Month: February 2012

Greece is in trouble because its government spends a lot more than it raises in taxes and because their society allocates a lot of resources to the unproductive and/or non-working. How did the U.S. Congress respond to this crisis today? Our leaders cut the payroll tax while maintaining growing government spending and simultaneously continued the practice of paying former workers to stay home and play Xbox for more than one year.

Full post, including comments

I enjoyed an outdoor lunch today with a young Dutchwoman. She is married to a hard-charging American litigator and there is a big age difference. I asked whether this wasn’t a recipe for epic problems. She said “I established a system where if one of us does something to upset the other, he or she says ‘I put something into the complaint box and we can discuss it tomorrow.’ Chances are, the next day I will already know what he was talking about and I will bring it up.” Ultimately, though, she said it was necessary to accept the other person. She knocked on the square wooden table and said “You can round off the corners, but your spouse will still have the same basic shape.”

[In case you’re wondering who eats lunch outdoors in February… I’m in Puerto Rico, staying in a charming family-owned hotel (i.e., the 646-room Caribe Hilton) and taking a daily holistic mood-improving medication made with local ingredients (i.e., pina coladas, supposedly invented here at the Hilton).]

Full post, including comments

Some good things about the movie “A Separation”… It is dramatic even though nothing extraordinary happens, a tribute to the filmmakers (I think it is much more challenging to make a movie that is realistic than one in which amazing stuff occurs). The characters spend the entire movie enmeshed in the Iranian legal system, which seems to be a lot more efficient than ours and perhaps just about as effective and fair. The judge, parties, and witnesses interact in a cramped office, not in an august courtroom. Generally speaking, there are no lawyers. The judge asks questions himself and tries to figure out who is most credible.

Given the extent to which Iran is demonized here in the U.S., it is helpful to see a movie in which Iranians live more or less as we do. Husbands and wives argue. Aging parents need to be cared for. Children study. People get stuck in traffic or wait for buses.

There are some big issues explored in the movie, but they are presented in the context of fairly small events.

Wikipedia says that the movie was made for $500,000 in Iran. If so, that’s a pretty damning comment on Hollywood.

Full post, including comments

One of the changes from having a child in the house is that friends and relatives want to have video chats with me whereas previously they were content to talk by phone (or not to talk at all!). I’ve tried Skype and Facetime and Google Chat on computers ranging from a 6-core monster to an iPad 2. Whether hardwired to the 5/15 Mbps Verizon FiOS connection or connected via 802.11n, the quality is almost always terrible, with jerky video and unreliable audio.

I can’ t figure out why this is. A reasonable voice phone call can be had with a 12 kbit/second connection. The same computers and Internet connection are used very successfully to stream high quality videos down from YouTube and NetFlix. The same network was used very successfully with Vonage for smooth voice calls. It can’t be a server issue, I don’t think, because these services should be peer-to-peer. I don’t think it is a too-hard-to-compress issue. The 6-core machine can compress a 1080p AVCHD video into a 720p .mp4 file in about 50% of real-time (i.e., can process 2 minutes of video in 1 minute), so presumably even a single CPU core should be able to do compression on the low-resolution videos that are standard for these services.

Why is it that the golden age of video conferencing is not yet upon us?

Full post, including comments

We finished our three-day RDBMS/SQL programming course yesterday at MIT. It was a very satisfying experience for me and a great one for many students due to the heavy teacher-student ratio (this weblog was very helpful in attracting volunteers, another triumph for the Web!). I was pretty wiped out after three days of 10:00 am to 7:00 pm. It is easy to understand why lab courses aren’t more popular among computer science teachers. Consider how painful it is to debug your own code and then imagine a room full of 50 newbies pointing to 15 lines of rather bizarre SQL and asking “Why doesn’t it work?”

One funny moment was the student who showed up to the lab course without a laptop computer. In the old days, of course, it was not uncommon to show up and ask another student to borrow a pen. But a whole computer? Yet sure enough, another student pulled out a spare laptop, freshly installed with Ubuntu, and said “You can use this one.”

Michael Stonebraker gave an amazing 2-hour talk and question/answer session. Afterwards, my friend Avni gushed “That was fantastic. It made volunteering for all three days worth it.” When I complained about the implication that my own mini-lectures and solutions discussions were less than inspiring, she tried to make me feel better. Somehow this included saying “Wow, John [Morgan], you’re exactly half Philip’s age.”

Considering that students flew in from as far away as Indiana and San Francisco and almost unanimously said that it was worth the trip, I will check off the class as a pedagogical success. Fortunately we won’t be teaching this again for another year, so my ego will have a chance to heal…

Full post, including comments