Nothing But Words

Here’s something I’d like for my birthday – The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World. I haven’t studied a foreign language since high school, but one thing I remember enjoying was learning words and expressions that had no exact equivalent in English. From what I can tell this book is a collection of such words from around the world. Here are a few samples from a description of the book:

Olfrygt – how the Danish describe the nagging fear of being unable to find a beer while out of town

Neko-neko – the Indonesian word for someone with a novel idea that actually makes the situation worse

Tingo – in Pascuense, to take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by borrowing them

Kai has been taking karate classes for about six months now. For a while it was the the sort of thing where we’d have to drag him to class, but then once he was there he’d have a great time. Then, about a month ago, they gave the kids shin guards and boxing gloves, and for some reason that put him over the edge: now when he comes back from class we can’t get him to take his ghi off, and he spends the rest of the day having mock karate duels with imaginary enemies (or me).

It’s very entertaining to watch him in class. He’s so enthusiastic he can’t do anything in a normal way. For example, when asked to come to attention, he doesn’t just slap his hands to his thighs and say “yes, sir”, he embellishes it by first leaping in the air as high as he can. Also, he asks a lot of questions, which I’m proud of. The other kids always just do what they’re told, or do their best to fake it if they don’t fully understand. But he’ll politely ask for help, or ask questions about why they’re doing a particular exercise. Part of that comes from his own assertiveness and curiosity, but I think Maria and I also deserve from credit. When we talk to him, we explain things in terms he can understand, but we try to never talk down to him, or just order him around “because I say so.” I notice a lot of parents try and fail to make their kids be polite to others, and its because they are often authoritarian with their kids and not very polite to them at all. I believe kids behavior is more influenced by their parents’ example than it is by trying to tell them what to do all the time.

Anyway, as you can see in the pictures, Kai is also talented when it comes to posing for the camera.

I have a whole bunch of photos of Kai and Eidan to share. There are too many to post all at once, so I’m going to try to post them in sets over the rest of the week. Here’s the first batch.

An acquaitance forwarded this link to me: PTO Requests Model of Warp Drive Invention. There’s another post with some more background. Considering some of the other ridiculous patents that have been awarded (not to mention silly trademarks), I guess they figured it was worth a shot.

Is it me, or does the guy who runs the patent law blog look way too earnest in his photo?

I’m back to blogging more than a few times a month now. As I’ve mentioned before, I had to cut back mainly because of the programming class I was taking, which was absorbing all of my free time and then some. Last week I dropped the class, and at this point I don’t think I’m going to return to Penn’s MCIT program. It was a difficult decision, but there were three things that, taken together, destroyed my enthusiasm for the program:

1. The professor for the course – the same guy I had last semester and the same guy I would have had again next Fall – was terrible. so I won't repeat myself here.
2. MCIT is a master’s program that is specifically advertised as career oriented. In reality, it is essentially the equivalent of an undergrad computer science academic degree, minus the typical undergrad general ed requirements. Academic exercises like writing your own programming language (like we were doing in the class I was taking) aren’t the sort of thing you’d ever do in an actual IT job. But I have to fault myself here for just reading the brochure page and not digging into the course information before signing up.
3. I had expected to spend about 10 hours/week on homework, in addition to the time in class. But this semester’s assignments were demanding more like 20 hours/week. Trying to squeeze that in meant Maria had to take care of the kids almost all the time, which was unfair since she’s at a crucial point in her career (she’s tenure track at Villanova, so now is the time she has to shine in order to get tenure down the road). And of course, spending weekend after weekend sitting in front of a computer, with the door closed, isn’t where I want to be when there are two small children on the other side of the door who want me to come out and play.

I don’t have a really clear picture of where I want my career to go. I signed up for the program because I figured I’d stay in computing, since that’s what I’ve been doing for 10+ years and I like it, and I could get the degree for free, so why not? Before I make a final decision on whether to go back to the program later, or apply to a different one like Drexel’s MSIS program, I’ll need to first clarify my motivations, and think about exactly what I want to get out of it.

Over the past few weeks the news channels have been filled with a lot of half-baked, belligerent commentary on Iran’s nuclear ambitions – the same sort of talk that got us into Iraq. More coherent and thoughtful analysis appeared in the Nelson Report a few weeks ago, and I thought I’d provide some excerpts. The article consists of long quotes from the Carnegie Endowment’s Joe Cirincione, and Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis.

Joe Cirincione:

“…The same neoconservative pundits who championed the invasion of Iraq are now beating the drums on Iran. They all got the same talking points this week. On Monday, urging us to keep military options open, William Kristol claims Iran’s ‘nuclear program could well be getting close to the point of no return.’ Wednesday, Charles Krauthammer said, ‘Instead of being years away from the point of no return for an Iranian bomb. . .Iran is probably just months away.

“This is complete nonsense. There is no need for military strikes against Iran. The country is five to ten years away from the ability to enrich uranium for fuel or bombs. Even that estimate, shared by the Defense Intelligence Agency and experts at IISS, ISIS, and Carnegie assumes Iran goes full-speed ahead and does not encounter any of the technical problems that typically plague such programs. In the next few months, they will be lucky to get a test centrifuge cascade up and running. Hardly a “point of no return.”

“This is not a nuclear bomb crisis, it is a nuclear regime crisis. US Ambassador John Bolton has correctly pointed out that this is a key test for the Security Council. If Iran is not stopped the entire nonproliferation regime will be weakened, and with it the UN system.

“But it will have to be diplomats, not F-15s that stop the mullahs. An air strike against a soft target, such as the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan would inflame Muslim anger, rally the Iranian public around an otherwise unpopular government and jeopardize further the US position in Iraq. Finally, the strike would not, as is often said, delay the Iranian program. It would almost certainly speed it up. That is what happened when the Israelis struck at the Iraq program in 1981. Israel knocked out the Osirik reactor, but Saddam went underground, expanding from 500 to 7000 workers on a more ambitious program that escaped detection until 1991. By then he was closer to producing a bomb than he ever would have been with Osirik. It went from a side project to an obsession.

“Your other Loyal Reader is correct that we could not destroy it in 1991 war. Even 43 days of coalition bombing failed to destroy the program, which ended only when U.N. disarmament teams methodically destroyed the equipment on the ground. This is the lesson to keep in mind as simplistic ‘solutions’ to the Iran program come churning out of the neocon machine.”

Jeff Lewis:

“Joe is dead-on correct. I have one comment — I don’t like saying this is a crisis. As Joe noted, we have lots of time. More important, we are so focused on the question of when Iran could have a bomb, we underestimate the real depth of our interests here. The current situation, where Iran does not have a bomb — but gives everyone the impression it is moving in that direction — is almost as bad as an Iranian deterrent — the day in, day out haggling creates a slow, steady erosion of confidence in the Nonproliferation Regime…My advice, not fashionable these days, is to take a page from LBJ after the Chinese nuclear test. We need to act confident that the acquisition of Iranian nuclear weapons does nothing to enhance their security and everything to further isolate and weaken them. But our political system tends to reward the hysterical at the expense of the calm.”

After the Neloson Report excerpt, Steve Clemons adds:

In my own view, Iran’s nuclear pretensions are a direct result of America removing Iran’s chief antagonist in the region, Iraq under secular (and yes, fascist) rule — as well as from the sad fact that America’s mystique of power and capability has been greatly damaged by bogging down in the Iraq quagmire. When the perception of American power declines, allies are prompted not to count on the US as much and enemies have an incentive to move their agendas…

The only presidential candidate who has been talking semi-sensibly about the “realities” in the Middle East as they are and not in some fictionalized sketch is Wesley Clark.

While Clark believes that we need a great deal more diplomatic effort to redirect Iran from its current nuclear course, he also knows that one can’t deal with either Iran or Iraq in a bubble unto themselves. General Clark has stated publicly that America needs to do a deal with Iran. He believes we cannot manage Iraq and potential explosive realities in the region without buy-in from Iran. In that, there may be opportunities to appeal to Iran’s desire to be less isolated on the international stage and dealt with in a more dignified way given its size and importance in the region.

This is no proposal to appease Iran — and no call for America and Europe to “bless” Iran’s nuclear activities. The truth is that American military power, allied with our allies’ military capacity — properly and lethally constructed — should be in our “last resort tool kit” if Iran shows no interest in negotiating on any front… But the James Woolsey types of this era want such military options much higher on the list, without much regard for consequences to America’s overall security or the viability of its military and foreign policy objectives.

A strong, visionary U.S. president would go to Iran and do a deal akin to what Kissinger and Nixon accomplished with China… what is extremely important for US policy makers to know is that a replay of the mistakes that America made running up to our Iraq mess may finally be the punctuation point that ends America’s role as a globally powerful, mostly benign hegemon.

UPDATE: Wednesday’s CS Monitor had a good article that explains in non-technical terms how uranium is enriched, and why it’s difficult and time-consuming to build a facility that can do it.

Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the creation of ENIAC, the world’s first all-electronic computer, here at U Penn. An interview with Presper Eckert, one of its co-inventor’s, was recently published on the ComputerWorld site. I was fascinated by his description of the Harvard Mark 1, ENIAC’s mechanical predecessor:

It could solve linear differential equations, but only linear equations. It had a long framework divided into sections with a couple dozen shafts buried through it. You could put different gears on the shafts using screwdrivers and hammers and it had “integrators,” that gave [the] product of two shafts coming in on a third shaft coming out. By picking the right gear ratio you should get the right constants in the equation. We used published tables to pick the gear ratios to get whatever number you wanted. The limit on accuracy of this machine was the slippage of the mechanical wheels on the integrator.

And about ENIAC itself:

The ENIAC was the first electronic digital computer and could add those two 10-digit numbers in .00002 seconds — that’s 50,000 times faster than a human, 20,000 times faster than a calculator and 1,500 times faster than the Mark 1. For specialized scientific calculations it was even faster… ENIAC could do three-dimensional, second-order differential equations. We were calculating trajectory tables for the war effort. In those days the trajectory tables were calculated by hundreds of people operating desk calculators — people who were called computers. So the machine that does that work was called a computer… ENIAC had 18,000 vacuum tubes… The radio has only five or six tubes, and television sets have up to 30.

He also mentioned that back then Philadelphia was “Vacuum Tube Valley.” My neighbor, a man in his 70s, told me he use to work on re-entry systems in an office on Walnut St. I asked if he meant programs for people re-entering the work force. “No,” he said “I worked for GE, designing re-entry systems for astronauts in spaceships.” It seems that little of this technological legacy remains here. Penn’s school of engineering isn’t what it used to be (Penn’s schools of business, architecture, communications, medicine, nursing and veterinary medicine are all top 5 schools, but engineering ranks 27th). And while there are Lockheed-Martin offices and pharmeceutical companies scattered around the tri-state area, and Drexel is a good engineering school, I don’t get any sense that the city of Philadelphia does anything to capitalize on its remaining engineering and technology assets.

Over the past six weeks or so Eidan has gone from getting up just once or twice a night to getting up about once every hour. Maria and I have become massively sleep deprived as a result. It’s amazing how little sleep you can get by with, once you adapt yourself to it. I’m not suggesting you try it though: when I say “get by” I mean you have to avoid meetings (as you’ll definitely fall asleep just sitting around listening to people talk), you probably shouldn’t drive, and forget about anything that involves the use of medium term memory (i.e. you can remember last year just fine, and you can remember 30 seconds ago just fine, but anything in between…maybe not).

We went through the same thing with Kai, and agonized over what to do about it. The one thing we weren’t prepared for as parents was how to deal with sleep problems. It’s the one aspect of parenting where you’ll find wildly different advice from all sorts of people with “MD” or “PhD” after their name. The advice ranges from “cry it out” to “the family bed” and everything in between. Reading online parents’ forums didn’t help either, as we found they were populated mainly by parents who were at their wits end (and therefore probably not the best sources of advise), and by folks I can only describe as “family bed” militants, who seem to believe there is a special circle of hell reserved for parents who let their infants cry.

We started four nights ago with the Ferber method, and we’ve been making good progress. Eidan is down to one hour-long wake up per night now (11-12 last night; 2-3 the previous night). We would have started sooner, but Maria’s mom was visiting, and we didn’t want to keep her up (not to mention that she vehemently disagrees with the Ferber approach…).

Personally, I’ve learned that I’m addicted to sleep: give me less, and I want more; give me more, and I want more . Here’s to the whole family sleeping through the night by the end of the week!

Over the past few weeks Russia has been having its coldest weather in 50 years, with temperatures in Moscow “…hovering between 4 and 29 degrees below zero F.” While some have experimented with a variety of new ways to stay warm…

…many Russians are resorting to a more traditional ritual to stay warm: drinking a few shots of vodka. Sales of alcoholic beverages soared by 30 percent over the past week, according to the Moscow-based National Alcohol Association. And in the town of Yaroslavl, about 180 miles north of Moscow, an elephant went berserk and ripped his cage apart after zookeepers fed it a bucket of vodka in an attempt to help it feel warmer.