Reza Behforooz

Solution to our health care problems

2009-01-27T13:28:00.000-08:00

This NYer article is the best thing I've read about US Health Care in a very long time. Read it.

On the left, then, single-payer enthusiasts argue that the only coherent solution is to end private health insurance and replace it with a national insurance program. And, on the right, the free marketeers argue that the only coherent solution is to end public insurance and employer-controlled health benefits so that we can all buy our own coverage and put market forces to work. Neither side can stand the other. But both reserve special contempt for the pragmatists, who would build around the mess we have.

8 years!

2009-01-20T11:22:00.000-08:00

< / B U S H >

Authors at google

2008-07-18T19:22:00.000-07:00

This lecture about behavioral economics is amazing. You can watch the video online. It's the best talk I've attended in a couple of years.

I also enjoyed this talk by Johan Bruyneel, retired pro cyclist who was also the director of Lance's team during the 7 Tour de France victories.

Bikes, Cars, and the Human Psyche

2008-03-16T19:52:00.000-07:00

Last week, there was a tragic accident in the Bay Area.

[Bikers] were struck and killed last Sunday morning by a sheriff's deputy who crossed the center line in his patrol car... Witnesses at the scene said there were no skid marks and that the officer said he had fallen asleep at the wheel [source SFGate].

This is a very sad tragedy for the bikers and their families. Yesterday, there was a short memorial ride to the location of the accident. Sadly, I wasn't caught up on my emails and only found out in the evening. As I was reading articles, comments, and blogs about the accident I was puzzled by two things related to the human phyche:

1) This online test shows how easy it is to not see cyclists on the road. I recommend taking it. I failed it like most people.

2) I am appalled by the comments that people wrote about a memorial bike ride. They show no respect to the families. I think it's fine for some people to be unhappy that cars need to share the road with bikers and that bikers have the right to take up an entire lane (just like a horse, tractor, or other vehicle that may move slower than cars). Debates are good. But the place for such discussion is not in the comments about a memorial ride.

Why is it so easy for humans to hate each other (bikers vs drivers, drivers vs pedestrians, religion X vs religion Y, country X vs country Y, ethnicity X vs ethnicity Y, people on different sides of a river, etc)? What wiring in our neocortex promotes this?

I saw a documentary that showed that some types of monkeys have a similar trait. In the experiment, they found that neighboring communities of monkeys had different ways of breaking hard-shell fruits like coconuts. One group used rocks, while the other group used sharp objects. They did a study where they took a monkey from one community and put it in the other community. The results were amazing. The displaced monkey would get mocked! It was just like a kindergarten where a kid with a different habit or race showed up in school.

I enjoyed reading these couple of pages of a Book on this topic called 'Why we hate?'. Here is a related article on Psychology Today.

Ithaca, NY

2008-02-21T10:28:00.000-08:00

Ithaca was always different from the rest of the NY state. The picture speaks for itself about Ithaca (home of Cornell). It was the only county in NY that voted for Obama instead of Clinton!

Climbing Mount Hamilton

2008-02-20T22:51:00.000-08:00

Today, I went up Mount Hamilton (4300 ft) for Stage 3 of Tour of California. Here are some pictures and videos I took. Here are more pictures taken by others people. It's amazing how fast the riders go. It was very cold on top of the mountain and the descent was freezing. I also have a whole new appreciation for the motorcycle riders who bring the races to TV. They were literally bouncing up and down.

Reputation and DUI

2008-02-14T11:02:00.000-08:00

Washington state recently passed a bill that requires DUI drivers to have a yellow license plate (news article). It's a bit like the Scarlet Letter. I like to see how effective this becomes. I think the bill has a problem. Some people share cars with other drivers. But DUI is a major problem in the US, and I'm happy to see experimentation by local governments.

I love reputation based systems like eBay and wikipedia. It's a good way to build trust and fight spam. I personally wish there was an easy way for people to have a publicly visible reputation that was influenced by anyone. Imagine a world where people could easily point their cell phone at you and give you a plus or a minus vote. If you let someone merge in, the other driver can give you a small star. If you stop and help someone with a flat tire, you might get lots of stars. If you cut people off or cheat on the carpool lane, you get bad karma. That's similar to PageRank. We all look at reviews for movies, restaurants, books, hotels, etc. And we look at the star rating on youtube, netflix, etc. Why not have it for people? There are now web sites that do this for professors and classes at universities. An open reputation based system is so much more effective than the usual student reviews for university faculty. Now imagine we did that in the office for everyone.

Why not have a rating on this very blog post?

Lessig 4 Barack

2008-02-05T16:10:00.000-08:00

Lawrence Lessig made a great video for why he's 4Barack. The video also demonstrates Lessig's masterful presentation skills.

See the comments on the blog if you want to see some debates among viewers.

Some videos from Brazil

2007-12-06T14:41:00.000-08:00

Football: one, two, three

Forro (a type of music/dance): one, two

Last thoughts about Brazil

2007-12-05T07:34:00.001-08:00

I’m not sure if I can put what I saw about the culture into words. You really have to experience it. The thing about Brazil that really jumped out for me was the people and how they live life. People just seem happy, not happy because of being contempt, but happy from having fun. Brazilians know how to have fun. They are also laid back and fluid. Little planning happens, but things somehow manage to work out at the end. Things are not organized. And it’s not rude to back out from earlier ideas just because you no longer feel like doing something. Maybe they’ve found the right balance. It’s silly that we send out emails days before, make dinner reservations at such exact times with an exact headcount, and do things we don’t feel like because we committed to them days before.

The culture in Brazil is also different from Asian cultures that I’m used to in a big way. Most of those places have a strong sense of obligation, various kinds of formality, and many implicit forms of expectations from others, all of which can often result in stress and unhappiness. I didn’t find those in Brazil. People are warm and friendly, yet relaxed like Europeans when it comes to social situations. People are friendly and help you, but they are not overly hospitable to make themselves or you uncomfortable. I have never seen such warm friendly people with relaxed space between them. I think it’s the best of both worlds.

People generally love to dance and party. My favorite was a woman in her 40’s who told me that she goes dancing 3 times a week: once with her husband, once with her girlfriends, and once alone. Of course, this is only possible since people have maids at home who take care of kids. Not everyone is a party animal. I met my fair share of people who like to go home early and just chill. But unlike here, it’s a choice they make and not one made for them by some silly rule that close down places.

Finally, Brazil – like the US – is a country full of immigrants with a sad history of slavery. But unlike the US, there are no racial boundaries today (there is still a class division based on money and education, but that is universal). Brazil is a real melting pot. And most people share the same culture, food, and music. It’s not like the US where different groups of people watch different TV shows and often live in segregated neighborhoods. I can’t describe what a typical Brazilian looks like. They have a lot of diversity in their features and color, mainly because so many have mixed heritage.

Enough from me. Go visit and see for yourself.

Futbol Pilgrimage and Pictures

2007-12-04T21:29:00.000-08:00

I had a chance to watch one football game in Brazil. The game was originally scheduled to be in the Maracana (the largest stadium in the world). But the Police had a concert so the game was moved to a smaller stadium. I reached the stadium an hour before. The ticket was about $7 for the best seats. There was live samba music outside and inside the stadium. And people were singing samba songs throughout the entire game. About a third of the people were dancing. The game was an exciting 3-0 victory. The experience was amazing. The energy level was unbelievable. There was a trophy museum for the team. Some of them went as far back as 1915. I’ve not seen so many trophies in my life. This is their sport. That's why they are the king of Football.

I met a girl from Belgium at the game. She is a 767 pilot at the age of 26! She started taking flying lessons at the age of 17 before she was able to drive. So her mom had to drive her to the airport for her to fly. Irony! The two of us visited the Maracana the next day. We got a little lost, went around the stadium, jumped over a construction site, went down a fence, and found ourselves on the field! A few people were preparing for the Police concert. Finally, somebody approached us and told us that we should not be here on the field and asked us to leave. He tried to sell us VIP tickets to the concert with a backstage pass. We later found the Futbol Museum.

See the photo gallery below. There are a few short videos to give you a sense of what it was like.

First impressions

2007-11-21T17:59:00.000-08:00

I love Brazil so far. Belo Horizonte is the 3rd largest city in Brazil with a population of 2M. It's called the Bar Capital of Brazil by the NY Times. I'm here to work with Googlers in our engineering office on a couple of projects. Last night, I enjoyed getting stuffed at a great churrascaria and later went out for caipirinhas and a jazz club.

Tonight, there was a football game between Brazil and Uruguay, rivals after the heart breaking loss in the 1950 World Cup final. Fans were paying less technical attention to the game than fans I've seen in other countries. But they for sure had a better time as the drinks kept flowing all night and the conversation between people was often louder than the announcers screaming 'Gooool'. I guess that's what happens when you have the most talented players in the world.

I had borrowed a couple of Portugese languages tapes from the library but never had a chance to listen to them. It's hopeless to try to learn a language in a week. It's certainly not as easy as understanding Spanish. Lucky for me, people think I'm a local until I have to open my mouth to speak! :)

Finally, as usual, my bag of jokes translate well after doing a s/{tork|norwegian|santa-singh|blond}/portugese (this is an inside joke for some and a puzzle for the rest of you)!

Brazil and a Blog Post

2007-11-09T15:31:00.000-08:00

Read the Google Blog post about my project and how things get done at Google.

In other news, I'm going to Brazil in a week. I'm really looking forward it to. And it looks like I'm going to get a chance to watch a football game at the Maracana (largest stadium in the world)!

Busy week at work

2007-10-31T00:08:00.000-07:00

I was involved in three independent launches this week:

My 20% Farsi keyboard launched on Monday. It's now listed in the Gadget directory. I've also embedded the gadget below.
We finished up a project that made some backend changes to Gmail. Nothing user visible, but some invisible things are now better.
OpenSocial is finally announced. It's launching on Thursday!

Searching Google in Farsi

2007-10-29T16:09:00.000-07:00

I sometimes need to do searches in Farsi, but I don't know the keyboard bindings. I built out an iGoogle Gadget that is an on-screen Farsi keyboard (see the screen shot). It launched today. Click here to use it. A lot of credit to Googlers in India who built this out for several other Indic languages. I only extended it for Farsi.

Do you have a racial bias?

2007-10-15T20:38:00.000-07:00

Here is a site that tells you about your biases against people. Go to https://implicit.harvard.edu (just click on demo and it takes about 10 minutes). Here is an article about this.

Right vs Left Brain

2007-10-11T17:04:00.001-07:00

This has been going around for a week. There is an article about it. If you see her turn clock-wise, then you use more of your right brain; otherwise, you're a left brain person. Your left brain is in charge of logic, math, analytics, practical, etc. Your right brain is in charge of creativity, art, feeling, fantasy, risk, etc. And most people I know have been able to rotate the direction with some concentration and luck.

On most personality tests, I score right in the middle. So I first thought that I will not see her rotate at all. But I guess I'm more of a right brain person according to this. I wonder if it'll change from week to week.

Cycling Videos

2007-06-18T22:17:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed watching this documentary from Netflix on the Tour. A few clips are on youtube: trailer, clip 1 and clip 2. Although this IMAX clip looks even better.

Square Cake Puzzle

2007-06-11T22:51:00.000-07:00

Last week, we started doing puzzles in the office. Bruce asked one that I enjoyed. There is a square cake. And there is a square shaped hole in the cake. The hole is in a random place (and at a random angle). You want to evenly divide the cake with only a single cut. Where do you cut?

Life at the Googleplex

2007-05-18T15:17:00.001-07:00

Here is an interesting story about doing massage interviews.

Psychiatric Hospitals

2007-03-21T22:05:00.000-07:00

The Rosenhan Experiment is a must-read for everyone. It basically shows that one cannot distinguish between sane or an insane in any community setting, in particular a psychiatric hospital.

Rosenhan's study consisted of two parts. The first involved the use of healthy associates or 'pseudopatients', who briefly simulated auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 different psychiatric hospitals in 5 different states in various locations in the United States. The second involved asking staff at a psychiatric hospital to detect non-existent 'fake' patients. In the first case hospital staff failed to detect a single pseudopatient, in the second the staff falsely detected large numbers of genuine patients as impostors. The study is considered an important and influential criticism of psychiatric diagnosis.

Science Fridays and rapper at Google

2007-03-10T12:06:00.000-08:00

We have a lot of amazing people at Google. At one extreme we have Turing Award winners like Ken Thompson (co-inventor of UNIX) and Vint Cerf (co-inventor of TCP/IP). At other extremes we have people with other amazing attributes. For example, take our summer intern Monzy who is a nerdcore rapper straight from the hills of Stanford (listen to his major hits: So Much Drama in the PhD and kill -9).

His blogs also describe a cool tradition in our NY office: Science Fridays. It looks like a lot of fun. I love the microwave experiment. It also reminds me of antigravity experiments done by a friend (and fellow Googler) JJ Furman.

Schools in Bay Area are Banning homework!

2007-03-04T17:24:00.000-08:00

I am all for getting Type-A parents to chill out about their children's education, specially in the early years. But this article is going too much in the other direction.

Oak Knoll Elementary in Menlo Park has mostly banned homework — except reading, special projects or catch-up work. Palo Alto's Addison Elementary and the Berryessa School District in San Jose are discussing the issue.
...
Not all homework at Oak Knoll has been eliminated — for example, third-graders will still practice their multiplication tables at home.

A researcher from Duke proudly adds the following obvious fact: Harris Cooper tells CBS News his research has shown that homework does help learning.

More on slashdot.

Working together

2007-02-28T00:00:00.000-08:00

Open source software is great. Anyone can improve the source code, add features, or just access the source code to better understand the software. The Internet revolution has been fueled by various open source technologies.

Wikipedia is the open source software model applied to a writing a collaborative encyclopedia. It works well.

The Oxford English Dictionary had a similar start. From 1857 to 1928, thousands of people sent examples of word usage not in their dictionaries. A few editors complied this into a dictionary. Sounds pretty similar to wikipedia to me, but with more primitive tools.

Was this the first example of this model? Do you know of other examples? Why is it that we don't see this in more artistic fields, i.e. composing music?

Great Book

2007-02-19T14:21:00.000-08:00

Thanks to JP for recommending this great book -- Basic Economics. I highly recommend it. A lot of the content is things I already knew, but it's full of small examples and his writing style is very engaging.

Funny book review

2007-02-11T15:28:00.001-08:00

I so agree with this review. I think authors are running out of ideas for books and just fill them up with countless examples of the same thing.

http://neopoleon.com/blog/posts/13725.aspx

A fun puzzle

2007-02-05T22:53:00.000-08:00

Let's say there are 10 cars, each numbered 1 to 10. Each car travels at a speed equal to its index * 10mph. For example, car number 3 goes 30mph, and car 10 goes 100mph. Now, assume they are traveling in a single lane road and no passing is allowed. Each car still prefers to go at the speeds described above unless a slower car is ahead and forces the faster car to go at the speed of the slower car. So if car 3 is behind car 1, then they both travel at 10mph since car 3 cannot pass 1.

For any random distribution of cars, if someone looks at the road from above they will see different pockets of cars going together. For example, assume the cars are going in order: 5 (back), 3, 1, 7, 8, 10, 4, 2, 6, 9 (front). We have 4 pockets. 5, 3, 1 travel at 10mph. 7, 8, 10, 4, 2 travel at 20mph. 6 travels at 60mph and 9 is speeding ahead of everyone at 90mph.

Now, assume we have N cars and consider all random distributions.

Question 1) On average, how many pockets are formed?

Question 2) What's the average size of pocket?
In the example above, it's (3 + 5 + 1 + 1)/4 = 2.5

I'll reply with possible answers and also a funny story about this puzzle.

Beautiful mountains

2007-01-28T23:38:00.000-08:00

This is from a few weeks ago while x-country skiing. It snowed the entire day and made it a fun adventure!

Pictures from cross country or snow shoeing

2007-01-28T20:50:00.000-08:00

These are some pictures from my few cross country or snow shoeing trips this winter.

Stop, and think of a better way

2007-01-24T21:22:00.000-08:00

People usually underestimate the applications of learning mathematics or computer science in real life. Most math/science people understand the importance of framing a problem. Every problem can be solved in many different ways. Some ways of thinking about a problem make it much easier. Computer Scientists in particular understand that brute force approaches are bad. If something repeatedly fails, we try to re-frame the problem to get unstuck. Let me give a few examples to show what I mean by framing.

Example 1
Let's look at sorting. Most people know how to sort cards they receive when playing cards. Most people use "insertion sort": starting with nothing, they pick (or insert) one card at a time in its right place. It works well when you have 10 cards to sort. But it really doesn't work when you have a hundred or so. One of the things that we learn a lot in CS is how to quantitatively evaluate and compare different ways of solving a problem. In insertion sort, at each step, one has to compare the new card with all the cards currently being held. For example, the last card is compared with every single card that was previously picked. The math is a little tedious (or obvious depending on your background), but given n cards you end up with n x n or n^2 comparisons. So sorting 100 cards this way requires 10,000 comparisons. And sorting 1,000 cards takes 1,000,000 comparisons. Wow, that grows quickly.

Now, most people don't actually compare the card with all the cards they are holding. At each step, they quickly find the spot for the new card by guessing where it should be and adjusting a little. We all do this when we look up something in Yellow Pages or a dictionary. If we're looking for an attorney in the Yellow Pages, we open up the front. And we quickly adjust our guess by guessing again. A more general version of this is called binary search where you cut the problem in half in every step. Binary search is must faster than linear scan. Again, the math is hard or obvious depending on your background, but binary search takes about log(n). So looking through 1000 sorted things for an item only requires only 10 comparisons (because you reduce the problem to 500 items, and then 250, then 125, 63, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, and finally 1 -- that's 10 steps), as compared to 1000 for a linear scan. Extending the insertion idea above to use binary search instead of linear scan reduces the complexity from n x n to n log (n). For 1,000 cards, we go down from 1,000,000 to 10,000 comparisons. So these are two different and correct ways of doing the same thing. But one is a lot faster. What's needed is having a way to quickly compare different ways of solving the problem.

Example 2
Here is another problem that shows framing. I like this puzzle. Imagine two trains, 100 miles apart, moving towards each other on the same train track. One is traveling 10mph and the other is going at 15mph. Eventually, the trains will crash. There is a super bee traveling at 20mph going back and forth between the trains trying to get the attention of the train drivers. Let's ignore the time it takes for the bee to turn and speed up again. How many miles does the bee travel in its futile attempt to save the trains? A bad way to frame this problem is start adding up all the distances the bee travels. It's hard to count because the trains are moving and the distance the bee travels keeping getting smaller. I'll let you try to do this on your own time. An easy way to frame the problem is to compute how long it takes the trains to crash: 100/(15+10) = 4 hours. Since we know the bee is moving at 20mph, it's easy to figure out that the bee will need to travel 80 miles in 4 hours.

Example 3
Here is my favorite example. Let's say you're on a boat in a river. You are traveling 20mph up stream. The river itself is moving 5mph. Let's say your hat falls in the river at noon and you only realize that this happened at 12:15. How far is your hat and how long will it take you to go back and fetch it? Your hat is now further up stream than where you dropped it since it's been moving at 5mph. [Stop reading here if you want to solve this.] Again, there is a hard way and an easy way. The hard way is pretty tedious since the river is moving. Knock yourself out if you want to do the arithmetic. The easy way is to change your point of reference. Does it really matter that the river is moving in respect to the trees and the land? The only things that matter here is that the boat is moving 20mph away from the hat for 15 minutes. So the answer is obvious. The speed of the river does not matter at all. Thank you Einstein for relativity.

Now, here is a version of the same problem that's easier for people to understand. Let's say you drop your hat on an escalator while you're walking up the escalator. Assume you drop your hat, climb 5 steps, and realize you need to go back to get your hat. It's easy to see that the hat is only 5 steps below. For some reason, we can abstract away the relative moving of the escalator. It doesn't matter how fast the escalator is going or that it's even moving at all. This is easier for people to understand than the previous problem.

Ok, enough examples! Now get to the point

These examples show a few things. First, it's important to frame the problem correctly, to ask the right question, to look at the minimum amount of facts needed to solve a problem. Second, it's important to be able to quickly compare different ways of solving a problem with each other. It's good to experiment and see what works. If you ever have to make 100 peanut butter sandwiches, it's good to take some time and think of a good way. It can save you a lot of time.

Most importantly, I don't understand how people can repeatedly try a brute force approach at solving a problem. When one is stuck or when things are not working as smoothly as expected, it's important to stop and think about a different way instead of trying the old way. Often, trying random new things is better than persistence and banging your head on the wall. In fact, there is a whole field of Randomized Algorithms based on this idea.

I think in the past couple of decades, businesses understood the importance of these things and that's why we started seeing people with PhDs in science and math in board rooms and on trading floors. Maybe in the next few decades, we'll see a similar trend and emphasis in more social disciplines that so far have focused on the soft skills.

Climbing Walls

2007-01-15T12:52:00.000-08:00

The big chase scene in 007 is based on an actual discipline called Parkour. It makes skateboarding look like a sissy sport.

Read more
More videos

My thoughts on the iPhone

2007-01-11T23:42:00.000-08:00

I'm talking about Apple's iPhone and not Cisco's; this trademark issue sounds like good $$ for the law firms. Overall, the technical spec and the features on the Apple iPhone sound amazing. It's very Apple. But here are some things that I was hoping for:

1) I wonder how well the multi-touch screen will work when using the device as a phone. When I want to send an SMS while doing something else, I can pretty much feel the keys with my fingers and type without fully looking at my phone. The sames goes for dialing a number. I can open my phone and call people on my speed dial or even enter a number without giving the phone a lot of visual attention. I just don't think it'll be possible with the iPhone as there is no touch feedback.

2) I hate voice mails. I hate navigating a long list of menus, I hate the blinking red light, I hate being forced to write down or remember a phone number quickly, I hate how people don't repeat numbers or how they don't even try to speak clearly, I hate how I sometimes have to leave a voice mail for someone else regurgitating info from a voice mail I received instead of being able to just forward the email, and after using Gmail for so long I hate how I cannot search my voicemails. Last year, contacted the IT department at my work and canceled my voice mail!! The voice mail UI on the iPhone is much better than most cell phones. But it can still do a lot better.

3) I think that voice recognition is key for doing search on a phone. All of us have called 411 while driving to get directions, find an address, etc. I guess I can still call 411 on my iPhone. But that's a pity given that I'm holding a $600 device. I wish simple searches could be done completely using voice.

4) The price and the size of the device can be better. But I'm sure that'll take care of itself in future iterations.

Nice job to Apple for building this and for keeping it a secret for so long. At work, I sometimes hear the expression: "maintain a healthy disregard for the impossible". I think the Apple team on this project certainly did that.

Getting people to talk

2006-11-08T23:39:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you have to spark the right conversation in a party to get people to talk. And sometimes you have to build a social application to get millions to talk. I'm glad I had a chance to do both this week.

We just launched orkut + Google Talk. I wrote up about it on the Google Blog and the Google Talk Blog. It was a fun project.

Here is a personal story about orkut. I grew up in four different countries so it was usually hard for me to keep in touch with childhood friends. A couple of years ago I found an orkut community for my elementry school and found an old friend from 3rd grade!

My name is Reza and I approve this blog post.

Longer version of the cell video

2006-10-26T00:30:00.000-07:00

Here is a longer version of the cell video from its source at Harvard. My friend David Bau has more details on his blog.

Animations from inside a cell!

2006-10-19T23:29:00.000-07:00

This video made by the BioVisions project at Harvard is amazing (learn more).

Fun puzzle

2006-10-09T01:32:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Ario for sending this to me. It's a cute puzzle. And the rest of the ones on this site are also pretty good.

http://www.nzmaths.co.nz/BrightSparks/frogs.asp?applet

For the geeks, why did applets lose to flash? Is it just the ability to create pretty UI? I couldn't find a flash version of this game.

Coffee and a bug at Starbucks!

2006-10-09T00:50:00.000-07:00

Look at this interesting total! I guess they have a bug in their software. I can't wait for these to popup on my other electronic devices.

For non-geeks, null means nothing in computer programming (this is not the same as zero as zero is itself something).

Random nerdy news

2006-09-27T22:00:00.000-07:00

- Anousheh Ansari called the Googleplex from space. She has a cool blog. (more here)
- White paper on how computers waste power, technologies that Google built, and how we are working with the industry to make this an open standard. 100 million computers running for 8 hours a day waste about $5B of electricity over 3 years!!

Video From Amazon

2006-09-25T19:28:00.000-07:00


This is taken from Lake Sandoval in the Amazon in Peru

Six F words

2006-09-21T00:06:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, a wise man was giving me some career advice. He gave me a list of six F words: fun, family, fame, fortune, freedom, and force. In life, one can only have two of them. For example, college professors (except for ones trying to get tenured at top universities) take family and freedom. Artist takes fun and freedom. Politicians take fame and force. People who do startups take fortune and fame at a very high risk and maybe some fun until the money starts to run out.

I think it's a good way to frame things. Once you know what you want, it's easy to pick a career or a lifestyle. But if you're not honest, life will seem like a square room with a rectangular rug. It will never feel right.

Another good advice is to do something at the intersection of what you enjoy, what you're good at, and what's useful in the world. Otherwise, you will hate your work, suck at it, or not find a job. People who want to be artists always struggle with this. The world needs very few of them. So most of them struggle with the last two.

Walking Tree in the Amazon Forest

2006-09-18T20:17:00.000-07:00

We saw a lot of amazing thing in the Amazon. But the walking tree was one of my favorite. It moves about 10cm per year in search of a better spot. Its roots don't really go inside the ground. And you can see which direction it's moving if you look at the roots: the roots on one side are dying while it's growing new roots on the other side. There was another related tree called the balancing tree. This tree doesn't move, but it can change its angle. I love seeing what evolution does.

Welcome to Random Travellers

2006-09-18T14:55:00.000-07:00

The number of comments on my blog went through the roof today. Finally, someone told me that my blog is profiled and linked from http://www.blogger.com. So welcome to all random people looking at my blog today. Here is a political correct joke for all of you: Why is six scared of seven? Because seven, eight, nine.

Funny movie: Little Miss Sunshine

2006-09-17T23:21:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed watching Little Miss Sunshine. It was nicely done, and I think everyone will find it funny.

Parrots in the amazon

2006-09-13T19:49:00.000-07:00


Parrots in the amazon feeding off a clay lick.

Video From Amazon

2006-09-13T19:48:00.000-07:00


This is taken from the Tambopota region of amazon in peru in Lake Sandoval.

Video From Amazon Basin in Peru

2006-09-13T09:06:00.000-07:00


The sounds here are amazing!

Machu Pichu

2006-09-13T08:09:00.000-07:00


Video of Machu Pichu in Peru

Pictures from Peru

2006-09-11T19:21:00.000-07:00

We took a lot of pictures from Peru. I'll write more about the trip later. But here is a summary album. I think the highlights of the trip were eating amazing food in Lima with our friends, seeing Machu Pichu, and spending three unforgettable days in the Amazon.

Trip to Peru and my mp3s

2006-08-25T15:15:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Peru tomorrow. It was pretty easy to plan the trip with the help of my Peruvian friends -- no overpriced, bad touristy restaurants for me. I watched this documentary last night and got really excited. I'm taking a lot of pictures.

We'll be having a lot of alfajores enjoying Pisco Sours, and eating a lot of amazing food.

Finally, my mp3 collection has been getting some attention recently. And maybe I should try to follow MCPlus+

DNA and Assembly Language

2006-08-19T23:59:00.000-07:00

Many people think it's amazing or surprising that the DNA between any two people is 99.9% the same. In fact, 50% of a human DNA is the same as a banana's. I think this totally makes sense, and I was surprised that we're even that different from a banana. All living organisms are composed of cells. And cells are composed of the same basic elements (there is some variety but it's basically the same). And the elements in cells are composed of the same organic molecules. Much of the machinery at each of these levels is basically the same across all organisms. For example, cell replicating, cell membranes, etc generally work the same for everyone. So that's what we have in common with an algae.

I think this is a little like comparing the differences between Microsoft Office and vi and expecting the pattern in their assembly language instructions to be very different. Office is a lot bigger and more complicated than vi. But at the end of the day, all programs have the same general structure in machine instructions. Data is loaded and stored, values in the registers change, basic logic and arithmetic operations are performed, and the program counter is manipulated in different ways to simulate function calls, recursion, or exception handling. This pattern is the same for all programs. At the end of the day, the same CPU can execute all programs. And the CPU only understands opcodes and operands. So it's not surprising that the patterns must be the same.

Based on the analogy, it's the same for living organisms. The actual organism is analogous to the software. The DNA is analogous to the assembly language instructions. Protein is analogous to transistors. And the biochemistry between the organic molecules is analogous to the physics that control the components of a CPU. Complexities in one abstraction layer are isolated from the other layers.

Instead of comparing to software, another analogy is that the brick laying patterns for a small house and a castle are basically the same. But I like the other analogy more.

Real estate ad in silicon valley!

2006-08-19T17:21:00.000-07:00

Where is Yahoo? And older names like oracle, Sun, HP are missing.

New version of Google Talk

2006-07-28T09:46:00.000-07:00

A new version of Google Talk is now available. The fast file transfer is great. In addition to sending individual files, you can drag an entire folder to a chat window and the entire folder will be transfered. We also added support for sending and receiving voicemail. Voicemails are sent to your GMail inbox as an MP3. Finally, we have some fun music features.

We're rolling out to everyone soon. But you can get it from here if you cannot wait.

Google behind the screen

2006-07-23T20:06:00.000-07:00

This is a good 1 hour show about Google. It's an Australian TV show but seems pretty similar to a PBS documentary.

Design vs Evolution in Technology

2006-07-21T17:43:00.000-07:00

I loved reading this article in the Technlogy Review. See blog post for more.

In grad school, I had a friend who was working on using genetic algorithms for chip design. Some of the chips were able to do all the logic of a simple ALU, but nobody was able to understand their internals. There were extra transistors whose output were not even used. But without them the system would not work. So the working theory was that the system was somehow dependent on the temperature increase caused by the seemingly useless transistors.

For those who don't know, the author Steven Jurvetson is one of the geekiest VC's.

Materazzi at his Best

2006-07-12T09:05:00.000-07:00


Painful

Finally... Forza Azzurri penalty kicks to football heaven

2006-07-10T23:41:00.000-07:00

Italy finally was able to win on PKs! And I can finally retire my 16 year old Azzurri jersey.

It was a great world cup. It was nice to have it in Germany. Italy didn't have any big stars this time. 10 players scored their 13 goals (that's amazing distribution for football). And more importantly, they didn't give up any goals during actual play. Zidane scored on a PK and they managed to have an own-goal against the US. All the Italian players also play for Italian clubs, not true for any other country! I guess Italians are really happy with their tough, defense oriented Serie A league. The scandals about the players and the Italian clubs helped the team just like 82 when they previously won when facing a similar situation. I think the entire team will be pardoned again.

When the game went to OT, I could vividly remember 90 when they lost the semifinals to Argentina on PKs in Naples, 94 when they lost the finals to Brazil on PKs, 98 when they lost the quarterfinals to France on PKs, and 02 when lost the round of 16 to South Korea in the last minute of overtime (after one of their own goals was incorrectly not counted). But this time, history didn't repeat itself.

Back in 1990 I was given an Azzurri jersey as a gift which I wore during all the games listed above. I really didn't know if I should bring it out this year. But the unlucky jersey was finally lucky. The jersey is now retired. For fun, I should send it to the FIGC and ask them to give me an honory number (I'll take 7 or 8 please) and a new official jersey (stitched letters please) WITH MY NAME ON THE BACK! If anyone has contacts there, please let me know. I think they'll like the 3 o's in my last name.

Thank you Azzurri! Now, let's get one more and tie Brazil. That's what really matters.

The unbelievable Zidane drama deserves a few links:
- Materazzi who was knocked down is quite the personality (amazing video of pain)
- What did he say to Zidane? I find it impossible that they can read his lips over the video. But I do love this quote from Materazzri in his own defense: I’m ignorant. I don’t even know what the word means.
- But thanks you Zidane for missing the easy header in OT. The ideal end for me would have been to watch him get subed out late after an Italy blow out in order to let the fans cheer for him. But life is not perfect. And he showed that he's only human.
- Zidane's must-see greatest moments: easily the best player of the past 20 years (compare him with Ronaldinho)

Twice as big as Japanese?

2006-06-19T22:16:00.000-07:00

My friend Niniane posted a picture from an elevator in Japan where the average person is expected to be 150 pounds!! And she guessed the number would be 250 pounds in the US. Well, here is a picture I took in SF.

Now SF is fourth healthiest city in America. So I expect this to be even more in Houston.

Analyze This

2006-06-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

Years ago, tobacco companies started claiming a pretty interesting theory on why smoking does not cause lung cancer. They claimed that the desire to smoke is genetic and the same gene is also responsible for lung cancer; thus cigarettes are really innocent and the smokers who get lung cancer are equally susceptible even without smoking. Of course, they were wrong. Nice try.

But this kind of cause and effect pattern actually does occurs. For example, there is a correlation between criminal activity and the mothers of the eventual criminal smoking during pregnancy. Now, it's possible that smoking during pregnancy somehow damages the brain of the child in a way that helps the child grow into a criminal. But it's also plausible that the kids turn into criminals for the same reasons that pushed their mothers to start smoking.

In general, alarms go off in my ahead when I read correlation as the justification for cause and effect. This is why I had a really hard time with social sciences. These sciences simply conduct experiments to find correlation between different variables, and simply assume that one variable causes the other.

World Cup in ASCII art

2006-06-15T19:08:00.000-07:00

I've been enjoying the World Cup so far. Today another googler showed me a service that shows the games live in ascii art!

Visit http://ascii-wm.net/ or even better just telnet ascii-wm.net 2006 during a game.

The quality is amazing for the technology. You can even make out the numbers.

You can also watch star wars in ascii art.

Picasa Web Albums and Spreadsheet

2006-06-15T19:00:00.000-07:00

Picasa launched web albums this week. The integration between Picasa and the web site is really nice and it's so easy to upload pictures. I love it.

Here are my pictures (mostly from Spain, but I'll post more later).

In other news, Google also launched online spreadsheets. It makes it so much easier to share a spreadsheet and make multiple people work on it at the same time.

Joga Bonita!

2006-06-06T22:07:00.000-07:00

The FIFA World Cup is starting this Friday. I'm so excited. There are lots of great teams and players.

The first world cup that I really followed was back in 1986 when I was in fifth grade. It turns out that the 86 world cup was really the best world cup since 1970. Only 24 teams (instead of the current 32) were in the tournament. So the overall quality was better. Even the final match was very exciting -- with 3 goals in the last 16 minutes. What drama!

1990 and 1994 left me really sad as the Azzurri lost in the semis and then in the finals on penalty kicks. Things were so bad that I couldn't really get into France 98 (where Italy lost again on penalty kicks in the quarter finals!). 2002 was a lot of fun at the start until Italy lost in last minute of the extra time to South Korea (at least no penalty kicks). I wish I was a little older to remember the glorious 1982!

I'm not sure who will win this time. But it will be very exciting. I do wish that Team Melli had not peaked last year with their all-time high FIFA world ranking of 15. And a better draw would have helped them. Joga Bonita!

An Inconvenient Truth

2006-06-04T03:06:00.000-07:00

I went to see the new movie by Al Gore called An Inconvenient Truth which is a documentary about the destruction of the environment -- mainly focusing on global warming. I thought it was nicely made (even funny at times) and raised a lot of awareness. I highly recommend it. It was also pretty scientific (like a good Nova show). The summary is that we're already in deep trouble. The earth's temperature is increasing. And this has a domino effect on the ecology of earth. For proof, look at the pictures I took from Greenland (you can see cracks in 3 of them).

And with over $1T of oil left in the world, energy companies don't want to see the adaptation of better energy sources. About 50% of media references to global warming somehow question the level of fear that scientists are showing. But no scientific jounral in the past 30 years has questioned the facts. Countless studies have shown that the current trend is simply too dangerous.

Some sad facts:

10 of the hottest years ever on earth have been the past 14. Increase in temperature raises sea levels, increases winds (2005 had the highest number of hurricanes and tornadoes worldwide), changes the gulf streams, and drys land (partly causing the famine in Africa)
A 20 feet increase in sea levels means that most of SF and the peninsula will be under water. There goes the Noe, Palo Alto, Googleplex, and Stanford. Most of Shanghai, Beijing, and Calcutta will also go under water. That's over 100M people!
US has lower standards for gas emissions than Europe and China! This is a disgrace.
California passed a law to increase the gas emission standard by 2010 to match today's standard in China. But our friends in Michigan are suing the state for trying to take the lead!
I was surprised to meet a few people this week who didn't know that the imports of Japanese hybrids in the US are restricted to protect our friends in Michigan. GM and Ford are so doomed in my opinion because their cars are simply crappy compared to their European and Japanese peers. I hate lobbyists -- government should be "by the people and for the people" and not "for the corporations". I don't think this policy will protect American jobs in the long-term.
Despite the US never signing the Kyoto Protocol, 10 states and 187 cities in the US are following the protocol. I love it!
This is so evil: Philip A. Cooney, the former White House staff member who repeatedly revised government scientific reports on global warming, will go to work for Exxon Mobil this fall. (NY times article)

Gore was a lot more charismatic in the movie than in the 2000 debates. Sadly, it's too late. I really liked Gore. He is a smart guy. Urrgh... Florida!

I have a couple of personal take aways from the movie. But on a funny note, I will never order beer that's in bottle again. By ordering beer from tap, one can save the environment one bottle at a time. Imagine if everyone did that! But seriously, go watch the movie.

Attending the Turing Awards

2006-05-27T00:03:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I had the honor of attending the ACM Turing Award ceremony in San Francisco. The Turing Award is the basically the Noble Prize for Computer Science. I arrived at the ceremony after riding up the elevator with Don Knuth (a world renowned computer scientist who probably doesn't remember that we both had offices on the same floor when I was in school!). There were about 100-150 people. I saw a bunch of my professors from Stanford and a few Googlers. The authors of at least half of my text books in college were there! The best part of the night for me was that my advisor from Stanford, Jennifer Widom, was named an ACM fellow. Peter Naur was the big winner this year for his work on Algol and programming languages in general. Thanks Naur for inventing recursion, scoped variables, BNF, etc.

The was also an award for humanitarian contributions given to the leaders of the Nakuru Local Urban Observatory project in Kenya. I really love how technology is starting to help developing nations. I can't wait for PCs to cost less than $100 for even greater impact.

It was so humbling to be around such amazingly smart and hard working individuals.

Google Talk news

2006-05-11T22:11:00.000-07:00

Terry added sound notifications when chatting in Gmail. We also added chat in different languages.

A flashlight into our culture

2006-05-11T21:32:00.000-07:00

In grad school, I did a project (using the web pages crawled for Google -- before it was incorporated) on analyzing trends of words on the web over time. We noticed that "mosaic" was going down at the time and "retail" was becoming more popular. You could also use the data to see significant events, like superbowl, when IE shipped, etc. Over the years, I always thought this would be a useful research tool.

So I was really excited when Google Trends launched on labs last week. The UI is nice and it lets you see the data over time and also over cities/regions/languages. Here are some examples: tea vs coffee or sushi vs steak. Or guess where they love JLo the most. You can have a lot of fun with this and learn a lot about what people around the world like. Please leave a comment with any good examples you find.

Best Job in America: Software Engineer

2006-05-09T22:48:00.000-07:00

According to a CNN article, being a software engineer is the best job in America. It's still the second fastest growing job (behind Physician Assistant). It looks like despite all the outsourcing and the slow years after the .com crash, things are still good for now.

In reality, there are two types of software engineers. The first group studied it in college because of the bright job prospects. The second group fell in love with it long before going to college, taught themselves programming, and continue to be involved because they love it. For them it's more of an art.

While interning at Microsoft a long time ago, Paul Leach gave me one of the best reasons why programming is so addictive. He said writing software is probably the only creative job in the world where one can always feel some progress. You fix a compile error. Progress! You step through the code and fix a bug. Progress! You refactor some old code. Progress! You figure out a clever way to do something complicated in a simple way and save weeks off a schedule. Progress! The project, even the company, can be in deep trouble. But the engineers who write code are often very happy when they are in the zone. We're not talking about a daily sense of satisfaction. We're literally talking about getting that job every minute or two.

There are a few other attributes I really like about being an programmer: working on a team, building something that millions of people use, and most importantly building things that actually improves the world. If a blogger in a developing country can earn a decent living from ads by writing some good content instead of working in a factory, we've leveled the playing field for the good.

Retiring from Hanayama Puzzles

2006-04-25T00:35:00.000-07:00

Scott got me hooked on these puzzles. But after finishing the three level 10 puzzles, I'm going to retire. I still liked the Cast Enigma best.

The Cast News is also fun. But you either get it quickly or you don't. I got lucky with it.

The Cast Chain was very tedious.

Fun with commas

2006-04-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

Last week during dinner, a friend asked everyone to guess the ratio between baby boys and girls in China during the peak years of the one child policy. We all guessed in the low 1.x's. After a hint that the number is higher, a few increased their guesses to three or four. My friend told us that the answer is 1,200 according to a study done by Columbia Univeristy. Yes, 1,200 boys for every girl! I couldn't believe it. For the ratio to be that high, 1,199 of the 1,200 women having a girl needed to somehow terminate it. It sounds so crazy. I could imagine a small village in a random place being like this, but I cannot believe it for a country as large as China. The law of large numbers will catch up to you. Since 1/6th of the world's population is Chinese, this unbalanced ratio would have huge global implications. I had to find the article and see for myself.

Luckily, another friend beat me to it. Read the numbers above carefully. In America, a comma is used between every three digits to make it easier to read and a period is used as the "decimal point". Well, in some other countries, it's the other way around. So the ratio is really "one and two tenth" (as most of us guessed correctly).

Funny quotes or sad reality?

2006-04-18T00:19:00.000-07:00

After a bus crash in Spain, the newspaper headline was "6 people and 2 Portuguese die in a car crash"! Neighboring countries rarely like each other. After all, they are forced to get in each other's way, like two kids who share a small bedroom. There is usually a lot of history involved that prevent the parties from being reasonable, like a divorcing couple who spend hundreds of dollars of legal fees per hour to fight over a small item. For proof, look at all the land, sea or river disputes!

In Japan, the weather person says "Luckily the hurricane missed Tokyo and is heading to Hokkaido". It's funny in a sad way. It even sounds like a mistake. Regional issues within a country is even worse in some ways. I've never understood why. And the more you zoom, it's more of the same. Even within a city or even a school, cliques and stereotypes are quickly formed.

I guess it's just human nature. We generally like to be around people who make similar decisions and trade-offs in life. Is there a way around this? Or are we simply not evolved enough?

A funny and sad lesson from history

2006-04-10T23:26:00.000-07:00

I've heard a few stories on how people started to be vegetarian, but none of them sound convincing to me. After all, humans evolved together as hunters, so why would some groups suddenly stop eating meat. The following theory is the latest attempt to explain this.

Back in the Stone Age, humans discovered how they can build tools using stones for hunting. They attached sharp stones to a long stick for hunting. Well, there was one person named Bubba who always missed and was never able to hunt. It wasn't his fault. The poor guy had lazy eye. Each day, he was the only person in his tribe who returned home empty handed. His family, especially children, were always sad and hungry. He wanted to stop going hunting as it was futile. So he finally came up with the idea of being vegetarian and that's how it all started. He was quickly kicked out of the tribe, so Bubba started recruiting other people who always missed from other tribes and formed a new tribe. Over the years, many cultures who share Bubba in their lineage consider being vegetarian a virtue. As usual, the truth got lost along the way!

History is often full of untold stories. And the legend of a courageous Bubba who dared to be different from those around him should be celebrated more in today's centrist world where most people sadly strive to be the first person to be like everyone else. Long live Bubba!

Low Hanging Fruits

2006-04-08T11:33:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, I read a paper by Dijkstra, a very accomplished Computer Scientist, on how to conduct scientific research. Although my undergraduate research quickly convinced me that doing a PhD and conducting research in general was not for me, Dijkstra made one key point that has stuck with me. The goal of the scientific community is to create new knowledge. For this, each scientist must work at his/her limit of knowledge. In other words, if you know that someone else in the field can solve a particular problem, leave it and solve a harder one. This strategy maximizes for the total output of the community by trading off the success rate of the best scientists for total output. Most people have a natural tendency of going after the low hanging fruits. But Dijkstra's point is that if a group wants to maximize the number of fruits it picks from a tree, each person has to work at his/her limits -- leave the low hanging fruits for someone who is afraid of heights or someone who is not as able.

Granted, practicalities of project management might not allow this to happen all the time in a work setting. But I really believe that this attitude also helps in a work setting. It's sometimes tempting to go after low hanging problems. But it's often best to leave them for someone new or with less experience in order to give them the experience and the confidence to reach higher next time. Sadly, in many organizations, people run after the low hanging fruits as it provides the shortest path to getting rewarded. This sadly fits in well with the super short-term view of most corporations as everyone scrambles to optimize the quarterly EPS number.

Puzzle: 50 coins

2006-04-07T19:47:00.000-07:00

With your eyes closed, somebody puts 50 coins on the table: 40 heads and 10 tails. Let's assume that you cannot tell the side of the coin from touching or any other mechanism. Your job is to divide up the coins in two groups. All the 50 coins must be in one of the two groups, but the number of coins in each group may be different. Your aim is to have the same number of tails in each group. What do you do?

Fire!

2006-04-04T22:14:00.000-07:00

I came down to California last night for a couple of days. I have started selecting middle seats on short flights to double my odds of finding a good person to chat with on the plane. But this time, I flew down with my coworker Niniane, so we were able to chat the whole way.

After having a good chelo kabab for dinner and getting tea in Palo Alto with a good friend, I went to my hotel. Around 12:30, the fire alarms went off. Luckily, I decided to go for a walk until the issue was resolved. There was an actual fire in the hotel! Luckily nobody got hurt as the fire was in the laundry room. We were permitted to return to our now smoky room much later. It was funny to see others random people blog about this too from the hotel's business center (the hotel is comprised of several disconnected buildings).

It seems like I have bad luck with hotels in Palo Alto. Last time I was here, they gave me the keys to a room that was not vacant and I walked into someone else's room. Luckily, nobody was there! On another previous occasion, a stranger starts loudly knocking on my door around 4am. Another reason to miss home!

Tapas in Spain

2006-04-02T20:01:00.000-07:00

I never like going to Tapas places for dinner. For those of you who don't know, Tapas is a style of food from Spain where they serve many very small plates. For example, a plate might have 3 shrimps or 2 garlic sauteed mushrooms. And since it's popular to go with a large group, I always find myself sharing a plate that's not even big enough for one person with 8 people. And ordering many dishes somehow doesn't end up being enough food for me. I usually leave Tapas places hungry and craving a place like In-N-Out to get stuffed.

In Spain, Tapas are not for dinner or lunch. They are only consumed in the afternoon before and after siesta (a wonderful ritual of closing business in the afternoons and sleeping). So Tapas were designed more for an afternoon snack than a meal. So nobody leaves hungry. I loved many of the Tapas plates there. But my favorite was probably
Jamon Serrano -- think of it as Prosciutto++ (Scusi to all Italians). Here are some pictures to wet your appetite! Another good place, recommended by a Googler, was a swedish-argentinean restaurant called Olsen. Sadly, they had no giant swedish meatball, which is the first thing that came into my mind when I heard of this interesting mix.

Fun time in España

2006-03-27T20:52:00.000-08:00

We had a great time in Spain. The highlights of the trip were going to Alhambra (picture below), watching Real Madrid play (videos / pictures), and eating Tapas.

But what was equally amazing was to see the coast of Greenland from the plane. I've never seen such a clear sky on a trans-atlantic flight (more pictures)

Cast Enigma Puzzle

2006-03-13T19:07:00.000-08:00

My colleague Scott recently introduced me to the Hanayama puzzle collection. The Cast Enigma is ranked as one the hardest metal puzzles in the world. It looks so simple and yet so impossible. I ordered one from Canada as I couldn't find any store or online store in the US that carried it! I was hoping that it would keep me busy on a long flight. But I was able to solve it last night in my first uninterrupted attempt. It is very clever and I really enjoyed it. Putting it back together was a lot more difficult.

Watching Real Madrid

2006-03-12T21:12:00.000-08:00

Football (that's soccer) was always my favorite sport growing up. In fact, it was the the only sport I played and watched until high school. The stars aligned and we're going to watch Real Madrid next week in Spain. Interestingly, they have a few of the best players in the world: Ronaldo (best Brazilian striker), Beckam (best British player and probably the most popular footbalist today), Zidane (amazing French mid-fielder from the 98 world cup team) and Raul (best player from Spain). Although their records show why having so many stars is not a good thing (for details read the good book Moneyball by the author of Liar's Poker).

Our seats will be on the 8th row from the pitch. So it should be amazing.

I can't wait for this summer's World Cup. Too bad that I can't go to Germany. But I need to shift my work hours like usual. At least the time difference should be better than the last World Cup in Asia.

Brazilian Samba in Seattle

2006-03-03T00:02:00.000-08:00

I have a couple of friends in a Seattle based Brazilian samba group called Vamola. They had a show this week, and I was amazed by their level of improvement since last year.

Music groups, like anything, can hit a point where they are better than their popularity. Vamola has certainly hit this point. If you live here, I recommend checking them out.

Get GMail and Google Talk for your own domain

2006-03-02T18:12:00.000-08:00

In short, if you run your own domain, you can let Google provide your users GMail and Google Talk. Your users can login with user ID's at your domain (i.e. reza@rezab.com). And they can also IM GMail users, users on other domains and any other Jabber user.

https://www.google.com/hosted says it all.

Countries that I've visited

2006-02-23T21:35:00.000-08:00

src="http://www.world66.com/myworld66/visitedCountries/worldmap?visited=CAUSMXCRPEBEFRDEITLUMCNLESUKVACYIROMTRCNINJPKRTH" width="75%" height="75%">

(create your own!)

A Paradox? Puzzle #6

2006-02-23T21:05:00.000-08:00

A law student (no not my wife) promises to pay his law professor when he wins his first case. He then decides not to practice law and takes no cases. The professor sues the student for his fees. Here are the arguments:

Professor's argument
* If I win, my student must pay, by the court's decision
* If he wins, the student must pay, by our agreement
* Either way, he must pay me

Student's argument
* If I win, I need not pay, by the court's decision
* If my professor wins, I need not pay, by our agreement
* Either way, he must pay me

Who is wrong?

Pictures of my work

2006-02-22T20:35:00.000-08:00

Tour of Googleplex: The Kirkland office is missing a few of these benefits, including the blue sky.

It's really made of cheese

2006-02-22T17:59:00.000-08:00

I was looking at the moon today. But I was surprised after I zoomed in all the way.

Puzzle #5

2006-02-20T17:59:00.000-08:00

A father and his son were driving to a game when their cars stalled on the railroad tracks. In the distance, a train whistle blew. The father tried to the start the engine, but in his panic, he couldn't turn the key, and the car was hit by the train. An ambulance sped to the scene and picked them up. The father died on the way to the hospital. The son's condition was very serious. So they rush him to the emergency room. The surgeon, on seeing the boy, said "I can't operate on this boy -- he's my son".

How could it be? The surgeon was not lying or mistaken. No time travel, adopted child, etc.

(This puzzle comes from here)

My friend published a novel

2006-02-18T18:48:00.000-08:00

My friend Kate Perry published a novel called Project Daddy. Her web site even has a little preview. She's a funny person, and her writing reflects that too.

I was looking for a book for the long flight to Spain. So it just works out.

We're proud of you Kathia and hope this is just the beginning!

Finally found time to paint again

2006-02-18T18:20:00.000-08:00

After a few months, I made time again to paint. It was a blast. I didn't use any brushes for the finish paint.

Other Googlers who paint (all much much better than me):
- Lilly
- Min
- Radmila

An easy puzzle for the long weekend

2006-02-16T22:16:00.000-08:00

Puzzle #4
You have three baskets. One only contains apples. One only contains oranges. And the last one is an even mix of apples and oranges. The three boxes are labeled. But all labels are placed incorrectly. Your job is to fix the three labels. You can reach in any basket, take one fruit out, examine it, and put it back. There is no other way to examine or look at the baskets. You want to minimize the number of fruits that you take out to examine. What do you do?

The answer posted for Puzzle #3 is correct. But that's based on algebra and that's not fun. I like this proof more as it's philosophical. Two real numbers are different if and only if there exists another real number between them. There is nothing between .99999... and 1. QED.

Fun math puzzle

2006-02-15T23:02:00.000-08:00

Puzzle #3:
Is .999999... = 1? If so prove it. This has a few proofs, and some are simple enough to show someone in junior high.

Most software companies are bad at innovating

2006-02-15T22:27:00.000-08:00

A couple of my past employers were organized and managed like a typical software company. They were either marketing or sales oriented. The overall vision of the company, product road maps, etc were set by people who had little to do with building the product. Some folks from engineering were often involved, but it was a very top-down approach: CEO/board identified a new market, buz dev considered buy-vs-build, product marketing wrote PRDs by doing a competitive landscape analysis (basically a spreadsheet with a list of features), PMs or engineering managers/architects wrote functional specs, and finally someone started coding. There is no room for innovation here. That's why markets are so crowded with very similar offerings.

The actual engineer building the product had little control in the overall direction of the company, but had flexibility to decide which technologies to use. Often the technology decision was also influenced by marketing as industry buzz words like ASP, J2EE, AOP, SOA, etc can help sell a product for reasons not yet clear to me. At times, management would throw bodies at the problem to speed up a schedule despite engineers calling it a futile attempt.

For execs, it's scary to give up control. After all, their careers often depend on the success of the venture. It's scary to trust a bunch of engineers to build something amazing. However, it's this actual fear that causes many companies to fail. Wisdom of the Crowds shows many examples where a group can make a better decision than even the smartest person in the group (and that assumes that the execs are the smartest folks in the group). So why do CEOs or VPs often try to force their opinions? Why not foster a more democratic approach where good ideas can come from anyone in the organization and somehow these ideas can get aggregated. Why not give everyone a chance to contribute? Why not empower the people building the product with the necessary freedom to do something amazing? A company's culture facilitates the mechanisms for innovating. And in the world of software, innovation is everything. There are hardly any barriers to entry and little capital is needed.

I'm so happy that my current employer is different.

Answer to the puzzle and the next one

2006-02-14T18:51:00.000-08:00

Ario explained it correctly.

Puzzle #2:
Divide a circle into 12 congruent pieces, with equal size and same shape, such that all pieces never meet. It's ok for pieces to be next to each other. But all of them cannot meet at the same point. So you cannot cut the circle in 12 pizza slices as they all meet at the center. This is more visual. Have fun. I first tried doing this with paper. But I was able to get it very quickly after deciding to close my eyes.

BTW, we have posted a very small collection of tech talks given here at Google on, you guessed it, Google Video.

Favorite puzzles

2006-02-12T20:01:00.000-08:00

I'm going to start posting some of my favorite puzzles.

Puzzle 1:
Let's say you have a cup of cream and a cup of coffee (same volume). You take a spoon full of cream and mix it in with the coffee. Now, you take a spoon full of the mixed coffee/cream and and mix it with the cream. Is there more coffee in the cream cup or is there more cream in the coffee cup?

Amazing co-workers

2006-02-07T01:26:00.000-08:00

I met TV Raman at Cornell. His PhD thesis was to make LaTeX talk -- which won the ACM award for the best thesis! He's actually visually impaired. But he is able to solve the Rubik's Cube in about 30 seconds.

This past weekend, I saw him again in the ski trip! It's such an honor and so humbling to work with such gifted individuals.

Another work project launched

2006-02-07T00:13:00.000-08:00

It's live now: Integration of Google Talk and GMail. You can now chat directly from GMail. To learn more, go here or read this article.

I really enjoy working on products that help people communicate. In fact, the reasoning behind this deserves its own long post.

Read news or blogs.

More later.

Thoughts on early retirement

2006-02-05T13:05:00.000-08:00

David's post about early retirement validates my own experience. Whenever I batch-forward an interesting or a funny email to a large group, it's always the young retired friends who respond in less than a minute with "good one"! Are they just sitting in front of their computer surfing the web and waiting for email? It's fun to be active, to build things, to be part of a team, to tackle challenges, to learn, to help others, and to improve the world. And in our society, you can't do this by sitting at home.

In fact, a good way to live life is to imagine you have enough money to retire but only have a few years left to live.

Make sure you read Greenspun's entertaining notes.

Trip to south of Spain and my ski trip in Tahoe

2006-02-05T11:51:00.000-08:00

Last week, I called an old friend after a long time. During the conversation, I found out that they were also going to Spain in March. And she also mentioned a cool Fire Festival (Las Fallas) in Valencia during our trip. It sounds a little fun and crazy.

I was in Tahoe this weekend for our ski trip. It was a lot of fun. I tried snowboarding for the first time, but the parties at night were really the highlight. A funny part of the trip was the shuttle ride from the Reno airport to Squaw. Our shuttle's door was not working, so the driver used duck tape to shut the door. But he was smart enough to not allow any of us to take a picture. Personally, I was happy that we were on our way. I never mind a little excitement; at least this wasn't as bad as putting a car in reverse while going 50mph.

Funny Answer on a Math Test

2006-01-25T19:18:00.000-08:00

Technically, it's a correct answer!

Amazing Lectures

2006-01-24T22:49:00.000-08:00

After listening to Lawrence Lessing, a law professor at Stanford, I really wish that I could take a class with him. Enjoy this great video as he discusses fair use in regard to Google Book Search. Amazing use of slides. And I like the geeky slide.

Speaking of great speakers, I also had a chance to watch a lecture from Noam Chomsky. It's amazing that he can be an expert in so many fields.

So much other news and so little time.

Open IM Federation

2006-01-18T01:05:00.000-08:00

I use my GMail account to email people who have their email hosted by someone else. I use my Verizon cell phone to call people who use Cingular. These technologies are based on standards that allow different providers to interoperate.

But the same is not true of IM. As a result users suffer and are forced to use multiple providers or not IM all their friends. Today, we took another step in fixing this by launching open federation. Now you can IM users on other networks. No official partnerships are needed with long meetings full of buzdev folks, lawyers, and paperwork. Just like email, set an SRV record in DNS pointing everyone to your XMPP server. Exchanging email between companies never required partnerships. Even most countries at war allow telephone calls to be made between them. Why should IM be different?

Using open standards has other advantages as demonstrated by the new Blackberry client for Google Talk.

In the meantime, for those of you who know me personally and know my google.com email address, feel free to add me as a Friend in Google Talk (just add my email address as a friend).

And if you don't know me but play backgammon and live in Seattle, I like to meet you!

Rain Rain Rain

2006-01-16T19:36:00.000-08:00

Unlike last year, the weather in Seattle has been very wet this year. This Sunday finally ended 27 days of continuous rain. Luckily, I missed some of the days given all my recent trips to sunny California.

Reza Behforooz

Solution to our health care problems

8 years!

Authors at google

Bikes, Cars, and the Human Psyche

Ithaca, NY

Climbing Mount Hamilton

Reputation and DUI

Lessig 4 Barack

Some videos from Brazil

Last thoughts about Brazil

Futbol Pilgrimage and Pictures

First impressions

Brazil and a Blog Post

Busy week at work

Searching Google in Farsi

Do you have a racial bias?

Right vs Left Brain

Further Reading

Cycling Videos

Square Cake Puzzle

Life at the Googleplex

Psychiatric Hospitals

Science Fridays and rapper at Google

Schools in Bay Area are Banning homework!

Working together

Great Book

Funny book review

A fun puzzle

Beautiful mountains

Pictures from cross country or snow shoeing

Stop, and think of a better way

Climbing Walls

My thoughts on the iPhone

Getting people to talk

Longer version of the cell video

Animations from inside a cell!

Fun puzzle

Coffee and a bug at Starbucks!

Random nerdy news

Video From Amazon

Six F words

Walking Tree in the Amazon Forest

Welcome to Random Travellers

Funny movie: Little Miss Sunshine

Parrots in the amazon

Video From Amazon

Video From Amazon Basin in Peru

Machu Pichu

Pictures from Peru

Trip to Peru and my mp3s

DNA and Assembly Language

Real estate ad in silicon valley!

New version of Google Talk

Google behind the screen

Design vs Evolution in Technology

Materazzi at his Best

Finally... Forza Azzurri penalty kicks to football heaven

Twice as big as Japanese?

Analyze This

World Cup in ASCII art

Picasa Web Albums and Spreadsheet

Joga Bonita!

An Inconvenient Truth

Attending the Turing Awards

Google Talk news

A flashlight into our culture

Best Job in America: Software Engineer

Retiring from Hanayama Puzzles

Fun with commas

Funny quotes or sad reality?

A funny and sad lesson from history

Low Hanging Fruits

Puzzle: 50 coins

Fire!

Tapas in Spain

Fun time in España

Cast Enigma Puzzle

Watching Real Madrid

Brazilian Samba in Seattle