Flying out of Stamford is a bit of a hassle. :) I try to reduce the hassle as much as possible. For those new to the city, let me review for you the choices you may have when leaving this fine city for JFK or LGA. (I disregard White Plains, even if it is more convenient. You simply cannot trust it to always be able to fly you where you want to go.)
In any event that you leave for JFK or LGA, plan to leave at least 3 hours before departure. The reasons will be most evident in a moment:
1) You can use the public transportation route to get to JFK/LGA. This is the cheapest route but the most time consuming. Both routes involve taking the Metro North to Grand Central. From there you can take a direct bus to either airport or use the public bus system to LGA or the subway to Penn Station/AirTran to JFK if you're really a cheapskate. Either route will take 2 hours if you get the express, 2.5 if you get the local. If you have a morning flight (<9 am) forget it; you won't make it in time.
2) Driving there yourself. This is a bit more expensive, and due to more exhorbitant fees for parking and the higher cost of gas, may not be the most economical for a long trip. Google lies and says that the trip takes 41 minutes for LGA and 50 minutes for JFK; however, traffic will double the length of time, although in the morning this is easily the fastest method.
3) Getting someone else to drive you. This is by far my preferred method. :) If you are without friends who will help you out (take the googled number in 2 and multiply by 4 and think again about asking a friend to drive that) then there are services that will drive you there and pick you up. I used to use CTLimo but now I use Red Dot because it's more convenient. Yeah it costs 60$ one way, but if you company compensates you this is a no-brainer, and it may be cheaper if your trip is longer than 2 days.
There you have it. The only ways to get to the major nearby airports guarantee that you will be travelling for at least 2 hours before you start travelling, or end up paying for the priviledge. Except for one amazing exception, I've never had problems with my flights. Feel free to send me whatever horror stories you have about your airport experience (especially if it was local so we can learn about it here :D) If I get enough responses, I may regroup them and publish for everyone to see, and in the process include my sole exception.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Thursday, August 7, 2008
On connections...
There are connections all around us! It makes our small world even smaller and more interesting. I'll now present two interesting anecdotes of this concept:
1) I have a new neighbor. Her renter's son's ex-girlfriend lives in the same complex and I used to work with the renter's son's ex at my previous job. After talking with her the other day, she told me that her second cousin also worked for the company that I work for now. My cubicle was across from his for six months and I had no idea.
2) Today the EPA rejected the bid by Rick Perry (Gov. Texas) to cut the ethanol subsidy. Ethanol is a curious connection between gas and chicken prices. Allow me to elucidate: Ethanol is used in 10% of gas, causing a drop in gas. It also causes a price increase in corn (heavily used in ethanol production), meaning that chickens (using corn as a food source) cost more for upkeep, meaning a loss of profit and a drop in the value.
James Burke is the undisputed master of such connections, and he had a series of shows (eponymously named) that dealt with these connections (if you haven't seen this series you must find a copy of it or look for it on PBS, it's really fascinating). He believes that the modern world would not exist without all these interconnections. There's also another cultural icon that relates to the concept of connections: six degrees of Kevin Bacon. The essence of this game is that through a series of movies less than six, link a named actor with Kevin Bacon. According to Wikipedia the game was invented by three snowbound college students, but the mathematics world did the same thing with Paul Erdos in 1969 and called it an Erdos Number.
The connotation that a connection usually "shrinks" the size of our perceivable universe is a quaint notion. I'm not sure how to prove it mathematically, because I'm not necessarily convinced that it's true. First we must define the domain of the problem. The closest concept to the "size of our percievable universe" is a diameter of a graph. A graph (our stand in for the universe) is a mathematical term for a diagram with vertices (points on a piece of paper, in our case people, places and things) and edges (lines connecting these points, or connections between people, places, and things). The distance between any two vertices of a graph is the number of edges in the shortest path connecting the two points. The diameter would then be the maximum distance between any two connected vertices.
Here's the crux of the reason why this problem (figuring the probability that a new connection "shrinks" the universe) may be hard. If you define that the distance between any two disconnected vertices to be infinite, the proof is trivial (and closer to human intuition), but this is a flawed assumption in an unbounded set of verticies (IE people, places and things will always be born, found, and created respectively, and new connections made between them, so the set of vertices between these "noun" vertices must be unbounded). It is more accurate to not consider unconnected people/places/things (vertices), meaning a new connection (edge) between them could concievably decrease the diameter of the universe (if the two people/places/things are already connected) or increase it (if the new edge connects two already well-connected "cliques" of people/places/things, such as the first contact between two cultures).
So keep in mind the connections that you make with other people. You may be making the universe larger or smaller as a result of your interaction. Whether or not that's a good or bad thing all depends on your outlook on life. Does it make you happier that we seem to live in a small world?
Edit: fixed an antecedent error in the first paragraph and removed an identifying marker.
1) I have a new neighbor. Her renter's son's ex-girlfriend lives in the same complex and I used to work with the renter's son's ex at my previous job. After talking with her the other day, she told me that her second cousin also worked for the company that I work for now. My cubicle was across from his for six months and I had no idea.
2) Today the EPA rejected the bid by Rick Perry (Gov. Texas) to cut the ethanol subsidy. Ethanol is a curious connection between gas and chicken prices. Allow me to elucidate: Ethanol is used in 10% of gas, causing a drop in gas. It also causes a price increase in corn (heavily used in ethanol production), meaning that chickens (using corn as a food source) cost more for upkeep, meaning a loss of profit and a drop in the value.
James Burke is the undisputed master of such connections, and he had a series of shows (eponymously named) that dealt with these connections (if you haven't seen this series you must find a copy of it or look for it on PBS, it's really fascinating). He believes that the modern world would not exist without all these interconnections. There's also another cultural icon that relates to the concept of connections: six degrees of Kevin Bacon. The essence of this game is that through a series of movies less than six, link a named actor with Kevin Bacon. According to Wikipedia the game was invented by three snowbound college students, but the mathematics world did the same thing with Paul Erdos in 1969 and called it an Erdos Number.
The connotation that a connection usually "shrinks" the size of our perceivable universe is a quaint notion. I'm not sure how to prove it mathematically, because I'm not necessarily convinced that it's true. First we must define the domain of the problem. The closest concept to the "size of our percievable universe" is a diameter of a graph. A graph (our stand in for the universe) is a mathematical term for a diagram with vertices (points on a piece of paper, in our case people, places and things) and edges (lines connecting these points, or connections between people, places, and things). The distance between any two vertices of a graph is the number of edges in the shortest path connecting the two points. The diameter would then be the maximum distance between any two connected vertices.
Here's the crux of the reason why this problem (figuring the probability that a new connection "shrinks" the universe) may be hard. If you define that the distance between any two disconnected vertices to be infinite, the proof is trivial (and closer to human intuition), but this is a flawed assumption in an unbounded set of verticies (IE people, places and things will always be born, found, and created respectively, and new connections made between them, so the set of vertices between these "noun" vertices must be unbounded). It is more accurate to not consider unconnected people/places/things (vertices), meaning a new connection (edge) between them could concievably decrease the diameter of the universe (if the two people/places/things are already connected) or increase it (if the new edge connects two already well-connected "cliques" of people/places/things, such as the first contact between two cultures).
So keep in mind the connections that you make with other people. You may be making the universe larger or smaller as a result of your interaction. Whether or not that's a good or bad thing all depends on your outlook on life. Does it make you happier that we seem to live in a small world?
Edit: fixed an antecedent error in the first paragraph and removed an identifying marker.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Now that's one way to lose those Facebook blues...
Wow, this is amazing. Ze Frank, master of The Show, Color Wars, and several other great internet art projects, has taken on a really interesting project. He assumed the identity of someone else's Facebook account. I'm not kidding, read about it here and here. It's kinda trippy and I think it's a great statement about the idea of an internet identity, how much time we put into our online persona, and the lack of freedom that results from said representation.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
No choice but to trust?
This is a somewhat heavy post. I put it here to get it out of my head.
I am by nature a healthily paranoid person. I doubt because I've been deceived in the past. This means that my world view actually factors in a bit of disbelief into its model. At times this is unhealthy; a distrust of everything eventually dissolves into total self-delusion. Therefore it is important that we do trust, but that we are very careful over what to trust.
I bring this up because of multiple recent events, of which I'll only bring up one. I usually work with a news station playing in the background (this is a good strategy for web workers to allay some feelings of loneliness that can occur from working alone at home during the day). So I was watching CNBC in the background, when a news alert came in, it was a report about a judgment in favor of Boeing. That wasn't significant, what was significant was the fact that it looped. The lady was speaking, and suddenly the "feed" started looping, repeating the same 4 words over and over. They had to cut away until they fixed "the feed". It seems obvious to me anyway that the remark was pre-taped; what bothered me about this incident was that the reporter in the pre-taping was pretending to be speaking in real-time, with a quick cut-away at the end.
This brought to mind the scene in the movie THX1138 when the lady is reading the daily news on one of the hovering televisions only to have it loop, and everyone shrug it off. For those who haven't seen the flick, TXH1138 is a dystopian (lol the spell checker doesn't like that word, dystopian) movie by George Lucas about an underground consumerist culture that prays to wealth ("work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and, be happy" is repeated over and over in the film as some unholy mantra). The move is pretty good for eschatologists like myself, but is only so-so in popular opinion. My point is that it's really depressing to see something in a dystopian movie happen in real life, and if concentrated upon it removes trust.
Trust is an important faculty in the human psyche. Without it we dissolve into insanity. Without it we cannot enjoy and participate in society. Without it no constructive thought can flourish. Trust must be placed in one's thought, one self, and in one's environment. Therefore, when I see CNBC loop like this I simply shrug it off. Not because it makes me doubt their honesty, but because I must extend my trust in order to be healthy. Extend by corollary: the concept of KISS and the belief against conspiracies must also follow from this premise in trust. Trust allows us to progress unhindered by doubt, and when it is betrayed it causes us to pause and perform cognitive dissonance. Trust assures us that many people out there aren't colluding to betray you. It removes paranoia.
I know all of this is obvious. Keep in mind that I'm a mathematician, and as such am distrustful of jumps in logic. My point that I'm getting to is that in order to survive, we have no choice as human being but to trust others, or to risk insanity, ostrichization, and oblivion. For some reason I felt it absolutely important to prove to myself this seemingly obvious fact. And it wouldn't have happened if CNBC weren't dishonest. It's a curious world when dishonesty spawns honesty.
I am by nature a healthily paranoid person. I doubt because I've been deceived in the past. This means that my world view actually factors in a bit of disbelief into its model. At times this is unhealthy; a distrust of everything eventually dissolves into total self-delusion. Therefore it is important that we do trust, but that we are very careful over what to trust.
I bring this up because of multiple recent events, of which I'll only bring up one. I usually work with a news station playing in the background (this is a good strategy for web workers to allay some feelings of loneliness that can occur from working alone at home during the day). So I was watching CNBC in the background, when a news alert came in, it was a report about a judgment in favor of Boeing. That wasn't significant, what was significant was the fact that it looped. The lady was speaking, and suddenly the "feed" started looping, repeating the same 4 words over and over. They had to cut away until they fixed "the feed". It seems obvious to me anyway that the remark was pre-taped; what bothered me about this incident was that the reporter in the pre-taping was pretending to be speaking in real-time, with a quick cut-away at the end.
This brought to mind the scene in the movie THX1138 when the lady is reading the daily news on one of the hovering televisions only to have it loop, and everyone shrug it off. For those who haven't seen the flick, TXH1138 is a dystopian (lol the spell checker doesn't like that word, dystopian) movie by George Lucas about an underground consumerist culture that prays to wealth ("work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and, be happy" is repeated over and over in the film as some unholy mantra). The move is pretty good for eschatologists like myself, but is only so-so in popular opinion. My point is that it's really depressing to see something in a dystopian movie happen in real life, and if concentrated upon it removes trust.
Trust is an important faculty in the human psyche. Without it we dissolve into insanity. Without it we cannot enjoy and participate in society. Without it no constructive thought can flourish. Trust must be placed in one's thought, one self, and in one's environment. Therefore, when I see CNBC loop like this I simply shrug it off. Not because it makes me doubt their honesty, but because I must extend my trust in order to be healthy. Extend by corollary: the concept of KISS and the belief against conspiracies must also follow from this premise in trust. Trust allows us to progress unhindered by doubt, and when it is betrayed it causes us to pause and perform cognitive dissonance. Trust assures us that many people out there aren't colluding to betray you. It removes paranoia.
I know all of this is obvious. Keep in mind that I'm a mathematician, and as such am distrustful of jumps in logic. My point that I'm getting to is that in order to survive, we have no choice as human being but to trust others, or to risk insanity, ostrichization, and oblivion. For some reason I felt it absolutely important to prove to myself this seemingly obvious fact. And it wouldn't have happened if CNBC weren't dishonest. It's a curious world when dishonesty spawns honesty.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Mysterious apartments and treasure hunts
Stories like these never fail to enchant me. Thank goodness there are more people out there in the world wanting to make life more enchanting. I may just leave a couple clues to the people who live in this apartment after me, but nothing so elaborate.
There are some people who know me through my persona firewall and would know that I love these kinds of treasure hunts. I have created seven of them in my lifetime, even though I only ran five of them and only three of those were solved (one was too hard and one didn't generate enough interest). I even got my pseudonym through the design of my second treasure hunt (the one I made too hard). When I was younger, I ran a few of them, and learned a lot of unique life skills and lessons through them, such as how to build puzzles backwards, how to keep people motivated to solve problems, and how to generate excitement. I even learned how to age paper in a microwave :D .
If you don't know what a treasure hunt would entail, you could go to the crappy Wikipedia page on the subject which I refuse to link to, or you could read about some real treasure hunts. The first one I was introduced to was the book Masquerade by Kit Williams. In it, people had to find a golden hare buried in the countryside, using a series of intricate clues hidden in ornate drawings masquerading as a children's book. It created quite a stir, with treasure hunters scanning the countryside and digging in many plots, some of them private property. Other puzzle books such as The Egyptian Jukebox and stories about fictional treasure hunts such as The Westing Game or Poe's The Gold-Bug fostered a desire to create one of my own.
My hunts were usually in a more linear fashion and involved more diverse puzzle solving aspects, some concepts of which I have liberally borrowed from books (I started one hunt with a puzzle very reminiscent of The Westing Game, where players had to match words together to get the next clue). There is a great movie about hunts of this fashion called Midnight Madness about the Luskin hunts in San Francisco. There are still a lot of groups out there that do these competitions and they pass the organization of these hunts to the people who solved the last one.
Nowadays the fashion has hit the web with the Alternative Reality Game, or ARG for short. An ARG would involve finding usually steagographed clues in web pages that would lead you to another clue with a hint that would make you find another hidden clue in an otherwise innocous site. TV shows have been using these to great effect; the ARGs for Lost (www.ocenaic-air.com, Find 815) used these to great effect in order to enhance the viewing experience.
Seriously, I forgot how much fun it was to run treasure hunts. It's a bit harder nowadays, with Google making it that much easier to look up trivia and puzzles easily mined by properly written algorithms. I could get involved in one of the more recent hunts and maybe use that to get my feet wet again. According to the Wikipedia site on Luskin's hunts, there are three that are hosted in the NYC area, and summer is the right season for these kind of adventures. I'll have to check it out.
(PS -- I just found out that the draft system posts in a way that dated by the creation of the post, not when the post is complete... so this post is actually a duplicate. What a dumb system!)
There are some people who know me through my persona firewall and would know that I love these kinds of treasure hunts. I have created seven of them in my lifetime, even though I only ran five of them and only three of those were solved (one was too hard and one didn't generate enough interest). I even got my pseudonym through the design of my second treasure hunt (the one I made too hard). When I was younger, I ran a few of them, and learned a lot of unique life skills and lessons through them, such as how to build puzzles backwards, how to keep people motivated to solve problems, and how to generate excitement. I even learned how to age paper in a microwave :D .
If you don't know what a treasure hunt would entail, you could go to the crappy Wikipedia page on the subject which I refuse to link to, or you could read about some real treasure hunts. The first one I was introduced to was the book Masquerade by Kit Williams. In it, people had to find a golden hare buried in the countryside, using a series of intricate clues hidden in ornate drawings masquerading as a children's book. It created quite a stir, with treasure hunters scanning the countryside and digging in many plots, some of them private property. Other puzzle books such as The Egyptian Jukebox and stories about fictional treasure hunts such as The Westing Game or Poe's The Gold-Bug fostered a desire to create one of my own.
My hunts were usually in a more linear fashion and involved more diverse puzzle solving aspects, some concepts of which I have liberally borrowed from books (I started one hunt with a puzzle very reminiscent of The Westing Game, where players had to match words together to get the next clue). There is a great movie about hunts of this fashion called Midnight Madness about the Luskin hunts in San Francisco. There are still a lot of groups out there that do these competitions and they pass the organization of these hunts to the people who solved the last one.
Nowadays the fashion has hit the web with the Alternative Reality Game, or ARG for short. An ARG would involve finding usually steagographed clues in web pages that would lead you to another clue with a hint that would make you find another hidden clue in an otherwise innocous site. TV shows have been using these to great effect; the ARGs for Lost (www.ocenaic-air.com, Find 815) used these to great effect in order to enhance the viewing experience.
Seriously, I forgot how much fun it was to run treasure hunts. It's a bit harder nowadays, with Google making it that much easier to look up trivia and puzzles easily mined by properly written algorithms. I could get involved in one of the more recent hunts and maybe use that to get my feet wet again. According to the Wikipedia site on Luskin's hunts, there are three that are hosted in the NYC area, and summer is the right season for these kind of adventures. I'll have to check it out.
(PS -- I just found out that the draft system posts in a way that dated by the creation of the post, not when the post is complete... so this post is actually a duplicate. What a dumb system!)
Thursday, June 26, 2008
I can ride my bike with no handlebars...
but I didn't think that I could split the atom of a molecule, since a molecule needs at least two atoms in it.
Or so I thought!
It seems that there's a disagreement on the internets over whether or not a molecule needs two atoms or just one. Some pages have dodged the issue by just saying that a molecule has as few atoms in it to guarantee the chemical properties of that unit. Even Wikipedia splits hairs, saying in one sentence that a molecule needs two atoms, but recognizes that some gases may be formed from atomic divisions of an element and that each division is a single atom classified as a molecule (such as the molecules in a noble gas such as Krypton or Argon).
However, I just think that the Flobots just didn't understand the chemistry or deliberately manipulated the truth to sound better. In any event, the verse sounds better as "and I can split the atoms of a molecule, of a molecule, of a molecule", regardless of whether or not the author was trying to foreshadow nuclear war as it is in the end stanza of the song. It doesn't matter; the song still rocks, and the rest of their album is also pretty good.
Or so I thought!
It seems that there's a disagreement on the internets over whether or not a molecule needs two atoms or just one. Some pages have dodged the issue by just saying that a molecule has as few atoms in it to guarantee the chemical properties of that unit. Even Wikipedia splits hairs, saying in one sentence that a molecule needs two atoms, but recognizes that some gases may be formed from atomic divisions of an element and that each division is a single atom classified as a molecule (such as the molecules in a noble gas such as Krypton or Argon).
However, I just think that the Flobots just didn't understand the chemistry or deliberately manipulated the truth to sound better. In any event, the verse sounds better as "and I can split the atoms of a molecule, of a molecule, of a molecule", regardless of whether or not the author was trying to foreshadow nuclear war as it is in the end stanza of the song. It doesn't matter; the song still rocks, and the rest of their album is also pretty good.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Long time no post...
...and this is where I pretend that I haven't been slacking for the last seven months. :D
Actually I have started a new job at TopCoder and that has been keeping me extremely busy. At the time that I post this, I'll have a few posts ready, so I will be posting regularly. Here it goes to posting regularly again.
Actually I have started a new job at TopCoder and that has been keeping me extremely busy. At the time that I post this, I'll have a few posts ready, so I will be posting regularly. Here it goes to posting regularly again.
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