| The Great Sock-Off Ends in a Tie |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|08:31 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | socks | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  amused | ] |
Several years ago now, I went shopping for cheap white ankle socks. I found that the store had two different kinds available for basically the same price: plain white (I think Hanes), and socks branded with a distinctive black swoosh. So: were the branded socks better made, to maintain brand image? Or were they cheap tat passed off with a nice logo?
I bought a package of each, and have been wearing them pretty much evenly since. I put the clean ones on the bottom of the pile). When a sock gets a hole (usually in the heel), it ends up in the trash. This sometimes left me with an odd sock of one or the other type, in which case the odd sock got paired after the next week's laundry.
I was surprised by how similarly the two piles wore out. Whenever a pair of socks in one pile got holey, a pair in the other followed a few weeks after.
A few weeks ago, I got down to only one of each sock. I started wearing them as a pair (mostly for stressful uses like sword practice).
And today? Both socks got holes simultaneously.
Conclusion: no difference, really. |
|
|
| Games and Turkey redux? |
[Oct. 19th, 2009|08:51 am] |
|
Anyone up for coming by at 7:30 this evening? I'm hoping we'll have some tales of Turkey courtesy of those just returned. And maybe a game or six. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Oct. 5th, 2009|08:48 pm] |
There is apparently a company in Winchester that is working on a flying car. There was an entrepreneurship summit in the conference center at work last week, and the inventor was out front showing off his work and describing his business plan to hard-headed tech business types.
( But I got lots of cheerful pictures. ) |
|
|
| Two great upcoming shows at the Somerville Theater |
[Sep. 21st, 2009|09:48 am] |
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the upcoming Never After, playing Saturday night and Sunday afternoon at the Somerville Theater, and featuring the lovely and talented ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) desireearmfeldt as well as the rest of the glorious Theatre@First. Lots more information including ticket information and showtimes is to be found on the Theatre@First web page for the show. I'll be there on Saturday Night, and I hear I'm not the only person you know who'll be in the audience.
Coincidentally, just a few days later, on Thursday October 1, Girlyman will be playing the Somerville Theater. If you haven't heard Girlyman, you should: rich vocal harmonies, silky folk. A band with really great intonation (imagine if Peter, Paul & Mary wrote all their own songs and were great instrumentalists to boot). Yes, that's right, I'm hooked because they're a group that can really sing. I'm planning to go. Haven't quite figured out ticket procurement logistics, I may just swing by the box office after work some day this week. Sadly, desireearmfeldt will be off at a conference. |
|
|
| Bike craziness |
[Sep. 5th, 2009|09:38 pm] |
We went on our annual pilgrimage to Maine a week+ ago, and saw a hurricane tide, forded a 30' wide stream deeper than our door seals at its deepest point, and I explored a road through the woods that didn't involve a ford just in case.
( I came here to talk about my bike. ) |
|
|
| Anyone up for games? |
[Aug. 31st, 2009|01:32 pm] |
|
At a bit of a loose end tonight, looking to play a game of something because other things have been taking away my gaming time lately. We got on a bit of a Dominion kick over vacation in Maine, playing with a mix of the original and the expansion. |
|
|
| See Spike Heels |
[Aug. 11th, 2009|03:23 pm] |
For those who haven't already seen the announcement in other venues, I'm involved in the latest Occasional Players production, Spike Heels by Theresa Rebeck.
The Occasional Players Present:
Spike Heels
by Theresa Rebeck
Directed by Andrea Humez
Produced by special arrangement with Samuel French, Inc.
"Pygmalion goes awry in this contemporary comedy of manners which explores
sexual harassment, misplaced amour and the possibility of a four sided love triangle."
Friday, August 14, 2009 8:00pm
Saturday, August 15, 2009 2:00pm
Saturday, August 15, 2009 8:00pm
Arlington Center for the Arts
41 Foster Street, Arlington, MA 02474
Directions
Tickets: $12 at-door. Or reserve at www.occasionalplayers.org
Note that parking for the Arlington Center for the Arts is not on Foster St; it's on Tufts St., the next street over, which runs one way from Mass Ave to Broadway below Arlington Center. Expect to drive around the block if you look at Google Maps. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Aug. 4th, 2009|09:55 pm] |
( graph )
OK, so graphing things, I have learned that for sufficiently large n, the following expression:
n (1 - (1 - k/n)^k)
Is approximately k^2. The asymptote is pretty striking, actually (see the graph for k=1..4). But I can't quite derive the limit analytically... Anyone remember the trick here?
I'm prepared to feel pretty daft here... |
|
|
| A Visit to Genova |
[Jul. 18th, 2009|10:03 am] |
Last week I attended ECOOP in Genova, followed by two days of hiking in the beautiful but forbidding Cinque Terre. I ate lots of delicious and light food (mostly seafood, with some salami), sampled the fantastic white wines of Liguria, and generally had a good time.
Administrativia: Do you know anyone going to Italy? I have two travel guides (restaurant recs were quite good). I also have a ticket giving the bearer 12 euros credit at any Italian railways ticket booth. Damn ticket machines. I want someone to claim this just because it pisses me off so much that I paid 20 euros for an 8 euro ticket. But of course all the ticket offices were shut, not to open again until after my departure.
( Brief travelogue singing the praises of the Cinque Terre )
( And then there's getting home Italian-style. )
Other observations: Why is Italian so much easier to fake than French? You can get by much more often than should really be allowed simply by tacking an extra vowel or two onto the word you expect.
I understand now why motor scooters are so popular in Italy. There are tons of districts where the roads are less than 1 lane wide, and often buildings span the roads and you walk under these narrow archways. It has been thus, I am sure, for two millenia. Want to pull up in front of your apartment? Yeah, nice try. I observed a gentleman riding his scooter down a foot-wide ramp at the side of a long set of steps. At the bottom it became clear his only way to leave would be to ride back up the ramp again. That was in the countryside; Genova is crazier still.
Genova may not be terribly touristy, but they did formerly have a law requiring every noble family to maintain a downtown Palazzo to be used by visiting dignitaries. These Palazza make jolly nice viewing, and are conveniently arranged along a couple of strategically-positioned streets.
The Genoese also invented modern banking ("banca" refers to the tables in a particular square), so I suppose that we indirectly have them to thank for the modern economy. For good and for ill... |
|
|
| Heard... |
[May. 13th, 2009|09:55 am] |
|
"Portmanturd," in response to a use of the word "webinar." Not quite a Google whack, but close. Proving that in the age of the web, nothing is truly original. |
|
|
| Star Trek |
[May. 10th, 2009|10:29 pm] |
Have concluded that we will probably not end up seeing the new Trek movie. This is based on the fact that we probably don't care enough to go see it without a mob, and everyone we know who did care seems to have seen it already.
Prove me wrong, I dare ya! |
|
|
| Data Mining and Statistical Bias |
[May. 10th, 2009|09:29 am] |
|
An article on the dangers of data mining in economics. This comes hot on the heels of a discussion at a workshop last week about whether computer scientists are doing science: That is, is there enough emphasis on reproducing and/or refuting past work? Do we spend enough time eliminating bias from our experiments? My general feeling is we don't. The interesting thing in this discussion was it connected this problem with another related problem in the field: nobody gets credit for building new infrastructure, because it's just recreating the infrastructure somebody already built somewhere else in a different context. But it provides a great opportunity to evaluate past research. |
|
|
| Insights from the Explaura |
[Apr. 13th, 2009|09:22 pm] |
Some of my colleagues have been working on the Explaura, which is a music search tool that is not based on collaborative filtering (users who liked X also liked Y)---not only because some of the really interesting bands just don't move enough units to give reliable data, but also because collaborative filtering usually can't tell you why they're making the recommendations they do.
Explaura instead looks at the tag cloud (the aura--geddit?) surrounding the music. Stuff like the band's Wikipedia page, the words used in reviews, and so forth. The real treat is "Steering" mode (click on the steering wheel icon). This lets you manipulate a tag cloud: assemble a tag cloud from multiple bands, delete some tags (eg dates and geography), enlarge, shrink, or negate tags, etc.
The recommendations seem to be pretty good. Apparently I ought to be listening to Van der Graff Generator (pretty good prog rock based on hitting the play button, sounds a bit like Passion Play with saxophones) and The Nice (harder to call). And more obvious stuff like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Genesis.
Apparently Andrea should listen to Ben Folds (yeah, OK, I can see that). And we should both be listening to The Pentangle. Unless that turns out to be a bit too psychedelic...
Give it a whirl. See what you get when you crank "Geek Rock" up to 11. (OK, Jonathan Coulton, Harry & The Potters, TMBG, and Ben Folds...) And so forth. |
|
|
| First really long ride, Harbison |
[Apr. 10th, 2009|09:50 pm] |
I'm a bachelor for the week, so I'm looking for stuff to keep me distracted. On the looking-for-stuff-to-do front, anyone up for doing something Saturday evening or Monday evening? I'm thinking of seeing the Indigo Girls on Thursday, is anyone interested?
I went on my first longish bike ride of the season today, having gotten sick of lousy weather falling on all the Saturdays where I'm not already busy. Around 42 miles in 2.5 hours, a bit over 14mph average. I rode up Tufts, round Mystic (too fast as usual), down Turkey Hill, then hopped on the bike path. At Bedford I hopped on 225 to Monument St and had a nice ride over the rolling hills, but discovered the bridge to Concord was out and managed as a result to be confused about which street I was looking for out of Concord Center again (answer: Lowell St., the one I had just come in on due to detours). Noodled around a bit on some local roads out past Concord Academy, then headed back via Virginia Rd and Mill St.
Just before I hit Virginia Rd. it clouded over and I started getting chilly (I was glad I wore my ninja hat and gloves even though I had just a shirt and shorts on). I got about halfway along Virginia itself, at the strange branch of Draper on the side of the airfield (for destructive testing?!) when... BONK! I looked down and had hit 30.00 miles exactly. Damn, still 12 miles from home; I'd been keeping a pretty good 15mph pace up to that point, even with the Turkey Hill climb.
So of course the rest of the ride was a bit of a mess, and I was glad I was already headed home and only had a couple of semi-serious climbs left. I succored myself on my bottle of 50% juice, but really I just needed to be in better shape and have eaten better before I left.
Tonight I went to my first Chamber Chorus concert in ages; they're typically very badly publicized. I happened to notice in the "arts mail" they send to undergrads that they were doing a Harbison tribute. We sang three of his anthem settings when I was in the chorus 10 or so years ago, and I really enjoyed and connected with them (they're texturally rich, and you have to really be on your toes with dynamics and articulation). One of them, a setting of "O Magnum Mysterium", was on tonight's program. The other Harbison work was based on Umbria of St. Francis of Assisi, and featured a chamber orchestra; this was the premiere of the version with chorus. Fantastic!
I've never seen a tuba mute before. They're 3 feet long. Getting them in and out quietly is a bit of an operation. |
|
|
| Venture Brothers |
[Feb. 26th, 2009|09:15 pm] |
For random reasons I find myself wanting to watch Venture Brothers. Does anyone happen to have DVDs of one or more seasons? Any words of warning/advice?
For that matter, if anyone wanted to have a Venture Brothers watching mob, that'd be even more fun.
Assuming I can get my hands on it. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
melancholy