Cogito, Ergo Sumana

Tips for New Summer Interns

Sun, 12 May 2013 13:49:44 GMT

Three tips to help new Google Summer of Code applicants and interns, some of which all remote workers could stand to remember:

Never let yourself get stuck on a technical question or problem for more than half an hour. Take a break, ask questions in IRC or a mailing list, find a technical book to read like The Architecture of Open Source Applications, look at some other codebase to see how they do it, eat a meal, or do something else, then come back to the problem.
Never let yourself get stuck waiting for someone's reply for more than 2 business days (Monday through Friday). Escalate -- ask your mentor. If your mentor isn't helping, ask your org admin. If the org admin isn't helping, ask on the GSoC discussion forum, or email Carol Smith.
Ask yourself at the start of every day: what did I accomplish yesterday? What will I try to do today? What are the obstacles I think I will run into? If you ask yourself those three questions and answer honestly -- especially if you let your mentor and team know the answers -- then you will prevent long delays and help keep your morale up.

Sorry!

Sun, 12 May 2013 12:54:48 GMT

I am sorry, Lakshmi Singh! I am one of those people of South Asian heritage who criticized your pronunciation of your name. I was wrong and I'm sorry.

A Really Long-Winded Way of Saying That Maybe I Love Techno Now

Mon, 06 May 2013 01:04:36 GMT

That thought about music, love and transformation made me think of how strange and world-changing it is to find a new friend or author or musician or project or workplace and suddenly click.

They taught me in my management classes that thriving is a function of a person and their environment. That helped me to see things unemotionally. "Bad fit" really does exist.

Every collaboration will be particular, like all power and influence is particular (financial, emotional, cultural, military). You'll get leaks and emergent behavior, and sometimes you can funnel energy, but sometimes it refuses to be fungible. It withers and dies, misdirected, confused. Sometimes that joule, that heat is irrevocably specific.[0] It makes you think about lasers and firehoses, flamethrowers and kindling, and limited burns at the urban-wildlife interface, and how high the specific heat of water is, and how water composes most of our bodies, and the compressed energy inside anyone needs just the right conditions to shine.

Do you remember stoichiometry?

That was the bit from chemistry about making sure that both sides of the equation matched, if I remember Mr. Marson's class right. (I wish I still had that extra credit project, where I went through the chemistry books for names and phrases and just made up like thirty or a hundred puns from scratch and wrote them on posterboard.) If you have two oxygens, and then three more, on the left, you'll end up with five, in some configuration, on the right.

Stoichiometry is tautology. There must be a metric zillion idioms, spanning every human time and place, reducing to the identity property plus the forward direction of time. "If you stand in the rain, you'll get wet." "A hungry cat will look for food." They sound like something you'd program into Cyc. We have sayings like "recipe for disaster" and "prescription for catastrophe," but the chemical equation suits some surprises best as a metaphor, because love is chemistry[1], and because sometimes you are an absent-minded would-be scientist, putting two and two and two together and getting surprised when you end up with six and your hair on fire.[2]

If I stop by a restaurant often enough, I'll be a regular. If I work with people on something we care about, those people will become real to me and I'll find myself a member of a new tribe. If I self-medicate my mood with a particular album and incorporate it into the rhythm of my day, how is that not love? Why fight it?

I'm taking stock of my supply cabinets and my heat sources. The summer student's gotten the hang of safety procedures and requisitions and the rhythm of notes and meetings and R and late-night discoveries. I'm really just getting used to the idea that there's always going to be this lab here, that there's always R&D going on in my heart, no matter how polished the products and services I make a habit of offering to the public. That I can't stop growing and learning and changing and experimenting and compounding, that every once in a while I will run across something "new" whose existence was -- I always realize belatedly -- prefigured in the periodic table.

[0] I'm thinking of freshman year at Cal, Comparative Politics, learning about patron-client dyads, thick vs. thin relationships, the innovation that is bureaucracy, the impulse to rational-legalism, how attractive those clear roles seem and how quickly they blur in practice, how healthy humans resist not treating others as full complete people to love and hate and screw.

[1] The saying goes: lust is biology, love is chemistry, sex is physics. My take: I've always asked "what is love?" not as a hair-stroking poet by the river, but as a frantic sysadmin space-barring through man pages.

[2] But we are analog; we can't spec out our futures pixel-perfect.

Music I Listen To A Lot

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:25:19 GMT

The 8-bit tribute album to Weezer
The music that helps me get to sleep: Robyn Miller's soundtrack to Riven, Zoë Keating's One Cello x 16: Natoma, Ray Lynch, Clint Mansell's Moon soundtrack. Did you know Keating used to be an information architect?
Guster, Easy Wonderful
Tally Hall, Good & Evil
The soundtracks to Battlestar Galactica and Lord of the Rings, which together combine into an almost ten-hour playlist that makes anything epic.
Beirut, Gulag Orkestar
Steve Martin, The Crow
Everclear, So Much for the Afterglow
Depeche Mode, The Singles 81>85
Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Holly Yarbrough, Mister Rogers Swings!
Belle & Sebastian, Dear Catastrophe Waitress
Dar Williams, End of the Summer -- I think Seth gave me this album in the late 90s.
Regina Spektor, What We Saw From the Cheap Seats -- like so many, I discovered Spektor via the "Us" video.
Barcelona, ZeRo-oNe-INFINITY
Lawsuit, Kind of Brown
The Mountain Goats, The Life of the World to Come
Daft Punk's Tron: Legacy soundtrack -- Andrea Phillips turned me on to this, saying that this soundtrack has a freakishly positive focusing effect and helps her work. It's pretty good for me too.

Late last year, I was showing my colleague Rob the recent albums I'd been listening to -- by Daft Punk, Kaftwerk, and other electronica artists -- and mentioned to him that I was suddenly discovering that sometimes I liked techno, and yet had never thought I would, and what does that mean? Does that mean I am a techno person now?

And Rob said, "You're an everything person, you just don't know it yet."

I felt like an arrow of enlightenment had hit me right between the eyes.

I get anxious over the betrayal inherent in adaptation. To instead conceive of growth as a radical hospitality towards and nurturing of previously unvoiced parts of myself -- what a revolution.

I like movies and TV shows, I like books and stories and blogs, I love stand-up and sketch comedy, but music and travel are what I find numinous, transformative. They crack open new Sumananess that blinks in the light, unaccustomed.

"I think I would close my eyes the whole time."

"Thoughtcrime Experiments", Four Years On

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 22:06:51 GMT

Four years ago today, Leonard and I released Thoughtcrime Experiments, an anthology of original speculative fiction and art. It's still an enjoyable collection to read, so check it out. The authors and artists continue to publish and thrive, and I get to call them mine, but not in a creepy way! With Ken Liu especially it's thrilling that I got to play a part in the restarting of a career that's so spectacularly taken off. And how it delights me that Mary Anne Mohanraj has written a collection in the world of "Jump Space"!

I still stand by my conclusion from a few months after the initial release: to me, turning nonreaders into occasional sci-fi readers, and occasional readers into rabid readers, is a more interesting unsolved problem than curating and editing unpublished art and turning it into published art. I applaud K. Tempest Bradford's regular short fiction recommendations, for instance. But I'm superglad for the editors who love editing! Yay for writers, readers, editors, and marketers! And I understand making stuff better because I did it. You can do it too.

Breakfast Conversation

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:37:41 GMT

"You can look up [shop name] to get the address. They have a map and everything."
"Oh I already did it."
"I did it thirty-five minutes ago."
"Well, I did it about five minutes ago."
"Shorter Watchmen."

And:

"Man, Mountain Goats would be just the worst songs to put into commercials. But in your arms, in your arms / I buy vegan shoes..... Like, remember when Devo did those ads where they turned 'Whip It' into 'Swiff It'"?
"Yeah, but that's not surprising, because Mark Mothersbaugh has written a lot of music for commercials."
"Yeah, but imagine some Devo fan who doesn't know that, but to whom Devo is really important, and they see that, and are like 'Aaargh!' And, like, there were probably fans to whom They Might Be Giants is, like, an anti-selling-out-machine, and then they did the Dunkin' Donuts ads."

I am listening to The Sunset Tree over and over because I just listened to a great interview with John Darnielle, Mountain Goats frontman.

Yep

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 02:49:48 GMT

"Upwards of 12 people in a newsroom of 1,000 sometimes find their boss difficult to work with." "Brusque" vs. "does not like to waste time." "Can you keep being awesome & getting great results but also just be softer & nicer about everything?"

"Polite, nice, kind, and good are all different alignments."

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:24:43 GMT

"I had tea with the intolerable aunt today," begins Zen Cho's short and fast-moving The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo. (Guardian review.) It is so great. You can read it for free online, and then - even if you don't much like speculative fiction - you will understand why scifi/fantasy fans have been burbling about Zen Cho for the last few years. After you read it, check out the afterword and comments.

Naming Opportunities

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:39:51 GMT

"Additional naming opportunities within the Museum are also available."

Things to name include:

An individual flavor of cupcake in the museum café (would you like chocolate, vanilla, or Leonard Richardson Memorial Strawberry?)
A stair step
The donation box
A security camera
The ceiling (the plaque would have to be huge!)
A coathanger in the coatroom
A paper-towel dispenser in the restroom
A mannequin in the costume exhibit
One of the stanchions in the ticket line
The Asteroids machine
An exit sign

The General

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 12:16:39 GMT

Oh my goodness, Buster Keaton's The General is AMAZING. Aside from being a little pro-Confederacy. Seriously, there is no reason this movie has to be about someone fighting for the racist traitors -- you could just switch sides and it would make just as much sense. Anyway, it has mindblowing stunts, jokes that stand up, and a protagonist who (unlike Chaplin's Tramp) is a hard-working competent guy. It makes me so happy to remember the look on his face the moment after something wacky happens -- sort of a scientist's resignation. Recommended.

Early Morning Soundscape

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 11:32:46 GMT

Rain on the air conditioning unit.

The susurration of pills inside vials -- the few slow clicks of big gel capsules versus the quiet tumble of small solid tabs.

Birdsong, far away.

The laptop fan, and the rhythms of my fingers tapping at the keyboard.

My joints cracking as I roll my neck in a tight circle.

Inhaling, exhaling, then yawning as I turn to work.

Speak 'n' Spell

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 02:51:29 GMT

A sign that my brother-in-law is truly part of the family: he can easily spell "Harihareswara" on the phone to customer service representatives.

Aparna Nancherla ‏(@aparnapkin): "Success is people saying your name right".

My last name isn't the easiest handle for others to grasp (as discussed previously on Cogito, Ergo Sumana). But my sister Nandini is very much on her way towards getting movers, shakers, and journalists to learn how to say our name. She recently co-presented "the implications of survey results from 11 African nations that shed light on payment and money transfer behavior in African households" (video).

She's turned her MBA and international affairs expertise towards solving the new last mile problem. I am a sucker for tales of local expertise and whiz-bang technology joining forces, especially in reducing the costs of information transfer or easing financial transactions (Indian example, Russian example). And she's become one of those experts and innovators! Both of us are into pretty rockin', worldchanging fields, and we've actually made it to the points in our careers where we have interesting conversations about work (in between sharing travel plans, going over our mom's health, and complaining about Aaron Sorkin's sudden inability to write interesting women).

(Side note: I am not on Facebook, but every two years or so I check on a few of my high school acquaintances -- specifically on what they've accomplished in their careers. We've gotten to the point where some of them are high school principals, or HIV policy experts, or sociology researchers. Always a bit of a brainbend. Of course, then there are the ones for whom the most recent mention Bing can find is an arrest record.)

Anyway. They got over Deukmejian, they'll deal with Harihareswara.

Link Roundup

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 14:32:01 GMT

Ex Urbe's wonderful series on Machiavelli.

Lore Sjöberg on digital music.

"Concerning the nature of a woman of computer science".

Paul Ramsey simply explaining why it's useful for technologists to meet and work face-to-face on occasion.

Wikimedia technical volunteer outreach problems, diagrammed.

Mako is speaking at the Students for Free Culture (Conference FCX2013) in NYC next weekend.

Griping

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 15:19:12 GMT

I get sick more often than I'd like. Part of this is because of travel, no doubt -- the stress of travel and my inevitable sleep deprivation lower my immune system's defenses, and new exciting people pass me germs, thus achieving their marketing departments' dreams of virality. But I think some of it is stress and lack of exercise. I feel overwhelmed a lot, and the defensive reaction is to huddle on my couch with my laptop and dither. This is not helpful. Also, I live where I have to do a bunch of planning to get anywhere really nature-y, which makes it harder. And I travel often enough that I don't want to sign up for a regular group activity and then miss it a lot and burden my groupmates.

I want to come to solutions eventually but right now I just want to sulk a bit.

Feed

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 18:05:02 GMT

Last night I informed Leonard that there exists a TV show called "Say Yes To The Dress." He conceived of a reality/game show where mothers from various stereotypically-moms-overfeed-guests-and-children cultures make food and try to feed each other's children, and whoever gets the kids to eat the most wins. So, an Indian mom feeds Jewish kids, the Jewish mom feeds Italian kids, etc., etc. "Say Yes To The Food" was his original title but I reminded him that reality shows these days need "Wars" in the title (e.g., "Storage Wars"). This to him explained the success of The History Channel and its hit show "War Wars."

Infomania told me about "The Deadliest Warrior" -- surely "Deadliest War" could get greenlit? The research would be reasonably easy.