I guess I haven’t been in suburbia during Halloween for a while, because I don’t remember so many Halloween decorations on houses when I was in high school. It’s starting to rival Christmas! And then there’s one home which decided to incorporate Christmas lights into their Halloween decorations. Thinking ahead…

I think the special election called by California’s governor is a complete waste of money, but since we’re having it, we might as well vote on the propositions before us. Proposition 77, which takes the power to redraw voting districts out of the hands of the legislature and into a panel of retired judges, is the only proposition I am voting for. It’s not perfect — there’s no reason to redraw districts until the next census in 2010 — but it’s a lot better than what we have now. Here are a couple of examples.

Congressional District 11 has a grotesque shape over parts of four counties, covering such disparate cities as Moraga, Pleasanton, Morgan Hill, and Manteca. State Senate District 15 stretches from Saratoga 200 miles down to northern Santa Barbara County. If this isn’t blatant gerrymandering, I don’t know what is. I want to put an end to this #$&%@&, so I’m voting yes on Proposition 77.

All of the other propositions are either bad ideas or poorly thought out, so I’m voting no on everything else.

There’s no excuse for anyone getting less than perfect on this quiz (unless they’re younger than 8th grade ):

• Could You Pass 8th-Grade Math?

Today was the second day of the grand opening celebration at the de Young Museum, and it was in full swing. Ben and I planned to meet at 10 AM, but when I got there, I found no parking within the park and settled for the new parking garage underneath the Music Concourse. It ended up being $15 for 4 hours — painful, but worth not circling the park for an hour. Then I got in line, which at the time stretched from the museum entrance all the way out to 8th Ave and JFK Drive, about 200 yards. A volunteer guessed it would take about 1½ hours, but it ended up being “only” 45 minutes, and granted, the line moved faster than I expected.

There is so much to see at the museum that we chose to concentrate our visit in three areas: the tower, where you get great views of the city; the special exhibition on Hatshepsut, the only female pharoah of ancient Egypt; and American paintings from the 18^th and 19^th centuries. I really enjoyed the Hudson River School and trompe-l’oeil paintings, but there were a few pieces of contemporary art that also caught my eye, including a stainless steel “fake rock” by Zhan Wang. As for the building itself, it’s very unusual, but in a good way (IMHO). I hope the copper holds up in the salt air… [photos]

Normally, my taste in architecture is traditional, but I’ve been trying to broaden my range. For example, San Jose’s new City Hall, which had its grand opening today, is decidedly modernist: clean lines and an absence of ornament. This is no surprise given the architect, Richard Meier. But it is an impressive space: the all-glass rotunda is striking, as are the views from the 18th floor, the tallest vantage point in the city. Dare I say, it’s a good place to bring visitors from out of town. Now if only the surrounding downtown blocks could get spiffed up a bit… [photos]

Thanks to the San Jose Mercury News, I am tuned into the Asian music scene. Or something like that. Case in point: the 12 Girls Band (女子十二樂坊), a band of classically-trained 13 women (originally 12) from China who use classical Chinese instruments to play contemporary Chinese and Western songs, including a cover of Clocks by Coldplay. I am intrigued…

New York Times: Classes in Chinese Grow as the Language Rides a Wave of Popularity

With encouragement from the Chinese and American governments, schools across the United States are expanding their language offerings to include Chinese, the world’s most spoken tongue, not to mention one of its most difficult to learn.

Yesterday IBM Research celebrated its 60th anniversary, quite a remarkable achievement when you think about the fate of other fabled labs such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. At Almaden, we had watched video from the main celebration at Yorktown.

Fred Brooks was one of the speakers at Yorktown, and he’s a very good speaker. A smooth delivery with a gentle Southern drawl, he talked about the lab in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s and had some wonderful anecdotes about Gene Amdahl (pioneer in mainframes), John Cocke (“father of RISC”), Ted Codd (inventor of the relational database), and Ken Iverson (inventor of the APL and J programming languages), among others.

We also had had a guest speaker of our own: David Patterson, Berkeley CS professor (Go Bears!), and president of the ACM. I liked what he had to say about what he considered to be the most pressing research needs in computer science: security, privacy, usability, and reliability (SPUR). He pointed out that the human experience is central to all four of these topics, and it’s refereshing to hear a person not in HCI recognize the importance of the human experience in computers.

I was surprised to learn that Google Maps was referring to Taiwan as a “province of China.” After all, how can there be room on a map for such a long label? It turned out the map itself only ever labeled Taiwan as Taiwan, but up until Monday, there was a space to the left of the map that listed the “official name” of a region if the map was zoomed out that far. And Google presumably got those official names from sources such as the ISO. Now that Google has removed that space, those official names, and the source of the controversy, are gone.

But, despite protests to the contrary, it is actually true that Taiwan is technically a province of China. The real question is: which China? The government that rules Taiwan is officially called the Republic of China, which was founded in 1912 after the emperor was overthrown. Even though it lost control of mainland China in 1949 to the communists, for decades it claimed it was the sole legitimate government for all of China, which the United Nations and the United States recognized until the 1970s. The only parts of China that the Republic of China currently rules is Taiwan province and a few bits of Fujian province.

Of course, no one thinks of the Republic of China when they think of China. “China” is, for all intents and purposes, synonymous with the People’s Republic of China ruled by the communists. Even the current government in Taiwan thinks so, and it is now promoting a “Taiwan”-based identity ahead of the “Republic of China.” Therefore, calling Taiwan a “province of China” is just asking for trouble, and I’m glad Google got rid of it, even if it was indirectly.

A miracle happens: Kepler's Books is saved! And in a timely article, the San Jose Mercury News describes how several independent bookstores have adapted to survive the chain bookstore and Internet era, including the Berkeley institution Cody's taking the gutsy move of opening a branch in Union Square.