The Blogg

June 27, 2009

Taking The Smartphone Plunge

Filed under: Computing, Personal — chadhogg @ 9:52 pm

My wife is required to own a smartphone (which the residency program will pay for), gets a 22% discount at Verizon stores, and was able to get released from her current T-Mobile contract because they do not have coverage in Williamsport. She decided on the BlackBerry Curve 8330, and we went to purchase one and sign a Verizon contract this evening. I intended to join her contract to take advantage of the discount and opt-out of the AT&T plan that I have shared with my family for the past 6 years, getting whatever inexpensive (or preferably free) handset that they would give me.

When the salesman informed me that we could get a second BlackBerry for free with the purchase, and that with our discount a data plan would only cost $23 per month, I caved in. A phenomenon that I feared has already begun: while we were able to live on my meager salary for years, now that Rachel is getting a paycheck it is much easier to spend that extra money on things that would have seemed extravagant last year than to put it all into debt relief.

The ability to send and receive email from virtually anywhere will be remarkably nice, and it appears I should be able to get an SSH client, with which I should be able to monitor experiments, write code, and otherwise work on the go. It is time, I suppose, for me to take up this additional totem of geekery. However, I have so far found the interface to be clunky, the connection slow, and the screen real estate small enough to make doing much of anything tedious. Hopefully with time and experience I will no longer notice these limitations. In the meantime, do you know of any cool/useful things I can do with the BlackBerry? Tethering would have been nice, but requires an additional fee. There is an application store, but it seems to be not nearly as extensive as what the iPhone purportedly has or that I expect Android-based phones to eventually have.

June 26, 2009

Laptop Shopping

Filed under: Computing, Personal — chadhogg @ 10:36 am

My current laptop (a Dell Inspiron 8600) has been falling apart for quite some time, and my repairs to it have not exactly returned it to factory condition. I’ve been talking about replacing it for quite a while, but actual funding for such a thing may be available soon. Unlike many people, I do not care very much about dimensions or weight; if it fits in my backpack it will be sufficiently small and portable for me. The following are my preferences, ordered from most important to least:

  1. I should be able to natively run Linux on it, with good support for all hardware components.
  2. I should be able to natively run Windows XP on it.
  3. It should be powerful enough to avoid obsolescence in the next five years, but not so powerful that I am paying a premium for cutting-edge technology.
  4. It should be durable and as user-serviceable as possible.
  5. It should be powerful enough to run modern games, although not necessarily with highest-quality graphics.

Although Apple is getting much closer to my ideals, it still seems silly to pay the premium for their hardware when I have no intention of running their operating system. The only offerings from Dell or Lenovo that meet preference 5 seem to be horribly overpriced, and I’ve not necessarily seen anything from Toshiba that looks attractive either.

I’ve been looking hard at several models from Acer, ASUS, and MSI equipped with NVIDIA cards in the second tier at http://www.notebookcheck.net/Comparison-of-Graphic-Cards.130.0.html, and they are definitely powerful for their price on newegg.com. I’ve only purchased components like motherboards from these manufacturers in the past, but have had no problems with them. I am somewhat concerned that servicing a machine from one of these companies might be significantly more difficult that with one of the major brands.

If you have any suggestions, I would very much appreciate them. I hate making decisions that I am going to have to live with for the next half-decade.

June 25, 2009

Book Review: I, Claudius

Filed under: Books — chadhogg @ 11:20 am

As an exercise in collating evidence from multiple sources and writing a fictional narrative to explain them, I, Claudius is excellent. My knowledge of Roman history is quite poor, but from what I have read much of the book is either known to have happened or is at least plausible based on our records of the time. It also serves as the most thorough treatise I have seen on that old chestnut, “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The text is mostly clear, but I must complain about the very large number of characters with similar names. People are mentioned at several points through the narrative with an expectation that you will recall what has previously been said about them and that you remember the distinction between Drusus and Drusilla, Urgulanilla and Urgulania, and so forth. Only the titular narrator is fully fleshed out, while most other characters we know only be their deeds deemed worthy enough of historical record. (Or in many cases, the deeds done to them.) I can imagine that I would have enjoyed this much more if I had been raised in an era that stressed knowledge of classical antiquity in education, but it was enjoyable even so.

June 20, 2009

Lockhart’s Lament

Filed under: Education, Personal — chadhogg @ 4:21 pm

Last night I was introduced through Slashdot to Lockhart’s Lament, an essay written by a disgruntled mathematics educator on how far what is taught in math classes differs from the practice of mathematics. Although a bit daunting at 25 pages, it is well worth the time. I do not agree with Lockhart that his particular field of expertise is more poorly covered than others in primary and secondary schools, but he provides a compelling example of one. I am also unconvinced that the heart of mathematics is quite as artistic and unrelated to practicality as he would have you believe; he easily admits that to do mathematics is to discover or invent ways to solve problems, and I believe that throughout history those problems have been largely inspired by practical concerns. Finally, I disagree with Lockhart about the importance of learning to perform arithmetic at a young age. Perhaps we could agree that this should be called something other than mathematics, but I believe it is nearly as important as the ability to read, write, and speak natural language.

I find myself wholly in agreement with Lockhart, however, on his main premise: that mathematics is not and should not be the memorization of facts and theorems or turning oneself into an automaton capable of performing calculations by following repetition of an algorithm without understanding it. To ask a question and to discover an answer is where real thinking is learned. Even when the student fails to find an answer, to have grappled with the problem and understood it, then given a well-known answer devised by some long-dead Greek with an explanation of the thought process that led to it is orders of magnitude more enlightening than to simply be told the results of that work. The whole point of recording discoveries is so that future generations will not need to spend their lifetimes working on the same problem, but not to forget the reasoning behind the solution.

I recall that in high school one of my friends came to find out that some of the strangest constants we had learned about were related in a highly unusual manner by what I now know to be Euler’s identity. My recollection is that he found this to be the case by randomly playing with these numbers in his calculator while the teacher was covering something far less interesting, but that may be incorrect. In any case, we asked our mathematics teacher about this and she was unable to give a satisfactory response. If my memory is correct we determined that it had something to do with polar coordinates and believed a full explanation to be beyond our current understanding. I had forgotten about it since then and, to this day, have no real intuition as to why it might be true; it is simply a fact that I know.

In another mathematical anecdote, at some point in the last year I was attempting to solve some practical problem in combinatorics. In the process of laborious calculations to solve this problem, I unintentionally derived the identity that the sum of all positive integers less than or equal to n is n(n+1)/2. At first I was frustrated about the time I could have saved if I had remembered this fact, but then I found myself quite impressed with the utility and simplicity of the identity itself; I rather doubt that I will forget it again. If it had been taught to me in this way, I doubt I would have done so even once.

Even before reading Mr. Lockhart’s essay I harbored feelings of this sort about science education. To do science is not simply to know things, but to find ways to determine things that are unknown. In my science courses in high school and even the two physics courses I took in college we spent plenty of time in the lab performing experiments and observing results. In exceptional cases we may have even hypothesized as to what results we expected and explained why, but none of this was really science. Performing experiments is the grunt work of scientific discovery; formulating reasonable and interesting hypotheses, and designing the experiments to prove or disprove them, is actual science. I do not recall doing much, if any, of that in school

Actually, the things we did as fun exercises, not thinking of them as teaching us anything (certainly nothing on which we could be tested) were much closer to awakening a scientific mind. Trying to build the strongest structure possible out of marshmallows and toothpicks does not exactly follow the scientific method, but it requires critical thinking about the directions and magnitudes of forces and strengths of materials, and observing the outcomes can open up all sorts of questions about why one’s intuitions did not match reality.

Some disciplines seem to do a better job of this than others. English classes certainly involved students actively writing, reading, and critiquing literature, for example. Thankfully, I think that computer scientists actually do a better job of this than most. Even in our most introductory courses we essentially give students a few basic building blocks and have them go solve problems in their own way, hopefully giving them advice on how to construct more elegant or efficient solutions, but not training them to imitate the masters without any real understanding of what they are doing.

June 19, 2009

Health Care Reform

Filed under: Personal, Politics — chadhogg @ 9:53 pm

With Congress debating ways to reform health care throughout the United States, editorialists railing for or against a single-payer system, and my wife today attending a 4-hour lecture on billing at the hospital where she will be working in a week, my thoughts have been on health care costs. I think there is no question that our current system has gross inefficiencies, with gigantic bureaucracies built up to determine what has been done, what it should cost, who should pay for it, etc. Removing the middleman of private insurers could certainly be worth some significant savings, but turning things over to government generally means more infrastructure, not less. That is a debate I will leave (for now) to those wiser and more knowledgeable than I.

What I would like to discuss today may be an even more controversial position: that what we need is less health care. I do not recall ever hearing anyone else espouse this opinion, but it seems quite logical to me. If we think about it, the relationship between resources spent on health care and the results we get from it (average life expectancy, quality of life, whatever metric you prefer) is a sigmoid function of the type shown below. There is a minimum result level that we will attain even if none of our resources are spent on health care. The results rapidly increase as we allocate a moderate amount of resources toward them, then continue to grow very slowly as more and more resources are used.

Graph of logistic function

Because we value human life and health so highly, it is natural to find ourselves on the asymptote of this curve, doing whatever we can to get the best possible results. If this is the case, then perhaps we could reduce expenditures by 30% and lose only 5% in quality. It may seem that no price should be too high to take care of the health of our citizens, but a simple thought experiment will demonstrate that this is not the case. Suppose that a single person had a very rare disease. A guaranteed cure for this disease is known, but a single dose of it can only be manufactured by the combined labor of 100 people for a year and the destruction of 1000 acres of rainforest in raw materials. No one, except perhaps our unfortunate victim, would advocate this as reasonable.

Knowing where to draw the line is of course quite tricky. It is easy to decide that some treatment is not cost-effective when none of our loved ones are in need of it, but another thing entirely when this is not the case. If we were to do something like this an impartial, evidence-based commission would need to make the decisions. I would guess, however, that the easiest thing to justify axing would be treatments that have been well-studied, are known in the average case to only increase life expectancy by a few months, and require an enormous expenditure per patient.

I am not, of course, proposing that such care should be outlawed, simply that it should not be considered a public good in a possible nationalized system. When insurers refuse to cover the least cost-effective treatments it causes outrage, and perhaps it should if people have been paying premiums under the belief that they will in return be given the best care money can buy. But that assumption must be changed; we could easily, if we valued it highly enough, spend our entire GDP on health care. There comes a point, however, where allocating resources elsewhere would result in a much higher increase in quality of life for society at large.

Perhaps my feelings on this stem from my own preferences. I have health insurance, but not the sort that would help me out in the event of a very serious illness. I want to be taken care of if I have a broken bone, a staphylococcus infection, arthritis, etc. If I were diagnosed with something that is likely to kill me within a few months if left untreated or a few years if I undergo a treatment regimen that will keep me in the hospital and sickly most of the time, I would choose the former in a second. Perhaps I would feel differently if I had children I wanted to see grow up, but my life has been full enough that at this point I feel no need to grasp for more, however unpleasant it might be.

June 16, 2009

Book Review: Cryptonomicon

Filed under: Books — chadhogg @ 5:42 pm

It is difficult for me to express how much I enjoyed this book. At 918 pages and two dozen major characters interacting in two parallel eras it was an undertaking, but infinitely easier to follow than most of the literature I’ve been consuming. What makes the book great to me is not the grand plot but the way Stephenson describes the insignificant details like how to properly eat Cap’n Crunch. More than in anything else I have read, his characters talk and think like I do, or at least how I would if I were more eloquent. I have yet to decide whether this is because Stephenson has a better understanding of human nature than most or because Stephenson and I as geeks are so radically different from the rest of the population. I hope the former is at least somewhat true.

That said, the plot is indeed engaging. The World War II story arc in particular left me wanting more. Like many authors of highly technical fiction I fear that Stephenson falls into the trap of providing enough detail about the technology to make people who are already familiar with it roll their eyes but not enough to help a novice really understand it. As seems to be the case with all of Stephenson’s works, the ending was unpleasantly abrupt and left many unanswered questions in my mind. Perhaps the Baroque Cycle will answer some of them.

There is a temptation when reading historical fiction to accept far too much as historical fact. I know much about Allied intelligence and cryptography during the war because of my own interest, but I would have loved to read a more extensive appendix discussing which parts of the book are known fact, accepted probability, conspiracy theory, or fictive imagination. My edition (Avon books hardcover) contained quite a few clear typographical or transcription errors, so perhaps there is room for a new edition to include such a thing.

In spite of a few flaws mentioned above, I cannot recommend Cryptonomicon more highly to anyone who is willing to take on a work of its size. The prose contained within is well worth your time. If you hate it, perhaps we have an answer to my question above.

Game Review: The Nameless Mod

Filed under: Computing — chadhogg @ 2:28 pm

If I were asked to name my five favorite computer games ever, it would not be an easy task. It is quite easy, however, to know that Deux Ex is among them. The revolutionary mashing together of first-person shooter, role-playing game, and adventure game remains almost unique in its awesomeness. A sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, was released 3 years later but was disappointing dumbed-down from the original.

I was thus quite excited to see a notice about the publication of The Nameless Mod, a completely new game built on the Deus Ex engine and philosophy over the course of 7 years by a team of volunteers. As soon as was possible I got myself a working Windows machine, installed Deus Ex, and began playing through the mod.

The creators had very large expectations to meet by working with such an epic system, and I am pleased to say that they exceeded them in almost every way. The game is easily as long as the original. They claim a play time of 15 hours for a normal user or 20 for someone who enjoys exploring. I put an official 24 hours into it, in addition to at least half that many of dying or exploring something and reloading when I found it to be fruitless. That was only a single playthrough and, like the original game, there are enough decision points and factions vying for your services that it sounds like I could go through again and complete few of the same missions. Beyond that, I was only able to use about half of the weapons in the game. It would be worth a replay just to face the same challenges with a vastly different arsenal. The game world is lush with flavoring, from real-life books and music to a fantastic sense of humor about gaming through the fourth wall and the flaws of the original game. Every line (and there are very many of them) is voice-acted at a quality at least as good as the commercial game. If they had put together a few levels and a decent storyline without any of these frills it would have been an outstanding achievement. With them, it is the greatest fan-produced work of entertainment I have ever seen.

The game is not, however, completely without flaws. Very early in the story you are thrown out into a very large city to explore, with a very poor map. This sounds wonderful to people who thrive on exploring an open environment, like myself, but it goes a bit too far. The problem is compounded by the fact that the entire game takes place at night and the city is poorly lighted. It adds to the mood certainly, but it did not take long at all for me to become very frustrated with the tedium involved in traversing this great area with only a tiny flashlight beam for guidance. There were a few points in the game where it was not at all clear to me what I needed to do, and I do not believe this was because I failed to notice clues. In the course of play I encountered two hard crashes, but these are just as likely to be caused by the engine than the modification. At one point in the plot I had an objective to rescue some hostages from a group of terrorists. The hostages were there, but there were no terrorists to be seen and I was never able to accomplish the goal. In another situation I tried to help someone escape from a holding cell and he was hostile towards me. Much later in the game he appeared and had a conversation with me that gave no explanation for his prior behavior.

The setting of the game is inside a web-based forum about Deus Ex. At first glance this seems extremely cheesy, and many of the game mechanics make absolutely no sense in a world of avatars interacting through a message board. Fortunately, the execution is so good that you quickly forget the more embarrassing parts of it and suspend disbelief in the rest.

I need to take a break from it for a while and actually be productive, but I think it is quite likely I will play through the mod again. When I encountered those few confusing points in the game I looked for a walkthrough on the web and was surprised to find that none existed. While there is an IRC channel dedicated to the mod where players can get help, I am toying with the idea of writing one myself. This would be a massive undertaking when I have so many other things I need to be doing, but I may take it on anyway.

Concert Review: Billtown Blues Festival

Filed under: Music — chadhogg @ 12:58 pm

This past Sunday I attended the 20th annual Billtown Blues Festival, held at the Lycoming County fairgrounds in Hughesville, PA. I paid $18 in advance for my ticket ($23 at the door). I am terrible at estimating these sorts of things, but I would say somewhere between 500 and 1000 people were in attendance. spread out in lawn chairs on a field in front of a medium-sized stage. There was a canopy in the back for people who wanted some shade. I started out there, but found that the music was only slightly louder than the conversations of people around me. Moving towards the front I found this to be less true, but they still could have used a boost in volume. Out in the sun, I got a predictable sunburn on my ears and forearms.

I did not make it in time to see Irving Street Blues, and only caught part of Sean Carney. The first act that I really saw was harpist / vocalist Gary Allegretto and mandolin player / vocalist Rich DelGrosso backed by a power trio. They were good, but I was a bit disappointed that the mandolin was not more exotic. It sounded so much like a guitar that I often could not tell which parts he was playing without watching either him or the guitarist.

Next up was gospel band The Campbell Brothers, a fairly large group driven by two steel guitarists. The only other time I’ve heard similar music is when The Blind Boys of Alabama and Ben Harper worked together. They were probably my favorite part of the festival because of their uniqueness. I love electric blues, but after a while you need something different.

I also enjoyed the next act, Greg Piccolo & Heavy Juice Expansion Pac, which was a nine-piece band led by a famous tenor saxophonist. I also enjoyed their quasi-big band style quite a bit. The last group I was was guitarist Bob Margolin and his band with vocalist Diunna Greenleaf. Margolin was good, and Ms. Greenleaf was exceptional. She sang a few songs as a tribute to the late Koko Taylor, and you could tell it was heartfelt.

The last act, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the festival, was to be a showcase of students from a local group of music instructors. I would have stayed to hear them, but it was becoming quite cool with the sun down and I was still soaked with perspiration from when it was burning down upon us. In addition to an afternoon and evening of good music, I had an opportunity to read 200 pages or so of my current novel, making an excellent day.

June 13, 2009

The Open Mic Night From Purgatory

Filed under: Music, Personal — chadhogg @ 11:42 pm

After the open mic night from hell, I’ve been to its competitor twice. The bar is much smaller and in every other way much more normal. Instead of a sparse, scary crowd, the place is jammed packed with mostly very ordinary seeming people. More importantly, the band has a different drummer on Wednesday nights, who happens to be competent. With him, the trio sounds infinitely better. There are also quite a few very talented people who come out to play, and a few less so.

Over the course of two evenings I’ve sat in on “Gimme Three Steps”, “Rockin’ In The Free World”, “Cocaine”, “Runnin’ Down A Dream”, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”, and “La Grange”, and I think acquitted myself well. Apparently others agree, because the house band’s guitarist thinks I would fit in with an old-time country band that he knows is looking for a bassist (hey, any experience is good experience, and apparently their gigs pay well), and one of the guest drummers has asked to put me on his list of people to call if he gets a gig and needs to put an impromptu group together. Hooray for playing a less popular instrument! I don’t really expect anything to come from either of those leads, but at least I am getting somewhat involved in the scene.

June 12, 2009

NHL Playoffs

Filed under: Personal, Sports — chadhogg @ 10:46 pm

I know hockey lost a lot of popularity with the lockout a few years ago, but this was ridiculous. Tonight was game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals, the last and most important game of the entire NHL season. Two seemingly evenly-matched teams would be competing for the cup, the same two teams that had been in the finals the previous year. The speedy youngsters versus the experienced veterans angle was available, as was the floundering team reviving itself with a coaching change now poised to be champions. In short, this story was a sportscaster’s dream. When I watched half an hour of ESPN’s SportsCenter this afternoon, however, there was no mention of the game. Instead, 20 minutes were devoted to basketball, 5 minutes to baseball, 2 to football, 2 to golf, and the rest to miscellaneous nonsense like who was seen with Paris Hilton. The NBA coverage makes sense, because they are also at the end of their championship series, but they will not have a game until Sunday. There are so many baseball games left in the season that really nothing could have possibly happened in that sport that could not be discussed next week. The NFL season does not start for another 4 months.

What a game this was, after a fairly slow start. From about 3 minutes left in the second period through the end of the game it was just non-stop action in Pittsburgh’s defensive zone. I was beginning to think that I was bad luck. In the first round I rooted for the Flyers (my team) over the Penguins, then in the second round the Capitals (parent team of my Hershey Bears, who also won the cup in their league tonight) over the Penguins. I was away during the third round, then came back to support the Penguins over the Red Wings. I know they are supposed to be big rivals, but I’ve never felt that way. The only teams I despise are the New Jersey Devils in the NHL and the Dallas Cowboys in the NFL. The other Pennsylvania teams are generally my second favorite.

Watching these playoffs over the last month and a half has really made it clear to me why I was never a great player (in addition to having never been remotely athletic). I was always conserving my strength, playing conservatively when I knew that another player should get to the puck first, or should be able to pass before I get to them, or whatever. Now I realize that every important thing that happens in a game is when someone should be able to make a play, fails to, and an opponent is in position to take advantage of it. Even the knowledge that an opponent is on his way causes opportunities when players must act quickly.

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