Mister Rogers went onstage to accept the award — and there, in front of
all the soap opera stars and talk show sinceratrons, in front of all the
jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small
bow and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have
loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to
think of the people who have helped you become who you are. Ten seconds
of silence.
And then he lifted his wrist, looked at the audience, looked at his
watch, and said, ‘I’ll watch the time.” There was, at first, a small
whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people
realized that he wasn’t kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some
convenient eunuch, but rather a man, an authority figure who actually
expected them to do what he asked. And so they did. One second, two
seconds, seven seconds — and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms
heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered
gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier. And Mister Rogers
finally looked up from his watch and said softly, “May God be with you,”
to all his vanquished children.
Su Song was most famous for his hydraulic-powered astronomical clock
tower, crowned with a mechanically-driven armillary sphere, which was
erected in the capital city of Kaifeng in the year 1088. His
clock tower employed the escapement mechanism two centuries before it
was applied in clocks of Europe; the tower also
featured the earliest known endless power-transmitting chain drive in
the world, as outlined in his horological treatise of 1092.
Gottfried Leibniz. Paul du Bois-Reymond, in a biography about Leibniz:
As is well known, the theory of the maxima and minima of functions was
indebted to [Leibniz] for the greatest progress through the discovery of
the method of tangents. Well, he conceives God in the creation of the
world like a mathematician who is solving a minimum problem, or rather,
in our modern phraseology, a problem in the calculus of variations — the
question being to determine among an infinite number of possible worlds,
that for which the sum of necessary evil is a minimum.
Decisions aren’t decisions if you have to keep making them. Set on the course and stick to it. If you keep talking about things that have already been decided, nothing will ever get done.
and…
Never let anyone tell you what you want. When someone says, “You don’t want that,” what they really mean is, “I don’t want you to have that.”
It literally got my adrenalin pumping to read how Derek wrestled with the tension small businesses create — there are people who are honest and kind, but sharing a business with another person who is neither of those things creates a crisis. That is, in a purely interpersonal relationship you can forgive and forget, but in a business you can be forced out, wrongly accused, and legally outmaneuvered until all you’re left with is the option to forget the business you started. It’s hard to find people to trust, doubly hard when you share a business with them.
If General Electric had the same ratio of titles to revenue as the Patriots, GE would employ 652 presidents, 1,304 executive directors, 1,956 chief officers and 9,780 directors.
Check out some of the examples:
Tennessee’s Bud Adams Jr. officially calls himself owner/chairman of the board/CEO/president.
At Dallas, Jerry Jones and his son Stephen have awarded themselves these six titles: owner, president, general manager, chief operating officer, executive vice president and director of player personnel.
The Patriots, this year’s winner for most top-heavy front office, have a chairman and CEO, a president, a vice president of player personnel, a chief administrative officer, a chief financial officer, a chief operating officer, three other vice presidents, two executive directors, two people who both hold the title director of sales, a director of strategic initiatives, and 12 other directors.
It’s like a league of a bunch of man-boys saying “mee oooh mee, I wanna be a manager for a football team!” Bleck.
An article entitled “Math Trek: The Grammy in Mathematics” from Science News Online explains how Jamie Howarth, with the help of mathematician Kevin Short, used an awesome technique to restore an old Woody Guthrie recording (emphasis mine):
Howarth had developed algorithms to correct these recordings. He looks for extraneous sounds, like an air conditioner or fan in the background that creates a rhythmic sound. Instead of simply removing these sounds, he uses them as a clock, a kind of built-in foot-beat in the recording that tells him what the true timing should be. When a recording is made, this background rhythm is even. But when it’s played back, it speeds up and slows down in perfect timing with the errors in the recording. That allows Howarth to adjust the timing of the recording to make it much more similar to the original sound.
When Howarth isn’t lucky enough to find a rhythmic background noise, he has another technique. He has found that all analog recordings contain a sort of rhythmic buzz at a specific frequency way above human hearing. This buzz can substitute for a background fan.
Howarth had successfully used these techniques to restore other old recordings, like the film soundtracks for Oklahoma! and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But the Guthrie recording was such a mess that it forced him to develop new techniques. He turned to Kevin Short, a mathematician at the University of New Hampshire who had done work on signal processing for sound compression.
The team discovered the many ways that wire makes a lousy material for sound recording. One problem is that wire’s round. When the wire kinked, it would twist out of position and the head would no longer be reading the proper side of the wire. The machine still read the low and medium frequencies, but the very high frequency sounds dropped out—including the signal Howarth used as his foot-beat.
Short developed techniques to interpolate the missing information. “We could actually pick up a hum from the Con Edison power supplies,” Short says. “It’s a pretty nasty noise.” Because that hum was lower frequency, it remained even in the twisted sections. Short also brought in more sophisticated techniques to shift the pitches once the algorithm had identified what needed to be done.
That is really really cool. Be sure to check out the article to hear the before and after soundclips, which are impressive.
For what it’s worth, my cell phone is thicker (by about a third) than the thickest point on Apple’s newest laptop, the MacBook Air. The thinnest part of the MacBook Air is 6 times thinner than my cell phone.
I find it easy to trust the hard-earned truths of a successful comedian. For example, here’s an excerpt from a recent A.V. Club interview with John Cleese:
A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people. There’ve been two or three examples where, just really laughing, it all goes away. I remember David Niven taking me out to dinner with Connie [Booth], my first wife. And we were sitting in the open air, drinking pinot grigio in the middle of Rome. There was an editor there, a really nice editor, but being British, he had terrible teeth—Americans have never seen teeth that bad, unless they read National Geographic. And David told us, “He’ll smile a lot, but he’ll never laugh.” Every time David made us howl with laughter, we glanced at the editor, who was roaring with laughter, trying to keep his lips together. Um, so what I’m saying is that when you’ve laughed like that with someone, it connects you at a humanity level.
Some great stuff in the full interview, if you have the time.
A short piece in which I continually widen the scope of the issues addressed.
The fact that I have precisely one choice for high speed internet in the capital city of Minnesota irks me to no end. For someone who will return to higher education and is currently freelancing doing webdesign, high speed internet is a need, not a want. So, I must pay what Comcast asks, and I have no other choice. As I said in the title, this sucks. Could it get any worse? I’m stuck as a customer of a coercive monopoly so… of course it could get worse. Read on.
As a practical, not hypothetical example, take a look at the media colossus that is Time Warner. This company includes AOL, Home Box Office, New Line Cinema, Time Inc., Time Warner Cable, Road Runner Cable, Turner Broadcasting System, The CW, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Cartoon Network, CNN, and DC Comics. Now, pick out two of those companies: Home Box Office (or more commonly, HBO) and Road Runner High Speed Internet. Buckle up, now it gets interesting.
Does anything about the relationship between these two companies, HBO and Road Runner Internet, strike you? Examine their business models: HBO sells premium cinematic and live content to home viewers, on demand. Road Runner Internet sells high speed access to the internet. OK, no overlap, no problem! But what if we described Road Runner Internet as a conduit to something like the Apple TV service, where you could rent premium cinematic content, on demand. Well now then, there seems to be some overlap, doesn’t there?
Put yourself in Time Warner’s shoes — users of their services can either buy HBO content at large markups or rent movies over Road Runner at reasonable prices. With HBO, Time Warner makes money… but with Road Runner, they lose money. In response to this conflict, Time Warner will not evolve their services to be more competitive, they will only raise prices to account for the data moving over their networks. How much data? Using the information from the Apple TV tech specs page, we can calculate that a movie like Ratatouille is about 2.4 gigabytes. How big is this? Well, consider that Time Warner is running a pilot program in Texas that limits monthly bandwidth usage to 5 gigabytes. That’s two iTunes rentals a month, provided you do almost no other internet browsing. Want 10 gigabytes a month? Pay more! In this way, Time Warner leverages its monopoly to raise the effective price of iTunes movie rentals. Diabolical, no? Steven Levy, writing in the Washington Post, recently articulated this same point:
Clearly it won’t just be inductees to the LimeWire Hall of Fame who are hit with excess charges.
Those penalties could be rough. Bell Canada, which meters service in some plans, charges customers who go over the limit $7.50 per additional gigabyte. (The Canadian dollar is worth about as much as the U.S. version these days.) That would jack up the $2.99 iTunes rental fee for “The Magnificent Seven” by 10 bucks.
Levy continues discussing the issue with an interesting factoid, on a topic dear to my heart:
Time Warner’s move illuminates some of the troubling issues facing the United States in the Internet era, where, in terms of penetration, we are in 24th place — behind Estonia — in the international broadband competition.
The truly sad state of internet access in the U.S. becomes even more glaring with a few more facts:
In the United States, where the Internet was born, we pay higher prices (seven times what they pay in South Korea) for slower speeds. (Japan’s users surf 13 times faster.) Though President Bush promised affordable broadband for all by 2007, tens of millions are still stuck with dial-up.
I wonder if, as Levy seems to articulate, internet devolution in the U.S. is merely a symptom of a greater problem — a stasis in innovation and government investment in driving science and industry forward. Let’s hope we don’t look back at this time and, with the benefit of perspective, see our country make stupid decision after stupid decision, condemning us to industrial, technological, and intellectual insignificance. Let’s hope crappy movie rental options are one of the larger concerns in this information age mess. Otherwise, we may be going nowhere rather quickly.
You did it, Katy! Congrats on getting your Master’s in Mathematics (I don’t know if those words should be capitalized, but they seem important enough to be capitalized) by passing a ridiculously rigorous, stressful and difficult oral exam! I knew you could do it. Whether or not you decide to get your Ph.D., you’ll always be the best math solver that I know.
Gaelic style: May your equations always add up, your integrands always integrate, and your proofs always prove. May the LaTeX be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face; the variables fall soft upon your pages and until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.
Clue style: Katy Micek, at the University of Minnesota, with a pencil.
The more I have learned and grown as a world citizen and the more the seeds of a liberal arts education have germinated within my brain, the more I have realized the incredible gift of a democratic government that we have here in the United States. That’s not to say my ignorance of the election system isn’t shocking — in fact, today I read through the Wikipedia article about Super Tuesday to understand what, exactly, happens on this day:
In the United States, Super Tuesday commonly refers to the Tuesday in early February or March of a presidential election year when the greatest number of states hold primary elections to select delegates to national conventions at which each party’s presidential candidates are officially nominated. More delegates can be won on Super Tuesday than on any other single day of the primary calendar, and accordingly, candidates seeking the presidency traditionally must do well on this day to secure their party’s nomination. In 2008, Super Tuesday is February 5; 24 states will hold primaries or caucuses on this date, with 52 percent of all pledged Democratic Party delegates and 41 percent of the total Republican Party delegates at stake.
Super Tuesday is tomorrow. To avoid a premature, misinformed, unfocused political debate, I will not venture the current candidate I favor at this time. Later this year, however, I promise we will get to have a good tumbledry political discussion. Focus is the key.
The main message here, though: get out and participate in your political system by reading about presidential candidates tonight, and caucusing for one of them tomorrow, on Super Tuesday. Please.
I just found out at The Blue Shallow that John passed his boards. Congratulations, John!
I found out in the middle of last week that I PASSED the National Boards I took late last year. So what does this mean? Provided I graduate in May, I can practice as early as the first business day after graduation. The National Boards say whether or not I will have a License to practice Veterinary Medicine. And now I can.