Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity

Great. Yet another day of aspirins and coffee…

The April 3 deadline for Workshop on Massive Data Algorithmics is
approaching. See here for details.

You might be wondering what does the word algorithmics means. It turns out to be related to agronomics; that is, the study of how to grow algorithm trees (in this case in soil made out of massive data). Its like spagetti trees, but better.

The pope says no to condoms: .

This might be known – given a set P of n convex pseudodisks (or pseudocircles if you subscribe to this good old religion) in the plane, can one always find a covex body C in 3d such that every given pseudo* is the projection of the boundary of intersection of C with some plane?

For circles this of course holds by setting C to be the standard paraboloid z=x^2 + y^2.

Update: For more info on pseudo-disks see the post by David.

Umesh Vazirani has a short writeup explaining the new FOCS submission procedure. While the problems are real (for example, the amount of work associated with being a FOCS/STOC PC memeber is ludicriously large), the solution looks a bit too mild for the problem.

The only worry I have is that a PC member might “referee” the paper by reading the short summary instead of reading the whole paper (hopefully not going to happen). I think one can make this more effective, by:

1. The short two page summary should be informal (i.e., like the talk given for the paper). It should not be just a cut & paste of the intro of the paper.
2. The summary should explicitly address several questions that would help refereeing the paper:
   1. Why do the authors care/excited about this result?
   2. Why do you think the paper should be accepted?

Via Muthu.

Seeing the Labour party in Israel going into the right wing govrenemnt is a cause for a post depression attack of depression.

Twilight Samurai: nice movie… http://tinyurl.com/6z9cao

One shot two kills… http://tinyurl.com/cd32lj

The left always sounds pedantic, and the right always sounds like they are in the middle of a coverup operation of something.

Virginity rate by major. Interesting, but not sure I believe Math is much higher than CS. http://tinyurl.com/cu3tww