My New Favorite Awful Movie

Last night I saw a movie that was so bad it was good. A movie so inexcusably, indescribably, inexplicably horrible that I actually ended up loving it. This movie, this film abomination, was called A History of Violence. It stars Aragorn, er, Viggo Mortensen as Tom Stall, the owner of a diner in a small town in Indiana. One night two thugs try to rob the place and Tom reacts like a trained assassin, killing both men in a few short seconds. He becomes a local hero and has his face splashed all over local TV and radio stations. Shortly thereafter, he is paid a visit by the pathetically corny scarfaced mobster Carl Fogarty (played by Ed Harris) from Philadelphia. Fogarty insists that Tom's real name and identity are in fact Joey Cusack, a fellow mobster also from Philly. Tom at first denies the accusation, but as the movie progresses and the mob starts threatening Tom, Joey slowly emerges as the true identity, taking out mobsters left and right.

What makes the movie so awful is, well, everything. Fogarty and his thugs are just laughable. The strange pauses in dialogue that occur often enough to be irritating. The feeling that so many of the lines are just so close to being classic, but in the end never measure up. The downright stupid and contrived tension between Tom's son and the high school bully. The totally unnecessary gore, with plenty of scenes of people getting shot or spurting blood from mashed-up faces. The dumb humor typical of this type of movie (although I have to admit, the scene near the end where Joey escapes from his brother Richie's house after taking out all his inept guards is pretty funny).

And so even though the story is halfway interesting and there seems to be some sort of moral or message buried in there somewhere, those qualities are completely overshadowed by everything else being so painfully awful in every single way - and in so being, the movie actually grew on me as it progressed and made me thoroughly enjoy the stupidity and corniness of it all. So if you're in the mood for a good bad, bad movie, I would happily recommend A History of Violence.

Holiday Recap

Well my friend The Mediocre Blogger abhors blogs that serve simply as diaries, and even though I wanted to avoid this myself, my absence for two weeks I think warrants an explanation for where I've been.

Two weeks ago I was preoccupied with building a new computer, which is an exercise I undertake less often these days but still thoroughly enjoy. The occasion? A free processor from Intel, care of Ladan, who got one as part of a "loaner" program for employees. They sent around a list of processors available - a Core 2 Duo E6700, a Core Duo, a Pentium 4, and a Pentium D. I assumed that anyone who knew anything about computers would choose the E6700 (it's by far the fastest of the lot, and currently retails for $500) and therefore the supply might be exhausted quickly, but within a few days of requesting it, Ladan got an e-mail informing her that her E6700 was ready for pickup. Within a week, I'd ordered all the new parts I needed online, and Ladan had sent me the processor, and so I was ready to build. Astute readers might question the necessity of building a new computer when my current machine was of sufficient power to run all my games acceptably. My answer is a question: how could I possibly pass over the chance to build a new machine with a free processor that is so much faster than my current processor? Sure, I have to sink a few hundred dollars into it, and I'll need to buy a replacement processor when (if) Intel asks for the original back (almost a certainty when she leaves the company in about six months), but it's just .... SO MUCH FASTER! Wouldn't I be crazy not to do it? Right, so you understand too. Heh heh.

So building that machine took a few days, and installing and updating Windows and then all my programs and games takes considerable time. Before I could fully finish the job, I had to leave to fly to Boston on the 21st, where I was planning to meet Ladan and then drive to Albany to spend a week with my family for Christmas. Unfortunately, her flight was supposed to stop in Denver, and the airport was closed that day. They couldn't guarantee her a ticket until Christmas day at midnight; alternatively, she could try to get a standby seat first to Chicago and then to Boston, with no idea of how long that might take. I was already flying to Boston when this happened, and right when it appeared that I might be spending the week in Albany alone, Ladan found a JetBlue overnight flight to Boston. I ended up staying with friends in Boston on Thursday night and then driving back to the airport at 5AM to pick her up. After a few more hours of sleep, we drove to Albany.

The next day we drove to Ottawa to visit some of Ladan's relatives. We stayed there one night, returning the next afternoon. Then from Sunday night to Thursday morning we stayed with my family in Albany. On Thursday morning we drove back to Boston and flew out in the afternoon, both of us returning to Phoenix to spend the New Year weekend together.

Christmas itself went well, and it was great seeing my parents and sisters again. Even though I'm clearly not enthralled with the holiday in general, we hadn't been home for Christmas since 2003 and I'd missed being with my family. There's been some serious friction between my father and my sisters over the past few months, and I'd like to think that those few days together somehow will help move all of us closer toward a resolution.

Our rental car was a nice surprise: I'd reserved the cheapest car possible, an economy car for $18 per day. When I walked to the designated spot in the Hertz lot in Boston, I had to laugh: it was a 2-door Chrysler Crossfire, a little hatchback sports car that looks similar to an Audi TT or a Porsche Carrera. Red leather interior, nice tight suspension, and a surprisingly powerful V6 215hp engine that can throw the car's weight around with ease. I had a blast driving it, and we put 1200 miles on it during the week as we drove from Boston to Albany to Ottawa to Albany to Boston. I even got stopped for speeding in Massachusetts - 85 in a 65 - but the cop thankfully let me off with a warning.

So now I'm in Phoenix for the weekend, and return to San Jose on Tuesday morning. I realize I'm pathetically behind in blog posts - I haven't even begun writing up the Nicaragua trip yet - but expect my New Year's Resolutions to appear here very soon.

Even The Airports ...

... are infected with nonstop Christmas music. Good grief! This Holiday Madness is (as always) just outta control. From Kam's classic track:

Every year I hear "Happy Holiday"
What's my religion? "I do what the dollar say"
That's why I celebrate Christmas
Cuz this overweight redneck devil is big business

This morning I'm sitting in San Jose airport awaiting my flight to first Dallas and then Washington, D.C. Thankfully I don't have many people to buy presents for, and have therefore not had to spend any time in malls. But somehow, the Evil Ghost of all Christmases has found me in the airport, and I'm being subjected to a barrage of cheerful Christmas tunes that I can't escape.

Christmas was always a big event in my house growing up, and as a kid, I of course loved it more than any other holiday. Very soon after Thanksgiving each year, my mom puts up the tree and starts decorating the house and playing the music. She still has almost the same enthusiasm for the holiday that she did when my sisters and I were kids, even though we're all adults now. I can understand her enjoyment of it simply based on the memories she has of working so hard to create wonderful Christmas mornings for us for 20 years; her continued attachment to the day is entirely understandable.

However, I myself have zero excitement for Christmas, and in fact, I even have quite a bit of scorn for it. Being atheist, I attach no relevance to the season in terms of it's religious significance. Beyond that aspect, I additionally am completely and totally against the entire over-commercialization of the holiday, the way all potential tangible meaning the season could have has been sucked out by the omnipresent commercials, songs, decorations, and encouragements to BUY, BUY, BUY that bombard you from every angle, all day long. I groan every year when I first walk into a store and see Christmas decorations: "already? Are you kidding me?"

I think most people would agree that the commercialization of Christmas has gotten way out of control. The difference for me is that I don't just say it - I act on it. I only buy presents for my immediate family, never play Christmas music, don't send cards, don't have a tree, don't decorate. If I ever have kids, I'm determined to just skip the holiday altogether, and when they're old enough to realize that, carefully explain to them why we don't participate. I'm not a grinch - maybe I'd buy them some presents anyway - but there would be no Christmas symbolism attached to it whatsoever.

Joining The Fight

One of the few good things about Phoenix is that the airport has free Wi-Fi, which I'm currently making good use of as I wait for my flight this morning back to San Jose. I had a fun weekend here with Ladan, and, as usual, am saddened to return home alone again.

Over the weekend I found out that I'm to go to DC on Wednesday for a meeting on Thursday. As I've done the past few times, I'll extend the trip through the weekend and thereby have time to catch up with friends in the area. When I return next Sunday, I'll have three days to prepare for a Christmas trip to Albany with Ladan. We'll be flying into Boston, driving to Albany, staying for five days, then driving back to Boston and returning home on the 28th. Then on January 25th, Ladan's parents arrive from Iran for a two-and-a-half month stay with her in Phoenix, which I'm excited about but frustrated that I won't be able to see them as much as I'd like.

The past few months have been just insane; I've been traveling about 75% of the weekends in the past three months: DC, Phoenix, Santa Fe, Denver, Nicaragua. I love traveling, and I'm racking up the air miles, but I feel like I've had little time to focus on The Main Issue - what I'm doing with my life.

Whereas over the past few weeks I was thinking I was headed more in the AI direction, I'm now back to the International Relations-ish line of thinking: one of the options I've been considering is getting a degree in that field when we move back to DC in about six months, as there are a plethora of good schools to choose from in the area. Ladan and I went to see Blood Diamond last night, an intensely disturbing film about the human cost underlying the diamond industry. I'd read about the industry before - the strife in the African countries where the diamonds are mined, the artificial short supply created by the diamond companies hoarding the available supply, the ridiculous overpricing of retail diamonds, the entire sickening culture of diamond obsession. If the numbers in the movie were accurate, it's tough to pinpoint the extent of the problem: two-thirds of the buyers come from the US, but only 15% of the diamond supply are estimated to be "conflict diamonds" - originating from countries or regions that are in "conflict" over the diamond mines. But clearly, this is a huge issue that needs to be addressed.

After seeing that movie - as seeing that type of movie always does - I felt determined to somehow "get involved", i.e. fight the bad guys, so to speak. It's one thing to be ignorant of what's going on the world outside your window; it's entirely another to be aware of it and decide to do nothing. There are so many things worth fighting for - how can I possibly be content to not fight for any?

Of course, the fact that I'm even considering getting somehow involved immediately makes me an outcast in places like Phoenix. Looking around my gate waiting area here at the airport, the fact that I'm not reading the Sports section of the paper, talking about yesterday's Big Games, doing a Sudoku puzzle or watching the drivel offered on the Fox News / CNN showing on all the big TVs - I clearly don't fit in here.

And thank for the FSM for that.

I Left My Heart In ...

10PM December 3, 2004
28th & Castro Streets
Noe Valley

I've just arrived from Maryland, having landed at SFO, gotten a rental car, and driven to this corner for the first time. Our new apartment is on this corner. Ladan is on her way from downtown, having attended a wedding that evening for a labmate. She's been living in Berkeley and I've been in Bethesda since May, when she moved out here. Finally I found a job and just today, I've moved out to San Francisco, and here I am. I'm standing at the top of a huge hill, overlooking a series of steep streets down toward the Mission. The lights and hills of the southern part of the bay are bright against a very clear night sky. Literally, my mouth is open and I'm speechless. All I can do is laugh, and I have to ask out loud, "Oh my god -- I live here?!?"


11:30PM December 5, 2006
23rd & De Haro Streets
Potrero Hill

I'm leaving a going-away party for a Dutch friend who's married to an Iranian woman. They've decided to move back to Holland. She's leaving tomorrow, along with their 10-month old baby girl. My friend is here for two more weeks. This is the first time I've been to San Francisco in months; since I moved to Sunnyvale in June, I rarely come back up this way. I'm standing at the top of a huge hill, overlooking a series of steep streets down toward downtown. The lights and hills of the entire downtown area are bright against a very clear night sky. Literally, my mouth is open and I'm speechless. All I can do is sigh, and I have to ask out loud, "My god -- why did I leave this place?!?"

And I wonder if I wasted the year-and-a-half that I lived here. I should have been more active, going out every night, every weekend, exploring, experiencing everything the city has to offer. Why on earth did I spend so much time at home? Behind that damn computer? As a visitor now, it's so easy to forget about the tedious hour-and-a-half commute to Sunnyvale (and same back) each day; the cold, cloudy, windy summer weather; the annoying no-left-turn laws downtown. But even remembering all those things, I still miss this city terribly, and head back to my car with the sinking feeling that I didn't take advantage of all this when I could have, and now it's too late.

*sigh*

The Cyc Project

I finally started reading a book I got from the library a few weeks ago called "Understanding Artificial Intelligence". The book is a compilation of articles about AI published in Scientific American over the past ten or so years. One of the articles I read last night was by a guy named Doug Lenat, who talked about an AI system developed at Stanford in 1984 called Cyc (as in en-cyc-lopedia). Lenat's basic premise is that a fundamental requirement for a computer program that is designed to exhibit human-like reasoning is that the program have a solid understanding of everything that humans would loosely group under the term "common sense". Otherwise, the program will not be able to make realistic, believable decisions. Cyc, therefore, is designed to be a vast knowledge base of concepts and relations that humans generally take to be common sense.

In the mid-90's the Cyc project was spun off into a private company called Cycorp. Lenat has continued to oversee the development and expansion of Cyc; the knowledge base now contains about 300,000 concepts and over 3 million "assertions", or relations between concepts. I found a ton of information about Lenat and Cyc by googling their names, including an hour-long Google Tech Talk that Lenat presented a few months ago where he drew parallels between Cyc and the Google search engine, showing how despite Google's power, it cannot interpret simple phrases or provide answers to questions. Combining the technology behind Google with the knowledge base behind Cyc, however, could lead to a radically more powerful organization, utility, and accessibility of information in the future. It sounds like this capability could both complement, and in some cases surpass, the advantages of the Semantic Web, assuming the latter ever actually materializes.

Cycorp has an open source version of the knowledge base available, as well as an expanded version specifically for use by research institutions. The company is currently working a number of national security-related contracts, an area where this kind of system could be put to effective use, culling through millions of pieces of information and trying to estimate probabilities of future events based on a common sense understanding of the world.

I think this approach to creating an intelligent system that can exhibit believable reasoning is fascinating, if a bit over-ambitious (after 20 years of work, the developers believe that it only contains about 2% of the total information it would need to operate with human-level intelligence) and narrowly focused. Having a working system like Cyc, even with the limitations it currently has in terms of comprehensiveness, helping control the responses of non-player characters in games could revolutionize the way players interact with them. Combined with a stab at natural language processing, I could see the days of static dialogue tree conversations coming to an end, with the player being given the ability to query NPCs on subjects of interest and receiving realistic answers. Imagine a Half-Life where you could hound Barney about that beer he owes you? Or a Deus Ex where you could coax more tips out of Tracer Tong? This kind of interactivity would completely change the way we even play games, throwing all the interactive game mechanics conventions right out the window.

5 O'Clock

If you ain't doin' what you love doin', you're losin'
Security's illusion created by institutions
To keep us movin' to the job, bank, and the store
A commonly accepted thus perpetuated war
And if what you're waiting for is opportunity to knock at your door
Then step it up, cuz it ain't like that no more
Sure, you can sit at home, rottin' away
But in your heart I know you feel there's something missing every day

That's me, summarized perfectly, care of The Perceptionists' "5 O'Clock" from their Black Dialogue album, one of a handful of CDs that have recently joined my collection care of Tower Records' going out of business sale and "70% Off Rap CDs" special. It's a great album, one I somehow overlooked last year when it was released.

This struggle to figure out in which direction I want to take my life has now grown to be an oppressive, omnipresent weight on my mind. I begin and end every day feeling frustrated. I sit in my office, all day long, annoyed at what a colossal waste each passing minute is. I don't hate my job, but have zero interest or enthusiasm for it. And it scares me to imagine what it would be like to spend the rest of my life like this. Last week in Nicaragua (yes, I know I've been slacking on the writeup) was so much fun, made me feel so alive - and this week I'm just back to the soul-crushing grind.

The question is, what do I do? If I want to switch careers, that most likely means getting another degree. If I want to do that in a reasonable time, I'd have to go back to school full-time. But the thought of attending classes, studying again, having no nights or weekends free anymore, not to mention the question of where the money to pay for it would come from, as well as getting used to having no extra money anymore, makes me cringe.

But what alternative do I have? I really don't see any. An example: one area I'd like to get involved in is artificial intelligence. Originally it was computer games' use of AI that sparked my interest, but now I'm additionally fascinated by the meshing of AI with deeper brain modeling concepts like consciousness, perception, and emotion. How can I get involved with this? Well, with no relevant programming experience, nor much knowledge of the foundations of traditional AI, and no relevant industry experience, what are the chances that any company or research organization would hire me even if I learned a language and some AI basics? Almost nil. A degree, and some academic research experience, seems to be the only way in.

I'm tired of not knowing what to do. I can't stand every day that passes and I'm still stuck in the same damn job, same damn environment, same damn waste of time. At this point I can't even imagine what it would be like to have a job I felt passionate about and actually looked forward to doing; the concept seems entirely alien to me.