The patron saint

The reception traditions at the alma mater have most likely changed considerably since my undergrad days, but at the time there were certain rites and ceremonies that had to be performed for the recently admitted students to be accepted as full members of the school, the final being a party arranged by the new students for the rest of the section. Of course I ended up on the arranging committee. As the party would coincide with All Saints’ Day, we thought we should do something saint-themed, such as introducing the patron saint of programmers, whoever that might be. So I spent some time trying to get hold of a Catholic priest I had located in the phonebook (yes, it was all analog in those days). When I finally reached the priest, it turned out he belonged to the Liberal Catholic Church which had no truck with saints. Well, I had no idea! By then it was too late to start over with finding a Roman Catholic priest, so we had to drop the saints in favour of other ideas which I hope are safely forgotten by now.

Still, with the advent of the World Wide Web, it is now possible to search for all desired information, and one then finds that the inofficial patron saint of programmers is Isidore of Seville on account of him having compiled the first encyclopaedia, so here he is.

Heritage

Today the OBS absolved the public defence of his PhD thesis. My grandfather went to school because they served lunch, saving his mother a meal. My parents received secondary education. The OBS has been in education since preschool.

One of the professors in the grading committee I knew from when we were sprightly Young Scientists, with hair, in the 1980s. Already then we had set out on our respective research tracks. We’ll hang along for a little while, but the next generation is waiting to take over. And that is as it should be.

Do I make sense?

I’d had a video automatically transcribed. I presume all kinds of AI jiggery-pokery had gone into turning audio frequencies into text—it was clear that the transcription engine was aware that a lot of hemming and hawing could be deleted, on the other hand not-quite-silences could be extrapolated into what probably was being said. A few times this worked amazingly well, but all too often the resulting text was nonsense. I was going to blame this on the lack of deep understanding on the part of the transcription engine, but as I replayed and replayed the same five second clip, trying to hear what was being said, by myself, I came to wonder: Is this actually what my students hear when I lecture—words that may be grammatically correctly connected, but rarely make any sense?

Language complications

Master’s students are presenting their theses, faculty members comment on their work. My German colleague’s accent becomes even more accentuated in English, and still more by him being quite critical:
“I take ekzeption to your very first vord. Vaht do you mean by ‘vee’?”

Having dissected the permissible uses of authorial pronouns, he continues:
“I zink your use of RE iz inappropriate.”

The student, already rattled, becomes even more confused:
“Did I write RE? It should be ER.”

The opponent relentlessly pursues the RE issue, while the student desperately scans through the paper, vainly trying to find the offending statement. I finally make the connection, and interrupt the proceedings:
“I think what we’re discussing, is AI.”

Still going strong

During my first course in calculus, Ambjörn the TA was going through whatever it was and I innocently asked “Isn’t this, like, fractal?” He spun around: “Yes, exactly!”, spun back towards the blackboard and proceeded, chalk blazing, to explain how the current course segment was tied to fractals, their implications for geometry and how that in turn related to other branches of mathematics, ever faster and further into ever more exotic subjects while we students could just hold on to our desks for dear life in the storm blast of imparted knowledge. Forty-five minutes later he suddenly made a double-take, checked the time, and with an embarrassed cough noted: “I think we ran over the time a bit there, let’s take the break now.”

During the break Å accused me of setting Ambjörn into self-oscillation and suggested I shut up in the future, lest we never manage to cover what was actually coming on the exam.

Well, I did pass the calculus exams, eventually even the dreaded Theory exam, though that took me five attempts (in no way an exceptional number). Still, perhaps that was more due to diligently doing all exercises and repeatedly reading the books, rather than thanks to Ambjörn’s TA efforts, which, while always entertaining and mind-opening, tended to veer off from the official subject into Deep Maths.

Eventually I became a colleague of Ambjörn’s, whose wide-ranging interests could no longer be contained within either the Department of Mathematics or that of Physics and thus had moved into Computer Science (which at the limit contains all other sciences). Passing his room would often imply getting drawn into impromptu lectures on maths and their relation to everything else in (and occasionally outside) the universe. He even stored some of his parabolic rock-melting mirrors in our lab, though we irreverently ended up using them as towel racks.

Today, Ambjörn was officially retired, though, as is the custom in academia, that simply means the end of salary, but not necessarily the end of research. So, I returned to the Alma Mater for Ambjörn’s Last Lecture, which, true to form, ranged from how to explain what weekday it will be in a million days, over homotopies of snakes on a torus, to how human culture is an integral over time.

I regretted Honeybuns wasn’t there to get some kind of idea of where I come from, intellectually, but the OBCM was there and afterwards we had a nice chat about teaching and geometric modelling over a cuppa.

A matter of perspective

Anders J Thor recently passed away. I found out from an obituary written by members of the home-owners’ association to which he belonged. They mentioned in passing that he had worked at KTH as well as ISO, but clearly the main part of his life had been spent tirelessly working for the home-owners’ association. I struggle to draw a moral from this.

Ordnung muss sein

I once was demonstrating some VR hardware to a class. They were too many to go all at once so I split them into three groups and decreed:
“You are group 1, you are group B, and you are group Red.”
When I had ran the demo for the first group I yelled:
“OK, time for group B!”
They stepped up and primly declared:
“We are group 2.”

Conventions are practical, but they’re not mandatory.

Angry and disgusted

I’ve been tangentially involved in consumer aspects on what’s known as the Internet of Things, so when SICS announced the Internet of Things Day 2012 I thought it was interesting enough that I took the day off to attend the presentations.

Professor Kia Höök, whom I otherwise much respect, argued in her introductory presentation that applications for the Internet of Things need to be emotionally attractive and to function in everyday life. However, “everyday life” turned out to specifically mean “leisure activities of affluent Westerners”. At some point I’ve had it deeply embedded in me that my task as an engineer is to make the world a better place and at the end of the day I don’t think computer games are a high priority in that respect. In fact, as far as I could tell, the proposed applications were explicitly geared towards increased consumption, probably with the assumption that Expanding the Economy is a Good Thing.

Interestingly enough, the more technical presentations in the afternoon session did demonstrate e g environment-monitoring applications, but the wrap-up presentation introduced a training aid for the Swedish national ski team and it was obvious that a corresponding body posture monitoring program for, say, cleaning staff, hospital orderlies, or garbage collectors had never been and would never be even reflected on even though it would affect a lot more people who would be more likely to get longer-term benefits from such help.

Back in the day, when the students’ union was still organised along party lines, Socialistisk Kårfront (the Socialist Student Front) had a slogan like “Technical development for the working class”. I thought it was rather silly sloganeering at the time, but technical development that automatically excludes the working class is never going to be user-centred in my mind.

Professor Höök also spoke about making “desirable” applications, which I find even more insidious. One of the keynotes was delivered by a Chinese official and I reflected that while dictatorships may use various means in order to coerce desired behaviour on part of the population, it is usually clear that this is imposed from the outside, whereas marketers manipulating our emotions make us believe that it is we ourselves that want to behave in the prescribed manner, making it that much harder to break free.

Getting around to it

Chaos and fractals were hot stuff in the 1980s and I spent quite a bit of time on the subject—at one point Cliff Pickover, a thoroughly nice person, sent me a large package of material by mail. So, one of the first courses I signed up for as a grad student was Chaotic Dynamical Systems. In the event, I had to drop the course, along with several other maths courses—my work was to be in other areas and the textbook ended up on my shelf for unread books.

The other day I decided to pick it up again and see what I’d missed out on. One thing was clear: I might have been able to do the exercises when I was a first-year student, but by now most of my calculus was just hazy memories. And indeed, in contrast with most of my other literature on the subject, this was a book about proper maths, rather than computer graphics, and spent most of its space on proving various theorems about seemingly simple functions, but which exhibited chaotic behaviour. Still, even if my understanding is patchy these days, I’ve been going through the book, picking up concepts and ideas.

In the book was still the receipt from when I bought it and as I was reading on the train home the other day I listened with half an ear to the two girls sitting next to me talking about their studies. The one just next to me turned out to be a first-year student at my alma mater and the continued conversation revealed she had been born just a couple of days after I bought the book I was finally reading. It’s so hard to keep up.

Not my idea

Ed Brayton quotes a student-teacher exchange:

When I informed this student that I suspected her paper was plagiarized, she said to me, “I got my paper from one of the students who was in your class last semester. How was I to know that she had plagiarized?”

Back when I was an undergraduate, copying was treated fairly cavalierly—it was of course wrong, but students will be students and all that, so if caught out, typically you would just be asked to redo the exercise. Over time the attitude has become much stricter and these days I understand students can be suspended for up to six months for cheating. I don’t know if this is a reaction to increased cheating or just a sign of harsher times. Certainly there is increased pressure on students to graduate on time.

Anyway, once upon a time, long enough ago that I believe it has been statute-barred, we had a mandatory course in business administration which was considered to be neither well taught nor very interesting. During this course we were to do a group project, working out the economics of some process of a fictitious company. The parameters were different for each group, but we figured out that they were reused from year to year. It was decided in my group that we would ask the students from the previous year to give us their report, retype it and present it as ours. The seniors kindly handed over their report and I ended up with the task of retyping it. Now, already then I had proofreader’s eyes and while I was copying the text I realised that the calculations were off: our predecessors had made a sizable arithmetic error. Still, they had passed, so apparently the grader had not read through the report very carefully. (The problem admitted many different solutions, depending on what assumptions and prioritisations you made.)

I mulled this over for a minute or two, but decided there was only one thing to do: Start over and do the calculations right. And so I did. Our group passed too.

Taram, taram, taram…

Back when I was an undergrad, the Maths department’s interface with the students was a little man universally known as “The Lightning”. (The Only-Begotten Children’s Mother reported how shocked she was when she many years later found out he actually had a perfectly normal name as well.) The reason for this sobriquet was soon made amply clear. Picture a queue of perhaps 300 students snaking down the stairwell outside the student office of the Maths dept, all out to buy the necessary textbook for the Analysis course starting that day. Eventually you get to the front desk and The Lightning curiously asks what you want. You declare that you wish to buy Funktioner av en variabel, textbook and exercises. “Oh!” quethes The Lightning and shuffles off to the book shelf at the back of the room, picks up the two books, returns to the desk, takes your money, counts out change and carefully makes an annotation in his cash ledger that he has sold Funktioner av en variabel, copies: 1, and exercises, copies: 1, @ 180 SEK. Then he raises his head, looks at the next person in the queue and inquires what he might be there for. Repeat for all students, repeat for all courses.

The Lightning eventually shuffled off this mortal coil, but I must now have run into his nephew: Honeybuns and I are preparing for a train trip again, and with the help of Die Bahn I had prepared an itinerary with all stops and connections and just needed to make the bookings. Unfortunately international travel cannot be booked on the Web, and I’ve found it impractical to do over the phone, so down I went to the Central Station to handle it in person. When I got to the ticket counter, I laid out my papers and explained the route. The gentleman behind the desk then had to look up each leg and make seat reservations and it went something like this:
Me: “…and from there we continue to Avignon, with the 18:14 connection…”
“Which day was this?”
“The same day.”
Clicks and then searches the keyboard.
Me, being helpful: “That’s A V I G N O&hellip”
“Wait, wait. A?”
Me, timing the letters with his hesitant single-finger typing: “A…V…I…G…N…O…N…”
“And this was when?”
“18:14…”
“Right, there it is. OK, wait a bit.” He clicks and then pads off to the other side of the office to the printer, retrieves a paper and puts it on the counter. “OK, now I have the train number, I’ll see if I can make a reservation…” More hunting and pecking. “Yes! It went OK.”
“Right. In Avignon we change to the 19:59 service to Aix-en-Provence…”
“Wait, wait.” Refocusses on the screen. “Which day was this?”
“Still the same day…”
“The tenth?”
“The tenth.”
“And where to?”
“Aix-en-Provence, that’s A…I…X&hellip” Etc, etc, with an unhurried excursion to the printer for each step of the way.
An hour and a half later I finally had the thick sheaf of tickets and had also missed the modelling meeting I had planned to attend. I don’t think it should be necessary for RyanAir to go into train travel to make it more efficient than that.

After years of writing scientific papers

Today I found myself writing “…increases the saliency of x.”, stared at it and realised it probably was not a well-suited expression for end-user documentation. I had to think for several minutes before coming up with “…makes x easier to see.”

A loss

Randy Pausch died today.

I had the great privilege of meeting him in person as he was giving a series of seminars at the HITLab in 1991. My notes from that meeting will have to serve as my tribute (note that this was written before the creation of the World Wide Web):

Today Randy Pausch from the University of Virginia is here and has spoken on his SIGCHI presentation “Virtual Reality on Five Dollars A Day”. He brought his equipment with two Private Eyes and a baseball cap for mounting, but unfortunately the equipment wouldn't sync so that we could get stereo images. […] Randy's claim is that rapid feedback is much more important than cool graphics and that one today doesn't have particularly good graphics in the Eyephones anyway—the cool pictures one sees are usually taken from the external video screen rather than the LCD screens that the user sees. […]

Since the Private Eye is monochrome so they only can draw wireframes, they have seen to that all objects are animated so that one can keep track of what lines go together. As a side effect the worlds become more interesting that way, there's always something going on. […]

After this he spoke about another, related, project—SUIT (Simple User Interface Technology). They have made a platform-independent interface builder—they have versions running under X, Mac and PC. NeXT was however not an option—“they are so consciously incompatible with everything else that it isn't worth it, in addition the NeXT InterfaceBuilder is superior there”. This interface builder they used in undergraduate education with completely incredible results—it took first-year students less than two hours to learn to use the system!

[— — —]
Since my last report Randy Pausch gave another seminar, this on Tailor, bespoke user interfaces. It turns out that Randy doesn't really work with virtual worlds, but with computer-supported speech generation for children with CP and he has had very encouraging results so far. (Though his opinion was that the money put into it would be put to better use in prenatal care instead of prosthesis research and I realised that maternal and child health centres are not a matter of course for everybody in this country.)

We also had a longer discussion about the utility of and possible spread of VR technology. Randy has a liberating distance to the subject and dares to express his doubts. Conversely he was very interested in MUDs as examples of already existing virtual worlds and Johan [Andersson], who is an expert on them had a lot to say. I realised that the problems with virtual worlds, and hypertexts, which in some sense are abstract virtual worlds, are that they have to be large to be really meaningful, but a lone programmer/author can never add enough to them to make them interesting. MUDs have that in common with Usenet that there are lots of people involved who, more or less independently of each other, extend the system, add all kinds of things that make it meaningful, useful and interesting in other ways. That's why the Net is so important, visualisation and holograms and such may be good, but it's really a lot of people that should be moving over it. […]

Randy is an excellent and entertaining lecturer with sound ideas about pedagogics, so I asked him to come to KTH and lecture at some suitable point. “I can be bought”, he said and gave me his business card.

We never got around to inviting him, and now it's too late, but over the years I've frequently had reason to read papers and reports by him. Indeed, less than three years ago I had reason to suggest the use of SUIT for a project at work. Eventually we decided on a different solution, but I wrote to Pausch and asked if I could have the source code to SUIT and he sent it to me a few hours later and I demoed it to my colleagues shortly thereafter.

Getting high on the West Coast

Late in the evening this past Monday I arrived in Gothenburg, just as jubilant and not-so-jubilant fans were moving towards the station from Ullevi football stadium. AIK had lost. Darn! I also saw the tram I should have been on pull away from the tram stop, fifteen minutes to the next. I spent those studying a, presumably, inebriated harmonica player courting a girl, who took this in good humour. I also found that Gothenburg too has introduced SMS tickets for public transport. Very convenient. I will have to run a test soon and see if I can get through a month without any cash at all. The tram trundled noisily through the slightly chilly night city and we soon ended up at my target traffic nexus. Hotel Gothia Towers was not difficult to locate, the twin towers rising high above me. Check-in was smooth in spite of a new and inventive misspelling of my name and soon I found myself on the 19th floor, looking out over famous Gothenburg landmarks. After having admired the skyline for a while I went to sleep.

Breakfast was served in a restaurant with a little bit too much of canteen feeling for my tastes, but nothing wrong with the buffet. Sponge cake for breakfast, yum! Then I set off for the conference I had been invited to. It turned out to be be very well-organised with lots of demos, presentations in parallel sessions and I chatted with people I hadn't seen for too long. I realised I have missed going to scientific conferences. I enjoyed myself greatly.

The social event in the evening took place at Peacock Dinner Club. I walked there with some colleagues and reflected that Stockholm is much more cramped than Gothenburg where the avenues are wide and bordered by wide pavements with proper bicycle paths and often even little lawns in front of the houses. It makes for a very pedestrian-friendly city. The dinner club turned out to be a very classy joint—when I asked for guanabana juice the bartender didn't bat an eye, just reached out for a bottle and poured me a glass, just like that. They didn't have banana juice, but they offered lychee instead, which was OK by me. However, I couldn't stay too long, as I had a presentation to prepare, so eventually I went back to my room and worked till late with the view to inspire me.

My presentation went over quite well, with a Q&A session lasting almost half an hour. Some of the questions I thought were rather tenuously connected to what I had spoken about, but that just let me take a “wider perspective” in my response, i e blab on. During the coffee break, a man came up and asked: “So what was your presentation about? This technical English is really hard to follow.” Ungh! I squirmed inwards but politely gave a condensed version in Swedish. For a moment I was confused by the statement that technical English was difficult to follow—I can make do in several languages as long as the discourse is constrained to technical matters, but then I realised that that is true as long as you remain within a familiar area of technology, where the terminology is shared and known. Nevertheless, I was still a bit disappointed that I hadn't managed to get my point across, I certainly don't consciously attempt to be abstruse and I'm always upset when I've failed to explain the work which is so dear to me.

In the afternoon I decided to skip the last workshop session and instead went walking in springy Gothenburg—the sun was shining, the Emilias were pretty, and the pollen count was high. My eyes and nose ran like fountains and I sought shelter in the railway station.

On the train back I found I had no WLAN in my car. The conductor did not quite understand what the problem was, but was eager to help and let me change seat to another car where I soon was connected again. It has happened to me before that car 6 (the end car) has bad (non-existent) WLAN coverage, maybe I should take that up with the SJ network people.

I did exactly this as late as yesterday

Veckans ord: ytnyttja

Jorden är begränsad, så det gäller att ytnyttja den effektivt. Det kan man göra genom att stapla på höjden, så går det inte åt lika mycket yta. Så har man gjort i New York.

Men det finns ju också andra värden som man kan behöva ta hänsyn till. Akademiska Hus har i uppdrag att dra in pengar från de universitet och högskolor som utnyttjar deras lokaler. Akademiska Hus struntar i vad universiteten använder lokalerna till, det är inte deras problem. Labbsalar och verkstäder tar mycket yta men används bara ibland och inte av så många personer åt gången. De blir relativt sett dyrare än t ex kontorslokaler som det sitter många personer i hela dagarna. Alltså bestämmer sig institutionen när den gör sin budget för att man nog kanske kan klara sig utan en labbbsal i alla fall och göra laborationer på dator i stället, så kan man lämna ifrån sig utrymmet till Akademiska Hus som kan göra kontor av dem och hyra ut till t ex nåt företag som behöver lokaler. Då har man ytnyttjat effektivt, och alla är glada. Men studenterna får se allt mindre av verkligheten och sitta alltmer vid simuleringar istället.

Vinnande bidrag i kategorin ”Snårigaste inledning”,eller,Mycket skrik för lite ull,eller,Finns det nån tanke bakom alls?

För länge sen, när jag pluggade på Teknis, fanns på Flygsektionen en teknolog som hette Einar. Einar var något av en legend, inte bara på Flyg utan även på övriga KTH, som på den tiden var tillräckligt litet för att man skulle kunna ha någorlunda koll på varandra. Det förefaller mig också ibland att trots den mindre mängden personer så fanns det fler original. Kanske kunde de sticka ut mer på den tiden.

Einar var ett kårvrak, en av dessa som lägger ner mängder av tid på att anordna fester, driva studentfackliga ärenden och hjälpa andra teknologer, kort sagt en av dessa eldsjälar utan vilken ingen förening överlever. En följd härav är att studierna lätt blir lidande och när Einar med tiden gick hädan för egen hand hade han varit inskriven i femton år eller så, vilket naturligtvis gav förutsättningar för mängden historier om honom och inte minst den ärliga saknad och sorg bland många över hela KTH som uttrycktes i den vackra dödsruna som sektionskamraterna skrev. (Jag var doktorand ungefär lika länge och när jag hörde en yngre kollega beskriva mig som en ”institution på institutionen” började jag på allvar anstränga mig för att ta mig därifrån – dock i mitt fall genom att ta examen.)

Men, under mitt första år som teknolog levde han fortfarande och jag läste i Flygs sektionstidning en anekdot om honom som gick ungefär så här:

Einar skulle upp på tentan i Mek. Mek-tentorna bestod huvudsakligen av typtal och hade man plugggat fem extentor fick man garanterat godkänt. Einar var ambitiös och pluggade tio extentor. Tyvärr hade detta bara gett honom tid att memorera svaren.

På tentan kommer mycket riktigt ett av typtalen och Einar skriver raskt ner svaret medan han fortfarande kommer ihåg det. Sen börjar han arbeta med lösningen men fastnar halvvägs. Han utgår då från svaret och börjar jobba sig bakåt men kommer inte riktigt ända fram till den punkt där han fastnat tidigare. Vad göra? Einar inför överraskningskoefficienten stora Ö och sätter likhetstecken. Einar klarar tentan.

Denna historia återberättade jag något senare för ett par sektionskamrater. En av dem, en ärans träbock som till min stora lättnad hoppade av studierna inte alltför långt senare, gned sig på hakan och invände:
– Men inte kan väl tentarättaren ha godkänt det?^*
– Förbannade historieförstörare! skrek jag.
Orubbad fortsatte träbocken att gnida sig på hakan och konstaterade fundersamt:
– Ja, man kanske inte ska analysera historier på det sättet…

Vilket för mig till det som egentligen var det jag tänkte skriva om, nämligen att analysera sönder en billig vits, jag kanske är gammal nog att kunna tillåta mig att vara en träbock.

Christina vrålar i vrede och frustration över (bl a?) det mansdominerade samhället och jag drar mig till minnes en historia jag läst någonstans för länge sen:

En gumma kommer in på apoteket och får syn på en flaska med en dödskalle och texten ”GIFT”. Hon konstataterar:
– Ja, se karlar kan se ut hur som helst, de blir gifta i alla fall.

Nu skulle man kunna tänka sig att den som ursprungligen totade ihop denna historia helt enkelt utgick från de dubbla betydelserna i ordet ”gift” och sen försökte baka ihop en historia runt det, men man behöver inte vara Freud för att reflektera över den bitterhet som lyser fram. Bara att gumman utgår från att dödskallen är en man (om hon nu inte förstås var (f d) osteolog och kunde identifiera könet på ögonhålornas form, men ikoniska framställningar är nog i allmänhet inte tillräckligt detaljerade för att detta ska vara möjligt), kopplat till det förmodat åtråvärda tillståndet att vara gift. (Man kan till och med fundera över om det är så att äktenskapet ska uppfattas som åtråvärt för mannen enbart.) Frågan är också om det finns en antydan av tvång, samhälleligt eller annorledes, som garanterar äktenskap åt männen, oberoende av deras yttre företräden. Det är dock oklart om gumman anser karlar vara kräk även i sina inre egenskaper, det skulle kunna tänkas vara givet förstås. Inramningen av historien antyder att den utspelar sig kanske inte direkt i nutiden, där det sällan står flaskor framme på apotekshyllorna på det sättet och framförallt inte heller med sådana etiketter. Kanske är giftermål inte lika viktigt idag heller, även om tvåförhållanden fortfarande tycks vara normen.

Om nu dessa funderingar hade nån sorts slutsats skulle den här bloggen inte heta som den gör…

---

^* Jo, nog kunde tentarättaren det. Några år senare hamnade jag i i stort sett samma situation på en Diff & Trans-tenta där Greens formel fallit mig ur minnet, men jag jobbade mig mot mitten av problemet från bägge hållen och satte likhetstecken i mitten. Jag blev också godkänd på tentan.

Truth in advertising (cont)

University applications are to be sent in this week and various institutions advertise to attract students. So does KTH:

Kan du bli nobelpristagare,
toppchef eller helt
vanlig astronaut?

Now, I wouldn't trade my degrees from KTH for anything, but to be honest, no KTH graduate has ever received a Nobel prize.

Uppsala University seems to be the place to go to if you are hankering for a Nobel Prize.