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Archive for October, 2006

Will I ever graduate?

Posted by Dan Hertz on October 30, 2006

Well, I’ve been a bit quiet on the blog front lately, chiefly because I’ve been busy with work and preparing and giving a bunch of talks. They all went reasonably well, but unfortunately work itself has taken rather an unfortunate turn. I recently discovered that my efficiency for reconstructing my signal events is only about half as good as we had thought it was and is lower than the previous analysis. This is not good since I was counting on having higher statistics than the previous analysis to make up for the fact that I will have larger backgrounds. However, if I have lower statistics and higher backgrounds, one might well ask why this analysis is really worth doing. And the answer would probably be no.
So right now I’m trying to determine the answer to that question and to see if there’s any way to get my efficiency up to a reasonable level but at the moment things are not looking good. The upshot of all this is that if I can’t figure out a way to fix this, I may end up having to change projects. This would be bad. Things were already looking like it might not be until sometime next fall before I was able to defend my thesis, but with this it might well not be until next Christmas or spring (meaning 2008) before I’d be done. All in all, not exactly terribly encouraging. So I’m sort of back to looking at feasibility again, which I thought I’d solved a long time ago (and discovered that it was very possible) and for now it’s not looking terribly hopeful.

This rather messes up the plan of moving to Baltimore next summer, obviously, which would be very frustrating, but for now I’m sort of trying to just focus on the task at hand and I will worry about the longer term consequences as they become relevant, so to speak.

Posted in Academics, Physics | 3 Comments »

Use of Powers in Amber

Posted by Dan Hertz on October 23, 2006

So I’ve been thinking about what constitutes excessive use of powers in an Amber game, what constitutes “flashy” use of powers, whether some powers are inherently more flashy than others and so on.

I think this all partly comes out of the fact that I’m used to rather (read extremely) paranoid sorts of Amber games in which everyone is very suspicious of everyone else and doesn’t want to overplay their hand or demonstrate how much they’re capable of. This is sometimes a little more confusing because as a player you know better what the other players are capable of than you do as a character, but that’s sort of a different matter. In any case, Amberites often keep their powers somewhat hidden. Well, some of their powers, in any case. Certainly, in our game, it is no secret that Rosarian is very skilled at crafting and forging items of great power. Nor is it a secret that Tristifer is very strong, only slightly less strong than Gerard. Howevever, it has not been publicized in, for instance, that Dominick is a Trump Artist, nor is it widely known, although it is not precisely hidden, that Tristifer is a shapechanger. And this has led me to wonder why exactly this is. It is in some ways his defining characteristic. I mean, it’s obviously something I’ve sunk a lot of points into, looking at it in those terms. So I’ve tried to come up with a few options.

I’m not sure whether I just feel like there’s ought to be some sort of general stigma in Amber associated with the idea of someone being able to change their shape more easily than other people change their clothes. This is probably a bit inspired by the extreme prejudice there was against shapeshifters in the Hard Lessons game I played in a while back. Maybe it’s my natural paranoia that means that I don’t want everyone to know just how much Tristifer is capable of. On the other hand, Tristifer is not generally a character that is particularly good at keeping secrets. Not to say that he blabs openly about everything and anything, just that he’s not the head of the secret police nor does he have any particular desire to be that.

Another option falls back on one of the first things I was instructed to read when I started roleplaying in an Amber game, but I’m not sure whether I’m sort of taking this too far. This article on Roleplaying An Amber character is probably also the source for the above-mentioned points, now that I think about it. But it basically says that you shouldn’t use your powers unless you have to, as I read it. And Amberites seldom have to use their powers, when you get right down to it. So although you could shapeshift into an eagle and fly around as a faster means of transport, it doesn’t seem to be the thing to do.

Now here’s a somewhat interesting contradiction, because people will use Sorcery and Trumps for that sort of ‘mundane’ purpose without it being considered overly flashy. Using a trump to go from the courtyard to your bedroom, for instance, or trumping someone rather than going to find them is pretty standard procedure in a lot of games. So why does it seem so much more flashy and just sort of… wrong to use shapeshifting for mundane purposes? I can’t really figure it out. Because I definitely have some sort of aversion to it, and I don’t know whether it’s a good or a bad thing.

Posted in Amber, Gaming | 3 Comments »

So that’s why people go into astronomy

Posted by Dan Hertz on October 20, 2006

Clearly there is no way that particle physicist are ever going to be able to compete with something like this. I mean, really. We can try all we want with pretty event displays, or CGI pictures of what goes on inside an atom, or simulations of what things look like at a quantum level. But that’s just a really really pretty picture. I guess it’s somehow enhanced and I’m not sure it’s really a proper visible spectrum picture. But even so… Wow.

The description is quite nice. I like how you can see that light reflects off the rings of Saturn to make even the dark side of it bright, and the fact that you can even see the little pale blue dot that is Earth is just sort of icing on the cake.

Posted in Fun, Science | 5 Comments »

Habeas Shmabeas, apparently

Posted by Dan Hertz on October 19, 2006

So I’ve been somewhat busy with work lately and preparing talks and things and thus missed the signing into law of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 yesterday. I also kind of missed just how serious this is. Maybe everyone else didn’t, but in case you did, the president has suspended Habeas corpus for anyone he doesn’t feel it should apply to. He’s also determined that we’re only going to follow the portions of the Geneva convention that we think are important, and apparently we’re going to keep torturing detainees.

But let’s go back to that first point since it’s a pretty important one, actually. Keith Olbermann has a piece on it which you can see and read here and here (the video is better in the second link, but there’s a transcript in the first link). Habeas corpus is the right to demand to know why you’re imprisoned. Essentially it’s protection against arbitrary indefinite detention. It’s included in the Constitution (one of the very few rights that was included even before the Bill of Rights, actually) and has been considered a cornerstone of a justice system. Now, however, the idea is that if you are determined, by a committee or some other appropriate body (which could simply mean the President himself), to be an illegal enemy combatant, you no longer have this right. I guess the idea is that in the War on Terror we can’t possibly let it be known why we have arrested and detained these people and so we have to be able to detain them indefinitely. But once you don’t have this right, you don’t have any way of appealing to… anyone. Because you can’t even know why you’re being held, nor can you request to be released. Basically freedom stops being a right and becomes a privilege.

Now do I really think that Bush is going to start sending people to mass detention camps? Probably not. I doubt this will really signal a serious change in policy. Rather I think it’s a way for them to legalize what they’ve been doing all along and to prevent any of the current detainees to make any legal challenges to their detentions.

This does seem to be pretty clearly unconstitutional, incidentally, since that document states quite clearly: The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it. I suppose the argument would be that the Constitution is just set in a pre-9/11 frame of thinking and that the War on Terror is an Invasion such that Public Safety requires it. Apparently there’s one swing vote in the Supreme Court who would decide this if it ends up there.

Anyway, I’m just horribly disheartened by this. I’m not really expecting to be sent off to Gitmo, obviously. But the administration doesn’t really have to justify it to anyone if they were to decide that they wanted to send me there. That is the scary thing.

EDIT: Reading the bill a little more closely, it is worded so that it does not allow for the arbitrary detention of US citizens, only foreigners. This does not actually make me feel any more at ease. While it’s not a generalized suspension of habeas corpus, it’s still a suspension thereof. And the fact that it’s ‘only’ for foreigners doesn’t really make it any less disturbing.

It’s just the idea that you can’t even ask why someone has been put in prison.

Posted in News, Politics | 1 Comment »

Googling oneself

Posted by Dan Hertz on October 17, 2006

So Maria recently posted an entry in her blog about the dorkiness of googling herself, which made me curious, and I decided to try googling myself, since I haven’t really done that in a long time.

The first interesting, and mildly surprising, result of this, is that I have a larger digital footprint than I would have thought. Even without quotation marks the top five google hits are all about me and the top two are in fact this blog :) I guess everyone’s reading my ramblings or something. This, however, is only for Dan Hertz. If I look up Daniel Hertz I get pretty much nothing at all, which I guess isn’t really surprising. I don’t refer to myself as that anywhere on my website or on this blog, so why would I expect to find myself by looking under that? There is another Daniel Hertz out there, though. Maybe he’s the guy who owns danhertz.com and doesn’t use it?

Anyway, I feel sort of like I’m famous, which I’m obviously not. But anything to cheer myself up on a dreary, dismal rainy day, I suppose.

Back to writing talks. They’re more or less done, but not quite. I’m going to be very happy in a week’s time when I’m done with them all. The one on Friday is really the key one, of course, but the one tomorrow and Tuesday are also the cause for some amount of worry and frustration.

Posted in Computer, Voices in the Ether | 1 Comment »

Why YouTube is cool

Posted by Dan Hertz on October 12, 2006

Today’s little bit of coolness is… Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager, a series of short movies made by some people with some quite good skills at making video, it seems. Would these people have had a forum for their talent without something like youTube? I don’t know. But now that they do, I can pass on the word.

I think it’s all well and good that you can find things like clips of Robot Chicken, and little bits of movies on there as well. But it’s really the user-made content that is the most interesting. Although to be honest, I don’t have to sift through all the crap, so I don’t have to see most of the probably pretty awful stuff that is no doubt the majority of what is there.

Anyway, episode 1, episode 2, episode 3 and episode 4. I don’t know if there will be more to follow yet or not.

Posted in Computer, Fun | 1 Comment »

more iTunes dorkiness!

Posted by Dan Hertz on October 8, 2006

Well, I’ve discovered another truly dorky thing about iTunes/my iPod which has the potential to be an enormous time-sink: song lyrics. If you look at the information for a track, there’s that tab for lyrics, which I’d never paid too much attention to? Well, it turns out that if you do put the lyrics for the song in there, they’ll actually show up in your ipod as well, much like the album art does. Which is kind of cool. But oh dear… because of course now I’m faced with the temptation of actually inserting the lyrics for a large fraction of my music library’s songs. At present count there are somewhat in excess of 16,000 songs in my music library and while a couple thousand of those are from audiobooks and quite a bit of classical music tracks, that’s still a whole lot of songs with lyrics.

Maybe at some point iTunes will have a feature that will import lyrics automatically, like the latest version does for album art, but I don’t know… and is it really at all worth it to have the lyrics in there? I don’t know about that either. But in any case. Those of you who know me as a somewhat anal person know that this is the sort of thing I’m tempted to do, of course. For now I’m sort of doing it a little bit at a time, album by album, just for one artist (Elvis Costello) when I’m not really doing anything else. This is relatively simple because all his lyrics are in one place online and so they don’t require any searching or anything like that. I don’t think I want to be doing much of any actual lyrics searches, since that will just be a pain in the ass. Much the same goes with capitalization and formatting…

I guess I’ll see what I want to do when I’m done with Elvis :)

Posted in Computer, Music | 4 Comments »

End of the great productivity wave?

Posted by Dan Hertz on October 6, 2006

Well, it seems that the long-awaited end of my extremely productive phase has at last arrived. This week has been highly mediocre so far and I’ve been unable to muster up much enthusiasm for really getting too much of anything done. So this means I’m moving on to looking at some reading for the theory section of my thesis. This will not be quite so exciting, of course, and will certainly not lead to pretty plots.

On the other hand, I do still have two talks to prepare for a couple weeks from now, so those are going to have to move ahead regardless of how productive I’m feeling.

Basically, this week has been pretty much a wash-out in terms of work. I guess next week I’ll have to try to do  better.

Posted in Academics | 1 Comment »

If you thought irony was dead

Posted by Dan Hertz on October 3, 2006

today’s little bit of weirdness comes courtesy of Texas, where some parents of a fifteen year-old girl are extremely unhappy about a book she has to read for a class in school. Apparently it has some terrible references to bad things happening with people doing bad things, smoking and drinking, and even taking God’s name in vain. Yes, the title of this book is of course Fahrenheit 451. Now her father hasn’t actually read the book, but he apparently knows filth when he sees it.

For the complete story, I direct you to read this.  In order to be truly perfect, the family would have to be suggesting burning the book rather than just banning it. But we don’t live in the most perfect of all possible worlds, I suppose, and so we are forced to make do with what we have.

The girl is now reading a different book which deals with similar themes. I guess her book has more kittens in it, though?

Posted in News | 7 Comments »

Fancy Schmancy Wedding

Posted by Dan Hertz on October 2, 2006

Well, I’m back in Ithaca after a weekend in Baltimore for a fancy schmancy wedding for Beth’s second cousin. It was a very nice wedding and the reception was extremely nice, at a hotel by the inner harbor in Baltimore. Rather intimidating in many respects, though, since it was on a rather larger budget than ours is going to be and also rather more meticulously planned than ours may end up being. But it was very nice. I think that when you get married and you’re in your 40s, however, people tend to expect you to throw a rather more extensive party.

We were actually a little late to the church, which turned out to be ok because one of the shuttle busses full of the groom’s relatives had been very delayed in traffic (partly because they were filming a movie in Baltimore this weekend, as they often do). The wedding itself was very simple and nice and then afterwards Beth and I drove back to her place and walked down to the hotel. In the parking garage where she parks her car a couple told us that we looked “very dapper”, which we had to admit that we did :)

While Beth’s immediate family is very small, once you reach second cousins it starts getting rather large, and this wedding included the majority of those, so it was fun to get to meet a lot of them, many of whom seem like a lot of fun and very nice. I don’t think we’re going to be able to invite any of them to our wedding, unfortunately (since we’d then have to invite them all, and that would add a block of ten or something, including spouses), but it’s possible that we’ll end up seeing some of them from time to time.

Beth and I even ended up dancing some, which is certainly the first time that’s ever happened. This was obviously helped by the rather copious quantities of alcohol that were consumed by all parties present, and I think that I’m still glad we’re not having a dancing section for our wedding. But it was fun to see everyone having such a good time.

The reception was only marred by one thing, really, which is still disturbing me even now. The grandmother of the bride did much of the raising of Dorrie (the bride) owing to some complications that her mother has had. Ruth (the grandmother) has for forty-odd years had a gardener come and help out with things and in more recent years he has helped by driving her places (since she’s now in her 90s). Since Frank (the gardener) has known Dorrie since she was a baby, he and his wife were invited to the wedding and reception. Frank and his wife are African-American. They were, apparently, somewhat delayed in getting to the reception, and there was some concern about why they hadn’t shown up. Eventually Dorrie managed to get in touch with them on the phone and found out that they had in fact shown up at the hotel but had been told that this was not the correct place. Frank had even shown them the invitation for the reception but as I understand it, they’d been told that they weren’t supposed to be there, or something like that. My knowledge of the details is not terribly great, but it’s pretty clear that this wasn’t just an innocent mistake. Frank and his wife were, understandably, very upset, and had wanted to go home rather than try to return, I think, but I am reasonably confident that Dorrie is not going to let this just sort of peter out.

Part of me is wondering whether I’m just an incredibly sheltered person, living in a bubble where things like this don’t happen and that this isn’t as rare as all that? But even if that’s the case, that doesn’t make it alright! I’m pretty strongly outraged, as was everyone else who heard about it. I don’t know if Dorrie and Kevin are on a honeymoon right now, but given everything I’ve seen of her personality (in how she dealt with the wedding and everything) I don’t see her as just letting this drop. I feel like this has the makings of a pretty serious lawsuit, to be honest, but again, maybe that’s just me and my sheltered world-view? I know that Baltimore is much more of a Southern city than one might think, based on where it is geographically, but again, that doesn’t make it ok.

Posted in Wedding | 1 Comment »