Data Mining news

It's been seven months since I barely pulled off my Master's Report and graduated. Over two years since I took my favorite class, which was Data Mining.

I have every intention of following up on the advice of my reader from the UT Journalism department, Dr. Iris Chyi (thanks again!) and finding some peer-reviewed journals to publish the study in. I'm told that it will take a lot of extra work first, which I haven't been sufficiently motivated to do. What I need to do is apparently read some journals that deal with the appropriate subject matter (i.e., focus on digital media for example) and get a feel for what kind of work they've accepted in the past. Then trim the paper to a manageable length (from 60 pages to, say, 25) and submit something that, in my judgment, they'd be likely to approve with no major changes.

I'm writing all this down so I have a reminder to actually get off my ass and do so, because otherwise I'm afraid I'll forget about it.

Determined to leverage this experience and make people remember who I am at work, on Tuesday I did an hour long presentation for most of the engineering staff (a room full of maybe 30 people) on what data mining can do for my company. I know I am an ultra-nerd, but I love doing presentations. False modesty aside, years of practicing topic presentation on TV and podcast have made me pretty good at it.

I put a Power Point presentation together and now I've uploaded it to Google Docs, so you can check it out by going here. You can't really get the point without hearing me talk, but it will give you a general idea of what I covered. The official topic title I picked was, "Data Mining: How math helps us compare apples to oranges, and shows that ice cream causes shark attacks." (If you care, I can explain that in the comments.)

Anyway, couldn't have asked for a much better result. I managed to hit all the major points I wanted regarding a complex topic in under 90 minutes with time to spare for questions. They laughed at all my jokes in the right places, appeared to follow the point of what I was saying, nodded sometimes, participated where I intended them to, and discussed it after it was over. All four of the company software architects had an animated discussion about what use they could make of it, after everyone else had left. And even today, two days later, I'm still getting IM's and people stopping by to let me know that they enjoyed and appreciated it.

People, please DO NOT FEED THE EGO!!!

My spoilery review of "Wanted"

As usual, I'm finding myself posting more and more on that other blog rather than on this one. Here's what I had to say about the movie "Wanted." I hope Ginny will read it, since it puts together some of the stuff we talked about after seeing it.

John McCain's energy solution: free labor!

McCain Proposes a $300 Million Prize for a Next-Generation Car Battery

“I further propose we inspire the ingenuity and resolve of the American people,” Mr. McCain said, “by offering a $300 million prize for the development of a battery package that has the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.”

He said the winner should deliver power at 30 percent of current costs. “That’s one dollar, one dollar, for every man, woman and child in the U.S. — a small price to pay for helping to break the back of our oil dependency,” he said.

If a corporation were to dedicate genuine effort to build this miracle battery, it would assign a director to the project, who would allocate a certain number of man-hours to the problem. The people who worked on the project would all have access to one another's research, and they would all get paid regardless of whether they arrived at a solution. Big companies, like governments are common pools for a lot of money, which is why they can afford to invest large sums up front to achieve a desired solutions.

Imagine a company instead saying "Okay, all of you employees start coming up with crazy ideas to design your own battery. Whoever pulls it off gets a gigantic bonus. Everyone else gets paid nothing." That's essentially what John McCain's proposal is. He's not fronting ANY of the money to generate this research. He's not proposing to absorb any of the risk, since if no engine gets built, no prize gets awarded. All he's offering to do is buy a finished product which does not yet exist.

I have to conclude that John McCain is not in the slightest bit serious about actually funding a solution to the problem. R&D is risky, therefore the cost of doing it is far higher than developing an actual product using known techniques. In any case, anyone who was capable of creating the miracle battery using only the funds available to an unfinanced individual would be able to make so much money from it that being bought out for $300 million in the end would most likely be insulting.

If McCain thinks the free market is so darn awesome, why hasn't the magic battery been produced already? This is a man who has no ideas.

Card is writing sequels to what? Argh. Argh. Argh.

A friend of mine (Buffy) just invited me to join Goodreads.com. It's a good recommendation for me, because I am a sucker for these social information-organizing web 2.0 sites.

So I'm adding stuff to my bookshelf, and in the process, I'm going back through my blog searching for books that I've discussed. I came across a mention of Ender's Game, and -- when will I ever learn -- went browsing through recent news about Orson Scott Card.

It looks like Hack Neocon Fundie Blogger Card is once again going around the space-time continuum desecrating the works of Talented Sci-Fi Author Card. This time he's writing a fanfic sequel to one of my other favorite TSFA Card novels, Pastwatch.

The original Pastwatch is a very enjoyable yarn about some Africa-based time travelers who are reluctantly driven to fix the past by interfering with the "Columbus discovers America" event. The story of Noah's flood is touched upon, but treated appropriately as the origin of a myth -- it appears to be a local flood and the Biblical details are greatly exaggerated.

Now Card tells an interviewer:

What we have planned for further books in the Pastwatch series (yep, series) are books that take place sort of in the midst of the Columbus book. There's the Noah book, which tells Kemal's story as frame but Noah's story and the flood as the main tale, and then there's the Garden of Eden story - yep, the hoariest cliche in science fiction, but I have no fear, the artsy types couldn't possibly despise me more, and I think there's a reason why it is the most-written cliche story in the field. People are hungry for a rational treatment of that story in science fictional terms. So ... I mean to give it a try. We'll see if anyone but me likes it.

I suppose it's remotely possible that HNFB Card will treat TSFA Card's source material with the respect and appreciation it deserves, and not turn stories about Noah's flood and the Garden of freakin' Eden into some obsessive religious rant. However, I have my doubts, given that he can't even get through one question about it in an interview without making some lame, smarmy swipe about mean liberal critics.

Sudoku solver, new and improved

If anyone enjoyed the Sudoku program I made earlier, I should let you know that it's been updated.

In the latest version you can click on the game board and type numbers directly into the screen, instead of messing around with the text box. You can still copy the contents on the text box and save them for later retrieval.

Also, the box now displays periods instead of spaces for empty squares. This way, the correct amount of white space doesn't disappear when you type it in an HTML comment. For instance, in a previous comment, Tatarize was trying to get me to try this puzzle:

1.......5
....3....
..2.4....
.........
.34...7..
...2.6..1
2....5...
.7.....3.
.....1...

Go ahead and paste that in... it's long, but still quick at maximum speed.

Obama is beating McCain

CBS News:

Presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama holds a six point lead over his Republican counterpart John McCain, a new CBS News poll finds. Obama leads McCain 48 percent to 42 percent among registered voters, with 6 percent of respondents undecided.

Okay, so it's one poll. It's also one day (give or take) after Barack Obama became the official Democratic nominee. (Oh, you hadn't heard that yet?) He hasn't even started campaigning against McCain yet, who's had the benefit of being the declared Republican for couple of months.

Now on the one hand, I'm sure the Rovish knives will come out in full force at this point. On the other hand, I (perhaps naively) think the negatives about Obama have pretty much been aired out already. People who think he is simultaneously a Muslim, and atheist, and a scary black Christian, already think that at this point. This isn't going to change much, and the current numbers probably reflect this.

Is it okay to be cautiously optimistic yet?

Sudoku!

As I mentioned two weeks ago, I started playing around with a Sudoku solving program. So finally, here it is. Your browser must have Java enabled to view it.



Brief instructions:

To watch the program solve a puzzle, click "Solve." You can enter new puzzles by typing numbers in the text box and clicking "update." I recommend going to websudoku.com, copying a hard puzzle, and cheating to get a fast time.

Future updates include (if I don't get too lazy):

• The program doesn't validate the initial state, so you can enter an obviously unsolveable puzzle and it will waste a fair amount of time trying to solve it. This is my top priority for a fix.
• I'd like to be able to click directly on the image and be able to type in numbers there.
• No guarantees, but you might be able to paste a websudoku.com URL and have it automatically load the puzzle from there.
• Kevin, the director of engineering, discussed some methods to automatically generate new puzzles. I might give that a try. But it's a solver, not a game, so I might not.

Updates: Validates puzzles correctly. "Maximum" option set on speed bar. Move counter added.

One reason I like my new job

On my schedule today, the director of engineering will be delivering a presentation with the following topic:
"Solving Sudoku puzzles with recursion"

Knowing this was coming, I started writing an experimental Java solver over the weekend. I had a pretty busy weekend, so I only got as far as reading a puzzle from a file and displaying it. During off-stage time at my two chorus performances, I worked out a possible algorithm in my head, but I'll need a few more days to write it out and debug. I'll probably put it in a Java applet on my web page when it's done, and you'll be able to watch it "think" if it works out the way I'm imagining it.

Fake money

Last week I had sort of a funny experience at Rudy's Barbecue that I thought I'd share.

After a successful dentist appointment, I thought I'd reward myself (and punish my teeth) by getting some delicious breakfast tacos. At the counter, I pulled a five dollar bill out of my wallet, and noticed that the number five was... pink.

I said, "Huh, that's weird. When did they become pink?"

The cashier laughed and said "Oh, about a month ago. The first time I saw it I thought somebody was trying to hand me Monopoly money!" (She was pretty close in guessing the date.)

We had a good laugh and I went to get some hot sauce. The guy standing next to me abruptly said: "It practically IS Monopoly money, anyway!"

At that point my BS detector immediately started to ping quietly. All I replied was a non-commital "Yeah, really."

The stranger persisted: "You know, our money isn't even backed by gold!"

My BS detector went from a quiet ping to a full-on klaxon siren. Strangers may start up some small talk as friendly chit-chat, but nobody attempts to strike up a conversation on such an off-the-wall subject unless they have an agenda to push.

I smiled cheerfully and said, "Oh, you're one of THOSE people."

He protested, "I'm not one of those people, I..."

Still smiling, I cut him off: "Look, I've had some pretty extensive arguments over some of these fake currencies that have been going around, so let's not even get into that, okay?" I took my tacos and left.

In retrospect, the only thing I regret is that I didn't pause to warn the cashier that she should carefully scrutinize any cash he may try to give her.

---

I guess I should explain. Several years ago, a friend of mine got involved with this unusual movement to replace the U.S. dollar with something new called "Liberty Dollars." They are minted by a company formerly called NORFED, now "Liberty Services." The gimmick is that the coins are made from real silver. Now, the argument about whether it is better to use fiat currency (currency which has no fixed value) vs. commodity-based currency (such as silver or gold) goes way back, certainly. The famous "cross of gold" speech by William Jennings Bryan (of Scopes Monkey Trial fame) was all about switching to the silver standard because gold was too expensive for most people to afford.

But that's not the issue here. Whatever your feelings may be about "fiat currency," Liberty Services is running a very transparent con game. What they do is, take an ounce of silver, mint it into a coin, and stamp a dollar denomination on it, i.e., "$10". Then, sell the coins to people at a "discounted rate" -- say, $8.50. Along with the coins, sell them a load of amateur political philosophy about the evils of fiat currency, and encourage them to go "spend" the silver coins at participating businesses. If no voluntary participants can be found, then give them the coins to unsuspecting merchants and be prepared to spout the same political philosophy as an explanation.

Here's the trick, though. Those coins with $10 stamped on them? They were worth $5 at the time. The price for an ounce of silver fluctuates just like stocks and other commodities, but you can check the spot price online at any time. When the spot price of silver was around $5, Liberty Dollars were imprinted with "$10." When the spot price of silver started drifting up toward $10 per ounce, the coins "doubled" in value, and were all restamped to say "$20." Now that the spot price is about $17 per ounce, they are now being re-issued yet again to say $50.

Get it? Today, you can buy (or in LS double-speak, "exchange") $17 worth of silver for $50 in cash -- or a mere $36 if you are an "associate." The coins aren't worth $50. They aren't worth $36. They are worth $17 at market prices, plus the small amount that it costs to mint them into a cute little round design with pictures stamped on it. But they SAY "$50" on the face, so supposedly you are acquiring something that is worth $50.

How do you get this value out of the coin? Well, the company's literature encourages people to "spend Liberty Dollars into circulation" by trying to pass them off as authentic money. Then if someone calls you on it ("what the hell is this thing"), you explain how the coins are all pure, solid silver, and therefore they have intrinsic value, unlike real American dollars. The fact that the intrinsic value is actually much less than the face value? Uhhh... don't bring that up.

To me, this has always seemed like a combination of counterfeiting, pyramid scam, and cult. Counterfeiting? The coins don't actually say they are worth fifty American dollars; they are fifty Liberty Dollars. But they have dollar signs printed on them, which is generally recognized to mean American dollars, and the web site certainly makes it sound like you are supposed to "spend" the liberty dollars on goods and services which are worth the equivalent amount of American dollars.

Pyramid scam? Joining the "associate program" to get bulk coins at a discount (though still much more than the intrinsic value!) smacks of MLMs in which you buy overpriced goods for yourself and then attempt to recoup your losses by selling them (or in this case, "spending") to an even bigger sucker for an even greater amount. Clearly it shouldn't matter all that much to Liberty Services whether you succeed in "spending" them, because they've already gotten YOUR money, and made a significant profit on the cost of the raw silver plus minting overhead.

I am not, of course, ridiculing the idea of investing in silver. Obviously, the very fact that the price of silver used to be under $10 and is now as high as $17 means that it may have been a good idea to just buy silver at a reasonable price. (Although, like any investment, past performance is no guarantee of future results.) You can get silver bars in bulk for as little as 19 cents per ounce over the spot price. But when you buy these "Liberty Dollars," you are in effect paying about double the price or more for the privilege of having the words "$50" stamped on your ounce of silver.

And hey, now that Liberty Dollars are being "converted" from $20 to $50 in value, you can get them restamped for the low, low price of $4 each! So not only do you pay an absurd premium to get the silver coins in the first place, but also when it "increases in value" -- remember, it's still the same ounce of silver with a fake dollar amount printed on it -- but you also pay an 8% premium (or 20%, depending on when you count it) to perform this "value increasing" operation.

If you think this makes sense, consider that Liberty Services could just as easily stamp "one MILLION dollars" on each coin, and it would have about the same meaning. They're only worth the face value if you can find somebody else dumb enough to believe they're worth that. Otherwise, they're only worth the price of silver. And don't forget that Liberty Services takes all their payments in good old American Dollars, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government, which is supposedly worthless fiat money that nobody wants to use. Tricky.

The kicker is that this pretty much IS counterfeiting, and there's a very real chance that you will be arrested for trying to pass off Liberty Dollars as real money. Trying to "put the coins in circulation" often amounts to nothing more than badgering innocent merchants to give you discounted goods and services in exchange for an object that is not really worth nearly what you claim. And if they do accept it, then you've just handed THEM the responsibility of finding an even bigger fool to take the overpriced hunks of metal off their hands.

If you want to invest in silver, then buy some silver from a reputable merchant, and perhaps the value will increase over time. If you want to pay for something using a universally accepted currency, the American Dollar (whether it's pink or not) is taken absolutely everywhere in this country. With Liberty Dollars, you get to combine the convenience of carrying silver with the investment value of carrying cash, which is to say, the worst of both worlds. The vast majority of merchants will wonder what you're smoking when you try to hand them a $50 coin that is worth $17, and you're paying an obscenely high fee to obtain and continually re-stamp the coins in the first place.

Fractal doodling

Since I now work in an environment with regular longish meetings, I've rekindled my interest in the art of doodling. Mostly what I draw is fractals.

I can't remember who gave me the idea of drawing Sierpinski Triangles on paper, but I've been doing that for years, in any situation where I'm bored and have pen and paper available but no computer. The triangle is easy to do, because you just have to keep drawing upside-down triangles on any space that doesn't have one already, and you can pretty much go on forever until the triangles get too small to draw. However, I recently got sick of Sierpinskis, so I started branching out into Koch curves.

I've tried to draw Kochs in the past, but always screwed up... I would freestyle just fine for a while, but then I would always turn a line in the wrong direction and wind up with an ugly asymmetric mess.

So I've been practicing my technique, and hit on the way to fix this. Draw dots that represent the framework first, and then draw more dots closer together, until you've got the level of detail you want; then fill in the curves. The down side to this approach is that unlike a Sierpinski, you can't increase the complexity after you're finished. You have to pick a level and stick with it until you're done, and then start a new one.

By gradually increasing the size and practicing smaller and smaller lines, I've managed to create a vertical square Koch curve against the left margin of a notebook page, which fills up most of the lines on the page and goes to a depth of five iterations. It took me about four meetings to finish. I've also drawn a snowflake which goes to four iterations, but I could probably get five because I still have room on the page to make it about 50% bigger next time.

I've gotten funny looks from people who saw what I was doing, but no comments so far. I wish I could do Mandelbrots, but it seems way too math-intensive to do in real time.

A few other fun facts about my history with fractals. When I was in college, I spent two years tutoring a smart high school kid named Willy in computer programming. One year, we wrote several fractal programs in Visual C++ for a science fair project. He went to state level but didn't win.

I still have several interesting fractal programs which I translated to Java and put on my Java applet page. One of them allows you to generate your own Koch curve, and another shows how you can get a Sierpinski to emerge naturally from pseudo-random rules.

My friend Denis Loubet introduced me to a term that I love to use: "Fractally wrong." This applies to someone whose opinions are wrong in the big picture, and regardless of where you zoom in on any particular detail, it's still wrong.

Thoughts on the primary, and on playing nice

I said earlier that I was bored with politics, but I had a long exchange with my dad about it anyway. Some of the things I've said in the past about political strategy are rehashed here.

Oh yeah, and Clinton and Obama each won another primary yesterday. Yawn.

The fact that recent news cycles have been obsessively dominated by such astoundingly dull trivialities such as Jeremiah Wright highlights an ongoing problem with the traditional media. (I prefer to use Kos's term rather than "mainstream media", for reasons explained here.) It's not that the media is either "liberal" or "conservative"; it's simply that they're frequently driven by laziness and a lack of interest in either learning or teaching. The reason this seems to disproportionately help Republicans is because they've learned to navigate and manipulate this media landscape, to an extent that Democrats mostly have not.

As I've said before, "Liberal Media," is largely a fabricated catch-phrase. It has been such a successful meme that traditional media organizations such as the New York Times now delude themselves into believing that someone like William Kristol is a Very Serious Pundit who actually has something valuable to say. Even though he says something objectively, factually wrong nearly every time he opens his mouth. NYT appears to worry that if they don't take the guy seriously, they will be accused of being "too liberal."

Well, of course they will. That's because Republicans know how to intimidate and embarrass the New York Times, and Democrats don't. When a Very Serious Pundit says something like "Gosh, I think that voters care a whole awful lot about what Barack Obama's former pastor said several years ago, and we should all be covering that," there is no organized movement to say "What are you, stupid? Of course voters won't care about that." There is a DISorganized movement, in the form of blogs and other scattered voices in the wilderness. But the Democratic Party hasn't learned how to harness and amplify this.

When I embarked on my Master's Report to compare the popular media focus to the interests of Digg users, this is partly what I had in mind as a motivation for possible mismatch. Of course the media is driven by a profit motive, but that doesn't mean they have to react to what all consumers want. They also have to react to differences between mostly quiet, apathetic consumers, vs. loud, strident consumers. The strident consumers are largely on the right, and can be treated as a large bloc of people who will boycott something. Or alternatively, for media they like, they will pour investment money into something that has no hope of making a profit. See Rupert Murdoch with Fox News, or Sun Myung Moon with the Washington Times (which has never turned a profit, but has been a goldmine in terms of "mainstreaming" far right conservative thought).

As distasteful as it may be, I think Democrats should figure out how to use intimidation and embarrassment as effectively as Republicans do. They should shame the media away from talking about Jeremiah Wright, while at the same time, shaming them into saying some of the obvious negative stuff about John McCain, instead of fawning all over him and bringing him donuts.

No, seriously. That happened.

Compare that to the kind of treatment Barack Obama received at the last debate, and you begin to see what the problem is.

I have a philosophy, which I've blogged about before, that has developed after years of playing strategy games. It is that nothing is inherently "unfair" in politics (or any other game) unless it actually breaks the rules. If one side is playing a strategy, and they are winning as a result, then by definition they have a winning strategy. Faced with losing, the other side has two choices: 1. Change the rules, and/or aggressively enforce the rules which are currently in place; 2. Adapt to the strategy.

When you regard legally accepted tactics as unfair, it hamstrings you. To repeat the analogy from before, if you are playing rock/paper/scissors, and you somehow arbitrarily decide that rock is unfair, then you are playing a different game from your opponent. You have a game in which scissors always wins or ties, and paper always loses or ties. In that game, it is a rational strategy to always play scissors. But if your opponent plays rock and beats you, you might want to say that it's "unfair."

It isn't. Unless the two of you agreed in advance to play "paper/scissors," your opponent is playing the real game and you are playing with artificial rules that only you are bound by.

I don't, of course, mean that Democrats should should do things like appealing to homophobia, racism, and theocracy. That would not, in any real sense, be "winning," any more than if Republicans won by running on a platform of peace, social programs, and respect for atheists. I mean that the Democrats should recognize that being divisive and grabbing the bigger half has been a winning strategy with Republicans for a long time.

For the time being, at least, Democrats should be a little less concerned about "Bringing everyone together" -- you can't anyway, since there are a lot of people who get off on calling everyone else a traitor. Instead, they should learn how to draw the battle lines so that the majority of people are more scared of extreme conservatism than of extreme liberalism. Highlight people like Larry Hagee and Pat Robertson. Make most Americans feel smart and special because they are not as dumb and flat-out crazy as some of the scary folks who support Republicans.

On the whole, Barack Obama has played this election very much like a shrewd politician. Sure, his language invokes the idea that voters are tired of divisiveness. But at the same time, his language makes it clear that we should pin the divisiveness on Republicans, which is in itself a redefinition of whom to flee from. I'm impressed with that, while at the same time being wary of his policies, as I think it remains to be seen how much he'll "reach out" by taking some Republican talking points to heart.

I enjoy the race more when Obama goes after Republicans on the issues, as when he hammered home the message that McCain doesn't understand economics. Every time he does that, I think he gains some popularity. I don't think he does it nearly enough.

Anyway, yes, be open and welcoming. Divide people, but make sure that the division leaves Republicans with as small a group as possible. The most effective message will convey the following: "John McCain is a huge jerk. I know that you're too smart to vote for a jerk, you smart voters you."

Or: "Look at what a low approval rating Bush has. Wouldn't you feel stupid being one of those 28% who is out of step with the rest of the country? And McCain says he wants to be just like Bush."

I'd say it's a deliberate exploitation of the argumentam ad populum fallacy, but also it takes rhetorical skill to successfully define the two sides in a way that is most advantageous to your party.

My game characters, myself

PZ Myers regularly writes long posts about squid, which is his field of study and weird obsession. I don't mind those posts, but I just skip them. My weird obsession is computer games, which is interesting to some. But I always have this need to warn non-gaming readers when I am about to write a gaming post, so that they may bypass it as necessary. This is such a post. You have been warned.

I was an early adopter of online gaming. My sophomore college roommate Mark was much more technically savvy than I am, and as soon as the original Doom released a patch to introduce network capability, Mark and I spent several weekends messing with cable and network settings so that we could play cooperatively. Later, our room became a mini-gaming center where people would get together and play two way deathmatches for hours.

I never really found deathmatches all that enjoyable, though, and cooperative gaming has always been where it's at for me. I love playing with two or more players against a hostile opponent, whether the opponent human or artificial. Which, to an extent, explains the staying power of World of Warcraft for me. It also explains why my other favorite game right for the last few months has been Team Fortress 2, even though I usually don't go for all-out player vs. player action.

I don't know if my brain is wired differently from most players, but I love to play a support role. Most players seem to like pointing their gun and shooting it, while competing to do the most damage and rack up the most kills. Me, I like being a character who multiplies everyone else's abilities. My first Warcraft character was a priest, Kazimus. (You can see character detail at the link, if you want to.)

People would ask me, "Russell, you're an outspoken atheist. How can you like playing a priest?" "It makes perfect sense," I said. "In this world, you actually fight demons face to face. You can do magic and bring people back from the dead. Why wouldn't I believe in gods?" In real life, I'm an atheist based on evidence. In a universe with gods, obviously I would be a theist.

That's not the point, though... the point is that priests don't do the job of calling down destruction; they heal people. They keep everyone in the group alive and in other ways enhance everyone's experience. They are probably the least played but the most appreciated class around. Other people slaughter monsters for personal gratification. For me, I get gaming gratification from the appreciation of others. It may be a neurosis, but I find it fun.

So now that I've been a level 70 priest for several months, I find that there's another class that's underrepresented: tanking warriors. In an online game, "to tank" means to run in ahead of everyone, with greater risk of dying, and draw the monsters' attention so that they hit you instead of the weaker players who don't wear plate mail. A tank doesn't deal a lot of damage, but they do play the role of protector.

That's right up my alley, which is why Rupert Thrash the warrior is planned as my next power character. Whenever I try to join a group and they say "Well, we can leave as soon as we find a tank..." I'd like to be able to say "no problem" and fill that role. Tanking in Warcraft is a much different experience from attacking, and requires a different skill set... instead of concentrating on one monster at a time, you have to pay attention to the entire group and make sure no one's in trouble.

Similar for Team Fortress, which is basically a fast paced all-out slugfest between dozens of huge, ugly, heavily armed thugs... and then there's this guy.


The medic runs around with a big Ghostbusters-style ray gun that shoots healing beams out of it. He is one of the most necessary classes for a team to achieve victory, and also the most likely character to be missing from any giving game. This is because, presumably, most players of a "first person shooter" style game find it more fun when you're shooting to kill.

The medic is my best character. According to my in-game stats, I've logged a total of 17 hours as a medic, and my personal record is 25 points scored and 9,600 hit points healed in one life. Since medics rarely hurt anyone, they score points by being attached to another player when they make a kill, or just by healing a lot.

Being a support player doesn't necessarily mean always playing the healer, though. The neat thing about TF2 is that you can switch between the nine characters any time after you get killed. As a result, my favorite character is whichever one happens to be required on the team at the moment, and I switch classes as often as I need to in order to ensure victory. No other medics? Be a medic. Too many medics? Be a heavy weapons guy (huge slow guy who gets tremendous benefit from being healed). Need to capture a point quickly? Switch to the fast moving scout. And so on. For me, the character-switching aspect of TF2 is almost as enjoyable as the gameplay, looking at the overall strategy of the map and picking the right tool for the current job.

I don't know very many people who play Team Fortress 2, so if you play, please add me to your Steam friends list and drop me a message. I am Kazim27, and I always enjoy hopping on a team with friends.

Big-ish personal update

I've been a bad blogger. :( My wife silently reminded me of this when she wrote a new post updating our son's blog, which had no posts since this February. This month, I've written several posts over at the Atheist Experience and gotten involved in some enjoyable arguments over there. (I personally think my new Star Trek rule should be considered an instant classic, but I'm hardly the one to judge). Meanwhile, my own blog has lain fallow.

I guess what I love most is blogging about three topics: religion, politics, and entertainment. Since the AE blog gets more eyeballs than mine, thanks largely to Martin Wagner's tireless regular posting, I find it more gratifying to put religious musings over there these days so as to reach a wider audience.

Politically, nothing is happening. The primaries are now officially freakin' boring, and I'm yearning for the Obama vs. McCain smackdown match to get started in a hurry.

On the entertainment front:

• I'm still reading Ken Follett's World Without End. People often assume that I read books very quickly, and I don't. When I'm at home, I like being on my computer, either playing games or catching up with news via blogs. When I'm out driving, I usually listen to shows on my iPod. So although I know it's good for me, I rarely just sit down and read.
• We recently saw The Ruins. It was a passable horror flick. Ginny read the book and didn't think it was a good adaptation. I didn't read the book, but I read stories indicating that the author wrote the screenplay himself; so I have to assume that he was satisfied with the elements that he had to change.
  
• I've nearly leveled a second World of Warcraft character to 70. "Rupert Thrash" the warrior is sitting at level 66 right now. I was going to write some more about Warcraft in this post, but then I realized it was a digression. I think I'll put it in a separate post, so that you non-gamers can skip it at your convenience.
• My chorus is getting ready to perform Beethoven's 9th. What a pleasant change that is from last season! I didn't like doing St. Paul, I find the English lyrics distasteful and borderline anti-semitic, and the music mostly didn't impress me. But you can never go wrong with "Ode to Joy." My concert will be in three weeks. Ginny and Ben will attend. I encourage other Austinites to drop in also; it's going to be a great show.
• I bought Ben a Wii for his birthday next month, plus the latest Mario and Metroid games. He doesn't know yet. We're planning a party at our house. Ben's birthday is on the last week of school; the party is the prior weekend.
• I got a coworker and his wife hooked on Kingdom of Loathing. They not only both started playing last weekend, but also donated $40 between them. Bwahahaha. Game companies should totally pay me referral fees, I'm very good at hooking people.
  

And then, of course, there's my job. I have to repeat what a tremendous relief it is that my employment gap only lasted a week, and that I'm now making more money. Our financial situation is just starting to settle down... just in time to start repaying my first semester of student loans. :P

It's a really interesting company I've found myself in, and a great bunch of people. I was the first arrival of four new hires, so in a way I kind of got "seniority" for a few weeks. I had a project assigned before any of the others, and I had to go through getting accounts and bugging the IT department and such (since they hadn't dealt with a new person for years previously). I have a name plate on my cubicle wall, although I don't have one of the little plaques that say "One/two/three/N years of service". So anyway, that means that I had to blaze the trail and then teach the other newbies what I learned to make their hiring smooth. I enjoy that role.

I've essentially completed my first project and gotten my feet wet with the company data system, which is huge and intricate and proprietary. I'm proud of the work I've done so far, and now I have a bit of a lull. I am spending it by updating our internal documentation, which is in the form of a wiki. I'm good with wikis, and nobody else really seems to "own" the company docs, so I figure this will (1) establish me as an expert at something, and (2) give me a more solid overview of the whole business. I think those are good things.

The project I finished has to do with email addresses. Now, I won't name any names, but there is a company out there whose job it is to find your email address and sell it to people. I just need to know your name and home address, and I send it to this company, and they scour the web or do some other kind of black magic, and they tell me every email address that is associated with you. The price is seven cents per successfully located address. Success rate is supposedly about thirty percent, but bear in mind that this includes addresses for any person in the United States, including people who may not be on the web much. For YOU, the person who actually reads blogs, I bet it's well over 95%.

This caused some consternation between me and my project partner, because on some level we view this as evil behavior. This company does not spam people themselves, but it's very obvious that their whole reason for existence is to enable spam. And spam sucks.

I don't think that my own company is doing anything particularly bad. We are, however, using this tool to provide email addresses to specific companies that already do business with the people in question. The assumption is that those customers "forgot" (wink wink) to provide their email to the company in the first place. That's as specific as I want to get, because I don't want to get accused of sharing my company's business model.

We are, however, giving our business to this other company, which has great potential to use their powers for evil. As a card carrying spam hater, I have mixed feelings about this.

Even so, the data development process is fairly interesting, and I see good opportunities for some really cool work at this company. Maybe some of you just read my job description and thought "Boy, that sounds boring." I don't see it that way, but of course, I've spent years developing a specialization. I mean, my sister Keryn works with sick and dying old people, and is downright enthusiastic about her job. I listen to her talk about her work and am tempted to think she's just crazy, but that's what she likes to do. I like the internet and powerful databases. So there you go.

I have seen the light

I've had a sudden change of heart. Oddly enough, this seems to happen every year around this time.

Sadly, the Atheist Experience will be ending after next week.

Update: That was, of course, an April Fool's joke. Sorry for a taking a week to explain.

Barack Obama should just act like he's the nominee

I'm tired of the primaries now. Barack Obama is far enough ahead in delegates that he is pretty much the guaranteed nominee. Unfortunately, he's not far enough ahead that he can be declared the actual winner any time soon. Today he's ahead by 122 delegates: a very substantial lead, but small enough that the result could IN THEORY be reversed.

As I understand it, this could happen only if either most of the remaining primary states buck the current trend and vote for Clinton, or most of the undeclared super-delegates decided to go for Clinton over Obama. The gulf between them is so large that neither is a particularly realistic scenario, yet the Clinton campaign is publicly acting like it is, and therefore they claim that Hillary is not under any pressure to drop out. So what it looks like, at this point, is that the nominee will not truly be determined until the Democratic Convention at the end of August, when the superdelegates officially declare their votes.

This is a problem for the Democratic party. Howard Dean, the president of the DNC, has said repeatedly in interviews I've heard, that August is much too late. John McCain is already the candidate for the Republicans (so sorry, Ron Paul fans) and while I think he's kind of a pathetic candidate, McCain is truly running unopposed right now. Obama's got just over seven months to make the case that John McCain would make a terrible president. In late August, it will be just over two months. And as Dean says, that's just not enough time for a proper campaign.

In the meantime, both Clinton and Obama are spending time and money on tearing each other down, rather than tearing down McCain, as they should be. Probably the best advice I've seen so far comes from a letter to the campaigns by Oregon Representative Pete DeFazio. DeFazio wrote:

"You both claim to be better suited than the other to take on the so-called Straight-Talk Express, so prove it. Run the next six weeks of your campaign against McCain, not against the other Democrat. Go after McCain for his policy positions, not the other Democrat for theirs. Allow the Democratic voters to believe in a campaign that can provide a new direction for this country and stop McCain from continuing the failed policies of the Bush Administration. In the end, it is the candidate who can take the fight to McCain and win that deserves my support and, most importantly, the support of the Democratic Party."

DeFazio wrote this to both Obama and Clinton. At that point it may not have been clear that Obama was going to win, but I think it's pretty clear now. That's why I think Obama should just forget that Clinton is still in the race and act as if he were running solely against McCain. No more talk about how much better he is than her. No more nitpicking about her revealing her tax returns. The opponent is McCain.

In doing this, he'll be mirroring a strategy adopted by Bush in 2000 and 2004. In both years, the election results were still open to interpretation and recounting; yet Bush immediately started talking to the press as if he were already the (re)elected president. By doing this, he made his opponent look like the unreasonable one for not conceding. This worked particularly well in '04, when Kerry pretty much folded without a fight where Ohio was concerned.

By confidently acting as the presumed nominee, Obama would accomplish several things:

1. He would probably confuse the media, who aren't all that sharp anyway, and might pick up on the narrative that Hillary is out.
2. He would free up his efforts to fight McCain, which he needs to do ASAP anyway.
3. He would be playing focused offense, instead of defending himself over dumb stuff brought up by two different opponents.
   
4. Hitting McCain right now would probably improve his standing in the eyes of the voters far more than squabbling with Clinton right now anyway. Hence, this would probably seal his victory over her in reality as well as in rhetoric.
   

Get down with the sickness

Worst illness I've had for a long time, all day today. Symptoms are severe sore throat, upset stomach, fever, occasional chills, a lot of weakness, and voice almost completely gone to the point where it hurts to talk. I've spent the great majority of today on a cocktail of medications that Ginny recommended, including Theraflu, Excedrin, cough drops, and Mucinex. Not that I know much about most of those drugs, so I expect a stern letter from Possum Momma asking me how I could think to mix THOSE particular drugs.

Ginny has been great to me, of course... with one teeny, tiny little exception. She and Caitlin come home sometime in the afternoon and I'm groggy from a recent nap. She says "Look, we got movies! Read this one." Then she proceeds to show me the cover for No Country For Old Men. I'm kind of a fan of Coen Brothers movies and didn't actually know this one existed, so I was somewhat interested. However, I was still tired so I went back to bed.

Ginny and Caitlin join me and start a movie, as I'm half drifting back to sleep. I hear "Ewww, yuck!" and half open my eyes, thinking "Hmmm, that's an unusual reaction to the Coen brothers, must be another Fargo." I can't sleep anymore, so I fumble around for my glasses. I am treated to the delightful image of a bloody brain being pulled out of a head in an autopsy. Followed by the body's skin being peeled off. It takes me a minute to register "Hey... this doesn't LOOK like their work..." before I am informed that they are, in fact, watching Saw IV.

Now I'm usually pretty resilient about horror movies, but the way my body is acting today... a few minutes later I'm huddled over the toilet not sure whether I'm going to throw up. Meanwhile, the movie is still playing in the next room, and I hear terrified screams the whole time.

Heh heh... I'm not faulting Ginny and Caitlin, who turned it down as soon as they realized what was going on. But there's a charming image to wake up to. :) I did not throw up, but it was an open question for several minutes.

Here's hoping I'll be all better for work on Monday. I don't mind taking sick days, but it would be an awkward way to start my second week.

Ken Follett's "World Without End" has arrived

Look! Over on the right! It's a new book! Unfortunately, with school no longer providing an obstacle, all I seem to be doing right now is accumulating new books to read, but not actually finishing any.

But this is Ken Follett, which means the new book takes priority over everything else. For those not familiar, Follett writes historical fiction and spy thrillers. He works with all kinds of different eras; his favorite seems to be World War II, but he's tackled modern America, 80's Afghanistan, 19th century England, and the US Revolution, among other settings.

By far my favorite, though, is Pillars of the Earth, a simply tremendous epic that spans most of the 12th century. The story surrounds the building of a cathedral. I like it because it is basically an ode to the power of human determination, and even while many of the positive characters are monks, it still regularly jabs at the power structure of the middle ages church. And villains. Follett writes great villains: they're smart and devious and humanized, and you're constantly given the impression that they might actually win.

World Without End is a quasi-sequel to Pillars. It takes place in the same town, in the same cathedral, but 200 years later. Many of the main characters are descendants of the original. I'm only a few chapters in, but so far it's very good.

Anyway, if you haven't read the original book then definitely go read that first. If you have, consider this a heads up that it's time to buy the next one.

Theomatics again

In case you didn't see it at the Atheist Experience blog already, here's a new post about this extremely silly topic.

My new job

Okay, I admit it: I deliberately avoided posting that I lost my job. It's not that I wanted to hide anything, and I'm sure I would have gotten a lot of supportive comments. But I know there are also a small contingent of people (hello, Amway distributors?) who would have enjoyed the opportunity to make snide remarks. And since I was a little down about losing the job in the first place, I just didn't want to deal with it.

So I didn't post that I lost my job, but I'm definitely posting that I got a new one. This past Monday evening I found out that I've been hired to start next Monday. I won't identify the company -- not because I'm paranoid but because I don't know the company culture well and can't be sure if they'll approve of being blogged about. I'll just say that it's a medium sized company, much smaller and hopefully less bureaucratic than IBM. The company manages data about cars. Enormous database which keeps track of cars and parts being purchased from lots of dealerships, all of which has to get passed around quickly in real time. There's a lot of emphasis on efficient data management algorithms, and I believe my data mining education served me well in the interview process.

This job is a raise for me -- not as much of a raise as I was hoping for, but still pretty substantial. Unfortunately I'm not a salaried employee yet, but since it is contract-to-hire, if all goes well then I'll have a salary and benefits right around my birthday this September.

I will immodestly state that I did an outstanding job in the interviews overall, which consisted of a half-hour phone call followed by a four hour on-site interview. I met four people and they all liked me. The interview involved solving a lot of logical puzzles, such as "Tell me what kind of code you would write to match a certain number of buyers and sellers in a reasonable amount of time." I'm really good at those. However, in the end they expressed some reservations about how I lacked recent professional (non-school) experience with SQL databases.

It came down a choice between me and another person who had a stronger background. The feedback I got from my recruiter was "They really like you, they think you've got the best educational background of any candidate, and if they had two positions they'd hire you on the spot." I really wanted the job, so I pestered my recruiter to see if there was anything I could do to sway them further. She suggested something vague about studying more and telling them what I was learning.

I went one better. I said "Tell them I'll write a Java program that solves one of the interview questions and shows off my ability to use SQL." And I did, in two evenings, and also wrote a rudimentary design document for the thing. (Thank you, Suzanne Barber, for your Software Requirements class!)

Anyway, it worked. They still hired the other guy, but apparently they created a second contract position just so they could, in fact, bring us both in. If I hadn't decided to write that program, I might not have gotten it.

So as I said, I'm starting Monday. I'm excited and nervous, because I still have a lot to prove. But I'm glad that I only spent a week unemployed.

I've already emailed a bunch of people, but in case I missed any: Heartfelt thanks to everyone I wrote or called asking for job leads. A lot of the help I got was not just with new jobs, but also with meetings I attended that helped me get my confidence, morale, and presentation straight. Everything was a big help.

Besides which, last Friday I was treated to lunch at the County Line BBQ and got a really nice send-off. My team and I left on good terms. It was understood when I was getting my Master's that I was planning to look for more fruitful work after school, and I only lost my job at this point due to budget cuts within IBM.

And finally, having the week off is pretty nice. I'm doing the very Serious and Important Work of getting a second World o' Warcraft character to level 70.

Memento

Somehow, this week, I managed to convince two people in separate incidents to watch the movie Memento for the first time. Looking back, I'm surprised to see that I've never written a blog post about Memento, which is easily in my top five favorite movies of the last decade. Because it can be confusing for first time viewers, I'm going for field a few questions about it and write some more thoughts as a review.

For people who have not seen the movie yet, I strongly advise you to stop reading this post and go watch it. This will contain spoilers. You should avoid reading too much about the movie, although it will help to know that it is played backwards. Scene for scene, each clip takes place immediately before the last one that was played. Some scenes are in black and white. Those are separate, but I'll have to talk about them after the spoilers.

SPOILERS AHEAD AFTER THIS LINE.

First, some general comments about the message of the movie and why I think it is so great. I already posted some of my remarks in an earlier comment thread to Dan, but I think they're worth repeating here.

If you insist on reading the spoilers, here's a quick synopsis. Lenny is a former insurance investigator who has a rare memory conditions that has left him unable to form new memories. Every so often -- somewhere between ten minutes and a few hours -- he forgets what happened recently. Thus, he is unable to remember names or faces, and the only way he can keep track of what's happened lately is to write things down and take pictures.

Lenny's last clear memory is that of his wife being killed, and his life's mission is to investigate and avenge her death. He writes important clues permanently as tattoos on his body. One other vivid memory that he keeps is the story of Sammy Jankis, a man who had the same condition as his own. Lenny investigated Sammy's case and thus knows all about his own situation based on prior knowledge.


In a nutshell, "Knowledge" is really the central theme of the movie. We think we know things because we remember them, but memory is unreliable. We think we can piece together an overall story from past events and familiar objects, but many of them are still subjective and can lie to us. Lenny gives an important monologue early makes an important speech early in the movie:

Early in Memento, Lenny's character gives an important speech about memory:

"Memory's not perfect. It's not even that good. Ask the police, eyewitness testimony is unreliable. The cops don't catch a killer by sitting around remembering stuff. They collect facts, make notes, draw conclusions. Facts, not memories: that's how you investigate. I know, it's what I used to do. Memory can change the shape of a room or the color of a car. It's an interpretation, not a record. Memories can be changed or distorted and they're irrelevant if you have the facts."

Despite his own condition, and despite his cynicism about memory as a guide to the past, Lenny unshakably believes that there are three things he can trust:

1. His memories of the night his wife died
2. His memories of Sammy Jankis
3. His own notes and tattoos
   

The end of the movie simply yanks the rug out from under these beliefs, not once, but for all three beliefs. They lead you down this trail, thinking that when you dig far enough back into the past, you'll find the answers to everything else. Instead, you get to the "end" of the movie (really the beginning, in a way) and they hit you with new revelations, wham wham wham, so fast you're left without anything to hold onto in your previous understanding of what really happened.

First you find out that his wife's attacker was already caught, so his entire quest to avenge her since then has been pointless.

Then you find out that he got the story of Sammy all wrong, that many of the events were about him, and that he may have actually killed his own wife.

THEN you find out that he lied to himself in his own notes. On purpose.

One message you could take from the movie is, "No amount of evidence is sufficient to accept a claim." That's not what I got from it, though. Rather, that people's interpretations of events are rarely reliable, and therefore relying on direct experience is a trap. The character of Lenny is not stupid and he's not entirely malicious; he's just going with events as they happen to him and trying to make sense of an array of personal experiences which are even more jumbled than most people's.

Now some specific questions from Tracie. She asked:

Sometimes it seemed like he was claiming that whenever he awoke he had no recollection of his wife's murder--that he thought she was still alive and well; but most of the time he expressed that he retained the memory of her murder. Did they ever explain his alteranating recollection of that memory? It seemed like _sometimes_ he forgot she died--but it seemed to be a pretty consistent "sometimes." Like I said I have to watch it again, but I thought he said he always woke up without the recollection of the murder--but he also said her death was the "last thing" he remembered (which I interpreted to mean it was part of his permanent recollection and not something he needed to remind himself about...?

The only guess I had, but I felt it was pretty flimsy, was that maybe since he had a warped concept of time, it was as if the event had only just occurred, and therefore, when he awoke, it was so "new" that it hadn't sunk in yet that she was gone? While I have had similar experiences, I have to say that in my experiences they're _much_ more fleeting than the film implied (and I can't stress that enough)--if this is what they were driving at. I might wake up _not_ recollecting bad news for like a few moments--but then it hits before I can even sit up in bed. I certainly can't imagine I'd get up and expend too much energy walking around looking for my husband, and expecting him to be in the bathroom, if I'd just seen him murdered "the night before." I think I would wake up initially oblivious and possibly happy thinking he was still alive, but it would hit me (and I don't think I'm unique in this regard) pretty quickly after I became conscious that he had been murdered.

Actually, according to one interpretation, his wife wasn't really dead when he found her. Teddy says as much at the end. As you point out in the next comment, Teddy isn't a reliable source himself, but in this case I think his claims might be plausible. Lenny's memory of Sammy is a false projection of events that really happened to Lenny. Teddy's version is that Lenny's wife survived the attack, but the trauma of seeing the rape still caused the memory condition. It was Lenny's wife who had diabetes, and it was Lenny who killed his own wife through an insulin overdose.

Although Lenny can't form new memories, there are hints that he can drill "facts" into his head through repetition. This might explain how he somehow managed to remember the real death of his wife and project it onto Sammy Jankis.

Then again, temporarily forgetting that his wife is dead may just be a product of the shock and not related to his condition at all.

2. So, who was Teddy? Was he a cop, a snitch? Was his motive actually to go around looking for people with JG initials to let Lenny randomly kill so Lenny could feel better again and again? That's a bit odd. I wasn't sure what to believe about Teddy or whether he was reliable--or was that the point?

Was Teddy supposed to confuse the issue? He lied enough and expressed such odd, unbelievable motives, that he was not a trustworthy character (I thought?). However, Lenny's reasons for not trusting him were, of course, contrived. But still, as the audience, I saw Teddy contradict himself (although we were shown that he did sometimes tell the truth), and I don't know who he really is, except that he seems to have more mental issues than Lenny.

I agree with you that Teddy is just about the least reliable character in the movie (although he has some tough competition!) but in the end I'm inclined to believe his version of events. It may be just because Teddy got the last word and tied up a lot of the other threads. He lies all the time, but it seems like in this case he may have been telling the painful truth just to get back at Lenny.

No, I don't think he was letting Lenny kill random people just to feel good. I think he really was a crooked cop, and he enjoyed the power of being able to go after small time crooks without hassling with court proceedings. The fact that killing crooks made Lenny happy was merely an added bonus, on top of the fact that Teddy got to keep his hands clean.

Also, in this case it's obvious that Lenny wanted to steal Jimmy's drug money. Throughout the movie, Lenny is really driving Jimmy's car and wearing his clothes, and Teddy keeps trying to get the car because there's money in the trunk.

3. Was Lenny's wife diabetic or were we supposed to be left wondering? If we can't be sure, this calls into question Lenny's entire story except what the police report validated. His notes were certainly unreliable. In addition to his conscious motviation to make Gambel the killer--even though he wasn't--he trusted Natalie, who was totally unreliable. So, the assessment he recorded, that she would help him, was very wrong and based on bad data--since he was unaware he'd killed her boyfriend.

I do think we are supposed to be left wondering, but I also seem to recall an interview with Chris Nolan (the director) saying "there is definitely a correct answer."

Again, my best guess is that Teddy was telling the truth about Lenny's wife, and about Sammy being a con man.

I want to wrap up with a few words about the black and white scenes, since those are a little hard to decipher. Unlike the color scenes, the black and white scenes play in forward order. Chronologically, they come before the rest of the movie. So if you want to piece the whole movie together in the correct order, start with the first black and white scene, and when you come to a color scene, skip it. Keep going forward until you get to the last BW scene in the movie.

When Lenny kills Jimmy Grantz, he takes a polaroid and then shakes it until it develops. As it does, the whole movie slowly fades into color. Watch the rest of the scene in color, then go backward to the next color scene before that, and so on.

Finally, the best explanation I ever saw for how everything worked was in this article at Salon. Hope it is helpful.