New Album from Maaya!

Apparently, Maaya is coming out with a new album for her 15th anniversary (of debuting with Yoko Kanno on Escaflowne). Of course,
here is the requisite link to purchase it on CDJapan, so that I can get a few percentage worth of kickback. (which is quickly becoming necessary with the current dollar's weakness against the Yen) Yes, Nintendo, you're not the only one suffering.

In other news, they are using some fancy material/method called SHM-CD, which is supposed to "sound better". It may have been a factor in the past when CD quality was poor, but my understanding these days is that you really don't get bit errors anymore when reading CDs, so having a "cleaner" signal really doesn't mean much when it's all processed digitally anyway.

Thoughts on departmental exams

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with the format of departmental exams given in other curricular groups, at other departments, at other universities, or even in different years, so these thoughts really only apply to that of the BO departmental given at SIO in 2009. However, I suspect, given the strong "tradition-esque" property of departmentals, that it is conducted in a similar manner to single-session oral exams elsewhere (and elsewhen).

My main issue with the process of departmental exams is the opaque process in which they are conducted. First, the issue of which members comprise the departmental committee varies from year to year. I believe it typically includes five members, one physical, one chemical, and three biological. At least one of each is one of the professors who taught the corresponding introductory course that year. However, replacements occasionally occur when certain members are unavailable. The remaining two biological members are drawn from the faculty, though it is unclear to me how they are chosen.

Once the committee members and time for the exam are decided, first-years are simply told to show up. No information is given about what will be asked, what the committee is looking for, etc. Yes, individuals can contact the committee members and ask questions about what they are likely to be asked about, and the committee members will likely respond truthfully, but it's still a very mysterious process.

Aside from the fact that the committee expects you to know *something* about oceanography, it's unclear what the expectations are. It seems that they take into account things like what classes you took, how large your courseload was, what research you did, your background, etc. I suspect the departmental exam is thought of as a test of your ability/qualifications to be a Ph.D student. My personal opinion is that this is an extremely subjective decision and that each committee member probably has different views on what qualities are most important.

I also think that a departmental exam isn't necessarily the best (i.e. accurate and/or fast) way to determine success of a Ph.D. student. It's not like you can track the students that don't pass the departmental exam to see how well they do in graduate school. There's probably an overly strong emphasis on academia success, which doesn't seem like a good idea, either. Given current numbers of graduating students and the number of positions available, it's clear that not all students will end up in (or even want to be in) academia. Success in academia depends on somewhat different factors than success in other fields for which a degree would be useful.

I think what really irks me is that the subjective/opaqueness of the committee's decision means that it's really hard to practice for. Practice committees with students probably does a close job of approximating the situation, but it's hard to say how useful any feedback will be. The feedback you get from passing (or not passing) the exam is usually along the lines of 1. take class x, 2. study more on subject y, which focuses just on the knowledge portion of the exam.

Finally, there's a huge element of luck. 90 minutes seems like a long time, but there are five committee members, who usually take 15-18 minutes each to ask questions, with some slack for follow-up questions and for the committee to take a break between examinees. Because the committee can ask virtually anything, it's likely that you won't know the answer to every question. (One aspect of the exam is probably to see how you respond when you don't know the answer and try to bootstrap from what you do know, make connections from related knowledge, etc.) However, it's also possible that the committee stumbles upon your area(s) of expertise. I'm not sure what they do in such a situation, but obviously you're at an advantage for passing if you know the answers to all the questions.

Q: How hard can copy-paste be?

A: as overly complicated as anything else that comes out of the Mac BU of Microsoft. Hey Microsoft, stop playing around with multi-touch in Windows 7 and get some engineers working on very basic aspects of your OS and major software. (You'd think they'd have a better business strategy than developing features for 0.01% of their users when features used by 90% of the users don't work properly. But that's what you get when you have a de-facto monopoly on the industry. I mean, people still use Powerpoint instead of Keynote!)

Well, through trial and error, here is what I have discovered. Let's say you have some data. You plot it in excel and format it all nice and pretty. Then you copy-paste it into Powerpoint for your talk at an upcoming conference. Uh-oh, it doesn't work! Turns out, you need to go back, and save that spreadsheet in .xls format (previous version format). Then you've got to copy and paste-special as a Microsoft Excel Chart Object. Now your format is screwed and your chart looks like shit. No worries, double-click it, tell it to convert, wait a ridiculously long 5 seconds, and now you can edit your chart directly in Powerpoint.

To review:
1) you can't copy and paste from .xlsx to .pptx format directly.
2) when copy and pasting from .xls to .pptx, you need to paste-special (Microsoft Excel Chart Object)
3) the pasted chart needs to be converted before you can format it and for it not to look like crap

I had similar problems copy-pasting from pdf. Solution? save as png and then paste it in.

Now I know why the Empire stuck with plain TIE fighters

As they say, the TIE/D Defender's high cost was one of the major obstacles for adoption by the Imperial Navy.

Here, the LEGO version (coming out in 2010) is priced at $49.99. Which is a pretty bad deal, even for a 304 piece Star Wars set. Maybe Lucas is upping the price for the license?

I'm also upset with image showing two lasers coming from the cockpit. Come on people, it only takes two minutes to read the Wookieepedia page and realize that there are two lasers on both of the bottom panels, and two ion cannons on the upper panel. The weapons on the cockpit module should be the warhead launchers. Tsk, Tsk.

[Thanks to FBTB for the image.]

Digital Distribution

It seems to me that Netflix streaming and Hulu are pretty much the main players now, having large libraries that are either free (Hulu) or free with associated subscription (Netflix). Compare to iTunes, where you can purchase (or maybe rent?) individual movies/TV episodes. Unfortunately for me, I prefer physical copies for my media - much easier to lend to other people. (While I buy some games on Steam, it's a bit more of a hassle for sharing my account info. Plus, who still shares computer games?)

Anyway, the point of this post was to note how "unique" indie films pop up on Netflix. The last time this happened, I ended up with Primer. My feelings about that are probably best summarized by the relevant XKCD strip (http://xkcd.com/657/)...

But recently, I stumbled across Ink (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1071804/), which is rather amazing for multiple reasons:

- visual atmosphere
- great soundtrack
- ontological paradox

Physics do not apply in the Star Wars universe.

I'm not just referencing Solo's "Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs" claim, which can be explained away as a boast about navigational and piloting ability rather than ship speed. (Though there may be relativistic reasons for why speed would affect the ability to accomplish the Kessel Run in a shorter distance.)

In the latest BrickMaster (LEGO's magazine), there's a fake ad from Koensayr for the Y-Wing that claims "Goes from 0 to 2,700G in less than a parsec!" I was going to try and figure out what that meant, and then realized that 2,700G is acceleration and parsec is distance! When car manufacturers boast that a car goes from 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, what they are bragging about is acceleration, that within 4 seconds, the power is such that the car can be accelerated to 60 mph from rest. What the hell does 2,700G mean? (Besides the fact that G is meaningless in Star Wars unless it references a specific planet.) If we take G to be 10 m/s^2, then 2,700G = 27,000 m/s^2. At that acceleration, it would take about 7 seconds to accelerate to lightspeed. I'm fairly certain that's not possible in the X-Wing flightsim games. Hyperspeed, yes, STL acceleration, no way.

Why I hate MS more and more...

I used to be fairly positive towards Microsoft in the past: sure, OS X is a much nicer experience, indie applications for the Mac are polished to a much higher degree than on Windows, and the free (!) IDE in XCode is quite good, but Windows has to deal with backwards-compatibility, it is *the* platform for PC gaming, and sometimes Microsoft Research churns out some cool stuff.

Still, I find myself more and more annoyed by Microsoft's UI design sense (or lack thereof). Perhaps I have merely become spoiled by living on a Mac or become more observant due to reading Siracusa's rants (exhibit A, exhibit B). Yes, Apple doesn't listen to its own UI guidelines - everyone (well, anyone in the "know") admits that - but sometimes this gives us good things. (And sometimes, horrible abominations), but at least it has the good sense to make sure at least one engineer brings key interfaces up to new UI standards. (Yes, I'm talking about the control panel UI crap shown here.)

I feel like Microsoft has become a company with no guiding vision - some people work on cool things, some people work on the behemoths known as Windows and Office, but there's no one there with the bullwhip making sure things are consistent. Just look at the Office UI - for something that is the de facto office productivity suite, you'd think they wouldn't just up and change the interface on us. (but that's what Office 2007 did). And then when they released the next update for OS X, you'd think they'd fix things or add functionality, but instead they removed VBA scripting. And if the Ribbon is such a GREAT UI idea, why isn't it in Office 2008? Yes, I hate the Ribbon, but it's super-annoying when I'll work on something at school, transfer the file to home, and suddenly wonder why everything behaves differently. Formatting titles in Excel charts used to be so easy! I do like the fact that Office 2008 UI behaves more traditionally, but what I don't like is the formatting palette that is clearly an Inspector Tool wannabe. Do the people at the Mac BU not know how to make OS X native apps, do they just don't care, or are they hideously understaffed? (maybe all 3?)

One would think that Office 2008 would run faster than Office 2004 on an Intel Mac (because 2008 is a Universal Binary and 2004 is PPC-only and requires Rosetta). Nevertheless, I find that Office 2007 running on emulated Windows XP using half the memory and one core still runs rings around both "native" Office versions. (at least as far as computation in Excel is concerned.) Any version of Excel still seems to be faster than the Numbers app in iWork, though...

I already use Keynote for presentations, and Pages / LaTeX for word processing - can someone please make me a good/fast spreadsheet app so that I can put Office out of its misery?