The story of a tree

I have few memories with my grandfather from my father's side, as he died when I was 8 years old, but one I remember clear is when he took me and my cousin to plant a walnut tree in front of his house. Years after, in the freedom induced madness from Romania people starting cutting down the trees in the streets. I don't know the exact reason, maybe they were making room for parking their cars, or they were annoyed they had to clean the leaves, but I could see it on many streets in my home town and elsewhere. One day my uncle said that he also plans to cut the walnut tree in front of my grandma's house giving me some stupid reason. I told him to don't even think about it as that is me and my cousin's tree and we want that tree to stay there. He eventually gave up and you can still see this beautiful walnut tree if you go in Constanta on Razoare street.

Having this story in mind and countless more about the massive deforestation that takes place in Romania I was very glad when I discovered the Tree-Nation community. They are dedicated to planting trees, as this is the most effective way to have a sound ecosystem on our planet. Forests prevent desertification and soil erosion, enhance bio-diversity, reduce CO2 and thus global warming and also provide important economical resources if managed wise. Tree-Nation organization has three big projects: one in Niger where they plant a huge forest aimed at stopping desertification and two others in Columbia and Nicaragua where they are doing re-forestation of some areas in order to stop the soil erosion and conserve the local flora and fauna.

So next time you have the opportunity to plant a tree don't miss it. Remember that is one of the three things a man has to do in his life.

Orange channel and more

This time it was the other way around: I heard a very nice song (see below) on the radio that sounded so familiar that made me think I heard it before somewhere else.



One of the obvious places to look for was in the latest Orange commercials. While searching on YouTube for the commercials from this year I discovered that these guys finally decided to create an YouTube channel (Orange Romania) where to post their commercials and more. For example this astonishing video of a building (Institute of Architecture from University Plaza in Bucharest) that goes alive:

Open the gate to the sun

Music was part of my life from the very beginning. I grew up in Mangalia and our apartment was right next to the first restaurants and hotels from Saturn resort. So all the summer you would here the music from the restaurant across the street. I was so used to it, that I couldn't fall asleep without that music. My mom told me that I woke up one night after the restaurant closed and I was very puzzled that the music was not there, I started saying: let the music play! Later on while in elementary school I always paused from doing my homework (not a huge fan of homework, but at that time I still tried :) ) to listen to the "song on request" program on the radio. In those years appeared the song "Deschideti poarta soarelui" (Open the gate to the sun) describing a serene and peaceful atmosphere of the communist Romania while the capitalists were decaying (now I see why Thriller was such a hit, they were mocking us :) ). The voices were good, as they gathered some of the great Romanian singers to record this song (I realize this was a replica for the much well known We are the world), but the message was rather cryptic to me. Looking back I understand now what the poet wanted to say: probably the action was set after a harsh winter with electricity cuts and freezing temperatures in peoples apartments so they were begging the rulers to open the gate to the sun so we could warm up a little bit. A punk version would describe that feeling much better though, so here it is the much needed cover:

The dream of a final theory

We now for some time what androids may dream of electric sheep from Philip K. Dick, but did you ever know what physicists dream about? Well, at least the ones specializing in particle physics (like Steven Weinberg) apparently dream of a final theory that will explain all that happens in our universe. He tells a history of the theories in physics (and also in natural sciences like chemistry and biology) in his book and how they converge to a still elusive final theory. The book is entertaining not only for the history of ideas in physics, but also for the discussion of the interference that various philosophical ideas had in the progress of science for better or for worse and also for the exposition of the reductionist argument, i.e. that chemistry and biology can be reduced to physical phenomena (that reminds me on how our physics teacher from high-school tried to lure us to his subject: he was telling us that after the discovery of the atom's structure chemistry was reduced to colors and smells of various substances and that we study math to apply it in physics).

Unfortunately our common sense is far behind these theories (although our gadgets rely on these advances in physics), as most people can barely imagine a curved space-time, so these dreams remain quite obscure: imagine that everything around is formed from tiny uni-dimensional strings and their various vibrations result in the matter and energy as we know it. That (string theories, cause there are many of them) is their main dream theme for the last 20 years.

A cartel of a different kind

According to Webster an economic cartel is "a combination of independent commercial or industrial enterprises designed to limit competition or fix prices". Usually a group of companies conspire to have higher prices on their products (like the recent case of detergent market in E.U., or the infamous notarial price lists from Romania) or to deter other parts to enter their market (what Vodafone and Orange were charged in Romania), but in this case a group of companies tried to fix the price of labour. Well, labour is a special market anyway, with a lot of social implications, but this market usually has an important asymmetry of information over salaries between the employer and the employee, as many private companies require their employees not to disclose their income (the study of asymmetry of information in markets and its implications was developed by Joseph Stiglitz and he was awarded the Nobel prize in economics for it) . Even in these conditions some companies (namely Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm and Pixar) allegedly engaged in even more anti-competitive practices (like an agreement not to try to hire employees of one another)? I understand that the competition for talented engineers is tough in Silicon Valley, but these companies are among the most profitable on this planet. It's always nice to save some pennies though, isn't it?

See the full story here with a nice diagram showing the suspected bilateral agreements between various companies.

Pseudofabula

I recently listened a cover of a nice Romanian classic rock song, here it is:



I wonder is the mouse, the cat, the dog, the wolf and the hunter and the man with rats read the same book, or all of them are that scary? I would say the book I read now is rather fascinating than scary, but that's for another story. However, for those who find alternative rock scary there is also the original version from Rosu si Negru (that would be Red and Black):

Autism - what lies beneath

I first heard about autism in a computer science class, Computer Processing of Pictorial Information, that I took at UMD. It's true that the professor, Yiannis Aloimonos, was quite unconventional and was telling us lots of stories about human and computer vision, and left us to decipher the equations used there by ourselves. One of his main ideas was that in order to make progress in computer vision was to understand as much as possible how the human brain processes the visual stimulus that results in human vision. But apart from recommending us books on human vision research he told us about a book of a different kind: clinical tales of a neurologist (The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat). In this book Oliver Sacks describes various cases of conditions or accidents that lead to an abnormal functioning of the brain and how people cope in these situations. One of the chapters in this book is about autism. This is a born condition that affects some children and which impairs social interaction and communication (a less severe form is the Asperger syndrome). But a good number of these people show some remarkable abilities: superior skills in perception (e.g. the ability to draw very accurate texture details), attention and computing (e.g. the ability to tell in an instant is a fairly big number is prime or not). This lead to a theory that somehow there is a trade-off in our brain: the computing power there is sufficient to be able to do instant computation of prime numbers but most of the time is shut down and the brain is wired for things much more useful to us like the ability to communicate and interact socially with other people.
Now I'm sure you'll have a different view on some piece of news like this one: A twelve year old rewrites Einstein's theory of relativity.

More than radio: semantic radio

Semantic web is basically the idea of adding some meta-information (usually tags) to the information presented on the web in order to facilitate automatic processing by hinting the computers about what that information is about. For example, the labels that I try to put to my posts that you can see of the left hand side of this blog. The big problem with this approach is the effort needed to tag all the information on the web, that's why there is also a big interest in processing unstructured data, which recently lead to a spectacular Jeopardy show won by a machine build by IBM.
Comming back to radio, this principle of meta data first occured a few years ago when appart from the audio signal the broadcasters added a station id meta data that was used by the radios in the cars to automatically discover the local frequency of an FM radio. This was a nice feature cause once you have your presets in your car then anywhere you would go the radio player will automatically identify the local frequency of that radio based on the radio id metadata.
But a few weeks ago one of my favourite radios (Radio Guerrilla) introduced an even more spectacular feature. They added metadata for the song currently played on the radio, so on the tiny screen in my car I could see the name of the song and singer while playing. I wouldn't care much about this feature on a classic rock radio, cause there I know most of the songs they play, but Gurrilla plays many new songs, especially British and some Romanians ones so before this metadata I was always trying to memorize some lyrics from the songs I liked in order to search for them and identify the song. Now I have right in front of me on the radio display. This will mean I will probably not know the lyrics of the songs anymore :)

Java programming nowadays

A colleague hit a problem yesterday while testing in isolation a SCA (Service Component Architecture) component. He was trying to call WSDL method from a Java SCA component using a SCA reference. In this case you actually obtain an implementation of a generic interface com.ibm.websphere.sca.Service, and on this interface you have to use a generic invoke that looks like this:
java.lang.Object invoke(java.lang.String operationName, java.lang.Object input);

In the case the WSDL method you try to invoke has one parameter then you just pass an object (SDO - Service Data Object in fact) of that type to the invoke method, we had such a case and it worked. But what do you in case the WSDL method has 2 or more parameters? Initially we guessed that the input would be an array of objects, but it didn't work (wrong number of arguments exception) and if you think carefully it would be ambiguous to have an array of objects because one cannot distinguish if the invoke should have as many parameters as the number of objects from the array, or just one parameter (array of objects). At this point we were stuck.

So what do you do when you get stuck? You search on Google: for the exception, or a part of the stack trace, add a few keywords that you think are relevant like the application server you are using (WebSphere Process Server 7.0), framework and technology names (SCA, SDO, WSDL, Java, invocation) and the like. Sometimes you get the answer immediately if someone else hit earlier the same problem and posted the solution on a blog or a forum, but this time it was not that easy. I had to search for about 45 minutes, try all kind of keywords, read forums, blogs and help pages until I finally found the solution in a sample in some documentation manual from IBM. You basically have to use the SCA API and create a special wrapper SDO that contains all the input parameters as properties and then pass this object to the invoke method. You can read the full solution here if you are interested :)

The tennis connection

I'm watching the men's final at Indian Wells masters series tournament between Nadal and Djokovic. After a disputed point the TV camera turned to a cheering spectator, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, who happens to be the owner of the tournament since a few years ago. Is this some business intelligence in a relational database or something? :)

P.S. Vamos Rafa!

Some fine Romanian music

First it's the song of a band heard by chance on TV tonight. I looked them up on the net and here they are, TiPtiL (the case is strange even for a Java programmer :), I use camel case usually, so I would write tipTil for a variable) with a jazzy alternative rock that in a song ("Spune-mi!") reminds me even of Alexandru Andries. And two female voices that complement each other very nice in some parts. I found only on Trilulilu their song that I liked most:

TiPtiL - Hai!

Asculta mai multe audio punk


The other band it's Toulouse Lautrec. I heard it before on the radio (they are qualified as Romanian indie rock), but this song I found tonight is infectious:

AI-MAS Winter Olympics

On last Sunday I went to the second day of AI-MAS Winter Olympics conference that took place at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest. The main event on this day was a presentation of the machine learning algorithm that it used for implementing Priority Inbox feature in GMail. They basically use a neural network standard algorithm, but the challenge is keeping a separate model (which might have additional user specific features which are instantiated dynamically from some templates) for each particular user and training it as you also manually sort your email. The other issue is of course scalability and processing in real time of data (for example the algorithm takes into account even the time spent reading a particular message to determine if the user really read it, or just opened it to be marked as read). Apart from the presentations there were on display projects done by students. The one I liked most was the Swim Green project done by a team from Babes-Bolyai University. It was a boat-robot which could navigate based on visual input and also pick-up plastic pieces floating on the water. The goal was to propose an automatic clean-up mechanism that could be used on lakes for example. Overall it was a very nice experience and of course I'm glad these kind of things start happening in Romanian universities.

Constantin Brâncuşi

During my years in the DC suburbs at University of Maryland I went one day with another Romanian fellow to the National Galery of Art. We knew they have some pieces of Brâncuşi there, but after a tour of the galery we didn't see them, so we went to the information desk and asked where to find the sculptures of Brâncuşi. The guy was puzzled, he told us he never heard about this sculptor. Now it was our turn to be puzzled. Wasn't Brâncuşi a famous sculptor in the whole world, or were we brain-washed by yet another Romanian propaganda story? We took the catalog, went to the index of artists, found Brancusi and pointed it to the guy behind the desk. He exclaimed "oh, \bran-ˈkü-sē\", sure we have his sculptures, go to that room. We got our pride back, the guy was confused because we asked about [brɨnˈkuʃʲ], the Romanian pronunciation with "â" and "ş".

Since that time I also went to Philadelphia Museum of Art which has one of the largest collections of Brâncuşi sculptures and also to the reconstruction of the artist's studio in Paris, which is part of the Pompidou Centre.

Today I opened Firefox and I saw a nice logo on Google, celebrating 135 years from the birth of Brâncuşi. I rest my case :)

Viata domnului Cartarescu

Ultima carte a lui Mircea Cartarescu, "Frumoasele Straine (sau cum am fost un autor de duzina)" e un colaj de povestiri din viata de scriitor roman a domnului Cartarescu. Nu are formatul unui jurnal, ci mai degraba a rememorarii unor evenimente (calatorii in special) cu largi divagatii pe cele mai traznite teme. Ceva a la Creanga, dar centrat pe aventurile scriitorului care este pus fata in fata cu cititorii si pe relatiile lui cu alti scriitori, cu mult umor, dar si usor oniric. Desi nu e "scris adanc" stilul e fermecator si "face diferenta" (na, ca tot barbarisme am ajuns sa folosesc; si doar am zis sa scriu in romana tocmai ca sa cinstesc un mare scriitor roman) ca sa zic asa :)

Desi e doar a treia carte de Cartarescu pe care o citesc (alaturi de "Enciclopedia zmeilor" si "De ce iubim femeile"), iar celebrele orbitoare sunt inca pe lista de asteptare, e altceva ce m-a legat recent de acest scriitor: un editorial publicat acum cateva luni in Evenimentul Zilei, un text in care am simtit ca ma regasesc, nu ca scriitor :), ci ca fiinta curioasa fata de toate aspectele functionarii acestei lumi. Nu stiu pentru ce imi trag seva (eventual pentru ceva scrieri de duzina in Java), dar si pe mine ma intereseaza si topologia, si teoriile fizicii, si economia, si filosofia, si biologia, si toate celelalte.

Deunazi mi-a povestit mama cum la o sedinta cu parintii din clasa a unspea a intrebat-o profesoara de biologie daca am intentia sa dau la medicina. I se parea ei ca sunt foarte interesat la orele de anatomie, pun intrebari si invat. Nu am avut niciodata nici cel mai mic gand de a ma face medic, ma intreb cum m-as descurca la un laborator de anatomie cand eu ma oripilez si cand trebuie sa tai o bucata de piept de pui crud (de altfel un coleg de facultate m-a intrebat prin anul trei daca nu vreau sa merg cu el la un laborator de anatomie, aranjase el sa intre pe sestache la o grupa de medicina din anul intai, dar l-am trimis urgent la plimbare; apoi mi-a si povestit ce misto a fost sa scoata ficatul dintr-un cadavru, ce consistenta avea si altele asemenea), dar asta nu ma impiedica sa ma intereseze din ce este facut corpul uman si cum circula sangele.

P.S. Retractez: as considera o cariera in medicina doar daca s-ar face practica la anatomie pe goolge body si m-as specializa in imagistica :)

Book of the year

Since I didn't blog about it when I read it during my summer vacation I introduce this book in the special section book of the year: "Plato and Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes" by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein. This is a hilarious book that present the most important philosophic concepts and schools and illustrates them using jokes. It also makes one think of the anatomy of a joke which stretches common concepts and assumptions to their limit.
In case I didn't convince you to read it, here are the authors presenting their book:



P.S.
A guy goes to his doctor and asks: "What do I have to do to live 100 years?". And the doctor tells him: "Well, you have to eat a banana each morning for 36500 days".

Happy new year 2011!

Another communist secret service (aka securitatea) story unfolds

It's 1974, the year when Ceausescu grabbed all the executive powers in Romania by proclaiming himself ("being elected") chief of the state (until then he was just the chief of the communist party). A high-school student (Stelian Mihalas) wanted to protest against this and distributed a questionnaire among his classmates asking who would they choose for president and about how the country was run. Stelian and his classmates were immediately investigated by the secret police and he was expelled from school although he a was a brilliant student in mathematics. Meanwhile a young student (William Totok - who was in the same circle of friends with Hertha Muller) heard about this story and tried to gather some more details in order to pass the information outside the country. He asked a colleague of Stelian for information, but this guy (Ovidiu Tender) went to the secret police (via his father who was the chief of border police) to tell them about the people interested in this story. William got arrested eventually, spent some time in prison and later on emigrated in Germany (like Herthe Muller he belonged to the German minority living in Romania). Stelian finished his studies in another school, graduated in mathematics, got a Ph.D. in US after the revolution and returned to teach mathematics at Faculty of Mathematics from Timisoara. And, of course, Ovidiu Tender became one of the most wealthy people in Romania, very well connected in ex-communist political circles. (see the full story here and here)

Those were the days of our lives...

Of cats and water

You may know that most of the cats do not like very much water, except when they drink it. So they developed an original way of drinking water, much different for the one of dogs for example, in order to minimize the splash that might land on their fur. This involves the use of superficial tension force on the liquid surfaces. As the researcher (Roman Stocker from MIT) that produced this study put it: "I would say cats know more about fluid mechanics than dogs" :) The full story can be found here.
On the other hand, cats sometimes enjoy water (or snow in fact), as can be seen in the following movie:

Re-build this city

Bucharest was badly damaged during the communist era. Entire neighbourhoods were demolished to make room for working class apartment buildings and the likes of "House of the People". Unfortunately this trend continued after the revolution, so high office buildings were built in house areas, next to beautiful churches. Houses classified as monuments (and thus forbidden to be demolished) are left to crumble and fall by their "nouveau riche" owners who just want to build another apartment or office building. When I found out (see the full story here) about this building

... I thought that maybe there is a hope to re-build this city. Since I went to Barcelona to see Gaudi's work and I also saw an exhibition about Hundertwasser in Budapest a few years ago, I will definitely go to Siriu street to see this beautiful building.

Orange did it again

After Paloma Faith and Mika, Orange produced a new advertisement having a very nice background song, from The Ting Tings this time:



Since I have very low expectations from a mobile operator at this point (just a phone with long battery life, a universal charger (sic!) and a reasonable candy-bar design + some national minutes) I would switch from Vodafone to Orange if they promise me (in writing) that they would provide me a very nice song every 3-4 months.

Llosa

It all started somewhere in high-school. I didn't read much at that time: I remember the Romanian language teacher asked us in the first class in ninth grade who is our favourite writer and most of us were completely puzzled, choosing in the end between Jules Vernes and Alexandre Dumas. Then a colleague passed me the Sven Hassle series and then I discovered the SF series of Asimov and Dune. But another group of my colleagues had some higher standards and were reading serious literature. And someday (in the tenth grade I guess) a "cult" novel started to circulate in this group of friends and they urged me to read it (remember everybody reading The Alchemist in 2001 or The Da Vinvi Code in 2004?). This was "The Storyteller" of Llosa. The style was new to me, I had to focus to follow the story line, but I liked the magical sensation created by the book and its message. Then "Conversation at the Cathedral" followed and I was already hooked. "Lituma in the Andes", "The War of the End of the World" (the revolution book), "In Praise of the Stepmother" (the wicked book), "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" (the hilarious book), "The Feast of the Goat", I would read these books time and again. So do I have a favourite writer nowadays? Yes, it is Mario Vargas Llosa, with or without the Nobel prize.

P.S. I sometimes regret I didn't attend his lectures at George Washington University in the fall of 2003. It was after all only a couple of metro stations away from College Park...