Life at Simons

There have been many posts on the technical talks happening at Simons (see +Moritz Hardt's latest on gradient descent if you haven't yet). Not as many yet on the less-formed discussions that are happening in and around the building, but maybe it's too soon for that.

In the meantime, I thought it might be fun to describe "a day at Calvin Hall".

I usually bike in after 9 am. Biking in Berkeley is not for the (literally) weak-kneed, and I'm discovering how weak my knees actually are. I haven't yet found a good site to plot elevation gains and losses for an arbitrary route, but this one is pretty decent.

The Institute lends out bikes if you don't have your own. It's a great way to get around if you're staying near campus, because parking is difficult and expensive.

Of course, the next step is:

It's a great machine. Only downside is that it shuts down at 5pm when the building does. But there are plenty of cafes around for later.

Then of course the decision: which talks should I feel guilty about missing today ? There are A LOT OF TALKS going on at the various workshops/boot camps. I feel embarrassed complaining about this, because we have such a stellar crowd of speakers and such fascinating talks. But there are almost too many talks: I have to shut down the feelings of guilt in order to find big chunks of time to think (or write this blog post <ahem>).

Thankfully, there's the live stream. I've already mentioned the Simons livestream on G+, but it's worth mentioning again. If you're late to the start of any talk you can watch it on the high quality live feed. If you can't watch it live you can watch it as soon as it's done on the Ustream site for the event. And a few days after that the talks are archived on the Simons site directly. There's also this cute feature where the live stream plays the most recent talk during coffee breaks. I know people outside the Institute are watching talks live because someone pinged me on twitter to ask the speaker to repeat questions they get from the audience.

So I've either attended talks or I've spent the morning brainstorming on some of the projects I have going. It's now time for lunch: thankfully, we're walking distance from both Northside and Southside Berkeley, which means a huge variety of eating places all within 5-10 minutes walking. All we need to do is avoid the huge class let-out at 12:20 or so. On Tuesdays we have a lunch seminar (organized by +Moritz Hardt) as part of the big-data program.

Once we're back, it's time for this:

Did I mention that the coffee machine is awesome ?

Usually, discussions start picking up in the afternoon, and you'll often find me here:

3:30 is time for the daily tea, at which we get all kinds of nice cookies, and the occasional cake/ice cream (on thursdays). This is much like the Dagstuhl tea time, but without the fancy tortes (hint hint!). Of course, no daily tea is complete with the addition of this:

By five, people are starting to trickle out slowly. On Tuesdays we have a happy hour at a local bar ($3 pints!). And it's time for me to check the sad state of my knees for the ride back, which is hard because it's uphill both ways !

The Sa-battle-cal starts..

I'm off on sabbatical, and we (two cars, two adults, two children and one cat) just started the long drive to Berkeley from SLC. This has turned out to be more exciting than I anticipated...

Our original plan was to drive 4 hours each day, making up the 12 hour drive to Berkeley in three days. With two drivers for two cars, this seemed like the best option to prevent us from getting over-tired.

Right at Wendover (Las Vegas for poor people!), about halfway on our first leg, my car broke down. Thankfully, I was able to coast it to a mechanic's shop just off the highway as we entered town. I had no clue what the problem was, and the mechanic wouldn't be able to take a look at it for a few hours (this is the week of the Bonneville races on the salt flats).

So I called my mechanic back in Salt Lake, and described the problem to him. He diagnosed it on the spot as a faulty ignition coil, which is apparently an easy part to procure and replace.... if you're near a dealership.

Which I was not...

He also needed me to figure out which coil was failing, which needed a computer scanner, which needed a mechanic.

So....

Here's what needed to happen, in short order. It was now 5pm. We (my wife and I) needed to

• get the mechanic to at least scan the car to get the appropriate error codes
• Call the car parts store (closing at 6) to see if they could procure the needed parts
• Find a hotel in Wendover (did I mention this was the week of the Bonneville Races, and almost everything in town was booked?)
• Change our reservations downstream because we were stuck in Wendover. 

Thankfully, through a series of small miracles and the generosity of many strangers and non-strangers, we managed to get all of this done. My mechanic even offered to to walk me through the installation myself once I did the appropriate Youtube self-study (MOOCs FTW !!)

Long story short, it's now day II of our trek. We doubled up the driving on day II to make up for lost time, and we're back on schedule (minus one set of car keys that I managed to lose in all the hurry). 

So far, this sabbatical is certainly not relaxing. 

p.s Shout out to Utah Imports of SLC, and S&R auto repair in Wendover. 

p.p.s I-80 through Nevada is one of the most mind-numbingly boring drives imaginable. 

"In the long run..."

"In the long run, we're all dead" is a famous quote attributed to John Maynard Keynes. The context was his arguments with economists of the time: he was trying to argue for government intervention in the markets to control inflation, rather than just letting it play out.

It's an apt response also to occasional claims that asymptotics will eventually win out, especially with large data. Asymptotics will eventually win out, as long as everything else stays fixed.

But that's the precise problem. Everything else doesn't stay fixed. Well before your $C n \log n$ algorithm beats the $c n^2$ algorithm, we run out of memory, or local cache, or something else, and the computational model changes on us.

We come up with external memory models, and are informed that in fact even a factor of log N is too much. We design streaming models and Mapreduce and so on and so forth, and realize that all this communication is burning a hole in our atmosphere.

Lesson to be learned (and re-learned): asymptotic analysis is a powerful tool, but it's only as good as the model of computation you're REALLY working with.

Absentmindedness

And now for a break from SODA updates. 

They say that professors are absentminded. I say that my mind is not absent: it's very very present - just somewhere else.

On that note, here are some levels of absentmindedness. I will refrain from any comment on how I came up with this list.

10. forgetting your keys are in your pocket
9. putting down your coffee while looking for keys and forgetting where you left it.
8. forgetting your glasses are on your head
7. forgetting that you're wearing your glasses
6. looking for your phone while holding it
5. missing your bus stop because you're day dreaming
4. missing your bus because you're day dreaming at the bus stop
3. taking your bus because you forgot you had the car that day
2. having to be reminded by your spouse not to take the bus because you took the car that day

I used to remember #1, but I've forgotten it.

Awards from the joint math meetings, and other notes..

It's the new year !! apparently, being on twitter makes blogging frequency drop, because the throwaway information one might blog about just gets tweeted. This is not a bad thing in general.

I've been away in India for much of the winter break, after dealing with the NSF proposal deadlines. On a side note, for anyone complaining about the SODA deadline close to the July 4 weekend, the NSF Dec 17 deadline is MUCH worse. I've submitted proposals now from a cruise ship in Hawaii and at 2:30 in the morning from my parent's place in Bangalore. argghhh

The Joint Math meetings are wrapping up in New Orleans, and award news is beginning to trickle out. Muthu mentions the prizes for Assaf Naor and Ingrid Daubechies. Much to my surprise and great pleasure, the wonderful and entertaining overhang papers by Paterson, Peres, Thorup, Winkler, and Zwick were given the David Robbins Prize for

 a paper with the following characteristics: it shall report on novel research in algebra, combinatorics or discrete mathematics and shall have a signifi cant experimental component; and it shall be on a topic which is broadly accessible and shall provide a simple statement of the problem and clear exposition of the work

The citation for their work is:

The Mathematical Association of America proudly awards the 2011 David P. Robbins Prize to Mike Paterson, Yuval Peres, Mikkel Thorup, Peter Winkler, and Uri Zwick for their innovative work on two papers: “Overhang,” American Mathematical Monthly 116, January 2009;
“Maximum Overhang,” American Mathematical Monthly 116, December 2009.

The two papers together solve, to within a constant factor, the classic problem of stacking blocks on a table to achieve the maximum possible overhang, i.e., reaching out the furthest horizontal distance from the edge of the table. The January paper was written by Paterson and Zwick, and the December paper was written by all five people named above. The January paper proves the surprising result that n blocks can be (cunningly) stacked using suitable counterbalancing to achieve an overhang proportional to $n^{1/3}$. (Many people have assumed that the overhang of about log n, given by the standard calculus exercise, is optimal.)
The December paper gave a complementary argument showing that an overhang proportional to n(1/3) is, in fact, the largest possible for any balanced stack.

The papers describe an impressive result in discrete mathematics; the problem is easily understood and the arguments, despite their depth, are easily accessible to any motivated undergraduate.

In other news, cstheory is humming along after the winter break. We're closing on in 3000 users. I'm always hoping for more on-target questions, especially in areas like approximations, geometry and AGT: complexity theory seems over-represented (which isn't a problem, but diversity is great!). We're hoping to develop some formal links with SIGACT fairly soon: stay tuned.

Odds and Ends

Glencora Borradaile makes her recommendations for FOCS videos to watch (can we have all our conferences do videos, please ? My 40 minutes on the bus will take on a whole new dimension). I like the idea of starring speakers who do a good job: might increase the competitive pressure. Come to think of it, here's another perk of having videos for conferences: sheer embarrassment will make sure that speakers improve their presentations.

The cstheory Q&A site rolls on. Those of you at FOCS might have noticed the little sheets in your registration packets, but I don't know if it actually encouraged new people to visit. If you're one of them, do drop a note in the comments. Three points of interest:

• We have a collaboratively edited article that we just submitted to SIGACT News (you can read the draft here). The article highlights some of the recent fascinating questions, answers and discussions on the site - do check it out
• This is purely anecdotal, but I've been hearing both at FOCS and on the site that people are having to avoid visiting the site because it's so addictive ! Don't worry - it isn't that bad - as a matter of fact I only spent 6 hours last night ! down from.. (never mind)..
• Another sign of catastrophic success: our first incident of undergrads in a theory class systematically trying to get their homework questions answered by posting on the site. Many alert users were able to close down the questions, but occasionally answers slip by. If you're an undergraduate and read this blog (HA ! blogs are for old fogies !), be warned...

Finally, because I'd be remiss not to do so, some neat questions (and answers) to chew on:

• What's the real complexity of computing the GCD of two numbers ?
• How hard is it really to compute the eigendecomposition of a matrix ?

And for some Sunday entertainment

(dare I say XKCD-style) Flowcharts for the life of the tenured and untenured professor. A collaborative School of Computing effort between my colleagues John Regehr, Matthew Might and myself (who says professors can't collaborate inside a department!).

Incidentally, we also make up the vast majority of our department's blogging presence.

If only they had given me an igNobel ...

Via Jeff Erickson (though I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be thanking him for this), my absurd research: http://bit.ly/d2CGJH

Although my wife is more impressed with this than
with any of my other papers ...

Could the IPad make computer science obsolete ?

OK fine. it's a provocative title. But hear me out.

Most non-cave-dwelling luddites have heard about the new Apple tablet (aka IPad). The simplest (and most misleading) way to describe it is as a gigantic ipod touch, with all the multitouch goodness of the ipod/iphone, as well as the numerous app store apps.

There's a vigorous debate going on over the merits and impact of the IPad, and while it's clear that it's not a work laptop/netbook replacement, it's probably the first internet appliance with some mojo.

The word 'appliance' is chosen deliberately. The IPad essentially behaves like a completely sealed off appliance - you can't hack it or customize it directly, and are only allowed the interface that's provided to you by Apple and the app store (also controlled by Apple). This is viewed (correctly, on many levels) as a feature, and not a bug. After all, most people don't care to know how their large and complicated computers really work, and all they want is a way to check email, surf the web, watch movies, etc etc.

But here's the thing. As long as the computer has been this complicated, hard to manage and yet critically important device, it's been easy to make the case for computer science as an important, lucrative discipline, and one worth getting into. Even in the past few years, with enrollments plummeting (they seem to be recovering now), there's been no argument about the importance of studying computer science (even if it comes across as boring to many).

And yet, how many people enroll in 'toaster science' ? More importantly, how many people are jumping on the chance to become automotive engineers ? As the computer becomes more and more of an appliance that we "just use", the direct connection between the person and the underlying computing engine go away.

Obviously there'll always be a need for computer scientists. Those social networks aren't going to data mine themselves, and someone needs to design an auction for pricing IPad ads. But it's quite conceivable that computer science will shrink dramatically from its current size down to a much smaller discipline that generates the experts working in the backend of the big internet companies (Microsoft, I'm not optimistic about your chances of survival).

This cuts both ways: a smaller discipline with more specialized skills means that we can teach more complex material early on, and are likely to attract only the dedicated few. However, it'll be a "few": which means that for a while, till we reach a new stable equilibrium, there'll be way fewer jobs at lower salaries.

I make this observation with no great pleasure. I'm an academic and my job might disappear within 10 years for other reasons. But along with rejoicing in the mainstreaming of what appears to be fairly slick use of technology, I'm also worried about what it means for our field as a whole.

Reading papers.

It's been a bad few months for blogging, while I've been doing (shudder) "real work". Whenever people ask me how I make time for blogging, I always say that it takes less time than one thinks. This is generally true, but the last few months have been a blizzard of paper and proposal deadlines, and I just never got the time to sit down and pen coherent thoughts. I've also noticed that my tweeting is bleeding thoughts away from the blog: random throw-away comments that might been assembled into a blog post end up merely getting tweeted.

For the first time in a long time, I took a "true" vacation, where not even a laptop came with me (ok I took my iphone, but that's not the same :)). It was only a week, but I appreciated the complete downtime, especially coming over the frenzy of deadlines. It's been hard to get back into the swing of things, but it was a really good way to recharge.

But you don't want to hear about any of that. What you really want to hear about is..... my lament on how to organize paper reading.

When I was a grad student, life seemed simple. STOC/FOCS/SODA (and then SoCG) would come around, we'd peruse the paper list, chatter on about them, and figure out if someone had scooped us or not. Now, things seem more complicated. Especially since I'm the sole algorithms person at the U, I feel the need to catch up on the latest (and not-so-latest) hot topics in theoryCS, at least to keep abreast of things and share the latest news with my students. I also work in a number of more 'applied' areas, which means that there's a SIGMOD/VLDB/PODS/ICDE timeline to keep track of, and more recently a NIPS/ICML/COLT timeline, not to mention even more applied areas like ICCV/CVPR/MICCAI (more on that later).

There's a large and complicated taxonomy of paper reading: some of the main items are:

• Papers I'm reading for technical material when working on a problem - this is the easiest kind to manage, because you have to read it RIGHT NOW.
• Papers that seem related to the problem I'm working on, and probably need to be cited, but are not in the critical path. This isn't too hard either - things like Mendeley allow me to save (and tag) papers for later use with just a few clicks. It's not a perfect system (what if the paper's on someone's home page), but it mostly works.
  

Then come the more complicated categories:

• Papers related to a problem that I'm not quite working on right now, but seem relevant. I can sock them away, but I have to remember to read them when I return to the other problem
• Papers that everyone's talking about at the latest-greatest conference, but might have nothing to do with my specific suite of problems (like for example the Moser LLL proof).
  
• Papers that might help me catch up on an area that is very hot, but which I wasn't following from the beginning (cough cough AGT cough cough)
• Papers that were just announced in the latest conference/arxiv/eccc issue, that sound worthy of perusal.
  

There are many technological solutions to squirrel stuff away: I even use Dave Bacon's arxiview app for the iPhone (and btw, I've found the only use for 2-column format - reading papers on the iphone). I've also experimented with private wordpress installations to allow me to bookmark interesting papers.

But the real problem, that I have yet to crack, is how to systematically plow through the mountains of reading that I must do to stay abreast of the fields I'm interested in. I've tried "read one paper a day", or "read papers over the weekend" and things like that, but nothing ever seems to stick, and I'm curious about what techniques people have used that actually work. I'm not excluding technological solutions, but I think the problem goes beyond that.

So what say you all ?

Anathem, and mathematical stereotypes

Neal Stephenson is (or should be !) a familiar figure in the sci-fi/speculative fiction landscape: his Cryptonomicon is a retelling of the story of Turing, along with much modern day drama involving advanced crypto and security. His new book, Anathem, came out with much fanfare, and is a vast tale set in a place where mathematics is a pursuit conducted in monastery-like places with strong religious overtones.

I'm reading Anathem right now, and am only at the beginning (so no spoilers please), but there's already a beautifully rendered discourse on stereotypes of the mathematican (or scientist in general). Inside the 'concent' (the monastery), these are termed 'Iconographies', as formal templates by which to understand how the "saecular" world perceives the mathematicians. I was reminded of this when writing I was writing the post on Soviet-style mathematics and realized the stereotypes at the heart of the referenced WSJ article.

So here are some of the iconographies discussed early on (you get one point for each one that you've encountered in real life):

• Tennestrian: seemingly clownish eccentric figures that have a darker side, luring impressionables and innocents into folly (a play on the story of Socrates)
  
• Doxan: brilliant, unemotional and cold, but as a consequence subordinate to passionate leaders with true human feeling. (can you say 'Spock'?)
• Yorran: Criminally insane mad scientist shut up in a lab with plans to conquer the world.
• Rhetorian: Sinister conspiracy plotters, out to take over the world by planting minions out in the secular world to attain positions of power.
• Muncostran: Eccentric, lovable, dishevelled theoreticians, absent-minded and good-natured (the subtext being: ignorable)
• Pendarthan: High-strung nervous meddling know-it-alls, unable to understand the realities of life, always subordinate to more 'masculine' (his words, not mine) secular folk.
• Klevan: Awesomely wise elder statesman who can solve all the problems of the world (apart from Einstein, I don't know of anyone who achieves such stature in our world)
• Baudan: Cynical frauds living in luxury at the expense of the common man (this sounds like the viewpoint of letter-writers to the Salt Lake Tribune)
• Penthabrian: keepers of mystical secrets handed down from above, with 'theory' as a smokescreen used to fool the lay folk (if only...)
• Moshianic: A combination of Klevan and Penthabrian - viewed as the most dangerous iconograph because of the high expectations placed on the theorist shoulders.

It's a neat trick to identify the ways in which the outside world perceives the 'theors', as they are called, and in doing so understand where the outsider is coming from, and what kind of threat they pose. I suspect I'm going to start classifying people in "the real world" the same way when I describe what I do.

Soviet-style mathematics

Via Anand Kulkarni (aka polybot) comes an interesting article in the WSJ by Masha Gessen on Grigori Perelman, Soviet-era mathematics and the question of 'big math'. The premise of the article (Masha Gessen has a book out on Perelman and the Poincare conjecture) is that special environments are needed to prove big results, and the Soviet-era mathematical enclaves fostered this environment both because of, and inspite of the Soviet political system.

It is indeed true that amazing work came out of the isolated confines of Soviet mathematical institutes, often parallel to or well before similar work in the Western world. There's a joke that goes around theoryCS circles that for every theorem proved before the 80s in the west, there's an equivalent result proved 10 years earlier by a Russian mathematician. We need look no further than the Cook-Levin theorem, the Koebe-Andreev-Thurston theorem (on circle packings), Kolmogorov-Chaitin-Solomonoff complexity (and according to some, the Cauchy-BUNYAKOVSKY-Schwarz inequality, though this is disputed).

But in the article is a more thought-provoking claim:

The flow is probably unstoppable by now: A promising graduate student in Moscow or St. Petersburg, unable to find a suitable academic adviser at home, is most likely to follow the trail to the U.S.

But the math culture they find in America, while less back-stabbing than that of the Soviet math establishment, is far from the meritocratic ideal that Russia's unofficial math world had taught them to expect. American math culture has intellectual rigor but also suffers from allegations of favoritism, small-time competitiveness, occasional plagiarism scandals, as well as the usual tenure battles, funding pressures and administrative chores that characterize American academic life. This culture offers the kinds of opportunities for professional communication that a Soviet mathematician could hardly have dreamed of, but it doesn't foster the sort of luxurious, timeless creative work that was typical of the Soviet math counterculture.

For example, the American model may not be able to produce a breakthrough like the proof of the Poincaré Conjecture, carried out by the St. Petersburg mathematician Grigory Perelman.

This is a reflection of one of the enduring myths of mathematical research, "a mathematician would be happy in jail if they had paper and pen", with a bit of the 'a mathematician is a solitary (and slightly crazy) genius'. I can see the allure in the idea: mathematics requires great concentration, and removal of distractions would surely make it easier to focus on a big problem.

But is this really impossible to achieve in the Western model of research ? After all, even Perelman's work built heavily on a program first outlined by Richard Hamilton from Columbia. Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's theorem while at Princeton. Ketan Mulmuley has been banging away at P vs NP while shuttling between Chicago and IIT Bombay (yes, I know it's not a perfect comparison because it hasn't been resolved yet). Stephen Cook proved that SAT is NP-Complete while at Toronto. And so on and so forth.

Possibly one argument in favor of the 'isolation: good' theory is that Perelman didn't need to prove himself for 6-7 years, maintain a steady stream of funding, and teach lots of classes in order to "earn" the right to study such a hard problem. It's hard to imagine a researcher in the US being able to do this before they get some kind of job security (tenure, or otherwise).

Quick note

(am posting this from 37000 ft. isn't technology cool ?)

The clustering series will be on hiatus for a few days while I wrap up some more pressing deadlines. It will restart two weeks from now.

Congratulations to Adam Smith and Sean Hallgren on getting a PECASE award. See what creating a new blog can do !

Quick hits

• If you limit yourself to actually reading one Terry Tao post each week (I'm told this frequency prevents brain explosion), then read this one.
• Joachim Gudmundsson wants to remind you that jausage is much taster than sausage. Oh yes, and JoCG is open for submissions.
• Get those SODA papers in (but not too many, I have work to do !)
• I kid, I kid....
• I wanted to spend more time talking about Robert Lang's talk on origami. It had deliciously beautiful pictures, and some even more juicy mathematics, and he pitched it at JUST the right level. No slides available, alas.
  
• Lecture notes on streaming from a workshop in Barbados...
• I had to explain to someone that Denmark is not a city in Sweden. And this after watching the Denmark-Sweden world cup qualifying game in a bar with a hundred roaring Danes, and feeling like I had been transported to a Viking battlefield.

And because I can't help myself, "SKÅL"

Kindle DX

Much well-deserved drooling over the Kindle DX. The killer app is native PDF support: as Michael Trick pointed out, the earlier Kindles didn't do too well with math support (the native Kindle document format is not PDF). I could easily see myself using the DX at conferences, rather than lugging around my laptop, or (worse) printing out copies of papers I wanted.

The Kindle has a nice feature that you can email documents to a specific address and have them synced automatically to the device, but it comes at a price ($0.10/document). If you use a direct transfer over USB though, it's free of course.

What I don't understand is why this has taken so long to happen: it seems to me that the academic market is the killer market for the Kindle: can you imagine transferring ALL your PDF papers to the Kindle for reading ? not to mention books ?

p.s for those of you who will no doubt point out that other readers exist that can read PDF, and are puzzled by all the hype over the Kindle, I leave you to your Archos MP3 players and Opera browsers.

p.p.s I spotted my first Kindle in the wild a month ago at a conference. It was rather cute looking. the DX will be much larger of course.

Committees and conferences...

FOCS 2009 PC size: 20
SODA 2009 PC size: 27
ICDE 2010 PC size: 230
IJCAI 2009 PC size: 600

SoCG 2008 attendance: ~150
SODA 2008 attendance: ~300

It's an impressive feat when a conference PC is larger than an entire other conference. It also explains why everyone has more PC memberships than I do :)

Wordles for STOC/FOCS/SODA/SoCG

A wordle is a visualization of the words in a text, organized to give more frequent words higher priority. It's a cute way of illustrating the repeated concepts in a text.

My student Parasaran Raman made wordles for the paper titles for FOCS 2008 and STOC/SODA/SoCG 2009. You can click on each image to get a larger view. Draw your own conclusions :)

FOCS 2008:


STOC 2009:


SODA 2009:


SoCG 2009:

Theory "vs" Practice

Today's Wild Side science column from the NYT (guest blogged by Stephen Quake) is an interesting Roscharch test for which side you fall on in the 'theory-practice' divide. The article in fact argues a very valid point: that great research is often done by moving smoothly between theoretical study and practical applications, rather than privileging one over the other. Along the way, he cites Gauss, Kelvin, Archimedes and others as examples of people doing solid theoretical work inspired by, and inspiring, more practical considerations.

I mention the Roscharch test because (like with political commentary) one often tends to read bias or skew into neutral statements. For example, practitioners will find much to be happy about in this opening:

The snobbish idea that pure science is in some way superior to applied science dates to antiquity

and theoreticians will be consoled by:

The stereotyped view is that the applied scientists control the lion’s share of funding, while the basic scientists control the most prestigious journals and prizes.

but if you can get beyond your reflexes, it's a fair article about the need to think broadly about the "impact" of your work both theoretically and practically, and how this can lead to solid research on both counts.

Flying While Brown, in 2009...

No beards, no scarfs, and DEFINITELY no discussion of safe places to sit:

Mr. Irfan turned to his wife, Sobia Ijaz, as they boarded AirTran Flight 175 at Reagan National Airport near Washington Thursday afternoon, and wondered aloud where the safest place to sit on the airplane would be — the front? The rear? Over the wing? 

But passengers sitting behind them evidently overheard the remark, saw Mr. Irfan’s beard and his wife’s head scarf, and grew concerned. Mr. Irfan and his wife, along with six members of their extended family, are Muslims, and were on their way to a religious conference in Orlando when they boarded the flight.

The worried passengers contacted flight attendants, who contacted Transportation Security Administration officials, and soon, Mr. Irfan and his wife were off the plane and being questioned in the jetway. The six remaining family members in the traveling party were taken off the plane as well, along with a family friend who happened to be on the same flight and who happens to be a lawyer for the Library of Congress. 

Next, the nine Muslim passengers — all but one are United States-born American citizens — were taken to a quarantine area in the passenger lounge where they were questioned by F.B.I. agents. Mr. Irfan’s three small nephews were denied access to food in the family’s carry-on luggage. 

Before long, Mr. Irfan told The Lede in an interview Friday morning, the F.B.I. concluded that the incident was obviously just a misunderstanding, and told AirTran officials that the family was cleared to travel. But he said AirTran still refused to rebook them, offering only to refund their tickets. The F.B.I. agents helped the family get on a later USAirways flight to Orlando, but those seats cost them twice as much.

Happy new year, same as the old year.

While in Paris...

My latest reason for being off the air has to do with the amazingly bad internet capabilities of Paris hotels. Yes, I'm in Paris, city of lovers, but certainly not of lovers of wifi. There are at least 30 networks visibile wherever you go, but they're all secure, so no mooching. The hotel-provided wifi is actually a generic service that costs 22 E/day for connectivity, with all kinds of bandwidth caps and a very slow connection. If I were to splurge for the "business" level, I get the luxury of paying 27 E/day, with unclear benefits (presumably I can now download my bootleg bittorrents (just kidding)).

Other things I've noticed since I last came to Paris: (which is not to say that they are new, just that I just noticed them):

• Every second store on the podunk street my hotel is on is a fancy clothing store. Clearly the world-wide economic collapse has not hit.
• Speaking of world-wide economic collapses, it really hurts to have a weak dollar. $7 espressos, sigh...
• ....but it's always a pleasure to walk into a cafe and order a 'cafe' and just know that something good will appear. This is in contrast to the unbounded depth circuit needed to specify a proper cup of coffee at Starbucks.
• Speaking of Starbucks, how on earth can they even survive in Paris ? I mean, you go to a Starbucks here, and you get the same experience as in the US, ending with a paper cup of coffee of questionable quality that you drink perched on a high bar stool. On the other hand, you go to a cafe, and they serve you with nice cups, and a little cookie, and let you sit there for hours nursing your coffee, and will even give you the WEP key for their secured WiFi. It's no contest !
• You can change the world while nursing your coffee. I was staying in the 14th Arrondissement (the Montparnasse area) and had to have a coffee at the Dome cafe, a place apparently frequented by Lenin and Trotsky before the Revolution. I have to say that at the time I went, the clientele looked like they were plotting a revolution... in 1907.... I'd link to a verification of this, but I can't make any sense out of the search results on google.fr
• Speaking of which, how does one tell google NOT to return results in french ? every time I edit the URL to go to google.com, it sends me back to google.fr. Suivant !!!

And why am I blogging from Paris, you might ask ? Well here's why. I'm an invited speaker, no less. Conference blogging was limited because there was no wifi at the conference site either. It's a long story involving military schools (and maybe even NASA). Details will appear shortly.