One of the best things I have learned in the past week is that there are actually an impressive number of Congressmen on Twitter. The other great thing is that a lot of them are personally twittering rather than having staffers do it for them. There is a nice nice wiki with the names of known governmental types on twitter. A lot of them seem to only update very infrequently (such as Mark Udall (D-CO)), or have staffers writing their tweets (such as Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner the majority and minority leader respectively). However their are a lot of congressmen that are writing their own tweets and replying to other twitterers. Dan Burton even has two accounts @DanBurton for his personal tweets and @RepDanBurton for official stuff from his press office. The grandaddy of all congressional twitterers is John Culberson from the Texas’ 7th District with almost 1300 updates. Another wild thing is that he follows 3200 people and is followed by 3000. He has also made a splash recently by Twittering and Qikking live updates and video from inside the House of Representatives during what has been called a Republican congressional revolt.

A couple interesting trends in congressional Twittering is that I expected Democrats to be more on top of new web technology but Republicans outnumber them on Twitter (at least from the list above) pretty significantly. From a quick look Republicans also seem to be the most prolific twitterers (discounting feeds that appear to be done by staffers). It also seems that Twitter has brought Democrats and Republicans together on some issues. Basically Culberson and a Democrat ally, Rep. Tim Ryan, want to overhaul rules regulating correspondence from representatives. The current rules are somewhat archaic and are based on the findings of the Franking Commission which was set up to regulate how postal fee allotments could be used by congressmen. The rules forbid posting to any website that contains politicking or advertising (i.e. pretty much every website) in their “official capacity” and posts must include a disclaimer identifying the poster as a representative. The 140 character cap on Twitter prevents that. The rules also apply to blogs, youtube, and other social networking sites.

It is extremely interesting to see how congress keeps up with technology in their personal lives. It is extremelty interesting to see folks like Rep. Culberson interacting quite directly with constituents (and other citizens whether they agree or not).

For example (excerpts put together from twitter feeds):

@johnculberson 1st back up your tax assertion 2nd actually? IMO market can drive it IF we do it right & we’re not.

@jpippert I strongly support alternatives-but without taxing anyone else to pay for it. Let free market & tax credits drive it-but drill 1st

@johnculberson & drill here drill now: listen to T Boone Pickens & his mtg with Obama re dev. alternative energy. http://tinyurl.com/6lvayh

How is that for direct democracy?

A few minutes ago I was making chocolate milk (yes, I know, I’m 5 years old, feel free to insert witty banter). Well, as I was stirring I realized that the frequency of the sound I was hearing as the spoon hit the side of the glass decreased with increasing rotational velocity of the fluid. I have yet to come up with a satisfactory explanation for this phenomena, though I’ve only thought about it for about 5 minutes now. Thoughts?

Cheers.

UPDATE: Verdict: lame. See comment #1.

A few things seem to have gone wrong with the Wordpress 2.6 upgrade. They are,

• Permalinks broke completely, still haven’t fixed this. For now, just using an ID call (static links to articles are nonfunctioning right now).
• RSS feed also seems to have gone down the drain. This is due to the same bug in 2.6 that caused the permalinks problem. I haven’t yet been able to fix it.
• Note that for you authors the login page has moved from ‘admin’ to ‘wp-admin’. This was a quick fix to another bug in 2.6 which I have decided to leave unresolved for the time being. Expect this change to be permanent.

Sorry about all this. The permalinks and RSS feed issues will either be fixed by me if I find the time/motivation or they’ll be fixed in the 2.6.1 release whenever that comes out.

Cheers.

This weekend I went to the University of Michigan Biological Station outside of Pellston, MI (near Mackinaw City, Petoskey). I got in a few firsts there: climbing a sampling tower, going to the UP. And for the most part (aside from seeing Batman in Mackinaw City) I was completely unplugged. It was amazing. I need to do that more often.

More to the point, I put up some pictures. You can check them out here.

Cheers.

A short post, but I have to post it. ‘The Complexity of Songs’ is a short communication Don Knuth wrote back in the 70s which is really quite interesting. It’s also a pretty funny joke.

The article capitalizes on the tendency of popular songs to evolve from long and content-rich ballads to highly repetitive texts with little or no meaningful content.

[...]

“…our ancient ancestors invented the concept of refrain” to reduce the space complexity of songs, which becomes crucial when a large number of songs is to be committed to one’s memory.

[...]

Finally, progress during the twentieth century—stimulated by the fact that “the advent of modern drugs has led to demands for still less memory”—leads to the ultimate improvement: Arbitrarily long songs with space complexity O(1), e.g. for a song to be defined by the recurrence relation.

We’ve really taken the concept to heart in modern popular music haven’t we? See here for explanation and here for the original paper.

Cheers.

I know vdov doesn’t usually go for the “hey look at this cool thing on the internet” type of posts but, hey look at this cool thing on the internet. It is clearly the greatest music video that has ever existed. It also dominates the field of “zombie Stalin” videos as well. It’s by a Russian metal band called ANJ [their myspace page].

I’m used to writing in C (and Matlab, unfortunately), though I’m not particularly proficient in either. But lately I’ve taken on C++ and holy hell what a huge language. Still, it has a lot of nice features that are going to be important to me in the next year of my graduate work and I’m gonna stick with it. Yay OO, ugh.

For all its size, one of the areas where I have been left completely unsatisfied is in support for threads. Yes, of course POSIX threads are there and I’ve had some success implementing them in some of my older, now completely obsolete C code which I never want to look at again. It’s baffling to me that there is nothing in the STL which develops some nice thread classes. I know there are at least 2 (if not more) very experienced C++ programmers who read vdov.net, and I’m looking for advice. Have you looked at some developed thread classes and if so what have you thought? Recommendations? I would really rather not have to write my own thread classes from scratch (especially since accessing the C pthread library would be a nightmare here), as this is both utterly useless for my research and, well, I’d probably screw it up with near-fledgling knowledge of the language.

Cheers.

I hate advertisements and, more specifically, advertisements on my clothing. This is one of the reasons why I wear GoodWill t-shirts: I don’t want to be a walking, talking billboard. This choice has brought me rather frequent social t-rauma (see exhibit 1) and I haven’t suffered alone. A recent news headline was A man was threatened with arrest for wearing a Transformers t-shirt. A couple of weeks ago my “Central Ohio Senior Olympics 1997” shirt caused me t-rauma, albeit far less public.

A man approached me while I stood in line at the Subway on the University of Chicago campus. He said, looking at my shirt, “Really? You think so?” I stared at him blankly. He continued “Are you from the area (central Ohio)?” Realizing he was talking about my t-shirt, I said “Yes”. The man replied “Well, welcome to intellectual heaven!” and walked away smiling. Still standing in line, I started to stew about this brief exchange:

Subway is intellectual heaven!? Is being from central Ohio or wearing a central Ohio t-shirt a sufficient qualification for admittance into intellectual heaven? Very unlikely.

Was I just welcomed by an (the) intellectual god? If yes, then I met an (the) intellectual god, a “sandwich artist,” and “ate fresh” in intellectual heaven after what must have been my untimely intellectual death.

What caused my intellectual death? I’d guess being constantly bombarded with advertisements and repeated t-rauma from my choice of t-shirts.

But wait! Where is intellectual hell? How can I be trying to answer such deep questions while reading mind-numbing advertisements for Doritos (taking snacking to a higher level), Mountain Dew (the new dew is up to you), Subway (eat fresh live green)? Am I really in intellectual hell?

[Update]: Is my hatred of advertisements legal in Canada?

The storm season in Indiana has been particularly active this spring/early summer. A couple weeks ago we had one hell of a storm come through north-central Indiana, hitting northern West Lafayette the hardest. It remains the only storm I have ever been through (and I’m including living in Florida for 9 years) which has actually scared me/caused significant damage.

This was a nice storm: decent MCS and individual supercell formation leading to a squall line. Loving thunderstorms and the study of weather as I do (thanks Meyers!), I was pretty busy taking pictures/watching/looking at weather data when I saw a swirling cloud of debris headed straight for the back of the house. I figured it couldn’t be that big of a deal so I just sat there and watched. Then the 100 mph winds hit the house and I hit the deck (and subsequently an interior room). While the damage to our house was moderate (shingles, aluminum siding and gutters missing, thrown AC unit, etc.), some other people right down the street didn’t fare so well.

Pictures of the storm and of some of the damage are available here.

Cheers.

I put up some (long overdue) pictures, some of my favorites, on the web for people to check out. It was one of the best times of my life. We spent the majority of our time on Molokai, some place I really want to go back to some day. The wedding was absolutely perfect, right on a completely deserted beach on the west side of the island at sunset. We even saw some humpback whales as the ceremony concluded.

Other notable events: crazy single engine Cessna ride to the island, touring the Leper colony after having hiked down (and subsequently hiked up) the tallest sea cliffs in the world. If you recognize those, it’s because Jurassic Park 2 & 3 were filmed there. And of course the cover of my first boy band album.

Congrats Mica & Jason! It was amazing, I was so happy to be there!

Cheers.

My love for South Park is well know. As such, while I was at this year’s ASMS conference in Denver, Lucas, Lindsey and I took a trip down Colfax avenue to go to Casa Bonita! It was amazing. Pretty much everything from the South Park episode (which, if you haven’t watched it is easily in my top 10) was there. Most importantly this includes the cliff divers (yes, they really dive) and Black Bart’s hideout. I put some pictures up online. You can find them here.

Cheers.

PS: The Colfax avenue bus is quite an experience.

One of the major cases before the Canadian “Human Rights Commissions” has concluded and awarded a win for free speech. While the outcome is gratifying the fact still remains that the Canadian government still believes it just and correct to regulate speech, which I (and many others) posit should be free and unfettered despite its message or content.

This has been one of the few “political” topics followed by vdov.net but I believe it has been an appropriate topic. For a little more background on the Canadian “Human Rights Commissions” vis a vis free speech you can see this previous article. Any debate and/or comments on the topic are always appreciated.