Category: Uncategorized

You may have noticed that my normally far-from-hectic posting rate has gone from snail-like to glacial over the last few weeks. Well, be assured that it’s going to stay that way for the remainder of 2006. I intend to have even less to say than usual.

Whether we like it or not, this is a season of consumption and so, for no good reason, here is a list of some of the best things I consumed in 2006.

Best fiction I read. Three Junes by Julia Glass. Not my kind of book at all, which makes it all the more remarkable that I found it unputdownable.

Best non-fiction I read. Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, who is my new intellectual hero. It was published back in 1991, but my interest in this kind of stuff is relatively recent. I was put onto it via Susan Blackmore’s excellent Consciousness, A Very Short Introduction. A book I’ll be reading again in the next couple of weeks, and one that changed how I look at life & death.

Best movie I watched. Hidden (Cache), directed by Michael Haneke. Watching movies or TV is usually thought to be a passive act. But with this movie you are absolutely engaged from the first shot, wondering what it is you are seeing. Are you the watcher? Are you watching the watcher? Are you a spectator watching the watched? It’s riveting. Then there is that one scene in the middle where, all of a sudden, everyone who sees it just gasps or swears. And to finish it off, there is the four-minute long final shot, which you scan from corner to corner for clues. Are there answers to the puzzles the movie poses? Who cares? Not me. Great stuff.

Best TV Series I watched. Intelligence. It’s unusual to be able to watch a Canadian drama series and realize that it’s not "good, considering" but just really really good. From the makers of Da Vinci’s Inquest, and shown on CBC on Tuesdays, the multiple plotlines, shady deals, double crossing, and excellent acting from the leads (Ian Tracey and Klea Scott) as well as from the big supporting cast make this the best series I’ve seen since Oz.

Best radio show I listened to. Continues to be Writers and Company, where Eleanor Wachtel does a great job of interviewing writers. She gives them space to talk, doesn’t get in the way, and as a result I’ve found several authors I like from this show.

Best restaurant I visited. Brars. Who knew that in the middle of the warehouses and  machine shops of the light-industry wasteland that is Brampton, in one of a million mini-malls scattered around Toronto airport, there is a vegetarian Indian restaurant that serves up to a thousand people in an evening, provides good value (it’s a buffet for $13), and the great atmosphere of many people enjoying their company and their food. Big tables, lots of rooms, and lots of food (and on the evening I was there, great company too). Being the only non-subcontinent people in the restaurant was a bit of an eye-opener as well – I guess I have some things to learn about this place I live.

Best food shop I bought from – The usual culprits in Kitchener Waterloo are the gourmet places, like Vincenzo’s, who are pretty good I must admit. But this was the year I discovered Onkar Food & Spices on Hazelglen Road in Kitchener. Good Indian ingredients at good prices. Plus I get to walk the dog through Monarch Woods when I go there.

Best other shop in K-W: J&J Cards and Collectibles on Weber Street, just south of University. Some years ago it was a place that sold Pokemon cards for the kids, Magic Cards and Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia for the teenagers, and so on. In the last couple of years it has expanded, and it now has a great selection of board games, chess stuff, and lots more. The Brothers J have done a great job with this place.

Best book launch of 2006 – No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart, at Words Worth books back in June. Great that so many people came out (and bought books). A belated thanks to everyone.

Labour saving devices save you physical effort, so unless you deliberately do something about it, labour saving devices cut down your physical exercise and make you unfit.

New research (via Slashdot and the Independent) shows that brain-saving devices cut down your brain exercise and make you stupid.

On the bright side, the research also shows that those who share my laziness are not condemned to remain stupid, because our brain can still develop.

Satellite navigation systems can stunt your brain, preventing it from developing, according to scientists. They have discovered that taxi drivers have actually grown more brain cells because of all the knowledge they keep in their heads.

When the scientists compared the brains of taxi drivers with those of other drivers, they found the cabbies had more grey matter in the area of the brain associated with memory.

They believe that this part of the brain, the mid-posterior hippocampus, is where black-cab drivers store a mental map of London, including up to 25,000 street names and the location of all the major tourist attractions.

The research is the first to show that the brains of adults can grow in response to specialist use. It has been known that areas of children’s brains can grow when they learn music or a language.

Link: Independent Online Edition > Health Medical.

Here’s why people who say that the unemployed should offer to work for less are wrong. It’s actually about tuition fees, but it’s a reminder that price can act as a signal of quality. What’s a little odd is that the price seems to be taken as a signal of quality even though the university itself did not change – that is, there is no guarantee that students who pay the full fees get what they are paying for.

John Strassburger, the president of Ursinus College, a small liberal
arts institution here in the eastern Pennsylvania countryside, vividly
remembers the day that the chairman of the board of trustees told him
the college was losing applicants because of its tuition.

 

At Ursinus College officials determined that tuition was too low to
draw enough students. So they raised it, and applications surged.

It was too low.

So
early in 2000 the board voted to raise tuition and fees 17.6 percent,
to $23,460 (and to include a laptop for every incoming student to help
soften the blow). Then it waited to see what would happen.

Ursinus
received nearly 200 more applications than the year before. Within four
years the size of the freshman class had risen 35 percent, to 454
students. Applicants had apparently concluded that if the college cost
more, it must be better.

“It’s bizarre and it’s embarrassing, but it’s probably true,” Dr. Strassburger said.

Ursinus
also did something more: it raised student aid by nearly 20 percent, to
just under $12.9 million, meaning that a majority of its students paid
less than half price.

Ursinus is not unique. With the race for rankings and choice students shaping college pricing, the University of Notre Dame, Bryn Mawr College, Rice University,
the University of Richmond and Hendrix College, in Conway, Ark., are
just a few that have sharply increased tuition to match colleges they
consider their rivals, while also providing more financial assistance.

The
recognition that families associate price with quality, and that a
tuition rise, accompanied by discounts, can lure more applicants and
revenue, has helped produce an economy in academe something like that
in the health care system, with prices rising faster than inflation but
with many consumers paying less than full price…

More at the New York Times, below.

Link: In Tuition Game, Popularity Rises With Price – New York Times.

A glimpse inside the world of that old efficient, lean and mean, innovative private industry, Microsoft style, from someone who spent a year working on the shutdown menu.

The scary thing about the story is that you can imagine how it happens, one step at a time, with a good reason for each step. This is not a "what’s wrong with Microsoft" story, this is a "what happens in big organizations" story. Read and weep.

Link: moblog: The Windows Shutdown crapfest.

So just on my team, these are the people who came to every single planning meeting about this feature [the shutdown menu]:

1 program manager

1 developer

1 developer lead

2 testers

1 test lead

1 UI designer

1 user experience expert

—

8 people total

These planning meetings happened every week, for the entire year I worked on Windows.
In addition to the above, we had dependencies on the shell team (the guys who wrote, designed and tested the rest of the Start menu), and on the kernel team (who promised to deliver functionality to make our shutdown UI as clean and simple as we wanted it). The relevant part of the shell team was about the same size as our team, as was the relevant part of kernel team.
So that nets us a conservative estimate of 24 people involved in this feature. Also each team of 8 was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let’s add them in too, giving us 24   (6 * 3) – 1 (the shared manager) 41 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked. Somewhere in those other 17 was somebody who did have final say but who that was I have no idea since when I left the team — after a year — there was still no decision about exactly how this feature would work.

By the way "feature" is much too strong a word; a better description would be "menu". Really. By the time I left the team the total code that I’d written for this "feature" was a couple hundred lines, tops.

Start with a long history of taking pride in haggling, put up some
websites for these hagglers to team up, and what you get is tuangou: a clever form of collective action among consumers.

Continue reading

There is a very seasonal and pretty spooky ghost story at Stageleft, see A Curious Incident.

Real or fake? Well, call me a sucker, but I’d say it’s genuine.

So, following on from my recent gripe about quantum computing, it turns out that there are others who have thought along similar lines, and actually done the work of going beyond generalized grumbles.

Specifically, Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized posts about a paper by M. I. Dyakonov called Is Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation Really Possible? Dyakonov goes on about the theory of error-correction in (hypothetical) quantum computers, which I know nothing of, and in particular criticizes the "threshold theorem", but he also makes some more elementary points that I did, so here are a few excerpts from Mr/Ms Dyakonov’s paper just to show I’m not completely out to lunch.

The enormous literature devoted to [fault-tolerant quantum computation]… is purely mathematical. It is mostly produced by computer scientists with a limited understanding of physics and a somewhat restricted perception of quantum mechanics as nothing more than unitary transformations in Hilbert space plus "entanglement".

[on decoherence] While the relaxation of two-level systems was thoroughly studied during a large part of the 20th century, and is quite well understood, in the quantum computing literature there is a strong tendency to make it look as an obscure quantum phenomenon.

Elsewhere, Dyakonov takes aim at the assumptions of ideal behaviour that permeate discussions of the feasibility of quantum computing, and to my mind does a pretty good job of bringing a little reality into the discussion. Click the  Shtetl-Optimized link above for some more discussion of the paper.