When Scott was in town last month, we were having a conversation about the importance of sleep and the effects of psychoactive stimulants, and he had some clever turn of phrase about how coffee is good for "paving over the cognitive potholes" of the afternoon. Since then, my friends and I have been grinning knowingly at each other and saying "potholes" whenever we pass each other in the stairwell clutching steaming to-go cups from Sugar and Spice.

The trouble is that I've been paving over a pothole that has now become four days wide. Each of the last three days has been an important due date for some assignment or project, and I've been sleeping about four hours per night. But finally, finally, it's all done and I can actually sleep, and I have no major deadlines for a week and a half.

Of course, there's always more to do. But I'm not going to do any of it tomorrow. I'm going to go to class and rehearsal, and then I'm going to come home and read Algorithms in a Nutshell, a book that should probably have the alternate title You Have A Job Interview In Two Days, Don't You, You Poor Sucker.

The more jobs I apply for, the more I notice things about my resume that are horrible. I typically notice these things right after I've sent off the resume. That's the way it goes. At least they get noticed and fixed.

But let me assure you that in future, it's just fine for you to pull me aside and say things like, "You know, Lindsey, the words 'a variety of' add exactly no information", or "You know, Lindsey, it might be just a tiny bit of an exaggeration to refer to Class::Std as an object system."

Alex oniugnip and I ran a marathon yesterday! This was my fifth marathon, and the second one we've done together.

I hadn't been planning to set a particular time goal, although I reckoned it would be nice to beat my previous record of 4:39:46. The day before the race, though, I saw that there would be an official 4:30 pace group and decided that I might as well go for it. This was an ambitious goal, considering how haphazard my training had been.¹ I had missed several of the long runs, and I hadn't even gotten around to doing my traditional 20-mile run until a week before the race; usually, the recommendation is to do your longest training run two or three weeks before, so that you'll be well rested. But I'm about ten pounds lighter than I was when I ran the 4:39:46 last year, which I figured could only help me, and I wanted to see what running with a pace group would be like.

So, yesterday, I set out with the 4:30 pace group, led by an enthusiastic middle-aged guy named Tommy. (Alex was up with the 4:00 pace group, led by an enthusiastic middle-aged woman named Betty. He was shooting for an under-four-hour race; he came within a hair's breadth of that goal with a time of 4:01:26, a personal record for him. Edited to add: you can read his story of the race, too!)

For the first several miles, I felt great. I actually got out well ahead of the 4:30 group -- a bad idea, in hindsight. At mile seven, I had to take a bathroom break, and when I emerged from the bathroom, Tom and the pace group were right there. I should have taken the hint and stayed with them, but unfortunately -- and I think this was my big mistake -- for some reason I then felt the need to get out in front of them again. Around mile eight or so, I found some fellow 4:30-ers who had gotten out in front of Tom, and we started pushing ahead together. I was able to stay with them through the halfway point, and we were feeling pretty good, but I started lagging at around mile fourteen. I rallied and caught up with them once, but I wasn't able to sustain it.

Meanwhile, Tom and the steady 4:30-ers had come up behind me. I was able to hang with them until about mile seventeen, and then, well, things just got tough. My legs were sore and stiff, and an angry, painful blister was developing on the pinky toe of my right foot. I fell far behind the pace group, although I could still see Tom waving his sign and hear him yelling encouraging things. I didn't have to walk, but I was no longer interested in speed, just in finishing. Mile 23 was probably the longest mile of my life. It was on a long, straight stretch of concrete with no shade. The wind was blowing against us, and my blister hurt like hell. I lost sight of the 4:30 group entirely. In the last mile or so, I was able to pick it up a little, but not much; I had a final time of 4:44:55. Not my best, not my worst. And now I know what it feels like to have gone out too fast. (To wit, it feels fucking awful, but this was a new experience for me; usually, I err in the opposite direction and save too much for the end. It's good to learn one's limitations.)

Overall, it was really a pretty good race for me. I spent much more time chatting with and getting to know my fellow runners than I had done in any previous marathon, and that was pretty cool. Part of the reason I was able to pick it up at the end was because a guy named Paul, whom I'd been running next to for most of the race, was cheering me on. Thanks, Paul!

Also, the race was in Indianapolis, and to be quite honest, I thought that the course would be boring and ugly, but I was astonished to realize that Indy is quite beautiful. I was able to appreciate it even through the raging pain in my toe. It didn't hurt that the weather was perfect, either. Oh, and we stayed at the downtown Hampton Inn, which is probably the nicest Hampton Inn that has ever existed; it's in a beautiful, ornate 1929 building, and our room, for some reason, was a gigantic two-room suite with a great view and a king-sized bed.

We drove back to Bloomington in the late afternoon yesterday and more or less inhaled a large broccoli/pineapple/jalapeño pizza from Mother Bear's. Alex then curled up and slept while I struggled to finish my due-at-midnight AI homework, which is usually the way of things. Thankfully, today was a day of rest. We went out for an extravagant brunch, and we've spent the majority of the afternoon energetically punching and kicking each other in Tekken, a hand-to-hand combat video game, which is amusing considering that neither of us are having a particularly easy time walking.

More tales from the apparently Frozen Boreal Wasteland:

Alex oniugnip: *drawing a diagram* So, P(H) is the probability that it's a hot day, and P(I) is the probability that you see someone eating ice cream.
Lindsey: And P(I|H) is the probability that you see someone eating ice cream...
Alex: ...given that it's a hot day.
Lindsey: *squinting* Okay. Let's say P(H) is, oh, I dunno, .1?
Alex: Well, around here.

It was 61 degrees today, by the way. Barely fall weather at all. I actually got sweaty raking leaves in the yard.

(Previously.)

My colleague Dave and I are writing our butts off so we can submit a paper to FLOPS 2010! Here's the abstract, which I just turned in:

Unification, a fundamental process for logic programming systems, relies on the ability to efficiently look up values of variables in a substitution. Triangular substitutions, which allow associations to values that are themselves bound by another association, are an attractive choice for purely functional implementations of logic programming systems because of their fast extension time and linear space requirement, but have the disadvantage of costly lookup. We present several representations for triangular substitutions that decrease the cost of lookup to linear or logarithmic time in the size of the substitution while maintaining most of their desirable properties. In particular, we show that triangular substitutions can be represented efficiently using deferred-extension skew binary random access lists, and that this representation provides a significant decrease in running time for existing programs written in miniKanren, a declarative logic programming system implemented in a pure functional subset of Scheme.

Yep, that says "deferred-extension skew binary random access lists". Best data structure ever! It's hilarious how I write about stuff like this, and then I go to job interviews and can't answer questions about hash tables.

Yesterday I had a phone interview with two computer scientists at GrammaTech. To prepare for the interview, I spent some time beforehand thinking about what kinds of questions I'd like to be asked, such as "What was the research you did over the summer?", and what I would say in response. While I was thinking about the answer to that particular question, it occurred to me that at some point -- not necessarily during this interview, but someday -- I was going to have to talk about monads with non-Schemers, and I was going to have to speak their language, which was problematic because "return a >>= f ≡ f a" looks to me like the cat stepped on the keyboard while I was trying to write C. So I made three yellow sticky notes and put them on the wall over my desk to serve as a sort of Rosetta Stone for the monad laws: first in math, then in Scheme, then in Haskell, and finally in English. Thus satisfied, I went back to thinking about things that might actually come up during the interview.

Five minutes into the interview, I was reading off of those sticky notes. I guess they were a good idea.

We talked about all kinds of things: teaching, miniKanren stuff, even my GPS follower. I had mentioned a few specific projects I'd worked on in my letter, so it's not as though they had to go out of their way to find things to ask me about, but I was pretty excited that they were interested in my projects at all. In the latter part of the interview, they asked me to solve a programming problem, but they didn't ask me to actually write code, just to describe what tools I would use, how I would do it, and how long it would take (both how long it would take the computer, and how long it would take me). It was a straightforward problem, but seriously, guys, I'm going to take the graduate algorithms course in the spring, because 2003 just isn't getting any less long ago.

Anyway, I think the interview went reasonably well. They've asked for references, so we'll see what happens next.

Alex oniugnip and I played our first show in Bloomington last night. Actually, it was Alex's first show ever! He was a little nervous, but he did great. We did eleven songs, including a Weakerthans cover. Supposedly, everything was recorded, so if that recording materializes, I might revive the podcast.

Thanks to the fine folks at Rachael's Cafe, we got to open for Abigail and Shaun Bengson, who are amazing. They just moved to Bloomington from NYC and plan to use it as a home base for touring. This is more evidence supporting something that's been on my mind lately: Bloomington is like a startup hub for bands. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. We have a world-class music school; we have a population of people who are interested in going to shows; you can live here on the cheap; and it's centrally located for touring around the country. You can barely walk down the street here without running into a musician; you can't bike around town at night without hearing people practicing. It's pretty great. Anyway, we spoke to the guy who does booking and promotion for the Bengsons, who seemed open to the possibility of getting us to open for them again, perhaps in a month or so, depending on their schedule. I'm looking forward to that.

Abigail and Shaun are also married, and they're clearly Into Being Married. After the show, Alex was conversing with Abigail, and I overheard her asking him with regard to us, "Are you in love?" Not, you know, "Are you boyfriend and girlfriend?" or something, but "Are you in love?" Cutting right to the chase. I like that. Besides, "boyfriend" is such an insufficient term. I mean, I've had boyfriends before.

Shh! Don't say it! But we're doing it. We're teaching our undergrads about it, and they're learning about it -- whether or not they realize it. And if it works, it'll be a book someday.

I'm just about to go sing the Stravinsky! We've been in dress rehearsals all week, and tonight and tomorrow are the two performances. There's more infrastructure for this thing than for any other concert I've been in here yet: headsets and lighting and costumes and "Places in five! Top of show in ten!" and all that. Luckily, almost all of it is for the ballet. All I have to do is show up, stand in more or less the right place, and sing for a little while.

It is, as I told my seatmate when we did the War Requiem last year, one of the four times per year that I put on makeup. Alex oniugnip is coming to see the show tonight; there's nothing approaching a dress code for the audience, but he saw me getting ready, ducked into the bedroom, and emerged in a suit and tie. Wow! Dashing! Damn, he looks better than me.

Anyway, only another day or so until I stop habitually mumbling strange decontextualized snatches of Russian around the hous-- oh, wait, no, we're doing a Shostakovich after this. Never mind.

I'm not sure how I managed not to find out about this until now, but it turns out that I'm in an article on the Smashing Pumpkins website about the Act IV project. Following a period of a couple of years from about 1998 to 2000 during which being a Smashing Pumpkins fan was a startlingly important part of my life, I played in a Pumpkins tribute concert in 2001 that, to the surprise of most of us who were involved, ended up becoming sort of a Thing. The show happened again in 2002, and together, the two concerts and the various other stuff we did comprised the Act IV project.

I ought to say something thoughtful and incisive about Act IV, but I don't have to, because in 2003, my sister Maya leadsynth made an audio documentary about Act IV that pretty well captures what it was all about. Happily, both parts of her documentary are now being hosted on the Smashing Pumpkins website and are linked from the aforementioned article.

Oh, yeah, did you know I play music? I play music! In fact, a week from tomorrow, Alex oniugnip and I are playing a show here in Bloomington that will be the first real show I've played in years. I refuse to act blasé about this. In fact, it's earth-shattering enough to make me use Twitter.

I was introduced to Scott McCloud and his incredibly cool family a couple of years ago, when Indigo indy1725 hosted a party in their honor during the Portland stop of their 50 State Tour. (I'm pretty sure that there's photographic evidence, somewhere, of his daughters roundly beating me at Wii Tennis.) I've been nerding out about his work ever since then.

A few days ago, I happened to walk by a sign announcing that Scott was giving a talk in Bloomington this evening. I wasn't at all sure if he would remember me, but I emailed to tell him that I'd be there with some friends, and that we'd like to take him out to dinner afterward, on the off chance that he didn't already have plans. To my surprise, he did remember me and didn't have plans, and that's how Alex, Christine, Damian, Mark, Andy, Will, and I all ended up going out to dinner with Scott McCloud at the Trojan Horse this evening, which I think effectively makes him a Beer and Algorithms guest speaker. Also, my friends seem to think I'm cool now.¹ Sweet! Thanks, Scott!

This semester, I'm taking an Embedded and Real-Time Systems course that doesn't actually have much to do with, you know, embedded and real-time systems. The alternate name for the course is "Experiments in Autonomous Robotics", and that name's slightly better. Here's what it's really about: there's a golf cart, it runs Ubuntu, and we write programs to get it to drive around places.

From where I sit, the whole write-code-to-control-a-robotic-golf-cart business has an overwhelmingly ICFP contest-like flavor to it. We had to do the "figure out which way to turn, assuming you're at location so-and-so and you're trying to get to location thus-and-such" thing, and that felt pretty familiar.¹ And in fact, a few weeks ago, when we were direly in need of a simulator so that we could test our code without actually going out on the golf cart, my colleague Dave hacked one together out of his own ICFP 2003 leftovers.

Now that we've mastered the basics of steering the cart, we've moved on to navigating a series of GPS waypoints. We receive the waypoints in a file format called RDDF. RDDF, as far as I've been able to tell, is a format invented specifically for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, which was a competition for driverless cars navigating through the desert, and looking at the RDDF spec is once again giving me an overwhelming sense of "This is like an ICFP contest problem, except that it's real."²

When I was applying to grad school, I wrote, "I don't want to sequence DNA and I don't want to build robots. I just want to move symbols around on pieces of paper. ... Is that so weird?" And it's still true. I'd rather be writing inference rules than doing any of this, I think. But all the same, it's kind of exciting when running a program actually makes stuff happen in the perceivable physical world, and not just the world of electrons.

"I need to make a [mumble mumble]-er."¹
"You need to make a Bruce Schneier?"
"...Yes! A Bruce Schneier! I need to make a Bruce Schneier."

Alex oniugnip and I ran in a local road race this morning! He's prepared a short dramatic reading for you:

A cool morning in early fall. The FINISH LINE, near a FOOTBALL STADIUM. Lots of RUNNERS.

A young couple, LINDSEY and ALEX, run past the finish line, cheerfully ending a fairly leisurely 5K. Nearby is THE DEAN, DR. BOBBY SCHNABEL, a thin, fit looking man in his late fifties. He's wearing running gear and a fashionable bicycle-style cap. He clearly finished several minutes ago, and is now eating a post-race banana.

LINDSEY: Hello! How was your race?
SCHNABEL: It was pretty good! I went faster than I expected.
ALEX: Great! How fast was that?
SCHNABEL: Oh, you know. About 23 minutes. I was a lot faster, when I was your age.
LINDSEY and ALEX (unison): Burn sauce!

I don't remember the part where we allegedly said "Burnsauce!" in unison, but I can certainly verify that Dean Schnabel was a lot faster than I was.

In today's race, there were 1333 finishers overall and 89 finishers in the "Female 25 to 29" age group; my overall finish place was 480, and my age group finish place was 24. My time was 28:11.0 -- just over 9-minute miles, which is not very good for a 5K. See, this is the dirty little secret of why I run marathons: if you run a slow marathon, folks are still impressed that you did it at all.

Despite my unfortunate callback audition, the powers that be put me in Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, and on October 9th and 10th, we'll be performing a Stravinsky piece, Les noces (or Svadebka, or The Wedding) with the IU Ballet. I had never sung Stravinsky before, and it's a lot of fun. There's lots of dissonance and additive rhythms and shifting meters and sudden stops and starts -- to grossly oversimplify, I guess it's kind of like Rite of Spring, but with a choir.

Rehearsals have been tough. Because we're operating under real-time constraints -- both in the sense that the performance is coming up fast, and in the sense that we'll have to perform in sync with the ballet -- we can't really experiment with the piece much. It's just drill-and-kill, three times a week plus the occasional weekend rehearsal, trying to match the tempi of the Bernstein recording that the dancers have been working with. The pronunciation is tough, too. I sang a fair amount of Russian music in college, but all of it was liturgical music, and most of it moved pretty slowly and used the same twenty or so words, half a dozen of which were variations on "God", so as long as you could get your mouth around the shapes of those words, you were more or less fine. But this piece isn't like that. It's about the preparations for a wedding that takes place in some kind of notional abstract past Russian peasant-world, and everybody is talking about food and clothes and hair and getting drunk and lamenting the passage from childhood to adulthood and, well, just all kinds of stuff that definitely never came up in Rachmaninoff's Vespers. One of the soloists has a line that, in the English transl(iter)ation, goes something like, "Pot smashers, arrogant wives, stooping wives, small boys, pea thieves, destroyers of carrots!"

Because this is the freakin' IU School of Music, the four vocal soloists are great, and I'm somewhat concerned that we mere mortals singing in the choir will sound like mud by comparison, especially in the not-acoustically-forgiving-to-choirs space we're performing in. Not that I have any illusions about our importance -- the audience probably won't really care what the choir sounds like as long as the soloists and the dancers are good, which they are. Still, it would be nice to do this right. We have two and a half weeks left in which to attempt to target our voices with laser-like precision and really nail those carrots.

Glass with peanut butter on it.

In related news, I'm clumsy before 9 a.m. when I haven't had breakfast or coffee yet.

So, someone who writes in Russian added me as a LiveJournal "friend". I don't know anything about this individual. I can't read their journal.

But I can sure do this. His name is Ilya, he's 25, and he runs Ubuntu. And his blog, machine-translated to English, is more comprehensible than a lot of things native speakers of English write -- and glows with humanity.

Is it a "good" translation? No. But -- this is the important part, guys -- it's better than nothing. Admit it: we feel some trepidation when we look at something we can't understand. If I can't tell whether something is cause for delight or alarm, well, then it's cause for alarm. But the tiniest little bit of understanding is enough to help widen my narrow little monoglot mind. This is how we're going to save the world.

I just found out that I passed the foundations qual two weeks ago. This takes away a burden that's been weighing on me for a year. Whew!