Gender: Male
Status: Single
Age: 28
Sign: Taurus
City: San Francisco
State: California
Country: US
Signup Date:
01/29/06
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Thursday, October 09, 2008
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10:22 PM - Inflation, The Fed, the Bailout, and Austrian Economics
Current mood:  worried
Category: News and Politics
Crossposted from LiveJournal.
I've always found Macroeconomics to be deeply unsettling. And not in the sense that I don't understand it: when it comes down to it, I don't really understand General Relativity, or Electrical Engineering, or Organic Chemistry, either — not in the hard sense that I can make sensible statements about them and be taken seriously by experts.
With those other fields, though, I can see how they build on what I do understand about them. While there are a lot of subtle nuances that go completely over my head, I can at least form a vague picture of how things work when you look at the bigger picture, and when I take a peek at the deeper details, I can see how they can combine to form the parts that I'm more familiar with (even if there's a certain amount of trust that people smarter than me have taken the time to rigorously prove it).
Macroeconomics gives me the same feeling I get when I read particularly bad bits of Philosophy or Literary Criticism. In short, when I compare Macroeconomics (the big picture) to Microeconomics (the details), I feel like I'm being tricked or swindled, because I don't see any possible way to build the former on top of the latter.
Read the rest on LiveJournal...
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Tuesday, September 30, 2008
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11:24 PM - Zürich photos; Folsom Street Fair
Current mood:  satisfied
Category: Parties and Nightlife
Crossposted from LiveJournal.
Here are the photos I took while in Zürich:
Also, the timing of my trip worked out quite nicely: I ended up missing the trip to Munich for Oktoberfest, but I got back to San Francisco just in time for the Folsom Street Fair. I ended up sticking around for about 4 hours, admiring the scenery. If you're not familiar, Folsom is pretty much the world's premiere fetish festival, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors from countries all over the world.
Read the rest on LiveJournal...
(I don't want to risk angering TPTB of MySpace.)
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Sunday, September 28, 2008
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5:00 PM - Zürich: Cool/Not cool
Category: Travel and Places
Crossposted from LiveJournal. The LiveJournal version is better: MySpace eats the links to Google Translate.
Cool: Public transportation
The Swiss S-Bahn heavy rail network is superior to BART, and the Zürich tram system completely kicks Muni's ass. Seriously.
The tram system has multiple transfer hubs, it actually obeys the posted time schedule, and it goes places other than downtown. It's a bit more expensive than Muni — CHF4.00/US$3.70 for one trip within town, or if you're smart CHF82.00/US$75.50 for a monthly pass, versus US$1.50 for a two-hour Muni pass or US$45.00 for a Muni adult monthly fast pass. However, Zürich tickets also more useful: they're good for all buses, ferries, and the S-Bahn. The catchphrase is "Ein Ticket für alles" (One ticket for everything), and it lives up to the name. A normal-price ticket is tied to a single zone, but Zone 10 contains pretty much everything significant in and around Zürich, except for the airport itself, so you hardly even notice it. Buying the S-Bahn ticket to cross zones to the airport is only CHF6.00/US$5.50, so it's right around the same price point as what BART would run you here in San Francisco (and the S-Bahn is far nicer than BART).
Oh, and the S-Bahn can actually take you to other countries. Beat that, BART and Caltrain!
Cool: Walkability
San Francisco is a very walkable town by US standards. The hills are sometimes a bit more than you bargained for, but the idea of driving to the grocery store is a pretty foreign concept here.
Zürich, however, beats San Francisco handily on this front. All the guide books suggest a two-hour walking tour from the Hauptbahnhof ("Main Train Station") down Bahnhofstrasse, past all the ritzy shops, then across the river to Bellevue and then back up Niederdorf through Altstadt ("Old Town"), which includes both the old churches and the red light district, and finally crossing the river again to the Hauptbahnhof to wrap up the tour. The "two hours" figure assumes quite a bit of touristy gawking; you can easily walk up one side of the river in about 25 minutes, so the whole route would be an hour or so if you were in a hurry.
San Francisco doesn't quite have this. If you flattened out the hills, moved downtown to a more central location, relocated Haight-Ashbury, The Castro, the north end of The Mission, and the Folsom/12th end of SOMA to all be one continuous neighborhood on one side of Market, relocated North Beach, Union Square, and Nob Hill to stretch along the other side of Market, then replaced Market with a river, then you'd have a version of San Francisco vaguely similar to how Zürich is laid out.
Cool: History
Zürich was the birthplace of Dadaism, and thanks to Switzerland's famous neutrality it was also a crossroads for many famous figures and an incubator of many 20th century schools of thought and ideological movements. Café Odeon, which today is sorta halfway a gay bar, was once an old haunt of Lenin and Trotsky (before they got famous), Mussolini (ditto), James Joyce, and various other figures who were staying in Zürich to take advantage of Swiss neutrality.
Oh, and Zürich was an important crossroads going back to pre-Christian Roman times, continued to be so through the Holy Roman Empire, and was one of the epicenters of the Protestant Reformation. Zürich is chock full of famous churches and abbeys that are steeped in that history: for instance, Fraumünster abbey once held absolute power over the city, but in 1524 as Zürich was being swept by the Swiss Reformation, the last Fraumünster abbess Katharina von Zimmern turned control of the abbey over to the city, abdicated her position, and even got married the next year.
Not cool: Schweizerdeutsch
One of my co-workers, a U.S. native who's now been living in Zürich for over a year, previously spent some time living in Germany and is a fluent German speaker. Even he has trouble wrapping his head around Swiss German, which is a mostly-spoken dialect of German so distinct from High German that it's almost its own language: not only does it have a lot of peculiar vocabulary, but it also changes a lot of pronunciations, a few spelling rules, and the occasional grammar rule. German-speaking Swiss are capable of speaking Swiss Standard German, which is mutually intelligible with standard High German, but would rather speak English than speak what they consider a clumsy dialect.
Mixed: Multilingualism
Basically everyone in Zürich speaks two versions of German (Schweizerdeutsch and Swiss Standard German), plus English, possibly plus either French or Italian. Any American posessing even a sliver of shame will feel embarrassed at how monolingual he or she is. Imagine how Americans react to a tourist visiting the US who speaks no English, and contrast that with how Zürich natives don't bat an eyelash as they switch to speaking your foreign language, and how the restaurants almost always have English menus (or bilingual German/English descriptions).
I suppose if you have no shame, this counts entirely as a "Cool".
Not cool: MySpace
Dear MySpace, Wow, this Internet thing sure is exciting, huh? Did you know that a bunch of computer engineers got together and wrote a bunch of standards on how it works? It's true! There's even one for the web! It's called RFC 2616, and it was published in June 1999. That was almost ten whole years ago! Wow, time sure does fly, doesn't it? There was even this nifty feature called the "Accept-Language" header: the user tells the web browser what languages he or she can read, and then the web browser tells the web server so that the server can figure out the best web page to send back to the user. The best part is that the user doesn't even have to click anything! It sure is better than guessing what language the user speaks by figuring out what country their computer happens to be in. People visit other countries sometimes, and they might even bring their computers with them! It sure would suck for a native English speaker to visit Switzerland, then be forced to navigate the "MySpace Schweiz" page in German, then be forced to choose between German, French, and Italian with no option for English. That would totally suck if you guys did that! Um, you guys don't do that, right? Right? Hugs and kisses, Chronos.
As a side note, MySpace has taught me that I'm apparently "schwul". Humorously, I have trouble keeping the words "schwul", "Schwert", and "Schweiz" separated in my head.
Not cool: Uptightness
Switzerland tracks fairly well with the rest of Europe on a lot of things, like gay rights or a laissez faire attitude toward nudity. (It was interesting to walk around Niederdorf and actually have to stop and ask myself, "Back in the US, could someone get away with showing this in plain view of the public, even in San Francisco?" Doubly so when you consider how close Niederdorf is to various famous historic churches.)
But on most other matters, Switzerland is apparently the Singapore of Europe. If you have the (mis)fortune of owning a car, you do not speed, even by 1kph, or you will be ticketed. Also, many places in Europe have become less and less religious over the years, but not Switzerland: many businesses are required by law to close on Sundays, and apparently it's a little bit scary to be atheist there — the country is very Christian and very Protestant (and I don't mean Methodist).
Worse than all that, the level of xenophobia manages to exceed even that of the US. The Swiss People's Party (SVP), which holds beliefs roughly analogous to, say, Pat Buchanan, is now the single most widely supported party across Switzerland, and enjoys 29% popular support — which is large when you consider that Switzerland has a 4-party parliamentary system with proportional representation. One of their ads shows three white sheep standing on a Swiss flag and kicking out a black sheep, with the words "Bringing safety" emblazoned across the poster — and these people get votes in Switzerland.
Not cool: Prices
Eating at a fast food place like McDonalds or Burger King (both are ubiquitous) will set you back around CHF15.00/US$13.80 for a combo meal, or CHF10.00/US$9.20 for just a burger by itself. A sit-down meal at a restaurant will normally run between CHF30.00/US$27.60 and CHF50.00/US$46.00, and that's for a steak-and-potatoes kind of restaurant.
Housing is even worse. Zürich makes San Francisco look cheap, and house prices are such that only 37% of the Swiss own their home, which is one of the lowest ownership rates in Western Europe. From what I understand, rents are a 60%-80% premium above San Francisco prices for equivalent space — although most renters instead opt for spaces that are small by any American measure.
Not cool: Food
The Swiss policy on vegetables is similar to the German one: they boil vegetables until they are no longer a threat. Hopefully you like potatoes, because you're going to be eating a lot of them. Seasoning consists of salt and, if you feel adventurous, ground black pepper. Spicy mustard is sometimes available for those who like taking their life into their own hands.
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Saturday, September 13, 2008
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5:55 PM - Zürich
Current mood:  busy
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers
Crossposted from LiveJournal.
I'm flying to Zürich, Switzerland tomorrow morning, and I'll be flying back on Friday the 26th. Sprint's CDMA doesn't work in Europe, and I wouldn't want to pay for international roaming even if it did, so I'll be leaving my cell phone behind and turned off. I'll still be online, though.
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Currently
reading
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The Origin Of Species
By
Charles Darwin
Release date: 2003-09-02
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Tuesday, September 02, 2008
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6:18 AM - Rafting Trip
Current mood:  cheerful
Category: Travel and Places
Crossposted from LiveJournal.
Last Thursday, a bunch of us at work went on a company-sponsored white-water rafting trip down the South Fork American River, out near Lotus, CA. A co-worker has a side job with All-Outdoors Rafting as a rafting guide, so he was able to wrangle a slight discount and guide one of our boats. The rapids we ran were mostly Class II with some Class III+ thrown in, which as I understand it means "just dangerous enough to be fun".
It's actually a surprising amount of work. Each person in the boat gets a paddle, and teamwork and a lot of elbow grease are required to steer the boat through obstacles. The river does most of the hard work of pushing the boat forward, but sometimes the raft needs a little extra "oomph" to slip past an underwater boulder or to plow through a rapid at maximum speed to keep from getting caught in an undesirable current. And there's lots of turning, which is hard work by itself.
Shockingly, our managed it through the toughest parts without a single rafter overboard... although one person did get dunked at an easier part that caught him off-guard.
I put some photos up on a Picasa photo album.
In summary: I had a blast, and I might end up doing it once a year or so.
ADDENDUM: Oh, I forgot to mention, I saw my first real-life gold farmers while I was out there. Turns out that we weren't too far from the place where gold was first discovered in California, triggering the famous Gold Rush, and while it's not quite enough to justify a big commercial mining operation, there's still enough gold in the river for small-time dredgers to suck up the muck on the riverbed and sift for gold.
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Wednesday, August 20, 2008
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8:42 AM - Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn
Current mood:  excited
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers
Crossposted from LiveJournal.
I'm somewhat shocked that this hasn't made it to the @Google Talks page, but Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn spoke at the San Francisco office on Monday morning as part of the Women@Google program. She's a biologist who's made her career out of studying telomeres, the protective DNA caps found at the ends of chromosomes, and she's a co-discoverer of telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomeres after they are damaged during cell division.
It was really a rather amazing experience. The first half or so of the talk was largely review for me, as she was basically rehashing what the telomeres are, what telomerase is, and how telomerase is at the center of a delicate balance between cancer and aging. However, during latter half of the talk she really got into the swing of things, mentioning tidbit after tidbit of cutting-edge information about the role of telomerase -- albeit with significant uncertainties and a lack of proven causation for many of the most exciting new results.
There were 3 big surprises for me.
The first surprise was that telomerase is highly dose-dependent. There is a disease (Dyskeratosis congenita, or rather the rare autosomal-dominant form) that is caused by a mutation in the RNA template that telomerase uses as a scaffolding. Normally, you'd expect a mutation like this to be no big deal: if you got a bad copy from one parent, then the copy from the other parent still gets the job done. But in this case, the fact that 50% of the telomerase is slacking on the job means that a host of problems crop up, particularly in the bone marrow and the cells that are created there (red blood cells, platelets, and immune system cells), and affected individuals are much more likely to die relatively young (from any of a number of causes).
The second surprise was that, thanks to a study spearheaded by Blackburn's team, we now know that there is a clear, strong link between chronic emotional stress, shortened telomere length, and reduced expression of telomerase. This study was one of the few to actually examine telomerase expression directly, rather than just telomere length. It examined mothers caring for a child with a burdensome condition, such as cystic fibrosis; when the number of years as a caregiver was compared to the telomere length in the mother's white blood cells, there was an inverse linear relationship. By itself, this would suggest that either (a) stress reduces telomerase production, or (b) stress increases the rate of telomere damage despite normal or rising telomerase levels. However, since this study measured telomerase as well, it found that short telomeres were found paired with reduced telomerase expression, which tends to invalidate (b) and point to (a). There may be a mechanism by which a cell, when exposed to stress hormones, reduces telomerase production, perhaps to conserve energy (analogous to how cortisol promotes fat storage).
The third surprise, which ties in to the second, is that short telomeres are strongly associated with many diseases, seemingly unrelated except by chronic stress. For instance, an examination into 6 major risk factors for cardiovascular disease -- high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, diabetes, smoking, and two that I'm forgetting -- found that shortened telomere length was independently correlated to all of them. ("Independent" means that, even ignoring the people who did actually have cardiovascular disease, short telomeres were still associated with smoking, diabetes, etc.) It's been known for a while that stress is a risk factor in cardiovascular disease, but now it looks like telomere shortening might explain how stress impacts cardiovascular disease. Short telomeres also directly impact the immune system, causing vulnerability to infectious disease because the bone marrow can't make enough white blood cells to mount an effective response. Short telomeres also increase the risk of cancer, since the immune system normally kills a lot of cancer cells before they become tumors. Interestingly, Dr. Blackburn holds the opinion that high telomerase levels probably hurt most cancers more than they help them, and seems to anticipate more interesting activity from the aging/stress/disease front (where telomerase is a good thing) than from the cancer treatment front (where telomerase is a bad thing).
Long story short: meditate and take a laid-back approach to life, and you'll probably live longer and healthier. (A controlled study is underway to demonstrate or disprove it, she promises, but for now it's what the evidence suggests.)
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Currently
listening
:
Letting Go of God
By
Julia Sweeney
Release date: 2006-12-02
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Monday, June 23, 2008
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10:54 PM - San Francisco Photos
Current mood: cheerful
Category: Life
Crossposted from LiveJournal.
I've been posting photos of San Francisco to Flickr.
The batch posted on May 27th has pictures of where I live, where I work, how I get to work, and the view.
The batch posted on June 18th has pictures I took during a pair of trips down to Google HQ in Mountain View; I snapped some photos of landmarks and tech companies (some even famous), just of places I could photograph from the highway.
The batch posted on June 21st has pictures I took at City Hall on June 16th, the day when the California Supreme Court ruling took effect that legalized gay marriage here. San Francisco decided to hold off until the 17th to open things up for everybody, and instead held a ceremony for a particular lesbian couple in their 80s who've been pushing for gay rights since they met in the 1950s(!).
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Saturday, May 10, 2008
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11:08 AM - BART
Current mood:  aggravated
Category: News and Politics
Crossposted from LiveJournal.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, during the course of flying to Phoenix and back, I took BART for the first time.
BART vs. Muni Metro:
- BART is generally on-time. Muni... isn't.
- BART is fast. Muni stops at red lights.
- BART will take you to places outside San Francisco. Muni is strictly in-city.
- BART within the city... is next to useless. Muni Metro has gaps, but Muni buses fill most of them.
- BART charges you based on distance. Muni charges you a flat fee for a 1.5~2 hour period.
- BART is a bit expensive. Muni is... not cheap, but competitive.
- BART is much more pleasant to ride. Muni is crowded, and you stand more often than you sit.
Since the SFO airport isn't actually located within San Francisco -- it's really down toward Millbrae in the next county -- public transit is basically limited to two options: BART, and Caltrain. And I'm far less familiar with Caltrain, so I took Muni to the BART station, and BART to the airport, and the reverse when I got back to the city. Ticket cost: $5.35 each way for BART. Ouch. Far cheaper than calling a cab, or parking at the airport, but far more than Muni prices.
Oh, and I discovered the answer to a riddle that had plagued me when I needed quarters every day.
Here's the setup:
The downtown stations on Market serve both BART and Muni: one level below the surface is a shared concourse with ticket machines and turnstiles, the next level down is the Muni platform, and the third level down is the BART platform. The Muni turnstiles accept only two things: coins, and Muni Fast Passes. The BART ticket machines have a button, obvious once you know to look for it, that allow you to change a $1 bill for quarters without buying a BART ticket. So far, so good. If you have $1 bills, you can use them at the station, just like the surface stops. There's just an extra step involved.
There also exist bill changers. These prominently display a notice that they accept only $10 or $20 bills. They dispense only $5 bills.
Nowhere in the BART/Muni station is there a change machine which will accept a $5 bill.
I experienced this riddle during my second week of commuting to Mountain View. I took the Google shuttle to Civic Center station, and only had a $20 on me. In the end, I gave up trying to solve the riddle, went to the surface, and found a bank that would give me a roll of quarters.
The solution to the riddle:
The BART ticket machines accept $5 bills. They clearly warn that they give a maximum of $4.95 in change.
A significant amount of BART profit comes from people buying tickets with more value than they need, and never getting around to using them.
Some small fraction of this is clearly 5¢ BART tickets bought at the downtown BART/Muni stations. They are literally nickel-and-dime-ing people.
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Friday, May 09, 2008
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10:35 PM - Google, Phoenix, Zürich
Current mood:  optimistic
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers
Crossposted from LiveJournal.
I've been too busy with work to blog about what's been happening since my last post.
Back on Monday April 14th, I started at Google with 2 weeks of training at the main campus in Mountain View. I drove the first two days — it's about 40 miles away, but traffic on the highway frequently crawls or stops, so it's not a pleasant commute. I quickly discovered the schedules for the shuttle bus routes that Google runs for employees, and started taking that on Wednesday. I had to ride the N-Judah to the nearest pickup ($1.50/day), plus back from the most convenient dropoff ($1.50/day), but that was still far cheaper than gas (I was getting far less than the 30mi/gal that my car gets under peak conditions), and as an added benefit it was much more pleasant because I didn't have to stress out over navigating Silicon Valley traffic.
So, after I took my two-week crash course in getting up to speed on how Google does things, I finally showed up at the San Francisco office on Monday April 28th. I finally met my boss, and we had a chat that included an exchange similar to the following:
Him: So, how do you feel about travel?
Me: Uh, OK I guess.
Him: Well, you really ought to visit the offices in Phoenix and Zürich in the next few months.
Me: Uh, I've got a high school reunion coming up around late July, but other than that my schedule's pretty open.
Him: Oh, then let's fly you out to Phoenix tomorrow and get that out of the way.
Me: ...?
So I did some poking around on Google's internal site, figured out how to book a flight, and flew to Phoenix the next day.
Phoenix is hot. Vastly, mind-blowingly hot. I mean, you may think it gets hot where you are, but that's just peanuts to Phoenix.
Seriously, though, the highs were edging toward 100°F, and this was late-April, early-May. I found this mind-boggling, especially after living in San Francisco for a month. Phoenix is also much more sprawling and suburban, which was a change from San Francisco (in ways that are at once pleasant and distressing). But I met the Phoenix members of my extended team, and they were pretty cool. I learned a lot about the project I'm going to be attached to. And on Friday I flew back.
Now I need to get a passport on pretty short order, because I'll be staying in Zürich for a while to do more of the same.
Anyways, Monday May 4 started (and yesterday ended) my first full week in the San Francisco office. It's conveniently near the Embarcadero/Folsom stop of the N-Judah, so my commute is still pretty straightforward. I got a Muni Fast Pass last month for May, so I don't have to lug quarters around anymore, and it's a bit cheaper ($45 versus $66, if you took Muni twice every weekday in May). The office was rather quiet for most of the week, since the people around me were variously on vacation or in Mountain View, Phoenix, or Zürich. Yesterday, two of my fellow new hires came to the office, so I finally had the chance to meet them. Again, they seem pretty cool.
So, overall impression of my first 4 weeks at Google: a little crazy when it comes to coordinating schedules ("herding cats" comes to mind), tons of information to absorb before you can wrap your head around what's going on, but fun and exciting and totally worth it.
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Sunday, April 13, 2008
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8:21 PM - Still Alive
Current mood:  anxious
Category: Life
Crossposted from LiveJournal.
So... tomorrow I start at my new job. I'll be spending lots of time down in Mountain View for the first few months while I train. I'm hoping I've got my head around the traffic situation well enough that I'll be there on time: I have to drive down through some nasty traffic (the worst of which is probably right here in San Francisco on 19th Avenue, heading south toward Daly City). If all goes according to plan, I'll be showing up about 40 minutes early on my first day, which should give a broad safety margin if my plan is wrong.
I've been settling into my new apartment for a bit over a week now. I'm starting, a bit, to get a feel for the neighborhood. Yelp has been a great resource for restaurants. I'm still a bit lost on less immediate things, though. I went on a two-hour expedition (to a Target that ought to be 15 minutes away but isn't thanks to traffic) and bought a few goods I'd found myself without, but came home empty handed on several important items. I still haven't gone looking for a good grocery store. There are lots of corner liquor/grocery stores around, but I have serious doubts about their selections; I might end up going to Safeway regularly. Parking in this city sucks even worse than driving, though, so I've been seriously reluctant to take my car out and actually do any shopping.
I've been reading up on the public transit system. It's... a royal mess. The Muni Metro wants to be a subway system, except the tracks run through the middle of traffic along most its length. Yes, the "subway" has to stop for red lights here. BART is better according to hearsay, but goes nowhere in-town; it's pretty much useless for everything except crossing the bay to Oakland and thereabouts. (There has apparently been talk of extending BART clear down to the San Jose area and back up the east side of the bay to form a loop, which it desperately needs.) Caltrain theoretically could get me to Mountain View without driving, but the trains are too infrequent for it to be reasonable. So, for my Mountain View commute, I'm pretty much stuck with driving unless the rumors prove true about Google operating some sort of shuttle bus service. Once I'm spending my time at the local office, that will be much easier, since the N-line should take me straight to work and back. As screwy as the Metro is, they schedule stops frequently enough that I should have no trouble getting to work, and it'll definitely be no slower than driving.
I'll be posting some photos once I get around to uploading them. I have a bunch of my new apartment, a handful I took on the road, and a bunch from the march in Topeka that I went to with Richard on the 30th.
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