San Francisco Gay Pride

San Francisco is a very gay city year round, but in June with the Gay Pride march, it becomes ... um ... well, GAY. The rainbow flag replaces the American one throughout the city (or sometimes the American one m orphs mysteriously into a rainbow-hued variation), and thousands of people flock in from all over to party. There is a woman's march on Saturday lead by the awesome Dykes on Bikes, and the bigger main parade on Sunday.

Marriage was a big theme this year - not that I saw much of the parade itself, because I marched with the Google group (which had huge balloons, swarms of crazy bikes, and included the lead engineer as a friendly gesture from management). I was a contingent monitor, and also helped out with some of the monitoring during the celebration afterwards - essentially pushing people out of the way so that ambulance carts could get through to people who needed help.

Gay Colours

Its that time of year again - San Francisco is awash with the rainbow flag as first the Frameline Film Festival and then the Gay Pride Parade party their way through the town. And Google has gotten in on the act - if you search on certain terms, like 'Gay Pride', the resulting page is not quite the normal one. Try it out. Its something which only happens on a few terms, and is in place for about two months.

Asymmetric Flights

Getting out of the USA was quick and pleasant; I was at the airport an hour ahead of my flight and it wasn't a problem. One look at the grimly pulled mouth of the Alaskan Air representative assured me that me leaving only an hour to get back into the US was not funny at all. And she was right. As in Shannon airport in Ireland, the US has staked out is immigration and customs office in a foreign international airport, all the better to refuse you entry with, and that meant queues: queue to check in (small, I was late) and then another queue to let good ol' Uncle Sam take my good ol' fingerprints and then onto the next queue for immigration and then finally (just when I thought I was in the home run, and was about to start running because my plane was about to take off) the mother of all queues through the off-with-your-shoes-belt-and-laptop-in-a-separate-basket bit.

I made it back. Yeah. Always so much excitement and will-they-wont-they fun. And the silver lining was that I (on the waitlist) got put into the side of the plane that I didn't want to be on, but it turned out to be just the right one: the plane passed over the series of giant volcanoes which I'd previously blogged about from the ground level, stretching from southern Washington State all the way into Northern California. Then it flew right over the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco downtown before making a U-Turn to land over the crazy coloured salt fields in the south side of the Bay. It was a beautiful flight.

The sunset photo below was taken on the outward bound trip, the others from the return one:




So for the joy of asymmetry, here is my list of the most striking differences between the USA and Canada:

• Canadians are even more polite than Americans. They stop for you if you're jay-walking across a road.
  
• the public transport in Canada is both usable and used, although cars are only marginally smaller than America's hulking monsters
• coins for dollars, and attractive money
  

And here's what's the same:

• checkerboard street grids with exciting names like "5th Avenue" "Broadway" and "64th Street"
• Fast Food Nations
• quarters, nickles and dimes
  

GoogleShare

Google had a volunteer day today which took me up to the top of the San Bruno Mountain State Park battling invading aliens with about 40 other Googlers. The photograph is my fellow intern, Altaf, from Bangladesh. The invading aliens were hemlock and monstrous tendrils of ivy; i'll never see this plant in the same way after the experience of ripping out 8 meter strands of it from the side of the mountain.

City Fjord

Today I discovered that one of the beauties of Vancouver is that with a short bus ride and about half an hour in a kayak, you're out in a gorgeous Fjord, the Indian Arm, with steep forested sides with snowy peaks behind them, and the illusion that you're in the heart of nature. Its gorgeous.

I had to do an eskimo roll in the sea kayak to prove that I could take it out by myself - the first time I failed, but they let me try again, and it worked fine. All those pool sessions in Columbia were worth while.

I kayaked for 5 hours and can feel it in my arms. I can hardly type, so I'm keeping this post curt.

Vancouver

I've been in Vancouver since Tuesday night at the SigMOD Conference on databases. When I told friends that, they said "wow, database conference, that sounds like fun" (that needs some heavy sarcasm punctuation of some sort). Actually, it wasn't half bad - stimulating and perplexing for me at the same time, some of the presentations I only half understood. But there was some good stuff. It was my first academic conference.
















The city is beautiful - verdant green, with snow-capped mountains off on the horizon over the water. At the same time, its eerily quiet, to the point that I find it disturbing. Its not a small city but it sounds like a quiet village. About the only sound is the buzz of the seaplanes taking off constantly. Large parts of the city are encrusted with tall condos of green glass which adds to the feeling both of its greeness and its sterility. I guess after New York, any city is going to seem sterile. You can't get less sterile than New York.

Renoogling

Back in San Francisco, at the house I was living in last summer (yeah! Stefanie! Laurie! Nicki!). And back at Google (which makes me a born-again Noogler) where I am working on the adwords backend. That's the system which supplies the Google web page with appropriate adverts - and helping out on it is a lot more interesting than it probably sounds. I never thought I'd say that about advertising.

Graduation!

My family (parents, sister Val, brother Pete and aunt Jackie) all came to New York to celebrate my graduation ceremony with me. Here I am with my parents in a graduation robe which looks a little like a Hogwarts nightgown, just after the SEAS Class Day. It was great to have them there - and man, is it great to have graduated!

Strictly speaking, I should think about winding this blog down now...

Alva Noto Concert

Good electronic music is relatively rare in New York, but tonight, I made it to a great performance by Alva Noto and other artists from the Noton label in the Project. Alva Noto is originally from Germany but is resident in New York. The visuals were great, and the acoustics in the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn were much better than the narrow space would suggest.

Window Washing and Window Dressing

Every year at the end of Spring Columbia spends a huge amount of effort sprucing up their campus for the graduation ceremony. For weeks before hand, flowers are planted, windows washed and hedges clipped. Even the dustbins get swabbed down. Here are workers washing the Lerner facade.

Dissent Networks of the Supreme Court

Although I have blogged a lot about my New York experiences in the last two years, I have rarely blogged about what I am really here for: living it up in the party capital of the US .... uh .... no, I mean working like crazy at grad school. But I've done some things which I have found really interesting. So I'm going to post a couple of results from some recent work.

This semester I did a great course on Network Theory, or the study of complex systems represented as theories, under Professor Dragomir Radev from the University of Michigan. What I liked about this course is how it applies to so many fields: computer science, of course, but also biology (protein-protein interactions), politics (committee structure of the US House of representatives) or linguistics (word networks like WordNet)

As a final project for the course, I wrote a paper called Dissent Networks in the US Supreme Court. Based on data from the Rehnquist I court (1986-1995) I linked the Supreme Court justices based on the extent to which they dissented together against the majority opinion in the court rulings. Then I ran a clustering algorithm on the network to cluster it into different blocs. Here is an example of the work, from the year 1989:
The abbreviations for the Justices are Ma=Marshall, Br=Brennan, Wh=White, Bl=Blackmun, Re=Rehnquist, St=Stevens, O'C=O'Connor, Sc=Scalia, Ke=Kennedy. The size of the nodes represents how much the justices dissented altogether, and the strength of the lines shows how much they dissented with each other. The colours represent the dissent blocs as identified by the clustering algorithm. The clustering is what is interesting: based on the dissent links, very clear blocs emerge. For 1986-1989 it was pretty much the same picture as the one shown above: heavily dissenting veteran justices Thurgood Marshal (the first black justice on the court) and William Brennan from previous liberal courts joined with their younger colleagues Stevens and Blackmun to form a consistent dissent bloc in a conservative court lead by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan.

Things get really interesting after this, because the older justices retire and are replaced by conservative nominations by first Reagan and then George Bush, the dissent bloc falls apart. Here is the situation in 1992, look at how different it is:
It is only after the nomination of Justices Ruth Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer by Bill Clinton in the mid-1990's that the clear dissent bloc re-emerges, although in a weaker form.

Five Boroughs

It was a crazy weekend. Beers on Friday night, a half marathon early Saturday, night in a bar with friends thereafter, and too many cranberry vodkas and not enough sleep later up early again (with a hangover) to do the 43 mile/69 km Five Boroughs Bike Tour, which makes a giant loop through Manhattan, the Bronx (token bit), Queens, Brooklyn and ends at Staten Island. I rode with the weekend's partner in sports craziness, Marie, and Ryan and Mark from Columbia's Asian Studies Institute.

The tour was a great experience: most of the roads were closed, and it started off cool and misty, with a dream-like feeling of cycling down the canyons of Manhattan with no traffic light to stop you.

The cyclists took over entire freeways and used bridges otherwise closed to cyclists, like the Verazzano Narrows bridge. For me, a highlight was crossing the amazing (and spectacularly rusting) Queensborough bridge. We did it in about 5 hours, and then I got home, showered ... and went out again to meet friends.

Well-Earned Bagel

With a head cold, five hours sleep and very little training, I stumbled through a half marathon this morning, and got a half-way decent time (1:47). Marie, a friend from IHouse, joined me. The race went along the Coney Island waterfront and then headed up the Oceanview Parkway to Prospect Park, ending pretty much right in front of where I live.

In Berlin after the marathon, you can get a beer. In Sweden, it was a coffee. In Brooklyn it was - what else - a choice of bagels in familiar variations: cinnamon raisin, sesame, onion. A bagel never tasted so good.

High Literary Concentration

One of the great things about New York is that it is relatively easy to get to hear internationally famous people. Tonight at the 'Town Hall' theater, as part of the PEN World Voices literature festival in New York, I saw on one stage in quick succession Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje (English Patient), Annie Proux (Brokeback Mountain), Ian McEwan and South Africa's own Rian Malaan. Tomorrow, Zimbabwe's Chenjerai Hove is taking part in a reading for the same festival.

$50 000 000 anyone?

... that's Zimbabwean dollars. Today I went to a talk at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) by two Zimbabwean activists from within the MDC. The situation there is so bad at the moment. At some stage during the evening, they passed around a $50 000 000 dollar bill which had just been issued. It was worth US$1 as they passed it around. What is it worth now?

Pierre!

My good friend Pierre, whom I met in IHouse, performed a Houdini-style stunt and appeared in New York from nowhere (well, from Paris). Yeah!

Together we trowelled the overlarge portions at Mama's Food Shop in Alphabet City and some of the huge beer selection at the DBA bar.

Rent

Made it to my first Broadway show last night - Rent in the Nederlander Theater, just off Broadway, with student tickets I got through Columbia. I went in having no background information and - BAM! - musical about aids and drugs and homelessness in the New York of the 1990's which was really energetic and a lot of fun to watch for someone who grew up on Gillbert and Sullivan fodder. And also a sign of how much New York has changed - the city from then was not always recognizable from the city of now.

Moving Road Movie

Last weekend I helped my friend Alyssa move her stuff from her parents' place in Jordan, Minnesota to Princeton, New Jersey where she is starting a new job at ETS. The trip was 1300 miles (2100km) and took us through 9 states: Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, a tiny bit of West Virginia, most of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York (to pick up more boxes).




Before the trip, I spent two days in Jordan and the nearby 'twin cities' of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Alyssa's parents have a small farm and a house they built themselves (during the construction of which the family of 5 and three helpers slept together in a shed for good on a year). Alyssa's dad loves wood, and it was everywhere in the house. Here is the moving van - we spent hours inside it trying to figure out the optimal way of stopping everything from shifting around. Although New York already felt a bit like Spring, Minnesota was still locked in winter, with a lot of snow and ice.


My room mate Jessica, also from Minnesota, was by luck in the Twin Cities that weekend too, so we picked her up from the airport and hung out together. Here we are in Target (big US supermarket chain which is based in Minnesota) kitting ourselves out with the essentials for a trip halfway across the continent: atlas, rope and chocolate drizzle indulgent snack mix (you have to love the US food industry)




The Twin Cities have a nice friendly vibe about them. We went out a lot: to a Ethiopian restaurant, an Irish bar with faux decor but genuine music, a gay cafe, the food co-op where Alyssa used to work, and then ended up meeting a bunch of Alyssa's friends from her college in the Herk, in Minneapolis' Uptown. It was a fun crowd in a fun venue because it has a microbrewery and - almost as good - a shuffleboard, which involves sliding pucks on salt down a long board, trying to knock your opponents pucks off. A bit like a combination of boule and bowling.




The trip to the East Coast was smooth - got up early each day and drove until late, stopping only rarely. So the experience was one of flash-glimpses of America: snow-covered corn fields in Iowa; the town of Preoria Illinnois which was distinct in a score of ways from the cookie-cutter similarity of other towns, the Hummer-Limousine in Indianapolis, the greening as we went eastwards and crossed over Pennsylvania. We had no CD in the car, so we read to each other from Tales of the City, did cross-word puzzles and listened to the sometimes quirky radio from the places we were passing through. In Iowa's farming country, a song by Kenny Chesney was playing:

She thinks my tractors sexy
It really turns her on
Shes always staring at me
While Im chuggin along

Here are the full lyrics if you want more. In Pennsylvania it was International Harvester by Craig Morgan.

We spent the night in Columbus, Ohio with Pete, Alyssa's boyfriend, in his cool wooden house for which he pays a rent which makes someone in New York weep. This is Tammy Faye, his cat, named after Tammy Faye Baker the wife of fallen evangelist Jim Baker. There is a strong resemblance.





This is the New Jersey Turnpike - got to be one of the ugliest (and most dangerous) stretches of road in the world, and all that with the Manhattan skyscrapers looming on the horizon. We rode down it into New York to pick up more boxes from International House and the best cargo of all: Stacey, who came back with us to Princeton. About the only tense moment was return down the highway hell of New Jersey in the dark when someone ahead of us had a puncture and was moving really slowly on the crowded freeway. Imagine going for hours of urban dystopia: freeways, factories, airports, endless strip malls. Then suddenly a barrier of green and you emerge into a quaint other-wordly Grimm-Brothers village of wooden houses and stone buildings; that was pretty much the experience of arriving in Princeton for the first time, and one of those strangely American experiences. We got in at 11PM, exhausted, found a restaurant which was still open, unpacked the mattress and fell asleep.

And the next day was the moving in of Alyssa's Minnesotan furniture, including her Prohibition-era speakeasy table with the secret drawer for the gambling chips, and the return of the truck to nearby Trenton and ... we were done.

Roomies Four

Brooklyn, like Manhattan, has a restaurant week during which restaurants make all kinds of special offers. I grabbed at the half-price wine with my fellow roomates (Nate, Jessica and Darla) at Miriam Restaurant.

And here, to give some context, is my room in Brooklyn. The orange walls are my work.

Bike Trip to the Pallisades

Today I took advantage of the great sunny weather and biked with Stacey and Ryan and Mark, a couple of her class mates, over the George Washington Bridge to the Pallisades in New Jersey. After the monumental ride over the bridge, 10 minutes of cycling hell going the wrong way down busy vehicle streets full of roadworks got us to cycling paradise: towering sandstone cliffs, the expanse of the Hudson and the illusion that you have a stretch of unspoilt nature all to yourself.