glasses

on this family trip a lot of people have said "oh you and your sister seema have similar glasses!" now, i must admit, my sister's glasses have grown on me: at first i didn't like them, but who can say no to a hint of pink (you can't see the pink in these pics, as it's on the inside). however, besides the aesthetics, which is what people often gravitate towards when discussing my glasses (i find people hate them or love them), my glasses are very smartly designed, and this is not a design that you'll find in my sister's glasses or very many other kinds of glasses.

my glasses are by alain mikli, from the alain mikli line (model A0344-08). miklitarian (the full last name of alain) does this amazing thing with telescopic hinges on this line that i will now demonstrate with my glasses (the video isn't the clearest thing but you'll get the idea):



why is this so important? when you see this video, you probably think "oh yeah that's cool but so what?" of course, if you don't wear glasses i can forgive you for this thought. often, when you get new glasses, after a few days you might notice pinching at the sides of your head -- this pinching can cause headaches. the pinching is caused by glasses that push against your head -- essentially they don't fit properly. similarly, if they are too loose, your glasses will tend to slip a lot and not feel stable on your head. adjustments are made at the time of purchase, or people make their own adjustments or go to their glasses shop and fix things up later. with the mikli glasses, these are nonissues. the hinge adjusts for you, but not to the point that it gets too loose.

think i'm nuts? well, i am, but knowing that there was something to his designs, i searched patents and found this quote from a miklitarian patent:

"Telescopic" hinges which, like most hinges, comprise two elements, bearing on one another and connected by a rotation pin, at least one of the two elements being movable, have the particular feature of including, in the movable element, a tie-rod mounted so as to slide in a housing and comprising a means for cooperating with the rotation pin, and a return spring.

When a spectacle frame is being fitted to a wearer's face, these telescopic hinges are advantageous because they allow over-opening of the sides, generally by 2 to 8°, which facilitates fitting, particularly if this is done by another third party (the optician). The telescopic hinges also improve the fit of the frame to the face since, because the over-opened position is unstable, once the sides are released by the person fitting the frame they come to bear against the sides of the wearer's face, under the action of the return spring.

To ensure a comfortable fit for the wearer, it is important that the sides bear against the sides of the face with enough force to keep the spectacle frame in place but not so much as to be unbearable, the intensity of this bearing force depending on the return force... [the patent then goes on to discuss this point]

even if you own glasses, you may think these points are minor. but, if so, i challenge you to wear some alain mikli's for a while and see how much more comfortable you feel. i guarantee you will feel more comfortable (and not to mention look great!).

of course, aesthetics is a whole different game, and so you might (gasp) think my sister's glasses are more pleasing to look at. but in terms of the care that goes into the ergnomic design of glasses, there is no comparison. personally, i also think the mikli looks are first-rate, but like with luxury car lines that i think look ugly, i nevertheless appreciate their subtler beauty :)

amusingly, while writing this post i came upon A0344-13, my glasses but white instead of black. on ebay. i bought them! man, this post was costly. but check out the pictures. here's one:

funny doors

today i had some great bad door locking moments. the first involves a change room in a mall. i entered the change room and couldn't figure out how to lock the door. i looked at the handle, nothing. i look around the handle, nothing. then i look up and notice a lone screw, sticking up at the top of the door, about half a room above my head. here it is:

what would you do with a screw like this? well, i turn it, and it starts going in. then i turn it the other way, and it starts coming out. but neither action actually locks the door. here's my sister and i, filming an interaction with the door.

and now here's the mechanism (shot from above, door in locked position):

the second door locking problem is even more amusing, but i didn't take any pictures because my sister somehow convinced me not to. i go into a bathroom stall in a ukranian cultural center in new jersey, and i can't lock the door. the alignment of door latch to lock is all wrong, and so the door cannot be locked. i puzzle for a moment, conclude that this door must be broken, and go to the next stall. the same thing! so i try a third stall. the same thing, again! i can't lock the door. is this some kind of sick joke? i can't find anyone to ask, but i'm sure it must be.

i am not a wirestripper

i am not a wirestripper.

and i never will be. after ruining about a foot of speaker wire while trying to strip it with an inferior tool and my perpetually shaky hands i've concluded that i am not a wirestripper, and never will be. and don't ever ask me to remove a splinter from your body, or operate on you, because i assure you, i'll likely regret it more than you, as you'll be dead.

sigh.

for me, this is one of those don norman moments, when at first i think i'm an idiot then realize that the tool i'm using was never built to do any task well, certainly not on first use.

here is a picture of the cheap cheap wire stripper i picked up from home depot (neha warned me that i should get the nicer one and i retorted "it's just wire stripping." how i eat my tasty words).



notice that the gauge adjustment, unlike any sane tool, is this screw you can move continuously along an axis (inside the left handle). that's right, there aren't even notches for recommended position given wire gauge. now, this gives this stripper the benefit that it can cut hypothetical 16.5 gauge wire (actually, such wire does exist but come on). how does this item continue to sell! are people's hands just so much softer than mine that the inexactness of their stripping tool can be offset by their ultra sensitive hands, which feel the prick of the insulation and thus strip without losing any copper? do they also feel my leg shaking under the table as the displaced air moves over their hands?

show me these people! i want to worship their hands.

now let's look at a reasonable wire stripper, courtesy youtube

feist

just bought the new feist cd, and it's wonderful. her voice has such range, and the supporting music is catchy. i went to check out one of her videos (my moon my man) and it is so much fun. very playful and well choreographed. check it out:



on the other hand, i find mushaboom's video a little too over the top, even for me:

mine eyes

if you're wondering what those beautiful retinas are doing on my blog, you can likely deduce the answer: they are my retinas! what healthy retinas, wouldn't you say? i certainly have no idea, but that's what my doctor says.

let me answer some questions that i know some of you will ask: no, i don't feel weird posting my retinas. these pictures are amazing. the eye is a fantastic structure, and these photos confirm that indeed my eyes are also fantastic.

if you know me, you might know that i am extremely disturbed by the idea of eye damage. i can't wear contacts for fear of hurting my eyes, and any time i see eye damage on tv or in movies i shudder and literally freak out. i jump up and down and cringe and just hurt hurt hurt

my classic example of eye damage in a film that freaked me beyond belief: demolition man. recall the beginning, when wesley "always bet on black" snipes escapes the prison using the warden's eye to pass the retinal scan. freaky! ugh! just the thought of it makes me quesy. but but but i decided to google the movie to find out what others say about the eye scene. i was so heartened by this find, which describes the scene as factually void:

Factual error: Simon Phoenix uses the warden's removed eye to escape from the cryoprison. The eye is on a spike, which would have not only destroyed the shape of the retina, but blocked the scanner from reaching it as well. There's no way the retinal scanner would have let him pass.

this makes me feel good, to a certain extent. sure, any crazy criminals who have seen this movie and need to get into my retinal-eye-scan-locked fortress might think of pulling a wesley snipes on me... but it's more likely that they'll think through the problem and realize that taking out my eye in tact is likely a difficult job. and so maybe they'll let me live.. at least leave my eyes alone!

Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with!

--Macbeth. ACT III Scene 4.

what's that word i'm looking for!

googlin around for a concept is hard! here's the concept:

why is it that a computer user would more readily listen to another human telling them to do something than a computer telling them the same thing?

now, before you send me all your answers to this question, that's not what i'm looking for! i have many seemingly reasonable answers to this question. i am interested in literature that discusses this idea, or some abstraction of it, either empirically or theoretically.

so i googed for a while and then concluded that i needed to invest in some human capital (sorry server farm, you don't push the right buttons all the time). i go scrounging about on berkeley's econ department page and find first one professor (a nobel prize winner who is really old) and then another, both of whom probably know the keywords i need to find the literature i'm looking for. but i don't want to email professors, this is a huge waste of their time. i want to email their students :)

but in econ, it seems, you don't list your advisor, and you certainly don't list your students! so i email the non-nobel econ prof and cross my fingers. no response. also no response from a psych prof who does behavioral psych.

sigh. i thought my phd-to-be-in-cs-street-cred would count for something, a lil hit of information, some breathing room... nothing.

so i pick up the goog again and keep whacking away at the concept. i just need the right words. back in high school i read some em forster, and his quote (the one that's always quoted) seems quite apt at this point in my adventure:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

so here the beast is passion? the monk the prose? well, i am certainly a beast as is my concept, and stupid google monk is refusing to see the beast, being afraid of conceptual understanding. i need to build a bridge.

and so, like all diligent elves, i muck about until i make the connection. but it shouldn't be so hard! and guess what? i have no idea what i did to make the connection, but i now know the key words i needed: advice-taking. there's a whole literature on advice-taking, and i found professor yaniv at the hebrew university of jerusalem and emailed him and he and his graduate student were so kind as to send me more information and offers of help.

the world
is
good
...
if you google hard enough

ps all the links here were found by taking the words linked and googlin. the google monk one is soo good, especially if you think about the invaders as the beast, that the video is posted here:



i realize i could actually write about this beast/monk idea in some detail with respect to concept discovery and google, but i think the video does the connection some justice.

you know you haven't got enough sleep when..

i moved the other day. largely a painless move, but my room is a bit noisy and last night i drank a cappuccino too close to bedtime. this resulted in absolutely 0 sleep for me last night.

today, i've been semi with it. i needed to setup a new water bill account and was flabbergasted that it cost $120 just to set up the account. getting all uppity, i finally looked back and saw that it was only $12.

just now i sent a txt msg to my phone from my computer. then i heard my phone beep and grabbed it thinking that someone had txted me (always like getting an sms). guess who it was from? me!

i need sleep.

herding cats and line omar

i am diligently packing in preparation for my next move and the cats are just not being helpful! here you can see raja flopped over in the sun, demanding a belly-rub (and getting in the footpath that i'm using to move stuff around the room!)

napoleon is dominating the bed, fully stretched out and mewing (sorry no sounds here).

ah here's another picture i wanted to share. at chi 2007 elgoog held a party at the san jose tech museum. at the tech museum you can get a robot to do a line drawing of your face. here's my line drawing. looks like me eh?

socks with hole

into the shoe not a peep
out of the shoe, i weep
for the sock i have worn
is now slightly torn
the second in only a week

writing vs knitting smack down

what am i creating when writing? today a friend commented to me that they knit because they love to create beautiful three dimensional objects. no doubt knitted things can be beautiful, but what about this writing?

what's amazing is that a small child can likely appreciate a beautifully knit object yet this text (whether it can be appreciated at all!) certainly can't be appreciated by a child. indeed, the following graph illustrates this point
that is all for now.

wonderful zadie smith story in the recent new yorker

i've often overlooked the fiction in the new yorker, but recently i've been reading the short stories. in the may 14th new yorker (which is generally excellent, cover to cover, with articles on banksy, walt mossberg and richard bransen that are particularly interesting) zadie smith has a wonderful story titled "Hanwell Senior." here's a quote from the story

His feet stank. He took off his shoes. At home he had a wife who was not well, not well in a manner he could do nothing about nor understand, but as he sat here now in the sun, the tense, resistant nub of flesh inside his back resolved itself for the first time in months. He lay down. His spine pressed into the soil a notch at a time, undid him. Upside down was a land of female legs. He was fond of these new bell-shaped skirts, wide enough to crawl under and be kept safe, and wished he had waited to marry, or married differently. He thought, What if I stayed here? Let the sun swallow me, and the orange dazzle under my eyelids become not just the thing I see but the thing that I am, and let the one daisy with the bent stem, and the rose smell and the girl upside down on the pub bench eating an upside-down ploughman’s with her upside-down friend be the whole of the law and the girth of the world. Wasn’t it the work of moments, of a little paint, to change “HANWELL’S FINEST” to “HANWELL AND HANWELL”? [omar's bolding]

i found that bold part particularly moving. words can be so powerful (i was thinking about doing photography recently and this reminded me of the power of words... i should push on my words)

fitting

today i watched an amusing and provoking imagemakers short film called "Erasmos Pocos" (One Too Many). it was one of the Oscar Nominated Shorts in 2007. here's a blurb from the imagemakers site and a i'll post a short clip at the end of this entry.

Utterly useless lay-abouts Joaquim and his son find they can't cope on their own when “mom” dumps both their lazy butts and leaves them for good. Joaquim concocts a devious plan for domestic rescue, becoming perhaps the first man in history to want his mother-in-law to move in with him. But the wily old lady has a trick up her own sleeve. A dead pan comedy written and directed by Borja Cobeaga and nominated for a 2007 Academy Award for best short film. Principal cast: Ramon Barea, Marivi Bilbao and Alejandro Tejeria.

in some ways this short film is about fitting nicely into your surroundings. there's all kinds of things we do well in our life -- and there are things we have trouble with. ideally, we place ourselves in a complimentary environment: i help you, you help me, we are compatible. in this film, the mother-in-law finds a home with people who appreciate her; the man and his son get a caregiver.

now i'm not just talking about doing laundry and making food -- certainly quite important things but there are many other forms of care. i'm also talking about people who help you see things differently, or nudge you in a direction that you should go but can't quite get yourself going along. this kind of relationship takes trust, care and appreciation, and this remarkable short film manages to get at all that in a humorous and moving manner. brilliant

adventure

an exciting night out with the cousin. we went to tokyo gogo and had some great sushi, and then neha went home and we proceeded elsewhere. had quite a bit of square one (100% certified organic rye vodka!). we met one of the founders of square one vodka at elixir on guerrero and 16th. good times, quiz night (every tuesday at 9pm)! do you know how many times princess leah kissed luke before kissing solo? i do!

the square one vodka woman bought me a free round, and it went down smoooooth. anyway, we were joking around and having a good time -- we joined her team and managed to climb to third place overall in quiz night, an impressive feat since our team did not appear until round 3 and hence had no points until round 3.

in sad news, at the end of the night our new friend realized that her wallet had been stolen, and likely by a woman who is frequenting mission bars and stealing easy pickings. so be warned!

but it was still good times and adventure. i'll never forget that the call sign for q is quebec (like the call sign for b is bravo) -- we thought q was queen. bad canadians.

90% knocked up - 2 hours ago

while reading my email in gmail, i saw this at the top of my screen and laughed: these three different items, all connected like so, great :)

tug this

at chi2007 i saw a wonderful talk presenting a neat tangible interface, the Tug N' Talk belt. here's the abstract:

Tug n’ Talk is a prototype of a tuggable communication device, allowing for
intimate communication between two individuals using tugging as a metaphor. In this paper we discuss the advantages of tugging over other haptic communication modalities, such as vibration,with a focus on input/output spaces and meaning construction.

the basic idea is that you and i are wearing virtually attached tuggable belts. each belt has a small chain attached to it. if i tug my chain, then you feel that same tug. harder tugs on my side translate to harder tugs on your side. no more using my cell phone or kicking you under the table -- i can tug you. here's two pics from the paper:

anyway, at the end of the talk a person stated that they can barely stand tugs from their children, and they aren't sure if tugs from their husband would be appropriate. so they said that while they thought this was cool, it seemed more art than practical. the presenter quite brilliantly responded

"do you let just anyone vibrate you?"

and this got a huge laugh but it's so true. we let people vibrate us all the time. the vibrating phone has become the norm. and so why not other mechanisms?

awkward comedy

today i was in what can only be described as a sitcom-like situation where a guy is doing ok with a girl by saying very little and just rolling with the conversation, and he proceeds to speak and dig himself into a very large hole. details would make this even more amusing but i can't provide those without revealing far too much:

---guy approaches our group of people---

guy: hi all
girl and others: hi
guy to girl: did we meet last night? i can't exactly remember, i was somewhat drunk...
girl: i can't remember either but i was pretty out of it too..

---laughter all around---

girl: but hi i'm Z, it's nice to meet in this sober manner :)

---random chatter---

guy to all: hey any of you want to get cake with us? (he refers to his group)
girl and others: yeah that sounds like fun.

---random chatter about random stuff. group X is discussed (the true identity of group X is withheld to protect the participants)---

guy: i really hate group X.
girl: huh. i'm from group X.
other person: a lot of my friends are from group X.

---awkwardness---

guy: well let me qualify.

---long story about group X ensues---

girl: i think most people in all groups have that characteristic. sounds like you just hate a particular type of person.

---random talk about the type of person that guy might have problems with---

guy turns to girl: i just wanted you to know that i don't consider you part of group X.
girl: that's a really left-handed comment! uh.. thank you?

---laughter---

guy: ok, i think you're research is really cool and you're cool (editor's note: he doesn't know this person at all!)

---awkward smiles---

---we all start to walk towards the door---

guy to girl: you still want to get cake?
girl: uhhh. no i think i'm going to work on my laptop instead (editor's translation: i'd rather tear pages out of my favorite book than get cake with you, this is super awkward).

guy walking away with rest of us: doh doh doh

---amusement for the rest of us---

the letter opener

we went to a handcrafted wood gallery while in australia, and some of the pieces were gorgeous. there were a lot of possibilities to take home, but as i remembered back to my best purchases from recent travel, i kept coming back to the things that made me fondly remember the trip... objects that to an uninterested viewer just appear to be what they are: for instance, a jacket, or a doorstop. but of course objects are links back into our memory. i've read that some scientists believe that our memory doesn't actually really forget very much at all -- rather, we lose the links to get to the memories. stranded memories.

of course, we've all had those aha moments when something random brings back a memory from the distant past. so then i thought it'd be great if i could surround myself with everyday objects that would bring back memories. and that's what i did in australia, with the purchase of a huon letter opener. check it out below:

huon is this wonderful wood that has such a distinctive smell. the smell is sort of like that of gasoline as you pump it into your car. i love that smell.

random thoughts

i walk a lot. in berkeley, in san francisco, i'm often on my feet. so it's been a bit hard going lately since i got back from australia, where my big toe was slightly crushed. a small bridge spanned the distance between the pontoon we were diving from, and the boat we took to the pontoon. this bridge would rock as the ocean moved, and it unfortunately rocked onto my big toe, and smothered it. what pain. one of the workers at the pontoon came by, told me to be careful, and said it'd be alright.

well, there's no doubt in my mind that it will be ok, but i've been walking a bit funny to adjust for the still dull pain in that toe. sigh.

anyway, as i was walking back to my home today, my mind, for some odd reason, wandered to yoda (yes, the little green alien) and star wars episode three (the final movie). i was thinking that things would've been so much better had yoda taken ewen mcgregor to fight the emperor. stupid yoda. what random thoughts... but i just wondered about the misery that could've been avoided. :)

finally, i've read the recent new yorker article about parkour. for those of you that don't know, parkour is .. well, if you see this video you'll understand what it is:



anyway, it's so amazing to see this man move. in the article, david belle (the man behind parkour) says that he wanted to move like monkeys, and he certainly achieves that.

australia pics

seema, jeff, neha and i went to australia at the end of march. we had a fantastic time. sydney is certainly in my top 5 list of wonderful cities. check out some of our pictures. hilights include koala holding, didjereedoo playing, hot full-body suits, man-eating spiders, and more!

Best of Australia

imagemakers

i haven't posted in a while, and there's no excuse. i just feel i haven't had much to say, and so i didn't want to waste time.

but now i have something to say. i have found a tv show on public television that i absolutely must tell everyone about (especially since many of my readers are in the bay area). the show is called imagemakers, and it's on kqed. the producers get short films from around the world and show them. imagemakers is only 30 minutes, so sometimes there is just one movie, but other times there are multiple very short films.

and they are great! ok, well, many of them. here's a very short one called consent that i saw the other day. a blurb about it first: "From Jason Reitman (the director of In God We Trust, one of ImageMakers' most popular films) comes a clever take on urban love. Two young adults with the hots for each other find themselves alone in bed for the first time. What's to stop them from doing it? As they soon find out, in this litigious society, nothing is as easy as it once was." (note: to preview button will show a preview on this page, but if you want to watch the whole thing you'll be taken to another website)



actually, it turns out that a lot of these short films are available online. i found the site atomfilms which seems to host a bunch of good short films.