Notes from a Sticky Wicket

Project Beansprout Successful

2008-11-14T23:14:00.001-05:00

Our star is born. We're delighted to inform you of the arrival of Tara Shriram Fisler. The baby is well, the mother is recovering, and the father is trying to not get in the way.

For photographs, and for our AFQ (Anticipated Frequent Questions) on various naming issues, please see the Web page (natch).

Stumbling at the Door

2008-11-12T15:37:00.001-05:00

Update:

I ordered my G1 about a week ago. Google said it would be available on the 10th. There was no mail delivery yesterday; it arrived in the mail today (12th). Good.

I try to connect. It won't connect. After 10 minutes with customer service we discover it's because Google has failed to activate my data plan. Customer service agrees it's pretty dumb to sell a phone that requires a data plan without one. She thinks someone forgot to hit “Save”.

I'm slightly confused because, a day after I placed the order, I got a text message from Google informing me of the plan change. Anyway.

Incidentally, without the data plan working, you cannot use the phone at all. Period.

So, I have the phone in a completely non-functional state.

I ask whether I can connect using my home WiFi. After a few rounds with the rep, it becomes clear she has no idea whatsoever what the question really means; additional questions about this yield increasingly garbled answers.

Along the way, she lets slip that yesterday, apparently no Android phones were working at all. But she reassures me that at least they're all working again today.

I am not reassured.

Happiness is...

2008-11-08T17:48:00.002-05:00

...a bike ride in the fall. A slight mist, perfect temperature, glowing trees, and a carpet of leaves. Post-ride, after wiping the water, sand, and organic muck off my bike, I was still left with tires wrapped in the glory of autumn.

New Hampshire is Pretty Independent, But...

2008-10-30T22:25:00.003-04:00

...since when did they switch to right-hand drive?

(Yes, I did get my terminology straight.)

The G Stands for Goodbye

2008-10-16T08:52:00.003-04:00

Over the past few weeks I've been getting progressively worse connection quality from Google Mail (GMail). Then, as of yesterday morning, about 24 hours ago, it stopped working entirely, giving me a 502 error.

Now, this isn't the first time GMail has gone AWOL. About two years ago, I had GMail disappear for one day, then two, then three...and then it came back for a few hours, then disappeared again for about three more days, for a total of nearly a week. I even wrote to some high-ups I know at Google, but to no avail.

But those were presumably growing pains. This one is a bit harder to take. Especially when the error message says to try again in 30 seconds, but their support site says it's expected to be out until about 6pm Pacific time today—that would be a total of eighteen hours of outage.

Maybe you're stretching a bit too thin, Google.

From Artless to Artful

2008-10-04T18:13:00.011-04:00

Did you have art classes in high school? I did. I learned a lot in them. Not art—our teacher wasn't up to the task of squeezing any productions out of me—but rather my inadequacy at it. Those experiences registered not so much as scars but as shoals, to be avoided as I went off to seek something for which I had a little talent.

Now, I had a similar experience with handwriting. (Before you ask, no, I didn't abandon that altogether, though there were certainly times when I considered it, and in the era of computing I effectively have.) I'm left-handed by nature, and hence wrote naturally with my left hand. But writing left-handed in India was considered unacceptable, so I had to take after-school lessons to learn to write dextrously. The result was that I wrote disastrously, in a scrawl that was so ill-formed it wasn't even bad enough to be considered awful.

But sometime in 9th grade, I tired of the state of affairs. I wasn't quite sure what to do about it—after all, it wasn't for lack of practice, so more of the same wasn't going to help—so on a whim I opened up an encyclopaedia to the entry on calligraphy, and worked through tracing out letter-forms. I hadn't ever used a broad-nibbed pen (and didn't have one, either), so it took me a while before I realized the pattern to where the strokes were thin and thick. But I eventually got the hang of it, to the point of being able to reproduce a passable Textualis blackletter.

Which brings us back to art. I realized this summer that I was similarly tired of my inability to draw just about anything at all. I tend to have lots of pictures in my head, and ever since I've come to understand the visual language of cartooning I've wanted to learn it. (For me, reading my morning funnies is a bit like watching the infielders in a baseball game: periodically, I see something so stunning that I focus entirely on the particular act and forget all about the context of what I'm watching.) I've tried to work through cartooning books, but I tire of messing around with paper and pencil.

The game-changer was, amazingly, a software program. My OQO 1+ came with a copy of Alias (now Adobe) Sketchbook Pro (v. 2.0.1), which I'd never used in the two years I've had the machine. One day I idly started the application, picked the felt-tip marker tool, set it down on the canvas...and saw this:

That's right, the ink spread, as if it were a real pen put to real paper.

Something about that moment was magical. As I explored the application more and found out how much more it simulated the physics of paper-based media, I was hooked. I was in the process of preparing the Web site for PASTE 2008, which I co-chaired, and I was annoyed at the lack of any visual embellishment. Perhaps, I thought, I could fix that myself. So I came up with this, which you can see in context.

Buoyed by this success (by which I mean, I asked a few other PASTE dignitaries what they thought about it, and they gave me stiff-lipped responses to the effect that any visual embellishment is welcome—carefully saying nothing at all about this specific one), I started to design images for use in our new book-let. Now you know whom to blame for all the images in the first version of How to Design Worlds, though I am rather pleased with the cow and the UFO (both also to be found on the cover), and by the graphic accompanying “The Movie Principle” (section 4.4, page 11 in the book).

All this can only lead to hubris—and it has. Our latest victim is another wall of the same room that we painted earlier. We now have a little mountain thing going,

which includes my personal rendition of the Pão de Açúcar:

Somewhere in here is a message for my art teachers, but I'm not sure what. Perhaps just, “Don't worry, you didn't miss much”.

Stopped by the Velour Rope

2008-09-23T23:15:00.000-04:00

For maybe the first time in my life I tried to stand in line for a new product release. And I was thoroughly rebuffed.

T-Mobile's Web site has been dreadfully slow all day. Even their usually clued-in and cheerful customer service staff sound frazzled and not entirely together with it. It must be tough to be popular (but, folks, did you ever consider a little extra provisioning?).

But, I have no phone.

I called to find out why I was being charged USD 299 instead of USD 179 for it. I had been given a hint by JJ: it had to be no less than about 18 months since my last phone upgrade. Well, in fact, I've suffered through this awful RAZR for a few years now...

Oh wait. In April 2007, Kathi and I got new phones. I didn't like mine, so I returned it. I was assured this would reset my upgrade clock.

Well, it didn't. That is, their records show that I bought and returned the phone, and they agree that this resets the clock, and they know I'm eligible for the deeper discount...but they can't set the bit in their system. So my agent suggests I wait until October 22, the date it becomes available to the masses, at which point they can give me the appropriate discount.

In practical terms this makes almost no difference, because the phone doesn't ship until October 22 anyway. Plus, their Web site suggests that the data plan you have to buy takes effect immediately—i.e., you pay for the plan without a phone to use it. Clever.

Because I've never actually engaged in technolust before, I was tempted to plonk down the extra USD 120 anyway. I would have, if I felt charitable towards T-Mobile. But I feel especially uncharitable today because I've lost over half an hour to their site design. This is because there's a point at which, before it confirms your order, it asks you to re-confirm your identity by entering either your SSN or your DOB. I didn't notice the “or”, which is in the typical tiny T-Mobile font size, and entered both. The imbicile who implemented the site saw it fit to reject such users. (Why did this cost me half an hour? Because T-Mobile has both my wife's records and mine on the account, and sometimes wants my information and sometimes hers, so I had to run through every combination...and while I was at it, I also tried out every combination with and without the leading zeroes. On a day when their servers were glacial when they weren't timing out.)

Welcome to the big leagues, T-Mobile. Now get your act together.

-ine: Do You See Yonder Cloud...

2008-09-22T21:42:00.002-04:00

The English language is rich in adjectives, and some of the most descriptive are those that compare an object (or its attribute) to an animal. I was surprised to see nobody has tried to catalog these terms (or at least not in a way Google can find). So here are the ones that occurred to me:

aquiline (eagle)
bovine (ox or cow)
canine (dog)
caprine (goat)
equine (horse)
feline (cat)
lupine (wolf)
ovine (sheep)
piscine (fish)
porcine (pig)
ursine (bear)

There are surely numerous other animals that have entered the descriptive pantheon (rats, anybody?), but I don't know and can't find terms for them.

On Samba Time

2008-09-12T23:20:00.018-04:00

Reading List

The Accidental President of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Brain Winter
Why is This Country Dancing?, John Krich
A Death in Brazil, Peter Robb

I.

To name, they say, is to conquer. Few names in recent times have had quite the grip of the McKinsey group's BRIC, the quartet of countries leading the developing world: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. You can argue about the massive differences in status and potential between these countries; you could argue about missing worthies (as Argentinians have, suggesting alternate formulations such as BRAC). But to contend the point is to concede it. And now, on account of being invited to deliver a keynote talk at the Brazilian Programming Languages Conferences (SBLP), I have the chance to see this sibling country up close.

II.

Ipanema is dorsal. Look down that grand sweep of beach, and over at the end stand two enormous, sharp peaks of rock, like a pair of breaching orcas. In photographs, they always look misty and just a little surreal. And that's just how they appear to the human eye, filtered through the distance, the humidity, the spray and, yes, the smog. The two giant fins could be the symbol of a city if it didn't already have so many to offer.

If Ipanema is dorsal, I suppose Copacabana is ventral. No longer the glamorous queen, it ought to have slipped into the role of the dowdy dowager. And, I suppose, some of its oceanfront hotels do. But there is life here—even if it's all cheap and kitchy and blandly uniform, somehow it feels a little more alive, too. It too, is punctuated by its own morro, the totemic Pão de Açúcar. And all these granite giants are simply a small part of what Guanabara Bay has to offer.

What is stunning is not that these beaches are the way they are, but that for so long, they weren't at all. The human obsession with the beach is relatively recent, newer even than the fancy for mountains. But whereas mountains were just dark and treacherous, beaches were...unnecessary? Ocean-going people knew the water already, while landlubbers had already chosen to avoid it. Who, then, had use for stretches of sand, or even the time and leisure to wallow in them? And thus these two had to wait until the 20th century to be “discovered”, though even then, it's a little difficult to understand why they weren't colonized simultaneously. Not that it helped, architecturally: neither appears to have a single redeeming building. But more on that in a bit.

I stay in Copacabana, wary of the clichés. I had actually hoped to be in Santa Teresa through a b&b service called Cama e Café. But repeated emails to them proved to be a highly frustrating experience, and I didn't want to trust my trip to them. Besides, there's something to be said for the anonymity of hotels over forced intimacy. In the end, Copacabana proves to be a perfectly fine base. Both its seediness and its commotion feel real, and I miss the hustle of the center of a large city.

Long before I cast my eyes on any rocks or beaches, however, I have to get into town from the international airport. Rio's Zona Norte is notoriously poor and slum-ridden, and in this the ride resembles nothing so much as a drive through Mumbai, down to the few half-finished houses, small bits of cement and plaster (as much as could be afforded) holding together brick, wood, and whatever other materials were available...and these are the grander accommodations. It's one of the great, great ironies of both Mumbai and Rio that some of the best views are afforded to those who might lose them at any moment by virtue of having their dwellings washed away in a rainstorm. And just as we pass this dwelling—on one of the major highways coming into town—a man runs right across the street, right across three lanes of traffic each way (imagine I-95), and at that instant I know I am closer to India than to the US. I continue to be so stricken by the similarities between the two cities that I wonder if this is some sort of curse of the Portuguese, from Bom (Boa? Boim?) Bahia to the Cidade Maravilhosa.

I also wonder, not for the first time, whether someday all our cities will have to feel like this. But that's another matter.

III.

I am on the metro at around 10am, in the recently-opened Cantagalo station. I have already fulfilled my tourist ambition to give directions (correctly) in every place I visit. In this case I can take no special pride at all: the woman wants to know whether the train will go to the Central station; there is only one line, we're at the end station, and everyone is on one platform. My only accomplishment is processing the Brazilian pronunciation of the terminal -l (yes, the rest of the world has been mis-pronouncing “Brazil” all along, in addition to mis-spelling it).

The platform is full, and filling. Few people look like they're from the beach; most look like workers or other natives. The platform gets fuller and fuller. On the opposite side are several workers, and just past the end of the opposite platform is a stationary train. Everyone is calm.

A few minutes into this, a functionary in a rather more serious-looking uniform (the workers on the other platform were in drab grey; the new one is in a very deep blue, clearly indicative of higher rank and authority) runs down the opposite platform. People are curious but only a few heads follow this motion. Then another. A small stream of people has been steadily heading back upstairs—these must be people on an actual schedule—but everyone else waits as even more people pour in. Everyone is utterly calm, utterly patient. Nobody seems to even ask the officials what's going on.

Finally, one more deep-blue-besuited official descends to the opposite platform, and he says something. Now people are upset. They are shouting, hollering, whistling, shaking heads, and showing a range of emotions. It's fascinating that simply the statement of the obvious releases this reaction, even though having said that the official may actually have hastened these people on their way to their destination.

My metro experience having been thwarted, I decide it's time to try the buses. The buses of Rio are mildly terrifying, and that's when they aren't outright heart-stopping, driving at what appear to be dizzying speeds and without regard for lanes. The system itself appears close to unstructured: there are hundreds of lines without clear markings of routes, stops, or anything else.

Not surprisingly, with a little inspection the system appears to be a wonder. The buses have dispensed with niceties such as route maps for the simple reason every bus says on its front where it's going and via which places. The buses do have numbers, though they're not always easy to find; and, more to the point, they don't really matter. Trying to get to Centro? Just stand where a bunch of other people seem to be standing, flag down a passing bus that says Centro, hop on (carefully, as this sometimes means crossing a lane of traffic), pay at entry (fixed rate no matter how far you're going) and, when you see your destination, press a bell, and hop off. In fact there appear to be numerous bus lines operated by different companies, with varying degrees of comfort (and perhaps safety). Their rates differ, too, but the rates are prominently displayed on the front. By staying away from the buses during rush hour, I've been grinning during and after every trip.

Of course, it doesn't help that as we lurch through town (the speed is a little oversold: what is dizzying is their momentum), I glance out my window and, in a storefront reflection, see the name of my bus company: Verdun. Not a comforting name for a system with a slightly dubious reputation for respect for human life.

Eventually I do use the Metro, and I use it quite a bit. It's clean, well-organized, easy to use, timely, and regular. It has some of the best, most rational signage of any metro I've ever used (though the announcements are spotty and sometimes wrong). The stations range from pleasant to excellent (Cantagalo mimics the Washington DC station structure). Low coverage aside, it does almost everything one could possibly want of a big city metro system. It is almost certainly a far better public transportation, along the same stretches, as the bus system, and will presumably eventually supplant most of it.

But it misses on two counts. For one, the turnstiles have a terrible sense of rhythm: you'd expect to insert your ticket and walk right through, and the half-second gap it forces always breaks my stride. In the nation of samba, this should be considered criminal: as if the metro is in Rio, but not of it.

Which it is. There is something human and visceral about these buses, and every time I speed between Zona Sul and Centro, across the arc of Botafogo beach, looking out over the morros of Guanabara Bay, with the Pão de Açúcar standing sentinel and the Corcovado's Christ statue towering over the scene, my heart races a little. If I lived here, if I did this every single day of my life, I think I would still feel a little bit happier every time I saw this sight.

But then, the metro, too, has its moments. It is late at night, and I am returning to my hotel. I am changing between tracks at Estácio, and we're waiting awhile. Suddenly a tune of haunting beauty floats in over the tannoy. I do not recognize it; I cannot even place it; but it swirls about me, enchants me, and then settles deep inside my bones. I let a train pass, hoping the music will never end.

IV.

I don't know how long it takes to get to Centro, or what time it is when I get there. I don't know these things because I'm not wearing a watch. I was told, you see, that to avoid being targeted by muggers, it'd be best to not be wearing any sharp-looking watches. So I left behind my watch; the plan was, once I landed here, I'd wander down to a local store and buy the cheapest thing I could find. But I'd gone a whole day without one, and when I did spot a store with the appropriate quantity of appropriately shoddy timekeepers, I...just kept walking. Somehow, it just seems appropriate in Brazil.

My afternoon in Centro reminds me of nothing so much as another leafy but large and congested, sub-tropical southern hemispheric city located by a fantastic bay: Sydney (minus, of course, the abject poverty of Rio). And just as Sydney is all modern but for a tiny sliver of preserved colony, so with Rio. Nobody standing in the afternoon sun in the Praça Imperial, amidst random statuary of unknown worthies and surrounded by low, white buildings with wrought-iron balconies can help but be transported to Portugal or the Mediterranean. To be sure, the moment passes quickly, but there are other such details dotting the city. My favorite was walking by the southern wall (on the other side from the flyovers) of the Museu Histórico Nacional and looking up to see blue tiles along the rim of the slightly-overhanging roof.

The Museu itself is worth a little while. It is mostly potted history that should be familiar to anyone who did a little reading before their visit. But a few objects stand out, and there are two new areas—a restored room of ceiling frescoes about the laws that have governed Brazil, and a section on native Indian art—that are both worth examining. Far less appealing is a recently created exhibition on health and medicine in Brazil, funded by Lisbon's peculiar Gulbenkian Foundation, whose entries are—unlike the rest of the museum—in Portuguese only. This is less of a pity than it might seem (for what a fascinating topic it is!) as the exhibit itself appears to be low on content and high on uninformative visuals. As for the rest, the historical paintings, busts, and the like are by a series of European nobodies who were smart enough to realize that with their talents, they would die poor and unknown in their native countries but would be feted as French or Italian painters and appointed to the court in Brazil. (It would have been interesting to learn more about episodes such as Projeto Rondon, about a modern variant of which I saw one photograph but learned nothing, and for which there's virtually no information even on-line.)

Brazilian TV is famed for its awfulness. I see nothing to redeem it, and there's certainly much about it that is abysmal in any language. But I do wonder if its reputation is overdone a little, or perhaps it has improved to the point of being only bad, and thereby not compelling enough. All of this, I must add, simply did not prepare me for the moment when I turned over a channel, landed on RAI (the Italian network), and found, dubbed in Italian, a modern Amitabh Bachchan movie.

V.

I want to go for a walk in the evening, and somewhere I read that Rua Visconde de Pirajá is an interesting shopping street. This is just as well, because I'm looking for a bookstore on the street, and figure I could scout it out. But I get there to find a drab, dismal street—worse even than the worst I'd prepared for, which is rows of boutiques and bijouteries—and I'm so depressed I turn around after two blocks. I stop in a store to buy some bread, only to find that a man blocks me and won't budge until the bread is up to his standards (the rolls look fine to me—and prove to be so), and the woman checking out in front of me handles her purse and purchases with the snobbish slowness of one who can't be seen to acknowledge other humans around—and I contrast all this to the essentially Brazilian good cheer of the staff, and remind myself never again to shop where the rich live.

The street, and the store, are in Ipanema. As I've mentioned, Ipanema is where it's at. Well, not really; Ipanema is yesterday's news, and the rich Cariocas have sold and moved on to Leblon and points further west. But they've left in their wake a place of unimaginable ugliness. It reminds me of...well, I can't really remember its name, and that's the point, but the similar area of Mexico City. As Ibero-America got rich in the 50s, 60s and 70s, they built buildings of truly striking blandness that combine to blight the landscape at least as much as the favelas their owners no doubt despise. The names of these buildings—for here, all buildings are named, much as they are in the rest of the developing world—speak of unrequited aspiration; the Edificio Mondrian, for instance, is an ugly brown stone with a brown-tinted glass foyer, conceived by an architect who cannot possibly have known even the very first thing about the Dutchman. These architectural crimes, combined with the fact that it's the only part of town when I ask a question in Portuguese and am responded to in English, means I avoid it entirely for the rest of my stay.

Speaking of aspirations, Kathi and I have been playing an informal game of Curves-spotting. Curves is a women's-only gym that is characterized by cheap locations and blinds and, I believe, a lack of mirrors (on the sound principle that women would be more likely to stay fit if they didn't have to worry about preening men or women, or intrusive eyes). Curves seems to be a class-marker of the solidly middle-class (you can fill in your own pop-sociological reason for why). And there, at the north-western end of Copacabana, I see my first Curves in Brazil.

VI.

Returning to the concrete matter of shopping for rolls, the astute reader will notice that I have entered that territory that every traveler outwardly dreads but secretly loves: that of Things That Must be Weighed. (I had thought rolls would be sold in whole units, but they are priced by weight.) This momentarily strikes terror: I gesture to the woman beside the bread tub, she signals to the weighing scale, I try to ask her what code to use, she doesn't understand, I desperately scan the bread sign for a code, find absolutely none, in despair place the bread on the scale, and it magically knows what I've ordered. That's right, there's nothing else around to be weighed. I don't feel too foolish as I grab the sticker it prints.

Walking back, and at several other times, I feel myself gently spritzed by water from above. My first two or three times I worry that it's about to rain, and find it odd that it could do so without a single cloud in sight—the Southern Hemisphere must be a truly strange place. Eventually, I formulate a reasonable hypothesis: this must be from stand-alone air-conditioners mounted on upper floors. It's winter here in Rio, which means it is merely somewhere between warm and hot but not blistering, and I feel sorry for these poor people who had to inhabit the mores of their settlers from temperate European lands.

VII.

As I walk around town, I notice several kiosks for chaveiros, and they appear to be key-makers. A quick search confirms this. Chalk this down to the opposite of a faux ami (a bon ami?): the root for the word in Portuguese sounds surprisingly similar to the word for ‘key’ in Tamil. Of course, this may not be coincidental: perhaps the Tamilians had no need to lock anything down until the marauding Portuguese showed up.

VIII.

As I drink a vitaminas (a fruit drink with milk rather than water, which would make it a sucos) at a roadside stand, a few blocks inland from Copacabana beach, I see something odd. A very fair-skinned woman walks up to the stand, towing a black boy. The woman is just pushing past 30, and is dressed to stand out: black pants and a shiny orange top buttoned tight; the boy is about seven, wears beach bottoms and nothing else. The woman is asking him to pick a drink; she leaves him there for a moment with the menu while she walks around the corner with purpose; while she's away, he fingers some cash (a two or five reais bill, and some coins); she returns; a drink is ordered, but I never hear a word from the boy. I nurse my drink, but I'm really quite done, and his drink is taking a while to make. I walk away.

An hour later, I'm walking to the shopping street, and four blocks from this encounter, I see the woman again. This time she's walking hand-in-hand with a much older man—about 55, heavier, a head mostly full of unruly white hair, comfortable and seemingly prosperous but, if he's filthy rich, hiding it well.

They don't say much, and I don't understand what they're saying.

IX.

In the evening, after sunset, I go to Arpoador Beach, the eastern end of Ipanema. It's quieter, calmer, there, and traces of pink paint the western sky. Copacabana is crowded, in part, because of separated “bike” lane that runs between the road and the beach proper; I use scare-quotes because there are relatively few bicycles in it compared to foot traffic, especially runners.

I had heard about the running in Copacabana, but since I'm traveling extra-light, I haven't packed running shoes. But as I come around the corner, I'm seized by the desire to move; so I tighten the straps of my Teva sandals, pick a particularly ugly hotel about a kilometer away as a target, and start to trot. It's tiring, and it feels great. To cool down I walk another kilometer. As I turn around, my legs suddenly start to move involuntarily. Running westward is less fun, because you're immediately beside the chugging traffic, but I feel propelled by forces I don't entirely grasp. I get to and pass my target (the same ugly hotel) without even noticing it, and keep on, and on—I must have a tailwind!—until I realize I'm a few blocks past my hotel, and I could go on forever with this wind...and I stop. There will probably be hell to pay on my kees eventually, but I'll take it.

X.

Rio has numerous “kilo” vegetarian restaurants. Some are purely vegetarian, while others have the odd non-vegetarian dish and are labeled “natural”. They range in quality, but the good ones are outstanding.

My favorite is one called Reino Vegetal. It's nowhere near anything you'd expect: it's neither in the chic Zona Sul, catering to the swelte, nor in the heart of Centro, ministering to executives. Instead, it's deep in the heart of a very old-fashioned commercial area—the kind of place where the streets are still cobbled (and not to be charming), the sidewalks are still high, and some of the signs look like they haven't been painted in decades. I've been here before: not here here, but it's Bangalore's N. R. Road and the old commercial center of very many other third-world cities. It's far from the searching eye of a tourist, executive or yuppie; indeed, it's far from the eye of all but the all-seeing Google (or, in this case, Happy Cow).

As I'm ordering a drink, one of the staff asks me whether I'd like...well, I'm not sure, really. It sounds a bit like the word for ginger, but it's definitely not. It sounds closer to injera, but surely not; nobody would put that in a drink! I decide it must be yet another of the local exotics, so I give her my assent. She's delighted; she repeats this to another person. Am I being had? The staff seem really nice and decent folk; and then, it hits me, she's asked me whether I'm Indian! (Why can they never phrase questions the way they're listed in the language guides?) [Tip for the baffled: Brazilian Portuguese pronounces “di” with a `j', so “India” comes out rather like “Inja”. That's right, I'm an Injun.] She goes out into the dining area and tells one of the diners—who I think is one of the owners—this. And the next time I walk in (how could you not return to such a place?), she immediately greets me with a great big smile and announces, the Indian is back. She's so taken with this that every time she walks past my table she comes by to ask me a question about the food and my enjoyment of it, and rapidly she has exhausted every word and phrase I know. It doesn't deter her one bit.

XI.

In the evening, I am on the metro when an elderly, dignified-looking white couple walk in; the woman seems much firmer than the man. A young black woman gets up to offer her seat to him. They thank her; then the older man says something, the younger woman asks something, and suddenly these three have begun a discussion that goes on for several stops. To be able to understand the language!

I do not have to wait long. The next day, an old dame sits by me. She has just squeezed through what have to be the narrowest of turnstiles to board a bus; though in fine shape, she's annoyed by this and tells me about it. I offer the universal roll of the eye in assent. Now she complains about something on the metro. What where they thinking, too, I agree. I'm worried that any moment now she's going to start asking questions, and I'll have to drop the pretense. It turns out she already has, without the intonation, and is awaiting my reply. I stutter out that I don't really understand, and at the same instant we both blurt out, “Descuple!” [I'm sorry.] She finds out I'm from America (no reaction), and that I'm Indian (delight!). Now that she's established I don't speak any Portuguese, we begin talking again, this time with very small words. The “conversation” covers religion, her sister, politics, her hometown of Santa Caterina, and poverty. It's heady stuff, even if I haven't an idea what she's saying. (Well, generally there are only two mainstream opinions on any of these issues, so it's pretty easy to establish which half of the equation she's on, but the bit about religion involves Christianity, her sister, and something about the Buddha, and I'm pretty much lost.)

XII.

In general, the people I encounter are everything the stereotypes suggest: warm, friendly, and patient. Yet there is such a species as the impatient Brazilian, and I find its natural habitat: the trains. As a metro train pulls into an end-station, the entire crowd lurches towards the (closed) doors, leaning on them, banging on them, some even trying to pull them apart. Something is afoot, I figure—maybe the doors open too briefly—so I join the throng. Then we are inside, the doors remain open for generously long, and I'm baffled. Next time, same behavior, again I join in, again the same response. So the third time, I stand back and watch.

They are rushing for the seats. They are not merely rushing, they are charging, knocking over one another, scattering in every direction inside from the door like roaches in a bright light. And then, once they're settled, they resume being Brazilian. (There is a similar scene near the beginning of Central Station where, before the train doors open, people pour into the cars through the windows.) If you don't want a seat, there are entire prairies of standing room awaiting your habitation. The one time I'm on a metro car that still has empty seats, two women walk in and proceed to stand at a pole. I am scandalized by their un-Brazilian behavior, until one of them pulls out a Lonely Planet guide.

This love of automated comfort carries over elsewhere. Put a staircase next to an escalator? Why bother? Even as dozens of people are queued up to get onto the escalator, I am stared at for taking the staircase—even in this town of legendarily buff bodies. (Then again, the turnstiles on the buses are so narrow and so firm, abs develop naturally and fitness is essential for using public transport.)

XIII.

The downside to all this urbanism is that it's simply impossible to see the night sky. I feel sorry for the vast majority of Brazilians, whose only exposure to the constellations must be the ones on their flag. In a few generations they may not even know what those stars on their flag stand for.

XIV.

One of the great joys of visiting Brazil is surely attending a soccer game, and in Rio, where would one want to watch one more than in Maracanã, that throne of Brazilian football? Of course, the thought of a football game at Maracanã is enough to raise every alarm about safety and security in Rio. Not surprisingly, an entire industry has sprung up where desire meets fear. For a neat sum, a tour guide will pick you up at your hotel, bundle you into a van of other (presumably) equally nervously excited tourists, take you to the stadium (where your ticket has been bought for you), have you all sit together in the stands, and then escort you back out into the safety of the van, to be returned to the hotel.

Does anything sound more awful?

That said, I confess to thinking about this for a while. I am nursing a cold, I am weary from the flight capers, I am...let's admit it, I am a bit nervous. As a compromise, I email a guide named Sergio, who runs such a service, but seems unlike the rest of his species. Sergio isn't available the week I am in town (but, to his great credit, happily answers my email questions). So I am on my own. I don't shave for a day, to try to achieve the characteristic Carioca scruff, and off I go.

Well, it's everything you might imagine. The level of play itself is quite awful; other than a few inspired minutes when Recife Sport puts together a textbook use of space—a display so good even the home fans seemed to admire it—there isn't much to watch on the field. (But as it is Brazilian football, there are a few moments of absolutely dazzling virtuosity.) But one doesn't go to a Brazilian soccer game to watch the play anyway. And I had, through a combination of error and luck, landed bang in the middle of the Flamengo cheering section, with drums right behind me and red flares going off over my head. It is terrifying and exhilarating.

I stand for the hour I'm on the train, on the grounds that I'll be sitting for the next two hours or so. As the fans file in, however, the front row is standing, so the rows behind have to stand, and those further back have to stand on their seats, and so on, until everyone in the entire section is standing. Then we begin clapping and singing—my hands begin to feel bruised, and I realize the game hasn't even begun yet—and we continue thus for the entire duration of the game.

This is Brazil, so of course we don't just stand. At various points everyone begins to jump to the beat in—remember, this is Brazil!—perfect harmony. I am jumping, too, but I feel an odd sensation beneath my feet. So I keep my feet firmly planted to the, uh, seat, and realize—the stadium is vibrating. It is difficult to translate that moment of terror into words; the only possible response to this is to resume jumping with everyone else.

This is so much fun that I go back and do it again later in the week. One of the legendary rivalries in soccer is between the two Rio teams, Flamengo and Fluminense. Having watched Flamengo play (league-leading Grêmio), it seems only fair to also watch Fluminense (play Recife Sport). Sergio—a Flamengo fan, it must be said—has warned me to not expect much from Fluminense. In the event, he was pretty accurate. At any rate, for the benefit of other travelers, I offer the following:

Watching a Game at Maracana

What I most like is that people have a great time entertaining themselves, without needing to be entertained. There is no pre-game show; there are no cheerleaders; there are no clocks or replays (though those may be safety measures). At half-time, a very, very old man bounces a ball off his foot, never letting it touch the ground, as he walks the entire length of the sideline; it is pure virtuosity; but nobody seems to especially notice. Instead, I equip myself with the cornerstones of every healthy meal, namely proteins and carbohydrates (aka, nuts and beer), and do my best to cheer to the insanely catchy Flamengo songs (though the Fluminense ones prove even catchier). Police swarm the place, but uselessly; at one point a group of them moves to investigate a flare-launcher; suddenly Flamengo scores, and the sky overhead turns red, and the police return to obsolescence.

XV.

After Rio, I ask nothing of the rest of Brazil. Fortaleza reminds me of nothing quite so much as Cairns, Australia, though the similarity proves somewhat superficial. São Paulo feels like New York, its language a jarring, truncated version of the mellifluous tongue spoken elsewhere. The facade of Boa Viagem in Recife depresses me during the day; even the brand new buildings are built with a pre-aged look. But at night, the beach clear, I emerge from my hotel to see the street-lights reflect off the dazzling white sand, and I find its attraction. There is nobody about, but I walk down closer to the water. Suddenly, I hear a muffled rhythm, and a barely-teen boy goes past, riding bare-back on a white horse.

I haven't earned the right to conclude anything, but I decide that Brazil feels like India about twenty years ahead. The traffic is Indian, but there is no honking; the footpaths are Indian, but there is no spitting. Yet again, I think, this may be what the future will look like for everyone.

But something special has happened here, where two potent, fecund forces—the tropics, and immigration (some of it forced, regrettably) to the New World—have collided. The street names in Rio (Venceslau, Dodsworth, Ulrich), the buildings in Recife (Lundgren, Robert Bruce Harley), and much else speak of great distances traveled for opportunity. On the other hand, in a world that increasingly values services over goods, it must be frustrating to be saddled with a language of one's own. How those forces will balance out will be fascinating to see.

A Pie of Speculation

2008-09-10T21:13:00.001-04:00

In cycling news, nothing is bigger than Lance's return to pro ranks. People compare it Jordan's return, and gosh, I hope it's different. I enjoyed watching Jordan so much, I entirely lost interest in basketball after he retired—and his second (third) incarnation did nothing to bring me back. Somehow, even though Jordan's competitiveness and fitness were no less legendary, things feel different about Lance. Could it be that cycling is somehow easier than pounding about on a basketball court?

Anyway, the Vanity Fair article that broke the news of his planned return—penned by a Rice professor, no less—has a curious photograph. It is of Lance presenting a cycle and helmet to Bill Clinton, and three things stand out:

What is that in line with the top of the handlebar? Is there something in Lance's hand, or is is that a...mirror? On a race-ready, low-spoke-count, team-livery Trek?
Is that really a huge cog on the rear cassette? Or could that be a...pie plate? On a race-ready, low-spoke-count, team-livery Trek?
And finally, what's that at Bill's right leg? It appears to be some kind of polystyrene stand for the cycle, but photographed at entirely the wrong angle. Or, could it be the oddest of creatures—a pie-plate for the chain ring? What would the Snob make of that?

Anyway, as an Internet commentator, I feel dragged into this Lance affair with a comment of my own. My own conjecture is that what Lance really wants is to finally win a stage atop Ventoux. It'll be interesting to see whether next year's Tour route has a finish atop the Windy One—the ASO is not known for playing ball.

Attending a Game at Maracana

2008-08-29T20:07:00.010-04:00

So you're going to be in Brazil, and you want to watch a game at Maracanã. Good for you. You may be frightened stiff by all the talk about Rio's dangers. Well, I did it and I'm alive to tell. It was mildly terrifying before I did it, exhilarating while I was there, and sufficiently staid afterwards that I went back a second time, with the same experience.

If, after reading this, you're still nervous, and attending a game is the most important thing to you, go with a tour. Your hotel definitely has one. Or you could hook up with Sergio, a wonderful guide. I didn't use him myself, and I've never met him; we've only traded email. But he was helpful even though I wasn't a customer, and demonstrated a genuine affection for the game. I got the clear sense that with him, I wouldn't be getting an overly packaged experience. And his rates were lower than the hotel's.

But I hate tours, and wanted to do this not surrounded by a group of other terrified tourists. So what follows is some approximation to step-by-step instructions on how you can do this for yourself.

Two more things to note.

Maracanã isn't the only stadium in Rio. Engenhão is another major (new) stadium with a full slate of games. But it's a bit farther from the subway, and I wasn't as sure about its neighborhood. Nevertheless, I imagine it makes for an equally exciting venue. (And you can get bragging points: “Oh, these days everyone goes to Maracanã, but I...”. You could make it out to be the K2 of Rio stadiums at your pub back home.)

More importantly, I attended two mid-season club games with only one team from Rio. So everything was easy. None of this applies for games whose results matter more, when a famous rivalry (such as Fla-Flu) is involved, when the national team plays, etc.

Okay, let's begin.

You can find a schedule to games on the CBF site. As of this writing, click on “Série A” at the top, and try the links on the left. “Escalas” should give you a schedule, but it may only show the current week. This link gave me a full season schedule, but sometimes the Web page just produces an error. This kind of difficulty may be good preparation. [Note: Sergio's site, linked above, usually contains the game schedule.]

Warning: I made various game plans based on this schedule. I sent email to two Brazilian friends to confirm I'd read everything right, and I had. A week before the games I checked the schedule again, and every game had changed in some way (time, date, ...). So give yourself a little flexibility, and check again closer to the date.

The stadium's name is not Maracaña—it's not in Spanish. It's pronounced “mah-RAH-ka-na”. You may hear the metro announcer pronounce it as “mah-RAH-ka-nu”.

Learn a few key words: today (hoje: ho-ZHAY), tomorrow (amanhã: ah-ma-NYA), yellow (amarela: ama-RAY-la), green (verde: vehr-DJEH), white (branco: br-AHN-cu). Practice the pronounciation a bit: though the written words are very similar to Spanish, they aren't spoken quite the same way. If you're taking my suggestion on tickets, and all this language stuff terrifies you, you could write a note containing the date, names of teams, “arquibancada verde/amarela”, and a number (of tickets), and slide it in the ticket window. This has the advantage that you will almost certainly have no problem at all, and the disadvantage that you will have failed as a traveler. [If you are repelled nevertheless, it may be because you're trying to buy tickets for a future game—even the next day's—and they aren't on sale on the current day.]

Research the team colors. The Wikipedia pages for all the teams I saw gave their home- and away-colors. You would do well to avoid wearing any team colors at all. (Admittedly, the second time I accidentally wore a shirt in partial team colors—one of Fluminense's tricolor—and nobody seemed to notice or care. Still, standard precautions apply.) And from reading those pages, you may also learn a chant or two.

You can usually buy your ticket the evening of the game—various sources recommend getting there two hours ahead. I found it easier to go earlier in the day, to keep my afternoons flexible. The ticket office seems to be open at reasonable hours. (You can also buy the tickets directly from the team's box offices—I located the one for Flamengo on Rua Raul Machado, two blocks west of the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas (that's right, it's not in the Flamengo section of town)—but going to buy the ticket is a good dress-rehearsal for getting to the match.)

To get your ticket, take the metro to the Maracanã station. You can't miss the stadium; you really, absolutely cannot. (The only way you could miss it is if visibility were under a hundred yards—if it is, what are you doing at a football game?) When you emerge from the station, take the (can't miss) ramp to the left. This will put you at one of the stadium's main gates. Facing the gate, proceed left along the stadium wall. You'll soon get to the ticket window. There seems to always be a handful of people milling about (including touts, who left well enough alone when I spoke in Portuguese but hassled people who spoke English). Also look for the word Arquibancada above the little teller windows. This is the word for the upper floor of the stadium, and where you want to sit.

Buy your tickets. I asked for Arquibancada Verde, the green stand; one time I was given a ticket for it, another time for the amarela (yellow) section. They're essentially indistinguishable. Those tickets were BRL 30. For more, you can sit in the white or blue sections, where you sit side-on to the field. On the back of your ticket you'll see all the relevant details (stand, date, time, teams) printed, so make sure these are what you wanted.

In terms of time, using the metro, it never took me longer than about an hour to get to or from the stadium, and that's from Cantagalo, currently the end-station of the other line (in western Copacabana). I expect 1h15m is a very safe estimate. I once got there in just about 45 minutes.

There is no real in-stadium pre-game tradition, nor the equivalent of batting-practice. So there's not much to do if you get there early, other than revel in the fact that you're there. Which is something in itself, so you might as well. Be aware that the locals seem to mill about outside the stadium until just before the game, so your “empty” section may end up packed. It may even be that you ended up in the heart of a team's cheering section, with drums behind you and flares going off overhead. This is not a hypothetical.

Why do people mill about outside? In part to meet their friends, etc., but I think mainly because you can't buy alcohol inside the stadium. The only beer is alcohol-free (if you order a beer and are told something that sounds like a disclaimer, that's what they're telling you). So you'll see lots of vendors selling alcohol outside, including on the ramp between the metro and the stadium. Get your fill if you must while you can. I chose to not dull my senses. (And given the dismal quality of Brazilian beer, the non-alcoholic stuff in the stadium was no great loss.)

You may have noticed that your ticket has some slightly bewildering code indicating your actual seat. For the games I went to, they weren't bothering with assigned seating. It meant I was free to roam around the stadium, and indeed I periodically moved between stands to get different views of the stadium, the game, and the cheering sections. If they are checking seating assignments, then I expect you will simply be pointed in the right direction.

You will be searched before you go in—a quick and friendly pat-down. (As you walk up the ramp in the stadium, you'll see guys lifting their shirts. They're showing the police their belts, though you may think this is just beach machismo gone awry.) I believe I saw backpacks get in; they didn't blink at (and certainly didn't inspect) my umbrella. I expect a bottle of water is also fine (they aren't obsessed with stadium concessions like they are in the US), but do leave the heavy artillery at home.

You won't actually find much at the stadium concessions. There's no real food to speak of. I saw some vendors selling what looked like boxed, pre-made hot-dogs; there were various kinds of snacks; and that's about it. On the other hand, it's not very expensive. (Beer was BRL 4, chips and such about BRL 3, a little bag of nuts is BRL 1. So you don't need to carry much cash.) One warning: the nuts (amendoim) contain monosodium glutamate (MSG).

One other tip. If you don't already have one, buy your return metro ticket before the game. (When people get off the metro they're all focused on finding friends, etc., so there are no queues at all to buy tickets.) This will save you a lot of waiting later.

My first game began at 8:30, so I got back to Cantagalo sometime around 11:30pm. It would be false to say that walking the 5-6 blocks back to my hotel (a block off the beach) felt like “the safest thing in the world”, but it did feel very safe. Even the streets immediately around the station, which are a bit dark, are peopled. They're all working-class folk, many of them enjoying what is presumably a post-work drink at the little local bars and snack counters, away from the tourist places. But because they're locals, not tourists, they do know their colors, and may be a bit tired or tipsy. So this is one place where wearing team colors may just cause a bit of trouble.

If you want a team jersey, the official ones cost a pretty penny. You can find cheap ones, but these aren't quality prints, and are presumably not legal. Anyway, if that's what rocks your boat, you can even find them outside the stadium. I approached a vendor and was quoted BRL 30. I laughed, and he immediately dropped it to BRL 20. I tried to talk him into BRL 16 and he wouldn't take it. Okay, that gave me a lower-bound.

Later, I walked around in the street-market in Copacabana and asked some of the guys selling Brazil team shirts for local team shirts. I noticed that asking them somewhat loudly made them immediately say no (so these are illegal!). But if you linger at a store for a few moments a store-keeper will eventually approach you; mention the team you want to him in a low and conspiratorial voice. He'll take you to the back of the store-tent and pull the jersey out of a big, black trash bag full of illicit team jerseys. He too will start with BRL 30-32, so just say “I can get this at the stadium itself for ...!” He'll fold right away. And you're probably still paying way too much for a cheap rip-off. I did.

An Unkempt Zebra

2008-08-04T23:05:00.001-04:00

This past weekend I changed the bar tape on my Bike Friday. Last year I switched from a bland black to zebra tape (frequent readers in these parts will be familiar with my affection for things zebra). I rather like Cinelli's cork tape, though the zebra pattern isn't always easy to find. In particular, they make a close variant: instead of black and white, it's black and a sort of dull grey (or gray). I never quite figured out the appeal to the latter. It looks a bit militaristic, but in a sort of new-agey, I'm-not-a-really-intimidating-military kind of way.

Anyway, over the weekend, I peeled off the old tape and attached the gleaming new one. As I was collecting the old tape to trash, I happened to notice a rather odd pattern. Here's a photograph:

The left is how the tape looks in its (mostly) pristine state. The right is how it comes to look after a year of constant wear. The right is also...the spitting image of the black-and-grey tape you'll find in a store.

And I was enlightened.

As my friend Laurie Heller said, it's like buying jeans that've already had abuse pre-heaped on them.

When it Takes Off, At Least it'll Fly Gracefully

2008-08-03T14:14:00.002-04:00

Several sites rave about Norman Foster's new terminal in Beijing airport. One phrase in the description caught my eye, however: the terminal's new “aerodynamic roof”. How's that, again? This phrase proves to be from Foster's own materials, and the phrase “soaring aerodynamic roof” is quoted in news article upon news article without comment.

This Eagle Feeds On Spam

2008-07-30T00:10:00.001-04:00

When I got to Brown, I felt a grand opportunity to reclaim my mailbox from spammers. My Rice email address was all over the Internet, and this was in the era before even decent spam filters. So at Brown, I began to hand out unique addresses (using plus-addressing). At last count I had handed out over 202 distinct addresses, until I ran into too many sites that refused plus-addressing (and I stopped worrying so much about email in the first place).

Well, boy, was that a failure.

Over time, only one email address has ever been abused, and that too, only once. By corporations, that is. On the other hand, one group of spammers has made my mailbox hell by treating each of these addresses as distinct and sending me multiple copies of the same thing. Those spammers would, of course, be the most shameless hustlers of the Internet: academics trying to disseminate conference announcements. (I recently tracked down that the worst abusers are the logic programming community. And there seems to have been some innocent or malicious collusion with ETAPS 2006.)

So it was with some surprise that I recently saw spam addressed to a unique address I created all the way back in February 2004. And I was deeply saddened to see that it's the address I gave to my favorite hotel—the Adler—in one of my favorite cities, Zürich. That's right: a quality, discreet hotel in a city that pride itself on its discretion in a country that makes a living of discretion...sends spam!

For shame, Hotel Adler.

Next, my Swiss bank will be generating gaudy low-initial-interest-rate credit-card offers and selling my account information to florists.

Slouching Towards Slackerdom

2008-07-28T22:07:00.004-04:00

It's official: Providence is a slacker town.

I'm increasingly of the view that the New York Times chooses content largely for blog-worthiness. How else to explain such a lackadaisical, listless, wandering...oh wait, those are the people the article's about. But the article in question, Towns They Don't Want to Leave, tells you just what you already know—that college towns are havens for hangers-on, some of whom do nothing and others of whom experiment and accomplish—in that special NYT kind of way, which is to spot trends so slowly that everyone's already forgotten about them. And to wrap them up in a top-k listing to give bloggers something to argue.

But, all that's neither here nor there. What (or who) is here is, for instance, a class act as a cheese-maker: according to the Providence Daily Dose, that's Louella Hill, who revolutionized the food sources and products at Brown. The article's central Providence slacker, Megan Hall, is one of the sharpest, liveliest Brown students I've ever had the pleasure of meeting, brimming with great attitude and incadescent energy. It's people like this make Providence a worthy competitor to Davis or Athens, GA. And while I disagree with some of these people about their politics or economics, life would be much, much poorer without them.

(Somewhat disturbing is a mutual friend's claim that the author is a friend of Megan's. A rather relevant fact that ought to have been in the article...if it were in a serious publication, that is.)

The Sky's No Limit

2008-07-27T17:29:00.008-04:00

For many years now, we've had a silent running battle in the house. Kathi thinks the walls are too white; she finds them institutional, hospital-like. I say they have an “art museum” aesthetic—which is just a sophisticated way of saying, “Yes, they're white, perhaps even too white, but provided we have an easy justification we don't have to do anything about it”.

Well, we've been attacking the walls for some time now, and gradually reducing the whiteness. We've mostly just removed one white wall per room, but even that has made a dramatic difference (indeed the most, as any incremental changes would have diminished marginal value).

Our latest ~~victim~~ ~~folly~~ canvas has been a wall in the guest bedroom upstairs. We contemplated various blandly uncontroversial shades, but knew we were compromising. Ultimately we decided what we really wanted was to paint a sky: a night sky, fading into dawn, dark at the top and brightening as we go down.

This would be a good moment for an interlude pointing out that we have no painting skills whatsoever individually, and perhaps even less between us. We've painted a few walls with a roller, and even those were slightly touch-(up-)and-go affairs. The only reason we even contemplated this sky affair is because it was so outrageously beyond our skill that we were too ignorant to be afraid.

We knew we didn't stand a chance of any realistic sky-like look, so we abstracted. We would paint three bands in three distinct blues; that was easy enough. The problem was merging them. Kathi's Web reading implied that sponges were the way to go. But in a few moments, the paint lady at our fabulous local hardware store Adler's (may they live long and prosper) had convinced us this was a terrible idea.

Did she have an alternate suggestion? No, she didn't. It's always a bad, bad sign when all the staff in the paint department gather around saying, “Hmm, that's intriguing...I have no idea what you should do, but do let us know how it worked out!”, and that's just what they were doing here. But Adler's is a terrific store; the staff also went through several books with us, and finally, on page 128 of Decorative Paint Techniques & Ideas, we found something loosely like what we were looking for: a “graduated color wash”.

The book's suggestion hinges crucially around the use of glaze (indeed, in a 3:1 ratio to paint), applied with a 4" “good quality” paintbrush in long, lateral strokes. We tried a small sample on a piece of cardboard using a cheap, small brush, but we both knew we weren't really interested in how it worked out on cardboard; so we went at the wall.

It was terrible.

The glaze is supposed to slow drying (which it does), but it also streaks the paint. The result was an impressionistic set of lines, but hardly the sky we'd set out for. (To the book's credit, it looked pretty much exactly as the photograph suggested it would.) It wasn't bad, mind, just not a sky at all.

Worse, I'd missed a few patches while painting. Repairing this was painful. Wherever the brush begins applying, it leaves a broad vertical mark; you have to then go further in the same direction to cover up the mark, and then again, all the way to the wall's edge (and get the edging right, again).

Meanwhile, we were running out of paint-glaze mix, so we had to make some more. Since the lower-glaze ratio mixture was less streaky, we didn't add any more glaze, only paint. This produced better patches, but the entire process of applying patches was so frustrating we decided the wall was good enough, and left it to dry. Until we went back to inspect it an hour later, and saw a few more spots...

This time, I took the cheapo brush and tried to apply a little patch. Amazingly, there was no vertical brush mark! I tried another patch. Ditto. And another. And so on. Losing track of our careful markers (top 20% in deep blue, next 30% in middle blue, bottom half in light blue) I sort of just dabbed away wherever I found streaks. Well over an hour later, most of the wall had been painted over, this time in small patches with a small brush and with very little glaze mixed in.

The result:

The wall actually looks better than this photo suggests. From the other end of the room, even we find it a remarkably credible sky. All that random patching, it turns out, was just the ticket! And here's a little detail:

In moderation (and especially with patching), the streakiness of the glaze proves to be just the right thing to create a wispy sky.

Dan Quayle's Secret Occupation

2008-07-26T23:20:00.004-04:00

In Yahoo's translation service (formerly Alta Vista's Babel Fish), enter

tomate

and ask for translation from Portuguese to English. It responds with

tomatoe

Given that this problem does not occur when translating from, say, Spanish to English, it suggests that Babel Fish has a separate vocabulary for each pair of languages, rather than an intermediate semantic representation. This would also explain why the set of X-to-Y pairs is fixed.

Google Translate doesn't suffer from this problem. They allow a free choice of source and target languages. From what I can tell, the superior technology they employ to solve this translation problem is to avoid translating anything at all. (Seriously, whether it's their HTML parser or their core translation routine—I haven't invested time to investigate, and I suspect it's the former to blame—their “translator” routinely returns the input unchanged as output.)

How to Climb Like a Champ

2008-07-20T17:16:00.013-04:00

I have discovered the secret weapon behind Chris Carmichael's success with climbers.

Chris is the coach behind Lance Armstrong's magnificent performances in the mountains of France. Now that we've had two Tours in a row in which other extraordinary climbers have been thrown out for illegal substances, many minds wonder what Lance was on (besides, as his famous Nike ad said, his bike for six hours a day).

Fortunately, for the right sum, Carmichael will tell us. Let's look at his advertisement (Bicycling magazine, July 2008, page 113):

Gives away nothing, does it? Now look at it again.

First, you'll have to ignore the model on the left who has the posture of a squat toad and the expression of someone who has just swallowed one. The one on the right is the one we are all supposed to aspire to be.

Ignore the geological oddity of this place, where each hill seems to be composed of entirely different substances. If the hills you train on don't look like that, well, that also explains why you aren't winning any Tours de France.

Ignore the extraordinary sharpness of the bleached rocks in the middle distance. Why did they use a photograph where rocks, not bicyclists, were in focus? No doubt because the Carmichael-trained cyclists ride so fast, no camera can capture their movement.

Focus, instead, on what's between the “dancing on his pedals” rider's legs. No, no, not like that! Here's the detail:

It's extraordinary. Where you would expect to see the background (of rock and grass in unearthly focus), you see...the fragment of a yellow oval with the letters “MIC” in the upper half, looking exactly the same as Carmichael's logo. And just a bit lower is what appears to be a third wheel for the bicycle, with a tire of clearly different type, hovering in the air, as if ready to drop like landing gear on demand. And if you look further down this montage (not—it is now clear—ever to be confused with a montagne), to the left of Carmichael's corporate logo you'll see a profusion of chains and gears and drivetrains and other instruments of S-and-M. (And the typo in the URL—trrainright.com—is just a bit of icing.)

When Lance won at Limoges, he said he rode with “the strength of two men”. Now, for a small fee, you too can have your second man.

Or, maybe it's possible that the secret to Carmichael's success is something else entirely.

It's Photoshop.

Dutch Mountain → Kenyan Mountain?

2008-07-17T20:21:00.002-04:00

Nicholas Leong has a dream: to turn Kenyans from Eldoret into professional bicyclists. Since they already vaporize marathon runners in their wake, this is a fairly natural next step. To make his point, he's recruited two riders to climb L'Alpe d'Huez and, hopefully, come close to the record time for the climb. It's a quixotic effort of the kind we'll look back on years later and ask, “Duh! Why didn't someone do that sooner?” So, good on you, Nicholas, and good luck, Zakayo and Mwangi. You'll roast my time, that's for sure.

Functional Programming and the ACM Curriculum

2008-06-30T23:47:00.004-04:00

In May 2008, ACM SIGPLAN organized a workshop on Undergraduate Programming Language Curricula. One of the outcomes of this workshop was a proposal to put functional programming in the ACM core curriculum. This was Stuart Reges's brainchild, and Matthias Felleisen and I worked with him on it. We were very pleased to accomplish this in a “zero footprint” fashion.

Of course, this has earned a little (but surprisingly little) sniping from the vasty deep that is the Internet. Stuart and I wrote some prose not only explaining how we planned to accomplish the zero-footprint but, even more importantly, why this material belongs there. It should be useful reading for people who are stuck in the old-fashioned trap of “paradigms” (more on that later).

Because I don't know what will happen to this prose when it's incorporated into the final report from the workshop, I'm posting the original version of it here. If you're stuck in a discussion about this change, feel free to refer to this.

NB: This is co-authored with Stuart Reges, and inspired by some text from Larry Snyder, who both seem to have more sense than to have blogs of their own.

Rationale for the Change to the CS2001 Curriculum

The proposed change has the following structure:

Knowledge Unit Current Proposed ----------------------------------------------------- PF4 Recursion 5 2 PF5 Event-driven programming 4 2

PL1 Overview of PL 2 0 PL2 Virtual Machines 1 0 PL3 Language Translation 2 0 PL6 Object-oriented programming 10 10 PL7 Functional Programming 0 10 -- -- Total 24 24

The changes have two key design goals:

To make the functional programming unit (FP), currently listed as PL7 in the curriculum, required rather than optional.
To account for this change in a "budget-neutral" way.

First we describe the high-level motivation for this change.

Functional programming is not merely about a change in syntax; rather, it forces students to approach problems in a novel way. This increases their mental agility and prepares students for a life of practice in a world where languages continuously grow, morph, and sometimes shift their perspective. This is not just the academic community speaking: this advice comes from influential industrial practitioners including Joel Spolsky, Steve Yegge, Paul Graham, Eric Raymond, and Peter Norvig, who have all written vocally about it.
The growth and change of languages, and the influence of functional programming, is not hypothetical. Virtually every significant mainstream language that has been designed, has gained prominence, or has been improved in the past decade, from JavaScript to Ruby to Java to C# to Visual Basic, incorporates notable features that used to be associated with functional programming. Datacenter programming techniques such as MapReduce grow directly out of functional programming. Microsoft has championed the use of functional constructs like closures in the .NET framework as the best way to express database and XML queries. The rise of multicore architectures is imposing new pressures on programmers to avoid the use of shared state whenever possible. Learning functional programming takes students directly to the source, without the overhead and pain of sometimes unwieldy encodings of these ideas.
By exposing students to multiple languages before they graduate, we make a strong statement about what they can expect to see in practice. History shows that the dominant programming language changes roughly every seven years, and over two or three of these changes little stays the same other than syntax. Furthermore, modern systems are rarely built in a single language alone; developers find it advantageous, and sometimes necessary, to use a combination of languages of widely different styles. Therefore, exposing students to a variety of styles is an essential part of their education.

Below we discuss the rationale for changes to specific knowledge units.

The topics in PF4 (Recursion) and PF5 (Event-driven programming) lend themselves naturally to coverage in both object-oriented and functional programming. Functional programming has traditionally made paradigmatic use of recursion, while the callbacks that guide event-driven programming are a natural fit when discussing closures. Furthermore, by seeing these topics in both contexts, students will be in a better position to compare and contrast their expression in different styles.
The topics in PL1 (Overview of programming languages), PL2 (Virtual machines) and PL3 (Language translation) are important topics, but we find it difficult to say much of use within this little time. The result is an enumeration of jargon without any deep study of concepts. Students will be better served by a substantial exposure to a functional language that serves as a contrast to whatever object-oriented language they will also learn. This experience of learning two different languages is more important than a superficial coverage of these other PL topics.
One of our major goals is to bring parity between the number of hours devoted to PL6 (Object-oriented programming) and PL7 (Functional programming) by requiring a substantial experience with each approach.

It is worth noting that the proposal is neutral about implementation. Some schools will choose to incorporate functional programming into their introductory sequence. Other schools might include it in an advanced programming course or a discrete structures course. And other schools will fit this into a required programming languages course.

NNTR / NN2R

2008-06-30T23:19:00.002-04:00

Mitch Wand pointed me to this article by an email veteran bemoaning what has become of the medium. Obviously, I concur.

One annoying type of message that continues to throw me off my game is those brief “okay” and “thank you” messages, especially from staff. I've been getting increasingly good at anticipating these and affixing NNTR or NN2R to my preceding message. Amazingly, both the former and the latter are indexed in Web dictionaries, which makes me wonder why people don't use them more. [That's “No Need To Reply”, natch, not a Myers-Briggs indicator, though it might as well be.]

Anyway, I do, and I encourage you to as well.

Meanwhile, you ask, what do you do? I'm afraid I still send those replies to staff members, because I think it's just basic etiquette (though many a misplaced good intention has been born there...). I'd like to ask them someday whether they'd be offended if I stopped doing this and instead used that old classic from the days of Usenet: TIA (that's “Thanks in Advance”, for you wee ones).

Animal Instinct

2008-06-27T21:03:00.002-04:00

After years of dealing with a pair of unpolarized shades with optical inserts, an ugly, ungainly, heavy combination, I finally decided to splurge on a pair of custom Oakleys. For the price of a small principality, they will create prescription lenses—not inserts, lenses!—that fit the frame of your choice. Of course, my optician was taking care of all the easy and technical parts (like the prescription); the awesome burden of designing the actual glasses fell to me. Oakley's site has a bewildering set of models, all poorly differentiated, each of which has umpteen customization options. Yee haw!

“These glasses will make you two miles an hour faster!”, my optician had said. Surely the glasses alone were just the beginning of the gains. The right color scheme, I was sure, would only enhance the effect. So I spent a night at it. What, I thought, spelled a combination of speed and stamina better than a zebra? I already have Cinelli cork zebra bar tape—a tribute to the great zebra train of Mario Cipollini, which represents everything that is ridiculously over-the-top about cycling—and this would be the perfect match.

In the morning, I was pottering around pouring cereal as Kathi came by. “I designed my new shades last night!” She responded encouragingly. “Guess the color scheme!” She gamely tried a few lackadaisical options, then confessed ignorance. I paused for effect. “Zebra!”, I proclaimed. Her reaction was a little too stable. “Want to see it?”, I only half-asked, bouncing off in the direction of the monitor.

“Oh, cute! A cow!”

Now would be a good time to point out that later in the week, she confessed to needing to update her prescription. I'm just sayin', is all.

Anyway, the shades are here. They're terrific. In my mind, a zebra is what they will always be. Though I could have sworn I heard a moo as I was waging war with the wind on Blackstone Boulevard earlier this evening.

The Functional Functionary

2008-06-26T13:29:00.001-04:00

L.K. Advani is pretty close to my least favorite Indian politician, even after his recent softening. Who would have thought I could find common cause with such a man? And yet, this image, embedded in this article in The Economist, shows him sitting pensively while looming over his left shoulder is...a great big lambda!

It looks a lot closer to the (ugly) Haskell lambda than the (elegant) PLT Scheme lambda. It figures that Advani would have poor taste, and would pick a fundamentalist language.

Major Faux Pas

2008-06-22T21:42:00.003-04:00

Life was tougher a hundred years ago, and tougher still in the face of open discrimination. Yet while people like Jackie Robinson are celebrated across the US, an earlier pioneer, Major Taylor, the first black cycling world champion, has been entirely forgotten.

Or would be, if a band of enthusiasts didn't have their way. But this group has kept his memory alive, and just under a month ago crossed a milestone: a statue of Major Taylor now stands outside the public library in Worcester, MA, a city where Taylor lived for much of his active life.

I wasn't there for the statue per se—I find most of these civic monuments uniformly ghastly—but to support Lynn Tolman, who has been the most visible member of this tireless group. They did have two headliners attend the event, Greg Lemond and Edwin Moses, and I figured they might have something interesting to say. In the end, things came out backwards. The statue is quite superb:

Moses was interesting enough, while Lemond continued to embarrass himself and those listening to him. It's one thing for Lemond to declaim about drugs in the sport: he knows something about life in the peloton in a way that the rest of us never will. (It doesn't help that he has become a kind of confidant-in-chief for suspect riders.) But at an event like this—which he knew about well in advance—he not only rambled without continuity or coherence part of the time but, worse, didn't so for the rest. When he wasn't rambling, he was telling us about how terrible a time he had had as a young American in Europe, and somehow linked his own tribulations (immense though they were) to Taylor's (which were unimaginably greater). In the end, one felt pity for Lemond and an even greater sense of Taylor's accomplishment.

So, no photograph of self-promoting celebrities. Here's Tolman during her pleasant and modest address:

Average Intelligence

2008-06-18T00:00:00.001-04:00

We were at the doctor's yesterday, and a counselor sat us down to discuss some numbers. Even as I girded myself for the usual array of bewildering physical units, the counselor told us that the array numbers—which all looked surprisingly close to 1—were all in terms of MoMs: multiple of the median. Unitless: perfect.

Most of the numbers looked just right, but one or two were a bit off, so I asked what we should understand by an entry with a MoM value of close to two. Her response: “Oh, that just means its twice the average”. I tried to clarify the distinction, until it became clear that she simply thought “median” meant “average”.

And we paid for this service.

Why Spam Will Improve English

2008-06-17T09:47:00.001-04:00

As spam increasingly relies on misspellings, poor grammar, and poor punctuation to penetrate our defenses (one of today's message headers: “run don't walk to yuor broker” [sic]), the only email that will get through any longer will have to be perfect.

Footprint-Neutral Curricular Change

2008-06-09T19:38:00.001-04:00

Last wee we had a SIGPLAN-sponsored workshop on programming languages education. Most of the usual luminaries, and people like me, attended. One of the outcomes—what, in fact, I think may be our most significant outcome—was a suggestion to rearrange some hours in the core ACM curriculum. You can find the details of that proposal here.

If at think this is at all a good idea (and you should), please post a comment to that effect. Yes, it'll take an extra minute of your time because you'll have to log in, which will involve remembering your ACM user ID (which you have long forgotten), but believe me, it'll be worth your time.

Third Time Still a Charm: Guston's Drawings

2008-06-08T23:56:00.007-04:00

Inspired by my previous successes following The Economist's art recommendations, I spent a good part of today at the Morgan Library & Museum in NYC for their exhibition of drawings by Philip Guston. I had only loosely heard of Guston as an abstract expressionist, so normally I would never have taken the trouble to attend such an exhibition. But the article was persuasive, and I'm glad it was.

After a career of abstract expressionism (and protesting pop art), Guston underwent a crisis in the mid-1960s. Saying, for instance, “I like old-fashioned things like gravity”, Guston began to paint objects in the world around him. This was not, however, a return from the abstract to the concrete so much as a view of the concrete through eyes of abstraction. Some of his earliest paintings in this phase—just a few black brushstrokes on white paper, really—are stunning, such as 1967's Air or Wave II, which is simply an overlapping cascade running eccentrically down the paper. The books he paints become indistinguishable from skyscrapers, gravitas united with gravity.

Then, in 1970s, he finally cuts loose. A flood of drawings, first of caricatured Klansmen and then of boots and books and cobwebs and cherries and the rest of the trash of existence, give his work both a comic-like absurdity and a weight and feeling of urgency as he rushes to pump out his emotions. Some of his most wonderful, color drawings were executed in the very year of his death.

It would be pat to say Guston balanced the literal and the metaphorical, the abstract and the concrete, with ease—pat, and wrong. Instead he struggled with them, and put his struggles on paper. Thus on the one hand he was able to say,

The visible world, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough... Also there was a desire, a powerful desire though an impossibility, to paint things as if one had never seen them before, as if one had come from another planet.

like he painted his books. But he also arrested himself from returning to his earlier phase as an architecture astronaut:

Sometimes when my painting is becoming too artistic, I'll say to myself, ‘What if the shoe salesman asked you to paint a shoe on his window?’

If the salesman had asked, he would have received a cartoon showing the metaphorical weight of the world being fitted to a size 9.

Oops!... I Did It Again

2008-06-06T21:37:00.001-04:00

Recently I wrote about my experience running into an art exhibition in New York that I'd learned about thanks to The Economist. Continuing my trend of being a man about town, I've done it again.

I had given myself over a day of free time in London to see Brilliant Women, a collection of portraits of 18th-Century Bluestockings. But I met so many people at Imperial College—and so enjoyed my time there—that I simply never got to the National Portait Gallery. The Imperial folks had also kept me from paying homage at Foyles, so my schedule was looking rather dire. Fortunately I had booked to fly on one of the new late-afternoon flights out of Heathrow (thank you, Open Skies!), so I had a little time in the morning. Foyles opens at 9:30, the NPG at 10:00, and the former is just up Charing Cross from the latter. Still, it was a close-run thing.

The exhibition (which runs for another week, as of this writing) was worth the manic tour of the Piccadilly Line, the second time The Economist's art critic (was it the same one?) has come through for me. The NPG has some of the best captions of art anywhere (well, at least if you read English), and this exhibition was in the same vein. But there were also letters and assorted memorabilia.

Two gems. There is Katherine Read's portrait of Elizabeth Carter, and it is praised as “quite unlike the common run of staring portraits”. And a young Mary Wollstonecraft, just a year or two shy of breaking out into the limelight, is sucking up to Catherine Macaulay in a letter on December 16, 1790:

I respect M^rs Macaulay Graham because she contends for laurels whilst most of her sex only seek for flowers.

If you find yourself in the vinicity, run.

A Totally New Concept for Learning Devices

2008-05-21T19:55:00.001-04:00

The book.

That's the latest “totally new concept for learning devices” from Nicholas Negroponte.

To be fair, it's not just a book. It's a battery-powered book. That is new indeed, because a regular book won't stop working in broad daylight, but an OLPC XO2 can.

The OLPC Kool-Aid-addled salesmen continue to trot out the fuzzy math concept that developing countries spend USD 20/year per student on textbooks. I've heard this before from their staff and demanded documentation, and none was forthcoming. I'm not asking just for the sake of it; I'm asking because I absolutely, totally refuse believe that number, for more reasons than I can count.

Notice that Negroponte no longer mentions India in his list of developing countries (besides, there's no room for two `I's in his BRIC...), now that the country wisely turfed his snake-oil out.

One Lesson Per Century

2008-05-20T17:11:00.002-04:00

I'm not usually into the +1 thing, and I've been doing the utmost to hold my tongue on One Laptop Per Child, but Ivan Krstić gets it so right that I can't help but ask you to read his post.

No Shark Jumped; Not Even a Dorsal Fin in Sight

2008-04-27T21:14:00.001-04:00

A good way to find out how many of your friends read reddit (or some equivalent site) is to wait for something of yours to appear there. I'm rarely in the limelight, but last week my book PLAI made it to the top-5 of reddit's programming site. The comments are the usual Intenet combination of praise, flames, argument, and randomness. I was tempted to respond to one or two, but decided to preserve my authorial dignity.

I Am Not a Spammer, I Am a Free Man!

2008-04-27T20:37:00.001-04:00

Houston is an eccentric city. Its apparent mono-culture actually creates a remarkably strong and flavorful counter-culture, of which there is probably no more delightful manifestation than the Art Car movement.

Two lesser, but even more eccentric, attractions are the Orange Show and Beer Can House. And now, a twofer: the NYT informs us that the former has acquired the latter, melding the city's passion for eccentricity and capitalism. The article contains a key insight about Houston:

Marilyn Oshman, the art patron who founded the Orange Show, said it was no accident Houston played host to such attractions. “One good thing about not having any zoning is you can do stuff,” Ms. Oshman said.

The problem lies in notifying your friends of such events. I sent email to old Houston friends with the title “Orange Show buys Beer Can”, to which one responded:

I deleted this message as spam (but didn't purge) before I noticed that it was from you. I guess "Orange Show buys Beer Can" is more like the title of spam that I get than a typical legitimate message.

When the names of a city's museums trigger spam filters, you know it's doing something right.

Who Needs The Onion When You Have Your Eyes?

2008-04-02T10:49:00.000-04:00

During my morning news scan, I came across this headline:

Bernanke to give update on the economy

I did a double-take, because I initially parsed it as:

Bernanke to give up on the economy

(It may be Freudian.)

I mentioned this to a colleague, whose said he too read it the same way.

(It must be Freudian.)

The Woman With Qualities

2008-04-01T21:39:00.004-04:00

Have you ever had the experience of reading about an art exhibit in, say, the Wall Street Journal or The Economist? If this week something excellent is opening in Basel, next week it's something else in St. Petersburg—oh, and you really must check out this temporary exhibit in the trendiest new district of London.

Who attends these? Are there people who jump out of their couches and say, “You know, darling, we really must pop over to Basel for the weekend; this new ironic statement about post-modernism sounds so droll!”, and then proceed to buy tickets? Or maybe nobody does, and these reports are really just meant to make the readership jealous. Indeed, I think it's all about promoting the brand: you want your reader to think they're part of a group in which everyone else (but them) gets to jet off to Basel at the drop of a hat—and feels good about being part of such an exclusive club.

Well, no more. I have joined the other side. I read the Economist's report on the Frick Collection's special exhibit on Parmigianino's Antea, and knew this was one I would make. I passed on it on multiple trips to the city the past two months, expecting that Kathi and I would see it over spring break. And we did.

Not only was the exhibit worthwhile, but so was the Frick itself, which I have never visited before. It reminded me most of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, one of my very favorite art museums in the world. In most other countries, the Brera would be a national jewel; in Italy, it seems to be a bit of an also-ran to all but the cognoscenti. In the Brera I had the experience walking into just about every room of saying, “Oh, and that's here too?” The Frick was rather like that.

One of the most important things about reviewers—of books, movies, shoes, computers, bicycles, or any other pieces of art—is not whether they're “good” or “bad”; it's about whether you and they are calibrated. If they get every single review “wrong”, that's much more helpful than doing so only half the time. This is much harder to establish with the Economist, whose book reviews are written by an unattributed team, not by a single person. Likewise, having seen and liked the Antea exhibit doesn't help me much with future art exhibits.

But since I'm not often free to jet off to Basel (they're always troubling me with chores around here), it doesn't much matter.

My Slow Email Movement

2008-03-25T00:40:00.001-04:00

I've never been a slow-anything person, other than riding slowly up mountains, and that's only because of the weakness of flesh, not any unwillingness of spirit. So it's not often that I embrace a Slow movement.

But on my Web page, I currently say

Every month I get over 10,000 messages. Of these, just over 8000 messages are spam. In this same time I send over 1000 messages. I am, in short, a full time email employee who gets to do a little teaching and research on the side. You know, as recreation.

If any of the deans or assistant deans or vice-deans or sub-deans or deans-in-waiting or deans-in-law at Brown are reading this: I'm kidding! Everyone else: I'm not!

For a day or two, I played with Google Mail on my mobile phone. Then, one day, I was lost during a bike ride, so I pulled out my mobile to find my whereabouts on Google Maps...and found myself checking my email. Soon after the apps ceased to work on my T-Mobile phone, and I was happy to not investigate why.

For the past year or so, I have rarely been checking my email when I travel. That is, I check it once every two to three days. And here's something amazing. If I wait a day, it takes me about an hour to restore my mailbox. If I wait two days, it takes me about an hour-and-a-half. If I wait three days, it still takes me about an hour-and-a-half.

These numbers are slightly misleading. They mask critical tasks that require real attention to detail and will take much longer than a minute to discharge. But those tasks are relatively few: I can be gone for two weeks and find only two or three such tasks lying in wait when I return. Which suggests I'm significantly promoting in importance things I do encounter daily.

There are other knock-on effects. You've played email ping-pong, right? Everyone treats their mailbox as a task-manager, so you get a task, you reply or forward to put the monkey on someone else's back, they do the same to put it back on yours, and suddenly you've lost an hour of the day (because studies haved, shown that these context-switches are extremely expensive, though as computer scientists, we should have known that). And, since you and your correspondent are both on-line, your reply begets their reply, and so forth. Congestion-control through exponential-backoff, anyone? (This is why I enjoy clearing out backlog during times when lots of people are on vacation: significantly fewer replies.)

The backoff strategy shows where our email user interfaces have gotten it wrong. They show us when we received email, but who cares; they should instead tell us when we should be replying to email. And that “when” should be a combination of when we need to (based on message content) and when it would be prudent to (based on correspondent habits).

So I'm making a conscious decision. I'm going to go Slow on E-Mail. I'm going to treat it as an addiction, like drinking too much coffee. There doesn't seem to be a simple, prescriptive or descriptive classification of addiction treatment akin to the seven stages of grief; much of the on-line material about treating addiction is rather disturbing and possibly borderline dangerous (and, mark me, there's a megachurch out there somewhere that is going to make a killing off faith-based treatments for email). So I'll have to figure this one out on my own.

Do feel free to drop me a note with your thoughts.

Just don't expect me to respond.

How to Provide Information to a Black Hole

2008-03-24T20:33:00.001-04:00

Some years ago I was talking to a visiting scholar who was a faculty member in a foreign country. I asked her why letters from her country seemed to be so uninformative. She pointed out that there, faculty never read letters: they only write them. Even graduate students are admitted purely on the basis of test scores.

The facts were hardly surprising—after all, this is the system I grew up with in India—but after hearing the way she put it, the proverbial bulb lit up. If you never evaluate letters yourself, how would you know what letters should and shouldn't contain? The feedback—admission decisions—is seemingly random, and therefore of little use. [Yes, I know, that isn't the same as a black hole. But admit it, the title got you reading.]

Read on...

The Monuments of State

2008-03-24T01:50:00.002-04:00

And now, to interject a rare political comment into this blog. I don't usually get my news from TV, and in general avoid the klieg lights of frenzied CNN coverage. Yet during winter break I was transfixed by the news of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. It may have been work-avoidance, but I think it was something more.

Sub-continentals of a certain age-mine-will remember the heady days of the mid-1980s, when two young technocrats came to power in India and Pakistan. Sure, they may have been scions of power, and this may have endowed them with a detached view of affairs. In India, we joked that we'd gotten the raw end of the deal: while their new leader had chaired the Oxford Debating Union (at a time when such things still meant something in the sub-continent), ours seemed to have spent his time at Oxbridge wooing a girl and not much else. But ours had then led a quiet life as a pilot, and nothing seemed a better metaphor for the flight to modernity that we were promised.

In the end, of course, it all came crashing down (if you'll pardon my sticking with the metaphor). Rajiv Gandhi was quickly mired in a major scandal; his modernizers ran into walls of orthodoxy and venality; and eventually, on the road back to power, he was the target of an early, high-profile suicide bomb. Benazir Bhutto, for her part, similarly mired in the muck of politics and corruption and lost, won, and lost again in dizzying succession. Exactly why Western powers had so much vested in her return is unclear; no political realist could have looked on her regency with much hope.

And yet, today, India at least is a booming economy; her considerable social troubles are at least slightly counterweighed by her achievement and hope in some arenas. And none of this growth has come in ways that Rajiv Gandhi imagined. His vision was ultimately still one of top-down, government-led development (and while he did listen to people smart enough to appreciate the need for telecoms infrastructure, it is unclear that that is the push that led to today's widespread mobile phone adoption in India). The companies that dominate the headlines today were shabby regional outfits at that time. Though they have attracted new sparks, to a considerable extent they are led by the same people as they were before: suggesting that the problem was not one of talent, but of freedom to innovate. (As The Economist put it recently, India's vast licensing regime was, fortunately, simply not attuned to software, so it got free before they could clamp their hands on it.)

And so, a chapter of sub-continental politics that began with so much hope in my youth, and had already sputtered to a halt a few years later, formally ended with Benazir's abrupt passing (which had an eerie parallel to Rajiv Gandhi's own end). With it, I hope, also died a chapter in the economics of development. While the centralized, top-down push for innovation that these leaders represented failed dismally, decentralized, bottom-up forces have used their freedom to forge a remarkable industry. The only hope now is that Pakistan will find in itself similar pockets of innovation to parallel India. And as for the world powers, as in technology, so in politics: instead of trying to find the leader who represents your views and promises to thrust it upon her people, work on empowering the people at the bottom.

Austan Power, or, Internationals Lacking Mystery

2008-03-24T01:44:00.000-04:00

Many months ago, when Barack Obama began his presidential run, I was intrigued by his views. Finding relatively little that didn’t require much digging, I did what any sensible person should do in the first place: ignore the candidate and proceed straight to the advisors. After all, I expect most presidents of most countries (with the exception of those played on TV by TV Nobel Laureates...) couldn’t tell apart the GDP from the WTI from a CDO. It’s the bright sparks behind the scenes who make up the ideas and quietly let the leader shamelessly take credit for it (where else is such blatant lifting of ideas not only condoned but the outright norm?).

So I began to peek into Obama’s team. Imagine my surprise when the first two names I encountered were people whom I both respected immensely. The first, for foreign policy, was Samantha Power, the self-proclaimed “genocide chick”, better known as author of the moving and brilliant A Problem From Hell, her account of the genocides of the twentieth century. The second was Austan Goolsbee, an intriguing centrist (at Chicago!) economist who rose to prominence for his proposal to simplify tax reporting. That was enough for me.

Unfortunately, these people are fundamentally academics and think-tankers, not pols. It had to be only a matter of time before their instincts for truth-telling came to the fore...but how! In just a matter of weeks, the very two people who had so reassured me have now become household names in the most undesirable way: Power for calling Hillary Clinton a monster, and Goolsbee for secretly telling the Canadians that the posturing on NAFTA was simply that, a campaign tactic. Underneath the latter, especially, is a fundamental and reassuring truth, but unfortunately truth and politics mix poorly. And the result is that American foreign policy and economics will be the poorer for the distancing of these two talents.

Bread, Butter, and Jest a Little Jam

2008-03-24T01:16:00.000-04:00

Back in high school, I frittered away far too much of my time on (but made a bit of money from) something called Jest-a-Minute (JAM). I was surprised to see little documentation of this on the Web (though Felix Klock II pointed me to something similar at the BBC).

Anyway, here’s how it worked in my circle.

Six contestants sit in a semi-circle, and each is equipped w/ a buzzer (or its low-tech equivalent, a steel chair, that the participant can thump with vigor to dramatic effect). The contestants take turns. The judge reads aloud a title, usually something a little ridiculous (eg, “Bread, Butter, and Traffic Jam”). The contestant whose turn it is has to begin speaking on the topic within one second.

While the contestant speaks, the others can object. Contestants object by buzzing (or thumping); the judge decides which contestant objected first, and asks for the objection; if the objection is sustained the objector begins speaking, else the previous speaker resumes.

Scoring: every second you speak scores you 1 point. Every sustained objection gets you 5-10 points (and control of the mic). Every overruled objection loses you 5-10 points. Whoever is speaking when the buzzer goes off at second 60 gets a bonus of 10-15 points no matter how long they have spoken, except...if you manage to speak a whole minute without any objections sustained, you get a whomping bonus (100-500 points).

The unwritten rule is that the speaker has to strive to be funny. Judges and audiences are sympathetic to speakers who kept it lively. On the other hand, judges are smart-alecks who don’t too much appreciate being out-smart-alecked by participants.

Categories of objections (all subject to the judge’s opinion):

pause
stutter or stammer
repetition (words, phrases, concepts)
ungrammatical speech
irrelevant speech (no connection with the given title)
and the catch-all, “TWT” (time-wasting tactics)

Speakers can try to defend themselves. For instance, if they appear to pause for longer than the normal time between words and someone objects, they can respond, “I was at a comma” or “I was at a period”. They would then be obliged to resume accordingly. Well, they aren’t required to, but if they don’t, someone could object that they were ungrammatical and that objection would be sustained.

A good contestant stretches the limit. If, for instance, I had said “The world is—” and was interrupted, but the objection was overruled, I could resume with “The world is”. If someone then objected to a repeition or TWT, the judge would find that unfair and overrule that objection too. But if I again began with “The world is” and someone again objected to a repetition or TWT, the objection would be sustained (usually with a sarcastic remark by the judge).

For advanced rounds, judges sometimes throw in twists: eg, no sentence can be logically tied to its predecessor, or no-one may use words that begin with a particular letter. Needless to say, these result in general mayhem: like the closing minutes of an American football game, it can take 10-15 minutes to get through a “minute”.

Just Say Slavery

2008-01-13T19:54:00.000-05:00

Since I've been doing research related to human subjects (specifically, evaluating user expectations in computer security), I needed to complete Brown's IRB (Institutional Review Board) certification. The certification course and exam is conducted by CITI, an organization that runs these services for a host of institutions. Presumably they charge a reasonable sum for their service.

I think IRB is a valuable practice. Studies with human subjects are fraught with difficulty; it's not so much that even seemingly innocent projects can expose subjects to risks (though they can), so much as the very act of forcing experimenters to think about these issues is valuable, and can help them re-think their study to be less intrusive, risky or harmful. Of course, there is still a slightly surreal air to this kind of training, which is meant to apply to everyone, including those who work with children, with prisoners, the whole lot. But let's just assume that's the common case (even though I don't believe that), so it's important everyone goes through training in all those aspects.

The bigger issue I have is with the kind of reductionist tests that accompany such training. I went into the (on-line) course hoping for an interesting, educational experience; what I got was a quick return to high-school history class, an absurd exercise in rote memorization and the recitation of slogans. Surely this could be tested in an interesting way, even on the Web (more on that in a bit), but you got the sense they weren't even trying.

It reminded me of not only high school history but also of driving tests. Every driving test has a de rigeur question about blood alcohol or about drunk driving penalties (but not—and this is a pet peeve—about the rights of bicyclists). But the answers are not instructive; instead, they're petty. Suppose the penalty for drunk driving is three months in jail; the options are never (1) three days, (2) three months or (3) three years, answers with an order of magnitude difference. They will, instead, be (1) one month, (2) two months, or (3) three months. You, reading the rules, and being the kind of person who is too sensible to drive drunk in the first place, probably thought “Okay, so the penalty is some number of months”, figuring you'd captured the high-order bit; instead you'd only captured the low-order one.

You could design a smart test. You could put people in situations and ask them what course of action they would take. Sometimes, the reasonable course of action would prove to be the wrong one according to the law, and understanding that difference would be instructive. But designing such a test requires the designer to actually understand testing, which is (guess what) a subtle and rare talent. A good tester, for instance, understands that most questions should be meaningful to administer even in an open-book exam. And so on.

Well, the CITI test was a lot like a typical computerized driving test. I had to work very hard at memorizing key phrases on the assumption that they might show up later (and some did). Only one question that I got wrong was actually instructive. And then I got to a question along these lines (actual wording not reproduced, so that the CITI doesn't come after me):

The purpose of SSL is to secure data:

True

False

Well, I thought! A question right in my wheelhouse! Here was an eminently debatable proposition...and then I remembered this exchange from one of my favorite Simpsons episode (cribbed from here):

Proctor: What was the cause of the Civil War?
Apu: Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between abolitionists and anti-abolitionists, economic factors both domestic and inter—
Proctor: Hey, hey... just say slavery.
Apu: Slavery it is, sir.

So I played it straight.

And now I'm certified.

The What Medal?

2007-12-03T21:42:00.000-05:00

It's common in popular writing to use the Nobel Prize as a moniker for acts of genius, usually in a sarcastic way (“that certainly won't earn him a Nobel prize”). So it was with some shock that I saw an article today in the magazine CFO.com (aimed, naturally, at Chief Financial Officers) the following paragraph:

When it comes to rating the technological progress of office equipment, the telephone probably runs a close second to the stapler. Walk in to almost any place of business and you'll see the same rectangular boxes companies have been using for years. The only change has been a proliferation of blinking lights. If this qualifies as advanced technology, then the inventor of Lite-Brite deserves a Fields medal.

Curiously, I could have sworn that the print version (which I leafed through at a restaurant) said “Fields medal”, but the on-line version says “Fields metal”.

I realize financial folks are often quants, but it's still a curious reference.

Scribd or Cribd?

2007-12-02T17:08:00.000-05:00

Scribd is a new document-sharing Web site.

Does that immediately remind you of something? Where did the content for the music-sharing networks come from?

Sure enough, the reason I found Scribd is because I was searching on a phrase, found a hit on Scribd, and realized it was in an uploaded copy of my book. Needless to say I didn't upload it, nor did I authorize it.

You would think the site would take real precautions to validate uploaded content. But they don't seem to (I pretty quickly found other copyrighted content). This has got to be a lawsuit waiting to happen.

What really curdles my cream is Scribd's copyright handling:

Please note that Scribd may, at our discretion, send a copy of such notices to a third-party for publication. As such, your letter (with personal information removed) may be forwarded to Chilling Effects (http://www.chillingeffects.org) for publication.

How's that again? Chilling Effects was created to protect fair use, fan fiction, parodies, and the like. Of course, you might say, some of the people writing Scribd really are nasty or stupid lawyers (I've received such email once—a story for another day). But these are hardly the people who care about Chilling Effects, either.

The What in the Where?

2007-11-21T22:29:00.000-05:00

I was watching (with subtitles) Godard and Gorin's cartoonish Marxist rant, Tout Va Bien. In it is this remarkable sequence of lines, as two voices conjure up a movie:

There'll be a country.
In the country, there will be a countryside.
In the countryside, there will be cities.

In most of human history, this last line probably seemed entirely natural. The great secular and spiritual centers, such as castles and temples, were built in part to dominate their surroundings, serving as an overpowering beacon to the visitor from the countryside. And yet, to an urban creature like me, cities are what there is; countrysides are what you obtain by subtraction. To hear of cities as the passive actors, planted into the countryside, is remarkable.

When I'm in Paris, I imagine what it must have been like to boat down the Seine, pass the exurbs of huts and fields, and then come upon the towering majesty of the Ile de Cite. (Likewise for Madern Gerthener's great cathedral alongside the Main in Frankfurt, or any number of other such monuments.) That's why the view of the Notre Dame that most impresses me is from the waterside on the embankment—from down below. Then we see the cathedral as its builders actually intended it to be seen.

The Dog Days of Fall

2007-11-10T21:15:00.001-05:00

I was driving back home tonight, turning off East Ave onto Blackstone Blvd, just over a mile-and-a-half from home. The area is generally a little dark—there's a cemetery on one side and a park on the other—and in addition, a road light seemed to be out. In the summer there are often people in the park late into the evening, resulting in a row of cars along the road's edge, but it's been a cold day and an even colder evening, so there was nobody present.

Except for a dog-like shape that crossed the road, paused, and then crossed to the other side.

Having grown up for eighteen years with a succession of three different German Shepherds, I'm pretty finely attuned to their profile. This had a similar profile but something was a bit off, like I was looking at the first cousin of an Alsatian: bushy tail, leaner, just that little bit more lupine. On a hunch I pulled over to look for an owner, saw none, then tracked the animal a bit, and we traded stares....

Coyote!

We've had a few coyote sightings in the towns near Providence, and this of course is a matter of some hand-wringing. In an ironic kind of consistency, the same people who typically engage in NIMBYism about development appear to go NIMBY over coyotes as well. There's a routine controversy over whether to kill them or be more humane, and whether killing them actually decreases or increases their numbers.

My inclination was to do absolutely nothing. The animal probably lived in the expanse of the cemetery, and didn't seem to be straying into “town”. And I would have left it there, except that the divider of Blackstone Blvd. has a wonderful running path that a few people do use in the dark. The last thing I want is to wake up tomorrow and read about an animal attack (it's always slow-news days around here, so you can just imagine what the local media would do with that).

So, with some trepidation, I called 911. They answered immediately and, to his great credit, the sergeant was relaxed about the matter. He seemed to be probing for whether I was hysterical about this. Once I assured him I was not expecting that Something Should Be Done, we agreed that the beast probably lived in the cemetery, had a pleasant exchange, he put me through to inform Animal Control (whose officer was equally relaxed), and the matter ended there.

I've had quite a year where wildlife is concerned (as I discuss at the end of my posting about my sabbatical), but right next door! Now it gets interesting.

How to Enliven the NFL

2007-11-04T20:50:00.001-05:00

I was watching the end of a routine game between the San Diego Chargers and the Minnesota Vikings today. Football (the American kind) has a unique notion of “running out the clock”: i.e., wasting time to end the game. This prompted that seer of baseball, Earl Weaver, to reputedly say, “You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all.”

Anyway, I was watching this game and thinking how generic it was: take away the colors and names, and it could be any two teams playing anywhere. What a waste of local color and character. So it occurred to me: why not allow teams to acquire attributes based on their names?

Imagine if the Vikings had real horns (not painted-on ones) on their helmets, and if the Chargers carried battery-packs that let enabled them to administer moderate shocks. (This would give a whole new meaning to the term “defensive battery”. Aside: the first few hits on Google for “football defensive battery” all refer to assault-and-battery charges on football players.) Various teams (Bills, Ravens, Bengals, Jaguars, Lions, Bears, Falcons, Cardinals, ...) could also outfit with horns, fangs, beaks, and the like. Give the Cowboys lassos, the Redskins tomahawks. The Patriots would be equipped with muskets and blunderbusses: lethal, you might think, but not when you consider the reload time. The Texans presumably arm with concealed weapons and lethal injections. Only the Dolphins, it would appear, are disadvantaged by this scheme.

Viva Bollywood

2007-10-24T23:17:00.001-04:00

I'm usually hopelessly behind popular culture icons. For instance, I rarely catch TV shows until they've peaked. So when I saw a promising preview of a new CBS show named Viva Laughlin, I set up the DVR to record it.

Little could I have imagined how strange it would be. It was a bizarre mix of film noir, slickish production values, flat characters, a quirky character (the lead detective) who rapidly turned creepy...and none of that was remotely as peculiar as its most bizarre characteristic: it was based on Bollywood. Indeed, from the very opening scene, characters would periodically meander into a combination of lip-synched and karaoke musicals, in this case pop music standards.

For all this, CBS demonstrated an absolute lack of ambition—an irony that can't be lost on a show situated in a casino. They didn't seem to believe in any of the elements, least of all the musical, leaving behind an utterly castrated and confusing show.

It figures that the one time I try to catch a show at its inception, the show would be cancelled after a single show (in Australia; they let it run for just two shows in the US). So much for my ability to pick popular culture: I ended up picking Fox Force Five.

The Most Bohring Country in the World

2007-10-13T20:55:00.001-04:00

I had just time, I say, and that was all, to prove the truth of an observation made by a long sojourner in [Denmark]; — namely, ‘That nature was neither very lavish, nor was she very stingy in her gifts of genius and capacity to its inhabitants; — but, like a discreet parent, was moderately kind to them all; observing such an equal tenor in the distribution of her favours, as to bring them, in those points, pretty near to a level with each other; so that you will meet with few instances in that kingdom of refined parts; but a great deal of good plain household understanding amongst all ranks of people, of which everyone has a share’; which is, I think, very right.

—Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

He is sullen as I hand it to him. He takes it, flips through, examines, moves on, and stops. He stares closely. Then even more closely. Then under a scanner. Now he frowns deeply. Scanner insufficient, he pulls it back out and stares at it even more closely. And finally he fixes me with a grimace: “This is not good! I cannot read the stamp!” I laugh slightly. “I see! Well, that's what there is.” This does not please. “It is not a laughing matter!”, he says sternly. “I will need to check on it.”

And with that, the immigration officer walks off with my passport and my supposedly suspicious visa. To be fair it is a bit suspicious, and we have the Portuguese to thank for preparing a visa that looks like it was cooked up by a third-rate counterfeiter. But he's ignored everything else to fixate on the one (only?) thing that is entirely normal about the visa: the embossed stamp on the edge. A long five or so minutes pass (as I try not to look “suspicious”, whatever that may mean, for their hidden cameras undoubtedly trained on me) before he returns and grudgingly lets me through.

But he's not done having the last word. After complaining about the embossing (which later proves to be entirely identical in quality to that on all my other visas), he wants to grind in his thoroughness, competence, and general unhappiness at the state of my passport. So he flourishes my latest UK visa and says, “And they got this also wrong!” I've examined (and used) that visa several times, so it seems hard to believe the British Majesty's service and I could both have missed something. But the Danish Majesty's service is pointing right at the offending item: the end-date on the visa. “It should be [20]06 and instead it says [20]16!”, he bellows, as he jabs accusatorily at the offending bit of paper.

If I weren't horribly jet-lagged, I would have pointed out that this would mean my visa was valid for -1 days. As it was I asked exactly what was offensive about it. “That means it is a visa for ten years!”, he declares, as if the rest is self-evident. With polite dignity I respond, “And that is because I have a ten-year visa to the UK”. His look changes from superior to startled, and his eyes reflect absolute incomprehension.

Welcome to Denmark, I think. And I remember why it feels like the UK will outrun the Continent.

Indulge me a little, here, as I propose a theory. The superficial differences are so stark, and so many, and so overwhelming, that the initial reaction would rightly be mocking laughter. Nevertheless, I'd like to suggest that Denmark is the Nordic Portugal: a formerly glorious colonialist, so greatly reduced in power and circumstance as to build an entire introspective national identity out of that decline; a homogenous region with a minority language, sitting on the fringes of and apprehensive of the European experiment of socio-politico-economic union.

I was here on invitation to give a talk at an increasingly successful IT industry conference called JAOO, held annually in Århus (Aarhus). When I started to page through whom I knew at Danish universities, though, I realized it would be foolish to not spend some time visiting the hordes (Danvy, Møller and Ernst at Århus; Henglein, Lawall, Schürmann at various schools in Copenhagen; and that's only half the list, just those I know well personally). And I was curious to see how this Adam Smith-ian would perceive Denmark itself.

My first impression is a shock. I'd expected a northern Switzerland: clean to a fault. Instead I confront certainly the messiest train station I have seen in Europe. This, it appears, it not an isolated incident. Both in Copenhagen and in Århus, both in the mornings and the evenings, train stations are flooded with litter (usually of the wrapping-paper variety). Never mind recycling bins (of which there aren't any, anywhere in public—though this is perhaps forgiveable on the grounds that people routine misuse them anyway); trash seems to be a real problem.

Outside the stations, though, the cities evoke a certain quiet charm. My hotel rooms were in both cases clean (though not overly cozy), and evoked a Nordic sensibility (in both senses of the word)—though much more so in the renovated part of the Scandic in Århus than the dowdy Hotel Danmark in Copenhagen.

You can't visit Denmark without a Hamlet reference. While Copenhagen held too much interest (and the pouring rain was too much of a disincentive) to visit Helsingør (Elsinore), I was delighted by the very first street name I saw in Århus: Rosenkrantzgade. Oddly, while Rosenkrantz is common enough, there are no Guildenstern's to be found in plain sight.

JAOO 2007

My primary reason for being in Denmark was to speak at the JAOO conference. This is an industrial conference that this year was attended by about 1200 people, and I spoke about Flapjax in a track about novel ideas of practical import. I was a bit concerned about speaking in one of five or six parallel tracks and at the same time as some high-profile speakers, but the talk was superbly attended (I had guessed somewhere between 150 and 200; the next day at the University I met the student volunteer for my talk, who told me there were 178 people). Audiences here are quiet and, given that they're commercial developers paying top kroner to attend, not as demanding as I'd have expected (I don't think it was just me—other speakers shared the same feeling), but I did make some very good contacts. (The only strange encounter was with Jim Coplien, who happened to sit with Erlang's Joe Armstrong and me at a dinner for speakers and proceeded to pick a surreal argument that clearly represented some long-standing itch he suffers from—I was happy to let Joe argue with him while I had a very good conversation with ActiveState's Shane Caraveo instead.)

Overall, then, I had a good experience at JAOO. The organiers, especially Katrine Hofmann Gasser, are top-notch. The tech support was the best I've ever seen: one person was dedicated to avoiding the common problem that projectors cut off part of the screen. On the other hand it's a dreadful place for a vegetarian, no matter how much you warn them about it in advance. At the speaker's dinner, the only veggie item was shredded beets and some zucchini (i.e., sides for the real stuff). When I asked the staff, one young man kindly walked me around the various platters of mains and pointed to a bit of tomato stuffed between some kind of animal meat and to a bit of pumpkin laid out to decorate large cubes of some sort of fish: i.e., to the garnishes. It's safe to say he didn't get it, and the effect was rather insulting.

One very nice feature of JAOO—one that I would love to see other conferences mimic in some form—is that they organize a run. It's one Danish mile, which sounds innocent enough until you realize that's about seven-and-a-half kilometers. I was very much looking forward to it but unfortunately came down with a cold, and wanted to meet two old friends for dinner to boot (the run is organized at a strange hour). Its highlight—which alone is enough to make you want to do it—is that you go through the ARoS art museum. On the one hand I was thrilled by the idea of getting to run through a museum without being pursued by the law; on the other hand I wondered how good a collection they have if they allow a large group of uncoordinated hackers come bounding through the premises.

Museums

I visited three museums in Denmark, going to each with low expectations and having all three vastly exceed even my undiscounted expectations.

Museums in Denmark were having their problems. The famous golden horns that represent the Danish national identity (they're a bit of a fake, but don't say that too loudly) had just been stolen. At first the police suggested a great mastermind at work (down to ominous reports involving black Volvos—in America it's black helicopters, in Denmark it appears to be black Swedish cars), but it proved to be an absolute amateur job. This suggests that the (nearly comical) problems the Norwegians have had keeping The Scream secure are by no means an isolated Scandinavian phenomenon where museums securing national icons is concerned.

But I digress. The Nationalmuseet has an excellent section on Danish life and the rest of it is worth a visit, too, including some remarkable historical artifacts, from some choice swords and beds to drinking horns—though the numismatic collection bizarrely illustrates coins from Haroun al Raschid with a copy of an Iznogood comic book. (It's not worth the explanation.) The Kunsthallen Nikolaj is a terrific exhibition space, and the current exhibit (Tent Show) was a worthy piece of contemporary art, the highlight being a video named The city is my play ground [sic] by citygallery and Anthony Schrag. And then there's the Moesgård (Moesgaard).

Moesgård Museum

The Moesgård museum is about 10km south of Århus. Its main selling point is—squeamish beware—the perfectly preserved body of a Stone Age man, so well preserved that you could tell what he'd had for lunch the day he died (my Rough Guide breathlessly gushed). This seems like a weak premise for building a museum around, and other one-artifact museums have sometimes been a disappointment. Not this one. A recent, major renovation and extension complements a collection of generic dioramas to explain the power of peat bogs as preservatives. (Did you know the Vikings used water drawn from the bogs for their voyages because it would not spoil?—that alone should have enabled them to sail the world!) Aside from the slightly cheesy spooky music in the bog area (and a reference to mythical bog creatures), the display is stellar.

Even better is to come: the material on the Moesgård man himself. The body (which is itself not that much to look at) is in a sunken viewing room; above this is a series of displays and panels including the obligatory touch-screen panel. My policy on touch-screens is to give them about fifteen seconds to see whether they will hold my attention—and they never do. Here, however, I stayed to read the entire panel's content, some of it twice. So if you're in the area, and you're looking for an alternative to what science museums seem to have become—turn-the-crank-and-watch-the-ball-roll diversions for kids, or overly graphical, information-free displays to let adults indulge in a simulacrum of learning—come check out what these folks have accomplished.

In fact, you should visit even if you couldn't care less for the science and the thought of seeing the body turns you off (which, by the way, is not a good reason to stay away as you can entirely avoid seeing it—I'm guessing this was one of the goals of the museum redesign, one accomplished with splendid subtlety). Between the museum and the water 1.5km away is a set of walking paths that lead down to a beach. The paths are maintained by the museum and don't seem to need payment, though the museum ticket cleverly doubles up as a path map on its back. There are two main marked paths; both have some reconstructed Viking-era buildings, while one of the paths winds through a reconstruction of forests from several eras. The map on the ticket is a bit imaginative, but just stick to the white stones and you'll be fine. Some of the white stones have red dots, evoking the ticket's rendition of the path, and others don't; but because white stones are not native to these parts, all the ones you see are signs of the Agency of Man.

One warning: one of the paths walks through a meadow that is populated by a group of rams. City Boy here tried to approach a little Viking ruin they were populating when the lead ram began to walk in his direction, staring intently and making aggressive noises. No doubt being Danish rams these are most polite and genteel creatures, but I nevertheless decided on a course of prudence. Just to test the creature, a few times I paused before resuming to walk in its general direction; but each time the very alert ram returned to its threatening posture, leaving me in little doubt about its intent.

The conference and the Moesgård Museum apart, Århus was a bit of a...not a let-down so much as a surprise. As the second city of Denmark (or so I was told), the largest thing in the area, and home to a vibrant university, I expected more of life and culture. The main “culture”, however, seemed to be shopping (which a former local explained was because that's where people in the vicinity could go for their consumer needs). The old town was pleasant but perhaps a bit less dramatic than many other European towns. They have an active effort to spruce up their river and its banks, and it's bearing fruit. Overall, perhaps Providence isn't a bad point of comparison: I'd score my own 'hood a bit higher, but of course I'm biased. What I couldn't understand was why one town needs three different Bang & Olufsen stores within five city blocks....

Copenhagen

Copenhagen is a city of dreamy spires and a football team named FCK. I've had a soft spot for Copenhagen since I bought a recording of Stan Getz Live in Copenhagen, and indeed jazz has long been in the air here. Even better, given my preferences, I happened to have ended up in Copenhagen at the same time as both their Blues Festival and their Film Festival! It was hard to concentrate on work amidst all those offerings, though my excellent hosts at DIKU—the computer science department at Copenhagen University (now you can work out the initials for yourself)—made it easy to stay honest. (At both universities, however, I discovered that colloquium slots are merely 45 minutes long, including questions. Visitors beware!)

Copenhagen feels a bit like a synthetic city, which may be because it has so many neighborhoods that maintain their distinct identities even today, many just a touch old-fashioned (how often do you see pissoirs in active service?—and once I saw a police car dash out into the middle of a cobbled plaza, so the (male) driver could run into such a facility while the (female) shotgun got out to chat with some locals). There is—yet again—the dominating presence of shopping, while the ever-expanding royals have peppered the place with castles and churches of varying quality (though some of the church spires are wonderfully eccentric, a sign either that under the Nordic and Lutheran rectitude lies a wild spirit, or that too much inbreeding produced some rather quirky royals).

Denmark, Generally

Denmark is one of the best places to watch English-language television. They have a lot of it, there are (decent) movies seemingly every night, and most of the shows seem to be unhampered by advertising. And that's not all: one night I got to watch the full-length, uncut version of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Virtually everything is subtitled instead of being dubbed though most strangely, unless I am very mistaken, the one show that was dubbed was Monk. (Some of the subtitles can be startling. I happened to catch a scene of Ace Ventura; where Jim Carrey said “Monopoly man”, the subtitle read “Matador-guy”.)

The Danes seem to have no pets. In a week, in the two largest cities of Denmark, I spotted only a single person walking a pet. I do not believe I saw a single cat the whole time. What cultural factors would inspire this I can't tell. (It certainly wasn't a matter of weather, because the last week of September was not especially vicious, at least by the standards of the area.)

Cycling is a big deal in Denmark. Indeed, it was listed as the top “attraction” by my Rough Guide (which may say more about the country than about the activity). But this, of course, is cycling of the stolid, intensely practical variety: in my whole time I didn't see a single road bike, though mountain bikes are plentiful. The Danish respect for bicycle lanes is refreshing and also somewhat scary (I wonder how many cyclists are subject to right-hooks). Then again, about a dozen times in Copenhagen I saw a bicycle being carried by a trunk-mounted bike rack of a taxi. Is this standard equipment for Danes?

Of course, the Danes may not have much of a choice regarding transportation. The country imposes a staggering tax on cars (180% or 200%, depending on whom I asked), which means (a) there are relatively few new cars on the roads, and (b) there are virtually no fancy ones: the contrast to German roads couldn't be more stark. Refreshingly, none of the locals I asked (and I asked many) about the causes for this gave me much guff about environmentalism; they simply referred to matters of balance of trade, and one put it very bluntly: “How many Danish car-makers can you name?” Setting aside the advisability of such tariffs, at least the citizens didn't seem to be deluded about them. (But the Danes clearly love their thrills anyway. One broadsheet headline I came across: “Danskere vilde med private helikoptere 1800 kr i brug i timen”.) Danish exceptionalism extends into other areas: not only their separate currency (a damn nuisance, frankly) but also to something called the Dancard, a credit card that is the only credit card accepted by some vendors (another nuisance).

One thing I never quite adjusted to was the shockingly high price of everything. I mean literally everything, even those things you'd expect to be moderate in a socialist paradise, like public transport. Even relative to travel elsewhere in Continental Europe in this era of a very weak dollar, I eventually felt numbed by the prices. One way to keep costs low (this is a figure of speech, you understand) is to avail of the food buffets. In the US, buffets suggest quantity over quality, especially a buffet at times served outside weekend lunches (e.g., an all-you-can-eat dinner service). In contrast, these are not only ubiquitous in Denmark, they're found at fairly good restaurants. Just by a way of example, at an Indian restaurant in Århus (“local Jutlandese specialities”, my host saucily suggested, before taking me to dine there), the dinner buffet ran to about USD 22, whereas a single main dish was around USD 31 (and we're not talking a particularly fancy restaurant here).

Smoking attitudes are still a little...traditional. I'm informed that only recently did Denmark pass no-smoking laws in restaurants. I was amused by my room at the Hotel Danmark, which had a strong anti-smoking statement at the reception, offset slightly by the ashtray and matchbook placed in every room. Perhaps I'd misunderstood them and they were for burning malformed visas.

Every guide to Denmark will tell you that the locals are perfectly proficient in English, and indeed the vast majority are. What is strange, though, is I saw less bilingual (or multilingual) signage here than I have anywhere else in Europe. I most certainly didn't see a single sign in, say, Japanese or Korean: I don't remember seeing one even on Strøget, the nation's premier shopping street.

I'll close with a little vignette. We were walking across the University of Copenhagen campus back to the department after lunch. I saw a few of these plump and delightfully colored birds that seemed to be ubiquitous, so I turned to my hosts and asked what it was. Amir Ben-Amram, a charming Israeli who spends half his time at the University, calmly replied: “That is a magpie. It is a crow as designed by the Danish.”

Practicalities

Vegetarian food isn't easy to come by in Århus. Under Engle is now closed, and I was never able to get into Gyngen to eat. Yellow Deli next to the train station makes a rather delicious sandwich in addition to having several more options.

Copenhagen has several vegetarian options, though I found both Flow and Govinda's closed down and gutted for sale or other changes. Den Grønne Kælder (Den Gronne Kaelder), RizRaz, and Morgenstedet are all excellent. Morgenstedet, in particular, is a bit of an institution: a communal restaurant deep in the heart of Christiania, offering by far some of the most affordable food in Copenhagen (and some of the tastiest, too). The Vietnam resturant, just across the street from the Nordhavn station, has good vegetarian options too.

For a peculiar (and controversial) look at the Danes, check out Danes are Like That! by G. Prakash Reddy, an Indian anthropologist who spent part of 1989 immersed in a Danish village. It's certainly possible (even for one as unfamiliar with anthropological methods as me) to argue with his technique and conclusions, but it is at least slightly amusing to behold the frustration of the Danes at being put under a microscope in just the way a Western anthropologist examines a Primitive tribe.

Adjacent headlines in the Copenhagen Post:
‘Disturbed’ Attacker at Large; and,
Loose Screw to Blame.

The Year of Ignorant Living

2007-10-13T20:33:00.001-04:00

This is a slightly modified version of an article I originally wrote for Conduit, our departmental newsletter.

Alumni might wonder about the charmed lives faculty lead on sabbatical. To be sure it is tough to return to civilian life, but not for what might seem to be obvious reasons (in fact, I've greatly missed the teaching!). Instead, this year has been terrific for me mainly because of what it's meant: a return to a state of ignorance.

For all our talk that research is an activity of constantly confronting ignorance, that's not what we really do. Research is more typically a man, a plan, canal panama (women sensibly leave absurd canals out of the picture). We may not know what precise result we're going to get—or even trying to get—but in the big picture we don't flail around very much.

I hadn't planned to spend this past year flailing. Now, I regard tenure less as a reward for past activity and more as a recognition of future promise; so the best way to honor it is to do something new, to view the freedom to take risks as an obligation to do so. Anyway, that's the theory; this runs headlong into (a) having established programs of work in place, (b) not knowing how to achieve ignorance (it's easy to decide to not publish papers or write grants, as Kathi and I did, but harder to decide what to do in its place), and (c) terror.

Proceeding with routine, I spent the summer and early fall working closely with Leo Meyerovich, Greg Cooper, Michael Greenberg, and Alex Bromfield on our new programming language, Flapjax. We finally released it formally in the middle of October to quite a bit of press coverage. In less than a year the experience of disseminating Flapjax has coughed up several surprises (press coverage for a programming language?—must be slow news days...), some negative in a curious fashion (as a result of which we've come to think of Flapjax not as a language but as a library), some surprisingly positive (such as its use at Berkeley). Those are all subjects for a different article.

We worked overtime on Flapjax last summer in part to have it out before I began my sabbatical travels. Kathi and I had been planning these trips for ages, carefully synchronizing the places we visited to be of mutual interest (since a sabbatical is also meant to be a time to recharge personally). Even before we left Providence, however, my carefully-laid plans were destroyed by a decision by the Brown administration that demonstrated a staggering lack of wisdom (needless to say, that won't be the subject of a different article). In a way, though, it was strangely liberating: if Brown didn't want me to accomplish what I'd set out to do on sabbatical, then I was free to do other things. So I did.

Our first stop was Edinburgh. Kathi was there to visit Keith Stenning, a cognitive scientist she knew from her work on diagrammatic reasoning, while I was there to visit Phil Wadler, one of the designers of Haskell and a pioneer of many programming language concepts. I was, however, also looking forward to talking to the seemingly dozens of other researchers Edinburgh has in programming languages, verification, and other parts of applied logic and in which Brown is desperately lacking. When it came to picking an office space, Phil told us that, by coincidence, he and Keith had adjacent offices and the one across the hallway from them was empty; would Kathi and I be willing to share it? It's been a long time since I've had an officemate but Kathi and I figured we could (just about) survive each others' company, and this way we could reduce our space footprint on their department.

What we didn't learn, until our first day in Edinburgh, is that our office neighbors in Edinburgh were Keith, Phil...and nobody else. Where I'd envisioned a long hallway with logicians in every direction you look, we were in rooms of a small tenment, whose door was locked to the world at large. Nobody was ever going to find us here, nor were we going to find anybody else! (Phil did arrange for me to have another, exclusive, office in the King's Buildings, but distance from home—more than any anti-royalist tendencies—made me use it only rarely. There I would have been near all those logicians, but still in a bit of an odd corner of the world.)

Geography is destiny, they say, and it couldn't be more true here. Stenning, it transpired, was no longer working actively on visual reasoning per se; instead he was understanding the logical models behind how people reason. His focus, with his collaborator van Lambalgen of Amsterdam, was on the famous Wason experiments in cognitive psychology, which are a kind of card trick that ask the subject to arrive at conclusions and measure how closely they hew to the entailment relation of classical logic; very poorly, it turns out. This has led some to conclude that logic itself is a poor way to study how people reason. (I hear the hallelujah's from Brown's cognitive scientists.) In contrast, Stenning and van Lambalgen, and others, had revisited the issue with much more detailed studies and found that there were parameterized families of logics that perfectly well explained how the subjects reasoned, and furthermore environmental characteristics—such as how the prompts were stated—predicted how people set the parameters.

Well! Kathi and I have been spending a lot of effort on the reasoning that goes into access-control security policies; but we've always known that what we're studying is tool support without reference to the underlying cognitive models. I had been nagged for a while now that properly executing this work demanded an understanding of these human factors, but I had no idea where to start. And now Stenning had accidentally shown us the world we were looking for. Understanding the consequences of this—and learning how to supress the repressed memories of my college psychology coursework experiences—has taken up a great deal of our effort since November, and will become an even stronger focus in the future. (There's one experiment I'd love to report on here, but can't yet. Yet.)

From Edinburgh we went to Oxford and Lausanne for PC meetings, thence to Paris to fly out to India. I've written at length about returning home after such a long time. After India came Australia (for a conference, followed by a personal vacation), about which, too, my notes will eventually show up here—for now, even nine months later, the memories of that continent are too vivid for words. This was the infamous left-right-left-right period of my life.

In late-January I attended a Dagstuhl event on Web programming, in which the main thing I learned is confirmation of my opinion that the Semantic Web folks are hopelessly out of touch with reality (perhaps it's a stealth marketing strategy). I was back in Deutschland ten days later at universities in Berlin (see blog), Tübingen, and Darmstadt, a well as another Dagstuhl, this one on end-user software engineering. Coming as it did after my Damascene conversion to thinking about user-interfaces this was a fantastic opportunity to revel in ignorance and soak up knowledge from the likes of Brad Myers, Mary Shaw, Margaret Burnett, Alan Blackwell, and Stephen Clarke (a UI designer at Microsoft).

In the early spring we visited the programming languages, security, and verification people at Penn, having several enlightening conversations with Insup Lee's group on obligations as a complement to access-control. We were originally due to spend all of spring at UT Austin; given all this other travel, however, we instead made just two very focused trips to UT (which too has a wonderful mix of applied logicians of numerous stripes). UT recently had the wisdom to hire Brown alum William Cook, who is surely one of the smartest and most tasteful researchers in programming languages; only Will can make even a topic like meta-modeling sound interesting. So a week spent primarily with Will and Don Batory was heavenly.

There were other trips scattered around, but the summer was a good time to consolidate and move forward. Usually I spend much of the school year planning for the summer (and hiring students for that purpose), but this year was obviously exceptional. So it was essentially pure luck that I stumbled upon two of the best students I've worked with at Brown, Jacob Baskin and Brendan Hickey, who continue in the tradition of Brown undergrads taking me in new directions (not least of all Brendan, thanks to whom I'm talking to vice-presidents and lawyers). Combined with two students elsewhere whom I'm co-advising, and my current PhD students—Arjun, who has made strong progress on a very interesting security technique, and Jay, who is feeding me doses of the Coq theorem prover when he's not busy getting married (congrats, Jay!)—it's hard not to realize that sabbatical is over and I'm back.

The end of sabbatical doesn't mean I've stopped plumbing the depths of my ignorance. In August, Spike got me excited about graphics for the first time, and I've been programming sporadically in Matlab since. Indeed, for the first time in my life I wrote a one-use, throw-away script that actually used trignometry. This has gotten me interested in research questions related to both the images and Matlab. I can only hope that if I lie down for long enough the feeling will pass.

I've also taken the plunge on a few other fronts:

I've long been skeptical of blogs, which associate a false temporality to thoughts. Largely pushed by Brown alum and Blogger employee Pete Hopkins, I created this blog anyway. It will be obvious to readers that I don't “get” the medium, treating it as a repository for essays rather than a dumping ground for thoughts; whether that will change, I don't yet know. I felt obliged to use Blogger, but in retrospect I realize I should have used anything but: that would be the way to test whether Pete was merely trying to drive up Blogger usage or whether he actually cared about what I have to say (my bet, like yours, is not on the latter).
I finally decided to self-publish my programming languages text, and to put it in print using Lulu, who have been impressive. (I actually publish the book in three formats: for-pay paper, for-pay PDF and free PDF. The beauty of self-publishing is that you can perform any outrageous experiment you want!)
I dove into understanding Creative Commons licensing—something I've put off for far too long—and found that it offered just the right mix of options for my book. So now people who've been excerpting parts of it (a.k.a., “remixing”) can do so legally.
I've started negotiations with a publisher in India that may result in a low-cost Indian print version, which is the one of the main benefits of a formal publisher I've missed.
I finally learned to use an image-processing application, so I can stop asking my colleague Spike, and Brown grad Morgan McGuire, how to do what I think they find the equivalent of balancing parentheses (well, for me; I count parens like some sharks count cards).

It's also been a wonderful year personally: from the urban delight that is Edinburgh to the new world being created in real-time in Bangalore, from walking in awe of nature in Australia to biking in Lance's town in Texas, from seeing (from afar) the site of the Burgess Shale to lying on my back on the Scituate Reservoir dam to bask in the Perseids. I've seen, up close and (sometimes) personal, everything from rattlesnakes to kangaroos, from a platypus to both black and grizzly bears. And as my blog's name suggests, cricket hasn't been too far away, from following a good chunk of the World Cup to fulfilling every fan's dream: watching England play Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground, even if that verb is a euphemism for the abject surrender of the Three Lions we witnessed that day. Over up!

A Driving Record with No Prius

2007-10-13T16:06:00.000-04:00

One hidden pleasure of my recent New Mexico trip was getting bumped up to a Prius.

When I first heard the term “regenerative braking”, I remember being thrilled by the concept. It was so obviously a good idea that I was delighted someone had taken the trouble to implement it. And the generalization of the concept had an immediate impact on my own driving, to the point that I saw an improvement in my mileage. But I'd never had a chance to test my skill against the actual thing itself.

There are many redeeming things about driving the Prius. Most of all, because jerky action tends to hurt mileage, and the Prius is constantly reminding you of it, the car instills a certain calm in the driver. It's a lot easier to obey low urban speed-limits when doing so means your car will whisper along on the electric motor alone. And finally, even though I put in a great deal of highway driving (which is not its strongest point), I averaged precisely 55 miles to the gallon on my trip, needing much less than a tank of gas where normally I would have needed much more: indeed, 55 is just about twice the best mileage I normally get from a rental car.

The car is, sadly, marred by several things:

Toyota simply has no internal design sense. The interior is true Toyota plastic with controls that are, in general, ugly, unintuitive, ill- and inconsistently-placed, -sized and -lit.
The relatively large LCD is another big disappointment, with cheesy graphics and no useful displays (e.g., when certain operations don't function, the LCD provides no useful feedback).
In my entire trip I never determined how to turn off the radio, only to turn the volume down to zero. (The volume button can be toggled by pushing, but whether it was depressed or not seemed to have no effect on radio operation.)
The rear “spoiler” is in a very awkward place, splitting one large rear window into two ungainly small ones; the glass warps slightly around the spoiler, distorting the view ever-so-slightly; and the spoiler is just about where the lights of cars would be, blocking an important visual cue.
The car beeps whenever you put it in reverse, a user interface disaster of staggering proportions.
There is a strange ‘B’ driving mode, which turns out to be the low-gear (but they didn't think to use ‘L’: the ‘B’ stands for “braking”, natch).
Hovering near certain speeds makes the electric motor turn on and off with regularity; furthermore, every time the motor disengages the car emits a slight clunk and changes its road feel, which is jarring.
And finally, the first few times I simply couldn't figure out how to get the car started without rebooting it. (There's a whole new meaning for a car's boot.)

Overall, the car doesn't feel quite ready yet. The internal interface, in particular, desperately demands Acura's masterful attention to detail when it comes to design and layout. And then, I think, I'd be delighted to get one.

Propane Rocks

2007-10-11T15:39:00.000-04:00

The best way to understand New Mexico is to consider the Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument.

Never heard of it, you say? That's the point. In New England, it would be one of the most celebrated natural sites. Nature is audacious in New Mexico, however, so it's just another little park, so minor that the last few miles of road to it aren't even paved. (Indeed, my decade-old Rough Guide to the Southwest covers Cochiti Pueblo, where it's located, but doesn't even mention the site.)

But more on that later.

Balloons

Photo Gallery

I was in New Mexico for a conference in Santa Fe, a town I've long wanted to visit. I was fortunate that my trip coincided with Albuquerque's celebrated annual Balloon Fiesta. Having now attended, I can confirm that the event lives up to its hype. The sight of literally dozens, perhaps hundreds, of large hot-air balloons—in different colors, shapes and sizes, but never mind that, just hundreds of them—is a signt not easily forgotten.

A few practicalities:

The most important question—to which I had trouble finding much information on-line—is whether one needs to go to the balloon park at all, or whether one can see the balloons (they are, after all, in the air, right?) from just about anywhere. The cost is modest (about USD 6), but I was more concerned about the crowds. Having made the trip, I can confirm that it's well worth going to the source. The area is so large that it's not as packed as it would seem (even though the numbers are considerable) and you get to literally walk amongst the balloons and balloonists, watching their preparation and ascent up close. Also, it's not always clear which way the wind will blow; the day I went it blew strongly to the north, and the balloon park is already north of Albuquerque, so from the center of town you wouldn't have seen a thing. (That said, some people on-line recommend going up to the high ground of Coors Ave to watch the balloons against the backdrop of the Sandia Mountains. This looks like a sound idea, but then you lose the immediacy of the ascents. If you can, do both!)
The event is more sensitive to wind conditions than you would guess from the coverage. Winds over about 10 knots lead to cancellation. So don't give yourself only one shot at watching the balloons, or you may be disappointed.
Don't drive to the balloon park. There's an excellent park-and-ride system with spots all over town. The extra cost is negligible (about USD 4) and saves you the bother of negotiating the crowded roads and lots. Buy the park-and-ride ticket on-line, print it, get to the lot by 5am, and you'll have a grand time.
At the park, there's a little ridge of higher ground at the northern end. Exploit this. It's a great site to set up a tripod, or just to watch the balloons as they drift away over the surrounding suburbs. It's an entirely different experience than watching them from the lower ground of the ascension area, so do both.
There's a grand tradition, apparently, of consuming breakfast burritos. Vegetarians will, however, have to hunt for one that doesn't have various animals pre-mixed. You can find food, but you'll have to work for it.

Beyond the visual and human spectacle, there is the problem of finding the balloons at all. I arrived at the park and walked around in a bit of a daze at—this being America—the sheer volume of commerce, everything from breakfast burritos to lapel pins to new-age crystals. After ten minutes of roaming (the Fiesta organizers boast of over a third of a mile of shops), I finally went to a nice lady manning one of the stalls and asked, a bit sheepishly, where the balloons were. She gave a big laugh, tapped me affectionately on the shoulder, said “Well, bless your heart!” as only a kindly Southern woman can, and pointed me off in the direction of the airfield.

Petroglyphs

At the other end of the human temporal spectrum is the Petroglyph National Monument (they don't have very many Parks in New Mexico—what you'd expect to be a Park invariably proves to be a Monument), one of the few national parks (I'm going to abuse terminology) sidling right up against a major city. There's a standard trail (in Boca Negra canyon) designed for everyone; this is interesting enough, but crowded, and too short to be satisfying. (If you're in reasonable shape, you need barely a third of the amount of time they estimate for each of the trails.)

But the Rinconoda Canyon trail, one intersection south from the Visitor's Center, is barely more challenging but longer, and excellent. This goes into the heart of the canyon through some fairly pristine scrubland. The park claims there are over 500 visible petroglyphs on this path; I can't say as I found more than about 20% of them (but then I was also trying to make time). The second half of this walk feels a bit disappointing—instead of walking alongside the rocks, you're now in the middle of the canyon—until you contemplate the idea of actually living here, as the creators of these petroglyphs did. Better than any interpretive sign, this walk conveys that experience.

Bandelier

Photo Gallery

One of the Southwest's more celebrated Native American sites is Bandelier, the dwelling of the Pueblo Indians from around 1000 to 1500, before poor land management (of a tough land!) caused them to abandon the site. Bandelier is known for its large collection of trails and remarkable rock dwellings, notably the so-called Long House, which is essentially a medieval condominium complex carved into a large mass of rock.

Bandelier may not be the Canyon de Chelly, but it's worth the visit nevertheless. There are two main foci in the park: the visitor's center at the bottom of the canyon, and a campground at the top. There are good trails from each, and a lovely path that connects the two. From the visitor's center a short walk takes you to the Long House and other artifacts, and a mile-long supplement takes you to a remarkable cave dwelling up in a hill. The ascent (and descent!) are not for the vertiginous; though I hate descending ladders, it felt criminal to pass up on the experience so, summoning courage, I trotted up the stairs and ladders. I'm glad I did. It's easy to see that power in such a society must have rested in those with the genes and conditioning to adapt to such a dwelling...while the slow guy got eaten by the bear.

Oh right, bears. There are black bears here. Normally I ignore this sort of information entirely, but my experiences in Banff (where we saw both black and grizzly bears) have made me a little more sensitive to such warnings (and the bear-proof trash cans everywhere were surely not installed merely to decorate or to confound the average visitor). I went to Bandelier early on a Sunday morning—well before the visitor's center opened—which is a great time to go, by the way, because it meant I essentially had the park to myself. To myself and the bears, that is.

The general advice for bear territory is to make noise as you travel, so as to avoid startling a bear. This would be fine but for the exceptional bird life in the park, and walking around reciting high-school poetry is hardly likely to help on that front. So I decided to stay silent (please, save your comments), saw some wonderful birds in the extended trail that goes to the cave dwellings, and returned uneaten and intact.

Of Bears and Other Beasts

In the early afternoon I did one of the overlook trails that emerge from the campground. Here there would be no danger of bears, or at least of coming up on one suddenly, because there are few trees and little shelter. Running late, I was rushing back from the overlook when I saw a snake sunning itself on the trail in front of me. Oh, I thought, what a lovely snake! It was a dark reddish-brown that blended well with the surrounding rock, and it had beautiful little diamond patterns on its back and black-and-white bands on its tail. Wait a minute: Diamond patterns? Black-and-white? Something I'd read back in Texas about snakes started to emerge through the haze of my consciousness, and that something was an instruction to stop. In the half-second it took for that thought to pass from brain to foot, however, I'd taken another step—enough for the snake to raise said tail and emit a loud sound like stones in a tin can. Rattling.

I'm a city boy, and we city boys know more about rats than about rattlers. I have since read that, if bitten by a rattlesnake, don't run for help: the blood circulation helps the venom spread. (Another thing I read, which does not inspire confidence: a wet rattle makes no noise.) My concerns were a little more immediate, however. Should I walk around, stand my ground and wait, or turn tail and run? (I've also since read that, from a safe distance, you can harass the snake into moving: throw a little sand at it, for instance.) Fortunately, I didn't need to learn any of this by trial and (very great!) error. I had already annoyed the snake, and after a few seconds it slithered a bit off the trail...and a bit more...and more. (All this while I was rushing to grab my camera because I know you, dear reader, will demand proof.) Finally it had moved off the trail, but was it lurking behind the large rock that it had passed behind, waiting to strike? I paused a half-minute and then, most beloved reader, having built up a full head of steam I ran, executing as perfect a steeplechase as you can ever hope to see.

Tent Rocks

Photo Gallery

So, back to those tent rocks. These “rocks” are hoodoos, a geological formation caused by the erosion of softer rock that lies under a hard top. We could employ euphemisms all day, but there is only one honest description of the result at Kasha-Katuwe, and it is perfectly accurate, even down to the details: phallic. Someone, surely, has nicknamed these the, uh, Devil's Mojo.

You absolutely should not miss out on Kasha-Katuwe (I liked it so much that I went back a second time, with Daniel Jackson). The thrill begins with the approach. Ever seen one of those roads that just heads off perpendicular to a highway, seemingly to nowhere—these are common in west Texas and other badlands—and wanted to take it to its end? Well, here's your excuse. The road, furthermore, runs just along the base of the plateau that separates Santa Fe from Albuquerque, so you can observe the escarpment up close. And then you're in hard-scrabble John Wayne country.

Which is why it's startling to suddenly see a sign to a golf course. Golf? Is there any grass, or is the entire course a sand-trap? I did not investigate, but a clue lay in the fact that there is also a dam of some size that appears to hold the water of the Rio Grande (and may explain why that river is but a mere dry bed downstream in Albuquerque). The juxtaposition of dam and golf course against the terrain adds an element of surreality.

The last five miles of the drive are on gravel (okay for cars, but not for RVs). This just heightens the sense that you're really getting out there, adding to which, you don't see the formations until you're nearly there. And then, suddenly, the hillside is alive with hoodoos...and that's not even the best part.

There are two marked trails at the main visitor point. One is a walk along the base of the cliff, leading up to an unprepossessing cave. Other than the opportunity to see one or two hoodoos (or hoodoo rocks) right up close (and, heh, heh, very personal), there's not much to be said for this loop...especially not compared to the alternative.

This alternative is the cliff walk (an out-and-back, not a loop), which takes you to the top of the formation. This is somewhat intimidatingly posted as having a 630 foot rise over 1.3 miles, which by my calculation is about a 9% incline. This posting is in fact entirely misleading, because the walk is much better and worse than that: the first mile of the walk has the same inclination as the cave loop, and virtually all the climbing happens in the last third of a mile. (Not that it's particularly hard anyway: from parking lot to the top took me 27 minutes, including pauses to make way for other people on the trail.)

But oh, what a route it is. For what they don't tell you is this: the hoodoos on this route—hidden out of sight from the parking lot and the cave loop—are vastly more dramatic; and the reason for that is that the first mile is through a slot canyon. The canyon alone is worth the price of entry and the drive, a stunning pink-and-grey confection of aggregate worn with utmost drama by wind and water. It's enough to make you forget why you came entirely, and the canyon, not the (remarkable) hoodoos, is the reason I went back to the park a second time. (Well, that and the company, but I was glad to have talked Daniel into going here.)

If you go, do it when the sun isn't directly overhead: the shadows are half the drama here. Also, if you decide not to drive the additional dozen or so miles of gravel to the next overlook, do drive another 300 yards or so, until you get to a gate, and turn around. You'll see an entirely different side of the hoodoos from there.

Interestingly, Kasha-Katuwe is only a handful of miles from Bandelier, but the drive between them is about 70 miles, the long way around. I predict that within ten years the last few miles to the tent rocks will be paved, and in a little while longer it'll be connected more directly to Bandelier. Even in New Mexico, a site this beautiful cannot be wasted. At that point, of course, someone will install an expensive cafe of the “Coyote Grill” variety at Kasha-Katuwe, but there's always the danger that, this being America, someone else will decide to illuminate the hoodoos every evening in a changing spectrum of kaleidoscopic colors. Can't happen, you think? Who could subject a great geological sight to such a travesty? You have clearly never been to Niagara, my friend.

The Cities

After all this, it was hard to care much for the cities. I must confess, too, that something has changed in my perception of the world. As I said initially, I've looked forward to visiting Santa Fe for years. But now that I was there, I couldn't bring myself to care; and what had happened in the meanwhile is Australia, a continent that completely awakened me to the natural world. That, combined with the tweeness and absolute ridiculousness of Santa Fe—a large parking lot, or a bank drive-through lanes, in regulation adobe—left me underwhelmed.

In contrast, Albuquerque exceeded my expectations. The physical location is stunning, and it seems to be a town that underpromises and overdelivers. Even the Nob Hill area, with its studied precocity, has a certain appealing modesty to it, and I was impressed by how few houses had lawns (as opposed to more regionally appropriate sand and rock) yards.

New Mexico is an interesting place. Not only nature but many generations of inhabitants have also been audacious here, with breathtaking effect (visit the Trinity Site for further evidence of that). It can be too easy to think of it—hills of yellow scrub, sky of the bluest blue—as a kind of cut-rate California, but this would be unfair and wrong. It is a slightly precarious place, seemingly dependent less on pure enterprise than on a generous dollop of federal money; and its native tribes lead a very troubled existence. (Surely their casinos do as much harm as good for a list of reasons that seems endless: the disproportionate distribution of wealth, the dependence on an unreliable revenue source, the incentive for young people to become croupiers instead of acquiring real skills, the execuse for those who might otherwise care to convince themselves to do nothing, ....) On the one hand it is a land trying hard to attract other forms of revenue (free Internet access at highway tourist information centers is surely a smart, tourist-friendly idea), but on the other hand I've never heard as many Christian stations on an FM dial.

Practicalities

Vegetarians in Albuquerque will want to check out Annapurna and the Green Light Bistro, both of which now run out of the same location at the corner of Yale and Silver, just south of the main UNM campus. This is hippie fare, but the Indian food is surprisingly pleasant (and their chapati is exquisite). Expect large portions and long waits for service, during which time you can listen to the new age music and read the Hindu philosophy on the order number flag.

Santa Fe has several vegetarian options, but food in the town in general felt a shade indifferent. Various sources raved about brunch at Cloud Cliff, but I was disappointed: the food seemed be liberally dosed in spices and sauces, but they hadn't cooked into anything. Annapurna has a branch here that I didn't visit. Tree House is very good (but drive slowly or you'll miss the entrance), though the menu on-line really has no relationship at all to what you'll find when you visit. I visited the Body Cafe several times, and concluded that their prepared food is indifferent, but their raw food is outstanding. I don't think I had a single good coffee anywhere in the state.

The Sage Inn in Santa Fe is an odd place. It's clearly a dumpy old motel that was heavily renovated. The Web site promises a great deal, but ultimately it's still just a motel, though two steps up from the typical American variant. The location is indifferent, but over time you realize it's actually pretty good (at its price) for Santa Fe: you can at least walk to the Plaza, even if the walk is not hugely pleasant. There is reasonable WiFi coverage, but the redesign clearly slightly predated modern times: there wasn't a single free power point in the room (other than the low-wattage plugs for electric shavers). The front desk staff are a morose, surly, clueless, and indifferent bunch (check your reservation carefully!). But the breakfast is surprisingly good (this being Santa Fe, you get yogurt and granola). If they would tone down their Web presence, improve the rooms for business travelers, and pay double to hire good desk staff, it'd be excellent value.

The Vagabond Executive Airport Inn in Albuquerque tries hard. They have an old facility, and the renovations give it a slightly surreal feel. The rooms are old but clean and enormous. The staff are eager to help: when my Ethernet connection wouldn't work (no wireless), they rushed me new (working) parts in two minutes. They run a 24-hour airport shuttle, and gladly also picked me up from the car rental lot the night before. But they also missed my 4am wake call, which seems pretty inexcusable for any hotel.

There's No Hills in This Country

2007-09-12T22:15:00.001-04:00

If you're an up-and-coming musician trying to catch a break, here's a trick for the new millennium. Give your songs the same names as ones people might be searching for (they don't even have to be covers, as you'll see in a moment), and get them into iTunes (okay, so maybe I contradict myself...). Indeed, I've lately been downloading versions of songs by artists I've never heard of, often to great musical advantage.

Poking about in this fashion, I came across a song by a singer named Wenche. It's a confusingly poor choice of name: if you're playing it for the hoots you'd spell it right, and if you're not, it seems an unfortunate association.

There was something else about Wenche, too. She was a good singer with solid (if entirely traditional) arrangements, and she'd pass for a country singer in any of the Red States of America...except she was just a little too country, you know? Her accent was just a little too pure, her drawl just a little too acute, her contralto trilled just a little too much. And there was still that Renfest-gone-bad name. Wenche?

Well, wouldn't you know, the too-country-to-be-true Wenche is Wenche Hartmann, and she's Danish. It was like Sue Foley all over again.

For a moment I hoped that Wenche would be playing in Denmark the week after next, but her Web site, despite claiming that “Wenche keeps a close contact with her audience”, doesn't list a tour date until early 2008. And as for her position in the musical pecking order, she's still thrilled that she “had the great honour of being the opening speaker at the Fish Festival in Strandby”.

Gaunt from Charts

2007-09-12T21:45:00.000-04:00

I've never really cared for Gantt charts. I've seen them but never really studied them, because they invariably represent the graphical representation of something entirely fake (such as time-lines of work in grant applications). Indeed, they've always seemed mildly worthy of suspicion. When 37signals got into some trouble for refusing to support them in Basecamp, that just confirmed my opinion that 37signals was a slightly eccentric but righteous organization.

Two weeks ago I was scheduling the dates when homeworks would be assigned and due in my course this semester (programming languages), and I wanted to check on the distribution of homeworks and ensure there were never more than two homeworks out concurrently. I set the dates in a calendar and tried to view multiple months at a time, but the result was somehow unsatisfying. I thought for a moment about how I'd like the information presented. What I really wanted, I thought, was a picture—a picture of the homeworks stacked as bars—

Oh wow. I wanted a Gantt chart. (As is so often the case, wisdom follows from necessity.)

Now nothing spells corporateness like a Gantt chart, and nothing spells corporateness like Microsoft, so I figured it to be an ideal match. (Besides, I already knew there was no point trying to do this via 37signals.) Creating a table of the dates in Excel was trivial, so all I needed was to find the Gantt chart mode....

This is how Microsoft wants you to create a Gantt chart (short of buying Microsoft Project, I guess). It's startling to think someone actually wrote those instructions with a straight face. For what it's worth, there's a fine YouTube video that explains this process interactively. Reading the comments is interesting: compared to the usual drivel that people post, just about everyone here is focused, on-topic...and damn grateful.

MIR3, This is Earth Calling

2007-09-06T22:26:00.001-04:00

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre, campuses are creating emergency notification systems. Brown has outsourced this to a company called MIR3 Intelligent Notification. We had a test run today.

I was aware this morning that there was going to be a test. But I was out for much of the afternoon so I forgot all about it.

I was at my desk this afternoon working on something important when I got a call. It was clearly an automated message (initial pause, followed by a slightly robotic voice), and all it said was something along these lines: “This is an important call. Please press 1 for an important message.” (Certainly the second sentence was verbatim.)

That's it. No identifying information, nothing, nada.

If you've ever worked from home, you know that this is precisely the kind of message that you get mid-day from guys trying to sell you timeshares in Florida. Same kind of voice, same lack of identifying information, same pretend sense of urgency to con you into listening further.

So I hung up, quietly cursing that the damn telemarketers had somehow managed to get my office line.

Only an hour later did I realize what the call was about.

Today they also sent us emergency notification email messages. The messages came in the name of a Brown administrator but from the MIR3 domain name, and the headers had enough to trigger the suspicion of many a spam filter:

Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2007 12:34:00 -0700 (PDT)
From: Walter Hunter <343821_6286449@notify2.mir3.com>
Reply-To: MIR3 System <343821_6286449@notify2.mir3.com>
To: my Brown email address
Subject: Faculty/Staff Notification - Test Only issued at 9/6/07 12:30 PM

It's even more likely to be binned in my case, because I know and have corresponded many times with Walter Hunter, and never through this email address.

Unsatisfied by my unresponsiveness it sent me the same message again, eleven minutes later.

The message body also demonstrated good attention to detail:

We are attempting to verify the accuracy of our data base. Please press or select "1" if you are a staff member

How's that again? I keep pressing 1 at my keyboard...but my email program doesn't seem to know what to do about it. (Don't overlook the charming Victorian prose touch: “data base”.)

And then:

!!! You may respond by doing one of the following: !!!

Nice touch, the three-exclamatory-marks. If the headers made it through a spam filter, this should give the message a fighting chance of being trapped.

And finally, one of my response options:

* Reply to this email with the corresponding number to your response on the top line within the body of the email, e.g., 1 for indicating that you wish to use response option 1.

Option# Response:
1 Faculty or Staff Member
2 Contacted in Error

Clearly these folks are adherents to the rule that, in an emergency, you should make your sentences maximally complicated. The logic is obvious: that's how you test whether the recipient is still clear-headed or is already suffering from smoke-inhalation.

Of course, this is why we conduct tests: so we understand how well our systems work and can, in turn, improve them for when we actually need them. But this first run does not give me a lot of confidence in this company's knowledge of how to create trustworthy communication.

Now I'm waiting to hear now many millions we spent on these “professionals”.

Resolving Unanticipated What, Again?

2007-09-06T19:09:00.000-04:00

My homies Ducasse, Wuyts, Bergel and Nierstrasz have a paper at the upcoming (2007) OOPSLA entitled User-Changeable Visibility: Resolving Unanticipated Name Clashes in Traits. Their abstract, as listed on the OOPSLA Web site:

A trait is a unit of behaviour that can be composed with other traits and used by classes. Traits are an alternative to multiple inheritance. Conflict resolution of traits, while flexible, does not completely handle accidental method name conflicts: if a trait with method m is composed with another trait defining a different method m then resolving the conflict Mayo prove delicate or infeasible in certain cases. In this paper we present freezeable traits that provide an expressive composition mechanism to support unanticipated method composition conflicts. Our solution introduces private trait methods and lets the class composer change method visibility at composition time (from private to public and vice versa), something which is not possible in mainstream languages. Two class composers Mayo use different composition policies for the same traits. [...]

Thanks to Microsoft Word, perhaps? Or the Web-publishing software?

Time Travel

2007-09-06T13:41:00.001-04:00

On Windows, a file has at least three attributes: Created, Modified and Accessed. while Modified and Accessed could be in any order (it may have been modified after you last accessed it), the one invariant you would expect to hold is that Created is older than either of the other two. Here's a file I just saw on my file system:

Created: Wednesday, August 29, 2007, 9:45:20 AM
Modified: Friday, April 06, 2007, 11:34:55 AM
Accessed: Friday, August 31, 2007, 2:33:41 PM

After considerable searching I finally found a Microsoft knowledge base article about this that explains how such a thing might have happened and, even more usefully, an article that explains the true semantics of these names and articulates the issues clearly. This latter article shows just how subtle it is to define precisely what these times mean—and equally, why it is equally important to define these concepts precisely.

Where's (Candidate) Waldo?

2007-09-06T10:32:00.000-04:00

A few enterprising young folks, including (full disclosure) a graduate student at Brown CS, have created a map mashup to track the US election candidates, Map the Candidates. The time-travel feature is quite interesting, and will become more so as the primaries approach.

The site has much more potential. Every press pundit takes pride in predicting who will become a candidate one or two years hence (of course, we only remember their hits, not their misses). By tracking news articles a site like this could perform similar forecasts, and take the bloviators largely out of the mix.

They're Baaack!

2007-08-29T21:20:00.000-04:00

You know summer is over and the Fall semester is in the air when you pass a group of what appear to be Brown students, intensly hunched over around a table, and overhear one of them say:

What I'm wondering is, how long do you have to look before you find an ideology?

A Useful Neologism

2007-08-22T19:10:00.000-04:00

Outsight. (It could've been more inventive, but it'll do.)

Flying Through Words

2007-08-21T21:04:00.000-04:00

It's rare that I encounter something in the computing world so novel, so fascinating, and so utterly different—so unlike anything I've thought of myself—that it makes me stop and rethink what I know and do. I recently came across something along these lines: Dasher, a text-entry tool, which I found out about from Spike.

It turns out I'm just late to the party. Several of my colleagues have heard of it, and Kathi even tried it last year as a substitute to typing, but she found it painful with a mouse. I, on the other hand, played with it on my OQO (a tablet PC), and it was the most fun I've had in a while.

The Dasher page contains a link to a Google Video. I figured the talk would be either just the math (which would have been interesting enough) or...or what? Demos for an hour?

It's actually wonderful. The metaphors are, at the very least, tantalizing. Every time I thought there would be no more content, there was yet another new idea. (At minute 33 I started to clap.) There's much fascinating material at the end, too, from translation interfaces to multi-modal inputs (which I've been especially pondering given the need for such things in cell phones).

It's interesting that the rise of mobile computing has led to tools that can actually help the long-neglected physically-impaired. This is just enlightened self-interest at work: on today's mobile computers, we're all “physically-impaired”.

I have some complaints with Dasher:

Punctuation is difficult (what is the natural order for punctuation?).
It uses the shorter edge of my screen (as Jacob Baskin pointed out, perhaps it's because people write English rightwards rather than downwards).
It uses rectangles rather than pie-wedges (Spike claimed some cognitive reason, but I suspect it's just to simplify implementation).
Worst of all, it violates its own cardinal axiom, Fitt's Law. Suppose you have two frequent next letters, say p and r. Then these appear in large boxes, and q in an appropriately small one. The boxes are, unfortunately, right-aligned (with the edge of the screen), so you have to navigate this tiny channel between the Scylla of p and Charybdis of r as you hunt for the miniscule q over at screen's edge.

But enough bickering. I certainly will not be using handwriting recognition on my tablet ever again, except in extreme circumstances. And one nice side-effect: Dasher seems to consume far less power than the handwriting recognizer, which is a boon on a lightweight mobile platform.

Film Festival Time!

2007-08-13T22:02:00.001-04:00

Three of the best things about summer in Providence: (usually) great weather, Crazy Burger, and the Rhode Island International Film Festival.

This year's festival was pretty typical in quality, so I approached it as usual. Once it begins, I go into a trance-like state of absolute concentration. The festival sells six-packs of session passes, which is just about as much as a human can consume anyway. This year, over four days, I made it to seven sessions featuring a total of thirty-six movies. Don't let that last number scare you: some were an hour-and-a-half long and some as little as two minutes. That, of course, is the beauty of the festival.

The typical festival movie is just what you'd expect of independent film: pretentious, self-indulgent, and too long (yes, there are five minute movies that are too long). But you could level an equally long litany against traditional movies, too. What stands out in independent film is passion, gutsiness, a realism forced by underproduction, an urgency imposed by tight budgets, and talent forced to stand in the spotlight in all its human, unvarnished glory. It's usually the case that the two-minute shorts are the very best movies: it's no surprise that they are invariably comedies, because they draw directly on the skill embodied in the perfect set-up of a stand-up comedian; though, because they transport this skill into a new dimension, the ones that make a social or political statement are even better. And the visual and production effects of some of these movies entirely belie their film school and other such origins.

As always, the festival had some suprises and some disappointments. My picks from the animated shorts were Fish, but No Cigar; Nasuh; Par Avion (a haiku of a movie: within the first three seconds, the animation succeeded in placing you on the banks of the Seine in Paris); Perpetuum Mobile (Leonardo da Vinci rightly credited as a props designer); and Voodoo Bayou. Of the movies, Entry Level was pleasant and refreshing. Amongst documentaries, Across the Plateau (Chuan Yue Gao Yuan) was a delight, while wordlessly emphasizing the growing Chinese presence in Tibet in two capacities: construction and the military (those two not being entirely independent). And finally, the movie that stole my heart was the short, Rocketboy.

We caught our first festival the week we moved to Providence in 2000, not having known of its existence before. Since then, we've screwed up only one summer, when we accidentally made travel plans for that same weekend. That so traumatized us that we start checking the festival calendar months in advance, so as to not repeat that mistake. The festival continues to grow in size and depth. Like a comet, it invades our life every summer, sprinkling a host of meteors about us, and satiates my entire year's need for movies in a week. Summer, and life, wouldn't be the same without it.

Assault by Battery

2007-08-08T21:38:00.001-04:00

Kathi and I are doing a series of user interviews to gather security requirements for a concrete system we're building. This is best done with a recording device for transcription, so we purchased an Olympus DS-2 Digital Voice Recorder.

There are many wonderful things about the DS-2. It's small, it's elegant, the display is legible. The buttons are a little strange: there's no clear on-off, and it was only intuition that led me to figure that putting it on Hold would eventually turn it off. But these are minor complaints for a device that has been functioning quite nicely.

Today, we found the batteries were running low: the indicator had gone from three bars down to one. Since we're still on our first round of batteries, we weren't sure what this meant in terms of recording time. The unit is rated to run 18 hours, but nobody who works with electronics takes these sorts of ratings as anything other than gentle fun, a brief diversion from the world of hard facts. Anyway, I figured, why bother? We'll start recording, keeping an eye on the device; most probably it would work fine; when it runs out, we'll pause the speaker, switch batteries (takes under a minute), and resume.

One major difference between Kathi and me is that she is the kind of person who reads manuals, while I proceed on pure intuition for electronic devices (worked for that Hold button, right?). In this case Kathi's approach was a savior, because on page 11 of the manual, in small print, under Notes, it says

If you are recording into a file and the batteries run out, you will lose your currently recorded file because the file header will not be able to close. It is crucial to change the batteries once you see only one Hash mark in the battery icon.

Give me a moment to scream...okay, I'm back, but I don't feel much better. Never mind that the explanation probably makes no sense to the vast majority of the audience; never mind that it's probably not even true. Just contemplate this failure mode. (I like, especially, the implicit belief that nobody would ever want to use this device in a situation where a single recording might run the entire duration of battery life: a day in the wilderness, say.) As my student Jacob Baskin put it so succintly, “They created a device that performs only one operation...and they couldn't get that one right?”

Bush(n)e(l)l of Acorn

2007-08-08T12:33:00.000-04:00

I didn't really want to shake Jesse Bushnell's hand.

Normally I'd be glad to, grease and all. But Jesse, whom I'd known as someone from bike rides, from watching the spring classics in his bike shop (The Hub, which doubles up as a furniture shop, The Zoo), and as one of my bike mechanics, had suddenly shot to fame as a principal participant in this summer's most entertaining happening: the maiden voyage of the Acorn, a replica of the US Civil War submarine, the Turtle. As to where Jesse's hands had been, this New York Times article says it all. (Even the droll, coolly ironic tone of the article cannot disguise the glee of a reporter assigned to a story whose copy virtually writes itself.)

So I go down to the Hub:

(Jesse) Dude, how's it going?

(Me) You're asking me? I'm surprised to see you still a free man.

[Grins, pauses, grins again...] Oops!

So here I am, interviewing Jesse Bushnell. What follows is a reconstruction of a conversation; I went in with prepared questions, but life is not a prepared activity when Jesse is around.

What's your connection with the other two?

They're both great friends. The Duke's my best friend.

Mr. Riley was recorded as emerging from the sub with a beer. Do you think it's safe to drink and dive?

The beer was intentional! That was to thin the blood. There's a ton of lead in that thing, so you've got to keep the blood thin, and the alcohol does that.

Given the quote by which the nation now best knows you, I have to ask: boxers or briefs?

Tighty-whities!

Owing to your action, do you think Alberto Gonzales would be justified in upping the terror level to a new color code? Say up to Celeste?

Who's that guy?

Aren't you embarassed about the lack of a propulsion mechanism, given that you work in a bike shop?

Dude, that's what saved us! The FBI told us that if we'd had a screw, they'd have definitely arrested us.

What's your relationship to David Bushnell?

The Duke tells me I'm related.

This unfortunately stole my next few questions, such as: was he related to Nolan Bushnell (of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese fame); whether, like the senior Bushnell, he too planned to migrate to making naval mines; and whether, given that David Bushnell moved to Georgia and adopted the name of David Bush, Jesse was also related to George W. Bush.

Some of the other things Jesse related was how the media glare was so intense he had to be escorted out the back door; how he got bitten by a dog while he was in the East River, and got stung by several jellyfish; and how the FBI descended on him. He said he was at one point bobbing around in the sub, looking out over at the Statue of Liberty and thinking about how cool all this was, when he saw a group of helicopters heading directly at him and began to revise his evaluation. When the Feds eventually got to him they asked him about various aspects of his life, including details of the houseboat on which he lives. He asked them how they knew about it. Their reply: “Because we have agents on it right now.”

The last word should surely go to Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly who, with New York sangfroid, called the Acorn the “creative craft of three adventuresome individuals”. Give the man a medal for his understanding that such utterly unfettered and wholly midsdirected creativity is precisely what makes America so insanely great.

Arresting Blackboards

2007-08-06T21:26:00.001-04:00

One of my friends (who is knowledgeable about this incident, but whose identity I've withheld for evident reasons) recently brought to my attention a disturbing event. I cannot testify to the accuracy of the report seeing as my knowledge of Turkish politics is low and I cannot read any accounts in that language. However, I was able to confirm the facts from another Turkish person, so I have at least some corroboration.

Ali Nesin is the head of mathematics at Istanbul Bilgi University. He apparently produces a popular mathematics magazines that sells thousands of issues while retaining a very respectable level of the mathematics. Ali seems to really love mathematics in its many forms (including computer science). Ali also cobbles together scraps of funds to run an annual math summer school for students and teachers.

Sadly, Ali's summer school has been shut down and he has been charged with several crimes. Irrespective of the merits of the other charges, the one that we should take issue with is this one: “giving education without permission”.

Alexandre Borovik has set up a petition to protest this. His blog has multiple posts about the situation. Be sure to visit the blog and see the photographs of the cordoned-off blackboard (and check out the content on it).

I have heard that one of the principal reasons for persecuting Ali is that he is the son of a left-wing Turkish humorist, Aziz Nesin, and the recent rise of Islamist power in Turkey has given a fillip to forces arrayed against him. Reading the older Nesin's biography, it's easy to see why he might have offended these powers—not that that excuses what has happened. Anyway, I have reliable evidence that Ali Nesin is a good soul who means to spread his love for mathematics.

It's a sad blow against fundamental freedoms in Turkey. In addition, no country can prosper that shuts down volunteer schools that teach group theory.

The Provost Paradox

2007-07-28T09:17:00.000-04:00

I was surprised to find myself explaining this phenomenon to multiple people over the past few months, so I'm putting it down here for dissemination and comment. Readers will wonder whether this is a specific reaction to something at Brown; it's not, and out provosts largely seem to be sound eggs.

There's a problem that plagues academic hiring. I'm sure it affects corporate hiring too, though there, the obsession with growth may mean this is considered a feature, not a bug. Still, I trust some B-school professor has given the problem a catchy enough title to write a book around it; I just haven't found it yet.

Provosts are chief academic officers of universities. Their responsibilities range from overseeing academic programs to supervising research activities, and they often control budgets and personnel to both enforce and exhort. At many universities, the president is a fund-raising, public-relations machine, while the provost keeps the academic and research programs running.

The problem is, many provosts are really just presidents-in-waiting. Positions like deanship and provosthood are ideal stepping-stones to presidencies elsewhere, so some provosts—especially those without a deep institutional attachment—are burnishing their vita waiting for the right presidential opening.

As an academic, one administrative attribute you value tremendously is stability. Innovation is terrific (and essential: the very lifeblood of quality academia) when it's driven bottom-up, for all the usual reasons that demand-driven, bottom-up activity works better than policy-driven, top-down decision-making. In some instances, of course, top-down decisions are essential, most crucially when an institution is stuck in a rut and needs shaking-up. In most other circumstances, things get iffy.

The problem is, steady-as-she-goes doesn't cut it in the job market. When you apply for that plum presidency, a cover letter that says, “Was provost for eight years; maintained quality of academic programs, sustained funding levels, ensured no drop in already-high student-satisfaction ratings” just doesn't cut it. That you obtained something in good shape and sustain that level of quality is simply not regarded as sufficient achievement, never mind that it's a tremendously difficult thing to do (indeed, much harder than sprinkling new works about campus).

The problem, I believe, has everything to do with the ubiquitous press release. A statement that says “We hired Ludwig Knickerbocker, who in eight years at Beta State U. didn't screw up anything” is synonymous with ol' Ludwig not being a go-getter; there's no tiger in his tank. Where is the pride in proclaiming such a person as your new president? What alumnus who hasn't donated before is going to start doing so now? Compare that with “created the world's first Institute for Hypodermic Psychoceramics” and you've got the alumni right where you want them.

Of course, nobody really asks Beta State what they think of the Institute. Oh, sure, there are some disgruntled faculty, but that phrase is redundant, and they're probably just upset that they weren't part of the institute's gravy train. The folks on the gravy train are, of course, ecstatic. What are the institute's long-term prospects? What did the creation plan say about evaluation? Were there any metrics? How does it score today? And do those metric make sense? You almost never see that in the press releases.

Of courae, ask any faculty member about the proliferation of Institutes and Programs, and they will respond with weary cynicism. That's because they know that long after the creator has burnished their vita and moved on, the institution will be left holding the bag (and given how conservative academia is, the new entity will never actually close, but rather will slither along in the undergrowth). And yet when they hire someone else's provost to be their president, they propagate the very culture that they, often rightly, deplore.

Out of Africa

2007-07-28T09:10:00.000-04:00

About a year and half ago, a good friend (name hidden to protect the guilty) bought me an extremely generous gift: a pair of MBT running shoes, which cost the grand sum of about 150 GBP, a sum I'm entirely unworthy of.

What kind of shoe costs that much? One that comes with its own DVD, of course. MBT stands for Masai Barefoot Technology, and you can immediately see it all come together, the confluence of technology (Technology), its opposite (Barefoot), and its appropriately politically correct second-cousin twice-removed (Masai). MBT shoes are characterized by a curved sole—think the shape of the Nike swoosh— that make the very notion of standing stil a bit of a balancing act. The theory is immediately obvious: the sole's shape mirrors the manner in which you're supposed to place, roll and lift your feet while running, so the shoes will improve your running motion and quite likely result in less stress on the knees. And so forth: there are details about the lace fasteners, and so on, but these are all second-order attributes.

I haven't, I'm afraid, had a chance to test any of these theories. Because my friend bought me the shoes from some sort of exercise center-cum-spa in London, to which I haven't been able to return, I was entirely at the mercy of the extraordinarily unqualified fitting, ahem, sales agent, who failed to account for either the width of my feet (wider than normal) or the thickness of socks. Result: the shoes don't fit me, and I've only used them about six times, usually with painful consequences.

Before leaving for Banff in May, I decided to go for a quick run in the morning. For reasons not worth elaborating, I decided to do the run in the MBTs, and without socks. (The latter is less daft than it sounds once you accept the initial premise, seeing as that's the only way I can fit my feet into the shoes.)

I was doing quite well for the first several minutes until I began to feel a slight itch in the rear of my right foot. After a while it got rather irritating, as if a small, sharp stone had gotten wedged. Squriming my foot didn't seem to move the stone at all so, at the end of a mile, I stopped to investigate. A goodly surface, about the size of an American quarter, had lost its epidermis and was raw, pink, bleeding flesh.

There was only one natural course of action. I took off the shoes, in the best puss-in-boots fashion put one on each hand, and proceeded to run the mile back home...barefoot. Oh, the irony.

For anyone tempted to smack down several Dead Presidents for MBTs, don't let this tale dissuade you. I'm sure they have wonderful reasons for making the backs of the heels chafe. They certainly can't be blamed for selling their wares prominently through incompetent outlets. The DVD alone may be worth the price. But I must warn you about one more unexpected side-effect of wearing MBTs.

Two winters ago we visited my wife's family in Williamsburg, Virginia. Kathi, her sister Jodi, and I went for a run through the historical area, and ended up in the cheese shop(pe?). As we traversed the store I heard a rather delighted squeal from behind, in stereo. I turned to find a mother-daughter pair, looking for all the world like they listed a spa as their home address, staring in delight at my legs. My ego deflated slightly when I realized they were actually staring at the bottom of my legs. We made eye-contact and they proceeded, mother taking the lead, “Ohmygawd! Where did you get those from?” After several rounds of exchange in which they revealed the celebrity status of MBT trainers at their spa, one of the distaff pair finally let it drop: “We've nevah seen those on a man before!”

Caveat emptor.

I Know I Knew a Knee

2007-07-28T09:03:00.000-04:00

In late 2005 I started to take up running. After two winters on a bike trainer in the basement, I was jealous of people who could actually do outdoor things in the winter—in shorts! Running is relatively convenient compared with cycling, especially where I live, so when spring arrived my feet stayed firmly planted on the ground, instead of clipping into pedals. And thus, what began as a winter substitute turned into cross-training and then slowly morphed into something I nearly admitted to liking. (The admission comes hard in part because having been asthmatic into my teens, running is truly harsh on me.) The day before we left for Edinburgh in November 2006, I ran my first sub-7-minute mile.

By spring 2007, the entire length of my left leg felt about twice as old as the rest of me. I had some persistent pain in that foot; then along the thigh; and finally the knee got so bad I couldn't sit with my knee bent for more than fifteen minutes. In restaurants, I had to find a table where I could stretch out my leg, as if fractured and in a cast. I was very close to going in to a doctor, and had begun steeling myself for the inevitable knee surgery.

As an experiment, starting in the beginning of May, I decided to give up running cold turkey and focus solely on cycling. At first all those old pains persisted, and manifested themselves on the bike. But then, about 500 miles later, I noticed that they were...completely gone. My left leg feels as good as my right, both feel excellent, and I write this message having just spent four continuous hours almost motionless on a plane, knees bent, without the slightest trace of pain.

It's well-known that running is usually harder on the knees than cycling (though a badly-configured bicycle can be just as bad or worse). I'm also lazy about warming-up and the like; clearly, people run marathons on end without anything like the problems my feeble efforts engendered. But it still amazes me that cycling can not only be so much less bodily stress, but that it can have helped effectively cure my knee. Maybe I can sink the cost of that surgery into a new bike instead!

If Your Name is Michaels, My Name is D78#*xj

2007-07-25T20:36:00.000-04:00

Kathi is decorating her office with large prints of some photographs from our recent trips. We were recently at a craft (chain) store named Michaels to buy the frame materials, and one of the photographs required a custom order. The young man at the frame department took our order, had us pay for it, and asked us to fill in our contact information.

I wasn't firing on all cylinders that afternoon, but it still struck me as odd that they wanted details like a street address. What were they going to do—mail a 24x36 border to our house? Besides, we had already pre-paid for the item, so it seemed it would be our problem to take delivery, not theirs. (Indeed, the form Kathi was filling had some legalese about how Michaels would hold the ordered item for only sixty days or so, further confirming that now that they had our money, it was now our problem, not theirs.)

While filling, Kathi noticed that she was signing an extremely generous waiver regarding what they could do with the information. She asked the frame clerk whether she could avoid providing all this information. He said he wasn't sure. Meanwhile, I noticed that the text included an express option for restricting distribution of the data. I asked how we could invoke that option. He wasn't sure about that either, but hesitantly asked whether we'd like to speak with a manager. He was slightly taken aback by the vigor with which I said yes.

The manager arrived. We explained the situation. She was two parts surprise that anyone would care (doesn't everyone love catalogs full of kitchy “crafts projects”?) and one part flummoxed. She didn't seem to entirely understand what we wanted. I pointed her to the line on the contract offering the opt-out (it wasn't an opt-in, natch). Her next two sentences would infuriate any privacy-conscious person: first, “I've never had anyone ask for that before” followed (much worse) by, “I have no idea how to do that”. In other words, Michaels cares so little about this that not only do they have an opt-out rather than an opt-in, they haven't trained their staff—not even their managers—how to enact it.

Points, though, to the frame clerk. He thought for a moment and said, “Now that we've placed the order, how about if I go into the database and erase that data?” The manager looked even more confused, but having no good argument for anything at this point, she consented. Of course, it's impossible to tell whether that will have any effect; for all we know, the moment the order was placed, our address had been zipped out to twenty different purveyors of schmaltzy catalogs. Time will tell.

Slow-Motion Sports

2007-07-25T20:32:00.000-04:00

American football is my canonical example of a slow-motion sport. By that I'm not referring to the long pauses between action (what George Will famously likened to committee meetings), and obviously not to the actual plays, in which numerous people with the speed of top sprinters charge in several different directions all at once. Rather, I'm referring to the fact that what you see is not what you necessarily get: before you can cheer for a touchdown, you have to check whether a flag was thrown on the 40-yard line because someone whom you've never heard of who had nothing to do with the play grabbed the jersey of someone else you've never heard of who also would have had nothing to do with the play—save for the jersey-grabbing, which has now nullified the play itself.

Every sport has or is acquiring slow-motion elements. Cricket and tennis now have action-replays that can make or nullify a decision. But these are invoked rarely, and when they are, the result is usually dramatic (in cricket, especially, the uses are sparing and important enough that the official replays are tenser than the play itself). And outside a small set of events there are no fouls or replays, letting stand what you saw as what happened.

Mind, I don't mean “slow-motion” as a pejorative. There is a certain kind of fan for whom that very indecision is part of the charm of the sport, and it leads to a kind of dramatic tension of its own. So be it. That isn't my point here.

What I did want to point out is that we've rapidly acquired a new slow-motion sport: cycling. It used to be that nothing matched the primal immediacy of a mountain stage: a small handful of the most talented riders struggling up an HC climb, attacking and dropping, standing and delivering. The pain was real because the context was real: you didn't need to refrain from delivering a glancing blow because you weren't sure of what flags were flying elsewhere on the field of play. You didn't need a photo finish: the difference in finishing times was in the order of minutes. For an aficionado, there are few more dramatic things in all of human activity.

That's still what happens on TV, but the outcomes have become entirely detached from the action. Who's dirty, who's clean? Who's going to have irregular blood or inhuman testosterone? From Hamilton to Landis to Basso to Petacchi to Vinokourov, what frustrates me most is not watching and wondering “Are they clean?” but rather wondering, “Should I be applauding?”. After all, tomorrow may say today didn't happen, or even next year may say this year didn't happen.

To me, then, the real tragedy is that what has gone out is not trust: that was never there. What has been lost, instead, is the immediacy, the directness, the decisiveness. Cycling has become a slow-motion sport—an ironic statement about an activity in which men and women climb impossibly steep pitches at improbably high speeds—where decisions are made and then unmade over what is, relative to the action itself, geological time. That, to me, is the truly incalculable loss. By the time we watched the finish of Stage 15 on a one-day delay, we'd already heard about Vino's (supposedly) failed dope test, so watching the play was surreal, and about half the comments by the commentators sounded cruelly ironic.

Meanwhile, though, I'll still be getting goose-pimples watching Alberto Con(ta)dor fly out of his saddle like—indeed, even better than—a certain Texan, and hope he won't go the way of all the other climbing prodigies of the past few years, from Iban Mayo to Alejandro Valverde to, perhaps the most dramatic of them all, Damiano Cunego, who rode like Marco Pantani on the way to his Giro win and has subsequently never demonstrated that same form (hmm...).

Being Flogged to in Multiple Tongues

2007-07-20T19:46:00.000-04:00

Well, I never would have guessed, even five years ago, that my Web-based mail program would be showing me ads in...Hindi. But अब मैं हिंदी में advertisement पढ़ सकता हूँ. The first one? हवाई टिकेट, correlated with an article on India's reintroduction of Jumbo passports forwarded from the Deccan Herald. (Well, I hope all that came out right. My fonts are fscked.)

Playing to Stereotypes

2007-07-17T00:32:00.000-04:00

I was walking around Harvard Square today when I saw a beggar seated on the ground, cardboard placard in front of him, facing the Harvard gates. Something about him looked immediately familiar, though I knew I had no reason to know him. In a second, it registered. He was wearing a Brown (University) t-shirt.

The Most Boring Country in the World

2007-07-17T00:17:00.000-04:00

As readers of my book reviews may have noticed, I have a habit of reading books about, or from, a country before visiting it. Since I'll be in Denmark in September, I'm of a mood to find books that will help me understand the country better.

I was at the Harvard Book Store this AM, and looked around their notable travel section. Nothing. Barely even a guidebook, much less literature or travel writing.

But I did notice a pattern: most travel books (with a few predictable exceptions; more on that below) seem to be written about places outside the temperate zone. It is perhaps unsurprising: the travel writing genre thrives on the life in extremis, and your odds of this are better if you're either parched or frozen to death. If the odds of your dying are nil, publishers don't appear to be interested.

Intrigued, after lunch, I visited the Globe Corner Bookstore, a fabulous store dedicated to travel. I knew there would be too many books there (and I would have too little time) to validate my conjecture, but surely they would have what I was looking for. Helpfully, the Globe combines travel guides with related writing, which is generally an most agreeable arrangement. But I again came up short: Peter Høeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow and a work by Karen Blixen, whom you better know as Isak Dinesen. But Blixen was writing about...Africa! Oh dear.

Later that evening we stopped by the Wellesley Booksmith, on the main street in Wellesley, MA, just around the corner from the college. Pattern: dead on. Every store had a few exceptions, such as a large number of books devoted to Ireland or France—for fairly obvious reasons. But even by this standard Wellesley seemed extreme: I'd guess that about a quarter of the books were about France, and a large percentage of those were specifically about Paris (this is not a given, with the strength of the year-in-Provence subgenre). Please infer your own stereotypes.

But this brings us back to Denmark. I hope my Danish friends don't take this poorly: There's something to be said for not being noticed. At the very least, it seems to mean that your weather isn't extreme enough to kill anyone off. The rest of the world should be so lucky. Perhaps people less fortunate dream about a life as placid.

I'll watch a few more Dogme 95 movies, I guess (though how many can one take?).

Addendum: Olivier Danvy kindly pointed me to the travel section on Amazon. I was embarassed to not have thought of that already, and wondered what treasures I would find there. Well, I got through the first three pages of entries under Books > Travel > Europe > Denmark. In numbers:

Two relevant items: a book about Hans Christian Andersen (A River, a Town, a Poet), and Mary Wollstonecraft's letters written during a short residence in Scandinavia.

Travel guides (a term I use broadly to include maps, language guides, and generic national guides): 23 to Denmark; 21 to Copenhagen; 6 to Scandinavia; one cycling map.

One book I couldn't classify: Journey through Denmark (travelogue?).

Novels: two copies of Out of Africa, and one book by Hans Christian Andersen.

Other travel guides: Netherlands (2), Finland (7), St. Petersburg (1), Tibet (1), the US state of Maine (1).

Finally, Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved (1), Appointment in Jerusalem (1), and books about adventures in mountains and/or ice but not set in Denmark (3).

So, I'm afraid it only reinforces my point. Two (or three) books of the kind I was looking for, compared against four books in the fire-and-ice genre, all set elsewhere.

Climb to the Vista Point for the Clouds

2007-07-15T21:51:00.001-04:00

The Charles River Wheelmen (CRW) organized an excellent ride today called Climb to the Clouds. The name is a bit of an exaggeration: the highest point in the climb is Mt. Wachusett, a ski station in central Massachusetts. But it is a ski station; the hill gains about 1100 feet over four miles, though this hides a few ridiculous pitches. That, combined with the warning that the course was very hilly and definitely not for beginners, made it undeniably tempting.

I have a confession: I wasn't sure I wanted to do Wachusett. Not the ascent, which I definitely wanted, but the descent, which—like many others in New England—is riddled with narrow roads, tight curves, frost heaves, and cracked pavement. Combined with how much my bike has been rattling lately (and rattled especially vigorously the last time I came down that way), I wasn't looking forward to doing it in a bunch.

So when I set out my gear last night, I laid out my very flash Nalini bike shorts, a bright red. My reasoning was simple: I felt morally obliged to negotiate Wachusett on account of (a) being in a ride called Climb to the Clouds, and (b) knowing I'd spend the rest of the day sacked out watching the first real mountainous stage of the Tour de France. And I knew that once I'd worn the Nalini, I'd really have no choice in the matter. Once you talk the talk, that is, wear the wear, you've got to walk the walk, that is, ride the ride.

It proved to be an exceptional ride. It was hilly as promised, and with the odd mile of awful pavement, mostly on very good roads. By taking it early on a Sunday morning I was able to avoid most of the traffic. There were two or three very fast descents, one long and screaming (the Wachusett payback). Some of the climbs were long hills that demanded that you settle into a steady tempo, others were short, widing roads whose length you couldn't estimate; there were a few genuine quad-busters.

Aside: someone in the Massachusetts Department of Transportation has a perverse sense of humor. At one point on Wachusett, coming out of a false flat, the road turns to the left and pitches upward sharply; it rises up and touches you in the nose, as Phil Liggett might say. And just there this humorist has seen fit to inscribe the instruction, SLOW.

But perhaps the best part of it was the CRW organization. They were superbly organized, firm but friendly, manned perfectly good feeding stations, and had arrowed with exceptional attention. Even someone who demonstrates nearly functional illiteracy when it comes to following arrows (e.g., me) managed the ride without a wrong turn. That is something they can brag about.

Using Bad Marketing to Hide a Weak Product?

2007-07-08T12:19:00.001-04:00

So there's this new company that runs movie downloads over the Internet. They're advertising during the Tour de France coverage. I'm interested, and want to check it out.

Except, I can't for the life of me remember exactly what their name is. It's either Vengo or Vango, and because they pronounce it in the French fashion (the ‘n’ is muted), it's difficult to be sure. Only at the very end, and only for a brief split second, do they show the URL.

I visit vango.com. It's a generic NetworkSolutions page. Okay, so someone's parking it. (But why not the actual vendor?)

So, clearly, it's vengo.com. But all that has is a corporate logo and “coming Soon...” [sic]. Huh? So why are they running TV ads?

After a while I finally determine that they're actually Vongo. What does their home page offer?

the software download
“View TV Spot” (yeah, right...)
“View Free Movie Clip” (better...)

But click on the crucial link, “Learn More”, and you get a Flash animation of three ridiculous people labeled “parking”, “shrink” and “funeral”. You have to choose one of these three to get a tour of Vongo.

Well, I don't want a tour, I just want the facts. “Ask Vongo” takes you to some strange combination of FAQ and interactive question answerer with an excessive amount of gratuitous JavaScript (e.g., links look like normal text until you mouse over them, then suddenly turn into blue underlining...spot the problem), all crushed into about 10% of my screen acreage. Clicking “How do I download Vongo?” starts off promising. Then the voice turns bizarre: “If you Click Open, the .exe file will not save on the customer's computer and you will be able to begin the installation” and stays in this voice subsequently (talking about “the customer”). The next sentence is,

If you click Save the .exe will save on the customers cusotmer, once the .exe is saved oyou will have to double click on the .exe to begin the installation.

[sic]. If you start trying to traverse the questions you rapidly get lost in this little q&a box, because there are no navigation mechanisms. (When people complain that browser features like the Back button are “accidental elements”, you feel like dropping them into this kind of interface and saying, “navigate away, buddy”.)

Anyway, amongst the “fundamental design flaws [that] are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws” (in Ted Nelson's memorable phrase), is this: deep in the bowels of this ridiculous information area you find out that they not only have DRM (not surprising), but that it limits you to a mere three devices. That means a couple with, say, a desktop and laptop machine each, and a fifth device that connects to the TV, are out of luck.

So maybe Vengo/Vango/Vongo knows more about their interface than I thought after all. Except I can't really decide whether tear out my hair (“shrink”) or slash my wrists (“funeral”) is more appropriate.

Affiliates' Program for Travel Sites

2007-07-07T19:58:00.001-04:00

An application we're developing has a good advertising opportunity: people who view a certain page we publish are almost certainly going to want to make very specific (corresponding) travel reservations. We have a pretty good guess of the dates of arrival and departure, and an even better guess of the destination airport. We can thus, as a first approximation, pre-fill most of that information on their behalf. (Contrast this to travel sites such as the Continental Airlines ticket purchase interface: after you purchase a ticket it asks whether you'd like a room or car; at least as of recently, if you clicked on either of these, you had to enter your data all over again, despite having just purchased a ticket.)

It appears you can use ITA Software's Matrix with pre-filling: most of the useful fields are exposed. Sadly, all this does is search, because the interface doesn't let you actually buy a ticket.

More importantly, in return for referring customers, we'd love to get a referral kickback, just like Amazon.com's Associates program. And from what I can tell (on the authority of some people in the know), there doesn't appear to be any such facility at all.

It seems like a pretty good service that benefits all three parties (the site users, the travel sites, and us), and yet none of the major travel sites seem to offer such a program. (The person of authority I spoke with suggested it's because their margins are piss-poor, though it's not then clear how they stay in business at all.)

That Must be Why They're Called “Specialized”

2007-07-07T14:10:00.001-04:00

I was looking at the Owner's Manual for my Specialized Decibel Helmet, and came across the following line amidst the usual swarm of disclaimers:

Failure to follow this warning could result in serious personal injury, death by strangulation, death.

Indoor Wilderness

2007-07-04T20:50:00.000-04:00

We returned from Austin last week to find that a long-neglected onion, relaxing in the fruit bowl, had turned into this:

This hasn't happened to our onions before, so I wonder exactly what was different about the circumstances this time.

It's no surprise that onions produce baby onions, but there's a wild organic beauty to scallions in the raw that you simply don't see in their tamed, bunched supermarket form. (And they made for a tasty addition to today's lunch.)

Feeling Blue

2007-07-03T16:51:00.001-04:00

Since my Bike Friday is in for repairs, I've begun to overhaul and put some miles on my old Specialized. Two years in the basement on the trainer—and not much maintenance before that—have left it in a fairly bad state. But over an hour of washing (with Kathi's help), and a few more (lighter) rounds of that since, have made it ship-shape. While I immediately notice my dislike of the sub-105 Shimano parts, and miss my 50T chainring (I'm back to mashing a bit in my 53T), overall I've been putting on some miles quite comfortably.

One problem with reviving a bike that's been in a basement too long, though, is that you don't know what really works and what doesn't. Last Friday, after a 25 mile ride, I was making the last turn before home when I went down comprehensively. I suffered very little external injury, so initially I was more confused than anything else. (A construction worker nearby asked whether I was okay and, when I replied in the affirmative, he responded, “That was spectacular!” It was immediately clear that he's never seen a real bike crash.) While taking inventory, I noticed that my front tire was...half-flat. So I'd had a very, very slow leak that had gotten progressively flatter as I bumped around town, and on that final hard right turn the tire just buckled.

It turns out that I'm actually quite bruised in various places inside. My friend Laurie Heller recalled that she'd had a similar experience: some of her worst injuries were from her slowest crashes. Due to various internally bruised parts, I can now primarily only ride in the drops. At the very least, I feel quite silly plodding along to school in the morning in that position.

One casualty of my fall was my bar-tape, which was anyway beginning to unravel. Four years ago the bike began with a Specialized Phat Wrap, which is surprisingly comfortable. Two years ago (after another fall) I switched to yellow Cinelli cork: less padded, but a lovely feel. Today I got a Deda Elementi blue wrap. This officially proves that my biking color is blue: blue glasses frame, blue shoes, blue gloves, and now blue wrap. I've realized the reason is because I don't like green, there's too much macho red on the roads already, and yellow is pretentious (or can appear that way).

The Deda tape is a thing of beauty:

(The actual tape is darker than the photo suggests.) Those little dents are just the edges of the logo, which is under wraps. The attention to detail is fantastic: the sticky strip is just broad enough, the color is sublime, it feels like it isn't there, and the package includes both tape for the end and a little supplement to wrap around the back of the hoods.

Once I was done wrapping, I proceeded to install the end plugs. I was about to just shove one in when I noticed it has the Deda ‘D’ logo on it. I stopped, rotated the plug a quarter turn to orient it properly, and only then pushed. That's what beautiful design inspires you to do.

Mothers by Convention

2007-06-30T22:45:00.000-04:00

The Economist's article on Europe's population, June 16th 2007, has a table (page 30) labeled “Family variety”. The subtitle is “% of mothers who have completed their families by number of children”, and the table is as follows:

N	Russia	Sweden	Italy	Germany	France
0	8	14	15	26	14
1	30	16	25	25	20
2	44	40	42	30	32
3+	18	30	18	19	34

A New Fixation

2007-06-29T23:47:00.001-04:00

Wherein our correspondent chronicles his very first experience with a fixed-gear bicycle, for the benefit of others who may follow this enlightening route.

There are no new puns left to make about fixies. None.

So I was riding around the criterium course at last weekend's Cox Cycling Classic in Providence, wondering why I wasn't racing, when a nitwit decided to pull over from the middle of the road all the way to the kerb—right in front of me, without looking over his shoulder—to greet his friends. Naturally I went down, hard. Because of the way the universe works, not only did he not crash, he didn't even notice what he'd done. It was left to his friends to come over to help. No road-rash, but it did remind me of why I don't race.

Friends are admittedly important—perhaps the most important thing in the world. But more important even than my front derailleur? Not only is it busted, but so (I shudder to even think about the cost this will involve) possibly is the front derailleur hanger, which in turn is part of the rear assembly of the bike: everything's just more complicated on a Bike Friday.

Anyway, since I'm feeling in particularly good riding form right now, I was fairly upset after dropping off the bike at my LBS, the Hub. As I was leaving the store, though, I realized I was...surrounded by bikes! So I asked Jesse whether he'd rent me one. Knowing I've been eyeing fixies for a while, he loaned me a brand new KBS. It was so pristine I was afraid to take it (how many falls does it take to learn to ride a fixie?), but with a twinkle in his eye he said, “Consider it a test ride”. Dangerous words.

Getting started was a bit terrifying, and my first day I doubt I exceeded 6-8mph. I was getting passed with abandon by people wearing cotton t-shirts riding flat-bar hybrids with zany pedalling styles—nothing against any of that, bless their souls, but it did make me, in lycra and gear, feel rather ridiculous. The second day I was well over 10mph. And I've learned a bit about the fixie experience.

My main concern was about needing to stay conscious of always pedaling (this is a fixed-gear, not just a single-speed). It turns out I needn't have worried. The momentum of the rear wheel is such that there is no real danger of stopping cold because you forgot to pedal. I went into turns and other configurations where I normally wouldn't be pedaling, and the momentum gave my leg the little kick it needed to remember to stay in motion; indeed, it would have taken effort to not stay moving.

The truly hard thing, I've learned, is stopping. There's a funny motion to it. Say your left foot is at 12 o'clock. You need to use your right foot to initiate braking. So as your right foot moves up to 12 o'clock, you keep adding resistance. So far so good.

Suppose, however, you don't come to a stop. Now your right foot goes over the top...at which point gravity pulls it down, and you have to make a conscious effort to (disregarding all your hard-earned, pedal-in-circles muscle-memory) push down on your left foot...but only until it peaks at 12 o'clock, and so on. As a result of not stopping by the time the countervailing foot had reached 12 o'clock, I would end up going through another pedal circulation, and another, and another.

I realized that I just needed to push down harder, but then I began to feel a rather strange sensation. Never having experienced it before I began to ease off, which of course led me back to the almost-but-never-quite-stopping cycle. A few minutes later I finally figured it out. That sensation was a muscle that I had never exercised, indeed even experienced, before, being called into duty. Marveling at the human body and letting the muscle do its job did the trick: I am now stopping (from low velocities of about 10-12mph) very nearly on command. (Though just as I came to believe this a squirrel ran half-way across my lane and planted itself there, losing me a few hundred heart-beats that I will never recover.)

So, yes, I'm hooked. It's an absolutely wonderful experience, and I can see it doing wonders for my cycling. A single-speed would simply not be the same; after all, I grew up riding nothing but (very few bicycles in India had gears; those that did were deemed “racing” models—usually synonymous with drop-bars—and my folks weren't about to get me one of those). I've parked the KHS for now because it doesn't have a front brake, and my interest is in improving my pedal-stroke, not in acquiring additional bones. Also, it's an ultra-cool, retro-design, all-black hipster model, and I am definitely not worthy of it. I'd proclaim that a fixie is definitely in my future, except I'm afraid the cost of one may be sunk into Bike Friday repairs this summer, pushing the fixie into the more distant future.

The Giant Sucking Sound of Hot Air

2007-06-26T21:06:00.000-04:00

Populists are romanticized at a distance, startling from nearby, and dangerous when contemporaries.

US Senators Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) are working on a bill to overhaul the H1-B visa status to “give priority to American workers”. Now I admit I'm a biased party here, seeing as I'm a foreigner stealing a job from the hundreds of Americans who apply to the Brown computer science department for faculty positions every year.

Having stipulated to my bias, let's go on. Durbin says, “Some companies are so brazen, they say ‘no Americans need apply’ in their job advertisements”. I was rather surprised to read this; surely this is a direct violation of the law! Intrigued by who was posting such ads I scoured the Internet for a while, but these rascally companies have made sure Google cannot find them (a curious way to advertise, for sure, but maybe these ads are only visible outside the US—oh, those wily foreigners!). What I find is article upon article talking about the phenomenon, instead of the phenomenon itself.

Durbin is not done. His ire rising, he lambasts these people who would reduce the American programmer to a hewer of wood and drawer of water:

foreign workers come to this country for a few years of training, then return home “to populate businesses competing with the United States.”

Free clue for the dummy: that's because many of them are forced back home by your own policies. This man is making national policy? I hope some of his constituents are reading this.

Fairness and Balance: The Programmer's Guild offers a counterpoint to my views.

Aside: The banner image on their site as of this writing contains the obligatory code snippet...in Lisp. Okay, so maybe they're not such a bad lot after all.

How Not to Conduct a Survey

2007-06-23T19:45:00.000-04:00

The New York Times asks me this morning,

Sorry for the interuption.
Hello! You have been chosen to participate in an important survey from Dynamic Logic, a respected 3rd party research company. This is for RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY. We are not selling anything. Your answers are grouped anonymously.

I answer affirmatively. I get:

Thank you for your interest. You cannot take this survey because you do not enable questionmarket.com cookies.

Curiously, I don't block cookies from that site. But it does make you wonder why they couldn't have designed the survey software to not need a cookie in the first place. Perhaps this was just their way of saying “Our site doesn't work with Firefox”? (If so, hurrah for Firefox.)

Word Equivalences

2007-06-21T09:45:00.000-04:00

Here's a strange word equivalence proposal. I typed “scutwork” into my browser's search box, and Google responded with:

Did you mean: diynetwork

Mismanaged, Again

2007-06-08T21:27:00.000-04:00

Another day, another conference paper manager. For another conference we're using something called OpenConf. It's going to be another long one.

First, when I log in to view my list of assigned papers, I get a category called “Papers to Advocate”. The output below this is:

We have encountered a problem: Unable to retrieve papers for advocating

SELECT paperadvocate.paperid, paperadvocate.adv_recommendation, paperreviewer.reviewerid, format, title, avg(recommendation) as paperavg FROM paperadvocate, paper left join paperreviewer on paperadvocate.paperid=paperreviewer.paperid WHERE paperadvocate.advocateid='2' AND paperadvocate.paperid=paper.paperid GROUP BY paperid

Can someone really have failed to test this on the empty input? Startling as that seems, it appears possible, even likely.

After an exchange with the program chairs, I went to view the list of all papers to bid on a few. The papers are listed by title, with no additional information, but that's a perfectly good start. You would expect clicking on a title would give you the title and abstract, and by control-clicking you could open it in a new tab for reading in leisure. Instead, this silly program has no notion of such things; the only other datum it has is the entire paper itself, which slowly loads in a PDF viewer (and consequently makes it difficult to switch between different papers in different tabs).

So my very first two encounters with this system have been painful. Do program chairs not test these things before selecting them? Or do they not realize how bad these interfaces are? Or do they not care?

Addendum: It turns out the conference manager can't show you the other reviews for a paper, either. Not that it has a setting for showing or hiding the other reviews and the PC chairs have turned it off; no, it simply can't show this information at all. No comment necessary.

A Modest Proposal: Paying to Play at Conferences

2007-06-06T20:44:00.000-04:00

I am on a program committee that is struggling with an explosion of submissions. There are way more than we expected (or, perhaps, can reasonably handle), and what really blows is that we apparently don't have the money to pay for quality conference paper management services.

In general, conferences have all sorts of problems with paper submissions. Every good conference is familiar with receiving a certain volume—sometimes a disturbingly high volume—of papers that are either too weak or too far off topic. These authors could easily save the program committee members (and themselves) a great deal of effort by just perusing past volumes, which would rapidly help them realize their work does not fit; but there is currently no disincentive in submitting (even the same paper to multiple venues). It's a sorry story all round.

I therefore have a fairly obvious modest proposal: charge each paper a submission fee of USD 10.

Here are various considerations:

Apparent disadvantage: It hurts those who can't afford that sum. However, this amount is absolutely nothing in the face of the other conference costs. Even if you lived around the corner from the venue, and the conference had a one-day registration fee, the cheapest you could do would be a minimum of about USD 250, making the submission fee a 4% overhead. But compared to the more realistic cost of a conference, it adds an overhead of about 0.66%, i.e., nothing.

Advantage: Conferences can use this money to pay for professional services for the submission, review and response phases. (The cynic will say, “But they won't!” But they'll have a harder time justifying why not.)

Advantage: Processing the submissions costs the program committee and administrative staff time and effort, so it seems reasonable to ask the authors to pay for it. (This is no different from college applications, etc.) Right now, they pay only if they get the (presumed) glory of an acceptance; but there is no (direct) cost in trying without success.

Advantage: It reduces the number of irrelevant, off-topic submissions.

Advantage: Some authors create havoc by submitting the same paper multiple times, etc. They'd be a bit more careful if they had to enter a credit card number each time.

Observation: This system appears to not have perverse disincentives. If, for instance, your friendly neighborhood oracle told you you have a 100% chance of acceptance, you undertake no risk at all in paying to submit. Thus, it hurts the best papers the least.

Mitigation of Disadvantages: You could waive the submission cost to select authors to encourage them to apply, just as we do application costs for other activities. Of course, choosing whose costs to waive can get controversial, and even counter-productive. One elegant solution would be to waive it for people whose papers were previously chosen for award nominations and the like, because these are precisely the people whom you want to have submit again (and they're a small enough group that they don't cost you much).

Concern: It may be more difficult to implement this using, say, credit-cards from some parts of the developing world. There are some alternatives we could consider in these cases.

I expect the first response most people will email me will be, “But then we won't have any submissions left!” Anyone so inclined is hereby expected to also explain why that's a problem. (-:

Software Engineers Who Don't Value Software

2007-06-06T13:17:00.001-04:00

Software engineering researchers can be bozos.

Software engineers love to sit around tables and complain about how nobody values their work. It's true, too: people will happily pay for physically tangible resources but always expect software to be cheap or free, even if it's much more complex and difficult to engineer than the physical object. So you would think that a software engineering conference, of all things, would appreciate the value of software and be willing to spend a little money to save a lot of time and effort down the road.

As you can guess by the very existence of this entry, you would be spitting-in-your-soup wrong. They've saved themselves a pocketful of change by using the free version of CyberChair (not a great conference manager even in its commercial version, but that's a story for another day), but in the process they've bought the program committee a right-royal headache.

Let's take the bidding interface. I would love to show you some screen-shots, but I can't do it without violating the confidentiality of the authors (or my own bids). This makes me sad, because words cannot do justice to how bad this program is. (I tried to include a redacted version of the HTML here, but Blogger will not accept a frameset tag, more's the pity. But in the process of generating this I had a look at the page source. Not only do many of the tags not nest, there are even closing tags with no corresponding opening tag. Wonderful Perl code, circa 1997.)

The idea is that you bid on all the submitted papers to indicate whether or not you'd like to review them. The bidding interface consists of two frames (yes, frames, in 2007). The left frame is some indifferent text, while the right frame is a long vertical list of all the papers, consisting of a paper number and a drop-down where you select your preference. That's right, paper number: like you know or care.

In the left frame you can select the list of all paper titles, with or without abstracts. So now you have two lists of 419 entries each...in two different frames. Guess who is responsible for keeping them in synch while scrolling through each one independently?

Let's say you've made a dozen bids. You'd hate to lose them because you accidentally killed your browser or something like that. But is there a way of saving bids? No, not unless you scroll down another 407 entries to find a save button (which is cleverly disguised under the name Update Bids, which has exactly the wrong meaning). And if you do save, you'll have to scroll your way all the way back up. (I later found that there's another copy of this button at the very top, which still leaves open a Texas-sized wasteland for the middle 395 papers.)

By the way, be sure to click on the correct button. For reasons that beggar comprehension, the system also offers a Reset button which, presumably, restores the defaults—not, I think, because there is any good reason for it (there absolutely is not), but solely because HTML offers a way of doing this. This is brain-dead user-interface design. And it's about to get worse.

For each paper you can enter a bid, which is an indication of how much you'd like to review it. There's a special category for papers with which you have a conflict-of-interest (a standard term-of-art in this area). Concretely, the bidding categories are that you'd love to review it (A), that you're willing to do so (B), that you'd rather not do so (C), or that you're conflicted with the paper (D). Now which letter would you think goes with Conflict?

As you're looking down the list of all papers (left frame), you might notice that there are two little columns labeled A and C. These are the counts of how many people have already bid A or C on that paper. Let me explain why this is about the stupidest information to provide. You want people to bid bidding independently of each other; you don't want someone to look at a paper and think, “Hmm, I could go either way on this; oh look, we've had ten people bid C and nobody bid A, which suggests nobody really wants to read this paper...I'd be crazy to get stuck with it, so I'll go with C”. I can't imagine a system better designed to make life maximally hard for a program chair.

Anyway, after well over two hours of this last night, I submitted my bids (my hand poised shakily over Update Bids, fearful of what would happen when I clicked). I then sent mail to Kathi, who is also on the committee, warning her to look for any other interface than the list-of-all-papers I'd just been through.

Happily, there is another interface: you can select just an area at a time and view all the papers in that area. Kathi happily marched off to use that, little knowing her life would be worse than mine.

First, the list of papers in an area only changes your view in the left frame. The right frame is still the list of all papers. So if you pick an area and its papers are paper numbers 11, 17, 89, 103, and so forth, guess how you enter your bids for those papers?

Second, you can't choose a single bid for all the papers in an area. That means it's not enough that you don't want to read a single paper on the Semantic Web; you have to find every paper in the category and manually decline (C) each of them. (Hmm; perhaps an Ontology would be able to help with that.)

Third, curiously, the list of papers does not include the A and C columns. In other words, they didn't reuse code! The good software engineering practices just keep on coming.

Finally, many papers fall under multiple categories. But if you bid on paper 11 under one category, it still shows up in sorted numeric order in all its other categories, without even indicating that you've already bid on it. (In other words, you would definitely see far more than 419 papers by the time you're done.)

This is bloody-minded software development in the extreme, a process of mindless, thoughtless, soulless application of algorithm to data structure. It is difficult to imagine that a living, breathing combination of human sinew, blood and fiber could have created an interface so awful.

The real moral, though, lest we lose sight of it, is the waste of it all. There are 34 regular program committee members, 16 people on the “Expert-Review Panel” (including Kathi and me), and two program chairs. Suppose each of us wastes just two hours of our time because of bad software design (seeing as I believe I've alredy wasted one hour, the odds of this are fairly high). Some of these people are fancy consultants, so on average say our time is worth USD 100/hour. That's a collective USD 10,400 just in terms of wasted billable time (never mind the frustration, the lost goodwill, etc). That's far more than the cost of a better conference management package. What does that tell you about what the committee thinks of our time? I can't wait to meet one of these people and hear them complain at the conference about the popular unwillingness to pay for quality software.

Maybe I should send them a bill. Maybe we should all send them bills, so they would come to their senses.

Gourmet Dinners? Oh, Fiddlesticks!

2007-06-06T10:46:00.002-04:00

The routinely ridiculous New York Times has an article today, Dinner at the Foodies': Purslane and Anxiety, about performance anxiety that hosts feel when inviting guests over to dinner. It has the predictable New Yorkers making the predictable dash about the island (and beyond!) to keep from falling behind in the wars of culinary one-upmanship. It contains the following precious line from a history professor:

There is a specific cachet that only a fiddlehead fern can convey.

It is therefore with the greatest glee that I report that last night, we had a foodie friend over for dinner and the casual meal we tossed together at the last minute consisted primarily of...fiddlehead.

I feel so superior right now.

King for a Day

2007-05-27T21:34:00.000-04:00

It was May 1997, and we were driving between Dayton and Houston. It was the proverbial cold, dark night, and the rain was pouring, just pouring in buckets. We crept along I-55 into Memphis, trying to find a hotel. A few miles out of town, I was playing with the tuner trying to find a station—a challenge, to hear something over the din of rain—when I heard a guitar note, and was transfixed. I stayed frozen as we drove into Memphis, bathed in the wonder of the blues.

It was the first time I had ever been moved by music so deeply as to feel a city, a population, a race, a culture. I knew little, then, about the privations Memphis had experienced, yet already I could feel it in my bones from just those few guitar notes. What I learned later only deepened my appreciation for what I heard, but what I read simply could not match what I'd felt.

It's easy to argue that B.B. King is too commercial, too simplistic, too mainstream, too easy to appreciate. He is indeed all those things. But he is also capable of music of great power, and he opened my mind that night. In a few spare notes he made me feel a side of American culture that isn't in the version exported to foreigners.

Today was a great thrill, as B.B. received an honorary degree from Brown.

It's the first time I've attended even part of the main graduation ceremony at Brown, and my reward was getting to hear B.B. offer us a brief piece, a capella. Enjoying it as much as anyone else was Craig C. Mello, Brown alum and 2006 Nobel Laureate (seated).

Long Live the King!

An Overflowing Cup

2007-04-15T19:19:00.001-04:00

The World Cup is on.

No, not that World Cup; it really was over last year. Rather, the Cricket World Cup, which is even more interminable than usual. But who's complaining? A few billion people in India and Pakistan, for instance, two cricket-crazy countries that were both eliminated in the first round; but not this happily non-partisan viewer.

To most people, world cups are temporary quadrennial punctuations in their schedules. To me, it's a Plimsoll line that plumbs my immersion in modern technology. As cups go, then, this one counts for two notches. But more on that in a bit.

The World Cup is beind held in the West Indies. Don't feel too badly if you've never heard of the West Indies; don't rush to your atlas, either. You're used to hearing of them as the Caribbean, except they also encompass South American countries such as Guyana, and exclude countries such as Cuba (now if only Fidel Castro had been a bowler rather than a pitcher...). Home of a thrilling, exuberant style often called “calypso cricket”, the region has gone to great lengths to host the tournament.

It's sad, then, that the impact of those two early exits—particularly India's—is writ so large. I single out India not for partisan reasons but because of an inescapable fact: it has by far the largest population of the circket-playing nations, combining a wealthy expat community in the US with an increasingly enriched population at home. Indeed when I was at the cricket stadium in Bengalooru in December 2006, I saw posters for world cup cruises that cost several thousand US dollars. But the half-empty stands are not the fault of India's team alone; they're equally due to a stupidly greedy ticket sales strategy that was irking the West Indians even before the tournament began. It's a pity, because this mismanagement means the cup may not return to this hemisphere for a while.

Another group that is undoubtedly hurting is the advertisers. Actually, I've been surprised by how few different companies have advertised all tournament long. A quick look at the categories of advertisers makes clear precisely who the target demographic is: insurance (inconclusive), money transfers to South Asia (hmmm...), and matrimonials (bingo: desi grad students).

What fans there are are, nevertheless, having a grand time. The stands teem with everything from tigers (Bangladesh) to kangaroos and crocodiles (guess). Even the half-amateur Irish, who have made it to the second round, are being supported surprisingly well. I haven't seen too many Rastafarians, but two days ago the camera focused in on a West Indian gent sporting a large, black knit cap featuring a beautiful green marijuana leaf. One presumes he was feeling pretty peaceful.

Despite huge changes over the past two decades, there are many ways in which cricket still lags behind better commercialized sports. Some of these ways are refreshing: cricketers from the lesser countries still give honest interviews, rather than substituting answers with long strings of disclaimers that are carefully designed to give offense to no-one. On the other hand, one of my colleagues, John Jannotti, observed that nothing gets transmitted during the lunch break, when that time could be used well for some entertaining tourism ads by the islands. This is not strictly accurate: while for part of the time there's merely a slide saying when play will resume, the rest of the time is taken up by some fairly remarkable—or remarkably awful—desi rap. The latter only reinforces John's point.

One of the ways in which cricket has stolen a march over other major commercial sports, such as American football, basketball and baseball, is in the smart use of technology. For a supposedly stuffy and traditionalist game, there seem to be few qualms about the use of televisions and replays. Furthermore, there is no adversarial scenario whereby coaches must “challenge” umpires: instead, umpires can freely consult television replays from multiple angles to render a verdict. This means the game has lost a touch of its spontaneity, but the far higher quality of decisions is a clear advantage, while the very small number of such replay consultations means it's rarely disruptive to the flow of the game (and indeed, every such replay is the source of great tension and excitement). This, combined with other technologies such as motion tracking of balls, means that in a mere fifteen years, cricket has been almost unrecognizably transformed (for the better, though two hundred tweed-jacketed MCC members will undoubtedly disagree over sips of their port).

The game's rules have also changed and, while some of these changes are designed to simply make matches more of a slug-fest, these rules have adapted to incorporate significant strategic elements. The most interesting of these is the terribly-named “power play”. It used to be that tight fielding restrictions (over where players could stand relative to the inner circle) applied for the first fifteen overs of a fifty-over game. Now these restrictions apply for a total of twenty overs; the first ten of these must be the first ten of the inning, but the remaining five can be taken any time the fielding captain chooses, in five-over blocks (with the caveat that they will be automatically enforced by the umpire if necessary). (The name is awful because “the fielding captain has chosen to take a power play” sounds like he just engaged in a positive action, whereas in reality he has undertaken an action that will hurt his team.) Names apart, though, they add a significant new element of strategy to games. Some teams have chosen to not strategize at all, taking all power-plays in a row (i.e., for the first twenty overs). Others have spread them out to good effect. In contrast, at least once (in a recent South Africa game), I saw a captain make a complete hash of it, leaving the last power-play until the end of the inning and giving the opposition a bushel of runs in the process. So it really does impact matches.

Finally, on to my own technological history.

Back in 1999, I heard that Fox Sports World was going to show one- and two-hour highlights of every day's play. This was what made us cross the line and get cable TV for the first time. (Before we got around to disconnecting it OLN began to show the Tour de France...and the rest is history.)

In 2003 we didn't get cricket on the TV, but decided against buying satellite connectivity. Of course, we could get the scores in close to real time over the Internet. For the finals, in which Australia played India, I was unfortunately out of the country; in particular, I was on my way from Frankfurt to rural Germany for a Dagstuhl workshop. What to do for the scores while on a slow, rural train in a country that's never even heard of the sport?

Fortunately, Kathi knew enough about cricket to be able to parse a score-line. And we'd just gotten ourselves T-Mobile phone services. T-Mobile lets you send email to an account that turns the message into a text-message. So every few minutes, Kathi copied the relevant parts of the scorecard off a screen and emailed it to my phone, and I kept up with the scores all the way to Dagstuhl. It was exciting, heady stuff. (The technology, that is. The match was an unmitigated disaster for any Indian.)

Now, in 2007, with the slightest prodding from my father, I've subscribed to Willow TV. Their service has been surprisingly good, even if they are excessively vigilant (if understandably so) about having multiple sessions for a single user account. Thanks to the Internet, we can route around the ignorance of American television entirely. (There hasn't been a single reference even to the tournament as a whole in any of the American media I follow, other than an op ed piece by Shashi Tharoor in the New York Times...bemoaning the lack of coverage.)

But that's not all. Last weekend my parents visited, with their boat-anchor of a laptop. The laptop, you see, has an s-video output. So my father brought that along with a cable; we plugged it into the TV and proceeded to spend all weekend as the most perfect couch potatoes you've met. It's the first time I've seen something to the "Windows Media Center" advertising: the OS is smart enough to take the signal inside Windows Media Player and send it to the s-video, ignoring everything else on screen, so you can even hide the player on the computer's display and proceed to use it to work (as my mother did, ignoring the two of us for the most part) without affecting the TV viewers. The signal has been sufficiently good that, save for a few artifacts and the very occasional blip (about twice over two days), I entirely forgot that we were watching programming over the Internet rather than normal-definition TV.

Well, that was rather nice, and after my parents left I was feeling pretty depressed about my own laptop. Then Kathi realized that we have an ancient (~2000) IBM ThinkPad in the basement, the machine Kathi bought when she started her job, which we keep around for emergencies when someone has to send a machine in for repairs. She knew it had a bunch of connectors on it, so she went to check. Wouldn't you know, one of them is an s-video.

It's actually a 7-pin s-video, not 4-pin. Calling various of our fine technology stores (Radio Shack, CompUSA, etc.) yielded neither connectors nor wisdom (indeed, none of the former and even less of the latter). Then we noticed that the four pins appear to be in the same position on both the 4- and 7-pin sockets; and I found some pinout diagrams on the Web that provided just the reassurance I was hoping for. So we plugged a 4-pin jack into the 7-pin socket, twiddled with some configuration, upgraded some of the ancient software on the ThinkPad and, hurrah, I have cricket on the TV again.

Life is great.

Coda

Life wasn't so great for Bob Woolmer, the coach of Pakistan, who died shortly after the country's team failed to qualify for the second round. Many in the cricketing world must have immediately wondered whether his death was natural or was caused by the gambling interests that are so strong in the game. When, a few days later, the coroner ruled his death was a murder, I'm sorry to say the news was more saddening than shocking. As a child I enjoyed reading about Woolmer's exploits for Kent and England, and he was a positive force on the game. So there is a dark underbelly to all the money sloshing around cricket, and Woolmer's death reveals just how dark it is.

Putting Overheating Computers to Work

2007-04-12T21:04:00.000-04:00

For lunch today, I picked up a salad, bread and butter from Au Bon Pain. As usual, the butter was frozen solid: utterly unsuitable for spreading. I flipped over my OQO (pocket-sized laptop) and put the butter on it. Four minutes later, it was of perfect consistency.

Seeing Stars

2007-02-19T11:59:00.000-05:00

I was in Australia last month and kicking myself for not having brought a star chart. Gary Leavens overheard me and pointed me to Stellarium.

It's a very nice little program that shows you the stars, constellations, nebulae and other information in the night sky based on where you are and the date and time. Just dim your laptop screen enough, hold it up, and you can match the program output with what you're seeing. It also has an object search facility, and will track the passage of time. And it's free, and runs on all the standard platforms! They were smart enough to design it to run unplugged, so you really can take it outdoors no matter where you are.

We Are Not All Jelly Donuts

2007-02-18T16:24:00.001-05:00

Berlin! I'm a city person, and I've been in Germany about a dozen times, so how did I miss this place? For some years I kept meaning to visit our friends, Henrik and Géraldine, who lived there; preying on my weaknesses, Géraldine once sent me a bookmark from the Pergamon Museum. But then they suddenly left, and Berlin slipped off my radar. But here I am, part business (to speak at the Technische Universität) but partly also to see a city that, if critics like the Economist are right, is in terminal decline...but then they think that of half the world. Thriving? Declining? Or both, going out in style? I couldn't wait to see.

“If passenger Yule-rich on board, please page a flight attendant. Passenger Yule-rich.” Ah, you know you must be on Continental. Could their American flight crew possibly know or care less about the world? (A moment later, one of the German flight attendants comes on-line and quietly re-pronounces Ullrich.)

Public Transport

Every dying city should wish it had Berlin's public transport. Setting aside an incredibly annoying, and poorly signposted, closure of track around Potsdamer Platz—which is a transportation hub—and the fact that all city transit maps, including the official ones, are out-of-date—the U1 and U2 have been merged into a U12 that does not correspond to either parent lines—the U- and S-bahn trains are superb. Both stations and trains are frequent, and a day's pass ends at 3am, which says something about Berlin life. Most remarkable are the small details that are so easy to get right and yet almost every subway system fails miserably: you always exit from the same side, which makes life easier for people to plan ahead, especially those with luggage; both directions share a common platform, so in a rush you can avoid making a decision until the last moment, and if you do make a mistake, correcting it is straightforward (nowhere is it less so than in Boston where, if you try to reverse directions in some stations, you must actually buy a fresh ticket!); the LED displays in most trains list the next three stops.

Not all signs of quality are so small. Some of the newer trains are entirely articulated, making it much easier to spread out the load; traveling in one of these, which also have LCD displays suspended from the roofs, as they go around or over small kinks in the route, feels a bit like being on the inside of a gigantic (and brightly-lit) snake. The most visible sign of progress must surely be the new Hauptbahnhof, perhaps more a statement of the aspirations of a united city than a reflection of reality; yet there it stands, several levels of gleaming glass and steel, looking like nothing so much as a runaway from the set of Metropolis (a quotation that was no doubt intentional and fittingly ironic). In contrast to the traditional underground bustle of German Hbfs, this one is an airy, spacious experience (rather reminiscent of the main JR station in Kyoto), full of shopping but sensibly equipped with services dominating luxuries; at the top and bottom, sleek IC and ICE trains hum in tune with the electricity. Gliding into it from the east, around a curve in the track that enters a semi-circular canopy enclosed in the square that is the station itself, is an electric experience.

Bauhaus

There is a modest Bauhaus museum in Berlin. Berlin's claim on the Bauhaus is minimal: the operation had lost most of its stars by the time it got here, and it was shut down pretty soon thereafter. But it would be out of character for cities to not exploit the very stars they once persecuted and drove out, and Berlin's artsy reputation demands something of this ilk anyway.

There were some nice surprises in its collection. There were several interesting mobile-like balanced sculptures that are not functional but nevertheless good eye-candy. I have long admired the undersung Gertrude Arndt's weaves, and she is well-represented here. There were some letterforms sketched by Albers. In one photograph of a table created for the Törten estate, I was stricken by the dullness and austerity of the black-and-white photograph contrasted against the rich two-toned beach-and-stained black fir chair in front of it: a room full of those chairs looks an awful lot more interesting! Overall, two things stood out from the collection: the sheer lowness of Bauhaus design, something that hadn't struck me until I saw this many objects assembled together (the chairs, for instance, have no wings, barely any backs, and certainly no headrests—this is prairie architecture imported into the living room), and the realization that some of the most beautiful pieces they produced were...ashtrays.

The Jewish Museum

One of the great new sites in Berlin is Daniel Liebskind's Jewish Museum. It's a mixed result. Liebskind was up against an astounding challenge—the museum of Jewish life, in Berlin—and it is a sign of his genius that he managed to deliver. Unfortunately, and perhaps unfairly, the latter part of the museum simply does not live up to the promise of the beginning, but perhaps it cannot. The beginning is solemn, reflective, startling...while the rest, an account of Jewish life in Europe through the centuries, is predictable and often somewhat pedestrian. I guess I had a sense of what to expect from the latter, and got just that. But do go, just to see the beginning. His Garden of Exile, a group of 49 towers on sloping ground, is claustrophobic and disorienting, the pillar-like towers serving as so many metaphors from smokestacks to the triumphal arcades of Nürnberg...and the Holocaust Tower, which is in fact the negative-space of a tower, again evoking a chimney, broken by a shard of light, transports you into mythological space. There is enough in those two Axes to occupy the mind for a long time, and nothing I had read prepared me for their power. Elsewhere, too, his sense of disruption is strong, as when the main staircase of the Axis of Continuity runs into a wall—anywhere else it would be a playful postmodernist joke, but here it's not funny (nor meant to be). But somehow there is a lingering sense that he invested all his emotion into the beginning. (The rest of the museum is both helped and marred by the large number of docents, who are usually solicitous but sometimes set about enforcing strange rules such as forcing you to either wear your jacket or wrap it around your waist, but not carry it upon your arm; or demanding that your bag must be carried in front of you, not on your back.)

The Holocaust Memorial

If you want real controversy, though, you can't beat the Holocaust Memorial.

First of all: a memorial? Is it possible to even monumentalize such things? Besides, having visited actual concentration camps, I can sincerely say that nothing is as powerful as visiting the sites of these crimes. Lincoln may have been on to something when he said, at Gettysburg, “we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground”. But nothing so simple as a non-monument passes these days, though the history of this Berlin memorial is tortured well beyond the standard as these things go.

But if you must do it, this result is difficult to surpass. It is in ground riddled with symbolism: formerly a no-man's land, a block south of the Brandenberger Tor—too close to be ignored, yet just enough out of sight to allow a modern country a chance of putting its past behind it.

At very first sight it is bland and unremarkable. Then, a moment later, your eyes take in the magnitude of the place—a full city square in a city of generous proportions—with a scale provided by the distant buildings of Potsdamer Platz, which is when you realize its real expanse. The plot is covered in about 2700 stelae of various heights, on a ground that is also uneven. Your first thought is of a dark wave, but if you've ever seen an old Jewish cemetery, such as the one in Prague—with gravestone piled upon gravestone—you realize that Eisenmann is quoting not only funerary caskets but a long history of Jewish oppression even in death. The plot accomplishes the neat trick of being both abstract and concrete at the same time.

As you walk around the site—the stelae are in a regular grid of paths—the structure becomes more and more oppressive as the surrounding buildings sink from sight and the sounds muffle. The references are evident, and effective. Near the middle, though, where the stelae are tallest and ground lowest, something strange happens: you are so surrounded in tall rectangular structures that the (perhaps inadvertent) quotation of Liebskind's Garden of Exile begins to actually feel derivative.

Part of the controversy over the memorial is that it wasn't Jewish enough, and that it didn't sufficiently reflect guilt. Here I think Eisenmann has redeemed himself wonderfully. It was by no means unanimous that the monument should be to Jews alone, and many still feel that leaving out other targeted groups was improper. Without doing so explicitly, Eisenmann includes them all. Yet the characteristic profile of a old European Jewish cemetary is unmistakeable, at once situating the site within a (forced) tradition. What, anyway, must a memorial be? It must be sombre, contemplative, and show remorse, all of which this does...but I think it must also, like this memorial, have in it an element of the universal, to say both “This could happen to you” and “you too are capable of this”: those should be the larger framework of Never Forgetting.

There is an information center under the memorial, which I did not visit, and the site itself was staffed on the cold, rainy evening that I visited by an eager young man handing out information pamphlets. The pamphlet is informative enough, even featuring an FAQ, though it can't but help pump up the center's management, answering a question that I bet nobody asks.

The other thing remarkable about this pamphlet, a trend equally visible at the Jewish Museum (and an increasing number of other sites worldwide), is the extraordinary emphasis on the architect. There he is on page one, in a black-and-white photograph, trying hard to look both pained and thoughtful at the responsibility of capturing the Weltschmertz. It is as inspecting the monument were not enough, that we must indulge this mutual admiration society of architects and commissioners. If Wren had the audacity to create the epitaph he did in his time, imagine what the pamphlet for St. Paul's would look like if he built it today! We'd be lucky to get to God by page 25. On the other hand, it's precisely the Wren spirit that is called for: I speak to you in stone, and the stone suffices: behold, and be awed.

Kino!

What is more Berlin than film? The city we associate with Lang and Metropolis, Dietrich and Der blaue Engel (and, let's admit, Riefenstahl and Olympia); a city that still trades on photographs of Gary Cooper landing in Tempelhof (an airport that, frankly, I more readily associate with Freud's flight at the last moment...); and—a city that just happens to be running its Film Festival while I'm in town! Not that they couldn't make it slightly easier to find information, tickets or shows, but eventually I was ensconsed in the Zoo Palast for a show at 2pm.

With several dozens of school children, actually, young enough to actually screech (rather than yell). I realized I'd ended up in a showing of short films for kids; but here I was, and perhaps I would understand more of the German anyway. What I saw for the next two hours was a series of films that each included at least one thing that would be considered too offensive for children in America: horror, pornography, infidelity, and in one peculiar instance, an animation featuring a rather violent spoon. Any of the shorts, much less the lot of them, would have readily ignited the entire righteous parenthood of Amerika (though it must be said that the spoon did get its comeuppance). I did find strange the sometimes emotionless voice of the speak-over translator (done on the cheap, perhaps, seeing as they used one woman to translate the voice of three different young boys). Also odd were the things they did and did not translate: the boys' names like Milton and Byron were “translated” (that is, simply repeated), whereas “sexy lady” was not (though none of the adolescents had any trouble with the concept). Given the sometime ponderous nature of European movies for “mature” audiences, and the weighty themes covered honestly and thoughtfully here, it was a far better experience than I could have expected (especially when I first sat down and looked around). Equally noteworthy was the extremely international mix of films, roughly one per continent—and the only German film was actually about the tough lives of illegal immigrants from the Ukraine.

Liquid Lounge

Berlin's Tegel is a modest airport, with about fifteen gates arranged in a ring, each (rather inefficiently) having its own security and departure section. It is, by the way, named in honor of Otto Lilienthal, though that name is printed virtually nowhere: I only found out by walking outside and looking back up at the control tower. But there is a small reward for those who take the exit less frequently used: just outside, besides the row of benches usually populated by smokers, there is a very low-slung sculpture—never more than a foot off the ground—of a man, lying prone, belly-down, wearing an aviator jacket and goggles, wings strapped to his hand, and tethered to the ground with a rope like a goat. An aviation buff would immediately recognize it as a wonderful tribute to Lilienthal himself.

Anyway, back to security and departure. I walk into my section and put my bags through the x-ray. The security guard politely but firmly wants to know what a particular object is in my bag. Expecting she's referring to the snake-like cable that accompanies my OQO laptop, I tell her it's computer wiring. No, she says; she's pointing at a ghostly rectangle. I tell her I have no idea; oh dear, she says. Is it shaving supplies? No, I point to the shaving cream I have in the separate sealed plastic bag, so we open up and start digging. It's my deodorant stick.

Now she's examining the stick, frowning and deep in concentration. I helpfully point out the obvious: it's a solid deodorant. But the x-ray does not lie, while passengers might, and she's not having anything of me. A little annoyed, I explain that I have just flown in from the US with the same stick, and indeed use the same brand all over the US and abroad, and I've never been stopped before, not even after the ban on liquids. Why, I ask, have I never been pulled over in America? She stoutly shakes her head, fixes me with a stare, brandishes my solid-as-a-brick deodorant with a grip so firm it would have sent any fluid squirting and, with no sense of irony any German has ever been accused of, says: “In Zhermany zis is a likvid.”

I am sputtering. She is considering me with the pitiful look one gives a competition contestant who has participated fairly but has no chance of winning. Finally I play my trump card. I have just flown out of Frankfurt last week with the very same deodorant. “How”, I ask, “is it possible for the same substance to be a solid in Frankfurt but a liquid in Berlin?”

An American security guard would make mincemeat of such an argument, usually by tapping on a gun or offering some other symbolic gesture. Here, however, she stops in her tracks as Teutonic rationality kicks into high gear. She calls over her supervisor. There is a small exchange of whispers. The supervisor finally says, “It's fine”.

Of course, we are not done. The guard must save face. “You vill put zhis in your sealed plastic bag?” I look at the bag. It is already packed to the point of bursting with little containers of toiletries. And even if it weren't, even were it empty, the stick would be far too large to fit into it. But I know the rules of the game we are playing. “Of course!”, I say, make a big fussy motion, and when we are both satisfied that Security has been Enforced, I calmly close my bag and walk away.

Squaring a Chalk Circle

The subway signs are telling. Neatly validating a Wall Street Journal article I'd read on the flight into Berlin, Canada—specifically Alberta—boldly advertises a job fair, no different from any other merchant peddling wares. Berlin? Alberta? But unemployment in Germany, though not visible the way it is in America, remains very real and a much more significant phenomenon.

And yet, amidst this sense of decay, there is the sense of being in a happening place. The German automobile club, next to the major Volkswagen dealership at the heart of Under den Linden (the intersection with Friedrichstraße), advertises a collection of nature photography. It looks like an obvious ploy to con people into visiting an automobile showroom. Sceptical but nevertheless curious, I pop in ready to beat a hasty retreat. But I stay for over an hour, admiring the winners and honorable mentions of the 2006 Europe-wide nature photography competition, being particularly impressed by the subjects, technique and patience of Ingo Arndt. The arts are a serious matter here.

Berlin's past will never entirely disappear. On my last evening, I was walking from Mitte to the Museumsinsel. One route goes through the most statesque parts of Unter den Linden and, just before that, passes the imposing Staatsoper. Berlin, opera, culture—these are the thoughts that occupy your mind as you walk past a pleasant but rather barren little green space between the Opera and Unter den Linden. And then you see the square's place written in that stark black-on-white Fraktur that they use all over the city: Bebelplatz. That's right: seventy years ago, they burned books here. In this, and in so many other respects, the dispatches of William Shirer and his ilk never entirely escape the mind.

But when you finally get to the Museumsinsel, and walk up the dramatic entrance of the Pergamonmuseum, enter, turn right, and right again, and are suddenly in the presence of the Ishtar-Tor. You see the remnants of the azure blue tiles from the wall of Babylon itself, and you have just passed through the very gate Nebuchadrezzar II himself. It is imperial theft, to be sure, and of the very highest order. But then you spend a half hour walking and examining the reconstructed ceremonial pathway approaching the gate and the gate itself...it takes quite a bit to impress us Indians, because age is in our blood: old things to others are quite new to us. But once in a while the ancient world can throw up something stunning, and at those moments you are transported, in this case, from the problematic space of Berlin into the pure abstraction of time.

New Book Reviews

2007-02-11T07:41:00.000-05:00

Mostly my Australian readings, this time.

Nettige Hogi

2007-02-08T10:48:00.001-05:00

Reading List

Not a Nice Man to Know, Khushwant Singh
The Age of Kali, William Dalrymple
The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen
Stones of Empire, Jan Morris with Simon Winchester
Imprint of the Raj, Chandak Sengoopta
Pilgrimage to India, Pramila Jayapal
On a Shoestring to Coorg, Dervla Murphy
Two Wheels in the Dust, Anne Mustoe

Ask for directions, the locals often joke, and the response you will get is, “Nettige hogi”: “go straight”. Even a brief glance at the almost medieval street plan of Bangalore makes it immediately clear that these directions are, at best, wishful thinking.

Buried in these directions, and in my title, is a weak pun. Given the steady barter of vocabulary between English and India's many languages, one can just as easily interpret these directions as “Go to the net”: a Horace Greeley-like exhortation for the Age of Communication. It is a diktat whose enthusiastic adoption has transformed the face of this city more than that of any other in the world, and with it the style—and perhaps, someday, even the substance—of the world's commerce.

I have lived half my life in Bangalore and the other half observing it from various points West. It's fifteen years since I was last in Bangalore. It's so long, in fact, that even the city has found the time to change its name. This is my account of returning in December 2006.

Plus ça Change

Every place changes, but few in history have witnessed anything as explosive as this. Fifteen years ago this was a sleepy metropolis with a nascent technology base. Now it is a city transformed, four times as large, with rich-poor gulfs enlarged to a cosmic scale, its roads choking beyond capacity, five times over.

My parents have moved two blocks in fifteen years, but those two blocks sum up a great deal of what has gone and what remains, and demonstrate how a street's best attraction can become its undoing. Our street used to have a generous sidewalk peopled by large, old trees that provided a leafy canopy for a narrow asphalt strip; a block from home was one of the entraces of Bangalore's greatest gem, the large green lung known as Lalbagh. The street was so unknown that offering its name by way of an address was useless; we instead directed visitors in terms of Lalbagh followed by geometry.

Then something funny happened. The commercial heart of the city, in the M.G. Road area, found Lalbagh directly in the way to the residential heart, in Jayanagar. Routing around this traffic obstacle of a park, the city pushed and pushed at every artery that could grow. Suddenly, those wide sidewalks looked awfully attractive to urban planners. Widening a road is an urban planner's white flag, the surest sign of (futile) surrender; that's precisely what happened to our road. So now it's a short but wide swathe on the map, one of the few in the area to be honored with its name on the map. They needn't have bothered; everyone know its name.

Shock and Awe

I am supposed to be shocked, but I'm not. For fifteen years I've been taking in the reports of visitors, speaking of a city I “wouldn't recognize”. What I did recognize was the tone of horrific awe in their reports: it was the tone of rubber-neckers. That Bangalore's urban planners had no idea how to handle its growth is so obvious as to be not be worth dwelling on; the interesting questions—who could have, should they have done differently, and how one halts not the Nudge but the Shove, the Bitch-Slap, of an Invisible Hand—are rarely discussed in the midst of describing the initial carnage.

I am also supposed to be bitter, and I'm not. I have no business judging the choices of those who had stayed behind; I knew, too, that this high-tech vision is precisely one I would have embraced had I stayed. If Bangalore had indeed changed beyond recognition, as literally everyone I talked to claimed, it seemed best to acknowledge the pattern of these reports in the simplest possible way: treat it as if I were visiting a new place.

The tough symoblic mountain I climbed was buying a travel guide that covered my own home town, the same Rough Guide series I buy for any other country I visit for the first time. I learned nothing from the guide, but it served the purpose of catharsis. I mentally decided to treat Bangalore (more so than the rest of India) as a new place where I just happened to know the languages and much of the street-map. You would easily feel violated if “home” has changed in ways you dislike, but you can't feel that way about a country you've never seen before! The attitude worked wonderfully: I constantly experienced the joys of discovery and rediscovery instead of the ennui, cynicism and judgmentalism of the expat returning home.

Oh, it can be taxing, all right. The streets are choked in internal combustion emissions so thick that my throat rasps and eyes tear, an experience I haven't had since Mexico City. Untrafficked streets on which I rode bicycles (helmetless!) or surreptitiously experimented with the motorized bikes of my friends are now so crowded that to cross them is most akin to playing Frogger, so I must switch to a heightened state of urban metal alertness. Also, our house is on the flight path leading to the Bangalore airport, and every night the lumbering jets coming from and then leaving for Europe pass overhead on finals. With a little effort, I'm sure I could identify the flight numbers from the jets' distinctive sounds. One such jet has just woken me up as I write this sentence, at 2:30am.

But those jets are also the sound of progress, the soundtrack for a city that was previously the poor cousin of India's other urban centers. Its name still does not roll comfortably off the tongue of Air France's crew, the `r' near the end terminating it in a phlemy guttural sound. But they'll have to learn it, won't they? Fifteen years ago a very high-level map of India would print only four cities—Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras—with a large terra nullius stretching down the spine of the country. Now that gap is ably filled by Hyderabad and Bangalore (even as three of the other four have changed their name), and newspapers and magazines speak automatically of the six urban centers, as if it were the natural order of things all along. I see my city's name when I walk through FRA or CDG. I've seen it for some years now, and each time I've felt that check-in counter was beckoning me back. Now I'm home.

What surprises me the most is how little looks different. Traveling along JC Road, for instance, not only are many establishments the same as I remember, but even many of the business signboards haven't changed. As a rough estimate, about 70% of the buildings and businesses are exactly the same; the other 30% are often new, sometimes incogruous (and certainly often inelegant) glass-and-steel erections. So it takes me a few days to understand what has happened. All the change has been chaotically swirling around the city, leaving its heart mostly unaffected (but for traffic). The mental model of what Bangalore is has altered radically, with places previously considered entirely outside town—indeed, at best a day-trip—now considered perfectly normal city subdivisions. So Bangalore has been reimagined, but it is still possible to conceive of the city in its old terms. This might explain my lack of surprise.

Even amidst this stability, some parts are more stable than others. Gandhi Bazaar remains an island of tradition, a stronghold of traditions and values that seem unaffected by its environs. It seems untouched by cynicism, commercial as always but not greedy, and it was the nicest introduction to Bangalore that I could offer Kathi.

Other parts, too, remain untainted. Malavika, Kathi and I attended a Odissi dance recital at Ravindra Kalakshetra, one of the main performing arts halls. The guest of honor held things up, Cell phones came on and off, people photographed freely, and a minister prattled on, without any of the slickness and superiority that characterizes cultural events in the West. The yuppies have their work cut out, yet.

The counterpoint was eating at Sunny's, a favored restaurant of the smart set. The menu was Italian/Western at prices I would not find cheap—and that's on translation into dollars. The food was generic to a level I found startling in a country of such culinary magnificence. But what Sunny's was selling was not food but an experience: the white walls, the air-conditioned insularity that blocked out all street noise, the quiet tinkle of silverware, all the way to the USD 3 Evian bottle on the table—advertising its value for “detoxification”—you were paying for an experience, not a meal. But it would be unfair to be too cynical: we did enjoy the salad, which we'd been missing from our diet, and if I lived in Begalooru, I too might, every so often, need to duck into that therapeutic cocoon. (And indeed, we went there because a friend who'd just suffered a great personal loss needed some peace, for which it was perfect.)

Sizes and Shapes

To everyone who complains about how boundlessly Bangalore has grown, I have a small observation: I swear it's shrunk.

The drive home from the airport was over much sooner than I expected. At first I attributed this to the streets at 2:30am; I'd never done that drive in completely deserted streets. But even while walking around in the daytime, the streets feel much shorter, and intersections much closer, than I ever recall. My mental videos of these streets, I realize, were populated in terms of buildings and other landmarks, not mileage. The older parts of town are much more dense than I ever noticed (being built largely before the advent of wide ownership of automobiles). With half my time away having been spent in Texas, none of this should be surprising, but I'm still startled.

Feelings like this make an extended absence interesting. When someone insists that “After just one year you can see the difference”, as numerous have reported, they mean it—but they can't. The differences my fellow expats refer to are the superficial ones, those you could glean from a statistical gazette. Beyond that, and beyond even the look, it's the feel I want to experience. I am shocked, for instance, at what seemed a long distance to walk when I grew up. I recall once walking home the few miles from school with a friend, and a right-royal event it was; but a few weeks ago, Kathi and I walked over twelve miles in Edinburgh and thought little of it (and, as Mitchell would point out, that's nothing, even for a weighed-down army).

I have a little insight now about transport in Bangalore. The crawl of traffic has, I believe, greatly exaggerated distance in this city: somewhere along the way, I think people fell for the faulty logic, “If it takes an hour just by bus, how much longer would it take on foot?” The superficial solution is to focus on better public transit, higher occupancy, and so on, but I think those issues merely hide a more profound disconnect with distance itself.

Since I love to walk cities, walking Bangalore may be the best way of recapturing it from the automobiles. There is a peculiar horror here about walking, though. Some of it is understandable when you consider the air, but it's not clear sitting in a car is that much better (it's much the same air, innit?), and anyway the tragedy of the commons argument is writ large here. As a friend has pointed out, there appears to even be a revulsion associated with public transport: “If you'd told us you were going to take an auto[rickshaw], we'd have sent over the car!” I know, I know, these are the first flushes of an automotive society, and wisdom can come only with time, not from scolding. But as someone who cares about urban landscapes and mindscapes, it's one of the few issues on which I find it hard to not be judgmental.

Honk if you Love...Noise

India has never been a quiet place, but the cacaphony was so natural growing up, and I have since so entirely forgotten it in the silent West, that it's a renewed phenomenon I am sampling with (for now) joy. The mania for jingles when vehicles back up has not abated here, and part of the fun (which will soon wear thin) is determining whether the three-note muzak rendering is of Jingle Bells. We sleep with our windows open, and the plethora of sounds is simultaneously enchanting and startling. Besides those jets, dogs have been barking away, cars have repeatedly honked down the road to get someone's attention (they got mine, even though they didn't need it), and one neighbor's cell phone rang repeatedly (to the ring-tune of Saare Jahaan se Achcha). Now, at 3:30am, a neighbor's alarm has gone off, and it's taken him a lot longer to wake up than it would have me (but, ah, he's in the shower now...even as another alarm has just sprung to action).

I had also entirely forgotten quite how much Indians use the horn while driving. It's as if an entire sense organ were going to waste, and a technique of traffic navigation arose to exploit this weakness. It's coming back, quickly, the many different meanings of a honk: from “I'm coming faster than you think!” to “Out of my way!” to “I am scooter, hear me roar!” to “I'm just so darn happy to be alive; these notes are my contribution to the cosmic song!”

Amidst the modern sounds are ancient ones. Just as the last flights have gotten out of Bangalore airspace and you've gotten back to sleep, at 5am the muzzein calls begin from across town. It's a complex polyphony, this call to prayer, broadcast from mosques in almost every direction from where we sleep (an increasingly figurative term). Of course they wake you up; that's what they're meant to do! And even as I remind myself to never adopt an organized religion with pre-modern calendrical traditions, I joyously embrace what these sounds spell for the Indian secular experiment. I reason that people who live in fear of their lives for their faith do not take to waking people up by broadcasting it over microphones at 5am, and I am delighted. These are the signs that Amartya Sen should have been looking for. (Or perhaps he should have been listening, not looking.)

It is not the only joyful sign. Several times already I have seen a sight I would not have countenanced fifteen years ago: women driving a two-wheeler with a man riding pillion. It feels to me a remarkable enough sight to be worth the attention. For all the evils of modern society that some Indian commentators focus on, little signs like this paint a much more complete picture. If you want to complain about Indian progress, you'll have to account for this side of it, too.

Courting Disaster

The water here is, of course, undrinkable. I don't know the scientific difference between water in Bangalore and in Mexico City, but (assuming it's small) the cultural difference is enormous. In Mexico, we were told even to brush our teeth with bottled water, and I was consciously aware of that entreaty. Here, I blithely forgot all about it—indeed, never even considered the matter—until Kathi raised the question. That's what happens when you feel like you're back home, I noted mentally. So is Mexico City's water really that much worse, or is this business about brushing with bottled water just American queasiness? Anyone know?

I am, meanwhile, eagerly trying to get ill in other ways too. Well, not exactly, but I am recklessly engaging in unprotected behavior known to be dangerous: I'm eating food from the roadside. I have no doubt that my immune system has lost most or all of its resistance, as I found out when I was diagnosed with a gippy gut in Edinburgh. But then again, I figured, if I could take it on the chin in Scotland, how much more fun it would be over here! So I've blithely been digging into roadside food, much of it not piping-hot (which would render it less prone to bacteria).

The good news is that, at least in my corner of Bangalore, “Indian fast food” is alive and well (well, alive with what—that's the question, innit). Little stalls continue to supply food in volumes, and many more have sprouted, either super-specializing or manufacturing a variety so staggering that the storefronts aren't big enough to feature a board that lists it all. Indeed, the growth of a yuppie middle-class with two-job families has given these a fillip. There is a disturbing side to it, too: when you've just consumed a large volume of fried carbohydrate but used a scooter to get to it and then get away, that's a lot of expanding instead of expending. The health costs of this food revolution are likely to be staggering. That, combined with the state of the air, indicates that Indian healthcare would be a terrific investment sector.

And yet, there is something classically Indian in the survival and growth of these restaurants. Dalrymple reminds us that the Hindu traditions alive in cities like Madurai date back to the same era as ancient Greece or Egypt, even though you will not find much of a worshipper of Zeus or Ra any longer. One could view this as a statement about the conservativeness of India, but really, it's a comment on the malleability of traditions. The most infuriating thing about Indian culture can be its willingness to go with the flow, but equally one of its most admirable traits is its ability to do so. And these restaurants demonstrate that what economists have long labeled the “Indian rate of growth” need not be taken as a natural structural feature: explosive, innovative, self-assertive growth is very much possible, if the regulatory system will permit it and the infrastructure will support it. (“Infrastructure” may be the longest word in common use in India.)

Language

Language is power, language is politics, and language is a dozen other cliches. Language is also confusing.

To take a national pulse, I try to read newspapers of countries I am about to visit. Language is usually a problem (though I did struggle for a month through El Pais), but doubly ought not to be in India. The country features several fine English papers (as well as my beloved Deccan Herald), and of course I ought to be able to read the ones in Indian languages too.

As an aside: Surprisingly, it feels like it's actually become harder to read Indian language papers from the US, owing to font problems. My conjecture is that, seven to eight years ago, font support was so bad that every paper was forced to provide fonts and instructions; now, computer sold in India come cofigured perfectly, but this just makes life harder for those elsewhere.

Back to the point, I've been trying to read Hindi and Kannada documents wherever I can find them. Not surprisingly I'm a much slower reader now. What shocked me, however, was just how slow I seem to have become. I tried to read the Hindi subtitles to the cabin safety announcements on Air France, and couldn't finish the text on most screens before the caption changed.

I figured out what's going wrong. The problem is that so much of this text isn't Hindi (or Kannada) at all: it's English. Especially when it comes to technical material, most of the key terms (“life jacket”) have been transliterated instead of translated. This is just as well (and goes back to the Indian culture of malleability—there are language academies, but a serious attempt to scrub the language would leave the general public laughing all the way to the bank), but it makes for very disruptive reading. You can no longer read a word written in Hindi in Hindi: rather, you have to stop a syllable or two in and ask, “Is this really a Hindi word?” (Because the script is different, you don't immediately recognize the word in the other language, as you would in, say, Spanglish.) Fortunately English sounds different enough that you can soon tell that “something is off”; but then you have to change to a different mode of reading entirely: read each syllable rather than the “whole word”, pronounce the word in your head, then mangle it slightly (since the transliteration is usually of necessity imperfect), repeat until you recognize the English word...then continue. This is taxing business!

I'd love to hook up with a linguist to understand this process better. I'm not up on the theories of phonics, but the time it takes me to read these words tells me that this sounding-out process is not natural to the way we read. I really do feel two entirely different mental processes in action, and it's disruptive to keep switching between them. Presumably, however, content creators wouldn't do this unless they felt their audience was comfortable with their product (at least, one presumes (or hopes!), the flight safety announcements were tested for readability). So why do the natives do much better than I did? What combination of the following is at work: (a) they read all the native script material faster, so they have time to perform this shift; (b) the words in question are routinely written in transliteration, so they may as well be thought of was native language words; (c) they have so much experience performing this shift that they can do it more naturally; (d) again, owing to experience, they're much quicker at recognizing when to shift to reading transliterations; or (e) something entirely different?

One phenomenon that simply made no sense was the transliteration, rather than translation, of names on storefronts and in ads. As for the later, the current cool trend is for using Hindi words spelled out in English, probably causing in the minds of Western visitors the dual of the confusion I describe above (“I know all the letters, but it doesn't spell any English word I know...”). But store signs? And in rural areas??? Sriram Rajamani finally offered a highly credible reason: given the periodic predilection for marauding gangs of language lawyers to deface signboards, this was a kind of insurance. This is only half an explanation, though; it still doesn't explain why they wouldn't just translate them.

One unmistakable linguistic phenomenon is the displacement of Tamil and Telugu by Hindi. It used to be—or so it seems to me—that Tamil and Telugu were much more widely spoken on the streets of Bengalooru. With the infiltration of large numbers of people from the North, however, stores I would never have expected to understand Hindi now do so (at least they understand it; I didn't hear a whole lot of it spoken by the staff).

What is most being lost, sadly, is some of the more absurdly poetic bits of Indian English. The highways have grown up, and in adulthood they seem to have shed their classic exhortations (Speed thrills but kills / Drive slowly live longer) for sensible signs (that are no more obeyed, for that).

Las Vegas, Las Vegas, what has happened? I got respectable and so did you. With pirate battles, jousters and volcanoes, the poor hookers have to dress up like Barney to get any attention.
—Bette Midler, September 5, 1994, returning to play Vegas after 18 years

I am happy to report, though, that the twisted, ritualized, police blotter-like diction of the Deccan Herald remains unchanged, a slightly ridiculous but always comforting buoy on a stormy sea of language.

Prison Cells

I've been reading for years how the developing world successfully leapfrogged the developed world in many respects by simply adopting the latest technologies and avoiding intermediate stages of development. The canonical example of this is the adoption of mobile phones, which avoid the need for cable infrastructure. I am fascinated to see how this will play out in domains like transportation. Bengalooru clearly needs to address its traffic and pollution problem; my guess is that in a short number of years people will simply not tolerate it to the point of voting with feet and wallets, at which point necessity will mother some entirely innovative solution that will also leapfrog the West. (There is a tragicomic intersection between these two realms: parking is so haphazard that a cell-phone is almost a necessity to coordinate such things, or even for an advance party to guide the rest to available spots.)

There is a lesson here. Infrastructure is not only a boon but also a burden, soaking up resources for its maintenance, and those maintainers fighting to preserve their entrenched interests. The lack of infrastructure is painful to live through, but it is equally like a fresh, unmarked lawn inviting people to create their paths through.

In all these ways, it was difficult to not feel a little like being transported back to what the West must have been like in the past. (To have gone to Bengalooru from Edinburgh, in particular, was to be powerfully reminded of Adam Smith.) This is, of course, a fiction: it is a transportation to not one but many pasts, some parts medieval, some parts much like the rise of the Industrial Age (refer to Engels' study of Manchester), some at the rise of the automotive age, and some in a post-wired-communication age. Yet while the overall feel is still somehow in the past, there is also a great sense of compression, as centuries elsewhere have passed in decades or merely years here. (The result can sometimes be comical. How do you respond to this caption: “Gadgets to Suit Your Sunsign”?) So to those who fret about the air and the roads and the water, I counsel patience (and not much of it): stable social change is best achieved bottom-up.

Other kinds of leapfrogging—of marketing—have also occurred here. My AirTel SIM was constantly bombarded with SMS marketing, driving me to anger. I eventually found out that I could text a message to a certain number to stop the spam—only to learn that the stoppage would go into effect just after I left. Sigh.

Speaking of marketing: In the US, soccer has for decades attempted to make inroads, to the extent of paying princely sums to import over-the-hill players, all to little effect. Indeed, each new soccer marketing effort is immediately followed by analysts gleefully predicting just how this one would fail. So India, a country where soccer has never had mindshare (at least outside certain cities like Kolkota), would...avidly follow the European league? Not only is the European soccer news given several inches of newsprint, I even saw ads featuring a fan wearing an England footy scarf—with no explanation, meaning it was a recognized cultural totem. I found the entire phenomenon a bit baffling, and don't know whether this was inspired by the Germany World Cup (or perhaps even just a bubble in the aftermath of that).

A Name by Any Other Name...

So what do I think of this Bangalore/Bengalooru business? My initial reaction was to sigh and experience something closer to annoyance than disgust.

Then, at Tippu's Fort in Srirangapatnam (uh, Seringapatnam), I spent a while studying a Map of Mysore Dominions by one C. Mackenzie, compiled in 1808. I was stunned. It's difficult to imagine a more tin-eared bunch. Barely a single town's name had gone unmolested—and nobody seemed to have realized that the names actually meant something in their native languages, replacing euphonious and even descriptive names with rough approximations of mangled sounds (e.g., the many “durg”s turned into “droog”s). It was when I came across preposterous examples such as “Moolwaggle” and “Sravana Billacull” (locals will—just about—recognize the originals) that I gained a deep sympathy for the cultural cause at play, seeing it for the first time as more than mere jingoism.

(There is something to be said for consistency in these matters. When is the restoration of a name considered reasonable? There seems to be some statute of limitations: if a generation is alive that used the old name, the world sees nothing amiss. Replacing Hungarian names with Soviet ones in Budapest prompted an immediate reaction—and much confusion, not to mention business for cartographers—after the Wall, but this seemed only right: a brutish invader had tried to impose an alien culture and dilute a local one. The British may not have renamed Srirangapatnam after Wellington, but why was the Economist so contemptuous about Bangalore's renaming?)

All that said, there is still something about this renaming that puzzles me. For all the claims that they are recovering the town's historical name (everyone, surely, has now heard the tale of beans), all they've done is substitute the British rendition with the Kannada pronounciation of the town's British name (Kannada doesn't have the `a', so it routinely gets turned into one of two or three close vowel sounds in Kannada; and an old joke goes that you can append `u' to any English word to turn it into Kannada: “banku”, “tanku”, “checku”, “caru”...). So is it chauvinism after all?

A Tale of Two Hotels

There is a new urgecy and optimism, though some cultural commentators also see in it a certain anxiety and nervousness. Some of it may well be that, but there is a new wind of a service economy that is blowing, with communication and tourism, into even the hamlets. The contrast couldn't have been starker between two places we stayed: the Lalitha Mahal Vilas Palace Hotel in Mysore and the Hoysala Village Resort outside Hassan. The former, run by ITDC, the government's tourism organization, is the Old India: people presiding over a decaying monolith, a good number standing around without activity but nevertheless filling the salary rolls thanks to some ridiculously fine-grained division of labor induced by a make-work program. The latter was the New: smiling, optimistic, less saluting and more doing, tacitly hoping to be rewarded for their work than expecting baksheesh.

There were other contrasts. As we were leaving the Palace—to some grumbling from our chauffeur at the terrible state of the facilities for them (to which we could only respond that we hadn't done so splendidly ourselves in a decaying white elephant)—the chauffeur of the car next to us suddenly had an outburst. Don't ever come to such a place, he said. They have no respect at all for his ilk. The hotel is a bit away from town, but there's no respectable food or services, nor is anything priced favorably.

I made a note to quiz drivers thereafter. The next hotel, not surprisingly, fared much better in their opinion (as in ours), though since it was located in city center, that wasn't surprising: the drivers weren't wanting for either company or affordable options.

The Hoysala Village, in contrast, would prove astute about this as well. Recognizing that they, too, were a few miles out of town, they not only provided entire facilies for drivers, but I believe they provided them all their food for free. You wouldn't see a happier group, and you could be sure they were going to recommend the place to every guest they had. I have no doubt the actual cost of this largesse was passed on to the guests, but it was a price I was glad to pay. In retrospect, taking care of the chauffeurs seems like an obvious imperative for a hotelier, but Old India seemed to have missed the trick entirely, and indeed swung to the opposite pole.

On the Make

Nor was such enterprise isolated. One day, I ran into a gas station convenience store (glistening with the sparkle of the new) to grab a bottle of water; even as I stepped in I was greeted, pointed to the water, told the price as I picked it up, and forgiven a rupee of change I didn't have so I could hasten along. It was heady to watch.

Another time, Malavika and I were wolfing through some sort of flavored corn (off the cob) near the entrace of the Garuda Mall. We spilt some on the floor, about which I immediately felt guilty given how spotless the place seemed. As I was about to pick up the bits, however, something induced me to just...walk away and observe from a discrete distance. A few minutes later I saw someone notice it, walk purposefully, and in just under seven minutes a dedicated cleaner had arrived, picked up the bits, mopped the floor, and dried it. That's how you have a spotless mall despite food services all around!

(Not everything can be had for any price, however. While in the Garuda Mall, I sought out a new pair of shorts, but not a single store stocked them. One salesman finally told me, in the slightly sad, patient tone that one reserves for a kind but somewhat dull child: “It is not the season, sir.” It was about 25C/77F outside.)

Even my beloved Lalbagh is experiencing the service economy. I was shocked, the first time I visited, to nearly be denied admission—I had simply never considered taking money for a ticket, and nearly didn't have any. I can only imagine the outcry when they first instituted ticketed entry (though, mercifully, with free admission for the morning walker crowd), and something tells me the Re. 7 fee (about 15 cents US) is a bit steep for the poorest people. But the inside is transformed: cleaned, renovated, and continuously maintained, even better than I remember it.

Of course, it's easy to be too optimistic. Many of the things I write about India today I observed about Hungary when I lived there just after the Wall came down and various freedoms were unleashed. It was an era when McDonald's and Burger King's were the exciting places to work, especially the glamorous stores at the Oktogon and Keleti pályaudvar. That romance has long since been killed by a rather harsh reality. Will this be different?

Perhaps. At some point, of course, the novelty will be pushed out of the way by the drudgeries of life. But something about India's new face feels so organic in its emergence—rather than by “tear down this wall!” fiat—that I am hopeful it will sustain and spread. After all, the 1990s in Central Europe were by definition top-down (owing to the replacement of government), an effect that then needed to trickle down. India's silent revolution is in contrast almost entirely bottom-up (government liberalization notwithstanding, it remains one of the greatest threats to continued growth).

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves afer a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
—Marcel Proust

Putting the Portal in Portugal

2007-02-06T15:58:00.000-05:00

I'm engaged in my annual ritual of applying for a Schengen Visa. Last year or so, the Schengen countries decided that they will not issue a visa for longer than one year (or so I was told), so the comfort of a multi-year visa in which I had basked was rudely taken away.

Anyway, my first call of entry on this new visa will be Portugal. It's almost enough to make me consider throwing in a weekend in Germany beforehand, just to simplify visa processing. In order:

There does not appear to be a standard portal for Portuguese visas.
I called the consulate in Providence. I was forwarded to their answering machine. The answering machine replied with an error saying it was not accepting messages. The call went into an infinite forwarding loop.
I called the embassy in Washington. I was forwarded to their answering machine. The machine gave me an error signal.
I called the consulate in New York. The number had been disconnected with no forwarding number.
I finally found a page for the Providence consulate. It:
- is virtually unreadable in Firefox;
- is even more unreadable in Konqueror;
- is entirely in Portuguese.

On this site I finally found a visa application form. It is solely in Portuguese.

Driven to despair, I visited my old friends, the Germans. Happily, the German consulate portal has a nice Web interface with the application form available in multiple languages, including English, and the boxes seem to match up (my loose translation of the Portuguese in some of the boxes corresponds to the English versions). For those I cannot translate, I'm making my best guess based on position.

A word of advice to the Schengen countries. You seem to be worried about population levels, brain-drains, competition, etc. You don't make yourself any more attractive by making it singularly hard for people to visit. This goes doubly for Portugal, which offers tons of information on tourism but none on how to get there.