Interesting article from the Sunday NYTimes about how humans have suddenly become larger and healthier in the last 100 years: "human bodies are simply not breaking down the way they did before." Scientists are in disagreement as to why, though the article focuses on one theory that says that what happens in a human's first two years of life has a huge impact on their health later in life.
Photosynth, a new technology from Microsoft Live Labs, looks very cool. It's a bit difficult to explain, but it can take multiple photos of a place and build a 3-d model of that location using the photos. Then it places those photos back into the 3-d model so you can explore the scene using the photos. This video does a better job of explaining the technology.
At Eric and Christina's wedding, they printed out flash cards with vector art cartoon pics of each of them for a game we played during the reception. They used a technology from Microsoft Research that can create vector art from still photos. Also very cool, and hopefully something that will be released as consumer software in the near future.
Someone at the International Cycling Union who has seen the results of tests on Landis's A Sample says that some of the testosterone was synthetic, not produced by his body. If true, it's another tragic setback for cycling in trying to regain its reputation as a sport with a level playing field, though in a practical sense that may be years and years away.
[That's not to excuse this French lab, which always seems to leak results through the press. That lab's inability to release information according to official procedures contributes to cycling's tarnished reputation.]
Knowing some of what professional cyclists go through to reach the pinnacle of their sport, though, the sport seems a long way from natural to me, even without banned substances. Cyclists sleep in altitude tents, test the aerodynamic qualities of their bodies and bikes in wind tunnels, tap the latest advances in material science to increase the stiffness and shave the weight of their bike frames, monitor their power output and heart rates with computers, and consume all sorts of strange supplements whose chemistry requires a PhD to understand.
We're a long way from the days of Jacque Anquetil, pulling an all-nighter the night before a race to drink whiskey and play cards. Anquetil, though, was up front about the fact that he took drugs. He was also a fantastic talent, a courageous cyclist. Landis, whether he took illegal substances or not, is a talented, hard-working cyclist. But we want heroes and villains, cloaked entirely in white or black, rather than people exhibiting shades of gray.
Sidenote: The phrasing of the positive drug tests for Gatlin and Landis should be changed. Saying that a male athlete tested positive for testosterone sounds odd.
Note: I'm no statistics major, so if I'm completely missing the boat here, I hope some of you stats geeks will correct me.
Netflix's Friends page changed sometime in the past few days, perhaps over the weekend. I noticed it yesterday. The most curious new feature is that all of my friends are given a % similarity score relative to me. For example, under Robert's name, I see: 86% similarity to you.
My inclination was at once to believe that Robert had pretty decent taste, but perusing the similarity scores of my friends, I found some of them to be somewhat odd. Of all my friends, Eleanor ranked lowest in similarity to me, at 54%. I may not be a fan of Grey's Anatomy, but anecdotally, that seemed low to me.
I searched the site to see if there was an explanation of how this similarity score was calculated, but I couldn't find anything, not even an explanation of how to interpret the score. If the score is 54%, does that mean that if we both watched a movie, there's a 54% chance we'd both rate the movie exactly the same? Or does that mean that 46% of the time, one of us would like the movie and the other person would dislike the movie? Or something else entirely?
If you click on the similarity score, the site displays a list of all movies you've seen in common with that friend and how you each rated the movie. Thankfully, the overlapping data between Eleanor and I was only 38 movies, so I put our ratings into a spreadsheet. Of those 38, Eleanor hadn't rated 8 of the movies yet, so I dumped those out of the data and looked at the remaining 30.
Of those, we had the exact same rating for 19 of the movies. So of the 30 movies we'd both seen, we had the same rating for 63.3% of them (Netflix allows you to rate a movie on a 5 point scale, from 1 through 5 stars). Of all the movies we'd seen in common, including those Eleanor had not yet rated, we had the exact same score for 50% of them.
Of the 11 movies we differed on, Eleanor gave 1 additional star on 8 of them, I gave 1 additional star on 2 movies and 2 additional stars on 1 movie. At any rate, that information didn't help me to understand the 54% similarity score. On the 30 movies we'd both rated, Eleanor's mean rating was 3.53 stars, mine was 3.40 stars, and the mean of the difference between our ratings on the movies was .13.
Netflix assigns a textual description to each of its 5 star rankings:
By that system, a rating of 1 or 2 stars was a negative review, and 3 stars up equated to a positive review. If Eleanor and I differed on our ratings but both assigned a movie a negative or positive review, then in my mind our ratings were not as different as if one of us had assigned the movie a negative review while the other assigned it a positive review.
Of the 11 movies we differed on, in only 3 cases did one of us assign a positive review when the other assigned a negative review. So of 30 movies we'd seen, we had both given the movie a thumbs up or thumbs down in 27 of them, or 90% of the movies we'd both rated. This rendered the 54% similarity score even more peculiar to me.
I looked up some collaborative filtering papers online, and it seemed that the Pearson linear correlation coefficient and cosine similarity were two popular methods for calculating user or item similarity in collaborative filtering online. I couldn't do cosine similarity in Excel (at least not easily), but Excel did offer a formula for calculating the Pearson coefficient of two arrays, so I calculated that for Eleanor and my ratings. Our Pearson coefficient was .564 (correlation coefficients range from -1 to 1). Close, but it didn't match up to the 54% similarity score.
I decided to look at relative similarity scores to see if they meant more. Audrey had a 75% similarity score to me according to Netflix, so by any number of measures, we should be more similar in our movie tastes than Eleanor. But a quick look at the facts didn't support that.
Of the 103 movies Audrey and I both rated, we had the same rating on 38 of them, or 36.9%. Audrey's average rating was 3.75, while mine was 3.36, and the average of the difference of our ratings was .39. Our Pearson coefficient was .454, or lower than the Pearson coefficient between Eleanor and me.
I don't expect Netflix to reveal its methodology for calculating similarity scores. Most companies are protective of their personalization algorithms. Even if I knew how Netflix calculated its similarity scores, I'm not sure it's much more than a minor curiosity. If you knew some people were similar to me in our film ratings, the way that would help me on a movie site is to use those people's ratings to predict which other movies I'd rate highly. Netflix probably already does that. If Netflix explained how the figure was calculated, or even how to interpret the figure, it might be more meaningful.
Having used the personalization features of lots of sites, I find the most useful personalization feature to be item similarities, e.g. Amazon's "Customers who bought this item also bought" feature. Attempts to use similar people to predict my tastes has always yielded mediocre results. I haven't encountered any sites that have really cracked that nut, and that's not surprising. There's no accounting for taste, especially those of creatures as complex as human beings.
Still, if someone out there can explain the similarity scores, drop me an e-mail (commenting doesn't work right now; my e-mail address is on my homepage). I'm curious.
UPDATE: Eleanor wrote to tell me that I show up as 85% similar to her in her Friends page, even though she's only 54% similar to me in my Friends page. Audrey says I show up as 80% similar to her on her end, or 5% lower than she shows up on my end. I'm guessing that even movies we haven't rated must factor into the similarity equation.
SeisMac is a freeware application that allows you to use your Sudden Motion Sensor-equipped MacBook, MacBook Pro, iBook, or PowerBook as a seismograph. I'm not sure why this would be of interest to anyone, but it struck me as cool, and since I'm moving to Los Angeles, maybe it will come in handy.
The Departed is Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Infernal Affairs, the first chapter in my favorite Hong Kong cops and robbers trilogy. Here's the trailer for the American remake, here's the trailer for the original.
The Hong Kong original included a star-studded cast, and Scorsese's version is no less loaded. Here's the key, as far as I can tell from the trailer:
Andy Lau --> Matt Damon
Tony Leung (Chiu Wai) --> Leonardo DiCaprio
Eric Tsang --> Jack Nicholson
Anthony Wong --> Martin Sheen
That's not even mentioning Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, and Ray Winstone, who are in the cast, and Robert De Niro, who was in the cast but had to drop out. It's good to be Marty.
You can find the DVD box set for the original Hong Kong Infernal Affairs trilogy at various Asian DVD sites (you will likely need a region-free DVD player) and even eBay (which includes many non-region-encoded copies). I would urge caution on eBay DVDs that seem too cheap to be true. Many are just mass copies of low quality, and many of my old eBay DVDs of Asian movies no longer play properly. If you want what amounts to a disposable play-once copy, go to eBay. If you want a copy for your collection, spend a bit more for a high quality version.
The one for Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuaron, starring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore. If you use music by Sigur Ros in your trailer, you're cheating, but it's an effective one.
Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke will premiere in New Orleans. Tickets will be free and available via Ticketmaster.
The third in a series of movie quizzes is online. The other two were mentioned here previously. 28 frames, each from a different movie. As always, a mix of the really easy and the ridiculously obscure.
Thanks to some of my uber-movie-geek pals for the answers to 7, 8, 15, and 25. Answers below in white text (run your cursor across them to see them):
1. Cube
2. Citizen Kane
3. Casablanca
4. Casanova
5. Titan AE
6. Groundhog Day
7. Bloodrayne
8. The Street Fighter
9. Dogma
10. Raiders of the Lost Ark
11. To Kill a Mockingbird
12. Life of Brian
13. Platoon
14. Dog Day Afternoon
15. Taxi
16. Heat
17. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
18. The Insider
19. Total Recall
20. Tom Yum Goong
21. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
22. Wag the Dog
23. Bulletproof Monk
24. No Man’s Land
25. Kopps
26. Y Tu Mama Tambien
27. Phone Booth
28. Scary Movie 2
What really used to impress me was a feature on IMDb in which people would write in with the vaguest descriptions of some scene they had stuck in their head.
"I remember a man walking down a hall, the lights flickering, and then a drop of water lands on his head." Or something like that. 9 times out of 10, one of the IMDb'ers could identify the movie. Amazing recall.
Nowadays, I think that letter column has been retired, but it appears that users are helping each other out with such questions on the IMDb message board I Need to Know.
Black Dahlia, starring Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, and Mia Kirshner. I'm a big De Palma fan, so I'm looking forward to this.
Babel (in HD), starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Kôji Yakusho (Kiyoshi Kurosawa's leading man of choice), and directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Interesting cast.
Good article on Judy Rodgers of Zuni Cafe in San Francisco and her theories on pre-salting meat. Definitely something to try the next time I prepare roast chicken or pork chops or some other meat entree.
=).
The commemorative page is one of the most detailed on the site, rivaling entries for Firefly and the Treaty Of Algeron for sheer length. According to the entry, the American Revolution was in fact instigated by Chuck Norris, who incinerated the Stamp Act by looking at it, then roundhouse-kicked the entire British army into the Atlantic Ocean.
I'm a big fan of Wikipedia, which was profiled in the New Yorker this week. It may on occasion be inaccurate, but it can be corrected instantly, and it is far more current and broad than a paper encyclopedia. It is the reference that only the web could have created, and it is the one the web deserves. It takes an occasional beating for its misstatements, but consider IMDb, another user-content generated reference which most people treat as gospel. I think IMDb proves that user-generated content, if moderated by a small cadre of super-users, who may come from the broad base of users themselves rather than the company's employees, can be assembled into highly useful references in very short order.
Yesterday I mentioned that one rider in the Tour had tested positive after stage 17. Pat McQuaid, president of the International Cycling Union (UCI) would only say, “I will say that I am extremely angry and feel very let down by this. The credibility of the sport is at stake. The rider, his federation and his team have been informed of the situation.”
The rider for whom a positive test would most damage the credibility of the sport was, well, obvious. I didn't state his name yesterday because it felt like saying it would make it so.
Then the rider in question failed to show up for a criterium event in the Netherlands, raising suspicions that he was the suspect in question.
"We've never experienced a situation that a 'topper' hasn't shown up without officially cancelling," said John van den Akker, who put together the start list for the Acht van Chaam, to ANP. "We've also learned nothing more from [Phonak team director] Lelangue. It's unbelievable, because Landis is one of the friendliest riders in the peloton. In the morning before the race, various people had breakfast with him and there was nothing wrong."
And today, Phonak and Floyd Landis confirmed that he was the one who had failed the test. Now his B-sample will be tested for confirmation. The World Anti-Doping Agency recently dropped the maximum testosterone to epitestosterone level from 6:1 to 4:1. The test is not conclusive in that some people have naturally high levels and can demonstrate that through a battery of endocrinological tests, and it's likely Landis will protest an adverse test result.
But no matter what, this test result will always leave doubts in people's minds. Another ex-Lance Armstrong lieutenant, Tyler Hamilton, also a universally acknowledged nice guy on the Tour, tested positive for blood doping a few years ago. He's still fighting the results. However, by now, most people have come to believe he was guilty, and it doesn't appear he'll ever make an impact on the pro cycling tour again.
Floyd's own mom seems ready to pronounce him guilty.
Arlene Landis, his mother, said Thursday that she wouldn't blame her son if he was taking medication to treat the pain in his injured hip, but "if it's something worse than that, then he doesn't deserve to win."
"I didn't talk to him since that hit the fan, but I'm keeping things even keel until I know what the facts are," she said in a phone interview from her home in Farmersville, Pennsylvania. "I know that this is a temptation to every rider but I'm not going to jump to conclusions ... It disappoints me."
"He is prominent and temptation is strong," she said. "He is still my wonderful son. If it has happened I love him as much as if he had won... (his) temptations are different than mine."
Scarlett Johansson has signed on with Reebok to design and model her own collection of shoes and clothing. The look is expected to be glamorous, taking cues from the 70's and 80's.
I have nothing to add. This was just an excuse to link to a ScarJo pic.
Levi Leipheimer confirmed that he'll return to ride for the Discovery Channel Team next year. Free subscription required at that site, so here's the relevant portion of the article:
Levi Leipheimer will join fellow North Americans George Hincapie, Tom Danielson, Michael Barry and Jason McCartney as he returns to the Discovery Channel Team. Leipheimer stated, “I’m very excited about returning to the Discovery Channel Team, its family of sponsors and working with Johan Bruyneel once again. This team has a long history of success and I plan to work hard to continue their winning ways in 2007.”
Team Discovery also added Sergio Paulinho and Thomas Vaitkus. Rumor has it that Discovery Channel is also courting Jan Ullrich. If he signs, it will be really interesting to see who acts as team leader in next year's Tour. Perhaps after this Tour the management didn't feel they had a clear team leader who would be ready to step up next year. Yaroslav Popovych is 26 or 27, and I'd think he'd be groomed as team leader in 2008 or 2009, but he had a tough time this year. Ullrich and Leipheimer both have maybe one more Tour in their legs, so they'd serve as a bridge team leader until one of the young guys was ready to step up.
I'm curious to see how Tom Danielson rides in the Vuelta Espana. He finished eighth their last year, and he's a great climber. He's also 28, so it's not as if the team can wait for him for a few more years. On the other hand, he's a former mountain biker, like Floyd Landis, and perhaps they have a longer shelf life than lifelong road racers?
In other, darker news, the sport is awaiting the revelation of which "high-profile" Tour rider tested positive for doping after stage 17, in which Floyd Landis won that miraculous solo breakaway. Will the dark clouds over professional cycling ever part?
By the way, I am aware that commenting is erroring out on my site. Something to do with the MT-Blacklist plug-in. At any rate, I'll be upgrading to Movable Type 3.31 within a week, so commenting should return shortly.
I was in China last year, and I jotted a few notes about the food in my journal:
My first meal in China was at one of the best Sichuan (Szechwan) restaurant in Beijing, Yu Xin. Straight off the plane, Eric and Christina wasted no time in tossing my stomach into the fire, literally. The spiciness of real Sichuan cuisine comes from mala, a spicy sauce of Chinese chilies and assorted seasonings like sesame oil and Sichuan peppercorns. The word "ma" refers to numbness, the word "la" to the spiciness, so mala spells out its effect: it burns and numbs at the same time. The numbness actually allows you to eat more of it than you would otherwise.
The first dish that came out was a meat dish, but it was unclear from its appearance what the dish contained other than diced chilies. I had to send my chopsticks burrowing deep into the mountain of chilies to find a chunk of chicken. By the end of the meal I'd lost all feeling in my mouth, but that didn't wipe the big grin off my jetlagged face. The problem with eating lots of mala is that all other types of food taste bland in comparison.
The toughest restaurant to get a table at in all of China? Kentucky Fried Chicken (ken da ji). Far more popular than McDonald's. It's so popular that another chain of restaurants knocked off KFC's logo, colors, and mascot. Yes, there's another restaurant with a Chinese-looking colonel and the white lettering on red background, but that restaurant doesn't serve fried chicken at all. I didn't have time to walk into one to see what they served, but its existence seemed appropriate in a place where respect for copyrights is about as scarce as toilet paper in public bathrooms.
The hottest new American export to the Chinese dining scene since my last visit? Starbucks ("xing ba ke" in Chinese, xing meaning "star" and ba ke simply being a phonetic rendering of bucks). There's one in the Forbidden City. We stayed with Joannie's friend Arthur and his wife in Guangzhou. We asked him what he liked to do for fun, when he wasn't cranking out sneakers for Nike (he worked at a supplier to the Swoosh). He said his favorite event of the month was every other week, when he and his wife would drive 45 minutes to an hour into the heart of the city to get Starbucks.
In China people actually don't use soy sauce much. Soy sauce and egg rolls and General Tso's chicken, they're all largely staples of the Americanized version of Chinese food. In China, they prefer vinegar use it instead of soy sauce as seasoning, for example, for dumplings.
My visit two weeks ago to Beijing was another culinary adventure. Christina and Eric are among the more passionate foodies in my circle of friends, and the week's worth of activities they organized for everyone leading up to their wedding included visits to many of their favorite restaurants.
That was music to my mouth. I don't look forward to the cuisine in every country I visit (many of the stops on my E. European visit earlier this year left much to be desired from a dining perspective), but China is a culinary mecca. On my visits there, I look forward to eating as much as or more than sightseeing.
Some meals I remember from this trip...
Our first lunch was at Lei Garden, a fairly new restaurant to Beijing. I don't believe it was there last year when I visited, but it's the newest branch of a high-end Cantonese restaurant chain that first achieved renown in Singapore. For those who love Chinese food but don't possess the most adventurous of palates, this is the perfect restaurant. The restaurant, tucked away on the third floor of a somewhat sober business building, is elegant and polished, and the service is top-notch. As for the food, when I found out we were returning to Lei Garden for the rehearsal dinner, I delivered a celebratory chest bump to the next guy I saw in the street, sending him scampering away in fear.
For one of our dinners, we visited the Qianmen branch of Quan Ju De (English website), the famous Beijing (Peking) duck restaurant. Roasted over a fruitwood flame, the duck arrives with a crispy skin and tender, juicy meat. Carved tableside and served in a wrap with scallion and plum sauce, it's a dish I can never pass on. Quan Ju De has the reputation of being the top roast duck purveyor in Beijing, though there are whispers of declining quality and worthy challengers. If you're only in town for a quick vacation, though, it's the safe choice.
Our dinner the next night was at Qiao Jiang Nan. What I remember most about our meal here, in a private banquet room, was that all the waitresses were wearing one-piece tennis outfits, much like the one Nicole Vaidisova is sporting here. I realize this seems like an excuse to reuse this picture of Nicole, but this is honestly the first photo of this type of outfit I could find. At any rate, I felt like we were eating at the clubhouse at Wimbledon.
Perhaps my favorite meal of the trip was at Ding Ding Xiang, a Mongolian hotpot restaurant which bills itself as "Hotpot Paradise." It's not boasting if it's true. It instantly moves onto my list of restaurants and dishes that will haunt me forever. My second day back from China, I actually did have a dream about eating there again, and when I woke up I nearly cried at the cold slap of reality. At Ding Ding Xiang, everyone gets their own personal hotpot, set on top of a flame. Each diner can select one of several different broths to serve as the base of their hotpot. Christina helped Jed and I out and chose the mushroom stock.
I saw abalone on the menu and had to order it, despite it being the priciest of the dishes. I adore abalone. The waiter actually brought it out for our perusal, and it was still moving! I'd never seen one live before. We also ordered lamb, a whole slew of mushrooms, spinach and other greens, and a whole lot more. The presentation was gorgeous, and the hotpot was simply the most delicious I've ever had, and I've had more than my fair share over the years. I'll be dreaming about that meal for years to come, and it is unequivocally my top restaurant recommendation from this visit to Beijing. The next time I visit, it will be my first stop upon leaving the airport.
As for changes from my visit last year, the Starbucks in the Forbidden City is no longer there. Our guide told us the Congress over there gave it the boot. All the other branches of Starbucks remain a huge hit, however, and Kentucky Fried Chicken is still the king of the fast food restaurants in China. I did not eat there this trip, but I am also not one of those foodie or travel snobs who turns their nose up in disgust at the mere sight of a KFC or McDonald's.
I think it's somewhat of a waste to spend a meal at McDonald's or KFC when abroad, especially when most of what they serve is available back home. But, even as an American, I don't flog myself every time I spot a branch abroad, and I no longer recoil in horror if someone has to duck in under the Golden Arches for the taste of something familiar. The typical travel snob who holds everything foreign on a pedestal can't ignore that most American fast food franchises abroad stay in business primarily through the traffic from locals. I find it interesting to gauge foreign perceptions of American restaurants and culture, and fast food restaurants are an easy barometer.
It's also been many years since I've harbored any illusions that any popular travel destinations are hermetically sealed time machines, completely devoid of other tourists or influences from home. Wherever I go, I see American movies, travelers, books, music, and yes, more than a few frappuccinos and Big Macs. If a complete absence of anything American is the only way you'll be satisfied, then consider that your presence abroad is probably ruining some other travel snob's vacation.
One last food story. I've always been a fairly adventurous, open-minded eater. My mom forced me to clean my plate, to sample something from every dish. Whether it was innate or trained, my broad palate has been with me for as long as I remember. It's a high risk, high reward dining strategy. At times, as with drunken shrimp in Hong Kong, it ends with gustatory ecstasy. At other times, as with some bad (though tasty at the time of consumption) ceviche in Quito, it has sent me to the hospital.
Last year during my visit to Beijing, a bunch of us went for a stroll down a well-known food alley near the Wangfujing neighborhood of Beijing. There, we stumbled upon more than one street vendor hawking some creatures I'd never thought of as food before. They were impaled on kabobs. The mere sight of them was fearsome, but after an initial bout of revulsion, I tried to summon my stomach, so to speak. More than few people from our travel party were there, and an audience usually amplifies my dining bravado. I asked the vendor how much for a kabob, and he said they were 10RMB, or just over $1.
I took a deep breath. Okay, I'd eaten a fried grasshopper before, surely this was not much different. I could do this, and I'd have a story to share for years to come. After all, they were deep fried, right? The vendor reached out for one of the kabobs, for another customer, and that's when the true nature of what I'd be attempting became clear.
These creatures' legs started waving wildly, even as they were impaled on the kabobs.
"I thought they were fried!?" I gasped in Chinese.
"No!" said the vendor, recoiling in horror. "Much better alive. Fresh!"
I couldn't do it. We walked away, but not before I grabbed some video of these unique creatures, both pre and post skewering. These creatures should be familiar to most people (view either the 320 x 240 high quality or the 640 x 480 medium quality Quicktime clip, both about 3.5MB), though perhaps not as a snack.
I'll eat most things, but not everything. I don't know who has the unfortunate job of having to prepare these creatures nor how they do it. I don't know how they ensure you aren't injured or even poisoned when biting one of these while they're still alive. You can ask for them deep fried, but even on my return trip this year I couldn't pull the trigger.
After my initial encounter, just as we turned to leave, a young boy of perhaps 7 or 8 years old walked by with his father. The boy had a kabob of these and had chewed the head off of one.
His t-shirt read: "You are what you eat."
Accomplice New York is "part theater, part game and part tour." Interact with actors in trying to solve a criminal mystery in New York, and experience the city in the process. They suggest 8-person teams, which is tough to achieve with just out-of-town visitors, but for locals it might be a fun alternative weekend activity.
At a Freakonomics book signing about a month and a half ago, Steven Levitt mentioned that Phil Gordon would be throwing a Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament so Levitt could study the play for some research he's conducting on people's ability to randomize. Annie Duke won this year, and Levitt mentions that she attributed her success to her new coach, Rafe Furst.
I would dismiss RSP strategy as ridiculous, but considering how many situations in my life have been arbitrated by RSP (who's buying this round of beers, who has to shovel the driveway, who has to sit in the middle, who's taking out the trash, e.g.), perhaps it's worth a bit of study. I don't think I could actually drop the name of one of these gambit plays with a straight face, though.