A nice counterpoint to de Millo, Lipton, and Perlis

Asperti, Geuvers,and Natarajan have this fun paper, Social processes, program verification, and all that, which provides a nice counterpoint to the 1979 De Millo, Lipton, and Perlis which supposedly killed the verification effort at the time. The De Millo paper argues that because proofs are social processes verified by the intuition of mathematicians, mechanized verification is a useless effort.

My favorite quote from the De Millo paper:
The verification of even a puny program can run into dozens of pages, and there's not a light moment or a spark of wit on any of those pages. Nobody is going to run into a friend's office with a program verification. Nobody is going to sketch a verification out on a paper napkin. Nobody is going to buttonhole a colleague into listening to a verification. Nobody is ever going to read it. One can feel one's eyes glaze over at the very thought.

From this paper:
As we have already observed, the gloomy predictions of De Millo et al. have been largely refuted. Formal verification is at present a concrete reality, permitting correctness proofs of complex software applications. For instance, in the framework of the Verifix Project a compiler from a subset of Common Lisp to Transputer code was formally checked in PVS (see Dold and Vialard (2001)). Strecker (Strecker 1998) and Klein (Klein 2005) certified bytecode compilers from a subset of Java to a subset of the Java Virtual Machine in Isabelle. In the same system, Leinenbach (Leinenbach et al. 2005) formally verified a compiler from a subset of C to a DLX assembly code. The Compcert project, headed by Xavier Leroy, has recently produced a verified optimising compiler from C to PowerPC assembly code, based on the use of the Coq proof assistant both for programming the compiler and proving its correctness (Leroy 2006; Tristan and Leroy 2008). Similar achievements have been obtained in other fields of computer science, spanning the range from hardware (Harrison 2007) to operating systems (Alkassar et al. 2009; Klein 2009).

Vegan/vegetarian food shopping note

If you subsist mostly on almond milk, organic yogurt, and vegan fake meat products, you are better off (on average $1/per item) shopping at places like Harvard Organic Co-op than Star Market, which kind of rips you off on these things (and has far worse selection). The fruit is actually comparably priced as well.

Deal hunting with RSS

A cool thing in life involves adding RSS feeds from deal sites (for instance, monitor deals from Ben's Bargains) to Google Reader. You can just add the URL directly as a subscription. <3

Sharing good reads

I recently became a member of goodreads.com, a website that allows friends to share books they have read along with ratings and optional reviews of the books. Become my friend to see what I have read!

The memoirs of Donna Williams

I recently read about Donna Williams, an Australian woman thought to be deaf and psychotic as a toddler and later diagnosed as autistic. She has written several books about her life, the first of which is the once best-selling Nobody Nowhere. She writes of its accidental publication:

I wrote the first of my four autobiographical works, Nobody Nowhere, on the verge of suicide after a wild half-crazy life with abuse, homelessness and ultimately hope for belonging only to find I was terrified of real closeness. I had a last inkling of hope that I couldn't truly say I'd tried my hardest to cope if I'd never fully disclosed the nature of my own private world. So I wrote out everything that mattered... and decided to give it to one child psychiatrist in the hope they could tell me what kind of mad I was... My intention was to then shred it, burn it and leave this world. Instead it was passed on to his colleague, then from her to her publisher, from him to an agent and from there out into the world it became a number one international bestseller...

In this book about her early life, Williams discusses extensively her "ghosts" Willie and Carol, two different and opposing personalities who help her exist in society. From the website:

Carol plays the mother's doll, intertwined with Willie's violent and defensive outbursts and fierce self protection mechanisms. Between Donna's autistic responses and behaviours, Carol, behaves like people on TV sit-coms, goes to school, even goes through the motions of 'friends', and develops a broad range of mimicked speech, stored phrases and charicatures, saving Donna from a life in an institution and often from the very real threat of death.

As the teenage years approach Carol and Willie fight it out for control of the body with the real Donna on the sidelines as the lot of them drift into homelessness, poverty and domestic prostitution passed from stranger to stranger.

I plan to read this book once I acquire it. Williams also has an extensive website which I recommend reading.

The novels of my nonage

In my abundant spare time today (read: while crossing streets) I reflected upon the books that shaped my youth. Since I love reminiscing and since I think they are rather telling, I will share my most memorable reads here.

Middle school: Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game. I love historical fiction and detective novels (there was a lot of Agatha Christie). I also loved those female novelists of the Victorian/Romantic genre: Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, etc. (I read Jane Eyre maybe 10+ times. I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 5+ times.)

An embarrassing truth is that I read a ton of young adult novels (Beverly Cleary, R.L. Stein, Babysitters' Club, Caroline B. Cooney, etc.). I do not recommend that other middle schoolers take this path.

9th grade: This might have been the year I lost to being a teenager, the year I read only magazines outside of the required school reading (Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, The Bible, King James Version)? The Odyssey was probably the book that left the biggest impression me.

10th grade: I was a huge romantic: Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky) made the concept of atonement enter into my thinking; This Side of Paradise (Fitzerald) made me fall in love with the F. Scott Fitzgerald rich-intellectual-white-1920's-boy lifestyle. (I have since fallen out of love.) Bruce Hall's Tea That Burns about the history of American Chinatowns also gave me some perspective about my life as a Chinese-American.

11th grade. I was such a wannabe-intellectual: The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson; Sartor Resartus (Carlyle). I also continued my Fitzgerald obsession and read things like The Beautiful and the Damnehd, Tender is the Night, etc. I even read Zelda Fitzgerald's autobiographical Save Me the Waltz. (I recently got closure with respect to this from reading Nancy Milford's biography, Zelda.)

12th grade. Looking for meaning: Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf). Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles also made me think a lot about life. This may have also been the time I was in love with Oscar Wilde's poetry, particularly The Ballad of Reading Gaol. King Lear also left a deep impression. I also found Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead fascinating, but I did not become an Objectivist.

Freshman year. Soul searching: Siddartha (Hesse); The Bhagavad-Gita; A Room of One's Own (Woolf). This might have also been when I read Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and stopped eating forevermore.

Sophomore year. I read a bunch of Greek tragedies which I liked a lot. I also read The Brothers Karamazov, which I had started shortly after Crime and Punishment changed the way I thought about things. By this point, however, I was too jaded (or something) for Brothers to capture my attention/imagination in the same way.

My favorite book this year was probably Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein).

Junior year. Lolita (Nabokov)--this was when I discovered Nabokov. I also read Hemingway's Garden of Eden, which made me think a bunch about gender roles. After reading Watson's The Double Helix, I became fascinated with the concept of the "gentleman scientist:" if Watson and Crick played squash every day while discovering the structure of DNA, then I should be able to have leisure and greatness at the same time, too!

Senior year. I started reading Saint Augustine's Confessions, which was really interesting. I also read some Camus. By this point a lot of ideas were already in my head, so I don't know that things really "changed my life" the way they used to. The closest was probably Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex, which sparked an extreme interest in gender ambiguity.

Post-graduation I've been reading a lot more non-fiction and discussing most of the interesting books in my blog, so I won't list them again. :) I would love to hear what your favorite books were!

Sheryl Sandberg: Don't Leave Before You Leave

Claire Le Goues sent me this nice article by Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg about how women should not plan too far in advance to slow down their careers before they actually have children. Sandberg says that this tends to slow down women's careers more than it should and gives the following advice:

Making decisions too early, trying to plan life too carefully, can close doors rather than keep them open. Any time you make a plan, you do it with imperfect information; the further in advance you make that plan, the less information you have. You never know how you will feel or what choices you might face. Take life one step at a time and don’t make decisions before you have to.

I think this article gives great advice about not letting perceived limitations get in the way of one's career.

Overhead on the MIT Saferide shuttle

I overhead the following conversation conducted in earnest by two (presumably) undergraduate women on the shuttle to Boston the other day:

Woman #1: Sometimes I don't know what the point is of working so hard. I mean, what if I graduate college and then get married right away?
Woman #2: Yeah...
Woman #1: I mean, that's what my mom did.
Woman #2: I think I'm going to work for 5-10 years, then start popping out the babies.
...
Woman ?: I would get so bored. There would be so much Oprah...
Woman ?: Yeah, a lot of talking on the phone...

I will admit my first reaction was one of disbelief: a combination of "can you believe these girls?!" and "what a waste of an MIT education!" I was struck by how resigned these girls were to their fates, and how unreflective they seemed to be about the other life possibilities out there. I was particularly surprised to hear such a conversation on an MIT shuttle: it seems like if you are going to spend all this effort (and tuition) on an undergraduate education in order to stay at home, it is a waste of your own time/money and the institution's time/money that you did not get a liberal arts education.

Though it is easy to blame these girls for not having more agency in deciding their futures, we must take some societal responsibility for these attitudes. Most people do not really know what's out there for them at age 20 and follow models that others have set out for them. While the young man who does not know what he's doing with his life will often find himself enrolling in law school, business school, or some prestigious Ph.D. program, the young woman who does not know what she's doing may have much less career-oriented paths to fall back on*. While I fully believe in the freedom to choose, it is not freedom if the chooser is not aware of what the choices mean. Choosing to go to MIT and work hard seems to be at odds with the "choice" to stay home with Oprah and the phone; I believe that if these women were aware of their life choices, they may choose differently. (Even if they chose to stay at home, they may discover that Oprah and phone are not the only possible activities.)

While on the shuttle, I wanted to tell these girls that they do not have to be like their mothers. Perhaps I will do that if there is a next time.

* This is an instance of the phenomenon where many women default to their mother's template of domesticity, often without reflecting upon why they are doing this. (I discuss this in my post about My Mother My Self.

Aggressively marketed enlightenment

Allow me to begin with an anecdote about the time I almost joined a cult.

One day last May I was innocently wandering X* Square when I came upon a sign regarding massages at a Dahn Yoga studio. Always in want of a good massage, I inquired within. What commenced was the most extensive set of influence techniques** I have ever witnessed. Each event below ends with an influence technique:

1. I walk in and ask about massages. Y*, the head of the studio, asks to make an appointment to see me in 45 minutes. (Asking people to make small commitments to enhance their bond to the thing in question.)
2. All around the studio, there is information about how Dahn yoga can improve every aspect of your life and there are testimonials about how it has changed people's lives for the better. (Yikes.)
3. Y asks me to fill out a 10-page questionaire (Small commitments thing again. People don't like to think they've put in effort for nothing.)
4. Upon hearing that my physical therapist told me to seek more restorative forms of yoga, Y asks, "So you would say your PT sent you here?" (People like to be consistent; you can take advantage of their desire for consistency to bend what they say slightly in order to influence them to do things.)
5. We jump around for about 30 minutes in a one-on-one session. (One-on-one attention makes people feel like they owe something.)
6. The whole time, Y told me things like the vibrations from jumping around were good for my brain, and that I was loosening my organs. (People are suckers for things they want to believe.)
7. After the jumping around, Y gave me a brief massage. When the massage was over, my contact was bothering me, so I was rubbing my right eye. Y began rubbing his left eye and said that his eye was bothering him too. (Mirroring, a phenomenon that occurs when people are bonding, is oftne used by salespeople for influence purposes. You can also hypnotize someone by mirroring: if you consistently lag without the other people noticing, you can begin leading and have them follow. Apparently you can make someone's cheek itch by scratching your own cheek.)
   
8. Afterward, Y asked me how I liked the session. (Asking people how they feel after you give them something will influence them to say good things about your product. Then you can take advantage of their desire for consistency.)
9. Y then told me that I had a lot of passion, which made me a good fit for Dahn Yoga. (Appealing to people's vanity is a great way to get them to use your product.)
10. Y said since I liked the session so much, since I was looking for something to help with my neck/shoulder injuries, and since my PT sent me there, it looked like I should continue going. (Consistency again.)
11. Y told me that there were often weekend gatherings where young people get together and there is a lot of energy. (Appealing to people's desires for community can get you a lot from them.)
    
12. Y then asked me if I would be willing to commit to multiple years of Dahn Yoga. Then he pared down to one year, then six months, then three months. I finally gave in at one month. (Asking unreasonable things of people will cause them to feel guilty and be more likely to acquiesce to smaller requests.)
13. When I was leaving, Y asked me when I was going to come again. (Commitments.)
14. Y said that I should plan to come either a few minutes early or stay a few minutes late so that he could show me take-home exercises. (Commitments.)
15. I never went back. For a couple of weeks afterwards, I often got phone calls from "Y from Dahn Yoga, X Square," asking when I was going to come back. (Connection/commitment.)
    

It was fortunate that the few bigger things caused me to notice the subtle manipulation: apparently these techniques are what causes many people to pay a lot of money (and sometimes devote their lives) to Dahn Yoga. The most sketchy thing was that 1) jumping around is not yoga and 2) there is no scientific basis to the "brain vibrations" business. I was also somewhat disturbed/confused by the "Brain Respiration" uniforms hanging in the bathroom. What caused me to think that there was intentional deception rather than just innocent evangelism of bogus ideas was the mirroring. Upon returning home I read their Wikipedia page, which linked to some references about how people had complained about Dahn Yoga's manipulative marketing, how people claim it is a pyramid scheme, and how at least one family has asked a cult deprogrammer to intervene with their son who had sold all of his possessions to live according to the way of Dahn yoga.

My Dahn yoga experience caused me to think more about the aggressive marketing of Bikram yoga (also see Wikipedia page and the Bikram Boston site.), a multi-million dollar franchised corporation which similarly claims to solve all health problems and has many testimonials from people saying that this has changed their life (and solved all of their problems). Bikram yoga has a similar script of telling you during the practice that. Bikram also has its own set of influence techniques: the instructors establish a clear teacher/student relationship and make you feel that you are not good enoughand must improve, causing you to return time after time even though you are spending a lot of money to be uncomfortable. (At least, this happened to me.) After a month and a half of Bikram, I talked to a middle-aged couple who said that everyone they knew who had done bikram had quit after less than six month due to injuries. This caused me to quit abruptly after I realized I wasn't getting any better. Though I wanted to believe the instructors when they said "this is the best thing to do if you have a neck injury" and "don't worry, you'll get worse before you get better," I had lost faith in Bikram.

I hypothesize that, like me, many are drawn to "programs" like Bikram because of a combination of 1) injuries and 2) desire for an easy path to spirituality. If I had not had that neck injury (that, by that point, had not healed for 10 months), I would not have been so desperate for things that promised to fix everything. I have also been told that though I am areligious, I have a strong desire for explanation and order: religious tendencies, if you will. I had come across bikram/dahn at a time when I believed that I could find "the solution to everything," " the relevation that changed my life." I also had many qualities that made me particularly receptive to this form of prepackaged, aggressively marketed enlightenment: I was not accustomed to waiting long to get anything that I wanted, most of my life and self-image were already comprised of aggressively marketed components, and the specific marketing of Bikram/Dahn appealed to my needs***. In an alternate universe that has a slighly more unfortunate (or perhaps fortunate, as I would be living in blissful, ignorant poverty?) outcome I could see myself devoting large amounts of time and money to something like this.

While the aggressive marketing aspect of Bikram and Dahn are harmful, they are not necessarily all bad. On one hand, this aggressive marketing is harmful because it preys on people's desire for spirituality and desire for an answer in order to market a product that is, essentially, fake. On the other hand, many people do believe in things like Bikram and Dahn and are perfectly happy about that. Bikram and Dahn could also be giving people health benefits, since they may not otherwise stretch or exercise****. The mental aspect (placebo effect) could also be improving lives. The major thing that makes something like Dahn Yoga more harmful than a religion is how aggressively it extracts money from Dahn practitioners. One might say that people who spend all of their money on Dahn deserve it, but many are young people who may be living on their parents' money. (See the external links on Dahn wikipedia page for stories on Dahn harm.) These people can believe what they want, but it may be our duty to make the information available to them that they are worshiping at the (very expensive) Church of McDonald's.

Since leaving Bikram, I have found a form of aggressively marketed enlightenment that better fits my lifestyle needs: heated vinyasa flow yoga. I like these studios much better because they do not claim to solve all problems and they do not claim to be the end-all be-all of spiritual needs. In fact, some instructors recommend other forms of yoga (like yin) that are more restorative. While it is somewhat ironic that instructors tell me to relax and breathe while cuing me through cycles of posture changes so fast they leave me out of breath, this has been a step in the right direction for my type A, impatient personality. I have become better at relaxing, better at being patient, and better at not pushing myself too hard--learning to modify postures in yoga has been one of my first lessons that it is often better for me not to do everything that I possible could. My dabbling in Spirituality Lite has had positive effects on my wellness (by first of all teaching me that this is is a concept), both physically and mentally. One day, I might be ready for The Real Thing. ;)

* Names obfuscated to protect ...?
** Good thing I read Cialdini's Influence, a book on psychological influence techniques used by salespeople, prison camps, and cults alike.
*** The message of both was that if you paid them money and kept coming, everything would be better. (The Bikram instructors' incessant "constructive" criticism also addressed my need to have my butt kicked.) This is an easier message to swallow than the prescription to slow down, take it easy, and find spirituality within. (For Bikram, the heat also tells you that you don't need to wait for your body to be ready to open: we'll just heat up the room so it happens instantaneously! This panders to the need for instant gratification in an extreme way.)
**** Bikram is actually a pretty good workout. One of the reasons I first took it up was because when I read the bios of Olympics athletes I discovered some of them would do 1+ days of Bikram a week to maintain flexibility. The Harvard crew team at one point also required a day of Bikram a week.

Tech interview preparation

This is adapted from an e-mail I wrote in January 2007 (when I was a junior in college--after I'd gotten internship offers with Google and Microsoft but before I knew anything about life). Though my Google full-time conversion interviews were more of the same (of the technical stuff--the interviews were longer, so the questions were a little deeper), this is probably mostly relevant for applying to internships.

For Harvard people: At the Office of Career Services they have (or had?) a nice small booklet on how to prepare for the interview. It gives some pretty good advice about how long you should spend preparing (the number of hours in proportion to how long your interview is) and it has you do a self-evaluation.

Here are some websites with puzzles:
http://www.techinterview.org/
http://halcyon.usc.edu/~kiran/msqs.html
The programming questions on this one are good as well.

This website is good for the nontechnical aspects of the interivew:
http://www.wetfeet.com/

So some non-technical questions I've gotten are:

• Tell me about yourself.
• What was your favorite computer science class and why. (You will often be given questions based on what you say your favorite class is.)
• Tell me about a time you solved a problem creatively.
• Have you been in a situation where a project you've been doing has gotten off schedule and you couldn't make the deadline? What did you do?
• Have you ever been in a situation in which someone has pushed you to do something that you didn't want to do? How did you respond?

Some technical questions I've gotten are:

• How would you represent friendship networks on Facebook? (Say you have a list of people and their friends.) I was asked on what data structure I would use, running time for searching through it, space complexity, etc.
• Given a vector of numbers, how would you find the median? Second part: say we chose a number and then put everything less than it on one side and everything greater than it on the other side. Assume we could throw away half the list each time. What would the running time be?
• How could you get unbiased flips out of a biased coin? (Say you had a 2-side coin of unknown probability p of landing on heads--if you wanted to make an unbiased decision between 2 choices using the coins, how would you do it?)
• Write a hex to decimal function.
• Write an insert function for a circular linked list. If we are inserting into an empty list, how can we make it circular?
• Write an insert before function for a singly linked list if you're only given the pointer to the node you want to insert before. (Hint: How can you turn this into an insert after function?)

Some good advice I've gotten has been:

• The most important thing is to talk through how you are getting the answer. Even if you don't get the answer, talking through it to show how you think is very important.
• If you get something wrong and they tell you the answer, don't argue with them unless you are sure your answer is right. (Think through it first, and discuss rather than argue!)

Mothers and daughters

Upon my college roommate Marianne's recommendation, I read psychotherapist Nancy Friday's My Mother My Self. Originally published in 1977, this was the first work to explore the mother-daughter interaction. It addresses how mothers serve as a role model for daughters' self-esteem, attitudes words men, and attitudes towards sexuality.

While I found this book somewhat dated (for instance, in its casting of the mother as the homemaker with frustrated ambitions) and somewhat unscientific in some its wishful "just-so" descriptions (Friday makes a weak connection between repressed anger and cancer), it helped me to examine and to better understand 1) my relationship with my mother and 2) how I derived some of my views on life.

In particular, Friday makes the following thought-provoking points:

• Mothers often start out (and often continue) to see daughters as narcissistic extensions of themselves. Friday says this explains the degree to which mothers fuss over their daughters' appearance, reputation, etc. and why mothers are often so critical of thier daughters.
• Society* tells women they are not complete without a man, without their children, etc. As a result, mothers often cling to their husbands and to their children, especially to their daughters. As a result, daughters are not "let go" in the same way that sons are. For this reason, many women have symbiotic relationships with their mothers. (Friday points out that it is not necessarily bad to have these symbiotic relationships, but it is important to recognize them for what they are.)
• Often as a result of not being "let go" by their mothers, many women go from having a symbiotic relationship with their mother to having a symbiotic relationship with their husbands. Friday points out that it is good for women to live on their own and have independent lives after separating from their mothers; this helps them realize that they can be on their own and not die.
  
• It is not usually acceptible to acknowledge the competition (general and sexual) that almost always exists between mothers and their adolescent daughters. This competition often causes many problems between mother and daughter; it helps to understand the competition as the root of the problem.
• Women often (consciously or subconsciously) adopt their mothers as a model for how they behave domestically. Many women will have fabulous and independent single lives in their 20's and then become quite similar to their (homemaking*) mothers after they marry. Friday's explanation for this is that these women can invent their own models of how to live while they are single, but they default to patterns they learned from their mothers once those apply. Recognizing this is step towards breaking out of the patterns.
  
• Our attitudes about our bodies and towards sexuality have to do with our mothers' attitudes and things she taught us when we were very young. It is helpful and h to reflect on our mother's attitudes.

My Mother My Self was helpful to me because it provided another world-view in which to frame issues I often think about regarding mother-daughter relationships, gender roles, etc. I would recommend reading this book with a healthy level of skepticism. (I have found the phenomena that Friday describes to be true; I am more suspicious of the reasons she provides for their occurence.) If nothing else, it is interesting.

* This is one of the places where (I hope) the book does not age well.

Some more things I learned about saving money

I would like to thank everyone who gave me financial advice!

My friend Jie recommended the following blogs:

• http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/
• http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/
• http://www.5dollardinners.com/
  

From these blogs I learned that there are many online coupons.

I also came up with some more ideas for saving money*:

• Subsist mainly on free food, such as that broadcast over MIT's vultures mailing list for free leftovers in Stata. (I have friends who actually do this.)
• Befriend the admins in your building so that they text you about free food before they send out the free food announcements.
  
• To fill in other gaps, join as many research groups as possible. Many of these are likely to provide a free lunch or snack. Tangentially collaborating with research groups in other departments will keep the level of suspicion low.
  
• To fill in the rest of the gaps, meet a succession of older people with jobs to date on sites like OKCupid* and go on 1+ dates with each of them. Act very poor but charming during the whole dinner; if you are lucky they will pay. (This assumes that these sites contain a large number of people willing to take me to dinner, and that these people do not communicate with each other.)
• Invest in a sewing kit and a set of patterns. Attend corporate talks and get as many free t-shirts as possible. Stay after the talks to get the leftover XL's that nobody wanted to collect fabric for making pants, dresses, handbags, etc.
• Hang out in each T stop and befriend the T operators so that you can get free public transportation. ("Sorry, X--I can meet you in Porter Square, but I'll have to leave there between 9 and 12. If you want to stay later, we can meet at Government Center.")
  
• Sell your furniture and move out of your apartment. During the week, sleep on a cot in your office. On the weekends, spend the night with hard-partying friends who think you're staying over just because the T stopped running. If this is unsatisfying and you would like a bed to sleep on, date a couple of people at once and spend your time between their apartments. (Befriending some empty nesters with spare rooms/beds should also work.) Either that, or convince your advisor to buy a group bed for one of the offices.
  
• Become friends with freegans.
  

The conclusion is that living in the Stata Center cannot fail you, since it will also let you save on heat, hot water, and electric bills. :P

* Most of these are untested.
** Thanks to Eugene's peer pressure and my own curiosity I had an OKCupid account for 2-3 days (not for this reason!!), during which time I met some colorful people and decided it was best to leave the site.

My attempts at money management

I recently discovered that I have been bleeding money out of my ears every day. I have taken the following measures to stanch the flow of money/blood:

• Gotten an account at Mint.com, a website that syncs up with your bank and credit card accounts and shows you how you are doing with respect to your budgets. Thanks, Joe Near, for showing me this site!
• Started following the advice of the Tight Fist (thanks, Eugene), a great tongue-in-cheek blog about how to save money. (I have been thinking quite seriously about their advice about how using too much soap just makes you need other things more, like moisturizer... If you give a mouse a cookie...)
  
• Stopped shopping at Whole Foods/Harvest and started shopping at Star Market. This, combined with a reduction of variety in my diet to the staples of tofu sausage, eggs, noodles, vegetables, and fruits, saves me multiple 10's of dollars on groceries per week now.
• Stopped buying random things I don't use full price from the internet. The next step will be finding deals when I need them... (I am currently operating under the assumption that I will not require anything new--this is not sustainable.)

Next on my list: using the library instead of buying 10,000 books / year.

I am still not to good at this thing, so please give me tips! :)

Mitzenmacher's advice to graduate students

I came across this blog post last year and found it to contain very helpful advice.

Balance ball chair

I recently acquired a balance ball chair, which seems to be very nice for making me sit with good posture. The chair is highly adjustable, since you can just deflate it to make it the right height. I had to deflate my 52cm ball quite a bit; I am not sure if I am getting fewer benefits because of this.

Rachel Simmons has a new book

Rachel Simmons, who wrote Odd Girl Out about hidden female bullying, has a new book, The Curse of the Good Girl, about how expectations of girls today are unrealistic and harmful. From the review:

...Simmons shows that pressure from parents, teachers, coaches, media, and peers erects a psychological glass ceiling that begins to enforce its confines in girlhood and extends across the female lifespan. The curse erodes girls’ ability to know, express, and manage a complete range of feelings. It expects girls to be selfless, limiting the expression of their needs... It diminishes assertive body language, quiets voices and weakens handshakes. It... follows many into adulthood, limiting their personal and professional potential.

I haven't read this book yet but I will read it as soon as I acquire it*.

* I have a birthday coming up... Hint, hint...

Practicing tourism in San Francisco

This past weekend I was in San Francisco visiting my college roommates Aliza and Marianne (and their respective boyfriends, Jesse and David), both of whom spent the past year doing Teach for America (Aliza in Oakland; Marianne in New Orleans) and both of whom have much more grown-up lifestyles than I do. Every time I go to California I become quite envious of the good climate and food. Here are some activities I did this time around:

• Went stand-up paddle surfing at the beach behind Aliza's house. Aliza's boyfriend Jesse works at a wind surfing shop where they have all sorts of equipment for doing fun water sports. This made me regret never surfing while I lived in Santa Monica! (Although doing these water sports in the bay is much less treacherous than doing them in the actual ocean.)
• Hung out at Zeitgeist, a cool bar in the mission that had a secret (huge!) outdoor component.
• Got a burrito in the mission. (This is apparently what you are supposed to do.)
• Browsed the antique fair, where there are miles of all kinds of antiques: furniture, china, jewelry, books, etc.
• Got a seitan Philly cheese steak at Triple Rock, a very good burger place. (My friends said it is a great burger place; I was happy to find that there were also some good selections for non-red-meat-eaters.) According to Jesse the beer aficionado, they also have a good beer selection.
• Enjoyed some refreshment at Heinold's First and Last Chance, a historical bar where Jack London used to drink. (There are many other cool facts: the floor is slanted from the earthquake, etc.) This is in Jack London Square, where half of Jack London's Alaska cabin was transported (and the other half rebuilt). (The other half is in Dawson City, Yukon Territory as a result of disputes over who gets the cabin.)
• Got ice cream at Fenton's, a very satisfying ice cream place (which was featured at the end of the movie Up).

Thanks to Aliza, Jesse, Marianne, and David for facilitating my practice of tourism! ;)

On matriarchy and matrilineal societies

Friedrich Engel's treatise The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State answers some of my questions about the inevitability of the modern patriarchal social structure*. You may read the relevant English-translated text here.

Engels describes patrilineage and patriarchy emerging as a result of the pairing family: in early communistic societies where men did not have pairing relationships with women, property belonged to the matriarchal gens (group of families). The notion of private property developed after the domestication of animals. Since it was the man's part to obtain food and the instruments of labor for obtaining food, the man owned the tools, the cattle, and the slaves. The children, however, belonged to the mother's gens, so they could not inherit from their father. This caused mother-right to be overthrown and replaced with patrilineage and patriarchy. The monogamous family**, which develops out of pairing family, is based on the supremacy of man because its "express goal" is to "produce children of undisputed paternity."

While this is clearly part of a greater argument against private wealth***, Engels addresses some interesting issues about the origin and role of male dominance. This piece confirms many of my hypotheses about the subject; I would be interested in reading more sources.

* I have been wondering about matrilineal and matriarchial societies; I would be grateful for any sources on matriarchal societies!
** Monogamy strengthens the pairing tie with the expectation that it will not be dissolved.
*** I make no claim to agree or disagree with his argument against private wealth. One should, however, always be suspicious of learning history from treatises!

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.