Oscar Nominations

This year's Oscar nominations have been announced. You can find the list here.

Here are some fearless predictions of the winners (not who I think should win):

Best Picture: Brokeback Mountain (it's all about the gay cowboys); I haven't seen this movie and have no desire to, but I'll go with the favorite on this one. I have been meaning to see Capote, but the times I've been free to see a movie, I haven't been in the mood to see it.

Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote; not having seen the film, I can only rely on what I've heard.

Best Actress: Reeese Witherspoon for Walk the Line; why in Hell is Keira Knightley being nominated for Pride & Prejucide. I liked the film and think she's a good actress, but Elizabeth Bennett is not supposed to giggle in her pillow! She's supposed to be analytical and calculating. I heard that Transamerica is a really good film. I should see that.

Best Supporting Actor: Jake Gyllenhaal for Brokeback Mountain; because he definitely won't win for Jarhead or Proof.

Best Supporting Actress: Frances McDormand for The North Country; I'm picking her as a tribute to her work in Fargo (for which she won Best Actress), you betcha!

Best Director: George Clooney for Good Night, and Good Luck. (I almost chose Bennet Miller for Capote based on what I've heard, but I'm going with my gut and will just mention that as an honorable mention.)

Best Original Screenplay: Noah Baumbach for The Squid and the Whale.

Best Adopted Screenplay: Dan Futterman for Capote.

Best Cinematography: Dion Beebe for Memoirs of a Geisha. (I'm rooting for Batman Begins on this one.)

Best Editing: Michael McCusker for Walk the Line.

Best Art Direction: Memoirs of a Geisha. I actually saw all the films nominated for this category (the first of these on the list). I was tempted to pick King Kong.

Best Costume Design: Pride and Prejudice. Honorable mention for Memoirs of a Geisha. Walk the Line was nominated, but there were a couple things in there that I actually noticed during the movie of seeming anachronistic. Charlie & The Chocolate Factory got nominated here.

Best Music: Memoirs of a Geisha; this is from John Williams, who has again been nominated more than once this year in this category (maybe he'll win for Munich?).

Best Original Song: It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp from Hustle & Flow just because of the name (note the double entendre). Only three songs were nominated (this must be the "Blame Canada" rule or something, although I actually really like that song).

Best Makeup: The Chronicles of Narnia.

Best Sound: Walk the Line. (I've seen all of these movies too.) I guess I shouldn't predict their award based on the music, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Best Sound Editing: War of the Worlds. I really have no idea. The other choices are King Kong and Memoirs of a Geisha.

Best Visual Effects: King Kong.

Best animated film: Howl's Moving Castle; although if the choice were mine, I would pick Corpse Bride.

Best foreign film: Paradise Now; I've never heard of any of these films, so I'm just going to pick this one because it came out of Palestine.

Best documentary: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. I still haven't seen this and I really need to. The nephews of one of my collaborators once got nominated in this category for their documentary on blind musician Paul Pena and his visit to Tuva (yes, there are Caltech references throughout the film; I especially loved the native who wore the Caltech sweatshirt and the 'say hello to Feynman for me' comment when they were leaving because apparently everybody from the US knows him, especially when he's been dead for 15 years), but they didn't win. Also, shouldn't The Aristocrats been among the nominees? (I'd also add Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic, but that isn't really a documentary.)

Best Short Documentary: God Sleeps in Rwanda.

Best Short Animated Cartoon: Badgered. I haven't heard of any of these, so I'm picking on essentially at random.

Best Short Live Action Film: Six Shooter. Again, I'm pulling one out of my ass because I've never heard of any of these movies.



I'll revisit this after the winners are announced. Let's see how I do.

Caltech sports teams and their losing streaks

Here is a recent article in the Los Angeles Times about the Caltech men's basketball team and its incredibly long losing streak in conference games. (The Cubs don't have anything on us!)

I love the following quote from one of the players (who is correct, by the way): "And when we do [win], as great as it is for us, it's going to be more embarrassing for the team we beat. And all those teams know it."

State of the Union drinking game

Courtesy Arcane Gazebo, here is a link to this year's State of the Union drinking game that some of you may wish to employ tonight. That's probably about the only way to make this whole thing palatable, and Bush's address might be enough to drive a teetotaler like me to drink. (We have driving to drink and then drinking & driving. Go figure.)

The Monkey Police

An article recently came out in Nature about policing in monkeys. It's been receiving press in the media, although I didn't catch anything until today. Here is the abstract for the article:


All organisms interact with their environment, and in doing so shape it, modifying resource availability. Termed niche construction, this process has been studied primarily at the ecological level with an emphasis on the consequences of construction across generations1. We focus on the behavioural process of construction within a single generation, identifying the role a robustness mechanism2—conflict management—has in promoting interactions that build social resource networks or social niches. Using 'knockout' experiments on a large, captive group of pigtailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina), we show that a policing function, performed infrequently by a small subset of individuals3, significantly contributes to maintaining stable resource networks in the face of chronic perturbations that arise through conflict. When policing is absent, social niches destabilize, with group members building smaller, less diverse, and less integrated grooming, play, proximity and contact-sitting networks. Instability is quantified in terms of reduced mean degree, increased clustering, reduced reach, and increased assortativity. Policing not only controls conflict3, 4, 5, we find it significantly influences the structure of networks that constitute essential social resources in gregarious primate societies. The structure of such networks plays a critical role in infant survivorship6, emergence and spread of cooperative behaviour7, social learning and cultural traditions8.


Given that the second author of this paper is a friend of mine from grad school, let me also list the paper's authors: Jessica C. Flack, Michelle Girvan, Frans B. M. de Waal and David C. Krakauer. The first, second, and third authors are at Santa Fe Institute, which I am supposed to be visiting at some point. My friend is apparently working very close with observationalists now (her thesis was in network theory and one of the papers that came out of it has become quite seminal).

D & D scheduling for weekend of 2/3

I should be free all weekend. Just let me know when we're playing.

Woody Allen's "Strung Out"

In 2003, Woody Allen wrote a hilarious article in The New Yorker called "Strung Out", which was later reprinted with permission in APS News in their 'Lighter Side of Physics' column. This caused quite a fuss because of the article's sexual content and APS News even ended up apologizing for printing it. Personally, they should have stood behind it. The article is damn funny, and some people just need to get a grip. Seriously, how can one dis any article that includes the following sentence: "All I knew was that I wanted to wrap my weak-gauge bosons around her gluons, slip through a wormhole, and do some quantum tunnelling."

Enjoy!

Somebody's trying to get an Ig Nobel

Here's a headline from today's New York Times: Scientists Find Gene That Controls Type of Earwax in People.

Here's an excerpt from the article:


"Earwax comes in two types, wet and dry. The wet form predominates in Africa and Europe, where 97 percent or more of people have it, and the dry form among East Asians. The populations of South and Central Asia are roughly half and half. By comparing the DNA of Japanese with each type, the researchers were able to identify the gene that controls which type a person has, they report in today's issue of Nature Genetics.

"They then found that the switch of a single DNA unit in the gene determines whether a person has wet or dry earwax. The gene's role seems to be to export substances out of the cells that secrete earwax. The single DNA change deactivates the gene and, without its contribution, a person has dry earwax."


Towards the end of the article, we have the following sentence:


"They write that earwax type and armpit odor are correlated, since populations with dry earwax, such as those of East Asia, tend to sweat less and have little or no body odor, while the wet earwax populations of Africa and Europe sweat more and so may have more body odor."


Isn't science wonderful? Anyway, I think we may have a winner here.

Saving Fish From Drowning

A couple weeks ago, I finished this new book by Amy Tan, which just came out a little while ago. I saw it for the first time in mid November and immediately bought it because of my past enjoyment of her novels. I discovered her when we had to read The Joy Luck Club for Academic Decathlon and I enjoyed it so much that I kept reading her novels (well, not the children's stuff she wrote).

This particular book was quite a departure from her previous ones, and I'm unhappy to say that it wasn't a good novel. I finished only because I'm anal and believe in finishing every book I start. Tan dropped the mostly light-hearted tone of her previous books, although there were occasionally snippets of humor here and decided to write about an ill-fated trip to Burma (based on real events) rather than on the experiences of Chinese-American families which drew very well on her own background (presumably, some of that stuff had some very loose basis in episodes from her life and those of people she knos) and were all quite enjoyable. This book, on the other hand, was tedious and I never got into it at all. The characters were all fake, and it wasn't just that they had flaws but were still likable. They were reminiscent of the type of fake person I saw all the time growing up in Beverly Hills, and I really can't sympathize with such people. Many of Tan's characters in her other novels were as insecure as the ones here, but somehow they could be likable and Tan didn't endeavor to take things too seriously the way she seemed to here.

Here is a link to the Amazon page for the novel, which I am including because of the reviews it contains. Apparently, I am not the only one who was grievously disappointed by this book.

Before this book, I automatically bought new fiction by Amy Tan (except for the stuff written for children) when it came out, but now I'm definitely going to check things out before I make the purchase. This novel was a complete dud. (Now I'm reading the third book in the Death Gate cycle, which is much better and is helping me wash the bad taste from my mouth.)

One more comment on last night's play

I completely forgot to mention that we had dinner in Old Pas after the play in a restaurant located in the building (at 35 South Raymond) in which I believe the playhouse where we saw the play last night was originally housed. Isn't it ironic, dontcha' think?

"Arsenic and Old Lace"

This evening, I saw "Arsenic and Old Lace" with fellow CPA members at the Knightsbridge Theatre in Los Angeles. (Going to plays in small venues can be pretty cool.) This play was performed in its traditional manner (as opposed to being updated for the 00s). The movie of the same name was based on it.

Anyway, the play was an enjoyable dark comedy, which definitely was the right kind of play for my current mood. I like dark comedies anyway (though when I'm in certain mood, I seek them out even more than usual), and morbidity was the order of the day. A couple Loreena McKennitt songs were playing while we were in the waiting room, although as it turns out they were accompanying some ad being played by DVD that was on infinite repeat. (Still, when I enter a play and I hear Loreena, I take it as a positive sign.)

A couple of the play's actors have been in commercials or had (very) brief roles in movies (like as a dancer in the background of one scene). One person's bio advertised how he had played a transexual on the 100th episode of CSI.

There were a couple characters who had the Tom Lehreresque opinion that poisoning people is ok but fibbing is a sin (although this play was written before Lehrer sang "The Irish Ballad", which was an 'ancient' Irish ballad that was written a few years before he started singing it). These were a pair of giggling old sisters, who were giggling like schoolgirls throughout the entire play (the teeheeing got on my nerves a bit; to borrow some words from Harlan Ellison, it was so saccharine that I thought I might get diabetes from listening to it) even when they were talking about their murdered victims, whom they always gave proper Christian burials as they buried them in their cellar.

Anyway, I enjoyed the play a lot.

Today's fortunes

This is reminiscent of a series of e-mails I used to send to The Usual Bastards back when we were still regularly in touch. (Alas, most of us drifted apart. Sigh... This is what is so impressive about The Three Musketeers, to resurrect an old name that most of you probably never heard. You guys succeeded where we failed. I do still keep in touch to some degree with some of the old gang, but sometimes one thinks something is "forever" when it turns out to be all too short.)

Anyway, on to happier things---by which I mean fortunes!

Only one of mine tonight was really good, although I'll share all of them anyway. Here's the one I really like:

"A thrilling time ahead; be in your guard." (And it even rhymes! Damn, that's awesome!)

"You will have no problem in your home."

"You will take a chance in something in the near future."

"In love you could shine as a brilliant star." (And this last fortune duplicated something I only remember catching once before: Many fortunes in the US include suggested lottery numbers. This one has the usual six numbers, except that two of them are 43. Oops.)

Why hasn't he been eaten by a grue yet?

Courtesy Justin Howell, here is Defective Yeti's Infocom (text adventure) version of the Iraqi invasion. It's awesome, so enjoy!

Celtic Woman's cover of "Orinoco Flow"

I've been enjoying this song so much that it deserves its own post.

This cover of "Orinoco Flow" (my favorite Enya song) was released in 2005 as part of the self-titled album by Celtic Woman. (Despite the album title, there are several women in the group, so it's really an ensemble.) I didn't actually hear the song until this year, so it's the early leading contender for 2006's song of the year.

While I really like a few of the Ladytron songs to which I've recently been introduced ("Beauty*2", in particular), this version of "Orinoco Flow" is an exceptionally good reinterpretation of the song. (One of the reasons I love this song so much is that it took a song I love in the first place and reinterpreted into something I also love. That is worlds better than an awesome cover that doesn't do any reinterpretation and [obviously] kicks the living crap out of a bad or mediocre cover.) Having an ensemble sing this song is really cool where one has one person (with a beautiful voice) singing some of the lyrics and then the whole group answers her.

Anyway, the concise way to express myself is that this song just makes me happy when I hear. It's that awesome.

Summary of "Town Hall" Meeting

One of the students writing a SURF proposal to work with me this summer kindly provided the link to a summary of the 1/25 Town Hall Meeting that one of his friends wrote. You can find that here. Apparently, a video of this will also be posted eventually.

Caltech's Town Hall Meeting (today)

I had read previously in The Tech that there was going to be a Town Hall Meeting on campus today with some Admins to discuss some of the undergrad concerns with them (and likely to give them bs, but that wouldn't be new). This morning, I received an e-mail (that was sent to the entire Caltech community, although I actually know the sender from my ping pong class---one of the few undergrads I know) asking that other members of the Caltech community show up to support the undergrads.

While I'll admit I'm tempted to show up, I also don't think it's my place to show up---I think that showing up would go perilously close to attempts to recapture my Caltech childhood which I promised myself I wouldn't try to recapture. (This was part of the reason I felt it was better that I go somewhere else for grad school, and my decision between Cornell and Caltech back then came down to the very last day.)

What I what like to do here is to offer my support to the current generation of undergrads in their attempts to fight The Man (aka, The Administration). While I don't agree with everything they wrote and feel that some components of this morning's message lacked perspective (among other things, the message is written as if such things haven't happened before), I do support them on general principles. (There is also one thing that comes to mind where I don't agree that they're getting screwed over, but there are some where I definitely agree with them---the very expensive board program going to 7 days is the one that particularly comes to mind.) So while I don't feel comfortable going to today's Town Hall Meeting, I am offering this message in support of the current undergrads' fight to prevent the inevitable (I'm ever the optimist, huh?).

I don't have the e-mail anymore that apparently has a url where the undergrads have listed their grievances. I couldn't find the url, so if anybody still has that e-mail and can give me the URL, I would like to link to it here.

Dynamics of 'the wave'

Just posted on the arXiv (the second author is definitely well-known in the complex systems community and the I've seen the first one's name at least a few times as well) is a paper on the dynamics of 'the wave', that insidious thing that people do in baseball stadiums instead of actually watching the game. Here is the abstract:


An interesting example for collective decision making is the so-called Mexican wave during which the spectators in a stadium leap to their feet with their arms up and then sit down again following those to their left (right) with a small delay. Here we use a simple, but realistic model to explain how the combination of the local and global interactions of the spectators produces a breaking of the symmetry resulting in the replacement of the symmetric solution -- containing two propagating waves -- by a single wave moving in one of the two possible directions. Our model is based on and compared to the extensive observations of volunteers filling out the related questionnaire we have posted on the Internet. We find that, as a function of the parameter controlling the strength of the global interactions, the transition to the single wave solution has features reminiscent of discontinuous transitions. After the spontaneous symmetry breaking the two directions of propagation are still statistically equivalent. We investigate also how this remaining symmetry is broken in real stadia by a small asymmetrical term in the perception of spectators.


I've never seen this called the "Mexican" wave before. It's interesting that they decided to present this as a spontaneous symmetry-breaking phenomenon, as that way of looking at this situation has occurred to me before. Alas, I have been beaten to the punch as far as actually doing the work is concerned.

The question to ask now is which journal will be publishing this study. The one saying who is the center of the Marvel Comics universe appeared in PRE and the one on the community structure of rappers has now been accepted by Journal of Statistical Mechanics.

Mmm... vampires

I saw Underworld: Evolution with a friend today. I had been waiting for this movie eagerly ever since I found out about the early 06 release date a few months ago. Actually, I had heard a while back that there was going to be a sequel to Underworld, which I enjoyed immensely. The second movie is extremely good, but I like the first one better---essentially, this is a novelty issue. They left a ton of room for a third movie, and back in the day (when the first one was in theatres), I remember reading that this was supposed to be a trilogy from the beginning. (I just looked it up on the IMDB entry for the first movie, and it looks like that is supposed to be a prequel.) This time, I thankfully had a chance to see the film in the theatre rather than on video. (I was really busy and it flew in and out of the Atlanta theatres before I could see it.)

The movie could certainly be gory at times. Jaws, heads, etc. were ripped off and there was even a death by being skewered by one's own appendage (just a smidgeon before the helicopter blades finish the job). The boss characters died too easily, and the mythos they have has some holes in it. (They seem to be a bit confused as to what occurred when at times.) The most amusing inconsistency (though a very minor one) starts when the main vampiress Selene remarks about having exhiled someone to a monastary (now serving as a prison) 300 years earlier and that she and Michael would likely be the first people that person has seen since then. They arrive at the place, and Selene says something like 'I don't remember that chain-link fence being there before.' (This was not said in a sarcastic manner. She said it like she was there recently and the fence just popped up, as opposed to there being 300 years for that to happen.)

Anyway, the flick is very cool. White Wolf still isn't being acknowledged anywhere. Here is their original press release over their lawsuit after the first movie came out. The wikipedia entry doesn't indicate any resolution for the lawsuit, so I guess this part of the story remains to be unfolded.

The Legend of the Porno Master is alive and well...

Thanks to Justin Howell for pointing this out, as I hadn't yet gotten a chance to read this week's issue of The Tech.

Anyway, a bunch of people have been writing some opinion pieces over the past few weeks. Their title hurts their cause, but in the last couple weeks, they have started to progress from rantings to more logical essays. Their point this week is that Lloyd controls the ASCIT BoD and the BoC, which (as Justin correctly points out) has always been true at least dating back to when I came to Tech and likely dating back longer. Maria Satterwhite '98 was (very amusingly) once called "The BoC Queen" in The Tech. I'm not sure the current studies realize how long this has been true, but that's beside the point.

Here I quote the article: "The seniors do pass down myths of a time when Lloyd-grade referred to the finest product available rather than a type of feminine hygiene product and of the ancient Lloydies, such as Nate Lewis, Tim Elling, and Mason Porter, but no evidence of that once thriving civilization remains."

I knew my legendary status outlasted my (first) time at Tech, but I didn't know that Tim had become a legend too! It's worth mentioning, that all three of us are currently on campus, so I imagine that helps spur or restart stories. How can they discuss Lloyd legends without mentioning Slayer (who almost won or at least got a lot of votes for a couple ASCIT offices via write-in votes several years after he left)? The Lloyd-grade stuff is pretty old at this point---it predates me, so it's really ancient history (it's from the 70s, I believe).

Another thing to mention here is the wikipedia entry on Lloyd House, which mentions both Slayer and the Porno Master as famous Lloydies.

March Meeting abstract

I'll copy Gazebo and show my March Meeting abstract:

Session V33: Focus Session: Social Networks
11:15 AM–2:03 PM, Thursday, March 16, 2006
Baltimore Convention Center - 336

Sponsoring Unit: GSNP
Chair: Alessandro Vespignani, Indiana University

Abstract: V33.00006 : A Network Analysis of Committees in the United States House of Representatives
12:39 PM–12:51 PM

Author: Mason Porter (Caltech)


Network theory provides a powerful tool for the representation and analysis of complex systems of interacting agents. Here we investigate the networks of committee and subcommittee assignments in the United States House of Representatives from the 101st--108th Congresses, with committees connected according to ``interlocks'' or common membership. We examine the House's community structure using several algorithms and reveal strong links between different committees as well as the intrinsic hierarchical structure within the House as a whole. We show additionally that structural changes, including a tighter community structure, resulted from the 1994 elections, in which the Republican party earned majority status in the House for the first time in more than forty years. In this work, we combine our network theory approach with analysis of roll call votes using singular value decomposition and successfully uncover political and organizational correlations between committees in the House without the need to incorporate other political information. This is joint work with A.J. Friend, Peter Mucha, Mark Newman, and Casey Warmbrand.



The chair of the session is actually somebody well-known in the field who it would be extremely good for me to meet. There are also plenty of other relevant people who will be at the meeting and likely at this session, so this should be quite productive. (I think many of them have actually heard about our first paper on this topic, but the conversations will still be very important.)

Because of lack of time, I won't actually be saying much about the so-called "Republican Revolution" of 1994 (this is pretty much for the official name of it at this point; we're stuck here; I think Newt coined the phrase), but one can see mathematically that there were changes and one can even track certain trends over time for each subsequent Republican-controlled Congress. You can see the short version of this paper here. We hope to submit the archival sequel to this short paper soon (perhaps as early as this month); we are in the final drafting stages.

D & D scheduling for weekend of 1/27

I am available Friday night, Sunday, and Monday.

Saturday is ok late after I get back from a play I am seeing, which should mean after something like 9pm. (Hence, it's really better for me to play on one of the other days.)

My proposal is the following: We play D & D (Tim's campaign, I assume) either Friday or Sunday and we have a more general gaming day at my crib on Monday (as it's an Institute holiday, we might as well game). I haven't played Apples to Apples for a while, and I want to play the game Mike got again. There are also other games I'd like to try, etc.