Chipotle I love you.

I ate chicken yesterday.

Shocking, I know.

Turns out Chipotle advertises on their website that they only use ethically raise chicken in their foods. Since my problem with eating meat centers on the ethical issues involved in factory farming practices, I didn't have a problem chowing down on one of my favorite burritos.

My brother in law made a very wise suggestion this past weekend, saying that instead of telling everyone I'm a vegetarian simply say that I'm boycotting factory farmed meat. People seem to find that less crazy...

Naturally, some of the lawyers with whom I eat lunch every day have tried to find flaws in my argument. They raise some good points:

• How can you trust the website of Chipotle?

There is definitely a trust issue to be dealt with. They're going to spin things so they look good. They cited an outside third party (Humane Animal Producer Society or something along those lines) that certified their producers as ethical. But how can you trust them? It seems plausible that this "objective" third party could easily be a sham organization set up to rubber stamp farms...

My response to this is that

1. Since this is a boycott with the goal of effecting the meat industry by changing my purchasing habits, supporting chipotle is sending a signal (albeit a minuscule one) that they're doing something good. I suppose the attempt by a company to appear ethical is better than companies that don't even try.
2. I haven't been perfectly consistent already, so taking this 'leap of faith' and trusting a company that may be tricking me is no worse that what I'm already doing. I haven't gotten to the point where veganism seems possible (give up cheese and eggs? this is hard enough already).

I look forward to going to Whole Foods, who I've heard carries lots of free-range meats. I'm also feeling pretty good about the sustainability of my little experiment. Free-range meat will be more expensive, and I won't have it every day so meat will remain a small part of my diet.

Also, I'm pumped because a coworker took me up on a bet that he couldn't go completely vegetarian for the next two weeks. Someone to share my pain with!

Multitouch is dead.

Scratching is the new interface. Check out what some clever folks over at Carnegie Mellon are doing with it:



Low tech, cheap, versatile, flexible... this has a lot of possibility. A laptop or cellphone placed on a desk or coffee table can transform it into a gigantic tablet or remote control. The walls of your house can control your music... all without installing any complicated or expensive systems.

Some hacker needs to take this and transform their coffee table into a remote control for Boxee or the XBox Media Center. I wonder if their code is open source?

To be XOR not to be

Can we introduce the concept of XOR into normal English please? For those who weren't electrical/computer engineers or studied logic in philosophy... XOR simply means "A or B, but not both." I propose we pronounce it with a z.

1. Dropping the word xor in regular speech would be awesome.
2. This would actually be useful.
   

For example, I'm currently working on a patent where we have to be very careful what we say, and keeping track of all of the ands and ors in the document is downright annoying. If we had a separate word for xor, my job would be a lot easier.

What's the next step to get this process started... urban dictionary? Should we include nand in there as well? Are there others I'm forgetting?

Like it xor not, I'm going to start using xor all the time now.

Life After Meat

Image via Wikipedia

So far this little experiment is going pretty well... Although I may have cheated, depending on how you classify shrimp. Seems the chef in the cafeteria seems to think it's vegetarian, so when I found it in my pasta... I decided not to make a fuss. I REGRET NOTHING!

Some stray thoughts:

Is it possible to be a good person? Does being a ethical require you to never do wrong? As an example, if being "good" requires a person to become a vegan, and they can only manage to become a vegetarian (still responsible for some pretty awful treatment of animals in today's world)... should they even bother being a vegetarian at all?

A slightly more extreme example would be a murderer (say the character Dexter from that awesome TV show) found a way to curb his impulses and only murder someone once a month rather than twice a month. He's saving lives! Is he a hero or a monster? A half-monster?

This brings up a pretty interesting difference between the nature of utilitarian ethics vs. Judeo-Christian ethics. My gut reaction towards the murderer in the example above makes me want to say that murdering one person rather than two doesn't make him half as evil. Do I need to invoke the concept of sin or heaven and hell to put all murderers in their own classification of evil?

Bottom line - if the ethics one adopts are so demanding that pretty much everyone falls somewhere in the "kinda evil" category.... is something wrong with the ethical system or something wrong with all of us?

Day 2 of Turning Vegetarian

Image via Wikipedia

Day 2 wasn't too bad, actually. I Did have a lot of fun at lunch when I announced to a table full of lawyers that I had decided to become a vegetarian. This came as something of a shock to them because only a week ago I had been making bold carnivorous statements such as "If it has cell walls it's not a meal." Naturally, their instincts were to try to cut my arguments to ribbons... which I attempted admirably to withstand.

One argument which was particularly tricky was what I'll call the 'natural' argument. In it's most basic form:

1. Some animals eat meat
2. Homo Sapiens evolved to eat meat
3. Acting as nature intended cannot be wrong

Conclusion: Eating meat cannot be wrong.

Perhaps I'll rebut the argument more fully in another post. Suffice it to say, digging into this gets tricky because it gets to the heart of what ethics is and how an ethical framework fits into the real world... heavy stuff.

Image via Wikipedia

This will seem like a joke to those of you who know me, but I've convinced myself to give up eating meat. Starting today.

I've recently been reading the books of Peter Singer, a philosopher who is best known for his work on animal rights and charity for the poor. When I took one of his classes in college, I found his arguments impossible to disagree with, but his conclusions outrageous. That was when I first seriously considered the possibility that what I was doing when I ate meat was wrong. Unfortunately (0r fortunately... I'm still not sure) life got in the way. Dietary demands from competing in a college sport and a lack of time and gumption made dropping meat a seemingly impossible task, so I never tried.

Revisiting the same arguments of Singer's now, I can no longer justify my eating meat in the majority of cases. Being young, single, and working long hours in the city means that I eat out almost all of the time. In these cases it's a matter of picking one item off of the menu rather than another. Is my preference for the taste of beef rather than tofu so important that I need to torture and kill an animal (who I imagine would very much prefer not to be tortured and killed) to satisfy it?

Short Term Goal:

1. Eat vegetarian options at all restaurants/office cafeteria.
2. Eat vegetarian when it doesn't inconvenience others.
3. Not feel bad when a meal doesn't fall into one of the above two categories.
4. Learn more about what foods I can eat ethically.
   

That being said.... My dinner tonight tragically undelicious. I hate Tofu.

Meat... MISS U

I hope to do some posts to discuss some of the other ethical quandaries bouncing around in my head, and I'll let you know how this little experiment is going. Please feel free to give me some support (if you're so inclined) or ridicule (I may actually prefer this, probably a better motivator for me). And definitely make fun of me if I stop within the next week.

Birds 1, Quantum Physicists 0

Turns out migratory birds might be better at entangling quantum particles than us, and they've been doing it for a long time.

Apparently their eyes can see the earth's magnetic field because they have structures in their eyes that can create entangled electrons from incident photons. As these electrons split apart, they remain entangled but are effected differently by earths magnetic field. This difference effects the electrical signal going to their brain, and is then translated into something the bird can see.

Wild. How did something like that evolve? This is very illustrative of the idea that the way we (or animals) understand the world around us is really only an approximation of reality, and through evolution we have taken advantage of whatever sources of information we can that prove to be useful from a survival perspective.

Augmented Reality

Cell phone v. Zombies

This is so freaking cool. I've seen examples of augmented reality before, but this really shows how interactive and potentially fun this could be.

The graphics seem to be limited by the hardware at this point... Wouldn't it be easier to just transmit the output of the camera to a desktop computer, have the much beefier computer do all of the processing, and then send the processed image back to the cell phone device?

My guess is that sending all of that video data would cause a lot of lag... but then again I just saw a demo of this other really cool technology that allows you to play graphics intensive games in your browser, and all of the heavy lifting is done by servers. If they can do it over the Internet, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to do it in this case.

Crowdsourcing Yourself?

Image via Wikipedia

The jellybean jar experiment is a relatively well known study that shows a rather surprising fact. The experiment itself involves asking a room full of people to estimate the number of jelly beans in a jar. Each person comes up with their own heuristic for making an estimate. For example, one person might come up with a guess for how many beans would make up a single layer at the bottom of the jar and then multiply by the number of layers they think would fit. Another person might have a completely different way of arriving at an estimate. Despite the fact that many people are way way off in their guesses, if you take the average of all the guesses you'll get an answer that is shockingly close to the correct one. Interestingly though, if you allow the people in the room to discuss their methods before the estimates, the average of their answers will get worse.

The reason this happens is because each person's original guesses are independent - they may not be good guesses, but the error they introduce into the average is unique. However, when you let them discuss, some will be convinced to use another person's technique. When this happens the errors no longer cancel each other out, they end up reinforcing each other and dragging the average away from the true answer.

This is a pretty interesting result when you think about how financial markets work and the role of security analysts in estimating the value of companies. Do our estimates of the stock prices get worse when a new report comes out? One person's opinion (albeit a much more informed person) is influencing many many people, whos individual trades will determine the actual price of the stock.

Anyway, the reason I bring the study up is because recently some psychologists also thought it was pretty neat. In a study described in Scientific American they wanted to see if they could reproduce the effect in a single persons brain. Two groups made a few estimations of a date in history (like the day the Magna Carta was signed). One group made a series of guesses, one after the other. The second group made several guesses, but had to write down reasons their earlier guesses might have been wrong and to use those reasons to form a new guess. And while their secondary guesses were no more accurate than their first, the average of their guesses turned out to be much better! This is in contrast to the first group, who's averages were not as good.

So it seems that we can harness the power of independent errors to make our own individual estimates more accurate, we just have to act like we have multiple personality disorder. For me this conclusion raised a lot of interesting questions, and I hope the psychologists try to tackle some of them.

• If a person has several facts relevant to a situation, would they make better choices if they try to consider all of the information and try to synthesize it into a single answer (the way we're all familiar with) or would they be better off making a series of estimations based on each individual fact and then averaging them together?
• What other kinds of problems is this method better at answering?
• Should we eliminate debate? Have members of congress vote on things without discussing them?
• The next time I want to count my jelly beans should I just pay a hundred people on the Mechanical Turk service to look at a picture of it and guess?

Blurring the Line

"I hate listening to people's dreams. It is like flipping through a stack of photographs. If I'm not in any of them and nobody is having sex, I just don't care."

Despite what Dennis from It's Always Sunny says, I'm going to tell you guys about two episodes from last night. I'm not really sure if you'd even call these dreams... they kind of blur the line of dreaming and being awake.

1) I wake up suddenly in my bed pumped full of adrenaline and terror. The room is very dark, but I can clearly see movement on both my left and right. As I sit with my back up against the wall, unable to move or speak, the movements resolve into three distinct people. They simply stand there, faces dark and indistinct, but they continue to shift around and watch me. When I can take it no longer, I lunge over to my nightstand to turn on the light. As soon as the light comes on the watchers instantly become familiar objects in my room, a chair and closet doors.

2) I'm having a dream where I am in a room with about 10 other people. Someone cries out and collapses after being bitten by a spider the size of my hand. The orange and black spider scurries around the room and we all begin to chase it to try to kill it before it gets anyone else. I finally corner him and try to smash him with a stick. At the very moment of the deathblow I suddenly find myself standing in my room next to my bed, again filled with terror. I feel something crawling on my arm and look down to see the spider climbing up towards my hand. With a cry I reach out with my other hand and turn on the light. Again, the moment the light comes on the spider disappears, leaving me standing alone in my room.

What the hell is going on here?! Waking up and imagining people and things in the darkness is something that happens to me often enough. But this has to be the first time something from one of my dreams has followed me into the real world... Any sleep-experts know what to call these?

Reading Code

These days I've been reading a lot of source code, and it can get pretty miserable if the code isn't well commented or if it isn't properly formatted.

It's a time-honored tradition (or requirement) to indent code so that you can see when statements are nested. This is ok, but for long documents where the nesting statements can stretch for pages and pages this can be inadequate. I feel like a good IDE must have a way of telling at a glance how deep you are.

I'm sure there are lots of tricks out there, but has anyone thought of displaying the nesting level in a 3rd dimension or colormap? For example, a line of code that looks further away than its neighbors would be clearly on a different nesting level, and you'd be able to instantly grasp the structure of the code you're looking at.

Am I crazy? Someone with more experience please tell me your secrets. (I'm looking at you Paul).

Thunderstorms are even sweeter when you're watching them from a skyscraper with big windows.

Ping.fm is pretty sweet!

Brojector!

Sometimes dreams come true. When I was a little kid, one of mine was to have a TV that took up the entire wall. I wanted Mario to be my size. Today, that dream came true.

This may be hard to see in the photo, but it is Tom standing next to our new TV playing Halo 3. We've redone the basement and bought a projector, which casts an image about 5x10 feet. It may be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. YES!

Idea: Parts of Songs

Image by Rafael Amado Deras via Flickr

When people practice an instrument they spend a lot of time playing along with their favorite songs. Learning to play songs you like is challenging and rewarding, the perfect way to practice. My experiences learning bass and guitar consisted a lot of sitting at my desk with my instrument and fumbling around with my mp3s to play along with them.

When you are learning how to play a part in a given song (the guitar part in stairway to heaven, for example) having the actual guitar part is obviously important. But what about when you have the song memorized and you are focusing on playing it well? I've found that when you reach this point having the guitar track playing actually gets in the way. I want to hear what it would sound like if I was the bassist in Red Hot Chili Peppers, not how it would sound if there was one awesome bassist and one crappy one.

Do you think there is a market for music with the different instruments removed? It would be like Karaoke for the rest of the band. I could also see it being useful for bands who want to do covers of songs, each member of the band could get a version of their song without their instrument.

Is there a way to do this automatically using existing songs? I know the band Girltalk is able to lift the vocals right out of songs to do mashups.... There might be some interesting legal issues to sort out though.

Anyway, my hope with this blog is interact with the people who read it, so instead of messaging me directly ya'll should leave comments! Lets get conversations going!

Idea: Portable Interval Trainer

Image via CrunchBaseI have a job! I'll be joining the Jones Day Patent Group in New York City. Looks like my wandering days are over for now.

Yesterday I was driving in my car thinking about training your ear. At music schools they use programs like the 'EarMaster' to train you to recognize intervals, chords, scales etc. This is really tedious but a vital skill to aquire if you want to compose music (anyone that has tried to use Reason or Garageband without music theory background will probably agree). Training your ear is tedious and requires hours of listening and distinguishing notes, but the software out there makes a relatively entertaining game out of it, so it's not so bad.

I realized though that I really want to be able to do this training any time, not just when I'm in front of my computer. What would be ideal is a program for an Iphone or even the DS or PSP. This would be such a good way to pass the time on a train (I'm thinking ahead to my commute from Fairfield to NYC) or on the road or wherever. Someone make this plz! And if this is one of those iphone apps that makes the creater tons of cash, all the better.

I hate you

Dear guys who robbed my house,

Not cool.

-James

P.S. Why would you steal my bucket of change but not my laptop?

Project Idea: Piano Minigames

One reason I decided to start a blog was to catalog my ideas for projects, businesses, and hobbies. Often when I find a new obsession (my current one is my new MIDI keyboard) I come up with tangential ideas or tools that I wish already existed or have other complementary thoughts. It was my hope that actually writing them down and creating some kind of conversation about them would help me to actually follow through with some of them (the conversation aspect is making the assumption that someone reads this blog... which is a questionable one). So without further rambling here's the project that I would love to undertake if I had infinite time:

I'd like to have a way of quickly creating different minigames that used my MIDI keyboard to help practice different concepts as I learn to play piano. The minigame I'd love to have right now would be something like Paul Nelson's epic 'Math Arena' game except with cords on the keyboard. Play something like that for a few hours and you'd be able to move quickly and confidently between the different chords no problem. But as I continue in my practicing I'm constantly facing new obstacles and coming up with new 'ideal' mingames to overcome them - what I really want is a sandbox type environment that would make it easy to create new minigames as I go.

Thinking about it, I feel like this would be a perfect project for Python. I know it has a PyGame module specifically made to create games with, and I'm sure it has a module for interfacing with a MIDI device all ready to go.

MAN this would be such a cool project... maybe I'll just take a week off after my trip and lock myself into my room and do it. What do ya'll think? Is 2k9 the year of the piano minigame?

P.S. I know what you're thinking: "But James, you already made a post about the dream to-do list project, what about that!" Don't worry, I'm still working on it. I've actually made a good deal of progress on it, I now have the site working with a database so I can edit the list from the site itself. I took a break from it to try and create the website at my job (qcllab.princeton.edu), which is an ongoing project. I'll try to keep you guys abreast of that as well.

Trippin' w/out the drugs

Here's a list of sweet tricks to get your brain to hallucinate without resorting to drugs... Or maybe we should think of these as gateway hallucinogens - paving the way for our youth to move on to harder and harder drugs! BEWARE

Hacking Your Brain [Via Boston Globe]

If anyone wants to try some of these with me, let me know. I think I have a fake arm that would be perfect.

Arriba Aruba!

Lots of stuff going on lately, here's a quick update!

I'm leaving for Aruba early Tuesday morning for a week, which is good because I need to show off all of the weight I gained in the past few weeks.

Finally got a keyboard and reason going, so hopefully I'll be able to start making some music for The Oversight Committee. If anyone knows good tutorials or resources for Reason or just composing in general I'd be interested. If I could choose one hobby/skill to be awesome at, it would be this, hands down.

I willfully submitted myself to the torment of going into the crawlspace underneath my house over the break. That is really one of the worst places, ever. Besides the dust and fiberglass I had to deal with Indiana Jones style spiderwebs everywhere. Worth it though, because now we have internet everywhere in the house - only took 3 routers and hours of debugging and research. Nothing is EVER easy when it comes to home networking - I'm still pulling out my hair trying to get NAT to be open so that we can use XBOX live properly.

My new athletic obsession is climbing, having discovered that I have free access to the climbing wall at Princeton. I got a sweet fingerboard for XMAS too, only problem is I don't have any place to mount it in my house... I guess I'll just save it until I move somewhere.

I'll put up some pics when I get back ya'll, have a good week!