Monthly Archives: January 2010

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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