Moving to Medium

Hi all. My new posts are now hosted at Medium, because I don't particularly like Blogger's user interface, it doesn't have as much engagement on mobile devices, and Google seems to be killing it slowly through neglect.

The Internet of Humans in Spacetime

I've been spending a lot of my waking time on Twitter, on and off. I've found it very helpful as a way to connect with others and express concepts and opinions that I would like to convert into blog posts. It's also an extremely challenging and confusing medium as soon as you start to interact with others, especially angry people. And we’re all prone to get angry about something or other.

It doesn’t help that I’ll wade into controversial topics, like racism or feminism or LGBT activism or poverty. One might think that arguing the liberal side of those topics (racism is bad, feminism is good, activism for human rights is good, we shouldn’t let some people starve on the streets while others have billions of dollars) would be easy, and, honestly, for me it is, because I’m a white guy so people tend to take me seriously and argue with my points, or they leave me alone.

That’s not the experience of a lot of others on Twitter (and everywhere on the Internet where you can post comments with a name attached). There’s been a massive hashtag flamewar on Twitter called #GamerGate that’s been rolling along for months with no end in sight. I try to leave them alone now, but a few months ago I tried to engage with them to see if there was anything to them. They mostly left me alone, but they spend an enormous amount of time in an ongoing campaign against a handful of women whom they collectively despise, and asking for less diversity and less critical analysis of games (preferably none at all) from any kind of sociological perspective.

Long story short, the movement is intertwined with "chan" culture, spawned from the anonymous imageboard 4chan. When GamerGate got too abusive in their harassment, particularly of individual women, they got kicked off of 4chan and moved to a new site, 8chan, which also hosts child porn sexual abuse images and now is some sort of central hub for whatever #GamerGate is today. This BoingBoing article does a far better job of explaining that culture than I could.

It's a new year and I’m eager to dial back my use of Twitter and refocus on longer-form pieces. We all have so much freedom on the Internet, and it's easy to cause offense unintentionally (and Twitter has a number of flaws that make it suboptimal for the “Internet of humans in spacetime” around conversation threading and notifications) and on the other end of the spectrum are those who make it their mission to offend or to harass a targeted group or individuals. I think existing privacy laws should be able to handle coordinated campaigns of death threats and other types of abuse, but in practice they’re often ignored. Big companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google have an obvious incentive to make sure things don’t get too out of hand there, but anyone can set up their own 8chan, or even hide behind a Tor proxy and closed, invitation-only groups.

There’s a great book from 2007 called The Future of Reputation by Daniel Solove. It covers the balance between privacy, freedom of speech, and the problems the Internet creates (and helps to solve). You can download it for free here.

Fresh New Blog Posts For Fall

As some of you reading this may know, last month I left my programming job at Google after 4.5 years in the Android telephony team. I'm excited for the change in scenery, as my old boss wouldn't let me use the vacation time I had saved up for a much-needed breather, so instead I resigned and cashed out the vacation time instead. Google's loss.

While I've been away from Blogger, I haven't been away from the Internet, so feel free to check out my posts on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. I tend to share articles and post my thoughts to some or all three social networks, because I have different social circles on each one. Facebook is where my family and old school friends follow me, Twitter is where I hang out with the sexy people (and the smart people and the argumentative people and the robots), and Google+ is for my tech nerd friends who like sharing photos, media, and long-form rants.

I'm having a really fun time now, stirring things up. I'm updating my resume on LinkedIn today, and I'll let you all know where I end up as soon as I've accepted an offer. In the meantime, I'm hoping to do a few long-form posts here about restoring some of my old computers (the VAXstation 4000 and my UltraSPARC, PowerPC, and Itanium boxes), NetBSD, and my new hashtag addiction, e.g. remembering not to put "#" before "NetBSD". Cheers!

2013 Veloster Turbo Review at 4900 Miles / 7900 km

I'll try to keep this review short since I was so extravagant in my last post with telling you all my life story and everything, as Holden Caulfield might say, instead of reviewing the damn car.

Long story short, I'm extremely pleased with my purchase decision. The handling is great, the 6-speed manual is great, the leather seats and controls feel great, the hatchback and the third side door are both convenient, the radio sounds great, and so in terms of enjoyment, it's exactly the mix of performance and practicality that I wanted.

The downsides of the Veloster are that the rear visibility is pretty bad, and you don't get the rear view backup camera unless you spring for the luxury package which included a bunch of things I definitely didn't want, like the all-glass sunroof (I'd rather have the extra structural integrity and simplicity of a regular top than an all-glass one) and a nav system that's not as good as on my phone(s). So it's definitely not a luxury car in the sense of a BMW or Audi, but in terms of raw performance, I'm quite satisfied with the turbo version that I bought.

What's interesting to me is that I'm starting to see more and more Velosters on the road, in a variety of colors, but so far I've not seen a single other turbo version. What's funny is the parking lot at Google where I park is filled with Teslas, Nissan Leafs, BMWs, Audis, and so on, but I've got the only Veloster, much less Turbo.

I did see one Veloster while I was visiting my family in LA, that someone had customized with three round exhaust tips where the two trapezoidal ones should have been. I thought that looked pretty damn janky (see my previous post on bad tuner car style choices), but thought it was worth mentioning. Three exhaust tips on a four cylinder car? That totally makes sense.

Another minor downside is that I managed to scuff three of the four 18" alloy wheels on curbs while I was getting used to the dimensions of the car. So be forewarned that the wheels stick out farther than you might think. On the plus side, I haven't scratched any of the paint yet, and the tiny windshield crack that I unfortunately got from a pebble kicked up by a truck shortly after buying it, was repaired for free by Geico and is scarcely visible (and hasn't grown). Fortunately the crack is on the passenger side or else I might be more annoyed.

The A/V system is nice, and one of the main factors in my purchase decision. The Turbo version comes with the premium story that has an 8" subwoofer and does a fairly nice job with all sorts of music. I really appreciate the Pandora integration, since I'm a Pandora addict (see my previous blog post on that topic) and it works great with my Android phones. On the downside, I'm not able to use any of the advanced music controls for A2DP music streaming (I should be able to do more than play/pause, and should be able to get the song info, but none of that is working on the Hyundai side).

The Hyundai BlueLink feature is kind of interesting, and is worth the subscription price (or at least the mid-tier subscription price without all the Bing-powered nav stuff) for the web and phone integration. I can unlock/lock the doors, turn the lights on/off, find the car on a map if I'm lost in a big parking lot, stuff like that. The voice recognition interface in the car itself is pretty terrible, though, so I never use it. BlueLink is only available in the U.S.

I wanted to wait until after the first oil change just to give a proper impression of the car after it's been broken in. I had the oil changed at the Hyundai dealer at 3000 miles, as they recommend for the turbo Veloster, and filled it with synthetic oil. The dealer had Kendall synthetic oil which seemed like a respectable old-timey brand (it's owned by Phillips 66, another old-timey oil company brand). I think it was an extra $30 for that, or $45 to get Mobil 1 synthetic. I asked the mechanic what the difference was, and he said, well, it costs more because it's "Mobil 1" and he made air-quotes with his fingers, so I figured the Kendall would be just fine. And it's been running really smoothly since the oil change, even in 102+ degree weather driving from LA to Mountain View nonstop. The A/C is perfectly capable of handling those temps with no problems.

I should also mention that the electric-assist power steering is excellent, and even better than the Prius. It didn't seem to have a lot of road feel when I first got it, but now that the suspension's been properly broken in, I'm really impressed with the handling, and how nicely it centers itself when you're driving straight. Very impressive handling, somewhat like I'd imagine a front-wheel drive BMW of its size would behave. Except that it retails for $23000 and takes regular 87 octane gasoline.

So that's my quick-and-dirty car review. I'll try to post more computer stories when I have time. I have a lot of stuff I'd like to cover in this blog related to everything from Amiga to VAX, and from NetBSD to FreeBSD to OpenVMS, not to mention my collection of Commodore and Apple II 8-bit stuff, but I'm not sure what I should talk about first. So if there's anything in particular you'd like me to write about, or make some YouTube videos about, please let me know in the comments.

I Just Enabled Google+ Comments

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I'll put a proper review of my Veloster later tonight. In the meantime, I'm sorry to say that I converted the blog to Google+ comments, but forgot to check the moderation queue, so those 36 comments in moderation got lost. I'm sure at least 35 of them were spam, but anyway, if you actually posted a real comment that got stuck in moderation, my apologies for losing it. Please make a Google+ account so you can comment moderation-free.

2013 Hyundai Veloster Turbo Review

My taste in cars has stayed fairly unchanged since my college days (late 90's) and can best be described in four words: "pre-tuned tuner car." Here's what I bought a few months ago for my commute.

Hyundai Style!

I grew up in southern California, in the suburbs of L.A., where I got my Computer Science degree from Cal Poly Pomona, a local state university known as a "commuter school." I got a great education at Cal Poly (good professors and very small class sizes, typically 20-30 students) at what was an incredible bargain for my parents (I believe the tuition for CA residents was something like $650/quarter at the time).

Going to Cal Poly enabled me to live at home for the first two years, then I rented an apartment in Pasadena with a few other CS students for the last two. In between, I took a 6-month internship at Be, Inc., which was a wonderful experience in many ways: living on my own for the first time, living in Silicon Valley, getting paid to work on a real commercial product, and meeting other engineers. Best of all, through a chain of events, my Be experience eventually led to my current job at Google.

Because I lived off-campus, I spent many hours driving around the parking lots looking for an empty space before class. Because of this, I became a bit of a connoisseur of the many varieties of Honda Civic and similar small cars that other students had customized to various degrees. I was especially amused by the mods people often did to make their car look more powerful than it actually was, such as ridiculous-looking aftermarket spoilers and my personal favorite, massive diameter exhaust tips welded onto the factory muffler. If you're not familiar with this phenomenon, here's a forum post with a description and some photos of a few of the more egregious examples.

At the time I was driving a Saturn, so it's not like I had anything to brag about myself, but one thing I quickly realized was that if you want a high performance car and you're on a limited budget, it's probably worth saving your money to buy the "performance" model of whatever car you're interested in, rather than getting the cheap version and then spending even more money trying to soup it up to some approximation of the good version.

After I graduated and started making enough money to buy a nice car, I bought a used 1998 BMW 328i which was a great car, and my first with a manual transmission. I had to sell it later, but after I got some more money, I bought a 1999 BMW 328is, which was essentially the coupe version of the same car (the 328is was the last model to transition to the E46 platform, so both of mine were E36).

In 2005, I got hired as a software engineer at a small company called Danger, Inc., which designed the hardware and software for the hiptop smartphone (aka the T-Mobile Sidekick). I found out about Danger from my former manager at Be, whom I contacted in 2005 to ask about interesting jobs in Silicon Valley. He told me about Danger, which sounded really cool, and armed with some previous work experience writing apps for Symbian Series 60, I sailed through the interview and got the job.

By late 2006, I had saved up some money so I decided to trade in the BMW for a more economical car. I was living in San Francisco at the time, and a stick shift isn't the most convenient for things like parallel parking on a steep hill. The bigger problem was that the BMW had enough miles on it that maintenance was becoming very expensive, and of course the mileage wasn't great. So I traded it in for a new 2007 Toyota Prius.

The Prius is a great car, and I still have it, but it's not particularly exciting to drive. In a few ways I did find it to be an improvement over the BMW. The biggest difference is that BMW, Porsche, and other sports car companies like to make a big deal out of their cars having rear-wheel drive, because it supposedly offers better handling due to a more balanced weight ratio between the front and rear wheels. In practice, I find front-wheel drive to be slightly easier and more intuitive for both regular and emergency maneuvering, and it also saves weight and cost, with the potential for better fuel economy.

Some other things I like about the Prius are motor-driven power steering, which provides just the right amount of steering assistance for the current speed, and two features that are required for Toyota's hybrid system but are becoming more popular on regular gas engine cars as well: electronic throttle control (the gas pedal is "fly-by-wire" and the ECU controls the real throttle) and push-button start.

So I decided I wanted to buy a second car that would be more fun to drive and would offer the benefits of the Prius along with the performance that I had to give up when I traded in the BMW. I also wanted to get another manual transmission, because I find it really fun to drive, and it also forces me to pay full attention to my driving. I also wanted something that would get reasonable gas mileage and preferably would take regular unleaded rather than premium gasoline.

A few months ago, on a trip to LA, the new Hyundai Veloster caught my eye. It has a style that I found to be quite attractive. I read a bunch of reviews and it became clear that if I was going to get one, it would have to be the Turbo version, because the regular version is not very exciting, performance-wise (it uses the same 1.6L 4-cylinder engine as the Hyundai Accent subcompact). The turbocharged version offers 201 HP (150 kW) and similarly impressive torque.

In addition to my time at Cal Poly, I learned most of what I know about tuner cars from the many hours I spent playing Need For Speed: Underground on my laptop. The one thing you can do in that game, or in any other racing game with tuning options (like Gran Turismo 5) to provide the biggest performance boost to any car is to add a turbocharger (or replace it with a bigger one).

American car buyers are slowly waking up to this fact, because until recently, most of the high-end automakers only sold big-displacement 6- and 8-cylinder engines for their sports cars, not 4-cylinder turbos. This is changing, though, and even BMW has just announced they will be bringing a 4-cylinder turbo to the U.S. as the 320i. The news articles are emphasizing the lower price compared to the 328i, but unfortunately the mileage is not going to be better than the 328i, so the lower price is apparently the only selling point for the smaller engine.

What about hybrids? It turns out there is one type of hybrid engine that is compatible with a manual transmission, which is the type that Honda pioneered with the Insight. The closest model they have to what I was looking for is the CR-Z, which would be nice if it had more power, but unfortunately the electric motor component is so wimpy (14 HP / 10 kW) that the combined gas + electric power is about the same as the regular Hyundai Veloster, which is no match for the Veloster Turbo. Perhaps a future CR-Z will offer something competitive with the turbo hatchbacks.

One thing I did before buying my car was to race it for many hours in Forza Motorsport 4, which I bought for my Xbox 360 specifically because Hyundai released a free downloadable Veloster Turbo add-on for it. Fortunately I also discovered that Forza 4 is a far more enjoyable game overall than Gran Turismo 5. If you're interested in a particular car that's available in Forza, I highly recommend racing it in the game to see if you like the engine performance, gear ratios, and basic handling.

In fact, there are a lot of great cars on the market with very similar features to the one I bought, from a variety of automakers. Just keep in mind my earlier observation about buying the "good" model to begin with instead of getting the cheap model and trying to tune it up.

The other thing I learned from playing many hours of Forza 4 and other games is that almost all the racing modifications you can make to a particular car are going to cost you something in return: noise, ride comfort, ground clearance, mileage, ability to pass California's notoriously stringent emissions checks, etc.

Therefore, your best bet is to find the style of "tuner car" that you like and then keep it stock, because it has already been pre-tuned by the manufacturer to balance all of these conflicting goals to give you good performance along with a quiet, smooth, fuel-efficient ride. I love racing my upgraded Veloster Turbo in Forza 4 but I'm also quite happy that the stock turbocharger doesn't make noises like a tea kettle or like the air brakes on a bus when I change gears. It also has enough ground clearance and a stiff enough suspension that I have not bottomed out once on a speed bump or driveway ramp, something I could not say about the BMW or even the Prius!

I got a little carried away writing the intro, so I'm writing part 2 to cover my thoughts on the car itself and some of the features that I liked. Stay tuned...

Machine Learning With K-Pop

I've finally found some time to write a few blog posts about some areas of interest that I've wanted to write about that are too lengthy to cover in a G+ post. This post is about Korean pop music, machine learning and the Pandora Internet radio station that I recently created, Super K-Pop Radio, for my new favorite music genre.

If you follow my Google+ or Twitter accounts, you may have noticed all the links I've been posting to K-pop music videos on YouTube. From now on, I'm only going to do that when I find something particularly noteworthy, so as to avoid annoying my friends who have different tastes in music. I am sharing a big YouTube playlist of K, J, and C-Pop music videos, so you can check out that playlist if you're interested in all the new videos that I've discovered.

A few months ago I decided to make a serious effort to start learning Korean, primarily for business reasons (there are a few times when I think it would've been helpful for me to know a little Korean when working with one of our OEM partners on previous Nexus phones). It's something I've wanted to do for a while, and once I got started on it seriously (I'm a big fan of the Pimsleur audio CD lessons, so I ordered the Korean I 30-lesson course and am working through that right now), I discovered that I really enjoy the way the language sounds and the abundance of high quality pop music and dramas coming out of South Korea in the past few years.

About 5 years ago, I made a similar decision to learn Japanese, and I managed to learn a thing or two (also using the Pimsleur CDs plus a few books) before losing interest and moving on to other studies. I definitely want to continue studying and improving (or at least not losing) my limited Japanese, but for the moment, it's more exciting for me to work on Korean, and I have many more opportunities to practice hearing the language. There are lots of things I'd like to write about learning a new language, and about aspects of Korean that remind me of things I'd previously learned from other languages, like Japanese and also French (similarities in the vowel sounds and the way the words connect together when spoken), but this post is about music, so I'll save those thoughts for another post.

The event that really kicked off my current K-obsession started a few months ago when Google released a native YouTube player for the Playstation 3. When I dusted off my PS3 to try it out, one of the top-ranking music videos was, you guessed it, PSY's Gangnam Style (technically I believe it was the duet version of the song with Kim Hyuna). Needless to say, I was hooked, and discovered many other cool K-pop videos in short order through the updated PS3 YouTube interface. The original Gangnam Style has over 278 million views on YouTube as I write this, and the duet version has over 54 million. Clearly this is a world phenomenon. So I started to get really seriously into K-pop, as it encompasses genres of music that I already enjoy, namely catchy dance-pop with good melodies, interesting rhythms, and R&B and electronica influences.

I've been a fan of J-Pop for many years, but J-pop as a genre doesn't really encompass the entire spectrum of uptempo pop music styles that I like. For example there's not a lot of R&B or funk influence in Pizzicato Five or Puffy AmiYumi songs that I can discern. K-pop seems to draw from a broader base of influences that match my own musical tastes, and I have some interesting data to prove that point, and maybe a few others. In fact, I think I can explain the popularity of PSY's Gangnam Style and Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe (nearly 270M views!) quite easily based on their shared musical attributes.

The subject of this post is "machine learning," and one of my favorite methods for discovering new music in my favorite genres is the Pandora Internet radio station. I must apologize here to my international readers, because Pandora is currently only available in the U.S. (with limited access in Australia and New Zealand, according to Wikipedia) due to the ridiculous complexity and expense of today's music licensing landscape.

The way that Pandora works that's different from other Internet radio stations is that every song in their archive has been listened to by a trained reviewer, who tags the song in Pandora's database with a set of attributes describing its various musical characteristics (genre, tempo, major/minor key, instrumentation, singing style, etc) according to well-defined criteria for each genre of music. For more detail, see this 2009 article or this 2011 interview.

This is different from other music matching systems such as iTunes' "Genius playlist" / "Genius Mix" feature, which uses patterns discovered from the user's own play history and ranking plus the selection of tracks that are listened to by the millions of other iTunes users using the service, to create playlists of similar songs. A "Genius mix" is just a larger playlist based around the genres that the service determined that the user listens to frequently, that is shuffled and looped like a radio station, but stored locally. The user can create any number of Genius playlists based around any single track in their library, but the list of Genius mixes and their contents is determined by the user's listening history and Apple's algorithm, and is not configurable.

Another common approach to playlist creation is taken by Google Play Music's "instant mix" feature, which uses automatic algorithmic analysis of the frequencies and rhythms of the songs in your library to find other songs with similar sonic features (according to the algorithm) to create a playlist around songs with similar themes. I would also recommend a free program called MusicIP Mixer, which is currently unsupported (the company was sold to Gracenote) but still freely available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, that scans your local music collection and then generates playlists that seem to be about as good as Google's instant mixes.

Both types of approaches (user behavior analysis or algorithmic analysis) work very well for creating playlists from your own music collection (presumably composed mostly of songs that you already like), but not so much for discovering new songs. With Pandora's approach, you crate a new station starting from a specific genre, or using an individual song or artist as a seed (you can have more than one seed, but it's usually best to start with something specific). I tried to do this with a few K-pop artists but then discovered I got a much better result by starting with the entire K-pop genre as the seed. For each song that plays on a station, you can give Pandora a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and it uses those scores to determine which songs to play on that station in the future.

So we have human reviewers who have cataloged each song in Pandora's library, and then human listeners scoring each song that plays on each of the millions of channels that people create on the service. Where does the machine learning come in? When people think of artificial intelligence, they often think of neural networks and other complex systems designed to simulate the behavior of human brains. That makes for great science fiction, and can actually be useful in certain areas such as speech and vision recognition, but for this application, we don't need anything nearly that complicated.

Instead, the simple approach (simpler and more predictable than a neural net, anyway) is to imagine each song occupying a position in a very high dimensional space (you can't actually visualize this, but try to imagine it conceptually). In this space, instead of the X, Y, and Z dimensions of the real world, you have a dimension to represent each type of musical attribute that is recorded in the system. Because there are so many attributes, there are very many dimensions, but for each dimension, there may be only a very limited number of possible values. In fact, for many dimensions the only values may be 0 or 1: a song either does or does not have an acoustic piano, or a laid-back female vocalist, or whatever, and every single attribute has its own unique dimension in the problem space.

Because there are so many dimensions, each song can be thought of as having its own unique (or nearly unique) position within this high-dimensional space, even if a particular dimension only has 2 or 3 possible values. Instead of an X,Y,Z position in space, each song's "position" is a long list of numbers representing its value for each of the many attributes along which it has scored by Pandora's reviewers. "Nearby" songs in this high-dimensional space will have close or identical values along many dimensions, while "distant" songs will have few. For each radio station, Pandora has to decide which song to play next based on the feedback given by the user (thumbs up or down) for previous songs that it has played on that channel. Songs with thumbs down are eliminated from the channel, but how can the thumbs-up scores be used to discover similar songs with similar attributes?

This post is long enough already and I'm not an expert in the field, but the Wikipedia entry for support vector machines goes into much greater detail on how the math works. Essentially what the Pandora service does (or is likely doing, since I have no inside knowledge of their algorithm) is a whole bunch of matrix arithmetic to construct a hyperplane (or more complex shape) to cut through this high-dimensional space of musical attributes, dividing the songs that are likely to be appropriate to play on that channel (based on the weighted thumbs-up scores of previously played nearby songs) from the ones that are likely to not be appropriate. Thumbs-down scores only eliminate a particular song from the channel; they don't signal a dislike for similar songs in the same way that a thumbs-up does, but I think they do signal a slight dislike for other songs from that artist. Similar models are used for tasks such as email spam classification or automated sorting of news stories into categories (e.g. Google News).

The primary weakness of this approach for music is that there isn't a dimension in the Pandora database to express whether or not a singer or a song is actually any good, by the individual listener's subjective standards of quality. The only way that Pandora could build a system that scales up to its current size is by limiting their list of attributes to reasonably objective attributes for which a relatively large number of human listeners can be trained to give consistent scores across songs and reviewers. Whether a song uses an acoustic piano or an electric guitar is something everyone can agree on, but whether a singer or a song is any good is not so clear-cut. So here's what happened when I created Super K-Pop Radio and started rating songs based on my personal standards of good pop music.

The main problem that people typically have with Pandora is that they always get the same 20 or 30 songs and have a lot of trouble adding more variety to a particular station that's of high quality. For those who aren't familiar with the service, the particular Devil's pact that Pandora had to make with the recording industry in order to be considered an Internet radio station, as opposed to some other kind of music service with an even more exorbitant royalty structure than what they currently have to pay, requires them to limit the number of songs you're allowed to skip: currently the limit is 12 skips across all channels every 24 hours. The limit used to be 6 skips per channel and 72 skips total in any 24 hour interval, but the new system actually works better for me when I'm focused on fine-tuning a single station like I am now.

So this limitation makes creating and tuning your stations a sort of game, because when a bad song comes on, you have to decide between listening to the whole thing and rating it thumbs down after the next song starts (which has no penalty) vs. hitting thumbs down immediately to skip the rest of the song and losing a chance to skip an even worse song that might come on in the future.

Because of the limitation on skips, sometimes it's difficult to build up a large thumbs-up list due to the combination of horrible songs in the exact genre that you want, horrible songs in a completely random genre, and songs you've already rated that it's already played for you 5 times in the past 5 hours. Fortunately for the last case, there's a separate "I'm tired of this song" button which will remove that song from all of your channels for some period of time, which works fairly well for me once I have a large enough collection of thumbs-up on a channel.

Pandora really needs to add an "achievements" system like Xbox to give you trophies for listening to a particular song 20 times or 50 times or 100 times on a channel. It does seem to have a habit of finding 5 or 6 songs that it thinks are particularly representative of that channel to play for you as often as possible until you are really and truly tired of it, but once you do mark it "tired", usually a few new songs pop up in the list that might have been hidden by the greater "star power" of the songs it wants to play all the time. But as a challenge I like to listen to those songs as many times as I can absolutely stand to before clicking "I'm tired". My playlist is long enough that by the time it comes around again, I'll probably really be wanting to hear it.

So here's the interesting thing that happened with the K-pop channel. Instead of getting the same 10 songs, I actually accumulated a collection of nearly 100 thumbs-up (out of about 200 songs total) before Pandora completely ran out of South Korean bands to play that it thought were closely related. Then it switched completely to songs from non-Korean bands. What I discovered is that the songs that I like in the K-pop genre blend seamlessly into songs from R&B, synth pop, J-Pop, and so the base of songs that match all the Pandora attributes that I could add to the station became huge.

But I didn't actually like more than a small number of songs from a small number of the non-Korean bands. The other thing I quickly discovered is how much bad R&B, bad synth pop, bad Latin pop, bad dance pop, etc. there is out there. By this I mean I have a very high standard in a few areas when it comes to music that I really like and want to listen to, in general:

1. Very high quality singing. Auto-Tune can conceal a multitude of flaws, but somehow there are so many bad singers (to my ear), including some big names, like Kesha (horrible!), Lady Gaga (I like a few of her songs, when she's singing in tune), Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, etc. that if I didn't have plenty of good K-pop songs to listen to, I'd probably abandon the entire genre.
2. Equally high quality musical performance and production values.
3. Interesting and enjoyable composition, melody and rhythm.

It's the third item that is the most challenging to judge, and of course the most subjective, but usually I can come down on one side or the other after one listen. BTW, it amazes me how many Disney child singers and musical soundtracks come up (because they're in exactly the K-Pop style) and how, even when the singing is not bad, the composition of the songs is always just so soulless and boring.

If you're a parent of young children who has to listen to those Disney soundtracks all the time, and you think it's horrible soulless corporate garbage, it's not because you're old and out-of-touch, it's because it really is soulless corporate garbage that doesn't have any reason to justify its existence. Buy your kids some Girls' Generation or Super Junior or the K-Pop version of whatever style they like, and you still might not like that kind of music, but at least it'll have some soul and some actual musicality to it, and they'll be better off for having some quality music to listen to.

So after many hours of listening and 300 or so rankings of non-Korean bands, Pandora is now starting to mix in songs from the K-Pop bands again, and even branching out into J-Pop and some other areas that I also like. But as I write this, I only liked 124 out of 527 songs: 100 songs from S. Korean bands plus 24 songs from the rest of the world.

If you like stats, I actually made a spreadsheet to add up the numbers, which I know marks me as a hopeless geek. I'm continuing to update the spreadsheet whenever I listen to the station, so here's a link to view the current version and here are snapshots at 500 songs and 400 songs ranked (you can open them in different tabs and flip back and forth). BTW, if you use Gmail and are concerned about your email privacy, you may want to open those links in an incognito window or log out of Google before opening them because otherwise your username will probably show up in the list of viewers where any other viewer could see it. Edit: because I made the doc world readable, Google Docs will keep your name and email address private and you'll show up to other users as "Anonymous user #x" if you're signed in.

Column A is the artist, column B is the # of songs from that artist that I rated thumbs-up, column C is the # rated thumbs-down, column D is 1 for a South Korean band, or 0 otherwise. B2 is the total thumbs-up count, C2 is the total thumbs-down count, D2 is the # of Korean bands in the list, E2 and F2 are the # of Korean bands I gave thumbs-up and thumbs-down ratings to (columns E and F are formulas I copied down the page, multiplying the cells in that row in columns B and C by the value in D, so the values are set to 0 for the non-Korean bands). G2 and H2 are the non-Korean thumbs-up and thumbs-down values, and in column H and I, I've put some formulas to provide the interesting stats.

So if you want an explanation for the popularity of both "Gangnam Style" and "Call Me Maybe", I think the simplest explanation is that they're catchy pop songs with high musical production values and good composition in a genre where it's easy to stand out from the rest of the pack because the rest of the pack (in this particular genre) tends to be pretty mediocre. I think it's not a coincidence that PSY, aka Park Jae-Sang, is a graduate of attended Boston University and Berklee College of Music. He knows his music theory and he has 10 years of experience making records in South Korea before Gangnam Style rocketed to the top of the charts. Edit: the Pandora bio for PSY says he graduated from both schools, but other sources say that he attended but did not graduate.

If there's a distinguishing characteristic of K-Pop as a genre, I would say it's the quality and attention to detail as opposed to something that's specifically Korean (they're not wearing hanbok and playing the gayageum or anything like that). I think I'm definitely a bit unusual for being so particular and not being able to really enjoy music that isn't of super high quality, because a lot of people don't have a good ear for pitch so they don't even notice the little things that turn me off, and it definitely limits the number of songs that I enjoy listening to, but then again, I had private piano lessons as a child and played in the school band for many years, so I have a certain set of standards that people who didn't play musical instruments as a kid don't have. I wouldn't be surprised if the South Korean school system and society place a much higher value on musical education compared to the U.S.

I'll keep listening to the Pandora station and adding thumbs up and thumbs down, and feel free to listen along if you enjoy the genre as much as I do. I'll try to start on my next blog post in a day or two.