A Hero of Our Time

Dawes show in Atlanta

2011-10-20T19:37:00.000-04:00

seeing some good live music and working on my camera skills:

2011-06-07T21:36:00.000-04:00

From an excellent essay on authors by Megan McArdle:

Talent is not wisdom. It's not even connected to wisdom. Art at its best gives us new ways of looking at the world, and this is itself beyond price. But that doesn't mean that art is Good With a Capital G, much less that artists are. They are all unreliable narrators.

Yet the glamor of narrative and wordplay are incredibly powerful tools can blind us to their drawbacks. There's evidence that novels and movies activate the parts of our brain dedicated to social learning, and so we internalize the "lessons' of authors as if they'd actually happened (have you ever watched an otherwise intelligent person systematically destroy their relationships because their template was some archetype from a book or a movie?) Narrative knocks down the defense mechanisms that usually operate when we're reading: the little voice saying "this is just some guy's opinion."

Bookpeels

2011-05-23T17:54:00.001-04:00

Do you have a Kindle? If so, you know that there are two drawbacks, one major and one minor.

Major drawback: when you're on the subway reading your kindle, you can't show off your good taste in books to the cute boy/girl across from you. They just see a kindle. Boring.

Minor drawback: if you go to a book reading, you can't get a signed copy of an e-book.

Solution: Removable stickers of book covers to go on the back of your kindle. Called Bookpeels. All of your problems solved, for 99 cents.

'Like' Bookpeels on Facebook below to see the cover designs and suggest books or covers. Thanks!

good opening paragraphs

2011-05-18T14:31:00.001-04:00

News from England:

Author and publisher Carmen Callil has withdrawn from the judging panel of the Man Booker International prize over its decision to honour Philip Roth with the £60,000 award. Dismissing the Pulitzer prize-winning author, Callil said that "he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe".

MFA's

2011-05-12T10:04:00.000-04:00

Elif Batuman, of Possessed fame, on creative writing programs in a LRB essay:

I should state up front that I am not a fan of programme fiction. Basically, I feel about it as towards new fiction from a developing nation with no literary tradition: I recognise that it has anthropological interest, and is compelling to those whose experience it describes, but I probably wouldn’t read it for fun. Moreover, if I wanted to read literature from the developing world, I would go ahead and read literature from the developing world. At least that way I’d learn something about some less privileged culture – about a less privileged culture that some people were actually born into, as opposed to one that they opted into by enrolling in an MFA programme.

zing! she also is writing a blog now.

two articles

2011-04-22T11:02:00.000-04:00

My new favorite daily website is The Browser. They hand pick 10 or 15 articles and blog posts a day from all over the internet and do interviews with experts recommending 5 books to read on a topic.

Two articles from today:

Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed, on life after her bestseller.

Ian McEwan on 5 books that influenced his writing.

James Salter

2011-04-17T11:28:00.000-04:00

a good essay by Alexander Chee on James Salter and writing about sex. (don't read it if you're squeamish about such things!)

Don't Look Back

2011-04-16T10:56:00.000-04:00

Peter Tosh is no doubt wondering why Mick is wearing a table cloth as a tie.

the Korean War

2011-04-12T10:32:00.000-04:00

Interesting short interview with Bruce Cumings, author of The Korean War, about the Korean War and the process of doing history in general.

Arcadia tonight

2011-04-01T13:27:00.000-04:00

I'm watching the revival of Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia tonight on Broadway. I read it years ago and remember loving it. I did a little background reading this morning and discovered something I hadn't realized before - Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, was Lord Byron's daughter. I can't remember if this is hinted at in the play at all but I will pay attention.

8-bit Dark Side of the Moon

2011-03-28T10:47:00.001-04:00

I never liked Pink Floyd or Dark Side of the Moon since it sounds so pretentious, but this is pretty good: an 8-bit (i.e. Nintendo sounds) remake of the album. Big improvement in my opinion.

here's a great line in a math paper

2011-03-24T14:12:00.001-04:00

"In order to control points where only two lines are incident, we use the flecnode polynomial of the Rev. George Salmon to conclude that most of the lines lie on a ruled surface."

Way to go, Reverend!

It's from this breakthrough paper by Guth and Katz on the Erdos distances problem. Guth is giving a talk about it in 10 minutes here.

Update: The talk was excellent. Larry Guth was clear and entertaining, and presented the main ideas of the proof. (The problem, by the way, is easy to state: if you place N points in the plane, what is the fewest number of pairwise distances possible? Call this D(N) - the upper bound is N log^{-1/2} N, they prove a lower bound of N log ^{-1} N).

He also gave another nice Rev. George Salmon detail. They were working on the proof and needed a statement in algebraic geometry about the maximum number of lines that could reside in a surface without it being a 'ruled' surface. They tried proving it and asking all the algebraic geometers they knew about it, but no one knew such a theorem. Finally Nets Katz found the theorem they were looking for - in a book from 1850! The author was the Rev. George Salmon.

Limitless

2011-03-23T10:42:00.000-04:00

Saw an unsurprisingly silly movie tonight, "Limitless" with Bradley Cooper. It's about a struggling writer who starts taking a new pill that increases his brain function and concentration. With the pill his mind can do anything - it's nearly limitless..

In four days he finishes his sci-fi novel that he's been stuck on for months. But what would you do if you suddenly became the smartest person on earth? Keep writing novels? Of course not. He becomes a day trader and his life predictably goes downhill.
The ladder of success laid out by the movie is as follows:
Novelist (lowest) -> Day Trader -> Investment Banker's Assistant -> Politician
evidently ranked in order of increasing brain-power required. One of the few memorable scenes from the second half of the movie involved a girl's ice skate in Central Park.

It's a bit of a shame that the movie went down this cheesy path, because there's some interesting stuff you could do about drugs that improve your thinking ability. They really do exist - there's something called 'Provigil' that I've heard of academics using to boost their concentration (I have not yet tried it myself). Here are a few ideas for the sequel:

1) A musician (novelist, mathematician, ...) starts using this drug and becomes wildly successful, but then depression sets in because he credits the drug instead of his own hard work or abilities.

2) An entire society starts using the drug which improves certain aspects of thinking - memory, quantitative ability, concentration and focus. But there's something subtly missing - maybe people stop dreaming or their dreams are only literal.

3) A historical drama about the rise of coffee drinking and coffee shops in 1600's Europe. There was debate within the church whether it should be banned or not, but it seems to have helped thinking tremendously (people sat around drinking coffee all day instead of beer - their minds suddenly worked a lot better and they invented things like calculus).

**The movie did give me a good idea for an action scene in a movie that would also subtly promote public safety. The hero would be biking home from work, while unbeknownst to him, a bad guy is waiting in his apartment to surprise him and steal something valuable. This is a common situation in action movies. He stops by a farmer's market to buy an organic apple. He gets home, picks up his mail, and starts walking up the stairs whistling a happy song, while the camera cuts to the bad guy hiding behind the apartment door with a lead pipe in his hand. The tension builds as the hero walks up the stairs (no elevator for him, he enjoys exercise). The door opens and the bad guys swings down the pipe - but he's stunned when he doesn't faze the hero - he is still wearing his bike helmet. The hero then defeats the bad guy in a Greco-Roman-style wrestling match in the hallway. If need be, I can play the role of the hero, I have a bike helmet already.

new Hayes Carll album is out

2011-03-22T10:38:00.000-04:00

called Kmag Yoyo (and Other American Stories). I don't know what that means, but he sings great country music. One of the songs, a duet with Cary Ann Hearst, is free here.

interesting advice on cooking a steak

2011-03-19T10:26:00.000-04:00

from Pascal Emmanuel Gobry. He suggests heating a pan as hot as possible, no butter or oil, no salt or pepper on the meat, then cooking the steak on each side until it becomes unstuck. Then keep the meat between two plates off the pan to let the heat get to the middle. It has the advantage of being easy - but can this be the right way to cook a steak?

best books about the Berlin Wall

2011-03-19T10:18:00.000-04:00

a nice list here. They include The Innocent by Ian McEwan which is one of my favorites.

Saturday!

2011-03-12T10:02:00.000-05:00

if you're feeling bad about Watson and Jeopardy

2011-03-09T18:59:00.000-05:00

you can take your revenge here and play against a computer in rock, paper, scissors. The computer supposedly used artificial intelligence and the data from other players to predict your throw. I played 50 times and was 24-16-10 (wins - losses - draws), so computers still have a ways to go.

if only academics were always this exciting

2011-03-08T14:07:00.002-05:00

the ashtray incident

NPR streaming Lucind Williams' new album

2011-02-21T12:39:00.002-05:00

right here

can't believe it - I like a Bright Eyes song

2011-02-11T20:05:00.000-05:00

you can download it for free here: (I don't think it has anything to do with the other Shell Game)

good deal today

2011-01-19T11:12:00.000-05:00

LivingSocial is a website that sends out daily deals usually personalized for your location. But today's deal is basically $10 for free - a $20 amazon gift card for $10. 20 hours left to buy it

crazy news of the day

2011-01-16T22:08:00.000-05:00

Baby Doc returns to Haiti to cheers. He was brutal dictator who should be in prison. Also the inspiration for Graham Greene's The Comedians.

art auction tonight

2011-01-14T11:01:00.000-05:00

Hubard, 2010, "I am a Pig", pen on paper napkin.

Harlem River Blues

2011-01-06T17:00:00.002-05:00

great new song from Justin Townes Earle

Jury Duty

2011-01-06T16:39:00.000-05:00

My two days of service to New York State are over. I can say completely seriously that jury duty was by far the best interaction I've ever had with any branch of government. The people in charge were competent, funny, and very organized. We did have to wait around a lot, but only because they don't know ahead of time how many trials will do jury selection on a given day.

I knew jury duty wouldn't be so bad when five minutes into our first day they showed us an instructional video. It started with a reenactment of trial by drowning in the middle ages - a pretty big production with lots of actors and good costumes. Then Ed Bradley comes on once everyone in the room is terrified and says "We don't do that anymore."

Skateistan

2010-12-22T10:33:00.000-05:00

Here's a really cool 8-minute documentary about kids learning to skateboard in Kabul, Afghanistan. It's interesting just to see shots of daily life in Kabul, and the program itself seems great - one of the few chances for girls to play sports in the city. The video's a good complement to Restrepo which showed a different side of the country.

Skateistan has a website with a lot more information about their program.

American Uprising

2010-12-20T11:48:00.001-05:00

My friend Dan Rasmussen has a new book coming out, American Uprising, about the largest slave revolt in American history. I can't wait to get a copy and read it. Check out his site for a blog, reviews, and a schedule of readings.

yoga in Kreuzberg

2010-12-14T11:31:00.001-05:00

went to a great yoga class today at the yoga emporium in Kreuzberg, I highly recommend it. Just three students so we got lots of attention, and it was a good mix of tough stretches, concentrated breathing, and calming poses. Felt very relaxed and calm the rest of the day as I cleaned my apartment and failed to sell my bike or bass.

Kitchen GIft Guide

2010-12-14T03:56:00.000-05:00

the always amazing Megan McArdle Kitchen Christmas Gift Guide is up now.

Shoulders of Giants

2010-12-13T12:24:00.000-05:00

I'm reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose right now, following along with a book-club blog here. It's a fun way to read a book - the creator of the blog/club Freddie deBoer writes introductory posts to each section, then readers post comments.

One thing I discovered today was the provenance of Isaac Newton's famous quote "if I see further than others it's because I stand on the shoulders of giants." A character in the novel has a similar quote, from what would have been 500 years earlier, so I looked it up. The saying does date back to a 12th century monk and by Newton's time had become a common saying. I also heard last week at a math dinner here in Berlin that Newton might have been poking fun at his rival Liebnitz, a very short man, in writing this.

Stasi Prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen

2010-12-12T06:32:00.000-05:00

I visited a Stasi prison-turned-museum in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen yesterday. It's not as well-known as the other Stasi museum in Berlin, but it was recommended to me by several native Berliners.

Our guide, by the way, was a German historian giving the daily 2:30 English tour. The other tours are in German and are often led by a 'witness' - someone who actually spent time in this jail in the DDR days, telling his particular story. I was sad to have missed that part.

Some history of the site: it's located in Hohenschönhausen, fairly far out in the northeast of the city. The oldest building of the complex was built in 1938 as a Nazi kitchen canteen, where food was prepared before sending it around the city, then in 1945 the Soviets took it over, turned the basement into small jails cells, and kept suspected Nazis and other political enemies there in terrible conditions. In 1951 it was turned over to the East German government, and they used it as a remand prison - where suspects would be held during their investigation. They used the old basement cells to torture prisoners. In the early 1960's the focus of the prison began to change. They began to replace physical torture with psychological methods, and a new building was built with 120 cells and 120 interrogation rooms.

This was where the tour really got interesting. After the basement, I was prepared for more stories of horrible conditions and torture, but what we heard and saw was a little different, though still terribly bleak. First, a quick quiz:

Stasi prison or East German apartment complex?

It started with the journey to the museum. We took a tram from Frankfurter Allee (nee Stalinallee), and went further east, finishing the last half mile on foot through rain and slush. The striking thing was how many terribly ugly apartment buildings there were (see this picture for a taste). Huge neighborhoods with identical, dilapidated Soviet-style blobs. Sometimes you think of East Berlin as the stylish part of the city - Prenzlauerberg, Mitte, Friedrichshain, and it's easy to only see that part of the east. But then there are neighborhoods like this and you get a better sense of the way the east looked to most of its citizens.

Late in the DDR, most of the people arrested and held in this prison were simply trying to escape to the west (or maybe they had done nothing). The Stasi isolated the prisoners for weeks, cut off all contact with the outside world, and revealed secrets about their private lives they could have only gotten from informers. The goal of this was to get more and more information and break down all trust between friends and family members. Their other goal was to sell prisoners to West Germany for badly needed western currency. One prisoner could return 50,000 DM. I haven't read much about it yet, but I assume West Germany bought easterners who had helped them in some way or high-profile people whose freedom in the West would increase the prestige of the West German government. The Stasi knew that many of the prisoners in Hohenschönhausen would eventually go to the west, so they didn't want to keep them in conditions that would reflect badly on the DDR. So the conditions in the new cells are actually not so bad. Each one has a bed, a sink, a toilet and a window (looking on a grey wall). The construction is shabby, but no more so than the offices or the apartment buildings in the surrounding neighborhood.

The depressing thing about the museum was how well it illustrated the cynicism of the DDR. By the end it was a money-maker for the state, using people's despair to keep the regime alive, and psychologically crushing them to extend the state further and further into everyone's life. Yikes.. back to Prenzlauerberg for dinner and happier thoughts of Berlin.

cool iphone app for taking pictures

2010-12-10T04:21:00.000-05:00

Called Instagram. Let's you preview and choose from a bunch of filters and share your pictures in a photostream with other users.

nice berlin music video

2010-12-08T04:01:00.000-05:00

saw this band, Myriad Creatures, playing an acoustic set last night in a basement in Kreutzberg

a challenge

2010-12-07T12:38:00.000-05:00

Rosetta Stone has added a new blogger, Guillermo Gayoso Jones, perhaps even funnier than me. His first post is here.

3:45 pm, December 5

2010-12-05T13:00:00.000-05:00

like a scene from a Russian novel. I'm glad they don't shovel the sidewalks here - it keeps some of the winter spirit and makes everything a little quieter

rosetta stone

2010-12-04T08:11:00.000-05:00

My latest Rosetta Stone blog post is up here (be warned, it's cheesy). It was linked to on RS's facebook page and a few people commented. My favorite comment, from Ted Abbot:

While I cannot hear what the dog heard, I can guess that it was inflected in a way the dog understood. The rising tones obviously are what caused the Pavlov effect. Sorry RS, you can't claim this one, the dog did not learn because of you. :)

Just Kids

2010-12-02T16:15:00.000-05:00

cool reading of excerpts of her book Just Kids by Patti Smith.

Howard Jacobson

2010-12-02T12:33:00.000-05:00

I just read The Finkler Question, the most recent winner of the Booker Prize. It's a short book, but it's tiring, funny, frustrating, sad, all at the same time. Still not sure if I liked it or not, but here's something I did like - an interview with Howard Jacobson (the author) on amazon.com. He talks about winning the Booker Prize, and doesn't say all the cliche things about it not affecting him. And he talks about comic novels - why he doesn't want to be thought of as a comic novelists but why all the best novels should be funny.

The Birthday Problem

2010-11-17T08:05:00.001-05:00

Here are a couple of famous probability problems with a common theme:

The Birthday Problem: How many people do you need in a room so that the chances of two of them sharing a birthday is greater than 1/2?
The Opera Problem: 1000 people show up to the Vienna Opera and leave their top hats with the hat-check girl. She gets into a fight with her boyfriend and leaves with all the claim tickets halfway through the opera. The manager then has to return hats at random at the end of the night. What is the probability that no one gets his own hat back?
The US Navy Problem: All the soldiers on a battleship go into town one night and get very drunk. They return to the ship and fall asleep in random beds. What is the probability that at least one of the sailors ends up in his own bed? (This is actually the same problem as the opera problem - and under appropriate modifications you can turn it into The Belarussian License Plate Problem or The Jockstrap Problem).
A more complicated version of the Opera Problem asks for the probability that no one gets his own hat and no pair of people get each other's hat.
Quality Control: Say the probability a chicken nugget contains a dead mouse is 1/5000. What's the probability that you've eaten a dead mouse if you've had 2000 chicken nuggets in your life?

What do they have in common? Each of them concerns rare events: it's unlikely two people share the same birthday, a man gets his own hat back at random, or a sailor ends up in his own bed after a drunken walk. There's a very nice way to solve or estimate problems like these and it's one of the best things to take away from probability theory, along with the bell curve and the law of large numbers. It's called Poisson Approximation or, somewhat cheesily, the Law of Small Numbers.

The basic idea: if you have a set of rare possible events, then the number of them that occur is approximately distributed like a Poisson random variable with the parameter being the average number that occur. The average is usually easy to calculate: it's just the sum of all the individual probabilities. Let m = the average. Then the probability that no event occurs is exp(-m). We can use just this basic fact to get good answers to all the above problems.

An example: if we have 23 people in a room, then there are 23x22/2 = 253 pairs of people. The probability than any pair has the same birthday is 1/365. So the mean number of pairs with the same birthday is 253/365 = 0.693. So the probability that no pair has the same birthday is approximately exp (-0.693)= .4999. And so we need 23 people in the room to have a 1/2 chance of two having the same birthday.

How about the Opera Problem? We calculate the average number of people who get there own hat back: each person has probability 1/1000 to get his own hat, and there are 1000 people, so the average number of happy opera-goers is 1 (this uses linearity of expectation, my favorite mathematical fact). Then using our Poisson approximation the probability that there are no happy people is exp(-1)=1/e = .367....

The other problems can be solved similarly, and Poisson approximation is useful in a huge number of situations. It's the neglected youngest brother of the three most useful facts in probability. It's better-known sibilings are the Central Limit Theorem (Bell Curve) and the Law of Large Numbers (think opinion polling). and

James Frey does Andy Warhol

2010-11-12T08:06:00.000-05:00

New York magazine has an article about a fiction writing factory James Frey has set up to produce commercial fiction with the help of struggling MFA students. Interesting article from several perspectives: how James Frey thinks he's going to become a superstar by mass-producting teen fiction; the implied grievance against Frey for taking advantage of these young creative writing students juxstaposed against the MFA programs that charge $40,000 a year and can't get students jobs or book contracts; the sour grapes of the article's author who tried to work with Frey but who's best idea for commercial teen fiction was this:

The idea I had cooked up was as commercial as I could imagine—something I thought I could write in a short time and fell within my interest in pre-Raphaelite art. I’ve been working on a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, so I imagined him as a child and granted him the superpower to enter into his painting.

Blake Mills

2010-11-07T16:38:00.000-05:00

Check out this new album from Blake Mills: Break Mirrors. That's the album cover above. He started out as a guitarist for the band Simon Dawes (which later became plain old Dawes) then left to tour with Jenny Lewis, Band of Horses and Julian Casablancas. And he's still 23 years old. One nice thing about the album is that he doesn't overdo it with the guitars - there are some nice bits but the singing is the main thing. The best place to start is the song "History of My Life" (listen to one version here) - it's my favorite song of the last year.

I looked up some of his videos on youtube but 1) he doesn't have many up and 2) he doesn't actually look like the guy on the album cover and his on-stage personality is not what I expected from listening to the record. The videos were like a movie version of a book you really like - not bad but not the same.

November

2010-11-07T11:08:00.000-05:00

Zadie Smith reviews "The Social Network". I'm about to begin reading White Teeth.
Liz Phair reviews Keith Richards' memoir.
A Berlin subculture: this is a 'kicker' (table football) bar. The players there are amazing - as close to professionals as table-footballers can be I think (and more than good enough to make it impossible for a civilian to play). It was fun to see them battle back and forth to be king of the bar for the night - I felt like I was living in a Tom Wolfe essay.

drachensteigen

2010-10-31T17:54:00.000-04:00

Tempelhof Airport was built in 1923 on a site where the Knights Templar used to live. Orville Wright flew there and Lufthansa was founded there in 1926. Albert Speer built a massive new terminal in 1936 and it became Europe's busiest airport. The Soviets captured the airport in April 1945 and flooded the bottom three floors to prevent explosions (they remain flooded today). It was in the America sector of divided Berlin. It's most famous moment came in 1948 when it was the site of the Luftbrucke - the Berlin Airlift. The last US troops left Berlin and Tempelhof in 1994.

The huge facade of the terminal, complete with angry eagles, is the most distinct example of Nazi architecture left in the city (in my not-completely-informed opinion). And the terminal is still one of the largest buildings in the world.

Tempelhof closed as an airport in 2008 and earlier this year, the outdoors part was reopened as a public park. (There are offices and an ice hockey rink in the terminal buildings). On a nice autumn day it's a perfect place to ride a bike, play football or fly a kite. Every German household has a kite - 'drachen'. My apartment is no different and this afternoon all four of us took our two kites and ran them up into the sky.

Some more pictures of Tempelhof (actually quite beautiful if you try hard and forget the Nazi associations).

German Compliment

2010-10-30T19:33:00.000-04:00

"If you were snobby you wouldn't have such a haircut."

Vielen dank!

die Deutchen Hunde

2010-10-30T11:50:00.000-04:00

The weather's been gorgeous here since I got back. Yesterday afternoon I took some work, grabbed a half-chicken and fries from Huhnerhaus and sat out on the steps in Gorlitzer Park. There were a few people tossing a football (I debated going over and showing them how to throw a spiral), two guys playing jazz guitar, and a bunch of people just enjoying a beer or coffee and the sunshine.

A few seconds after I opened my bag of food, I had a visitor. He sat there looking just like that, completely still and focused but very polite. (German dogs are remarkably well-behaved. Most don't have leashes but know how to follow the traffic signals and I've only heard one dog bark the entire time I've been here.) This one seemed to be entirely unaccompanied. I used the opportunity to practice my German: "Es ist mein Essen" (no response). "Wo is dein Mensch?" (no response). "Was ist deine name?" (no response). "Sitzt!" (he sits down).

Some of the Pommes were a bit over-soaked in ketchup so I eventually relented and threw one to the unnamed dog. He ate it quickly and went right back to staring at me. "Nein, das ist alles!" (more staring). "War es lecker?" (some drool). By the end of the hour he'd eaten about fifteen french fries. And as soon as all the food was gone, a young woman whistles from across the park and the dog runs off to go home.

Berlin dance music in New York

2010-10-26T13:02:00.000-04:00

My friends Chaitu and Burcin visited Berlin a few weeks ago and we made a little tour of German house and techno music (I may be misusing these terms..). Tonight we're going to reprise it in Brooklyn and see one of the best German dj-groups, Booka Shade, above, at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.

Lykke Li does Bo Diddley

2010-10-25T13:38:00.000-04:00

Lykke Li has a new song out, "Get Some" - download it here.

Las Vegas Slide Show

2010-10-24T09:34:00.000-04:00

here are the slides for my talk this afternoon.

The paper is a hardness of approximation result for graph coloring. I'll try to briefly explain what this means.

Graph Coloring: You probably know that every map can be colored with 4 colors so that no two adjacent countries get the same color. Graph coloring is similar: we want to color the nodes of graph with as few colors as possible so that no two adjoining nodes get the same color. Because a graph, unlike a map, doesn't have to be drawn on a flat piece of paper, sometimes this can require many more than 4 colors: e.g., the graph on 10 nodes in which every pair is joined requires 10 colors.

Approximate Graph Coloring: It's an old result that determining exactly the fewest number of colors to color a graph is very hard (in a mathematically precise way - it's called an NP-hard problem). So instead of deciding exactly, maybe we could get an approximate answer. One way to view the approximate problem is as a game: I give you a huge graph and promise that it can either be colored by 3 colors, or it takes more than 9 colors to color (i.e., it's far from being 3-colorable). You have to decide which case holds. This is called a gap problem, since there is a gap between the 3 and the 9 and we want to know if it is computationally feasible to distinguish between the two families of graphs.

What we proved: We proved that a slight variant of the gap-graph-coloring problem is NP-hard. The variant is that now we only ask to be able to color 99% of the graph - we're allowed to ignore 1% of the nodes. In this problem we proved that it's hard to distinguish a 3-colorable graph from one requiring more than 9 colors, or 4 and 16, or q and q^2 in general.

las vegas bleg

2010-10-20T11:15:00.000-04:00

(a 'bleg = blog + beg' is a request from a blogger to his audience).

I'll be going to Las Vegas for the first time with 200 computer scientists, and i'd like to tell a funny joke about the situtation, but not anything to do with card-counting or MIT. please email me suggestions, you'll be handsomely rewarded.

reggae night in Berlin

2010-10-17T17:25:00.000-04:00

I went last night with two of the more adventurous mathematicians here to a reggae/ska show in Kreuzberg featuring Dreadnut Inc (above) and the Berlin Boom Orchestra. At first I couldn't help laughing at the sight of a giant German with blonde dreadlocks singing reggae with a Jamaican accent, but the show was great. Everyone in the crowd danced, no matter how bad they were at it, and the band wasn't afraid to look dorky (contrast with Brooklyn). Before last night I hadn't imagined it possible that a reggae band could come from Germany.

Then today Florent pointed out to me that Peter Fox (monkey look-alike and my favorite German pop-star) used to be in Seeed, Germany's second most popular reggae band according to wikipedia. Check out their version of 'The Tide is High'.

In America I think non-Jamaican reggae players are looked down upon as inauthentic, but in Germany authentic reggae is so far away that they don't feel any burden. You can compare this to the fact that the first white guys to mimic the blues were British teenagers, and they did it with a lot of dancing and not too much seriousness.

Kreuzberg: Everything is shiny, so beautiful and new. If you don't like it, make it new.

2010-10-12T14:44:00.000-04:00

Peter Fox, coolest German. song is called 'Alles Neu'

Bob Dylan on NPR's music site

2010-10-12T10:40:00.000-04:00

If you don't know about NPR's music site, you should check it out. They often have full streaming previews of new albums. This week you can listen to a bunch of songs from The Witmark Demos, a compilation of songs Bob Dylan recorded from 1962-64 for his music publisher. Just him and his guitar, shortly after he wrote the songs, they sound rough and fresh. I particularly liked "Boots of Spanish Leather', 'When the Ship Comes In' and the piano songs.

Laura Cantrell live in NYC

2010-10-11T08:29:00.000-04:00

If I were in New York, I'd go to her show at the City Winery. I've never seen her live (she doesn't play often), but her albums are fantastic. I'm sorry I'll miss this show

Rosetta Stone

2010-10-08T09:23:00.000-04:00

one reason my German is so good is that I talk to my computer before going to bed. as a side benefit, I got a gig as a guest blogger here.

I got some new bike shorts today -

2010-10-06T16:07:00.000-04:00

not bad, right? (you can find other cool bike attire on bikeblognyc.com

a beautiful sunny day in Berlin

2010-10-03T10:22:00.000-04:00

lunch in Prenzlauerberg, bike ride through Mitte, food festival in Kreuzberg, karaoke in Mauerpark?

blasts from the past in Berlin

2010-10-01T07:48:00.000-04:00

a neighborhood in Berlin was cleared out yesterday when the authorities found a bomb. no that that kind of bomb - it was an unnexploded WWII bomb discovered at a construction site
Germany will make the final WWI reparations payments to Belgium and France this weekend (!). The size of the German reparations was one of the worst ideas of many bad ones in the Treaty of Versailles.

NY Times on Jamey Johnson

2010-09-27T05:14:00.003-04:00

a nice profile, including details about how he got his start as a songwriterfor some Nashville stars.

Huhnerhaus rap

2010-09-26T07:29:00.002-04:00

Right around the corner form me and right outside Gorlitzer Park is a great Rotisserie chicken stand, Huhnerhaus. It has some devoted fans as you can see.

geriatric rollerblade marathon

2010-09-25T13:37:00.000-04:00

some spice on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Berlin

contemporary country music - it's hip

2010-09-25T08:07:00.000-04:00

There are plenty of good reasons to detest modern country music (people named Easton Corbin, Hootie and the Blowfish with banjos, songs about 9/11 etc.) and it's very fashionable to say 'I only listen to old country music'. If you want to be on the real cutting edge though, you should answer - "No, I like current county music." This surprises even the most unsuprisable hipster. You'll need some actual current country singers to listen to who you won't hate, so in a series of 7 posts I'll introduce you to a few.

Singer #1 is Jamey Johnson - kind of a modern, narcotics-anonymous/hells angel/Lynyrd Skynyrd Merle Haggard. His first album was great and his second double album The Guitar Song just came out. Try The High Cost of Living from the first or California Riots from the second. Or the Waylon cover The Door is Always Open (check his lead guitarist's style in this one). You'll start to love Jamey Johnson for the beard, but the songs will grow on you too.

balls and bins..

2010-09-23T05:23:00.000-04:00

Giving a talk at ETH's theoretical computer science Mittagsseminar today. Here are the slides (as a pdf - sadly you'll miss the animated bouncing of the balls as they fall in the bins).

Freedom

2010-09-22T10:15:00.000-04:00

I finished reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom the other day. I loved it - it might not be a classic for all time, but it's a great book to read right now and enjoy. And how many books written now are classics for all time? We'll have to wait and see.

There have been a ton of reviews of 'Freedom', mostly very positive and some informative. The funniest one I read was by some guy named BR Myers and it is very negative. BR Myers objects to authors using the f-word and notes very seriously that "Every new book we read in our brief and busy lives means that a classic is left unread." Ok.

But if you're willing to risk leaving a poor lonely Dh Lawrence book unread, some of the things you have to look forward to:

It's very funny in a lot of places, but still serious (this is my favorite kind of book; unfortunately every joke we read in our brief and busy lives is, well, something else left unread)
Franzen is very good at examining the power balances in relationships - between husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, parents and children, and between friends.
Good account of a college athlete's mentality
It's almost always painful to read about pop musicians in fiction, but he makes the description of Richard's music not-so-painful and gets some funny jokes in at Wilco and the Manhattan teenage owner of multiple vintage guitars.
The characters change over the course of the book
My favorite part of the book was the story of Joey and Connie's relationship.

Zurich

2010-09-22T08:50:00.000-04:00

in Zurich this week visiting ETH and working with some of the mathematicians there. We're working on something called 'Explosive Percolation'. Imagine water getting colder and colder and turning into ice. As the temperature nears 0, two water molecules may bind together. When all of the water molecules are bound together, we have ice. Water (I think) undergoes a continuous phase transition - small blocks of ice emerge, grow and join together until there's only one piece. At some point 1% of the water is ice, and this percentage grows continuously. Explosive percolation would be something different - as the water gets colder, all of a sudden 30% of the water would instantaneously become ice - a 'giant' component emerges discontinuously (not starting with 1% and growing, but starting higher).

The mathematical goal is to prove that such explosive percolation occurs in certain random models. It's something we 'know' happens - all the computer experiments give strong evidence, but we would like a mathematical proof.

rain in berlin

2010-09-14T23:15:00.005-04:00

If it ever stops raining in this city, I'll ride my new bike.. the orange bullhorns were a custom addition

new paper posted..

2010-09-14T03:47:00.000-04:00

it's a sequel. only click through if you're interested in numerical computing or goodness of fit tests in statistics. another to come shortly.

Roald Dahl

2010-09-13T12:50:00.000-04:00

a good review of a new biography just out. Includes a list of the harrowing things that occurred to him and his ancestors which might explain some of the weirdness in his stories.

what is combinatorics?

2010-09-12T15:41:00.000-04:00

The picture doesn't answer the question. But quite conveniently they scheduled the World Triathalon Championships for the same weekend in Budapest as the Vera Sos birthday conference (and the finish line was in the shadow of the Hungarian Academy of Science (pictured above) where we heard some music and a nice Ron Graham talk (despite what you might think from the picture on his webpage, Ron Graham did not, to the best of my knowledge, walk on a tightrope between the twin towers in New York.) It gave the triathletes a chance for some enrichment before their races.

Usually the answer to the question is that combinatorics is the study of counting, or of discrete structures. People associate it with combinations, permutations, factorials, and annoying high school math problems that started "How many ways are there for 12 people to order dinner at a Chinese restaurant if there are 11 dishes on the menu and you can't order the same thing as your sister?"

Fortunately, combinatorics is better than that. Nati Linial gave a great talk today on higher dimensional combinatorics, but he started out with an overview of the recent history of combinatorics (which has been highly influenced by Vera Sos). If I can recall it correctly, he gave several reasons why combinatorics has evolved form 'recreational mathematics' with a bunch of clever but unrelated problems to a central area of math with strong connections to other areas:

the asymptotic perspective
extremal combinatorics
the emergence of the probabilistic method
computational connections
geometrical perspective

The idea is that as the area has matured, it has gone from using the methods of other areas to solve hodgepodge problems to developing its own methods that have proved useful to other areas. And Budapest is where a lot of this happened.

After the nice introduction, the rest of his talk was mainly about random simplicial complexes, which are generalizations of Erdos-Renyi random graphs to higher dimensions. You can read more about that here.

Andrew Sullivan can't resist a foreskin mention

2010-09-12T12:55:00.002-04:00

he links to amusing anecdotes of scientific self-exploration. The original post here is amusing and interesting, as is a post about Henry Head's (err.. yea thats his name) colleague, WHR Rivers and double-blind trials.

Vera Sós birthday conference

2010-09-11T11:53:00.000-04:00

I'm in Budapest this weekend for a birthday conference for Vera Sós, one of the (many) great Hungarian combinatorialists. The conference has been a lot of fun so far - we're in the beautiful Renyi Institute, named after Alfred Renyi, and many of the people there were old friends and colleagues of Paul Erdos (pictured above with Vera Sós), so his presence is in the air. There are also a lot of great Hungarian-mathematician haircuts on display.

Two lectures today, by Endre Szemeredi and Miklos Simonovits, were devoted to the recent (and as of yet still unpublished) proof of the Erdos-Sos conjecture: If a graph on n vertices has more than n/2*(k-2) edges, then it must contain every possible tree on k vertices. The proof as outlined today is a bear - lots of difficult technical work involving decompositions and various special cases. The first question from Ron Graham after the talks, which got a laugh from everyone, was "Is this the Book Proof?"

But we also learned how the conjecture came about. Vera Sos was teaching the very first class in Hungary on Graph Theory in 1962 and she had just showed her class the proof of the Erdos-Gallai theorem, which in a particular case says that every graph with more than n/2*(k-2) edges must have a path of length k. (Gallai, incidentally, was Sos's high school math teacher and he introduced here as a promising mathematician to Paul Erdos. One of the themes of the weekend was that mathematics is a small world - but perhaps especially so if you grew up in Budapest.) A path is one extreme case of a tree - all vertices have degree 2, except for the ends. The opposite extreme case is the star - one central vertex connected to k-1 neighbors. To ensure a star of size k, there also must be at least n/2*(k-2), since this is when the average degree is k-1, and if the average is k-1, then there must be at least one vertex with that many neighbors - the center of the star. So knowing the two extreme cases, Vera Sos gave her class a homework problem - show that any tree on k vertices must occur in a graph with more than n/2*(k-2) edges. Anyway, no one solved the problem.

An interesting remark was that this problem has two extremal cases - graphs that have n/2*(k-2) edges but do not have all trees of size k. One is a disjoint collection of k-1 cliques, and the other is a bipartite graph with one piece of (k-1)/2 vertices and the other with n - (k-1)/2 vertices. Somehow it's the presence of two extreme cases makes it hard since you have to deal with more than one difficulty as the number of edges gets small.

a new job..

2010-09-11T10:47:00.000-04:00

Loyal readers, my years of blogging have finally paid off. Starting very soon, I will be using my well-honed blogging skills for fame and profit (my fame, someone else's profit). Links will be posted soon, but it will be Berlin-related.

what I'm reading..

2010-09-08T07:32:00.000-04:00

I have a few plane flights and train rides over the next couple of weeks (Berlin -> Prague -> Budapest -> Zurich), so I picked up a couple books to read in between practicing German and working on math problems.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a novel by David Mitchell set in 1799 Japan and deals with Dutch traders, medicine, and the doomed resistance of the Japanese ruling class to European influence. Bu it's also funny. The nerdy romantic hero and the struggle of early scientists against tradition and superstition remind me a lot of the Neal Stephenson books - Cyrptonomicon and the trilogy of historical-science fiction, The Baroque Cycle (Cryptonomicon I guess you'd call historical science-fiction). Mitchell is a little more restrained and more subtle a writer than Stephenson.

The second book I picked is Freedom by Jonathan Franzen which got such positive (and well-written) reviews I couldn't resist. I haven't started this one yet.

Berlin on a Saturday night starts with Canadian pizza

2010-09-06T13:47:00.000-04:00

This is a real sign outside a real restaurant in Berlin. The white splash hints at a lot of things, but not necessarily good pizza. But because someone invited me there, I went in and tried it. We had the 'couch potato' pizza - potato, sweet potato, rosemary and feta cheese - plus the special sauce: maple syrup infused with chili peppers. It was quite good actually, and nothing like normal pizza.

And that was only the start of Saturday night. We went to a bar overlooking the Landwehr Canal where the famous comedian Rosa Luxemberg was killed in 1919. Then I was kidnapped by a bunch of Volkswagen employees (no joke) and made to stay out until sunrise dancing in the clubs of Kreuzberg.

funny, amazing and kind of sweet..

2010-09-03T16:30:00.002-04:00

monkey helpers

biking: New York vs Berlin

2010-09-03T06:15:00.000-04:00

Felix Salmon has a post up about how to deal with bikes in car/pedestrian/bike interactions as New York becomes more bike-friendly (the answer: treat them like vehicles, not pedestrians, which means giving them space on the street and making them follow traffic laws).

Berlin (among other European cities) is the end goal of such policies. Here there are clearly marked bike lanes, sometimes on the road and sometimes adjoining the sidewalk, and bikers really do follow the traffic laws (you won't see them go through a red even if no cars are around - it's a 100 euro fine handed out by plainclothes police). The cars accustomed to the bikers and the pedestrians stay out of the bike lanes. It all works very smoothly and so everyone here rides a bike - from 7 year olds to senior citizens.

So it's a bikers paradise, right? Well, kind of. But you lose the sense of rebelliousness that you have as a New York biker. It's thrilling to fly up 6th avenue in New York City, weaving through traffic, running red lights and battling taxi cabs. Riding a bike is a part of your personality (I'm cool! I'm dangerous! I have a brightly colored custom single-speed bike!)

Once biking isn't a fashion statement anymore, bikes get less colorful. Almost all the bikes here are clunky, black and ugly. They don't even bother locking them properly (if you had a pickup truck, which no one does, you could fill it with 10 bikes in 30 seconds. The bikes aren't locked to anything, the back wheel is just locked to the frame to prevent it from spinning). Of course this is not a well-designed experiment - perhaps it's German culture that frowns on showing off a cool bike rather than commuter bike culture.

One amusing thing is that there in the last year a New York-style fixed-gear messenger bike subculture has started to emerge, especially in the Friedrichshain neighborhood. While everyone in Williamsburg has had a fixie for years, in Berlin owners are a small, new, persectured minority (the police will fine you 80 euro if you don't have two brakes). But it's nice to see that Berlin bike culture has at least a tiny bit to learn from New York.

new office

2010-08-31T02:47:00.000-04:00

Berlin is not all fun and games. You also have to work (this is true for about half the people in the city). Here's my office on the 6th floor of Technische Universitat's math building.

berlin on Sunday

2010-08-29T16:56:00.000-04:00

two very nice bits of Berlin from Sunday -

Bear Pit Karaoke Berliners of all ages gather around an amphitheater near the Mauer Park flea market to watch karaoke run by an funny, enthusiastic American. It had rained all day but the sun broke through just for the show. An old man with great dance moves and a Santa Claus bear was blowing soap bubbles, kids were running around on stage and the crowd was in a really good, positive mood.

Stattbad art/culture. An abandoned swimming facility turned into a bunch of artist studios, they also throw parties that evidently last until 4pm the next day (at least for the dj and two party-goers)

plus a bonus math link to a documentary on Andrew Wiles, Fermat's Last Theorem, and how he persevered through initial problems in his proof

success in Berlin

2010-08-29T06:07:00.000-04:00

I've been in Berlin for two full days now. The first was spent wandering around, adjusting to the time change, and screaming at a disgusting Australian in the hostel who woke everyone up at 6:15 am and wouldn't stop talking.

The second day was filled with even more accomplishments. Getting an apartment was the number one goal, and I soon discovered the site Germans use instead of craigslist to find apartments and roommates: wg-gesucht.de. This means 'searching for living community' I think. Later I will write a bit about different Berlin neighborhoods, but I discovered yesterday that I definitely wanted to live in Kreutzberg - former West Berlin, just south of the Spree river, an old Turkish community with lots of stores and restaurants and bars in easy walking distance (some other neighborhoods, like Prenzlauer Berg have cool cafes and restaurants but they're more spread out). I sent out a bunch of emails responding to ads on the site and saw two apartments in Kreutzberg on Saturday. Both were enormous and cheap by New York standards - 350 euros / month for bedrooms bigger than my whole East Village apartment, bathroom included. Both apartment viewings were great successes - I got along well with the girl leaving the first apartment and while I didn't her room, I went out later that night with her and her friends, and they're taking me to some flea markets today (accomplishment #1 - met some Berliners). The second room was in an apartment with three Germans, in a cool area of Kreutzberg right by the Spree river (the view above is from a bridge one block from the apartment). The apartment's on the ground floor in a cool old building and the room is huge with a lofted bed, a desk, and two full-sized couches (note to readers.. you can visit!) . The roommates texted me an hour later and said I could take the room, which I did. (accomplishment #2 - found an apartment). They speak some English but hopefully living with them will rapidly improve my German.

Goals for day 3: visit the Sunday flea markets, look for a bike and a guitar.

I'll Teach You a Lesson (with my Smith & Wesson)

2010-08-25T20:14:00.000-04:00

for more from the Lakeside Lounge show, click here

jenny & johnny

2010-08-24T16:01:00.000-04:00

You can hear the whole album at the npr site now (it comes out august 31). (it's Jenny Lewis and her underage bf). It sounds great to me - a little bit surf rock, lots of harmonies and her voice sounds great as always.

articles I should have been interviewed for

2010-08-24T11:06:00.000-04:00

In the first installment of a presumably regular feature, note this Washington Post article on a physicist trying to use math to come up with a better way of rigging an 8 for rowing. His 'idea' (which I'm sure Andy Card has tried before) is some sort of extreme bucket-rig with port / port / starboard / starboard / starboard /starboard / port / port, stern to bow. The idea is to minimize the amount of power going into side to side motion. That rig is only one of several that have side-to-side motion canceled out according to his calculations - some more popular rigs like the 'German rig' (standard bucket) also are acceptable.

your daily Bolano update

2010-08-23T09:14:00.000-04:00

A nice short article by Diego Paz, I Never Went to Blanes, about his correspondence with Roberto Bolano. The article reads a lot like one of Bolano's short stories (which, by the way, are available, accessible, and a good introduction to the author). I like the picture of Bolano eating an ice cream cone on the beach.

proofs, mathematical physics, experimental math, and combinatorics

2010-08-20T12:33:00.000-04:00

Neil mentioned this blog post of Dick Lipton's to me: Proofs, Proofs, Who Needs Proofs? The question he tries to answer is why mathematicians work so hard for a formal proof of a statement everyone knows is true (P != NP being a prime example). There are a few good reasons to search for a formal proof:

A proof gives certainty that what you 'know' is true is actually true.
A proof can give insight into why something is true.
An inventive proof comes with new ideas and new methods.

And of course there are different kinds of proofs. There are proofs that are short, beautiful and almost magical. The steps seem to have come out of thin air and you marvel at how a human being could have thought of them. Erdos called these "proofs from the Book". Then there are proofs that are longer and less aesthetically pleasing, but whose steps explain the difficulties of the problem and, at least in retrospect, seem reasonable and straightforward. Then there are proofs that are aesthetically offensive, with steps that can be checked line by line to be correct but don't provide any illumination. An example of this last kind is the computer-aided proof of the four-color theorem which says that you can color any map with just four colors so that no two adjacent countries are colored with the same color.

As Dick Lipton mentions, a theorem will often have several different proofs. Maybe the first proof was ugly and technical, but subsequent proofs have either refined it to a gem-like Book proof or elucidated the steps to explain the heart of why the theorem is true.

So that's why mathematicians look for proofs. But the first thing they need to decide is what to try to prove. And this is often the harder task. Just for fun, we can separate three different ways of deciding what to prove:

Mathematical Physics: a professor I know uses this name to include actual mathematical physics but also other situations in which you're searching for a formal proof of a statement that the physicists (or computer scientists, or ...) know is true but haven't given a rigorous argument for. Stanislaw Smirnov just yesterday won a Fields Medal for exactly this - proving rigorously some fundamental facts about percolation models (think oil moving through porous rock) that physicists had long believed but never proved.
Combinatorics: again this includes combinatorics but more generally math in which individual problems are the stars. Think of Paul Erdos offering cash prizes for the solution of some of his favorite problems. The problems may or may not have applications to the real world, but there is a sense of joy, playfulness and appreciation of math for its own sake which was embodied by Paul Erdos himself and carried on by anyone influenced by him (which we all know is basically every mathematician..)
Experimental math: Here the mathematician interacts with an outside source to figure out what she should try to prove. Maybe the source is a computer or an actual laboratory experiment. This is math as classical science, trying to discover facts about the world. A formal proof is always nice to have, but a new algorithm supported by strong numerical evidence but no proof can still have a real impact on the world if people use it to solve real problems.

All three are great reasons for working hard at math, and ideally you'd get to do a little of each - math at its very best is illuminating, fun and practical.

2010-08-19T16:05:00.006-04:00

Anthology Film Archives on 2nd ave and 2nd shows a lot of arty movies you can't see elsewhere - rare, old, foreign. The atmosphere is unabashedly film nerdy - the audience claps during the opening credits for their favorite film editors and soundtrack composers, they laugh a little too loud at awkward moments, and the theater doesn't even serve any refreshments. Tickets are $7 with a student ID, and my only complaint is that the seats are a little too small.

Last night Alfredo and I saw this 1969 French heist movie, The Sicilian Clan. Alain Delon is one of the coolest criminals you'll ever see (Alfredo wants to dress like him now), and the old Sicilian guy is a bad-ass too. It's a real pleasure to discover a great old movie you'd never even heard of - it makes you imagine all the other great movies that you still have a chance to see for the first time. Scenes in this movie that are not even crucial to the plot are delightful - from the details of 1960's transcontinental air travel to the the two old Sicilian gangsters playing in the toy store. There's also a very nice aerial shot of 1960's NYC.

world's second-most stylish mathematician wins Fields Medal

2010-08-19T10:57:00.000-04:00

(yes, that's a scorpion). here's a list and write-up of the four winners, including the first ever winners from Vietnam and Israel, and one probabilist.

a short review - Super Sad True Love Story

2010-08-18T12:03:00.000-04:00

I recently finished Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart's new novel set in the not-too-distant future. It's gotten a lot of very good reviews and while I had to stop reading his other two novels, I flew through this one and was constantly entertained.

The basic plot is a super sad love story, but the real drama is Lenny Abramov's struggle against the deadening culture of the future. Most of the humor is in Shteyngart's extrapolations of the way we interact with each other through technology - he imagines a world in which everyone stares constantly into their hand-held apparat (iPhone), girls wear see-through 'onion skin' jeans, people rate everyone around them on a scale of 1-1000 in different categories (fuckability, personality, credit rating), and every event in your life is posted for the world to see on the GlobalTeens network.

It's amusing but also rings a little bit true - for whatever reason I feel that even over the past 6 months the amount of time people look at their phones has increased dramatically. But this will probably date the book badly - he's just taken the iPhone and Facebook to the 10th degree and shown us that future. But will those two pieces of technology really be so dominant in the future? Probably not. And it's not that the predictions will be inaccurate - predictions about the future always are, and accuracy has little to do with how well futuristic literature stands up. The bigger problem is that 5 or 6 years from now it may be hard to understand why he was so obsessed about those two particular things.

Compare this way of describing the future to that of 1984 or A Clockwork Orange, which seem to be the two books he's trying to echo. They spend less time imagining technological progress and instead make psychological predictions of the future - and not to literally predict what the future will be like but to examine human qualities under stress and from a different persepctive. And this book does the same thing - while 1984 asked what a human life would be like under constant surveillance from Big Brother, this book asks what a life would be like if you were compelled to expose all the details of your own life for the rest of the world to see. It's just that all the techy details, while amusing, get in the way of this question a little bit.

Still - a fun book to read, especially if you want some motivation to leave your iphone at home for a few hours and lay in the grass and read some printed pages.

some updates..

2010-08-12T12:41:00.000-04:00

on the P vs NP problem:
whatever the result of the purported proof (and it looks like it will not stand), the whole thing has been interesting as a demonstration of how the internet, and blogs in particular, change the way math is done - within days there have been a lot of interesting discussions about the math involved from good mathematicians and computer scientists around the world. Check out these posts on Dick Lipton's blog, as well as Scott Aaronson's follow-up meta-post and Timothy Gower's thoughts on the problem.

on measuring a room:
Pinterest conducts an interview with our two favorite room-measuring designers.

body measuring

2010-08-09T22:20:00.000-04:00

Two designers come into a party with a problem - they design apartment rooms, but nobody wants to measure their own apartment! why won't people just get out their tape measure and do it? the bartender at the party has what he thinks is a good idea - print business cards with the silhouette of someone lying down on the floor. encourage people to measure their apartments by body lengths. (then multiply by your height..) while they appreciated the artistry of the suggestion, they came up with a slightly more practical method themselves: stand on the tape measure and do a sort of dance step across the room.

P vs NP?

2010-08-09T10:36:00.000-04:00

for an interesting glimpse into how math and science work, take a look at Dick Lipton's blog post and the comments section. Vinay Deolalikar, a researcher at HP Labs, has posted a first draft of a proof of P =! NP, the biggest open problem in computer science, one of the biggest in all of math, and one of the Clay Millennium problems that has a $1 million prize attached. Purported proofs of this appear all the time, but they are clearly wrong and written by cranks. This one is different - he's a serious researcher and has written a serious paper with new ideas. Still, computer scientists who have studied this problem are very skeptical (Scott Aaronson pledges his own $200k in addition to the million if this is a correct proof). The skepticism is just not sour grapes that they didn't get there first - it comes from many results that show that any possible proof of P =! NP must get around certain difficulties. It's also assumed that any proof would have to contain revolutionary ideas since people have spent 40 years failing to prove it with the ideas we have already.

So the next week or so should be exciting. The experts will dig into the 100 page proof, looking closely at each line. And even if they find a flaw in the proof, it won't necessarily mean it's not worthwhile - the new ideas Deolalikar introduces could still be very valuable.

the end of linear algebra

2010-08-06T15:15:00.011-04:00

Done teaching for the summer, the class took their final yesterday and got their final grades today. If you'd like to try the final exam, it's here.

It was indeed a lot of fun to teach this class. One surprising thing was that the topics I liked best ahead of time and thought would interest the students the most (abstract vectors spaces, spaces of polynomials, adjacency matrices of graphs) didn't. And the topics I didn't really know very well myself going in (least squares solutions, pivot positions) went over the best.

Little Cabin Home on the Hill

2010-08-05T09:36:00.000-04:00

trying out some new songs in preparation for the Lakeside Lounge.. this one's an old Bill Monroe song.

science movies

2010-08-05T07:53:00.000-04:00

Watched two movies recently, Agora in the theater, and Amadeus at home. While Amadeus was one of the best movies I've ever seen (can't believe I hadn't seen it before), Agora was flawed but entertaining.

Agora is about 4th century Alexandria, a woman mathematician philosopher named Hypatia, and the tensions and violence between Pagans, Jews and Christians. As Tyler Cowen says, the movie is very pro-science and anti-religion, almost naively so. And the early Christians are portrayed as Islamic terrorists. You get the strong feeling watching the movie that the director is one of those Europeans worried that Muslims will take over the world.

The cheesiest parts of the movie are reserved for the moments of scientific discovery, as Hypatia struggles to understand the motion of the planets and eventually looks at her wooden conic section sculpture... I won't spoil the ending.

It made me wonder, though - are there any movies that portray the work of science or math well? I ask this because Amadeus takes what could be a nerdy topic - a long-dead classical composer, and turns it into an exciting, thrilling drama. You see Mozart as a little punk but you also feel his genius. Part of this is because we can hear his music in the film. You can' really do that with science the great discoveries of the past (like the motion of the planets) don't seem genius to us since we've grown up accepting them as facts our whole lives.

There are certainly good movies about math - Proof, for example. But it's good as a drama that happens to star mathematicians, not in how it presents the process of doing math. The play Coppenhagen, later made into a movie with Daniel Craig, is even better, and uses the physics involved as a metaphor for the (real) mystery of the meeting of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. And there are certainly a number of good movies about medicine (Outbreak etc..)

The trick would be to portray a scientific discovery that is not too abstract (this is where movies like A Beautiful Mind and Proof get bogged down), or too understandable now (like the motion of the planets). The audience should be impressed but not mystified - like hearing and appreciating Mozart's music. My suggestions for topics ripe for a portrayal:

The Manhattan Project - the atomic bomb is still an amazing creation - so much energy out of so little. Plus there would be lots of potential storyline to follow: the escape of Jewish scientists from Europe; the development of the computer for the calculations; the secrecy and security surrounding the project.
Alan Turing - he helped invent the computer and break Nazi codes. He was also persecuted for being gay. The invention of the computer would be something that I think could be portrayed well on screen.
Perhaps too nerdy, but the battle between Newton and Liebnitz over Calculus.

two nice improvements to good restaurants in the east village

2010-08-02T21:12:00.000-04:00

went back to two of my favorite spots in the East Village recently and I can report two positive improvements.

At Bibim Bar, hidden behind Ramen Satyagaha on 1st and 9th, the hot stone (dulsat) bibimbap was hotter than I'd remembered, and delicious. And before they'd serve it with a small bowl of miso soup and kimchi. This time we got the miso and the kimchi, but also three other small Korean side dishes - one seaweed thing, some delicious squid in sauce, and pickled cucumber slices (I guess those are called 'pickkles'). And they were very nice about refilling the side dishes as we ate.

And today I went back to Totale Pizza for lunch. Two improvements: the big sign out front has been replaced thankfully. The old one had a picture of a brown blob that was supposed to be their pizza. It looked disgusting and ensured that they got no walk-in customers off St Marks. The new sign has proper colors and the pizzas look edible. And the prices have improved (though they were quite reasonable already) - everything's about $1 cheaper and now they have a great lunch deal: for $9 you choose any of their pizzas and any of the appetizers. I'd recommend the spinach salad and the Margherita DOC.

10th and B, nyc

2010-07-31T16:16:00.000-04:00

espn.com and the Palinization of the English language

2010-07-30T12:11:00.000-04:00

Refute: Prove (a statement or theory) to be wrong or false; disprove.

I check the sports headlines at espn.com once in a while, and in the last month I've noticed the same strange thing three times. Whoever writes the headlines uses the word "refute" when she should use "deny". Today's example: "Bosh refutes Raptors GM claim he 'checked out'". If you click on the story you'll see it's just about an interview in which Chris Bosh claimed he did play hard because his name is Bosh and Boshes work hard. Is that a refutation? Not so much. The other instance I remember was at the beginning of the Tour de France, a story with the headline "Armstrong Refutes Landis' Doping Claims". I clicked on the story thinking, 'wow, Lance Armstrong found some proof that Landis was lying'. But no, the story was just Armstrong saying he'd stopped paying attention to Landis and that he's always been clean. Again - not a refutation, but a denial.

One possible explanation - the headline writer thinks "refute" sounds more sophisticated than "deny", and so screw the subtleties of the meanings, let's use the sophisticated-sounding word. (An infuriating example of this kind of thinking is at the checkout line at many retail stores - the cashiers have been instructed to say "Following guest, please step forward" instead of the shorter, correct "Next guest, please step forward". It's painful to listen to).

A darker explanation for this bit of illiteracy is that people (meaning journo-publicists at espn.com) don't understand the concept of a proof. A proof involves logical deductions from factual evidence - a denial is just a statement. Good journalists should demand evidence for a denial, not just accept the word of a celebrity as proof in itself. It's not breaking news that espn would take the second route - see for example the farce that was LeBron James' "Decision". But now their pandering to stars has trickled into their language.

This is actually one of the best reasons I can think of to teach math to a broad audience of students. A lot of the math you're taught in high school and college is painful and useless - trigonometric formulas (double angle formula??), how to compute integrals by hand, all sorts of numerical computations you would use a computer for in real life. It's a bunch of memorization of things you never need to remember. But learning how to write a simple mathematical proof is actually an important skill. You learn how to take given information (facts), proceed in well-defined, logical steps, and reach your conclusion. It's not a matter of stating your opinion - you have literally proved the statement. How to disprove a statement? You don't just deny it - you give a specific, concrete counterexample. And to learn how to write proofs you don't memorize a bunch of things - you learn a different way of thinking through practice and examples. And you'll certainly learn that "refute" and "deny" have different meanings.

tales from the pinup

2010-07-29T10:48:00.000-04:00

here's a little recap with pictures from Paul's pinterest meetup in SoHo on Monday. Alfredo has vowed to revenge on Ian for not deleting that photo of him. Is he justified? It's the very last picture of the set

8/17/10

2010-07-28T10:26:00.000-04:00

a cool DIY bike lock

2010-07-28T09:49:00.000-04:00