Interesting Stuff

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/08/18/BL2005081800744_5.html – this is long, but touches on a bunch of topics, several of which I hadn’t heard of before.

http://www.slate.com/id/2124603/?nav=tap3 – John Roberts appears to have improperly ruled in a case concerning whether the Geneva Convention applies to people at Guantanamo Bay (he should have excused himself from the case). Does this happen often? How would we even know? I think it’s pretty scary that you might have to question the impartiality of the judicial system.

Right. More later!

Some of you know how two weeks ago, I was all \ford{What I need is a strong drink and a peer group.} Well, that’s exactly what I got last night! Jeffrey, Emily, Amanda, Lauren, Diana and I went over to Lily’s pad to have a “we’re all 21″/”end of the summer” party. We started off the night with Smirnoffs, and watched some Monty Python, including several sketches with some biting social commentary, which was pretty great. After mixing a few things involving Kahlua, Bailey’s, banana schnapps, and some other stuff, Amanda and I beat Lily and Jeffrey in a game of team chess, which was kinda weird. I had no idea that Amanda was such a good chess player. It’s kind of sad thinking this is the end of the summer – Jeffrey left for Iowa State today,Emily went back to Madison (though she will supposedly return for the State Fair and RenFest), Diana leaves next week… and I’ll be back in Claremont in a week and a half. After a really shitty start (thanks again to everyone who wrote and cheered me up), the summer has turned out OK. Nonetheless, I can’t wait to get back to Mudd and see everyone!

Oh. Also, Jeffrey and I went to St. Olaf on Tuesday to see Michael. We went to an Indian restaurant for dinner and then saw The Wedding Crashers, which was pretty good. Michael seems to be doing well, though he hates his job.

“There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.”
— Arthur C. Clarke

Also, Hansford introduced me to Russian Jokes, which I find hilarious.

Müller returns to his office and sees Stirlitz kneeling in front of the safe. “What are you doing here?” asks Müller. “I’m waiting for the tram,” Stirlitz replies. “Ah, I see,” says Müller and walks out. “Wait a minute,” he exclaims, “how can a tram go through my office?” He rushes back, but Stirlitz has disappeared. “He caught the tram, then,” thinks Müller.

Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev are all travelling together in a railway carriage. Unexpectedly the train stops. Stalin puts his head out of the window and shouts, “Shoot the driver!” But the train doesn’t start moving. Khrushchev then shouts, “Rehabilitate the driver!” But it still doesn’t move. Brezhnev then says, “Comrades, Comrades, let’s draw the curtains, turn on the gramophone and pretend we’re moving!”

On one hand, I pick up a hand with Ace-Queen-Jack-fifth in both spades and clubs, and open 1S. My left-hand opponent overcalls 2H, and Jim passes. I think to myself, finally! a chance to use Mel’s Complete Count! (Mel Colchamiro invented MCC as an approximation to determine when to continue bidding after opening a 2-suited hand with no help from partner and interference from the opponents. The situation almost never comes up, but when it does, you get pretty confused and worried trying to decide whether to bid on). However, before I could get that far, my right-hand opponent bid… 3C. She had 5 clubs, and I had another 5 of them, finessing the crap out of her! I quietly passed, and the opponents worked their way up to 3NT, at which point I doubled. Jim lead the Ten of spades, and I saw that Dummy had the King of clubs and Nine of spades (note that I had the Eight) but Declarer had the King of spades. However, she held up on the first trick, and took my Jack of spades with it on the second (Jim had continued with a low spade, showing a doubleton, and Dummy played her Nine). We then went through six red tricks, and Jim started to look pretty worried about my double. At last, Declarer let the Jack of clubs ride around to me, and I claimed the remaining 5 tricks with my Queen-Ace of clubs and Ace-Queen-Eight of spades. We got a score of +500 for the hand!

That was one of our two top boards. We also took three second-from-tops and two more tied-for-second-from-top. Our worst boards, however, were merely fourth-from-bottom. Hot damn!

Sunday, much to my surprise, my old bridge partner Jim called me up. He had been suspecting that I’d be back in town sometime soon, and was wondering if I’d like to play with him again. This was really touching, since we had only really played together 3 or so times before, and I hadn’t told him when I’d be back in town! So I was thrilled. We went to the Tuesday game, which is really large because they charge a little bit extra, award a few extra Master Points, and donate money to some sort of charity/fund thing. There were 15 tables there! Jim and I played surprisingly well – I counted 1 big mistake that I made, 2 games that got away from me without me understanding what was going on, and 1 small mistake that Jim made (there were other things we could have done better, but they were pretty small). The coolest part about the evening was that we had absolutely no misunderstandings – certainly we made a couple bad bids, but we at least communicated what we were trying to say. This apparently paid off – we took 2nd place! That is to say, 2nd place over all 15 East-West partnerships (we beat every life master sitting there), and 4th out of all 30 partnerships present. In our stratification(which is only the people with less than 50 Master Points), we took first among the East-Wests and 2nd among everyone. We had an incredible 60.1% game (for you non-bridge types, 50% is perfectly average, less than 35% is abysmally embarrassing, and no one ever breaks 75%. A 100% game would mean that, on every single board, you got the best score in the room). This is the first time I’ve had a 60% game, and only the second time I’ve broken 55%, so I was absolutely psyched. Jim quipped that we should take the scoring printout and frame it on the wall. We were given a whopping 1.76 Black Master Points, bringing my total to 4.70. I can almost certainly make Junior Master by the end of the summer (that takes 5 Master Points total). This weekend, there is a larger Sectional tournament that awards Silver Master Points, but I’m going to be in Wisconsin at the time. Boo!

I think the reason Jim and I do so well is that we understand each other almost completely. Bridge partnerships are built on trust and understanding at the bottom, and good performance on top of that. Jim is only a Junior Master and I’m not even that yet, but we can actually communicate with our bids and discards, and this information allows us to each do our parts better than if we only had a vague idea of what was going on. I think this is why Sheri and I did OK but not great – we have pretty good performance, but we are a bit weak on the understanding and severely lacking in trust, and that was pretty frustrating. I wish I could find someone like Jim out in California.

On an unrelated note, I spent today hanging out with Hansford, who is doing an REU up at the U of M. We went canoing on Lake Calhoun (and Lake of the Isles and that one next to it and even up to Brownie Lake), which was pretty cool. Hansford had never been canoing before. He then came over for dinner and we hung out and played Set and Xactika and stuff. It was pretty low-key, but a lot of fun.

Can some one explain this to me? Why would any branch of Al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organization want to blow up a resort in Egypt? Last I checked, Egypt wasn’t really doing anything to combat terrorism and they certainly weren’t claiming to be a bastion of freedom (remember how the most recent election was fixed and had a lot of coercion surrounding it). I don’t think anyone would claim that Egypt had some sort of animosity towards the “Muslim world,” so that’s probably not a motivation. If these people were trying to kill some Israelis without Israel’s security forces and army wandering around, I think they could have done it in a much less obtrusive manner. I honestly have no idea what prompted this bombing, which is weird because I like to at least pretend I have a vague understanding of the world.

Dear Senator Coleman:

Thank you very much for the information you sent me about how you are helping to curtail Iraqi prisoner abuse. However, I originally wrote you to express my concerns over a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. I feel quite strongly that such an amendment would place the symbol of our freedom above our freedom itself, and I believe that this is precisely the sort of notion that our constitution stands against. Democracy is widely held to be the most tolerant form of government because it tolerates dissent and gives people the right to freely voice and display their opinions in a nonviolent way. If we start to ban such displays, we start to slip away from democracy and towards totalitarianism.

As one of my representatives in the senate, I implore you to do everything in your power to keep this amendment from passing. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to seeing your work in the senate.

Sincerely,
Alan Davidson
Edina, MN

For those of you who are interested, the results from the robotic part of AAAI are at this site. Ironically, it looks like there will be more work packed into these final 2 weeks than in the rest of the summer – we have to build a website (mostly completed), write 2 papers (we’re about a quarter done with the first one), make a new poster, and if there’s any time left over, do the rest of MCC and the visual odometry stuff. We’ll see about that. In the meantime, Ben and I have completely different writing styles, and it’s getting even more trying to work together. However, by the time that Ben, Mac, and I can finally agree on anything, it’s absolutely gorgeous (this is kind of how we wrote code, too, except that I gave in to Ben more often than I should have, which resulted in the bugs that we had to fix at the conference).

Oh! One more awesome thing that happened at the conference – on Wednesday, we gave a 10-minute presentation on our robot and how everything worked. That went really well. Two hours later, Paul Rybski (who was in charge of the robotics exhibition and works with Manuela Veloso on Aibo soccer) gave a talk about the Aibos in his lab. He mentioned that they were using a particle filter to localize themselves, and then said that he’d explain how particle filters worked, but the Harvey Mudd team had already done that. It was awesome!

Other than that, things are starting to return to normal, which is both boring and nice. Strangely enough, though, there seems to be very little in the news these days. I hope you’ve all heard that Carl Rove is purportedly the leak that revealed former CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name to the press (though there is some talk that there was a second leak from one of Dick Cheney’s aid). When he was elected president, Bush vowed to fire any member of his staff who leaked secret information. However, he has recently rephrased his stance to say that he will only fire anyone committed of such a leak. Ordinarily this is fine, but it is nearly impossible to actually commit someone for this offence. You have to prove Rove knew that Plame was a CIA agent, that this information was classified, that the CIA wanted this information to be secret, that he was telling this information to someone without the required clearence, and finally that Rove was doing all of this on purpose. Consequently, Bush has revised his position to be idealistic but not practical, simply to help his loyal servants (which would be permissible if Rove hadn’t committed a crime). Well, we’ll see what happens.

As Ricco mentioned in a comment to my previous post, it turns out that we won the scavenger hunt with flying colors. We took first place in the scavenger hunt, and Sony gave us an Aibo for that (this was unexpected; we didn’t know that there were any prizes). We also got a Technical Merit award for “Overall Excellence in an Autonymous System,” which I’m really happy about – all robots at the conference were eligible for technical merits, so we apparently beat Sparticus to that one, (though it got awards for being awesome too). We’re dubbing our awards the “ghetto-badass” award and the “holy shit – it worked!” award, irrespectively. As Ricco also mentioned, our robotics lab now has 2 Aibos, and they need names (the one we currently have is called something like AIBO1 right now). At first, we were thinking of naming them Homebrew and Budget (or various spellings thereof), since that phrase has become a bit of an inside joke for the four of us (perhaps only the three of us, since Ben was out of town when we wrote the abstract). However, we might call one of them AMBR (Alan, Mac, Ben, Ricco) instead, since some people think it’s wrong to call a commercially-made robot Homebrew. Any feedback here would be appreciated.

Wednesday night, Dodds took us out to dinner to celebrate. It was hilariously like he was back in high school – since he’s spending a year on sabbatical at CMU, he has moved to Pittsburgh and is living with his mother in a 3-story penthouse above an office building. To pick us up, he borrowed his mother’s car. We went to the City Grill, which was great, and we then rode an incline, to get an historical perspective of Pittsburgh (inclines are like trolleys that go up the sides of mountains). While trying to find a parking spot, Dodds drove for a bit half on the sidewalk and half on a gravel parking lot, and since the Prius sits so low, we scraped the bottom against the corner of the sidewalk, eliciting “OOH”s from the dozen or so people walking by. When we finally got to the incline, Dodds didn’t have enough money to pay the fare for the 5 of us, so he borrowed money from both Mac and Ben. We then took the robot to Dodds’ mom’s house, where he will keep it until school starts up again. However, the building was locked and Dodds had forgotten his keys. He borrowed Mac’s cell phone to call up and see if someone could let us in, but there was no answer. So what does he do? He scales the fire escape! He also claimed to have done this several times before. It was hilarious – he was wearing suit pants and a nice, collared shirt. Our estimed professor – climbing the fire escape as though he were sneaking back home after curfew. Mac had the foresight to recommend that we get pictures of this, which we took profusely. He finally gets up there and gets his mom to come let us in. Then, to pay back Mac and Ben, he borrows money from his mom! It was just like we imagined he would have acted in high school.

On the whole, this has been the best week of the year, and I hope to go to AAAI again next year. If you’re interested in anything remotely related to AI, I strongly suggest you look into going, too.

Also, we were apparently mentioned in Wednesday’s edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune (the 2nd page of the local section, I think). Unfortunately, we don’t have any copies of this paper. If anyone can find one, we’d like it, or a scanned copy of it, or something. On a related note, we forgot to videotape the robot scavenging for the judges. If anyone happened to have been at AAAI and taped it, we’d like a copy of that too.