The experience myth

The Hillary campaign and their supporters all want the Clintons back in Washington, and one of their chief arguments to make that happen is the perception that Hillary has this wealth of experience. Mr. Clinton even went so far as describing a vote for Obama as a “roll of the dice”.
What just occurred to me however is that its no more of a roll of the dice than a vote for Clinton in ’92, when he was just a governor from Arkansas with no Washington experience.
That seemed to work out well enough for the Clinton fans, so why not roll the proverbial dice (if that’s how you want to think of it) again? Is anyone really ready to be president on day one, a job unlike any other?

Barack Obama Rally In Boston

Kristi and I went to a rally for Obama in Boston last night. It was much bigger than I expected, though in retrospect I think I should have expected more. It was my first time at a political event of any kind. I enjoyed it a lot, despite all the standing around. He invited everyone to head up to New Hampshire to volunteer there (reminding us “its only an hour away”), so who knows, maybe I’ll try my hand at canvasing one of these days.
Me at the rally
Barack

Flickering LED Christmas lights

Beware LED christmas lights by Phillips – they have an annoying 60Hz flicker!
I decided to do the power saving or environmentally conscious thing and buy LED christmas lights to decorate the apartment this year. We picked up a 60 “bulb” set by Phillips for $12 and once they were up it was immediately noticeable that they flicker at a rate just low enough to be perceptible. It should be obvious to anyone that has taken the most basic of electrical engineering courses that AC current flows in two directions, and diodes only let current flow one way, so the LEDs will be dark half the time. Any useable LED set needs to have a rectifier to power the LEDs with DC current instead so they light up steadily.

I saw a review of them here (after the fact of course) and it indicates the flicker might have been fixed in this year’s model, but I can confirm its not.

So if you’re in the market for LED lights, look for some higher quality lights that give off steady light – the things last practically forever so it’s probably worth the investment.

Late to the cloud computing party

I saw on nytimes.com today “I.B.M. to Push ‘Cloud Computing, ’ Using Data From Afar“. The idea is to make it easier to process large volumes of data using centralized computing capacity in the “cloud”. Despite having several hundred phds working on this, they’re offering the exact same software (Hadoop) and vaunted “google programming model” as you can already use, (at 10 cents per server-hour) on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.

When you’re out innovated and out maneuvered in bringing a (open source) technology to market by a book company, its no wonder your stock price is basically stagnant.

I recently had the opportunity to use Amazon EC2 to process ~35 gigs of log files for someone and it was quite easy, costing me about $15 in data transfer and CPU time fees, and I bet it would have been cheaper/faster if I’d taken the time to use something like hadoop.

Obama

Andrew Sullivan writes a great article “Goodbye To All That” in this months Atlantic painting 2008 Presidential election as the continuation of the Boomer-generation’s civil war that started with Vietnam and lumbers forward even now, and more importantly how Obama can bridge that bitter divide (claiming more republicans would vote for him than any other democrat) and rebrand America.

There’s also a follow up interview with the author.

A recent NYT op-ed mentions this article too.

Statistics, Causality, Sports

Many sports “statistics” seem to ignore causality altogether. The most recent example that comes to mind for me was during one of the recent ACLS games, when an announcer observed that all of the Red Sox’s RBIs had been by left handed batters – so they were really getting it done tonight. This ignores the fact that, save for the case of a home run, the necessary condition for an RBI to occur is for a runner to be on base already. Surely some of the runner’s on base must been right handed hitters – so if no right handers were on base, there would be no left handed RBIs; a whole chain of events had to occur for the RBI to happen.

What of the idea of the “winning run” (touchdown/shot/field goal etc), or its converse the losing play? If your team is up by 10, and you make an error thats lets s run score, that’s no big deal. If you’re tied, it is. Did Bill Buckner lose the world series in 1986? Not by himself he didn’t. Did the Immaculate Reception win that game for the Steelers? Not if they were down by more than 7 points at the time.

This probably all depends on your ideas about causality. If you make two more touchdowns in the first half, then you wouldn’t need the last second heroics, but then your opponent would have played differently from that point on as well – a whole tree of parallel universes of game outcomes.

I love that there’s a list of famous hail mary plays on wikipedia.

Full-time student

For a little while at least, I’m a full time grad student. I finished up my fifth class (wireless sensor networks) this summer to reach the halfway point in my master’s program and was starting to think about going full time.. in fact I’ve thought about it the last two summers because the Tuft’s CS program really isn’t conducive to part time study. All the “interesting” classes are offered at 10:30 unfortunately. I’d also been interviewing for new full time positions. In the midst of that deliberation this time around, I had the good fortune to get laid off from my full time job…

So now I’m taking Intro to Machine Learning, Intro to computational biology and a seminar on Brain-Computer interaction. I’m also tagging along with one of my advisor’s research groups which will hopefully afford me the opportunity to carve off some work to get started on my Master’s degree project.

In my (ever declining) free time, I’ve also been doing some Ruby on Rails work for a small company in Cambridge as a contractor.

Boston Ruby User’s Group meeting

I attended my first Boston Ruby User’s group meeting earlier tonight. I wasn’t sure what to expect exactly, but I was surprised how many people attended (in the neighborhood of a hundred I would guess).
Both of the speakers were quite interesting.

  • David Black gave an interesting talk on the way Ruby implements inheritance with a particular emphasis on giving objects that “spring from” the same class different behaviors without defining additional classes.
    Learned a lot from this exercise in meta programming because I’ve really only dabbled in Ruby so far.
  • Zed Shaw had a really energetic, engaging and entertaining presentation touching on his http server, Mongrel, its competitors, evildoers and anti-social behavior on the internet and how he aims to address that with his Utu project

The sessions were video taped so they’ll apparently be up on Google video sometime soon. You don’t really have to know or care about ruby to enjoy and learn from Zed’s talk.

One of the great things about living somewhere like the Boston area is that people I’ve heard of before show up at things like this – attendees of the meeting tonight included Martin Fowler and John Resig (wrote JQuery), along with many other folks much smarter than me.

My personal info on lost IBM tapes

I received a letter today marked “Urgent message from IBM. Please open immediately”. What’s this I thought? It turns out my information relating to my IBM employment was on the tapes lost back in February. I had read about the incident some time ago when it became public back in April.

At the time I figured I couldn’t be involved, because I hadn’t already been offered this free id-protection for a year. Turns out they just took a month and a half to notify me after it became public knowledge (3 and a half after it happened). Nice job all around IBM.