The skinny on (Asian) noodles

The most notable thing about my (temporary summer) kitchen cabinet right now is that despite the depth of my inventory, I have quite a breadth of noodle and hot sauce varieties. I thought I'd write about some different kinds of Asian noodles and what they are good for, along with some notes about how to have my noodle lifestyle*. (You may e-mail me for questions about non-Asian noodles various hot sauces; I am very into them.)

Basic kitchen ingredients:

• Garlic (good for non-broth noodle preparations).
• Scallions (these don't keep as well as garlic, but they are good for topping a dish).
• Sesame oil and soy sauce.
  
• Hot sauces: I try to have a chili garlic sauce for flavoring, a black bean sauce for flavoring, and Lao Gan Ma chili sauce in oil for spiciness.
• Having dry Sichuan peppers around is also good for flavoring broths and stir-fries. (Since they are dry, you are responsible for spreading the flavor.)
  

Basic preparations:

• Broth. You can make a vegan broth by quartering an onion, cutting a carrot into small pieces, and boiling with water for 20-30 minutes. It is very easy to make a chicken broth by putting pieces of chicken (frozen or fresh) into the broth in the beginning. The broth is pretty robust to overcooking; cook until everything looks done and the soup tastes flavored. Adding salt is a good idea; I also like to add some dry Sichuan chili peppers. You could cook the noodles in the broth, but keep in mind that noodles may absorb a lot of water, so it is usually best to cook the noodles separately. A cool thing you can do to flavor broth is to stir-fry some shallots and put them in the top/bottom of the bowl.
  
• "Dry." I usually just throw together a basic noodle sauce using sesame oil and some hot sauces. I usually use a combination of chili garlic sauce and chillies in oil. It is sometimes also fun to grind up some dry peppers to make the sauce spicier. You may also use soy sauce for flavoring. With the right repertoire of hot sauces and some experimentation, it becomes very easy to get the flavor to suit your mood very quickly.
• Stir-fried. I'm not a pro at this, but you can get pan-friable noodles and stir-fry them with a little bit of water in the pan. One idea for topping the noodles is with scallions and chicken or seitan; you should cook the noodles separate from the other stuff.
  

Noodle varieties:

• Wheat (udon) noodles are medium thickness and good for either the broth or dry preparations.
• Buckwheat (soba) noodles can be served cold/dry or hot in broth. They are quite good with some sesame oil/miso, but since I am Chinese (Hunanese) and not Japanese I opine that everything can be improved by hot sauce. :)
  
• Mung bean starch noodles come in various thicknesses. They are okay for broth, but I find they serve the best purpose for "holding" flavor since they themselves don't have too interesting of a flavor. These are a good substrate for a spicy chili/oil sauce.
• Somen are very thin wheat noodles that can be served cold with some sort of sauce or hot in broth. I love somen in broth; somen has a good enough flavor that it is good with some hot sauce, but it is always fairly clear to me that it was not meant to be eaten that way.
• Egg noodles come in either thick or thin varieties. Both kinds are great in soup; thin egg noodles often come in a pan-friable variety--but you have to read the label to make sure.
• Fresh Shanghai noodles are thicker and absolutely great for making dan dan noodles or variations thereof. It is fairly easy to make some approximation of dan dan noodles with some dan dan sauce (or combination of chili garlic/chili oil/black bean sauce) and garlic.
• Rice noodles in Chinese cuisine usually come in thick and thicker and are great both in soups, as a substrate for spice, and in stir fry. (For the thicker variety, look for fresh noodles.)
  

Some notes on cooking noodles:

• Noodles will often overcook if you let them stay hot for too long; if you are concerned about this you should drain them and rinse them with cool water before proceeding to the post-cooking step.
• Noodle varieties have very high variance in how long they take to cook and how much they tend to expand. Once you get the hang of things, it tends to be pretty consistent.
  

* Most of what I say is calibrated for cooking for one to two people. With noodles I'll usually make a vegetable and then have either a couple of poached eggs, some chicken or tofu sausage, some seitan, or some chicken (which I prepare with black bean sauce, sesame oil, and chili sauce).

An awesome snack

I just concocted the best snack ever: I diced a nectarine, added brown sugar and Life cereal, microwaved this for one minute, and added three tablespoons of plain lowfat yogurt. This was the healthiest and quickest way to approximate a peach cobbler a la mode with the ingredients in my kitchen! :)

Also awesome:

• Strawberries dipped in plain 2% Greek yogurt and brown sugar.
• Blueberries and any plain yogurt and brown sugar.
• Raspberries and any plain yogurt and brown sugar.
• Plain yogurt with jam.
  

Yogurt recommendations: for Greek, I prefer Fage 2%; for regular, I like the Whole Foods brand 2% or Nancy's Organic Yogurt 2%. Greek yogurt is thicker than "regular" yogurt and is good for dipping fruits.

Jam recommendations: Bonne Maman has a pretty good flavor/texture--it is best to get something that is not too gelatinous.)

If you are into yogurt you may also want to try kefir, another fermented milk product that is more liquid and has different properties from yogurt.

Seattle Underground Tour

Putting in a plug for the Seattle Underground Tour, which gives you a great hour-long introduction to Seattle's history. Started in the 1970's by Bill Speidel to fund a grass-roots preservation campaign, the tour gives you a brief overview of Seattle's early history and takes you through Seattle's underground tunnels, which were the city's sidewalks until they raised the streets. Take the tour to learn more*! ;)

* This is quite an interesting story; if you are not in Seattle I recommend reading about this on the internet.

Bat pose

Recently at yoga I have been introduced to bat pose, which involves hanging upside-down from a looped strap attached to the wall with the strap on your sacrum (so your back forms the bottom edge of an isosceles triangle), your legs along the outsides of the strap, and your feet on the inside of the strap. It is very fun and relaxing; it has been quite helpful for reducing back tension.

Internet is ruining slang

I recommend reading this fun NY Times article on how the internet has affected the spread of slang. Since the point of using slang is to separate from the actually cool people from the wannabes and the internet makes knowledge of slang available to all wannabes, fairly quickly do slang words cease to be slang and enter the greater cultural vernacular*. The article discusses the spread of slang, the role of slang in social identification, inter-group slang transfer, and the evolution of slang with respect to internet technologies. As a total slang goon, I found this article to be hella rad.

* This might actually be why I create my own slang and abuse the polymorphic term "goon." Only my real friends will pick up the appropriate ways to use my slang. ;)

Bike polo

Today I came upon some pick-up bike polo matches occurring at the tennis court across the street from where I was getting ice cream. It is kind of like roller hockey on bikes: players have sticks with which they handle the ball*. It looks like a technically interesting (and potentially dangerous) sport. I would compare it more to fencing than to something like ice hockey: it seems like technique is much more important than level of physical fitness. It was the first time I had ever seen or heard of such a thing!

According to the US Bicycle Polo Association, the sport is thought to have originated in India, where British troops used bikes to work on their equestrian polo skills. It is also apparently growing in popularity throughout the US and world. :) The NY Times also has a 2007 article about bike polo.

* According to internet sources the stick is supposed to be a mallet, but the players I saw had lightweight metal sticks with thin hollow cylinders at one end. (A really interesting thing was they shuffled teams by putting all n sticks in the middle of the court and randomly throwing n/2 to each goal.)

The fine line between self-expression and cyberbullying

Model Liskula Cohen won a court case against Google to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger who maligned her* on the Skanks of NYC blog. Apparently Google initially refused but the Manhattan supreme court ruled that Google, who owned the blog, needed to provide the information. Perhaps I do not understand the gravity of the situation, but I am disappointed that one person's offended vanity sets such a precedence for revealing (conditionally) private information**. It is a slippery slope when people start being punished for saying "mean" things.

* They called her a "skank" and labelled photos of her with similarly derogatory words.
** While I understand cyberbullying to be a serious issue, it seems like Google's lawyers could have made a convincing case that this level of bullying does not pose a physical threat. Perhaps the issue is that people don't know what to do about cyberbullying? It does not seem like the court would have been so harsh had this whole thing happened in print media.

Airline pricing

Anyone interested in economics likely finds airline companies interesting: one of the few things I remember from my introductory economics class was the story of how some airline company realized they could make more money by not filling planes; it is also interesting how budget airlines like Ryanair can offer astoundingly low prices by cutting frills. Airline pricing is also interesting because finding the lowest fare for a given route is NP hard; companies like ITA software have sprung up to solve such problems.

Company business models aside, I find airline pricing to be incredibly interesting because it is one of the few things relevant to my life where supply and demand have such an immediate effect on price. According to Wikipedia, airline reservation systems sometimes have perfect discrimination when it comes to filling each seat of a plane at the highest price a customer would pay without driving the customer away. This is in line with the advice I've gotten over the years about purchasing plane tickets: tickets to leave Friday and return Saturday are expensive because there is high demand from corporate travellers, who don't care what they pay; ticket prices tend to drop after midnight (I hypothesize because reserved seats open up again); waiting for fare wars is a good way to plan semi-spontaneous trips. Plane tickets are cool because you can really improve your quality of life by having a good strategy and having a good strategy is fairly low-cost.

Recently I've been spending a bit of time on Bing travel (formerly Farecast), which compares prices over different dates and offers a prediction of whether to buy or wait with an estimate of the price variability. (A cool thing is that it will also let you set fare trackers that e-mail you the daily price--at some fixed time of day--for some trip.) It shows you graphs of the historical lows and the daily low price, both of which are interesting because they can vary a surprising amount (over $200 for tickets that can be in the low $100's) over the course of a few days (sometimes with seemingly random highs/lows). You can also see longer-term trends: an obvious trend is that ticket prices increase the closer you get to the flight date. I've also discovered fairly high variability (difference sometimes in the hundreds) of tickets over the course of a day; ticket prices do seem to increase quite a bit during the course of a day. (The price difference of flying to different locations is also interesting, since it depends not only on distance but also on demand for flying to that city, whether it is a hub, etc. etc. etc.)

I recommend playing around with Bing travel/Farecast if you are interested in this kind of thing. It is also a great resource for planning trips. ;)

Brain stuck in a rut

This popular NY Times article talks about how stress can cause your brain to go on autopilot, making you do the same (bad) things over and over again when you are stressed for too long.

Bed Buddy: another ergonomic secret

Another item people have seen me using and commented on what a good idea it was is my Bed Buddy, which is this rice pillow you can put in the microwave and then on your neck/shoulders/back. I use it every day; it generates moist heat (as opposed to the dry heat you get with the self-heating pads) that is quite effective for relieving muscle soreness/tension.

Trackpad keyboard for mousing-related problems

After mousing aggravated some of my shoulder problems, I switched to using keyboards with mice in them. I've tried a few, but the Adesso Tru Pro has been the best so far. I received it today: it has the slight elevation/separation between two hands, soft keys, and a nice track pad. It is a little big, but I kind of like that.

Previously I was using the Keytronic trackball keyboard, which was okay but not very ergonomic. The trackball also often got stuck, which was annoying. The keys are also pretty loud. I have also used the Lenovo Ultranav, which is basically the Lenovo laptop keyboard with both a touchpad and a ball mouse. I got the version without the number pad on the side so the mouse is in the middle. I found it to be okay but not sufficiently substantial: my hands get kind of funny after typing on it for a while; it might be because it's a mini keyboard.

If you are having shoulder problems with your mousing shoulder, you might want to try switching to a keyboard with a built-in mouse. I also type with my keyboard in my lap, elevated by a Lapinator so that my elbows can be at 90 degrees.

Worried about switching keyboards because you already have a fancy schmancy one you don't want to give up? My friend who was having mousing problems got this touch pad to use with his Kinesis.

Life lessons: computers are pretty bad for you, but the internet is so cool.

What's in a (woman's) name?

This Feministing post talks about how 70% of American women think wives should take their husbands' names and 50% think it should be a legal obligation. I was surprised to read that the law has intervened in cases where the husband wanted to take the wife's last name, where the parents wanted to give their child the mother's last name, and even where the parents wanted the child to have a hyphenated last name.

While I'm not sure I trust these numbers, I have been surprised how the people I went to school with who get married take their husband's last name. My one friend explained to me that she thought it was a nice way to express her love. I'm not sure how I feel about this--it would be if she told me she thought staying home with the kids would be a nice way to express her love. While it is nice that she loves her spouse so much, I would hope that she considers more than just her desire to please him when making such a decision. Especially since changing one's name often has more permanent effects than exiting the workforce for one to n years, it is a pretty big sacrifice to take someone else's last name.

Maybe in second grade I thought for two minutes it might be cool to be Mrs. So-and-So, but the idea of changing my name doesn't make too much sense to me anymore. Also, while I see how deciding on a single name (rather than a hyphenated name) for the children in a family might make their lives easier, in this day and age the choice of propagating the man's name seems fairly arbitrary.

Analyzing data is the new cool thing

According to this NY Times article, studying statistics/social sciences is the new cool thing because of the explosion of data that has come from all of the things going on on the internet. Apparently Google has been hiring people with social sciences backgrounds to try to make sense of all of their data. It's cool that the people with the money now have (what I would say is) more direct motivation to pay people to have at it with data*. This almost makes me regret not doing something cooler with my life, like studying anthropology.

* Analyzing data has always been cool to physical and social scientists, but there hasn't always been a lot of money there.

Cooler temperatures more conducive to sleep

An article backing up the claim I often make about cooler temperatures being better for sleep.

I love my feet

I was amused to find a New York Times article about how most people don't take sufficiently good care of their feet and are embarrassed about it. Though I used to wash my feet every night, I can't say I'm among the responsible few who moisturize my feet every day. Maybe it's because I'm a runner*, but despite my general negligence I actively love my feet.

* According to the article, runners and other athletes are more likely to love their misshapen feet.

Language may shape thoughts

Sharon Begley has this nice Newsweek article about Stanford professor Lera Boroditsky's research on how language might shape thoughts. Some examples: the gender of nouns in different languages seem to affect perceptions of the entity associated with the noun; people have a better memory for colors if there are distinct names for different shades; speakers of a language with different words for two concepts often have an easier time distinguishing between them.

From a previous blog post, you might have seen that I am very interested in this sort of thing but don't have much background.

Also, I love Sharon Begley.

Fair sentencing for crack and cocaine

I'm a little late in posting this, but I was reading a back issue of Newsweek and found this nice article I agree with about disparate sentencing of crack vs. power cocaine*.

Brief summary: The problem has been that crack cocaine dealers receive disproportionately long sentences compared to dealers of power cocaine. According to the article, "If federal prosecutors convicted you of peddling five grams of crack, you got the same five-year minimum sentence as someone dealing 500 grams of powder." This differential sentencing has hit black communities particularly hard because they tend to use crack more than cocaine. Cose urges the administration to change this "dimwitted" policy and focus on more real drug problems, such as abuse of opioid painkillers.

* This is a subject about which I have occasional and only moderately well-informed but strong opinions.

Relationships are bad for health

Here is a New York Times article I could cutely use to support my view that relationships are harmful to one's health. The article, titled Divorce, It Seems, Can Make You Ill, discusses a study that shows people who have been divorced or widowed have poorer health, which the study measures by looking at rates of chronic health problems. Unfortunately, this article is sensationalist and good for nothing more than generating conversation. One of the only reasons I mention it is because it fits in with my general view that relationships can cause particularly traumatic experiences.

The article does a lot of scientific wishful thinking about why it is that divorced or widowed people might have more chronic health problems: well, having a spouse is good for you because they can take you to the doctor, but the end of a relationship is usually traumatic, so perhaps this is why you never recover. The article cites a couple of other studies: one that shows people taking care of loved ones with Alzheimer's experience telomere shortening, and one where married couples' physical wounds take longer to heal after conjugal discord. While this information is all interesting and good, it seems rather narrow-minded to focus just on relationships: divorce, death of a spouse, and fighting with a spouse don't seem to be on a different level than other traumatic life events such as losing one's job, losing one's home, or fighting with a peer. A logical set of other studies to mention are the ones showing positive correlations between traumatic life events and/or depression and chronic illness. From those studies we might conclude that the results of this study are either obvious or confirm the hypothesis that relationships tend matter enough to have the potential to affect one's stress levels.

Anyway, the fact that I wrote a whole blog post on this shows that even when articles about studies are not that useful for furthering scientific knowledge, they are useful for generating (perhaps useless) conversation*.

* Although it is important to recognize the flaws of such articles!

Merits of young coconuts

I have recently discovered the amazing joy of eating young coconuts. You can buy them at grocery stores (as un-fancy as the Redmond Safeway) and you can eat them by hacking off the top, drinking the coconut juice, and scraping the insides to get at the coconut jelly. Coconut juice is supposed to be an amazing post-workout beverage because of its electrolytes. It is also supposedly very nutritious: full of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, so it can't hurt to drink it in general either. Since first discovering the joys of eating young coconuts last Saturday, I have had a total of 4. ;) This must be love.

MTV's 16 and Pregnant

There has been some hype about MTV's 16 and Pregnant, a reality show featuring 1-episode stories about pregnant teenagers from across America. They show clips from the teens' lives from the early stages of pregnancy to a couple of months post-birth.

I watched this show out of curiosity and because I wanted to make sure that it wasn't making pregnancy seem too cool*; I was satisfied to find the show to be interesting, somewhat realistic about the difficult aspects of teenage pregnancy, and not disgustingly voyeuristic**. I watched one episode: one about Farrah, a cheerleader estranged from her baby's father and one about Amber, a girl who moves in with her 3-years-senior boyfriend after discovering she is pregnant. Both girls commit to raising their babies; while this is not a choice I would make, perhaps especially because this is not a choice I would make, I found it interesting to see the preliminary execution of these decisions. The show satisfies my curiosity by seeming to do a pretty good job of conveying a (sensationalized, MTV-ized) sense of what it may be like to be 16 and pregnant.

Of course, 16 and Pregnant has the expected cringe-worthiness in that the footage is extremely edited to convey what MTV wants to convey. An example is that they portrayed Farrah's mother as "controlling" and "hot-tempered" for telling Farrah to get her life in order and for fighting with her about wanting a car while she could barely afford the baby. I had found her to be surprisingly supportive of her daughter's decision to keep a baby, especially one fathered by a boy whom Farrah found too immature to even inform of the baby's existence. I also found it amusing that she was fully made up for the delivery even though her water broke at 2 am. :o Despite this, it is still interesting to dig through the layers and imagine what these teens' lives might actually be like. As someone who went to a small all-girls school where I didn't know any pregnant teens and had a deep fear of teen pregnancy, sex, pregnancy, and the opposite sex instilled by even more fearful parents***, I find teenage parents' lives fascinating.

One interesting question is how much being on this reality show affects the lives of these teen parents. From the shows I watched it seemed like the girls, their families, and other people in their lives were trying hard to keep it together and be supportive; no doubt being on TV had something to do with that. Perhaps this helped set a more solid foundation for something with an otherwise tumultuous beginning.

Given that this is a reality TV show about pregnant teenagers and that it's on MTV, it is much less terrible than I initially anticipated. They have some of the episodes online, so if you find yourself in the same situation of wanting to watch something while ironing clothes, I would recommend checking this out.

* It seems that Angelina Jolie has made pregnancy cool. When I used to read trashy magazines in the gym, they would have at least one spread of pregnant celebrities. Teenage girls seem to think it's cool to be pregnant--in the extreme case there was that girl on Maury and there was the pregnancy pact.
** My threshold for what is acceptible is probably way too high, thanks to reality TV pollution of ambient voyeurism.
*** I used to wake up with nightmares about being pregnant or about knowing pregnant people even though I rarely even saw, let alone interacted with, non-faculty, non-family member males.

Dangers of the cloud

Courtesy of Joe: a New York Times article on the downsides of cloud computing in terms of privacy etc. While I am more enthusiastic about the cloud than Joe is, I think it's important to consider these issues.

Top ten from college

I figured I now have sufficient distance to write about college with some perspective and sufficient distance that I should write thing down before I forget. Below I list a heterogeneous collection:

1. Third Eye Blind at Yardfest ('07): singing along to every song with Dara Blume and others! There was Boloco and some substances involved. (Was this when they first released Motorcycle Driveby?) A close second is Ben Folds at Yardfest ('06).
2. Senior week: everyone's existential angst manifested itself into fervent desire to drink and be merry. Six flags, senior soiree, last chance dance, and the booze cruise were all great times.
   
3. Senior spring in general: all of my roommates were done with our extracurriculars and we spent a lot of time bumming around the room together, talking about everything, asking if we can still order late-night takeout from the Hong Kong and eat on the floor when we're 40 (or maybe that was just me). We also had the massive ambulatory parties that migrated from restaurant to cafe to bar, sometimes stopping by Berry Line along the way (or again, maybe that was just me).
   
4. Not sleeping very much junior spring. There was a combination of taking Principles of Programming Languages (thank you, Norman Ramsey!), working with Yao*, and being a teaching fellow for intro CS that led to little sleep and much fun. There was a lot of CS, a lot of Yao, and a lot of Boloco**.
   
5. Freshman week: wandering around meeting people; wandering around being lost; wandering around looking for parties in the quad. What fun!
6. Interning at Google Santa Monica, summer 2007. There was a lot of beach, a lot of food, and a lot of reading. (Also a lot of playing with cool Google infrastructure, but my lips are sealed!) This is when I became a foodie and a beach lover. Also when I developed an admiration for and fear of the social power of C++.
   
7. Foreign Cultures 48: The Cultural Revolution with Roderick MacFarquhar. What a class (what a core!); what a man. Professor MacFarquhar was possibly the best lecturer I've ever had: he is this awesome ex-Parliament member who had been a journalist in China during the Cultural Revolution. I fell asleep in this class once per class but I absorbed all the material anyway. A great part was trading my semester's notes for sushi with a friend, only to have the friend discover that my notes were dominated by ellipses from where I fell asleep. :)
   
8. Robocup World Cup '06 in Bremen, Germany. This is when I fell in love with the German food lifestyle: grease and beer, mmm. It was also a fun trip with Kristina, Jie, Andrew, Geneva, et. al.
   
9. PRISE in Boston, summer 2006. This is when I first started appreciating Boston; it's also when I first started running a lot. <3
10. Annenberg, our Harry Potter dining hall where all freshmen eat and where visitors are forbidden to enter. Dinner at 6 was such a fixture in my life that I refused to schedule anything else around it; so many of my friendships started with meals there. There was also a while freshman year when I made my friends sit on one side of the table facing the door so we could people-watch, since it was the last time we could potentially see everyone in our class in one place. :)
    

As you can tell from this list, freshman and senior years were the most social and there was a lot of random stuff in between. :) On the whole it was a postiive experience.

* Yao Yu, the most fun CS partner I've ever had. She was taking operating systems, programming languages, AI, and another class at the same time while being a teaching fellow for algorithms, so she slept very little. Despite this we had a lot of fun staying up until the milk trucks came out (approx. 4 am), spending some of this time watching videos of Yevgeny Pleshenko skating and Yevgeny Kissin playing Rachmaninoff. (Love Russians; love Yevgeny's.)
** Boloco is an "inspired burrito" place. Without exception I would order a chicken teriyaki burrito, light on the teriyaki sauce, with hot sauce. On days I was feeling particularly good I would also get a mango smoothie. That was the life.

On biking

I got a bike shortly after coming to Seattle and have been figuring out the deal about biking around. I've been biking to work and to the store; yesterday I took my first long bike ride on some trails (maybe about 22 miles; it took me an embarrassing 2+ hours)*.

After some thinking, some observation, and some more thinking I realized I am a public menace. First of all, I go on the sidewalk a lot, which is apparently illegal in most cities. :( Secondly, when I go in bike lanes sometimes I go opposing traffic, which is also a terrible thing.

Since I had started doing both of these things after watching other people, I wanted to share this in case you are also a public menace. :o

* I have two questions: 1) how do you prevent the seat from being extremely painful? 2) how do you deal with being hunched over for so long?

The food situation in Seattle

I haven't yet extensively explored the Seattle food situation, but a cursory investigation reveals that it is pretty good. In particular, the quality of the "bar food" and the diversity of their menus has been impressive. Some places I've been:

• Barolo - a nice place to get a drink and eat some really good food. (Check out the menu on the site!) They supposedly have multiple happy hours where things are half-priced; when I took advantage of this it was pretty great.
• Feierabend - a great German restaurant. You know how I'm a sucker for a nice German meal with beer. (Unfortunately I no longer eat red meat, so the German food experience is significantly less enjoyable.)
  
• Table 219 - a great, well-priced place to eat and people-watch. I had a really good special: red snapper over cucumber salad with some sort of curry.
  
• Elysian Brewery - a nice place to get a beer with some good (healthy!) bar food. I had a great mushroom reuben sandwich with a good chicken lemon grass soup; my friend had a great tofu salad on soba noodles.
  
• Random Asian in Redmond - there are a lot of pho places and random Japanese/Korean places are here. I've been to a couple and they are pretty good.

Capitol Hill seems good in general for food; along Broadway (where Table 219 is) I saw many other restaurants that looked like they could be good. :)

This past weekend I attended Bite of Seattle, an annual food festival where local restaurants have booths. There was a really cool alley where you paid $10 and got to try samples from 7 different fairly nice restaurants (Salty's, Cellars, etc.); I am glad I saved room for that but the samples were not big enough to determine whether the restaurant was actually good. I also got to eat a coconut, which was really great.

Impressions of Seattle

Seattle has been really cool so far*: there is a lot of water and it is surrounded by "big" nature. (On clear days you can see Mt. Rainier in the distance, a pink cartoon mountain stencil in the sky.)

Here are some things I've done up to now**:

• Go to Bollywood night at the Baltic Room, which is happening every 2 weeks this summer.
• Get a bike. :)
• Go to the Pride Parade.
• Help set a world record: most zombies in one place at one time!
• Watch the 4th of July fireworks from Bainbridge Island from a sailboat sailing from Shilshole.
• Attend an amazing Decemberists concert at a local park.
• People-watch on Capitol Hill.
• Go to the Space Needle.

The one less cool thing is that I've been living in Redmond, which is a 25-minute bus ride into downtown Seattle, not counting the 20 minute to the bus stop (on weekends, since the bus doesn't stop everywhere), the time to wait for the bus, and the time to walk to the final destination. There is also supposedly terrible traffic on and around the bridge going over Lake Washington, which one must cross to travel between Seattle and Redmond. Life involves tradeoffs. :)

* I have been here for 3 weeks now.
** I owe most of these plans to one Ms. Jennifer Nan. <3 span="span">

Dublin in a nutshell

I was in Dublin a couple of weeks ago for PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation conference); what I saw of the city was the important landmarks (that you can get in any guidebook) between Trinity College and the Guiness brewery*. These are about a couple of miles apart, so it is a good day's walk to walk around Dublin between those parts. In between you'll pass by a bunch of churches, Grafton Street (the commerical district), some museums**, and some parks. Further out is the jail; I have heard it is cool and has lots of historical value. If I had more time I would have liked to see that.

I also got to experience Dublin pubs, which I discovered close fairly early (11 or 12) on weeknights. Late drinking supposedly occurs mostly in the Temple Bar, a neighborhood of bars.

It was cool to see the Dublin of James Joyce; it was also cool to discover that James Joyce is all over Dublin.

* This is actually a cool place; at the top you get a good view of the city, labelled (on the windows) with quotes from Joyce relevant to the landmarks (and generally relevant). The Guiness in Dublin is supposedly the best you'll ever have; I'd believe it.
** You see more museums if you take a somewhat meandering route that involves some looping.

Children (Voluntarily) Without Clothes

A cute New York Times article about when it is appropriate to allow kids to run around without clothes. While I think nudity should be more desexualized than it is in our society, it is currently the case that nudity is closely related to sexuality. Allowing children to run around naked could help desexualize nudity, but it could also leave the children confused and frustrated when they become too old and have to start wearing clothes. As someone who wasn't allowed to leave her room until fully dressed (and sometimes with 5+ layers!), I would have certainly appreciated more time to run around with fewer clothes.

Firefox, please

Courtesy of Joe: US State Department workers beg for Firefox.

Evolutionary psych: take with a grain of salt

Newsweek's Sharon Begley has this very nice article* about why one should be wary of results evolutionary psychology. The reasons Begley gives for this are 1) the assumptions made by many evolutionary psych results are shaky, but people don't often question them because they believe/want to believe them and 2) the claims made by evolutionary psychologists are often untestable and have been proven false by examining people living primitively today. (She gives great examples, debunking the myth about men liking women with 0.7 waist/hip ratios and others; see the article.)

As someone who had recently gotten into what Begley calls "Pleistocene just-so stories" that people like to believe because they are interesting and sexy, I learned to be more wary of the premises of such "results." As evolutionary psychologists are model builders, it is important to recognize that these are models whose assumptions should be rigorously questioned.

* It is surprisingly insightful and nice for something as mainstream as Newsweek. It was so good I considered writing to her; I also considered jumping up and down.
** I found Miller's The Mating Mind a fun read.

Reading recommendations: Chinese people

All of these books are great reads. :)

Cultural Revolution:

• Wild Swans (Jung Chang) - an autobiographical family history of three generations of women, the first of whom was married to a warlord (I think) and the last of whom grew up as the daughter of somewhat powerful officials during the Cultural Revolution. Grounds a lot of the context one learns about Chinese history surrounding the Cultural Revolution.
  
• Red Scarf Girl (Ji-Li Jiang) - an autobiographical story of a girl who was a teenager during the Cultural Revolution and had to participate in in Red Guard. I read this when I was around the age of the narrator (12) and it put a lot things into perspective.
• Mao's Last Revolution (Roderick MacFarquhar) - I have not read this whole book but I took a course from Roderick MacFarquhar, who was an amazing lecturer (and amazing person!). (This is the best course I have ever taken--the lectures and readings were unparalleled.) After becoming a reporter in order to go into government, he ended up in China during the Cultural Revolution and became a major Chinese history scholar. I admire how he has tried to get a good picture from all sides with respect to the cultural Revolution and he is able to convey this information in an interesting and clear way. (He was later a member of British Parliament.)
  

Chinese-American immigration:

• Tea that Burns (Bruce Hall) - the fourth-generation Chinese American author traces his family's history in context of Chinese immigration to Chinatowns in the 19th century. A great way to learn about the history of Chinese-American immigration.
  

Gender issues:

• Bound Feet and Western Dress (Pang-Mei Natasha Chang) - the American-born, Harvard-educated author writes a dual memoir about her great-aunt Chang Yu-I, a member of an important Chinese family, and her own struggles with discovering her identity as a Chinese American woman. The book talks a lot about Chang Yu-I's struggle to establish a place for herself as a Chinese woman in a changing world: she did not have her feet bound because she cried too much and her brother dissuaded her mother from continuing; she was part of the first modern divorce in China; she became the first woman vice president of a Shanghai bank. This book resonated with my own struggle to resolve my desire to preserve tradition with the fact that many traditional Chinese values devalue women.
  

Reading recommendation: Nabokov

This is the first post in my series of themed reading recommendations.

The topic of the day is Vladimir Nabokov, who, according to John Updike, "writes prose the way it should be written... ecstatically." I am currently reading Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, a tale of an incestuous pair of siblings, and it is one of the most wonderful experiences I have ever had. While Nabokov's stories often feature strange fetishes (and always feature butterflies), the fetish he satisfies most is the one for words. Ada is clever, brilliant, and exhilerating. Nabokov writes of Ada and Van, lovers born to Marina, sister of Aqua:

Their immoderate exploitation of physical joy amounted to madness and would have curtailed their young lives had not summer, which had appeared in prospect as a boundless flow of green glory and freedom, begun to hint hazily at possible failings and fadings, at the fatigue of its fugue—the last resort of nature, felicitous alliterations (when flowers and flies mime one another), the coming of a first pause in late August, a first silence in early September.

If you are getting started with Nabokov I would recommend Lolita: it is his greatest work I've read thus far, for its use of language and the use of the unreliable narrator. Pale Fire is also a favorite; it is more funny than Lolita (and more clever) but less beautiful. My friend David likes his memoir Speak, Memory; I enjoyed it less than his other works for the same reason David likes it: it is Nabokov being a "real person" (and revealing more of a love for words--the original title was Speak, Mnemosyne.) All of these were originally written in English.

Nabokov was also quite prolific in writing novels in Russian; he translated all of them to English himself. I have not read many of these, but one I enjoyed was Laughter in the Dark. The opening passage captivated me:

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

My friend Luke's favorite is Invitation to a Beheading, about a man sentenced to death for "gnostical turpitude."

Gender gap in maths driven by social factors

Thanks for Philip Guo for this link.

Persistence of women in computer science

Thanks to Jean-Baptiste for a link to this 2006 Universities of Pittsburgh/Virginia study about the "consistently small... and declining" numbers of women in computer science.

Since many people have recently expressed the opinion that there are few women in computer science to begin with and that they doubted loss accounted for this, I'll cite some of the motivation for the study here:

...the dearth of women in IT, and disproportionate loss of women from undergraduate CS programs (relative to men) are well-documented phenomena (Camp, 1997; Camp et al., 1999; Crews & Butterfield, 2003; Freeman & Aspray, 1999; Gurer & Camp, 2002; Myers, 1999; NSF, 2000). Statics available from the U.S. Department of Education show that, from 1993-1994 through 1997-1998, the percentage of women earning bachelor's degrees in computer science decreased to a low of 26.7% (NCES, 2001). This drop in female CS bachelor's degree recipients stands in contrast to the steady growth of women earning degrees in other sciences and in engineering.

The study focuses on the relationship between achievement and persistence based on enrollment data from the University of Pittsburgh and reports findings that increased levels of math education and home computing experience imcrease likelihood of persistence. The study reveals that many high-achieving female students switch out of computer science due to loss of confidence and/or finding that the major does not meet expectations. Because of the small sample size and the relative homogeneity of the sample we should not conclude anything about general trends, but it reports some interesting findings in line with those reported by Unlocking the Clubhouse.

Amazon pulls Stockholm game

Amazon must have gotten so much negative feedback about the Stockholm syndrome game (reference previous post) that they pulled it. I received the following e-mail regarding my customer service inquiry:

Thanks for contacting Amazon.com with your concern.
The item you referenced is no longer for sale on our site.
Thank you again for your feedback.

It's pretty cool that they respond to feedback.

Amazon game allows practice of sexual abuse

I read on Feministing that Amazon is carrying Stockholm: An Exploration of True Love, a game that allows the player to play the kidnapper who causes his victim to love him by abusing her*. From Feministing:

This includes using poison gas on the victim, sexually assaulting her and using psychological abuse against her in efforts to make her "love" you. Unbelievable.

It should go without saying that Amazon should not support such psychological and sexual abuse of women. The Feministing post encourages people to contact Amazon to tell them it is not acceptable to profit from this kind of thing. I wrote to them and hope you will do the same.

This new generation of young people...

I am apparently old; I have never been a hugger*. This New York Times article talks about how hugging has become the most common greeting among teenagers, about peer pressure to hug, and how some schools have banned hugging.

* I often have this awkward moment where I feel obligated to hug someone I have not seen in a while but then I realize I don't have to, causing us to both stare over each other's left shoulder for a while...

Unliberated and Unhappy

In an op-ed piece Liberated and Unhappy, Ross Douthat gives his thoughts on a study on the paradox of declining female happiness: as women have more freedom, they are less happy relative to men than they were in the 1960's. Douthat correctly zooms in on motherhood as an issue that makes women's lives difficult: there is still inadequate support for working mothers. However, he chooses to focus on single motherhood as an issue that decreases the happiness of women, suggesting that we should save women from unhappiness by bringing them back under the wing of good ol' patriarchy. He writes:

They should also be able to agree that the steady advance of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women... There’s no necessary reason why feminists and cultural conservatives can’t join forces — in the same way that they made common cause during the pornography wars of the 1980s — behind a social revolution that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the “fallen women” of a more patriarchal age.

There are many ways to make women happier; instating social stigma that enforces expectations of responsible patriarchy will not do it. Rather than creating stigma that causes unhappy and unsupportive men to stay with the mothers of their children, society should support these women in raising children alone. One of the reasons working mothers have been increasingly unhappy is the lack of a support network beyond the nuclear family*; perpetuating the cult of the nuclear family to solve the problem of female unhappiness would be missing the point.

* A product of the conservative 1950's, I believe.

Some issues of sensitivity

Since well-meaning people have often made insensitive comments about women and other marginalized groups in the sciences, I have put together an FAQ (Frequently Answered Questions) about some of these issues.

This FAQ is targeted at the men who make up the comfortable majority among computer science graduate students, but all may find it relevant. My experience shows that these questions are highly relevant; if you are skeptical please contact me to discuss.

Q: I make fun of my Canadian friends all the time and they don't mind. Why should making misogynist or homophobic jokes be any different?
A: Making fun of Canadians is different from making fun of women/minorities because 1) it is a two-way thing based on a rivalry rather than historically harmful prejudice and 2) the targets of the jokes are not in a position (either due to having fewer numbers of them or not having as powerful of a voice) to stand up for themselves. Making jokes about the intellectual abilities of women or the personal decisions of homosexuals enters much more sensitive territory--it is inappropriate to speak lightly about reasons for which these sgroups have been oppressed/persecuted . Just as mature graduate students should not tolerate glib comments about the Holocaust or slavery, they should not tolerate misogynist, homophobic, or otherwise culturally insensitive comments.

Q: What would be considered a misogynist or homophobic joke?
A: There are many things people say that should be obviously offensive. For example, "Chores? That's what the women are for." There are also more subtle things that are as harmful: any statement that implicitly suggests it is bad to be a woman/gay/other minority is not appropriate. Examples include: "that's so gay" and "stop being such a woman."

Q: Why should I think twice about coming on to women with whom I work?
A: Your co-workers deserve to have a comfortable working environment free from unwelcomes advances. Everyone should be able to have a professional and productive work life.

Q: What if I just like to hit on girls for fun?
A: If you are making them feel uncomfortable, you should stop--and apologize. If someone else liked to joke by hitting you in a sensitive region every day, you would also like to be able to make them stop. This is not appropriate behavior for a work environment; you should discourage this behavior in others as well.

Q: Then how do I get a girlfriend?
A: Do extracurricular activities--there are many women in other departments and in the city/town where you lives. It is not the responsibility of the women in your department to date you just because you don't meet a lot of women. If you are really in love with someone who works with/near you, be respectful and be careful.

Q: Is it appropriate to check out other students? Is it appropriate to check out students if I am a teaching assistant?
A: Put yourself in the shoes of an employee, at say, Google, where you would find it important to maintain a professional relationship with your coworkers. If you are a TA, pretend you are a group leader responsible for evaluations that lead to promotions, etc. Graduate students should be held to some standards of professionalism.

Q: Why should I care so much about making minorities feel comfortable in my department?
A: It doesn't cost you that much and everyone is better off if smart people can do good work without always being made to feel they don't belong. If you're asking this question, I'm assuming people don't give you a hard time for being who you are--return the favor for everyone else. It does not benefit the field to push out those who may be different. Intolerance of homosexuality drove Alan Turing to his suicide; his death is one of the greatest losses in computer science.

He's a liar; she's a slut

A friend from college who worked on a campaign commented that when people insult a female candidate, they will just call her a slut. I have recently encountered the question of why people insult women (and only women) by denouncing them as promiscuous, so I've been thinking about it a fair amount.

One explanation for why promiscuity in women is so much more abhorred than promiscuity in men the evolutionary one*. The story is that early humans were mostly serially monogamous, women had children by several partners, and their current partners would help take care of the children. For a woman it was bad if their partner was spending time with another woman, because it meant time that the man was not contributing his resources to taking care of her children. For men it was bad if their partner was promiscuous, because then they would not be able to tell when they were contributing their resources to a child they did not father. This would explain why men are terrified of promiscuous women. But according to this explanation only men should be terrified of promiscuous women, so the use of "slut" as a blanket slur suggests the dominance of male preferences reflected in language.

Here are some reasons why people need to stop throwing around the term "slut:"

1. The use of such a primitive slur against a political candidate suggests they are not taking women seriously. "Slut" is far from a substantive denunciation: a politically inclined person would be embarrassed to put down a male candidate solely by calling him a "prick" or "asshole."
2. Using the term "slut" as a blanket insult perpetuates the limitation on female sexual freedom. There is not such a stigma around promiscuous men that people insult men by calling them promiscuous.
   
3. Even if men are inclined to fear promiscuity in women, this does not mean men are justified in calling women sluts. Men are also naturally inclined to go around naked when it is sufficiently warm, urinate in public, fight other men to the death etc. Last I checked, these behaviors were illegal and not socially acceptable. Fortunately humans are cultured animals; we should take advantage of this quality. Also, many "natural" inclinations are maladaptive with respect to our society and people should just get over them--for instance, xenophobia.
   

* I don't have a citation for this; I heard this by word of mouth by I trust the sources. I am also often skeptical of these evolutionary fables because they are often highly biased by what people want to believe.

Fear of the unknown

Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, wrote this post about how uncertainty increases tendency to worry. From the post:

...researchers at the University of British Columbia studied people who had undergone genetic testing to determine their risk for developing the neurodegenerative disorder known as Huntington’s disease. Those who learned that they had a very high likelihood of developing the condition were happier a year after testing than those who did not learn what their risk was.

Why would we prefer to know the worst than to suspect it? Because when we get bad news we weep for a while, and then get busy making the best of it. We change our behavior, we change our attitudes... But we can’t come to terms with circumstances whose terms we don’t yet know. An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.

What Gilbert says makes a lot of sense.

OMG Della--gag me now

Note: Since the internet backlash against Della, Dell has toned down the site. An article here.

Always considerate, Dell has designed a totally cute new site/product just for women! Since I primarily look to computers for complementing my accessories, for allowing me to gossip via e-mail, and for helping me sum my caloric intake, I am going to run out of my office screaming "OMG" and purchase one immediately.

View the awful Della website here*. ( abominable, alarming, appalling, atrocious, deplorable, depressing, dire, disgusting, distressing, dreadful, fearful, frightful, ghastly, grody, gross*, gruesome, grungy*, harrowing, hideous, horrendous, horrible, horrific, horrifying, nasty, offensive, raunchy, repulsive, shocking, stinking, synthetic, tough, ugly, unpleasant, unsightly )

Sorry Dell, but being patronizing does not encourage me to buy your products? In fact, if I didn't have work to do I would go home right now and throw my Vostro 200 out of the window? (It's a piece of crap anyway. Plus, it's not pink.)

To make my complaints more specific: 1) the product is poorly marketed with little understanding of its target demographic and 2) the website is patronizing, assuming that women use computers for e-mail and as a looks-enhancing accessory. While I am not against having a "cute" computer, color and size do not provide adequate specification. Not only can women handle having full specification of the memory size and processor speed of a computer, but (gasp!) they may even shop for a computer based on its performance. I mean, when I do learn to use Microsoft Word I'm going to want it to be fast, right?

The good thing is that the sensible women of the internet are already speaking out. Here is a comment from the Tech Tips section:

...This is a load of fluff that only serves to provide insight into how Dell perceives my demographic. Essentially, we women will buy anything if it comes in pink and fits in our purse.

Come on Dell! Treat us like intelligent consumers and not like trained monkeys....

Here is another great comment from the site which sums my attitude as well:

HAI I ARE WOMEN AND I THINK THESE TIPS ARE GRATE!!!! THANKS U FOR HELPING ME IMPROOVE MY LIEF WITH THESE HELPFUL HINTS. LOFLCON!!!!

Feministing and Gearlog have good posts about this.

Epic fail!

* Can't have any positive words surrounding the link; otherwise Google might get the wrong idea.

Philip Guo is impersonating me

Search "Philip Guo*" on Google. A stylized overview of how he became me follows**.

PG: I am so much more important than you that I will subsume you on Google. I will show up before you when people search "Jean Yang."
JY: You can't beat me.

Though in regular search he shows up on the second page, by some accounts he shows up earlier in personalized searches. From an e-mail from a mutual friend: "When I search for 'Jean Yang' on my google account, his page comes up second, which surprised me, but then I tried searching for 'Jean Yang' without being signed in, and he's on the second page of results."

* My friend at Stanford who mentors at me.
** In case you are reading this after he has taken it down, his webpage currently says "My name is Philip Guo (also search for me as Jean Yang, Phil Guo, Philip J. Guo, Philip Jia Guo, pgbovine)."

My life is average

I was accidentally at home when they showed my extremely messy apartment. MLIA.

A brief and incorrect history of programming languages

This is quite amusing. From the chronology:

1986 - Brad Cox and Tom Love create Objective-C, announcing "this language has all the memory safety of C combined with all the blazing speed of Smalltalk." Modern historians suspect the two were dyslexic.

Star Trek movie

I was somehow peer pressured into seeing the Star Trek movie, which was surprisingly good. It involved sufficient amounts of plot, special effects, and hot actors (Chris Pike as Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock). It also involved sufficiently little amounts of weird parts and cheesy romance. On a scale of one to good movie, it is a good movie! (And this coming from someone who is neither a Trekkie nor a movie person!)

Justification for my red-meatless diet

This article, Paying a Price for Loving Read Meat talks about how a study of more than 500,000 Americans that suggests cutting down on red meat can decrease the chance of heart disease and cancer and increase longevity.

CS-related Tom Swifties

Let me know if you have your own!

• "Languages should have classes and inheritance," she said objectively.
• "I would like a data structure with O(1) insertion," she said listlessly.
• "Monads are a pain," she stated.
• "Mutation is important," she said effectively.
• "I may have lost all my work," he said noncommitally.
• "Here are some parentheses," he lisped.
• "Let's evaluate this," she schemed.
• "How do I know if my program is correct?" he inquired dynamically.
• "I wish my number representation could handle this," he said longingly.
• "I have a seg fault!" she exclaimed freely.
• "What kind of seeds do you have?" he asked randomly.
• "Do this while I'm gone," she said imperatively.
• "We should retrace our steps," he declared logically.

From my friend Joe Zimmerman (as a comment below):

• "Register allocation is not so hard", she said optimistically.
• "Remember that the time bounds are only defined over nonnegative integers", she told him discreetly.
• "Type systems have nothing to do with math!" he exclaimed categorically.
• "Theorem proving is easy with the right tools", he replied automatically.
• "I wish there were a way to prevent memory access violations in C", she complained stormily.
• "What if you just used streams?" she suggested lazily.
• "My algorithm will always terminate", he decided.
• "We can fill in the rest of the weights by symmetry", she remarked distantly.
• "How will you know who I am without asking for my password?" he challenged.
• "Literate Haskell programs are just easier to work with", she commented prosaically.

Tom Swifties

My friend Eirik told me about Tom Swifties, which are phrases in which a pun links a quote to the manner in which it is spoken. Some excellent examples:

• "I unclogged the drain with a vacuum cleaner," Tom said succinctly.
• "I might as well be dead," Tom croaked.
• "They had to amputate them both at the ankles," Tom said defeatedly.
• "Who discovered radium?" asked Marie curiously.
• "I dropped the toothpaste," signaled Tom, crestfallen.
• "Have I been emasculated?" Tom demanded.
• "Dat's de end of April," said Tom in dismay.
• "Here's someone who can't speak!" exclaimed Tom dumbfoundedly.
• "I'd like chicken soup with matzo balls and gefilte fish," said Tom judiciously.

So this is where gender roles come from

This blog post shows pages from a book from the 1950's (?) celebrating the wonderful differences between boys and girls. I used to think people made this stuff up, but now I see where it comes from. :o

• Boys are doctors. Girls are nurses.
• Boys are Presidents. Girls are First Ladies.
• Boys fix things. Girls need things fixed.
• Boys can eat. Girls can cook.
• Boys invent things. Girls use what boys invent.
• Boys build houses. Girls keep houses.
• I'm glad you're a girl! I'm glad you're a boy! We need each other.

/* No comment. */

Getting started with OCaml

A friend with some experience with SML asked me how to get started with OCaml, so I thought I'd write this incomplete guide.

Apparently, the internet also has a "Getting started with OCaml" guide. My guide will remain competitive by being much more concise (and therefore, incomplete).

Steps to getting started:

1. Download an OCaml compiler from somewhere. Other useful things to have are ocamlfind (which finds your OCaml libraries), ocamllex (for lexing), and ocamlyacc (for parsing). Another useful thing is OCamlMakefile, which helps you manage builds with Make.
2. Read a tutorial or two. This is a good thing to read. Also, bookmark the Index of modules.
3. Write some programs while compiling frequently. (Compiling too late in the game may cause death of the Ocaml experience.)
4. If you want to lex and parse, look into ocamllex and ocamlyacc.

Some details:

• OCaml is very similar to SML. The only different parts are loops and things like that. I try to stay away from those because they are creepy.
• The file extension is .ml; the file extension for interfaces is .mli. You don't need an interface file; without one you export everything by default.
• The contents of file somefile.ml are in the Somefile namespace, which you can open with "open Somefile." By default all of these little guys are exposed. You can hide things by creating modules and writing module interfaces. Read more about that here.

Some important things to know:

• OCaml is the future because (arguably) a lot of people are using it. It is the new big thing for scientific computing because you can actually get good performance out of it!!
• OCaml is more practical than Haskell for some things and also yields better performance more easily.
• One thing OCaml is not great for is backwards compatibility. Each new release of OCaml supposedly breaks a lot of things. From my understanding a lot of libraries change/break, causing everyone to experience organ failure.

How I learned OCaml:

1. In fall of 2006, I spent a long time struggling with the MLton SMLNJ compiler. It gave me lots of obscure errors and I cried.
2. From fall of 2006 to spring of 2007, I came to not only be master* of the MLton compiler but also the Moscow ML compiler. These compilers are not only difficult to use but also often difficult to install, so you should be very impressed.
3. After learning SMLNJ was not really being maintained anymore, I said "screw this shit" and moved on to Haskell.
4. In January of 2009, I realized** that OCaml is the future. For my next project I decided to use OCaml, which I picked up in an ad hoc ways throgh the steps above, skipping step 2 (but compiling very frequently). I am still in this step.

* This is subjective.
** Through a combination of talking to people about what people used for different things, trying to do 3D arrays in Haskell, and meeting myself at Xavier Leroy.

Speaking out

I was wandering around Boston when I came across the following poem on the Holocaust Memorial:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

Then they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me.

This poem, which is by Pastor Martin Niemoller about the inactivity of the German intellectuals to speak up after the Nazi rise to power, made me think about the importance of standing up for people who are not in a position to speak out for themselves. Big picture-wise, the most relevant example these days is immigrants, illegal and otherwise (non-U.S. citizens), who do not have the full rights and freedoms of citizens and have been treated increasingly worse in the last few years. On a smaller scale, there are many opportunities day-to-day to speak out: from the stories I hear many workplaces are rife with subtle (and not-so-subtle) racism, sexism, and general inappropriateness. The perpetrators may not mean harm, but as we learned in sensitivity training at Google, the intent does not matter--only the oucome. (Also, I personally don't find racism or sexism very funny. Do you?) We should be aware and conscientous that we are not going along with things just because we are comfortable members of a majority.

Exercise videos aren't so bad...

First yoga, now exercise videos*?! It started when I wanted to begin doing more stretching outside of yoga class. I picked up Rodney Yee's A.M. Yoga DVD while browsing at Whole Foods, which contains five 20-minute workouts, one for each morning: standing poses, twists, forward bends, backward bends, and hip openers. I was so inspired by my enjoyment of this practice that today I picked up Bollywood Booty, a dance workout to lift (??) and tone one's backside, and Rodney Yee's Back Care Yoga. The first one was much more fun than the back care yoga, which was yoga at a much slower pace than I was used to and involves a chair as a prop. (It seems to basically take the strengthening parts out of various poses that stretch the back and make it so that you don't have to work much to stretch your back.) These videos provide a nice alternative for doing nothing on nights when I come home after the gym is closed. I never thought I'd say this, but exercise videos aren't so bad.

* I would like to note that these videos are a supplement rather than a substitute for my normal workouts. For instance, today I did the two videos after I'd gone for a 4-mile run earlier.

Someone who is honest about PL design

Gilad Bracha on how he was a computational theologist with the job of interpreting (programming) language specifications. :)

The Narcissism Epidemic

In this Newsweek article, writer Raina Kelley mentions a new book, The Narcissism Epidemic, and reflects on how societal forces have caused today's young people to become self-centered far beyond having healthy self-esteem. An issue I have with this article is that Newsweek seems to be using this article to appeal to narcissists looking to identify with other narcissists: 1) they include photographs of young people partying recklessly, looking in mirrors, etc. that don't portray the people in a negative way and 2) the writer seems to use the mention of the book as a jumping-off to discuss how her own life experiences have cured her of narcissism... (This may have just been a symptom of the fact that the article was not centered around a tight thesis.) Despite this, the article is worth reading because it brings up good points about how it is good for young people to be taught humility. Society should say "no" to us and give us grades lower than B's every once in a while.

Isn't it a good thing that even Newsweek recognizes that it is important to remind me that it's not all about me? ;)

Using the non-functional parts of OCaml is often creepy

I tried to use Map.iter a few times, but it was just creepy:

iter : (key -> 'a -> unit) -> 'a t -> unit

The function takes a function that takes a key, value, and updates some state, and then in the end you don't get anything back--just the updated state that lives somewhere else. Agh! I prefer to use Map.fold, which makes the state updating more explicit:

fold : (key -> 'a -> 'b -> 'b) -> 'a t -> 'b -> 'b

What will happen when tides turn?

China's gender gap is estimated to be 32 million: largely due to the one-child policy and selective abortion, there are 32 million more young males (under the age of 20) than young females. I can't imagine that the culture will continue to value baby boys for much longer. I once watched a documentary on the social unrest people fear resulting from a population of mostly young men, many of whom are unmarried with no change of marriage. When/how will this cause families to begin valuing baby girls? Will the scarcity of marriageable young women increase their societal value in healthy, productive ways or will it increase the degree to which women are objectified? Wjdk*.

* "We just don't know"--a phrase I borrow from my friend Joe Zimmerman.

Programming of the future

Interaction and search allow ambiguity, concision.

Nostalgia, or why I am not a creative writer

Senior Spring: bangs too long; drinking.*

* This flash blog post inspired by Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak, which were inspired by by Ernest Hemingway's six-word flash fiction, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Downward dog, happy puppy

I had thought this was a joke, but it's true: dog yoga is the new big thing. I don't do yoga with the dog I don't have, so I am not sure how I feel about this.

So many books, so little time

Below are some books I've recently finished, with some brief commentary:

Non-fiction

Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher - a well-researched, engaging 2001 book describing 1) surveys of the current state of the women in computer science (or lack thereof), 2) suggestions about how to improve the situation, and 3) descriptions of current efforts to increase numbers of women in CS and their results so far. Margolis and Fisher discuss how societal stereotypes of the "boy hacker" icon often cause women to have less exposure to and interest in computing. They provide well-motivated suggestions for how to change classroom dynamics, and recruiting efforts to include more women in computing. I am happy to say that many of the issues in this book are somewhat dated by now: since the publication of this book, the "locker room" classroom dynamic has become less acceptible now, and computing as a field has moved more towards applications and connections to other fields rather than being just about pure speed and power. My issues with the book are that 1) it does not motivate why more women should be in computing and 2) it does not portray women who do computer science favorably. While I clearly believe that more women should be in computing because it is useful and because women can be good at it, I would have liked to see the authors' reasons. As for the second point, the book portrays women in computer science as survivors victimized by bad classroom dynamics and inadequate support networks. The book quotes all these women either explaining why they chose to stick with computer science or saying things like "well, I took these courses and they were difficult, but I persevered." There is not a single confident woman in the book who is passionate about computer science. (Maybe they couldn't find one, but I don't think they looked tha hard. My female professors have all been confidant and passionate.) Also, much of the book addresses the "fact" that there are all these women who start out behind and lack the confidence to continue without much speculation on social factors for this--it becomes easy to read this as "women start out with a disadvantage because they are weaker." It might be for this reason that the book assumes women's self-reported levels of aptitude and experience are accurate and never discuss normalizing self-reported levels by actual performance. (It is a known phenomenon that women tend to deflate their abilities in surveys and men tend to inflate. There are studies on this and I have experienced this personally.)

Zelda, by Nancy Milford - a biography about F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife Zelda Sayre. Because of my teenage crush on This Side of Paradise's protagonist Amory Blaine, I had become very interested in the Fitzgeralds and what I thought was their exciting Jazz Age life and read all of Scott's books and also Zelda's large autobiographical novel Save Me the Waltz. From the fiction I had gathered that Scott was burdened by a very inspiring but crazy* wife; this books provides a sympathetic and surprising view into Zelda's life. Zelda not just inspired Scott, but he often included her letters and diary verbatim in his works. (The "broken columns and clasped hands and doves meant romances" line from Paradise is from one of Zelda's letters. Instead of acknowledging her he bought her a nice fan. WTF, Scott?) When Zelda received a publishing offer on her diaries, Scott refused, saying that they provided him a lot of material. When Zelda was writing Save me the Waltz, Scott tried to prevent it from being published and eventually had it taken off the shelves. Later, when Zelda was very ill and badly wanted to write novels, Scott told her she wasn't good enough and that she was allowed to do anything except write. The biography left me much less a fan of Fitzgerald than I used to be. However, if you are interested in the fiction based on the Scott-Zelda dynamic, a nice triology is Scott's Tender is the Night, Zelda's Save Me the Waltz, and Hemingway's Garden of Eden.

Fiction

My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, edited by Jeffrey Eugenides - the author of Middlesex has compiled an anthology of "love stories" that may be of a different nature than what one might first imagine a love story to be. These stories include classics like Faulkner's A Rose for Emily and Nabokov's Spring in Fialta. I also discovered some good comtemporary ones, such as Jon by George Saunders, about lust, love, and difficult decisions between two teenagers in a distopian world where they are part of the Trendsetters and Tastemakers, children chosen to detect and set trends by assessing products every day. Another good one is Lorrie Moore's How to be an Other Woman.

Mysteries of Pittsburgh, by Michael Chabon - an engaging coming-of-age novel about a young man who has just finished college and is hanging out in Pittsburgh. The novel has vivid and accurate descriptions of what it is like to be young, in love, and in Pittsburgh. The movie is coming out this month; I will definitely go see it.

I am currently reading Lorrie Moore's Birds of America, a collection of short stories; I really like it so far.

* Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent decades of her life in and out of mental institutions. It seems, however, that this was early 20th century schizophrenia: she had periods of being better and period of being worse, so it is more likely that she was manic depressive. Scott's Tender is the Night is based heavily on his experiences with Zelda's illness.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

I discovered this book while checking out at the bookstore yesterday. While I've only read the first page, I recommend that you check it out. In this funny "novel" published by Quirk books, Grahame-Smith has taken Austen's classic novel and changed it to accommodate some zombie parts. A blurb:

...As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy... Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you'd actually want to read.

Below is the opening of the book:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie on possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was the truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead.

"My dear Mr. Bennet," said his lady to him one day, "have you heard that Netherfield Park is occupied again?"

Mr. Bennet replied that he had not and went about his morning business of dagger sharpening and musket polishing--for attacks by the unmentionables had grown alarmingly frequent in recent weeks.

The book also includes fun illustrations of the battles involving zombies. I did not buy this book because I was skeptical of its ability to capture my interest throughout the whole thing, but let me know if you find it a good read.