Category Archives: OldBlog

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.

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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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Teaching

Posted on 2010-01-08 by pappp

My big new behavior for the coming semester is that I’ll be working as a teaching assistant (for those unfamiliar with the system: at the university level TAs are graduate students who handle some portion of the instruction for classes). It had been mentioned to me several months ago that I might be asked to TA EE281 (the basic digital logic lab at UK) this semester, but because no one ever got back to me, I thought they had found a PhD student to do it. Last Tuesday I got a note that in fact it hadn’t been resolved, and, not knowing it had been previously mentioned to me, asking I would be willing to TA. It isn’t ideal; It ruins my perfect “Class only on T/R afternoon” schedule in a big way, one of the lab sections has an awkward little overlap with one of my classes (which I’m told will be worked around), and handling 3 lab sections will be a fair amount of work but I agreed anyway. Its good for the CV, its good departmental sucking up, it pays significantly more than my living expenses, and most importantly, its an experience I would like to have early on since I’m seriously looking at a career in academia. Monday I find out exactly what I’ll be doing from the faculty member running the course; I suspect I will be handling the lab sections and most of the grading, but not much of the lectures/lab design, which should be good for easing in. I might see about doing a little bit of the other parts as well just for the experience.
Before you are allowed to TA, the university requires an orientation. Said orientation took up Thursday and Friday, 8:30A-4:00p, far longer than was actually needed for the amount of content, despite being shorter than the summer version. I’m glad for the orientation, and learned a lot of valuable information, but some of the material the first day was pretty bad; things with as much BS in them as the ed-psych people usually only say “moo.” The good stuff from the first day included the obmbud information session (ass-covering rules, syllabus constraints, etc.), and we had a fairly solid setup for the microteaching exercise. The second day started two hours late due to weather, and was improved for it. The morning was a quick procession of presentations on rules, regulations, recommendations, and resources both for TAs to use ourselves and to refer students to, which did include the joke worthy “Rules about sleeping with your students.” The latter half of the second day was spent running and group critiquing our microteach lessons, and everyone in my room did quite well, definitely better than some of the instructors I’ve had. For my session I ran a 7-minute math-free version of the “Know your parts” style lesson on Light Emitting Diodes, at the hobbyist/beginning EE student level. Even the people who didn’t have the background to completely follow seemed to think my technique was good, and I’m not too embarrassed watching the video now (Things I see now that no one commented on: I made a few dumb omissions to keep time, and looked at my note page too often), so I probably did a reasonable job. I’ll grant that the microteaching system is a good way of vetting and improving teaching ability, and I tend to be quite skeptical of meta-education.
Some of the anecdotal content was pretty useful as well. There were TWO versions of lessons on not being bullied by football players and other large entitled people, because it is apparently that much of an issue. It was also interesting to hear from people already TAing; one of the existing TAs who has been teaching Chemistry 105, which is gigantic and incredibly hostile (its the scraper course kids who mistakenly think they are pre-med), had a lot of good questions on classroom management, particularly with regard to cheating and hissy fits by students that brought up lots of useful information.
As an additional source of irrational excitement, I get one of those nifty blue-flap UK Graduate School messenger bags, which I’ve always really liked for some reason.

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Musical Clicktrances

Posted on 2010-01-05 by pappp

I’ve spent a disgusting fraction of my winter break embarking on various clicktrances, in to all manner of vaguely embarrassing and totally useless topics (The Elder Scrolls Lore? Rimfire Rifles? The hunt for new Electropop?). I’d really love to know the etymology for “Clicktrance;” it gets used on BoingBoing frequently, but I’m not sure if that is where it was coined. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, a clicktrance is a common (and my favorite) term for the situation where one finds something marginally interesting/attractive/etc. online, and, hours later, discovers they’ve been intently link following from it. The phenomenon still always makes me think of the Eugen Roth quote I posed a while ago while griping about Distractability.

As for the last clicktrance topic, lately I’ve been noticing the only way to actually find interesting music on the Internet is by finding some weird little scene and browsing in it. The last round of unusual finds I listen to consistently (A Kiss Could Be Deadly, Electric Valentine, Hyper Crush) are all out of the same Southern California scene that I stumbled upon via Pandora, then clicktranced through their mutual linking. Another more recent (for me) example of the phenomenon: earlier in the break I found my way into a link cluster for some British pop starting (Warning: The following links may consume hours of your life)here, and here. Most of what turned up ranged from unremarkable to truly awful, but had a few gems. These include
Ellie Goulding – A pretty good, synth-dressed version of the “Girl and a Guitar” archetype.
Little Boots – Imagine if the “Girl and a Piano/Guitar” archetype were translated to “Girl and a bunch of bitchin’ synthesizer gear” in the best way possible.
Example – His older pure storytelling hip hop is terrible, but he has found quality pop hooks, and produced the following two tracks, which are pretty amazing. Apparently there is a whole album like that coming, and I will obtain it on first opportunity.
Loebeat – Noise meets Pop, it’s truly something different. The “Dicey $Verbs” videos are fascinating, basically ambient/noise with storytelling value. The player on their website includes direct links to the MP3s so you can make it portable for when the odd sounds haunt you hours later.

Later in the same foray, I got off the British common thread and found a couple other winners. The pick of that batch was from the always exciting electronic, girly, and morose vein: Fan Death, who are probably named for the very, very weird Korean superstition. They only have a handful of tracks available (including creepy-awesome videos for 3 of them), but they are all excellent, and there is supposedly an album coming. Also, the leads’ names are captivatingly ridiculous: Dandelion Wind Opaine, who is apparently a fixture in the Vancouver techno scene (?) and Marta Jaciubek-McKeever.

In general, I’m so pleased the Kid + Pop Sensibilities + Synthesizer = Electropop/Synthpop genre is being legitimized by acts like Owl City. His current tour mate, Lights, is pretty fun as well, but a little too saccharine for my tastes.

All the links in this post should be copyright-legit; it would be irresponsible to just link easily available torrents for everything with a published album…which is irritatingly only about half of the bands listed.

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PoS Toy

Posted on 2009-12-28 by pappp

I scored a (at least mostly) working Point of Sale terminal from the trash at the nearby location of a fast-food sandwich chain named for a mode of mass transit. It’s a pretty nifty little piece of hardware, a Micros Eclipse 400498, based on a 1Ghz Pentium 3, 512Mb of RAM, and normal (ish) PC-BIOS. It has a broken WinXP install on it now, I think it shipped with an older NT version, because the drivers are all fucked up. The fun part is the attached goodies: a 3-track magnetic stripe reader (credit cards, etc.), 2-line VFD display, and a 12” touchscreen (only 800×600, but pretty crisp and good colors).

I’m thinking it will make a bitchin’ jukebox. Scroll the track information on the VFD, put a touch-flow-esque interface on the touchscreen, hook up some speakers, etc. One of the housemates suggested a barmonkey (it could even process payments), but that is a WAY more involved project because of the valve rigs, and I have plenty of unfinished involved projects right now.

It is however being obstinate about drivers and alternative boot devices, and the manufacturer (micros) seems to believe that not providing any drivers/manuals/support of any kind will enforce support plans/upgrades/create security by obscurity or something, because their website is supremely unforthcoming. There don’t appear to be any WinXP compatible drivers for the various hardware, so the best choice is probably to try for Linux. Its not wanting to boot off USB devices (despite the BIOS’ claims that it will), doesn’t seem to like having a 2-channel ATA cable attached, has no CD drive, and has repeatedly failed on the wubi-install-from-USB trick, so it will be exciting to get going. Maybe some sort of netboot stunt.

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