Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

Over the break, I’m visiting Phoenix and Austin. This entry is here to help me keep track of everything, and partly to beg rides, and lodging from Austinites.

I’m hoping to hang out with the wondrous Sunshine on the afternoon of the 28th. I’ll probably be calling people tomorrow to ask for places to sleep and rides to and from Pallas (Friday to Sunday: won’t be in Austin then). Volunteers for the airport rides would be appreciated.

On presents: (Yes, this is very late.) If there’s anything in particular you want, ask for it. If not, I may have seen something recently that struck me as perfect for you. If so, I probably got it. Otherwise, sorry, I’ll keep my eyes open (KMEO) specifically for you. (It’s silly to give gifts only at Yule time.) On the other hand, I’m going to San Francisco on Thursday for the specific purpose for K-ingMEO, so if there are any shops you know of that I might particularly want to KMEO in, please comment. Suggestions for a better acronym are also welcome. Don’t get me presents. It will be enough to see my Austinites.

This is what this season is all about.

(but nobody else is any better.) Alex Stepanov: Notes on Programming course taught at Adobe, 2005-2006 [PDF] (This is the guy who wrote the STL.)

I just got back from my second visit to San Francisco in two weeks. It’s an hour’s ride each way on the CalTrain, $10 total. That’s about the same cost as driving, but I can read on the train.

The first trip, last Saturday (20051029), I took my bike. I went to the farmers’ market at Market and Embarcadero and ate lunch there (French-style yogurt and an organic hamburger (thank you, cow)). Then I headed into the city and up Nob Hill. I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea. “I have a mountain bike with lots of very low gears. The hill can’t be that tall.” Right. So several panting stops later I made it to the top and found Grace Cathedral. Amy, go there when you visit. They have two labyrinths. Then I headed north back down the hill. Took a detour to see Lombard street, the curviest street in the world. This time I left my bike at the bottom of the hill and just walked up. Then all the way down to the Fisherman’s Wharf area. Stopped in at Patagonia, seller of high-priced but ecological clothing. They’ll even take one of their fabrics back to be recycled when it’s worn out. Didn’t buy anything, but I might when I need a new jacket. Then locked up my bike to walk around. I walked over toward Ghirardelli Square. Just before I got there, I found two neat little art galleries on Beach St. One had some of Dr. Seuss’s paintings. Ghirardelli square was nice; sat for a while and listened to the live band. I couldn’t decide what to buy there, so didn’t buy any chocolate. I walked around a little more, and then had dinner at a little (overpriced) pub called Fiddler’s Green because, well, you have to go eat at characters from Sandman. Then biked back to the train and went home.

Today I left my bike at home, planning to just walk around South of Market. I was surprised by how much the class of neighborhoods can change in just a few blocks. Market street around 4th and 5th is extremely high-class, but Mission street, just the next major street south, is much more run down by 6th and 7th streets. I walked from the train stop to Market & 5th, and then looped back to Yerba Buena park and the Martin Luther King memorial there. It was amazing how different the park felt from the rest of the city. They have what seems to be a mall on one side, but they’ve managed to prevent that mall from having anything commercial really visible from the park. So effectively the mall just acts as a wall keeping the city out. So you walk in, and it gets really peaceful and green, except for the occasional siren going by. And they picked quotations from MLK that aren’t primarily about civil rights, but about peace and community and stuff. Anyway, after that I walked down Mission street to 12th, and then over to McRoskey, who sells beds, since I still need one of those. $3,500 for a queen: ouch. But they’re made by hand, and in San Francisco, which is nice because it provides better jobs than mattresses made in a big factory far away. They’re not made from organic materials though, so I’ll go look at the stores in Berkeley (link so I can remember which stores) before deciding. Then I walked back up Market street and then to the Apple store and Cody’s bookstore. Cody’s doesn’t compare to Powell’s in Portland, but it has a nice selection, and I bought Freakonomics and The Ecology of Commerce. (So Sunshine will be getting her copy back shortly. Thanks for making me read that!) They also had two authors speaking tonight, so I stayed for that, which was worthwhile. Then it was 7:00, so I had time to walk around Union Square, which is nice enough, but surrounded by really expensive, not-worth-it stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. There was an accordion player. Then back to the train. Along the way, I stopped at the Whole Foods, which is bigger than the tiny one in Palo Alto, but not so huge as the one in Austin. Noticed that they have reasonable queen sheet sets made of organic cotton, and picked up “natural” shampoo and deodorant. We’ll see if they work. Then home, and posting, and bed. Good night!

I’m visiting Austin on a recruiting trip with Google, and I want to see the people I know. I was thinking we could go to Mirrormask at Dobie at 7:10 on Saturday and then go to dinner and coffee and hang out afterwards. Everyone is invited. I’m thinking Polvos for dinner, but that’s open for negotiation. Comment here if you have a better idea.

I don’t believe in accidents. We’re here for a reason. The Great Spirit took the gumbo from New Orleans and poured it all over Texas.

Cyril Neville, New Orleans percussionist

Yesterday, I found out that my parents are something-ist. I told them that some of you were thinking of taking in a refugee (wow, refugee is such a strange word to use in the U.S.), and their first reaction was (paraphrasing), tell them to be careful. A lot of the refugees aren’t good people. Well sure, any group of fifty thousand people is going to have a few untrustworthy ones. But why should they be any less honest, on average, than, say, the random person I shared a dorm room with for my first year at college? These people aren’t like random people in College Station. Well, that’s true. The people who couldn’t leave New Orleans were blacker and poorer than those in the town I grew up in. I don’t know which label fits, but I’m pretty sure one does.

I’m not immune to either racism or classism. I’m ashamed any time an instance gets pointed out to me, but the attitudes are still in there. So why am I disappointed in my parents for expressing them? What really matters is the scientific and statistical answer to the question: Are poor/black people more likely to steal from or otherwise hurt the people they live with than middle-class/white people? But there’s a whole lot of grey area between a scientific answer of yes and a scientific answer of no, and I think we’re currently in the middle of it. Our racism and classism is determined by how much we believe one way or another before getting a scientific answer. I see answering yes before all the data is in as a moral failing, and, apparently, am willing to call people out on it here.

Work is great, and Katrina sucks. So, while I’m not so cool as to go to Houston to help, I did give a sixth of this two-week’s paycheck to the Red Cross to compliment the third that the federal government didn’t use to help anyone.

For all the beer drinkers among my readers: the company that makes Fat Tire lives sustainably.

[via Shelley]

You can buy yourself a place in one of sixteen authors’ next books. The auctions were suggested by Neil Gaiman and benefit The First Amendment Project.

This war has a popular label and a political label, but it’s not accurate. Terrorism is a means of power projection, it’s a weapon, it’s a tool of war. Think of it as our enemy’s stealth bomber. This is no more a war on terrorism than World War II was a war on submarines. It’s not just semantics … Words have meaning. And these words are leading us down to the wrong concept.

Lieutenant General Wallace Gregson, quoted by Britt Blaser

Wow, this guy’s good.

I can’t find it in myself to care about the at-least-50 people who died in the London bombings two days ago. For that matter, I couldn’t care about the almost 200 killed in Madrid or the almost 3,000 who died in New York. Certainly it’s sad that human beings died, but I didn’t know them. I would care if anyone I know died. If I know anyone who lost someone in these attacks, my heart is with you. But it’s not with the thousands of people I don’t know, who lost someone.

And for that matter, why should I care? What makes these 3,250 people’s lives more important than, say, the hundreds of thousands who starve to death every year because our agribusiness is more important than their livelihoods? Or the millions of Americans whose lives are torn apart by the idiocy of the drug war? Oh, that’s right: they’re white, and the brown people did it. It’s not that the grief for the people killed in London is racist, but the fact that we care so much more about this tragedy than the thousands of others happening daily makes me sick.

A friend proposed another explanation yesterday. When a few people set bombs that kill 50, we have a very short chain of cause and effect, and we can point to the people responsible. When we refuse aid to organizations that promote the use of condoms, and five years later, a quarter of Africa has AIDS, the chain of causality is longer, and more people were involved: it’s harder to pin the blame on any one person. When we vote for a war on drugs, and fifteen years later a third of the black population has been in prison, not only is it harder to follow the causal chain, when we finally come to its beginning, we find ourselves. It’s really hard to admit that, yes, I had a hand in causing this tragedy.

But no matter which psychological reason explains our grief for Londoners rather than Africans, I can’t make myself believe that 50 lives have different values in different places. I have only a certain amount of energy that I can use for grieving, and it has to be split up among all of the world’s unnecessary pain. 50 Londoners just don’t deserve that much.

In the next few weeks, you have several chances to see me before I leave for California:

• Pagan Caffeination Night
• First party celebrating my leaving, on Monday, July 11 at Aphrodite’s. Come over some time in the afternoon; leave later.
• The Priest Salon
• Second party celebrating my leaving, on Saturday, July 16 after the priest salon, also at Aphrodite’s. If you just want to come for the party, I’m guessing you should show up around 8-9:00. I’m having two parties to accomodate people who work either weekends or weekdays, not because I’m greedy for attention. Or it could be that too.
• I go to College Station on the 18th, come back on the 22nd, and then leave Austin for California on the 23rd. I will spend the night of the 23rd in El Paso, the 24th in Tucson, the 25th in Phoenix, and then either drive straight to to Mountain View, or stay the night of the 26th in Los Angeles and arrive in Mountain View on the 27th. If you want me to visit you on the way, or want to come with, comment or send an email.

As most of you know, I start working at Google on August 15^th. I will be programming (sorry, Software Engineering™) for them, but I don’t know yet what project I’ll be working on. I move out there in the last week of July, which gives me time to settle in before I have to start work. I’ll be living at 40² Villa St. #14², Mountain View, CA 94041. (Do the math.) That’s within biking distance from Google, so I won’t have to use my car much. I also live in walking distance from Castro St., Mountain View’s downtown. I’ll have a full 1-bedroom apartment with a sofa bed, so if anyone is passing through the bay area and needs a place to crash, give me a call/email.

I just finished reading The Cultural Creatives (a very worthwhile book), and one of the themes it reminded me of was the lack of a story of how to live in our culture. We don’t have a shared myth, or, maybe more accurately, our shared myths haven’t been updated since we lived in small tribes. And people are getting hurt because we don’t have these stories to help guide our behavior, to help us navigate life. We need a pattern language for living.

But how do we intentionally write a new myth? A new story for people to live by? As a computer scientist, I see myths as abstractions of true stories. In order to design a new abstraction, you first have to look at a large sample of its concrete examples. My idea for myth-writing is to make it a collaborative process based on a wiki, but with a twist. People who log in will have access to a personal area whose content they control completely. Here, they can provide examples — stories from their own life — without worrying that anyone will change them. Then we will have a public area into which the community can distill and abstract individual stories into common myths intended to resonate with the entire culture. Anyone will then be free to take these stories and retell them outside of the myth-wiki in the hope that the stories can help someone live their life better.

So what do you think? The details aren’t here yet, but are there general suggestions that might make this sort of project more likely to succeed? Has someone already done this? Do you have stories that you want to tell?

Say you’re driving your car at 70 mph on the highway, and you need to stop. As a rough calculation, you’re going 110 km/hr or 30 m/s. Your car weighs on the order of 1000 kilograms, so the energy your brakes absorb is 1/2mv² = 1/2*1000*30*30 = 450 kilojoules. Unless you have regenerative breaks (i.e. are driving a hybrid), this energy is wasted. A desktop computer uses on the order of 300 watts. So the amount of energy your car wastes every single time you stop from 70mph is enough to run your computer for 25 minutes. I’m sure you can find other good comparisons.

Since we drive on city streets more, it might be more fair to consider a stop from 30mph. That’s 13m/s and 85kJ, with which you could run a computer for about 5 minutes, for every time you stop at a traffic light.

I wrote this speech differently from the way I’ve written most essays. I obviously put more effort into getting it right than I usually do, but the techniques I used were also different. Most of the time I put a lot of effort into each paragraph as I write it and then barely revisit my earlier paragraphs as I finish the later ones. If I revise them, I usually only reword the sentences. This time, I treated it more like a program. I wrote a draft of each paragraph as quickly as I could, to get something readable quickly. Then, I went back and rewrote whole paragraphs at a time. It seemed to work at least as well, and I wound up with something of a history of what I wrote.

Since I’ve been studying Category Theory recently, I procrastinated by thinking of a mapping between essay-writing and categories. Sort of a category of essays. To specify a category, you have to say what the objects are and what the arrows are. The objects are audience mental states. Or maybe sets of audience mental states. The arrows in the essay category are sentences. They compose into paragraphs. This is true because any given sentence or paragraph needs the audience to be thinking certain things in order for it to make sense, and leaves the audience with some new thoughts. We can replace one sentence with another, or one paragraph with another, as long as they still type-check. Effectively, when we write an essay or a speech, we have some audience we expect, giving us the source of the arrow, and we have some new thoughts we want the audience to be thinking afterward, giving us the target. The work of writing an essay is to find an inhabitant of that type.

I also sent drafts of the speech to a lot of people to critique. Comments that I agreed with, I accepted immediately; ones I didn’t, I argued with. I worry a little that my arguing makes those people less likely to give me possibly-negative comments in the future. On the other hand, I don’t think I could do anything differently. If I don’t argue, I can’t simply accept the proposed changes since I don’t believe in them. I can’t just ignore them because they might have been correct. So the net result is that I argue strongly with some suggestions, I may finish the conversation with the other person thinking I’m annoyingly obstinate, and then I may very well wind up accepting the suggestion the next day. I’m happy to hear suggestions on how to do this better, but it may just be how my brain works.

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As I announced a few weeks ago, I was asked to give the student speech at my graduation. Here’s what I wound up saying. You’ll notice that the punctuation and capitalization isn’t always correct. That’s because I used the grammar to give me cues on how to say it. Thank you to everyone who helped me write it, even or especially if I seemed to resist your ideas. It wouldn’t have been nearly this good without you.

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One of the things I routinely tell people is that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. By definition, “news” means that it hardly ever happens. If a risk is in the news, then it’s probably not worth worrying about. When something is no longer reported — automobile deaths, domestic violence — when it’s so common that it’s not news, then you should start worrying.

Bruce Schneier in Should Terrorism be Reported in the News?

I have been selected to give the student address for the 2005 College of Natural Sciences graduation at UT-Austin. Wow. I get five minutes to say whatever I want to the entire college. Now I just have to figure out what that is. Suggestions are welcome.

• General platitudes about what an exciting time we live in and how we’re the future of America, etc.
• Doom and gloom about the direction of America. The coming theocracy, why it’s bad, etc.
• Anti-consumerism, Adbusters, Slow, Voluntary Simplicity, etc. Make Sunshine proud.
• On Greatness. Draw from Richard Hamming’s talk. Encourage graduates to be great rather than just good. Warn them about the perils of getting stuck in a job they hate. (drains your energy; makes you not want to work on anything you love; makes you an American.) I may be able to combine this and the previous one…