabulary with different, incompatible shades of meaning, but that doesn’t really make the situation less bothersome. I’m partial to phrases like “Human Technology Interaction,” because they imply accordances on both sides of the line. Terms like “Human Centered Design” always strike me as implying a system of presenting shallow models to make things “easier” for users, which don’t actually take into account the real mechanisms of the underlying system. This kind of design tends to be grossly inefficient for the technology, and break down as soon as something unexpected happens. It should make for fun discussion in class.

Related Note: While looking at related material, I FINALLY put together that “Intelligence as an emergent property of (reducible) distributed systems” Danny Hillis and “Chief architect/co-founder of Thinking Machines” Danny Hillis are the same person, who was also a student of Claude Shannon. How the fuck did I never put that together?

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Class Impressions: Spring’10

Posted on 2010-01-16 by pappp

My classes have met for the first time this semester, so it is time for my customary class impressions post. Older similar posts are archived, the link chain starts here. I am only taking 6 hours this semester, originally because my preferred last core class was not offered. I was thinking this would allow me to get ahead on research this semester, but is now also fortunate because of the TA position. The lab sections don’t start meeting until next Tuesday, so I can’t start talking shit (up to FERPA-approved limits) about that yet.

CS585:Linux Internals/Finkel
There are a lot of familiar people in this class, instructor included, and I’m pretty sure it is going to be awesome. It seems like the class is going to be exactly what I hoped; we’re going to dive into the kernel sources and hack around, guided by the books and lectures. We’re using two books, Linux Kernel Development, which is written in the fabulous tongue-in-cheek manner that seems to be endemic to good computer scientists, and Understanding the Linux Kernel, which is an O’Reilly book in the standard tradition.
This should more than make up for the extremely lackluster undergraduate OS class (CS470) I had from UK, seeing as we basically covered CS470, less some tedious detail on implementing resource locks and using shared memory, in the first lecture. Very excited, and expecting very hard projects.

PSY562:Human Technology Interaction/ Carswell

We did the around-the-room introductions thing, and the composition of the class should make things really interesting: 11 Psychology Seniors, a Computer Science Senior, a Computer Science Masters Student, an Education Graduate(didn’t catch which) Student, an Information Sciences Masters Student, a Computer Security person, and myself. In addition to the professional variety, we have hobbies like “Professional Juggler,” “Snake Breeder,” “Dog Trainer,” and “Certified Skydiver,” so there should be no shortage of interesting people. I suspect groups will always be set up with the topics people evenly distributed among the psych kids for the mutual exposure. Apparently the class is going to be fairly guided, and run around a selected central project (”Something significant to the Lexington community”, but we don’t know what yet), which means there won’t be quite as much chance for implementation as I would have liked, but it should be great fun anyway.

There is one other person in both these classes, which proves(or at least allows me to pretend) they aren’t a totally irrational pairing of interests. Looking forward to the semester. Good skills to be had, and it looks as though the classes themselves will be fun.

Posted in Announcements, General, OldBlog, School | 1 Comment

Chicken Tikka Whatever I have in the Kitchen

Posted on 2010-01-11 by pappp

ctmsm.jpg
I had a really good “I don’t want anything I have around, and don’t want to go to the store” off-the-cuff cooking experience earlier tonight, for a dish roughly like Chicken Tikka Masala that I’ll be calling Chicken Tikka Whatever I have in the Kitchen.
“Chicken Tikka Masala” is apparently literally “Small cooked pieces of chicken in spice sauce,” (and is not actually Indian in origin) and there is an oft-quoted (but rather difficult to actually obtain) survey from “The Real Curry Restaurant Guide” in 1998 that found from 48 restaurant recipes for chicken tikka masala, the lone mutual ingredient was… chicken. I would just call it that, but I tend to think of something a little smoother and creamier, like what Kashmir served before it was replaced by Punjab II and their suck.
For a change from my usual habit of not including recipes in my food posts (because there aren’t any to give), I tried to write down what I did for this one:
All measurements totally eyeballed offhand, and really based on rough ratios, not volumes. The volumes on the ginger are especially sketchy because it was grated frozen, so the listed values are less than fluffy frozen grated, and more than paste. Use this as a rough technique idea, not something to be followed in detail.

Ingredients:
2-ish boneless/skinless chicken breasts
1 medium onion
1/2 can crushed tomato
1/2 cup milk
1-2tsp arrowroot powder (thickener, use whichever you prefer)

Spices:
Ground Coriander
Garam Masala (prepared powder)
Garlic (bottled, chopped)
Grated fresh ginger
Cardamom pods
Tsien tsen (or similar) chili (dried)
Paprika

Prep:
Chop chicken into small cubes, loosely dice onion, finely grate enough ginger to supply the below. Crush 2 of the cardamom pods and one hot pepper.

Cooking:
In pan 1 (heavy pan): mix 1-2tsb garam masala, one crushed pepper, 1-2 crushed cardamom pods, 1tsp coriander, 2-3 Tbsp garlic, 1-2 Tbsp grated ginger with 1-3 Tbsp oil (enough to wet everything)
In pan 2 (wok/deep pan): mix 1-2tsp garam masala, 3-4 whole cardamom pods, 1-2tsp coriander, 1-2tsp paprika, 2-3 Tbsp garlic, 2 Tbsp ginger with 1-3 Tbsp oil (enough to wet everything)
Turn pan 1 on med-high heat, pan 2 on med; heat until spices are extracting into oil (just prior/beginning to smoke)
Douse chicken with 2tbsp lemon juice, add to pan 1. Add onion to pan 2.
Cook chicken until ready to eat, and reserve. Ideally it should pick up some smoky flavor from the spices overheating at the beginning and after running dry at the end, but mostly cook moist. Add a little liquid to make it happen if needed.
Cook Onion until soft, add crushed tomato, cook covered until texture starts to disappear.
While the cooking is going on, mix 1-2tsp of arrowroot and 1/2 cup of milk in a little container and shake until mixed.
Add the prepared chicken to the sauce, and stir until mixed. Add milk+arrowroot mixture, then reduce heat and stir while the thickener sets. Serve over basmati rice.
Watch for cardamom pods while devouring, they will ruin a bite if you demolish one at an inopportune time.

There are a couple of tweaks that already occur to me; For the sauce, if I weren’t too lazy to do it, pulling out the cardamom and running the mixture through a food processor/blender after cooking but before adding the chicken would probably make a better texture. Using cream (which I don’t keep on hand) instead of whole milk (which I do) would also improve the sauce. For the chicken, coating it in yogurt (and possibly some of the dry spices, or a little premixed tandoori spice) along with the lemon juice before cooking would improve it in almost every way, but again, I don’t always have plain yogurt on hand.
Those avenues for improvement aside, it was surprisingly delicious for a first pass recipe, and despite it having more tomato than I should really eat in it, I’ll probably play with it again.

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What the Dog Saw

Posted on 2010-01-10 by pappp

I went on a binge a while ago and read all of Malcolm Gladwell’s books available at the time. They’re all pop-science pieces on sociological/psychological matters, with really spectacular breadth and readability. The only big downside is that they tend to have glaring issues with correlation v. causation and statistical rigor, which make some of the conclusions he draws a little irritating, and more than a little suspect. I enjoyed all three, so I was pretty excited when I heard he was coming out with something new.

A friend bought me a copy of his new book, What the Dog Saw: and Other Adventures earlier in the break, and I devoured it in a couple of sittings, finishing up earlier today.

What the Dog Saw is a little different than his previous books; instead of having a central topic, it is simply a collection of 19 articles he wrote for the New Yorker, broken into three loosely themed sections. Interestingly, all the articles used in the book are available in an archive on his website (along with many others), so the book is more of a convenient selection than a sole source. This decision may be an experiment to see if free availability affects sales; based on some other authors who have performed similar experiments, it probably won’t, and may actually boost sales as people get hooked and decide they would rather not read the whole thing off a screen.

In my opinion two of the articles stand out above the rest; John Rock’s Error, which discusses the public health implications of some strange decisions by birth control pioneers and Million-Dollar Murray, which discusses fundamental issues with the way social service issues are handled. The other thing I really enjoyed is that reading through the set, a large number of the articles work together to form a ringing and very thorough condemnation of the goals and methods of modern business culture, from risk perception, analysis and handling, to hiring practices, which agree with my feelings on the matter (feelings which form a part of my inclination to remain in academia on a permanent basis).

The book is both better and worse for lacking a central theme; worse in that it doesn’t have the depth of the earlier books, better in that it avoids the overwrought, dubiously justified conclusions that made the last bit of each of its predecessors painful to read. Not an extraordinary book, but fun, and way better for you than reading more Internet garbage. Certainly worth reading (as are his other three) if one has the time.

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Chili and Cornbread

Posted on 2010-01-09 by pappp

The weather in Lexington SUCKS right now; the temperatures have been in the teens, there is snow, but not quite enough snow to be really fun, and its been kind of dreary, so I wanted something warm and heavy.

Because I spent most of the day at the TA orientation, I didn’t have a whole lot of time and energy for feeding, so I made classic southern winter food; a pot of chili (the halfassed kind from mostly canned ingredients and ground beef), and a pan of cornbread. The batch of chili is kind of mediocre, I overdid the oregano and got impatient and pulled it off simmer too soon, but the cornbread (which is barely modified from the recipe on the back of the cornmeal package) is excellent.
chilicornbreadsm.jpg
Sometimes its nice to just have a classic.

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