tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-360385622024-03-07T18:39:16.851-05:00Notes from a Sticky WicketShriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.comBlogger104125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-34029387433681541062008-11-14T23:14:00.001-05:002008-11-14T23:15:40.609-05:00Project Beansprout Successful<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
For photographs, and for our AFQ (Anticipated Frequent Questions) on
various naming issues, please see the
<a href="http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Personal/Tara/">Web page</a> (natch).
</p>Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-86879942922750789722008-11-12T15:37:00.001-05:002008-11-12T15:38:41.287-05:00Stumbling at the Door<a href="http://notes-from-a-sticky-wicket.blogspot.com/2008/09/stopped-by-velour-rope.html">Update</a>:
<p>
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.
<p>
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”.
<p>
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.
<p>
Incidentally, without the data plan working, you cannot use the phone
<em>at all</em>. Period.
<p>
So, I have the phone in a completely non-functional state.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
I am not reassured.Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-32643524350081614322008-11-08T17:48:00.002-05:002008-11-08T17:51:41.597-05:00Happiness is...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRd6bwC-CXN7ZWd0yWe186rERPheTiVik6k3vP5Joc3OxFMfhBC-fcEe6PSICYrJfZnViA1OuSnq4g-I12QqUrFCdo-5r75Sy9aeRuo2xJpK-I-lXNPwD-qFSToafvFJ5upagI/s1600-h/P1140513.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRd6bwC-CXN7ZWd0yWe186rERPheTiVik6k3vP5Joc3OxFMfhBC-fcEe6PSICYrJfZnViA1OuSnq4g-I12QqUrFCdo-5r75Sy9aeRuo2xJpK-I-lXNPwD-qFSToafvFJ5upagI/s400/P1140513.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5266422499032876194" border="0" /></a>
...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.Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-59030676143676587202008-10-30T22:25:00.003-04:002008-10-30T22:27:17.030-04:00New Hampshire is Pretty Independent, But...<p>...since when did they switch to
<a href="http://www.politickernh.com/robtornoe/4389/jeanne-just-wants-know-which-way-wind-blows">right-hand drive</a>?</p>
<p>(Yes, I did get my <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_on_the_left_or_right">terminology</a> straight.)Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-60817946315074826672008-10-16T08:52:00.003-04:002008-10-16T08:57:08.633-04:00The G Stands for Goodbye<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Maybe you're stretching a bit too thin, Google.</p>Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-54795875328308748942008-10-04T18:13:00.011-04:002008-11-15T11:30:14.228-05:00From Artless to Artful<p>
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.
</p><p>
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.
</p><p>
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.
</p><p>
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.
</p><p>
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:
</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr04ROeJQsWkHEOU46juf1cPedJVPE2OuALFaAJifEXESxiB6293qyVL1U6kH0gkeECM8h3TzvrgTsOQmNuVFJy5-j0zxpTB7Q3N5tQoRRfcZXIH0E4b6lRiR9osG5ogxlXlfN/s1600-h/marker.bmp"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr04ROeJQsWkHEOU46juf1cPedJVPE2OuALFaAJifEXESxiB6293qyVL1U6kH0gkeECM8h3TzvrgTsOQmNuVFJy5-j0zxpTB7Q3N5tQoRRfcZXIH0E4b6lRiR9osG5ogxlXlfN/s400/marker.bmp" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5253426212458796690" /></a>
<p>
That's right, the ink <em>spread</em>, as if it were a real pen put to
real paper.
</p><p>
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
<a href="http://paste2008.cs.brown.edu/paste.png">this</a>,
which you can see
<a href="http://paste2008.cs.brown.edu/">in context</a>.
</p><p>
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
<a href="http://world.cs.brown.edu/1/"><cite>How to Design Worlds</cite></a>,
though I am rather pleased with the cow and the UFO
(both also to be found on the
<a href="http://world.cs.brown.edu/1/front.jpg">cover</a>),
and by the graphic accompanying “The Movie Principle”
(section 4.4, page 11 in
<a href="http://world.cs.brown.edu/1/htdw-v1.pdf">the book</a>).
</p><p>
All this can only lead to hubris—and it has. Our latest victim is
another wall of the same room
<a href="http://notes-from-a-sticky-wicket.blogspot.com/2008/07/skys-no-limit.html">that
we painted earlier</a>. We now have a little mountain thing going,
</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNTTbZG-6m4HwhVWhrM3LvWcbBj9dTbPixtGmYulffbI4LHsGi6V9XfDvTKkKMEpTtIu1e2tzcNgIuHrpJ4Gg8MeRd9YuHqQHmi_w6HkYazKJvhkNCRGSm_PPDvrFTwCPRz1yb/s1600-h/P1140385.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNTTbZG-6m4HwhVWhrM3LvWcbBj9dTbPixtGmYulffbI4LHsGi6V9XfDvTKkKMEpTtIu1e2tzcNgIuHrpJ4Gg8MeRd9YuHqQHmi_w6HkYazKJvhkNCRGSm_PPDvrFTwCPRz1yb/s400/P1140385.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5253426546583015986" /></a>
<p>
which includes my personal rendition of the <a href="http://notes-from-a-sticky-wicket.blogspot.com/2008/09/on-samba-time.html">Pão de
Açúcar</a>:
</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPHd8-1mAeLPyrFHBABD4tZ81Vg6XiabaUTk9_2d1h_pbHWWVbdtUCDeazCf5NGNILcTqi-NHjFJJX4NoGwbBN0DrhgaeEcM4jRRqfhZ6y5cYkxfzni7WKoQajQ4EnrFkCri0T/s1600-h/P1140379.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPHd8-1mAeLPyrFHBABD4tZ81Vg6XiabaUTk9_2d1h_pbHWWVbdtUCDeazCf5NGNILcTqi-NHjFJJX4NoGwbBN0DrhgaeEcM4jRRqfhZ6y5cYkxfzni7WKoQajQ4EnrFkCri0T/s400/P1140379.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5253426765931782658" /></a>
<p>
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”.</p>Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-69506517526918882222008-09-23T23:15:00.000-04:002008-09-23T23:17:08.220-04:00Stopped by the Velour RopeFor maybe the first time in my life I tried to stand in line for a new
product release. And I was thoroughly rebuffed.
<p>
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?).
<p>
But, I have no phone.
<p>
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 <em>years</em> now...
<p>
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.
<p>
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
<em>can</em> give me the appropriate discount.
<p>
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.
<p>
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 <em>reject</em> 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.)
<p>
Welcome to the big leagues, T-Mobile. Now get your act together.Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-90319907505621768932008-09-22T21:42:00.002-04:002008-09-22T21:49:06.754-04:00-ine: Do You See Yonder Cloud...<p>
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:
</p>
<blockquote>
aquiline (eagle)<br>
bovine (ox or cow)<br>
canine (dog)<br>
caprine (goat)<br>
equine (horse)<br>
feline (cat)<br>
lupine (wolf)<br>
ovine (sheep)<br>
piscine (fish)<br>
porcine (pig)<br>
ursine (bear)
</blockquote>
<p>
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.
</p>Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-9254518476054927552008-09-12T23:20:00.018-04:002008-09-15T13:34:22.250-04:00On Samba Time<h3>Reading List</h3>
<p>
<ul>
<li><cite>The Accidental President of Brazil</cite>, Fernando Henrique
Cardoso and Brain Winter</li>
<li><cite>Why is This Country Dancing?</cite>, John Krich</li>
<li><cite>A Death in Brazil</cite>, Peter Robb</li>
</ul>
<p>
<h3>I.</h3>
<p>
To name, they say, is to conquer. Few names in recent times have had
quite the grip of the McKinsey group's
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRIC">BRIC</a>,
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.
<p>
<h3>II.</h3>
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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
<em>beach</em> 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.
<p>
I stay in Copacabana, wary of the clichés.
I had actually hoped to be in Santa Teresa
through a b&b service called
<a href="http://www.camaecafe.com/">Cama e Café</a>.
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 <em>real</em>, and I miss
the hustle of the center of a large city.
<p>
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.
<p>
I also wonder, not for the first time, whether someday <em>all</em>
our cities will have to feel like this. But that's another matter.
<p>
<h3>III.</h3>
<p>
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).
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
Finally, one more deep-blue-besuited official descends to the opposite
platform, and he says something. <em>Now</em> 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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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
<em>via which places</em>. The buses <em>do</em> 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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
<h3>IV.</h3>
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.)
<p>
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.
<p>
<h3>V.</h3>
<p>
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 <em>staff</em>, and remind myself never again to shop
where the rich live.
<p>
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 <em>favelas</em> 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.
<p>
Speaking of aspirations, Kathi and I have been playing an informal
game of Curves-spotting. <a href="http://www.curves.com/">Curves</a>
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.
<p>
<h3>VI.</h3>
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
<h3>VII.</h3>
<p>
As I walk around town, I notice several kiosks for <em>chaveiro</em>s,
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.
<p>
<h3>VIII.</h3>
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
They don't say much, and I don't understand what they're saying.
<p>
<h3>IX.</h3>
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
<h3>X.</h3>
<p>
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.
<p>
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 <em>here</em> 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).
<p>
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.
<p>
<h3>XI.</h3>
<p>
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!
<p>
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
<em>they</em> 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.)
<p>
<h3>XII.</h3>
<p>
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.
<p>
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 <cite>Central Station</cite> 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 <cite>Lonely Planet</cite> guide.
<p>
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.)
<p>
<h3>XIII.</h3>
<p>
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.
<p>
<h3>XIV.</h3>
<p>
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
<em>every</em> 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.
<p>
Does anything sound more awful?
<p>
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 <a
href="http://futebolnomaracana.blogspot.com/">Sergio</a>, 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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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 <em>stadium</em> 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.
<p>
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:
<p>
<h4><a href="http://notes-from-a-sticky-wicket.blogspot.com/2008/08/attending-game-at-maracana.html">Watching a Game at Maracana</a></h4>
<p>
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.
<p>
<h3>XV.</h3>
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-33097596866826310542008-09-10T21:13:00.001-04:002008-09-10T21:16:46.876-04:00A Pie of SpeculationIn 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
<em>easier</em> than pounding about on a basketball court?
<p>
Anyway, the <cite>Vanity Fair</cite>
<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/09/armstrong200809">article</a>
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
<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/images/culture/2008/09/cuar04_armstrong0809.jpg">cycle and helmet</a>
to Bill Clinton, and three things stand out:
<ul>
<li>
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?
</li>
<li>
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?
</li>
<li>
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
<a href="http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/">the Snob</a> make of
<em>that</em>?
</li>
</ul>
<p>
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.Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-90948355627524363292008-08-29T20:07:00.010-04:002008-09-15T13:34:39.227-04:00Attending a Game at MaracanaSo you're going to be in Brazil, and you want to watch a game at
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Est%C3%A1dio_do_Maracan%C3%A3">Maracanã</a>.
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.
<p>
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
<a href="http://futebolnomaracana.blogspot.com/">Sergio</a>, 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.
<p>
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.
<p>
Two more things to note.
<p>
Maracanã isn't the only stadium in Rio.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Est%C3%A1dio_Ol%C3%ADmpico_Jo%C3%A3o_Havelange">Engenhão</a> 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
<em>everyone</em> goes to Maracanã, but I...”. You could make
it out to be the K2 of Rio stadiums at your pub back home.)
<p>
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
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fla-Flu">Fla-Flu</a>) is involved,
when the national team plays, etc.
<p>
Okay, let's begin.
<p>
<hr>
<p>
You can find a schedule to games on the
<a href="http://www.cbf.com.br/">CBF site</a>.
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.
<a href="http://200.159.15.35/seriea/tabela.aspx">This link</a> 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.]
<p>
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
<em>every</em> game had changed in some way (time, date, ...). So
give yourself a little flexibility, and check again closer to the
date.
<p>
The stadium's name is <em>not</em> 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”.
<p>
Learn a few key words: today (<em>hoje</em>: ho-ZHAY), tomorrow
(<em>amanhã</em>: ah-ma-NYA), yellow (<em>amarela</em>:
ama-RAY-la), green (<em>verde</em>: vehr-DJEH), white
(<em>branco</em>: 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.]
<p>
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.
<p>
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 <em>not</em> in the Flamengo
section of town)—but going to buy the ticket is a good
dress-rehearsal for getting to the match.)
<p>
To get your ticket, take the
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Rio">metro</a>
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 <em>Arquibancada</em> above the
little teller windows. This is the word for the upper floor of the
stadium, and where you want to sit.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.)
<p>
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 <em>are</em> checking seating assignments, then I
expect you will simply be pointed in the right direction.
<p>
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.
<p>
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
(<em>amendoim</em>) contain monosodium glutamate (MSG).
<p>
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.
<p>
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 <em>may</em>
just cause a bit of trouble.
<p>
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.
<p>
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 <em>are</em> 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.Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-80033214368914186932008-08-04T23:05:00.001-04:002008-08-04T23:07:03.921-04:00An Unkempt ZebraThis 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
<a href="http://notes-from-a-sticky-wicket.blogspot.com/2008/06/animal-instinct.html">things
zebra</a>). 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 <em>white</em>, it's black and a sort of
dull <em>grey</em> (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.
<p>
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:
<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnvpYTXUuUfa93-Dz9EfQDe88u8FqDjpVSxkUh9V8ZnA1YN1euxPzJBwA_bGAxFaO8ntZEDdzgKPhDE5KPC0N0GPcgj-ciFXDIu4QpChiAgJDldz8SRnH9818LwHj2-KPHFSql/s1600-h/P1140359.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnvpYTXUuUfa93-Dz9EfQDe88u8FqDjpVSxkUh9V8ZnA1YN1euxPzJBwA_bGAxFaO8ntZEDdzgKPhDE5KPC0N0GPcgj-ciFXDIu4QpChiAgJDldz8SRnH9818LwHj2-KPHFSql/s400/P1140359.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5230864508320917682" /></a>
<p>
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.
<p>
And I was enlightened.
<p>
As my friend Laurie Heller said, it's like buying jeans that've
already had abuse pre-heaped on them.Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-39830575099084146182008-08-03T14:14:00.002-04:002008-08-03T14:24:37.142-04:00When it Takes Off, At Least it'll Fly GracefullySeveral 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 <a href="http://www.fosterandpartners.com/News/328/Default.aspx">Foster's own materials</a>, and the phrase “soaring aerodynamic roof” is quoted in news article upon news article without comment.Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-84611384534817503342008-07-30T00:10:00.001-04:002008-07-30T00:12:25.739-04:00This Eagle Feeds On SpamWhen 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
<a href="http://notes-from-a-sticky-wicket.blogspot.com/2008/03/my-slow-email-movement.html">stopped
worrying so much about email</a> in the first place).
<p>
Well, boy, was that a failure.
<p>
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
<a href="http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/etaps06/">ETAPS
2006</a>.)
<p>
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!
<p>
For shame, Hotel Adler.
<p>
Next, my Swiss bank will be generating gaudy low-initial-interest-rate
credit-card offers and selling my account information to florists.Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-76490308661289041972008-07-28T22:07:00.004-04:002008-07-28T22:14:38.776-04:00Slouching Towards SlackerdomIt's official: Providence is a slacker town.
<p>
I'm increasingly of the view that the <cite>New York Times</cite>
chooses content largely for blog-worthiness. How else to explain such
a lackadaisical, listless, wandering...oh wait, those are the people
the article's <em>about</em>. But the article in question,
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/education/edlife/27collegetown.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp">Towns
They Don't Want to Leave</a>, 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-<em>k</em> listing to give bloggers something to argue.
<p>
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.
<p>
(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.)
</p>Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-84356485774454939212008-07-27T17:29:00.008-04:002008-07-28T08:12:30.241-04:00The Sky's No LimitFor 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”.
<p>
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).
</p><p>
Our latest <s>victim</s> <s>folly</s> 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.
</p><p>
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.
</p><p>
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 <a href="http://www.adlersri.com/">Adler's</a> (may they live long and
prosper) had convinced us this was a terrible idea.
</p><p>
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 <cite>Decorative Paint Techniques & Ideas</cite>, we
found something loosely like what we were looking for: a “graduated
color wash”.
</p><p>
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.
</p><p>
It was terrible.
</p><p>
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
<em>bad</em>, mind, just not a sky at all.
</p><p>
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).
</p><p>
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...
</p><p>
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.
</p><p>
The result:
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu59YgETs0kzP03GtW1wmLyJVtw20RQKPtR88cOrpUb3NUPHbyan5ERXkswsuvEta2PzSly7ilpH5zEDWuVTIBqUFoKAU-pCr31juJHkJ0cIJW1kW247-v4mnzVibHhRqssHCC/s1600-h/P1140315.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu59YgETs0kzP03GtW1wmLyJVtw20RQKPtR88cOrpUb3NUPHbyan5ERXkswsuvEta2PzSly7ilpH5zEDWuVTIBqUFoKAU-pCr31juJHkJ0cIJW1kW247-v4mnzVibHhRqssHCC/s400/P1140315.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5227809403344718258" /></a>
</p><p>
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:
</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYAujEWutPAUy3J0r1ywiOZq__EkZeDFVvGuiu_rpSffmLV4fL0CJbJJwGbvWO27YP1wubsYKND2wKCJ__xjM3XCNKm0j3Wkqq1Z7WP-yeidpSl-DwaKh9c6hWaAS6x9gB5lKH/s1600-h/P1140305.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYAujEWutPAUy3J0r1ywiOZq__EkZeDFVvGuiu_rpSffmLV4fL0CJbJJwGbvWO27YP1wubsYKND2wKCJ__xjM3XCNKm0j3Wkqq1Z7WP-yeidpSl-DwaKh9c6hWaAS6x9gB5lKH/s400/P1140305.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5227809609975674562" /></a>
<p>
In moderation (and especially with patching),
the streakiness of the glaze proves to be just the right thing to
create a wispy sky.
</p>Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-4443446363938647132008-07-26T23:20:00.004-04:002008-07-26T23:27:24.207-04:00Dan Quayle's Secret Occupation<p>
In <a href="http://translate.yahoo.com/">Yahoo's translation service</a> (formerly Alta Vista's Babel Fish), enter
</p>
<blockquote>
tomate
</blockquote>
<p>
and ask for translation from Portuguese to English. It responds with
</p>
<blockquote>
tomatoe
</blockquote>
<p>
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 <em>X</em>-to-<em>Y</em> pairs is fixed.
</p>
<p>
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.)
</p>Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-46180988871741545352008-07-20T17:16:00.013-04:002008-07-20T20:15:18.943-04:00How to Climb Like a ChampI have discovered the secret weapon behind Chris Carmichael's success with climbers.
<p>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 (<em>besides</em>, as his famous Nike ad said, his bike for six hours a day).
</p><p>Fortunately, for the right sum, Carmichael will tell us. Let's look at his advertisement (<span style="font-style: italic;">Bicycling</span> magazine, July 2008, page 113):
</p><p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRX1B5spmTQZduo-cMH8WqIx9M1PxCY1StwF4krtoU95gO0-xFd2fPFQG5RjXtmUmNg3JwIH8e3LZD3eKaui4avvqF2gxAfHIGyP0UwG-1YEAzua8uAgq6mkVwKExNjUlNorig/s1600-h/climbing.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRX1B5spmTQZduo-cMH8WqIx9M1PxCY1StwF4krtoU95gO0-xFd2fPFQG5RjXtmUmNg3JwIH8e3LZD3eKaui4avvqF2gxAfHIGyP0UwG-1YEAzua8uAgq6mkVwKExNjUlNorig/s320/climbing.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225208723808087954" border="0" /></a>Gives away nothing, does it? Now look at it again.
</p><p>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.
</p><p>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.
</p><p>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.
</p><p>Focus, instead, on what's between the “dancing on his pedals” rider's legs. No, no, not like <em>that</em>! Here's the detail:
</p><p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg2LxV-ztFvi7CSeGI-Y0kGTXjF3ez6iAzNKdBNthhRf0kXCImk_PmJiGL2cBzgaFKud-YzmgZ769hkVXKnYnSJXkuo4hc4OTs6ClOQ-9JoU7aQ1ysGEBSITHyq_6-MQnBsV4n/s1600-h/climbing-2.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg2LxV-ztFvi7CSeGI-Y0kGTXjF3ez6iAzNKdBNthhRf0kXCImk_PmJiGL2cBzgaFKud-YzmgZ769hkVXKnYnSJXkuo4hc4OTs6ClOQ-9JoU7aQ1ysGEBSITHyq_6-MQnBsV4n/s400/climbing-2.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225210045319298322" border="0" /></a>
</p><p>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 montag<em>n</em>e), 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—<code>trrainright.com</code>—is just a bit of icing.)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Or, maybe it's possible that the secret to Carmichael's success is something else entirely.</p><p>It's Photoshop.</p>Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-91303406566944509722008-07-17T20:21:00.002-04:002008-07-17T20:25:34.041-04:00Dutch Mountain → Kenyan Mountain?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 <a href="http://www.theafricancyclist.com/">climb L'Alpe d'Huez</a> 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 <em>my</em> time, that's for sure.Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-59702584286620307182008-06-30T23:47:00.004-04:002008-07-02T00:17:32.375-04:00Functional Programming and the ACM CurriculumIn May 2008, ACM SIGPLAN organized a
<a href="http://www.sigplan.org/pl-workshop/">workshop</a> 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.
<p>
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).
<p>
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.
<p>
NB: <em>This is co-authored with Stuart Reges, and inspired by some
text from Larry Snyder</em>, who both seem to have more sense than to
have blogs of their own.
<p>
<hr>
<p>
<h3>Rationale for the Change to the CS2001 Curriculum</h3>
<p>
The proposed change has the following structure:
<pre>
Knowledge Unit Current Proposed
-----------------------------------------------------
PF4 Recursion 5 2
PF5 Event-driven programming 4 2
<p>
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
</pre>
<p>
The changes have two key design goals:
<p>
<ol>
<li>
To make the functional programming unit (FP), currently listed as
PL7 in the curriculum, required rather than optional.
</li>
<li>
To account for this change in a "budget-neutral" way.
</li>
</ol>
<p>
First we describe the high-level motivation for this change.
<ul>
<li>
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.
</li>
<li>
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.
</li>
<li>
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.
</li>
</ul>
<p>
Below we discuss the rationale for changes to specific knowledge units.
<ul>
<li>
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.
</li>
<li>
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.
</li>
<li>
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.
</li>
</ul>
<p>
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.Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-28836636069801329452008-06-30T23:19:00.002-04:002008-06-30T23:21:36.325-04:00NNTR / NN2RMitch Wand pointed me to <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/06/rip-returned-every-email.html">this article</a>
by an email veteran bemoaning what has become of the medium.
Obviously,
<a href="http://notes-from-a-sticky-wicket.blogspot.com/2008/03/my-slow-email-movement.html">I concur</a>.
<p>
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 <strong>NNTR</strong> or
<strong>NN2R</strong> to my preceding message. Amazingly, both
the <a href="http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/NNTR">former</a>
and
the <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/NN2R">latter</a>
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.]
<p>
Anyway, I do, and I encourage you to as well.
<p>
Meanwhile, you ask, what do <em>you</em> 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: <strong>TIA</strong> (that's “Thanks in
Advance”, for you wee ones).Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-80006314464590969982008-06-27T21:03:00.002-04:002008-06-27T23:11:00.753-04:00Animal InstinctAfter 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!
<p>“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.
</p><p>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.</p><p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjScu0T11Xs8Ax23N1LLlevbVSw4AYWCDqPPNvDBp8r0wWjtyE3WDglTk76ZXWfAyHaEk0001WxUu37B7Yh6UNaxBEaQnYRYDOjGJTIi-_l_7eHqMkTRDpvin0dikck2EAjXXLT/s1600-h/oakley.bmp"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjScu0T11Xs8Ax23N1LLlevbVSw4AYWCDqPPNvDBp8r0wWjtyE3WDglTk76ZXWfAyHaEk0001WxUu37B7Yh6UNaxBEaQnYRYDOjGJTIi-_l_7eHqMkTRDpvin0dikck2EAjXXLT/s320/oakley.bmp" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5216732748171549506" border="0" /></a></p><p>“Oh, cute! A cow!”
</p><p>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.
</p><p>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.
</p>Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-64778489355454941162008-06-26T13:29:00.001-04:002008-06-26T13:33:21.422-04:00The Functional Functionary<p>
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,
<a href="http://media.economist.com/images/20080531/2208BK2.jpg">this
image</a>, embedded in
<a
href="http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11448647">this
article</a> in <cite>The Economist</cite>, shows him sitting pensively
while looming over his left shoulder is...a great big lambda!
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-68193515042364283742008-06-22T21:42:00.003-04:002008-06-22T22:02:13.071-04:00Major Faux PasLife 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, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Taylor">Major Taylor</a>, the first black cycling world champion, has been entirely forgotten.
<p>Or would be, if a <a href="http://www.majortaylorassociation.org/">band of enthusiasts</a> didn't have their way. But this group has kept his memory alive, and just under a month ago crossed a milestone: a <a href="http://www.majortaylorassociation.org/statue.htm">statue</a> of Major Taylor now stands outside the public library in Worcester, MA, a city where Taylor lived for much of his active life.</p><p>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:
</p><p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS8W_jqE4Ws-oRMndf8PBRpyjhTsfVw9eff1ufPPpOSJkC3CiglEQFjcGYjW6rehzH3_YmrhcrYRwUu6H3qJZXPbqJX3dH6Ryr95urKXownxq23-423ap4J4BNnzoPPmKZUn23/s1600-h/taylor.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS8W_jqE4Ws-oRMndf8PBRpyjhTsfVw9eff1ufPPpOSJkC3CiglEQFjcGYjW6rehzH3_YmrhcrYRwUu6H3qJZXPbqJX3dH6Ryr95urKXownxq23-423ap4J4BNnzoPPmKZUn23/s320/taylor.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5214891216667817682" border="0" /></a>
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 <a href="http://velonews.com/article/12271">confidant-in-chief</a> 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 <em>he</em> 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.</p><p>So, no photograph of self-promoting celebrities. Here's Tolman during her pleasant and modest address:</p><p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHJ2VViBG22FjhuQEUHV3wr-9xQqn279oPXuTK_s1Y9F0-pVBDEuEJfKKkUWvtjOb3rGqlFVpjp9ZDzrcizIMG98S93i7Q3YSnFaDGIlTEURw1NrCIVbOb2nH2ek2_r6d_ydo1/s1600-h/tolman.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHJ2VViBG22FjhuQEUHV3wr-9xQqn279oPXuTK_s1Y9F0-pVBDEuEJfKKkUWvtjOb3rGqlFVpjp9ZDzrcizIMG98S93i7Q3YSnFaDGIlTEURw1NrCIVbOb2nH2ek2_r6d_ydo1/s320/tolman.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5214891107180732978" border="0" /></a></p>Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36038562.post-24015982630833197912008-06-18T00:00:00.001-04:002008-06-18T08:55:41.458-04:00Average IntelligenceWe 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:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_of_the_median">multiple
of the median</a>. Unitless: perfect.
<p>
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”.
<p>
And we paid for this service.Shriram Krishnamurthihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02956763366608000839noreply@blogger.com2