inspired by practical considerations

I believe I'll vote for a third Democrat!

ruakh — Sun, 05 Aug 2018 03:25:56 GMT

A top-two primary with only two candidates is somehow even weirder than an uncontested election. I can vote for either Amy Walen or Cindi Bright, but both will certainly appear on the ballot again in November, so . . .

(And both of them are from the same party, namely the Democrats. But I can't decide if that makes it less weird, or more.)

Ran's bar mitzvah.

ruakh — Sun, 26 Feb 2017 05:41:32 GMT

I went to Chabad this morning to say a mi shebeirach, and as I came in, I saw a sign that said it was Ran's bar mitzvah.

And lo, it was so.

Ran is not a very common name; I've met a few other Rans online, but I'm not sure if I'd ever met one in person before. (Technically I guess I still haven't, but eh, close enough. I had the third aliyah and he had (and read) the fourth, so we were within a foot of each other at one point.)

In his dvar torah (= sermon), the Rabbi said I'd read very well, that I was a good boy who was growing up well, and that I'd given a very nice speech last night. I don't remember that speech, but I'll take his word for it. :-)

Oh, and I was pelted with candy, by virtue of still being on the bima at the end of the bar-mitzvah Ran's aliyah. So I really got the bar mitzvah experience.

(Incidentally, I wonder if the bar-mitzvah Ran had a moment of panic when I was called up to do the third aliyah? After all, there was no sign warning him of my existence!)

San Francisco!

ruakh — Sun, 12 Feb 2017 19:01:25 GMT

I went to San Francisco last weekend to visit Funty, who's on the verge of moving back to Boston. It was fun!

Highlights:

- Funty, obviously. I also saw Jeremiah (Sunday brunch) and Ben (Monday lunch break — he and Funty work together), and met a bunch of Funty's friends.

- So much food. A Mexican restaurant Friday night; a sourdough pizza Saturday noonish at Fisherman's Wharf; an ice cream sundae at Ghirardelli Square shortly afterward; a Japanese restaurant (Izakaya Kou) for Duaa's birthday dinner Saturday night; birthday cake after that; a dim sum place for Sunday brunch; an Italian restaurant (the Sausage Factory) for Sunday dinner; a cookie from Hot Cookie after that; the "Impossible Burger" (which I had read about in The New York Times, but had not expected to ever try myself) for lunch on Monday at a place called the Cockscomb. I, uh, gained some weight.

- So, so much rain. Especially Saturday morning, but really the whole weekend.

- Funty has a rugby team?? So we went to watch them play.

- We saw wild sea lions! They just hang out on Pier 39 like it's no big deal. And birds and turtles (and sculptures) at the Palace of Fine Arts. Oh, and wild crabs at Fort Point when I climbed down onto the rocks (which Funty declined to do, but afterward we managed to see some that were visible from the sidewalk).

- We saw where the trolley turns around! On a turntable! Pushed by a person! Funty did not find this nearly as exciting as I did. :-P

- Museum-wise, I mentioned Fort Point (an old fort by the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge) and the Palace of Fine Arts (preserved/restored from the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition) above. We also went to the Legion of Honor, which is an art museum that Crysta had recommended. And being me, I of course read various historic markers as I wandered about (especially on Monday morning when Funty was at work). Apparently part of the reason the San Francisco fire was so bad was that the earthquake had ruptured the water mains. So after that, they set up pumping stations that firefighters could use to pump saltwater out of the Bay.

- We went to the Castro (including looking around a sex shop, since that is apparently part of the Castro experience?).

- We tried to go to Whole Foods (to buy a birthday cake for Duaa), but there was no parking. San Francisco indeed. :-) So we went elsewhere.

- Of course, not everything we did was terribly specific to San Francisco. We went to the arcade at Pier 39, where we played Grand Piano Tiles (kind of like Guitar Hero), Skee-Ball, air hockey, and an Old-West-themed rifle-target-practice game; we watched the first several episodes of The OA (which Funty had seen and wanted to share); and Funty had me play the game Portal, which I'd heard of but had never tried.

New personal policy.

ruakh — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 04:22:12 GMT

New personal policy: no full meals at Jack in the Box.

Electoral college.

ruakh — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 01:18:28 GMT

It seems like the electoral college has two options tomorrow, both of which are bad for our democracy:

1. choose Trump
2. choose anyone other than Trump

Setting aside the question of whether #2 has any actual chance at all . . . much as I want it, and much as I think it's the right and Constitutionally-appropriate choice given Trump's unapologetic corruption, it's really just the lesser of two evils. I mean, we complain about Republicans' gross departures from democratic norms and values, but the electoral college anointing someone other than Trump? Not democratic, and not normal. (It's appropriate under the Constitution, but only because the Constitution is not really all that democratic.) And if the college chooses anyone sane, I don't imagine Trump voters just rolling over and accepting that; they will rightly feel that elites have stolen the election from them.

I think it will take a long time for the country to heal either way.

What are y'all's thoughts?

More common knowledge.

ruakh — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 22:58:39 GMT

Today I learned that a Fire TV is not a TV.

Common knowledge.

ruakh — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 16:48:44 GMT

Two things I've learned recently:

- the Washington Redskins are from the other Washington
- stocking stuffers are not necessarily literally stuffed into stockings

Escape!

ruakh — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 06:00:49 GMT

I just watched Zootopia. It turned out to be exactly the right dose of escapism. Thanks, Disney!

"The Female Brain"

ruakh — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 02:13:17 GMT

Apparently they're making a movie based on Louann Brizendine's pop-pseudoscience book The Female Brain?

I'm starting to suspect that Hollywood simply doesn't care about quality science. :-/

New laptop!

ruakh — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:46:42 GMT

My laptop died the other week. Quoting from my Facebook post at the time:

> My computer died the other day, not without warning. (It had been having serious problems for months.) I've decided I don't want to deal with the new version of Windows -- all the fearmongering has worked on me -- but I also don't want to deal with getting Linux working, and I have no desire to learn how to use a Mac.
>
> So, I've ordered a laptop from System76 with Linux, specifically Ubuntu, preinstalled. I feel so decadent. :-P
>
> Wish me luck!

The new one finally arrived today:

> My new laptop arrived today, finally. I had some initial frustrations -- for example, connecting to my home Wi-Fi network caused the wireless card to crash, and it took me forever to figure out what happened -- but now that it's set up, I'm really liking it!

So, since I'd been LiveJournal-less for more than a week and a half, I thought it would take me forever to catch up on my friends page. It did not. I guess LiveJournal is not as hopping as it used to be. :-(

ruakh — Tue, 24 May 2016 04:12:15 GMT

So, dunno if there's a woman card, but there's definitely a gay card: I played it this afternoon after a coworker, having learned on Friday that I was unmarried, lost no time finding me a shidduch. :-P

Cross-posted from Facebook, 'coz, let's face it, this is the real journal. Y'all are better!

Giving up fish pros/cons.

ruakh — Sat, 20 Feb 2016 05:23:40 GMT

I gave up fish once for a semester or so in college, but then I returned to my normal vegetarian-except-for-kosher-fish self.

But, I'm considering giving it up again.

Pros:

- I don't need to eat fish.
- Apparently there's a lot of slavery in the global fishing industry.
- The Orthodox Union says you can't trust fish labeling in the U.S.; even if the menu claims that an item is a kind of fish that you know to be kosher, you can't really assume that the item is made of kosher fish.
- Apparently overfishing is a serious environmental problem.
- Many kinds of fish are high in mercury and other toxins.
- Farmed fish seem to be unhealthy (at least compared to wild fish), and I don't generally know what I'm eating.
- I don't want to support the frankenfish industry. :-P

Cons:

- I currently have a jar of Manischewitz Premium Gold gefilte fish in my cupboard that literally will not eat itself. (It's had plenty of opportunity, but means and/or motive must be missing.)
- Also, some packets of tuna.
- I usually eat fish several times a week, so it will be a pretty significant change.
- I live in the Pacific Northwest. Fish is big here. (Though it's not like I'd be the only vegetarian, either.)
- Fish is a good source of various healthy things.

I dunno. I think for now I'll cut back on my fish-eating, but not fully declare myself fish-free.

What are y'all's thoughts?

Family reunion.

ruakh — Thu, 14 Jan 2016 09:27:05 GMT

I went to Israel last month for a family reunion.

Before the trip, I was stressed about a bunch of things, such as:

- How would Shabbat, etc., work with my very-religious sister's family?
- Would I enjoy the reunion itself, or would it just be a big ball of awkwardness?
- My layovers for the flights back (Tel Aviv → London → Chicago → Seattle) were very tight, and since I had to go on call the following day, I needed it to go OK.

, but really, almost everything turned out OK.

Randomnesses:

- On the way there, I had a long layover in London, so I went into the city a bit. (Unfortunately, I hadn't thought about this beforehand — I might have had a chance to meet pensierobello. Also unfortunately, it was New Year's Eve, so the first few museums I went to were closed. But I tried out the Tube; I tried authentic English food (namely, a tuna-and-cucumber-and-sweet-corn sandwich I bought in a Tube stop); I walked around a bit; and I spent a few hours at the Queen's Gallery enjoying Dutch art that some of her ancestors had purchased a few centuries earlier; and, dunno what else.)

- I stayed with my parents at their apartment in Jerusalem, which is next door to my sister's apartment. (My sister actually lives in Jerusalem; my parents don't, but they visit her enough that it apparently made sense to buy an apartment?) The reunion, though, was in Tel Aviv.

- My mother was surprised that I made it from Ben Gurion (the airport in Tel Aviv) to their apartment, on my own, with no issues and without assistance. *sigh* I'm 31 years old, I speak fluent Hebrew, I have an ATM card, and she'd given me precise instructions. And I don't think I'm flattering myself when I say that I'm not a complete idiot. What did she think was going to happen??

- My sister pre-supplied my parents and me with gifts to pretend that we had bought for her kids — I "bought" Eliyahu, her youngest, a remote-controlled car-like thing.

- Shabbat ended up OK. No one expected me to go to services, which was nice. (I'm not even really opposed to going to super-religious services, but I didn't pack terribly appropriate clothes, and anyway I needed the sleep — I arrived early Friday morning after departing Seattle late Wednesday evening.)

- We visited the graves of both of my grandmothers, and of my aunt (my father's sister, who died in late 2014). My uncle (my mother's brother) and his wife, and my father's cousin and his wife, joined us for certain graves. (Well, my uncle's a cohen, so couldn't actually go into the cemetery. But he came in theory.) I wept a bit, which I hadn't really expected to.

- The cemeteries are so crowded. With graves, I mean. They have a lot of graves in areas that used to be walkways and so on, because they're running out of room.

- My father took me to Cafe Neeman for two separate breakfasts. And he took me, my sister, and her family to a fancy restaurant called Greg's on Sunday night. Plus all of my sister's Shabbat cooking. So, all told, I had a lot of high-quality kosher food. (And a lot of regular kosher food. Including a lot a lot of bread and hummus.)

- My mother's father's yahrzeit was while we were there, so my mother and I took a walk and she told me about him. (He died when she was a child.) This is also why she didn't come to Greg's with us.

- More generally, my mother and I took a lot of walks. We also do that when I visit Kalamazoo. I don't think I know anyone else who goes for walks as much as either of us does, so I guess I get it from her? I never really thought about it until now.

- The reunion itself, a few hundred people attended. It was for all the descendants of my great-grandmother Sarah, and perhaps the other descendants of her husband Avraham. They had eight children together, and he had three from a previous marriage. None of my cousins came, unfortunately, so the only people I knew there were my parents, my sister, and my brother-in-law. But it was interesting to meet some people I'd heard about but never met. It was also interesting to meet some people who were like me in ways I hadn't expected.

- My father MC'd the reunion; he'd put together a slide show, he told us a bit about the history, he shared some memories, he invited other people to share memories (though almost no one did). And someone had put together a book with photos and stories that people had contributed from various branches of the family — including, ha, one of the pictures includes me as a kid :-P — and had it professionally printed.

- In Ben Gurion before flying home, I tried sahlab, a warm beverage that's apparently popular in Israel in winter but that I'd never had before. It was good. If you're ever in Israel in winter, give it a try?

- I had terrible jet-lag afterward. One night I didn't get to sleep at all, so I went to bed at 5 PM the next night, only to wake back up before midnight. So, that sucked. All told, it took me over a week to get back to a normal-ish sleep schedule.

- I started Mary Roach's Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (non-fiction, 2013) on the way there, and finished it while there. I recommend it; it's interesting and entertaining. Though it does have a lot of gross stuff, so if that's a dealbreaker for you, then — deal broken!

- Then I read Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity (science fiction, 1953), which I enjoyed, but probably don't recommend. It's very "hard" science fiction, with a heavy emphasis on the mechanics of the world entailed by our current understanding of physics and chemistry; not really the current fashion in science fiction. I finished this in Ben Gurion before my flights home.

- Fortunately, I'd brought my Kindle as fallback in case I finished both books, so on the trip home, I reread some of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga (specifically "Labyrinth", "The Borders of Infinity", and Brothers in Arms, all of which I recommend . . . "The Borders of Infinity" is one of my all-time favorite short stories, though I think it only works if you've read some of the other books in the same series (otherwise the ending would really come out of nowhere)).

Silicon finds a way!

ruakh — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 07:03:24 GMT

I read an article the other day that I find really mindblowing, from the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Evolvable Systems in 1996. So, I mean, not exactly late-breaking, but this was the first I'd heard of it.

I think that y'all will find it mindblowing, too, even if you don't know or care at all about hardware; but it's a little bit technical, so bear with me.

The hardware: a 10×10 array of "cells" on a hardware chip. (For the computer-y types reading this: a 10×10 region at the corner of an FPGA.) Each "cell" had three inputs and generated one output, and could be configured to implement any of various dirt-simple logic functions; things like "output is 'true' if either input #1 or input #3 is 'true'; input #2 is ignored".

The goal: to develop a circuit that could distinguish between an input that oscillated between "true" (5 volts) and "false" (0 volts) 1000 times per second, and an input that oscillated between "true" and "false" 10,000 times per second. The researcher, Adrian Thompson, wanted the circuit to output "true" in one case and "false" in the other (he didn't care which way was which). The thing to note is that none of the 100 cells had any concept of time, or memory, or clocks, or anything like that. You change one of their inputs, and the output would switch to the appropriate new value within a few billionths of a second. So it should be impossible for any circuit on this chip to distinguish these long timescales — the difference between "20,000 times my response time" and "200,000 times my response time" simply shouldn't be meaningful.

The method: he randomly generated a "population" of fifty possible configurations, and he created a "fitness function" to evaluate how well any given configuration distinguished between the two inputs. He then simulated evolution, basically: he would evaluate the "fitness" each member of the population, and then he would create a new "generation" where the fitter members of the population were better-represented, with some random "mutations" sprinkled in. And then he repeated the process, a few thousand times. (This overall approach is actually a pretty standard approach called an "evolutionary algorithm" or a "genetic algorithm" — in fact, this approach is what the entire conference was about — but usually it's done with software algorithms, not hardware circuits!)

The result: after a few thousand generations, he successfully had a circuit that could consistently distinguish the two inputs, despite this being obviously impossible.

What happens is, not all possible configurations really "make sense" to a human designer. The components of the chip are meant to be used in certain sorts of ways, and hooked up in certain sorts of ways, so as to represent digital logic; you'll notice I talked about "true" and "false" above, even though physically this really means "5 volts" and "0 volts". But the hardware, of course, lives in an analog universe, where if you hook things up in unexpected ways, you can get non-digital behaviors. (Actually, I'm even overstating how much freedom the circuits had; all of the connections were unidirectional, which was a feature of the chip in order to ensure that no sort of hookups could damage it. So the configurations couldn't even mess too much with what was hooked up to what.)

What he found was that in the final successful configuration, a lot of the cells didn't even have their outputs hooked up to anything — so, in theory, they should have no effect on the overall output of the circuit — but if he started turning off these cells, the circuit's ability to distinguish the inputs would start to degrade. Somehow, these not-actually-hooked-up cells were contributing something to the overall circuit (presumably via some sort of electromagnetic effect? or ghosts? no clue. the researcher doesn't seem to have figured it out).

It's just mindblowing. Even in the purely artificial realm of a hardware chip where every piece was designed by humans with a specific purpose for use by humans, evolution found a way to do something that is contrary to this purpose and this design, and that seems obviously impossible. And not even real evolution, but just a dirt-simple simulation of it.

I'm torn between a religious reaction (that our efforts to understand the real world seem almost pathetically futile, if we can't even understand what we ourselves have created for maximum understandability) and a non-religious one (since evolution and Creation are supposed to be enemies?). But either way, mindblowing. I'm sure I'll be thinking about this paper for a while.

(The full paper, for anyone who's interested: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=7D81073D97A7646A079C6B4A89DE66CE?doi=10.1.1.50.9691&rep=rep1&type=pdf.)

All-day breakfast!

ruakh — Thu, 19 Nov 2015 07:55:19 GMT

I texted my sister:

> The legends are true: the McDonald's on Redmond Way really does have 24-hour breakfast now. :-)

She replied:

> Lolol

It's like she doesn't even take this seriously?

I had an Egg McMuffin at 9 PM! It was amazing!

(Also, it turns out it's not just the McDonald's here: http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/food/meal_bundles/alldaybreakfast.html.)

High Holy Days

ruakh — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 03:48:10 GMT

I'm going to make more of an effort to post here. Not substantial entries, necessarily — if I try to post substantial entries, the end result is probably that I won't post anything at all — but, just, something, so that those of you who are still reading will have some idea what's going on with me. :-)

(And so that those of you who read both me and jerseyjess will have something to read while waiting for her next post . . .)

So, I visited my parents for the High Holy Days — two full weeks. (I can do my job remotely, so this way actually let me take fewer days off, by flying there and back on weekends. And it let me help my parents build the Sukkah; though that seems to be a five love languages thing, in that I care about helping them with it more than they seem to care about receiving the help.)

Jess is now in Pittsburgh, which is sad, but still, I enjoy visiting my parents.

Unlike in past years, I didn't even make a cursory attempt this time to try to get in touch with and/or potentially visit any of the other people within visiting distance of Kalamazoo (Derek, Elyse, Crysta, Squid and Shosh, etc.). I'd love to see them all, but meh, sometimes laziness wins. Carlessness is limiting.

I did talk to Raphie, though. She and Jason are doing well, if you're wondering. :-)

Oh, and I also talked to Elyse, but she and I talk about once a month anyway, so that wasn't particularly specific to the High Holy Days.

I started Timothy Zahn's novel The Icarus Hunt during the trip, and finished it a few days after getting back. I enjoyed it. (Before this, the only other thing of his that I'd read was a short story collection that Abby lent me. Overall, I think I'd be more inclined to recommend that collection than this novel.)

. . . and, that's it for right now. This entry came out a decent length anyway, albeit admittedly perhaps a bit disjointed.

The pitfalls of science.

ruakh — Tue, 23 Jun 2015 06:32:31 GMT

My father visited this past weekend. This is continuing an annual tradition that he and I have had for years; when I lived in Solon, we would meet halfway to go to a baseball game together in Detroit, and now that I live in Redmond, he comes here and we go to a Mariners game.

The Mariners won. :-)

On the first day of his visit, I sent my mother this SMS:

Me: FYI -- I accidentally locked Abba out of his phone.

("Abba" being the Hebrew word for "Dad", from the Aramaic word for "father".)

Two hours later, she replied:

My mother: How???
Me: He said that the thumbprint thing [to unlock his phone] worked really well -- it always recognized him. I said that this was confirmation bias, and that we needed to test *non*-examples to really see for sure.
Me: So then I tried a few of my fingers, until it locked up (suspecting a break-in attempt) and demanded his fallback password, which he couldn't remember.
Me: But he's taken care of it now -- he was able to unlock it using his Gmail account somehow?
My mother: Wow!
Me: I know, right? The pitfalls of science!
My mother: Kids these days. ..

Also while he was here, we went to the zoo, and so on. If you're on Facebook, my sister posted one or more pictures.

First post (in a long time)!

ruakh — Fri, 06 Feb 2015 05:22:49 GMT

I'm going to try to start posting here again. It's been a long time . . .

So, uh, let me see, what's new in my life?

- My parents bought me a smartphone when I was home for the High Holy Days. I had been a bit hesitant about it, but they connived me into it. ;-) I'm actually still not totally used to it; modern technology is supposed to be magically easy-to-use, but I haven't even figured out yet how to use italics in my e-mails. (My current theory is that maybe the Gmail app doesn't support that, but that just seems so implausible . . .) But it's still very cool. Plus, typing in other languages, especially Hebrew, is much easier on the phone than on my computer, which is a perk that would never have occurred to me.

- I crossed the two-year mark at work, which means (among other things) that I can now quit without having to pay Amazon back for my move out here. Oh, and that I've now been here longer than almost anyone else on the team.

- Sometime during the summer, I realized that I had gained about twenty pounds since moving here. I've since managed to re-lose almost all of it, though. *whew*

- My sister and her family have bought a house. They are no longer walking distance. (I almost wrote, "no longer walking distance from me", but no — out in unincorporated boonies, "from what" doesn't enter into it. They aren't walking distance, period.)

- I'm currently reading Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko. We were supposed to read it in second-year ATYP English, when I was in ninth grade, but I, uh, did not make it all the way through.

- Ever since starting at Amazon, I've gotten a steady flow of LinkedIn messages from recruiters. It's a bit funny when, even though my profile has no information about what I actually do at Amazon, they say things like (to quote from one yesterday), "your experience at Amazon is extremely relevant to what our API team is doing here at Netflix". Not that I really expected recruiters to take the time to personalize their spam. :-)

Bilbao.

ruakh — Sun, 03 Aug 2014 23:51:04 GMT

Early last month, I went to Bilbao with my parents for a little over a week. My mother was there for a conference; my father and I did the conference's "accompanying persons" program.

It was really great, and I can't do it justice. Stray notes:

- We stayed at the Barceló Bilbao Nervión, which was the only hotel that the conference people suggested (aside from staying in the dorms of a local university). It was a surprisingly nice hotel (I mean, surprising for me, since my parents handled all the arrangements), and very nicely situated (right on the river, and a short walk from various points of interest, such as the old city, and such as the Guggenheim Bilbao). We did a bunch of day-trips, but no overnight trips.

- The conference's "social program" (which is for both attendees and accompanying persons) included a visit to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which was great. I'm not a big fan of modern art, and neither is either of my parents, but the museum itself is cool, and there were a lot of cool things there. The Case folks reading this will, of course, remember that the Guggenheim was designed by the same architect who designed the Peter B. Lewis building, and the resemblances go deeper than just the mass of curvy sheet metal that covers the whole top of the building. (Incidentally, my father made the connection on the very first day when we arrived, as we passed the museum on the way from the airport to the hotel. Also incidentally, after we'd been inside, he commented that he wasn't as impressed with the architect himself as with the engineers who took the design and actually made it possible. Heh.)

- Bilbao has one skyscraper, the Iberdrola Tower. It's not as tall as some skyscrapers elsewhere (if suddenly transposed to Cleveland, it would be the fourth-tallest building there; if to Seattle, the tenth-tallest), but since there's only one of it, with the surrounding buildings all being normal-sized, the effect is quite startling. I could see it from the window of my hotel room.

- Bilbao is the capital of the province of Biscay. I had thought that that meant that it was the capital of the Basque Country (an "autonomous community", which — I now know — is roughly the Spanish equivalent of a U.S. state), but it turns out that Biscay is actually just one part of the Basque Country. Historically, although there was (more or less) a single Basque language and culture, there was never a single Basque state.

- The accompanying persons program included a visit to the Biscay coastline, including the towns of Bakio, Bermeo, and Gernika (a.k.a. Guernica). ("Coastline" being subjective, perhaps. Bakio and Bermeo are on the coast — with beautiful views — but Gernika is not much closer to the coast than Bilbao, each being several miles inland.) Gernika does not look very much like the Picasso painting that takes its name, which is probably for the best. The province's parliament is at Gernika, and the parliament-house is really quite lovely. We saw the famous Oak of Gernika; its current incarnation is quite young, but has apparently contracted the same illness as the previous incarnation, so will probably have to be replaced fairly soon. The Oak was historically a place where people would go to make agreements and take oaths, so when the parliament was established, they placed it by the Oak and had their rulers take oaths there. The tradition in the Middle Ages was for their rulers to take oath with their hand on the law-books, but with the ruler kneeling and the law-book held higher than their head, as a symbol of the rule of law — not what we usually associate with the Middle Ages. Also, if I recall the explanation correctly, when Castile took over Biscay, the peace agreement granted various forms of freedom and autonomy to the Basques, but because the Castilians had difficulty with this concept, the only way they knew to implement it was to declare the entire Biscay population to be nobility.

- The accompanying persons program also included a trip to Donostia / San Sebastián, which was gorgeous. Fortunately, my mother had been there last year, so she wasn't jealous about missing it this time. :-) My father and I saw the old city (where we had lunch at a restaurant named "Gott" in the plaza where they used to have bullfights), the river, the coast (including a sort of stone area that's designed with spout-holes from which the water can spray you), and the Museo San Telmo (where we learned about Basque historical culture, some of which was more interesting to my father — he was very interested to see that one of the historical gravestones had a Star of David — and some of which was more interesting to me — I was entertained to learn that Basque women used to wear their hair and headdresses in fancy ways with interesting swoops and points, until the Catholic Church banned that practice because they thought it was phallic).

- The social program included a trip to Burgos, which isn't in the Basque Country, but rather in Castile and León. (In fact, it was once the capital of the Kingdom of Castile.) We did not see much of the city; rather, we had a tour of Burgos Cathedral, which was enormous and interesting, and then we went to the Museum of Human Evolution, which was . . . also enormous and interesting? Not in quite the same ways, though. Incidentally, Burgos Cathedral has a Star of David in one of its windows, which apparently was an expression of gratitude to the Jews of Burgos for having donated the money for that part of the Cathedral to be restored.

- We stayed an extra day after the conference ended, and took a day-trip to Santander, just for the beautiful beaches.

- Late in the trip, we went to the Basque cultural museum in Bilbao, which had some interesting exhibits. Among other things, we saw some giants from past editions of the annual parade of giants (and not just giants: it also has people who just wear giant heads as masks, though of those we only saw pictures, not any actual giant heads).

- Language-wise, I was disappointed at how little Basque we encountered. Permanent signage generally had Basque as well as Spanish, but temporary or informal signage (daily menus, notices that a store was closed for a few weeks, most kinds of ads) generally had only Spanish. That wasn't so surprising in Bilbao and Donostia, since they're decent-sized cities, but in places like Bermeo I expected more Basque. On the other hand, I did get to practice my Spanish a lot. (In many cases, I think that the other party's English would have been better than my Spanish, but I have no regrets!)

- Also language-wise — most of the museums had little or no English, which I found surprising and annoying. I did my best to translate for my parents, but my Spanish is not that great.

- One of the joys of traveling with my parents, especially my father, is that we had ice cream almost every day. :-P

K'zoo; prop; ex; seder.

ruakh — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 17:23:56 GMT

I'm in Kalamazoo this week for Passover. (As are my sister and brother-in-law and niece and nephew.) This gives me more time to relax, and enjoy the bizarre things in life.

For example, one of the proposals in next week's special election is to (among other things) raise the vehicle registration fee from $20 a year to $60 a year. The King County Official Local Voters' Pamphlet includes statements in favor of and opposition to the proposal; the statement in opposition includes this tidbit:

> […] unjustly skyrocketing taxes on motorists from $40 for every vehicle over two years to $600 each over 10 years: an unacceptable 1,500% increase.

I really don't know who they think they're kidding. It reminds me of Charles Seife's book Proofiness, which I posted about here and here. I'm not sure which of Seife's categories it belongs in; either "cherrypicking" and "Potemkin numbers", I guess, or maybe somewhere in between. Or maybe it's the latter, but trying to make itself look like the former. (It's a bad sign if you're trying to make yourself look only slightly dishonest, in the hopes that no one will notice you're being completely dishonest . . .) My favorite part is that the writers of this statement list their contact info as TruthInTaxation@aol.com.

Another bizarre thing in life I've had time to appreciate . . . my ex-boyfriend Sam messaged me via OkCupid last night. Here's what he wrote:

> Hi, what's your name? Want to meet some time?

I have the same account on OkCupid that I had before we dated; and my pictures are clearly recognizable as me; and in general, WTF? Is this some sort of weird joke?

The seder, by the way, was great. My vegan-ish cousin Elah drove in from Toronto, and it was a casual vegetarian seder with just family.

Cirque du cheval.

ruakh — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 04:49:14 GMT

I went to "Odysseo: The Equestrian Spectacular by Cavalia" yesterday with my sister and niece. It's basically like Cirque du Soleil, but with horses as well as people. It was a lot of fun. I especially loved how much Zelly loved it, so if you're planning to go, I recommend taking her along. (N.B.: Please get her parents' approval beforehand. Turns out the kidnapping of toddlers is frowned upon.)

In other news, I haven't read very much lately, because I'm still working through Memories After My Death, an "autobiography" of Tommy Lapid by his son Yair, which I'm reading in the original Hebrew and is taking me forever. (Partly because I'm often too tired to make the effort during my commute. I think I'm going to switch to taking an English book on the bus and to work, and keeping Memories After My Death at home.) However, I have read a few books:

- The Word for World Is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin. I enjoyed it, but I don't have much to say about it. If you like her books, you'll probably like this one. It's in the same universe as most of her other sci-fi novels (The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, etc.), and is a pretty quick read.

- Mockingjay, the third novel in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy. I liked it, unlike many people. There were a few scenes that made me laugh out loud, except silently, because I read it while waiting during jury duty, which is not the best place to laugh out loud non-silently. I neither recommend nor disrecommend it, since there doesn't seem to be a point in doing so: if you've read the first two books, you already know whether you're going to read the third, so my recommendation is moot.

- NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, about the latest (as of 2009) research into child psychology. I'm not necessarily a fan of the "latest" science, because science has fashions just as other things do, but it was still a very interesting read. I recommend it. Actually, I think I'll re-read it myself: it's very information-dense, and doesn't try to reduce everything to a single simple narrative for easy gist-grasping.

Pipeline health. (Spoiler: not about digestive issues.)

ruakh — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 07:16:32 GMT

The serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

This evening, a co-worker sent me an e-mail that read, in its entirety:

I'm a bit concerned at your lack of concern for pipeline health.

(where "pipeline health" means the smoothness of our process for getting changes live).

After considering various angry replies, I finally settled on:

Thank you for your bit of concern.

which he'll surely know better than to take literally, but which hopefully conceals at least some of my anger.

The courage to change the things I can.

I should remember this emotion. I've sometimes used this tactic in online arguments — pointedly interpreting people's opinions for them (my disagreement with him on pipeline health has become my "lack of concern" for it) — and it's not generally been effective. I still don't intellectually understand why I can't just object and explain that he's misinterpreting, but at least I now know that I can't. Something about this tactic just shuts down the argument.

Emotions are weird.

Jury duty.

ruakh — Sat, 25 Jan 2014 22:58:07 GMT

I had jury duty this week, for the first time.¹ It was interesting.

So, the way it works is,² you spend two days in the jury assembly room on the first floor of the King County Courthouse. Every so often, they announce that they've randomly selected some of you³ to be juror candidates assigned to a given court for a given trial (or trial-like thing), and they call out names and numbers. (For example, if they call out "John Smith, 12", then John Smith will be juror candidate #12.) There's some paperwork you have to fill out, so the attorneys have information about you that they can use in deciding whether they want to eliminate you from the jury. Then you're brought to a court, and they have the voir dire — jury selection process — after which you're either on a jury, or returned to the jury assembly room to wait to be randomly selected for a different court. At the end of the two days, if you're not currently assigned to a court, you're free to go. (And even during the day, they're generous with breaks and so on. They said basically "there are a lot of things we can't do to make this easier, and we can only pay you $10 a day, but we really appreciate your coming, so the few things we can do, we're generous with." And it was so.) Oh, and you have to wear a dorky "juror" badge the whole time, even when you're out getting lunch, so that non-jurors who see you know not to have conversations in your presence about cases, since juries are supposed to make their decisions based solely on what's presented in the courtroom, and aren't supposed to be contaminated with outside information (or "information") about the case.

The first morning (Tuesday morning), I was called almost immediately for an inquest that sounded interesting. (I didn't even realize we had "inquests" in the U.S.! The judge spent a while explaining what an inquest is, and how the prosecutor is a neutral party representing the court, and how the jury won't be asked to determine guilt or innocence, and isn't a grand jury, and how there's no expectation of a follow-on civil or criminal case; rather, the job of the jury is to determine the facts surrounding — in this case — the man's death.) I was juror candidate #12 (out of 25), so I was pretty optimistic about making the jury; what I didn't realize was that an inquest only requires six jurors, so they didn't get all the way up to #12. (They expected the inquest to take through yesterday, so they did excuse one candidate who had to fly out yesterday morning for a business trip, but they took juror candidates #2–7.) Disappointing!

In the afternoon, I was called for the trial of a man accused of assaulting a police officer. This time I was juror candidate #32 (out of 37), so I didn't expect to make the jury, and indeed I did not. (This one needed 13 jurors: 12 jurors plus one "alternate juror", because although the trial wasn't expected to be very long, the judge was concerned about flu season.) The voir dire was interesting, though; after releasing people for reasons of undue hardship, they asked us a lot of questions like, do we know either of the attorneys, do we know the defendant,⁴ do I and the juror candidate next to me know each other (since we both work at Amazon), how do we feel about police officers, how do we feel about homeless people downtown, have we ever bought newspapers from homeless people (and if so what did we think of those papers), why do we suppose the verdicts are called "guilty" and "not guilty" rather than "guilty" and "innocent", do we have experience judging people's credibility, how would we feel about bringing a finding of "not guilty" if we think the defendant probably did it but there's reasonable doubt, how would we feel if the defendant chose not to take the stand and we were instructed not to consider that decision as evidence against him, what are some reasons we can think of for why a defendant might choose not to take the stand, etc., etc., etc. (At one point, when the defense attorney had gone into a lengthy explanation about reasonable doubt, the prosecutor objected, saying something like, "Objection, your Honor, Mr. [Prosecutor] is educating the candidates, not querying them.")

The voir dire took maybe two hours on Tuesday and another two hours on Wednesday;⁵ but the judge had meetings most of Wednesday morning, so rather than having us come in for a few minutes in the morning and then sit around bored, she had us just come in Wednesday afternoon to resume the voir dire. Since I was assigned to her court during that time, I wasn't eligible to be called to any others, and by the time we got out on Wednesday, there were no more trials/inquests/etc. needing to select jurors, so we were let go. (Both days, actually, we were at the court later than people who weren't assigned to a court; but I can't complain, given that we still got out before 4:15 each day, and given that we didn't have to come in Wednesday morning, and given that being assigned to a court is more interesting than waiting in the jury assembly room.)

1. It's the second time I've gotten summoned, but the first time was in Michigan, after I'd moved to Ohio, so I just updated my residency information and didn't have to go.

2. Obviously, this varies from court to court. I'm just describing how it works for the King County Superior Court, or at least, how it worked for my two days there.

3. A variable number. I guess the judge makes a determination beforehand of how many candidates (s)he wants, based on how many candidates (s)he thinks are likely to be eliminated. They'd rather have too many than too few, apparently. One time they called only 25 people; another time they called 110. The 110 was a bit interesting, in that they originally called 100 people, and then a few minutes later they decided to call 10 more.

4. A bit of humor: the judge asked the group, "Do you know either Mr. [Prosecutor] or Mr. [Defense Attorney]?", then paused and added, "Mr. [Defendant]?", meaning "Do any of you know Mr. [Defendant]?", but he turned to her in surprise and grunted inquiringly, thinking she was calling on him, with an obvious "Sorry, I wasn't listening, what was the question?" look on his face.

5. Actually technically less than that. I'm including all the standing around, and being lined up to enter the courtroom, and having a break, and waiting for juror candidate #10 who for some reason kept having difficulty taking the elevator from the first floor to the eighth, and receiving instructions from the judge, and so on; but the voir dire itself is just the part where we were actually in the courtroom being asked questions.

"The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date"

ruakh — Sun, 19 Jan 2014 04:30:23 GMT

Last month I read The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date, by Samuel Arbesman. Overall it was interesting and enjoyable, though I still find it bizarre that Arbesman intentionally avoids distinguishing between facts that expire because they're discovered to have been wrong (e.g., the "fact" that humans had 48 chromosomes) with facts that expire because the situation has changed (e.g., the fact that no one had ever walked on the moon). (Granted, there could be some blurriness between the two — for example, the magnetic permeability of iron has changed over time, due to improvements in the technology for purifying it — but Arbesman doesn't say that, he just says that it makes sense to consider them the same way because it turns out that they expire following the same sort of exponential-decay pattern. Which seems a bit like question-begging to me.)

Also, I'm not sure I agree with all of his examples. For example, one example he gives is that he was "wrongly" taught about Brontosaurus, when the "right" term was Apatosaurus. He goes into a great deal of detail about the history here, so he's not giving reality short shrift, and I guess he's entitled to his opinion about the overall situation, but can a word really be a "fact"? (I guess this falls into the same sort of conflation as above — the "fact" of Brontosaurus is expiring in favor of the "fact" of Apatosaurus, though it's a very slow process — but I find it weird.)

And he gets a surprising number of details wrong, to the point that I started to wonder if it was intentional. And not about little-known things, either. Like, at one point he claims that centi- means "one-tenth". (Later on, he explains how the iron content of spinach was originally misstated by an order of magnitude (and the resulting notion that it's unusually iron-rich was popularized by Popeye), so maybe he's just carrying on a tradition of order-of-magnitude misstatements?)

Overall, I recommend it. He makes a lot of thought-provoking points. For example, he views it as a good thing that (as recent studies suggest) people nowadays are worse at remembering facts of the sort that are easily found using Google; he argues that remembered facts are likely to be obsolete anyway, whereas Google keeps us up-to-date. (Socrates, call your office!)

"The Hunger Games"

ruakh — Sat, 14 Dec 2013 07:07:36 GMT

I just watched The Hunger Games, finally, as what Trump calls "homework": I'm going to see Catching Fire tomorrow with my sister (plus some other people), so I figured I should watch the first one first. (I've read the first two books, so it's not like I'd have no clue what was going on, but still.)

They made more changes than I expected; I had heard from other folks that while the movie obviously removed some details, it didn't actually change very much; but I noticed a bunch of changes, such as:

- In the novel, Cinna tells Katniss and Peeta to hold hands when they go out in the chariot, and they comply without really thinking about it (only once they're already doing it does Katniss notice that all the other tribute-pairs are more or less ignoring each other), whereas in the movie Peeta gets Katniss to hold his hand once they're already out and moving, and she initially resists. (More generally the movie removes a lot of the indications of Cinna's intelligence and political savvy.)
- The novel repeatedly emphasizes that everyone is required to watch the games, whereas the movie makes it seem like they're not.
- In the novel Katniss only learns about Avoxes when she actually meets one in the Capitol (a girl whom she had once encountered in the forest outside her District), but in the movie she makes a comment early on about the possibility of the Capitol removing her tongue (which isn't exactly what is done to Avoxes in the novel, but that's clearly what she's alluding to).
- In the novel Katniss is the very last tribute to demonstrate her skills to the gamemasters, whereas in the movie she goes before Peeta, presumably leaving him a tough act to follow!
- In the novel Katniss pieces together Foxface's death, rather than simply seeing her dead with the berries. (In the movie Katniss states outright that she's smart. The novel opted for a "show, don't tell" approach. Of course, in several cases it would be hard to show Katniss figuring things out — they do show her figuring out the mines, at least — but in the case of Foxface's death, in the novel she actually explains it out loud to Peeta, which seems quite movie-ifiable.)
- O.K., so the dogs in the movie are monstrous, but they're not quite the monstrosities of the tribute-modeled dogs in the novel.
- This may be subjective, but I feel like in the novel the gamemasters don't seem to control the details of the arena quite so thoroughly; for example, in the novel, when the fireballs start, Katniss explains that this means she's in an area where they've installed fireballs, and she just needs to get out of that area (giving the impression that the fireballs are a feature that was installed beforehand and that the gamemasters can now turn on and off), whereas the movie makes it seem like the gamemasters have chosen fireballs on-the-fly, and they control individual fireballs (and individual trees). Though on the flip side, the novel has the gamemasters drain the water out of all the lakes and everything to drive them back toward the cornucopia, whereas the movie doesn't try to convey that, so I guess they had to make tradeoffs.

(Disclaimer: I read the book more than a year and a half ago, so I may be misremembering some stuff. The above should not be taken as gospel.)

The scenes without Katniss are interesting additions. The scene with Seneca Crane at the end was . . . something. I'm not sure I would know what to make of it if I hadn't read the second book. Actually, I still don't know quite what to make of it — is the suite with the berries a sort of super-fancy oubliette?

I didn't expect to cry at Rue's death, seeing as I already knew it was going to happen and was emotionally prepared for it, but nope, I cried anyway.