Blayne Sucks

As I’m sure many of you know, I graduated from Purdue University in 2003 with a degree in Computer Engineering. It’s been 5 years since I graduated and I recently had the opportunity to visit Purdue for the first time since graduation. To say that Purdue has undergone a lot of change in the last 10 years is a bit of an understatement. They have built or significantly renovated 35 new buildings including Ross-Ade Stadium, the Recreational Sports Center, the Boilermaker Aquatics Center, the Purdue Memorial Union, the Dauch Alumi Center, the Lawson Computer Science building, and the Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering. Some of these renovations took place, such as the Recreational Sports Center, while I was there. Many of them took place after I left.

First and foremost, the primary purpose of the trip was to tour the new Lawson Computer Science building. I want to sincerely thank Dr. Spafford for inviting me and taking the time to visit with me as well as give me a personal guided tour of the building. Spaf, that was exceedingly cool of you, and I appreciate it.

The building was dedicated last year, but still looks new and has plenty of room for expansion. I didn’t take pictures while touring the interior of the building itself, but the picture to the left is a view of the building’s exterior taken on the day I visited. The whole building has a warm and clean feel to it. All the server closets have windows so that the systems and cabling inside are visible. The entryway and the halls are extremely impressive, but I was even more impressed with the labs and classrooms inside.

The graduate student labs all have a kitchen area including a microwave, refrigerator, and sink. Combined with the comfortable reading areas, desks and meeting rooms it would appear that computer science grad students at Purdue would almost never have to leave their lab. Another nice addition for graduate students are the separate offices for TA office hours. There’s even a meeting area outside the offices for group discussions. This is a critical addition as described in Gerald Weinberg’s The Psychology of Computer Programming. Basically, he states that having this commons area will allow people who have the same questions to gather and potentially figure them out while waiting for the TA to be free.

The computer labs, instructional labs and classrooms are similarly well thought out. They are all state of the art. There are video control rooms and server closets close by to ensure that the labs and classrooms are able to service any possible request such as video capture of a lecture in a classroom or special network setups in a computer lab.

I also had the chance to visit the new Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering, which was dedicated this past October. The picture to the left is a statue of Neil Armstrong right outside of the main entrance. In the entryway is a replica of the Apollo 1 Lunar Module. The building houses a mix of interdisciplinary labs, administrative offices, and teaching facilities as well as a cool-sounding zero-gravity research lab about which I know almost nothing.

Probably the most startling change to me was the renovation of the Purdue Memorial Union. The reflecting pool that was almost always anything but reflective has been replace with landscaping, but the big changes were done on the interior. Basically, the whole commons area has been completely altered and much improved. When I was a student, I spent a lot of time between classes at the Union. I ate there many times and studied there even more often. Several of my regular study groups would meet there in the evenings. Thus, seeing some of the changes was quite shocking.

Pappy’s is totally different. It used to be relatively small looking with dark wooden benches, chairs and tables. Now it is a retro 1950′s style diner complete with nickel jukeboxes on the tables. There are windows along the wall to the hallway that makes it feel more open and everything inside is bright.

The other areas have also changed. Instead of having several stores with a single checkout area, the stores are all independent with their own styles and checkouts. There is even a Starbucks. The only store that hasn’t changed that much is the Oasis. I’m not sure if there’s less seating as a result of the redesign or not. The seating has certainly changed. Most of the old seating areas have been replaced by tables and chairs in the style of the vendor area where they appear. It’s a lot more like several small restaurants rather than a single common area to sit and eat, even though there are still some of those areas.

On the whole, the trip was fantastic! It was weird to be back as an alumnus for the first time and see that Purdue has changed. Of course, everything changes and I’m pleased to see Purdue is improving by leaps and bounds. I’ve posted some pictures from my trip along with more descriptions in my gallery.

I don’t really have the opportunity to watch as many movies as I once did, but I recently saw The Fountain by Darren Aronofsky whom you might remember from Pi or Requiem for a Dream. At 96 minutes long The Fountain is an incredibly descriptive movie that says quite a bit more than movies nearing twice that length of time. It was billed as a movie about living forever, and if you aren’t in the mood for a thinking movie, then you should probably pass because this one will seem entirely pointless. However, if you are in the mood to watch a movie that might force you to reflect on what it means to live, then you definitely will enjoy this.

Most of our lives consist of a frenetic discord of which we may not even be fully aware, but if you are able to find stillness in the noise you can see the underlying harmony to be found simply in living. Sometimes, I think the Biblical message about the rich man trying to enter heaven is overly specific, but metaphorically correct. It is not simply wealth that prevents people from understanding our purpose in life. Those who have great wealth, responsibilities, or addictions can’t hear the harmony of life as easily as those without.

In some ways, this is a sort of existential crisis. If you spend your entire life working for the wrong things, then you’ve essentially done nothing with your life. However, if you spend your entire life searching for the right thing to do and not acting, then you have also done nothing with your life. How then should one go about living? Perhaps the best plan is to achieve a system of checks and balances to act and then review consistently. The Fountain certainly makes the case that it is essential to take a few moments from time to time to listen for harmony.

This movie is about a man’s recognition of the harmony of life through his wife’s illness and despite his “richness.” He is a doctor researching a cure to cancer or some similar ailment. He is obviously talented and has obviously worked very hard throughout his life, but it appears that his work takes on new meaning when his wife becomes ill. This story is interlaced with an older story of a Spanish Conquistador who has similarly worked very hard, but finds his purpose in life takes on new meaning when the Queen of Spain is threatened. This shows that the problems we have with finding this solace within our own lives are not new.

I won’t give away more of the movie even though I’m not sure there’s really a secret to give away. There is a lot of symbolism in the movie and with its short duration it would certainly make for a great discussion afterwards. Some of that symbolism is Christian, and if you are a member of a Bible study, I hope that your group would be open minded enough to talk about such things rather than institutionally ignore them. I recommend that you rent it or add it it to your Netflix list. It’s definitely worth the price of admission.

For many people the idea of reading a book about a mathematical proof right after finishing a semester in a Computer Science graduate program would be an apt definition of torture. First, I am not one of those people. Second, Fermat’s Enigma really isn’t a book about math so much as it is a book about determination and history. Third, it’s only a three hundred page book.

For those who may not be familiar with Fermat’s Last Theorem, it is one of the most famous problems in the history of mathematics. Many incredibly smart mathematicians worked on it and failed to solve it. Eventually, it was solved in a truly extraordinary fashion by Sir Andrew Wiles, who worked in isolation on the proof for seven years and then had to endure another year working to patch a flaw in the proof with the intense heat of the international spotlight on him.

Probably the most amazing thing about Fermat’s Last Theorem is that it was so simple to explain. The Pythagorean Theorem states that the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle squared equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides. It’s a formula usually written as: x^2 + y^2 = z^2. Fermat’s Last Theorem states that this formula doesn’t have any non-zero whole number solutions for powers larger than two. More formally x^n + y^n = z^n where a, b, and c are whole numbers doesn’t hold for n > 2. Sounds pretty basic, and yet it took over 350 years to solve.

The book is made of two parts. First, it is part history of the problem and people who attempted to solve it. Second, it is part inspirationaly story of determination. The characters in the book are larger than life. There are some incredibly strange confluences of events that affected the people who were involved in Fermat’s Last Theorem. In particular, I thought the story of Sophie Germain was quite moving. I also found it personally amusing that the book discussed the Königsburg bridge problem since it was covered pretty early on in my Graph Theory course this semester.

Overall, I highly recommend the book to anyone who has a passing interest in mathematics or history. There’s plenty to go around. If you loved the book or the movie A Beautiful Mind, then you should not pass on this book! Of course, if you simply have something against reading, you can watch the PBS show about the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem called The Proof, but really, the book is short and exceedingly good.

I am beginning to slowly comprehend the extent to which Randy Pausch is sneaky smart. Maybe. I honestly don’t know, but he’s absolutely got me enthralled in a riddle.

If you don’t know who Randy Pausch is or you haven’t already read my previous posts about Dr. Pausch’s “Last Lecture” and about his Time Management Talk I would recommend you at least read those posts to fully appreciate this enigma.

Now, there’s only one truly important item in this post and it’s not the riddle. The riddle is amusing and I’ll discuss it in a bit, but I want the focus of this post to be clear.

I consider myself a rather introspective person and as a result I’m always trying to improve my abilities by setting aside a little time to think about my approach to things. It seems like a natural extension to my engineering instincts to look for a way to “engineer” the way I get things done. In that spirit, I first watched Dr. Pausch’s Time Management Talk about a month ago on the hunch that he was an excellent presenter for the “Last Lecture” and I thought it might carry over into his time management talk.

I was impressed enough to add it to my blog, which was not something I did for any of the previous time management techniques I have tried with varying degrees of success. I didn’t have a particular reason except that the field of personal productivity is, well, personal. There are a lot of different approaches because there are a lot of different people, and I figure what worked for me might not work for very many others. I once heard or read (I can’t remember where, but I think it was Merlin Mann’s Google Tech Talk) that the art of time management was essentially “Advanced Common Sense,” which is the best three word description I could give to Dr. Pausch’s talk. So I posted it.

I can’t impress upon you strongly enough that even if you saw the previous Time Management Talk I linked, you should watch the new version. It has been updated after ten years of practice, insight and feedback and I guarantee you the return on investment in watching the talk is worthwhile. In short, it is fantastic. I have embedded if you want to watch it right now or you can find it online here and watch it when you have an hour. Please set aside some time to watch this video. It is the best thing you can find in this post.

Now with the really important stuff covered, I can delve into the riddle. When I finished watching the original time management talk I thought to myself that I would try to implement a few pieces of it for a month and then take stock to see how it worked out. I was able to do some of it exceedingly well, and I was unable to do some of it at all. That’s sort of the point though. If you make incremental improvements you’ll eventually become fantastic at managing your time.

Fast forward to today. It’s “dead week” here at NCSU, which has traditionally been one of the most hectic weeks of the year, both for me and for many other students, in terms of time management.

(Are you ready for the riddle yet?)

I got an email from Randy Pausch to notify me of the updated version of the talk and compliment me on a couple of posts.

First, I need to tip my hat to Randy for the heads up and for the lecture. The new lecture should be required viewing for, at the very least, all graduate students.

My initial thought upon seeing the email was that someone was using his address to spam people in the hopes that they would read it, but once I read the email I was utterly blown away to find that (it appears) he actually emailed me. I mean, how freaking cool is that?? Of course, when I really thought about about it I found some serious weirdnesses. Here’s a brief list:

1. The fact that it had been almost exactly a month when he contacted me, which was the deadline I set for myself to review how some of his techniques worked out, was eerie coincidence.
2. Despite what some may claim, the path to fame and fortune is not to create a blog. I don’t get gobs of fan mail complimenting me for my blog posts, so getting an email from a recognized expert about something I posted on my blog is highly unusual and arguably a first for me.
3. I’m a computer science graduate student. I spend much of my time trying to get useful information out of computer science professors, so getting an unsolicited email with useful information from a computer science professor is highly unusual and absolutely a first for me.
4. If there is humor in extremes, the fact that Randy Pausch emailed me about my blog is comedic gold. The readership of my blog is pretty small. I am pretty sure the list of people who *don’t* read my blog includes my own mother and my PhD adviser. The exposure that Randy Pausch’s site and talks have deservedly earned is enormous. His story has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, Good Morning America, ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and Oprah.
5. While watching the new version of the talk, around minute 52, the camera pans into the crowd and lands on Mark Sherriff, a fun-loving recent PhD graduate of NCSU’s Computer Science Department now a professor at the University of Virginia. I worked in the lab with Mark over the summer. I was at a party with him last Friday night. He did not mention the talk to me and yet Randy Pausch did!

I could continue with this list, but I think I will move on to the riddle: First, how? How did he find my blog post on the topic? Second, why? Why email me? I’m hardly all that important. Why email anyone? His press basically is writing itself. In fact, there’s already a book deal in the works.

Perhaps there is a sort of Randy-esque nature to it though. Each of Randy’s talks has a central theme: get more bang for your buck. You only have one spin on this merry-go-round, so you might as well go all out. Now, I have only had a day to think about his email and I haven’t met Randy, but maybe he came to the realization that people don’t affect real change by screaming into a megaphone so much as they can by whispering into someone’s ear. Maybe he figured that calling the national media doesn’t really change as many minds as simply sending out a few emails to a few bloggers.

I have been blessed to have many gifted teachers. All of the best teachers are able to teach you something without even making you aware that they are teaching you. Randy talks about this as a sort of a head fake in his “Last Lecture.” Maybe this was another head fake. Maybe I will never know the answer to the riddles of how or why he emailed me. Maybe I’m simply over-thinking this whole scenario. Maybe he sent out dozens or hundreds of emails like the one he sent me. Maybe it’s actually best that I don’t know the answers to this riddle because for a curious mind, there’s a magic in not knowing why things work the way they do. All I know for sure is that he really got me thinking about life and if there was any planning that went into this at all, it was sneaky, sneaky smart.

Slashdot recently reported on an ArsTechnica article on the death of RealID. There are several things to take from this.

First, RealID is horrible from a privacy and liberty standpoint. This is well-known to anyone who actively concerns themselves with these sorts of issues. It is essentially a national ID card. Depending on how much of a privacy nut you are this seriousness of this could range from a simple invasion of your privacy to something straight out of 1984 or the Book of Revelation. I’m not sure I would take it to that extreme, but I do think the concept of a national ID card is a non-trivial invasion of privacy.

Second, RealID isn’t ecnonomical. The exact details of the security tradeoffs show that RealID is an extremely expensive trade-off. This is very important and subtly hard to understand. Instinct tells us that being able to identify everyone should allow us to determine those people who pose a threat and those who don’t. Unfortunately, reality doesn’t work like that if for no other reason than the simple fact that past behavior doesn’t always accurately predict future actions. Of course, there are many other reasons stated in the link above.

(BTW, This is really the only reason that RealID is dying. It was a massive unfunded mandate for the State governments. If it had been a pork barrel project with horrible security consequences but a nice paycheck for the State governments, then we might have a different story.)

Third, RealID may actually worsen national security. A single national database with the personal information of every citizen in the US is a juicy target for a lot of people with bad intentions. It is the ultimate honeypot, only using real data as opposed to fake data. A single process by which identification can be done is a monoculture with similar problems. I think the easiest analogy for people to understand is that throwing your support behind RealID as the identification card for any American is like putting your entire investment portfolio in one business. It’s just a lot safer to not have all your eggs in one basket.

So if RealID is so bad and it’s also “dying” why have I titled this post “The Non-Death of RealID”? Simply put, this sort of problem is like a bad penny. It keeps coming back because human instincts make it sound good. It keeps coming back because it affects personal liberty, which must always be defended. Security and Liberty aren’t things that you do once and forget about so the threats to these never really die.

Last night I watched Randy Pausch‘s Time Management Talk. I stumbled upon a list of his other lectures that were in video format. I figured that he was an excellent presenter in his “Last Lecture” and so he would probably be an excellent presenter in other presentations. He was.

It’s kind of interesting to watch his Time Management lecture for a couple reasons. He gave the presentation in 1998, which was years before he knew that he had cancer. It also interesting to see how things have changed in the intervening decade. The technologies are more mature or different, but the time management techniques are basically the same. In fact, you can see him talking about the Inbox Zero concept way back then.

You can check out the Google video here:

Dr. Pausch was also on Oprah’s show to reprise his “Last Lecture” in a shorter format. I still think that the long version is better, but if you’re interested, here’s the short version:

First, let me extend my condolances to the family of the woman who was killed after answering a Craigslist Ad in Minnesota. It’s never easy to lose a loved one, but it is much harder losing someone so young and so unexpectedly.

I heard about this story on CNN this morning. Unfortunately, murders happen every day and most are not covered on the national news media, so why was this one different? Well, the CNN coverage did everything it could to imply that this was somehow the fault of the Internet. Even the article that I linked earlier implied something to that effect. Here’s a quote:

They also say Katherine often found the internet, and Craig’s List, in particular to be a helpful tool to meet people and find opportunities.

This week, police say a man used the internet to lure Katherine to her death.

Let me be clear in refuting this: the Internet is no more a tool of murder than the plaster cast. The Internet is a tool. What it does do is foster communication amongst humans. It does this extremely well, but it does this for anyone who has access. You are reading this post because we both have access to the Internet. Craigslist is essentially a giant classified ads page for some geographic region.

This same sort of murder could have taken place decades before the Internet via another tool: the newspaper. People have used the classifieds for all sorts of illegal things including prostitution and murder. This is not a failure of technology; it is a failure of humanity. Some people do evil things and they use all the tools available. On net the tools that we have created have improved our quality of life. This hasn’t changed with the coming of the Internet. I just wish the news media would wake up to that.

Dr. Randy Pausch recently received national attention for his “Last Lecture.” Naturally, I didn’t hear about it until I found it on Robin’s blog. Dr. Pausch is a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also dying from cancer. His “Last Lecture” covered his thoughts on how to go about achieving your childhood dreams. As a former Disney Imagineer, Dr. Pausch knows something about dreams.

I watched the Google Video version, and I have to say that it was one of the most inspiring talks I have heard in a long time. I am usually quite skeptical when someone comes out with the latest “Here’s how to succeed” story, but when genuinely articulate, intelligent people talk about how they achieved all they ever wanted I am more than willing to listen. The lecture is simultaneously hilarious, uplifting and bittersweet. I highly encourage you to take 90 minutes to watch it.

Clarence Thomas was interviewed on 60 Minutes tonight. I was still rather young when Thomas was going through his confirmation process and I didn’t realize that he only had about one year of experience as a judge at the time. There were a lot of political machinations that were going on with his nomination. I didn’t really understand them all at the time, but I do remember thinking it was far more of a circus than I thought it should be.

Daniel Solove was commenting recently on the idea of ending life tenure for Supreme Court Justices. His argument was inspired by the New York Times article and contained some of the same kinds of things that I disliked about the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Solove argues that life appointments make the process even more politicized, put pressure on Presidents to nominate inexperienced justices that will be able to serve longer and are dangerous because of the unpredictable nature of which political entity would be in power when a seat comes open.

Life appointments make sense today for the reasons they did when they were initially chosen. The position is too important to have justices worried about what they will do after their time on the bench. Anything that can be done to ensure their independence in decision making should be done. Arguing about life expectancy differences doesn’t make sense to me. Ben Franklin was the perfect example to those writing the Constitution that it was possible a justice could live far longer than average and have an impact on the bench for decades. Regardless of what term limit there is, the process is going to be politicized to no end simply because it’s the Supreme Freaking Court. In the US, this is the last say in all things judicial, so why wouldn’t it become politicized? As for President’s nominating young and inexperienced people to the court, that is a serious problem and it’s out of hand. Youth isn’t nearly as big of an issue as inexperience, but it’s not a Presidential nomination problem so much as it is a confirmation issue. There’s a reason that the Senate has to confirm nominations. If the nomination is young or inexperienced, then the Senate should not confirm the nomination.

I recently read an excellent article on John Paul Stevens by the New York Times. I definitely don’t agree with all his opinions, but it is hard to argue that his voice and experience with decades of serving on the Supreme Court are detrimental. I don’t know that Justices are constantly able to think broadly in terms of history, but I expect it would be easier if you had broad experience with it.

I would hope that we could avoid messy confirmation battles like the one that Clarence Thomas went through, but I would prefer having those battles over changing a system that has worked pretty darn well for so long. With the political battles that have been fought recently, it seems more important than ever to make sure that the Supreme Court Justices are as independent and removed from the political process as possible. Lastly, term limits would cut short the time that once in a generation minds could serve. What if Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was only allowed to serve 18 years? What about John Marshall? What about Louis Brandeis?

[Edit: I wanted to add that Clarence Thomas's recent autobiography and interview on 60 Minutes have caused Anita Hill to speak out. This seems like one of those stories for which we may never be able to fully know the truth. It also is exactly the worst kind of story in politics in that it has almost no significance on the national level but yet we still devote tons of time to trying to understand it.]

[Edit2: More commentary on cnn.com that argues Clarence Thomas has a right to be angry.]

There’s a BBC article that was posted this past Saturday entitled Big Brother is watching us all. I am leary of reading traditional media articles about privacy because many of them are inflammatory and most seem to provide and distorted view of what most reasonable privacy advocates are actually advocating. However, I was curious because it was the BBC and London is well-known to have extensive surveillance camera networks.

Despite my misgivings, the article does describe some technologies in a rational and accurate manner. I don’t know if the technologies described are right around the corner or if it will still take decades for them to be functional. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle. However, I do know that we’re nowhere close to being able to understand as a society the implications that some of these things, when functional, will have for us.

Of course, there is a great example of the traditional tripe usually found in mainstream media articles. It comes at the end of the article:

Using radio waves, you point [the device at] a wall and it tells you if anyone is on the other side. [Ian Kitajima's] company, Oceanit, is due to test it with the Hawaiian National Guard in Iraq next year, and it turns out that the human body gives off such sensitive radio signals, that it can even pick up breathing and heart rates.

“First, you can tell whether someone is dead or alive on the battlefield,” said Ian.

“But it will also show whether someone inside a house is looking to harm you, because if they are, their heart rate will be raised. And 10 years from now, the technology will be much smarter. We’ll scan a person with one of these things and tell what they’re actually thinking.”

He glanced at me quizzically, noticing my apprehension.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “It sounds very Star Trekkish, but that’s what’s ahead.”

This is exactly the reason I dislike mainstream media articles about technology. No, there will not be a magic radio wave device that can read your mind and determine what you’re actually thinking in the next ten years. This is hogwash. One of the many reasons why is simple. The first step in building a device that can determine what someone is actually thinking is creating an algorithm or process that can determine what someone is actually thinking. Anyone who has ever been married can tell you how successful humans are at that sort of thing.

A quickly beating heart is indicative of many disparate things. Most of these are not “I am preparing to kill whomever is staring at me through my wall.” However, if you are a member of a SWAT team holding a device such as this in one hand and a machine gun in the other… Well, let’s just say that a hammer sees every problem as a nail.

A similar situation is described in Blink by Malcom Gladwell where a police officer had to make a split second decision based on bad instincts. The good news is that training can improve split second decisions in police officers. Thus, it is possible that proper training in the use of technology can prevent abuses and wasteful spending which might result from misunderstanding technology. The bad news is that we may not be able to train those in decision making positions rapidly enough to keep up with technology marketers (and clueless mainstream media journalists) who are trying to sell the next miracle device that will solve all your security problems.