yet another reason not to go into academia...

(maybe dave will find this slightly more interesting...)

well, it's not like i really needed any more reasons, but this story is so awful it really seals the deal.

(edit: since this is extremely current news, and could potentially be catastrophic, i've blotted out the relevant names below.)

after yoga on saturday, krister, *****, and i went to a nearby coffee shop for tea and croissants. while there, ***** told us about what had been going on in her lab last week. she's been a post-doc in the plant biology lab at unil for a year or so now, and she was told beforehand that her project was going to be to continue some of the work which had been done by one of the finishing phd students. now, what actually happened is that said finishing phd student was a parisienne bitch of epic proportions who refused to turn over any part of the project except under extreme duress, ended up staying for another eight months, and took the first author slot on the paper they recently published in nature, which was basically a summary of the work my friend was told she was going to be responsible for. but she was still second author, and even second author on a paper in nature is nothing to scoff at... until last week, when she tried to reproduce some of the results... now, the bitch is finally gone (got a very cushy post-doc position in ****, england), and suddenly they can't find any of the data/materials that correspond to what was published. and at the moment it's looking like they can't reproduce them either. all indications point to the whore from paris having faked it all and covered it up, which somehow went unnoticed because she was the professor's golden child that could do no wrong (of course, at this point, my first thought was to ask if the professor had been "involved" with her, but my friend thinks this is unlikely).

this is unbelievably shitty, and stands a decent chance of ruining not only my friend's entire career, but effectively shutting down her professor's whole lab. on friday, when my friend was talking with the professor, he apparently started making jokes about wanting her to be the one to write the press release if he was found dead on the couch this week.

wow. i thought the tension was a little thick between alcherio and some of his "competitors," but this is beyond anything i would have ever imagined. well, please keep your fingers crossed, and hopefully it will all turn out okay for my friend, and hopefully the other bimbo will get what's coming to her...

and this is why we test our results

okay kids, remember that thing about when stuff is too good to be true? well, yeah, pretty much that means it's not.

so that whole "1 million" figure from last week? turns out i'm a moron that can't type, and one of my conditionals effectively read: "if (x<MIN||x<MAX) return false" --- like i said, i'm a moron.

anyway, i just ran the ionian batch again with the corrected version, and now i've got 411,003 records, which probably puts us back up in the just shy of three million range (as an initial guesstimate) for all magnificent seven of them. which, as i said before (when i though it was 3.5 million) still isn't bad... we'll just have to see what we can do with it next.

UPDATE:

here are the latest results.


mysql> select count(cantus.id) as count,mode.name as mode from cantus, mode where cantus.mode = mode.degree group by mode;
+--------+------------+
| count | mode |
+--------+------------+
| 393230 | Aeolian |
| 394386 | Dorian |
| 411003 | Ionian |
| 309340 | Locrian |
| 289798 | Lydian |
| 383144 | Mixolydian |
| 414909 | Phrygian |
+--------+------------+
7 rows in set (18.06 sec)

mysql> select count(cantus.id) as total from cantus;
+---------+
| total |
+---------+
| 2595810 |
+---------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

laundry and locrian

last night, two nice things happened.

the first is not necessarily all that interesting, but held a certain immediacy for me which should be readily apparent given that i moved into the new apartment three weeks ago: i finally got my first chance to use the laundry room [rolls eyes]. well, at least the concierge is trying to make up a new schedule---one that includes us this time---and she said we would probably get monday evenings from 16h-20h. the fact that we have to stop at 8:00 is a little annoying, but it's better than getting the 12h-16h slot (you know, given that we actually have jobs and all...).

second, much more amusing: i goofed off with my pet music project again, which i seem to have nicknamed "generatus" at the moment (other suggestions still welcome). this whole DTL framework for interfacing to the database is a little odd at first, but i think i'm getting to like it. in any case, it seems to work, so i can't complain too much. i actually managed to complete the link, and tried piping the generated sequences into mysql. oh, and i wasn't quite right in my previous description; those counts were before i put in the bound on total distance leapt. limiting it to 24 half-steps (two octaves; seems fairly generous to me, and was quite a bit larger than most of the human-composed examples i consulted) actually brings down the total number---including all seven modes---to just under one million.

now, of course, that's assuming i didn't make any mistakes, because now that i have a database (woohee!) it's much easier to navigate through the results, and i get the sneaking suspicion that there might be some possibilities missing, which i'm not sure why they would have been ruled out yet. i set the generation process to run while i was sleeping last night, and only looked at the results for a couple of minutes this morning over my breakfast cereal, so i haven't really had a chance to properly investigate yet.

but it's unbelievable how excited i am about the fact that it actually seems like it's working (or at least beginning to work). this is possibly the first of my silly side-project ideas in a *very* long time that i've actually followed through on, such that it may eventually come to fruition. and don't worry, one of the next steps will be the cheesy web interface so that all one of you that both reads this and might actually care can share in my elation. or laugh uproariously at me. yeah, probably the latter. shut up, bitch, or i brings you the hurt. ha. take that.

if only i was this motivated about my research... [sigh]

break the chai--- [ahem] wires

this weekend was pretty interesting. the part that shocked me the most, though, was that i actually managed to get the pci wireless card that i bought to work with my computer.

it started as just another hairbrained scheme to deal with the fact that the phone jack (ergo, the dsl) is in the hallway, and the computer is in my room... so i went out and bought the cheapest pci 802.11 card that i could find. of course as soon as i got it home, i remembered that i probably should have done a driver search beforehand, but even trying to do it after the fact, i learned that it's basically a lottery anyway, since the name on the box doesn't really have any correlation to the actual chipset used (which is what requires the driver). i guess they just throw chips on at random in most manufacturers, for some stupid reason. the shake-n-bake of computer components. anyway, i decided to just open the box and get it over with. seems i may have gotten semi-lucky; it claims (according to lspci) to be an rt8185, and realtek does actually give a linux driver. however, it's not in portage, and i'm not sure how the system will react if i start managing some stuff on my own (thus far, it's been fantastic to just let it take care of everything, and not have to worry about stepping on its toes or vice-versa).

anyway, i was able to get the driver to work in userland, which proves that it's possible (yay!), but i'm still investigating possibilties for actually adding it neatly into the normal control scripts. we'll see how much of a mess i end up making...

saturday was just plain goddam awesome, since christian stefansen (danish guy from five [yikes!] years ago at caltech) and his girlfriend sumi (who's working as an opera singer in zurich) came to lausanne to visit me. fantastic. i guess it might be to be expected after five years, but we basically just spent the entire day walking around talking, interspersed with sitting down in restaurants talking. honestly the most fun i've had in a pretty darn long time. seriously.

sunday, well, it was back to the slave pits. between re-editing alcherio's snf report/proposal and pulling a poster out of thin air for the mics shindig in zurich next week (which was due at 8:00am this morning), i lost pretty much the entire day (well, from 12:30 when i started until just before midnight when i decided to sleep a little). then i still got up at around 4 this morning to finish up the poster before the deadline. which basically just means that my brain is fried, and i'm ready to go home now, but it's only the middle of the afternoon, so i don't think it would be acceptable, therefore i'm still at my desk accomplishing next to nothing. completely ridiculous.

"buy-buy roma"

strangely enough, that was actually (no joke) the name of all the duty-free stores in the rome airport.

the 'swarm robotics workshop (srw)' was actually really nice. it was just after the 'simulation of adaptive behavior (sab)' conference. the only real downside was, as predicted, it was a working weekend (a long one at that) and despite being in rome, i didn't really have any free time to do anything, so it might as well have been in poughkeepsie. but i do have to say that it was still kinda fun, albeit in an extremely intellectually fatiguing way.

getting there was more eventful than necessary. to summarize, i left the house before 8:00am, and didn't get to the conference center until after 6:00pm (more than 10 hours)---when i drove back from rome after our vacation with the family two years ago, it took me 9 hours. i thought airplanes were supposed to go faster?

anyway, the plane was two hours late leaving, by the time i got to the train station in the airport and bought a ticket, i missed the train into the city by about 30 seconds, and had to wait half an hour for the next one. when i got into rome proper, the directions i had said that one could either walk 20 minutes, or take the metro. now, you all know i'm almost always partial to walking, but i figured, i'm in a hurry, i'll take the metro... so 20 minutes later, i had found the metro station, bought a ticket, and was still on the platform waiting for it to come... but i was committed by that point, so i got on, got off, re-surfaced, and started asking for directions. multiple iterations later, i had actually been directed all the way around the outside of the campus in the wrong direction, and after 45 [more] minutes of walking, i got there just as they were ending the last session (i had been trying to get there to see the last session, since alcherio was chairing and pierre was presenting).

thus began the whirlwind weekend of i'm-not-sure-why-we're-in-rome-because-we're-spending-all-our-time-inside-working-anyway.

the presentations were mostly quite good and interesting, though there were a couple that were either badly executed, or not adequately literature-searched, which made me squirm a little bit feeling bad for those people. at least i can be extremely grateful it wasn't me, though. i got to spend a decent amount of time talking with spring, the girl from upenn (a student of vijay kumar), who was cool. they're trying to do top-down modeling of swarm systems, whereas alcherio has typically taken the bottom up approach. they've got some good ideas, and i was certainly impressed, but it seems they have some pretty major hurdles to handle before it can really be said to actually work (which i suppose is good, since otherwise it would basically put us out of business). also got to spend some time with alan winfield's grad students and postdoc, who were fun to be around as well. the only problem with this whole picture is just the usual when you are surrounded by people who are brilliant, you can't help but feeling stupid...

i gave my presentation on sunday morning, and it actually went really well. i was pleased with myself (doesn't happen very often), and several people told me afterwards that they thought i had done a great job, so that made me feel good. alcherio said it was "okay" and "much, much better than the practice run we did"---that's probably about the best compliment one could have gotten out of him---though he was irritated that i skipped the video in order to stay within the time constraints. i guess he thought i should have had it playing in the background while taking questions.

monday we went to CNR to visit stefano nolfi and his group. again, great people, but it was really quite striking how i didn't expect there to be such a marked difference between the facilities we have here, and what they have there. it was like everything was ~30 years old, and with half the funding. i almost felt a little sorry for them, and a twinge of guilty for all the advantages we have here.

on the way back, i ducked into the duty free shop at the airport to grab a bottle of the limoncello, which we had been served after dinner one of the previous nights. i guess i'm kinda getting into this whole collecting semi-exotic liquors thing.