mim's blog

Welcome to wordpress

filed under /general

In a fit of insomnia, I've installed wordpress 2.0 and copied all of my blosxom entries over to it. You can read it here and get the rss here. I won't lie to you, you should switch the feeds by hand, I had to do some meddling with the formatting of the text and your rss reader probably won't like it. I have to say, wordpress is pretty slick. Lots of ajax in the interface on my side, making things look very nice and behave nicely as well. The highlighting that fades out is cute, if a bit over the top. How do you write a javascript spell check?

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Edgy Eft

filed under /general

Today I installed Ubuntu 6.10, also known as Edgy Eft, on mr-pc here. A number of small problems had been piling up and I really liked Ubuntu after installing it on a few servers. I also wanted to get my hands on some newer versions of things like firefox before Etch was released. I know, I could have used it while it was still testing, but I'd rather have a real release. Problems included random crashing when running one of the scripts in cron.weekly, leading me to stop rotating my logs and updating the locate database, and the kernel module ipt_recent crapping out after 25 days.

After trying to copy my /etc/passwd and /etc/group directly, I found myself in something of a pickle. Ubuntu's /etc/sudoers allows people in the "admin" group to sudo, but I wasn't in the admin group in my old setup, so I could no longer sudo. Ubuntu also doesn't have a root login, so I was out of luck. I had to reboot from the CD a couple of times to get it right.

Otherwise, setting up apache, blosxom, mysql, gallery, fluxbox, etc. were pretty easy. Firefox 2.0 seems to be a lot snappier than 1.0 and restarting things like apache seemed to take less time as well. I'd also like to get wordpress set up here, so I can get some decent comment spam filtering going. And that might make me migrate to apache2, but we'll have to see.

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NIPS 2006

filed under /research

I just finished the final version of my paper (with Dan and Tony Jebara) that was accepted to NIPS entitled "An EM Algorithm for Localizing Multiple Sound Sources in Reverberant Environments." I'm very excited to get to go again after going two years ago. Here's a link to the preprint and here's the abstract:

We present a method for localizing and separating sound sources in stereo recordings that is robust to reverberation and does not make any assumptions about the source statistics. The method consists of a probabilistic model of binaural multi-source recordings and an expectation maximization algorithm for finding the maximum likelihood parameters of that model. These parameters include distributions over delays and assignments of time-frequency regions to sources. We evaluate this method against two comparable algorithms on simulations of simultaneous speech from two or three sources. Our method outperforms the others in anechoic conditions and performs as well as the better of the two in the presence of reverberation.

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Cross country, part 1

filed under /general

Well, I got back from the cross country trip last week, but haven't had time to write about it. I still don't, but I'll at least tell you that I've posted some pictures from the trip, mostly from Chicago, South Dakota, and Yellowstone.

I'll also try to summarize the trip: We drove 3333 miles in 8 days. I passed through the following 13 states: NY, NJ, PA, OH, IN, IL, WI, MN, SD, WY, MT, ID, WA. We camped three nights, at Myre/Big Island state park in Minnesota, in Badlands national park in South Dakota, and in Bear Butte state park in South Dakota. We saw the world's only corn palace in Mitchell, South Dakota and we stopped at Wall Drug in Wall, South Dakota. We saw lots of friends: Harley and Maureen in Chicago, Amrys in Madison, and Paul Pham, Manuel and Shannon, Basil, and Liz in Seattle. We spent an extra day in Chicago at the Art Institute and on an architectural boat tour. We spent a morning hiking in the badlands. And we took a day to drive around Yellowstone. We got around 38 mpg in the Prius.

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The History of Rome

filed under /books

I just finished reading 2.5 books on ancient Rome: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Donald Dudley's The Civilization of Rome, and Michael Grant's The Fall of the Roman Empire. After taking 6 years of Latin in middle school and high school, I realized how little I knew about the history of Rome itself. I had heard various emperors mentioned, and the periods of monarchy, republic, and empire, but I didn't know much beyond that. Julius Caesar was hard to follow without knowing the history, inspiring me to read the other two books.

I liked Dudley's book, but unfortunately left it on the Chinatown bus in Philly, right at the peak of the Roman empire. Unfortunately, the second book didn't pick up until 150 years later, after Constantine's conversion to Christianity and other exciting and important events, so I missed out on some key parts of the history, but got the basic idea.

Reading these books made me aware of how little I know about that time period in general, and in particular the other empires that were around at the time. As scholars have had 2000 years to study them, I'm sure there are some good books around on the subject. Unfortunately, it sounds like many of the "barbarians" at the time didn't leave much of a direct record behind, but it would be interesting to learn what people have managed to figure out about them.

The thing I enjoyed most about these books was learning how Roman civilization faded into medieval European civilization, through the many causes of its fall. It was certainly a gradual transition that I'd like to read up on further. For example, the decline of the Roman middle class and the taxes Rome levied on its citizens combined to form the seeds of the feudal system. To support its growing military, Rome raised taxes ever higher, the brunt of which fell on the poor, as the rich found all sorts of means of evading such taxes. The rich did, however, offer protection to the poor from both tax collectors and invaders on their own estates, causing large numbers of proto-serfs to flock to these estates. These estates became towns unto themselves and eventually ossified into feudal serfdoms.

In fact, power and wealth in Rome had always been hereditary, another aspect of the history that fascinated me. The Roman government, whether republic or empire, seemed to be an oligarchy in practice, with powerful families fighting for control over the country. This story continued through the fall of the empire, with the plutocrats remaining in power and even cooperating with the conquering German tribes to maintain their status. This history of Rome added some texture to the idea that the rich tend to stay rich. Obviously there were many who came from humble backgrounds and worked their ways up, but they eventually added their own line to the preceding ones. The image that comes to mind is a bowl of spaghetti lifted up by a fork, making a giant intertwined continuum of powerful families through time. Each strand begins and ends at some point, but the whole entanglement continuing forever. I'm sure that these families continued through Medieval Europe and one to today's royalty, etc. I'd like to read the history of the time immediately after the fall of Rome, which seems like it should be full of interesting power struggles as well.

Such battles for control of the empire were also fought between the various religions of the Western Roman Empire. I'm very interested to learn about the early history of Christianity and the establishment of the Church as such a powerful institution. One question Grant raised was how the tiny sect of Christians managed to eventually take over the entire Roman empire, instead of, say, the Jews? Constantine adopted Christianity because he hoped it would unite the empire, but even when it had utterly failed at that and splintered into a number of opposing factions, it continued to augment its ranks. The history of the Jews also intersects with that of Rome a number of times. And for all my years of Hebrew and Sunday school, I've never gotten a historical view of the Jewish people. There was a piecemeal account from the religious texts themselves, but never an objective, modern history. I'm sure there are lots out there, I'd like to check out some of those as well to fill in those gaps.

All of these relationships and power struggles are eerily familiar, invigorating my sense of the stability of certain human characteristics over the past two or more millennia. The question becomes, in which ways are "modern" humans and institutions different from those of the time of Christ?

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I can hear!

filed under /research

After over a week of having my left ear blocked, it has finally cleared. All it took was a physical intervention. When it finally did come back, everything sounded much louder out of my left ear, and my right ear even started to feel blocked. I imagine this is the same experience I would have if I'd been wearing an ear plug in one ear for a week. High frequencies were also much more noticeable in my left ear right after it cleared, but eventually faded away after a day or so.

Whereas I had reported previously that my localization abilities were generally intact, I failed the cocktail party test. With lots of talking in the background, it became very difficult to discern the speech of someone right in front of me. Another symptom of the blockage that I failed to report earlier was tinitus in my left ear. It seemed that with a decreased amount of useful input, my auditory system needed to adjust various detection thresholds, causing an increase in the number of false alarm auditory events and hence a ringing at various frequencies.

With all of that said, it is so nice to be able to hear again. Perhaps hearing at this level of acuity is necessary to perform my research, it certainly would be much more difficult to verify and to postulate without it.

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Cross country fun, part 0

filed under /general

I'm currently on a road trip with my sister across the country. She's moving to Seattle for a year, so we're driving her car and her stuff there from Philly. I've always wanted to drive across the country after hearing my dad's stories about his intracontinental travels and this was the perfect opportunity. I'm taking lots of pictures, but can't get them off my camera until I get home. And since we're generally camping, internet connections are few and far between, so I'll write up my thoughts and all when I get home. I know you'll be patient.

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Ear Wax

filed under /research

This is not a followup to Dylan's post on a related topic, but I've had some recent experiences with ear wax as well. Mine involves losing much of the hearing in my left ear due to waxy complications. This condition does allow me to do some introspective hearing "research".

Since I've been researching sound localization, I would like to report that my ability to localize seems to be generally alright for wideband signals, although it hasn't been working as well for narrowband sounds like prairie dog squeaks or when I cover up my good ear with, e.g. a pillow. I do find myself localizing sounds more often inside my head, even when they shouldn't be, so perhaps my perception of depth is a bit out of whack.

My hearing is much more sensitive to noise, which prevents me from discerning speech or music. Songs are harder to identify, just due to the lost sensitivity. My other ear seems to have adapted a bit so that its sensitivity is diminished as well. I can still hear sounds internal to my head quite well, like talking and chewing, it's quite hard to hear someone talking to me when I'm eating a carrot. Perhaps the most surprising thing I've experienced is a "feeling" of numbness in the left side of my head and outer ear. This comes from not being able to hear the rustling when something brushes against it that I would normally hear and do hear on the right side.

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Retraction

filed under /general

Marios did not actually say that last quote of the week. In fact, no one in Greece says it. Oscar Wilde says it in The Importance of Being Earnest, and he says it like this: "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."

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Marios' quote of the week

filed under /general

"As we say in Greece, 'the problem with women is that they are too much like their mothers, but the problem with men is that they aren't enough like their fathers.'"

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Paris

filed under /general

You wouldn't believe it, but I just got back from Paris. Ok, maybe it was last weekend, or my birthday weekend. I had a great time staying with Joanne in Elsa's apartment in the 18th arrondissement. Joanne is on an extended European tour flitting from one music cognition conference to the next. Somehow we managed to fit an aweful lot into three days.

I took the red-eye Thursday night and arrived Friday around noon with no trouble at all. The terminals were eerily deserted on either end. Joanne picked me up at the airport and we went to drop off my stuff at the apartment and had a wonderful lunch of all sorts of French foods: cheeses (my favorite was apparently called St Nectair Fermier), breads, foie gras, rabbit-in-a-can, fruits, and so forth. Due to bad planning, I had completely gorged myself a full three days before this meal at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, but still had trouble getting it all down.

I think I dozed off after that, and awoke in time for dinner, which was at a great place on the left bank called Bouillon Racine. It was built in 1906 and thus was full-on art nouveau, with mirrors on all of the walls framed by organic green trellises of wood. The tables and chairs matched the decor and the food was excellent to boot. After dinner, we scaled the Eiffel Tower, all 700 steps of it, at least to the second level, where we enjoyed the view of the city, the first of many memorable views, and the view of the menu as le Jules Verne. Our descent proceeded with more haste, as we were in danger of missing the last train(s).

Saturday, we purchased Paris museum passes, which were good for two days and admitted us to some thirty odd museums, monuments, and places of interest in the city. We made it to: the Pompidou Centre, the Conciergerie, the museum of the Middle Ages, the cathedral of Notre Dame, the archaeological crypt of Notre Dame, the Musee d'Orsay, the Pantheon, the Picasso Museum and Sainte-Chapelle.

The Pompidou center was showing some relatively interesting video art, but the best part was perhaps the view of the city from the escalator. As my mom said, the building is really much more impressive than the collection. The Picasso museum was very cool, although I remember seeing Guernica there with my parents and yet it's been in the Prado in Spain for years. I did like the various statues, including one of a monkey with its head made out of two toy cars embedded in concrete. The Musee d'Orsay was also excellent, I could have spent a lot more time there than we actually did. We got to see a sculpture of a polar bear by Francois Pompon that I really like, as well as Rodin's plaster of The Gates of Hell.

The cathedral of Notre Dame was stunning, as were the gargoyles on the exterior. The crypt was alright, but did give an interesting overview of the 2000+ year history of Paris as an unfortified city. Speaking of basilicas, we also went to Sacre Coeur, which was a short walk away from Elsa's apartment. I had no idea that it was built so recently or that any basilica had been, for that matter. The mosaics inside were incredible, as was the view of the sunset from the front steps. Saint-Chappelle was a spectacular chapel, with 50 foot ceilings and stained glass nearly the whole way up. When the sun was shining through it, it was like nothing I've ever seen. In addition to being built in the 13th century and housing the "real" crown of thorns and a piece of the true cross, the butresses holding up the ceiling were nearly invisible, and everything that wasn't made of glass was painted to look like cloth or the sky.

Next door was the Conciergerie, which was mainly the prison where they kept Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution, but also included dinner seating for 2000 soldiers. The museum of the Middle Ages had some amazing tapestries of a women, a unicorn, and a lion. There were six of them, representing the five senses plus one for good measure, and they filled up an entire room with variations on the composition, the iconography, and the expressions on the faces of the subjects. They were also incredibly good looking for textiles their age.

Then there was the Pantheon, which was also incredible. It's a little bit unclear of what it's purpose was, either to be a church or "civic temple", but the result is a giant cross-shaped building with nothing inside save a few statues and walls covered in murals, floor to ceiling, of scenes from french history. The spaciousness allowed Léon Foucault to dangle a big brass ball on the end of a very long wire to show the rotation of the earth (just a little too late). Curiously, his pendulum only rotates through 270 degrees in a day, possibly attributable to the lattitude of Paris. It was getting late and we were forced to choose between the crypt and the dome. We chose the latter and got our third panorama of the city. We also spent some time in the Jardin du Luxembourg and took a boat tour along the Seine.

For dinner one of the nights we tried to go to creperie Josselin, which Jessica recommended to us, but it was closed and its little sister, le Petit Josselin, was fairly mobbed by the time we tried to line up. Since we had to walk down an entire street of creperies (rue du Montparnasse) to get there, we settled for going across the street to la Creperie bretonne for some pretty good crepes.

Quite a trip, let me tell you. If you still want more, I think Joanne is going to post some pictures.

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A couple of weeks ago...

filed under /general

I seem to start out most of my entries here with a phrase approximating "a couple of weeks ago..." The fact that narrator of this blog doesn't have to be exactly the same as the author, made me think that the narrator could experience things a couple of weeks after the author, and so that the author has had a chance to think about them and burnish them to a sheen. This raises some issues of consistency with the outside world, for which you can forgive me.

This all links in to an opinion I've been cultivating, that I've always been too litteral and earnest in my social interactions. Many times, what is called for is not a story about something that actually happened, but simply a story. My proclivity for truth-telling makes me want to tell more or less the truth, the whole truth, etc. but who is going to mind if I take a little artistic license to make the story more entertaining? Perhaps many people find themselves on the other end of this spectrum, but I'll have to work at it. There must be some middle ground. On this middle ground, I'll tell you a truthful, entertaining, slightly embellished version of an event that more or less happened to me.

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Newport Jazz Fest

filed under /music

A couple of weekends ago my parents and I went to the Newport Jazz Festival, also known as the JVC Jazz Festival Newport. Here are the schedules for saturday and sunday if you want to follow along. It was very cool, once I realized that three simultaneous stages meant that I could leave a show I didn't like and go exploring. In general, the side-stage acts were younger and I was less likely to have heard of them, but more likely to enjoy their performances. Don't get me wrong, there were some great acts on the main stage, including MyCoy Tyner, the Bad Plus, and Dave Brubeck, but the people I really liked were on the side stages. My favorites were Hiromi, Avishai Cohen's Trio, James Carter, Cyrus Chestnut, Gold Sounds (including Carter and Chestnut), Christain Scott and the venerable Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

Some random thoughts in no particular order. I found it a bit weird that most people in the crowd knew the words and were singing along to George Benson's songs, as I don't think I'd ever heard them before. It was even weirder that my dad was one of them. For all of his pop-iness, he still plays a mean guitar. Al Jarreau seemed to be drunk or something. Arturo Sandoval was a lot of fun and as entertaining and impressive as ever. Dave Brubeck seems to be getting a little soft now that he's entered middle age, although I liked his sax player Bobby Militello more this time than previous times I've seen him. Savion Glover was pretty amazing to watch, the communication between him and the rest of the band, although I think I needed to get into the shade at that point otherwise I might have passed out. Avishai Cohen's pianist plays a mean melodica, espcially considering that he plays it through a giant bendy-straw while dancing. And Hiromi was playing some licks on her synth that sounded like she had the arpeggiator cranked up to 11, but it was all her.

In general, an interesting experience and a good introduction to some people I hadn't heard or heard of before. Next time I'll start exploring the side stages sooner.

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Secret Society

filed under /music

Last night Matt and I went out the Flux Factory in Queens to check out Darcy James Argue's Secret Society. The flux factory is apparently in the middle of nowhere in Queens, but luckily it wasn't too long a ride on the 7 from Matt's place in Long Island City. The concert itself was well worth the ride. The setup was your typical 20 piece big band, but playing some really awesome, dark music. Recordings of past shows are available on Darcy's website and do a pretty good job of capturing them.

They reminded both Matt and me of Justin Mullens' Delphian Jazz Orchestra, a show that we saw at the Bowery Poetry Club a few months ago. The Secret Society also happens to play at the BPC, so maybe I should look into other big bands playing there as well. The thing that I really like about this kind of music is the way that it just keeps building in intensity. Even when they were playing a ballad, the trumpets would sneak in at some point and all of the sudden they'd be screaming, but in a way that compeletely fit the mood of the piece and just built the intensity even further.

This show and the Newport Jazz Fest got me thinking about the arc of a performance's energy and structure. Bear with me here, I'm imagining arcs within arcs. At the smallest scale, an improviser needs to build this sort of arc into his/her solo. As Arni Cheatham from the Aardvark Jazz Ensemble said once at a rehearsal, building a solo is like making love, you have to build up to things.

The next level of structure would be the song level. This is where I find that the typical head-solos-head jazz combo form falls flat. With each soloist building his own solo's energy, there isn't much continuity from one to the next or to or from the head. When you take the head out, it doesn't really feel like you've arrived anywhere aside from where you started. Big band music like the Secret Society or the Delphia Orchestra, being through-composed, can go somewhere. The extra structure around the solos, and perhaps instead of some of the improvising, allows the energy to build and unifies the whole piece. It's not a new idea, incorporating improvisation into a large-scale structure, Mingus did it with his through-composed pieces, but I feel like these new bands really take the idea and run with it.

I guess you can see where this is going. The next levels would be the set / album level, then maybe the career level. I suppose this is all stuff that they teach you in composition 101, but I feel like it's been neglected in jazz's emphasis on the individual improviser.

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SAPA 2006 Workshop

filed under /research

A while ago now I had a paper accepted to the Statistical and Perceptual Audition Workshop (SAPA), to be held the day before the ICSLP conference, also known as Interspeech. The paper is on localizing sound sources using binaural recordings. Here's the abstract:

In this paper, we derive a probability model for interaural phase differences at individual spectrogram points. Such a model can combine observations across arbitrary time and frequency regions in a structured way and does not make any assumptions about the characteristics of the sound sources. In experiments with speech from twenty speakers in simulated reverberant environments, this probabilistic method predicted the correct interaural delay of a signal more accurately than generalized cross-correlation methods.

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Please Forgive Me

filed under /general

This is the view from my kitchen window. Someone keeps painting Mel Gibson's stencilled portrait on the next building. That blue paint that matches the brick so well, that was to paint over the previous rendition, which did not beg forgiveness. This most recent version seemed to appear right after Mel got himself into the tabloids, so my question to you is this: is it the repeat graffittist or Mel Gibson who is asking us for forgiveness? Also, don't you think there's a slight resemblance between this likeness of Mel Gibson and those stencils of George Bush, with the Homer Simpson sort of snout?

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Jens Lekman

filed under /music

Adrian was in town this week and in addition to going to Hallo Berlin with him and jwerberg and perlick and liz and qwdigbo we also went to see Jens Lekman play in Williamsburg. The set was just Jens playing on his mini guitar (plus a trumpet and some whistling by the crowd) in a rather intimate back room of a record store. What with this heat wave, it was around 110 degrees in there at 100% humidity, even with a bunch of fans and air conditioners going. To me that just made it all the more fun, but the Swedes seemed to be slightly wilted by it. Don't get me wrong, the set was still great, but perhaps a bit shorter than it might have been. Of course, anything is more music than you usually get for free.

Another fun part about it was that this was the second show of Jens' that I'd seen this tour. A few weeks ago Joanne and I saw him and his band play the Bowery Ballroom. We missed Beirut's opening set, which I regret even more after having listened to a few of their songs at the record shop yesterday. But it was interesting to hear the same songs played with and without a band and to hear what worked and what didn't. Pardon my unfamliarity with his repertoire, but there was one song about a trip to Berlin and being introduced as a friends fiancee that he played both nights and came off completely differently. Personally, I think it worked better with the whole band because without them the climactic stop time part fell a little flat. But it was easier to hear the words without the band getting in the way.

The last fun part about last night was eating dinner in the same little pizza place as Jens and his small entourage. This funness also extended to recognizing various members of the band and the non-Beirut opening act from the previous show. In my time in New York, I haven't recognized that many celebrities, maybe I'm not going to the right places.

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Welcome Back

filed under /general

After many months of inactivity, I once again have enough free time on my hands to putter it away on this blog. In the intervening months, I acquired and started my summer job, finished up my classes for the semester, and wrote a conference and workshop paper (both being evaluated as we speak). I have also played the saxophone as much as I've blogged, that is to say not at all since the beginning of March. Hopefully I will remedy that soon as well.

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Food Balls

filed under /general

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Tapioca Pictures

filed under /general

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Birth Control Stats

filed under /stats

Yesterday Graham was wondering about the popularity of various birth control methods. I found a paper about it on the CDC's website. I got these numbers from table 6 in the paper. These are just the most popular methods (and whether birth control is used at all). Note that not having sex is filed under not using birth control. In general, I didn't find the numbers very suprising, except for the number of women having sex and the rarity of unprotected sex.

age	15-44	15-19	20-24	25-29	30-34	35-39	40-44
using contraception	61.9	31.5	60.7	68.0	69.2	70.8	69.1
not using contraception	38.1	68.5	39.3	32.0	30.8	29.2	30.9
pill	18.9	16.7	31.9	25.6	21.8	13.2	7.6
female sterilization	16.7	0.0	2.2	10.3	19.0	29.2	34.7
condom	11.1	8.5	14.0	14.0	11.8	11.1	8.0
male sterilization	5.7	0.0	0.5	2.8	6.4	10.0	12.7
other contraceptive	9.5	6.3	12.1	15.3	10.2	7.3	6.1
no intercourse in 3 months before interview	18.1	56.2	17.9	8.9	7.6	9.1	10.8
had intercourse	7.4	69.0	8.4	8.0	7.0	7.7	6.7

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Fun with Tapioca

filed under /general

The other night, for Joanne's party, I cooked up some tapioca pearls I had lying around the cupboard. The boring half I made into tapioca pudding, which was still quite tasty. The exciting half I made into bubble tea bubbles, because that's really why I'd bought the tapioca to begin with.

Then I had a great idea, I'm going to a party with bubble tea balls, why not mix them into cocktails instead of tea? Thus was born the "Bubbletini" and the "Bubble G and T" (or should it be "G and Bubble T"?). Just remember, when these are all the rage next year, you heard it here first. Unless they're already all the rage, in which case, I'll retire to my study to await my next flash of recycled inspiration.

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Acoustic Trainspotting

filed under /research

I live on 7th avenue, over the uptown 1, 2, and 3 trains. Whenever a train goes by, my floor rumbles for a bit, almost imperceptibly, but if you're paying attention (or sitting on the floor, as I am right now) you can feel it go by. A few days ago I thought to myself, "I wish I had some way to detect when the floor was vibrating so that I could see when trains go by. If only I had some sort of instrument for recording vibrations." After a few minutes, I realized that my crappy computer mic could do double duty as seismometer. Since the vibrations are audible, they must have frequencies in them above 20 Hz, so the mic should be able to pic them up. Since they're so low, I could record at a very low sampling rate, and thus at a very low bitrate, and thus for a very long time.

So I left sox recording at 200 Hz sampling rate overnight Thursday and lo and behold, I could see train smudges in the spectrogram of the recording. Here's a picture of one train and If I zoom out a little, you can see when they start coming pretty frequently Friday morning (click for a wider view).

Those times are basically clock times, since I started the recording at close to midnight. The frequency axis goes up to 100 Hz, so the train takes around 25 seconds to rumble by at 50 Hz.

The next step after doing this once was to set up a cron job and some simple scripts to automate the recording process, which I've done. Now I have three 8-hour chunks being recorded each day. At 200 Hz, they only take up 12 MB each. The weekend is fine, but the trains are all running on special schedules, 2 locals, no 3, etc. So with a week's worth of weekday data, I can get a decent idea of what's going on. I'll also be able to get around the problem of disrupting the recordings with my presence.

People have point out that the MTA publishes a schedule for the 1, 2, and 3 trains, in fact for all of their trains. That's all well and good, but how often have I stood on the platform waiting for 20 minutes at 10 am for a train? Hopefully I'll be able to determine how accurate the train schedules are and how often the trains are late. Are train arrivals spaced every N minutes, or are they more of a Poisson process?

Once I have the times recorded and analyzed, maybe I could take it even farther. Is it possible to tell the 1 from the 2 from the 3 using just the rumbles? How about uptown vs downtown? How about identifying particular trains or particular drivers? At some point this descends into the realm of get-a-life, but for now I'm still grabbing bushels of low hanging fruit.

Adrian also suggested speeding the recordings up so that you could listen to them more quickly. I think this could be cool, but there are problems with the volume at which I'm recording and other sounds getting in the way. Assuming I can work out those issues, you might some day soon be able to listen to an entire day's worth of audio in only a single hour, what a boon! But seriously, it could be interesting if the trains make cool noises and you could hear how frequently they come.

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On the Road

filed under /books

It took me a while to get in to Kerouac's On the Road, even though it's a short book. The style is generally "then I went here, then I went here, ..." ad infinitum, but eventually some characters started to emerge from the rhythm. The feature that stood out most to me was the general positivity and open mindedness of the characters. They seemed to be of the opinion that is something to gain from every experience and every person. The flip side of this positivity, however was that their thirst for experience led to their departures from many seemingly satisfying situations. Certainly an existentialist novel, but much more enjoyable, interesting, and engaging than The Stranger. It should be noted that I found this book, suitably old and tattered, up for grabs in the entranceway to my building.

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Comments

filed under /general

I just added comments to this blog. Jesse recommended I try writebackplus, so that's what I'm using. I was sidetracked, briefly, trying to get Doug Alcorn's version of writeback working, but to no avail. His claims to be able to run plugins of its own to for example reject spam or send email when someone posts a comment, but the version on that page didn't even seem to be finished. I had to hack at writebackplus a little to get it to filter out spam comments. It's not pretty, it's barely functional, but I'm sure I won't be bothered to change it for a while.

One trick to getting it to look nice was making a new flavor that is invoked for single posts that include the comments, whereas when viewing an entire category or the whole blog the original flavor just tells you how many comments each post has. Perhaps I'm dumb for writing my own style from scratch, but it does match the rest of my site pretty well and doesn't have lots of extra cruft floating around.

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Musical Aspirations

filed under /music

I was thinking about taking some sax lessons in New York with Sean Nowell. If I'm going to go as far as to drag someone else into this endeavor, I figured I should make a list of what I want to get out of it. It's not easy to tell whether I've met these goals, nor is it clear that they are any different from what anyone else in any stage of musical development would say, but here they are anyway.

The thing I most want to get out of playing the saxophone is to be able to get what I hear, internally or externally, into my intellect and into my fingers. My secondary goal, one that is more measurable, is to be able to survive a New York jam session. As a step towards that first goal, I need to learn how to approach fast changes. This means knowing which chords are most important and which could be ignored or substituted or glossed over and knowing where important harmonic events like key changes occur. In addition, I need to learn what to play over each type of chord: major, dominant, dorian, diminished, half-diminished, and augmented. This means which notes are very important, which notes sound good, and which ones sound bad. In order to survive a jam session, I'll need to have a bunch of songs memorized, which means I'll need to get better at memorization. Since that's a difficult thing to do, a more concrete approach might be to get better at recognizing which features of songs are the most crucial to their identities. Features could include particular chord progressions, voicings, rhythms, melodic motives, etc.

In the even longer term, I have a few more things I'd like to accomplish. It would be nice to be able to bust out some fast bop licks when it would be appropriate. Maybe that will just come with more practice. I also want to make my ear more sensitive to different players' sounds and to figure out what I'd like my horn to sound like. In addition to recognizing players' tones, it would be nice to be able to recognize what they're doing musically. And finally, I want to learn how to approach soloing in different styles and what makes a song or a solo more one than another.

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Good Night and Good Luck

filed under /movies

When I was in California I saw "Good Night, and Good Luck". I liked it a lot at the time, but on further reflection I'm not as sure. The technical aspects were great: the acting, the cinematography, the period atmosphere complete with smoke wafting in every direction. I also couldn't help but be excited by the parallels drawn between McCarthy's red witch hunt and the current administration's war on terror. My problem with the movie is that it was too black and white (har har). It was pretty clear who the good guys were and who the bad guys were, even if McCarthy played himself. Perhaps it was that clear in real life, but I somehow doubt that. That's not to say that I didn't cheer Edward Murrow's journalistic integrity and wish it upon our current media, but Clooney might have dressed it up a little. The character Murrow epitomized the ideal of doing the right thing and taking the attendant blows in stride.

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Delphian Jazz Orchestra

filed under /music

Last night Matt and I went to see Justin Mullens' Delphian Jazz Orchestra at the Bowery Poetry club. It was an awesome show, I wish I hadn't missed the first two numbers. It's a traditional big band setup, but they play music that does a lot of my favorite things. Individual songs change style frequently. There's a great groove, but it's always shifting, either when they play a waltz with no drums or when the drummer plays some sort of samba rhythm and keeps switching up what he's playing it on. The harmonies are dense, rich, lush, and crunchy.

The highlight of the night was the last song called "S'latch" which was played in accompaniment to a video put together by the bari player, Matt Cowan. The video was made up of clips from "Land of the Lost", a campy 70s TV show, featuring claymation dinosaurs, people in ape suits, and "aliens" with giant gem-like eyes. The best special effect had to be when the characters were supposed to be plummeting down some sort of bottomless pit, but it was clear that they were actually sitting on the floor wriggling their arms and legs. Cowan didn't have to do much to make the show completely ridiculous, but he did a good job of splicing various scenes together with iMovie. The music was superbly synched with the video on a fine temporal level as well as an emotional level, which was doubly amazing since the band members seemed hardly to pay any attention to it.

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How do People Die?

filed under /stats

This whole mine collapse incident got me wondering, rather morbidly, in what ways and how many people die in the US every year? Really what I'm concerned with are deaths not from disease but from accidents, homicides, or suicides. From the CDC website that collates such facts, I got the following information for 2002 (these categories are not mutually exclusive):

Cause	Number of deaths
Injury Deaths	161,269
Unintentional Injury Deaths	106,742
Motor Vehicle Traffic Deaths	44,065
Suicides	31,655
Firearm Deaths	30,242
Poisoning Deaths	26,435
Homicides	17,638
Work Related Deaths	5,307

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Paradox of Plenty

filed under /books

More recently I finished Harvey Levenstein's Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, which picks up where Revolution at the Table leaves off and continues up to the present day. This book was written first, but revised after the other was written.

Of course I did learn some history from these books, a large part of both was devoted to how ideas of nutrition evolved over time. The first nutritionists around the 1890s tried to get the poor to eat cheaper food so that they would have more money for other things, since Malthusian theory prohibited wage increases. Then around the turn of the century, the "new" nutritionists tried to spread the theory of food as being made up of fat, protein, and carbohydrates and the interchangeability of e.g. one carbohydrate for another. The "newer" nutritionists around the 1920s became concerned with people's eating enough of the newly discovered vitamins. And finally the "negative nutrition" starting in the 1960s told people not to eat certain foods deemed to be unhealthy. I was surprised by how recently most of what I consider current nutritional knowledge was acquired, much of it within the last 20 years.

Taken together, both books disappointed me. While this one covered many aspects I felt were lacking from the first volume, Levenstein's books seem more concerned describing the "what" than the "why" of American's eating habits. Events seem to just have happened, without much justification or cause. Government agencies and corporations leap into existence. The masses start to feel a certain way for some inexplicable reason. Good history should explain the logical flow of ideas, technologies, movements, businesses, fads, and so forth, many of which were lacking in these books.

Levenstein is definitely not a scientists or "nutritionist" (whatever that means) but he is certainly a thorough historian. While I can excuse the books' omission of technological and scientific aspects, his history is less compelling for its lack of causal relations. His academic objectivity also got on my nerves. He takes pains to represent both sides of every issue, often dismissing both in the process. One of my main motivations for reading these books was to shed light on the processes that have led to the current state of food in America and its disconformity with my understanding of nutrition. Levenstein's lack of an angle left my ideas slightly battered, but with nothing to supplant them.

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Revolution at the Table

filed under /books

A couple weeks ago, now, I finished Harvey Levenstein's Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet. It's about how about how food and eating evolved in America between around 1880 and 1930. It was not what I had hoped it would be, and it was a bit boring to boot.

To be fair, it did contain some interesting material. Apparently, Americans have always taken pride in the amount of food (and specifically beef) that they eat, even dating back to the early ninteenth century. Similarly, America has had a sweet tooth since the mechanization of sugar production at some point in the mid ninteenth century, a point I had hoped would get more attention in this book. I was surprised at how much WWI and specifically Herbert Hoover's propaganda was able to affect American's eating habits, especially compared to all of the other failed nutrition campaigns. I also found the invention of home economics and its ability to insinuate American ideals of cooking into immigrant homes interesting.

I was expecting a different book, though. The book that I imagined would have talked more about the industrialization of food in terms of the farming, manufacture, distribution, and retail industries. In opposition to these industries would have been the USDA and the FDA, which were suddenly introduced into the book without much in the way of explanation. It also would have talked more about the evolution of America's sweet tooth and its penchant for large meals. Other issues not explored in much depth include the evolution of the restaurant, the standardization of American's eating habits in the 1920s, and the increase in American's statures during the same decade.

The book did get me thinking a bit about the role of scientists in industry. In the early part of the twentieth century food science was a hot field, but all of the jobs were in the food companies. Scientists were thus paid to find results that show their companies in a positive light, not to find the truth. Of course, every scientist has results she would like to see or hunches she would like to validate, but that can't get in the way of results. My impression of the food industry, especially of that era, is that it would use ridiculous and blatantly false claims to convince people to eat particular brands of breakfast cereal. There is obviously a difference between looking in a particular direction for experiments to run and burying experiments that don't turn out the way you had hoped.

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What Do People Eat?

filed under /stats

It took a bit of digging, but I found stats on what people all over the world eat. These numbers come from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Specifically, I got them from the Food Supply sections of the Agricultural data in the FAOSTATS database. It would be nice to do it by country and put it all into map form using something like DIY Map, but for now I'll just provide a table listing the data by continent.

This table shows the percentage of average daily calories per capita that come from various foods. The top section shows the breakdown between animal and vegetable foods, while the bottom section breaks it down even further into specific foods. The FAO db will let you break it down even further, but I didn't want the table to be too big. So, where do people on the various continents get their calories?

	world	usa	europe	oceania	near east	south america	asia	africa
vegetal products	0.83	0.72	0.70	0.70	0.89	0.79	0.86	0.93
animal products	0.17	0.28	0.30	0.30	0.11	0.21	0.14	0.07
cereals - excluding beer	0.47	0.22	0.28	0.24	0.56	0.32	0.55	0.50
vegetable oils	0.09	0.17	0.13	0.11	0.09	0.10	0.08	0.08
sugar & sweeteners	0.09	0.18	0.11	0.13	0.09	0.17	0.06	0.06
meat	0.08	0.12	0.12	0.14	0.04	0.11	0.07	0.03
starchy roots	0.05	0.03	0.04	0.07	0.02	0.05	0.04	0.14
milk - excluding butter	0.04	0.10	0.09	0.09	0.04	0.06	0.03	0.03
alcoholic beverages	0.02	0.04	0.05	0.04	0.00	0.02	0.02	0.02
animal fats	0.02	0.03	0.06	0.04	0.01	0.02	0.02	0.01

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Crime in NYC

filed under /stats

I thought that I'd seen a cool GIS visualization of crime in New York's various police precincts, but it appears to be MIA. I'll have to settle for text versions. To wit, the stats for south Manhattan:

	1990	1995	1998	2001	2004
murder	124	46	26	24	27
rape	207	168	114	93	125
robbery	14866	6441	4193	2701	2127
fel assault	3997	2854	2281	1714	1405
buglary	16090	9168	5326	3720	3100
grand larceny	44811	24847	20131	16673	15160
gr larc auto	9446	4011	2526	1457	1025

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The Mind's I

filed under /books

A while back I finished reading The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. It's a collection of essays and science fiction about the philosophy of mind, the subject of my final HASS-D, taken senior year from Steven Yablo. The science fiction was interesting, but not my cup of tea. The essays I enjoyed more, although I'd already read a couple of them including Alan Turing's paper proposing the Turing test and Hofstadter's "Prelude, Ant Fugue." The latter I thoroughly enjoyed rereading; I am inspired to dig up modern research on ant colonies and social insects (although not inspired enough to do it quite yet). Other highlights include another essay by Hofstadter, a couple by Dennett, and two by Raymond Smullyan. Also, the talmudic commentary given by the editors after each essay was informative and ensures that the last word subscibes to their perspective. On the whole, many of the essays didn't break too much new ground for me, but there were some new ideas to be found. Conclusion: I should read stuff that Hofstadter and Dennett write instead of things they just edit.

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Body Worlds

filed under /general

While I was home for the holidays I saw Body Worlds at the Franklin Institute. The basic idea is that people will their bodies to Gunther von Hagens when they die and he preserves them and presents the bodies as educational exhibits. The first two thirds of the exhibit was a straight anatomy lesson and was very interesting. Each body system had a couple of complete bodies devoted to it, in various stages of dissection, but there were also lots of bits and pieces of bodies around to show specific parts or pathologies. The lymph system was sadly neglected, as usual, but the exhibit was plenty long without it.

Just looking at the bodies revealed some interesting things. I was surprised at how small both the lungs and kidneys are compared to the other internal organs. I was also surprised by all of the nerves shooting off of the spinal cord and all around the body. The display of a woman eight months pregnant raised quite a few eyebrows, but I found it quite educational. It answered the question of how does a whole baby fit in there (there isn't much room to spare).

The various diseased body systems were also fascinating. Before the exhibit I was under the impression that functioning body systems were pretty similar from individual to the next. Not so. Just because you're still alive doesn't mean that everything's normal under the hood. The surprise of the evening was the body's ability to survive in the face of gross deformations of the liver, kidneys, heart, aorta, etc.

The last third of the exhibit was less about the anatomy and more about showing people without their skin in interesting poses. In addition, each "sculpture" was signed by von Hagens. This section was I'm sure what he was most proud of and his favorite part of the job, but I found it to be in questionable taste. It was interesting, but these were people quite recently. How would you like to see Aunt Wilma without her skin in a contortionistic yoga pose? I exaggerate, but you get the idea.

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Paisley

filed under /general

For some reason, I had the urge to change my background to paisley. After scouring the internet for hours, no tileable paisley was to be found, so I decided to make my own. Well, to derive my own from a photo I took of a tie I stole from my dad. It's an incredible tie, lots of little brown and turquoise paisleys. I made two versions, one that covers the whole page and another that only covers the left border and merges into a plain gray background for the rest. This clearly fills a gaping void in the resources of the information superhighway, so I'll let you download the big version, the small version, and the vertically-tileable version (use background color #b6b6b6).

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Syriana

filed under /movies

I saw Syriana this weekend and really liked it. Perhaps it is a weakness of mine that when the plot of a book or movie seems to show me the way the world "really" works, I can overlook certain artistic flaws. The plot was right up my alley, political intrigue, interlocking story lines, the US government as the ultimate bad guy, etc. There was much art to it as well. While there were too many characters to get a particularly in depth look at any one, the views we had of each of them sketched out interesting and believable characters. Parts of it did drag a bit, and few of the characters seemed a bit extraneous, but on the whole I enjoyed the unfurling story.

It also got me thinking about the way the world works, one question in particular: what is the goal of all of the power struggles? Say that finally someone from generic country X gets control of all of the oil in the world, gets the biggest economy in the world, is able to do whatever they want. Then what? What's the point? The movie was full of posturing, manipulation, strategy and counter-strategy, people in power using the world to their own ends, but what are those ends? More power? The ability to do anything they want any time they want? Say your economy is expanding quickly with no limitations or end in sight, what would the politicians do then? Is it just the thrill of the chase they're after?

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Joe Lovano at the Vanguard

filed under /music

Thusday night I caught the late set of Joe Lovano's Extended ensemble or some such title. The sax section was hot: Steve Slagle on flute and soprano, Ralph Lalama on tenor, George Garzone on tenor, and Gary Smulyan on bari. They were all tearing it up and I was especially impressed by Slagle's bebop lines that just kept going. Smulyan, although he must double-time anything too slow, was still a little fireball. He was playing so fast that I didn't hear the individual notes, but the lines were miraculously discernible.

I missed the opening, but the whole show was some sort of suite, with a bunch of songs by Lovano plus some of the Birth of the Cool arranged by Gunther Schuller thrown in for good measure. The interactions between the musicians trading solos was great; all of the performers were clearly enjoying themselves. During all of the solos Lovano would make up a background, sing it to the band, and they would all play it the next time it came around. The best, though, was when he called Giant Steps as the background for a minor blues. And one of my favorite parts, aside from the incredible music and the surly waitress, was that Lovano's sax strap matched his purple shirt, that's class.

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The Asymmetric Society

filed under /books

I just finished The Asymmetric Society by James Coleman. It's a very interesting collection of five sociology lectures he gave in the late 1970s about the personhood of the corporation and its effects on real people. The gist was that the rise of the fictional person has replaced people in organizations with positions. This indirection has given individuals unprecedented freedom to change positions and stations in life, but needs to be studied further before these changes go somewhere undesireable. It came off as a very balanced critique of the idea of the modern corporation. Instead of the usual "all corporations are evil and should just go away," it highlighted the need to stear the current state of affairs wherever the collective "we" would like to take it. At times it seemed too descriptive and not predictive or prescriptive enough, but it made a lot of sense and contained a lot of well thought out ideas that were new to me.

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Darwin at the Natural History Museum

filed under /general

Yesterday I went with Graham to see the Darwin exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. From the picture of the man with his hoary beard way down to there, I always imagined him to be something of a stuffy fellow, but all signs point to the contrary. The exhibits on the voyage of the Beagle were the most entertaining. It seemed that Chuck's first reaction to meeting any sort of new animal was to put it in his mouth. He did have a history of going into the voyage, founding a rare animal-eating club as a college man, as depicted in the Marlon Brando / Matthew Broderick movie "The Freshman". But while circumnavigating the globe he tried out armadillos, sea iguanas, giant Galapagos tortoises (they could fit 700 on the boat at once and at 200 pounds of meat a pop, that was a lot of meat!), and my personal favorite, the lesser Rhea. Apparently he'd been looking for this bird for quite some time only to discover the first one on his own dinner plate. He quickly grabbed the uneaten head, legs, feathers, etc., shoved them into a box and shipped them back to Cambridge for cataloguing. For all of the effort the bird was (re)named for him, Darwin's Rhea. The boys back in Cambridge must have thought it a bit odd that he'd packed it in barbecue sauce instead of the standard formaldehyde. It made both Graham and me breath a little easier about our graduate school experiences.

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