catching a moment

Sun - January 23, 2005

Quote of the Day

"tag superpositions solve the problem of hierarchy and polysemy in folksonymous systems without abandoning the flexibility of a bottom-up emergent domain vocabulary." Maciej Ceglowski, delicious-discuss, 1/11/2005, 9:57PM PST

Posted at 11:30 PM Entry | | |

Mon - December 20, 2004

Del.icio.us Web

I still remember how I was blown away when I checked out DEC's AltaVista search engine for the first time almost 10 years ago. Up to that point bookmarks were the most important navigation instrument and people used to exchange new discoveries by email: the cooler your friends the cooler your bookmarks. For a while you could even buy real, physical paper books listing bookmarks. Then, when AltaVista search started to suck, Google's "I feel lucky" search jumped in. Google's PageRanking proved to be so good that I didn't really need bookmarks anymore. I just needed to remember a good search term to retrieve a site.

Or, at least I thought so until I discovered del.icio.us. On the surface it is an unassuming looking and free service that allows one to post web bookmarks. Each registered user has his/her own page which works like a bookmark blog (for example, del.icio.us/carlosmalt). Each bookmark can have one or more tags, each tag being one word. Tags are a big deal since booksmarks can be viewed by tags (or combination of tags) across all users. For instance del.icio.us/tag/outliners provides all bookmarks people submitted and tagged "outliners". Some think that these tags might be the long-sought-after way to content classification of the web that eventually would provide the metadata soup for the Semantic Web.

If a particular user stands out as providing particular useful bookmarks, one can then look at the tags and bookmarks of that user. That way I can discover experts for a particular topic and maybe even adopt some of the tagging words of those experts to tag my own bookmarks. Reusing tagging words of people that I consider experts not only makes those tagging words more popular but also aligns my way of tagging the Web more closely to theirs. In fact, I can think of a TagRank algorithm that similar to the PageRank algorithm puts weights on tags depending on the total weight of users that are using them and puts weights on users depending on the total weight of their tags. Anyhow, over the past few days I suddenly found myself exploring topics of interest on del.icio.us much more successfully than I ever managed on Google!

I had heard about this del.icio.us over half a year ago but remember not being too impressed. No surprise since this is another example of a web site that becomes more useful as more users submit their bookmarks. I think now del.icio.us has achieved or is very close to achieving critical mass. People have written articles and a number of useful tools for del.icio.us. See you at del.icio.us/carlosmalt/del.icio.us! (Ah, almost forgot -- you can subscribe via RSS to every del.icio.us view).

Posted at 07:22 PM Entry | | |

Mon - July 26, 2004

Stern Grove: Gamelan Sekar Jaya and Trilok Gurtu

Another perfect afternoon at the Stern Grove: fog shielded us from the hot sun and kept the temperatures ideal. The concert was much less crowded than I expected. At 1PM we were still able to get good seats (5th row!). Well, maybe that was because Gamelan Sekar Jaya was definitely on the weird side and Trilok Gurtu (good fan site) requires a taste for fusion. In my case I enjoyed both acts thoroughly -- something that cannot be said for Zulah (half way through Trilok Gurtu she fled to her favorite plant store nearby).

Gamelan Sekar Jaya was a great Balinese performance full of mysterious musical insturments with strange sounds and rhythms and strange dances. These contortions of fingers, arms, eyes, and even toes had an almost hypnotic effect on me. The stage was divided between gongs, bells, flutes, and drums on the right side, and some kind of bamboo percussion ensemble on the left. The topic of the performance was not entirely clear to me. It seems the story line went like this: King and queen love each other, queen has a child, the child gets rejected by members of her court, she drops the child and kills it. The outraged king kills the queen and goes mad. The madness is depicted as an elaborate battle among various kinds of monsters and members of his court who are trying to protect the king. At the end both the queen and the king are resurrected (but I'm not sure). The monsters were very cool looking and the dancing went really well with the rapid rhythms of bamboo percussion and the hellish sounds of slightly-out-of-tune gongs and bells.

Trilok Gurtu did the most amazing percussion and drumming performance I have seen in a long while. This guy was playing a very unconventional drum set where the mostly electronic tomtoms were associated with base drum sounds. Two snares and a large number of cymbals completed the set. But he also played excellent tabla drums (occasionally at the same time!). Trilok was backed up by Sanchita Farruque on vocals, a keyboarder from Paris, and a great guitar player from LA originally from Korea (sorry, don't remember their names).

Posted at 05:59 PM Entry | | |

Mon - July 19, 2004

When Oil Production Peaks

Listening to another talk given at the Long Now Foundation, this time by Peter Schwartz I learned that in the long term no known form of energy has a chance to replace Hydrocarbons: sun, wind, water, and tide does not provide enough, fusion is not well enough understood to tell whether it will ever be able to replace HCs, and nuclear energy has too many inherent problems to be fit for a long-term solution (or at least human society has to achieve a much higher level of trust before this technology can be considered safe). There is increasing evidence that the peak of world-wide oil production is near, i.e. within this decade. So what gives?

How can we hope to act rationally as a world's population after not even the orders of magnitude smaller population of Easter Island was able to manage their resources adequately?

Posted at 03:52 PM Entry | | |

Stern Grove: West African Highlife Band and Youssou N'Dour & The Super Etoile De Dakar

Another very good concert. A little more fog this time lead to pleasant temperatures. Lots of dancing. The most impressive musicians in both groups were the Tama players. On the way to the concert I was listening to Brian Eno's The Long Now where he begins with contrasting hierarchical music such as traditional Pop music with clear separation of foreground and background layers, with less hierarchical music such as African music, Velvet Underground, and Steve Reich's music. I think this concert really supported this notion: there was no such thing as a background or foreground instrument -- except Youssou N'Dour's singing of course. Oh, and then there were two incredible Senegalese dancers.

At the end the host had to cut off the concert -- I think they would have played all night -- people did not want to leave.

Posted at 12:45 AM | | |

Sun - July 18, 2004

The Corporation, created by Jennifer Abbot, Mark Achbar, and Joel Bakan

Finally managed to see this excellent movie (movie's site, book) on the last week it was still playing in the South Bay. Fascinating and shocking how the corporation has become a truly monstrous institution that has acquired a life of its own. Three highlights of the movie for me: (1) the corporation as a person being diagnosed as a psychopath, (2) morals don't matter, getting the job done and be profitable for shareholders does, and (3) fascist countries tend to be much more investor-friendly than non-fascist countries (see for example the involvement of IBM in Nazi Germany).

I put this in the "Worries" category because I do worry about the fact that the most efficient and effective institutions of today are entirely and exclusively driven by profit in a world where social and environmental cost is either not accounted for at all or only shows up as public relations expenses. A particularly insidious example that is mentioned in this movie is the exploitation of the "nagging" factor of children trying to convince their parents to purchase a product. TV ads are taking advantage of the incomplete developmental stage of children in order to make them nag more effectively for certain products.

Posted at 12:14 AM Entry | | |

Mon - July 12, 2004

Terrorist Attacks and the Election

After reading this I'm probably not the only one who gets the sneaking suspicion that this administration will somehow manage to postpone elections until the president has a higher chance of winning. After what recently happened in Congress I for one certainly don't put it past this administration to do just that. Or, maybe this election will be repeatedly post-poned so that in effect we won't have an election for quiet some time, similar to the Mickey Mouse copyright law that postpones expiration of copyrights so that there is effectively no time limit on copyright. Maybe it's time to re-read 1984 ...

Posted at 08:46 PM Entry | | |

The Long Now Foundation: Jill Tarter of SETI

Some time ago I discovered The Long Now Foundation and their monthly seminars which take place every second Friday, usually at Fort Mason in San Francisco. I never made a real effort to go to these talks until the foundation published the audio of some of the past talks. After listening to Bruce Sterling and Rusty Schweickart I couldn't help but think that these seminars got to be one of the most interesting public talks series in the bay area. This is truly mind-blowing stuff! So last Friday I finally managed to attend a seminar with SETI's Jill Tarter speaking.

Jill Tarter's talk convinced me of the importance of an existence-proof for extra-terrestrial technology. Especially after listening to Rusty Schweickart it becomes obvious that there are difficult barriers for a "young" technological life form like us to cross in order to become an "old" technological life form. Having some hint that this is even possible would be helpful indeed.

Posted at 05:54 PM Entry | | |

Stern Grove: Souad Massi and Lila Downs

This weekend I managed to catch a Stern Grove concert. The warm-up was Souad Massi who in addition to her unbelievably beautiful voice was backed up by some very impressive musicians (unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to find the line-up of musicians right now). The main act was Lila Downs who almost instantly made me want to travel to Oaxaca. Her music mixes Mexican folk, Hip-hop, Jazz, and much more. She was backed up by musicians mostly from New York City of which I thought two stood out: Paul Cohen, a clown, juggler, sax and keyboard player, and Celso Duarte, who plays harp (which at some point he managed to make sound like steel drums), violin, and guitar.

Very good concert!

Posted at 12:47 PM Entry | | |

Sun - July 4, 2004

Tom Tomorrow's Latest

San Jose's city mag "Metro" this week has an excellent cartoon by Tom Tomorrow.

Update: Here is the link to a readable color version.

Posted at 02:54 PM Entry | | |

Sat - July 3, 2004

Brian Copeland's "Not a Genuine Black Man"

Don't miss this one! Brian Copeland delivers at the Marsh a spell-binding performance that is an emotional roller coaster: Fascinating, sad, and very funny. I particularly liked the fact that there was a ethnically mixed audience which reacted differently to this show in interesting ways. I love the Mission District in San Francisco!

Posted at 10:14 AM | | |

Fri - June 18, 2004

Guizhen Yang: Semantic Web Information Processing

Guizhen Yang's talk (abstract) was mostly about Flora-2. Two novel features: the object hierarchy can be dynamically defined by rules, e.g. "item#1 is a CommodityItem if its cost is less than 50", and the evaluation supports three-state logic: true, false, and undefined which allows easy integration of models with conflicting rules and facts. The second part of the talk was about automatically turning HTML content into a semantic web but unfortunately the speaker didn't have enough time to present this part adequately. The only thing I took from this is that it is easy to scrape semantics from highly regular web sites that are the result of content management applications. However, these are also precisely those sites that can easily add semantic web components.

Posted at 11:20 PM Entry | | |

San Francisco Symphony

Michael Tilson Thomas directs Mahler's Symphony No. 2, Resurrection, with Isabel Bayrakdarian, soprano, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, mezzo-soprano, and the SFS Chorus.

We religiously try catch all Mahler symphonies directed by MTT. This time we didn't buy tickets until a day before and luckily there were two tickets available in the second row! We've never sat that close to the stage and the experience was overwhelming. Nobody can tell me that the sound is better in any of those 1st or 2nd tier balconies. Granted, the sound might not be as balanced, but it is as crisp as a sunny early morning after a winter storm in Boulder, CO (I'm still homesick as you can tell). Being this close to the stage makes you also realize the perfection that this symphony cultivates -- which also highlights any mishaps and mistakes. Since this was the first concert of this particular symphony there were a few of them. The first one was committed by a french horn who going from a low note to a high note did not hit it at all. It was loud, too. MTT's face briefly turned into something very frightening. The second one was a violinist dropping her bow which noisily clattered over the floor during a very quiet section. Anyways, the concert kept me on the edge of my seat because it was in many respects so much more up-and-close.

A definite disadvantage of being in the floor section is that you are surrounded by a lot more people and, unfortunately, that much more noise. At the beginning of the concert we gave one of our playbills to an older lady behind us who was not very mobile anymore. But when during the concert she proceeded to use the blaybill to noisily fan herself, we almost took the playbill away from her. The woman directly behind me inspired

Rule #3: Do not bring jewelry that makes noise whenever you move. Especially, don't pack your wrists with heavy bracelets. You will earn furious looks whenever you move your arms!

Posted at 10:09 PM Entry | | |

Sun - June 13, 2004

San Francisco Symphony

Andrew Davis conducts Takemitsu's "From me flows what call time" with Nexus on percussion, and Holst's "The Planets".

I have never been disappointed by the SF Symphony's more modern appointments. Takemitsu's piece was no exception. Of course the modern stuff is always hotly debated and I heared many negative reactions during intermission. I think upon completion of this performance Andrew Davis sensed the mixed reception by the audience and only returned once for applause while Nexus appeared twice. But I love percussion, especially when played by masters such as Nexus and combined with symphonic sounds.

Holst's piece was beautifully performed. But of course, it lacks the bleeding edge quality of Takemitsu and somehow I couldn't get rid of the feeling that I've heard this music in some science fiction flick before.

The whole concert had one drawback. There were two instances near us where parents decided to bring kids to the sympony. I'm sorry, but I can't stand noise during a symphony. In our case a guy brought his 4-year old daughter, and a couple brought two subteens.

Rule #1: Do not bring your 4-year-olds! For them sitting still and listening for hours is extremely unnatural -- I'd be actually worried if my 4-year-old would do that.

Rule #2: If you bring kids that are old enough so that they can understand and follow the rule of absolute silence during a symphony, just bring one! If you bring more than one, they inadvertently start to engage in all kinds of noisy competitions and games. It doesn't work!

There were about 30-40 people affected by the noise of these kids. If you multiply that with the admission price times the diminished value (say 50%) because of the noise, you arrive at around $1,000 worth of damage. People get arrested for a lot less.

Posted at 03:01 PM Entry | | |

Santa Cruz "We" Carnival

Zulah, Steve, Adrian, and I went to the Santa Cruz "We Carnival". It was much smaller than the San Francisco one, but the quality was at least as good! My favorite were the Sista-Wit-Style which combined Soco music, dance, and gorgeous outfits: