Chocolate window display season

The seasons are observed here primarily by fashionable footwear and window displays. We are now solidly into the "absurdities constructed of chocolate" season. (Previously.) The displays either fall into the "embarrassing abundance of chocolate riches" camp:

Everything can be chocolatized: snowmen, chickens, bunnies, eggs, n'importe quoi (simply everything).

... or the "stark and dark but decidedly sumptuous" camp.

Vaguely religious, for those who worship hollow animals made of chocolate.

The displays are delightful.

Hundreds of euros' worth of exquisite chocolates.

I cannot find anywhere --- not even the British specialties importer* --- who has Cadbury minieggs. The European-brand substitute is not the same, does not elicit the taste-memories of late-night problem sets and slogging through slushy snow. I gaze upon a wealth of taste, and miss my lowbrow origins.

This post's theme word is suasion, "the act of urging; persuasion." The particular arrangement on display was the final suasion tempting me into the shop of earthly delights.

*An inexplicable business, here in the heart of France, which imports bland dried and canned food from the UK, and somehow stays open. I admit I patronize them for the oatcakes, so I am supporting the import of inexplicable gustatory horrors into the land of wine, cheese, and bread.

... burned down, fell over, THEN sank into the swamp...

The fire brigades and construction squads just could not catch a break with Osaka Castle.

"The center of the castle is called Hommaru and in the case of Osaka Castle, the government palace was situated in Hommaru. The palace built in the Toyotomi period was burned down in 1615 during the Summer War of Osaka. Later the Tokugawa Shogunate rebuilt the castle together with the palace but again it was burned to ashes in 1868 during the civil wars of the Meiji Restoration. In 1885 a part of the palace in Wakayama Castel was moved to this place and was called Kishu-Goten Mansion but this mansion too was burned down in 1847."

The castle grounds are a huge nested set of walled and moated compounds, and it was not particularly clear which pieces had burned down when, although some very involved infographic maps attempted to portray it. This is not helped by the fact that the entire zone shifted, grew and shrank, over the course of these several hundred fire-swept years.

This plaque --- freestanding in an open area --- also notably does not describe when, or by whom, any of the currently-standing structures (mostly stone) were built. I remain clueless, but delighted. I do not think that a Western cultural location would ever have such a frank and unabated listing of the various destructions the area had suffered. And the details! Not simply burned, but burned to ashes, a complete obliteration into tiny constituent particles and released energy.


This post's theme word is adjure, "to command solemnly," or "to request earnestly." The shogun adjured that the castle be rebuilt --- this time, of fireproof stone.

Tarts

I made some tarts, all on this summer day.


This post's theme word is gamboge, "a strong yellow color," or "a gum resin obtained from the sap of trees of the genus Garcinia, used as a yellow pigment and as a cathartic." The plain vanilla tarts appear gamboge, although there is no added coloring.

Alas! Edward Norton

Apparently, at some point in the past, Marvel figured out that they could get more mileage (money) from their fan base by recombining existing superheroes into a superhero gang. Thus did Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, and some other incidental characters included for franchise convenience, combine forces to become The Avengers in 1963. I am not a comic book aficionado, so now I willfully elide and ignore the vast, rich intervening history of Marvel fandom and the Avengers. And now, nearly fifty years later, this sad and wrung-out merchandising ploy is being resurrected as a live-action film by the unimaginative executives of today.

Thus do we arrive at The Avengers movie.

A universe in which the extremely scientific and engineering-centric Tony Stark coincides with the Norse god Thor who has magical hammer powers makes no meaningful, consistent sense. (Mjöllnir!) I continuously wondered throughout this trailer whether the super-science field would cancel the super-mythological field and render them both as pitifully over-muscled, emotionally immature men. Shouting at each other in a giant crater of their own inability to come to terms with life.

All this absurdity could be overlooked, but for one fact: Edward Norton is no longer the Hulk. I am appalled and disappointed; I enjoyed [mocking] Edward Norton-as-the-Hulk's origin movie, and Edward Norton is a favorite of mine. Now there's some other guy playing the Hulk, and he is frankly much less Edward-Norton-ish than I'd prefer.


This post's theme word is snite, "to blow your nose." I snite at you, you so-called Arthur King, you and all your silly reboots of franchise movies!

I, Robot

Isaac Asimov's delightful I, Robot has almost nothing to do with the eponymous movie. It is a set of charming vignettes detailing the early years of the development of the "positronic" robot brain, smarter than humans and equally self-aware. The only difference is that the robots are bound to the Three Laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
   

These rules are "impressioned" into robot minds straight off the assembly line. There are repeated assurances from many robot-building authorities of mathematical proof* that a robot brain would fail catastrophically (disabling the robot) before it could break any of the three laws. I, Robot is about the various ways in which the previous sentence does not mean what you think it means.

This involves strange robot behavior, of course, and the troubleshooting humans attempting to diagnose and repair the problem. Some mistakes are due to the nature of the three laws: they are broad and leave much to interpretation: what qualifies as harm to a human? physical pain? emotional anguish? can preventing long-term harm justify causing short-term harm? Some mistakes are due to conflicts between the laws, despite their rules of precedence: when laws conflict in a complicated way, so much of the robot's brain is absorbed in resolving the conflict that the robot behaves drunkenly.

Robots require human robopsychologists to assess, diagnose, and provide therapy. Robots are surprisingly human in their deviousness, in their psychological hang-ups, and in their reasoning. This human treatment of the subject of robots reminds me of Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad; robots with human problems are the source of much comedy in both books.

It's short and fun. Go read it!



*I'd like to see that proof!

This post's theme word is epanorthosis, "the immediate rephrasing of something said in order to correct it or to make it stronger. Usually indicated by: no, nay, rather, I mean, etc." Quite useful in issuing precise orders to robots.
This post written like Isaac Asimov! I often feel that my thoughts form in the style of the latest writer I'm reading: here is a datum supporting that suspicion.

Thomas Pynchon and The Crying of Lot 49

I have been trying for several months to read books by Thomas Pynchon.

PART ONE: AGAINST THE DAY

It all began when I picked up Against the Day and read the first 10 pages. It had all the hallmarks of Books Lila Likes: it was large enough to serve an architectural function (1085 pages), the book jacket blurb and quoted critics' remarks included words I had to look up in dictionary, and (most importantly) the book was sarcastic.

At least, the 10 pages I read at the beginning were hilarious. They described, tongue-in-cheek, a ragtag but determined group of boys (and one literate dog), the Chums of Chance, and their ongoing adventures in their "hydrogen skyship" Inconvenience. The tone was just right, earnest enough to be read as honest or extremely contemptuous.

(Darby [Suckling], as my faithful readers will remember, was the "baby" of the crew, and served as both factotum and mascotte, singing as well the difficult treble parts whenever these adolescent aeronauts found it impossible to contain song of some kind.) "I can't hardly wait!" he exclaimed.

"For which you have just earned five more demerits!" advised a stern voice close to his ear, as he was abruptly seized from behind and lifted clear of the lifelines. "Or shall we say ten? How many times," continued Lindsay Noseworth, second-in-command here and known for his impatience with all manifestations of slack, "have you been warned, Suckling, against informality of speech?" With deftness of long habit, he flipped Darby upside down, and held the flyweight lad dangling by the ankles out into empty space---"terra firma" by now being easily half a mile below---proceeding to lecture him on the many evils of looseness in one's expression, not least among them being the ease with which it may lead to profanity, and worse. As all the while, however, Darby was screaming in terror, it is doubtful how many of the useful sentiments actually found their mark.

And there you have the shortest joke I could find in the first few pages. That's how it reads -- lengthy but sarcastic. A bit like Moby Dick or Jane Austin, a dated tone, but published in 2006.

I was delighted by this beginning and the prospect of a thousand more pages of the same. However, after about 20 pages on the Chums of Chance, the narrator got more interested in some incidental characters, and so the narration switched over to their story. After another ~20 pages, the attention-deficit narrator brought yet another side-story to center stage. And again. I stopped reading at 91 pages, when my page of notes tracking character names and relationships overflowed onto a second sheet. We still had not cycled back to any previously-introduced characters.

Total read: 91 of 1085 pages, or ~8.4%. I'll get back to it someday.

PART TWO: GRAVITY'S RAINBOW

Undeterred and driven to figure out what Pynchon is doing, I picked up Gravity's Rainbow. This is the book I associate with his name, and his "most celebrated book" according to Wikipedia. This one didn't immediately grab me; the first scene is about making a banana breakfast while watching German bombs fall on London. It took me two readings of the scene to figure this out. Of course, eventually words like "banana" and "bomb" and other context clues are given, but at first reading, it was bewilderingly mid-scene. (Sort of like the cereal-eating scene in Cryptonomicon.)

Good! A book that's going to make me work. It also featured some very clever and erudite phrases and sentences.

In fact, as I read along, perhaps a few more erudite sentences than I'm used to. It's not that the sentence structure is hard to unravel; in fact, it's often very simple (if lengthy). Most of the sentences are fragments, apposite to some prior noun or subject or implied subject. It's hard to read. Unlike most authors, Pynchon makes no allowances for the fact that his readers are being introduced to the story. He uses names, nicknames, synecdoche, metonymy, for things he has not yet introduced. Reading his characters' conversations is more like overhearing them than participating. My reading comprehension is permanently five or ten pages behind my reading.

When did I abandon Gravity's Rainbow?

1. World War II had ended some hundred pages ago, but the characters (not unlike actual participants in history) have no idea of the importance of this fact, and show every indication of refusing to resolve their personal storylines.
2. The book progresses in a similar style as Against the Day: the main character, who we've been following fairly constantly since the book's beginning, lurches from obsessing about X to obsessing about Y. Then he obsesses about Z. Casually flipping back through the hundreds of pages I'd read, I noticed that the seeds of Z had been planted long ago in the story. I didn't notice them, of course, because the story is full of irrelevant details (again, like real life) and I was very focused on figuring out what happened 5 pages ago, which had nothing to do with Z. It was very frustrating to find that some apparent non-sequiturs from hundreds of pages ago were now important.
   

Total read: 419 of 887 pages, or 47%. I'll get back to it sometime.

PART THREE: THE CRYING OF LOT 49

In my ongoing quest to decipher Thomas Pynchon's writing, I picked up The Crying of Lot 49. It was much shorter (tractable) and also a pleasing color (I got this edition). Wikipedia offers this encouraging description: "Although more concise and linear in its structure than Pynchon's other novels, its labyrinthine plot..." Whoops! That was a good beginning. At least it's short, right?

Of course right!

So I read this whole book. Yay! 100% of all 178 pages. My eyes caught light reflected off the light and dark parts of the page, and, through a series of processes not fully understood by science, I formed a clear mental image of the book's characters, plot, writing style, and even themes and purpose.

This was hard work. I read the first 60 pages three times, because I kept getting to the beginning of chapter 3 and realizing I had no idea what was happening. Now, having finished it, I wouldn't recommend it to others: it was hard to read. The sentences never went the way I was expecting. The plot was very confusing. I'm still not sure if the book is set in reality, or some very close parallel reality.

The one part of The Crying of Lot 49 -- which is actually not about the crying of lot 49 until the last two pages -- that I enjoyed was a lengthy description of a preposterous play The Courier's Tragedy. This offered me some handholds: I know what to look for in play descriptions, how to read for symbols and meaning. And this one was delightful. It featured, amongst other things, several lengthy descriptions of gorey and unnecessarily drawn-out mob torture/executions. When the next character is due for a mob execution, it is described as "a refreshingly simple mass stabbing."

That, my friends, is what I will call my next band.


This post's theme word: obscurantism, "being deliberately vague or obscure; also a style in art and literature," or "opposition to the spread of knowledge."
This post written like H. P. Lovecraft.

Schur's lemma

Last night, I had a dream. I found myself being interviewed by various professors. One of them told me it was vital that I understand and present a proof of Schur's lemma. I did not remember what Schur's lemma was until I awoke, anxious, and looked it up.

Why do I never (remember) dream(s) of relaxing things? Flying. My dreams are fraught with tension.


This post's theme word: pother, "(noun) a commotion or fuss; mental turmoil; a smothering cloud of dust or smoke," or "(verb tr.) to confuse or worry someone; (verb intr.) to worry or fuss."

Dreams

I've been remembering my dreams very vividly of late. And they all have ties to actual thoughts and experiences, so I remember them during the day. It makes me pause and think, "was that real?" It's sometimes hard to tell.

Yesterday I awoke still humming a song from a dream. It took me a few hours to figure out whether the song was real or just a figment of my dream. Preliminary Google searches suggested "figment," but then I remembered the words to a verse and it was real after all.

Two days ago I awoke from a dream that I was taking a long cross-continental train ride, and throughout the thing, gross wet stuff (dog pee, rotting milk, etc.) kept getting splashed on me, in one way or another. (Perhaps this was a mental echo of being sprayed with lobster juice during the day.) Also, the dog in question had untrimmed nails and kept standing (painfully!) on my feet. I think this was because (in real life) my sandals had worn raw spots on the tops of my feet during the day, and the pain came through into my sleeping brain. I tried to get off the train to escape, but it was in the middle of Siberia or the arctic -- very cold and snowy -- and as the train blew its whistle to leave, I realized, "I won't survive here!" I had to sprint to catch up and then leap onto the train. Only to be promptly hit with a drinks cart, soaking me in cups of flat soda and strangers' backwash.

Last night, I had a dream. I was going back to Japan, with a friend, to stay with my host family again. My topology professor showed up and tried to teach me game theory, insisting, "If you don't know this, you're unemployable!" -- but we couldn't find any empty blackboards. That's saying something, because three of the four walls in my bedroom were covered in blackboards, but E. had left notes and lists and diagrams all over them that I couldn't erase.

Robin Williams was in Japan, too, with a cockney accent, trying to pull off some movie-heist scheme involving my friend. (Note: some parts of my dream were close-up shots of his face while speaking & emoting, and I remember thinking, "This was shot with an HD camera! Look at that detail! Nice camerawork." in my dream.) He had a huge, cavernous lair with a concrete floor decorated by the imprints of tyrannosaurus footprints (laid in wet concrete). There was a rough layer of pebbles scattered on the floor, and at some point he gave them a verbal command and they self-assembled into a tyrannosaurus! -- starting at the footprints, and building upward. The pebbles were actually tiny robots! Eeeeek!

So we ran and ran and ran, while I wondered what algorithm the little robots were running to coordinate so well. And I woke up.


This post's theme word: ecumenical, "having a mix of diverse elements" or "universal; general" or "pertaining to the whole Christian church; concerned with promoting unity among churches or religions. "

Tattoo of drums from the other room

Overheard from two rooms away: "It's official! R. is no longer listed as single!"

This is how we transmit news: either at the speed of light over a world-spanning interconnected series of tubes, or by shouting across the apartment.


This post's theme word: canard, "an unfounded rumor." Yes, it means "duck" in French, but it also means "hoax;" in Old French, caner means "to quack."

Vacation highlights

Vacation is a few days over, and I've been back to work. My last post of the year will be how my brain works: all the referential highlights, with none of the downtime buffer between. I love my family. Today, the last day of 2008, is one second longer than a normal day! (It has a leap second added.) So go enjoy your extra second of new year's eve party!

My vacation, montage-style:

Exchanging the lock on a bag of M&Ms, since it was too narrow for both of us to fit our hands in at once.

A simulated depth-first search with some interesting vertices. Kingsly.

Death by chocolate. Semi-literally. So much chocolate, ice cream, candy, and souffle that I felt a little sick. More than once.

"In order to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion."

"Mennonite ankle porn" and learning Japanese from anime. "Take anything you want! Leave me my life!" あぶない！にんじゃです。Thereafter, nearly everything was declared あぶない.

Delighted by ducklings.

"Safari action adventure Lila"

Pandora (which I've now set up to work from Canada). Listen to this song, it's amazing.

It's so hard to find a really snootily-educated man these days.

"E., Mom's worried about something in particular. But I'm just worried. About curtains, about the bed, about gravity..." (Note: his room has increased gravity. For training purposes.)

A stray lawn dart killed my only bunny. Twice.

While giving a back massage, E.: "It's like your shoulders are reinforced!"

This island.

Benjamin Button? Not as good as watching Atonement for the third time in 24 hours.

Easy wind and downy flake

The weather here is excellent, lacking only in people (snowball targets). Canadians have gone home, and all the international students who are staying are griping about the weather. I have to go back to the office later tonight to gather the truckload of material that I'm taking home with me, and the only complaint I have is this: the city of Toronto has no idea how to deal with snow. Main streets are a few inches deep in it, and secondary streets have a completely unplowed 6 or so inches. I wish my office had a window, so I could have watched the streets fill up with snow.


This post's theme word: flocculent, "having fluffy character or appearance."

No light propitious shone

I awoke from overheating 30 minutes before my alarm, to the dulcet tones of Crazy Lady swearing through the wall and the heartening sight of ample snow falling on the pre-dawn street. William Cowper's "The Castaway" was running through my head, but I could only remember the first and last stanzas, so I'm printing it out to memorize at the gym this morning.


This post's theme word: logy, "lethargic, groggy."

Research meeting debriefing

I have this experience approximately once a week:

A meeting approaches. I dread it, I feel confused and unprepared. I briefly consider dropping out of grad school to professionally serve fries or perhaps tutor rich kids.

The meeting happens. I leave the meeting with enthusiasm and newfound understanding. Life is suddenly full of delicious opportunities.

Someday, I want to be the kind of advisor that inspires students this way. (And maybe I'll be lucky enough to have students who are more competent grad students than I am now.)


This post's theme word: quiddity, "the essence of someone/something," or "a trifling." It has the nice property of having two meanings, and serving as its own opposite.

Tired

Fine, not very hot. One egg.

This week was very tiring, and the weekend is totally booked; no downtime.

That is all.


This post's theme word: orthoepy, "study of the pronunciation of words" or "customary pronunciation of a language."

Traffic spike!

A week ago I must have been crawled by some Google spider, because my previous maximum visits-per-day was 6. Since then, I've had between 8 and 47 hits per day. FORTY-SEVEN. I think I interact with fewer than 47 people each day. WHO ARE YOU OUT THERE IN THE INTERTUBES? (intertubes intertubes intertubes...)

Only two of you came from my departmental page, and five from my facebook profile. 97 new visitors came from Google images. Where? When I Google image search my name, I get some hits for me but none for LilaPrime.

Welcome to all my new, anonymous internet stalkers. I guess I have to be even more careful and paranoid about what I post. (This blog has come so far since its early days as a public status update to my mother.) I invite you to leave comments, so that (1) I know who you are, and (2) I get feedback. These will both contribute to a more enjoyable blog-reading experience for you, o my anonymous and numerous readers.


This post's theme word: asperse, "to spread false and malicious charges against someone" or "to sprinkle with holy water. " It is a transitive verb, as in, "Lila aspersed him on her blog."

Tall personality, short physique

I spoke with G. on the phone this afternoon. Approximately:

G: You sound more assertive on the phone.
L: Really? How?
G: Well, I don't know... more assertive than in person.
[A beat while I think: if anything, I'm more assertive in person.]
L: Do you mean that I sound taller on the phone?
G: Yes.

I have heard similar things before, namely, that my personality is taller/bigger/whatever-er than my actual, physical body. Yes. I know I'm short. That doesn't mean I'm a passive, docile munchkin. (Nothing against passive, docile munchkins.)

G. also mentioned that he sometimes reads this blog to see what I'm up to. It is very strange for me to hear about readers of this blog, even though I obviously write here with the expectation of nonzero readership. Sometimes, while I am having a conversation with someone, he references (directly or indirectly) this blog, and it takes me a moment (or several) to realize what is happening.

I dedicate this post to my latest RSS subscriber, D. Welcome!

Would you like a post dedicated to you? Well, now's your chance! I'm looking for an easy way to monitor my RSS subscribers. (I'd be happy just to know the number, but other data would also be nice.) If you can tell me how to easily do this within Blogger, I will dedicate a post to you. And I'll probably make it one that involves you, or relates you somehow, so this is your chance to be famous amongst my readership! Immortality! Take it, it's yours!


This post's theme word: bespoke, "made to order."

What is the value of a PhD?

I've heard a lot of dismissal recently -- mostly from graduate students in software engineering at Toronto -- of the value of a graduate degree. This puzzles me: if the degree (Master's/PhD) is so worthless, why are they spending time, effort, and mental cycles working for it? I figured that maybe it was just a University of Toronto issue, or maybe even just a perception in that research group. (I haven't heard anything similar from my theory colleagues.)

Just today I've received contradictory information about a PhD. The idea of a PhD looms on my horizon, as I'm finishing my MSc this semester and planning on continuing into the PhD program.

From one of the business managers of the Grace Hopper Institute (I didn't get her name, and there were no barcode scanners nearby so our meeting was undocumented -- we agreed to meet up later and get scanned), I heard a very strong encouragement: "Women should stay in the pipeline all the way through the PhD. This is what we're working towards, this is what we're trying to encourage." This advice would seem to unequivocally encourage me to continue my graduate studies, stay in academia for several more years, and get a PhD. (The widely-observed problem is that women "fall out of the pipeline" to PhD/academic jobs, and locally, I am the one most in control of whether I remain in that pipeline or not.)

From a senior recruiter (Apple), I heard different information. She said that to industry, a person with a PhD often looks "too academic," and thus undesirable. Her observation about the pipeline was skewed positively: many people in graduate programs are too constrained by academia, and basically leap out of the pipeline and into startups where they can accomplish their ideas more easily.

I think that it's unlikely that women are disproportionately more entrepreneurial than men, so the recruiter's explanation can't account for the ever-worsening gender ratio further down the academic pipeline. But it seems to be mostly an issue of perception: academics are unhappy that people choose other jobs? industry professionals greedily want to soak up the best talent before it becomes absorbed into academia?

What is the value of a PhD? I think that, as with everything else in life, its value is what you want it to be. What I want it to be. If the PhD is what I want, then I can devote myself to it and do a fantastic job and (with luck) end up well-situated for entry into an academic job. (And I genuinely like my current research; I'm not sure that proof complexity lines up with an industry job.) But if there are more exciting projects and opportunities elsewhere, then I can easily fall into the open, welcoming arms of industry. I have to be an adult, know myself, and boldly make my own decisions.

So in the end, what it comes down to is choice.


This post's theme word: prorogue, "to discontinue/defer/postpone a session of something." Unfortunately, it is not an adjective meaning, "in favor of rogues."

Fall is...

Fall is... purple-painted people circling my building playing marching band songs. Loudly.
Fall is... beautiful weather.
Fall is... signing up for five different sports teams. (They think I'm a freshman.)
Fall is... engineering students exploding things outside my advisor's office during meetings.
L'automne est triste, avec sa bise et son brouillard.
Fall is... searching for a new apartment.


This post is dedicated to antennae and neighbors with unsecured wireless networks. Epizeuxis' antennae can pick up internet, though Quine can't even see any networks.

Oh, be joyful!

I wonder if other people have moods as variable as mine. It is impossible for me to ever know, since I can't be other people; and even if I were, how then would I refer to my own moods?

This morning I crabbily awoke and ran several miles through beautiful early-morning weather, then lifted weights. My weaker knee kept up, and didn't complain too much. The work day has been productive, with a break in the middle for free lunch (at the cost of mentoring some incoming graduate students). I found out that I'm headed to a conference, and that my costs will be totally covered. Everything's coming up roses!

I've somehow just discovered a large online community of women researchers (grad students, recent PhDs, early- and mid-career academics) who also blog. Their thoughts are fascinating and validating.

Let's see if I can replicate the good parts of this day tomorrow.


This post's theme song: the eponymous song from "The Civil War."

Ninjas vs. professors

The rhyming perfects the humor:
But who would win? It depends on the contest, and the ninjas. Professors can't compete with them physically, but ninjas are no match for their brains. "They're that smart?" you wonder? Well, let me put it this way... you've heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Morons!


This post's theme word is kyphosis, "excessive outward curvature of the spine, causing hunching of the back" -- compare with lordosis, "excessive inward curvature of the spine." I read it here.