encounter with a Gophers legend

I was walking through downtown SF yesterday evening--down California Street, from where we're staying these days, near the top of Nob Hill, down to Market Street. I would've caught a cable car if one had come by going down, but none did--which turned out to be lucky.

California St comes down from Nob Hill, cuts across Chinatown for a couple blocks, and then goes through the Financial District. Somewhere in between Chinatown and the Financial District, I spotted a guy outside a hotel flagging down a cab. What caught my eye was that he was wearing a Gophers letter jacket.

Then I looked a little closer, and realized that it looked like none other than...Gophers great Miles Tarver.

So I went up to him and asked, and indeed it was Miles. He was surprised--seemed like he thought at first that we had met somewhere before. I told him I was from MN, mentioned the '97 season. He seemed like he actually wanted to talk with me. If his friend hadn't been anxious to get in a cab, I think we might have hung out.

He said he's working as a teacher in SF. I put it together later, that he was from the Bay Area originally--Oakland or Alamdeda, I think.

I should have thought to mention to him how a friend's game is modeled on his. Indeed, I might not have recognized him had I not seen his photo on Mark's desk a couple week's ago.

Jury duty! (+ upcoming.org, digg.com, and me teaching calc on the web)

Just found out yesterday evening that I have to report for jury duty this afternoon. So I've got to get to the Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant by 1:30pm.

That's about two miles from here, but knowing Muni, I'm going to give myself an hour. (Too bad the 19 isn't on NextMuni--I could have employed my new connecting algorithms for the first time!)

That gives me an hour to get some work done. I'm preparing a calc lecture for tomorrow. If you want to see me in action, go here. Or tune in tomorrow, 12:35-1:50pm (PDT). Assuming, that is, that I'm not stuck in jury duty.

Two cool information-sharing sites that are focused on social networks, both of which I came across in the past week: digg.com and upcoming.org. The latter I discovered just this morning, via this Flickr blog post. Turns out Upcoming is the newest addition to the Yahoo family!

If you get on either of those, connect to me: this is my digg page, and this is my Upcoming page.

Update: Shortly after finishing this post, I discovered how to incorporate the upcoming.org "badge" into the template for this page. So you should see my list of upcoming events in a table on the RHS of this page.

Lifehack: Emergency Preparedness

At some point over the last few weeks I came across Lifehacker.com, and subscribed to the RSS feed. (Once again, if you haven't done so, you need to start using some sort of RSS aggregator, esp if you spend any time at all reading blogs. I have been using, and highly recommend, Rojo.com.)

Noticed this Lifehack entry just now. I'd seen the linked-to NYT article last week, but didn't get a chance to read it.

Like many others, emergency-preparedness has been on my mind lately. We bought a big jug of bottled water a couple weeks ago. I also read another cool tip and started implementing it: keep some bottles of water in the freezer. In addition to having some more water around, you can move those frozen bottles to your fridge if the electricity is out, which will keep stuff cooler longer.

The other thing I want to get is a handcrank radio/flashlight. I bookmarked this site, which sells a variety of models. I've got my eye on the Eton FR300, since it also includes an adaptor for
handcranking a cell phone.

Lawn Bowling in Golden Gate Park

I biked to work again Thursday morning, and once again cut through the Children's Playground. But then noticed the Lawn Bowling facility just behind it. Which was an odd coincidence, b/c Arjun had e-mailed just the previous day that he wanted to check this out when we meet in the park on Sunday. So I took this pic for him.

golden gate lawn bowling
Originally uploaded by shooGu.

It's peaceful around there in the morning.

Measure spaces and measurable sets

Ina e-mailed that she was trying to understand what it means for a set to be measurable. Here was my quick writeup:

As the Wikipedia entry for Measure Theory says, "a measure is a function that assigns a number, e.g., a 'size', 'volume', or 'probability', to subsets of a given set."

Using the notation of that Wikipedia entry, which is pretty standard, the "given set" is X, the subsets are the members of a σ-algebra Σ over X, and the measure is a function μ: Σ -> [0, ∞]. So: a measure is a function μ on a σ-algebra Σ over a set X. A measure space consists of those 3 things: it's a triple (X, σ, μ).

So μ maps every Y \in Σ to a real number in [0, ∞], and μ(Y) is the "size" of Y under that measure. Then the measurable sets are just the sets in the σ-algebra Σ: all the sets that "measures."

Maybe I should contribute some of this to the Wikipedia entry...

Probability links: measure theory and sigma-algebras

Ina is taking a statistics course this fall, for which the prof recommended real analysis as a prerequisite. Turns out he's doing probability in quite a bit of detail. It must be b/c it's through the Econ dept.

So Ina asked me last night about the definition of a sigma-algebra. We were at Vesuvio at the time, so I told her I'd check my analysis texts at home. Royden has the material, but I figured it would be easier to send her some links. I e-mailed them to her, but figured I'd also post them here:

GooglePrint has a lot of material. Here is one titled Real Analysis and Probability that could be a good reference. But it seems like its aimed at readers already familiar with real analysis and probability. Probably a better option would be this: A First Look at Rigorous Probability Theory by J.S. Rosenthal.

It just occurred to me that I have Durrett's Probabilty: Theory and Examples at home as well. Another Cornell text that Amazon turned up, and which looks like it could be appropriate: A Probability Path by Sidney Resnick.

Amazon also led me to Billingsley's Probability and Measure, which I believe is a classic text, but again might be aimed for a more mathematically mature audience. It also led me to a couple more texts on stochastic processes (by Resnick and Durrett, actually) that I might need to take a look at sooner or later.

But to get started, the wikipedia entries for measure theory and sigma-algebra look pretty good.

Biked to work--finally!

Finally. I pulled the Tourmalet down off the wall and biked to work this morning. Doing my part to counteract the car culture.

It took me 1 3/4 years to finally work up the energy and daring to do it--but it turned out to be a nice, fairly leisurely ride. It helped that I was familiar with the route, from biking to soccer games in GG Park last fall: across 19th St to Valencia, up the bike lane, west on 15th St across Market, up Sanchez and Steiner into the lower Haight, west on Page into the upper Haight and into Golden Gate park. Cut through the playground, past the Carousel, came out where MLK meets Lincoln, near Kezar Stadium. From there, just two blocks up to Irving. Two sets of elevators--one up to Parnassus, the next up to our 11th floor perch. 30 mins door to door--about the same as if I take the shuttle.

Once I figure out how, I'll trace out the route on GoogleMaps. For now, I'll give you the driving directions, but it's not the same route at all--driving one goes over the 17th Street pass. On bike, I cut up north of Buena Vista, avoiding the hills.

The ride was so mellow. Sometimes i dream about SF as nearly car-free village, with the main arteries given over to buses and light rail, and the side streets for bikes.

O'Reilly's Web2MemeMap

Web2MemeMap
Originally uploaded by Tim O'Reilly.

Came across this via this TechCrunch post. Just added the TechCrunch RSS feed to my Rojo account a couple weeks ago.

AJAX for Anj

This link is for Anj.

It was #10 on this list of "Top 10 AJAX Applications" (thanks to Jason for passing that on).

I haven't checked out any of the others on that list. But I did start using another AJAX app, called NumSum. I actually started using it to do some calculations here at work. For simple spreadsheets, this is much prefereable to opening up Excel--and then keeping track of the resulting .xls files.

Web 2.0, people.

photos from 18th & Mission

Back in June I did a post titled "A walk to work", which was one of my most popular posts. (In that two people told me they read it.) I still haven't followed through on the idea of documenting the whole route photographically. But on Tuesday morning I did snap a handful of photos at the beginning of the route--the corner of 18th & Mission. Epicenter of the future gentrification of Mission Ave:

Our Mendo photos are also up. They're in a Mendocino 2005 group pool our 'keeper Todd set up. So far only our photos and the Marshburns' are in there.

But I'll post a writeup about Mendo soon, hopefully this weekend.

literary events

One thing that's been bothering me is that I go to less literary events here in SF than I did in Ann Arbor. Obviously there are obviously tons of readings happening every week, here in the city and also over in Berkeley, but I've only hit a handful the whole time we've been here. A large part of the reason is geography. It takes some time and effort to get to Opera Plaza (Clean Well-Lighted Place), or to the Haight (Booksmith), or over to Berkeley (Cody's), where the majority of readings happen. Unlike in Ann Arbor, where every reading was at Borders or Shaman Drum, both of them within two blocks of where we lived.

E.g., Dave Eggers did an event at Clean Well-Lighted Place (nice domain grab!) a couple weeks ago, but didn't make it up there for it. that is where Anj and I saw Amitav Ghosh in May, and where I saw Walter Mosley last summer.0

Anyways, the good thing is that the Commonwealth Club does a good number of literary events. Next week they've got Susanna Clarke on Monday and TC Boyle on Wednesday. I've never read anything by either--although I did receive a Boyle book as a gift once--but I think I'll go check them out. Might as well, since I paid for a Commonwealth Club membership.

Also, check out this science writing panel they've got coming up next month. Looking forward to that one.

Graffiti: Urban scrawl of artistic freedom?

That's the title of this panel discussion at the Commonwealth Club that I'm heading downtown to catch in a few minutes here. Should be interesting, esp since one of the panelists is Apex, a local writer whose work I've seen, both on Flickr and in person. Here's a photo of one his works that I took:

That reads "dream" BTW--a dedication to Mike Dream, as I learned on Flickr from otherthings (click on the photo above). Which is another reason this event should be interesting: I may meet otherthings, the creator of Graffiti Archaeology and a prolific contributor to Flickr. See, for example, his collection of Apex-tagged photos on Flickr.

VOIP: gizmo, skype, messenger

Just d/l'ed and installed Gizmo & Skype. Now I just need someone to call. Anybody out there?

Also, I've just discovered the fun of IM over the last couple weeks. It was only on Friday that I discovered that it's possible to send and receive text messages to and from cell phones within Yahoo Messenger--only on Windows though, AFAI can tell :(

But it appears that Messenger also does voice! And if I can get our dormant iSight working with Messenger...

Audioblogs - breath of life

I've been keeping up with the essential Soul Sides, but I've been sleeping on breath of life in the few weeks since O-dub referred everyone over to them (here). I finally got around to listening to this week's tracks while reading some of the accompanying essays just now (while trying to read about "The challenges of modeling mammalian biocomplexity" for our literature meeting).

I agree with Brady, the UI is a little wack. But it cool to have a player built into the site, and the words are good. Well, at least the ones I just read about "The Girl from Ipanema" Just listened to Archie Shepp's free jazz version...which segued into Goodie Mob's "Soul Food".

OK, back to reading about modeling mammalian biocomplexity.

GoogleMaps & Ajax

I wrote up this post about 10 days ago, but never got around to posting it. So really the post-date should be around July 28--relativize all my time references below to that date:

Another hiatus, this time 2 weeks. Actually I wrote up a post in the middle of last week, but lost it. It was my fault. I was going to use Blogger's handy e-mail-to-post feature, but I lost my draft in my mail program due to a misclick. That will teach me to compose posts offline in a text editor, as I'm doing now, instead of online.

I started out last week's lost post by simply wanting to record the Vietnamese sandwich spot that Josh took me to for lunch: Pho Ha Tien. But that took me into a long tangent about what neighborhood that is. Using the SF Realtors' Map, I found that it was the cusp of 4 (micro-)'hoods: Westwood Park, Mount Davidson Manor, Ingleside Terrace, and Ingleside.

But it also took me into a longer discussion about maps online. And today I found myself
proselytizing to some friends via e-mail for GoogleMaps. So I'll tell you what I told them:

Check out GoogleMaps if you haven't started using it already. It really feels like a new level of information technology for the web compared to the stuff that's been out there. Try it the next time you need directions.

Or go to http://maps.google.com and click on some of the example searches on the right, and start playing around with the maps. The maps are amazing: great rendering, nearly instantaneous zooming in and out, draggable for panning around, satellite overlays, businesses pinpointed (and conveniently tied to Google search results). Ok, just take their tour.

Coincidentally, just yesterday I read a bit about the technology behind this kind of stuff. It's been termed Ajax, for "Asynchronous JavaScript + XML." Even after skimming through an introductory essay by the folks who coined the term, I don't really get it. But from GoogleMaps, it does look like it's leading to a new kind of web apps--one which really are dynamic and interactive, as Google is advertising their maps.

For further reading on Ajax, go to del.icio.us. Indeed, even before I learned what Ajax stands for, I'd been noticing that Ajax-related links kept popping up on the del.icio.us popular list.

Postscript: I could go on and on about all the other cool tools Google has got going. Naturally, there's GoogleEarth, which has gotten some attention in the MSM (mainstream media). I downloaded it and played around with it for a few minutes. It is also amazing, but at this point it seems to be more of a toy than something I'll use regularly. But people are using it; check GoogleEarthHacks.

Beyond that, there's Personalized Google, which I think they have just added more features to; and GoogleSMS, which I haven't yet had the occasion to use.

Related to the last is one additional topic: "continous computing". It's the concept posited in a recent article by a writer for MIT Technology Review, Wade Roush, as well as the focus of this blog of his.

Rosen's "Praeludium" / TiddlyWikis

If you want to read what I'll be presenting on in this Friday's Literature meeting at work, you can view the document here. It's the Prelude to Robert Rosen's book Life Itself. Pretty odd stuff (esp when you remind yourself that this is a book about biology--a book that claims to address Schrodinger's question, "What is life?" I'm still not sure whether Rosen is profound or something of a very learned crank. But he does have one very good point--biologists are largely silent on that fundamental question.)

I'm really hyped about using TiddlyWikis--I'm going to try to do my Lit Mtg presentation using one, instead of PowerPoint or even KeyNote. We started one at work as a way to collaboratively write a draft manuscript about the model we're working on (actually, we're using a ZiddlyWiki for that, so we can store it on a server). And I created another TW Monday night to serve as a BookLog. Check it out.

Evening @ the Commonwealth Club & in the Mission

Yesterday--even though it was a Monday--was a good day, reminded me how good life in this city can be. In fact, the whole weekend was like that, but more on that later, hopefully.

But yesterday--the weather was glorious, clear, sunny, and warm. I went down and across Parnassus to the library in the afternoon to find a book ("What is this think called Science?" by A.F. Chalmers--got to read up on scientfic induction) and read a bit in preparation for the literature talk I have to give Friday. Felt lucky to sit there with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands to the north, Golden Gate Park and the ocean to the west.

Almost on the spur of the moment decided to head downtown after work to hit an event at the Commonwealth Club. Aaron Peskin, President of the SF Board of Supervisors, in conversation with the COO of the Club. It worked out perfectly--I used NextMuni.com to catch an inbound N-Judah, as if it was sitting there waiting for me when I took the elevator down to Irving St. Twenty minutes to the Montgomery St station, which put me (thanks to choosing the right exit--a key in navigating undeground public transit) right at the doorstep of the Club's building.

Some complimentary wine during the reception, a bit of browsing their nice library, one the 2nd floor above 2nd & Market--even before the event itself, I was thinking again that I really ought to spring for a membership. Where else can you hear speakers ranging from
Bill Frist to Steven Levitt to the RZA?? Each of those guys will be speaking over the next month!

Listening to Peskin speak about the issues facing the city was fascinating and stimulating. I took copious notes, which I really should go through and write up.

Afterwards, back down to Market and down into the Montgomery St station, but this time down to the BART level. Five minutes to wait for a train heading my way, maybe 10 minutes to 24th St. The plan was to meet Anj, Emily, and Greg at the Attic, just across the street from the BART station. I didn't get through to anyone's cell, so I took a walk around the block--down the Osage alleyway to 25th, across to Mission and back up to 24th--so that I could take a few more graf shots. Here are two; Check the rest in this Flickr set.

After a quick Bud @ the Attic ($2 on Mondays), we walked around the corner and had excellent pupusas for dinner at La Santaneca. Yet another little spot to hit in the 'hood for cheap eats.

Yes, all in all, a good day and evening in the city.

Graffiti archaeology

Capp @ 17th St
Originally uploaded by suman_ganguli.

A whole month passed w/o an entry! I've mentally been composing a summary of the past month, but that will have to wait, since I'm at work (and trying to focus on actually getting some done).

I did do a couple posts over at dillytaunt, our new (but so far fairly quiet) group blog. (Don't ask me about the name--ask fatmango).

I'm always pleasantly surprised (amazed actually) that some folks are still dropping in here and reading. Both Arjun and Simeone told me they liked my 'walk to work' essay. I would still like to follow through on that idea of making it a photoessay. A positive development is that (as of Friday) I've started lugging the camera around--check my Flickr photostream for my latest uploads. Quite a few of those are yet more Ukraine photos that I uploaded over the weekend (we've got almost all of them up, so we should finally be mailing out the link soon. I have also been meaning to write up something about the trip to go out with the photos, but that hasn't happened yet either.)

More specific to the idea of taking some photos of the walk to work, however, is that I started taking some shots of graffiti in our neighborhood. It's another thing I'd been thinking about doing for a while, but I was motivated to finally start after Anj pointed out this NYTimes article about the Graffiti archaeology site, which in turn led me to the Flickr Graffiti Archaeology pool.

The SF photos in the Flickr pool inspired me to get started. Check my own baby SF Graffiti set. I added that handful of shots to the Graffiti Archaeology pool, which elicited a comment--a mini-dialogue, in fact--regarding the piece pictured above. It seems the hype about Flickr being a social forum is in fact true.

A footnote: Flickr got mentioned in a couple NYT articles about last week's London bombings. This Arts essay in particular is primarily about how the events got covered on Flickr. I happened to take a look at Flickr's Hot Tags list on Friday, and of course "londonbombings" was up there. But as that Times piece points out, most of the photos weren't of the events itself, but one or more steps removed from them.

A walk to work

The weather has been beautiful here in SF ever since we got back to town last Wednesday (actually, I hear it was beautiful ever since we left!). This morning it was such a pleasure to be walking outside, that instead of turning from 18th St onto Mission, in order to catch the shuttle at 16th & Mission, I made an impulsive decision to walk all the way to work. It's only the 2nd time I've done that in a year and a half, the other time being sometime last summer or fall. I did walk home a handful of times last year, but I've yet to do that this year. (It was on one of those walks home last fall that I randomly found Mario playing tennis on the Dolores Park courts, just days after he'd arrived in town!)

It was a pleasant but somewhat sweat-inducing walk. (Thanks to the pedometer that Anj now regrets getting for me, I now know how long the walk is too: approx 5500 steps, or about 2.25 miles.) The walk across 18th Street, from Mission to the Castro, was nice. It was good to get out of the usual rectangle defined by our place and 16th & Mission that I typically walk every day. As I walked by Tartine, Delfina, DPC, and the park, it occurred to me how rarely I get over even that far. Also got to see the signs of 18th streets continued gentrification, and reminded me of this SFBG BizNews column about that topic, which I had planned to do a post about. I may still do a longer post on that--in particular, about how I keep thinking that the move of Fabuloid to a Mission
storefront seems like a significant one for the neighborhood: the first upscale boutique on Mission itself.

I kept going, past the glorious park (one couple playing tennis), through the Castro, up Upper Market and up into the the hills (what some call the "Swish Alps" apparently, as I read in last year's SFBG's Best of the Bay, where it
lost out to the Tandoorloin in the category of "Best New Neighborhood Name"). The views from up there--back across the Mission to the bay and across to the East Bay--are wonderful. (If you don't want to hike the hills up there, take the 33 Stanyan from the Mission to the Haight, or vice versa, since its route snakes through there. And you can even check when the next one is coming on nextmuni.com.)

One of these days I'll have to follow through on my plan to walk from our place to the top of Twin Peaks...it's not all that much higher. But I crested where Corbett intersects with Twin Peaks Boulevard, and then descended down in Cole Valley. This part of the hike I wasn't so excited about, I suppose since I walked nearly every variation of it when we were living on Saturn our first couple months in the city, and I was commuting to work on foot.

I'd loaded up the Shuffle with some fresh tracks in the morning, including all the BE tracks, which I'd just ripped. And as I headed up Parnassus, I had one of those iPod moments, where the shuffle algorithm's computation aligns with your time, place, and being: the BE intro kicked in just as I arrived at the edge of campus.

The weather being so nice facilitated a nice SF sort of weekend. Friday afternoon on Pier 23, followed by dinner in North Beach; Saturday on the beach in Marin, followed by La Taqueria takeout for dinner; drinks Sunday afternoon at the recently renovated Cliff House. It's been occurring to me how SF isn't oriented towards the ocean--the only times I see it
are when I climb up to the top floor of our building and take in the view. So this past weekend was a nice exception to that.

Postscript: Last fall, when I was regularly biking across the city and into Golden Gate Park on Sundays for our soccer games, I thought of doing a photographic essay of the ride. Should still do that (even though I haven't made the ride since early Dec; in fact, the last time was when I got caught in the Muni tracks at Church & Duboce and wiped out!), and also do something like that for this walk to and/or from work. I'd been thinking about how I should start carrying the camera with me.

Ukraine photos on Flickr

Now that we got DillyTaunt up and running (or at least jogging), I'm trying to figure out how to divvy up my posts between there and here. I think what'll happen is that most of what I was putting up here--the political, musical, literary--will instead go over there; and this will become more of the personal--the what, where, and when of me.

E.g., here's what's been happening the last couple weeks: we were travelling, to Ukraine and Istanbul. Just got back Wed night, and still getting over the jet lag. If and when I find the time and piece of mind, I'll write something up. (My track record on this is not good. I've only written up two days of our two-week trip to South America (here and here), and that was 5 months ago.)

I did start organizing the couple hundred photos we snapped. Got them into iPhoto, and also got two iPhoto plugins which will get me to finally start using iPhoto and Flickr: Flickr Export and Keyword Assistant. (Aren't these freeware/open source programmers great? I think I might donate to these people, if I use their creations as much as I'm anticipating I will.)

So started tagging our Ukraine photos and uploading them to Flickr. Check my growing Ukraine set of photos.