Eventually, I believe the idea is to turn them into podcasts that you can listen to as you run at 7-8 minutes per mile.

Anyway, I’m excited for her and thought I’d help her spread the news. Feel free to tell any of your friends in Boston or San Francisco to check out cityruntours.com.

1.  In real life, the winner is the country with the best economy/happiest citizens, not the one who prevents global warming, so that’s how the game must work, too.

2.  Global warming requires cooperation, but per point 1, everyone also has to compete.

3.  Preventing global warming presents a cost, and if it is prevented, the benefit is constant to all players.  Thus, it’s best to be a free-rider on any solution.

4.  Global warming won’t happen for certain.  Even if it does happen, we have no idea when it will occur or what the impact will be.  This means we need a mechanism to randomly decide each turn if global warming occurs, how severe the impact is, and a time limit on the game, so that it maybe doesn’t happen.

5.  There has to be a way for all people to lose.  Otherwise, no one would ever try to prevent global warming; they’ll just try to be the best after it does occur.  This competes against the free-rider problem.

6.  I think this game needs a victory point system.  Victory points can be spent on something that prevents global warming (enviro-chips?).  Every turn, players tell the other players how many enviro-chips they have; however, they don’t need to tell the truth (these are governments releasing figures on pollution).  Victory points can also be spent on things that get more victory points (industry; maybe R&D as well?), but may produce more pollution (or maybe just the fact that you’re not buying enviro-chips is enough “pollution”).

7.  Global warming takes a bunch of VPs (half?) from everyone and makes it harder to get more.

8.  There’s a minimum number of VPs required to win and a limited number of turns (also random?).

9.  If global warming is prevented (determined by counting total enviro-chips at the time of global warming and comparing them to the number required to prevent global warming, which is determined by a severity roll, also at the time of global warming), instead of losing VPs, everyone gets some small number (same to everyone, though)

10.  Trade needs to be a part of the game, which helps you get VPs.  This is so that players can punish someone who is not going along with saving the planet (or the other way around).  Table talk is encouraged, so that people can come up with a plan/convince others to finance more of global warming.

11.  The minimum severity of global warming must be big enough that it’s not realistic for a single player to prevent it (or maybe if it is possible, that player has no chance of winning)

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Well, I know it’s not very organized, but those are a few thoughts I had.  Maybe I’ll actually try to flesh it out a bit more, since I think this sounds like it could actually be a really good game.  Anyone else have any ideas?

As I thought about the problem, I realized that salsa dancing (and most partner dances) is really a finite-state machine. We have X number of states (the positions that you end up in on beat 1), and transitions between the states (twirls, etc.). Naturally, I thought of creating a diagram with states and transitions and tracing paths through the diagram to come up with new sequences. This way, if I could memorize a few positions and all the different transitions between them, I could come up with lots of sequences on my own without ever having to memorize a two-minute series of steps. Each set of steps would be at most 8 or 16 beats long.

Still, I didn’t know exactly what to call each state, what precisely is considered a transition, or most importantly, how to present this information in a usable manner. Last week, I was again thinking about this and realized that since a finite-state diagram is also a directed graph, and the web is a directed graph, a webpage made perfect sense for a presentation mechanism. Moreover, if I used a wiki, I could start adding pieces very easily, even if I don’t know the best terminology or have the perfect definition of each state. Plus, other people can add their own moves to the wiki and eventually, we can all learn from each other.

Thus, yesterday morning, I started a new website: salsa.wikidot.com. So far it’s not much; I have a few positions and moves described, and I plan to add more. I feel a little bit like I shouldn’t actually be the one adding content, since I’m so new at dancing and don’t really know how to describe everything. However, I also think that a lot of times we just need to start doing something even if we don’t know how, so there it is. I have it set up so that it will be easy to add photos and videos of the steps if I ever get that far. Should be fun. Hopefully this helps someone someday.

Now that I’m here, though, I noticed that I really haven’t written in an incredibly long time; I thought I wrote more than that.  Anyway, I guess history proves that I can’t promise anything on here – so, no promises of posts, etc.  You get what you get.

I have had a few thoughts of things I could write about, though, so I think I’ll write another short post tonight before I go to sleep (I hate mixing topics, so I’m not going to put it in this one).

The jeans cost $45, the shirt was $22, and shipping altogether was $20. I think the shipping rate goes down a little if you buy more items at a time. Still, the prices are fairly reasonable. $55 for a nice pair of jeans is just over average, and $32 is a little high (if you usually buy on sale), but possibly worth it if it fits perfectly.

I decided to measure myself according to the directions on their website and see how the items turned out. My shipment arrived yesterday, for a total production+delivery time of 18 days. Not too bad.

It turns out that the material and craftsmanship in both the jeans and shirt is extremely good. For example, check out how they lined up the stripes across the shoulder seam versus the black shirt from Express (which would have cost $45 had I not gotten it on sale).  Unfortunately, the jeans don’t quite fit. I probably should have had a tailor help me get my measurements, since I wasn’t really sure how to estimate what the correct number for me should be, and the seat of my pants is slightly too tight.

Nevertheless, I’m very happy with the overall quality and will probably order from them again (after getting professionally measured).

1. I could give it up and suddenly not be online.
2. I could use generic services like GMail and Blogger to maintain a basic web profile.
3. I could host my own server either with a dynamic DNS entry or with a static IP address and dedicated hostname.

None of these were quite right enough for me because I want to be online with a distinctive, cohesive website on which I have a lot of room to experiment, but I also want the 99.9% uptime guarantee for essential services that places like GMail provide. Therefore, I really don’t want to just not be online anymore; generic services don’t allow room to experiment, nor do they provide a cohesive web presence; and frankly, I’ll probably be messing around with my server too much to provide any sort of uptime guarantee.

After a little bit of research, I decided to go with a free Google Apps account with a personal domain name ($10/year). This is nice, because Google Apps provides all the functionality of the Google suite – GMail, Calendar, Docs, etc., but with the personal domain name, I can also set it up so that some subdomains point at my own server. This provides a coherent interface to the outside world. You can see what I mean if you go to http://blog.mpdaugherty.com and you end up on http://daugherty.mit.edu.

On the other hand, my email address (which I’m not going to type here because of spammers) is also @mpdaugherty.com, but when I check it, the interface is basically the same as GMail; this is so much more convenient than trying to set up my own mail server and make sure everything continually works correctly.

My only disappointment is that the web pages part of Google Apps is very limited. You cannot just upload html files arbitrarily; at least for your homepage, you must use their WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. I already have a fine website design; why can’t I use it? Luckily, this won’t be a problem in the Fall, once I get my server set up and redirect http://www.mpdaugherty.com/ there. For the summer, however, I may have to just live with the pre-designed Google webpage templates.

Unfortunately, soon after changing the theme, I noticed a sharp drop in visitors on my Google Analytics reports. Since my readership is so low anyway, I first attributed this just to people being busy and/or not noticing anything.  However, after three days of zero visitors showing up (even when I tried to make visitors show up by visiting myself), i realized something was wrong.  Turns out, I forgot that the display of WordPress blogs is entirely decided by the theme, and the way I had gotten Analytics working before was to put the javascript code into the theme footer.  So, when I changed the theme, I also eliminated all the tracking code from my website.  It’s back in there again (you can check), so everything should be back to normal.
So, in conclusion, let me know if you like the new theme.  I’m a little worried that I won’t be able to keep it over the summer when I will probably host my blog on wordpress.com for free, but I guess I’ll figure that out when it’s absolutely necessary.

After I woke up (late, of course), I decided to check my degree audit online again to see if anything new had been posted, and there it was… I had enough credits! The only piece still missing is the credit for my UAP, but since I personally turned in the UAP grade report and saw the “A” written on it, I feel ok. In 13 days, I will be an MIT Grad. I can finally turn my ring around and move on with my life. I can’t wait.

My project ended up being some work in story-analysis using common sense (provided by ConceptNet, another Media Lab project) as well as trying a new approach to anaphora resolution (basically determining antecedents for pronouns), which didn’t rely so much on common sense.

If you’re really interested, you can download the paper I wrote. I also am planning on releasing the source code to my project by the end of the month, though I want to get through my linear-algebra final first before I clean it up and put it on a webpage somewhere.