Ode to a paper deadline

Oh, that you were succinct and timely
Like the full stop of this strophe.

But instead you run on,
and on,
and on,
Needlessly extending,
delaying,
postponing,
Without hint,
or rhyme,
or reason for doing so
Requiring authors to collect,
and analyze,
and run more data
And ultimately to re-write,
re-shape,
re-reflect on their submission
Spending night,
after night,
after exhaustingly late night
Putting in one last chart,
one last plot,
one last conclusion
Before finally,
thankfully,
mercifully,
(and without warning)

You end.

Nice Goals

I visited a couple of art museums yesterday, and while I haven't had any formal art history training, I feel like I'm pretty good at getting the big picture.

Take Henry Matisse, for example. The "bored, rich, white dude that decided to take up painting." Now he's got a museum dedicated to him. The commentary provided for his artwork went on and on about how he really wanted to infuse the colors of the blue, blue Mediterranean sea into his paintings and everything changed substantially after his visit to Tahiti and blah blah blah. I don't know if I buy it. I think he might have just wanted an excuse to stare at naked women all day. (Actually, I really liked some of his impressionism stuff, especially the statues. I love the idea of presenting what you see, not what is visible.)

Or take, for example, the museum of Marc Chagall. The audio tour included with my visit (thank the gods for student discounts!) provided the meaning of every last brushstroke. Do you really think Chagall used the crucifix to represent his father's hat on his 26th birthday, the trials of his people in Belarus, and the end of suffering to the Jews? Or do you think that Chegall, a Jew, was merely including the crucifix because his employers were Christian churches? (Actually, I was baffled and in awe at the incredible woven tapestries he designed. The amount of skill and precision they must have required... Incredible!)

But what gets me even more is that Chegall was actually alive when they dedicated his museum. In fact, he designed the museum and placed his paintings. I would have been fascinated to have him give the audio tour–or at least offer a rebuttal to the current version. What would he have said? Would he have called it a bunch of hogwash?


And then I stumbled across XKCD: explain today and realized that Randall probably has an even harder time. Not only do his comics get critiqued, they often get over-analyzed. And he's STILL ALIVE WHEN THIS HAPPENS. What gets me even more is the discussion section: "And you, sir, are a canonical example of an outlier. Seriously, though, go to http://google.com [hyperlink included, just in case you missed it] and type 'is an acquired taste.'"


Someday when I grow up, I'm going to be a famous artist. And then I'm going to show up in disguise at all the fancy-schmancy art dinners and say, "Oh I heard Nathan talking about how his latest painting entitled 'apple by book' is actually a reference to the Garden of Eden as written in The Bible and in fact suggests that history is a tangled mess to nail down." I'd be the master troll.

Love from Nice, where the water is blue, the houses are pastel, and you can't help but look away from the camera when you take a selfie.

Becoming acquainted

I forgot my bike on the bus today. It felt good.

Not because I had left a (mostly just) sentimental transportation device on a public vehicle that would have been a hassle to recover, but because, as I was walking away empty-handed, the bus driver honked the horn and patiently waited for me to realize my error. This was the same bus driver I had chatted with my entire ride about South-By, traffic, the 30 route, and how more people should take public transportation... This was also the same driver who, when I got on the bus, greeted me with a welcoming smile and a reference to the conversation we'd had yesterday.

I love taking the bus. I feel proud to say that I haven't driven once to school this entire semester, and even though the experience isn't always the most pleasant (sometimes it might smell like an armpit and sometimes your bus might be 20 minutes late...and sometimes both of those things happen in the same day), I feel like I'm contributing to a better environment.

But what I really liked about my experience today was that it had become routine enough that the driver recognized me. I haven't had a lot of experiences like that, and I don't really know why. (It might be that growing up not drinking hot or alcoholic beverages prevented my establishing a favorite coffeshop or bar, or it might be that being a poor college student who didn't want to take out student loans precluded my frequenting of restaurants, but it just as likely could be something else.) Lately, though, I've been looking for some sort of consistency. I've been looking for a diner where I can walk in, say "the usual" and they'll know exactly what I mean. I've been looking for a barbershop where I can say, "same as last time," and they won't bat an eye.

So it was nice today when the bus driver remembered my face, remembered my stop, and even nicer that he noticed I had forgotten my bike.

A time-lapse video taken from the car (loser) in the official Austin Rush-Hour Race–another reason to take public transportation.

Bad Feminism

I am a bad feminist.

The other day, a friend asked me if I was a feminist and I hemmed and hawed and qualified and... I finally had to admit that, even if I had some pro-female qualities, I really couldn't label myself as a feminist.

And then within only a few short days, I was called out on several occasions for saying or thinking things that really were counter to the feminist movement. I like to think of myself as more of an egalitarian, somewhat progressive and forward-thinking, typically politically correct, culturally aware, etc, etc, etc. I also am fairly aware that I have a ton of middle-class-white-educated-male-I'msurethere'salotmore privilege, and I do a fairly decent job of recognizing when someone says something fundamentally ignorant or racist. But twice? In two days? Being corrected for very male-centered thinking?

This morning while I was playing basketball, I found myself wondering how certain darker-skinned guys (how do I say this without being racist?) had a very similar cadence/accent to their speech. Is it just because they were raised that way? Because they've been around it from a young age? Is it a conscious choice or something that just happens? And then on the way home, the Ted Radio Hour addressed just this issue. An African woman talked about how she had control of three "languages": her native African dialect, the African-American dialect she was raised on, and her "articulate" American dialect she's developed so people think she's "qualified." The program further went on to describe how even Prime Minister Tony Blair (definitely not American) was considered "more American" than Barak Obama.

And then Paul Bloom went on to say something that really stuck with me:

You can't change implicit biases by just sitting in your room and concentrating, saying, "I'm not going to be racist, I'm not going to be racist." But what you can do is, you can actively expose yourself to real-world instances which give you maybe a more accurate and more fair representation of these groups.

Maybe I am a bad feminist. And I probably have a lot of hidden biases that will come up with terrible timing. And I certainly hope I'll be corrected in the future for my self-centered thinking. But instead of being sorry for this reproof, I should welcome it as real-world instances that give me a glimpse into another group.


So I'm going to stick with Roxanne Gay on this one, and proudly proclaim that I, too, am a bad feminist—and that's not a bad thing.

A Grief Observed

I've recently gone through one of the hardest experiences of my life.

During the month of December, I made a new friend (a girl who worked at the University) and enjoyed the brief time I was able to spend with her. The getting-to-know-you phase was cut somewhat short by the holidays (I went home for a few weeks), but we still kept in contact. On December 30th, I flew back into town to plan a New Year's Eve party, and picked her up to help buy decorations. About 5 minutes after I had picked her up, I made the turn into my apartment—the same left-handed turn I'd made hundreds of times in a year and a half of living there—and was broadsided by an oncoming car. I was knocked unconscious so there's a good chunk of my memory that's rather blurry (and I remember none of the incident or the supposed other car), but after a few CAT scans and other procedures, I was released, completely fine.

She never made it out of her coma.


The ten days between when the accident happened and when she finally passed were some of the hardest days of my life: wrestling with God, with my emotions, trying to accept what happened. And the days and weeks that have followed have not been any easier. Since that time, I've gone through a complete gamut of emotions: intense guilt followed by sweet peace; sadness and fear that things will never be the same, followed by an optimistic hope and a knowledge that they would...followed by the confused, gradual, heavy settling that she was permanently gone and I was powerless to do anything about it; concern that I had forgotten her and moved on too quickly followed by intense, violent sobbing...

I've also learned a lot about comfort in grief. I've learned that the worst (and yet most common) thing one can ask is "How are you doing?" (Are they using the phrase in its trite, meaningless greeting sense, or do they know what happened—and are they prepared for the floodgates that might be opened in response?)

But most of all, I struggle with the "What can I do for you?" question—which is traditionally followed by "No really, what can I do for you?" and almost always wrapped up with "Well remember that if you need anything, I'm just a phone call away." As if repetition and emphasis makes up for the burden they've just (knowingly or otherwise) placed on my already-weary shoulders, the burden of making them—the non-grieving, nonetheless—feel better by offering them control in a situation that for me has been spinning violently out of control for days and weeks and now months... I've since quit telling them, "Well for starters, you can never ask me that ever again," and have instead opted to just smile and thank them for their concern. Sometimes, the simple repeated song is all that humans or birds know how to sing.


In stark contrast, the most meaningful expressions since that day have been in the form of gifts. Gifts I neither asked for nor expected, but sent me to tears nonetheless—tears of appreciation and gratitude and friendship and love. One such gift was the remote to our apartment complex gate, so I could take the back entrance instead of revisiting that same left-hand turn day after day, driving over the fluorescent-green painted lines in the street that shouted to all passers-by "something terrible happened here."

The other gift that meant the world to me was a pair of pants. Someone should have told me when I got on the plane that cold December morning to put on a pair of ragged jeans and a sweatshirt I didn't care about. When they pull you from your totalled vehicle, they don't ask you nicely to lift up your arms as they gently take off your jacket. They don't even spend the time to unbutton your shirt or unzip your pants. Instead, they take scissors (or a knife or bolt cutters or a blow torch or whatever they have handy, I guess) to the lot of it, giving it back to you in a hospital carryout bag like a prize from Dave & Busters. No, they really should have told me not to wear my favorite outfit, to keep my faux leather jacket I still haven't replaced safely hung in the closet, to keep my brand new pair of Bonobos safely unpacked, and to save my favorite flannel shirt for a different chilly Texas day. So when the pants came in the mail (from one of my very best of friends who, despite her attempts at remaining anonymous, left her billing address on the packing slip), I was once again reduced to tears. But this time, they were welcome tears, appreciative tears, and--most important--tears I could experience on my own, in the comfort and privacy of my own car, and at the rate I wanted or did not want.


Maybe this is the way all grief is: the disgust with trivial "checkins," the appreciation of gifts. Or maybe I'm different. In conclusion? Save your favorite outfit for a day when you'll decidedly maintain a comfortable distance from ambulances and paramedics with blow torches. And buy a friend a pair of blue jeans.

Musical Turing Test

I currently TA for an undergraduate Issues in Computer Science class, and during one of the lectures, the professor talked about a computer's ability to create art and music—which, one might suppose, are very "human" skills. Can a computer compose music? Sure...but it won't sound quite right. Right? In class, the professor tried this with two composers: Bach and Joplin. For each of these composers, she had a computer program generate ("compose") a musical piece after it had identified patterns ("learned") from a lot of music from that composer. She then recorded a pianist playing the computer-composed piece, so a piece generated by a Bach-learned program would sound a little something like Bach, and a Joplin-learned one would sound quite a bit like your typical Joplin rag.

I won't bore you with any more details (there are a few more at the actual test—you should take it, it only takes 7 minutes tops), but the results were interesting. During class, the teacher juxtaposed each computer-composed piece with an actual human composed piece, and then asked the students to pick the real piece. The performance was terrible. It was clear these students couldn't tell the difference between a great like Bach and a computer imitation of Bach. But then I began to wonder: as I took the test, I was able to pick out each of the real compositions. Was this because of my musical background? I decided to give the same test to a larger audience, this time recording their self-reported musical experience.

If you're not interested in the individual results and discussion, the takeaway is that, even among self-reported musicians, only just over 40% of the individuals were able to correctly identify the human composer. Yes. Only 40%. In other words, more often than not, humans think computers are more "human" composers than Bach or Chopin or Joplin. This is a terrible result! (There's a pretty good description why this is bad in this RadioLab episode, at about 16:26.) I'll try and go into it more in the Analysis section below.


Population Distribution
For those of you interested in the questions and population distribution, I've been updating the values here. For your information, the quiz consisted of 6 questions: three background, and three with the paired audio samples. For the first three questions, here are the number of respondents (total of 247) in each category:

1. What is your major field of work? The responses were free-form and varied from math to computers to culinary arts to music to motorcycle repair. I haven't looked at any of these responses past collecting answers.
2. Do you play any instruments? This was multiple choice, divided into 4 categories of increasing "musicality." Here are the number of respondents that self-selected each category:
1. No: 28
2. Yes, but I've picked it up on my own without lessons: 27
3. Yes, and I've had official lessons for at least one year:  131
4. Yes, I would consider myself a professional musician: 61
3. What is your technical musical background? This was also multiple choice with 4 categories, and had the following number of respondents:
1. None: 38
2. I know some musical theory, but I've picked it up on my own: 42
3. I've taken a class or lessons in musical theory: 124
4. I'm a professional musician or majored in music theory: 43

Categorical Results by Response
And here are the responses, separated into response for each category

Second question, accuracy by response:

1 - 27.4%

2 - 40.7%

3 - 42.0%

4 - 50.3%

Third question, accuracy by response:

1 - 32.5%

2 - 42.9%

3 - 40.9%

4 - 54.3%

Average total accuracy:
42.2%

A graphical representation of the responses, by category. The x-axis has the question number, and the y-axis has the accuracy. The circle size is representative of the number of respondents for that specific question.

Overall Results and Analysis

The overall accuracy for all three composers was 42.2%. In other words, only 42 out of 100 times were people able to correctly identify who the human composer was. There probably aren't quite enough samples to show statistical significance, and the survey process wasn't exactly accurate (I didn't prevent anyone from cheating—they could take the survey as many times as they wanted), but there does seem to be a general trend that with musical experience, the accuracy increases.

This is what I expected.

Almost.

On closer inspection, this all is actually quite disconcerting. With the sole exception of those who are professional musicians, humans think that the computer composer actually sounds more human. How could this be possible? Well, I can think of a couple of possibilities.

First, it's possible that there was a hidden variable we weren't controlling for. I had my roommate take the quiz first, and he got them all right. I asked him how he did it, and his response was that he just picked the better recording each time. Oops. When I designed the quiz, I already had the mp3 files for the computer composers, but I was lazy with the real compositions and just ripped the music off YouTube clips. I went back and actually purchased the music off iTunes so they would sound more similar. When I sent the survey out to a larger audience, there were more issues. Turns out iTunes adds album artwork, which was displayed in some browsers when they played the music. Oops again. This was a little harder, but with some online conversion and VLC magic, I finally cleared them all of their extraneous information. Perhaps there is something more I'm not controlling for—if this were real science, I'd want to have the same performer play each piece and be recorded with the same device. Good thing this isn't real science, right?

But there's another possibility that seems more likely. When the computer "composed" a piece by Bach, she wanted it to sound as much like Bach as she could, so she consciously added bits and pieces of actual songs. But when Bach really wrote his pieces, his goal was to create something new and fresh, something that didn't sound like anything he'd written before. Something that people would clearly identify as Bach--or would at least recognize it when they heard it before. All of his similarities to previous works were subconscious, influences from his schooling, the music he enjoyed listening to, even some of the music he previously composed.

Conclusion

With high statistical confidence, humans think that a computer who is trying to imitate a Bach piece actually sounds more like Bach than the composer himself. Maybe this is bad (computers will eventually replace composers and artists and singers and all other "human" fields), but maybe, instead, this identifies an aspect of talented human creators: the ability to create something truly unique.

Notes:
Note1: As people take this test, I'll update the results on this page. Hopefully I replace them all so it makes sense. Also, if you want some more statistics, I can try and get them to you—or I could probably give you the data myself, it's pretty well-anonymized.
Note 2: The first numbers were published on 23 Nov 2013 with 65 respondents and 42.6% accuracy. The results were updated on 26 Nov 2013 with 99 respondents and 40.7% accuracy. They were updated again on 11 Dec 2013 with 201 respondents and 42.8% accuracy. They were updated on 12 Sep 2014 with 247 respondents and 42.2% accuracy.

Back it up

My hard drive just crashed, completely unexpectedly. I have a high-end MacBook Pro that I only bought in 2011, so it was well under the typical 5-year life of most spinning drives. I learned two lessons from this experience:

1. Get the Apple Care. If you're buying Apple, it's one of the best add-on purchases you'll make. It gives you three years of protection (most companies only give you two), and it's only a fraction of the cost of your entire machine. The amount you spend will definitely be justified by your peace of mind. Apple replaced everything for free--and did it all over the weekend (I went in on Saturday and was out by Monday. The lag was because I had customized hardware). Very fast and efficient.
2. Back up your devices. While waiting in line to pick up my laptop, I stood behind an older gentleman who was obviously distraught after losing data on his phone--probably in the form of non-replaceable pictures of his grandkids. Unfortunately, there isn't much you can do after the fact, so prevention is the only way to go. Get a large external drive, something like the 3 TB Seagate drive I have (on sale, it's just over $100--definitely worth the hours of time you'd spend rewriting all your papers). If it's this big, you can also use it to store any pictures and music and movies that don't fit on your machine. Make sure you set it up to remind you to back it up every 10 days or so, or you'll forget and will have wasted the $100.

Do it. You won't regret it.

And to help you remember, I've included this wonderful song: 

On qualification exams

A part of me died last night.

It wasn't really a big deal. Really. I'd been planning for a month or so to give a presentation today–a sort of oral qualifying exam, the only of its kind in my PhD program. I'd been over my slides several times this week with my advisor, and then he finally sort of snapped. The conversation went from "I don't understand this slide" to "You need to do it my way," and then finally ended with a decisive "You're not ready for your presentation tomorrow."

Perhaps his decision was closely linked to our "discussion" earlier, the discussion that started out with ridicule, then proceeded quickly to a heated argument and ended with him walking out saying, "Maybe you need to find someone else willing to bring forward your research ideas." I watched him go in a quandary:  Do I apologize, let him know I'll change my slides to match his desires, or do I just ignore him and go forward with the presentation? He's fairly fickle, and if I could catch him in a good mood, I was confident I could get him to pass me. Besides, I would be presenting to a committee of three professors, and I'm guessing the other two wouldn't have any emotional attachment to my slides.

But then I decided to bow out. I'd had such visions of grandeur up to this point. Coming to graduate school was going to be the best thing I'd done. Sure, it might be hard work, but no longer would I be surrounded by incompetent undergraduates, no longer would my nights be filled with busy work just to get the grade.  Instead, I'd be in an environment surrounded by high-energy, deep-thinking scholars. The only problem I would have is finding enough room on my CV for all the publications I'd be pushing. There would be no drama, no posturing for positions or fighting with the "wunderkind" for an advisor's attention. Just research, and making an impact on the world.

And then I let that dream die.

It was slowly replaced with a kind of saddening understanding. Maybe a PhD program is something akin to the hazing process required for a college fraternity. At times the requirements might not make sense, and they might have nothing to do with the end goal, but if you can only get through the hazing, you'll be accepted by the group and given a lovely PhD diploma to hang on your wall.


Now I have only one question for myself:

Is this really what I want?

MR-ADAM

Dear C++ MapReduce:

All your base are belong to us.

EOM

Bogo Sort

(This post inspired by one of the latest XKCD comics)

The CS department recently finished our new building, and it's the first time I've actually been seated with my fellow labmates.  As the first item of business, we commenced prototyping our own version of Bogosort.

According to Wikipedia, the expected runtime is (n - 1) n!, so obviously we sought to empirically determine if this was accurate.  Our results showed that for lists of length 10, the number of iterations varied wildly from 1.0 to 315.9% the expected number of iterations, with an average at around 82.8%.  We also found that, for lists of numbers of length 15, nobody had the patience to wait for a single run to finish.  We also empirically determined Python is inefficient and hypothesized that C++ could probably even do the job better.

If you'd like to run the code yourself, you can find it here.

And finally, we determined an even more "efficient" (I use the term loosely, since efficiency for Bogosort is somewhat of a misnomer) Bogosort algorithm:

While not sorted(list):
  Rebuild Universe

Unfortunately, we never made it past the prototyping stage, even after expanding our search to include non-standard libraries.

Dear Sarah*

You're right.

When I said I wasn't into you more than you were into me,
It was a lie.

Not because I wanted you to think I liked you less,
Only because I wished you liked me more.

It doesn't really matter, now that it's over,
But admitting it is a big step for me.

Distance makes things easier to say.

On poetry and shoes

"It's too bad you don't have bigger feet."

I sent that message to a friend the other day. I don't think he understood what I meant, and I didn't offer any further explanation. We just left it at that. I've thought about it quite a bit since then, and I've realized I was pretty spot-on.


When aimed at a fat kid, jokes and insults are entirely uncalled for. Parents scold their children for verbalizing what they themselves keep tucked silently in the not-so-hidden recesses of their minds. After all, it's not the kid's fault they're a little overweight, right? Perhaps they haven't been taught to exercise, or perhaps their parents don't provide for them correctly. Or perhaps they're just "growing into themselves."


But when you've got big feet, it's open season.


You quickly learn that is is acceptable, almost even expected, for individuals both young and old, both those in your immediate family and those you've never met, to laugh at the obvious.

"How's the water skiing going? Barefoot, right?"
"I'll bet you love snow-shoeing – you don't even need the shoes!"
"How many gallons of milk can you fit in these boats?"


When I was 16, I bought my first size 16 shoes. I went from a 13 to a 16 in one glorious day – my feet had never felt better. But while I have what some might call a "firm understanding" (I'm a poet and didn't know it, but my feet show it:  they're Longfellows), the size of my feet and the stuff by which they are shod have seen no end of ridicule. But do you know what makes it even more interesting? Someone asked me recently what I'm most self-conscious about. My honest response was my feet. It's been that way for a while, probably since I was 16. So why is it that even as a grown adult, it's inappropriate to remark on a guy's weight or skin tone (as pale as it might be), and a cardinal sin to even suggest "weight" in any of its forms in the presence of a woman, but nobody thinks twice when it comes to feet? Even today, I can count on my two hands the number of days it's been since someone has commented on their disproportionality.


And yet, I've learned a lot from all these "well-meaning" offenders. Because various aspects of my uncontrollable physique (let's not even get started on height) have been the butt of many a joke, my skin is a little tougher. I learned long ago that someone telling me, "Hey are you sick? You actually combed your hair today," might not be a senseless act of ridicule. I learned to laugh when someone tries to walk around with their shoes entirely inside my own, and even help them out when they wanted the "perfect item for a clown costume."  I learned there are things beyond your control that others find humorous – perhaps because it helps them find a common ground, or perhaps because, in their mind, it's just not that big of a deal.


But that's what happens when you've got big feet.


So, to all my easily-offended friends, I only lament: "Would that you also had big feet!!"

A day in the life

Sometimes I love my life.

For example, today.

It quickly became apparent that my cubicle-mate was eating lunch because 1) the overpowering smell of something spicy and very oriental swelled over the dividers, and then 2) the loud and incredibly aggravating probably-culturally-acceptable-in-some-other-part-of-the-world sound of him eating his soup kept time with the clock.

I took a break to use the bathroom, passed the bike in the walkway that hasn't moved in months but instead is defiantly challenging the passive-agressive "Bikes are not allowed in cubicle areas" sign just feet away, turned left at what used to be the US army's "I want you..." poster with "...to stay quiet" below but now reads "Help Create a Culture of Acoustic Courtesy" (I only wish that phrase were enclosed in quotation marks or asterisks), and finally got to the bathroom.  I took care of my business next to a lot of ruckus in a stall, then washed my hand as the now-finished ruckus-maker slurped water from the sink (how he found this more sanitary than partaking from the drinking fountains just outside is beyond me).

And then I got back to my computer where I should be working in Lisp on Recursion and Induction homework but instead am trying to figure out at what sampling rate I need to save an mp3 file so an incorrectly-sampled video can have the audio synced with the speaker's lips (if I reduce the rate to 45960Hz, by the way, it looks nearly perfect).


Swell.  All we need is some of the cribbage players to start up their rousing game in the corner with the cot and one of my other cubicle-mates to start talking on the phone in a language that sounds like it's using the N-word all too frequently.


If that doesn't make you envious, I don't know what will.

I got sunshine in a bag

I have a computer science department mailbox I don't usually check, partially because it's not very convenient, but mostly because it usually just has junk from "Friends of CS" (tech companies pay money to the department for recruiting purposes).  Today I had a couple pieces of mail that were surely, from the looks of it, sent by Friends of CS.  One in particular caught my eye since it had what appeared to be a printing error on the address.  I figured it was just a form-letter that did a really good job of imitating handwriting (I'm always impressed with mass mailings that do a good job of this).

I opened the envelope and saw the following:

My first thought was that someone wanted my money.  No thank you.  On the way to the trash, I flipped it up to read the inside.

This was probably the best way to start an otherwise rough-starting week.  I don't know how long ago this letter was sent (I was the TA for this student last fall), and I'm super glad the department hadn't thrown it away (although they could have tossed the announcement about the pizza party last month).  But mostly, I'm glad this student (I removed his name so it would be anonymous) took the time to express his appreciation.  It was a small thing, but it made a big difference.

Thanks, [name removed for the sake of privacy]!