Not that Sane

The land of good Chinese food

2013-05-22T23:19:00.005Z

I'm sitting in the airline lounge in Hong Kong, slurping noodles and waiting for my flight back to the US. This was my first visit to China, and perhaps it is apt that I started in Hong Kong and then across Shenzhen Bay to the first region that benefited from the economic opening. And benefited, it has.

Shenzhen is vibrant, in every sense of the word. The buildings are tall, the streets are clean and people are busy. It is closer to the wide-open parts of Europe (Estonia, say) than to other developing countries like India. The fourth biggest city in China, Shenzhen, beats Delhi or Bangalore on pretty much any measure.

The most surprising thing to me about Hong Kong is how green it is. The picture you have of Hong Kong (at least the picture I had before coming) was of Hong Kong Island. But Hong Kong is not just that one island. It also comprises quite a bit of Kowloon peninsula. And the peninsula is full of hills and completely wooded. Hong Kong, in other words, could have sprawled Phonex-style, but they have done the smart thing and remained compact.

This is the ferry that takes you from Hong Kong Island to Kowloon. Pretty cool ride. You can also take the metro, but the metro is not as cool. It is, surprisingly, also more expensive.

Hong Kong is most famous for its shopping. America, however, spoils you because nowhere else do you have the selection or the prices that you have in pretty much any medium-sized city in America. So, it was more amusing than anything to see people lining up to enter a handbag store:

It is not just handbags, of course. I have not seen as many ads for luxury watches than I saw in Hong Kong. I used to think the Lake Geneva was quite tacky with huge signs representing different watch brands, but Hong Kong beats it in sheer quantity. Wonder who buys all those watches. When I mentioned the watch ads to my Chinese hosts, one of them pointed to his smartphone ("who needs watches any more?") but the other one said that she was wearing a Swiss watch. So perhaps every Chinawoman will one day own a Swiss watch, and these ads are simply fighting for that market share.

The night-time view of Hong Kong Island from Kowloon makes Manhattan look provincial.

I was visiting China to visit the Shenzhen meteorological department and Sunday happened to be "open" day. These are Chinese citizens visiting the observatory. The TV screens with familiar weather forecasters reading the forecasts were the big draw.

The radar in Shenzhen is atop the observatory. In fact, the observatory was specially built to house the radar. The building has 15 floors, but the floors are 30-40 feet tall. So, with their high ceilings, the office spaces feel light and airy. Before they moved here, the meteo department was in what is now the second tallest building in Shenzhen:

The hospitality was astounding. When we have visitors to NSSL, we may do one dinner with the visitors at a local restaurant. Here, one or the other of my hosts accompanied me at lunch and dinner each and every day. I told them at the outset that I loved food, was not picky and as long as they chose food without beef, I would be quite happy. They seemed thrilled that I ate with chopsticks and that I would eat fish with bones.

I also told them about cooking my way through Fuschia Dunlop's book on Sichuan food. "An English book," waved one of my hosts dismissively. But he was from Sichuan and so he had to show me what real Sichuan food tasted like. Off we went to a gourmet Sichuan restaurant. That clothesline-type thing in the picture are cold cuts. The noodles and vegetables were awesome. I think I come close in how my noodles taste, but the variety and taste of Chinese food in China is simply incredible. Chinese food in America doesn't hold a candle to this. Even the supposedly authentic Chinese places are poor echoes of Chinese food. I wonder how Chinese people can stand it (perhaps, they get served proper food when they visit and I get crap because I am not Chinese? -- I know that I can get proper Indian food at Himalayas, a local Indian restaurant in Oklahoma, but what they normally serve in their buffets is creamed-up junk).

Close to the observatory is one of the largest parks in Shenzhen. It was built for some flower expo and consists of houses similar to what you will find in different provinces of China. A very cool park, and I took advantage to people watch in the mornings ...

The really cool thing was that people would "walk" their birds and hang them from trees.

One evening, I went to Darfen "village", a colony of painting shops. I had read about it in the NY Times a few months ago and thought it would be cool to get an oil painting of the family done. Turns out, though, that it is the completely wrong mix of convenience, price and quality. The painting would take two weeks to do (so it would have to mailed to me), would cost about $300 and consist mainly of transferring the photograph to canvas. The examples they showed looked nothing like paintings -- the art was lifeless and failed to capture the spirit of the subjects. There is no point to a low-quality painting -- I might as well hang a high-quality photograph -- and so I decided to not get a painting done.

With my work mostly complete, I had a day of looking around in Shenzhen. Unfortunately, the city is only 30 years old, and so there is nothing historic here. The best option was "Splendid China", a theme park that has small models of architecture from all over China. A little cheesy, but it was perfect for me, with my passing acquaintance of Chinese provinces and building styles.

The entrance to the park has these three "gods" reflecting Chinese aspirations. The first one is the god of family, the second the god of wealth and the third the god of long life. And I think that order is roughly right, because nothing provoked as much admiration in China as the size of my family -- two children!, everyone remarked, one boy and one girl. Put together those characters mean the word "good". Very fortunate, etc. etc.

All the Chinese forecasters and scientists had exactly one child each, of course. We seem to take for granted that this means that the population of China will slope gently downward in the next few decades and so the demographic dividend will lag behind that of the United States (or India) whose populations are yet to peak. I think we are mistaking quantity for quality. I observed that, because they have only child, Chinese parents pour all their hopes and resources into that one child. Get ready for a generation of extremely well-educated, well-rounded children. Good for the world as a whole, but it is going to be a tough country to compete against. Think South Korea, but more focused, militaristic and ten times as large.

Any way, back to the theme park. There was a quite a bit of Tibetan stuff there, placed in the context of grottos and Buddhas from other provinces in China. The subtext here was quite clear.

They also had quite a few shows of minority (i.e., non-Han) peoples. The subtext here seemed to be that these were primitive peoples practicing primitive religions and lifestyles. Maybe it is even true.

The last evening in Shenzhen, one of my hosts (who is from Guanxi) decided that he had to introduce me to food from his hometown. We went to a restaurant that sourced all its food from that province. In other words, they did not shop the local markets. They got all the fish and meats and vegetables from Guanxi to Shenzhen. And yes, the food was delicious.

But the really interesting thing was the ordering of the food. We ate in a private room (Chinese restaurants have huge halls, but they also have dozens of private rooms, and most companies get one of these rooms for their groups. As far as I could tell, there was not a significant price difference between eating in a hall and eating in a private room). But we had to go downstairs, to where the food was kept and select the fish and vegetables and tell them how we wanted it cooked. Selected fish would get whacked right there. The manager would write up a bill and then as the food got served, it would get crossed off the list. The cost of a dinner for five with about a dozen dishes ran to about sixty US dollars.

All in all, in less than a week in China, I got to taste five different Chinese cuisines -- Cantonese (mostly steamed), Guangdong (cooked in meat fats), Mongolian (mostly grilled), Sichuan (mostly pickled-peppery) and Guanxi (cooked in mild sauces). I could live in China forever for the food -- the US now feels like the land of bad Chinese food ... but then you also quickly notice the drawbacks of living in China. No, not the pollution. It rained like crazy while I was there, so the air was quite humid, but clean. There was the time when one of my colleagues posted a link on Facebook to a New York Times op-ed about being a woman programmer and I found that I could not access it. I could not access any New York Times article while I was in China. It was only when I was back in Hong Kong that I could read even that rather innocuous article.

Interesting story about the rain photo (above), actually. The colleague who had taken me to Splendid China resolutely kept his phone-camera pocketed for over two hours. Meanwhile, I had taken about 200 photographs. But the rain moved in, and out came the camera. Weather geeks! They are the same every where.

Casually full of verve

2013-05-01T05:15:00.000Z

JK Rowling's first book after the Harry Potter series, Casual Vacancy, seems to be getting rather poor reviews. I think it may be all the new adults expecting the author they grew up with to remain stuck in the School of Magic.

As someone who found the Harry Potter books rather juvenile (of course! consider their audience), her new book was an eyeopener. JK Rowling can write! And make trenchant observations. The Casual Vacancy somehow rises past its rather humdrum plot to become a story of what life is like in the 21st century. It brings to mind the great English novels -- the Victorian ones, with their large casts, careful plots, observations about the fine distinctions of class and Dickensian morals. Except that it has been updated for modern Britain. But you will recognize America in there too. All rich countries these days are alike.

Highly recommended. It is high literature that manages to point at the injustice of modern life while always remaining a very entertaining read.

Interesting geography

2013-04-29T04:43:00.000Z

Would you buy airline tickets from this travel agency?

If their map is to be believed: buy tickets to London, and they'll send you to a spot in the ocean a wee bit off Cape Town.

Limits are counterproductive

2013-04-29T01:28:00.001Z

I am going to be teaching a course on spatial programming next semester and was dawdling around the internet looking for books on the topic. I found a book by Esri Press that looked very promising and decided to see if there was some sort of educational discount on it.

There was. In fact, they would send me the book for free if I told them the course number that I was evaluating it for.

I went to type in the details on the web form and found a statement that free samples were "limited to three books once every 4 months." What would you do in that situation? Me? I went through the catalog and found two more books that would be kinda useful. One was a prerequisite for my course and the other would be advanced topics for it.

This is, of course, the same reason why putting up a speed limit sign can be counterproductive. Instead of taking it as a maximum speed, many drivers will treat it as a suggestion of what speed they ought to be
driving. Esri, I am sure, will be giving away far fewer books if they took out that limit on the number of books (or at least informed piggies of the limit only if they tried to order more than three).

Schizophrenic weather

2013-04-09T18:58:00.000Z

The weather forecast for today evening:

Until 7pm, we're going to have spring-time severe weather. Huge hail balls in Western Oklahoma (not so much in Norman).

Then, a cold front moves in. By midnight, we should be enjoying freezing rain and sleet.

Fun, eh?

Anindya Das

2013-03-25T17:41:00.003Z

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever," said Gandhi, and there is no one I know who lived that way as much as Anindya Das. He died last week in Pondicherry.

Anindya had been playing basketball with some kids when he collapsed on the court. He was dead by the time he got medical attention. Anindya left behind a career in academia (he used to teach computer science at OU and UWO in London, Ontario) but decided that he could have a more sane and fulfilling life in Pondicherry. He found a job there in a small technology company. The company, happy no doubt at getting an overqualified friendly and competent person for cheap, allowed him to build his work hours around Anindya's volunteer hours at the Aurobindo Ashram school. He taught the kids there math and volleyball and basketball. That's where he was when he died.

Maybe because he listened so well, he picked up languages very easily. He was a Bengali who grew up in Orissa, so that got him two languages. Hindi, of course, and English. His sister lived in the former French colony of Pondicherry, so French and Tamil too. He perfected his French in France and Quebec, and picked up Arabic and Spanish along the way. Probably a few more that I don't know about.

I am glad that our kids got to see their Uncle Andy when we went to India last summer. We'd taken a bus from Chennai to Pondicherry and he met us at the bus station. He took us swimming in the Bay of Bengal, off to dinner at a local hangout and then bought the kids ice cream. He's enriched my life immensely, but I can not help wishing, rather selfishly, that he could have been around a couple more decades -- the kids could have gotten to balance the charms of an unhurried, minutely examined, life with whatever rat race they are in.

Things I learned today

2013-03-15T05:00:00.000Z

One of my young colleagues keeps a blog where she jots down research ideas (it seems to not be public, but her public blog is here). I think that's a very cool idea and thought I'd try it for a day but with a slightly different spin. So, I decided to keep track of the things that I did not know on Wednesday but learned on Thursday. Here's a partial list (not including things that involve other people, for privacy reasons).

(8.15am) In a Linux script, to run two processes, wait for them to finish before starting to do something else:

#!/bin/bash

./create_train_data.sh train -ldm &
./create_train_data.sh valid -ldm &
wait

How could I not have known this earlier? Still, better late than never. This will cut the time needed to do some data mining work I am doing in half; I should be able to check the results of the trained algorithm after lunch instead of waiting till tomorrow.

(9.02am) Austromigration is when birds migrate within the Southern Hemisphere. There are birds in South America, that migrate within the continent i.e., they fly North for the winter!

(9.20am) One way to track the location of small birds is to attach sensors to them. GPS chips are too big and too expensive, so one device works by simply recording the time of sunrise and sunset. How is this enough? The time in between, solar noon, tells you the longitude. The length of day can tell you what the latitude is, although the accuracy of the latitude varies through the year (less accurate around an equinox).

(9.45am) Cornell University and the Audubon society run a citizen-bird-reporting app called ebirds which is similar to the mPING application that we created. Birders love the ebirds app because it allows them to keep personal records, but Cornell can QC the data and provide it for scientific studies. Might be a way to validate bird density estimates from radar ...

(10.35am) People take drills way too seriously. We had an "active shooter" drill at work. This is better than a fire drill because you can simply shut the door of your office and keep working. No big deal. But then, the drill was followed by a "hot wash" where the police officer said he was impressed that the place became a ghost town. Fine. Can we get back to work now? Nope, some one had a question. And more questions. People!

(11.00am) Google Reader is being decommissioned in July. Oh no! How am I going to keep up with my RSS feeds?

(1.15pm) Just because I think the ground clutter case was from KGYX doesn't mean it isn't really from KRLX. It might be better to more careful about such things before wasting 2 hours on debugging something that is actually working correctly.

(2.00pm) On the other hand, the process of debugging a non-problem actually led to several neat ideas that do improve the clustering algorithm (once I try it on the actual problem case). So maybe it's a good thing to be sloppy once in a while. I still have to figure out why it is not working though.

(2.40pm) If a few storms are embedded in clutter, using a height-based attribute and expanding to cover the whole cluster will lead to the NN being poorly trained. Said clutter will never be removed. (sorry)

(4.00pm) When smoothing per-capita county data, a population-density-based filter size might work better.

(4.20pm) NDVI from MODIS before and after severe weather events is a good way to determine damage paths of weather events.

(10.30pm) Feedly is a worthy replacement for Google Reader. Although I am not a fan of the wide open spaces, I will probably get used to it.

(11.00 pm) 2NT showing the minors is a wonderful preemptive overcall of a strong NT. (sorry)

(11.55pm) Jim Crow laws were actually a major economic drain on the south. "A total of four restrooms had to be constructed and maintained at significant expense in any public establishment that bothered to provide any for colored people: one for white men, one for white women, one for colored men and one for colored women." That is from Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns".

Monopoly deadlock

2013-03-10T03:07:00.000Z

The daughter's friend was over for a sleepover and the two girls were playing monopoly when they ran into an insoluble problem.

First, the friend rolled the dice and had to go to jail, so she had to skip a turn. Then, S2 rolled the dice and also had to go to jail, meaning she too had to skip a turn.

What's the way out?

A data-driven world

2013-02-14T15:50:00.000Z

Biased journalist, meet data logging. This ought to be interesting ...

The perils of a nice telephone number

2013-02-12T19:53:00.000Z

When I changed phone carriers recently, I got a new cell number. (I moved my old telephone number to Google Voice and it forwards to my new one. So that number you have for me still works.)

It so happens that my new telephone number is a nice, easy-to-remember one. Pretty cool, right? Well not quite.

It seems that someone who applied for a student loan put down a fake number (MY number) on their loan application. Now, the US department of education's automated voice calls me three times a week to direly warn Dylan Davis (name changed) to call them back and set up a payment plan.

Once, I stayed on the line and tried to tell the loan collector on the other end that they had the wrong number. Didn't help. Two days later, there was the automated voice again.

My phone number is on the Do Not Call registry. But it doesn't apply either to government agencies or to "people who you have done business with before". Plainly, the US government thinks I have done business with them before. They have it on their form that I borrowed their money!

Sigh.

Can do wrong now

2013-01-18T15:09:00.002Z

You know that period in your child's life when you could do no wrong? That time is now only a memory. Conversation at home yesterday:

Wife: So how many students are in your class this semester?

Me: Six, all graduate students.

11yr-old son: Only six? Wow. The class must be boring!

8-yr old daughter: Maybe the class is not boring. Maybe Appa just teaches it in a boring way.

Where the streets have no name

2013-01-14T05:10:00.003Z

Over Christmas break, we flew into San Jose, Costa Rica, rented a car and drove around the country. This is quite an adventure since in Costa Rica, roads and streets have no names. Hotels give out their address as "200 meters from Bank of X" and you have to somehow figure out how to get to X and then look around in all directions. Maps (both the paper one that we got from rental agency and offline Google maps that I downloaded before I left) are quite unreliable.

Just past Santiago de Punscal, in the mountains in the central part of the country, the paved road (a numbered national highway according to both maps) turned into a gravel one and soon deteoriated into a dirt road. Several hours later, we finally ended up on a paved road running along the coast, but we were seriously worried by then. Roads have no names, so it is never clear if you are on the right road or not. GPS worked even with no data connection, although because the terrain was mountainous, and the map locations terrible, we often seemed to be traveling parallel to marked roads. Something that happened quite commonly was that we would drive past a fork and then turn back when it appeared that our location error was beyond the common GPS/map errors. Still, the trip would have been incomparably harder without the offline maps on my Android phone. I don't know if we could have done it as easily with two young children in the days before GPS and offline Google maps. Thanks, Google!

In San Jose, we stayed in the guest house of a coffee estate. This was the highlight of our trip, accommodation-wise. The host family immediately adopted our kids. Hearing that the kids played the piano, they dug out their old keyboard and had the kids play Christmas tunes. We also got treated to the traditional tamales and smoky-banana cake. After this, the standard hotels we stayed at in Manuel Antonio or Monteverde seemed rather mundane. This was our first experience with AirBnb.com, and it was very, very good. I will look at them on family vacations before I book any hotels.

But you probably don't want my unsolicited testimonials about internet companies.

First full day in Costa Rica, we went to Poas Volcano. This is the largest active crater in the world, but it lies in a cloud forest. Meaning it is very unlikely that you will actually see the crater. And indeed, when we went in the morning, this is the sight that greeted us:

We saw nothing beyond a dozen yards. Having nothing better to do the rest of the day, we decided to stick around, have lunch and try again in the afternoon. As we were hiking towards the crater in the afternoon, a strong wind parted the mists and we got treated to this sight:

A crater, a sulfurous crater lake and a fumarole. Just saying.

"Second time lucky," I gushed to the German tourist standing next to us. "For me, it is the third time lucky," he told me in crisp language, "I came here 4 years ago and again last year and did not see the crater." I did not clarify that this was simply our second attempt the same day.

The second day, we got on the road to Quepas. Instead of taking the major highway, I decided that we would take the scenic route through the mountains. What could go wrong? This was a numbered highway, similar to the one we took to Poas. Boy, was I wrong! The trip that we thought would take us 3 hours (at 50 km/hr) ended up taking nearly seven hours. Still, we arrived in time to hit the beach.

The beach was accessed by parking the car by the side of the road and taking a steep trail through thick jungle to a tiny strip of beautiful white sand flanked by massive volcanic rocks. The beach was awesome, in the original sense of the word -- it inspired awe.

Manuel Antonio National Park was Costa Rica's first national park, and it was modeled quite self-consciously around the Smoky Mountain park. The smokies is my least favorite national park -- to me, it was sad that the absolutely stunning natural landscape had been marred by a Gatlinburg-like vibe. Still, the hikes, wildlife and waters within the park were breathtaking.

That's a sloth in the picture. Look carefully.

Having learned our lesson about Costa Rican roads, we left quite early for Monteverde. There is no paved road access to Monteverde -- the last 20-30km are quite terrible. It rained all the time that we were in Monteverde, but we still hiked nearly every trail in the park and saw all the sights. We even saw a quetzal.

From Monteverde, we drove around Lake Arenal to La Fortuna. It was in La Fortuna that our luck ran out. Arenal volcano is supposed to erupt 41 times a day and we'd booked 3 nights there. What we didn't know -- because the guidebooks are quite coy about this -- is that Arenal volcano went dormant in 2010. Nobody has seen anything in the last 2 years. And worse -- the volcano is constantly enveloped in clouds. When we went, it had been 45 days since the last time that the top of the volcano had been visible. La Fortuna and Arenal volcano should be dropped off visitors' itineraries. If you are going to Costa Rica and want to spend your time wisely, skip Arenal.

Still, La Fortuna was where I saw the prettiest waterfall I have ever seen. I think what made it stand out is that the area has two waterfalls. The one on the left is a powerful, thundering waterfall full of stones and mud. The other skips from rock to rock with a silvery sheen. The contrast is probably what makes the one on the right look so pretty. Pictures do not do it any justice.

Another cool thing we did in La Fortuna was to laze around in the Tabacon river. The river starts out in the area of Arenal volcano, and so the water is hot as it flows out. Wonderful feeling, to sit amidst rocks as hot water gushes all round. We had three days in La Fortuna, and with nothing much else to do, we lazed around quite a bit in the hot springs.

Costa Rica is a gorgeous, gorgeous place. But they should absolutely give names to their streets.

Types of epidemics

2013-01-04T16:26:00.000Z

A very interesting, and counter-intuitive, article on the cause of the crime epidemic of the 70s:

Experts often suggest that crime resembles an epidemic. But what kind? Karl Smith, a professor of public economics and government at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, has a good rule of thumb for categorizing epidemics: If it spreads along lines of communication, he says, the cause is information. Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. Think influenza. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think malaria. But if it's everywhere, all at once—as both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and the fall of crime in the '90s seemed to be—the cause is a molecule.

Turns out the culprit is lead in gasoline. As we have switched to unleaded gasoline, the crime rate has subsided. I was skeptical, but the article is quite convincing.

Ripping off the locals

2012-12-29T17:13:00.001Z

One expects that as a tourist you are going to be ripped off. But locals getting ripped off? That seems to be a Costa Rican specialty.

Most national parks and attractions are priced in dollars with an equivalent price in colones. As one would expect the conversion rate is quite bad. But think about it.

The folks paying in dollars get a good deal but the locals get ripped off!

Why a cheapskate might buy a book

2012-12-09T23:53:00.002Z

Some one who knows how cheap I am (about buying books at least) was curious about my previous blog post. "The Norman library doesn't have that 24-hour bookstore book yet," she remarked, "how did you read it?".

Some context here: I typically reserve books/e-books at the public library as I hear about them, and then read the book whenever my turn comes . If the library doesn't carry the book, I suggest the book and then they automatically add me to the waiting list. It may be six months between when I hear about a book and when I actually read it. It's usually not a problem -- books usually keep and if I didn't have this attitude towards read-once-and-throw-away books, I'd be spending thousands of dollars every year on them. I had to purchase the book in question though obecause a book club I'm part of was reading it for December. No way to wait six months if we're going to be discussing the book in a few weeks ...

This conversation about the blog post about books brought to mind an earlier conversation with someone else who remarked that I'd posted about 1Q84 just as she was reading it, and that she thought that was pretty cool. That was a book that I'd prefaced saying that I didn't really expect anyone else to take up my suggestion, so I suppose I am underestimating how many of my "real-life" friends do read and do take book suggestions from my blog.

If you live in Norman, and you know me, and you'd like to join the book club let me know. We're going to be reading Ted Dekker's Adam for January. We try explicitly to cover as wide an array of books as we can (previous selections: The Round House and Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore), and it has been a long time since I've read one of these mass-market thrillers. Should be fun!

UPDATE: This is truly creepy. Amazon recommends, just for me:

What's creepy about this? That book happens to be one of the suggestions floated around for the month after next ...

A novel for nerds

2012-12-03T02:55:00.004Z

If you love books, technology, distributed computing, maps, visualization, typography, (i.e. if you are anything like me), there's a new book that you ought to read. And even if you don't care for any of these things, if you like well-spun yarns of young love, I think you would love Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Unfortunately, though, this is a book-of-the-moment. The book has so many references to current technology (Google, Twitter, etc.) that it may seem very dated a couple of years from now. Still, it would make a nice 2012 Christmas gift.

Canada intervenes

2012-11-12T03:58:00.000Z

I just finished reading a hilarious book called America, But Better: The Canada Party Manifesto. The idea that Canada, which has been watching America go to the dogs, decides to stage an intervention. As the book puts it:

We’re offering you the chance to kick back for a while and let a trusted friend cook your meals and fluff your pillows, giving you time to do some healing and generally reevaluate your place in the universe. So this is not an invasion; it’s an intervention ... Sure, we’ve had a few rough patches. The War of 1812. Vietnam. Celine Dion. [Again, we are really, really sorry about that.] But we’ve weathered these storms to develop the largest trading partnership, most integrated militaries, and weakest beers in the known universe. Both of our Constitutions are based on the personal liberties outlined in Mom’s Magna Carta, and it is this—our mutual status as beacons of freedom to the rest of the world—that unites us in cause and makes us continental BFFs. Which is why it has been with great sadness, and more than a little nausea, that we’ve witnessed our American brothers and sisters betrayed over the past decade by privately owned politicians who have created franchises out of persecuting the disenfranchised, fetishized ignorance at the expense of reason, deprived citizens of their civil liberties in the name of a very profitable notion of security, and driven up taxpayer debt

Don't worry. The book is not as serious as all that. Seriously funny one-liners litter the book. Here's a sampling:

Exxon and WalMart are now the largest people in the United States. But the average American is catching up.

It’s not like we don’t have our own faults. Our prime minister makes Dick Cheney look like a human-rights crusader. Our oil program is so apocalyptic it was given a “Special Thanks” credit in the book of Revelations.

1789: Pennsylvania ends its prohibition of theatrical performances, allowing the signing of the Constitution and the centuries of drama it would incur. [Although drafted while medicine was theoretical and man-tights all the rage, it is still referenced literally in modern American law.]

1941: America and Canada cooperate to send 133,000 of their citizens to internment camps as part of a Japanese Community Outreach Program.

1972: Canada realizes Richard Nixon is a Dick. 1974: America realizes Richard Nixon is a dick, pretend they noticed first.

Quebec and Boston, two cities where visitors can’t understand the locals

We understand that diabetes affects the eyes, but if you are going to televise our games, we beg you not to add a streaking fireball indicating the puck’s location. It hurts our tummies.

[on not getting on board with the metric system] America is shooting itself in the foot by sitting on its perch, stone-faced, chained to its furlongs and miles, in league with no one, not an ounce of unity, ignoring their backyard neighbors by the pound for reasons we can’t fathom.

Terminally ill patients will have the right to end their lives on their own terms. Religious groups opposing this policy have the right to heal said patients.

Irish views

2012-11-06T17:34:00.002Z

Storms over Galway

It has taken me a long time to sort out and arrange pictures from my Ireland trip. Because I was there on work, most of my pictures are from around the time of sunset.

Galway city center and docks

This place in the pedestrian-only city-center area claimed to serve the best fish and chips in Ireland. I liked it, but my colleague who is English was not so impressed.

"Best fish and chips in Ireland"

Fortunately, I did a have a weekend in between, had a rental car, and the weather sort-of-cooperated (it only rained half the time), so I was able to drive out to the Cliffs of Moher and to the Connemara mountains.

Cliffs of Moher

Dunguaire Castle

Driving was interesting to say the least. The stick shift and the mirrors are all on the "other" side, so my instincts were all wrong. Within town, driving on the left was not a problem, because there were cars on the other side keeping me constantly aware of this. Out in the country, it was not quite so trouble-free. I scraped the car on a few stone walls. Stone walls! Apparently, because the area is so rocky, the way to make the land halfway-useful was to physically move the stones to the periphery of the plots. This explains why the country is dotted with lovely stone walls. But so are the roads. On both sides of most roads were 3 foot high stone walls. The roads were about as wide as the shoulder on an American interstate, and the speed limits were 100 kmph (about 60 mph), so yes, driving was quite interesting.

An Irish highway.

View of the Atlantic Ocean

Connemara

Totally worth it though.

Oklahoma state questions: my thoughts

2012-11-05T19:16:00.004Z

I'm sure there have been TV ads and such regarding the state questions this year, but I haven't watched TV in a while. So, based on my reading of the state questions for my precint, this is what I am thinking. I'm quite open to suggestions and corrections, so feel free to chime in. Unlike say, a certain election for commander-in-chief, my mind's not made up on any of these topics.

(758/358) Changes the cap on increases in real-estate taxes from 5% to 3% on property.

I am inclined to vote "No". Capping property taxes is why California's excellent education system unraveled. We already have a 5% cap. Let's not make it worse.

(759/359) No affirmative action programs in employment, education and contracting.

In general, I am for anything that helps guarantee equality of opportunity and against anything that seeks to enforce equality of outcomes. So, I agree completely with avoiding affirmative action in contracting and employment. But I am torn about affirmative action in education. It can and should be about equality of opportunity but it now mostly favors affluent minority kids at the expense of everyone else. On the grounds that 2.5/3 is a pretty good ratio for a state question, I will vote "Yes".

(762/360) Remove governor from parole process, leaving it to a board.

I agree. We need to reduce the prison population in this state, and since politicians are reluctant to do anything that could conceivably cause blowback, a technocratic solution might be best

(764/361) Allow Oklahoma Water Resources Board to issue bonds.

This is an organization that makes loans to towns within the state, and these bonds are a way to finance these projects. Since the individual bonds will be voted on by the communities who take on the projects and loans, there is nothing to see here. Vote yes.

(765/362) Abolish Oklahoma Dept. of Human Services. Instead, create a new agency to do the job that DHS currently does.

This is a bipartisan reform effort headed by Republican Greg Treat and supported by minority leader Sean Burrage. So, give them the benefit of the doubt. Vote yes.

(766/363) Exempt all intangible personal property (patents, land leases, licenses, trademarks, etc.) from taxation based on the value of property.

How is the revenue lost here going to be made up? The "land lease" seems ot imply that this is something inserted by oil special interests. Vote no.

What's the matter with Indian-Americans?

2012-11-02T18:30:00.004Z

It's an interesting political question. Why do 69% of Indian-Americans identify as Democrats (second only to blacks)? On one hand, they are a minority, and minorities in the US tend to support the party that keeps talking about tolerance and fairness. But on the other hand, Indians are the richest minority in the United States, with a median income nearly twice the national median income. We have one of the fastest assimilation rates. More than 90% of our children live in two-parent households. Large numbers of us are entrepreneurs and small business owners. For us, America has been the land of opportunity. We do not like it when the Democrats take potshots at outsourcing low-skill service jobs to Bangalore. George W. Bush, for all his faults, really improved the US-India relationship bringing it back from the disastrous state it was during the Cold War. All these should argue for at least half of Indian Americans plumping for the Republicans. But no ... 84% of Indian Americans voted for Obama the last time around.

Two articles, one from the right and another from the left, examine this conundrum. Both articles identify one key factor: encounters with any proselytizing faith creeps Hindus out. We are just not used to people who assume their religion is better than ours, and tell us we are going to burn for eternity if we don't come around to their beliefs. So:

when the Republican Party loudly touts its allegiance to “Christian values” and insists that Christianity is inextricably interwoven into the DNA of this country, it doesn’t anger Indians, it nonplusses them. It effectively signals to them that they don’t fully belong in America or their party. And the sight of Haley and Jindal on the Republican convention stage, both of whom rejected their faith and embraced Christianity, doesn’t reassure Indians -- it creeps them out!

So, yes, religious intolerance is a key factor. As far as I am concerned, the GOP can not shake off the extreme right wing intolerant faction soon enough.

But both articles leave out two other factors. A group consisting of highly educated engineers and doctors does not react well to fact-free, expertise-dissing rhetoric, and the Republicans increasingly do this on climate change, evolution, efficacy of tax cuts and other matters that most Indian-Americans would consider purely empirical, non-ideological matters.

To understand the third factor, take the minority community that was, until recently, the richest minority in the United States. Jews also vote overwhelmingly Democratic, and the reason is that views of social justice are part of the fabric of that community's makeup. In spite of intermarriage, in spite of reduced observance of Kosher and other religious laws, that tendency has not changed. Similarly, the cultural makeup of Indians arcs towards non-violence. No matter how much we assimilate into America, that affinity towards non-violence defines Indian-American culture. When one of the parties in America is excessively militaristic, it drives us towards the other party.

Third-grade dilemma

2012-11-02T00:37:00.000Z

The daughter came home with a math review test.

One of the problems read: Jean did a survey of ages of children in her block. She created this frequency table. Find the maximum, minimum, and range of the ages.

Ages	Frequency
2	5
3	4
4	3
5	2
6	1
7	2
8	6
Total	23

S2's answers were: min=1, range=5 and max=6, but there was evidence that she had first written down 2, 6, 8, then erased them and wrote down 1,5 and 6.

"These are not correct, S2," I told her, "you had it right the first time and it looks you erased the right answers and wrote these wrong answers."

"No," she protested, "the teacher said we always had to do things with the data that she collected, not with the first numbers."

"If that's what your teacher wants you to do, then her question is wrong. Because she asked for ages."

My third-grader then got down to the key issue at hand.

"I know that these answers are not right," she said, "but this is what my teacher said we have to do. When she gives these questions on the test, I have to do things her way. Otherwise, she will take points off."

Sigh.

The Gish Gallop Party

2012-10-04T18:25:00.001Z

Surprisingly, I don't see any tea party types worried that Romney "won" the debate by backtracking on so many of his primary promises ("If my tax cuts for the wealthy will increase the deficit, then I won't do the tax cuts.").

But that may be because in his debating style, they finally recognized him as one of their own. Romney's debating style was heavily borrowed from the creationist and climate change denying crowds. It even has a name: Gish Gallop.

It's style over substance with the Gish-Gallop crowd. As long as Romney argues like them, they don't care that he shook that etch-a-sketch and sounded like the out-of-town roofing contractor who cruises your neighborhood after a hail storm.

The Seinfeld effect

2012-10-03T15:31:00.001Z

More people will read a rant about the overuse of "Really!" because of Seinfeld's hilarious letter to the NY Times editor riffing on it.

A delinquent loan

2012-09-28T18:36:00.001Z

Rohinton Mistry, the author of A Fine Balance, is in Norman to receive the Neustadt prize and I went to hear him give the keynote. The entire speech was an extended metaphor that ended with his statement that "a delinquent loan can be a blessing". That metaphorical explanation of why he writes was very good, so I'll share it with you.

Mistry grew up listening to Western music, reading Western books and imbibing Western culture. Part of this was because organizations like the British Library would loan out books to anyone who registered. Besides, the consulates were all airconditioned -- no small advantage in a city like Bombay. But any loan comes due and has to be repaid. The loans of books and music and theater and culture had to be repaid and it was repaid in terms of the minds and souls of all the impressionable young people who frequented these premises. That was why Mistry emigrated to Canada. India was never going to be enough for him. He would not be fenced in.

He was, however, too sophisticated to fall into the justifications that most immigrants fell into. He would not insist that he was going to spend only a few years abroad. He was not going to believe that he could ultimately take all this family and friends and connections with him to Canada. Mistry knew he could never go home again.

Not being able to go home was only one part of the paradox. The remainder of the paradox was that home never leaves you either. He was always going to be homesick. The way he resolved this was to recreate the home, the sights, the smells of the life he had left behind and scaffolded it with language. The loan, in other words, could be delinquent -- the West would not require a clean break, and would be quite tolerant of divided loyalties -- and that would be a blessing.

Writing was Rohinton Mistry's answer to the age-old immigrant's lament.

The audience was mostly young students, in their 20s, born into the cultural milieu they inhabit. I wonder how much of this keynote they really grokked. To me, it was moving, because the extended metaphor of a delinquent loan does capture my intellectual life, captures my desire to visit India every summer, to find ways to work in India when I can.

A delinquent loan, indeed.

Innumeracy: Andrew Sullivan edition

2012-09-14T20:49:00.001Z

If you see a post titled "Romney360", does this mean:

Romney is back where he started from?

or does it mean:

Romney has abruptly changed direction?

A circle has 360 degrees, of course, so it should be the former, right?

But while everyone gets their panties in a twist if someone misuses the word "literally" (on the subject of which, see today's XKCD), no one cares a hoot if someone misuses math.

To reverse course, which is what Andrew Sullivan meant to say, you do a 180.