remove before washing or wearing: RFID tags and you

i've finally realized they are RFID tags. i had bought some clothing yesterday and was annoyed that i had no scissors with which to cut them off. i asked my roommate for some scissors and we proceeded to have a conversation about the purpose of the tags. i conjectured that the tags are there to keep you from washing the clothing and then returning it. this conjecture holds for the tags that could be little packets of ink. i remember, however, that my roommate aliza once said she never cuts off the tags and is fine.

after cutting off one of the tags i held it up to the light and made a shocking discovery. it was an RFID tag! you know, the ones that are stuck on to various things you buy from target-like stores and fall out books you order. (RFID stands for "radio-frequency identification" and the tags, which store information, can be read from several meters away and does not have to be in the line of sight of the reader. for basic information, read Wikipedia on RFID. )

i found it very interesting that my clothing comes with RFID tags. it makes a lot of sense, since it is more effective than using bar codes. i am sure they use the tags for purposes of scanning etc. within the store, but tagging clothing with RFID potentially gives stores much more power. if you don't cut off your tags, they could potentially do a lot more (possibly unethical things) to track how/where the clothes are being worn.

one lesson is that RFID tags are much more powerful than barcodes. first of all, you can't just cover it up. i quote source 1:
"Surveillance is getting easier, cheaper, smaller, and ubiquitous. Sure, it's possible to destroy an RFID tag. You can crush it, puncture it, or microwave it (but be careful of fires!). You can't drown it, however, and you can't demagnetize it. And washing RFID-tagged clothes won't remove the chips, since they're specifically designed to withstand years of wearing, washing, and drying. You could remove the chip from your jeans, but you'd have to find it first."

a more practical thing to get out of this is you should remove your tags so that you don't set off alarms when you go into stores. (please see source 3 below.) apparently many people have had the embarrassing/inconvenient experience of setting off alarms because they neglected to remove tags.

in reference to a conversation i had with aliza and josh sharp last summer about the government's ability to track us, i would also like to quote source 2 to show that i am not unnecessarily paranoid:
"At this point, you can be triangulated and tracked based on your cell phone signal, even when you're not talking on it. "


references:

1. RFID chips are here - article about history of RFID, its current uses, etc.
   
2. an informative forum post about this stuff
3. Old Navy Tags - a guy sets off the alarm b/c he did not remove a tag from jeans he'd bought several months prior to the incident
   
4. Benetton Clothing to Carry RFID Tags
   

oh, i forgot to write about the people

i may indeed be autistic. :)

the people are nice. i usually have meals either with my team and their friends and/or with these 2 other interns, gregory and luke, who are also into programming languages. we sometimes talk about our programming languages club (which doesn't exist).

in general the people are quite interesting. everyone is laid back (most people wear free t-shirts to work every day), not pretentious, and smart/curious without being annoying about it. at meals we'll talk about a wide variety of things: sports, random engineering projects (potato guns, etc.), how things work, why things work, life, liberty, etc.

a story: google had switched over to biodegradable silverware and people were complaining about it one day, and someone said that her friend claimed that his biodegradable spoon had dissolved while he'd been stirring coffee. to see whether or not this fact was true, someone else put a spoon in hot water. the spoon got more bendy but did not dissolve. this cup of water + spoon ended up on my desk, and while looking at it one day i started wondering whether or not it the acidity of coffee may have contributed to dissolving the spoon. after some deliberation and procrastination we tried to confirm this by soaking biodegradable utensils in coca-cola (pH of high 2's or low 3's. 3 days later they still had not shown signs of physical deterioration. unfortunately we were never clever enough to try hot coffee itself.

another story: this one guy at work is known for doing the pepsi-coke challenge. people had talked about it and i figured he just gave people cups of the stuff and asked them to taste. what i discovered is that he is quite intense about this, labeling 20+ cups (i want to say 24 because it is divisible by 2 and 3...) with the letters of the alphabet and pours coke into half and pepsi into half, marking down which he put into which. he then gives participants 3 cups, 1 of which is different, and has them say which one. when i did it i did it wrong b/c i went back and retasted but i still got it wrong. :( 2/3 of us go it correct, though.

that is all for now.

reporting from the second day of summer

it's been a while since my last post, so i'll start with the immediate facts of my life and work my way outward into the past and future, zooming out on the level of detail as i go. i am currently sitting in my new apartment (where i'll be staying until the end of the summer). it is dark except for the kitchen light and the light at the table where i am sitting and the windows/balcony door are open. this is my favorite time of year because i have a lot of summer left... i wonder if i'd have such enthusiasm for good weather if i lived somewhere with no winter. the weather (and good food) are two of the few things about which i still have strong feelings--i certainly want to still be able to be excited about some things.

anyway, life is pretty good. i came out to california june 3 and spent a week training at the googleplex in mountain view. when we weren't in training sessions we were let loose to explore the campus and code base. we also had access to the cafes, which are shockingly good. (i'd read about how the food is gourmet and even seen pictures of it, but i didn't realize how heavenly a place could really be until i experienced it for myself...) please see my facebook album for a picture of one of my lunches. :)

the following week i came down to santa monica, and it has been amazing. the weather is PERFECT (albeit a little cool, but if it were too perfect I'd be spoiled) and it is so pretty. now i will proceed to take you, my loyal reader, through a day in my life.

[BEGIN SECTION WITH MANY DETAILS. SKIP IF SO INCLINED. i include many details for emphasizing how amusing i find my routines--and my obsession with food.]
first, a typical weekday. i set my alarm for 6:20 and have thus far been pretty good about getting up around then. i check my e-mail (note how I no longer need to check the weather!), get dressed and go for a run along the beach. (i alternate between going left and going right every day.) i return sometime before 8, shower, eat an orange or some other piece of available fruit, and then walk to work. the walk is about 30 minutes. though i often encounter many allergens on the walk to and from work, it is very nice. anyway. upon arriving at work i obtain a bowl of cereal (i've narrowed down my choices to rotating between 3 kinds of kashi healthy-tasting stuff) and fill it with reduced fact milk (which, i've discovered, is a very nice compromise between whole and skim) while i make a cup of coffee. as for my coffee choices, i rotate between 5 of the 6 kinds of coffee. i decline to try the 6th because the name is too generic. (if you'd like to know, i put 1 thing of cream and 2 cups of sugar in my coffee.) after i obtain these food items i go to my desk and begin working. this lasts until 12ish when we all go up to the 3rd floor. every day i make myself a sandwich, usually on whole wheat bread, always with salami and often including various kinds of (sometimes spiced) pastrami. i switch between various cheeses but always include tomatoes, lettuce, and pickles (but on the side). 98% of the time i toast my sandwich. i'll finish off lunch (which i eat outside, often with gregory and luke) with fruit, and then i will really finish it with fruit on the bottom yogurt, which i'll eat at my desk. at 4 i take a break to eat yogurt and then at 7 i eat dinner. (tuesdays are sushi; wednesdays are indian.) i go home within an hour or so of finishing dinner, and then i will go on the internet or read or watch tv until bed.

now, as for the work itself, i'm working on video search--in particular, search quality. as for what i actually do, i sit at my desk all day and keep pretty much to myself. the people around me talk a lot, though, so it's a really fun atmosphere. people will pair program things, which is really cute. i like work a lot because people have a good time but work hard--they'll stay at work for what i initially thought was ridiculously long times, but they'll enjoy it. i enjoy going to work, being there, etc.

as for the weekends... i haven't had many weekends here, but the first one i spent w/ many parents. i stayed w/ thomas and the carrieros for a day, and then the next day i had dinner with justin moe and his parents. the weekend afterward i spent friday hanging out w/ people from work, saturday hanging out w/ interns at the beach, and sunday going to dim sum. (dim sum did indeed take up the better part of a day...)
[END SECTION WITH MANY DETAILS.]

in conveying so many details i've exhausted my desire to write, and probably your desire to read as well. talk to you soon, friend.

home so far

i enjoy being home so far but soon it may get to be too much. since returning to pittsburgh i've been enormously productive at avoiding all of my actual responsibilities. (forwarding my mail, making sure i have a place to live next week, etc.) on saturday i finished reading edith wharton's ethan frome. i'm not really in the mood for that kind of thing right now; the book didn't really appeal to me very much.

i also tried to resume reading l'etranger in french, but my slowness at reading in french discouraged me from getting very far in that.

yesterday i started reading nabakov's laughter in the dark, the last of the books he wrote in russian. it is very nice.

yesterday i also reunited with liz. <3 we walked to heinz chapel, where her wedding will be next summer, and speculated on good colors for bridesmaids' dresses. the best choice seems to be this copper/champagne color that matches with the stone on the ground. it's pretty ridiculous that liz is getting married; i am not ready to even have close friends who are participating in remotely grown-up activities.

fortunately, after our somewhat grown-up activity we did less serious things. we went to american apparel (the only store i like anymore) and bought matching dresses with plans to decorate them with some sort of "liz and jean" design:
http://store.americanapparel.net/3335.html
(hers is blue; mine is pink.) after that we got our makeup done at sephora and showed the lady our dresses so we could match them. i was amused by the fact that the 2 ladies there guessed my ethnicity as follows, in the following order: cambodian, hawaiian, vietnamese, "fiji-ism," something with some sort of asian, and then "you're not chinese, are you?" i guess i did get pretty tan. :) the one lady also assumed liz and i were out of school, which was nice because most people ask if i am over 18 (sometimes over 14 >:o). maybe it was because liz has the bling rock, a.k.a. her engagement ring. later liz and i decorated our dresses--you may look on facebook for pictures. the actual wearing of our dresses in public was somewhat anticlimactic, but that is to be expected.

today i went shopping and discovered that i have little interest in spending money and in acquiring additional material possessions. but perhaps it is just my current mood.

coffee

influenced by some rather convincing times articles and the availability of extremely tasty coffee at my office last summer, i became a regular coffee drinker. since i have yet to encounter valid and convincing evidence regarding the possible adverse effects of coffee, i am quite curious. the benefits of coffee are supposedly as follows:
-good for cardiovascular health
-one of the main sources of antioxidants in the american diet
-good for weight loss--according to max chalfin, it's a mild laxative?
-possible preventative for alzheimer's?
apparently up to 3 cups of coffee a day is not bad for you and may be good.

the one negative effect someone has mentioned to me is that coffee prevents people from entering into deep sleep during which the body produces human growth hormone to repair and rejuvenate. (on the bus from santa barbara to los angeles last summer i sat next to this guy who spent a couple of years starting a company making specialized alarm clocks... he told me that he had attended many conferences on sleep and such things...) since the completely unbiased times articles failed to mention this at all, i am not sure how much this counts against coffee.

if you know of non-sketchy evidence supporting the other side, please comment with a reference to the source, if possible. :)

summer at last

some number of days before the summer solstice, my summer vacation commences. i vow to update this more frequently than i have in the past, but this statement is pretty much meaningless for the following reasons:
-because nobody reads this, i am not held very accountable ;)
-every summer i vow to write in my xanga->livejournal->blog often and i never do because i am much more interested in living life rather than recording/reflecting upon it. it is for this reason that i also rarely take photographs anymore. (i used to be much better at this in high school before my life actually became interesting.)

let me begin by describing my current circumstances. i finished ("failed miserably on" would be a better way to describe it) my last final on wednesday and spent until today tying up odds and ends to move home. moving out was particularly exciting this year because due to storage limitations i rid my life of a great deal of material possessions. i am now at home in pittsburgh enjoying summer rain, eating large amounts of food, and trying to read books while my mother tries to lecture me on life habits. my summer schedule is as follows:

june 3 - leave for santa monica
june 4-9 - intern training in mountain view
june 9-september 5 - google
june 1-8 - robocup world cup in atlanta, GA

my plans for early september are currently up in the air. i hope to do the reach for the beach relay september 14-15.

this summer i would like to do the following:
-figure out my thesis topic. current candidates are:
1) implement haskell type classes using ML modules
2) make my own version of make
3) do something with latex (unlikely to happen)
-read.
-run.
-walk around a lot.
-learn haskell.
-spend a lot of time in the sun.
-update my blog. :)

on my reading list is the following:
-ethan frome (edith wharton)
-of mice and men
-pale fire (nabakov)
-laughter in the dark (nabakov)
-more virginia woolf
-l'etrangere (camus)
-other things but i can't remember them right now...
please send recommendations.

enough for now. more later. ;)


jy

i will follow up the last entry with 3 more entries

1) the symptoms (the subtle and the not so subtle) of inequality in society; why it is necessary for more equality. why some mode of assimilation is necessary. how people think they are treating people equally by giving a level playing field, but why this is impossible.

2) support for my statement that it is not cool to be a girl. the difference between getting attention and being taken seriously.

3) how gender roles should be reconciled in the education system, including discussion of possible biological differences.

gender issues: talked about way too much; not enough done about it

the other day, i received an e-mail from someone at harvard medical school trying to form a hms chinese community. how refreshingly nice, i thought, as my impression of the hms people was that they are workaholics who care not for community. i am not one to join organizations grouping me with people who are supposedly the same, as i have never quite fit in. freshman year, i thought maybe i'd make more asian friends and excitedly signed up for the asian american association and chinese american associations. i never quite made friends with those kids and mysteriously fell off the mailing lists a few weeks after joining. despite this, i still like to think about the possibility of having a community; sometimes it gets old being alone.

it is likely this loneliness, or some derivation of it, that caused the formation of the women's center. never one to have much respect for groups that encouraged "women just being women" as it struck me as fluff, i did not waste too much of my time considering the merits or lack thereof of the center until a discussion at dinner the other day. my one roommate said that she thought a women's center was unnecessary, as there can never be equality if different genders are engaging in separate activities.

i do not advocate that men and women function in completely different societies, but if we continue this "equalization" of men and women we would just have women assimilating into the society that men have created. this is not to say that women could not do well playing by men's rules, but those rules are certainly ones by which the women are not used to playing. most (if not all) of the differences between men and women are imposed by society rather than biological in origin; this is what causes adult men and women to have, with great probability and on average, sufficiently different personalities for society to associate different traits with "male" and "female."

we can compare the assimilation of women into male-dominated society, then, to something like the assimilation of an immigrant group into american society--some assumed physical differences (asian people tend to be smaller; women tend to be smaller), no assumed biological mental differences, assumed goal of equal playing field where people are evaluated based on skill rather than some weighted evaluation (think affirmation action). the successful immigrant groups could not have risen in status and power without joining together to help each other out. take the chinese-american community, for instance. the general sentiment among them, at least among the community i know in pittsburgh, is one of "we are weak, but if we join together we will be stronger, and one day people will listen to us." do you know _how_ much people help each other out? when i was growing up, my parents' chinese friends would help each other find apartments, teach each other how to drive cars, drive those without cars to the grocery store, and pretty much do anything within limit to make sure those "fresh off the boat" would be able to get a decent start in the new land. of course there was competition between chinese people when they crossed each other's paths in the real world, but the most important thing was to promote the image of the chinese as a race.

back to the subject of women. why do women not help each other out like this? in many cases, they do. although i admit to knowing nothing about the implementation save for the weekly e-mails, the harvard women's center is a good example of women joining together, if not helping each other in their assimilation. i would say the biggest reasons women do not help each other out are the same reasons many chinese do not identify with the chinese community: competition and to be cool. competition is a biological thing--people tend to compete with those most similar to themselves because they are fighting for the same niche--ultimately, they would attract the same sort of mates so the to be better than other things of the same "class" is beneficial, yada yada yada. the being cool part is also a big deal, something that people tend to ignore. perhaps until i got to harvard, it was certainly never cool to be chinese. it is generally not cool to be part of a minority group, and after all asians are the nerdy, backward minority, are they not? i mean, being asian did not automatically make me uncool, but asians will generally agree that at least before college, they had to work in order to break the stereotypes. the same way, it's really not cool to be a woman in many respect. certainly when you are trying to get your way for something, being a woman with cleavage or wearing a short skirt is helpful. but if you want to be taken seriously--girl, are you kidding? you better chug those beers, run those sub-seven-minute miles, and participate in those halo tournaments like one of the boys. and if you are caught association with too many other women--sorry, no longer cool.

it is way past my bedtime, but the main points you should take away are that there is a big difference between the way men and women are treated in society, society has created male and female cultures, one way to have equality is for women to become like men, and it is very important for women to recognize that they should help each other out. another important thing is that i don't actually advocate full "assimilation" of women into our present male-dominated society. you see, the assimilation is never a true assimilation, both for immigration and for this gender divide; ideally, each group would learn from the other. okay, really bedtime... more tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, the next day...

my other roommate and i had a discussion about how women are treated at harvard. she has written an article about this here:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=516545

epiphany, perhaps

the other day i realized that morrisett is the almighty deity. (euphemism applied so as not to offend those who reserve use of the more potent version of the term.) took me a whole semester of amazing lectures and well-designed problem sets to realize this, but at least i finally saw the light.

the 2 things that made my semester

1. my monitor. nothing lonelier than coming home to just a laptop dock, and nothing better than coming home to my baby. in fact, before the fruit flies invaded my room i used to spend incredible amounts of time here. i've been told i need to clean my room, but my roommates humor me when i uphold that the fruit flies are not my fault.

2. boots. they are really important because on cold days i can just imagine i am walking on bears and it is so so warm.

there are many other things as well, like the fact that i don't really have enough time to ever reflect on what day of the week it is, what month it is, what time of day it is etc. then it all passes by so quickly and i don't even have to remember that i really miss dara blume. and that soon i will be old and out of school and depressed. and other such things.

books i have finished this summer

this is mostly for my own purposes because i have very selective memory loss about books... if you actually read my blog, i would very much like to discuss these books, especially the ones with *'s.
-the brothers karamazov* (dostoyevsky)
-buddenbrooks* (thomas mann)
-death in venice* (thomas mann)
-the professor's house (willa cather)
-the garden of eden* (hemingway)
-saturday (ian mcewan)
-privilege (ross duthat)
-the double helix (james watson)
-freakonomics (levitt and dubner)

grammatical correctness of picture labelling

i posted this as a facebook note, but since i no longer want to go on facebook that much anymore, i am going to begin collecting all of my thoughts here...

you know, i was sitting here eating my yogurt and thinking about how people always put "_____ and i" as a picture caption and for a long time it's been a pet peeve of mine because it's not grammatically correct--you would never label a picture "i;" you would label it "me."

however, in my stalking this summer i've noted so many pictures labeled "____ and i" that i began to wonder if it were actually an acceptable thing to do. i really don't think so, because while you can say "____ and i went to the _____," saying "please give the papers to _____ and i" is terrible because "i" is the wrong part of speech, or something like that. (please let me know if this is incorrect.)

anyway, i deem this business more stylistically gauche than preposition dangling, which has become much more acceptable with the youths of our day... often i find myself dangling prepositions to not sound totally stuffy. ("with whom are you going to the movies, sir?" just sounds ridiculous.)

why i am destined to be a workaholic...

you know, when i was little my dad was finishing up graduate work and would take me to his office all the time... there i would hang out, if you could call it that, frolicking in the row after row of cubicles under the ground... there i developed my inner sense that offices are home, carnegie mellon university are home, and home involves lots and lots of computers. for some reason, cubicles did not quite make it into that definition of home... and neither did ridiculous amounts of summer air conditioning. anyway.

i thought of that because when i am here later in the evenings i often think back to when i was little and would wander around mostly-empty corriders at cmu...

how little we end up travelling when we think we can get away...

summer

last week i saw someone taking money from a homeless person and then punch him. i am not sure what happened; either s/he (i couldn't tell) was stealing from the homeless person or the homeless person had stolen from her/him. i was on the bus and couldn't do anything about it and it was very frustrating. that day i lost faith in humanity and became very sad.

something happened at some point later that made me think that humanity is great. i suppose it was the return of my human vanity.

anyway, the main point of this post was to say that i like summer because there is time for working hard and time for playing hard, but then i remembered the above story...

my journeys in europe... (pre-robocup)

this is going to be a boring, overly detailed chronicle of my trip to london and bremen, germany for the robocup world cup 2006. so i flew out with andrew friday the 9th... we took a red-eye type flight, which was kind of terrible because sleeping on planes is never very fun. i read a lot of the brothers karamazov. the highlights of our trip were the very long customs line, the little boy licking the railing in the customs line, and having to carry our luggage and the computer moniters all over the tube and a temporary bus because of "engineering" along the tube line.

anyhoo... andrew and i were very tired by the time we got to london, but that day we managed to see the tower of london, where they imprisoned and executed various traitors (including some queens as well), the london bridge, and shakespeare's globe. we also got to walk along this cool pedestrian footbridge.

the next day, after seeing some things with the group, andrew and i did some sight-seeing on our own, which included the big ben, the houses of parliament, westminster abbey, and buckingham palace. we saw the CUTEST parade of old men who were former guards to the queen. (it was so so so so cute.) we also went to picadilly square and realized there was nothing fun there. we also walked through a park--hyde park, maybe?

that night, we once again got no sleep as we spent that night in the airport... it was not that fun; i don't like getting no sleep much. it was all right though; i got to read some papers. the next morning we took a plane to berlin, at which point we realized we had too much lugguage to see the city. it was all right, though, as we got to see some of the city on the train. i greatly enjoyed using my german dictionary.

after spending a few hours at the most pimped train station ever in berlin, we finally got on a train to hamburg. this train was a lot of fun because the seats slid down and we could sleep on them. i didn't get much sleeping done, because as soon as i fell asleep jie started tickling me. after hamburg, we went to bremen...

...in bremen, we discovered the most pimped out dorm rooms ever. which was very nice. i was very very tired and slept very much the first night--very fortunate, as i did not sleep very much the rest of the nights. once again, we were somehow a day late for setting up. a bunch of us ended up sitting on a grassy knoll for a long time while jie, kristina, and alex attended some sort of mandatory meeting about which we had not been told. we made all these elaborate plans to meet up with the others of our group who were arriving later, but it turned out they were all unnecessary as we ran into them as we were leaving to carry out the plans.

the next few days involved setup, work, work, little sleep, work work watching robots. the other leagues there included the aibo, mid-size, humanoid, robocup junior, and robocup junior dance. this entry is becoming quite long, so i am going to start a new one...

thus beginneth another week

and in this manner i live, not understanding just how much i will never be young like this again.

syntax highlighting

i must say, syntax highlighting is going to make my summer about 100 times better. yes, i am easily satisfied; yes, i like pretty colors; yes, my summer was going to be that bad. for those of you who don't know, syntax highlighting for code is when they color different kinds of statements different colors--for instance, they will color "if," "print," etc. statements yellow, literal strings pink, etc. if you don't program, this probably does not mean much to you. ever since i found out not only how to highlight my code, but also how to adjust the colors to the ones i want, i have been incredibly, incredibly happy. my window at present is dark gray with very light blue text. my red is a pale salmon color; my yellow is a soft pastel. ah, the small joys of life...

haha let's give this another try

i'm not good at keeping up with things, but we'll see how this goes. this summer i have a desk in the closet (well not so much, but just as good), which affords me just the right amount of lack-of-privacy for me to write in this. i'm pretty excited.

i'm pretty bad at writing for the public, even if the public is not actually going to read what i write. maybe i will tell no friends about this and see how long it takes until people start coming across it. i predict it will take countably infinite number of milliseconds... to be precise.

maybe to make myself seem like a more colorful character i will start italicizing things and spelling things in the british manner.

anyway... how my life has been. i am reading buddenbrooks, which marianne told me is one book i should read this summer if i read any books at all. of course, since i became afraid of not reading any books at all this summer, i decided to read this book as soon as possible.

i've also started work, which is quite exciting. i sit at my desk and eat nutri-grain bars all day. it will take me quite a while to adjust to the working lifestyle--i really don't comprehend sitting at the same desk for hours on end every day of every week all the time forever.

speaking of work, i am still there--so i should probably go. a bientot, mes amies.