tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87890922024-03-12T19:23:52.415-07:00Moving downstreamMichelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comBlogger467125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-84618883077094546682010-06-08T23:45:00.000-07:002010-06-08T23:50:02.855-07:00Time to move on...So I finally decided to leave Blogger and build something that provides me with a little bit more control over the types of content that I can provide and manage. This blog will not be updated any more. If you want to continue following me, please move to my new spot:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.movingdownstream.com/blog">www.movingdownstream.com/blog</a><br /><br />Yes, my own domain! Isn't that exciting? What isn't exciting is that I've had it for quite some time now and only now I'm putting it to some use.<br /><br />Enough about my last post. So long!<br /><br />BTW: I've imported all posts from this blog into my new blog, so you won't have to ever refer back to this blog.Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-24116178582785031662010-05-18T22:45:00.000-07:002010-05-23T19:45:41.962-07:00It's hard to blog when having too much funYes, I know, it's been another hiatus on my blogging activity. It's not that I don't have anything to say, it's just that the things that I want to talk about would require more time to blog than I have free to think about them. So I decided to just throw things out there and at least I'll get some things out. I apologize in advance for not providing much commentary on any of them. The order is not really important.<br /><br /><strong>1) Average per household food cost for the largest cities in the US</strong><br /><br /><a href="http://www.bundle.com/article/food-spending-in-the-biggest-US-cities-11040">Original article from Bundle</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.bundle.com/Content/11/11023/Infographic%20Food%20and%20Drink%20by%20City_hl_lg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 390px; height: 1220px;" src="http://www.bundle.com/Content/11/11023/Infographic%20Food%20and%20Drink%20by%20City_hl_lg.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />The diagram above is quite interesting, but, at the same time, not necessarily that helpful. Looking at New York numbers is probably the best way to see how misleading the numbers could be. It's all a matter of how big the city is and how diverse the population is. Cheap food can be very cheap and it becomes expensive very rapidly. For example, you can go to McDonald's and spend $4 per person on a reasonably sized meal. At the same time, I can go to Whole Foods and spend $15 on salad and a little bit of starch and protein. <br /><br />The same thing can be said about groceries. I remember when I was living in Stillwater, OK that I could go to Wal-Mart and spend $30 on my weekly groceries. Today I generally don't spend less than $70. And I'm probably even buying less food than I used to buy (I used to have more time to cook than I have today).<br /><br />My point is that when you have things that are this different, every time you have a mix of population of multiple different income levels, low income people (that is usually a majority) will pull the average cost down very rapidly. A better metric would be to look at this number as a fraction of the income level. Do New Yorkers spend more of their salary on food, or on buying HDTVs?<br /><br /><strong>2) Arts</strong><br /><br />Lots of things going on in the arts department here. A day before my birthday Amy and I went to see the world premiere of <a href="http://www.seattleopera.org/tickets/production.aspx?productionID=78">Amelia</a>. It was a very different opera. The story line was mostly non-linear and there were very few things that I could call a "big aria".<br /><br />The production was divided into two acts of roughly an hour each, each with three scenes. Between the scenes the curtains would go down but the orchestra kept on playing. No pause for clapping until the end of the acts. The music was quite modern, unusual for opera, but nothing that I can say I had never heard before. But, as I said, very different for an opera.<br /><br />Later this month we are going to watch <a href="http://www.5thavenue.org/show/Candide0910/">Candide</a>. This piece has a little bit more of a personal connection, as I've rehearsed most of it for a future performance that actually never happened before I left the choir. It's much lighter operetta, but with the normal arias, duets, choirs, etc. Let's see how well they do it. It's always a danger to listen to a piece that I know very well, as any small mistakes will drive me crazy.<br /><br />Finally, the choir I sing with (Seattle Jewish Chorale) is getting ready for our last concert of the season coming up on June 13th. Tickets are available on <a href="http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/107423">Brown Paper Tickets</a> and with me if anybody is interested. It's going to be a great concert. I'm very excited about it.<br /><br /><strong>3) Work</strong><br /><br />Lots of things happening at work. So many that writing them here will bore some people. I'll just say that I've been working late most days (not today, though, as I'm in one of those uninspired days - which gave me time to write this post!) but starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel of my most important project of this year. <br /><br />Oh, and today I was awarded my first patent! It was one I filed with two other co-workers over 4 years ago. I have other 5 or 6 out there being reviewed. The patent process is very interesting, to put it mildly. I believe that patents are important, but they can be easily misused and that makes me sad. The question that people with way more understanding on the subject that I do have been asking is whether the danger of misuse is worse than the benefits that it provides. I will not even try to answer the question.<br /><br />And I think that's all I'm going to write about today. There are my topics to cover, like my robot building project, the wedding, Facebook, Twitter, working in South Lake Union, my new gadgets, winemaking, books read, just to name a few, but I'll leave those to my readers' imagination until I decide to be uninspired to work again and write another long-ish post.Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-13739319922943148832010-04-19T23:33:00.000-07:002010-04-19T23:52:12.061-07:00One graph to conquer it allI received a link from a friend of mine to a very interesting challenge:<br /><br /><a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/54085/graph-theory-ii-contest-for-geekgold">Graph Theory II: CONTEST for Geekgold</a><br /><br />It's an interesting contest in which people decomposed a board game into a graph and then you need to identify the board game looking at the graph.<br /><br />This reminded me of an old discussion I had at work. But before I get there I have to remind people that my Ph.D. research was on graph-structured databases, so I have used a lot of graphs in my life. I don't even know how many different graph "frameworks" I have implemented, including a very restricted but highly efficient graph database. I like graphs, but I also learned their limitations.<br /><br />Back to my story: my old manager once had a vision of how to solve every problem. He thought that if we could build a giant graph that recorded everything and how everything related to everything you could solve all problems. And we had many meeting discussing this vision, which was never implemented, because nobody really believed in it beyond that manager.<br /><br />This vision had two different problems:<br /><br />The first one, which is the easiest to explain, is scale. It's very hard to build something that has an arbitrary level of connectivity and allows for queries that could be of any length. If you add to this the need to build something on a large fleet of small and "unreliable" hardware, so requiring redundancy and robustness to failure, you basically would have a very hard time to keep it to any reasonable level of performance. That I have personal experience with, as I did implement a graph structured database that, in order to achieve any meaningful performance characteristics it required (1) to pre-calculate all the "joins" and (2) make them read-only.<br /><br />The second one is harder without explicit examples, but it's related to the curse of dimensionality: if you add too much to your graph, soon you can't conclude anything from it, because little noise in many dimensions will overwhelm all your signal. Just saying that in the air is hard to convince anybody. New techniques to deal with large datasets with large number of dimensions are more and more successful at identifying "low-hanging fruit" at scale, i.e. whatever has a very large signal compared to the rest of the noise. If you have a lot of data, those algorithms have been able to scale so well, that it's possible to apply them in all the data and find a lot of different "high signal" patterns. It's not that the filters are getting better, it's just that we have been doing a better job at looking at a lot of data at once.<br /><br />In any way, going back to the board game graph puzzle, it's an interesting challenge. I don't know enough board games to be able to recognize almost any of them, but I had fun just trying to decipher the graphs and relate them to a possible game. Enjoy!Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-63043236813241753182010-04-04T11:06:00.000-07:002010-04-04T11:42:05.752-07:00The danger of Twitter sentiment analysisSo I was reading an article from TechCrunch entitled "<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/03/sentiment-is-split-on-the-ipad-people-either-love-it-or-hate-others-for-not-shutting-up-about-it/">Sentiment Is Split On The iPad: People Either Love It, Or Hate Others For Not Shutting Up About It</a>". The subject was funny so I decided to read it. But, when I started to look at their sources I realized they were pretty much just using <a href="http://www.tweetfeel.com">TweetFeel</a> which is a service that tries to do sentiment analysis on the tiny twitter messages flowing around with the given keyword.<br /><br />Sentiment analysis is a very hot topic lately and there are lots of interesting results from it. However, it doesn't work that well, because most of the methods are based on keywords around the concept you are looking for and language is not very good at being locally unambiguous. Twitter makes it different:<br /><br />- It has a positive thing that people can't write much, so they will put their sentiments there and not just make a reference to it in an far away phrase<br />- It's bad because there is only so much context that can be obtained from 140 characters.<br /><br />So I decided to use <a href="http://www.tweetfeel.com/#ipad">TweetFeel</a> to see what data they were using. They made some references in the article, but I wasn't sold. TweetFeel is quite interesting: it keeps streaming the references to the keyword you enter (in this case "ipad") and highlights it in green if it's considered good and red if it's bad. It also keeps count of good and bad references. <br /><br />After letting it run for a minute or so I was seeing about the same thing that the TechCrunch article mentioned:<br /><br />Negative: 37 (52%)<br />Positive: 34 (48%)<br /><br />But when I started looking at what was considered positive and negative, I started seeing some very interesting tweets (I don't recommend people clicking on the links):<br /><br />Free <font color="red">ipad</font> WTF http://j.mp/cQdSbk Risen #thefeelingyouget #TLS 5lko<br />Free <font color="red">ipad</font> WTF http://sn.im/v8uda #OMGThatsSoTrue Feliz Páscoa #TheFeelingYouGet #HappyBdayKoba j59y<br /><br />In other words, lots of spam sources that were trying to use common keywords to get people to click on their links hoping it had something to do with the their keyword spam. Moreover, because had the word "WTF" I'm guessing TweetFeel considered that negative. My 1-minute sample is not significant, but if I remove all those spam tweets, here is the new count:<br /><br />Negative: 26 (43%)<br />Positive: 34 (57%)<br /><br />(as I said, this is not statistically significant, so don't take these numbers too seriously)<br /><br />Anyway, now that I'm talking about the iPad, one might be wondering if I'm planning on buying one. The answer right now is "no". If I looks at how I access the information that I want to access and interact, I don't really think that there is a gap that is worth $500. Although there are some apps on it that I really wished I could access without having one, even if it's just to play around with it for some time (like the Marvel app for reading comics). I just hope that the trend is not for thing to migrate all to the iPad framework and not to also have a web or other computer-based way of accessing it.Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-70040486053021767522010-04-03T09:46:00.000-07:002010-04-03T10:02:38.872-07:00Amazon still invaded by medical doctors?A long time ago suddenly <a href="http://www.amazon.com">Amazon</a> started recommending me a lot of medical stuff, like anatomy books, drug dictionaries, etc. Looking at why I was recommended it (which is one of the best features for curious people like me), it was all because I had bought a Palm Pilot (yes, this was a long time ago). Apparently Palm Pilots were very popular among doctors because it had some very useful apps for them to keep track of patients, do quick calculations and get references to drugs.<br /><br />The interesting thing is that if you think of the statistics of it (and I ask people that claim statistics background to go through this during interviews all the time), it makes sense that you will see something like this if you have a biased population. Let's say that out of customers for product A, 20% are medical doctors and the rest is a random scattering of other types of people. If, just to make it simple, 50% of all medical doctors buy product B, suddenly you will see that 10% of everybody that bought product A also bought product B.<br /><br />The reason that medical doctors are such an interesting category is that I'm not aware of any other category of people that have such strong counts of specific products they purchase. Engineers don't all buy similar books. Graphic designers also don't. Maybe lawyers might, but I haven't seen any evidence that this is happening.<br /><br />Anyway, why was this brought to my attention? Well, it's because I added something to my Amazon wedding registry and I received the following recommendation:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8GUe9Tr3KR3OhEjC6ca1SQS1kq_FFVYHra1suQXhto5sk5juS8NV-s4SlkF1RvfWUnEPSa_L0EcAb9XLMZxoWvJt9gJIIub7p7wPwbbQvXFPJ_j7NDzVqMvcXpiavRJjbme5ZGQ/s1600/Picture+2.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 46px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8GUe9Tr3KR3OhEjC6ca1SQS1kq_FFVYHra1suQXhto5sk5juS8NV-s4SlkF1RvfWUnEPSa_L0EcAb9XLMZxoWvJt9gJIIub7p7wPwbbQvXFPJ_j7NDzVqMvcXpiavRJjbme5ZGQ/s200/Picture+2.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5455957053580805634" /></a><br /><br />A <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000F4SP1W">stethoscope</a>? Unfortunately for this type of recommendation I can't see why I was recommended it. It would have been interesting.Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-50408865850385551142010-03-16T20:07:00.001-07:002010-03-16T20:20:37.679-07:00Is being recognized always good?Yesterday I received an email from a former research colleague that exclaimed that a paper that I co-wrote with him in the past has surpassed 100 citations. The paper, <a href="http://epjb.edpsciences.org/index.php?option=article&access=standard&Itemid=129&url=/articles/epjb/abs/2004/18/b04111/b04111.html">Problems with fitting to the power-law distribution</a> was quite an interesting paper to write. The idea to write it was from the aforementioned colleague, but most of the experiments and statistical background was given by me (that's why I was given the first author position on the paper). <br /><br />I'm proud of having written it, but every time I read about it I remember one sad thing: this wasn't what my research was about. None of the papers I wrote for my research received any recognition. It's quite an interesting conflict that probably I'll have to live with for the rest of my life. Unless I decide to get back to research and continue my work on feature extraction on graph-structured databases until I find ways to draw better parallels to other people's research results and people can use my proposed ideas.<br /><br />Anyway, I should be happy for the achievement. 100 citations in 5.5 years is something that very few can claim. Actually <a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=9811958105854205060&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=xkmgS-mCE5LSMsbahe8L&sa=X&oi=science_links&resnum=1&ct=sl-citedby&ved=0CAgQzgIwAA">Google Scholar</a> claims that the paper has something between 174 and 175 citations. I don't trust the results of Google Scholar, but I have to live with it, as it's the only "free" system that provides some sort of comprehensive view of articles and citations.Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-68776089167817707412010-03-16T20:04:00.000-07:002010-03-16T20:07:01.738-07:00Sometimes people need to be careful with statementsThe written language is a powerful thing, but is also a dangerous weapon that can backfire if you don't know your audience very well and don't measure your words correctly. Here is a statement that I received from somebody through email:<br /><br />"[...] the development is either algorithmic or done in C# [...]"<br /><br />In other words, this person claimed that no algorithms can be done in C#? Quite a strong statement!Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-31094194827717109092010-02-25T23:56:00.000-08:002010-02-26T00:10:30.352-08:00The fall of FriendFeedA long time ago, I <a href="http://movingdownstream.blogspot.com/2007/10/friendfeed.html">mentioned</a> in this blog that I really liked the idea of <a href="http://friendfeed.com">FriendFeed</a> as a hub for people's activities online that was both open and semi-extensible. Unfortunately it was probably a little too complex for most people and it never really caught up with the masses and was eventually <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-friendfeed/">acquired by Facebook</a>.<br /><br />After the acquisition there was a mass exodus from people adding content directly to FriendFeed, but I could still follow must of the people that I liked to follow there, because of the "hub" effect. I couldn't follow the discussions anymore, but there was still something out there to see.<br /><br />Well, tonight a new nail was added to the FriendFeed coffin: it was down and has been down for at least 45 minutes (I tried to access it 45 minutes ago and it was down and, as far as I can tell, it's still down). I'm getting a great message:<br /><br />500 Internal Server Error<br />nginx/0.6.34<br /><br />Not good at all...<br /><br />Actually I'm really tired of all this "news push" technologies. I have even stopped reading regularly my RSS readers. I don't access Twitter or Facebook. I at least read my emails, but haven't been very good at replying to them. <br /><br />So you might ask what I've been doing with all this extra free time on my hands? My blog hasn't been the one receiving all of it, so what is it? To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure. I've been working until reasonably late, dealing with wedding stuff, sometimes playing some video game at night (as "my" PS3 is going to stop being mine on Tuesday).<br /><br />Other things I've been doing is struggling with <a href="http://wiki.openembedded.net/index.php/Main_Page">OpenEmbedded</a>... I don't even want to start on this one. It has been a very painful process to just get to build a distribution with the developer libraries of OpenCV for my BeagleBoard. It's one of the hard things of working with a reasonably fast moving open source project: the main documentation that are the user discussions all seem to refer to previous versions, because their suggestions don't seem to work for me. And I'm really learning to despise Windows 7. If they call this the best Windows yet, those Microsoft people are keeping their bar quite low to allow for even better OSs in the future.Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-51906955594519003462010-02-23T22:29:00.000-08:002010-02-23T22:49:11.025-08:00Why do companies try to fool us?I made a purchase online on an online company that seems to partner with <a href="http://www.bizrate.com/">bizrate</a> for customer surveys. If you fill the survey, you automatically enter to win $25 on a daily drawing. Because I like to give feedback, I decided to enter all the data. At the end of the survey you are asked to provide your name and email address for the $25 drawing with the following options:<br /><br /><b>Yes. Enter me to win</b> in the daily cash giveaway and send me bizrate's money saving newsletters!<br /><b>No Thanks.</b> - but, still enter me in the daily cash giveaway.<br /><br />The boldface is actually the same they provide on their page. If you only read that you conclude that if you check the first one you will enter to win the prize, while if you check the second one you are forfeiting the option of entering to win $25. But when you read the whole phrase you see that actually the first one you are entering the drawing and signing up for their spam, while the second one you are still entering the drawing and not signing up for their email.<br /><br />It's so dirty that makes me not want to buy at that company again. I know it's not their fault for this, but it just ruined my complete shopping experience.<br /><br />But the bad quality of bizrate doesn't end there! After you enter it all it gives you your satisfaction rate compared to the average:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0_7waBv6njEhid8SnC7syfWWumTcZZl2bZWkVAkkanUYgLz8gTmOj1zUjeoX7wjofj9a_XgMiun6ZCJBI1SsTSAH5UHdFQkt7_6ei3TvmqE4tEH_4YelFLodNxapu5zyeiynRUA/s1600-h/results.PNG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 70px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0_7waBv6njEhid8SnC7syfWWumTcZZl2bZWkVAkkanUYgLz8gTmOj1zUjeoX7wjofj9a_XgMiun6ZCJBI1SsTSAH5UHdFQkt7_6ei3TvmqE4tEH_4YelFLodNxapu5zyeiynRUA/s200/results.PNG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441696845760693346" /></a><br /><br />Do you see the problem there? Quite puzzling.<br /><br />(by the way, "puzzling" seems to be my newest favorite word right now)<br /><br />But just to end on a positive note, after one month wait I finally received my first printed board shipped from Bangkok through Hong Kong, from an Australian company. It looks exactly how I designed it and the components seem to fit as expected. Now I just need to have courage and do my first surface soldering of a component that requires a magnifying glass to see if it's in the right position (think of a 3mm x 3mm component). So it's going to be lots of fun! I ordered 4 boards so that I could make mistakes and I received 9! I can make lots of mistakes now!Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-17855871834906094182010-01-04T19:32:00.000-08:002010-01-04T19:55:34.384-08:00Tracking timeI was reading <a href="http://www.steverubel.com/three-ideas-for-2010-part-iii-lifelogging-and">this interesting article about people tracking what they do with their lives</a> and was fascinated by this video:<br /><br /><a href="http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid46203255001?bclid=46205328001&bctid=53500994001">Baby Sleep Tracking</a>.<br /><br />Somebody spent a whole year tracking the sleep patterns of their newborn baby and generated a visualization of it. Quite interesting to see the pain that many of my friends are going through right now. It would be interesting to see how it is for different philosophies of what to do when babies wake up in the middle of the night. There are lots of them out there!<br /><br />This reminded me of the time that I spent about two weeks tracking by the minute how I spent my time at work. It's really enlightening! I suddenly realized how much time I spent writing emails and talking to people that dropped by my office. The part that I wasn't able to actually track was the context switching cost. <br /><br />The problem with this is that some context switching is good: it allows you to relax your brain and when you come back you will see things that you were ignoring before. At the same time, it might produce bad results. I've seen variable naming standards changing because of breaks in coding. I've seen even full system architectures shifting because of the inability to remember all the context when coming back to the code. So some of this loss might be long term, when you have to go and refactor the code to handle this "drift".<br /><br />In any way, it was a good exercise. I suggest everybody to do things like that from time to time to really understand their days and how to maximize the parts of your day that you actually like.Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-55798527748035610222009-12-31T06:53:00.000-08:002010-01-02T01:37:26.835-08:00And here comes 2010! And I feel... old...We've reached the end of another cycle around the sun. But this is semi-special again: we are entering the last year of another decade and it has a special psychological significance. We are not in the 2000s any more, were are in the 2010s! Thinking back in the past, I had a completely different expectation of what 2010 was going to be about: not really flying cars or robots helping us on everything we do; but where technology was more part of our surroundings.<br /><br />Yes, we carry our pocket computers (our phones), but there is still a lot of "old style" things around. Newspapers, magazines and books can be found in every corner, in most people's hands in the bus. The bus also is not as connected as I was envisioning. I can theoretically check status of the buses in Seattle on their <a href="http://metro.kingcounty.gov/oltools/tracker.html">tracking website</a>, but not all buses are available and it just doesn't feel like it's something that people believe needs to be there (for example, my bus that I take to work always says "no information available").<br /><br />Cars also are only timidly more technological. Only the higher-end models have GPS (although I see a good amount of people with "tiny" GPS units glued to their windshield), collision detection, blind spot warning, back-up camera... Driving in 2010 is not really any different from driving in 2000.<br /><br />Also, I've been observing negative effects of technology. People going around with their lives outside listening to their iPods not paying attention to what is going on, and whether somebody actually needs their attention. I feel bad for bus drivers when they have to make an announcement. Very few people in the bus are actually listening.<br /><br />Oh, well, that's what progress is about. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. The hope is that when it's bad we are learning and it will eventually turn into something better. As they say, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Progress is always better on the other side of our dreams.<br /><br />Happy 2010!Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-77846353152599436182009-12-27T11:05:00.001-08:002009-12-27T11:11:45.737-08:00Denied at Google - updateJust to make it even more interesting, I was starting to get "denied" messages on Google Reader (why did I decide to go back to that application anyway?), so I decided to log out and log back in. When I clicked on logout, I get the warning from Firefox saying that the connection is untrusted. Looking at the technical details, things get even more puzzling:<br /><br />www.google.com uses an invalid security certificate.<br />The certificate is only valid for *.s3.amazonaws.com<br />(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)<br /><br />Now my theory is that I have a misbehaving plugin on my Firefox. The odd thing is that I don't have many plugins installed, so I'm not sure which could be misbehaving. And if I turn one off, it required restarting Firefox, which might make the problems go away anyway.<br /><br />Oh, well, I guess I'll just have to live with not knowing what happened.Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-37026066349662224472009-12-27T10:42:00.000-08:002009-12-27T10:47:24.391-08:00Denied at GoogleHow great is it? I'm doing a <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=toshiba+32af44&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a">Google search</a> and receiving this awesome response:<br /><br /><error><br /><code>AccessDenied</code><br /><message>Access Denied</message><br /><requestid>64283040B63F0895</requestid><br /><hostid><br />EtXPyF4Ywx5Z4NkV+u0yEa+Nr37ZGjsbmC3no9eMyYNEXQBYlb/0nKgYiFdvUAH+<br /></hostid><br /></error><br /><br />Maybe Bing infiltrated my Mac laptop?Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-3967042714501033992009-12-26T11:36:00.000-08:002009-12-26T11:50:22.345-08:00Sometimes visualization helpsSo everybody knows that the US health system is broken, right? Well, that makes finding charts to show that it's broken so easy. Look at this one from <a href="http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/12/the-cost-of-care.html">National Geographic</a>:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://blogs.ngm.com/.a/6a00e0098226918833012876674340970c-800wi"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 786px; height: 1138px;" src="http://blogs.ngm.com/.a/6a00e0098226918833012876674340970c-800wi" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />Sadly, like most "easy to understand" graphs, it only gives you a way of seeing that there is a problem, but it provides no help in identifying what the problem really is. Where is all this money going if not to improve the general health of the population? Or maybe it's just because the cost of living is higher in the US, so doctors, nurses, and other health care staff get higher salaries and this increases the average cost? But maybe the high cost of living is caused by high medicals costs - and there you have your vicious cycle!<br /><br />Other factors that probably should be taken into consideration here: how much is this actually due to external factors that make the population "sicker"? Bad nutrition, too much use of cars and other mostly-passive modes of transportation, too much sitting in front of the TV... Maybe the problem is not the left hand side of the graphic, but the right side of it.<br /><br />Anyway, at least there is a lot of activity right now on trying to understand what is going on and how to improve it. It doesn't mean that it will make it better, but at least without this activity it would never be better.Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-87984441571577238462009-12-22T08:52:00.000-08:002009-12-22T09:13:08.344-08:00Multiple failuresEngineered products generally are built with some level of redundancy or safety multipliers. But failures and accidents still happen, due to the rare chance of multiple rare events happening together (which is usually more likely to occur than people think, and that is what makes the design challenging). For example, an airplane is built to handle being hit by a bird during landing, but if that at the same time causes the pilot to despair and abort the landing accelerating and trying to change course too quickly, then it could cause an accident. In the software world it's the same thing. I've built software that can handle network outages and computer crashes, but when a computer crashes during a network outage that happened during a deployment, then you never know what is going to happen.<br /><br />Well, but today's story was much less tragic. My alarm is set for 6:15 AM. At 7 AM Amy wakes up and wakes me up saying that it's already 7 AM and I'm still in bed! I try to remember if I had woken up by the alarm, turned it off and went back to bed, but I haven't. Before I explain what happened, I need to explain the setup that I have at home:<br /><br />- There are two alarm clocks: one that has the alarm, but has no good clock display; and another that has good time display, but terrible alarm<br />- If I don't turn the alarm off, it goes for one hour and then turns off by itself.<br />- My alarm clock has three alarm settings: beep, radio (generally set to <a href="http://www.king.org/">King FM</a>) and sound (which can play one of 4 soothing sounds, like beach, rain, etc.)<br />- The alarm clock has a "sync to atomic clock" feature. It tried to auto-sync the time every so often (which also makes it a good alarm clock, as when there is a power outage at home at night, it automatically can find the time when the power is back)<br /><br />Now to the story:<br /><br />During the weekend I changed the alarm settings to make a beeping sound instead of the normal music (long story why that). When I reset the alarm on Sunday night I had forgotten of it and it beeped on Monday. So in the morning, with the light off, I thought I had changed it back to radio, but I hadn't:<br /><br />- FAILURE 1 (human): it was set to "sound", which doesn't really wake anybody up. But there was one piece of the puzzle left: the alarm is supposed to run for an hour and it wasn't running when we woke up!<br /><br />- FAILURE 2 (engineering): for some unknown reason, my alarm clock decided to readjust itself to about 35 minutes ahead. So the actual sound started playing at 5:40 and at 7 it was already off.<br /><br />Oh, well, I was still able to get to work in time for my first and only meeting of the day (which is at 10 AM, and I arrived at work at 8:45). Alright, now that I've used my work time to write this story (while I was waiting for some data gathering process to run), it's time for me to get back to it.Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-20863405599984100632009-12-16T07:24:00.000-08:002009-12-16T07:34:36.151-08:00Misleading "price promotions"One day in my far past I decided that I needed web hosting. After looking around for options, for some reason I'm not too sure of why anymore, I went with Textdrive. I was fairly happy and used it for one project that ended up dying after some time. Then Textdrive was acquired by <a href="http://www.joyent.com">Joyent</a>. And with it I received a lot of other free products, like file storage, contact and calendar manager, and others.<br /><br />Joyent continued its merry way acquiring other companies and merging products. One of the few "added" products that I used was Strongspace, a simple file storage solution. It was free and it felt like I was using at least some of the $15 I was spending with hosting every month.<br /><br />Then they decided to migrate to "Strongspace 2.0", a much better system. And with it they were giving me a promotion:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL-C6QB0p4S_XVq07CbOS1Wbrxdb3XT00eQujSYsQUl967uNCawkvHLCp4-1nrvFogQelfB4CfZ65yF4jEvzfvYjc8so49lypymw7GiwCOlDDqmmVZVUk40r61qPv_d9aUes6Zxg/s1600-h/Picture+1.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 142px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL-C6QB0p4S_XVq07CbOS1Wbrxdb3XT00eQujSYsQUl967uNCawkvHLCp4-1nrvFogQelfB4CfZ65yF4jEvzfvYjc8so49lypymw7GiwCOlDDqmmVZVUk40r61qPv_d9aUes6Zxg/s200/Picture+1.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5415857540085234770" /></a><br /><br />More for less! Right? Not really. I used to pay $15 for the whole hosting, now they are offering me $4/month for just the file storage. The sad thing is that, as I said, it's the only thing I use. So I have to think about it...<br /><br />Alright. Late for work. Time to go!Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-31674157230856113102009-12-11T09:23:00.001-08:002009-12-11T09:32:39.582-08:00Quick update on my computerNot that you reader really care about it, but I just want to confirm that I woke up this morning and my computer was still on! Now it's time for me to get back to work - and I mean this in multiple different ways:<br /><br />1) At my paying work, I just have a lot of things to do, and things are certainly not moving as quickly as I was hoping, because I think I still don't fully know the answer to what I'm trying to write. So, subconsciously, I don't want to write whatever is in my head right now, because I know that most probably I'll have to rewrite a good part of it.<br />2) At my robot work, everything stalled too. <br />a) I finally had <a href="http://wiki.openembedded.net/index.php/Main_Page">Openembedded</a> building, but not yet doing anything useful for me. My next goal was to start writing my first vision software that would only test if there is something orange in sight. I'm still scared about build times.<br />b) I designed the I2C level translator PCB, but I still haven't had the courage to spend my first $50-70 to get it manufactured. I know that there will be something wrong with it, and I'm just not ready to throw this money and time away on "my education".<br /><br />At least the wedding stuff is somehow moving.Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-76440288373007776712009-12-11T00:30:00.000-08:002009-12-11T00:51:08.073-08:00My computer puzzle: solved! (I hope)I think that today I finally figured out what was going on with my desktop. So here is the story:<br /><br />I have a desktop that was running Windows XP. I bought it to play games (as you can't really play many games on a Mac) and to run the occasional software that either doesn't have a Mac version (e.g. <a href="http://www.cadsoft.de/">CadSoft's Eagle</a>, or has a much worse Mac version (e.g. <a href="http://quicken.intuit.com/">Intuit's Quicken</a>).<br /><br />A lot of the games that I was playing I bought on Steam, which meant that they took a lot of disk space. Moreover, I was starting to be annoyed with the gradual lack of support for drivers and other things for Windows XP. So I decided to take the "hit" and to a double upgrade: (1) Buy Windows 7 and (2) Buy another 2 TB of HD.<br /><br />Actually it was cheaper to buy two 1 TB HD, so that's what I did. So I now have 3 HDDs on my desktop and Windows 7. And everything seemed to be running ok. Until one day that I woke up in the morning and my computer was off without me turning it off. As I turned it back on, it stopped "mounting" one of the new HDDs! It could recognize it, but it just wasn't there to be used anymore.<br /><br />I was puzzled, but had to do other things. When I came back to my computer: off again. And this time when I turned it back on it didn't turn itself completely. I had to turn off again and on again and everything seemed to be working for a few hours and it would shut down again (never when I was using it, though).<br /><br />My first thought that it was some sort of sleep mode, but one piece of evidence that suggested otherwise was that Windows complained that I turned off the computer unexpectedly when it came back. So I dropped that theory. <br /><br />My next theory was that the power source was too weak for 2 new HDDs. I couldn't figure out how to prove it, so I bought a new bigger power source that arrived today (well, actually yesterday). After installed, I turned the computer back on and everything seemed normal, except that the HDD was still not being added. Tinkering around a little I found that it was simply not being assigned a name and fixed that.<br /><br />I went out for dinner and when I arrived back the computer was still on! Very exciting! Then I went to watch the Top Chef final episode and when I arrived back to my computer... Surprise! It was off! I cursed it and turned it back on. New surprise: it came back on in the same place it was before! My computer had gone to sleep! Then everything clicked! This is what I think happened:<br /><br />* By default Windows 7 puts your computer to sleep after 30 minutes in idle.<br />* However, my old power source did not support sleep mode, so when it would issue the sleep message, it wouldn't sleep exactly, it would just turn off.<br />* The new power source does support it, so it went to sleep as expected.<br /><br />I turned off the "sleep in 30 minutes" and not I'm going to sleep myself and see in the morning if my theory is correct.<br /><br />The conclusion is that maybe I shouldn't have bought a new power supply... It's also debatable whether I should have bought Windows 7. I have to agree that it was great that it automatically recognized my network printer, while for Windows XP it was extremely painful to get it to only half-work (I couldn't get the scanner to work at all and the printer printed every other request). But my video card that has only the latest upgrade for Windows 7, is still showing the same rendering bugs that I was seeing before.<br /><br />I'll write more about Windows 7 some other day. It's certainly not as "refined" as some people claimed, but it's cleaner and prettier than XP. Also, it doesn't feel any slower than XP. And that's all I can say for now.Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-90728702337395191182009-12-04T21:12:00.000-08:002009-12-07T23:07:59.123-08:00New lows - in temperature, that isSo it's pretty cold here in Seattle right now. The weather forecast is saying that tonight it might hit all the way down somewhere between 16-19F (between -9 and -7 degrees Celsius). In some parts of the country, this is nothing. But considering that the lowest recorded temperature for Seattle today was something like 18F, you can see it's pretty record-breaking.<br /><br />I'm trying to keep myself warm. I've been staying home for longer lately, trying to think about the many things I have to think about. For example, I just bought a new set of HDs for my desktop and... Now my desktop decides to randomly shut down! How great is that? So I just ordered a new power supply and hope that this is going to solve the problem. That's the only theory I have so far. I just have to wait for it to arrive (probably sometime late this week or early next week) to confirm the theory.<br /><br />I've also been trying to read things. I actually finished a couple of books: <br /><br />Coders at Work, by Peter Seibel: quite interesting book. A set of interviews with some famous programmers. Unfortunately I didn't find it organized enough to be able to draw common themes throughout them. Perhaps that they all like to code and solve problems, they seem to have times in their lives that they just focus on getting something done, and times they are just coasting and making sense of what is out there. It was a fun read.<br /><br />A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin: it's a classic fantasy book (published in 1996). Very deep and convoluted story, but felt a little slow at times. Maybe not slow, but perhaps a little too full of concurrent things that all tie to each other, so require cautious retelling in order to make sense. Great book, nevertheless. Now I have to read the next one: A Clash of Kings.<br /><br />Inferno, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: another classic. This was great that was a pretty short book (I read it in about 7 bus rides). It might have been a little better if I remembered Dante's Inferno, but besides that, it was very imaginative and slightly philosophical. Highly recommended, if you haven't read it yet. It was published in 1976.<br /><br />Now I finally decided not to wait for the Kindle edition of The Gathering Storm, by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. My back hates me for that. It's a big book (760 pages long) and only the first part of 3 of the conclusion of the series (i.e., it book 12 of 14 planned), so... we'll see.<br /><br />Done with the report about things that are not very useful for other people except for me... Time to get back to thinking about life, FX, the universe and ABN.Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-399597373008953802009-12-03T06:55:00.000-08:002009-12-03T23:41:05.335-08:00Playing chess - Chess With Friends vs. Chess.comA co-worker a few weeks ago suggested that now that I'm "sheep" and I have an iPhone, I should get "Chess With Friends" and play chess against him. It's a free application that allows you to play against a specific person or a random person.<br /><br />Before accepting his "challenge", I decided to download it and try a couple of games to see how my chess is doing. On my first game, I was playing with black and quickly I realized how rusty I was. But, after starting pretty badly, my opponent decided to play badly too and I ended up winning the game.<br /><br />At this point, I decided to look around and make sure it was a good application. That's when I remembered that I had played with <a href="http://www.chess.com">Chess.com</a> before and was slightly impressed with how much they had put into it. And they have an iPhone app. So I installed that app (also free) and started my first game on chess.com (playing with whites) and a second game on Chess with Friends (playing blacks).<br /><br />The chess.com game was going quite slowly, so I decided to start a second game on chess.com (playing blacks), so playing 3 games at the same time.<br /><br />One interesting thing about chess.com games is that they give you 3 days to move, or else you automatically lose. Chess With Friends doesn't have that restriction.<br /><br />Why is this last information important? Well, after 5 days, the second person I was playing against on chess.com simply stopped playing, so I won the game by him giving up. The game was way too early to say who was winning. So I was back to 2 concurrent games. And I wasn't doing so great in any of them.<br /><br />But then again the guy on Chess With Friends started making more mistakes than I was making and I won the game. On the other hand, the one on chess.com mostly dominated the game from the middle of the game and I ended up giving the game up after 27 moves.<br /><br />Now comes the summary:<br /><br />2 games on Chess With Friends, both playing as blacks and I won both games.<br />2 games on chess.com, one I won because my opponent stopped playing and the other I lost (playing with whites)<br /><br />My decision then became: do I want to continue on a platform that is a little prettier (the chess.com iPhone app is not that great), with worse players, so easier to win; or do I want to do the chess.com, lose a lot of games (or have players simply disappear from time to time), but potentially learn more?<br /><br />It's a tough decision... But I guess I made up my mind: and it's not for any of the reasons above. It's because of a very nice feature on chess.com: after you finish a game you can request computer analysis of your game. And then you receive a nice play-by-play analysis of where I made mistakes and what I should have done. The report doesn't look very flattering:<br /><br />Inaccuracies: 6 = 24.0% of moves<br />Mistakes: 2 = 8.0% of moves<br />Blunders: 1 = 4.0% of moves<br /><br />Yes, I have a lot to learn! Only 64% of my moves were good. But, hey, it's been many years that I haven't played chess. And I did win those Chess With Friends games, so I'm not a complete loser!Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-71254727312072006742009-11-24T23:47:00.000-08:002009-11-25T00:46:50.553-08:00Still in existencial crisis, I guessSo I'm still here and alive. I'm actually doing reasonably well, except for getting quite a nice cold last week and making me REALLY late on a project.<br /><br />Well, I haven't been posting much, because I don't really know what to post about. I'm in a time in my life where I'm reading a lot, looking around a lot, but not doing much. I just don't really know what I want to do. I've been trying a few projects, but I always seem to find a reason why the project won't work and I stop or postpone it.<br /><br />For example, tonight I was trying to fix a problem of buying the wrong component for the robot. I actually didn't buy the wrong component, just the wrong packaging for the component, SO8: a very tiny package that is made for surface mounting, so I can't really interact with it myself. Looking at other options, I found out that for what I want, there are no non surface mounting ICs on sale anymore.<br /><br />But on the plus side, I could solve the problem by just using an n-channel enhancement MOSFET instead. So I went around and chose one that should work to buy. Total cost: components = US$2.50; shipping = US$7.00. Yuck! So I decided to look around for other components I want to buy and remembered that I still wanted a compass and a gyroscope. I went to look through the options and lo and behold: all of them are surface mount only (well, all the reasonable ones).<br /><br />And then I'm back to where I started: I have to build a board and send it for somebody to manufacture it for me. After a few weeks I might get what I was hoping for and then try to heat the board so that the components would glue to it and test it. Oh, joy!<br /><br />I'm not even talking about work here! It's kind of sad to see really smart people being afraid of accepting that they are smart and that they can stand behind their early decisions. What happens is that they have to find something that will make them feel better about it. The cost is a lot of disruption on the things they never really tried to understand.Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-36523768886330950922009-10-30T22:11:00.000-07:002009-10-30T22:16:45.622-07:00Pricing tricks?I was doing my daily time-wasting browsing around the internet when I came across <a href="http://www.madwine.com">MadWine</a> - as you can guess, an online wine store. There are hundreds of them out there, so the finding itself wasn't that impressive. What actually impressed me is that I decided to click on their <a href="http://www.madwine.com/search.php?Items=Monthly%20Specials">Montly Specials</a> and then decided to get everything from $20-$40 and what do I see? US$ 19.99-priced wines! Finally a company that does not use those x.99 price tricks to make it feel like you are buying something cheaper than it actually is. Kudos for <a href="http://www.madwine.com">MadWine</a>!Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-20348270035545741242009-10-18T23:33:00.000-07:002009-10-19T00:09:14.691-07:005 years at Amazon, 5 years in SeattleTime flies... And here we are, 5 years later looking back and trying to decide if it was all worth it. 5 years in a tech company doing software development is a long time. Especially if I add the fact that pretty much I never switched teams (although the team's main focus and even all system it maintains were eventually switched around from under us a couple of times), I become a very unlikely person. It basically puts me in the class of those "old grumpy men" that just stay around to criticize people and tell them stories of things that happened so long ago that it's not really relevant any more.<br /><br />Every time that I go through those anniversaries, it's good to consider whether it's been worth it. And I can't really say it hasn't. I have built a lot of things and a few cool things. I still don't think I have reached my limit, but from time to time I start wondering if I'm close to it. Especially in the last couple of months that I have been building something that is very likely much more complicated than I had initially thought. The result of it is that it was released already a couple of times and when it starts getting used some major bugs start cropping up that force me to step back and review some of the assumptions that I had made before. After the third time that this happened I was really worried about my ability to actually ever get it right. More than this, my ability to get it right to a level that other people could get it right too (which has been proving to be even more complicated - when other people touch the code it seems to break it more than fix it - thank you extensive test suites that keep things mostly working). But it's so cool... At least I think it's cool!<br /><br />Anyway, back to abstract thought: Amazon is a fun place to work. The distributed and isolated nature of the systems and organizations sometimes can look very unproductive (lots of people doing similar things all the time), but it fosters a very interesting split:<br /><br />1) Teams that have strong people with good vision of what they want to do can get their things done<br />2) Teams that fall behind and become reactive to things that break can just find themselves digging bigger holes and never getting out of it. Some of them don't even realize it.<br /><br />Fortunately I've always been working in teams that had more of #1 than #2. I have worked with #2 teams and having the knowledge that they exist out there makes me happy to keep myself put and keep moving forward towards what this "vision" is. I could talk about the vision here in this blog, but it's nothing very exciting to external users of the Amazon website, so I'll keep it for myself.<br /><br />Enough about work, let's talk about Seattle... Seattle is a very interesting city. It's big enough to allow for some culture and activity buzz, but not that big that you are caught on the stress of too many things to do, and higher living costs. Having moved here from Oklahoma, I can't say there is anything that I really miss (maybe being able to find parking anywhere I go). And comparing to Sao Paulo, it's actually even more complicated to compare. What I miss about Sao Paulo is not the city, but the people. And I was never very social - but you don't have to be very social to have lots of friends and lots of options of things to do. In Seattle I have some good friends, but people are much more "reserved". Maybe it's just that I'm surrounded by not-so-social people.<br /><br />Anyway, all in all, it has been a great experience. I like where I am and I am comfortable with where I'm heading right now. Next year is wedding year, so that will go by probably without many other things going on. Then, if I'm given the opportunity, I'll re-evaluate and see where I should be heading.Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-5306086598788279142009-10-07T00:05:00.001-07:002009-10-07T00:27:08.444-07:00Autism in more than 1% of the children population in the US?The number that <a href="http://psychcentral.com/news/2009/10/05/autism-now-in-1-in-91-children/8778.html">this article from PsychCentral reports</a> is quite scary. And the article probably could have been written in a more positive way: it talks nothing about what the root causes are and how to prevent it. It's only talking about the fact that it needs to be addressed by health care to take care of those kids and analyzed as for the impact that this will have in the economy when those children arrive at the workforce.<br /><br />So I went out looking for articles talking about the possible sources for autism spectrum disorder. I'm not a medical doctor, so I'm certainly not the best person to rate these articles, but I found one that was quite complete-looking:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.ei-resource.org/illness-information/environmental-illnesses/autism-spectrum-disorders/">Autism Spectrum Disorders from The Environmental Illness Resource</a><br /><br />There are lots of references out there, and many from not-so-impartial sources, like nutrition websites (that sell food supplements) that claim that it's because people don't do a complete detox before having kids; or genetics labs that keep pounding on the evidence of a genetic link to chance of developing autism (in many ways, everything is genetic, but genetics can't explain a 10-fold increase in number of autistic kids in a period of less than 10 years!); or some immunology magazines that keep repeating that there is no proof that there is a connection between autism and vaccination (there was a huge controversy about that some years ago because of a research that suggested that there was a connection).<br /><br />In other words, people still don't know. It's probably somehow related to the immune system, but if it's a cause or just a correlation is hard to tell. Again, I'm still not sure how something like this could cause such a huge spike in the number of cases. But who am I to know those things?Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8789092.post-72562816972213373732009-10-05T19:32:00.000-07:002009-10-05T19:35:41.209-07:00There are bad spam message subjects...Lately for some reason my almost spam-free Yahoo email was found by some "Canadian Pharmacy" mass mailer. They are all quite "harmless" and easy to identify, so I haven't been too bothered about them (except for feeling puzzled by the fact that they found my email address). Today, though, I receive an email with this subject:<br /><br />"Learn where you will DIE!"<br /><br />For the Canadian Pharmacy... Why?Michelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01768363149883727759noreply@blogger.com