cars and computers

A coworker referenced this quote today. I've heard it before, but it was still funny to me.

"If cars were like computers, you'd be able to buy a car for $1000 that gets 500 miles to the gallon and goes 300 miles per hour. Of course this car would occasionally explode for no reason, killing all the occupants."

Chichen Itza

As promised, here are some of my photos from our Mexico trip. I realized that they are all of Chichen Itza, which makes sense, I guess.

















The last picture documents pretty much the only real Mexican food that we ate during the whole trip. We stopped by a small restaurant outside of the site for a late lunch, and our driver recommended "panuchos" and "salbutes" as the local Yucutan specialties. They were both basically like fried tacos; the panuchos (pictured above) had bean paste spread between two tortillas fried together, and the salbutes were fluffier and doughier with no bean paste. I liked the salbutes better.

gender stereotyping of children

(Here's another post that's been in the queue for months. I'm just going to post it as is...)

I've been attending baby showers for several years now, and I've realized that gender stereotypes start to be enforced even before babies are born. The types of clothes, toys, and other gifts that people buy for girl babies and boy babies are noticeably different.

It made me wonder if it would be to a child's benefit to hide its gender for a few years, so that unconscious stereotypes wouldn't affect its mental and even physical development at such a young age?

That idea was still floating around in my head a few months ago when I ran across a Newsweek article entitled Pink Brain, Blue Brain addressing a similar topic. The article discusses Lise Eliot's (similarly named) new book, which cites a couple of particularly interesting studies. I've excerpted the parts that I found intriguing and insightful, below.

In one [study], scientists dressed newborns in gender-neutral clothes and misled adults about their sex. The adults described the "boys" (actually girls) as angry or distressed more often than did adults who thought they were observing girls, and described the "girls" (actually boys) as happy and socially engaged more than adults who knew the babies were boys.

In another study, mothers estimated how steep a slope their 11-month-olds could crawl down. Moms of boys got it right to within one degree; moms of girls underestimated what their daughters could do by nine degrees, even though there are no differences in the motor skills of boys and girls.

6 and 12-month-olds of both sexes prefer dolls to trucks...they settle into sex-based play preferences only around age 1, which is when they grasp what sex they are, identify strongly with it, and confirm to how they see other, usually older, boys or girls behaving.

realization

Pasteurized is just another word for "less tasty". Mmm, French cheese.

refreshing

D and I spent the long weekend in Cancun with some of my coworkers. We stayed at the all-inclusive Dreams Resort Cancun, which meant we spent most of the weekend ordering our mixed drinks with extra shots on the side. D also loved the 24-hour unlimited free room service.

On Sunday, we all took a day trip to Chichen Itza. It was more impressive than I'd expected, and we spent several hours roaming around the area while dodging souvenir hawkers. At some point I'll try and post some photos.

I quite enjoyed being abroad for V-day; we were nearly finished with our (completely unromantic, table-of-seven) dinner when we remembered what day it was. I'm thinking we just might have to make a habit of escaping the madness by leaving the country. Yes, I hate pink. :-p

highs and lows

We launched a major product earlier this week at work.

The last few weeks have been a complete rollercoaster. It seemed like every day, a potentially launch-blocking issue would arise, and then a bunch of engineers would wrestle it into submission, so we would wake up the next day still convinced that we were going to launch on time. I think there were literally seven days of mini-crises and solutions.

Two Fridays ago, we found a bug that we thought would actually prevent us from launching. Many engineer-hours later (I think Tuesday around noon), it was discovered that we could fix the problem without making a new build of a particular server, and we were on track once again.

The following Thursday, we found yet another seemingly intractable blocking issue, and the launch was cancelled. People were pretty bummed the rest of the day. Then, Friday at noon, a crazy plan was concocted to launch on time anyway. Many, many people volunteered to work weekends, early mornings (starting at 4am, I kid you not), and otherwise went above and beyond the call of duty. Still, it was probably 50-50 whether the plan would succeed.

The final call was made the day before launch, after making sure everything was proceeding as expected. The rest of the day, I was too excited to get much done, but all the people involved in the launch process must have done their jobs, because we did indeed roll out our feature according to the original schedule. I think maybe all the adversity made it even more awesome when in the end, it actually happened.

Whew! Now I'm buried in a pile of user-reported bugs, but so far none of them seem too serious, knock on wood.

butternut squash w/ barley, corn, & leeks

We got an entire butternut squash this week in our veggie box. I wasn't sure what to do with it at first, but then I saw this wild rice pilaf recipe on epicurious that looked interesting. I didn't have any wild rice, but I did have some pearl barley, so I went with that. I also didn't bother with the parsley.

Here's what I did, in the end:

Butternut Squash w/ Barley, Corn, & Leeks

1. Cook 1-2 cups barley in chicken stock and water for 30-45 minutes.

2. Cut the butternut squash into cubes, toss w/ oil, salt & pepper, and bake at 400 degrees until soft. (I think this took about 20 minutes.)

3. Dice the white part of two leeks, and cook two ears of white corn. Simmer the leeks and corn in water with 1 tablespoon butter, for about 5 minutes. Add garlic salt.

4. Add the squash and barley to the leeks and corn, and mix together.

It turned out pretty well, although I was adjusting the whole time to make sure neither the barley nor the vegetables were too watery or too dry, so I'm not confident about any of the measurements.

useless software

I uninstalled Microsoft Office 2003 Professional from my Windows laptop today. It turns out I had last used it in July of 2006 (at least according to the Control Panel).

smart television

It was a long day at work yesterday. When I finally got home, I watched an episode of House, and then a rerun of The West Wing.

It takes a surprising amount of concentration to follow both those shows, and I was thinking to myself that I can't possibly be rotting my brain when I watch them. I was reminded me of this article which I first read nearly five years ago, about how watching television makes you smarter.

I had meant to write a blog post about it, and had actually started writing one, but I could never summarize the salient points to my satisfaction. If I start trying again I'll probably never post this at all, so I'm just going to excerpt (what I think is) the notable part, here.

When a sci-fi script inserts into some advanced lab a nonscientist who keeps asking the science geeks to explain what they're doing with that particle accelerator, that's a flashing arrow that gives the audience precisely the information it needs in order to make sense of the ensuing plot. (''Whatever you do, don't spill water on it, or you'll set off a massive explosion!'') These hints serve as a kind of narrative hand-holding. Implicitly, they say to the audience, ''We realize you have no idea what a particle accelerator is, but here's the deal: all you need to know is that it's a big fancy thing that explodes when wet.'' They focus the mind on relevant details: ''Don't worry about whether the baby sitter is going to break up with her boyfriend. Worry about that guy lurking in the bushes.'' They reduce the amount of analytic work you need to do to make sense of a story. All you have to do is follow the arrows.

By this standard, popular television has never been harder to follow. If narrative threads have experienced a population explosion over the past 20 years, flashing arrows have grown correspondingly scarce. Watching our pinnacle of early 80's TV drama, ''Hill Street Blues,'' we find there's an informational wholeness to each scene that differs markedly from what you see on shows like ''The West Wing'' or ''The Sopranos'' or ''Alias'' or ''E.R.''

''Hill Street'' has ambiguities about future events: will a convicted killer be executed? Will Furillo marry Joyce Davenport? Will Renko find it in himself to bust a favorite singer for cocaine possession? But the present-tense of each scene explains itself to the viewer with little ambiguity. There's an open question or a mystery driving each of these stories -- how will it all turn out? -- but there's no mystery about the immediate activity on the screen. A contemporary drama like ''The West Wing,'' on the other hand, constantly embeds mysteries into the present-tense events: you see characters performing actions or discussing events about which crucial information has been deliberately withheld. Anyone who has watched more than a handful of ''The West Wing'' episodes closely will know the feeling: scene after scene refers to some clearly crucial but unexplained piece of information, and after the sixth reference, you'll find yourself wishing you could rewind the tape to figure out what they're talking about, assuming you've missed something. And then you realize that you're supposed to be confused. The open question posed by these sequences is not ''How will this turn out in the end?'' The question is ''What's happening right now?''

The deliberate lack of hand-holding extends down to the microlevel of dialogue as well. Popular entertainment that addresses technical issues -- whether they are the intricacies of passing legislation, or of performing a heart bypass, or of operating a particle accelerator -- conventionally switches between two modes of information in dialogue: texture and substance. Texture is all the arcane verbiage provided to convince the viewer that they're watching Actual Doctors at Work; substance is the material planted amid the background texture that the viewer needs make sense of the plot.

Conventionally, narratives demarcate the line between texture and substance by inserting cues that flag or translate the important data. There's an unintentionally comical moment in the 2004 blockbuster ''The Day After Tomorrow'' in which the beleaguered climatologist (played by Dennis Quaid) announces his theory about the imminent arrival of a new ice age to a gathering of government officials. In his speech, he warns that ''we have hit a critical desalinization point!'' At this moment, the writer-director Roland Emmerich -- a master of brazen arrow-flashing -- has an official follow with the obliging remark: ''It would explain what's driving this extreme weather.'' They might as well have had a flashing ''Unlocked!'' arrow on the screen.

The dialogue on shows like ''The West Wing'' and ''E.R.,'' on the other hand, doesn't talk down to its audiences. It rushes by, the words accelerating in sync with the high-speed tracking shots that glide through the corridors and operating rooms. The characters talk faster in these shows, but the truly remarkable thing about the dialogue is not purely a matter of speed; it's the willingness to immerse the audience in information that most viewers won't understand. Here's a typical scene from ''E.R.'':

[WEAVER AND WRIGHT push a gurney containing a 16-year-old girl. Her parents, JANNA AND FRANK MIKAMI, follow close behind. CARTER AND LUCY fall in.]
WEAVER: 16-year-old, unconscious, history of biliary atresia.
CARTER: Hepatic coma?
WEAVER: Looks like it.
MR. MIKAMI: She was doing fine until six months ago.
CARTER: What medication is she on?
MRS. MIKAMI: Ampicillin, tobramycin, vitamins a, d and k.
LUCY: Skin's jaundiced.
WEAVER: Same with the sclera. Breath smells sweet.
CARTER: Fetor hepaticus?
WEAVER: Yep.
LUCY: What's that?
WEAVER: Her liver's shut down. Let's dip a urine. [To CARTER] Guys, it's getting a little crowded in here, why don't you deal with the parents? Start lactulose, 30 cc's per NG.
CARTER: We're giving medicine to clean her blood.
WEAVER: Blood in the urine, two-plus.
CARTER: The liver failure is causing her blood not to clot.
MRS. MIKAMI: Oh, God. . . .
CARTER: Is she on the transplant list?
MR. MIKAMI: She's been Status 2a for six months, but they haven't been able to find her a match.
CARTER: Why? What's her blood type?
MR. MIKAMI: AB.
[This hits CARTER like a lightning bolt. LUCY gets it, too. They share a look.]

There are flashing arrows here, of course -- ''The liver failure is causing her blood not to clot'' -- but the ratio of medical jargon to layperson translation is remarkably high. From a purely narrative point of view, the decisive line arrives at the very end: ''AB.'' The 16-year-old's blood type connects her to an earlier plot line, involving a cerebral-hemorrhage victim who -- after being dramatically revived in one of the opening scenes -- ends up brain-dead. Far earlier, before the liver-failure scene above, Carter briefly discusses harvesting the hemorrhage victim's organs for transplants, and another doctor makes a passing reference to his blood type being the rare AB (thus making him an unlikely donor). The twist here revolves around a statistically unlikely event happening at the E.R. -- an otherwise perfect liver donor showing up just in time to donate his liver to a recipient with the same rare blood type. But the show reveals this twist with remarkable subtlety. To make sense of that last ''AB'' line -- and the look of disbelief on Carter's and Lucy's faces -- you have to recall a passing remark uttered earlier regarding a character who belongs to a completely different thread. Shows like ''E.R.'' may have more blood and guts than popular TV had a generation ago, but when it comes to storytelling, they possess a quality that can only be described as subtlety and discretion.

easily entertained

I went to a two-year-old's birthday party last weekend. In addition to the usual hors d'oeuvres, cake, and decorations, the parents had hired a clown/magician who spent over an hour making balloon animals, doing magic tricks, and otherwise entertaining the crowd.

The balloon animals were well done and some were really complicated; I was most impressed with a Mickey Mouse that incorporated at least seven balloons in different colors (black, red, yellow, white, and flesh-colored).

Some of the magic tricks were easy to figure out. Some were definitely not. I spent several minutes trying to figure out how he did a sequence of tricks with a piece of rope that kept splitting into multiple pieces and getting put back together.

The kids were totally mesmerized. They ranged in age from two to ten, and most of them required no attention for the duration of the show. Awesome.

It was a surprisingly good show for something designed for preschoolers. I'm not sure how much it cost, but I'm guessing it was well worth the money.

chasing culture

When it comes to classical music, I find that I gravitate towards somber pieces. For example, I love Mozart's Requiem Mass in D minor, and wanted to use it in a wedding processional, but that idea was vetoed.

I heard Yo-Yo Ma playing some Bach Cello Suites when I was a kid, and I decided that I liked cello music. I think there's something about the tone of the cello that is inherently a little bit melancholy? Maybe I'm making that up.

Later on, I saw him play in an amazing West Wing holiday episode, which made me really want to see him live.

So, when I heard that Yo-Yo Ma would be playing with the San Francisco Symphony this season, I put the single ticket sales date on my calendar. That morning, I spent an hour clicking on windows in four browsers on two computers, and finally got my tickets (awesome loge seats near the center).

On the day of the performance, MTT came out and treated the audience to a short "fun" piece. I've totally blanked on the name of it now, but it was a nice transition from the rainy weather outside.

Then, the official program started with a short piece by Sibelius called "Oceanides". It was lighthearted and entertaining and the water theme was very clear. I'd never heard anything by Sibelius before, so it was a pleasant surprise.

Next up was the prime event; Yo-Yo Ma playing Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 2 with the symphony. He was very good, but I think I am not a huge Shostakovich fan. It's too "modern" for my taste. I actually preferred the Tchaikovsky "Little Russian" Symphony which followed, but I'm a sucker for Tchaikovsky. Still, it was a great evening of music.

I topped it off by going home and spending the rest of the the evening listening to Bach Cello Suites on YouTube.