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Fri, 28 Jul 2006 Last night, while we watched Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior, I nursed a pint of Samuel Smith's Imperial Stout. Call it followup research, call it what you will, I call it a damn good beer. It has none of the harsher notes present in Old Rasputin, and yet is every bit as flavorful. This is the hands-down winner between the two. Next up is the Oak Aged Yeti. [ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ] Wed, 26 Jul 2006
ego trippin at the kalends of august
Last weekend I visited May and Sherv in the Bay Area—a totally badass trip! What with the hanging with Sherv and classmates (...and in particular...), seeing Clerks 2, the Flaming Lips, and Ween, and Dim Sum on Sunday before heading out, the weekend was packed with teh awesome. Clerks 2 was actually good! Don't expect the first Clerks—I'd say this is Kevin Smith's take on a romantic comedy (by contrast, Chasing Amy would probably best be called a romantic tragedy), but with the usual View Askewniverse trappings. Go see it, but maybe see the original first if you're fuzzy on the details, since you'll surely appreciate the references more that way. I have to admit, though, seeing Randal and Dante in Clerks 2 made me feel old. Fuckin' fuck. Now that I'm back in reality, my head is spinning. I have basically no time for my own crap at work ("can't-say-no-itis" has apparently rubbed off of Marius), which means this weekend will probably be flooded with midnight oil to get some architectural design done. Fuck it; at least after that I'll be able to hide in the lab and have some real fun. I picked me up a Fluke 175 at Fry's today, and promptly came home and found the nagging bug on my headphone amp board (which has been sitting in my room waiting for attention for too long now). Flukemeters are hot. And now, to bed. Yay. [ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ] Mon, 17 Jul 2006(n) Taking pleasure in others' misfortune. a.k.a. Schadenfreude. According to wikipedia, this word does not appear in most modern dictionaries, but appears in Nathaniel Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary. The more you know... Thu, 13 Jul 2006 Grabbed me a four-pack of Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout at my local liquor store. Matt and I each had one, and agreed that while it's just as flavorful as your average stout, it ends on a much sharper kick than, e.g., Guinness or Young's Double Chocolate Stout. As this is my first Russian Imperial Stout, I don't know if that's a peculiarity of the beer or of the type. More research is clearly needed. [ permalink | 4 comments ] Mon, 10 Jul 2006
undead shirt returns from the dead; football shoes, but for football
It's back! Of the Dead, one of my most favorite Threadless designs, has just been reprinted. You know you love killing zombies. Also, yesterday I got what seemed to me a total steal on a pair of Puma soccer shoes. Now, you might say, "but Riad, you don't play soccer!" Well, yeah, but I do play football, and soccer cleats are comfortable, readily available, and, it turns out, reasonably inexpensive. Man, you can really work out your legs when you're running routes in cleats—but I think the bigger difference is actually when playing defense. All around, an incredibly satisfying investment in weekend fun. And who knows, maybe I'll start playing soccer now. Then I can get really famous and then headbutt someone. [ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ] Sat, 08 Jul 2006Mike, Katie (Dominus), Cyrus, and I were grabbing a bite at T.G.I. Friday's last night and talking about Al Gore appearing on the Daily Show and claiming (tongue-in-cheek, at least to an extent) that he really did win Florida. This jump-started us on a discussion of the issue, and opinions flew: Gore really did win it, we fucked up, this, that, whatever. I take exception to such claims, not because I'm a fan of Bush (at this point it must be admitted that the country has taken a turn for the worse under his presidency, and no I'm not turning into some pinko commie liberal weenie), but because the reality of the matter is one that our electoral system is not designed to handle, namely, the result was so close that it was literally undecidable. The 190-odd votes one way or the other were below the noise floor. In other words, because of the particulars of the way votes are taken and counted, the election cannot be resolved with enough precision to give a number to each candidate which is more accurate than, say, plus or minus a thousand votes. The election in Florida was metastable, and the Supreme Court ended up acting as the bounded-time arbiter. Having stated the matter this way, I realized something else: the electoral college makes this problem much worse. Here's how: the noise level in the system is more or less independent of the number of participants, since it arises largely from very local phenomena (i.e., it is generated in each voting precinct, and the number of people per precinct is approximately constant). The signal, on the other hand, scales directly with the number of people participating in a given election. Because of the electoral college system, however, the apparent number of people voting is artificially limited, since each of the states happens as an independent voting event (and thus we really have 50 small elections, not one large one). Thus, assuming that we had 50 equally-sized states (we'll come back and deal with this in a second), we have 50x less signal versus the same noise, i.e., an apparent 34 dB rise in the noise floor per election event due to the electoral college. Now, when you average all of these back together, you should get exactly a 34 dB fall in the noise floor, right? Wrong. The problem is this: because of the way electors are assigned (one per Senator or Congressman), the SNR cannot be recovered completely: small states are actually overrepresented in the electoral college (because Representatives are a function of population, but Senators are a constant for every state, and in small states the Senators represent the majority of the electoral clout), and it is in these very states that the SNR is worst. Thus, we end up averaging a set of results which has been distorted in a way that cannot fail to increase the noise—the results which get greater marginal weight are exactly the ones where the SNR is worst. So what is this added noise, really? It's distortion and quantization noise! Instead of keeping everything high resolution (i.e., in terms of actual votes), we quantize on artificial boundaries and then make the final decision on a set of discrete values which are not only low-rez, but skewed. What, then, does this suggest about fixing the electoral college? Clearly, one way to fix it is to get rid of it. But it's worthwhile to imagine instead what would happen if we had a thousand states instead of fifty: we'd be making a final decision based on bits which, while they each hide a greater quantity of "thermal" noise (due to imprecisions at the precinct level, et cetera), contribute less quantization noise to the final outcome. At this point, the quantization portion of the noise goes away, and we're left only with the problem of distortion. So really, to fix the electoral system, we need each elector to represent precisely the same number of voters, and for the number of electors to be enormous. Isn't a popular vote just better? Side note: what if instead of electing based on a single event, we oversampled the voting population? Say, everyone votes in 16 elections, and we actually feed back the results from the previous election, in effect shaping the quantization noise from the decision while simultaneously attenuating (by way of the gain in the feedback loop) the noise contribution of the election process itself. Seems like overkill, but holy shit it would be cool if our electoral system were more like a delta-sigma data converter. [ permalink | 5 comments ] Fri, 07 Jul 2006Saw a Pirates 2 matinee with Mike and Cyrus today. Honestly, don't bother. Wait until it comes to video and then watch it the night before Pirates 3 comes out. There is absolutely no resolution whatever, just an abrupt ending. Davey Jones is really badass, as is the rest of his crew, and the Kraken is also awesome. Unfortunately, they just can't carry the movie. There's also about thirty minutes of worthless non-plot-advancing crap shoved in at the beginning, and Kiera being all "oh no do I love Jack or Orlando 'The Hotness' Bloom?" Jack does have some good lines, though. When is Pirates 3 out? I have a feeling that Pirates 2 will be a better movie when it can be followed directly by 3. Thu, 06 Jul 2006 Central Market was useless in locating the 120 Minute, so I turned to Grape Vine Market. They were most helpful in locating not only the 120 Minute, but also the 90 Minute, some Delirium Tremens, and a newcomer, Delirium Nocturnum. Also, I've now got some Victory HopDevil and some Duvel in the fridge waiting to be drunk. Wow we have a helluva beer shelf going on right now. [ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ] Sid and I had intended to go to the Ginger Man on Monday night because it was Saint Bernardus Abt 12 logo glass night. Unfortunately, they ran out of logos early on, and Cy and Mike wanted chicken wings first, so by the time we were ready to head over to the GM we instead decided to hang out at the Man House and digest. Turns out, this wasn't the best plan: when we finally went to the Ginger Man last night (two days late...), they were out of the Abt 12, its spot on the wall now occupied by the Saint Bernardus Tripel. I didn't get a pint of it, but I did back-to-back taste it with my "go-to" beer, the Tripel Karmeliet. I'll have to drink a bit more of it (facilitated by the 750 in my fridge—thanks, Sid!), but the Bernardus offering is a bit more complex and finishes on the slightly sour side, as opposed to the Karmeliet, which is sweet through and through. So I've told you what I didn't drink, now how about what I did?
So what did we learn? For one, I absolutely must swing by Central Market and pick up a bottle of the Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA. I expected the 90 Minute to be so abusive that I wouldn't even want to think about the 120, but instead it rocketed itself into my top ten beers. The 120 Minute is a very different beast (and hard to find for sale, the reasons for which include its high cost and 21% ABV!), but I expect that if they do the 90 that well, the 120 is worth a try. Meanwhile, I think I'll have to make a concerted effort to try out the other well-regarded IPAs—perhaps they'll even get me off my Belgian kick (hey, the probability isn't high, but it's there). Another thing I learned is that my recollection of Leffe Blonde was embarassingly inaccurate, except for the part where I remembered that I was underwhelmed. Finally, I learned that I get better at darts and pool when I decide to showboat a little bit. Sun, 02 Jul 2006 Went and saw Superman. It was really good. I especially liked all the references to older Superman stuff and other DC lore. Examples: at the beginning of the movie, when it shows Superman as a kid, he can only jump (this is consistent with the early Superman cartoons, where his travel power of choice was leaping, hence, "able to leap tall buildings in a single bound"). Marlon Brando plays the voice and face of Jor-El (which is to say, they reuse the footage from the Fortress of Solitude in Superman 2). More subtly, at one point a newscaster mentions Gotham City. Woot. Another reason to catch the movie: the Spiderman 3 teaser beforehand is pretty awesome. Yeah, you can just download it, but whatever, it's still great to see in the theatres. Upcoming excitement: Pirates 2 (next weekend), the Flaming Lips in Berkeley (7/22), and Miami Vice (7/28). Woot. [ permalink | 2 comments ] |
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