Today was a day of near misses, the type that make me irritable and panicky while they happen, and then grateful afterward. It could have been so much worse.

• I figured out this morning that I'd never received my W2 forms. Fortunately, the university payroll office can produce duplicates in a matter of seconds. Everyone I asked for help along the way was able to point me in the right direction, promptly and courteously. It's hard to complain about that. My taxes are done now.
• The Thursday deadline for the extended abstract is soft. I don't intend to stretch it, but that's still reassuring.
• The power went off for ten minutes in the middle of the afternoon. When it came back up, a few of the file servers were gone. It turns out that there's something screwy with the uninterruptible power supply (it appears to interrupt itself), but they were able to restore the file servers by late in the afternoon. The server with my directory on it was one of the last to be recovered, but since I spent the mid-afternoon working in a coffee shop and the late afternoon buying toilet paper -- have I mentioned everything in the apartment was Patxi's? -- it made little difference to me.
• I got home and checked e-mail just before Patxi unplugged the cable modem and took it to his new apartment. There was an alarming mail from Sanjay saying that a funding agency needed something from us by tomorrow. I came into the office, since I thought I might need the network resources, and I might end up burning the midnight oil for his request. It turned out that what they needed was one paragraph, and he just wanted a sounding board.
• The microwave was gone, so I didn't heat the enchiladas I'd planned to have for dinner. But I had a slice of olive bread, some cheese, an orange, and some apricots, so that was fine.
• I couldn't find a hot water pot in the grocery store, but the hot water spigot in the kitchenette has finally been repaired, and so I still had my evening tea.

The day turned out well. I can't complain.

It has been almost a year since I started writing this blog. It has been about a year since Saddam Hussein's downfall. And it has been about a year since I organized my personal papers. It seems like I always organize under the same impetus: I need to make sure I have all the information I need for taxes. And, as always, I think the task of organizing all my papers, which I spent the past few hours doing, will prove far more tedious than actually filling out the tax forms.

Patxi and Esther will take the cable modem with them tomorrow. I expect I'll spend more time in the office after that.

Patxi and Esther are finishing their packing. They've reserved a truck, and will move tomorrow. I helped classify kitchen items for a while earlier. Tea, tea cups, tea pots, electric kettle -- those are mine. Coffee items and most of the mugs (except the black ones and the Dilbert ones) -- those are Patxi's. The baking sheets and pans, the spices, the cheap beat-up frying pans without nonstick -- those are mine. The wok, the good skillet, and almost all the utensils (except two forks, two spoons, and two butter knives) -- Patxi's. And everything outside my kitchen, the bedroom, and one half of the bathroom cabinet is Patxi's.

In a couple more weeks, I'll move back to Berkeley. I'll miss El Cerrito, but at the same time, I'm starting to look forward to the move. I lived in Berkeley for my first year of graduate school; it was miserable in some ways, but it was pleasant in others. I'll be able to walk home late at night without waiting twenty minutes for a train. I'll be close to Black Oak Books again, and to Shattuck Avenue, and to interesting parks. I'll be closer to my favorite cafes.

I remember my weekend routine from my first year, when I lived in Berkeley. I would buy a book from Black Oaks on a Saturday walk, and bring it home with me. After making dinner, I'd retreat to my room, sit in my inflatable chair next to my floor lamp, and alternate between reading and radio listening. On Saturday, I'd listen to Prairie Home Companion and Beyond 2000, a show of science fiction stories turned into radio drama. On Sunday, I'd listen to To the Best of Our Knowledge -- the same show I'm listening to now. Between programs, I'd read. My roommate was rarely home for most of those weekend evenings, and the quiet was undisturbed. I never quite went back to that routine after my move to El Cerrito.

The EECS department at Berkeley will hire a few new faculty members next year, and so we've had several interesting job talks. Earlier this week, I heard a candidate talk that touched problems from combinatorics, PDE-constrained optimization, and quantum computation -- and was still comprehensible. At least, I thought he was comprehensible. A job talk is an odd balancing act: there's always too much material to cover, but it must be presented in a way that is still accessible and interesting. There's an edge of tension to a job talk that's missing in an ordinary seminar talk. The matrix computations seminar today interested me just as much as the candidate talk, drew from nearly as many disciplines, and similarly balanced the completeness and accessibility of the presentation; but it was much more relaxed, and I think that contributed to my enjoyment and understanding. Besides, today's speaker spoke with a Dutch accent which I found easy to listen to.

I gave a talk yesterday to a group of MEMS engineers. It turned out to be a very small group; everyone who would normally attend was busy, including the guy who originally invited me to speak. Such is life. I figured out some interesting things in the process of preparing the talk, and I may have convinced someone to use my software, so I can hardly complain.

In a way, classes are a pleasant break from preparing and hearing talks, not to mention from coding and writing. We're studying stability in my fluids course. The material so far is elementary, or at least familiar, but I've still remained entertained. How do you tell if your roommate is stable? asked the professor. Wait until he's at equilibrium -- asleep on the sofa, say -- and then make a loud noise to perturb him. If he quickly goes back to sleep, he's very stable. If he runs to the kitchen, grabs a knife, and chases you around the apartment, he's probably unstable.

I also amused myself for half an hour this morning solving a question asked by a colleague: what does this series sum to?

∞ ∑ n = 0

sin((2n+1)y) ⁄ (2n+1)

The answer is π/4 -- independent of y. It's simple if you remember the appropriate calculus tricks. I'm still unsure why Jason cared about this sum, though I assume it was probably for some sort of series solution to a differential equation. Still, I was grateful for the brief distraction. Short, easy problems are a boon. I have spent too much focus on work recently, and it's starting to show; my eating and sleeping patterns are both off.

A fellow student in my graduate algebra class at Maryland once claimed that Gauss went clean-shaven when he worked on algebra, but went scruffy when he did analysis. I expect the story was apocryphal, but if it was not, I seem to be mimicking Gauss in at least one trivial way. Yesterday and today were full of analysis, leading to satisfactory ends in some cases (I have a perturbation-based method for thermoelastic loss calculations which runs way faster than the straightforward approach), and less satisfactory results in other cases (using slightly different versions of the same formula, I get answers which range from 50 to 50000 -- and I trust none of them). Even when I'm not entirely successful, I find this sort of analysis satisfying; unless there's some analysis to aim a computation, the computer will usually give answers which are at best useless and at worst misleading.

However much I admire Gauss and enjoy analysis, I do need to shave.

I've done a poor job of maintaining this blog lately, and have only done an adequate job of responding to friendly e-mails. I have taken some time from work to do other things, though. I walked home a couple times in the last week. The route I take is about five miles, mostly downhill, and it takes me just over an hour and a quarter to walk it. I usually watch the sunset at the end of the walk; I often smell the scents of evening. One day last week, I stopped at a cafe near campus on my walk home. There were several undergrads there, chatting merrily with each other. One pair was discussing fraternity politics; another was talking about which majors on campus were most difficult (with each party in the conversation convinced that he surely had the most difficult major). They spoke loudly enough that I couldn't easily ignore them, and I mentally rolled my eyes a few times as I listened. Was I ever that young?

Of course I was that young. I still am. But in every young man, an old man bides his time. The converse might be true as well, if those who believe in reincarnation have the right of it.

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lime and honey

Alistaire Cooke died yesterday at age 95. I was introduced to Cooke through his Letter to America, the long-running radio series that ended only a couple weeks ago. I enjoyed his radio program, and I have enjoyed his writing. I only hope I survive to such energetic old age.

I spoke at the local matrix computations seminar today. I stayed up too late last night working on the slides, and my presentation was unpolished, but the talk went acceptably well. Whether or not my audience learned anything new from my talk, I learned something truly remarkable from it. In preparing my talk, I tried to describe in pictures why a certain phenomena occurs. When I described the picture during the talk, I realized that I had not carried my idea as far as it would go. After lunch with colleagues, I walked home, thinking as I went. I paused at the French Hotel Cafe and wrote down my idea, then wrote about a different problem for a while. I finished my walk; put my room in order and checked e-mail; had dinner, tea, and an interesting conversation about Hamilton's principle with Dave; talked to Winnie; and then returned to my insight from earlier in the day.

I wrote the programs I needed in about twenty minutes. Neither one was complicated. I tested them on a small problem, and they worked beautifully. They were fast, too, and solved most of my problem in a fraction of the time taken by approaches I'd tried until now. So I gleefully set up a larger problem and set my programs to work -- and the network connection died.

That's okay. The network will come back tomorrow. It was still a good day.

I spend much of my time doing calculations that are not too taxing on a modern computer. I set them up, start them, and work on something else for anywhere from a few seconds to half an hour, then come back to look at the answers. At least, that's what usually happens. Some days I mis-estimate what is small, and halfway through the calculation my machine comes to a grinding halt as my tiny computation eats all the available memory.

Today seems to be one of those days.

The word thou is archaic now, but before it fell out of use, thou was the second person singular form and you was the second person plural. The lapse of this usage that made you bear the weight of both the singular and the plural has lead to the introduction of the plural forms y'all and youse in some American regional dialects. The use of the older thou form persists in popular culture through older works of English literature, including the plays of Shakespeare and the King James translation of the Bible. Unfortunately, the thou form may appear in literature classwork, but it does not typically appear in grammar class. Consequently, some people think thou is simple a more formal way of saying you, and abuse the poor pronoun ferociously. Pronoun abuse is a peeve of mine; but since I lack the resources to run a pronoun abuse hotline, I'll settle for writing lists like this one.

How to use thou

• Use thou for singular and you for plural. It is not correct to thunder from the pulpit Thou art sinners! unless perhaps you're addressing someone with multiple personality disorder -- and in that case, don't you think you're being a bit hard on the poor fellow? It would be grammatically correct to say You are sinners -- except thee, though the I will leave the truthfulness of the statement to the religious authorities.
• Conjugate! You would wince (or perhaps thou wouldst wince) if you heard someone say we am going now; the phrase thou are going now is just as wrong. It should be we are going now and thou art going now. In general, verbs that go with thou end with an st, though there are irregular verbs that don't fit (like art). Thou dost, thou makest, thou thinkest, thou hast.
• Be consistent! Unless you need to do so for some specific reason, don't switch between the verb forms in mid-sentence That means that if you start with thou, you should use thy and thine for possessives. If you're unsure how to use thou correctly, why not use the modern forms?
• Do not mistake thou for a particularly impressive or authoritative form of the modern you. It has a specific meaning; that meaning should be respected. If you're unsure of the grammar of the old form and still want to give your prayers and hymns a sense of religious grandeur, use capitalization. And if Terry Pratchett's personification of Death can speak in capitals all the time, surely you can manage it for a single word on occassion.

Rain is falling and playing percussion on the roof. I'm glad to be indoors, pondering cosmic questions like What are tomatillos related to, and how did anyone think to make salsa from them? I often wonder about the origins of various foods and drinks. Who would think to make drinks from rotted potatoes or fermented mare's milk? I've been told olives are almost inedibly bitter in their natural state (and some friends would claim they remain inedible even after processing). Who first thought to pickle them in brine? The oxalic acid in rhubarb leaves is toxic, though not nearly so much so as the neurotoxin in blowfish; how did we end up eating these things? Even my cup of tea -- flavored with osymanthus flowers today -- is a bit of a mystery. According to one tradition, tea was discovered when a few leaves blew into a Chinese emperor's kettle, but that story is likely apocryphal.

I finished my corn chips and salsa with lunch. That salsa is wonderful stuff. My friends all found it too salty -- but I've always had a weakness for salty foods, to the point that my flatmate once suggested we install a salt lick. With the chips and salsa gone, my cupboard looks startlingly bear. I have the ingredients for sour cabbage for dinner, with some bread and cheese on the side, but then I will need to visit the grocery store.

I briefly visited campus today, before the rain started, and checked out a book on the physics of musical instruments. I also photocopied an article on the effects of air loading and acoustic radiation loss on the sounds of kettledrums. To all appearances, the books in that library are organized by Library of Congress codes, but the journals are organized alphabetically. I could be mistaken; whether I was mistaken or not, though, I certainly was bewildered. By the time I wandered out of the physics library with my prizes in hand, it seemed like high time to have a cup of coffee and a snack.

The Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus is in the basement of Moffitt Library, which is next door to the Doe Library Building where the physics library is housed. I often enjoy something there when I'm visiting the libraries. Despite the spring break holiday, the cafe was open and busy today. I found a table where I could skim my article, but spent less time reading than I spent listening to the group at the next table, who seemed to be discussing the results of some experimental data on groundwater contamination. While their discussion was spirited and sounded fascinating, it was also distracting, and so I finished my coffee, got on my bike, and headed home.

The rain started when I was only a few blocks from home.

Yesterday, Winnie and I went to Stanford, where made a lunch of garlic bread, cheese, and oranges; played frisbee barefoot in in the grass for a while; and met one of Winnie's college friends and his girlfriend. They were visiting from the East Coast. The four of us went into the city, walked along the Golden Gate Bridge, rediscovered the joys of driving in San Francisco, and ate at a nice Italian place. Then I came home and slept.

Today, we took the BART to Berkeley station and walked back home. We stopped at Black Oak Books along the way, and browsed through the used cookbooks. I have not done that in quite a while. It was a beautifully sunny day, though the breeze carried a chill with it that told of the end of our midsummer-in-March weather. I made us a cross-cultural dinner: French onion soup followed by Chinese stir fry over rice, with strawberry ice cream for dessert. We shared our meal with Patxi, Esther, and Mike. Then we watched Muppets from Space -- which I found hilarious -- and then it was late, and Winnie headed home.

Wednesday, I will be back to work. Until then, though, I'll enjoy the chance to read and play and do non-academic things.

I have been happily busy. My talk last Saturday went well; my hike this Saturday was fun; and in between there were some fun things and some not-so-fun things and a lot of general doings.

I continue to work my way through a volume of short stories by Dorothy Sayers. A friend loaned me three sci-fi books by Michael Flynn, which look interesting. I have the new SIAM Review, which I've perused in part, and a copy of Alistaire Cooke's Memories of the Great and the Good. It had been on my wish list for a while, and I finally decided to buy it -- not long before the last of his Letters from America. I will miss his voice on the radio.

I now own Horn and Johnson'sTopics in Matrix Analysis, which I've missed ever since my former office mate graduated and returned the copy our advisor had loaned to her. Barenblatt's book on similarities and intermediate asymptotics should arive soon. I'm still making my way through Fowler's book on code refactoring and through Rob Phillip's excellent Crystals, Defects, and Microstructures. I have a bounty of light reading and of technical reading, both.

At the end of the meeting last Saturday, there was an interesting round-table discussion about education in computational science and engineering. The immediate question was from numerical computation experts at the national lab who asked How can we ensure there continue to be people with the right background available to hire? The ensuing discussion was wide-ranging and heated, and covered everything from how high school might be better organized to the effect of the job market to the structure of undergrad curricula in engineering, computer science, mathematics, and the physical sciences. I listened to the argument, and I agreed with many points made -- and I pondered my own thoughts quietly.

The word amateur now has a negative connotation -- an amateur is a bungler, or at least someone who lacks the skill to be a professional. Yet that is not the original meaning of the word. From the Latin, an amateur is a lover -- one who pursues a skill for the sheer joy of it. I would like to see more students become professional scientists and engineers of various stripes, but I really want more amateurs: people who build their own physical models to better understand every-day phenomena, for example. I also think we need more amateur historians and poets, philosophers and writers, engineers and naturalists. The world is a marvelous place, and we should take time to marvel and question and explore for ourselves.

Mark Zimmermann discovered my pages, first Sandy Mack's sermons and then this blog. He seems a kindred spirit, with wide-ranging interests much like mine. In an e-mail, he reminded me of the question about whether you can hear the shape of a drum -- given a membrane, how much can you tell about the geometry by learning the frequencies of the modes of vibration. Quite a bit, as it turns out. Jim mentioned the same body of literature when I first mentioned drums to him. It's not quite the same problem that I'm helping Cynthia simulate -- but it's an interesting problem nonetheless.

I ran another resonator simulation this week, and also another drum-head simulation. Both simulations were intended as much to test some new machinery as anything else. That's good, since I'm suspicious of the results of at least one of those simulations -- but for reasons that have nothing to do with the machinery I wanted to test. I also went to the floating point committee meeting this Thursday, and was party to a four-hour discussion on extended semantics for NaN (Not-A-Number). I was grateful when the meeting ended and I was able to meet with Winnie and play Frisbee for a while. I also helped my neighbor with a calculation involving molecule alignment, finished a fluid mechanics homework problem, and learned a little more about thermal effects at grain boundaries in polycrystalline silicon. It was a busy week.

It was also another beautifully sunny week, and a week of good food. Last Saturday there was a banquet dinner after the meeting, and I got to take home some leftovers. I had duck for a few days. When Winnie visited on Sunday, we got a loaf of olive bread, tangelos, and a delicious brownie. I was so impressed that I walked back to Andronicos on Monday to buy some bread and cheese, more tangelos, and a gallon of milk. On Thursday evening, I went with Winnie to the store, and we bought grapes and cheese and a baguette; and yesterday, I went to Trader Joe's and got some sesame thins, corn chips and tomatilla salsa, tangerines, and grapefruit Italian soda.

You might have the impression from these grocery lists that I subsist mostly on bread, cheese, and citrus fruit. It is not so -- I eat salad regularly, too, not to mention sour cabbage, noodles, rice, and beans. On the other hand, I do dearly love good bread, cheese, and fruit, and I've been eating a lot of all three lately.

And this week is Berkeley's spring break. I look forward to enjoying a couple days off, and also to finishing a little of my work backlog.

The weather this week has been balmy. It has reached 80 in many places, and it is supposed to remain this warm through Saturday. I have enjoyed the heat during my bike rides and walks, but I'm not looking forward to sitting in class today. On Tuesday, the heat was stifling in the classroom where my fluids course meets. I expect it will be the same today.

Patxi told me last night that he and Esther are planning to move. They've found a place they really like, which may open in the next few months. I'm not sure how the timing will work; our lease doesn't run out until June, I think, and none of us are in a tremendous rush. I understand why they want to move: our two-bedroom apartment, though spacious for two, is not so spacious for three; and I think Esther will be more comfortable sharing housing with her boyfriend than with her boyfriend and his quirky flatmate. Still, this is drattedly inconvenient. I'd hoped not to move again until after graduation.

• Currently drinking: Black currant tea

I'm making a movie of the (simulated) oscillation of a coupled micro-resonator system. It's not quite Oscar material, but I'm very pleased with myself.

I should see if I can get Peter Jackson to direct the sequel, Lord of the Shear Rings.

I stuck my head through Mike and Tracy's door this evening to show off my new hat, and this conversation ensued:

D: Did you know the Siberian crane dabs a collar of mud around its neck as part of its courtship ritual?
T: (laughing) I'm trying to decide which is funnier, the crane or the hat.
D: Looks like you're leaning toward the hat.
M: What I want to know is, where did you find out about the crane?
D: I just finished a book on cranes by Peter Matthiesen. I gather from your expression that you find the hat amusing, too? I got it to keep the sun off my neck.
M: Well... you look a little like a hybrid between a geeky computer scientist and someone who should be named Billy Bob.

The Prairie Home Companion radio show this week was a repeat from earlier in the year. It was done in Nashville, Tennessee, and includes a skit of concert musicians being taught to guffaw, wear coveralls, and keep chickens handy in order to make the Grand Old Opree more authentic. I suppressed the urge to slap my knees and say hee hee hee! and Mike's comment -- but just barely.

• Currently drinking: Red tea with rasberry

I've written little lately, in part because I've been busy, and in part because I've spent my leisure time enjoying the sun. But I'm working on a lot of interesting things, and I feel inspired to share.

1. Computer animators and game developers use physics-based simulations to create some incredibly convincing effects. Sometimes they resort to models that are fast and look reasonable, but are physically unrealistic; but as computers get faster, they can get more of the physics right and still run fast enough to remain on schedule.

   That's great for graphics, but what about for sound? Several professors and students at Berkeley are working on creating sounds on a computer by simulating the real physics of objects bounding off each other, or by simulating what happens when a musical instrument is played. Cynthia, a graduate student researcher in the department, has been working on simulating drums for computer sound generation. I've been helping her build some of her finite element models, which so far include only the vibration of the drumhead, but will soon include the interactions between the drum skin, the drum body, and the air inside and outside the drum. I hope to use this for the term project for my fluids class -- it's an interesting computation, it helps someone else out, and I might be second author on some related publication.

2. When you hit a drum, the sound dies away after a brief period. Why? Some of the sound energy is absorbed by the walls of the drum; some radiates out into the room, where it is absorbed by the ceiling tiles, the carpet, or the household pets; and a very little bit turns into heat energy in the air itself.

   Now, what if your drum was a bit of silicon, a small fraction of a hair's width in size, and it vibrated at around the same frequency as the carrier signal for your cell phone -- 2.4 billion times every second. The vibrations of this drum, too, will eventually die away, but the energy will be dissipated in different ways from a bongo drum. Some of the energy will escape through mechanical connections to a larger chip of silicon, to bounce around and eventually be absorbed, perhaps into the glue used to hold the chip to its packaging. And some of the energy will turn into heat inside the material itself.

   Find a rubber thick band, like the type used to hold stalks of celery together in the grocery store. Stretch it quickly between your fingers, and hold the stretched band to your lips. Can you feel a slight change in the temperature? What about when you let the rubber band relax? Rubber is a remarkable material, but in other materials, too, fast stretching and compression can cause changes in temperature, and vice versa. When an elastic material is stretched, if the stretching isn't uniform then the change in temperature will also not be uniform. Heat will flow from the warm spots to the cool spots, and in the process, some of the energy that was put into the material by stretching will be dissipated away, so that it can no longer be used to do further mechanical work. This thermoelastic damping is negligible for your bongo drum, but not for micrometer-size MEMS resonators.

   Together with researchers in the radio-frequency microsystems (RF MEMS) group and colleagues in computational mechanics, I'm involved in trying to figure out how these high-frequency resonators vibrate, and the ways in which those vibrations die out. In particular, right now I'm involved in looking at a test problem -- in a vibrating beam, how much energy is lost due to thermoelastic damping? We also hope to look soon at how much energy radiates away through the anchors by which the beam is connected to the rest of the chip.

3. Suppose you drop fine grains of sand into the water, and watch them drift downward toward the bottom. If you drop ten grains of sand together, will they fall at the same rate at which a single grain of sand would fall alone? No! Water has some viscosity, and so each of the ten grains of sand pulls its neighbors with it as it falls. Consequently, the ten grains fall faster together than they would alone -- a fact which will doubtless be astonishing to anyone with more experience in committee work than in physics. The last fluids homework involved a calculation of the descent of such a collection of slowly-falling particles.

4. If you slowly turn off a running faucet, the smoothly flowing stream will turn into a sequence of individual droplets before it finally halts completely. If you sufficiently push hard on the end of a column, eventually it will buckle to one side or the other. These are both bifurcation behaviors: sudden, qualitative changes which occur in many systems when some parameter (like the flow rate or the load in the previous two examples) exceeds some critical threshold.

   Finding the values at which such bifurcations occur is not always an easy task. There is some general-purpose software available for numerical bifurcation analysis, but many of the best software packages only work well for small problems. If the size of the problem is too large, these software packages run too slowly to be very useful. In order to extend the software that works so well for small problems to be useful for bigger problems, we use a projection method, in which we're able to examine a carefully constructed sub-problem which tells us all we need to know about the bigger problem. I have been collaborating with Mark, a math professor in Alabama, on an algorithm called continuation of invatiant subspaces, which should let us intelligently choose the sub-problems we need in order to find bifurcations both accurately and quickly.

5. I maintain a large linear algebra package called CLAPACK, which is a C translation of the venerable LAPACK library, a huge collection of Fortran 77 routines for solving a variety of problems in numerical linear algebra. It's a popular package, and I usually receive at least two or three requests each week from people who are having difficulty using the routines, or who don't understand which routines they need to solve their problems. For example, I recently had several exchanges with a gentleman who is studying the cable equation, which models neuron activity. He wanted to use LAPACK routines as part of his differential equation solver, but had trouble preparing his input in a way that made LAPACK happy. I was able to help him, and he sent an e-mail thanking me for clearing away one of the final impediments in his thesis research. I filed his thank you note where I can retrieve it easily; I like to have such notes available to comfort me when I'm forced to deal with inquiries written in broken English by those who have no grasp of what they're doing or why they're doing, but seem utterly convinced that the fault lies in some bug in LAPACK.

Dr. Seuss's hundredth anniversary was this week.

Big Q, little q, what begins with q?
The quick queen of Quincy, and her quacking quackaroo!

I remember, even after so many years. Of course, I don't remember the rhymes for any of the other letters. I was particularly attached to the letter Q, though. I still look fondly on it, even though now when I see the letter in isolation it immediately conjures thoughts of system energy or quality of resonance.

When I woke this morning, I had the theme song to Monsterpiece Theater stuck in my head. This spoof from Sesame Street of Masterpiece Theatre was hosted by Alistair Cookie (the Cookie Monster dressed in a bathrobe), and always began with a shot of the cookie monster chewing meditatively on a pipe, listening to the alphabet being sung to a sort of chamber music tune. Ah, Mr. Henson! I come from a generation whose culture is part Sesame Street and part The Simpsons -- both shows which allude to an amazing number of other bits of cultural trivia, so that they can act almost like a filter for the world. I've heard of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses; if I had to make glasses out of Sesame Street and The Simpsons, what color would they be?

Winnie asked me today why the Cookie Monster is blue. I had no immediate answer, but later I decided that it must be because of his diet. If the Cookie Monster ate more vegetables, perhaps he would be green. After all, pink flamingos are pigmented because of their diet. Why not blue Muppets?

Last night, I received around forty copies of an e-mail virus message. The mail told me that my computer was infected by a virus, and that I should execute the attachment in order to remove the infection. However clever the author might have been, his grammar was abominable:

Hello user of Berkeley.edu e-mail server,

Your e-mail account will be disabled because of improper using in next
three days, if you are still wishing to use it, please, resign your
account information.

Pay attention on attached file.

In order to read the attach you have to use the following password: 07407.

The Management,
The Berkeley.edu team

When I received the first such message, I was entertained. By the time I moved that message to the trash, there were four more in my inbox. That's when I wrote a filter so that I wouldn't have to think about it any further.

Yesterday was sunny and mild, and the weather is supposed to remain sunny for the rest of the week. I've started to bike to campus again. Though the weather provided no excuses, few voters cast ballots yesterday -- the registered voter turnout was around 43%. The low voter turnout didn't keep our governor from praising the electorate for passing his budget measures, saying Don't you love to see the people flexing their political muscles? The people of California are the greatest power lifters in the world. A commentator on one of the morning radio programs commented that Bush plans to stump in California soon, and that he hopes to ride on Schwarzenegger's popularity. That seems backward to me: Schwarzenegger has succeeded as a populist, not a partisan. His strength is in the combined support he has received from Republicans and Democrats. One of the callers on this morning's Forum program called Schwarzenegger a Democrat in Republican clothing; certainly his social views are more liberal than the views of many Republicans. In contrast, I doubt Bush's social conservatism and fiscal laxity will play well with California's electorate.

Were I Bush, I might stump in California despite misgivings about the state's politics, if only to enjoy the weather. Perhaps he'll spend some time campaigning by Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco? What a circus that would be! I can imagine Schwarzenegger posing beside the man who pretends to be a steam-powered robot (complete with silver body paint and hoses which must have been cannibalized from at least three vacuum cleaners). I cannot imagine Bush doing the same.

The SIAM conference on Parallel Processing took place in San Francisco last week, at the Hyatt near Fisherman's Wharf. I did not go to most of the conference, but I did attend part of a workshop on Combinatorics in Scientific Computing on Friday and Saturday. I left early on Saturday to return to Berkeley in order to hear a panel session that was part of the CS division 30th anniversary celebration. Between the sunny days, the interesting conversations I had with people at the workshop, and some of the work I've done in the past week or so, I feel a renewed enthusiasm for my research -- which is welcome, since I felt uninspired for most of the latter half of February. I spent some time on Monday working on adding support for anisotropic effeects to the thermoelastic element model from last semester. I look forward with unholy delight to adding other physical effects to this element, so that we can add an avalanche of appropriate adjectives beyond anisotropic. Actually, the next effect will probably be Akhieser damping. Huzzah for alliteration! I've also helped analyze and draw pretty pictures of vibrating drumheads; computed frequencies and node points for the third harmonic of a shear-ring resonator; read about thermal effects at grain boundaries in polycrystalline materials; drawn three-dimensional pictures of a building brace structure; and worked out a fluids homework problem involving sedimenting particles. I get to turn interesting physics into interesting mathematics, and solve the resulting problems with interesting computational methods. Huzzah!

• Currently drinking: Lemon-spice black tea

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

I spent Wednesday of this week writing documentation for my Matlab-FEAP interface and pondering my software toolkit. The documentation is generated automatically in part; there is a script to build the table of contents, another script to generate the list of function references from my Matlab comments, and yet another script that generates all the graphics. The scripts are a few lines each, written in AWK and Matlab and shell.

When programming, I write a few these little scripts each day. They do things like produce header files for me, or rewrite function calls to change the order of arguments, or change a naming convention I've decided I don't like. Most of them fit on 5-10 lines, usually in AWK. Perhaps I should learn to be more comfortable with Perl, but it is hard to beat AWK for clean one-liners. I write Matlab scripts, AWK scripts, and shell scripts, as well as Makefiles and the odd macro in M4 or the C preprocessor. All this, of course, is in addition to the code I write in compiled languages: predominantly C, C++, and Fortran.

I've thought a lot recently about my choices of languages and tools. My Linux environment is very programmer friendly. That's one of the reasons I switched to Linux -- eight years ago, now. With Linux, I had access to free compilers, build tools, version control systems, and so forth, in a flexible environment very similar to the one we used for coursework. And the situation has improved a lot since then. The Fedora installation has caused me no troubles, and I've had the opportunity to trade time spent mucking with details I don't care about -- such as the syntax of yet another configuration file in the /etc subdirectory -- with tasks that I care about and enjoy.

Still, there is a long way to go. I still spend too much time trying to build numerical software, often in the face of utter frustration. The make tool, which is the de facto standard of software building today, was invented early in the life cycle of UNIX. Autoconf, a powerful and cryptic tool for configuration detection and setup, is written in M4, a preprocessor which first saw use as a preprocessor for Fortran. Every compiler takes different flags, or has different quirks in library support, and every tool is documented in a different format: TeX or troff or HTML or DocBook, or any or all of the above. Building software under Windows is sometimes like starting from scratch; while Windows supports a make program of its own, Windows make is a somewhat different beast from its UNIX sibling. I have powerful debugging tools like Valgrind under Linux -- but they don't work when I need to develop Matlab extensions, or when I need to debug my code under Windows. And, with a timing that seems to depend on the phase of the moon and the alignment of the planets, sometimes everything breaks. Would-be authors of portable code are reduced to the lowest common denominator they can bear -- and sometimes that denominator is technology from the 1970s with a thick layer of GUI painted in peeling layers on top.

All this has motivated my continued use and exploration of scripting languages. I use Matlab for much of my day-to-day numerical work; as a language, it leaves some things to be desired, but it is adequate for many applications -- and it's hard to beat when it comes to numerical linear algebra. I use Lua to script SUGAR, the MEMS simulator I work on. Lua is fast and small, but it is also very flexible, and I've spent a lot of time gloating over things I can do with it. Recently, I've increasingly been looking at Python, which is increasingly popular among scientists at the labs (who use it for steering their codes), system administrators, and web developers. It has a simple high-level syntax, it's compiled, and it has a big library. If I want to run my codes remotely and interact with them via a web interface, it will be a lot easier for me to write the interface in Python with compiled hooks into code that I provide as a dynamically loaded library.

I want to spend time on the problems I want to spend time on. I don't want to spend (much) time writing hash tables in C, fighting with broken build systems, or figuring out how to port my code to platforms that don't obey a relevant standard. I don't want to type ten lines of code to beat a behaviour out of Java that I could get out of ten characters of LISP. I don't want to reinvent wheels. I don't want to spend more time than I must in debugging. I do want to spend time thinking about software design and algorithmic strategies, and about how to efficiently pose and solve computationally difficult scientific and engineering problems. I'm not alone in feeling this way.

The state of the art advances, and I get to work every day with some truly amazing hardware and software systems. And at the same time, we've got a long way to go.

I had a marvelous lunch discussion last week this time last week. It took a variety of twists and turns, from tales of lunches in France and travels in China to stories of the history and structure of Oxford University. As we walked back to Soda Hall from the food court where we'd eaten, the topic turned to Byzantine history. As we wrapped up the conversation in the office, Beresford Parlett commented that history seems a great deal more relevant and interesting as you get older. I raised an eyebrow at that; I enjoy reading history, though my chronological memory is too poor for me to ever be more than an amateur. Christof saw my raised eyebrow, laughed, and said Don't worry, we'll count you as old already. Parlett chuckled and mentioned that a friend once gave him a clipping of a New Yorker cartoon, in which a woman is patting her husband on the shoulder and saying to friends: Well, we were all young once -- except for Beresford.

I thought about that as I took BART home yesterday after eating dinner with Winnie and reading from Cooke's America. It was George Santayana who said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it -- and it is telling that I know so many people who remember that phrase (if not who said it), but remember little of their history studies. Somehow my middle and high school teachers often lost the story of history. I like Cooke's history for the same reasons I liked Barzun's Dawn to Decadence: they are works to be savored, full of opinions, perspectives, and stories written in language that is at once elegant and clear. I enjoy historical stories, fiction and nonfiction alike, and find recently I've spent ever-larger fractions of my free reading time relishing tales of Byzantium and Persia, feudal Japan and Communist China, Egypt and Axum, the character of Emperor Justinian and of Thomas Jefferson.

There can be a chauvinism of youth against history -- with such a brave new world before us, why learn about the old one? Quizzes that involve the number of casualties at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire hardly help the situation. My high school European history teacher had the right idea: he told history as a story, in his droll style, with characters and plots. I did less well on the European history exam than I later did on the American history exam; but I enjoyed the European history class more, and I have retained more of it to the present day.

But since the Romans had no computers and the Greeks no matrix algebra, perhaps I should save my historical musings for a later hour.

• Currently drinking: Black coffee

The Year of the Monkey is approaching, and I have been celebrating by playing the code monkey. I don't think we saw any other code monkeys at the zoo yesterday, unless they were wandering around with small children outside the fences. Perhaps they were hiding behind the endangered wheelbarrows.

I automated the setup of the tunnel I use to access library resources from off campus. I reorganized the sources for my interface between Matlab and FEAP, and finished adding the new functionality I needed to extract the appropriate matrices during thermoelastic simulations. In the process, I found and diagnosed a bug in FEAP in the nonsymmetric mass matrix formation. This evening, I spent some time trying (eventually successfully) to figure out a bug in the memory manager code that I wrote for FEAP.

I also paid bills, talked to Winnie, and visited with a friend from the geotech department. And I missed most of the news, but I did listen with interest to a segment on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, a panel discussion on the role of Sandra Day O'Connor in the court. I have heard one of the panelists, a law professor at Berkeley, in several other discussions. I think I have yet to agree with any of the positions he has taken.

• Currently drinking: Hot water with lemon

I finished installing. I proofread a manuscript sent by a colleague. I added some new functionality to the interface that I maintain between Matlab and FEAP (a Finite Element Analysis Program). And I was hit over the head with a vorpal cudgel of silliness, which kept me working until past my bed time.

I just finished transitioning to Fedora Core 1. I was using RedHat 7.3 until yesterday. I took the opportunity to clean up my drive, too -- I backed up critical files to CD and did a clean install rather than an upgrade.

I take such joy in these little things.

A panda walks into a bar, orders and eats a sandwich, fires a gun into the air, and then walks out. On his way out, he tosses a poorly punctuated wildlife guide to the bemused bartender. The bartender turns to the entry for panda, and reads Panda: Native of China, this creature eats, shoots and leaves.

I was reminded of this joke while reading an article in the NY Times yesterday on a surprising best-seller on punctuation (entitled Eats, Shoots and Leaves). I only realized later that the joke is not only an attack on poor punctuation -- it's an ad homonym attack as well.

I'm listening to All Things Considered on National Public Radio. When I'm around to listen to it, the evening NPR programs are always a high point in my day. At the moment, the major theme in the news seems to be Mars. This morning I heard Kim Stanley Robinson talking about the landing on Mars (he's impressed; his son is not). And this evening, I've heard about the surroundings of the Spirit lander, a plain of small rocks with a nearby depression dubbed Sleepy Hollow. The excitement doesn't end in America, either; as one of the NASA team wisecracked of a European team, Remember how we were jumping up and down, and hugging and crying? It was the same thing, only in German.

Of course, I listen to other stations, too. I found an electronic music program on Saturday night that I hadn't discovered before. And someone in the middle of the dial was playing the Broadway song that goes da da da da in America! -- where da da da da is replaced by words of some sort. I like listening to the BBC, and online stations from Canada and Europe, too. So I decided to get a portable radio -- with shortwave reception as well as FM and AM. It should arrive some time in the next few days; it was on sale from Amazon.

I spent the day listening to the radio and being productive at home. My e-mail inbox is now back to about 30 messages, where there were around 200 before. I've set up an ssh proxy tunnel to my office machine so that I can use the electronic library resources without actually being on campus. I spent time writing, too, but was severely hampered by the fact that I apparently cannot differentiate on a week when there will be a full moon.

Okay. Maybe I just couldn't differentiate today.

I'm actually able to tell when the new moon is because I finally bought calendar's this weekend. They were half price. A calendar of baby animals has been replaced by a calendar of Irish landscapes. I bought a pocket calendar, too; with luck this one will last longer than the one that I got at the beginning of last year. That calendar lasted about a week before it disappeared.

I'm sipping hot water with lime, which goes well with the chill in the air. We've had a few clear, breezy days, and I appreciate the break from the winter rains -- but even if it has been dry, it hasn't been warm. The days are still short, too, so I'm unlikely to forget that it's still winter. But I have my hot mug, and that's all I need right now.

I think I'll go back to work as soon as I'm finished sipping and writing, but perhaps I'll just work for a few hours and then spend some time fiddling with my computer. It has been a while since I upgraded the software on my system, and my temptation to do so is only tempered by the recollection of how much of a time sink upgrades can be. Perhaps I'll spend the time playing with Python, instead. I haven't exactly made a New Year's Resolution to learn a new language, but I've meant to add Python to my toolkit for a while, and now seems like a good time. Or I could try to build nicer configuration scripts for LAPACK and FEAP, if only for my own use.

Or I could continue to work on things that I'm supposed to be working on, I suppose.

Perhaps I'd be better off taking a shorter break and doing something completely unrelated to computing. I have history to read: I'm in the middle of Alistair Cooke's America, and I have The Histories of Herodotus and O'Brian's historical fiction piece Master and Commander in queue.

For the moment, though, I think I will fix myself something to eat, and -- as I've just finished my water and lime -- perhaps I'll have a cup of tea, too.

Neither holy, nor Roman, nor empire.

Dad is back in the hospital for a day or two. Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve both -- it's like some unfortunate sort of double-header. My fingers are crossed. My legs are crossed, too, but that's just because of the way my legs are stretched out.

I worry, but can do little.

• Currently drinking: Hot apple tea with lemon

Hmm.

It's wet, wet, wet outside. I like the sound of rain on the roof and wind on the windows, but I'm glad that I'm in here and not out there. I suppose this means that the area waterfalls will be particularly impressive for the next few weeks.

Today, though, seems to be a good day for quiet activities. Indoors activities. Work activities, perhaps.

• Currently drinking: Black coffee

This poem hangs on the refrigerator at my family home. It seems a good New Year's thought.

People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you've got anyway.

You see in the final analysis. it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

-- Mother Theresa.