A Weighted Random Process

Hi world,

As you (the world) may have noticed, it has been a hot summer. Perhaps the hottest summer ever (or at least the hottest july). But in addition to being a hot summer for me, it has also been a crazy one of change, which will be capped off shortly when I start work at Google in a few weeks.

After signing my name 10,000 times, I get the keys to my apartment!

June will be described as the anxious month. After signing a contract back in March, I finally closed on my new apartment only a few short days before June ended. If you want to learn more about the joys of becoming a home-owner in a co-op, I recommend reading the fabulous Co-op and Condo site, which I relied on extensively to calm me down during the process. That and my amazing broker Malcolm Carter and his great blog. To recap, in May I became a college graduate, and now in June I am living the American dream: I own a home, have a mountain of debt (and a mortgage term that is longer than I have been alive), and am unemployed! That said, I am very pleased with my apartment, which you might call “small” but which those of us from New York City prefer to call “cosy”. And while living with Steve has been great fun, I am really excited to have a place to myself.

Behind the Wheel of Kind of Blue

The wind in my hair as we sail to Capri

July will be the adventurous month. After owning the apartment for only a week, I zoomed off on the first leg of my great summer adventure: a week aboard the cavernous 40-foot sailing vessel “Kind of Blue” in the Bay of Naples. For those unfamiliar with the joys of sailing, imagine fitting a three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment complete with living room, kitchen, and 56-hp diesel engine into a 39 foot by 13 foot oval. Sounds terrible, but it is actually great fun, and one of the best ways to travel. Sailing takes you places that are either difficult or impossible to get to any other way. (Once, sailing near Petite St. Vincent, I visited this amazing island, no more than 1000 sq. ft., basically a sand bar, populated only by a wood and palm leaf umbrella.) With the wind in your sails and the engine stopped, you feel this great calm as the pure forces of nature propel you and your 17,000 lbs boat from island to island across miles of open sea.

And the Bay of Naples is quite the sight. In our first day we sailed 50 nm from our port in Procida to the lovely little island of Ponza, with beautiful white beaches and clear waters. The island in the middle, Ventotene, still uses its old Roman port, where August banished his adulterous daughter Julia. Now, it has a charming atmosphere that epitomizes what one imagines when thinking of the Mediterranean. Islands that are closer to Naples, like the famous Capri and its beautiful but less famous neighbor Ischia, were much more developed and overrun with tourists from the mainland. Sailing to places like Ventotene offers a great vacation without the company of hundreds or thousands of other vacationers, a huge perk. My sailing adventure was a great success and something I hope to do again soon. And no one fell overboard either!

The Roman Port at Ventotene

This being the first week of July, we were starting to feel the heat, saved mostly by the great Mediterranean breeze and the cool water. Upon leaving Naples and arriving in Prague, the real force of the heat started to set in.

This post is getting long, so I’ll leave a description of the next leg of my journey for my next post.

-Brad

PS House warming party? Should I have one? Please leave your advice below.

Today, Professor Michael Mitzenmacher, whom I have had the great pleasure of working with at Harvard these last four years, announced that because he will be taking over as head of the CS department (or more technically, “area” in Harvard speak), he will stop writing his fabulous blog, “My Biased Coin“. I understand the reasons that he intends to leave the blogging world, but I hope that is is only temporary and that we will be seeing him online again in the next few years, when he feels the longing of blogging once again.

His blog is one of the reasons that I tried to get into blogging a few years ago and why I am trying to get back into it now. He comments on his observations as a researcher, as a teacher, and as a parent and a human being, a mixture that makes his blog worth reading even if you are not a researcher in CS Theory. I hope I can find some similar mixture as I venture forth on my “real” try at this medium.

NB: It might seem that the title of my blog is similar to “My Biased Coin”, but if it is, then it is a subconscious similarity. I chose this title because of a difficult philosophical problem that I won’t go into here in detail but relates to free will and neurobiology.

Not sure how it happened, but I managed to graduate from Harvard. The graduation ceremony seems like more of a ritualistic incantation from some strange mystic cult than an american graduation ceremony. In particular, some of the statements that the provost makes during the conferring of diplomas sound like they’ve been translated word for word from latin.

I find it hard to believe that I am not a student anymore, that I will not be returning to a new room in Lowell in the fall. The weirdest part is that I won’t be having dinner at the ungodly hour of 5 o’clock with my best friends anymore.

I’ve been inspired by my roommate emeritus Steve to return to my blog, despite its neglect. If he keeps posting to it, then I will probably keep posting to mine.

The future is a big and scary place. I’m spending some time relaxing before I start work, and I guess I’ll just muse a bit about things until then. Keep me to it. Please. Or else, what is the point?

See you soon, internet.

So, the flight to Beijing is still in JFK. We were supposed to take off at 3:50. Been on the plane since around then. No word on when we will leave. The plane keeps shaking because the wind gusts are so strong. Hoping to fall asleep and wake up in the air. I’ll update my Twitter: twitter.com/bradseiler when I know more.

Dear World,

I am about to embark on an adventure. I will be chairing the NGO program at the first ever HMUN China. 1000 high school students, mostly from China but from as far away as Egypt and Lebanon, will be congregating in Beijing to simulate the UN in a foreign repeat of the ever popular and successful Harvard Model United Nations.

I’ll try to do a few updates from the road on my impressions of Beijing, the delegates, and the conference. I’ve never been to China before and I don’t speak a word of any dialect of Chinese, so this will certainly be a learning experience for me. Good thing the conference is conducted in English!

Please feel free to ask questions in the comments and I will do my best to answer.

Wish me luck!

-Brad

A very disturbing narrative is being spun by several commentators on the right. In the aftermath of the failed Christmas day airplane bombing, several politicians and pundits have criticized the Obama administration for using the criminal justice to legally detain and try the attempted bomber, instead of holding him as an “enemy combatant”. You may remember that President Bush invented the notion of an enemy combatant on order to indefinitely detain individuals who had been captured in Afghanistan and Iraq and were suspected of being terrorists. The supreme court ruled that this indefinite detention without trial or tribunal violated the criminal trial rights provided in the constitution. And yet, these commentators make the argument that by using the criminal justice system in this way, Obama and the justice department are somehow putting America at risk, failing to extract critical information from this dangerous terrorist.

First, it should be noted that this is a blatantly hypocritical attempt to make political hay out of a near tragedy. When the shoe bomber similarly failed to detonate an explosive on an aircraft in the Bush years, he was tried in the criminal justice system and not labeled an enemy combatant. These commentators, including the former Vice-President, supported that decision then, and they ate only objecting now to try to convince Americans that Obama is somehow endangering America.

However, it is significantly more important to remember why the Bush era policy is so dangerous. On our constitutional republic, we operate under the principle that our executive must be subservient to the constitution, and that no national crisis gives the executive the power to ignore the provisions enumerated therein. It is exactly in times of crisis that these provisions are so important, as the supreme court held in the famous case of Ex parte milligan. Lincoln overstepped his authority by suspending the writ of habeas corpus during the civil war, which was perhaps the greatest nation crisis our country has ever faced. The limitation on the power of the executive to indefinitely detain people is of utmost importance because the police power of the executive is so easily abused, and there is so much injustice committed when someone is incorrecy deprived of their liberty and separated from their family.

Perhaps those who believe that the civil rights of a terrorist are unimportant should remember what it is that we are defending. After the Boston masacre, the people of Massachusetts were outraged, and they demanded that the British soldiers involved be executed. However, John Adams, at great peril to his reputation, took on the task of defending these soldiers. He did this because he believed that in a society of laws, justice cannot be served unless the laws are applied equally to everyone. This means that anyone who is accused of a crime, no matter how guilty they may appear, is entitled to the same legal protections. This is necessary because justice does not know in advance who is truly guilty. If our legal system is to have any legitimacy, it must never prejudge those who come before it. That is why John Adams presented the defense for those soldiers. If they had not had a proper defense, their trial would have been merely a stage show, and any punishment made against the would gave been just as injust as the killings that they themselves perpetrated. And once we become a nation of show trials, we will rapidly descend into a state where politics is practiced through the criminal justice system instead of in our democratic institutions.

The space shuttle has two propulsion systems, the main engines, which run on liquid fuel (SSMEs), and the solid rocket boosters (SRBs). The SRBs are the two thinner rockets on either side of the external fuel tank, and they provide most of the thrust that the space shuttle uses to get into orbit. You may have seen video of them dramatically separating from the shuttle, which they do once they are finished boosting the shuttle.

The thing about the SRBs is that because they are solid fuel, there is no easy way to turn them off. The ignition system sets the fuel on fire and it burns until it is used up. When you see the space shuttle launch, you see the SSMEs turn on about 6 seconds before liftoff. The purpose of this is to test SSMEs to make sure that they are operating correctly before the SRBs are lit.

Once the SRBs are lit, they will burn for 123 seconds, and until that time, NASA has no ability to abort the ascent of the space shuttle. It is going for a trip. Once the burn is done, there are several abort options, usually landing in Europe or attempting to turn around and return to Florida. But for those 123 seconds, the shuttle is going to fly on its course.

There are many times in life where you don’t know if everything is going to work perfectly. The shuttle was never tested in unmanned flight before its first launch. Any number of things can and do fail immediately after takeoff. However, sometimes in order to do something important or difficult, you need to take a chance that problems may arise. Launching the space shuttle would be next to impossible on liquid fuel alone, and far more costly. So in order to reap the benefits some great undertaking, sometimes you have to fire the SRBs and hope for the best.

Steve is going to go without caffeine for two weeks. Or so he says. Wish him luck! So far he is one hour in. So far so good.

I made it to California! I’ve been here about a week now and I’ve settled in pretty well to both my home for the summer and my job. This is the first time I’ve lived in a house proper where I’ve had to take care of the place myself. I’ve managed to fix the sprinkler system, clean mold out of just about every appliance (the power went out for about 10 days before we got here) and pull internet out of thin air!  [I also perform at birthday parties.]

Anyway, if you are someone I know  (or someone whom I should know) and you are in the silicon valley area, shoot me an e-mail and say hello. Or do that anyway. I’d love to know if anyone actually reads this.

The 1 hour flight to Boston requires you to arrive at the airport 1 hour in advance of departure. For me, that means that I have to get to the airtrain 80 minutes before departure, and the LIRR to get to the airtrain 30 minutes before that, which requires leaving the house a total of 2 hours before the flight takes off. It takes another 45 minutes in Boston to get to Cambridge from the airport. That means that if everything clicks perfectly it will take 3 hours 45 minutes total travel time for a 1 hour flight.

Take the bus, and you have 20 minutes extra travel on each end of a 4 hour ride, for a total of 4 hours 40 minutes. So taking the bus to Boston takes 25% more time and costs 10% as much.
The Amtrak train costs slightly more than the plane and takes about the same amount of time.

So why not always take the bus? Comfort is a consideration, but is that comfort worth a 900% premium? Reliability is another, but I don’t have enough information to determine the relative reliability of these modes of transportation; if anything, I think the bus is more reliable. So really it is a comfort issue. Today, comfort won out, but maybe next time I’ll go with cost, given my general annoyance with JetBlue today. Anyway, food for thought I suppose.

[Stuck in JFK because I missed a flight by 2 minutes...]