Archive for March, 2006
March 13, 2006 at 11:05 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
The day when I sit in my basement University office working furiously for the 40th hour on my weekly homework, and hear Anthony sighing, and read (correctly) that he is tired of graduate school and needs to think carefully about why he’s in it, and know that the reason I understand that from a mere sigh is that of course I’ve sighed that sigh for nearly 20 years, not just his one.
The day when I realize that Spring is here, and it’s thus the time when loved ones die. My last aunt, who died this weekend while recovering from a fall and showing every sign of recuperating better than before. Her grandson, who at age 17 keeled over for no reason beyond a silent congenital heart defect. My friend Nancy, who downsized her household and promised me she’d help me sell the 50 boxes of beloved antiques she consigned to me, but who then succumbed in four short months to non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and whose packed boxes still sit stacked in our house a year later, speaking of her short sharp fall and the things I can now never learn about their contents. My uncle, my grandmother, my Dad. Spring is hard on us, the gone and left both.
The day the garage roof leaked all over the valuable antique crap stored in the garage. The day we drove at 8 o’clock through a thunderstorm to discover the doctor appointments were next week, not today. The day we realized the lovely graduate student health insurance poops out in five weeks.
The day we chatted in class, and it was seen in the midst of conversation that neither the promising tenure-track academic nor the wannabe returnee will ever be sufficiently well-regarded or rewarded to compensate for the shit they and their peers have put each other through.
The day a grad school colleague asks me, “How do you know all these cool people?” and I realize the right answer is nothing to do with me now, but rather with the fact that I once had a life outside, beyond the ivy-covered walls — they are all people I knew from Before, from life. Of course you cannot be expected to have them; you are Inside.
The day I manage to dig out from Winter and see just how many ideas have to wait, projects languish, simple solutions sit undone, because I need to catch up on the homework and the grants and the other projects that have been sloughed aside since first snowfall.
It is a day one thinks hard about values, and society, and age. A day one takes stock, and builds a number of lists with two columns, weighing left against right. It is a rebalancing day, a day of contrasts, and deficit calculations.
And luckily, the first day you could drive with the windows open.
Otherwise, it’d be pretty damned depressing.
March 12, 2006 at 10:53 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Barbara’s posted the Bookp(h)ile entry for a book I scanned this afternoon (between homework assignments).
Her comments don’t allow <img> tags, so here are thumbs from Norman Price’s illustrations for the novel:
That’s all you get, until you go sign up for a free, fun, volunteer account at DP. And even then, you might have to wait a while….
March 12, 2006 at 10:22 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Amazing and useful images of Document icons. Very inspiring for the Big Picture reader.
March 12, 2006 at 9:40 am · Filed under Uncategorized
At Language Log: “The December 1 DWIM effect”:
If some computer virus or trojan did this sort of damage to the results of thousands of high-cost biomedical experiments, I imagine that we’d see a serious effort to put some people in jail. I’m not suggesting that any similar sort of retribution is appropriate here, but perhaps some rehabilitation would be in order….
(Via Quantum of Wantum.)
March 11, 2006 at 8:09 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Washed my mom’s car yesterday.
Arrayed on the metal frame of the carwash door: ’bout seventeen magnetic “We Support Our Troops”, “Milan Soccer”, Jesus fish, Darwin amphibia, “Bring Them Home” ribbons.
We swim in a sea of symbolism. For some people, avowed affiliations can wash off. They collect along the shore.
Pick your own.
March 11, 2006 at 11:22 am · Filed under Uncategorized
A brief exercise in modern economics.
When the morning’s symposium began, I downloaded the Project Gutenberg edition of Anthony Hope’s adventure novel The Indiscretion of the Duchess. This is a book I bought (that is, a physical original copy I own) a few months ago, scanned on my Plustek scanner, submitted to the Distributed Proofreaders website, and which Barbara and the Distributed Proofreaders team edited into HTML and text editions, and thereafter contributed to the Gutenberg archive.
[Why did I choose that book? Frankly because it's a simple novel, though an entertaining one, little-known. I could have chosen widely, and just from our own scanned library: we've produced a few hundred books in the last couple of years, and own thousands destined for online redistribution. One thing I've come to realize is that novels are much easier to manipulate quickly. Dictionaries, textbooks, and bibliographies are a bit trickier. If I'd chosen one of those more complicated volumes, I might've spent more than an hour on the following exercise.
Maybe two.]
You can view and download the current Project Gutenberg editions of the book here.
When Paul Courant started speaking on the economics of content, scholarship, publishing and copyright, I fired up Apple’s Pages software, and dropped the Gutenberg file directly into it.
Ugly! So I spent about 45 minutes changing the styles to suit my personal tastes. The resulting file is (approximately) an octavo book—like the original was—in a roughly contemporary font I have on hand here on my laptop. I used the scanned drop caps and illustrations and adjusted them somewhat, and made modifications of the flow of the text, the pagination, the margins, a bit of nip and tuck here and there.
I’ve never actually used Apple’s Pages layout software much; I think I wrote a letter in it once. So I had a bit of trouble putting the page numbers on the pages in the way I wanted. I suppose there must be a way; I could spend a few more minutes doing so.
About the time Karl Pohrt (from Shaman Drum bookstore) recommended Charlie Stross’s Accelerando as the “best business book of recent times”, I saved the file as a PDF.
Here.
Why would I do such a thing? That is, in the bigger picture, what kind of insane economics would drive some idiot engineer to buy old, dead books nobody cares about, scan them and clutter up the Internets with trashy novels, and then take a half-hour of valuable time to make some PDF version nobody will ever read?
Barbara and I do this all the time, understand.
One answer (from Barbara, reading over my shoulder): Because I can.
Good answer. A very, very good answer.
Another answer—the one I have in mind personally—is one that I know Karl and Charlie Stross already understand. I wonder how many others in the audience here will understand it. Before it trundles up to them one day and knocks them over. Tell me what you think it is.
Your hint: Charlie Stross did write a business book.
For extra bonus irony: When Karl was talking about Print on Demand/Bind on Demand technology, I accidentally sent my edited Hope to the default printer, over in the IOE Building on campus, instead of to a PDF file. That’s the first case of Print By Accident publication I can recall….
So. Here’s my copy of Anthony Hope’s book. I could change it, if I find something wrong with it. Let me know how you’d like it changed.
So could you. I could post it to a wiki somewhere. You could, if you like. We could make a new edition that looks different. We could fix the typography. We could write your kids into it. We could translate it into Mandarin.
Why would we do that? Feel free to tell me. I’d really like to know. Arguably, we will do things along those lines. I did one or two just now.
But at this exact moment, they’re ringing the bell. I’m about to start the second session of this conference, myself. Time for a sip of coffee.
later that afternoon: I spent ten (10) minutes more, and added corrected headers, footers, page numbers, deleted the Project Gutenberg wrappers, enhanced the frontis illustration to replicate its position in the original book, and added three words not found in the original book.
Ten minutes.
And I deleted the old edition, which the link used to point to. And substituted this one.
March 10, 2006 at 11:52 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Barbara and I are semi-live blogging from the Symposium being held at the Rackham Auditorium today; I’m going to drop her notes here, and we’ll edit in links and comments afterwards.
Read the rest of this entry »
March 9, 2006 at 1:57 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
This is my life.
Two things, one morning:
- I am working on a 30-page report for an Operations Research class, in which we are picking apart a large-scale combinatorial optimization problem. We’ve spent (looks at calendar) seven weeks exploring in great detail why this one problem is so very hard to solve with CPLEX. We modify the constraints, we fiddle the objective function, we reframe and retrench. It’s actually quite good, as a class, because it shows how very hard it is to solve large optimization problems with current standard tools.
We’re not using heuristics, of course. We don’t do that, much, where I work. And it’s not what the class is about.
Because the class is, on the face of it, set up to train young practitioners to think in the proper way about the Big Hard problems they will have to solve in their future careers.
- An old friend wrote. He works at a quantum computing company. They solve difficult combinatorial optimization problems. Fast. This is the future: hard things will become much easier.
Wait, was that a raindrop? What the hell is this raindrop on my homework?
Crap, now I’ll have to start over.
March 8, 2006 at 7:07 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Barbara has transcribed an 1879 newspaper account of an “aerolite”, which sounds a lot more like a string of tongue-in-cheek jibes at the expense of the named parties, than it does a mysterious phenomenon. I wonder how many of the strange newspaper filler stories of the 19th century (and since) are examples of subtle prods. I’m thinking particularly of the “airship panic” flap that cropped up all across the US in the latter 1800s.
Nonetheless, inside jokes don’t travel well through time, do they?
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