if you're scared of AI, you should be scared of smart humans too

The AI apocalypse argument is hitting the mainstream.  In a nutshell, AI is advancing very quickly and as we have no idea how to instill it with human values, it is likely to destroy all that we value in pursuit of some goal we have given it.

I don't want to say this is impossible.  Janelle Shane has compiled a fun Twitter thread of AI agents achieving goals in unexpected ways, exploiting aspects of the environment that most humans would consider off-limits.  These exploits remind me of an apocryphal test for psychopathy:

Question: A woman meets and engages in extended conversation with an attractive man at her mother's funeral.  However, he leaves before she can get his contact information.  A few days later, the woman kills her own sister.  Why?

Answer (supposedly only deducible by psychopaths): She is hoping the attractive man will also show up at her sister's funeral.

You could imagine an AI system also coming up with that answer.  "Hey, you didn't tell me I couldn't kill my own sister, you just told me to try to meet the attractive guy."  The AI apocalypse argument is the idea that one day an AI system will say "hey, you didn't tell me I couldn't kill all humans, you just told me to make a bunch of paperclips".

And so I like to think of AI systems, at least the current batch, as psychopaths.

But... we already have human psychopaths.  And some of them are quite intelligent.  Some of the most intelligent ones are probably able to conceal their psychopathy enough to successfully further their own goals.  Certain CEOs come to mind.  And to a lesser extent, we're all psychopaths in that we're "unaligned" with prosocial values; most people would be willing to inflict some amount of harm on society if their own well-being or that of their loved ones were at stake.

Secondarily, the AI apocalypse argument appeals by analogy to historical examples of lesser intelligences encountering greater intelligences.  Homo sapiens drove extinct earlier hominids, as well as many other mammalian species.

What's noteworthy about these examples is that the differences in intelligence are relatively small.  Humans haven't driven cockroaches extinct, or ants.  The intelligences of those creatures are different enough from our own that the competition for resources is limited to our pantries.

The scariest creature is a psychopathic human (or group thereof), a little bit smarter than us and competing with us for resources.

how to do well in grad school

I wrote this blog post 10 years ago but didn't publish it.  It's directed at incoming PhD students to the University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering department (now the Allen School).  My sense from talking to recent CS undergrads is that I would have zero chance of being accepted to this program nowadays.

This is a list of things I didn't do, but should have.  I graduated in 8 years, the last in my cohort.  Follow these rules if you want to do better.

1.  Start doing research right away, and spend most of your time on it.  In fact, you should have done this already.  It's even possible to arrive at the beginning of the summer and start working on a project then.  The sooner you do this, the better, because doing research and writing a dissertation are the main bottleneck in grad school.  Everything else is secondary.

2.  For one, your classes don't matter.  Well, they barely matter.  If you haven't started doing research yet, I suppose extending a class project is one way to get started, but you're better off doing research to the detriment of your class performance.  The classes outside your research area really don't matter.  Do the minimum amount of work required to not embarrass yourself.  And don't take too many classes at a time.  Again, this is never the bottleneck.

3.  Similarly, TAing does not matter.  Do the minimum amount required.  We have something called the Bob Bandes Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching.  If you get this award, it's a sure sign that you're doing something wrong.  I won it my first year, and it felt good but had zero lasting positive consequences.

4. No one knows what it really means to do research in computer science, in some deep sense.  Don't get hung up on this, and just try to make cool stuff.

5. Don't work in your office, work in your group's lab, and socialize with those people.  Hanging around smart people in your area is extremely important.  Don't become friends with the rest of your cohort or your officemates.

6. If, after a few years, things aren't working out, LEAVE.  There's no shame in leaving with a Master's.  If you wait too long, though, there will be shame in leaving, and you'll be stuck in no man's land.

7. There are lots of things to do in Seattle.  It's silly to say don't do them, but don't do something else that's really time consuming or difficult, as it will eat up your willpower.  Getting a PhD takes all the willpower you have and then some.

8. Be married when you arrive, or be single and stay that way.  Having tumultuous relationships is extremely distracting.  Everyone I know who showed up married finished in 5 years.  This advice may apply only to men.

Don't think you're too good for this advice.  I thought that, too.  I thought I could simultaneously do research, take martial arts classes 5 days a week, and play in an '80s cover band.  I also thought I could work alone, in my office.  If you think you're good, you can try breaking some of these rules, but be warned that everyone else in your position also has reason to think they're good, and I guarantee that the majority of you can't get away with breaking these rules.

Finally, remember that even if you are the worst, the outcome isn't that bad.  You're not going to leave worse than you are now (though you'll be older), and you must be pretty good already if you got accepted.  You won't be unemployed when you leave, and at worst you can get a job programming interesting things.

chords I like

Below is an email I sent to a group of music nerd friends, including The Doctor of Rock.

Here are the two main qualities that make a good chord:

1. At least one note from outside the song's key.  This includes chords like II, VI, VII in one direction and bIII, bVI, bVII (and I suppose iv) in the other.

2. Somewhat unexpected given the preceding context.  So the bVII in a song that just goes back and forth between I and bVII is not as good as the bVII in Flashdance, which is pretty close to the ideal chord.  And the III in a song that's obviously minor is not as good as the III in the chorus of Glory of Love.

Sometimes an entire song section can be chock full of good chords, to the point where it's hard for me to assign "good chord" credit to individual chords.   Like the prechorus and chorus of Borderline.  This is also a case where the sequencing of the chords helps a lot; the chorus *starts and ends on the V*.

Another thing I like is when II-like chords and bVII-like chords appear in close proximity.  Like the bVII and III in the prechorus to Starlight.  More generally I'd say the weakest use of II is in a II - V, and the weakest use of III is in a III - vi.  Not weak, just weaker than other uses of II and III.

Sometimes a song has a chord that I think I can improve on.  Are You Happy Now by Michelle Branch is a pretty good song, but the ii in the chorus should *clearly* be a II.  Dream a Little Dream has a bVI that should *clearly* be a ii^ø7.

where I mostly write

It's been a while since I updated this blog, mainly because I've been using Facebook as a mini-blog. (You don't need to friend me in order to read my posts.)

I've also been contributing to many of the posts on Dan Morris's music theory blog.

Hotelling's Law

Hotelling's Law is often cited as the reason politicians running against each other end up taking similar positions.  For example, look at Obama and Romney on this chart.  The classical example is two vendors selling ice cream to patrons along a boardwalk, where each patron will buy ice cream from the nearest vendor.  In this scenario, each vendor is incentivized to move right next to the other, towards the middle of the boardwalk, in order to maximize profit.

I started thinking about some extensions to this.  Namely, what happens if you add more vendors, and what happens in different spaces.  You might guess that if you add more vendors, they all cluster at the middle, but you would be wrong.

(I should add that I ran simulations but didn't work out any of the math, so it's possible some of my results here are not correct.)

Three Vendors
What happens with three vendors?  The middle vendor has no incentive to do anything and takes a random walk, but the outer vendors want to squeeze the middle one.  Once they all meet, they move around together, and don't necessarily stay at the center.

Four Vendors
It's tempting to think that four vendors would also fight over the same spot, but this did not happen in my simulations.  I instead got two vendors sitting right next to each other at 1/4, and the two others at 3/4.  Each vendor then gets 1/4 of the patrons, and none has any incentive to move.

N Vendors for Even N
This plays out just like four vendors, with two vendors at 1/N, two vendors at 3/N, two vendors at 5/N, etc., with each vendors getting 1/N of the patrons.

N Vendors for Odd N
This seems pretty chaotic.  I can't come up with any simple way to describe what happens, and it's not always the same.

Two Vendors, Circular Boardwalk
Now imagine a circular boardwalk.  In this scenario the vendors' positions do not matter at all, as they will split the profits equally.

Three Vendors, Circular Boardwalk
Eventually, you get a stable situation where two vendors are right next to each other serving 1/4 of the patrons each, and the other vendor is on the other side of the circle serving the other 1/2 of the patrons.

N Vendors for Even N, Circular Boardwalk
Plays out just like it does on a linear boardwalk, with pairs of vendors at N/2 equally spaced positions on the circle.

Two Vendors, Two Dimensions
Just like in one dimension, they move to the center.

Two Vendors on a Sphere
Same as a circle, position doesn't matter.

If I get a chance I'll try to get some of these simulations running on the web somewhere.  Also, someone please address this more rigorously than I just did.

RescueTime productivity feedback

RescueTime is a useful tool for tracking your computer time, but it would be nice to get constant real-time feedback so you can see your scores plummet as you surf Facebook all day.

I hacked together a simple Windows application that lives in the system tray and shows your RescueTime productivity, updating every minute.  You can get it here.  You'll also need to install Python and PyWin32.  You also need to enable a RescueTime API key here and then add that key on line 16 of productivity_feedback.py.  If you want the application to run all the time, create a shortcut and set it as a startup task.

Yeah, I didn't make it easy for you.  If I get a chance I'll put together a simplified cross-platform version.

don't break the only way to do something

It is impossible to stay up-to-date with all of the blogs and news sites I read.  For infrequently-updated sites with a high percentage of good stuff, RSS solves the problem.  For frequently-updated sites with a lower percentage, it does not.  I don't want to sift through hundreds or thousands of articles manually each day.

Up until a few weeks ago, I knew of exactly one solution to this problem: "sort by magic" in Google Reader, which sorted the RSS entries in my feed by, well, magic.  Unfortunately, Google's much-maligned Reader update has killed the magic.  The "sort by magic" option is still there, but they should probably change its name to "sort by angry illiterate moose".  I used to see a nice mixture of posts from all of my followed sites, where posts from infrequently-updated sites usually showed up near the top, along with only the "best" posts from frequently-updated sites.  (I don't know what "best" means, but it seemed to do just fine.)  Now, I just see hundreds of posts from TechCrunch.  This is not magic.

So, now I have zero solutions to this problem.  I can no longer follow blogs like Marginal Revolution with several posts per day.  TechCrunch is out of the question.

Any suggestions?

does playlist order matter?

Does playlist order matter?  Many people seem to think so (see High Fidelity), but I remain unconvinced.  I was inspired to resolve this issue in my mind after seeing a poster at ISMIR 2011 evaluating several algorithms for automatic playlist generation.  It turns out that there's a free dataset containing around 30,000 actual user-created playlists, covering over 200,000 songs.

What does it mean for playlist order to matter?  There are a few simple things we could look for:

1. Some pairs of songs should occur frequently in one order, but not the other.
2. Some pairs of songs should occur close together (in either order) more frequently than predicted by chance alone.

There's a problem with looking at pairs of songs, though: the above dataset contains over 47 billion possible song transitions and only 30,000 playlists, containing around 20 songs on average.  Possibly worse, only 9627 of the 545,867 pairs of consecutive songs (1.8%) appear more than once.
To address this lack-of-common-pairs issue, we can think about modeling a playlist as a list of artists rather than a list of songs, as this should increase the amount of repetition.  Now, instead of counting the number of times Even Flow by Pearl Jam comes after Rusty Cage by Soundgarden, we count the number of times any Pearl Jam song comes after any Soundgarden song.  This ameliorates the problem somewhat, as there are 128,778 consecutive artist pairs (23.6%) that occur at least twice in the data set.

Now, let's address #1: are there pairs of artists for which one is more likely to come first?  Here's a simple way to test this:

• For each pair of artists, compute the probability that they appear in one order (say, Pearl Jam then Soundgarden) when they appear consecutively.  Then find the pairs of artists for which this probability is highest.  (It's necessary to use something akin to Bayesian Rating here, to avoid pairs of artists that appear a few times in one direction and zero in the other.)
  
  
• Randomly shuffle each playlist and recompute the probabilities, again looking at the highest-probability pairs.  Do this several times.  The highest probabilities you see will give you a good sense of what can happen based on chance alone, since there is obviously no meaningful order to the randomly shuffled playlists.
  
  
• Are there any pairs of artists with ordering probability higher than anything you saw when using the randomly shuffled playlists?  If so, we can say this pair of artists is likely to appear in one order over the other with some degree of significance.

It turns out that running this experiment yields no pair of artists that are significantly likely to appear in one order over the other.  There's still a possibility of some asymmetry, however — maybe Pearl Jam is likely to appear two songs before Soundgarden, or three, etc.  To address this, we can re-run the above test, but without the requirement that the songs are adjacent.  That is, we can compute the probability that Pearl Jam occurs earlier than Soundgarden in a playlist where both appear.  When we do this, we find that there's still no pair of artists with a preferred ordering.

Let's look at #2, then: are there pairs of artists that appear next to each other more than chance would predict?  We can adapt our above experiment for this case: just compute the probability that two artists appear consecutively (in either order) when they both show up in the same playlist, and do the same for the randomly shuffled playlists.  It turns out that now there are a few pairs of artists that tend to appear consecutively with some significance (keep in mind these playlists are from the early 2000s):

• Ben Folds Five and Barenaked Ladies
• Radiohead and Björk
• Blink 182 and Weezer
• Radiohead and Pink Floyd

So, I guess I will have to acknowledge that playlist ordering is something, and not nothing.

reverse lottery

Of course you know about the lottery, where you can pay some small amount of money for a low probability of winning a large amount of money.  And lots of businesses have promotions along the same lines: e.g., if you buy our slightly-overpriced french fries, you might win a yacht.

However, I have never seen the reverse: we're giving out free french fries, except there's a small chance you'll have to pay us $1000.  Now, a potential customer might not have $1000, so let's lower the values here to get a simpler and fairer comparison between two potential offerings:

1. French fries cost $1.25, but one out of every five customers gets his for free.
2. French fries are free, but one out of every five customers has to pay a $5.00 fine.

There must be a reason why businesses never offer the second type of deal.  Is it just logistical?  Or is it that people would hate this, and a 1 in 5 chance of losing $5 is worse than just giving away $1.25.  It seems that this sort of deal would not be too difficult to arrange, so I have to imagine that businesses don't offer it because people don't like it.

This brings me to my main point: a lot of law enforcement works like this "reverse lottery", and I think we're underestimating just how much people hate this.  Our goal should be punishments that exactly offset the value of the crime, and a 100% chance of getting caught.  This makes enforcement prohibitively costly, but serves as an ideal.  (The other extreme, where you get away with criminal behavior almost all of the time, but if you get caught you and your family are tortured for 20 years then killed, sounds awful to anyone.)  Certainty itself has value, and this needs to be traded off against the cost of enforcement.

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about crime statistics, and I would hope there are experts who do know what happens as you vary the level of punishment and probability of getting caught.  I'm betting that, while keeping level of punishment times probability of getting caught constant, good things happen as punishment goes down and probability of getting caught goes up, and the only reason not to move further in this direction is cost of patrol.

This blog post arose from a discussion with Alex Jaffe.

(Another way to look at things is that in my ideal scenario, there is no crime — you simply pay for the damage you do.)

resolutions: 2011 edition

The last time I made resolutions, it was the end of 2008.  I've since gone 2 for 4 on those resolutions, and one of them took me an extra year.  Here's what I resolve to do in the coming year (in no particular order):

1. Take piano lessons and do at least one public performance (Rewind shows don't count).
2. Participate in at least one submission wrestling tournament.
3. Re-learn and improve the 540 kick (see this video).
4. Take a dance class.
5. Finish (version 1 of) the awesome chord-listening iPhone app I'm working on.

I think I can go 5 for 5 this time.  These are all extremely doable, like your mom.  Notice that I did not officially resolve to post more often to this blog, or learn to snowboard, or learn to ride a bike, or learn Portuguese, or learn Chinese, or read more books, or play more video games, even though these are all things I want to do.  You have to make cuts somewhere.

I also didn't include any work-related resolutions, because they are top-secret.  And because we already have a similar process, except they actually hold you to it.

generalized bullshit

I haven't read Harry Frankfurt's 1986 philosophical treatise On Bullshit.  But here's a summary I like from its Wikipedia page:

In the essay, Frankfurt defines a theory of bullshit, defining the concept and analyzing its applications.  In particular, Frankfurt distinguishes bullshitting from lying: while the liar deliberately makes false claims, the bullshitter is simply uninterested in the truth.  Bullshitters aim primarily to impress and persuade their audiences.  While liars need to know the truth to better conceal it, bullshitters, interested solely in advancing their own agendas, have no use for the truth.  Thus, Frankfurt claims, "...bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

This does seem to be the defining characteristic of bullshitting - the lack of regard for truth.  And it does seem to be more dangerous than lying, for the same reason that a machine learning classifier with 50% accuracy is far less useful than one with 10% accuracy.

However, bullshit can describe many things beyond statements with a truth value.  For example, we talk about bullshit jobs.  What exactly is a bullshit job?  Is a bullshit job just one that requires you to generate bullshit statements?  I think there's more to it than that.  There's a whole book on bullshit jobs, and it provides us with some useful examples: cheese artisan (sculptor of supermarket cheese), feng shui consultant, economist, aromatherapist, life coach, and so on, though some unfortunately stray from bullshit territory into mere unpleasantness (roadkill collector) or overt detriment to society (patent troll).

What do these jobs have in common with Harry Frankfurt's definition, the lack of regard for truth?  Certainly some may require explicit truth-disregarding, but I think a more fundamental similarity is the idea of a broken link to what really matters.  For bullshit statements, the link between a statement and its truth value has been severed.  Again, this is different from false statements, in which the link is present but set to "reverse".  And bullshit jobs, then, are jobs which provide no direct benefit to society, and for which the indirect benefit requires a link which has been severed or never really existed at all.

What "really matters"?  I'd say something that makes a person happy, though you can use whatever rule you want, as long as it isn't "nothing".  Or, I suppose, if you say nothing matters, then you should conclude that everything is bullshit, which might be a defensible position.  And keep in mind that there's lots of non-bullshit that is pretty far removed from mattering, like designing uniforms for train conductors, but that remain non-bullshit as long as the intermediate links hold up.  In many cases it may be difficult to test all of these intermediate links, and in fact the increasing specialization in modern society may be the cause of the proliferation of bullshit.  I'd guess that hunter-gatherer societies are able to get away with considerably less bullshit, because the links to usefulness of any activity are easily testable by anyone.

Looking it at this way, a large fraction of what we do all day is bullshit.  From personal experience, most of what happens in academia is bullshit.  99% of research papers, including (especially?) the ones by me, are bullshit, even if every single statement in them is intentionally true.  The business world, notorious for its bullshit, actually seems a little bit better.  From what I can tell, tech startups seem to have relatively low levels of bullshit.  At least, the good ones do - some have made my life noticeably better.  And things like baking and selling bread are about as far from bullshit as you can get.

my first iPhone app

Last week, my first iPhone app was finally accepted by Apple and is now available in the App Store.  At first, I was a bit surprised at the number of hoops I had to jump through just to make my app available: lots of certificates, code signing, Developer Program joining, bundle identifying, not to mention Apple's notorious review process.  Now that I look at the sheer number of throwaway apps available, though, I think there should be some more hoops, or at least different ones.  For example, does iLike really need to produce an app for every single music artist in existence?

My app has now been up for a week or so, and another surprise has been the geographic distribution of downloads.  Most of my downloads are from outside the US, even though I made no special effort at internationalization.  I'm not even sure how people are finding it, as so far I've only told my friends about it and it's certainly not at the top of the App Store charts.

Oh yeah, I suppose I should describe the app itself.  It grew out of a simple demo I created for our music seminar here at UW.  Our theme that quarter was the theremin, which allows for continuous control over pitch but is extremely difficult to play.  The problem with continuous control over pitch is that usually (in Western music), you just want to play the 12 standard notes, and mostly just the 7 notes from one key.  My app lets you trade off between these two extremes.  You play by touching the screen, with pitch on the x-axis and hardness of quantization on the y-axis.  Touch near the top of the screen, and the pitch is quantized to the nearest note from a particular scale.  Touch near the bottom, and the pitch is unaltered.  Touch near the middle, and the pitch is "soft-quantized", or nudged gently toward the nearest scale note.

Anyway, my app is pretty fun.  You should download it.  And if you tell me how to make it better, I might actually do it, especially if you have suggestions for making it a "real" instrument, that someone might use in a performance.

Interestingly, there is another instrument that allows for both continuous and discrete control over pitch: the ondes Martenot.  Good luck porting that to the iPhone.

LeechBlockList

LeechBlock is a Firefox extension that blocks time-wasting websites that you manually specify.  One of the nicest features for those of us who use multiple computers is the ability to load the block list from a URL.  I put together a simple web interface for maintaining such block lists:

http://leechblocklist.appspot.com/

It's useful even if you just want to maintain your own list, but possibly more useful in that it maintains a list of sites that are commonly thought to be time-wasting.  Or, it will, if a few more people start using it.

so much to say

How is it that everyone has so much to say they have trouble deciding what not to say?  I'm thinking of this quote, attributed to Blaise Pascal:

I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.

This gets brought up in the context of presentations, papers, conversations, code, art, anything that requires some amount of creativity.  The hard part, as it goes, is condensing the huge number of things you'd like to say into a smaller coherent form, often to satisfy some external constraint on time or space.  If left to my own devices, a person of this mindset must think, I would emit an endless stream of wisdom, but alas, others are unwilling or unable to process my brilliance in its entirety.  All of my effort must therefore go toward eliminating all but the very best of what I have to offer.  And these are gems I'm discarding.

Never once in my life have I had this experience.  Coming up with enough to say has always been a struggle for me.  While other people are cutting stuff out left and right, I'm trying to come up with just enough to avoid outright embarrassment.  Am I just not creative?  Not prolific?  Or is my threshold for what is worth saying much higher?  I wouldn't say it's that high, since I'm blogging about this right now.

Incidentally, So Much to Say is possibly the only Dave Matthews Band song I like.

PageRank for images

I was just watching a talk by Peter Norvig in which he mentions some research done at Google (paper here) on applying PageRank to image search. The idea is that instead of connections based on hyperlinks, connections between images are based on visual similarity between the two images, as computed via SIFT or some other descriptor. Then, the VisualRank of an image is some estimate of its centrality in the underlying collection of images.

I don't think this is the right way to think about image search, for a few reasons. First, and most simply, a hyperlink between two web pages has different meaning from a pair of similar images. The PageRank algorithm for web pages has an intuitive explanation: imagining a simplified web surfer randomly following web links, what is the stationary distribution over pages visited by this surfer? (Of course, it's slightly more complicated than that.) VisualRank has no such intuitive model -- instead of following web links, a surfer would have to randomly jump from one image to another similar image. This doesn't seem related to actual image browsing, and is nearly impossible on the current web as links between visually similar images aren't manifested in any way.

One could argue that it's not clear that the PageRank browsing model is the right way to think about web search either, and I would imagine much research has been done on alternative models. In essence, what is captured by both PageRank and VisualRank is a measure of centrality. I want to argue that while centrality may be a reasonable criterion for ranking web search results, it is less reasonable for ranking image search results.

In PageRank, hyperlinks are directed. I can link to CNN (and just did) without them linking back to me. This is not true of image similarities in VisualRank, which are undirected. What are the implications of this? Well, if I link to CNN and they don't link back, it is entirely possible and likely that our PageRanks will be very different. However, if two images are visually similar, they are likely to have similar VisualRanks. (This is caused not only by the symmetry of visual similarity, but also its near-transitivity -- if image A is similar to B and B is similar to C, then it is likely that A is also similar to C. One can imagine a contrived image collection in which this is not the case, but in a quick test it seemed to hold about 75% of the time. Visual similarity is much more like an equivalence relation than hyperlinking is.)

This is all fine if you want to find the single best image. But, if you want to find the best k images, you're going to get a bunch of near-duplicates of the highest ranked image, or at least a set that exhibits high redundancy. As an example, I computed the VisualRank of every image in a collection of a few thousand images of the city of Dubrovnik. Here are the images with the top 5 VisualRanks:


In contrast, and to illustrate that this isn't the only photo people take in Dubrovnik, here are the top 5 images selected by a simple summarization algorithm that also aims, indirectly, to avoid redundancy (disclaimer: algorithm is mine):


I do think centrality is a useful measurement on image collections. Alone, however, it is not a good way to order image search results unless you want homogeneity. This is less of a problem in web search in that there's nothing inherently wrong with the top set of results linking to one another. Sure, they may suffer from homogeneity of opinion to some degree, but the content of each result is different. With connections based on visual similarity, linkage among the top ranked images means some of them are providing no new information at all.

Paul Graham's essays

It annoys me when blog-like content does not have an RSS feed. Sometimes it even annoys me enough that I go and do something about it. So without further ado (not that there was that much ado to begin with), here's a full-text RSS feed of Y Combinator founder Paul Graham's essays:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=e7e734678a95c1b71652ef7c4f4cfe9c&_render=rss

It only contains the most recent 10 entries, to keep loading time reasonable. I tried to include more, but Google Reader kept choking on Yahoo's Pipe when I tried to import the feed.

the kind of person

I was flipping through one of Michael Pollan's books at the airport bookstore last weekend. It may have been In Defense of Food, but I can't remember. Anyway, I came across this puzzling piece of advice:

Be the kind of person who takes supplements.

That is, you don't really have to take the supplements, as long as you are the kind of person who might. Pollan explains that studies have shown people who take multivitamins are generally healthier, but in controlled studies, multivitamins haven't been shown to actually make anyone healthier. This is reasonable, as it could be that supplement-takers are more health-conscious to begin with, and taking the supplements simply indicates their health-conscious status.

The puzzling part is this: how can someone follow Pollan's advice, other than by taking supplements?

This is related to a few philosophical paradoxes. Here's Kavka's toxin puzzle (from Wikipedia):

An eccentric billionaire places before you a vial of toxin that, if you drink it, will make you painfully ill for a day, but will not threaten your life or have any lasting effects. The billionaire will pay you one million dollars tomorrow morning if, at midnight tonight, you intend to drink the toxin tomorrow afternoon. He emphasizes that you need not drink the toxin to receive the money; in fact, the money will already be in your bank account hours before the time for drinking it arrives, if you succeed. All you have to do is. . . intend at midnight tonight to drink the stuff tomorrow afternoon. You are perfectly free to change your mind after receiving the money and not drink the toxin.

The question being, is it possible to intend to drink the toxin tonight if you know you won't actually have to tomorrow?

starting tomorrow

It's sad that it took me this long to come to this realization, but starting tomorrow does not work, at all, for anything.

The interesting part is that starting now does not work either. The entire mindset associated with making an abrupt transition from a bad state to a good state is the problem. Typically, the good state is unsustainable and you eventually end up back in the bad state again, where you tell yourself that at time t you will make another abrupt transition to the good state, which is unsustainable, so you end up in the bad state again, and so on.

The only solution that I've found is to try to be in a state that is not so bad that you have to make empty promises to yourself to transition out of it, and not so good that you can't keep it up.

Another reason not to make an abrupt transition from the bad state to the good state at some future time t is that this encourages you to get in all the damage you can before time t. And since you keep reverting back to the bad state, you can end up doing a lot of damage this way.

wordless melodies

This is the second post in my Things I Like in Music series.

Have you noticed that lots of songs have vocal parts with "la la la..." or "na na na..." instead of lyrics? And have you noticed that these parts are almost always extremely catchy? The best example is probably Hey Jude, but there are many such songs: Land of 1000 Dances, Centerfold, Can't Get You out of My Head, and many more. I posted a quiz a while back about guessing these songs given only the rhythm of the "na na na..." part, if you're interested in more examples.

If you agree that these parts are usually catchy, and you do, you may wonder why this is the case. My guess is that removing lyrics doesn't actually make the melody catchier, but that sometimes a melody is so catchy that the songwriter feels no need to embellish it with lyrics.

A related phenomenon that I also like is when a song has an instrumental solo that is just the vocal melody. Some examples are Come as You Are (or Smells Like Teen Spirit for that matter), Buddy Holly, and Paint It Black, in which the vocal melody is both played on guitar and hummed (not simultaneously). You could also count the whistling in Walk Like an Egyptian.

Or you could make an entire song out of weird vocal noises, like this one.

in between major and minor

This is the first post of many I plan to make about Things I Like in Music.

If you've played around with Songsmith (and if you haven't, you should), you'll notice that instead of a switch between major and minor, we provide a "happy" slider that lets you explore a continuum between strictly major and strictly minor chord progressions. Is this really how music works, you might ask? Can a song be somewhere in between major and minor? Now, certainly a song can be major and minor in different sections, like the chorus and verse (Happy Together is a good example of this). Minor-verse-major-chorus (and its much rarer opposite) is also a Thing I Like in Music, but right now I'm interested in songs that sound both major and minor within a single section.

It turns out that many great songs do this, and wavering between major and minor is part of what makes them great. Here are a few examples (Roman numeral chord names assume the major key):

One Headlight
Listen to the verse, and notice how the first half of each line sounds just a little bit less gloomy than the second half, which helps give the song its poignant feel. The chord progression during the verse is VI -> I -> III -> vi, two chords generally associated with the major key followed by a minor cadence.

Just What I Needed
The same thing happens in the verses here. The first half of each line sounds happier than the second. Even the lyrics seem to follow suit. "I don't mind you coming here." Moderately happy! "And wasting all my time." Umm, not quite so happy. The chord progression in the verse is I -> V -> vi -> III, the two chords most indicative of a major key followed by the two chords most indicative of a minor key.

Say It Ain't So
The previous two songs (or at least their verses, which we were focusing on) probably sounded closer to minor than major. This song, to me, sounds closer to major. The chord progression is vi -> III -> VI -> I, this time ending each phrase with a major sound. Perhaps ends of phrases have a stronger influence on the overall feel.

Yesterday
Both sections of this song live in the mysterious land between major and minor, and it's generally considered one of the best songs ever (citation needed). Coincidence?