Back to school

For the fall semester I enrolled in an online class of artificial intelligence taught in parallel with the live class offered at Stanford University. I have about 170.000 classmates and some 46.000 of them are even doing homework and taking exams. So far it's fine, as they don't just put online video recordings of the live class, but prepare special videos and quizzes in an effort to make it interactive and have you thinking into the subject even at late night hours. I'm doing all this effort mainly for my laptop, I expect that by the end of the class the machine will become much smarter and it will be able to answer the quizzes by itself :)

Another type of marketing

In my opinion, consumerism is one of the main factors which took us in the double crisis where we stand today: economical and environmental. Did you ever hear about a company which told you that you should buy their stuff only if you really need it?! And that takes a pledge to design and manufacture their products so that they last for a long time (as opposed to those who design products so that in 2-3 years they feel out of fashion)? That encourages you so sell or donate their used products on eBay if you no longer need them (thus cannibalizing some of their sales)? That, although not forced by some law, takes back their products that cannot be used anymore for recycling? That donate 1% of their sales to environmental projects? How is that for a business plan? Do you think is doable? Well, here, at Common Threads Initiative (I wonder if they got the idea from the "thread pool" concept of efficiently utilizing system threads for computing :) ) they think they can. Let's wish them good luck!

Zero impartit la trei

Mi-a povestit ieri un coleg ca a auzit urmatorul concurs la Radio Zu.
Cat fac zero impartit la trei?
Primul ascultator: zero
B&M: gresit
Al doilea ascultator: zero
B&M: gresit
Al treilea ascultator: aceasta operatie e imposibil de facut!
B&M: corect, ai castigat!

Intr-adevar, zero nu se poate imparti la trei... prosti :)

Un alt fel de cover: asa e in tenis

Ca tot am vorbit in postarea anterioare de publicitate si cover-uri, iata un altfel de cover pe care l-am vazut recent la turneul de tenis Bucuresti Open:



Macar asta e ceva mai distractiv fata de "maximienii" cu care ne toaca Vodafone de luni si luni de zile. Aveti aici si originalul pentru comparatie si aducere aminte:



Nu ca m-am intersectat eu prea mult cu maestrul Toma (pot sa spun ca am fost contemporani doar pentru vreo doua luni...), dar am crescut cu o caseta cu scheciurile sale pe care le stiam pe de rost: Fabula, Mefisto, Un telefon discret, Petrecerea continua.

Another type of advertising

Movie trailers are just another type of advertising. Here's a nice one that I saw today, with an incredible cover of Immigrant Song of Led Zeppelin. I thought first that this was a teaser for the next Bond, since Daniel Craig is starring, but in the end it's another movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo:



P.S. Even with a good advertising, I won't necessarily buy the product, let's see the IMDB ratings first :)

The beauty of computers

What can be beautiful in can of silicon and wires and which also usually contains lots of bugs? Knuth entitled his famous books "The Art of Computer Programming" because he considered that computer programming cannot be considered yet a science, but it's rather a craftsmanship. All software licensees have a part where it is stated that the particular software is not "fit for a particular purpose" (see for example Mozilla Public License, section 7 here). The best joke about software engineers is the one where all kind of engineers try to fix a car and the software guy proposes that all step out of the car, get back in and try to start it again. This is how much the programmers trust their work! So in this wonderful (i.e. full of unanswered questions) industry of computers there was a man who maybe thought: we may not be able to do it right, but at least let's make it beautiful. And he did it time and again: from the calligraphic fonts that he introduced on computers, the mouse and the careful researched user interfaces, to the overall design of all Apple products. Then Bill Gates copied some of his ideas and Google guys were probably inspired by him when they designed their user interface. If so many people still use these beasts called computers and don't totally hate us for it, it is in part due to the work of Steve Jobs, who for sure will be remembered for a long time.

Why I'm not a physicist but I still read physiscs books

Although I participated in physics contests in secondary school, I was not really into it until I started high-school where, at physics, Mr. Bararu was the best professor I ever had. He was funny, but also inspiring and his teaching methods (e.g. open books exams, grading by the Gaussian curve) were revolutionary at that time. He tried hard to lure us into physics, as there was already a mathematics gang in the class (as the contests in math start much earlier, in the fourth grade as opposed to those in physics which start in seventh grade) and on the other hand we were a computer science intensive class. I still remember his arguments that we study math in order to apply it in physics and that chemistry it's just about mixing stuff and checking its color and smell. All went very well until one day he tried to solve a problem in front of us and he just failed. He put all the forces in the described situation, did the computation, but the result was different than the one in the book. Then he tried some different settings of forces until he found one that matched the expected result. That was really odd for me, as I was used to the way of solving problems logically, starting from premises and applying different logical techniques to reach the conclusion. That annoyed me so much that I gradually started loosing interest and by the eleventh grade I didn't even go to physics contests anymore. I was back to mathematics just in time for the highly abstract algebra with groups, rings and corps which I liked most. Only much later on when I read the Objective Knowledge of Sir Karl Popper I fully realized how physics works, how we are constantly make educated guesses (i.e. theories) so that they fit our observations of the surroundings as much as possible. On the other hand, the reality around us is so complex to describe that one needs to use highly simplified models to ever compute something about it. So if mathematics is the poetry of science, the physicists are the story tellers that describe what happens around us. And these stories of big bang, black holes, curved space-time, vibrating strings and quanta are always fascinating me. So here I am again, this time with a book that tells the story of quantum mechanics theory, the building blocks which led to it and its huge impact on our civilization: In Search of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality by John Gribbin. The story telling of this author is good, with the drama of various people involved and their struggle to get a grip on this weird phenomena they were unfolding. Quantum mechanics is still a mister as the given interpretations are far away from what we normally expect from the world to behave like, but that's all we have for now: a grand casino where at every point in space and time dice are rolled to determine the next step. You just have to play the game!

Computer science on paper

Blogger changed its interface and templates and when I tried to migrate I lost some of the settings I had on the old one, so I decided to use a new template. The new one it's a tribute to the good old days when we did computer science on paper. You just had to think carefully on the algorithm, write it down on paper, run it in your head again and then eventually get your turn to work on a computer to implement it (punch card or even keyboard version cause we were kind of short on computers). I think that being able to write down the algorithm and run through it really makes one understand it better, so actually in the year when I was a teaching assistant at University of Bucharest I asked many of my students to explain a few steps of their basic algorithms (back-tracking, divide et impera and the like) on paper in order to make sure they understood them and didn't just copy the project from a coleague. Some of them even liked it :)

Hug a developer today...

...ability to work under pressure and meet deadlines, flexibility to changing priorities, be able to learn new technologies (like every other month), ability to express ideas in technical and non-technical terms, most unpaid overtime than almost any other profession...

Pouvre, pouvre developers :)

The Economist on carbon tax

I wrote a while ago here about a paper with various proposals to put a cost on CO2 emissions and how I like the idea of a carbon added tax. This evening I read the first complete endorsement of a carbon tax in The Economist. The blog post dismantles various arguments against such a tax and explains the incentives it will bring about. It's worth reading it on Free Exchange.
So if most economists agree on this issue, why is it not happening, what is politician's position on this issue? One the one hand the likes of the tea party don't wont any kind of tax whatsoever and another big group would prefer to spend money on their pet green projects, than to have a generic tax that would make the good and cheap technologies winners. Apart from being captive to special interests, their chronic lack of vision in handling various aspects of current economic challenges is disappointing.

Caught speeding?

Apparently, not only that God plays dices (in the game called quantum mechanics), but he is also speeding. In an experiment performed at CERN it appears that neutrinos travel at a speed greater that the speed of light which is the theoretical ultimate speed limit postulated by Einstein in his relativity theory. The results are still up for review, the researchers say they want to eliminate every possible chance that they made a measurement or design error and would be glad to see their experiment replicated by another team, but I can't stop thinking what the venerable Einstein would think about this?

If this experiment turns out to be right, we have to re-write all our theories on physics. Again! So should I stop trying to understand the current ones? :)

More details on this story here.

Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris is a magic movie about a magic city. Of all the cities I visited, I remember Paris as having the best atmosphere on its streets. Summer is not terribly hot, winter is not very harsh, so the coffee shops are always there, everywhere, inviting you to sit and relax, and watch the time passing by. That probably attracted all those artists in the early 20th century, cause they were flooding to Paris from allover Europe and America alike. So what could possibly happen at midnight in such a city? It's just another walk, drink or party, or what? I'm not gonna spoil it for you, so go see the movie.

Poate o sa va placa...

Eram la vanatoare de melodii si asta m-a sedus :)

Party in my mind

This story goes back to the years when I studied at UMD. One day one of my housemates passed by the open door of my room and saw me laying in bed and staring at the ceiling. He asked me if I'm ok cause he felt I had a strange look fixing that wall. In fact I was doing my homework for advanced algorithms class, but he found it hard to believe that this was a proper way of doing a homework. Staring at the ceiling became a hallmark of the way I am, it feels for me just like a big screen where I can project my imagination :) So I felt vindicated when Sheldon introduced Flatland to Raj in my favorite sitcom The Big Bang Theory (you can watch the scene here). And now there's even a song about having a party in one's mind:



It's easy to join this party, just stare at the ceiling above you wherever you are (blue sky also accepted) :)

Was Marx right in the end?

In a recent interview Nouriel Roubini (also known as the prophet of the crisis) said that capitalism could auto-destroy itself when too much capital accumulation takes place and the agregate demand becomes in turn very weak. The original declaration can be seen here:



First I'd like to note that in general any system involving human beings can self-destroy by simply commiting suicide. If somebody wants to give credit to Marx she should prove somehow that capitalism will always lead to a self-destruction stage. My second observation is the focus on consumption that appears in current macro-economics world. We need to keep increasing our consumption in order to match the ever increasing producing capacity and this is the only way we can advance the global GDP (here domestic is planet Earth :). I think the real trap in today's economics is this focus on consumption that creates the demand. We can live a happy life without this exacerbated consumption and in the end this is a matter of what we value, isn't it?

P.S. By comparing the subjective theory of value and labour theory of value one can understand the fallacy of Marxism, but more on this in another post.

Division by zero

I bought this book (the original title is "Stories of Your Life: And Others") a few weeks ago because I liked its name with mathematical connotations and I read on the back cover that two of the stories were awarded Nebula Award (it's like an Oscar for SciFi literature). The interesting fact is that this is the whole opera of this author so far (two awards out of eight stories is an impressive rate, isn't it?). His stories are rather some kind of parables set in a slightly different universe, but far from the standard SciFi galactic clashes between races and/or robots. There are even some notes at the end of the book explaining how the author got the idea of each particular story, sometimes that would be just a mathematical or physical principle he wanted to illustrate. Yet the reading is entertaining, especially "Stories of Your Life" which reminds me of the feeling from "Chronicle of a Death Foretold".

Amy Winehouse

"I don't ever wanna drink again, I just need a fried", so sad she didn't find one...

Carbon tax proposed in Australia

Australian government proposed a carbon tax that will be paid by all companies emitting CO2. If this will be devised this kind of tax has the potential to drive a "green" behaviour from all sides, since a reduction of VAT is also proposed in order to offset the total amount of collected taxes. For example, let's say a KW of energy costs 10 dollars, the VAT will be reduced by 1 dollar, but the energy produced from coal will be taxed supplementary by 2 dollars, as opposed to wind energy which will not be carbon taxed. So the coal energy will end up costing 11 dollars, but the wind one will cost 9 dollars (this is a pure imaginary example, I don't know the exact amount of VAT and the proposed tax, or the cost of energy). So greener products will become cheaper, thus the incentive to consume those ones. Note that Australia is one of the developed countries that didn't sign the Kyoto treaty (they consume a lot of coal), so the change in policy is significant. In my opinion, taxing all the types of pollution is the best way to obtain a reduction in the ecological pressure we put on the planet.

The original news can be read here.

Funky business and funky bac

I'm reading "Funky Business" a book written around 2000 that tries to describe the new business model that will take over all of us as the use of technology continues to rise. I have some mixed feelings about this book: on one hand I totally agree with their vision of empowered individuals that will challenge more and more all sorts of institutions of our society. The description of internet use and the possibilities it opens look already outdated today, after only a few years since they wrote the book. On the other hand, I don't like the extreme consumerism ideas they induce, where sky is the limit and the consumer is king. I guess the severe recession we still experience in Europe and U.S. and the prices of oil and other raw materials just show to all of us that we don't have unlimited resources and unlimited supply of money.

So once one understands the importance of education, it may be a good idea to try to improve the education system. An important part of any kind of improvement process is in my opinion a way to measure the results of your efforts. In the case of education the best way to measure the results of the system are national (or even international) tests, that's why I'm glad that this year the widespread fraud that plagued the high-school graduation exam (aka bacalaureat) was stopped. The results were not good at all, less then 50% of the students took the exam, but unless we face the truth of what the education system in Romania produces at this moment there is no chance to ever improve it.

Update: Gabi pointed out one of the best quotes from the book: "if you think education is expensive, try ignorance"

Bubble-sort with Hungarian ("Csángó") folk dance

If you ever got bored while studying sorting algorithms, this is a fun way to do it:



Now in order to evaluate complexity you need to see how tired the dancers are in the worst case scenario :)