The Carnegie Library, Main Branch, is Too Inviting.

I went in the Carnegie library for the first time last week. It’s an impressive stone building right next to where I work. I picked a book at random from the card catalog on the internet before I went, and used it as a goal so I wouldn’t look confused and aimless while I was there.

The front rooms of the library are too inviting.  It’s like a birthday party in there. Brightly colored “Ask a Librarian” and “Did you know…?” and “Dig into gardening!”.  You have to wander out a back door under a small sign that says “mezzanine” to get to the musty.  Library of Congress is on the mezzanine and second floor, Dewey on the third. Both, huh.

I couldn’t find the stairs to the third floor (my book was numbered in Dewey: 937 point something; a 1916 translation of Caesar’s “Commentaries on the Gallic War”) before an aggressively friendly librarian saw me looking lost. I stammered out a description of my fake goal. He variously directed me to several places where I might look up other resources, but discouraged me from 937: we don’t use Dewey anymore; some of those books are more than 40 years old; we’re still going through them to figure out what can be saved and what needs replaced.  I can take you up there if you really need something…

But, I excused myself as quickly as I could and vanished down a random Library of Congress-numbered aisle. I didn’t want to be helped.  What I wanted was to walk down a long aisle between old and new books of mismatched sizes, under fluorescent lights. I wanted to stop somewhere where the books had serious-looking spines, and grab a tall, heavy blue hardcover with unbent white pages. I wanted to skim the introduction and be welcomed by some random academic who warmly assures me that finally an overview of this topic is collected together in one volume. I wanted to read just far enough to find out something that I didn’t even know you could know about. 

Then I’d put it back on the shelf, a little uncertain at first about where it went, but I’d check the number carefully. The label on the shelf asks you to leave the book out rather than put it back — I like to imagine that if the book is shelved in the wrong place, it could be lost for 40 years before some wandering volunteer finds it, lifts her eyebrows in surprise, and drops it into a reshelving cart. But I always reshelve the books myself anyway because I like to feel like I’m a library insider.

I guess I have an odd sense of what’s inviting.

Clouds, sideways

(It looks better in a wider view on the vimeo site: Clouds sideways).

This is a slitscan manipulation of timelapse clouds by Matt Conroy. Time runs left to right across the frame; the black stuff at the beginning is a pine tree at the left side of Matt's video.

Pumpkin liqueur

I'm trying a pumpkin liqueur -- we ended up with a vast pumpkin from Gathering Together farms, and it's got to be et.

I found this pumpkin liqueur recipe and tried to follow it, but it makes all kinds of no sense:

• How the heck much is 24 ounces of pumpkin? I chopped it raw and used 4 cups.
• Boil four cups of pumpkin in the juice of one lemon? Not possible. So I kept adding enough water to keep it from burning. It probably spent a half-hour on the stove total.
• I tried straining it, but it seemed like a waste of effort -- every other recipe I've used involves big chunks of stuff soaking in the liquor, then you strain at the end. So I just dumped it in there, pumpkin, lemon peels, and all.
• Instead of 6 oz of sugar, I used "some" sugar. Probably less than that; I'll add syrup when I'm done.
• I don' t know how much rum I used. probably a little more than they called for.

I'm not optimistic about this one, but we'll see.

UPDATE: I gave it a couple weeks, then strained it and added sugar water to it. The result was something like limoncello. No pumpkin flavor at all. Not great limoncello, but not undrinkable; I kept in in the freezer and drank it in small amounts as an after dinner sippy drink. If I were to try this again, I'd use a pie pumpkin (they're sweeter), maybe add some sugar during the first stage, and of course no lemon. Maybe add pumpkin pie spices after it's done, but I'd want to taste it without them first, because I think they'd overwhelm the pumpkin.

Concord Liqueur Experiment

I'm trying a liqueur making experiment, and I'm blogging the recipe so I don't forget what I did in case I like the result. I didn't find a good recipe on the internet anywhere so I'm just making this up. Any advice is appreciated.

• 3 cups (loosely packed) of Concord grape skins
  
• 2 cups Everclear
• 2 cups distilled water

The plan is to let it sit about a month, then strain it and add sugar and water (maybe 2 cups sugar, 1 cup water, premade into syrup), and let that sit for another few weeks.

A frozen old friend

So I was just googling people I haven't seen in a long time, and I found an article about some friends of mine, Mary Margaret and Jim Glennie, who I knew when I was in college. Jim died of a brain tumor, and had his brain cryopreserved in hopes of reanimating it some day; and Mary Margaret is signed up for the same treatment.

I don't know enough biology to say anything intelligent about whether this process could work. Seems far-fetched. But Mary Margaret's logic was sound: she pays some amount of insurance to Alcor, for a few decades, and gains some probability, however small, of a long, interesting, unimaginable life in the distant future, by the side of loved ones you're guaranteed to lose otherwise. If you can afford it, and you don't believe in any metaphysical afterlife, then why not? It's a bit like a materialist's version of Pascal's wager.

All the same, I don't see myself signing up. I have faith that, a society that had the technology to revive me wouldn't need me. They'd be bringing me back out of nostalgia or contractual obligation, and in a society with that kind of technology, I'd basically never die. I'd be the same kind of quaint annoyance as the crappy old buildings you can't knock down when historical preservationists take things too far. I mean, I like to think of myself as a beautiful and unique snowflake, but one coffee table book of snowflake pictures is about all anyone can appreciate. I'll let Jim and Mary Margaret fill that role. They'll make fine ambassadors to the future.

(Thanks mysza831 for the photo)

Lazy Substitutiony Vegetarian Mofongo

I got envious of Andrew's culinary adventures without me in Oregon, and decided to make one of my own favorite things, Mofongo.

I did it extremely lazy, and made lots of substitutions, and it still came out really good. I think the mofongo recipes you find out there are way too fussy. Or maybe I just have tin taste buds...

Anyway, here's what I did:

Lazy Substitutiony Vegetarian Mofongo

• 2 green plantains
• 1 package of LightLife SmartStrips, the tasty vegetarian meat substitute with the stupid name. If you like to eat pigs, put bacon or pork in instead as a meat substitute substitute.
• 5 guks of olive oil (turn the bottle upside down and listen: guk guk guk guk guk STOP)
• Too much garlic powder
• One package of shrimp ramen

Peel the plantains. They're awkwarder to peel than bananas. Chop them into pieces like half an inch thick. Fry them on medium heat for a while in a little too much olive oil. If your frying pan isn't small and stupid like mine, then you'll probably need more guks. Anyway, turn 'em and don't burn 'em. They don't even have to brown, but you want to make sure they're mostly cooked inside.

Lift them out of the frying pan with a holey spatula so most of the grease is left in the pan, and put the strips in the there and start them frying.

While they're frying, mush up the plantains. Mine were kinda crusty from cooking, so it wasn't easy, and like I said I don't have any kitchen equipment to speak of, so it was a little spoon and a too-small bowl. Maybe you have an electric plantain-o-matic you got at your wedding and haven't used, but don't go crazy and overmush them; you want tasty chunky texture.

Next you're supposed to prep a cup of bouillon. Like I have bouillon. Instead I used half of the flavor packet from the shrimp ramen, too much garlic powder, and maybe a little less than a cup of water. I know what you're thinking, but shut up, it came out good.

When the strippies have browned a little, I took a little more than half of them out, because there were too much. Having no containers left, I put them in a tupper, and it started to melt the bottom. So I floated it in the sink in the hopes it would keep the plastic from melting through, ruining my leftovers AND my tupper. You don't have to do it this way, if you have fancy french-chef kitchen stuff like "non-plastic bowls". Anyway, the sink trick totally worked.

Put the mushed plantains back in the pan, and then pour the ramen packet garlic water in there, and it'll make all cooking noises and smell good.

Oh yeah, you should have cut those strips things into smaller pieces before cooking. But it's not too late -- just attack them with the spatula. It'll slip and you'll get grease everywhere, but that's what cleaning up later is for.

Anyway, keep playing with this watery chunky mess, and as the water cooks down, the plantains will kind of soak it up and finish cooking, and you'll want to take it off the heat when it's dry.

It's supposed to be served on a plate in a kind of big snowball-sized lump. Mine is served in a lump that happens to be exactly the same shape and size as my one big cooking spoon. Same shape, you'll notice as the rice, which I did in a pan, not a rice maker, because I don't have one, and it came out perfect even though I was doing two things at once, because I'm master Plastic Chef.

Also? Beer and avocado.

The cost of gay marriage

The Economist's blog reports that the head of the Republican
party, Michael Steele, is saying that gay marriage costs employers money, because more of their employees will have spouses that employers must provide health insurance for.

I'm not getting it. I thought the GOP opposed gay marriage because they think it encourages and increases homosexuality. Of course I think they're mistaken. But if their absurd strategy works, gay employees will eventually give up on being gay, marry the opposite sex, and employers will have to pay insurance for those opposite-sex spouses. (and perhaps they'll even be more likely to end up with children to insure)

But suppose the strategy doesn't work (as I suspect Steele knows that it won't). Suppose people are gay just because they're gay and not because creeping liberalism lured them into it. Then what Steele is saying is pretty explicitly awful: we admit that banning gay marriage doesn't have the positive moral effect we intend, and in fact we're depending on that failure to save money.

It's like if you decided to train a horse to talk by only feeding it when it said "please". Maybe your horse won't learn to talk, but think of all the money you'll save on oats!

A materialist argument for Intelligent Design

From what I know, and I'm no biologist, it seems like we have solid evidence that life evolved gradually, changing from generation to generation because of mutation and genetic recombination, selected by the failure of the least fit to reproduce. Also, from what I've heard, the "intelligent design" (ID) people are almost all Christians who in fact believe in the biblical account of creation, and they're just using the vague ID argument as a backdoor way to eventually teach Bible stories in the science classroom.



But I think there's an aspect of their argument that can't be rejected out of hand.

Suppose you hand a responsible, honest specialist some item, and ask them, "Was this designed by an intelligent being, or did it come about through some non-intelligent process?" Let's say, maybe, that it's a kind of square rock that could be an ancient brick, or it could just be a square rock. How would they answer?

I think, to answer responsibly, they'd have to have some clear idea of what constitutes "design" and what constitutes "intelligence". Otherwise they'd just be talking through their hat. Maybe an archeologist could take the rock and X-ray it or something and show that there were systematic chip marks, just the right size to have been made by a human hand. That wouldn't be proof, but it would be a good indication that it was designed by a person, and we know people are intelligent, so: intelligent design.

But it's kind of a cheat answer because it just relies on the common assumption that "humans are intelligent". It doesn't answer the deeper question of what "intelligence" really means, and how it shows up in the design of an object. It wouldn't help us answer the question of some alien artifact, made by a creature whose intelligence was in question. And it wouldn't help us figure out whether life on earth was created by an intelligence or not.

Well, I don't have a good set of criteria, either, that could demonstrate that, say, some crude hand-axe was made by an intelligence, but the human eye was not.

So here's another possibility. Suppose I said that the hand-axe wasn't intelligently designed. Sure, some person made it, but people aren't really intelligent. Actually they're just made of chemicals and membranes that bounce around and react to each other for eighty years or so, and any apparent "intelligence" they exhibit can actually be seen as the sum of a lot of unintelligent smaller things: neurons firing when they get stimulated, muscle reflexes getting triggered by neurons, etc.

Supposing you buy that, then why is it that the emergent behavior of a bunch of dumb neurons is considered intelligent, but the emergent behavior of DNA reactions and natural selection is not considered intelligent? They both produce amazingly complex artifacts. The time scales are wildly different, and humans have lots of other interesting characteristics like language and feelings and elbows, but aren't they both at least capable of creating some pretty brilliant designs?

The ID'ers, I think, would like to take a further leap and say this intelligent process is part of a great mind, that is self-aware, that created the universe, and inspired scriptures, and hears your prayers, and really likes candles and singing. I'd rather not jump to such conclusions, but instead suppose that there can be intelligence without "mind". Maybe intelligence is just a feature of some natural systems, like for example evolution, brains, and maybe other complicated things: an ecosystem? an economy? an anthill? Maybe humans are just unusual in being examples of intelligence that also have self-awareness, minds, and blogs.

Anyway, I think the ID argument poses an interesting problem: if we say the eye is not intelligently designed, then we are making a strong claim that ought to be justified, not about how the eye arose, but about what exactly is intelligence, and what exactly is design.

Andy and Olivia's Korean Ceremony

My brother and sister-in-law just did the Korean ceremony part of their wedding. My dad just posted his photos of it. I really wish I could have gone. I can't get over the cool hats!

After the coronation, Queen Olivia reads her first proclamation to her adoring subjects.

History is fake

Wow. I just ran into a very very old friend, who I hadn't seen since high school. He's someone I parted with on a bad note, and one of the first things I did when we found each other again, was apologize. The funny thing was, he had no memory of the incident that I thought had driven us apart, and that had being bugging me for a quarter of a century.

I know that the fussy, detailed social dramas we all play out in our heads are make believe bullshit that draw our attention away from real things; the feel of your feet in your shoes, the flavor of ramen, or the way your shirt smells when it's still clean enough to wear a second time. But I need constant reminders like this or I forget again.

A Modern Brown Elephant

Allison and Eric helped us paint our new place last week. Here we see them deviating from the planned minimalist abstract color field, experimenting with representational zöoscape. This represents an elephant:

花見

花見. The cherries are in bloom in Oregon!

Spanish: it stings, it burns, it chafes!

I just got another of a series of phone calls from 1-555-000-9561, some telemarketing recording in Spanish. I searched for it because I get this once a month or so, and I was curious how they manage to look like they're dialing from "555" when that's not a real area code.

Anyway, I found this web site (800Notes.com) that collects reports of weird telemarketing calls, and lots of people have been getting this. The amusing thing to me was how many people, maybe 1 in 20, were just especially enraged about the fact that it was in Spanish:

AT WORK - MY PRIVATE CELL PHONE RINGS AND THIS MEXICAN JUST STARTS RUNNING HIS MOUTH - I HUNG UP --- IF YOU CAN'T SPEAK ENGLISH - GO BACK HOME ---- I PAY AMERICAN DOLLARS FOR MY CELL PHONE, SOMEONE NEEDS TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS CRAP -- SORRY -- JUST AGGRIVATED.12:05 PM.

I'm fascinated by this hugely different attitude people have towards variety in the world. The people who react this way seem to be irritated by seeing anything different from what they're used to. Do they think it will hurt them somehow to hear it? As for me, I think my irritation with a telemarketing call would be inversely proportional to how exotic the language was. If someone called me up and tried to sell me timeshares in Ainu or Quechua, I'd probably at least opt to attend the obligation-free seminar in Aspen.

I guess change irritates me, too, with certain things -- I hate the way menus in Microsoft Word change themselves around trying to adapt to my use patterns, making it hard for me to find things. So, I can be a xenophobe too. I wonder what determines when we prefer variety and when we prefer homogeneity?

How to succeed as a student

Well, I've just finished my first semester in grad school. Well, not my "first" really, because I got a master's degree 15 years ago, but I had a very different attitude towards that experience, and I got very different things out of it. Here's what I've learned so far this time around:

Grad school, at least the way Oregon State does it, is not so much about learning ideas as it is about learning to communicate ideas clearly and engagingly. I took one graduate-level class, and participated in several research groups, and we were repeatedly asked to present our own projects, or our understanding of papers we'd read, to the group. It was remarkable how quickly some people improved over the course of even our short 3-month term, and how easily you could tell second-year from first-year students. (As for me, I was thinking more about content than presentation, so I'm really not sure if I improved or not. I may need to ask for some feedback.)

I also did grading of exams and projects an undergraduate "writing-intensive" software engineering class, and quickly discovered that I was asking too much of myself to attempt to grade the students' "understanding" of the material -- all I can do is evaluate their presentation of it. My math-teacher friends Matt and Jenni told me the same thing: they constantly have to remind students that they're grading their work, not their understanding of concepts: teachers are not mind-readers.

Students would do well to think of studying in terms of practicing their performance, rather than checking their understanding. I think there was a time that I would have rankled at that suggestion; that somehow it was noble to increase my understanding of the world, and that practice was secondary. But understanding reaches a dead end quickly without practice; it's ephemeral and ungrounded and forgettable. We delude ourselves into thinking our understanding is firmer than it really is; only in practicing it and explaining it to others are we confronted with the holes and contradictions.

Another thing I learned is that articles written for conferences and journals are not so highfalutin' as I thought they were. They're glorified term papers. Like term papers, they're required of certain people and they represent about a term's worth of work. They're original and interesting at their best, but they don't all get picked up by the New York Times, turn the scientific establishment on its head, or win Nobel prizes. They're just updates on what you're working on, and they keep you on track and in communication with your colleagues. I guess I had the notion before that "publish or perish" was a critique of the shallowness of academic bureaucracies, but it just doesn't seem that way from what I'm seeing at OSU: paper submissions are simply a way to chunk and organize this otherwise vague process called "research". If someone is researching but not publishing, they're making the same mistake as the student who thinks understanding the material is more important than communicating it. If you discover the wheel but can't think of a way of demonstrating its usefulness to other people, then your discovery won't make any practical difference in the world. Anyway, that's how things look to me as a newbie; we'll see how I feel after a few rejections :-)

So far I love being a graduate student. I love being paid to think about stuff that used to be a hobby. I don't love every single thing I'm working on, but I don't hate any of it. I have some serious, but I think healthy and natural, uncertainty about how I'm going to position my perspectives and passions within the corner of the academic world I've chosen to start in. I can't just pursue any crazy cool idea I come up with, because everyone around me has their own interests and perspectives, and I have to learn how to collaborate. My adviser is a proficient cat herder, and I want to learn that from her, and let myself be herded a little; but I still want to stay in touch with my cat-nature.

(thanks Westernlady and Tiger for the picture!)

Bike Reflector Art

I took my brother and sister-in-law to see the building I work in, late at night after dinner. There's this artwork on one wall, about 10 feet wide and three very tall stories high, made of different colored bike reflectors. My brother, Handy MacGyver, had a flashlight/laser pointer readily at hand, and he quickly discovered that if you brace the flashlight on your forehead and walk back and forth across the atrium, you see shiny waves of light crossing the piece. Of course, everyone had to try it, including a baffled professor who discovered us staggering around in the lobby. Here's my blurry sister giving it a try:

Left and Right Brains

The LA Times reports on a study of brain differences between liberals and conservatives. They showed people an "M" or a "W", and they had to click a key only when an "M" showed up. M's were much more common than W's. Liberals did better on average than conservatives at holding back from clicking when a W appeared. The implication the Times draws is that conservatives are more prone to making decisions without considering new information.

If this is an accurate report, it makes me wonder how to find a game where conservatives would do better than liberals. My guess might be some test of field dependence, like the embedded figures test. If conservatives are more likely to wrongly fixate on a pattern when asked to look for exceptions, maybe they're more likely to correctly identify a pattern when distracted.

I'd rather this kind of research be used to figure out how people can broaden themselves, than to pigeonhole people or belittle their beliefs as poor brain functioning. Is it possible to train the brain to be more field-dependent or independent at will? Can we learn to adopt a liberal or conservative mindset when one or the other is advantageous? Maybe there's a scientific bias against studies asking people to "do" things mentally and observing the results; since internal "doing" is so hard to describe and to measure. But maybe improving brain scan technology will allow more exploration of the ways people can choose to change the way they go about thinking and emoting.

Taking night pictures with a cell phone camera

In my explorations of what you can do with a cellphone camera, the most interesting challenge is night pictures. I find brightly colored lights at night to be really beautiful, but the cell camera doesn't capture it well. Here's a snapshot of what was a brilliant traffic light my last night living in Denver:



You can see some redness in the "don't walk" sign across the street, but the traffic signal just shows up white next to the streetlight. I think it was green at the time, but it's hard to tell here. Should I photoshop it to fix the color to what I remember seeing?

Here's a photo of the Man and the moon from Burning Man last week. The man was bright green -- here he shows up white. The green canopy under it shows up as green though. Must be something about intense green getting washed out more than other colors.



Also the moon is a lot less dramatic. I took several moon pictures and they always look tiny. Why is that? Must be related to the effect that makes the moon look bigger on the horizon. I don't think I'll bother with moonshots any more without a telephoto lens.

Here are our water bottles: we put glow sticks in them so we can carry them around and not lose them and not get hit by bikes. The green looks fine here.



One final example: I tried to get a picture of the Thunderdome; this is a huge geodesic dome where the audience climbs on the outside and people fight inside hanging on bungee swings. I was trying to just get a straightforward snapshot of the fighters with audience in the fore- and background, but obviously the shutter speed had to be too slow for all the motion and my unsteady hand (snapping at arms length over my head). Plus my aim sucked. But I kinda like it anyway; it captures a sense of anarchy and chaos. I guess night photos with a cell phone have to be either still lifes or lomographic motion shots like this.

Sky-blue Mohawk

I also got some good pictures last week of Andrew in his blue mohawk and dustpunk coiture. We had to scrunch up the fabric covering the dome to create larger openings, when a windstorm/dust-whiteout came up and the dome got blown about 10 feet. Opening up holes cut the wind resistance a little, but our stuff got incredibly dusty.



He was frustrated with how quickly the blue hair faded in the sun, but I think it looked good that way.

The world from my window

I took some pictures at Burning man with my new camera phone. Most pictures come out crap with it, but occasionally I really like one. Andrew keeps telling me this should inspire me to get a better camera, but I really like the convenience of this one, and it seems like the fun part of art is to see what you can make with the medium you're working with, rather than obsessing about better equipment.

This is looking out at the sky from the doorway of our geodesic dome home.