It's time for a mid-day tea break. Today I'm having black tea flavored with black currants.

I looked outside this morning and thought My umbrella will never survive this. But I needed to go to campus. So I changed into shorts and a t-shirt, put on a pair of sandals, and ran to Long's Drugs in the El Cerrito Plaza. Carlson Ave was flooded, and the water was knee-deep in places along the route I took. By the time I reached the store, I was drenched and dirty, as though I'd been swimming in mud water. I picked up a rain coat from the rack, walked to the register, and pulled my wallet out of the plastic bag in my pocket. The cashier looked at the rain coat and then at me. I smiled at her politely, and she started to laugh. I think I made her day -- she was still laughing when I left the store.

The rain was lighter when I walked in to campus for my meeting, and now there is no rain at all. I'm sure it will start again soon enough; I'm just thankful that I had the chance to walk in the sun for a few minutes.

I spent part of yesterday handling routine paperwork that accumulated over the past two or three weeks. Part of my task was sorting through commercial mail: discarding the dross that I kept only because I'd not looked at it, retaining the book catalogs and newsletters which I'd like to read, paying the bills, and sometimes puzzling over what to do with the odd bits left over. One such odd bit is a DVD that I received from Genetic Programming, Inc. which contains a FREE 4-hour DVD inside! along with an advertisement for a book (Genetic Programming IV: Routine Human-Competitive Machine Intelligence). The packaging looks so like one of the gaudy AOL CD's that I quickly tossed it toward the discard pile with my left hand, only to catch it with my right before it landed among the car insurance ads. After a moment's thought, I put it in the pile of things that I may look at soon or may discard next time.

I know several ways I could reasonably appear on a mailing list of people interested in books on evolutionary computation. As I thought about mailing lists, I turned up the radio, just in time to hear an interview segment from Weekend Edition about the new essay section on the SAT. The interviewee recently wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled Would Shakespeare get into Swarthmore? After analyzing essays by Shakespeare, Hemingway, Orwell, and the Unabomber -- only the Unabomber's essay would have scored well in the new exam -- the author of the article observed that the SAT is a perfect predictor of who will get into top rate colleges, and of very little else. And I thought, I wonder whether many marketers buy mailing lists from the Educational Testing Service?

Later yesterday, I read about a study of server break-ins. The company who ran the study looked at some thousands of break-ins, not including those due to Windows worms and viruses, and counted how many of the compromised systems ran one operating system or the other. Many of the compromised systems ran Linux, and relatively few ran Mac OS X; therefore, concluded the company, Linux must be insecure while Macs are secure, with Windows somewhere between. This conclusion seems eminently logical, as much as if the company surveyors walked into a local high-end jewelry establishment, counted heads, and decided that the most Americans make salaries of at least $100K and will marry within the year.

I spent much of the remainder of yesterday afternoon reading about the migrations of cranes and about fluid mechanics. I also took an hour to walk to Barnes and Noble, browse, buy a toffee bar, and return home. Such little things make pleasant days.

My cold has migrated. I stopped constantly blowing my nose; now I'm just dealing with bouts of rattling coughs. I don't think it's bronchitis yet, and I'm trying to keep it that way. The sun was out today, so the trip to school would probably have been rather pleasant; still, I canceled meetings and worked from home today. I continued to drink enormous quantities of liquids: cold water, hot water with lime juice, mint tea, orange tea, osymanthus-flavored tea, and miso soup.

I did some work, but lacked the concentration to do anything substantial. I had a bad case of clear-ls syndrome, in which I suddenly realize that I've done nothing for five minutes but repeatedly clear the screen and list the contents of the current directory. My fingers know those command so well that they can perform them without any intervention from higher brain functions -- so if I quit thinking, they'll keep typing, just to stave off boredom. Of course, other tasks are nearly as automatic as clearing the screen: finding capitalization errors in a bibliography, for example, as I did yesterday evening. I might even find it easier to do such tasks when my wits are dulled; if I could muster my concentration, I'd probably find it annoying to spend it on such a picayune task.

I typically listen to the radio during the days I work from home, and today was no exception. I was particularly amused by Fresh Air today. The show featured an interview with a White House correspondent for the Washington Post, who spoke about what it is like to deal with the Bush administration; and an interview with the man who helped Bill Clinton make jokes for his speeches. Some of the things said by the correspondent in the first interview made me think about Bush's peculiar brand of cleverness. Garrison Keilor observed that Clinton speaks in complete paragraphs; in contrast, Bush seems to delight in devising malapropisms. But though Bush's unrehearsed public speech may be rough, he delivers prepared comments skillfully enough -- far more so than I would, were I in his shoes -- and I can only guess at what his private speech might be like. In any case, Bush is a successful politician: he has pushed through legislation that he wanted, and still he remains popular.

His geniality and political savvy aside, I dislike the reasons behind Bush's policies, even when I agree with his actions, or at least feel ambivalent toward them. I thought about that today when I listened to news about the report published today by the Union of Concerned Scientists, in which the authors objected to the administration's policy of loading scientific review boards with administration supporters. On one of the radio programs that aired this morning, a panelist said: So what? Scientists disagree; why should we not choose the scientists who agree with our point of view? The panelist's comment reminded me of a point Barzun makes repeatedly in his essays: we apply the label of science to too many subjects in which there is precious little of the scientific method. It should not be an insult to state that a subject is not a science. Indeed, I do not regard most of computer science as a scientific discipline; rather, it is an engineering discipline. But somehow the meaning of the word science has blurred; we can say that someone has a skill down to a science and mean the skill is so practiced it is nearly automatic. Where is the sense of questioning, of hypothesis and experiment, in such a colloquial usage? In what sense does political science employ the scientific method? Scientists disagree, true, and debate over interpretation of the available data is an important part of the process. But scientific review panels should be chosen according to familiarity with the data; if our administration chooses instead based on political or religious position, it risks promoting the likes of Lyshenkoism.

In the evening, the music programming began. For half an hour I listened to a musician trained in the drum styles of the Indian subcontinent; for another half hour, I listened to jazz; and for another half hour, I listened to classical music. I appreciate music without lyrics, or songs in which the lyrics play a secondary role. The tune of Summer time is poetry enough even when unaccompanied by singing.

I've caught cold: my nose drips, my sinuses hurt, and my chest rattles when I inhale. But I have the good taste to drink plenty of hot liquids, the good sense to take a decongestant and a nap, and the good humor to keep grinning.

I read the rest of Simple and Direct yesterday. I enjoy Barzun's writing not solely because he has wit, style, and insight, but also because he states his opinions so forthrightly. I do not always agree with him, but when I disagree, I find myself framing counter-arguments, and not simply shrugging and reading on.

Next on my list is The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes by Peter Matthiesen. I bought it last year, but it disappeared into my cluttered piles, only to emerge after I bought new shelves recently.

We ate dim sum for lunch and a particularly good salad for dinner. We read from Cooke's America, walked in the sun, played frisbee, and practiced salsa. In the morning, I got confused and made a detour of nearly an hour through the BART system; and in the evening, I had to assemble my exit fare from two small tickets and the coins in my change purse. But my BART misadventures proved a minor irritant only.

It was a good day.

I spent much of the past two days dealing with Fortran 77 programs. I would say that I've spent the past two days swearing at the Fortran compiler, but the truth is that I'm much too mild-mannered to swear at such a commonplace nuisance. I satisfy myself by muttering I hate Fortran 77 from time to time, and by taking frequent breaks for tea.

Much of what I do on a day-to-day basis involves combining subprograms written in Fortran, C, C++, and Matlab into a single program that will solve problems that interest me -- and that may solve problems that interest other people, too. Not all of these subprograms were designed to work nicely together, and so it isn't always trivial to write the interface code that glues the program together. I typically receive a few e-mails each week asking how to use C and Fortran together, usually from people who want to use CLAPACK 3.0, a library which I built in my first years at Berkeley by translating the LAPACK library. This week, I've answered an unusual number of requests for technical help, not all of them related to CLAPACK. Between answering those requests and extending the finite element program FEAP to solve a problem in my own research, I've been dealing more than normal with some obscure, arcane, and frustrating details of various computer systems.

Some days, I think the work of building interfaces between different programs is like bringing together two or three unfriendly and remarkably stupid parties in a negotiation. In this analogy, I suppose I would be the skilled negotiator. But when I visualize a skilled negotiator in my mind, I see a middle-aged gentleman with a fringe of grey hair and a solemn and dignified demeanor. I lack grey hair, and am far too familiar with the workings of my own mind to call myself solemn and dignified, no matter what the rest of the world may see. Perhaps a better analogy would be this: I am like a monkey with a staple gun, a clever creature of questionable sanity who delights in firmly attaching together articles which are not usually joined. Likening myself to a monkey may be no more realistic than likening myself to a diplomat, but the notion of stapling a sock to the ear of a gargoyle on the roof is more amuses me more than the notion of concluding a treaty.

I think most people are likely to flee a monkey with a staple gun rather than to thank him. But almost everyone who has asked me a question this week has said Thank you after I've answered. I appreciate the thanks. Thanks keep me answering questions -- thanks and bananas. Of course, I'm aware that I can't record e-mails of thanks or acknowledgements in papers and theses on my CV. Still, I'm pleased to here that I've helped.

As I write, I'm listening to an Internet radio station. The station plays electronic music, and the altered sound of the bass drums in the song that is playing reminds me of a rhythmically talented bullfrog. Croak! Thump! Croak! Thump! It tickles my fancy to hear these things, even if it might annoy me in other circumstances. My taste in music, like my taste in food, is catholic. What a wonderful thing it is to be able to listen to classical music, news programming from NPR, jazz, or techno just by turning a dial! At the same time, I'm glad that the radio and the computer both have convenient off switches. I like to write in my blog and to surf the web, but I also like to write with a pencil and read a book.

I think it is time to turn off the computer. A book, a glass of water, and a warm bed all beckon.

Today was a day of tea.

After this week's social dancing class, Winnie and I went to San Francisco for high tea. We had one pot of tea flavored with black currants and one of a blend of black teas. There were also finger foods to savor between sips.

In the evening, I went to dinner with friends at La Mediterranee, a local Mediterranean restaurant. The wait was longer than we expected, but the food came quickly after we were seated. It all tasted good to me. We ate cake at home. Two friends brought tea with them. My friends have excellent taste.

It was a full day, and I'm omitting details. In the brief quiet moments, I did a little work, listened to the radio some, and read more from Simple and Direct by Jacques Barzun. And now I will read a little more and go to sleep.

And tomorrow I'll start with a cup of tea.

I was sitting in a chair in the Barnes and Noble Cafe this evening, reading a book and nibbling on a cookie, when I was distracted by a comment from the people chatting at a nearby table. You actually remember CS 61A [Berkeley's introductory CS course]? one exclaimed. Yeah, said the other, but all that stuff you learn is useless. When I started this job, I was looking at code with some other programmers, and I said something looked like it was O(n³). They laughed at me, and I said to forget it.

The conversation at the next table turned to the topic of night life in various Bay Area communities, and I stopped listening. I finished my dessert, closed my book, and left the store. But as I went to buy milk and then to walk home, I continued to think about the exchange I had overheard.

How quickly I never use it becomes It is useless! A college acquiantance of mine -- a business major with a concentration in information systems -- once told me that computer science education was worse than useless, because computer science students learned irrelevant crap. Business majors who had introductory programming coursework, he argued, are in a far better position: they know all the programming anyone really needs, and they have business savvy as well. I've heard others say similar things, though less bluntly. Oddly, I know few who say the same of mathematics. Of course, I know many people who have an unwarranted high opinion of their own computer expertise, but most of those people find mathematics frightening -- at best . Perhaps they would prefer not to mention math at all, for fear that an integral might smite them from the sky, hurled like lightning by a vengeful god with a short temper and a part-time job teaching freshman calculus.

My college acquiantance's attitude annoyed me, but I shrugged it off easily. I was more disturbed by the statement I overheard tonight. It is one thing to hear a businessman say that an understanding of electrical current is useless; it is quite another to hear the same from an electrician who supposedly learned his trade in school and who helps design the wiring for new office buildings. The businessman may be blindly, willfully, and woefully ignorant, but he is probably less dangerous in his ignorance than the electrician.

Perhaps I'll regret that metaphor by the morning. Or perhaps I'll have forgotten it.

Every night since Wednesday, including tonight, I've thought I'll take a break this evening and spend a little time reading before I sleep. But I haven't quite managed it yet. It was a productive week, but a busy one.

Tomorrow, I intend to spend a little time reading before I sleep.

Am I incorrigible, encouragable, or simply uncorrugated?

I finished Master and Commander (Patrick O'Brian) and Angels and Demons (Dan Brown) this weekend and last night. I enjoyed the former a good deal more. I didn't understand most of the nautical terms -- this despite the fact that many pages are spent in explanations of those exact same terms to the ship's doctor.

I re-discovered today that I cannot maintain adequate attention through 3.5 hours of lecture without some break. Today was the first meeting of an interesting, if hastily-organized, course on numerical optimization. Alas, it came on the heels of an hour and a half of fluid mechanics. The first lecture of the optimization course could be entitled a two hour review of elementary analysis: in which we briefly review definitions related to topology, sequences, continuity, and compactness, focusing predominantly on the real line. At least, it could be so entitled if the title conventions of former centuries remained in vogue. Fortunately, times change, and so the first lecture would more likely be entitled lecture 1. Regardless of the title -- and of the familiarity of the material -- I could feel my eyes crossing by six.

I think I will stick to fluid mechanics and the matrix computations seminar for this semester's formal offerings.

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lime and honey

Tomorrow is Groundhog Day. Sadly, it seems overshadowed by football at the moment.

For my part, I think prognosticating rodents are far cooler than half-time commercials.

It's a beautiful day. We opened the windows to the apartment earlier, and I can hear the sounds of the wind rustling the branches outside. I plan to go walking with Winnie in about an hour when she arrives in El Cerrito. For the moment, though, I need to stay near the phone -- so it seems like a good time to catch up on some writing.

I already spent some time outside today. My bike is in working order again at last, and I took a ride around the block to try it out. Traffic aside, it was grand to be out riding again. Before the bike ride, I walked to the post office to drop of some mail, and from there to Barnes and Noble for a morning cup of coffee and some browsing. I deliberately left my glasses at home, a tactic which I find usually keeps me from becoming so engrossed in browsing as I otherwise might. Glasses or not, though, I was distracted today. I have two new books in my collection: The Pig Who Sang to the Moon by Jeffrey Masson, and The Value of Science, a collection of three books by the famous French mathematician Henri Poincaré.

Sadly, Poincaré is not as well-known outside mathematics as he deserves to be. He was a giant in mathematics, a physicist of no mean skill, and an author of several popular science articles for the general public. The article cited above (from an excellent site on the history of mathematics) ends with the following quote from Poincaré's funeral, which I think is quite well-put:

[M Poincaré was] a mathematician, geometer, philosopher, and man of letters, who was a kind of poet of the infinite, a kind of bard of science.

We need more such figures today (and not just in Georgia).

My proudest accomplishment of the week is, alas, probably an insignificant one. On Thursday night, I finished writing (rewriting, actually) a small program to print mathematical documents typeset by Kahan for an Epson FX80 printer using a custom font. My program generates Postscript code, which I then usually feed through ps2pdf to obtain a PDF document. Unlike previous versions, this code correctly handles all of the documents which I've received from Kahan over the past couple years, including switching back and forth between fonts. And if the code ever does encounter a special character that I forgot about, it will fail gracefully -- an error message describing the unknown character will be sent to the console, and a placeholder will go into the document.

It may not be the most marvelous thing I've ever done, but it was a lot of fun to write.

If I had any doubts that the spring semester is well and truly underway, they would be quashed after a glance at the seminar schedule this week. The matrix computations seminar began this Thursday with a special seminar -- Gene Golub spoke about the solution of real positive nonsymmetric linear systems -- and there was a guest from Japan who spoke on Friday about some of the work done at Chuo University on combining measured data with finite element models in order to more accurately predict microsystem behavior. I attended both those meetings, but I missed both the presentation by MEMSCAP representatives (MEMSCAP runs several standard MEMS fabrication processes) and the presentations for Sensor Nets Day. The seminar calendar is full of other presentations, too -- they might be less relevant to me, but some sound interesting nonetheless.

One of those interesting presentations is coming soon, but remains to be scheduled. My fluids professor is hosting a visitor this semester who is, among other things, an expert in creeping flows and lubrication theory. We've been talking for the last two weeks about creeping flows. Creeping flows are flows in which viscous effects dominate inertial effects. Think about trying to move a marble through cold honey, by way of example -- unless the marble is fired into the honey at high speeds or something similarly implausible, you can neglect the inertial forces (the ma term in F = ma). Since inertial forces scale with volume, it's usually possible to neglect inertia when dealing with very small objects like single-celled animals or microsystems. Since I spend a lot of time thinking about micron-scale machines, creeping flows are particularly interesting to me. Lubrication theory deals with creeping flows in narrowly confined channels -- like the layer of air between a transparency and a projector, the layer of air that supports an air hockey puck, or even a layer of drying paint. A lot of the flows in MEMS involve creeping flows in a thin film of fluid, so lubrication theory is pretty relevant to me, too. So I'm looking forward to this presentation, even though I don't know when it is.

Of course, the fact that it is relevant to my research is an excuse, if a true excuse. The real reason that I'm going is because I think the topic is intrinsically interesting, and because it sounds as though the presenter is one of the grand old statesmen of fluid mechanics -- and such gentlemen often have an entertaining presentation style.

Of course, going to lectures costs time and attention. After the presentation on Friday by our guest from Japan, I and some of my colleagues presented on MEMS simulation, design, measurement, and model verification in which we've been involved. I'd heard most of the presentations before, but felt obliged to stay for the sake of politeness. Polite or not, though, my concentration was spent halfway through the second mini-presentation. I'd have probably felt miserable and started pining for a coffee break if I hadn't had my pencil and pad with me. As it is, I doodled my way through some calculations which I think may prove useful. I need to sanity-check them tonight or tomorrow in order to be sure.

I added command line history and a proper X11 refresh loop to FEAP this morning. It took perhaps an hour of reading last, another half hour this morning, and an hour of coding, testing, and debugging. That was about as I estimated -- which is surprising, as I'm not very good at such estimates. The rest of the day was not as productive. I seem to be prey to a dark and distracted mood, and did a lot of wandering in circles.

I enjoyed the social dance class yesterday. After dancing, we read, and then ate Indian food. It was all quite good.

I took a walk this afternoon. I'm out of English Breakfast tea, and planned to get some more from Peet's Coffee and Tea on Solano Avenue. It takes me just under half an hour to walk there from my home in El Cerrito at my normal clip. I'm not sure whether it took more or less time today, as I was trying to walk and read at the same time. Eventually, I gave up on that idea as too hazardous; there are just too many dog leashes stretched across the walkway (not to mention too many cars in crosswalks, or parking meters and lamp posts along the sidewalk).

I had a bite to eat and read for a while at the Cactus Taqueria near the top of Solano, then turned around and walked home. I didn't stop at Peet's. I took a different route home than the one I usually follow, and my wanderings took me through the center of Kensington, past the old mission-style chapel. The view from there is beautiful, even on a cloudy day like today. The sky was slate grey with clouds, but I could still see the Bay, the bridges, and Albany Hill.

After I returned home, it occurred to me that if I'd planned to pick up cheese as well as tea, I could have been part of a Wallace and Gromit episode. All I'd need would be a dog. Okay, I'd need some improbable tools and perhaps a herd of sheep, too, but it's the thought that counts. And the tea and cheese counts, too.

I shared a dinner of chili and rice with Patxi and Esther this evening. Esther made cornbread. She replaced the usual vegetable oil with olive oil -- necessity being the mother of invention -- and the result was quite tasty. We also had grated cheese laced with jalapenos for the top. It was delicious. As I was preparing the rice, Esther commented -- not for the first time -- how odd it was that Patxi and I prepare rice in a pot. It seems that many of my friends who eat a lot of rice use a rice cooker, and are a little bemused that we would prepare decent rice without such a gadget. In fact, Patxi and I do have a rice cooker, but it invariably burns the rice, and so we rarely use it.

Otherwise, today was a lazy sort of day. I thought I might do some work, but I was distracted and instead spent the time reading about cascading style sheets and about various GUI toolkits. I also spent some time reading various articles about intellectual property. There was a NY Times Magazine article on current battles over copyright, and I'd recently filled out a member opinion poll for the US ACM policy arm regarding legal protections for data collections. And it all set me to thinking.

The ACM poll results, last I looked, were very telling. About 80 percent of the respondents strongly agreed, and another 10 percent agreed with the ACM's position that current legal protections are adequate. But software developers have depressingly little clout when it comes to the actions of Congress and business. The SCO law suits seem to me more about businesses hiring lawyers to march to war than about any real point of technical merit. Diebold would be in far better shape if only they listened to their programmers before releasing their voting machines. Large companies can afford to engage in patent warfare, and they do so -- but the programmers I know agree almost uniformly that software patents as posed now are just foolish. And so it goes.

The current environment in the US with regards to copyrights and with respect to cryptographic export restrictions means that some software projects are migrating abroad -- and no longer accept input from American programmers. Those who warn of cyber terrorists urge industry and academia to address problems with the current computer security infrastructure, but judgements based on laws like the DMCA discourage researchers from pursuing those same problems. Similarly, various agencies seem to feel it's important to ensure the existence of another generation of researchers competent to analyze physical threats, whether they be biological, nuclear, or whatever; but at the same time, foreign graduate students who come even close to those areas face intimidation and woe, and domestic students... well, it seems that more domestic students want to go into business than into science or engineering.

After all, business is where the money is.

Happy Year of the Monkey! Gung Hay Fat Choy!

I wrote today.

I've been thinking recently about mathematical writing. It's a tricky business. Ideally, mathematical writing should simultaneously be concise, precise, elegant, lucid, and correct. Each goal is difficult in its own right. Further, there is tension in these goals; sometimes it is easier to be lucid by writing (at least initially) an imprecise or slightly incorrect statement which conveys the idea of a proof, then filling in corrections later. The conventions used by most authors are a compromise. It is hard to write proofs which are precise and correct without sounding stilted, because ordinary speech patterns are often too vague. There is a reason why we write let k be an integer instead of k is an integer; the former sentence defines the type of k, while the latter sentence observes a fact which might be a consequence of something else (e.g. Let k = m + n where m and n are integers. Then k is an integer).

There are other conventions, too, which students of mathematics absorb over time. The phrase for suppose not usually starts a proof by contradiction; the phrase without loss of generality means that the proof treats a special case to which all other cases can be reduced trivially. Even the vague-sounding phrase almost everywhere has a precise meaning: a statement holds a.e. (almost everywhere) if it is true except on a set of zero measure.

I recently read a draft of a paper which severely abused the conventions of mathematical style. It was not a mathematical paper, and I think the author only adopted the style because he thought it sounded impressive. I read the paper slowly, marking as I went, and when I finished I walked to the bathroom and washed my hands and face with hot water until I felt better. I was in the bathroom for several minutes.

My favorite mathematical authors usually write two or three descriptions of their ideas. First, they describe the idea at a high level, often in intuitive language: this quantity describes how close a matrix is to being singular; this theorem describes why we cannot comb a sphere covered with hair without creating a part somewhere. Then there may be a special illustrative case, something to show the idea without the baggage of technical details -- though the technical details may be mentioned so that the reader is alerted to their existence. Finally, there is a theorem and a proof, which should ideally be written using a concise and suggestive notation. If done well, the reader is left pondering the ideas presented, and does not have to battle constant confusion because the author has decided to make n approach zero as an integer epsilon goes to infinity.

I cope gracefully enough with authors who present their intuition clumsily. Similarly, I'm entirely sympathetic to authors who occasionally resort to awkward devices or notation in their proofs. But those who write a vague and imprecise proof sketch and claim they are done irritate me immensely, as do those who write enormous quantities of unmotivated (and often irrelevant) algebra without even attempting to help the reader develop a mental road map first.

Concise, precise, elegant, lucid, and correct -- that's my ideal. I read few papers, mathematical or otherwise, that do well in all categories. I'm still critical of my own ability to be simultaneously concise and lucid, but I leave room for self-forgiveness. And I make progress, however slowly.

If only I could apply the same criteria to political speeches!

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lime

Oh. All I needed to get my code to link under Solaris was to use the -mimpure-text option. Obvious, yes?

I don't really hate computers. And I don't hate Fortran 77, either, my frequent complaints notwithstanding. But that sort of linking problem sometimes makes me drift from a Muppet personality of Gonzo (generally friendly, if a bit confusing) to something more like Miss Piggy (Hi-ya!).

I think it's time for lunch. Maybe I'll play the Swedish Chef for a few minutes.

First day of classes for Spring 2004! The first fluid mechanics lecture is this afternoon; the starting topic for the course seems to be flow at very low Reynolds numbers. Fun stuff.

I bought a bookshelf and an under-bed plastic storage unit at Target on Saturday. I carried it home, assembled it, put books on it, and suddenly found that I could see the spines on most of my books! But there was still some double-stacking, and if I put one more book on my desk I would probably reach critical mass and the whole pile would self-destruct. So after we returned from a dance lesson at Stanford, I asked Winnie if she would drive me to Target for a second set of shelves. She was willing, and getting the shelves home proved much easier with a car. So on Sunday night, I assembled another set of shelves, reshelved the forty books on my desk (I counted) and shelved the remaining double-stacked books. I filled up two of the three shelves in the unit, so I have some room for expansion.

Whee! Books! I found a few that I thought I'd lost or loaned away. Hello, Mythical Man Month! Fancy meeting you here.

Yes, I talk to my books. No, they don't talk back.

I spent the morning of MLK day reading prognostications about a digital Pearl Harbor, stupid patent tricks, and a college kid named Mike Rowe who set up a site called MikeRoweSoft -- and was sued by Microsoft for it. I came away growling. Computer security experts whose sole qualifications are in management of a security-related company, or in dire prognostications, can do an awful lot to improperly alarm a credulous public. Is computer security important? Yes. Do these authors form plausible scenarios, or write about countermeasures that make sense? Well, some of them are probably the same people who think it's vitally important that public restrooms in the BART train stations be unavailable in order to thwart terrorists (who presumably will be so distracted by full bladders that they'll become confused and head home).

I spent the afternoon and evening becoming equally irritated by linker errors on Solaris. I fixed my interface so it should now actually be portable. But I don't think the thirty pages of linker warnings have anything to do with my code being correct or not; I think they have something to do with the linker receiving the wrong options. I could be wrong, though. The error messages are singularly unhelpful, and the code takes long enough to compile that trial-and-error is trying as it is error-prone.

Monday -- now technically tomorrow in Pacific Standard Time -- is Martin Luther King day. It's a big deal in Berkeley, even more so than Indigenous People's Day (known as Columbus Day in the rest of the country). It was a big deal when I lived in Maryland, too. Enough of that attitude has transferred that I still take a few minutes every MLK day to listen to the radio when the I have a dream speech plays.

I've thought a lot recently about another dream: men on Mars. Books on Mars are a sci-fi staple, probably because Mars is the only planet in the neighborhood we could plausibly survive on. I've read many books from the Mars sub-genre. I've read Heinlein's Red Planet and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and various others, good and bad. I think the dream of Mars is exciting; and for a nation where ever-fewer students want to study engineering and the sciences, I think that excitement is important.

I also think that an unnerving fraction of the unmanned missions sent to Mars have failed. The current Mars rover is inspiring, and that robot is almost certainly a more appropriate choice than a human at this point. I remember watching the Challenger go up -- and blow up -- in elementary school. I remember how NASA had to struggle to leave the shadow of Challenger, and I wondered if I would watch history repeated with the Columbia. To more than one generation, astronauts are heroes, and the death of such heroes is hard to take. I wonder if we will rush to send the first men to Mars, only to find men lost, hopes dashed, and NASA irreparably damaged.

Mars is a noble goal, and I'm impressed by it. I'm less impressed that the first steps involve taking away funding from other productive projects -- like the Hubble -- and promising insufficient additional funds. If the project is to be undertaken, future administrations will face hard fiscal questions. Of course, those fiscal problems may be minor compared to other future fiscal difficulties resulting from Bush administration policies. I was disturbed to hear Paul O'Neill's quote of Cheney: Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. Carpe diem! I do not think we have the funds to commit to a manned Mars project done right; and a manned Mars project done wrong will reduce funds and prestige available for other space-based science. I also agree with critics who point out that we have some serious messes on our own planet and in our own country that should take precedence over putting men on Mars. I also expect that Bush's move is inspired less by a grand vision of men in space than by a grand vision of Bush in office for another term.

But for all that, I still would like to see men on Mars while I live.

My mixed feelings about Mars mirror a lot of my mixed feelings about politics recently. Should the United States have reacted to September 11 with an examination of it's own security? Of course -- that was an inevitable part of the reaction. Does that mean that we should suspend civil liberties for the prisoners of Guantanomo Bay, or that some bureaucrat should decide that BART train restrooms must be closed until further notice for your security and the security of others. No! Is Afghanistan better off under a regime less repressive than the Taliban, and are Iraq and the rest of the world better off without Saddam Hussein in a position of power? I think so. Did we do well to anger our allies, not only acting unilaterally, but in the process declaring them irrelevant if not outright reviling them? No! Freedom fries indeed. Are we now doing the right thing in trying to help Iraq? Well, perhaps we have some of the details wrong, but I think we're obligated to give what help we can. Does the proclamation that countries who were not militarily involved in Iraq shall not bid on reconstruction projects make the US sound like we have any motivation higher than commerce? Not really, though I believe that we do. Should we explore new technologies for energy production, and study the failures of the current distribution system in the hopes that it can be improved? Yes. Does that mean conservation is irrelevant because profligate energy expenditure is the American way, and the American way of life is a blessed one? Hardly.

I dream of a world where people are morally outraged by sloth and profligacy, and not by the fact that not everyone in the world is Christian. I want to see more people excited by the opportunity to build and explore, to be scientists and engineers, and fewer people who are excited by the profitability of law suits. I dream of ideas shared, not locked up in a safe and guarded by ill-considered patents. And I dream of men on Mars in my lifetime.

I also dream of warm socks, breakdancing koala bears, and writing equations with a weird stick of chalk that keeps changing colors. I suppose the dreams that come from REM sleep have as much place in life as the dreams that come from inspired sentiment. And right now, I think I ought to check in on those koalas.

The thing that has always disturbed me about O_DIRECT is that the whole interface is just stupid, and was probably designed by a deranged monkey on some serious mind-controlling substances.
-- Linus