japanese traditional entertainment: lost in translation

in hakodate, at the aamas conference reception, we were treated to some traditional japanese entertainment. the japanese people in the audience were fascinated by this husband-wife pair, clapping and singing along. the foreigners, from my observations, were a bit dumbfounded. i really got into it after a few minutes. the woman's jumping was hypnotic.

my podcast lineup

over on winky's blog i just posted a comment that lists my favorite podcasts, and then i figured i wanted to spread my love of podcasts here.

i listen to so many podcasts. i've been doing this for almost a year now. here are the ones i like:

democracy now: great daily independent reporting show that really sticks it to US media and does a fantastic job covering the latest stories.

bbc's documentary archive: radio documentaries from the bbc. some are amazing.

bbc's in our time: it's always a discussion about some historical person or phenom. always fascinating, very scholarly, if you're into that. a recent show on john stuart mill was just great. i learned that his father essentially treated him as an educational experiment, and in fact jeremy bentham was his godfather.

kqed forum: discussion of topics of interest in america and abroad. a panel discusses a topic, and the last half of the show there are callers. quite good, though the host has a way of talking too loudly and hurting my ears at times.

cbc's quirks and quarks: bob mcdonald is amazing. he makes science so much fun. the recent segment on happiness was fantastic. "if you're looking for happiness, skip bulgaria.'

in addition, i listen to the new york times podcasts of their opinion columns. finally, a good search engine for podcasts is podzinger.

insults on the street: how to respond?

while walking around the mission yesterday evening, neha and i were heckled by a loud, perhaps drunken man carrying a guitar. this guy certainly seemed drunk or crazy. he asked, "is your woman for sale?" and then proceeded to make some racist comments concerning arabs, which i didn't quite catch. we kept walking and largely ignored him, even as he shouted loudly (but not coherently) in our direction.

as we walked away, neha commented that maybe the best thing to do to this guy would be to kick him in the balls. she said she'd get a sense of satisfaction, and maybe next time he'd think twice about insulting people and saying rude things, especially to women if it was a woman who beat him up. i thought that violence wasn't the answer, as it could get ugly, but also because i don't think violence is a good tool for teaching people lessons. i imagined that this might just make this heckler violent towards others, if he himself was attacked (note: interestingly, now that i think about this, if someone told me that in this case violence was the ONLY way to teach a lesson, i still don't think i'd endorse it.. so my original argument certainly isn't enough for me). at the time, i thought that ignoring him was the best strategy. though now i'm not so sure. i guess the question is whether some harm (verbal, physical, emotional) should've been meted out on this jerk? neha pointed out that in a reasonable world, we could just tell him that what he said was very insulting and we were hurt. but such words wouldn't have worked here.. so then what...

at the same time, i remember feeling so violated by the miami immigration agent and i think i did imagine punching him at some point (though of course that would've been very, very bad, at least practically speaking). i had this strong sense of "he can't do this to me, and i shouldn't let him. i should teach him a lesson!" of course, punching him probably would've taught no lesson, but my point here is more about the strong reaction i felt when i was mistreated.

Buying Clothing Online, revisited

if you recall, about a year ago i wrote about an idea i had for getting all your clothing online, shipped to you, styled for you (see here).

well, while this isn't exactly the same, MyTailor.com is in the business of making clothing that fits you well, and matches your style. you send them a shirt and they'll measure it, and you choose your shirt/jacket/etc style and they will custom tailor it, in hong kong, and send it to you.

it's a start! i found out about MyTailor from this times article.

graduate school: the horror!

recently we were asked to fill out a form concerning our experience in our graduate department. the responses were sometimes uplifting, often funny, and downright depressing at times. here's a sampling of answers. note that i've gone with more funny ones than anything else.. to be honest, there were many happy responses. but those aren't interesting!

update: my sister seema tell's me that my samples below are more depressing than anything.. i tend to think of them as quite amusing. perhaps there's some schadenfreude here

on advising and graduate advisors:

After my advisor received tenure, he stopped showing interest in most of my groups' research projects. It has been very frustrating.

The advisors should at least be living in Berkeley and not in another country! The advisors priority is his fame, industrial relationship and money more than the students research and progress.

Instead of explicitly turning me down, one professor would just schedule other people during our arranged meeting times so I would show up and he would be busy. He'd promise to email me and not follow through. It's not clear what professors are looking for in potential students. There were way too many students my year and not enough advisors to go around. [ed note: i especially liked this one because it can be read as if the advisor promised to email AND not follow through with his promises. ha!]

I had secured an advisor early on but had to change in the middle of my PhD as the previous advisor ran out of funding on the project I was working on. I was told to change topic or change advisor.

a happy one:

I feel that my working relationship with my advisor is excellent, but it would be nice to have a better working relationship with other faculty in the same area.

on improving diversity and position of women in computing:

Maybe making the environment a little more friendly toward women.

This question assumes that 'improving diversity' is a good thing. For the love of god, talk to people who've gone to programs with forced measures to 'improve diversity' (CMU's fiasco with women, first and foremost), and you'll get a good idea of how much that fucked things up.

some photos and a video from japan

we actually got to japan at a wonderful time. in hakodate, the cherry blossoms were just blooming, while in tokyo the temperature was perfect, albeit a little rainy.

 

omar, angry-looking, but really enjoying the cherry blossoms blooming in hakodate, japan.

 

some beautifully colored trees in a tea garden on the outskirts of tokyo

 

can anyone guess what these symbols mean? they sit between the up and down escalators, at 10 meter intervals. i thought the red symbols meant that you shouldn't place items on the middle area (see the guy placing something in the right-hand red symbol?) i was wrong. the red symbols mean "no smoking."




in this video, some crazy goldfish try to leap out of the water and eat me as i get too close to their feeding ground.

 

hakodate, japan

i'm now in hakodate, japan, where halldor and i are presenting a paper at the ap2pc workshop. my presentation went well, and i think i may have found someone who wants to do some quick collaboration.

today halldor and i browsed around the city. we went up to mount hakodate, which gives a spectacular view of the city.

while there, we saw a crow that let us get really close. i mistakenly insulted the crow, and now it's haunting me and halldor believes i'm cursed. i took a video of this close encounter i've uploaded it to google video. Here it is:

Award Error

I TAed for a class this semester and won an award for excellence in teaching. I received the certificate in the mail and wasn't very impressed... can you spot the error?


Update: the department is sending me a new certificate. they didn't approve of the spelling either... :)

Dave's Wedding

a few weeks ago i was in philadelphia for my good friend dave's wedding. the wedding was a great place to meet up with my 3 roommates from my last two years of college, neal, dave and qiuwei.

after neal, q and i sat down and started reminiscing about dave (we actually freaked q out by telling him that he would almost certainly have to give a speech, since he was dave's roommate for 4 years) we realized that dave hadn't asked any of us to be in the wedding party. now, from the outset, i don't mean this to be a "tut-tut why didn't dave ask us" complaining blog entry. what it got me thinking about was friendship, and how easily we can become distant.

honestly, dave and i haven't really communicated that much since we graduated, and i think that's also true of dave and q, and dave and neal. however, it's weird to think about how close we were back then, and how so much can change so quickly! of course, we're all still friends, but somehow really not that close.

i guess what was so befuddling was to look up and realize that i didn't really recognize anyone in dave's wedding party, despite the fact that we were friends for all 4 years of college. was there really such a separation in dave's life between us and them? i guess we all have our distinct group of friends.

anyway i can't exactly pinpoint what is bothering me about this, but i know i don't like it! but of course i'm very happy for dave, for kirstin, and i was so happy to be there. all i know is that it must be tough being the bride and groom, making decisions that might make people like me miffed... can't please everyone.

Chinese President's social concept of honor and disgrace, and online response

over at china digital times there's a great post looking at the online response to the chinese president's recent moralizing campain. for instance, here's one of the 8 parts of the moral code, which focuses on honor and disgrace:

5) The honor of togetherness and cooperation; the disgrace of profiting at the expense of others

the most interesting part comes at the end of the above post, where a blogger points out that one obvious way of really reading the template "The honor of [goodThing]; the disgrace of [disgracefulThing]" is to read it as "More and more people must be doing [disgracefulThing]." Here's the rewrite of 5:

5) More and more people must be profiting at the expense of others

Larry Brilliant: The World's 4 Major Problem Areas and Challenges

larry brilliant gave an invited lecture at berkeley yesterday. the title of the talk was the health of humanity. larry has done many amazing: he was a leader with the WHO's smallpox eradication program, founded the WELL online community, started Seva, an international health nonprofit, a TED prize winner, and now, the director of Google.org, the charitable-wing of google. an interesting, if somewhat dated, article about larry can be found here.

at the very beginning of his talk, larry gave the WHO's definition of health:

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. (Link)

it's a great definition and was really the launching point for larry's talk. (aside: first larry stated this definition, but when he restated it, he added "spirtual" to "physical, mental and social".. i thought that was interesting. in fact, he peppered his whole talk with mentions of the spirtual and religion. i didn't particularly care for this but it was clear that some sort of spirituality stokes him)

larry outlined what he thought the 4 major problems facing the world are:

1. Global Warming
2. Diseases of Animals
3. Poverty and Injustice
4. Religious and Sectarian Violence

and then he stated some thoughts on each.

before giving notes on what he said, i'll first say that larry ended his talk by saying that everyone in the audience, esp. berkeley students, should strive to work in one of these areas and really make a difference for the world. that resonated with me. i've been trying to learn a lot about various aspects of world development on the fronts outlined above and my next step is to figure out how i want and can contribute... but that's for another blog post.

Now the 4 topics:

1. Global Warming
Larry said at first he didn't think it was a problem up there with the rest of the world's major problems, but he has since reconsidered. he pointed out one scary thought which quickly showed the negative effects of global warming. the grameen bank, in bangladesh, has given out billions of dollars and helped millions of people out of poverty. it has been an amazing success story. however, as larry said, the bank and its successes are on a "collision course with global warming." bangladesh is not much above sea level, and as the water rises, the hopes and success of many might wash away.

2. Diseases of Animals: the overpopulation of protein providers
larry pointed out that about 35 years ago there were 15 million chickens in china. today, there are about 15 billion. the growth of the chicken population has dwarfed the human population growth. this has increased the liklihood of diseases jumping from animals to humans. in fact, most of our most deadly diseases have had this jumping characteristic, which is made easier because of our encroachment into all areas of the planet, and our international transportation networks which quickly move all kinds of animals and diseases around the world.

the key take away from this point, however, was how this problem was a problem for all of humanity, the poor, the middle class, the rich and the ultra-rich. larry spoke of a slide he uses in presentations that shows 200 emperors, empresses and kings and queens killed by awful pandemics of the past. "we're all in this together!"

3. Poverty and Injustice
honestly, i was less interested in what larry said on these points so my notes are less copious. i noted the oft-stated fact that about 3 billion people in this world live on less than US$2 a day (the bottom, or base, of the pyramid, as the group is often called). larry went on to say that this group used to love america back in kennedy's time, because in some ways america stood for what could be achieved, but now it's unlikely that much of this group loves america, given the current administration's policies. i don't recall being very interested in what he was saying here, or the strange logic he was following...

4. Religious and Sectarian Violence
larry spoke of a civilization that lived in historic afghanistan that actually praised all religions, and took great strides to make people of all faiths feel welcome. they had coins depicting gods from all kinds of religions, and were stewards of many religious icons (like the giant buddha statues that were recently destroyed by the taliban).

anyway, i think larry's point was that this is the kind of model we need today, and it's even worse that we don't have such an acceptance today because the damage fanatics can do today trivializes anything that could've been done thousands of years ago, or even hundreds of years ago. today it isn't too difficult to create awful diseases, or weapons of horrible destructive power. angry and bad decisions can have huge repercussions!

i'm hoping that they'll post larry's talk at the webcasts site soon.

jet lag, time delay, crazy faces..

yesterday while paying for lunch at the thai restaurant around the corner from my building i turned briefly to look at something on my right. i thought it was a brief turn, but the cashier nudged me with my change.. he couldn't have got the change that quick! i thought. but then i noticed that i was reacting very slowly to many things.

i think this is because of my jet lag on returning from india. jet lag is killer, and i get so little sun while in my berkeley office that i just want to fall asleep, right there, at the desk.

in possibly related news, i keep seeing people making odd faces, and i think i might be going crazy. the faces look something like this:

i hope these strange visions will also fix themselves up.

the medical establishment

while in india i learned, just by chance, that i may have a medical problem that has gone undiagnosed for, well, my whole life! but let's say its affected me for 20 years. (NOTE: i'm in the process of getting this problem diagnosed.. it may be nothing, but i have strong reasons to think otherwise.. though i have been called a hypochondriac)

the condition itself isn't so bad, but nevertheless this made me so angry! not spotting this problem was a failure on my part, my parents part, the medical professionals i have seen all my life, as well as the medical system itself. i was really down and angry, and got into a bit of an argument with my sister, who's about to graduate from medical school.

here are three areas where i have problems with the medical establishments i've been involved with (canadian and american)

1. outcome evaluation
2. patient training
3. easy access to entire medical history, key diagnoses, chronic issues, etc..

outcome evaluation: i told my sister that i really felt that most of the time my doctors didn't actually evaluate the outcome of the treatment they prescribed for me. she told me that checking outcomes is huge in the medical profession, and gets a lot of emphasis in training. but my typical experience with outcome evaluation is that the doctor prescribes something, and if the patient doesn't reappear, they assume that everything worked out. maybe they don't even assume that, since doctors are so busy that it's hard to schedule time for everything. however, i feel that diagnosis gets the most time and attention, and outcome evaluation just seems like this fuzzy area. i'd love to know how outcomes are supposed to be tracked, and how good the profession is doing, if anyone has comments.

patient training: i didn't even know that the problems i was having were in fact problems! and even today when i feel some small ailment i don't always have a good language for describing it, and i'm sometimes not diligent enough to remember to track it, so that when i do see the doctor again, i remember to mention it. i imagine a few hours of training would go a long way in helping me do a better job of gauging my healthiness, and might help me to better understand when it makes sense to see a doctor. i've never heard of such training, anywhere.

medical history: coming from the area of computer science, and especially google, i'm astounded at the awful disorganization of my medical records. i've moved around a lot, and seen specialists from time to time, and so i have medical records in any number of places. even when i get one office to fax their records to another office, i've found it unlikely that the new doctor will actually take more than a cursory glance at these new records. instead, they will in fact ask me to identify what's important via questions and filling out a long form. sure, i have some ideas, of what's important, but really, this is laughable!

there are probably some excellent observations embedded deep within those records that will never again see the light of day. for instance, i had wrist problems in college and so had treatment there. some things worked, some things didn't. i don't even remember all the things we tried. but it won't be easy for me to discover what worked for me and what didn't. there are likely so many interesting and useful things pertaining to my health that can be gleaned from those records. but they aren't in any format that makes this easy.

i was recently reading a paper on a usb flash drive that is the soul of your computer -- all your data and programs. you could go around to another computer, plug in, and voila, it's your computing environment. it's called a soulpad. i want that for my medical records. i want my medical records securely stored on a flash drive that i can lug around with me. i can go into any doctor's office, plug it in to their computer, and the doctor can quickly grok my entire history, with hilights and everything. furthermore, when the doctor is done, i can get her report uploaded to my little medical flash drive before i leave the office. i am actually thinking of gathering all my medical records and going through a somewhat laborious process of making such a device.

perhaps one day all our medical records will be securely stored online and we'll be able to easily grant access and doctors will have excellent tools to understand medical histories and make highly informed diagnoses and recommendations that pool together the collected work of many diagnoses and analyses on innumerable patients. until then, having all my medical records in my hands, easily accessible to me and perhaps my health professionals is within reach, and hopefully it happens soon!

went to rural india and all i got was ... sick?

yesterday dad, mom and i went to sitapur, and stopped in all kinds of little towns and villages between lucknow and sitapur. there was a familiar story at each place: get out of jeep into scorching weather, be surrounded by people i don't know and can't effectively communicate with, sit down with such people, and be somewhat forced to eat food. this procedure was amusing the first time, but it was a chore after that

when we were little, my brother and sister and i never learned urdu. my mom didn't speak it, and my dad didn't make much effort to teach us, and we didn't make much effort to learn. anyway, here's where it would've paid off. without urdu, i was essentially a prize being paraded around that people could smile over and talk about.

my dad was pretty busy talking with everyone, and he says that my mom and i didn't make enough of an effort to get him to be our translator. anyway, i did try a bit, but it was difficult, given that there were so many people talking to him. my cousin ayan tried to help, and did quite a good job, but it was actually his first visit in a long time too, and he was also overwhelmed! we should've hired a translator!

by the second last place we visited, i felt full of food, and a bit weak. the next morning i was sick. sigh.

here's a picture that shows how many people there were.. it's cool and all, but so overwhelming. this pic is taken from my sister's overwhelming time, as i forgot my camera

largest sundial in the world

indian guides seem quick to boast, but supposedly this sundial in jaipur is the largest sundial in the world. and who would want a larger one?


built a few hundred years ago, supposedly it can measure time to within 2 seconds. the sundial was in an outdoor observatory. at first, we thought we were entering some modern art sculpture garden, because all the tools had the useless look of modern art. but they actually are used to take observations and perform calculations! you'd think those things were modern art too, check it out:


in this next image, i'm walking down the sundial. my quads were throbbing after going up and coming down. it was tougher than any stairmaster! not that i know, but it was tough.

agra and the taj mahal

in agra, the road to the taj mahal is lined with tiny stores and restaurants, and a million touts who are just dying to sell you nick-nacks that look worthless. these touts are often younger than 10, and we all feel so sad that these kids aren't at school, or otherwise living a life that doesn't demand their begging in order to get by.

you're forced to deal with all this because the indian government has denied cars access to the lead-up to the taj mahal, because all the pollution generated by the cars has caused the white marble building to tint slightly yellow. disgusting!

anyway, when we finally make it to the entrance, this guard does a major search of my person and my bag and declares that neither my laptop nor my cell phone are allowed near the taj, and i must check them. so i hand them over to a nice old man who puts them in a locker and gives me a flimsy key. i worry about my laptop.

but then we turn around a corner and their it is, the taj mahal. neha said it is the most beautiful man-made building she has ever seen, and i agree. the symemtry and attention to fine details, namely the jeweling and the embedded arabic writings, are fantastic.

symmetry: shah jahan, who built the taj for his dead wife, went a little nuts with the symmetry. he actually built a mosque to the west of the taj, facing mecca. but since that put the whole look of the area out of balance, he built a fake mosque, that looked exactly like the first and was a mirror image in every way, to the east of the taj. this mosque cannot be used to pray because it doesn't face mecca, so this giagantic building was put there merely to satisfy his symmetry fancy.

the shah was also a bit crazy about the uniqueness of his building. the story goes that he cut off the thumbs or hands of many of the major artisans involved in the building of the taj, so they could never do something similar again.

anyway, the best way to appreciate the taj is to see it, so if i get a good connection, i'll throw up some photos.

on the way to agra

yesterday we spent the first half of our day driving to agra along india's hiway system. what a fascinating place. it's under extreme development, and so people are everywhere on the hiway laying bricks, putting up metal barriers, and generally just leaping out in front of cars.

we saw many bulls, cows, horses, donkies and camels, all helping people build the hiway and transport goods.

then we stopped at either sikander's tomb or akbar's tomb... either way it was a tomb. when we got out of the car, we learned that our driver had arranged a guide.

this drove jeff crazy: he said that our driver should just be our driver, and not try to make random side deals that benefit him and are of questionable benefit to us. anyway, jeff would have none of the guide, and said that he'd walk alone if the guide came along. so we dropped the guide.

i don't remember much of this tomb. what i do remember are the giant wasp hives attached to the ceiling of the tomb. these things were massive! and the wasps were this beautiful golden color. i will remember to update these blog posts with pictures when i have a faster connection.

seema and jeff approach me in sikander's tomb

day 2 in delhi

so we went to qatar manar (sp) where there was this really old
tower, and an even older, like thousands of years old, 7m iron pole. it was less
than climactic, though supposedly scientists are quite impressed with the purity of the iron ore.

when trying to get into this cultural attraction, there are two prices you can pay: the foreinger price and resident price. the foreigner price is like 25 times local price.

dad tried to pass some of us off as non-foreigners (250Rs vs 10Rs if you're indian), and as we're going in they stop us and the guard asks me: "what country are you from?" i feign like i don't understand him then when he persists i say "canada" and he's like "the jig is up!" and so we pay full price for 4 of us.. though we should've paid for 5 because my dad no longer counts as indian.

personally, i think dad just likes trying to get away with breaking the rules, it's his little thrill.


so next we went to the jama masjid and the red fort. the jama masjid was quite pretty -- a huge large open area and dome where people come to pray. it seems like many, many people just hang our there for the day, letting their children run around and be wild. since you can't charge entry to a mosque, they came up with this crazy idea to charge our cameras an entrance fee. if your camera wants to "see" the mosque, it needs to pay 150rs!

at the red fort we saw this stupid light show covering the history of india from the mughal time through 1950, all in one hour! dumbest thing we did so far. we did the hindi light show cause we figured we didn't want to wait an extra hour for the english version.. mistake!

it was awful. the lights were these pathetic shining lights, and the words, well, we couldn't understand. i listened to my ipod and got stung by a bazillion mosquitos. none of us brought mosquito repellant!

today we head to agra and the taj mahal, which neha says is the most beautiful man-made structure she has ever seen. that's high praise!

arrived in delhi!

arrived in delhi last night... my first indian experience at the airport was this large flashing sign saying "DO NOT BRIBE." felt very indian, knowing my dad.

dad and jeff picked me up from the airport, which was quite nice because there were so many people and it was very confusing. as soon as i stepped outside into the delhi night, i could hardly breathe! the air was so bad!

we found our driver, raja. dad had hired raja to drive for us while in delhi... he seemed like a reasonable driver, he almost hit three separte bikers, which seemed the norm.

the hotel we're staying in is half built. i've attached some pictures below. the room itself is fine; probably just as nice as our decent hotel in paris. however, everything else is under construction! see the hole in the floor... that's for an elevator, we think.

i'm really jet-lagged.. slept only a few hours last night. hopefully i adjust soon!

i'll post more as i do stuff. today we're going to the red fort and the jama mosque, and something else.

NOTE: i couldn't post the photos, uploading was taking too long.

feet

i find feet dirty. what do i mean? so suppose you've had socks on all day, and then you run your socked feet over some carpet. then you take your feet out of those socks and put them near my face. i will recoil in horror. if you ran your hand over that same floor, and put your hand near my face, i would not recoil.

feet just sort of repulse me when they invade my space without my consent.

especially around food. i can't stand feet near food.

how do you feel about feet?