overheard in providence

During an otherwise shoddy decade, the US Mint spent most of the aughts engaged in a noble attempt to lift our nation’s spirit with its delightfully patriotic 50 State Quarters Program. Following that program’s overwhelming success (e.g. no one got hurt, many people continued to use quarters), the mint shrewdly undertook a shorter, but no less patriotic District of Columbia and United States Territories Quarter Program.
Although I was hugely enthusiastic about the initial 50 State Quarters Program (just ask my freshman year roommate), I spent most of 2009 foolishly preoccupied with writing a PhD Thesis, and thus failed to even notice the follow up program until yesterday, when I was shocked (SHOCKED) to discover that a coin in my possession featured a design commemorating the Northern Mariana Islands. Naturally I assumed I’d been given some manner of foreign or counterfeit currency, but I could not have been more wrong.

Under the District of Columbia and United States Territories Quarter Program the following non-state quarters were issued in 2009.

• District of Columbia (January 26, 2009)
• Puerto Rico (March 30, 2009)
• Guam (May 26, 2009)
• American Samoa (July 27, 2009)
• U.S. Virgin Islands (September 28, 2009)
• Northern Mariana Islands (November 30, 2009)

If you ask me, this list is kind of implicitly sticking it to the District of Columbia, since (as is all too often the case) a rather centrally located chunk of the continental US is being lumped together with a bunch of crazy island territories scattered throughout the globe (I’m looking at you Puerto Rico). What’s more, whereas the 50 State Quarter Program typically released between 500 million and 1 billion quarters per state, the follow up District of Columbia and United States Territories Quarter Program released only 636.2 million quarters in total. In fact the final territory quarter, which I now proudly possess, was only minted in a batch of 72.8 million.

While 72.8 million may sound like a lot, it means there was not even one Northern Mariana Islands US Quarter minted per US household. Once the general public gets wind of this shortage (not to mention the quarter’s breathtaking depiction of a seaside Latte Stone) demand is sure to skyrocket. Needless to say, with so few coins to go around, I will be placing my household’s quarter safely within the confines of the Rachlin family safe deposit box, along side our supply of gold bars and other precious metals. If you’re lucky enough to get your hands on one of these rare beauties, I suggest you do the same.

After a solid century of corn-inspired confectionary, the marketing masterminds behind the world’s most artificial vegetable, candy corn, have finally noticed that there’s nothing particularly Halloween-related about their product*. As such, my own mother snagged the last bag of red and pink (yes, you heard right, RED and PINK!!!) candy corn at Varsono’s Chocolates in the the west village. Admittedly, this Valentine’s Day inspired change in hue doesn’t do much to foster the candy’s already tenuous visual association with corn, but on the plus side, it’s robust corn syrup induced flavor profile still shines through (how DID they do it!?).

Now that candy corn finds itself untethered from the confines of the fall, I’m anxiously anticipating its additional holiday appearances. Easter seems like a natural choice, but I’d also like to throw my weight behind St. Patrick’s day, and Flag Day. The nice thing about flag-themed candy corn is that the supply would naturally spill over into Independence Day, after which we could unload any additional unused candy on the French for Bastille Day.

The larger issue, of course, is our pressing need to identify other seasonal commodities that can be repurposed and enjoyed year-round? Fireworks are a fine way to celebrate the 4th of July, but surely they’d spice up Veteran’s Day as well? Why the heck are we only producing gingerbread houses around Christmas? I for one would be delighted to consume a gingerbread log cabins on Lincoln’s birthday. For that matter, why even limit our gingerbread constructions to houses, gingerbread boats would be a perfect fit for Columbus Day! All I’m saying is that if we put a little bit more thought into all this, we could be getting a lot more bang for our buck out of the many fine holiday products already in production. I look forward to reading your suggestions in the comments.

*I realize that corn is harvested in the fall, and Halloween takes place in the fall, but that sort of reasoning would be much appropriate for a Thanksgiving tie-in. As far as I can reason, the only meaningful connection between Halloween and bags of fang-shapped candy corns is that the latter enable otherwise uncostumed children to place said candies on their teeth and pretend to be vampires. This in turn extends the magic of Halloween well into November. Of course, these days, with the resurgence of the sexy vampire, the candy’s transition to Valentine’s Day couldn’t be more natural.

A brief educational retrospective:

1999: Eric graduates Stuyvesant Highschool and begins attending Brown University. At the time, he foolishly assumes that his affiliation with Brown will be limited to a mere four years.

2003: Eric graduates from Brown University with an Bachelor of Science in Applied Math/CS. In a shrewd attempt to avoid joining the workforce, or even pay for a U-Haul, he elects to remain at Brown and begins living with 9 of his yet-to-graduate friends. He also starts working for professor John Savage, securing his status in Brown’s directory as a “Class F Employee”.

2004: Eric is accepted to Brown’s PhD program and elects to continue working under Professor Savage as a computer science graduate student. Upon renewing his Brown Student ID, he immediately remarks on its absurdly distant expiration date: 06/01/10.

2006: Eric fulfills the requirements for a Masters of Computer Science and is admitted to PhD candidacy. Although he is awarded his Masters, he chooses to sleep in and skip the degree ceremony.

2008: Eric boldly relocates to New York City while continuing to work toward his PhD. The majority of his research-related discussions now take place between him and the cat.

2009: Eric’s proposed thesis, “Reliable Computing at the Nanoscale”, is approved! Completion of his third Brown University degree appears imminent.

2010: 9 agonizing months and 150 harrowing pages later, Eric sends out a finalized draft of his thesis to his thesis committee and schedules his defense for March 5th. He also relocates to Providence for his final semester in order to begin work with Professor Michael Black. He is enthusiastic about his new research area and extremely enthusiastic that he will not be re-renewing his student ID.

So there you have it. I’m back in Providence (at least for the semester), and I can now officially assert that my tenure as a Brown student has “spanned three decades”. I’m also looking forward to resumed blog posting (plus, the frickin’ olympics just started up again!)

I brought this up once before, but with all the recent griping over the Cash for Clunkers Program and its lack luster milage requirements, it’s worth reflecting on how confusing miles per gallon ratings are from the perspective of trying to conserve gasoline. What we should be talking about is gallons per mile, (or perhaps gallons per 10 miles, or decamile, just so the numbers are nicer).

The Cash for Clunkers Program offers you a of $3500 rebate if you trade in a car that gets at most 18 miles per gallon, and purchase a car that gets at least 22 miles per gallon (and of course you can’t just use your rebate to buy a 5 year supply of metro cards, because I guess that would save too much gas). 22 MPGs strikes many as a pretty meager milage requirement (because it is), which is probably why the program offers an additional $1000 if your newly purchased vehicle increases your fuel milage by 10 MPGs (although both rebate conditions are less strict for SUVs and trucks).

Encouragingly, preliminary reports seem to indicate that the majority of trade-ins are meeting the 10 MPG requirement. Still, one can’t help but wonder if a minimum fuel requirement closer to 30 MPGs would make the prograe more worthwhile (particularly since today’s new cars are required, on average, to get 27.5 MPGs, and this number will increase to 30 in 2011). Perhaps it would, but the current situation isn’t as dire as you might think.

Consider the following example:

You trade in a car that gets 17 miles per gallon. That’s quite close to .59 gallons per 10 miles. You switch to a 24 mile per gallon vehicle, which is a bit under .42 gallons per 10 miles. Assuming you drive 1200 miles per month, and don’t change your driving habits, you’ve saved over .17 x 1250 = 20.4 gallons of gas. Now suppose you wanted to save an additional 20 gallons of gas, you’d need to go all the way to 40 miles per gallon. At that point you’d be down to 30 gallons of gas a month, and saving the next 20 gallons would require that your car’s milage enter into hypothetical chevy volt territory.

Of course the above example isn’t completely honest. People do drive about 1200 miles per month, but people also change their driving habits based on their car’s fuel consumption. My intuition is that this only leads to a modest reduction in fuel savings (particularly when gas is expensive), but it’d be interesting to see some real numbers.

Incidentally, in Europe, where conservation is all the rage, they already do the whole gallons per mile thing (except they call it liters per kilometer, which is sooooo like them). In contrast, miles per gallon strikes me as a reflection of this country’s love affair with the open road. Here in the states, when we’re looking to buy a car, we want to fill that bad boy up with a tank of gas and drive as far away as humanly possible. In Europe I’m pretty sure they just all sit around by fountains or something.

I’ve never been sufficiently enticed by the “raw hucksterism” of television-based retail to buy a product directly off of an infomercial (i.e. to CALL NOW), but I still own at least three products which proudly bear the moniker “As seen on TV”. In support of my recent assertion that lists lend themselves to top-quality blogging, I’ve decided to recount how each of these remarkable inventions made its way into my heart closet.

The Shake-Powered Faraday Flashlight

In a post 9/11 world (also a post 8/14 world) modern day staples such as electricity, or traditional battery-powered flashlights, cannot be relied upon. As such, during my first year of grad school (also my first year of living alone), I saw fit to purchase a shake-to-power flashlight. The main appeal of this product was that it’s commercial, while asserting that the flashlight is powered by inductance (and indeed it is!), briefly flashed on screen Faraday’s law of induction expressed in integral form. As far as I know, this is the only time a closed integral has ever been used to sell the american consumer a product. As a member of this country’s educated elite, I felt it was my duty to support their bold decision. Also, I liked the thought that one day, in some seemingly perilous situation, I’d find myself running around in the dark with my Faraday Flashlight in hand, and I’d literally be powering it as I ran!. Plus it’s waterproof!

The ShamWow!

Who among us dreamt that impossible dream—soaking up spill after spill with a single square of ultra-absorbent space-aged fabric (and simultaneously being really, REALLY enthusiastic about the entire cleanup process). My ShamWow purchase was made at Bed, Bath and Beyond soon after a particularly trying 2 AM emergancy cleanup. Bela (who was but a naive kitten at the time), accidently pulled a placemat out from under an regretfully perched bottle full of red wine. The bottle broke, the wine spilled, and the clock began ticking with regard to permanent stain of our lightly colored carpet. Jessica tactfully remained asleep during the entire clean up process, which left me to spend the next hour of my night cleaning both glass and wine as quickly and thoroughly as possible. It was all a bit much for 2:00 in the morning.

Now that I have my ShamWows (and I have plenty; they came in a box of 8) a comparable incident has yet to occur. In fact, the ShamWows remain untested, but as with the hypothetical blackout scenario eluded to above, I am fully prepared for future cleanup calamity. In the meantime, I should probably consider using these bad boys for more modest day-to-day wipe downs. Also, I may start giving them away as housewarming gifts.

Aqua Globes

These too were purchased from Bed, Bath and Beyond, and quite recently I might add. My tentative plan is to use them next week when Jessica and I are away in SF. Since last summer, I’ve put together quite the window box garden, and I hate to see draught to set it. The aqua globes (I bought 6!) harness the power of gravity and/or osmosis to slowly water your plants over time (all I really know is that it doesn’t involve an integral in any way). The setup seems simple enough, but I’m concerned that I haven’t had time to really test how reliable they are. Perhaps someone who’s reading this will volunteer to come check in on the plants midweek (*hint*).

Last Saturday, moments after I had posted a condemnation of math education, Jessica read me an unexpectedly relevant blurb from New York Magazine. Julia Stiles, it seems, has long felt unsatisfied with her public elementary school education, and earlier this year she decided to voice her concerns to NYC School Chancellor Joel Klein.

During the Atlantic’s viewing party for President Obama’s speech, Stiles interrupted Klein’s response to the president’s proposals to talk about how city’s public schools had failed her. When she transferred to a private middle school, her science teacher instructed the class to take out their beakers, and she didn’t know what one was, she says. “Everyone laughed at me. I’d never had a science class!” Afterward, Stiles, mortified (“I have a lot to say and I was wildly inarticulate”), apologized and awkwardly asked for Klein’s e-mail.

The funny thing is, I’m 95% percent sure I was in Julia’s 7th grade science class (earth science with Ms. Allen). I have only a vague recollection of the incident she describes, but I do remember that Ms. Allen was intimidating, and I certainly apologize for laughing. Also, it’s really too bad for Julia that she missed out on 5th and 6th grade science at Friends, because our teacher, Glenn McKnight, was probably the best teacher I ever had. Having spent several days upset over our country’s math curricula, it’s a welcome contrast to recall some education done right (also, for the record, I liked practically all of my math teachers, both at Friends and Stuyvesant, and I do think Friends does a better job than most schools)

The great thing about Glenn was that he taught Science, not just facts, but scientific inquiry: forming conjectures, making predictions, conducting experiments, and examining their outcomes. To do this, he’d lead the class through a scientific investigation of say, why objects sink or float, or how batteries power circuits. By having us suggest ideas, develop experiments, then revise their hypothesis, the stuff we got tested on became secondary (and with good cause, we’d all see it again in grades 7-12 anyway). Plus, Glenn would let older students come back to his class and visit during their free periods, which was definitely a good time. Oh, also he let me write a few damn funny plot summaries of the Second Voyage of the Mimi Series. (Maybe if I can dig them up I’ll use them to fill in the season’s missing Wikipedia entry)

And there you have it. My 5th and 6th grade science classes were top notch, and my 7th grade science class was a challenge for now-famous actress Julia Stiles (who was actually a top student, I should note). Even so, Julia has since appeared in a number of thoroughly enjoyable and extremely successful movies, where as I have squandered my 20’s working toward a PhD in Computer Science. I think we can safely chalk up the whole thing as triumph on Julia’s end.

Eric’s Top 5 Stiles Film Picks: State and Main, 10 Things I Hate About You, the entire Bourne Trilogy.

Bonus Fact: My father went to school with Julia’s mother, although they were a few years apart.

By way of Scott Aaronson, I recently read a surprisingly inspired essay on the dysfunctional state of math education. Paul Lockhart, the essay’s author, is a serious mathematician. He has a PhD in mathematics, is a former MSRI fellow and a former Brown professor. Since 2000, however, he has chosen to teach math at Saint Ann’s, a K-12 school in Brooklyn. Saint Ann’s is a rather unique institution that gives it’s teachers (and students) significant freedom—I like to think of it as the anti-Stuyvesant (my alma mater)—affording Paul the opportunity to step back from the tyrannical absurdity of standard US math curricula.

Paul’s essay, Lockhart’s Lament, is a little on the long side (24 pages), but the first three pages make his point beautifully (and humorously). Remember back when you were ages 6 – 18 taking 12 years worth of math classes, well it turns out you weren’t learning math. At first you learned some arithmetic (albeit in an extremely dry, monotonous fashion), and after that it was all downhill. Seriously, just read the first 3 pages, it’s a good time (also maybe check out the last two pages for quick drilldown of the standard US math education, plus I really like page 18 onward).

Here’s the big secret about math: It’s an art, not a science. It may look like a science, but that’s just because science has a lot of math in it. Almost all of mathematics, particularly the math you see in school, was not developed to try understand the world. It was developed when smart people made up interesting questions, then thought about how to answer them in interesting ways. As such, no one should attempt to learn math without taking time, a lot of time, to think about those very same questions. Examples of said questions (from Paul’s essay) include: “What is the area of a triangle?” or “Given the sum and difference of two numbers, can you determine what they are?”

With luck, time, and guidance from the teacher, students may actually be able to figure out solutions to these problem (and remember them), but even if they fail, they’ll make progress, and when they are taught the answer (i.e. a formula, an algorithm, a proof) they’ll appreciate why someone is bothering to explain it to them. Also they’ll have gotten a taste for the amount of thought that’s realistically required to understand math (hint: it’s a lot).

Sadly, in your own math classes, you were probably too busy learning to solve “math problems”—and you’ve no doubt forgotten how to solve most of them—to spend any time at all thinking about actual math. When it’s was all over, your big reward was that you went to college, got a job, and then never, ever, solved a “math problem” again. Maybe you use arithmetic, although I seriously doubt you find yourself multiplying 3 digit numbers or carrying out long division, but if you do anything beyond that it’s almost certainly material you saw/revisited in college.

In short, we really get very little in return for 12 long years of math education. Even for someone who likes math (me!) there’s just a ton of wasted time. Most of the skills you learn aren’t at all practical, and the most of the interesting ideas behind them are left out. I could go on (and trust me, I will) but mainly I just wanted to share Paul’s essay because it does a great job of illustrating, to the corrupt masses, what mathematics is actually about. As Paul points out on page three, most people leave high school with absolutely no idea.

According to a relatively recent New York Times article, only 7.4 million of the 133 million blogs tracked by the blog search engine Technorati have been updated in the last 120 days. This blog has become perilously close to falling into that neglected 95%, as my last post is dated February 18th, 2009 (although to be fair, I did update said post sometime in March). Perhaps it was a particularly busy semester.

The temptation, I suppose, is to compensate for my post-post deficit by rattling off a list of “personal updates” that account for the intervening 117 days. (Blogging aside: Lists generally lend themselves to blog posts. A blog itself is basically a poorly organized list. Slapping in some sublists creates the illusion of structure.) I will resist this urge, and opting to save these pearls for the impending swarm of summer blogging. (Second blogging aside: overly long posts are a blight on the casual blogger.)

Instead, I simply note that on April 28th my doctoral fate was all but sealed with the successful presentation of my long awaited thesis proposal. This strongly suggests that my thesis defense will take place in the fall, and that the up-and-coming fall semester will be my last at Brown. An extremely timely exit, since a delay of even a few months would permit me to make the dubious claim that “my tenure as a student at Brown spanned 3 decades”. At that point, I assume I’d be a lock for graduate student orator at my graduation ceremony next May, but my preference is still to acquire a PhD in time for my 10 year high school reunion (slated for Thanksgiving weekend).

With the uncertainty of my post-Brown existence drifting closer by the day, the need for a more regular blogging regiment is at an all-time high. Expect more updates shortly.

 Yes it’s that time of year again, time for one of the found-content blogs I work on to get nominated as a finalists for the Best Blog SXSW Webaward. Ok, really this has only happened once before, but it was last year, and we ended up winning. If this trend continues I am obviously destined to become a blog publishing mogul, but for now I remain completely focused on finishing my PhD. Honest. I totally have my thesis proposal open right now in TextMate.

Update: I forgot the obligatory solicitation for votes. Voting, however, is only for the coveted People’s Choice Award. The winner of the Best Blog Award is selected by a well-credentialed team of internet experts, and rightly so.

Update 2: SXSW was a blast, but sadly, Postcards lost to The Bygone Bureau. I’m not actually familiar with this site, but the two guys who went up on stage and accepted the award struck me as entertaining.

In other news, Passive-Aggressive Notes lost to I Can Has Cheezburger in the 2009 Bloggies, although it was competing in the highly questionable “Best Community Weblog” category.

More on SXSW to come.

Via Ezra, then Matt, I’m reminded of Max Dean and Raffaello D’Andrea’s self-healing chair:

Really though, I find their earlier work, The Table: Childhood, to be the superior piece of autonomous furniture artwork (though less impressive technically).

On a more pragmatic note, Matt seems to have quelled his typical worries over an imminent robot uprising. Instead he expresses concern that most robotics work is being funded by DARPA, and thus conducted with military applications in mind.

My impression, as a CS graduate student, is that DARPA (as oppose to NSF or NIH) funded research has access to much more money, but also more demands/pressure. This wasn’t always the case, and I do get the sense that attitudes toward DARPA funding has soured some in the past decade.

Getting an NSF grant is quite competitive, and hence professors tend to devote a lot of their time to grant writing. Also, a typical grant is not that large (say enough to support one or two graduate students for a few years), but once you have a grant, you need only submit annual progress updates, which are typically brief. The main “accountability factor” for such grants is one’s reputation. If you don’t publish valuable results, you’ll have a hard time getting future funding.

In contrast, DARPA grants can provide much larger sums of money for large projects of military interest (for example, bionic arms). Grant recipients, however, are likely required to produce quarterly progress updates, travel to progress reviews, and be available for meetings/presentations. As such, DARPA funded research is more susceptible to external pressure. Obviously this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s enough to make some academics reluctant.

In the case of robotics, I do think a lot of fundamental tools (for example, better object recognition, automatic path planning, object manipulation) could be developed in the context of a DARPA grant. The primary difference would be that the military provides access to fancier hardware. For example, iRobot makes small, inexpensive vacuums for consumers, and rugged but pricey PackBots for the military (they’re built Ford tough).