[M]etabrain[E]ntry[L]og

Migration time

2007-11-19T09:07:00.000-05:00

I have no idea how this post will look, as I'm writing it from within lynx to avoid the Great Firewall of China this time. But yes, I'm moving house.

The new blog is up at http://blog.melchua.com, and I'll be posting there from here on out. All past posts and comments have been imported (hurrah wordpress) but the site itself looks extraordinarily ugly still; I'll be fixing that over the coming days, but wanted to shunt people to the new content asap. I'll put instructions on updating your feeds there in just a moment.

In other news, I'm in Shanghai. To make a gross understatement, it's somewhat colder than the Philippines.

A nose by any other name would still smell.

2007-11-12T04:58:00.000-05:00

Warning: If you wince at the sound of the Chinese language being mangled, do not read any further. (Then again, if you wince at that, you probably shouldn't be reading this blog in the first place.)

Question: How does one go about getting a Chinese nickname?

Background: As most of you know, I've been learning Mandarin. Slowly. With a terrible American accent. But learning nevertheless. And as I learn about the actual meanings of words I've seen before (like my name, for instance) I can't help but think "man, these could be more amusing."

So. Armed with a dictionary and utter lack of regard for tradition, here goes.

Current name: Cai Jia Ling (蔡佳铃) - good ringing-of-a-bell. Or "nice-sounding chiming from a bunch of jade pieces thwacking together." Something in that vein.

Personally, I like the (inevitably over-romanticized in novelizations, I'm sure) Native American tradition of adolescents being given new names upon their passage to adulthood, names that convey something important to know about the person. Unfortunately, "If-you-cannot-find-her-just-look-in-a-library-or-at-the-nearest-computer" is a little long, and sounds terrible ("jia ru ni pu ke yi fa jue ta...")

Let's try some reasonable criteria here to narrow down the field. Let's say... must sound phonetically alike, even to the point of sticking to the "proper" tones: cai4 jia1 ling2.

And look how much more entertaining this is! 菜加零 ("adding zero vegetables") It's more appropriate for my brother the carnivore, though; I personally enjoy vegetarian food and tend to cook mostly without meat when I'm home. Also, I'm not entirely sure I want my name to be Bad-Luck-Vegetables. It has the lyrical sound of impending botulism.

For the sake of not being confusing, I think I should keep my last name. But I still don't think I'm a bell. Or a belle, for that matter. "Lovely tinkling" sounds way too girly for my taste, and I haven't even reached the Age of the Shrinking Bladder yet.

So how about these?

蔡佳聆 = good-listener Chua (never mind the severe high-frequency bilateral whatsit; you don't need to hear consonants anyway)

蔡加昤 = adding-sunshine Chua (mmm, optimism. and vitamin D.)

蔡家零 = brains-of-the-house Chua (this title rightfully belongs to mom, though)

蔡佳领 = quality-leader Chua (see? I'd rather be a leader than a bell.)

And my personal favorite,

蔡加零 = Chua+0 (no artificial colors, flavors, or preservatives either.)

Since any native Mandarin speaker will probably stare at me in befuddlement and horror if I use any of these "names" - or more to the point, since my parents and at least one of my grandparents would likely object, I'm sticking with "Hey, Those Expensive Green Stones Sound Great When You Hit Them!" for now.

But really - why be a bell when you can be a mathematical statement?

Backwards balikbayan box

2007-11-11T12:16:00.000-05:00

I'll probably be switching out of Blogger soon. Christie's warnings of "no blogger in China!" have finally spurred me to set up some wordpress-fu after about 9 months of being in the "eh, I'll get around to it" stage. The new blog is still in the "Mel hasn't finished playing with php yet" stage so I'm still using this one, but you might see me popping off Planet Olin and onto my own site in about 5 days. We shall see.

Today I went to the supermarket with my aunt and cousin and (thanks to my aunt) got enough stuff to fill my backwards-balikbayan box (balikbayan boxes, or return-to-home-country boxes, are usually headed to the Philippines) with good Filipino food to cook back in New England.

Any Bostonians feel like coming over for some kaldereta, sinigang, kare-kare (with bagoong), champorado, adobo, lechon, lugaw, or a halo-halo party sometime when I get back? (Yeah, I'm going to make you look up what all those foods are.) I'm also learning how to make lumpia (monster-big fresh spring rolls) and huana miki (Filipino noodles, the "chicken noodle soup" of my childhood) and bringing home banana ketchup, which is good on everything. And spaghetti sauce - the sweet Filipino kind.

And mango. Dried, sorry - but perhaps that's for the best; I haven't been able to enjoy mangoes in America ever since I ate my first mango in the Philippines; Filipino mangoes just spoil all others for you. Another "darn, I can't take it with me" item is buko, fresh young coconuts (of the "lop off the top for an instant juice cup... and meat!" variety, not the shrivelly brown hairy dessicated overpriced specimens found in some U.S. groceries.) I also haven't figured out how to make taho, which is super-soft tofu that you eat with a sweet syrup and sago (tapioca pearls) and one of my dad's favorite foods.

Other than those three, laing (a creamed spinach-like dish with local ingredients) and bicol express (main ingredients: coconut milk, hot peppers, and several gallons of water to drink between bites), I think I can make all my favorite foods from this country back in the states until my sauce mixes run out.

I have probably misspelled an atrocious number of words here, since I'm phonetically transcribing Tagalog that I'm only vaguely familiar with. Oh well.

Hypothetically, I'm also bringing back some candy (including polveron, which is sugared powdered milk compressed into tablet form, and much tastier than it sounds). We will see how much is left by the time I actually fly back to the US in January. Once I begin to eat Ovalteenies (malt chocolate tablets) it is very hard to get me to stop.

I also wrote my first essay in Mandarin on my failed attempts to find vegetables at the supermarket. Other things covered via creative combinations of my limited vocabulary:

My memory, or lack thereof, for remembering the names of fruits.
Filipino supermarkets sell soap, medicine, and other things to whiten the skin. In contrast, American supermarkets sell tanning lotion.
The word for "brown" is literally translated as "the color of coffee." There's an old word that just means "brown," but I'm told that using it sounds really old-fashioned. (I wonder when the linguistic shift took place.)
MANGOES.
Artificial food coloring. I didn't know the word for "artificial," so I said "not-real," where "real" is the character used in the previous post's song fragment about true/real/genuine love. The effect is more melodramatic than intended, something like... "foods that have - o, vile tricksters! - reneged on the true nature of their hues, breaking their promises and - and - *sob* ...my hea-art!"

I also have two new favorite Mandarin phrases. One is "meige haizi, yige diannao," or "each child, one computer." (Hey, you know you want one.) Tagalog version is "isang laptop kada bata." I've been collecting translations of the phrase in as many different languages as possible because I think it'll make a kickass t-shirt.

The other (which has no connection to the first) is "bai wu liao lai," which is the rough equivalent of the English "bored to death," and, if I'm reading the dictionary correctly, literally means either something like "one-hundred nonsense disclaimers," or something like "one-hundred occasions of yakking away to kill time and dammit it's someone else's fault."

It's interesting to see how we create meaning (linguistically and otherwise). Last year's simultaneous foray into a little book by Applebee, and some stuff on Chomsky's work has really sent me down the "learning as language" path, and I've been there so long I'm trying to kick myself out of it, if only to see the thought-path I'm headed down a little better. But how do you kick yourself out of thinking in terms of words? (Extensive meditation?)

More incoherence!

2007-11-09T06:17:00.000-05:00

Folks looking for technical and/or enlightening content can skip this entire post, which is another brainsplosion.

First the events of yesterday. It was my Guakong's (mom's dad) death anniversary, so we had mass and visited his crypt. Then lunch (Filipino-tasting Italian food), then I went to the dermatologist (my aunt's classmate, at the insistence of my grandmother) where I got my clogged pores scooped out with a miniature melon-baller. Then dinner with my dad's college friends, the "gang of 5" he hung out with all the time, with me standing in for my dad - the first time they'd come close to being all together for almost 30 years.

. Now...

While my teacher and I were singing today, my Ama (dad's mother) came in and told us that the song we were in the middle of was actually one of my Angkong's favorites.

You ask me how deep is my love for you,
how can I count the love I have for you?
My feelings are also true,
My love is also true,
The moon is a reflection of my heart.

My grandfather wasn't exactly Frank Sinatra, and my dad inherited his musical ability; whenever they turned on the karaoke machine at home, Jason and I bolted for the door and a long drive in the name of "sibling bonding." (Actually, those conversations and critiques of Chicago's architecture were some of the best conversations my brother and I had as teenagers, so "karaoke nights" were a good thing.)

All the same, it's nice to think of him singing that to her when they were young, just like my dad sings "Misty" when he's feeling far too sentimental - overdramatically, complete with hand gestures and puppy eyes towards mom as us kids groan around him. (My emotional immune system hates sappiness - a good indication that's something I have to work on.)

I'm used to thinking of my dad's parents as more formal, traditional people, but that image has been cracking during my stay here. Okay, my grandmother still wants me to wear dresses and be more ladylike. Sure, my grandfather never flew - even across the ocean - in anything other than a suit and tie. But as my aunt reminded me last night, the affection and love they showed for each other was unusually visible for their age and time and culture. You can't imagine one without the other. Same with my mom's parents. And my parents. I'm very lucky.

As time goes by, I'm becoming more appreciative of my tight extended family. When I say "tight extended family," I mean that two of my mom's sisters are married to two of my dad's boyhood friends and classmates, my grandmother's brother married my grandfather's sister, both my parents' eldest sisters were classmates, and so on. It's a big clan.

I'm simultaneously exasperated by it and in love with it. Nearby houses with cousins and aunts swarming around all the time. Everybody always asking what everyone else is doing. I grew up in a house full of aunts and uncles, and apparently when I was a toddler I declared that nobody else could get married because I'd noticed a direct correlation to my relatives getting married and them moving away and not playing with me any more.

In the absence of solid computer time - my usual platform for hacking - I've been forced to move to a different one, namely myself. Which is inconvenient and insanely frustrating and partially as intended. I spend a lot of time thinking. Sleeping, too... and god, it's nice. Just last week I started having regular vivid dreams for the first time since... before high school. I try hard not to feel guilty about taking the time to do this.

I've noticed that my English is getting more fragmented as I learn more Chinese; in the back of my head I'm always trying to figure out a parallel translation for what I want to say, and there isn't always one. I've also noticed that my thoughts are jumping around more - and I can let them do that now, and I'm actually conscious of it. I know that if I release the reins and wait instead of trying to beat the ADHD-ness out of my head, my brain will dance a marvelous dance, longer and deeper than what I'd originally planned on "forcing" it to do.

I've also noticed that whenever I have these periods of MASS CONFUSION!!! they're typically followed by a Period of Massive Growth and Productivity in whatever area I'm confused about. So when I'm befuddled, my tendency is to try to make myself as confused as possible as fast as possible, and let it all stew out and then explode back into clarity (more or less) on its own schedule. (This usually doesn't coincide with an academic semester schedule, really.)

Somewhere in the middle of this mess and confusion (and often aggravation) is the trying to figure out how to hold seemingly contradictory things inside myself, since I'm a walking statistical anomaly who's recently become aware of the various facts that make up that statement. (It's a lot easier to be a girl who loves math before you learn that being a girl who loves math is weird.) I need to recompile all my header files, so to speak. I've also forked too much, and now I'm figuring out how to merge all the changes back into the main repository for the next release.

Oh, there's getting work done in the "conventional" sense, of course. Always is. This is work of a different sort that's also there. Summary: I'm alive and confused and happy, all three of which are sort of the same thing.

Mass production!

2007-11-06T20:07:00.000-05:00

Yeah, baby!

Lumpia

2007-11-04T19:49:00.000-05:00

I did my first useful bit of translation last night - redirect instructions to the new ubuntuwomen.org wiki in Chinese. I showed it to my grandmother for checking before I hit the "Save" button, and she read it and said it sounded correct but what in the world was Ubuntu and what did I mean it had relocated? So I ended up translating from/to three languages; Mandarin, English, and (as Chris would say) Bahasa Geek.

Yeah, I know I am way too excited over the "I can speak Chinese!" thing. I daresay my family's getting tired of me trying to translate every Chinese-language sign we walk by, carrying a dictionary in my pocket, etc but I'm just amazed at being able to understand - it reminds me of being a kid and reading about something new in physics (or whatever) and running around excitedly going "and-and-and does the magnet stick to this? YEAH!" (Sometimes this led to "and does the do ?" *CRASH* "Whoopsie..." situations. But it's always fun.)

I also did my first semi-extended bout of translation on my grandfather's eulogy (which had actually been delivered by my dad in English, then translated into Chinese - I wanted to see how well I could do in porting it back to English). It matched up reasonably well, aside from the idioms I wasn't familiar with. I think I'm ready to try something with no English language equivalent now. Armed with the power of Dictionary, that is; my vocabulary is still forlornly small.

Yesterday's dinner was a family favorite - lumpia. It's the Chinese equivalent of a burrito. Take a lumpia wrapper (much, much thinner than a tortilla) and put a lettuce leaf on top so it won't get soggy. Put shredded vegetables, top with a mixture of sugared peanuts and seaweed with white crackers, roll, and eat. Here's a lumpia before wrapping, followed by my Ama (paternal grandmother) demonstrating correct eating technique.

Lakwasa

2007-11-03T00:48:00.000-04:00

I am a lakwasera. This is a Tagalog term for someone with a great wanderlust - always itching to go out and explore, can't stay at home (of the female variety; the male equivalent is 'lakwasero'). Today I had my Chinese lesson al fresco - my teacher's family went to Tagaytay, so I went along.

It turns out that my teacher and I are actually related by marriage - she and my mom are something like third cousins (discovered during a conversation about our extended families). Chua laoshi was the last Chinese-Filipino I'd met during my entire time here who I didn't think I was connected to in some way. I give up. We're either related to or classmates of (or related to classmates or classmates of relations of or...) everyone in the Fil-Chi community, or so it seems. I gave up trying to keep track of who was who long ago, because if I met the daughter of the niece of the second wife of the father of my paternal grandfather for 2 minutes when I was in 1st grade, I will probably not remember.

Anyway. Today I saw pineapple bushes for the first time. We bought bits of tree trunk from roadside stands (with young coconuts and bananas attached), I mangled the national language of the People's Republic of China, the view was gorgeous, the air much better than Manila except for when we passed the piles of burning garbage - common practice here, alas; one pile was the size of my parents' front lawn and sent a thick gray plume into the air that we could see for kilometers afterwards.

Another new food was also introduced: fish crackers, which are simply small fish about 8cm long that have been battered and fried. No gutting. You just dip them in vinegar and eat, eyeballs and guts and bones and all, with the feathery bones making a calcium-rich crunching sound between your teeth. ("Are you going to eat that?" one of my distant aunts said, smiling at my extended close scrutiny of the food item. "Yeah - I'm just trying to get over the fact that it looks like a fish," I said.) It's pretty tasty, but I'm not too fond of the bones.

One of the nieces of my teacher, a woman twice my age who's a professor of dentistry in one of the main area colleges, pointed out a(nother) field of goats as we drove by. "I know there are also animals called sheep that are similar," she said, "but I don't know what they are." "A sheep," I explained, "looks like a goat with an afro."

We had a dinner of homemade noodles in Chinatown. This video (taken with permission from the restaurant's owner) is how they make them. It's also a nice example of powers of two, for the younger folks following along. The noodles were delicious.

Oooh, fishies.

2007-11-01T08:01:00.000-04:00

Happy birthday, dad! My dad loves fish, both on a plate and in a pond. Whenever he sees a body of water with fish inside, he turns into a little boy - "Ooooo, fishies!" (If the body of water has no fish, he peers inside and with a dejected voice says "Awww, no fishies," then reverts to his adult self.) He's wanted a koi pond for I don't know how many years.

I'm learning something new about Mandarin every day. Yesterday it was the large embroidery that hangs on the living room wall; it's got 9 fish leaping upstream, and four characters: a weird complicated one I didn't recognize, then "have" (you), then "year" (nian) repeated twice. I assumed it meant that something - whatever the first strange word meant - had two years, although that really made no sense.

Yesterday I learned that the weird word meant "overabundance," was a homonym for the word "fish" (yue - hence the picture), and the words were written from right to left. Whoops. So it's "nian-nian-you-yue," or "year-year-have-overabundance," or "every-year-have-extra (food)." Chinese and Tagalog both do the doubling-up thing; in Chinese if you want to say "every day," you say "day-day," in Tagalog, if you want to say something's especially pretty, you say "pretty-pretty." Nice and efficient.

Local elections ended a few days ago here; leading up to that were a few days of traffic clogged by poster-plastered cars, buses, bikes, trikes, and marchers with matching t-shirts headed by a couple people banging on large rolling drums. I have never seen so many election posters anywhere. They're like wallpaper on the buildings and walls outside, mostly for barangay captain and kagawad (...kinda like the head of a neighborhood and the multiple assistants of the neighborhood head, respectively). My aunt and eldest cousin showed up one night with fingers dark purple from indelible ink.

Oh, right. Jumping back to the first sentence of this post, this is my dad. He works for a medical supply company and gives very, very interesting product presentations to the salespeople there. His name is Captain Electrode (shown here with offspring).

Apparently it's genetic. (Me, Halloween 2005.)

Happy birthday! Miss you, dad.

Hofstede cultural dimensions

2007-10-31T04:06:00.000-04:00

My friend Chris Watkins from Appropedia introduced me to Geert Hofstede's work last night when we were swapping notes on Indonesian and Filipino culture. Hofstede originated the idea of "cultural dimensions," ways you can describe societies and compare them to one another. Yes, countries are not cultures, and individuals can act out of type for their nationality - but this doesn't claim to be anything more than what it is; a broad, sweeping overgeneralization of the dominant national culture - as Hofstede found it, anyway.

Since you can only compare two countries at one time on Hofstede's website, I whipped up a quick chart. The labels, from left to right, stand for Power Distance Index (the acceptance of uneven distribution of power), Individuality, Masculinity (the relative value placed on stereotypically male or female personality characteristics and actions), Uncertainty Avoidance Index, and Long Term Orientation.

The first two things you notice are the Huge! Orange! Bar! by IDV and the even more gigantic blue one by LTO. That's America being insanely individualistic and China shooting for a long term view, respectively.

This could explain conversations like the one I had with my grandmother this morning about renewing the lease on my great-grandparents' tomb in the Chinese cemetery, which expires in... either 25 or 50 years, we're not sure. Her response was that well, we'd need to call the council of elders together, and then ask all their children, and then tell my generation, and so on. It also explains why my parents talked to me as a young kid (early elementary school) about the importance of saving money to put my future children (which I shall of course have) through college, and so forth.

I could pull out other stories to illustrate the other parts of this chart here, but that's all ex post facto - I can pull out stories to illustrate almost any "fact" I want most of the time. I do see the first column's gap here, though - and it's the one that rubs up against me the most. As a nicely-dressed Chinese, I'm allowed entry into pretty much everywhere, even without ID in most cases. Less well-dressed Filipinos are chased away by security guards or made to line up by entrance gates for identity verification. (On the flip side, it's "safe" for them to run around on the streets, whereas I'm confined to quarters because it's "too dangerous" for me to go outside - so we have as hard a time entering their world as they do entering ours.)

After four whirlwind-filled years of college, I'm used to brazenly batting ideas around with folks with impressive-sounding titles - they're people, after all, and when I get really into a conversation or I'm really passionate about a topic, I don't care what their nametag says. It also makes me incredibly uncomfortable treating people as anything less than an equal. I can still get away with that here to some extent; I'm the American balikbayan, young and impetuous (and tall), and (if all else fails) an engineer and therefore a geek, so my lack of "conventional social graces" turns into a point of humor and even endearment. (I'm sorry, but I make eye contact and speak in sentences rather than statements that trail into questions?)

The discrepancies only crop up occasionally, but they jar me when they come. I squirm whenever I hear a well-to-do person talk pityingly (or denigratingly) about "the poor," as if they were a homogenous lump of helpless and/or lazy shiftless bums. It means I'm having a hard time getting used to being served, and a hard time adjusting to the submissiveness of those doing the serving. (And I flinch whenever I hear a grown person in the "lower classes" referred to as a "boy" or a "girl," and try to make a point of saying "man" and "woman" in my own speech.)

Problem: The gap between social classes is sufficiently ingrained that it makes them uncomfortable when I act as if we were equals. And when in Rome - right? What's the line between "a righteous crusade of JUSTICE! and FREEDOM!" and just plain ol' blind cultural imperialism?

It certainly keeps life interesting. And it makes for memorable conversations - like when my (female) cousins were astonished to find that you can keep your last name! when you get married! ("I'm going to move to the US so I can keep my last name!" one exclaimed excitedly) and another time when I was equally astonished to find that it's legal here to specify gender* for a job posting and require all applicants to submit** a picture*** of themselves. It was explained to me that sometimes men and women had different characteristics - women are more nurturing and make better nurses, etc. I replied that the current statistics might make certain combinations more likely than others, but that wasn't the same thing.

Conversations like that usually end up with a shrug and a "yeah, I know, but what can you do? It's the ," where is almost always China, the Philippines, or the United States.

*obviously, sometimes gender does give you an advantage - a job posting for a wet nurse or a sperm donor, for example. But I can't for the life of me figure out why a construction supervisor should be a man, or a secretary a woman, and was puzzled why my gender should keep me from applying to some engineering positions I saw posted. To be fair, while many job postings specify gender (and height), many don't.

** "pix plz"

***even for non-customer-facing jobs. I mean, if you're auditioning for a play, I can understand why you'd want headshots, but do I care whether my programmer's gorgeous?

Is open source actually open?

2007-10-29T10:06:00.000-04:00

Today I explained "open source" to my Chinese teacher in halting Mandarin - I was pleasantly surprised to find that I know enough words after 3 weeks to be able to get the concepts across at a (very) rudimentary level. It reignited this ill formed draft that's been turning in my head for a while; I'm not sure how to put it into the right words and finally figured just blurting it out might help.

Here's the premise: open source isn't really open.

I'm not really talking about legal or physical access here, although of course that's a barrier as well. [1] I'm talking more about moving from being a user to being a contributor. Hypothetically, there shouldn't be that many barriers. Hacker culture values self-taught learners, so lack of formal education is no big deal; anyone can jump in and help, you can shield yourself from stereotypes to some extent by not telling folks that you're in high school, or homeless, or a terrible stutterer. [2]

Nope. The biggest problem is that the folks who can "teach themselves hacking" were the ones who were thinking like a hacker in the first place. I hypothesize that open source hackers, to some extent, are raised and not born. Yes, they eventually make themselves - but it's awfully hard to make people who realize they have the ability to recreate and reteach themselves and share things with the world.

Many people don't follow or understand the open source development culture. "Just do it," "Start something," "Hack now fix later," "Ask forgiveness, not permission" - they're not necessarily optimal or natural ways of thinking, but it's assumed without question that contributors to the project do think that way. [3]

Culturally, some people - in particular, those who aren't western males - may actually be raised to behave in the exact opposite manner; the appearance of consensus, proper identification of leadership, attempting things indirectly to save face over being bluntly efficient and potentially contradicting something in public, or watching out closely for one's own group instead of broadly for all.

How do you get involved with and contributing to something that may go against some of the basic social norms you're surrounded with? How many people are willing to live with two (or more) lives - one as a contributor in the open source community, another as... whatever - if those two lives don't intersect, acknowledge, and value each other?

I have no answers. I don't even have much in the way of a well-formed question. But I wanted to get an artifact out there so there's at least a concrete mass of words to tumble about and argue with. Thoughts?

[1] Not everyone is equally free to download, modify, and share "open" resources because not everyone has access to a computer, the 'net, the knowledge of how to use these, and the time and opportunities to do so in a socially acceptable manner. ("Why are you playing with your mom's computer? It's not for kids. If you break it, she can't work. You should be watching your baby brother.")

[2] Many people consider the attributes that stereotype them to be integral to their identity and don't want to hide that they're female, Latino, etc. but will get short shrift in some way if they do, so this is really a case of some groups having "less freedom" than others - but that's an entire series of posts all to itself, and others have written about it with much more eloquence.

[3] You have no idea how hard it was for me to wrap my head around "ask forgiveness, not permission." It was like having a mental concept with no direct equivalent in my native language. I went through high school and half of college trying to convince myself that it was possible to think something like that.

Regarding money...

2007-10-28T11:53:00.000-04:00

You don't need it. Really. Sure, it makes a lot of things more convenient, but it's not in the same category as air, water, and food; you won't die without it. Cash (and later, credit) is an invention we've adopted into our social conventions because it serves as a handy shorthand for barter. Money is worth exactly as much to us as we think it is. I'm writing this after a month of not having spent a single cent (I am, however, racking up a gigantic karmic debt to family, but that only brings me tighter into the circle of blood relations; this is what we do for each other).

It's like having a degree - the important thing isn't that you have one for the sake of having one, but in what you can do, with or without the sheet of paper that proclaims you proficient in something. Similarly, what do you want lots of money for? Not for the sake of having lots of money, I hope. If you want to start a business, there are many options other than loans, VCs, and being independently wealthy. I usually put in sweat equity, do some bartering, see what other people are trying to get rid of and make use of that.

First: do you really need it? What's the worst that could happen? I realize not everyone has this same luxury, but I'm able to do a lot of stupid things because I know that even if I lose everything, I can convince a passing stranger to let me use their cell phone to call - or pop into a library and grab a public terminal to email - a friend, a family member, someone who'll let me stay with them, no questions asked, while I get back on my feet. I also know it's not beneath my dignity to cook, clean, babysit, or take a minimum wage job - and resourceful enough to find other opportunities fast, or create them. I think that knowing I have a fallback plan makes me much less liable to use it.

Can you trade, convince someone else to share, or even just ask for it? Can you cook dinner for a friend who gives you a lift to the airport? I'm making websites and doing a little tech stuff for the family members who are so graciously hosting, feeding, and (despite my protests) clothing me here, and they know I'll do the same to them if they come by my place.

Can you make it instead of buying it? My cousins and I went to visit an outlying barangay of Abra, a city in the northern province of Ilocos. Their cash flow is almost nonexistent; this is a place where ~$100 a month is a princely sum that can support an entire extended family. But they have fruit trees, a clean creek, some wandering goats and chickens, own their own land and homes, hand down clothes to younger kids - they don't really need to buy much, because they can make or find most of whatever they need. I hope that a certain little project will someday render their (incredibly expensive in proportion to the total amount of money they have) expenditures for schoolbooks obsolete as well.

This may require a more collaborative mindset from that usually cultivated in the US. Money provides a convenient buffer between us and the holders of whatever goods or services we might want - no need to get to know them, figure out what you can do for them and vice versa - just hand over a wad of the green stuff and out pops a product. No need to ask permission or to share; it's private property, yours, and yours alone. Liberating? Kind of. I think it's actually restrictive. If "I can buy that!" is your only hammer, you're blind to everything except nails.

If you've got money, you might as well do something sensible with it. If you're reading this and you haven't gotten a savings account and an investment account, do it now. I don't care if you're only 20, or 17, or 13, or 9, or claim you don't have any money. Hey, Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy) says it's a good idea. Even a couple of bucks a month will get you in the habit. Put a chunk of every input to your income in a high-interest savings account like ING or Emigrant (there are many options). Get an IRA (fancy name for a special type of investment account that gives you tax savings) by opening an account with Etrade or some other broker - the cheapest one you can find. The point is to make very few trades as infrequently as possible and for as little money as possible.

Then, once a year or so, buy stuff and hold it. By "stuff" I mean an index fund, which averages a lot of stocks automagically so you'll get a pretty low-pass-sampled version of the market. Any index fund. Then don't touch that money except to add to it every year or so, until you retire. This will make it possible for you to retire in the first place. (How did you think you were going to pay for that condo in Florida? Compound interest, baby.) If you love a company you think will be around and growing 50 years from now, buy stock, but that's making stuff more complicated. That's it, if you want - no need to read bazillions of complicated. If you don't want to fuss with this "investing" stuff (I don't), get your younger brother to do it in exchange for website help.

The point is to get to the point where you'll feel secure that you're not making decisions because of money issues any more. This is a different point for every person. If you can do this with no money, awesome. If you can only do it when you have 50 million in the bank, fine. But get out of being an indentured servant to cash as soon as you can. It should be your tool, not your master.

And think about what you're going to do with this stuff in the future, since you can't very well take it with you when you kick the bucket. Personally, I agree with my parents; I want my descendants, if I have any, to earn their own way through the world. Not that I'll have much to give them, other than funds for college if they so choose. I hope to exit this earth at a nice ripe age with exactly $0 in net worth, having already spent it all on getting other people to take charge of their own educations.

And the occasional fruit smoothie, because you do have to live a little. Be a tightwad, but not a miserable one. It's totally cool to splurge on the occasional gelato if you'll really appreciate it and it makes you happy.

Note: I don't actually know anything about money and/or investing, but it's a good idea to think about it as young as possible so you won't have to waste time later on getting it set up. Other people can give better advice, but you've got to spend an afternoon taking it, or nothing will happen.

Where are my eyebrows?

2007-10-28T01:24:00.000-04:00

It struck me that what I'm writing here is an excellent derivative of my life. That is to say, it doesn't really describe what's going on, it describes the changes in what going on. I first noticed this when I got concerned about the lack of technical content (and tech-related content, like - say, engineering education) on this baby, and then realized that this was because I already saw that as an innate part of my identity and thought "but of course I'm doing some technical stuff, and of course I'm still doing some engineering education stuff," and assumed I didn't have to put that in for folks to know I was doing it.

So that's... kind of nice, actually. I do think of myself as an electrical engineer, albeit one in training. That's new, and I didn't expect it to happen for a very, very long time. I wish Chandra was around to explain this in terms of identity theory; it would make more sense that way.

On the other hand, I still haven't come to think of myself as a language learner, or a member of the Chinese-Filipino culture, so I keep writing about that. I'm also not used to thinking of myself as a young woman, so... well, you can read about that now.

Longish hair is fascinating to have. It's still quite short by most criteria, and I can't quite sweep my bangs into a ponytail (I can barely gather enough for a stubby thing at my nape) but for someone used to a short black crop, it's a little weird to have hair brushing your shoulders. It also takes longer to shampoo, which is why I'm going to cut it again once I grow it long enough to give me an idea what long hair is like to have (not sure how long that will be yet).

My hair also has red streaks in it - the one concession I was able to extricate from Operation: Make-Over-Mel. My hair has been trimmed "in a comely fashion," and yes, it has highlights. This, I learned, involves getting your hair foil-wrapped in pasty grey froth for several hours while a dryer revolves around your skull, making the air smell like hydrogen peroxide and making you wish desperately that you were anaerobic.

Alas, said highlights are a subtle red*, not the "blazing neon" I asked for. This, too, was a compromise. I usually wouldn't get highlights; they said I should try it. I groaned and said as long as I was in for one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences I'd give bright red streaks a shot. (This is a wink on my part; hypothetically, red is off-limits since we're in mourning. However, if I have red hair, nobody will make me shave it off, as my mother has forbidden me to get another buzz cut.) They looked horrified and said highlights should be dark brown so they wouldn't show.

"Why would I get highlights that don't show?" I asked. "That's like putting on makeup so you don't look like you're wearing makeup." "Of course!" they said, as if that was the entire point. There is apparently some sort of parallel twilight zone of estrogen where these things make sense.

My eyebrows are also, ah... shapely. I'm not entirely sure why they're shapely, but my aunt claims that ripping out portions of one's eyebrows with thread makes your eyes look like a woman's eyes ought to. As far as I can tell, ripping out portions of one's eyebrows with thread gives one sore eyebrows. ("Where are they?" I whimpered afterwards, running my fingers across my now-much-smoother brow. "My eyebrows! Where did they go?") They brought out the fashion magazines and pointed out that all the women in them had shapely eyebrows, therefore it must be normal. I am not entirely convinced.

I also possess twice the clothing I arrived with despite not having purchased any further clothing myself. Some of the new arrivals have lace. Some are dresses. I am washing my t-shirts and cargo pants repeatedly in an attempt to minimize the occasions on which I have to wear these Things With Lace.

Next I am supposed to have a manicure and pedicure. This is apparently to clean my nails. I am not sure what that means, as I've told them that I trimmed my nails yesterday and they're quite clean and I can go at them with a brush if they needed to be even cleaner. They say it's a different kind of cleaning, but don't worry, they wouldn't make me put on nail polish. Thank you for the nail polish decree, I said, but what the heck was there to clean from my nails if I already cut them?

That will also be interesting to see. I am putting up with this because I'm filing them under the category of "once in my lifetime" experiences, emphasis on the "once."

In happier news, the 60-something-year-old ladies at the Tai Chi group can totally kick my butt. They've been (ever so patiently, bless them) reteaching me how to walk. It takes about two weeks to learn how to walk, they say. After a few hours of just putting one foot slowly in front of the other, I was drenched in sweat - more soaked than I would have been after running a few kilometers or lifting weights in the gym.

As I struggle to balance in a straight line with aching legs, they wave swords and fans around with impossible grace as they stand on one foot. Then again, some of them have probably been doing this for longer than I've been alive. Huzzah for pursuits that take a lifetime to master - they're what make a lifetime worth having.

Tie an orange ribbon...

2007-10-26T09:50:00.000-04:00

Orange ribbons lined the streets outside the house today. Why? Erap Estrada is coming home. Mind you, I don't think this is a great idea. In fact, I think it's patently unfair.

The former president of the Philippines, who was convicted of inane amounts of plunder after being forcibly removed from office by the populace, happens to live on the same street in the same subdivision as my grandmother. My aunt and I drove by the other night and saw his house brightly lit, with a contingent of white-baronged security men standing outside.

The current president (Arroyo) pardoned him today because of his age (70), his promise not to run for public office again (big whoop, he was President) and the "hardships he's endured" (read: confinement in a luxurious mansion under house arrest for 6 years). The announcement went out over the radio as we were driving down the orange-ribboned street (Estrada's favorite color, to celebrate his homecoming). "Great," my aunt groaned. "And then there's going to be a motorcade coming through here, and the whole Philippines will be stuck in traffic."

My cousin was somewhat more vehemently vocal about the level of political corruption here, which makes American politicians seem like choir boys. I won't recount the stories of first-hand experiences at government budget meetings, state dinners, etc. I've heard from various people here, but every single person - from a variety of backgrounds, stations, industries, jobs, races, ages, genders, everything - I've spoken to about volunteering in the Philippines has immediately said "don't go through the government! You have to go through private channels!"

There's a lot of history around here, and it's not all good. If I step outside our subdivision, I can have dinner at the same club where Cory Aquino took oath as President after People Power ousted Marcos' martial dictatorship. Driving to the office yesterday, we passed the mall where a bomb exploded a few days back while I was in Cagayan (in another mall, actually. "Don't go 2 d mall - bomb just went off in makati," texted my aunt. A day later, I read the news reports on the carnage.) I can see the prison where my great-grandfather was held and executed during WWII, or the monument including two of my grand-uncles who were kidnapped and deported during the Marcos regime... woo, legacy.

I hear stories about slum schools built in landfills (and one where the mountain of trash collapsed, burying the school and killing the children in it), see barefoot kids in elementary school selling flowers on the streets (a cousin had to interview several for a class, and the ones she found told her that they sold flowers after school, had to sell them all before they were allowed to return home to surrender the money to their parents, and that their earnings were used largely for gambling), get followed for several blocks by women with their heads wrapped in t-shirts holding grubby infants and moaning "baby hungry, baby hungry," even after I told them I didn't have any money (I don't - and these people are often part of large begging syndicates, too). One of the most common prescriptions at the charity clinic I visited was multivitamins - a lot of folks get real sick here just because they can't eat right.

The first time I came to the Philippines, I asked permission to get out of the car and give my hamburger to the other kids my age who were rapping at the car windows. It was explained to me that this would be both dangerous and prone to start a street fight among the kids for my leftovers; we drove on. Past people sleeping under highways. Rivers the color of thick chocolate, dotted with wrappers. Walls that smell of stale urine. I know exactly why they keep me inside the gates and inside the car, and I can't stand being inside when that stuff is out there. I know the above descriptions sound melodramatic, but I'm trying to say them as matter-of-factly as possible. That's life here. For some people.

I'm mad. No, not mad. But burning inside somewhere. It happens every time I come to the Philippines, and crops up occasionally between visits. How am I supposed to change a world that's been deemed too dangerous for me to explore? How do you even begin to find out what's going on? How do you jump from a school whose first Honor Code clause is "Do Something" to a country where the most common response to my questions is "oh, you/we can't do anything, that's just how it is"?

Aha. A challenge.

In other news, I learned about polyphase filters today. They're really a fancy name for saying "If you're convolving stuff and then downsampling, just downsample first before you convolve, so you'll have less to multiply." It was one of those "eh wait, there's a name for that?" moments - less awe-inspiring than the one that went "wait... you call that calculus?" some years ago, but cool nonetheless. Laziness is fun (and computationally efficient). I need to learn more about how Python handles memory, though - I can see what's happening in assembly and C (woo malloc and free), but as far as I'm concerned, things get stored in VAGUE-LAND! in Python. ("I work at the STORE! I do THINGS!")

The stuff I've studied and done as an electrical engineer seems so far away from what people here need, though. And that thing is still seeping frustration inside me. And I can't get out to do things here. And...

But, y'know, do what you can, learn what you can, and keep your eyes open, right?

I can has babelfish?

2007-10-24T12:03:00.001-04:00

世界正在傾訴，你聽見了嗎?

OH MAN. (With the help of a great many cobbled-together technological aids), I'm understanding Chinese! Yes, I'm getting way too excited about this, but look, I get hyperactive about everything, okay?

世界 = (shi jie - both 4th tones) means "world." The characters, individually, mean something like "era" and "divided." I had to look this one up. I'm still not sure where they got that from. (I'd like to think the world is more than a bunch of divided eras.)

正在 = (zheng zai - both 4th tones) means "is in the middle of doing." The characters, individually, mean something like "correct/righteous" "at/exist," so it's talking about an ongoing process that's positive. I had to look the two up together - I hadn't seen them in a pair before.

傾訴 = (qing su - 1st then 4th tone) is something related to being interested, along with the word for "announce." Together they (apparently) mean "to pour out one's heart." I had to look this one up and I'm still not entirely clear on the exact usage, but eh.

你 = (ni, 3rd tone) "You." Yeah, pretty simple.

聽見 = (ting jian, 1st then 4th tone) means "listen." The first character is an ear and a bunch of other stuff. The second character is the symbol for "eye" over one of the variants for the symbol for "person."

了嗎 = (le ma - no tones) make it a colloquial question.

So... shi jie zheng zai qing su ni ting jian le ma = World is currently pouring out its heart (and this is an awesome thing to do). You listening, dude?

And then we check it against the actual Global Voices slogan, and sure enough...

The world is talking. Are you listening?

Di tou si guxiang.

2007-10-24T11:14:00.000-04:00

I love the gurgling ascending scale a large bottle of water being poured into a water bottle makes. If I needed a sound effect for a machine powering on, I'd love to use that. (Wonder if I can find a good microphone and make it my laptop startup sound.)

I've discovered something else I like here: massages. They are unbelievably cheap by American standards - 200 pesos per hour, or roughly $4. My aunt and cousins were astonished to hear that massages cost at least 10 times that amount in the US. Minimum wage here is about $8 a day, though.

Now an explanation of what the post title means. This morning, I read (or rather, struggled through with massive amounts of assistance from my teacher) my first classical Chinese poem. I need to figure out how to type tones - probably just accent marks over the right vowels. (I refuse to do things like "ta1 shi4 wo3 ma1 ma1" where the number at the end refers to the number of the tone; it's just ugly to read.)

Poem:

Chuang qian ming yueguang,
yi shi dishang shuang.
Ju tou wang ming yue,
di tou si guxiang.

A rough word by word rendition:

Bed front clear-bright moon shine,
Doubt is on-the-ground frozen-water,
Raise head look-hopefully clear-bright moon,
Lower head reminisce home-town.

My translation:

Moonshine is beaming down before me on my bed,
I half-believe I see a frosted blanket on the grass.
Clear moonbeams fill my gaze when I uplift my head,
Bowing, I think about my homeland in the past.

Ok, it's a crude first attempt, and I have so much respect for translators right now. But it's fun to translate, and it does sound a lot better in the original Chinese. Buoyed by this, I'm starting to translate some of my favorite English poems in the other direction. Mind you, it's terrible Chinese I'm producing, I'm actually supposed to be writing characters repeatedly for "homework" instead, and my teacher will probably laugh uproariously when she sees it, but at least I'll have fun and find out what I'm doing wrong.

Rudyard Kipling is probably not a good task for beginners ("If" is what I'm using for my first attempt) but if I don't try, I'll never know how I'll do. Also, I like the poem and there aren't many tricky double-meanings to render into an unfamiliar language. It is much easier for me to translate Chinese into English, but I lack appropriate reading material to tackle. (I can't actually read that many words. I can use the dictionary, but looking up Chinese characters is aggravating; you do lookup by radical, then strokes, then...)

I'm really tempted to do the Ballad of Mulan, or the Tao Te Ching (the only two works in Chinese I know of that I really want to read), but both have an archaic vocabulary that will be hard to find definitions for and won't do me much good to learn, plus their study has stymied native Chinese scholars for ages. Sort of like suggesting to a new English speaker that they ought to start in on their Shakespeare analysis. I could find or create readings with zhongwen.com but a speech by Bill Clinton isn't really on my "woo I want to read this NOW!" list.

Maybe I can tackle some Wikipedia articles, or try reading Global Voices. I'll be slow, inaccurate, and in some amount of pain at the start no matter what I do, but I might as well attempt to be helpful and/or read "real stuff" instead of baby books that serve no purpose other than acting as grammar exercises.

Why am I blogging?

2007-10-21T12:35:00.000-04:00

Why am I blogging? It's almost ludicrous; I'm sneaking online in the middle of the night, trying desperately to catch up on email and work, have thousands of other productive things I could be doing, and... the first thing I nearly always do is post here. (For the record, every blog entry since October represents nearly every time I've managed to get online. So you can see why I've got a growing backlog.)

I write most of my posts offline (as I write most of my emails now, and read most of my webpages). This one is an exception. It means it typically takes about 30 seconds to actually post the thing live - so yeah, I stay productive online. For the most part, it's spent in a furious attempt to keep up with wikis and docs and remote server configs and occasional forays onto IRC to stem the flood of "shit, I have to catch up" panic by talking to Bostonians up far too late.

Efficiency aside, I blog because it's one of the things keeping me sane. I need to talk, to spout, to hash out things that may occasionally be more in keeping with Western cultural norms than Eastern ones, to use complex English words and American slang, and (most importantly) to yammer about technology and geekiness and crazy ideas about education with... anyone. People. Even if I'm tossing these words out into a black hole most of the time, I get to say them. Sometimes I even hear something back.

I need to speak and not have to explain for the umpteenth time why open source is not ridiculous, to not have to bang my head repeatedly against the "but this is the proper way to teach children because otherwise the poor misguided souls won't do things correctly" wall. To speak into a space where I've made myself belong somewhat, instead of into one where I'm expected to belong but don't quite. To feel entirely and completely, even for a brief moment, like myself again, and not an awkward variant of the young lady I'll probably never properly become.

I guess that's it, really. Despite this being a post where I'm trying somewhat to explain myself, the internet - and my blog - is a place where I don't have to ask permission or explain myself. I blog so that the person I want to be gets a chance to de-rust her vocal cords once in a while and speak (however incoherently) so that I don't lose her in the rush of things which are often beyond my control.

Despite the ranting, I'm really having a great time in the Philippines - it's just that this part of me needs feeding too, and I don't know a better way to get it.

Cagayan de Oro

2007-10-21T10:33:00.000-04:00

Friday: Philippine Airlines has in-flight snacks that exemplify the national culinary obsession with meat; during the flight, I snacked on chicken-flavored peanuts and beef-flavored crackers. (There is an ad for "meat seasoning," which it describes via sultry voiceover as "a woman's secret." This isn't seasoning for meat; it's seasoning for vegetables to make them taste like meat so that the men in your life will... love you more, says the TV.)

I was flying to Cagayan de Oro with Tito Pax, who once threw my dad into a lake when they were college kids at UP Diliman. Tito Tophie (who helped Pax dump my dad in the lake) was going to meet us at an event called "Go Negosyo" (Go be an entrepreneur) for which Pax was speaking. Pax and Tophie aren't actually my biological uncles; we call the friends of our parents and the parents of our friends as if they were our aunts and uncles here. Also, they claim my father used to be a nerd. I do not believe them.

Several hours later, after the "Go Negosyo" theme song was running circles around my glazed eyes (short attention span + long lectures in a foreign language = MEL IS DISTRACTED) we had some fantastically spicy Filipino food (and in my case, three bottles of water) for dinner. Cagayan has more {space, trees, breathable air} than Manila, and the persistent hacking cough I've had for nearly 3 weeks slowed dramatically as soon as I arrived. We met up with Tito Tophie's family, ate fantastically spicy Filipino food, and left for school. Er, home.

They're actually the same thing. Tito Tophie's family runs two Montessouri schools in Mindanao, and their house is a small loft above the mountainside classrooms with a gorgeous view of the bay. At night you can see the tiny pinpricks of fishing ships at sea, and hear the "EH!-gou, EH!-gou" calls of the large geckos that swarm the trees and buildings.

Saturday: Foundation Day! This is an annual festival where the entire 200-odd group of K-12ers at the school put on a musical extravaganza. This being a predominantly Catholic school, the (very, very long) play progressed from the Garden of Eden all the way through Noah's Ark, then split into presentations of cultures of countries around the world that came from Noah's descendants.

The show was an unintentionally hilarious one, as it turns out. The preschool Adam and Eve couldn't get the Apple of Good and Evil off the tree and had to shrug and eat the Invisible Apple of Good and Evil instead before grabbing the Large Cardboad Fig Leaves of Nakedness Covering. Noah played baseball with his Gnarled Staff of Aged Infirmity offstage right when he thought nobody was watching. Toddlers in paired Winnie the Pooh costumes jumped up and down and waved their hands, except for a lone penguin who stared forlornly into the footlights, slightly stunned at the multiple copies of Eeyore and Tigger (isn't the wonderful thing about them supposed to be that there's only one?) costumes leaping on the grass beside him.

Music was... nontraditional, to say the least. I recognized the Gladiator movie theme, as well as the Hobbits theme from Lord of the Rings. The Russians got their segment from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, the Egyptians strutted to "Walk Like An Egyptian," and Germany... well, Germany's presentation featured small, decidedly non-Aryan children in costume waving cardboard cutouts of sausage, cheese, and beer. Then the music started, and suddenly the SS men and the pretzel ladies were doing... the chicken dance.

I almost knocked over the speakers laughing.

Sunday: My knees hurt. Whitewater rafting was involved. Apparently, my upper torso is sufficiently sun-browned to warrant only a coating of mild sunblock, but my pasty-white "I've been in jeans inside an office all summer!" legs... are not. They've metamorphed from pasty-white right to an angry stinging pink which I'm continually slathering lotion on top of. So that's what sunburn feels like. Ah, new experiences.

Monday: Visiting Tito Tophie's high school, which is built on a farm (the students run the farm as part of their studies). The school's a year or two younger that Olin (depending on whether you count Partner Year). My blog entries get exponentially shorter as I attempt to hit the minimum parental description demands before passing out in preparation for a 5am wake-up call.

Good night.

Ha! productivity!

2007-10-11T05:43:00.000-04:00

It's been a lovely and productive day at last. My grandmother went off to volunteer at church for most of the day, so in the last 36 hours I've popped off two project spec drafts and the majority of a Trac install (with lots of help - there are a good number of dependencies and the remote server I was working on is configured a little differently than usual), given a presentation, and coughed less phlegm down the sink than usual, which felt good (or at least less bad).

I also finally got to start catching up on OLPC stuff, which is kind of like trying to plunge from a standstill into the midst of a herd of stampeding wildebeest. So that's going to take a while. But it's a start.

Also: acquired an inordinate amount of hopia, a porcelain bowl, and two behemoth tupperware containers at the mooncake festival last night. Luck was with me; I won 3 of the 4 second-place prizes offered in all the games that evening (only my aunt had a luckier streak - she rolled a string of 2's and got to take home a mooncake larger than her head).

On the other hand, now I'm stuck with large amounts of Lucky Tupperware and a Lucky Porcelain Bowl that I've been told firmly and repeatedly not to give away because - well, they're lucky. I'm supposed to bring them to China, then back to the Philippines, then to the US and back to Boston so I can take the luck with me - don't I want more of what I experienced at the game? "It depends," I told them. "Is the luck for attracting good fortune in general, or just free serving dishes?"

Finally, I changed the company website of my aunt and uncle from this to this. I hadn't planned on doing so, but after seeing the old site I couldn't take it any more and asked for ftp access and permission to do them a favor.

Old site: huge flash animation that took up most of the screen real-estate in garish blue-grey, stiltedly misspelled English, One Gigantic Image File. (Yes, the text is an image. The entire webpage was one gigantic non-searchable jpeg.) Total: 4.7+ MB.

New site: standards-compliant strict xhtml and css, easily extensible page templates, Total: 28kb, which is... nearly a 175x reduction in size. Sure, I'm not the best at writing ad copy, and the color scheme needs to change, and I need to get some product pictures so the site actually features what they sell, but still.

It's still a few hours before dinner - there's plenty of time yet to get more stuff done. Whee!

Some starting thoughts on SparkEs

2007-10-11T03:16:00.000-04:00

Rant #1: (subject = grandmother) (direct object = me) (verb = fuss). Gah.

Rant #2: Installing and configuring Trac is like running a marathon through the woods. You know you start at A and end at B, and that the distance as the crow files is finite and not-that-bad, but the path keeps doubling back in weird loops until you have no idea how long it'll take, you're getting tired... and then THE ICE WEASELS ATTACK. I've done it a few times before in the past few years, but it's taken inordinately long each time (I'm finally taking notes this round) and it's... not my favorite thing to wrestle with.

So, yes. Content. Poorly structured and organized as usual. Ah, braindumps.

I'm convinced that we need a primer titled "What the heck does a SparkE do." There are many people in the world that haven't the foggiest idea what the (not-so-mystical) art of Electrical and Computer Engineering actually is. This isn't their fault or their shortcoming - it's our fault for not adequately communicating what it is that our field is for.

But if we don't do that, how are they going to know what we can do? And if we don't do that, how are we going to get more people - with their different talents and perspectives - to join us?

Disclaimer: I don't know what the heck a SparkE does. Heck, I'm not sure I barely qualify as one myself (despite the piece of paper that claims I can "BS my way through Electrical and Computer Engineering").

If you don't come in with some background in what you're studying, you can wander around in a haze for years because you don't see the big picture. I know this because that's how I spent most of my undergraduate education.

I spent most of my undergraduate education in a haze because I am a masochist. I chose my major (yes, ECE) with a dartboard and decided to stick with it because it was the degree that I knew the least about and thought it would be an interesting challenge to see how I could learn how to learn something I hadn't heard of before.

The answer, by the way, was "not very well." However, I did learn how to learn electrical engineering. I also learned how to learn, so thrown into a similar soup in the future I think I could flounder better next time - and in fact am doing so now.

But what I'd put in a document like that is what I wish I'd been told 4 years ago, and it goes something like this:

0. Engineering is not about doing lots of math or building shiny machines. It's about solving problems.

1. Electrical and computer engineering is about making things communicate. Whether they're circuit components, a wall outlet and your PDA's power port, bits of computers, computers, people (using technologies that you've made - cell phones, for instance), the point is to do whatever translation you need to do in the middle in order to get things to talk to each other.

2. To make a grand understatement: Electrical and computer engineering is a huge field. And I mean jaw-droppingly huge.

3. It's fun! This was a huge surprise to me. I totally didn't expect to have this much fun.

4. Hypothesis: there is a peculiar state of mind called "SparkEness" that ECEs enter at some point that gives them a peculiarly SparkE way of looking at the world (and fixing ECE-related things). It's kind of like... electric satori. (Younger SparkEs may have occasional experiences of kensho.)

It is very, very easy for SparkEs to forget that not everyone has had the same revelations, and that in fact most people are staring at acronyms and spaghettilike diagrams in terror while muttering the single debugging phrase available to them: "It doesn't wo-orrrrk."

The common explanation is that these people are "stupid" and that those who become SparkEs must be "really smart." This is not true. (Proof by counterexample: I am a SparkE.) It's just a different way of thinking about stuff that's hard to switch into if you're not used to it. Native English speakers have a tough time learning Mandarin, but that doesn't mean native Mandarin speakers are smarter than native English speakers. Same deal.

It's that last point that I find elusive and hard to clarify and explain... and hopefully, eventually, teach - or as John Holt would say, "t-each."* And it's that last point that's become the driving purpose of my life over the years; helping people slip in and out of different ways of thinking as they wish (especially technical ones, particularly those related to electricity and computers).

*T-eaching is turning your student into an obedient robot: follow this formulae, do this worksheet, clean the board, yes ma'am. In contrast, t-eaching is helping your student learn how to become her own master. The job of a t-eacher is to make herself obsolete.

So there are some thoughts, and my brain's swimming in them now between projects. Wonder what will come of it.

Tiny roadblocks

2007-10-05T03:27:00.000-04:00

I'm not the only one who's remarked on this recently, but reading the blogs of friends is an excellent remedy for depression. If all the cool people I admire have their moments of despondence and occasionally feel incompetent, then... maybe I'm sort of normal.

I'm still fighting past nontechnical problems in order to be able to solve technical ones. I am no longer bolting for the tissue box every few seconds; instead, I'm hawking phlegm into the sink every few minutes. It's an improvement; at least it's a great incentive for me to constantly chug water. Also, the wireless router is now more frequently on but the quality of the connection is somewhat more finicky (hey, have you ever tried to configure Trac on a remote server when your connection keeps hanging?)

Finally, I have yet to convince people that I'm not actually on vacation and that I have work to do even if I don't go to the office for a regular paycheck. (Also on my list of myths to dispel: being an electrical engineer does not mean I can wire your house or fix your computer. My idea of "fixing your computer" probably involves installing Linux on it.)

Ok. My connection seems kind of stable now. Armed with the power of screen, I'm going to try getting Trac up again.

Market day & visiting grandfather

2007-10-05T02:22:00.000-04:00

Grandma logic: "Can I do boxing?" "No, boxing is not for girls. It's too violent." "How about kung fu?" "Kung fu is okay." "So... learning how to pummel people unconscious with my hands is too violent, but learning how to kill people with sharp pointy weapons is okay?" "Yes."

Going in and out of air-conditioned rooms isn't the most pleasant thing for my nasal passages, which have continued to drip into my lungs at an amazingly prodigious rate. My usual activities include chugging water, sleeping, and talking to people in a congested-sounding voice. The first thing people say to me is now "do you have a cold?" (instead of the usual "you are so tall!" - I'm 5'8" but tower above nearly all the women in Manila... clothes shopping is entertaining because I've never been an XL before).

We went to the market this morning to get food for the week (I carried a box of tissues with me). Market day is not for the squeamish; fish guts and scales fly through the air, with skinny men in Mr. Bean t-shirts smacking cleavers into questionably sanitary wood blocks. Everything is packed in ancient styrofoam chests held together by faded stripes of packing tape; a pig's head gazes hungrily at its own roasted hindquarters by way of advertisement for purchasing the latter ("My butt is so tasty even I want to eat it!") and white squids lounge across the grills, dangling charring tentacles languidly above a sea of ash.

Some fruits and vegetables I almost recognize. The carrots are stubby and fat, the green beans are a half-yard or so long, the asparagus is downright midget-sized, but the mangoes are amazing. Others I pointedly avoid. Durian, which is a large spiky fruit on a stout stick that looks like a medieval torture implement, actually is - an olfactory one, at least. It smells like a cross between mildewing garbage and a backed-up toilet - tastes great, though. Then there's ampalaya, a knobbly green melon that works wonders as a cough remedy because its sheer bitterness makes the phlegm choke itself out in an attempt to get away. (Ampalaya tastes great, says my grandmother. Ah, so I need to wait for more of my taste buds to die, I tell her.)

Merienda (second breakfast; we're like hobbits) was purchased at the market as well. It consisted of two foods whose spelling I will proceed to mangle: bibingka and puto bunbun. The former is made by pouring a batter, sprinkled with salty eggs, into a leaf bowl stuffed over a charcoal fire, then covering it with a pan of more charcoal until it puffs up into a bright yellow cake. The latter involves neon purple rice steamed and packed in envelopes of banana leaf. I'll need to take pictures of this at the next Sunday market.

After arriving home, we greet my late Angkong('s picture, hanging next to photos of his parents) in the tiny ancestral shrine in the living room, bob long sticks of red incense in front of our faces in his general direction, then bow three times; nobody can tell me exactly why we do this. It's probably for the same reason we rubbed our clothes with packets of rice after the funeral (it "soaks up" bad luck, so of course you can't toss it in your garbage - so the funeral procession detoured past McDonalds to toss the now-accursed papers into wads of discarded Big Macs) and why I technically can't wear red (purple is okay but yellow is "too red," so I'm not sure what color theory the ancients used) and other things.

Anyway. Back to the incense. You're only supposed to burn it during the day because the ancestors, being rational people, sleep at night. This makes me unsure what my children will do if they decide to shrine-ify me after my death. ("Hey, it's 4am and I want to BURN THINGS! Think mom's still up?" "Yeah... where's that flamethrower she asked us to use?")

Then we drove to the crypt. Actually, I drove to the crypt. I think my family was more freaked out by my navigation of Manila traffic than I was. Downtown New York driving is an excellent way to ease into the more advanced Manila navigation dance - one foot for the gas, one hand for the wheel, one hand for the valium.

Angkong's urn resides in space 275F of Christ the King. Getting his ashes to the Philippines (he had a heart attack while he was visiting my parents in Chicago) was an adventure; when you bring a Chinese person's remains home, you have to call to their spirit every step of the way so they won't get left behind. My dad was the one who flew back to the Philippines with the ashes. "Pa, we're going into the car; come with us." "Pa, we're going into the airport; come with us." "Pa, we're going through security; come with us." ("Sir, you're going to have to put your carry-on baggage in the scanner.") "Uh... okay. Pa, you're going through the x-ray machine..."

He's up in a little shelf with a door of pink marble now. It's a pretty comfy spot after a long, full life. Some of the neighboring spaces contain much younger occupants, which sobered me; seeing photos of high schoolers and toddlers in bonnets taped to a spot always makes me remember how close I came to being a gap-toothed picture on a wall years ago. Then there was the single tomb that contained only a photograph of a baby and a single date for birth and death...

On the way back, I admired jeepney decorations. The local buses are usually airbrushed with neon renditions of Catholic saints, cartoon figures, or both. One jeepney proclaimed its decorations were THE JUSTICE LEAGUE! and featured Superman, a trio of colorful people that were either chubby cartoon Power Rangers or "Powerpuff Girls: Age 30", and (at the head of this motley crew), SUPERJESUS! whose main power appeared to be RADIATING BEAMS OF HAPPINESS AND PEACE FROM HIS FACE!!!!

Which is a pretty cool power, if you think about it. Imagine...

Generic Villain: "Blah blah blah monologue about world domination blah blah blah"
SUPERJESUS: ...turns the other cheek and suddenly a BLINDING BEAM of GOD'S INFINITE LOVE AND MERCY hits Generic Villain in the solar plexus
Generic Villain (after vomiting out a couple demons): "My Lord and my God!"
SUPERJESUS: "He's yo' daddy."

I'm trying to persuade my cousins to accompany me, my Guama (my mom's mom), and my mother and aunts to Shanghai next month. "Look, I'm going to be touring China with six women over the age of 45*. Now, if one menopausal mother has to pee at least once an hour... think about the amount of time I'll be spending waiting in public toilets if you don't come." ("We could," I pointed out, "tally how many bathroom breaks each mom takes, and start a betting pool for the grandkids.")

*Technically, the youngest aunt is not quite 45. But still. Even traveling just with my mom requires an order of magnitude more bathroom breaks than I'd usually take alone.

The crabs need cleaning. I must be off.

ARTHRITIS: The Conquest! or: I miss libraries

2007-10-05T01:44:00.000-04:00

Old immune system plus new germs means I'm writing this from bed, by dose stubbed dup so dat I dalk like dis, my head feeling approximately like someone's scraped it out with a $2 K-Mart Jack-O-Lantern carving kit (complete with dull injection-molded knives and spoon of questionable integrity) and packed warm, oil-soaked cotton where my brain and sinuses used to be.

Chua Laoshi (yes, my Chinese teacher's last name is the same as mine) is remarkably patient with my incessant questions. How incessant? Well, during our first session where I barely asked any questions, we got through 6 chapters in the book (which is, incidentally, written for 5-year-olds.) During the second lesson, I turned the question-o-meter way up. We barely squeaked through a single chapter.

Tushuguan (libraries) are sorely lacking in the Philippines, and my grandma's private collection of books doesn't quite intersect with the qualities I tend to look for in a library. First of all, all the books in the house could fit in one bookshelf (they're interspersed between the much more numerous photo albums). Half the books are traditional Chinese. The remainder consists of Catholic tracts and novenas with the occasional health book geared towards those considerably older than 21; "ARTHRITIS: The Conquest!" is not exactly on my must-read list.

Learning Fukien/Fookien/Hokkien (my family's dialect), Mandarin/Instik/Putonghua (technically, Putonghua != Mandarin; the former is spoken in the PRC, the latter in Taiwan, iirc), and Tagalog/Pilipino/Filipino doesn't actually help me understand what my family says, as they mix the three languages together with English, shamelessly using the grammatical conventions of one to conjugate vocabulary from another. ("Have you ever heard your 5-ee* conjugate?" my 7-ee said before proceeding to give an example - which I must get her to recreate sometime - of a Hokkien word mangled into Filipino grammar.)

*My mom is the 4th of 8 sisters. We refer to her sisters by number for convenience: 1-ee is the eldest, then 2-ee, and so on to 8-ee. The numbers are in Hokkien: 1= Ah, 2 = Di, 3 = Sa, 4 = Ci, 5 = Go, 6 = Lak, 7 = Chit, 8 = Pue. Actually, the titles of my various maternal aunts is the only reason I can count in Hokkien... and the reason I can only count up to 8 in Hokkien.

Vegetarians and people trying to avoid sugar will probably not be happy here. Incidentally, diabetes is an issue in these parts...

Ok. Head feels like packed cotton. Must... nap. (Dear immune system: if you happen to have my blog in your feed reader, please wake up. Tell those T-cells to hop to it already.)

the day before Taipei

2007-10-03T04:33:00.000-04:00

One memory from the summer: going to the ICA with Joe and Chris towards the end of our residency at Fenway. It was a crisp, sunny morning and a spontaneous trip; Joe said "there's dancing," Chris and I said "let's go," and we stepped into the heels of our sneakers and walked through a mini-architectural tour of Boston (commentary provided by the boys) stopping long enough to be denied entry into the conference center across the highway. "What's the point of having a gorgeous building like that," Joe muttered, "if the public can't come in and appreciate it?"

We ran across six empty lanes of highway to the art center, where blue-and-gray dancers were undulating through the building, sweating slightly as they weaved arms before the windows, slapped palms under the staircase with a synchronized sticking sound, and rolled down the entry ramp flapping brown skirts behind them. We watched the dance twice, stopping into the gift shop in between. As the dancers swam off the stairs for the last time, we clambered onto them in time to avoid the first raindrops striking down onto the new wooden deck.

I crouched in the staircase hollow at first, sunken in a gravelly recess so that I was eye-level to the ground, watching the rain splatter cross-section. Chris stood on the outdoor stairs, shielded by the jutting overhang of the building that covered an entire back plaza. Rain rolled fat down the glass highway that covered the entire side of one wall and misted off the deck, sending spray and the smell of the sea to cling lightly to our shirts.

The glassy ocean turned into rough silk; thick fronds of moss brushed it from below, a neon orange buoy pinned it from above, tearing a white rent into the fabric of the water as it waved by. A poem about Orpheus was frosted onto a glass panel that stood at the edge of the water. You could peer through it at the albino-white buses parked across the way, rain streaming from the bright red eyes of their lights, steaming. The rain scoured and scrubbed and swept your lungs with calming cool when you inhaled, out, in, out with the breath of the wind.

When the clouds had hung themselves out to dry and were languidly dripping gray through a number of rainbows, we sloshed through the flooded parking lot in carefully dry sneakers and admired the whirlpool vortices that had placed themselves in precise crystal miniature above the four holes of a closed manhole.

More architecture - this time the world trade center - that we couldn't access, but we ran across a wedding party and a system dynamics conference prep session instead, stuffed bags, took a program with paper abstracts back with us to the bus and then the train to Central square, where we shared Tibetian food and then split, stomachs full of buttered tea and hot lentils.

Chris went to work. Joe and I aimed for the garment district but ended up packing laptops in bubble wrap at the OLPC office instead. Joe hoisted the large bundle onto his right arm, I strapped the yellow kite-bag to my shoulder, and we walked back to the mural-painted walls of Fenway talking about sports bras, hyperbolas, heavy-duty zippers. That was the afternoon, and that was the day, and I went to Taiwan the next morning.

Just a series of moments I wanted to remember, or at least mark down in passing.

The best thing for being sad is to learn something

2007-10-03T04:24:00.000-04:00

News flash: loneliness does take hold when you're on the other side of the world from the majority of people you know and the culture you grew up in and the language you speak (and I don't just mean English - I mean American Hacker English).

Fortunately, I have a lot to catch up on and learn. My current mode is "dah! I want to write and write and write!" so that's what I'll do.

Manila, II

2007-10-03T01:57:00.000-04:00

Manila is dangerous, according my elders who must therefore always be correct. (It depends on who you ask, but generally...) Kidnappings, robberies (yeah, even with the fences of glory), carjackings... they're not just things you hear about on the news - they're things that have happened (multiple times) to family and friends within my lifetime, and not just because we're having a string of bad luck. Looking like a Chinese or someone from overseas (or worse: a Chinese from overseas) is, according to my parents, a "mug me! I have lots of money!" beacon - never mind that the entirety of my current finances would barely buy groceries for two weeks. That having been said, OH MY GOD I WANT TO WALK AROUND OUTSIDE.

Traffic... is fun. Manila has the highest population density of any city in the world. Sure, most of that population can't afford cars, but it's bad enough that they used to (maybe they still do?) set a restriction for which days cars could drive on the street (license plates beginning with certain letters could drive on some days, license plates with other letters could drive on the other days). The result? Everyone who could afford it bought another car with the alternate-letter plate. Traffic doubled.

Matt: Eating every three hours sounds fantastic, and it is for the first few weeks. But after a while of lunches and banquets and lunches, you start looking at your plate and the lazy susan full of food that people are still heaping onto it and see endless parades of fish, noodle, and unidentifiable meat dishes in your future... it's not quite as fun any more.

Christie: My fingers are crossed that I'll be able to get around it with scribefire, but not being able to see my blog from China would be a fantastic way to force myself to switch to a custom Wordpress (I was flummoxed previously by Google's move to the "new Blogger," which broke the import API, but they've fixed that now).

Mark: Your room is huge! Boy, the firstborn son thing has perks... I can't wait for you and the other cousins to arrive, though, because it's way too quiet here.

Erin: "Mabuting kapalaran sa iyo," I think... but I don't actually speak Tagalog. Yet.

Today's update is much less exciting. The sobering discovery that the wireless is only on when my grandma's computer is on (and it's in her room, and she turns it off when she sleeps, and...) has made my plans to work during the Filipino night (Boston day) a little more difficult.

However, my throat hurts; I had my first Chinese lesson today, and my vocal cords are not used to the sounds of the language (oh, I've made them before. Just not for several continuous hours). After 4 years of Olin-style learning, it's vexing to have to go back to drill & kill worksheets, canned vocab lists, and handwriting practice - I feel like a computer being programmed - but that's the predominant style of education here, and I want to get a taste of it before starting to suggest my own ideas...

Also, to my vexation, the sounds for j, q, z, s, sh, ch, zh, and x (probably a few more I've forgotten) sound absolutely identical. I really can't tell whether they're aspirated or you're curling your tongue to the back of your throat or not. It's not a question of having "American ears" - the k/t/p/s/sh/ch/c/x/h/...etc sounds are invisible to me in English. Consonants are high-frequency, and I just can't hear them, period. But at least in English I can use context to figure out the words. Not so in Chinese (yet). It poses a slight problem, because the key to successful language learning is constant comprehensible input, and my hearing automatically makes the "comprehensible" part a little harder. I am therefore trying to learn how to read. Fast.

Finally, jet lag sucks. That is all.

In Manila

2007-10-01T21:56:00.000-04:00

In the Philippines, currently being deafened by a VERY LOUD AIR CONDITIONING UNIT and attacked by skeeters. I'm surrounded by old photo albums displaying weirdly young and skinny versions of my father. And whoever decided that 1am international flights were a good idea never flew coach.

I packed last night while my parents were at a wedding; one backpack and a laptop bag for my clothes and stuff, and a rolling red luggage for all the gifts they wanted me to bring (Mel Chua, human balikbayan box). Airplane food was surprisingly good. Asiana serves asian food on its flights, and bibimbap (rice and pickled vegetables smeared with a spicy-sweet red pepper sauce) beats the usual sad-looking omelet and dessicated beef hands-down.

My Amah (my dad's mom) and Auntie Lily (my dad's cousin? I think...) picked me up from the airport. First question: Had I eaten? I had. Was it lunch? It was. Was I hungry? Not particularly. "Ok, then we go to dim-sum." (Chinese families: if you're hungry, serve food. If you're not hungry, serve food. The best strategy is to fast before arrival.) Several minutes later I was having dumplings and turnip cake piled on my plate by two elderly ladies who were also spooning noodles from their bowls into mine. I protested the oncoming food in English, then in Fookien, then (in an act of desperation) badly accented Mandarin.

Eventually I ran out of languages to say "wait, no more food!" in, and four dumplings, two turnip cakes, a beef ball, wonton, fish ball, and a bowl of noodle soup later, they relented and I waddled into the van. The traffic was pretty good; we only had 2 or 3 near-collisions on the way. I commented happily on the number of motorcycles in the streets and Amah gave me a "don't even think about it" look. I got the usual litany of don't go outside the subdivision, do you want more food, don't go outside the gate, what would you like to eat, it's dangerous, we're going to have dinner. Food and paranoia: it's how Asian families show they care.

We drove past the armed guard at the subdivision's gate and down streets named, for whatever reason, after American politicians. The driver honked our house's signal (each house honks their horns in a different rhythm to tell the maid to open the door - the Filipino garage opener) to signal Manang Lorna to unlock the GIANT SPIKED METAL GATE OF PARANOIA! Manila is a long, long way from Boston, where I could slip out the kitchen door to buy ice cream at a downtown convenience store at 2am without passing 5 layers of security on the way.

After sleeping through dinner, I woke before sunrise and took a shower - actually, not a shower, but tabo - the much more water-frugal Filipino variant. Basically, it's a Navy shower with a bucket instead of the shower; you fill a large-ish bucket (~5-7 gallons) with clean water and use a large scoop to pour the water over you in the shower. I actually prefer tabo to showering - faster, saves water - but it requires a bathtub-length shower to be really comfortable, unlike the enough-room-for-one-person-to-stand stalls common in American dormitories. (The Olin suite showers could do it, but I'm not sure how my roommates would have felt about that.)

By the time I left "my" room, Manang Lorna was up and making oatmeal in the kitchen. I had leftover noodles from the dinner I'd slept through the previous night, some mangosteen, and atis, a knobbly green fruit with sweet, fleshy white pockets surrounding large black seeds. When I'd finished the sugary fruit, Lorna told me to leave my plate on the table (I've never gotten used to having maids in the house, although it's de-facto for the upper middle class and above here) and showed me the atis tree growing at the corner of the building, and how to tell whether the fruit was ripe. "Have to eat, or else the birds will eat it," she instructed. I told her I'd do my best.

I'm typing this while chewing a mouthful of sticky, bright purple sweet rice. ("Brunch," said Manang Lorna, despite having fed me a full meal less than 3 hours ago.) I think portion control may be a slight problem here.

Explaining a tracheotomy to young children

2007-09-24T02:28:00.001-04:00

Kid: What's that thing on your throat?
Me: It's a scar.
Kid: You have a scar on your throat?
Me: Yeah, when I was really little I got sick and I couldn't breathe very well, so they had to make a hole in my throat so that I could still breathe.
Kid: Ewwww.

*brief silence*

Kid: Did it hurt?
Me: Not really. I was really small, so I don't remember it, and they put you to sleep first.
Kid: *sounding vaguely disappointed* Oh.
Me: I'm sure there was blood involved somewhere. I mean, they're cutting a hole. In your throat.
Kid: *perking up* Oh!
Me: And you can't talk when you have it in, too - *claps hand over throat* you have to stop it up with your hand if you're trying to say something, or *removes hand from throat, mouths wordlessly, then places hand back over throat* ...hear anything.
Kid: Ewwwwww!

*interlude as Kid pantomimes talking with a hole in their throat*

Kid: (in awe) And so you're walking! Around! With a hole in your throat!
Me: They put a little tube in it, and when they take the tube out you have to wear a band-aid over the hole.
Kid: Can you put stuff in the hole?
Me: You... theoretically could, but you probably shouldn't...
Kid: And when you swallow stuff, would it come out?
Me: I don't remember that part, actually. I don't know where the epiglottis is on the trachea in comparison to-
Kid: (utterly ignoring me by this point) ...and if you were in a food fight could you, like, point your throat towards someone, and eat your food and go BLAAAAHHH! and shoot it out the hole in your throat at them? (this part is accompanied with vigorous miming)
Me: Well, the muscles in your throat probably don't...

*you can see the gears in their little heads turning by this point.*

Kid: And if you didn't like to eat vegetables could you just put them in the hole so they'd go in your stomach anyway?
Me: Uh-
Kid: Or, like, eat them, and then spit them out through your throat when they're not looking? *mimes* BLAAAHH!
Me: I'm not sure that's what a tracheotomy is intended for.
Kid: EWWWW! THAT'S SO COOL! I WANT ONE!
Me: No, trust me, you really don't.
Kid: *running around pretending to shoot stuff out an imaginary throat-tube at people* BLAAAHHHH! BLAAAAAAH! BLAAAAAAH!

Sherlock Holmes for engineers

2007-09-23T17:15:00.001-04:00

I've fallen in love with a book again. If I only changed the software, why is the phone on fire? is Sherlock Holmes for geeks and should be required bedtime reading for students in POE (the Olin class that says "here, a microcontroller; go build something mechatronic"). It's a collection of tales involving electrical engineers at a fictional consulting company trying to figure out embedded bugs (the bugs are based on real-life fiascos).

There are occasional code snippets and prompts telling the reader to stop and take a glance to see what they can figure out before proceeding with the story, but instead of making the book feel hokey, they actually make you stop and appreciate it more (and grimace at some of the code; Lisa Simone has included some realistically icky pieces of C in order to demonstrate how good and bad code "feels" - thankfully, that particular chapter involves refactoring the ugly mess.)

My favorite character is Li Mei, the bright-but-hesitant team newbie who's fresh out of school. She knows stuff by the book but is less versed in the unwritten tricks of the trade, and contributes (not always correct) guesses in a combination of timidity and enthusiasm that reminds me a lot of... well... myself. She's eventually taken under the wing of Josie, the cool, experienced engineer who serves as the right hand (wo)man of Oscar, a blunt and efficient ace debugger who's just been promoted and is still getting the hang of managing people rather than components. A young, quick, but just a mite too independent hardware hacker named Ravi is the last member of the quartet. Eduardo from testing (formerly a programmer) makes occasional appearances and shows just how far you can get in debugging without having to look at code.

Some comments:

(1) Holy cow female electrical engineers that aren't token minority inclusions. Josie and Li Mei actually think, talk, and act like female SparkEs I know - in particular, Li Mei's hesitation (I'm not the only one that worries about wasting my coworkers' time and overcompensates with perfectionism?) and Josie's slightly protective, gentle approach to mentoring (she asks Li Mei how she's doing which gives her "permission" to respond - in contrast, Oscar assumes Ravi will speak up with the inevitable questions about what he doesn't know how to do). It's not that different from how male SparkEs act, but I appreciate that the two characters aren't just male engineers with larger breasts and higher voices.

(2) Engineers are people too. The ones in this book get frustrated, cheer each other up; their work is affected by how they're feeling, they get angry at each other, they rejoice together, they socialize over dinner and beer at the pub down the street, they make mistakes, miscommunicate, get cranky when they're tired, their eyes light up in realization right when they're on the verge of fixing a tricky bug. It's a neat view of life in an engineering department. If you haven't gone out for an engineering internship yet, read this book first. I sure wish I'd had it before my stint in Continuum.

(3) Neat pedagogical tricks for hacks you usually don't find in textbooks. Instead of throwing an explanation of PWM in the appendix, we see Josie explaining it to Li Mei during a site visit where a temperature sensor's gone awry (complete with diagrams and Li Mei asking those questions you always wanted to but felt stupid to say out loud). Instead of a dry footnote about checking processor speeds when porting to different hardware, we see Oscar showing Ravi an old Pong game he'd written in 1993 and how it's been rendered unplayable by the orders-of-magnitude-faster CPU of a new computer. By following Li Mei through drawing a flowchart, we learn how to make one ourselves. By watching over Oscar's shoulder as he tiles "DEADBEEF" into flash to check where a program is storing its data, we learn about memory fill patterns.

(4) Code and problems that look real. They're messy. Sometimes they're ugly. They're confusing. Sometimes they' not thoroughly tested or well documented. Customers are irate. Emails are written in caps. Variables don't get initialized. Long strings of if statements show up where switch statements should be. Off-by-one errors pop up in array indexes. Receivers don't receive what the transmitters say they've transmitted. Equipment needs to be debugged on the factory floor, not by dissecting the intermittently failing machine (which is still in operation) but by talking to the non-technically-trained foreman, whose answers need to be translated into engineerspeak. At least these have nicely explained answers at the end for those who want a sanity check on how they did.

(5) It's fun to read. This above all - it's well written and actually keeps you up all night turning the pages. It may be slightly unfair for me to say this, since I tend to get more absorbed in books than most, but oh! Would that other writers of electrical engineering textbooks could take a cue from Randall - with some intro tutorials and a ramp-up series geared towards raw beginners (Oscar teaches his twin middle-schoolers about the AVR Butterfly?) this might be the kind of thing we need to get more kids interested in electrical engineering. I wish there was a regular column of these coming out - I'd totally subscribe.

Other people being funny

2007-09-22T15:05:00.000-04:00

I don't usually do blog posts full o' links, but these made me chortle (and humor is something I need massive doses of at the moment). Actual original content coming next.

From: Six videogame gimmicks that need to die

Game villains must have no interest in ever leaving their various lairs and/or hideouts, because the sheer number of spinning blades, falling blocks and other torture devices crammed into every conceivable corner renders them all horrible deathtraps. It’s a wonder Bowser can find his way past the Whomps and rotary knives to go to the bathroom, let alone oversee his military operations outside the castle (not to mention having to deal with the multitudes of work-related injury claims from his Koopa staff).

Maybe the reason why I'm terrible at gaming is that I learned physics before I learned video games.

Even better: 5 things hollywood thinks computers can do.

Beyond #5 ("You Can Blow Up Shit At Will – With Hacking") there are gems like... (From "A Computer Might Become Self-Aware At Any Moment")

The microwave-sized IMSAI 8080 computer the hero [Matthew Broderick's character in Wargames] used to take over the nation’s nuclear missile fleet had 64KB of memory. That means if it tried to open this article as a Word document, it’d get about half way through before it ran out.

(From "Computers can talk to *#%*@ UFOs")

The Earth is under attack by a race of vastly advanced aliens, so Jeff Goldblum creates a virus from his PowerBook that disables the entire apparently Macintosh-compatible fleet of ships... But of course, there is exactly one reason why the aliens were defeated by a PowerBook in Independence Day: because Apple paid for it as part of the product placement. Yes, my friends, the entire plot culminated in an advertisement, and one you paid to see.

Then there's the "Bad grammar makes me [sic]" shirt, which I would totally have gotten for my editors at Frankly Speaking years ago, if I'd seen it then.

20 guiding principles of computing

2007-09-20T18:47:00.000-04:00

I wonder how many posters nowadays start out as cool random things people run across on the internet. The 20 Guiding Principles of Computing (now hanging in abridged format next to the 1cc printer) is one of them. Here's the short version, with my commentary - I do recommend going back to read the original link, though.

1. Brooks’ Law: Adding More Programmers to a Late Project will make it later.

Usually, but not always. If you have a good project manager who's able to focus solely on handing compartmentalized, completely independent, non-vital (but still helpful - what Dave Barrett would call "#2's*") tasks to enthusiastic volunteers, you may be able to make your project not get later. In fact, you might hit on some really good helpers and get it done earlier. This does sink the time of one of your good project managers, but it's the kind of time-sinking that needs to be done especially in open-source projects where programmers will try to add themselves to a late project anyway.

Nothing new here that folks like Mike Fletcher haven't already pointed out. But yeah, if you're in a panic and think you need MORE MANPOWER NOW!!! you're wrong, because you're in the wrong state of mind to utilize that (hu)manpower.

*How Dave describes the scope of SCOPE projects to the Olin engineering seniors who tackle consulting problems for companies every year: #1's are mission critical, live or die problems for the company. We don't want those. #3's are problems nobody cares about; their solution won't matter to the company. We don't want those either. #2's are potentially cool/beneficial things that aren't bad if they don't get solved - stuff on the "cool to do, but not spending our limited resources on right now" list. Those are what we want (as SCOPE projects). And these are the things we should be handing out to volunteers (on open-source projects).

2. Choose the Middle Way: bad ideas are just good ideas carried to extremes.

Note: this doesn't mean always doing the mundane thing. There are 3 ways to make an extreme idea middling. The first is to cut down the extremity - do the mundane. But you can also cut the number of people involved; a small number of people with permission to run wild is called a skunkworks and can have startling success for minimal risk. You can also cut the timescale - in fact, "everyone go nuts for an hour!" is usually called a "brainstorm" in corporate circles, and can be rather refreshing.

3. Conservation of Complexity: Simplicity is Complicated

I wholeheartedly agree and will defer to John Maeda on this one.

4. First law of logic: logic doesn't always work. Embrace Contradiction.

"The opposite of a Profound Truth is another Profound Truth." Years ago, I hated this quote. Now I've grown to love it. Mostly because of the next item on this list:

5. Gould’s Spandrel: Things are the Way They are because They got that Way.

Why? Because. Some things just are, without any plan or reason (or for a reason that's long since ceased to exist).

It's the kind of answer that's annoying when you know there's an answer that they're just not telling you, but wonderful when you realize there really isn't an answer, because you can loosen the furrowed brow of intellectual consternation and really just... wonder.

6. Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when taking into account Hofstadter’s Law.

This makes me think of two things: (1) Hofstadter's law is a strange loop, and (2) I wonder if Zen philosophies might be a good coping mechanism for folks with ADHD - we tend to have a hard time with this scheduling/planning stuff, so why not just live in the moment since we're only present in the present anyway?

7. Occam's Razor, a.k.a. K(eep) I(t) S(imple) S(illy/tupid).

Yes, but remember - simplicity is complicated. See Dan Ward's simplicity cycle.

8. Lubarsky’s Law of Cybernetic Entomology: There’s Always One More Bug.

Also known as "stop being a perfectionist already" - or take the Linus Torvalds approach and get others to help (Linus’ Law: Given Enough Eyeballs, All Bugs Are Shallow).

9. There are Many Ways to the Mountaintop

...so make up your own mind which you want to take. You know those product FAQs where you ask "which will I like best, is best for me?" and they reply with the frustratingly circular "ultimately, it's about which is best for you - which one will you like best?"

Well, they're right.

Also, it's a lot easier to tell people the wrong routes up the mountaintop. Mostly because it's impossible to tell them the right ones. (You can, however, tell them the ones that have worked for you and many others - but it's no guarantee it'll work for them.)

10. Moore’s Law: Computing Power Doubles every 18 Months

And that's why I'm not worried the XO now costs $188. People, stop calling it the "$100 laptop" and fussing about how it's not. That name was just a catchy meme, plus there's this lovely thing called economics that talks about things like inflation and currency fluctuations and yada yada yada - basically, prices are to some extent arbitrary, and Moore's Law says whatever prices* are now, they're going to get cheaper later on anyway.

*for the majority of electronic devices in the medium-term foreseeable future. Obviously, this does not apply to things like signed memorabilia, stocks, or bottles of fine wine.

11. Murphy’s Law: Anything that can Go Wrong, Will.

And then there's O’Niel’s Law: “Murphy was an optimist.” Far from sending you into a sinking depression at the hopelessness of your project, this should instead inspire a joyous sense of fearlessness - things are going to go wrong! We don't know what they are and we're going to have to figure it out along the way - it's going to be an adventure!

12. No Silver Bullet

Along the lines of there being many ways to the mountain and blah blah blah - there's no one-size-fits-all solution to your problems. Yeah, stuff is hard, but just think for yourself and have fun, and you'll probably be all right.

13. Pareto Principle: The 80/20 Rule

80% of your gains comes from 20% of your expenditures (and vice versa).

But remember Joel Spolsky’s Caveat: Although 80% of people use only 20% of the features. “Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20 percent. Everybody uses a DIFFERENT set of features.”

Does that mean you should leave everything at 100% expenditure anyway? No. It means there's no silver bullet for deciding which 80% to cut. You'll have to make up your own mind.

14. Parkinson’s Law: Work Expands to Fill the Time Allotted

Fortunately, this is true - for as many have pointed out, the natural corollary to this is that Work Is Compressible. Witness Ben Fisher's impressive half-hour hacks, and his prelude to such:

This blog is the result of a paradox. I am more productive when under constraints. A busy schedule keeps me driven to do more with my time. I live my life on the run. If you had all the resources you wanted, and any amount of time or money available for a project, realistically, you would spend years creating a bloated, over-complicated application, possibly never even finishing.

And then look at the kind of stuff he's been able to pull off in 30 minutes - yes, Ben is amazing (I think our first conversation alternated between Ben typing on his laptop and me saying "oh my god!" every 15 seconds or so) but he also understands that his mad skillz are occasionally better in concentrated form.

15. Patrick's Population Principle: Individuals are Individual.

You can view communities as a super-organism, or a bunch of Individuals, or as a Swarm.

We all belong to groups, but we are not the groups we belong to.

16. Shapiro’s Observation: Technology Changes. Economic Laws do not.

This has also been expressed as the Law of Disruption: “Social systems change incrementally, technology exponentially.” Also see David Shenk’s Second Law of Data Smog: “Silicon circuits evolve much more quickly than human genes.”

And this is why it's so important for engineers to understand the people they're making things for, why sometimes the best solution is not a technological one, and why education is one of the most powerful technologies (in the sense of tools-able-to-change-things) ever created*.

*This is not necessarily a good thing. John Holt has some choice words on why the power of an education system is dangerous and potentially harmful to learning.

17. Slingerland’s Law of Fools: No System’s Foolproof, because there’s Always a Bigger Fool

Basically, Murphy's Law applied to users. Yes, there's plenty of repetition in this 20-item list, but they all sound so snappy and good! (Although if I practiced Pareto, I should slash this list to 4 "fundamental" principles and be done with it.)

18. There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

...but you can finagle things so that you're doing work you enjoy in order to pay for yours.

19. Everything is Connected to Everything Else

Culture + New Technology YIELDS New Culture

And this is the reason I am going to study education and sociology before going to graduate school for electrical engineering.

20. Veblen’s Principle: All changes help some people and hurt others.

Personally, I would have ended on a more inspiring note. But yes, no free lunch. This doesn't mean life is a zero-sum game, though; the magnitude of the hurt may be more or less than the magnitude of the help (depending on what scale you're using - there's no absolute rating for "goodness").

The good you do may end up having not-so-good consequences you should watch for, and try to alleviate and understand, and ultimately accept. It's part of the job of trying to do good. You can only ever do good to some people, and from a certain point of view.

Again, you get to decide. Which is a terrifying - and liberating - charge to have.

Flying and gloves

2007-09-18T02:35:00.001-04:00

As tangentially mentioned in a previous post, a family friend tried out his new pilots' license by taking us up in his 4-seater Cessna. It was loud as all heck - I soon ripped off the headphones and just stared slack-jawed out the window at the view (the bay! the bridge! the horrendously expensive homes!)

I've wanted to learn to fly since I was in second or third grade, so the prevalence of radio communications worried me - I couldn't understand a word the control tower was saying. Asked around afterwards and it turns out, thankfully, that I can still become a pilot. With some limitations, of course - I won't be able to make flights requiring the use of radio, which is the auditory equivalent of being required to drive with your glasses on. But. Someday, when I can afford lessons, I can learn how to fly. Good to know.

Also, my aunt sent me a link to this guy's book - hearing loss worse than mine, also lives in the hearing world, flew out to Africa for 2 years in the Peace Corps. Meh, I reckoned. Another memoir. But then I read the excerpts and his blog and thought, "whoa, there's someone out there that experiences and copes with it the same way I do!"

7:20: wash hands.7:25: pour wine, drink.7:30:
cut piece of bread, eat it. Someone flips a fish. Why is my apron
yellow while everyone else’s is white? Someone's talking to me -- nod.7:35: drink. 7:40:
look at skyline from window. Try to figure out which route Spiderman
could take to get to a baby trapped on a fire escape on 86th street.7:45: is this fish for me? Thank you. Wow, delicious. Drink.7:50: what’s everyone talking about? I’ll laugh now in a friendly manner.7:55: that knife has to cost $70 bucks easy. How come they don’t have those ginsu commercials on TV anymore? 8:00: drink.

Yeah, that's roughly what life's like in a large group of people where you can't always read lips. Dah dah dah dah dah fake it fake it dah dah dah wonder if they can tell dah dah dah dah everyone else is laughing so I should too.

Also, the kinds of things that go into latex glove manufacturing are totally cool. Imagine a long row of ceramic (I think) hands on a conveyor belt, dipping down into a smelly pool of latex, coming up dripping just short of the elbow; a little roller that brushes around the forearm to make the lip at the end of the glove, a puff of air (and powder, perhaps) shooting from within the hand to blast the glove into a stack - paCHING! the amazing shooting hand. Gloves lined up on nozzles, like translucent blue udders, bulging with water to check for leaks. Gloves!

fdisk /dev/life

2007-09-15T04:10:00.001-04:00

(Apologies in advance to any readers and to hell with the rest of the productivity I was supposed to have tonight. It's going to be a rant, or I'm going to explode.)

It is 11:54 pm. I'm sitting on the toilet seat of a hotel room in Mountain View with my laptop on my knees. Every few minutes I reach up to turn the timer that keeps the light (and fan) on so it won't cut me off in the dark mid-sentence. I'm trying to work. It won't matter after 2.5 hours because that's how much longer my battery lasts, and there aren't any outlets in here. It won't matter after another day, because my mom's going to join us in this hotel room, and then I won't be able to sneak away to work in the bathroom.

I'm tired. I'm grouchy. I'm terrified of the amount of catching-up I have to do. I'm struggling to find a way to simultaneously be a good daughter and a happy, productive person. I'm trying to partition my life again - here are the things I'm supposed to do, to be "Good Girl" (that's actually the translation of my Chinese name) during the day, and Mel during the night when everyone's sleeping. Spending my own time late at night has been my solution around the demands of others for years; I started sneaking into the bathroom while my parents slept so I could read math books when I was 11. It's how I became an insomniac. It's the reason I pull allnighters. The night is mine, so I take it, because it's often all I've got. (The bathroom timer shuts off. I turn the light on again.)

According to a book by Howard Gardner (whose title I've forgotten) that was on my aunt's shelf, the Chinese way of thinking about teaching is not huge on experimentation. The point of education isn't to learn how to figure out things. The point of education is to learn how to do it perfectly, where "perfectly" is defined as "whatever your elders handed down." Match this standard. Match this standard. Match this standard, you punk, don't try to make your own. it got hammered into my head hard in ways I've just barely begun to realize.

In retrospect, the only reason I've been able to do amazing things in the past is because I was fast enough at doing all the things other people wanted me to do (like algebra homework or watching kids) that I had free time in the margins to fit in things I wanted to do, like read math books that had no relation to what we were studying in class. I wonder how many other kids could have had fun reading math books, but had to spend too much time doing their algebra homework and ran out of time for reading. I wonder how many people could do wonderful things if they weren't forced to meet a lot of other obligations, play a lot of other roles.

I had a great childhood. Lots of opportunities. A fantastic, close extended family network. Good schools. Concerned parents who really wanted me to do well. All the same, I was (and still am) jealous of the kids who didn't have to cram things secretly into the margins. Had parents who didn't define "do well" as rigidly. Who let them bike more than a block away, cross the street alone at 16, left them to their own devices. I disagree with my parents on this - doing things like that is not a mark of not caring about your kids. In America, it's the way you help them grow up. You're raising a little cowboy. They're supposed to go venturing out into the unknown on their own account.

In college when the things other people asked me to do took up enough time that I didn't have free margins, I learned (a little, but not very well) how to make other people want me to do the things I wanted to do, and it was great. Not perfect. I almost flunked out because I didn't learn how to do it well enough. But better, much better, than anything else I'd ever had before; nobody had ever asked me what I'd wanted to do before, and I remember being utterly astonished by it - "you want me to tell you what I want to do? You mean I can do it? I'm supposed to?" It took me about two years to believe it.

At the beginning of this summer - glorious summer! - I owned all my time for the first time in my life. It was the most fulfilling and productive period I've ever had. I was working on something of my choosing at all times. Nobody had a sword to hold over my head. And then the slow creep began; I was out from under the protective title of "student," which had given me freedom for the past 7 years. Back then, I could sweep random projects under the "but I'm pursuing X degree and this is how we do it!" rug. Now I'm being treated according to "adult child with no real job" protocol, which means I'm back to having to play a role set by someone else, live a schedule set by someone else, ask permission (not forgiveness) for everything. I want to decide what I eat, when I sleep, whether I answer the phone. I've gotten "too Americanized," says the Asian family I'm struggling to fit back into. It's tough to simultaneously be an American adult and a good Asian child. I'm really, really bad at being a good Chinese kid.

I read a book about Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, living in a crummy little apartment the year after she graduated from college, starting a movement she cared about, and it made me want to cry. I want an unstable life in a lousy apartment working inane hours for a cause I'm passionate about. (The bathroom timer shuts off again. I turn the light on. Again.) I had that a little at the start of summer and I want it again; I want to grab a 10-gallon hat and blaze new trails roughly instead of following old ones perfectly. I want to move without eons of history and the voices of a collective family tree dragging behind me. I want a "get out of filial piety free" card because I can't bring myself to just up and run.

I don't want to play a role. I want the person I'm supposed to be to be the same as the one I want to be. I want to be able to stop thinking and fussing and making entirely too big a deal about this, and I want to stop feeling torn, want to stop having to steal my nights for being myself. I want to love - not resent - my family, appreciate them, honor them, make them happy... while disagreeing with a decent portion of the things their culture has carried into my life. I want to be one person and have everyone be okay with the person I end up being. I should stop complaining about being two people, and start being one, and doing what I want to do - but how much of my happiness is tied to my family's happiness? How much is who I am being part of that group, its heritage and traditions and values - and how much is... well, what else is there?

Enough. I'm going to fall asleep with happy things in mind. The twisted white trees in Monterrey are among the most lovely things I've ever seen, and a simple floured and pan-fried fish filet is hot and delicious, tasting faintly like the sea. A jovial old man who produces theatre and builds sets in a tiny town for the love of it; lurching through the air in the back of a 4-person Cessna dreaming of when I'll be able to get my own pilot's license, noodle soup too scorching to sip without vigorous fanning of each spoonful. It's been a good trip. It's been a good trip. It's been a good trip.

Degrees don't limit you.

2007-09-15T02:20:00.001-04:00

Stumbled upon this today while looking for something else. I wrote this a year and a half ago to a friend who was having a hard time figuring out what to do after engineering school, and I'm posting it (anonymous-ified) now because I needed someone - even my 19-year-old self - to tell me this now. I think I've just conclusively proved to myself that I was actually wiser at 19.

...it's not that getting an engineering degree limits you, but it changes your perceptions of the options you can pick from (mostly because it looks like it'll change other people's perceptions of you). Graduates from an engineering program, especially one like Olin, and particularly because you're the first class, are expected to do "well." By normal terms. Which means an upwardly-mobile corporate job, a highly-regarded grad school, or at the very least a spunky little startup. Anything "beneath" that is a waste of talent, or training, or intellect, or opportunity, or...

Cognitively, we realize this. Emotionally, it's harder to reconcile, especially with lots of neighbors and friends and relatives and their combined expectations. It's like applying to Olin in the first place. I'm pretty sure all of us, at some point, got incredulous stares and a "What do you mean, you don't want to go to MIT/Stanford/? What's this... Olin place? Have you gone bonkers?"

I think you should... do whatever you think will make you a better human being. Because ultimately that's what life is about - it's not about being a CEO, or even a really good engineer; it's about being a good person, and whatever that means to you - if it's being a CEO, that's cool; if it's having wild experiences, that's cool too - if it's being a good mother, or a musician, or getting involved in local politics, or recycling everything, or knitting... there's a lot to life, and it's your life, so should do what you want to do. In the end, you'll be left with lots of memories, so there's no sense looking back with regret.

You don't "lose a year" any more than anyone else; years go by regardless of what you're doing. There is actually no such thing as "falling behind." It's just a different way of deciding how to spend your years. And those that recognize that and are able to control it and be happy with it are the lucky ones.

Also, these "quirky experiences," or whatever you want to call the off-the-successful-engineer-beaten-path stuff, will make you a better CEO (or designer, or whatever) in the future. Lots of "successful" people can't help those that aren't "succesful" because they've never been there. They don't understand the world outside the one they live and work in. I think it's great that you want to go beyond that. I think this is one of the few chances you'd have to do so, the space between graduation and your first job; you're still fresh into the world, you're still impressionable, you're still open-minded and able to learn. And while you'll still be open-minded and thirsty for knowledge later in life, there's something especially nice about a blank slate. No preconceptions.

I'm planning on taking at least a year to do something different (current plan: roadtrip hopping from school to school and writing a book about american k-12 education - or - teaching english/math/science/design in some non-US country, probably China.) I want to understand a different kind of life, one without privelege, assumptions of education, internet access, piano lessons, and consistently clean running water. I'm also planning on working in the corporate world and going to grad school at some point so I can be an Olin prof for some period of my life.

I figure they won't think less of me for spending a year living in the back of my car, as long as I get as much (or more) from the experience as I would have in . Doesn't have to be the same thing, but needs to be worthwhile, by whatever standards you judge worth. I reckon if I think I'm a better person to hire a year down that road than I was before, and they don't think so because it's "not normal," then I probably don't want to work for that company in the first place. Wherever I go, I want to go off the beaten path, so they need to be ok with me veering off in the first place.

You're not alone.

Yeah, but I sure feel like it now. I want to go back to Bossssston. And be surrounded by haaaaaackers. And live as an individualistic Amerrrrrican instead of a family-bound Chineeeeeeese. ; Not really. I need to learn how to cope with this part of my world again. I've been relatively free from it for 7 years, being away at school, but I've got to learn how to live within the culture of my family again instead of running away from it.

Online and offline laptop usage

2007-09-14T03:50:00.001-04:00

it's distressing to find how reliant I am on my laptop and the internet, and how readily I equate the two. I take ready access to online storage and apps for granted, and find myself crippled by not being able to yank something from flickr, or pull up a google doc, or look it up in wikipedia. I need to keep reminding myself that the kids who get the laptops will by and large be in the same situation, and that i've been spoiled by the last four years of being immersed in outlets and wifi and other people with lots of laptops around.

So as best I can through the finicky wireless I can only access at night in the hotel while my family sleeps, I've been trying to restructure my digital life to get around this. Rough steps:

My laptop is a tool, not my life. All the same, it's an immensely powerful tool, and I love using it to keep lists, take notes, and so on... my usage of my laptop is limited by access to power; I ration my battery now. I wish I had a human-powered charging option for this thing.
My laptop happens to have the ability to access the internet... sometimes. Offline caching, composing, etc. is handy. All my email is now downloaded for offline use. Think in batches of things to send, download, read, etc.
My computer should do merging and syncing, not me. Set up scripts to automatically sync up online and offline versions of important things (I had merging working with my local and online dokuwiki install for one glorious day, then it mysteriously borked - still trying to track that one down) and to do things like automatically send/receive emails when it detects the siren song of wireless.
Back up! While you're at it, make your computer sync to an external flash drive. Or at least the important bits - I've got a thumb to hold my email and wikipages-to-upload, and a 120gb flash to back up my entire laptop hard drive.
There exists something called paper. It's useful. I usually go through notebooks pretty fast, but I'm discovering just how fast... I need to review that shorthand cheat sheet Boris gave me again, because my hand is cramping up in protest.
There exists something called memory. The organic, brain-based kind. It's useful. It's harder to upload to the 'net automatically, though. Much of my backlog is "well great, I know exactly what I need to type for all these, but it takes a bloody long time to type them."
There exists something called life. It is present away from the computer. It's pretty cool.

Yeah, it's often annoying, since I'm still getting used to the switch. The reason I liked webapps is because I didn't need to worry about keeping stuff on my hard drive, being conscientious about backups, and so on. I like outsourcing. I did it a ton for info/data storage. (I should do it more for work.) So trying to download everything I need late at night is a bit of a pain. Should have done this when I was swimming in internet.

One big missing piece is a sane way to read and contribute to wikis offline. I suppose I could nab the offline image of - for instance - the OLPC wiki daily for browsing, and store my edits in a text file, but that's a lot of bandwidth to download unless there's a clever way to do a diff - like through Recent Changes - and it's also a hassle to merge my changes back up into the proper pages. I really can't wait to see Mako's thesis on this.

Okay. I'm exhausted. Bed.

Moment of silence

2007-09-13T02:08:00.001-04:00

Two Olin students were in a motorcycle accident this weekend. They didn't make it.

I was just on campus to visit last week. Didn't meet Rachel, since she just started this year and I've graduated. But I saw Matt in passing, promised I'd send him that email I owed him - it was waiting in my inbox to be sent when I next hit the internet, but I saw the email with the news that he'd passed away first. Can't imagine what it must be like on campus right now. In a school with only 300 students, the loss of two hits home hard. And it's hard to imagine that someone you know, just a little younger than yourself (they were both 19) has died.

Hope everyone out in Needham is doing ok.

pulling an Erdos

2007-09-11T04:51:00.001-04:00

Update: AHA! Found the port that allows me to send email from my new laptop consistently. Now I no longer have to carry the broken one around... assuming I transfer over the hard drive stuff before the taxi comes in 3 hours. Boy do I rely on electronics for communication. Stable email! Stable IRC! Stable cellphone with text messaging! That's all I'm asking - but that's a lot of infrastructure to need.

I enjoy living interrupt to interrupt - I'm working on a ton of projects with a ton of people and responding when they ping me - but I need to learn how to close processes cleanly so I don't leave any dangling obligations when I rush to the next thing. It's very humbling to finally not have anyone (mostly) telling you what to do after 21 years - finally get what you've been fighting for for a long time, and then finding out you don't know what to do with it. I'm starting my unschooling journey as a young adult, but I'm still a very immature learner.

Finally, my travel schedule, in case people want to meet up, do something, and so on.

Sep 11-18 - San Fransisco, CA (Palo Alto, Berkeley, etc. - mostly booked but can meet people Wednesday the 12th, email-available.)

Sep 19-30 - Chicago, IL (Glenview, Evanston, Aurora, etc. - relatively open schedule, very email-available.)

Oct 1 - Nov 17 - Manila, Philippines (relatively open schedule after Oct 10, can travel within the Philippines for short trips, intermittently email-available.)

Nov 18 - Dec 23 - Shanghai, China (relatively open schedule and intermittently email-available after Nov 28, also traveling within China, destinations unknown... yes, I know it's a big country, it's going to be a sort of spontaneous thing here.)

Dec 24 - Jan 8? - Manila, Philippines (not so much the traveling here; Christmas with the family, so I'm booked, mostly email-available.)

Jan 8? - Jan 15? 2008 - Chicago, IL (give or take a few days - I'm booked doing an intersession at IMSA, very email-available)

Jan 15? - May 31 2008 - Boston, MA (okay, Somerville. At least that's the game plan so far. Relatively open schedule... so far. Will be going to NYC at least once; I need to visit my uncle in New Jersey, but can extend the trip to see other people and places as well. Very email-available.)

June 1 - August 30 2008 - America. No, really. I'm biking across the United States with Chris Carrick on an appropriate technology tour. Not sure about the email part for this one.

Finally, I thought this was fittting...

Possessions meant little to Erdős; most of his belongings would fit in
a suitcase, as dictated by his itinerant lifestyle. Awards and other
earnings were in general donated to people in need and various worthy causes. He spent most of his life as a vagabond,
travelling between scientific conferences and the homes of colleagues
all over the world. He would typically show up at a colleague's
doorstep and announce "my brain is open", staying long enough to
collaborate on a few papers before moving on a few days later. In many
cases, he would ask the current collaborator about whom he (Erdős)
should visit next. His working style has been humorously compared to
traversing a linked list.

I can't decide whether feeling like I'm "pulling an Erdos" somewhat is a good thing or not (oh, I'm not really doing it now, but I could be moving in that direction). I need to learn how to embroider so that I can stitch "My brain is open" onto my travel pack. And then... what? I can't write math papers at every house. (Heck, I don't know how to write math papers. I don't think I could help with one in a few days. But I could be wrong.) Maybe I could learn how to code well enough that I could do something like Ben Fisher's half hour hacks with people. Or broadening that thought, maybe I could do a teaching/learning swap of lessons in exchange for housing and food for a week. And if they have time, I'd ask them to teach me something too. As I went along, I'd presumably know how to teach more things, but I'm polymath enough to give mini-intro-classes on a number of subjects right now.

I wonder if people would actually go for that, if I could do it for - say, if I could do it for a month? Four weeks, four people, four lesson swaps. It'd be a fantastic way to learn about learning. A really amazing way to do some of my education research (...okay, not technically - I'm supposed to be focusing on undergraduate engineering education, and this is more general self-directed learning outside of institutions). A pretty hardcore way to learn how to teach.

Hmm. Not going to try to plan firm stuff more than 3 months into the future for the most part, but... hmm.

A dialogue with my body

2007-09-10T14:11:00.001-04:00

Me: Good morning.
Body: Good morning! You're up early. And - oh, water. Thanks.
Me: *glug-glug-glug*
Body: That was good. What's the agen- wait, what are you doing?
Me: It's called running.
Body: I'm moving.
Me: I know.
Body: I don't do running.
Me: You do this morning.
Body: I'm supposed to read! At a desk! I - what's going on? AAH! Respiratory system! Respiratory system!
Me: It's called homeostasis. Get over it.
Body: But what's this stuff that's coming into my lungs?
Me: Oxygen. Remember oxygen? It's much less efficient to be anaerobic. Ever heard of something called ATP?
Body: I can look it up on Wikipedia.
Me: You do that.

Body: Done reading. You're still doing this "running" thing. I'm going to make your legs hurt.
Me: Yeah, I know.
Body: They're not used to this. You're going to have to stop.
Me: Eventually.
Body: Lactic acid! C'mon, my little H+ friends!
Me: Eh, mild discomfort. Lactic acid actually doesn't cause muscle soreness, you know. That's a common misconcep-
Body: MORE! MORE! BURN! BURN!
Me: Oh, come off it. I'm not going to overdo it. I'm just running at a bit of a clip for 20 minutes, with occasional walk breaks. I'm out of shape - spent the last month far too immobile. Remember how you sprinted 3km through the streets of Taiwan to get your suitcase without getting out of breath?
Body: Yes? Almost? Distant memory?
Me: Could you do it now?
Body: No?
Me: Exactly.
Body: Why do you care?
Me: Because taking care of yourself is good. And not-moving has correlated with me feeling really scattered and sluggish for the last 5 weeks. And because I want to learn tai chi, and that's a lot easier when you can, y'know, do more than 50 squats in a row.
Body: So you're going to do this again?
Me: That's the idea. Right, so we're done. Shower, lunch, some reading, and then let's do some crunches!
Body: ...
Me: Let's go!
Body: *grumble* I know I'll be happy about this in a month, but I really don't like you right now.
Me: Aww, I love you too.

Glenview is ridiculous.

2007-09-09T19:37:00.001-04:00

Quickie: "The Unplugged," a short story by Vinay about a (hypothetical?) future movement towards individual self-sufficiency in terms of environmental footprint. Interesting. Possible? Well, that depends on whether you're speaking technologically or sociologically.

Arrived in Chicago last night. On the way to the house, we stopped by the newly constructed Whole Foods that was along the way. This thing is a marvel of modern commercialism and a food lover's heaven. $150 bottles of wine stood behind a glass case with little rubber tubes sipping into them, dispensing $8 tasting samples. Heaps of hot garlic shrimp, bright red beef mixed into patties with expensive cheddar, four restaurants! inside the supermarket!!! shelves of spa products and - oh, you could buy everything. And all I could think was "expensive! expensive! expensive!" and "how is so much abundance possible in one place?" and then "when the store closes in a few hours, I bet they throw all these heaps of perfectly good food out."

Ignoring that depressing note: All four of us (mom, dad, brother, myself) have been wanting to try heirloom tomatoes for... well, years. So faced with them in the market for the first time, we gave in and got four small, twisted heirloom tomatoes this morning and one tiny tub of mozzarella (total: $14 - ow) and sliced them up with a sprinkle of salt, nothing else. Holy cow. It was exploding tomato flavor - four varieties, four tomato tastes - tart and beefy, light, fruity, richly acidic, crisp... and then the cheese was just sweet and white and soft in between, and then the tomato exploded in your mouth again. Ohh.

And so I'm finally sitting - fed and hydrated - in a room of my own (!) in a big house with a nice new kitchen and a fully-stocked fridge (!!) and a mattress that's mine (!!!) and free laundry (!!!!) and relatively stable internet (!!!!!) and I feel incredibly out-of-place because after a summer of doing things like walking 12 miles to save $2 on train fare so I can buy spaghetti, suddenly I'm living in a really expensive, super-nice place that's supposedly the house where I grew up but doesn't feel like it.

The house I grew up in had a non-working dishwasher we used as a drying rack, an oven that kept on sputtering out, a rusted-through Chevrolet. Not a Lexus and a flatscreen TV and the ridiculous beds that have a remote control to adjust the firmness. In some sense, we've become a "normal" family for our area; Glenview is ridiculous, and median household income is nearly twice the national average ($80,730 vs $42,148 - both numbers in 2000). Four blocks away in Northbrook, it's $95,665. (Northbrook is the 85th richest town in the United States with a population of at least 10k.) My classmates in middle school had huge homes and chandeliers and two-story Christmas trees. We had garage-sale furniture and a house we could only afford because it was purchased and inhabited by nearly our entire extended family to begin with.

So I considered myself a lower-middle-class kid growing up in an upper-middle-class town. But slowly, when I went away for school, my family's apparently migrated to the upper-middle-class as well. My parents and brother think this is normal because they've been living here for the past 7 years as the house evolved, but I come back and find a swimming pool where I used to ride my bike and feel very, very strange - and guilty for having it and even enjoying it, a little.

But this is good. I have a bed and internet now. So if that holds constant for today and tomorrow, and I don't have to worry about food, then maybe I can actually get... stuff... done, instead of "Oh, yeah, food. Do I have enough pocket change for bananas? Can I walk to the supermarket and buy bananas?" and then there goes the afternoon, walking back and forth with a bunch of bananas at the grocery store. Now I can do things other than figuring out where I'm eating and sleeping. Novel concept, that.

Back online and not looking forward to it

2007-09-07T00:30:00.000-04:00

I HAVE INTERNET AGAIN! Kind of. Not on my "real" laptop, but on my trash laptop. I think we gave the folks upstairs the wrong mac address for my good laptop. But it's my laptop, with my stuff on it, and not a quick steal of webmail on someone else's computer (which I did once, I think - thank you, Gui)

No, I don't need internet that badly. Actually, I got along just fine without it for the last week and ended up building a ton of furniture instead, the end result being that we have chairs and tables now (built in the middle of the night while the others slept) and a ballroom that's been finished being painted green. What I do need are ways to plan my internet outages in advance.

And - and - oh god, the backlog... it's been nearly a week without internet that I didn't plan for. I have to pack before I start sifting through this, but... man, I've missed so much. Especially on the Summer of Content front - and apparently my emails about that didn't actually go out, plus they're stuck on the good laptop, and I need to find a USB drive to transfer them over. It's going to be a long night.

How do frequent business travelers do this? Oh, yeah - they have money and can travel without broken laptops and do things like hail buses and taxis and buy wireless or internet cafe time they didn't explicitly write into their budget beforehand. Also, they have better problem-solving skills. I'm beginning to understand the rationale behind setting aside certain hours for work. I love my no-schedule thing, but sorely need to optimize my algorithm for deciding what things to do at a given moment.

In the future, I need to plan my internet outages in advance so I can actually be a responsible transient (I feel like such a bad grown-up right now). Also, I've upgraded from sleeping on a folded blanket in the corner to sleeping on a mattress (the aforementioned futon was at my aunt's house). My life's become semistable just in time for me to travel again; I sleep at the house one more time tonight (if I sleep tonight), at Olin tomorrow night, in Illinois for the next three, and then in San Fransisco.

Right now I need to pack four climates' worth of clothes (including formalwear, because I can wager there'll be at least one "fancy dinner" to go to in the Philippines) into a carryon, which is an adventure in itself. Then I'll try to sync up online. Gaaah.

Steal, drink, lie, and cheat: skills for a happy life

2007-09-04T12:18:00.001-04:00

Futon vs floor: there is no contest. My spine is a happy spine today, and I've slept in too late.

Today: Moving out of my aunt's house. This is a more involved process than it sounds, since I have to pack - in one carryon suitcase - equipment and clothing for business meetings in San Fransisco, winter gear for Chicago, formal dress for a Christmas party in the hot, tropical Philippines, and everything for a jaunt through China... plus research books and all the junk I'm schlepping back to my parents' house to return to them and/or leave there. And then I have to take that suitcase and the associated stuffed backpack through several miles of walking and an hour of public transport and changing trains...

By the way: the four most useful things I've learned this summer are how to steal, drink, lie, and cheat - and I highly recommend you learn them, too. Here's why.

Steal. There are a lot of great ideas out there, many of them free for the taking. Why duplicate work? Take advantage of what others have done - thousands of people standing on the shoulders of those who have come before create giants in their own right. (Corollary: Make your own stuff steal-able - open-license or public domain your work when you can.)

Drink. It doesn't need to be alcoholic, but it needs to not be alone. There's more to life than work. Getting to know folks is fun, makes it easier to work with you, and spurs plenty of random ideas for new collaborations. You get more done if you're not thinking about productivity all the time. (Corollary: Stay spontaneously grab-able. If someone announces they're going out, you want to occasionally - not always, but occasionally - be able to pick up and waltz out the door.)

Lie. A better word for this might be "just-in-time truth." If someone asks you a question, it's not dependent on a physical law of nature, you don't know the answer, and you're pretty sure nobody else does, then make it up - someone's going to have to eventually. "Do you know where we're supposed to meet for the party?" "Ah... Harvard square!" Improvise. (Corollary: Publicly. Invented truths don't do any good if they're not spread.)

Cheat. In the video games sense - the fact that your character can jump only so high is an arbitrary line of code you can punch in a few symbols to modify. Most rules aren't actually. Know which "oh, we're not supposed to!"s or "but we can't!"s are actually "most people don't, but nothing actually prevents us from doing so"s. (Corollary: Publish your cheat codes so others can take advantage as well.)

Is this the real life, is this just fantasy

2007-09-04T02:19:00.001-04:00

The Oliners have gone back to school; life continues as usual for them, with slightly different roles. Classes, projects, hanging out in the lounge, late night conversations in the lounge, work, clever furniture arrangements, chaotic solidity, wide-eyed frosh who haven't gotten bags under their eyes yet (they come chattering in excitedly from ice cream instead). My old suite is occupied by Liz Kneen & Co. and sports an even more spectacular sound system, the total cubic footage of which utterly dwarfs the full-size fridge in the corner. I stayed a night and slept in Yrinee's empty room (Jon's room last year) and drew on Matt Crawford's student handbook; campus felt comfortable but faded, like an old shirt you've loved but wore through and outgrew. It still feels familiar, but you don't quite fit it any more.

Chandra came. We went to dinner with the two dozen Olin students who responded to Boris's spur-of-the-moment email. Chandra lives in New Hampshire now, in a proper apartment, with a little patio, and carpet, and a bedroom with a walk-in closet. We assembled furniture, sat in boxes of packing peanuts, lit the wall sconce in her apartment for the first time (flickering red candles; lovely), and spent too much time at the outdoors store picking out a traveling pack (glory, backpacks are expensive) and travel towel (amazingly absorbent) for my treks around the world. She agonized over floor lamps at Bed Bath and Beyond and compared frying pans. I browsed through quick-drying underwear wondering which ones would dry out fastest on a hostel clothesline. Our lives are taking very, very different paths right now.

Kristen's at a post-Olin house by Central with 3 other alumni - Chris, Susan, and Pearl - and some MITers. She cooks excellent spaghetti and introduced Chandra and me to the Super Bomber Man video game over raspberry beer floats. I also live - for this last week before travels, anyway - in a post-Olin house. Maker House. A reasonable-length walk from Porter and currently stinking of paint, meaning I have a roof over my head but it's the kitchen's or the workshop's or whatever the room with the softest floor is that hasn't recently been attacked with a roller and I've yet to sleep in the same place more than two nights in a row this month and we don't have internet there either but might start sharing wireless with the Ryans (two people, first names, both genders, upstairs) soon but not yet so I'm at my aunt's house one last time so I can get 'net for a night and pack my books for Chicago.

It's a scary thing when Gui and Jenn are the most stable people in your household. With Not in Zambia, Matt sleeping on a couch on the back porch of an MIT coop - quite nice, actually. I took the second back-porch couch once, and the sun filters through the upper deck before the chainsaw from next door wakes you - and me without any space to actually call mine, we're a house of bohemian transients... definitely not "proper adults" as I was taught you were supposed to become. I spend a couple hours a day now scrambling for a place to sleep and transportation to get there (walking is slow). I've considered claiming a corner of the dance studio with my sleeping bag, but I think they painted that tonight. Sleeping in a different spot every night means I need to find a different spot to get 'net every night - and that some nights I don't, since I'm largely staying in friends' apartments that haven't quite been set up yet. (revelation: houses don't come with internet. Someone has to come out and install it.)

Also, houses don't come with furniture. You have to get it and build it and put it in; until you do, you get to eat pancakes and scrambled eggs cross-legged on the floor, or last night's orange-glazed chicken stir-fry while balancing on the arm of the single sofa which is the only seat in the room. Stability? I think I used to have that, used to sleep in pajamas instead of my clothes, under comforters instead of in sleeping bags. I'll be glad to return to Boston in 2008 and have a room that is mine, that I can bike home to every night, where I know I'll get wireless, food, and friends. When I can spend my day thinking about fixing bugs, closing tickets, reading books, starting businesses - not where am I gonna eat, sleep, find a shower. (I've never worried about not being able to find one. It's just a matter of where and how it's going to turn up.)

Then again, that's homeostasis speaking. I want to learn how to keep an inner compass - something I don't have so much, I rely on externally imposed input, structure as a scaffolding. I need to learn how to consciously preserve certain habits even when the rest of my life is unstable - something I hope traveling will teach me. How to keep up little rituals of productivity that require minimal infrastructure. How to keep walking towards my goals in the absence of someone telling me what they are. How far can I let the reins go on my hyperactive attention span before I slip over the edge of not making sense to most of the rest of the world.

I've never missed school as much as I do tonight. There were professors there, and even if I rebelled against classes in the end they at least gave me something to push against, and I miss the people - and I miss living in a world I knew how to run within. The ocean's so much wider than the ponds I've been, and I haven't even begun to fathom how far out it goes.

I keep telling myself I chose not to take the easy route - a job, an apartment, a car - because I'd wonder for the rest of my life what would have happened if I didn't. But they don't tell you how terrifying adventures are when you're actually living them. I'm the happiest I can remember being, and I'm learning at an amazing rate... and I am always - always - afraid.

Free textbooks - different philosophies

2007-08-27T20:59:00.001-04:00

Josh Gay came to the OLPC office to hang out tonight and we butted heads (in a frustrating but ultimately good way - disagreement makes you think) on what "free textbooks" meant, should be created, or look like. Didn't really realize why until I re-read the development philosophy on his site, Freetextbookproject.org.

Josh's philosophy

Many of the existing education projects out there are primarily
focused on developing software and standards with the hope that educators and volunteers will propogate their web sites with educational and teaching materials once a framework has been built.

This project takes the philosophy that software and standards should be based upon the data that is collected and the problems you are trying to solve. We place priority in technology projects that make it easy for contributors to contribute and organize the data.

My philosophy

Many of the existing education projects out there are primarily focused on developing content and tools for making content with the hope that educators and volunteers propagate their web site frameworks with educational and teaching materials, other teachers and students will actually use and learn from them.

This project takes the philosophy that the ultimate goal of any education project should be based upon creating a great learning experience at a specific moment for a specific learner or group of learners. Rather than contributing something to a general pool "for the good of humanity" or so it will be useful to some vague hypothetical set of future students, we place priority in creating the resources that an active group of learners needs to get to the next step they want to be at, now.

In a nutshell

Josh and I want to design for different user groups. Josh wants to serve content contributors and creators by giving them a reason to contribute, an easy way to do so, good ways to get started, small task-chunks they can take on if they don't want to sink their life into something - because students can't learn from resources nobody's made. I want to serve students by giving them blue foam interfaces to build their own airplane as they fly it, throwing down guidance and resources one step ahead of them, or by their own direct request - because folks are more motivated to create immediately relevant resources when students are going to be learning from them 5 minutes after they create them.

It's partially a chicken-and-egg problem - but it'll be interesting to see what happens, as I'm sure this topic of conversation will spring up quite often.

Now... where did I put my ECS textbook? I wonder if I can get one or more of the ECS NINJAs this year to test it out as a resource for their class - it'll make me write new chapters to stay ahead of the first-years, since I was only able to really finish one chapter I'm marginally proud of (everything else I'm scrapping). (If you are reading this, plan on being an ECS NINJA, and are interested, give me a ping.)

The past 24 hours have been - interesting.

2007-08-27T10:47:00.001-04:00

Man, what a weekend. I was simultaneously working on my new laptop (new laptop! I love my new laptop!), decimating my personal property ("Do I need 14 polo shirts? No. And I don't even wear them."), happily eating Crenshaw melon, but otherwise feeling really sluggish, unproductive, and confined-to-quarters - I love my aunt's house, but wish it was much closer to public transportation - and wishing I could make it into town for Mako & Mika's housewarming party, but having no way to get there.

After battling kernel modules and getting Feisty to boot consistently, I fired up wireless, installed Xchat, and headed for the #olpc-content channel for the first time in a long while. Chris (Crschmidt), Mitchell, Julius, and Adrian were talking about meeting up for a beer. I wished out loud I could come, but reckoned it wasn't going to happen because I didn't want to walk several miles to the under-construction Green line in the middle of the night. The next thing I knew, Chris had swooped out to pick me up, and we headed to The Cellar on Mass Ave to meet up with the rest of the crew. During the next 24 hours, I...

Hung out @ the Cellar playing with laptops and giving informal demos - such a good way to recruit new potential volunteers!
Went to the new Acetarium location (Mako & Mika's new place) in Davis Square, where I tried the worst blueberry-coconut smoothie ever (apparently vodka makes things taste bad) and saw SCUL riding down the streets of Somerville from the Acetarium's roof.
Decided we were hungry at around 3am. Piled into multiple cars, drove across town to the South Street Diner, consumed copious amounts of cholesterol-laden comfort food.
Crashed for all of 2 hours on one of Mako & Mika's many couches, bounded up refreshed at 7:30 ("Did you sleep?" "I don't usually, yeah.") and washed dishes from the night before as a relaixingly productive way to start the day.
After an amusing episode involving Mako's attempts to decide whether or not to wake up Ben Swartz, we headed for brunch at Johnny D's. They had excellent quesadillas and live Jazz music on a Sunday morning. I had my second bowl of cheese grits, which were delicious.
Spent the day replying to email, reading a book on typography, and (apparently) micronapping intermittently, all on the Acetarium's couch. Was reminded (via email/IRC) by Steve Longfield and Nikki Lee how much I miss long conversations with Oliners about randomness and learning and life. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone when they move back in on Tuesday.
Eventually headed out with Mika to meet the guys at Harvard Yard - ate chips & salsa and played a card game about bean farming, which is a lot more fun than it sounds like (and reminds me that I'm a terrible card player - although I ended up in a 3-way tie for second place).
Wandered down Mass Ave, bubble tea in hand, past throngs of people (including the closest-to-naked dancers I've ever seen) coming back from the Cambridge Carnival, which had apparently happened directly in front of the OLPC office. They were breaking down the booths as I went by, and the delicious smell of roasted meat and plantains was thick through the air.
Hit the 1cc OLPC office... and stayed.

Yeah, I spent last night at the office. And I wasn't the only intern to do so on a Sunday night. Rafael and Joel were there through most of it as well. I'm not sure if Rafael slept; joel and I both took naps on the couch. My couch-nap accidentally made me miss the MIThenge moon event at 4am, which I'd intended to wander off to as a break from slogging through a month of email backlog. Oh well.

Brain core dump finished - I just don't want to forget the mindblowing whirlwind that's been the past day. Back to backlog!

The best thing for being sad is to learn something

2007-08-26T09:02:00.000-04:00

Left without a computer, I've been reading a lot (unsurprisingly). As I've read, tiny bits of books stick and tumble around and over in my mind - here's one that's been swimming in the back lately, from The Once And Future King.*

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn... "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you."

*I actually have never read this book. I've read multiple books that cite it, and know many people who adore it, and should probably pick it up sometime.

Now the actual update. First, I can still get by on very little sleep, which is good to rediscover. I've been crawling lethargically around the house for the last week blowing my nose a lot; not sure if that was allergens, a cold, or a combination of both. It was probably best that it happened during my week of worst connectivity, though... I started clearing up right about the time I got my new laptop.

Ah, yes. Laptop. I'm wired and mobile again! I'm typing this post from my brand-spankin'-new Thinkpad. It is a thing of beauty, and needs significant modifications to the default Ubuntu install to be truly awesome (for instance, sound would be nice, as would the ability to go on standby) but it has (1) firefox, (2) working wireless, (3) xchat, and (4) the ability to ssh, so it's getting there.*

*update: Bluetooth works (after a fashion), I no longer have to modprobe piix every time I boot up, and thunderbird is present but burping slightly on occasion. Progress. I'm trying to enable one new feature every day.

Also: I'm in Boston again, as opposed to fairly-remote-suburbs-thereof-without-bike-or-car. Thanks to a late-night ride into the city from Crschmidt, I'm typing this post from a sofa in Mako & Mika's apartment, having just washed plenty of dishes from the Acetarium housewarming party last night, with help from the other folks who crashed here this morning. Note: Blueberry-coconut smoothie sounds great, but tastes nasty. Also note: Late-night diners are expensive but filling and tasty. Also also note: Roofs are wonderful! Why have I not been up on them more?

Proximity and connectivity are two things I've lacked for a while, and it's good to have them back, albeit in temporary and limited form. I'm wincing at the amount I have to catch up on, though. Should just shut up about how much I've got to do, and just do it.

Reading back through this post, I'm shaking my head at how dissolute and unordered my thoughts are this morning. Right, though. To work.

Thumbs up, thumbs down.

2007-08-22T10:57:00.000-04:00

Good things, bad things. Bad things first:

No Australia for Mel.

My talk/tutorial (on Jams and Summer of Content) for Linuxconf.au got turned down (it was a long shot - over 75% of proposals get rejected, and I'm a little newbie punk with no credentials) so it looks like there's to be no Sydney for me this coming winter - ah well, such is life.

Computer goes kaput.

Also, I'm spoiled. I depend too much on the infrastructures that usually surround me for support; lack of easy transport and stable computing are severely debilitating for my communications and productivity. My Dell has given up staying together in the physical sense. I am balancing the monitor on my knee as I type this; the hinge has fractured at three points (and is slopping around on the monitor cable and one last desperate clinging screw, the plastic panel covering the lights and buttons above the keyboard has snapped off and been replaced by saran-wrap to avoid water or something splashing into the now-exposed circuit board. Also, my Dell is narcoleptic, and I'm slowly migrating everything off its hard drive before files start getting mangled (as it is, I'm pretty sure I'm missing a chunk of archive emails somewhere - that'll teach me to save them in four different local folders...).

Stop saying I can't learn languages.

Frustration: My mom says that I'm not good at learning languages. Something about it being difficult because of my hearing (which was the reason I wasn't allowed to take Spanish classes in middle school). I used to believe that for a long time, because adults told me that was the case. Now I don't. I just reckon it means I need to learn them differently than most folks do. But (as of 2 days ago, anyway) Mom still does... I told her that there were things called books, and things called self-fulfilling prophecies, and that I was going to use the former and to please stop saying I wasn't good at languages lest the latter continue to occur.*

*The bulk of my language-learning activities this summer (Spanish, and now Tagalog) have been filled with deliberately easy victories and low-hanging fruit - reading Wikipedia pages in parallel with their translations, learning about nifty little linguistic idiosyncracies, reading about minimalist syntax (which gets me stoked on the topic of learning actual languages). I tried starting with classroom-like activities and just froze up; I couldn't get rid of the voice that said that I wasn't Good at the way you're Supposed to learn languages in School. So I'm looking for a back-door.

I secretly hate doing well.

It's weird; as I meet more and more smart, independent, self-confident young people, I become more and more painfully aware how much I'm terrified of succeeding (much more scared of it than failing) and how many of the voices inside my head and out tell me I don't have the ability or the right to do this or that or the other, because I'm too young, or too deaf, or too female, or too idealistic, or too... something - or I'm not naturally a linguist or an athlete or a good concentrator or a something else I want to be.

Whatever. I'm just going to keep on Doing Stuff, and occasionally looking back and pointing out to the voices in my head (and, somewhat more politely, the ones outside my head) that hey, this is proof by counterexample that I can do things. The trick is, apparently, that I can't realize I'm doing the proof-by-counterexample thing when I start. When I read a book on minimalist syntax and love it, the voices in my brain don't recognize it as a language learning activity at first, so the "you're not good at laaaaaanguages!" mantra doesn't switch on until I'm enjoying myself too much to stop anyway. That's what I mean by going through the back-door on stuff I want to learn.

It also makes me wonder how much of my love of mathematics was made possible by discovering the grown-up math section of the library just barely before middle school, when the "you're not good at maaaaaaath!" voice seems to start for most girls (if I remember the research lit correctly). Maybe by the time I realized math wasn't a common or cool thing to like, I liked it enough to be able to keep doing it anyhow.

That's all the depressing braindumps I had. Now the great stuff.

New laptop is coming!

First, I'm getting a new computer. It's supposed to arrive late this week. It's a Thinkpad. I am now thankful I put money into that "new computer fund" throughout college. I'm going to start that again.

Komp(uter untuk an)Ak

Languages make me happy! The fledgling OLPC Indonesia group wrote today that instead of literally translating "One Laptop Per Child" they wanted to translate "OLPC" as "KompAk," short for "Komputer untuk anak" (The Children's Computer). As an added bonus, "kompak" means "to integrate," "to unite," "team-work," and similar in Bahasa Indonesian. Was this okay?

I told them it was more perfect than they could imagine, as the original name for the laptop was "The Children's Machine," which is almost certainly from a Papert book of the same name. The book was about... integration. Collaboration between disciplines, between people, blending things together to make synergy happen. Aided by computers, of course.

Food is awesome.

Finally, in the absence of stable computing, I've spent more time in the last few weeks doing things away from my keyboard - especially cooking and paring-down-stuff. The sweet smell of roasted fall vegetables is thick throughout the kitchen, prepping for a creamy soup by bubbling into softness in a pot of homemade chicken broth (made from the roast chicken carcassfrom several days back); I'm about to bring out the (super-ripe) raspberry sorbet, tomatoes broiled with balsamic vinegar have been tossed with seasoned parmesan over spinach-cheese ravioli, the miso rub for the salmon later tonight is waiting in the fridge, and there are peaches to grill for dessert. (Oh, I love my aunt's kitchen, there are ingredients to cook with!)

Minimalism is also awesome.

And in the paring-down-stuff department - I'm working to get (and I think I'm going to make it!)

All my clothes (minus shoes) in one luggage
All my bedding (pillow, comforter, sheets, everything) in one duffel
All my electronics and development tools (minus a monitor and printer/scanner) in one backpack
Everything else in two bins: one for archiving (the "leave in someone's basement for a decade because this will be a rich source of stories and delightment 10 years from now" box) and one for stuff I actually use (lamps, cooking supplies, decorations, etc etc).

That leaves only my library to deal with, and I have a plan for that (Chris and Boris have heard it, but not many others as of yet). But otherwise, I can carry my life in a luggage, a duffel, and a bin (...plus Some Container to hold my few pairs of shoes, monitor, and printer, but hopefully a solution for that will present itself).

Cam: fishing for better prices with mobile phones

2007-08-20T03:02:00.000-04:00

Via Vinay's blog: a fascinating article that made me think of Caslin's Social E! class all over again. It's about Cam, "a toolkit that makes it simple to use phones to capture images and scan documents, enter and process data, and run interactive audio and video." Big whoop, right? But that's the entire point of appropriate technology: tiny changes leverage into huge benefits.

When fishermen from the Indian state of Kerala are done fishing each day, they have to decide which of an array of ports they should sail for in order to sell their catch. Traditionally, the fishermen have made the decision at random–or, to put it more charitably, by instinct. Then they got mobile phones. That allowed them to call each port and discover where different fishes were poorly stocked, and therefore where they would be likely to get the best price for their goods. That helped the fishermen reap a profit, but it also meant that instead of one port’s being stuck with more fish than could be sold while other ports ran short, there was a better chance that supply would be closer to demand at all the ports. The fishermen became more productive, markets became more efficient, and the Keralan economy as a whole got stronger.

My favorite part, however, is the one that you usually don't see in articles about Social E! and appropriate tech. It's the sober admission that you can't help everyone at the same time. Economics isn't a zero-sum game, but often, when someone benefits from something, someone else is disadvantaged anyhow. There are many counterexamples to that generalization and many more ways to minimize the effect, but it's still there more often than not. As we help thousands of people leap the digital divide, we still leave others behind.*

It would be a mistake to see Cam and technologies like it as a panacea for the problem of underdevelopment. While it's easy to become infatuated with the promise of microfinance and small-scale entrepreneurship, it's also easy to overestimate how much influence these things can exert on developing economies, which often face structural problems that won't be solved by making local markets more efficient. And it's also the case that, in the short run at least, the arrival of new technologies can widen the gap between the prosperous and the struggling: if you're buying more from the Cam-equipped farmers, you'll probably buy less from the non-Cam-equipped ones. In other words, not everyone will win.

*That's okay. We don't have to save the world ourselves. That's why there are another 6,602,224,174** of us.

**(according to the CIA Factbook this month)

Jamendo rocks (no pun intended)

2007-08-19T02:09:00.000-04:00

Do you like music? Like playing music, listening to music? You need to see Jamendo.

It's a... music community, for lack of shorter inclusive phrase. Bands can host, publicize, stream, etc. their creative-commons-licensed music, listeners can remix, playlist, rate, download, etc. them... artists can get revenue through donations and advertising, and the project aims to put musicians back out in front of their audience (instead of stuck in recording studios in order to make money).

Are you creative? Do you want your music to be listened to by a wider audience? jamendo brings the artists back on stage. Music is done by artists for the public and now is the time to get rid of exclusive intermediaries.

Their business model is fantastic. Seriously, it's like YouTube for music, but... open. My (occasional) band, License Server is recording a song just so we can put it on Jamendo. It's that cool.

As if that weren't enough, they're also partnering with OLPC. I was lucky enough to be able to meet Sylvain, the CTO and founder of Jamendo, at Wikimania this year. (And when I say "amazing," I mean "we had a single conversation one evening and by the following day he appeared with a music collection bundled for the laptop and scripts to autogenerate more, along with a press release for recruiting more Jamendo musicians.")

So... yeah. Go! Find yourselves some great music! (Oh - did I mention it's multilingual and multicultural, and that Peruvian pop and Indian rock sound really good?) Better yet, make some music, CC-license it, and share it on Jamendo. And if you put "OLPC" before the name of a playlist you're making, it'll automatically add it to the OLPC library.

*hums happily*

The Tale of the Scipline Islands

2007-08-18T19:40:00.000-04:00

This is a continuing piece (read: I'm tired and need to complete the typing later, although the story's finished) and my first attempt at a learning parable a-la Papert. Many thanks to Chris Carrick, the first audience of the story, who provided many helpful comments which have been incorporated here. I'm curious whether readers can guess where this story is headed (heck, it might be better than the one I've got written already). Bonus points if you can pick up the naming references. (Hint: They're not all that subtle.)

The Tale of the Scipline Islands

There was once a place called the Scipline Islands, a series of island villages in the midst of the ocean (More often the natives just referred to their home as "The Sciplines," and themselves as "The Sciplinarians.") All the Sciplines spoke a similar language, traded amongst themselves, and were generally on friendly terms with each other. It wasn't hard to travel between villages, but most people generally spent most of their time in the place where they were raised.

This was not because they disliked traveling. It was because of fruit. The primary food source of all the villages was an amazing variety of fruit-bearing bushes - many varieties of delicious fruit, but fruit tricky enough for humans to gather that it took some good amount of skill to be able to efficiently pick it. For the most part, everyone had to gather their own food - a skilled adult could gather just a bit more than what he or she needed in a full day of picking, so specialization in things other than fruit-gathering was rare. Most villagers spent their time gathering enough fruit to feed their family. Finally, each island's fruit was peculiar to that island (there had been several attempts to plant fruit from one island on another, but the soil composition was different between islands and these experiments inevitably failed), and the fruit perishable enough and the distance between islands far enough that the fruit would barely last the length of a journey.

This meant two things: First, given the choice of living in a place where you knew how to pick the fruit and having several hours of free time left (after an efficient fruit-picking session and the subsequent tasty meal) to enjoy each day, or moving to another island and spending several miserable and slightly hungry years spending long, inefficient hours trying to get the hang of picking a different type of fruit entirely - well, most people picked the former.

Second, given the difficulty of transporting fruit from one village to another, a small number of traders ran a tricky but profitable business shuttling fruit (usually the sparse extra fruit that others had picked, as the traders had to spend most of their time and energy crossing the ocean) between two islands. But fruit is best when it's picked ripe, and one that had crossed the ocean was never quite the same as a fresh-picked one, so the people on each island though the Inter-Sciplinarians (as the traders were called) must not be terribly good fruit-pickers, as the exotic foodstuffs they brought from the other lands never tasted nearly as good as their own...

One fateful season, a number of hard, round objects washed up on the shores of one of the islands. They were grey, smooth, about the size of a person's head... and, as the Sciplinarians soon discovered, yielded an edible brownish-tan flesh when repeatedly bashed with a heavy rock. Further experimentation led to the conclusion that this new "fruit" was moderately nutritious and not unpleasant to consume, rather versatile in recipies, but nowhere near as delicious as their island's local bush-fruit. Out of curiosity, they decided to plant the remaining objects to see if they were seeds (as some of the Sciplinarians theorized) and would sprout into some sort of plant.

An Inter-Sciplinarians arriving at that island the following season was astounded to see several tall, spindly trees jutting from the usual low cover of bush-foliage. After several queries, she found a boy named Henry who explained that the trees had been planted just the season before, and offered to climb one for her. "In this tree, we get fruit," said the boy. "Indus tree - you get fruit?" misheard the trader. After being shown the hard grey orbs (procured by Henry with some difficulty), the trader decided to take a few of these "Indus tree fruits" to see if they would trade well at the other islands - not as fruit (as it wasn't nearly as tasty as bush-fruit) but as an easy source of plentiful wood.

It turned out that Indus trees (the name stuck) flourished equally fast in all the islands - the first plant known to do so - and since timber and fuel are always handy things to have around, within several seasons all the islands had tiny groves of Indus trees growing amidst their fruit-bushes.

ndus wood grew popular, but the Sciplinarians still hadn't acquired a taste for Indus fruit. Indus trees were yet another plant to learn how to pick fruit from, and their fruit wasn't nearly as tasty as bush-fruit. It just wasn't worth it... for the older adults, at least. On yet another island, some of the younger Sciplinarians began to hear the traders talk about thriving Indus tree groves on the other islands and began to think. It went something like this:

1. We want to travel and see the world!
2. Why can't we?
3. We can, but it's difficult because we have to relearn how to get food every new place we go to, and struggle and go hungry until we figure it out - and figuring it out takes years.
4. Well, why do we have to relearn how to pick fruit at every island?
5. Because the fruit on every island is tricky to pick in a different way.
6. But supposing there was a plant with edible fruit that grew on every island? We could learn how to pick just that plant, and we'd be able to eat on any island...

The next morning, the island's elders were astounded to find a small passle of young people doing pull-ups, braiding long ropes, and (with great difficulty and loud grunts and shouts) climbing the Indus tree grove with great diligence and concentration. They, of course, asked the youngsters to explain themselves. What were they trying to do? Why were they learning to climb trees that yielded not-so-tasty fruit? Wasn't this a waste of time?

"Learning this will give me freedom - maximum mobility to get where I want to go," said a teenage girl perched halfway up a trunk. "It's not as good to eat, but it's worth it to be able to travel," added a boy of about the same age cracking an Indus fruit open against a rock. "Besides, we're the ones eating it." "Yes," the girl agreed, "and we ought to be able to decide what we want to eat, right? And if we want to eat it, we've got to learn how to get it." The island elders shook their heads and walked away, some smiling softly.

(more to come...)

Learning parables

2007-08-18T16:27:00.000-04:00

This is perhaps my favorite Star Wars joke. The kind that makes you laugh first and think afterwards.

I'm drawn to Papert's playful parables on learning. Actually, frequent glances back at his work along with Galt's, Holt's, Kozol's, and Applebee's (to name a few) are what are keeping me slogging through the rest; I'm still at the point where, if I want to get through "formal academic papers" on the topic of education (or engineering education), I literally have to force myself to sit and stare at the paper, even read it out loud. Some seem to be written with either too many words for not enough content ("excess padding"). Others seem to be written as humorless vivisections of a topic I love - teaching and learning pinned out on a cold and sterile table, every part tagged with an overly polysyllabic name that ultimately tells you nothing about it.

Learning is not a science. It is not an art. It is both; it is more. It is a human endeavor, although even that falls short of a good description... I seethe in frustration at attempts to block-diagram and standardize it.

Anyway. Parables! In an odd, roundabout way, reading Papert makes me want to study Zen. Here's one of my favorites (on the OLPC project), as told by Nicholas Negroponte and reported by Xavier Leonard. It's one of the least parable-y Papert parables I've read, actually.

[Imagine a school in a country where] the only form of communication is speech. Then, one day, someone invents writing and everyone thinks it great. Trying find a way for students get the greatest benefit from this new technology, the school administrators first discuss putting a single pencil in each of the classrooms. Then they decide that a better idea is to take 10 pencils and put them all into one room, called a "pencil lab." Each student would be able to access a pencil two hours a day, two days out of the week.

You can read the wiki version here - if you do, be sure to read these four supporting links afterwards. Especially this one:

I get upset when people say that the point of the laptops is that children can learn “all the time, everywhere.” Of course it’s true. But insulting to children. They are learning all the time wherever they are. Maybe not what you want them to learn – but that’s a very different story.
It is not only insulting, but counter-productive, to count only our kind – or school’s kind – of learning and thinking as real learning and thinking. The central problem of education is not teaching children to think differently, but connecting what we think they should learn with the kind of thinking they can do very well.

Next up: My first attempt at parables (with the assistance of Chris Carrick).

Why you should or should not go to $schoolname

2007-08-18T15:37:00.001-04:00

Ran across twofish's old post on why to go (or not to go) to MIT today. It's a compelling read, especially since I nearly went to MIT (but ended up at Olin instead). Some passages that particularly caught my attention - after the usual disclaimer that his post represents his individual experience at MIT, just as mine represents my individual experience at Olin, and your mileage may vary:

There are some great teachers at MIT. There are also some truly awful ones. Research is a higher priority at MIT than undergraduate classroom teaching. The quality of the classroom instruction is not a good reason to go to MIT... the main reasons that the undergraduate experience works, lies outside the classroom.

Coming from a teaching-oriented school at Olin, I'm always surprised by this, even if my professors (and my friends from other schools) have repeatedly described the low position teaching (particularly the teaching of undergraduates, and especially first-years) holds on the totem pole of academia. After being surrounded by Olin professors by four years, one of the main reasons I want to become a professor myself is so that I can teach like them - my (naive) mindset still wonders how can teaching not be your passion if you're a professor.

For me, this is a good thing. I was (and internally still am) a shy, reluctant person who needed that direct guidance and support a good teacher gives in order to jump into adventuring in the wider world. To put it another way: my professors at Olin gave me the courage to learn without them. In fact, they (after many years) gave me the courage to learn without a school at all. I believe that good teaching is good precisely because it gets you to see and interact with the world that lies outside the classroom. For some people, an MIT-style environment is great, because they're already putting more stock in things-that-aren't-their-coursework, but others (like me) won't think outside the classroom unless someone inside the classroom (where they've been trained to listen) leads them out of it.

MIT is a bad place to be if you don’t know who you are and what you want to do with your life.

This made me grin. I've lost track of how many times I've talked to someone at Olin - even in their senior year - and asked what they wanted to do afterwards, and their answer was laughter and a happy "you know, I have no idea!" So... yeah. Different.

If you are sure you want to do something technical, but not sure exactly what technical thing you want to do, MIT is a great place. On the other hand, if you think that you might want to be an artist, a high school teacher, or carpenter, or you aren’t sure that you want to do with your life, then MIT may not be such a good place.

Following off the above comment - while there are a decent number of "I'm going to graduate and be an Engineer with a capital E and I love high-carbon steel and CNC machines and silicon wafers and PSPICE forever!!!" students at Olin, there are an equal (or possibly even higher) number of people who enjoy engineering, are glad to learn it as a background, but want to do something else either in conjunction with or instead of engineering as it's traditionally thought of. (I don't think we have a carpenter yet, but high school teachers and artists, yes.)

The problem is that MIT is a very busy place, and busy places make it hard for you to sit down and think things through. At MIT, there will always be this deadline or that activities, and it is hard to find the time to meditate and think about what you want to do.

Yeah. Actually, I think this is true for life in general, if you're the kind of bright, fast-paced, ambitious, inventive kid that would go to Olin, MIT, or some other similar school in the first place. If you like life fast, it's going to come at you that way - and it's going to be up to you to remember to take time out to slow it down once in a while.

At some point when you are at MIT, you will likely feel totally miserable. There was one anonymous survey that indicated that most people at MIT had a mental health issue that interfered with their functioning sometime in the past year. The fact that the everyone at the Institute is trying to push themselves at thir limits is what makes MIT a great place, but there is a cost to this.

Ah, yes. The dark side. No matter how much you try to take care of everyone, it happens. Again, I think this tends to happen to bright young people who are ambitious and push themselves hard no matter where they end up. I think that these students tend to do a remarkable job of supporting each other through this. I can't speak for MIT, but at Olin I have also seen faculty and administration go through incredible lengths to help students who are going through a tough time (heck, I've had professors call my friends to check up on me).

Generally: No matter where you are, there are people who care. Ask for help. Don't push them away and don't ignore what's being offered to you, and please don't play up the dramatic "Woe is me! Nobody cares about me! So I must heroically push through, misunderstood, through a lonely tragic life" angle. Yes, life may be hard. It often is. And maybe some people who you may have immediate dealings with really don't care. But somewhere out there, somebody does. Go out and find them.

The final point is that, if you want, MIT or something like it will eventually come to you... Don’t be under the mistaken notion that accepting an admission to MIT is the one and only chance you will have to interact with it, it isn’t.

Amen. There will always be cool places and people and projects - don't feel like you have to grab onto all of them right now. As long as you're doing something you're happy doing, there will always be opportunities open to you in the future.

And if they don't yet exist, you can always make them. If there's anything I learned in college, it's that if a bunch of people (and they're all people - extraordinary ones, but also ordinary ones as well) can get together and "build their own damn school and have it ripple out to touch so many lives so deeply (and that's just as a warm-up!) then... well, who knows what I can help build?

Stuff I've enjoyed reading in the past 48 hours

2007-08-16T20:31:00.001-04:00

It's time for one of those rarities: a post on this blog made almost exclusively from nifty links.

dotSUB makes me happy (and informed!) It's a site where you can subtitle (and translate) videos and podcasts, and its interface is a lot handier than my WikiTranscript idea (which may still be useful in terms of seeding something like dotSUB with a starter transcription - I need to play with the Sphinx voice rec engine more, though). I have never been able to understand an entire podcast before without the help of a friend or a text transcript hosted elsewhere on a website (and seriously, folks, it's so much nicer when you don't have to scroll through the text yourself...)

Ivan Kristic is amazing. He's the inventor of Bitfrost (which is fascinating; read the spec here), director of security at OLPC... and needs to have his office pranked sometime ;-)

Conference blogging (courtesy Ethan Zuckerman) - you mean there's a word for what I do, and other people post their notes to blogs? Sweet! This brings back memories of last year's Wikimania, when I coordinated session transcriptions (using a gobby document for each talk). Conclusion: notetaking is too much of an individual effort for this kind of thing to work - you end up with one person being the primary typer and others editing. I'm going to try doing this at the next conference I'm at - announce I'm taking notes on a gobby server and invite others to join me, but take responsibility for posting my own notes to a wiki somewhere. I think it will help, since I love taking notes on everything, type pretty fast, and have a hard time catching words sometimes during speeches (basically, if I look away for a few second, I have no idea what the speaker's saying - the disadvantage to being lipreading-reliant and using a Markov-type model to guess missed words through context).

Turn off your air conditioning.

I'm sorely tempted by these t-shirts, although I know I don't need them (and have enough shirts, really). Also, I appreciate that Questionable Content sells geeky girls' t-shirts. I almost don't want to admit this because I have (or had?) a longstanding aversion to thinking/talking about clothes and curves and hate sounding remotely "girly," but they... look (and feel) a lot better on me (as far as I'm concerned) than normal guys' t-shirts. Most of my wardrobe could still be worn by a guy my size, though.

She blinded me with library science
Math is delicious! (my favorite)

That's all for now.

Laura's on Worldchanging!

2007-08-16T02:55:00.001-04:00

I'm probably going to get pelted by her for this, but couldn't resist: a certain fellow Olin '07-er is on the front page of Worldchanging. (Center of picture, holding a white cylinder to what looks like a disc sander.) Her dedication to IDDS (for which she was one of the key organizers) has been amazing, including spending hours every week during her hectic final semester at college riding a bus to and from MIT to make org meetings, not to mention working round-the-clock to keep everyone sane, fed, organized, and happy (and spending long hours defusing discussions and organizing volunteers, to boot).

And now she's going to Zambia for D-Lab. Actually, she's probably already on her way there to save the world (which is probably the only reason I'm able to write this in the first place...) Definitely one of those people you have to keep an eye on, since you have no idea what she's going to do in the next 10 years but you know it's going to be spectacular.

Stigmergy: why engineering educators reinvent the wheel?

2007-08-15T01:57:00.001-04:00

I never thought I'd say this, but I wish I could sleep. Insomnia is a bummer sometimes.

Fascinating new word today - stigmergy, courtesy Mark Elliott. I adore his intro paper on the topic.

Stigmergy is a method of indirect communication in a self-organizing emergent system where its individual parts communicate with one another by modifying their local environment.

It might - just might - be a clue to how to explain a phenomena in engineering education I've been noticing but didn't have a name to call. Why do engineering educators reinvent the wheel all the time? Why do they keep trying the same "innovative" experiments, barely publish those experiments they do, spend so little time learning about the context, history, and prior work in the engineering education - or even just the education - field? (I stereotype and overgeneralize here, of course.)

Maybe they are, unconsciously, counting on stigmergy to be the solution. It's the "throw your hands in the air and give up" solution to the cat-herding problem. If a lot of smart people strike out independently, something will happen, like Mark's paper says:

...how disparate, distributed,
ad hoc contributions could lead to the emergence of the
largest collaborative enterprises the world has seen. However, is it
correct to call these enterprises “collaboration”?

Right. That sometimes becomes the problem. If something happens, it stays localized because of lack of clear communication lines. If something happens, it takes a while to realize it, because people are so busy doing that they don't poke their heads up to "be meta" often enough. Again, stereotyping, overgeneralizing, exaggerating.

Stigmergy assumes a critical mass - or rather, a critical balance of concentration - of people and action. Too little space, and any action crystallizes the mass; people don't feel like they have room to step out and breathe and explore independently, there's too much at stake at every turn. Too much space, and you lose the ripple effect potential; you get affected by the actions of others, but not with enough speed or frequency to be able to pass it on enough to make a difference.

It's the same reason why you should hold classes (and speeches and meetings) in as small a physical space as possible. And it's fascinating to watch communities grow into (and shrink out of) the spaces they've built for themselves, a trail of just-in-time creation (supply-chain style), followed by wikipages and mailing lists... or houses, cities, land, clubs (I think we all know this happens for clubs at Olin), etc lying fallow, dying through selective neglect, ossifying and remaining as muted calcifications on the landscape. Which the next generation, of course, blithely ignores (or thinks they do - they're subtly affected by it nevertheless).

And now, the reason why I like Mark's paper so much:

The following represents some of the current findings of the author’s PhD research on and around collaboration and stigmergic collaboration, and comprises the core components of the theoretical framework guiding this article:
Collaboration is dependent upon communication, and communication is a network phenomenon.
Collaboration is inherently composed of two primary components, without either of which collaboration cannot take place: social negotiation and creative
output.
Collaboration in small groups (roughly 2-25) relies upon social negotiation to evolve and guide its process and creative output.
Collaboration in large groups (roughly 25-n) is enabled by stigmergy.

My gut and experience tell me this is probably true. The scientist in me inserts the <em> tags around "probably." I wonder how we could find out. I'm watching Mark's research with interest.

A related word I was enamored by, several months back (thanks to the E.O. Wilson book of the same title) is consilience. Ah, meta stuff. It feels good to embrace this tendency instead of fighting it (and laugh ironically at my old sometime-handle of "metamel" from years ago before I standardized to "mchua").

mel.unstable.0.3.1.tgz

2007-08-13T06:02:00.001-04:00

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.

I feel like I've been living in Slaughterhouse Five for at least the last week, if not longer. Haven't slept in the same bed more than two nights in a row for the past three weeks. Haven't slept vaguely the same hours, either. I've been eating and sleeping enough, but not regularly; with a lot of work to catch up on and no reason to knock myself back into a normal Boston-hour schedule after returning from Taiwan, I seem to have stepped into a quasi-bohemian mindset that features 3AM chocolate cake munchings, 6am tromps across the city, midnight bookstore-browsing trips, and a growing sense of walking around the world pushing the "view source" button that peels back the technological, psychological, and social constructs I'd normally take for granted.

I haven't figured out how to deal with this "Blaaah! World looks different!" feeling yet, so my mind is consequently quite a mess as it tries as many different ways of handling the new input as possible. Last time a paradigm shift of this magnitude happened, its effects were kept relatively in check by the fact that I was still a student and had classes to go to and homework to turn in. Last paradigm shift was of the "wait, I don't have to stay in engineering?" variety - it was the realization that loving education was okay, and that I could work in any field I wanted to. This shift is more like realizing that I don't have to work in any particular field at all - or rather, that what constitutes the possibilities for "work" and "field" are much, much broader than I'd previously imagined.

The previous two paragraphs probably sounded quite strange. Coherence is something I think I'll be struggling with a lot in the next 9 years - I'm taking the "your twenties are a time of personal growth!" adage very seriously, so any blog of mine is going to sound like a "download: mel.unstable.tzg" release for a while. Translation for the non-coders reading this blog, courtesy Wikipedia (with mild rewordings):

...the term unstable does not necessarily mean that there are
problems - rather, that enhancements or changes have been made to the
Mel that have not undergone rigorous testing and that more changes
are expected to be imminent. Friends and family of Mel are advised to use
the stable version of the Mel-interface if this weirds them out (consult man mel or just say "Man, Mel, I don't understand why you're doing X...") but are requested to test the unstable version if the new functionality is of interest that exceeds the risk that something might simply be confusing and chaotic for a while (for both Mel and you).

I've been experimenting with a (self-invented, as far as I know) TMLMT rubric for two weeks, and it seems to be working pretty well. Basically, every day I try to Teach something, Make something, Learn something, Move (physically - do something that's good for my body) and Think (take some time out to feed the meditative, spiritual, and otherwise contemplative part of me). I formerly tried Ben Franklin's 13 virtues, but found that list to be too long to remember - plus I had to rate how well I did something - whereas this is a handy "one-thing-for-each-finger" check-off. Hypothetically, I could get five colored rubber-bands or bracelets and slip them from one wrist to the other throughout the day if I really wanted to outsource my brain to external memory, but I've yet to find bracelets I actually enjoy wearing.

Particularly important right now is the "think" bit. Homeostasis tends to pull me into constant whirlwind sleepless action, and sometimes I need some time to step back and sort things out (which, for me, usually means "writing things down.") Being busy tends to make me less transparent, but that's exactly the time when I need to be told to stop, go outside, breathe, talk to someone, start making sense again.

I think blogging will become especially important to me in the next few years. In the absence of a fixed physical location, semistable job, and coherent external input in general, the best I can do is to try to produce some coherent, constant stream of output in an attempt to make sense of it all and to make it all make sense to those who are watching. If you're confused and you broadcast it loud and clear, at least others can see, make suggestions, and keep you from stampeding off cliffs. (In other words, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.)

I can start by going through my Wikipedia notes and writing about what the hell happened to me in Taiwan. (Short answer: lots. mindblowingly lots.) I'm also tinkering with dokuwiki as my eventual all-in-one blog/projects/notes solution, though I won't move cleanly on until the start of September or so. (Really nice codebase & devel community, though. Mmm. I was really tempted to use Semantic Mediawiki, but decided somewhat regretfully that it was overkill and that flat textfiles were my friend. This parenthetical aside is devolving into a technology drool-fest, so I shall end it.)

Sorry about that. My mind tends to wander. But if there's an overarching theme to this post at all, it's that my mind likes to wander, that it's at its strength when spinning off on wild, random, exploratory tangents - and that I'm going to be trying every way I can think of to feed that talent while harnessing its powers for Awesome and still remaining able to interact comprehensibly with the world at large.

This will probably be one of the last posts on this blog

2007-08-06T04:27:00.001-04:00

...depending on how long it takes me to get my new Mediawiki one up and running - thanks to Enric for the inspiration and guidance.

Mediawiki is the new Emacs. It's got everything but the kitchen sink (which is nonetheless mentioned in [[Talk:Cooking appliances]], or something). Then my entire web-presence can run on the same software, and I'll have an excuse to actually become a MediaWiki hacker. Sweet.

For those of you whom I've just rendered horribly confused, Mediawiki is a very common piece of wiki software (if you've never heard of wikis before, watch this). Notably, it's what Wikipedia runs. And since I'm currently sitting in Taipei recovering from Wikimania, my head's still swimming around with thoughts of it.

Wait. You're in Taiwan?

Yep. With Herbert. Last week I found out I was going to the Wikimania conference with Sj and a posse of XO laptops from OLPC; life then became a jumbled mass of packing, prepping, wrapping-up, and hoping my parents would mail my passport in time (it arrived in the mail 12 hours before I had to leave for the airport).

Following a heroic early-morning drive by my aunt, I hit the gate with an hour to spare. Sj did not. In between exchanging "where are you?" "I'm coming." "where you?" "there's a line!" text messages as he attempted to shuffle through security before the plane finished boarding, I sat with an elderly Chinese couple learning how to say "RUN FASTER! WE'RE LATE!" in badly accented Mandarin, intending to yell it down the hallway as he came charging towards the gate, but I'd started boarding by the time he finally did make it. I discovered later that Sj actually speaks much better Mandarin than I do, having spent a month in China learning the language some years back.

Across the ocean!

We found Phoebe, Austin, and James in the San Fransisco airport, ate chocolate, and hopped the ocean to Taipei; the wonderful Taiwanese mother next to me watched out for me throughout the flight; it turns out that we share our Chinese last name and are probably thus vaguely related umpteen generations back... and that her company manufactures the wireless chips for OLPC. Small world.

We found Henna, our bus, and our hostel, in that order. Then everyone else went to sleep while Sj and I hunted on foot through the streets of Taipei for a 24-hour internet cafe so we could talk to the OLPC folks back in Boston. (I've probably mentioned this before, but he is the only person I've ever met who's given me a run for my money with regards to sleep, work, and findability habits... or lack thereof. In fact, he may actually win. However, he has an 8-year head start.)

The past week has been a series of increasingly wonderful "there are people like me in the world!" revelations. I tried to explain this to Sylvain and Heather during the party on Saturday night - that people like them make me feel like my life might actually have a shot at becoming marginally useful - but the music was loud and I was babbling, so that probably didn't come across so coherently. By the way, Sylvain runs Jamendo, a creative commons music site which is rapidly changing the way legal music distribution works. I totally want to call a License Server band reunion to compose and record some tracks using something other than Gallimore's PDA now.

But I'm getting ahead of the story. Anyway, back to Wednesday night, when Sj and I were in an internet cafe in Taipei at 5 in the morning...

By the time I crept back into the tiny Japanese-style room (complete with weightbench and spray-painted wall art) I shared with Henna and Phoebe, it was 6:30am. So I lay down, closed my eyes, opened them, stood up, and headed to the Overseas Youth Center to set up for the Jam with the amazing Bob Chao until TC brought us to a coffeeshop for the pre-Wikimania party, which I mostly spent talking to Chriswaterguy from Appropedia when not racing the impending closing of the print shop several blocks down and the even more impending death of TC's Macbook battery to design and print business cards for myself and Sj for the next few days. We made it and now I have an $800 (Taiwanese dollars) set of business cards that proclaim me as an "OLPC Content Minion."

And the morning and the evening were the first day, and lo, it was good, and I practiced Aikido rolls on the wet grass and talked with Cormac and Ray about copyright issues until everyone else (even Sj) had gone to sleep, and then I watched the sun rise again, lay down, closed my eyes, opened them, and stood up. (Since leaving Boston 8 days ago, I have accrued a total of 27 hours of sleep and boy do I feel great!)

Next: the actual Wikimania conference... (to be continued, with somewhat more coherence than the post above demonstrates)

And yes, I've got quite the email and post backlog now. And I'll tackle them back in Boston. Back to work...

Announcing the Summer of Content

2007-07-23T01:12:00.001-04:00

Some of you have asked what I've been up to the last few weeks. Thanks to a late-night wiki cleanup crew (thanks, Xavi, Nikki, Andy, and SJ!) we are finally ready to go live.

So without further ado... I proudly present the Summer of Content (SoCon), a collaboration between OLPC and the Commonwealth of Learning. In a nutshell, we match interns who want to contribute to open content with mentors from existing open-content projects who can help them, while providing stipends to the interns that allow them to work full-time on their project.

SoCon runs two summers a year, one for each hemisphere. This summer is the Northern Summer pilot, with projects running from August 10 - September 24. Groups like Google and Fedora are already on board. We're ridiculously excited and can't wait to get started.

What's the Summer of Content?

It's kind of like Summer of Code, minus the code, plus a few key differences (below text mostly lifted from the stuff I wrote for the website).

We're aiming for the inverse demographic.

The Summer of Code program has traditionally attracted a large number of individual students with technical backgrounds from the developed world. By making our stipend $500 instead of $5000 and allowing teams to apply together, we're hoping to attract an even larger number of collaborating creators from the developing world - including non-students and people with non-technical backgrounds.

Collaboration is good.

I mentioned above that you can apply in teams. I'd like to point it out again. Actually, applying in teams only helps your chances. (The catch is that the team all has to split a single stipend, but if you come from the developing world, that's still pretty good money.)

Emphasis on joining the community, not cranking out a product.

You do have to get something done. But we're going to make it very clear that the real job of the interns is to learn how to work with a particular content community, not to act as a contractor that just churns out stuff for them in exchange for pay. There are people involved. Get to know them. Collaborate.

"Content" doesn't just mean Content.

We're aiming to nurture a self-supporting networked ecosystem of projects. In other words, in addition to more traditional content-production projects (write a book, curate an encyclopedia, compose a piece of music, etc) there will be meta-content projects - for instance, accessibility and documentation projects with interns whose jobs will be to publicize, disseminate, and make other SoCon projects more accessible to various populations.

There will also be event/testing projects with interns whose jobs will be to run Test Jams and other local free culture conferences/events to get feedback to other SoCon creators about the work they're producing. Other types of projects will also be encouraged, but the important point to note is that SoCon is not just about the creation of open content, but instead about making that content useful and accessible and therefore used for Awesome purposes by the rest of the world.

We're hiring, and we need help!

We're looking for mentor organizations, mentors, and interns as well as volunteers. Check out the current project proposals (better yet, suggest your own)!

The deadline for applications this round is August 6, so please help us spread the word - if you're interested or know anyone who might be, there are some template letters you can use. We're especially looking for non-English-speaking organizations, mentors, and interns, and for participants from the developing world.

We also have an immediate need for volunteer translators - if you can help us translate the website into your language, please contact me. We're especially looking for people who can do Amharic, Arabic, Hindi, Nepali, Portuguese, Thai, and Urdu.

Questions? Thoughts? Ideas?

We'd love to hear what you think. Leave a comment on this blog or a message on the official Summer of Content Talk Page, and we'll get back to you (make sure we have your contact info, though).

The quest for plane tickets + recipe for Tim Neng

2007-07-22T15:57:00.000-04:00

I didn't win the round-trip plane tickets which I was going to use to run a Curriculum Jam in Manila (for those following along, Roger did - congrats, Roger!) so it's time to crack out the ol' thinking cap and find myself another way to get there. I reckon $1,200 should do the trick - that's all for transportation, by the way, planes and taxis... need to ask my family if I can unroll my sleeping bag on their couches.

Also need to find a local coordinator, a location, and food donations for the Manila Curriculum Jam. If you're in the area or know anyone who might be interested (or know someone who might be interested), holler! We're looking for teachers, students, and people interested in creating educational materials for the One Laptop Per Child project. If you're interested in finding out what we're about or lending a hand in helping us do it (giving every kid in the world the power to teach themselves anything they want to know), a Jam is a fantastic way to get started.

I've been spending the last 5 days sleeping on various couches in the area (Lauren's, Matt's, my aunt Lynne May's, and the floor in the back corner room of the OLPC office between 5 and 7:30am one morning) and I am so happy to have wireless back again. My apologies to people I was supposed to communicate with this weekend... maybe I should pay for internet on my phone?

Also, thanks to my aunt Joji, a recipe for Tim Neng. It's a sort of Asian quiche - tasty. I'll need to hit Super 88 to get ingredients and make this at some point.

How To Make Tim Neng

Ingredients:
1/2 lb ground pork
1/4 lb shrimp, chopped
1 pc dried shitake mushroom. chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
salt & pepper to taste
4 pcs eggs, beaten + water mixture (1:1 ratio, but add a bit more water if you want a softer Tim Neng)
spring onions, chopped (for topping)

Instructions:
Saute garlic until fragrant. Add pork, mushroom, shrimp and continue to saute until cooked. (about 10 mins). Add salt and pepper to taste.

Put all sauteed ingredients in a big soup bowl or pyrex (or an 8x8 cake pan, or anything else you can heat and cook in). Pour egg/water mixture into the meat mixture; it will soak through and surround them (you don't need to mix). Sprinkle the chopped spring onions on top.

Steam for 45 minutes or until eggs are fully set. The easiest way to do this is to set the bowl of eggs into the middle of a shallow pot of boiling water; make sure the boiling water is shallow enough that it doesn't spill into the eggs - there should only be boiling water between the inside of the pot and the outside of the bowl of eggs. (And remember to cover the container you're steaming in.)

Dig in!

Computing thinking

2007-07-18T21:41:00.000-04:00

Amusing ad from october 1998: this made me smile.

This powerhouse was configured with a Pentium II 266MHz MMX processor, 128 MB of RAM, 24xCD ROM drive, 6.4 GB hard disk, 56Kbps USR modem, built in Zip 100MB drive, Matrox Millennium II graphics card and Altec Lansing's ACS90 multimedia speaker system. It is still a great performer.

Currently in New York on the couch of Lauren's (OLPC) apartment. The traffic noise of Brooklyn is drifting through the window, which has a stained-glass plate of a robot hanging in front of it with fishing line. This post is my online indulgence before I return to the Massive Block Of Tasks awaiting me on the OLPC wiki... it's definitely a working trip. (And as I write this, there are at least three simultaneous conversations on the #olpc-content IRC channel, where Nikki and I - among others - have become regulars. You can join us if you'd like; ask one of us if you don't know how.)

Today's train of thought comes from a conversation I had with Eric Munsing on the notion of "computing thinking" (during which I went on a long spiel about the use of computers as thinking tools - this was several months before I read Papert's book Mindstorms, which words it much more eloquently).

The following is taken almost verbatim from notes on the conversation and some scattered emails - side conversations on other topics have been clipped for clarity, and some sentence fragments have been filled in to add context, but otherwise they're untouched.

Eric: I'd hazard a theory that computers are naturally conservative analytical tools - they only process existing data reflecting the current structure/beliefs and don't introduce new concepts or frames for analysis.

Mel: Interesting exercise - take your four lines of text above and replace the word "computers" with the word "languages."

I see computing thinking partially as a different type of language. Mathematics as well, for that matter. There's a grammar, a vocabulary, and a set of structures you can build both mentally and electronically. In and of themselves, they don't mean anything, but they can be used to build spectacular things that do have meaning, and as tools to help people express and create meaning. It's the "Guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people" philosophy, except the non-depressing version with computers and innovation instead of guns and death.

From one perspective, computers are very powerful tools for manipulating information in ways that enable humans to see new concepts and come up with different paradigms for viewing the world. The plots that facilitated the development of chaos theory, prototyping houses in SketchUp, sorting columns in Excel, or Hans Rosling's first Gapminder presentation on TEDtalks are all new worlds of creativity we couldn't have explored before. There's more. The entirety of Eyebeam's R&D lab output. The communications capabilities of the internet; croudsourcinig, open-sourcing. The ability to provide statistical, historical, analytical proof to back up a glimmering hypothesis you came up with in the shower.

They're powerful tools. But tools need to be learned, mastered, understood, and appreciated. There's a craftsmanship behind the black boxes that I feel that many people don't even try to understand.

If computers become the dominant tools we use for gathering information, they will be stagnant and silent (and we won't realize it, trapped inside that box). My lack of fluency in non-English languages restricts my thinking to English structures. My lack of fluency in non-engineering disciplines restricts my thinking to technical structures. (I'm finding this a difficult thing to cope with in my sociology class.)

Eric: I'm of the belief that most technology is like this. I'd say that funding a new computer science program is not very likely to give new insight into major societal problems like environmental injustices or the eradication of slavery.

Mel: But it can help you track and understand, however imperfectly, how you're doing in working towards those goals.

It's official.

2007-07-17T14:53:00.000-04:00

Apparently, I'm now a "respectable" person, as I have a house and a job as of this moment - both occurred within the last 12 hours.

The great thing is that I'm not actually going to change the things I'm doing or anything at all. It's just that I have a place to dump my stuff come January, and that my bank account will look a little less malnourished shortly.

Mmm!

Things I never thought I'd appreciate

2007-07-16T00:16:00.001-04:00

This summer alone has seen some tiny openings of my world and worldview - stuff I never thought I'd like or appreciate. Here are a few.

Good toilet paper.

The thick, soft kind. It sounds silly, but every time I'm in a bathroom with the good toilet paper now, I go "How nice! A little luxury in my day." One of those weird, tiny little affordable luxuries that I probably won't spend the extra on for my own place without prodding, but which is... I mean, face it, comparing that stuff to single-ply is like driving a new Lexus versus a 2-decade-old Honda. Sure, they both get you there just as fast. The Lexus is totally a luxury buy. But it's so... nice.

Rap lyrics.

I got a thick, rich mixed bitch, handling bricks/And a quick-witted slick clique to manage the chick (from one of T.I.'s raps)

Roll that around on your tongue a bit. Taste the (thick, rich) spitting explosion of off-cadenced syllables - then try to say it faster, then faster, then faster, while still folding your lips fully around each word. It's a whole different sort of mastery of the English language that I've only slowly - and just now - become aware of. Whoa. I want more. I want more... who and what should I listen to? I want to learn how to appreciate it better. I'd like to learn how to do it. Need to listen to and read more, though, in order to get a feel for it.

Beer.

It really is tasty. I drink beer like I drink tea - not for the physical effect it has on me, but to appreciate the artistry of the taste. (In fact, I dislike being even mildly inebriated, and hate the jittery
feeling I get with caffeine, and do my best to avoid both.) The Cambridge Brewing Company's summer hefeweizen is currently tied with fresh-drawn Sam Adams Boston Lager for my favorite.

Cold, fresh, filtered drinking water.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmm, delicious. With the water cooler at OLPC's office not far from the mess of tables I work in, I'm closer to being not-dehydrated now than I think I've ever been in my life.

$2.

You can do a lot with $2. You can get a sandwich of some kind - a whole meal, reasonably filling if you eat it slowly. You can get a large drink - one that comes in a 24 oz. sports bottle, so that you can reuse it as your water bottle and have a way to tote around free hydration with you. When I have $2 in my pocket, I feel rich and free - like I can get something useful (that is to say, food) if I need to. I don't think I've thought of $2 this way since I was in elementary school.

Up on the roof

2007-07-15T00:46:00.001-04:00

This post will be oddly disjointed and incoherent - it's a series of mental snapshots. The title comes from one of my favorite James Taylor songs.

I've developed a fondness for butter tea since eating at Rangzen,
the local Tibetian restaurant. I usually drink my tea straight, but a
little bit of milk, butter, and salt make it taste oddly good. It also
takes more time and means I get to wash a knife in addition to a cup,
so that's a tradeoff.

It's (almost)* official; I'm addicted to OLPC. My leave-the-office times in this week alone have crept from 7pm... to midnight... to 2am... to 4:30am in a memorable flamenco-soaked fest last night. (That, by the way, is the OLPC summer blog, which consists mostly of the Content crew so far.)

*oh, you'll find out soon, although some of you have undoubtedly guessed it by now.

(the remainder of this post written almost a full day later:)

My brain is becoming wikified. Transparency, crosslinking, talk pages, and a strange sense of stability-in-anarchy are popping up in my metaphors for everyday life. I have occasional compulsions to put things in [[Brackets]] (in mediawiki syntax, that would make a link to the "Brackets" page). I blame SJ. Well, I blame him from starting me on this and continually feeding me input that reinforces it, but I'm steering myself into it, so I suppose I really can't blame anyone but myself.

(and yet some hours later...)

A longer post tonight has been superseded by a wonderful long talk with Joe. That's not the right word, but I'm attempting to convey that the creative, expressive impulse to share what's normally the continuous introverted thought process of my mind - in an attempt to let the world in and stop myself from shutting more of it out - that impulse has been nicely fulfilled by the conversation, and my mind is quiet enough now that I can... think. And sleep. Thank you, Joe.

Some potentially cryptic notes from that conversation, which will probably mean different things to me tomorrow morning taken out of context:

Jealousy and envy have subtly different connotations. I want to obtain things (not necessarily physical entities, mind you) for myself by creating more of them in the world, not by taking them away from other people.
Physical awareness is good stuff. I need more of it.
Comfort in your own skin is preferable to detachment/shutdown, but shutdown is (to me, at least - and I think to Joe as well) preferable to a mask. They're the truth, silence, and a lie, respectively.
The preceding statement implies an objectivity and precision that doesn't actually exist around this topic.

The world is wonderful, and I am being selfish tonight for once... and going to bed.

Powering on!

2007-07-12T01:32:00.000-04:00

Where did the power icon come from, anyhow? The jury is still out on that question, but the "stop" icon is explained here. The history of design is fantastic; it's almost like tracing back a pictorial linguistic thread.

In other news, OLPC Austria had a Sewing Jam. The fuzzy laptop carriers "warm the cockles of my heart," as my high-school physics teacher Laura Nickerson would say.

We spent most of tonight working on content for the upcoming release. Or I should say we spent a long time trying to figure out the organization scheme of different hierarchies and how much curation work they'd need to become useful (the answer, more often than not, was "a lot"). Among other things, we found lessons on how to maintain a chainsaw. Especially in a way that's approved by New Zealand.

Organizing information is hard. How do you push around raw thoughtstuff? It's easier when you verbalize or symbolize and then draw/write them, easier to manipulate and sort things with some element of physicality. But information? I don't even know where to start sometimes.

When I don't know what to do, I either freeze, ask for help, or (with increasing frequency now) just try making something. It's the ask-forgiveness-not-permission philosophy; I bank on the tendency of those older and wiser than me to lunge forward and catch me before I injure anything and show me a Better Way to do things. Last night, after witnessing my flat-footed mangling of the OLPC wiki, SJ gave me a mini-lecture on how to create pages with information organized in an elegant fashion, writing the style guide as he went. (And after going back and renaming and relinking all the Jam pages, I will never forget that lesson.)

Working on "fuzzy" things, working with people, coordinating folks you may have never met in person, jumping into something while only hearing snippets of a conversation that has been going on without you for weeks if not years... it's tough. No taking a project into the back room and hacking. No being a Plant. In fact, Cliff (from Apache) said today that even with technical things, independent code modules, they'd run into problems there when someone just went off and Made Something without trying to get to know the way the community worked first.

If I ever had any doubts as to whether non-technical work was "just as hard" as technical work, they have all been erased now (in fact, at least four or five times a day, I find myself thinking that it would be so much easier to be a coder or an engineer.) But hard is good. It means you're learning.

Learning about PGP and microformats

2007-07-10T15:24:00.000-04:00

Because I haven't posted about anything remotely technical in a very, very long time:

Today I finally got a PGP key because I needed one to get an account on the OLPC dev server.. (For my parents: A PGP key is a special number that sort of acts like a "password" for messages. It helps make communications like email and such private.)

Aside from "it's something related to crypto," I didn't actually know what PGP was. (I'm still mildly fuzzy on it, so if anyone's into that kind of stuff and wouldn't mind explaining...) So I did a little reading, and got my key with the help of this tutorial. My favorite part was the way Phil Zimmermann challenged the US regulations on exporting PGP (they considered cryptosystems with 40+ bit keys "munitions"). Via Wikipedia:

Zimmerman challenged these regulations in a curious way. He published the entire source code of PGP in a hardback book, via MIT Press, which was widely sold in bookstores. Anybody wishing to build their own copy of PGP could buy the $60 book, cut off the covers and separate the pages, then run them through a scanner and an OCR (optical character - or text recognition) program to create a set of text files containing the source code. One could then build the application using the GNU C Compiler and GNU Make utility, which are freely available on the Internet. The compiled files could be put on a server anywhere in the world, and anyone could download them. The principle was simple: the export of munitions--guns, bombs, planes, software--is restricted; but the export of books is protected by the First Amendment. Anybody could buy a book and cut it up, so any computer programmer with common UNIX skills could build the software. However, the question was never tested in court.

I also learned about microformats while working on the OLPC sample library, or rather, trying to find out how it ticks; it's all html and css right now. If you're looking for neat free childrens' books to read your kids, siblings, or students, check it out. They're multilingual, too. And we're looking for translators, people to read the books out loud and send us the sound-files (bonus points for , and of course... more books.)

Microformats are "adding simple semantic meaning to human-readable content which is otherwise, from a machine's point of view, just plain text." That was the idea behind Ad Libris (which is on the back-burner for now as we gather content to test it out with).

In other words, we read text (for instance, this blog post) and it means something to us; you can say "ah, the post is about pgp and microformats, and Mel wrote it." But your computer sees a bunch of letters (or ones and zeroes, really) and can't answer those kinds of questions. Microformats tell your computer that hey, Mel is the author! Hey, this post is about PGP! so it can begin to answer intelligent questions like "Computer, show me all the stuff Mel's written about OLPC in the last year" without someone having to build a custom database of time-sucking glory.

Nifty stuff. Happy Mel. Man, the world is full of great ideas.

Endless summer, or: with a single click, you can sponsor an OLPC Education Jam in the Philippines

2007-07-08T02:09:00.001-04:00

This a post chock-full of happy excited announcements. Woo!

Endless summer finalist

First of all, I'm a finalist in the Endless Summer competition, which (by providing round trip airfare anywhere plus $1000 to donate once I get there) would put me one step closer to that 'round-the-world engineering education trip I'm working on. Vote for me here. (Voting closes July 13.) If you think someone else should go, by all means vote for them! I especially like Dawn's entry.

Now, I can't do the research trip on a single round-trip ticket. I'd also need a place to live, food to eat, that kind of thing. So if I win, here's what I'll be doing.

Running an Education Jam in the Philippines

Remember the OLPC Game Jam we did at Olin? (If not, the Boston Globe and Needham Channel article/video-clip here can quickly explain things). Well, we're doing an OLPC Curriculum Jam in the fall in several simultaneous international locations. Teachers and high-school/college students interested in education will spend a weekend developing open-content learning materials; after ~2.5 days they swap their curricula with a group in another country (so a teacher in Vancouver might make materials for a teacher in New York to use, and vice versa) and then proceed to teach their partner group's lessons to a group of younger local kids that very afternoon.

Instant feedback. Content creation, community building. And everything that's designed that weekend is automatically guaranteed to be sustainably flexible - usable by teachers in different countries with little to no support from the content's original creators.

Problem: Right now we have groups in the US and Canada. Not a very representative sample of folks from the developing world.

Solution: Go to the Philippines to run one in Manila. My family's there (read: free food and housing for the Mel). My parents went to school there and some of my cousins still do, so contacts (especially young student-testers from a broad range of socioeconomic backgrounds) would be easier for me to find on short notice than most other places. Most people speak English, making communication barriers with OLPC headquarters minimal. We can mobilize the open-content community there, get something for the local userbase to nucleate around. $1000 goes a long way in Manila; I think we could do the entire Jam on that budget.

That's what I'd do with the grand prize. It's a win-win-win; starts a snowball of education goodness that ripples through a community my family once called home, jump-starts content development and a local community for OLPC, lets me visit and work within an educational system very different to the American one I'm used to. Also, I can (finally) visit my grandmother!

(By the way, if you're interested in running an OLPC Jam in your location or helping out with one in Manila, Vancouver, New York, Boston, or Chicago, give me a ping.)

And a few other things I should explain...

Astute readers of my Endless Summer entry may note some things I've forgotten to mention here.

I'm learning how to talk! That is, I'm going to do aural rehabilitation, which is apparently code for "speech therapy for deaf people." If I'm going to teach and speak, I can't do that from behind a keyboard all the time. The catch is that the student-teachers at Northwestern are out for the summer, so I've got at least 2 months to do things on my own like learn about the musculature of the throat, learn IPA and go through lists of words people have heard me mispronounce, that kind of thing (if you have any ideas for fun things to do with this, please let me know; I'm totally making things up right now).
I'm learning jazz piano. Okay, I'm slacking off on this and playing swing sheet music instead (my "how to play jazz piano" books are in Chicago) but I'm also starting to break away from sheet music and improvise around songs, even starting to bang out complete ones of my own instead of just aimlessly playing "things that kinda sound good." It's probably not jazz, but it's something.

Summer of Content

And then something you probably haven't heard because it hasn't been announced... until now. For those of you who are familiar with Google's Summer of Code, we bring you the Summer of Content. Basically, we're paying students to work with mentors from open content organizations to make... anything they want. Textbook, music, movies, photographs - want to make it? Propose it!

We're running a 5-week pilot at the end of this month (all students eligible), a Southern Hemisphere one in the Winter, and another in parallel with next year's Summer of Code. The program is still under construction, but it's moving forward fast. Interested in mentoring a project? Interested in doing a project? Know someone who would be? Please forward and ask questions!

Right-o. Thanks for reading. I just had two mugs of Golden Monkey tea, so I'm super-hyper tonight, and proportionally more shameless.

4th of July: "Boating" "on the Charles"

2007-07-06T11:22:00.001-04:00

"We're going boating on the Charles. You should come," said Chandra.
"Sure. What boat?"

Three sporting goods stores later, I was $27 lighter and the proud owner of an inflatable raft rated to carry approximately 50 lbs less than the combined weight of myself and Matt Ritter, my co-captain in this adventure. Wrapping food in garbage bags, Chandra, Molly, and I drove to the Beef & Beer house in Somerville and chilled on the porch as more Oliners started showing with boats... and then more, and more. The lady in the house next door thought it was an auto accident because there were so many people clustered by the curb, talking.

We packed everyone into as few cars as possible, drove to the Charles, and dashed! furiously! across fences and Storrow Drive, where we inflated and launched, somewhat precariously, from the BU dock. Matt and I found that our boat was low enough in the water that we couldn't row because the oar-paths intersected with our scrunched-up knees. We proceeded to use them as paddles, sitting cross-legged across from each other, scuttling backwards because Matt didn't have his glasses and I was navigating.

A string of twenty-something tiny plastic rafts (and one canoe) scooted the mile down the Charles, their forty-odd occupants singing merrily and bashing into each other. Chris Dellin wins for Most Ghetto Paddle: tennis racket wrapped in a garbage bag and duct-taped to a pole. Did I mention it was raining? We can only imagine what it looked like to the passing helicopters.

We lashed our boats together under the Mass Ave bridge and began to eat the strawberries, bread, sausage, and cheese we'd brought. (Hypothetically we had soda, but the ginger soda Matt had was spicy and went straight up your nose, so nobody drank it.) The current driiiiiiifted us out from under the bridge and we started to get soaked. We cut loose from the flotilla, paddled back under, and began to eat again. The current driiiiiifted us out... people on the bridge started staring down at us and pointing.

After a few rounds of this, the Coast Guard came and chased us back to shore for not wearing life jackets. We hauled the raft ashore and went running back and forth along both riverbanks with Duc and Chris to see if we could find Matt's friends from Pika, who supposedly had life jackets. Four soaked, muddy college students peering from group to group, asking for directions to the sailing pavilion. I ended up watching the fireworks with Matt on the MIT side of the river, dripping river and rain onto Heather's flip-flops, which were much too large for me and cut into my feet enough that I ran barefoot as much as I could.

The fireworks were beautiful.

Later we found out that Kelcy and DJ had ripped a hole in their now-useless raft, that David (from IMSA) had capsized into the river, that some members of the scattered group had managed to stay on the Charles, that others climbed to the bridge, and that everyone had, by and large, had a grand ol' time (if not the time we'd expected). A hot shower never felt so wonderful afterwards.

Standardization vs specialization

2007-07-03T01:44:00.001-04:00

At Olin tonight. Ironically, Tesch, Andrew, and Chandra all chose to visit on the same day. We even had a MetaOlin meeting (of sorts). Being back like this is always odd, but fun. It's like slipping on an old sweater that's far too ragged to wear in public and has holes and scratchety places, but which somehow feels good anyhow. While I'm in Olin-mode, here's more from Gardner - yes, the same book, Self-Renewal. (Seriously, Olin folks should read this one. These are all excerpts from my notes on the slim paperback.) This time he's talking about the difference between "learning about" and "learning to be."

All too often we give our young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. We are stuffing their heads with the products of earlier innovation rather than teaching them how to innovate. We think of the mind as a structure to be filled when we should be thinking of it as an instrument to be used.

(How do you "teach someone to innovate," anyway? I'm getting sick of hearing the word "innovation." It's a buzzword that's used so often and so thoughtlessly that it's ceased to have much meaning. But Gardner wrote this years back before the word became so abused.)

He points out that being a generalist allows you to specialize in what is needed at that moment. In fact, you could say that being trained as a generalist allows you to move between different specialties. Renaissance engineering. Later, reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I saw fields of study branching out and merging into each other in a slow, melting dance through time; professions tend to change drastically within the timespan of a person's career. Think of the meteoric ascent of computer science, the fading of alchemy, the budding of systems engineering and design theory, the discussion on whether to offer 3 Olin degrees (MechE, ECE, and General Engr.) or just General Engineering (we currently do the former).

"All learning is specialization in the sense that it involves reinforcement of some responses rather than others," says Gardner, so in order to be a generalist, students need to step out of their learning and abstract it on a higher meta-level so they can identify and zoom in on the parts that most interest them. This entire process is different for each student. In order to maximize the learning of as many students as possible, schools should set up a gentle tension by training their students to be generalists and making it clear to the youngsters that it's their responsibility to create their own education that will turn them into the specialists they want to be... at that moment, at least.

Finally, my favorite.

The truly creative person is not an outlaw but a lawmaker.

You can be comfortable in chaos if you know you have the ability to create order from them in an instant if needed (like knowing you can swim strong strokes allows you to relax and float in the water). If you can create new structures - physical, mental, cultural, anything - at will, you're not so tied to old ones. You know you can always make new ones again if things don't work out. Part of why Olin's culture is so amazing is that we are, in every sense of the word, a community of makers.

Money is like chocolate.

2007-07-02T00:23:00.001-04:00

First, I would like to rant about not having a working scanner. RANT RANT RANT RANNNNNT. "Scanning" via carefully-held digital camera just isn't the same.

Today was my splurge day - a most excellent $10 lunch consisting of an excellent raspberry seltzer, a cheddary, toothy, and gargantuan green onion scone, the best, moistest apple cake I've ever tried, and a cold mint-nutmeggy rootbeer with lovely citrus notes. In the course of our wanderings through Boston, Chris, Joe, David (an IMSA friend) and myself went from Fenway to the South End past the Commons to the North End and back (I copped out and caught the train from Government Center because I had a 6pm meeting). Along the way we met revolutionary war reenactors, scored some free basil seeds (+ dirt + time = PESTO!), drooled over gelato we did not purchase, and ogled a wine shop.

I'm starting to think of money as a convenience rather than a need. A luxury, at times - like today's lunch - but usually just an occasionally handy thing to fall back on, like when Matt and I rode to Broadway Bicycle yesterday... three times in as many hours to fix two flats, then one flat, then a stuck chain (it was the day of the Bike Curse). Could we have found a way to fix the bikes without money? Maybe. Probably. Eventually. In that short a time? Probably not. And having tools and new parts on hand definitely added a little to the fun with their shininess.

Money, like chocolate, is best when used sparingly and well. Aside from food, my other expenditures in June were rent, a T pass, 2
used books for my research that cost at total of $4, and a few dollars
in bike parts to replace the blown tire. Having dinner at DJ & Kelcy's, dining at Pika with Matt &
Ryan, and sipping tea at OLPC costs me no money at all - and in all cases, the food is even better because of the excellent company. And when people come visit us, we'll cook them extra hamburgers or lend them a spare mattress. Sharing is fun. I almost enjoy being "poor*" because you get to share so much.

*ok, I have a computer, food to eat, and a home with running water; I'm filthy rich in the grand scheme of things.

At its core, cash is really just something to barter with. Time may be money, but I prefer to say that "money is time" and spend my money so that I can do what I want with my time. Usually, doing what I want requires no money at all.

I miss creative writing.

2007-06-29T23:34:00.000-04:00

Walking from the Hynes stop to Fenway House is always rich with sensory overload to step back from. Puffs of tobacco smoke strain into automotive exhaust and vents, creating an olfactory tour with abrupt temperature gradients. Buses whine and Sox fans travel in packs, waving cigarettes and low halter tops or gelled hair and collared white shirts on top of cosmetically-grunged tees. Crossing lights chirp out no-cross warnings as Sox shirts wade between taxis, parting a sea of yellow chrome, neon Budweiser signs, and old Hondas packed with college kids. A trio of out-of-towners stand on the wrong corner, giggling as they try to flop down a taxi with a folding umbrella. I round the corner at the Historical Society building and skip down the sidewalk, stomach buzzing with caffeine.

I'm acutely aware that I'm not in my own voice right now. It's the residual awkwardness of having read great writing - Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down The Bones, in this case. When I soak in a book like I just did on the train, I speak with an accent for a bit afterwards. It's been seven years since I first read Bones in Chris Kuhl's English class my first year of high school, and I still remember drinking in the passages about allowing yourself to write, and the late-night essay I pounded out (assigned title: "I Am...") and how Kuhl stopped me after class a few days later and asked permission to read it in class, and the stunned silence that followed the reading with the class at a loss for adjectives. We let the silence sit for a while - no verbal dissections on the "meaning" of my work, for once - and then we took a collective breath and continued with our lives.

But that pause, that pregnant pause - I was so terrified by the silence that I forgot to breathe, gasping in a draught of air only when the silence ended. It was one of the greatest moments I've had, all the better for being barely acknowledged - classmates trickled up to me for days afterwards with quiet variants on "that was... wow." And the best part was that I didn't feel that it was extraordinary. That the clarity I'd been able to tap into while writing was something I could always reach in and do.

Anyway, after that essay, Kuhl said I really ought to keep developing my writing and would I like to do some out-of-class work with her on it. I did for a bit and it was wonderful - the odd little books and stories she'd lend me had a grace and clarity of phrasing I'd never seen before, and I would just wash the raw honey of the words over me, turning them about, slowly unraveling them, sitting down to write and finding I'd absorbed a tiny bit of them.

Eventually my parents got upset when they discovered some of the fiction literature she assigned as reading mentioned sex. (Never mind that Shakespeare continually brings it up in his plays; those are "classics.") So we stopped the independent work. I took Kuhl's one-week writing seminar during Intersession that year, wrote some short stories. And then... I slowly stopped writing. I'd still fire up on papers, and I still write parodies and little plays, and this blog - but the sustained effort of raw writing, repeatedly digging deep into a storehouse of words for hours at a time, no particular formulae or point of conviction or function to display, just sheer expression - I haven't done that for a while. I feel rusty when I do.

That's why it was so hard for me to start my sci fi story, and why I didn't make it through NaNoWriMo last year. It's like a former marathon runner trying to lope an easy 26 miles after a decade of eating potato chips on the couch. I don't practice now. It's not a part of who I am at present, but the residual memories say it should be. Maybe it can be again. I'm not going to plan for it or try too hard, since that's a surefire way for me to block myself, but I'm just going to watch a little closer, maybe tip the probabilities a little more. In this case, I do something by doing nothing.*

*I may be reading the Tao Te Ching and Tai Chi books a wee bit much. But hey, that's what writing is for - snapshot of your thoughtstream at the moment. Thoughtstreams can change.

Wei wu wei

2007-06-29T18:12:00.001-04:00

Not's post earlier reminded me to write this; I've been meaning to for a bit.

I need more adventures, memories that stick out because they’re so odd.

It's easy for me to say that as well, but I think a more accurate statement would be that I want more adventures. I twitch and itch and pick anxiously at the edges of things, grasping at novelty. I'm a high-pass kid in a high-frequency world. I gulp down three glasses of ice-cold catalyst every morning and go through paradigms like cheap conference t-shirts. I want continuous metamorphosis and I want it now. Gritty, transformative experiences. An endless succession of climaxes, rites of passage. New worlds.

But it's not what I need.

I need to balance it, to learn how to sit and be happy. I don't want to be tied to a home, but I want to be drawn to one - to have something constant that I'm willing to go back to time and again. I want rituals with depth, traditions with a meaning behind them that runs out richer the longer I go on. I want to be content to find clarity in stillness and internalize that progress is possible without having to run full-tilt at the wall, or even move forward at all. Those tiny settlings in perception that sink into things, soak deliciously through your mind instead of careening off it with a thundering clang. I need to be open to not changing. It's a kind of coming of age not to need to come of age - I don't know if it's possible to reach that.

I'll still sprint, of course. I'm built to need that, so far. And I can't see myself reaching the kind of peace with the present I've just described. But I'm learning to learn from silence and stillness instead of thinking, and I'm trying to let go of my powerful thirst to learn - it can be an addictive lust as much as anything else can, though there are far worse vices in this world.

That's all.

Back from Vancouver and Seattle! And boy am I full.

2007-06-29T02:20:00.001-04:00

Back from Vancouver/Seattle. I'm happy to report that the 2-4 (our room) has acquired an electric keyboard sans power cord, a disco ball, and an air conditioner which has been rendered partially usable by vigorous applications of packing tape. I've also accumulated several thousand emails, so tomorrow, after I scan some book illustrations and upload a funding proposal, will be... fun. (I'm implementing Inbox Zero. I need to be consistently reachable somehow and I've been historically terrible at that.)

The family reunion was great, despite the insipid amount of traveling it involved. My maternal grandfather's younger sister married my grandmother's older brother, leading to some really weird "I'm my own grandpaw" relationships and a very tight-knit extended family. We bought amazing handmade salami from Salumi (run by Armandino Batali - Mario's father), charred quesadillas atop the cabin's wood-burning stove, watched the kids chase each other wielding empty 2-liter bottles, waded into the (freezing) surf to scatter my grand-uncle Rizal's ashes into the Pacific, carried boxes of pizza across town, and danced disco and played limbo after dinner. It was a lovely time to be with tiny Asian people. "Every time I think I'm short," my mom (maybe 5'3"?) said, "I just stand next to my sisters, and then I go 'okay, I'm tall.'")

One thing little cousins are great at is making you apologize repeatedly to your parents for being that age at some point. I got to explain to toddlers how Jason (18) could be my little brother ("He can't be your little brother because he's big!" "Yes, but he used to be little." "But he's not little, he's big!") and repeatedly sic my cousin Neil (8) on Jason. Neil is going through the "I like to punch everything!" phase, and since he's small for his age, his fists are exactly the height of Jason's behind. This was the first reunion I've been an "adult" for, and it was neat to see my cousin Melanie (now 12) assume the "leader of the children" role that I've previously held. My youngest cousin Audrey (3) decided she didn't like me because she didn't get to drive a tractor, which I had nothing to do with - I just happened to be standing beside her when her mom told her she was too young. (Then she asked me for help getting across the playground. "Do you like me yet?" "No. But Achi Mallory, I need helllllp." "Well, okay. *help* Do you like me now?" "Almost.")

On the long route back from Tofino to Seattle we stopped at several restaurants. At the first, Kei (6) came back from the bathroom asking what the "condom police" sign on the wall meant. ("It's... for grown-ups, dear" my aunt finally managed to say as my mom and I silently doubled over in laughter. "You know, our family is awfully naive," I told my mom later. "Well, sex in Filipino-Chinese culture is very different," she said. "You don't need to know about it when you're in high school because you're not going to have it.")

Our second major degustation was at a huge Asian mall with a marvelous food court with puffy onion cakes which we ate with crisp, cold, thinly-sliced salty-sweet pig ears, soup dumplings (nip a little hole in the side and suck out the rich broth before eating the rest), egg noodles (fresh - there is no comparison) with fat shrimp in wonton wrappers and sweet broth, creamy pan-fried taro and turnip cakes, curried meat and potatoes stuffed into pillowy white bread. (And almond milk! With coconut jelly! And mango shake!) And then there was the picnic later, with grilled squash, peppercorned broccoli, thick grilled ribs and cold pesto radiatore... ah! "There are two sources of cholesterol: food and family," read an ad in the Readers Digest. "I thought those were the same thing," I told my uncle.

I also visited the Commonwealth of Learning headquarters (more on this later, I'm sure - it was awesome), saw my first Red Sox game at the Seattle Mariners stadium with my cousins (Mariners won) while eating the worst value-for-your-money food I have ever purchased; plasticky pizza, sodden fries, and some sort of fibrous, artifical-flavor drenched mass that was supposed to be bbq pork. "No beer," said my mom. "Don't worry, I can't afford it," I told her afterwards. Apparently some people could. "Look for the drunk half-naked Bostonians," I told my brother on our way back from purchasing a Horrifically Overpriced Lemonade. "Ah, yes. Guy who's showing a foot of boxer short. Our seats must be nearby." (We were across from the Half Naked Drunk Bostonians and behind some Very Vocal Mariners Fans, also endowed with liberal amounts of Miller Lite. Family fun!)

I miss them already. But now to sleep. And then awake and to work.

This book is not required

2007-06-19T23:44:00.001-04:00

Wow. Some great insights on social entrepreneurship in the comments from the last post - I'm going through some books and articles on the topic before I respond, but right now my position is very similar to Matt's phrasing.

In the meantime, I grabbed a $1 book on the way down Mass Ave and read it tonight. It's an underground-education book (best read with a grain of salt; like many good books, it points out interesting topics but has a bias of its own) titled This Book Is Not Required. Ironically, it's since become required reading on several sociology syllabi.

The fundamental premise is that the goal of education is not knowledge, but wisdom, which it (loosely) defines as the ability to live, understand, and direct one's life no matter what that life may turn out to be. The book has strong Buddhist and sociology overtones but is gracious enough to tell you so repeatedly. It's meant as a "everything [the author] would give as advice to her incoming college self" sort of book, and was revised and extended by a spontaneously-formed group of college students after the author's death.

A few interesting passages. As usual, I'll start with one on grades.

I want you to understand the vital difference between operating within a set of rules and internalizing those rules. The cardinal point here is that what you don't internalize can't really hurt you...

In the next few pages, Bell suggests an experiment which I'd unknowingly been doing for the past three years; in order to tell how affected you really are by grades, notice how tense you are right before you're being handed back a graded paper. The amount of anxiety you have that moment is a good indicator of how invested you actually are in grades, regardless of how you think you're doing or where you'd like to be with respect to them. (It's totally ok to be invested in grades and have them as goals - just understand what that means and why you're doing it.)

How much, Bell asks us, does our education enable us to understand and live our own lives better? To that I would answer "as much as you make it," and also that Bell is probably a Myers-Briggs introvert-intuitive (INXX) who places a high value on self-knowledge. I don't dispute it's a portion of education we often ignore in formal institutions. I'm a very "know thyself" sort of person, and this "how can I use this to understand my life?" aspect was one of the things I valued highly about MetaOlin. Self-knowledge is not the primary driver of everyone, nor should it be; some folks have temperaments that pull them in different directions.*

* I can't resist saying that some modicum of self-knowledge is helpful to know what direction you're being pulled in, but that's my inner INFP speaking.

Another section reflects on perceptions of self and how they're influenced by the media. Another (one of my favorites) dissects college relationships in Western culture by looking at it through the lens of an Eastern philosophy ("Hm," I thought for a moment, "perhaps I'm not asexual - just unconsciously a Buddhist sociologist with regards to this topic.") It also has the calmest "Fight The Establishment! The Big Bosses are blinding us! Down with The Man!" passages I have ever seen, mostly on the topic of lack of self-directed inquiries in college.

The very format of school works to ensure boredom. At 9:00 a.m. three times a week you are supposed to become engrossed by medieval history. Never mind that you broke up with your boyfriend last night, or that your parents are on your back for not majoring in business administration, at 9:00 a.m. it's medieval history... our education has, all along, been answering questions we never asked.

It's a mildly written but quietly counter-cultural book and satisfyingly chewy food for thought. Because of the clear biases in the book, you have to mentally masticate the material instead of swallowing it blindly, but that's exactly what the author advocates - so hey. Nice meta-book-design.

Beer and an unrelated note about social entrepreneurship

2007-06-17T15:01:00.001-04:00

Ray, Chris, and I scored some free Sam Adams glasses yesterday when we went on their brewery tour. The beer (tiny glasses of Boston Lager and the Summer brew) was... well, I can't enthusiastically say it's my favorite thing to quaff in the world since I'm still at the point where I haven't gotten over the bitterness of the hops and astringency of the alcohol-taste, but it was tasty, and different (and much better) than I thought beer would taste. If you add the tiny glasses up, this was the first complete glass of beer I'd had.

I was able to tell that the two beers were different, but that's about it; I'd like to taste a few more so I can start noticing more subtle things, similar to how I now taste tea (I used to think they all tasted the same too). Apparently 1.5 beers is also enough to physically affect me; it felt like my perception had a tiny bit of inertia. When I turned my head, my head would turn, my vision would go right with it, and then a half-second later my brain would say "Oh, I'm looking that way now!" and everything would be all synced-up again.

My cousin Mark came over for brunch this morning. He had some cereal while I wolfed down half the leftover Fiesta Nachos from Sunset yesterday (three young people, one $10 plate... leftovers for two servings afterwards. It's a big plate.) He's staying across the Fen with the son of our uncle's classmate and a graphic designer roommate and working for an internet marketing firm. One thing I'm learning from the jobs that Mark and my brother Jason are working this summer is that the work world often takes shortcuts that, while entirely legal, make me feel a little sketchy about the values they're espousing. I still need to reconcile my entrepreneurial desire to take advantage of opportunities with my conscience which prevents me from doing anything that could be construed as "taking advantage" (in the negative sense of the phrase).

Dad said once that the key in business was to reconcile your head and your heart. One tenet of "social entrepreneurship" (although I want it to exist badly, I'm still questioning whether that's even a valid phrase) is "doing well by doing good." Is the idea of social entrepreneurship (to quote a grad school classmate) "bullshit"?* I can't convince myself that it isn't, so I'm going to try convincing myself that it is bullshit. I need to see where both perspectives are coming from.

So tell me - why is social E! total bull? (or why isn't it? I think the first type of response will be more helpful, though.)

*Matt and Ben, before you kill me, look up the phrase "proof by contradiction" - but note that I'm not aiming towards such; I'm really trying to prove that social E! is bull. I'm not going to hold back on this, because it's the only way we can test it.

Visiting the Zen center

2007-06-14T23:52:00.001-04:00

Gosh, it's nice to be able to take things one at a time, switch tasks when you feel like it, take some time to pay attention and relax into what you're doing without feeling pushed to do more things faster.

I spent the morning and much of the afternoon sending thank-you notes. Lots of them. 6.5 hours' worth. After a quick stop-in at the OLPC office, I set off for the Cambridge Zen Center's free introductory session, after which we sat on dense blue cushions atop faded green mats and asked questions of a visiting Masai chieftain (38 years old, a chief since he was 18) who wore a gold watch and black and white checkered cloth robe over his slacks and collared blue shirt.

I asked him what made a person a good leader, and he responded that it was a lack of selfishness and giving everyone consideration regardless of who they were. He does this by example as well. Masai are polygamous, but instead of four wives and 40 children he has one wife and four children - and three adopted children - because one issue facing the Masai right now is population control; "when there are more people, the land becomes small." Asked whether he worries about his children (who are attending private school) moving to the city and forgetting the Masai ways, he replied that he could not say he does not worry about it, but that he tells his children that it is their responsibility to give back to the Masai community they came from.

After the talk, we clustered around a beautiful wood table by the kitchen where huge bowls of carob-chocolate rice pudding, warm banana-pineapple chunks, and whipped cream were sitting along with a pot of smoky tea. "You mean we can just... eat it? People that just walked in?" "Yes," said a young man who lived at the Center (who'd originally mistaken me for a friend, causing mild confusion and then a good laugh). We talked about life. After I told him about going to college for engineering, he asked me if it had been fulfilling. "Yes," I said. "Well, it fulfills a part of me." There's a part of me that really needs to build and read and study. But studying can't tell you how to live or what to believe.

It was a warm night, so I walked back from the Center (by Central Square) to Fenway, a stroll that took about an hour. A twentysomething man was sobbing loudly onto a streetlamp across from a Thai restaurant, his friends in baseball caps and faded hoodies clustering around to comfort him. Soft rock guitar and somebody's trumpet battled for aural dominance by the Berklee apartments.

Fenway was, according to Harvard historians via the House Manager's manual, actually built in 1903 (or thereabouts), well after the end of slavery (so Gui was off by several decades). Turns out the wee rooms were servant quarters. I also know how to exterminate cockroaches in the kitchen now, and on the table in the lounge is a black book with yellowed pages falling off; I opened it to a 1981 entry in blue ballpoint where a boy describes his disappointment at the lack of anarchy at Fenway, how he'd grown more radical over the course of his studies but that the house hadn't. "I feel like a snake shedding its skin," he wrote as he prepared to leave.

Some black and white photos of young men in scruffy beards amidst piles of books were pasted within the pages. Those young anarchists are my parents' age now. I wonder if they grew into collared salarymen with slight paunches and a lawnmower in their garage. I hope they didn't. All the same, I'm acutely aware my current behavior (not spending money, no job, living in a crazy painted house, eating at random hours, walking across the city) is tolerated precisely because I'm young and "going through an experimental phase," and at some point - twenty five? thirty? I stop being a cute, eager kid and start being a kook who never learned to live in normal society.

I feel the vague itchings of "I should really be studying something technical" in the back of my mind. I'm deliberately ignoring it and letting it build - I want to make sure it's real desire to learn instead of a sentiment of obligation because I have an engineering degree - and when I can't hold that back any longer, I'll devour something with intense speed and relish... I'm hoping my appetite will turn towards Proakis, or Horowitz and Hill, but we'll see; I've been enamored with the idea of learning kernel hacking, as of late.

Normalcy can wait. Tonight I start a new book - on ethnographic fieldwork methods. Mmm! Time to read.

Game Jam pictures, finally

2007-06-14T13:24:00.000-04:00

At the Game jam, we had programmers...

Team Minuteman, who had to skip the last day of the Jam to graduate from high school

We had food... (thanks to the tireless efforts of the Olin crew)

And we had judges. Oh, did we have judges! So... many... judges...

And a very tired - but happy - Mel.

Now I know why most conferences are run by older people with lots of contacts, experience, and more funding... and of course, I'm going to be doing this again. :-D

Entrepreneurship without a business

2007-06-13T08:53:00.001-04:00

Andrew Coats, Erik Kennedy, Lindsay Redmond, and myself were panelists for an Olin-Babson conference on entrepreneurship education for engineers (somehow this becomes the acronym SvE^3). I missed the bus there by one minute, which led to me running pell-mell from the next bus (a half-hour later) down Great Plains, backpack swinging, waving a bright yellow sign that said "PLEASE GIVE ME A RIDE TO BABSON! LATE STUDENT!" and giving desperate looks to passing drivers.

I did get a ride about halfway there, and ran breathless into the room four minutes early (technically 26 minutes late for briefing), then followed the eloquent trio of Andrew, Erik, and Lindsay talking about Olin's entrepreneurship programs by telling the audience all about how I'd stayed as far away from formal programs at Olin as possible, swearing not to follow in the footsteps of my dad, a MechE-turned-MBA. "But I still consider myself an entrepreneur," I told them (roughly paraphrased). "It's not just about starting businesses. It's about creating value." When an audience member asked what Olin students went on to do after graduation, Andrew and Steve Schiffman pulled out the Post-Grad-Planning sheet and read the numbers of alumni in startups, going to Harvard Business School, and so forth; I piped in and said that the kids going to grad school or industry would  be acting entrepreneurial within their institutions as well.

Thing is, Olin made it really easy to start things. Businesses. Clubs. Independent studies. Classes. Projects. Committees. Hacking the school itself (in the "changing tradition and policy" sense, not the "MIT prank" sense). Our ideas don't have to all be good, or work, or even be remotely sane for people to take them seriously and allow them to happen. They don't so much allow them to happen as tell you to take whatever initiatives you want; it's an ask-forgiveness-not-permission mentality. In Gardner's words, the school is "...a fertile seedbed from which enlightenment can spring" - not that it will spring, but that it can, and part of allowing it to spring up is making it okay for many, many things to fail.

After the panel, we were treated to a lovely dinner at which a soon-to-be-professor from Florida gave me some wonderful advice about being a master of jack-of-all-tradesness. ("Being an integrator is a very important role! You probably won't get hired for that for your first job, so you may have to start with a specific project, then move on to as many different projects as you can, until they find out you're a wonderful generalist... and then you're set.") Once the conference attendees left, Erik and I had a good conversation about IdeaTree (his startup) and then walked back to the dorms, where I ended up staying at Boris' room, then waking up at 6am to catch the train to OLPC. I love my life right now.

Fun fact: Fenway House is over a century old, something I learned from Gui when he showed me the "basement" (really a crumbly dirt pit dug out by the foundations for storage) and pointed out that the upstairs rooms used to be slave quarters. If these walls could talk, indeed.

Books vs mobility

2007-06-12T21:05:00.001-04:00

Mobility is important to me. I like traveling. I like living in random places (although I prefer my crash locations to all be my own paid-for places so I can come and go as I choose without inconveniencing anyone), coming home at random hours, living relatively simply, packing light.

There's just one problem. I love books.

I love them so much and I read them so fast that I have - after extensive paring, mind you - four blue bins and one large box plus whatever I packed into my suitcase to read or re-read during my two weeks at home. More than half my worldly goods by volume are books. Far more than half if you go by weight. (In contrast, all my clothes, sheets, and blankets fit into a single bin.) At Olin, they took up the entirety of the space under my bed, a stack by my window, a stack on my drawers, and the entire back row of my desk and dresser.

They're an extension of my brain and my memory; I'll randomly grab and reference them for strange things, quoting Minsky in an english paper, Milton in a physics assignment. Some books are sentimental keepsakes (Oh the Places You'll Go! from my parents) and others I keep to remember the strange flips my brain turned when I first met them (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). I started taking down quotes and notes in .txt files so as to not have to carry some of my favorites around, but... how do you get rid of Boyce & DiPrima when you keep on randomly remembering differential equations you've forgotten and want to look up again?

They're also a status symbol. I long to have bookshelves like my professors', well-worn and packed with tomes from all the subjects they're interested in. Quirky additions; a book on fractals, another on negotiation, an old yearbook, a Foxtrot collection. For bibliophiles and graphomaniacs like me, a bookshelf is in some ways a snapshot of our brain. Hey, I didn't know you were into solar cars. Or clocks. Or philosophy.

How do I ensure I have access to the information I want, whenever I want it, without having to carry around too much dead-tree baggage from house to house? Scan them all and put the PDFs on a hard drive? (Ow.) Buy them online? (I like the physical action of page-turning, but that may be a habit I can grow out of.) Donate them to my local library? (I need to stay local to that library.) Have one "permanent" house and wander with sublets from there? (The long-term solution I want, but too expensive at present.) What do other bibliophile-nomads do about this?

A salute to the grounded

2007-06-11T16:41:00.001-04:00

I want to take a minute to thank the many sane people whose stability, kindness, and acts of dedication make it possible for the crazy folks to fly.

A good many of the most valuable people in any society will never burn with zeal for anything except the integrity and health and well-being of their own families - and if they achieve those goals, we need ask little more of them. There are other valuable members of a society who will never generate conviction about anything beyond the productive output of their hands or minds - and a sensible society will be grateful for their contributions. Nor will it be too quick to define some callings as noble and some as ordinary. One may not quite accept Oliver Wendell Holmes' dictum - "Every calling is great when greatly pursued" - but the grain of truth is there.

 --John Gardner

Not everyone is an uberstudent. Not everyone wants to be. That's wonderful and no less valuable than burning with an all-consuming passion for something(s). I was always jealous - and admiring - of the folks at Olin who managed to balance their schoolwork with sleep, maybe some soccer, a club or two, the ones who quietly built up their lab, shelved books, talked to their girlfriends on the phone... took time to breathe, have a more normal - if it's possible to be normal at Olin - life. It's wasn't apathy. They still cared. They just showed that caring in very different ways.

The Jam is Over.

2007-06-11T16:36:00.001-04:00

I got six hours of sleep last night. SIX HOURS! It was great. I feel all refreshed now.

Today was data entry day. After a trip to Olin to drop off checks (I need to get over my fear of handling sums over $100; in some respects it's a lot of money, in some respects it isn't, but it's just money. That's all.) SJ and I went back to the OLPC office and I typed up the surveys from yesterday's Game Jam tests. The results left me wondering how children find 3-5 hours a day to play video games. Probably the same way the average American finds over 4 hours a day to watch TV.

As a side note, the OLPC office is not unlike Gill's lab; open tables, people grabbing space to work... it's a little cleaner and doesn't have snakes or a Wii, and the age distribution of the people present is much broader than 18-22, but the atmosphere feels similar. I like it. I need to find another OLPC project to work on, because...

...the Jam is beginning to reach done-ness. It is slowly moving off my shelf to be replaced as alpha project by my research proposal - beta project is now my financial infrastructure, which I really need a Crunch Day for, with company. Something about moving thousands of dollars between accounts makes me much more nervous than it should, so I've been doing research and research and putting it off. I need company to help motivate/compete/guilt me into getting my finances set up already, slacker! If you're in the Boston area and want to do this, email me.

The hunt for the replacement of my Dell continues. Omar had a lovely, lovely IBM tablet at the Jam this weekend. SJ as a shiny IBM X60. They are both expensive... but not as expensive as EmpororLinux's Raven tablet (over $3k). That's right, folks; they got the handwriting rec and the fingerprint scanner working. They are shiny, tiny, and I would greatly like one. However, I still have no reliable source of income, so until then, I hope my Dell doesn't fall apart.

Finally, Gloria wrote a beautiful article on women in technical communities. If you are interested in technology or gender equity, please give it a read; I'm curious to hear what folks think and also whether similar behaviors are exhibited within other minorities-in-technology or minorities-in-<field> groups (as in, is this a "women in tech" thing, a "women in X" thing, a "minorities in tech" thing?)

One of the smaller sections at the end describes the practice of writing under a male pseudonym. I actually don't go by Mel because it's a male pseudonym. It was a nickname I chose for myself when I was 7 ("Mallory" was too long, "Mal" meant "bad," and "Mol/Mil/Mul" just sounded weird) without knowing it was a male/unisex name. That having been said, it's rather convenient. I don't hide the fact that I'm female, but people online will usually assume I'm a guy (giving me more "credibility") unless I've been introduced to them through someone else (which gives me "credibility" too). However, I'm also moderately blunt, less apologetic, and in speech/interests/manner more "stereotypically male-like" than most females I know. So there's a particular little experiment I have in mind to run sometime, just to see what happens.

Game Jam, Day 2

2007-06-10T08:59:00.001-04:00

Woke up this morning to find the Jam in the Boston Globe. One thing I'm learning: I was a very slow-paced reporter. I like to get to know my interview subjects and ask them what they'd like to share, but being interviewed for this one was like WHAM! Call me asap. WHAM! Busy, call back. WHAM! Question question question thank you DONE. The other reporters took more time, but I'm still reeling from how fast they go. Maybe I'm more of an anthropologist than a journalist; people are a lot more than sources of information. Also got interviewed (on-camera this time) this afternoon so we'll see how that goes.

We have... working... games. They're demoing at the midway check-in right now, and we've got a memory game, an Incredible-Machine-like physics simulation, an Abalone board, a flower breeding game, Reversi... and the games that were working last night (along with more that are very, very close to playable). (3D-pong just got a rousing round of applause - the levels have different-shaped paddles, gravity going down, sideways...)

Lunch was an adventure. Yifan, Bryce, Jessi, Boris, and I sliced and diced our way through obscene amounts of lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and bell peppers - and even more obscene amounts of bread - to make sandwiches to feed a small army, wrapping them in loads of paper towels (with scrawled marker letters indicating which ones were sundried-tomato-beef-cheese-onion and which were honey-mustard-ham-lettuce-pepper-mayo or whatever other permutation we could find), wrapped those in clean garbage bags, and trundled them in a rickety cart through three buildings, an elevator, and rain... and rain... and rain. When Yifan and Boris began unwrapping the sandwiches, there was a collective murmur of "ohmigod" at the sheer volume. We had perhaps 10 cubic feet of sandwich. Probably more. Dinner involved the largest pot of spaghetti I have ever cooked, along with the realization that with said spaghetti one could feed an entire conference for a little over $1 a head.

Judging tomorrow. Whee!

Game Jam, Day 1

2007-06-09T10:10:00.001-04:00

So far, so good. Folks came, we had food and soda (had to order a 2nd round of pizza, but eh) and now we have code cranking, amazing music and graphics, games working (or at least functional - they'll respond to things you do with them). I've seen at least two playable games - Kuku Anakula (Number Munchers with a chicken) and 3D Pong.

My feet are sore from walking most of the day in not-entirely-broken-in shoes. My camera is being exercised regularly. The blackboards have a few square feet of clear space left. I was supposed to draw a background for Team Minuteman, but my computer is rebelling right now so it's still in B&W - need to color it tomorrow. And can I just mention again how incredibly talented our full-time musician (Matt Myers) and artist (Roberto Christen) are? I thought I could arrange and draw reasonably fast, but seeing them in action is something else entirely.

Jessi, Nick, and Molly have been working tirelessly getting food, getting people online, manning the registration table (armed only with vague directions from an intermittently present organizer), and driving hither and yon. The entire Quirk family showed up to both coordinate and code, getting many of the XOs up and running and helping folks out with Pygame. Noah (coderanger) gave a fantastic pygame crash-course, Darius gave an intro to Jamming, Omar and his mother have been setting up our open discussions and acting as a bridge between code and education, and SJ is holding it all together and keeping us (especially me) from going insane.

And the laptops! XOs scattered around the room, icons popping up
everywhere - you can actually see other people on the network. It's a
friendly feeling. I can't wait until our judges (ages 3.5 to 11, so far) arrive on Sunday afternoon.

A bundle of sheets is lying in my temporary EH dorm room still wrapped in plastic as I'm taking the night watch and fighting off sleepiness with adrenaline. I'm hoping to be in bed before the sun comes up, but as that's in about an hour I had best hop to it (there are still teams awake coding, hence I'm awake writing this as my laptop is being too finicky today to do much else).

Olin students are slackers.

2007-06-05T18:57:00.001-04:00

Jon tells me I should post this to a wider audience, so here goes (about 4 weeks later). I wrote this letter to Jon and Debbie (two of our profs at Olin) the day after a meeting for the Task Force on Pedagogical Innovation (TFPI) where Jon mentioned that some people say that Olin students are slackers.

Dear Jon and Debbie,

I was sitting in anthro thinking about what Jon mentioned at TFPI (because as an Olin student I of course am lazy and never pay attention to classwork, especially when I'm studying unimportant topics outside of engineering), and was struck with the sudden realization that - well, they were right. We're completely unprepared, terrible engineers with bad attitudes, and it's going to cause a lot of trouble later on.

Olin students are slackers. We only do work when we absolutely have to, and even then we don't necessarily do it at all. Instead of studying for a bio exam, we take off early on Friday afternoons and drive to Hyde Park to coach a high school robotics team. Sometimes we'll stumble into math class bleary-eyed after staying up late the night before arguing about topology or something else that wasn't even taught in class and won't ever be on the test (what a waste of time). We start renewable energy businesses instead of turning in our papers free from typos. We have the nerve to walk into our professor's office even after we've failed a physics exam in order to talk - not about the exam, but about life and random topics we're interested in, for no good reason whatsoever.

Clearly we have no sense of priority - if we did, we'd be preparing for our futures by turning in clearly written, well-done assignments for assessment so that we can be certified as initiative-taking, independent-spirited engineers who will lead big changes in the future. How else will people know we can start wonderful things if we don't get certified to do so?

Olin students don't know what the outside world looks like. We live in a bubble and only leave campus to work, go to classes, dance, socialize, present at conferences, attend meetings, negotiate with investors, volunteer, and sometimes just for fun (we're slackers, you see). At the start of our projects, we spend a lot of time quietly watching and learning from people who are able to do things we don't understand, wasting valuable time we could be using to start solving the problem. We astonish customers by conversing articulately with them about their situation - this isn't what engineers are supposed to do, that's not what they hire us for. We've obviously been trained to do the wrong things.

In fact, we're ruined for life. We've lost the ability to lock ourselves up in a windowless room and produce technology unconstrained by the many contradictory needs of the people in this world. We even have the nerve to claim that not all problems are best solved through technology. We're engineers! Why are we proposing curricula, documentary films, business plans, and even the removal of technology from locations that are clearly spending a large amount of time and effort (and money) using them?

This can be traced back to the terrible idea of giving teenagers the freedom to design their own learning experiences; kids have no idea what they want to do or what they need to learn. Without proper guidance as to what real engineers do, we've steered ourselves down the wrong paths.

We insist on being able to make our own mistakes and pursue our own interests regardless of whether the syllabus covers it or not. Such blatant disrespect for authority will cause tremendous upheaval in the organizations we enter after graduation (assuming any of them will even want to hire us at all).

Olin students don't have solid engineering backgrounds. We're unable to rattle off the wave equation from memory and don't know the the mass of a silicon atom or the date the steam engine was invented, vital information that all engineers must know. Ask us what our area of focus is, and you'll often get disclaimers that we're interested in other things as well. Ask us if we know how to read a spectrogram, wire a power supply, or code in C, and you'll get the disturbingly noncommittal answer of "we can learn" instead of the course number where that topic was on the syllabus; we can't possibly have learned it unless we've taken a class. Because we spend our days engaged in intense play, we have done too few problem sets and listened to too few lectures to truly learn anything the correct way.

Raise this reasonable concern to students, and they'll dismiss it with an "Oh, but we can look that up!" We plunge irresponsibly into things without taking the time to amass the necessary background training first, cockily assuming we can handle whatever comes up. We can't! We fail at a tremendous percentage of the things we try, but even with that, we don't realize this is an indication we should change - instead, we call them "learning experiences," pick ourselves up, and launch into the next overambitious plan.

Olin students are coddled. We enjoy posh dormitories, excellent food, and an overly permissive community that allows us to monitor and discipline ourselves when we step out of line. We encourage wild projects and thoughts that have no hope of converging upon the correct answers. We support nonacademic pursuits such as fire juggling and voice lessons at the expense of more vital pursuits such as the study of thermodynamics and signal processing (although students will, with typical impudence and disciplinary inappropriateness, claim that fire juggling is thermodynamics and that singing into a microphone constitutes a signal processing system).

It's no wonder our faculty are burnt out; they are in the terrible position of having to deal with such students in such an environment and simply cannot teach things the proper way. These students are wasting the time of some of the smartest people in the world. Instead of absorbing in the most efficient manner the factual knowledge these brilliant minds contain and thereby aspiring to imitate their success, students have the arrogance to tell their professors what they want to learn. We are unable to simply accept the authority of those with more experience.

Who would ever want their students to be as lazy, clueless, unschooled, and spoiled as Olin students are?

Obligatory my-little-brother-graduated-from-high-school post

2007-06-04T17:18:00.001-04:00

My brother Jason graduated from high school yesterday, leading to the looking-back-now-I-can-laugh-at-it picture of me in an unkempt academic robe, hood sliding off one shoulder, (parents wanted a picture of both of us in grad gear), mortarboard in one hand and typing with the other fielding phone calls and chats for the Game Jam while intermittently dashing away to take family pictures.

The speeches were interesting, if somewhat predictable. The alumna speaker talked about how much more fortunate we were than the students in Africa that she works with, which was nice - but I grinned when she told the students they could be anything they wanted to be, like "a doctor, or a lawyer..." We live in an upper-class suburb indeed.

The other thing that struck me was how much the ceremony was like an assembly line. A huge, government-funded, 12-year, 700-kid assembly line.

Step 1: Reader calls the kid's name with the Graduation Intonation (TM) - first-name? middle-name? last-NAME. Since this is Glenview, home to the upper-class which includes plenty of Asians, we had a steady stream of "dah-dah? dah-dah? CHANG.", "dah-dah? dah-dah! LEE." and "dah-dah? dah-dah? PARK."s in the lineup. I thought we would never run out of Parks. (I wonder if any are going to school in Boston so we can tell them "Pahk, your cah's in Hahvahd yahd.")

Step 2: Kid stands next to the podium in dark blue gown and mortarboard and smiles for the camera. Acceptable variants include mortarboard upright on head or pinned back nearly perpendicular to the ground; honors sash or Glenbrook-scholar hood (visual distinctions based on GPA - I don't agree with this practice, but there it is), and sheepish/proud/I-know-you're-taking-my-picture smile.

Optional: For a few kids, family members or friends will whoop and cheer in the background as step 2 occurs (despite the request to refrain until all students have received their diplomas) followed by a muttered grumble of annoyance rippling through the audience

Step 3-7: Kid rotates 90 degrees clockwise, walks across the stage, shakes hand, gets diploma, shakes another hand, takes picture, joins long line of marching blue-robed students shuffling back to seat. Basically, step up, here? is? your? NAME. rotate, walk, shake, take, shake, picture, shuffle, shuffle, sit. Like boxes being packed and processed (with the Glorious Rewards of KNOLLIDJ, no less).

It was a long ceremony. They looped Pomp and Circumstance more times than I'd care to remember. "Some people need ceremony," my dad said on the way to the theatre. "I don't." "So why are we going?" I asked him. "Because we have to." Afterwards we went to dinner with one of my mom's old classmates and her husband, and then Jason went off to some graduation party which he came back from at 5am, proceeding then to sleep for 12 hours (he called from his cell phone upstairs to complain that I was playing piano at 3pm. "Why didn't you walk downstairs and tell me?" I asked. "I'm lazy," he said.")

Happy graduation, dorkboy. Wake up already so I can play piano.

The question is will it get done, not who is doing it

2007-06-01T20:03:00.000-04:00

Finally at home with a (mostly) working laptop and a working cell phone. I'm somewhat overwhelmed with the OLPC conference, definitely having a series of "why did I think I could do this?" moments, but I've been scheduling "grit your teeth and just get down to it" sessions which are helping a lot and chipping away at the mountain of Stuff That Needs To Be Done. Learning a lot.

From a Worldchanging article on OLPC:

If other projects can put a laptop in every child’s hands, the project achieves its goal, even if the laptop is not the XO.

Now that is exactly what I was talking about at the Presidents' Council for Olin. There's all this talk about other countries "beating us," other engineering schools someday becoming "more innovative," as if the objective were to come out on top of a hacker's horse race. We can't let that happen! some of the trustees cried.

Actually, I said, we should. Our competitors are our friends. If we inspire other folks to try new things, that's great! They certainly do the same for Olin. If other schools offer crazy, make-your-own educations, fantastic. And if other schools inspired by Olin someday surpass it in sheer magnitude of innovation and quality of education - well, the phoenix rises from the ashes again.* The greatest joy of a good teacher is to have your own students surpass you; it means you've taught them well.

The point is to get a laptop to these kids; it doesn't need to be an XO. The point is to get a good education to young engineers; it doesn't have to be an Olin one.

*And sometimes there is no "best," there is no "optimal" - there are many ways to be excellent, and we shouldn't try to rank-order everything.

Why now?

2007-05-30T22:21:00.000-04:00

I asked this question of the fledgling Olin student product design firm IdeaTree at the end of the semester. "Why now? Why not 5 years from now?" In the case of IdeaTree, I was asking them whether it made sense to start a design firm now or to start working towards* a design firm with a firm deadline - no pun intended - of full operation 5 years in the future, when the students involved (all frosh and sophomores) have industry experience and contacts?

*This is what Chris and I are working on, starting off as "geekspeak translators" that help folks talk about their tech needs with engineers (usually through writing specs and giving technology overviews). We've had two projects so far and things are going well, although we really need a better way of describing ourselves and a punchier name than "Human Readable Specs."

Anyway. For any decision of whether to take an action or not, there's a list of Reasons Yes and Reasons No for any point in time - call these Y(t) and N(t) and label them green and red, respectively, in the figures that follow.

In the simplest case, you take the action at the maximum Y(t) and minimum N(t) possible.For instance, the question "when should I die?" usually yields the answer "as late as possible." (fig 1) However, "when should I wear diapers?" has a much different answer for most people (fig 2) and "biologically speaking, when should I have kids?" usually peaks in your twenties. (fig 3)

"But Mel, the max value of Y(t) and the min value of N(t) usually don't coincide." True. So you can take the difference Y(t)-N(t) (fig 4, purple) and go at the maximum value of that, since it's the time when the positives most outweigh the negatives.

"But every issue is both positive and negative!" (or: "for every good reason to do it there's also a bad one!") Okay, okay. If Y(t)-N(t) is always constant (fig 5), go for the minimum value of Y(t)+N(t). In other words, when you have the fewest issues and therefore the least situational complexity (fig 6, blue) which could lead to uncertainty and definitely just gives you More Stuff To Deal With.

Astute former ECS students of mine will notice these graphs have few labels, no scales, no units, titles, etc. This brings up one last point - that there's also the question of whether the question deserves as much thought as that - some things are most optimal when you don't bother obsessively optimizing them. There are more ways to deal with the world than enumerating and rank-ordering items - stop planning and start living. Do it now.

Toothbuds and commercialist zen

2007-05-30T22:20:00.001-04:00

Wouldn't it be great if dentists could implant tooth buds into your jaw when they do a crown or make a filling? That way, when the filling reaches the end of its lifespan several years later, the matured tooth will wiggle it loose and shoulder in, white and shining, to take the filling's place. No need for repeated fillings which get progressively more invasive. I've got a vested interest in this, as my teeth are particularly susceptible to decay; since my extended coma occurred in early childhood, I have weakened enamel in my adult teeth.

Turns out some folks are working on this. (see the first abstract, "tissue-engineered odontogenesis in dog mandibles.")

And another random thought from a long-ago conversation with Eric Munsing. Is design a western variant of meditation, a sort of commercialist Zen? It emphasizes awareness, attention to details both large and small, the connections between things, subtle meanings. Its practitioners spend hours in contemplation and creation. It uses both sides of the mind (often denying there are two sides at all), leaps across cultures, transcends classes. It's about being here, awake. I recognize I'm mangling terms and possibly clutching at straws here, but what are the connections between the burgeoning field of "design thinking" and traditional notions of cultivating awareness?

Finally looked at my transcript.

2007-05-30T02:40:00.001-04:00

Since I've graduated and can't affect them any more, I've just looked at my grades[1] for the first time in a very long time.

It's a strangely detached feeling, lovely in its peacefulness. I grew up as a Studious Asian Child (TM). I used to wait anxiously for grades, work towards them, fret over them, and agonize over anything less than a B+. I pored over gradebooks whenever I could, making sure I was jockeying for a top score. It was another game to play, but it became an overriding input of my life. In middle school, I once spent an afternoon scrubbing a refrigerator to get an extra half-point to push me into an A- so I could get a 4.0. I kept a running total of points on my calculator. I was a grade addict, an plus-junkie, a check-head.

Sophomore year of college I went cold turkey. Now I don't even remember to check them until over a week after graduation, and that only when I read Boris's post about checking his. No drama, just mild surprise. They're numbers on a screen, measurements by one metric, some more meaningful to me than others, all small parts of my mental picture of "how I did" in a given class.

Yessssssssss.

In at least one small way, I've managed to master my education rather than the other way around, to use its metrics as an (occasionally helpful) guide to my own rather than the gospel to which my life is held. It sounds really simple, stupid, and obvious, but - hey, I'm a slow learner. It took me 15 years of getting grades to learn how to look at them this way. And if you've been raised in a "grades! grades! grades!" culture, it's easy to step back and calmly evaluate yourself when you're getting decent scores. It's much harder when you start tanking (by their standards). Accepting volatile information into your input stream and letting it affect your judgment but not cloud it - that's tough. I'll be old and wrinkled before I ever get a grasp on that, if I ever do. But this is a step.

Now to print the screen and give my parents the letters they've asked for for 4[2] years.[3] And work on The Project.[4]

[1]To anybody who has the notion that I actually get good grades, I will say (1) Hah. and (2) class grades don't necessarily correlate with how much you've learned.

[2]homophones wheeeeee!

[3]I love footnotes.

[4]Dun dun DUNNNN...

Addendum - 1:30am is the best time for your mother to read such documents, because she's sleepy enough to not be able to react much.

Mel Chua, college graduate... and furniture mover.

2007-05-29T23:31:00.001-04:00

Got shanghaied for another impromptu job today. Furniture relocation for a family friend who's moving to a retirement home. An entire dining room set from her apartment to our house, starting with the chairs. "I can carry two at once." The chairs were big but light, perhaps 10 pounds each. "No, no, you need to be careful with them." "I can carry two and be careful with them!" "No."

We lifted them one at a time from the living room to the hallway, from the hallway to the elevator, from the elevator to the lobby, from the lobby to the front door, from the front door to the sidewalk, from the sidewalk into the van. Then we drove the van home and carried chairs from the van to the front door, from the front door to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the dining room...

Then we drove the van back* and moved the tabletop. All I will say about the tabletop is that (1) it was delicate dark wood with a hinge in the middle and a glossy, impeccably varnished finish (2) the floor was alternating strips of carpet, raspy tile, and concrete (3) were it one foot larger in any direction, it would not have fit in the van, period and (4) ow, my back.

*it was rush hour. Joy!

I also got a talking-to from my mother about not trying to please everyone all the time. "You can't keep on giving if you don't have anything" was the overriding sentiment. Translation: "Please try to find some source of income instead of volunteering." If I didn't look out for myself, she said, nobody would (except the family, of course). I really need to get some sort of automated income - I hate having to think about earning money, I want to be able to volunteer all my life. Book royalties? Website advertising? 37 cents in interest from Disney stock every year (a birthday present from 20 years past; I own the smallest portion of Disney stock that it is possible to own). At least my housing and food are paid for until August 19. I don't know anything about this making-money stuff.

Time for a trip to the library. I need to learn, and fast.

First, however, I need to learn how to organize a conference. I'm doing so in the hardest way possible right now - giving it a shot and making all sorts of wonderful inexperienced mistakes. My "do NOT do this again" catalog is expanding exponentially right now. God, I'm looking forward to running my second conference and not making all these blunders - it's gonna be great the second time around!

'Course, it's going to be fantastic the first time too. So now I get back to my flood of emails...

Design Squad @ Continuum (belated)

2007-05-29T02:45:00.001-04:00

Last summer during brainstorm training at Continuum we did our final round on ways to build a hill for the upcoming Design Squad show (a game show for teenage engineers). Since the episode hadn't started filming yet (alas, they shot about a week after I left) we weren't supposed to talk about it at the time in case one of the contestants would hear. Now that it's out, I can say that they designed "summer sleds" that roll down grassy hills - the end products resemble either toboggans-on-wheels or very low-riding wagons.

I finally watched the episode tonight (episode 13, "Winner Takes All") and the grass hill in the office - they built one inside by the main staircase - looks even better than I'd thought. Continuum is really as cool as it looks, especially after the office renovation - although there isn't incessant screaming, cheering, and camera zooming a-la MTV as per the episode. It's also really weird to see your former coworkers on television. I'm biased, but seeing Continuum people up there was the best part of the whole show for me.

Ok, so I could have done without the incessant pop licks and Really! Upbeat! Cheerfulness! but shows like Design Squad are a step in the right direction towards making engineering cool - and just as important, more transparent - to students. I'm looking forward to seeing where they go. My own documentary* on engineering teams is going to take a less scripted, more reflective approach - it'll be interesting to see how the two compare.

*Yeah, I really need to figure out how to get digital film equipment. I knew microphones were expensive, but sheesh! Any recs for getting budget cameras/lights/microphones/lens/software/etc? I'll need it pretty long-term, a bit over a month (July to mid-August).

ECS tutorials follow me into my sleep.

2007-05-28T13:24:00.001-04:00

My SCOPE team was watching Gallimore present to a bunch of collared-shirt-and-glasses types in the back of a room that looked like AC109. He was doing very well. I was getting very restless. Most of the audience seemed to be following the presentation, but the front row was made of 6 kids (aside from them all speaking English, they were the most diverse group of kids you could imagine) around the ages of 10-11 years old who were utterly lost. Too many abstractions in the presentation for the NDA's sake. "I'm Vague-Man! I work at the store! I do things!" I wanted to burst in and whisper to Eric that dude, the kids didn't get it. But that wasn't the point of our presentation; they weren't our customers, so he was giving the right kind of talk.

So when it came my turn to talk, I ignored the collared shirts, hunkered down in front of the kids, and gave the example of using our system to control... a Lego motor. And the scene gradually shifted into an ECS tutorial. A motor materialized at my elbow when I turned around, and when I turned from drawing diagrams of torque on the blackboard it was not surprising to find it hooked up to a DAQ, which was plugged into a laptop chugging MATLAB which had definitely not been on the table before...

We talked about Ohm's law (again) and I found myself thinking, for completely unrelated reasons as the kids pretended to be electrons, that I should really pick up a book on semiconductors afterwards (I should). It wasn't until a towheaded boy piped up about the nonlinearity of various components that I realized it was odd for 5th graders to understand the differential equations associated with viscous damping. How are they asking these questions? I thought in wonder. Oh! I'm dreaming!

Gosh, I should add this stuff to the textbook! I thought, and found myself staring at the side of a digital alarm clock, followed by a slight wave of disappointment that I wasn't actually teaching.

Lots of thinking to do. And lots of work. I just need to be at my computer long enough to do it. The family's been doing a good job of keeping me away from my laptop, but I'm going to tell them that today, after lunch, I really need to get work done now.

In Chicago, and glory do I have a communications backlog.

2007-05-24T20:54:00.001-04:00

I'm finally back home in Chicago, meaning that I've got a lot of correspondence catching-up to do (how does one accumulate over a thousand emails without noticing?) and I'll be on radio silence for another day or so taking care of that. However, I would like to note that:

I failed the Olin challenge twice in the airport - Lynn Stein was on the plane to Paris that was boarding at the gate across from mine, and then I turn around and get on the plane only to discover Joanne Kossuth on the same flight.
My brother is a cynical little man*. And I say this with as much affection as possible. We are very different people indeed.**
Other families give graduation gifts like... I don't know, cameras, or computers, or even cooking equipment. My graduation present... was underwear. "Well, you need to buy it sometime," my mom says. I must admit that it is a rather pragmatic gift, since it's surprisingly expensive stuff and this certainly saves me money. But still. (And she complains that I'm strange!)

*A hypothetical scenario is probably the easiest way to describe this. Imagine giving each of us a paperclip.

Me: A paperclip! Oh boy, a paperclip! Thank you, thank you! I'm gonna figure out a million things to do with this paperclip - ooh, maybe I could use it as a jumper wire... or a pin... or - hey, look at this shiny paperclip! You want to go find out about how it was manufactured? Hey, could we teach other people how to use paperclips? Wow, a paperclip! I have a paperclip!

Jason: Thank you for the paperclip. How can I get another?

**which is why he's going to Stanford. Something about wanting to study business. Our parents say that we would make a very good partnership (opposites balancing each other out and all that) as long as we don't kill each other first. I told them we got over that back in elementary school when I learned that he could beat me up and he learned that I had a social network (at the time, the network was called "Mommy") that would exact vengeance in my place.

Catching up, thinking, and sleeping a lot. But mostly catching up now.

Justice or mercy?

2007-05-20T01:14:00.001-04:00

Sometimes there's both. Even when you don't deserve either.

I'll sort this out later once I'm done grading, packing, cleaning... and graduating. Right now it's time to do what has to get done.

Hello, adulthood. Here I come.

The exponential decay of attachment

2007-05-19T09:36:00.001-04:00

Contrary to popular belief (if it ever was one to begin with), graduation day doesn't indicate a clean release from your school. It's a marker in the middle of a long fading-out that begins months earlier when you start thinking about job-hunting, and ends months or even years later (indeed, for some people it never quite ends at all).

I'm in the middle of typing up grade reports for ECS, the last bit of TAing I'll do as an undergraduate. When that's done, I still need to migrate my website, switch over my email, update my address, track down all the websites I have control over and hand them off, do a committee writeup, and on and on and on... it's the longest goodbye. I'm trying to rid myself of all Olin obligations (but not connections!) as quickly as humanly possible so that I can let go of it, and it can let go of me, and whatever I do for Olin in the future is out of choice and not obligation. So... transition documents, yay! I also have another personal project up my sleeve that won't be finished for another week or two after graduation day. More on this later, most likely.

My mother says that I am loyal to a fault. That it takes me a while to decide to become part of a group or to make someone a close friend, but once I have loyalty to something I will march into the jaws of hell for it, go out of my way to do anything for it. It's always been hard for me to detach, even when circumstances change; my loyalties have high inertia. But circumstances are changing, and I am letting go. Letting go. Letting go.

Easy to type, but hard to do.

Suite dinner

2007-05-18T15:12:00.001-04:00

My suite went out for dinner a few nights ago. It was a microsm of why I'm going to miss them so much.

We drove to Oga's (a local Japanese place), sat down, and waited. Chandra and I had a conversation about how to redesign the umbrella-wrapper in the corner (it places your umbrella in a plastic bag so it won't drip) so that it would be cheaper to manufacture. "You don't actually need springs there, so what quantities would it take before it's cheaper to injection mold it rather than folding the sheet metal?" "Actually, I would extrude it..."

Got our seats. Sat down, ordered, waited. Conversation ranged from robotics to buying houses to fathers to how the glazing process worked for the tiny ceramic dishes that were supposed to hold soy sauce. (Kristen explained the pottery production process in 60 seconds.)

Got our food. Ate, ordered dessert, waited, got dessert, ate. Discussed the mass-manufacturing techniques that could have made the glass bowl that ice cream came, in while admiring its design (flowers). On the way to the car, Chandra mentioned that she wanted to make drunken watermelon (soak watermelon in liquor, in this case sake, so that it absorbs the alcohol - the classic way appears to be drilling a hole, sticking the neck of an open bottle into the watermelon, and waiting) and we had an argument about osmosis, with me advocating sticking two different liquors in the watermelon, one in each end, so that we had a drink-type gradient, and Chandra holding firm on having separate sample containers with watermelon slices soaking in each type of drink to maintain control over the samples.

On the way back to Olin, Gallimore's car radio started playing "Bring Me To Life," which was a song we rehearsed for License Server (our band) once upon a time. We'll probably never play together again; life is taking us to too many corners of the earth (and our instruments are too big to haul on a whim). When we turned into the front drive of Olin, Eric stopped the car and Kristen hummed taps to mark one of our last entrances into campus.

VanWyk started taking down the large Japanese paintings from our lounge today. The walls are glaringly white, and the corner formerly known as "Pile Of Tools" shockingly empty. My shelves of books are being packed into blue tubs, and I now own 1 computer (this laptop) instead of 4, but I now have enough money to pay rent and food for the entire summer and buy a folding bike, so life is good. It's always good.

Graduation rehearsal in 45 minutes. I should pick up my gown.

Ondelettes are adorable.

2007-05-14T04:55:00.001-04:00

W00t. Just sent in a paper on using swarm robotics as a model for classrooms (yes, this is related to Boris's project). It's the counterpart to his model of the teacher-student broadcast system, which works well for lectures; my premise was that student-driven small group projects are better modeled by a purely peer-to-peer system of mobile robots with a mesh network (no teacher-arbiter). Along the way, I learned about wavelets* and now want to learn more; apparently Gilbert Strang, one of my textbook-heroes, has written a book on it... and the book is expensive. Plus I have many more books to read. And I can always hang out in MIT's libraries this summer, and I know they have that book because I looked it up for a friend there years ago. Yes. That's a better plan.

What's left: a SCOPE poster (which is waiting on Eric Gallimore), editing a paper on the history of Olin's curriculum revisions, and then a Thursday afternoon presentation for my anthropology class which is half-meta; the first part is on observations of an engineering student (me) learning anthropology and why it's been both tremendously difficult and incredibly enlightening, the second part on my research proposal to study the subcultures of engineering education in universities around the world. I was originally focusing solely on pedagogical techniques, but conversations with Pres. Miller and feedback from the discussions at the President's Council meeting have persuaded me that it's the pervasive culture of a place that makes a difference in student learning more than a mere tally of what methods are used in the classrooms. (Culture, of course, is much harder to "pin down." If I'm not careful I might end up with a doctoral thesis on my hands.**) More about this later.

The sun rises. Time to sleep. I'm exhausted and a weird mix of conflicting emotions right now, but the dominant feeling is peaceful happiness so I'm going to run with that and just fall into bed for a couple of hours.

* in French, ondelettes. Note: Naming your ideas well is important. Half the fun of learning about wavelets is being able to say a word that means "little waves" over and over again; it's the signal processing equivalent of calling it the iNoun. Instant theoretical coolness.

**Not...that I'd mind that, really.

Glory be, I can write about education again!

2007-05-11T11:11:00.001-04:00

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. -- Herbert Simon, Recipient of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and the A.M. Turing Award

I've been on a blog hiatus for a while because I thought it would make me more productive/less distracted. As it turns out, it does the opposite. Writing allows me to solidify my thoughts (through creating "physical" artifacts) and gives me a way to let ideas go because I know they're recorded somewhere. It's the "output" side of the equation, the input side being my astonishing reading rate. I didn't realize my reading speed was a working asset until my junior year of college, surprisingly - up 'till then I'd thought it was a handy recreational ability that helped me waste time reading stuff I "wasn't supposed to" (meaning that it wasn't assigned). So I'm back.

Mindblurt the first: personal learning environments for managing individual explorations into "hard" topics.

What's missing from the learning resources we have today? Here's a quote I love from "The Search For Design In Electrical Engineering Education":

"Finally, we didn't realize until mid-stream the importance of having  appropriate textbook references available, because otherwise there are so many unanswered questions that frustration easily occurred. When teaching in a “do-learn” fashion, we must give students very good resources to find answers to their questions. We now realize that we need to write a new text-book (or at minimum a set of course notes) that presents the material in a manner appropriate for a “do-learn” subject. Current text books, for example, explain synchronous detectors, but use language that depends on a semester or more of ECE."

Yesterday I met the founders of a great project called e3f (education for everyone everywhere - for free). They're creating a place where people can rank and review learning materials on the web, especially material past the K-12 level - I'm looking forward to seeing where they go! One of the things they discussed was enabling people to eventually build "portfolios" and personal learning environments (PLEs) to keep track of the things they're learning, so I sent them some of the links I've been reading through on PLEs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Learning_Environment (of course)
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/ple/ - research group at Bolton University
http://headspacej.blogspot.com/2006/02/personal-learning-environment-model.html - one model for a PLE; I think it contains all the components, but not necessarily in the right organization.
http://michelemartin.typepad.com/thebambooprojectblog/2007/04/my_personal_lea.html - a walkthrough of one person's PLE
http://www.elearningeuropa.info/files/media/media11561.pdf - very skimmable paper

Mindblurt the second: Libraries and self-directed learning

I'm also struggling with the relationship between libraries and autodidacts. I know there is one, but what is it? From an email I sent MetaOlin and Dee Magnoni (the head of Olin's library) this morning:

I think of librarians as (among other things) teachers and propagaters of information fluency rather than The People Who Are Really Information Fluent... I'm still struggling to pin down a global and concise definition of "library" and "librarian" - just like it took years for me to summarize "engineer/engineering" as "problem-solver/solving problems."

Not quite sure where this train of thought is going yet. It shall be fun to watch. I feel like I'm drifting away from engineering, but I haven't really - I'm just starting to focus into the domains of using technology to teach, and teaching about technology, and taking a sabbatical to get more of a grounding in education before I jump back into the study of engineering. Someday, somehow, I'm still going to get that second* PhD in EE or CS. At least that's still the plan.

*The first is going to be something related to education, although whether it'll be an education degree, an anthopology degree, or something else entirely is completely up for grabs still. If I want to bridge these two ivory towers, I'd better become part of both of them first.

So I turned 21...

2007-05-11T11:00:00.001-04:00

...and learned that alcohol burns. It's warm in your throat and your stomach, and it makes your tongue feel all bitter-tingly, although you can't taste the alcohol as much when it's moving through or around in your mouth, but mostly after you swallow. I wonder why? Is it because that's when you inhale so it gets the chance to evaporate/oxidize? Anyone know organic chemistry?

It was an interesting first exposure - a lot of my friends came over to watch me try my first drink (a rum-pineapple-orange concoction by Kristen Dorsey). I made the mistake of sipping the shot and immediately made a terrible face that Mark Penner may or may not have caught on camera. The subsequent sips of cold white chocolate liqueur, courtesy of Ray Young, were much better. I didn't have very much, since I had to write a paper that night; I've yet to get tipsy (and somewhat doubt I'll ever really get drunk, which suits me fine).

Some folks ask me why I waited until my birthday to drink. Personal preference, really. I don't think it's morally wrong to consume alcohol at any age, and think that the current legal minimum age law in America (21) is wholly arbitrary, and to be honest, a little dumb. (This is assuming responsible consumption - not that you don't get drunk, but that you make sure everything and everybody is safe and fully informed, which is a good general rule of thumb for all activities in life anyway. I vehemently oppose reckless drinking no matter how old you are.) I don't think responsible drinking ought to be an act of rebellion. However, I never had a burning desire to try alcohol, and the "wait 'till you're legal" thing was very meaningful to my parents, so I waited. That's it. Not a big deal. Doesn't make me any better, any more prudish, any less social than my friends who didn't wait. (And I'm very grateful to them and the drinking environment at Olin, since I've never felt pressured to try alcohol before I wanted to.)

Having tried alcohol now after years of listening to descriptions of it, I'm fascinated by the relationship of my previous conception of alcohol and my current understanding of what it's like to drink - sort of the theory vs. practice gap, or the "how do you describe red to a blind person" thing. I've got to find out more about the psychological and physiological effects of alcohol now, beyond the dinky little symptoms lists I found online the night before. I realize that the usual effect of having a few drinks is to make you stop thinking intellectual thoughts, but hey - to each their own.