pod world

After getting my new ipod about 3 weeks ago, I decided to check out podcasting (of recent mention in the NYTimes). While I still think there's a pretty high signal/noise ratio out there amongst podcasters, there are a few goodies like Coverville, The Laporte Report, and (my favorite) On the Media. "On the Media" is actually an NPR show, i.e. a real bona-fide radio program; it's just waaay more convenient to listen to it on my iPod than trying to catch on the radio.

Anyways, you don't need an iPod to listen to these things, just a computer and a podcast aggregator. I used to listen to the radio 24/7 when I was in high school but now only listen for the 30 seconds it takes to get me out of bed in the morning. While I love the music I have, it's nice to have some new music(or intelligent/interesting fodder for thought) to freshen things up.

Partly due to listening to Adam Curry's The Daily Source Code, I've started listening to a lot of mashups recently. Some of them are quite good and I'm especially fond of Beatles mashups because they add flavor to quality music that's almost gone bland after static repitition. Anyway, a few favs are: "No One Takes Your Freedom" by DJ Earworm, "Numb/Encore" by Linkin Park + Jay-Z, and "Boulevard of Broken Songs" by Party Ben. Check 'em out and see if you get addicted too.

The New York Times > National > Jailing of Reporters in C.I.A. Leak Case Is Upheld by Judges

The New York Times > National > Jailing of Reporters in C.I.A. Leak Case Is Upheld by Judges: "Two reporters who have refused to name their sources to a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. officer should be jailed for contempt, a unanimous three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington ruled yesterday.

The panel held that the reporters, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, may have witnessed a federal crime - the disclosure by government officials of the officer's identity. The First Amendment, the panel ruled, does not give reporters the right to refuse to cooperate with grand juries investigating such crimes."

It's a good question, should reporter's be able to receive information that is illegal for anyone to disclose? What pisses me off is that Robert Novak, the guy who published the identity of a secret agent, is not the one being jailed. That makes no sense to me.

baby eaters

as posted on the recently killed
lokitorrent.com





Good god, when was the last time you saw a company consciously launching a campaign of terror? I don't use bittorrent to download illegal music but tactics like these inspire me to commit egregious acts of violence against the heads of the MPAA (and RIAA).

Perhaps they should use this as inspiration for future campaigns?

the way we speak

I've always been very sensitive about the way people speak. I often identify voices not by their tone or pitch, but the way they pronounce words and their inflection. If only I could consciously reproduce these subtleties, I would be great at doing impersonations.

Anyways, over the last few months, I've noticed that I speak like a theoretical computer scientist, or, at the very least, an MIT theory of CS person. In everyday conversation I talk normally, but when I start explaining something, or stating an opinion, I start introducing pauses, emphasis, and sentence inflections in a way that people in my lab do. I've always been slightly conscious of this, but as I sit here in the Theory of Cryptography Conference, I'm acutely aware of how distinct a way the people here have of explaining things. There are some variations of this "Theory accent" and I'm quite sure that the MIT version of the accent has been heavily influenced by the Italian accent of Silvio Micali.

This, I think, is due to the facts that Silvio a) has the strongest accent in the department and b) is easily the most interesting person to listen to for any period of time. Regardless of the cause, however, it's rather surreeal to be talking to someone about something utterly non-geek-related and realize I'm speaking with a mild Italian inflection (not pronunciation, mind you, inflection).

For example: In normal English, when you pose a rhetorical question, you do it much in the same way you would pose a normal question: your voice rolls up and down as you ask the question, with natural peaks at both the key word in the question (i.e. who/what/etc.) and the sentence end. With an MIT TOC accent, however, your voice naturally ramps up during the entire question, raising in urgency until you reach the end of your rhetoric question. Then you have a pause, where it is clear that no one should interject an answer, then you give your answer with strong emphasis.

I guess it's natural for people who spend a lot of time talking each other to speak in a similar way (e.g. siblings), but it's just so strange to think of that happening to you in someplace like the crypto group at MIT....

the end is nigh

Just a few minutes ago, I saw a girl running on a treadmill and talking on her cellphone at the same time. And I'm not talking "earbud crazy person wire"-talking on the phone -- she was full on holding the phone to her right ear as she ran at an awkward angle to compensate for the fact that she was only swinging around her left arm.

Crazy. Maybe she was talking to her personal trainer? I don't know.

do the evolution

Now that I've stopped updating my news-related blog, i feel the need to post striking facts in this blog. Apparently not only are youth ignorant about the 1st amendment, but only recently did half of this sountry start believing in evolution. I remember my Biology AP teacher, a devout Christian, started the evolution unit with the disclaimer "I don't believe this, but it's covered on the AP so I'm going to teach you this." But it's still amazing...

The New York Times > Science > Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes: "In a 2001 survey, the National Science Foundation found that only 53 percent of Americans agreed with the statement 'human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.'

And this was good news to the foundation. It was the first time one of its regular surveys showed a majority of Americans had accepted the idea. According to the foundation report, polls consistently show that a plurality of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago, and about two-thirds believe that this belief should be taught along with evolution in public schools."

well now

For regular readers who remember my previous web celeb post, it would seem that Google updated its webcrawl and has rediscovered my website. My (in)famous yatta page is once again at the top of the heap and, more excitingly, is no longer listed when searching with the family name. Instead, my personal homepage pops up as hit #9 under that search, making me, somehow, the highest ranked Patil in my extended family. Probably because I'm the only one that cares. Anyways, good to know that people looking up my uncle's bio won't be bombarded with diapered Japanese men anymore.

it's art, stupid

I've been mulling about a digital art idea for a while and while I don't have the patience to create the full realization of the final vision, I did have the time (and patience) to make a pretty good approximation which is a few "coolness" points lower, but probably better looking.

It's a bit out of step with previous projects (like my collages and "eyes" page) but as someone pointed out today, it's the natural inverse of my "faces" piece. I took the text of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" (courtesy of Project Gutenberg) and superimposed some of the book's original illustrations on top -- creating an image out of the words.

The resulting files are rather large, about ~30MB, since a) the font can only get so small and stay readable b) they're .tiff (uncompressed) files c) I'm hoping to be able to print it out at somepoint, so I figured 3' x 4.5' ish was a good sounding size. If you have the bandwidth and monitor size to check out the final files, please do and give any feedback you might have. I'm not sure how much change I can make* but I'm always looking to improve things. (* the fastest computer I have is a 1.2 Ghz P3 with 512MB RAM, so Photoshop takes something like 15 minutes just to change the font size of the text. I made these two images while snowed in on Sunday)

Below I'm posting thumbnails which link to the full-sized files as well as a "zoomed in" view to better show the text/image detail (for non-bandwidth blessed). Give some feedback!

pink panther

Steve Martin is starring in a new addition to one of my favorite movie series, The Pink Panther. If you watch the trailer, it really makes you appreciate how hard of a character Insp. Clouseau is to pull off and how much better Peter Sellers was than Steve Martin ever will be. It's funny how many people these days don't even know who Peter Sellers was or hadn't heard of "The Pink Panther" until the Steve Martin film went into production. And that's *after* being the focus of a reasonably well advertised and double-Golden Globe winning biopic. Just goes to show, I guess.

you don't care, but google does

and posting on wings that work is pointless since google currently doesn't index it.

Running Firefox 1.0 on Mandrake 10.1

getting creative

some more amusing brevity:


Thanks to a story in Wired, I've become aware of the amusing Gates quote about redefining intellectual property and the resulting "creative communists/commonists" fad centering around the creative commons movement. I've always been a fan of creative commons -- another cool thing they're doing is hosting the "the fine art of sampling" contest which has already revealed to me that I have absolutely no patience for music sampling... it's fun to do in my head, but a pain to actually try and do on a computer.

Anyways, "Giant Robot Printing" is selling "Creative Commies" t-shirts which are quite nice and very reasonably priced ($8-10 after s&h). Gonna order me one in a little bit. Sadly no money from the shirt goes to support CC, so if you're feeling a bit more generous, check out your donating options. Of course, if you're in a giving spirit, be sure to remember recent victims as well as multitude of always deserving.

delayed discharge

More unrelated thoughts presented in itemized list format

• I was watching "60 Minutes" with the extended family and there was a story on Google. During the story, Leslie Stahl does a little demo of "Google SMS". The Fam was quite delighted -- they immediately began experimenting with their own cell phones and squealing in delight when they received their results. Anyways, the few family members (including myself) who are, for lack of a better term, "computer oriented," were shocked by everyone's ignorance -- google sms is old news as far as we're concerned. Now my family isn't exactly stupid (if level of education is an accurate measure), so our incredulity just goes to show how specialization blinds us to the outside world and fosters arrogance about the importance of our own field. Case in point, later that weekend I guessed that humans have 26 pairs of chromosomes. Damn, I'm getting stupider. Anyways, check out Google Labs and this previous post if you're smart enough to not spend >40% of your life in front of a computer.


• Just watched two interesting movies: The Gods Must Be Crazy and Tadpole. Both were not what was expected and require a bit (maybe a lot) of tongue biting ("oh! come on!"), but were certainly worth watching; especially after a few weeks of watching nothing but generic Hollywood movies.


• For some reason, our router at home (Southern California) refused to connect to the MIT domain (18.*) so I was unable to see http://web.mit.edu/, check my e-mail, access my web-locker, etc. It turned out to be the perfect incentive to give Tor a real test-drive. Tor is a web-anonymizer that allows you use the internet with (reasonable) anonymity -- in doing so, it accesses the internet through a variety of other computers which comes in handy when surfing the internet from behind an unintentional, or deliberate, firewall. To the point, it allowed me to bypass my web-restriction problem with moderate ease. Hot stuff.
  Tor recently received backing from the Electronic Frontier Foundation which is just another reason (in a long list of reasons) why the EFF kicks ass.


• Wired Magazine has a beautiful story on the history, impacts, and implications of everyone's new favorite p2p program, BitTorrent.

well put.

scenes from a waiting room

For those of you who wonder how anyone could ever mispronounce my name, let me just say that during my last visit to the doctor, the nurse retrieved me from the waiting room under the sadly uncommon "ush-kaya" ('ush' as in 'slush').

In other little-to-do-at-home fronts, there's been a lot of interesting news recently, esp. for bittorrent users, as partially chronicalled in my list of interesting news stories. For the most part, MPAA is not only suing sites but launching electronic attacks on them as well. All of this while p2p networks from the napster-era try to market themselves to content providers as the new, legal, distribution channel.

Also, I've been playing about with ObjectDock in an attempt to get over my OSX envy (final conclusion: bit buggy and sucks up power on laptops, but certainly very very cool).



On a more cultural note, I've recently become a big fan of Ann Telnaes's political cartoons. Check her stuff out if you're bored and cynical.

web celeb

I was going to make a facetious comment about me being a "web celeb" due to yatta, but when I went to go link the Google results page, I discovered my site is no longer the number one hit. In fact, it doesn't actually appear in the results at all anymore. A quick check to my counter showed that starting Dec. 9th, the site daily hits halved in number (600 to 300)... a moderate Google effect, I guess.

Anyways, the unindexing of the site is probably a good thing; now when you Google for the family name, dancing japanese men in their underwear are no longer hit #5. On the downside, my actual website, wings that work seems to have been unindexed as well....

ass in ascii

it's been inquired if the title of this blog is meant to signify an ass in ascii. no.

it's a statement about confined expression. i like the aesthetics of an exclamation in parens just to begin with... it's also is a mild allusion to a Piet Hein grook:



AN ODE TO MODESTY

Talking of successful rackets
modesty deserves a mention.
Exclamation marks in brackets
never fail to draw attention.

I seem to have a bad habit of creating titles requiring explanation -- the hallmark of a bad writer, but now you know.

my yahoo

my.yahoo.com updated recently -- including rss feed aggregation. Worth scoping out, but still not as hot as bloglines. On the other hand, yahoo can display lots of other types of information, like ticket fares and their calendar. So it's still spicing things up.

state of the union

I had some time to reflect and watch some non-primetime television this weekend. Some strange and pessimistic musings resulted:

• Britney Spears is releasing a "greatest hits" CD/DVD entitled "My Prerogative". Greatest Hits. This is a performer in her young 20s (no, I don't know how old she is, and I'm happy that I don't) who puts words like "prerogative" in album titles. How does she have a greatest hits album already? I'm left flabbergasted.
  
• My favorite gelato place in the country used to charge $2.25 for two scoops, no charge for the cone. That was August of 2003. Now it charges $2.75 for two scoops, $0.25 for the cone.
  
• The number one movie in the US this weekend features a plot line focusing around a character named "Benjamin Franklin Gates". How serious a lack of creativity do you suffer from that you go about naming a character that? Let alone your main character. Runner up, Sponge-Bob. They should just re-release "Kangaroo Jack" and ban everyone who shows up to theaters from ever buying a movie ticket again.
  

Not to mention, I forgot poland.

10 x 10

another cool way of digesting the news -- 10x10. Very graphical and does news-correlating so you don't read the same story in 4 different manifestations. Heard about it from my man rich. Screen shot courtesy of Josh Rubin's "Cool Hunting"

feeding my information addiction

I've recently become hooked on using Bloglines.com. It feeds my information addiction like no other website.

The story:
I surf the web more than I should. I read The New York Times online, sometimes browse BBC World to get some outside takes on international news, read some online comics, and try to check out blogs for a few friends. Squinting at pages to figure out what's new, or spending time loading up a blog only to find out your friend hasn't updated recently is annoying.
Well, it turns out that all of these things put out RSS feeds. RSS = online format that makes it easy for computers to understand website content. You can then use an RSS aggregator to watch all these RSS feeds for updates. This way, You just open up one window and immediately see the state of all websites you care about.
So, anyways, bloglines does that for me. There are other nice aggregators out there, but what's nice about this one is that it keeps track of what i've seen across all computers, so when I open up my page on another computer, it still only shows me the stories I haven't seen. You can see all the sites I keep track of here. (Note, that if this was your account, it wouldn't show you all stories, just the stories that have been added/updated since you last logged in.... don't be scared by the information overload. Embrace it)

crazy like a fox

Firefox 1.0 launched February 9th. I'm a great fan of the web browser and use it (along with thunderbird) all the time.

One exceedingly useful feature of Firefox is the ability to add extensions to the program. My all-time-favorite is AdBlock which squashes website advertisements. For some reason, the default download doesn't include a list of filters, so I'm publshing my filters list here. enjoy!