It has been a Long Weekend of Action! (tm).

Friday, 7/4: Project Best Idea Ever 4.0.
This is maybe the most awesome thing I've done in Boston yet. Man Hall alumni, ring-led by Anthony Roldan and Andrew Coats, organized a flotilla of more than 20 inflatable rafts on the less toxic than previously! Charles River for the fireworks (which, for the uninitiated, are launched from a barge on the river between the Harvard/Mass Ave and Longfellow bridges, thus making the river itself an excellent viewing point). We assembled at Beef & Beer house in Somerville to receive our life vests and flags, MBTA'd it to the BU Bridge to pick up our rafts and head down to the BU boathouse (perhaps illegally crossing Storrow Drive in the process -- shh), where we inflated our watercraft, entered the river, and headed east. We paused at the Mass Ave bridge to wait for the stragglers to catch up and enjoy hot dogs, grilled on the water by Anthony and Coats with camping stoves jury-rigged to a canoe (!), before continuing to our anchor point at the edge of the restricted zone.

It was a beautiful evening on the water. Experiencing a sunset on the Charles is [HIGHLY RECOMMENDED] -- it set up this awesome orange glow on the water and over the MIT dome. The goings-on were sufficiently amplified that we could clearly hear the Boston Pops and the utterly inane radio announcers (who we mocked without pity). On the other hand, we could also hear Rascal Flats, so I guess it was sort of a mixed bag. The fireworks themselves were almost overwhelming in their sheer volume, both audibly and visibly. 22,000 pounds of explosives (per the Globe) puts on a hell of a show. I think the jellyfish/Pac-Man ghosts were my favorite, though the upside-down smiley faces were pretty awesome.

Afterwards, our exit was facilitated by a convenient dinghy dock at the Esplanade, where we deflated our rafts and dripped our way back to the Red Line. Somewhere on Beacon Street, a woman in the mold of a Boston Brahmin, observing our life jackets and oars and our direction of travel (away from the water), jovially asked us where the boat was -- I pointed to the folded raft my boat buddy Alorah was carrying and said "right here!" She laughed bemusedly. I grinned.

All in all, a brilliant success. I've never been prouder of our national pyromania. Beef and Beer folks deserve "mad props" for flawless execution.

Saturday was a bit less eventful, in that I woke up at 11, sat in my room all day, and posted journal articles to my tumblelog (kumokasumi_tmbl). Oops. George S. dragged me out of my apartment for dinner at Nine Tastes in Harvard Square, which was tasty.

Sunday, I headed up to Diesel in Somerville to check it out and chat with Chris Morse before he leaves town for a puzzle conference. It's probably my favorite coffeehouse yet -- large and well-lit, with ample seating (apparently it wasn't very crowded this morning) and well-executed decor. And good coffee! -- they serve Intelligentsia. How can you lose? Then I met up with spiraloflife, who also had a quiet Saturday and was in the mood for Action. We went to an Indian restaurant in JP for the lunch buffet and then hit up the Museum of Fine Arts (for free!) for the afternoon. (Colonial portraiture is kind of boring. American impressionists are more fun. Japanese art is pretty. The end!) Then, I came home, scribbled down some notes about CORe, and biked over to Harvard Square to meet up with cat_bird and her beau Simon for a showing of "Blade Runner: Final Cut" at the Brattle (awesome) followed by ice cream at Herrell's (not bad either).

Anyway, it's past my bedtime. Supposed to be warm this week -- ew. Tomorrow I get to sit at a microscope for most of the day, which at least means I can commune with my Zune without appearing antisocial. Hurrah!

1. Heyyy Boston! Beaching / Harbor-Islanding should happen. The only real question is: when? Vote here for days where you're down for a day trip to either the Harbor Islands (some of which have beaches!) or a more traditional beach somewhere along the coast. I've selfishly removed the two weeks in mid-July that don't work well for me -- <3.

2. So I went to Simon's Coffee Shop this morning and Simon made me a cappuccino. So that's what that's supposed to taste like.

Amazing would begin to describe it. I've never had perfectly textured milk before.

The tomato and mozzarella sandwich wasn't bad either! And all at perfectly reasonable coffeehouse prices!

Someone needs to convince them to move to nicer digs though... as it is, the storefront is slightly awkward geographically in that it is halfway between Porter and Harvard (and a 10-minute walk from either), there's not a lot of seating, and the seating that they have is sort of awkward thanks to the super-narrow layout of the store. Wireless is pay-to-play, too -- $5/hour or $8/day. But the espresso is HIGHLY RECCD. If you haven't been you don't even have a concept of what you're missing.

here is an incomplete yet overambitious list of things i am going to do and places i am going to visit in the greater boston area this summer. if you would like to accompany me to some or potentially even all of them, i would welcome you! if you have suggested additions to my list or if there are places you would like to take me, i would welcome that as well. let us begin!

rock shows and movies, some of which are imminent:
- 6/30, paradise rock club: datarock and ladytron. hm! a little steep at $25 door price though. sold out anyway.
- this week at the kendall square cinema: "auf der anderen seite / the edge of heaven." featured review in the phoenix this week; sounds like fun.
- 7/1: oxford collapse at tt the bear's; $10, 8:30 doors. you know them for "please visit your national parks" -- nothing you haven't heard before, but competent alt rock and probably kind of fun to the secret fratboy corner of your brain.
- 7/4-7/8 daily, brattle theater, 2:30, 5:00, 7:30, 10:00: blade runner: final cut ("to this day, one of the most influential science-fiction films of all time, blending film-noir and high-tech in a prototype for ‘cyberpunk,’ and one of the most authentic seeming visions of the future in all of film.")
- 7/14: fleet foxes and no age are playing separate stages at the mideast! which show do i attend!
- 8/2: wolf parade at the paradise rock club
- 8/12: thao with the get down stay down at tt the bear's; wilco at tanglewood. think i'm gonna go for wilco on this one.

activities without specific dates:
- go boating on the charles (pbie might suffice for this) done! would do again.
- the institute of contemporary art visited; would return. target free thursdays!
- spend lazy weekend mornings at simon's and diesel (north cambridge and somerville seem to have much more active coffee culture than central square)
- museum of science (open til' 9 on fridays, $17)
- museum of fine art (free wednesdays 4p-9:45p)
- isabel stewart gardner museum (tue-sun 11-5; closed 7/4. $5 w/ id)
- beaches! a proper beach, mind, probably well north of us. or maybe the cape, or p-town. any way you slice it! beaches must be had!
- new england aquarium ($20)
- urban oases: boston harbor islands, Castle Island
- as you like it, free on the boston common: jul 16 thru aug 3.
- walk at least the downtown bits of the freedom trail

during the school year:
- 9/16: dandy warhols and stars together at the wilbur theater -- the same day the new fujiya and miyagi is released. best evening in pop, ever? i am totally clearing my calendar for this one guys.
- 9/22: mogwai and fuck buttons, also together at the wilbur theater. kate m. and i are definitely in for this one.
- 10/4: tegan and sara... at the palladium in worcester :/ we should buy tickets now or they will vanish quickly, or else give up because they're playing worcester of all places
- 10/12: the notwist at the roxy theater
- 10/13: lykke li at the paradise
- 10/30: of montreal at the orpheum (!)
- huntington theatre, 11/7-12/7: stoppard's rock 'n' roll! (i'm glad there's a theatre company in town that likes stoppard as much as i do -- they did "the real thing" in 2006.)
- boston ballet is mandatory. i didn't know i loved ballet until i got to see them perform during UOCD last year. i love ballet. amazing.

Whose idea was it to ship this crap? Excel is essentially useless for scientific graphing, which is a shame, because PivotCharts are awesome.

a) 6% turnout
b) Gerry Connolly??

LAME. :(

Hey Virginia kids! You should come and learn why you should support Leslie Byrne, and then we can hang out after. Yaaaaaay.

Wow. I emailed the Leslie Byrne folks yesterday about how her website didn't address her positions on any issues and asked for more information to distribute.

The communications director, Joe Fox, quickly got in touch and let me know it turns out they were just getting around to that. True to his word, her website now hosts an updated issues section addressing Iraq, the environment, Dulles rail, and her pro-woman positions. And now the field director has my email address (uh oh).

So yeah! Responsive! I have a feeling I'm going to be on the phones when I'm home next week.

Also. Seen in Woodson's theater program last weekend. Seriously, Gerry? The man has fists of ham.

Tom Davis (R, VA-11) to Republicans: Guys, we're screwed.

The political atmosphere facing House Republicans this November is the worst since Watergate and is far more toxic than the fall of 2006 when we lost thirty seats (and our majority) and came within a couple of percentage points of losing another fifteen seats. Whether measured by polls, open seats, money, voter registration, generic ballot, Presidential popularity or issues, our party faces a steep climb to maintain our current numbers.

Edited by him, personally, on his home computer, by the looks of it -- if you look at the document metadata, the author is "JDD" (his wife, Jeannemarie Devolites-Davis, who got totally owned by Chap Petersen in the 2007 legislative elections). Perhaps questionable is his juxtaposition of the phrases "Barrack [sic] Obama," "tar baby," and "immigration" in the same paragraph. D'oh.

But hey, TJ kids, and others in most of Fairfax County! Remember to vote in the Democratic primary on June 10 to pick Davis' successor! If you haven't registered, you just missed the deadline; if you're going to be gone on the 10th, there's no time like now to request an absentee ballot or to go over to the Elections Office in the Government Center and vote in person.

I"m pulling hard for Leslie Byrne in this primary. Leslie is trustworthy, progressive, experienced, and eminently electable (she lost 2005's statewide Lt Gov election to the paleolithic archconservative Bill Bolling by mere slices of a percent -- she won VA-11 by 55% in that race). Essentially the entire Northern Virginia Democratic establishment, including Sen. Jim Webb, State Sen. Chap Petersen (who ran against her for Lt Gov), openly gay Del. Adam Ebbin, and newly-elected Del. Margi Vanderhye, has lined up in support of Leslie. Labor unions, who have a lot at stake in this race, can't declare their endorsements fast enough. She's secured endorsements from AFSCME, Emily's List, United Steelworkers, and NOW, to name just a few of her endorsers (many of whom I remember fondly from Nevada).

If you want to know more about her and her policies, I hope you'll check out a great blog chat with her from last month at Fire Dog Lake.

I know many of you are friends of the Connolly family, but the more I learn about him, the more skeptical I become. Is he really "a stealthy and reactionary puppet of war profiteers" SAIC as Howie Klein would have you believe? Maybe not. (And my parents work in defense and I have friends working for SAIC, and I'm pretty sure they're not evil.) But everyone seems to agree that he's a bit corporate and heavy-handed. Judging by his embarassing forays into Facebook-land, he doesn't really seem to understand the Internet or how to use it. I'm also astonished that he's managed to completely evade responsibility for the reckless development that's characterized Fairfax during his tenure as Board of Supervisors Chair, which just makes his sketchy land use decisions involving SAIC even worse.

So: I'm hoping you'll join me in supporting Leslie Byrne. Let's turn Fairfax a true blue on June 10.

I posted a while back about the purported inefficacy of antidepressants and it drew a fair amount of conversation... varrucaria of _scientists_ just stopped by and left an interesting comment about study design and marketing practices that I thought you might all find interesting.

In other news, I lost my copy of Molecular Cell Biology in lecture a couple weeks ago. I stopped by Wellesley today, not expecting to find it, but it was in a drawer in the lectern of the lecture room. Sweet!

I subjected my computer to a virtual lobotomy this morning and had it reimaged. On the upside, it works a lot better now, but on the other hand I've now spent all day redownloading everything before I'm comfortable using it again instead of studying for my exam, which I really ought to take tomorrow. Hmm.

I am now "tumble-logging." You can find me at http://kumokasumi.tumblr.com or kumokasumi_tmbl.

We'll see how long this experiment lasts. I still feel like "tumble" should reference some crude sex act, but urbandictionary disappoints.

There is no known disease entity or appreciable physiological deficit that is associated with loss of airway smooth muscle contractility. Rather, it seems that, when it is operating normally, airway smooth muscle may have no compelling function and, when it contracts excessively or contracts even moderately within an altered microenvironment, serves only to cause problems. In that sense, it is a frustrated cell, for in those very instances when airway smooth muscle manifests itself the consequences seem to be almost uniformly undesirable.
...
As is often the case, frustration coupled with lack of purpose can be a precursor of misbehavior. Among the various cell types that populate the body, we might think of airway smooth muscle as the Hell’s Angel of cells, sitting on a Harley-Davidson, unshaven, a cigarette in one hand, a can of beer in the other, and a tattoo on its arm reading “Born to Lose.”

C.Y. Seow and J.J. Fredberg, Signal Transduction in Smooth Muscle: Historical perspective on airway smooth muscle: the saga of a frustrated cell. J Appl Physiol 91: 938-952, 2001.

I'm just going to savor that analogy.
Also, Eric Martin, I thought of you. ;p

One view of forest:

"Not to frighten you, but a green Miata is one of the hardest vehicles to spot on the highway at night. It has such a low profile, plus the green tends to blend into the darkness. Truck drivers especially can't see it from up in their cabs. It can be a risky business, particularly in tunnels. Sports cars really should be red. Then they'd stand out. That's why most Ferraris are red. But I happen to like green, even if it makes things more dangerous. Green's the color of a forest. Red's the color of blood." - Oshima
...
"One thing I've got to warn you about -- don't go very far into the woods. The forest is really dense, and there's not a good path through it. Always keep the cabin in sight. It's easy to get lost if you go any farther, and it's hard to find your way back. I had a terrible experience there once. I was only a couple hundred yards from here but spent half the day going in circles. You might think Japan's a small country, that there's no chance you could get lost in a forest. But once you get lost in these woods, believe me, you stay lost." - Oshima

...

That afternoon I decide to go into the woods. Oshima said that going too far into the forest is dangerous. Always keep the cabin in sight, he warned me. But I'll probably be here for a few days, and I should know something about this massive wall of a forest that surrounds me., Better to know a little, I figure, than nothing at all. Empty-handed, I say good-bye to the sunny lot and step into the gloomy sea of trees. ... Now I know exactly how dangerous the forest can be. And I hope I never forget it. ... But the [trees] here -- the ones living here -- are totally different. They have a physical power, their breath grazing any humans who might chance by, their gaze zeroing in on the intruder like they've spotted their prey. Like they have some dark, prehistoric, magical powers. Like deep-sea creatures rule the ocean depths, in the forest rees reign supreme. If it wanted to,l the forest could reject me -- or swallow me up whole. A healthy amount of fear and respect might be a good idea.

...

I found a hatchet in the shed and use it to chop simple hatch marks on trees. ... The fear that made me shudder isn't there anymore. I've made my own rules, and by following them I won't get lost. At least I hope not.

Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore

I haven't been answering. I lost my phone last week, during Mini-Expo at Candidate's Weekend 2. D: I'm not really sure how I've been surviving. I spent a while pretty much seriously freaking out about it.

The good news is that my spring break plans in the Outer Banks conveniently take me near my house, where we'll crash for a night, I'll see my sister, parents, and poodles, and where I'll reactivate my old phone and have most of my glorious, glorious connectivity restored. Albeit in a clunkier, thicker, slower package. Without Bluetooth. Grr.

It'll be a pain when campus po' finds my phone in a month and I have to pay the activation fee twice... not that I really have a soft spot in my heart for campus po right now after their baseless and capricious midnight suite intrusion tonight, but that's another post for another time, since we're leaving town at 7am tomorrow and it's almost 2 now. I need to work harder at fighting the power. Whoo sleep!

I don't think I've seen anyone do a really good job of integrating interactive Internet technologies (so much inter) into classroom lectures.

Maybe there's a good reason for that, potentially involving Wikipedia syndrome.

Could be fun to think about though.

Do antidepressants really help treat depression?
Maybe not.

Meta-analyses of antidepressant medications have reported only modest benefits over placebo treatment, and when unpublished trial data are included, the benefit falls below accepted criteria for clinical significance. Yet, the efficacy of the antidepressants may also depend on the severity of initial depression scores. ... Drug–placebo differences in antidepressant efficacy increase as a function of baseline severity, but are relatively small even for severely depressed patients. The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication.

Ouch!

Over the years, I've learned that the first idea you have is irrelevant. It's just a catalyst for you to get started. Then you figure out what's wrong with it and you go through phases of denial, panic, regret. And then you finally have a better idea and the second idea is always the important one. ... The first business plan is there to make sure you can use Microsoft Word.

- Arthur van Hoff of Java fame, quoted in Founders at Work.

So I sent an email to helpme tonight looking for a copy of the book to read and made some sarcastic comments because we have a reading quiz tomorrow when the book is completely irrelevant to our project's goals, but I'm actually getting really excited about the concept of entrepreneurship and honestly this book is making me want to get back into code-monkey mode, bubble burst be damned. Not that I'd do it, but.

Coffee Club had a tasting on Saturday and I was chilling there with Andrew, and he mentioned something about if I were interested in going to business school. Wouldn't that be different.

Anyway. The introduction to this song is perfect.
I'll be in the back room drinkin' my half of the beer...

While I was writing that article, DVD Jon's latest project, DoubleTwist, liberated all my old iTunes Music Store purchases and transcoded them into DRM-free mp3's for me. ♥♥♥ Get while the getting's good...

Edit: Well, it was a good idea. They all have short gaps in them. Why?

... for in design, we care much more about what the user perceives than what is actually true.
- Don Norman

I'm taking a course at Olin called Human Factors and Interface Design that was pioneered by Lynn Stein. It's about designing software interfaces for real people (vs. for you, the programmer) and demonstrating a lightweight usability design process. The course is being taught this semester by Matt Jadud, who's a visiting professor here at Olin, has done a lot of research in computer science education, and gets really excited about robotics.

A couple of the books that we're reading are Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running The Asylum and Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things (DOET).

Alan Cooper is an angry, angry man. I don't know if any of you saw the Family Guy movie, but if Peter did a special human-factors version of one of his "Grinds My Gears" segments, that's what it would sound like -- any frustration that anyone has ever experienced using an electronic device is the direct result of lazy, self-indulgent programmers coldly turning away from the users' pleas for mercy. One rather imagines Cooper at the head of a frenzied mob of gleaming-eyed villagers with torches, descending on the home of the unsuspecting tinkerer... curiously, this is all from the same man known as "the father of Visual Basic."

In any objective sense, Cooper is frequently wrong. But I think there's a real challenge there that makes him useful anyway. Because he's right on the edge of sanity, he makes really compelling cases that force you to articulate what designs ought to be able to do, and he's memorable -- you don't want to be That Guy who designed a Cooper product. Fun, at least.

Norman is at least sane, but he has a thing going about affordances. The example Norman uses to introduce affordances in his first chapter is that at some point in the past, British Rail decided to build passenger shelters out of reinforced glass. Reinforced or not, hoodlums were smashing them to bits horrorshow fast. After a few months of this, the railway noticed that the plywood they were using as temporary replacement material was holding up fine -- the wooden sheets were being scribbled on but not destroyed, even though it's just as easy to smash apart. Glass affords smashing; plywood, as a flat, porous surface, affords graffiti. It's an extreme example -- you can also say that a pushbar on a door affords pushing. Unfortunately, those are the only examples that Norman gives in the entire book, which makes the concept sort of difficult to interpret or extend. Regardless, the concept immediately caught on fire.

We had a class discussion about whether affordance was true after we read the first chapter of DOET. Our professor, Matt, is deeply suspicious of the concept. There's nothing about wood that says to the world "please write on me." In a strictly literal sense, Matt's right, but I liked the idea that we had a cultural understanding of the kind of operations that you can perform on a given material. Because I'm a pissant undergrad, I decided it would be funny to reference affordance as often as possible just to annoy Matt, and so I do.

That's going pretty well. We did a paper prototyping exercise in class today (after readily heavily from Carolyn Snyder's very useful Paper Prototyping), and it quickly became clear that one of the buttons in the paper prototype did not convey the same affordances that a real-live button would. Are paper buttons momentary or push-on-push-off? Does something happen to the button as you press it? Without tactile response, users treat buttons differently. So I piped up and mentioned it. Matt glowered at me, but the class understood what I meant. We'll account for it now.

The points I'm making in a sort of roundabout way are that:
1. This is design. All bets are off.
2. Truth is not a measure of utility.
3. Affordances are useful ways to describe real phenomena, and Cooper provides a useful way to think about design -- even if affordances don't really mean anything, and even if Cooper is deranged.

I think I'm getting excited about thinking about this class, finally.
--
All that said, I'm frustrated with the way Norman has talked about affordance since publishing DOET. Annoyed by being asked to settle pub disputes over what constitutes affordance (I imagine), Norman dramatically failed to clarify the situation in an essay on his website (from which I quote at the top of this entry). He eventually got frustrated enough to actually explain what the hell he meant, and somewhere along the way decreed that the concept has essentially no relevance to anything important. How disappointing! It's strange to me that he's so willing to accept the mutability of reality but not the mutability of language, since his concepts are being treated more or less correctly either way.

Can anyone help me figure out which text book I need to buy for Wellesley BISC 220 (Physiology of the Cell w/ Lab)?

This new Amazon Digital "upgrade your book" thing is intriguing. Along with your paper text, you have the option of purchasing a full digital edition of the book, which you can annotate. I sprung for it for the cell bio book I bought for Alishia's class... will be interesting to see how useful it is/isn't.

Nobody does Christmas in Vegas -- it's kind of disappointing. I hit Las Vegas Blvd. tonight to take some photos and walk around the casinos, and sort of expected everything to be decked out in garlands and mistletoe with flashing red & green lights.

Nope!

Aside from the (I hope) more-miserable-than-usual expressions of the clerks, it could have been any other night tonight on the Strip. I took photos anyway, because of course I had to, which I'll maybe upload sometime in February, after the caucus and REU applications are done with, and oh my god I haven't even started those yet.

It's been a quiet, relaxing day here in Henderson, Nevada. The family I'm living with is off visiting relatives, so I had the house to myself. My hopes for a marathon sleep session weren't quite satisfied -- I woke up around 10:30. I realized that I didn't have anything festive for breakfast, and was a little sad -- but my host family left me a gift bag with a loaf of pumpkin bread in it, and just like that Christmas was saved. It was awesome.

Life has pretty much been crazy. I imagine I'm not encouraged to say much about what I'm doing, but the Las Vegas Sun recently profiled one of my co-workers, and the talk about 14+ hour days is no lie. There were also big-ass photos of him lookin' pretty both above and below the fold on the front page of the newspaper, for which we are predictably still giving him shit. I also have a new-found affinity for 2's. What can I say? Two is an awesome number.

I think I left the cable to my little flash mp3 player at home. Sad! I haven't updated it since the beginning of the summer, and the thing only holds about 100 songs...

Hope you all had a merry Christmas! Also, folks in primary states should prepare to request absentee ballots... for Hillary! With the strength and experience to lead! :D