Metal Monday

I know, it’s not Monday. I’ve been revisiting many of the bands that I listened to in high school. I was excited because Kreator was going to be in Lubbock on Sunday (!), but they didn’t show up. Exodus was there instead. I’ll write about both of those bands later, but I wanted to kick off this series with the most extreme metal band I can remember, Nitro. Here’s there video for “Freight train,” their only real hit (and I use the term loosely):

Nitro comprises Jim Gillette on vocals, Michael Angelo Batio on guitar, T.J. Racer on bass, and Bobby Rock (not the producer) on drums. Everything about Nitro was remarkably overdone. Gillette boasted a five-octave range: according to Wikipedia, they were signed to a record deal after he shattered three wine glasses with his voice at a gig. Batio was (and still is, I think) a hero to shredders everywhere: his over-and-under left hand technique (see at the beginning of the video) and the infamous quad guitar that descends from the heavens at about 2:18 into the video set him apart from other metal guitarists at the time. And, let’s face it, the hair is second to none.

Gillette is now married to the first lady of heavy metal, Lita Ford. Batio has a solo career and has been releasing instructional videos such as this one:

Watch Michael Angelo Batio VERY INFORMATIVE shred lesson !!!!!!! in Comedy  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

2009 Fulkerson Prize

It seems 2009 Fulkerson Prize is awarded to the following paper.

• Maria Chudnovsky, Neil Robertson, Paul Seymour, Robin Thomas : The Strong Perfect Graph Theorem, Annals of Mathematics Vol. 164 (2006), 51 — 229 [pdf]

This is the fourth time for Paul Seymour, third time for Neil Robertson and second time for Robin Thomas. The list of past winners is here and here.

My Other Blog

I started a new blog (exclusively for technical posts) using wordpress. I like latex-editing features of wordpress much better than blogger. I will continue to use this blog for quick theory-related announcements, puzzles and other fun stuff.

Valiant's 60th Birthday Celebration

The program for Valiant’s birthday celebration is listed on STOC 2009 website. Next week (May30th to June 5th) is an exciting week. Valian’t Birthday celebration, followed by STOC 2009, followed by complexity workshop. I am glad that I will be attending all of them.

Godel Prize 2009

Via My Biased Coin….

The 2009 Godel Prize is awarded to Omer Reingold, Salil Vadhan and Avi Wigderson for their work on Zig-zag product of graphs. Here are the related papers :

• Entropy waves, the zig-zag graph product, and new constant-degree.
• Undirected st-connectivity in Log-Space.

Magical double bass?

In doing some research on (i.e., Googling) the double bass in Russia, I stumbled across this, which is old news, apparently:

Tonya Grotter and her Magical Double Bass

It’s a Russian parody/unauthorized copy/cultural adaptation of the Harry Potter books (which I’m proud to say I still haven’t read, despite working at a Barnes and Noble at the height of their popularity). But it’s totally different–the girl attends Abracadabra Magic School and flies around on a Double Bass.

The book is (not surprisingly) not available in English translation. I’m not going to get into all of the legal problems surrounding it. I did manage to find an unauthorized (!) translation* of part of it:

Chapter 4: “They forged Rvakli?”

“Tsviang!” hummed the string third from the end, which Tanya pressed
closer to the middle of the fingerboard. Hardly had the sound faded
when on the loggia sprang up a fat round head in a copper helmet. It was
about the same size as a decent cauldron, and fearsomely rotated its
gaze. The head’s appearance, frankly, was like a robber’s. Its curved
nose had at some time been dented by a fist, and on its cheek it
displayed a long scar.

“They forged Rvakli?” it asked, when its gaze settled on the little
girl.

“They didn’t forge Rvakli…I made a little mistake….” mumbled
Tanya, attempting to hide behind the double bass.

[...]

Tanya backed up in fright and, hoping the head would disappear,
quickly ran the bow across the neighboring string.

“Bzhiangg!” droned the string thickly. No, the head didn’t
disappear. Instead there immediately arose another right alongside,
even more bandit-like than the first and adorned with fluffy feldwebel
whiskers.

*Do two wrongs make a right? What about my unauthorized reproduction of the unauthorized translation of the unauthorized parody/copy?

STOC 2009 and Complexity Workshop at Princeton

I am attending STOC 2009 and this workshop titled “Complexity and Cryptography: Status of Impagliazzo’s Worlds” at Princeton. It is scheduled right after STOC 2009. I am planning to drive to STOC (Maryland) and then to princeton. Looking forward to one week of excellent theory talks !!

Anybody in and around atlanta (or) on the way to maryland, let me know if you want to join the drive. I have two more vacancies in my car.

STOC 2009 and Complexity Workshop at Princeton

I am attending STOC 2009 and this workshop titled “Complexity and Cryptography: Status of Impagliazzo’s Worlds” at Princeton. It is scheduled right after STOC 2009. I am planning to drive to STOC (Maryland) and then to princeton. Looking forward to one week of excellent theory talks !!

Anybody in and around atlanta (or) on the way to maryland, let me know if you want to join the drive. I have two more vacancies in my car.

Proofreading

I’ve been reading quite a lot of student papers this past week and I’m bothered (as I usually am) by the lack of proofreading that takes place. Students–proofread your papers! Read them out loud. Print them out and read them and mark them with a red pen. The best thing, I’ve found, is to have someone else proofread it. Some recent favorites:

• I attended a performance of Candied by Leonardo Bernstein
• After the first half of the concert, there was a fifteen minute intervention

Something else that I’ve noticed in quite a few papers is sudden changes in font size and/or style. For me, this is an immediate red flag that plagiarism is afoot.

Here’s Taylor Mali on the the impotence of proofreading (WARNING: this is rated PG-13, at least):

If you’re still not convinced, here’s a real-world example. I was on the search committee for the recent theory/composition opening that we had here at TTU. We had around 95 applicants for the position. When you have to wade through 95 CVs and cover letters, you look for just about any reason to eliminate one of them. One of the first people I ruled out was someone who thought that he would be a great fit for the University of Alabama School of Music.

Twitter

So I’m on Twitter now. I initially didn’t see the appeal of it, but I found that I can follow news, sports (all of my favorite pro cyclists, for instance), friends, and LOLcats all on one page. Now of course I’m trying to find pedagogical uses for it. I was thinking perhaps of using it to post homework assignments and tips–perhaps creating a different account for each class, or one generic “Professor Berry” account.

Do any of you use Twitter? For pedagogical applications? For vaguely pedagogical applications?

BTW, if you want to follow me, I’m (not surprisingly) ttutheory.

Twitter

So I’m on Twitter now. I initially didn’t see the appeal of it, but I found that I can follow news, sports (all of my favorite pro cyclists, for instance), friends, and LOLcats all on one page. Now of course I’m trying to find pedagogical uses for it. I was thinking perhaps of using it to post homework assignments and tips–perhaps creating a different account for each class, or one generic “Professor Berry” account.

Do any of you use Twitter? For pedagogical applications? For vaguely pedagogical applications?

BTW, if you want to follow me, I’m (not surprisingly) ttutheory.

Synchronizing Research Documents

I have been using dropbox for the last two months and am very happy with it. Dropbox is an online service to synchronize your files across your computers. I use it to synchronize my research documents. Here is a quick list of features I liked :

• Simple interface. Adds a folder in your file explorer (windows/mac). This folder can be used like any folder on your computer.
• Automatic synchronization. Modify files without worrying about synching them. Drag and drop to add new files.
• Saves the files locally and on the dropbox server. You can also access your files online from any computer using web-browser.
• Uses CVS like protocol (sending only the diff-file to the server). You can recover older versions of your files.
• You can create shared folders with other friends. This helps a lot when you are collaborating. You can share the files, without emailing them back and forth.
• You can essentially use dropbox as a CVS server.

For more information visit Dropbox Wiki.

Marking one's part

This past weekend I had the opportunity to play The rite of spring with the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra. Technically (for the basses, at least) the piece isn’t very difficult. There are a few unusual harmonics that are called for, but most of the notes could be played by a junior-high-school student. The difficulty of this piece lies in the counting. There are a variety of rhythmic techniques used by Stravinsky to make life difficult. In an effort to make it through some of the rough patches, my stand partner and I marked the daylights out of our part. This is particularly important when rehearsal time is limited and the orchestra is not one that plays together every day. Below are two pages from the bass part with our markings.

The first example comes from the Danse Sacrale near the end of the work. The problem here is that Stravinsky’s beaming does not correspond to either the grouping (i.e., sometimes there is a rest between what appears to be a pair of notes) or the time signature (i.e., sometimes notes are beamed across the barline). The trap here is that the strings and horns all have this same rhythm and that no one is playing in the rests. It’s very easy to fall in one of the holes, so we marked every rest with a long vertical slash, and put brackets with the number of notes in each group above the beams. We made it through both performances without falling into any of the rests.

Arrows at the end of the system indicate that the figure continues onto the next line (i.e., we play on the downbeat). We’ve indicated the rests from the previous page at the top of the system to facilitate page turns (there are many nasty ones in this particular edition). The markings to the right of the staff are indications for setting the low-C extension on the bass (I don’t have one; my stand partner does).

In the second example, we detected an ostinato pattern that transcends the bar lines. For the most part, the notes are grouped in a 3+2 sixteenth-note pattern, which we indicated with brackets. There are a few abberations–4+2 and one 5+2–but generally we were able to focus on the underlying 3+2 pattern and (don’t try this at home) ignore the conductor at this point. Shortly after rehearsal 198, the pattern shifts to a purely duple grouping, 2+2, at which point we’re basically home free.

Incidentally (and I’m embarrassed to admit I never noticed this as a theorist and/or bassist), the last chord in the double basses–D E A D.

Marking one's part

This past weekend I had the opportunity to play The rite of spring with the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra. Technically (for the basses, at least) the piece isn’t very difficult. There are a few unusual harmonics that are called for, but most of the notes could be played by a junior-high-school student. The difficulty of this piece lies in the counting. There are a variety of rhythmic techniques used by Stravinsky to make life difficult. In an effort to make it through some of the rough patches, my stand partner and I marked the daylights out of our part. This is particularly important when rehearsal time is limited and the orchestra is not one that plays together every day. Below are two pages from the bass part with our markings.

The first example comes from the Danse Sacrale near the end of the work. The problem here is that Stravinsky’s beaming does not correspond to either the grouping (i.e., sometimes there is a rest between what appears to be a pair of notes) or the time signature (i.e., sometimes notes are beamed across the barline). The trap here is that the strings and horns all have this same rhythm and that no one is playing in the rests. It’s very easy to fall in one of the holes, so we marked every rest with a long vertical slash, and put brackets with the number of notes in each group above the beams. We made it through both performances without falling into any of the rests.

Arrows at the end of the system indicate that the figure continues onto the next line (i.e., we play on the downbeat). We’ve indicated the rests from the previous page at the top of the system to facilitate page turns (there are many nasty ones in this particular edition). The markings to the right of the staff are indications for setting the low-C extension on the bass (I don’t have one; my stand partner does).

In the second example, we detected an ostinato pattern that transcends the bar lines. For the most part, the notes are grouped in a 3+2 sixteenth-note pattern, which we indicated with brackets. There are a few abberations–4+2 and one 5+2–but generally we were able to focus on the underlying 3+2 pattern and (don’t try this at home) ignore the conductor at this point. Shortly after rehearsal 198, the pattern shifts to a purely duple grouping, 2+2, at which point we’re basically home free.

Incidentally (and I’m embarrassed to admit I never noticed this as a theorist and/or bassist), the last chord in the double basses–D E A D.

A Compendium of PPAD-complete problems

Motivated by my recent paper (joint work with Laura J. Poplawski, Rajmohan Rajaraman, Ravi Sundaram, Shang-Hua Teng) and a suggestion of Noam Nisan, I created a compendium of PPAD-complete problems. Please let me know if you see any additions/corrections.

A Compendium of PPAD-complete problems

Motivated by my recent paper (joint work with Laura J. Poplawski, Rajmohan Rajaraman, Ravi Sundaram, Shang-Hua Teng) and a suggestion of Noam Nisan, I created a compendium of PPAD-complete problems. Please let me know if you see any additions/corrections.