Kenny Easwaran's Journal

Username:	Password:
Forgot your password?	Remember Me

freezing fridge
The fridge in my apartment has an unfortunate habit of freezing everything solid. I hadn't noticed this the first week I was here, because at that point I didn't notice that the fridge wasn't even plugged in at all! But ever since it's been plugged in it freezes everything, which is really quite annoying for spinach and yogurt and other things that aren't so happy when they're thawed out (and was really annoying for the pasta sauce too, though probably not as long-term harmful to the sauce).

Anyway, I've set the fridge to its warmest setting, and it still seems to be happening. I tried putting it back to a medium setting to see if that would have less of an effect, but I couldn't really tell the difference the next day. Anyone have any other ideas?

****ing Sesame Street
funny video - I think they've added a couple voiceless consonants before and after those bleeps, but they've done it in a very effective way!

obamamania
Wow, apparently people are upset about that New Yorker cover (seen in the link) with the Obamas dressed up as the right wing says they are. I thought it was pretty funny. People apparently are under all sorts of misconceptions about what a New Yorker cover is supposed to be - they think it's supposed to be connected to an article inside (most of them aren't) or that it should be explicitly mentioned as sarcasm when it is. I'm also not quite sure why this is the one that offended people, rather than the one with Clinton and Obama in bed together reaching for the phone at 3 am, or various other covers that they've run during this (extended) campaign season. Even Kevin Drum says that it's "gutless", because they didn't add a touch that would have made the whole thing too complicated and rather pedantic-seeming. (I think this comment explains some things for me - people like to get offended at things.)

On an unrelated note, I found myself today writing the sentence "One should always select the model with the highest posterior" and only afterwards noticed that it had a double-entendre.

psychology wars
Browsing around Cosma Shalizi's notebooks, I ran across an interesting article from several years ago discussing conflict over the term "psychologist", and the strange (or non-existent) relation that most people with that professional title bear to the scientific study of the mind. Some of the criticisms she gives of psychotherapy are explicitly naive Popperian ones, but I suspect that the general critique is right. But if that's the case, then why do so many well-educated people continue with some of these types of psychotherapy?

I guess I've always been unsure of what the word "psychology" means. In the past several years, I just assumed it meant the scientific study of the mind, because that's what everyone I know who does psychology is involved in. As an undergrad, I don't know if that's what I thought, but even if I did, I had no idea what that involved, which is why I never ended up taking any psychology classes. I probably would have been almost as interested as I had been in linguistics. I guess I thought it was about Freud, which is probably only marginally better than much of what goes by the name of psychotherapy these days.

(Also, reading Cosma Shalizi's notebooks and seeing what he linked to, he now seems more comprehensible as a person - I'm still just as impressed with his amazing breadth and depth of knowledge, but I can see that his understanding isn't perfect in every field that he discusses.)

updates
Melbourne was fun, but I got a bit of a cold while I was there, so I headed back on Friday afternoon instead of staying an extra day or so to see the city as I was considering. I suppose I'll be back to visit some time later in the year (when it's warmer).

I did see the video game exhibit, GameOn, put on by the Barbican in London, and traveling around the world. It was interesting to see lots of historical games, and to learn about some of the earliest video games, but I didn't get to try many of the historical games from the '70s and '80s because there were so many kids there playing all of them. I did try out one interesting game made for visually impaired people, called Chillingham (from about four years ago), which just has the starting screen, but then basically acts like a text-adventure/King's Quest type game, but entirely in audio. I was also surprised to learn that before Tomb Raider and Resident Evil, there was a Super Mario Brothers movie, with John Leguizamo - I'm sure we're all happy not to remember the movie.

The conference banquet on Wednesday night was really quite impressive - for just $65 we got a whole lot of food, and it was in the fancy buffet area in a big casino on the south side of the river - I almost felt like I was visiting my parents in Vegas again. The seafood eaters were really quite spoiled, with two lobsters at every table, as well as shrimp, crabs, oysters, and various other things for the appetizers. I was a bit worried I wouldn't have much to eat, but then I discovered the vegetable dumplings, chickpea curry, noodles, potatoes, and other tasty things that I really can't remember because the dessert selection was so amazing. (I had a strawberry parfait and several fruits that I dipped in chocolate, but there were many other options.) Also, everyone got three free drinks with dinner. And the rest of the time, it was nice to realize that it's possible to have food for under $10 in an Australian city, unlike in Canberra, especially since the hotel I was staying at was right next to Chinatown.

There's been weird Catholic activities going on in the streets of Canberra the past few days - on Friday on my way back from the airport, there were people waving Italian flags that said "Padova" and singing songs while playing guitar. This afternoon the people were waving French and Belgian flags. Actually, one of the weird Catholic things was in Melbourne - I was walking down the street and got stuck behind a big group of people waving a Vatican flag, and wearing knit orange hats that said "Zambia" on them. I don't remember them singing songs though. I wonder if this is all connected to the big World Youth Day that's going on in Sydney some time soon for the Catholic church. (You can buy promotional clothing for that in all sorts of stores in town, it seems. At least, you certainly can in Target.)

Also, today I made it to the board game store for the second Sunday of the month, when there are board game activities. I played Hameln (which was fun, but I think the different parts of the game weren't well-integrated), and Ticket to Ride (which of course is always fun), and then a quick game of For Sale at the end, which was nice for a ten to fifteen minute game.

AAP in Melbourne
I'm in Melbourne this week for the annual conference of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. It's been fun so far, especially running into friends who live in Sydney or Melbourne (I haven't yet run into my friend coming from Singapore, but his talk was at the same time as another talk I really wanted to go to). The building the conference is in is quite neat - it's called Storey Hall, which is the same name as a dorm I lived in once as an undergrad. The general architecture is very climbing gym, which is a bit odd for an academic building. But then the lecture halls and everything else are tiled in Penrose tiles, though there are some mistakes in the tiling at some points. But they do a good job of illustrating the existence of the large and small scale tilings in the pattern.

Also, I heard a story from a friend about the best/worst event ever. At her university the grad students social organization organized a speed-dating event, but only as it started did they realize just what they had done. Since it was grad students, there were people of a variety of orientations there, and they had realized this, but not thought through their strategy. Instead of having the women sit still and the men rotate, they had people interested in men sit still and people interested in women rotate. This had the effect of making straight men talk to lots of gay men as well as to straight women, and lesbians talked to straight women and gay men, and none of the gay people talked to anyone of the appropriate orientation. My friend thought it was lots of fun, because she got to talk to lots of interesting people rather than just a whole bunch of straight guys that were hitting on her.

An interesting fact about travel in Australia - in addition to not having to take of your shoes or worry about liquids, you don't even need to show ID if you're traveling domestically! And when they stopped me for an extra explosives test, they had me read a description of the procedure and asked me if it was ok if they did it.

I'm glad I don't watch TV news
I don't think I would have been able to stand this week's coverage of Wesley Clark's comments on John McCain. Wesley Clark did not attack McCain's military service or military record. All he said is the blatantly obvious thing that being shot down is not a qualification for being president. And it's not just Fox News that's switboating Wesley Clark here - even CNN and NBC seem to be doing it!

weeds
I just read a very interesting article from the International Herald-Tribune about the relations between weeds, invasive species, and climate change. There's really a lot of interesting stuff in there, like the fact that weeds tend to thrive under different temperatures and higher concentrations of CO2 where native plants and crops tend not to improve as much; the idea that the notion of "weed" itself is a social construct ("plants humans don't like") that ends up having real-world biological consequences (as a result of our war with them, weeds tend to be extremely diverse and hardy in various environments); that invasive species are often a symptom of biosphere damage rather than a cause of it (speaking of which, I saw my first wild rabbit in Australia last night); that understanding the relation of traditional crop plants to weeds can help agriculture react to climate change; and that the environment in urban areas often mimics the temperatures and CO2 concentrations that we can expect in the world as a whole several decades in the future.

Interestingly, the article doesn't appear to come from the NYTimes or Washington Post, but seems to be original reporting by the IHT itself - I didn't realize they did any of that!

e-mail and wiki
I just got set up with my e-mail account at USC. (I still don't have mine for ANU, despite having been here three weeks - apparently there's just been miscommunication, because several visiting students said they got that sorted out in their first day in town. I did get paid today though, so it's good to see that at least that is working.) Anyway, it's very interesting - USC seems to have a big wiki set up to arrange for new faculty transition. Each person has a page on the wiki, and they've got a serious system of permissions so that we can only see the pages associated with ourselves, and we can make comments on pages, but can't actually edit most of the things. But it means that we can see what things need to be done overall, and what we have to do, and who we need to get to sign off on them on the wiki. It seems very organized.

Also, USC seems to have some partnership with Google, where they use Google documents and offer USC-branded gmail accounts for students and the like.

And despite Canberra being a smallish town, and my birthday having been on a Tuesday, we were still able to stay out until 3 am doing karaoke and dancing, so that was fun. I've checked though - somewhere between a third and a half of all posts on my wall on Facebook are happy birthday wishes from this year or the previous two years.

New Firefox
Today is the download day for the new version of Firefox. I was very annoyed when I went yesterday (which was June 17) and didn't see any information except for something saying "June 17 is download day - will you pledge to download it then?" or something like that. It was very hard to find the information saying that they meant 10 am pacific time on June 17, rather than midnight in your local time zone, or even midnight pacific time.

And today, when I finally downloaded it and installed it, it crashes within a few seconds of starting every time I try to run it. I don't know if it has something to do with the fact that I closed all windows of Firefox before quitting my old version - I had thought that was a prudent thing to do so that it didn't try to import information from that old version unnecessarily. Matt says that he's got it working fine, and actually it seems to be working quite well for him.

Is anyone else having troubles like I am? Have other people who use Macs been able to make it work? I assume so, because there must be millions (or at least hundreds of thousands) of Mac users that installed it today, and I haven't seen any news reports about widespread bugs, just news reports about it being download day.

zombies and kangaroos
But not zombie kangaroos, unfortunately.

Friday night (Friday the 13th) was apparently International Zombie Awareness Day. At least, it was here in Canberra, and it was celebrated by a party at the bar at the university, where I met up with

ironed_orchid and

adamthebastard and some of their friends, which was fun.

Today I met up with some of the philosophers to go for a hike up Mt. Ainslie, which is one of the two highest points in Canberra, and only 800 m lower than the highest point in Australia, but still only takes about 45 minutes to walk up (if that). It was a nice hike, especially since most of us (including a faculty member) hadn't been up to the top. (Last year I made it most of the way up, but by then it was too dark to continue.) On the way down, we were very excited to see a wallaby through the trees - it was small and black. I had never seen a wallaby before. And then a few minutes later, we saw a whole flock of kangaroos (I heard the technical term is a "mob", but I like "flock" better) right near the trail. When they're just grazing and walking around slowly, they have an interesting five-legged walk - they put down their hands and tail and move their hind-legs forwards, and then move their hands and tail forwards again for the next step. I suppose you need something like this if your movement is going to be bilaterally symmetric, and you don't want to fall down or gallop. I had only thought of the tail as an important counterbalance before, rather than as an actual support structure.

Also, it looks like on Tuesday morning I'll finally be moving into my own apartment rather than continuing to live with the professor I'm working with, who has been very nice, but I'm sure my visit is getting old for them. I was just looking into internet plans yesterday, but then realized it'll be more complicated than I thought. Apparently even for home internet, there's a monthly limit on the included amount of data, and you can either pay a lot extra if you go over, or just have the speed drop almost to dialup speed.

Do Australians have any suggestions on the best sort of plan to get? I don't even have any idea how many gigabytes of data I usually transmit in a given month. I could imagine it being anywhere between 1 and 100.

Chemistry Party!
Chemistry party.

Was this YouTube video really sponsored by the EU? It's on the EUTube channel...

in Australia
Contrary to the previous few United flights, this one was on time and in fact remarkably empty. I think the only places there was more than one person in any group of three seats was when it was a family traveling together. So I could stretch out and relax, and actually managed to get probably almost 8 hours of sleep - I was worried I was waking up too early, but I looked at the time, and it was already 5 am Australia time, so I figured it was safe to get up then.

The wait at baggage claim and customs and for the bus weren't pleasant, but they went by without a hitch, and now I'm at Alan Hájek's place.

Next items on the agenda - get on the university payroll, and put in my housing application.

last day in California
My flight for Australia is scheduled to leave in about 12 hours (I don't know whether I should believe this, because this flight is actually a continuation of the same flight I was on from Chicago to SFO a few weeks ago, which was quite overbooked and delayed).

So yesterday, Matt took the day off from lab and we went to SF. We were planning on going to a brunch place before leaving, but then

cityofgates called us up, and we eventually realized that Zachary's pizza was a better idea - even though Matt and I had had it twice in the past week and a half.

In the city, Matt and I mainly wandered around Golden Gate Park, which I think I've been to four times this year, but only once in the nine years before that that I've lived in the Bay Area. We checked out places we hadn't been before, like wandering around in the little hills and forests (with the fog making it constantly look like a storm was brewing), and going to the Conservatory of Flowers (which should really be called the Conservatory of Orchids - though I suppose the flower I use as my new phone desktop picture is definitely not an orchid), and the de Young museum. The de Young was a nice space, and had some great glass art (only one or two Chihuly's, but lots of others that I wouldn't have known about), but we didn't get a chance to go up the tower, because we tried too late.

Then we came to the real reason we went to the city, which was to see Das Rheingold at the opera. It's part of the new American production of the Ring cycle sponsored by the Washington and San Francisco opera houses, with Alberich and Mime as '49ers and Fafner and Fasolt as construction workers from the Empire State Building, and the gods as Great Gatsby-style aristocrats. I think the choreography was great, and the translations clarified some of the relations of the characters more than I remember, and also preserved a lot of the alliteration and other literary devices. And the idea of having video projections going during the scene changes was quite nice (especially the formation of stars and planets out of dust at the begnning), though I think the imagery could have been faster moving, but with fewer random and confusing jumps. It's sad that we didn't get to see Valhalla, but perhaps that's reasonable. I thought the use of a croquet mallet as Thor's hammer was cute, but really didn't work overall. Most importantly though, Matt seemed to enjoy it almost as much as I did.

two hour visa
I applied for my visa for Australia a couple weeks ago, but I hadn't heard back yet as of this afternoon on the status of the application. Since my flight is Wednesday night, I was getting worried. When I e-mailed the person at the university to ask, she said it sounded like all I needed was to get a chest x-ray (to prove I don't have tuberculosis?) So I called the department of immigration (using Skype, so it was just 7 cents a minute rather than whatever ridiculous price my cell phone would charge), and once I got through to a person, she just said I needed to send some images of my passport, and less than two hours after my first e-mail to the university, I got an e-mail back saying I was approved! Now I just need to see if it actually works when I get to the airport.

And then find a place to live in Australia.

California Marriage Equality
This proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in California may not actually be a blow against marriage equality, if I understand the amendment and the court ruling properly. If the ruling had said that the state must recognize same-sex marriages, then I think the amendment would overrule it and thus restore inequality.

However, as I understand the ruling (which is mainly through a few news articles, and a couple paragraphs excerpted from a several hundred page document), it doesn't say that California must recognize same-sex marriages. Instead it gives the legislature a choice - either recognize both same-sex and different-sex marrigages; or else grant same-sex marriages a different name - while also renaming other marriages with this same name.

As I understand the amendment, it says that only marriages between a man and a woman can be recognized in California. However, it doesn't say that such marriages must be recognized. Therefore, since the amendment would ban same-sex marriages, and the court ruling says that the existing constitution says that different sex partners can be married iff same sex partners can be, together these would have the effect of banning different sex marriages as well.

Now maybe this isn't totally right, but it looks to me that there's a real possibility of reading things this way. I imagine most supporters of the amendment haven't considered the possibility that it would have this consequence - so I think someone should warn the public of this potential unforeseen consequence. This might persuade many people to vote against the amendment (though I suppose many people would actually vote for it if they thought it had this consequence, thinking that the government ought to get out of the marriage business anyway).

politics
Apparently, if the vote were held today, the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in California would pass 54-35. However, this is apparently not very bad news, because ballot initiatives on controversial issues tend to decrease in support drastically over the course of a season, so the fact that it's only slightly over 50% means that we'll just have to watch. (This also gives me very strong reason to make sure I'm registered as an absentee voter this fall - I'm fairly sure that the Democrat will win both California and my congressional district.)

fivethirtyeight.com - an interesting site that tracks all 538 electoral votes by some complicated weighted average of polls. What makes in more interesting than others is that it gives an estimate of the probability that each candidate has of winnin each state. Apparently with current numbers, Obama has a projected 53.7% chance of beating McCain while Clinton has a 60.6% chance of beating McCain (mainly due to recent strong polling numbers in Ohio and Florida).

allergies and jet lag
One thing I forgot to mention is that apparently while I was in Madison, whatever I was allergic to in Berkeley totally disappeared. I didn't sneeze in Madison, and I didn't sneeze at all when I came back (from several times a day before, and much worse on some days). However, it did start coming back a little yesterday. Since hot days often make my allergies worse, I wonder if the heat wave while I was gone triggered all the pollen to release, so that when I got back it was mostly spent for a little while.

Also, some suggest that fasting can help reset your circadian rhythms. I wonder if this is why I often have very little trouble dealing with jet lag - when I'm traveling, I find it very hard to get myself to eat stuff, either because it's airplane food, or because it's the wrong time of day.

Ph.inisheD.
Or at least, so says the lollipop they gave me when I filed my dissertation on Tuesday. It's exciting to be done, but also somewhat scary - I'll be in Australia in two weeks, and from then on my only time in Berkeley will likely be whenever I'm visiting Matt.

The defense was interesting, especially because almost no one at Berkeley has one. (As far as I can tell it's just the PhD programs in Logic and the Methodology of Science, Near Eastern studies, Buddhist studies, and Interdisciplinary studies.) The first question my outside member asked, before I even started talking, was "So is this, like, a defense defense?" Basically, I talked for an hour about my thesis (I had been planning on doing just 30-45 minutes, but I hadn't timed my outline, so I went to about an hour even after cutting several topics on the fly) and then there were about 20 or 30 minutes of questions, and then it was off to the Graduate Division to file the thesis and make sure the margins and font size and such were acceptable so they could give me the lollipop.

In other news, I've been doing a lot of traveling the past couple weeks, to New Jersey for my high school reunion, and Madison for the Formal Epistemology Workshop. These airline experiences were far worse than anything that was going on during the winter - I guess the summer travel season just compounds the problems. I think only one of my flights landed within 2 hours of the scheduled arrival time, and that was the one where I had to yell at United people for quite a while before I managed to get a seat. (I had used frequent flyer miles for the Madison trip, but accidentally booked the return flight at 5:30 am instead of 5:30 pm - when I tried to change it, they put me on a "waitlist" for the flight, and never bothered to tell me that the chances of getting off that list were basically nil, until every single flight out of Madison that day was full even for paying customers. So I convinced them to just fly me from Chicago to SFO, and I'd take the bus there, but they required me to pay a $100 change fee. And I'm lucky I made it onto that flight - there were about 60 people trying to fly standby, and about 30 like me that had reserved tickets but no seat assignment, until United bribed people into staying overnight.) However, it sounds like I was lucky enough to miss the awful hot weather in Berkeley while I was in Madison.

I've somehow miraculously managed to clear my e-mail inbox down to 21 messages, seven of which were sent today. (Normally the number is closer to 80, and at some points this year it's gotten as high as 160.)

Cute video of a dog nursing kittens and puppies.

Interesting facts about female prime ministers. (The site also has a page about female presidents.) For instance, did you know that the first modern world leader who was female (not counting monarchs) was the leader of Mongolia in the 1940s? Or that Margaret Thatcher was only the 5th female prime minister in the world? (In addition to the obvious Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir, there was a leader of Sri Lanka and a leader of the Central African Republic, of all places!) Another very interesting fact - the first time that a female leader was followed by a female leader as a result of an election was in 1994, when Chandrika Kumaratunga of Sri Lanka stepped down as Prime Minister to become President, and her mother(!) Sirimavo Bandaranaike replaced her as Prime Minister. (Bandaranaike was also the first female prime minister in the world, back in the early '60s.) The only countries that have had two successive female presidents are Ireland and New Zealand. And France and Canada have both had female prime ministers, but only for one year each.

dissertation bleg
I figured this out a couple years ago, but I seem to have lost my notes. I'd like to at least include it in a footnote in my dissertation. So here's the question:

Stone's Representation Theorem guarantees that every Boolean algebra can be represented by a collection of sets, where negation is interpreted as complement and conjunction is represented by intersection. Since every sigma-algebra is a Boolean algebra, the same is true for those. However, I believe there are sigma-algebras where countable conjunction is not represented by countable intersection in the Stone Representation. I believe this involves some ultrafilter containing each element of the intersection, but not containing their countable conjunction, but I can't recall.

Can anyone actually give me an example of a sigma-algebra with this property?