On typing

From a letter by Mark Twain to his brother upon the acquisition of a Remington typewriter (quoted in Faster by James Gleick, p. 117):

I am trying t to get the hang of this new f fangled writing machine ... The machine has several virtues I believe it will print faster than I can write. ... It piles an awful stack of words on one page.

(The typographical errors are copied from Faster, and presumably in turn were copied from the original letter.)

Savagery

From a letter from Bertrand Russell to the editor of The Observer (12th Jan, 1963, p. 30). Via Yours faithfully, Bertrand Russell (ed. Ray Perkins, Jr.), pp. 406--407.

   Have we all become savage? Why do we turn, inevitably, towards ferocity in dealing with political opponents -- towards maiming or killing or sentencing them to disproportionately long imprisonment?
   I think it is because we live in an atmosphere of fear bred by present political policies. We have been conditioned to accept cruelty, even the threat of extermination, as the sole means of defending a way of life that seems to prove itself, by such a result, hardly worth defending.

Salsa

The best thing about dinner at Cancun Taqueria this evening? Mango salsa. We ran out of chips before we ran out of salsa, so I drank the rest without chips.

They have pretty good agua fresca, too, with bits of fruit floating in it.

• Currently drinking: Cold water. But maybe I'll have hot water and lime soon.

A Specious Odyssey

I've got a great idea for a movie. I call it Y2K+1. In it, a maintenance programmer discovers a mysterious monolithic code of unknown origin. I haven't worked out the details, but I have a few lines of dialogue...

• What does this code do? It's origin and purpose are a total mystery
• The editor is opening. I can see the C code. My god, it's full of stars!
• Just what do you think it's doing, Dave?
• The 9K series is the most reliable computer program ever made.

On hash function security

Researchers have found flaws in the MD5 and SHA0 hash functions. A hash function is a function which takes a large amount of data (a document, say) and from it generates a much smaller number. Ideally, it should be very hard to find a collision, or two inputs which generate the same output. The recently-discovered flaws in MD5 and SHA0 mean that it's possible to find collisions in these functions much more quickly than anyone had previously realized.

Cryptographically secure hash functions are key to generating digital signatures. To digitally sign a document D, I would compute a hash function H(D), then compute another function S(H(D), K) based on my secret key K. Only I can easily evaluate S, but anyone can check to see that what I've evaluated is correct. We evaluate S(H(D), K) instead of S(D, K) because the output of S is the same size as the input, and we don't want a signature that takes as much space as the original document. Also, we can compute S much more quickly if the input is small. However, we don't want it to be easy for someone to cut our signature and attach it to another document, which they could do if the fake document F had the same hash as D does (i.e. H(D) = H(F)). That's why finding these collisions is considered a big deal.

However, the sky is not falling (except insofar as the sky is always falling locally in areas where convection cycles in the atmosphere produce a downdraft). If I can come up with an input file that produces the same MD5 hash as the mortgage you digitally signed, then I could replace your mortgage with my file, and the signature would still check. But finding some input file that produces the same MD5 hash as your mortgage is a far cry from finding some meaningful input file that produces the same MD5 hash as your mortgage. For the time being, the easiest way to forge an electronic signature on a document in which you will me all your money is to hire goons to steal your key.

• Currently drinking: Black coffee (Peet's African blend)
• Current password: Squeamish ossifrage

Ink in the drink

I have two fountain pens in Berkeley. One of them takes Parker ink cartridges; the other takes Waterman cartridges, or uses an adaptor to take ink from a bottle. It is a corrolary to Murphy's law that if I can't find one of the pens, I will be out of ink for the other. This evening, Murphy did not strike. I found Waterman cartridges, and had the appropriate pen close at hand. I had no problem taking out the old cartridge, putting the new one in, or reassembling the pen.

I should have been worried. Murphy always gets his due.

Half an hour later, I had an envelope with holes scratched into it, ink stains along my index fingers, a bottle cap full of inky water, and a renewed appreciation of water-soluble inks. I haven't left so many finger prints on a paper since the last time I spilled coffee on my hand while juggling a clipboard.

Just as my pens sometimes run dry, so do my creative juices. At least, so went my thought as I cleaned up and tried to figure out what I wanted to write with my newly-charged pen. Perhaps pouring a little water in my ear would help? Right -- and if the eyes are windows to the soul, then the virtuous should buy stock in eyeball squeegies?

• Currently drinking: Black tea flavored with osymanthus flowers and water-soluble ink

Thinking time

A few years ago, I bought a copy of James Gleick's Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. I enjoyed his Chaos: The Making of a New Science when I was in high school, and the title tickled my fancy. I enjoyed it enough that I took it home for my parents to read. I spent part of yesterday evening browsing through the shelves around my old room, saw that Faster was still there, and picked it up. I think I might take it back to California with me.

There's a semi-humorous You might be a graduate student if... list that used to occasionally make it into my inbox. It was funnier before I passed through the 20th grade. One of the bullets is you find the bibliographies of books more interesting than the actual text. I don't feel exactly that way, but besides the re-read value, a strong reason for bringing Faster back to Berkeley with me is for the references, both in the Acknowledgements and Notes section and in the body of the text. More book recommendations!

(I've barely scratched the list of books recommended from reading From Dawn to Decadence, but since when has that factored into my reading habits?)

Vacations are a good time to think about time. What does mail have over e-mail? I've mentioned the aesthetics of pen and paper before. But I think another attraction of hand-written letters is the time they take, both in the drafting and in the sending.

I can type faster than I write, faster even than I can draft a coherent sentence. So when I type, my hand has the tendency to run ahead of me; then I backspace; and then my fingers run ahead again. The mental image I have is of a man walking a crazed little dog -- the type that runs in circles and yips impatiently at the staid pace of its owner. That's an exaggeration, but it captures the feeling. It's a sort of fidget. When I write with pen and paper, or with pencil and paper, I have much less difficulty keeping up my hands in sync with my thoughts. Furthermore, I often write letters in parts; a paragraph or two one day, a few more the next. I rarely write e-mail that way.

Then there's the sending. Write an e-mail, hit send, and you can expect the message to arrive in a matter of minutes. Write a letter, drop it in the mailbox, and you can expect it to arrive in a few days. And that's fast! One of the themes running through Patrick O'Brian's books, which are set in the British Navy early in the nineteenth century, is the sending and receiving of mail. A letter sent could take months to arrive at its destination, if it arrived at all. A correspondence in which there are months of delay between exchanges must be different from a correspondence in which the delay is a minute, an hour, even a day. Minutes are a matter of short term memory; months are not.

Have you noticed how much shorter pop music pieces are than classical or jazz pieces? Or how instantly identifiable BBC segments are by the relatively long periods of time the camera remains in one place? How differently people talk on cell phones than on land lines? How different conversations are when you have only a few minutes to talk over the phone rather than a couple hours to talk over food (or over books, as the case may be)?

Fill in the blank: the blank pace of modern life. Hectic, right? There's a very interesting discussion of American perceptions of leisure time in Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam (which came to my parent's home around the same time as Faster; the two books sit together on the shelf). It's not very original to say that Americans scurry a lot; nor is it original to observe that we actually have a lot of spare time, much more than we realize. Unoriginal hardly means unworthy, though. Old topics are good for chewing slowly; and time is a very old topic.

What's the most famous quote of Thoreau? I came to the woods to live deliberately. The word deliberately does not connote slowness so much as unhurried or careful. It's good to spend some time remembering to be deliberate.

I don't want to reject the fast or the slow. I just like being able to think about it, and make choices about what things I find useful and what things I'd rather not have:
Cell-phone? Not yet.
E-mail? Is great.
Long letters? Also great.
Staccato sentence fragments? Check.

• Currently drinking: Green tea

I am at my family's home, and have been here since last Wednesday. Winnie came along for the first week, and we trooped around College Park and DC and Annapolis. My siblings came along for some of the DC visits, and we went to Annapolis with my parents. We ate dinner with my friends on Saturday evening, and ate lunch with one of her college friends on Sunday afternoon, and had other meals with varying subsets of my family. The weather was mild and clear through Wednesday morning, when Winnie left. A thunderstorm blew past Wednesday afternoon, and today a more serious storm system started moving past. I'm listening to the sound of rain on the roof as I type. It's a nice sound.

College Park remains much the same as I remember, enough that it was no problem to navigate. There is a Ten Ren Tea House, new since I graduated (though that's five years past, now). I remember a quirky little coffee shop at that corner which no longer seems to be there. They used to have open mike nights periodically. I visited that cafe sometimes, though I always avoided the open mike nights; but I like the idea of a tea house, too. Not that it matters either way, I suppose.

Now I'm just enjoying the quiet of home. Our old grey cat, Misty, is the only survivor from when I still really lived here, but the other cats are willing to be around, even if they're cautious. There are books, of course, and I've been going through a novel or two each day, for the past couple days. They're mostly short, light, and forgettable. An exception, which I picked up in an idle moment in a Barnes and Noble in DC (you knew I would visit a book store some time, right?) is Don Knuth's Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. I particularly enjoyed lectures 3 and 4, but the whole book was interesting and entertaining, and I'm looking forward to taking it back to California to lend to friends there.

I'm in the middle of a few serial letters. I do enjoy writing to people, assuming that I remember their address and have some inkling that a letter might be welcome. I took home a fountain pen which is one of my favorites for letter-writing, and some pads of regular-sized paper. I like e-mail -- at least, I like it many days when the spam filter is working -- but there's something relaxing to writing a letter that isn't shared in writing an e-mail. Perhaps it's a lack of immediacy. Or maybe it's just that a pen or pencil and a piece of paper are such wonderfully engineered artifacts: simple to use, robust, unlikely to freeze up or lose a connection, unchanging in their fundamental design for a long time.

I've done a little work, sipped a little tea, and spent a lot of time staring into space. I've exchanged awful puns with Dad, and sung silly songs with Mom, and had unhurried conversations with my brothers, and played with the cats. And while I look forward to returning home to California on Monday, for now I'm just enjoying the old home.

Gen mai cha is green tea with toasted rice kernels. Adagio Tea makes a variant which they call gen mai cha pop, in which the rice kernels are toasted for long enough that they pop. The rice gives the tea a nutty flavor that I like. I keep a tin at the office in the top drawer of my desk.

The office is quiet in the evening these days. One of the advantages of being the only person here after hours is that I can listen to the radio -- via the Internet or from my clock radio -- without my earphones. It's like whistling while I work, but without the absent-minded off-key wandering periods when I concentrate.

The radio is nice during tea breaks, too.

• Currently drinking: gen mai cha

What the programming world really does not need is a debugging tool based on the antics of a troop of monkeys. It would be amusing, though -- give a whole new meaning to tree walk and dangling pointer.

• Currently drinking: Russian caravan blend

Surf the web and talk on the phone at the same time! says the announcer on the Comcast commercial. Does this seem rude to anybody else?

Uttered in an introductory programming class:

How do you eat an elephant? Anybody? You cannot eat an elephant all at once. Not even a tiny baby elephant. You must divide and conquer!

Seems like it could go for any number of disciplines. How much gnashing of teeth actually comes from some poor soul trying to gnaw through the skin of an elephant? Even a tiny baby elephant?

Some days I think I should have chosen a different career path. Like being a zookeeper.

I like paper. Part of this, of course, is because I love to read, but there's also the smell and the heft and the texture of it. Flipping through a book can be a wonderful experience even without the words on the pages, just because of the feel of paper on finger tips. Books smell good, too, whether they're new or old. So sometimes I flip through a book even if I don't feel like reading it, just for the feel of flipping through the book.

In a brief break this afternoon to rest my eyes from the monitor and let the world regain non-pixelated edges, I flipped through Desolation Island, the next of the Patrick O'Brian books in my queue (The Mauritius Command was fun, by the way). I wasn't paying a great deal of attention to the words, though I sometimes paused to sample a sentence. But an indented passage of text caught my eye, and I stopped to read

Before my bed, clear moonlight
Frost on the floor?
Raising head, I gaze at the moon
Bowing head, I think of my own country.

Winnie taught me that poem last weekend! At least, she tried to teach me; I remember how to say the first two lines in Cantonese, but when I was practicing I mistakenly said chicken head instead of raising head, and promptly forgot everything from there on. I laughed at the coincidence, and that broke the sour mood that I hadn't even realized I'd fallen into.

This morning, like so many other summer mornings, the sky over Berkeley was overcast. But the clouds broke in the afternoon to let the sun through, and so I extended my break to take a walk. I went to the office to pick up a book, then wandered through downtown Berkeley to Safeway to buy fruit. Jazz music, the smell of cheese, and a queue of customers wound their respective way out of Cheeseboard Pizza as I passed, and the smell of coffee and the sound of espresso machines wafted out of the cafes. I passed a seeing-eye dog leading a blind woman and a woman walking a blind dog with eyes clouded by cataracts. I heard conversations in Spanish and Mandarin and English, and perhaps in Russian and Greek as well. As I made my way home, the sound of the BART train passing through the tunnel mingled with traffic noise and shouts from a soccer game in the park. And I walked and looked and listened, and hummed Walking in Memphis under my breath, and was pleased with the world.

Cities and neighborhoods have personalities. Getting to know a place is a little like getting to know a person. There are first impressions, sometimes right and sometimes wrong; there are things the city shares with one person but not with another; there are shades and shifts and changes over time, and there are things that stay pretty much the same. And we get to like a place, or dislike it, or live with it happily, or ignore it, or treat it nobly or ignobly in many of the same ways we treat other people.

So I wandered, and I let my mind wander. I thought about how alien Berkeley felt when I first came, how it became more familiar over time, how it changed as friends arrived and left. When I stopped at the office to pick up one of my books on eigensolvers, I read an e-mail from a professor at College Park, who I hadn't heard from since I took his course on ODE theory as an undergrad; and so I was thinking about Maryland, too. The squirrels will be out in force on campus at this time of year, sporting around the end of McKeldin Mall like a particularly playful invading army. It's probably hot and humid, perhaps with a smell of rain in the air, quiet as campuses always are in the summer.

And then I came back and sat down and discovered that I didn't feel like returning to my strivings with Matlab. I picked up a fountain pen and thought for a moment about writing a letter; but after playing with it for a moment, much in the same spirit as I flipped through the book earlier in the afternoon, I put the pen down. I wasn't sure who I would write to. So here I write, and, it would seem, here you read.

And now I'm going to have some bread and water (a wonderful combination given an undeserved reputation by association with solitary confinement), and do some more work.

Something to ponder if you are interested in shock waves or phase transitions, or if you're just stuck in traffic -- could controlling a few cars stabilize the state of stable traffic flow when a jam would usually occur?

In college, we played the Vacuously True Statement Game. Example: Every time I've been abducted by space aliens, they've treated me well. The statement is true, since I've never been abducted by space aliens (at least to my knowledge). Related amusements include:

• The Alarmist Trivia Game -- Dihydrogen monoxide can be fatal when inhaled!
• The Escalating Exaggeration Game -- This pack must weight fifty pounds. What's that, fifty kilos? Yes, it's amazing that I'm not squashed under this fifty kiloton pack. This is one of Patxi's favorites.
• The New Constant Game -- Someday, I'll have an important class of numbers named after me. Like the set of all even primes. Like the Vacuously True Statement Game, this is Mike's invention.
• The Ridiculous Song Game -- Self-explanatory. Since this is one of my favorites, there are examples in the archives. Chopsticks, Edelweiss, and the Surprise Symphony are my favorite templates.
• The Flagstaff Game -- In which any geographical location you care to name is placed in relation to Flagstaff (usually within walking distance). This is also Patxi's contribution.
• The Ramsey Theory Bites Dance -- It doesn't, really. But after Mike and I got to prove the fifth or sixth variant, it did start to get old.
• The Spackle Convention -- If your friend told you he'd eat a gallon of spackle if he were shown wrong, would you, too, quickly change topics?
• X Wars -- How many sets of xeyes can your host support before it becomes unusable?
• Boardy -- This was a variable name from a chess program capable of bending the computer into pretzels, written in AP Computer Science by Will. Chant it over and over again, and it becomes fantastically funny. At least, it does if you're me. Or if you're Will, for that matter. I don't think it ever amused anyone else quite so much.

I think it's time to eat now.

From the farmer's market: fresh salmon and heirloom tomatoes
From the Cheeseboard: asiago bread and tomato salsa
From things around the kitchen: spices and peppers and onions
From Winnie: sweet corn on the cob

I'm really looking forward to dinner this evening.

There are days when editing, for me at least, is a way to slack off.

Now, in college I had a friendly argument with friends which went on intermittently for a month or so before we all dropped it. I claimed that vacuuming, washing dishes, cleaning the bathroom, and eating meals are all -- potentially, at least -- ways of slacking off. I like to eat, and I like to clean -- eat something messy, wipe a dish off, and admire the sparkle. It takes little effort, and the results are immediate. Now, these activities are necessary, and I would probably do them even if I didn't enjoy them. But I do enjoy them, and I figure that if I eat and clean when I have other, more urgent, and perhaps less enjoyable tasks pending, then the eating-and-cleaning time counts as goofing off. My friends disagreed, but they never really convinced me.

Therefore, I feel vaguely guilty for spending the afternoon editing when I should probably have been writing code or running experiments. I'm fond of my red pen, probably because very few other things in my life involve such a vivid primary color. Sit me down with a red pen, a cup of something warm, and a manuscript in progress, and I'll be happy as a clam. Writing new text is hard work, but revising existing text is fun. Maybe I enjoy editing for the same reasons that I enjoy cleaning: it's easy, and the results are immediate. Still, while I don't feel guilty about my editing time (certainly not as if I should be chastised with scorpions as one high-school teacher put it), I also think it's fair to say that I was slacking off. At least a little.

I also goof off in other ways, of course. I read books, and I've taken to watching television sometimes. I make up bad puns (does anyone else think about legally changing their name to Bic Pentameter?); I go for walks; I people-watch; I hang out with friends; I surf the web. Sometimes I just stare into space, though I can't imagine how I look any different when daydreaming than I do when proving a theorem or thinking out how to design a program. Apart from some extra enthusiasm about things mathematical and a tendency toward speech patterns more commonplace in the nineteenth century than in the twenty-first, my distractions and my habits of work and play are in the normal range for a modern-day male American in his mid-twenties. And so I'd guess that there are plenty of other folks out there who, like me, sometimes engage in goofing off of the necessary sort, whether by fixing a car, cleaning, or doing some other enjoyable chore in place of something more onerous.

Pete, feel free to disagree with me the next time you feel like goofing off.

• Currently drinking: Osymanthus fancy black tea

From Patrick O'Brian's The Mauritius Command:

   Certainly, said Stephen. To the ultimate crosstrees if you choose: I too am nimble as an ape.
   Jack was moved to ask whether there were earthbound apes, as compact as lead, afflicted with vertigo, possessed of two left hands and no sense of balance; but he had seen the startling effect of a challenge upon his friend, and apart from grunting as he thrust Stephen up through the lubber's hole, he remained silent until they were comfortably installed along the studding-sails, with their glasses trained upon the town.

What a wonderful sentence!

• Currently drinking: Black coffee

A cup of tea or a glass of lemonade, sipped in solitary quiet, is a wonderful thing. Eating alone is usually not as fun. But there are exceptions.

I eat fast. I often make cold meals of fruit, bread, and cheese, and when I do, it usually takes me more time to cut things up and wipe away the crumbs than it does to actually eat. Cold leftovers disappear go just as quickly. But I also like to cook, and it's a good thing. Cooking can be almost as meditative an activity as preparing tea (not quite, but almost); and I find it easier to take my time enjoying hot food. Also, while I enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables and bread, not all the food in the kitchen is fresh. I've eaten stale bread with molding cheese and wilting spinach. I've also used stale bread, Cheese of Ages, and wilted veggies to make french onion soup and omelette fillings. The soup and omelette were good; the sandwich was miserable.

This evening, I split the difference. I had fresh olive bread and good black cherries (on sale at Safeway), and I also made an omelette filled with the last of the munster cheese (which wasn't exactly bad, but needed to be used), the last of the zucchini (in about the same state as the munster), some tomato, and an excellent jalapeno. I cooked the vegetables for the omelette filling in olive oil with a little black pepper, and added them after the cheese melted. It was good, and it was hot, and I ate with gusto tempered by caution against burning my mouth.

What better way to end than with a hot beverage of choice?

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lime

• According to StarDate, the navy bounced the first voice transmission off the moon fifty years ago today.
• The CBC has an entertaining and informative brief history of beer.
• Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article on the legend -- perhaps apocraphyl? -- of William Tell.
• In the July issue of The New York Review of Books there is a review entitled The Lost Art of Eating. It is inspired by Roy Strong's Feast: A Grand History of Eating, which I think I must add to my to-read list; but like most NYRB reviews, it wanders entertainingly far afield from the topic of the book.
• I've mentioned Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History before. It's a fascinating book. So is The Basque History of the World by the same author (who also wrote Cod: The Fish that Changed the World -- do I see a pattern?). I stumbled across a rather shorter history of salt online, but the book is more entertaining.

I think now is a good time to close the computer and take a walk.

This morning, I read an amusing revision of Asimov's three laws of robotics written by Mark Zimmermann after watching I, Robot. There was also an NPR segment on the same film earlier this week, and a review by Gary Westfahl at Locus Magazine. The review confirm what I'd guessed from the trailer: that I, Robot is an action movie more influenced by Will Smith than by Isaac Asimov. It seems a pity. But then, I enjoyed Independence Day; why should I be disappointed to hear that I, Robot is another movie in the same style?

In a talk given at BookExpo America, Ursala Le Guin commented on some assumptions about fantasy. Though none of her examples are drawn from science fiction, her points apply more generally. The third point she makes seems particularly apropos:

Assumption 3: Fantasy by definition concerns a Battle Between Good and Evil. This is the one where the cover copywriters shine. There are lots of fantasies about the Battle Between Good and Evil, the BBGE, sure. In them, you can tell the good guys from the evil guys by their white hats, or their white teeth, but not by what they do. They all behave exactly alike, with mindless and incessant violence, until the Problem of Evil is solved in a final orgy of savagery and a win for the good team.

Westfahl echoes Le Guin's sentiment in the first paragraph of his review:

Contrary to some published reports, the film I, Robot does in one respect powerfully recall the thoughts and writings of Isaac Asimov. Unfortunately, what came to my mind while watching the film had nothing to do with Asimov's robots, but was rather the statement that echoes through his early Foundation stories Violence ... is the last refuge of the incompetent which explains why Asimov's fans will regard this film as an appalling travesty.

Violence need not be the anathema of plot and character development; just look at the death toll in Hamlet, in which Shakespeare gives the final soliloquy to a secondary character for lack of any main characters left alive! And while Asimov created the character of Salvor Hardin, whose motto about violence is the source of Westfahl's quote, he also made Hari Seldon proficient in a judo-like martial art (twisting). Still, the point is made: a shoot-em-up cannot be fairly said to be based on Asimov's ideas if those ideas are displaced by mayhem.

A good screenplay based on an Asimov book could not be the same as the book. Books contain details which don't fit easily into the dialogue and scenery; and book authors can deliberately omit details in a way that would be hard for a screenwriter to manage. Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings was successful in part because of the beauty of New Zealand's landscape and the power of Howard Shore's score, elements which were clearly not part of the books. Jackson paid respect to Tolkien's ideas and intentions where it was appropriate, and he interpreted, added, and elided elements as needed to craft a film. The result was a grand success, and, I think, faithful to the spirit of the book.

I think many of my favorite science fiction and fantasy books would be very difficult to adapt to the screen. Jackson managed better with Tolkien than I would have imagined, but attempts to interpret Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov have all fallen flat. I think the thing that separates the successful from the luckless is the skill with which the filmmaker sifts out the character, plot, and high-level ideas and makes them independent of the author's crafting of details. Tolkien was a linguist; Heinlein was an engineer; Asimov was trained in the physical sciences. Vernor Vinge was a professor of computer science for a time; Kim Stanley Robinson received a doctorate in English; Jerry Pournelle studied a variety of things before he turned to writing (and picked up two doctoral degrees along the way). Mary Doria Russell, whose books I enjoyed recently, has a day job as a researcher in paleoanthropology. Not all my favorite science fiction authors hold advanced degrees, but almost all of them have some area of intense interest and long study, and it shows in the way they write. Tolkien wouldn't be Tolkien without the created languages. Heinlein wouldn't have been nearly such fun if he didn't tell the details of the control systems on his rocket ships. Part of the fun of Vinge is reading about his interstellar version of Usenet, or about his vision of programming turning into archaeology as computer systems become too complicated and baroque for anyone to truly understand. David Weber's battle scenes would fall flat without his interest in military history and his thoughtful analysis of the ways in which different technologies would necessarily change tactics and strategy. But none of these detailed interests would translate well into a movie.

I'd say that's a good reason to keep reading... as if I needed an excuse.

• Currently drinking: Oolong (which I now know means absent-minded in Cantonese)

I think the extended complex scaling technique sometimes used in quantum mechanics computations is extremely similar to the perfectly matched layer methods used for acoustics, Maxwell's equations, and (most recently) elastodynamics. Sadly, while I understand the notion of a PML at this point, I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to decipher much of the available literature on ECS.

One day I'll have to learn some quantum. And some statistical mechanics. And some economics. And some more topology. And some Mandarin. And...

To the tune of My Favorite Things:

I take my car to a quantum mechanic.
He's a little bit strange, and perhaps a bit manic.
He strokes Schrodinger's cat, and uncertainly sings:
What are a few of my favorite things?

My position! My momentum! All that folderol.
I can know one of two of my favorite things,
So why can't I know them all?

(The answer to that last why question has something to do with non-commutativity of certain operators -- as I understand it, that's really what the uncertainty principle is about. I might be able to say something more if I actually understood something about quantum mechanics; alas, knowing something about spectral theory for continuous self-adjoint operators is not quite the same.)

• Currently drinking: to the confusion of my foes?

I was at the SIAM Annual Meeting in Portland from Tuesday through today (Friday). However, I've had relatively little time accessing, and I've spent more time on the human sort of networking than on the computer sort. I'll catch up on e-mail and such over the next few days.

The technical program was interesting. Topics that I found particularly exciting included:

• Shear wave imaging

  When a doctor feels for lumps, she moves her fingers back and forth. A lump is a place where the subsurface tissue is more resistant to the shearing force that comes from rubbing across the surface. We already use ultrasound imaging, which involves compression waves traveling through tissue. Why not use the much more slowly-traveling shear waves, too?

• Splines and Boeing

  There was a keynote talk about computations done at Boeing using spline. The talk involved a lot of pretty pictures, and also a back of the envelope calculation in which the speaker estimated that there were probably about half a billion spline calculations done in Boeing systems every day.

  A half billion is a lot.

• Equation-free and multiscale models

  Mathematical modeling usually involves creatively fuzzy vision. If you want to model a weight hanging on a spring, you can try to model every atom in the system, and go nuts; you can do some averaging and model the spring by a set of partial differential equations, and keep people like me employed; or you can assume that the amount that the string stretches is roughly proportional to the amount of weight you hand on an end, do one experiment to find the constant of proportionality, and go for a walk.

  We have a lot of tools, both analytical and numerical, that work well for systems described by partial differential equations. But what about systems of particle interactions in which we're not smart enough to write down a continuous approximation? It turns out that it's sometimes enough to posit such an equation exists (and is continuous) -- without writing it down. You use your microscopic model to fill in what's happening in a few places, and then use the data at those points to fill in everywhere else. The idea is simple, the details are hard, and the whole effort is immensely interesting.

  It's also sort of astounding. How do you solve an equation without the equation? Equation-free modeling sounds like it ought to be the title of a Zen koan -- if Zen koans had titles and a flair for the technical -- but it was actually the title for one of the keynotes.

  A related area, less magical-sounding but equally profound, is multi-scale modeling. It's exactly what it sounds like: there are some things that happen very quickly and some things very fast, or there are some things that happen over a large area and some over a small area. If you looked at everything finely enough, you'd see the whole picture, but that's unbearably expensive. So you selectively put on glasses, and build some machinery to connect the very small to the very large.

• Implicit codes and software engineering

  We didn't want to tell the scientists they would have to change their codes a lot. The scientists hate that.

  Very true. I'm glad to see it recognized.

• Google

  We'll take Google as an example. Nobody knows quite what Google does, but we think it might be this.

  Web searching is a hard technical problem involving some very interesting ideas from numerical linear algebra. Marveling at the math is almost as much fun as marveling at Google.

• Eigenvalue problems

  I talked about one type of eigenvalue problem. Other people talked about different types of eigenvalue problems. I enjoyed the talks and the conversations.

More generally:

• Portland is impressive. There is a book store here that covers an entire city block, and a companion technical book store which is also extensive. Several of us went there this afternoon; we met others with the same idea. We should have just held the last session here.
• There are other impressive things about Portland, too, like the train system and the people. And did I mention the book store?
• Through Thursday, there were vendor booths with several major technical publishers and a handful of people selling software. I bought two books, a little monograph on Lanczos algorithms and Matrix Algorithms, Volume II: Eigensystems by Pete Stewart. I've intended to buy the latter since it came out -- a year ago? two? -- and I haven't finished gloating over it yet.
• I still find it astounding to watch human networks at work. I met a lot of people at the meeting -- that's much of the point, after all. Some of them I knew from reputation, some of them I didn't. In any case it usually took all of fifteen seconds of conversations to find someone we knew in common, and often a common research interest. Also, I'm always impressed by how friendly and approachable the people at these meetings are.
• I'm so glad that I took classes on fluid mechanics and finite element analysis. I cannot imagine enjoying this meeting half as much as I did if I knew nothing about those topics.
• My talk went well. I'm glad it's done.

While I'm finishing my coffee and waiting for clean socks from the drier, some notes on recent and moderately-recent reading.

• Henri Poincare. The Value of Science --

  Poincare was a luminary of mathematics and physics who contributed, among other things, to the study of dynamical systems (he won a prize for his work on the three-body problem) and topology (analysis situ, as it was known at the time). E.T. Bell called him the Last Univeralist for the breadth of his work. In addition to being a leading scientist, Poincare was a science writer, and The Value of Science is a translation of several of his popular science works from the end of his life, near the turn of the twentieth century.

  I've read some of The Value of Science, but I haven't exactly made rapid progress. I expect I would enjoy it more if I read French; while the translation is competent, it still has the odor of a translation about it. Also, while interesting, the topics covered are mostly familiar. The familiar topics and the slightly stilted translation together make my reading leisurely and sometimes drowsy.

• Patrick O'Brian. Post Captain and H.M.S. Surprise --

  I wish I read more books with lines in which one main character cries to the other You have debauched my sloth! The books are fun and easy to read, despite -- or perhaps even because of -- the frequent nautical jargon. The next two O'Brian books are in queue.

• Roger Zelazny. The Great Book of Amber --

  I bought this collection a while back while on a let's buy classic fantasy I haven't read kick. The Amber books are regarded as classic for a reason. There are some interesting premises, and the books move along smartly. I was glad to see the end of the last one, though. For all the plot twists -- and all the plotting -- the books seem to have an endlessly inconclusive quality to them, reminiscent of Neil Stephenson (but with a better editor).

• William Gibson. Pattern Recognition --

  One of my friends has commented that Stephenson's writing changes meaning completely if you don't pay attention to every word. I only half agree with him, but Pattern Recognition makes a persuasive argument for his case. Looking back, the plot seems a little off, but the writing is wry, witty, and dense in a way that makes it difficult to read some paragraphs only once. There are no cyber-cowboys or vat-grown ninjas, but the imagery is fully as developed and surrealistic as anything in Neuromancer and its successors.

• Bill Bryson. A Walk in the Woods --

  I'm only half done, but it's funny and fast-reading so far. If I like the second half as much as I liked the first, I'll probably check out some other things Bryson has written.

When Jim left last Tuesday for a week at home, he left behind a bag of donated zucchini. Eat it! I don't want to see it when I come back, he said.

So here are 2.5 ways to prepare zucchini if you're not the greatest zucchini fan. All were shared with and approved by Winnie, so there is at least one other person who thinks they're good ideas.

Zucchini stir fry:
I used baby bok choy, a green pepper, snap peas, and zucchini. It was seasoned with soy and served with a little beef (cooked separately).

Zucchini with eggs (1):
I used a small zucchini and a tomato, pan-cooked together with a little olive oil, black pepper, and salt. Then I added eggs, scrambled everything together, and added some cheese at the last minute.

Zucchini omelette (2):
This is a variant on zucchini and eggs. I pan-cooked zucchini, tomato, red onion, and green pepper in olive oil for the filling, with basil, black pepper, and salt for seasoning. The omelette was an ordinary omelette, with the some mozarella and some Munster added just before putting in the veggies and folding the entire thing.

Zucchini salsa:
I finely diced a small zucchini, lots of garlic, some tomatoes, some red onion, and some green pepper. I sauteed the zucchini and garlic in olive oil, which I used more generously than I sometimes do, and added black pepper and salt. Then I added the red onion, green pepper, and tomato, and cooked it all a little more. I think it would taste good without the second cooking, too. I mixed in a healthy dose of lime juice and served with the end of a two-day old baguette, which I sliced into thin rounds and toasted. I put the salsa in a bowl and arranged the toast in a double ring around the outside. It looked colorful and elegant -- at least to my eye -- and surely was one of the more appealing ways I've used up a zucchini, a fading pepper, and a slightly stale baguette end.

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lime and honey

Two minutes before completion, I lost the network connection to my machine on campus. Since I foolishly ran my hour-and-a-half simulation in the foreground, it was terminated when my secure shell session was terminated.

Joy.

Let's try something different for the moment: a mostly-unrewritten entry.

Usually, I write with great pauses between sentences. Sometimes the pauses last so long that I forget what I was writing in the previous sentence, or that I abandon a paragraph -- or an entry -- entirely. At other times, I write the same sentence four or five times, and constantly delete and re-type. I'm picky, and half the time I can't even form something grammatically correct the first time it comes out. Or if I can form something grammatically correct, it's technically incorrect, which is nearly as bad.

I am procrastinating now, though, from -- what else? -- writing. So this seems like a good experiment.

I write here for three reasons, really. The first is the reason that has kept me writing to myself for many years: I forget things. More specifically, I forget the chronological order in which things occur. Well, I sometimes forget other things, too -- like birthdays and people's names and where I put my glasses. But in terms of remembering events, I'm pretty good at keeping odd little details in my memory. I just forget the matrix in which those details should be embedded. And so I have a few notebooks of terse recounts of my days and weeks, which I doubt would be of much use or interest to anyone but me.

The second reason is to communicate with friends and family, which is really most of the set of people reading, I think. If someone else finds it amusing, that's fine, too. And for those arriving at these pages through a search engine: the proper spelling is teetotal, the conventional definition is to abstain completely from alcoholic beverages, and dictionary sites will probably serve you better than this search.

The third reason is to think. I do mathematics with pen or pencil in hand, and the pen is often moving, even when I'm staring into space. I take notes in classes that I find particularly difficult, even if I never look at the notes later. I write summaries of problems that I work on, even if I have no intention of sharing the summaries with anyone else. The act of writing forces ideas into a more concrete form, filters the mental fuzz, and enhances the memory. I can write some pretty incomprehensible garbage when I'm not thinking straight, but it's easy to recognize it as garbage once it's on paper.

This is not to say that I'm deliberately spending my time filling this page full of garbage. It is to say that some of the things I write have more to do with me writing than with you reading.

Even if there are no real meaty thoughts behind them, it's a joy to run fingers over the keyboard. It's almost as much fun as writing with a pen, though the two activities are different and suit different moods. I imagine I might get the same joy from playing a musical instrument, if there were any musical instruments that I played competently.

I'm listening to the radio. I'm waiting for a simulation to finish; it has about forty minutes left, which means that it's more than half finished. Sitting beside me is A Walk in the Woods, with the cover picture of a green forest and a bear's head peeking up over the subtitle bar at the bottom. On the other side is a pile of pages of scrap, intermixed with the marked-up pages of an old draft of the report I'm currently working on -- or avoiding working on, as the case may be. There are so many marks on the borders of the draft that it is hard to tell those pages from the pages of scrap paper. The pile is relatively neat, but I doubt the pages are in the right order, and I'm sure that the pages of the draft are mixed together with the pages of notes. And since I've processed most of the comments in the draft that actually meant anything for more than a minute after I wrote them, the state of disarray is just fine.

I don't think I had a face-to-face conversation for all of the day, unless you count the interaction with the clerk at Barnes and Noble. I talked to Winnie on the phone, of course, but beyond that, I don't think I had any conversations today. For that matter, I haven't had many conversations since the start of the past week. People are out of town, at home and at the office, and so days have been quiet. Suits my mood, it does. Still, I'm glad Winnie visited on Friday, and I'm looking forward to having dinner with her again tomorrow night.

And I'm actually really looking forward to my trip this coming week, even if it's a little bewildering to travel again so soon after I returned from Copenhagen. Well, perhaps it isn't that short a break.

Tap, tip, tap. Perhaps I should return to reading. Or perhaps I should return to editing.

I felt like a walk this afternoon. So I went to Barnes and Noble, where I got the next two Patrick O'Brian books and Bill Bryson's Walk in the Woods. After laughing so hard at the inebriated sloth in O'Brian's H.M.S. Surprise, I thought I would probably read the next in that series first. Instead, I read about the Applachian Trail for a while.

I opened all the windows and both the doors when I returned. It's a fine day, and the breeze passing through feels good.

• Currently drinking: Osymanthus black tea

During a break a little while ago, I found this article on the Bookshelf as Identity. I was reminded of an article a friend sent a while back, entitled The Library of Congress Comes Home. Both articles are about bookshelf organization, though from very different takes. And both concentrate on the topics of the books.

My bookshelves are topically organized only in very broad strokes. Books that have something to do with religion or philosophy mostly go on one shelf -- though that shelf also has my copy of The Smithsonian Book of Books and The Complete Guide to Calligraphy. I would say that this indicates something about my personal pantheon, except that the same shelf has Fermat's Enigma, Stairway Walks in San Francisco, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, and Worms Eat My Garbage. Further down is a shelf which houses a few history books: From Dawn to Decadence, Africa in History, and The Soong Dynasty are there. So is Autumn Lightning, which is half history (the other half is autobiography). But wedged right next to those books are Kay's Tigana (fantasy), Zinnser's On Writing Well (what it sounds like), Brooks' The Mythical Man Month (software project management), Icke's Force of Symmetry (physics), Asimov's Azazel (humor), and an odd copy of SIAM Review (an applied math journal). Furthermore, Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples and Lewis's The Middle East are a couple shelves down; and Herotodus is again on the shelf with philosophy and religion, two books down from the Tao Te Ching and three from Marcus Aurelius.

So what's the correlation? Well, if you took all the books from one of my shelf and put them into a cardboard box, you'd probably find that they packed together pretty well. The philosophy shelf also happens to have a lot of books that are shaped oddly, and didn't fit that well with anything else -- the Book of Books in particular is very tall, and doesn't fit at all onto some shelves. Most of my science fiction fits neatly on the bookshelf by my bed, simply because those books are all paperbacks of roughly the same height, and taller books don't fit well on those shelves.

There's some shuffling over time, of course, as I take a book down for reading or simply for reference, and as I put back books that begin to clutter my desk. And the books in my office are a little more topically organized: mathematical analysis in one place, computer systems in another, mechanics in another, and linear algebra -- well, linear algebra moves about the shelves and about the office, but there's some sort of concentration between the books on technical writing and the books on analysis. Even there, though, I organize by physical shape and by the frequency with which I refer to things before I organize by topic. And it shows: there is no topical reason for the top-shelf mixture of books on statistics, asymptotics, special functions, and other amusements, except that a lot of them are Dover paperbacks with sort of similar shapes.

It's fortunate that my spatial memory is better than my temporal memory, or I'd lose all sense of where my books live. But if you spoke no English and were somehow tasked with finding a place for a stray tome from my collection, I suspect you would manage to find a good place for it. Just be careful if that place is the shelf o' philosophy. You might knock over the origami cat.

Still looking for an old bookmark to a technical paper, I found a bookmark to Nature's debate on open access. Alas, my opinions on the topic are not sufficiently well formulated that I care to write anything about them.

Going through my bookmarks in search of something else, I stumbled across this page of photos of skills found only in China. I think I might be able to sleep atop a chain link fence, too, if sufficiently motivated.

• Currently drinking: Black coffee

As a youngster, I often responded to inquiries about my day with I ate lunch; I had recess; and... um... I've changed in many ways, but my response to such pleasantries has changed little. I know people who can reply smoothly and quickly to such inquiries, and to other social pleasantries; I have not decided if the smoothness of their response comes from some quickness of thought that I lack, or whether some habit or reflex allows these people to handle such routine interactions without any thought.

When I spend a day writing and revising, re-reading papers I've cited, and generally chewing over the presentation of a few technical ideas, I have an even harder time answering social questions. Writing code, sketching calculations, and related pursuits can be wordless things, difficult to express even to someone who asks about them with more than a perfunctory social curiosity. But a day of wordsmithing, perhaps, engenders the opposite problem. It's all too easy to express the words I've been thinking about all day. Do you want to hear why local moment-matching approximations are so attractive for producing reduced models of RF resonators with anchor losses taken into account? Or would you like to hear how to formulate the analogue of Sommerfeld's radiation condition for linear time-harmonic elasticity problems? The answer, of course, is likely a resounding no: the question what's up? is an invitation to a smile and a nod, perhaps, but not to an impromptu lecture, let alone an impromptu research presentation. So I smile, I nod, and these days -- usually -- I keep my impulses in check and stick to safe topics of conversation, like what I had for lunch; at least, that's what I'll do until my mind has had time to warm to some more mutually entertaining topic.

I had New England clam chowder for lunch, and a cup of Russian Caravan tea afterward. And dinner was a scramble of leftovers, combined in a way that called for no particular culinary skill, with some spiced black tea later. Oh, and I spent some time writing, and some time managing my recipes. Or managing my references. Um...

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lime

On my way to a meeting on Thursday afternoon, I was caught in a river of capoieristas walking along Shattuck. I was late, and in a grim temper, and I was not well pleased by the slowness of the crowd. But two women in front of me were practicing samba as they walked, and when one of them stopped so suddenly that I nearly ran into her, she grinned such a cheerful apology that I couldn't help but grin back. I was tempted to skip the meeting altogether, and walk with the crowd to their final destination, to hear the merimbau played and perhaps to see a roda. But I resisted the temptation, and went to my meeting.

On Friday, I walked to school to receive a call from a collaborator. As I walked by the park near my home, I saw two men practicing forms. More specifically, they were practicing one of the forms of a style from southern China which a college acquaintance of mine practiced. I slowed for a moment, watching. The Chinese martial arts can be very graceful, and one of the men was quite smooth; the other had problems with his elbow. While I watched, the more experienced man turned to his neighbor and corrected the position of his elbow, showing how to set it up to cover against a strike to the ribs even as the hand parried a strike toward the head.

Last night, I was deep in H.M.S. Surprise by Patrick O'Brian, and came to a passage involving an inebriated sloth. I laughed until I had to put the book down to catch my breath. In time I recovered, and as I reached to pick up the book, I thought Wouldn't a drunken sloth school of martial arts be grand? Practitioners would learn how to plod slowly along tree branches for a few feet, then fall asleep with one arm and one leg wrapped around a branch, half-dangling from their perch. Advanced exponents would learn to miss their footing and fall artfully in a way that squashed opponents passing below.

I think that the Drunken Sloth style, along with the style of Bread Do, would be a wonderful addition to the mix of Hong Kong action movies. But for longer lasting interest, I'll keep watching the parks and the streets on my way to work.

Death is a conservative sort of fellow. He still rides a pale horse, and does his work with an old-fashioned hand scythe. But with the world as crowded as it is, Death needs some assistance with his busy rounds. Something so that he can quickly be reached if needed, wherever he may be.

Thus, the Grim Beeper.

This afternoon when I tired of writing, I decided I would spend some time figuring out how to get my little 5 dB antenna to work a little better. I've seen designs for antennas made from Pringles cans, tin foil, and Chinese mesh cookware. I know something about RF waveguides, though my training is not as an electrical engineer. And I only need a little boost, since I know that I can get the signal I want; I just kept losing it.

After some reading online, a trip to Barnes and Noble to read the O'Reilly Wireless Hacks book, and a trip to the local hardware store, I thought I would be ready. But the book told me little that I didn't know, and at the hardware store I forgot what I wanted, and just bought some more clothes hangars and a roll of tape. Still, I came home filled with the notion of my own cleverness, ready to build a parabolic antenna from tin foil and start scanning it about.

That's when I rediscovered the wonder of binder clips. It turns out that the signal I get is just fine, so long as the pigtail connector from my wireless card to the external antenna is held firmly in place. A binder clip does that trick. With the binder clip in place and a little piece of cardboard to keep the antenna from falling over, I'm all set.

I retrieved my photos of Copenhagen from Long's Drugs this afternoon. I usually go through a roll of film every year or two, which means the next post in which I announce an entire roll of photos should probably occur some time after I graduate. I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide whether that is an optimistic or a pessimistic statement.

• Currently drinking: Russian caravan blend

I ate dinner with Dave this evening, and afterward we visited Barnes and Noble for dessert. Then we wandered over to the music section.

I buy CDs rarely. But I've thought for some time now that I would like to buy some of the Verve jazz collection CDs, and the music section stocked the CDs that I wanted. So I bought the Verve Unmixed 2 CD, a collection of classic jazz pieces which was released as an accompaniement to Verve Remixed 2, a collection of remixes of those same tunes. I also bought the Verve Remixed CD.

I listened to the remix CD and read for a while this evening. Now I'm listening to the first few tracks of the Unmixed CD, long-time favorites: Manteca, Sinnerman, and Whatever Lola Wants. And the remix CD includes Summertime, which I think has been my favorite jazz tune since I first heard it as a youngster.

Books often keep me up past my bed time. Music keeps me up less often, but there are nights I stay up late listening. This is one of them.

Winnie visited today. We went to the Cheeseboard after she arrived, and bought a loaf of provolone-olive bread. Together with slices of good tomatoes -- heirloom tomatoes bought from the Berkeley farmer's market -- and a little salt, it was good. Actually, if you can't imagine that it was delicious just given the description, then you have less imagination than I'd credit to you... or perhaps your lactose intolerant, hate olives, and break out in hives near tomato plants, in which case I'm very sorry, and hope that you at least like garlic or chocolate.

The loaf of bread is gone now. So are the tomatoes.

I just returned yesterday afternoon from the conference in Copenhagen. I slept some ten hours last night, but even with that, I'm sufficiently out of it that I'm about useless for any technical work. So this seems like a good time to write about the trip.

The route from SFO to Copenhagen consisted of a long flight over the pole from SFO to Paris, a mad dash across Charles de Gaulle airport, and a shorter flight from Paris to Copenhagen. We made it across the airport in time, but our luggage did not. Other American travelers we ran into had the same problem; I guess the heightened security at de Gaulle caused some issues. Air France gave us a kit of toiletries and a t-shirt (with the Air France logo on the sleeve). After we checked in at the hotel, we wandered around central Copenhagen looking for places that sell socks. There were many of them, but none were open. The closest we got was a 7-11, which was open but which (oddly enough) didn't sell socks.

I saw a lot of 7-11 stores in Copenhagen, actually. They were more tightly concentrated than I'd ever have imagined -- coming out of the Copenhagen central train station, for instances, there are two 7-11s visible, spaced a short city block apart. There are at least two others in an additional two block radius. One of the ones next to the train station saved me on the trip back: I needed 25 kroners to pay the station fare, but only had a 20 kroner coin. It was around 4:30 am, but one of the 7-11 stores was open. So I'm willing to forgive them for not having socks.

A lot of things about the city reminded me of New England -- of Boston, perhaps. The plant life was similar in color and shape, and there were a lot of brick buildings in a reasonably familiar architectural style. Of course, the Danish train system (the DSB) is much nicer than the T, and Copenhagen is much more bike-oriented than any place here. Many of the roads have three height levels: there is the road for motor vehicles, a step, the road for bicycles, another step, and the sidewalk. There is a system of bikes for free use around the city center, and other bikes are parked everywhere. Of course, the bikes are often not locked to anything; I suppose cycle theft is less of a problem there.

All the Danes I encountered spoke fluent English. One of the conference speakers, a Scot, joked that he spoke with a heavier accent than any of the Danes he'd met -- and he was right. At least half the television stations played English-language programming: mostly American programs, though some were from the BBC. I only had language trouble in Denmark at the train ticket vending machine the one time I tried to use it, though when I was alone I was sometimes addressed in Danish initially (it never happened when I was walking with Rajesh, the other Berkeley grad student at the conference). The Danish greeting hej sounds the same as the English hi, so in at least one exchange (where I was buying a magazine), I don't think the gentleman behind the counter didn't realize I spoke no Danish until I said thank you at the end. At dinner one evening, one of the gentleman with whom I was eating, a professor from the Netherlands, pointed out that there are only a few million speakers of Danish, and that the total combined population of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark is somewhat less than the population of New York. So a lot of the entertainment media is never translated from English (and American English, at that).

The Eurocup 2004 competition was everywhere. The Denmark-Sweden match took place on the night of the conference dinner, and as we walked from the train station to our hotel before the dinner, we passed many people in red Danish soccer shirts heading the other way. There was also one brave soul dressed in Sweden's blue and yellow, with Swedish flags painted on each cheek. They were all going to see the game projected on the side of one of the buildings in central Copenhagen. Those of us in the dinner were kept posted, too -- people had their cell phones set to receive bulletins every time there was a goal, and they kept running to the microphone on the stage to let us know about it (the final score was 2-2). We also heard the scores from the Italy-vs-Bulgaria game from representatives of those countries. And in the insomniac hours when we watched a little television, the commercials constantly referred to soccer. There was also a really catchy music video for the Danish team, which I wish I could find now.

Night lasted from around 10:30 at night to around 3:30 in the morning, and between the daylight and the jet lag, I didn't sleep much. I was also hungry a lot. Danish bread and cheese are outstanding, and I ate a lot of bread, cheese, and meat (and sometimes fish). I didn't live exclusively on a diet of bread, meat, and cheese, but in retrospect it seems pretty close. Otherwise, I had French food a couple times (and was impressed), a pizza-and-salad buffet once (much like Pizza Hut), and a Turkish buffet once (which was warm, filling, and otherwise mediocre). But I probably ate fewer fruits and vegetables during my entire stay than I sometimes eat in a single day here. When I came back, the first thing I did after showering and getting my hair cut was to walk to the Berkeley farmer's market and buy fresh produce: heirloom tomatoes, a cucumber, string beans, and a lettuce mix. Winnie visited yesterday evening, and while she was here, she poked at my ribs and said You lost weight! Maybe Atkins does work. I thought she was exaggerating, but while walking around Berkeley today, I noticed that my pants were a little on the loose side, and my shirt kept coming untucked. So perhaps she was right.

The cheese-slicer at the hotel's morning buffet was a marvelous thing. The cheese sat on a horizontal platform, alongside a bar that served as a stop. Through the center of the platform was a threaded post, and from the top of the post there extended a long crank handle, with a slicing wire stretched below it. Turning the handle pushed the wire through the block of cheese, and simultaneously turned the threaded post so that the platform -- and thus the cheese -- moved up a notch. So the slices came out at just the right thickness. And there were several different varieties of bread to go with the cheese, from a soft, nutty multi-grain bread to a dense pumpernickel loaf. It was good.

The conference itself was quite interesting. I'm glad I spoke on the first day, when everyone was fresh. The technical sessions started early (~9) and ended late (~7), so even the most enthusiastic were starting to flag by the end. There were a few outstanding presentations, a few terrible presentations, and a lot of interesting presentations somewhere between. The very worst presenters spoke in a mumbling monotone and used foils with print that would try those with the best of eyesight. I've decided that I'm not one of those with the best of eyesight, even with my glasses taken into account. I believe I ought to get my prescription updated. Rajesh and I skipped out on the morning sessions during the last day, in order to see Copenhagen, but otherwise I did go to the presentations, even if I ended up scribbling observations about my own favorite equations during some of the not-so-good presentations.

The conference dinner on Tuesday took place at Det Ny Teater, which I imagine means something like the new theatre. The meal was very good, with an appetizer, main course, dessert, and coffee with cookies, all spread out over five hours. There were also five wine courses: champagne with strawberries while we milled around in the foyer, a white wine with the appetizer, a red wine with the main meal, a dessert wine, and cognac after the coffee. I tried a sip of the white wine, but that was about as far as I got -- I'm told all the wines were quite good (and that Danish beer is justifiably famous as well), but I still can't seem to make it past the scent. Ah, well. The food was good, and so was the coffee. Also, there were performances of some violin pieces and songs from some German operettas, and I enjoyed both -- somewhat to my surprise, since I usually don't care for opera music.

I've lost much of the rest of the chronology of the trip already. I have mental snapshots of the Buddha Bar, which shared a wall with a church; of American Indians performing in one of the main square; of looking across another square to see a street flanked by a 7-11 on one side and a Chinese restaurant on the other, with old brick buildings rising above each and a spire rising in the background; of getting lost on a walk from the DTU campus back to the Lyngby train station; and of many interesting conversations. But those snapshots are already all out of order.

The trip back felt much like the trip there. I left the hotel early, so that even after back-tracking to a 7-11 so I could get change for the train -- thank heaven for 7-11 -- I was at the airport in plenty of time. I again rushed through Charles de Gaulle, this time accompanied by a Danish tourist also going to San Francisco, who asked if he could tag along since he was unfamiliar with the airport. We made it across the airport quickly enough, but spent a long time in the line for security. Everyone else was in the same boat, though, so the flight departed late. There was additional confusion from several families who had arranged to sit together, but were accidentally reseated apart. The flight attendants did what they could -- I exchanged my seat for another aisle seat so that a mother and child could sit together -- but I still think a few of the passengers came away very unhappy with Air France. Still the winds were favorable, and so we arrived in SFO nearly on time. My baggage made it back with me this time, and the rest of the trip was mostly uneventful.

Somewhat to my surprise, I wasn't ever initially addressed in English while I was in Charles de Gaulle, or while I was between Paris and the States. I surely felt like a confused American, and I'm told that the gait, garb, and mannerisms make Americans easy to identify. But the Air France check-in attendant, the stewardesses, the security attendants, the guy I sat next to, and one pour soul who seemed to be lost in the airport, all addressed me in French (at least at first), and gave me French-language forms to fill out. I was also addressed twice in German, once in passing through the airport, and once by the woman sitting next to me on the plane (naturally enough, since she spoke but little English, and knew even less French than I). I helped her fill out the customs form -- they'd given me the French version and her the English version, much to our respective confusion -- and the visa exemption form, which was written in French, but was simple enough for me to interpret. Her English was only slightly better than my German, but we were able to communicate well enough by a combination of the two languages, and she was grateful for the help.

And now I'm sitting in familiar surroundings, sipping tea and looking at a pair of plants. I think I probably ought to water them now, poor things.

• Currently drinking: Jasmine downy pearl green tea

I leave for Copenhagen tomorrow afternoon, and will be gone for about a week. This is not my first conference talk, but it is my first trip out of the States. I look forward to the conference, even to giving my talk -- I'm just not looking forward to the plane ride, or to the jet lag, or to the pranks of Murphy. Also, I notice that the weather forecast predicts rain for most of the time I'll be there. Fortunately, I have both an umbrella and a rain coat.

Also fortunately, I can happily sit and stare off into the rain for hours on end. I can sit and stare into the distance on a sunny day, too, but it doesn't have quite the same charm. Regardless, I'm easily amused by just watching the world go by. It's entertaining, educational, inexpensive, and relaxing.

Time to rest now, I think.

• Currently drinking: Water

I think I should read Ulysses at some point.

In an article on Bloomday, a reporter copied Joyce's description of Bloom's talkativeness -- how we could see a straw on the floor and talk just about that straw for an hour, without taking a break. I could not do that. I rarely speak more than a few sentences in an ordinary conversation without pausing to think and sort my words. And I rarely write even a single sentence without first pausing to chew the words over in my mind. That doesn't mean I never speak a thoughtless word or write a careless sentence, but it does mean that I spend a lot of time staring into space when I write, or even sometimes when I talk.

Sometimes I think a lot and don't write at all. Silence and white space can both be beautiful; there's no need to fill them without purpose. Pensive moments often sound more foolish than thoughtful, once they're recorded; and, as Samuel Clemens wrote, it's better to remain silent and appear a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.

I wonder if I could sell the visual variant of John Cage's music -- 4.33, a blank sheet of white paper 4.33 cm in length. It has probably already been done. I prefer landscapes.

A week in conversations ...

What's new with you?
Oh, I'm working on slides for a talk.
Another one? You give more talks than just about anyone I know.
It comes in bursts.
Yeah, I guess I had a time when I was speaking every month or two. I kept revising the same slides. I was sick of them by the time I was through
Well, that's my blessing and curse -- I only give the same talk once every several months. I cycle through topics.
Hunh. You're like a professor talking about all the work his grad students have done, except that there's only one grad student involved.
Something like that.

...

Ha! And another detailed description of the character's main meal.
Yeah, he Modesitt does do that, doesn't he?
It's like an obsession. He must have read a series of books that really bothered him, once upon a time, in which none of the characters ever ate or used the facilities. So now he makes a point of describing all the characters' meals.
Oh, it's not so bad as all that.
No? I just think it's funny that I flipped to a page arbitrarily, and that's what I found.

...

So which of you wants to be the first subject for this user study?
Uh?
Too late. Jason just volunteered you.

...

Have you actually ever been to Moscow?
No...
That is the Moscow subway on your shirt, right? Look, the zoo!
It is, but I got it from my dad.
Ah. Well, it's a wonderful city.

...

The language of this standard is so broken! At least there aren't any implementations of this part.
Yes, there are. There's ATLAS.
It's not a complete implementation.
I think it is. And Intel has one, too.
Really? And they didn't complain?
I'm sure they have one. I caught a bug in one of the routines a while back.
Huh. I remember that. Are you sure those are complete implementations?
Pretty sure. Besides, there's a reference implementation.
I'm sure there's not.
I'm sure there is. Check Netlib.
Oh. There it is. That's too bad; we'll never get the standard fixed, now.

...

Do you think I should bring her cookies? What's your favorite dessert that I've made?
I've only had the cookies.
That's true...
Cookies are always good, though.
Do you think she would like cookies?
I think so. I mean, I have trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of someone who doesn't like cookies. I see!

...

• Currently drinking: Spiced black tea

I finished the last of my loose vanilla-flavored black tea this morning. I carefully tapped the leaves into the tea ball and shook a bit of dust away. Then I put my nose into the tea tin, inhaled the scent of vanilla, and lapsed into thought. A minute or two later, I realized I was still idly waving the tea tin back and forth below my nose.

In high school Spanish, I saw a film about a Spanish sherry maker nicknamed El Nariz (The Nose). He had an enormously long nose, under which he would wave a glass of wine which he was judging. My nose is long and bony, though not so magnificent as his; but this tea tin is rather smaller than a wine glass, and the similarity struck me as I continued to absent-mindedly sniff at the smell of vanilla.

Then I put the tea tin away and went to get hot water.

I'm right in the middle of my mid-afternoon slump, which is why I'm writing here rather than revising slides. I'm listening to an episode To the Best of Our Knowledge; this time the topic is Shades of Color. The first segment was on color in poetry, and I wondered as I listened -- is it the color images or the color words that make a difference? You don't have to be able to see red to associate it with blood, luck, or tomatoes (depending on your cultural biases), and color words are often the short, sharp, old words that work so well in poems.

On a completely unrelated note, I was amused by this comment on correspondence, particularly after recent conversations on the topic of letter-writing with Vince, and on the topic of scientific correspondence with -- drat. Well, I think I had a conversation about scientific correspondence with someone recently.

I think I should make another cup of tea and work on my slides, now.

I took off around 5:00 this evening. I took a break at home, ate a pear, showered, and listened to the radio for a while before I left the apartment again. This evening, the program for Fresh Air included an archived interview with Ray Charles. As I walked to Safeway, and then to the office, I found myself humming Georgia on My Mind.

I was young during Reagan's presidency, and at that age I was usually more interested in the letter Q than in politics. My priorities have changed since then -- except in my saner moments, when I still think the letter Q is far more interesting than the latest shenanigans of our elected officials -- but Reagan remains a vague figure in my memory, colored more by reading history than by living through it. Ray Charles is different. I remember him for myself.

Patxi had a going-away party at the Basque cultural center last night. It was a good meal and good company. There was butternut soup, fresh pepper on the salad, a savory dish of lamb shank with beans, and a sort of Basque cake (gateu Basque) for dessert. And there was at least one person who expressed keen interest when I joked about Gateux and Frechet derivatives after hearing about the cake.

On a completely unrelated note, I've discovered the reason that I like salty flavors so. It's because I'm secretly part porcupine:

The porcupine feeds on leaves, twigs and green plants and has a ravenous appetite for salt (it will chew on any salt stained tools or clothes it comes across) and also it relishes plywood because of the glue between the layers.

I think the butternut soup was much better than plywood would be.

• Currently drinking: Loose black tea flavored with caramel bits

I've decided to cut back on coffee, from a cup or two a day to a cup or two a week. When the ratio of coffee to food is too high, my stomach starts to complain. And early this week, my stomach complained bitterly, if mercifully briefly.

Tea is different. I had a cup of osymanthus fancy (a black tea blend flavored with osymanthus flowers) last night, and a cup of Earl Grey this afternoon. And now the apartment smells of masala from the lentils cooking, of lychee from the tea brewing, and of bleach from the still-drying kitchen floor.

• Currently drinking: Black tea with lychee

Hey Dave?
Mmm?
I'm your roommate, I can ask prying questions, right?
And I can refuse to answer. Go ahead.
Are you always this out of it?
Only when I'm thinking about a problem.
And that is...
... almost always, yes.
Okay. Just checking.

Even though I took yesterday off, I spent today in Friday mode. I spent some time this morning sitting in a cafe and reading further chapters from the Feynmann lectures. I spent the afternoon reading something else given to me for my consideration which was considerably less lucid, and which I think is fundamentally flawed. Still, perhaps the afternoon reading was as instructive in its own way as the morning reading was.

I came home early. Dave came over, and after we visited for a bit, I loaned him some books for his flight. Then I went to the south bay to have dinner with Winnie. We ate at a Mexican restaurant called Ancestros, a very pleasant place with good food, and then took a little walk. The walk ended at Borders, where there was a live band playing, and where we both got distracted by books. Well, perhaps I was more distracted, but Winnie knows me well enough by now to understand and forgive the quirks in my character that come out when I'm near large collections of books.

On the train ride home, I finished reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I turned the last page near Macarthur station, and chewed on the ideas through the Macarthur, Ashby, Berkeley, and North Berkeley BART stops, and on the walk from the North Berkeley BART to home. It's an interesting, well-written book, and I recommend it.

While at Borders, I picked up a copy of The Far Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian. I enjoyed Master and Commander, and hope this will be as good. I also think it will suit my reading mood: I want a well-written narrative which is neither too deep nor too pulpy.

Some things are easy to repeat. I bring the same sweatshirt to the office most days; I cycle through the same web sites when I'm procrastinating; sometimes I'll even write the same sentence repeatedly (usually with increasing frustration as I fail to find better words). But it's impossible to cook lentils or fall in love the same way twice. I had lentils and rice this evening for dinner, and now I'm feeling immensely benevolent. Oh, brave new world that has such spices in it! And spinach and tomatoes -- those were good additions, too.

I didn't work through the entire weekend. Winnie came here to visit on Saturday, and on Sunday, I went to the south bay, and we swam and watched Shrek 2 (not at the same time). Still, I made it into the office Sunday morning, and again on Monday. I was running simulations and making movies to be used in a presentation and sales pitch at a workshop this week. Sanjay is giving the presentation, but no few of the visuals will be things that I produced. I also finally did a preliminary study of the effects of film thickness on the predicted quality of resonance, and discovered a secondary effect that I think is most interesting. Suffice it to say that the number I care about (call it Q) seems to vary by about five orders of magnitude over a small range of film thicknesses. It seems relatively stable outside that range. Now, I think this is immensely excititing for two reasons. First, it means I have a testable hypothesis: a qualitative behavior predicted by the model which I believe will occur somewhere in the range of fabricateable devices, even if I don't know the material properties precisely enough to predict exactly where. Second, it may be something that I can exploit -- or, rather, that I can tell my engineering colleagues how to exploit -- to build a system which blows our current prototypes out of the water (not to mention all but the most expensive of the existing alternatives).

Whee!

Somehow, though, even that excitement hasn't been enough to keep me crunching. Yesterday afternoon, I set up a long-running computation and then went outside to read from the Feynmann lectures, sip coffee, and munch on a biscotti. It was a pleasant break, but even with that break, I felt grouchy and tired by five or six, when I left the office. So I came home, showered, and went for a walk.

So -- books! My stroll ended in the nonfiction section of Black Oak Books. I'm now the proud owner of Wave Motion in Elastic Solids (Graff); Perturbation Methods (Nayfeh); and Mathematical Models in the Applied Sciences (Fowler). There were lots of other interesting-looking books, too, but I'd been thinking about getting those three for a few months (Graff, Nayfeh) to a few years (Fowler). Besides, some of the other books looked more interesting than they actually were -- and some of the books which were probably most interesting were also incomprehensible

There was a slim volume of classic papers from the mathematical masters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, which looked immensely interesting. I opened it, read the introduction (in English), and then turned to the first paper -- only to be forcibly reminded that English was not the prefered language of technical communication at that time. There were papers written in French, German, and Russian, all with authors whose names most any engineer, scientist, or mathematician would recognize immediately. I know no French, precious little Russian, and just enough technical German to decipher the descriptions of the equations when needed.

So much for that. I walked home almost chortling aloud in glee, and my mood hasn't dimmed appreciably since. Whee! Books! This makes up for the ending to This Rough Magic, which was a fun book with a very mediocre conclusion. I finished it late Monday night. Perhaps that's why I felt so wiped out by Tuesday evening. It may have been a mediocre ending, but I did stay up past my bed time.

I had a cup of herbal tea and then went to bed at a reasonable hour, but I wasn't much more motivated today than I was yesterday. So I think I will take a day or two regrouping: walking, reading, doing laundry, enjoying the sun, and avoiding the office. Maybe I'll read some more from the Feynmann lectures, or maybe I'll go to the library and read from the work of E.B. White.

And, of course, I'll drink plenty of tea, cook good things to eat, and enjoy the leftover lentils.

• Currently drinking: Black tea with lychees