Angela J. Hill

From the French–but as there’s no perfect translation, I’m using it as-is.

Flambeur: a big-shot, a high-roller, a show-off, a risk-taker. I’ll also add, a compulsive-hyphenator.

or

But don’t limit yourselves. All gifts welcome.

I may have forgotten to mention that 2569062 was going to get a companion piece.

Partway through the first one, after doing about a bajillion dots (all by hand! With a paintbrush!) I thought, Hey, I should totally have punched out a bunch of dots with a hole punch and just scattered those on a canvas. An artist friend suggested that I do both. After finishing the painting I got going on this one–first with spray adhesive, which was both a pain in the ass and also ineffective, and then after sleeping on it for a few nights, I settled on using a gloss medium as both glue and varnish and applying the dots with a paintbrush. It worked! And I realized that I loooooouuuurrrve the two pieces together with this one so much less filled in. They tell the story that way! Continue Reading…

A pinky ring? Are you serious? You’re far too young to stoop to that level.

This outfit is a veritable cornucopia (see? Thanksgiving theme) of things I’ve made, and funny faces. Though you can’t see the other funny faces, I guarantee they were there in the b-roll. Anyhoodle, here’s the list of items in which I am clad:

Black and white splatter-paint print pencil skirt, which I made
Oatmealy tank
Plaid punkified blazer, which I reworked from a conservative one I had
Black & brown booties with which I am strangely preoccupied
Leather & stone necklace from a street vendor on the St. Charles Bridge in Prague
Big ring, which I made from accoutrements (French accent please) I picked up in Paris

Since I just made the jacket, it gets more pictures of its own. Things I did to the jacket include:

Cutting off the sleeve
Removing the…ahem…shoulder pads
Making holes in it with sandpaper over rocks
Washing it
Safety-pinning the sleeve back on
Drawing on it with a sharpie
Odd and unplanned pink and red embroidery
Adding black and white striped trim over some seams
Adding an applique at the nape of the neck
Popping the collar (for added coolness)
Removing the label, embroidering “ANGEL” over “MERON” while still using the final “A” from “Merona” (thanks, Target!), and then hand-sewing it back on
Removing one of the buttons and replacing it with a mismatched one
More Pictures…

It’s finally done!

The numbers were filled in with an interference violet that makes the whole thing shimmer as the light changes. See how the (white) numbers are greener on the left and pinker on the right? This has been a ton of work but I’m really pleased with the result! Continue Reading…

I love pink tights.

Included herein:

Printed wrap dress
Black long-sleeved tee (under the dress)
Pink tights!
Black suede & patent heels
Printed leather spats (which I made, natch)
Grey drusy ring
Pearl earrings from a street market

May I also add that I created the table I’m sitting on? Bought the structure, but I created the whole rock thing and did the finishing. It’s bumpy and impractical as a coffee table, but I tend to think of that as a challenge moreso than anything else.

I’ve rediscovered (again) the first jazz album I ever fell in love with: Joe Williams’ Ballad and Blues Master. Back in the diz-ay (high school jazz choir…) we did an arrangement of a tune on this album, “One Hundred Years from Today/Tomorrow Night”. Since I was brand new to jazz, I listened to that track on the album over and over. Let’s add, it was on a dubbed tape copy of the CD, further demonstrating my dedication. Somewhere along the line I realized that every lick of piano on the whole thing is pure genius: a pure genius by the name of Norman Simmons. Between these two, it’s jazz that’s interesting, tasty, and completely accessible. What more can you ask for?

A couple of years later I saw Joe live with George Shearing, another brilliant pianist–just the two of them. They had an album, Here’s to Life, coming out shortly thereafter, which of course I bought. Most of it is highly orchestral (so I missed the tasty jazz piano) but the last track is an excruciatingly beautiful Joe-plus-George duet of the title song, made all the more poignant since Joe passed away a few years later.

During my first college jazz band audition, which I found terribly intimidating, the director asked about my musical influences. Off the bat I listed Keith Jarrett and Norman Simmons, and as soon as I related Norman back to Joe, the director (who was pretty stone-faced up until this point) broke into a big smile and said that Joe Williams was his dream guest for the annual jazz festival. I made the first band and the rest is history.

I have a client with a sort of complex setup. We host most of their site, so we can manage URLs and page titles. However, their press releases are hosted offsite, where we have very limited control. Unfortunately those are files on which they need very specific reporting. They need to see aggregate page views to these pages as well as be able to look up views to specific press releases. The page URLs are unintelligible, and the names have nothing in common, but all of these pages are in the same folder on this offsite host.

I can get aggregate numbers in the Content Drilldown report, since they’re all in the same folder. However, in the Content by Title report, the client gets frustrated at having to search for the desired page name, because there are so many other page names on the site–and since the press release page names don’t have anything in common, we can’t do a search for the common term to reveal all of the press releases.

To get around this, I needed to create a profile and filter that preserves the folder structure of the press releases, but replaces the file name in the URI with the page title. This will let us use the Content Drilldown report for everything, and when we navigate into that press release folder, we can see the page names instead of the unintelligible URLs. Bam. Best of both worlds. Continue Reading…

Just kidding. I’m completely smitten.

Saw him in Bozeman, Montana at HATCH and just assumed he was a really talented local guy. After striking up a ridiculous conversation about his cool hat, went home and thought, I need that album. Lo and behold: he’s the son of James Taylor and Carly Simon. Which I should have figured out just because a) he looks exactly like James Taylor, and b) he sounds exactly like James Taylor. It was just so out of context, I guess. Anyway, he played in SF a couple of weeks back and I went to that show as well (also great) and found out the specifics of a poem he’d recited in MT: What Do You Make of the Stars by Tim Mayer.

The iTunes commercial with the Coldplay song
The American Express commercial with Diane von Furstenburg
Every military recruitment video ever made
The Snickers commercial with the guitar that comes out of nowhere
The “I’m not a chicken, you’re a turkey!” anti-drug commercial from my youth
The Boost Mobile commercial with the cool 3D

There are…even more dots! We’re getting close now…

This painting, which I’ve shown before, is coming along. I can’t believe how much work this has turned out to be. There are really a LOT of…dots. But, I’ve finally hit a point where the momentum is starting to carry me–I think I’ve crossed into the home stretch.

Continue Reading…

Today’s magic outfit includes this skirt that I made. It’s a copy of a pencil skirt I happen to love. I’ve had it in mind to do a pencil skirt in this fabric for a while and finally got around to it this weekend. In toto, this outfit includes:

Splatter-paint-look pencil skirt, made by yours truly
Fancy new shoes, which are my new favorites (don’t mention this to the other shoes)
Drapey black top
Silver nonspecific-predatory-cat ring with green sparkly eyes (a.k.a. tackiest ring ever)
White enamel ring from a Marimekko boutique in Seattle
70’s-lamp-style owl necklace

Also about the skirt: I actually did this one right. Normally I rush through all of the prep and pretty much freestyle the whole thing. This time, however, I not only made an actual pattern, I also trued it up, put in a lapped zipper according to instructions, did an interfaced waistband, finished the seams, topstitched the seams, added contrast bias tape to the hem and kick pleat, AND learned how to use the blind hem stitch on my machine. Wheeeee!

P.S. I had intended to that this photo be of the skirt only, but the disembodied skirt looked really weird. So, skirt in context. But, the shot was lined up without my head in it. Fear not, I still have my head. It will return.

In addition to a steady diet of fashion magazines, I’m reading a lot of math stuff. (Obviously.) This book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, is sort of a cross between math, probability, philosophy, biology, and history.

The thing that’s getting me about this is the description of two different types of systems: one where things cluster in the middle, and one where they cluster at the outer edges (the author refers to them as “Mediocristan” and “Extremistan”). The second reminds me of the Lorenz attractor–a system where values cluster around two values instead of one.

Taleb applies his Mediocristan/Extremistan model to financial systems, which seems like nice work if you can get it. In the context of money, it seems to make sense that there would be two clusters–basically, big successes and big failures. And the Lorenz attractor has two “clusters” as well. But there are plenty of other strange attractors that are more complex. Is it possible that Taleb’s one-dimensional Extremistan has two-, three-, or more-dimensional counterparts that we can use to discuss highly improbably events?

Miriam Makeba died the way I’d like to think a lot of musicians would choose: while singing one of her greatest hits.

A lot of other people will say a lot more knowledgeable things about her life and accomplishments than I could. But I can say this for sure: she was a master at creating those moments when, as a listener, you sit up, take notice, and realize that somehow, you’ve been connected to something much bigger than yourself. This video from Paul Simon’s Graceland concert is a perfect example.

I made this!

Continue Reading…

Bayesian search theory uses the work of mathematician Thomas Bayes to find lost objects–particularly objects lost at sea. For example, submarines.

What’s great about this method is that it works with hunches. In the search for the USS Scorpion, John Craven used Bayesian search theory, along with Vegas-style rounds of betting by a group of experienced submariners, to construct a theory about where the Scorpion could be found. The key elements of Bayesian search theory are:

1. Creating a variety of hypotheses, and probabilities, about where the object might be
2. Determining the likelihood of finding the object in each of those places, assuming it’s there (i.e., if the water’s deeper, it’s harder to find)
3. Multiplying these two together to make a probability map
4. Continuously revising the map as the search is conducted (i.e. when it’s not found in the first location, it’s more likely to be found in the second location, and so forth)

What does this have to do with anything, you ask? (But…you may ask that about nearly any post on this blog…) First, this technique is used in prediction markets and spam filtering online today. But second, I think there’s no reason that the concept can’t be used in just about any type of research where we’re looking for something within a finite amount of area (physical or conceptual). In that case, the keys would be:

1. Defining the area in which you’re searching
2. Developing good hunches
3. Quantifying the strength of those hunches
4. Knowing your subject matter well enough to determine the feasibility of the hunches
5. Doing the math

I’m going to try this the next time I’m looking for predictive analytics relationships!

I DID IT, Nicole. I found a way to wear the leather necktie necklace.

This includes:

STUDDED LEATHER NECKTIE NECKLACE, a lovely birthday gift/dare from Nicole
White wife-beater
White men’s dress shirt, tied at the waist with sleeves rolled up
Big sparkly ring I got at the same place Nicole got me the necklace!
Dark blue jeans
Brown sandals, knockoffs of those Dior ones Carrie wore in the SATC movie
Continue Reading…

Fashion war partially on hold. Had to go onsite to a client this morning…added the hat afterward.

This still partially weird, but nowhere near as weird as I’d like it to be, outfit consists of:

Grey jersey dress (worn backward!)
Chiffon Alice Roi top with weird flamenco-y sleeves
Camel wool fedora
Red felt flower I got at a trimmings shop in Paris
Black earrings from H&M
Shell ring from Costa Rica (thanks, Katie!)
Strange pointy ring from my mom

…and additionally, though you can’t see them:

A bracelet from an antique store in Austin
Black peep toe shoes with white polka dots and red wedges…$8 at Target.com, also bought by virtually every woman I know

Tomorrow will be weirder.

My brother Aaron is a great saxaphonist and is bizarrely obsessed with throat singing, which is NEAT but can indeed draw attention when done in public. Not always good attention…

Throat singing is a way of creating more than one note at a time with your voice. Follow the link above to hear/see an example. Multiphonics is a more general term for this; it often refers to creating more than one note at a time on a woodwind instrument. It sounds impossible–any type of horn is set up to create only one wavelength, and the presence of two notes indicates that there are two wavelengths supported at once.

At any rate–I just came across this piece of research (from 1989…but it’s new to me) that concludes that woodwind multiphonics can be described with strange attractors (a main concept in chaos theory). Given my ongoing chaos obsession, the audio background, and all of the thought I’ve been putting into how web analytics relate to each of those individually, this seems like it could sort of close the whole loop! Hopefully I can find some followup research.

…but I’m not the only one.

I’m nowhere near being done talking about Chaos: Making a New Science. Possibly because it offers infinite complexity…haha. Ahh. Yes. Jokes no one will get.

Anyway, while thinking about phase shifting behavior in nature (which is really neat: matter behaves predictably when it’s a solid, liquid, etc., but at that point when it’s changing from one to the other–freezing, melting, what-have-you–it behaves completely unpredictably. Not only that, but its behavior is nothing like either a solid or a liquid. It’s chaotic), it occurred to me that this is true for project management, too. We know what to do when we’re in the strategy, creative, or engineering phases of a project. Chaos arises at the handoffs.

Chaos was hard to study from a math/science perspective because our languages for discussing math and science were built around describing linear systems. We quite literally didn’t have a way to talk about it. So, we viewed chaos as “noise” and just assumed it was randomness. We ignored it, and/or minimized its importance, because it was hard to talk about.
Continue Reading…

Fashion war, day three.

I have to be honest: I’m loving this. I look like I’m from the future! From the future, and very angry with you.

This look includes:

Orange, forest green, and mint green socks
Black art deco-y peep-toe wedges
White dress
Aqua studded belt (which you can’t see)
Black velvet cutaway jacket, sleeves pushed up
Big gold necklace
Leather cuff from a street vendor in Prague
My favorite yellow and aquamarine ring
Big mirror-y glass ring
Lots of orange eye shadow
Hair slicked back

Last night I fell asleep reading Chaos: Making a New Science, which I’ve posted about before. I woke up with that didn’t-I-have-a-really-cool-dream,-oh-crap-what-was-it-about?-I’m-losing-it!-No,-I-remember! feeling. I opened up the book–I’d been reading about circadian rhythms and had had a brainstorm about applying that science to web analytics.

The basics: circadian rhythms are built into plants and animals and keep us going through a 24-hour-ish period of activities (for a while, at least) even when external cues (i.e. light, temperature) are removed. Everyone has a slightly different internal clock, so if light and temperature were held steady for a long long time, we’d drift out of phase with each other. However, the cues (particularly light) sort of re-set us every day so that we’re all on the same cycle. In the chaos book, they were discussing some research done with some kind of animal (it was late…I’ll look it up later) where they isolated them from those regular exogenous cues, then showed flashes of light at specific points in the circadian cycle, just to see what would happen. What happened?
Continue Reading…

The fashion war wages on.

Not as ridiculous as yesterday, unfortunately. But I did combine hot pink and brick red, which is pretty jarring. This lovely ensemble includes:

Hot pink shrunken small-wale corduroy blazer
Brick red t-shirt with a matching satin tie at the neck
Green leather super-wide belt with weird closure (which I made)
Big brown plastic ring from the dollar store
Black & white flower ring from H&M in Vienna
Jeans
F*ing awesome cowboy boots
Feathered headband
“I Voted” sticker (because I Voted)

P.S., I un-tucked the jeans from the boots. It’s just more comfortable that way.

Endogeny is something that “arises from within”; that is, it’s created or synthesized within an organism or system. Its opposite is Exogeny.

I like it that Wikipedia calls out that in psychology, “an emotion or behaviour is endogenous if it is spontaneously generated from an individual’s internal state.” I’d like to make a list of my endogenous behaviors and emotions.

…and possibly the only one I like more than my own personal calling card.

1. Sonar. Okay, let’s talk about this. Sonar in general is ridiculously cool. Even in bats. But especially when in human-created machinery. It’s seeing by sound. AND, it’s seeing things your eyes couldn’t see even if they were looking. But here’s what’s amazing. Sure subs are using all sorts of amazing technology to do this now, but back in the diz-ay, people just listening were able to identify other submarines going by–not just the class of sub, but the specific boat, and oftentimes the skipper too! Just by listening, because each boat has tiny anomalies in the way it’s made, and thus, the way it sounds. And each captain has his own style, and thus, the way his boat sounds when he’s in charge. Again: just by listening.

Continue Reading…

Yes, I’m wearing this to work. I’m waging a sort of fashion warfare against a coworker. It’s complicated.

My fabulous look includes:
Enormous plastic chain necklace
Many many rings made of flourescent plastic, glass, and stone
Leather cuff bracelet I made
Houndstooth fedora
Piece of fabric from the seventies, which I think my mom gave me, tied around the fedora
Pink shiny leather ruffled heels
Grey jeans
Black t-shirt

I posted earlier about my desire to listen to analytics data. So far I have barely scratched the surface of this, but just getting the system up and running is pretty inspiring. Now it’s time to dig into the data processing and analysis. By the way, to get this to an audible frequency I have to interpolate some values, so every time I do any processing, I go back to the source, process, and then interpolate. Anyway. So far what we have is this:

First, hourly data for a website stretching back to 2003. What I like about this is that it clearly shows some seasonalities, through repeating rhythms, in the data–this site gets big boosts around Thanksgiving and Christmas. Interesting, if you ask me.

Continue Reading…

My dad works on submarines, so I’ve been around them here and there (and certainly heard about them) since I was a little kid. I vaguely remember going on a tour of one when I was probably about 9 or 10. Last Christmas my dad took me & Gabe on a tour of a sub in Virginia, and let me tell you, they seem a LOT smaller inside when you’re a grownup.

But I digress. At some point I was talking with my dad about an analytics problem I was working on, and describing the process I was using to try to figure something out. He told me the tale of the USS Scorpion, a sub that went down somewhere in the Pacific, and the process the Navy used to locate the sub. I was transfixed as he told me about John Craven, the mastermind behind the search effort, and his use of an old mathematical theory that quantifies the value of hunches. They used it to successfully locate the sub. (More about that soon.)

Anyway, that was enough of a motivation to get me to read this book, and now I AM OBSESSED WITH SUBMARINES. Seriously. It’s out of control. But they’re fascinating! The book is full of all true stories of submarines from WWII through the Cold War, and it was the first time that a lot of these stories were made public. I can’t recommend it enough.

I went to college in Missoula, MT. Montana is GORGEOUS and its people have a real sense of community that you just don’t find elsewhere…I think it may have something to do with the cold winters. (When it’s cold enough to kill you, there’s a basic humanity that comes out. You know you may sincerely need your neighbor’s help, and he/she may need yours. We just don’t have that in California.)

My friend Scott Billadeau is one of the founding members of HATCH, which was started 5 years ago to bring together up-and-coming creative minds from a variety of disciplines (film, music, photography, design, etc.) with established mentors in those industries. Everyone benefits from the student/mentor relationships, but for me the highlight is actually the merging of all of these types of creativity.

One of my favorite presentations here was the Design, Creativity, & Innovation panel with Jody Turner (trend forecaster), Will Travis (one of the founders of Attik), and Paul Budnitz (founder of Kidrobot). The whole thing was great and the panel discussion was an excellent opportunity to get ideas from three dynamos.

You can see the webcast (well worth giving your email address for) and/or get more information about Hatch here.

Image from the Mumbai Mirror

My brother Adam works at the coolest place EVER: Archinoetics, a company in Hawaii that “focuses on the research and development of human-centered technologies…includ[ing] functional brain imaging systems, human fatigue and performance monitoring devices, intelligent algorithms based on genetic programming and biometric sensors, remote sensing, and neurobiologically inspired computing platforms.” The “functional brain imaging systems” are basically brain-computer interfaces…so you think, and the computer responds.

One of the cooooolest applications of this is the work they’ve done with Hawaii artist Peggy Chun, who developed Lou Gehrig’s disease and is now fully “locked in”. However, R&D from Archinoetics and the University of Virginia’s Dennis Proffitt has developed a system that lets her paint by thinking. The paintings, system, and just the whole concept in general is/are completely fascinating and can be seen here.

They’ve also just launched Project Niu, “…a K-12 science curriculum that provides students and teachers with hands-on, project-based experiences with the technologies used in remotely monitoring the ocean. Through deploying and tracking a high tech “message in a bottle” as it drifts out to sea, students develop an understanding of mankind’s impact on the watershed while forming personal connections to the environment.”

This one’s most definitely in progress. There need to be a lot more dots. But here we are:

Here we have the second of my number paintings.

These are in the Art page, but I wanted to call them out.

I’m doing a series of paintings based on my synesthetic responses to numbers. I have grapheme-color synesthesia, which in my case means that I perceive numbers as having innate color properties. (To get even more detailed, my synesthesia is based on the concept of the number, not the actual physical representation of it–so just thinking of the “concept” of, for example, the number 5, makes me perceive orange. If I see a 7 and a 2, my mind turns it into a math problem, and I get blue for the 7, yellow for the 2, and orange for the 5 that’s implied when you subtract 2 from 7. Just…go with it.)

So, sometimes I either see or just think of a number, and it gets stuck in my head like a melody. Those numbers have been winding up on canvas. This is the first one:

After batting practice this morning, I went for a run in a bit of a downpour, because I was feeling extra-badass. Whenever a run is particularly grueling (and I am not making this up), I imagine that I am in a prison camp with Heinrich Harrer trying to get myself in shape to escape over the mountains of Tibet. I find this extremely motivational. Imaginary Heinrich Harrer is never quite satisfied with my performance but still slightly impressed when I finish.

My brother Adam recommended this book: Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. It was the first book to introduce the principles of chaos theory to the general public, and it’s FASCINATING. A really readable description of some very advanced mathematics.

I find myself drawn to population dynamics, which is really not the focus of this book at all, but does get referenced several times. The more I think about this, the more likely it seems that techniques used to predict populations could extend almost seamlessly to web analytics. We already see that people online behave as populations (and we can segment visitors into all sorts of populations of our choosing). And many of the graphs of population groups look like they could be web analytics data if the axes were re-labeled. Case in point:

Continue Reading…

Ok. It works like this.

I majored in Music Technology (technically composition with that emphasis, but whatever). I’ve studied a lot of music synthesis techniques, sometimes from a music class and sometimes from a physics class. I also deeply, deeply love numbers, and would have gone for a math minor had I not graduated early.

All tonal music is composed of periodic waveforms. The frequency of the waveform determines the sound’s pitch, and the shape determines the timbre. I’ll do a basic intro to the physics of sound at a later date; for now there’s a pretty good description at numbera.com from whom I’ve also borrowed this image:

Which, it seems to me, looks kinda like this:

Which got me to thinking: what would that analytics data sound like, if I could listen to it?

Continue Reading…

I’m slightly ashamed of leaving the title of this post “Hello World!” but I sort of like it that way.

So, I, like, started a blog? And now I have a lot of catching up to do so there are going to be quite a few posts in a row? Because there’s a lot to talk about? And hopefully this is going to be kind of fun? But I don’t fundamentally believe that there is an audience of people out there who really want to know what I’m doing every day? But these days you just sort of have to have a blog regardless? So I’m going to sort of be writing to myself and thinking of this as a portfolio? Of my, like, you know, thoughts?

And with that, we’re off to the races!