Israel

Short post. Going to Israel for a little over 2 weeks. Will travel all over the country. There will be a wedding. Leaving tonight. Returning on the 7th. On the way there and back, I get some time in London to wander around. Let's hope this cease fire sticks. Will take pictures.

Left v. Right

We've all probably heard the concept that different people may experience color differently. Maybe what I see as yellow looks, in my mind, like what the color blue looks like in your mind. There's no real way to answer that question definitively using modern technology and our limited understanding of how the brain works, but in theory with sufficiently advanced technology and a sufficiently advanced understanding of the brain, one could answer that question. Of course, there would be no 'right' or 'wrong' way to perceive colors, but one could at least agree that two people either see things the same, or differently. That said, I've heard somewhere (it could have been through my dad, who as a lawyer, is not an authority on the matter) that we all probably see colors the same way.

The other day I was thinking along similar lines about the whole left/right distinction. The decision of which goes where is arbitrary. If everything in your head were a mirror image of what things were like in reality (we'll come to reality later), then you wouldn't have any problems getting around in the world. You would have learned to read 'backwards', drive on the 'other' side of the road, etc. However, everything would be flipped, so everything would still agree internally. Still, just like the color example we're more familiar with, it's possible that what 'left' feels like in your mind may be what 'right' feels like in my mind.

Now, if two people really do disagree in their minds of where 'left' goes and where 'right' goes, and we somehow figure out a way to study the brain enough to discover when that's the case, who would be considered to have a mirror-image view of reality? I don't believe that we could say either way, since each person's views of reality are internally consistent, and would make all the same predictions about reality. There's just no way to determine if the universe is actually this way or that way. Construct a model of the universe, and look at it through a mirror (don't try this at home, it's far too big.) Everything still works normally, since you're looking at the same thing, but certain rules are changed. The right-hand-rule for vector multiplication in electromagnetic interactions would become the left-hand-rule, the parity violation of weak interactions would cut the other way (I think that's how it works), etc. The question instead becomes whether the universe makes a choice here, or if reality doesn't actually have a preference in the left/right placement decision, and outside of our minds the structure of space is something bizarre and foreign.

Tech-savvy districts in NH like Clinton

While not being definitive proof of fraud on the part of either the electronic voting machines used in New Hampshire or the human ballot counters, it seems like there is a general discrepancy in the percentage of votes won by senators Clinton and Obama in the primary. In towns that use electronic voting machines, Clinton experienced an advantage, and in towns that hand-count their ballots, Obama experienced an advantage. The other candidates also experienced advantages in one type of voting machine or the other, but the percentages were much closer to zero. I haven't figured out the statistical significance of these numbers, so it could be attributed to random noise. However, I am skeptical of that since the candidates with a higher overall vote count experienced higher discrepancies between electronic and hand-counted ballots, whereas I would think the reverse would hold if it was simply 'background noise'. All the more reason to insist that all electronic voting machines implement a voter-verified paper record of votes.

2008 New Hampshire State Primary Results

---

Update:
After doing some very simple analysis on the numbers, I've found the following:

Of the 135 towns that used paper ballots, Clinton beat Obama in 47 of them (~35%)
Of the 100 towns that used electronic ballots, Clinton beat Obama in 59 of them (59%)

So, in districts that use electronic ballots, Clinton beat Obama almost twice as often as she did in districts that use paper ballots.

iGoogle

Despite the fact that I started using Google as my homepage because it was little more than a search box on a plain white background, I've been using the 'iGoogle' homepage for a while now. It lets you customize the page somewhat with themes, but almost all of the themes are cutesy: little cartoon animals doing something different depending on the time of day, making tea, gathering berries, what have you. Google is finally trying to break into the adults-who-don't-have-hello-kitty-pencil-bags market, and added a 'Solar System' theme. Different picture depending on the day, quite tasteful in my opinion. They have images of the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. No Pluto, no asteroids or comets, none of the jovian moons (or any moon other than THE moon for that matter,) but still a nice spread. They have 10 images, but there are only 7 days in the week, and I'm guessing that some of them are either unused, or not every day of the week will be the same from week to week.

Maths

I've been digging around some, and have failed to see this information demonstrated, at least not in a way that I could identify, so...

I propose the following:

For all p, p being a safe prime (with a corresponding Sophie Germain prime s,) implies that for all y in [2, p-1], y^s mod p is either 1 or p-1.

Furthermore, a discrete logarithm only exists under the following circumstances:

• 0^k = z mod p is only true for z = 0, with k in {1, 2, 3, ...}
  
• 1^k = z mod p is only true for z = 1, with k in {1, 2, 3, ...}
  
• (p-1)^k = z mod p is only true for z in {1, p-1}.
  (p-1)^k = p-1 mod p for all odd k values, and
  (p-1)^k = 1 mod p for all even k values.
  
• Otherwise, let y be in [2, p-2]:
  
  
  • if y^s = p-1 mod p:
    for all z in [1, p-1], there is some k such that y^k = z mod p.
    Let the set of all such y values be represented as Y.
    
  • if y^s = 1 mod p:
    y^k = z mod p has a solution k if and only if p - z is in Y.
    
  
  

I have managed to show that this is true for all safe primes under one thousand, I just need to figure out how to prove it for all safe primes. Hopefully there will be more to come here.

For a follow up, here's an interesting chart showing this information for the safe prime 11. The columns represent the y values, the rows represent the z values, and the numbers in the cells (if present) represent the k values. The relevant Sophie-Germain prime powers are highlighted in green.

A			5				5	5	5		1
9			6	2	3	4	4	8	2	1
8			3				7	9	1
7			7				3	1	9
6			9				1	7	3
5			4	3	2	1	6	2	8	4
4			2	4	1	3	8	6	4	2
3			8	1	4	2	2	4	6	3
2			1				9	3	7
1		1	A	5	5	5	A	A	A	5	2
0	1
	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	A

---

2007/11/08: Here's a similar chart for the safe primes 5 and 7:

4			2	2	1
3			3	1
2			1	3
1		1	4	4	2
0	1
	0	1	2	3	4

6				3		3	1
5				5		1
4			2	4	1	2
3				1		5
2			1	2	2	4
1		1	3	6	3	6	2
0	1
	0	1	2	3	4	5	6

Compare these against a non safe-prime (not even prime) base 12:

B												1
A											1
9				2						1
8			3						1
7								1
6							1
5						1
4			2		1				2		2
3				1
2			1
1		1				2		2				2
0	1						2
	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	A	B

---

I've written a program to show these tables, available here

I'm going to start solving all my problems with violence

My phone was working for the most part, but the memory card I got for it wasn't being recognized. The card worked in other phones (same make and model) and other memory cards also wouldn't work in my phone. Seems my phone was the problem. Then, on Friday, I stepped out onto my balcony to make a phone call, pulled out my phone, and flipped it open. Here, my toddler-like reflexes got the better of me and the phone went sailing off the balcony. I watched as it fell down seven floors, and hit a tree. It made a nice loud crack as it hit. Figuring I was fucked, I ran downstairs to collect the pieces, and found my phone sitting on the ground, seemingly unaware that it just fell a good 70 feet. Later on during the weekend I tried the memory card again, and it works fine. So from now on, when something or someone doesn't do what I want, I'm going to throw it, or them, off my balcony. Just a heads up.

Bad time to upgrade

Step 1: Get a new iPod, one of the latest-generation "iPod classic" ones.
Step 2: Realize that, while compatible with my iBook, it's not compatible with the OS I was running (10.3.something)
Step 3: Decide that, since I was planning on upgrading anyway, now would be a good time to do it.
Step 4: Go out and buy OS 10.4.
Step 5: Realize today that OS 10.5 is due to come out in a month, and is also compatible with my iBook.

I wonder if I'll be able to upgrade to OS 10.5 at a discount since my purchase of 10.4 was so recent. Google hasn't been much help on that end, so I guess it's "wait and see" for the time being.

Bored

I'm bored, so I'm going to bore you with some computer stuff...

When working in any programming language that supports C-style commenting (both /* */ and //), there is a simple way to have a large block of code that can easily be commented and uncommented. You start the comment block normally: /*, but you end the comment somewhat differently: //*/, with no code following on the line of the end-comment code. To un-comment the block of code, type another / before the opening /*, resulting in //*:

// Commented out:
/*
foo("bar");
...
//*/

// Not commented out:
//*
foo("bar");
...
//*/

Okay, back to work.

Stardust

So last night I saw Stardust: that new movie based on the novel by Neil Gaiman. The movie was excellent; on par with Pan's Labyrinth, with the added bonus of me not having to read subtitles or learn Spanish (which, really, I should learn anyway.) This post is not, however, going to be a review of the movie. Just go see it.

A little later that night, I was standing outside with my field of vision unintentionally pointing upwards, when I saw a meteor (more precisely, a fireball, boldie, or detonating fireball.) Now, I've seen meteors before: individual unexpected meteors, meteor showers I've decided to go outside and watch, I've even briefly owned a couple meteorites. This one was a vibrant green, a color I've seen before in meteors, and lasted a good two to three seconds. Towards the end of it's path it slowed down and disintegrated into several smaller chunks, some falling behind to make a short trail of meteors. One of the more impressive displays I've seen. I'd guess it's apparent magnitude was at least as bright as -5.

Statistical Linguistics + Music

A class I'm taking this semester on computational linguistics, which is a continuation of the one I took last semester, is covering statistical analysis of linguistics. The subject covers everything from calculating how often specific words occur by simply counting them and dividing by the total number of words, to automatically grouping words by grammatical class and determining simple rules of grammar, to determining the author of unknown works by comparing them to samples of works by known authors. It's not what I thought the field would be when I started taking the course, but it's extremely interesting (to me, at least.) I've been wondering what else you could do with this, and then it hit me.

What if, instead of words, letters, or sounds, you used musical notes. You could create, more or less, the same type of analysis for music as you can for language. Some applications could be interesting, like determining the composer of unknown works, but the same tools that allow you to describe language, or in this case music, allow you to go the other way: you can create random variations based on what you've seen and analyzed. I tried this a while ago with my blog, and while a lot of the text it produced is garbage (you need a ton of sample text to get consistently good English, and my blog isn't that large), there were a few gems. Like "Tim can confiscate your property if he wants to." I'm looking into what's necessary to do this with music. I have a ton of Scott Joplin sheet music that I could run the analysis on, create a model, then generate novel music from. Chances are a lot of it will be crap, but with a basic understanding of music theory I could add some assumptions on how music is structured that could improve the results.

The only thing holding me back is that, while I really want to do this, I would have to translate all the sheet music into something a program could understand, which will involve a ton of typing. I could also do it on waveforms taken from MP3s on my computer, but that'll add an extra layer to the problem: figuring out the notes from the sound, which seems trivial but is actually fairly hard, especially with all the distortion used in a lot of my music. Maybe if I stick around another 4 years after I get my linguistics degree and get a music degree it'll all come together.

If I pull my act together and do this, I'll post some MP3s. Just don't hold your breath.

Wait, teenagers know about sex? When did this happen?

The Bush administration has been focusing on abstinence as the only one hundred percent effective way of preventing unwanted out of wedlock pregnancies. Spending federal tax dollars on preaching this message to minors is bad enough, in my mind, and the 18-29 year old crowd is being added as targets of this message since the problem of out-of-wedlock pregnancies for that age group is large. I see two logical flaws with this approach. One is that if abstinence is the only 100% effective way to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and pregnancies are a risk one takes when choosing to take part in unnecessary and risky behavior (sex, that is, if you don't remember what you learned in middle school health class), what is preventing that logic being applied to other unnecessary and risky behavior. High school sports come to mind. Any kind of contact sport (though according to my brother, dancing is a contact sport, football and lacrosse are impact sports) carries a risk of injury. If the only 100% effective way to prevent unwanted concussions and broken bones is to not take part in sports, why are these sports encouraged? I guess team-building and physical fitness are some of the benefits of doing sports; however, there have been a few studies showing that encouraging aggression on the field translates into more aggression in other aspects of life, so there is at least some detrimental social impact from sports like football, etc. In addition, frequent sex has been linked to improvements in mood and mental composure. What it seems to boil down to is that society deems sex out of wedlock to be immoral, while sports to be wholesome, to hell with the evidence. This argument could be continued indefinitely, it seems, and probably neither side would be able to convince the other. So even though the internet is the perfect place for such an indefinite argument, I'm not interested in having it. So on to my main objection (math warning).

In practice, abstinence is 100% effective, while contraceptives vary in effectiveness, but tend to be good and can be combined (if a condom is 90% effective, and the pill is 98% effective, a combination of the two should be 99.8% effective.) Abstinence is in the lead. However, public policy is not directly tied to sexual behavior. There is a barrier: the effectiveness of education. Assuming that abstinence only education is 90% effective, and contraceptive education is 95% effective (both probably off, but in my mind fair guesses), then we have to tie in these numbers to get the actual expected risk to the population. With these numbers, abstinence only education would be, in the end, 90% effective (90% of the time it works every time, 10% of the time it never works), while contraceptive education would be 94.81% effective (95% of the time it is 99.8% effective, 5% of the time it never works.) While touting the message that abstinence is the only 100% effective behavior to prevent unwanted pregnancies, it may be the case that contraceptive education is more effective than abstinence-only education (using my numbers and a slew of other assumptions.) So until we know the effectiveness of the various methods of education, relying on the assumption that people will behave in accordance to whatever way we educate them is unfounded, risky, and may lead to a less effective public policy towards sex.

Time Machine, revisited

In June of 2005, I posted about an idea I had about sending information backwards in time. This morning, I got IMs from Tim and Ben pointing me to this article in which John Cramer, a physicist at the University of Washington, is performing an experiment testing what I proposed. It's not the exact setup I described, but the basic idea is the same: you perform an observation at some point in the future on an entangled photon which will determine how the entangled photons pair behaves when you observe it in the present. If you do one thing to the future photon, the present photon behaves like a particle (the superposition collapses before observation) and if you do something else to the future photon, the present photon behaves like a wave (the superposition collapses at observation). My first reaction was that he stole my idea, which is obviously not likely. I then found this article, written in 1997, describing the foundation of the experiment. So he beat me to the punch, but I still feel good about getting the idea in the first place.

California

My job sent me to California again. This is the second time I've been sent out on business, and the second time it has been to Pasadena. And guess what? Next week, I'm going back for another meeting. Three business trips, three times to Pasadena... At least the weather this time was much better; the last time I went it rained the whole time. This was much more like how I would expect southern California to feel.

I went for the 38th annual DPS meeting. I sat behind a table, talking to the occasional passers by, but mostly took advantage of the fact that a bunch of other people from the PDS, not just the SBN, who work elsewhere in the country were there, and I got a bunch of good ideas for my search engine.

Thursday night I went out with my boss, Bill Knopf, the head of the PDS, and a few other coworkers. We went to pick up Bill's friend, Rob, who has a recording studio on Los Angeles, and while we were at his house Stevie Wonder came by to pick up a hard drive (Rob handles Stevie's music hardware.) Stevie Wonder was suprisengly interested in astronomy, and we were all trying to figure out in our heads the math for the distance, speed and time of a few space probes. After Stevie left we got a tour of the recording studio, which was in this guys house, and it was impressive. I didn't bother counting how many computers, keyboards, sequencers, mixers, etc. he had there, but there were a few rooms full of the stuff. After the tour, the executive vice president of Sony came by to pick something up, and we talked with him for a while about the computer animation software they're using, particularly the "fur algorithm" used in open season. Unfortunately he didn't reveal any trade secrets I could go sell to their competitors. After he left the rest of us went to dinner, a good restaurant but an anticlimax from the rest of the night, and talked mostly about music... turns out basicaly everybody I work with either plays some instrument, conducts, or in some way does music-stuff in their free time. Go figure.

Friday afternoon before my flight I went to visit Allison, a childhood friend (her parents and my parents are friends, and we used to all go to the outer banks every summer when we were kids.) She's going to law school at UCLA. We got lunch, caught up for a while, then I had to go catch my flight.

I got sick at some point on this trip, and flying with a cold did a number on my ears. I'm just getting over it now, so I'm not looking forward to next weeks trip.

Glossary:
DPS: Division for Planetary Sciences, a part of the AAS
AAS: American Astronomical Society
PDS: Planetary Data System, a division of NASA
SBN: Small Bodies Node, a part of the PDS
ME: trying to sound important

Dinosaurs had scales

I was bored, and remembered back from my days of music theory that there are a bunch of different 7-tone scales, more than just Major, Natural Minor and Harmonic Minor. I don't really care about all of them, so here's the short list of ones I was thinking of. On a piano, starting on the following notes and hitting the 7 following white keys (no sharps or flats) gives the following scales:

• C Major


• D Dorian


• E Phrygian


• F Lydian


• G Mixolydian


• A Natural Minor


• B Locrian

Now on to dinosaurs...

In my psychology class, the teacher was talking about evolution. The first thing that caught my attention was his discussion on heart disease (we'll get to dinosaurs in a minute). He said that the reason humans are susceptible to heart disease now is that for a long period of human history we weren't living very long. The average lifespan was probably somewhere in the 20s or 30s. If heart disease doesn't set in until the 50s or 60s, then nobody would be living long enough for that to be a problem, so we never bothered evolving to be less vulnerable to such a fate. But, now that we are living to be old enough to encounter the problem, humans may wind up evolving wider coronary arteries that are harder to clog, or something along those lines. (He didn't mention that, while we weren't living that long, we were also much more active and probably ate less fatty foods, but that's not a big deal.) What bothered me is that, while yes, people are dying of heart attacks, most people have them when they are old and have already had children, so the genes are already passed on. This sort of thing is called a selection shadow, and it sort of shows that he should stick to psychology and stay away from biology.

The other thing he said, that really got me, was about how human memory evolved. He said that our early ancestors probably had worse memory than us today, and our memory today still isn't perfect (though, his idea of perfect is also flawed, ignoring the concept of efficient storage of relevant facts instead of brute-force perfectly-photographic memory.) He then, in his infinite wisdom, went on to say that a probable reason for this was that humans with better memory could remember where dinosaurs tended to hang out and avoid them. My professor suggested that humans had to avoid dinosaurs. DINOSAURS!

And people are surprised that, in the beginning of a college evolution class when the teacher asks for a show of hands who thinks that humans and dinosaurs coexisted at the same time period, a significant portion of students raise their hands. (true story)

I'm going to go drink heavily and hope to forget this.

Theft

I saw a few articles recently that I find somewhat disturbing. The gist is that the police can confiscate your property if a crime might have been committed, even if the courts find you innocent.

Police property: It’s finders keepers in NH

Federal Appeals Court: Driving With Money is a Crime


Any lawyers feel like weighing in?

Shitty Birds

So I need one of those fake decoy owls, or a real owl that I can keep on my balcony. Birds seem to think that the railing and chairs on my balcony are good places to perch and expel waste, and I disagree. It hasn't been a problem until now, so my only guess is that the birds are coming back to College Park for spring semester classes... because birds never migrate or anything.

Lazy like a fox!

So I haven't posted in a while, nor am I going to post much here. I'm starting a blog for beer recipies, food recipies, and really, recipies for anything you consume. My figuring is that between Tim, my Dad, and me brewing beer, me trying to learn how to cook, and (from what I hear), Tim's dad developing an interest in wine making, we should be able to get a decent number of posts... better than codemill at least. I need a better name, since now it's only beerandfood.blogspot.com, but all of the simple names I could think of were taken (by people who had one post, total, back in 04 or 05.) So, if you're interested in getting setup as a contributor, let me know and I'll try to figure out how to do all that.

I'm making the blog on the new blogger (beta.blogger.com) since, for a while, that was the only site I could access. See, my blogger and gmail logins were the same, so when I went to log into blogger it found a gmail account with that login/pass and figured I was logging into the beta site. That meant that I had no way of logging into the old site, which meant I couldn't post here. I just fixed it, so I'm back. Hooray!

Beer and Cheese

Went to the Baltimore Zoo on Saturday with everybody, and most of the beer I had was of good quality. I, uh, entered a cheese eating contest. Only because Tim and John were doing it and I didn't want to appear weak... and I'm stupid... and I like cheese. There were 10 guys on stage and we were each given a block of cheese (me? Pepper Jack) and two minutes in which to eat it. One guy launched his cheese into the crowd while trying to open it. I tried to stay calm and not stuff my face, and my approach worked: I won... two tickets to Six Flags... and the free block of cheese I just ate. I almost lost it twice but managed to keep everything down. I got passing comments for the rest of the day from strangers... things along the lines of "This guy likes cheese!" and such. My parents should be so proud.

grocery list: sponges

Moving out of the old place was quite the ordeal. Having the keys to my new place for a couple weeks before moving out of the house in Laurel made the move easier than it could have been; I got to move a lot of my stuff (books, clothes, etc.) before the actual move. On the Friday before the move I brought as much of my small furniture as I could, leaving only my bed, a couple couches, a table, and a book case for when we had a moving truck. Saturday morning Tim and I went to pick up the U-Haul and first loaded my stuff. Parker and Tim then came down with me and helped move stuff up to my apartment. A couch and the book case proved difficult to fit into the elevator because Tim and I, the people carrying the heavy furniture, couldn't figure out how to get a couch that is too long to slide in the elevator upright, and too long to just tilt and slide in to fit into the elevator. Parker (the nurse and, in my mind, less mathematically/geometrically inclined, suggested we slide it in upright and then stand it on its end once it's in. This, in hindsight, should have been obvious to Tim and me, but we're dumb, and Parker is smart. Once we got all the furniture moved in my brother called. He was supposed to help out, but didn't think we would start as soon as we did, so he came back to Laurel to help move Tim and Parkers stuff. They had a lot more stuff than I did, probably because there is two of them and they weren't moving as much stuff beforehand. We filled up the U-Haul, and two vans, and drove up to their place in Columbia. They have a 3rd floor apartment in a building with no elevators, so we had to move everything up two flights of stairs. Pushing a couch up two flights of stairs is hard, and it's even harder when you try it after spending most of the day tiring yourself out. Either way, everything was moved up, and Tim, Jeremy and I went back to Laurel to deal with the carpet people.

We have to get the carpet cleaned before leaving since there were animals in the house, but I didn't do anything with the carpet cleaners; Tim took care of that and can write about it on his blog if he pleases. If not, you'll have to be content with just the knowledge that we got the carpet cleaned. I know, I know, you want to read more about it. "Write a book!", you say. Perhaps some day, when I'm old, I'll write a memoir with a title like "Having the carpet in my old house in Laurel cleaned." or "What it's like to have a roommate talk to carpet-cleaning people." but until then, rest easy and know that, somewhere, a carpet is now cleaner than it once was.

Once the move was complete (more or less) a bunch of people came over to the house for a party. Keep in mind that there was no furniture, and we couldn't walk around on the carpet. We hung out in the kitchen mostly, and somewhat on the deck, then slept on the floor in sleeping bags.

Sunday, after cleaning up the rest of the house, I drove down to my new place in College Park and started unpacking and arranging furniture. This has been going on since, and I'm more or less happy with how I've arranged everything. I still need to get a coffee table (I think I can take my grandfathers old one that my parents are holding on to), a TV (assuming I get one) and a few more things for the kitchen. I've gone out and gotten a lot of things for my kitchen, both food, and tools for working with food, and at this point I'm only in want of some knives and maybe a mixer. I still haven't cooked a real meal. I've made dinky things like omelets, grilled cheese, and soup-from-a-can, but maybe this weekend I'll bake some bread or have my family over for dinner.

I have no internet at my place yet, and if I wasn't so busy shopping for the kitchen (damnit, I need sponges), this would mean that I would have time to read. Maybe now that everything is more or less taken care of I can read. Or maybe I can call the cable people and get some cable-tv and internet setup.

I'm probably forgetting things here, but chances are that the things I'm forgetting to write about, much like the things I have written about, aren't interesting enough to expect people to read about.

Oh, one other thing, people need to come see my place. I have food, and alcohol, and places to sit. What more could you want? Maybe after finals are over (so, next weekend) I'll have a small party where people can come over and make comments like "dude, where are your sponges" or "you should get a coffee table."

Chris Bliss

Do you like juggling? How about just watching people juggle? How about watching someone do an impressive juggling routine to the tune of "Carry That Weight" by The Beatles? Most musical-juggling-link salespeople would charge $50 for such an offer, but for a limited time, it can be yours for $20. Too expensive? How about $10? Ok, ok, it's yours for free. But the next one's going to cost you. How does your first born sound? Ok, ok, second born.