Cross Product

For those who weren't aware, the SXSW festival has been kind enough to take a ton of music from the artists who play at the festival and make it available for download (all gratis). Some kind souls have collected all of the downloads and packaged them into multi-gigabyte torrents for easy downloading. I've been slowly digesting the first torrent from this year. I was so impressed with one of the bands included in the torrent that I picked up their debut album and continue to be impressed by it. The band is Alberta Cross and they hail from Sweden and the UK. Those of you who have been burned by my music recommendations in the past take note, these guys are a serious blues rock outfit, not some kind of weird experimental noise unit. I've been making a conscious effort to listen to more accessible music recently because while I still like free improvised music, listening to it can be somewhat demanding and even I am not always in the mood to be challenged by the music I'm listening to. Check these guys out if you get a chance. They're slated to play at a number of festivals this year, including Coachella and Bonnaroo.

After the Gold Rush

A lot of people have been talking about what American's spending habits are going to look like when (if?) the economy starts to improve. Some think consumers are going to back to their old habits while others think that consumers are going to be a bit more thrifty. The most persuasive argument I've seen in favor of the latter is this recent piece from the Economist.

While consumer spending habits reached ridiculously unsustainable levels or the past five years or so, it seems like people have been talking about American's propensity for living beyond their means for much longer than that. Given this, it seems kind of strange to hear people characterizing a return to mid-1980s or even mid-1990s levels of personal spending and savings as a return to fiscal discipline. Still, while the Americans of 10-20 years ago weren't exactly pinching pennies, you could still argue that their consumption habits were still within the realm of fiscal sustainability.

The magnitude of the reset is going to be determined by how much wealth is ultimately destroyed and the kinds of new financial regulations that are enacted. If, as I write this, we're closer to the end of this mess than the beginning and some new controls are added to at least address the known causes of our current financial predicament, we'll probably see a modest return to thrift once the dust settles. It would probably take another great depression and world war to turn Americans into fanatical savers. Hopefully, we can avoid that scenario.

Unknown Legend

Rachel Getting Married is a movie that I never would have considered watching had I not read a bunch of great reviews. While I believe that truly great art is by definition accessible to almost everyone, there's a lot of good art that is only accessible to those equipped with the tools to truly understand it on multiple levels. Rachel Getting Married may fall into that category, or it may be a self-indulgent piece of trash, or it might just not be my kind of film. Roger Ebert's review, which I did not read until after watching the movie, is particularly interesting. He loved the movie, but his review barely even talks about the story. That may be because there isn't much of a story being told, and that was my biggest problem with the film. The viewers of the movie are essentially guests at Rachel's wedding weekend. We watch it unfold and get some details from the past through conversations that the characters have with each other, but that's about it.

I found it funny that B-movie legend Roger Corman played one of the guests at the wedding and that there was a thank you note to him in the credits, but after I reading his bio, I learned that in addition to making lots of cheesy movies, he also gave a ton of big-name Hollywood types their start in the show business, including Jonathan Demme, the director of Rachel Getting Married.

I also had no idea that the groom's character was played by the lead singer of the band TV on the Radio. I know little about the beyond beyond being aware of their existence, so it's not surprising that I didn't recognize their lead singer. This information does help explain his acapella rendition of Unknown Legend during the wedding vows (perhaps my favorite part of the movie). The funny thing is that had I not decided to log onto the internet and register my disgust, I never would have learned about Roger Corman's contributions to the more respectable side of Hollywood or Tunde Adebimpe's (the aforementioned groom) acting career, both of which made the appreciate the movie a little bit more.

Back in the Saddle

I biked to work for the first time this year on Friday. It turned out to be a great day to bike to work since it was sunny and relatively warm (low 40s) in the morning and there was no traffic since it was Good Friday. The ride home wasn't quite as nice since it was threatening to rain the whole way, but I made it back without getting wet. My goal for this year is to bike the equivalent of 1000 driving miles to and from work. My round-trip commute is 13.6 miles by car, but it's a bit longer by bike (between 16.5 and 17.5 miles), so I'll need to bike about 1250 miles to cover the equivalent of 1000 driving miles. It's doable, but it's a pretty aggressive goal.

All the Tea in China

As you may know, I tend to read food labels fairly thoroughly. Recently, I've come across some highly suspicious information on some food packages. For starters, I was reading the description on a box of Trader Joe's Earl Gray tea and read the following

The earliest recorded evidence of the cultivation of tea plants comes from China in the 14th century...

This is, of course, completely wrong. Tea has been an important part of Chinese culture for millenia. According to Wikipedia, records of tea consumption in China date back to the 10th century BC. The earliest record I could find for recorded evidence of tea cultivation, not just consumption, is a work from the late 8th century called The Classic of Tea by Lu Yu, so Trader Joe's is off by at least 500 years.

Keeping with the China theme, I was standing in line at my local Chinese grocery store when I noticed some good-sized bags of whole black and white peppercorns. I knew we were running low, I grabbed one of each. At $2.50 for a 7oz bag, it's at least 4 times cheaper than pepper at the regular grocery store. When I got home and cracked into one of bags, I noticed something strange on the nutrition facts label.

According to the label, one serving of pepper contains 12.3% of your daily fat allowance! I read the label a little closer and noticed that the serving size is 3.5 oz. I know the Chinese like their food a little spicier than Americans, but 3.5 oz is more than an entire grocery store-sized spice container (the bottle of Spice Islands whole white pepper that this package replaced is 2.7 oz). As if that wasn't bad enough, the 7 oz package lists that it contains four 3.5 oz servings. Still, you can't beat those prices.

Vegging Out

We dined at the Garden Grille [warning - audio link] for the first time on Friday. I was quite impressed with my meal, the Mixed Grille. I've had dinners that were entirely comprised of meat and I once had a dinner in Kyoto that was comprised almost entirely of tofu, but I think Friday was the first time I've ever had a dinner that was entirely comprised of vegetables. I had a plate asparagus, eggplant, sweet potato, onions, peppers, squash, and mushrooms all grilled to perfection. Highly recommended.

All Aboard the Dictatorship

It turns out that I was wrong, Parade Magazine did publish their annual survey of the world's worst dictators this year. This is, of course, the first worst dictators survey of the Obama administration. The whole enterprise of ranking the world's worst tyrants in a general interest newspaper insert magazine seemed to make a modicum of sense during the Bush years. I can't say that I would be surprised if it is eventually revealed that the former President used the survey when making key foreign policy decisions. We'll see if this enterprise continues as the US hopefully returns to a more nuanced approach to foreign policy.

While much has changed in Washington, not much has changed in the annual dictator rankings. Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe rocketed up to the top spot from sixth place last year. My money was on Sudan's Omar al-Bashir capturing the top spot on the strength of his recent ICC arrest warrant, but he had to settle for second place once again. The only newcomers to the top 10 list this year were Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, who moved from 11th place to 10th, and Turkmenistan's Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov, who debuted on the list in 9th place this year.

Parade cited Zimbabwe's hyperinflation, cholera epidemic, and ZANU-PF thuggery as the reasons for Mugabe's rise to the top of the list. With the exception of the cholera epidemic, all of those things were true last year when Mugabe was deemed only the sixth-worst dictator in the world (and I'm guessing that Zimbabwe was hardly a public health success story even before the cholera epidemic). If anything, Mugabe improved his behavior in 2008 by agreeing in principle to a power-sharing government (though, as Parade correctly points out, he has not honored either the spirit or the letter of the agreement).

The inclusion of Berdymuhammedov is another head-scratcher. You may remember that he took over power in 2006 after the death of Saparmurat Niazov, a fixture on any survey of the world's worst dictators. Berdymuhammedov has been in power for only a couple of years and while Turkmenistan has not become a beacon of peace and freedom in Central Asia, I can't imagine why he would be ranked higher than some of his neighbors, including Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov (11th place in this year's survey).

Cover Story

Today's Providence Journal ran a story about Rhode Island's quest to grow its knowledge-based economy and included a photo of yours truly from last week's Providence Geeks meeting on the front page. This marks the second time that my picture has shown up in a geeks-related news story. So far, I've managed to avoid letting all of this fame go to my head, but I can't guarantee that I won't turn into an insufferable prima donna if this keeps up.

Flirting with Disaster

This is a really old story, but I heard about it for the first time at tonight's geek night and thought it was interesting. It's about how young Saudi's use bluetooth discovery on their mobile devices to flirt without running afoul of the religious police. Yet another example of how technologies get used in ways their creators never dreamed of.

Baby, You Got a Stew Goin'!

I've been doing a lot of cooking this week. I made another batch of Ming Tsai's Red Rendang so I had to use it up. One of the dishes that I used it on was a lamb stew that I did in a slow cooker. When I opened up the cooker after letting it stew, I was overwhelmed by the smell of lemongrass. The lemongrass flavor was barely noticeable in the paste and I wasn't overwhelmed by it while eating the stew, only while smelling it. Lemongrass and fish sauce, both Southeast Asian standbys, are ingredients that I find tasty but can't really stand the smell of when they get too strong. I'm told that even people who enjoy the taste of the durian feel the same way about it, so maybe it's just a characteristic of Southeast Asian food.

I've also been enjoying some Trader Joe's English Cheddar with Caramelized Onions. Some friends of ours introduced us to it recently. It's probably something I never would have picked out on my own, but the two tastes go together so well that I'm surprised all cheddar cheeses (and possibly, all cheeses) aren't alloyed with caramelized onions.

Block Expressions

I discovered a weird Java collection initialization idiom whilst reading this post a couple days ago.

List<String> l = new ArrayList<String>() {{
   add("A");
   add("B");
   add("C");
}};

It took me a minute to figure out what was going on. For those who haven't seen this before, the first and last curly brace define an anonymous inner class. The inner curly braces and the code therein comprise an instance initialization block for the anonymous inner class. So this code effectively create a subclass of ArrayList that adds three elements ("A", "B", and "C") to itself upon creation. It's kind of interesting, but I'm not sure how useful it is. The only place I could see using something like this would be in a class that needs a wrapped static final collection. Using this pattern would eliminate the need to build and populate a temporary collection in a static initializer and then wrap it and assign it to the static final member.

As it turns out, one of the proposals on the table for Java 7 is something called Block Expressions, which would allow you to define temporary local variables within expressions. One of the use case given for this feature is identical to the use case I outlined above.

public static final Map<Integer,Integer> primes = (
   Map<Integer,Integer> t = new HashMap<Integer,Integer>();
   t.put(1, 2);
   t.put(2, 3);
   t.put(3, 5);
   t.put(4, 7);
   Collections.UnmodifiableMap(t));

Block expressions have other uses beyond this so it may be a good idea to add them to the language, but I'm actually partial to the anonymous inner class with instance initializer approach in this situation.

public static final Map<Integer,Integer> primes = Collections.unmodifiableMap(
   new HashMap<Integer,Integer>() {{
       put(1,2);
       put(2,3);
       put(3,5);
       put(4,7);
   }});

The Falun Gong Show

We caught the Divine Performing Arts show when it came to Providence last week. It's billed as a celebration of Chinese cultural heritage through music and dance. What's not mentioned is the Falun Gong proselytization that pervades most of the show. While I don't support the Chinese government's suppression of Falun Gong practitioners, I also don't like how the Divine Performing Arts troupe isn't upfront about their ties to Falun Gong in their promotional materials. Of course, even if you stripped all of the Falun Gong material out of the show, I still wouldn't have enjoyed it very much. The music was bland and the sets were awful. The entire show was performed in front of a giant screen that had cheesy renderings of Chinese landscapes projected onto it. The format was incredibly tedious as well, with the emcees coming on stage between every single number and talking about the next one.

America's Finest Editorial Cartoons

How is it possible that I just found out about The Onion's weekly editorial cartoon today? Here are some of my favorites.

Hangover Cure

Here's a round-up of recent chatter about one of my favorite subjects, the life and death of cities. First, there's Richard Florida's piece from The Atlantic and his discussion of that piece on On Point (listen for the Providence shout-out around the 39 minute mark). Finally, some dueling viewpoints grabbed from the NYT Op-Ed page.

I think Florida could clear up a lot of confusion about his ideas if he stopped using the words 'city' and 'suburb', because those terms are so loaded that it's easy to stop listening to him once he says something that conflicts with your interpretation of those words. Florida is often criticized by people who think he's saying that everyone needs to trade in their 4 bedroom suburban home on a 2 acre lot for a 500 sq ft apartment in a high-rise. I don't think that's what he believes and I think he finally articulates his vision at the end of the On Point interview when he says Americans need more efficient ways of living and moving around. Efficient in terms of energy, but also in terms of time and effort. Innovation requires a critical mass of human capital that can interact in seamless and chaotic ways. If everyone is stuck in traffic for an hour and a half on their way to an office park in the middle of nowhere, time is being wasted and opportunities for innovation and collaboration are being squandered (not to mention the big decrease in quality of life).

Obviously there are a lot of people who are happy with the status quo and will continue to abide by it even in the face of multi-hour car commutes and $4+ gas. That's fine, but I think what Florida is saying is that there are a lot of people who would like some saner options for balancing life and work and areas that can provide these options will likely fare better than those that don't.

Good and Bad

The first no-hitter than I experienced was the no-hitter that the Tigers' Jack Morris pitched in 1984. It was the first no-hitter pitched by a Tiger since Jim Bunning hurled a no-no in 1958. Being a young Tigers fan, I filed this piece of information somewhere in my brain and didn't think about it again for a while. At some point in my adult life, I learned Jim Bunning had gotten into politics after hanging up his spikes. More recently, I've learned that he's kind of a jerk. I don't have anything interesting to say here, it's just funny how I have a one highly positive and one highly negative data point about Jim Bunning, separated by about 25 years.

Deposed

Sadly, it appears that Parade Magazine has decided to discontinue their annual survey of the world's worst dictators. It's possible that they've decided to move the feature from its usual mid-February spot, but the World's Most Wanted cover story that they ran a couple weeks ago seems a lot like a replacement for the worst dictators feature.

Empty Bench

February 19 | 7:22 pm | Providence, RI

Stream of Consciousness

I've been taking a look at functional programming languages in general and Scala in particular as of late. Partially because I've been sucked up into the hype surrounding FP & Scala and partially because I've never really done any FP. I read this post about infinite lists in Scala a couple months ago and decided that I wanted to try and do something similar with files. My goal was to create a function that takes a directory and returns a lazily evaluated list that can be used to recurse through every file and directory under the directory. Here's what I came up with:

import java.io.File

def makeFilestream(filelist: Stream[File]) : Stream[File] = {
  if (!filelist.isEmpty) {
    val file = filelist.head
    if (file.isDirectory) {
      Stream.cons(file, makeFilestream(file.listFiles.toStream.append(filelist drop 1)))
    } else {
      Stream.cons(file, makeFilestream(filelist drop 1))
    }
  } else {
    Stream.empty
  }            
}

def filestream(root: File) : Stream[File] = {
  val filelist:Stream[File] = root.listFiles.toStream
  makeFilestream(filelist)      
}

So what's the point of all this? By using Scala's Stream class, the list is lazily evaluated so it doesn't have to scan the entire directory tree before returning the first element. Furthermore, since Stream behaves like any other Collection class, all of the normal Collection operations like foreach, map, reduceLeft/Right, etc. are supported, eliminating the need to load the directory tree into memory and storing it in a List before operating on it.

Here are some examples of the cool things you can do with a file stream

Print everything in the directory /tmp

val tmpdir = filestream(new File("/tmp"))
tmpdir.foreach(println)

Print the first 10 directories under ~

val homedir = filestream(new File("/Users/username"))
homedir.filter(f => f.isDirectory).take(10).foreach(println)

Find the largest file under ~

val homedir = filestream(new File("/Users/username"))
val biggestFile = homedir.reduceLeft(  
      (a, b) => if (a.length > b.length) a else b)

Find the first Java source file under ~

val homedir = filestream(new File("/Users/username"))
val firstJavaFile = homedir.find(f => f.getName().endsWith(".java"))

Pretty much any file searching, selecting, or transformation operation you can think of can be expressed as a one-liner or chain of one-liners and thanks to the Stream, any operation that doesn't need to scan the entire directory tree is fast and efficient.

The Roof is on Fire

We saw Fiddler on the Roof at PPAC last night. It was my first time seeing Fiddler. My family went to see the local high school's production of it when I was 13, but I had no desire to see a musical or hang out with my parents and I managed to weasel my way out. Since then, I've developed more of an appreciation for musical theater (as well as being seen in public with my family). I went into the show with high expectations and I wasn't disappointed. Compared to most musicals that I'm familiar with, Fiddler on the Roof is more understated and dark. I enjoyed that and I also enjoyed seeing Chaim Topol playing the role that he's played for the past 40 years. I've always wondered how actors can play the same role night after night. It seems like it would get boring after a while. If Topol is tired of playing Tevye, it didn't show on stage. You could really tell that he was enjoying himself up there and his performance exuded a lived-in kind of quality that an actor who has only been playing the Tevye for six months (or even six years) wouldn't have.

Who Wants to be a Best Picture?

We recently made it out to see what all the hype surrounding Slumdog Millionaire was about. It's an enjoyable film, but neither of were really blown away by it. Visually, it's quite gorgeous and the story is endearing, though predictable. It's a good movie, but we probably wouldn't have nominated it for 10 Oscars had the academy asked us.