Radio Free Meredith [entries|friends|calendar] Meredith L. Patterson [ website | Not-very-interesting CS stuff ] [ userinfo | livejournal userinfo ] [ calendar | livejournal calendar ]

No thank you, no tea; why look at the clock. [26 Nov 2004|08:47am] Just because I didn't say anything particularly Thanksgiving-ish yesterday doesn't mean I wasn't thinking it. But now it's the day after, and it's time for me to take to the road again. Every trip home, for me, has a different character to it, and this one has been no different. I'll write about it more later, but for now, I leave you with my favourite W.H. Auden poem, which captures a little of what this particular round of going-and-leaving has felt like. Have a Good Time by W.H. Auden "We have brought you," they said, "a map of the country; Here is the line that runs to the vats, This patch of green on the left is the wood, We've pencilled an arrow to point out the bay. No thank you, no tea; why look at the clock. Keep it? Of course. It goes with our love. "We shall watch your future and send our love. We lived for years, you know, in the country. Remember at week-ends to wind up the clock. We've wired to our manager at the vats. The tides are perfectly safe in the bay, But whatever you do don't go to the wood. "There's a flying trickster in that wood, And we shan't be there to help with our love. Keep fit by bathing in the bay, You'll never catch fever then in the country. You're sure of a settled job at the vats If you keep their hours and live by the clock." He arrived at last; it was time by the clock. He crossed himself as he passed the wood; Black against evening sky the vats Brought tears to his eyes as he thought of their love; Looking out over the darkening country, He saw the pier in the little bay. At the week-ends the divers in the bay Distracted his eyes from the bandstand clock; When down with fever and in the country A skein of swans above the wood Caused him no terror; he came to love The moss that grew on the derelict vats. And he has met sketching at the vats Guests from the new hotel in the bay; Now, curious, following his love, His pulses differing from the clock, Finds consummation in the wood And sees for the first time the country. Sees water in the wood and trees by the bay. Hears a clock striking near the vats: "This is your country and the hour of love." 4 comments|post comment

[25 Nov 2004|10:23pm] [ mood | sticky ] 5-minute epoxy isn't kidding. 4 comments|post comment

A double dactyl about work [25 Nov 2004|02:25am] (and a reference to my gmail address, at that.) DNA, RNA; Meredith L. Patterson Modifies genomes For profit and fun; What are the goals of her Mutagenerative Hobbies? Creating an Army of One. 2 comments|post comment

Happy unbirthday [23 Nov 2004|08:58pm] Yesterday was the birthday of the linguistics blogger who goes by Semantic Compositions (he's revealed his real name elsewhere, but you can dig it up yourself). He posted a link to Wikipedia's article on things that happened on 22 November, so of course I had to go check out what happened on 30 April. I already knew the bit about the Church of Satan being founded, but what really caught my eye was the fact that I share a birthday with none other than Claude Shannon. How cool is that? 2 comments|post comment

Excuse me, we're looking for the porn [22 Nov 2004|11:36pm] Lately, I have found myself using the term "porn" as shorthand for "the stuff that's good but no one can explain why", in any category of stuff you care to name. This originally came up at the office when I was explaining to my boss why support vector machines mean never having to say what your explicit criteria are; I used the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced" remark as an analogy, and concluded with, "So all we have to do is tell the system what's porn and what's not porn, and it'll go find the best porn for us." Conveniently(?), someone who hadn't listened to the rest of the conversation happened to walk by right as I said this, so now the joke going around the office is that I'm writing the world's most advanced porn search engine. (Of course, it could be used to look for quality erotica, but it could be used to look for a lot of other things, too.) And then just now in a conversation with shkspr13, I remarked, "Art is the pornography of writing," meaning that I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be art, but I know it when I see it. But "porn" is shorter. It amuses me as shorthand. I hope it catches on. 7 comments|post comment

[22 Nov 2004|10:44pm] [ mood | sick ] I love all you Dallas people, but I am still violently allergic to your city. 1 comment|post comment

[writing] What makes it go [21 Nov 2004|09:29pm] The comments thread on a recent post from an LJ acquaintance brought up the time-honored idea that pain can be a valuable catalyst for art. Like most conventional wisdom, there's certainly some truth in it; case in point, right now I'm sitting on the couch of czarina69, a jewelry designer who started producing some of her best work in the aftermath of a really bitter divorce. A lot of the short fiction I still find the most compelling -- in theme, at least, if not necessarily execution -- came out in response to pain of my own. On the other hand, I have my doubts as to how effective a catalyst pain is for craft. ( Here's why. ) 11 comments|post comment

[geekery] They could at least try to make it difficult... [20 Nov 2004|02:20am] From the description of the programming assignment I have to do for my Design and Analysis of Algorithms course: ...perform an experimental study and comparison of three algorithms for Selection: (1) the median of medians algorithm we studied in class; (2) the simple randomized algorithm from Homework 2; (3) the algorithm that sorts the input set and finds the k'th smallest. #3? You mean like int Select(std::vector<int> foo, int k) { std::sort(foo.begin(), foo.end()); return foo[k-1]; } Or did you mean it was supposed to be the kind of code that most people would write from scratch? I was going to do this assignment in LISP, on the grounds that it would be good practice, but really, if they're going to ask me to do something that insultingly simple, the least I can do is insult them right back. Tasks like this are why SGI gave us the STL in the first place. I am genuinely at a loss as to whether the professor expects people to write the sort from scratch out of some sense of diligence, or whether he expects people just won't think to exploit the tools available to them. (Hmm. I see in the docs for the Algorithms library that std::sort uses "introsort ... whose worst case complexity is O(N log(N)) ... and is at least as fast as quicksort on average." Maybe it's time to talk the folks into picking me up the three-volume set of The Art of Computer Programming, since I've been coveting it for about a year anyway...) 4 comments|post comment

Endorphins [15 Nov 2004|02:42pm] [ mood | high ] [ music | Moody Blues, "Your Wildest Dreams" ] I really hate running while I'm doing it, but I've noticed that if I do a medium-length (20-30 minute, for me) run at a comfortable/slightly-faster-than-comfortable pace, then make sure to take the time to do a proper cool-down, I feel great for an hour or more afterward. Kind of fuzzy and lightheaded and blissed-out, a bit like what it feels like just after I've had work done on a tattoo or if I've spent a couple of hours coding. (It's even better if I can change into clean warm clothes immediately afterward instead of having to sit around in sweaty ones.) Five journalpoints to anyone who can figure out a common thread between that set of stimuli, other than the fact that it's me who responds positively to them. Also, the people who say that regular exercise does good things for your mood are not just making things up. ( TMI, but it's enough for you to know that ) for the last few days I've been feeling uncharacteristically great. Anyway, time to come down from cloud nine and play around some more with this interesting little functional language I've been learning, after which I'll probably be back around cloud six or seven at least. Weird, weird brain. 10 comments|post comment

Follow the money [12 Nov 2004|12:40pm] [ mood | obsessive ] Several folks took me to task for the "stuff like highway funding" remark in my last post, so I decided to do a little digging and find some real numbers about how federal expenditures by state break down. Conveniently, the US Census Bureau produces an annual report, Federal Aid to States, which covers all this stuff and explains it with lots of tables and pie charts and things. Let's take a look at how Uncle Sugar gives his kids their allowance, hmm? ( Warning: lots of boring statistics ahead ) 5 comments|post comment

An Open Letter from a Flyover State [11 Nov 2004|12:57pm] Dear blue states, For the last couple of weeks, you've been going on about how pissed you are about the presidential election and how you want to secede and stuff. For my part, I haven't gloated at all. I understand that you're angry and I'm doing my best to be quietly supportive, like that tongue-tied friend you had in high school who never really knew what to say when bad stuff happened like your girlfriend dumping you or your grandfather dying, but who gave really good hugs and at least knew not to say anything dumb. You're blowing off steam. I understand. This is okay. I'm not mad at you and I don't hate you. But then Wonkette read me this letter, and I'm sorry, blue states, but I have to speak up. Call it an intervention, call it whatever you want, but really, blue states, you're setting yourself up for a fall here. You say stuff like The next dickwad who says, "It’s your money, not the government's money" is gonna get their ass kicked. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal fucking dollars and pay the least... can you guess? Go on, guess. That’s right, motherfucker, they're red states. And eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most? It’s too easy, asshole, they’re blue states. It’s not your money, assholes, it’s fucking our money. What was that Real American Value you were spouting a minute ago? Self reliance? Try this for self reliance: buy your own fucking stop signs, assholes. Correct me if I'm wrong, blue states, but I'm pretty sure that most of those federal dollars go into stuff like highway funding. We're not using it to build amusement parks or churches, we're building and maintaining the infrastructure that gets stuff from one end of the country to another. My buddies Nebraska and Kansas and I may be responsible for an awful lot of the corn, wheat, beef, pork and soybeans you guys eat, but a whole lot of the produce you really love comes from your fellow blue state California. It all has to get put on trucks and shipped across us, the red states, in order to make it to the East Coast. We're glad to do it. The trucking business is good for our economies. But seriously, blue states -- without us, you're screwed. That's not a threat; it's just the way things go. Boats are too slow and airplanes are too expensive to get all the stuff you want from one end of the country to another, and for that to work out, states like Wyoming and Nevada need federal financing. Otherwise the whole system falls apart. Without the trucking industry, New York City would starve out inside of three days. Without roads, where do the trucks go? Every last one of us takes it for granted, blue states, but the system is so much more fragile than most of us realise. We'd really rather that didn't happen, blue states. If you really, truly want to call it quits, well, maybe you'll do that, and maybe you won't. Maybe I'm that quiet high school friend, sitting next to you while you get drunk off your ass and ready to hold your head over the porcelain god when you've finally had too much. And, yeah, maybe I will give you some shit about it later, because that's what people do. All I'm saying, blue states, is this: before you do anything rash, think about the consequences. Think about why money goes where it goes, and what it buys you, and of those things, which ones you need. I'm sure you'll make the right decision, blue states. Just think before you act, okay? Your friend, Iowa PS. I am here if you need a hug. 25 comments|post comment

Okay, a little about politics. But more about journalism. And still about math! [08 Nov 2004|11:24pm] I generally prefer to absent myself from the morass of meta-journalism that is discussion about the blogosphere itself, but that said, if you want to read an incredibly patronising article, you don't have to look a lot farther than this Eric Engberg op-ed. The editorial focuses on the shitstorm of commentary that swept the web on 2 November, natch. Certainly, a lot of that was wishful thinking, a lot of it was misinformation, and a lot of it was just flat-out wrong. That's fine, because it's all true. What gets under my skin, though, is stuff like the following: While out on the campaign trail covering candidates, my own network’s political unit would not even give me exit poll information on election days because it was thought to be too tricky for a common reporter to comprehend. If you are standing in the main election night studio when your network’s polling experts start discussing the significance of a particular state poll, you the reporter will hear about three words out of one hundred that you will understand. These polls occur in the realm of statistics and probability. They require PhD-style expertise to understand. The people who analyze them for news organizations, like the legendary Warren Mitofsky and Martin Plissner at CBS News -- have trade associations like doctors do to certify their work. First of all, never you mind that a binomial distribution absolutely does not take a PhD to understand; it's standard fare for the latter half of your average undergrad Stats 101, and I can explain it to a high school student of above-average intelligence such that he'll remember it when he gets into Stats 101. That isn't the point at all. The point to which I object is Engberg's attitude that because We the People aren't certified to deal with these Scary Data, we shouldn't be allowed to put our grubby little hands on them at all. Well, you know, the vast majority of We the People aren't going to grok most of what goes into the EnsEMBL genomics database, or the reports and data on the Center for Army Lessons Learned, but it's all up there for anyone to take a look at. You want to see some data that could be outright dangerous if used irresponsibly, paw through some of the stuff on CALL; there are POIs in there that can get you killed if you're not observing proper safety precautions. Them's the breaks; you pick the information you want and how you want to use it. Engberg continues: When you the humble reporter are writing a story based on the polls you need one of these gurus standing over your shoulder interpreting what they mean or you almost certainly will screw it up. There is a word for this kind of teamwork and expertise. It’s called "journalism." Now, I'll absolutely concede that it is the responsibility of people who provide information to others to double-check that what they're putting out is correct, and part of that responsibility includes consulting expert resources before running one's mouth. (It's also especially amusing that this sort of high-horsery is coming from CBS, given the colossal fuckup that was the Bush National Guard Documents scandal.) But there's also a flip side of the coin: when people screw things up, they are expected to print retractions. This happens in blogs all the time; this happens in print media as well, but I don't even have to invoke my expertise as someone whose job it was for several years to proofread the laid-out pages of a major metropolitan newspaper to remind you that the print media usually do their damnedest to bury retractions in the tiniest print they can get away with. I'll even argue that in blogs, particularly in political blogs talking about transitional situations like elections, the truth will out not only because people call each other out (as was the topic of much discussion after Rathergate), but because transitional situations come to an end and everyone finds out What Really Happened all at once. This leads directly into a facet of the blogosphere that Engberg is utterly glossing over: its time scale is radically compressed from that of print or even TV journalism. With one exception: sports. The blogosphere allows for a play-by-play of what's going on from moment to moment, just like the commentators in a football game describing every action on the field for the loyal listeners back home. So what if the commentators point out that the Cowboys are up by a field goal at one point in the first half, but they end up losing the game anyway? That doesn't change the fact that, say, from the field goal at 7:34 pm until the Texans scored a touchdown at 7:52, the Cowboys were ahead. Likewise, if Wonkette points out at one point that Kerry is up 52-47 in Ohio -- which he was at one point, because I was one of those no-life dorks hitting Reload on cnn.com all fucking night of the election, until I got sick of it and went off to grade papers -- that isn't changed by his ultimately losing the election. Engberg seems to be of the opinion that blog readers are looking for Gospel Truth and receiving at best, half-truth, at worst, lies, damned lies and statistics. I submit that Engberg misunderstands what we're interested in. Journalism, of the type he describes, can indeed provide a slice of what's going on all over the country, but it must wait until long after the fact to do so. Those of us who are interested in a truly up-to-the-minute assault of information understand that we're going to have to take it with a shakerful of salt; that seasoning is the price we pay for a slice of life that we can get from blogs. 1 comment|post comment

Proof by Childish Accusation [08 Nov 2004|09:15pm] Every time I see a problem in a math or CS textbook that begins with the phrase "Argue that < foo > is the case," I wonder what would happen if I were to put down "< foo >, because I said so, nyeah nyeah nyeah." They never said it had to be a convincing argument. Edit: And I'd like to point out for the record that, even with all this political BS going around, it took me less than a week post-election to get back to rabbiting on about math. Let's hear it for the ivory tower. 4 comments|post comment

For those of you who are at all interested in graphs [05 Nov 2004|08:24pm] [ mood | accomplished ] Lately, I've been helping a colleague of mine with some data-mining research on the Enron email database (yeah, the one the DoJ subpoenaed from them). We're not doing anything the media will find terribly exciting -- I mean, I don't think we'll be uncovering any exciting new conspiracies or anything like that -- but we're hoping to discover interesting and/or useful things about how large organisations use email as a tool. Anyway, one of the things my colleague wanted was a directed-graph representation of senders and recipients, where each edge represents an email from the source vertex to the target vertex; edges increase in weight as the sender sends more emails to the recipient. "This is a job for Graphviz!" I said, and since I'd been meaning to sit down and learn how to use the Boost Graph Library anyway, I sat down and got to it. It's been a somewhat bumpy ride -- the BGL does some weird, weird things with templates, and its documentation seems to be written for people who, erm, already know what they're doing -- but I am now the proud author of my very own topologiser, Klein. Klein creates maps of networks, mainly communication networks. It reads "source" and "target" data as tuples from a PostgreSQL database; it takes as command-line parameters the database name, source field name, target field name, table name (I'm already planning to handle joins in a future version, but not now), any necessary database connexion parameters, and (optionally) a minimum edge-weight. (The latter is in case you run into the same problem we did, where the graph is so large that Graphviz can't handle the resulting .dot file and you just want to look at a higher-activity subgraph.) It outputs a file in DOT, the definition language which Graphviz uses. It requires libpqxx, which should come packaged with PostgreSQL and can also be found here, and libpopt, which is part of GNOME. It is pretty fast; analysing a graph of ~78,000 vertices and ~290,000 edges took about twenty minutes on a Pentium-4 M with 512MB of RAM, and that was with KDE running and reading the source data over 802.11b. (The resulting graph was way too big for Graphviz to handle, though.) In the next few days, I'll throw GNU Autotools at it (which will be an adventure in and of itself) and package it up for release under the GPL. In later releases, I plan to include other data-source options, including reading from an ordinary istream; it would be terribly neat, I think, to figure out some way to read from an Ethereal or tcpdump session (preferably from a network adapter in promiscuous mode on a switch) in order to model network traffic density. I haven't thought very far ahead about other useful features, but if anyone has an "ooh, shiny" moment, I'll happily listen. :) And, all that said, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the role LJ has played in my evolution as a software developer. About two and a half years ago, other mentioned the existence of Graphviz, and the following semester, ernunnos pointed me at Boost; okay, maybe it took me two years to become a good enough C++ programmer to make use of it, but we all have to start somewhere. Thanks, guys. :) 9 comments|post comment

[05 Nov 2004|02:55pm] /me dances the dance of the half-time research assistantship for next semester! Christ on a pogo stick. No students, no grading, work that'll overlap with my job. I've needed this for a year and a half now. Life is good. 1 comment|post comment

Post-election psychology [04 Nov 2004|10:37pm] This is largely a rhetorical question, because I don't think there's any good way to evaluate this. Grief is not something that can be quantified terribly well, and in any case a proper survey of this type would take some pretty impressive infrastructure to which I don't have access. Still, my handful of readers spans a majority of the United States, not to mention a few other countries, and if nothing else, that's a rough way of putting a thumb on the pulse. What I'm wondering is this: There are a lot of people who are really, genuinely heartbroken over the results of Tuesday's election. Do more of these people live in swing states, or states which went solidly one way or another? I've got some speculations about this one, but I'll leave them unspoken for the moment. Please pass this link around to your friends -- the more results, the better. (Note: Where I say 'a red state' or 'a blue state', I mean a solidly red or blue state, as in "there is no way this state could have gone any other way," like Texas.) Poll #378863 Open to: All, results viewable to: All Where 1 is "not at all" and 10 is "extremely", how upset are you about the results of the 2004 Presidential election? View Answers Mean: 6.25 Median: 8 Std. Dev 3.09 1 8 (15.4%) 2 1 (1.9%) 3 4 (7.7%) 4 4 (7.7%) 5 2 (3.8%) 6 2 (3.8%) 7 4 (7.7%) 8 13 (25.0%) 9 7 (13.5%) 10 7 (13.5%) What kind of state do you live in? View Answers A swing state 12 (23.1%) A red state 15 (28.8%) A blue state 15 (28.8%) I don't live in the United States 10 (19.2%) If you voted, how did you vote? View Answers The same way that my state went 16 (31.4%) Different from how my state went, but a major party 21 (41.2%) Third party 4 (7.8%) I didn't vote 10 (19.6%) 10 comments|post comment

[04 Nov 2004|01:55pm] A great big welcome to the Head Minion, aka semanticsmc! 3 comments|post comment

In national news today, nothing's changed. [03 Nov 2004|07:02pm] What did you do today? My eight hours of sleep wrapped up around 11, and I dragged myself out of bed, got cleaned up, checked my email, went to campus, returned the papers I'd graded the night before, then sat down at my desk and worked on homework for my Computational Theory class. Around 5, I went to meet a bunch of friends for sushi at a restaurant a few blocks away. We discovered that the restaurant is no longer doing its usual weeknight happy hour, so we relocated to a nearby pasta joint, sat down, and had a leisurely dinner. Except for the bit about the sushi happy hour, this is how I've spent every Wednesday since the beginning of the semester. I would have had the exact same day if the election results had been different. By and large, in that alternate universe, yours would have too, in nigh on every detail apart from the ones in your own head. ( How did we get here? ) 13 comments|post comment

[02 Nov 2004|09:10pm] I don't know what the hell CNN was doing, but for a while there, the race in Louisiana was looking really strange. ( Fargin' huge image ) A few minutes later, it reset from 77% of precincts reporting to 0% of precincts reporting, and everything was cleared. I was deeply amused by the idea of Badnarik beating out Bush by 120 votes, though. 3 comments|post comment

Costumes I saw in Washington, DC this weekend [31 Oct 2004|09:10pm] [ mood | exhausted ] I pulled another one of my famous Disappearing Acts this weekend (well, okay, a few people knew where I was going, such as the friend who dropped me off at the airport, plus deza and tall_man, my courteous and esteemed hosts), and used that free Northwest Airlines ticket I had to go to DC. It's been a weekend of copious amounts of food, cool museum trips, the antics of small children, and some pretty darn cool costumes. Including: The entire US women's synchronised swimming team -- who turned out to be gay men in drag, and who did a really cool Esther Williams routine on the Metro A troop of Brownie Girl Scouts A guy wearing a lampshade on his head with a bra hung over it, and a rectangular piece of cardboard around his waist with condoms taped to it -- he was a bedside table A keg of Yuengling beer A bottle of Corona One of the guys from Kraftwerk, down to the little logo on his red button-down Hellboy (who won the costume contest at the club we went to -- he even had the cigar!) Several Cats in the Hat Lots and lots of Dorothys, some with ruby slippers, some without Lots of Farscape characters, none of whom I could actually identify A crayon Lots of samurai, including one guy who was a dead ringer for John Belushi in Samurai Bartender/Butcher/Lawn Care Specialist/&c; Two of the ghosts from the Haunted Mansion A leather-clad Little Red Riding Hood (aka deza) A guy who was supposed to be a Roman, but whose toga was a bit too short; between that and his baldness and glasses, he looked a lot like Gandhi A pug dog dressed like a vampire #6 from The Prisoner (whom I chatted up briefly, then ran off to go dance to "Werewolves of London"; he didn't talk to me for the rest of the night and I hope I didn't offend him by accident) Ronald McDonald The Hamburglar (independent of Ronald McDonald) Edward Scissorhands (I wanted to place bets as to whether he was going to stop by the gay club next door as Edward Penishands) Raiden from Mortal Kombat, complete with glowy bits Marilyn Monroe Hugh Hefner in a Turkish bathrobe, who hung out for a fair bit of the night with Marilyn Monroe A bride and groom The Joker A butcher with bits of a plastic dog strapped to him Some really convincing zombies in the Metro -- not sure they were in costume, though. Capitol Hill was an interesting place to go trick-or-treating, in the "may you live in ~ times" sense of the term. We started out in what appeared to be a heavily Republican neighbourhood, judging from the Bush/Cheney signs in the windows; most of the people weren't home or weren't giving out candy. Soon, we migrated over toward Independence Avenue on a tip from a passer-by, and ended up in a neighbourhood which featured signs like "Bush is Scary, Vote for Kerry" and "No Candy for Republicans -- Compassionate Conservatism" -- and in which the candy flowed like blood in the streets. By 8pm we had one very tired princess and one even more tired fireman on our hands, so we took them back home via the Metro, then went out to a churrascaria and ate more meat than I know what to do with. And tomorrow it's back to business as usual in Iowa. 3 comments|post comment

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