overheard in providence nyc

I’ve never been sufficiently enticed by the “raw huckstermism” 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).

I’ve gone on before about the public transit utopia that would immediately ensue if we were using GPS-trackers to put bus (and ideally also subway) locations online (like Portland). By way of Matt Yglesias, here’s a second selling point.

For me personally, the great thing about being able to get bus/subway wait times on my a computer/phone would be trip planning. It’d be super easy to figure out when I should leave my house, or my friends house, or a bar, to catch the bus/subway and avoid waiting more than a minute. Internet-enabled trip planning isn’t for everyone, but as Tom Vanderbilt highlights, even non-planners feel better when wait times are available. When people know how long they will have to wait, they feel like service is both more available and more reliable, even if service isn’t actually any better.

My personal experience more than reinforces this insight. Jessica constantly remarks on her preference for the L line, because on the subway platform wait times are electronically displayed. Even when the wait is +10 minutes (a long wait by subway standards), she is much more relaxed than during shorter waits of unspecified duration. Although I tend exhibit calmer on-platform behavior, I also have a tendency to needlessly watch for the train hoping for its arrival.

The situation is that much worse on a bus, since at bus stops your often waiting in less-than-perfect weather conditions. What’s more, you don’t pay for a bus until you get on, so you never actually “commit” to waiting. Instead, you frequently find yourself wondering “maybe I should just walk”, because the last thing you want to do is waste five minutes waiting standing in the cold.

So there you have it, GPS-buses are poised to be even more spectacular than previously imagined. On a related note, the impending economic stimulus bill currently has $10 billion allotted for mass transit. For about $200, you can put a GPS tracker on a bus and pay for years worth of service. I don’t know how many new buses we’re going to purchase with that $10 billion, but I’d strongly consider sacrificing a few units and using that money to track, say, 10,000 buses. I’m certain that once you put GPS locations of buses online, some intrepid young programmer (like yours truly) will, within a month, make a website with with both maps and and estimated wait times.

According to yesterday’s New York Times, 2009 is a bellweather year for Blu-ray High Definition DVD’s. According to this blog, however, Blu-ray DVD’s are doomed. A bold statement, and just the kind of hasty proclamation you can expect from me in 2009. (Second example: One day I will live within 3 blocks of a zoo.)

Now, when I say “doomed”, I don’t mean Blu-ray DVDs will be gone by 2010. I’m just predicting that by the time next January rolls around, it will be completely clear to everyone that Blu-ray DVDs are not going to achieve anything close to the success of their standard-definition brethren. In short, Blu-ray DVD’s are not a successor to normal DVDs, and 2010 is going to be the year of the movie download.

In The New York Times article, Blu-ray supporters are optimistic that the falling price of Blu-ray players (i.e. sub-$200) will finally prompt their widespread adoption. Unfortunately, said supporters don’t seem to understand that 2009 is also the year of a giant global recession, and back when we weren’t in the giant recession (like last holiday season), Blu-ray player’s still sold for $400 dollars. Even worse, up until one year ago, Blu-ray was still in the midst of an absurdly drawn out format war with HD DVDs (RIP), which further encouraged sharp-eyed buyers to hold off.

According to Nielsen, about 25% percent of households have a high-definition TV (I got me a big one!), but last November the Wall Street Journal reported that less than 2% of households have a standalone Blu-ray player. Since Playstation 3 also plays Blu-ray DVDs, the percentage of households with Blu-ray buyability is actually closer to 7%, but many of those don’t necessarily HDTVs. Finally, even though it looks like holiday Blu-ray sales were stronger than expected, the number of households with blu-ray players doesn’t appear to have increased by more than 1%.

Now consider the competition: Currently (and while you’re reading this even) you can go to itunes or amazon, download an HD movie, and proceed to watch that movie, in high-definition, on your already high-definition computer screen. You can also connect your computer to your (HD)TV for $25-$50. If you don’t much care for dealing with computers (and really who does), Netflix is more than happy to stream HD directly to your TV, as is vudu, or even the good folks at apple.

All this brings me to my real point: Blu-ray deserves to fail. Besides that irritating format war mentioned up above, Blu-ray is set on pushing antiquated technology. DVDs scratch, and they take up a lot of space, and are slow to start up, and in the case of Blu-ray, you can’t even play them on most computers (to quote Steve Jobs, “Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt”). Remarkably, all of these problems would fade away except for the absolute worst, most absurd, totally and completely shortsighted thing about DVDs: it’s ILLEGAL to copy your own DVDs onto your computer. This isn’t to say it can’t be done, you can easily find software that rips DVDs, but because it’s illegal, this extremely desirable feature can’t be built into easy-to-use, super-popular programs like iTunes or Windows Media Player.

Shortly after MP3’s appeared in the mid-90’s, computer hard drives smashed the 10 GB barrier. All of a sudden it became viable for people to keep music collections on their computers. For years, a digitally-inclined individual could continue to buy CDs, copy the songs to their computer, and not worry about investing in a dead format. CD sales, of course, continued to plummet, but at least their decline was graceful. Now that HDs are breaking the 1TB = 1000GB barrier, it would be completely reasonable to rip your newly purchased (Blu-ray) DVDs to a $100 hard drive, and then transfer those movies to your laptop/ipod/tv-media-thingy as needed. Regrettably, the DVD-gods will have none of it, so by 2011, they’ll be finished.

Two days ago I was mentally preparing to break my month+ of blogging silence with the triumphant announcement that I successful acquired tickets to last Thursday’s Daily Show (with guest Ron Howard!) Alas, the evening was a flop. Despite having reserved/confirmed two tickets, and getting in line well within the specified timeframe, Jessica and I were one of a handful of people who didn’t get in. It was a tragic turn of events, but they did inform us that we could email the show requesting special VIP tickets to a subsequent taping. I think that basically means that next time around, we’ll be able to skip the line.

Despite my disappointment, I was keenly aware that, from a blogging perspective, not getting in was still a pretty solid outcome. First off, hundreds of people manage to attend each and every Daily Show taping, and millions see the resulting episode on TV, but how many poor schlubs get rejected after having reserved tickets, like 20 max. In short, this, right here, is the kind of first hand account of Daily Show rejection that only a handful of blogger’s are in a position to give. Plus, I now have a solid understanding of the logistics involved in going to see a Daily Show taping, and in the end, dear reader, isn’t that the reason you come to this blog?

LOGISTICS!

• You can request up to four (4) Daily Show tickets here. They’re booked many months in advance, but if you check back every few days, you’ll likely stumble on a cancellation. This works for The Colbert Report too.
• When sign up for tickets, the email asking for confirmation tells you to show up at 733 11th Ave (between 51st and 52nd) from 3:30 to 4:00. It also says that your guests can show up as late as 4:30. This isn’t particularly accurate.
• Since they don’t actually give you tickets until they start letting you in, anyone can hold a spot for anyone else until about 4:30. I arrived at 3:50, but as I’ve already lamented, this was a wee bit too late. Had I gotten there at 3:45, I’m sure I would have gotten in.
• If it’s warm day, I’d probably show up a little before 3:30. If you’re on early side, you’ll wait on 11th, but the later folks wait around the corner on 52nd. It’s always less fun to wait for stuff around a corner.
• At 4:00 or so, someone explains that you absolutely cannot use a camera during the taping, and that you’ll have to go through a metal detector. As such, I would try to bring as little as possible to the event. (They also let you know that you’ll be able to use the bathroom once you get inside.)
• TV studios are kept cold, so stay sharp and dress appropriately! Also 11th Ave and 52nd street, which is right by the river, would be a very cold place to wait in line when it’s chilly out.

So there you have it. Jessica and I also have some tickets reserved for the Colbert Report, but they are for midwinter, so I’m less excited about all the standing around outside.

In other news, I’ve supplemented my inability to actually go out and do things by joining facebook and twitter. More on that later, but for now, here’s a vaguely relevant blog post I wrote a long time ago.

I just noticed that my favorite elected official (a.k.a. my new hippest friend) linked here from PVD’s finest online cultural institution, The Providence Daily Dose. His link was in reference to my post highlighting a video on sculptor/machinist Arthur Ganson, so I can only assume anyone following the link is expecting to seeing some other hot videos that appeal to nerdy/techy/artsy types (Dave’s ultra hip now, but in college he was a math major).

Not being one to disappoint, I was tempted to embed the newest Sony Bravia ad, except then I decided it wasn’t so hot and that really their older ads are much more exciting (especially the first one, which features 250,000 multicolored bouncy balls). Instead I’ve decided to embed this video, brought to you by the freethinking radicals over at Quicksilver, and made by a bunch of crazed Bill Ayers supporters no doubt.