winter dreams' proxy

built my dreams

sappidus — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 04:12:13 GMT

- Cal

hanami

sappidus — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:49:07 GMT

Cherry blossoms on two different continents:

- Cal

indian winter

sappidus — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 06:00:23 GMT

interiors

sappidus — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:41:53 GMT

- Cal

health and wealth and a white house on a hill

sappidus — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:55:34 GMT

"She held her head up imperiously. She was a small girl, and the gesture made her look less regal than impish. But it exposed her neck; I suddenly realized how smooth her pale skin was." - from an earlier entry

- Cal

3,679,200 minutes

sappidus — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:17:28 GMT

Chinatowns 200 miles and 7 years apart:

Boston, 2001

New York City, 2008

- Cal

wait 'til next year

sappidus — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:05:14 GMT

- Cal

film farewell

sappidus — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 21:27:40 GMT

- Cal

frederick and calvin

sappidus — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 14:53:08 GMT

Hitting up some photographic cliches in NYC's Central Park:

- Cal

hot as Jay-Z

sappidus — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 23:13:32 GMT

We take a detour from our irregularly-scheduled programming for lighter waters. (What? LiveJournal can be used for such things?!?!/1interrobang)

Courtesy of the faintly ridiculous but undeniably fun Delicious Library -- I'd buy a drink for whoever came up with the webcam-as-barcode-scanner idea -- here are some books I'm currently reading:

Three books on sociology! One to make me feel bad about being shallow, one to make me feel good about being shallow, and one to make me feel shallow about Japan. A novel from the inscrutable archipelago, too: it may be more classically Japanese in tone than even Kawabata's Snow Country, which I would've a priori considered impossible. You can't get much more American than the Rabbit series of novels, though, and I submit that there's a bit of Harry Angstrom in all men. Finally, a thorough examination of someone who might just disprove that last sentence, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who said in 1929, "My two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It's a pity they can't be combined." That he was so wrong on that count is chilling, touching... probably for him most of all, haunting.

One of my favorite pastimes when I was young was just to go to bookstores. I could spend arbitarily long amounts of time in them. (That this enthusiasm never quite extended to libraries is an issue for another post.) Even now, when my time in my beloved home city of NYC tends to be short, I always devote an afternoon to making the pilgrimage to at least two of my favorite bookstores there (Housing Works! Three Lives and Company! The Strand! The list goes on.) I just found a lovely little bookstore here in St. Louis, in fact, and...

Hell, did I just use the word "lovely," and not in reference to a hot chick?

By the way, I've never been too enamored of obscure vocab, but words can still entertain me. I ran into an old favorite today, "velleity," which roughly means, "volition of the weakest kind." Fricative to liquid to stop, ohh, joy! I am only half kidding. Sometimes I think I should just buy a Random House Webster's Unabridged for the fun of it. (Don't get me started on the OED, man. Have you ever tried to use that thing? And seriously, how many pages do you really need on "and"?)

Anyway, I actually have a book on the way from Amazon (I know what I just said about bookstores, but it's hard to beat Amazon for instant gratification) titled Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler. I haven't indulged my amateur interest in linguistics in a good long time. I guess all that Latin training meant something after all... I suppose I did go on to the even more (structurally) elegant language of ancient Greek, and then to the controlled insanity of Sanskrit...

What the hell am I blabbing on about, anyway? I bet you wish I'd just posted a juggling video instead.

- Cal

the negative and the print

sappidus — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 05:49:19 GMT

As usual, I'm taking a while with the promised second and third parts to this post, so I figured that in the meantime, I'd tell you about my performance at my school's talent show this year. It should provide a good backdrop for the aforementioned part 3 anyway.

First off, let me explain how I came up with the routine. I knew an audience of peers would go easy on me, but I still took the planning very seriously. I spent a week just deciding what song to use, finally settling on a Z-Trip remix of the Jackson Five's "I Want You Back." The original, besides being too short, was simply too energetic for me to credibly juggle to. But using a remix seemed perfect to me: the song would be immediately recognizable but not seem old-hat, plus the mix had a modern, relaxed vibe to it that would frame the juggling in a cool-but-not-too-cool atmosphere. (Yes, I really think in these terms sometimes.)

There was just one problem: four minutes is too long for a one-prop juggling routine. At the least, keeping an audience's interest for that long requires consummate performing skills, and I am not a performer. In fact, the talent show would mark my first ever solo public juggling performance for more than about ten people. The length was the main reason it took a week to decide on the song. In the end, I sucked it up and resolved to design the routine for maximal visual variety at my skill level. Besides, like I said, it was my first solo performance; I admit, I wanted to keep the spotlight for as long as plausible, as I might not get another chance.

I remember sitting down with headphones, noting down all the salient points in the music that I wanted the routine to match:

0:00 - start
0:02 - guitar
0:12 - guitar'
0:22 - bass starts
0:31 - bass'
0:41 - drum starts
0:51 - drum'
1:01 - verse starts
1:20 - verse B
1:39 - I want you back
1:50 - verse
2:09 - verse B
2:29 - dance break
2:39 - break'
2:49 - guitar only
2:59 - Michael bops
3:08 - Michael hits "need"
3:18 - verse
3:28 - verse B
3:38 - last "back"
3:47 - drum coda
4:10 - fade starts
4:37 - end

Young Michael Jackson hitting "need" at 3:08 was the climax of the song, and I knew immediately what I wanted to be doing at that moment: juggling 5 balls. See, for a juggler, 5 balls is the great demarcation line. Anyone -- and I mean *anyone*, barring real physical or mental barriers -- can learn to juggle 3 with the proper instruction, and 4 is generally no more than a few weeks' worth of light practice away from 3. But 5... Suffice to say, if you ever see someone juggling 5 objects, he's put a lot of concentrated effort into learning it. Not being particularly gifted with so-called "numbers" juggling myself, I still wasn't comfortable with 5 balls, especially for the stage. But if I was going to perform, it simply had to be in there.

That decided, the next issue was how to occupy the preceding 3 minutes. No problems with the outline: I considered myself a pretty smooth 3 ball juggler, and I definitely knew enough different tricks to take up 2 minutes with that number. Then 1 minute with 4. That would be a bit harder, not necessarily because I didn't have enough tricks in the bag, but because many of them looked too similar to be interesting juxtaposed against one another.

I decided to work on my bread-and-butter 3 first. The standard pattern with 3 is called a "cascade," and I made a choice that I wanted to eschew doing it until the very end of the routine. That is, instead of the usual practice of doing the cascade, then a trick, then back into the cascade, then another trick, I would simply move from trick to trick to trick. This wasn't anything that a lay audience would consciously realize, of course, but I thought it would help on the visual interest front if I never did the same pattern twice. Also, going directly from trick to trick put stringent restrictions on just how I could juggle, and that would help to tighten up my routine.

After some contemplation, it seemed to me that starting with "straight line" tricks, with balls traveling strictly vertically or horizontally, and then moving on to the more sinewy ones was a natural progression. That would also allow me to start off with a mildly humorous trick, both to gain the interest of the audience and to relax what were sure to be frayed nerves on my part. I worked out the possible transitions over the course of a few days and came up with the following list:

3 balls:
2-ball columns
box
extended box
columns
fake columns, both sides
fake columns
crossed-arm fake columns
machine
boston mess
wide reverse cascade
yo-yo
outside burke's barrage
inside burke's barrage
mills mess
fake mills
shower, both ways
shower w/ extra throw
531 mills
crossed-arm reverse cascade
outside 441
inside 441
windmill
reuven-style

(I know this list makes no sense to a non-juggler. I just want to convey my thought process.)

What of 4? The basic pattern with 4 is called a "fountain." It would've been nice to go from trick to trick without returning to the fountain, but I knew I wasn't confident enough for that. Still, I designed it so that if I was feeling good on the day of performance, I could at least theoretically go from trick to trick.

4 balls:
half-shower, side view
half-shower, frontal
tennis
async columns
sync fountain
sync crossing
async fountain
534
552
5551
561
shower
hi-lo shower
dancey's devilment
multiplexes

Overly ambitious, this list. For example, 561 alone was hard for me just to run for the video camera (where I could have ten failed attempts before hitting it on the eleventh) yet here I was, wanting to put it into live performance. However, I figured that intending to have such borderline tricks in the routine, and thus practicing them, would help make my training (and not just designing!) serious. In other words, too easy a routine may have led me to lollygag with the practice, but too hard a routine would better prepare me for the stress of performance. I could always leave out tricks when the time came. Right?

5 balls:
[54]2[22]
cascade

There isn't much more to say about 5 balls. But that was a full minute before the end of the song... How would I end off the routine? With 3 again. Progressing from 3 to 4 to 5 then dropping back down may sound odd, but my flashiest tricks were all with 3.

3:
triplex btb start
clawed
world's fastest trick
2-up, 1-up in 1 hand
right-hand backcrosses w/ half-turn
backcrosses
overhead
finale

The finale proper was a question mark. I wanted to end off on a high note, which meant selecting something that looked difficult to the audience, but I also wanted to have a good chance of pulling it off on stage, which meant that it couldn't be something at the very edge of my skill. There was something I could do that would fit the bill, but I wasn't sure I had the pluck to do it. Until the day of the performance, I made sure to keep a backup finale trick ("drop 1 to half pirouette, throw 2 to full pirouette") in the bag, but I had proved shaky on even the backup in practice. In the end, I went with my original idea, and while it didn't *quite* go as intended, I think it closed the act well enough.

As far as performance, what of everything that preceded that finale? I had about the expected number of drops. (The ugly truth is, in at least a hundred times trying, I never once ran the routine dropless in practice.) I was supposed to be able to run the first three-ball section in my sleep... so I wish I'd been asleep! Then I got completely lost in the four-ball section, taking me "off the score" so to speak, but my flustration led to a moment which I never could've planned. And five balls went as well as I could have realistically hoped, even if I didn't hit the "need" moment I so desperately intended to in designing the routine. Still ahead of the music just before the finale, I threw in my go-to, time-killing trick to good effect, and I already mentioned how I felt about the end.

Anyway, more than enough words about it, check it out for yourself:

Performance (Quicktime)
(if that doesn't work on your computer, try this uber-compatible MPEG-1)

It was a good experience, and I'm quite proud of the result, looking back. At the time, though, I was nervous as shit, but that is another story...

- Cal

or in health

sappidus — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 17:19:46 GMT

- Cal

oof

sappidus — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 00:57:12 GMT

These aren't real "photographs," and I'm no real photographer, but I thought it would be nice to break my long LJ layoff by posting a few out-of-focus pictures from my digital camera over the past few months.

( see the rest )

- Cal

send a crew back to school

sappidus — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 14:48:57 GMT

I came to cause some pandemonium
Battle a band of phony MC's and stand the only one
Imitator, intimidator, stimulator, simulator of data, eliminator
There's never been a greater since the burial of Jesus
Fuck around and catch all of the venereal diseases
My thesis will smash a stereo to pieces
My a cappella releases plastic masterpieces through telekinesis
And eases you
mentally
gently
sentimentally
instrumentally
with entity
dementedly
meant to be
infinite
~ Eminem, "Infinite"

- Cal

night falls on manhattan

sappidus — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 04:55:29 GMT

When it comes to photography, I am an unabashed classicist. My first camera, a hand-me-down from my father, was a Nikon FM2, a rugged 35mm manual SLR that continues to strike me as an extraordinary feat of engineering -- how can it, through purely mechanical means, consistently measure out 1/4000th of a second for 300,000 consecutive exposures? (Of course, the FM2 is not alone in achieving this sort of precision and longevity, but it is a sterling example of its ilk.) When I finally graduated to a new camera, it was... what else... a Nikon FM3a, the company's only very slightly modernized version of their venerable warhorse. It remains one of my most prized possessions.

See, there is really nothing quite like a manual SLR. Everything you can do with it occurs with satisfying feedback and finality: the quiet ka-chunk of the shutter release, the resistance when twisting a new lens onto the body, or the whirr of manually rewinding the film. Even just the process of loading a new roll of film is an course in fine tactile adjustments: slotting the roll onto the axle, aligning the guide holes with the sprockets, threading the film lead into place, locking the camera back closed, cocking the shutter to wind the film into position.

I complain about the digital revolution a lot with criticisms that at best sound quaintly retro and at worst sound hopelessly out of touch. "So crisp! So antiseptic! Where's the grain? Digital film noise is not grain! How about those high-contrast edges? Low-light situations? Black-and-white? Show me a CCD that can capture the contrast range of a B&W negative!"

But deep down, my antipathy towards digital cameras has nothing to do with inferior light sensors or purple fringing or shutter lag. Neither do I mind that their ease of use makes anyone and everyone a "photographic artist" these days -- I'm all for bringing the wonder of photography to anyone with an eye and an itchy trigger finger.

What it pretty much comes down to is that a digital camera, and to some degree almost every kind of automated camera, robs me (not you, not the wedding photographer over there... me) of those sensations I fetishized above, that joy of process, the certain oneness with the tool that a manual camera cannot help but engender. With only a little metal, glass, and silver halide, a manual camera performs the absolute miracle of trapping an instant of light. Yes, of course, there is extraordinarily clever technology being applied in any digital camera, and that's not even taking into the account the amazing achievement that integrated circuits and the control of moving electrons are in the first place. Yes, the digital camera makes so many things much more convenient and gives us possibilities that we could not have even dreamed up before. But the experience is not the same. I can respect arguments that one or the other is better or more rewarding in the long run. But anyone who maintains that the camera is only a tool, that the "experience" has no real bearing on the final product and thus can be discounted... I would think such a person is missing out on enjoying a whole facet of the craft, of the art, and I would feel a little sorry for him.

* * * * *

So anyway, I bought my first digital camera. (A compact one, no less!)

Because I wanted to be a little mean to it, my first assignment was to take some no-light pictures to see how the camera would react. All things considered, I think the Canon acquitted itself quite respectably. Under the cut are a handful of views through the windows of my family's NYC apartment.

(Note: The combination of extremely low lighting and multiple JPEG re-compressions led to some pretty noticeable artifacting on these files. It's tolerable when I view them on my Mac, but I suspect that the different gamma standard on Windows will accentuate the problem. Still, it was just for fun, and besides, what do you want from me, these are my first digital shots...)

- Cal

bushes

sappidus — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 04:07:16 GMT

I've been sick at home the past week or so, which wasn't such a horrible turn of events. But it did lead to me getting pent-up on the juggling, so when I was finally well enough today, I decided to tape my practice session.

It was perhaps not quite enough material to fill out 3 minutes and 46 seconds, but I just really wanted to use the song.

http://homepage.mac.com/sappidus/jug061805_lo.mp4 (16 megs, Quicktime 6 required)

- Cal

life is but a

sappidus — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 03:48:38 GMT

in first snowfall
though slurping only hot water...
my home
- Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827)

I've missed you.

- Cal

- ---

sappidus — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 16:25:19 GMT

Jenny. Her name is Jenny.

- Cal

let them eat cake

sappidus — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 04:15:12 GMT

Always searching for that killer angle, looking for the perfect hook... This, maybe, is one of the reasons I don't complete too many entries for the website/LJ. I'm too inflexible about it: all sorts of things I would like to write about swirl around, but I am either too lazy or too dumb to find the "right way" for me to write about most of them.

One of the biggest subjects that I continually falter about describing is how I relate to my academic love of mathematics. It runs deep -- perhaps more deeply than any "love" of mine not having to do with people runs. But I never really feel like I have a good enough handle on what I really think about it to write about it. Perhaps, though, my recent enthusiasm over a certain simple-sounding problem will be enough, for now, to express something of my affection for the subject...

So, suppose you and I want to divide a cake into two parts in a completely fair fashion. What does this really mean? It means that we both want our fair share -- or, because we are greedy (I know I am!), more than our fair share. To put it in mathematical terms, we both want pieces that we think correspond to at least 50% of the value of the entire cake.

But no one needs any math to figure out a way to do this: you cut, I choose. That is, you cut it into two pieces, then I choose one, and you get the other one. This is intuitively the right way to go.

But here's something you might never have considered: this also works just fine no matter how differently we value parts of the cake. That is, let's say around half the cake has vanilla icing, which I really adore but you don't really care one way or the other about. Because you don't care about the vanilla icing, it is perfectly plausible that you will make your cut so that the pieces seem equally valuable to you, but one (with more vanilla icing) seems more valuable to me. Luckily, I get to choose, right? So I pick one with more vanilla icing, and I feel like I got more than my fair share (say, 60% of the value of the cake). Meanwhile, you're left with the other one... But you're not disappointed at all! Because when you split it, you split it so that each piece had a 50% value to you. So it didn't even matter which of the pieces you end up with: you get 50% value and thus you do not feel cheated. (Note that you logically would not divide it any differently, say 51% and 49%, because of the risk that you would be left with the 49% piece and thus not get your fair share.)

Simple enough, right? Or maybe you think I've overcomplicated the issue with all these % values and overanalysis of what every schoolchild already knows. Well, you ain't seen nothing yet...

So we come to the interesting part: What about dividing a cake amongst three people?

This gets a lot more thorny. One of the big issues is "envy," because it turns out it is possible for each of the three people to get what they believe is a "fair share" (i.e., of 33 1/3% value or more to them), but for them to still be envious of someone else's piece, in which case it hardly seems like a fair division anymore. This isn't too obvious, so maybe an example will be illustrative:

Let's say you, I, and Barry want to split this cake. You and I don't care about the message written in icing on the top, but Barry cares a lot about it. Then it is more than possible that if the cake happened to already be split into three pieces, then you and I would value each of the pieces at 33 1/3%, but Barry would value them at 50%, 40%, and 10% (due to the differing amounts of the message that each piece has).

So, if Barry were to get what he sees as the 40% piece, then it's true that he should feel like he got more than his fair share, since it's even more than 33 1/3%. Still, he will be envious of whomever of us gets what he sees as the 50% piece, since 40% is less than 50%. (Clearly, since you and I value all the pieces equally, we will get our fair share and not be envious no matter where the pieces end up going.)

So the question becomes this: How can three people divide up the cake so that each person believes the following...

1. "My piece is worth at least 33 1/3% of the value of the cake, as I see it."
2. "Neither of my friends' pieces is worth more than mine (again as I see it)."

Yes, what we want is a proportional, envy-free, and finite cake division procedure.

But how?

This entry has probably already been too technical for most of your tastes, so I guess I will leave it at that. There is an appropriate procedure, though, which is relatively simple but maddeningly difficult to guess.

- Cal

turnaround

sappidus — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 23:39:12 GMT

Bored today, I decided to videotape myself juggling. And of course it turned out to be a horrible session: it honestly felt like I was dropping every fifth or sixth throw. Thus, the following video clip is less cool than I might have hoped... But I felt such a mixture of triumph and relief at pulling off even one trick that the clip holds much cathartic value for me.

Kickup and half-pirouette -> pirouette -> back-of-the-neck catch and drop (359k; as usual, Quicktime 6 required, muhuhahaha)

My parents' bedroom ceiling is high, isn't it?

- Cal

countdown

sappidus — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 06:29:04 GMT

With two days until graduation, my thoughts:

(the first is a picture of a tiny fraction of the chairs being set up for the ceremony; the second is of one corner of the large awning being put up for the occasion)

- Cal

another year

sappidus — Fri, 21 May 2004 13:38:05 GMT

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened. - Jennifer Yane

- Cal