My vocal chords hate me. They are currently and have been complaining that I screamed too much at the Thursday concert I went to on Tuesday.
Circa Survive and Rise Against were ok, not exactly my taste. Billy Talent was fun, but again, too young of a sound. Thursday played really well and refreshed perfectly the notion in my mind that is a Thursday concert. When Rise Against ended their set, it was rather amusing to see all of the tiny and young Rise Against fans remove themselves from the front of the pit to make way for the Thursday loyalists. I much preferred the Thursdayists; they were much nicer and more fun.
The only disappointment I found at the concert was that no one knew the words to Thursday’s newer album, “A City By the Light Divided,” which just reflects how poorly the album did compared to earlier albums. Part of the magic of a Thursday concert, as I have experienced it, is screaming lyrics at Geoff Rickly with hundreds of fellow fans, fueled by an awesome band that brings all too much energy to the stage for their own contentment. It is a sense of community and power that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. The energy is just pervasive. That’s what keeps me coming back.
I’ve compared this last week’s concert to the Death Cab show I went to a few weeks earlier, but there is no comparison. The band performed excellently, and the drum solos were to die for, but the energy of the band and of the crowd just wasn’t the same.
Another note: one thing that bothered me about the IBM Privacy and Security day set up was that the chair of the day asked everyone to hold their questions to the end of the speaker’s timeslot, when a few minutes have been explicitly allotted to Q&A.
This is a bad idea in general. Questions are a speaker’s way of figuring out what the audience likes or dislikes, is stuck on or understands. Questions allow for a dynamic presenter to tune his presentation to his audience. They allow the audience to ask richer, more useful questions with the relevant information fresh in their minds.
The good thing about holding questions until the end of the talk is that the chair has a better mechanism for making the talks and the session end on time. If the speaker ends on time, take a few questions, otherwise only take one. Given a mid-session question, a good speaker will be able to adjust the length of his delivery appropriately. But let’s face it: there are more bad speakers than good speakers.
I think mid-talk Q&A is worth it if the chair of the session is bold enough to warn speakers of the time remaining (through some visual cue, like a soccer warning card) and to cut the speaker off when time elapses.
I attended last week’s IBM Privacy and Security Day where a bunch of IBMers and area security researchers got together to talk about the research they are doing to protect our identities and our systems.
One short session of the day, just before lunch, as a poster talk where several grad student researchers are given five minutes each to present their work and convince people to visit them at the poster session after lunch. Columbia’s representatives presented some interesting researchers, but were the worst five minute presenters.
Talking points for a five-minute, non-math pitch:
Do: Give the audience, in 75 words, what the topic is, without moving past your title slide.
Do Not: Reference any diagrams or equations during those 75 words.
Do: Give the audience a small sense of how your work is novel compared to previous work, just to show you’ve done some reading.
Do Not: List papers by other authors and describe the research they presented there.
Do: Tell the audience what the topic is again, using a simple diagram.
Do Not: Reference any equations.
Do: Allow the diagram to reinforce what you tell them
Do Not: Let what you tell them reinforce the diagram.
Plan your talk as if you were only given three minutes. That’s more or less the amount of substance you’ll probably be able to cover in five come delivery time. The five-minute poster talk is supposed to entice the audience to come look at your poster, not bore them before they even see it. It’s your time to have the explicit attention of your audience.
Dale Carnegie’s “The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking” is a fantastic resource for this. I bought it a long time ago when I was somewhat fearful of public speaking; it didn’t help, but it helped me understand what an audience wants and needs to hear. (In fact, I need to reread that book to refresh my memory of the particulars).
I just found a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser in my mother’s cleaning closet and became interested in it. The product is pretty cool: it’s a hard foam that is composed of interconnected stands of the hardest commercially-available plastic: melamine. Melamine is interesting in this application because it is traditionally known as the main ingredient in formica as well as the stuff that make up a whiteboard.
The Magic Eraser, marketed by Proctor and Gamble, is actually a product from BASF called Basotect. Apparently, it also has good sound insulation properties.
One report mentioned that the substance is execelent at removing the polish from glossy paint. I performed a quick experiment by very lightly dragging a dry Magic Eraser on the surface of a glossy photograph. The photograph had very obviously lost its finish in the area with really tiny scratches. I then wet a tip of the Magic Eraser and gave a quick back and forth on a different area of the photograph: the eraser removed the gloss and the pigment of the photograph. It is pretty incredible how sharp the microfiber must be.
I start a slurry of holiday weekend posts by quoting an article published yesterday in the science section of the New York Times, “A Free-for-All on Science and Religion” by George Johnson. Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and is the go-to guy when it comes to science quotes.
In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.†When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica†failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.â€
It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.
“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,†Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ â€
There are four bottles from the last few weeks that have accumulated on the top of our fridge that I’ve been meaning to record. Unfortunately, I’ve lost my tasting notes for these bottles and don’t have a detailed memory about them.
Rock River Cabernet Sauvignon 2004 (California) - Delicious after being left out for 45 minutes. Nothing too stellar, but good enough, great value. $10
SignorelloSyrah 2004 (Napa Valley) - The best Syrah I’ve ever had. Worth every penny (Especially when going to the tasting room with a manager of the Rutherford Grill). Beautiful color on the glass. The Viognier adds something special to the glass. This was my last bottle from the batch I brought from Napa and it was a fantastic finish to a great trip. $36
Gallo Cabernet Sauvignon 2003 (Sonoma County) - Dirt. I was told to add it to my case to balance in price some more expensive wines already present, with claims that the Gallo Family Vineyard is somehow better than the E&J Gallo Vineyard. One of the worst wines I’ve had. I’m fairly suspect of any wine company that adheres to ISO 4001 and produces that much wine.
Ballentine Chenin blanc Old Vines 2003 (Napa Valley) - A spectacular wine that made me and Varun really happy. It’s too bad the 2003 isn’t available direct from them anymore, only the 2005, which I haven’t had. I would seriously consider joining their wine club.
Casey, Varun, and I (later joined by Morgan and then Somudro) enjoyed a small wine assortment last night. There was no better way to make a decision about our party plans in light of Six’s illness but over a good glass of wine.
The night started with a bottle from a mixed case of Syrah I bought yesterday. Luigi Bosca Syrah Reserva 2002, Argentina promised “raspberries, blackberries, and hints of pepper.” It was fairly absent of a nose, color dark. The first glass was acceptable, worthy of drinking. The initial taste was a more subdued Syrah, giving a slightly oaky taste but not a lot of it. The finish was exceedingly strong; perhaps too tannin-y for my taste in Syrah. I immediately thought “blackberries, raspberries” which was confirmed by reading the bottle notes. The second glass was less forceful and more enjoyable, after allowing the wine to air about half an hour. $13
Casey, in the spirit of drinking wine with friends then offered up his Campbells Rutherglen Muscat NV, Australia. If I recall correctly, this wasn’t the first time I had encountered this exact Muscat (I think it was when I took Dan to Public a few years ago). He prefixed the serving by saying that it’s really bad and was mocking its taste. I found it to be an acceptable dessert wine, especially given its cost at a Boston-area supermarket. It gave little other than a strong raisin and was delectably sweet. Tasty. $18
With Somudro joining us and Casey and Morgan departing for sleep before attending to marching band, I broke out what my man at the wine shop, Tyronne, highly recommended to me as one of his favorite wines, Clos Mimi Petite Rousse 2004, California. The pink-labeled bottle has a story about a red-headed girl who enchanted Renoir “with her irrepressible ‘joie de vivre’ and a quote from Victor Hugo.” It was obviously more delicate in smell, color and taste. What I found was an absolutely delicious bottle of Syrah, almost exactly the ideal Syrah for my palette. The flavor was not overbearing, but instead light and playful. It was a much lighter and more airy wine than the Luigi Bosca. It, too, improved with the second glass, but the first was surpisingly very good. Highly recommended. Interesting Winemakers notes. $20
