I was just now looking at the Barack Obama Wikipedia article and was surprised to learn about his religion:
Obama, how could you???
I refreshed the wiki article, and the vandalism disappeared. Click here to see what it looked like when it was active.
The UK Daily Star confirms that I am not wasting my time with my fruitless pursuits of the Zodiac killer’s unsolved mysteries:
But that’s if [Britney Spears] can tear herself away from the internet where she has been indulging her latest obsession – trying to solve crime.
The star has become fascinated by the unsolved Zodiac killings that took place in California in the late 1960s.
They are the US equivalent of our Jack The Ripper murders. The recent film Zodiac about the case starring Jake Gyllenhaal, 26, captured Britney’s imagination.
She has been spending hours on a website called zodiackiller.com and is convinced she can crack the case as many people believe the culprit is still alive.
Gimme my Cheetos, y’all; We’re gonna crack this thing!!
Chris sent me this funny email he received this morning:
From: terptix
Sent: Mon 10/22/2007 1:38 AM
To: Chris
Subject: Ticket NotificationThis is just a reminder that the Request and Claim period for student
tickets for the @Sport game vs. @Opponent on @EventDate will begin
shortly online. Please check the student ticket website for exact
schedule information.
Somebody needs to put some data behind that template!
It was sad to have to come back from our London trip. We had a lot of fun experiencing the city with Chris, Angel, and Eris. London is such a fascinating city and there is just so much to see. We are always struck by London’s diversity of cultures; walking down a busy street, you’ll overhear dozens of different languages being spoken. Our rental apartment was very nice. It was situated on the relatively quiet Pembroke Street near the busy streets of Kensington High Street and Earl’s Court.
Our spacious and comfortable apartment was home to a vast array of hard-to-use and barely-working appliances with extremely confusing user interfaces packed with incomprehensible hieroglyphics. The combination of bizarre buttons, confusing instructions, and malfunctioning appliances generated a nine-day-long comedy of errors that added some frustration and entertainment value to our vacation.
We can’t go to London without sampling a pub, so Kathryn and I picked one at random on Kensington High Street. She tried to order an amaretto sour, and the bartender had no idea what we were talking about, even after we explained how to make it. OK, how about a cosmopolitan then? Nope, that also stumped the bartender. So Kathryn finally settled a gin and tonic. I looked at the draught taps and fancied a pint of bitter. The bartender then told me the bad news that all the draughts were empty. What kind of pub is this? Do you in fact have anything whatsoever to drink?? Somehow I ended up with an amaretto mixed with Pepsi. Luckily, there were thousands of other pubs to choose from and I was able to sample some British ale.
We visited many popular tourist spots: The London Eye (awesome views of the city from the top of an enormous, slow-moving ferris wheel), Big Ben / Parliament, Kensington Gardens, Trafalgar Square (the opening ceremonies of this year’s Tour de France happened here during our trip), St. James’ Palace (obligatory tourist vs guard photo op), “Theatreland” in London’s West End, National History Museum (site of the fascinating GECCO “Complexity and Evolution” keynote by Richard Dawkins, Lewis Wolpert and Steve Jones, SoHo, Chinatown (many awesome types of Asian food – ALL IN ONE PLACE!), Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Science Museum, Amora sex museum (the world’s first “sex theme park”), London Trocadero (cool entertainment complex with a huge arcade and casino), Picadilly Circus (I got a free tart here), the Tower of London (so many stories about famous executions, so little time), St. Paul’s Cathedral (incomprehensibly huge and beautiful), Tate Modern (the building is as stark as some of the modern art it houses), Millennium Bridge (Angel made it across despite her fear!), the Bramah Museum of Tea & Coffee (the McCubbins enjoyed high tea there), and the Carnaby Street shops (there is a very cool toy store there called Playlounge).
The food. Oh, the food. London is a glorious cornucopia of dishes for every palate. While there we sampled stuff like Iranian food at Yas Persian restaurant (bad service, incredible food), pan-Asian food (Japanese, Chinese dim sum, Thai curry) at Ikkyusan restaurant, fresh baguettes, pub food, fish and chips, Greek cuisine, gourmet hamburgers (so big and juicy you gotta eat em with fork and knife), and halal kebabs. Chris and Angel are great cooks so they made coq au vin at the apartment – YUMM!! Seriously, we need to get Jon and Kate AND Chris and Angel together on our next trip somewhere, so we can really benefit from their combined cooking knowledge. We’ll eat like kings!!!
Chris and Angel had the hankering for dim sum, so we all went to a dim sum place in Chinatown. The dim sum was awesome. Except for the chicken feet.
Iris and Eris had a lot of fun as well. I think we wore them out a lot with all the walking through the city. Plus, they wore each other out because they are such good friends and play very well together. Exhausting for the parents as well! Iris and Eris both say that their favorite thing about visiting London was riding the trains. Mind the gap!!
GECCO Conference
A highlight of the trip for me was attending the GECCO evolutionary computing conference and presenting my poster, the culmination of a toy project I started last year in a graduate course in Genetic Algorithms. Chris also went to GECCO. He’s a legitimate computer science researcher (he does R&D for a living for APL), so he got to go as part of his job to present his paper (Using Genetic Algorithms for Naval Subsystem Damage Assessment and Design Improvements). I went to GECCO mainly as a newbie bystander, since I don’t yet have as much research experience. Which made me quite starry-eyed when I saw all the cool research going on.
We saw many tutorials and presentations – the speakers represented many countries: Spain, England, America, Italy, Germany, Romania, Poland, Iran, Czech Republic, Portugal, Netherlands, and Australia. It was a good feeling to be part of something so globally-reaching. The first tutorial we attended was John Koza‘s introduction to genetic programming. He gave us a fascinating tour of solving problems with genetic programming by essentially making computers program themselves using evolution-inspired techniques. The automated inventions arising from the techniques are fascinating – some have even infringed on existing patents for inventions previously designed by humans (example).
(an odd side note: John Koza also invented the scratch-off lottery ticket).
Other interesting tutorials and presentations we attended:
The keynote event was very interesting. Richard Dawkins, Lewis Wolpert, and Steve Jones, well-known in biology circles, answered questions about complexity in evolution. The fascinating discussion was punctuated by some hilarious anecdotes. For example, Wolpert described how he got into biology in the first place, and was once asked why he was so fascinated with evolutionary development. His answer: “My nose is too big, and some of my genitals are a bit small, and I want to understand this.” Steve Jones joked about how many sociological things, from acne to zoophilia (from A to Z), can be mistakenly explained using evolutionary language. For example, acne can be a way to make sexually maturing but financially bereft young males undesirable to females. And zoophilia can be a way for shepherds (and sheep) to gain a survival advantage, since “the sheep like it”, and will congregate with shepherds that will give them this extra love. Another Steve Jones quote: “I am a geneticist. And my job is to make sex boring.”
After the keynote, the attendees poured into the poster session held in an overly narrow hallway in the natural history museum. “Nibbles” of food were provided, which is an overstatement of how little food was actually provided: a few handfuls of nuts in small shared dishes. I had fun meeting people while explaining my poster; there were a lot of interesting people at GECCO. Many of the people I talked to about my poster had good ideas on different ways to apply the art-generation color-matching technique to other areas.
There’s me in the blue shirt explaining my poster. It was kind of like being in grade school again, standing with a science fair project poster. Photo credit: Kumara Sastry.
Ah yes, turns out I’ve done this before… but it’s been 17 years! (photo is from my junior high school yearbook)
Fractals! I just can’t get away from computer graphics and fractals. This is a picture of an old math fair project from my junior high school yearbook.
Hmm, I’ve regressed to my childhood. This level of self-indulgence can only mean that the ending to this blog post is overdue!
We’re off to London with the McCubbins for a vacation and for GECCO 2007! At least, we hope the McCubbins are coming — they filed for their passports seventeen weeks ago, and as of today (the day before our flight leaves for London), they still have not received their passports! Can you believe it? Thank you, U.S. Government, for making it harder to leave and return to the U.S.
Seventeen weeks. The State Department guidelines have always said 10 to 12 weeks, tops, for non-expedited passports. Gah! There’s a good chance they will get them in time today, since they’ve gone down to the passport office in D.C. directly. We’re crossing our fingers.
Hopefully, the recent drama in London won’t affect us. Our apartment is about 5 miles from where the first bomb was found.
The final, slightly less boring version of my poster for the GECCO poster session is available here: poster-final.pdf (supplement: poster-supplement-final.pdf).
Kathryn sat at the intersection, waiting to turn left. A truck with an attached trailer sat at the same intersection, in the lane next to her, waiting to go straight. The light turned green, and both vehicles tried to go their separate ways. But the truck’s trailer got snagged on Kathryn’s front right bumper, and dragged her car into the intersection. And she had a work client in the car! Luckily, there were no injuries – just body damage to the front right bumper. Both drivers pulled over and exchanged information and filed the police report. At this point, Kathryn found out that the other driver owns an auto body shop. He even gave her a business card!
Coincidence? Who knows!
I drove down to the site of the accident to drive Kathryn’s car to a different auto body shop to get the repair estimate. Her car is still sort of drivable – the only thing dodgy is the right front tire, which has some as yet non-fatal gashes in it. When we told the other auto body shop the name of the guy who was driving the truck, they recognized his name, and told us that he had filed for bankruptcy at some point in the past.
So, that got the conspiracy theory gears going in my head. Now I’m really starting to think that the guy was desperate for business!
“Looking back at the age of eighty-eight over the fifty-seven years of my political work in England, knowing what I aimed at and the results, meditating on the history of Britain and the world since 1914, I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing. The world today and the history of the human anthill during the last fifty-seven years would be exactly the same as it is if I had played pingpong instead of sitting on committees and writing books and memoranda. I have therefore to make the rather ignominious confession to myself and to anyone who may read this book that I must have in a long life ground through between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of perfectly useless work.”
– Leonard Woolf, from The Journey Not the Arrival Matters.
Playing with YouTube again – here is a short video of Iris going down the inflatable slide at “Too Much Fun”, a fun-for-the-kids event we went too with the McCubbins over the weekend.
Her scream as she comes down the slide reminds me of the Dean Scream.
And here is a video of Eris and Iris bouncing around:
Kathryn flew to San Diego to visit a friend for a few days, and while she was gone, I rented United 93, the movie about the hijacked 9/11 flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. Over the weekend, Iris pointed to the picture of the airplane on the DVD disc and, recognizing an airplane, innocently asked me “Is that the airplane Mommy is on”? The disturbing juxtaposition surprised me. I laughed, and said, “I hope not!!”
After mentioning this to Chris, he told me about a similar incident:
This morning Eris is in the car on the way to school and she’s like “first I was 1 years old, then 2 years old, then 3 years old, and then I’m gonna die”
I think Eris left out a few steps in her description there.
Found this funny picture languishing on my computer —
A while ago, Jim got some junk mail at BKA with a funny tagline under his name. He entered that as his job title on some web form he filled out to receive product information from some company.
