Music To My Ears, and Eyes

Kyle

I’m telling you, Julie Rehmeyer is fast becoming one of my favorite science writers. Her Science News Math Trek piece this week follows up on a paper by music theorist Dmitri Tymoczko that represents musical chords in hyperdimensional geometries. Even cooler than Rehmeyer’s very accessible written description of the work, though, are the accompanying videos (1 2). It turns out that Tymoczko’s techniques explain some of what goes on harmonically in Chopin’s E-minor prelude, and the videos capture the effect beautifully.

Still, I was initially skeptical about Tymoczko’s ideas in the last graph:

What’s particularly amazing, Tymoczko says, is that the mathematics needed to describe these spaces wasn’t even developed in Chopin’s time. Nevertheless, he says, “it is unquestionable that he had some cognitive representation of the space. So there was this period of history where the only way Chopin could express this abstract knowledge was through music. His knowledge of four-dimensional geometry was most efficiently expressed through piano pieces.”

I’m not sure I share Tymoczko’s certainty that Chopin knew anything about what we would call four-dimensional geometry, abstractly or otherwise. But the more I watch these videos, the less I doubt that he “had some cognitive representation” of some idea that Tymoczko’s merely learning another way of exploring. I doubt he’ll be able to fully grasp whatever that idea is any more meaningfully than Chopin could, but it’s hard to fault either for trying, and in the meantime we all get to bask in the beauty.

Sorry to get all heavy on you. I think today’s Daily Office reading sort of puts you in the mindset to want to ponder these things: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

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I’ve been warned by a psychologist friend about the strength of the science in some of these fMRI studies, but I nonetheless thought this piece was also interesting. Douglas Adams would be pumped about the music & math/science vibes in this week’s Science News coverage.

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Congrats to the Badgers for clinching sole possession of the Big Ten Championship today at Northwestern. Speaking of Northwestern, I stumbled across this post from a Northwestern student giving online dating a go. Good writer, interesting stuff.

Acronym Ambiguity? Nope. Acronym Confusion? Nope…

Kyle

I’ve been thinking a lot about acronyms today, specifically conflicting ones. For starters, I was interested to read this morning about the test flight of a plane powered by a pulse detonation engine. My enthusiasm was dampened, though, by (minor) confusion each time I read a subsequent reference to the aircraft, which sounds–when the acronym is applied–as if it’s powered by partial differential equations. That’s only figuratively true.

I’m not sure there was a better alternative, but it’s still a little irksome to me that whoever named this technology didn’t work a little bit harder to come up with a name whose acronym was not identical to one used by a significant portion of the community that might be interested in the technology. I have a similar complaint about portable document format acronymicly conflicting with probability density function. I’ll admit I’m on shakier ground there, since the connection is much more tenuous between these two terms, and therefore confusion less likely. (More about the latter type of PDF soon, when I unveil the program I’ve been working on occasionally to brush up on my Java skills and learn applets.)

If I’m honest with myself, I have to concede that we should name engines, equations, formats, and functions as descriptively and unambiguously as possible using real words first. I guess it would just be nice if trying to avoid repeat acronyms could be, say, a secondary consideration. A tiebreaker. After all, what’s wrong with “universal document format”? Well, this is what, apparently. Hey, I didn’t say it was going to be easy.

It’s not as if there can’t be consequences of these mix-ups. One funny though hardly earth-shattering instance came last semester in my linear programming class: One morning, somebody asked what breadth-first search had to do with the revised simplex method. In the process, he more or less shouted to the professor that he’d skipped the previous lecture on basic feasible solutions.

If only life, like Wikipedia, came with disambiguation. Or in this case acronymbic disambiguation.

By the way, do you prefer acronymbic or acronymic, which I used adverbially earlier? I think I like the former. Either way, we need a word for this. Is there one? A quick search didn’t yield any leads, although I found out that andrw313 is pissed about them (though he apparently doesn’t know the George Clinton tune “Chocolate City”), and some dudes at the Mayo Clinic thought they were annoying enough to apply some machine learning algorithms in the name of clarifying them. It’s the funniest paper I’ve read in quite some time (well, since this one, as a matter of fact). As you’d expect, the authors just couldn’t help themselves: “For example, according to the UMLS 2001AB…” And later: “This paper presents preliminary results suggesting that using the WWW in conjunction with clinical corpora can be used for generating training data for acronym disambiguation.”

Out of leads, I tried on my own to come up with something clever, like backronym or recursive acronym. The problem is, ambiguous acronyms are homonyms. Acro-homonym? Eh. Homo-acronym? Surely not. I’m stumped. Anyone got any ideas?

I guess we could resort to an acronym that describes the problem or solution. In addition to the ideas in this post’s title, we might also consider Acronym Disambiguation (of course, it’s ambiguous with Athletic Director) or Disambiguation of Acronyms (ambiguous with District Attorney). I’m beginning to believe there’s a complementarity relationship between acronym ambiguity and acronym length, so we’re probably going to need to describe the problem with more words in order for this acronym not to be all snarky and self-referential, not that I’d have a problem with that.

After thinking about this stuff for over an hour now, I’m beginning to understand why my friend Milad got fed up with acronyms and just named his inertial confinement fusion code “Cooper,” after his sister’s dog, I think he he told me.

So…what prompted me to recall the BFS/BFS vignette that finally gave this idea the mental critical mass necessary for me to actually want to post on it (a post that, as you can see, has just totally spiraled out of control)? Just a little acronym overload from my network flows class this morning. Don’t get me wrong–we all knew what he was talking about, and there was nothing annoying or especially ambiguous about it, but I couldn’t help but chuckle internally when my professor wrote this on the board: “Every BFS produced by NSM is SFB.” With suitable out-arc choice, of course.

On the off chance that you’ve made it to the end of this post and are scoring along at home, that’s “Every basic feasible solution produced by [the] network simplex method is [a] strongly feasible basis.”

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By the way, this kid rules.

Big Ten Champs!

Kyle

Thanks to my roommate’s awesome soon-to-be in-laws, I got to see the Badgers clinch a share of the Big Ten Championship tonight. It was a pretty serious blowout (not a word to all my Penn State alum coworkers, I promise), which was great fun on Senior Night. I’ve got no real insight here, I’m just psyched.

Go Badgers!!

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Also Keith Law expects a big year from the Brewers’ Rickie Weeks. Join the club, Keith.

[Insert Puppet Joke Here]

Kyle

It’s been more than a year since something I actually wrote got published anywhere but on this blog, so I couldn’t help but post a link to my short write-up of an engineering-education-related talk Professor Greg Moses gave at a recent department colloquium.

If you’ve got a second, you should also check out some of the other stories in Teaching and Learning Insights, one of our college’s “COE 2010” projects. I think Alecia Magnifico’s been doing a really nice job with it.

“Hey Jesus, You Want Pizza or What?”

Kyle

Part of our Lenten discipline at St. Francis House this year has been a weekly Movies with Meaning series. Admittedly, eating free food and watching movies on Monday nights hasn’t felt like much of a sacrifice compared to the usual “oh shoot, I didn’t do enough homework this weekend” tone of a typical Monday night. Still, we’ve had the struggling and contemplating part down the last two weeks as we’ve tackled Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, based on the book of same name by Nikos Kazantzakis (which latter was apparently a big reason why a friend of mine went to seminary).

After finishing up the movie this evening, we did a little amateur film criticism in addition to the theological discussion you’d expect. As a bit of a follow-up, I tracked down this post from from Matthew Dessem, a fellow user of the exceptionally clean Minima template by designer Douglas Bowman.

I love the “separation between Spiderman and state” bit at the beginning of Dessem’s post, and I thought both his theological and filmic discussions were well worth reading, though when it comes to the theology he cleverly warns us “I don’t really have a dog in this hunt, so take my opinion with a pillar of salt.”

Let me quote at some length his discussion of the apostolic accents, which our group discussed in depth (and came mostly to the right conclusions, from the sound of it). If you’ve seen the movie, feel free to chime in with your own thoughts on the film’s dialog and how it was delivered, or about anything else.

So that’s the theology; what about the film? Many people had problems with the casting and the accents. Harvey Keitel speaks like, well, Harvey Keitel, with a pronounced New York accent, as do the apostles. This may seem crazy, and the movie took a lot of heat for it, but it was a conscious choice. Scorsese says on the commentary track that the traditional approach here here, using the language of the King James translation, wouldn’t work because, “if the audience heard that language, and heard a British accent, they could be safe, they could turn off. it’s just a Biblical movie.” Scorsese, Schrader, and Cocks wanted to engage the audience more directly. That’s why the dialogue echoes the Bible but almost never quotes it directly [Good call, Scott. ~KMO]. And as Schrader puts it, colloquial English is “as appropriate as King James’s language. It’s not as appropriate as Aramaic but you’re not gonna get Aramaic.” I like to think Mel Gibson heard this commentary track and said to himself, “Oh, yeah?” For the most part, for me, the colloquial English worked the way it was supposed to. For one thing, giving the lower-class apostles New York accents sets up a nice contrast when the Pontius Pilate shows up, with a British accent. It creates the same cultural divide that Aramaic and Latin do in The Passion of the Christ. It’s the Rebel Alliance/Galactic Empire school of dialogue coaching, and it works very well here.

Shake a Tail Feather

Kyle

So I’m up doing some work and watching a little PBS, and I just saw something I simply had to share. The special I’m watching is on evolution in rain forests and how a few pieces of new technology have affected some studies of same.

Thus, thanks the wonders of high-speed (and regular-speed) camera equipment, I give you the best moonwalking that the animal kingdom (and ornithological research community) has to offer:

Sunday Judgment VI

Kyle

A couple of years ago, my one-a-day usage errors calendar (yes, I had one) went off mission for a page to tackle a pronunciation issue. I’ll take that as license to do likewise. To be honest, though, I think the author and an awful lot of other people make too big a deal about this particular mistake.

Who cares if people say “nucular” instead of “nuclear”?

Aren’t there tons of other words that get mispronounced all the time that no one cares about? Why do we reserve special condemnation for this one in particular? Hell, I’ve heard professors and industry professionals say “nucular.” I dislike George Bush as much as the next guy, and I agree that no one’s going to confuse him with George Plimpton, but can we just let it go?

Turns out I’m not the only one who’s thought about this. And, actually, the “army of coal-powered zombie dolphins” bit notwithstanding, I think this video might be on to something regarding what quite probably is a rhetorical move on Bush’s part:

In other nuclear news, my old friend Ryan Hagen just sent me a link to a video he came across. He sums it up pretty well: “It’s not even really fair to say it’s an intellectually lazy guide, because it’s on a whole different planet–but it’s an interesting look into the way nuclear energy continues to be perceived.” The subject of the video? “Hunting the Radioactive Beasts of Chernobyl,” apparently.

I won’t insult your intelligence by discussing what’s wrong with it, although I’ll share that my favorite line was “This is what happens when we play with technology we don’t understand.” You can say that again.

Warning: This video contains foul language. Like, a lot of it. And also booze.

The Hacker Within: Baseball Edition

Kyle 2 Comments

With a little help from geek and proud, I’m now able to listen to MLB.TV radio broadcast streams on Kermit, the Linux machine I work at. Using the MediaPlayerConnectivity plug-in Alan suggests and choosing Totem as the default player in the configuration wizard seems to do the trick on my system (“i686-redhat-linux-gnu” according to configure).

I couldn’t get the video to work, though. I don’t view much MLB.TV video at work anyway, so you’d think I’d have been able to leave it at that. I couldn’t. I spent much of the afternoon reading up on Silverlight and Moonlight, GStreamer and Pitdll. I battled with autotools and Mono distributions. I was defeated. Hopefully the Moonlight people get a Firefox plug-in finished soon. They’re working pretty hard, from the sound of it.

Speaking of computing in the name of baseball, stay tuned for a report on draft.gms, my network flow model that will hopefully let GAMS choose my fantasy baseball draft picks. I think I can do it as a modified assignment problem with the help of little tuning trick I learned about in a breast cancer diagnosis project I learned about in linear programming last semester. I’m sure you’re on the edge of your seat.