I was watching another excellent TED talk video, this one featuring ethno-mathematician Ron Eglash who got a fulbright grant to study why African villages were built in a fractal manner. In his Introduction to Fractals bit at the beginning he demonstrates how a line segment fractal develops:

Maybe I'm weird (ha, "maybe") but I couldn't help but notice the resemblance to the famous "chunky bacon" foxes from Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby. Now my mind is full of an infinite fractal fox syncytium shouting "chunky bacon!"

Technorati Tags: chunky bacon, ruby

I thought twitter was semi sort of neat for a bit, until it exploded during a SXSW marketing blitz and I started getting overwhelmed by twaffic. Even before the deluge, the non sequitur nature of the twaffic was often puzzling. The last straw was when I mentioned to Mie that I don't even bother checking my phone when I get SMS messages anymore, so she told me in no uncertain terms to turn twitter off.

My other phone complaint is regarding my Treo 700p and my 4G SD card. Or perhaps I should say my erstwhile SD card, since the thing has a habit of falling out of the phone and I haven't been able to locate it since it's last escape. I hope Tesla didn't swallow it. It had photos and videos of her I'd like to keep. If I ever find it or get a replacement I think I'm going cover the slot with duct tape.

My friend Jim sent me a couple of interesting things recently. One was information about a collaborative information project he is helping ramp up. In a (surely inaccurate) nutshell it's a bit of a wikipedia / cooperation commons / xanadu mashup. I can see tie ins with my own quixotic belief system project as well. As a bonus, he sent a link to the blog of Geet Duggal, one of the principals of the project. Geet authored a physics paper called What is an Energy Landscape that includes a section on "the ass-pains of an atomic pair potential". Geet turned me on to the term Bloom Filter, which is something I'd never heard of despite the fact that I implemented what is apparently a specific algorithm for a Bloom filter at my last company (I simply referred to it as the Ullmann algorithm, used for subgraph isomorphism searches of molecular compounds).

Jim also sent a set of links to a series of articles written by Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve. Murray examines the realities of the modern education system and the role it plays in society. Here are some excerpts (and the links):

Intelligence in the Classroom

Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.

Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.

What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP's definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.

What's Wrong With Vocational School?
Too many Americans are going to college

Combine those who are unqualified with those who are qualified but not interested, and some large proportion of students on today's college campuses--probably a majority of them--are looking for something that the four-year college was not designed to provide. Once there, they create a demand for practical courses, taught at an intellectual level that can be handled by someone with a mildly above-average IQ and/or mild motivation. The nation's colleges try to accommodate these new demands. But most of the practical specialties do not really require four years of training, and the best way to teach those specialties is not through a residential institution with the staff and infrastructure of a college. It amounts to a system that tries to turn out televisions on an assembly line that also makes pottery. It can be done, but it's ridiculously inefficient.

Aztecs vs. Greeks
Those with superior intelligence need to learn to be wise.

The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities--in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire.

The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks. The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies not because they will need them to communicate in daily life, but because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level.

The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good.

I don't usually do these things, but maybe I'm in the holiday spirit or something. I noticed danah recently did a 5 things list that focused on embarrassing things, so I'll try to lean in that direction.

5 Things You Probably Don't Know About Me

1. I spent nearly nine years between graduating high school and graduating college with a BS. Before finally switching to computer science I seriously entertained majoring in art, and then psychology for a couple of years. Even after picking CS I was going to minor in dance until my advisor talked me out of it. I also spent a few years not being in school mixed in there.
2. I spent one night homeless in New Orleans in 1990 and slept in the bus station until they kicked me out, and then jumped a fence in the French Quarter and slept on someone's porch until early dawn, when I moved to a park bench in Jackson Square.
3. I grew up in a rural NC house that for a long time lacked indoor plumbing and electricity. I used to read by oil lamp at night. We took showers outside under a hose, which sucks when there's snow on the ground. Even after we got the plumbing and electricity hooked up, the house was like a large well disguised shack in many respects. The only source of heat was a wood stove. I've probably chopped more wood than anyone else you know.
4. I cry at movies all the time, especially on airplanes. Sometimes I tear up when listening to patriotic songs.
5. There are videos of me and a high school friend lip syncing to Air Supply and playing a house organ and air guitar. We weren't being ironic or funny.

Wow, I'm starting to realize I could probably easily list 50 embarrassing things if I had to.

I guess this is the part where I tag other people: Mie, Thombert, Ele, Savvy, Kitten. Embarrassing or not is up to you.

Tesla Rhea Yaginuma.

Why did we name our daughter Tesla? It was a name I came up with well after our first attempts failed. A month or more later I visited my friend Michael Rei and his family. M.R. told me he briefly considered naming his daughter Ellington after the famous jazz musician Duke Ellington whom he admired. This got me thinking about people I admired.

I asked Mie how she liked the name Tesla, and she thought it sounded pretty good. This immediately shot the name to the top of our list, as we really didn't have much affection for any of the other names we'd come up with at that point. Naming a person is hard.

When we ran it by other people, reactions varied but were generally positive. This is how I would break down the initial reactions:

• 50% You mean like a tesla coil? Like Doctor Megavolt?
• 25% Wasn't there a crappy hair band with that name?
• 25% Like the scientist?

The most apt association is (C) like Nikola Tesla, the Serbian born American scientist who was a contemporary and rival of Thomas Edison. In fact I tend to describe their relationship as Tesla was the Apple to Edison's Microsoft. Although it's not the best way to put it. In some ways it's more like Tesla was the Xerox PARC to Edison's IBM.

Nikola Tesla did important research and created inventions in all manner of electromagnetic pursuits, and in his time was one of the world's most famous scientists. His name has faded from the public consciousness, in my opinion, because he was not nearly as brilliant a businessman as he was a scientist. He was also always a bit eccentric, an attribute that only increased over his long life.

Tesla did invent the Tesla Coil, a device for making artificial lightning. He invented radio, a feat erroneously attributed to Marconi, who was actually using circuitry invented by Tesla. In 1898 he publicly displayed a wireless remote control operated boat and submarine. He also was the force behind worldwide adoption of alternating current as the principle means of power grid distribution (this was after a very heated and public battle with Edison who promoted direct current for the same task. Edison's propaganda assault included paying 25 cents a head for stray dogs and cats that were electrocuted via alternating current in order to show how dangerous it was).

For these reasons and more, Nikola Tesla in one of my favorite scientists.

I liked the name 'Tesla' as a girl's name as well. It has the ending -a which denotes femininity in most romance languages. The nickname Tes is a three letter version of a common girl's name Tess (Mie and I like three letter names). It's pronounceable in Japanese (where a name like Arthur, for example, is not; it comes out as 'Assa'). I liked that the name is associated with energy and power. The general concepts of energy and power are something nice to associate with anyone, and the specific connotation of power transmission and energy production are subjects that I believe will play a central role in the era of Tesla's (my daughter's) life. In fact Nikola Tesla is often on my mind these days because the modern energy crisis is something I believe he would have tackled with relish and creativity. And finally, Mie pointed out that having a daughter associated with magnetism isn't too shabby either (a tesla is a unit of magnetic flux density equal to one weber per square meter (no, I don't really know what that means either)).

Most of the people we presented with the potential name liked it or loved it. Some thought it was pretty. Some liked that it was a strong name for a woman (this mainly came from the strong women we know). My fellow science buffs liked the connection to Nikola. I concurred with all of these assessments.

It wasn't all roses though. Most people from our parents generation thought it was too strange, or too masculine. In Japan, for example, any name that begins with 'Te' is usually a boys name. Almost uniformly anyone over the age of 50 didn't care for it.

In the end, Mie and I had to decide for ourselves what we wanted to call our daughter. We left ourselves open to last moment inspiration, or even to leaving the hospital with her still unnamed and amending the birth certificate at a later date, but after she was born and I was getting ready to call in the announcement, we simply decided to go with our gut and give her the name that had been growing on us for the past few weeks.

Funnily enough, five days after she was born, BoingBoing posted a blurb celebrating Nikola Tesla's 150th birthday anniversary. I hadn't even realized it was coming up, she missed it by five days! Also, my friend Alex pointed out that there was a british comic book super-hero named Tesla Strong, a "science hero... [who] like her father ... is possessed of a genius intellect, incredible physique, and insatiable thirst for adventure." Word.

Her middle name Rhea is the middle name of my adoptive mother. She died in 1991 of cancer. In these days where I spend more and more time with my biological maternal family, and can expect that to only increase in time as I want Tesla to have a relationship with her kin, I thought it was important to honor the mother who raised me.

Sometime soon Mie and I are going to have to finally decide on a name for our art project. We've been using the "working title" of Gargle, courtesy of Mie's father, but that's probably not going to win her many friends in school so the pressure is on for something a tad more appropriate.

Since both Mie and I have three letter names, a few friends suggested we come up with another three letter name. My friend Jim who was a fellow computer science student back at my University went a step further and suggested a recursive three letter name, such that the initials were also the first name. For example, Amy Michelle Yaginuma = A.M.Y..

I liked this idea, so I wrote some quick ruby code to spit out all possible three letter permutations ending in Y:

for letter1 in 'a'..'z'
  for letter2 in 'a'..'z'
    puts letter1+letter2+'y'
  end
end

Then I manually took out all the results that simply wouldn't do (like Cqy), yielding a number of normal names (Amy, Fay, Guy, Ivy, Jay, Joy, Ray, Roy) plus plenty of words that would be more creative names (Any, Ary, Bay, Boy, Coy, Day, Fey, Fly, Fry, Gay, Hay, Hey, Icy, Key, Lay, Nay, Pay, Ply, Pry, Say, Shy, Sky, Spy, Sty, Thy, Toy, Way, Wry, Yay). There were also a lot of results that were simply valid utterances although neither name nor recognizable word, such as Axy, Bly, Cey, Ely, Emy, Kny, Koy, Oxy, Pey, Qay, Rey, Umy, Vay, Yfy, etc.. There were a ton of these.

We're not into normal names so that cut out the first set, and yes, I fully expect the "why couldn't you give me a normal name" conversation years from now. You'll appreciate it one day, now go do your homework. Out of the second set, the closest Mie and I could come to an agreement was Sky, but we both thought that was still a little too much of a common hippie name. Personally, my favorites were Sky, Spy and Fly. I thought Yay would be funny for about a month, but figured I'd be made to regert it at some point. Bay is cool on one level, as it ties to San Francisco in a way, but I didn't like the sound of it as a name. Ary was too geeky even for me. I love the irony of Boy, but even I know that would be a mistake. Shy is nice, but could end up being a personality affector in one way or another. I also liked Qay for some reason. Eventually it occurred to me that Qay was the name of a club Mie and I went to the first time I visited her in Tokyo (Mission: Woo). But I just checked the photo record and it was actually called Cay. I kind of like that too.

So that turned up a lot of of possibilities, but nothing really grabbed us. Mie came up with a mutation of the algorithm, which was to make the name have more than three letters, but still be recursive. For example, Brandy Rand Yaginuma = B. Rand Y.. This would greatly increase the possibility space, but we haven't come up with any good ones yet.. I might have to write some code again to help out. Actually Mie's first example of this algorithm was Kinky Ink Yaginuma, which segues into our other category of attempts.

We were watching Born Into Brothels, a great documentary about children of prostitutes in India. One of the kids names was Kochi, which Mie really liked. Of course, this might have something to do with her blog being named Kokochi. A few days later we were out in North Beach and ran across an exotic dancer named Aiku, which Mie also liked. I suppose it's pretty sad that our short list is partially culled from films about prostitution and fake stripper names.

Another restriction Mie has placed on the name is that it must be easily pronouncable
to a native Japanese speaker. This has nixed a few names so far. I've recently started to like Xeni (yes, I got the idea from that Xeni), which is pronounced "SHEH nee", but Mie says that will turn into Jenny in nihongo. I like the idea of X Y as initials. Xeni Zenith Yaginuma! Or how about Wind Xeni Yaginuma, W.X.Y.?

Incidentally, I've always thought Danny and Quinn set the bar when they named their daughter Ada after the world's first computer programmer Ada Lovelace. Great name, great legacy. Geek power!

Mie and I both like the idea of using a place name as either a middle or first name. That way we could rationalize making a family trip there some day. One of these days we'll sit down with an atlas and scour the possibilities. We could also use somewhere we already know and love, like Pai in Thailand.

My friend Sean has been helpful. Before we knew the gender he came up with several names that would be appropriate just in case the baby turned out to be an hermaphrodite. I forget most of them, one was Bevmo. He always goes one step further than the average joe. His more recent suggestions include Feral Yaginuma, Tobor Isrobotspelledbackwards Yaginuma and Cataract Condoleeza Yaginuma.

Um, so as you can see we're not making a lot of progress. We still have at least a few months to decide though. And of course we could always do what our friend Lani did. She refused to name her son when she left the hospital, only settling on Nicholas after getting to know him for a couple of months. That actually makes a lot of sense.

And then there's the important thing with any name in this day and age: is the .com domain available? . Perhaps we should just name her Daughtr .

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Last week I started following a story about an unidentified surfer who drowned off at Ocean Beach here in San Francisco. I've had a couple of close calls myself while surfing, so this kind of news always gets to me in a way.

In the end it turned out to be a friend of a friend, someone I had met briefly at a few dinners. You can read more about it (and watch a touching video of Sean) at Alex's memorial page here: Candleblog - Sean Fahey.

I never know what to say to someone who has lost a loved one. Everyone handles death differently. Normally I say as little as possible. This time I felt like I really might be able to offer a unique perspective though, and decided to give it a shot. Apparently it did actually help in a way, so I've decided to repost an excerpt here. Perhaps it can help someone else too.

One time I was surfing in waves far larger than my ability to handle them. There were very few people out so I was more or less alone with nobody near me. I took off on a wave and wiped out. I was held under water for quite some time, rolling around. When I struggled to the surface again I realized my surfboard was no longer attached to my leg leash and was nowhere in sight. I was now in the area where the waves were crashing down; the water was way too rough and I was too far out to give me any hope of making it to shore swimming. After a few minutes of struggling and making no progress and seeing no one around me I started realizing that this was probably it for me. I was going to die out there. My strength was almost gone. I had been knocked under water several times by huge waves. I knew I would not be able to struggle to the surface one more time after the next one hit me. Moments later two surfers who had noticed me finally made their way over and rescued me.

And here is the part that I want to relate, because maybe Sean had this moment too. I hope he did.

After becoming exhausted fighting to stay on the surface, when I realized I wasn't going to make it a great calm came over me. I was truly at peace with this being the end; I'll never forget the feeling and ever since that day I've hoped that it would be there with me again whenever the real end came. I thought about the people I loved and the people that loved me and I just wanted to tell them "it's ok, not a bad way to go" and I hoped they would understand.

Sean, I hope you're at peace.