These bills would strangle freedom on the World Wide Web. I urge all visitors to visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s action page and take action. Thank you.
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2011 in retrospect
M and I are ready to see 2012. The year that’s ending had more than its share of toil and trouble, for us and the world at large.
The year started normally enough. We flew to Colorado on January 2, since I was going to attend professional meetings at which I was to be a member of the interviewing team for my department that was looking to hire a new faculty member in my field. I had a persistent cough that had started just before Christmas (truly persistent; it lasted well into the Spring) and spent the time we had in Golden and Breckenridge, before the actual interviews in Denver, mostly indoors, reading candidate files and trying to not cough too much.
M did a few activities involving snow without me, which was fine as I am not a big fan of skiing (bad knees—long story). We did have some very good meals and admired how the Denver airport continued operating during a snow storm so we could leave for home when the interviewing at the economics meetings was over.
We came home to a nasty little surprise, which fortunately did not turn out to be as bad as it could have been. During our absence, the batteries in our thermostat died, which meant that our house was unheated for an undetermined number of days. Indoor temperature was about 39 F at our arrival and the faucets were not working, but luckily the freezing in the pipes had not become bad enough to burst through the pipes. It was a narrow escape.
The next step was to resume normal activities, at least for M, who had to start her regular Spring semester activities at Arcadia U. I was on sabbatical in the Spring; I applied for the sabbatical with some trepidation, because I had the irrational fear, reinforced by friends, that M’s ovarian cancer would recur, just as it first appeared when I had a sabbatical in Spring 2000 (that one was coordinated with M’s sabbatical, and came right after we got married; needless to say, we did not spend it as we had anticipated). Nevertheless, the semester started, M started teaching, using a draft of her book on personality psychology that was nearing the last editing stage, and I started reading stuff on my research project that was supposed to occupy my sabbatical, along with some last-minute editing of a paper that had just gotten accepted at a journal. Oh, and I spent a lot of time on Al Jazeera and Twitter following the Arab Spring uprisings. It’s hard to ignore major historical events happening in front of one’s nose.
My research project was to be joint work with our friend R, who now lives in Belfast. We had plans to visit Belfast during M’s Spring break and had purchased tickets. That’s when, in early March, a CT scan (she had been having those regularly, because her oncologist is eagle-eyed and very, very careful) showed something suspicious, which was corroborated by a blood test. Soon enough, we had cancelled the trip to Belfast, so M could go get a needle biopsy done. This was done in the beginning of her Spring break, and then we immediately went to a fancy B&B in Cape May to at least await the results in something resembling a little vacation. To cut the story short, the result confirmed that this was the second recurrence of M’s cancer.
And so the irrational fears about the sabbatical were validated (surely this is spurious, I know, but knowing brings scant comfort). Now it was time to make plans with the oncologist on how to get this recurrence under control and eventually get our old friend NED back in our house (No Evidence of Disease). While I was able to do some work on my project, which is still in progress right now, it was time to draw the wagons in a circle and fight the cancer with all we had. And we had, and have, a lot, for which we are immensely thankful: excellent doctors and magnificent friends and family. It is no exaggeration to say that we would not have done well at all, at least in terms of sanity, without the love of these wonderful people.
It would be all too easy to go crazy with the details of the chemotherapy and eventual operation. I will leave them in the background, however. M had chemotherapy from late April to late October, with various different drugs (due to a sudden shortage of one of her chemotherapy drugs that happened in mid-summer and necessitated a change, which brought relief from some side effects and introduced others). Throughout, we were determined to not let cancer cancel our plans for as normal a summer as possible. We took short trips to the Atlantic Ocean, had our usual pool parties (even if, in some of them, some of our visitors would stay indoors to visit with M who was dealing with chemotherapy side effects) and took a big house in Ocean City, NJ, where we spent two excellent weeks in the company of wonderful friends. At that time, M had to limit walking and sun exposure due to one of her drugs, but this turned out to be a surpassable problem: all it took was good sun protection and a scooter to let her roll up and down the boardwalk while not overtaxing her blistered feet.
Oh, by the way, I discovered that playing Angry Birds is good for those interminable hours of waiting for test results or for a chemotherapy infusion to be over. Hence the T shirt.
Meanwhile, she was working on proofreading her book, all 200,000 words of it, with some help from me and friends. As the Fall semester approached, she submitted the final version of the book, completed the Instructor’s Manual in a single month (the book is a textbook) and then proceeded to take medical leave for most of the semester to accommodate the chemotherapy. Do I sound proud of her? I sure hope so, as I am, so very proud. The book was published in early October and we already know of colleges that have adopted it for the Spring semester.
During the Fall, the chemotherapy became more challenging, as M developed an allergic reaction to one of the drugs. It is a drug that she has received a lot over the years and one can only have so much of it over a lifetime. So two of the infusions had to be while she was inpatient, over about 30 hours each time. I can’t say it was fun for us to camp out in the hospital (I always went to her treatments) and yet it gave us the satisfaction of doing what we could to fight the disease.
Once the chemotherapy ended, all indications were that the tumor had shrunk and possibly just a dead shell of its former self. But M’s oncologist did not want to rest on his laurels (richly deserved, as he has already kept M going for a long time, surprising the doctor at Sloan-Kettering whom we have consulted occasionally over the years). He wanted an operation to get the remnants of the tumor out, in case there was still active disease there, of which he was convinced. He performed the operation on December 2, with the help of another surgeon, and it turned out he was right: most of the tumor was dead but there was still active cancer in the middle of it. During the operation the doctors looked around for any other evidence of cancer but did not find any. So NED is in our house again!
Recovery from this surgery has been slow. It was a very extensive operation and it came after many other treatments that had weakened M. Her previous operations, while extensive, had come before chemotherapy and were easier to recover from. However, as the new year approaches, M is feeling better and better and looking forward to teaching her personality course, using her very own textbook.
And with this it is time to say goodbye to 2011 and all its troubles and hello and welcome to 2012, a year, we hope, of health and happiness for all.
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Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011
You changed the world appreciably for the better, Steve Jobs. Thank you and rest in peace.
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September 11
At about this time 10 years ago I walked into my building at the University, unaware of what was happening. The tears and scared faces of everybody in the coffee shop on the ground floor, where the radio was on loud and clear, started cluing me in.
The rest of the morning was spent around a radio, listening to NPR, and soon enough I was on a train back home—classes were canceled. The eerie absence of contrails in the sky was another step up on the surreality feeling scale.
The full horror struck me when in front of the TV. The momentous decisions this attack prompted will still affect the world for many years. The sadness for all these lives lost might be redeemed a little if more and more people draw the lesson of avoiding absolutism of any kind. Here is a very math-nerdy embodiment of this moral injunction, in an article on Bayesian statistical analysis: Cromwell’s_rule
The reason for the name “Cromwell’s rule” is Oliver Cromwell’s plea in 1650 to the synod of the Church of Scotland that read, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”
School started earlier this week for both of us. M will not teach much more this semester, as she is taking medical leave for eight weeks starting on September 8. She will be having treatments starting then and ending some time in late October that will make her feel intermittently unwell. Therefore, what better day for a sudden winery tour in NJ than today!
We started around 10:15 and went first to Cream Ridge winery. Actually, we first got slightly lost by following some signs instead of Google Maps; the signs were not comprehensive. But this ended up being more fun than otherwise, because we stumbled upon an ice cream place that was open at 11 am!
After that we did make our way to the Cream Ridge winery, where we had a tasting and a snack on their nice, shaded porch, on rocking chairs.
The next stop was at the Hopewell Valley Vineyards. There we had another tasting, and got a glass of wine each for lunch, which we had brought with us (already seen in the photo above). They have a nice deck in this winery, overlooking the vines, and we spent an enjoyable couple of hours having lunch, eating and drinking our glasses (I had Chambourcin, M had Chardonnay) and reading books we had brought along. Hey, we made sure to spend some time absorbing the wine so we would be safe drivers on the way back home.
All of you, dear readers, know how terrible I am at finishing books. This has only been exacerbated since I started reading on my Kindle DX (and on the Kindle app on the Mac and on the Galaxy Tab).
And yet, I did manage to read a few to the end recently. One was James Gleick’s The Information: A Theory, a History, a Flood. I started reading this on the Kindle, and it was handy on a train trip in April to have it along with a few other things without carrying a heavy book bag. (It was also handy to have it at the car dealership while waiting for a multi-hour repair to be done.)
But the book was so excellent, so engaging, that I could not stand the idea of reading the rest of it in the Amazon-enforced one font and with substandard graphics. Halfway through, I bought it again as a hardback and finished it the old-fashioned way, holding a nicely produced book in my hands.
What was so good about the book? The same qualities that distinguished the other book by Gleick I read (several years ago, that one), Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Gleick’s books, on the evidence of this two-point data set, are deeply researched but written with novelistic pace. You just know that the limpid explanations you are reading get the science correctly. You also can’t wait to continue reading, because the next amazing thing is lurking in the next page (or screen). The Information, for example, starts with a disquisition on the language of African drums. Not what I expected, and I couldn’t have expected it anyway, as I was totally unaware of everything about African drums as communication media except the bare fact that they exist.
The more I kept reading, the more I realized how much Gleick was teaching me about aspects of information theory that I had absorbed (badly) by osmosis in my general restless reading over the years. This continued throughout the book. Revelation was followed by revelation: a much clearer understanding of what entropy has to do with information transmission (along with a nice mini-biography of Claude Shannon); how Turing’s revolutionary work fits in; the amazing telegraph networks built in Europe in the late 1700s and early 1800s; the story of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage and the famous Babbage adding machine; and much more (it’s telling that I can remember these examples without consulting the book now, some two or three months after I finished reading it).
Having given this glowing recommendation to The Information, I turn now to a novel I finished exclusively on the Kindle and various Kindle apps: Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife. I had some trepidation to start this one, even though I read good reviews, because it is about the Balkans and would stir up old resentments in me. So it did. It reminded me of the huge backwardness of the culture there, especially outside major cities. It reminded me of the unbelievable small-mindedness of nationalism and war-making. It… but enough about the bad reminders.
The book rose above all the negatives. I kept turning the virtual pages. I was even undeterred by a certain fabulistic (“magic realistic”) element. I just wanted to finish. So I did. And many of the book’s scenes got engraved in my mind almost as though I saw a movie (I bet one will be made soon, but I don’t know if I will see it; I think I would rather keep the memory of the movie that formed in my own mind as I was reading). Everything Obreht wrote (how can she write so well, so vividly, at such a young age?) rang true to what I remember from growing up in the Balkans and hearing stories from elders who grew up in villages. I am glad for Obreht that she did not stay stuck in that part of the world and I am glad for English readers like me who have more books from her to look forward to.
Finally, for now, I want to talk a little about Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall. I got this one from one of the Atlantic bookstores that serve the New Jersey shore resort towns during our shore vacation this July. I just finished it a few days ago. I bought it in the first place because I had really loved Cunningham’s The Hours, another book I read some years ago. By Nightfall starts well and builds up the story even better. It also makes a movie in one’s mind, maybe less vivid than Obreht’s but a movie still. The main characters are a couple in their mid-forties living a fine second-rung existence in the art community in New York City and the wife’s much younger brother. I liked the ruminations about life in general and the allusions to other books and works of art (I am sure I missed many of these, too).
On the topic of allusions, I accidentally read a scathing review of By Nightfall in The Guardian that laid into Cunningham for overdoing the allusions, especially in the last chapter. After some thought on this, I decided to take Cunningham’s side. The narrator lives in his mind among worlds of different arts; he gives meaning to his life this way, and it is entirely in character that he would go off the rails and overdo it in the emotionally charged end of the novel.
At the end, I came away from By Nightfall with not quite the great impression that The Hours left me with. I just could not really identify with the growing obsession of the main character. Of the three books I talked about in this post, this would rank third but it still was one I liked. Of course I did, you will say: I finished it!
Now let’s see how long it will take me before I write another post here. I keep vowing I will make it a habit to write at least a little something at short intervals. All I can say now is, we’ll see. Meanwhile, O Gentle Reader who read all the way through to the end of this mammoth post, thank you.
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Checking out WordPress 3.2
Since this is my “play” blog to a large extent, I am checking out the latest WordPress version, 3.2, along with the new default theme, Twenty Eleven, and the “Zen” full-screen editing feature.
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Review of the Galaxy Tab 10.1
I have now played enough with the Galaxy Tab to have a reasonably comprehensive opinion of it as a portable lightweight device that does, with varying success, what I want it to do. Obviously, others will have different takes, and it is not hard to find reviews online. This review just talks about my use of the Tab for my own purposes.
Hardware
The device is very thin and light. It is more elongated than the iPad. It seems that this choice was made to make it more pleasant to watch widescreen movies. The screen is bright and easy on the eyes. It is about the same quality as the one of the iPad, and it has a few more pixels in the longer dimension, but that is not a significant difference. Battery life is good; I can get a day’s pretty heavy use with one charge. It may be that the iPad has better battery life, but even on the iPad there are Apps that eat the battery fast, such as Crosswords, which is less energy-thirsty on the Tab. The Tab is very snappy, responding to user input fast enough for any purpose.
The Tab has a cable attachment with a USB end to it. Take that, iPhone and iPad! It is very handy to have this; Kindles have it, too.
The front camera is good for video calls (see below about Google Chat) and the back camera is pretty good. Both are better than the corresponding cameras on the iPad 2, from what I read online, but the back camera of the iPhone is better than all of these.
Operating System
The Tab runs Android version 3.1, aka the latest version of Honeycomb. The older Galaxy Tab, the one that was in stores about a year ago already, had a 7 inch screen and ran Android version 2.2, aka Froyo. I learned from a friend that the 7 inch Tab has serious issues with losing WiFi access; there are long forum discussions on this online. I have used my 10.1 inch Tab heavily since I received it on Monday and I think that it does not have this issue, given my pattern of use, but I am not sure. I am keeping an eye out for this problem.
When I first started using the Tab, I had a little difficulty with the interface, as I am so used to iOS. By “little” I mean it took me about five minutes of exploration to figure out all the important elements for navigating the device. Not bad! The OS excels in notifications, as I had read all over online. It is no surprise that Apple has decided to adopt its method of notifying you of incoming emails and other events. Notifications appear in the bottom right discretely and they can be ignored easily if you are doing something else that is more important. In contrast, when I wake up my iPhone 4, I must first manually deal with each one of the notifications that have accumulated since I put it to sleep, before I can do anything with it. As a result, I have throttled down almost all App notifications on the iPhone in Settings.
It is a reasonable guess that I find the Galaxy Tab’s OS easy to deal with because I have experience running various versions of the Linux OS on computers for more than seven years. But this only becomes relevant if I want to do things under the hood. For pretty much all regular user functions, geekery of this sort is not required. It is easy, for instance, to get on the Android Marketplace to find and download Apps, free or not.
The on-screen keyboard installed by default is Samsung’s own, although options are available, including an option to dictate to the Tab. Samsung’s keyboard works well, but it has too many additional screens with symbols (three in total, one of which is exclusively devoted to emoticons). I keep activating CAPS LOCK by accident, because of the difference between the Samsung keyboard and the iOS keyboard I am used to from my iPhone. I decided not to write this review on the tablet itself, as a real laptop keyboard is still significantly faster than Samsung’s keyboard, or any keyboard on a touchscreen (but I still intend to check out Swype).
App selection
The App selection on the Android Marketplace is decent; one can also look elsewhere for Apps, as opposed to the situation with iOS, which is locked down so that one can only get Apps that Apple has approved from Apple’s App store. The Apps I downloaded have various degrees of sophistication and polish. Many are still not optimized for a large screen, so they have microscopic fonts, which are not user-changeable. This category of Apps includes the Facebook and Posterous Apps. Other Apps are better suited for the large screen and offer user customization options, including font size; the official Twitter App is an example.
One of the best Apps I have seen so far is Feedly, which offers a superb interface for reading RSS feeds and synchronizes with Google Reader. In contrast, Google’s own Reader Web App uses a small font that is not user-changeable. A good Google App, native on Android instead of being a Web App, is on the Tab to handle Gmail. This also does not offer a user-changeable font, but the font it uses is quite readable.
The Evernote and Dropbox Apps are good, although not as good as their iOS equivalents. The WordPress App is as good as its iOS equivalent; I have already made two posts here using it, the last two posts. The Youtube App works well and has a pretty interface. Instapaper does not have an Android App, but Everpaper is a good client for Instapaper. For reading and annotating PDFs, one of my primary uses for the Tab, RepliGo Read is good enough. The Kindle App is fast and beautiful. It makes me thing that I will be using the Kindle DX I bought in January only in situations of reading outside in strong sunlight, which are going to be quite rare.
The Tab comes with some preinstalled Apps, notably QuickOffice and Pulse. The first allows editing of Microsoft Office files. I have tested it a little, and it seems good at what it does. Pulse is a visual RSS reader. I found it inferior to Feedly; since it is preinstalled, it also is impossible for me to find how to update it. I can update Apps I installed myself easily. This is a deficiency of App management on the Tab.
The chat App is called Talk and it works very well with Google Chat for video calls. I looked at the Skype App on the Android Marketplace but the reviews there said it does not do video (which the iPhone Skype App does well) so I did not bother installing Skype.
Reading
Kindle and RepliGo Read are good for books and PDFs, respectively. Feedly is superb for RSS feeds (it is also superb on the iPhone and pretty good as a browser extension on computers, although there I discovered some syncing issues and the occasional crash on Chrome).
Online
The browser is very good. It offers native browsing and Apps plug in to it so that, for instance, it is easy to send a link on Twitter from the browser or to send a page link via Email or the whole page to Instapaper via Everpaper.
Music
I am surprised that the Music App that came preinstalled does not offer links to either Google Music or Amazon’s music store. All it offers is a suggestion to connect the tab via USB to a computer so you can copy music to the Tab. For Windows and Linux this requires no software on the PC side, the instructions claim; for Mac OS X, they offer a link to download an application to handle the USB side of things. I have not tried this yet.
Games
I am not much of a gamer. But Angry Birds and Angry Birds Seasons work fine on the Tab, use the large screen well, and are free. Nuff said.
Movies
Youtube clips play beautifully. I have not tried to access Netflix or Hulu yet, or to download movie files. I am also not planning to try out the HDMI cable capability, although I suspect it will work well with our TV, which is also made by Samsung.
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Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
This gizmo, my latest imdulgence, arrived today. So far, I have been busy settimg up email and social media accounts, Dropbox, Evernote, the Posterous app, and the WordPress app, on which I am composimg this. So far, so excellent. I will post a longer review later.