Ten Things that happened or that I learned on our 8-day trip to Seattle

1. I wrote a sentence in my book about how depending on what country you’re in, you get a totally different view of the psychoacoustic research leading up to mp3 coding (though the concepts — masking, critical bands, etc., are all the same). Then Lucent (the fools who closed Bell Labs) won a suit against …

10 Things About Berlin

I arrived in Berlin having never spent any time in Germany apart from what must add up to a few days in the Frankfurt Airport (sorry “Flughafen”) and knowing almost no German. Here are some incredibly pedestrian insights resulting from that set of circumstances. 1. From outside the U-Bahn, it sounds just like the Washington …

Modernity in a List

Legend Berlin Time/Montreal Time: Activity List 8:45am/2:45am: Wake up. Notice new headcold. 9:30/3:30am: Eat tasty German hotel breakfast with cool people from Paris and Davis. 10:30am/4:30am: Catch a cab to the airport. Drive by funky old looking monument. Ask in (very!) broken German what it is. Turns out it was a victory monument. I thought …

Atheistic Drinks at Lunch on Campus

So I was speaking on the phone with a friend last night who has just moved from Canada to take an academic job in the U.S. So I did to her what all the Canadians did to me when we arrived here. “So? What’s it like? What are the differences? Have you considered starting a …