Hell Yeah! [Weekly Head Voices #59]

Posted on October 9, 2011 by cpbotha| 8 Comments

We kick off this week’s edition of the WHV with Ben Goldacre giving his TED talk on “Battling bad science” at 180 km/h:

He’s fabulous, isn’t he? If you haven’t done so already, you should really read his book “Bad Science” too, and don’t forget to hand a copy to anyone in your neighbourhood that might be confused about homeopathy, accupuncture, any other forms of alternative medicine, or anything by Patrick Holford, vitamin-peddler of note.

On a completely different note, I’ve fallen in love with a piece of software again. This time it’s Zotero, open source reference manager. For those of you not into writing (scientific) articles, a reference manager is an indispensable tool that keeps track of all the other articles that you’ve studied and helps you to cite them correctly whilst writing your latest attempt. I tried Zotero in 2009 but wasn’t that impressed. It seems that much has happened since, as I’ve been completely blown away this time. Killer feature #1 is the extreme ease with which I can import new references, by clicking on the little icon in my Firefox 7.0 url bar (Zotero 2.1 is a Firefox plugin). If the PDF is available, it’ll add that as well. I can also just drop a PDF directly in there and tell it to extract metadata to make a bibliographic entry. It does this surprisingly well.  Killer feature #2 is the explicit support for storing one’s reference database anywhere else, for example in one’s Dropbox, another piece of software with which I have a long-term romantic involvement and which in this case ensures that I have transparent access to my whole reference database, via Zotero, from any computer I care to use.

(NB: If you’re going to do this, make sure you don’t run Zotero concurrently on multiple machines. A better solution, which I’m now using, is to have only the zotero “storage” folder in your dropbox, and then symlink that into the default zotero firefox profile directory. Please let me know in the comments if you need more detail on this.)

Just in time for our regular coffee-themed blog post interlude, there’s been yet another study on coffee-related health benefits, and now it looks like coffee drinking may also protect against depression in women. As you will recall, I recently blogged about the coffee-related prostate-cancer protection. Seems coffee is perfect in one more regard: It’s an equal opportunity health benefit!

For my birthday, TNR bought me Anything You Want by Derek Sivers, and beamed it directly to my Kindle (go 21st century!). Derek Sivers is the guy who started CD Baby almost by accident, a company that became the largest seller of independent music on the interwebs. I say by accident, because his goal in the beginning was purely to sell his own CDs online (which was quite a feat in 1997, as there was no PayPal and not that much WWW yet), and then friends asked if he could sell their CDs too, and before he knew it, he had 85 employees, 150000 musicians and 100 million dollars in revenue. It’s a fabulous story, all the more because he really just wanted to keep his company as small as possible and do what he loved.

The book is chock-full of philosophical nuggets, for example the one that inspired the title of this blog. Sivers explains that when you have to decide whether to commit to a new project or not, there are only two choices: It’s either HELL YEAH! or NO. Your time is too limited to take on just yes or even maybe. Makes sense, no?

What really resonated with me however, was the following thought on how people grade themselves:

For me, it’s how many useful things I create, whether songs, companies, articles, websites or anything else. If I create something that’s not useful to others, it doesn’t count. But I’m also not interested in doing something useful unless it needs my creative input.

I think that I’ll leave it at that. Now go have an epic week kids!

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Time-traveling Danube Dubstep in my BBQ [Weekly Head Voices #58]

Posted on September 27, 2011 by cpbotha| 4 Comments

The title is pretty close to pure gobbledygook, but that’s what you get when the foundations of physics seem to have been rattled every so slightly. Let’s first take a gander at this gentleman, pointed out to me by TNR, as he rattles the foundations of absolutely insane facial expressions. He really gets going at about 23 seconds into the video:

The insane asylum soundtrack accompanying this artwork belongs to the music genre called Dubstep, music that is notoriously hard to dance well to. However, the following gentleman seems to have mastered the art just perfectly (if you’re really pressed for time, start watching at 1:13):

At this junction, as they say, you might be wondering why I’m showing you dubstep videos. Well, I have only the following to offer: Alliteration!

You see, this week I flew to Vienna (unfortunately not under my own power yet) for a meeting with some old and some new friends (Graz, my man in Vienna, Rostock, Bergen, Delft) to set up a new EU research project. It’s just grand when you sit around the table discussing the ins and outs of a research project and realise that the convenors have managed to put together a perfect team in terms of skill set but more importantly also in terms of social interaction. Cross your fingers that the thing gets granted, then I’ll be able to tell you more.

On the topic of flying, you will not have missed that CERN LHC scientists measured an ever-so-small discrepancy in the arrival time of neutrinos travelling over 732 km through the Earth (I wish I could do that) to Gran Sasso.  The neutrinos seemed to have arrived 60.7 nanoseconds earlier than they should have, had they been traveling at the speed of light.

Oops.

The scientists really did their best to explain that the devastating impact of this result, were it to be true, necessitates further study to find for example hitherto unknown systematic errors that could be the cause. The media of course had great difficulty not sensationalising the whole business. Personally, my money is naturally not on faster than light travel. Whatever the case may be, this world event has resulted in the prerequisite physics jokes. My favourite is this one, via @flyosity on twitter:

“We don’t allow faster than light neutrinos in here”, said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.

On the topic of world events, Saturday September 24 was the South African national Braai Day. BRAAI DAY PEOPLE! As is the duty and pleasure of every red-blooded Saff Efrican I fired up my BBQ on Saturday. On Sunday, I did so again, this time with some of them lovely rib-eye steaks (yes, after years of practice I make a perfect medium-rare pink-in-the-middle steak on the barbie) and, even more importantly, joined by a full complement of my super-social neighbours. Perfect weather, scorched animal parts, zillions of kids running around (not scorched), beer and friends: Life is exceptionally good.

For this week’s backyard philosophy, I wanted to bring under your attention Steven Pinker’s new book, to be released on October 4 and titled The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker is a well-known experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author with a penchant for evolutionary psychology. In this book, Pinker argues that we humans currently find ourselves  in the most peaceful time of our species’ existence. Looking back through history, it becomes apparent that we’ve been becoming persistently less violent over the past hundreds of years. I find that an absolutely marvelous observation!

Let me conclude with suitable Pinker quote, found on this Pharyngula post (emphasis mine):

I think the final and perhaps the most profound pacifying force is an “escalator of reason.” As literacy, education, and the intensity of public discourse increase, people are encouraged to think more abstractly and more universally, and that will inevitably push in the direction of a reduction of violence. People will be tempted to rise above their parochial vantage point, making it harder to privilege their own interests over others. Reason leads to the replacement of a morality based on tribalism, authority and puritanism with a morality based on fairness and universal rules. And it encourages people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, and to see violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be won.

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Coffee addiction potpourri. [Weekly Head Voices #57]

Posted on September 18, 2011 by cpbotha| 4 Comments

Yes boys and girls, I was keeping back writing that Rebecca Black post, but now it’s 4 days later and I can let ‘er rip again, like I promised. This week’s post sort of reflects my week 37: Chock-full of super-dense life nuggets. Hmmm, sounds like a brilliant new high energy meta-physical chocolate bar that would probably be immediately declared illegal by the current conservative and non-thinking (excuse the tautology) batch of spineless politicians (excuse the tautology).

Let’s get today’s life lessons started with Mitch Hedberg, Comic Genius (note the captital C, and the capital G):

Hedberg’s genius unfortunately could not save him from drug addiction and his overdose-related death in 2005.

On the topic of addiction, fpixel forwarded these new findings that coffee drinking is genetic, both in terms of capacity and perhaps also in terms of addiction. Even my atoms are addicted to coffee, so that feels about right. What’s really interesting however, is that the documented study found that the genes involved in the metabolism of coffee (CYPIA1 and NRCAM, if I understand correctly) are also related to the onset of Parkinson’s disease. You see, coffee drinkers are less prone to Parkinson’s disease (as well as a whole list of other diseases including prostate cancer, type 2 diabetes and liver cancer). However, past studies of course show correlation and not causation, i.e. coffee drinking and low risk of disease X appear together, but that does not tell us anything about what causes what. This new study has made the first steps towards understanding the mechanism that actually links Parkinson’s disease and coffee drinking.

On the topic of coffee and addiction, TNR and I spent the Monday morning working (like animals) on our new parallel startup (there, I said it) at the Coffee Company in Delft. Two things:

  1. The Coffee Company makes a killer cappuccino. The milk is steamed to perfection, but it’s got the perfect espresso bomb exploding through all that milky goodness at just the right moment. BAM! HELLO THERE! Highly recommended. With every purchase, you get WiFi access for one hour, so no surprises or misunderstandings.
  2. It’s amazing what such a change of working environment does for one’s creativity.

On the topic of startups, Dr Jorik Blaas, ex PhDer, full-time genius and friend, is now the director of research and development at Synerscope (probably no relation with sinister, but my subconscious is just not behaving today), a high-potential startup that makes visualisation-based tools for fraud detection in big data (big money, IOW). Synerscope has brought together some of the top visualisation brains in the country. Personally, I can’t help but imagine it like this:

Are you in there somewhere?

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we made a quick train trip (*cough* 9 hours there due to delay thank you NS, 7+ hours back) to Magdeburg for the bi-annual German MedVis meeting. You’ll recall that I spent my first micro-sabbatical there. The city almost feels like home, and it was really great seeing many of the Magdeburg peeps again. The meeting itself was of high quality, with a number of VisWeek contributions being presented. Thomas Kroes (should I start using fictitious names and acronyms again?) presented his interactive photo-realistic volume renderer too! By the way, download it, use it (it makes fantastically beautiful renderings), spread it, and do cite the soon-to-appear article.

On Saturday, it rained (again, or still, I forget), so I decided to flip Mother Nature the bird by BBQing four juicy rib-eye steaks outside. Take that Mother Nature! The steaks were delicious, thank you. Mother Nature is not all bad though… Check this out: The Southern Lights. FROM SPACE!

Aurora Australis (thanks Bart!) FROM SPACE, taken by Ron Garan. Click on the photo to go to the original.

I’m going to wind down this post with two backyard philosophy-themed bits. The first is a quote by mathematician Alfred North Whitehead from this article on “The Skill that Matters Most” (found via Joe Botha, serial entrepreneur, currently changing the world with Trust Fabric):

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

I haven’t thought about it that way before, but it does make complete sense. The more things we humans do well in a routine fashion, the better.  Otherwise, our inconsistency is prone to lead to problems. By the way, the mentioned skill is self-control.

Finally, AJ forwarded this video called Disconnect to Connect. I’ll just let you watch and think about it for a while:

I’ll be off now. Please do have an epic week, and think of me when your level of enjoyment is at a local maximum. At these points, you might also consider jumping around randomly.

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Rebecca Black is OK! [Weekly Head Voices #56]

Posted on September 14, 2011 by cpbotha| 2 Comments

Probably the most brainless song on the whole of YouTube must be “Friday” (don’t click that link, please) by Rebecca Black. At one stage, she’s seriously singing about leaving home and going to the bus stop on Friday. As if that’s not mentally taxing enough for her, her friends arrive in a car, and, wait for it, SHE HAS TO DECIDE IN WHICH SEAT TO SIT. Heavens. Talk about broody teenager angst. DANGIT I MISS GRUNGE!

In any case, I was convinced that Rebecca Black was a portent of the end of the world as we know it, probably due to an unstoppable tsunami of vacuous stupidity crashing through the whole of civilization (you have to admit, there are signs. what signs? well mostly politicians and managers). However, due to a recent instance of such blinding brilliance that I had to don my mental steampunk goggles of total darkness (yes, the ones I’ll be wearing to Burning Man when I go there), I have to revise my opinion of Rebecca. You see, her musical atrocity has acted as a catalyst for the creation of the musical masterpiece that is Braaiday! Seat yourself comfortably, and experience it:

Yes? Yes. Hang on while I listen to it one more time. No I don’t need YouTube anymore, the whole thing is engraved in my brain. By the way, September 24 is National Braai day in South Africa. You know what to do…

As if Braaiday wasn’t enough to make my year, TNR, friend and business partner, underwent two significant life events:

  1. He turned a year older.
  2. The day after his birthday (doh), TNR was offered an assistant professorship in our section!

We’ll leave the consequences of life event #1 for a later, more philosophical, occasion. The consequence of #2, together with the fact that we’ve somehow managed to attract a handful of Truly Kickass people (you know who you are, kickass people!), is that there’s now an absolutely fabulous vibe in our research group. I’ve had the privilege of experiencing this specific vibe in other places before. You can’t engineer it, it simply has to happen. The best you can do, is to put the right people together and cross your fingers. When it does decide to appear, it’s epic!

On a different topic: The reason why I’ve been ignoring all of your email the past weeks, and why I generally haven’t even been able to pay attention to the beautiful wooshing sound all of my passing deadlines made as they flew by, is because I was first preparing for and then running, together with a whole team of ninjas, the TU Delft CS first year introductory project. I designed this brand-new module last year, and severely honed it this year. 130+ first years worked together in 26 small groups designing and implementing augmented reality music instruments with real-time video analysis, 3D graphics and sound loop mixing. CACOPHONY with a capital C!

I’ve uploaded to YouTube some video impressions of the top teams demonstrating their projects in the concluding session. Click here to view these and any other clips that other peeps have tagged with “ti100a” (the course code).

OK people. That was it for weeks 35 and 36 (this post was 100% produced within moving trains!), the week 37 blog post will hopefully appear this weekend sometime. I’m still Way Too Busy (do you hear that wooshing sound in the distance too?), but managing to keep myself quite happy by:

  1. ensuring that most of the time I spend, I spend creating value;
  2. ensuring that the people I interact with are primarily of the ass-kicking variety;
  3. making many bullet lists like this one.

See you on the other side!

P.S. Have you heard about batmanning? Apparently it’s the new planking:

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The Lowlands Tooth Fairy #37. [Weekly Head Voices #55]

Posted on August 28, 2011 by cpbotha| 9 Comments

In this week’s Weekly Head Voices, looking back at weeks 33 and 34 of 2011, there are three important topics that I’d like to discuss. For your convenience, I’ve arranged them in order of increasing significance. This has the added advantage of guaranteeing that this post ends, at least technically speaking, with a sort of climax. Oh yes, the theme of today’s post is dry.

Photo of the Bravo tent during Lowlands 2011, taken by Andreas Terlaak for NRC Handelsblad. I hope they don't mind me linking to their picture. You can see more of Terlaak's Lowlands 2011 work by clicking on the photo.

One

I turned 37 very recently. This is the last prime number I’ll have the privilege of gracing before shooting past the big four-oh. I remember when I turned 32. Amongst other defects which I believe I’ve gotten more or less under control, I was extremely smug, and I would probably have irritated the living daylights out of 37-year-old me. I’ve been very much desmugged in my search for harmony and balance in life, although I’ve been told that I tend to be self-congratulatory, an observation that I personally think might have been triggered by my extroverted optimism. Whatever the case may be, I’ll take 5 more years to de-self-congratulatorise myself as well. It’s really a small price to pay for harmony with the universe.

On my birthday, many wonderful people left sweet messages on my facebook wall, in my email inbox, in my SMS whatever and even to my face. It can’t be understated what a positive experience this was. Thank you wonderful people.

Two

I had the awesome privilege and unbridled pleasure (when last did you read about unbridled pleasure in a blog post?! hmm?) of spending 3 sunny days at Lowlands 2011, an alternative reality where it’s sunny (if you were in NL this “summer”, you would know that sunny weather is a purely theoretical concept) and you get to hang around on the grass drinking beer or in tents experiencing Amon Tobin doing ISAM, or Little Dragon being absolutely gorgeous on Sunday morning, or Trentemöller and his band being superbly Danish. Of course you get to do this with a group of Exceptionally Wonderful People (EWPs). There is one thing you should take into account before starting to hang out with EWPs: They attract even more EWPs, resulting in huge groups of like-minded EWPs that renders linking up with your favourite EWPs (a subset of the larger group) an interesting challenge, further complicated by the fact that 65000 people SMSing at the same time in the middle of nowhere tend to clog up the few available cellphone towers, which in turn delays any SMS by a random amount from a few seconds to a few hours.

Whatever the case may be, I had an awesome time and am already very quietly counting down until August 2012. EWPs, get ready!

Three

Genetic Offspring #1 lost her first milk tooth and this is of course a major life event. So the Tooth Fairy, or the Tooth Mouse as we call it (GO#1 has ascertained that fairies don’t exist, but she has visually confirmed that mice in fact do, so she’s willing to play along for now), or actually just Yours Truly, had to sneak into her bedroom and exchange said tooth for a sizeable (compared to what my teeth went for back in the day) amount of cash. Remember that this is her major life event, but I did spend a few moments pondering the fact that I’m now someone else’s Tooth Fairy. That’s just huge man…

Conclusion

That’s (almost) all I have to say kids. This is my fourth blog post of the weekend: I also wrote one on Django testing with selenium, one on getting a Windows console that doesn’t suck, and another pre-dated one on my newest toy.

I really liked writing them all, but I enjoyed this one the most.

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