Upper Harmonics

If Programming Languages Were Types of Music

2012-01-22T20:24:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the classic If Programming Languages Were Religions for the inspiration. Actually, it turns out there are a bunch of If Programming Languages Were X things out there.

Assembly would be scales: They're the foundation that all music is based on.

Fortran would be a Gregorian Chant: Ancient and methodical, but still sung occasionally in certain dark places.

C would be Bach: Almost all modern music is based on Bach in one way or another. The music can be pretty elaborate, but if you break it down, it's actually pretty straightforward.

C++ would be Beethoven: To the untrained ear, it sounds just like Bach -- classical and easy to listen to. But once you start listening more closely, it's actually a lot more complicated than most people realize.

Java would be The Beatles: Familiar to almost everyone, simple and uncontroversial, though as time went on, they started adding more stuff to their act and getting a little weirder.

BASIC would be kids music: Everyone liked it when they were younger, but no one takes it seriously once they start listening to anything else.

JavaScript would be Lady Gaga: Everyone knows her hits and thinks they can play them even if they're not a musician, but few know how talented she really is.

Perl would be The Ugliest Piece of Music Ever Written: You're required to make fun of Perl when you write a post like this, right? (Skip to 7:45 if you just want to hear the song.)

Python would be OK Go: You watch them occasionally on YouTube, but you would never listen to a full album from them.

Haskell would be Radiohead: You've heard them a few times, but you've never really understood what they're singing about, or what their fans are talking about.

Ruby would be electronic music: It's not bad or anything, but fans of electronic music act like it's the best music in the world, and rarely listen to anything else. Most people don't see what the big deal is.

I apologize if I left out your favorite programming language. It's either because I'm not familiar with it, or I couldn't think of a good musical analogy. Leave a comment and let me know what type of music it would be.

Prop 8 overturned one year ago

2011-08-04T01:15:00.000-07:00

It was one year ago today that Proposition 8 was overturned by a Federal judge, making it legal for same-sex couples to marry in California. Except not really. I used to think that when courts strike down laws, those laws are, you know, not laws anymore. In fact, that's pretty much what happened the last time a court struck down Proposition 8. "But wait!" you say, "That wasn't Prop 8. In fact, that was before Prop 8 even passed!" Right, it was Proposition 22. But see if you can spot the difference between the two:

The complete text of Proposition 22:

This initiative measure adds a section to the Family Code; therefore, new provisions proposed to be added are printed in italic type to indicate that they are new.
SECTION 1. This act may be cited as the "California Defense of Marriage Act."

SECTION 2. Section 308.5 is added to the Family Code, to read:

308.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

The complete text (pdf) of Proposition 8:

This initiative measure expressly amends the California Constitution by adding a section thereto; therefore, new provisions proposed to be added are printed in italic type to indicate that they are new.
SECTION 1. Title
This measure shall be known and may be cited as the “California Marriage Protection Act.”
SECTION 2. Section 7.5 is added to Article I of the California Constitution, to read:
SEC. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Prop 8 changes the Constitution, while Prop 22 only changed the Family Code. Much more importantly, Prop 8 has the word "thereto" in it. I think that means they hired more expensive lawyers in the intervening 8 years? Anyway, what was I saying? Right, so it's been a year since this court decision, but same-sex couples still can't actually get married here, because the Proposition 8 proponents are appealing the decision, so there's a stay on the decision. And, the court isn't actually considering their appeal yet because first they need to figure out whether the proponents even have standing to appeal. In other words: It's gonna be a while.

What I want for Christmas

2010-11-26T10:18:00.000-08:00

Here we are. Black Friday. The day that the TV box insists is the biggest shopping day of the year, although I suspect that it's a lie -- nowadays, I bet most people are either smart enough to start before Black Friday, or lazy enough to wait until the 23rd or 24th. Or they just buy everything online. Anyway, it's time for you to start deciding who you like enough to buy Christmas presents for, and what in the world they might want. So if by any chance I was going to end up on your list, here's what you should get me:

Nothing

Seriously. I have plenty of stuff. So if you really want to spend money this Christmas, spend it on someone who can really use it. Some ideas, in no particular order:

Make a Kiva loan. The best part about this one is, you probably get the money back eventually.
Vote For Equality. Remember that gay marriage thing? Yeah, it turns out we still don't have it, and this is a great, volunteer-based organization that is really doing the work to make sure we win if this comes to a vote again.
Speaking of which, you could also donate to the American Foundation for Equal Rights, who is fighting prop 8 in court right now.
You've probably heard about The Trevor Project -- a hotline to help LGBT kids who are thinking about committing suicide.
I think you've probably heard of Teach For America, which encourages college graduates to teach for a couple years, before or instead of getting a more typical job. Even though they didn't accept me, they're still great.

What other organizations are worth donating to? Let me know in the comments!

Maggie Gallagher on gay teen suicides

2010-10-20T21:49:00.001-07:00

Maggie Gallagher of NOM has written about the idea that anti-same-sex marriage groups like hers are responsible for all the gay suicides that have been happening lately. She seems to slightly misunderstand the charge: it's not that gay marriage prevents teen suicides, it's that homophobia is what causes them--and no matter how you try to state it, NOM is of the opinion that same-sex relationships are not as good as opposite-sex ones--NOM is part of that homophobia that gay and perceived-to-be-gay teens are surrounded by. There's a nice, reasonable response to her column from The Bilerico Project where they admit that people like NOM aren't directly responsible for gay suicides, but also explain that they are, in fact, part of the problem.

Toward the end of that post, they say:

If Maggie Gallagher is actually concerned with queer youth as she says she is, perhaps she could donate to the Ali Forney Center to help some teens find a place to stay so that they don't have to get caught up in the violence that she knows so much about. Of course she won't, because she's a clown who doesn't really care about much other than advancing her agenda.

So I posted this on NOM's blog:

Maggie, call this blogger's bluff!

http://www.bilerico.com/2010/10/who_cares_about_queer_youth_not_maggie_gallagher.php

Donate to the Ali Forney Center or the Trevor Project, or even just publically state your support for anti-bullying laws.

As you say, "These kids need help, real help." So do something that will actually give them that support.

Think she'll do it?

California Propositions 2010

2010-10-17T21:10:00.001-07:00

Here's how I'm voting on the 2010 propositions on Nov 2. As of this writing, my decisions are based on the (extremely small) amount of research I've done. I will update this post as my opinions change, so feel free to comment and tell me how wrong I am.

YES on 19: Makes it legal to possess less than an ounce of marijuana. People are already using marijuana, so let's go ahead and make it legal -- and tax it! I know there are a lot of issues with this law, and it may not hurt the Mexican drug cartels as much as we want it to. But I still would rather it be legal.
YES on 20: Don't allow legislators to draw their own districts. Seems like a pretty simple choice to me.
YES on 21: Adds $18 to the cost of owning a car, to fund state parks and wildlife conservation. I'm kind of indifferent on this one but $18 isn't THAT much and our state parks can probably use the money.
NOT SURE on 22: Prevents money that belongs to local government from being taken by the state. If there is money that is supposed to go to local governments and local projects, then the state shouldn't be allowed to take it just because they can't find their own source of funding. But according to the "No" arguments, that funding is NEEDED for important things like police and firefighters. Sounds like the way our state works is super broken and I can't tell if a "Yes" or a "No" on this will make it any less broken.
NO on 23: This would suspend a law passed in 2006 that would get the state to reduce emissions by 2020. I feel like reducing emissions is a good thing, so no on this one.
NOT SURE on 24: Something about taxes and businesses. I can't tell if this affects small businesses that really need the tax break, or huge ones that frankly don't. I need to read more about this one.
YES on 25: Punishes the state legislators by taking away their paycheck if they don't pass the budget (which is admittedly pretty mean, but I think they'll survive, because they'll be pretty unlikely to be super late like they always are now) and more importantly makes it so that a majority of the legislature needs to pass the budget, not a 2/3 supermajority. Maybe if this passes, we won't pay all our state employees in IOUs.
NO on 26: Makes it harder to create/increase certain taxes by requiring a 2/3 vote of the legislature or voters, instead of a simple majority. Look, I know taxes suck, but I feel like if we require a 2/3 vote to increase pretty much ANY tax, then we'll never get anything passed.
NO on 27: This is pretty much the exact opposite of Prop 20 -- it gives all the power to draw district outlines back to the legislators.

So there you go. Tell me how super wrong I am on the above points, or help me with my "not sure" ones. Also, just sayin': Almost all of the official pro and con groups are called "Citizens For Lower Taxes" or "Taxpayers Against Evil Things" or "Just A Bunch Of Totally Reasonable Everyday People Who Are Totally Reasonable, We Promise, And Are In Favor Of Things That Everyone Loves Like Ice Cream And Puppies. I Mean, You Don't Hate Puppies, Do You?" It's a little sketchy, am I right?

Scribe 1.0 released

2010-09-06T17:32:00.000-07:00

I have officially released version 1.0 of Scribe, my first Android app ever! (insert confetti and cheering here) It's an Android implementation of the paper-and-pencil game, Scribe. It's a two player game, so find a friend and give it a try!

If you are viewing this on an Android device, or if you have the ChromeToPhone or FoxToPhone extension, then you can just click right here to download it. If you have a barcode reader app, then you can point it at the QR code below. Otherwise, just open the Android Market and search for "Scribe." Let me know what you think!

The gay agenda: Legalizing prostitution?

2010-08-20T00:41:00.001-07:00

I'm sending the following to both CNN's contact page, and GLAAD. We'll see if either of them acts on it.

This Tuesday night, Larry King had four guests on his show to debate gay marriage and Prop 8. For the most part, the debate was fairly civil and fair, but at one point, Bishop Harry Jackson claimed that "on the gay and lesbian agenda, right now, is a desire to legalize prostitution" (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT6g5w1qNrw#t=50s ). While I don't expect everyone to fully understand or agree with the "gay and lesbian agenda" as he put it, I think it's quite obviously and provably false that any gay rights activists anywhere are working to legalize prostitution.

I think that was a moment in which Larry King should have injected a little bit of fact-based questioning into the discussion: "Hang on a second -- where did you hear that? Stephanie, you're gay. Is that on your agenda?" Since he didn't do that, it would be nice for him to make a statement on his show, explaining that he did some research and (as far as he can tell) there is no such item on the gay agenda, while offering to Bishop Jackson the opportunity to come back on the show and explain where he got his facts from, or what he meant.

By the way, if you're curious what the actual gay agenda is, I laid it out on this very blog a couple of years ago.

political quotes of the day

2010-08-14T17:15:00.000-07:00

At a Ramadan ceremony at the White House yesterday, President Obama spoke out in favor of allowing Muslims to build a community center and mosque, close to the site of the World Trade Center towers. He defended their right to build a place of worship by referring to an obscure legal document called the "First Amendment to the Constitution":

But, he continued: “This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are.”

I wish the phrase "But, he continued, 'This is America'" appeared in every article about Obama, or for that matter, any article about politics. Kinda like this. My other favorite quote from this article is:

In New York, Rick A. Lazio, a Republican candidate for governor and a former member of the House of Representatives [said,] “With over 100 mosques in New York City, this is not an issue of religion, but one of safety and security,” he said.

Anyone know what that means? I'm trying really really hard to figure out why a mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero would be a safety and security concern, whereas another mosque, a little further away, would not be. Even if we accept the idea that all Muslims are terrorists, which obviously is not true, I still don't get it. Is he afraid that someone is going to attack the same site again, and he thinks that the Muslims who worship elsewhere in Manhattan, (or elsewhere in the country, or the world), don't have access to, you know, transportation? The only reasonable explanation I can think of, is that this man truly doesn't hear himself when he speaks. He says words, but he doesn't hear himself saying them. Any other ideas?

I'm so excited to see how crazy this country will get during the election season this year. We're off to a great start.

The "just to be safe" argument. And then: The Ask.

2010-08-07T23:42:00.000-07:00

I've been watching the marriagetrial.com reading of the Proposition 8 ruling, while also sort of reading along in the official pdf. If you're too lazy to read all 136 pages (although it's double spaced and a fair amount of it is just citations, so it's really more like 60) there are some great summaries at the Bilerico Project and Blogging LA (thanks to Heather for that second link).

Anyway, I was tweeting a couple of my favorite quotes from the decision, and someone responded on Twitter: "Fuck the other half of CA, and dumb bigots." Of course I understand the frustration behind this statement, but I want to be sure to make one thing very clear.

The seven million people who voted for Proposition 8 are not the enemy in this fight. I know this may be hard to believe, but it's true. Watch this ad, even if you've seen it before:

This is the kind of message that voters saw over and over and over again in the six weeks leading up to the 2008 election. It was two full weeks before the No on 8 campaign came up with any response to the message that allowing gay marriage meant the unthinkable would happen -- kids would be taught the shocking truth that gay people exist and sometimes they fall in love and want to get married. I know. Shocking. (Waiting this long was the single biggest mistake made by the No on 8 campaign, according to The Prop 8 Report, something I've been meaning to blog about since it was released last week, about a day before the trial decision came out. Worst timing ever.)

So for two weeks, many people were faced with the following set of facts, or perceived facts:

If I vote no on Prop 8, my children might be taught something I don't want them to know, and at a very young age!
This is backed up by a very official person with a law degree who is much smarter than I am, as well as by actual facts.
I don't know of any negative consequences if I vote yes on Prop 8.

There is only one rational conclusion that can be drawn from these three facts, or even from just #1 and #3: Vote yes on Prop 8! Even if you think the threat to children is unlikely or insignificant, there's no downside to voting yes. It's a win-win. Many of the voters I talk to as a volunteer with Vote For Equality (more on this in a moment) tell me that they're not sure how they feel about gay marriage, or they have no strong feelings one way or the other. Yes, I'm sure many of them are against gay marriage, and just don't want to say so to my face. But I believe that a significant number of them are truly undecided or indifferent. And yet, of the 13.7 million Californians who voted that day, less than two and a half percent were unable to decide, and didn't cast a vote one way or the other on Prop 8. If you don't see the harm in voting yes, why would you ever vote no, just to be safe, just in case those scary ads about harming children are true?

I bring this up for two reasons, First of all, as I said, we need to remember that the 7 million "yes" voters are not the enemy in this fight. Call me naive, but I think the majority of them aren't actually that offended by the idea of a couple of guys making a promise to each other, eating some cake, drinking some wine, signing a piece of paper, and one of them getting to use the other's health insurance. They were just misled and tricked into changing the definition of marriage. It's not their fault. Really.

Secondly, we can convince people that "fact" #3 is not true, because, of course, it's not. Yes, we can rebut the other two facts as well, but if we can show people what marriage means to actual real-life gay and lesbian Californians and their families, then we can win next time. This is one of the central arguments made by the plaintiffs in the prop 8 trial: By denying marriage to a couple, you are sending them a clear message that their relationship is inferior to other people's relationships.

That is what I've been doing with Vote For Equality for the last few months: Having open, honest conversations with voters, both on the phone, and at their front door, explaining to them why I believe we ought to extend marriage benefits--not the separate but equal classification of "domestic partners", but marriage--to all committed long-term relationships. More importantly, Vote For Equality has devoted itself to something we almost never did during the No on 8 campaign: listening to the voters and finding out what their concerns are. Check it out!

We won't always change someone's mind, like Jay did in this video, but with every conversation we have, we'll find out more about that person -- their thoughts about this issue, any ideas they have that are factually incorrect, and any questions they have about same-sex marriage, that we might be able to answer for them. It's a lot of fun, and I believe that if we vote on this again, in California or elsewhere, and we win, it will be largely because of this kind of work. If you volunteered with the No on 8 campaign, and you were frustrated with how ineffective our tactics were, I promise you this is different. We've learned from our mistakes, and we're continuing to improve our approach.

(And if you were at any of the No on 8 actions, you know what's next -- The Ask)

One of the next major events coming up is a phonebank on August 24, where we have phone conversations much like the in-person conversation in that video you just watched. It also happens to be the day before my birthday, and seeing all of you, my huge following of blog readers (okay, so there are like four of you, but still), at the phonebank, would be a pretty awesome birthday present. I know it might seem scary to just call up a stranger and ask them how they feel about gay marriage, but once you get into it, you'd be surprised how much people are willing to talk about it.

If you have any friends or family who might someday want to marry a person of the same sex, please come to this phonebank, for them. I'm sure you know at least one, and if not, then come to this phonebank for me -- for my birthday. There might even be free food! And no using band as an excuse, TMB people. If you leave right after practice, you'll get there on time, even with traffic.

The details:
Vote For Equality voter persuasion phonebank
August 24th, 6:30pm-9:30pm
1125 N. McCadden Place,
Los Angeles, CA 90038

I want to conclude this blog post with a quote from an unlikely source. As they are a project of NOM, you can imagine I don't agree with much of what comes from the Ruth Institute, but they're 100% right about one thing, and it nicely sums up why the work Vote For Equality is doing is so important, and why we can't just sit around waiting for court decisions:

As with other issues, what will decide the “same-sex marriage” controversy in the long run are the attitudes that prevail in society at large, not this or that judicial decision, ballot measure, or piece of legislation.

P.S. I really think if you give it a chance, you'll enjoy this phonebank, or find other VFE actions that suit you better. But if you really don't want to do this, or can't make it on that day, or find that you have more spare money than spare time (hey, it's possible!), then you can also make a donation to Vote For Equality, and that would also make a huge difference. Thanks!

NOM is on the road to protect (some people's) marriage!

2010-07-18T09:08:00.000-07:00

I don't know if you've been following the NOM Blog recently but the National Organization for (Hetero-Only) Marriage is going on a National Tour! (And by national, I mean just the eastern US -- I know, I was hoping they'd actually come to California, instead of spending lots of money on our politics). Their recent blog post basically covers three things:

People were very excited about "protecting marriage" and NOM had great turnout at their rallies.
Gay marriage bloggers are jealous, and they're a bunch of liars. But no, we won't bother linking to any of those blogs ~~because you might be exposed to some intelligent ideas that we don't really want you to hear~~ because you don't need to see those lies for yourself, you can trust NOM. (I mean, if you're going to accuse bloggers of lying, you ought to at least link to their blog so that your readers can see for themselves, and the accused have a chance to defend themselves. Right?)
There were some protesters at the NOM rallies but they were silly and ineffective. No mention of what the protesters' signs said (though you can see a few pictures on their flickr page) or the fact they were from an actual established group, rather than just a bunch of randoms.

It's almost as though one of NOM's main goals on this tour is to draw the attention of gay marriage supporters -- to bring out protesters who are still angry about their right to marry being taken away. All it takes is one or two people angry enough to shout over NOM's rallies, or with signs that imply NOM is bigoted or hateful, and all of a sudden, they'll be the victims. The poor, tiny, grassroots, average Americans, just trying to stand up for tradition and common sense against the big bad oppressive super-powerful atheist family-hating gay lobby.

Here on the internet, we call them trolls. The first evidence I saw of this, was this tweet from a couple of days ago: "Brian: On our way to Albany. Car just swerved to cut us off and gave hand gesture. Got tolerance? #nom". So I want to reiterate what I said on twitter: As a supporter of marriage equality, you should get out there and make your voice heard. Make signs, carry rainbow umbrellas, draw attention to the issue from all over the place, talk to your friends and family about why marriage is important for you or the same-sex couples in your life. But please, PLEASE don't do anything that will help NOM and other anti-gay-marriage groups to play the victim. They thrive on that, so let's not give them any more assistance than they already get. You know, "Don't feed the troll."

Of course, maybe I'm overreacting. As my friend Jonathan said, "@tbreisacher Maybe it wasnt even a marriage equality believer. Maybe the nom car driver is a shitty driver..."

Scribe for Android!

2010-07-03T14:59:00.001-07:00

UPDATE 9/6/10: This release is no longer available. Please download the official one from the Android Market.

Good news, everyone! The first official release of Scribe for Android is now available. If you have an Android device, fire up your barcode reader and try it out! Keep in mind this is still a very very early version of the game so most of the menus don't work yet, and it's starts to feel very slow as you get close to the end of the game.

Please let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, bug reports, etc. by creating an issue on the github issue tracker, or just emailing me.

Enjoy!

New Android game, Scribe: Coming soon!

2010-06-28T00:00:00.001-07:00

Remember how I said I would update this blog, like, all the time? Me neither. Anyway, I'm working on a game for Android called Scribe (pdf):

Scribe is a pen and paper game for two players. Nine mini grids together form one super grid. The 19 glyphs of Scribe are listed in the left margin. Draws cannot occur in Scribe. Mark Steere invented Scribe on October 1, 2006.

I've played a sort of "play by email" version of it at superdupergames and I always thought it would be more fun in real time, so I decided to make it my first Android development project. I've already cranked out all the data structures and tricky logic (specifically, the difficult task of figuring out who won a particular mini-grid), so all that's left is the UI. As it's my first Android project, I don't know how long it will take, but my (admittedly rather arbitrary) goal is to have a beta version ready for download by the beginning of August.

If you want to follow along with the development, keep an eye on my github account. (The Scribe project that's up there now is a desktop version, hastily thrown together in Swing, but I couldn't get the github "downloads" feature to work, so you'll have to build it from source, or wait a little while.)

In the meantime, can you prove Mark Steere's claim that ties are impossible?

GLAAD Media Monitoring

2010-05-27T13:18:00.001-07:00

I just finished the online training for to be a GLAAD Media Monitoring volunteer. For those who don't know, GLAAD is the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. They're the people that go after reporters, news organizations, TV shows, etc. who represent GLBT people unfairly or inaccurately, as well as hosting their own awards show (which I volunteered for a couple of years ago) for awarding postive portrayals of gay and lesbian people in the media. Although I've criticized GLAAD before for being over-sensitive, I think what they do is generally a good thing, so I'm excited to be volunteering for them. If you're not officially signed up as a volunteer, you can still help by filing an incident report whenever you see something in the media that you feel is defamatory to the GLBT community in some way.

The first part of the training was essentially just a summary of what GLAAD does and why. I would encourage you to click around their website a little bit to get an idea of it, but the general idea is that they want to ensure news stories are fair (reporters contact LGBT people or allies, not just anti-gay people), accurate (factually correct, and not defamatory), and inclusive (including LGBT people even in stories that aren't directly about them, when appropriate). Next, they went into more detail about specific words that should be used/avoided by reporters. If you don't think words matter, take a look at the numbers from this CBS news poll from a few months ago:

The other good/bad word pairs I managed to jot down were "adoption by gay people" (good) vs. "gay adoption" (bad) and "sexual orientation" (good) vs. "sexual preference" (bad). Lots of other word-choice recommendations can be found in GLAAD's official Media Reference Guide.

Because the media works on a 24-hour news cycle, information and stories are constantly being written and published, which is why it's important for organizations like GLAAD to react quickly. If a story appears on the AP wire this afternoon, GLAAD can act and possibly get parts of it reworded before it goes to print in newspapers the next morning. Even after something goes to print, it's important to act quickly. Newspaper editors aren't interested in complaints about stories posted several weeks ago.

The direct action that volunteers take, is filing incident reports. All this really means is sending an email to incident@glaad.org telling them about anything defamatory that you find in the media, including where you found it (whether it's a newspaper, magazine, internet, TV, etc.) and why you think it's defamatory. There was a little more information given in the training (for example, noting that you have to treat a news story different from the way you treat an opinion piece, although both can be defamatory) but really, that's basically it!

The trainers mentioned that GLAAD also has a guide about how to write effective letters to the editor (of course, most of the information would also apply to blog posts and comments, etc.) but they implied that it's not available online. I asked them to send me a copy, and maybe I'll summarize it on this blog as well. But I will also encourage them to post it online, as well as perhaps posting a video of today's training. Update: It turns out this information is online, on page 72 of their Media Essentials training manual. I still think they should post the powerpoint or video from today's training, though. Making your materials open and accessible is a good thing!

Anyway, if you find yourself fighting defamation against GLBT people or anyone else, let me know! And I will keep you updated on how this goes for me.

Ignoring People

2010-04-26T11:59:00.000-07:00

I saw something this morning that I found very impressive. I'd never seen anything like it in my four years at USC. In fact, I don't think I'd ever seen anything like it in my life. A kid was sitting on a bench reading a book, without looking up at all. The bench in question was Associate's Park, between Bovard and the PE building. For those not familiar with the geography of USC, this is a location typically used for sitting quietly and reading/studying, unlike, say, Hahn Plaza, which is traditionally where enthusiastic people with clipboards and flyers try to stop you and get you to join their party this weekend/religious organization/service organization/volunteer opportunity.

Anyway, this kid is sitting there, reading a book, not looking up at all. Next to him are two people with some sort of small flyers, talking to this kid about how Jesus loves him and quoting something from Genesis. They're just continuing, on and on and on, seemingly completely unaware of the fact that they're absolutely being ignored. I've never seen anything like it before--I've never seen anyone so intent on getting a stranger to believe what they believe. It was really quite amazing.

Discrimination

2010-03-27T10:21:00.000-07:00

If you know me at all, you know I love The Rachel Maddow Show. One of the things that Rachel often says, both on her show and her website, is that they really do read the emails that they get. So I decided to send her an email about an idea that's been floating around in my mind for a while. We'll see if they respond, or maybe even mention my idea on the air (unlikely, but possible, right?). Here's my message (linkified for my blog audience).

Rachel,

First of all, I love your show. I guess I'm more of a liberal on most issues, but more than wanting to take sides, I really just like hearing the facts about what's going on. So much of the "news" is about poll numbers or speculation. It's almost like the news anchors have become pundits, and you're the one that just gives us the actual facts. Plus it's hilarious when you get all excited about things like which cocktails were served at a White House cocktail party. =)

Anyway, I'm glad you're still following the "Discrimination based on sexual orientation? Yup, that's fine" story from Virginia. It's really shocking and horrible and most people (news people and regular Americans) only seem to have the attention span to follow it for a day or two. I was thinking: Though it doesn't happen often (maybe ever), if someone were fired for being straight, that would also constitute discrimination based on sexual orientation, wouldn't it? Which means it would be perfectly legal to do in Virginia, and in several other states that don't have an ENDA-like law.

What do you think about the following scenario: There is a government official in VA who is gay, but has straight employees who work under him. He picks one of them and fires him without explanation. When questioned, he says that the official was "one of those heterosexuals" and although he was a good employee, "it was just hurting the morale of our government office to have a breeder in our offices. After all, there were women who worked in the same office with this guy. Who knows what might have happened? I wish him the best of luck in life, with his "partner" and hold no personal grudge against him, but this is what is needed for the proper functioning of the Virginia government" etc.

Of course, you would probably want to get the permission of the person who was going to be fired, maybe make it someone who was planning on leaving anyway, or has enough money saved up to be out of work for a little while. But the idea is that then straight people across Virginia and across the country would be livid. "How dare you fire someone just because they're not the same sexual orientation as you are! What he does in the bedroom has no bearing on how he does his job or serves his state! We should judge people based on their work ethic and intelligence, not their sexual orientation!" And then anyone who agreed with the governor's position (maybe even the governor himself?) would pause for a second and go "Ohhhhhh, so that's how it feels when the law doesn't protect you."

What do you think? Is it feasible? Do you know any straight Virginia government employees that would be up for it? Would people dismiss it as a cheap, irresponsible publicity stunt? Maybe just presenting this as a hypothetical would make people think twice about it.

Tyler Breisacher
http://trojansax.blogspot.com

Jax and his webcomic

2010-03-20T22:04:00.000-07:00

Everyone go to my friend Jackson's webcomic, Majestic 7. I fully admit that most of the reason I'm writing this is because I'm hoping it shows up on the first page when I do a Google search for Majestic 7. You know because I'm way too lazy to just remember the address or bookmark it or something.

But yeah, it's fun. It's made with legos! Check it out.

... Majestic 7

NCAA Nicknames on Sporcle

2010-03-17T18:04:00.001-07:00

If you liked my last post, you might like this Sporcle game I just made: NCAA Nicknames. I looked at all the answers (because I had to in order to create the quiz) and I still only got about 44.

Mascot/Nickname Bracket

2010-03-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

I thought it would be fun to fill out an NCAA tournament bracket where the winning team is the one with the better team nickname and/or mascot. What makes it better? Oh, you know. If there's something funny about the mascot, or I think it's clever, or just more original than the opponent, then I'll put it through to the next round. I may also select the one who I think would actually win in a fight. I'm not going to spend a ton of time researching each mascot (i.e. this is based on whatever I can find on Wikipedia in a couple seconds) but in some cases, I've actually seen the mascot in person at previous tournaments so I may draw on that experience.

Some notable matchups:

#5 Michigan State Spartans vs. #12 New Mexico State Aggies (Round 1). While I have to admit that Spartans is at least a little more original, I would bet New Mexico State is the only "Aggies" team whose mascot carries a gun. Maybe the only mascot of any kind that has a gun. Also, the Spartan is named Sparty and he looks like Jay Leno. Sparty? Come on. Winner: Aggies
#8 UNLV Rebels vs. #9 Northern Iowa Panthers (Round 1). Both pretty boring, honestly. But the Panthers mascot is TC Panther. An homage to T.C. Boyle, perhaps? Or a nod to the school's founder whose name was T.C. Something-Or-Other? Nope, it stands for "The Cat". Really. But he's won all kinds of awards at cheer competitions and stuff, so I'll give it to him. Winner: Panthers
#3 Georgetown Hoyas vs. #14 Ohio Bobcats (Round 1). It turns out, no one is quite sure what a Hoya is. It may have come from this weird Greek/Latin mishmash phrase that students used to say, but no one quite knows why they said it. I can't decide if it's kind of cool that they're willing to use a mascot that they don't even know what it is, or if it's really tooly, like having a tattoo of a Chinese character on your ankle without knowing what it means. Luckily, they're up against one of the most boring and generic mascots ever. Winner: Hoyas.
#2 Ohio State Buckeyes vs. #15 UCSB Gauchos (Round 1). I think you guys know where I'm going with this. It's a nut. Or a... big seed. Or something. Winner: Gauchos.
#7 Oklahoma State Cowboys vs. #10 Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets (Round 1). Normally I would go with the bees on this, because I think it would be the only chance for an insect to make it to the second round. But it turns out the mascot for the the Cowboys is Pistol Pete, a name I recognized from when I read about New Mexico State a few minutes before. It turns out the same guy is the mascot of two different schools. Technically, I can't let him be eliminated in the first round and make it to the second round at the same time. It might cause a rip in the spacetime continuum or something! Winner, by a spatial-temporal technicality: Cowboys.
#4 Vanderbilt Commodores vs. Murray State Racers (Round 1). I think this is my favorite first round matchup. "Commodore" reminds me of the stuffy British sailors in Pirates of the Caribbean who are always running around with bayonets asking each other how the hell Jack Sparrow has escaped yet again. Racers, on the other hand, refers to racehorses, which sounds like a team you can bet on. Literally. I have to admit, there aren't too many teams named after people instead of animals, that actually sound cool. Winner: Commodores.
#2 Kansas State Wildcats vs. #15 North Texas Mean Green (Round 1). Normally, I would eliminate a mascot that's a color, instantly. But unlike the Syracuse Orange or the Stanford Cardinal, at least they thought to add some sort of adjective to it. And they're up against one of the most unoriginal things ever, yet another Wildcats. Winner: Mean Green.
#5 Temple Owls vs. #12 Cornell Big Red (Round 1). Remember Owl from Winnie the Pooh? He was awesome. Winner: Owls.
#4 Wisconsin Badgers vs. # 13 Wofford Terriers (Round 1). I was about ready to give this to the Terriers because they're so cute. Until I remembered that, when I was in high school, badgers were the funniest damn thing in the world. If there's a "Fighting Mushrooms" or "Garden Snakes" in the tournament next year, I promise to put them through to at least the Sweet Sixteen. Winner: Badgers.
#7 Clemson Tigers vs. #10 Missouri Tigers, and #5 Texas A&M Aggies vs. #12 Utah State Aggies (Round 1). What the hell, guys? How did this happen? All four of you lose the first round.
#11 Old Dominion Monarchs vs. #14 Sam Houston State Bearkats (Round 2). Yes, with a 'k'. What the hell is a bearkat? I can only assume it's a cross between a bear and a kat. I bet that kind of unholy hybrid would be pretty good at basketball. Unfortunately, this bracket is rigged. See below. Winner: Monarchs.
#11 Old Dominion Monarchs vs. #15 Robert Morris Colonials (Sweet 16). AMERICA! Winner: Colonials.
#1 Kansas Jayhawks vs. #4 Maryland Terrapins (Sweet 16). I know, I know. How did a turtle make it this far?! But look at him. That looks like a pretty badass turtle. And plus, his name is Testudo. Like a combination of testosterone and Menudo. Obviously pretty badass. And, did you know the Jayhawk is a mythical cross between two birds -- the noisy blue jay and the quiet sparrow hawk? So these are some pretty sweet mascots. But ultimately, the power of flight wins out over the power of... plodding. Winner: Jayhawks.
#15 Robert Morris Colonials vs. #9 Wake Forest Demon Deacons (Final 4). I hate to see America lose this one, but isn't a "demon deacon" like being a double-agent in the ultimate war? Winner: Demon Deacons.

The complete bracket:

Final thoughts:

There are too many Golden Somethings. You can't take a boring mascot like a Bear and make it somehow interesting by calling it a Golden Bear. Come on. I think there were four of these.
If your team name is literally a color, I have no respect for you at all. Figure it out, Syracuse.
I wish there could have been a matchup between the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets and the Richmond Spiders.

So what do you think? Which mascot was unfairly eliminated? Who's your favorite mascot that didn't even make the tournament? What would your mascot/nickname bracket look like, and who would be the ultimate champion?

Apparently, yes, they are.

2010-03-04T22:36:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I told you about a comment I left on the blog for the anti-same-sex-marriage group NOM. It seemed that NOM had deleted it, but I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. So I posted another comment, which I thought was fair and unoffensive and such. I took a screenshot in case NOM took it down again, and sure enough, when I checked tonight, it was gone.

If NOM doesn't want certain comments on their blog, they certainly have the right to delete or censor any comment they like. But it would be nice if they had a clear set of criteria for what is allowed. Even something as simple as "We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason" would be great, but as far as I can tell, they don't have a policy like that, or any other policy, posted anywhere.

I want to make sure I'm being clear here. It seems like every time something like this catches people's attention, someone mentions the First Amendment, claiming that their Constitutional right to free speech is being violated. This is not a First Amendment issue. I was posting on their blog, which they own, and they have the right to absolutely control the content on it. I just think it would be nice if they explained their rationale. Don't you think?

Is NOM censoring comments on their blog?

2010-03-03T23:31:00.001-08:00

Several weeks ago, while the Prop 8 trial was underway, someone posted a comment on the blog of the National Organization for [opposite-sex only] Marriage and it almost immediately disappeared without warning or explanation. He posted another comment expressing disagreement with NOM's position, took a screenshot to prove it, and sure enough, it was gone within a few minutes. (If anyone has the link to that blog post, that would be great. I don't remember whose blog it was but maybe someone can find it.) There was a some outrage on Twitter and a few other blogs, but nothing huge, because everyone was more worried about the trial. At some later point, I posted a comment disagreeing with NOM so I believed they had stopped taking down pro-SSM comments.

Today, they posted an entry about a Catholic charity in Washington, D.C. which has decided not to offer benefits to any of their employee's spouses, after same-sex marriage became legal in that city today. As a charity, they receive a lot of money from the city each year, so the city told them if they're going to offer benefits to opposite-sex married couples, they should do the same for same-sex married couples. Since that goes against the teachings of the Catholic church, they decided not to offer benefits to anyone's spouse. It was a very difficult decision for them, and this is an issue that same-sex marriage supporters should consider. Even if you believe that same-sex marriage should be legal, no matter what, you should realize that it can have unintended consequences like this, and be careful that you're not advocating anything that would force charities into uncomfortable positions like this, if possible.

But NOM picked the following title: "Church Forced by DC Government's SSM Law to Drop Future Spousal Benefits" As another commenter before me pointed out, that's not just misleading, it's an outright lie. In fact, the very first sentence of the blog post itself (from the Washington Post article I linked to above) is: "The church faced two options with the approval of the new law." So, yes they were put into a very difficult position. Yes, they were forced to make a choice. Yes, perhaps the DC City Council should have considered the charity's complaints more carefully before passing this law. But no, sorry, the government didn't force the church to drop future spousal benefits. That is just not true.

I posted a comment saying something to the effect of "Look, there's a real debate to be had here. But if your post title says the church was forced by the government to do something, and the very first line of the text says they had two options, then how are we going to have that debate?" When I looked at the entry again, my comment was gone. I don't want to accuse NOM of censoring comments, especially because there are several other dissenting comments on that entry which have not been deleted. But it does seem suspicious. I went ahead and posted another comment saying more or less the same thing. So far it is still there but I'm excited to see if it gets taken down again. If my first comment was indeed removed, I'm curious how they decide which ones to leave up and which ones to remove.

P.S. I have to give NOM credit for using the term "SSM" instead of "gay marriage" or "homosexual marriage." As you might have seen in a recent poll about DADT, people feel a lot differently about "gays and lesbians" than they do about "homosexuals" so thanks NOM! I appreciate you using a term that is less likely to stir up emotions. That is a big step in the right direction and I very much appreciate it!

Things I like in a website

2010-02-01T10:45:00.000-08:00

There are a couple of things that I really like in a website. Neither of them really matters that much but they make me feel like I'm dealing with a nice, simple, easy-to-use website. Like Facebook, c. 2004. Or like Facebook now, except the exact opposite.

A favicon. For those unfamiliar, it's the little 16x16 or so image that shows up next to the address bar and on the tab next to the page title. I think everyone picks up on visual cues a lot more than they realize, so it's much easier to find the tab or page you want when there's a colorful, simple, icon by it. Plus, it means my bookmarks bar can look like this:

Bonus question 1: How many of these favicons do you recognize? Bonus question 2: Many of these favicons are letters. How can I rearrange them to spell something funny? Other than "WTF" which I already have.
Simple URLs. The example which inspired me to write this is my friends Casey and DJ's new site for scientists, CoLab. The address for someone's profile is, for example, http://www.thisiscolab.org/researchers/profile/caseystark/, rather than http://www.thisiscolab.org/photo.php?pid=958307&id=1017661724&fbid=1313519230881#profile.php/?pid=238924769803?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_content=Google+Reader&feature=related. I don't know why but why I see lots of extraneous characters that don't mean much to me, in a URL, it gives me the sense that the site is overly complicated, was built without a simple. clear focus, and is going to break at any moment. Also, what with Twitter being all the rage nowadays, it's nice to have a reasonable chance at fitting a URL into a tweet without using a shortener. Even if you do have to shorten a URL, we put an extra strain on the URL shortening services when we try to shorten multiple copies of the same URL which don't look identical but actually are. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epUk3T2Kfno and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epUk3T2Kfno&feature=channel are exactly the same video, even though the URL is superficially different. Maybe I'm just being a little obsessive, but it's something I always notice.

Old games with a twist

2010-01-29T17:54:00.000-08:00

I love casual games. I don't know if there's a strict definition for a "casual game" but I would say it's a small, simple game that you can learn very quickly. The kind of free flash games you find at places like Kongregate or Armor Games or Jay is Games. Lately I've seen a few fun games that are all twists on very familiar games, or combinations of them.

In Tuper Tario Tros, you're playing Mario and Tetris at the same time, in the same place. The tetris blocks that fall become the terrain that Mario is running and jumping on. If Mario can't make it across a gap, switch to Tetris mode and build him a bridge out of tetrominoes. If you can't find anywhere to put your current block, switch back to Mario mode and move through the landscape until you find a more favorable area.
First-Person Tetris is more or less what it sounds like. It's tetris but you are the tetris block! Warning: This game will make you dizzy and perhaps naseous if you play it enough.
gnop (yes, that's "pong" backwards) is a clone of Pong, except that you are the ball. Perhaps it was inspired by First-Person Tetris. While playing this one, I imagine that some kid in the 80s with a bad haircut is playing pong, and is wondering why the ball refuses to follow the laws of physics.
Lastly, I just discovered TetriSnake which is of course a tetris game where instead of blocks, you have little snakes. Which is cool because they can be any shape you want if you can succesfully maneuver them into that shape.
UPDATE: Found another one: Anti-Pacman, where you control the four ghosts. In fact, this is part of an Anti-Games series, but of all the ones listed, Anti-Pacman sounds like the coolest.

Do you know of any other casual games in this "classic(s) with a twist" category? What two games should be mashed up next?

The numbers don't lie. Except when they do.

2010-01-28T22:00:00.001-08:00

On The Rachel Maddow Show today, they did a cute little segment where they played a fake game show called Pin the Debt on the Donkey whose purpose was to point out that Republican presidents in recent history have added much more to the national debt than Democratic presidents. To that end, they showed this graph.

I don't want to argue about this from a political standpoint, or imply that Rachel Maddow's staff got the numbers wrong* or anything like that. My issue with this graph is that the way the graph is designed deceives you into thinking Reagan spent way way more than anyone else. It's the kind of simple misunderstanding of math that Good Math, Bad Math is all about. First of all, some of these presidents were in office for 4 years, and others for 8. They put this in the "fine print" so to speak, but this is a graph! The point is to show information visually. They could have used the average increase per year, which is also readily available on PresidentialDebt.org. That graph would look like this:

(Sorry it doesn't look as fancy as Rachel's. Upper Harmonics' graphics department consists of, well, me and OpenOffice.org.) In this graph, things look a little more balanced, and you could argue that if Carter and Bush Sr. had gotten a second term, they would have increased the debt by about as much as they did during their first term, so it's a little more fair.

I don't think this is the biggest issue though. The real problem with this graph is that the numbers are percentages, not absolute numbers. This would be of no consequence if they were percentages of the same thing. But each number is a percentage of the national debt at the start of that president's term. So if you happened to be president after someone who (as Rachel points out) nearly tripled the national debt, you look much better in comparison. Not just because you're being compared to someone who spent a lot of money, but because your spending is being reported as a percentage of a higher number. If we look at each president's debt increase in actual dollars (actually, trillions of dollars), we get this:

Wow! You mean the first President Bush and President Clinton actually increased the national debt by the same amount? Yup. And both of them increased the debt by just a little less than Reagan did? Yes. But that's not really fair, you say. Clinton had two terms, and Bush only had one. Okay, let's look at each term, rather than each president, shall we?

This still illustrates the general point Rachel Maddow was trying to make: The worst four-year presidential terms of national debt increase in recent history were mostly during Republican administrations, and the best were mostly during Democratic ones. But I think the graph they chose to create didn't show the whole story as clearly as it could have.

You don't have to be an economics or math major to understand this. This is very simple math. A given amount of money may be a small percentage of one value, and an enormous percentage of another value. Comparing percentages the way they did on the show distorts the facts.

To be clear, I don't think Rachel Maddow or her staff were intentionally deceiving anyone or trying to distort the truth -- it sounds cliche but I'm really not trying to make this into a politcal thing. I suspect they just took the five easiest-to-spot numbers off of PresidentialDebt.org and quickly threw them onto a graph. So some of the blame should lie with that site, which made those numbers a bit more prominent than they should have been.

* Although, they rounded Bush Sr.'s number from 55.6% (direct from PresidentialDebt.org) to 55%. We could argue about the .5 rule all day, but I think we can all agree that 55.6 rounds to 56, right? Also, during the segment, she says George W. Bush grew the national debt by $4.9 trillion. The number is actually more like $5.04 trillion, which I assume is due to another rounding error. Either that or they got that number from another source that uses the actual inauguration days, instead of the end of the year, as the delineation between presidencies.

Prop 8 trial transcripts available!

2010-01-20T12:24:00.000-08:00

I'm excited to tell you, my loyal readers, that full, official transcripts from the Prop 8 trial, which is currently underway, are available! If, like me, you were excited to watch the videos posted online each night, and disappointed when the Supreme Court of California disallowed the posting of those videos, this is a great way to read exactly what's happening in the courtroom. Several people who are present in the courtroom have been reporting on the proceedings, via blogs or Twitter, but now we can actually get the full transcripts and read them for ourselves. There will also be a video re-enactment posted any day now, based on these transcripts.

Here is the link to the transcripts. Thanks to Karen Ocamb for posting it on her blog, LGBT POV!

I'm only a little way through the first day so far, but I'll leave you with a quote from Ted Olson, attorney for the plaintiffs (which are the people opposed to Prop 8 which means they're in favor of same-sex marriage -- I know it can be confusing!) in his opening statements:

We wouldn't need a Constitution if we left everything to the political process, but if we left everything to the political process, the majority would always prevail, which is a great thing about democracy, but it's not so good if you are a minority or if you're a disfavored minority or you're new or you're different. And that's what happens here.

Prop 8 and violence against GLBT people

2010-01-14T19:38:00.000-08:00

As with any major event, there's been a lot of traffic on Twitter this week because of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, better known as the Proposition 8 case. The supporters of Prop 8 (that's the people who are against same-sex marriage) asked the court not to broadcast the proceedings, or even make them available on YouTube, because they feared it would create a "media circus" (though I'm not sure the mainstream media spending more time on this issue is really a bad thing) and more importantly, that their witnesses might be intimidated or threatened by people who recognized them from the video of the court's proceedings. Most people seem to believe this is only an excuse, and that the real reason they don't want cameras is that they don't want the general public to hear the arguments for SSM expressed eloquently and carefully by the very intelligent team representing the plaintiffs and the pro-SSM witnesses they've called to the stand.

However--and this is what a lot of the people on the pro-gay side don't seem to want to admit--supporters of Prop 8 were intimidated and harassed right after Prop 8 passed. I remember seeing pictures of a Mormon church in Los Angeles being vandalized, and thinking that whoever did that, acting out of anger and desperation, was setting us way back. There were huge crowds of people in the streets that Wednesday night, and while I'm sure the huge majority of them were peaceful, there were lots of acts of violence and harassment not just against the people who put prop 8 on the ballot and ran its campaign, but against the individual citizens that voted for it. If that's what happens to individual voters, imagine what could happen to someone trying to defend Prop 8 in federal court.

My point is not to encourage groups like Protect Marriage to continue playing the victim (they do plenty of that without my help). And I hope it goes without saying that I don't mean to encourage anyone to commit acts of violence, vandalism, harassment, etc. against anyone. But it's conceivable that some witnesses really did have legitimate fears about cameras in the courtroom.

The reason I bring this up is that there's a very popular trend on Twitter tonight of posting videos like this describing hate crimes that have been committed against gay people. I guess the implication is that laws like Prop 8 encourage hate crimes, or at least encourage the kind of thinking that occasionally leads some people to commit hate crimes. I tweeted "Not liking all the RTing of this video http://bit.ly/6hI1oh Do people think homophobia / hate crime will disappear if we strike down #prop8?" To expand on that a little, if this case eventually goes in our favor, we'll never hear the end of it from the anti-gay-marriage crowd about "activist judges" who are "overriding the will of the people" and so on. Eventually, we would like broad societal recognition that gay relationships are equal to straight ones, not just government recognition. I worry that when we're posting these videos, people will say that we're equating everyone who is for Prop 8 with anyone who's ever killed a gay person. If we ever want people like Protect Marriage and NOM to accept gay marriage, we need to stop thinking of them as the enemy and start thinking of them as someone who is wrong but well-intentioned. That means not implying they're responsible for the occurrence of hate crimes.

Twitter user @california411 then said to me: "@tbreisacher No read the SCOTUS ruling- the US Supreme court is protecting the perpetrators of violence towards GLBT's" thus confirming my worry. You might say that attitudes like those of the Prop 8 supporters are related to the attitudes that lead to hate crimes. But that hardly means that SCOTUS was directly protecting the perpetrators of violence.

Someone named @nutrioso reacted to the videos more or less exactly the way I expected the anti-gay-marriage side would react: "Hmmm...looks like the lefties are displaying their penchant for civil discourse by swamping Twitter with irrelevant propaganda. #prop8" Basically, no one made it clear, at least not to this person, what the connection was between hate crimes and Prop 8.

I guess the point I'm really making here is that if you're going to post something about the GLBT community being victimized, in a Prop 8 discussion, it would be wise to show the connection between that victimization and Prop 8, as clearly and carefully as you can. And remember, the "other side" is not your enemy -- they are just someone who doesn't yet understand why marriage is so important to GLBT people. In the event that we have to fight this issue (or another GLBT issue -- yes folks, gay people do care about things other than getting married!) at the ballot box, we need every vote we can get. Out of the millions who voted to take marriage rights away from us, most of them did so with very good intentions and were simply misguided. Let's help those who are willing to listen to see our side of the story.

USC Basketball Sanctions

2010-01-05T14:05:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of talk lately about USC's self-imposed sanctions that have been applied to its basketball team in response to the violations of NCAA rules committed two years about by OJ Mayo and Tim Floyd. Some people say USC didn't go far enough, a lot of people say Mike Garrett is sacrificing the basketball team to save the football team.

To me, the whole system seems quite irrational. The NCAA makes it very clear what is and isn't allowed, but as far as I know, there are no official penalties for any of the violations. So when something happens, the school imposes a penalty on itself, hoping the NCAA will think it's harsh enough. If the NCAA accepts it, then maybe we could have gotten away with less, and we punished ourselves unnecessarily. If they impose even harsher sanctions than the ones we came up with, then we look like we're not taking the infractions seriously, simply because we couldn't read the NCAA's mind.

Imagine if the coaches determined their own penalties for fouls during football games. Instead of the officials referring to the rulebook (delay of game = 5 yards, holding = 10 yards, etc.) the coach simply imposes his own penalty and hopes the officials will accept it as "harsh enough." This would be a ridiculous way to run a football game. How hard would it be for the NCAA to create a mapping from violations to specific penalties? If you can find the exact rule that Mayo and Floyd violated, you should also find, on the same page of the NCAA rulebook, a specific description of the penalties that will be imposed on the coach, the school, and players who were involved. Maybe there's a reason the NCAA doesn't work like that. I would love for someone to tell me what that reason is.

But back to the sanctions themselves. My biggest complaint, really my only complaint, is the way the administration is taking our current team (none of whom were involved in the rules violations at all, and most of whom weren't even at USC at the time) out of all postseason play, including the annual Pac-10 Tournament and the NCAA Tournament (which I think we probably would have participated in for the fourth time in a row -- the first time that would have ever happened to USC).

This punishment has absolutely no effect on anyone who is actually responsible, and it keeps a great team, who so far as surpassed all expectations, from showing the country what they can do in "the big dance." So here's what I think we should do instead. Currently, during halftime of USC home games, there are a couple of little challenges, where students come down from the stands and try to make a shot or two in order to win money or plane tickets from Nike or American Airlines. Instead of that, I think we should have OJ Mayo and Tim Floyd come down and stand at midcourt. A student stands at either end of the court and fires a nerf gun at the NCAA rules violators. One student's nerf darts have cardinal paint, and the other's have gold paint, to make it easy to see which one got more hits. The winner receives a free Trojan Fever t-shirt. Mayo and Floyd do not. What do you think?

Non-deerlike Characteristics

2009-11-10T10:38:00.000-08:00

Something a bit more light-hearted, today. I guess the moral here for high school students trying to decide where to go to college, is that there is a lot of variety out there. Any kind of college environment you want to experience, you can.

The following is an email sent to all students at my sister's college, Simon's Rock.

Dear All,

It is currently bow hunting season in Massachusetts. Shotgun season begins on the 30th of this month. The campus is private property and hunting is not permitted on our campus. We are, however, surrounded by a few properties that allow hunting. On occasion, hunters have been seen in the woods on or near our campus. If you do see anyone hunting (don't worry, you will recognize them immediately) please let someone know so we can ask them to leave. Additionally, as you make your way through the woods over the next month, I ask that you follow official Massachusetts State Government recommendations by "actively displaying non-deerlike characteristics." I will leave this up to your interpretation, and perhaps endless entertainment, but I will suggest wearing bright colors and singing loudly - neither of which are considered deerlike.

Thanks,
Ken
Director of Security

Responses to Teach For America pre-interview readings

2009-11-05T07:42:00.001-08:00

I applied to Teach For America last week and I made it to the phone interview phase, which will be Monday for me. Before the interview, there are a couple of short articles you're supposed to read. To help organize my thoughts, I will discuss them a little here. Comments welcome, of course.

The first article is all about the Achievement Gap, which basically means the fact that students in certain groups (namely, those from low-income families, African-American, and Hispanic students) tend to perform worse than others, according to several different measures of performance. It cites lots of statistics to demonstrate the problem, and then tackles the questions of why the gap exists, and what we can do about it.

There are many reasons given but the one most relevant to a TFA applicant is of course the quality of teaching. According to the article,

[S]tudents in high-poverty, high-minority schools have less access to highly qualified teachers than do students in low-poverty, low-minority schools. Secondary students in high-poverty schools are twice as likely as those in low-poverty schools to have a teacher who is not certified in the subject he or she teaches. Students in high-poverty, high-minority schools are also more likely to be taught by an inexperienced teacher. Furthermore, teachers in high-poverty schools reported less favorable working conditions than teachers in wealthier schools. Teachers from high-poverty schools were more likely to report that student disrespect and lack of parent involvement were problems.

Makes sense to me. I was very fortunate to attend a nontraditional private school up through 6th grade and then the Manhattan Beach school district after that, both of which encouraged lots of parent involvement, as well as parental financial support. Of course it made a huge noticeable difference to the students, by providing for great art and music programs, relatively happy teachers, etc. Plus parent involvement goes a very long way toward getting students to be engaged with their classes and homework.

I also really like the point about teachers having a credential in the subject they teach. I can't imagine teaching, say, English or History, at any grade level. I suppose I would be capable of doing it if necessary, with the right kind of support. But why would you put me in that position? I don't have much of a passion for history or literature, so I would make an uninspired lesson plan, and then follow it mechanically with far less enthusiasm than someone who majored in that subject, or at least something closely related to it. If a student asked a question that was outside the planned curriculum, I would encourage their curiosity, but I would probably be very little help in answering it myself. It would be very hard for me to show the students the connection between the current lesson and future lessons or careers. (And effective learning is all about students drawing connections between things. That's one of the many things that Carl Wieman talked about when he came to USC -- something else I've been meaning to blog about.) I think people often forget how perceptive students can be. You can bet they know the difference between a historian (or mathematician, or scientist, or musician, or whatever) sharing their love for their chosen field, and someone who is "just" a teacher, plodding through the same old three-ring binder full of lecture notes, year after year.

Okay, you say, you're passionate about Physics. You're really interested in the cutting edge research and string theory and all that. But is it really possible to be that passionate about boring, first semester Newtonian mechanics? Absolutely. I think it's awesome how a few simple equations can describe all kinds of different phenomena in the real world. If you don't buy that, then at the very least, you can remember how interesting it was when you learned it for the first time, and be excited that you have the chance to pique the interest of a whole room full of new students. This is more or less what I said in my TFA application: The achievement gap is depressing, yes. But what disappoints me more (maybe just because I have more first-hand experience with it) is that things I find so intriguing (such as Physics) are so immensely boring for a lot of people. When I tell people I'm a Physics major, they always say things like "Oh God, I hated Physics. I was terrible at it!" This makes me incredibly disappointed, not because the person has "failed" in some way--many of these people are very successful in some other field--but because Physics is really cool and it saddens me to think that people are unable to see how cool it is. I think getting people interested is probably half the battle in getting them to achieve at a higher level. If you truly care about what you're learning, it's easy to be motivated enough to excel at it.

The other article is called Assessment Through the Student's Eyes, and it's all about how assessment affects students' emotions and self-confidence, which of course affects their performance. If they do well on tests and homework, they are pleased and encouraged and tend to keep doing well. If not, they just think "I don't get it" and become less and less motivated, so their scores stay low.

Okay, so what do we do about it? The article is mostly about what it calls "assessment for learning" as opposed to "assessment to verify learning." The assessment methods should be developed by both the students and the teacher, rather than just the teacher. They should be descriptive and contain clear indications about what the student can do to improve. If you're too lazy to read the whole article, I would recommend you skip down to the "scenarios." They show how you can keep students motivated (without just giving everyone an A), and they seem like great examples to follow. I've had a couple of great experiences that follow this philosophy pretty closely.

The private school I went to (then called Via Pacifica, now called Del Sol) didn't have grades, in either sense of the word: No A's, B's, or C's, and also no first grade, second grade, etc. Instead, students were divided into four groups (called "pods" for whatever reason) called the "explorers," "discoverers," "investigators," and "voyagers." People unfamiliar with the school would always ask me, "Well... how do you know if you did well, if you don't have grades?" It seemed like a strange question at the time, because we actually got more feedback than in many public-school classrooms. On writing assignments, we would sit down and go through them, paragraph by paragraph, explaining things that were unclear and figuring out how we could have written them more clearly in the first place. In math, we would identify any mistakes and confusing concepts, and continue to work on them until everything was clear. In fact, the math classes seemed to mimic the article's second scenario pretty closely. Last time you got, say, an 87% on a math test, did you look through it and find all your mistakes, so that you could take it again and do better? Probably not, because there is no incentive to do so in most classes.

The other experience I'm reminded of is last year in Quantum Mechanics with Dr. Richard Thompson. We had homework and tests just like any other Physics class, but after an assignment was returned, we were expected to go back and correct all the mistakes on them. It may sound a little draconian ("Do it again, and don't come back until it's perfect!") but it meant that we would really understand everything in one chapter before diving into the next one. Of course, mistakes ranged from simple sign errors to bigger conceptual misunderstandings, but in each case, we would find the mistake, with the professor's help if necessary, fix it, and then write out the rest of the problem. Once you got used to it, it was a very satisfying system, in which you knew that you really understood everything you'd learned, even though you may have messed it up on an assignment or in the high-pressure environment of an exam.

These two experiences reinforce what the article said: Assessment can and should be used, not just to evaluate the performance of students and teachers but to provide useful feedback to the students that will help them understand what to do as they move forward, and motivate them to do it.

Again, comments are welcome. Wish me luck on the interview!

How To Win Civil Rights

2009-10-09T19:34:00.000-07:00

From this CNN interview yesterday between Anderson Cooper and Cleve Jones:

You know, any one thing you do isn't going to get you where you want to go. A march won't do it; electing a friendly legislator won't do it; writing a check won't do it; signing a petition won't do it; clicking a mouse won't do it; picketing won't do it; getting arrested in civil disobedience won't do it. But if you do all of those things, over and over, relentlessly, with determination, that's how we win.

You also have to love Anderson Cooper's description of Barney Frank as "highest ranking gay member of Congress."

Don't look back, don't look forward. Look at where you are.

2009-09-06T22:55:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was my last first gameday ever. The last time that I will ever, as a student and as a member of the Trojan Marching Band, experience the thrill of that very first day of USC football. There are more gamedays to come of course, but only a handful of them, and there is nothing like the first game: No substitute for seeing the Coliseum full of cardinal and gold, for the first time since a November or December game that seemed like years ago.

There are going to be a lot of "last" moments this year, and I know that at certain times, it's going to be tough not to get a little disappointed. From my very first band camp, I could already tell how important the band was going to be, and I knew the years would fly past me way too fast. I was right.

I was going to write a whole post about not taking things for granted, because if you do they will be gone before you know it. And I do think that every single day, you should think about all the great things in your life, and how lucky you are to have them. I was going to list all the things that I'm grateful for, from big things like being admitted to USC, to small things like the amusing little running jokes we have in the band, and everything in between.

But I'm beginning to think that won't be an issue for me this year. I'm beginning not to worry that I will take anything for granted. The greater risk for me, I think, is that I will go too far in the opposite direction. That I will spend too much time thinking about how quickly it's all slipping away from me; picturing what it will be like when I march my last step on the field; anticipating how that last finals week in May will feel; picturing commencement and realizing that I may be seeing some people for the last time.

So my goal is to strike the right balance. For every great moment that happens this year, I will mentally detach myself, just for an instant, to realize how lucky I am to be part of it. And then I will try to let the instant pass, clear my mind, and simply live in that moment. It's all about finding the right balance between reflecting on events, and simply living through them.

Fight on, Trojans.

My email to the National Organization for Marriage.

2009-08-11T18:47:00.000-07:00

I will let you know when I get a response. Should you become inspired to write your own email to NOM, the address is contact@nationformarriage.org

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 6:47 PM, Tyler Breisacher wrote:

Hi there!

I've been reading the material on your website, and I'm particularly interested in the "talking points" page on your website. I'm a Californian and I was very involved in the gay marriage battle in this state last year. It's great to see the best arguments against gay marriage summed up in one place. Of course, this issue is far from settled, and is still being debated all over this state and country, so I want to continue to be as informed as possible in the event that the issue comes up when talking with my friends and family. In particular, I have a question about this point:

“Religious groups like Catholic Charities or the Salvation Army may lose their tax exemptions, or be denied the use of parks and other public facilities, unless they endorse gay marriage."

Of course it's usually hard to prove or disprove statements about what "may" happen so normally I would accept this as a very real possibility. But as Californians we have the unique perspective of a state that had gay marriage for a few months last summer, before we restored the traditional definition of marriage. I think pro-gay activists might jump on this point: "No one will lose their tax exempt status. Gay marriage was legal last year, and no one lost their tax exempt status, did they?" I wouldn't know how to respond to this. Do you have any news stories about churches losing their tax exempt status over this issue, either in California or elsewhere? I seem to remember a case from New Jersey but my understanding is that it was a fairly complicated situation, so it would be nice to see all the facts of that case laid out somewhere.

Whenever I'm discussing this kind of thing with my friends I like to be armed with as much information as possible, so if you could point me to more information on how gay marriage has negatively affected churches I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you!

Tyler
matrixfrog@gmail.com

TDD with Infinitest

2009-08-09T10:33:00.000-07:00

As I posted last time, I'm writing a game in Java called Flood It, ~~copied from~~ inspired by the game of the same name by Lab Pixies. I encourage you to play it and if you find any bugs, or would like to request enhancements, add an issue in the issue tracker. In fact, if you do play it, you'll probably understand this post better.

One of the most important classes in the game is called Grid: It represents the big grid of squares and also keeps track of which ones are in the upper-left group. Because it's so important, I decided to write some unit tests for it, because that's supposed to be the best way to write great code and all that. I'm also using a great little tool called Infinitest which continuously runs your tests for you in the background, all the time. What happened just now is, I think, a great example of why everyone says unit testing is so important.

The constructor for Grid takes a width, a height, and a number of colors. It picks some colors and then populates the grid with a random assortment of squares. So far, so good. But I'm trying to implement an undo/redo feature so I think I'm probably going to need to override clone(). In this case, the constructor will fill the grid with a bunch of incorrect squares, only to have the clone() method overwrite all that data. I decided not to worry about it. Here was my original clone() method:


protected Grid clone() {
 Grid clone = new Grid(this.getWidth(), this.getHeight(), this.colors.size());
 clone.colors = this.colors;
 for (int x=0; x<getWidth(); x++) {
   for (int y=0; y<getHeight(); y++) {
     clone.data[x][y] = this.data[x][y].clone();
   }
 }
 clone.update();
 return clone;
}

The update() method just checks for any squares that may have suddenly become part of the upper left group because the player changed the color of the group, and adds them to the set. Can you see the bug yet? There are actually two bugs, very closely related. I might have caught both of them eventually by playing the game itself, but this method isn't called anywhere in the actual game yet so that might not be until a few days from now. Luckily, I thought to write a unit test:


private void testClone(Grid orig) {
 Grid clone = orig.clone();

 System.out.println("Original:");
 System.out.println(orig);
 System.out.println("Clone:");
 System.out.println(clone);

 assertEquals(orig.getWidth(), clone.getWidth());
 assertEquals(orig.getHeight(), clone.getHeight());
 assertEquals(orig.getColors().size(), clone.getColors().size());
 assertEquals(orig.getNumInUpperLeftGroup(), clone.getNumInUpperLeftGroup());

 for (Color color : orig.getColors()) {
   assertTrue(clone.getColors().contains(color));
 }

 for (int x=0; x<orig.getWidth(); x++) {
   for (int y=0; y<orig.getHeight(); y++) {
     Square origSquare = orig.get(x,y);
     Square cloneSquare = clone.get(x,y);
     assertNotSame(origSquare, cloneSquare);
     assertTrue(origSquare.sameColor(cloneSquare));
   }
 }
}

Actually, it was the comparison of the toString() outputs that led me to the first bug. Then I decided to add the getNumInUpperLeftGroup() method and use it in the unit test, which led me to the second bug. Which is why you shouldn't put information in toString() that's not accessible somewhere else. But anyway. The first bug was that clone.update() was not adding anything to the upper left group. I knew this because the toString() showed squares in the upper left group as capital letters and others in lowercase. In the clone, it was all lowercase. What was wrong with the clone's update() method? Nothing, actually. For a Grid constructed normally, the last thing in the constructor is upperLeftGroup.add(get(0, 0)); and then update(); My new grid needed that first square to "seed" the update method. So I added clone.upperLeftGroup.add(clone.get(0,0)); to the bottom of the clone() method, before the update, and ran the test again. This time the toString() outputs matched perfectly, but the test still failed.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find the second bug. And by that I mean I'm tired of typing so I'll post it later. But suffice it to say that without this unit test having caught the second bug, I might have had some very strange behavior that only showed up in a very particular case. It might have gone uncaught for weeks and when I did find it, it would have driven me crazy and taken me quite a long time to figure out.

This is why everyone says unit testing is so important. I think I get it now.

New project: Flood It

2009-08-06T00:36:00.000-07:00

Through a stroke of luck, I managed to gain possession of an iPhone for a few days, and I downloaded a game I really liked called Flood It. Knowing I'd only have the iPhone for a few days, and not knowing whether any implementations of the game existed online anywhere, I decided to try and make my own, and try to learn a little about Swing and GUI programming as I go.

If you have Java, download it and play it and let me know what you think. Hopefully I will continue working on it at least a little every day so try it out and if you have any suggestions or bug reports, put them in the issue tracker (I don't know if you need a Google account or what).

Enjoy!

Windmills do not work that way!

2009-07-20T22:06:00.001-07:00

Not everyone is a scientist, but there is a certain amount of science that everyone should know. If I were going to start a new blog where I explain scientific topics in laymen's terms, with the goal of improving the general public's scientific literacy, I would call the blog "Windmills do not work that way." Maybe I will do that someday. Like I'll maybe update this blog more often some day.

The line comes from the episode of Futurama I'm watching right now.

OpenCongress.org

2009-06-29T19:26:00.000-07:00

A group called the Sunlight Foundation is trying really hard to take the Good Idea That Everyone Agrees On, that the activity in government should be open and visible to everyone, and turn it into a Cool Website You Can Actually Visit.

It's called and it's as Web-2.0-y as you could possibly want. You can leave comments and discuss bills. There's a Facebook app. You can track things. Etc., etc.

Check it out!

Stonewall

2009-06-28T13:30:00.000-07:00

As you may know, today is the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which are often seen as the beginning of the gay rights movement. I was going to try to do a little reading on the history of the movement, and talk about how far we've come and how much further we have yet to go. But my friend Kyle basically did all that already, so instead, I encourage everyone to read his excellent post.

Real-life Version Control

2009-06-23T21:34:00.000-07:00

I had an idea today, about Version Control. Since probably half the readers of this blog don't know what that is, maybe this quote from the Subversion Book will help:

Subversion is a free/open source version control system. That is, Subversion manages files and directories, and the changes made to them, over time. This allows you to recover older versions of your data or examine the history of how your data changed. In this regard, many people think of a version control system as a sort of "time machine."

Subversion, and all the other version control systems out there, were generally designed by programmers, and they tend to also be used by programmers. This is because they tend to include tools that are good for writing code, like "diff," and that programmers are the kind of people that like to find technological solutions to problems.

Other people may have their own methods for version control, usually with pretty bad big-O complexity. Which is computer-science-speak for "wastes hard drive space, and runs slowly." Have you ever seen something like this on your computer?

project052809.xls

project052909.xls

project052909 - 2.xls

project053009.xls

project053009 fixed.xls

project053009 final.xls

project053009 with changes.xls

project053109 with changes 2.xls

project060109.xls

project060109 - new.xls

project060209.xls

project060209final.xls

project060209 really final.xls

project060209 FINAL VERSION.xls

... you get the idea. You don't want to lose track of old versions, because every time you delete

or change something, you know that you might later change your mind and want to revert back to that point. Well that's the whole point of version control, except that it's automated so you don't have to keep changing filenames. Plus it's done in a very clever way so that if you have 25 versions of a 400MB file, it probably won't take 10GB of file space to do it. If you like, you can have multiple people accessing the same repository, which means no more emailing the same file back and forth with minor changes. Even more exciting: You don't need anything fancy like a system administrator or knowledge of how to use Linux.

Anyway, the idea that I had today was "What if other types of engineers could use version control? What if we could version-control real-life things?" So I had an idea for a cute little video that could be used to demonstrate the functionality of version control systems. As far as I know, no one has yet created such a video. And by that I mean I looked on youtube for a few seconds and didn't find anything. Here goes:

A girl opens a drawer and gets out a blank piece of paper. A little blue question mark appears, hovering over the corner of the paper. She gets a pencil and starts drawing a picture of a tortoise. After a little while, it looks like a cute little tortoise, not bad for a first draft. She looks at the front of her desk and sees a little machine with several big friendly buttons on the front. She presses one that looks like a green arrow. Suddenly,

something pokes out of the top of the machine, and a laser shoots down and scans her new drawing. The laser mechanism retracts back into the device. The girl looks down and sees the the blue question mark has been replaced by a green circle.

The girl now cheerfully grabs a bunch of permanent markers from a cup on her desk, and begins to color in her drawing. As soon as she starts drawing, the green circle floating above the corner of the drawing turns red. She keeps going until the tortoise is looking rather adorable, and pushes the green button again. The device laser-scans her drawing, the circle turns green again, and she walks away, satisfied with her new drawing.

Cut to her friend's house. Her friend sits down at his desk, with no paper or drawing of any kind. But he does have the device. He presses a gold button on his machine, and suddenly an exact copy of the girl's drawing appears on his desk, with the green circle hovering above it. He grabs an orange marker and a black marker and starts drawing a tiger, standing behind the tortoise. The circle turns red. The tiger is, of course, ferocious. But it is also very badly drawn. Not seeming to mind, the boy hits the green button proudly. His drawing is laser-scanned and the hovering circle turns green.

The girl now comes back to her desk, and the drawing still looks like it did when she left. She hits a button on the version control device and it instantly changes to include the tiger. She picks up a black marker and adds an outline to the tiger to make him look less sloppy.

Etc. Eventually there would be a part where something goes terribly wrong, and they use version control to undo the changes. Anyway, that's my idea...

Just ignore them.

2009-06-05T23:16:00.000-07:00

This is a lesson that people really need to learn. Just ignore them. Sometimes when something annoys you, talking about it, complaining about it, gossiping about it makes you feel better. And that's great for little things like how ugly your friend's new car is or whatever. But for things like this latest scandal on the gay blogs (this kind of gay blog, not this kind) there is only one right answer. Actually, there's two. One of them is "Just ignore them" and the other is related to that.

Okay, so the issue itself is this. A couple of talk radio hosts at some radio station went on an extended anti-transgender tirade a few days ago, saying all these terrible things about transgender kids, explicitly advocating violence toward them, etc. And as I'm reading all this, there are a variety of reactions. The one I've seen the most is "Click here to send a message to the two radio douchebags and ask them to apologize." Well, lots of people did that, and guess what? They refused. Anyone shocked?

Radio people are just people. If you walked past someone on the street, standing on a soapbox, going on and on to all who would listen about how transgender people are subhuman, what would you do? You would not listen. If everyone did that, the guy would disappear. Well okay, not really. But in the case of these radio guys, they really would. It turns out Jeff Atwood recently wrote a post about the same thing. It's a programming blog but the point is the same. People who rely on media to be heard, whether it's the internet, the radio, or whatever, will disappear if people stop listening to them. What those people need is not money, it's attention. Take that away, and they're no one.

My friend Heather was asking last night, is the internet still there if no one is there to use it? Well, in a sense, no, it's not. A blog that no one reads is a lot like a blog that doesn't exist. (Now you're thinking about posting some clever sarcastic comment involving some form the word "irony." But you're reading this, so shut up.) And a radio host that no one listens to is likely to be fired. So rather than contact the idiots and ask them to apologize, how about we contact the station, and let them know that this kind of shit is just not okay. At all. Ever. (In fact GLAAD succeeded in getting some advertisers to stop advertising on the station. For once I think GLAAD is doing the right thing and all the other orgs are wrong...)

Anyway, if you don't like something that a perfect stranger is doing, ignore them. If everyone did that, the world would be a better place overnight.

Internship: Week 1

2009-06-03T20:21:00.000-07:00

So I'm about a week into my internship this summer, and I'm already up and running in a real way. I don't have any dramatic, sweeping observations just yet, but here's a few quick ones.

I know everyone's heard of KISS -- Keep It Simple, Stupid. But sometimes you try a little too hard. I had to write a test which would create a new feed. All feeds must have a unique name, so how do you come up with a unique name -- one that you know hasn't been used before? My solution: Search the database for the name "testFeed1" -- if it's already been created, look for "testFeed2." If that's already been used, ... etc. until you find one that hasn't been used yet. Can you guess yet what answer my supervisor told me to use? The answer is: testFeedyyyyMMdd_hhmmss, where yyyy is the four-digit year, MM is the two-digit month, etc. So yeah. KISS.
Java can be a little wordy but I'm starting to really like it. If you have Eclipse, it's great, because you rarely have to type any full words. Also dot-ctrl-space is my best friend. "I know this object can do what I want, and the method for doing it is probably starts with 'get' -- how will I find out what it is?" Also the Javadoc tool is great. There's a few annoyances, and some Python features I really miss having, but overall, good times.
I might be able to do some kind of research project in the fall that would be a continuation of what I'm doing this summer. More details to come.
Software people love silly jokes. You can tell that in every conversation or meeting, they're always waiting for an opening--anything that they can make a joke about. And when it comes, they will pounce on it. Of course you have to make the joke in the exact tone of voice that you would use when you're not making a joke at all.
~~Ping pong~~ Table tennis is a big deal at this company. Seriously.

The Gay Agenda

2009-05-25T15:04:00.000-07:00

Jaan Williams, who was a huge part of the No on 8 campaign, recently posted what you might call The Gay Agenda (or actually the GLBT agenda) on Twitter. Rather than retweet it (since it's several tweets long) I thought I would re-post it here. So here it is.

Marriage equality is great; it's just not the be all end all of our rights. We still need employment protections, hate crimes protections. We need to repeal adoption bans, work for second parent adoptions. We need anti-bullying laws, we need protection from discrimination in accommodations and housing, we need healthcare reform and educated providers. We need immigration rights (w/other CIR), a repeal of DADT, repeal of DOMA. We need a repeal of the APA's definition of gender identity. We need reform in the way identity documents are used, created and maintained. We need to stop no-match letters coming from social security. We need better education and prevention on same sex/queer partner abuse. We need awareness and education for EMS staff about trans people. We need more AIDS prevention/living w/AIDS programs in general and in communities of color. We need broader recognition of all family structures. I could go on and that is the point. I care passionately about the right to marry. I spent 6 months working on the No on 8 campaign. We can just not believe for 1 minute, regardless of what happens on Tuesday, that marriage is our only fight and that it is only in California.

Plans for summer

2009-05-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to take a second and lay out some plans for the summer before I start my internship on Tuesday. Whether I actually stick to all of these, well, we'll see.

Get feedback. In my last two internships I didn't ask for feedback very often. I guess that's probably more typical for the real world, but what I'm used to is school where every single assignment has a grade associated with it, so you know exactly what you did right, what you did wrong, and how to improve for the next assignment. So this time, I want to try to check in with someone as often as possible, to get some feedback. This is my only internship-related plan so far. I'll probably add more once I get there.
Read some books. Like a lot of people, I don't read enough. I mean, I read a lot of blogs and websites and stuff, but that doesn't really count. So I'm going to try to read some actual books this summer. Probably starting with the one Andy gave me that I never got through.
Continue the conversation. A few weeks ago, I tried to start a conversation with the handful of people I know who voted yes on prop 8. It went well, but I didn't have enough time to devote to the conversation. Regardless of the decision this Tuesday, I want to continue to talk to them, understand their reservations about same-sex marriage, and debunk any misunderstandings they have about the situation.
Do some coding. Of course I'll probably be doing a bunch of coding at my internship, but if I have time, I'd like to do some little project of my own as well. I don't know what it would be... just something fun. Maybe learn a new obscure language.
Fun stuff. Besides hanging out with band people at orientation gigs, I'll probably try to spend some time at the beach, in West Hollywood, and of course Catalina and Lake Tahoe. This is my last summer before graduation so it has to be fun!

How to Repeal "Don't Ask Don't Tell"

2009-05-12T10:48:00.000-07:00

I've been reading the new study that just came out from the Palm Center at UCSB, entitled How to Repeal "Don't Ask Don't Tell".

What many people probably believe, and what I believed until recently, is that since DADT was created by Congress, it would take an act of Congress to eliminate it. Such an act already exists, the Military Readiness Enhancement Act, first introduced in 2005, although I think the Let the Gays Serve Their Country If They Want To, For God's Sake. Don't You Know We're At War Right Now?! Act might be a more appropriate name. In any case, as the study points out, many people in Congress don't want to do anything without consulting with military leaders first. Military leaders don't necessarily want to do anything either. Obama wants to do something but knows that it might be unpopular with many people. Basically, everyone is waiting for someone else to act.

But what I didn't realize until just now, is that Obama can effectively stop this ridiculous policy immediately if he wants to. He can tell the military to stop investigating whether people are gay. (In the recent case of Lt. Dan Choi, there wasn't much of an "investigation" -- he came out willingly on national television). This might be somewhat unpopular because it could come across as circumventing the laws that Congress has created, instead of getting them repealed via the appropriate channels.

But there is something else he can do, even for Lt. Choi, and the thousands of other soldiers who are already known to the military to be gay. According to a law passed after the Vietnam War, "the President may suspend any provision of law relating to promotion, retirement, or separation applicable to any member of the armed forces who the President determines is essential to the national security of the United States." (pg. 11 of the study) Typically, this is used to force people to stay on duty after their normal term of service ends. (The "stop loss" policy.) In this case, it would be used to keep someone in the military who actually wants to serve. This doesn't provide a long-term solution, but maybe after a few months of gays serving openly, if the sky doesn't fall and the world doesn't end, Congress will understand that this is the right thing to do.

Hm, wasn't I thinking almost this exact thought, a few months ago? Oh, right. "Now that gay couples actually have gotten married in this very state," I said, "surely people will see that these marriages had no effect on them, and will live and let live." Ugh.

Personally, I think it would be better if the change comes from Congress, but it's clear that the president needs to act quickly and assertively, either to get the Congress to step up, or to simply make it happen directly. Otherwise, we'll be stuck with this same dangerous, stupid, offensive policy for years and years. He needs to just be the guy that goes, "Okay. This is what we're doing."

Lt. Choi's new organization, Knights Out is asking everyone to call the White House today and "flood the switchboards" to ask the President to repeal this law. They offer a sample script but if you can just speak honestly about your opinion of this policy, I think that would send a stronger message. If you've read this far, I'd say you're probably well-informed enough to do that. 202-456-1111. Please call and express your support for ending this ban. This is not a "gay issue," this is a "let's treat everyone equally" issue.

I'll finish up this post with a quick quote I found in the study, and to keep this blog from getting too serious, a video from The Onion.

“Equal and just treatment of all personnel exerts direct and favorable influence on morale, discipline, and command authority. Since these key factors contribute to mission effectiveness, efforts to ensure equal treatment are directly related to the primary mission.”
(Department of the Army. (1973). Improving race relations in the Army: Handbook for leaders. Washington, DC (Pamphlet Number 600-16), page 2.

'Gays Too Precious To Risk In Combat,' Says General

Teach For America

2009-04-09T13:41:00.000-07:00

A recruiter from Teach For America emailed me and a few other students, saying that she was "reaching out to us based on our achievement at USC and our roles as SI Leaders." The recruitment director for the program wants to come and talk to us on campus next week. Woo! Anyway, I started reading a little bit more about it, and it turns out there's this whole collection of blogs from current TFA corps members. After reading several of their posts, here's what I've learned:

Teaching is hard.
No really. Teaching is very, very hard.
Occasionally, teaching is extremely rewarding.
See numbers 1 and 2.

I still think I want to learn more about the program and probably apply for it. And maybe even be a teacher permanently. Maybe.

USC Ally Discussion: Pro-Gay Marriage and Anti-Homophobia Intervention Strategies

2009-03-05T14:17:00.000-08:00

I went to this event today. Here's the full description:

Ally Discussion: Pro-Gay Marriage and Anti-Homophobia Intervention Strategies
Featuring Jade Agua, Assistant Director for Asian Pacific American Student Services and Rev. Jim Burklo, Associate Dean for Religious Life
12- 1 pm
WPH 403
On the day the California Supreme court begins to hear arguments about Propostion 8, USC Allies will learn intervention strategies on how to combat homophobia and also advocate for marriage equality. Some topics to be discussed how to use religion in favor of gay marriage and how to start these conversations with our friends and family.

Basically we just talked about the different anti-gay arguments that tend to come up a lot, particularly those that were used during the prop 8 campaign, and the best ways to combat them. I took some notes along the way, so I just wanted to post some scattered thoughts and good quotes.

The first thing Jim talked about was how his own homophobia was cured over the course of about 20 minutes, as a result of a close friend coming out to him. It's important to represent ourselves and the gay community as real people so that people can't think of us as "those people up in the Castro"--we're just people like everyone else. Later on, someone mentioned that people associate homosexual couples with sex. They see gay families as an environment where innocent children are surrounded by sex all the time. Seems to me, the solution is probably to make gays seem like ordinary people.
When he was growing up, gay rights was a nonissue, in the sense that it wasn't something people thought about or talked about at all. Sometime soon, it will be a nonissue, in that nearly everyone will just agree that same-sex marriage is okay.
He believes that the people and the churches will lead this movement. (Obviously not all churches, but some of the more "progressive" ones.) Then the law will follow. This goes against the feeling I had recently, "There's no point in us fighting much more right now. It's the court's move at this point." That was largely an excuse I made to myself anyway, because I was sick of doing campaign work.
Jim moved on to talking about the Bible. The type of same-sex relationships we're talking about (committed, monogamous) are never mentioned in the Bible. Jesus himself didn't mention homosexuality at all. He does, however, have something to say about divorce. In any case, progressive Christians are not required to believe everything the Bible says.
Jim and Jade did a little role-play, Jade playing a yes-on-8 voter who is uncomfortable going against the Catholic Church. Jim reminds her that even the Catholic church admits that you must listen to your conscience--the voice of God within you--when it is in conflict with the Church.
He also emphasizes religious freedom. No one wants there to be an official religion of the state. One of the students in attendance (who was half of an adorable gay couple) points out that this argument must be approached very carefully, because the yes voters want their children to be "free from having the beliefs of others forced upon them." A great point about that: Teaching kids about something is not the same as teaching them that it is good or they should do it.
There are a lot of sins in Leviticus that no one would ever seriously suggest we legislate against. I didn't catch the title, but there's a book about someone who tried to follow Leviticus literally for one year. Supposed to be very funny.
More on the Bible: St. Paul condemns homosexual relationships. But he also condemns heterosexual relationships, advises everyone not to have sex at all, unless absolutely necessary. He's also completely opposed to marriage and family life. (If I understood correctly, reproduction isn't necessary because the second coming of Jesus is only a few years away.)
The slippery slope argument: If we let gays get married, how do we know this won't open the door to pedophilia, incest, etc. The key is to point out that we're talking about consenting adults. Children and animals are not in that category. Also, remind people that those are completely separate, unrelated issues.
Jade: "The traditional family is a myth. Somebody made it up in the 50's and they've been promoting it on TV ever since."
This is important: According to some study, people don't vote for rational reasons. Their votes are usually based on emotional reasons. This of course goes back to the common complaint that the no on 8 campaign should have used actual images of gay couples. But with that in mind, what are the appeals to emotion that we can make? The suicide rate among GLBT kids is still relatively high. Not that we can change that overnight, but the way the government/society treats them might have something to do with it.
http://www.soulforce.org/ is a resource for gay Christians. Jim described it as "PFLAG for evangelicals"
Rick Warren is slowly beginning to change his stance. He's removed all the anti-gay language from his website and invited Melissa Etheridge to speak at his church. This was news to me!
I think the most annoying argument I hear is that prop 8 is the "will of the people." Democracy is not the same as majority rule. There's a reason we have courts and a Constitution.
Jade recommends talking to the yes voters you know, and who may be persuadable, not worrying about the far "right wing" people.

If you have friends who voted yes, and you probably do, talk to them. It's not easy, but it's necessary. No matter what happens 90 days from now, we should continue to fight, and dispell the myths from the campaign that many people still believe.

easy-to-use!

2009-02-24T21:33:00.000-08:00

I'm beginning to think that Python being really easy to use is not a wholly positive feature. In a language where refactoring your code takes a long time, you're more likely to stop and think before you write something, like you're supposed to do. That's all for now.

Sierpinski Triangle

2009-02-24T14:06:00.001-08:00

I've been playing around with Scheme (a dialect of Lisp (a weird language that I can't really describe)) by watching these videos and kind of just playing around. Today, I got a working Sierpinski triangle program. It's not particularly elegant, but it could be worse.

What's the best way to auto-convert spaces to non-breaking spaces?

; Draw a sierpinski triangle

; Get all six coords of vertices of equilateral triangle
; with tip at (x1, y1) and side length 'side'
(define (triangle x1 y1 side)
 (let ((x2 (- x1 (/ side 2)))
       (x3 (+ x1 (/ side 2)))
       (y2 (- y1 (/ (* (sqrt 3) side) 2)))
       (y3 (- y1 (/ (* (sqrt 3) side) 2))))
   (list x1 y1 x2 y2 x3 y3)))

(define (draw-triangle g x1 y1 side)
 (let ((tri (triangle x1 y1 side)))
   (graphics-draw-line g (first tri)
                       (second tri)
                       (third tri)
                       (fourth tri))
   (graphics-draw-line g (first tri)
                       (second tri)
                       (fifth tri)
                       (sixth tri))
   (graphics-draw-line g (third tri)
                       (fourth tri)
                       (fifth tri)
                       (sixth tri))))

; Level-zero Sierpinski triangle is just a triangle
; Level-n triangle is three copies of level (n-1) triangle
(define (sier g n x1 y1 side)
 (if (= n 0)
     (draw-triangle g x1 y1 side)
     (let ((tri (triangle x1 y1 (/ side 2))))
       (sier g (- n 1) (first tri) (second tri) (/ side 2))
       (sier g (- n 1) (third tri) (fourth tri) (/ side 2))
       (sier g (- n 1) (fifth tri) (sixth tri) (/ side 2)))))

(define (new-sier g n x1 y1 side)
 (graphics-clear g)
 (sier g n x1 y1 side))

(define g (make-graphics-device 'win32 1000 1000))

;Call it like this:
(define side 2)
(new-sier g 6 0 (/ (* side (sqrt 3)) 4) side)

Note to Obama

2009-01-09T22:50:00.000-08:00

I realize that Obama himself is unlikely to actually read this, but I'm submitting it on the change.gov website and I'd like to think that maybe some intern or assistant somewhere might read it and, you know, take a note. Hopefully it does some small part to counteract all the letters they're getting from the "EQCA Action Center."

I worked very hard during the summer and fall of last year for a political campaign--something I had never done before because no person or issue had motivated me. And no, sorry, it was not the Obama/Biden campaign. While I was quite happy to see you win the election, my efforts focused on trying to defeat California's Proposition 8. I appreciated both Obama's and Biden's opposition to that proposition, and I am very disappointed that it passed, not just for the thousands of devoted same-sex couples statewide, but because I might like to get married myself one day.

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Equality California, asking me to write to Obama and his team, and express my intense outrage at his decision to allow Rick Warren, a vocal opponent of gay rights, to speak at the Inauguration. However, this is one of those times when I had to disagree with EQCA's views. In this case, I believe you have shown more maturity than many of the gay-rights leaders in this country. Rather than label our opponents as hateful, ignorant bigots, you have clearly expressed your disagreement with them on certain issues, but then shown them that you respect their views and do not think they are bad people just because they have such beliefs.

I see the passage of Prop 8 as a huge step backward for my state, and it angers and saddens me to know that people like Rick Warren are largely responsible for it. Nonetheless, I hope my voice will stand out as part of a minority within the LGBT community -- as someone who understands and supports the decision to allow him to speak.

It would be wonderful to have a president who agreed with me on everything. Instead, I have one who has committed to look at both sides of every issue. Realistically, that's probably the best I can hope for, which is why I look forward to hearing Rick Warren's comments on the 20th, and to the next four years.

"The politics of division"

2008-12-18T16:40:00.000-08:00

I just got an email from Equality California, one of the big gay-rights groups in California. I'm getting increasingly frustrated with them, and the other groups that fought against prop 8 this year. The latest scandal is that Barack Obama has asked Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration, and this has gotten the gay community into one of their big hissy fits, because he was a vocal proponent of proposition 8.

The email is actually from Geoff Kors, the director of EQCA, who apparently was invited to attend Obama's inauguration...

It is extremely disappointing and hurtful that President-elect Obama has chosen California Rev. Rick Warren, who actively supported Prop 8 and the elimination of existing civil rights for LGBT Californians, to give the invocation at his inauguration.

Accordingly, I have decided to decline the invitation to attend the inauguration as I cannot be part of a celebration that highlights and gives voice to someone who advocated repealing rights from me and millions of other Californians.

I was looking forward to hearing a speech by the new President about his vision of a new America and an end to the politics of division where one group is pitted against another.

I can't say that I'm particularly happy with Obama's choice, but I would definitely call this an overreaction, which represents my biggest problem with the gay-rights movement right now. People seem to be absolutely unable to see that just because someone disagrees with us, doesn't mean they hate us. I'm sure the accusations against Warren have some truth to them, and I'm sure if I did some research, I could find several things he's said which are extremely offensive to the gay community, and are probably flat-out lies. But if we want to end "the politics of division," how do we do it? Refuse to attend an event where someone who disagrees with us is going to speak? Accuse our opponents of "actively working to divide Americans"?

Obama and Biden were both on our side on the issue of prop 8. Let's not forget how meaningful that is. I doubt any politician could afford to oppose prop 22, and that was only 8 years ago. Now Obama is trying to demonstrate that he understands where the other side was coming from. He's trying to make those opposed to same-sex marriage feel like Obama is not their enemy. As hard as it is to hear, the people who are against same-sex marriage are people too. They're not stupid, or hateful, they just have differing opinions. And by the way, they also represent some 52% of California voters. The only way they're going to go away is if we can convince them to change their minds. For many people, this may impossible. Rick Warren may be one such person. But for the director of one of the biggest gay rights groups in the state to make a refusal like this... to me, it just seems like a huge step in the wrong direction.

Here's my prediction. Warren's invocation will include something like, "Let us unite as Americans" or "Let us put aside our differences, as we welcome a new era in American politics" or something like that, urging Americans to come together. That clip will be posted on youtube, and GLBT people will post the link over and over on their blogs, facebooks, etc., with comments like "Oh, how ironic. He wants us to be united, after he used his church to divide us," followed by some kind of insulting, divisive comment about Warren, his church, or Christianity in general.

Science TV

2008-12-15T17:13:00.000-08:00

I feel like I've talked about this before, but I wish there was more TV out there for science-minded people. I'm a physics major, which of course means I'm more knowledgeable about physics and the terminology it uses than most people. But I'm no more knowledgeable than anyone else about, say, biology, chemistry, neuroscience, or any number of other disciplines. It would be nice to see some TV shows about those things that were aimed at a "science-minded" audience.

I was watching Discovery Science channel the other day (which, when I first heard about it, I thought might be the kind of sciencey TV I was hoping for) and they were talking about how a microwave works. They said something like, "the transformer and the capacitor cause the electricity to become supercharged before sending it along to the magnetron." I guess because "supercharged" supposedly sounds cooler than "high voltage" (if that is in fact what they meant). It's just imprecise and uninformative.

Not to mention the point later on where they talked about electrons moving back and forth in a circuit at "nearly the speed of light." (It turns out this is one area where Wikipedia appears to be weak, but see here for at least some kind of explanation.)

Americans are dumb, and I don't think Discovery Science is helping as much as it could be.

How they see us

2008-12-04T22:17:00.000-08:00

Arianna Huffington was on the Daily Show last night talking about blogging and how great it is and how she has this new book out which is all about blogging. And one of the things she said is that blogging should be all about the first thought that comes to your head, rather than the conclusion you come to after lots of pondering.

I don't know how much I agree with that, but here's a thought I had today.

We get a lot of mail that's not for us, or at least that we didn't ask for, because of all the previous residents that have lived in our apartment. So today we got an envelope. The first thing I noticed was: "Your opinion matters!" and the fact that the return address was somewhere in Pennsylvania. The next thing I noticed was who it was addressed to: "Current resident"

I think that pretty well sums up the way that companies look at us. They want to know a lot about us: what we eat, what we buy, how often we buy it, what kind of stores we like. Basically, our opinion matters. But of course, what doesn't matter is our name. We don't want to know WHO you are, we just want to reduce you to a bunch of useful marketing data.

I feel so needed.

Daily Trojan: "Pro-gay rights and pro-proposition 8"

2008-11-19T01:25:00.000-08:00

In today's Daily Trojan, Kartik Sreepada, a student who voted yes on 8 tries to explain why. I recommend you read the whole thing, but I want to address some of the main points. First, though, I want to stress again that I fully respect the views of nearly everyone who voted yes on 8, because I know they did so for genuinely good reasons. I think they made the wrong choice, of course, but I do not want to label them as bigots or imply that they think of me as a second class citizen or any such thing. Anyway, here we go:

I recalled the succinct words of Vice President-elect Joe Biden during the vice presidential debate.

“Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage... That is basically the decision to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths,” he said.

First, by voting yes on 8, you redefined marriage. Admittedly, the existing definition had only been in place for a few months, but by voting yes, you are taking a stand on the issue and redefining marriage. I would also like to point out that Obama and Biden both supported NO on 8. (Biden: "If I lived in California, I'd clearly vote against prop 8. ... I think it's regressive, I think it's unfair."; Obama: When you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that's not what America's about."

I think there is a misunderstanding going on here. Civil marriage--marriage as recognized by the state of California--is not a religious institution. A couple may be both legally married and married in a religious ceremony, but the two do not have to go together. The CA Supreme Court decision in May made it very clear that the ruling only affected civil marriage. It had no effect on the marriages of any individual church, just as a change in any church's definition of marriage would have no effect on civil marriages. Of course the official definition of marriage as recognized by any particular church is up to the leadership of that church. There is no reason this should be the same as the definition the state offers, and of course it's not the same in many cases.

I truly do not understand how allowing same-sex couples to marry violates separation of church and state. The only explanation I can think of is that Sreepada seriously misunderstood the way our state handled same-sex marriages between June and November this year. Going on:

While the California Supreme Court’s acceptance of gay marriage appeared to grant complete equality to gays, it undemocratically undermined another pillar of our Constitution: the separation of church and state. The decision could have led to a dangerous rift between religious institutions and our government, possibly putting patriots at odds with the religiously faithful.

First of all, there seems to be a very common sentiment that any time a court overturns an existing law, it is undemocratic, simply because that law itself was created through democratic means (either a legislature, or a ballot measure). The foundation of our government is "by the people, for the people" but it is also a system of checks and balances. And a very important part of that is the ability for courts to rule that a law is unconstitutional. You may disagree with their decision, but striking down laws is part of their job--it's not unconstitutional for them to do it.

But to address the real point being made, I fail to see how the decision undermined the separation of church and state. I can only imagine that this view resulted from a misunderstanding of what allowing same-sex couples to marry (again, I'm talking about civil marriage, not marriage in the eyes of any specific religion) did and didn't do. It did indeed create a "rift" (to put it nicely) between several groups and individuals, as did prop 8 being on the ballot, as did its passage. I don't see how that makes it wrong or right. It just means this is a controversial issue.

After this, Sreepada tries to elaborate on how same-sex marriage undermines the separation of church and state. There is an argument about religious leaders being "forced to act against their faiths," which did not happen during the period when same-sex marriage was legal here, and would have continued not to happen, regardless of the outcome of prop 8. Then it is claimed that marriage is "not a legal concept." Certainly, religious marriage is probably older than civil marriage, but then the idea of trading goods for money has existed much longer than any California laws regulating businesses. Does that mean that a business is not a legal concept? No, it just means that it may have different meanings in different contexts. And one of those is a legal definition. Marriage is most certainly a legal concept.

In time, maybe the Supreme Court will declare the term “marriage” unconstitutional. When that moment comes, it will be a victory not just for equality, but the separation between church and state.

Perhaps this sheds some light on what was really meant. It's not that marriage isn't a legal concept, but rather that it shouldn't be one. That is, it is a religious concept which the government has become involved in, so its become a legal concept. Maybe it would be better left to the churches, and the government should just stay out of it. While the idea of eliminating civil marriage altogether is a bit radical, it would certainly be equal. All couples would have the same rights under the law.

Basically, this person seems simply misled or misinformed. If you think you understood him better than I did, please tell me.

Looking Forward

2008-11-06T14:26:00.000-08:00

Okay, so we lost. We're all angry about it. If it's going to take you a while to stop being angry, I understand. In fact, you probably shouldn't plan on ever "getting over it." So write angry facebook notes, take to the streets, unfriend the people who voted yes, whatever you need to do.

But I'm going to try to do what I can to look forward. Right now there are already lawsuits being filed, and whether anything comes from those or not, it's not clear what the next step will be. Whether it will come through the courts, the legislature, or another proposition showing up on the ballot, we don't know. But regardless of what it is, proposition 8 has started a long conversation on same-sex marriage, and I think it's important that we allow this conversation to move in a new direction.

To the "yes on 8" voters:

Marriage has always been between a man and a woman in this state, up until this past June, and I understand that kind of change is difficult for you, in the same way that anything new or unfamiliar is always difficult. The Supreme Court of California recognized a new right that had never been legally considered a right before (at least not here). Of course there will be at least some part of you that objects to that kind of change. I realize that, despite what you heard from the protesters on the streets of West Hollywood on Wednesday night, your vote was not intended to be bigoted or hateful, or to treat anyone as a second-class citizen. Change is hard, and we will never get any closer to reaching any kind of agreement or understanding on this issue if we don't recognize that fact.

That said, many of you were tricked into voting yes. You bear much of the responsibility for that, and of course, so does the official "yes on 8" campaign. The campaign consistently misled and lied to voters, in an effort to move the conversation away from the real issue (same-sex marriage) and scare people into voting yes. No church has ever been denied their tax-exempt status for refusing to marry any particular couple. If topics like marriage are taught in California public schools, they have to give parents the right to opt out. Barack Obama stated very clearly that he was against prop 8. Nearly all the official material that came from the yes on 8 campaign was absolute lies or at least implied false statements. It is your responsibility as a voter to be smart enough not to fall for such things, and to call out your own campaign when you see it happening. If you want to use the electoral process to prove that a majority of Californians are on your side, then you need to actually get out there and convince people. As it stands now, all you've proven is that people are very susceptible to emotional advertising.

To the "no on 8" voters:

First of all, next time, get angry before the election. And then channel your anger into volunteering or donating, or at least making sure all your friends will vote our way. And if they say they're not going to, then talk to them about it (see below). In any case, get angry and take action before the election. I'll only say it one more time. Get involved BEFORE the election.

When I was volunteering for the No On 8 campaign over the summer, trying to recruit new volunteers to join us, I would explain briefly how the campaign needed so many thousands of volunteers in order to win. Often, they would then assure me that such a proposition would never pass, not here in California. I don't think anything more needs to be said about those people.

I want to stress again that I understand how frustrated and disappointed everyone is right now. However, slogans like "Stop the hate, no on 8," referring to your opponents as bigots, saying they've treated you as a second class citizen, insulting an entire religious group: None of that helps us very much. Changing the minds of millions of people is not easy, but insulting them is a sure way not to do it. I think we did a great job in this campaign of making sure our messages were always positive and truthful. Next time around, we need to do exactly the same thing, and work even harder to combat the lies that we now know the other side will probably tell.

To people on both sides of this issue:

Even though this fight is over, the conversation that will lead us to the next fight has to continue. So keep talking about this issue, not just with your friends on your side, but with anyone you know who voted the other way. This can be a somewhat painful experience, but we all have to live in this state together, so let's at least try to understand each other a little bit. We will never all agree on everything, and there are people on both sides who will never be swayed. But if we don't start talking to each other soon, trying to understand where the "other side" is coming from, then the "yes" voters will always be "hateful homophobic bigots" and "no" voters will always be "in league with activist judges trying to redefine marriage for us all." This is California. We should be better than that. All of us.

Finally, an update

2008-10-09T00:49:00.000-07:00

Since the last time I posted anything of substance:

* I turned 21. That went pretty much how it should have gone.
* Classes have started again. I have two Physics classes, both of which started off kinda slowish, one much more than the other, but are now starting to become legitimately challenging and fun.
* I'm an SI Leader for Physics 152. I don't think I'm doing so well with that, but it's hard to know. I think I'm slowly improving.
* I've been working hard on the no on 8 campaign, which now has a small but mighty corps of volunteers here at USC, with phonebanks two days a week.
* I did the USC Programming Contest again, but I didn't really prepare for it at all, like I did last year. Did very badly, but it was also a tougher contest than the last one. And we all got t-shirts!
* I've agreed to help Elizabeth with a journalism project that will require some programming. I'm not even sure how I want to do it. It's the kind of thing that would be web-based in real life but Javascript is meh and other web programming languages I don't know at all. So I'm going to see if I can build up a proof-of-concept in Python. I guess.

Next post will be something about prop 8 I think.

Flash

2008-10-03T01:03:00.000-07:00

Fuck yes.

Actual informative post coming soon. Hopefully.

Prisoners and Lightbulbs

2008-07-20T23:14:00.000-07:00

I've been chatting on IRC a little bit, after discovering that, yes, people still use IRC sometimes. I really had no idea. Anyone, someone there posted this problem called One Hundred Prisoners and a Lightbulb, and it was driving me insane trying to figure out the answer. Unfortunately, the paper they linked to also had the answer, so I looked after a little while. Still, a fun problem, and it might be interesting to derive the details of the solution just using the basic outline.

Python Challenge

2008-06-13T23:46:00.000-07:00

I've been learning Python lately, both for my job and just for fun. After all, all the cool kids are learning Python, aren't they? Best of all, I found a great puzzle called Python Challenge, which consists of several cryptic puzzles that require programming to solve.

If you're learning programming, or want to learn, or you already know some and want to expand your realm of expertise, I highly recommend it. Out of the levels I've done so far, there is one that requires Python. The others were designed to be solved in Python, but could probably be done in any other language.

If you get stuck, there is a help forum, but they usually help you more with the concepts rather than how to write the code, so I wouldn't necessarily think of it as "cheating"--but try to do them on your own. It's more fun that way.

Lawmakers

2008-05-15T15:25:00.000-07:00

I never intended for this blog to be political in any way, and I'm not trying to change that now. But I do have one question. Here are some quotes from 365gay.com's article on today's historic California Supreme Court decision:

The dissenting opinion to Thursday's ruling was penned by Justice Marvin Baxter.

While he agreed with many arguments of the majority he said that any changes to the state marriage law should be decided by voters.

[...]

Schwarzenegger has previously vetoed bills that would have legalized gay marriage. Both times Schwarzenegger said that the courts or the people through a plebiscite should decide the issue.

I'm not an expert on how government works, but these two people, a California Supreme Court justice, and an actor-slash-governor, should both know a little something about how it works. If I'm not mistaken, we have three branches of government, just like the federal government does. One of them, the legislative branch, is responsible for making laws. We, the people of the state, are responsible for, among other things, electing the members of the legislative branch. The only reason for having the voters decide an issue directly is if the legislative branch is not responding to a pressing issue for some reason, and the citizens need to take things into their own hands. Now, it may be that the legislature is unwilling or unable to act on some issue, and in that case, it might be a good idea to have a ballot initiative. However, this is not that issue. The legislature has tried to make a decision, and, as it says in the article, Schwarzenegger vetoed their decision twice. I see no reason that this issue ought to be decided by the voters directly. Except perhaps that Schwarzenegger doesn't want to have a bunch of conservative anti-SSM people mad at him.

I'm not even looking at this from a gay rights point of view. I'm just saying, there are people in Sacramento whose job it is to make laws, and while there are other ways of doing that, I see no reason those other ways should be invoked now.

Writing "code"?

2008-05-12T23:57:00.000-07:00

My friend from freshman year, Elliot, has recently started a new blog, Anyone Can Code. I guess he's going to teach some programming courses over the summer, partly because he, like me, doesn't like the way most of the courses he's taken at USC have been taught. And because he believes that, well, anyone can code.

His first post on the Anyone Can Code blog lamented the people who are somewhat interested in computer science, but think they can't code. I've always thought that "people who can't do math" were just people who had terrible math teachers and never took them time to learn any math on their own. There isn't really anything wrong with this, but it's now become relatively socially acceptable to know almost no math. It's also socially acceptable to know literally no coding, since most people never take any computer science classes.

I've digressed a little, but the point I wanted to make here is that perhaps referring to programming as "coding" is not good for making it accessible to the general public. Code, in everyday language, is a message which is unreadable until a person or machine performs some kind of operation on it to decode it, so that humans can read it. Back in the days of punchcards, that may have been somewhat accurate, but now writing computer programs is (or at least should be) almost the opposite. You write down what you want the computer to do, in as clear and straightforward a way as possible. Then the computer compiles or interprets it, which is when it becomes completely unreadable. But the programmer isn't writing "code". They're just writing down a set of instructions, in another language. So maybe instead of "coding," we should look at programming as writing in another language. Because that's all programming languages are--they're just languages, where the rules of grammar must be followed much more strictly than in languages like English or Spanish.

Oh great, you say, so coding is just like learning a language, except with even more emphasis on grammar? Sounds lovely. Well yes, but there's very little emphasis on learning new vocabulary. In fact, most of the important words in most languages are actually words you already know. And the grammar rules are much clearer and completely unambiguous, especially in languages like Ruby and (from what I hear, although I haven't used it myself) Python, which were deliberately intended to be easier to use. I think Elliot is right that anyone can code. It doesn't mean everyone will find it fun. But if we stop thinking of code as "code," perhaps everyone will be able to do it.

USC Programming Contest: 6th Place!

2008-04-28T23:46:00.000-07:00

This past Saturday, I participated in the USC Programming Contest. As you can see here, they used my code as one of the sample solutions. More importantly, as you can see here, I slipped in just two minutes shy of 5th place! I would have gotten to choose a video game as a prize, but since I had to leave early to volunteer at the GLAAD awards, I had someone grab one for me. I realize now that since my taste in video games differs so much from most people's, I probably could have just asked the contest organizers to give me whatever was left, and it would have been something I really liked. Instead, I ended up with an FPS from the Medal of Honor series, which Andy assures me is badly designed, badly coded, and generally just not a good series of games. So I'll probably sell it. It's more about the glory anyway.

In any case, I'm pretty excited, and the GLAAD awards were fun too. We got to watch the show for a few minutes, including seeing Kathy Griffin win for best reality show. The GLAAD people were so grateful for our help, they let us take gift bags with all kinds of swag in them. One paper, one programming project, and three big dance performances away from the end of classes! Then finals, then commencement (playing, not graduating), and then Brazil!

Star shapes

2008-04-10T18:47:00.000-07:00

So I skipped Philosophy today and went to my CSCI 101 midterm pretty early. Before it started, I was talking to Ashley and Rollerblades Kid (I call him that because I don't know his name, but he uses rollerblades as his primary mode of transportation) about the impending midterm, and computer programming in general. Ashley has no programming experience other than this class, and she was telling me how she had been having trouble on a recent assignment with opening an input file. The relevant code would go something like:


ifstream fin;
string filename;
/* ... */
cout<<"Please enter filename: "; cin>>filename;
fin.open(filename.c_str());

I don't think I ever figured out, based on her description, what she had done wrong, but she said she contacted a friend who works at Google, and her friend had told suggested some sort of modification using character arrays in place of strings. It makes you wonder why, when C++ was designed, they didn't rewrite ifstream::open() to accept strings. I mean, you could just do:


void ifstream::open(string filename) {
open(filename.c_str());
}

C++ just seems so user-unfriendly after playing around with things like Javascript and Ruby. It would be interesting to learn the history of various languages, because programming languages do grow and evolve like spoken languages, but there are also some clear differences between the way they evolve. In any case, I suppose they use C++ for the 101 class because it's well established, and the people running the department probably aren't familiar with a lot of the newer languages anyway. Plus, C++ forces you to think a little bit about the way the computer deals with data, internally, when you pass things by reference, or try to access an array value that's out of range. I suppose that would be helpful when you get to classes on data structures. (One of many classes, by the way, that I should be taking this fall, but can't because it conflicts with a required physics class.)

However, Ashley is a chemical engineer. Many of the people who take this class are business majors. They're not taking a data structures class, and have no desire to become programmers of any kind. There really ought to be another class for such people. In fact, sometimes I think a few basic programming skills ought to be required of all students. However, I would never wish this particular class upon the student body at large. This other class would be like Physics 100, which I gather is a physics class for people who really don't like physics. It would probably be taught in some version of BASIC, maybe VBA since it's infinitely more useful for many people than any other language. Ideally, it would be something where students can type things in at a command line, rather than having to write, compile, fix compiler errors, recompile, test, fix runtime errors, recompile, etc. There would probably be no need to deal with OOP, but maybe they'd touch on it at the very end.

As it is, no one is going to learn anything from a single class like CSCI 101, especially when we spend more time worrying about things like header files than we do actually writing code. I guess that's the whole point of Ruby. The programmer's job is to write code, and the interpreter takes care of everything else, like memory allocation. Anyway, I have a few problems with the way our class is taught, as well, but I'm sure I'll post about that another day.

What I wanted to post about was actually an exchange with Rollerblades Kid. I was complaining about what I called "bullshit" on the test. I tried to reproduce one from today's test from memory, but Blogger tried to interpret the << operator as the beginning of an HTML tag and it got all messed up. In any case, we have a couple of functions that have a more or less random assortment of +'s, -'s, switch statements, if statements, arguments being passed by value/reference, etc. They don't correspond to anything real at all, it's just arbitrary data manipulation. We have to trace through the program, then write down the output it would generate. Admittedly, these problems are pretty simple, and I guess they're okay for test questions, but it completely goes against the principles of good code writing. You can't use descriptive variable names when your variables do not in fact describe anything.

In any case, Rollerblades Kid didn't seem that concerned with this type of problem, because he was used to them from the AP Computer Science test (which I didn't take), but he and Ashley both objected strongly to "Star shapes" problems. The kind which are supposed to print output like:


*
**
***
****
*****
******

   *
  ***
 *****
*******
 *****
  ***
   *

I must admit that, in modern times, when we have the ability to use "real" graphics, there is no need to learn this particular skill. Yet for some reason, I find it much less like a pointless busywork assignment than the "bullshit" trace problems. I think that's because it solves a real problem. Not real as in real-world. Just real as in, there's an actual problem with a non-trivial solution, and the code is that solution. Yes, it's a problem you may never face, but the same could be said of so many problems you're asked to solve as classwork. Still, it's hard to explain just what it is that, to me, makes Star Shapes problems seem not to be completely worthless. You can actually learn something about good programming style from such problems. But of course, there is absolutely no guarantee that will actually happen.

Just in case you weren't sure how big a nerd I was: Song Chart

2008-03-22T13:47:00.000-07:00

I discovered new meme, via the SDMB, where you take the lyrics of a song, and represent it as some sort of chart or graph. These range from scatterplots to bar graphs, pie charts to flow charts, and represent all kinds of songs. Some of the best ones, in my opinion, are An Analysis of Our Discussion, I don't care too much for money..., Jay-Z's current problems, Test Results, deepness of cuts, class DancingQueen, kung fu fighting.

Cycles

2008-03-20T08:03:00.000-07:00

There is extreme comfort in cyclical patterns. When you know exactly what will happen next because you've seen it before, far from being boring or irritating, it is actually quite comforting. When times are good, we kick back and talk about how great it was the last time around, or about the times when things were a complete disaster, but it's funny now, in retrospect. And no matter what happens at practice, or on the bus, or in an airport, we all know that the cycle will complete itself and everything will be as it was soon enough.

Alone

2008-03-07T06:46:00.001-08:00

I think part of the reason I'm always up late is that I like being alone. When I'm in my room, even though I'm not necessarily doing anything particularly unusual or secretive, I just feel weird that my roommate is there, as if he's watching me. Maybe it's because I'm often watching him, not judging, just curious what he's doing. Usually watching something, but what is he watching? For some reason I often have a desire to know the answer. Out in the living room, late at night after everyone has gone to sleep, is one of the few times I can feel like I'm alone. I keep meaning to spend some time in the "backyard" of Century, particularly since I won't have one next year. Maybe I should also do some studying in one of those closed-off rooms in the library. Or in Doheny somewhere, since Leavey is too bright and everything. I'm just really bad at making plans and sticking to them.

Pet Peeve

2008-03-04T19:47:00.001-08:00

When people mix up dates and days of the week. For example, my next math assignment is due on "Monday, March 11" but March 11 is a Tuesday. How do you fuck this up? Look at a calendar.

Philosophy class is just starting to get interesting again after a couple weeks of being kind of tedious. I think the idea that a complex enough computer can be, at least for all intents and purposes, conscious, is really fascinating.

I'm going to Northrop Grumman on Monday for an interview for a summer internship. It'll be something software-related but I don't really know anything else. I feel like my strategy needs to be to prove that while I don't know a whole lot, I can learn new things really quickly. Also I'm totally a team player.

Google All-Nighter (or, I am so tired I feel like I'm about to die)

2008-02-19T00:26:00.000-08:00

Well, I decided to go ahead and enter the contest, and I'm glad I did because we ended up winning some prizes! We mashed up the data from Citysearch Los Angeles (screen-scraped... shhhhh!) and Google maps, so that users could find restaurants in their area, and find out how much money they would spend in gasoline to drive there from their house, as well as how much CO2 they would be releasing into the atmosphere over the course of the drive, which is how we tied it into the theme of the contest, "Think Green." We ended up with a really good team. Ben pulled the data from Citysearch, I did the mapping stuff, Josh did the HTML, CSS, and processed the data so that I could use it, and David designed some awesome icons to use as map markers. In the end, we won "most useful" and I got a beanbag chair and a sweet Google lava lamp. Now I'm extremely tired, and I still have philosophy homework due in about 13 hours.

Google All-Nighter

2008-02-15T13:24:00.000-08:00

There's a contest this Sunday and Monday, taking advantage of the long weekend, called the Google All-Nighter. You have 24 hours to write an application that uses one of Google's APIs in some way, and fits the theme, which will be announced at the start of the competition. It looks like I'll probably team up with this kid Ben I met, and I'll have to leave in the middle of it for the big ucla game, but it should be pretty fun. All this week, Google and USC UPE have been holding workshops on the various Google APIs and other technologies that may be useful in the contest, like Javascript. On Tuesday, we learned how to use the Google Maps API, so I made a little USC trivia game, where a marker appears, pointing at a building on the USC campus, and the user is supposed to guess the name of the building. I'll post a link once I get it working better. Luckily, a lot of the data I need, including a couple of really nice USC map overlays, already exists, but I didn't realize that when I started writing, so when I get some time, I'm going to rewrite my code to deal with that data, and it will be awesome. Perhaps the hardest part will be making it forgiving, so that if the user misspells something, or adds a tiny bit of extra whitespace, the game will still count it as right. I guess I could make it multiple choice instead. What I really want to do is learn the Google Calendar API since I could probably make things that are actually useful, rather than just fun, with that.

In other news, the white-space-phobically named LetMePracticeAtUSC system could be improved so much by a couple of tiny changes, and I have a feeling that, given several hours to understand the code, I could fix it. It appears I would have to learn ASP, and the source code isn't publically available, AFAIK. Which makes it a lot easier to say that kind of thing, I guess.

Sidewalk Chalk

2008-01-31T22:54:00.000-08:00

I wasn't sure who I was going to vote for in the primary, coming up this Tuesday. I guess it's basically between Obama and Clinton at this point, but they both make such good points in their debates, I really can't decide between them. Luckily, someone at USC decided to make it easy for me. They wrote, in big sidewalk-chalked letters, multiple times, on the corner of Jefferson and McClintock, "Vote for Barack Obama," "Vote Obama Feb. 4th," etc. I guess now I don't have to worry about their voting records in the Senate, their policies on gay rights, immigration, the war in Iraq, etc. Someone has made the decision for me, and informed me of this service, via sidewalk chalk. Thanks guys.

Spring Semester 2008

2008-01-20T12:54:00.000-08:00

There's no better way to celebrate surviving the first week of class than going directly into the first three-day-weekend of the semester. And no better way to spend a Sunday afternoon on such a weekend than to blog about that week. These are my classes for the semester:

MATH 445: This class is going to be all about partial differential equations and such, but so far all we've done is Fourier analysis, which allegedly is an important step towards solving PDEs. My favorite parts of this class are the professor telling us that the required textbook kinda sucks, but we have to buy it anyway, and the fact that we spent almost no time on boring administrative stuff, instead diving right into Fourier series, deriving the formula for it, and then proving it converges, all in three lectures. For the first time in a USC math class, the homework is actually required, but there's none assigned yet.

EE 101: Very low-level digital logic stuff. Binary representations of numbers, and gates, or gates, etc. The "textbook" for this class is a course reader that only cost about $18, and since everything so far is fairly trivial, I've been reading ahead about how to build multiplexers and adders and such. Seems like this is going to be an easy A.

MUEN 308: Men's choir. I did this last spring, but I've never done it in the fall. I guess this is a pattern that could continue to work: Band in the fall, choir in the spring. Anyway, the director is redoing some pieces from last semester, which puts the new people (there are about five of us) a little behind. This was fun last year and it's looking like it will be fun again this year.

PHIL 262: This is my category I GE. The title is something about "Mind and Self." Since this is a philosophy class, I was worried it would be a little like this. And it might be, but I'm very optimistic about it, at this point. The professor told us we can call him Jake. "You do NOT need to call me Professor Ross. My father was Professor Ross. Well, my father wasn't a professor, but if he had been, then he would have been Professor Ross." What's more amazing, he actually listens when students ask questions, instead of assuming he knows what they're going to ask, then going on and on about something unrelated. Again, it's only the first week, and we've already examined five alleged "proofs" for the existence of God. Not an easy A, but it should be interesting.

CSCI 101: I had already heard from my friend Greg, who took this class last semester from the same professor, that the professor wouldn't be all that great, and it's looking like it's going to be a few weeks before we get into anything remotely challenging. Eventually, I might learn something, and it looks like another easy A.

Basketball Band: Another semester of Tony Fox. Joy. This week, we recorded this Foo Fighters song for some youtube contest. Every other week is going to be pretty lame in contrast.

Concert Band: This year's show is all Broadway songs, so I couldn't really pass this up. Still, I feel like the music is way over my head, so I'm going to have to practice a lot. Apparently, I'm allowed to reserve PIC rooms since I'm officially in this class, even though I'm not a music major. This could end up being a really rewarding experience.

Overall, I'm pretty excited about this semester, and I'm fairly confident that my GPA will go up when it's all over.

Cloud Appreciation Society

2008-01-09T01:08:00.000-08:00

Through my youtube subscription to AtGoogleTalks, I found this talk by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, a man who started the Cloud Appreciation Society. From their website:

You love lying in the park on a summer’s day and looking for shapes in the cumulus clouds. You think a mackerel sky of puffy altocumulus stretching off towards the setting sun is one of the most beautiful sights in the world. In short, you love clouds. And yet everyone else just seems to complain about them. Are you the only one who thinks life would be poorer without these glorious ‘patron goddesses of idle fellows’?
No, you’re not. There are others like you. And together we’ll fight the sun fascists and their obsessions with ‘blue-sky thinking’. As a member of The Cloud Appreciation Society, you’ll receive a free membership certificate and a badge (as shown to the right).

The badge is a little pin, and the certificate says:

The Cloud Appreciation Society

We do hereby certify that [name] was elected as a member of this society on [date] and will henceforth seek to persuade all who'll listen on the wonder and beauty of clouds.

I don't want to get in the habit of just posting links without adding my own insight or comments, but the main reason I want to post this is that I think it's extremely amusing that this exists. It's not a joke either. Mr. Pretor-Pinney seems completely aware that this is a rather whimsical idea, but he also seems completely serious about the goals of the society, and fighting the sun facsists. As I'm typing this, I'm almost halfway through his hour-long talk at Google, at which he apparently just talked about clouds, showed pictures of clouds, waxed poetic about clouds, on and on, in his British accent.

But if you think about it, why shouldn't there be such a society? Clouds are amazing if you don't know how they form, and arguably even moreso if you do. Why should we think of it as childish to appreciate them? It's no weirder than birdwatching, or mountain climbing, is it? Why aren't there millions of societies out there for the appreciation of each different natural phenomenon or flower or animal? (I realize there probably are such societies, actually.) I probably won't actually join, even though that pin is kind of awesome. I have a tendency to lose pins, anyway. But it's great that this website exists and everything.

Okay, what's my point in posting this? Besides just saying, "Hey look at this. Look at how silly this is." I suppose my point is this: Clouds are easy to see, it only takes a little bit of imagination to enjoy them, and if you take the time to enjoy them, you can see all kinds of different shapes. Maybe this guy is really onto something important, or at least something fun and obvious that everyone has forgotten.

Portal Physics

2008-01-05T23:33:00.000-08:00

I really want to post with some consistency, even if I'm just rambling. So tonight, I will be rambling about the physics of the popular video game Portal. In case you're unfamiliar, you can read about it online, but basically, you're in an enclosed room, armed with nothing but a special portal gun. Shoot it at a wall to create a bluish portal, and at another wall to create an orangish portal. As if by magic, the two portals will be connected, so that you can send any object, including light, or yourself, through one portal, and it will come out the other. You use this to transport yourself or other objects to places that would otherwise be unreachable. It looks kind of like an FPS, but it's actually more of a puzzle game, which is why I like it. Of course, teleportation in video games isn't new, but what's unique about Portal is that the momentum of objects is also transferred through the portal, which leads to some very interesting solving techniques. For example, if you're on a high "cliff" next to a wide, deep chasm, and you need to get across the chasm, but can't create a portal on the other side (some walls resist the portal gun), you can shoot one portal in the wall next to you, so that it faces across the chasm, then shoot another on the ground of the chasm, way below you. Then jump into the lower portal, and you will soon find yourself shooting out of the wall portal, across the chasm. Of course, almost as much fun as actually completing the game is running through some interesting hypothetical scenarios. I really am just rambling here.

Put one portal on the ceiling, and another on the floor, directly below it. Jump into the floor one, and you'll fall out of the ceiling and into the floor, infinitely many times, moving faster and faster each time. (You can actually do this in the game, and there is apparently some kind of randomization built in that causes you to slightly miss the floor portal after a few iterations. Suppose that didn't happen though.) Suppose you keep your body oriented the normal way. If you look up or down, you see an infinite tunnel of portals, similar to the infinite "hall of mirrors" effect if you stand between two parallel mirrors. Clearly, each time you go through the portal, your kinetic energy is unchanged, but your potential energy increases by your weight times the height of the ceiling. So yes, conservation of energy is being violated, but don't worry about that for now.

As the person goes faster and faster, they measure the distance between the floor and the ceiling to be shrinking, according to special relativity. Eventually, this effect should be so pronounced that, according to the person, two or more parts of the body are at the same place relative to "the" floor. For example, suppose the room has contracted enough that its height is half that of the person. Just as the person's feet are entering the floor portal, his waist is also entering the "previous" floor portal. The person might cite this as evidence that there truly are an infinite number of portals. Meanwhile, an observer sitting quietly in the room would see the portal traveller shrunk to about half his normal height.

I can see that having a basic understanding of special relativity, and almost no understanding of general relativity, is going to be a problem. Still, let's go on. What if the falling portal traveller starts feeling sick, and shoots a portal onto the floor nearby, with the same color as the current floor portal, so they will instantly stop? Putting aside the broken bones and bruises that will likely result, we now have a paradox. If the portal traveller and the stationary observer were both wearing watches, each would have said the other's was running slow. Now that both are in the same frame of reference, which watch has the earlier time, assuming the traveller's watch miraculously didn't break upon impact? Admittedly, no real physical theory should be required to answer this question, as we've already violated conservation of energy, but it's still an interesting thought.

One thing that is completely absent in the game (and probably for good reason) is any significant quantity of liquid. Suppose you have two large tanks. Tank A is full of water, and sits on the ground. Tank B is elevated somewhat, and initially empty. A portal is created that connects the bottom of both tanks. What happens? My first thought is that it works like a siphon, with water "seeking its own level" -- that is, water will flow through the portal, filling tank B, until both tanks have exactly the same water level, relative to the ground. By this logic, if tank A is lifted up after equilibrium is reached, water will again flow from A to B. I can't see why this would happen, so I think a new hypothesis is needed.

One of the first things we learned in PHYS 162 last semester is that electric field lines always diverge from positive charges and converge to negative charges. They never form closed loops, and can only start and end on charges or go out to infinity. Suppose a room contains a single positive charge. If you can trace a field line through a portal, it should come out the corresponding portal, potentially at a different angle. Assume the portals are as in the first situation: one on the ceiling, one on the floor. It seems to me the only way to draw the field lines accurately would have to be by modeling the setup as an infinite set of rooms, stacked one on top of the other, each containing a single positive charge. Further evidence that the portals really do create "copies" of the room, rather than simply connecting two parts of the room which are normally separate.

What if you dropped the positive charge into the portal, the same way we dropped a person through it originally? You would have a moving positive charge, i.e. a current. I suppose this would set up a magnetic field in the room, which would be constantly increasing. If you used two floor portals, instead of a floor and ceiling portal, you would effectively have two nearby AC currents, thus instead of infinite kinetic energy, you could create infinite electromagnetic energy.

I think that's enough for now.

Project Euler

2007-12-22T16:37:00.000-08:00

I saw this talk on youtube by Randall Munroe, author of the webcomic xkcd, and he mentioned a site called Project Euler, where mathematical problems of varying difficulty levels are presented, usually meant to be solved with the help of a computer program. It's a great way to develop programming skills in the language of your choice, and a great way for me to pass the time before I go back to USC for bowl week. Check it out!

One Small Step, II

2007-12-19T23:16:00.000-08:00

That last post was getting a little long, so I'm splitting it into two parts. I was talking about how curiosity and a sense of wonder is a very good thing to have. My next example was going to be this clip, from The View, that I keep thinking about.

If you can't watch it, this is the part that really kind of scares me:

Whoopi: Is the world flat?
Sherri: Is the world flat? I don't know.
W: What do you think?
S: I never thought about it, Whoopi. Is the world flat? I never thought about it.

For me, it's almost worse that she said "I've never thought about it," rather than "Yes, I believe it is flat." She is ignorant of something, and ignorance can be fixed. Granted, this is an extreme example of "ignorance," but if she were willing to listen, someone could explain to her about gravity and spheres and such. But, like Seven of Nine in the Voyager episode I was talking about, she is only interested in completing her mission, exactly as stated, (in this case, raising a child) and has no desire to learn anything along the way that seems "irrelevant." This is worse than ignorance, a lack of knowledge; this is a lack of curiosity.

When I went to find the video I came across a clip from The View, a day or two later, when they gave Sherri a chance to defend herself after she was being mocked all over youtube and elsewhere. Fast forward to about halfway through:

Sherri claims it was a "little hard for her because she never had to defend her religious beliefs in public." They were talking about God and evolution before, but then she seems to imply that not knowing whether the earth is flat is a religious belief. Anyway, her new position demonstrates another point I was making: Science is extremely scary for many people.

Sherri: You asked, Whoopi, did I know if the earth was round or flat, and Barbara asked if I knew if the earth was round or flat, and I was so nervous, all I heard was, "How many triglycerides does it take to make Pluto when the Robitussin comes, and the earth..." So when they asked me, I was like "I don't know!"

She sounded very clear-headed on the first clip, so I don't know how many people will be satisfied with this explanation. In any case, this is the question I really want to ask:

Is there a word for a lack of curiosity, in the way that "ignorance" refers to a lack of knowledge? If not, what should the word be?

One Small Step, I

2007-12-19T21:47:00.000-08:00

There are only a few TV shows that I watch regularly, and most of them aren't showing new episodes right now, due to the writers' strike, or other reasons. So I've been watching some other things instead, including Star Trek: Voyager, because Spike TV shows it at a time when there's not much else on. The episode I watched today ("One Small Step") was about the natural desire to explore.

Quick summary: The crew encounters a strange and dangerous "spatial anomaly" which simply appears out of subspace. They realize the anomaly is probably the same one that caused the mysterious disappearance of the Ares IV ship and its commander, John Kelly, way back in 2032, during one of the Mars missions. They send the Delta Flyer inside the anomaly, where they find the entire Ares IV, basically intact, along with the debris of many other ships that have been swallowed up over the centuries. Everyone wants to go get the Ares IV, because it's such an important part of history, except Seven of Nine, who repeatedly insists that "History is irrelevant" and the mission is too dangerous. In the end, Seven herself ends up beaming aboard the ancient ship, and finding a wealth of data and video logs, recorded by John Kelly, from inside the anomaly, which have never been seen before by anyone. The entire crew, discovers that John Kelly, like themselves, was willing to risk his life in the name of collecting data and learning more about the universe. Seven discovers her own humanity as well, and begins to recognize the value of history, and of exploration for the sake of exploration.

Typing it out like that makes it sound a little corny, I admit. But the episode is basically about the natural human urge to explore the world, to seek out new civilizations, to boldy... well, you get the idea. At the risk of reading into it a little too much, the title is obviously meant to remind readers of a time not too far back in our own history, when the public's desire for space exploration was greater than it is now. (Or in 1999 when the episode was aired.)

Of course, there are good reasons for opposing space exploration, but I think the desire to explore is definitely lacking. And this isn't just about space. Any time you take a class, or even talk to a new person, it's an opportunity to explore something new, and many people don't see classes that way. Classes, it seems, are about getting good grades, rather than being an opportunity to inspire a sense of wonder in yourself.

Professor Bickers likes to inject a little of the history of physics into his lectures. You might call it a digression, and sometimes it is (Super-Professor! Able to leap from Coulomb's Law to the Grand Unified Theory, to Bose-Einstein Condensates, in a single aside), but I think it also gives you an appreciation for the process of science, and what you can achieve with two simple words: "I wonder..."

For example, this last semester, in Physics 162, he made a big deal about what he likes to call "the punchline of the course" how the Maxwell equations predict the propagation of electromagnetic waves, and how the speed of light "pops out" of the equations automatically. Sure, not everyone is going to be excited by that, or even have any desire to understand it. But the point is that Maxwell figured out there was a single missing term in one equation, and in doing so, he answered a very fundamental question about the universe: What is light?

It makes you wonder. Perhaps there's some equation now that's taken to be true, and is reprinted in textbooks all over the world, but anyone who's curious enough could come across it, and notice that it's not quite right, and develop a whole new theory. If your goal is just to memorize things and get a 4.0, this probably won't happen.

Presidential Debate on Science

2007-12-19T21:32:00.000-08:00

Now that I've got this blog set up, one of the first things I want to talk about is "Science Debate 2008," a movement calling for a presidential debate on scientific issues, including global warming, stem cell research, science education, space exploration, and so on. I think that for most people, when they hear the word "science," they think of people in lab coats, speaking incomprehensibly about subjects they will never begin to understand; or of a class they barely passed in high school and learned nothing from; or of a set of strange and unlikely assertions that contradict their own strange and unlikely beliefs. Perhaps if this debate does happen, people will begin to think differently.

In any case, count me as another supporter of this movement.

Entering the blogosphere...

2007-12-19T20:58:00.000-08:00

I've recently started using Google Reader and reading a lot of blogs, mostly about science or programming, and I thought I'd try to start my own and see where I can go with it. I hope to post fairly often, and perhaps even establish a base of regular readers.

These first posts are boring, so I'll try to keep it short.

I am Tyler, better known to some as TJ. I'm a sophomore at the University of Southern California, majoring in Physics and Computer Science, unless of course I change my mind at some point down the line. I play alto sax in the Trojan Marching Band. After college, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Keep reading and you'll find out, I guess.

Please feel free to leave comments, links you think I'd enjoy, or anything else that comes to mind, or to link to posts on this blog.

Fight on!